I can't disagree too much with this. In fact, Something Special is a sign language programme, really aimed at older kids with special needs, but ideal for toddlers also. My daughter does learn the signs from it and use them.
I will say though, our local children's centre has free sign-language groups, and she picks up more signs at that class than from TV.
Another mod up for this; an 18-month old has no need to be using a computer! My 22 month old likes building with plastic bricks - I help her out suggesting and starting a structure e.g. a house for her duck teddy and she carries on working out where stuff fits. Being a girl she also likes throwing tea parties for the teddies and changing and feeding a doll.
She also likes the bright screens of laptops and TVs, but when she does watch TV like Peppa Pig and Something Special (not sure if you get those in USA), she just kind of glazes over and clearly isn't really thinking anywhere near as much as she does at other times. A PC is a bit more interactive, but I think she would just watch the moving lights, rather than learning. We let her watch a bit of TV, partly because we've also got a newborn needing attention, which is very difficult to deal with particularly while I'm at work. But ideally we'd keep her occupied with other toys the whole day.
Perhaps not the most creative use, but it seems every single item I connect to my PC needs a different cable - mostly USB, but there are so many versions to choose from these days. Plus other stuff like headphones, a portable hard disc, spare batteries for cordless mouse etc. Generally I'd got a pile of bits and pieces centred around a desktop with 7 empty 5.25" bays.
Or even more far-fetched, someone brings in a fan heater from home, forgets to switch it off one evening, some paper blows into the elements and sets on fire, and it burns down the building.
Keeping an off-site backup is not a ridiculous idea in itself. Could the business survive if the office burned down and all servers and data was lost? Maybe if employees are allowed to take data home, most stuff could be pieced back together, but even then it would be a substantial amount of work. But as with TFA, it's not something to spend a massive amount of money on. Where I work, all projects should have a daily backup to a central server (just simple batch script / shell script / version control system), and that has an off-site backup, which as far as I'm aware just means one of the admins swaps the hotswap bays and takes the discs home on a weekly basis. Total cost is about 5 minutes a week to swap the discs; the hotswap hardware itself, and a few extra discs is well under £1000. Everything else is no different from what we'd need to do for regular backups anyway.
Even for my own data, e.g. holiday photos, every so often I make sure to put it all on a removable hard disc and copy it onto my work PC. I'd certainly consider it worthy of a disaster recovery solution, given that it's so very easy to do.
External graphics cards? These have been tried before for laptops, but electricity only moves down copper traces at a very limited speed. This sort of connection could decrease the latency as well as bandwidth. Potentially other external components could be done the same way - e.g. additional memory in a laptop base station. The bandwidth is enough to support it, and the latency should be good too.
I think the problem people have with RAMBUS is specifically that they sat in on the JEDEC working groups to watch the development of new standards, and then when everyone had decided on the design and invested huge amounts of money, they piped up that they had a patent on it. This was completely against the principles of the JEDEC working groups - where the meetings are specifically aimed at ensuring they are developing an open standard free from their member's patents which might otherwise block the technology - not necessarily 100% unpatented, but where they know what the patent licensing agreements are. Generally all the members agree to cross-licence the patents between themselves - this is the 'cost' of joining the JEDEC standards group.
The RAMBUS technology (and to a leser extent, it's implementation) is actually rather good, so they aren't a classic patent troll, but their submarine patent on DDR technology makes them clearly some form of patent troll.
The most worrying thing is that I wouldn't put it past the government to pass a law repealing the third law of thermodynamics!
I was quite impressed with the Monster Raving Loony party's campaign this year. Introduction of a 99p coin to save on change was genius, but this definitely tops it.
> That said, I wouldn't employ half of the people on my undergraduate degree course to change a lightbulb, unless someone else was supervising them.
I would definitely agree with that, but it's nothing new. I finished uni 7 years ago, and I knew people (even some awarded a first) who quite simply couldn't write a computer program. I work at a dedicated software house, but most people we employ have come in from the other sciences, particularly physics, and maths backgrounds. I understand why: my brother went to the same university 2 years behind me, doing Physics and Molecular Chemistry. He had to take an 'introduction' to C-coding course worth 5 units - it covered approximately 3 full modules (30 units) of my own course.
As I say, my own experience of uni is now a bit out of date, but I get the impression that generally, the CS courses on offer in the UK are not up to par with the proper sciences or maths. And the grades are awarded way too easily, even to people who fundamentally don't understand the subject matter.
Which things and how? I can't find any answers and I'm really interested in what went wrong here. I had a bit of an investigation online - I even found a useful article and discussion here which appears to have a number of knowledgeable people:
Why is everyone so fixated on BP's management and failings, when they were just leasing a rig owned and operated by Transocean? Yes, the fact they were getting the profits from the rig means they have a duty to pay the costs of the disaster, and they are doing so with very little complaint. But sending BP's management to prison? It seems like Transocean were the offshore drilling experts, and hadn't made any complaints that BP were asking them to act recklessly in any aspects of the rig operation. I think BP should continue paying for the clearup, but I don't see any evidence that they were criminally negligent.
> If they halved the price, they could possibly quadruple the number of subscribers
I don't believe that at all. The market is miniscule because it's a niche product. As others have said, for most purposes a standard mobile network will suffice. For fixed but remote installations, its easier to put up a dish and use that. Typically for stuff like cruise ships, they just stick a cell tower on the boat. So Iridium is only ever going to be used by small groups of people wandering about in the wilderness. I don't think reducing the price would cause more people to want to do that.
I agree - once a day trading sounds to me like a very good thing. I've recently set up a day-trading account just to investigate the details of how it would all work - the information openly available didn't seem to be that complete. I've got a few thousands of pounds in shares that I'm worried may drop in the short term, and was considering whether to take out some short positions as a hedge against it.
But in the end, there's a few things stopping me:
- The moral dilemma. As you say, so far as I can see the only situation in which it isn't pure gambling is probably insider trading. With leveraged futures trading I'm not even putting much extra investment money into the system. At least I know with my shares there is real money to be invested and hopefully I'll make a good long term profit too.
- The exchanges are only open while I'm at work - unless I'm trading on another countries exchange on stuff I know even less about - and then it's even more like gambling. Even if a started trades during the out of hours period in the evening, I'd need to be looking at stuff the next working day, distracting me from... er, Slashdot.
- I'm just not sure I even like the concept of shorting. Now the Germans have banned some of it, and I wonder if that will spread. Surely not as far as the US, but maybe across more of Europe. I can't say I'd be too upset if it does.
RAID 6+1 would be mirrored, and I've never heard of it - total overkill !! You'd much more likely go with RAID 5+1.
RAID 0 is striping, RAID 1 is mirroring, RAID 3 is a dedicated parity disc, RAID 5 is striping with a striped parity block, RAID 6 is the same with two parities.
Personally, for my own stuff, I've just got plain RAID 5 with offline backup discs. Any form of RAID is only an attempt to keep your system going during a disc failure. It's not a substitute for backups, and I always tend to think that RAID 5+1 (or 6+1) setups are made by people who think they can avoid backups with this sort of redundancy.
A friend had a 5 bay hotswap backplane, and the power circuits failed. By the time he got to the server, all 5 discs were ruined. RAID will only get you so far...
Re:You know you're doing something wrong when
on
Hacking Vim 7.2
·
· Score: 1
I think the Lib Dems should go only for proportional representation, as their only demand. If that goes ahead, their views can be considered in line with their vote share for every future election. That has to be a great result, even if it means for this (most likely short lived) parliament, they are sidelined once more.
But if you look outside of southern England, the accepted wisdom in many areas, particularly Scotland, is that the Conservatives aren't going to win a seat. I think a lot of voters in these areas vote Lib Dem or other parties as their way of voting for not-Labour.
As it is, there's little point voting Conservative if you know they'll only get 10% of the vote. They just won't win the seat, and your vote will mean very little. I wonder what the real Conservative vote would be in Scotland if people thought their vote would count.
Definitely. I live in Rochdale, which previously had a Lib Dem MP on a very slim majority. The constituency was changed to move a solidly Labour ward from a nearby solid Labour constituency into Rochdale. It worked perfectly. We now have a Labour MP on a narrow majority. And the nearby consituency is slightly less solid Labour, but still Labour. Nice result for the Labour government.
Supposedly, the constituency boundaries are independantly set, but strangely they always seem to favour one side.
I am very optimistic of the potential of a hung parliament. For the last 13 years, it seems barely a single Labour MP has had the backbone to vote outside of the party line. Law after ridiculous law has been passed without proper debate. Time and again, these laws have been badly worded and badly scoped. But it just doesn't matter because all the Labour MPs vote according to their party position. Perhaps a dozen seem to actually engage their brain and vote as they believe, but the parliamentary majority was big enough that it made no difference.
The media always seem to portray the Conservatives in a very negative light for their internal disagreements on policy. This for me is one of the more attractive features. They have many more MPs who have strong beliefs they are willing to argue for publicly, that don't necessarily go along with what the overall party believes. Assuming people vote properly for their local MP based on that persons views this is a very good thing.
I'm really hoping that in this next parliament, controversial and unpopular laws are going to be unpassable, at least without a proper discussion of the merits, and attempts to remove or minimise the possible deleterious effects. Even the Conservatives + Lib Dems will have a smaller majority than Labour had, and so I hope the laws that do get made will be far more sensible than the ones we have had these last 13 years.
I'd never heard this one before, guess it's the American version! The one I was taught was a complaint by a pub landlord to their sign writer: You've left too much space between pig and and and and and whistle
It's really easy to deal with a world in black and white. Of course the real situation is that this guy producing code has various generic libraries that help him to produce a website. Those weren't developed as part of the 'Write X' task but are completely integral to it. Your scheme only allows for off the shelf software, and stuff developed right from first principles, which is ridiculous.
Most core business software just wouldn't fit into either model. I wonder if anyone has some insider knowledge here, but for systems like SAP, there always seems to be an extremely long and expensive configuration and commissioning phase. Words like programming are not used, but I'm assuming that really, that's mostly what happens during that phase. Because the fact is that every business has its own unique little characteristics and foibles in the way the business is run, and I just don't believe SAP have somehow written software that can handle them all without additional programming.
So when you buy just about any big piece of software, you are going into this big grey area where you're buying a mixture of off-the-shelf and custom code, where either component by itself is useless, and the combination is the only possible way of getting the job done.
One other factor is causation. The fact is that on this subject there are some studies that seem to show correlation, drowned out by ones which don't. But so far, there is no known method for this radiation to affect living tissues. Maybe if anyone could get anywhere describing a mechanism for causation, then serious scientists would take another look at the extremely weak correlation.
Well said. I think a lot of people forget all the things that go into making a piece of software than pure programming, and pretty much everything in the article is just describing some of the things in that list. Personally, I didn't even think it was all that comprehensive.
I've thought about going it alone myself, because when it comes down to coding stuff, I'm pretty self suffficient now. It's still very useful to be able to easily go and ask an AIX or Oracle expert when I don't know stuff, but I can mostly figure it out myself. Unfortunately, I'm not enough of a salesperson, and not a people-person in general. And to be honest I'm just not that interested in the business side. I'd be bored senseless dealing with that side of things.
The other difference with plumbers and many similar occupations is that self employed plumbers get a lot of business from individuals. On a person-to-person basis, a whole load of overhead of dealing with companies tends to just disappear; other than a one page overview and a receipt, there's almost no paperwork for my new bathroom. But individuals don't have that much use for custom software, so as an independant developer you're not really in the same type of business as an independant plumber anyway.
My approximately 6 year old motherboard has PCI-Express and will still take brand new graphics cards as PCI-E v2 is backwards compatible. That's socket 939, which was primarily for single core chips, although the Athlon X2 was launched towards the end of it's lifetime (I upgraded to an X2 4200+).
But either way, the poster above already convinced me I was wrong with the Steam survey data. I guess it's mainly down to the difficulty of programming part rather than install base.
Slashdot Mirror
Nah... they we're clearly made from Meccano. But even Meccano doesn't come with human parts so I can't shed any light on that.
I can't disagree too much with this. In fact, Something Special is a sign language programme, really aimed at older kids with special needs, but ideal for toddlers also. My daughter does learn the signs from it and use them.
I will say though, our local children's centre has free sign-language groups, and she picks up more signs at that class than from TV.
Another mod up for this; an 18-month old has no need to be using a computer! My 22 month old likes building with plastic bricks - I help her out suggesting and starting a structure e.g. a house for her duck teddy and she carries on working out where stuff fits. Being a girl she also likes throwing tea parties for the teddies and changing and feeding a doll.
She also likes the bright screens of laptops and TVs, but when she does watch TV like Peppa Pig and Something Special (not sure if you get those in USA), she just kind of glazes over and clearly isn't really thinking anywhere near as much as she does at other times. A PC is a bit more interactive, but I think she would just watch the moving lights, rather than learning. We let her watch a bit of TV, partly because we've also got a newborn needing attention, which is very difficult to deal with particularly while I'm at work. But ideally we'd keep her occupied with other toys the whole day.
> The first person to think of trimming a sharp rock for better performance was a genuine innovator.
If only they'd patented it!
Perhaps not the most creative use, but it seems every single item I connect to my PC needs a different cable - mostly USB, but there are so many versions to choose from these days. Plus other stuff like headphones, a portable hard disc, spare batteries for cordless mouse etc. Generally I'd got a pile of bits and pieces centred around a desktop with 7 empty 5.25" bays.
I've got a few of these: http://www.quietpc.com/gb-en-gbp/products/caseaccessories/kama-cabinet-abk - they're just little storage drawers, but they're helpful for organising all the bits that go with the PC.
> in case a nuclear bomb goes off
Or even more far-fetched, someone brings in a fan heater from home, forgets to switch it off one evening, some paper blows into the elements and sets on fire, and it burns down the building.
Keeping an off-site backup is not a ridiculous idea in itself. Could the business survive if the office burned down and all servers and data was lost? Maybe if employees are allowed to take data home, most stuff could be pieced back together, but even then it would be a substantial amount of work. But as with TFA, it's not something to spend a massive amount of money on. Where I work, all projects should have a daily backup to a central server (just simple batch script / shell script / version control system), and that has an off-site backup, which as far as I'm aware just means one of the admins swaps the hotswap bays and takes the discs home on a weekly basis. Total cost is about 5 minutes a week to swap the discs; the hotswap hardware itself, and a few extra discs is well under £1000. Everything else is no different from what we'd need to do for regular backups anyway.
Even for my own data, e.g. holiday photos, every so often I make sure to put it all on a removable hard disc and copy it onto my work PC. I'd certainly consider it worthy of a disaster recovery solution, given that it's so very easy to do.
External graphics cards? These have been tried before for laptops, but electricity only moves down copper traces at a very limited speed. This sort of connection could decrease the latency as well as bandwidth. Potentially other external components could be done the same way - e.g. additional memory in a laptop base station. The bandwidth is enough to support it, and the latency should be good too.
I think the problem people have with RAMBUS is specifically that they sat in on the JEDEC working groups to watch the development of new standards, and then when everyone had decided on the design and invested huge amounts of money, they piped up that they had a patent on it. This was completely against the principles of the JEDEC working groups - where the meetings are specifically aimed at ensuring they are developing an open standard free from their member's patents which might otherwise block the technology - not necessarily 100% unpatented, but where they know what the patent licensing agreements are. Generally all the members agree to cross-licence the patents between themselves - this is the 'cost' of joining the JEDEC standards group.
The RAMBUS technology (and to a leser extent, it's implementation) is actually rather good, so they aren't a classic patent troll, but their submarine patent on DDR technology makes them clearly some form of patent troll.
The most worrying thing is that I wouldn't put it past the government to pass a law repealing the third law of thermodynamics!
I was quite impressed with the Monster Raving Loony party's campaign this year. Introduction of a 99p coin to save on change was genius, but this definitely tops it.
> That said, I wouldn't employ half of the people on my undergraduate degree course to change a lightbulb, unless someone else was supervising them.
I would definitely agree with that, but it's nothing new. I finished uni 7 years ago, and I knew people (even some awarded a first) who quite simply couldn't write a computer program. I work at a dedicated software house, but most people we employ have come in from the other sciences, particularly physics, and maths backgrounds. I understand why: my brother went to the same university 2 years behind me, doing Physics and Molecular Chemistry. He had to take an 'introduction' to C-coding course worth 5 units - it covered approximately 3 full modules (30 units) of my own course.
As I say, my own experience of uni is now a bit out of date, but I get the impression that generally, the CS courses on offer in the UK are not up to par with the proper sciences or maths. And the grades are awarded way too easily, even to people who fundamentally don't understand the subject matter.
Which things and how? I can't find any answers and I'm really interested in what went wrong here. I had a bit of an investigation online - I even found a useful article and discussion here which appears to have a number of knowledgeable people:
http://www.drillingahead.com/forum/topics/transocean-deepwater-horizon-1
But still nothing really clearcut. A lot of interesting titbits on the BOP, and how that might have failed. It's worth a read if you're interested.
Why is everyone so fixated on BP's management and failings, when they were just leasing a rig owned and operated by Transocean? Yes, the fact they were getting the profits from the rig means they have a duty to pay the costs of the disaster, and they are doing so with very little complaint. But sending BP's management to prison? It seems like Transocean were the offshore drilling experts, and hadn't made any complaints that BP were asking them to act recklessly in any aspects of the rig operation. I think BP should continue paying for the clearup, but I don't see any evidence that they were criminally negligent.
> If they halved the price, they could possibly quadruple the number of subscribers
I don't believe that at all. The market is miniscule because it's a niche product. As others have said, for most purposes a standard mobile network will suffice. For fixed but remote installations, its easier to put up a dish and use that. Typically for stuff like cruise ships, they just stick a cell tower on the boat. So Iridium is only ever going to be used by small groups of people wandering about in the wilderness. I don't think reducing the price would cause more people to want to do that.
I agree - once a day trading sounds to me like a very good thing. I've recently set up a day-trading account just to investigate the details of how it would all work - the information openly available didn't seem to be that complete. I've got a few thousands of pounds in shares that I'm worried may drop in the short term, and was considering whether to take out some short positions as a hedge against it.
But in the end, there's a few things stopping me:
- The moral dilemma. As you say, so far as I can see the only situation in which it isn't pure gambling is probably insider trading. With leveraged futures trading I'm not even putting much extra investment money into the system. At least I know with my shares there is real money to be invested and hopefully I'll make a good long term profit too.
- The exchanges are only open while I'm at work - unless I'm trading on another countries exchange on stuff I know even less about - and then it's even more like gambling. Even if a started trades during the out of hours period in the evening, I'd need to be looking at stuff the next working day, distracting me from ... er, Slashdot.
- I'm just not sure I even like the concept of shorting. Now the Germans have banned some of it, and I wonder if that will spread. Surely not as far as the US, but maybe across more of Europe. I can't say I'd be too upset if it does.
RAID 6+1 would be mirrored, and I've never heard of it - total overkill !! You'd much more likely go with RAID 5+1.
RAID 0 is striping, RAID 1 is mirroring, RAID 3 is a dedicated parity disc, RAID 5 is striping with a striped parity block, RAID 6 is the same with two parities.
Personally, for my own stuff, I've just got plain RAID 5 with offline backup discs. Any form of RAID is only an attempt to keep your system going during a disc failure. It's not a substitute for backups, and I always tend to think that RAID 5+1 (or 6+1) setups are made by people who think they can avoid backups with this sort of redundancy.
A friend had a 5 bay hotswap backplane, and the power circuits failed. By the time he got to the server, all 5 discs were ruined. RAID will only get you so far ...
My main one is using this plugin: http://www.viemu.com/ :)
I think the Lib Dems should go only for proportional representation, as their only demand. If that goes ahead, their views can be considered in line with their vote share for every future election. That has to be a great result, even if it means for this (most likely short lived) parliament, they are sidelined once more.
But if you look outside of southern England, the accepted wisdom in many areas, particularly Scotland, is that the Conservatives aren't going to win a seat. I think a lot of voters in these areas vote Lib Dem or other parties as their way of voting for not-Labour.
As it is, there's little point voting Conservative if you know they'll only get 10% of the vote. They just won't win the seat, and your vote will mean very little. I wonder what the real Conservative vote would be in Scotland if people thought their vote would count.
Definitely. I live in Rochdale, which previously had a Lib Dem MP on a very slim majority. The constituency was changed to move a solidly Labour ward from a nearby solid Labour constituency into Rochdale. It worked perfectly. We now have a Labour MP on a narrow majority. And the nearby consituency is slightly less solid Labour, but still Labour. Nice result for the Labour government.
Supposedly, the constituency boundaries are independantly set, but strangely they always seem to favour one side.
I am very optimistic of the potential of a hung parliament. For the last 13 years, it seems barely a single Labour MP has had the backbone to vote outside of the party line. Law after ridiculous law has been passed without proper debate. Time and again, these laws have been badly worded and badly scoped. But it just doesn't matter because all the Labour MPs vote according to their party position. Perhaps a dozen seem to actually engage their brain and vote as they believe, but the parliamentary majority was big enough that it made no difference.
The media always seem to portray the Conservatives in a very negative light for their internal disagreements on policy. This for me is one of the more attractive features. They have many more MPs who have strong beliefs they are willing to argue for publicly, that don't necessarily go along with what the overall party believes. Assuming people vote properly for their local MP based on that persons views this is a very good thing.
I'm really hoping that in this next parliament, controversial and unpopular laws are going to be unpassable, at least without a proper discussion of the merits, and attempts to remove or minimise the possible deleterious effects. Even the Conservatives + Lib Dems will have a smaller majority than Labour had, and so I hope the laws that do get made will be far more sensible than the ones we have had these last 13 years.
I'd never heard this one before, guess it's the American version! The one I was taught was a complaint by a pub landlord to their sign writer:
You've left too much space between pig and and and and and whistle
It's really easy to deal with a world in black and white. Of course the real situation is that this guy producing code has various generic libraries that help him to produce a website. Those weren't developed as part of the 'Write X' task but are completely integral to it. Your scheme only allows for off the shelf software, and stuff developed right from first principles, which is ridiculous.
Most core business software just wouldn't fit into either model. I wonder if anyone has some insider knowledge here, but for systems like SAP, there always seems to be an extremely long and expensive configuration and commissioning phase. Words like programming are not used, but I'm assuming that really, that's mostly what happens during that phase. Because the fact is that every business has its own unique little characteristics and foibles in the way the business is run, and I just don't believe SAP have somehow written software that can handle them all without additional programming.
So when you buy just about any big piece of software, you are going into this big grey area where you're buying a mixture of off-the-shelf and custom code, where either component by itself is useless, and the combination is the only possible way of getting the job done.
One other factor is causation. The fact is that on this subject there are some studies that seem to show correlation, drowned out by ones which don't. But so far, there is no known method for this radiation to affect living tissues. Maybe if anyone could get anywhere describing a mechanism for causation, then serious scientists would take another look at the extremely weak correlation.
Well said. I think a lot of people forget all the things that go into making a piece of software than pure programming, and pretty much everything in the article is just describing some of the things in that list. Personally, I didn't even think it was all that comprehensive.
I've thought about going it alone myself, because when it comes down to coding stuff, I'm pretty self suffficient now. It's still very useful to be able to easily go and ask an AIX or Oracle expert when I don't know stuff, but I can mostly figure it out myself. Unfortunately, I'm not enough of a salesperson, and not a people-person in general. And to be honest I'm just not that interested in the business side. I'd be bored senseless dealing with that side of things.
The other difference with plumbers and many similar occupations is that self employed plumbers get a lot of business from individuals. On a person-to-person basis, a whole load of overhead of dealing with companies tends to just disappear; other than a one page overview and a receipt, there's almost no paperwork for my new bathroom. But individuals don't have that much use for custom software, so as an independant developer you're not really in the same type of business as an independant plumber anyway.
My approximately 6 year old motherboard has PCI-Express and will still take brand new graphics cards as PCI-E v2 is backwards compatible. That's socket 939, which was primarily for single core chips, although the Athlon X2 was launched towards the end of it's lifetime (I upgraded to an X2 4200+).
But either way, the poster above already convinced me I was wrong with the Steam survey data. I guess it's mainly down to the difficulty of programming part rather than install base.