"Wouldn't it be fun to be a head engineer at one of the bigger companies and be able to test it out:)" Oh really?
Let's see your proposal, your test criteria, your plan. Let's see your budget... cut it in half Now for risk analysis, what if you're right and the servers all fail sooner than expected (i.e. sooner than budgeted)? Spend 3 weeks filling out red tape Spend 2 weeks waiting.
OK, you can run your study. Set up two racks in a closet and take measurements every day for a year.
Now write up the review.
Alright, thanks for your study, but our lawyers have advised us that it wasn't peer reviewed and published in a respected compsci journal and therefore we can't do anything with it, or the insurance wouldn't cover us and we'd be liable for deaths resulting from servers or something.
File in circular file or far back of filing cabinet never to be seen again until you're clearing out your office because they had to let you go because server replacement costs were too high to keep you on the payroll.
I thought the reasons for water cooling systems not being placed in data centers were: 1) A failure causing coolant leakage could potentially destroy tens of servers. 2) Maintenance of these systems is quite expensive (mold and such growing int he lines that needs to be periodically cleaned out.) 3) Failure of a main pump could bring down the entire data center (although I assume there would be redundant systems in place)
"Why should it cost any more to maintain the room at 0 degrees than it would to maintain the room at 100 degrees. I would expect quite the opposite ( with great insulation AROUND the room. )" Yeah, therein lies the problem. This "great insulation": A) Doesn't exist. B) Is horrendously expensive.
Yes, in an ideal environment this makes sense, but we're not working in one. You have energy leak in from the outside. In addition to that, there's no device that can move energy ideally. There's inefficiencies in every thing. Heaters, fans, air conditioning, etc. This causes further energy "losses".
It reminds me of a joke. A farmer goes to a physicist and says "I want to know if a chicken lays an egg on a roof, which way will it roll. Do you have an equation for this". The physicist thinks on this for awhile and then says "I do, but it only works for perfectly spherical chickens in a vacuum".
We have thermodynamic equations to model things like server rooms, but you have two options: 1) Make assumptions about things to simplify the equations. 2) Take into account everything and make your equations so complicated that they become practically unsolvable
"Words like "global pandemic" should be reserved for something more dangerous than the sniffles"
No, it shouldn't. Pandemic refers to the number of people infected and how quickly it spreads, not how deadly it is. People should fucking learn what this term means, rather than assuming it means "AMAZING DEADLY SUPER VIRUS". We should NOT redefine it to mean "SUPER DEADLY SUPER VIRUS".
Swine flue IS a pandemic. It's not super amazingly deadly, but it IS a pandemic. The paranoia is not the fault of the government. This paranoia is the fault of the dipshit idiot populous that elects idiots into the government and then ceases to think for themselves.
"When the listen to stupid advice because you are some sort of public figure, I agree there should be some responsibility on the part of the public figure."
Absolutely not. Political commentators should not have their first amendment rights revoked simply because people are stupid. That's what's being suggested here, that public people should be held accountable for what people do after listening to them, SIMPLY BECAUSE THEY'RE PUBLIC.
It makes sense that doctors, lawyers, people in positions of authority, etc. should be held accountable, because they're expected (both by the public and by law) to give advice. But not fucking comedians.
Yeah they would. Mutants are people that have had mutations in their body. Radiation causes super powers by mutating the DNA in your body. (At least, that's what it does in comic books). Ergo, they're "mutants".
So if you stab a patient with a scalpel it's the engineer's fault? Bullshit. The properties of ANYTHING that makes them useful makes them dangerous. The scalpel has to be sharp to cut skin, the radiation machines have to produce levels of radiation unsafe for healthy people, etc. If the scalpel is dull or the radiation machine incapable of producing radiation, then it has no ability to help people. If a patient is allergic to a drug, it's YOUR responsibility NOT TO ADMINISTER IT. Not administer it, watch the patient die, and then say "it should have been designed better such that there weren't any allergic reactions".
YOU have a responsibility to make sure that you aren't using the equipment improperly. Jesus fucking Christ, a medical degree does not give you free license to use equipment without knowing what you're doing and use the excuse "it should have been designed better". I seriously hope I never get taken to a hospital where you work.
Won't necessarily stop anything. Chances are, if you have one "Warning: such and such will happen, press OK" messages then you have a lot of them, most of them mundane. Operators will start to click "yes, proceed" faster than idiots click "next, next, next, finish" on their software installations.
"Gambling, pretty much by definition, has to work with people who don't know what they are doing." I'm not entirely sure how you managed to arrive at this conclusion.
People gambling aren't always idiots that think "Ima go win a million bucks". Often times they are people that do it for recreation or fun knowing full well that they're loosing money. For example, you can gamble at a slot machine for many hours on only $20-$50. Some people have fun watching the wheels spin and lights flash. For them, it's worth the money. Other people enjoy the social aspect of gambling such as in blackjack where the players aren't competing against each other. Or in craps, where the players are all competing against... the shooter... or the house.. unless they roll a 7 and it's the third tuesday of the month.... anyway, there's a lot of people cheering for someone so someone is having fun.
A solution that I've heard of is storing a backup in a safe deposit box in a bank. If your data is stolen from a bank safe deposit box, you've got more problems than the missing data. Suppose that you could only really store weekly backups there unless you want to go to the bank every day. Put two hard drives in the box. When you put one in with your weekly backup, take out the one for the previous week. Nightly backups could be stored locally.
"then IMO Bill is culpable" Why? If someone is stupid enough to take medical advice from a comedian/political satirist then any negative outcome of that is just natural selection. It's not like he's pretending to be a licensed doctor.
"But if you think for a second that every healthcare worker shouldn't get the flu shot, you don't know a lot about healthcare." And if you think for a second that every healthcare worker should be required to get the flu shot, then you haven't actually thought about the issue for more than about 10 fucking seconds. I got my seasonal flu shot already and I'm going to get the N1H1 shot when it's available (FYI: I don't work in healthcare), but you're making blanket statements about a large group of people with absolutely no consideration for exceptions. I can't actually think of anything stupider than that.
You idiot, it's not "Obama's debt". He's been in office for about 8 months now, he wasn't the one that fought two useless wars and gave fuckloads of contracts and tax cuts to military contractors and allowed shitloads of money to exit the country via outsourcing.
The debt was incurred by Bush. I mean, I can understand people not understanding the intricacies of global economics, but did you seriously forget how to use a calendar or have you just been brainwashed by FOX?
"The conservative party caters to BIG FUCKING BUSINESS" "Oh yeah, they overwhelmingly vote and donate to the Democrats..."
You seem to be confusing what companies do for what the government does. I know, it must be hard to think of a valid argument, you probably had to stop thinking entirely to actually accept the arguments given by republican candidates, it's an easy mistake. Just, in the future, try to use your brain.
"I make less than $50,000/year. They raise my taxes, I have less money to support my family." You don't seem to be reading what Obama's tax policies are actually doing. Your taxes aren't going to increase unless you make more than something like $75k a year (might have been $100 k, I don't remember the number exactly, but it was way over $50k).
"I was rejected so they could meet minority-quota" Minority quotas are unconstitutional as per the supreme court ruling University of California V. Bakke. Being given extra consideration isn't illegal, but it wasn't a quota. You probably didn't bother to actually pay attention to why you were rejected, or you're making up bullshit. I don't know which, but you weren't denied due to a quota. And what exactly were all of these discriminatory places? You didn't mention a single one.
Why don't you actually go read up on and do some research about the democrats' policies. And no, watching FOX news doesn't count as "research". You'll find that the republicans usually outright lie about or, at the very least, spin what democrats actually plan to do.
Did you read the patent or are you just assuming that because it's about a patent that it's also frivolous. There are a lot of bad patents out there, but assuming that they're all garbage isn't conducive to fixing the situation of bad patents. It just creates more noise in every discussion about patents.
The current one doesn't give the sizes of the atoms because the size DOESN'T FUCKING MATTER IN MOST CASES. Size generally has not a whole lot to do with any properties. Any size-based properties are very general. e.g. "Very big atoms are unstable". It does you very little to no good to know if one atom is SLIGHTLY larger/smaller than another. You can get the difference between "very big" and "very small" with the current table, and because that's all that matters, the current table is just fine.
I can't even read half of the circular table because it's UPSIDE FUCKING DOWN. What a stupid way to represent something. I suppose that if the creator spent more than 10 fucking seconds working on it then they might have realized that they could have flipped the upper half upside down again to make ALL of the elements readable. Of course, that still doesn't help the fact that I don't know where the periods begin or end. It's a circle, there's no start or end part marked. The current table has these nifty things called ROWS and COLUMNS (or periods and groups respectively, for those of you that actually paid any attention in chemistry).
"And the gaps create an immediate sense of wonder." That's CONFUSION, not wonder. The periodic table is a reference and a tool, not a motivational poster or something that should create "wonder". I don't know what field you work in, but I'm going to guess that you use one or more reference books on a regular basis. Imagine taking these reference books, flipping half the pages upside down, and reorganizing the entire thing to make it half as useful but make you "wonder" more. Does that sound like a good idea? Of course not!
Imagine saying, "HEY! Let's take the charts that machinists use to convert between metric, standard, and decimal standard and make them into a circle to illustrate the fact that diameters are related to circles!" You'd be shot, and rightfully so. Imagine taking the dictionary and reorganizing it by which words evoke which emotions rather than by alphabetical order. Same thing.
And you seem to assume that the periodic table is only used by "today's youth". The periodic table is used by ANY CHEMIST doing ANY CHEMISTRY WORK. Again, it's a bloody reference tool. The only reason you assume that most of the people that use the periodic table are children is because you're ignorant of what it actually is or what it's actually used for. You saw it in high school, have never used it since (not surprising if you don't work in a chemistry-related job), but never really stopped to think what it actually is other than a worthless table you had to look at in class.
"I wasn't raided with the "I'm better than you - look at my Mac" attitude" Have you seen the recent PC ads? "OH NOEZ! THIS MAC IS TOO EXPENSIVE!!!"
How many times have you heard "Wow, you use a mac. You're an idiot" or "macs suck and are overpriced dude, get a PC"?
I'm not an apple fanboy, I use windows on my desktop, windows/ubuntu dual booted on my laptop, and centos on my server. I agree that SOME apple owners can be pricks, but that's true of everyone that owns anything. SOME people that own XYZ device or use IJK product will be assholes. Don't try to tell me that this attitude is exclusive to mac owners.
So, The researchers were able to preregister the domains that the botnet was going to use to download software. Wouldn't it be possible to upload a patch to the website (obviously formatted such that it would be downloaded and executed by the infected machines)? I think that'd be pretty damn funny and efficient. Every infected machine patching itself at once and eliminating the virus. Some of the machines wouldn't be online at the time, but any machine not online also isn't a risk.
Because that's a HUGE time investment that the professors would rather spend publishing papers or basically doing anything else.
A few professors will write books, but it's not something that every professor is interested in, or even capable of doing. Some profs. are lousy teachers and some are great teachers but shouldn't ever write a book.
You require specific textbooks, there isn't a problem there. Could you imagine teaching a course by saying "Everyone bring in some kind of physics textbook"? The problem is the fucking publishers stop publishing the old editions.
Slashdot Mirror
New headline: Bittorrent may begin gaining users next year.
"Wouldn't it be fun to be a head engineer at one of the bigger companies and be able to test it out :)"
Oh really?
Let's see your proposal, your test criteria, your plan.
Let's see your budget... cut it in half
Now for risk analysis, what if you're right and the servers all fail sooner than expected (i.e. sooner than budgeted)?
Spend 3 weeks filling out red tape
Spend 2 weeks waiting.
OK, you can run your study. Set up two racks in a closet and take measurements every day for a year.
Now write up the review.
Alright, thanks for your study, but our lawyers have advised us that it wasn't peer reviewed and published in a respected compsci journal and therefore we can't do anything with it, or the insurance wouldn't cover us and we'd be liable for deaths resulting from servers or something.
File in circular file or far back of filing cabinet never to be seen again until you're clearing out your office because they had to let you go because server replacement costs were too high to keep you on the payroll.
I thought the reasons for water cooling systems not being placed in data centers were:
1) A failure causing coolant leakage could potentially destroy tens of servers.
2) Maintenance of these systems is quite expensive (mold and such growing int he lines that needs to be periodically cleaned out.)
3) Failure of a main pump could bring down the entire data center (although I assume there would be redundant systems in place)
"That way the coolant can collect more heat in the evaporation phase"
WHAT?!?
The heat of vaporization doesn't change based on temperature. What are you talking about?
"Why should it cost any more to maintain the room at 0 degrees than it would to maintain the room at 100 degrees. I would expect quite the opposite ( with great insulation AROUND the room. )"
Yeah, therein lies the problem. This "great insulation":
A) Doesn't exist.
B) Is horrendously expensive.
Yes, in an ideal environment this makes sense, but we're not working in one. You have energy leak in from the outside. In addition to that, there's no device that can move energy ideally. There's inefficiencies in every thing. Heaters, fans, air conditioning, etc. This causes further energy "losses".
It reminds me of a joke. A farmer goes to a physicist and says "I want to know if a chicken lays an egg on a roof, which way will it roll. Do you have an equation for this". The physicist thinks on this for awhile and then says "I do, but it only works for perfectly spherical chickens in a vacuum".
We have thermodynamic equations to model things like server rooms, but you have two options:
1) Make assumptions about things to simplify the equations.
2) Take into account everything and make your equations so complicated that they become practically unsolvable
"Words like "global pandemic" should be reserved for something more dangerous than the sniffles"
No, it shouldn't. Pandemic refers to the number of people infected and how quickly it spreads, not how deadly it is. People should fucking learn what this term means, rather than assuming it means "AMAZING DEADLY SUPER VIRUS". We should NOT redefine it to mean "SUPER DEADLY SUPER VIRUS".
Swine flue IS a pandemic. It's not super amazingly deadly, but it IS a pandemic. The paranoia is not the fault of the government. This paranoia is the fault of the dipshit idiot populous that elects idiots into the government and then ceases to think for themselves.
If you're counting cards on blackjack then you can tip the odds in your favor and win in the long run. The percentages actually turn in your favor.
"When the listen to stupid advice because you are some sort of public figure, I agree there should be some responsibility on the part of the public figure."
Absolutely not. Political commentators should not have their first amendment rights revoked simply because people are stupid. That's what's being suggested here, that public people should be held accountable for what people do after listening to them, SIMPLY BECAUSE THEY'RE PUBLIC.
It makes sense that doctors, lawyers, people in positions of authority, etc. should be held accountable, because they're expected (both by the public and by law) to give advice. But not fucking comedians.
Yeah they would. Mutants are people that have had mutations in their body. Radiation causes super powers by mutating the DNA in your body. (At least, that's what it does in comic books). Ergo, they're "mutants".
So if you stab a patient with a scalpel it's the engineer's fault? Bullshit. The properties of ANYTHING that makes them useful makes them dangerous. The scalpel has to be sharp to cut skin, the radiation machines have to produce levels of radiation unsafe for healthy people, etc. If the scalpel is dull or the radiation machine incapable of producing radiation, then it has no ability to help people.
If a patient is allergic to a drug, it's YOUR responsibility NOT TO ADMINISTER IT. Not administer it, watch the patient die, and then say "it should have been designed better such that there weren't any allergic reactions".
YOU have a responsibility to make sure that you aren't using the equipment improperly. Jesus fucking Christ, a medical degree does not give you free license to use equipment without knowing what you're doing and use the excuse "it should have been designed better". I seriously hope I never get taken to a hospital where you work.
Won't necessarily stop anything. Chances are, if you have one "Warning: such and such will happen, press OK" messages then you have a lot of them, most of them mundane. Operators will start to click "yes, proceed" faster than idiots click "next, next, next, finish" on their software installations.
"Gambling, pretty much by definition, has to work with people who don't know what they are doing."
I'm not entirely sure how you managed to arrive at this conclusion.
People gambling aren't always idiots that think "Ima go win a million bucks". Often times they are people that do it for recreation or fun knowing full well that they're loosing money. For example, you can gamble at a slot machine for many hours on only $20-$50. Some people have fun watching the wheels spin and lights flash. For them, it's worth the money. Other people enjoy the social aspect of gambling such as in blackjack where the players aren't competing against each other. Or in craps, where the players are all competing against... the shooter... or the house.. unless they roll a 7 and it's the third tuesday of the month.... anyway, there's a lot of people cheering for someone so someone is having fun.
A solution that I've heard of is storing a backup in a safe deposit box in a bank. If your data is stolen from a bank safe deposit box, you've got more problems than the missing data. Suppose that you could only really store weekly backups there unless you want to go to the bank every day. Put two hard drives in the box. When you put one in with your weekly backup, take out the one for the previous week.
Nightly backups could be stored locally.
"then IMO Bill is culpable"
Why? If someone is stupid enough to take medical advice from a comedian/political satirist then any negative outcome of that is just natural selection. It's not like he's pretending to be a licensed doctor.
"But if you think for a second that every healthcare worker shouldn't get the flu shot, you don't know a lot about healthcare."
And if you think for a second that every healthcare worker should be required to get the flu shot, then you haven't actually thought about the issue for more than about 10 fucking seconds. I got my seasonal flu shot already and I'm going to get the N1H1 shot when it's available (FYI: I don't work in healthcare), but you're making blanket statements about a large group of people with absolutely no consideration for exceptions. I can't actually think of anything stupider than that.
You idiot, it's not "Obama's debt". He's been in office for about 8 months now, he wasn't the one that fought two useless wars and gave fuckloads of contracts and tax cuts to military contractors and allowed shitloads of money to exit the country via outsourcing.
The debt was incurred by Bush. I mean, I can understand people not understanding the intricacies of global economics, but did you seriously forget how to use a calendar or have you just been brainwashed by FOX?
"The conservative party caters to BIG FUCKING BUSINESS"
"Oh yeah, they overwhelmingly vote and donate to the Democrats..."
You seem to be confusing what companies do for what the government does. I know, it must be hard to think of a valid argument, you probably had to stop thinking entirely to actually accept the arguments given by republican candidates, it's an easy mistake. Just, in the future, try to use your brain.
"I make less than $50,000/year. They raise my taxes, I have less money to support my family." You don't seem to be reading what Obama's tax policies are actually doing. Your taxes aren't going to increase unless you make more than something like $75k a year (might have been $100 k, I don't remember the number exactly, but it was way over $50k).
"I was rejected so they could meet minority-quota" Minority quotas are unconstitutional as per the supreme court ruling University of California V. Bakke. Being given extra consideration isn't illegal, but it wasn't a quota. You probably didn't bother to actually pay attention to why you were rejected, or you're making up bullshit. I don't know which, but you weren't denied due to a quota.
And what exactly were all of these discriminatory places? You didn't mention a single one.
Why don't you actually go read up on and do some research about the democrats' policies. And no, watching FOX news doesn't count as "research". You'll find that the republicans usually outright lie about or, at the very least, spin what democrats actually plan to do.
Did you read the patent or are you just assuming that because it's about a patent that it's also frivolous. There are a lot of bad patents out there, but assuming that they're all garbage isn't conducive to fixing the situation of bad patents. It just creates more noise in every discussion about patents.
The current one doesn't give the sizes of the atoms because the size DOESN'T FUCKING MATTER IN MOST CASES. Size generally has not a whole lot to do with any properties. Any size-based properties are very general. e.g. "Very big atoms are unstable". It does you very little to no good to know if one atom is SLIGHTLY larger/smaller than another. You can get the difference between "very big" and "very small" with the current table, and because that's all that matters, the current table is just fine.
I can't even read half of the circular table because it's UPSIDE FUCKING DOWN. What a stupid way to represent something. I suppose that if the creator spent more than 10 fucking seconds working on it then they might have realized that they could have flipped the upper half upside down again to make ALL of the elements readable. Of course, that still doesn't help the fact that I don't know where the periods begin or end. It's a circle, there's no start or end part marked. The current table has these nifty things called ROWS and COLUMNS (or periods and groups respectively, for those of you that actually paid any attention in chemistry).
"And the gaps create an immediate sense of wonder." That's CONFUSION, not wonder. The periodic table is a reference and a tool, not a motivational poster or something that should create "wonder". I don't know what field you work in, but I'm going to guess that you use one or more reference books on a regular basis. Imagine taking these reference books, flipping half the pages upside down, and reorganizing the entire thing to make it half as useful but make you "wonder" more. Does that sound like a good idea? Of course not!
Imagine saying, "HEY! Let's take the charts that machinists use to convert between metric, standard, and decimal standard and make them into a circle to illustrate the fact that diameters are related to circles!" You'd be shot, and rightfully so. Imagine taking the dictionary and reorganizing it by which words evoke which emotions rather than by alphabetical order. Same thing.
And you seem to assume that the periodic table is only used by "today's youth". The periodic table is used by ANY CHEMIST doing ANY CHEMISTRY WORK. Again, it's a bloody reference tool. The only reason you assume that most of the people that use the periodic table are children is because you're ignorant of what it actually is or what it's actually used for. You saw it in high school, have never used it since (not surprising if you don't work in a chemistry-related job), but never really stopped to think what it actually is other than a worthless table you had to look at in class.
"I wasn't raided with the "I'm better than you - look at my Mac" attitude"
Have you seen the recent PC ads? "OH NOEZ! THIS MAC IS TOO EXPENSIVE!!!"
How many times have you heard "Wow, you use a mac. You're an idiot" or "macs suck and are overpriced dude, get a PC"?
I'm not an apple fanboy, I use windows on my desktop, windows/ubuntu dual booted on my laptop, and centos on my server. I agree that SOME apple owners can be pricks, but that's true of everyone that owns anything. SOME people that own XYZ device or use IJK product will be assholes. Don't try to tell me that this attitude is exclusive to mac owners.
So, The researchers were able to preregister the domains that the botnet was going to use to download software. Wouldn't it be possible to upload a patch to the website (obviously formatted such that it would be downloaded and executed by the infected machines)? I think that'd be pretty damn funny and efficient. Every infected machine patching itself at once and eliminating the virus. Some of the machines wouldn't be online at the time, but any machine not online also isn't a risk.
" Is there a good place to report behavior like this?"
Yes. theconsumerist.org They're an excellent review site.
"it's only common sense by your definition."
Well, yes, of course. If we do:
#DEFINE common_sense lack_of_intelligence
then every congressman has lots of common sense.
Because that's a HUGE time investment that the professors would rather spend publishing papers or basically doing anything else.
A few professors will write books, but it's not something that every professor is interested in, or even capable of doing. Some profs. are lousy teachers and some are great teachers but shouldn't ever write a book.
You require specific textbooks, there isn't a problem there. Could you imagine teaching a course by saying "Everyone bring in some kind of physics textbook"?
The problem is the fucking publishers stop publishing the old editions.