Bigger numbers are better. That's it. End of story.
No one cares about proportional improvements, they'll look at the headline figure - whatever that happens to be for all the cars they are interested in and rank them accordingly. In this case as 10 (v. bad) 20 (pretty awful) 33 (now we're getting somewhere) 50 (OK, that will do). It sounds to me as if this professor doesn't understand how people make decisions and is, himself, too bogged down in the trivia of the numbers (or is trying to be too clever by half - it doesn't impress, BTW).
We've conditioned ourselves to stop doing almost everything in order to answer a phonecall. Even if we have no idea who's calling, we are prepared to interrupt most activities and (unforgivably) most people in order to speak to a little voice who almost certainly only called because they want something.
I say, let them wait. If it's important they can leave a message - although there's nothing that a normal person can tell us that can't bear being delayed for an hour or two. If they are prepared to do some work themselves, they can TEXT you, instead.
Every week you hear about football clubs fining players for bad behaviour. This guy accepted the University's terms and conditions when he signed up for his course. So if that makes provision for this sort of punishment for this sort of activity he can either pay up or get out.
never let the facts get in the way of a good story.
Even calling this thing a "project" in the headline and "a bit of a joke" once it's suckered in the readership reeks of the kind of deceitful tactics we don't expect (or want) on/. It would be nice to see better judgment and control over the stories - even on the weekend. Better no news than stuff like this.
Think about electricity, for example. We pay for mains power to our houses. We buy batteries in various forms at various prices - rechargables, single use, car batteries. We have the option for solar power at a different price point. Yet no-one would say "I want to pay once for all my different sources of electricity, no matter what the format is).
This idea just doesn't make sense. The various suppliers (whether for bandwidth or electrcity, or water - bottled, mains, rainfall etc.) all have different infrastructures, cost models, shareholders, benefits and overheads. Same for transportation, same for food sources. I don't thing the poster has thought through much beyond the I want...... stage
but dumber if all you do is "play" facebook all day.
Intelligent use of the internet, like intelligent use of a library or research facility lets you do more good stuff quicker. It probably also lets you extend your capabilities (though sometimes people extend too far and become burdens rather than assets).
However, if you're not inclined to use your mental faculties and just want to goof around all the time, the internet lets you waste time like never before. Of course there are poeple at work (you probably know some) for whom the best contribution they can possibly make is to just sit in the corner and keep out of the way.
On the whole I reckon that like radioactivity, it's a force for good. Although it has the potential to enable a lot of bad stuff if people wish to use it for that.
Not rendering bitty little colour screens or scanning for viruses. Plus the code was written to extract every last drop of power out of the architecture. So when you compare the amount of WORK a machine from the 70s or 80s did (my university's mainframe had a FORTRAN complier that needed less that 131kWord of memory - today the GRUB bootloader is bigger than that) with a more modern box, with all its overheads and inefficiencies, the balance isn't as great as the scoffers might think.
is never rely on a single source. Always have a plan B. In this case it wasn't really that important - not like having your (single) bank account frozen. However it's a good illustration of what could happen, that people should worry about.
So just make sure you always have a fallback email account. If your life really does revolve around being able to post to, or administer, a particular group of people then why not set up a secondary account with the same privileges? It's not that hard to do.
Now, if you'll just hang on a second I'll pop over to my alternate/. account and mod this up.
Hubble was launched in 1990 so it's managed the 20 years that's "many times the operational lifespan of space missions". Plus it's able to observe 24*7, not just when the crew are allowed to fly. So it does sound like the description could do with reigning in it's dismissive attitude towards the competition.
It obviously does have advantages so far as costs go, though only time will tell just how many observing hours it clocks up
Sounds like you've made the obvious error of believing that (what was once, but is no more) the company name had a meaning. Just like you can't get Chicken Tikka in a branch of Currys, or rent a radio from Radio Rentals. Forget it. BP is just as american as British Aerospace, Exxon, United Airlines and all the rest.
It sounds like you're suggesting that for every deep-water oil rig that's built, the oil companies should build a spare "just in case" and have it start the drilling operation to get a lead in case there's a problem on the production platform. Given that in this case, the problem started when the production rig sank (and killed 11 workers), there doesn't appear to be any alternatives that having a 100% redundant rig standing idly by, for every one that's working.
So the question becomes: how much extra on a gallon are you prepared to pay for this extra safety factor?
It's not like petrol - once you've used it, it's gone forever. Presuming that the vast majority of the water that Intel uses is not contaminated with heavy metals, it can be filtered and reused. In that respect the problem is one of energy, needed to do the purification. It's also different from the water used by farming, as this IS destroyed - or at least evaporated off. So personally I don't think that these guys should spend too much time complaining about Intel's water consumption.
The more specialised you are, the fewer job openings you have - that will use your speciality (yes, obviously you could get a lesser job, but isn't that a waste of your talents and so ultimately unsatisfactory?). That means you have to range further to find those rarer openings. So in that respect more educated people will have a tendency to be more mobile, though not always through choice. And not always viewing it as a good thing: having to move from country to country to chase the next step of career progression.
So when they click over from 399,999 to 400,000 and have to start spying on people I would guess that they have to notify all their existing customers of the change. Which would lead to a mass exodus (or not) which would drop the number back below 400k again.. and so on...
it would also be interesting to know if they would then be able to enforce minimum contract lengths, given that they would have tomake significant changes to their contract conditions. Maybe we'll start to get closed memberships of ISps when they get too close to the limit, rather than having customers desert them.
First of all, forget about the sorts of examples you've cited. That's not what it's about. Really it's only about emerican film and music companies wanting to punish (as opposed to simply recover any lost revenue) who look at their products but haven't paid them before doing so. The basic problemm with all f this is that if you download a movie then they're after you not just for the £10 or so that a top selling DVD goes for, but they want to ruin you - take your house, all your money and make it impossible for you to live normally forever after that.
Although I'm not an expert, I wouldn't be surprised to discover that a convicted rapist has a less onerous punishment placed on them than someone in the grips of these film studios.
The first thing we need to do is change some of the descriptions. My data is stored on my computers. If some personal information is stored on your computers, that's your data (even if it refers to me, or other people). And being your data, you are responsible for its safe keeping, its security and (as with oil spills) for cleaning up and making good any lapses it it gets out.
So, for example when a bank says that my identity has been stolen and my bank account drained, what they're really saying is some data they held became insecure and they let an unaurthorised (i.e. not me, or someone I have power of withdrawl to) person take it from them, and that lack of care on their part allowed someone to take money from them (but not from me).
it's only after these sorts of ownership and liability factors are widely accepted and written into law, that we can start to assign responsibility for information that people or organisations hold regarding us. I fully expect that once organisations are deemed liable for any damage or loss that occurs because they lose or fail to secure their data, the problems of identity theft, data loss and security will solve themselves.
People are willing to pay for the paper edition because it gives them several benefits over the same content on a website edition. The biggest is convenience: you can take the content with you and read it where ever you happen to be. No need for batteries, internet connections. You can read it in normal daylight and you don't get reflections off the screen (who decided that matte screens were a bad idea, so that all you can buy now are glossy ones that are impossible to view?).
You can read it on the train, you can read it on the lavatory - and if you run out of toilet paper..... there's something else you can't do with a laptop. You can even line your parrot's cage with it.
What Murdoch is about to find out is that the value people place on the content is quite small, especially when most of it is celebrity gossip, ill-informed and bigoted columnists and rants disguised as stories - written purely to promote the owner's politics. The real value of the newspaper is it's ease of use. Once you take that away the disadvantages of a web-only publication far outweigh the lower price. He will also find out that just because news costs money to gather, script and present doesn't mean that people are willing to pay that cost and that presentation is a much bigger part of the deal.
Yes, this is something that really should be a central part of the review. The only possible reason (apart from scoffing at how crude and unevolved the older version is) for comparing Ubuntu 10 with 8.04 is to quantify the benefits of migration. Since it appears to be impossible (without a backup, wipe, virgin install and then days spent rebuilding all your customisations and apps and settings) there should at least be a ote to that effect.
Since the only major performance improvement is from going EXT3 - EXT4, there's no point in even trying an "in place" upgrade. It's a gaping hole in Ubuntu's release and something you'd'a hoped someone would have considered. I wonder why they forget about us 8.04 users?
I remember the "Echo" satellites from the early 60's. their orbital times were even published in the newspapers and you could see them move through the night sky. I know you can see the ISS when it's around, but aren't these sorts of baloons rather old-hat now?
Re:This was the ONLY episode I watched
on
Lost Ends
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· Score: 1
They all died in the crash,
The island was purgatory.
Aren't you thinking of the end of Ashes to Ashes (the sequel to "Life on Mars" - the english version for anyone who's been living in a hutch for the last 3 years)
The trailers saved me lots of time
on
Lost Ends
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· Score: 1
I watched them and shrugged. Something about a plane crash and a bunch of survivors - thanks, but that's all I needed to know next channel please. If they hadn't trailed the programme every new episode and every new series, I might have been tempted to give it a try. Luckily nothing I saw during those short clips gave any impression it was worth spending time on. Thank you to however produced them, you did me a favour.
The chance to name something after yourself
on
Scientific R&D At Home?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Basically astronomy and biology are your two best bets, if you want your name to live on. Though whether you'd like your name to be associated with a disease is debatable. Sadly astronomy is getting away from the amateur, as the americans have pretty much automated the hell out of asteroid discoveries (at least in the northern hemisphere) with huge automated "discovery factories". You might strike lucky and discover a comet, though.
Biology is more promising, with many opportunities to discover new types of insect in your neighbourhood - or even in your garden. The hours are long, but any discovery has to be earned.
It's all very well having nuke-proof bunkers and thick steel doors. But at some point someone's gotta get in there (presuming they think out digital formats are worth decoding - they could be in for a bit of a disappointment) to get the keys. If the future society gets into such a state where it's lost all the external copies of these keys it's probably not going to be too good at looking after physical means of access.
I can just imaging after the next war / asteroid / depression / pandemic all these people standing outside this massive steel door, wondering what the hell was inside it?
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't a liter what you use to set fire to your cigarettes?
No one cares about proportional improvements, they'll look at the headline figure - whatever that happens to be for all the cars they are interested in and rank them accordingly. In this case as 10 (v. bad) 20 (pretty awful) 33 (now we're getting somewhere) 50 (OK, that will do). It sounds to me as if this professor doesn't understand how people make decisions and is, himself, too bogged down in the trivia of the numbers (or is trying to be too clever by half - it doesn't impress, BTW).
I say, let them wait. If it's important they can leave a message - although there's nothing that a normal person can tell us that can't bear being delayed for an hour or two. If they are prepared to do some work themselves, they can TEXT you, instead.
Every week you hear about football clubs fining players for bad behaviour. This guy accepted the University's terms and conditions when he signed up for his course. So if that makes provision for this sort of punishment for this sort of activity he can either pay up or get out.
Even calling this thing a "project" in the headline and "a bit of a joke" once it's suckered in the readership reeks of the kind of deceitful tactics we don't expect (or want) on /. It would be nice to see better judgment and control over the stories - even on the weekend. Better no news than stuff like this.
This idea just doesn't make sense. The various suppliers (whether for bandwidth or electrcity, or water - bottled, mains, rainfall etc.) all have different infrastructures, cost models, shareholders, benefits and overheads. Same for transportation, same for food sources. I don't thing the poster has thought through much beyond the I want ...... stage
Intelligent use of the internet, like intelligent use of a library or research facility lets you do more good stuff quicker. It probably also lets you extend your capabilities (though sometimes people extend too far and become burdens rather than assets).
However, if you're not inclined to use your mental faculties and just want to goof around all the time, the internet lets you waste time like never before. Of course there are poeple at work (you probably know some) for whom the best contribution they can possibly make is to just sit in the corner and keep out of the way.
On the whole I reckon that like radioactivity, it's a force for good. Although it has the potential to enable a lot of bad stuff if people wish to use it for that.
Not rendering bitty little colour screens or scanning for viruses. Plus the code was written to extract every last drop of power out of the architecture. So when you compare the amount of WORK a machine from the 70s or 80s did (my university's mainframe had a FORTRAN complier that needed less that 131kWord of memory - today the GRUB bootloader is bigger than that) with a more modern box, with all its overheads and inefficiencies, the balance isn't as great as the scoffers might think.
So just make sure you always have a fallback email account. If your life really does revolve around being able to post to, or administer, a particular group of people then why not set up a secondary account with the same privileges? It's not that hard to do.
Now, if you'll just hang on a second I'll pop over to my alternate /. account and mod this up.
It obviously does have advantages so far as costs go, though only time will tell just how many observing hours it clocks up
Sounds like you've made the obvious error of believing that (what was once, but is no more) the company name had a meaning. Just like you can't get Chicken Tikka in a branch of Currys, or rent a radio from Radio Rentals. Forget it. BP is just as american as British Aerospace, Exxon, United Airlines and all the rest.
So the question becomes: how much extra on a gallon are you prepared to pay for this extra safety factor?
It's not like petrol - once you've used it, it's gone forever. Presuming that the vast majority of the water that Intel uses is not contaminated with heavy metals, it can be filtered and reused. In that respect the problem is one of energy, needed to do the purification. It's also different from the water used by farming, as this IS destroyed - or at least evaporated off. So personally I don't think that these guys should spend too much time complaining about Intel's water consumption.
The more specialised you are, the fewer job openings you have - that will use your speciality (yes, obviously you could get a lesser job, but isn't that a waste of your talents and so ultimately unsatisfactory?). That means you have to range further to find those rarer openings. So in that respect more educated people will have a tendency to be more mobile, though not always through choice. And not always viewing it as a good thing: having to move from country to country to chase the next step of career progression.
it would also be interesting to know if they would then be able to enforce minimum contract lengths, given that they would have tomake significant changes to their contract conditions. Maybe we'll start to get closed memberships of ISps when they get too close to the limit, rather than having customers desert them.
Although I'm not an expert, I wouldn't be surprised to discover that a convicted rapist has a less onerous punishment placed on them than someone in the grips of these film studios.
So, for example when a bank says that my identity has been stolen and my bank account drained, what they're really saying is some data they held became insecure and they let an unaurthorised (i.e. not me, or someone I have power of withdrawl to) person take it from them, and that lack of care on their part allowed someone to take money from them (but not from me).
it's only after these sorts of ownership and liability factors are widely accepted and written into law, that we can start to assign responsibility for information that people or organisations hold regarding us. I fully expect that once organisations are deemed liable for any damage or loss that occurs because they lose or fail to secure their data, the problems of identity theft, data loss and security will solve themselves.
You can read it on the train, you can read it on the lavatory - and if you run out of toilet paper ..... there's something else you can't do with a laptop. You can even line your parrot's cage with it.
What Murdoch is about to find out is that the value people place on the content is quite small, especially when most of it is celebrity gossip, ill-informed and bigoted columnists and rants disguised as stories - written purely to promote the owner's politics. The real value of the newspaper is it's ease of use. Once you take that away the disadvantages of a web-only publication far outweigh the lower price. He will also find out that just because news costs money to gather, script and present doesn't mean that people are willing to pay that cost and that presentation is a much bigger part of the deal.
Since the only major performance improvement is from going EXT3 - EXT4, there's no point in even trying an "in place" upgrade. It's a gaping hole in Ubuntu's release and something you'd'a hoped someone would have considered. I wonder why they forget about us 8.04 users?
I remember the "Echo" satellites from the early 60's. their orbital times were even published in the newspapers and you could see them move through the night sky. I know you can see the ISS when it's around, but aren't these sorts of baloons rather old-hat now?
They all died in the crash, The island was purgatory.
Aren't you thinking of the end of Ashes to Ashes (the sequel to "Life on Mars" - the english version for anyone who's been living in a hutch for the last 3 years)
I watched them and shrugged. Something about a plane crash and a bunch of survivors - thanks, but that's all I needed to know next channel please. If they hadn't trailed the programme every new episode and every new series, I might have been tempted to give it a try. Luckily nothing I saw during those short clips gave any impression it was worth spending time on. Thank you to however produced them, you did me a favour.
Biology is more promising, with many opportunities to discover new types of insect in your neighbourhood - or even in your garden. The hours are long, but any discovery has to be earned.
I can just imaging after the next war / asteroid / depression / pandemic all these people standing outside this massive steel door, wondering what the hell was inside it?
This is a firefox add-on which might go some way to at least confusing, if not entirely obsfucating your brwser identity