Are they telling us that Linux, that Open Source software, that the stuff not made by Microsoft has bugs? I am shocked, I tell you. Analyzing the past five years of OSS development, there is little doubt that Linux is still a long way from posing any serious threat to Microsoft's hegemony. The problems with Linux begin even before you get a chance to use the OS. So far only SuSE managed to produce a relatively simple and reliable installation process. If an average PC user with no Unix skills cannot even install Linux, should we be surprised by the tiny market niche occupied by this OS? Instead of fixing numerous bugs and improving the installation process, Linux developers seem to be spending an abnormal amount of time adding eye candy. Are they building the new Windows?
I just observed Firefox commit a harakiri on my Solaris 10 SunBlade 2000, leaving no clue as to the reason for the crash. Shit like that happens and I can live with it (as long as it doesn't happen too often). I also use Firefox on my Windows XP box and value its striking security edge over the IE6.
Whatever's under the hood of a modern browser, the overall visual appeal and performance is important. Ability to customize it to death has to be one of the key features. With IE7 you have to learn to live with too many choices made by its developers. The interface is static, inflexible and annoys the hell out of me.
I am not a big Windows critic: can't spit on something I productively and by choice use every day. However, IE7 seems to be just half a step in the right direction for Microsoft.
Just tried the demo version of ChatterBlocker. From reading the description on their site, I imagined this to be some sort of active sound cancellation software. It's not. No microphone is required. It just loops through pre-recorded sound samples. The effect is more annoying than any office chatter.
The military already has stuff like that. This is where Sun is getting the idea. In everyday life this should be useful by dropping this datacenter-in-a-box in, say, India and in two minutes you have instant outsourcing. Sun should really start by improving their customer support. I remember the time when Platinum support from Sun meant a Sun field tech on site within two hours. Now the best you can get from them in two hours is an automated email. I deal with this kind of crap while sitting in a Lazyboy inside a nice office with a cup of good coffee. If I had to do my job from a 10x20 metal container... God, what an awful thought. I was going to come with one of those Soviet Russia jokes, but I lived there and it wasn't half as bad.
Covering for one's incompetence by blaming the competition is a way of life in business. It's just that in this particular case this widely-accepted practice is likely to backfire. Apple's attempt to blame its lack of quality control and questionable production practices on Microsoft is as hollow as it is ridiculous. I never owned an Apple computer or any other Apple gadgets. They do look nice at the local Microcenter, though. My poor student days are a distant past now, so the issue here is not the cost of Apple toys. I know Apple enjoys a near-religious following from its user base. I see no objective, technical reasons for that. I find Apple users glorifying their overpriced hardware more disturbing then Scientology nuts knocking on my door at ten o'clock at night. It seems that this kind of insanity permeated to the very top of Apple's corporate structure, causing the kind of imbecilic damage control efforts we see today.
Is this new information? I was not aware that the Chernobyl accident was caused by a design flaw. The accepted cause of the accident was human error. Some local genius at the plant decided to get creative during a planned experiment. If you are referring to the design flaw theory put forth by Valeri Legasov, his point of view was never widely accepted. The bottom line, enough mistakes have been made by the plant's personnel to make any "design flaw" theory redundant. True, a different type of a reactor design would have been more tolerant to human error. However, there are no fool-proof designs, as far as I know.
If they failed to properly detonate a plutonium device, the resulting 'fizzled' explosion would not have caused that big boom they detected in Russia and Japan. Equally, I find it hard to believe that anyone would go through the trouble of piling up and detonating thousands of tonnes of explosives just to make an impression. I think the most plausible explanation is that NK has a limited amount of fissionable material for their testing, so they are going for low-yield tests. In terms of scientific data, there is nothing you can get from a high-yield test that you can't get from a low-yield one.
I am not the greatest of physicists, but it is news to me that thousands of tonnes of explosives are required to initiate a chain reaction in plutonium-based nuclear weapon. How would this work: a plane with a nuclear bomb is followed by a train full of dynamite?
If the reaction "fizzled" and the magnitude 4 earthquake recorded by Japan, South Kora, and Russia was solely the result of conventional explosives, this would be something new in the world of nuclear weapons design.
Russians estimated 5kt - 15kt "definitely nuclear" explosion. This might have been a scaled-down test. As far as nuclear tests go, a small boom is as good as a big one for gathering scientific data.
I just find it hard to believe that North Koreans packed 5,000,000 kilos of TNT into a hole in the ground and blew it up just for shits and giggles.
I'd probably be a millionaire by now if it wasn't for computers and the xbox. But then again, if it wasn't for computers, I'd be unemployed. Based on the time killed, I aguess here are my top five:
What a waste of time and cash. If this is about machine learning, this guy is years behind. If this is about a computer playing drums, just buy a drum machine from Yamaha and be happy. The most impressive piece of technology in these video clips is that big Apple monitor on this dude's desk. As to a machine playing drums, I've seen one in a museum. It was made in 1800s and will give this computerized plywood wonder a run for its money.
In Soviet Russia they couldn't afford that many cameras. I'll have to agree with Marx, Capitalism is a required step on your way to Communism. Otherwise where are you gonna get the cash for all the cops, cameras, and prisons?
In the project they use elements of a consumer air ionizer. These devices create negatively-charged ions. These are attracted by dust and smoke particles, causing the latter to fall to the ground or be attracted to positively-charged surfaces.
"All the affected airborne particles ultimately wind up on surfaces close to the ioniser, making the area immediately surrounding the ioniser dirty..." (Wikipedia). The more dirt sticks to the ionizer, the less air it is able to move. anufacturers of Ionic Breeze and other such devices recommend cleaning the metal plates every couple of days. This is probably not a very practical solution for a PC. However, it's an interesting experiment.
Actually, from first-hand experience I can tell you that we (in the US) most definitely live in a developed Socialist society. You just never lived in the USSR, I assume. Back to the patent/licensing issue, though. I agree, if I come up with something useful that also happens to be in demand, I would like my share of the pie. I see no reason why anyone should enjoy the fruits of my labor for free, unless I want them to. This is regardless of whether someone uses my work directly or tries to build on top of it - I would want a piece of the action.
I guess, in a situation like this, it all boils down to whether or not I, the patent holder, and the potential licensees want to be reasonable. These two definitions of what's "reasonable" quickly grow apart as the amount of potential profit increases. It's OK to be greedy. If in the end that MP3 costs too much for the target consumer, then everyone will lose and new arrangements will be made. On the other hand, patents should never stand in the way of progress. Patents are routinely used to squash competition and unfairly increase the profit margin at the consumer's expense.
The entire patent system is a part of our society. It should benefit the society. And if it doesn't, then it should be swapped for something more user friendly, regardless of whether the users are capitalist conservatives or pinko commies.
SMART-1 uses Hall effect thrusters. These have been flown on dozens of Russian spacecraft over the past thirty years. So, I wouldn't neccessarily say that SMART-1 is such an interesting development. However, SMART-1 is the first non-Russian space vehicle to use such an engine. This in itself is very interesting, considering that the first ion thruster (based on a different principle, though) was invented in the US back in the 60s. I wonder why such delay, considering all the advantages offered by ion thrusters.
Back in the days, some professors I knew would have been most disturbed by a camera in the classroom. One of those professors was deriving Ohm's law and got I=R/V. He then erased everything from the board, picked up his lecture notes and derived the law again. Again he got I=R/V. I would have loved to have that on video.
Another professor I had for one of my math courses had such a heavy Chinese accent that some students asked to write on the board whatever he was saying. He was happy to oblige. The problem was that nobody in the class could read Chinese. At least that's what it looked like from where I was sitting.
I'd say just make those lecture podcasts available online shortly after the lecture. Restrict access only to students registered for that course. Attendance is not going to be affected by this. Those with a habit of skipping classes will continue on their course. This does not define them as bad students: bad grades do. After all, you still let students to take their textbooks home. Think about it: this might encourage them to actually read the book and not come to the next lecture.
I have a Windows box at home I use for some work-related stuff. I have about 200Gb of changing data that I need backed up regularly. After messin' around with some backup software and hardware, I settled on an external 300Gb USB 2 drive and this simple command saved as a *.bat file and executed from Task Scheduler every night:
xcopy/CEDY "C:\" "U:\"
Works just fine at no additional software cost.
Before that I tried an old version of Backup Exec and the latest version of Acronis TrueImage and a few other programs. They all have some drawbacks: too complicated, not automated enough, only work with removable media, too CPU or memory intensive, or some other nonsense.
When it comes to backups, simpler is better. HD to HD backups is the way to go. Compressing data is a bad idea. Creating multi-volume backups that span removable media is an even worse idea. I am talking about backups for your home PC, of course. I doubt too many of us can afford a robotic tape library and a NetBackup server.
As a sysadmin I know a thing or two about the way our HR operates. They have things well automated. Emails with job inquiries and resumes are automatically processed and added to the database. They run keyword searches against that database when looking for someone with a specific skillset. Hence the importance of having two versions of your resume: one for sending to specific individuals who might actually read it; and another one optimized for a keyword search.
Let's say they are looking for a sysadmin for their Red Hat cluster. An opening listing appears in the database that says "Red Hat, cluster, system administrator, unix". If you are a Red Hat expert but your resume just says "Linux", you are out of luck. You need to always keep in mind that in many large companies these things are handled by dedicated HR personnel who have no clue about the technical aspects of the job position in question. You goal at this stage is just to get your foot in the door.
As a sysadmin with dozens of busy systems and hundreds of users to support, my e-mail box was constantly over disk quota. So I increased my quota. Then I just forwarded all of my Exchange email to my Unix mailbox, where it is scanned by a script. If the email meets certain criteria (certain keywords in the sender, subject or body fields), the message gets "escalated" - sent back to my Exchange account with a modified subject line.
This is a great way to deal with hundreds of emails every day. Otherwise I wouldn't get any real work done. People who worked with me long enough know that I will respond quickly to their emergencies, while my responses to lesser issues might take days or even weeks. Sometimes there's a problem user who demands immediate response to some trivial question and spams everyone's mailbox. I lower their email box quota below their current usage. That usually gets them off my back for a day or two.
The most important thing is to let your boss get used to the fact that his emails get no priority with you. This takes some time.
There is a difference between working "fine" and working reliably. Working "fine" is for managers. Being rated to work reliably is for the engineers. So who's driving this project? As far as electronic shielding, you assume that someone is going to listen to their chatter. Possibly. But most likely, someone may try to jam their systems with EMC or knock it out completely with EMP.
I guess Lockheed's assumption here is that these are Coast Guard vessels and the most advanced enemy they will have to fight are the Colombians. Probably, but this can change. And it's certainly no reason to shortchange the Service or rip off the taxpayers.
What would get me away from my computer and cause me to get my lazy ass over to a music store to buy some overpriced CD? Free apple-glazed jelly doughnuts. But seriously, I have thousands of MP3s (all of them absolutely legal, naturally...), well tagged and organized. However, there's little pride that comes with such a collection. Everyone and their uncle have tons of MP3s. I even sold my iPod on ebay ever since my boss got one.
Why do people collect stamps and not digital photos of stamps? Because there is some material value in the former and none in the latter. When someone comes over to my house and I wish to brag, I don't show them a CD folder and say: "Hey, here are the hundreds of movies I ripped." No, I show them my collection of thousands of DVDs that cost me lots of money.
Music CDs and CD cases look too utilitarian. There's no art there other than music on the CD. Perhaps the industry should think about redesigning the old and tired jewel case. Make it the size of an LP case. I am not joking: if I am to spend $20-30 on a CD album it might as well come with 12 x 12 cover art.
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Are they telling us that Linux, that Open Source software, that the stuff not made by Microsoft has bugs? I am shocked, I tell you. Analyzing the past five years of OSS development, there is little doubt that Linux is still a long way from posing any serious threat to Microsoft's hegemony. The problems with Linux begin even before you get a chance to use the OS. So far only SuSE managed to produce a relatively simple and reliable installation process. If an average PC user with no Unix skills cannot even install Linux, should we be surprised by the tiny market niche occupied by this OS? Instead of fixing numerous bugs and improving the installation process, Linux developers seem to be spending an abnormal amount of time adding eye candy. Are they building the new Windows?
I just observed Firefox commit a harakiri on my Solaris 10 SunBlade 2000, leaving no clue as to the reason for the crash. Shit like that happens and I can live with it (as long as it doesn't happen too often). I also use Firefox on my Windows XP box and value its striking security edge over the IE6.
Whatever's under the hood of a modern browser, the overall visual appeal and performance is important. Ability to customize it to death has to be one of the key features. With IE7 you have to learn to live with too many choices made by its developers. The interface is static, inflexible and annoys the hell out of me.
I am not a big Windows critic: can't spit on something I productively and by choice use every day. However, IE7 seems to be just half a step in the right direction for Microsoft.
Just tried the demo version of ChatterBlocker. From reading the description on their site, I imagined this to be some sort of active sound cancellation software. It's not. No microphone is required. It just loops through pre-recorded sound samples. The effect is more annoying than any office chatter.
The military already has stuff like that. This is where Sun is getting the idea. In everyday life this should be useful by dropping this datacenter-in-a-box in, say, India and in two minutes you have instant outsourcing. Sun should really start by improving their customer support. I remember the time when Platinum support from Sun meant a Sun field tech on site within two hours. Now the best you can get from them in two hours is an automated email. I deal with this kind of crap while sitting in a Lazyboy inside a nice office with a cup of good coffee. If I had to do my job from a 10x20 metal container... God, what an awful thought. I was going to come with one of those Soviet Russia jokes, but I lived there and it wasn't half as bad.
Din't do a very good job, now did he? As they say, eugenics starts at home.
Covering for one's incompetence by blaming the competition is a way of life in business. It's just that in this particular case this widely-accepted practice is likely to backfire. Apple's attempt to blame its lack of quality control and questionable production practices on Microsoft is as hollow as it is ridiculous. I never owned an Apple computer or any other Apple gadgets. They do look nice at the local Microcenter, though. My poor student days are a distant past now, so the issue here is not the cost of Apple toys. I know Apple enjoys a near-religious following from its user base. I see no objective, technical reasons for that. I find Apple users glorifying their overpriced hardware more disturbing then Scientology nuts knocking on my door at ten o'clock at night. It seems that this kind of insanity permeated to the very top of Apple's corporate structure, causing the kind of imbecilic damage control efforts we see today.
Is this new information? I was not aware that the Chernobyl accident was caused by a design flaw. The accepted cause of the accident was human error. Some local genius at the plant decided to get creative during a planned experiment. If you are referring to the design flaw theory put forth by Valeri Legasov, his point of view was never widely accepted. The bottom line, enough mistakes have been made by the plant's personnel to make any "design flaw" theory redundant. True, a different type of a reactor design would have been more tolerant to human error. However, there are no fool-proof designs, as far as I know.
If they failed to properly detonate a plutonium device, the resulting 'fizzled' explosion would not have caused that big boom they detected in Russia and Japan. Equally, I find it hard to believe that anyone would go through the trouble of piling up and detonating thousands of tonnes of explosives just to make an impression. I think the most plausible explanation is that NK has a limited amount of fissionable material for their testing, so they are going for low-yield tests. In terms of scientific data, there is nothing you can get from a high-yield test that you can't get from a low-yield one.
I am not the greatest of physicists, but it is news to me that thousands of tonnes of explosives are required to initiate a chain reaction in plutonium-based nuclear weapon. How would this work: a plane with a nuclear bomb is followed by a train full of dynamite?
If the reaction "fizzled" and the magnitude 4 earthquake recorded by Japan, South Kora, and Russia was solely the result of conventional explosives, this would be something new in the world of nuclear weapons design.
Russians estimated 5kt - 15kt "definitely nuclear" explosion. This might have been a scaled-down test. As far as nuclear tests go, a small boom is as good as a big one for gathering scientific data.
I just find it hard to believe that North Koreans packed 5,000,000 kilos of TNT into a hole in the ground and blew it up just for shits and giggles.
We are blessed to have his benevolent gaze shining over our great nation.
Yeah, I also think Bush is our greatest President yet.
It is a well known fact that the biggest security flaw in Unix is the sysadmin. Years of typing su - root make you feel invincible :-)
I'd probably be a millionaire by now if it wasn't for computers and the xbox. But then again, if it wasn't for computers, I'd be unemployed. Based on the time killed, I aguess here are my top five:
And now back to Tetris...
What a waste of time and cash. If this is about machine learning, this guy is years behind. If this is about a computer playing drums, just buy a drum machine from Yamaha and be happy. The most impressive piece of technology in these video clips is that big Apple monitor on this dude's desk. As to a machine playing drums, I've seen one in a museum. It was made in 1800s and will give this computerized plywood wonder a run for its money.
Went to their Web site and clicked on one of the video links. It says "object not found". Invisible indeed.
In Soviet Russia they couldn't afford that many cameras. I'll have to agree with Marx, Capitalism is a required step on your way to Communism. Otherwise where are you gonna get the cash for all the cops, cameras, and prisons?
In the project they use elements of a consumer air ionizer. These devices create negatively-charged ions. These are attracted by dust and smoke particles, causing the latter to fall to the ground or be attracted to positively-charged surfaces.
"All the affected airborne particles ultimately wind up on surfaces close to the ioniser, making the area immediately surrounding the ioniser dirty..." (Wikipedia). The more dirt sticks to the ionizer, the less air it is able to move. anufacturers of Ionic Breeze and other such devices recommend cleaning the metal plates every couple of days. This is probably not a very practical solution for a PC. However, it's an interesting experiment.
Actually, from first-hand experience I can tell you that we (in the US) most definitely live in a developed Socialist society. You just never lived in the USSR, I assume. Back to the patent/licensing issue, though. I agree, if I come up with something useful that also happens to be in demand, I would like my share of the pie. I see no reason why anyone should enjoy the fruits of my labor for free, unless I want them to. This is regardless of whether someone uses my work directly or tries to build on top of it - I would want a piece of the action.
I guess, in a situation like this, it all boils down to whether or not I, the patent holder, and the potential licensees want to be reasonable. These two definitions of what's "reasonable" quickly grow apart as the amount of potential profit increases. It's OK to be greedy. If in the end that MP3 costs too much for the target consumer, then everyone will lose and new arrangements will be made. On the other hand, patents should never stand in the way of progress. Patents are routinely used to squash competition and unfairly increase the profit margin at the consumer's expense.
The entire patent system is a part of our society. It should benefit the society. And if it doesn't, then it should be swapped for something more user friendly, regardless of whether the users are capitalist conservatives or pinko commies.
SMART-1 uses Hall effect thrusters. These have been flown on dozens of Russian spacecraft over the past thirty years. So, I wouldn't neccessarily say that SMART-1 is such an interesting development. However, SMART-1 is the first non-Russian space vehicle to use such an engine. This in itself is very interesting, considering that the first ion thruster (based on a different principle, though) was invented in the US back in the 60s. I wonder why such delay, considering all the advantages offered by ion thrusters.
Back in the days, some professors I knew would have been most disturbed by a camera in the classroom. One of those professors was deriving Ohm's law and got I=R/V. He then erased everything from the board, picked up his lecture notes and derived the law again. Again he got I=R/V. I would have loved to have that on video.
Another professor I had for one of my math courses had such a heavy Chinese accent that some students asked to write on the board whatever he was saying. He was happy to oblige. The problem was that nobody in the class could read Chinese. At least that's what it looked like from where I was sitting.
I'd say just make those lecture podcasts available online shortly after the lecture. Restrict access only to students registered for that course. Attendance is not going to be affected by this. Those with a habit of skipping classes will continue on their course. This does not define them as bad students: bad grades do. After all, you still let students to take their textbooks home. Think about it: this might encourage them to actually read the book and not come to the next lecture.
I have a Windows box at home I use for some work-related stuff. I have about 200Gb of changing data that I need backed up regularly. After messin' around with some backup software and hardware, I settled on an external 300Gb USB 2 drive and this simple command saved as a *.bat file and executed from Task Scheduler every night:
/CEDY "C:\" "U:\"
xcopy
Works just fine at no additional software cost.
Before that I tried an old version of Backup Exec and the latest version of Acronis TrueImage and a few other programs. They all have some drawbacks: too complicated, not automated enough, only work with removable media, too CPU or memory intensive, or some other nonsense.
When it comes to backups, simpler is better. HD to HD backups is the way to go. Compressing data is a bad idea. Creating multi-volume backups that span removable media is an even worse idea. I am talking about backups for your home PC, of course. I doubt too many of us can afford a robotic tape library and a NetBackup server.
As a sysadmin I know a thing or two about the way our HR operates. They have things well automated. Emails with job inquiries and resumes are automatically processed and added to the database. They run keyword searches against that database when looking for someone with a specific skillset. Hence the importance of having two versions of your resume: one for sending to specific individuals who might actually read it; and another one optimized for a keyword search.
Let's say they are looking for a sysadmin for their Red Hat cluster. An opening listing appears in the database that says "Red Hat, cluster, system administrator, unix". If you are a Red Hat expert but your resume just says "Linux", you are out of luck. You need to always keep in mind that in many large companies these things are handled by dedicated HR personnel who have no clue about the technical aspects of the job position in question. You goal at this stage is just to get your foot in the door.
Put the phrase "penis/breasts enlargement cream" in the subject. This always gets noticed.
As a sysadmin with dozens of busy systems and hundreds of users to support, my e-mail box was constantly over disk quota. So I increased my quota. Then I just forwarded all of my Exchange email to my Unix mailbox, where it is scanned by a script. If the email meets certain criteria (certain keywords in the sender, subject or body fields), the message gets "escalated" - sent back to my Exchange account with a modified subject line.
This is a great way to deal with hundreds of emails every day. Otherwise I wouldn't get any real work done. People who worked with me long enough know that I will respond quickly to their emergencies, while my responses to lesser issues might take days or even weeks. Sometimes there's a problem user who demands immediate response to some trivial question and spams everyone's mailbox. I lower their email box quota below their current usage. That usually gets them off my back for a day or two.
The most important thing is to let your boss get used to the fact that his emails get no priority with you. This takes some time.
There is a difference between working "fine" and working reliably. Working "fine" is for managers. Being rated to work reliably is for the engineers. So who's driving this project? As far as electronic shielding, you assume that someone is going to listen to their chatter. Possibly. But most likely, someone may try to jam their systems with EMC or knock it out completely with EMP.
I guess Lockheed's assumption here is that these are Coast Guard vessels and the most advanced enemy they will have to fight are the Colombians. Probably, but this can change. And it's certainly no reason to shortchange the Service or rip off the taxpayers.
What would get me away from my computer and cause me to get my lazy ass over to a music store to buy some overpriced CD? Free apple-glazed jelly doughnuts. But seriously, I have thousands of MP3s (all of them absolutely legal, naturally...), well tagged and organized. However, there's little pride that comes with such a collection. Everyone and their uncle have tons of MP3s. I even sold my iPod on ebay ever since my boss got one.
Why do people collect stamps and not digital photos of stamps? Because there is some material value in the former and none in the latter. When someone comes over to my house and I wish to brag, I don't show them a CD folder and say: "Hey, here are the hundreds of movies I ripped." No, I show them my collection of thousands of DVDs that cost me lots of money.
Music CDs and CD cases look too utilitarian. There's no art there other than music on the CD. Perhaps the industry should think about redesigning the old and tired jewel case. Make it the size of an LP case. I am not joking: if I am to spend $20-30 on a CD album it might as well come with 12 x 12 cover art.