You've never had an off day where you blow up at someone, but then come back to your senses and apologise for it? All that editing needs to do is drop the apology, and you look like a douchebag. With full context, i.e., the apology, you suddenly look much more like a normal human being.
Googling for "car colour theft", one of the top hits is an article suggesting painting your car pink. Not sure if the cure is worse than the disease, but that's your call to make for your own situation.
2100 people is not a small sample at all. Try taking a course in statistics. All it takes to get to 95%-19-times-out-of-20 confidence is, if I recall my university engineering-statistics class, somewhere around 1100. Getting to 2100 may provide a 97% confidence, even when representing millions, assuming that's 2100 valid respondents.
That still gives rise to manipulation through bad questions. I'm not looking to debate the question. Just the number.
The point of having disparate information all colocated in one person's head is to improve one's ability to form patterns, and, from those, extract hypotheses to extend those patterns (or to fill holes in those patterns). In other words, if you don't actually know something, it's hard to extend that piece of information in new areas. Memorisation isn't the goal - it's information which you then need to apply critical thinking skills against in order to produce new information.
As always, capitalism only works when all sides are peers in the transaction. That means that the person, or, in this case, the government bureaucrat, who looks for private companies to tender on a contract needs to be aware of what they're asking for. They need to understand what the transaction entails, and they need to understand the alternatives (whether hiring someone to do it in-house, or it's simply the competition in the marketplace). Any time you are at an informational disadvantage, you open yourself up to being taken for a ride. There's a reason why government tenders generally include the clause "we reserve the right to go with any vendor, not just the lowest bid" or something like that: so that they can weed out crackpot offers.
It seems to me, then, that the person in Birmingham's city government who decided to go with this outfit was at an informational disadvantage and could thus be duped by incompetent and/or malicious corporations. They apparently took the lowest bid, not the best bid.
What happened to "News for Nerds"? I realise this is the "idle" section, but still - is it just so someone can make fun of religious people or something? This isn't nerdsworthy in the least. Maybe if this were a site of "News for Catholics" but it's not.
Personally, I find that winning academy awards is a better indicator that I won't like it than I will. Not a guarantee, of course, but a pretty good indicator.
How's that any different than any other government contract? The government gets work done, someone else does the work, government pays said other person for the value of their work (not necessarily the same as the cost of the work). Heck, remove "government" from this, and it's still true.
Some private companies also reward their employees with finder's fees for reducing costs ("reduce costs by $1m per year, and we'll give you a $10,000 bonus!"), hiring ("Recommend someone to hire, and if we do, and they accept, and they're still around after x months, we'll give you $5,000"), valuable ideas ("Submit a patentable idea, we'll give you $2,000, with a $3,000 bonus if the USPTO accepts it") or really valuable ideas ("If we license that patent for over $10m, we'll give you $50,000"). Heck, they even give out bonuses if you increase the corporate income (i.e., SALES). Why should the government lose out on it?
Besides, by getting the general public involved, they even get to add a buzzword to their job descriptions: Crowdsourcing.
A single thread of high CPU usage should only impact a single (virtual?) CPU. However, since the secondary (hyper-thread) CPU also was impacted, it tells me that there are some situations where a HT CPU cannot do two things literally at once. For lack of better statistical methods, I estimate this as the virtual CPU counting only as half a CPU.
When I run "make -j13", there are so many processes flying around that I can't tell quite so directly whether the hyper-thread CPUs count as nothing, full, half, or any other portion. Especially when a bunch of the compile processes happen on another physical machine. Determining the value of the extra virtual CPUs here would take far more analysis than I've attempted to do, which I freely admit. (More than I care to do, either - I've already purchased the CPU, and did so based on counting the HT CPUs as half CPUs, for a total of ~6CPUs instead of the 8CPUs Intel keeps trying to call it. Having already purchased it, I want to use it, not analyse it.)
I used to have a P4 with HT until some piece of the machine became unstable at normal operating temps, and then got an i7 quad-core with HT. In between, I also purchased an AMD Phenom quad-core, which is still running, though it probably doesn't have enough fans.
I wouldn't count hyper-threading as doubling the CPUs. Often times I would run a single CPU-bound app and find that the "hyperthread" CPU to also spike to 50-100% as shown on conky. So while you may sometimes see a doubling of your processing power with a hyperthread, my experience says to count a hyperthreaded CPU as if it were a half-CPU.
There's no doubt that my i7 is faster than my Phenom. Then again, there is about a two-year gap in purchasing times, so that's expected, and doesn't speak to which company is producing better hardware. All I know is that I would rate my i7 as if it had 6 non-hyperthreaded CPUs instead of 8.
(Running Gentoo, so I get lots of CPU-bound compiling in to do rough seat-of-the-pants informal comparisons... though now I use distcc to get the Phenom to help the i7 and vice versa.)
Daylight savings time is just as deterministic as leap seconds, and yet pretty much all modern software handles DST just fine.
If you're on a system where time goes through glibc, then your timezone-data can get refreshed (as it seems to many times every year - we're currently on 2010l - that's the twelfth update thus far this year, and I have record here of installing 2009u last year, too, which may not have been the last one of the year). Why not just include leap seconds in there?
As for other systems, I'm sure that the OS can handle it even on Windows - and Patch Tuesday should cover it.
They sidestep a lot of ethical objections by not having any sort of nervous system, or indeed any tissue differentiation apart from a separate type of cell on the outside of the sphere that is destined to form a placenta.
Unfortunately, the people who object to ESC are less concerned with cell biology or anything tangible or proveable and more concerned about souls.
I have to admit, I've never heard this as a stated objection to ESC. This is the first time I've heard either of these objections - either the nervous system OR the souls. Makes me wonder if it's a strawman.
The reality is that the embryo is biologically a distinct human being. The same objection would be raised if we had to end a 20-year-old's life to save my mother, or a 10-year-old's life, or a 1-year-old's life, or a -8.3-month-old's life. You don't sacrifice one person's life for another (though they may choose to sacrifice their own life, but I don't think anyone is going to argue that an embryo can choose that sacrifice). And that's the basic objection.
The secondary objection I've heard is that adult stem cells have managed to solve a great number of problems already, and, as far as I can tell, we haven't reached a limit (*) on those yet, so why go down an ethically controversial road when an ethically non-controversial road has not yet been fully explored (**)?
(*) I use "limit" here more as a statistical limit (80-20 rule: 80% of the value, 20% of the work) rather than a mathematical one. Given this is/., I better make that explicit.
(**) Here I use the term "fully" in the same sense as the above "limit". Great breakthroughs are being made regularly still. The pace has not slowed down. And, unlike AI or a lot of other technologies discussed on/., many of these are less than 5 years away from practical use.
Better than that - recently my ISP, Shaw (shaw.ca) increased all of its plans by 50% without changing rates. So I was getting 10Mbps, now it's 15Mbps. That should, in theory, get me up to about 1.9MB/s. However, they also apply a SpeedBoost "technology" (yeah, they just allow extra bursts at higher rates) such that I've seen 2-3MB/s speeds from some mirrors. And wherein the boost is supposed to be for brief durations, though they never really say how brief, I've had sustained 2-3MB/s speeds for 10-30 seconds before settling back down.
Their customer service sucks. But at least I almost never need to talk to them. And when I do, I generally ignore their questions about operating system. Works better that way. Especially since the only times I call are when the cable modem itself no longer has the upstream light on.
As is often the case with knee-jerk solutions, this one isn't completely perfect, either. Reporting after a verdict is a great idea that will never happen for political reasons (the cops need to be seen to be doing their job in order to procure exceedingly larger budgets from their city officials). Reporting not-guilty, though, isn't perfect, if only because large swaths of the populace have bought into the cop propaganda: if they were arrested, it's because they did it, and if they were found not guilty it's due to some technicality, not because they didn't actually do it.
I'm not saying that I have the perfect solution - I don't. But if someone can solve these sociological issues, I'm pretty sure I could really get behind it. Because what we have now doesn't merely suck, it's misleading.
That's ok, it appears few others have read the article, either. The basic brilliant idea is to keep track of everyone's password, and reject passwords that are too common.
This just means that attackers have to create an account, and keep changing the password until they get one (or more) rejected. And then they can use those passwords to hack in to other accounts - they know they'll be valid passwords for SOME accounts.
I don't see this as being an improvement. Maybe if they also randomly reject non-popular (or even unused) passwords to pollute the attacker's dictionary, but even then, that's just obscuring the information instead of denying the information to an attacker.
Slashdot Mirror
You've never had an off day where you blow up at someone, but then come back to your senses and apologise for it? All that editing needs to do is drop the apology, and you look like a douchebag. With full context, i.e., the apology, you suddenly look much more like a normal human being.
Googling for "car colour theft", one of the top hits is an article suggesting painting your car pink. Not sure if the cure is worse than the disease, but that's your call to make for your own situation.
2100 people is not a small sample at all. Try taking a course in statistics. All it takes to get to 95%-19-times-out-of-20 confidence is, if I recall my university engineering-statistics class, somewhere around 1100. Getting to 2100 may provide a 97% confidence, even when representing millions, assuming that's 2100 valid respondents.
That still gives rise to manipulation through bad questions. I'm not looking to debate the question. Just the number.
The point of having disparate information all colocated in one person's head is to improve one's ability to form patterns, and, from those, extract hypotheses to extend those patterns (or to fill holes in those patterns). In other words, if you don't actually know something, it's hard to extend that piece of information in new areas. Memorisation isn't the goal - it's information which you then need to apply critical thinking skills against in order to produce new information.
As always, capitalism only works when all sides are peers in the transaction. That means that the person, or, in this case, the government bureaucrat, who looks for private companies to tender on a contract needs to be aware of what they're asking for. They need to understand what the transaction entails, and they need to understand the alternatives (whether hiring someone to do it in-house, or it's simply the competition in the marketplace). Any time you are at an informational disadvantage, you open yourself up to being taken for a ride. There's a reason why government tenders generally include the clause "we reserve the right to go with any vendor, not just the lowest bid" or something like that: so that they can weed out crackpot offers.
It seems to me, then, that the person in Birmingham's city government who decided to go with this outfit was at an informational disadvantage and could thus be duped by incompetent and/or malicious corporations. They apparently took the lowest bid, not the best bid.
What happened to "News for Nerds"? I realise this is the "idle" section, but still - is it just so someone can make fun of religious people or something? This isn't nerdsworthy in the least. Maybe if this were a site of "News for Catholics" but it's not.
From what I can see, AC isn't saying it's a solution. It's a next logical step.
Personally, I find that winning academy awards is a better indicator that I won't like it than I will. Not a guarantee, of course, but a pretty good indicator.
How's that any different than any other government contract? The government gets work done, someone else does the work, government pays said other person for the value of their work (not necessarily the same as the cost of the work). Heck, remove "government" from this, and it's still true.
Some private companies also reward their employees with finder's fees for reducing costs ("reduce costs by $1m per year, and we'll give you a $10,000 bonus!"), hiring ("Recommend someone to hire, and if we do, and they accept, and they're still around after x months, we'll give you $5,000"), valuable ideas ("Submit a patentable idea, we'll give you $2,000, with a $3,000 bonus if the USPTO accepts it") or really valuable ideas ("If we license that patent for over $10m, we'll give you $50,000"). Heck, they even give out bonuses if you increase the corporate income (i.e., SALES). Why should the government lose out on it?
Besides, by getting the general public involved, they even get to add a buzzword to their job descriptions: Crowdsourcing.
A pilot?
I think you may have misinterpreted what I said.
A single thread of high CPU usage should only impact a single (virtual?) CPU. However, since the secondary (hyper-thread) CPU also was impacted, it tells me that there are some situations where a HT CPU cannot do two things literally at once. For lack of better statistical methods, I estimate this as the virtual CPU counting only as half a CPU.
When I run "make -j13", there are so many processes flying around that I can't tell quite so directly whether the hyper-thread CPUs count as nothing, full, half, or any other portion. Especially when a bunch of the compile processes happen on another physical machine. Determining the value of the extra virtual CPUs here would take far more analysis than I've attempted to do, which I freely admit. (More than I care to do, either - I've already purchased the CPU, and did so based on counting the HT CPUs as half CPUs, for a total of ~6CPUs instead of the 8CPUs Intel keeps trying to call it. Having already purchased it, I want to use it, not analyse it.)
I used to have a P4 with HT until some piece of the machine became unstable at normal operating temps, and then got an i7 quad-core with HT. In between, I also purchased an AMD Phenom quad-core, which is still running, though it probably doesn't have enough fans.
I wouldn't count hyper-threading as doubling the CPUs. Often times I would run a single CPU-bound app and find that the "hyperthread" CPU to also spike to 50-100% as shown on conky. So while you may sometimes see a doubling of your processing power with a hyperthread, my experience says to count a hyperthreaded CPU as if it were a half-CPU.
There's no doubt that my i7 is faster than my Phenom. Then again, there is about a two-year gap in purchasing times, so that's expected, and doesn't speak to which company is producing better hardware. All I know is that I would rate my i7 as if it had 6 non-hyperthreaded CPUs instead of 8.
(Running Gentoo, so I get lots of CPU-bound compiling in to do rough seat-of-the-pants informal comparisons... though now I use distcc to get the Phenom to help the i7 and vice versa.)
Daylight savings time is just as deterministic as leap seconds, and yet pretty much all modern software handles DST just fine.
If you're on a system where time goes through glibc, then your timezone-data can get refreshed (as it seems to many times every year - we're currently on 2010l - that's the twelfth update thus far this year, and I have record here of installing 2009u last year, too, which may not have been the last one of the year). Why not just include leap seconds in there?
As for other systems, I'm sure that the OS can handle it even on Windows - and Patch Tuesday should cover it.
They sidestep a lot of ethical objections by not having any sort of nervous system, or indeed any tissue differentiation apart from a separate type of cell on the outside of the sphere that is destined to form a placenta.
Unfortunately, the people who object to ESC are less concerned with cell biology or anything tangible or proveable and more concerned about souls.
I have to admit, I've never heard this as a stated objection to ESC. This is the first time I've heard either of these objections - either the nervous system OR the souls. Makes me wonder if it's a strawman.
The reality is that the embryo is biologically a distinct human being. The same objection would be raised if we had to end a 20-year-old's life to save my mother, or a 10-year-old's life, or a 1-year-old's life, or a -8.3-month-old's life. You don't sacrifice one person's life for another (though they may choose to sacrifice their own life, but I don't think anyone is going to argue that an embryo can choose that sacrifice). And that's the basic objection.
The secondary objection I've heard is that adult stem cells have managed to solve a great number of problems already, and, as far as I can tell, we haven't reached a limit (*) on those yet, so why go down an ethically controversial road when an ethically non-controversial road has not yet been fully explored (**)?
(*) I use "limit" here more as a statistical limit (80-20 rule: 80% of the value, 20% of the work) rather than a mathematical one. Given this is /., I better make that explicit.
(**) Here I use the term "fully" in the same sense as the above "limit". Great breakthroughs are being made regularly still. The pace has not slowed down. And, unlike AI or a lot of other technologies discussed on /., many of these are less than 5 years away from practical use.
I was looking for Bogosort myself, actually.
Personally, I avoid dropping electronics, especially ones with moving parts, on to the floor. Or any other surface, for that matter. Helps a lot.
HTH, HAND
Better than that - recently my ISP, Shaw (shaw.ca) increased all of its plans by 50% without changing rates. So I was getting 10Mbps, now it's 15Mbps. That should, in theory, get me up to about 1.9MB/s. However, they also apply a SpeedBoost "technology" (yeah, they just allow extra bursts at higher rates) such that I've seen 2-3MB/s speeds from some mirrors. And wherein the boost is supposed to be for brief durations, though they never really say how brief, I've had sustained 2-3MB/s speeds for 10-30 seconds before settling back down.
Their customer service sucks. But at least I almost never need to talk to them. And when I do, I generally ignore their questions about operating system. Works better that way. Especially since the only times I call are when the cable modem itself no longer has the upstream light on.
I'd say he doesn't know most politicians. Can we start with them? Please? Don't remove the water, first, though.
When it enables the speaker to pay less, it's a fair share.
When it enables the speaker's favourite causes to suck on the public teat, it's a fair share.
Really, you didn't know this?
As is often the case with knee-jerk solutions, this one isn't completely perfect, either. Reporting after a verdict is a great idea that will never happen for political reasons (the cops need to be seen to be doing their job in order to procure exceedingly larger budgets from their city officials). Reporting not-guilty, though, isn't perfect, if only because large swaths of the populace have bought into the cop propaganda: if they were arrested, it's because they did it, and if they were found not guilty it's due to some technicality, not because they didn't actually do it.
I'm not saying that I have the perfect solution - I don't. But if someone can solve these sociological issues, I'm pretty sure I could really get behind it. Because what we have now doesn't merely suck, it's misleading.
It was a single university textbook. Yeah, he would have paid :-)
Have you tasted KFC lately?
I think that's punishment enough.
I'm not actually aware of a unix that doesn't ship with Perl, either, so I'm not sure of your point.
And now you're back to the security of your master password alone.
That's ok, it appears few others have read the article, either. The basic brilliant idea is to keep track of everyone's password, and reject passwords that are too common.
This just means that attackers have to create an account, and keep changing the password until they get one (or more) rejected. And then they can use those passwords to hack in to other accounts - they know they'll be valid passwords for SOME accounts.
I don't see this as being an improvement. Maybe if they also randomly reject non-popular (or even unused) passwords to pollute the attacker's dictionary, but even then, that's just obscuring the information instead of denying the information to an attacker.