I should point out that the times that I logged circa-2002 included a round-trip through our server. That is, they were measurements from the time our software decided to initiate a trade against ISLD to the time we received and processing a confirmation message indicating that we had bought the shares.
The NASDAQ figures quoted above are from the customer's network port, throgh NASDAQ's equipment, and back to the customer's network port. (I assume measured at the NASDAQ facility.) So, it's a significantly shorter path.
So what do we take from this?
- Linux can do ~100 uSec trades today.
- Linux and MS-DOS could do ~100 uSec trades several years ago.
- The additional latency of a customer-side trading system of Windows-2000/MFC several years ago was probably much less than 100 uSec, since the total round trip was in that range.
-.net might suck. Or maybe just un-talented programmers.
The fact that we aren't see 50uSec or 10uSec trades today is not surprising, given the exponential growth in volume...
I suspect that OUCH is still the undisputed king of low-latency execution.
Furthermore, NASDAQ's volume is very significantly greater than the LSE's, and OUCH-entered orders represent a significantly greater proportion of NASDAQ's total volume than LSE's "dark pool".
Hate to burst their bubble, but we were executing trades with ISLD in better time than this circa 2002 or so.
Pretty sure we saw some confirmations in the 80uSec range, and regularly in the 100 uSec range. Have to pull out the logs to be sure. We had a small high-frequency trading operation, which was probably one of the first. I got the idea to co-locate in the same building as ISLD at 50 Broad St. (We started out trading from St. Louis, LOL - moved to co-location at our broker 30 miles up the Hudson, and then into 50 Broad.) We initially co-located at their Internet provider at the time, located in the building, in order to get the closest Internet connection to receive quotes from ISLD via their ITCH interface. Later, we were able to obtain the use of a fibre in the elevator shaft and bypass the Internet part, and eventually were able to start entering our trades directly through OUCH, bypassing our broker's equipment, and sharing the same fibre connection (most firms had to use dedicated T1's at the time). (We leased T1s to some of the other ECNs, and got some data from our broker's system.) When ISLD moved to NJ, we moved our equipment to a co-location facility that they provided. (They never had an official one at 50 Broad.)
Not sure if ISLD had transitioned to Linux for the OUCH servers at that point, or were still using MS-DOS. Our own equipment used Windows 2000.
Josh Levine at ISLD was a fanatic about low latency. Most firms couldn't care less, so he was eager to work with anyone who showed an interest. We had a lot of discussions on how to decrease latencies, and he introduced me to TCP_NOWAIT, which disables the Nagle Algorithm in TCP stacks.
Other ECNs were resistant to change. I'm not sure if they knew just how far ahead of them ISLD was. At that time, based on our logs (we logged the timing of every trade with microsecond resolution) ISLD was the no-contest hands-down winner, with REDI a not-so-close second, followed by Instinet, and crap. ARCA was hampered in the extreme by their Chicago server location. Of these, REDI was the most willing to listen, and did cooperate in making changes to reduce latency. INCA and NASDAQ obviously eventually "got it", since they bought ISLD essentially for it's technology. There really wasn't much to the technology - it consisted of nothing more than an approach of insisting on knowing just where every microsecond goes, and eliminating unnecessary delays.
At least at my location, the Google images appear to be higher-res than the Bing images. For example, on Bing, I can't see ALL of the RG6 runs on the roof across the street - only where there are several bundled-together.
(Sorry, Slashdot won't post the Bing URL - it's "an awfully long string of characters"...)
BTW, I took a look at some of the military stuff in the area. At higher-res, the aircraft carriers mysteriously disappear. But that could just be because they weren't in port when the high-res images were taken.
I thought I saw an area mysteriously blanked-out with a croshatch pattern. But then I realized that what I was looking at was headstones at Ft. Rosecrans National Cemetary.
So, I'm pretty close to the airport, so I thought I'd take a look over there. Something tells me they had to get SOME kind of special permission for this:
I kid you not, I can see the RG6 on the roof of the building across the street! (San Diego)
I took a look at my own building first to see if there were new, higher-resolution images. Sure enough, I could see the plastic conduit on our roof that carries the Cox cables to each stack. I think it's about a 4" conduit.
Just for yucks, I pan over to the building across the street, and I can see the bare RG6 laid on the roof.
Voila! I now have the photographs to accompany my presentation to the HOA about how stupid it is that our cable is laid-out orthogonally, as opposed to the sensible, star layout across the street. (It's so stupidly laid-out that it accounts for the 8db difference between my living-room drop and bedroom drop.)
See link below. (What the heck, privacy is dead, right?) This isn't even at maximum zoom, you can zoom in further yourself. I left it at this zoom level so you can see both buildings at the same time.
I recently sponsored my first two 99Designs contests, and it was (for the most part) a throughly pleasant experience. I paid $250 (plus fees) for a great logo. My local designer would have charged me $750. Oh, his absurd logo price schedule: $400 for non-profits, $750 for normal companies, and $1500 for big fish. Yea, you read me right. Nothing to do with effort. Based on ability to pay - charge what the traffic will bear. Is that a better system than 99design?
(The one negative was excessive nannying by 99Design staff and the "sour grapes" reaction by some contestants when I permitted a design to make use of a tracing of a photograph. The designer disclosed that to me, I gave him permission, and it turned out to be the winning design. Unfortunately, 99Design suspended the contestant for 7 days. Thank you very much, but let ME manage my legal risk. But they did pay him the prize money. Now, had somebody pointed-out the tracing before the contest was over, or at least before the winner was chosen, it would have been USEFUL to me. Instead, they waited till it was all over - and so it was just obstructive. In fact, I will probably have the traced part of the logo re-done, using the original tracing only as inspiration. I love the DESIGN CONCEPT and it is a starting point. I would have never come up with that logo design myself, and the tracing is just one element that can certainly be re-drawn from scratch. Contestants and 99Design staff DO NOT KNOW whether the logo will be used commercially as-is, and shouldn't make assumptions.)
Yes, there are poor-quality Chinese and Indian (gotta pick on SOMEBODY) entries. And they were obviously low-quality I eliminated them early on. I never eliminated a DESIGNER (something you CAN do), and in fact one of designers of the early low-quality entries listened to feedback well enough to ultimately come very close to winning. BTW, the Chinese designers tend to have horrible typefaces, so they get eliminated on that if you have any taste at all. Yes, some of the designers have poor or no English skills, so that feedback is nearly impossible. But they still see other's designs and your "star ratings" of designs (unless you run a "blind" contest) and so they still can see the direction you are going. Myself, I prefer to work with the designers that have excellent English skills making feedback effective. There's no lack of designers with excellent English skills.
It's important to provide feedback. I gave plenty, and the designers appreciated it.
Sometimes you get a great result through feedback and iteration. Sometimes a great design just drops out of the sky. The winner of my logo contest worked his ass of making change after change at my request. My second choice just swooped-in with a beautiful, simple design that required just a single iteration - to change the colors in the company name. I told him "don't change a thing - it is perfect". (The second choice was really a much better logo - it just wasn't the image I wanted to project. Great for a Fortune-500 bank or investment house. Not playful enough for an iPhone software development company.) The second-choice probably didn't take the designer much time. Three simple shapes that overlap to form the logo. I think he just got an inspiration that took him a half-hour to draw. Both approaches are valid, and 99Designs allows you to choose.
In fairness to contestants, once I had leading choices, I stopped making requests of other contestants. No need to run the ragged for nothing. I imagine most contest holders (or at least experienced ones) are pretty fair to contestants this way.
Next time, I will try running a "preliminary design" contest, and a second one (or contract with the winner) for a finished design. Tell the contestants right-off, I'm not looking for a finished design, but design concepts. I think it's useful to be a bit creative with the process. This is the way it often works with a single designer, anyway. You get rough sketches, color palettes, etc. first, then final artwork later. 99De
Actually, this has already been done, on a limited basis. Not sure what is available at present, but some ECNs have offered the option of such an auction as you describe. It's really just the same as the typical "opening auction", but then repeat it at some interval, more typically a few minutes (like 15).
But this has only been done as an available option to traders, and then on a single ECN.
By eliminating ECNs (e.g. only a single, central market) and allowing only this type of trade, the system could then be "fair".
If you can memorize this, you'll be the life of any cocktail party:
"We're seeing them from AS 48438, coming across to us as an Optional Transitive Attribute which our force-10s are not parsing (but cheerfully passing along to our clients, who are then flapping their peers because of it.)"
Uh-huh-huh-uh! They've been "flapping their peers".
A one-inch piece of wire or a dampened finger will "pick up" UHF, VHF, or Martian signals. It's all a matter of how well, not whether or not they do.
The "loop" is nominally designed-for and tuned to pick-up UHF signals. The "rabbit ears" is designed-for and tuned (by varying the length of the ears) to pick-up VHF signals. But either will "pick up" both bands with some degree of success. ("Both" bands is actually a misnomer, since the VHF broadcast TV allocations span multiple ranges with holes for other services, such as public safety, etc.)
Given that almost nobody bothers to tune rabbit-ears by adjusting their length, the non-adjustability of loop antennas, and the incredible width of the broadcast TV spectrum, most simple indoor antennas like this are essentially "random wire" antennas for most channels anyway.
I'd love to see the logo be an image of Fidel dressed-up as a penguin.
I'm pretty sure the guy has a sense of humor. When I was a kid, I was a "shortwave listener" (before I got my ham license) and sent of to Radio Havana (among others) for a "QSL" card, confirming that I had heard their station.
Besides the card, I got other periodic mailings, including a Christmxxxx New Year card one year, bearing the cartoon likeness of Fidel Castro, laid-out on the dining-room table as a pig, complete with an apple in his mouth. I kid you not. I'll bet he had a big laugh.
Wish I still had it - could probably sell it for a bundle on eBay!
(Other "interesting" material I received included a copy of the Little Red Book from Radio Peking, and a subscription to China Pictorial - a beautifully-printed bled-to-edge full color magazine with gorgeous pictures of fields and tractors...)
Wow, what a stupid idea. He is just adding to the problem.
Most spammers never look at return mail. The return address is usually bogus, or, worse, somebody ELSE's legitimate email address.
As a one-time victim I can attest to the potential damage of the approach this idiot is advocating. (My domain name was used in a prolific spammer's return address - the resulting deluge shut-down my ISP for a few hours. My domain at the time was live.net - the spammer was advertising a phone service with "live girls"...)
Spam return addresses are generally MEANINGLESS and by publishing them you are potentially harming an innocent third-party.
To clarify, each display board had a number of serial-in parallel-out TTL shift registers across the top of the board. The parallel outputs went to latches (or maybe the shift registers had latched outputs?) which went to the column drivers. I think there were about 800 LEDs total on the two boards, so quite a bit larger display than this kit! The addressing technique used by the kit would be impractical for this size of display.
It would bang out the bits, latch the outputs, turn on the row driver, and start banging out the next line.
It was BRIGHT and the power supply, even though switching, was hefty. Probably drew as much as a PC power supply.
I wrote the firmware for one of these thingies about 20 years ago. (I did it for a company that was in the electronic sign business - they made those flip-dot signs you see on buses, subways, etc.) I was lucky to have been given pretty-much complete flexibility in the firmware design, including functionality.
We used a Z-80 as the controller. The display panel was built on two identical circuit boards - they could be chained endlessly, though I don't think they ever made a wider model. It was a BIG DEAL getting the component-stuffing machine to place all those LEDs! (This wasn't surface mount, but through-holes.)
Each display panel had a shift-register - one bit per column, and just passed the bits down to the next panel. The CPU banged out bits to the shift register until the row was filled, and then enabled the row driver. Yes, we were careful to avoid refresh rates that could be a problem for epileptics.
They insisted on an asymmetrical case design - the case had a "base" that it could sit on on a desk or other surface, or it could be mounted from a ceiling. Only problem was, if it was mounted from a ceiling, it was then "upside down" and the characters had to be flipped. They were going to put a switch on the back, but I figured they would get support calls from people who wouldn't read the manual, so at my suggestion they put in a mercury switch, mounted at a 45 degree angle. The processor read the mercury switch and flipped the characters if needed.
We used an RCA flat-panel keyboard with a custom overlay. I designed icons for the various effects, and the icons were printed over letters and accessed during programming with the "ALT" key. The icons appeared on screen when in programming mode. There was a simple text-editor, and some icons accepted parameters (for example, transition effects all took an optional transition time parameter) I implemented a simple macro system [macro_name] so that text snippets could be stored and referenced from within messages. You could store multiple messages and select the one or ones to be displayed, or a timer could trigger them.
There was also a serial port through which it could be programmed. I think the idea was that it could be programmed remotely in, say, a store location. I don't know if this was ever implemented, but I vaguely recall that the idea was to send a subcarrier signal on a muzak station (that stores would already have access to) that would be decoded and passed to the serial port.
I never did install one of these in the back window of my car. I certainly entertained the thought, though.:)
I had one of the pre-production samples kicking around for years, and finally discarded it. Yea, I wish I still had that Schelbi Mark 8 too... (Mine was build on a wirewrap board - somebody was selling a kit with a wirewrap board and all the parts).
(Would be interesting to compare the designs. However, the site referenced by the article has been slashdotted...)
My first programming language was IBM 1620 machine code (not even assembly) in high school and I am forever grateful for it. Along with my electronics classes in high school, it left me understanding at least the basics of how things work under the hood, which I think many programmers never really grasp.
The 1620 instruction set is actually close to idea for this. It's decimal. Learning the "IDE" was easy - we punched instructions on punch cards, one instruction per card.
We quickly moved-on to Fortran II, but I think it's critical that we started with assembly.
Again, in college, they taught us Knuth's Mix assembly first, before moving on to PL/1.
Is this approach dead? I hope not.
I'd think kids would be fascinated with the concept of typing in what looks like random strings of numbers that can DO SOMETHING. Like a secret code. Kids are always fascinated with secret codes.
I think you can blame Bill Gates (or at least his Altair Basic team of Paul Allen and Monte Davidoff) for PEEK and POKE.
I believe it first saw the light of day in Altair BASIC (later Microsoft BASIC). Way back in the day when Bill Gates actually wrote code, and you got Altair BASIC on a paper teletype tape.
I have no proof, but it seems logical.
Altair BASIC (1975) predates the Commie and even Apple I. Prior to that, Basic ran only on shared minicomputers. PEEK and POKE would have been a Real Bad Idea, as it would have the potential to crash the entire system, which would make the other users unhappy.
Altair Basic, as the first BASIC written for a single-user microprocessor system, logically would have been the first one to contain the PEEK and POKE commands.
And, yes, I used the paper-tape version, and I recall that it had PEEK and POKE. The work I was doing was in factory automation, and we couldn't have done what we were doing (controlling odd and unique devices) without PEEK and POKE. I don't think there was any linkage to assembly language code from within BASIC at the time. We did all our device control in BASIC with PEEKs and POKEs.
Anyone know of a previous use of the terms?
Totally out of context, but I am sure seriously amusing to slashdotters, while refreshing my memory, I came across the Open Letter to Hobbyists on Wikipedia. In it, Gates chides computer hobbyists for stealing copies of Altair Basic. My favorite quote:
"Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software".http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
It had been a requirement imposed by international treaties until a few years ago. The FCC kept this archaic requirement for a few years longer. The U.S. military dropped Morse Code a few years ago as well.
I agree, though, about the crotchety old farts. I had an Advanced Class license when I was in high school and college, but let it drop. A few years ago I bought a scanner and a cheap digital SW receiver to see if I might want to re-license. Listening to the local VHF repeaters was a hoot, listening to the geezers (OK, I guess they are my age...) get twisted in a knot.
While I never was able to copy the 25WPM needed for the Extra license, I still copy in my head when watching WWII war movies. They can be pretty amusing. Yes, they are usually sending real Morse code, but it isn't always in context.:)
While tuning-around with my recent toys, I had a brief fascination with QPSK, a very narrow-band digital technique used on shortwave frequencies. Typically done by running the audio output of your receiver into a computer sound card and running a DSP application on your PC. The PC applications are able to copy several conversations from around the world at once out of the slice of spectrum pumped into the sound card. Kinda like IRC on (slow) steroids.
While disaster communications is not the be all and end-all for amateur radio (it's just one of the justifications for it's existence - experimentation is another - some of the first communication satellites were designed and constructed by hams and launched as "ballast" by the U.S. Air Force and then NASA. Amsat Oscar I was launched in 1961.) and it's not something I've ever been involved in, my hat is off to those who've helped out in the NW floods. Most of the time, these people wait around and train for disasters that never happen, and then have to deal with officials who keep them on a long leash. In this case, they really were needed, and thankfully the officials weren't obstructive, and the training and innovative spirit of these hams appears to have been put to good use, and has been truly helpful and perhaps life-saving.
My favorite quote from my mother: "What's all this about radio? Television is the thing now!" If not for ham radio, I'd probably not have wire-wrapped that 8008 computer, and would probably be another out-of-work real estate agent.
(Ex-WB8DBN - "Detroit's Bad Novice", from my WN8 days...)
I wonder how much the Amazon Kindle has to do with this? (The Kindle uses EVDO through Sprint to download books, and Amazon picks up the tab for the airtime.)
It seems to me like this is more oriented toward that type of specialized device, rather than simply a "bring your own phone" option.
I think Verizon may have realized that there is potentially a huge new market to be tapped, which could go to WiFi or other carriers if they don't provide the ability to use these type of devices on their network.
With this, legitimate AdWords will work, but ones that redirect through other questionable sites won't
Won't work. Almost ALL Adwords ads redirect through some tracking service. In some cases, an ad may redirect through SEVERAL tracking sites.
I'm sure Google would love it, though, it advertisers were forced to use THEIR tracking service...
Google does insure that the final destination page (which Google calls a "landing page") matches the domain name displayed in the "short URL" in the ad. (The ad doesn't have to display the full destination URL. The "display URL" typically is the merchant's home page or a section header page.) In my experience, though, they are somewhat lax on this, and new ads may run several days until Google catches a mismatch.
Google does some degree of exploit checking on landing pages. Dunno if they do this on intermediate tracking URLs. Google doesn't permit intermediate tracking URLs to display any content, and perhaps they thought that this made them safe.
Well, *I* only posted it once. I do see now that somebody else already posted about it, but in a comment that was primarily about URL display. Sorry, I hadn't noticed the previous comment at the time that I posted.
But I think the fact that advertiser accounts are being hacked as part of this attack is important enough to merit it's own comment thread, in any case.
Approximately concurrently with this, some Adwords advertisers have discovered that their accounts have been hijacked using a similar technique. Ads that they did not write were added.
Oddly, in at least one case the hijacker added their OWN credit card information to the account to pay for the ads! (Perhaps to try to avoid detection when the advertiser's credit card bill arrives.)
There are some first-person accounts by advertisers at WebmasterWorld:
Er, since when does Malibu have an international airport?
People seem to have gotten this case confused with an earlier one. David Carruthers, CEO of BetonSports PLC was, indeed arrested in July, 2006 while on layover in Dallas/Fort Worth.
Re:This shouldn't be your first Rails review, eith
on
Rails Recipes
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· Score: 1
Well, it *isn't* an appropriate first book on Rails. By the time you have an interest in or need for this book, you should know what those terms mean. Go through the exercise of building the "depot" application in the first few chapters of Agile Web Development With Rails, and this will all make perfect sense to you.
I bought this book at the same time that I bought Programming Ruby and Agile Web Development with Rails. I paged through Recipies, and it was all Greek to me. I set it aside, having seen enough, though, to realize that it would be very useful later.
Slashdot Mirror
BTW, here's the current published latency for NASDAQ's OUCH interface. 98uSec.
http://www.nasdaqtrader.com/trader.aspx?id=inet
I should point out that the times that I logged circa-2002 included a round-trip through our server. That is, they were measurements from the time our software decided to initiate a trade against ISLD to the time we received and processing a confirmation message indicating that we had bought the shares.
The NASDAQ figures quoted above are from the customer's network port, throgh NASDAQ's equipment, and back to the customer's network port. (I assume measured at the NASDAQ facility.) So, it's a significantly shorter path.
So what do we take from this?
- Linux can do ~100 uSec trades today.
- Linux and MS-DOS could do ~100 uSec trades several years ago.
- The additional latency of a customer-side trading system of Windows-2000/MFC several years ago was probably much less than 100 uSec, since the total round trip was in that range.
- .net might suck. Or maybe just un-talented programmers.
The fact that we aren't see 50uSec or 10uSec trades today is not surprising, given the exponential growth in volume...
I suspect that OUCH is still the undisputed king of low-latency execution.
Furthermore, NASDAQ's volume is very significantly greater than the LSE's, and OUCH-entered orders represent a significantly greater proportion of NASDAQ's total volume than LSE's "dark pool".
Hate to burst their bubble, but we were executing trades with ISLD in better time than this circa 2002 or so.
Pretty sure we saw some confirmations in the 80uSec range, and regularly in the 100 uSec range. Have to pull out the logs to be sure. We had a small high-frequency trading operation, which was probably one of the first. I got the idea to co-locate in the same building as ISLD at 50 Broad St. (We started out trading from St. Louis, LOL - moved to co-location at our broker 30 miles up the Hudson, and then into 50 Broad.) We initially co-located at their Internet provider at the time, located in the building, in order to get the closest Internet connection to receive quotes from ISLD via their ITCH interface. Later, we were able to obtain the use of a fibre in the elevator shaft and bypass the Internet part, and eventually were able to start entering our trades directly through OUCH, bypassing our broker's equipment, and sharing the same fibre connection (most firms had to use dedicated T1's at the time). (We leased T1s to some of the other ECNs, and got some data from our broker's system.) When ISLD moved to NJ, we moved our equipment to a co-location facility that they provided. (They never had an official one at 50 Broad.)
Not sure if ISLD had transitioned to Linux for the OUCH servers at that point, or were still using MS-DOS. Our own equipment used Windows 2000.
Josh Levine at ISLD was a fanatic about low latency. Most firms couldn't care less, so he was eager to work with anyone who showed an interest. We had a lot of discussions on how to decrease latencies, and he introduced me to TCP_NOWAIT, which disables the Nagle Algorithm in TCP stacks.
Other ECNs were resistant to change. I'm not sure if they knew just how far ahead of them ISLD was. At that time, based on our logs (we logged the timing of every trade with microsecond resolution) ISLD was the no-contest hands-down winner, with REDI a not-so-close second, followed by Instinet, and crap. ARCA was hampered in the extreme by their Chicago server location. Of these, REDI was the most willing to listen, and did cooperate in making changes to reduce latency. INCA and NASDAQ obviously eventually "got it", since they bought ISLD essentially for it's technology. There really wasn't much to the technology - it consisted of nothing more than an approach of insisting on knowing just where every microsecond goes, and eliminating unnecessary delays.
At least at my location, the Google images appear to be higher-res than the Bing images. For example, on Bing, I can't see ALL of the RG6 runs on the roof across the street - only where there are several bundled-together.
(Sorry, Slashdot won't post the Bing URL - it's "an awfully long string of characters"...)
BTW, I took a look at some of the military stuff in the area. At higher-res, the aircraft carriers mysteriously disappear. But that could just be because they weren't in port when the high-res images were taken.
I thought I saw an area mysteriously blanked-out with a croshatch pattern. But then I realized that what I was looking at was headstones at Ft. Rosecrans National Cemetary.
So, I'm pretty close to the airport, so I thought I'd take a look over there. Something tells me they had to get SOME kind of special permission for this:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=2414+Front+Street,+San+Diego,+CA&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=36.726391,79.013672&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=2414+Front+St,+San+Diego,+California+92101&t=h&ll=32.733691,-117.182491&spn=0.000424,0.000603&z=21
I'll leave nearby military installations and bunkers as an exercise for the reader...
I kid you not, I can see the RG6 on the roof of the building across the street! (San Diego)
I took a look at my own building first to see if there were new, higher-resolution images. Sure enough, I could see the plastic conduit on our roof that carries the Cox cables to each stack. I think it's about a 4" conduit.
Just for yucks, I pan over to the building across the street, and I can see the bare RG6 laid on the roof.
Voila! I now have the photographs to accompany my presentation to the HOA about how stupid it is that our cable is laid-out orthogonally, as opposed to the sensible, star layout across the street. (It's so stupidly laid-out that it accounts for the 8db difference between my living-room drop and bedroom drop.)
See link below. (What the heck, privacy is dead, right?) This isn't even at maximum zoom, you can zoom in further yourself. I left it at this zoom level so you can see both buildings at the same time.
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=2414+Front+Street,+San+Diego,+CA&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=36.726391,79.013672&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=2414+Front+St,+San+Diego,+California+92101&ll=32.730802,-117.165676&spn=0.000842,0.001206&t=h&z=20
I recently sponsored my first two 99Designs contests, and it was (for the most part) a throughly pleasant experience. I paid $250 (plus fees) for a great logo. My local designer would have charged me $750. Oh, his absurd logo price schedule: $400 for non-profits, $750 for normal companies, and $1500 for big fish. Yea, you read me right. Nothing to do with effort. Based on ability to pay - charge what the traffic will bear. Is that a better system than 99design?
(The one negative was excessive nannying by 99Design staff and the "sour grapes" reaction by some contestants when I permitted a design to make use of a tracing of a photograph. The designer disclosed that to me, I gave him permission, and it turned out to be the winning design. Unfortunately, 99Design suspended the contestant for 7 days. Thank you very much, but let ME manage my legal risk. But they did pay him the prize money. Now, had somebody pointed-out the tracing before the contest was over, or at least before the winner was chosen, it would have been USEFUL to me. Instead, they waited till it was all over - and so it was just obstructive. In fact, I will probably have the traced part of the logo re-done, using the original tracing only as inspiration. I love the DESIGN CONCEPT and it is a starting point. I would have never come up with that logo design myself, and the tracing is just one element that can certainly be re-drawn from scratch. Contestants and 99Design staff DO NOT KNOW whether the logo will be used commercially as-is, and shouldn't make assumptions.)
Yes, there are poor-quality Chinese and Indian (gotta pick on SOMEBODY) entries. And they were obviously low-quality I eliminated them early on. I never eliminated a DESIGNER (something you CAN do), and in fact one of designers of the early low-quality entries listened to feedback well enough to ultimately come very close to winning. BTW, the Chinese designers tend to have horrible typefaces, so they get eliminated on that if you have any taste at all. Yes, some of the designers have poor or no English skills, so that feedback is nearly impossible. But they still see other's designs and your "star ratings" of designs (unless you run a "blind" contest) and so they still can see the direction you are going. Myself, I prefer to work with the designers that have excellent English skills making feedback effective. There's no lack of designers with excellent English skills.
It's important to provide feedback. I gave plenty, and the designers appreciated it.
Sometimes you get a great result through feedback and iteration. Sometimes a great design just drops out of the sky. The winner of my logo contest worked his ass of making change after change at my request. My second choice just swooped-in with a beautiful, simple design that required just a single iteration - to change the colors in the company name. I told him "don't change a thing - it is perfect". (The second choice was really a much better logo - it just wasn't the image I wanted to project. Great for a Fortune-500 bank or investment house. Not playful enough for an iPhone software development company.) The second-choice probably didn't take the designer much time. Three simple shapes that overlap to form the logo. I think he just got an inspiration that took him a half-hour to draw. Both approaches are valid, and 99Designs allows you to choose.
In fairness to contestants, once I had leading choices, I stopped making requests of other contestants. No need to run the ragged for nothing. I imagine most contest holders (or at least experienced ones) are pretty fair to contestants this way.
Next time, I will try running a "preliminary design" contest, and a second one (or contract with the winner) for a finished design. Tell the contestants right-off, I'm not looking for a finished design, but design concepts. I think it's useful to be a bit creative with the process. This is the way it often works with a single designer, anyway. You get rough sketches, color palettes, etc. first, then final artwork later. 99De
Actually, this has already been done, on a limited basis. Not sure what is available at present, but some ECNs have offered the option of such an auction as you describe. It's really just the same as the typical "opening auction", but then repeat it at some interval, more typically a few minutes (like 15).
But this has only been done as an available option to traders, and then on a single ECN.
By eliminating ECNs (e.g. only a single, central market) and allowing only this type of trade, the system could then be "fair".
Too bad this wasn't hosted at one of world's 10 biggest data centers. If it had been, the site might have survived the Slashdot effect.
You need an engineer at this point, not a PCB design.
If you can memorize this, you'll be the life of any cocktail party:
"We're seeing them from AS 48438, coming across to us as an Optional Transitive Attribute which our force-10s are not parsing (but cheerfully passing along to our clients, who are then flapping their peers because of it.)"
Uh-huh-huh-uh! They've been "flapping their peers".
A one-inch piece of wire or a dampened finger will "pick up" UHF, VHF, or Martian signals. It's all a matter of how well, not whether or not they do.
The "loop" is nominally designed-for and tuned to pick-up UHF signals. The "rabbit ears" is designed-for and tuned (by varying the length of the ears) to pick-up VHF signals. But either will "pick up" both bands with some degree of success. ("Both" bands is actually a misnomer, since the VHF broadcast TV allocations span multiple ranges with holes for other services, such as public safety, etc.)
Given that almost nobody bothers to tune rabbit-ears by adjusting their length, the non-adjustability of loop antennas, and the incredible width of the broadcast TV spectrum, most simple indoor antennas like this are essentially "random wire" antennas for most channels anyway.
I'd love to see the logo be an image of Fidel dressed-up as a penguin.
I'm pretty sure the guy has a sense of humor. When I was a kid, I was a "shortwave listener" (before I got my ham license) and sent of to Radio Havana (among others) for a "QSL" card, confirming that I had heard their station.
Besides the card, I got other periodic mailings, including a Christmxxxx New Year card one year, bearing the cartoon likeness of Fidel Castro, laid-out on the dining-room table as a pig, complete with an apple in his mouth. I kid you not. I'll bet he had a big laugh.
Wish I still had it - could probably sell it for a bundle on eBay!
(Other "interesting" material I received included a copy of the Little Red Book from Radio Peking, and a subscription to China Pictorial - a beautifully-printed bled-to-edge full color magazine with gorgeous pictures of fields and tractors...)
Wow, what a stupid idea. He is just adding to the problem.
Most spammers never look at return mail. The return address is usually bogus, or, worse, somebody ELSE's legitimate email address.
As a one-time victim I can attest to the potential damage of the approach this idiot is advocating. (My domain name was used in a prolific spammer's return address - the resulting deluge shut-down my ISP for a few hours. My domain at the time was live.net - the spammer was advertising a phone service with "live girls"...)
Spam return addresses are generally MEANINGLESS and by publishing them you are potentially harming an innocent third-party.
...The Day the Google Died.
To clarify, each display board had a number of serial-in parallel-out TTL shift registers across the top of the board. The parallel outputs went to latches (or maybe the shift registers had latched outputs?) which went to the column drivers. I think there were about 800 LEDs total on the two boards, so quite a bit larger display than this kit! The addressing technique used by the kit would be impractical for this size of display.
It would bang out the bits, latch the outputs, turn on the row driver, and start banging out the next line.
It was BRIGHT and the power supply, even though switching, was hefty. Probably drew as much as a PC power supply.
I wrote the firmware for one of these thingies about 20 years ago. (I did it for a company that was in the electronic sign business - they made those flip-dot signs you see on buses, subways, etc.) I was lucky to have been given pretty-much complete flexibility in the firmware design, including functionality.
We used a Z-80 as the controller. The display panel was built on two identical circuit boards - they could be chained endlessly, though I don't think they ever made a wider model. It was a BIG DEAL getting the component-stuffing machine to place all those LEDs! (This wasn't surface mount, but through-holes.)
Each display panel had a shift-register - one bit per column, and just passed the bits down to the next panel. The CPU banged out bits to the shift register until the row was filled, and then enabled the row driver. Yes, we were careful to avoid refresh rates that could be a problem for epileptics.
They insisted on an asymmetrical case design - the case had a "base" that it could sit on on a desk or other surface, or it could be mounted from a ceiling. Only problem was, if it was mounted from a ceiling, it was then "upside down" and the characters had to be flipped. They were going to put a switch on the back, but I figured they would get support calls from people who wouldn't read the manual, so at my suggestion they put in a mercury switch, mounted at a 45 degree angle. The processor read the mercury switch and flipped the characters if needed.
We used an RCA flat-panel keyboard with a custom overlay. I designed icons for the various effects, and the icons were printed over letters and accessed during programming with the "ALT" key. The icons appeared on screen when in programming mode. There was a simple text-editor, and some icons accepted parameters (for example, transition effects all took an optional transition time parameter) I implemented a simple macro system [macro_name] so that text snippets could be stored and referenced from within messages. You could store multiple messages and select the one or ones to be displayed, or a timer could trigger them.
There was also a serial port through which it could be programmed. I think the idea was that it could be programmed remotely in, say, a store location. I don't know if this was ever implemented, but I vaguely recall that the idea was to send a subcarrier signal on a muzak station (that stores would already have access to) that would be decoded and passed to the serial port.
I never did install one of these in the back window of my car. I certainly entertained the thought, though. :)
I had one of the pre-production samples kicking around for years, and finally discarded it. Yea, I wish I still had that Schelbi Mark 8 too... (Mine was build on a wirewrap board - somebody was selling a kit with a wirewrap board and all the parts).
(Would be interesting to compare the designs. However, the site referenced by the article has been slashdotted...)
My first programming language was IBM 1620 machine code (not even assembly) in high school and I am forever grateful for it. Along with my electronics classes in high school, it left me understanding at least the basics of how things work under the hood, which I think many programmers never really grasp.
The 1620 instruction set is actually close to idea for this. It's decimal. Learning the "IDE" was easy - we punched instructions on punch cards, one instruction per card.
We quickly moved-on to Fortran II, but I think it's critical that we started with assembly.
Again, in college, they taught us Knuth's Mix assembly first, before moving on to PL/1.
Is this approach dead? I hope not.
I'd think kids would be fascinated with the concept of typing in what looks like random strings of numbers that can DO SOMETHING. Like a secret code. Kids are always fascinated with secret codes.
I believe it first saw the light of day in Altair BASIC (later Microsoft BASIC). Way back in the day when Bill Gates actually wrote code, and you got Altair BASIC on a paper teletype tape.
I have no proof, but it seems logical.
Altair BASIC (1975) predates the Commie and even Apple I. Prior to that, Basic ran only on shared minicomputers. PEEK and POKE would have been a Real Bad Idea, as it would have the potential to crash the entire system, which would make the other users unhappy.
Altair Basic, as the first BASIC written for a single-user microprocessor system, logically would have been the first one to contain the PEEK and POKE commands.
And, yes, I used the paper-tape version, and I recall that it had PEEK and POKE. The work I was doing was in factory automation, and we couldn't have done what we were doing (controlling odd and unique devices) without PEEK and POKE. I don't think there was any linkage to assembly language code from within BASIC at the time. We did all our device control in BASIC with PEEKs and POKEs.
Anyone know of a previous use of the terms?
Totally out of context, but I am sure seriously amusing to slashdotters, while refreshing my memory, I came across the Open Letter to Hobbyists on Wikipedia. In it, Gates chides computer hobbyists for stealing copies of Altair Basic. My favorite quote: "Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
The Morse Code requirement was dropped for all classes of amateur radio license in the U.S. in February of this year:
:)
http://www.arrl.org/news/stories/2007/01/24/100/?nc=1
It had been a requirement imposed by international treaties until a few years ago. The FCC kept this archaic requirement for a few years longer. The U.S. military dropped Morse Code a few years ago as well.
I agree, though, about the crotchety old farts. I had an Advanced Class license when I was in high school and college, but let it drop. A few years ago I bought a scanner and a cheap digital SW receiver to see if I might want to re-license. Listening to the local VHF repeaters was a hoot, listening to the geezers (OK, I guess they are my age...) get twisted in a knot.
While I never was able to copy the 25WPM needed for the Extra license, I still copy in my head when watching WWII war movies. They can be pretty amusing. Yes, they are usually sending real Morse code, but it isn't always in context.
While tuning-around with my recent toys, I had a brief fascination with QPSK, a very narrow-band digital technique used on shortwave frequencies. Typically done by running the audio output of your receiver into a computer sound card and running a DSP application on your PC. The PC applications are able to copy several conversations from around the world at once out of the slice of spectrum pumped into the sound card. Kinda like IRC on (slow) steroids.
While disaster communications is not the be all and end-all for amateur radio (it's just one of the justifications for it's existence - experimentation is another - some of the first communication satellites were designed and constructed by hams and launched as "ballast" by the U.S. Air Force and then NASA. Amsat Oscar I was launched in 1961.) and it's not something I've ever been involved in, my hat is off to those who've helped out in the NW floods. Most of the time, these people wait around and train for disasters that never happen, and then have to deal with officials who keep them on a long leash. In this case, they really were needed, and thankfully the officials weren't obstructive, and the training and innovative spirit of these hams appears to have been put to good use, and has been truly helpful and perhaps life-saving.
My favorite quote from my mother: "What's all this about radio? Television is the thing now!" If not for ham radio, I'd probably not have wire-wrapped that 8008 computer, and would probably be another out-of-work real estate agent.
(Ex-WB8DBN - "Detroit's Bad Novice", from my WN8 days...)
I wonder how much the Amazon Kindle has to do with this? (The Kindle uses EVDO through Sprint to download books, and Amazon picks up the tab for the airtime.)
It seems to me like this is more oriented toward that type of specialized device, rather than simply a "bring your own phone" option.
I think Verizon may have realized that there is potentially a huge new market to be tapped, which could go to WiFi or other carriers if they don't provide the ability to use these type of devices on their network.
Won't work. Almost ALL Adwords ads redirect through some tracking service. In some cases, an ad may redirect through SEVERAL tracking sites.
I'm sure Google would love it, though, it advertisers were forced to use THEIR tracking service...
Google does insure that the final destination page (which Google calls a "landing page") matches the domain name displayed in the "short URL" in the ad. (The ad doesn't have to display the full destination URL. The "display URL" typically is the merchant's home page or a section header page.) In my experience, though, they are somewhat lax on this, and new ads may run several days until Google catches a mismatch.
Google does some degree of exploit checking on landing pages. Dunno if they do this on intermediate tracking URLs. Google doesn't permit intermediate tracking URLs to display any content, and perhaps they thought that this made them safe.
Well, *I* only posted it once. I do see now that somebody else already posted about it, but in a comment that was primarily about URL display. Sorry, I hadn't noticed the previous comment at the time that I posted.
But I think the fact that advertiser accounts are being hacked as part of this attack is important enough to merit it's own comment thread, in any case.
Approximately concurrently with this, some Adwords advertisers have discovered that their accounts have been hijacked using a similar technique. Ads that they did not write were added.
0 21.htm#msg3321934
Oddly, in at least one case the hijacker added their OWN credit card information to the account to pay for the ads! (Perhaps to try to avoid detection when the advertiser's credit card bill arrives.)
There are some first-person accounts by advertisers at WebmasterWorld:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adwords/3320
Er, since when does Malibu have an international airport?
r y07/Neteller%20Arrests%20PR.pdf
e r-founder-john-lefebvre-granted-bail-20070117.html
People seem to have gotten this case confused with an earlier one. David Carruthers, CEO of BetonSports PLC was, indeed arrested in July, 2006 while on layover in Dallas/Fort Worth.
John Lefebvre was arrested in Malibu, however.
The official DOJ press release:
http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/nys/pressreleases/Janua
Article citing the earlier arrest of David Caruthers while in transit:
http://www.point-spreads.com/news/industry/netell
Well, it *isn't* an appropriate first book on Rails. By the time you have an interest in or need for this book, you should know what those terms mean. Go through the exercise of building the "depot" application in the first few chapters of Agile Web Development With Rails, and this will all make perfect sense to you.
I bought this book at the same time that I bought Programming Ruby and Agile Web Development with Rails. I paged through Recipies, and it was all Greek to me. I set it aside, having seen enough, though, to realize that it would be very useful later.
Maybe you should do the same with this review.