game-like simulations are a valuable tool for training soldiers in situations that would be too expensive to simulate in reality
OK, I'm not a military man, but it seems to me that the first and most important lesson you want to teach troops is how not to die. Knowing how to squirt death around (preferably at the other guys, not your own side) is fine, provided you aren't dead or injured.
What video games teach is that you can do pretty much anything with impunity. The worst thing that happens to you is a sore thumb. If you use games as traning tools, you could well end up with a bunch of soldiers who think they are invincible - they'll soon learn otherwise.
4) Your desk should face the door. Otherwise, people will always walk up behind you.
Better, make sure there is no line of sight from the door to your desk. That way no-one can see if you're sitting behind it without coming into the room.
OK, I think we'vew all worked out that they want to site you in the computer cupboard (away from all the "real" people).
First of all, consider the safety aspects. If you're going to be the only human being in there, either by design or because any other team members will be absent for any length of time, what will you do if there's a fire in one of the racks, or an electrical accident?
Just installing fire-supression is more cure than prevention and it doesn't stop you getting injured if the fire is between you and the exit.
If you're surrounded by electrical equipment, I would hope you company would enforce a ban on liquids (coffee etc.) in the room. If they don't do this from the outset, they will as soon asn health and safety get sight of theplan - or someone spills a drink over the equipment. How will you deal with that?
Finally, expect that over time, more and more equipment will get moved into the room and it will encroach on your "office" space. Where will you personally draw the line? When it becomes a general store room? When the cleaner starts leaving their buckets on your desk?
In the "old days" it was necessary to provide recording studios, press plastic records, bribe DJs, buy good reviews and coerce musicians into making records to order.
Nowadays, most of those functions can be bought-in by the artist themselves. Record companies are now recognised as a barrier rather than the "necessary evil" they once were.
If their demise means more poeple start producing music, themselves, then good luck. As always, some will suceed and some will fail. However the failures will only fail because of their own shortcomings, rather than industry politics, greed, marketing and (lack of) promotion.
If there's anything us normal people can do to help bury the record companies, just let us know
not because it doesn't work, but simply because it's such a dumb idea.
OK, I realise that most of the other replies are critical, too
Really this is just using tech. for it's own sake - and introducing a whole bunch of unnecessary problems into what is really a very simple procedure. Instead of a simple piece of rubber tube, with a "thingy" at each end you are now reliant on an embedded device with it's own power requirements, a link to a host PC with software compatability and yet more power requirements and finally the doctor or nurse wears a headphone to listen to exactly the same sounds they'd hear through a conventional stethoscope.
there is a slight glimmer of hope for this: remove the doctor.
If you can possibly make this device totally idiot-proof and throwaway cheap, it might just find a use for remote diagnostics, where a patient can self-monitor, upload their "swooshing" noises to an AI which does most of the work.
Of course this presuposes that the patient isn't too busy having a heart attack, and can get their PC connected up to the net, and the battery in the device hasn't gone flat, and the AI at the other end is working, and someone can take the necessary action (if needed).
On second thoughts, scrub the glimmer of hope. There are just too many things can go wrong
so when they get a commercial operation going, beaming gigawatts down at a similar radiation ('cos that's what it is) intensity to sunlight, how will that affect the wildlife? There's bound to be gaps in the receiver antenna array, if only to get maintenance vehicles into the place. That means there will be plants growing and they will therefore "see" the radiation. It won't be long before the radiation causes mutations and the plants start to adapt to it.
It could make the arguments about GM crops look like a polite debate
I've just finished some building work on my house. Some of the time I was wearing industrial thickness gloves, and sometimes not. As a result my fingers are now quite rough, with worn parts, small scratches and the like.
If someone was to take my fingerprints now (either with permission or against my will) and record them as "mine", what would be the situation when my hands healed? Would I forever be denied access to me because of the discrepancy, or would there be two me's, with different fingerprints - but otherwise identical.
Should I do more building work (or refrain from it) before I go to the US, or do the border controls send you home if it looks like your fingers have been tampered with?
There's a lot more to this biometric thing than meets the eye
Would this mean you can also see when your boss gets hauled up - even if no charges are brought, or he/she is acquitted?
First of all, it'll allow you to see, at the interview stage, if you'll be working for a bunch of crooks.
Second, if companies do start to take "brushes with the law" into account for career advancement, it sounds like a relative in law-enforcement could be the fast track to promotion.
that may be true in america, but for the other 95% of the world's population (including the 1/3rd who simply don't have any electricity at all, ever) aircon is simply not a factor.
With any luck they'll be the main beneficary of this tech.
While the sun might be strong enough at some locations to provide the headline power output for the price paid, is this only going to be on the equator in high summer?
Considering that (in most countries) more power is consumed during the winter months to keep warm, the power output from solar power is at it's lowest so more cells are needed than would be the case to generate the same amount of power during the summer. Likewise, the industrialised countries tend not to be in the areas of the globe that get the most sunshine.
What we really need to know is the cost (i.e. number of square metres) of cell needed to generate 1W of electricity at a given latitude at a given time of year. Until you get these numbers, all you have is marketing hype.
It has always been the case that people have been sensitive about nuclear installations. Whether it's the location of reactors (remember TMI?) or research labs. There have always been concerns about the possibility of aircraft hitting a reactor - although the idea that it might be flown deliberately into one is new - well 6 or 7 years old.
The reason terrorism works is because it does change the way people think. It's goal is to instil fear and it is obviously very successful at tapping into peoples' underlying anxieties. Just look at all the "security" features popping up everywhere.
In the past the cold war was the main source of fear and anxiety, although we didn't call it terrorism, because it came from a state rather than a political group. It did however change the way people thought and acted in exactly the same way as terrorism does.
Nothing's really changed
... the military outpost that is required to guard it is huge.
If you have a reactor that's 20 feet by 6 (by what? - that's only 2 dimensions) then it would fit nicely onto the back of a truck. You can't just plunk it down, hook it up and go on to install the next one. What's to stop the baddies from coming along, winching it up onto a rig and towing it off to extract the fissionables?
I'd guess that one of these would require a level of security commensurate with the threat. Hmmm, nuclear material - let's see would a couple of retired cops be enough?
First of all, there are no standards in IT security. You can't say "I'm trained in the XYZ" methodology. The only underlying principle in IT security is "Deny everything to everyone all the time" (Is there an acronym for that?). So as long as you keep this principle in mind you can't fail.
Here's the really good bit: the interviewer can't ask you questions about your past experience or clients, because that's confidential. If pressed you just need to say that "You wouldn't want me to talk to future employers about your security setup, so you must respect previous clients' confidentiality".
Now if you think this leads to:
no means of checking credentials
a job for life
the worse things get, the greater the need for security
an industry filled with the clueless (see #1)
a universal policy of "when in doubt reduce access even further"
... and if that didn't work, tighten it even more
total chaos, due to the lack of rigour and standards
No third world country would want a machine from the 1960's. As far as training goes, why would anyone want to learn a technology that was obsolete 30 years ago?
It's not as if an IBM 650 is like a modern computer, but a little slower or bigger. It would be more like TV sets from the same era.
As far as biodegradable goes, no. They're the exact opposite. Full of heavy metals and toxic compounds.
The good news is that almost every fact in the original article is wrong. The computer in question (an IBM650) had been replaced in 1965 by an upgraded model. The one that was "buried" was new in 2005. Although it was not "buried" at all - it was in all likelyhood sold off as scrap, since the price of metals such as copper has risen so much in recent years.
The box they actually "buried" (note, this is a journalistic misrepresentation - it was scrapped, not buried. The metals make it far too valuable to merely throw away) was a 60MIPS bottom of the range Amdahl. At current rates of conversion, that corresponds to about 4 or 5 modern PCs.
Typically a datacentre will have 1 admin person on shift for every 800-1200 PC type servers, as opposed to the specialised staff that a mainframe needs.
The servers need the same quality of power, cooling, maintenance, security and monitoring that a mainframe does, so there's very little difference - except you can place the servers in a single rack, using a fraction of the floorspace.
Also, mainframes too are usually replaced on a 3 - 5 year cycle in most places simply for economic reasons. New tech is faster, cheaper, more reliable and supportable. The story gives the impression that the university got rid of a 47 year old mainframe - they didn't. The box they "buried" was less than 10 years old and the nonsense about card readers and monthly rental costs is completely irrelevant to the removal of the Amdahl - it would never have any of these attributes.
Personally I doubt if the engineers who built these wonderful machines give a rat's.... about where they end up. After they've been paid it's on to the next and bigger and better project. Life's too short to shed a tear every time an obsolete, inefficient and crushingly expensive (we saved over $500k per year on power bills by replacing an ECL mainframe with a CMOS one) box gets scrapped.
These days with the price of metals, no-one in their right mind would dump one of these in landfill, they get shipped off to the third world and stripped for precious metals then ground up and re-smelted for all the others.
OK, this box might have started life in 1960 as an IBM, but it hasn't been one of those for many, many years. Like all good product lines IBM and Ahdahl have provided upgrade paths, so it stopped being it's original configuration before most slashdotters were born. I doubt that it has any of it's original parts left - not even the power plug.
In fact a Millenium 1015 is quite a recent mainframe - introduced in 2000, (hence the name) although the 1015 is the bottom of the range unit with just a single processor.
It would be nice if reporters actually researched this story instead of merely cat'n'pasting the whimsical and completely inaccurate press release.
OK, there are some tech support people who don't belong there, but for most of the "reboot and call me back if it happens again" types, hell's too good for them.
Maybe we should talk about which ring of hell (either Dante's version of Inferno or if you prefer, Niven & Pournelle's updated version) they all belong in.
biggest, oldest, features of people/animals long dead, planets very far away, new species.
All very nice in a "boys book of wonders" way, but very little in the way of actionable information. Maybe that's the way of pure science, but I was rather hoping that at least one of these discoveries would have a material effect on my life. (
(and no, I don't think mapping Craig Venter's gemone counts).
Mutation is not a "jump in a sequence". It's a new trait.
There is no sequence as there is no "path" that human evolution is following. It's a random selection of those who adapt best to changes in the environment surviving to sexual maturity. Nothing more.
The really interesting question would be: what are we evolving into?
All this means is they have a fixed idea of how it should be done and cannot bear to see it done any other way. Frequently (as you found to your cost) the final product is the result of trial-and-error techniques. It's very likely the original programmer thought of and tried the way it should be done, then found the flaws in this approach and adopted methods that produced the results.
It's equally likely that some of the ugly code in any implementation is to get around bugs in the development system, programs it interfaces with or even the O.S. itself. The inexperienced programmer only sees the ugliness of the end result, they assume that the original programmer was dumb/lazy/old-fashioned (because that's what they see in themselves?) and in their arrogance assume that there's nothing worth keeping and only a complete re-write will meet their high standards. If only this was
Usually none of the "experience" is documented - only a description of what a module does, not why that method was chosen.
Of course the BIG mistake is to only have one programmer. What happens when they take a break or leave? Everything stops.
(my favourite) The RIAA are getting tired of the "war" so they're engineering a victory. Look! our stats say we've won - we can stop now.
possibly the stats are over the summer, when the colleges were empty
Just like house prices, you can't draw any real conclusions from a single data point. Give it a year and see if there's still a downward trend or if this was just a blip
Slashdot Mirror
OK, I'm not a military man, but it seems to me that the first and most important lesson you want to teach troops is how not to die. Knowing how to squirt death around (preferably at the other guys, not your own side) is fine, provided you aren't dead or injured.
What video games teach is that you can do pretty much anything with impunity. The worst thing that happens to you is a sore thumb. If you use games as traning tools, you could well end up with a bunch of soldiers who think they are invincible - they'll soon learn otherwise.
Better, make sure there is no line of sight from the door to your desk. That way no-one can see if you're sitting behind it without coming into the room.
First of all, consider the safety aspects. If you're going to be the only human being in there, either by design or because any other team members will be absent for any length of time, what will you do if there's a fire in one of the racks, or an electrical accident?
Just installing fire-supression is more cure than prevention and it doesn't stop you getting injured if the fire is between you and the exit.
If you're surrounded by electrical equipment, I would hope you company would enforce a ban on liquids (coffee etc.) in the room. If they don't do this from the outset, they will as soon asn health and safety get sight of theplan - or someone spills a drink over the equipment. How will you deal with that?
Finally, expect that over time, more and more equipment will get moved into the room and it will encroach on your "office" space. Where will you personally draw the line? When it becomes a general store room? When the cleaner starts leaving their buckets on your desk?
in case the price drops $200 a couple of months later.
Nowadays, most of those functions can be bought-in by the artist themselves. Record companies are now recognised as a barrier rather than the "necessary evil" they once were.
If their demise means more poeple start producing music, themselves, then good luck. As always, some will suceed and some will fail. However the failures will only fail because of their own shortcomings, rather than industry politics, greed, marketing and (lack of) promotion.
If there's anything us normal people can do to help bury the record companies, just let us know
OK, I realise that most of the other replies are critical, too
Really this is just using tech. for it's own sake - and introducing a whole bunch of unnecessary problems into what is really a very simple procedure. Instead of a simple piece of rubber tube, with a "thingy" at each end you are now reliant on an embedded device with it's own power requirements, a link to a host PC with software compatability and yet more power requirements and finally the doctor or nurse wears a headphone to listen to exactly the same sounds they'd hear through a conventional stethoscope.
there is a slight glimmer of hope for this: remove the doctor.
If you can possibly make this device totally idiot-proof and throwaway cheap, it might just find a use for remote diagnostics, where a patient can self-monitor, upload their "swooshing" noises to an AI which does most of the work.
Of course this presuposes that the patient isn't too busy having a heart attack, and can get their PC connected up to the net, and the battery in the device hasn't gone flat, and the AI at the other end is working, and someone can take the necessary action (if needed).
On second thoughts, scrub the glimmer of hope. There are just too many things can go wrong
It could make the arguments about GM crops look like a polite debate
If someone was to take my fingerprints now (either with permission or against my will) and record them as "mine", what would be the situation when my hands healed? Would I forever be denied access to me because of the discrepancy, or would there be two me's, with different fingerprints - but otherwise identical.
Should I do more building work (or refrain from it) before I go to the US, or do the border controls send you home if it looks like your fingers have been tampered with?
There's a lot more to this biometric thing than meets the eye
First of all, it'll allow you to see, at the interview stage, if you'll be working for a bunch of crooks.
Second, if companies do start to take "brushes with the law" into account for career advancement, it sounds like a relative in law-enforcement could be the fast track to promotion.
With any luck they'll be the main beneficary of this tech.
While the sun might be strong enough at some locations to provide the headline power output for the price paid, is this only going to be on the equator in high summer?
Considering that (in most countries) more power is consumed during the winter months to keep warm, the power output from solar power is at it's lowest so more cells are needed than would be the case to generate the same amount of power during the summer. Likewise, the industrialised countries tend not to be in the areas of the globe that get the most sunshine.
What we really need to know is the cost (i.e. number of square metres) of cell needed to generate 1W of electricity at a given latitude at a given time of year.
Until you get these numbers, all you have is marketing hype.
The reason terrorism works is because it does change the way people think. It's goal is to instil fear and it is obviously very successful at tapping into peoples' underlying anxieties. Just look at all the "security" features popping up everywhere.
In the past the cold war was the main source of fear and anxiety, although we didn't call it terrorism, because it came from a state rather than a political group. It did however change the way people thought and acted in exactly the same way as terrorism does.
Nothing's really changed
If you have a reactor that's 20 feet by 6 (by what? - that's only 2 dimensions) then it would fit nicely onto the back of a truck. You can't just plunk it down, hook it up and go on to install the next one. What's to stop the baddies from coming along, winching it up onto a rig and towing it off to extract the fissionables?
I'd guess that one of these would require a level of security commensurate with the threat. Hmmm, nuclear material - let's see would a couple of retired cops be enough?
Here's the really good bit: the interviewer can't ask you questions about your past experience or clients, because that's confidential. If pressed you just need to say that "You wouldn't want me to talk to future employers about your security setup, so you must respect previous clients' confidentiality".
Now if you think this leads to:
- no means of checking credentials
- a job for life
- the worse things get, the greater the need for security
- an industry filled with the clueless (see #1)
- a universal policy of "when in doubt reduce access even further"
... and if that didn't work, tighten it even more- total chaos, due to the lack of rigour and standards
You'd be right. Now where do I signIt's not as if an IBM 650 is like a modern computer, but a little slower or bigger. It would be more like TV sets from the same era.
As far as biodegradable goes, no. They're the exact opposite. Full of heavy metals and toxic compounds.
The good news is that almost every fact in the original article is wrong. The computer in question (an IBM650) had been replaced in 1965 by an upgraded model. The one that was "buried" was new in 2005. Although it was not "buried" at all - it was in all likelyhood sold off as scrap, since the price of metals such as copper has risen so much in recent years.
Typically a datacentre will have 1 admin person on shift for every 800-1200 PC type servers, as opposed to the specialised staff that a mainframe needs.
The servers need the same quality of power, cooling, maintenance, security and monitoring that a mainframe does, so there's very little difference - except you can place the servers in a single rack, using a fraction of the floorspace.
Also, mainframes too are usually replaced on a 3 - 5 year cycle in most places simply for economic reasons. New tech is faster, cheaper, more reliable and supportable. The story gives the impression that the university got rid of a 47 year old mainframe - they didn't. The box they "buried" was less than 10 years old and the nonsense about card readers and monthly rental costs is completely irrelevant to the removal of the Amdahl - it would never have any of these attributes.
These days with the price of metals, no-one in their right mind would dump one of these in landfill, they get shipped off to the third world and stripped for precious metals then ground up and re-smelted for all the others.
In fact a Millenium 1015 is quite a recent mainframe - introduced in 2000, (hence the name) although the 1015 is the bottom of the range unit with just a single processor.
It would be nice if reporters actually researched this story instead of merely cat'n'pasting the whimsical and completely inaccurate press release.
Maybe we should talk about which ring of hell (either Dante's version of Inferno or if you prefer, Niven & Pournelle's updated version) they all belong in.
All very nice in a "boys book of wonders" way, but very little in the way of actionable information. Maybe that's the way of pure science, but I was rather hoping that at least one of these discoveries would have a material effect on my life. (
(and no, I don't think mapping Craig Venter's gemone counts).
There is no sequence as there is no "path" that human evolution is following. It's a random selection of those who adapt best to changes in the environment surviving to sexual maturity. Nothing more.
The really interesting question would be: what are we evolving into?
All this means is they have a fixed idea of how it should be done and cannot bear to see it done any other way. Frequently (as you found to your cost) the final product is the result of trial-and-error techniques. It's very likely the original programmer thought of and tried the way it should be done, then found the flaws in this approach and adopted methods that produced the results.
It's equally likely that some of the ugly code in any implementation is to get around bugs in the development system, programs it interfaces with or even the O.S. itself. The inexperienced programmer only sees the ugliness of the end result, they assume that the original programmer was dumb/lazy/old-fashioned (because that's what they see in themselves?) and in their arrogance assume that there's nothing worth keeping and only a complete re-write will meet their high standards. If only this was Usually none of the "experience" is documented - only a description of what a module does, not why that method was chosen.
Of course the BIG mistake is to only have one programmer. What happens when they take a break or leave? Everything stops.
- students have found ways to not be discovered
- the students have got all the stuff they want
- there's nothing much worth downloading at present
- (my favourite) The RIAA are getting tired of the "war" so they're engineering a victory. Look! our stats say we've won - we can stop now.
- possibly the stats are over the summer, when the colleges were empty
Just like house prices, you can't draw any real conclusions from a single data point. Give it a year and see if there's still a downward trend or if this was just a blipparticularly with this "type" of film, the drunker you are the funnier it seems.
won't the sync process do this for you already? You just have to make sure you have dirtied up some blocks every few minutes.