What NASA releases for general consumption are highly filtered, highly photoshopped images that are promoted for their vivid colours and "cosmic" impressions. That's not what Hubble is used for. If that was all it did then yes, this guy (and the thousands of others around the world like him) could fill the media with colourful images all day long.
However, none of them is worth a dam' for research use: where calibration is much more important that prettiness and resolution, low noise and even the spectrum of light used (not all light makes it through the atmosphere - esp. IR) are the sole reasons for spening all that money getting Hubble up there.
While I applaud the Telegraph for publicising this, it not what professional astronomers do - nor is it even close to what Hubble does to earn it's money.
A touchpad is probably the dumbest design you can think of, for anything except the most coarse-grained "point and shoot". Imagine trying to use photoshop on a touch screen. All the areas you want to select are automatically obscured by the very finger(s) that are doing the selecting. How stoooopid is that? Obviously the people who thought it was a good idea either took us all for fools, or reckoned we'd evolve transparent fingers in a year or two.
The study makes reference to another analysis down on Unix systems 20 years ago and concludes nothing (much) has changed.
All this tells us is that the exhortations to choose more secure passwords reaches a certain level and then has no more effect. The implication is that ways of educating users has not improved in the past 20 years.
Let's not blame the users -they are only doing what they're told. The problem is that we (i.e. IT people) are not telling them the right things in a way that they are willing to accept. That's the problem, not laziness, incompetence or ignorance - motivation. The users ARE motivated to choose passwords, but not to go to the inconvenience of choosing complex ones.
In every other area of computer use, the trend has been to making things simpler to use. Maybe it's time this process was applied to passwords. Of course it's possible we don't really want better security - we just want someone to blame for lapses.
All this tells us is that people are filling their spare time.
An individual spends a certain amount of time asleep, a certain amount at school or working (or housekeeping, or whatever), a certain amount eating, washing(!), travelling and all the other miscelleanea of living. Then they have some time spare - is that such a surprise?
All this study does is tell those people who believe studies what those individuals spend their time doing. Would you prefer they spend that time drinking, instead?
Oh yes, that thing about multi-tasking media. All that tells us is how unfulfilling sources like TV are - people don't actually *watch* it, they just have it on in the background (while doing something more interesting) just in case something worthy of their attention does happen. That's all TV is today - whatever age you are.
Volunteering sounds nice, but aren't you just doing for free what a local worker would get paid for?
By the time you fly into a country, get yourselves settled into a hotel, cure your jetlag, get to the place you're volunteering and become familiar with the local practices, customs and ways of working your vacation will be over. That's even presuming you speak the language. What's worse is that by going to another country and donating your time you are effectively taking work OUT of the local economy, not benefiting it.
Whether it's a specialised software role or just digging ditches (probably worse with manual labour, which would be done by individuals who can't do anything better) you are stopping a vacancy being advertised and a local family from having an income.
If this was a ruse to get me to dump them, spend money, go to the hassle of upgrading the O/S and very likely having to replace a whole load of hardware and applications, then sorry guys. You've failed.
US freedoms, protections and liberties only apply within US borders. If you put your data in "the cloud" is there any guarantee that your data will stay with US borders, or is it free to float (as clouds do) to any other geographic location.
Specifically, would it be wise to assume that all, or any, backups will only be taken in america, or that the data won't get routed to or through another country.?
It's a big world out there and the USA is only a small part of it.
No, you're quite wrong. Jokes are funny, they make people laugh.There's nothing even remotely joke-like in the statement. Stupid, ridiculous, ill-advised and correctly punctuated maybe but if you said those words to a million people, even drunk ones, not a single one would laugh. In my book, that makes it a failure as a joke.
Next question: were the police right to overreact like that? Obviously no, though if making unfunny jokes on an internett site was a crime, we'd all be in chokey.
Next question: don't the cops have anything better to do than goof around on twitter? Again, apparently not - though maybe if they had solved all the outstanding crimes and banged-up all the criminals there might be an excuse for it.
Next question: think of one simple way to screw up someone's life; Correct, impersonate them on twitter and make stoopid threats.
The kernel can't add implementation for a bus that doesn't exist
and that's why it will alway be a follower rather than a leader. The innovations are what creates the need for standards. Without them nothing new would ever be developed and there would be no need to codify and standardise any developments.
What I would like to see is some innovation, some game-changers: giving the Linux kernel new features that no other O/S has - but once it has them, EVERYONE realises how useful, necessary and well-done they were and therefore how necessary they are to modern, leading edge implementations. It's a question of does Linux want to follow the innovators lead, or does it want to be out in front?
Most releases seem to be minor improvements: a few bug fixes, re-porting to another architecture, some new drivers and tweaks to (or reimplementations of) existing features such as VM or filesystems.
Are we ever going to see major new features (along the lines of the USB implementation, or SMP), or a major re-think? Or is this basically as good as it will ever get?
It does appear to me that all the kernel is doing these days is mimicking the features and support found in "other" operating systems - rather than pushing the boundaries of innovation and novelty, itself.It would be a shame if Linux just fell into line and became a follower in a world of twisty little O/S's, all the same rather than producing some killer features, unique to it's implementation, that made people WANT to run Linux on their desktops and enterprise systems.
A lot of houses in Britain have been built on flood plains.
Even though they are clearly marked on the maps, and (presumably) are discovered in property searches, people still buy these places. Yet when the inevitable happens - for rain is a fact of life in England, they whine and moan about "our house has flooded... you gotta HELP us!" Better still, a lot of river-side properties are very desirable and attract huge premiums. The buyers seem not to associate having a large body of moving water, passing by the bottom of the gardens to their million-pound houses, with any sort of risk, at all.
All I would suggest is huge.... massive.... crippling... increases in home insurance premiums to both alert buyers to the dangers and also to make them pay the going rate for repairs and renovations - rather than being subsidised by all the sensible people. Just like happens with car insurance.
If you want to get a true picture of life in a data centre look at what the management actually do, what they spend money on and what they produce. If you rely on the answers they give you'll end up broke very quickly. The only way to tell if datacentres really are understaffed is if they start hiring more people: any other action just shows the lie in their responses.
When managers say they need more staff, they generally mean they need more cheap staff (often to replace the expensive staff they already have). They could always fill any critical needs very quickly by offering more financial incentives (the only ones that really mean anything), but this almost never happens. Somehow they manage to bumble on with their "staff shortages" and still meet their targets.
Basically he's observed his family members (and some friends children) and assumed therefore that every child does or will behave like that.
I've got to say, this sort of behaviour just reinforces the common view of psychology as mostly worthless generalisations and unsupported theory.
WHERE ARE THE NUMBERS?
Let's see a proper study, using statistically valid numbers of subjects - taken from all races, creeds, famiily backgrounds and nationalities. Then there's be something worth discussing. Until then this is just a "aren't my children are wonderful" monolog. Boring.
The content of the programmes is what people watch - not the fuzziness of the picture, or the brilliance of the colours, nor whether the characters "leap out" of the screen (though how this would work on games shows and reality programmes I do not know). TV nowadays is constrained by budgets and timescales - there's a limited amount of advertising money available to turn into programming and a limited amount of time to spend making each show. These are what limits the quality of programmes - whcih is the only thing that would increase the amount of TV that people as a whole would watch.
We already know that audiences are willing to put up with very low quality pictures - video recorders proved this and pretty much defined the minimum acceptable quality. No one has ever said to me "I would have watched <whatever> on TV, but the technical quality of the broadcast was too low". However everyone I know (including myself) frequently won't watch programmes if the acting / story / premise / genre / script is poor.
I would guess that since TV companies aren't able or willing to improve the programme content, that doesn't leave much of a differentiator, so gilding the lily (or polishing the turd) is the only way they can try to shift viewers from one low quality show to another. The only people who stand to make out of this new fad are the hardware manufacturers.
as a terrorist you don't really care about picking a special target plane.
Sure you do. Some country's airlines give greater publicity (which, after all is what it's about) to problems like their planes exploding. Plus, it's generally not a smart move to blow up flights run by your own or a sympathetic country.
This guy got his reputation from our technology - now he goes around insulting the people who read his gushings.
misrepresented by crowds of quick and sloppy readers
It sounds like he has become altogether too precious about his own opinions and superiority (in his own mind, at least) and forgets that every printed word he's ever made money from has gone through exactly the same process of being edited, distributed and read (and possibly mis-understood - but isn't that HIS failure, not the reader's?) as the electronic texts he is so critical of.
You presume that the person coming after you will have both your background and your programming ability. This is incorrect. No-one who sees your code will have the same background you have and therefore they will not have the same writing style or familiarity with the problem you were trying to solve. Comments are primarily (but see later) there to save time. They act like signposts on the roadside and should guide people towards an understanding of what a section of code does, why it does it and how it relates to the stuff around it. If your comments don't do this, then you're not a very good programmer.
Just like you can drive around and will eventually (as the earth is round) wind up at your destination, having a map, signage and/or a GPS makes getting to the right place a whole lot quicker. Your comments should do the same.
While you are right (as all *experienced* programmers know, anyway) that/* increment the counter */ comments are pointless (but harmless) you've missed an extremely significant type of comments. These are the warning to future programmers why you DIDN'T use the obvious approach, or why a particular algorithm is not suitable for the task in question. Further, code that has been corrected, modified or had bugs fixed MUST have comments to identify that fact. These comments are at least as valuable as the actual code. Again, experience will teach you this.
Finally, never, ever forget the most important rule of commenting. NEVER include a URL in a comment. They change over time and cannot be relied upon to still exist in 3 months, let alone the lifetime of a software product. A similar warning should exist for book / magazine references, too. Not only do they become unobtainable or go out of print, they also get modified or corrected in the "second edition" and therefore still can't be relied on. If an algorithm has a well known name, such as Bresenham's, then by all means quote that otherwise, explain the algorithm in, or before the code that implements it. Unless you want the next guy to curse your name - provided you put that in the comments.
This sort of pop-sci is really insulting to the huge number of dedicated scientists and technicians who spend their whole lives carefully taking measurements, building and proving (or disproving) theories, based on painstaking work. Even worse is that it makes it harder for people to get grants if the bodies holding the purse strings (or the public who's money it eventually is) thinks it's basically a lottery.
This kind of hype was exactly the problem
on
The Long Shadow of Y2K
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Not the tech. issues, but the pundits rattling on about things they knew nothing about. Painting doomsday scenarios that were lapped up by the gullible - or those who enjoy nothing more than making a crisis out of a molehill.
We see exactly the same reaction today about all the issues that face us (whether personal, local, national or world-wide). The considered, thoughtful and measured responses that would (given a chance) produce equitable solutions with a minimum of fuss get washed away by the ignorant but vocal commentators in the media. These people don't care about the problem, or finding a solution. All they want is the cameras pointing in their direction.
If you are able to remove completely the users internet access (that's totally: not just during work hours) so they can't screw up their machines with stuff they download, knowingly or not then the support burden, costs and insecurity drop massively.
Of course, reducing the number of support calls is not necessarily in the interests of the IT support people, who will therefore get cut. Even if it does improve overall quality.
And how many were killed by guns in america? At a guess, the same number as road fatalities.
(if this doesn't get neg'd out of existence I'll be amazed)
Slashdot Mirror
However, none of them is worth a dam' for research use: where calibration is much more important that prettiness and resolution, low noise and even the spectrum of light used (not all light makes it through the atmosphere - esp. IR) are the sole reasons for spening all that money getting Hubble up there.
While I applaud the Telegraph for publicising this, it not what professional astronomers do - nor is it even close to what Hubble does to earn it's money.
A touchpad is probably the dumbest design you can think of, for anything except the most coarse-grained "point and shoot". Imagine trying to use photoshop on a touch screen. All the areas you want to select are automatically obscured by the very finger(s) that are doing the selecting. How stoooopid is that? Obviously the people who thought it was a good idea either took us all for fools, or reckoned we'd evolve transparent fingers in a year or two.
All this tells us is that the exhortations to choose more secure passwords reaches a certain level and then has no more effect. The implication is that ways of educating users has not improved in the past 20 years.
Let's not blame the users -they are only doing what they're told. The problem is that we (i.e. IT people) are not telling them the right things in a way that they are willing to accept. That's the problem, not laziness, incompetence or ignorance - motivation. The users ARE motivated to choose passwords, but not to go to the inconvenience of choosing complex ones.
In every other area of computer use, the trend has been to making things simpler to use. Maybe it's time this process was applied to passwords. Of course it's possible we don't really want better security - we just want someone to blame for lapses.
An individual spends a certain amount of time asleep, a certain amount at school or working (or housekeeping, or whatever), a certain amount eating, washing(!), travelling and all the other miscelleanea of living. Then they have some time spare - is that such a surprise?
All this study does is tell those people who believe studies what those individuals spend their time doing. Would you prefer they spend that time drinking, instead?
Oh yes, that thing about multi-tasking media. All that tells us is how unfulfilling sources like TV are - people don't actually *watch* it, they just have it on in the background (while doing something more interesting) just in case something worthy of their attention does happen. That's all TV is today - whatever age you are.
By the time you fly into a country, get yourselves settled into a hotel, cure your jetlag, get to the place you're volunteering and become familiar with the local practices, customs and ways of working your vacation will be over. That's even presuming you speak the language. What's worse is that by going to another country and donating your time you are effectively taking work OUT of the local economy, not benefiting it.
Whether it's a specialised software role or just digging ditches (probably worse with manual labour, which would be done by individuals who can't do anything better) you are stopping a vacancy being advertised and a local family from having an income.
If this was a ruse to get me to dump them, spend money, go to the hassle of upgrading the O/S and very likely having to replace a whole load of hardware and applications, then sorry guys. You've failed.
Specifically, would it be wise to assume that all, or any, backups will only be taken in america, or that the data won't get routed to or through another country.?
It's a big world out there and the USA is only a small part of it.
it sounds unmistakably like a joke,
No, you're quite wrong. Jokes are funny, they make people laugh.There's nothing even remotely joke-like in the statement. Stupid, ridiculous, ill-advised and correctly punctuated maybe but if you said those words to a million people, even drunk ones, not a single one would laugh. In my book, that makes it a failure as a joke.
Next question: were the police right to overreact like that? Obviously no, though if making unfunny jokes on an internett site was a crime, we'd all be in chokey.
Next question: don't the cops have anything better to do than goof around on twitter? Again, apparently not - though maybe if they had solved all the outstanding crimes and banged-up all the criminals there might be an excuse for it.
Next question: think of one simple way to screw up someone's life; Correct, impersonate them on twitter and make stoopid threats.
The kernel can't add implementation for a bus that doesn't exist
and that's why it will alway be a follower rather than a leader. The innovations are what creates the need for standards. Without them nothing new would ever be developed and there would be no need to codify and standardise any developments.
What I would like to see is some innovation, some game-changers: giving the Linux kernel new features that no other O/S has - but once it has them, EVERYONE realises how useful, necessary and well-done they were and therefore how necessary they are to modern, leading edge implementations. It's a question of does Linux want to follow the innovators lead, or does it want to be out in front?
Are we ever going to see major new features (along the lines of the USB implementation, or SMP), or a major re-think? Or is this basically as good as it will ever get?
It does appear to me that all the kernel is doing these days is mimicking the features and support found in "other" operating systems - rather than pushing the boundaries of innovation and novelty, itself.It would be a shame if Linux just fell into line and became a follower in a world of twisty little O/S's, all the same rather than producing some killer features, unique to it's implementation, that made people WANT to run Linux on their desktops and enterprise systems.
Though getting out of bed on the wrong side is a bit of a bummer.
Even though they are clearly marked on the maps, and (presumably) are discovered in property searches, people still buy these places. Yet when the inevitable happens - for rain is a fact of life in England, they whine and moan about "our house has flooded ... you gotta HELP us!" Better still, a lot of river-side properties are very desirable and attract huge premiums. The buyers seem not to associate having a large body of moving water, passing by the bottom of the gardens to their million-pound houses, with any sort of risk, at all.
All I would suggest is huge .... massive .... crippling ... increases in home insurance premiums to both alert buyers to the dangers and also to make them pay the going rate for repairs and renovations - rather than being subsidised by all the sensible people. Just like happens with car insurance.
And that's about as good as a 3-day weather forecast, too.
If you want to get a true picture of life in a data centre look at what the management actually do, what they spend money on and what they produce. If you rely on the answers they give you'll end up broke very quickly. The only way to tell if datacentres really are understaffed is if they start hiring more people: any other action just shows the lie in their responses.
When managers say they need more staff, they generally mean they need more cheap staff (often to replace the expensive staff they already have). They could always fill any critical needs very quickly by offering more financial incentives (the only ones that really mean anything), but this almost never happens. Somehow they manage to bumble on with their "staff shortages" and still meet their targets.
I've got to say, this sort of behaviour just reinforces the common view of psychology as mostly worthless generalisations and unsupported theory.
WHERE ARE THE NUMBERS?
Let's see a proper study, using statistically valid numbers of subjects - taken from all races, creeds, famiily backgrounds and nationalities. Then there's be something worth discussing. Until then this is just a "aren't my children are wonderful" monolog. Boring.
The content of the programmes is what people watch - not the fuzziness of the picture, or the brilliance of the colours, nor whether the characters "leap out" of the screen (though how this would work on games shows and reality programmes I do not know). TV nowadays is constrained by budgets and timescales - there's a limited amount of advertising money available to turn into programming and a limited amount of time to spend making each show. These are what limits the quality of programmes - whcih is the only thing that would increase the amount of TV that people as a whole would watch.
We already know that audiences are willing to put up with very low quality pictures - video recorders proved this and pretty much defined the minimum acceptable quality. No one has ever said to me "I would have watched <whatever> on TV, but the technical quality of the broadcast was too low". However everyone I know (including myself) frequently won't watch programmes if the acting / story / premise / genre / script is poor.
I would guess that since TV companies aren't able or willing to improve the programme content, that doesn't leave much of a differentiator, so gilding the lily (or polishing the turd) is the only way they can try to shift viewers from one low quality show to another. The only people who stand to make out of this new fad are the hardware manufacturers.
as a terrorist you don't really care about picking a special target plane.
Sure you do. Some country's airlines give greater publicity (which, after all is what it's about) to problems like their planes exploding. Plus, it's generally not a smart move to blow up flights run by your own or a sympathetic country.
This guy got his reputation from our technology - now he goes around insulting the people who read his gushings.
misrepresented by crowds of quick and sloppy readers
It sounds like he has become altogether too precious about his own opinions and superiority (in his own mind, at least) and forgets that every printed word he's ever made money from has gone through exactly the same process of being edited, distributed and read (and possibly mis-understood - but isn't that HIS failure, not the reader's?) as the electronic texts he is so critical of.
Any admin worth their pay can run rings around a net-blocker. So why piss-off the talent?
While you are right (as all *experienced* programmers know, anyway) that /* increment the counter */ comments are pointless (but harmless) you've missed an extremely significant type of comments. These are the warning to future programmers why you DIDN'T use the obvious approach, or why a particular algorithm is not suitable for the task in question. Further, code that has been corrected, modified or had bugs fixed MUST have comments to identify that fact. These comments are at least as valuable as the actual code. Again, experience will teach you this.
Finally, never, ever forget the most important rule of commenting. NEVER include a URL in a comment. They change over time and cannot be relied upon to still exist in 3 months, let alone the lifetime of a software product. A similar warning should exist for book / magazine references, too. Not only do they become unobtainable or go out of print, they also get modified or corrected in the "second edition" and therefore still can't be relied on. If an algorithm has a well known name, such as Bresenham's, then by all means quote that otherwise, explain the algorithm in, or before the code that implements it. Unless you want the next guy to curse your name - provided you put that in the comments.
This sort of pop-sci is really insulting to the huge number of dedicated scientists and technicians who spend their whole lives carefully taking measurements, building and proving (or disproving) theories, based on painstaking work. Even worse is that it makes it harder for people to get grants if the bodies holding the purse strings (or the public who's money it eventually is) thinks it's basically a lottery.
We see exactly the same reaction today about all the issues that face us (whether personal, local, national or world-wide). The considered, thoughtful and measured responses that would (given a chance) produce equitable solutions with a minimum of fuss get washed away by the ignorant but vocal commentators in the media. These people don't care about the problem, or finding a solution. All they want is the cameras pointing in their direction.
Government facility:
I'm surprised. Any decent government run operation would need far more than 47 managers just to oversee the management processes.
Of course, reducing the number of support calls is not necessarily in the interests of the IT support people, who will therefore get cut. Even if it does improve overall quality.
And how many were killed by guns in america? At a guess, the same number as road fatalities.
(if this doesn't get neg'd out of existence I'll be amazed)