not as a source of final truth on a subject, but a starting point.
While you are correct. I always hate this commonly stated phrase. The reason is that it implies that WP is not reliable. A better statement would be that WP's information is 98% reliable. So, it often depends on how important it is to be right. If I want to know how photosynthesis works, Wikipedia is a fine final authoritative source. If in the middle of the article, it says "In plants photosynthesis occurs in organelles called photoplasts." instead of "In plants photosynthesis occurs in organelles called chloroplasts.", it just doesn't matter. It would be a complete waste of my time to try to verify that everything in the article is accurate. Whereas if I were looking up information to decide if I really want to go through the risky heart operation that my doctor has presented as an option, I would definitely look beyond WP. Of course, In that case I'm not going to take ANY single source as authoritative.
I guess it boils down to, if the information is REALLY important, then their is no publication that should be considered 100% reliable, but the statement implies (and is interpreted by most people) that WP is in some special class of unreliability.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'pants', but as for check cards, having a 'PIN' when money can be withdrawn without one is the same as not having one at all. If a crook can just choose to not use the PIN, you choosing to use one is just security theater. As for you not being liable for fraud, different banks will have different levels of service with that. In a worst case scenario, you have to prove that it was fraud to get your money back, and even in the best case scenarios, you are still out the money until you report it. That is plenty of time for your mortgage check to bounce, your car payment check to bounce, as well as any other checks you might have written. Your bank does NOT guarantee that the fees generated by those bounced checks will be covered.
I am consistently surprised at the number of people that accept having their bank account opened up to anyone that can get their hands on their card with no security whatsoever. Then if they happen to be the unlucky person who gets their bank account drained, they think the bank if doing them a favor if they get their money back that the bank gave away in the first place.
Heck, Visa ADVERTISES that 'check cards' are easy to commit fraud with.
Next CW up for challenge: the idea that you shouldn't give strangers your ATM card and PIN number.
Too late. The 'Check Card' that has become almost ubiquitous is an ATM card that has no PIN number so is always known as nothing. So, the banks have already handed out the PIN number to strangers.
Well, your first problem is using MS Exchange. Switch to Lotus Domino and it is just a check box. It has been since at least Version 4 which was released in '95 or '96. The same is true of things like off-line web apps. Lotus Domino has had it since at least 2001. It is secure and has good replication by default. Take a look outside of MS once in a while and you will find that there is a great big world of software waiting for you.
I still remember going to MS seminars back in '97 when MS was telling us that they were going to compete head to head with Notes/Domino in groupware. They were claiming that they were going to make Outlook and Exchange more feature rich. A year later, it all just got swept under the rug, and they turned their attention to changing the definition of 'groupware'.
I call clicking through a windows install wizard, selecting the "cluster box" and typing in the name of the other server trivial to install. I call adding users by clicking on the "Tools->People->Register" then filling out 3 or 4 fields with things link "Name", "Email Address" and "Password" to be trivial to maintain. Of course, if you hate Windows, you can do the same thing on Linux, or your big iron.
This is a problem that was solved a decade ago. I guess this is part of the bad side of a MS world. Trivial problems that were solved a decade ago seem like magic to people until someone as big as Google decides to hock their wares as if it is something that needs a giant data center to accomplish something so trivial.
No, YOU are misunderstanding. Adding one extra server is not "throwing money at the problem". It is trivial to add a second server that is set as a cluster so that any email delivered to either server is instantly replicated the other server. This means no data loss and dramatically higher up time than Google. Understand. All data delivered is stored on two separate machines in real time so that even if you have a hardware failure, there is no data loss. This is trivial to install, and maintain. It has been trivial to install an maintain for over a decade.
Look who's talking. With two systems, which is very little money, you will get better uptime than with google. Actually, with just one, non-redundant system, you will generally get better uptime than with google. First you try to play the "Well, there is always the possibility of downtime" in the context of extremely small numbers. Then when you are called on it, you switch to the "If I compare ridiculous amounts of redundancy to google, google will be cheaper."
It's real simple. Hardware is not that fragile, and administering an email server is brain dead simple. The is no excuse for internal email system to be down, and Googles uptime is apparently not very good.
For personal email, that is fine. For companies that rely on email, it is a poor choice.
Yes, you might have a 1 in 100 trillion chance of losing data every century or two. I explained very simply how you get as many 9s of uptime as you want. I certainly hope YOU are not an admin if you don't understand that.
No. You just set up a replica, or if you have the need a simple cluster on a second machine and have a secondary MX entry. If one system drops, everything continues to chug along on the second machine. At most, the user should see a message telling them that the primary server has failed, and they are being redirected to the secondary server.
With this simple setup you get 99 with a lot of.9s uptime, and if you want to add 9s all you have to do slap in more machines. As a bonus, by adding the extra machines you can get load balancing as a bonus.
People keep claiming that Google has better uptime than in house systems. I have to ask, what kind of monkeys are administering these systems? In the last decade, we have not had a single unscheduled email server outage. We haven't even come close to 28 hours of SCHEDULED downtime. Heck, my personal mail server hasn't come close to 28 hours of unscheduled downtime in the last decade.
There just isn't that much that can go wrong on an even half assed administered email server. I get why it would take longer for Google to restore their backups, but that is just a weakness of centralized data storage. It's everybody trying to get a restore at the same time so they have to stand in line. That is just one reason that gmail is only good for personal email.
You are honestly trying to claim that drunks have excellent reaction times? Really?
Having had experience with drinking (although I don't drink and drive) and talking on a cell phone, I have done the research first hand on which is more distracting. THAT is why I can say that the studies are faked. Just because you can find people to agree with your point of view doesn't make it correct. e.g. 700 club and Fox News.
Like most things in life there is a counter intuitive element to road safety.
That is simply a bizarre thing to say. Most things in live are counter intuitive? I can't imagine what other bizarre things you believe given that. It does explain why you would believe things as dumb as drunk driving being safer than cell phone use while driving, and that drunks have excellent reflexes.
So, your saying that the danger of drunk driving is massively overblown, and that drunk driving is even less dangerous than talking on a cell phone? Jeez, if that were true, we should repeal all of the drunk driving laws because they are a joke.
Personally I'm not buying it. A much more plausibly explanation for those studies is that they are done by people belonging to the small but vocal minority who find the existence of cell phones to be offensive. If you haven't heard this group of neo-Luddites complaining, then you haven't been paying attention. They complain about phones in in airplanes. They complain about phones in cars. They complain about phones in schools. They complain about phones in restaurants. They complain about phones at work. They complain about phones in waiting rooms. They even complain about phones in grocery stores. Heck, I have a friend who get pissed when he even sees people out on foot in public with a bluetooth earpiece.
Do you think for a second that these kinds of people are not willing to fake studies to try and 'prove' something as blatantly stupid as the claim that drunk driving is less dangerous than talking on a cell phone while driving?
You can try to downplay the dangers of drunk driving all you want, but I don't think many people will believe it.
I am always surprised how often people shun technology because they don't understand it. The problem with touching current screens is that they are not designed to be touched. The surface is a material that does not clean well. All that needs to be done is put a smooth glass surface and the screen can be easily cleaned to a perfectly clean state. Personally, I'm kind of annoyed that current monitors don't come with a flat non-porous surface.
And the newest enhancement is corrupting files you weren't working on at random.
Because the documents you weren't working on will be stored on disk within the same binary blob.
MS has already done this. Dos 6.0 with disk compression turned on put all of your files into what is essentially a giant ZIP. If the file got corrupted anywhere, the who drive was lost.
The idea of a patent is to grant rights over non trivial/obvious things. I am not claiming the system works as it is intended to, but it is certainly is not meant to give rights over the obvious/trivial. The flaw here of course being the perception of what is/isn't obvious/trivial.
It seems to me that if it is thought up by multiple people independently, then it is obvious/trivial.
Actually, defending teachers unions is the knee jerk reaction. I cannot attest for what the unions in Finland are like, but here in the US, they are a business, and are primarily interested in making money. Furthermore, I have no doubt that many individual American teachers would prefer teaching classes as small as possible. After all teacher are people, and people tend to want as much money for as little work as possible. This works in both the teachers and the Unions favor. Smaller classes = more classes = more teachers = easier job for the teachers AND more money for the Unions.
One of the big problems we have is the false belief that there is ONE problem with our educations. This leads to the fallacious argument technique of believing that if you can show that some other part of our education system is broken, that your part (or the part you support) is working fine. The sad fact is that EVERY level of our public education system is broken. From the parents to the teachers to the unions to the state to the feds to our culture as a whole. The whole system is broken, and there is no incentive to fix it. There is just too much money being made by having a broken education system.
The article is correct. Our whole culture discourages good education. A favorite anecdote of mine is the school district in my city. While complaining about not having enough funds for education, they decided that it made sense to rebuild their sports stadium. Installing stadium lighting, astro-turf, the whole nine yards. This kind of behaviors seems common across the country.
A good way to tell where a school's priorities lie is to drive by the school, and check two things. 1) How much land is dedicated to education vs. how much is dedicated to sports, and 2) Do they have a sign in front of the school telling you about their education, or do they have one telling you about their sports teams.
Since the software works off of a database of people who have previously been found attractive, you would need to show bank balances to get real noticeable differences between men.
No, but a patentable idea is supposed to be something that is non-obvious. When hundreds of thousands of people get the exact same effect BY ACCIDENT, it is pretty obvious that it is in fact obvious.
Even worse is that having magnification in menu shouldn't even be called a invention. It is more a discovery. I would think that most of us have accidentally created menus that have had different fonts or image sizes for buttons when working on a CSS for a menu.
When your getting on a busy freeway and there are a stream of semis that are not intending on letting you in, the semis are already doing 65, and the only safe spot to get in is ahead of one of the semis. Stopping on the on ramp is dangerous immediately, as well as makes the merging dramatically more dangerous, and driving the shoulder a little slower than the trucks is even more dangerous.
I'm not saying that this is common, but it has happened to me on more than one occasion.
While I have seen a few games sold for Linux. I have not seen any that came on the same disk as Windows. Do you know of any boxed Linux games that were shipped on the same disk as Windows?
What needs to be done for Linux gaming to take off is for companies to stop getting greedy about it. Just include the Linux version on the same disk as the Windows version. This was common back in the Apple/C64/IBM days. If the Linux version (yes, even a wrapper version) was included on the same disk, you would find that people would be more likely to use it.
Slashdot Mirror
not as a source of final truth on a subject, but a starting point.
While you are correct. I always hate this commonly stated phrase. The reason is that it implies that WP is not reliable. A better statement would be that WP's information is 98% reliable. So, it often depends on how important it is to be right. If I want to know how photosynthesis works, Wikipedia is a fine final authoritative source. If in the middle of the article, it says "In plants photosynthesis occurs in organelles called photoplasts." instead of "In plants photosynthesis occurs in organelles called chloroplasts.", it just doesn't matter. It would be a complete waste of my time to try to verify that everything in the article is accurate. Whereas if I were looking up information to decide if I really want to go through the risky heart operation that my doctor has presented as an option, I would definitely look beyond WP. Of course, In that case I'm not going to take ANY single source as authoritative.
I guess it boils down to, if the information is REALLY important, then their is no publication that should be considered 100% reliable, but the statement implies (and is interpreted by most people) that WP is in some special class of unreliability.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'pants', but as for check cards, having a 'PIN' when money can be withdrawn without one is the same as not having one at all. If a crook can just choose to not use the PIN, you choosing to use one is just security theater. As for you not being liable for fraud, different banks will have different levels of service with that. In a worst case scenario, you have to prove that it was fraud to get your money back, and even in the best case scenarios, you are still out the money until you report it. That is plenty of time for your mortgage check to bounce, your car payment check to bounce, as well as any other checks you might have written. Your bank does NOT guarantee that the fees generated by those bounced checks will be covered.
I am consistently surprised at the number of people that accept having their bank account opened up to anyone that can get their hands on their card with no security whatsoever. Then if they happen to be the unlucky person who gets their bank account drained, they think the bank if doing them a favor if they get their money back that the bank gave away in the first place.
Heck, Visa ADVERTISES that 'check cards' are easy to commit fraud with.
Next CW up for challenge: the idea that you shouldn't give strangers your ATM card and PIN number.
Too late. The 'Check Card' that has become almost ubiquitous is an ATM card that has no PIN number so is always known as nothing. So, the banks have already handed out the PIN number to strangers.
Well, your first problem is using MS Exchange. Switch to Lotus Domino and it is just a check box. It has been since at least Version 4 which was released in '95 or '96. The same is true of things like off-line web apps. Lotus Domino has had it since at least 2001. It is secure and has good replication by default. Take a look outside of MS once in a while and you will find that there is a great big world of software waiting for you.
I still remember going to MS seminars back in '97 when MS was telling us that they were going to compete head to head with Notes/Domino in groupware. They were claiming that they were going to make Outlook and Exchange more feature rich. A year later, it all just got swept under the rug, and they turned their attention to changing the definition of 'groupware'.
I call clicking through a windows install wizard, selecting the "cluster box" and typing in the name of the other server trivial to install. I call adding users by clicking on the "Tools->People->Register" then filling out 3 or 4 fields with things link "Name", "Email Address" and "Password" to be trivial to maintain. Of course, if you hate Windows, you can do the same thing on Linux, or your big iron.
This is a problem that was solved a decade ago. I guess this is part of the bad side of a MS world. Trivial problems that were solved a decade ago seem like magic to people until someone as big as Google decides to hock their wares as if it is something that needs a giant data center to accomplish something so trivial.
No, YOU are misunderstanding. Adding one extra server is not "throwing money at the problem". It is trivial to add a second server that is set as a cluster so that any email delivered to either server is instantly replicated the other server. This means no data loss and dramatically higher up time than Google. Understand. All data delivered is stored on two separate machines in real time so that even if you have a hardware failure, there is no data loss. This is trivial to install, and maintain. It has been trivial to install an maintain for over a decade.
Look who's talking. With two systems, which is very little money, you will get better uptime than with google. Actually, with just one, non-redundant system, you will generally get better uptime than with google. First you try to play the "Well, there is always the possibility of downtime" in the context of extremely small numbers. Then when you are called on it, you switch to the "If I compare ridiculous amounts of redundancy to google, google will be cheaper."
It's real simple. Hardware is not that fragile, and administering an email server is brain dead simple. The is no excuse for internal email system to be down, and Googles uptime is apparently not very good.
For personal email, that is fine. For companies that rely on email, it is a poor choice.
Yes, you might have a 1 in 100 trillion chance of losing data every century or two. I explained very simply how you get as many 9s of uptime as you want. I certainly hope YOU are not an admin if you don't understand that.
So, what part of the rest of my post doesn't explain how even the simplest of admins can have close to 0 downtime?
No. You just set up a replica, or if you have the need a simple cluster on a second machine and have a secondary MX entry. If one system drops, everything continues to chug along on the second machine. At most, the user should see a message telling them that the primary server has failed, and they are being redirected to the secondary server.
.9s uptime, and if you want to add 9s all you have to do slap in more machines. As a bonus, by adding the extra machines you can get load balancing as a bonus.
With this simple setup you get 99 with a lot of
This isn't rocket science.
People keep claiming that Google has better uptime than in house systems. I have to ask, what kind of monkeys are administering these systems? In the last decade, we have not had a single unscheduled email server outage. We haven't even come close to 28 hours of SCHEDULED downtime. Heck, my personal mail server hasn't come close to 28 hours of unscheduled downtime in the last decade. There just isn't that much that can go wrong on an even half assed administered email server. I get why it would take longer for Google to restore their backups, but that is just a weakness of centralized data storage. It's everybody trying to get a restore at the same time so they have to stand in line. That is just one reason that gmail is only good for personal email.
It's the anti-Ballmer. Customeres! Customers! Customers!
Having had experience with drinking (although I don't drink and drive) and talking on a cell phone, I have done the research first hand on which is more distracting. THAT is why I can say that the studies are faked. Just because you can find people to agree with your point of view doesn't make it correct. e.g. 700 club and Fox News.
Like most things in life there is a counter intuitive element to road safety.
That is simply a bizarre thing to say. Most things in live are counter intuitive? I can't imagine what other bizarre things you believe given that. It does explain why you would believe things as dumb as drunk driving being safer than cell phone use while driving, and that drunks have excellent reflexes.
So, your saying that the danger of drunk driving is massively overblown, and that drunk driving is even less dangerous than talking on a cell phone? Jeez, if that were true, we should repeal all of the drunk driving laws because they are a joke.
Personally I'm not buying it. A much more plausibly explanation for those studies is that they are done by people belonging to the small but vocal minority who find the existence of cell phones to be offensive. If you haven't heard this group of neo-Luddites complaining, then you haven't been paying attention. They complain about phones in in airplanes. They complain about phones in cars. They complain about phones in schools. They complain about phones in restaurants. They complain about phones at work. They complain about phones in waiting rooms. They even complain about phones in grocery stores. Heck, I have a friend who get pissed when he even sees people out on foot in public with a bluetooth earpiece.
Do you think for a second that these kinds of people are not willing to fake studies to try and 'prove' something as blatantly stupid as the claim that drunk driving is less dangerous than talking on a cell phone while driving?
You can try to downplay the dangers of drunk driving all you want, but I don't think many people will believe it.
I am always surprised how often people shun technology because they don't understand it. The problem with touching current screens is that they are not designed to be touched. The surface is a material that does not clean well. All that needs to be done is put a smooth glass surface and the screen can be easily cleaned to a perfectly clean state. Personally, I'm kind of annoyed that current monitors don't come with a flat non-porous surface.
And the newest enhancement is corrupting files you weren't working on at random. Because the documents you weren't working on will be stored on disk within the same binary blob.
MS has already done this. Dos 6.0 with disk compression turned on put all of your files into what is essentially a giant ZIP. If the file got corrupted anywhere, the who drive was lost.
The idea of a patent is to grant rights over non trivial/obvious things. I am not claiming the system works as it is intended to, but it is certainly is not meant to give rights over the obvious/trivial. The flaw here of course being the perception of what is/isn't obvious/trivial.
It seems to me that if it is thought up by multiple people independently, then it is obvious/trivial.
Actually, defending teachers unions is the knee jerk reaction. I cannot attest for what the unions in Finland are like, but here in the US, they are a business, and are primarily interested in making money. Furthermore, I have no doubt that many individual American teachers would prefer teaching classes as small as possible. After all teacher are people, and people tend to want as much money for as little work as possible. This works in both the teachers and the Unions favor. Smaller classes = more classes = more teachers = easier job for the teachers AND more money for the Unions.
One of the big problems we have is the false belief that there is ONE problem with our educations. This leads to the fallacious argument technique of believing that if you can show that some other part of our education system is broken, that your part (or the part you support) is working fine. The sad fact is that EVERY level of our public education system is broken. From the parents to the teachers to the unions to the state to the feds to our culture as a whole. The whole system is broken, and there is no incentive to fix it. There is just too much money being made by having a broken education system.
The article is correct. Our whole culture discourages good education. A favorite anecdote of mine is the school district in my city. While complaining about not having enough funds for education, they decided that it made sense to rebuild their sports stadium. Installing stadium lighting, astro-turf, the whole nine yards. This kind of behaviors seems common across the country.
A good way to tell where a school's priorities lie is to drive by the school, and check two things. 1) How much land is dedicated to education vs. how much is dedicated to sports, and 2) Do they have a sign in front of the school telling you about their education, or do they have one telling you about their sports teams.
We already have that. When you make a purchase from the MAFIAA, you both own it and don't own it at the same time.
Since the software works off of a database of people who have previously been found attractive, you would need to show bank balances to get real noticeable differences between men.
No, but a patentable idea is supposed to be something that is non-obvious. When hundreds of thousands of people get the exact same effect BY ACCIDENT, it is pretty obvious that it is in fact obvious.
Even worse is that having magnification in menu shouldn't even be called a invention. It is more a discovery. I would think that most of us have accidentally created menus that have had different fonts or image sizes for buttons when working on a CSS for a menu.
When your getting on a busy freeway and there are a stream of semis that are not intending on letting you in, the semis are already doing 65, and the only safe spot to get in is ahead of one of the semis. Stopping on the on ramp is dangerous immediately, as well as makes the merging dramatically more dangerous, and driving the shoulder a little slower than the trucks is even more dangerous.
I'm not saying that this is common, but it has happened to me on more than one occasion.
While I have seen a few games sold for Linux. I have not seen any that came on the same disk as Windows. Do you know of any boxed Linux games that were shipped on the same disk as Windows?
What needs to be done for Linux gaming to take off is for companies to stop getting greedy about it. Just include the Linux version on the same disk as the Windows version. This was common back in the Apple/C64/IBM days. If the Linux version (yes, even a wrapper version) was included on the same disk, you would find that people would be more likely to use it.