My dad's almost 70 and a few years ago, after constant problems with Windows, he decided (on his own) to buy a system with Linspire. He loved it! He called me and was very excited about how easy it was to download all kinds of useful applications, but the one piece that was still missing was an accounting package that he liked. The accounting was for my Mom's business (she uses a Mac Mini, but the accounting was still handled separately on a Windows system).
Recently, somehow (despite numerous precautions on their part) malware still made it onto the Windows system. He reformatted the Windows system, reinstalled the accounting software, disabled networking and changed all of his online passwords (just in case) and transfers files via disks. I told him he ought to just get a VM, run Windows on that with networking disabled and use a shared folder to transfer files. The only choice left is whether to use Linux or a Mac (I think he's leaning toward the Mac because their TV just went out, he wants to get HDTV and hear about the Apple TV). I probably won't hear about it again until he's got a new system configured VM and all. There was a time years back when I was constantly handling his tech support.
Just goes to show that you're never too old to learn. And studies have shown that it improves one's health, too. Of course, it helps that he started his career working for IBM. He always liked idea of PCs but hated the implementation (probably explains his attraction for Linux, even though had never used Unix).
As has been mentioned by others, incline settings and lack of wind as a cooling factor can counter the lack of wind resistance. I have a treadmill that has a minimum incline of 1% (which is the setting I use except when running hill intervals when I crank it up to 8%). I'm never able to run as fast on the treadmill as I can outside -- I'm usually about 0.2 mph slower on the treadmill and on a good day 0.1 mph slower. The speed/pace reading from my foot pod agrees with the treadmill setting, so it's not a calibration issue, either (and my foot pod deviates 1% from my GPS except over very short distances).
That's funny, because the only reason I buy DRM is so I can pay less to get ringtones. For example, go to iTunes, download the ST:TOS theme song (not the whole album of themes and incidental music from every spin-off). Burn it to CD, import as mp3, clip the exact portion I want for the ring (this is the part I like best, because I don't have to rely on the taste of the person who selected the sample for the phone), and transfer it to my phone. And it's not like my phone is Hi-Fi.
I wouldn't be so quick to discount this as a major source of many instances of ball lightning. For starters, Silicon is the most common solid element on Earth, so there is plenty around. And I see no reason to think that Silicon would be the only element or molecule that could produce this effect. Also, the experimenters are also dealing with much less energy than a real lightning strike and much purer silicon than lightning would hit. Given higher energy (heat) and less silicon you might see something that would float more.
This reminds me of something I saw years ago that wasn't quite ball lightning but had similarities. My wife and I were driving along some major power lines in Bloomington, IN, when lightning struck a transformer behind us (I saw it in the rear view mirror). A glowing, greenish ball streaked down one of the lines and passed our car leaving a long, thick trail behind. It was much like a cross between a phaser and photon torpedo effect in Star Trek... very cool. I'm not sure if there's much silicon in a transformer, but copper might explain the green color.
I've seem them and probably have some tucked away somewhere around the house. But part of the original problem with the $2 bill and the $1 coin was that most tills have no slot for them (and most vending machines wouldn't take them). Get rid of the nickel and the penny and you have room for both. I haven't used a cash register in decades, so it may be that the half dollar slot is now used for dollar coins (that's where we put them in the 70s). Around here most of the vending machines and parking meters take one dollar coins now.
Ah, but you neglect to notice just how far ahead of the curve the imperial system was. Think of the computers. Everything is in binary. Floating point 1/2, 1/8, 1/16... is all exactly represented in binary whereas metric is rife with rounding errors. Now if we could just convert our currency back to bits. Nickels and pennies are becoming more of an annoyance than useful, so one bit (12.5 cents) would make a reasonable smallest coin. And then follow the Canadians and add a $2 coin.
I don't think the reverse IP requirement would be workable. Many mail servers are private addresses behind a NAT/PAT/firewall, so the first hop would have a meaningless address. Even if you went with the first hop on the private side, there may be a single IP address handling many names.
I like the idea of a cryptographic chain of authentication -- even if it is not universally adopted, it would speed up processing of good mail, and as more servers adopted it, pressure would increase on the non-adopters as senders become more frustrated with the false positives stopping their legitimate messages.
You're correct. I make a BlueTooth connection to my (Cingular) Motorola RAZR and can drag and drop files between the devices. I downloaded an MP3 edit and take snippets of music to make ring tones (even via iTunes by burning the song(s) to CD, converting to MP3 and back to the phone -- Hello ST:TOS theme). And OS/X iSync recognize the phone and syncs my Calendar and Address Book (I set up a smart list in the address book to sync only those contacts I wanted on the phone).
Is that 1.5% of taxable wages a fixed percentage for everyone or is there a sliding scale? In the US Medicare is 1.45% of taxable wages (the employer matches that for a total of 2.9%) and isn't even enough to cover the cost of the retired population let alone the entire population. I know that the medical system here is seriously flawed and inefficient, but I can't believe it's that out of whack.
My (family) coverage runs about 3% of my taxable salary, but I'm only paying 20% of the insurance bill (the employer covers the other 80%). I'm also on the high end of the pay scale for a programmer/architect, so the percentages would be significantly higher for the typical employee. Plus, I just switched from HMO to PPO because the costs were about 67% lower and my family is healthy (we also have a HRA option, but I'm not willing to take the risks with the enormous potential annual outlay if something serious happened).
But having all of these options is partially indicative of how messed up the healthcare system is. The idea of insurance is to create a shared pool. But as these pools encourage all of the healthy people into one pool and all of those with health issues into another, the costs of the high risk pool go through the roof (which is why I dropped the HMO option). That eventually forces those in the high risk pools out of affordable health care (either through a plan that doesn't cover their needs within the limits of their income or no coverage at all). Care gets delayed (costing more), bills get paid late or not at all and then eventually the costs get covered out of the rest of the population through higher bills or taxes (hospitals can't turn you away once you get sick enough so the public as a whole eventually pays). As they say, the US has universal coverage, but it's about the most expensive universal policy you could ever design.
The problem I regularly had, back when I used Windows for more than just an AS/400 terminal session (now I'm on a Mac) was with the Office applications. Word would totally hijack the system (it was the worst offender, but sometimes Excel or Outlook would, too). I would keep a Word document open almost constantly to work on documentation when programming. At some point the system would get so busy the UI became totally unresponsive and any other processes would slow to a crawl. Once I could actually get the Task Manager up (seemed like forever), find the offending process (e.g. Word), click on it and kill it everything went back to normal. This would happen even with a blank document (and I always had the Assistant turned off). Eventually, I realized I could simply change the Word process to below normal priority and things would behave better (I tried to remember to do that immediately every time I started an Office app).
Because it effectively was a legacy app in the sense that it was running a legacy programming language/system MUMPS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS. I haven't used MUMPS, but my brother-in-law was working on a project to add a web interface to a MUMPS application. The language was so unwieldy (see the previous link and note the user of abbreviations and [sometimes] syntactic meaning of spaces) that he recommended scrapping the conversion a rewriting from scratch in Java because it would be up and running sooner and be much easier to maintain. Unbeknownst to him, management set up another group to start a rewrite and they completed the rewrite in half the time the upgrade team had been working (at the point the upgrade was cancelled). From TFA it appears IT at Kaiser was similary concerned, but in their case management appears to have ignored IT.
The first desktop Java apps I wrote were slow and cumbersome. Then I learned how to use Swing interfaces and some obscure features within the abstract classes I discovered by reading the source code (documented but not in a way that is very comprehensible). I do on the fly data validation for applications and threaded JTable builds that have no problem keeping up with data entry specialists. I have more trouble getting the backend databases to keep up with the demand than the Java interface. And that's on older (desktop) hardware. I don't see how performance could be an issue with current hardware if the programs are designed properly -- not that Swing makes that particularly easy to figure out, which is the real problem.
Then there's always NeoOffice for the Mac which uses Java for rendering OpenOffice on the Mac. I can't out type it on my 3 year old PowerBook and I'm a reasonably fast typist.
I was thinking the same thing, but when I RTFA (I know, shocking!) and came away with an entirely different impression that is more in line with my experience. The article isn't about how people feel in general, but how they feel about math. I absolutely detested the subject. I complained bitterly about the teachers, the subject, the requirements, etc., yet went on to major in physics and was one course short of a double major in math. Nevertheless, I am optimistic and fairly sociable. Said one colleague to a client she wanted me to help diagnose a problem (I'm now a programmer), "He's the most technical geek I know, but he talks like a normal person so you'll be able to understand him." But I really don't find that to be all that unusual about either the brighter students I knew in college or the current programmers and tech support staff at our company.
But the crux of the matter is that the kernel is not off limits. Signed drivers from third parties are allowed to access the kernel. So how is this any different? Why make an arbitrary distinction between say video drivers and antivirus software? Shouldn't we welcome the choice. After all, if Microsoft can actually make a decent security add-on, won't we be better served by the competition between the third party vendors. Maybe then the other players products will be more efficient and less annoying.
I for one welcome our new music underlords and there minions. The more fragmented the minor players become the more power Apple/iTunes has, and I trust Apple more than the RIAA (for the moment).
It's clearly intended for ultra extreme programming: one wide desk and three keyboards. The programmers on the left and right write the code and the person in the center works on continous merges of the best ideas. A fourth back seat drivers continuously runs from left to right giving directions and asking why they aren't just checking the UML.
Thrashing is even worse when the system doesn't allocate enough ahead of time. One of my Java programs (unintentionally) brought down a production AS/400 in the middle of the work day. A third party utility for running batch applications allocated the Java program to a 1 MB (max), single threaded pool. This was a program that used three threads of its own (plus however many the JDBC process spawned, which was probably at least two). So somewhere between swapping all of those thread contexts into a single threaded workspace and managing at least 64MB (and probably closer to 128MB) in a 1MB window, you might say that it converted OS/400 to DOS.
The amazing thing is that it had run successfully several times prior (we were trying to figure out why it was running so many orders of magnitude slower when running in batch vs interactive).
I like the idea of a paper copy as the basis for the count. But automatic readers could have problems, too. Is there an error checking code on the printed copy? And why not cross check the (electronically read) paper tallied vote against the machines that generated the vote? Or is that already part of the plan?
I suspect vests will still be necessary. If you watch the video linked in the first post, you can see there
s still quite a bit of deformation before the bullet bounces off. Those rigid plates will still offer additional protection to sensitive areas by distributing the impact (like the risk of the heart stopping when boys getting hit at just the right area in the chest at just the right time with a baseball, although I believe that risk goes away after a certain age).
My concern is that (according to TFA) each OS takes a processor. Does that mean I can't run Linux, Windows and OS/X all at the same time? With VirtualPC (Mac or Windows), I can run several VMs at once. More importantly, I prefer to test threaded Java programs with two processors running to have a better chance of catching race conditions that won't reveal themselves on a single CPU. Moreover, OS/X is the primary environment. Windows is primarily a convenience for dumb internal web sites that require IE (and for testing on a Windows platform, but I've rarely seen issues with Java programs).
So, it seems there is still room for another option. Perhaps VMWare will implement some of these things in either a more flexible or simply different manner. Think Different anyone?
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Recently, somehow (despite numerous precautions on their part) malware still made it onto the Windows system. He reformatted the Windows system, reinstalled the accounting software, disabled networking and changed all of his online passwords (just in case) and transfers files via disks. I told him he ought to just get a VM, run Windows on that with networking disabled and use a shared folder to transfer files. The only choice left is whether to use Linux or a Mac (I think he's leaning toward the Mac because their TV just went out, he wants to get HDTV and hear about the Apple TV). I probably won't hear about it again until he's got a new system configured VM and all. There was a time years back when I was constantly handling his tech support.
Just goes to show that you're never too old to learn. And studies have shown that it improves one's health, too. Of course, it helps that he started his career working for IBM. He always liked idea of PCs but hated the implementation (probably explains his attraction for Linux, even though had never used Unix).
Moved Permanently Use http://copyright.us/
Or how many people have a Mac and can't use IE (also a growing number) and have no choice but to boycott the site?
As has been mentioned by others, incline settings and lack of wind as a cooling factor can counter the lack of wind resistance. I have a treadmill that has a minimum incline of 1% (which is the setting I use except when running hill intervals when I crank it up to 8%). I'm never able to run as fast on the treadmill as I can outside -- I'm usually about 0.2 mph slower on the treadmill and on a good day 0.1 mph slower. The speed/pace reading from my foot pod agrees with the treadmill setting, so it's not a calibration issue, either (and my foot pod deviates 1% from my GPS except over very short distances).
That's funny, because the only reason I buy DRM is so I can pay less to get ringtones. For example, go to iTunes, download the ST:TOS theme song (not the whole album of themes and incidental music from every spin-off). Burn it to CD, import as mp3, clip the exact portion I want for the ring (this is the part I like best, because I don't have to rely on the taste of the person who selected the sample for the phone), and transfer it to my phone. And it's not like my phone is Hi-Fi.
Well, that would not be the response of the USAF when Staff Sergeant Michelle Manhart appeared in loose clothing http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-kluger/the-nak ed-drill-sergeant_b_39035.html (I like the line from the article, "Unfortunately for Manhart, the Air Force's top brass wasn't exactly titillated").
I wouldn't be so quick to discount this as a major source of many instances of ball lightning. For starters, Silicon is the most common solid element on Earth, so there is plenty around. And I see no reason to think that Silicon would be the only element or molecule that could produce this effect. Also, the experimenters are also dealing with much less energy than a real lightning strike and much purer silicon than lightning would hit. Given higher energy (heat) and less silicon you might see something that would float more. This reminds me of something I saw years ago that wasn't quite ball lightning but had similarities. My wife and I were driving along some major power lines in Bloomington, IN, when lightning struck a transformer behind us (I saw it in the rear view mirror). A glowing, greenish ball streaked down one of the lines and passed our car leaving a long, thick trail behind. It was much like a cross between a phaser and photon torpedo effect in Star Trek... very cool. I'm not sure if there's much silicon in a transformer, but copper might explain the green color.
I've seem them and probably have some tucked away somewhere around the house. But part of the original problem with the $2 bill and the $1 coin was that most tills have no slot for them (and most vending machines wouldn't take them). Get rid of the nickel and the penny and you have room for both. I haven't used a cash register in decades, so it may be that the half dollar slot is now used for dollar coins (that's where we put them in the 70s). Around here most of the vending machines and parking meters take one dollar coins now.
Ah, but you neglect to notice just how far ahead of the curve the imperial system was. Think of the computers. Everything is in binary. Floating point 1/2, 1/8, 1/16... is all exactly represented in binary whereas metric is rife with rounding errors. Now if we could just convert our currency back to bits. Nickels and pennies are becoming more of an annoyance than useful, so one bit (12.5 cents) would make a reasonable smallest coin. And then follow the Canadians and add a $2 coin.
I don't think the reverse IP requirement would be workable. Many mail servers are private addresses behind a NAT/PAT/firewall, so the first hop would have a meaningless address. Even if you went with the first hop on the private side, there may be a single IP address handling many names. I like the idea of a cryptographic chain of authentication -- even if it is not universally adopted, it would speed up processing of good mail, and as more servers adopted it, pressure would increase on the non-adopters as senders become more frustrated with the false positives stopping their legitimate messages.
You're correct. I make a BlueTooth connection to my (Cingular) Motorola RAZR and can drag and drop files between the devices. I downloaded an MP3 edit and take snippets of music to make ring tones (even via iTunes by burning the song(s) to CD, converting to MP3 and back to the phone -- Hello ST:TOS theme). And OS/X iSync recognize the phone and syncs my Calendar and Address Book (I set up a smart list in the address book to sync only those contacts I wanted on the phone).
Is that 1.5% of taxable wages a fixed percentage for everyone or is there a sliding scale? In the US Medicare is 1.45% of taxable wages (the employer matches that for a total of 2.9%) and isn't even enough to cover the cost of the retired population let alone the entire population. I know that the medical system here is seriously flawed and inefficient, but I can't believe it's that out of whack. My (family) coverage runs about 3% of my taxable salary, but I'm only paying 20% of the insurance bill (the employer covers the other 80%). I'm also on the high end of the pay scale for a programmer/architect, so the percentages would be significantly higher for the typical employee. Plus, I just switched from HMO to PPO because the costs were about 67% lower and my family is healthy (we also have a HRA option, but I'm not willing to take the risks with the enormous potential annual outlay if something serious happened). But having all of these options is partially indicative of how messed up the healthcare system is. The idea of insurance is to create a shared pool. But as these pools encourage all of the healthy people into one pool and all of those with health issues into another, the costs of the high risk pool go through the roof (which is why I dropped the HMO option). That eventually forces those in the high risk pools out of affordable health care (either through a plan that doesn't cover their needs within the limits of their income or no coverage at all). Care gets delayed (costing more), bills get paid late or not at all and then eventually the costs get covered out of the rest of the population through higher bills or taxes (hospitals can't turn you away once you get sick enough so the public as a whole eventually pays). As they say, the US has universal coverage, but it's about the most expensive universal policy you could ever design.
The problem I regularly had, back when I used Windows for more than just an AS/400 terminal session (now I'm on a Mac) was with the Office applications. Word would totally hijack the system (it was the worst offender, but sometimes Excel or Outlook would, too). I would keep a Word document open almost constantly to work on documentation when programming. At some point the system would get so busy the UI became totally unresponsive and any other processes would slow to a crawl. Once I could actually get the Task Manager up (seemed like forever), find the offending process (e.g. Word), click on it and kill it everything went back to normal. This would happen even with a blank document (and I always had the Assistant turned off). Eventually, I realized I could simply change the Word process to below normal priority and things would behave better (I tried to remember to do that immediately every time I started an Office app).
Just call Wesley, he'll crush them.
Because it effectively was a legacy app in the sense that it was running a legacy programming language/system MUMPS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS. I haven't used MUMPS, but my brother-in-law was working on a project to add a web interface to a MUMPS application. The language was so unwieldy (see the previous link and note the user of abbreviations and [sometimes] syntactic meaning of spaces) that he recommended scrapping the conversion a rewriting from scratch in Java because it would be up and running sooner and be much easier to maintain. Unbeknownst to him, management set up another group to start a rewrite and they completed the rewrite in half the time the upgrade team had been working (at the point the upgrade was cancelled). From TFA it appears IT at Kaiser was similary concerned, but in their case management appears to have ignored IT.
The first desktop Java apps I wrote were slow and cumbersome. Then I learned how to use Swing interfaces and some obscure features within the abstract classes I discovered by reading the source code (documented but not in a way that is very comprehensible). I do on the fly data validation for applications and threaded JTable builds that have no problem keeping up with data entry specialists. I have more trouble getting the backend databases to keep up with the demand than the Java interface. And that's on older (desktop) hardware. I don't see how performance could be an issue with current hardware if the programs are designed properly -- not that Swing makes that particularly easy to figure out, which is the real problem. Then there's always NeoOffice for the Mac which uses Java for rendering OpenOffice on the Mac. I can't out type it on my 3 year old PowerBook and I'm a reasonably fast typist.
Windows (the BSOD) anyone? Or Vista (The Tardy) since Vista (the Cruiser) was in the 60s?
I was thinking the same thing, but when I RTFA (I know, shocking!) and came away with an entirely different impression that is more in line with my experience. The article isn't about how people feel in general, but how they feel about math. I absolutely detested the subject. I complained bitterly about the teachers, the subject, the requirements, etc., yet went on to major in physics and was one course short of a double major in math. Nevertheless, I am optimistic and fairly sociable. Said one colleague to a client she wanted me to help diagnose a problem (I'm now a programmer), "He's the most technical geek I know, but he talks like a normal person so you'll be able to understand him." But I really don't find that to be all that unusual about either the brighter students I knew in college or the current programmers and tech support staff at our company.
But the crux of the matter is that the kernel is not off limits. Signed drivers from third parties are allowed to access the kernel. So how is this any different? Why make an arbitrary distinction between say video drivers and antivirus software? Shouldn't we welcome the choice. After all, if Microsoft can actually make a decent security add-on, won't we be better served by the competition between the third party vendors. Maybe then the other players products will be more efficient and less annoying.
I for one welcome our new music underlords and there minions. The more fragmented the minor players become the more power Apple/iTunes has, and I trust Apple more than the RIAA (for the moment).
It's clearly intended for ultra extreme programming: one wide desk and three keyboards. The programmers on the left and right write the code and the person in the center works on continous merges of the best ideas. A fourth back seat drivers continuously runs from left to right giving directions and asking why they aren't just checking the UML.
Thrashing is even worse when the system doesn't allocate enough ahead of time. One of my Java programs (unintentionally) brought down a production AS/400 in the middle of the work day. A third party utility for running batch applications allocated the Java program to a 1 MB (max), single threaded pool. This was a program that used three threads of its own (plus however many the JDBC process spawned, which was probably at least two). So somewhere between swapping all of those thread contexts into a single threaded workspace and managing at least 64MB (and probably closer to 128MB) in a 1MB window, you might say that it converted OS/400 to DOS. The amazing thing is that it had run successfully several times prior (we were trying to figure out why it was running so many orders of magnitude slower when running in batch vs interactive).
I like the idea of a paper copy as the basis for the count. But automatic readers could have problems, too. Is there an error checking code on the printed copy? And why not cross check the (electronically read) paper tallied vote against the machines that generated the vote? Or is that already part of the plan?
I suspect vests will still be necessary. If you watch the video linked in the first post, you can see there s still quite a bit of deformation before the bullet bounces off. Those rigid plates will still offer additional protection to sensitive areas by distributing the impact (like the risk of the heart stopping when boys getting hit at just the right area in the chest at just the right time with a baseball, although I believe that risk goes away after a certain age).
My concern is that (according to TFA) each OS takes a processor. Does that mean I can't run Linux, Windows and OS/X all at the same time? With VirtualPC (Mac or Windows), I can run several VMs at once. More importantly, I prefer to test threaded Java programs with two processors running to have a better chance of catching race conditions that won't reveal themselves on a single CPU. Moreover, OS/X is the primary environment. Windows is primarily a convenience for dumb internal web sites that require IE (and for testing on a Windows platform, but I've rarely seen issues with Java programs). So, it seems there is still room for another option. Perhaps VMWare will implement some of these things in either a more flexible or simply different manner. Think Different anyone?