"Is anyone out there successfully juggling running a company and studying at the same time? How do you juggle the two without hampering either due to lack of the right amount of attention?"
It's tough. To be honest, when you decided to drop out the first time, you made a mistake. There's a reason people tend to go to school FIRST and only start working AFTER...
I hope you won't end up in school for a decade, like most of my friends who are on that same path right now... My only advice is to sacrifice work for school if you have to (yes, you read that right). You will always have more job opportunities, but if you keep putting off school, you'll simply never reach the goal (i.e., the degree). Besides, having the degree opens up new opportunities for you.
Re:Is it that hard to supply a BIOS setup manual?
on
Secrets Of BIOS Tweaking
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I don't know how often i pressed F1 in vain just to see the message: "Help: Enable A-20 Gate. PG UP=on PG DN=off"
In case you are still mystified about A-20, it is an ancient holdover from when machines didn't have a high memory area. In 16 bit arithmetic, incrementing 65535 produces 0, and many programs took "advantage" of this fact. However on newer systems there was an extra address line, and if it was enabled this address "rollover" didn't happen correctly. Result: legacy programs crashing.
A-20 is automatically enabled by all 32-bit operating systems anyway. The option in the BIOS is there to control HOW that enabling happens. Modern chipsets can enable A-20 directly. Historically, however, A-20 was logically AND-ed with a pin on the keyboard controller, so in order to enable A-20 you had to reprogram the keyboard controller.
I love PCs, they are the only hardware I've encountered where you have to program the keyboard chip in order to enable high memory access.:)
This wasn't a gathering of online "characters," it was a gathering of players. A character is a fictional creation designed to have certain traits and idiosyncracies. Consider the difference between the characters in a novel and the actual human being who wrote it.
Saying that this was an online gathering of "characters," mere ones and zeros, is completely incomprehensible. If it had been videoconference or teleconference instead, would you have said the same thing? At what point does it become "real enough" for you people? What is so special about physical nearness? Why does it become less meaningful if it just so happens that the big bunch of atoms I call "my body" is far away from that big bunch of atoms you call "your body?"
Do I suddenly become nothing more than an electrical wave if I speak over the telephone? No, I don't. Don't reduce these people to "characters" simply because they met over the Internet.
Whoops, I was thinking one-dimensionally:) If we want to be mathematical about it, a doubling of areal density within a differential area element of the platter surface implies a sqrt(2) increase in linear density across a differential length element. sqrt(2) = 1.414 ~ 41% increase in linear density.
Ah, this takes me back to my days of calculus and physics..:)
How did you arrive at the 42% value? Similar method?
An increase in data density automatically implies an increase in transfer rate, because more bits are packed into each square centimeter. An 80GB platter turning at 7200 RPM can be read twice as fast as a 40 GB platter also turning at 7200 RPM, precisely because twice as many bits turn underneath the head in the same amount of time.
Not only do you get double the storage space, you also get double the transfer rate (all other things being equal of course).
Or, if you really want a "silent" drive, then turn the drive speed down to 3600 RPM, and get the same old transfer rate but without the 7200 RPM hum. But why you would care whether the drive was silent in a SERVER is totally beyond me.
Can someone more versed in optics explain to me why you can't just use FTIR (picking up the evanescent wave) to tap into a fiber without actually splicing it? It seems like it should be possible, and you wouldn't have to damage the fiber except for removing the cladding...
Most people have the hardest time with symbolic logic and languages. Where I went to school, the department used the compilers course as a filter to remove about 30% of the prospective CS students each year.
Just press on, stick it out. Once you get to the upper division stuff you'll see that it was all worth it.
Sure, it boils down to whether or not I can trust you. But how do I know that your signature is *your* signature?
By consulting with a mutually trusted third party, of course. A similar concept as that of a notary public. (I said similar, not identical).
Trust centers such as Verisign make it a little simpler to verify identity: I don't have to personally check you out myself -- I accept Verisign's "voucher" that you are who you say you are, and therefore I offload my research responsibilities onto Verisign.
This is not a perfect system for many reasons. But you can't HAVE a perfect secure system. I think this system is about the best we have for now.
Why can't glibc help make the world a better place by dropping dangerous functions, such as gets()
Because that's ANSI/POSIX standard.
sprintf()
Because that's ANSI/ISO/C99 standard.
strcpy()
Because that's POSIX/ISO standard.
strcat()
Because that's POSIX/ISO standard.
Are you done ripping on GNU now?
You miss the point(er)
on
Think Python
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· Score: 4, Insightful
While Python is my favourite language, I think it's rather silly to teach Computer Science and especially basic algorithmics with a language that doesn't have pointers.
You have failed to understand the point of Computer Science (pun intended). Python is a terrific language for teaching CS because it has the basics of discrete structures: lists, maps (in Python, called dictionaries), tuples, and atomic data types such as strings, ints, and reals. That's all you need.
There's really nothing you can't do once you have lists and maps. Don't object that you can't have O(1) access-time arrays -- you can do that with a map.
I challenge you to describe any algorithm at all that can't be implemented without pointers. If you think you need pointers, you just aren't thinking like a computer scientist.
For some classes, such as AI, there's simply no winner for Prolog, and perhaps Lisp
In general, you are absolutely correct. Of course, this is opinionated and others may disagree. But remember, you can use any Turing-complete language to simulate any other Turing-complete language (that's the entire definition of Turing-complete). Which means I can write a C interpretter in Prolog if I want (and I'm feeling particularly masochistic), and therefore I can simulate pointers using Prolog.
Oh, but you cry "That can't possibly be efficient!" Right again. But you've again missed the point of Computer Science. CS is about efficient algorithms, not efficient programs. That's something we leave to the software engineers and other "implementors." Us CS freaks think about what can be done, we don't actually do it;-)
I know plenty of teens read Slashdot (is it the majority?), so I can understand how a lot of people might be pissed off about this...
But as an adult this appeals to me on certain levels. Most teen drivers I encounter drive like fucking braindead idiots and having some way to keep those people in check would be nice. Then again, there's probably lots of responsible teen drivers. But you know what -- I don't tend to notice those drivers because they just blend in with the rest of the responsible masses. The only ones who get noticed are the dipshits.
So, to the teens out there who are upset about this: you need to do one of two things: if you are an asshole dipshit driver, change your driving habits. Or, if you are a considerate, responsible driver, you surely know some friends who drive like dipshits. Put some pressure on your friends.
It's easy to feel invincible as a teenager, but just in the last several months I've seen a lot of nasty stuff happen on roadways to friends of mine (luckily nobody has died yet). You are certainly NOT invincible. And you aren't only taking your own life into your hands, you are also responsible for all the people around you on the road.
This reminds me of a woman in Portland, Oregon who got in trouble with the city for walking around town sticking quarters into expired parking meters. She thought she was being a nice old lady.
Apparently, she was saving enough people from parking tickets that the city's transportation revenue was starting to feel the effects...
Maybe someone should do a new study to prove/disprove the following hypothesis: the more buzzwords there are in a Slashdot article submission (e.g., 'spam'), the less likely it is that a Slashdot editor will actually read the article.
I don't know about "consumer" electronics in Russia, but one of the reasons they used tube technology in their military equipment was because it wasn't as susceptible to electromagnetic pulse damage during a nuclear strike. An EMP will destroy any unshielded semiconductor device. But if you are using tubes, and you know the strike is coming, you can just power your systems off. Since a vacuum tube only "conducts" when running at high voltage, this prevents the EMP from propagating throughout the entire circuit, thereby improving the chances of surviving the EMP.
At least this is what I have heard from a Russian physicist.
If I were interested in rooting a lot of machines, I might do it kind of like this:
Waste many months of otherwise useful time writing an IRC client. Make sure it gets really popular by adding neato colors. Oh, and give it a name that's sure to offend my mother.
Wait until everyone trusts me, then throw something slightly more interesting into the mix. Like a blatant back door. Hope no one notices.
Screw with my FTP server and make it looked hacked, to ensure deniability.
Assume global emperorship.
Of course, if I had done it, I would have made it more subtle. Perhaps a hard-to-find buffer overflow in CTCP handling, or such...
2.59 is certainly closer to 3 than it is to 2, but by your reasoning, 2 should be the result of the rounding operation.
It would also be the reasoning of any other scientist. The reason the number gets rounded is because we are agreeing how many significant digits there will be. If we're rounding to the one's place, then the tenth's place is significant in terms of which direction we are going to round -- but we've already just admitted that we're only accurate to within a one's place (otherwise why would we round off there?). Therefore the hundredth's place is even MORE uncertain, and is ignored.
Mathematically it might be confusing, but with scientific measurements you just can't TRUST those small decimal places, so you pretend that they don't exist -- if the error is distributed symmetrically, the result is a "fair" rounding over many data points.
Re:From MSDN...
on
Pet Bugs?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
They haven't changed anything. I was taught to round this way in the first science class I ever took. Scientists have rounded this way for at least a hundred years.
And it's for good reason: 2.5 is NOT closer to 3 than to 2. Neither 2 or 3 should be preferred, but we have to choose SOMETHING. Therefore the compromise is to round down when the rounding point is an even digit, and round up when it is odd. In the long run this cancels out the upwardly-drifting rounding error. You still introduce error (you're ROUNDING), but that error is equally distributed high and low, so the AVERAGE error is zero. The easy way to remember this is, when rounding off a 5, the result will always be even.
Also, the rint(), rintl(), and rintf() functions in glibc also round in this way.
Since when did Flops turn into ops? It's importatnt to make a distinction between floating point operations and integer operations, right?
Not really, for two reasons: first, supercomputer CPUs are rigged for floating point, and they do it really fast anyway. Second, a super CPU is so fast compared to RAM that the time difference between an integer op and a floating point op is almost totally amortized into the RAM access time anyway. In other words, computing a float multiplication might be 1.5 times slower than an integer multiplication, but it's still 200 times faster than a RAM access.
Then you have to work out what exactly you mean by "operation" -- a single multiplication, or a single vector instruction (which might multiply 64 numbers in one shot). It quickly becomes difficult to judge performance based on some "flops" or "ops" number. To figure out performance it's better to just run the real application and see how fast it goes...
The setiathome website claims there are three million users. Guessing that each user has about 10 MFlops, this is a total of 30 TFlops -- about the same as the Earth Simulator.
However the SETI network could never do what the ES does because although it is compute-distributed, the data is centralized, so the actual compute rate is limited by communication speed. And over the Internet that's really slow compared to real interconnect architectures for these sorts of applications. At least, until the Internet can compete with a multi-gigabyte-per-second local interconnect. Of course by then, the processors will still be outstripping the network, so you probably still wouldn't be able to do it.
Slashdot Mirror
It's tough. To be honest, when you decided to drop out the first time, you made a mistake. There's a reason people tend to go to school FIRST and only start working AFTER...
I hope you won't end up in school for a decade, like most of my friends who are on that same path right now... My only advice is to sacrifice work for school if you have to (yes, you read that right). You will always have more job opportunities, but if you keep putting off school, you'll simply never reach the goal (i.e., the degree). Besides, having the degree opens up new opportunities for you.
In case you are still mystified about A-20, it is an ancient holdover from when machines didn't have a high memory area. In 16 bit arithmetic, incrementing 65535 produces 0, and many programs took "advantage" of this fact. However on newer systems there was an extra address line, and if it was enabled this address "rollover" didn't happen correctly. Result: legacy programs crashing.
A-20 is automatically enabled by all 32-bit operating systems anyway. The option in the BIOS is there to control HOW that enabling happens. Modern chipsets can enable A-20 directly. Historically, however, A-20 was logically AND-ed with a pin on the keyboard controller, so in order to enable A-20 you had to reprogram the keyboard controller.
I love PCs, they are the only hardware I've encountered where you have to program the keyboard chip in order to enable high memory access. :)
Saying that this was an online gathering of "characters," mere ones and zeros, is completely incomprehensible. If it had been videoconference or teleconference instead, would you have said the same thing? At what point does it become "real enough" for you people? What is so special about physical nearness? Why does it become less meaningful if it just so happens that the big bunch of atoms I call "my body" is far away from that big bunch of atoms you call "your body?"
Do I suddenly become nothing more than an electrical wave if I speak over the telephone? No, I don't. Don't reduce these people to "characters" simply because they met over the Internet.
Ah, this takes me back to my days of calculus and physics.. :)
How did you arrive at the 42% value? Similar method?
An increase in data density automatically implies an increase in transfer rate, because more bits are packed into each square centimeter. An 80GB platter turning at 7200 RPM can be read twice as fast as a 40 GB platter also turning at 7200 RPM, precisely because twice as many bits turn underneath the head in the same amount of time.
Not only do you get double the storage space, you also get double the transfer rate (all other things being equal of course).
Or, if you really want a "silent" drive, then turn the drive speed down to 3600 RPM, and get the same old transfer rate but without the 7200 RPM hum. But why you would care whether the drive was silent in a SERVER is totally beyond me.
Well, that isn't exactly what I meant. I meant why haven't hardware manufacturers done this themselves? Why did they have to wait for Vorbis to do it?
Yawn, because it took so long for it to happen. Come on. Fixed point is not exactly difficult to deal with. Why didn't we see it sooner?
But what does it SOUND like in the cabin of an M1 when it gets hit by an anti-tank round. That's what I want to know.
Can someone more versed in optics explain to me why you can't just use FTIR (picking up the evanescent wave) to tap into a fiber without actually splicing it? It seems like it should be possible, and you wouldn't have to damage the fiber except for removing the cladding...
Just press on, stick it out. Once you get to the upper division stuff you'll see that it was all worth it.
Funny how "Computer Science" doesn't fall into your category of fields that mix computers and science.
As a CS, I'm offended.
By consulting with a mutually trusted third party, of course. A similar concept as that of a notary public. (I said similar, not identical).
Trust centers such as Verisign make it a little simpler to verify identity: I don't have to personally check you out myself -- I accept Verisign's "voucher" that you are who you say you are, and therefore I offload my research responsibilities onto Verisign.
This is not a perfect system for many reasons. But you can't HAVE a perfect secure system. I think this system is about the best we have for now.
Because that's ANSI/POSIX standard.
sprintf()
Because that's ANSI/ISO/C99 standard.
strcpy()
Because that's POSIX/ISO standard.
strcat()
Because that's POSIX/ISO standard.
Are you done ripping on GNU now?
You have failed to understand the point of Computer Science (pun intended). Python is a terrific language for teaching CS because it has the basics of discrete structures: lists, maps (in Python, called dictionaries), tuples, and atomic data types such as strings, ints, and reals. That's all you need.
There's really nothing you can't do once you have lists and maps. Don't object that you can't have O(1) access-time arrays -- you can do that with a map.
I challenge you to describe any algorithm at all that can't be implemented without pointers. If you think you need pointers, you just aren't thinking like a computer scientist.
For some classes, such as AI, there's simply no winner for Prolog, and perhaps Lisp
In general, you are absolutely correct. Of course, this is opinionated and others may disagree. But remember, you can use any Turing-complete language to simulate any other Turing-complete language (that's the entire definition of Turing-complete). Which means I can write a C interpretter in Prolog if I want (and I'm feeling particularly masochistic), and therefore I can simulate pointers using Prolog.
Oh, but you cry "That can't possibly be efficient!" Right again. But you've again missed the point of Computer Science. CS is about efficient algorithms, not efficient programs. That's something we leave to the software engineers and other "implementors." Us CS freaks think about what can be done, we don't actually do it ;-)
But as an adult this appeals to me on certain levels. Most teen drivers I encounter drive like fucking braindead idiots and having some way to keep those people in check would be nice. Then again, there's probably lots of responsible teen drivers. But you know what -- I don't tend to notice those drivers because they just blend in with the rest of the responsible masses. The only ones who get noticed are the dipshits.
So, to the teens out there who are upset about this: you need to do one of two things: if you are an asshole dipshit driver, change your driving habits. Or, if you are a considerate, responsible driver, you surely know some friends who drive like dipshits. Put some pressure on your friends.
It's easy to feel invincible as a teenager, but just in the last several months I've seen a lot of nasty stuff happen on roadways to friends of mine (luckily nobody has died yet). You are certainly NOT invincible. And you aren't only taking your own life into your hands, you are also responsible for all the people around you on the road.
Apparently, she was saving enough people from parking tickets that the city's transportation revenue was starting to feel the effects...
Remember, no good deed goes unpunished.
Maybe someone should do a new study to prove/disprove the following hypothesis: the more buzzwords there are in a Slashdot article submission (e.g., 'spam'), the less likely it is that a Slashdot editor will actually read the article.
At least this is what I have heard from a Russian physicist.
Waste many months of otherwise useful time writing an IRC client. Make sure it gets really popular by adding neato colors. Oh, and give it a name that's sure to offend my mother.
Wait until everyone trusts me, then throw something slightly more interesting into the mix. Like a blatant back door. Hope no one notices.
Screw with my FTP server and make it looked hacked, to ensure deniability.
Assume global emperorship.
Of course, if I had done it, I would have made it more subtle. Perhaps a hard-to-find buffer overflow in CTCP handling, or such...
(The preceding was a JOKE...)
It would also be the reasoning of any other scientist. The reason the number gets rounded is because we are agreeing how many significant digits there will be. If we're rounding to the one's place, then the tenth's place is significant in terms of which direction we are going to round -- but we've already just admitted that we're only accurate to within a one's place (otherwise why would we round off there?). Therefore the hundredth's place is even MORE uncertain, and is ignored.
Mathematically it might be confusing, but with scientific measurements you just can't TRUST those small decimal places, so you pretend that they don't exist -- if the error is distributed symmetrically, the result is a "fair" rounding over many data points.
And it's for good reason: 2.5 is NOT closer to 3 than to 2. Neither 2 or 3 should be preferred, but we have to choose SOMETHING. Therefore the compromise is to round down when the rounding point is an even digit, and round up when it is odd. In the long run this cancels out the upwardly-drifting rounding error. You still introduce error (you're ROUNDING), but that error is equally distributed high and low, so the AVERAGE error is zero. The easy way to remember this is, when rounding off a 5, the result will always be even.
Also, the rint(), rintl(), and rintf() functions in glibc also round in this way.
Not really, for two reasons: first, supercomputer CPUs are rigged for floating point, and they do it really fast anyway. Second, a super CPU is so fast compared to RAM that the time difference between an integer op and a floating point op is almost totally amortized into the RAM access time anyway. In other words, computing a float multiplication might be 1.5 times slower than an integer multiplication, but it's still 200 times faster than a RAM access.
Then you have to work out what exactly you mean by "operation" -- a single multiplication, or a single vector instruction (which might multiply 64 numbers in one shot). It quickly becomes difficult to judge performance based on some "flops" or "ops" number. To figure out performance it's better to just run the real application and see how fast it goes...
However the SETI network could never do what the ES does because although it is compute-distributed, the data is centralized, so the actual compute rate is limited by communication speed. And over the Internet that's really slow compared to real interconnect architectures for these sorts of applications. At least, until the Internet can compete with a multi-gigabyte-per-second local interconnect. Of course by then, the processors will still be outstripping the network, so you probably still wouldn't be able to do it.
That is, 550e15 hz. Light is around 550 petahertz.
In addition to the bazillion other ways people have already mentioned, you can also just right-click on the address entry field and select "Clear".