Live astronomy in the cloudiest part of england at the cloudiest time of year?
The Manchester area (where these programmes were recorded) is renowned for being rainy and January is one of the poorest for clear weather. It would hard to find a less suitable time and place to do a live programme about stargazing (the title of the show was Stargazing Live). There was, out of three solid hours of TV - no ad breaks on the BBC - about 10 minutes of live stargazing and that was all in the first episode. If you wanted to put people OFF astronomy, you could do little worse than explaining there was a meteor show - but it was too cloudy to see. There was a partial eclipse - again too cloudy for most of the country and the only live view of Jupiter showed an over-exposed blurry ball from a long-exposure camera on a wobbly mount. The only thing that could put more people off would be to have a top-drawer celebrity explain that although he had bought 3 telescopes he hardly used them, since setting them up was "too hard" and that the views he had seen left him "rather underwhelmed".
In true BBC science programming tradition, there was lots of aspirational stuff from Mauna Kea showing large telescopes, chats with ISS astronauts and lots and lots of photos from Hubble. But ther was little or nothing to help starters get their first telescope, set it up (to demonstrate that it wasn't too hard) or even identify most of the constellations. There were brief diagrams of U. Major, Orion and Taurus but a novice could be forgiven for thinking that's all there was.
Those who have no experience and say it's "stupid" should look and learn from those who are actually doing it and getting their employers good value for money in proven, real-life situations. It *does* work. It's a quick, reliable and scalable solution in many, many cases. Obviously you need a background in performance analysis so that you've correctly identified and quantified the bottleneck - and no, merely playing with a "point and shoot" GUI "tune your system" toy program that you downloaded for free off some website doesn't qualify you.
Yes, I've personally seen it done on two seperate occasions. In both the situation was the same. A software vendor that licenced on a per-processor basis (Oracle). One box was a 12 processor macine, the other was a 16 processor job. In both cases it was far, far cheaper to swap the CPUs for faster ones than to add more of the same speed. In both cases that was my recommendation - based purely on cost savings and in both cases it worked very well.
With hardware prices dropping every year, the longer you can defer hardware upgrades, the less money it will cost you. Given that basic piece of information, it's hardly a surprise that companies don't upgrade until they absolutely have to (anyway: why would they until there's a need?). If they can give their kit a mid-life kicker with some more memory or swapping in some faster CPUs, isn't that better than spending 10s of thousands or more on a new box. Better, that is for everyone except the hardware manufacturers who will counter the drop in sales volume by lowering prices even more.
You might as well argue that it's "wrong" for airlines to charge different fares for the same flight on different days (or even on the exact same plane, depending when you book it), or for any other company to alter its prices depending on the demand it sees. In the long run the point is moot. If you think your ISP is screwing you, just change to another. There are dozen / hundreds to choose from - the free market will kill off any that aren't competitive.
Pay X per month, get 1MBit/second. pay X+Y and get a faster connection.
The ISPs have always had a market where more money == faster service, we are also used to the idea of paywalls where some stuff is free and other stuff needs money to get access to. So where, exactly, does this idea that everyone should get access to everything for the same price come from? Would it still be "net neutral" if Facebook suddenly started charging $10 / year for "membership"? Is that really any different from your ISP saying "If you want to get access to service X, it'll cost you more money"? The only difference seems to me to be who does the charging - one organisation and that's business (or monetising), a different organisation and people bleat on about net neutrality.
Although a lot of consultants like to try and pin dollar costs on "quality", coding standards, development tools and other intangibles, the inescapable truth is that unless these processes and methods actually stop additional money from leaving the company they have no real-world, measurable value. Sure they might make your life easier (though most just increase the amount of time it takes to get something done), they might reduce the number of bugs, or the time taken to fix one, However if that time is already accounted for in your working day then the only way these things could save money is if they get you fired and can save your salary.
Since you appear to have the time to spend on these support tasks, there would only be a saving (and one that would take a considerable time to realise and even longer to pay back) you could only really make a case if you can say that int he future your workload will increase to the point where another person will have to be hired to assist ot take over these tasks. That's the only solid, dollar cost you will have to offer. Even then it's going to be an uphill struggle as the zero-cost alternative is just to make you work harder for the same money.
If movies gave a true depiction of being a scientist, they would be full of people writing submissions for funding, trying to get some budget for new equipment and emailing off papers for publication. There has not, ever, been a real-to-life scientist characterised in any movie - ever. If people see "scientists" in movies and are then inspired to become like those characters they are in for a massive let down if they try to pursue that mythical career. It simply doesn't exist.
What's nearly as bad is the science career advice children receive at school. Almost no teachers anywhere have ever met a professional scientist. Even the few who might be married to one have no real idea what their partner does on a daily basis and they are in no position to advise on either the suitability of a child to try to become a professional scientist, nor on what that child could expect from a career in a scientific job.
The single biggest failing of science is that it does nothing to prepare the next generation for work in the field. Meaning that those children who leave school to attend a university science course, assuming it will be like the science they did in school, have one hell of a big surprise when it turns out to be completely different from what they expected. The surprise is nearly as big as the one science graduates get when they discover, in turn, that working as a professional scientist is again, nothing like what they thought it was when they were students.
The internet is a worldwide network. If one country banned or censored it, it would make almost no difference to everyone else - expect that the amount of spam might be down a little.
From the charts, they range from -0.04 to +0.10 for the classifications given. Now I'm no statistician, but those ranges of values don't seem to be much more than a slight tendency. They certainly don't seem to me to be "dead cert" formulae for getting more comments or likes.
They get between a person and their goals, they are too easily forgotten and once you have to keep track of more than a few they become unreliable and burdensome. Add on to that, most of the "information" that these passwords protect is not really worth protecting, anyway.
So, since they are an annoyance and don't give users any tangible benefits, you shouldn't be surprised when users choose their passwords so they require the least amount of effort: either to remember or to enter. As for enforcing rules to require users to change them regularly - you might as well forget it. All they'll do is take their core password and add a number onto it - I know: that's all I do.
Passwords have been in effect since the beginning of multi-user systems: what? 50 years or so. Surely in all that time the world could have come up with something better, easier, more reliable and keyed to the user rather than the piece of paper all the passwords are undoubtedly written on.
This arrangement effectively shorts the power supply - the users are lucky that it doesn't destroy their devices. They're even luckier that the problem seems to go away once the shorted power supply has crashed the Kindle, and presumably turned the power supply off. A shorted battery with all its power flowing through a nice, flammable animal product would be even worse - either for the leather or the battery.
Disclaimer: not a Kindle owner, just sowing a bit of FUD.
Personally I don't care how many modules any repository has, just so long as the ones I want to use work properly. That will always be my primary measure of success, followed closely by how well they are documented and then by how easy they are to find and use.
Any site that asks for my email address right away, forget it.
Just toss 'em a disposable email address. I don't know why people make such a big thing of it - surely you have more than just one, single, lousy email address? don't you?
If you have the abilities to get a good degree, or the personal/social/business contacts to leverage the reputation of the college or university then it could pay dividends. If you're just an average student you'll still be judged by what you can do and not by where you went to university.
it's like buying a top of the range car. If you're a good enough driver to make use of the high performance then you'll reap the rewards. If you aren't interested in pushing the limits and only use it for day-to-day driving to the shops, or commuting then you might as well save your money (personal vanity notwithstanding) and spend the cash you save for something else.
Unfortunately, it's the only substitute we have. So since most writers are unable to come up with worthwhile plots, characters we can connect with and layers of complexity, we're just gonna have to put up with yet more
By the time the coding starts, most projects are already doomed. The basic mistakes that occur before any code is written have a far greater effect on the project. While these are almost all outside the control of the programmer, he/she always gets the blame due to the "last person who touched it, broke it" principle. My short list of favourites would be:
Allowing too many options / features in the design. The classic example being unable to decide whether feature A or B is best, and ducking the issue by including them both
Assuming 5 working-days of effort can be achieved in a working week. Conveniently forgetting about all the office overheads such as "progress" meetings, timesheet administration, interrupted work, all the other concurrent projects. Even the most efficient, single-threaded operation needs half a working-day per week just for the trivia.
Following on from that, conveniently forgetting about annual leave commitments, national holidays and the possibility of sickness. If 5 working-days per week is impractical, 12 working-months in a year is downright negligent.
The tacit assumption that testing will inevitably be followed by reelase - rather than bug-fixing.
Holding the end-date constant while delaying the start, or presuming that all delays in the specification, design, approval stages can somehow be reclaimed during coding (how: by thining faster?)
I doubt this has been the case for 10,15 years or more. The fact is that most of these "counter culture" people are inventions of the media or hollywood and have never, really, existed in the real world. The few people who would describe themselves as such may still exist in some parts of the world, and are usually referred to as criminal hacking gangs, but they've not contributed a dam' thing to the Linux kernel.
That's not to say some individuals with long hair and others with low personal hygiene standards haven't done their bit, but those attributes don't make you counter-culture.
Just a bigger dependence on foreign electricity, instead.
At least oil can be stored efficiently and portably. So if your supplier decided to turn off the tap you still have enough reserves to bomb the crap out of them, sorry: that should read negotiate a new deal. With electricity, the moment they flip the switch, all the lights go out.
Pretty sure that there is a law where you can't make money off someone else's likeness.
if there was such a thing all the tribute bands (bootleg beatles etc.) would have a tough time. However since they appear to be thriving - even though the Beatles "Apple" is nearly as protective as the other one - it appears as if there is not such a thing, even in China..
Anyhow, surely SJ's image is a personal property - something that he, personally should be protecting - not something that a company would get involved in (unless Apple somehow think they own Jobs)
Maybe it is dangerous, but if you get to (say) 80+ and can only look forward to a few more years with increasing incontinence and decreasing memory (which may even make up for the incontinence) then it's got to be worth a shot. After all, it's not as if you have much to lose. Though your relatives might not appreciate the loss of any expected inheritance, and the nursing homes have a vested interest in it failing, and the whole pension / insurance industry will go broke overnight. However, if it means I could live to be 200, all that's a small price to pay.
Slashdot Mirror
The Manchester area (where these programmes were recorded) is renowned for being rainy and January is one of the poorest for clear weather. It would hard to find a less suitable time and place to do a live programme about stargazing (the title of the show was Stargazing Live). There was, out of three solid hours of TV - no ad breaks on the BBC - about 10 minutes of live stargazing and that was all in the first episode. If you wanted to put people OFF astronomy, you could do little worse than explaining there was a meteor show - but it was too cloudy to see. There was a partial eclipse - again too cloudy for most of the country and the only live view of Jupiter showed an over-exposed blurry ball from a long-exposure camera on a wobbly mount. The only thing that could put more people off would be to have a top-drawer celebrity explain that although he had bought 3 telescopes he hardly used them, since setting them up was "too hard" and that the views he had seen left him "rather underwhelmed".
In true BBC science programming tradition, there was lots of aspirational stuff from Mauna Kea showing large telescopes, chats with ISS astronauts and lots and lots of photos from Hubble. But ther was little or nothing to help starters get their first telescope, set it up (to demonstrate that it wasn't too hard) or even identify most of the constellations. There were brief diagrams of U. Major, Orion and Taurus but a novice could be forgiven for thinking that's all there was.
I'm just waiting for the backlash
Those who have no experience and say it's "stupid" should look and learn from those who are actually doing it and getting their employers good value for money in proven, real-life situations. It *does* work. It's a quick, reliable and scalable solution in many, many cases. Obviously you need a background in performance analysis so that you've correctly identified and quantified the bottleneck - and no, merely playing with a "point and shoot" GUI "tune your system" toy program that you downloaded for free off some website doesn't qualify you.
Yes, I've personally seen it done on two seperate occasions. In both the situation was the same. A software vendor that licenced on a per-processor basis (Oracle). One box was a 12 processor macine, the other was a 16 processor job. In both cases it was far, far cheaper to swap the CPUs for faster ones than to add more of the same speed. In both cases that was my recommendation - based purely on cost savings and in both cases it worked very well.
With hardware prices dropping every year, the longer you can defer hardware upgrades, the less money it will cost you. Given that basic piece of information, it's hardly a surprise that companies don't upgrade until they absolutely have to (anyway: why would they until there's a need?). If they can give their kit a mid-life kicker with some more memory or swapping in some faster CPUs, isn't that better than spending 10s of thousands or more on a new box. Better, that is for everyone except the hardware manufacturers who will counter the drop in sales volume by lowering prices even more.
You might as well argue that it's "wrong" for airlines to charge different fares for the same flight on different days (or even on the exact same plane, depending when you book it), or for any other company to alter its prices depending on the demand it sees. In the long run the point is moot. If you think your ISP is screwing you, just change to another. There are dozen / hundreds to choose from - the free market will kill off any that aren't competitive.
The ISPs have always had a market where more money == faster service, we are also used to the idea of paywalls where some stuff is free and other stuff needs money to get access to. So where, exactly, does this idea that everyone should get access to everything for the same price come from? Would it still be "net neutral" if Facebook suddenly started charging $10 / year for "membership"? Is that really any different from your ISP saying "If you want to get access to service X, it'll cost you more money"? The only difference seems to me to be who does the charging - one organisation and that's business (or monetising), a different organisation and people bleat on about net neutrality.
Since you appear to have the time to spend on these support tasks, there would only be a saving (and one that would take a considerable time to realise and even longer to pay back) you could only really make a case if you can say that int he future your workload will increase to the point where another person will have to be hired to assist ot take over these tasks. That's the only solid, dollar cost you will have to offer. Even then it's going to be an uphill struggle as the zero-cost alternative is just to make you work harder for the same money.
What's nearly as bad is the science career advice children receive at school. Almost no teachers anywhere have ever met a professional scientist. Even the few who might be married to one have no real idea what their partner does on a daily basis and they are in no position to advise on either the suitability of a child to try to become a professional scientist, nor on what that child could expect from a career in a scientific job.
The single biggest failing of science is that it does nothing to prepare the next generation for work in the field. Meaning that those children who leave school to attend a university science course, assuming it will be like the science they did in school, have one hell of a big surprise when it turns out to be completely different from what they expected. The surprise is nearly as big as the one science graduates get when they discover, in turn, that working as a professional scientist is again, nothing like what they thought it was when they were students.
The internet is a worldwide network. If one country banned or censored it, it would make almost no difference to everyone else - expect that the amount of spam might be down a little.
From the charts, they range from -0.04 to +0.10 for the classifications given. Now I'm no statistician, but those ranges of values don't seem to be much more than a slight tendency. They certainly don't seem to me to be "dead cert" formulae for getting more comments or likes.
So, since they are an annoyance and don't give users any tangible benefits, you shouldn't be surprised when users choose their passwords so they require the least amount of effort: either to remember or to enter. As for enforcing rules to require users to change them regularly - you might as well forget it. All they'll do is take their core password and add a number onto it - I know: that's all I do.
Passwords have been in effect since the beginning of multi-user systems: what? 50 years or so. Surely in all that time the world could have come up with something better, easier, more reliable and keyed to the user rather than the piece of paper all the passwords are undoubtedly written on.
Then it would have to be 58 lamest tech moments
Disclaimer: not a Kindle owner, just sowing a bit of FUD.
Personally I don't care how many modules any repository has, just so long as the ones I want to use work properly. That will always be my primary measure of success, followed closely by how well they are documented and then by how easy they are to find and use.
Any site that asks for my email address right away, forget it.
Just toss 'em a disposable email address. I don't know why people make such a big thing of it - surely you have more than just one, single, lousy email address? don't you?
it's like buying a top of the range car. If you're a good enough driver to make use of the high performance then you'll reap the rewards. If you aren't interested in pushing the limits and only use it for day-to-day driving to the shops, or commuting then you might as well save your money (personal vanity notwithstanding) and spend the cash you save for something else.
But within the foreseeable future, cracking those same codes could become trivial, thanks to quantum computing
At least the number of burglaries will go down
maybe it's the occupants getting larger.
Unfortunately, it's the only substitute we have. So since most writers are unable to come up with worthwhile plots, characters we can connect with and layers of complexity, we're just gonna have to put up with yet more
Allowing too many options / features in the design. The classic example being unable to decide whether feature A or B is best, and ducking the issue by including them both
Assuming 5 working-days of effort can be achieved in a working week. Conveniently forgetting about all the office overheads such as "progress" meetings, timesheet administration, interrupted work, all the other concurrent projects. Even the most efficient, single-threaded operation needs half a working-day per week just for the trivia.
Following on from that, conveniently forgetting about annual leave commitments, national holidays and the possibility of sickness. If 5 working-days per week is impractical, 12 working-months in a year is downright negligent.
The tacit assumption that testing will inevitably be followed by reelase - rather than bug-fixing.
Holding the end-date constant while delaying the start, or presuming that all delays in the specification, design, approval stages can somehow be reclaimed during coding (how: by thining faster?)
That's not to say some individuals with long hair and others with low personal hygiene standards haven't done their bit, but those attributes don't make you counter-culture.
Assuming that you're an American
Always a bad assumption, given that americans only make up 5% of the population - by head-count, at least
At least oil can be stored efficiently and portably. So if your supplier decided to turn off the tap you still have enough reserves to bomb the crap out of them, sorry: that should read negotiate a new deal. With electricity, the moment they flip the switch, all the lights go out.
Pretty sure that there is a law where you can't make money off someone else's likeness.
if there was such a thing all the tribute bands (bootleg beatles etc.) would have a tough time. However since they appear to be thriving - even though the Beatles "Apple" is nearly as protective as the other one - it appears as if there is not such a thing, even in China..
Anyhow, surely SJ's image is a personal property - something that he, personally should be protecting - not something that a company would get involved in (unless Apple somehow think they own Jobs)
Maybe it is dangerous, but if you get to (say) 80+ and can only look forward to a few more years with increasing incontinence and decreasing memory (which may even make up for the incontinence) then it's got to be worth a shot. After all, it's not as if you have much to lose. Though your relatives might not appreciate the loss of any expected inheritance, and the nursing homes have a vested interest in it failing, and the whole pension / insurance industry will go broke overnight. However, if it means I could live to be 200, all that's a small price to pay.