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Comment Re:Statistics can be misleading (Score 1) 152

On Question Time Anna Soubry (Under-Secretary of State for Health) said that some doctors schedule more at-risk surgeries on a Friday because then they will be able to deal with the patient during the weekend when they don't have surgeries planned.

They control for the type of procedure, so you can rule out the obvious confounding factor of scheduling procedures that are inherently more dangerous for later in the week. It doesn't tell you about the differences between the individual patients, of course ("this hip replacement's going to much trickier than that one, so I'll do it on Friday") but the numbers do not provide any evidence for the hypothesis that this kind of schedule-shuffling is going on. Comparing between types of procedures, the numbers for risk (Table 1, toward the bottom) look pretty flat, with the obvious (and unsurprising) exception that procedures performed on the weekend tend to be lower risk. Between Mondays and Fridays, there's essentially no difference at all.

You do need to be careful when you want to find explanations for statistics like these.

Stupid researchers! They never thought of that! [rolls eyes]

Comment Re:Fusion Reactor (Score 4, Interesting) 204

That's the kid's own website, right?

No, it's not. You may have been confused because his name is Farnsworth, which isn't a particularly common name; as another poster said, it would be interesting to know if there's a family connection with the Farnsworth the fusor is named for. Fusor.net, AFAICT, is a site run by and for fusor hobbyists, people who like to tinker with the kind of machines this kid built.

And for those who are saying "Oh, he just downloaded some tutorials off the net"--well, if you could or would have done something like that as a teenager, good for you, but most people couldn't or wouldn't. It's not groundbreaking research, but putting together a working fusor is a pretty neat accomplishment for a high-school kid.

Comment Re:Why aren't there more contributors to this proj (Score 1) 252

It's the only realistic chance of dethroning MS from the desktop in favor of an open alternative.

It has no chance of dethroning Windows. Zero. Zip. Nada.

Look, no one will ever be as good at being Microsoft as Microsoft is. ReactOS may be eventually be 99 44/100 % Windows compatible. It may look like Windows, feel like Windows, and act like Windows almost all the time--but it won't be Windows. And sooner or later, anyone running it will run into some instance where Windows does this but ReactOS does that. Now, when this happens (when, not if) developers will say, "That's interesting, we should fix that." But regular users will think, "Serves me right for trying to use this cheap knockoff. Guess I'll just get the real thing." And if anyone asks them about their experience with ReactOS, that's pretty what they'll say.

ReactOS is an interesting project, and I wish them the best of luck. I'm sure it will find its uses. Taking significant market share away from Microsoft isn't one of them.

The same, BTW, applies to open-source clones of other Microsoft products, which is why it's kind of dismaying that the OpenOffice family (LibreOffice, etc.) tries so hard to imitate Microsoft Office interface standards. Those aren't the only way to design office software, and there's no reason to assume they're the best, either. The more you chase the market leader, the less chance of eventually becoming the market leader you have. Try to do something different and better instead. That's about the only way any piece of software has ever broken another's market dominance, and probably the only way it ever will.

Comment Re:BYOD means IT imagines less control over it (Score 1) 377

I had this problem with my parent company - Engineering and R & D would be trying to find coding examples and the sites they would end up trying to reach were flagged by the web filters as hacking sites or game sites (which they were a lot of times). The train of thought they were following would stop because it took days to get an approval for opening up a site. They finally said to heck with it and started using their phones as hot spots, plugged their computer into the corporate network and then used local route statements to define what went where - Internet traffic vs. corporate traffic (tech savvy developers).

The key for security is having it in such a fashion that people use that security vs. trying to work around it to get what they need.

Comment Re:Meh. (Score 1) 109

That might be true, I don't know, I wasn't one of the pre-adoption G+ users. But I can tell you that since G+ has been public, it has always been slower than facebook. The initial page load takes longer, posting a comment takes longer, posting a page takes longer, everything takes longer and as far as I can tell, it always has.

Now that I think about it, yeah, I guess I was one of the beta users. What the hell, I tried that with Gmail, years ago, and that worked out pretty well ...

The pre-public-release G+ was kind of odd-looking, but my God it was fast. I'm really sad about how quickly it went downhill.

Submission + - Former Amazon cloud engineer spills to Reddit audience (networkworld.com)

Brandon Butler writes: Amazon is usually pretty hush-hush about the internal workings of its cloud. But, an anonymous engineer recently did a Reddit IAmA and spilled the beans about the company's cloud and what it's like to work there.

Some highlights:
-Amazon uses a lot of secreet sauce in both hardware and software, including multiple flavors of "Amazon Linux"
-Pay and benefits aren't that great, but having AWS on the resume is worth it
-How VPCs work and what the best way to deal with "noisy neighbors" is

Read the full IAmA post here http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1e5o4p/iaman_exaws_engineer_ask_me_anything_about_the/

And a summary here http://www.networkworld.com/news/2013/051713-amazon-reddit-269890.html?page=1

Comment Re:Easy (Score 3, Interesting) 161

If you didn't get that from TFA, you may have read it, but you certainly didn't understand it.

I'll just re-quote from the article the passage I quoted in a previous post:

The senior VP had serious technical chops, but he wasn't about to demonstrate them in front of his peers. He feared, justifiably, that if he did so he'd get classified as a techie and taken out of consideration as a possible future CEO.

Understanding this is pretty easy; if you choose not to do so, that's your business, so to speak.

Comment Re:Easy (Score 4, Interesting) 161

Believe it or not, that's the opposite of what the summary says.

No it's not. The summary (and the article, which is essentially the same fluff as the summary repeated several times--I RTFA'd so you don't have to) says to avoid technical jargon, which has actual meaning and is therefore terrifying to people who want to be executives. The bullshit list is business jargon, which is inherently meaningless and is therefore very useful to C*Os and those who like to imagine themselves in such positions.

Comment From TFA (Score 5, Informative) 161

The senior VP had serious technical chops, but he wasn't about to demonstrate them in front of his peers. He feared, justifiably, that if he did so he'd get classified as a techie and taken out of consideration as a possible future CEO.

For any /.er working in an environment like that, I'd like to think this would be a sign that it was time to get the hell out.

Comment Meh. (Score 5, Insightful) 109

When G+ started out, it was clean, fast-loading, reliable, and did exactly what it was supposed to do and no more. You know ... like Google used to be. I had real hopes that G+:FB::Google:Yahoo.

Every change since then has made it uglier, slower, and buggier; with the latest interface changes they've not only caught up to but actually surpassed Facebook in the amount of irritating crap they shove at the user. Google may be able to coast on people's affection for them as a search engine (especially when the competition is Bing) but they're going to find it increasingly difficult to break into new markets if all they do is ape the worst behavior of the existing market leader--which in this case emphatically includes "adding a bunch of new 'features' when the ones we already have are kind of crap."

I still use Google as my primary search engine, Gmail as my e-mail provider, and Google Maps when I want to figure out how to go somewhere I haven't been before. Nothing they've done since then has provided any reason to switch from whatever solution I'm currently using. And I really don't think I'm alone in this.

Comment Re:And here I was hoping (Score 1) 193

I'm right there with you, but don't hold your breath. It's appropriate that he's going to be doing this show. He's precisely this generation's equivalent of Sagan: a scientist who did good work in his field early on but who has since coasted on a public image as the Voice Of Science, with his most mundane statements breathlessly repeated as though they were great wisdom. [shrug] I guess it's better for people to choose a scientist to worship than an actor, musician, athlete, politician, or preacher, but it's still kind of irritating to watch.

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