Very good, a bunch of unstearable, 10cm objects traveling at orbital velocity, that will be all but undetectable when their batteries run down. I think about 20cm of steel plate would stop one - or several astronauts in line.
I heard that to stop all the juvenile jokes about its name, Uranus had been changed to 'Urectum'. I am sure I saw that on some future documentary show.
Being in the middle of a reasonably successful career in IT, I think it is a fine path to pursue. But lets be honest, if you work in IT you are going to have to admit that many, many of the people you work with are dead end people. There are many fine ones too - but pound for pound we seem to have more than our share of people who, for whatever other fine and noble aspects of their personality they may have (and however well hidden), are certain to only rise to the level the incompetence of their management will allow.
I read New Scientist regularly, and if you look at the job ads in the back, you can see it is a widely read and well respected journal. I am yet to see an ad for 'Mad Scientist wanted to create Doomsday device to Teach Fools a Lesson'.
It makes me think the editorial policy must have changed to read this article. Or maybe the editor is on holidays and they let the work experience intern handle this edition. Or maybe I blanked out for a few months and now it's April?
Anyhow, what bunk.
From several previous NS articles, we know that Magnetars have HUGE magnetic fields - they have the strongest known magnetic fields in nature. Yet they don't seem to be slipping into other dimensions and warping around the universe. But maybe we can only see the Magnetars who's magnetic fields are not strong enough to do that. That would make the field required for warp pretty damn strong. About, oh 100 to 1,000 trillion times the strongest field we can create in the lab today.
"Australiam scientists have created mice which can regenerate absolutely any tissue excpet for the tissues of the brain. Heart, lungs, entire limbs, you name it. This is the first time this has been seen in mammals. The potential implications are positively mammoth. I thought this warranted attention.:)"
What - a mouse can regenerate a Mammoth? And so can any mammal. Well, that bodes well for future of male cosmetic surgery.
While the article is undoubtedly right in everything it says, the conundrum comes in finding 'only the best programmers' which of course presumes there are good programmers to which the 'best' are better.
Sadly, finding a good programmer is something almost impossible, at least in Australia, and therefore the 'best' of a very mediocre lot, is still pretty damn mediocre.
Oh sure, there are many programmers who _say_ they are good. But any code you would care to inspect has one or more major failings. It is either a) a hack of someone else's working code with the comments removed, and can not be supported by the programmer b) buggy and inefficient as hell c) the coding is so obtuse the writer can't even understand it all any more, and all to often d) all of the above. And yet, this does not prevent the so called 'best' programmer for holding out their hand for a six figure salary, working a 2 day week (sure, we all know what 'working from home' really means', and through their care-less attitude contributing to the demise of every company they work for.
My tip on Australian tech IPO's is look at how many programmers are on the payroll, then divide their salaries into the start-up capital, and that will tell you how many month the company will last before another capital injection is needed.
It is a very sad state of affairs if you ask me.
All I can say is; if I had the money, even if it were all the money I had, plus some I had to borrow, man, I would go.
I bet there are plenty of billoinaires that would do it. I mean what's a hundred mill to a few billion?
"With many IT applications relying on accurate time information and many having automatic adjustments for DST, how will the IT world handle this change?"
I guess slack arse programmers and sysadmins will just have to do some work for a change.
I hear you brother. There is no doubt about it, the VCR was mine, now my wife is hassling me to get a DVR, and she will own it. Maybe it would still be the case with VCR's if there were no DVR technology - maybe it just took women 12 years to figure out how to use it. If I had time to think about it I am sure I could figure out the answer, but right now I have to get back to washing the clothes and doing the dishes.
People with real ability seem to make it no matter what. But how common are they? How many Steve Jobs's are their? Bill Gates or John Chambers probably would have done just fine if they left school at any age.
As a parent, even though I think my kids are wonderful, I have to acknowledge they are not that far above average - and a University degree they will get, because a resume without it will be filtered out on the first round by any reasonable employer.
Has history taught us nothing? Look what happened to Krypton when they tried to tap the core of their planet. And look what happened to the Atlanteans when they tried it, as evidenced by the Well's expedition to the Centre of the Earth in 1890. It is pretty clear the Venuseans tried the same thing, and look at their planet now. Will we never learn.
Question: if you've totally blocked thier acces - how do they get the email telling them to clean up their act?
That is a good question. We never used to email them either - just waited for them to call and then tell them what the charges and reconnection cost would be. But then the 'marketing' guys decided it would be better 'customer service' if we advised them.
'Ok' I said 'Would you like me to hire three more engineers to cover the time it will take to call these service abusers and explain it to them? Or are you sales guys going to do that?'
Well, heaven forbid a sales guy should talk to a customer, and no one wanted to give me three more engineers. So the token email notice was decided on.
Everyone has at least one backup dial-up account anyway, right?
From the very start we (an ISP) have told our customers they are responsible for the proper use of their computers. If you own a car and drive it into a schoolyard and kill someone's child, it is not an acceptable defence to say "Shucks, I didn't know how to drive, not my fault".
So too, if you own a computer and want to be part of a community of connected computers, not bothering to inform yourself of how to do that does not excuse your responsibility for whatever damage your computer causes.
So what we do to spam zombies is:
a) block them totally and stop them from causing any more damage
b) send them an email telling them how much it cost to clean up their mess (usualy around $500), and that we will bill them if they do it again
c) only unblock them when they give us their assurance they understand what the future costs may be an will never allow it to happen again
d) permanently disconnect them and bill them the full amount of sysadmin and helpdesk time and materials of they allow it to happen again.
It's a really tough line, sure, we have lost maybe 3 customers as a result in 18 months (average spend per customer is $34 per month), out of 20,000. But it is far, far cheaper that the cost of just letting it happen unchecked.
Whew, that's a releif. I can go back to smoking 'backy in my asbestos pipe, get rid of the hands free of my cell phone, and start eating PVC again. Hurrah for science!
I assume it means 'idiot', in that broad southern Irish accent. I picked up both words from the 'Father Ted' series. Fr Dougal says "Ah, what a great eejit I am Ted."
I just assumed any site I provided my email to for 'free' access to something, sold that email address to some direct marketing agency anyway. Who reads all the fine print of the privacy statements on most sites? Don't they say details will be kept strictly 'for use by the comany and its affiliates'? The affiliate being a direct marketing company of course.
An Irish word, probably not in common use elswere, but one I like to use at work at lot is 'eejit', as in 'What a great eejit that [person who did something stupid] is'. There are four grades of eejits - eejit, great eejit, fecking eejit and fecking great eejit, as in 'Feck off, you fecking great eejit'. One can only say the English language is enriched by this gem of a contribution from our Feanian cousins.
My favourite, or maybe most irksome, word of non-English commonly used is 'deplane' as in 'We expect you will be able to deplane on schedule at LAX'. Funny, I don't recall enplaning in Sydney, or maybe I just planed? What airline bureaucrat came up with that bit of doggerel I wonder.
Our two main carriers, Telstra and Optus, here in Australia have a soluttion to that - $10 per 15 minutes for WiFi access, thank you very much. There are other operators who charge less (but not much less), but they are very sparce. There are very, very few 'free' hotspots, no matter how much coffee you buy.
Slashdot Mirror
Very good, a bunch of unstearable, 10cm objects traveling at orbital velocity, that will be all but undetectable when their batteries run down. I think about 20cm of steel plate would stop one - or several astronauts in line.
I heard that to stop all the juvenile jokes about its name, Uranus had been changed to 'Urectum'. I am sure I saw that on some future documentary show.
Being in the middle of a reasonably successful career in IT, I think it is a fine path to pursue. But lets be honest, if you work in IT you are going to have to admit that many, many of the people you work with are dead end people. There are many fine ones too - but pound for pound we seem to have more than our share of people who, for whatever other fine and noble aspects of their personality they may have (and however well hidden), are certain to only rise to the level the incompetence of their management will allow.
LOL. I was going to try some pithy response, but yours was as good as I could imagine.
It makes me think the editorial policy must have changed to read this article. Or maybe the editor is on holidays and they let the work experience intern handle this edition. Or maybe I blanked out for a few months and now it's April?
Anyhow, what bunk.
From several previous NS articles, we know that Magnetars have HUGE magnetic fields - they have the strongest known magnetic fields in nature. Yet they don't seem to be slipping into other dimensions and warping around the universe. But maybe we can only see the Magnetars who's magnetic fields are not strong enough to do that. That would make the field required for warp pretty damn strong. About, oh 100 to 1,000 trillion times the strongest field we can create in the lab today.
Well that should be easy to test then.
What - a mouse can regenerate a Mammoth? And so can any mammal. Well, that bodes well for future of male cosmetic surgery.
So an anti-spam bill will stop spam. Go figure.
While the article is undoubtedly right in everything it says, the conundrum comes in finding 'only the best programmers' which of course presumes there are good programmers to which the 'best' are better. Sadly, finding a good programmer is something almost impossible, at least in Australia, and therefore the 'best' of a very mediocre lot, is still pretty damn mediocre. Oh sure, there are many programmers who _say_ they are good. But any code you would care to inspect has one or more major failings. It is either a) a hack of someone else's working code with the comments removed, and can not be supported by the programmer b) buggy and inefficient as hell c) the coding is so obtuse the writer can't even understand it all any more, and all to often d) all of the above. And yet, this does not prevent the so called 'best' programmer for holding out their hand for a six figure salary, working a 2 day week (sure, we all know what 'working from home' really means', and through their care-less attitude contributing to the demise of every company they work for. My tip on Australian tech IPO's is look at how many programmers are on the payroll, then divide their salaries into the start-up capital, and that will tell you how many month the company will last before another capital injection is needed. It is a very sad state of affairs if you ask me.
All I can say is; if I had the money, even if it were all the money I had, plus some I had to borrow, man, I would go. I bet there are plenty of billoinaires that would do it. I mean what's a hundred mill to a few billion?
"With many IT applications relying on accurate time information and many having automatic adjustments for DST, how will the IT world handle this change?" I guess slack arse programmers and sysadmins will just have to do some work for a change.
I hear you brother. There is no doubt about it, the VCR was mine, now my wife is hassling me to get a DVR, and she will own it. Maybe it would still be the case with VCR's if there were no DVR technology - maybe it just took women 12 years to figure out how to use it. If I had time to think about it I am sure I could figure out the answer, but right now I have to get back to washing the clothes and doing the dishes.
The 41% off-line number matches what we see too. On our little (ADSL) ISP with 20,000 end users, we typicaly have 60% on line at any one time.
As a parent, even though I think my kids are wonderful, I have to acknowledge they are not that far above average - and a University degree they will get, because a resume without it will be filtered out on the first round by any reasonable employer.
Has history taught us nothing? Look what happened to Krypton when they tried to tap the core of their planet. And look what happened to the Atlanteans when they tried it, as evidenced by the Well's expedition to the Centre of the Earth in 1890. It is pretty clear the Venuseans tried the same thing, and look at their planet now. Will we never learn.
Yesss..... and incure even more costs they have to pay for. I don't think they would appreciate that.
Hey Ford Motor Company, my car ran out of gas and left me stranded on the highway, why didn't call me and tell me I needed to fill it up?
Uhhh, wtf, used to be the same for guns too. Idiot.
'Ok' I said 'Would you like me to hire three more engineers to cover the time it will take to call these service abusers and explain it to them? Or are you sales guys going to do that?'
Well, heaven forbid a sales guy should talk to a customer, and no one wanted to give me three more engineers. So the token email notice was decided on.
Everyone has at least one backup dial-up account anyway, right?
So too, if you own a computer and want to be part of a community of connected computers, not bothering to inform yourself of how to do that does not excuse your responsibility for whatever damage your computer causes.
So what we do to spam zombies is:
a) block them totally and stop them from causing any more damage
b) send them an email telling them how much it cost to clean up their mess (usualy around $500), and that we will bill them if they do it again
c) only unblock them when they give us their assurance they understand what the future costs may be an will never allow it to happen again
d) permanently disconnect them and bill them the full amount of sysadmin and helpdesk time and materials of they allow it to happen again.
It's a really tough line, sure, we have lost maybe 3 customers as a result in 18 months (average spend per customer is $34 per month), out of 20,000. But it is far, far cheaper that the cost of just letting it happen unchecked.
Whew, that's a releif. I can go back to smoking 'backy in my asbestos pipe, get rid of the hands free of my cell phone, and start eating PVC again. Hurrah for science!
Well, since I am never going to get access to your site, I guess you will just have to gfys then.
I assume it means 'idiot', in that broad southern Irish accent. I picked up both words from the 'Father Ted' series. Fr Dougal says "Ah, what a great eejit I am Ted."
I just assumed any site I provided my email to for 'free' access to something, sold that email address to some direct marketing agency anyway. Who reads all the fine print of the privacy statements on most sites? Don't they say details will be kept strictly 'for use by the comany and its affiliates'? The affiliate being a direct marketing company of course.
An Irish word, probably not in common use elswere, but one I like to use at work at lot is 'eejit', as in 'What a great eejit that [person who did something stupid] is'. There are four grades of eejits - eejit, great eejit, fecking eejit and fecking great eejit, as in 'Feck off, you fecking great eejit'. One can only say the English language is enriched by this gem of a contribution from our Feanian cousins.
My favourite, or maybe most irksome, word of non-English commonly used is 'deplane' as in 'We expect you will be able to deplane on schedule at LAX'. Funny, I don't recall enplaning in Sydney, or maybe I just planed? What airline bureaucrat came up with that bit of doggerel I wonder.
Our two main carriers, Telstra and Optus, here in Australia have a soluttion to that - $10 per 15 minutes for WiFi access, thank you very much. There are other operators who charge less (but not much less), but they are very sparce. There are very, very few 'free' hotspots, no matter how much coffee you buy.