I have an not-terribly-old Compaq 1710 laptop with Windows ME (I know that is worst case). It takes 2 full CDs worth of Compaq patches after the recovery disk to get this piece of crap to even function reliably. Then 5 or 6 more CDs worth of drivers and apps.
Needless to say, we just use the machine for web surfing and streaming media. The current recovery plan is to install Linux. As far as I know, the only thing we will miss by doing that will be the Winmodem, and some distros may even have Winmodem supprot for it by now.
I am sure this was some lame ass attempt by some engineer who couldn't figure out why he could not open 18000 file descriptors or why his "malloc 2^64" was failing, and thought changing the kernel time slice parameters to reduce context switches would help.
The poor guy in India probably had a Master's Degree in Solaris Kernel Tuning and pissed off the engineer by telling him he was an idiot.
>>>Ever spent 4 hours on a Saturday afternoon running Ad Aware on their PCs?
Actually our people always managed to screw their machines up tp the extent that running Ad-Aware was pointless. We just re-imaged.
Now that your remind me my heroically patient co-sysadmin did spend hours and hours and hours talking hapless remote users through configuring their DSL and VPNs. The problem was usually remedied by a fed-exed laptop exchange.
I guess I am old and cyncical, because I'm next tempted to say "nobody ever got a raise for NOT working on nights and weekends." I'm working at Big Huge Company right now and I promise to do the right thing when I can.
I don't understand your response. The original poster was asking what might happen if wind turbines extract a significant amount of energy from the atmosphere, versus trees for example. It's probably reasonable to assume that when energy is extracted from wind, the wind slows down or stops, and the numbers show turbines don't have much effect.
The "butterfly effect" is largely a literary metaphor. Technically, its the tendency of a model to be sensitive to inital parameters. I'm don't see how that has anything to do with how much the wind slows down or changes direction as the result of one or 100 windmills placed in its path.
Maybe, you could find a configuration of windmills that if large enough and strategically placed could result in stopping the Gulf Stream, or something like that, but that wasn't really the question.
Maybe I am just getting old and cynical - but it seems the reason thin clients aren't catching on is that in most large organizations big enough for thin clients to provide big operating efficiencies, say, at the just-sub-CIO level, these people are rewarded rather than penalized for padding headcount and budgets.
In smaller organizations, it's easier to convince people to deploy innovative solutions like thin clients, but the advantages are minimal since the organization is rarely so large that there are big savings ocer conventional systems.
The people who benefit the most - sysadmins who woudl spend less of their time doind dumb stuff like ghosting systems and installing patches, and users who would not hve to wait days for software upgrades to take effect - don't really have much say in the matter.
And then there's the issue that the whole world seems to be a whore to Outlook, but that's another topic completely.
So the aperture of the 17 ft windmill is 227 ft^2 and a 10 mph wind is moving at 14.7 ft/sec so 3337 ft^3 of air is moving over the windmill every sec. That's 270 lb of air evey sec.
Since E=1/2 m v^2, E = 29172 ft-lb/sec. I'm not sure if I got my mass conversion factors right but that's about 40 kW kinetic energy.
So until turbines get way more efficient this is probably something we won't have to worry about.
The article is a plug for the author's book, "The Unix Guide to Defenestration" so it's part of a larger plot (I'm all for it BTW). Preaching to the PHB who gets bonuses based on the number of password resets and the bloat of his staff rather than overall security and performance. It doesn't seem to be a very technical book, and if you already know why it's good to defenestrate your AD server, then you probably already know how to do all the technical stuff.
It's a spectrum hog, just like your crappy old car the get 7 MPG and spews out smelly grey smoke. I want those channels recycled for UWB and other wireless services. Some might even be new unlicensed Part 15 bands so The Man doesn't get even his geedy capitalist hands on them.
In addition, I live in the SF Bay area where reliable reception of both analog and digital TV is impossible in most areas without a 70 foot antenna tower. So conventional TV broadcast frequencies are useless to me anyway.
Since by 2009 you will be able to build a digital receiver with NTSC analog modulator for about $10 I suspect stations will be able to offer free or dirt-cheap receiver-converters for those poor folks too poor to shell out 50 bucks for a new digital-ready TV so they can watch The Newlywed Gaem or whatever crap that's still on analog TV. Shoot, by 2009 nice plasma TVS are gonna cost about $200.
Just to dispel any rumors the The Man is making you pay $300 for a $40 lamp in a commercially available projector, the $300 lamp is a "UHE" type arc lamp and the $40 lamp is a halogen. The UHE is going to produce I'd guess about twice as much light, with 1/2 the power consumption, it's going to last about as long as the halogen (1500 to 2000 hr) and it's going to have a much higher color temperature.
If you were really into DIY you'd homebrew an arc lamp power supply, but it's tricky, you can't just plug the arc lamp into voltage, the current has to be regulated, similar to a flourescent light ballast.
Mistakes with arc lamps can be fun - for the small lamps in home projectors blowing one up would not be a big disaster (though expensive). I worked once as a commerical projectionist, we would get replacement arc lamps as big around as your thumb for our projectors shipped in wooden crates with layer upon layer of padding and big labels on the outside "MISHANDLING WILL RESULT IN DEATH".
What are we going to do once we "occupy" these points? Extract taxes on the spice trade to Zeta Reticuli?
Really, the first colonizations will be on the moon and maybe Mars. The LP are a long way from either. Unfortunately, I have much more confidence in the human race's ability to exterminate itself before space colonies at the LPs are feasible.
Although I only fly 1 or 2 times per year, much to my annoyance the latest trend, at least on the Southwest Airlines run between Oakland and Houston last weekend, is to have multiple cheapo DVD players, the kind that look like little laptops, and play them at FULL BLAST through the F***ING SPEAKERS. There were at least two of these things going within earshot on each leg of the trip.
Please make these glasses cheap and easily affordable as soon as possible for these retards.
On the other hand, brand new 737s with 33 inch seat pitch. Yee haw!
If you are a savvy interviewee, the "questions" people ask in these types of interviews give you as much clue about the place as anything. There are no wrong or right answers, they are just trying to get some clues about your personality.
This is different from the "tech-out", which a technical interview to determine whether or not the hapless candidate thrown into your office with no notice by your PHB is a total dumbass or not.
If you're too big of a snob to play MS's interviewing game, then you should work somewhere else. 99% of the jobs at MS probably aren't CS (whatever that is): it isn't rocket science, it's trying to get the Flaming 747 Full of Ebola Victims that is the Product out the door. Like a lot of places, their ideal candidate likes to play politics AND "think out of the box".
"Ooog, finish your mastodon and get back to work on that brokerage project now!"
Yes, we were clustering when y'all were in nappies
on
DECnet Isn't Dead
·
· Score: 1
Imagine a non-Beowulf cluster of MicroVAXes, out of the box seamlessly providing clustered batch processing for rooms full of kerosene-fueled electrostatic plotters . . . . dagnabbit, you kids get the hell off my lawn!
My point is that if I ever have a job important enough for someone to want to chop off my hand to forge my credentials, I'm pretty sure I'll be allowed to carry enough weapons or bodyguards around to make that extremely difficult.
OK, I just heard about this, it's bad enough that I have to drag around a separate PDA, phone, and laptop - now I find out I'm dragging space and time around with me as well?
I painstankingly upgraded my 128 to 512 by unsoldering the 128Mb chips and wiring in 512Mb ones. Either the mobo would not accept 4MB without a PROM upgrade, or larger chips were too expensive at the time. Later, I upgraded to a "Mac Minus" by installing a set of bootleg PROMS in the upgraded mobo. I think that mobo died and I ended up installing a Mac Plus mobo I had dumster dived. The video died twice, but the case is original, and the contraption still works. I run the warping clock on it as a night light every once in a while.
Because users need needless complexity too
on
The Book of Postfix
·
· Score: 1
Just read the Postfix list sometime - people who want to rewrite headers for some virtual domains but not others, then filter those for spam and bounce the spam with a 500-error variant based on the phase of the moon, all the while rejecting 50000-message per minute mail bombs and extracting every 300th incoming spam to convert into a realtime blackhole list, then offering users a choice whether they want TLS or SMTP-after-POP, all the while making sure the CEO doesn't get any spam and that outgoing mail headers are rewritten to obfuscate the originating subdomain based on what floor the email is sent from.
And that's the special kind of humor, with a "u", that we Yanks can only see on Prime Minister's Questions on CSPAN. It really makes the US Congress look like a bunch of pitiful sausagemakers.
All I can say in response to this joke is "waggh waggh harrumph harrumph haw haw haw" or whatever it is all the MPs say in response to a particularly funny or pointed remark.
The first noticeable effect if you stand too close to the radar is it will cause localized RF burns (very painful) and possibly turn your eyes into poached egg whites (cataracts). Long before it turns your nuts into raisins. Besides the vehicle roof is a pretty good shield. These radars are frequently installed on not-terribly-tall poles on boats.
More usefully, it's a waste of money since you'll get better data via the internet. Marine radars - at least the sub-multi-$thousand ones, just aren't that good at picking up details of precipitation at ranges of more than a mile or two. The whole point of having a marine radar is to see through precipitation!
And if I was considering traveling to Tornado Alley to ride in a tornado chase vehicle I'd doubt the wisdom and sanity of anyone with a marine radar on their car. Some of these guys are pretty loony.
A good sentiment, but depending on the size of their collection they might just toss paperbacks, they are not durable enough. And odds on they already have many of these Penguin titles, which are generally "classics", in some other form. My local library just takes donated paperbacks and puts them in their "honor system" no-checkout-required rack or sells them at the flea market fundraiser.
I woudl call and ask - my library prefers a cash donation - libraries get deep discounts on new hardcover books, they can buy the books they have demand for, and sometiems the classics are available special beefed-up library editions.
Slashdot Mirror
Is this an English-language thing or, does everyone know the Moon is really made of "fromage vert"? They got the color wrong.
case in point:
I have an not-terribly-old Compaq 1710 laptop with Windows ME (I know that is worst case). It takes 2 full CDs worth of Compaq patches after the recovery disk to get this piece of crap to even function reliably. Then 5 or 6 more CDs worth of drivers and apps.
Needless to say, we just use the machine for web surfing and streaming media. The current recovery plan is to install Linux. As far as I know, the only thing we will miss by doing that will be the Winmodem, and some distros may even have Winmodem supprot for it by now.
Regular TV = $500
Fancy-ass double-doodad TV = $3000
Doh!
Unless you live on a 22 foot boat of something.
I am sure this was some lame ass attempt by some engineer who couldn't figure out why he could not open 18000 file descriptors or why his "malloc 2^64" was failing, and thought changing the kernel time slice parameters to reduce context switches would help.
The poor guy in India probably had a Master's Degree in Solaris Kernel Tuning and pissed off the engineer by telling him he was an idiot.
>>>Ever spent 4 hours on a Saturday afternoon running Ad Aware on their PCs?
Actually our people always managed to screw their machines up tp the extent that running Ad-Aware was pointless. We just re-imaged.
Now that your remind me my heroically patient co-sysadmin did spend hours and hours and hours talking hapless remote users through configuring their DSL and VPNs. The problem was usually remedied by a fed-exed laptop exchange.
I guess I am old and cyncical, because I'm next tempted to say "nobody ever got a raise for NOT working on nights and weekends." I'm working at Big Huge Company right now and I promise to do the right thing when I can.
I don't understand your response. The original poster was asking what might happen if wind turbines extract a significant amount of energy from the atmosphere, versus trees for example. It's probably reasonable to assume that when energy is extracted from wind, the wind slows down or stops, and the numbers show turbines don't have much effect.
The "butterfly effect" is largely a literary metaphor. Technically, its the tendency of a model to be sensitive to inital parameters. I'm don't see how that has anything to do with how much the wind slows down or changes direction as the result of one or 100 windmills placed in its path.
Maybe, you could find a configuration of windmills that if large enough and strategically placed could result in stopping the Gulf Stream, or something like that, but that wasn't really the question.
Maybe I am just getting old and cynical - but it seems the reason thin clients aren't catching on is that in most large organizations big enough for thin clients to provide big operating efficiencies, say, at the just-sub-CIO level, these people are rewarded rather than penalized for padding headcount and budgets.
In smaller organizations, it's easier to convince people to deploy innovative solutions like thin clients, but the advantages are minimal since the organization is rarely so large that there are big savings ocer conventional systems.
The people who benefit the most - sysadmins who woudl spend less of their time doind dumb stuff like ghosting systems and installing patches, and users who would not hve to wait days for software upgrades to take effect - don't really have much say in the matter.
And then there's the issue that the whole world seems to be a whore to Outlook, but that's another topic completely.
One cu ft of air weighs .0807 lb according to http://www.physlink.com/Education/AskExperts/ae650 .cfm
So the aperture of the 17 ft windmill is 227 ft^2 and a 10 mph wind is moving at 14.7 ft/sec so 3337 ft^3 of air is moving over the windmill every sec. That's 270 lb of air evey sec.
Since E=1/2 m v^2, E = 29172 ft-lb/sec. I'm not sure if I got my mass conversion factors right but that's about 40 kW kinetic energy.
So until turbines get way more efficient this is probably something we won't have to worry about.
Basically, air is *heavy*.
The article is a plug for the author's book, "The Unix Guide to Defenestration" so it's part of a larger plot (I'm all for it BTW). Preaching to the PHB who gets bonuses based on the number of password resets and the bloat of his staff rather than overall security and performance. It doesn't seem to be a very technical book, and if you already know why it's good to defenestrate your AD server, then you probably already know how to do all the technical stuff.
It's a spectrum hog, just like your crappy old car the get 7 MPG and spews out smelly grey smoke. I want those channels recycled for UWB and other wireless services. Some might even be new unlicensed Part 15 bands so The Man doesn't get even his geedy capitalist hands on them.
In addition, I live in the SF Bay area where reliable reception of both analog and digital TV is impossible in most areas without a 70 foot antenna tower. So conventional TV broadcast frequencies are useless to me anyway.
Since by 2009 you will be able to build a digital receiver with NTSC analog modulator for about $10 I suspect stations will be able to offer free or dirt-cheap receiver-converters for those poor folks too poor to shell out 50 bucks for a new digital-ready TV so they can watch The Newlywed Gaem or whatever crap that's still on analog TV. Shoot, by 2009 nice plasma TVS are gonna cost about $200.
Just to dispel any rumors the The Man is making you pay $300 for a $40 lamp in a commercially available projector, the $300 lamp is a "UHE" type arc lamp and the $40 lamp is a halogen. The UHE is going to produce I'd guess about twice as much light, with 1/2 the power consumption, it's going to last about as long as the halogen (1500 to 2000 hr) and it's going to have a much higher color temperature.
If you were really into DIY you'd homebrew an arc lamp power supply, but it's tricky, you can't just plug the arc lamp into voltage, the current has to be regulated, similar to a flourescent light ballast.
Mistakes with arc lamps can be fun - for the small lamps in home projectors blowing one up would not be a big disaster (though expensive). I worked once as a commerical projectionist, we would get replacement arc lamps as big around as your thumb for our projectors shipped in wooden crates with layer upon layer of padding and big labels on the outside "MISHANDLING WILL RESULT IN DEATH".
What are we going to do once we "occupy" these points? Extract taxes on the spice trade to Zeta Reticuli?
Really, the first colonizations will be on the moon and maybe Mars. The LP are a long way from either. Unfortunately, I have much more confidence in the human race's ability to exterminate itself before space colonies at the LPs are feasible.
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/1 0/1543214&tid=126&tid=14
You will then be grateful for the technology, if only to block your field of view...
Although I only fly 1 or 2 times per year, much to my annoyance the latest trend, at least on the Southwest Airlines run between Oakland and Houston last weekend, is to have multiple cheapo DVD players, the kind that look like little laptops, and play them at FULL BLAST through the F***ING SPEAKERS. There were at least two of these things going within earshot on each leg of the trip.
Please make these glasses cheap and easily affordable as soon as possible for these retards.
On the other hand, brand new 737s with 33 inch seat pitch. Yee haw!
If you are a savvy interviewee, the "questions" people ask in these types of interviews give you as much clue about the place as anything. There are no wrong or right answers, they are just trying to get some clues about your personality.
This is different from the "tech-out", which a technical interview to determine whether or not the hapless candidate thrown into your office with no notice by your PHB is a total dumbass or not.
If you're too big of a snob to play MS's interviewing game, then you should work somewhere else. 99% of the jobs at MS probably aren't CS (whatever that is): it isn't rocket science, it's trying to get the Flaming 747 Full of Ebola Victims that is the Product out the door. Like a lot of places, their ideal candidate likes to play politics AND "think out of the box".
Quick somebody post the dupe again, so we can put this guy away for life. Or does Florida not have a three strikes law?
"Ooog, finish your mastodon and get back to work on that brokerage project now!"
Imagine a non-Beowulf cluster of MicroVAXes, out of the box seamlessly providing clustered batch processing for rooms full of kerosene-fueled electrostatic plotters . . . . dagnabbit, you kids get the hell off my lawn!
.. oh, nevermind.
My point is that if I ever have a job important enough for someone to want to chop off my hand to forge my credentials, I'm pretty sure I'll be allowed to carry enough weapons or bodyguards around to make that extremely difficult.
OK, I just heard about this, it's bad enough that I have to drag around a separate PDA, phone, and laptop - now I find out I'm dragging space and time around with me as well?
I painstankingly upgraded my 128 to 512 by unsoldering the 128Mb chips and wiring in 512Mb ones. Either the mobo would not accept 4MB without a PROM upgrade, or larger chips were too expensive at the time. Later, I upgraded to a "Mac Minus" by installing a set of bootleg PROMS in the upgraded mobo. I think that mobo died and I ended up installing a Mac Plus mobo I had dumster dived. The video died twice, but the case is original, and the contraption still works. I run the warping clock on it as a night light every once in a while.
Just read the Postfix list sometime - people who want to rewrite headers for some virtual domains but not others, then filter those for spam and bounce the spam with a 500-error variant based on the phase of the moon, all the while rejecting 50000-message per minute mail bombs and extracting every 300th incoming spam to convert into a realtime blackhole list, then offering users a choice whether they want TLS or SMTP-after-POP, all the while making sure the CEO doesn't get any spam and that outgoing mail headers are rewritten to obfuscate the originating subdomain based on what floor the email is sent from.
Postfix is perfect for that kind of stuff.
And that's the special kind of humor, with a "u", that we Yanks can only see on Prime Minister's Questions on CSPAN. It really makes the US Congress look like a bunch of pitiful sausagemakers.
All I can say in response to this joke is "waggh waggh harrumph harrumph haw haw haw" or whatever it is all the MPs say in response to a particularly funny or pointed remark.
The first noticeable effect if you stand too close to the radar is it will cause localized RF burns (very painful) and possibly turn your eyes into poached egg whites (cataracts). Long before it turns your nuts into raisins. Besides the vehicle roof is a pretty good shield. These radars are frequently installed on not-terribly-tall poles on boats.
More usefully, it's a waste of money since you'll get better data via the internet. Marine radars - at least the sub-multi-$thousand ones, just aren't that good at picking up details of precipitation at ranges of more than a mile or two. The whole point of having a marine radar is to see through precipitation!
And if I was considering traveling to Tornado Alley to ride in a tornado chase vehicle I'd doubt the wisdom and sanity of anyone with a marine radar on their car. Some of these guys are pretty loony.
A good sentiment, but depending on the size of their collection they might just toss paperbacks, they are not durable enough. And odds on they already have many of these Penguin titles, which are generally "classics", in some other form. My local library just takes donated paperbacks and puts them in their "honor system" no-checkout-required rack or sells them at the flea market fundraiser.
I woudl call and ask - my library prefers a cash donation - libraries get deep discounts on new hardcover books, they can buy the books they have demand for, and sometiems the classics are available special beefed-up library editions.