Maybe use virtual machines, with pre-packaged disk images specially prepared for those websites (like, IE pre-configured to only connect with their servers, only accept their SSL certificates and completely locked down to any configuration changes), and a policy of returning the VM to the initial state (requires a VM with snapshotting) after each use? Most decent VM engines support RDP too, so the actual hypervisor with its VM images doesn't even need to exist on the workstations, you can put it on a secured server somewhere in the company and make some scripting that would start and present to the user a new, clean VM instance each time they connect. Should be easily hackable using VirtualBox OSE. Alternatively, VMware might offer something like this sytem out of the box, should you decide to pay someone to do this for you.
AFAIK (and I might be wrong, I'm no biologist, but I remember reading this in more than one book), mammals have this interesting property in that the ratios of their metabolic rate, cell division rate and lifespan are roughly equal across species.
Ah, OK. I thought you meant that when a student wants to use his own laptop on the school grounds, they want to install some crap on it, as well as installing it on the school hardware.
As a side note, I wish Slashdot swapped the "Submit" and "Continue Editing" buttons. It's too easy to click the former much too quickly by accident, as can be seen in the above post.
1. Install VirtualBox. 2. Install Windows as a guest (preferably the same version as host if it is Windows, or some believable version if the host is a *nix or whatever). 3. Start the virtual machine in full-screen mode, with automatic USB and CD pass-through. 4. Let them install all the crap they want, smiling and thanking them for it. 5. Save the sate of the virtual machine just in case it's suddenly needed sometime in the future. 6. ??? 7. Prifot, and a crap-free computer with a good VM system installed for other uses.
As far as I know, the contact pads are still being heated because the processes involved in reflow and hot air soldering generate much "excess" (actually, not) heat around the solder paste itself and heat those pads, as well as the rest of the whole board, to a uniform temperature.
Besides, I can recall a technology that involved microwaving a board with a water-based solder paste on it and AFAIR it was said to be highly unreliable oexcept in strictly controlled conditions because of the pads not getting hot enough from just the heat of the paste - as the water evaporated, thethermal capacity of a paste glob decreses and soon there's not enough heat in it to maintain the temperature increase in the pad.
Either it's a bad case of lousy, pseudo-scientific journalism, or the people who invented this were not as bright as it seems. The invention itself is interesting and undoubtedly will be found useful for some very specific uses (molding microscopic parts, maybe?), but soldering electronics is not going to be one of them.
You just can't put hot solder on a cold contact or PCB pad and expect it to work. It will not. Soldering requires heating the surfaces being joined as well as the solder, to the same or even higher temperature (achieved by only directly heating those surfaces and letting the solder melt in contact with them). Period.
Even though it's just a short report, it's going to be very valuable for anyone doing similar work, be it for a conference or for a more permanent setup. No textbook is going to protect against those "oh crap, why didn't I think of it before?" moments like some actual experience would, and this posting is the next best thing after actually having someone with experience on site. And this works for any field of applied technology, not just wireless networking.
Unless I'm reading wrong, this *is* PCI-Express all right, just a different physical interface with an additional (most likely optional) lane and some new, fancy I/O lines.
But why USB 2.0? That would be a perfect place to include 3.0, wouldn't it?
Ever heard of polycarbonate? They use it to produce composite bulletproof window panes, safety shields for industrial machinery, impact-resistant safety glasses, underwater portholes, etc. It does degrade somewhat under UV light, but then, you can just put an UV filter on top of it, it's not going to be a problem for the panel itself. And there are other transparent plastics with very good properities for this application.
I believe this is about coffe shops and universities, where the network accessible through those APs is completely separate from the "work" network and absolutely intended to be open, for the convinience of the customers and students. Thus, it's got nothing to do with what you said at all.
There is one difference, on which I based my post. None of those previous inventions that caused all the changes you outlined were made by the very same people whose jobs were in turn being obsoleted. They were usually made by hired engineers paid by managers who wanted their companies to generate more profit with less cost. The engineers had so much to do with the job of the people they were replacing with machines as to be able to design and deploy a control system tailored to the task, and no more. Some might have had a doubt or two, but they were paid good money and their job was very secure. The managers couldn't care less.
This is not the case with AI (the kind described in the article), where the direct inventor will be explicitly making himself obsolete and, being someone smart enough to invent a superhuman-level AI, should be able to realise this.
The only way I can see this happening is when said engineer happens to be a delusional madman who just doesn't care, but that's very close to a James Bond-esque vilian, so not very likely.
I don't know what kind of experts and in what field those actually were, but if I were an AI expert about to create such an AI - and I'm able to see the problem and the remedy even though I'm not really an expert of any kind - I'd say "screw it, if it's going to take my job, and jobs of my friends, family and all my descendants, I'm making it a complete dimwit and swearing by all I know that it was impossible to design otherwise, and putting that in every single book and publication on the topic!"
98.27% Windows. 70.82 of that is XP, 17.25% is Vista, 10.77% Win 7, then 2000, Server 2003 and 98, all three in sub-percentages.
1.21% Linux 0.24% "not set" 0.21% Mac
In addition: 9 people (sub-promile amount) on an iPhone, 8 on Symbian, 5 on an iPod (WTF?...), 2 on an Android, 2 on some WebTVs or something.
Might be gaming bias, non-Windows gamers are rare in general. HoMM games mostly work on Wine, and there was a native Linux port of HoMM3 (without add-ons and incomatible with Windows versions in online play, quite useless today), but still, that's not mainstream by any measure.
I wouldn't be so sure about this. A majority of my users are really "casuals", not HoMM nerds. There's a group of about 60 of those, with 20-30 visiting on any given day, and the rest are mostly kids who just bought HoMM5 at an electronics store because the box was shiny enough, or adults with jobs and families who fire up the good, ol' HoMM I, II or III once a month or so for an hour to bring back the memories of college all-nighters.
A news site would probably be better for a non-biased sample, but I consider my statistics good enough, especially with such a huge difference.
If you don't speak Polish, it won't be of much use to you. If you do, you probably know it already, and if not, you should be able to find it using Google in no time.
Besides, I'm not taking my chances by putting a link up on/., I'm not *that* confident in my database optimization skills.
I remember posting about this about a year ago or so on/., and now I see the trend continue.
I run a website about the Heroes of Might and Magic game series (very little "geek bias"), in Poland and for Polish-speaking audience. It's relatively popular, about 1500 unique visitors a day, first hit for "Heroes of Might and Magic" in a localized Google search, thrid for "heroes" only after a Wikipedia disambiguation page for the term and the page on that goddamned TV series. The statistics are so completely different that it looks almost as if it were a parallel universe or something:
January 2008: 53.58% - Firefox 31.19% - IE 13.83% - Opera
January 2009: 60.99% - Firefox 23.99% - IE 12.32% - Opera 2.10% - Chrome
January 2010: 60.33% - Firefox 16.12% - Opera 15.29% - IE 6.24% - Chrome
Data gathered by Google Analytics, active on just about every non-static page on the server. It gets even more interesting in a month-by-month comparison on a graph, some of the fluctuations clearly correlate with new releases of FF, Opera, Chrome, *and* IE, but I'm afraid that I don't have the time right now to prepare something you could see and decide yourself.
Any other admins out there with similar statistics to share?
An Asymptote script should be able to do that. It's both a data representation language and a programming language, similar to LaTeX in principle, but resembling C++ in syntax. It doesn't support shebangs , so you'd have to invoke the intepreter explicitly (or write some kind of a wrapper attached to the begining of a file), but it does provide a mechanism for reading from standard input, and any other file, for that matter. Take a look at the histogram.asy example file provided with Asmptote.
Don't be so harsh, there surely is some reliable information out there. Of course, there still remains the problem of finding it, a process which, even with aid of a search engine, most closely resembles searching for diamonds in a septic tank with a single pair of rubber gloves and a ladle...
I prefer the Python interactive shell and GNU Octave (or any other Matlab-compatible environment, including Matlab itself) for numerical calculations, Asymptote for plots and other methods of data visualisation, Maxima when a CAS is in order and LaTeX to turn all the stuff generated by those packages into something readable and publishable.
Throw in some scripted links between all those tools, a few functions from Peter Acklam's Matlab Utilities, your favourite function for converting a matrix to a LaTeX table and saving it into a file in a single call, a few exec()-equivalents here and there, and you'll get a rig that auto-regenerates your report/publication/thesis/shopping list/whatever else you might have been doing, in a single run of a single program, should you spot a mistake somewhere deep in the calculations, or a typo in the input.
For one, I don't think I'll ever understand people who use spreadsheets. And copy their results to the word processor. And then spot a mistake in a formula, fix it and proceed to copy the new, correct results from scratch. And then spot a typo in the data.
Why biased? Well, I'm studying control systems and robotics. It's all about task automation. Besides, everything in this field involves using Matlab for something, and just about everyone in the academia (the technical side of it, at least) is using LaTeX, so you just kind of get used to using those two for just about anything after a while, and automating everything with scripts.
Of course, the above assumes somtheing more complicated than a few basic operations in a single line. We're talking about sophisticated calculators here. For simple tasks I'm just using Google...
The Japanese are probably the single most proactive nation in the world when it comes to the aging of population and proper care of the elderly, and this invention has some very obvious uses in this field. Coupled with a caretaker robot which would remind about medicines, schedule appointments with a doctor and call emergency services as appropriate, this device might actually improve the quality of life of some people considerably. Interestingly, such robots are already being tested in Japan, and they are also designed to relay local news, play logic- and memory-based games and engage in everyday chitchat with the people under their care to delay the onset of dementia and effects of boredom.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe the same people who claimed to believe in the Jedi religion on the national census (Google it if you don't believe) will vote for them?
Do you suggest that we withhold every single news item on the basis that someone, somewhere might not care?
Dont care? Don't read.
Maybe use virtual machines, with pre-packaged disk images specially prepared for those websites (like, IE pre-configured to only connect with their servers, only accept their SSL certificates and completely locked down to any configuration changes), and a policy of returning the VM to the initial state (requires a VM with snapshotting) after each use? Most decent VM engines support RDP too, so the actual hypervisor with its VM images doesn't even need to exist on the workstations, you can put it on a secured server somewhere in the company and make some scripting that would start and present to the user a new, clean VM instance each time they connect. Should be easily hackable using VirtualBox OSE. Alternatively, VMware might offer something like this sytem out of the box, should you decide to pay someone to do this for you.
AFAIK (and I might be wrong, I'm no biologist, but I remember reading this in more than one book), mammals have this interesting property in that the ratios of their metabolic rate, cell division rate and lifespan are roughly equal across species.
Ah, OK. I thought you meant that when a student wants to use his own laptop on the school grounds, they want to install some crap on it, as well as installing it on the school hardware.
As a side note, I wish Slashdot swapped the "Submit" and "Continue Editing" buttons. It's too easy to click the former much too quickly by accident, as can be seen in the above post.
1. Install VirtualBox.
2. Install Windows as a guest (preferably the same version as host if it is Windows, or some believable version if the host is a *nix or whatever).
3. Start the virtual machine in full-screen mode, with automatic USB and CD pass-through.
4. Let them install all the crap they want, smiling and thanking them for it.
5. Save the sate of the virtual machine just in case it's suddenly needed sometime in the future.
6. ???
7. Prifot, and a crap-free computer with a good VM system installed for other uses.
As far as I know, the contact pads are still being heated because the processes involved in reflow and hot air soldering generate much "excess" (actually, not) heat around the solder paste itself and heat those pads, as well as the rest of the whole board, to a uniform temperature.
Besides, I can recall a technology that involved microwaving a board with a water-based solder paste on it and AFAIR it was said to be highly unreliable oexcept in strictly controlled conditions because of the pads not getting hot enough from just the heat of the paste - as the water evaporated, thethermal capacity of a paste glob decreses and soon there's not enough heat in it to maintain the temperature increase in the pad.
It is.
Either it's a bad case of lousy, pseudo-scientific journalism, or the people who invented this were not as bright as it seems. The invention itself is interesting and undoubtedly will be found useful for some very specific uses (molding microscopic parts, maybe?), but soldering electronics is not going to be one of them.
You just can't put hot solder on a cold contact or PCB pad and expect it to work. It will not. Soldering requires heating the surfaces being joined as well as the solder, to the same or even higher temperature (achieved by only directly heating those surfaces and letting the solder melt in contact with them). Period.
Even though it's just a short report, it's going to be very valuable for anyone doing similar work, be it for a conference or for a more permanent setup. No textbook is going to protect against those "oh crap, why didn't I think of it before?" moments like some actual experience would, and this posting is the next best thing after actually having someone with experience on site. And this works for any field of applied technology, not just wireless networking.
So, thanks and be back with some more soon!
Unless I'm reading wrong, this *is* PCI-Express all right, just a different physical interface with an additional (most likely optional) lane and some new, fancy I/O lines.
But why USB 2.0? That would be a perfect place to include 3.0, wouldn't it?
Ever heard of polycarbonate? They use it to produce composite bulletproof window panes, safety shields for industrial machinery, impact-resistant safety glasses, underwater portholes, etc. It does degrade somewhat under UV light, but then, you can just put an UV filter on top of it, it's not going to be a problem for the panel itself. And there are other transparent plastics with very good properities for this application.
I believe this is about coffe shops and universities, where the network accessible through those APs is completely separate from the "work" network and absolutely intended to be open, for the convinience of the customers and students. Thus, it's got nothing to do with what you said at all.
Seeing software problems in terms of Flying Spaghetti Monsters? Ah, so that's where the "spaghetti code" term comes from!
There is one difference, on which I based my post. None of those previous inventions that caused all the changes you outlined were made by the very same people whose jobs were in turn being obsoleted. They were usually made by hired engineers paid by managers who wanted their companies to generate more profit with less cost. The engineers had so much to do with the job of the people they were replacing with machines as to be able to design and deploy a control system tailored to the task, and no more. Some might have had a doubt or two, but they were paid good money and their job was very secure. The managers couldn't care less.
This is not the case with AI (the kind described in the article), where the direct inventor will be explicitly making himself obsolete and, being someone smart enough to invent a superhuman-level AI, should be able to realise this.
The only way I can see this happening is when said engineer happens to be a delusional madman who just doesn't care, but that's very close to a James Bond-esque vilian, so not very likely.
I don't know what kind of experts and in what field those actually were, but if I were an AI expert about to create such an AI - and I'm able to see the problem and the remedy even though I'm not really an expert of any kind - I'd say "screw it, if it's going to take my job, and jobs of my friends, family and all my descendants, I'm making it a complete dimwit and swearing by all I know that it was impossible to design otherwise, and putting that in every single book and publication on the topic!"
http://xkcd.com/684/
Sorry,couldn't resist...
98.27% Windows. 70.82 of that is XP, 17.25% is Vista, 10.77% Win 7, then 2000, Server 2003 and 98, all three in sub-percentages.
1.21% Linux
0.24% "not set"
0.21% Mac
In addition: 9 people (sub-promile amount) on an iPhone, 8 on Symbian, 5 on an iPod (WTF?...), 2 on an Android, 2 on some WebTVs or something.
Might be gaming bias, non-Windows gamers are rare in general. HoMM games mostly work on Wine, and there was a native Linux port of HoMM3 (without add-ons and incomatible with Windows versions in online play, quite useless today), but still, that's not mainstream by any measure.
I wouldn't be so sure about this. A majority of my users are really "casuals", not HoMM nerds. There's a group of about 60 of those, with 20-30 visiting on any given day, and the rest are mostly kids who just bought HoMM5 at an electronics store because the box was shiny enough, or adults with jobs and families who fire up the good, ol' HoMM I, II or III once a month or so for an hour to bring back the memories of college all-nighters.
A news site would probably be better for a non-biased sample, but I consider my statistics good enough, especially with such a huge difference.
If you don't speak Polish, it won't be of much use to you. If you do, you probably know it already, and if not, you should be able to find it using Google in no time.
Besides, I'm not taking my chances by putting a link up on /., I'm not *that* confident in my database optimization skills.
I remember posting about this about a year ago or so on /., and now I see the trend continue.
I run a website about the Heroes of Might and Magic game series (very little "geek bias"), in Poland and for Polish-speaking audience. It's relatively popular, about 1500 unique visitors a day, first hit for "Heroes of Might and Magic" in a localized Google search, thrid for "heroes" only after a Wikipedia disambiguation page for the term and the page on that goddamned TV series. The statistics are so completely different that it looks almost as if it were a parallel universe or something:
January 2008:
53.58% - Firefox
31.19% - IE
13.83% - Opera
January 2009:
60.99% - Firefox
23.99% - IE
12.32% - Opera
2.10% - Chrome
January 2010:
60.33% - Firefox
16.12% - Opera
15.29% - IE
6.24% - Chrome
Data gathered by Google Analytics, active on just about every non-static page on the server. It gets even more interesting in a month-by-month comparison on a graph, some of the fluctuations clearly correlate with new releases of FF, Opera, Chrome, *and* IE, but I'm afraid that I don't have the time right now to prepare something you could see and decide yourself.
Any other admins out there with similar statistics to share?
An Asymptote script should be able to do that. It's both a data representation language and a programming language, similar to LaTeX in principle, but resembling C++ in syntax. It doesn't support shebangs , so you'd have to invoke the intepreter explicitly (or write some kind of a wrapper attached to the begining of a file), but it does provide a mechanism for reading from standard input, and any other file, for that matter. Take a look at the histogram.asy example file provided with Asmptote.
Don't be so harsh, there surely is some reliable information out there. Of course, there still remains the problem of finding it, a process which, even with aid of a search engine, most closely resembles searching for diamonds in a septic tank with a single pair of rubber gloves and a ladle...
I prefer the Python interactive shell and GNU Octave (or any other Matlab-compatible environment, including Matlab itself) for numerical calculations, Asymptote for plots and other methods of data visualisation, Maxima when a CAS is in order and LaTeX to turn all the stuff generated by those packages into something readable and publishable.
Throw in some scripted links between all those tools, a few functions from Peter Acklam's Matlab Utilities, your favourite function for converting a matrix to a LaTeX table and saving it into a file in a single call, a few exec()-equivalents here and there, and you'll get a rig that auto-regenerates your report/publication/thesis/shopping list/whatever else you might have been doing, in a single run of a single program, should you spot a mistake somewhere deep in the calculations, or a typo in the input.
For one, I don't think I'll ever understand people who use spreadsheets. And copy their results to the word processor. And then spot a mistake in a formula, fix it and proceed to copy the new, correct results from scratch. And then spot a typo in the data.
Why biased? Well, I'm studying control systems and robotics. It's all about task automation. Besides, everything in this field involves using Matlab for something, and just about everyone in the academia (the technical side of it, at least) is using LaTeX, so you just kind of get used to using those two for just about anything after a while, and automating everything with scripts.
Of course, the above assumes somtheing more complicated than a few basic operations in a single line. We're talking about sophisticated calculators here. For simple tasks I'm just using Google...
The Japanese are probably the single most proactive nation in the world when it comes to the aging of population and proper care of the elderly, and this invention has some very obvious uses in this field. Coupled with a caretaker robot which would remind about medicines, schedule appointments with a doctor and call emergency services as appropriate, this device might actually improve the quality of life of some people considerably. Interestingly, such robots are already being tested in Japan, and they are also designed to relay local news, play logic- and memory-based games and engage in everyday chitchat with the people under their care to delay the onset of dementia and effects of boredom.