Microsoft is now above the law here in the US, so the only other entities that are above the law can do anything. Once MS own enough patents there will be no choice but to play with them, like it or not. They're subtler than mere barratry. Instead, think countless bludgeons custom made for each market, forcing the use of MS products.
MS has no choice because current offerings won't support Microsoft's stock prices. They have to branch out into completely new markets, and barratry is the obvious next step since they can't distinguish theft from innovation.
Unfortunately, you're not frightened enough. I don't think that even large multinationals will be able to stand as significantly against MS unless they cooperate.
MS is vast enough that simply pouring out resources in front of a powerful opponent will win a war of attrition. Cost vs. benefits? Terrible, but winning is everything.
SCO looks like a testing ground for their new business model. Whether SCO wins or loses is almost irrelevant, because the knowledge gained is invaluable. If the lumbering giants don't recognize what's happening and act quickly, they're in for a lot of pain.
"This only holds true for smaller diesels... but: If the valves ain't a rattling, you got them suckers to damn tight. "
It's easy to burn a valve on an aircooled VW engine, since with air cooling you run much closer to overheating all the time. It's safer to have the valves too loose than too tight. Besides, it makes all those cooling fins ring like little bells.
Valves too loose hurts your performance a little, but burnt valves hurts your performance a lot more.
There are VW mechanics who tunes the valves so they don't rattle (too loose) and don't burn valves. There are more mechanics who think they do. As a hamfisted amateur, I prefer to err on the side of caution.
"But even with these enhancements, it's been conclusively shown that some problems are intractable for neural networks. In any case, neural networks are no new thing."
Not so. Maybe you're still thinking about extremely simple neural nets, because no such proof of intractability exists for larger more complex networks.
Here's proof: Neural Networks can emulate a Universal Turing Machine. Since they can also be emulated by a UTM their limitations are no greater or less than those of any UTM. One citation if this isn't obviously true.
This is exactly why Marvin Minsky has been accused of slandering neural nets unfairly, and hindering AI research. In his book _Perceptrons_ he demonstrated a simple problem that a trivial (one or two layers with no feedback) NN can't solve. A lot of scientists wrote off Neural Nets just as you have, because a toy was the only tool used. Never mind the fact that an only slightly more complex NN can solve such a problem easily. I find it telling that for a human to solve the same problem, one has to construct a strategy to do it. Not the sort of thing I'd assume any extremely simple machine could do. These days Minsky complains that AI isn't trying to build human brains. He's a brilliant man, but in some cases (as with many famous people) his chutzpah occasionally outstrips his judgement. I only wish that great scientists were immune to this.
Lots of less qualified people complain that neural nets aren't useful because they have some unpleasant experience with them. They have no idea of the variety of neural nets. It's like using a Playstation and complaining that computers are not useful.
As for spam filtering with AI, unless you have the narrow definition of AI, the Bayesian techniques of SpamAssassin are AI, as is the Latent Semantic Analysis done by OSX mail.app for spam filtering. LSA, while computationally expensive on a PC, is regarded as equivalent to a particular type of 3 layer neural net, (see Kohonen self-organizing maps.)
One thing you have right. Neural nets are "no new thing." They're as old as biological brains. Novelty is not a criterion for usefulness.
Lots of them are in English, and really are great books.
Another amazing thing is that a lot of these books seemed to have been letterpress printed rather than the usual offset lithography. Those wacky Sovs and their archaic tech. It was lovely feeling the impression left on the page by the metal type on a modern mass produced book.
Here's my service. I guarantee 100% backups of any amount of data for $100 a month, or your money back. Any month that you seek backed up data and I don't have it, I'll give your money back for that month.
I don't have to do anything at all except collect a lot of checks and mail a few refunds. Overall, I'll come out a winner.
It's not the bicycle so much as the road. If you don't have a road, you don't get the big win. It's just too easy to forget how important infrastructure is. I remember calculating in my high school physics class that if you had a bicycle on a paved road on the moon, you could achieve escape velocity. Infrastructure is a problem with most alternative energy sources. The nice thing about alcohol and biodiesel is that they can be integrated with the existing infrastructure easily, unlike hydrogen.
I'm curious about this as a cottage industry. That's one way of getting around other infrastructure problems, (no major production, no distribution currently.) While it doesn't seem economical, if you look at moonshining, some of that stuff is sold almost as cheaply as gasoline. I'm not at all interested in begging grease from my local restaurants, or feeding and running an unlicensed still, but I'm just crazy enough to consider growing algae in a pond for an experiment.
Refining is not the same as with dino oil. That's the cool thing about diesels in general. They're very forgiving of fuel. For vegetable oils, it's just the usual physical seperation methods for vegetable oil. Then the oil is converted to biodiesel by esterifying it with lye and alcohol. In fact, vegetable oils can be run straight in a mixed fuel vehicle which starts on ordinary fuel, and then cuts over to vegetable oil.
You think your ISP gets cranky about you running a server? If you did this, and the telco figured it out, (for example by looking for symmetric traffic on your internet line and your phone line, or by subscribing to the service themselves to get a list of numbers) they'd cut you off. Not many people will want to burn down their landline to give away phone calls.
Twenty some-odd years ago, a guy from my high school was caught running a demon dialer. Southwestern Bell explained to his parents that he could have either a live phoneline or a modem, but not both.
This is what I always wanted to do with VOIP too, but I could never convince myself that it was worth the risk.
I've heard that some companies with international networks and PBXs are illegally doing something very similar with VOIP, but only with their own calls. Their lines are expected to be heavily utilized, and they have much more leverage with the telcos.
Salesman: "Do you know the difference between optical zoom and digital zoom?"
Me: "No, pray tell... What _is_ the difference?" (More importantly, what's his story?)
Salesman: "With optical zoom, you can see that fly on the wall over there. With digital zoom, you can tell what SEX it is." (He's as funny as he is knowledgeable.)
My wife rolls her eyes at me, and not at the joke. What he said couldn't be farther from the truth. Digital zoom doesn't give you more information. The picture loses resolution with digital zoom because you're just cropping the picture and blowing it up. You have less information. It's always like this. I think these are the guys who don't have enough brains or charisma to sell cars.
Tangentially: Since the economy still sucks, why is customer service still awful everywhere? Granted, I'm not looking for any of those jobs, but a lot of bright folks seem pretty desperate.
Jobless recovery means the check is in your mouth.
/E argument is ignored unless it is at the end of the line.
This directly contradicts the documentation, which shows the option arguments preceding the file/path arguments.
The/e argument allows you to edit the ACL instead of replacing the existing permissions with your entry. Here/e and/E are interchangable, as in most (but not all) MS commandline utilities as a consequence of smashing case.
Notwithstanding all of the above, the right way to permanently change the permissions is with a global policy.
I'm interested to know which registry cleaner it was that was crippleware and rendered his machine unbootable.
Also, any others known to watch out for?
I don't mind shareware with limited functions if I'm told what they are up front, but if the vendor springs surprises on me they deserve to go down in flames. I buy products that are useful, but surprise crippleware is worse than useless because it burns my time.
So padding your resume with keywords isn't lying? Nonsense! Padding a resume is lying, and if you don't believe that, you're lying to yourself.
Perhaps you distinguish dishonesty between "outright lies" and the category that resume padding falls into. I guess resume padding is just plain old lies. But then you imply that resume padding is not even lying. The distinction is a self-serving one.
Resume padding is dishonest. If it wasn't dishonest, it wouldn't need the special name, would it? It's important and almost universal, but unless the statements on your resume are true both literally and in implication, then it's lying.
At leaset Izzy Illiterate actually has a degree from the College of Wants Your Money. Did he work for four years for it? No. Did he say he did? No. Does he have a diploma? Yes.
Hell, a fake diploma is just trying to defeat a keyword search too. SQL == True, C++ == True, Bachelor's degree == True.
I'm not defending fake diplomas or attacking resume padding. There are lots of justifications for lying, and occasionally good ones, but lies are still lies.
What disgusts me is those who think the guy who has a fake degree is worse than the one who pads his resume.
To the poster: Hey, I'm psychic, and I'll tell you two things about yourself.
(ready)
1. You have a degree. 2. You pad your resume.
Have fun with the flexible morality and the sanctimonious attitude though. You must be ready to legislate morality now.
It's not an analogy, stupid. He's pointing out a direct and literal counterexample.
Then you make a truly bad analogy, by comparing militant separatists to participants in a declared war.
Whatever.
It sucks that the US has made so many violent enemies in the world, including those in our own country. We all have our own enemies, even if Canada's enemies are fewer.
I'm very fond of suspend to disk. Suspend to RAM I don't care for at all.
I prefer to be insensitive to power loss and pay a small penalty in startup time. If I've hibernated a system, I know that if I leave the laptop unplugged too long, or if the PC gets moved and consequently unplugged, I'm fine. I move hardware more often than I'd like. LiveCDs are fun to play with too. Don't lose your state, and pay less of a penalty in boot time.
Long before hibernate was commonly available, I thought that suspend to disk would be a perfect response to power events. Do your servers have enough battery backup? What about if the same power event kills all the stoplights and elevators in your large city? Why not retain the server's state, instead of incurring the cost of a total shutdown and restart? If my laptop battery is about to be drained, I prefer that it go to a state where I can swap batteries or not worry about rushing to a charger.
Yes, my dad wrote a bunch of programs for the MicroAce* that worked this way. With no sound output, you just manipulated some bus signal or other, and put a radio antenna close to the back of the vacuum formed plastic case. I don't think anybody would ever bother emulating most of those programs. Besides he published lots of them in the zx81 hobbyist magazines.
*The MicroAce was a build it yourself clone of the Timex/Sinclair that was cheap. After all, the Timex/Sinclair was almost $100 at the time.
Even further offtopic: Only a year or two later, a friend of mine with an Apple wrote something he called Monkeywrite. This was very much like what is now Dissociated Press.
Thanks! Here's my list. The stuff I carry is usually for cases where I can't access the network or hardware. If the machine sees the network, I've got it made.
I mentioned these two, but here are details.
chntpw, reset NT/2k/XP passwords with the full bootable floppy version.
Bart's network boot disk built into a 2.88 meg image allows a huge load of network drivers, and with a copy of ghost I don't ever have to mess with building boot floppies for ghost again. I also included basic DOS utilities for manipulating the HDD and testing.
Bootable CDs with floppy images can be useful, and Bart provides a handy utility for building them. Put a disk image of chntpw on a bootable CD with other goodies per instructions at Bart's site.
I also carry Knoppix or perhaps a nice Bootable Business Card with lots of network drivers. With read-only NTFS access and networking, I've stripped data off of drives I couldn't even access for a fresh NT/2k install. Pour it across the network, and you're a hero. Also good for a slow clone with dd, or an emergency Remote Desktop Client. If you pick a livecd with a nice recent version of kparted, you can resize live NTFS partitions (I used SystemRescueCD). I've needed to do this more often than I'd have expected. Knoppix's NTFS tools were less useful at the time.
I'm looking forward to using the Captive NTFS drivers, but that seems less neccessary with one more set of tools from Bart's site, the bootable XP/2000 pre-execution environment in BartPE. These allow full access to NTFS, as well as providing an environment you can run Adaware and other Windows tools from. One of these made my day last week. It's dog slow to boot, but running Adaware or other utils (chkdsk, AV, undelete), from NOT the boot drive is great.
What are the others? Yeah, I could make a bunch up, but I'm really interested in what other people find useful.
I'm working in a school, so my best tools are Bart's Network disk with ghost on it, (all NICs except the ones with no DOS drivers, for that I'm working on ghost32) and chntpw.
The aggressive firewalling, censorware and AV ensure that most of the problems are intentional mischief.
Remarkable how destructive bored adolescents can be. I guess that's one reason the military loves 'em.
Heisenberg's motivations are still arguable. After the war, an amazing number of people suddenly "did not sympathize" with the Nazis, although they worked diligently and enthusiastically for them. Heisenberg may have been a "big Nazi." Wasn't Einstein personally acquainted with the man, and in a position to form a legitimate opinion based on evidence we may not have seen?
Personally, I think Heisenberg was probably sabotaging the Nazi effort, but none of the evidence is compelling. He was such a convincing collaborator that it's hard to tell.
Heisenberg's actions may have intentionally slowed down the Nazi pursuit of the atom bomb, or perhaps he was actually trying hard, and just wrong or (un)lucky. All these men were perfectly fallible.
We're responsible to everyone for what we do, and who we pretend to be and. We're responsible only to ourselves for who we are.
Fiction is a good arena for the unknowable. Kurt Vonnegut's _Mother Night_ is a lovely book about these very problems and even the movie is great.
Wrong! You are making an easy mathematical error, but fortunately it is easy to understand your error if you are willing to think about statistics for a moment.
"(T)he fact that half of their team is below average *for the team" is not a fact, and it is actually extremely unlikely for any team. The "normal distribution" applies (when it does) to very large samples. The smaller the group, the less applicable the normal distribution is. This is one reason why "grading on a curve" is absurd in anything but huge classes, and arguable even there.
Even your minimal claim has simple counterexamples, eg: You've got six people on a team. Five are ordinary and indistinguishable in ability. One is great. In that case, Five are below average. While extreme, this is only a simple case. If you look at likely cases, most of them don't divide neatly in two, neither do they fit a normal distribution, which the GE example approximates with three values instead of two.
The number of people one manager rates is small enough that the normal distribution will almost certainly not apply.
If you have trouble with this, sit down with a coin and flip it, graphing as you go. Even with exactly two integer options, the distribution will not be 50/50 for quite for some time, although the longer you flip, the more those discrepancies will vanish into the noise.
Hell, I'll write a script using a RNG to demonstrate it. I've argued this before. I'm only bothering now, because in your case it is important.
Another example that will obviously violate your expectations. Imagine a task that is easy to do to a certain level of ability, and improvement after that point is very slow and difficult to distinguish. Imagine also that the ramp up speed is fairly fast, but before that point, performance is simply inadequate. Now imagine a team where most folks have been doing this for long enough to be good enough. Maybe a few are better, but not by much. Now there is one new guy who is utterly incompetent. Once again, most are above average. Again, this is an extreme example, but not an uncommon one at most workplaces.
If this isn't what you mean by "average" you shouldn't use mathematical terms, and if you want to define a midpoint that isn't "average," you need a statistics course before you'd better inflict it upon other people. Forcing data to match an arbitrary curve is dishonest or ignorant.
Your methods are unquestionably screwing many of your employees. This is math, not opinion, even if you regard evaluations as arbitrary, which again, they'd better not be. As a manager, you really need to understand how wrong you are. This is logic worthy only of the true PHB.
Your example isn't even the same as the GE example. If you have an odd number, then obviously half are not below average, so your simple rule is already broken in at least half of the possible cases. This doesn't apply to the more complex (although equally wrong for other reasons above) GE example you cite. Nonetheless, your claim is demonstrably different from the GE example, and you should be able to tell the difference. In the GE example, people will be clustered at the 80% point, and thus, only ten percent will be below average.
And if that/NYT Al-Quaeda partner link gets as much traffic as I expect, everyone who reads Slashdot will be on a Department of Justice suspected terrorist list.
Notify your family that you will soon be arrested and held incommunicado for a few months or years.
I worked at a games studio a few years ago. The real thing costs around $100,000. I also remember the Playstation (one) dev station that got tossed out because it was an obsolete 486, just running special software that was no longer worth anything.
Laws being driven entirely by what is good for one particular business are wrong in principle, and these people are the most destructive sort of Luddites.
Any conservative should oppose legislated business models. If government run business or trade restrictions are destructive, how can this be anything but worse? It doesn't just make competition difficult, or irritate our trade partners to no good end. It hamstrings everyone who lives in this country and abides by the laws. This is the worst sort of protectionism and legislated inefficiency.
Any liberal should be opposed to this because public policy and individual rights are not to be determined by industry.
If you live in California, write a letter about this now. A single point, put down on paper, concise and polite. Send a signed copy to your legislators, your assemblyman, Bill Lockyear too. I'm afraid our Governator is a lost cause, or I'd suggest him too.
I'll be writing two letters to each, one about P2P and legislated business models (maybe still too complex) and one about Lockyear's shameful parroting of corporate policies that are legally outrageous and unprecedented. It would be less offensive if the letter actually made sense, but it's just a smear.
Help! There are a lot of us in California. Let's demonstrate that internet advocacy isn't totally impotent. All you have to do is find out who your legislators are, write a paragraph, and mail a leter.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft is now above the law here in the US, so the only other entities that are above the law can do anything. Once MS own enough patents there will be no choice but to play with them, like it or not. They're subtler than mere barratry. Instead, think countless bludgeons custom made for each market, forcing the use of MS products.
MS has no choice because current offerings won't support Microsoft's stock prices. They have to branch out into completely new markets, and barratry is the obvious next step since they can't distinguish theft from innovation.
Unfortunately, you're not frightened enough. I don't think that even large multinationals will be able to stand as significantly against MS unless they cooperate.
MS is vast enough that simply pouring out resources in front of a powerful opponent will win a war of attrition. Cost vs. benefits? Terrible, but winning is everything.
SCO looks like a testing ground for their new business model. Whether SCO wins or loses is almost irrelevant, because the knowledge gained is invaluable. If the lumbering giants don't recognize what's happening and act quickly, they're in for a lot of pain.
"This only holds true for smaller diesels... but: If the valves ain't a rattling, you got them suckers to damn tight. "
It's easy to burn a valve on an aircooled VW engine, since with air cooling you run much closer to overheating all the time. It's safer to have the valves too loose than too tight. Besides, it makes all those cooling fins ring like little bells.
Valves too loose hurts your performance a little, but burnt valves hurts your performance a lot more.
There are VW mechanics who tunes the valves so they don't rattle (too loose) and don't burn valves. There are more mechanics who think they do. As a hamfisted amateur, I prefer to err on the side of caution.
Mmmm... Ham...
This only holds true for smaller diesels... but: If the valves ain't a rattling, you got them suckers to damn tight.
"But even with these enhancements, it's been conclusively shown that some problems are intractable for neural networks. In any case, neural networks are no new thing."
Not so. Maybe you're still thinking about extremely simple neural nets, because no such proof of intractability exists for larger more complex networks.
Here's proof: Neural Networks can emulate a Universal Turing Machine. Since they can also be emulated by a UTM their limitations are no greater or less than those of any UTM. One citation if this isn't obviously true.
This is exactly why Marvin Minsky has been accused of slandering neural nets unfairly, and hindering AI research. In his book _Perceptrons_ he demonstrated a simple problem that a trivial (one or two layers with no feedback) NN can't solve. A lot of scientists wrote off Neural Nets just as you have, because a toy was the only tool used. Never mind the fact that an only slightly more complex NN can solve such a problem easily. I find it telling that for a human to solve the same problem, one has to construct a strategy to do it. Not the sort of thing I'd assume any extremely simple machine could do. These days Minsky complains that AI isn't trying to build human brains. He's a brilliant man, but in some cases (as with many famous people) his chutzpah occasionally outstrips his judgement. I only wish that great scientists were immune to this.
Lots of less qualified people complain that neural nets aren't useful because they have some unpleasant experience with them. They have no idea of the variety of neural nets. It's like using a Playstation and complaining that computers are not useful.
As for spam filtering with AI, unless you have the narrow definition of AI, the Bayesian techniques of SpamAssassin are AI, as is the Latent Semantic Analysis done by OSX mail.app for spam filtering. LSA, while computationally expensive on a PC, is regarded as equivalent to a particular type of 3 layer neural net, (see Kohonen self-organizing maps.)
One thing you have right. Neural nets are "no new thing." They're as old as biological brains. Novelty is not a criterion for usefulness.
Lots of them are in English, and really are great books.
Another amazing thing is that a lot of these books seemed to have been letterpress printed rather than the usual offset lithography. Those wacky Sovs and their archaic tech. It was lovely feeling the impression left on the page by the metal type on a modern mass produced book.
Here's my service. I guarantee 100% backups of any amount of data for $100 a month, or your money back. Any month that you seek backed up data and I don't have it, I'll give your money back for that month.
I don't have to do anything at all except collect a lot of checks and mail a few refunds. Overall, I'll come out a winner.
It's not the bicycle so much as the road. If you don't have a road, you don't get the big win. It's just too easy to forget how important infrastructure is. I remember calculating in my high school physics class that if you had a bicycle on a paved road on the moon, you could achieve escape velocity. Infrastructure is a problem with most alternative energy sources. The nice thing about alcohol and biodiesel is that they can be integrated with the existing infrastructure easily, unlike hydrogen.
I'm curious about this as a cottage industry. That's one way of getting around other infrastructure problems, (no major production, no distribution currently.) While it doesn't seem economical, if you look at moonshining, some of that stuff is sold almost as cheaply as gasoline. I'm not at all interested in begging grease from my local restaurants, or feeding and running an unlicensed still, but I'm just crazy enough to consider growing algae in a pond for an experiment.
Refining is not the same as with dino oil. That's the cool thing about diesels in general. They're very forgiving of fuel. For vegetable oils, it's just the usual physical seperation methods for vegetable oil. Then the oil is converted to biodiesel by esterifying it with lye and alcohol. In fact, vegetable oils can be run straight in a mixed fuel vehicle which starts on ordinary fuel, and then cuts over to vegetable oil.
The Department of Energy report cited in the article is a broken link. This one's live.
You'd lose your phone.
You think your ISP gets cranky about you running a server? If you did this, and the telco figured it out, (for example by looking for symmetric traffic on your internet line and your phone line, or by subscribing to the service themselves to get a list of numbers) they'd cut you off. Not many people will want to burn down their landline to give away phone calls.
Twenty some-odd years ago, a guy from my high school was caught running a demon dialer. Southwestern Bell explained to his parents that he could have either a live phoneline or a modem, but not both.
This is what I always wanted to do with VOIP too, but I could never convince myself that it was worth the risk.
I've heard that some companies with international networks and PBXs are illegally doing something very similar with VOIP, but only with their own calls. Their lines are expected to be heavily utilized, and they have much more leverage with the telcos.
Scene
CirCity camcorder department.
Salesman: "Do you know the difference between optical zoom and digital zoom?"
Me: "No, pray tell... What _is_ the difference?" (More importantly, what's his story?)
Salesman: "With optical zoom, you can see that fly on the wall over there. With digital zoom, you can tell what SEX it is." (He's as funny as he is knowledgeable.)
My wife rolls her eyes at me, and not at the joke. What he said couldn't be farther from the truth. Digital zoom doesn't give you more information. The picture loses resolution with digital zoom because you're just cropping the picture and blowing it up. You have less information. It's always like this. I think these are the guys who don't have enough brains or charisma to sell cars.
Tangentially: Since the economy still sucks, why is customer service still awful everywhere? Granted, I'm not looking for any of those jobs, but a lot of bright folks seem pretty desperate.
Jobless recovery means the check is in your mouth.
/E argument is ignored unless it is at the end of the line.
/e argument allows you to edit the ACL instead of replacing the existing permissions with your entry. Here /e and /E are interchangable, as in most (but not all) MS commandline utilities as a consequence of smashing case.
This directly contradicts the documentation, which shows the option arguments preceding the file/path arguments.
The
Notwithstanding all of the above, the right way to permanently change the permissions is with a global policy.
I'm interested to know which registry cleaner it was that was crippleware and rendered his machine unbootable.
Also, any others known to watch out for?
I don't mind shareware with limited functions if I'm told what they are up front, but if the vendor springs surprises on me they deserve to go down in flames. I buy products that are useful, but surprise crippleware is worse than useless because it burns my time.
I've been told that if a business in this state has security tapes, there is a retention time of > months and months, if not years, required by law.
This was the stated reason for not putting in cameras. The video retention required by law was burdensome.
So padding your resume with keywords isn't lying? Nonsense! Padding a resume is lying, and if you don't believe that, you're lying to yourself.
Perhaps you distinguish dishonesty between "outright lies" and the category that resume padding falls into. I guess resume padding is just plain old lies. But then you imply that resume padding is not even lying. The distinction is a self-serving one.
Resume padding is dishonest. If it wasn't dishonest, it wouldn't need the special name, would it? It's important and almost universal, but unless the statements on your resume are true both literally and in implication, then it's lying.
At leaset Izzy Illiterate actually has a degree from the College of Wants Your Money. Did he work for four years for it? No. Did he say he did? No. Does he have a diploma? Yes.
Hell, a fake diploma is just trying to defeat a keyword search too. SQL == True, C++ == True, Bachelor's degree == True.
I'm not defending fake diplomas or attacking resume padding. There are lots of justifications for lying, and occasionally good ones, but lies are still lies.
What disgusts me is those who think the guy who has a fake degree is worse than the one who pads his resume.
To the poster:
Hey, I'm psychic, and I'll tell you two things about yourself.
(ready)
1. You have a degree.
2. You pad your resume.
Have fun with the flexible morality and the sanctimonious attitude though. You must be ready to legislate morality now.
It's not an analogy, stupid. He's pointing out a direct and literal counterexample.
Then you make a truly bad analogy, by comparing militant separatists to participants in a declared war.
Whatever.
It sucks that the US has made so many violent enemies in the world, including those in our own country. We all have our own enemies, even if Canada's enemies are fewer.
I'm very fond of suspend to disk. Suspend to RAM I don't care for at all.
I prefer to be insensitive to power loss and pay a small penalty in startup time. If I've hibernated a system, I know that if I leave the laptop unplugged too long, or if the PC gets moved and consequently unplugged, I'm fine. I move hardware more often than I'd like. LiveCDs are fun to play with too. Don't lose your state, and pay less of a penalty in boot time.
Long before hibernate was commonly available, I thought that suspend to disk would be a perfect response to power events. Do your servers have enough battery backup? What about if the same power event kills all the stoplights and elevators in your large city? Why not retain the server's state, instead of incurring the cost of a total shutdown and restart? If my laptop battery is about to be drained, I prefer that it go to a state where I can swap batteries or not worry about rushing to a charger.
Yes, my dad wrote a bunch of programs for the MicroAce* that worked this way. With no sound output, you just manipulated some bus signal or other, and put a radio antenna close to the back of the vacuum formed plastic case. I don't think anybody would ever bother emulating most of those programs. Besides he published lots of them in the zx81 hobbyist magazines.
*The MicroAce was a build it yourself clone of the Timex/Sinclair that was cheap. After all, the Timex/Sinclair was almost $100 at the time.
Even further offtopic: Only a year or two later, a friend of mine with an Apple wrote something he called Monkeywrite. This was very much like what is now Dissociated Press.
Not KParted, QtParted. My apologies to the developers of QtParted, you've got a great tool.
QtParted is great for resizing live NTFS partitions.
Aaargh!
Thanks! Here's my list. The stuff I carry is usually for cases where I can't access the network or hardware. If the machine sees the network, I've got it made.
I mentioned these two, but here are details.
chntpw, reset NT/2k/XP passwords with the full bootable floppy version.
Bart's network boot disk built into a 2.88 meg image allows a huge load of network drivers, and with a copy of ghost I don't ever have to mess with building boot floppies for ghost again. I also included basic DOS utilities for manipulating the HDD and testing.
Bootable CDs with floppy images can be useful, and Bart provides a handy utility for building them. Put a disk image of chntpw on a bootable CD with other goodies per instructions at Bart's site.
I also carry Knoppix or perhaps a nice Bootable Business Card with lots of network drivers. With read-only NTFS access and networking, I've stripped data off of drives I couldn't even access for a fresh NT/2k install. Pour it across the network, and you're a hero. Also good for a slow clone with dd, or an emergency Remote Desktop Client. If you pick a livecd with a nice recent version of kparted, you can resize live NTFS partitions (I used SystemRescueCD). I've needed to do this more often than I'd have expected. Knoppix's NTFS tools were less useful at the time.
I'm looking forward to using the Captive NTFS drivers, but that seems less neccessary with one more set of tools from Bart's site, the bootable XP/2000 pre-execution environment in BartPE. These allow full access to NTFS, as well as providing an environment you can run Adaware and other Windows tools from. One of these made my day last week. It's dog slow to boot, but running Adaware or other utils (chkdsk, AV, undelete), from NOT the boot drive is great.
What are the others? Yeah, I could make a bunch up, but I'm really interested in what other people find useful.
I'm working in a school, so my best tools are Bart's Network disk with ghost on it, (all NICs except the ones with no DOS drivers, for that I'm working on ghost32) and chntpw.
The aggressive firewalling, censorware and AV ensure that most of the problems are intentional mischief.
Remarkable how destructive bored adolescents can be. I guess that's one reason the military loves 'em.
Heisenberg's motivations are still arguable. After the war, an amazing number of people suddenly "did not sympathize" with the Nazis, although they worked diligently and enthusiastically for them. Heisenberg may have been a "big Nazi." Wasn't Einstein personally acquainted with the man, and in a position to form a legitimate opinion based on evidence we may not have seen?
Personally, I think Heisenberg was probably sabotaging the Nazi effort, but none of the evidence is compelling. He was such a convincing collaborator that it's hard to tell.
Heisenberg's actions may have intentionally slowed down the Nazi pursuit of the atom bomb, or perhaps he was actually trying hard, and just wrong or (un)lucky. All these men were perfectly fallible.
We're responsible to everyone for what we do, and who we pretend to be and. We're responsible only to ourselves for who we are.
Fiction is a good arena for the unknowable. Kurt Vonnegut's _Mother Night_ is a lovely book about these very problems and even the movie is great.
Wrong! You are making an easy mathematical error, but fortunately it is easy to understand your error if you are willing to think about statistics for a moment.
"(T)he fact that half of their team is below average *for the team" is not a fact, and it is actually extremely unlikely for any team. The "normal distribution" applies (when it does) to very large samples. The smaller the group, the less applicable the normal distribution is. This is one reason why "grading on a curve" is absurd in anything but huge classes, and arguable even there.
Even your minimal claim has simple counterexamples, eg: You've got six people on a team. Five are ordinary and indistinguishable in ability. One is great. In that case, Five are below average. While extreme, this is only a simple case. If you look at likely cases, most of them don't divide neatly in two, neither do they fit a normal distribution, which the GE example approximates with three values instead of two.
The number of people one manager rates is small enough that the normal distribution will almost certainly not apply.
If you have trouble with this, sit down with a coin and flip it, graphing as you go. Even with exactly two integer options, the distribution will not be 50/50 for quite for some time, although the longer you flip, the more those discrepancies will vanish into the noise.
Hell, I'll write a script using a RNG to demonstrate it. I've argued this before. I'm only bothering now, because in your case it is important.
Another example that will obviously violate your expectations. Imagine a task that is easy to do to a certain level of ability, and improvement after that point is very slow and difficult to distinguish. Imagine also that the ramp up speed is fairly fast, but before that point, performance is simply inadequate. Now imagine a team where most folks have been doing this for long enough to be good enough. Maybe a few are better, but not by much. Now there is one new guy who is utterly incompetent. Once again, most are above average. Again, this is an extreme example, but not an uncommon one at most workplaces.
If this isn't what you mean by "average" you shouldn't use mathematical terms, and if you want to define a midpoint that isn't "average," you need a statistics course before you'd better inflict it upon other people. Forcing data to match an arbitrary curve is dishonest or ignorant.
Your methods are unquestionably screwing many of your employees. This is math, not opinion, even if you regard evaluations as arbitrary, which again, they'd better not be. As a manager, you really need to understand how wrong you are. This is logic worthy only of the true PHB.
Your example isn't even the same as the GE example. If you have an odd number, then obviously half are not below average, so your simple rule is already broken in at least half of the possible cases. This doesn't apply to the more complex (although equally wrong for other reasons above) GE example you cite. Nonetheless, your claim is demonstrably different from the GE example, and you should be able to tell the difference. In the GE example, people will be clustered at the 80% point, and thus, only ten percent will be below average.
And if that/NYT Al-Quaeda partner link gets as much traffic as I expect, everyone who reads Slashdot will be on a Department of Justice suspected terrorist list.
Notify your family that you will soon be arrested and held incommunicado for a few months or years.
I worked at a games studio a few years ago. The real thing costs around $100,000. I also remember the Playstation (one) dev station that got tossed out because it was an obsolete 486, just running special software that was no longer worth anything.
Laws being driven entirely by what is good for one particular business are wrong in principle, and these people are the most destructive sort of Luddites.
Any conservative should oppose legislated business models. If government run business or trade restrictions are destructive, how can this be anything but worse? It doesn't just make competition difficult, or irritate our trade partners to no good end. It hamstrings everyone who lives in this country and abides by the laws. This is the worst sort of protectionism and legislated inefficiency.
Any liberal should be opposed to this because public policy and individual rights are not to be determined by industry.
If you live in California, write a letter about this now. A single point, put down on paper, concise and polite. Send a signed copy to your legislators, your assemblyman, Bill Lockyear too. I'm afraid our Governator is a lost cause, or I'd suggest him too.
I'll be writing two letters to each, one about P2P and legislated business models (maybe still too complex) and one about Lockyear's shameful parroting of corporate policies that are legally outrageous and unprecedented. It would be less offensive if the letter actually made sense, but it's just a smear.
Help! There are a lot of us in California. Let's demonstrate that internet advocacy isn't totally impotent. All you have to do is find out who your legislators are, write a paragraph, and mail a leter.