If the guy's irreplaceable, you not only have to worry about him getting pissed off and leaving, you need to worry about him getting hit by a bus (or cancer or heart attack or a better offer from some startup company.) If he's not only irreplaceable, but a hostile troll, you need to worry about him getting shot in a fight in some bar because he pissed off somebody else who had no social skills either.
On the other hand, if he said he didn't document what he did because he had a deadline, his manager needs to whack him with a clue bat about deadlines and priorities, and about modular programming with well-defined interfaces even if the modules themselves may be opaque. That doesn't mean there isn't a place for people whose real skill is finding problems and telling people what to fix, but you want production code built in ways that can be used.
And the fact that Josh stayed at the company as long as he did meant that Janet either didn't take the job there or didn't stick around, which cost them a lot of money that they didn't know how to measure because they only saw the HR costs of trying to hire her, not the value of the work she didn't do because she'd left.
Ok, unless you're a government, a billion here and and a billion there still does add up to real money after a while...
According to the folks on the radio (which is at least as authoritative as reading something on the Internet), Madoff probably only got about $10-20B in actual money from his victims. The rest was all smoke and lies (and as you say, they're not going to find it, because most of it never existed, though he probably did have the money sitting in interest-bearing investments when he wasn't spending it or paying it in dividends to investors who wanted to take some of their earnings out.) Not that lying to people is moral either, or that it isn't a shock to find out that most of your balance never existed, even if what you put in hasn't entirely vanished.
The reason Swiss bank secrecy laws developed was because of German requests for information after the Nazis came to power - if you were Jewish and had money out of the country, which you could use to escape, they wanted it, and they wanted your name and address. Some banks cooperated, so the laws were written to require secrecy, though they weren't always obeyed. And yes, Bad Guys have also taken advantage of banking privacy, but that's not why it's there.
But even if the banks do become required to cooperate with specific requests from other governments, that's better than being required to participate in the wholesale information vacuum cleaner processes that are increasingly happening in less privacy-friendly countries.
Also, there's tax evasion and there's tax avoidance. You're not required to structure your financial activities in ways that maximize taxes in your home country, though structuring them to avoid taxable activities usually requires foreign corporations as well as foreign bank accounts. For Americans, it seems to be more popular to use Caribbean or Latin American banks (Caymans, Panama, etc.), where you can easily set up a corporation and invest in it, and where the local corporate taxes are cheap or zero.
Unfortunately you don't have the control over the data at the right places to do what you need here. The bottleneck isn't getting from the ISP to the user's house (unlike in adequately-funded ISPs) - it's the feed that that the ISP is getting in from their upstream. You might still do something like run Weighted RED to harass the FTP and BitTorrent traffic, but it's not as effective there as if you got your upstream to prioritize what they're sending you.
Connection speeds with any of the technologies out there are full-duplex, and they may be symmetric or asymmetric. DSL's almost always asymmetric, and cable is also, and if you ask what the upload speed is they'll tell you, usually with the same level of vagueness that their download speed is. DSL used to be sold as ADSL or SDSL, though now it's mostly [random bunch o'letters]DSL as the technology keeps evolving.
But if you're a good little couch potato \\\\\\\ typical consumer, you're mostly downloading far more bits anyway, either to read web pages or watch video or whatever. Unless you're running a server or file sharing, download speed is the speed you care about. (Ok, video conferencing is an exception, but most of that's at 128kbps or below, so you're even ok there.)
Basically everything the Department of Energy does is either about designing nuclear weapons, or about cleaning up from the processes of building nuclear weapons, or about making it easier for their scientists and engineers to do their work (so there's been some good computer science and network research done there), or about 10% of other friendly-sounding good-for-society work to distract people from the weapons work. And even the friendly-sounding work is mostly working with the nuclear power industry, which you can argue about whether it's good for society, or environmental cleanup technology (because uranium mining, waste disposal, nuclear research and such are messy in rather special ways), or environmental cleanup work of other kinds (because the nastiest environmental problems at Livermore Labs are mostly from what the Navy did before LLNL opened - there's a lot of solvents and explosives and old transformers and such buried there, vs. only a little plutonium.)
Running two copies at once on the hardware might be breaching your license, but you're not doing that here - you're running Linux on the base hardware, and if the VM counts as license-affecting hardware you're only running Windows on it, and if it doesn't count, you're only running one copy of Windows on the physical hardware, even if you're not running Windows the way Mr. Bill expects.
The big reason to use VMware or its competitors here is to let Windows run in a safe protected environment, not exposed to the cold cruel world. Also, you can boot the Windows OS from a clean copy each time, so even if it gets infected you're not very exposed.
You're not going to running IE on a non-updated system - you're going to have your Linux machine behind a firewall, and you're going to be running NAT or something more powerful between the Windows VM and the Linux machine, and you're going to update the Windows system and reboot it. Then you're going to install any applications and update them and reboot. And you're going to snapshot that OS partition, and have a separate OS partition for the data, and *then* you're going to start using IE and its little friends for classwork. And every few weeks you're going to boot the snapshot OS without the data partition and run Windows update, anti-virus updates, etc.
There was one day I was driving home from the dentist after a root canal, and while there were lots of cops out on the road, I was *very* glad they didn't stop me. My speech was slurred because one side of my mouth was still numb, and if they were to do a drug test, novocaine's closely related to cocaine, the codeine I'd taken the night before is an opiate, the Sudafed I took to make it easier to breathe during the work is a meth precursor, and ibuprofen causes alse positives on the cheaper drug tests:-) (On the other hand, the nitrous had worn off before I started driving, and I'd chased it with coffee...)
But if you haven't slept in 24 hours, you shouldn't be driving (and you should still be in college and getting home by walking or taking the bus.)
No, it was about the user's data getting trashed because the application wrote the data to disk in orders that weren't stable if the system crashed for whatever reason, including power loss, and about the change in file system behaviour increasing the potential delay between writes and therefore increasing the risk that the badly written application would lose data by about 30x.
TFA shows examples of applications that work by
1. Trash the old version of the file.
2. Write the new version.
.3...(oops, system crashed, not getting the new version written to disk.)
4. Lossage!
and comparing them to applications that rename the old version, write the new version, and do their fsyncs in orders that will always leave the disk with a correct old version, at least until the new version is stably written. In the latter case, if the new version didn't get written, the application can use the old version, and it'll be fine.
I'm fairly surprised to hear that vacuum cleaners use that much power - 1.25kw each is about 1.6 horsepower each. That should be enough for your vacuum cleaners to do 0-60 in the 10 seconds worth of battery you've got...
Yeah, you might get faster performance if you spend twice as much money to get SLC instead of MLC, and you may want to do that, but as far as write counts go, the stuff is so cheap you Just Don't Care\(tm. Suppose a $20 8GB USB stick burns out in a year - you've wasted more money than that reading this Slashdot discussion, and if it saves you a few hours a month you win, and when it's burned out you'll have to spend $10 replacing it with 16-32GB.
If you're doing something like Vista ReadyBoost, a $10 couple of gigabytes will let Vista do some decent caching, plus it'll cache your development tools and frequently used files (in case RAM wasn't doing that adequately) on one non-rotating spindle so the rotating disk can spend all its time supporting the files that are actually changing and therefore spend a lot less seek time.
If you're using Linux, you could use it for/tmp (if you're not using/tmpfs) or if it's fast enough flash you could probably even get away with using it for swap, or there's probably some appropriate fancy union filesystem thing you can do which will let you keep the more frequently used bits of your environment on flash and the less-used bits on rotating disk.
If your main problem is speeding up your development environment's use of temporary disk storage (because Linux is already caching a lot), use/tmpfs, which stores the files in virtual memory, and if the system needs to page them out, it does that - it's really useful for files that are going to get created for short periods but don't need to get kept for long.
Windows Vista Readyboost is doing something fancy and semi-automatic with caching in USB flash disks - get yourself a USB2 memory stick and turn it on. The stuff is so cheap these days that you might as well buy a large fast ReadyBoost stick, but you'll probably get a lot of payoff even from adding small drives - 8GB is now $20-40, and 32GB is ~$60-120 depending on how extreme you want to get.
Those panels aren't going to last forever, and unlike silicon panels which may involve some toxics during manufacturing but aren't bad once they're finished, cadmium's a nasty toxic material, so cadmium-telluride panels aren't going to be something you can send to the dump for free; I don't think anybody knows what the disposal costs will be.
Cadmium's a really nasty material - even if it's available in significant enough quantities to transform the electric industry, it's not the kind of stuff you want to have getting into the water system.
Hey, don't you remember that "spam" has replaced "libertarians vs. socialists" as the default Internet discussion topic for the last decade?:-)
Marxism-Leninism doesn't actually work that way - the workers may get oppressed under capitalism, but they don't get around to developing the class consciousness that they're supposed to, so the elitist vanguard has to lead them in a revolution and stomp out the bourgeois classes. Since Marxism fails to recognize the value of creativity and risk-taking that entrepreneurs provide, that work doesn't get done after the revolution, so the economy recovers very slowly if at all from the damage done in the revolution, with idealist dogmatism as a poor replacement for the information provided by prices in a market, and the elites end up becoming the new class of bosses, not even the same as the old bosses, and the final stage of Marxist-Leninist communism is a chaotic transition to something like less competent capitalism.
Back in the early 90s, I was at economic conferences in Eastern Europe, and one of the fundamental issues that those societies were trying to solve was how to give the means of production to the workers before the ex-Communist bosses stole all the good stuff; in some cases the former state companies gave stock to the workers, but that didn't happen all that often, and usually only on businesses that weren't worth stealing.
On the other hand, the current top-down government aid paid to huge corporations is not only not either theoretical or real Communism, it's a great reminder that Ayn Rand's morally pure capitalists were more of a fictional device than a description of real capitalism. I don't think I agree with your assertion that the aid is getting paid for by "workers" - after all, we're taxing the "rich", and have been taxing businesses all along, and the bailout money's mostly getting borrowed, either from China or from Westerners who still have assets to invest in T-bills. Some of it will get paid back by your kids, and some of it will get defaulted on somehow, either by finding a way to restart inflation (which is a lot tougher in today's global economy than it was when Reagan did it) or by some new scam.
Sweden had a smaller version of a banking crisis a few years back (90s, I think, or maybe early 00s.) They gave the banks more capital by having them issue stock which the government bought; it diluted the original shareholders' stock, and the government could have theoretically run the bank operations as a big stockholder, but once the banks recovered the government made a profit on the deal so the taxpayers actually got something back. I think it was around the timeframe that I was bumming around Scandinavia on vacation, and the Swedish currency was worth about 2/3 of what the Norwegian and Danish currencies were, but they got over it.
As to whether stocks or bonds in a distressed company are worth more, that's hard to say - both can lose pretty badly. And then there's the car companies - when they were asking for a bailout, the amount they wanted was something like 10x the market cap of all of GM's stock.
Microsoft's real problem with Open Source is the language it's written in; if you translate it into a language they like better, they're not as concerned with the actual license. So here's a MS-friendly version of the code:
Yeah, the guy was stupid and showed the cops one file that was probably illegal, and I can see that the judge could order him to produce that file again. But if there's one, there's probably a lot more, and while the cops have enough evidence to get a search warrant for the rest, forcing the guy to turn those files over means he'd be incriminating himself on possession of files 2...N, and therefore he'd probably be subject to more prison time than just file 1.
... still had vacuum tubes and punchcards. (Actually, I was probably 15 by then.) We were allowed to do anything we wanted with the punchcards and the paper drive tape, but only a couple of adults were allowed to rewire the plugboard on the side that had the core program installed on it.
It was an IBM 403 printer system, plus we could program drum cards for the Model 026 keypunch and do anything we wanted on the card sorter...
My cat used to have a Hotmail account (and even though it no longer works, she still sits on my computer chair at night hoping to read her email.) However, when she applied for it, she put in her correct birthdate and species. A few years later, due to some child-protection laws, Hotmail put in a policy about "No children under 13 can have accounts", and since they weren't adjusting ages for Cat Years, they closed her account. I could have gotten it reinstated, but I'd have had to give them a credit card number, and she'd have just gone wild on eBay ordering fish by mail order, so that wasn't going to happen.
Slashdot Mirror
If the guy's irreplaceable, you not only have to worry about him getting pissed off and leaving, you need to worry about him getting hit by a bus (or cancer or heart attack or a better offer from some startup company.) If he's not only irreplaceable, but a hostile troll, you need to worry about him getting shot in a fight in some bar because he pissed off somebody else who had no social skills either.
On the other hand, if he said he didn't document what he did because he had a deadline, his manager needs to whack him with a clue bat about deadlines and priorities, and about modular programming with well-defined interfaces even if the modules themselves may be opaque. That doesn't mean there isn't a place for people whose real skill is finding problems and telling people what to fix, but you want production code built in ways that can be used.
And the fact that Josh stayed at the company as long as he did meant that Janet either didn't take the job there or didn't stick around, which cost them a lot of money that they didn't know how to measure because they only saw the HR costs of trying to hire her, not the value of the work she didn't do because she'd left.
Ok, unless you're a government, a billion here and and a billion there still does add up to real money after a while...
According to the folks on the radio (which is at least as authoritative as reading something on the Internet), Madoff probably only got about $10-20B in actual money from his victims. The rest was all smoke and lies (and as you say, they're not going to find it, because most of it never existed, though he probably did have the money sitting in interest-bearing investments when he wasn't spending it or paying it in dividends to investors who wanted to take some of their earnings out.) Not that lying to people is moral either, or that it isn't a shock to find out that most of your balance never existed, even if what you put in hasn't entirely vanished.
The reason Swiss bank secrecy laws developed was because of German requests for information after the Nazis came to power - if you were Jewish and had money out of the country, which you could use to escape, they wanted it, and they wanted your name and address. Some banks cooperated, so the laws were written to require secrecy, though they weren't always obeyed. And yes, Bad Guys have also taken advantage of banking privacy, but that's not why it's there.
But even if the banks do become required to cooperate with specific requests from other governments, that's better than being required to participate in the wholesale information vacuum cleaner processes that are increasingly happening in less privacy-friendly countries.
Also, there's tax evasion and there's tax avoidance. You're not required to structure your financial activities in ways that maximize taxes in your home country, though structuring them to avoid taxable activities usually requires foreign corporations as well as foreign bank accounts. For Americans, it seems to be more popular to use Caribbean or Latin American banks (Caymans, Panama, etc.), where you can easily set up a corporation and invest in it, and where the local corporate taxes are cheap or zero.
Unfortunately you don't have the control over the data at the right places to do what you need here. The bottleneck isn't getting from the ISP to the user's house (unlike in adequately-funded ISPs) - it's the feed that that the ISP is getting in from their upstream. You might still do something like run Weighted RED to harass the FTP and BitTorrent traffic, but it's not as effective there as if you got your upstream to prioritize what they're sending you.
Connection speeds with any of the technologies out there are full-duplex, and they may be symmetric or asymmetric. DSL's almost always asymmetric, and cable is also, and if you ask what the upload speed is they'll tell you, usually with the same level of vagueness that their download speed is. DSL used to be sold as ADSL or SDSL, though now it's mostly [random bunch o'letters]DSL as the technology keeps evolving.
But if you're a good little couch potato \\\\\\\ typical consumer, you're mostly downloading far more bits anyway, either to read web pages or watch video or whatever. Unless you're running a server or file sharing, download speed is the speed you care about. (Ok, video conferencing is an exception, but most of that's at 128kbps or below, so you're even ok there.)
Basically everything the Department of Energy does is either about designing nuclear weapons, or about cleaning up from the processes of building nuclear weapons, or about making it easier for their scientists and engineers to do their work (so there's been some good computer science and network research done there), or about 10% of other friendly-sounding good-for-society work to distract people from the weapons work. And even the friendly-sounding work is mostly working with the nuclear power industry, which you can argue about whether it's good for society, or environmental cleanup technology (because uranium mining, waste disposal, nuclear research and such are messy in rather special ways), or environmental cleanup work of other kinds (because the nastiest environmental problems at Livermore Labs are mostly from what the Navy did before LLNL opened - there's a lot of solvents and explosives and old transformers and such buried there, vs. only a little plutonium.)
Running two copies at once on the hardware might be breaching your license, but you're not doing that here - you're running Linux on the base hardware, and if the VM counts as license-affecting hardware you're only running Windows on it, and if it doesn't count, you're only running one copy of Windows on the physical hardware, even if you're not running Windows the way Mr. Bill expects.
The big reason to use VMware or its competitors here is to let Windows run in a safe protected environment, not exposed to the cold cruel world. Also, you can boot the Windows OS from a clean copy each time, so even if it gets infected you're not very exposed.
You're not going to running IE on a non-updated system - you're going to have your Linux machine behind a firewall, and you're going to be running NAT or something more powerful between the Windows VM and the Linux machine, and you're going to update the Windows system and reboot it. Then you're going to install any applications and update them and reboot. And you're going to snapshot that OS partition, and have a separate OS partition for the data, and *then* you're going to start using IE and its little friends for classwork. And every few weeks you're going to boot the snapshot OS without the data partition and run Windows update, anti-virus updates, etc.
The IBM PC was a hamster wheel, and MS-DOS smelled of Elderberries...
And what is the air velocity of a chair thrown by a CEO?
There was one day I was driving home from the dentist after a root canal, and while there were lots of cops out on the road, I was *very* glad they didn't stop me. My speech was slurred because one side of my mouth was still numb, and if they were to do a drug test, novocaine's closely related to cocaine, the codeine I'd taken the night before is an opiate, the Sudafed I took to make it easier to breathe during the work is a meth precursor, and ibuprofen causes alse positives on the cheaper drug tests :-) (On the other hand, the nitrous had worn off before I started driving, and I'd chased it with coffee...)
But if you haven't slept in 24 hours, you shouldn't be driving (and you should still be in college and getting home by walking or taking the bus.)
No, it was about the user's data getting trashed because the application wrote the data to disk in orders that weren't stable if the system crashed for whatever reason, including power loss, and about the change in file system behaviour increasing the potential delay between writes and therefore increasing the risk that the badly written application would lose data by about 30x.
TFA shows examples of applications that work by
and comparing them to applications that rename the old version, write the new version, and do their fsyncs in orders that will always leave the disk with a correct old version, at least until the new version is stably written. In the latter case, if the new version didn't get written, the application can use the old version, and it'll be fine.
I'm fairly surprised to hear that vacuum cleaners use that much power - 1.25kw each is about 1.6 horsepower each. That should be enough for your vacuum cleaners to do 0-60 in the 10 seconds worth of battery you've got...
Yeah, you might get faster performance if you spend twice as much money to get SLC instead of MLC, and you may want to do that, but as far as write counts go, the stuff is so cheap you Just Don't Care\(tm. Suppose a $20 8GB USB stick burns out in a year - you've wasted more money than that reading this Slashdot discussion, and if it saves you a few hours a month you win, and when it's burned out you'll have to spend $10 replacing it with 16-32GB.
If you're doing something like Vista ReadyBoost, a $10 couple of gigabytes will let Vista do some decent caching, plus it'll cache your development tools and frequently used files (in case RAM wasn't doing that adequately) on one non-rotating spindle so the rotating disk can spend all its time supporting the files that are actually changing and therefore spend a lot less seek time.
If you're using Linux, you could use it for /tmp (if you're not using /tmpfs) or if it's fast enough flash you could probably even get away with using it for swap, or there's probably some appropriate fancy union filesystem thing you can do which will let you keep the more frequently used bits of your environment on flash and the less-used bits on rotating disk.
If your main problem is speeding up your development environment's use of temporary disk storage (because Linux is already caching a lot), use /tmpfs, which stores the files in virtual memory, and if the system needs to page them out, it does that - it's really useful for files that are going to get created for short periods but don't need to get kept for long.
Windows Vista Readyboost is doing something fancy and semi-automatic with caching in USB flash disks - get yourself a USB2 memory stick and turn it on. The stuff is so cheap these days that you might as well buy a large fast ReadyBoost stick, but you'll probably get a lot of payoff even from adding small drives - 8GB is now $20-40, and 32GB is ~$60-120 depending on how extreme you want to get.
So was it the really good Swiss lenses, or the Japanese biotech ones that need to be replaced before your optic nerve rots?
Those panels aren't going to last forever, and unlike silicon panels which may involve some toxics during manufacturing but aren't bad once they're finished, cadmium's a nasty toxic material, so cadmium-telluride panels aren't going to be something you can send to the dump for free; I don't think anybody knows what the disposal costs will be.
Cadmium's a really nasty material - even if it's available in significant enough quantities to transform the electric industry, it's not the kind of stuff you want to have getting into the water system.
Hey, don't you remember that "spam" has replaced "libertarians vs. socialists" as the default Internet discussion topic for the last decade? :-)
Marxism-Leninism doesn't actually work that way - the workers may get oppressed under capitalism, but they don't get around to developing the class consciousness that they're supposed to, so the elitist vanguard has to lead them in a revolution and stomp out the bourgeois classes. Since Marxism fails to recognize the value of creativity and risk-taking that entrepreneurs provide, that work doesn't get done after the revolution, so the economy recovers very slowly if at all from the damage done in the revolution, with idealist dogmatism as a poor replacement for the information provided by prices in a market, and the elites end up becoming the new class of bosses, not even the same as the old bosses, and the final stage of Marxist-Leninist communism is a chaotic transition to something like less competent capitalism.
Back in the early 90s, I was at economic conferences in Eastern Europe, and one of the fundamental issues that those societies were trying to solve was how to give the means of production to the workers before the ex-Communist bosses stole all the good stuff; in some cases the former state companies gave stock to the workers, but that didn't happen all that often, and usually only on businesses that weren't worth stealing.
On the other hand, the current top-down government aid paid to huge corporations is not only not either theoretical or real Communism, it's a great reminder that Ayn Rand's morally pure capitalists were more of a fictional device than a description of real capitalism. I don't think I agree with your assertion that the aid is getting paid for by "workers" - after all, we're taxing the "rich", and have been taxing businesses all along, and the bailout money's mostly getting borrowed, either from China or from Westerners who still have assets to invest in T-bills. Some of it will get paid back by your kids, and some of it will get defaulted on somehow, either by finding a way to restart inflation (which is a lot tougher in today's global economy than it was when Reagan did it) or by some new scam.
Sweden had a smaller version of a banking crisis a few years back (90s, I think, or maybe early 00s.) They gave the banks more capital by having them issue stock which the government bought; it diluted the original shareholders' stock, and the government could have theoretically run the bank operations as a big stockholder, but once the banks recovered the government made a profit on the deal so the taxpayers actually got something back. I think it was around the timeframe that I was bumming around Scandinavia on vacation, and the Swedish currency was worth about 2/3 of what the Norwegian and Danish currencies were, but they got over it.
As to whether stocks or bonds in a distressed company are worth more, that's hard to say - both can lose pretty badly. And then there's the car companies - when they were asking for a bailout, the amount they wanted was something like 10x the market cap of all of GM's stock.
Microsoft's real problem with Open Source is the language it's written in; if you translate it into a language they like better, they're not as concerned with the actual license. So here's a MS-friendly version of the code:
Yeah, the guy was stupid and showed the cops one file that was probably illegal, and I can see that the judge could order him to produce that file again. But if there's one, there's probably a lot more, and while the cops have enough evidence to get a search warrant for the rest, forcing the guy to turn those files over means he'd be incriminating himself on possession of files 2...N, and therefore he'd probably be subject to more prison time than just file 1.
... still had vacuum tubes and punchcards. (Actually, I was probably 15 by then.) We were allowed to do anything we wanted with the punchcards and the paper drive tape, but only a couple of adults were allowed to rewire the plugboard on the side that had the core program installed on it.
It was an IBM 403 printer system, plus we could program drum cards for the Model 026 keypunch and do anything we wanted on the card sorter...
My cat used to have a Hotmail account (and even though it no longer works, she still sits on my computer chair at night hoping to read her email.) However, when she applied for it, she put in her correct birthdate and species. A few years later, due to some child-protection laws, Hotmail put in a policy about "No children under 13 can have accounts", and since they weren't adjusting ages for Cat Years, they closed her account. I could have gotten it reinstated, but I'd have had to give them a credit card number, and she'd have just gone wild on eBay ordering fish by mail order, so that wasn't going to happen.