That $600 hammer was meant to be used in an area normally filled with an explosive gas mixture. If you had to work in that area you would be glad the hammer you were using was made of materials that would not cause an explosion, no matter what it costs.
The other explination of this hammer is it is an accounting gimic: they spend $x on researching purchases that year, and bought y things, so each thing cost $x/y in research, never mind a hammer needs little research, while the engine they also bought needs are lot more than that before buying.
Last, I've used $300 hammers. If the $600 hammer is a much better than the $300 hammer as the $300 hammer is over the $15 hammer it was money well spent! $15 hammers are hard on the joints and should never be used.
In my co-op, total votes for the director who won was just over 1000. If you don't like yours representative gather the facts and start knocking on doors. You just have to talk to your neighbors, so it isn't like this is hard. 2000 doors in a month is less than 10 a day, you should be able to do that. A lot of work I will grant, nothing compared to trying to change a presidential election.
Honestly, I'll bet most of your neighbors know very little of the subject. The fact that you are interested and have a position (and presumably a candidate who you think is better) could be enough to change their vote.
Actually about half the people are interested enough to vote. There are other factors.
Politeness is a big one. So long as I don't discuss politics with you I don't know if you are an ultra-right-wing conservative, or a bleeding heart liberal. (I can guess, but my guessing ability isn't all that great) People out here have broken off friendships over politics when it is discussed. There also isn't much we can do (out there in DC you have a much easier time lobbing our representatives than we do, or at least that is the feeling) so why talk about it?
There are other things to talk about. Politics are nice and all, but where I live we talk about the weather. (Seriously, it shocks visitors that talking about the weather is what we do, and not a way to say we were talking without specifying what) In other areas they talk about the sport, cars, and girls/guys. There is nothing special about politics that I should talk about it.
Actually knowing how to dig a waterwell may not be as useful as you think. Some of those areas have poison (arsenic?) in their ground water. The unsanitary shallow wells people have been using for years don't have it, while the sanitary deep wells do. At least with unsanitary wells the problem is things your immune system learns to fight off. (Mostly, I don't want to make the claim shallow wells are safe, just safer than deep wells in some areas)
Of course this depends on what area of the world you are in. If the ground water is safe in your area knowing how to dig a well can help you, if the groundwater is not safe then it is useless trivia.
Name one country that doesn't claim to be a net exporter of food. You can't, because everyone claims that. I don't know where it all goes, because nobody is importing it, just exporting.
There are political reasons that everyone wants to claim to export food. Some countries will export food while their own people starve.
Maybe, maybe not. Books are great, so long as they are up to date. A book on atomic energy from 1950 is only useful if you are historian - I have someplace in my personal library such a book, but I wouldn't want a poor person to read it, because while interesting there is too much that we have no learned isn't correct. Web sites can at least be updated.
Hook that computer to the internet can you get things like newsgroups. Places where you can ask questions and get answers latter. You can ask questions of experts and learn things that have never been written in books.
Books are expensive, for the cost of an internet connection they can buy maybe 2 books a month. (hard to compare because internet connections are more expensive there) The computer gives thousands of books instantly, and access to experts.
Sure a full, up to date library is more useful than a computer, particularly if several people want to use a different resource at the same time. However the computer is more up to date, and solves other problems.
People inside the beltway are far more likely to work for congressmen than people in the rest of the US. This concentration of people who have to know politics in detail is what allows you to have those conversations. Those same people would be unable to have a in depth conversation on the merits of various corn varieties. Its what you know.
Of course once you have a critical mass of people who know the subject onlookers who otherwise won't have to care become sucked in because the only way to have a conversation with most people is to talk about politics in detail. People have the same problem with me, unless the topic is computer programing I can't hold a conversation. I know politics (Not to the level you do), but I don't know how to hold a conversation about it.
I was refused an interview for a linux kernel development position because I hack FreeBSD. Now IBM isn't interested in me because they want FireFox and I hack Konqueror.
Many people made lots of money in the.com boom, while the company I worked for kept going downhill. Get a job I like, and they go bankrupt in 3 months.
If this trend continues much longer, companies are going to refuse to allow me to work for them because I'm bad luck. Then I won't be able to earn money and I'll starve...
Sorry, I got little carried away. Its all true up until that last paragraph though.
Good story. One question though: Why didn't you detect his scan, and shut him down before he finished. Better yet, have security walk into his cube and escort him out as the scan is finishing.
I'll grant that intrusion detection is hard. (and you have to deal with false positives from your department) There are valid reasons not to do it. I just want to know if you have a valid reason for not noticing his scan in real time.
That is what I was referring to (except I forgot who did it). NASA has a good mirror in spares, but it would be just like grind a new, flawed mirror anyway.
Obviously you are not running a machine with 100s of users. If you were you would know the difference, a single user that is exploited costs much less than a root exploit. The root exploit costs everyone, which can amount to millions of dollars in downtime. The local exploit costs one person, less time because you just restore from backups. (You do have backups, right?)
Yes a local non-root exploit is bad. However it is nowhere near as serious as a root exploit.
Maybe. However most linux mailers default to not running programs (javascript in HTML, or just binaries) received via email. Most linux users are not running as root, which limits a virus somewhat. (particularly on a multi-user system)
Most Microsoft Windows users have a mailer that runs programs by default. (though I understand this has gotten a lot better in the last few years) Most Microsoft Windows users are running as administrator, so anything that breaks in gets full power over the system without extra effort.
There is a difference between a local exploit and a local root exploit. Most people running Microsoft Windows don't know this though because there is no difference when you are administrator. If root/administrator rights were not used in the exploit, you just restore the one user from backup and you are back to where you started. If there was a root exploit you need to rebuild the system, which on a multiuser system affects everyone.
You think the police have nothing better to do that harass you?
Sometimes. My life is best when the cops have nothing to do (because there is no crime), but that means they are bored. It also means they need to justify their existance, hanging out in donut shops looks bad, and as a tax payer I start thinking perhaps we could get rid of a few and save some money.
Police are only human. Some are perfect, but most are not. Some use their cop cars and a list of people on vacation to steal.[1] Some just use their power to run IDs on people just for the fun of it. Some use their power to check out the cute girls, while appearing to follow all procedures correctly. Sometimes they honestly believe they are doing the right thing when they butt into some situation that is undercontrol but appears not[2]. Just like everyone else really.
[1]I'm thinking of a particular case that happened sometime in the '60s. The cop was roommates with my uncle at the time. Eventially my uncle figured out what was going on an turned him in, but this went on for quite a while, and everyone was oblivious. (Actually we suspect the other officers were catching on and investigating, I wasn't born yet so I don't know all the details)
[2]This is very difficult to figure out in some situations. They need to butt into many situations that are out of control, but once in a while they misunderstand what is happening.
Some (but not all, depends on the type) can be diverted by making a big maginet under the lunar base. Charged particles enter the magnetic field and deflect away from the base.
It has been suggested (in other posts, I have no knowledge of this) that there are concentrations of iron in the area where this base is proposed. So we just need to build a robot to mine and refine iron (all using solar power) until there is enough iron for a maginet under the base. Then charge the magnet (easy, since we now have solar power for an electromagnet) and build your base on top of it.
For extra credit build a linear/super collider instead, and when radiation isn't a problem you can use maginets to for science, then when radiation is an issue align all the maginets and protect the base. (I wonder if this could/would work...)
This doesn't do anything about UV, but it solves some problems anyway.
It isn't that we can't do it like we used it. It is that there are now cheaper materials (and processes for laying them) that more than make up the difference in cost of having to replace them every few years. We can build them like we used to. It just costs a lot more money.
There is also the broken window fallicy argument that the labor is good for the local economy)
When you run the numbers, that road that lasted 40 years may cost more per year than replacing the junk road every 4 years! The good road surfaces are expensive to put down.
Let your local government know that you don't like construction. The cost analysis does not factor in your lost time because you have to go around construction, if that was factored in the 40 year surface would be worth it.
I don't e-file because I'm cheap. A stamp costs $.37, and I drive by the Post office anyway to get the weight. e-file costs me more than that. If the IRS wants to save money by not having someone read my chicken scratching (Yes I do my taxes by hand, it is easy if you can follow directions) they can provide an easy, cheap electronic interface. Until then I will use the interface they want me to by charging less for it.
Considering this story, I'm glad I don't use software to do my taxes.
Re:The morality of the story:
on
Tracking Your Taxes
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
More than that, if you know you owe the government money you want to wait until the last filing date. When my money is in a savings account I at least earn interest, once I pay the bill I quit earning interest on the money. Now granted today's interest rates are so tiny this isn't much money, but still an extra few pennies add up over time. (I pay most of my bills on the first of the month so that I can get an extra month's interest on my money, again it isn't much but it adds up over all my bills and time)
Just before April 15 in the US (Taxes are due then here) there is a news bulletin of which post offices are open until midnight. Some people really do wait that long to turn things in. Personally I try to turn mine in a week or two before that just in case something bad happens to me.
I don't know how UK taxes work, but in the US there are a large number of people who have an advantage of waiting until the last minute to pay their taxes. Then there are those who have the advantage of doing them early, but just lazily hold off. Combine together you are right, it is very short sighted to not have system that can handle the load of most people waiting to the last minute.
There is no benefit either way. If they are designing their own chips, circuit board layout is nearly trivial in comparison. If they are not designing their own chips they are in violation of patent laws.
Pins are interesting, but unless you are going to buy their circuit boards, and replace their chip with yours what is the point. Those who care about pin compatibility, care because it allows them to replace a chip from one manufacture with another without doing any other work.
You are right that driver compatibility isn't a big deal.
It only matters to me in two ways: I want drivers that work for my system (graphics cards are very bad about this, my laptop has a cheap 3d chipset, but no drivers exist for it so I can't make use of it), and I want documents that I can open.
People assume that I can open Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel documents on my computer, so they send them. Nevermind that plain text would work just as well, I get documents in the format they created them in, which I cannot view. (OpenOffice.org could open them, but installing OOo on FreeBSD is nearly impossible for experts - it is worse because I do not agree with the Java license agreement so I couldn't get all features if I did install it)
When Linux has a significant market share (it doesn't even have to have a majority, just enough that everyone knows about it) this situation will change. Until then I live with a better OS that has some stupid limitations beyond my control.
I prefer FreeBSD myself, but most Linux applications run on FreeBSD as well. Most developers of applications that don't run are at least interested in my patch to make it work. (and since nearly all apps are open source I have the ability to make those patches!)
Re:Symbolic, Of Course
on
Hope for Hubble
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
And it would be a better Hubble too because they would use a mirror ground correctly. That alone would make it better than Hubble can ever be.
I take that back. It would be just like bureaucrats to grind a new mirror to the wrong specs just so everything is the same as Hubble is now. (or is it for political reasons? Makes no difference)
Yes, and in fact some are working on this. However it is a hard problem made worse because new cards are coming out all the time, and each is different from the last. Each card needs to be reversed engineered separately. (Though once you have done one you will find much that still applies. However you still need to check everything to see what changed)
Pay my wages and I will join the effort to do this. Until they I don't have time to reverse engineer new drivers. I don't really have time to fix drivers that I do have source and specs for. (And I do that once in a while anyway)
(for those who don't understand that) Most video cards are pin compatible. There aren't that many choices, you can plug your card into a PCI slot or a AGP slot (there are other up and coming slots that I'm ignoring for now - they are important, but this applies to them too). Every PCI card is pin compatible with every other one, likewise with AGP. However the addresses and registers are not even close to similar.
Drivers need to deal with those addresses. Device drivers for video cards tend to be much more complex than drivers for other devices (SCSI cards for example), because Video cards have so many more options.
Slashdot Mirror
That $600 hammer was meant to be used in an area normally filled with an explosive gas mixture. If you had to work in that area you would be glad the hammer you were using was made of materials that would not cause an explosion, no matter what it costs.
The other explination of this hammer is it is an accounting gimic: they spend $x on researching purchases that year, and bought y things, so each thing cost $x/y in research, never mind a hammer needs little research, while the engine they also bought needs are lot more than that before buying.
Last, I've used $300 hammers. If the $600 hammer is a much better than the $300 hammer as the $300 hammer is over the $15 hammer it was money well spent! $15 hammers are hard on the joints and should never be used.
In my co-op, total votes for the director who won was just over 1000. If you don't like yours representative gather the facts and start knocking on doors. You just have to talk to your neighbors, so it isn't like this is hard. 2000 doors in a month is less than 10 a day, you should be able to do that. A lot of work I will grant, nothing compared to trying to change a presidential election.
Honestly, I'll bet most of your neighbors know very little of the subject. The fact that you are interested and have a position (and presumably a candidate who you think is better) could be enough to change their vote.
Actually about half the people are interested enough to vote. There are other factors.
Politeness is a big one. So long as I don't discuss politics with you I don't know if you are an ultra-right-wing conservative, or a bleeding heart liberal. (I can guess, but my guessing ability isn't all that great) People out here have broken off friendships over politics when it is discussed. There also isn't much we can do (out there in DC you have a much easier time lobbing our representatives than we do, or at least that is the feeling) so why talk about it?
There are other things to talk about. Politics are nice and all, but where I live we talk about the weather. (Seriously, it shocks visitors that talking about the weather is what we do, and not a way to say we were talking without specifying what) In other areas they talk about the sport, cars, and girls/guys. There is nothing special about politics that I should talk about it.
Not much to say really. Yahoo brings out their non-compete (everyone has one it seems, so I assume they do), and Microsoft can't let him work anymore.
Actually knowing how to dig a waterwell may not be as useful as you think. Some of those areas have poison (arsenic?) in their ground water. The unsanitary shallow wells people have been using for years don't have it, while the sanitary deep wells do. At least with unsanitary wells the problem is things your immune system learns to fight off. (Mostly, I don't want to make the claim shallow wells are safe, just safer than deep wells in some areas)
Of course this depends on what area of the world you are in. If the ground water is safe in your area knowing how to dig a well can help you, if the groundwater is not safe then it is useless trivia.
Name one country that doesn't claim to be a net exporter of food. You can't, because everyone claims that. I don't know where it all goes, because nobody is importing it, just exporting.
There are political reasons that everyone wants to claim to export food. Some countries will export food while their own people starve.
Maybe, maybe not. Books are great, so long as they are up to date. A book on atomic energy from 1950 is only useful if you are historian - I have someplace in my personal library such a book, but I wouldn't want a poor person to read it, because while interesting there is too much that we have no learned isn't correct. Web sites can at least be updated.
Hook that computer to the internet can you get things like newsgroups. Places where you can ask questions and get answers latter. You can ask questions of experts and learn things that have never been written in books.
Books are expensive, for the cost of an internet connection they can buy maybe 2 books a month. (hard to compare because internet connections are more expensive there) The computer gives thousands of books instantly, and access to experts.
Sure a full, up to date library is more useful than a computer, particularly if several people want to use a different resource at the same time. However the computer is more up to date, and solves other problems.
People inside the beltway are far more likely to work for congressmen than people in the rest of the US. This concentration of people who have to know politics in detail is what allows you to have those conversations. Those same people would be unable to have a in depth conversation on the merits of various corn varieties. Its what you know.
Of course once you have a critical mass of people who know the subject onlookers who otherwise won't have to care become sucked in because the only way to have a conversation with most people is to talk about politics in detail. People have the same problem with me, unless the topic is computer programing I can't hold a conversation. I know politics (Not to the level you do), but I don't know how to hold a conversation about it.
I was refused an interview for a linux kernel development position because I hack FreeBSD. Now IBM isn't interested in me because they want FireFox and I hack Konqueror.
Many people made lots of money in the .com boom, while the company I worked for kept going downhill. Get a job I like, and they go bankrupt in 3 months.
If this trend continues much longer, companies are going to refuse to allow me to work for them because I'm bad luck. Then I won't be able to earn money and I'll starve ...
Sorry, I got little carried away. Its all true up until that last paragraph though.
Good story. One question though: Why didn't you detect his scan, and shut him down before he finished. Better yet, have security walk into his cube and escort him out as the scan is finishing.
I'll grant that intrusion detection is hard. (and you have to deal with false positives from your department) There are valid reasons not to do it. I just want to know if you have a valid reason for not noticing his scan in real time.
Read that again. There is a full time IT guy. However that guy is incompetent. He is doing IT because the IT guys are not doing it.
At least if we believe his post. Since I don't have the other side of the story, I'm taking it on face value.
That is what I was referring to (except I forgot who did it). NASA has a good mirror in spares, but it would be just like grind a new, flawed mirror anyway.
Obviously you are not running a machine with 100s of users. If you were you would know the difference, a single user that is exploited costs much less than a root exploit. The root exploit costs everyone, which can amount to millions of dollars in downtime. The local exploit costs one person, less time because you just restore from backups. (You do have backups, right?)
Yes a local non-root exploit is bad. However it is nowhere near as serious as a root exploit.
Maybe. However most linux mailers default to not running programs (javascript in HTML, or just binaries) received via email. Most linux users are not running as root, which limits a virus somewhat. (particularly on a multi-user system)
Most Microsoft Windows users have a mailer that runs programs by default. (though I understand this has gotten a lot better in the last few years) Most Microsoft Windows users are running as administrator, so anything that breaks in gets full power over the system without extra effort.
There is a difference between a local exploit and a local root exploit. Most people running Microsoft Windows don't know this though because there is no difference when you are administrator. If root/administrator rights were not used in the exploit, you just restore the one user from backup and you are back to where you started. If there was a root exploit you need to rebuild the system, which on a multiuser system affects everyone.
You think the police have nothing better to do that harass you?
Sometimes. My life is best when the cops have nothing to do (because there is no crime), but that means they are bored. It also means they need to justify their existance, hanging out in donut shops looks bad, and as a tax payer I start thinking perhaps we could get rid of a few and save some money.
Police are only human. Some are perfect, but most are not. Some use their cop cars and a list of people on vacation to steal.[1] Some just use their power to run IDs on people just for the fun of it. Some use their power to check out the cute girls, while appearing to follow all procedures correctly. Sometimes they honestly believe they are doing the right thing when they butt into some situation that is undercontrol but appears not[2]. Just like everyone else really.
[1]I'm thinking of a particular case that happened sometime in the '60s. The cop was roommates with my uncle at the time. Eventially my uncle figured out what was going on an turned him in, but this went on for quite a while, and everyone was oblivious. (Actually we suspect the other officers were catching on and investigating, I wasn't born yet so I don't know all the details)
[2]This is very difficult to figure out in some situations. They need to butt into many situations that are out of control, but once in a while they misunderstand what is happening.
Some (but not all, depends on the type) can be diverted by making a big maginet under the lunar base. Charged particles enter the magnetic field and deflect away from the base.
It has been suggested (in other posts, I have no knowledge of this) that there are concentrations of iron in the area where this base is proposed. So we just need to build a robot to mine and refine iron (all using solar power) until there is enough iron for a maginet under the base. Then charge the magnet (easy, since we now have solar power for an electromagnet) and build your base on top of it.
For extra credit build a linear/super collider instead, and when radiation isn't a problem you can use maginets to for science, then when radiation is an issue align all the maginets and protect the base. (I wonder if this could/would work...)
This doesn't do anything about UV, but it solves some problems anyway.
It isn't that we can't do it like we used it. It is that there are now cheaper materials (and processes for laying them) that more than make up the difference in cost of having to replace them every few years. We can build them like we used to. It just costs a lot more money.
There is also the broken window fallicy argument that the labor is good for the local economy)
When you run the numbers, that road that lasted 40 years may cost more per year than replacing the junk road every 4 years! The good road surfaces are expensive to put down.
Let your local government know that you don't like construction. The cost analysis does not factor in your lost time because you have to go around construction, if that was factored in the 40 year surface would be worth it.
I don't e-file because I'm cheap. A stamp costs $.37, and I drive by the Post office anyway to get the weight. e-file costs me more than that. If the IRS wants to save money by not having someone read my chicken scratching (Yes I do my taxes by hand, it is easy if you can follow directions) they can provide an easy, cheap electronic interface. Until then I will use the interface they want me to by charging less for it.
Considering this story, I'm glad I don't use software to do my taxes.
More than that, if you know you owe the government money you want to wait until the last filing date. When my money is in a savings account I at least earn interest, once I pay the bill I quit earning interest on the money. Now granted today's interest rates are so tiny this isn't much money, but still an extra few pennies add up over time. (I pay most of my bills on the first of the month so that I can get an extra month's interest on my money, again it isn't much but it adds up over all my bills and time)
Just before April 15 in the US (Taxes are due then here) there is a news bulletin of which post offices are open until midnight. Some people really do wait that long to turn things in. Personally I try to turn mine in a week or two before that just in case something bad happens to me.
I don't know how UK taxes work, but in the US there are a large number of people who have an advantage of waiting until the last minute to pay their taxes. Then there are those who have the advantage of doing them early, but just lazily hold off. Combine together you are right, it is very short sighted to not have system that can handle the load of most people waiting to the last minute.
There is no benefit either way. If they are designing their own chips, circuit board layout is nearly trivial in comparison. If they are not designing their own chips they are in violation of patent laws.
Pins are interesting, but unless you are going to buy their circuit boards, and replace their chip with yours what is the point. Those who care about pin compatibility, care because it allows them to replace a chip from one manufacture with another without doing any other work.
You are right that driver compatibility isn't a big deal.
It only matters to me in two ways: I want drivers that work for my system (graphics cards are very bad about this, my laptop has a cheap 3d chipset, but no drivers exist for it so I can't make use of it), and I want documents that I can open.
People assume that I can open Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel documents on my computer, so they send them. Nevermind that plain text would work just as well, I get documents in the format they created them in, which I cannot view. (OpenOffice.org could open them, but installing OOo on FreeBSD is nearly impossible for experts - it is worse because I do not agree with the Java license agreement so I couldn't get all features if I did install it)
When Linux has a significant market share (it doesn't even have to have a majority, just enough that everyone knows about it) this situation will change. Until then I live with a better OS that has some stupid limitations beyond my control.
I prefer FreeBSD myself, but most Linux applications run on FreeBSD as well. Most developers of applications that don't run are at least interested in my patch to make it work. (and since nearly all apps are open source I have the ability to make those patches!)
And it would be a better Hubble too because they would use a mirror ground correctly. That alone would make it better than Hubble can ever be.
I take that back. It would be just like bureaucrats to grind a new mirror to the wrong specs just so everything is the same as Hubble is now. (or is it for political reasons? Makes no difference)
Yes, and in fact some are working on this. However it is a hard problem made worse because new cards are coming out all the time, and each is different from the last. Each card needs to be reversed engineered separately. (Though once you have done one you will find much that still applies. However you still need to check everything to see what changed)
Pay my wages and I will join the effort to do this. Until they I don't have time to reverse engineer new drivers. I don't really have time to fix drivers that I do have source and specs for. (And I do that once in a while anyway)
ITYM address compatible card. HTH HAND
(for those who don't understand that) Most video cards are pin compatible. There aren't that many choices, you can plug your card into a PCI slot or a AGP slot (there are other up and coming slots that I'm ignoring for now - they are important, but this applies to them too). Every PCI card is pin compatible with every other one, likewise with AGP. However the addresses and registers are not even close to similar.
Drivers need to deal with those addresses. Device drivers for video cards tend to be much more complex than drivers for other devices (SCSI cards for example), because Video cards have so many more options.