Sorry, do you routinely make decisions at your job which are likely to be nit picked by the general population (who lack context) and by elected officials (who lack backbones)? I've seen people make the right decision, seen the decision lambasted by the press, made a scapegoat by the board or city council, and "decide" soon thereafter to "retire early." It is entirely reasonable to consider the impact your decisions will have. That is kind of the point of democracy. This is what accountability looks like. It works well, and it works horribly. It's still the best thing we have.
I've seen a number of contracts go, not to the lowest bid, but to the bid by the incumbent because it was asserted that they have a proven ability to deliver.
Yeah, our incumbent had a proven inability to deliver.
None of the school districts I've worked with do anything other than full year or multi-year contracts. Because student enrollment on two days (one in October, one in February) determines annual funding in my state. The only way to control spending is be able to predict it, and that means longer contracts. Additionally, you must consider that our school districts have lost 3-5% of our funding every year for the past 14 years. Our state changed funding to be centrally funded, so millages cannot be levied (the money just goes to the state). Google "Michigan Proposal A 1995". All the money still goes to the state education fund along with lottery revenue, but it is routinely raided by the legislature (because the state is in so much trouble). Because so much of our tax money would go to Detroit schools, our citizens have little motivation to pass millages.
There's also two other issues going on here. First, this is a town of 50k people, surrounded by farmland, wilderness, and two other towns about the same size. The next town of larger size is over 100 miles away. Second, the vendors in our area only support one copier make. If you want Kyocera, you go with A, if you want Canon, you go with B. Why? There aren't enough customers to go around. At the time bidding closed, we only got two bids: one from the old vendor (that we were unhappy with for a variety of reasons, technical and business-wise) and one from this second vendor. Until they ran out of money, the business that failed provided excellent service and we had no complaints. This was a drastic improvement on our previous vendor. The current vendor is actually the company the techs from the failed company went to, so now we still get excellent service. (Yes, the current company that provides service now was a third make of copiers.)
Contracts are always granted to the lowest bidder. Think about what that means. You will always be hiring the guy who is cutting the most corners, hiring the fewest, least skilled workers, purchasing the lowest quality or oldest tools and materials, etc. The only time you don't go with the lowest bid is when you can show that there's something wrong with the bid itself (i.e., it missed one of the requirements).
Example: There was a contract for copier service and repair at one of the K-12 schools we supported. The contract bid was half that of the other bids. Indeed, it was half the cost of the previous contracts to support the same number of copiers. Even though this makes no sense, they got the contract. New copiers were leased and installed and users were trained. 8 months through the first year, the business ran out of money. They stopped responding to calls. Then we discovered that their techs had left for another service company because their paychecks bounced. The business filed for bankruptcy. The school had to hire another service company to support the next 6 months at higher expense while a new contract was bid. The new contract was more reasonable, but the copiers were a different make. So, new copiers were leased and installed and users were trained all over again. This is how government waste happens.
By the way, if you don't go with the lowest bid the citizens will inevitably complain to the city council or representative. They will do this anyways because Americans always complain, but when there's something a council member or rep can pin on you, well it's something you want to be able to justify. "I know these guys are shady" just isn't going to cut it in all cases.
I worked help desk in K12 education a few years ago. In one district we supported there was a teacher that routinely responded to every phishing email she got. Every "go to this site and enter your password" or "email us your username and password" email she got she would immediately respond to. About once every six weeks we would get a call from her saying she wasn't getting email. Well, the hackers would connect to her compromised email address and configure Outlook rules to delete all her email and forward the spam or command messages they were sending out. Every six weeks we would have to reset her account password, delete all the rules, and essentially rebuild her mailbox from scratch. Every time we did this we told her "We will never, ever ask for your password in an email or with a link in email. Emails saying as such will always be attempts to steal your account. Again." Then six weeks later....
The woman was lucky she worked for the smallest district we supported. All the other districts had computer security agreements that would've had her up for disciplinary action or termination, but this district did not because the superintendent did not see why it was necessary. We all agreed her blatant inability to learn was pretty depressing considering her profession, and that it was almost certain her repeated violations would constitute negligence and numerous FERPA violations.
The real difference is that at the end of the year, with MS, you still have closed software being managed by a mediocre admin and are pretty much limited to what the vendor wrote in the software and what your admin can find on google.
With the second option, you've still spent $60k, but you started with a much higher level of base competence and things usually go up from there. At the end of the year you have many more options and much more flexibility in what you're capable of, IT wise and business wise, with that higher level of competence.
The logic of this argument is quite common here on Slashdot, and that logic always escapes me. Everybody seems to acknowledge that a talented Linux sysadmin costs more than a mediocre Windows sysadmin. What I fail to understand is why a business is only presented with those two options. In reality, a business cares about money first and foremost. And the cost of your salary is usually quite a bit more than the cost difference between Windows Server and Red Hat Server. The reality is that a business is going to choose between a talented Linux sysadmin and a talented Windows admin (because they're willing to pay for talent) or they're going to choose between a mediocre Linux admin and a mediocre Windows admin (because they're not).
Slashdot seems to think there's no such thing as a talented Windows administrator. That's complete and utter bullshit. The concepts of administering Linux are not significantly different than those for administering Windows. I would go so far as to say that if you're unable to secure and manage a Windows network, you shouldn't be a sysadmin at all on any operating system. Windows is easy to administer. You read and reference the Resource Kit, research and follow best practice, and you will be absolutely fine. Just like on Linux. If you cannot do these things as a sysadmin, please quit your job. You're making the rest of us look bad.
The argument is like saying, "well, the average COBOL programmer costs quite a bit more than the average C programmer... clearly we should go where the talent is and program in COBOL!"
I also find it completely baffling that Slashdot seems to think that because you go with Linux, the business software you're going to run will use open source, too. More than that, that just because you hired a talented sysadmin you also hired a talented software developer. In my experience, sysadmins make horrible software developers because they do not develop robust solutions that adhere to development best practice. You end up with buggy, badly performing, un-maintainable software that may or may not function correctly. Similarly, software developers make horrible sysadmins, because they constantly do things that make their system work and compromise the integrity of everything else. You end up buggy, badly performing, un-maintainable computer systems that may or may not function correctly. The mindsets required to properly do software development and system administration are entirely different, and to do anything well requires focus and dedication. I would not look for the same talent in the same person any more than I would look for a writer to also be an editor, or an actor to also be a musician. Yes, it can be done, but generally it is the exceptions that prove the rule. Once a person chooses one path, they seldom cross to the other again.
Here's what you do. You start with the salary you want to pay. Now, you attach to that job requirements for a much higher qualified person. That is, if the salary is $50k a year, you ask for 10 years experience building widgets instead of 5. And you ask for every possible certification requirement. In this way, you set the bar for qualification very, very high, while the salary remains modest at best. The key is to specify every little thing you might want. There is no "we hire someone and train them on the job". That's for suckers.
Now, very, very few people will apply for that kind of job. It looks like they're asking for the world and giving you a pittance in return, and probably nothing very rewarding since be definition it will be something you've already done. The few people that do apply could be considered seriously, but honestly its not that important as long as there are very few remotely qualified applicants.. The goal is to show you've tried your best to find someone for this position and "the market just can't satisfy your needs". So you can get an H1B visa.
Now you can get to foreign countries that are used to a much lower salary and have a much larger pool of applicants. The important part here is that you *still* don't lower your requirements or increase your salary offer. Since people require a fraction of the income and you're more likely through sheer force of numbers to find applicants that actually meet your desired qualifications, you don't offend people with your requirements, and you find your golden boy candidate and pay him your modest salary. The extra cost associated with an H1B visa? You'd have had to pay more than that to get an American with those qualifications. You're actually running at a profit!
The worst part is this has the effect of raising the overall quality of available workers while lowering the quality of available jobs for the American worker. Other jobs that aren't playing the H1B game benefit because some highly qualified American actually wanted enough money to afford a house and feed his kids, so they take the other jobs.
This is how "entry level" came to have "requires 5 years experience" tacked on to it. Think about that for a minute.
See, I think this could be due to observation bias and a self-selecting bias. You're probably a good, upstanding citizen and so are the majority of your family and friends. Therefore, the vast majority of the police experiences you, your family, your friends, and your co-workers have is traffic tickets. This doesn't mean there *aren't* dozens of police who do nothing but write traffic tickets to earn money for the PD all day every day, but I don't believe that's all the cops are actually doing.
Looking at these pictures, though, these police cars are about as well camouflaged as the so-called "stealth" cars my local police department uses. Look guys, nobody other than cops has that much crap stuck to their dash, that many antennas attached to the car, or has hand-operated headlamps attached to the driver and passenger side windows. If you're aware at all and know what to look for, unmarked cars are as subtle as a fart on a long elevator ride.
HoN is the same genre, not the same game. It'd be like suggesting EverQuest instead of WoW, or Quake instead of Unreal Tournament, or Battlefield instead of Call of Duty. Yes, they're the same genre, same settings, and similar styles. The problem is you play these games to interact with your friends. If your plan is to meet your friends at McDonald's for lunch you don't decide to go to Burger King and expect to see your friends there, do you? If someone asks you to install Debian you don't install Red Hat or Slackware or BSD and tell them "they're both POSIX", do you?
I use modern computers. At work my computer has 32 GB of memory. At home I have 16 GB of memory. My laptop has 8 GB. I honestly could not care less how much memory Firefox uses because it can't use enough for any of these computers to care (Firefox being a 32-bit program) and I would rather the program use RAM (which is fast) instead of disk (which is slow).
I have better things to do using the web browser itself instead of incessantly complaining about the fact that the program that encompasses 80% of my home use as 30% of my work use uses an equally large amount of the resources of the computer. I want the personal computer to spend it's time running the programs I'm using. I don't want 90% of the fast resources to be always available and doing nothing whatsoever. If this were still 2006 or if we were talking about servers, the memory usage shtick would be a valid complaint. However, now that memory capacity is an order of magnitude greater than it was (thanks to 64-bit operating systems and lower cost per GB) and considering that web browsing is never something you should be doing on a server, it's really not a valid complaint anymore.
You're either doing something stupid (like running badly coded extensions), using ancient hardware (which can't keep up anyway), or just enjoying playing the same old song and dance over and over. The Firefox memory complaints were valid when there were actual memory leaks that might consume 90% of available system memory. That is no longer reality, and unless you're running beta and third party 64-bit builds, it's a technical impossibility.
All censorship is subject to special interests. By its very nature there are always at least two interested parties: those in the party who want to prevent a message from being communicated, and those in the party who are prevented from hearing the message. I suppose it's technically possible for those two parties to be identical, but that's usually called "willful ignorance" rather than "censorship."
Homeopathy refers to a specific form of alternative medicine, and one that boggles the rational mind. The basis is that "like cures like". That is to say, if you are poisoned, you can cure it by exposing yourself to more poison. If you have a disease, you can cure it by exposing yourself to more disease. Wait, it gets better. They say that diluting the substance increases it's potency. A 1:1 solution is diluted to 1:10 (called X1) or 1:100 (X2), but can be diluted to 1:1000000 (X6) or more. There are dilutions that go up to X24 (1 part in 10^24, which often means there will be no actual molecules of the substance in the dilution) and even higher such as X60 and X400. Yes, that's 1 part in 10^400. So, how does the active ingredient work? Well, you see, it imprints itself on the water! Water has memory, and this causes the healing! Scientific testing has shown that homeopathic cures are (unsurprisingly) just as effective as placebo. James Randi has famously taken massive overdoses of homeopathic cures and suffered absolutely no ill effects (or any effects at all, truly).
Acupuncture, on the other hand, has shown real beneficial effects under scientific observation, but it's mechanism of functioning is not well understood. That is to say, it works for many people but it's difficult to explain why and it does or does not. However, many organizations such as the WHO and NIH have recognized the benefits of acupuncture. There is debate about the efficacy of acupuncture, but at least it can be shown that you're doing something other than drinking water or eating a sugar pill.
In short, I agree acupuncture probably helped your cat, but it is an insult to everybody involved to call it "homeopathy".
Most insightful thing I've read on/. in ages. Well done!
I find it interesting how much what you're promoting mirrors Android development. I don't think that should be surprising.
I would like to reiterate: 1. Users are not developers. Don't act like they are. 2. Users do not want to be developers. You can't convince them that they do. 3. Users are not less important than developers. A developer without users is little more than a hobbyist.
Yes, this is a perfect situation for the false positive paradox. Essentially, unless the rate of false positives in the test is significantly lower than the number of perpetrators (which is anywhere from 1 in 8000 to 1 in several billion) then the test is useless.
This is the same reason the AMA said *not* be screening for prostate cancer may be preferable because the tests are inaccurate. Mathematically you're guaranteeing you would largely treat patients that were not ill, and since treatment is not without risk you're risking more casualties by testing than would succumb to the disease.
DNA evidence taken on this scale can be nothing more than circumstantial unless the test they use and the quality of forensic sample they have from the crime scene are accurate enough, and I can only hope the defense rakes the state over the coals if they screw it up. I honestly hope they get two unrelated positives, or one positive for a resident who has an air tight alibi.
You've got some flawed reasoning there, because if robots made the offending part it wouldn't have had metal debris in it.
It's worth noting at this point that there's a good chance the errant part was made by machine. Perhaps not a robot in the technical sense, but not a human either.
More to the point, the argument that humans will create flawed tools while robots will not is false on it's face. Robots are tools made by humans. What's to stop the robot from being flawed in the first place?
[Insert "it's turtles all the way down" reference here]
Wherever did you get that idea? NTFS gets as fragmented as any other filesystem, especially when available disk space drops below 20%. There are no filesystems that are immune to file fragmentation.
Consider this thought exercise: let's say the smallest size that can be allocated on a disk is 4KB. That's somewhat typical. Let's take a disk that's 40GB. Now, fill the disk full with 4KB files. Now delete every other file (i.e., if they were numbered, delete the odd ones). Now create a file that's 20GB. Guess what? It's highly fragmented. There is no filesystem that will get around that without a huge amount of work.
The Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) or possibly Application Virtualization (App-V) should be able to handle the cases where you're required to deploy software that the developers refuse to write correctly. It also offers the benefit of buffering the rest of the system against the stupidity of what is almost certainly particularly badly written code. It only makes sense if you have to do it on a large scale (our POS system could do the ACT treatment, but it's not worth it for 20 machines) but it does work very well.
Beware, though, that the Marketdroids appear to have pre-empted the App-V name to include cloud-based services (because buzzwords, I guess) so you might have to dig a bit more to find the right information if you decide to go that route. Here's some links to get you started:
It's not wrong. It is somewhat backwards in the connotations. I would say that CD-ROM discs are not in CD-R format, but that CD-Rs are in CD-ROM format.
Technically, he won't be sentenced until September, but given the fact that he's 68 and was found guilty on 45 felonies involving sexual abuse of boys that were between the ages of 10 and 12, he certainly will be in jail for the rest of his life.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, do you routinely make decisions at your job which are likely to be nit picked by the general population (who lack context) and by elected officials (who lack backbones)? I've seen people make the right decision, seen the decision lambasted by the press, made a scapegoat by the board or city council, and "decide" soon thereafter to "retire early." It is entirely reasonable to consider the impact your decisions will have. That is kind of the point of democracy. This is what accountability looks like. It works well, and it works horribly. It's still the best thing we have.
I've seen a number of contracts go, not to the lowest bid, but to the bid by the incumbent because it was asserted that they have a proven ability to deliver.
Yeah, our incumbent had a proven inability to deliver.
None of the school districts I've worked with do anything other than full year or multi-year contracts. Because student enrollment on two days (one in October, one in February) determines annual funding in my state. The only way to control spending is be able to predict it, and that means longer contracts. Additionally, you must consider that our school districts have lost 3-5% of our funding every year for the past 14 years. Our state changed funding to be centrally funded, so millages cannot be levied (the money just goes to the state). Google "Michigan Proposal A 1995". All the money still goes to the state education fund along with lottery revenue, but it is routinely raided by the legislature (because the state is in so much trouble). Because so much of our tax money would go to Detroit schools, our citizens have little motivation to pass millages.
There's also two other issues going on here. First, this is a town of 50k people, surrounded by farmland, wilderness, and two other towns about the same size. The next town of larger size is over 100 miles away. Second, the vendors in our area only support one copier make. If you want Kyocera, you go with A, if you want Canon, you go with B. Why? There aren't enough customers to go around. At the time bidding closed, we only got two bids: one from the old vendor (that we were unhappy with for a variety of reasons, technical and business-wise) and one from this second vendor. Until they ran out of money, the business that failed provided excellent service and we had no complaints. This was a drastic improvement on our previous vendor. The current vendor is actually the company the techs from the failed company went to, so now we still get excellent service. (Yes, the current company that provides service now was a third make of copiers.)
Contracts are always granted to the lowest bidder. Think about what that means. You will always be hiring the guy who is cutting the most corners, hiring the fewest, least skilled workers, purchasing the lowest quality or oldest tools and materials, etc. The only time you don't go with the lowest bid is when you can show that there's something wrong with the bid itself (i.e., it missed one of the requirements).
Example: There was a contract for copier service and repair at one of the K-12 schools we supported. The contract bid was half that of the other bids. Indeed, it was half the cost of the previous contracts to support the same number of copiers. Even though this makes no sense, they got the contract. New copiers were leased and installed and users were trained. 8 months through the first year, the business ran out of money. They stopped responding to calls. Then we discovered that their techs had left for another service company because their paychecks bounced. The business filed for bankruptcy. The school had to hire another service company to support the next 6 months at higher expense while a new contract was bid. The new contract was more reasonable, but the copiers were a different make. So, new copiers were leased and installed and users were trained all over again. This is how government waste happens.
By the way, if you don't go with the lowest bid the citizens will inevitably complain to the city council or representative. They will do this anyways because Americans always complain, but when there's something a council member or rep can pin on you, well it's something you want to be able to justify. "I know these guys are shady" just isn't going to cut it in all cases.
I worked help desk in K12 education a few years ago. In one district we supported there was a teacher that routinely responded to every phishing email she got. Every "go to this site and enter your password" or "email us your username and password" email she got she would immediately respond to. About once every six weeks we would get a call from her saying she wasn't getting email. Well, the hackers would connect to her compromised email address and configure Outlook rules to delete all her email and forward the spam or command messages they were sending out. Every six weeks we would have to reset her account password, delete all the rules, and essentially rebuild her mailbox from scratch. Every time we did this we told her "We will never, ever ask for your password in an email or with a link in email. Emails saying as such will always be attempts to steal your account. Again." Then six weeks later....
The woman was lucky she worked for the smallest district we supported. All the other districts had computer security agreements that would've had her up for disciplinary action or termination, but this district did not because the superintendent did not see why it was necessary. We all agreed her blatant inability to learn was pretty depressing considering her profession, and that it was almost certain her repeated violations would constitute negligence and numerous FERPA violations.
Why do you think these stories always involve cops doing this around a crowd of onlookers?
The same reason they put locks on the glass doors of convenience stores. To keep out inquisitive idiots.
The real difference is that at the end of the year, with MS, you still have closed software being managed by a mediocre admin and are pretty much limited to what the vendor wrote in the software and what your admin can find on google.
With the second option, you've still spent $60k, but you started with a much higher level of base competence and things usually go up from there. At the end of the year you have many more options and much more flexibility in what you're capable of, IT wise and business wise, with that higher level of competence.
The logic of this argument is quite common here on Slashdot, and that logic always escapes me. Everybody seems to acknowledge that a talented Linux sysadmin costs more than a mediocre Windows sysadmin. What I fail to understand is why a business is only presented with those two options. In reality, a business cares about money first and foremost. And the cost of your salary is usually quite a bit more than the cost difference between Windows Server and Red Hat Server. The reality is that a business is going to choose between a talented Linux sysadmin and a talented Windows admin (because they're willing to pay for talent) or they're going to choose between a mediocre Linux admin and a mediocre Windows admin (because they're not).
Slashdot seems to think there's no such thing as a talented Windows administrator. That's complete and utter bullshit. The concepts of administering Linux are not significantly different than those for administering Windows. I would go so far as to say that if you're unable to secure and manage a Windows network, you shouldn't be a sysadmin at all on any operating system. Windows is easy to administer. You read and reference the Resource Kit, research and follow best practice, and you will be absolutely fine. Just like on Linux. If you cannot do these things as a sysadmin, please quit your job. You're making the rest of us look bad.
The argument is like saying, "well, the average COBOL programmer costs quite a bit more than the average C programmer... clearly we should go where the talent is and program in COBOL!"
I also find it completely baffling that Slashdot seems to think that because you go with Linux, the business software you're going to run will use open source, too. More than that, that just because you hired a talented sysadmin you also hired a talented software developer. In my experience, sysadmins make horrible software developers because they do not develop robust solutions that adhere to development best practice. You end up with buggy, badly performing, un-maintainable software that may or may not function correctly. Similarly, software developers make horrible sysadmins, because they constantly do things that make their system work and compromise the integrity of everything else. You end up buggy, badly performing, un-maintainable computer systems that may or may not function correctly. The mindsets required to properly do software development and system administration are entirely different, and to do anything well requires focus and dedication. I would not look for the same talent in the same person any more than I would look for a writer to also be an editor, or an actor to also be a musician. Yes, it can be done, but generally it is the exceptions that prove the rule. Once a person chooses one path, they seldom cross to the other again.
I don't think you understand how the game works.
Here's what you do. You start with the salary you want to pay. Now, you attach to that job requirements for a much higher qualified person. That is, if the salary is $50k a year, you ask for 10 years experience building widgets instead of 5. And you ask for every possible certification requirement. In this way, you set the bar for qualification very, very high, while the salary remains modest at best. The key is to specify every little thing you might want. There is no "we hire someone and train them on the job". That's for suckers.
Now, very, very few people will apply for that kind of job. It looks like they're asking for the world and giving you a pittance in return, and probably nothing very rewarding since be definition it will be something you've already done. The few people that do apply could be considered seriously, but honestly its not that important as long as there are very few remotely qualified applicants.. The goal is to show you've tried your best to find someone for this position and "the market just can't satisfy your needs". So you can get an H1B visa.
Now you can get to foreign countries that are used to a much lower salary and have a much larger pool of applicants. The important part here is that you *still* don't lower your requirements or increase your salary offer. Since people require a fraction of the income and you're more likely through sheer force of numbers to find applicants that actually meet your desired qualifications, you don't offend people with your requirements, and you find your golden boy candidate and pay him your modest salary. The extra cost associated with an H1B visa? You'd have had to pay more than that to get an American with those qualifications. You're actually running at a profit!
The worst part is this has the effect of raising the overall quality of available workers while lowering the quality of available jobs for the American worker. Other jobs that aren't playing the H1B game benefit because some highly qualified American actually wanted enough money to afford a house and feed his kids, so they take the other jobs.
This is how "entry level" came to have "requires 5 years experience" tacked on to it. Think about that for a minute.
See, I think this could be due to observation bias and a self-selecting bias. You're probably a good, upstanding citizen and so are the majority of your family and friends. Therefore, the vast majority of the police experiences you, your family, your friends, and your co-workers have is traffic tickets. This doesn't mean there *aren't* dozens of police who do nothing but write traffic tickets to earn money for the PD all day every day, but I don't believe that's all the cops are actually doing.
Looking at these pictures, though, these police cars are about as well camouflaged as the so-called "stealth" cars my local police department uses. Look guys, nobody other than cops has that much crap stuck to their dash, that many antennas attached to the car, or has hand-operated headlamps attached to the driver and passenger side windows. If you're aware at all and know what to look for, unmarked cars are as subtle as a fart on a long elevator ride.
HoN is the same genre, not the same game. It'd be like suggesting EverQuest instead of WoW, or Quake instead of Unreal Tournament, or Battlefield instead of Call of Duty. Yes, they're the same genre, same settings, and similar styles. The problem is you play these games to interact with your friends. If your plan is to meet your friends at McDonald's for lunch you don't decide to go to Burger King and expect to see your friends there, do you? If someone asks you to install Debian you don't install Red Hat or Slackware or BSD and tell them "they're both POSIX", do you?
God, please, don't give them any ideas. Download.com has been the zit on the ass end of the Internet for over 15 years.
They really are just copying the iPad, aren't they?
I use modern computers. At work my computer has 32 GB of memory. At home I have 16 GB of memory. My laptop has 8 GB. I honestly could not care less how much memory Firefox uses because it can't use enough for any of these computers to care (Firefox being a 32-bit program) and I would rather the program use RAM (which is fast) instead of disk (which is slow).
I have better things to do using the web browser itself instead of incessantly complaining about the fact that the program that encompasses 80% of my home use as 30% of my work use uses an equally large amount of the resources of the computer. I want the personal computer to spend it's time running the programs I'm using. I don't want 90% of the fast resources to be always available and doing nothing whatsoever. If this were still 2006 or if we were talking about servers, the memory usage shtick would be a valid complaint. However, now that memory capacity is an order of magnitude greater than it was (thanks to 64-bit operating systems and lower cost per GB) and considering that web browsing is never something you should be doing on a server, it's really not a valid complaint anymore.
You're either doing something stupid (like running badly coded extensions), using ancient hardware (which can't keep up anyway), or just enjoying playing the same old song and dance over and over. The Firefox memory complaints were valid when there were actual memory leaks that might consume 90% of available system memory. That is no longer reality, and unless you're running beta and third party 64-bit builds, it's a technical impossibility.
All censorship is subject to special interests. By its very nature there are always at least two interested parties: those in the party who want to prevent a message from being communicated, and those in the party who are prevented from hearing the message. I suppose it's technically possible for those two parties to be identical, but that's usually called "willful ignorance" rather than "censorship."
Correct. A judge is not there to create law, only interpret it.
Is this dangerous? Absolutely. Call your damn congressman instead of bitching on the Internet and get the law changed to reflect the times.
Acupuncture has nothing to do with homeopathy.
Homeopathy refers to a specific form of alternative medicine, and one that boggles the rational mind. The basis is that "like cures like". That is to say, if you are poisoned, you can cure it by exposing yourself to more poison. If you have a disease, you can cure it by exposing yourself to more disease. Wait, it gets better. They say that diluting the substance increases it's potency. A 1:1 solution is diluted to 1:10 (called X1) or 1:100 (X2), but can be diluted to 1:1000000 (X6) or more. There are dilutions that go up to X24 (1 part in 10^24, which often means there will be no actual molecules of the substance in the dilution) and even higher such as X60 and X400. Yes, that's 1 part in 10^400. So, how does the active ingredient work? Well, you see, it imprints itself on the water! Water has memory, and this causes the healing! Scientific testing has shown that homeopathic cures are (unsurprisingly) just as effective as placebo. James Randi has famously taken massive overdoses of homeopathic cures and suffered absolutely no ill effects (or any effects at all, truly).
Acupuncture, on the other hand, has shown real beneficial effects under scientific observation, but it's mechanism of functioning is not well understood. That is to say, it works for many people but it's difficult to explain why and it does or does not. However, many organizations such as the WHO and NIH have recognized the benefits of acupuncture. There is debate about the efficacy of acupuncture, but at least it can be shown that you're doing something other than drinking water or eating a sugar pill.
In short, I agree acupuncture probably helped your cat, but it is an insult to everybody involved to call it "homeopathy".
Most insightful thing I've read on /. in ages. Well done!
I find it interesting how much what you're promoting mirrors Android development. I don't think that should be surprising.
I would like to reiterate:
1. Users are not developers. Don't act like they are.
2. Users do not want to be developers. You can't convince them that they do.
3. Users are not less important than developers. A developer without users is little more than a hobbyist.
Yes, this is a perfect situation for the false positive paradox. Essentially, unless the rate of false positives in the test is significantly lower than the number of perpetrators (which is anywhere from 1 in 8000 to 1 in several billion) then the test is useless.
This is the same reason the AMA said *not* be screening for prostate cancer may be preferable because the tests are inaccurate. Mathematically you're guaranteeing you would largely treat patients that were not ill, and since treatment is not without risk you're risking more casualties by testing than would succumb to the disease.
DNA evidence taken on this scale can be nothing more than circumstantial unless the test they use and the quality of forensic sample they have from the crime scene are accurate enough, and I can only hope the defense rakes the state over the coals if they screw it up. I honestly hope they get two unrelated positives, or one positive for a resident who has an air tight alibi.
Forensics is not a substitute for police work.
You've got some flawed reasoning there, because if robots made the offending part it wouldn't have had metal debris in it.
It's worth noting at this point that there's a good chance the errant part was made by machine. Perhaps not a robot in the technical sense, but not a human either.
More to the point, the argument that humans will create flawed tools while robots will not is false on it's face. Robots are tools made by humans. What's to stop the robot from being flawed in the first place?
[Insert "it's turtles all the way down" reference here]
Wherever did you get that idea? NTFS gets as fragmented as any other filesystem, especially when available disk space drops below 20%. There are no filesystems that are immune to file fragmentation.
Consider this thought exercise: let's say the smallest size that can be allocated on a disk is 4KB. That's somewhat typical. Let's take a disk that's 40GB. Now, fill the disk full with 4KB files. Now delete every other file (i.e., if they were numbered, delete the odd ones). Now create a file that's 20GB. Guess what? It's highly fragmented. There is no filesystem that will get around that without a huge amount of work.
The Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) or possibly Application Virtualization (App-V) should be able to handle the cases where you're required to deploy software that the developers refuse to write correctly. It also offers the benefit of buffering the rest of the system against the stupidity of what is almost certainly particularly badly written code. It only makes sense if you have to do it on a large scale (our POS system could do the ACT treatment, but it's not worth it for 20 machines) but it does work very well.
Beware, though, that the Marketdroids appear to have pre-empted the App-V name to include cloud-based services (because buzzwords, I guess) so you might have to dig a bit more to find the right information if you decide to go that route. Here's some links to get you started:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd562082(v=vs.85).aspx
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee461265(v=ws.10)
It's not wrong. It is somewhat backwards in the connotations. I would say that CD-ROM discs are not in CD-R format, but that CD-Rs are in CD-ROM format.
Obviously, he used the weirding way.
Technically, he won't be sentenced until September, but given the fact that he's 68 and was found guilty on 45 felonies involving sexual abuse of boys that were between the ages of 10 and 12, he certainly will be in jail for the rest of his life.
I give him 4 months, tops.