I'll leave the other interesting question for someone else: How low do the mean and sd have to go before probability of the observed failures brings chance into "plausible" range (.05)?
One way to find out is to run the numbers. How likely is it that 3 of 8 drives will fail in 4 months or less just by chance, assuming normally healthy drives?
You can work out the math the hard way, but simulation is faster and easier. I like R for the job:
ssdfails=function() {
# test hypothesis that three of eight SSD drives failing
# in four months could happen by chance.
# Do 10,000 sets of eight drives.
# Give them a mean life of 48 months with s=12 months
a=rnorm(80000,48,12)
dim(a)=c(8,10000)
# mark the tests in which 3 or
# more drives fail in 4 months or less
There's no mystery. Paleolithic cultures (and most since) were polygynous. A few powerful men had all the women, leaving large numbers of randy young men without mates. The obvious solution was "hunting parties." (That's why the 72 virgins)
One interesting and relevant finding not involving neandertals is in neolithic DNA; in many cases the Y chromosome is neolithic, but the mitochondrial DNA is mesolithic. Bands of neolithic bachelors raiding mesolithic villages, killing the males and keeping the females would have that effect. It's not an over-the-top guess that something like that could link paleolithic men with neandertal women.
Different strokes...The keyboard in the video is where my keyboard is (elbows on the desk means no CTS). The difference is I have bare wood where they have the touch pad.
For me the configuration is ideal. Using the pad just requires leaning back in my chair, just as I do when all I need is the mouse.
Charlie conflates SF novels with SF television series. They don't have the same criteria.
Unlike a novel, a good SF series doesn't take itself too seriously. That's what was so good about Star Trek. We expected it to be a little tacky and weren't disappointed. Every so often we'd get the equivalent to one of the characters turning to the audience and saying "this is just fiction, you know." Shattner's "Get a Life" was bang on.
The shows that lost sight of this, BG being the best example, were boring-to-annoying.
What's a person with a liberal-arts major doing on Slashdot?
"A matter of opinion" is not a theory, it's conjecture, an admission of ignorance. With some evidence it becomes a hypothesis. If it can be made both complete and consistent, explains everything we know, survives rigourous testing, has its predictions validated and survives the passage of years without effective contradiction, it may be elevated to the status of theory.
A "fact" is a repeatable observation. It's input, not output.
An infection rate of 7 to 9 percent of IP addresses? That's a very narrow range. Too narrow to be credible. None of the enterprises had, say, 4 or 12 percent compromised?
These folks are statistically impaired. They probably are sitting on a lot of really useful data, but they don't know what it means. Certainly, they haven't released enough information for anyone to draw conclusions from it.
The repository is an important source of software, and by itself will satisfy many people's needs. Neither MS Windows nor MacOSX have anything really comparable.
Sure they do, in fact, several. I invite you to visit tucows.com or the PCMag download section.
Find an application you want and click "Download Now". Thanks to the Windows standard, selecting an application to download has the same effect wherever you find an application. Installing is as simple as double-clicking the setup file that's downloaded to your desktop.
That's a really good point. I always run in "Windows Classic" mode because I find the newer themes distracting.
The interesting thing is that whenever I have to work on someone else's machine, the first thing I ask is whether I can temporarily switch the UI to Classic. The response, without exception, has been, "You can do that? Sure. And please leave it that way when you're done."
It's worth noting that newspapers don't do radio news and they don't do television news. Each medium ultimately finds its own business model.
Paper, radio, TV news content is paid for by advertising.
The shape of internet news is already evident. The only thing missing is blog sites that start bringing in enough revenue to put journalists and researchers on staff. Suppose HubPages or Blogger decided to set up a section for hard, fact-checked news and well-respected columnists. The ad rate in this section would climb fast. Positive feedback and competition does the rest.
All but a few of the complaints about COBOL are just mindless groans with nothing specific to say. The only specific complaints are about COBOL's verbosity. The irony is that, now that we can have long names for things, verbosity has become a preferred programming practice.
It would be interesting to see a feature-for-feature review of COBOL 2002 against other big, compiled languages.
That's one reason COBOL was deliberately made verbose: to avoid subtle typos in a hostile environment.
I handwrite a program on a coding sheet which is copied to punched cards by a non-technical keypunch operator and read by a sometimes reliable card reader; typos are guaranteed and you want the compiler to jump all over them. No spending half a day to find the place where "-=" should be "==".
Same here. Every few months I download a few of the latest free AVs and ASWs, run them and then wipe them. In over five years the only thing any of them has found is suspicious cookies.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably a very long time before anyone who uses "intertubes" was born.
That's all right. They also think that a "quantum leap" is really big.
I'll leave the other interesting question for someone else: How low do the mean and sd have to go before probability of the observed failures brings chance into "plausible" range (.05)?
or are we just unlucky?
.
One way to find out is to run the numbers. How likely is it that 3 of 8 drives will fail in 4 months or less just by chance, assuming normally healthy drives?
You can work out the math the hard way, but simulation is faster and easier. I like R for the job:
ssdfails=function() {
# test hypothesis that three of eight SSD drives failing
# in four months could happen by chance.
# Do 10,000 sets of eight drives.
# Give them a mean life of 48 months with s=12 months
a=rnorm(80000,48,12)
dim(a)=c(8,10000)
# mark the tests in which 3 or
# more drives fail in 4 months or less
b=colSums(a<=4)>=3
# add up the hits and output the ratio
sum(b)/10000
}
> source("C:\\prj\\R\\ssdfails.R")
> ssdfails() [1] 0
Zero of 10,000 trials says that the odds of it happening by chance are infinitesimal. You got crappy drives.
Maybe a little work for a foregone conclusion, but ain't science fun?
There's no mystery. Paleolithic cultures (and most since) were polygynous. A few powerful men had all the women, leaving large numbers of randy young men without mates. The obvious solution was "hunting parties." (That's why the 72 virgins)
One interesting and relevant finding not involving neandertals is in neolithic DNA; in many cases the Y chromosome is neolithic, but the mitochondrial DNA is mesolithic. Bands of neolithic bachelors raiding mesolithic villages, killing the males and keeping the females would have that effect. It's not an over-the-top guess that something like that could link paleolithic men with neandertal women.
1970 just left a message. It says, "You're Welcome."
Different strokes...The keyboard in the video is where my keyboard is (elbows on the desk means no CTS). The difference is I have bare wood where they have the touch pad.
For me the configuration is ideal. Using the pad just requires leaning back in my chair, just as I do when all I need is the mouse.
Exactly.
Charlie conflates SF novels with SF television series. They don't have the same criteria.
Unlike a novel, a good SF series doesn't take itself too seriously. That's what was so good about Star Trek. We expected it to be a little tacky and weren't disappointed. Every so often we'd get the equivalent to one of the characters turning to the audience and saying "this is just fiction, you know." Shattner's "Get a Life" was bang on.
The shows that lost sight of this, BG being the best example, were boring-to-annoying.
the positive actions of one company are no substitute for a government policy
Something you don't like? The answer is more government.
Don't you ever get tired of this crap?
Sorry, I forgot this was Slashdot, where you have to slash every distinction and dot every i.
Yes, facts are the output of observation, but they are input to the scientific process. If we disagree and it's not repeatable it's not a fact. Gee!
Your definition of opinion fails to draw any usable distinction, making it useless for anything. I prefer mine.
What's a person with a liberal-arts major doing on Slashdot?
"A matter of opinion" is not a theory, it's conjecture, an admission of ignorance. With some evidence it becomes a hypothesis. If it can be made both complete and consistent, explains everything we know, survives rigourous testing, has its predictions validated and survives the passage of years without effective contradiction, it may be elevated to the status of theory.
A "fact" is a repeatable observation. It's input, not output.
A collection of inspirational clichés. Made me think of the Miss America interviews.
An infection rate of 7 to 9 percent of IP addresses? That's a very narrow range. Too narrow to be credible. None of the enterprises had, say, 4 or 12 percent compromised?
These folks are statistically impaired. They probably are sitting on a lot of really useful data, but they don't know what it means. Certainly, they haven't released enough information for anyone to draw conclusions from it.
The repository is an important source of software, and by itself will satisfy many people's needs. Neither MS Windows nor MacOSX have anything really comparable.
Sure they do, in fact, several. I invite you to visit tucows.com or the PCMag download section.
Find an application you want and click "Download Now". Thanks to the Windows standard, selecting an application to download has the same effect wherever you find an application. Installing is as simple as double-clicking the setup file that's downloaded to your desktop.
This has to win an award for the longest sentence ever posted on Slashdot, with a special mention for incoherence.
That's a really good point. I always run in "Windows Classic" mode because I find the newer themes distracting.
The interesting thing is that whenever I have to work on someone else's machine, the first thing I ask is whether I can temporarily switch the UI to Classic. The response, without exception, has been, "You can do that? Sure. And please leave it that way when you're done."
A bit of, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."
Not so new. Palm has been using that form factor for a long time.
It's worth noting that newspapers don't do radio news and they don't do television news. Each medium ultimately finds its own business model.
Paper, radio, TV news content is paid for by advertising.
The shape of internet news is already evident. The only thing missing is blog sites that start bringing in enough revenue to put journalists and researchers on staff. Suppose HubPages or Blogger decided to set up a section for hard, fact-checked news and well-respected columnists. The ad rate in this section would climb fast. Positive feedback and competition does the rest.
All but a few of the complaints about COBOL are just mindless groans with nothing specific to say. The only specific complaints are about COBOL's verbosity. The irony is that, now that we can have long names for things, verbosity has become a preferred programming practice.
It would be interesting to see a feature-for-feature review of COBOL 2002 against other big, compiled languages.
Intriguing. Dijkstra was big on the idea of code being provably correct by construction. I know of no language that makes that easier than COBOL.
That assumes that programmers make well-informed, rational decisions at all times. Chuckle.
That's one reason COBOL was deliberately made verbose: to avoid subtle typos in a hostile environment.
I handwrite a program on a coding sheet which is copied to punched cards by a non-technical keypunch operator and read by a sometimes reliable card reader; typos are guaranteed and you want the compiler to jump all over them. No spending half a day to find the place where "-=" should be "==".
C# is a Java clone
Clearly, you've never worked with C#. C# is like java in the same sense as java is like Fortran.
The funny thing is...
Same here. Every few months I download a few of the latest free AVs and ASWs, run them and then wipe them. In over five years the only thing any of them has found is suspicious cookies.