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Comment nice button... (Score 0) 469

by chanio (#38663396) Attached to: The Bosses Do Everything Better (or So They Think)
Anecdote:

I used to work as a qualified data entry guy that had to collect all the household analyzed rating data and parse it into some excel sheets. After lots of graphs resulting from the data filtered by several customers targets, the result was one +200 hundred pages printed book personalized for each customer. Totaling near a thousand books every month.

The number of different results was so high that the algorithms should be heavily watched constantly. And I was never as sure as to not expect to find any possible mistake in any output. But from outside, my boss would only see a funny guy that was mostly always sitting down and doing nothing. ..
The idea that such a heavy and responsible job would look as doing nothing made me laugh a lot.

So much so, that I created a very nice button at the starting page of the Excel sheet that would do all the job without any hesitation. Without human checking any results before hand! But it was so tempting! It was my boss's point of view of my job...

As I expected, later I got fired. But then, I found out that that nice button caused them the lost of a lot of customers, until they decided to start doing all my work again from scratch...

And finally new that mine was really a busy job...
Science

Submission + - The Mathematics of Basketball (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: To shoot, or not to shoot, that is the question. Whether 'tis nobler to try to score right away or wait for a better chance. Professional basketball players face that quandary multiple times in every game. And in a new study a researcher and hoops fan provides some mathematical guidance for the best time to take aim.

Submission + - Happy WLAN Day 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Today, August 2nd 2011, is Wireless LAN day! Happy WLAN Day Everyone!
Microsoft

Submission + - Internet Explorer users have a lower IQ (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by DaveAtWorkAnnoyingly
DaveAtWorkAnnoyingly writes: The BBC has discovered an interesting study that suggests Internet Explorer users have a lower than average IQ, according to research by Consulting firm AptiQuant. The study gave web surfers an IQ test, then plotted their scores against the browser they used. IE surfers were found to have an average IQ lower than people using Chrome, Firefox and Safari. Users of Camino and Opera rated highest. Their own website states that people are queueing up to sue them!
The Internet

Submission + - Georgia Tech Releases Analysis of FCC Data (gatech.edu)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: When it comes to broadband speeds, U.S. Internet service providers (ISPs) largely deliver on their promises, says a report issued today by the Federal Communications Commission, but “throughput” is only one of several metrics listed in the report that affect network performance. ISPs should provide a broadband “nutrition label”—easy-to-understand information about service-limiting factors—and users need better ways of measuring the performance their ISPs are delivering, concludes a study from the Georgia Tech College of Computing.
The Internet

Measuring Broadband America Report Released 160

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the cablevision-users-weeping dept.
AzTechGuy writes "Early this year I received one of the 'Whitebox' routers to test the speed of my ISP and compare it to the advertised speed. Today I received an email that they have released the first report with another report due at the end of the year. My results do not correspond with the results reflected in the report." It appears that most ISPs are within 80% of their advertised speeds during peak hours with Verizon leading the pack mostly exceeding their advertised rates. Cablevision users, on the other hand, shouldn't expect more than half of the promised bandwidth (youch!).
AMD

Submission + - AMD's Low Power A6 Desktop APU Tested (hothardware.com)

Submitted by
MojoKid
MojoKid writes: "Llano is AMD's mainstream processor that fuses four x86 cores with a DX11-class graphics processor on a single piece of silicon. The current flagship APU (Application Processing Unit) in their desktop line-up is the A8-3850, which hums along at 2.9GHz, with 400 Radeon cores. The new entry level AMD A6-3650 is built using the same silicon architecture, but clocks in at 2.6GHz, with 320 active Radeon cores, running at 443MHz. It's not a benchmark burner but for a low-cost, low-power quad-core processor, the A6-3650 offers decent x86 horsepower with solid performance in a DX-11 class graphic processor. The A6 won't catch even Intel's low end in general compute workloads but in gaming and multimedia, AMD's low power chip offers much better performance."

Comment Re:Duh? (Score 0) 633

by chanio (#34475606) Attached to: Why Money Doesn't Motivate File-Sharers
I guess that the only way is just ignoring those who still wish to earn something from what is not a crime.

Laws used to say that there was crime when there was proffit involved.
And humanly, every product belongs to all of us, not only to the one that stood over the others' shoulders to define it...
There was even a pope that said that stealing to learn or to help others was not a crime...

But sharing something freely with others, is only saying that we aknowledge that todays cost of life is pretty unfair.

Should this be discussed? What is the proffit of discussion?
Image

Download Firefox, Feed a Red Panda 90

Posted by samzenpus from the have-a-sandwich dept.
KenW writes "Mozilla has launched a new marketing campaign to promote Firefox: adopting red pandas and putting them on live webcams. The company wants to underline the fact that the red panda is the mascot for its open source browser via a new section on its site called Firefox Live. It's clear that Mozilla is trying to think of new ways to promote its browser ahead of the launch of Firefox 4. The company has been struggling recently as Firefox steadily loses share to Google Chrome."
Music

Why Money Doesn't Motivate File-Sharers 633

Posted by CmdrTaco from the just-wanna-watch-tron dept.
nk497 writes "File-sharers aren't motivated by financial gain, but by altruism, according to an economist. Joe Cox, of the Portsmouth Business School, said those uploading content for others to share don't see what they're doing as illegal, meaning current tactics to deter piracy are doomed to fail. 'The survey data suggested there was a deep-seated belief that this type of activity shouldn't be illegal, that there was no criminal act involved.'"
Biotech

Stopping Malaria By Immunizing Mosquitoes 100

Posted by Soulskill from the will-they-get-a-public-option dept.
RedEaredSlider writes "Millions of people in the tropics suffer from malaria, a mosquito-borne disease that has been difficult to treat and which costs many developing countries millions of dollars per year in lost productivity. Up to now, efforts at controlling it have focused on attacking the parasites that cause it, keeping mosquitoes from biting, or killing the insects. But at Johns Hopkins University, Rhoel Dinglasan, an entomologist and biologist, decided to try another tack: immunizing mosquitoes. When a mosquito bites an infected human, it takes up some of the gametocytes. They aren't dangerous to people at that stage. Since plasmodium is vulnerable there, that is the point Dinglasan chose to attack. A mosquito's gut has certain receptor molecules in it that the plasmodium can bind to. Dinglasan asked what would happen if the parasite couldn't 'see' them, which would happen if another molecule, some antigen, were binding to those receptors."

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