I used to work at a company that made network-attached storage appliances. Amazingly enough, one source of drive failures was the hot spare spinning up! The current draw during the spinup would cause a voltage dip on the power plane, which could lead to a read or write error on one of the neighbouring drives. Unfortunately, the most common cause of the hot spare spinning up was...another drive failing. So suddenly a second drive fails because of a read or write error.
The thing is, sometimes getting a read error doesn't actually mean the media is bad. There could have been some power fluctuation during the write, so the checksum doesn't match the data and the drive's controller returns a failure during the read. But if you rewrite that sector, it will be fixed (e.g. during an unconditional format).
Organization: CASHBACKALLIANCE (cashbackalliance.com) Position Description:
We are an ICANN accredited domain registrar. We require programmers to help develop software to strip all WhoIs servers through proxy ports over the Internet.
Skills Required:
-C++
-UNIX Proficiency.
-Experience with scripting languages (Perl, CGI, etc).
-Strong data parsing skills.
Prior experience in the domain name industry would be beneficial.
(Their website seemed to indicate that they were running some kind of pyramid scheme-type operation.)
as a result companies now can start building iSCSI products
Hardly. Any company seriously considering shipping a product that supports iSCSI has already been working on it for the past year and a half. I worked on a development team making an iSCSI target and initiator for Linux, and we had to suffer through major, non-backwards compatible draft releases as we tried to make iSCSI work. I guess that's why they have that disclaimer on them saying you're not supposed to use them for anything serious...
Anyway, I don't work there anymore, but I'd imaging there would only be small changes required for them to ship a fully standards-compliant iSCSI product.
Have you heard of Raidzone (http://www.raidzone.com/)? They have 2U or 4U rackmountable systems, and cubes, with capacities ranging from a couple hundred GB to a few TB. It runs a variant of RedHat linux. Features redundant boot partitions, NFS/SMB/Appletalk, hotswapple drives, temp/voltage monitoring, journaling filesystems, Gigabit ethernet, GUI-based remote administration, snapshotting, and more, at very competitive prices...check it out!
[disclaimer: I work for this company]
Re:Free ideas and free code development for Google
on
Google Programming Contest
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
For once, I just might agree with a binary only submission. That way if Google is truly interested they can license the code from the developer or have some sort of other agreement / arrangement.
It isn't like Google is offering up their source to the rest of the world, so I don't see why it is unreasonable to only offer up a binary to them.
Well, they *have* been running the best search engine on the web FOR FREE for the past 3 years. They don't clutter their main page with flashing X10 ads, or the the irritating news+sports+weather+financialnews+email combo that everybody seems to think people want. This might not be a bad way to give something back to the company that's saved us so much time and effort finding information.
And to the guys out there who wouldn't bother with this contest for less than $100K: if your idea is so good, go develop it yourself! Get a lawyer, and work out a deal with Google that suits you better.
I doubt it'll be long before there's a work-around.
Don't count on it.
We've had multiplier-locked CPUs for almost 4 years. Millions of people overclock, but nobody has discovered a way to increase the multiplier (only the FSB).
I wonder what they meant by unique profiles. I clean out my cookies every week or so. Does this mean I get to be unique hundreds of times? I'm sure the actual number of people they're tracking is much lower, especially when you prune people who appear not to have looked at a webpage in the last 6 months. It would require an enormous amount of work to get any value at all out of a database like that.
A lot of people don't seem to realize that a small annoyance for them (ads) might be the lifeblood of a struggling internet website. Often, a webmaster will put hundreds of hours into a site and pay hundreds of dollars in hosting and bandwidth charges. It is too much to ask for him/her to recoup a small amount of that by putting up banner ads?
Apparently, it is. People would rather see their favourite sites go away than put up with a little popup that they can just close. In effect, you're pirating your viewing of the site. Many people rationalize downloading warez by saying that the big companies are making too much money anyway (and they may be right), but by blocking popups, you're hurting the bottom line of people just like us.
When you watch TV, you put up with the ads. Or, you subscribe to some premium channels that don't have ads. Or you just don't watch TV. Same with printed magazines. Why screw over webmasters?
Thanks to Davin and Eugene at StorageReview.com for making me aware of this issue.
---
Computer engineering is like electrical engineering with a specialization in computers. Often, the first two years will be common to both programs, and there are sill some courses they take together after that. Generally, you have a choice to specialize in software, hardware (chip design), or communcations (networks and signal processing).
In terms of pure programming, I'd say that CE and CS get about the same amount of training. CS's get more theory (e.g. theory of algorithms, theory of computation) than CE's do. They also get more ELECTIVES, if that's important to you.
If you're planning to do regular Windows programming, it probably won't matter much which you pick. But if you want to do anything related to Operating Systems, Networking, Compiler Design, etc., then CE is definately the way to go. CS's don't learn much about registers, busses, assembly language, or signal processing, all of which is extremely important if you want to do anything low-level.
There's also the issue of what degree you get when you graduate. If you are an Engineer, you are a "Professional", which means that a few years after you graduate, you can apply to get your P.Eng, which puts you into the ranks of the doctors and the lawyers (i.e. you can sign passports, among other things). As a CS, you're just an arts/math major.
That's my perspective, as a computer engineer at the University of Toronto. Things might be different in the US (e.g. at Princeton, CS is part of the engineering department).
This isn't entirely accurate. God of Cookery is a parody of an earlier movie, God of Gambling. In fact, it's a parody of a whole bunch of movies (most of which I haven't seen). The cooking styles are parodies of classical martial arts moves. The translation was pretty clever at times. They managed to adapt some puns in Chinese to puns in English.
Iron Chef is based on the cooking show in God of Cookery, so this new movie would be a spinoff of a spinoff of a spinoff.
There seem to be quite a few similarities between the MP3s and mixtapes.
A bit of background: back in the '80s, hiphop was getting almost no commercial airplay. So there was no way for an artist to become known. An aspiring musician would get caught in a catch-22, where he wouldn't get invited to play at a club because he was unknown, and he couldn't get known without performing in clubs.
So what ended up happening was this artist would give a couple of tracks to a DJ who spun at a club. It would help the DJ, because he would be getting cool music to play, furthering his own reputation, and it would also help the artist by getting him more recognition.
Many DJs also made mixtapes on the side, to supplement their income. An unknown artist would have relatively little problem with being put on a tape, because it would get his material out to a wider audience, but DJs tended to put better-known artists on tapes as well, in order to have some big names on the tape so that people would recognize the artists on it and therefore buy it. The mixtape industry was, and to a lesser degree, continues to be, the method of choice for distributing new music to the core listening audience in a particular city, although nowadays, hiphop gets a lot more mainstream radio airplay than it used to.
Thus, an entire industry was built on mixtapes. The electronic music scene (house, drum&bass, breaks, etc.) evolved in a similar way, where the original artist would not be paid for the music. There is still a booming industry of largely illegal mixtapes. Sometimes the cops crack down on them, but mostly, the artists leave it alone, in recognition that they would not be where they are today if it were not for mixtapes.
MP3s can work in a similar way, as others have commented. A hard core MP3 collector will get all kinds of music, often experimenting with material he might not know yet, and he will show his technically-challenged friends particularly interesting tracks. The only difference here is that the middleman, the DJ, is cut out of the loop. Dre is just a moneygrubbing bastard who, unlike other artists (Chuck D. comes to mind), cannot see far enough past his fat belly to recognize the potential of this new medium.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to work at a company that made network-attached storage appliances. Amazingly enough, one source of drive failures was the hot spare spinning up! The current draw during the spinup would cause a voltage dip on the power plane, which could lead to a read or write error on one of the neighbouring drives. Unfortunately, the most common cause of the hot spare spinning up was...another drive failing. So suddenly a second drive fails because of a read or write error.
The thing is, sometimes getting a read error doesn't actually mean the media is bad. There could have been some power fluctuation during the write, so the checksum doesn't match the data and the drive's controller returns a failure during the read. But if you rewrite that sector, it will be fixed (e.g. during an unconditional format).
Organization: CASHBACKALLIANCE (cashbackalliance.com)
Position Description:
We are an ICANN accredited domain registrar. We require programmers to help develop software to strip all WhoIs servers through proxy ports over the Internet.
Skills Required:
-C++
-UNIX Proficiency.
-Experience with scripting languages (Perl, CGI, etc).
-Strong data parsing skills.
Prior experience in the domain name industry would be beneficial.
(Their website seemed to indicate that they were running some kind of pyramid scheme-type operation.)
He was probably quoting the price in Aussie dollars or New Zealand dollars, which are worth about half as much as USDs (today, anyway).
Hardly. Any company seriously considering shipping a product that supports iSCSI has already been working on it for the past year and a half. I worked on a development team making an iSCSI target and initiator for Linux, and we had to suffer through major, non-backwards compatible draft releases as we tried to make iSCSI work. I guess that's why they have that disclaimer on them saying you're not supposed to use them for anything serious...
Anyway, I don't work there anymore, but I'd imaging there would only be small changes required for them to ship a fully standards-compliant iSCSI product.
He was probably referring to offers he's seen in *SPAM*, not jealosy at other actors' success.
Have you heard of Raidzone (http://www.raidzone.com/)? They have 2U or 4U rackmountable systems, and cubes, with capacities ranging from a couple hundred GB to a few TB. It runs a variant of RedHat linux. Features redundant boot partitions, NFS/SMB/Appletalk, hotswapple drives, temp/voltage monitoring, journaling filesystems, Gigabit ethernet, GUI-based remote administration, snapshotting, and more, at very competitive prices...check it out!
[disclaimer: I work for this company]
For once, I just might agree with a binary only submission. That way if Google is truly interested they can license the code from the developer or have some sort of other agreement / arrangement.
It isn't like Google is offering up their source to the rest of the world, so I don't see why it is unreasonable to only offer up a binary to them.
Well, they *have* been running the best search engine on the web FOR FREE for the past 3 years. They don't clutter their main page with flashing X10 ads, or the the irritating news+sports+weather+financialnews+email combo that everybody seems to think people want. This might not be a bad way to give something back to the company that's saved us so much time and effort finding information.
And to the guys out there who wouldn't bother with this contest for less than $100K: if your idea is so good, go develop it yourself! Get a lawyer, and work out a deal with Google that suits you better.
Don't count on it.
We've had multiplier-locked CPUs for almost 4 years. Millions of people overclock, but nobody has discovered a way to increase the multiplier (only the FSB).
I wonder what they meant by unique profiles. I clean out my cookies every week or so. Does this mean I get to be unique hundreds of times? I'm sure the actual number of people they're tracking is much lower, especially when you prune people who appear not to have looked at a webpage in the last 6 months. It would require an enormous amount of work to get any value at all out of a database like that.
Crunch those numbers, boys!
Apparently, it is. People would rather see their favourite sites go away than put up with a little popup that they can just close. In effect, you're pirating your viewing of the site. Many people rationalize downloading warez by saying that the big companies are making too much money anyway (and they may be right), but by blocking popups, you're hurting the bottom line of people just like us.
When you watch TV, you put up with the ads. Or, you subscribe to some premium channels that don't have ads. Or you just don't watch TV. Same with printed magazines. Why screw over webmasters?
Thanks to Davin and Eugene at StorageReview.com for making me aware of this issue.
---
In terms of pure programming, I'd say that CE and CS get about the same amount of training. CS's get more theory (e.g. theory of algorithms, theory of computation) than CE's do. They also get more ELECTIVES, if that's important to you.
If you're planning to do regular Windows programming, it probably won't matter much which you pick. But if you want to do anything related to Operating Systems, Networking, Compiler Design, etc., then CE is definately the way to go. CS's don't learn much about registers, busses, assembly language, or signal processing, all of which is extremely important if you want to do anything low-level.
There's also the issue of what degree you get when you graduate. If you are an Engineer, you are a "Professional", which means that a few years after you graduate, you can apply to get your P.Eng, which puts you into the ranks of the doctors and the lawyers (i.e. you can sign passports, among other things). As a CS, you're just an arts/math major.
That's my perspective, as a computer engineer at the University of Toronto. Things might be different in the US (e.g. at Princeton, CS is part of the engineering department).
This isn't entirely accurate. God of Cookery is a parody of an earlier movie, God of Gambling. In fact, it's a parody of a whole bunch of movies (most of which I haven't seen). The cooking styles are parodies of classical martial arts moves. The translation was pretty clever at times. They managed to adapt some puns in Chinese to puns in English.
Iron Chef is based on the cooking show in God of Cookery, so this new movie would be a spinoff of a spinoff of a spinoff.
There seem to be quite a few similarities between the MP3s and mixtapes.
A bit of background: back in the '80s, hiphop was getting almost no commercial airplay. So there was no way for an artist to become known. An aspiring musician would get caught in a catch-22, where he wouldn't get invited to play at a club because he was unknown, and he couldn't get known without performing in clubs.
So what ended up happening was this artist would give a couple of tracks to a DJ who spun at a club. It would help the DJ, because he would be getting cool music to play, furthering his own reputation, and it would also help the artist by getting him more recognition.
Many DJs also made mixtapes on the side, to supplement their income. An unknown artist would have relatively little problem with being put on a tape, because it would get his material out to a wider audience, but DJs tended to put better-known artists on tapes as well, in order to have some big names on the tape so that people would recognize the artists on it and therefore buy it. The mixtape industry was, and to a lesser degree, continues to be, the method of choice for distributing new music to the core listening audience in a particular city, although nowadays, hiphop gets a lot more mainstream radio airplay than it used to.
Thus, an entire industry was built on mixtapes. The electronic music scene (house, drum&bass, breaks, etc.) evolved in a similar way, where the original artist would not be paid for the music.
There is still a booming industry of largely illegal mixtapes. Sometimes the cops crack down on them, but mostly, the artists leave it alone, in recognition that they would not be where they are today if it were not for mixtapes.
MP3s can work in a similar way, as others have commented. A hard core MP3 collector will get all kinds of music, often experimenting with material he might not know yet, and he will show his technically-challenged friends particularly interesting tracks. The only difference here is that the middleman, the DJ, is cut out of the loop. Dre is just a moneygrubbing bastard who, unlike other artists (Chuck D. comes to mind), cannot see far enough past his fat belly to recognize the potential of this new medium.