As a citizen of Austria, I find it quite astonishing that this thing was able to provide light for a couple of days, although I have to admit that compared to now October still had plenty of daylight. I don't know whether or not they have been removed from the streets, but it would be pretty interesting to see for how long they can go in December/January, when it's quite dark throughout the entire month.
Apart from the energy savings, though, I wouldn't necessarily want to see them implemented throughout the city. Most of the 1st district's lighting is quite dim, giving the whole city with its many historic buildings a bit of a romantic flair, which - in my opinion - would be lost with all those bright lights everywhere.
Off topic and maybe obvious, but don't forget to make a backup of a mysql dump here and there on your home workstation. Replication will happily replicate an accidental DROP TABLE.
[...] as low as $10 were leaked for the really large OEMs, though that may be after the crapware subsidy rather than before.
In which case your argument of Windows being a net profit generator is invalid, since there's still $10 left for the consumer to pay, right? Unless, of course, they sell the Windows installation for >$10, thereby making a profit, which would *still* not explain more expensive Linux configurations.
Just like the poster above me I find it funny stumbling upon you here on Slashdot after having read "The Cuckoo's Egg". Interesting how many IT "celebrities" are on Slashdot.
By the way, I once got an A on a test in my German class (native German speaker) for completely ripping one of your more psychological/pedagogical articles apart. Sorry 'bout the bad karma.
That entirely depends on the definition of "Diensteanbieter", as a literal translation would read "service provider" and could actually mean anybody or anything that offers services. For instance, in my (EU member) country, 4 or 5 different kinds of telco providers are defined, like "somebody who stores informaton for others" and "somebody passing along data for others". The spirit of the law is that if you only forward data for others (which makes you a "provider for telecommunication services", regardless of being an ISP or hosting a proxy server on your DSL line) without modification you can not be held liable for those data.
Indeed, and on top of that I have the feeling that instead of resolving the scheduling issues many other "fixes" were proposed and/or implemented like preemptive locks and 1000Hz ticks, etc. We'll see how all those together will affect performance.
On the other hand, I have always liked the scheduler when it came to high-load and not too latency critical situations, even though IMHO the FreeBSD scheduler still scales better.
I wouldn't be so fast to call bullshit. FreeBSD has always been known to scale better than many other operating systems, although I must have to admit that I haven't yet tried SCHED_ULE. On the regular scheduler (SCHED_4BSD or similar) everything will *still* crawl to a halt at some load level, be it does so pretty gracefully.
I mean, why shouldn't it? Things like audio skipping while compiling simply happen because one or a few processes are given more time for the sake of throughput while "starving" other processes. A load of 80 over 5 minutes only means that on average there were 80 processes waiting for CPU time. If you gave each of them enough CPU time (and didn't have many other distractions like IRQs) why shouldn't they run pretty smoothly assuming the bottleneck wasn't the CPU itself?
Duh, sysadmin productivity is of course measured like UNIX uptime. Regularly check how many tasks each sysadmin is currently working on and take the average over 1, 5 and 15 days. A sysadmin uptime of 1.0 means he's productive 100% of the time, 0.01 means he's pretty much idle. If your average is way over 1.0 you need more sysadmins, else fire some.
For more fine-grained stats you could even split up those values into "user" (fixing stuff for idiots), "nice" (high priority stuff), "interrupt" (dealing with users), "system" (regular maintenance), "I/O" (meetings) and "idle" (reading slashdot).
Newer sysadmins even come with cost-savings built in. Simply lower their pay if they're mostly idle and step-by-step increase pay when uptime is reaching certain thresholds.
No question, your argument is of course valid. On the other hand, the possibility of untrusted parties gaining potentially interesting knowledge like personal health data and medical data from sewage was explicitly mentioned in the article. AFAIR, all the waste was collected and taken back to America for disposal. I'm pretty sure the porta-potty was under heavy surveillance and it's unlikely that he has much privacy when on the toilet, yet his feces seem to be important enough to be a state secret.
Related fact: Even your president (or at least the Secret Service) expects privacy when it comes to his sewage. When Bush came to visit my country, he brought his own portable toilet and toilet paper and refused to use any other toilet.
I'm not even going to comment on all that useless and baseless drivel and "interesting" definition of theft. I wouldn't even know where to begin. Instead, I present to you that snipped above. It just says it all and IMHO is the best summary there is.
As an autodidact I'm easily bored by overly long and dry technical presentations of what could be read through in a couple of minutes, but this video is getting very interesting and funny after the first couple if minutes. Lots of insight into the process of creating the new standards and and all the thoughts that go into it, mixed with anecdotes, random trivia and geek humor by Bjarne Stroustrup himself. I'm actually considering downloading the 700mb xvid version of the talk and making me some popcorn to go with it. IMO, even if you're not a C++ geek it's actually worth watching.
IMHO it's because a sysadmin's work consists of 2 major parts: getting things running and keeping things running. We do get the occasional "thanks for fixing my PC/server/app/issue". SAAD is there to remind people of our actual work: "thanks for having an uptime of 99.999% this year". People only notice when things *don't* run. They never do when everything *does* run flawlessly due to our hard work.
And don't forget: SAAD is an important day. Go on, blame us for that 0.01 percent of time things don't work, as long as once in a while you thank us for running incredibly complex stuff perfectly 99.99% of the time. Because that's what we actually do. Even if you don't see us "doing" anything at all it's not because we're lazy or redundant, it's because we're good at what we do.
If you don't know it already, you might want to check out Face of Mankind. They already implement a subset (albeit small one) of your ideas. For instance, there's many factions (police, military, mining, mercs, etc) where players can gain ranks within the faction (not really automated but set by higher players) and control the missions and the story line.
As far as I understand the article, there already was a royalty-free way to license their IP for those standards, only that as of now people don't have to explicitly fill out forms to be granted a license.
Making standards easier to apply is always a good thing, but IMHO for a standard to make sense it's even more important to force people to actually implement it properly and in a conforming way. Which brings me to the licensing terms of Adobe's PDF stuff, which can be freely implemented as long as the implementation strictly follows the standard. In the same vein, it might have been a good idea to add a constraint to the license that makes the free use of IBM's IP only available to people who strictly adhere to the standard. Everybody else who thinks they have a good reason for adding their own "extensions" would have to fill out forms like it used to be and maybe have to make any documentation and patent portfolio regarding their changes freely available.
As a result, people would either have to follow the standard or at least provide documentation and patent licenses to guarantee some degree of interoperability, in order to prevent things like Microsoft's bastardization of Kerberos.
But I'm neither a patent lawyer nor do I have any special insight into licensing deals, so if this idea is stupid then please feel free to point out any potential issues you might see.
Let's not forget the 1973 in the product name, which makes it sound antiquated to a mass market that largely appears to be drawn to "futuristic" numbers (2000 in the 90s, 3000 now). Yes, I know, it means nothing to the average slashdot audience but there seems to be a reason why psychology plays an important part in creation and advertisement of products.
I partially agree with you. Yet every now and then I find it interesting to have currently popular articles posted that others may have read, only to have it torn to shreds by Slashdot posters who know what they are talking about. Even though the articles might be bad, the following discussion is mostly relevant and interesting, which makes Slashdot special compared to Digg and the like.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm looking forward to "OMG, ur resrch is teh sux" comments and "CHEEP FUNDING M0RTG4GE" spam from elite universities around the world.
As a citizen of Austria, I find it quite astonishing that this thing was able to provide light for a couple of days, although I have to admit that compared to now October still had plenty of daylight. I don't know whether or not they have been removed from the streets, but it would be pretty interesting to see for how long they can go in December/January, when it's quite dark throughout the entire month.
Apart from the energy savings, though, I wouldn't necessarily want to see them implemented throughout the city. Most of the 1st district's lighting is quite dim, giving the whole city with its many historic buildings a bit of a romantic flair, which - in my opinion - would be lost with all those bright lights everywhere.
Your geek card is hereby revoked
Off topic and maybe obvious, but don't forget to make a backup of a mysql dump here and there on your home workstation. Replication will happily replicate an accidental DROP TABLE.
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1804996&group_id=4421&atid=104421
Been there, done that, didn't help.
Did you mean something like Morgellons disease or (the most likely cause of Morgellons) delusional parasitosis?
Original comment here, posted within a battle rap thread.
By the way, I once got an A on a test in my German class (native German speaker) for completely ripping one of your more psychological/pedagogical articles apart. Sorry 'bout the bad karma.
That entirely depends on the definition of "Diensteanbieter", as a literal translation would read "service provider" and could actually mean anybody or anything that offers services. For instance, in my (EU member) country, 4 or 5 different kinds of telco providers are defined, like "somebody who stores informaton for others" and "somebody passing along data for others". The spirit of the law is that if you only forward data for others (which makes you a "provider for telecommunication services", regardless of being an ISP or hosting a proxy server on your DSL line) without modification you can not be held liable for those data.
On the other hand, I have always liked the scheduler when it came to high-load and not too latency critical situations, even though IMHO the FreeBSD scheduler still scales better.
I mean, why shouldn't it? Things like audio skipping while compiling simply happen because one or a few processes are given more time for the sake of throughput while "starving" other processes. A load of 80 over 5 minutes only means that on average there were 80 processes waiting for CPU time. If you gave each of them enough CPU time (and didn't have many other distractions like IRQs) why shouldn't they run pretty smoothly assuming the bottleneck wasn't the CPU itself?
For more fine-grained stats you could even split up those values into "user" (fixing stuff for idiots), "nice" (high priority stuff), "interrupt" (dealing with users), "system" (regular maintenance), "I/O" (meetings) and "idle" (reading slashdot).
Newer sysadmins even come with cost-savings built in. Simply lower their pay if they're mostly idle and step-by-step increase pay when uptime is reaching certain thresholds.
See? It's that easy!
No question, your argument is of course valid. On the other hand, the possibility of untrusted parties gaining potentially interesting knowledge like personal health data and medical data from sewage was explicitly mentioned in the article. AFAIR, all the waste was collected and taken back to America for disposal. I'm pretty sure the porta-potty was under heavy surveillance and it's unlikely that he has much privacy when on the toilet, yet his feces seem to be important enough to be a state secret.
Related fact: Even your president (or at least the Secret Service) expects privacy when it comes to his sewage. When Bush came to visit my country, he brought his own portable toilet and toilet paper and refused to use any other toilet.
I'm not even going to comment on all that useless and baseless drivel and "interesting" definition of theft. I wouldn't even know where to begin. Instead, I present to you that snipped above. It just says it all and IMHO is the best summary there is.
As an autodidact I'm easily bored by overly long and dry technical presentations of what could be read through in a couple of minutes, but this video is getting very interesting and funny after the first couple if minutes. Lots of insight into the process of creating the new standards and and all the thoughts that go into it, mixed with anecdotes, random trivia and geek humor by Bjarne Stroustrup himself. I'm actually considering downloading the 700mb xvid version of the talk and making me some popcorn to go with it. IMO, even if you're not a C++ geek it's actually worth watching.
IMHO it's because a sysadmin's work consists of 2 major parts: getting things running and keeping things running. We do get the occasional "thanks for fixing my PC/server/app/issue". SAAD is there to remind people of our actual work: "thanks for having an uptime of 99.999% this year". People only notice when things *don't* run. They never do when everything *does* run flawlessly due to our hard work.
And don't forget: SAAD is an important day. Go on, blame us for that 0.01 percent of time things don't work, as long as once in a while you thank us for running incredibly complex stuff perfectly 99.99% of the time. Because that's what we actually do. Even if you don't see us "doing" anything at all it's not because we're lazy or redundant, it's because we're good at what we do.
If you don't know it already, you might want to check out Face of Mankind. They already implement a subset (albeit small one) of your ideas. For instance, there's many factions (police, military, mining, mercs, etc) where players can gain ranks within the faction (not really automated but set by higher players) and control the missions and the story line.
thanks for the laugh. this was awesome.
Making standards easier to apply is always a good thing, but IMHO for a standard to make sense it's even more important to force people to actually implement it properly and in a conforming way. Which brings me to the licensing terms of Adobe's PDF stuff, which can be freely implemented as long as the implementation strictly follows the standard. In the same vein, it might have been a good idea to add a constraint to the license that makes the free use of IBM's IP only available to people who strictly adhere to the standard. Everybody else who thinks they have a good reason for adding their own "extensions" would have to fill out forms like it used to be and maybe have to make any documentation and patent portfolio regarding their changes freely available.
As a result, people would either have to follow the standard or at least provide documentation and patent licenses to guarantee some degree of interoperability, in order to prevent things like Microsoft's bastardization of Kerberos.
But I'm neither a patent lawyer nor do I have any special insight into licensing deals, so if this idea is stupid then please feel free to point out any potential issues you might see.
You mean a captcha like this one?
Let's not forget the 1973 in the product name, which makes it sound antiquated to a mass market that largely appears to be drawn to "futuristic" numbers (2000 in the 90s, 3000 now). Yes, I know, it means nothing to the average slashdot audience but there seems to be a reason why psychology plays an important part in creation and advertisement of products.
I partially agree with you. Yet every now and then I find it interesting to have currently popular articles posted that others may have read, only to have it torn to shreds by Slashdot posters who know what they are talking about. Even though the articles might be bad, the following discussion is mostly relevant and interesting, which makes Slashdot special compared to Digg and the like.