What? 1) Read original decision 2) Read relevant portion of statute 3) Read jury instructions 4) Read 9th Circuit decision 5)THEN tell me I don't know what I'm talking about. This decision is important in that it has implications far outside of chipmaking, especially in the 9th Circuit. If you need me to draw you a diagram I will, but don't attempt to use any part of it to argue with me, lest I sue you for improperly using it.
So here we have the 9th Circuit - yes, that 9th Circuit, making it up as it goes. If any of you have been following this, you might ask "How the heck was adequate correction provided to the jury, when the initial instructions regarding reverse engineering were wrong, and the later, more general instructions, were proper?". I have no idea. The part of the instructions that specifically deal with the issue at hand which were wrongseem to clearly specify the action the jury should take. It's like having the regular print in a license agreement say one thing, and way later in the document have it say something else, but in a very general, nondescript way.
Welcome to the 9th. Does anybody know if they are still the most overturned Circuit?
Now that Opera is Free as Beer, I guess it's time to switch...again. However, I wish they would change some of the vocabulary, and lose the attitude, and make it easier to write extensions, etc. I've used Opera, but it just isn't compelling to me compared to FF, especially when I can use this boatload of extensions (like the AWESOME AdBlock), and not read ads on/.!
This is so unbelievably stupid I can barely stand it. 1) There is a reason why elections have monitors all over the place. 2) There is a reason why both parties are entitled to have their own independent monitors at each and every polling place to challenge votes. 3) While the paper trail (receipt for the voter and one for the backup-box) is a GREAT idea, it hardly constitues potential fraud; the "hacks" require the other protections in place to fail in order to succeed. 4) The modem is a great idea, but also can AND IS SUPPOSED TO BE managed by the local jurisdiction. 5) If I worked for ANY software company, I would expect that firm to DEMAND that I keep comments and revelations about EVERYTHING that goes on inside...INSIDE! How the heck is this any different? If Black Hat taught anybody anything, it's that companies have an expectation that their information will be kept confidential by employees and contractors who are required to sign agreements to same. So, what is the news here? This is OLD news, and it isn't any different than news about some new hole in IE or FF, or Sendmail. The only difference is that if people are stupid then the losing party has grounds to appeal an election. Those of you that think...no wait...those of you that know that there are aliens living among us will also know that our system of laws doesn't work, and the hack will be successful. The rest of us are reasonably sure that things won't make it that far because Boards of Elections don't want the publicity, and Clerks of Elections want to keep their jobs.
The issue I have is that the purification system, even in miniature, is going to add another 10-15 lbs. in order to be efficient enough to be useful. Charcoal, UV or chlorine, RO/DI (if you're nuts), etc. and spare parts together will easily add that much weight, and in order to go in the desert (as opposed to just in the field, where you pack your gear, and half-a-goat) is going to require even more effort and efficincy since the loss is higher. In addition, you still have to exert EXTRA effort to make the generator work (duh, perpetual motion), but you lose the diminishing mass advantage (no, I know - not all of it, just "much" of it).
Humans are not the only mammals on the planet.
The article is about humans, as is my reply.
Just as a side note before I go into the physiology, are you actually aware of any children anywhere in the world being breast fed at age two? Howabout three? The answer is, of course "no". Before lactose intolerance can even become an issue, it's already irrelevant. That's the point.
I don't disagree that there are babies that aren't biters. However, even for nonbiters, physiology makes it almost impossible that baby will ever make it to age 1 still nursing. Granted, baby can bite Mommy with the soft palette, but that's a different story, and isn't what I was referring to, anyway. Baby's mouth is very small, even at that age. However, Mommy's nipple is huge at that point. It, like the rest of the breast, is engorged. Nipples will grow to about 250% of their diameter (or so - 200% to, well, you can imagine). Baby takes the entire nipple into his/her mouth, as well as most of the areola to suck.
The problem for baby is that two things happen: 1) As baby's mouth grows in diameter, mommy's nipple is drawn further in, which means that mommy's nipple is now in danger of being squeezed, bitten, or pinched by baby's palette. Before baby has teeth (and essentially zero biting force), this is not much of an issue. After baby has teeth, the space that was previously clear for mommy's nipple is now occupied (and those suckers are SHARP!), and mommy gets sore. 2) Even without teeth, as baby grows, baby needs longer periods of nursing, and in cases where mommy doesn't produce adequate milk or baby is growing quickly, baby nurses more frequently, or mommy needs to feed baby both breasts instead of just one. So, mommy doesn't get several hours to heal any more. She might get just two, or in extreme cases, just one. Mommy bleeds, or gets sore, or whatever, and ultimately baby gets force-weened.
Oh, and one other thing: it's difficult to argue that lactose intolerance is or is not "faulty". It just is. Since we don't understand every little nuance of human physiology, especially at the cellular level, there may be very good reason to (or not to) consume milk from any species beyond a certain age, but the fact that it tastes so good to me makes me believe that may not be the case.
NEWS FLASH: Moms stop nursing BEFORE ONE YEAR. Do you know why? BECAUSE KIDS GROW TEETH AT AROUND SIX TO EIGHT MONTHS! I've got...oh crap...many...children. The kids that didn't ween themselves got forced off Mom because nursing hurts like hell anyway (especially with some kids, who just can't figure it out, or are so hungry all the time that they are feeding almost constantly, resulting in lots of sores on Mama), and once kids have teeth it's unbelievably painful. So four years is WAY past the time when Mom would be done with them already.
Damn. I need to go to get my prescription changed. Once I got closer to the screen I could see that you were saying "freeman". My bad on the second part of the post, however, the first part I stand by completely...wait - I can't it now - were you saying this was a silly idea? Dammit, Darcy, where the F*** are my spectacles?
OK, first of all, what the hell is the point of carrying around a bunch of weight to recycle something? News flash - you put more energy in than the work you get out. Plus you have filters, sterilizers, etc. So no, you can't use this (insanely massy) pack to recycle urine more efficiently than just carrying (and consuming, and expelling) water.
Second, this is not like a "fireman suit". By the way, we call those thingies "bunker gear" or "turnout gear" or "firefighting ensemble". They consist of PBI, Nomex, and Kevlar, along with some other goodies to keep other crap off of us. Oh, and here's a newsflash - it's almost unbearably hot in a "fireman suit", especially in Summer. That's why firefighters generally much prefer late Fall or early Spring. It's much more comfortable. I've been on FAST (or RIT) team calls (that's where we show up to rescue any firefighters that might become trapped trying to save your house), where we were standing outside in -10F for three hours, and I was a happy, happy, warm, comfortable camper.
I've seen lots of comments on this thread about how traits are selected because they increase survivability, or they increase a person's ability to procreate, blah, blah, blah. What I haven't seen is anyone stating the mechanism by which this happens. Evolution isn't some driving force. Evolution is simply a result. Evolution is simply a pattern - a way to explain what we see - that traits are statistically more or less common in species in given geographic areas. The question is Why? Can one seriously argue that lactose tolerance (or intolerance) increases survival of humans in areas that produce (or don't produce) bovine milk? Probabily not. It is, I believe a mathmatical fallacy to suggest that statistics provide answers. Statistics simply are summary of data that, due to their curiosity, cause people to ask questions (and rightly so). The argument that the welfare state, or high sex drive, or intelligence has been selected would seem to also be silly, until related events can be correlated against them. If an Atlantic tsunami wipes out the entire East Coast, there will be an associated reduction in traits that were concentrated there. In addition, beings digging through the fossils ten thousand years from now might be inclined to draw some conclusion based on the stark differences in numbers of fossils with various traits (uh, smart people don't live in coastal areas), when no such conclusion may be warranted. In an evolutionary sense, did the people who live in the interior have some sort of advantage based on their genetics? Maybe. Maybe we're just lucky in ten thousand years we'll know for sure. However what we WILL find is that of the people that live on the coast and survive the tsunami, there will be a statistically higher concentration of certain traits, that might have enabled them to survive. Their genes will survive. The others won't.
Oh, and just so we don't have a repeat of the hand-wringing that we're having over NOLA, I would like to serve notice right now: There WILL be a tsunami that causes devestation to the East Coast. Yet I don't see a mass exodus out of there. Why is that? Maybe people in the interior are smarter after all.
Actually I'm running XP Pro, but I still have issues DAILY, everything from the machine slowing to a crawl, to having to reboot because something horrible goes wrong. But that raises an interesting point - if you have to have the most current and recent version of an OS to be able to use an application that, to be useful, requires very close to 100% uptime, then the app. becomes much less useful, since most of the machines out there aren't running the most recent (and patched) version of any OS.
What is the big deal? It's neat to be able to do this sort of thing, but it's, what, ten years ahead of its time? Desktop OS's aren't reliable enough yet, and get slowed down at the weirdest times, which means that this is going to be unreliable, too. Please give me a cheap-to-deploy, POTS-enabled (yet still cheap) system that a monkey (i.e. the person at the front desk) can administer. It needs to be able to interface with HR so that when a new person comes on board the system is automatically updated, and when a person leaves their stuff is forwarded to their manager and their account is blocked. THAT would be great. The rest of this stuff is just a lot of technology for WebEx to deploy to reduce their development costs.
OK, let's be more clear. You are correct, as I pointed out further down, that this is an interesting idea, and it has exciting implications. However, until the reaction times can be extended significantly and the output can be used to do something (since that is the whole point, right?), the experiments are not particularly useful. However, the main point from all of that was that I don't expect 500 million pounds to finance much of a reactor, given what Rochester and Berkley have invested and what they've done with it.
This isn't NEWS. The only NEWS here is that someone in Europe is trying it. Big freaking deal. Berkly and Rochester have been all over this for quite a while now. The only problem is that they haven't actually done any useful experiments yet, the test reactions last milliseconds, and the fuel used and energy released are so small as to be barely discernable.
The insane part of this is that they think 500 million pounds is going to build a meaningful facility. What are they going to return - picowatts? Come on. What's even funnier is that anyone thinks that anyone is Europe is going to get this done quickly. Just aligning the mirrors and getting the timing right takes YEARS. Just ask the folks at Berkley. It's an interesting idea, and the ramifications and implications are exciting, but probably not until we're all pretty darn old.
Slashdot's audience, being geeks, are generally more intelligent and well-informed than the average US consumer: Think about it - could there possibly be a reason why so many Slashdotters are criticising Bush? I'll leave you to ponder it.
Hey "more intelligent geek": could you please mix in a grammar lesson? By the way, you might try a logic lesson while you're at it.
People in the South ask this of folk in the North every winter. The 200+" of snow every winter, the temp. at -20F, the accidents caused by the poor conditions, the high heating bills, etc. The fundamental difference between living (for instance) at the coast as opposed to inland, can be measured as death by one slice or a thousand slices. NO just got the one-slice treatment. However, if you take the same number of people in the north, and compute the negative cost of living there over the time since the last catastrophic storm to nit NO, and I would be willing to bet that things are pretty close to being equal.
Look at this another way. I was considering building a golf course a few years ago on 180 acres near my house. The land was unbelievably cheap. I got in touch with the USGA and ordered a book they have on the topic. The really weird thing that I drew from all of the analysis in the book is that overall a golf course in the north and a golf course in the south, at the end of the year, will be pretty close to each other in terms of their overall after-tax profit, including cost of land, cost of construction, etc. It was startling to review the analysis and be able to draw that conclusion. The longer season in the South is offset by higher energy costs, water, chemicals, operating budgets, and over the course of the year the revenue was only proportionally larger, compared to the length of the season and the expense of operating it.
None of this, of course, discounts the very serious discussion we need to have as a nation as to whether or not NO should be left fundamentally as-is and used as such, or drained and rebuilt. Personally, from the standpoint of someone who knows what winter is and intentionally lives somewhere boring, I'd vote to not rebuild it. I'd also vote to not rebuild WTC, and to only reimburse victims in high-risk areas once, perhaps purchasing the land as part of the reimbursement and turning it into park or at-your-own-risk area.
In the case of NO, I would be particularly concerned that a terrorist could repeat this event with a cargoplane full of fertilizer and fuel oil, only next time there won't be 48-60 hours of warning to get out.
After reading the thing, here you go: OSX Server is significantly slower than Yellow Dog Linux (Server)running the Big Three on a G5. How many people try to run enormous traffic sites on OSX Server? Nobody?
It seemed that the authors were trying to make a point about the G5 vs. X86, and why Apple switched, but unless I missed it, there isn't any discussion of OSX Server on X86, or the opportunities that brings. It only seems to discuss OSXS vs. YDL on G5's. OK, Linux is faster. So? I don't get it.
Well, since this case will never make it to the courtroom, it will be interesing to see what the parties are going to settle for. Regardless of whether or not AMD is right, or Intel is right, in two years Intel is going to give AMD some cash, or some tiny market share, and nothing will change.
Unfortunately, AMD acting in this manner isn't going to help them with attracting firms to their side. They are just going to have to beat Intel in some other way, with some new product. In business, David doesn't beat Goliath, unless Goliath is alseep at the switch.
Would I rather have too much security in IT or too little? I vote for too much. The first day my firm makes the news because of some breach that results in piles of data being released is also the first day that I'm looking for a new job. No thanks. Users are pretty forgiving when they understand why we do things the way we do. Nobody ever got id-thefted by this way.
The false positive problem is certainly an important one, as is a method to alert others in the vacinity that there is a problem. As firefighters we carry a device called PASS, which, when we aren't active does several things: 1) after 30 seconds of inactivity it sounds an alert tone, at low volume, for about five seconds. 2) After the five second low-volume tone, it increases volume to an obnoxious level for another five seconds. 3) After the second five-second alert it goes hog wild until it is manually silenced. We get lots of false positives with this system on the fire ground, because much of the time of people not in the building fighting the fire is spent standing around. This is especially true for the RIT or FAST team - a separate team of firefighters that is standing by outside the structure and waiting to execute an entry and effect a rescue within five seconds of a "mayday" going over the radio, or hearing someone's PASS alert going off inside the structure. In firefighting the PASS alarm is useful because we can tell which way to go to find the injured, unconscious, or trapped firefighter or team. Unfortunately such systems don't work so well in water, because the speed of sound is much faster (water is more dense than air), so your ears are unable to distinguish direction, except with extended training (tens to hundreds of hours of underwater time).
The good news about such a system is that the lifeguards, like the RIT or FAST teams, get used to false positives, and learn to evaluate situations quickly to figure out what's going on. In addition, such a situation can be further improved if only one lifeguard is initially responsible for the monitoring of the system and evaluating alarms, at least for ten seconds or so.
On the question of how long you have when you drown, AED (that's automated external defibrilator) companies have researched this topic extensively. For a non-trauma-induced cardiac arrest (drowning is included in this category), you have an approximately 90% probability of survival if defibrilation is conducted within one minute of arrest. The probability of survival goes down by roughly ten percent per minute after that (the curve isn't linear, though). In addition, we have found that after about four minutes even in victims that are effectively converted, the quality of their outcomes are significantly diminished.
So what about CPR? CPR in the vast majority of cases (approaching 99%), is not sufficient intervention to convert a cardiac arrest. In fact, it is believed that in the cases where CPR alone was successful in converting an arrest, that the victim was not arresting, and the report was wrong, based on various enzyme and other chemical levels in the bloodstream. CPR buys time, it flattens out the conversion curve, so that defibrilation and IV intervention can improve both the probability of survival and the quality of the outcome.
One of the least considered, studied, and written about things is project methedology. It seems like all the books about the subject relate to automotive production, where the Japanese flooded the market with their philosophy. Afterward, automotive companies hoisted these philosophies on unsuspecting suppliers. The number of paradigm shifts that auto suppliers have endured as a result over the last 20 years is amazing.
Yet I have never had a large client try to push a project development methedology for software on us. There has never been discussion of any of these, and it seemed that for the most part, we as a group were on our own when it came to evaluating various options.
I've been waiting for someone to start talking about the various paradigms and structuring philosophies for a while. For projects as complicated as large software systems, it is frequently a lot of trial and error, followed by more of the same. Finding any comprehensive discussion has been impossible. Hopefully this will foster more books on the topic. Software is becomming such a critical part of corporations, government, and daily life, that not only are the tools that we use important, but so is the way that we use them.
I would also be interested in seeing some sort of discussion as to how various team-structuring philosopies fit with various classes of development tools. For example, database development lends itself to a different approach than web design, simply because of the design process, hurdles that have to be dealt with, degree of expertise, and expense of the individuals that participate in the project.
Apparently mod points don't correlate with better grammar, though. So in conclusion, maybe people with fewer mod points use their grasp of the language better.
Not only can you call 911, but E911 support was mandated by the FCC a couple of months ago. In the case of Vonage and a couple of others, they were initially denied the 911-redirect numbers, which meant that you got an administrative phone in a 911 center. On a couple of well publicized occasions, the results were tragic. However, shortly cell phones will be the only ones that don't give a dead-on location for all customers, and (hopefully) that will only be a matter of time, but the GPS capability of cell phones still needs work. Unfortunately your cell company frequently can't pinpoint your location, either, and can only give the 911 center a general location (which at its tightest is several square city blocks, and at its worst is an arc of a couple of miles).
Slashdot Mirror
What?
1) Read original decision
2) Read relevant portion of statute
3) Read jury instructions
4) Read 9th Circuit decision
5)THEN tell me I don't know what I'm talking about. This decision is important in that it has implications far outside of chipmaking, especially in the 9th Circuit. If you need me to draw you a diagram I will, but don't attempt to use any part of it to argue with me, lest I sue you for improperly using it.
So here we have the 9th Circuit - yes, that 9th Circuit, making it up as it goes. If any of you have been following this, you might ask "How the heck was adequate correction provided to the jury, when the initial instructions regarding reverse engineering were wrong, and the later, more general instructions, were proper?". I have no idea. The part of the instructions that specifically deal with the issue at hand which were wrong seem to clearly specify the action the jury should take.
It's like having the regular print in a license agreement say one thing, and way later in the document have it say something else, but in a very general, nondescript way.
Welcome to the 9th. Does anybody know if they are still the most overturned Circuit?
Now that Opera is Free as Beer, I guess it's time to switch...again. However, I wish they would change some of the vocabulary, and lose the attitude, and make it easier to write extensions, etc. I've used Opera, but it just isn't compelling to me compared to FF, especially when I can use this boatload of extensions (like the AWESOME AdBlock), and not read ads on /.!
This is so unbelievably stupid I can barely stand it. 1) There is a reason why elections have monitors all over the place. 2) There is a reason why both parties are entitled to have their own independent monitors at each and every polling place to challenge votes. 3) While the paper trail (receipt for the voter and one for the backup-box) is a GREAT idea, it hardly constitues potential fraud; the "hacks" require the other protections in place to fail in order to succeed. 4) The modem is a great idea, but also can AND IS SUPPOSED TO BE managed by the local jurisdiction. 5) If I worked for ANY software company, I would expect that firm to DEMAND that I keep comments and revelations about EVERYTHING that goes on inside...INSIDE! How the heck is this any different? If Black Hat taught anybody anything, it's that companies have an expectation that their information will be kept confidential by employees and contractors who are required to sign agreements to same.
So, what is the news here? This is OLD news, and it isn't any different than news about some new hole in IE or FF, or Sendmail. The only difference is that if people are stupid then the losing party has grounds to appeal an election. Those of you that think...no wait...those of you that know that there are aliens living among us will also know that our system of laws doesn't work, and the hack will be successful. The rest of us are reasonably sure that things won't make it that far because Boards of Elections don't want the publicity, and Clerks of Elections want to keep their jobs.
It isn't anymore vaporware than Windows Vista
The issue I have is that the purification system, even in miniature, is going to add another 10-15 lbs. in order to be efficient enough to be useful. Charcoal, UV or chlorine, RO/DI (if you're nuts), etc. and spare parts together will easily add that much weight, and in order to go in the desert (as opposed to just in the field, where you pack your gear, and half-a-goat) is going to require even more effort and efficincy since the loss is higher. In addition, you still have to exert EXTRA effort to make the generator work (duh, perpetual motion), but you lose the diminishing mass advantage (no, I know - not all of it, just "much" of it).
Humans are not the only mammals on the planet.
The article is about humans, as is my reply.
Just as a side note before I go into the physiology, are you actually aware of any children anywhere in the world being breast fed at age two? Howabout three? The answer is, of course "no". Before lactose intolerance can even become an issue, it's already irrelevant. That's the point.
I don't disagree that there are babies that aren't biters. However, even for nonbiters, physiology makes it almost impossible that baby will ever make it to age 1 still nursing. Granted, baby can bite Mommy with the soft palette, but that's a different story, and isn't what I was referring to, anyway. Baby's mouth is very small, even at that age. However, Mommy's nipple is huge at that point. It, like the rest of the breast, is engorged. Nipples will grow to about 250% of their diameter (or so - 200% to, well, you can imagine). Baby takes the entire nipple into his/her mouth, as well as most of the areola to suck.
The problem for baby is that two things happen: 1) As baby's mouth grows in diameter, mommy's nipple is drawn further in, which means that mommy's nipple is now in danger of being squeezed, bitten, or pinched by baby's palette. Before baby has teeth (and essentially zero biting force), this is not much of an issue. After baby has teeth, the space that was previously clear for mommy's nipple is now occupied (and those suckers are SHARP!), and mommy gets sore. 2) Even without teeth, as baby grows, baby needs longer periods of nursing, and in cases where mommy doesn't produce adequate milk or baby is growing quickly, baby nurses more frequently, or mommy needs to feed baby both breasts instead of just one. So, mommy doesn't get several hours to heal any more. She might get just two, or in extreme cases, just one. Mommy bleeds, or gets sore, or whatever, and ultimately baby gets force-weened.
Oh, and one other thing: it's difficult to argue that lactose intolerance is or is not "faulty". It just is. Since we don't understand every little nuance of human physiology, especially at the cellular level, there may be very good reason to (or not to) consume milk from any species beyond a certain age, but the fact that it tastes so good to me makes me believe that may not be the case.
NEWS FLASH: Moms stop nursing BEFORE ONE YEAR. Do you know why? BECAUSE KIDS GROW TEETH AT AROUND SIX TO EIGHT MONTHS! I've got...oh crap...many...children. The kids that didn't ween themselves got forced off Mom because nursing hurts like hell anyway (especially with some kids, who just can't figure it out, or are so hungry all the time that they are feeding almost constantly, resulting in lots of sores on Mama), and once kids have teeth it's unbelievably painful.
So four years is WAY past the time when Mom would be done with them already.
Damn. I need to go to get my prescription changed. Once I got closer to the screen I could see that you were saying "freeman". My bad on the second part of the post, however, the first part I stand by completely...wait - I can't it now - were you saying this was a silly idea? Dammit, Darcy, where the F*** are my spectacles?
OK, first of all, what the hell is the point of carrying around a bunch of weight to recycle something? News flash - you put more energy in than the work you get out. Plus you have filters, sterilizers, etc. So no, you can't use this (insanely massy) pack to recycle urine more efficiently than just carrying (and consuming, and expelling) water.
Second, this is not like a "fireman suit". By the way, we call those thingies "bunker gear" or "turnout gear" or "firefighting ensemble". They consist of PBI, Nomex, and Kevlar, along with some other goodies to keep other crap off of us. Oh, and here's a newsflash - it's almost unbearably hot in a "fireman suit", especially in Summer. That's why firefighters generally much prefer late Fall or early Spring. It's much more comfortable.
I've been on FAST (or RIT) team calls (that's where we show up to rescue any firefighters that might become trapped trying to save your house), where we were standing outside in -10F for three hours, and I was a happy, happy, warm, comfortable camper.
I've seen lots of comments on this thread about how traits are selected because they increase survivability, or they increase a person's ability to procreate, blah, blah, blah.
What I haven't seen is anyone stating the mechanism by which this happens. Evolution isn't some driving force. Evolution is simply a result. Evolution is simply a pattern - a way to explain what we see - that traits are statistically more or less common in species in given geographic areas.
The question is Why? Can one seriously argue that lactose tolerance (or intolerance) increases survival of humans in areas that produce (or don't produce) bovine milk? Probabily not. It is, I believe a mathmatical fallacy to suggest that statistics provide answers. Statistics simply are summary of data that, due to their curiosity, cause people to ask questions (and rightly so).
The argument that the welfare state, or high sex drive, or intelligence has been selected would seem to also be silly, until related events can be correlated against them.
If an Atlantic tsunami wipes out the entire East Coast, there will be an associated reduction in traits that were concentrated there. In addition, beings digging through the fossils ten thousand years from now might be inclined to draw some conclusion based on the stark differences in numbers of fossils with various traits (uh, smart people don't live in coastal areas), when no such conclusion may be warranted.
In an evolutionary sense, did the people who live in the interior have some sort of advantage based on their genetics? Maybe. Maybe we're just lucky in ten thousand years we'll know for sure.
However what we WILL find is that of the people that live on the coast and survive the tsunami, there will be a statistically higher concentration of certain traits, that might have enabled them to survive. Their genes will survive. The others won't.
Oh, and just so we don't have a repeat of the hand-wringing that we're having over NOLA, I would like to serve notice right now: There WILL be a tsunami that causes devestation to the East Coast. Yet I don't see a mass exodus out of there. Why is that? Maybe people in the interior are smarter after all.
Actually I'm running XP Pro, but I still have issues DAILY, everything from the machine slowing to a crawl, to having to reboot because something horrible goes wrong.
But that raises an interesting point - if you have to have the most current and recent version of an OS to be able to use an application that, to be useful, requires very close to 100% uptime, then the app. becomes much less useful, since most of the machines out there aren't running the most recent (and patched) version of any OS.
What is the big deal? It's neat to be able to do this sort of thing, but it's, what, ten years ahead of its time?
Desktop OS's aren't reliable enough yet, and get slowed down at the weirdest times, which means that this is going to be unreliable, too.
Please give me a cheap-to-deploy, POTS-enabled (yet still cheap) system that a monkey (i.e. the person at the front desk) can administer. It needs to be able to interface with HR so that when a new person comes on board the system is automatically updated, and when a person leaves their stuff is forwarded to their manager and their account is blocked.
THAT would be great. The rest of this stuff is just a lot of technology for WebEx to deploy to reduce their development costs.
OK, let's be more clear. You are correct, as I pointed out further down, that this is an interesting idea, and it has exciting implications. However, until the reaction times can be extended significantly and the output can be used to do something (since that is the whole point, right?), the experiments are not particularly useful.
However, the main point from all of that was that I don't expect 500 million pounds to finance much of a reactor, given what Rochester and Berkley have invested and what they've done with it.
This isn't NEWS. The only NEWS here is that someone in Europe is trying it. Big freaking deal. Berkly and Rochester have been all over this for quite a while now. The only problem is that they haven't actually done any useful experiments yet, the test reactions last milliseconds, and the fuel used and energy released are so small as to be barely discernable.
The insane part of this is that they think 500 million pounds is going to build a meaningful facility. What are they going to return - picowatts? Come on. What's even funnier is that anyone thinks that anyone is Europe is going to get this done quickly. Just aligning the mirrors and getting the timing right takes YEARS. Just ask the folks at Berkley. It's an interesting idea, and the ramifications and implications are exciting, but probably not until we're all pretty darn old.
Most important of all, THIS ISN'T NEWS!
Slashdot's audience, being geeks, are generally more intelligent and well-informed than the average US consumer: Think about it - could there possibly be a reason why so many Slashdotters are criticising Bush? I'll leave you to ponder it. Hey "more intelligent geek": could you please mix in a grammar lesson? By the way, you might try a logic lesson while you're at it.
People in the South ask this of folk in the North every winter. The 200+" of snow every winter, the temp. at -20F, the accidents caused by the poor conditions, the high heating bills, etc.
The fundamental difference between living (for instance) at the coast as opposed to inland, can be measured as death by one slice or a thousand slices. NO just got the one-slice treatment. However, if you take the same number of people in the north, and compute the negative cost of living there over the time since the last catastrophic storm to nit NO, and I would be willing to bet that things are pretty close to being equal.
Look at this another way. I was considering building a golf course a few years ago on 180 acres near my house. The land was unbelievably cheap. I got in touch with the USGA and ordered a book they have on the topic. The really weird thing that I drew from all of the analysis in the book is that overall a golf course in the north and a golf course in the south, at the end of the year, will be pretty close to each other in terms of their overall after-tax profit, including cost of land, cost of construction, etc. It was startling to review the analysis and be able to draw that conclusion. The longer season in the South is offset by higher energy costs, water, chemicals, operating budgets, and over the course of the year the revenue was only proportionally larger, compared to the length of the season and the expense of operating it.
None of this, of course, discounts the very serious discussion we need to have as a nation as to whether or not NO should be left fundamentally as-is and used as such, or drained and rebuilt.
Personally, from the standpoint of someone who knows what winter is and intentionally lives somewhere boring, I'd vote to not rebuild it. I'd also vote to not rebuild WTC, and to only reimburse victims in high-risk areas once, perhaps purchasing the land as part of the reimbursement and turning it into park or at-your-own-risk area.
In the case of NO, I would be particularly concerned that a terrorist could repeat this event with a cargoplane full of fertilizer and fuel oil, only next time there won't be 48-60 hours of warning to get out.
After reading the thing, here you go: OSX Server is significantly slower than Yellow Dog Linux (Server)running the Big Three on a G5. How many people try to run enormous traffic sites on OSX Server? Nobody?
It seemed that the authors were trying to make a point about the G5 vs. X86, and why Apple switched, but unless I missed it, there isn't any discussion of OSX Server on X86, or the opportunities that brings. It only seems to discuss OSXS vs. YDL on G5's. OK, Linux is faster. So? I don't get it.
Well, since this case will never make it to the courtroom, it will be interesing to see what the parties are going to settle for. Regardless of whether or not AMD is right, or Intel is right, in two years Intel is going to give AMD some cash, or some tiny market share, and nothing will change.
Unfortunately, AMD acting in this manner isn't going to help them with attracting firms to their side. They are just going to have to beat Intel in some other way, with some new product. In business, David doesn't beat Goliath, unless Goliath is alseep at the switch.
Would I rather have too much security in IT or too little? I vote for too much. The first day my firm makes the news because of some breach that results in piles of data being released is also the first day that I'm looking for a new job. No thanks. Users are pretty forgiving when they understand why we do things the way we do. Nobody ever got id-thefted by this way.
The false positive problem is certainly an important one, as is a method to alert others in the vacinity that there is a problem. As firefighters we carry a device called PASS, which, when we aren't active does several things: 1) after 30 seconds of inactivity it sounds an alert tone, at low volume, for about five seconds. 2) After the five second low-volume tone, it increases volume to an obnoxious level for another five seconds. 3) After the second five-second alert it goes hog wild until it is manually silenced.
We get lots of false positives with this system on the fire ground, because much of the time of people not in the building fighting the fire is spent standing around. This is especially true for the RIT or FAST team - a separate team of firefighters that is standing by outside the structure and waiting to execute an entry and effect a rescue within five seconds of a "mayday" going over the radio, or hearing someone's PASS alert going off inside the structure.
In firefighting the PASS alarm is useful because we can tell which way to go to find the injured, unconscious, or trapped firefighter or team. Unfortunately such systems don't work so well in water, because the speed of sound is much faster (water is more dense than air), so your ears are unable to distinguish direction, except with extended training (tens to hundreds of hours of underwater time).
The good news about such a system is that the lifeguards, like the RIT or FAST teams, get used to false positives, and learn to evaluate situations quickly to figure out what's going on.
In addition, such a situation can be further improved if only one lifeguard is initially responsible for the monitoring of the system and evaluating alarms, at least for ten seconds or so.
On the question of how long you have when you drown, AED (that's automated external defibrilator) companies have researched this topic extensively. For a non-trauma-induced cardiac arrest (drowning is included in this category), you have an approximately 90% probability of survival if defibrilation is conducted within one minute of arrest. The probability of survival goes down by roughly ten percent per minute after that (the curve isn't linear, though). In addition, we have found that after about four minutes even in victims that are effectively converted, the quality of their outcomes are significantly diminished.
So what about CPR? CPR in the vast majority of cases (approaching 99%), is not sufficient intervention to convert a cardiac arrest. In fact, it is believed that in the cases where CPR alone was successful in converting an arrest, that the victim was not arresting, and the report was wrong, based on various enzyme and other chemical levels in the bloodstream. CPR buys time, it flattens out the conversion curve, so that defibrilation and IV intervention can improve both the probability of survival and the quality of the outcome.
One of the least considered, studied, and written about things is project methedology. It seems like all the books about the subject relate to automotive production, where the Japanese flooded the market with their philosophy. Afterward, automotive companies hoisted these philosophies on unsuspecting suppliers. The number of paradigm shifts that auto suppliers have endured as a result over the last 20 years is amazing.
Yet I have never had a large client try to push a project development methedology for software on us. There has never been discussion of any of these, and it seemed that for the most part, we as a group were on our own when it came to evaluating various options.
I've been waiting for someone to start talking about the various paradigms and structuring philosophies for a while. For projects as complicated as large software systems, it is frequently a lot of trial and error, followed by more of the same. Finding any comprehensive discussion has been impossible. Hopefully this will foster more books on the topic. Software is becomming such a critical part of corporations, government, and daily life, that not only are the tools that we use important, but so is the way that we use them.
I would also be interested in seeing some sort of discussion as to how various team-structuring philosopies fit with various classes of development tools. For example, database development lends itself to a different approach than web design, simply because of the design process, hurdles that have to be dealt with, degree of expertise, and expense of the individuals that participate in the project.
Caucasian males is the way to go.
Apparently mod points don't correlate with better grammar, though. So in conclusion, maybe people with fewer mod points use their grasp of the language better.
Not only can you call 911, but E911 support was mandated by the FCC a couple of months ago. In the case of Vonage and a couple of others, they were initially denied the 911-redirect numbers, which meant that you got an administrative phone in a 911 center. On a couple of well publicized occasions, the results were tragic. However, shortly cell phones will be the only ones that don't give a dead-on location for all customers, and (hopefully) that will only be a matter of time, but the GPS capability of cell phones still needs work. Unfortunately your cell company frequently can't pinpoint your location, either, and can only give the 911 center a general location (which at its tightest is several square city blocks, and at its worst is an arc of a couple of miles).