Actually, as a business owner, if I had a fixed amount of money and had to decide to spend it on either A. A plumber, B. More help on the loading dock, or C. IT, I gotta say that C would be last on my list. Sorry guys. I can run my business with somewhat broken computers. I can't run it with no toilets and nobody to receive the inventory.
Not so long ago, this post would have been impossible at/. Either the geeks are starting to grow up, or the demographic of/. posters has changed.
I'm actually surprised how many posts there are by people who actually get the business side of thing. Who actually understand that IT is a service as much as any other service. No worse, but certainly no better.
And, I might add, already vastly more expensive than all plumbers in the facility combined.
And, I might add, all managers run computers at home, so they can't be bullshitted by the technobabble that pretends great difficulty in "just keeping it all running". They've all bought a new computer once and struggled to set it up. Many, many fewer of them have set up the new water-heater they bought...
You can copy all technology you want, like other countries have done, and get your jump ahead a lot cheaper and faster.
You can't do that any more. A couple years ago you wanted to shoot something into space, you paid the Americans to do it. They had the rockets, the navigation, guidance, control, communications technology, orbital models, environmental know-how, you name it. But ITAR has made it just about illegal for an American to do anything tech-related that benefits a non-American just over the last couple years. There will never be something like Cassini again. Because of this closing of the tech-door, everybody in the world is now developing their own capabilities. They have to.
The Americans chose to give up what amounted to almost a monopoly. That's their choice. What we're seeing here is merely one of the many, many, many pieces of fallout from that decision.
Since I can't read the report without forking over money: The writeup suggests that there's something wrong with the notion that IT security is akin to facilities management. It doesn't say HOW it is different, though.
As far as I can tell, IT security and building security are pretty much the same idea. You my squeak by without any; you probably want to pay a couple guys to provide some basic security service; there's a diminishing return at the upper end, where hiring more security guards doesn't really make your facilities any safer; no amount of security folks will ever give you absolute security, but it is sufficient to be more secure than the neighboring company so as to not be "low hanging fruit". Many of the folks in the field are dedicated professionals, many others are posers who have no clue what they're doing. They constantly send you requests for more money/people/power and tell you that you're doomed if you don't beef them up. You keep'em funded at some reasonable level and you resign yourself to the occasional breach. Because there's nothing you can do about it.
A molecule of CO2 from the developing world impacts the environment just as much as a molecule of CO2 from the developed world, and it's silly to treat them separately.
OK. So you have places like the US or Europe with high CO2 emissions and areas like equatorial Africa with little. If you want to treat them all equal, you either have to tell the industrialized countries to curb their emissions or you have to tell the developing countries to crank up theirs. Or you find some middle point where a bit of each happens. In one word: Kyoto. Congratulations for figuring it out.
1) Give every person on the planet a carbon credit [...]
This is one I never really understood: why every person? Why look at this per capita? Why would the global climate give a rats ass whether a certain amount of CO2 was emitted by one, ten, a thousand or a million people? Do you really want to give countries an incentive to crank up overpopulation because more people means more carbon credits? What we need to do is reduce carbon emissions. In units of tons. Not in units of "tons per something we happen to have a lot of". I fail to see why or where the "per capita" thing ever enters the picture at all.
Global warming does not mean (never meant, never was claimed to mean by anybody) that any one day of any one year at any one place on earth was going to be warmer than ever before. To the contrary: from the word go, you were told (for three frigging decades now!) that you can expect the weather to become more extreme: higher highs, lower lows; because of the additional energy stored in the climate system. Europe freezing over because of a stalled Gulf Stream conveyor is expressly a possible aspect of global warming.
I suggest that you refrain from posting about the climate at least until you grasp the difference between climate and weather.
I would go as far as saying it was established fact. Of course, nothing happened. It turned out killer bees were a total non-issue.
Killer bees were found in the US as early as 1990. Everything that was predicted actually happened. Your insulting little lies to the contrary nonwithstanding.
Because Reality doesn't give a hoot what any one moron believes.
Listen: I already told you that I have no interest in "converting" or "convincing" anybody who has already made the conscious decision to spit on Truth. You do not want to know about the actual Reality around you, that's entirely your prerogative. Go ahead and live a life of denial. Why are you addressing me? What are you expecting? That I suddenly decide to abandon Reality and flee into your retarded little faith-based world?
why is that anyone who believes this could be the case here must be some type of moronic fool?
As it turns out, and contrary to what certain people will tell you, reality is not decided by consensus. Reality doesn't give a rat's ass what you believe. It doesn't care what your momma believes, what your priest believes or what your favorite Republican propaganda outlet believes. Reality just is.
You have the option to study reality. Honestly. In an honest attempt to really, truly, honestly figure out how the actual real (capital R) Reality actually works. That's called "science". Or you have the option to continue to spout faith-based nonsense. This seems to be your choice.
As it turns out, Reality is also not a proselytizing religion. It is not my job (nor anybody else's) to "convert" or "convince" moronic fools like you. The universe is the way it is; whether you choose to be aware of it or not.
Coming from a member of the wikipedia cult, this is bold. Wikipedia insits that there never needs to be any evidence for or against any claim, that anything anybody can type is somehow valid and that truth is decided by who has the most time on their hands to change other people's writing.
Once you have decided that truth is not decided by evidence, you cannot turn around and require that your critics somehow show evidence when they accuse you of something.
If we made evidence the arbiter of truth, 95%+ of Wikipedia would vanish into the thin air from whence it was pulled in the first place. Yes, ninety-five percent: it's true because I said so and it is Wikipedias claim that things must be true if someone types it.
Such is the danger of publicly disavowing any kind of standard of scholarship: You don't get to question the standard of scholarship of those who question you on anything.
That already exists. You design on the computer, it makes a custom set for you. You can even upload graphics for the custom box they make. Have a look at the web-site...
This is incorrect. Mars *can* hold a thick enough Earthlike atmosphere, just not indefinitely.
I'm sorry but that doesn't make sense. The same can be said of every body in the solar system. No matter how small the pebble, it'll hold an atmosphere. Just not indefinitely.
In the same vein, all living things on earth can survive on Mars. Just not indefinitely. Hey, I can survive on Jupiter for what that's worth. Just not indefinitely.
The notion of terraforming usually means "turn into something like terra". Not "fake the appeareance of terra for a short while".
Terraforming is going to take a long time. If you're losing your atmosphere while you're trying to build it up you're not going to get anywhere. And you'll run out of oxygen "top it off" with if you keep bleeding it off into space.
And the warmer you make it, the faster it is going to boil off...
Mars is a far better candidate for terraforming than Venus.
No, it isn't. Because it cannot be terraformed. The gravitational field of Mars is not strong enough to hold an Oxygen atmosphere at breathable partial pressures. And certainly not at temperatures that humans could survive. Please do not misrepresent science fiction as fact
Venus has one hell of a thick sludge as an atmosphere, but most of that is CO2 and we living things have evolved pretty powerful mechanisms to turn that into building blocks for ourselves. There's mile-high hurdles to overcome, but at least terraforming Venus is physically possible. While Mars will never hold an earth-like atmosphere.
Yes, these could survive the cold. They could NOT survive the pressure on Mars. People keep talking about Mars "atmosphere" as if there were any to speak of. The atmosphere on mars is hundreds of times thinner than it is on earth. The difference between the top and the bottom of a hill can mean a factor of two in residual thinness.
Just because something can survive cold (we already know that that is possible) doesn't mean it can do so without any water whatsoever, exposed to a hundred times the radiation it would see on earth and with an atmostphere so thin it rivals what we call "vacuum" inside neon tubes.
As the other dude points out, it takes a seriously deprived person to imagine that an average of 1.5 or so sex partners per year for an unmarried guy is "boasting". Some years add a couple because of a couple short-term things, other years go by with me being happyly together with the same person. A relationship lasts six weeks, or six months, or six years, and you won'k know until you try. What part of that is "boasting"?
(In case you missed it: the G...GP was claiming that 90% of single men have no more than one sex-partner for the decade of their 25th through 35 year. It ain't exactly "boasting" just because you aren't quite as stuck up as that.)
With regard to the yes/no dialog box, the user is always forced to make a choice. They'll ignore it anyway, if they're going to ignore it
Well, ignore this:
Not deleting all files?
[OK][No]
or this:
Cancel current operation?
[Yes][Cancel]
or this:
Stop HD format?
[Retry][Format]
Using a computer should be dangerous. You should be sweating in anguish every time a box pops up. You should dread ever clicking the wrong thing. We'll see how much you're going to habituate on clicking "yes" then...
You do understand why we want to go to Mars? Good for you. I don't.
People will go to Mars. We can haggle all day over the "when exactly" -- maybe it'll be another 500 years. But I think it isn't too far fetched that it is going to happen, right?
When people go, they will bring their culture with them. Their values. Their social taboos and cognitive environments.
What would it be worth to you that space is colonized with values and cultural concepts near and dear to yourself? That the meme of free speech is planted on mars, not the meme of blind party-obediance, for example?
How likely is it for your own values to flourish on a new planet? I don't know. How likely is it for them to prosper on a planet that has already been colonized by an antagonist of your values? Smaller, I would guess.
If we want to make something less intelligent more intelligent, it seems likely that at some point, when its intelligence is in some sense the same as the average human's, that its behavior would be more similar to a human's than it is now.
Why would it?
The first flying machines we built weren't very good. Today we have flying machines that fly much better than birds. At now point in the intervening time did we ever have a machine that behaved anywhere similar to a bird.
A point could be made that airplanes are useful exactly because they do NOT behave like birds. In the same vein, I do not expect intelligent mechanisms to behave like people and their value to be derived from exactly that dissimilarity.
It's supposed to drive research in the field of knowledge representation, based on the supposition that in order to compress knowledge well, you have to find good representation for it.
The problem that I see here is that we're precisely not compressing knowledge, but a certain, precisely-drawn-but-arbitrary slice of it. It might be possible to represent, say, all knowledge of classical electrodynamics in form of a bunch of equations, but how do you represent the subset of that knowledge contained in an arbitrary (but precisely proscribed) number of pages of a particular book? In the end, "dF=0" is an extremely compressed version of a lot of knowledge. More knowledge, than you can find in, say, chapter 3 of Jackson. And yet, compressing that chapter will require many more bytes than "dF=0".
I think the problem here is that the project doesn't actually compress knowledge per se, but a certain, given representation of it (namely in the English language encoded in ASCII or whatever) and that the criterion for winning is NOT (un)packing the knowledge, but re-establishing that particular representation.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, as a business owner, if I had a fixed amount of money and had to decide to spend it on either A. A plumber, B. More help on the loading dock, or C. IT, I gotta say that C would be last on my list. Sorry guys. I can run my business with somewhat broken computers. I can't run it with no toilets and nobody to receive the inventory.
Not so long ago, this post would have been impossible at /. Either the geeks are starting to grow up, or the demographic of /. posters has changed.
I'm actually surprised how many posts there are by people who actually get the business side of thing. Who actually understand that IT is a service as much as any other service. No worse, but certainly no better.
And, I might add, already vastly more expensive than all plumbers in the facility combined.
And, I might add, all managers run computers at home, so they can't be bullshitted by the technobabble that pretends great difficulty in "just keeping it all running". They've all bought a new computer once and struggled to set it up. Many, many fewer of them have set up the new water-heater they bought...
You can copy all technology you want, like other countries have done, and get your jump ahead a lot cheaper and faster.
You can't do that any more. A couple years ago you wanted to shoot something into space, you paid the Americans to do it. They had the rockets, the navigation, guidance, control, communications technology, orbital models, environmental know-how, you name it. But ITAR has made it just about illegal for an American to do anything tech-related that benefits a non-American just over the last couple years. There will never be something like Cassini again. Because of this closing of the tech-door, everybody in the world is now developing their own capabilities. They have to.
The Americans chose to give up what amounted to almost a monopoly. That's their choice. What we're seeing here is merely one of the many, many, many pieces of fallout from that decision.
Let's say that it's not the most efficient way of redistributing wealth.
You don't solve problems by "redistributing wealth". You solve problems by generating wealth.
Since I can't read the report without forking over money: The writeup suggests that there's something wrong with the notion that IT security is akin to facilities management. It doesn't say HOW it is different, though.
As far as I can tell, IT security and building security are pretty much the same idea. You my squeak by without any; you probably want to pay a couple guys to provide some basic security service; there's a diminishing return at the upper end, where hiring more security guards doesn't really make your facilities any safer; no amount of security folks will ever give you absolute security, but it is sufficient to be more secure than the neighboring company so as to not be "low hanging fruit". Many of the folks in the field are dedicated professionals, many others are posers who have no clue what they're doing. They constantly send you requests for more money/people/power and tell you that you're doomed if you don't beef them up. You keep'em funded at some reasonable level and you resign yourself to the occasional breach. Because there's nothing you can do about it.
Seriously: where is the difference?
The logistics of engaging in an invasion of the Sun without burning up are mind-numbingly astronomical.
Just land in the night ...
If voting changed anything, it would be illegal.
A molecule of CO2 from the developing world impacts the environment just as much as a molecule of CO2 from the developed world, and it's silly to treat them separately.
OK. So you have places like the US or Europe with high CO2 emissions and areas like equatorial Africa with little. If you want to treat them all equal, you either have to tell the industrialized countries to curb their emissions or you have to tell the developing countries to crank up theirs. Or you find some middle point where a bit of each happens. In one word: Kyoto. Congratulations for figuring it out.
1) Give every person on the planet a carbon credit [...]
This is one I never really understood: why every person? Why look at this per capita? Why would the global climate give a rats ass whether a certain amount of CO2 was emitted by one, ten, a thousand or a million people? Do you really want to give countries an incentive to crank up overpopulation because more people means more carbon credits? What we need to do is reduce carbon emissions. In units of tons. Not in units of "tons per something we happen to have a lot of". I fail to see why or where the "per capita" thing ever enters the picture at all.
Then you must be retarded.
Global warming does not mean (never meant, never was claimed to mean by anybody) that any one day of any one year at any one place on earth was going to be warmer than ever before. To the contrary: from the word go, you were told (for three frigging decades now!) that you can expect the weather to become more extreme: higher highs, lower lows; because of the additional energy stored in the climate system. Europe freezing over because of a stalled Gulf Stream conveyor is expressly a possible aspect of global warming.
I suggest that you refrain from posting about the climate at least until you grasp the difference between climate and weather.
I would go as far as saying it was established fact.
Of course, nothing happened. It turned out killer bees were a total non-issue.
Killer bees were found in the US as early as 1990. Everything that was predicted actually happened. Your insulting little lies to the contrary nonwithstanding.
Because Reality doesn't give a hoot what any one moron believes.
Listen: I already told you that I have no interest in "converting" or "convincing" anybody who has already made the conscious decision to spit on Truth. You do not want to know about the actual Reality around you, that's entirely your prerogative. Go ahead and live a life of denial. Why are you addressing me? What are you expecting? That I suddenly decide to abandon Reality and flee into your retarded little faith-based world?
why is that anyone who believes this could be the case here must be some type of moronic fool?
As it turns out, and contrary to what certain people will tell you, reality is not decided by consensus. Reality doesn't give a rat's ass what you believe. It doesn't care what your momma believes, what your priest believes or what your favorite Republican propaganda outlet believes. Reality just is.
You have the option to study reality. Honestly. In an honest attempt to really, truly, honestly figure out how the actual real (capital R) Reality actually works. That's called "science". Or you have the option to continue to spout faith-based nonsense. This seems to be your choice.
As it turns out, Reality is also not a proselytizing religion. It is not my job (nor anybody else's) to "convert" or "convince" moronic fools like you. The universe is the way it is; whether you choose to be aware of it or not.
Does that answer the question?
[...]without any citation given as to the polar bear populations over time.
According to Wikipedia, polar bear populations have tripled in the last six months.
In short... show me the evidence.
Coming from a member of the wikipedia cult, this is bold. Wikipedia insits that there never needs to be any evidence for or against any claim, that anything anybody can type is somehow valid and that truth is decided by who has the most time on their hands to change other people's writing.
Once you have decided that truth is not decided by evidence, you cannot turn around and require that your critics somehow show evidence when they accuse you of something.
If we made evidence the arbiter of truth, 95%+ of Wikipedia would vanish into the thin air from whence it was pulled in the first place. Yes, ninety-five percent: it's true because I said so and it is Wikipedias claim that things must be true if someone types it.
Such is the danger of publicly disavowing any kind of standard of scholarship: You don't get to question the standard of scholarship of those who question you on anything.
So .. why exactly should someone log off when they're finished with their computer? What exactly is that supposed to solve or prevent?
Has there ever been a virus or trojan or worm or whatever that said "oh, the user is logged off, I guess I won't infect this machine, then"?
Every sufficiently evolved incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
Great, that narrowed down the list by about two.
Oh, there's someone else other than myself who's perfectly satisfied with their service? I had almost given up hope.
That already exists. You design on the computer, it makes a custom set for you. You can even upload graphics for the custom box they make. Have a look at the web-site...
This is incorrect. Mars *can* hold a thick enough Earthlike atmosphere, just not indefinitely.
I'm sorry but that doesn't make sense. The same can be said of every body in the solar system. No matter how small the pebble, it'll hold an atmosphere. Just not indefinitely.
In the same vein, all living things on earth can survive on Mars. Just not indefinitely. Hey, I can survive on Jupiter for what that's worth. Just not indefinitely.
The notion of terraforming usually means "turn into something like terra". Not "fake the appeareance of terra for a short while".
Terraforming is going to take a long time. If you're losing your atmosphere while you're trying to build it up you're not going to get anywhere. And you'll run out of oxygen "top it off" with if you keep bleeding it off into space.
And the warmer you make it, the faster it is going to boil off...
Mars is a far better candidate for terraforming than Venus.
No, it isn't. Because it cannot be terraformed. The gravitational field of Mars is not strong enough to hold an Oxygen atmosphere at breathable partial pressures. And certainly not at temperatures that humans could survive. Please do not misrepresent science fiction as fact
Venus has one hell of a thick sludge as an atmosphere, but most of that is CO2 and we living things have evolved pretty powerful mechanisms to turn that into building blocks for ourselves. There's mile-high hurdles to overcome, but at least terraforming Venus is physically possible. While Mars will never hold an earth-like atmosphere.
Yes, these could survive the cold. They could NOT survive the pressure on Mars. People keep talking about Mars "atmosphere" as if there were any to speak of. The atmosphere on mars is hundreds of times thinner than it is on earth. The difference between the top and the bottom of a hill can mean a factor of two in residual thinness.
Just because something can survive cold (we already know that that is possible) doesn't mean it can do so without any water whatsoever, exposed to a hundred times the radiation it would see on earth and with an atmostphere so thin it rivals what we call "vacuum" inside neon tubes.
starts boasting about their sexual exploits
As the other dude points out, it takes a seriously deprived person to imagine that an average of 1.5 or so sex partners per year for an unmarried guy is "boasting". Some years add a couple because of a couple short-term things, other years go by with me being happyly together with the same person. A relationship lasts six weeks, or six months, or six years, and you won'k know until you try. What part of that is "boasting"?
(In case you missed it: the G...GP was claiming that 90% of single men have no more than one sex-partner for the decade of their 25th through 35 year. It ain't exactly "boasting" just because you aren't quite as stuck up as that.)
With regard to the yes/no dialog box, the user is always forced to make a choice. They'll ignore it anyway, if they're going to ignore it
Well, ignore this:
or this:
or this:
Using a computer should be dangerous. You should be sweating in anguish every time a box pops up. You should dread ever clicking the wrong thing. We'll see how much you're going to habituate on clicking "yes" then...
You do understand why we want to go to Mars? Good for you. I don't.
People will go to Mars. We can haggle all day over the "when exactly" -- maybe it'll be another 500 years. But I think it isn't too far fetched that it is going to happen, right?
When people go, they will bring their culture with them. Their values. Their social taboos and cognitive environments.
What would it be worth to you that space is colonized with values and cultural concepts near and dear to yourself? That the meme of free speech is planted on mars, not the meme of blind party-obediance, for example?
How likely is it for your own values to flourish on a new planet? I don't know. How likely is it for them to prosper on a planet that has already been colonized by an antagonist of your values? Smaller, I would guess.
If we want to make something less intelligent more intelligent, it seems likely that at some point, when its intelligence is in some sense the same as the average human's, that its behavior would be more similar to a human's than it is now.
Why would it?
The first flying machines we built weren't very good. Today we have flying machines that fly much better than birds. At now point in the intervening time did we ever have a machine that behaved anywhere similar to a bird.
A point could be made that airplanes are useful exactly because they do NOT behave like birds. In the same vein, I do not expect intelligent mechanisms to behave like people and their value to be derived from exactly that dissimilarity.
It's supposed to drive research in the field of knowledge representation, based on the supposition that in order to compress knowledge well, you have to find good representation for it.
The problem that I see here is that we're precisely not compressing knowledge, but a certain, precisely-drawn-but-arbitrary slice of it. It might be possible to represent, say, all knowledge of classical electrodynamics in form of a bunch of equations, but how do you represent the subset of that knowledge contained in an arbitrary (but precisely proscribed) number of pages of a particular book? In the end, "dF=0" is an extremely compressed version of a lot of knowledge. More knowledge, than you can find in, say, chapter 3 of Jackson. And yet, compressing that chapter will require many more bytes than "dF=0".
I think the problem here is that the project doesn't actually compress knowledge per se, but a certain, given representation of it (namely in the English language encoded in ASCII or whatever) and that the criterion for winning is NOT (un)packing the knowledge, but re-establishing that particular representation.
We have been trying to hire a DBA or two since April. We are still trying to find good candidates that will actually show up for work.
And now comes the hard part: what are you willing to pay?
Ah ...