***Since the UAC so clearly fails in its goal of making computing more secure, and substantially increases complexity, why is it common wisdom that turning off UAC is 'not recommended'?***
We can't have a Slashdot discussion without an automotive analogy, right? But in this case, it might be appropriate.
There is abundant evidence from insurance company data that Antilock Braking Systems do not do much in practice to prevent or mitigate accidents. No one knows why not, but they don't. But would you recommend to someone that they disable their ABS system? Not only will you be blamed if they have an accident on any road that has a trace of moisture or sand on it, you might even be legally liable.
UAC looks to be much the same thing. It's pretty evident that it is a failed approach to secutity. Not necessarily dumb. But failed. Nonetheless, very few people are just going to come out and say that it doesn't work and you might just as well turn it off and wait for the next attempt to bolster security. After all, there might be some condition somewhere where it actually helps.
*** I really don't know how else to explain some of the boneheaded changes they have made. And they wonder why sales are off.***
Well don't blame me. I went right out last week and bought a brand new AcerPower 1000 -- with XP. Figured it might be my last chance to avoid Vista. So there you have it. Solid evidence that Vista is GOOD for hardware and software sales.
***It's lights-out for analog TV over-the-air broadcasting in 2009.***
Barring a miracle, the chances that analog TV will be shut down in 2009 are roughly the same as those that George W Bush will be elected mayor of Ramadi, Iraq in a free and fair election. My guess is that the next analog deadline in the on-going debacle that has been digital TV rollout in the US will be 2012. And the real shutdown will be in 2015 or later.
Many congressmen have staff people who are capable of figuring out the consequences of turning off analog TV to millions of voters before they voluntarily switch to DTV. 'Taint likely going to happen until the number of potentially angry voters is reasonably low. Which means not until a lot more DTV stations are on the air, most TV sets are DTV, and probably not until folks can buy a DTV to NTSC converter at their local drug store for $20.
***If I had to guess, the Iranian's claim to have a viable space program are both about as reliable as the previous claims about Iraq***
If you will recall, back in the 1980s, America's then bosom buddy Saddam Hussein -- then the defender of democracy in the Middle East -- engaged in a lengthy war with Iran. Both sides launched IRBMs at each other -- quite a lot of them. So, it shouldn't come as any suprise that Iran has some ability to build a rockets. It's hardly alone. If Iran actually put a payload into orbit, they would be the ninth country to do so. Many others (e.g. Canada, South Korea, Germany, Brazil) probably could do so if they chose to.
As to why Iran would chose to build big rockets... I dunno, maybe it has something to do with the fiasco in Iraq. I expect that the Iranians would like to ensure that the next bunch of incompetent fundamentalist Christian screwballs who decide to re-engineer the Middle East pick someplace other than Persia to liberate.
***The question is, do we really need to replace PDF? I think the article was about replacing wordprocessor formats, not PDF. They are two very different things.***
That's certainly a fair question.
Answer -- I'm not sure. The indictment against PDF is fairly lengthy. Adobe's PDF offerings are slow, bloated and not especially reliable. XPDF often doesn't work. For that matter, neither does Foxit, but at least Foxit will run on an older PC without consuming all the available resources. Many PDFs aren't text searchable. Text recovery from PDF documents that permit text copy is often a total shambles -- looks more like OCR with insufficient queues to the OCR software than anything reasonable
I think that PDF is used primarily for two things. It is used to specify documents where the author doesn't want things moved. Basically -- Here's the layout, no will you please (Godammit) try to adhere to it as closely as is physically possible when rendering/printing? Perfectly reasonable request. I'm not sure that PDF is a particularly good answer. It's just better than the alternatives. That's what I think a real layout language might help.
The second use for PDF is here's a document that was produced for some other purpose -- e.g. for a scientific journal or whatever. How to make it available digitally without rewriting it from scratch? I don't think PDF does that at all well, but it may be better than the alternatives. I'm not even sure what the alternatives are.
***I think this fellow's point is that HTML/CSS formats can store any information that a Word Processor might need to store, with no need to invoke new technologies. To a certain extent, he may be correct. Unfortunately, HTML/CSS may make a good intermediary format, but it is not particularly good from a performance or usability perspective. Then again, XML formats in general are fairly poor choices for the same reason.***
The M in HTML stands for MARKUP. And it means it. HTML is NOT a layout language. Never has been, and apparently never will be despite unending attempts to use it for page layout. In fact, HTML documents look different in every browser -- which is not, I think, a characteristic that most users are going to desire for a large subset of documentation. How, for example, can you specify a an OCRable form, if the rendering program is free to move the damn boxes around?
If someone would like to propose an standards based HTLL that focuses on document layout, they have my support. I don't care if it is XML based. Just that it works, is reasonably concise, everyone uses it, and that it replaces PDF as a vehicle for specifying documents that need to be rendered pretty much exactly as the author specified them.
While I'm sure that an HTLL specification would be lengthy, I don't think it needs to embody every quirk of every version of Microsoft Word or Open Office.
***Exactly. "Unsupported" is a magic word used by tech support departments so they can wash their hands of the problem.***
So what is support supposed to do? Modern OSes are insanely complex and both OS and Application documentation is virtually useless for most of the reported problems. Figure many hours, maybe days for any problem that isn't trivial and where an answer doesn't pop up in the first 20 Google hits. That's if the problem can be fixed at all. Call the vendor's tech support? Right. With most (not all) vendors, their time is far better spent prowling through configuration menus,.INI (or/etc) files or even the #$@( registry in hopes of finding a magic solution. Which doesn't mean that their chances of finding an answer are especially good.
If you give Tech Support an undoable job, should you be suprised when it turns out that they can't do it?
But if you want to fault Tech Support for being arrogant, pigheaded, obnoxious, totally out of touch with reality, etc... well, that's a different story. Many -- maybe all -- your complaints could be well founded.
***Sure, farmers can buy all the fertilizer they want, but that's petroleum based and doesn't really fully replenish the topsoil. ***
A reasonable concern. But y'know what? Crops can be grown without fertilizer. The yield is substantially lower, but modern crop varieties are much more productive than those in use a century ago. And quite a lot of land that was under cultivation in say 1850 has returned to wilderness -- at least in North America. So maybe we'll muddle through. Or maybe we won't. It's far from an open and shut case that the demise of modern civilization would be a tragedy.
***What exactly does this do for alternative energy, i thought we were attempting to avoid oil gas, and coal? How small exactly? Are we talking laptops powered with natural gas small? Or just a minimal reduction in size, either way, i don't see much benefit, couldn't those corn cobs be better used to make biodiesel instead?***
Well, it's like this. Five or ten decades from now, gasoline from the ground is probably going to be a scarce and expensive resource. It may well be easier to make methane from biological sources than it is to make a mixture of medium chain length hydrocarbons -- e.g. gasoline, kerosine, and/or biodiesel from biological sources. This corn cob thing looks to maybe be a better solution to storing Methane in a vehicle than storing the stuff under pressure -- which is what is done nowdays for fleet vehicles.
What could possibly go wrong? Plenty. the corn cobs could deteriorate over time, or breed nasty bacteria that convert Methane to something toxic, or... the list is long and I doubt anybody's list of possible problems is really complete. Still, the list is probably less intimidating than for the simplistic solution -- hydrogen. [George W Bush thinks hydrogen is the fuel of the future. That should to be all anyone needs to know in order to suspect that it might not work out]. So, this is a possibly good idea. We'll know more in 5-10 years
***Um, but doesn't the summary of the paper say that there is no infant mortality effect,***
It does. But it also says -- repeatedly -- that the data is disk replacement data, NOT disk failure data. i.e. it's data on the number of problems that the user tech thought might be fixed by replacing the disk, not by the number of disks that actually failed. One might wonder if, for example, the response to a system failing while it was being set up or in early lifetime might not be to put the whole damn thing into a box and ship it back to the vendor rather than dink around trying to figure out what is wrong. That won't be recorded as a disk failure.
The study is fine -- really it is. But, table 3 ought to give pause. It's quite clear that different data sets show quite different diagnostic patterns. We've got one set of data that says that power supplies, for example, are hardly ever replaced and a second set that says that they are the most frequently replaced item. There MAY be good reasons for this. But it could also be an indication that the technicians are incompetent, that the record keeping is erratic, or (and I'd seriously consider this one) that only certain kinds of failures are being recorded.
Finally, I think someone really ought to mention that there is no way that a disk manufacturer is actually going to measure MTBFs of 100000 hours prior to printing up the data sheets. The problem is that there are only around 750 hours in a month. And you need a reasonable number of failures (many quality guys would say at least 4) in order to get a reasonably valid MTBF. In order to actually measure a six digit MTBF, the manufacturer would have to run maybe 500 units for a month. My guess is that isn't going to happen. If they have the production line producing 500 units, they are going to ship them. Manufacturer MTBF data are surely based on data from a handful of engineering and preproduction units plus a bunch of wild guesses.
My guess, and it is just a guess, is that manufacturer MTBFs for disks are probably pretty much the MTBF goal in the drive specifications established before the design actually started.
Incidentally, based on some experience with other sorts of high tech gadetry, if the engineering/preproduction units do fail during test, a failure analysis will be done, and steps will be taken to fix the problem. Problem's fixed. OK, we shouldn't count those failures since they won't happen any more. That's called "censoring failure data". Begin to get an idea why disk MTBFs might be pretty much pure fiction?
***Let's be fair. The reasons for those two organizations being against LPFM are very different. Clear Channel doesn't want competition. NPR realizes that the only place where first adjacents are likely to work reliably is in the lower power non-comm band, which means it will disproportionately hurt NPR and its member stations by causing harmful interference. You can't really fault them for that.***
Let's be even fairer. NPR is ALREADY having interference problems with the satellite radio RF modulators. Some NPR operations e.g. North Country Public Radio in extreme upstate new york, depend on an assemblege of low power repeaters and translators operating in the 88.1-91.9 non-commercial band. Because of the low power and difficult topography, signals are often marginal even without some idiot in an SUV blasting too many watts of Howard Stern into a channel that belongs to someone else.
Presumably an answer to this is to give 88.1MHz to unlicensed low-power FM. Sirius, XM, et al translators can fight it out with college dorm stations, guys in garages, etc. Will it be a mess? That'd be my bet. Who cares?
***Humorously, if that same chunk of spectrum were used for traditional FM, assuming you didn't allow second adjacents (and you really shouldn't allow them), you would only have fifty stations in that same chunk of spectrum. However, if you used an uncompressed 16-bit, 48kHz audio signal and modulated it with SSB, even if you couldn't do better than 1 bit per cycle, my quick back-of-a-napkin estimate is that you ought to be able to do it in a less than 120 kHz band (instead of 1 MHz for FM), or about 400 uncompressed channels in that same space---more channels than XM/Sirius, crammed into the same space, and without using lossy compression.***
I must be missing something here. Traditional FM channels are 200KHz, not 1MHz, and often have two signals -- the main signal and an SCA signal modulated onto them. The reason for not allowing adjacent and second adjacent channels isn't that listeners can't separate five equal strength signals on adjacent channels -- they can. It's that in real life, the signals aren't equal strength and two transmitters in Podunk operating on adjacent frequencies would have probably have significant dead spots in their coverage near the other guy's transmitters. If every signal were the same strength -- as is, I assume, pretty much the case with satellite radio and if the SCA bandwidth were used for a real primary channel, wouldn't 50MHz of satellite FM hold 1000 channels? (Which is not to say that an optimal digital scheme might not do better).
Warner Bros. sued by James Dean's Family: "Warner Bros. (was) . . . ordered to pay $1.6 million to the family of James Dean and their agent, Curtis Management Group, related to a suit the studio . . . lost over merchandising rights . . . The studio had filed a $90 million suit in 1991, claiming that it was the rightful owner of Dean's likeness and image because of a clause in a contract that the actor had signed in 1954 prior to the filming of East of Eden. The clause, located in a standard contract, allowed the studio to use Dean's likeness and image in perpetuity for commercial tie-ins to the film. While the studio claimed that the clause also carried over to the use of merchandising unrelated to the film, a U.S. District Court judged . . . ruled that it only related to the selling and advertising of the three films he starred in before his death. The Dean image has generated some $30 million since 1984."
Universal sued by James Garner: James Garner waited six years to go to trial on his $16.5 million lawsuit against Universal Studios, charging he was " . . . cheated out of his fair share of syndication profits from the television series The Rockford Files. The case was settled a few days after jury selection began in mid March." The Universal series The Rockford Files, starring James Garner " . . . ran on NBC from 1974 to 1980 and then moved into off-network sales, where it is still going strong. After determining that the show had taken in more than $120 million from syndication, foreign, and other markets, the studio's accountant informed the actor that it had earned less than $1 million in profits and that his share . . . fell a little short of $250,000. Garner sued and nearly a decade later settled out of court for a reported $5 million."
***Dude, until I can click on setup.exe, and it just works***
Maybe it doesn't have to go that far. Most of us have lived for years with Windows where you click on SETUP.EXE and damn near anything can happen. Granted -- a usable installation is the most probable result -- but unusable installations are common, and sometimes other things get broken. In the worst case (thankfully rare), you may need to reinstall Windows. I don't know about anyone else, but I've spent months of my life (cumulative total) dealing with the consequences of clicking on SETUP.EXE.
And as for clicking on UNINS000.EXE and its friends, it's better than not clicking on it I suppose. But leaving stuff behind seems awfully common.
It'd be nice if Unix install/uninstall worked better than Windows. But just working as well as Windows seems not all that high a barrier.
So, just get me something that works. And if it would tell me clearly about missing dependancies and give me a clue where to look for the stuff I need, that would be nice. Looking for missing libraries and packages is tedious if you are used to it and quite intimidating if you aren't.
If I were writing this paper, I wouldn't specify brands and neither would most people. Technologies change so fast that the manufacturers that were not too great a year or three ago may be superior this year and the makers that were great in the past may well be dogs this year. Why ask for trouble?
Exception: If one specific manufacturer or model were clearly an utter disaster, I might exclude the data for that manufacturer-model in order to keep from contaminating the results. In that case, I probably would name names. But apparently nothing the authors dealt with was that bad.
***This makes it harder for them to get one. Once they are denied a driver license, a whole host of otherwise trivial transactions (banking, travel, renting an apartment, etc) become much harder from them to accomplish without attracting attention.***
Give us a break, eh? Bin Laden and similar creeps have real resources fueled by petrodollars behind them. Not vast sums most likely, but plenty to manage whatever form of real or false ID is needed for any given operation that doesn't involve thousands of people. Neither the DHS/INS STASI-lite operation nor the bizarre and ineffective financial controls that do not affect the real cash flows to fundamentalist islam are going to do anything other than incovenience Americans and legitimate visitors.
(BTW, How many people are going to want to visit a totalitarian state where incompetent federal police might throw you in jail for years with no legal recourse because they have confused you with a Bulgarian arms dealer or a Malaysian moslem extremist?)
Want proof? Think about this. The draconian measures that are supposed to protect the US from terrorists are largely the same measures that would be needed for a real and serious war on drugs. Have you heard any stories about the price of imported drugs (Cocaine, Heroin, etc) soaring due to scarcity? Anything about a massive switch to domestic drugs (e.g. methamphetamine). Do you really doubt that with the right contacts and a bunch of cash, you could get a metric ton of good quality Latim American or Canadian marijuana delivered to your garage a week from next Tuesday?
Make no mistake, these driver's license/passport etc measures are a foolish and inept attempt by incompetent leaders to accomplish the impossible -- to deter terrorism without actually infringing serously on personal freedoms. The net result will be to infringe on freedoms without impeding terrorists one bit.
***Except the 'simple printed ballots' have to be stolen from a secure facility.***
Maybe where you live they have secure facilities and store ballots in them. But I doubt it it. Are there secure facilities in Vermont and other rural areas? Sure, I've been in a couple belonging to the military or the feds. I suppose that a bank vault would qualify. But most secure facilities would hardly be a reasonable place to stash large stacks of paper. And few of the citizens responsible for getting the ballots to polling places (in the middle of the night incidentally) would have the least idea how to effect secure transport and storage procedures. For that matter, the polling places are in school gymnasiums and mostly aren't my idea of secure or especially securable. Do you have any idea how many people have keys to your local school gym -- especially in rural areas? More than you'd care to think about I'd bet. The ballot boxes, and voter check in lists look to be reasonably secure . That's about it. (But it probably wouldn't be that hard to slip three ballots into the box instead of one whereas an optical scanner doesn't look like it would permit that).
The problems are not unique to Vermont. In other states, I've cast ballots in polling places in all sorts of marginally secure places including garages attached to private residences.
***I don't understand why authorities in the US insist on using voting machines.***
Good question. I happen to know why Essex, Vermont switched to optically scanned ballots quite few years ago. (A relatively simple system that retains the ballots should a recount be needed and permits a manual count if the machine fails).
The reason has to do with the mysterious disappearance of several thousand blank ballots during an election several decades ago. That doesn't sound like a lot, but since there were only about sixty thousand voters in Chittenden County and voting rates are only around 65-70% in general elections, it's enough to swing an election. To this day, no one knows where the ballots went, or if they were perhaps the result of an inventory miscount and never existed at all. Not a big deal actually, but perhaps a good enough reason to move beyond simple printed ballots where fraudulent ballots might be a little easier to slip into the ballot box.
***We do a very similar thing here in New Hampshire***
Likewise in this part of Vermont. Seems to work fine.
But the liklihood that the mudheads who dominate American politics are going to look to small rural New England states, much less to Canada for viable solutions to problems seems to be close to zero. I mean, why use proven technology when you can have Diebold quality for just a few dollars more?
***Your comment is correct. I spent two years in Haiti, the poorest in the western hemisphere. Did anyone run Linux, no. They used old hardware everywhere. Old hardware that would not run linux. I tried replacing the pirated copies with linux and failed! Bandwith is very expensice there at least when compared to Income levels. So downloading linux "for free" is actually much more expesive than the 50 cent Devils own copy of windows.***
Only too right I fear. Windows 3.1 will run satisfactorily with 8mb of memory. It'll crash every few days when its 64kb heaps fill up, but at least it will run. Windows 95 runs quite acceptably with 16mb of memory. My experience has been that even text mode Linux will have trouble with a machine with only 8mb of memory. e.g. it will be swapping to disk just to run man. I'm sure that it can be optimized to run better by using fewer consoles, etc. It'd be interesting to watch the "just download Ubuntu and go" crowd try to deal with one of these minimal machines.
If there is a Linux release that will run a GUI acceptably and do anything useful of old machines without much memory, I've never encountered it. My feeling is that to get anything like Windows 95 performance and capability out of linux you probably need a MINIMUM of 64mb of memory (and more than 500mb of disk storage probably). And that might be optimistic.
***USA gets about 20% of its electricity from nuclear power.***
Correct. 20% of the electric power, 8% of total energy usage. I think total energy was what the original article was about although it is hard to tell for sure since I couldn't track down the actual statement about 10%.
BTW, it might be 7% or 10% rather than 8%. I did look the number up before I posted, but its something of a rarity for two sources on US energy usage to actually agree comnpletely on the numbers.
Well, for starters, 10% seems kind of optimistic, and I can't find 10% in the linked article (I looked), but it could be in the paper. Anyway, the US currently gets about 15% of its total energy usage from non-fossil fuel sources -- 8% nuclear power, 5% hydroelectric, 1% other. Bringing up the geothermal from under 1% to 10% would cut the use of Natural Gas, Petroleum and Coal by about 12%.
I know that most Americans think that's not important, but I can make a pretty good case that natural gas and petroleum are going to be much less affordable in the future than they are now. Maybe not $500 a barrel for oil, but a couple of hundred. The world is, trust me on this, running out of that stuff, and the price overall is eventually going to go up because the Japanese, Chinese, Indians, Europeans, et al need it also. If you didn't like $3 a gallon gasoline, how are you going to feel about $9 a gallon gas?
That said, there are problems with geothermal. The oldest US geothermal field -- The Geysers north of San Francisco seems to be running out of steam - literally. Which is too bad because it is a realtively non-polluting energy source. Geothermal isn't always non-polluting. Plants that use superheated brines -- the US has one in California's Imperial Valley -- have to deal with the problem of disposing of a lot of water full of dissolved minerals. Not to mention that superheated brine is very corrosive and tends to eat the power generation equipment.
Still, in all, Geothermal is a realtively relaible, long term energy source, It can possibly be used for things like residential and industrial heating (they do that in Iceland) as well as electric power generation. Unlike solar and wind, it doesn't arbitrarily shut down because the weather is lousy.
***"watch a conversation between two people and, using natural-language processing, figure out what are the tasks they agreed upon."***
I don't know about anyone else, but my experience has been that very few conversations actually result in mutual agreement upon a task. Most conversations are indeterminate, and most of the rest result in symetrically paired misunderstandings about what has been agreed to.
Oh well, at least for once "they" aren't spending my money to kill/maim innocent bystanders.
***I bet a scientist has never said no two snowflakes were alike. It was probably somebody's grandmother.***
We actually know who first said it, or at least where most people first heard it from. A Jericho, Vermont, farmer named Wilson Bentley. Bentley lashed together a Microscope and a (quite expensive) Camera and took thousands of pictures of snowflakes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He published a number of papers, articles, and a book on the subject of snow crystals. Since he was the first person to successfully take a photograph of a snow crystal, and was clearly a serious investigator, I'd rank him as a scientist -- albeit a self trained one.
Slashdot Mirror
We can't have a Slashdot discussion without an automotive analogy, right? But in this case, it might be appropriate.
There is abundant evidence from insurance company data that Antilock Braking Systems do not do much in practice to prevent or mitigate accidents. No one knows why not, but they don't. But would you recommend to someone that they disable their ABS system? Not only will you be blamed if they have an accident on any road that has a trace of moisture or sand on it, you might even be legally liable.
UAC looks to be much the same thing. It's pretty evident that it is a failed approach to secutity. Not necessarily dumb. But failed. Nonetheless, very few people are just going to come out and say that it doesn't work and you might just as well turn it off and wait for the next attempt to bolster security. After all, there might be some condition somewhere where it actually helps.
Well don't blame me. I went right out last week and bought a brand new AcerPower 1000 -- with XP. Figured it might be my last chance to avoid Vista. So there you have it. Solid evidence that Vista is GOOD for hardware and software sales.
Barring a miracle, the chances that analog TV will be shut down in 2009 are roughly the same as those that George W Bush will be elected mayor of Ramadi, Iraq in a free and fair election. My guess is that the next analog deadline in the on-going debacle that has been digital TV rollout in the US will be 2012. And the real shutdown will be in 2015 or later.
Many congressmen have staff people who are capable of figuring out the consequences of turning off analog TV to millions of voters before they voluntarily switch to DTV. 'Taint likely going to happen until the number of potentially angry voters is reasonably low. Which means not until a lot more DTV stations are on the air, most TV sets are DTV, and probably not until folks can buy a DTV to NTSC converter at their local drug store for $20.
Not necessarily:
If you will recall, back in the 1980s, America's then bosom buddy Saddam Hussein -- then the defender of democracy in the Middle East -- engaged in a lengthy war with Iran. Both sides launched IRBMs at each other -- quite a lot of them. So, it shouldn't come as any suprise that Iran has some ability to build a rockets. It's hardly alone. If Iran actually put a payload into orbit, they would be the ninth country to do so. Many others (e.g. Canada, South Korea, Germany, Brazil) probably could do so if they chose to.
Here's a link to an unclassified five or so year old intelligence assessment of Iran's missile capabilities. http://www.fas.org/irp/threat/missile/rumsfeld/pt2 _katz.htm
As to why Iran would chose to build big rockets ... I dunno, maybe it has something to do with the fiasco in Iraq. I expect that the Iranians would like to ensure that the next bunch of incompetent fundamentalist Christian screwballs who decide to re-engineer the Middle East pick someplace other than Persia to liberate.
That's certainly a fair question.
Answer -- I'm not sure. The indictment against PDF is fairly lengthy. Adobe's PDF offerings are slow, bloated and not especially reliable. XPDF often doesn't work. For that matter, neither does Foxit, but at least Foxit will run on an older PC without consuming all the available resources. Many PDFs aren't text searchable. Text recovery from PDF documents that permit text copy is often a total shambles -- looks more like OCR with insufficient queues to the OCR software than anything reasonable
I think that PDF is used primarily for two things. It is used to specify documents where the author doesn't want things moved. Basically -- Here's the layout, no will you please (Godammit) try to adhere to it as closely as is physically possible when rendering/printing? Perfectly reasonable request. I'm not sure that PDF is a particularly good answer. It's just better than the alternatives. That's what I think a real layout language might help.
The second use for PDF is here's a document that was produced for some other purpose -- e.g. for a scientific journal or whatever. How to make it available digitally without rewriting it from scratch? I don't think PDF does that at all well, but it may be better than the alternatives. I'm not even sure what the alternatives are.
The M in HTML stands for MARKUP. And it means it. HTML is NOT a layout language. Never has been, and apparently never will be despite unending attempts to use it for page layout. In fact, HTML documents look different in every browser -- which is not, I think, a characteristic that most users are going to desire for a large subset of documentation. How, for example, can you specify a an OCRable form, if the rendering program is free to move the damn boxes around?
If someone would like to propose an standards based HTLL that focuses on document layout, they have my support. I don't care if it is XML based. Just that it works, is reasonably concise, everyone uses it, and that it replaces PDF as a vehicle for specifying documents that need to be rendered pretty much exactly as the author specified them.
While I'm sure that an HTLL specification would be lengthy, I don't think it needs to embody every quirk of every version of Microsoft Word or Open Office.
So what is support supposed to do? Modern OSes are insanely complex and both OS and Application documentation is virtually useless for most of the reported problems. Figure many hours, maybe days for any problem that isn't trivial and where an answer doesn't pop up in the first 20 Google hits. That's if the problem can be fixed at all. Call the vendor's tech support? Right. With most (not all) vendors, their time is far better spent prowling through configuration menus, .INI (or /etc) files or even the #$@( registry in hopes of finding a magic solution. Which doesn't mean that their chances of finding an answer are especially good.
If you give Tech Support an undoable job, should you be suprised when it turns out that they can't do it?
But if you want to fault Tech Support for being arrogant, pigheaded, obnoxious, totally out of touch with reality, etc ... well, that's a different story. Many -- maybe all -- your complaints could be well founded.
A reasonable concern. But y'know what? Crops can be grown without fertilizer. The yield is substantially lower, but modern crop varieties are much more productive than those in use a century ago. And quite a lot of land that was under cultivation in say 1850 has returned to wilderness -- at least in North America. So maybe we'll muddle through. Or maybe we won't. It's far from an open and shut case that the demise of modern civilization would be a tragedy.
Well, it's like this. Five or ten decades from now, gasoline from the ground is probably going to be a scarce and expensive resource. It may well be easier to make methane from biological sources than it is to make a mixture of medium chain length hydrocarbons -- e.g. gasoline, kerosine, and/or biodiesel from biological sources. This corn cob thing looks to maybe be a better solution to storing Methane in a vehicle than storing the stuff under pressure -- which is what is done nowdays for fleet vehicles.
What could possibly go wrong? Plenty. the corn cobs could deteriorate over time, or breed nasty bacteria that convert Methane to something toxic, or ... the list is long and I doubt anybody's list of possible problems is really complete. Still, the list is probably less intimidating than for the simplistic solution -- hydrogen. [George W Bush thinks hydrogen is the fuel of the future. That should to be all anyone needs to know in order to suspect that it might not work out]. So, this is a possibly good idea. We'll know more in 5-10 years
It does. But it also says -- repeatedly -- that the data is disk replacement data, NOT disk failure data. i.e. it's data on the number of problems that the user tech thought might be fixed by replacing the disk, not by the number of disks that actually failed. One might wonder if, for example, the response to a system failing while it was being set up or in early lifetime might not be to put the whole damn thing into a box and ship it back to the vendor rather than dink around trying to figure out what is wrong. That won't be recorded as a disk failure.
The study is fine -- really it is. But, table 3 ought to give pause. It's quite clear that different data sets show quite different diagnostic patterns. We've got one set of data that says that power supplies, for example, are hardly ever replaced and a second set that says that they are the most frequently replaced item. There MAY be good reasons for this. But it could also be an indication that the technicians are incompetent, that the record keeping is erratic, or (and I'd seriously consider this one) that only certain kinds of failures are being recorded.
Finally, I think someone really ought to mention that there is no way that a disk manufacturer is actually going to measure MTBFs of 100000 hours prior to printing up the data sheets. The problem is that there are only around 750 hours in a month. And you need a reasonable number of failures (many quality guys would say at least 4) in order to get a reasonably valid MTBF. In order to actually measure a six digit MTBF, the manufacturer would have to run maybe 500 units for a month. My guess is that isn't going to happen. If they have the production line producing 500 units, they are going to ship them. Manufacturer MTBF data are surely based on data from a handful of engineering and preproduction units plus a bunch of wild guesses.
My guess, and it is just a guess, is that manufacturer MTBFs for disks are probably pretty much the MTBF goal in the drive specifications established before the design actually started.
Incidentally, based on some experience with other sorts of high tech gadetry, if the engineering/preproduction units do fail during test, a failure analysis will be done, and steps will be taken to fix the problem. Problem's fixed. OK, we shouldn't count those failures since they won't happen any more. That's called "censoring failure data". Begin to get an idea why disk MTBFs might be pretty much pure fiction?
Let's be even fairer. NPR is ALREADY having interference problems with the satellite radio RF modulators. Some NPR operations e.g. North Country Public Radio in extreme upstate new york, depend on an assemblege of low power repeaters and translators operating in the 88.1-91.9 non-commercial band. Because of the low power and difficult topography, signals are often marginal even without some idiot in an SUV blasting too many watts of Howard Stern into a channel that belongs to someone else.
Presumably an answer to this is to give 88.1MHz to unlicensed low-power FM. Sirius, XM, et al translators can fight it out with college dorm stations, guys in garages, etc. Will it be a mess? That'd be my bet. Who cares?
***Humorously, if that same chunk of spectrum were used for traditional FM, assuming you didn't allow second adjacents (and you really shouldn't allow them), you would only have fifty stations in that same chunk of spectrum. However, if you used an uncompressed 16-bit, 48kHz audio signal and modulated it with SSB, even if you couldn't do better than 1 bit per cycle, my quick back-of-a-napkin estimate is that you ought to be able to do it in a less than 120 kHz band (instead of 1 MHz for FM), or about 400 uncompressed channels in that same space---more channels than XM/Sirius, crammed into the same space, and without using lossy compression.***
I must be missing something here. Traditional FM channels are 200KHz, not 1MHz, and often have two signals -- the main signal and an SCA signal modulated onto them. The reason for not allowing adjacent and second adjacent channels isn't that listeners can't separate five equal strength signals on adjacent channels -- they can. It's that in real life, the signals aren't equal strength and two transmitters in Podunk operating on adjacent frequencies would have probably have significant dead spots in their coverage near the other guy's transmitters. If every signal were the same strength -- as is, I assume, pretty much the case with satellite radio and if the SCA bandwidth were used for a real primary channel, wouldn't 50MHz of satellite FM hold 1000 channels? (Which is not to say that an optimal digital scheme might not do better).
Warner Bros. sued by James Dean's Family: "Warner Bros. (was) . . . ordered to pay $1.6 million to the family of James Dean and their agent, Curtis Management Group, related to a suit the studio . . . lost over merchandising rights . . . The studio had filed a $90 million suit in 1991, claiming that it was the rightful owner of Dean's likeness and image because of a clause in a contract that the actor had signed in 1954 prior to the filming of East of Eden. The clause, located in a standard contract, allowed the studio to use Dean's likeness and image in perpetuity for commercial tie-ins to the film. While the studio claimed that the clause also carried over to the use of merchandising unrelated to the film, a U.S. District Court judged . . . ruled that it only related to the selling and advertising of the three films he starred in before his death. The Dean image has generated some $30 million since 1984."
Universal sued by James Garner: James Garner waited six years to go to trial on his $16.5 million lawsuit against Universal Studios, charging he was " . . . cheated out of his fair share of syndication profits from the television series The Rockford Files. The case was settled a few days after jury selection began in mid March." The Universal series The Rockford Files, starring James Garner " . . . ran on NBC from 1974 to 1980 and then moved into off-network sales, where it is still going strong. After determining that the show had taken in more than $120 million from syndication, foreign, and other markets, the studio's accountant informed the actor that it had earned less than $1 million in profits and that his share . . . fell a little short of $250,000. Garner sued and nearly a decade later settled out of court for a reported $5 million."
http://www.homevideo.net/FIRM/sue.htm
Maybe it doesn't have to go that far. Most of us have lived for years with Windows where you click on SETUP.EXE and damn near anything can happen. Granted -- a usable installation is the most probable result -- but unusable installations are common, and sometimes other things get broken. In the worst case (thankfully rare), you may need to reinstall Windows. I don't know about anyone else, but I've spent months of my life (cumulative total) dealing with the consequences of clicking on SETUP.EXE.
And as for clicking on UNINS000.EXE and its friends, it's better than not clicking on it I suppose. But leaving stuff behind seems awfully common.
It'd be nice if Unix install/uninstall worked better than Windows. But just working as well as Windows seems not all that high a barrier.
So, just get me something that works. And if it would tell me clearly about missing dependancies and give me a clue where to look for the stuff I need, that would be nice. Looking for missing libraries and packages is tedious if you are used to it and quite intimidating if you aren't.
Exception: If one specific manufacturer or model were clearly an utter disaster, I might exclude the data for that manufacturer-model in order to keep from contaminating the results. In that case, I probably would name names. But apparently nothing the authors dealt with was that bad.
Give us a break, eh? Bin Laden and similar creeps have real resources fueled by petrodollars behind them. Not vast sums most likely, but plenty to manage whatever form of real or false ID is needed for any given operation that doesn't involve thousands of people. Neither the DHS/INS STASI-lite operation nor the bizarre and ineffective financial controls that do not affect the real cash flows to fundamentalist islam are going to do anything other than incovenience Americans and legitimate visitors.
(BTW, How many people are going to want to visit a totalitarian state where incompetent federal police might throw you in jail for years with no legal recourse because they have confused you with a Bulgarian arms dealer or a Malaysian moslem extremist?)
Want proof? Think about this. The draconian measures that are supposed to protect the US from terrorists are largely the same measures that would be needed for a real and serious war on drugs. Have you heard any stories about the price of imported drugs (Cocaine, Heroin, etc) soaring due to scarcity? Anything about a massive switch to domestic drugs (e.g. methamphetamine). Do you really doubt that with the right contacts and a bunch of cash, you could get a metric ton of good quality Latim American or Canadian marijuana delivered to your garage a week from next Tuesday?
Make no mistake, these driver's license/passport etc measures are a foolish and inept attempt by incompetent leaders to accomplish the impossible -- to deter terrorism without actually infringing serously on personal freedoms. The net result will be to infringe on freedoms without impeding terrorists one bit.
Maybe where you live they have secure facilities and store ballots in them. But I doubt it it. Are there secure facilities in Vermont and other rural areas? Sure, I've been in a couple belonging to the military or the feds. I suppose that a bank vault would qualify. But most secure facilities would hardly be a reasonable place to stash large stacks of paper. And few of the citizens responsible for getting the ballots to polling places (in the middle of the night incidentally) would have the least idea how to effect secure transport and storage procedures. For that matter, the polling places are in school gymnasiums and mostly aren't my idea of secure or especially securable. Do you have any idea how many people have keys to your local school gym -- especially in rural areas? More than you'd care to think about I'd bet. The ballot boxes, and voter check in lists look to be reasonably secure . That's about it. (But it probably wouldn't be that hard to slip three ballots into the box instead of one whereas an optical scanner doesn't look like it would permit that).
The problems are not unique to Vermont. In other states, I've cast ballots in polling places in all sorts of marginally secure places including garages attached to private residences.
Good question. I happen to know why Essex, Vermont switched to optically scanned ballots quite few years ago. (A relatively simple system that retains the ballots should a recount be needed and permits a manual count if the machine fails).
The reason has to do with the mysterious disappearance of several thousand blank ballots during an election several decades ago. That doesn't sound like a lot, but since there were only about sixty thousand voters in Chittenden County and voting rates are only around 65-70% in general elections, it's enough to swing an election. To this day, no one knows where the ballots went, or if they were perhaps the result of an inventory miscount and never existed at all. Not a big deal actually, but perhaps a good enough reason to move beyond simple printed ballots where fraudulent ballots might be a little easier to slip into the ballot box.
Likewise in this part of Vermont. Seems to work fine.
But the liklihood that the mudheads who dominate American politics are going to look to small rural New England states, much less to Canada for viable solutions to problems seems to be close to zero. I mean, why use proven technology when you can have Diebold quality for just a few dollars more?
Only too right I fear. Windows 3.1 will run satisfactorily with 8mb of memory. It'll crash every few days when its 64kb heaps fill up, but at least it will run. Windows 95 runs quite acceptably with 16mb of memory. My experience has been that even text mode Linux will have trouble with a machine with only 8mb of memory. e.g. it will be swapping to disk just to run man. I'm sure that it can be optimized to run better by using fewer consoles, etc. It'd be interesting to watch the "just download Ubuntu and go" crowd try to deal with one of these minimal machines.
If there is a Linux release that will run a GUI acceptably and do anything useful of old machines without much memory, I've never encountered it. My feeling is that to get anything like Windows 95 performance and capability out of linux you probably need a MINIMUM of 64mb of memory (and more than 500mb of disk storage probably). And that might be optimistic.
Correct. 20% of the electric power, 8% of total energy usage. I think total energy was what the original article was about although it is hard to tell for sure since I couldn't track down the actual statement about 10%.
BTW, it might be 7% or 10% rather than 8%. I did look the number up before I posted, but its something of a rarity for two sources on US energy usage to actually agree comnpletely on the numbers.
I know that most Americans think that's not important, but I can make a pretty good case that natural gas and petroleum are going to be much less affordable in the future than they are now. Maybe not $500 a barrel for oil, but a couple of hundred. The world is, trust me on this, running out of that stuff, and the price overall is eventually going to go up because the Japanese, Chinese, Indians, Europeans, et al need it also. If you didn't like $3 a gallon gasoline, how are you going to feel about $9 a gallon gas?
That said, there are problems with geothermal. The oldest US geothermal field -- The Geysers north of San Francisco seems to be running out of steam - literally. Which is too bad because it is a realtively non-polluting energy source. Geothermal isn't always non-polluting. Plants that use superheated brines -- the US has one in California's Imperial Valley -- have to deal with the problem of disposing of a lot of water full of dissolved minerals. Not to mention that superheated brine is very corrosive and tends to eat the power generation equipment.
Still, in all, Geothermal is a realtively relaible, long term energy source, It can possibly be used for things like residential and industrial heating (they do that in Iceland) as well as electric power generation. Unlike solar and wind, it doesn't arbitrarily shut down because the weather is lousy.
I don't know about anyone else, but my experience has been that very few conversations actually result in mutual agreement upon a task. Most conversations are indeterminate, and most of the rest result in symetrically paired misunderstandings about what has been agreed to.
Oh well, at least for once "they" aren't spending my money to kill/maim innocent bystanders.
We actually know who first said it, or at least where most people first heard it from. A Jericho, Vermont, farmer named Wilson Bentley. Bentley lashed together a Microscope and a (quite expensive) Camera and took thousands of pictures of snowflakes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He published a number of papers, articles, and a book on the subject of snow crystals. Since he was the first person to successfully take a photograph of a snow crystal, and was clearly a serious investigator, I'd rank him as a scientist -- albeit a self trained one.
See http://snowflakebentley.com/