Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:No, just no. (Score 1) 91

How do you know any of that is true?

For a customer you can easily have a tour arranged. You can meet with your account manager regularly. You'll know the people assigned to your account.... Your agent can just tell you since we all go on tours.

A tour. Is this middle-school? Sure, a tour is nice and fun... and always gives you a good impression, because that's that tours are for. Lets be honest, no company would allow, let alone offer, tours if it had any risk of leaving a bad impression to potential customer. But if you are touring through a corporate Disney park, that they won't say.

The only way to verify what the previous poster addresses, is through regular audits covering all facets of production, management, troubleshooting, etc. You need to talk to those workers, that the provider will not put in front of the customer during the touristic tour. You need to review their experience, work methods, communications methods and so on. No company in the world would allow a client to perform such audits, except maybe if the client is ESA or the USAF or something like that.

And now we are speaking only about competence. Whether the provider plays (willingly or not) hand it hand with intelligence agencies is yet another question, one you will never find the answer to unless there's another leak. But you can probably bet your ass that every god damned intelligence agency is either deep within your cloud provider or trying to get there. From the NSA to North Korea, with China, Russia and Isreal. They are all there, waiting for your sensitive data. What else do you expect when you concentrate data in large data centers which are fully accessible in the open world?

You obviously still like bedtime stories. In the meanwhile, I'll leave my sensitive data off the hands of cloud.

Comment Re: Let me put my skepticism hat on... (Score 1) 169

At the time of posting my previous comment, I didn't realite the Source was actually critics of atom energy and of its uses.

This wasn't at first obvious to me considering the flaws of the tool, giving a much to positiv view of atomic energy.

Now I'm not sure what worse. Is it a voluntary omission? Or not? i wonder.

Comment Let me put my skepticism hat on... (Score 3, Interesting) 169

A "tool" to understand costs of nuclear energy production from the "The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists". Could this tool be any more biased? I doubt it looking at the selected metrics.

First the costs for long term securing spent fuel are grossly underestimated. After all, can we really estimate the cost of securing spent fuel for over 100'000 years? It's a bit of a philosophical question, but point is - it can't really be estimated.

More importantly, the "tool" seems to cover only construction costs. Nowhere are decommissioning costs included, which are order of magnitude over the construction costs. Experience has shown both in the US and elsewhere, that these costs have been (willingly or not) underestimated by order of magnitude by the industry. The lack of transparency help a large boom of the industry 30 years ago, but the lack of long term sight is kicking back in full force. Sad of an industry, which should secure waste thousands if not millions of years.

Let me be clear on my sight. I am actually in favour of sensible use and development of nuclear energy. But this cannot be done without transparency, hiding the real costs. Worse, I believe its the hiding of the real costs (and risks) that made this industry stagnate and sent it towards its death (lets be honest, Atomic industry is really dying). This tools seems only to continue this long tradition.

It's a lung cancer patient dying with a cigarette in the hand.

Comment Re:We can learn from this (Score 4, Insightful) 163

People like the folks at MPAA do not need a "how to" manual. That's what they do as a business. They are like leeches which are perfectly adapted to the political ecosystem. The only hope you can have, is to have judicial system independent enough to tackle the issue.

I've read here on /. a lot of critique to the leaking of the Sony dataset and how it was further spread by Wikileak. Taken aside the peculiar personalities linked to Wikileaks and problems one might have with them, THIS is exactly why it is good to have this information out in the world. I can only hope judicial instances will pick up this dataset and start their own investigations, for the little it may help.

It will only help a little, because those leeches are also expert in finding loopholes through regulations. Remember, this is what they do... which is quite ironic for anti-piracy lobbyists. Some countries/regions are fast in finding and closing loopholes, but not in the reign of the MPAA and especially not when it is linked to political corruption / financing of political parties and/or figures.

Comment Re:Technological limitation (Score 2) 78

Its coming from my personal experience designing hyperspectral imagers capable of doing analysis such as what is presented in the example.

The compression is not really the problem. The biggest issue is data analysis and interpretation.

And the time component is obvious... you don't wand to look at the same object without moving with your handy for 2 hours to get the required SNR to be able to do a spectral analysis. You have minimum requirements in resolutions, spectral band and SNR. Theses parameter will vary lot depending on the species you are trying to identify and with which precision you want to do that. But for a comfortable observation time, with a non-specialized device, you'll quickly come in the range of GB/s... and that even at low spatial resolution.

Comment Technological limitation (Score 2) 78

Hyperspectral imaging devices based on MEMS are not new. I've seen the first practical devices presented in conferences about 10 years ago. But I doupt we'll see flexible hyperspectral imaging devices like mobile telephones. Even for bigger hand-held spezialized devices it is far fetched. The problem is simply the data quantity. I deal with this problem daily with hyperspectral imaging; you are producing GB/s of data... Processing that near realtime is a true challenge.

What I can see possible with the state of the art are devices that are specialized to identify specific compounds. But a device that can do a generic and nonspecialized retrieval and identification of chemical compounds requires a lot of processing power - especially when dealing with hyperspectral data in contrast to simple spectral data. If you want to do a quantitative analysis, its even worse.

Comment Re:What really happened: (Score 3, Insightful) 178

What is the scrap value for a 777-200ER, what is its used parts value?

The untraceable used parts value for a 777-200ER is... ZERO. Used and reconditioned parts can be installed on other airplanes, but not without Certificate of Conformity / Form1 and so on. There is a lot of paperwork involved in getting a spare from one airplane onto another one. This includes full traceability. Without this paper trail, the part is useless. And faking a paper trail is possible, but doing so for all parts of a 777-200ER is beyond what's possible without raising red flags.

If it were a old 737, a DC-8 or a Cessna, It could be plausible. The people exploiting some old aircraft in some region of the world live under a, let say, different regulatory oversight. But I doubt any 777-200ER operate under conditions where you could use bootlegged market parts. You may as well sell the raw materials.

I believe that a much better reason to make an airplane AND its passenger disappear, is its payload.

Comment Re:Politics aside for a moment. (Score 1) 538

Seriously, to those who work in IT departments... how many of the IT users know the rules? How many of them know the rules on the management levels?
How many simply ignore the rules from IT departments, assuming its not important?

Ignorance is not an excuse, but I hope no one is surprised.

Comment Re: Morale of the Story (Score 4, Insightful) 217

Yes, because no one ever tried to produce a watch that does more than tell the time before pebble. [/sarcasm]

I do not fully agree with AC and I find he is definitely going too far. But he also speaks some truth. If it seems too good to be true, it often also is too good to be true. The problem is that for most people, the concept of risk in design is quite abstract. As an engineer, I can weight the risks not only because I know how to do that and have experience doing it, but also because I understand the technologies and problems linked with project management. So when I support a KS project, I have an idea what the risk level is and how good my investment is placed.

Now, most people cannot do this for one reason or another and their decision to invest is solely based on enthusiasms, thrust and first impression. It may be deeply driven by technological ignorance. The person have a high risk of being disappointed because they have implicit expectations of success for a project which may actually have very little chance of succeeding. This is exacerbated by the fact that project closer to the leading edge (or even to the "bleeding edge"), are those who stir the most enthusiasms and interest, even though they are also the projects with the highest risk. This is a dangerous combination when money is in play, as the investors are not fully aware or informed of the risks.

Investing only is safe and low-risk projects as the AC proposes is a solution, but it's not the best promote incubation of new ideas. But maybe better inform KS users of the risks maybe a good idea. Maybe a open risk assessment could be a solution (a bit like an open peer review of KS projects). The potential investors would then be informed of the potential risk associated with backing a project before they do so. Maybe a project with high risk hoping for 500k funding won't get 2 million USD funding anymore, but that maybe for the best as experience showed.

Slashdot Top Deals

Work is the crab grass in the lawn of life. -- Schulz

Working...