Mod parent up- right on. The cable needs to be made of "baloneyium" (as someone famously opined about the composition of Niven's Ringworld). Its composition and engineering are way beyond our current capabilities - not so far that it's not worth pursuing, mind you, but this contest does seem to put the proverbial laser-powered cart before the carbon-nanotube horse.
I'm old enough to have seen that a breathless "the real secret to Stradivarius's violins discovered!!!" story comes up about once ever ten years, then fades away, making way for the next iteration.
When I was in high school it was that the wood he used was floated down rivers before it got to him, and therefore picked up minerals - which a modern maker claimed to have duplicated by boiling the wood in a broth made from shrimp shells. (I'm not making this up.) Earlier, it was something to do with the exact composition of the varnish. And no doubt numerous others that I never heard of.
Somehow, through it all, Strads are still prized above all other instruments, and keep increasing in value each year.
Circa 1975 through 2000 or so, the "native" (*) versions of the Pick Operating System worked exactly this way. Even the OS-level programmers - working in assembly language (!) - only saw virtual memory in the form of disk pages. When you put an address in a register, it was a reference to a disk page, not physical memory. The pages were auto-magically brought into memory at the moment needed and swapped out when not by a tiny VM-aware paging kernel. That was the only part of the system that understood that there was anything besides disk storage in the entire system.
Might sound inefficient, but I remember the first Pick system I worked on supported 14-16 simultaneous online users using only 64kb of physical memory (and it was core - REAL core - at that point).
Now get off my lawn, kids.
-TSG-
(*) "Native" meaning "with no other OS involved underneath, bare Pick on the metal". These types (Reality, Ultimate, CDI Series/1, etc) were mostly gone by Y2K in favor of more modern systems with underlying host OS (Un*x or NT) handling the hardware and Pick riding on top as a database/programming environment (Universe, Unidata, AP / D3). Though I'm sure there are still hundreds if not thousands of the old systems chugging away in back rooms of warehouses and the like to this day.
Methinks it would be good to RTFA again after checking your browser for the ability to display superscript fonts.
That was 10^32 to 10^41 years, not "1032 to 1041" years. In other words, 100 million trillion trillion (give or take an order of magnitude) years at a minimum.
At a meeting this week in Hawaii, the study group has been finalizing a proposal calling for creation of a new, as yet unnamed task group to carry forward the work of crafting a standard.
Not quoted was a later section, which went on to say:
"Study group members recommended several more meetings to work on gritty details of the task force proposal, beginning with further "working sessions" to be held in Tahiti, St. Tropez, Rio de Janeiro, and a luxury cruise ship in the Carribean. 'Our work is never truly done', sighed one group member, clearly still feeling the effects of the previous night's 'Bacardi and Bimbos' breakout group. 'We'll keep at it as long as it takes, just like we did with 802.11n', promised another, as two 19-year-old, bikini-clad "adjunct group members" massaged coconut oil into his back."
What the parent describe is not an isolated case. The same thing happened to me - and in the olden days as well, with direct (dead tree) junk mail.
Also, does anyone here recall the whole SoftRAM95 scandal - and recall as well that TigerDirect heavily promoted this product (full page catalog spreads, etc)?
To me both speak of a "money first, everything else is noise" way of doing business. I never do business with them, and steer my clients who might be using them to better alternatives.
Re:Incognito mode actually isn't really so...
on
Google Chrome, Day 2
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I call shenanigans on the parent posting. This is FUD, and mis-informed FUD at that. There's no evidence that Chrome sends anything but the *hash* of the site you type in the address bar, and does not send your browsing history anywhere at all - whether in incognito mode or not.
See Lauren Weinstein's Privacy Forum posting here and here. Quotes:
Yesterday I posted some thoughts on the privacy policy
associated with Google's new "Chrome" Web browser, and gave the
open-source product -- which has a great deal of potential -- an
overall thumbs-up based on current information...
and
I'm afraid that I'm much more concerned about the privacy policy for
Microsoft's new "Internet Explorer 8" browser (which of course is
not open source). While overall functionality and touted privacy
improvements appear to be similar in many ways to Chrome, some of
the specific privacy-related decisions in IE8 are very different
from Chrome -- and not necessarily in a good way. One in particular
is significantly alarming...
This guy does privacy issues and privacy policy for a living. I've been reading his analysis for years, and I give his opinions great weight.
What is IT? Does it include desktop PC installation and maintenance? Running the help desk? The guy who helps fix the copier when it's jammed? The guy who runs the network cables through the ceiling? The gal who programs the PBX and voicemail system? The group doing web design and website maintenance for the marketing department?
Different companies would regard all, some, or none of these as "IT" functions and all, some, or none the people who do them as "IT staff". So it depends in large part on your definition of "IT".
That being said, at my main client (a privately-held manufacturer with about 600 US employees and a couple hundred more overseas), there are only ten IT employees - meaning ALL of IT, including of the functions listed above. Plus two half-time consultants. Three employees do PC installation/maintenance/troubleshooting, one takes the help desk calls (and fixes the copiers/phones), five do programming, web, and database wrangling, and one is the manager (and also the network administrator). One of the part-time consultants does mail and system admin (me), and one does more web design. No other outsourcing, and most of the applications are home-grown custom jobs, so there's no large vendor support for anything. In all, it's about 11 FTEs.
This is a manufacturing company and like most of those that I've seen, they run a very lean operation. IT gets what it needs, but nothing more.
Now, a much more useful metric in my mind is "percentage of total company sales spent on IT". I think it's about 2% for this company (though again, definitions of "IT" are tricky). I've heard that 5% is a more typical number for most companies in the US, speaking across a broad range of industries. Anyone know a source for more concrete numbers?
Dissenting opinion: I've seen Goodwill trucks pull up to our local transfer station (where stuff is dumped on its way to the landfill) and disgorge a huge load of stuff they couldn't sell in their stores quickly enough for them. I'm not saying it was all, or even mostly, tech items, but I know for a fact that a LOT of what gets sent to Goodwill ends up in the landfill. (And this is in Seattle, where there's lots of environmental consciousness and hugely high dumping rates).
Really, you're far better off putting it on Freecycle, on the Free section of Craigslist, or a local computer reuse non-profit. All of those get your stuff it in the hands of people who want and need it.
Of course, it could all just be a stunt to get attention and further a reputation as a Bad Boy Airline.
Remember, this is the outfit that promoted its Business Class service with a You Tube video entitled "Beds and Blowjobs": here's the official RyanAir press release from June '08 (work safe)
Demand is not completely inelastic...AT&T just lost me as a potential customer because of their texting rates.
Though I don't send many text messages, I have friends who are addicted to it, and send them to me. I get charged for those, so a minimal text plan is a de facto requirement. (I'm with Verizon.) I had thought until yesterday that I'd be switching to a 3G iPhone come 7/11 - until AT&T released the pricing details yesterday.
"Unlimited data" costs $10 more than the old iPhone - fine, it's 3G, I can live with that.
But on top of the data charge, they're now going to charge $5/month for minimal text messaging (200 messages) - EVEN THOUGH YOU ALREADY PAID $30 FOR UNLIMITED DATA. That's just rapacious. So the cheapest iPhone plan, with taxes and fees included, will now come out to around $90/month for me.
The extra $5 - and the idiocy of it - was the tipping point at which I decided to investigate alternatives and will probably stay with Verizon (whose network has been pretty reliable in my experience).
Your opinions and analysis may differ - fine. But I'm sure I'm not the only sale they lost because of this.
Yes, but....dude, this is *Sprint* you're talking about.
It's sort of like saying "I asked all these girls to go to bed with me and every one did!", which sounds impressive - until we find out that the only ones you asked were terminally-ill great-grandmothers.
If this is true (a glancing blow by a huge object), I'm confused as to where the debris ejected from the collision would have ended up? Certainly not everything would have ended up melding with the main planet, especially (again) if this was a glancing blow. I'd expect some sizable amount of mass to be blown into orbit, as happened in the Earth-Moon formation event.
Mars's two moons are incredibly tiny - IIRC more like smallish asteroids - so no coalescence of debris into a larger satellite as we have.
Someone more awake in astrophysics class maybe can help with this.
1) Roll out an on-demand video service so crippled by DRM restrictions that it can work in only ONE browser (IE), and on only ONE platform (Windows) - and those only if you have the tip-top absolute latest releases and updates.
2) Find that half your customers can't (or won't) use your service as a result.
3) License others to make special-purpose hardware just to get around the restrictions in (1) and take a big cut of that.
I run email for several of my domains through Google Apps for Your Domain - essentially, Gmail. On my largest account, I get several hundred legit emails and 200-1000 spam messages each day. The problem isn't Gmail's filtering of this - it's actually damn good, with maybe 2-3 false negatives a week and maybe one false positive. Better than almost anything else I've seen.
The problem is that Gmail gives me NO options - as a user or domain administrator - to sift through the spam box automagically, looking for those false positives. You CANNOT access the spam box in any way other than their web interface, looking manually through your spam, hoping to see the occasional legit message that confused the filters and was labeled spam. (Okay, if you go the full IMAP route, you can apparently see it, but that's cumbersome in the extreme if your users aren't doing IMAP in the normal course of things.)
This borders on perverse. How hard would it be to allow POP to the spam box, so that I could suck down the messages and run my own filters on them? And what's with the lack of user filtering options? "Um, Google, here's a hint: I don't read Chinese or Russian. If mail comes into the spam folder in one of those languages, you just delete it and not bother me with it, OK?".
Dunno, it feels like a case where someone's high up in Gmail's design group has a religious or aesthetic conviction about how spam should be handled ("no filters...no settings...no controls...no access") that blinds them to how badly this works for users and administrators in the real world.
You're making the same mistake the guy who posted the 24-entry "truth table" is. Just because you can enumerate X possibilities for something doesn't mean that each one has a 1/X likelihood of happening.
In this case, your first two options have a 1/3 chance (each) of happening. But the second two have a 1/6 chance (each) of happening (1/3 x 1/2 = 1/6).
If you add up those probability ratios, you get the 2/3 (switch wins) vs 1/3 (switch loses) that almost everyone else agrees is right.
As I said, nothing's going to convince you (including the other responder, below, who said it better than I did, and with nicely laid-out probabilities to boot).
So I think it best not to try anymore.
But look at the bright side...the "Intelligent Design" folks are hiring for a new spokesperson. You may have all the qualifications they're looking for.
Another way to look at it that works for some skeptics:
Expand the problem to 100 doors, behind which can be found 99 goats and one car. You pick one of those 100 doors at random.
Now Monty opens 98 of the remaining doors, shows you 98 goats, and asks if you want to keep your door or switch to the other remaining closed door the (one you didn't pick).
Are you better off switching? Nearly everyone understands here the answer's "yes". Monty's stacked the deck greatly in your favor - you have a 1/100 chance of your original pick being right and a 99/100 chance of the other door being right.
The same principle works when you reduce the problem to just three doors, even though the odds go down to 2/3 in your favor instead of 99/100.
Slashdot Mirror
Mod parent up- right on. The cable needs to be made of "baloneyium" (as someone famously opined about the composition of Niven's Ringworld). Its composition and engineering are way beyond our current capabilities - not so far that it's not worth pursuing, mind you, but this contest does seem to put the proverbial laser-powered cart before the carbon-nanotube horse.
Or this.
whatcouldpossiblygrowwrong
...that the very first even to occur on the Internet was a **buffer overflow**? Talk about a zero-day exploit.
I'm old enough to have seen that a breathless "the real secret to Stradivarius's violins discovered!!!" story comes up about once ever ten years, then fades away, making way for the next iteration.
When I was in high school it was that the wood he used was floated down rivers before it got to him, and therefore picked up minerals - which a modern maker claimed to have duplicated by boiling the wood in a broth made from shrimp shells. (I'm not making this up.) Earlier, it was something to do with the exact composition of the varnish. And no doubt numerous others that I never heard of.
Somehow, through it all, Strads are still prized above all other instruments, and keep increasing in value each year.
Circa 1975 through 2000 or so, the "native" (*) versions of the Pick Operating System worked exactly this way. Even the OS-level programmers - working in assembly language (!) - only saw virtual memory in the form of disk pages. When you put an address in a register, it was a reference to a disk page, not physical memory. The pages were auto-magically brought into memory at the moment needed and swapped out when not by a tiny VM-aware paging kernel. That was the only part of the system that understood that there was anything besides disk storage in the entire system.
Might sound inefficient, but I remember the first Pick system I worked on supported 14-16 simultaneous online users using only 64kb of physical memory (and it was core - REAL core - at that point).
Now get off my lawn, kids.
-TSG-
(*) "Native" meaning "with no other OS involved underneath, bare Pick on the metal". These types (Reality, Ultimate, CDI Series/1, etc) were mostly gone by Y2K in favor of more modern systems with underlying host OS (Un*x or NT) handling the hardware and Pick riding on top as a database/programming environment (Universe, Unidata, AP / D3). Though I'm sure there are still hundreds if not thousands of the old systems chugging away in back rooms of warehouses and the like to this day.
Methinks it would be good to RTFA again after checking your browser for the ability to display superscript fonts. That was 10^32 to 10^41 years, not "1032 to 1041" years. In other words, 100 million trillion trillion (give or take an order of magnitude) years at a minimum.
At a meeting this week in Hawaii, the study group has been finalizing a proposal calling for creation of a new, as yet unnamed task group to carry forward the work of crafting a standard.
Not quoted was a later section, which went on to say:
"Study group members recommended several more meetings to work on gritty details of the task force proposal, beginning with further "working sessions" to be held in Tahiti, St. Tropez, Rio de Janeiro, and a luxury cruise ship in the Carribean. 'Our work is never truly done', sighed one group member, clearly still feeling the effects of the previous night's 'Bacardi and Bimbos' breakout group. 'We'll keep at it as long as it takes, just like we did with 802.11n', promised another, as two 19-year-old, bikini-clad "adjunct group members" massaged coconut oil into his back."
Also, does anyone here recall the whole SoftRAM95 scandal - and recall as well that TigerDirect heavily promoted this product (full page catalog spreads, etc)?
To me both speak of a "money first, everything else is noise" way of doing business. I never do business with them, and steer my clients who might be using them to better alternatives.
I call shenanigans on the parent posting. This is FUD, and mis-informed FUD at that. There's no evidence that Chrome sends anything but the *hash* of the site you type in the address bar, and does not send your browsing history anywhere at all - whether in incognito mode or not.
See Lauren Weinstein's Privacy Forum posting here and here. Quotes:
Yesterday I posted some thoughts on the privacy policy associated with Google's new "Chrome" Web browser, and gave the open-source product -- which has a great deal of potential -- an overall thumbs-up based on current information...
and
I'm afraid that I'm much more concerned about the privacy policy for Microsoft's new "Internet Explorer 8" browser (which of course is not open source). While overall functionality and touted privacy improvements appear to be similar in many ways to Chrome, some of the specific privacy-related decisions in IE8 are very different from Chrome -- and not necessarily in a good way. One in particular is significantly alarming...
This guy does privacy issues and privacy policy for a living. I've been reading his analysis for years, and I give his opinions great weight.
What is IT? Does it include desktop PC installation and maintenance? Running the help desk? The guy who helps fix the copier when it's jammed? The guy who runs the network cables through the ceiling? The gal who programs the PBX and voicemail system? The group doing web design and website maintenance for the marketing department?
Different companies would regard all, some, or none of these as "IT" functions and all, some, or none the people who do them as "IT staff". So it depends in large part on your definition of "IT".
That being said, at my main client (a privately-held manufacturer with about 600 US employees and a couple hundred more overseas), there are only ten IT employees - meaning ALL of IT, including of the functions listed above. Plus two half-time consultants. Three employees do PC installation/maintenance/troubleshooting, one takes the help desk calls (and fixes the copiers/phones), five do programming, web, and database wrangling, and one is the manager (and also the network administrator). One of the part-time consultants does mail and system admin (me), and one does more web design. No other outsourcing, and most of the applications are home-grown custom jobs, so there's no large vendor support for anything. In all, it's about 11 FTEs.
This is a manufacturing company and like most of those that I've seen, they run a very lean operation. IT gets what it needs, but nothing more.
Now, a much more useful metric in my mind is "percentage of total company sales spent on IT". I think it's about 2% for this company (though again, definitions of "IT" are tricky). I've heard that 5% is a more typical number for most companies in the US, speaking across a broad range of industries. Anyone know a source for more concrete numbers?
Dissenting opinion: I've seen Goodwill trucks pull up to our local transfer station (where stuff is dumped on its way to the landfill) and disgorge a huge load of stuff they couldn't sell in their stores quickly enough for them. I'm not saying it was all, or even mostly, tech items, but I know for a fact that a LOT of what gets sent to Goodwill ends up in the landfill. (And this is in Seattle, where there's lots of environmental consciousness and hugely high dumping rates).
Really, you're far better off putting it on Freecycle, on the Free section of Craigslist, or a local computer reuse non-profit. All of those get your stuff it in the hands of people who want and need it.
Remember, this is the outfit that promoted its Business Class service with a You Tube video entitled "Beds and Blowjobs": here's the official RyanAir press release from June '08 (work safe)
Though I don't send many text messages, I have friends who are addicted to it, and send them to me. I get charged for those, so a minimal text plan is a de facto requirement. (I'm with Verizon.) I had thought until yesterday that I'd be switching to a 3G iPhone come 7/11 - until AT&T released the pricing details yesterday.
"Unlimited data" costs $10 more than the old iPhone - fine, it's 3G, I can live with that. But on top of the data charge, they're now going to charge $5/month for minimal text messaging (200 messages) - EVEN THOUGH YOU ALREADY PAID $30 FOR UNLIMITED DATA. That's just rapacious. So the cheapest iPhone plan, with taxes and fees included, will now come out to around $90/month for me.
The extra $5 - and the idiocy of it - was the tipping point at which I decided to investigate alternatives and will probably stay with Verizon (whose network has been pretty reliable in my experience).
Your opinions and analysis may differ - fine. But I'm sure I'm not the only sale they lost because of this.
Yes, but....dude, this is *Sprint* you're talking about.
It's sort of like saying "I asked all these girls to go to bed with me and every one did!", which sounds impressive - until we find out that the only ones you asked were terminally-ill great-grandmothers.
If this is true (a glancing blow by a huge object), I'm confused as to where the debris ejected from the collision would have ended up? Certainly not everything would have ended up melding with the main planet, especially (again) if this was a glancing blow. I'd expect some sizable amount of mass to be blown into orbit, as happened in the Earth-Moon formation event.
Mars's two moons are incredibly tiny - IIRC more like smallish asteroids - so no coalescence of debris into a larger satellite as we have.
Someone more awake in astrophysics class maybe can help with this.
...but I assume the game is written in p-code?
1) Roll out an on-demand video service so crippled by DRM restrictions that it can work in only ONE browser (IE), and on only ONE platform (Windows) - and those only if you have the tip-top absolute latest releases and updates.
/tsg/
2) Find that half your customers can't (or won't) use your service as a result.
3) License others to make special-purpose hardware just to get around the restrictions in (1) and take a big cut of that.
4) Profit!!!!!
...or another ostensible democracy, and asked the same question, I wonder what percentage would say "yes" here as well?
I think it might me much higher than most Slashdotters would believe.
Well, it's a two-edged sword.
I run email for several of my domains through Google Apps for Your Domain - essentially, Gmail. On my largest account, I get several hundred legit emails and 200-1000 spam messages each day. The problem isn't Gmail's filtering of this - it's actually damn good, with maybe 2-3 false negatives a week and maybe one false positive. Better than almost anything else I've seen.
The problem is that Gmail gives me NO options - as a user or domain administrator - to sift through the spam box automagically, looking for those false positives. You CANNOT access the spam box in any way other than their web interface, looking manually through your spam, hoping to see the occasional legit message that confused the filters and was labeled spam. (Okay, if you go the full IMAP route, you can apparently see it, but that's cumbersome in the extreme if your users aren't doing IMAP in the normal course of things.)
This borders on perverse. How hard would it be to allow POP to the spam box, so that I could suck down the messages and run my own filters on them? And what's with the lack of user filtering options? "Um, Google, here's a hint: I don't read Chinese or Russian. If mail comes into the spam folder in one of those languages, you just delete it and not bother me with it, OK?".
Dunno, it feels like a case where someone's high up in Gmail's design group has a religious or aesthetic conviction about how spam should be handled ("no filters...no settings...no controls...no access") that blinds them to how badly this works for users and administrators in the real world.
In this case, your first two options have a 1/3 chance (each) of happening. But the second two have a 1/6 chance (each) of happening (1/3 x 1/2 = 1/6).
If you add up those probability ratios, you get the 2/3 (switch wins) vs 1/3 (switch loses) that almost everyone else agrees is right.
It's not intuitive, but it is correct.
So I think it best not to try anymore.
But look at the bright side...the "Intelligent Design" folks are hiring for a new spokesperson. You may have all the qualifications they're looking for.
and /. apparently doesn't like the "pre" tag anymore...I actually wrote:
Sorry, but your truth table is a fallacy. Though I doubt anything anyone says is going to convince you of that.
For everyone else: where he's going wrong is assuming that each of the 24 table entries is equally probable.
They're not. The table is assymetric.
Such a table can't have repeated entries in (for example) the column labeled "you" and still provide equi-probably outcomes for each.
In other words, where he has (going down the 'You' column): ....
He actually needs:
1 1 2 2 3 3
If he really wants to assume all the probablities of each table entry is equi-probably.
My stat terms may be off but that's the flaw I see.
[piling on here...]
Another way to look at it that works for some skeptics:
Expand the problem to 100 doors, behind which can be found 99 goats and one car. You pick one of those 100 doors at random.
Now Monty opens 98 of the remaining doors, shows you 98 goats, and asks if you want to keep your door or switch to the other remaining closed door the (one you didn't pick).
Are you better off switching? Nearly everyone understands here the answer's "yes". Monty's stacked the deck greatly in your favor - you have a 1/100 chance of your original pick being right and a 99/100 chance of the other door being right.
The same principle works when you reduce the problem to just three doors, even though the odds go down to 2/3 in your favor instead of 99/100.