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Comment: All models are wrong (Score 4, Interesting) 676

by Bud (#37853114) Attached to: Why Economic Models Are Always Wrong

"Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful." (George E.P. Box and Norman R. Draper, Empirical Model-Building and Response Surfaces (1987), p. 74)

"One of the most insidious and nefarious properties of scientific models is their tendency to take over, and sometimes supplant, reality." (Erwin Chargaff)

I think that says it all, really.

--Bud

Comment: The Celine Dion effect (Score 1) 89

by Bud (#36328902) Attached to: AC/DC Music Attracts Great White Sharks

One wonders if they'll be turned off by Celine Dion music — a new type of shark repellent perhaps?

Oh yes, the "Celine Dion effect" is well known. For example, playing My Heart Will Go On in railway stations late at night will magically keep the stations empty from pickpockets, rapists and other miscreants and indeed any sentient beings except cockroaches. The high notes will first melt your earwax and then your brain. Cockroaches merely lose their orientation and walk into walls.

I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work underwater too. Unless of course the sharks fight back with lasers.

--Bud

Comment: Re:Sad, but we could see it coming (Score 1) 78

by Bud (#34367768) Attached to: Symbian Foundation Sites To Close

One element I pushed was that nobody was going to be interested in their kernel, regardless of what they did, and that conversion to Linux would eventually be necessary if they were not to continue to expend millions on re-inventing the wheel.

Not a good thing to push because the kernel is the interesting part of Symbian. It's power-tight and has real-time features, both of which are very nice features in a mobile communications device. Unfortunately it only runs on ARM. Linux on the other hand runs on everything. With Qt on top of both Symbian and MeeGo, there's nowhere Nokia can't go. (There's no guarantee they'll actually go there, but they *could*.)

--Bud

Comment: Re:If this were posted to photo.net... (Score 1) 114

by Bud (#33609274) Attached to: Hubble In Anaglyph Stereo 3D

Ouch - this is the best that Hubble can do? The images show serious chromatic aberrations, with significant red-blue fringing on edges. What's worse is that the effect gets more pronounced as the camera moves around.

Given that the camera moves at relativistic speeds, the chromic aberrations are probably a relativistic effect and would of course get more pronounced the faster the camera moves. Another interesting side effect is that while for you the movie is over in a matter of minutes, someone observing you will feel that the movie takes too long, and incidentally also perceive you as significantly smaller.

Kids, don't try this at home!

--Bud

Media

RIAA President Says Copyright Law "Isn't Working" 473

Posted by CmdrTaco
from the you-mean-it-could-be-worse? dept.
Kilrah_il writes "Apperantly not satisfied with the current scope of the DMCA, RIAA President Cary Sherman wants to broaden the scope of the law to have content providers such as YouTube and Rapidshare liable for illegal content found on their sites. 'The RIAA would strongly prefer informal agreements inked with intermediaries ... We're working on [discussions with broadband providers], and we'd like to extend that kind of relationship — not just to ISPs, but [also to] search engines, payment processors, advertisers ... [But], if legislation is an appropriate way to facilitate that kind of cooperation, fine.' Notice the update at the end of the article pointing out that Sherman is seeking for voluntary agreements with said partners and not to enact broader laws without their cooperation."
Programming

Con Kolivas Returns, With a Desktop-Oriented Linux Scheduler 333

Posted by timothy
from the dare-not-speak-its-name dept.
myvirtualid writes "Con Kolivas has done what he swore never to do: returned to the Linux kernel and written a new — and, according to him — waaay better scheduler for the desktop environment. In fact, BFS appears to outperform existing schedulers right up until one hits a 16-CPU machine, at which point he guesses performance would degrade somewhat. According to Kolivas, BFS 'was designed to be forward looking only, make the most of lower spec machines, and not scale to massive hardware. i.e. [sic] it is a desktop orientated scheduler, with extremely low latencies for excellent interactivity by design rather than 'calculated,' with rigid fairness, nice priority distribution and extreme scalability within normal load levels.'"
GNU is Not Unix

GPLv2 Libraries — Is There a Point? 585

Posted by kdawson
from the spirit-of-the-license dept.
PiSkyHi writes "I understand that if I build an application that links with a library that is licensed under GPLv2, I must also make my application GPL2. I can see that value in this for an application. But for a library, what's to stop me separating my program into a GPLv2-compliant client app that talks to the rest of my (choose my own license) application?"
Networking

How Do You Create Config Files Automatically? 113

Posted by timothy
from the hire-7-new-admins dept.
An anonymous reader writes "When deploying new server/servergroup/cluster to your IT infrastructure, deployment (simplified) consist of following steps: OS installation: to do it over network, boot server must be configured for this new server/servergroup/cluster; configuration/package management: configuration server has to be aware of the newcomer(s); monitoring and alerting: monitoring software must be reconfigured; and performance metrics: a tool for collecting data must be reconfigured. There are many excellent software solutions for those particular jobs, say configuration management (Puppet, Chef, cfengine, bcfg2), monitoring hosts and services (Nagios, Zabbix, OpenNMS, Zenoss, etc) and performance metrics (Ganglia, etc.). But each of these tools has to be configured independently or at least configuration has to be generated. What tools do you use to achieve this? For example, when you have to deploy a new server, how do you create configs for, let's say, PXE boot server, Puppet, Nagios and Ganglia, at once?"

I B M U B M We all B M For I B M!!!! -- H.A.R.L.I.E.

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