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Comment Re:That seems weird to me (Score 5, Interesting) 186

I fully agree. In fact, when this first happened, I remember the team saying they were sure they had missed something and wanted help figuring out what they had missed. Seemed to me that they were using the scientific method exactly as it should be used. All I can figure is that there were politics or other internal pressures.

Comment Re:Kernel shared memory (Score 1) 129

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the method you described sounds almost exactly like LVM Snapshots. A great approach, and saves a ton of disk space. How often should a VM be rebooted or re-cloned though? Memory is a lot more volitile than disk storage, so I would think that the longer the system runs, the more divergent the memory stacks would be, thus the less efficient this method would be over time, or am I missing something? Thanks!

Comment Ask your local community college (Score 1) 369

I am a professor at a regional community college, and we have a course designed for exactly the skills you are asking about. We also have a division called Workforce and Community Education. This division's job is to provide credit or non-credit training to businesses and industry in our region. Almost every community college has a similar component. Ours would jump at the opportunity to provide a pre-employment test and/or training for a company like yours, and we (as any other equivalent school) already have the people and resources to do it. If you want to do it in house, you could probably just ask the computer science professor for a copy of their final in the equivalent course and modify it as needed, or hire them for a couple of days as a contractor to make it for you and have it fit your exact needs. I fully agree that such testing is vital. Before I took this job I worked at a local chemical plant with 3000 employees. Our helpdesk of 10 people spent almost half of their time providing support to the same 7 or 8 employees in the plant. HR would never do anything about it, but there was a huge hidden cost in supporting these people by keeping them on. Also, some regular training on stuff for your current employees will help too, and you'd be surprised at how little it might cost doing it the way I've outlined. Good luck.

Comment Re:It's going to get us! (Score 1) 188

Actually, it could be a threat according to this theory: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/nemesis-comets-earth-am-100311.html It basically says that since extinction events on earth occur every 26 Million years, the orbit of an as-yet-unknown brown dwarf may be causing impacts on earth that lead to these extinction events.

Comment Re:Unethical (Score 1) 458

So can we ethically allow mind-altering substances that are naturally (emphasis mine) present to exist in the water supply?

If a substance is naturally occurring, that means we didn't put it there. How are we morally obligated to remove it if it is below any known threshold of danger? Would you propose that all water used by man be nothing but pure H20? I've got bad news for you, no municipal water supply is ever pure H20 - they add lots of chlorine and other stuff to make it more palatable.

Power

Submission + - Solar plane breaks endurance record (cnet.com)

calmond writes: "QinetiQ Group PLC claimed Sunday that its propeller-driven aircraft called Zephyr flew for 83 hours and 37 minutes non stop, more than doubling the official world record set by Northrop Grumman's Global Hawk in 2001.
The Zephyr is much different from the Global Hawk, which is about the size of a fighter and requires runway for taking off and landing.
Zephyr, on the other hand, is an ultra-lightweight carbon-fiber aircraft that weighs less than 70lbs and is designed to launch by hand. The little aircraft flies on solar power generated by amorphous silicon arrays covering the aircraft's paper-thin wings. It is powered day and night by rechargeable lithium-sulfur batteries that are recharged during the day using solar power."

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