Regardless of the failure rate of SSDs, this veterinary office took 15 years to fill up 500 MB! They almost certainly aren't doing enough writes to wear out an SSD before the cows come home.
And yes, I know you can do an awful lot of rewrites without filling up any extra space (an unbounded number, in fact). But just spend a second thinking about the likely workflow of a veterinary office. I still don't think they really will be running a large number of rewrite cycles.
In Soviet Russia, it is in to get enraged when someone sells YOU for monetary gain!
Missing Option: Imagine a beowulf cluster of the acheivements of Cowboy^WNatalie Portman naked, petrified, and covered in hot grits!
One might ask, though, why the federal government is being asked to fund this instead of the state government. Since it only affects Alaska, it ought to be done by Alaska. That is why it is labeled pork.
There must be something I'm not understanding here. GP says "Bug can put itself into BIOS, so it's there every time you boot (and before your rescue disk would even get read)". You say "Yeah, but that's nothing new. What's new is that once this thing has run itself, it can slip under the OS and make itself undetectable by the OS".
Looks to me as though this would in fact mean that a recovery disk would not help you. A recovery disk would merely boot an OS, just like booting from your hard disk boots an OS. If the SMM escalation code is in your BIOS, and gets executed before any OS gets booted, and once executed is undetectable by any OS, how exactly is a recovery disk going to help you?
In short, you quote GP: "Then it's there on every boot". Then you say "Yeah. But it's only there on a single boot". Which one is it?
You know, you didn't actually address anything I said. I still maintain that we would get completely swamped in trolls long before we would gain any significant number of non-troll dissenting posts. If this is the case, then attempting to save the non-troll dissenting posts at the cost of any semblance of lucidity and good faith in discussion is just not worth it.
Now, at least on the face of things, it appears that there are two points on which you might disagree with me, and discussion of these would be an actual *reply*. You might disagree that swamping us in trolls is a bad thing, if it saves a scant few dissenting posts. You might also disagree that we would be swamped in trolls. Would you like to discuss one of these two points, or perhaps even some other point on which you might disagree with me that I didn't think of?
A user makes a simple statement which isn't offensive nor does it attack anyone. It is simply not in line with the mob mentality I find on here far too often. As a result, he's labeled as a troll. It's one thing to need to regulate the people that make ridiculous statements repeatedly.
I do not disagree with any of this. I don't even dispute that the post in question might be non-troll. However, I do disagree that this statement is relevant:
However, this isn't the first time someone has decided that their opinion is the "right" one and someone else's is wrong and should be labeled as such.
I claimed, and still claim, that this is not what is happening here. If you still don't understand what I claim *is* happening, please read the second sentence of my original post.
Oh, get off your high horse. The reason for that is that claiming to have a dissenting opinion from most/.-ers is a very effective way to troll. The result is that by far the majority of dissenting opinion posts are in fact trolls. There's always a tradeoff between false positives (which you claim we have here) and false negatives. If we swing the needle back towards marking fewer posts as trolls, we will quickly be overwhelmed by troll-threads, without really gaining very many legitimate dissenting opinion posts.
That's certainly a nice patriotic position to take. However, I somewhat suspect that, in the long run, making the barrier to entry to citizenship very low is going to be better for our society, country, and probably world. I'd be happy to grant citizenship benefits to everyone who pays taxes. If you don't pay your taxes one year, you don't get to enjoy being a citizen that year.
"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses..." That's what made us the greatest country historically. Why are we changing it?
Wait wait wait. You're claiming that pricing the spectrum outside the reach of anyone but Verizon et al will increase competition? Man, I gotta get me out to California for some of that "medicinal" stuff.
There's an important difference here. To the best of my knowledge (and, it would seem, Dell's), Psion has not marketed, sold, developed, or even intended to develop a product called "netbook" in about ten years. If you sell a product under your trademark, you may still have to sue people to keep protecting it, but you Should(TM) win those suits. Psion should probably lose this suit.
True enough. I suppose I misunderstood you. From your first post, "fail to detect the Higgs" certainly sounds like what someone who confused an inconclusive result with a conclusive but negative result would say, but it seems you do get the (rather important) difference. My apologies for haranguing you.
You're still missing the distinction between failing to observe (because we don't have enough sensitivity), and having enough sensitivity to say it is definitely not there.
But even so, if it is not there as a standard model Higgs (what we're looking for), then it can still be there as a fermiophobic Higgs, or a SUSY Higgs, or a variety of other marginally different Higgs models. These other models all exhibit different decay products, different production mechanisms, different cross sections, even sometimes more Higgs particles (SUSY has 5 Higgs particles). Some of these are just different enough from the Standard Model that, although the Higgs would be there, even the LHC wouldn't have the sensitivity to see it, at least not very quickly. So we could rule out, or exclude, the Standard Model Higgs at all masses, and still not require enormous revisions to theory. OTOH, if we were to rule out the entire Higgs mechanism (not immediately sure how we could do that, or even if we could), regardless of variations to the model, then we'll have some pretty serious theory work to do.
Merely failing to detect it would not be terribly interesting (although a highly unlikely scenario). Actually ruling it out (very possible) is what would be tremendously interesting. Although, to be fair, most of the alternative theories are very similar at the end of the day, just with different decay and production signatures and such, so it might not be such a huge deal.
In fact, a large number of the Tevatron people are also working to some degree on an LHC experiment. I'm on CDF, and planning to do some work in the not too distant future on a CMS track trigger.
Ahha, I should have RTFA. I've been complaining in other comments that no, we won't find the Higgs. But this is a much lower standard. 2 or 3 sigma significance I can definitely believe. We call this evidence for the Higgs, but not discovery. Discovery requires a 5 sigma significance signal (PRL standard).
As I said above, no, they're not. I happen to disagree with their numbers, as I can't see how we're going to get the amount of data necessary to improve our sensitivity sufficiently. Remember standard deviation goes as 1/sqrt(n), so to double our sensitivity we need to collect four times as much data as we have now. We need to more than double our sensitivity. But we can tell by just how much we need to improve (although I can't remember off the top of my head), since we have very precise theoretical predictions, and can compare our data to those.
We actually have a very good feel for how close we are at any given time to finding it. We have good solid analyses set up, and we rerun/rework them periodically to incorporate new data. Every bit of data improves our sensitivity just a tiny bit, and we can tell from our analyses just how sensitive we are (so far) to the theoretical particle we're looking for. It's just statistics.
What they mean (yes, I'm on CDF, and beginning my own segment of a Higgs search analysis), is that there is a 50/50 chance that the Tevatron will have acquired sufficient data for us to be sensitive to a Standard Model Higgs at reasonable mass ranges (115 - maybe 300 GeV/c^2). Thus, if it exists (the SM Higgs specifically) we'll be able to tell it is there, and if it does not exist, we'll be able to say with a high level of confidence that it is not there.
To discover the Higgs, we must show that given a theory without the Higgs, our data would only occur 1 in 2 million times we did an experiment like this, (5 sigma significance, standard for particle discovery) and of course the the difference in the data is consistent with a Higgs.
To exclude the Higgs in a certain mass range, we must show the opposite: if there were a Higgs, our data would only occur some very small percentage of the time (I can't remember the exact significance, but it is less stringent than discovery, again standard).
LEP already excluded masses below 114 GeV/c^2, and the Tevatron has excluded a small mass range around 160 or 170 GeV/c^2.
However, all that said, I disagree with the apparently official Fermilab line (50/50). We have a small chance of excluding all the available mass ranges, but the amount of data needed to go from excluding it if its not there to discovering it if it is there is huge. We would need several times as much data as we will have unless we keep running for quite a bit longer. Maybe we can get a chunk of the gov't stimulus package?;)
Without any data to base your odds on, you're just making some shit up. Not only is their level of precision low, but there is zero confidence.
Quite the contrary, sir, and I do somewhat resent remarks like these, although I understand they were made in haste in your frenzy to get first post. We have a tremendous amount of data, and we have theories that describe exactly what we're looking for. It's almost just a statistical game now. Our level of precision is in fact quite high (although not as high as is achievable at a lepton collider), and as I said above, we have excluded some potential Higgs masses to a high level of confidence.
I think the idea is that if you kill off all the carbon life in some river, the (preexisting but uncommon) other life is much more likely to flourish and be plentiful there. Same way that we get antibiotic resistant bacteria.
Actually yes. Silicon based life forms, or so I understand (IANA biochemist), are rather unlikely because of the chemical instability of silicon based polymers, but silicone based life forms are a much better possibility.
IAAParticle Physicist, working on the Collider Detector at Fermilab, looking for the Higgs boson. Am I sufficiently credentialed for you, or will you "call my bluff" like the poor AC below? Electrostatic forces are an effect of the electromagnetic (or to go even further, the electroweak) interaction. GP is correct, P is incorrect.
Usually, the four fundamental interactions are given as gravity, electromagnetism, and the weak and strong nuclear interactions. At high enough energies, electromagnetism and the weak nuclear interaction turn out to be the same thing. At even higher energies, maybe the others will merge in as well.
Except gravity, these interactions have pretty well understood quantum field theoretic descriptions, motivated by particular symmetries (and their breaking sometimes), involving the exchange of momentum and other quantum numbers via various particles (the gauge bosons). The gauge boson responsible for the electromagnetic interaction is the well known photon.
But you don't have to take my word for it. Please run down to your local library and pick up a copy of John David Jackson's _Classical Electrodynamics_, and a copy of Peskin and Shroeder's _Quantum Field Theory_. These are the standard graduate textbooks for their respective fields, and will provide all the detail you might wish to find.
Also, in the future, please look these things up before spouting off what you remember from your "year 10 science" class. You probably don't remember it correctly, if today is any indication.
Strongly disagree here. That very abstract thinking is vitally important for a great many disciplines. The first few that come to mind are computer programming, engineering, science. It can be taught, it must be taught, and it should be valued. I think it is implicitly valued much more than you think it is. The people who get ahead in the aforementioned disciplines tend to be the ones who understand and can manipulate and create abstractions, whether that is explicitly recognized or not.
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Regardless of the failure rate of SSDs, this veterinary office took 15 years to fill up 500 MB! They almost certainly aren't doing enough writes to wear out an SSD before the cows come home.
And yes, I know you can do an awful lot of rewrites without filling up any extra space (an unbounded number, in fact). But just spend a second thinking about the likely workflow of a veterinary office. I still don't think they really will be running a large number of rewrite cycles.
In Soviet Russia, it is in to get enraged when someone sells YOU for monetary gain! Missing Option: Imagine a beowulf cluster of the acheivements of Cowboy^WNatalie Portman naked, petrified, and covered in hot grits!
WTH, arguing with Roger Penrose about the definition of energy? Who does that? I mean, really, who does that?
One might ask, though, why the federal government is being asked to fund this instead of the state government. Since it only affects Alaska, it ought to be done by Alaska. That is why it is labeled pork.
Throughout history there have always been those crying "end of the world". Many of them cooks and manipulators, I'm sure. All of them wrong.
Curse you, short order chefs!
There must be something I'm not understanding here. GP says "Bug can put itself into BIOS, so it's there every time you boot (and before your rescue disk would even get read)". You say "Yeah, but that's nothing new. What's new is that once this thing has run itself, it can slip under the OS and make itself undetectable by the OS".
Looks to me as though this would in fact mean that a recovery disk would not help you. A recovery disk would merely boot an OS, just like booting from your hard disk boots an OS. If the SMM escalation code is in your BIOS, and gets executed before any OS gets booted, and once executed is undetectable by any OS, how exactly is a recovery disk going to help you?
In short, you quote GP: "Then it's there on every boot". Then you say "Yeah. But it's only there on a single boot". Which one is it?
Now, at least on the face of things, it appears that there are two points on which you might disagree with me, and discussion of these would be an actual *reply*. You might disagree that swamping us in trolls is a bad thing, if it saves a scant few dissenting posts. You might also disagree that we would be swamped in trolls. Would you like to discuss one of these two points, or perhaps even some other point on which you might disagree with me that I didn't think of?
A user makes a simple statement which isn't offensive nor does it attack anyone. It is simply not in line with the mob mentality I find on here far too often. As a result, he's labeled as a troll. It's one thing to need to regulate the people that make ridiculous statements repeatedly.
I do not disagree with any of this. I don't even dispute that the post in question might be non-troll. However, I do disagree that this statement is relevant:
However, this isn't the first time someone has decided that their opinion is the "right" one and someone else's is wrong and should be labeled as such.
I claimed, and still claim, that this is not what is happening here. If you still don't understand what I claim *is* happening, please read the second sentence of my original post.
Hey! No looking at my glowy bits!
Oh, get off your high horse. The reason for that is that claiming to have a dissenting opinion from most /.-ers is a very effective way to troll. The result is that by far the majority of dissenting opinion posts are in fact trolls. There's always a tradeoff between false positives (which you claim we have here) and false negatives. If we swing the needle back towards marking fewer posts as trolls, we will quickly be overwhelmed by troll-threads, without really gaining very many legitimate dissenting opinion posts.
"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses..." That's what made us the greatest country historically. Why are we changing it?
Wait wait wait. You're claiming that pricing the spectrum outside the reach of anyone but Verizon et al will increase competition? Man, I gotta get me out to California for some of that "medicinal" stuff.
There's an important difference here. To the best of my knowledge (and, it would seem, Dell's), Psion has not marketed, sold, developed, or even intended to develop a product called "netbook" in about ten years. If you sell a product under your trademark, you may still have to sue people to keep protecting it, but you Should(TM) win those suits. Psion should probably lose this suit.
True enough. I suppose I misunderstood you. From your first post, "fail to detect the Higgs" certainly sounds like what someone who confused an inconclusive result with a conclusive but negative result would say, but it seems you do get the (rather important) difference. My apologies for haranguing you.
You're still missing the distinction between failing to observe (because we don't have enough sensitivity), and having enough sensitivity to say it is definitely not there.
But even so, if it is not there as a standard model Higgs (what we're looking for), then it can still be there as a fermiophobic Higgs, or a SUSY Higgs, or a variety of other marginally different Higgs models. These other models all exhibit different decay products, different production mechanisms, different cross sections, even sometimes more Higgs particles (SUSY has 5 Higgs particles). Some of these are just different enough from the Standard Model that, although the Higgs would be there, even the LHC wouldn't have the sensitivity to see it, at least not very quickly. So we could rule out, or exclude, the Standard Model Higgs at all masses, and still not require enormous revisions to theory. OTOH, if we were to rule out the entire Higgs mechanism (not immediately sure how we could do that, or even if we could), regardless of variations to the model, then we'll have some pretty serious theory work to do.
Merely failing to detect it would not be terribly interesting (although a highly unlikely scenario). Actually ruling it out (very possible) is what would be tremendously interesting. Although, to be fair, most of the alternative theories are very similar at the end of the day, just with different decay and production signatures and such, so it might not be such a huge deal.
In fact, a large number of the Tevatron people are also working to some degree on an LHC experiment. I'm on CDF, and planning to do some work in the not too distant future on a CMS track trigger.
Ahha, I should have RTFA. I've been complaining in other comments that no, we won't find the Higgs. But this is a much lower standard. 2 or 3 sigma significance I can definitely believe. We call this evidence for the Higgs, but not discovery. Discovery requires a 5 sigma significance signal (PRL standard).
As I said above, no, they're not. I happen to disagree with their numbers, as I can't see how we're going to get the amount of data necessary to improve our sensitivity sufficiently. Remember standard deviation goes as 1/sqrt(n), so to double our sensitivity we need to collect four times as much data as we have now. We need to more than double our sensitivity. But we can tell by just how much we need to improve (although I can't remember off the top of my head), since we have very precise theoretical predictions, and can compare our data to those.
We actually have a very good feel for how close we are at any given time to finding it. We have good solid analyses set up, and we rerun/rework them periodically to incorporate new data. Every bit of data improves our sensitivity just a tiny bit, and we can tell from our analyses just how sensitive we are (so far) to the theoretical particle we're looking for. It's just statistics.
To discover the Higgs, we must show that given a theory without the Higgs, our data would only occur 1 in 2 million times we did an experiment like this, (5 sigma significance, standard for particle discovery) and of course the the difference in the data is consistent with a Higgs.
To exclude the Higgs in a certain mass range, we must show the opposite: if there were a Higgs, our data would only occur some very small percentage of the time (I can't remember the exact significance, but it is less stringent than discovery, again standard).
LEP already excluded masses below 114 GeV/c^2, and the Tevatron has excluded a small mass range around 160 or 170 GeV/c^2.
However, all that said, I disagree with the apparently official Fermilab line (50/50). We have a small chance of excluding all the available mass ranges, but the amount of data needed to go from excluding it if its not there to discovering it if it is there is huge. We would need several times as much data as we will have unless we keep running for quite a bit longer. Maybe we can get a chunk of the gov't stimulus package?
Without any data to base your odds on, you're just making some shit up. Not only is their level of precision low, but there is zero confidence.
Quite the contrary, sir, and I do somewhat resent remarks like these, although I understand they were made in haste in your frenzy to get first post. We have a tremendous amount of data, and we have theories that describe exactly what we're looking for. It's almost just a statistical game now. Our level of precision is in fact quite high (although not as high as is achievable at a lepton collider), and as I said above, we have excluded some potential Higgs masses to a high level of confidence.
I think the idea is that if you kill off all the carbon life in some river, the (preexisting but uncommon) other life is much more likely to flourish and be plentiful there. Same way that we get antibiotic resistant bacteria.
Actually yes. Silicon based life forms, or so I understand (IANA biochemist), are rather unlikely because of the chemical instability of silicon based polymers, but silicone based life forms are a much better possibility.
Ronald? Is that you?
IAAParticle Physicist, working on the Collider Detector at Fermilab, looking for the Higgs boson. Am I sufficiently credentialed for you, or will you "call my bluff" like the poor AC below? Electrostatic forces are an effect of the electromagnetic (or to go even further, the electroweak) interaction. GP is correct, P is incorrect.
Usually, the four fundamental interactions are given as gravity, electromagnetism, and the weak and strong nuclear interactions. At high enough energies, electromagnetism and the weak nuclear interaction turn out to be the same thing. At even higher energies, maybe the others will merge in as well.
Except gravity, these interactions have pretty well understood quantum field theoretic descriptions, motivated by particular symmetries (and their breaking sometimes), involving the exchange of momentum and other quantum numbers via various particles (the gauge bosons). The gauge boson responsible for the electromagnetic interaction is the well known photon.
But you don't have to take my word for it. Please run down to your local library and pick up a copy of John David Jackson's _Classical Electrodynamics_, and a copy of Peskin and Shroeder's _Quantum Field Theory_. These are the standard graduate textbooks for their respective fields, and will provide all the detail you might wish to find.
Also, in the future, please look these things up before spouting off what you remember from your "year 10 science" class. You probably don't remember it correctly, if today is any indication.
Strongly disagree here. That very abstract thinking is vitally important for a great many disciplines. The first few that come to mind are computer programming, engineering, science. It can be taught, it must be taught, and it should be valued. I think it is implicitly valued much more than you think it is. The people who get ahead in the aforementioned disciplines tend to be the ones who understand and can manipulate and create abstractions, whether that is explicitly recognized or not.