Posts by Britt Johnston 579 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Apr 2006
The extinction events are presumed to be caused by major volcanic activity or comets, with climate as intermediary.
The aside about limestone is interesting, in that it appears to have been precipitated intermittently at the end of a period of warming climate, and as you point out, the binding effect is huge - which would be useful in our situation.
Has anyone an explanation for what triggers limestone precipitation, more plausible than Gaia or a quicklime comet?
I always liked the idea that US citizens have a duty to resist unjustified taxes, and feel that in the EU a responsible citizen should be required to resist silly laws.
This one is right up there with taking all liquids away from air travellers - which needs resisting badly now as the EU commission are reviewing security. Even MEPs see the futility, but who listens to them.
My mother picked up dengue in Singapore, it took her a year to get over it; longer if you count the reminiscing. The isolation idea should polish off air travel then. No big loss, IMHO.
The second point, about motivation, is complex. The company I work at provides WHO with the current combination malaria therapy at cost, a major logistics project. It has also a research centre into dengue and other tropical diseases in Singapore. Research pride, hoped-for spill-overs, loss-leaders and good citizenship all contribute, as well as profits, I suggest.
Those fighting epidemic diseases have a depressingly counter-intuitive set of priorities - they live in a strange world, poor chaps. CDC, one of the citations in a good wiki article, blames poor infrastructure from uncontrolled urban growth, deteriorating public health infrastructure, passive health surveillance systems, panic mentality, unwitting GPs, increased travel, ineffective mosquito control - but not global warming or lack of research.
There are increased rates of fatal complications if you catch a second strain of dengue, and, if I recall correctly, the strains are getting nastier too.
I'm not sure there is a single best solution on how to keep information current across a change in format.
In the doc-bound Pharma industry I work for, the biggest overkill I can recall was an complete emulation of a green-screen ERP system after it was replaced by a blue-screen one. It was used, but keeping the old one running as a zombie would have been much easier, as would a transfer of the historical records.
With the demise of mainframes at the end of the last millenium, we made a complete copy of the old central product database* on CD, and as a paper dump. Only the catalogues were ever consulted.
Just in case, we kept a copy of the new database on a laptop, too. This turned out to be one of the better value Y2K ideas, since although it was never used, the programmer who did the port got to keep the laptop once January had faded into history.
A most interesting commercial idea (for Adobe) is to convert everything to PDFs. If you want e-access to the content, you could always scan it in and convert to a current office document, just like today.
I concur with anonymous coward; RTF was never considered for such solutions.
* actually there were two, since we were just mopping up after a merger. Here Y2K was a great help.
Here's how firefighting is managed in the confederacy of direct democracy and cheese with holes. (Sorry, no Swiss icon, alien will have to do.)
Each parish sends a tax bill for the amount agreed by the council. You know what you're paying, and if you don't want to pay, you can volunteer to be a fireman.
It might not work in England, mind - An English colleague signed on, causing havoc, because he didn't take firefighting seriously, and preferred to meet in the pub.
Well done guys, you even get quoted in the foreign IT press. http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/100097
However, note that the article starts with a lead story in the weekly glossy Stern, comparing 50 entries with those in a standard 15-volume printed encyclopedia, Brockhaus. Wikipedia won 43:6, with 1 draw.
While the German version is less politicised, it has also only a third of the number of articles. The German quality is not better, but content is independent of the game-playing, at least in the short run.
The German interior department is indeed serious about its Bundestrojan, It has been aired for nearly a year, and appears to be waiting for resignation to kick in.
However, I don't find it so funny, as they will be reading from all PC's, not just terrorists, and they don't know how to make it stop at the borders - I'm vulnerable, living in Basel, as I use a German Ebay account for instance.
As far as I know the Stasi argument has not been much used - well spotted @ sceptical bastard - and might have some success in MEP circles - EU, do us all a favour, please.
You may recall a DDR game of trying to feed the Stasi with false information. Could a friendly counter-hacker come up with a Misleading Info Generator (MIG) - a Norton plug-in perhaps?
Is this incitement to international terrorism (IT)? Will IT trip the CIA trawlers?
Or, more likely, as someone comes up with yet another nasty, he finally convinces me to stay off-line with my working machine.
I suspect that politicians want answers, and administrators keep saying it isn't easy, we have no accurate data for comparison, so please give me a better database.
I am not yet convinced that politicians really want one, except for the department head who gets the spend for a sexy project.
Once their staff get one, they will want it optimised for ease of use and applicability, not security. They'll still be unable to answer many tricky questions - like when will they lose their first files - but will take any reasonable m.t.b.f. approach to get it.
The unusual reaction remarked on is perhaps related to why doctors make bad patients - they want less operations and pills for themselves.
To address the question posed:
1) The database is not representative, of either Brits or criminals
2) The policy for capturing and auditing data is baroque
3) the error rate in a good database might be 90% complete and correct - how does John Smith activate error correction procedures?
4) There is no personal advantage to providing information
5) There is no believable statement on current or future use restrictions - when will the police flog it on to Tesco?
6) the link to identity files is nigh, desired by administrators but less so by politicians
The latest call from Swiss populist politicians is for DNA data from foreigners - skiing holiday anyone?
I recently worked on the content side of a wiki describing data processes - sounds boring, but in fact it was useful and informative.
What stopped it cold was a quality department which insisted on disclaimers on top and bottom of each page that the contents were a mixture of facts, opinions and ideas, and please refer to the official company documents. Who wants to contribute small facts sandwiched between fat disclaimers?
Couldn't you antipediamongers torpedo wikipedia by enforcing such large disclaimers that they displace the ads, as well as the content?
Here is a helicopter at the same half-baked stage for half the price.
http://www.engadget.com/2006/08/25/gen-h4-personal-helicopter-is-for-realz-and-for-sale/
What I like about it is the counterturning rotors, which should help reduce travel sickness. On the other hand, it isn't built for two fat passengers or English rain.
The comment that Vista is crap is perhaps tough, but I agree it doesn't offer value over XP worth paying a second time for. In particular, it is still subject to attacks over the internet.
It was my understanding that virtualisation avoids this in principle, since the OS and all apps are restarted each time.
I'd be interested in your opinion on how realistic this hope is, in terms of ease of use, residual dangers and % loss of performance.
What has changed is that auctioning limited top-quality items via internet actually brings better prices - think concert tickets, celebrity underwear... Ebay is not just a jumble sale.
People used to eat acorns into the 19th century. Dr Johnson reports enjoying acorn puree. Then it was rrealised that the tannins were toxic to human kidneys (not pig's though, no need to feel sorry for them). Is there any unimployed biotechnician out there willing to resurrect the delicacy with a tannin-free acorn?
IOur IT group just been to lunch at a Black forest restarant, to round off the week - they were advertising "neue Wii".
Imagine our disappointment as techies to find they were refering to the local 2007 vintage.
Worse still, it would have been only half-fermented, and they didn't have any in yet.
A propos Filemaker, a new version was recently released, which I was hoping to see reviewed sometime, as I was thinking of using it to post collected gems onto the internet.
Instead, we see a lot of science news stories - great for putting IT in its proper corner, but less central to your first calling.
The very idea of dialects has been suppressed for yonks, so it isn't so surprising that they are not well captured, or even that an interested American party is running the project.
I consider it the defining contribution of John Major that dialects have been allowed to surface.
German publisher DTV has a paperback dictionary assigning interesting words on regional maps. This Swiss internet page can tell which valley you were born in, from how you say ten key words. http://dialects.from.ch/
Academic circles have done some digging, however. Bill Bryson in Mother Tongue mentions that regional ordering didn't work well in English, and blamed family migration.
My instant test will be the act of making tea, which was "char bashing" where I grew up.
There are several alternative small digital recorders with inbuilt microphones to record music, or as an executive toy.
Edirol's R-09 is a neat package http://www.rolandus.com/products/productlist.aspx?ParentId=114
and M-Audio offers an alternative
http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/MicroTrack2496-main.html
Essentially, the iKey uses the disk and power supply of the iPod, making it a bit cheaper but a clumsier plug-in.
Thanks, I enjoyed the article, which corroborated a discussion I had last month with a physicist at the ETH in Zurich. It started by my asking whether universities appreciated using the recent batch of free Express databases. Put politely, his institute was well equipped with hard and software, costs no issue, but the academics' use varied in sophistication. (He had at least improved his own somewhat by volunteering to be a IT liason.)
A main point in the article is that wonderful things happen when programmers' skills and users' needs meet and amalgamate. I'd suggest that it takes several years with RDBs for serious users to appreciate what they can do. Worse, in my non-Finance neck of the large company woods, the OLAP abilities of latest DB versions is inaccessible, because current applications have fixed reporting, set up like card files or RDBs. So users can't even imagine what improvements are possible.
Any suggestions on, or good examples of, improving RDB and OLAP use?
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