Wires on telephone poles are much easier to install and maintain. Assuming ideal conditions, you can string up a mile of new line in an afternoon with very little equipment. Breaks, shorts, and other faults are much easier to find and fix as well. No digging required, just follow the line until you see the broken line or sparks flying and then send up a lineman to fix it.
The downside is that telephone poles are somewhat unsightly. It varies by region, but where I live, you usually only see buried lines in well-to-do areas.
Real usability testing is not market research. It's measuring how well people did on tasks, not what they said they liked.
On the other hand, it's hard to blame TFA for their usability testing methods when Gnome, Unity, and KDE have done no usability testing at all. (And then tell their users that they're wrong for liking their old workflows...)
The Wii has a pretty good Netflix client/interface.
Had a pretty good Netflix interface. On my Wii, Netflix somehow silently upgraded itself about a month ago to a new version. The new version has no new features, but is significantly slower, less informative, and outright buggy.
Agile programming is not a lie. It works, and the company I work for has the customers, profits, and happy non-burnt-out engineers to prove it. But it's not easy to do right, and certainly isn't cheap if you're hiring the right people.
Head back to Wikipedia for a bit... Feynman was not talking about all of psychology, but mostly parapsychology. Reading minds, bending keys, that kind of thing. He was also speaking in a time where non-religious (or loosely religious) mysticism was fairly common and even mainstream compared to today. Psychology is a much different field nowadays than it was almost 40 years ago.
So if psychology isn't a science, then classical conditioning doesn't exist, despite the huge volume of evidence that says it does? There's no value in trying to understand how human reasoning and memory works? We can't learn anything at all about how brain damage causes changes in day-to-day behavior?
Fact: Anything researched and studied according to the scientific method is science. That there are some researchers who draw conclusions without appropriate methods or sufficient evidence, or that some areas are difficult to conclusively test does not cast the entire profession as pseudoscience.
Of course not! It would be illegal to force people to work without pay.
In some (most?) states, you may be asked to work beyond your normal work day if you are a salary employee and they are not legally required to pay you overtime. Either that, or I've worked for a couple of very illegal companies over the last few years.
I worked in the IT department of a large financial firm a couple years ago where we had a rotating week-long on-call schedule. You worked your normal 8-hour day and then there was about a 50/50 chance that you'd get called in in the middle of the night to fix something that someone messed up during the day. And there was the 3 a.m. maintenance window on the weekend. Throw in a couple of all-nighters for equipment moves and disaster recovery tests every couple of months for good measure.
We didn't get paid overtime for any of this. Or extra time off. The department manager's position was that our salary was already calculated to include compensation for after-hours work and that there would be no "free rides" for something that we knew was part of our job.
Let's face it, the slashdot moderation system has been broken for a long time.
How can you know that, having a 2.5M uid?
Slashdot's moderation system, although hardly perfect, is still about a thousand times better than the trollfests that pass for commentary systems on 99% of the websites that allow visitor contributions.
I have to wonder, however, if the folks doing the market research realize just how adverse Dr Who fans will be to a big budget movie. One of the appeals of Dr Who is the low production value of it,
I don't have any numbers handy, but it always looked to me like the newer Dr Who shows had amazing production value. Most two-part episodes looked to me like they could have had the budget of a full-fledged Hollywood flick. The special effects are pretty spot-on. The sets are huge, detailed, and plentiful. Yes, you can sometimes notice when a set or prop has been repainted for a different episode. (I particularly liked being able to recognize when the same neighborhood street was used for two different episodes in the same season.) They could do with more extras in some scenes, that's pretty much the extent of my complaints.
Now contrast with the average American prime-time drama where the bulk of their 43 minutes is pretty much summed up by inane banter that bounces back and forth between 5 or 6 sets maximum.
But honestly, if it were a Dr Who movie, I could care less about the production values. I just want an entertaining Doctor and a really good science-fiction story. They achieve that, and I'll be happy.
How many people here know the $5 debit card fee is a direct response to Congress stupidly passing a law that targeted only very large banks like BofA forcing them to cap how much they could charge as a processing fee to retailers.
Oh man, I hear you. Those poor big banks, right? The ones that get to gamble with the economy, get bailed out by taxpayers, and continue to post record annual bonuses to their executives. Retail stores, restaurants, and gas stations all around the country sure have those big banks bent over the counter now!
The problem of security is slightly improved, if you run each thing on separate virtual machines on the same hardware. You should in theory get relatively fast interconnects. If you VM is any good, that is. But you're still losing efficiency, unless you're doing "zones" or something like that. And it's 3x the headache to manage 3 separate instances of OSs, for what is in effect just one top level system anyway.
Well, nobody (or at least, nobody sane) does it like that. There is no non-trivial datacenter that virtualizes the different components of their server stack on the same physical machine just because they think it's going to buy them any extra security. They're going to have a web server farm over here, some application server blades over there, a database cluster on the other side of the room, and perhaps a row dedicated to SAN, document storage, backups, and so on.
Virtualization is more typically used as key part of a larger system to rapidly deploy new hosts on demand and take better advantage of the incredible power of today's hardware by partitioning it down into smaller chunks. The only time "security" enters into it is the fact that you always separate hosts based what they do and who should have access to them, which you would do with physical machines anyway.
It plainly shows where Apple is going with Mac OS X, and that is to a much more controlled environment where end-users can only install Apple-approved software on their own machines. It makes sense that this would happen after Lion introduced a lot more iOS-like features to OS X. All those pundits who said the merging of iOS and OS X would never happen, guess what? It's happening now.
"But," you protest, "this doesn't stop you from downloading and installing applications from the web!" And you're right, it doesn't now. But that won't be true in the future, otherwise there would be ZERO point to sandbox only Mac App Store applications.
If in five years, if Apple does not have a MacBook or iMac (or future equivalent) that requires jailbreaking for the user to have total control of their own machine, I'll eat my hat.
Really, Fedora? I used to like Fedora because they weren't afraid to ship current versions of software and always tried to new newer, better ways to build a Unix-like OS. I liked how the Fedora community was organized and how the package management system worked. I liked Ubuntu because it took a solid, sane Linux distribution (Debian) and made it into a user-friendly, everything-just-works OS that practically anyone could use.
But now I'm starting to believe that all of the mainstream Linux distros have lost their fucking marbles. Between adding more and more layers of pointless abstraction, the KDE4/Unity/Gnome 3 bullshit and this, I don't know what to think anymore. It's like they've all totally given up on improving a good thing and are now changing shit just to change it. Did the Linux world somehow absorb a massive influx of middle-managers and HR drones when I wasn't looking?
Christ, it's enough to make me switch to BSD and start drinking.
There's probably nothing you can do. You don't say what the project is about, or what you might possibly need support for, so I'm forced to assume that you're going to be running CentOS/RHEL in a common configuration on commercial-grade hardware. And if that's true, then your boss is right.
But more importantly, recognize this: the CIO is your boss. He made a decision, you questioned it, he reaffirmed his position, end of story. You deploy CentOS. If or when you need support for the OS (and not the application you're paying for), the blame will have to come back to him since it was his decision. And unless you weren't smart enough to get it in email, there's a paper trail too.
Now make way for the comments from other bitter Slashdotters who will tell me I'm wrong because they've allowed themselves to be scapegoats for their bosses' inept decisions.
My big concern is that by adding seamless PDF rendering to browsers, we're inadvertently encouraging the less clueful to start designing web sites in PDF rather than the old, cumbersome, finicky HTML/CSS/Javascript combo.
Exactly! It shouldn't be too hard to make the cockpit windscreen able to block or attenuate lasers. Biggest problem is that technology is required in a technology-averse industry.
No, biggest problem is that you can't block out high-power green and red lasers without blocking out all the green and red light from outside. After white, those are the two most common warning/indicator colors that pilots needs to see in order to find the runway and in general keep from crashing into things.
I've purchased things from dealextreme before and have been quite happy. You just have to bear in mind that everything they sell is absolute crap. You have to restrict yourself to things that are reasonably difficult to screw up (cables, trinkets, screen protectors) or that won't break you if they arrive DOA. The phrase "you get what you pay for" has never been more appropriate. Anything relatively important/expensive like a cell phone, you're going to get screwed.
Just put pull-down shades on the cockpit windows. Leave them closed unless you need them. Problem solved. If you can land in a snowstorm at night, then you don't need the windows in the first place.
Wow. Just, wow.
One of these days, I'm going to make a website called People of Slashdot just for comments like this.
Yes. But try hitting an airplane with one of those guns.
We're not talking about an airplane cruising at 30,000 feet here. Laser incidents happen when the aircraft is going low and slow. Takeoff, landing, circling the runway, the kinds of situations where pilots require all of their attention. (Or in the case of a helicopter, the whole flight.) It doesn't take superhuman skill to light up an aircraft at close range.
Up close it does. At the distance of a plane, not so much.
Wrong. At night, pilots work in a cockpit which is almost pitch black. The instruments are very, very dim because the pilots have to be able to see outside to watch for obstacles like buildings, towers, antennas, the ground, etc when operating at low altitude. Remember, airplanes don't have headlights like cars do. The pilots have to rely on their night vision to fly safely.
When some doofus shines his laser at a plane, he can easily light up the whole cockpit and utterly destroy the night vision of both pilots. The duration of the illumination doesn't matter as much as you'd think. Even a quick flash means that your night vision is totally gone for up to 15-20 seconds. That's a very long time to not see where your going, especially when you're trying to land and have a couple hundred people whose lives depend on you and your copilot not fucking it up.
It's important to understand that in the UK (and Australia... and Canada... and many other places) there are much, much stronger legal principles surrounding defamation than you are used to in the US. The idea is that you are free to say anything - but not free to cause harm to others without compensating them. So if you publish something which alleges that a particular individual is a child molester (and they aren't), they are entitled to come after you to recover in dollars the harm you have caused to their reputation.
The difference is that the U.S. legal system starts with the premise that its citizens have total freedom of speech that even the government cannot take away and that there are certain very narrow exceptions to what an individual cannot say. (Libel is one of them.)
In most other countries, speech is a right that can be both granted and taken away, as needed, by the government.
But in the US, people at times appear to have liberty to destroy reputations without consequence under the guise of "free" speech.
Not true. There are strong anti-defamation laws in the U.S., but they are much harder to abuse as a means of retaliation or censorship because they require a higher standard of proof. Among other things, you have to be able to prove that the defamatory statements were untrue, caused harm, were made with malicious intent, etc.
In the rest of the world, defamation laws are a way to censor or retaliate against someone who said something you don't like.
In the case of Bitcoin, no such authority exists, so the tokens are just going to keep getting bigger, and eventually they will be too large to be useful.
Maybe I don't quite grok your definition of "tokens," but bitcoins in the current implementation are divisible down to six decimal places (IIRC), so even in the unlikely case where the vast majority are "lost" or hoarded by a small number of people, anyone can still trade in milibitcoins, nanobitcoins, etc. And they can increase the maximum (er, minimum?) number of decimal places at any time, it's just a software tweak.
In short, the odds are against Bitcoin being successful. Really, more traditional cryptocurrency is needed, where a bank issues tokens but the tokens can still be transferred anonymously. Sadly, Bitcoin's failure will make it even harder to start a digital cash bank, since everyone will associate digital cash with Bitcoin and think that all digital cash systems suffer the same problems.
The entire point of Bitcoin is that it is decentralized and can't be controlled by a central entity. Any cryptocurrency with perfect anonymity is a great way to evade taxes and law enforcement since auditing is a million times harder. As such, every country on the planet would attempt to outlaw or control any alternative currency with a central controlling authority. And central authorities are pretty easy to take down, just look at the charred remains of all the previous companies that have tried digital currency in the past.
Slashdot Mirror
Wires on telephone poles are much easier to install and maintain. Assuming ideal conditions, you can string up a mile of new line in an afternoon with very little equipment. Breaks, shorts, and other faults are much easier to find and fix as well. No digging required, just follow the line until you see the broken line or sparks flying and then send up a lineman to fix it.
The downside is that telephone poles are somewhat unsightly. It varies by region, but where I live, you usually only see buried lines in well-to-do areas.
No, it's one of the oldest con games in history.
On the other hand, it's hard to blame TFA for their usability testing methods when Gnome, Unity, and KDE have done no usability testing at all. (And then tell their users that they're wrong for liking their old workflows...)
Had a pretty good Netflix interface. On my Wii, Netflix somehow silently upgraded itself about a month ago to a new version. The new version has no new features, but is significantly slower, less informative, and outright buggy.
Agile programming is not a lie. It works, and the company I work for has the customers, profits, and happy non-burnt-out engineers to prove it. But it's not easy to do right, and certainly isn't cheap if you're hiring the right people.
Head back to Wikipedia for a bit... Feynman was not talking about all of psychology, but mostly parapsychology. Reading minds, bending keys, that kind of thing. He was also speaking in a time where non-religious (or loosely religious) mysticism was fairly common and even mainstream compared to today. Psychology is a much different field nowadays than it was almost 40 years ago.
Hey, there's a scientologist in our midst!
So if psychology isn't a science, then classical conditioning doesn't exist, despite the huge volume of evidence that says it does? There's no value in trying to understand how human reasoning and memory works? We can't learn anything at all about how brain damage causes changes in day-to-day behavior?
Fact: Anything researched and studied according to the scientific method is science. That there are some researchers who draw conclusions without appropriate methods or sufficient evidence, or that some areas are difficult to conclusively test does not cast the entire profession as pseudoscience.
In some (most?) states, you may be asked to work beyond your normal work day if you are a salary employee and they are not legally required to pay you overtime. Either that, or I've worked for a couple of very illegal companies over the last few years.
I worked in the IT department of a large financial firm a couple years ago where we had a rotating week-long on-call schedule. You worked your normal 8-hour day and then there was about a 50/50 chance that you'd get called in in the middle of the night to fix something that someone messed up during the day. And there was the 3 a.m. maintenance window on the weekend. Throw in a couple of all-nighters for equipment moves and disaster recovery tests every couple of months for good measure.
We didn't get paid overtime for any of this. Or extra time off. The department manager's position was that our salary was already calculated to include compensation for after-hours work and that there would be no "free rides" for something that we knew was part of our job.
I worked there for less than a year.
Take it from me, PC gamers are not ordinary people.
How can you know that, having a 2.5M uid?
Slashdot's moderation system, although hardly perfect, is still about a thousand times better than the trollfests that pass for commentary systems on 99% of the websites that allow visitor contributions.
I don't have any numbers handy, but it always looked to me like the newer Dr Who shows had amazing production value. Most two-part episodes looked to me like they could have had the budget of a full-fledged Hollywood flick. The special effects are pretty spot-on. The sets are huge, detailed, and plentiful. Yes, you can sometimes notice when a set or prop has been repainted for a different episode. (I particularly liked being able to recognize when the same neighborhood street was used for two different episodes in the same season.) They could do with more extras in some scenes, that's pretty much the extent of my complaints.
Now contrast with the average American prime-time drama where the bulk of their 43 minutes is pretty much summed up by inane banter that bounces back and forth between 5 or 6 sets maximum.
But honestly, if it were a Dr Who movie, I could care less about the production values. I just want an entertaining Doctor and a really good science-fiction story. They achieve that, and I'll be happy.
I double my productivity by meeting people and sleeping with them at the same time
Oh man, I hear you. Those poor big banks, right? The ones that get to gamble with the economy, get bailed out by taxpayers, and continue to post record annual bonuses to their executives. Retail stores, restaurants, and gas stations all around the country sure have those big banks bent over the counter now!
Well, nobody (or at least, nobody sane) does it like that. There is no non-trivial datacenter that virtualizes the different components of their server stack on the same physical machine just because they think it's going to buy them any extra security. They're going to have a web server farm over here, some application server blades over there, a database cluster on the other side of the room, and perhaps a row dedicated to SAN, document storage, backups, and so on.
Virtualization is more typically used as key part of a larger system to rapidly deploy new hosts on demand and take better advantage of the incredible power of today's hardware by partitioning it down into smaller chunks. The only time "security" enters into it is the fact that you always separate hosts based what they do and who should have access to them, which you would do with physical machines anyway.
It plainly shows where Apple is going with Mac OS X, and that is to a much more controlled environment where end-users can only install Apple-approved software on their own machines. It makes sense that this would happen after Lion introduced a lot more iOS-like features to OS X. All those pundits who said the merging of iOS and OS X would never happen, guess what? It's happening now.
"But," you protest, "this doesn't stop you from downloading and installing applications from the web!" And you're right, it doesn't now. But that won't be true in the future, otherwise there would be ZERO point to sandbox only Mac App Store applications.
If in five years, if Apple does not have a MacBook or iMac (or future equivalent) that requires jailbreaking for the user to have total control of their own machine, I'll eat my hat.
Really, Fedora? I used to like Fedora because they weren't afraid to ship current versions of software and always tried to new newer, better ways to build a Unix-like OS. I liked how the Fedora community was organized and how the package management system worked. I liked Ubuntu because it took a solid, sane Linux distribution (Debian) and made it into a user-friendly, everything-just-works OS that practically anyone could use.
But now I'm starting to believe that all of the mainstream Linux distros have lost their fucking marbles. Between adding more and more layers of pointless abstraction, the KDE4/Unity/Gnome 3 bullshit and this, I don't know what to think anymore. It's like they've all totally given up on improving a good thing and are now changing shit just to change it. Did the Linux world somehow absorb a massive influx of middle-managers and HR drones when I wasn't looking?
Christ, it's enough to make me switch to BSD and start drinking.
There's probably nothing you can do. You don't say what the project is about, or what you might possibly need support for, so I'm forced to assume that you're going to be running CentOS/RHEL in a common configuration on commercial-grade hardware. And if that's true, then your boss is right.
But more importantly, recognize this: the CIO is your boss. He made a decision, you questioned it, he reaffirmed his position, end of story. You deploy CentOS. If or when you need support for the OS (and not the application you're paying for), the blame will have to come back to him since it was his decision. And unless you weren't smart enough to get it in email, there's a paper trail too.
Now make way for the comments from other bitter Slashdotters who will tell me I'm wrong because they've allowed themselves to be scapegoats for their bosses' inept decisions.
My big concern is that by adding seamless PDF rendering to browsers, we're inadvertently encouraging the less clueful to start designing web sites in PDF rather than the old, cumbersome, finicky HTML/CSS/Javascript combo.
No, biggest problem is that you can't block out high-power green and red lasers without blocking out all the green and red light from outside. After white, those are the two most common warning/indicator colors that pilots needs to see in order to find the runway and in general keep from crashing into things.
The regular low-power laser pointers they sell at Walmart aren't a threat. The more powerful ones sold online for more than a few bucks are.
I've purchased things from dealextreme before and have been quite happy. You just have to bear in mind that everything they sell is absolute crap. You have to restrict yourself to things that are reasonably difficult to screw up (cables, trinkets, screen protectors) or that won't break you if they arrive DOA. The phrase "you get what you pay for" has never been more appropriate. Anything relatively important/expensive like a cell phone, you're going to get screwed.
Wow. Just, wow.
One of these days, I'm going to make a website called People of Slashdot just for comments like this.
We're not talking about an airplane cruising at 30,000 feet here. Laser incidents happen when the aircraft is going low and slow. Takeoff, landing, circling the runway, the kinds of situations where pilots require all of their attention. (Or in the case of a helicopter, the whole flight.) It doesn't take superhuman skill to light up an aircraft at close range.
Wrong. At night, pilots work in a cockpit which is almost pitch black. The instruments are very, very dim because the pilots have to be able to see outside to watch for obstacles like buildings, towers, antennas, the ground, etc when operating at low altitude. Remember, airplanes don't have headlights like cars do. The pilots have to rely on their night vision to fly safely.
When some doofus shines his laser at a plane, he can easily light up the whole cockpit and utterly destroy the night vision of both pilots. The duration of the illumination doesn't matter as much as you'd think. Even a quick flash means that your night vision is totally gone for up to 15-20 seconds. That's a very long time to not see where your going, especially when you're trying to land and have a couple hundred people whose lives depend on you and your copilot not fucking it up.
The difference is that the U.S. legal system starts with the premise that its citizens have total freedom of speech that even the government cannot take away and that there are certain very narrow exceptions to what an individual cannot say. (Libel is one of them.)
In most other countries, speech is a right that can be both granted and taken away, as needed, by the government.
Not true. There are strong anti-defamation laws in the U.S., but they are much harder to abuse as a means of retaliation or censorship because they require a higher standard of proof. Among other things, you have to be able to prove that the defamatory statements were untrue, caused harm, were made with malicious intent, etc.
In the rest of the world, defamation laws are a way to censor or retaliate against someone who said something you don't like.
Maybe I don't quite grok your definition of "tokens," but bitcoins in the current implementation are divisible down to six decimal places (IIRC), so even in the unlikely case where the vast majority are "lost" or hoarded by a small number of people, anyone can still trade in milibitcoins, nanobitcoins, etc. And they can increase the maximum (er, minimum?) number of decimal places at any time, it's just a software tweak.
The entire point of Bitcoin is that it is decentralized and can't be controlled by a central entity. Any cryptocurrency with perfect anonymity is a great way to evade taxes and law enforcement since auditing is a million times harder. As such, every country on the planet would attempt to outlaw or control any alternative currency with a central controlling authority. And central authorities are pretty easy to take down, just look at the charred remains of all the previous companies that have tried digital currency in the past.