Are you recommending we put work (advertising abolition, creating devices that do not automatically switch, etc. ) into reversing this, whilst implementing other energy saving schemes?
While I believe DST has many benefits beyond energy saving (why have the sun rise at 3:30am and set at 8:30pm when it can rise at 4:30am and set at 9:30pm giving an extra hour of summertime daylight to enjoy?), I believe there are bigger fish to fry than first focusing on the parts of diminishing returns. Don't get me wrong, I think an extra month of DST is a great thing, it will very likely have an impact on the environment wrt energy saving.
When I first heard of extending DST as an energy saving scheme I wasn't entirely sure how it could realistically and effectively do that, but after thinking about it and how the simple fact of an extra hour of daylight would mean fewer lights on, it does seem reasonable. As I've suggested earlier, however, I see extending DST as a very minor solution that has diminishing returns, whereas focusing on getting the citizenry to replace older appliances with newer more efficient ones would return a greater yield in terms of energy savings.
In answer to your question, I don't believe changing the status quo either way is really the place to start.I think, leave DST as is for now and simply put our effort into changing less efficient to more efficient appliances, THEN worry about dicking around with DST. The net result is a far greater impact on the environment.
The Industry talks about piracy they always bandy about numbers like (from TFA), three billion dollars per year in lost revenue.
The concept they seem to fail to also grasp is that perhaps most movies today lack the substance that makes a movie actually worth watching. With the eye candy and special effects, they probably think the movie will rake in kazillion buckazoids for the CG alone and plot and story be damned, but I am the only one too sophisticated for the crap that passes for movies these days?
If they're looking at lost revenue, perhaps the truth is, THEIR MOVIES SUCK!!!!! There are many movies that came out in the past few years I wished I had downloaded illegally and watched, because quite frankly I didn't think it deserved my money or my time. Wasting my computer's time to download it and a few minutes to find out it's utter SHIT and delete the file, sure, but not anymore than that.
I see advancing daylight hours one month to be a very trivial and somewhat dubious solution to a big problem. Where ever you are, you'll want the lights on if it's dark. Whether the sun is shining or it's pitch dark, you'll probably still have the TV on, food on the stove etc. At the time of the year in question, that means turning the lights on probably at 6:00pm sun time or 7:00pm sun time and leave them on (I don't, but some people do) for 3 or 4 hours before going to bed. In the meantime, they turn on the tv, cook their meals, etc. When you factor in how much electricity 2 or 3 light bulbs consume for one hour multiplied by 30 days over how much we willingly thow away (tv, etc), the reduction is more than a token amount.
I'd much prefer to see the effort put in to energy saving appliances and devices so the effect can be noticed for the entire year.
It's not so much a matter of ignoring one vs the other, but more along the line of optimizing a computer program. You don't start with optimizing the infrequently called functions, you start with the ones that are called over and over again. First you start with the biggest pigs that use the most electricity (old stoves, fridges, dryers, etc) and get those more energy efficient (a gov't rebate if you buy an energy saving appliance perhaps), then you worry about the trivial little things.... I don't feel guilty leaving an extra 60 watt lightbulb turned on for an hour or two in the dead of summer when I open the windows up on a cool night and let the house cool down without the use of the A/C (I have a programmable thermostat and it's set up to lower the temperature of the house in the evening when I'm not home. I live in canada and the nights can drop to 20c so it's a double whammy to open the windows up as well and the A/C runs for half as long to get the house to a cool 23c. By the next evening, the temperature is 27 but it's still comfortable).
Think of all that energy we could save if everyone bought a $30 programmable thermostat and let the A/C run in the dead of summer at night when it's the coolest outside and the heat transfer is most efficient. (It's similar to how a hot cup of coffee cools down the most in the first 5 minutes, but takes the next 30 to reach room temperature. The greater the temperature difference between the hot and the cold, the faster the heat transfer).
All I'm saying is the marginal savings by getting people not to use lights for that one hour for a month or so should be first focused elsewhere.
Because it's naturally brighter in the evening, people use fewer electrical lights when cooking dinner.
Or perhaps people should be sold on the idea of replacing incandescent lightbulbs with screw in replacement fluorescent lights. They last longer and require far less electricity.If every single home were to replace just one incandescent lightbulb with a flurorescent light bulb, the power saved could power thousands of homes.... (I forget the exact statistics, but it's something like that).
How about UTC?.... UTC and GMT are essentially the same. As I understand it, GMT however may be subject to (although may or may not actually implement) daylight savings time, thus for half the year could really confuse someone. UTC is UTC, not matter the time, season or geo-political orbits.... it follows the sun, not how we silly humans would like the time to be so we can get an extra hour of daylight.
Besides, what the hell does daylight saving time have anything to do with saving energy anyway? All they can hope to accomplish is to get people to get on with their routine an hour later. Unless someone thinks, just because it's dark, we'll go to bed earlier and so won't waste as much energy.
It doesn't really matter. MS reboots automatically from a kernel embarrasement and the driver resumes its sales. YOU CAN'T STOP IT!!!! IT'S A JUGGERNAUT!
I say we should first form a commitee to weigh the pros and cons of consolidating and leveraging synergy for our information techology solutions in the marketplace. After all, forming a commitee to actually do it might be too costly. We need to know what we're getting into first.
Also, we should do a separate study to find out if the marketplace is ready for that consolidation in the first place.
Of course, the results of these studies are only to be used as guidelines anyway, so we might as well form that commitee to consolidate as well. We can consolidate and keep it ready for when the market does become ready.
The idea behind any firewall is to prevent unauthorized access and to alert the user when such access might be taking place. Microsoft is not about to second guess any of its own services, because clearly they are benign, their firewall has been known to let their own services traffic through without being second guessed. Even with all them service packs, it's entirely possible for an exploit in any area of their OS, and their remote desktop is no exception.
Why is microsoft so willing to let their customer base get screwed time and time again with the lack of security?
There are only two reasons I can think of for remote desktop.
1) It provides a means to allow a knowledgeable friend or tech support person to temporarily control your computer in order to solve some problem you can't. 2) It allows you access to your own computer from a remote location.
Every time two computers want to activate the remote desktop feature, the computer being "dialed in" should generate a public/private encryption key pair and fire off the public key to the other computer and that is needed for the entire remote desktop session. To end the session, the private key gets tossed. In any event, there should only be two ways to allow the remote desktop feature to even be accessed beyond the point of encryption key handling. The first involves a huge nasty dialog box that states "a remote user is trying to access your deskop remotely. do you want to allow it?" and the second is through some kind of PGP signature generated before you leave the computer and is placed on a usb key or emailed or something.
If joe q public gets a new computer home, joe is not about to put much effort to secure it by turning off the unnecessary services - those services microsoft quite helpfully has enabled by default - and with a more complicated environment, the risk of security holes increases. This is especially true if joe doesn't even have the slightest clue what "remote desktop" might be.
The best shot microsoft might have to improve security is to strip the running services down to bare nuts and provide a long questionnaire - with an explanation of each service and a detailed pros/cons - allowing the user to selectively tune the box to fit their needs. You can turn off a half dozen services in xp that are enabled by default and not only are they unnecessary, but it will make the system faster and more secure.
I'm more astonished at microsoft for failing to put the greatest amount of effort into securing their OS where it really counts. By simply leaving certain services disabled where most users will never need them.
I would get the best maps and satellite photos possible, then use a compass to take sightings of mountain peaks and triangulate.
That sounds an awful lot like how they did it before GPS came around. You'd be amazed how accurate a map you can create with an accurate wrist watch, the sun, a compass, a good stack of writing paper and a good amount of effort.... But I suppose it's the effort part that puts off a lot of people.
I know a lot of one dimensional people. Would this take pictures of them too?
Maybe if you lined them all beside each other you'd have enough to make up one 2D person.... But the moire pattern from the scan lines might ruin the image.
I think what he meant was 'that sound you just heard was the joke flying over your head'. Either that our your reply was just too dry for most of us to get.
I must admit my humour might be a bit too dry for some. In any event, I did get the original joke.
However, none of that qualifies you as a jackass.
I can take a dubious "that was meant as a joke" criticism, after all humour is subjective and my jokes could be over their head as well. That "I don't get it so therefore you're a jackass" was way over the line and I felt deserved the response.
Maybe the only joke I didn't get was the "you're a jackass, jackass" bit, but having to decide if I'm being insulted or not, I tend to choose the being insulted route.
That would work if there were 100,000 songs I liked. I might only have something 10,000 I liked, so why should I blow about 90 grand on crap I don't like?
I suppose I could always buy 10 separate copies of the 10,000 I did like. But then I'd need those 10 ipods, not the 1 I'd otherwise get.
In my world, triple redundant implies at least 4 copies and you have three 32 bit integers. Also, what is meant by "voted on"? Is there some kind of AI routine that says to itself "which bit from these three integers do I like best? Which one had the most effective election campaign?"
Triple redundancy of critical data implies ensuring it can be recovered. What happens during the writing process where individual copies are not properly written (e.g. a corrupted raid)? I'd entertain the idea of going with blocking the data into fixed size 2 dimensional arrays and performing checksums on each axis. In the event of a disk failure, the data can be reasonably rebuilt by isolating the specific byte or bytes in that array that fails the checksum verification and applying a reverse checksum algorithm to determine the most likely original byte value.
Before I'd answer that question, I'd try to find out the purpose behind that subroutine.
An employer should have the right to expect reasonable performace from their employees. No one puts a gun to an employer's head saying "employ that person", and no one is putting a gun to the employee saying "work for this person".
The employer should have the right to approach their employees and tell them up front, their work is being monitored. As long as it's done in the open, the employee can't complain about invasion of privacy. If they feel their privacy is threatened, perhaps they are not doing their job. They are after all being paid to do their job. Why then should an employee feel they are being mistreated when the employer finds out through monitoring devices, they are surfing for porn or spending 50% of their time using IM with their friends or doing seriously poor work?
OTOH, as someone else pointed out, I'd expect 100% privacy IN the bathroom or in areas of the building where work is not expected to occur. However, I wouldn't feel overly offended if the boss put up a camera pointing at the bathroom door to see how much time I spent doing my business.
I don't use windows, I use linux, and microsoft is not about to port that ugly blue e to linux anytime soon.
Now if I can just figure out how to get my computer infected with a worm or virus, I'll have a reason to reinstall the OS after 3 years. I feel like I'm missing out on so much fun.
Slashdot Mirror
This is probably in bad taste, but why did I have an image of that "can you hear me now?" guy in a rowboat going down the streets of new orleans?
Are you recommending we put work (advertising abolition, creating devices that do not automatically switch, etc. ) into reversing this, whilst implementing other energy saving schemes?
While I believe DST has many benefits beyond energy saving (why have the sun rise at 3:30am and set at 8:30pm when it can rise at 4:30am and set at 9:30pm giving an extra hour of summertime daylight to enjoy?), I believe there are bigger fish to fry than first focusing on the parts of diminishing returns. Don't get me wrong, I think an extra month of DST is a great thing, it will very likely have an impact on the environment wrt energy saving.
When I first heard of extending DST as an energy saving scheme I wasn't entirely sure how it could realistically and effectively do that, but after thinking about it and how the simple fact of an extra hour of daylight would mean fewer lights on, it does seem reasonable. As I've suggested earlier, however, I see extending DST as a very minor solution that has diminishing returns, whereas focusing on getting the citizenry to replace older appliances with newer more efficient ones would return a greater yield in terms of energy savings.
In answer to your question, I don't believe changing the status quo either way is really the place to start.I think, leave DST as is for now and simply put our effort into changing less efficient to more efficient appliances, THEN worry about dicking around with DST. The net result is a far greater impact on the environment.
The Industry talks about piracy they always bandy about numbers like (from TFA), three billion dollars per year in lost revenue.
The concept they seem to fail to also grasp is that perhaps most movies today lack the substance that makes a movie actually worth watching. With the eye candy and special effects, they probably think the movie will rake in kazillion buckazoids for the CG alone and plot and story be damned, but I am the only one too sophisticated for the crap that passes for movies these days?
If they're looking at lost revenue, perhaps the truth is, THEIR MOVIES SUCK!!!!! There are many movies that came out in the past few years I wished I had downloaded illegally and watched, because quite frankly I didn't think it deserved my money or my time. Wasting my computer's time to download it and a few minutes to find out it's utter SHIT and delete the file, sure, but not anymore than that.
I see advancing daylight hours one month to be a very trivial and somewhat dubious solution to a big problem. Where ever you are, you'll want the lights on if it's dark. Whether the sun is shining or it's pitch dark, you'll probably still have the TV on, food on the stove etc. At the time of the year in question, that means turning the lights on probably at 6:00pm sun time or 7:00pm sun time and leave them on (I don't, but some people do) for 3 or 4 hours before going to bed. In the meantime, they turn on the tv, cook their meals, etc. When you factor in how much electricity 2 or 3 light bulbs consume for one hour multiplied by 30 days over how much we willingly thow away (tv, etc), the reduction is more than a token amount.
I'd much prefer to see the effort put in to energy saving appliances and devices so the effect can be noticed for the entire year.
It's not so much a matter of ignoring one vs the other, but more along the line of optimizing a computer program. You don't start with optimizing the infrequently called functions, you start with the ones that are called over and over again. First you start with the biggest pigs that use the most electricity (old stoves, fridges, dryers, etc) and get those more energy efficient (a gov't rebate if you buy an energy saving appliance perhaps), then you worry about the trivial little things.... I don't feel guilty leaving an extra 60 watt lightbulb turned on for an hour or two in the dead of summer when I open the windows up on a cool night and let the house cool down without the use of the A/C (I have a programmable thermostat and it's set up to lower the temperature of the house in the evening when I'm not home. I live in canada and the nights can drop to 20c so it's a double whammy to open the windows up as well and the A/C runs for half as long to get the house to a cool 23c. By the next evening, the temperature is 27 but it's still comfortable).
Think of all that energy we could save if everyone bought a $30 programmable thermostat and let the A/C run in the dead of summer at night when it's the coolest outside and the heat transfer is most efficient. (It's similar to how a hot cup of coffee cools down the most in the first 5 minutes, but takes the next 30 to reach room temperature. The greater the temperature difference between the hot and the cold, the faster the heat transfer).
All I'm saying is the marginal savings by getting people not to use lights for that one hour for a month or so should be first focused elsewhere.
Because it's naturally brighter in the evening, people use fewer electrical lights when cooking dinner.
Or perhaps people should be sold on the idea of replacing incandescent lightbulbs with screw in replacement fluorescent lights. They last longer and require far less electricity.If every single home were to replace just one incandescent lightbulb with a flurorescent light bulb, the power saved could power thousands of homes.... (I forget the exact statistics, but it's something like that).
...everyone can just use GMT.
How about UTC?.... UTC and GMT are essentially the same. As I understand it, GMT however may be subject to (although may or may not actually implement) daylight savings time, thus for half the year could really confuse someone. UTC is UTC, not matter the time, season or geo-political orbits.... it follows the sun, not how we silly humans would like the time to be so we can get an extra hour of daylight.
Besides, what the hell does daylight saving time have anything to do with saving energy anyway? All they can hope to accomplish is to get people to get on with their routine an hour later. Unless someone thinks, just because it's dark, we'll go to bed earlier and so won't waste as much energy.
exposes to kernel to crashes
It doesn't really matter. MS reboots automatically from a kernel embarrasement and the driver resumes its sales. YOU CAN'T STOP IT!!!! IT'S A JUGGERNAUT!
My riting is just grate. I don't need there book to tell me how to rite better.
Now I goota get back to my tecnical documenteation for this project I'm dooing over hear.
BTW, wat excactly does a java inturfaice do again?
A slashdot story which is about stories already covered on slashdot.
Aren't you glad it's not a dupe?
We should form a committee to consolidate
THIS IS A PERFECT OPPORTUNITY FOR BUREAUCRACY!!
I say we should first form a commitee to weigh the pros and cons of consolidating and leveraging synergy for our information techology solutions in the marketplace. After all, forming a commitee to actually do it might be too costly. We need to know what we're getting into first.
Also, we should do a separate study to find out if the marketplace is ready for that consolidation in the first place.
Of course, the results of these studies are only to be used as guidelines anyway, so we might as well form that commitee to consolidate as well. We can consolidate and keep it ready for when the market does become ready.
The idea behind any firewall is to prevent unauthorized access and to alert the user when such access might be taking place. Microsoft is not about to second guess any of its own services, because clearly they are benign, their firewall has been known to let their own services traffic through without being second guessed. Even with all them service packs, it's entirely possible for an exploit in any area of their OS, and their remote desktop is no exception.
Why is microsoft so willing to let their customer base get screwed time and time again with the lack of security?
There are only two reasons I can think of for remote desktop.
1) It provides a means to allow a knowledgeable friend or tech support person to temporarily control your computer in order to solve some problem you can't.
2) It allows you access to your own computer from a remote location.
Every time two computers want to activate the remote desktop feature, the computer being "dialed in" should generate a public/private encryption key pair and fire off the public key to the other computer and that is needed for the entire remote desktop session. To end the session, the private key gets tossed. In any event, there should only be two ways to allow the remote desktop feature to even be accessed beyond the point of encryption key handling. The first involves a huge nasty dialog box that states "a remote user is trying to access your deskop remotely. do you want to allow it?" and the second is through some kind of PGP signature generated before you leave the computer and is placed on a usb key or emailed or something.
If joe q public gets a new computer home, joe is not about to put much effort to secure it by turning off the unnecessary services - those services microsoft quite helpfully has enabled by default - and with a more complicated environment, the risk of security holes increases. This is especially true if joe doesn't even have the slightest clue what "remote desktop" might be.
The best shot microsoft might have to improve security is to strip the running services down to bare nuts and provide a long questionnaire - with an explanation of each service and a detailed pros/cons - allowing the user to selectively tune the box to fit their needs. You can turn off a half dozen services in xp that are enabled by default and not only are they unnecessary, but it will make the system faster and more secure.
I'm more astonished at microsoft for failing to put the greatest amount of effort into securing their OS where it really counts. By simply leaving certain services disabled where most users will never need them.
I would get the best maps and satellite photos possible, then use a compass to take sightings of mountain peaks and triangulate.
That sounds an awful lot like how they did it before GPS came around. You'd be amazed how accurate a map you can create with an accurate wrist watch, the sun, a compass, a good stack of writing paper and a good amount of effort.... But I suppose it's the effort part that puts off a lot of people.
does GPS equipment from the US work over there?
I'm sure it functions just fine over there, but I wouldn't count on it settling down and getting a job there without applying for a work visa first.
I know a lot of one dimensional people. Would this take pictures of them too?
Maybe if you lined them all beside each other you'd have enough to make up one 2D person.... But the moire pattern from the scan lines might ruin the image.
I think this may really have potential for abuse..
Like taking a 3d photo of your butt????
Not only do you get to see the hairs sticking out of your crack, but they're in 3D!!!!!
Calories are bad. Fluff is good.
Don't you mean fibre? fibre is good.
You can print out the article then eat the paper for the fibre.
I think what he meant was 'that sound you just heard was the joke flying over your head'. Either that our your reply was just too dry for most of us to get.
I must admit my humour might be a bit too dry for some. In any event, I did get the original joke.
However, none of that qualifies you as a jackass.
I can take a dubious "that was meant as a joke" criticism, after all humour is subjective and my jokes could be over their head as well. That "I don't get it so therefore you're a jackass" was way over the line and I felt deserved the response.
Maybe the only joke I didn't get was the "you're a jackass, jackass" bit, but having to decide if I'm being insulted or not, I tend to choose the being insulted route.
Actually, either way you're a jackass, jackass.
Apart from going out of your way to label me a jackass, your post has no value whatsoever.
As for the point of labeling me a jackass, your argument doesn't carry any weight.
You even posted anonymously. I find you a pitiable person.
Just buy 100,000 songs and hey, free ipod!
That would work if there were 100,000 songs I liked. I might only have something 10,000 I liked, so why should I blow about 90 grand on crap I don't like?
I suppose I could always buy 10 separate copies of the 10,000 I did like. But then I'd need those 10 ipods, not the 1 I'd otherwise get.
isn't one enough?
I'd gladly trade in the extra 9 for more songs.
Psychologists developed tests to determine if someone is psychotic by having a list of "does this person exhibit xyz behaviour - yes, no".
Every sufficiently large organization upon which this test is applied shows that it is clinically psychotic.
Why would microsoft be any different? It doesn't surprise me at all.
(Example question, since I know you're curious:)
I'm curious about the answer....
In my world, triple redundant implies at least 4 copies and you have three 32 bit integers. Also, what is meant by "voted on"? Is there some kind of AI routine that says to itself "which bit from these three integers do I like best? Which one had the most effective election campaign?"
Triple redundancy of critical data implies ensuring it can be recovered. What happens during the writing process where individual copies are not properly written (e.g. a corrupted raid)? I'd entertain the idea of going with blocking the data into fixed size 2 dimensional arrays and performing checksums on each axis. In the event of a disk failure, the data can be reasonably rebuilt by isolating the specific byte or bytes in that array that fails the checksum verification and applying a reverse checksum algorithm to determine the most likely original byte value.
Before I'd answer that question, I'd try to find out the purpose behind that subroutine.
An employer should have the right to expect reasonable performace from their employees. No one puts a gun to an employer's head saying "employ that person", and no one is putting a gun to the employee saying "work for this person".
The employer should have the right to approach their employees and tell them up front, their work is being monitored. As long as it's done in the open, the employee can't complain about invasion of privacy. If they feel their privacy is threatened, perhaps they are not doing their job. They are after all being paid to do their job. Why then should an employee feel they are being mistreated when the employer finds out through monitoring devices, they are surfing for porn or spending 50% of their time using IM with their friends or doing seriously poor work?
OTOH, as someone else pointed out, I'd expect 100% privacy IN the bathroom or in areas of the building where work is not expected to occur. However, I wouldn't feel overly offended if the boss put up a camera pointing at the bathroom door to see how much time I spent doing my business.
Am I missing something?
Perhaps a 12 minutes windows heist?
I don't use windows, I use linux, and microsoft is not about to port that ugly blue e to linux anytime soon.
Now if I can just figure out how to get my computer infected with a worm or virus, I'll have a reason to reinstall the OS after 3 years. I feel like I'm missing out on so much fun.