Saying that the kernel should have no protocol understanding because you might wish to decode the signals from the remote to your 1976 airconditioner using a diode hooked to the mic connector on your soundcard sound to me like saying TCP/IP and the e1000 driver shouldn't be in the kernel because you might want to run SNA/SDLC over your homebrew hardware connected to a serial port (hint, you can - from userspace).
]]>A new study confirms that the reaction time of cell phone users slows dramatically, increasing the risk of accidents and tying up traffic in general, and when young adults use cell phones while driving, they're as bad as sleepy septuagenarians.
"If you put a 20-year-old driver behind the wheel with a cell phone, their reaction times are the same as a 70-year-old driver who is not using a cell phone," said University of Utah psychology professor David Strayer. "It's like instantly aging a large number of drivers."
The study was announced today and is detailed in winter issue of the quarterly journal Human Factors.
Cell phone distraction causes 2,600 deaths and 330,000 injuries in the United States every year, according to the journal's publisher, the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.
Drivers talking on cell phones were 18 percent slower to react to brake lights, the new study found. In a minor bright note, they also kept a 12 percent greater following distance. But they also took 17 percent longer to regain the speed they lost when they braked. That frustrates everyone.
Drivers on Cell Phones Kill Thousands, Snarl Traffic | LiveScience
]]>According to the report, qualities such as application, self-regulation and empathy were more likely to be developed in children whose parents employed a "tough love" approach.
It found that these qualities made "a vital contribution to life chances, mobility and opportunity".
The report said these characteristics were profoundly shaped in pre-school years.
The Building Character report analysed data from more than 9,000 households in the UK.
It found that children from the richest backgrounds were more than twice as likely to develop the key characteristics compared to those with the poorest origins.
Additionally, children whose parents were married were twice as likely to show such traits than children from lone parent or step-parented families, the report said.
But it added that when parental style and confidence were factored in, the difference in child character development between richer and poorer families disappeared.
The report concluded that this indicated that parenting was the most important influence - and the same result occurred when the family structure factor was analysed.
]]>
The competition, now in its 45th year, is owned by BBC Wildlife magazine and London's Natural History Museum.
The panel of judges looked through more than 43,000 entries to this year's competition.
BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Leaping wolf wins photo contest
]]>Professor Kaare Christensen, of the Danish Ageing Research Centre at the University of Southern Denmark, who led the study, said life expectancy had been increasing since 1840 and there was no sign of this trend slowing down.
bq.. He said: "The linear increase in record life expectancy for more than 165 years does not suggest a looming limit to human lifespan.
Before his unit went in to Gaza, Rabbi Kaufman said their commander told him to blow the ram's horn: "Like (biblical) Joshua when he conquered the land of Israel. It makes the war holier."
Rabbis handed out hundreds of religious pamphlets during the Gaza war.
When they came to light, they caused huge controversy in Israel. Some leaflets called Israeli soldiers the "sons of light" and Palestinians, the "sons of darkness".
Others compared the Palestinians to the Philistines, the bitter biblical enemy of the Jewish people.
BBC NEWS | Programmes | Newsnight | The rise of Israel's military rabbis
]]>As for the top executives, they are the glamour superstars. They move around town with long convoys of so-called security cars.
They are by far the heaviest donors to Pentecostal Churches, with attendant privileges.
Pleading innocence
Many of them travel in their own private jets and they dip into their bank's resources as if these are their personal piggy-banks. Hollywood stars would envy their lifestyle.
]]>The fiction created a romanticism around spies which attracted many people to work for the service.
Among them was Daphne Park, who joined in the 1940s and rose to become a controller at MI6.
"I suppose it did start with reading [Rudyard Kipling's] Kim, reading John Buchan and reading Sapper and Bulldog Drummond and I think from a quite early age I did want to go into intelligence. I didn't know what kind or how it would be. But I always wanted it."
As well as attracting individuals to sign up for desk jobs, the daring antics of fictional spies also helped MI6 in its core work of recruiting agents - people willing to spy for the service and pass on secrets.
]]>Researcher Dr Arlan Richardson, of the Barshop Institute, said: "I've been in aging research for 35 years and there have been many so-called 'anti-ageing' interventions over those years that were never successful.
"I never thought we would find an anti-ageing pill for people in my lifetime; however, rapamycin shows a great deal of promise to do just that."
]]>Supporter Clayton Grassick echoed those sentiments and said that bringing Abdelrazik home is an important victory for the nation's democratic rights.
"If we would let a Canadian citizen be tortured and then permanently exiled, without any charges, without any court, without any due process, if we hadn't stopped that, then we would have crossed a line."
]]>It was a story buried in the middle of the Indian newspapers.
Two star-crossed lovers committed suicide after the local village council, or panchayat, ordered them to annul their marriage or face death.
Amreen was Muslim and her husband, Lokesh, a Hindu. Their match was simply unacceptable to their communities. The couple poisoned themselves.
Now police have charged the entire panchayat with abetting suicide.
]]>I think we're all guilty of retribution at some point in our lives, even if we're not proud of it. I'd be lying if I said that I didn't implement firewall rules at an ISP in direct response to user activity. The user didn't break the terms of service (TOS) in literal word, but in spirit, and I reacted to that by changing the firewall rules specifically to prevent them from doing what they were doing. What I should have done was discuss the situation with management, edit the TOS, and the firewall to reflect it. Fortunately in my job roles after that, I have reacted more maturely to issues such as these.
http://www.simple-talk.com/exchange/exchange-articles/a-sysadmins-guide-to-users/
]]>There still are details (and even complete subsystems) to be documented more thoroughly, but this is the workbook I presented at MySQL Conference. I've heard comments that the book has 'hypothetical' situations, but generally every bit is there represents real practice we're having.
The talk did drift to some bits of information that may not be there (or did go much deeper), as well as the book covers some parts of operations that were not discussed at the tutorial talk. Anyway, I hope both session and tutorial has some value.
Here's the file: Wikipedia: Site internals, configuration, code examples and management issues (the workbook). For now it is PDF, but I hope to transform it into properly evolving public document.
Update: Another good presentation on Wikipedia technology by Mark: Wikimedia Architecture
]]>TCA methodology can be used to measure the cost of individual shopper operations, such as registering on the site, browsing, searching, adding an item to the shopping cart, checking out, and so on. You determine the capacity of a site by dividing the costs of shopper operations into the total resources available from the server. To simplify the discussion of TCA methodology, this white paper focuses on determining the CPU capacity of the server only. For a discussion of calculating multiple resource costs on the server, see the Capacity Model for Internet Transactions white paper, available from the same Web page as this white paper.
After you understand the cost and relative frequency of each shopper operation, you can view the performance numbers for a site's pages to identify where the bottlenecks are, and identify where you can optimize performance to improve the site's capacity.
For example, TCA methodology can help you determine which operations are the most costly, which pages are accessed most frequently, and so on. You can use the performance data that you collect, using TCA methodology, to perform "what if" scenarios. This way you can see how performance improvements (or degradation) affect your site. Once you know the cost of each operation, you can improve the performance of your site by optimizing high cost or frequently used Web pages. If you need additional capacity, identifying and lowering the cost of these "expensive Web pages" will help. In addition, you will clearly see the impact of adding features to a Web page, and can plan to install additional hardware required to service the load generated by additional shoppers or new code releases.
A Transaction Cost Analysis is comprised of the following:
* Compile a User Profile
* Measure the Cost of Each Operation
* Estimate Site Capacity
* Calculate Site Capacity
* Verify Site Capacity
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/commerceserver/bb608757.aspx
]]>Three men with links to Sir Ernest Shackleton have reached the South Pole.
Lt Col Henry Worsley, from Hereford, Will Gow, from Kent, and Henry Adams, from Suffolk, arrived on Sunday.
The team members, descendents of Shackleton's team or his family, took 66 days to complete the explorer's route, 100 years after he abandoned it.
Speaking from Antarctica, Mr Gow said: "It's been a very long journey, 66 days over 900 miles of pulling our sledges... we're absolutely ecstatic."
Shackleton set out on his Nimrod expedition in October 1908, hoping to become the first person to reach the South Pole.
But icy blizzards and dwindling rations forced him to turn back 97 miles from his goal on 9 January 1909.
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