Well, not really. Web applications are generally cross-platform. Have you tried www.hrblock.com? I've used since 2004. The site works in firefox, it includes e-filing, and paying by check or credit card.
How would a bad linux version translate to a loss of market share when you have web apps that will work just as easily?
This happens with legit games when the connector fails. Each of my friends has their own special ritual, involving blowing into the console, tapping the cartridge down "just right," and so on.
When you press a cartridge down, you're pressing a 72-pin spring-loaded connector. You should be able to buy a new one for $10 or so, excluding shipping (try eBay). The repair process is very easy.
My family and I watch this movie every year on Christmas eve... I always look forward to that little tirade. This is one of the few things I've seen that made me laugh hard enough to cry.
Here's the video for anyone who doesn't know what the parent poster's talking about:
With the exception of keyboard support (if there is any, let me know:-) ), the Wii's Opera browser is perfect for "web 2.0" sites like Meebo.
Go check it out. http://meebo.com. You can sign in immediately from the page to AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Gtalk, ICQ, and Jabber, or you can sign up, create a profile, and all of your IM identities will get stored in the site for single sign-on.
The only bad part is trying to type using an on-screen keyboard.
What other nifty sites lend themselves to the Wii?
Yeah, but some aren't. I had an interesting run in with some credit card scammers earlier this year. I got a call from my credit card company about 10 minutes after I bought lunch one day. It was from the fraud early warning system, which I'd gotten a few times now. These were usually due to me flying around the country, or taking extended road trips, or making very large purchases ($900 in appliances, $1500 in furniture, etc.). I wasn't too worried about it.
This time, though, I it asked if I could verify a purchase for "theme park tickets," "appliances," and some other things. I told it no, and an amazingly easy 15 minutes later, my account was frozen, all the obvious charges were rolled back, and a new card was on the way, along with some paperwork for me to flag other charges that the CC company missed.
The scammers had my old address apparently. I knew this because they tried to order a convection oven (who'd have figured?) and have it shipped to my old address. My guess is that this is the address in whatever database that got cracked. When I did get my next statement, I noticed a few charges to some random "music store".com that was based in the same state as this old address, and donations to a charity of a few cents.
It turns out that credit card company had cancelled far more of these "song" purchases, and "donations." The thieves had made, over a few weeks, donations of varying amounts from a few cents to about $2, and random song purchases of about $1. It seems that they were trying to establish that I was "normally" spending money in the area where I used to live, and also verifying that my card was still legit.
So yeah, some criminals are dumb. Others are not. The fraud detection systems we have are pretty good though.
I'm pursuing this now in my spare time -- I'm curious to know what the rules are re: political calls to cell phones.
I called the TN Regulatory Authority (among other things they manage the TN do not call list), and the gent I spoke with said that political calls are protected. However, the same document says (I *think*) that cell phone calling is disallowed explicitly.
Further, federal law states that cell phone calling is illegal (but gives the same waiver to political calls for other things).
I'm trying to send out feelers to see whether the "calling a cell phone" issue might superscede the free pass that political calls are given.
I think that the statement would be true, if I'd prepended, "Assuming a normal distribution," which the human population is. Arguing that the Senate is "normal" is a separate matter.:-)
Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), is somehow ranked at 53.3% according to this article.
This has to be flawed -- the man got quoted as saying this in a debate:
Ten movies streaming across that, that internet, and what happens to your own personal internet? I just the other day got...an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday, I got it yesterday. Why? [...] They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
If you search around, you'll find a copy of the MP3, where you can hear him stumble over the words.
I'd argue that the article is ranking something meaningless if Ted "Series of Tubes" Stevens got a 53% score. That, or the bottom 50% are REALLY bad.
This does bring to mind a quote (from somewhere): "Think about how stupid the average (American, Person, Senator, ___) is. By definition, half of them are more stupid than that."
And yes, I realize this is a "score" not a "ranking."
Quoting another link you can see how they reached these numbers (which I take issue with):
The following figure shows the block diagram of the MDGRAPE-3 chip. It consists of 20 force calculation pipelines, a j-particle memory unit, a cell-index controller, a master controller, and a force summation unit. The force calculation pipeline is the most important part of the chip which performs calculations of two-body forces such as Coulomb and van der Waals forces. Each pipeline performs 33 equivalent floating point operations per cycle when it calculates Coulomb force. Thus, when it operates at 250 MHz its performance will reach 165 Gflops with 20 pipelines. The chip also has the j-particle memory unit, which corresponds to the main memory of the CPU. Therefore, no extra memory is needed to attached with the chip.
With that answered, I'm confused. Another poster sent along that link which explains what Riken will do. I'm confused about that actually. Reading the page, based on the verb usage, either someone didn't understand future and past tense (possible, but unlikely), or they haven't built the entire box yet. Perhaps I'm reading a bit too much into it... it's quite possible that someone simply hasn't updated the website.
Based on the webpage, all of the calculations to reach 1 petaflop are based on theoretical peak performance measurements, extrapolated from the theoretical peak of a single special-purpose ASIC which has been built, but may or may not have been actually placed into a fully configured system. Nothing talks about measured benchmarks, and the OP's article contains the same theoretical extrapolated numbers.
That's because, mostly, it is. Trying to pretend that it's not isn't going to help things. Some kinds of jobs attract some kinds of people and we just have to accept that.
That's not true.
Everything I do in at work is a team effort. In fact, working as a loner is a very quick way to annoy many people crucial to your success, and kill your career. On top of that, I'd say that it's becoming increasingly hard to do anything significant as a loner, because new systems and applications are too massive to be developed by a single person.
I see a sort of natural selection at work, where those that have the "soft" skills and people skills tend to be more successful, and those that don't get stuck on a more "standard" career path. Maybe where you work it's that way, but at IBM (at least in Austin), things are different.
Really? A Hypervisor's a pretty hard piece of software to write. Also, don't expect native speeds; I imagine there must be *some* overhead associated with whatever this "virtualization technology" is. It might be constant, regardless of the number of partitions running on a machine, or it might scale with the partitions. It'll be interesting to find out.
By the way, IBM's had this sort of thing for years. Go look around for information on IBM's System p servers and Phyp.
Someone might be working on a Wine-style wrapper. However, until that becomes available (if it ever does) you can use Virtual PC (http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/virtualpc/v irtualpc.aspx?pid=virtualpc) to do what you want. It boots Windows as an app within Mac OS X, and even integrates things like the clipboards, drag-n-drop functionality, and shared folders between the two operating systems. I'm not 100% sure, but I think they even integrate the start menu into the OS X dock.
Ditto. About once per month I get an email from headhunters for some company or another offering me an interview. They seem to alternate between SMB's / startups and mega-corps. Its nice to know my skill set is still (apparently) attractive.:-)
I can look at my server logs and see hits for "electrical engineering filetype: pdf" and so on on a weekly basis. I'm sure some of these are from folks looking to scavage and cobble together a resume (.edu domains are a bit of a giveaway), but I'm certain that I got two of the job offers I did because of my blog, and its contents. I mentioned some previous jobs and some of the neat things I was doing, and got offered a position mysteriously close to one of those.
I also would like to second the parent poster's comments. Google yourself, your email address, your IM nickname / game handle / whatever. See what comes up, and see what others are seeing about you.
On a slight aside while I'm thinking about it, you should also check your "real" identity as well. I've moved to several states for various jobs, and apparently am responsible for at least four different "Michael Hollinger" identities in the US. For each record, some piece of information is wrong (my middle initial seems to be the most common thing to screw up) but the addresses are all past addresses. Since this can affect credit applications (e.g. your next car, house, credit card rates, etc.) make sure this paints a positive picture of you as well!
If you're concerned about giving your information to random folks on the web, carefully read the next offer you get in the mail. It *should* contain in the fine print a phone number (or a link) to opt out of further credit card offers.
I'm not in my home office, so I can't verify the optoutscreen.com URL, but you ought to be able to call a number and enter yourself into an appropriate database. I did this, and see no targeted junk mail. I still see things like "To our valued neighbor, from your local pizza shop," but all the interesting stuff like credit offers don't show up.
The data may be fake. This followup article says that iBill claims that it was framed. From the article
"The databases, examined by Wired News, include names, phone numbers, addresses, e-mail addresses and internet IP addresses of customers making online purchases. Other fields in the compromised databases appear to be logins and passwords, credit-card types and purchase amounts, but credit-card numbers are not included.
But Spaniak says iBill cross referenced the 17 million transaction database against its own on Wednesday, and that only three e-mail addresses matched between the two.
Additionally, some entries in the stolen databases were identified as purchases on Diner's Club cards, which iBill says it has never accepted in its nine year history. Spaniak says iBill recently passed a security audit that found its databases well secured.
SunBelt Software couldn't immediately be reached for comment Thursday. But Secure Science's Lance James backed away from his conclusion that iBill, which processes most of its transactions on behalf of adult services, was the source of the leak."
So, I'd suggest that we stop with the knee-jerk reactions, and realize that everyone here may have been had by some l33t h4xor renaming a file.
I just did a search of my old, old emails, and it looks like usenet-access.com used iBill as well (back in the day, I downloaded DreamCast backups).
In my case, every piece of information in the database entry is wrong (according to the email I found from the original purchase), since I've moved four time since I bought the account.
Given the trouble I had getting an Xbox 360 (still don't have it) and a PS2 (I had to write a script to crawl amazon.com and make an alarm go off when it found "add to cart"), I'd like to just plain pre-order one this time, and save all the hassle.
How is the HDTV connected to the PC? Also, what sort of display do you have? My experience with the DVI connectivity between the TV, and my PC was that the display was recognized as a 1024x768 display, and that was the maxmimum resolution my video card would drive. I suppose this might be dependent on drivers as well?
Yeah. as near as I can tell, this should be possible. "All it would take" (famous last words) is an understanding by the graphics subsystem that the pixel units are non-square, so that it knows my display will effectively stretch the 4:3 picture horizontally. On a standard monitor, the picture might appear squished, but on my plasma, it'll appear normal, if a little lower res than you might expect. However, from 10 feet, I don't think the resolution will made a difference, as I won't ever be composing an email on it.;)
I guess i'll have to play the "wait and see" game, since I know XP won't do it (tried it for a good day or two) and I'm not sure Vista will either.
Here's an important question: I have a 1024 x 768 plasma display. The chipset supports this resolution, but does the driver in the mini support a widescreen 16:9 display with rectangular pixels and a 4:3 resolution, like many plasmas?
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen trace before that said something like: "FunctionName: line 434 : Error: (Not an error)"
Well, not really. Web applications are generally cross-platform. Have you tried www.hrblock.com? I've used since 2004. The site works in firefox, it includes e-filing, and paying by check or credit card.
How would a bad linux version translate to a loss of market share when you have web apps that will work just as easily?
This happens with legit games when the connector fails. Each of my friends has their own special ritual, involving blowing into the console, tapping the cartridge down "just right," and so on.
When you press a cartridge down, you're pressing a 72-pin spring-loaded connector. You should be able to buy a new one for $10 or so, excluding shipping (try eBay). The repair process is very easy.
~ Mike
My family and I watch this movie every year on Christmas eve... I always look forward to that little tirade. This is one of the few things I've seen that made me laugh hard enough to cry.
Here's the video for anyone who doesn't know what the parent poster's talking about:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07SlmpuG4nc
~ Mike
Well crud. Meebo's basically broken on the Wii. So much for that...
On my system at least, the page is corrupted, with all sorts of layout issues.
With the exception of keyboard support (if there is any, let me know :-) ), the Wii's Opera browser is perfect for "web 2.0" sites like Meebo.
Go check it out. http://meebo.com. You can sign in immediately from the page to AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Gtalk, ICQ, and Jabber, or you can sign up, create a profile, and all of your IM identities will get stored in the site for single sign-on.
The only bad part is trying to type using an on-screen keyboard.
What other nifty sites lend themselves to the Wii?
Yeah, but some aren't. I had an interesting run in with some credit card scammers earlier this year. I got a call from my credit card company about 10 minutes after I bought lunch one day. It was from the fraud early warning system, which I'd gotten a few times now. These were usually due to me flying around the country, or taking extended road trips, or making very large purchases ($900 in appliances, $1500 in furniture, etc.). I wasn't too worried about it.
.com that was based in the same state as this old address, and donations to a charity of a few cents.
This time, though, I it asked if I could verify a purchase for "theme park tickets," "appliances," and some other things. I told it no, and an amazingly easy 15 minutes later, my account was frozen, all the obvious charges were rolled back, and a new card was on the way, along with some paperwork for me to flag other charges that the CC company missed.
The scammers had my old address apparently. I knew this because they tried to order a convection oven (who'd have figured?) and have it shipped to my old address. My guess is that this is the address in whatever database that got cracked. When I did get my next statement, I noticed a few charges to some random "music store"
It turns out that credit card company had cancelled far more of these "song" purchases, and "donations." The thieves had made, over a few weeks, donations of varying amounts from a few cents to about $2, and random song purchases of about $1. It seems that they were trying to establish that I was "normally" spending money in the area where I used to live, and also verifying that my card was still legit.
So yeah, some criminals are dumb. Others are not. The fraud detection systems we have are pretty good though.
Which models are affected? The article's pretty useless, and I don't even know where to begin on the Sony site.
I'm pursuing this now in my spare time -- I'm curious to know what the rules are re: political calls to cell phones.
I called the TN Regulatory Authority (among other things they manage the TN do not call list), and the gent I spoke with said that political calls are protected. However, the same document says (I *think*) that cell phone calling is disallowed explicitly.
Further, federal law states that cell phone calling is illegal (but gives the same waiver to political calls for other things).
I'm trying to send out feelers to see whether the "calling a cell phone" issue might superscede the free pass that political calls are given.
Anyone know?
Heh. See, I try to end on a light joke...
:-)
I think that the statement would be true, if I'd prepended, "Assuming a normal distribution," which the human population is. Arguing that the Senate is "normal" is a separate matter.
This has to be flawed -- the man got quoted as saying this in a debate:
-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes
If you search around, you'll find a copy of the MP3, where you can hear him stumble over the words.
I'd argue that the article is ranking something meaningless if Ted "Series of Tubes" Stevens got a 53% score. That, or the bottom 50% are REALLY bad.
This does bring to mind a quote (from somewhere): "Think about how stupid the average (American, Person, Senator, ___) is. By definition, half of them are more stupid than that."
And yes, I realize this is a "score" not a "ranking."
Quoting another link you can see how they reached these numbers (which I take issue with):
- http://mdgrape.gsc.riken.jp/modules/tinyd0/index.
With that answered, I'm confused. Another poster sent along that link which explains what Riken will do. I'm confused about that actually. Reading the page, based on the verb usage, either someone didn't understand future and past tense (possible, but unlikely), or they haven't built the entire box yet. Perhaps I'm reading a bit too much into it... it's quite possible that someone simply hasn't updated the website.
Based on the webpage, all of the calculations to reach 1 petaflop are based on theoretical peak performance measurements, extrapolated from the theoretical peak of a single special-purpose ASIC which has been built, but may or may not have been actually placed into a fully configured system. Nothing talks about measured benchmarks, and the OP's article contains the same theoretical extrapolated numbers.
Anyone know if they've actually built it?
~ Mike
I disagree this is a very bad name. Look at like this, are you really going to say "Lets go play some wii"?
No. You'll say, "Let's go play Nintendo."
It doesn't matter whether I was playing Eternal Darkness on my Gamecube, or Mario on my NES; I'm still "playing Nintendo."
~ Mike
That's because, mostly, it is. Trying to pretend that it's not isn't going to help things. Some kinds of jobs attract some kinds of people and we just have to accept that.
That's not true.
Everything I do in at work is a team effort. In fact, working as a loner is a very quick way to annoy many people crucial to your success, and kill your career. On top of that, I'd say that it's becoming increasingly hard to do anything significant as a loner, because new systems and applications are too massive to be developed by a single person.
I see a sort of natural selection at work, where those that have the "soft" skills and people skills tend to be more successful, and those that don't get stuck on a more "standard" career path. Maybe where you work it's that way, but at IBM (at least in Austin), things are different.
~ Mike
Really? A Hypervisor's a pretty hard piece of software to write. Also, don't expect native speeds; I imagine there must be *some* overhead associated with whatever this "virtualization technology" is. It might be constant, regardless of the number of partitions running on a machine, or it might scale with the partitions. It'll be interesting to find out.
By the way, IBM's had this sort of thing for years. Go look around for information on IBM's System p servers and Phyp.
Nope, I didn't catch the last line. That's why slashdot posts need executive summaries or abstracts at the top. :-)
My bad!
Someone might be working on a Wine-style wrapper. However, until that becomes available (if it ever does) you can use Virtual PC (http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/virtualpc/v irtualpc.aspx?pid=virtualpc) to do what you want. It boots Windows as an app within Mac OS X, and even integrates things like the clipboards, drag-n-drop functionality, and shared folders between the two operating systems. I'm not 100% sure, but I think they even integrate the start menu into the OS X dock.
~ Mike
Ditto. About once per month I get an email from headhunters for some company or another offering me an interview. They seem to alternate between SMB's / startups and mega-corps. Its nice to know my skill set is still (apparently) attractive. :-)
I can look at my server logs and see hits for "electrical engineering filetype: pdf" and so on on a weekly basis. I'm sure some of these are from folks looking to scavage and cobble together a resume (.edu domains are a bit of a giveaway), but I'm certain that I got two of the job offers I did because of my blog, and its contents. I mentioned some previous jobs and some of the neat things I was doing, and got offered a position mysteriously close to one of those.
I also would like to second the parent poster's comments. Google yourself, your email address, your IM nickname / game handle / whatever. See what comes up, and see what others are seeing about you.
On a slight aside while I'm thinking about it, you should also check your "real" identity as well. I've moved to several states for various jobs, and apparently am responsible for at least four different "Michael Hollinger" identities in the US. For each record, some piece of information is wrong (my middle initial seems to be the most common thing to screw up) but the addresses are all past addresses. Since this can affect credit applications (e.g. your next car, house, credit card rates, etc.) make sure this paints a positive picture of you as well!
Check a list of "Information Brokers" and see what they know about you (and if the info's correct!). - http://www.privacyrights.org/ar/infobrokers.htm
G'day,
~ Mike Hollinger
If you're concerned about giving your information to random folks on the web, carefully read the next offer you get in the mail. It *should* contain in the fine print a phone number (or a link) to opt out of further credit card offers.
I'm not in my home office, so I can't verify the optoutscreen.com URL, but you ought to be able to call a number and enter yourself into an appropriate database. I did this, and see no targeted junk mail. I still see things like "To our valued neighbor, from your local pizza shop," but all the interesting stuff like credit offers don't show up.
The data may be fake. This followup article says that iBill claims that it was framed. From the article
"The databases, examined by Wired News, include names, phone numbers, addresses, e-mail addresses and internet IP addresses of customers making online purchases. Other fields in the compromised databases appear to be logins and passwords, credit-card types and purchase amounts, but credit-card numbers are not included.
But Spaniak says iBill cross referenced the 17 million transaction database against its own on Wednesday, and that only three e-mail addresses matched between the two.
Additionally, some entries in the stolen databases were identified as purchases on Diner's Club cards, which iBill says it has never accepted in its nine year history. Spaniak says iBill recently passed a security audit that found its databases well secured.
SunBelt Software couldn't immediately be reached for comment Thursday. But Secure Science's Lance James backed away from his conclusion that iBill, which processes most of its transactions on behalf of adult services, was the source of the leak."
So, I'd suggest that we stop with the knee-jerk reactions, and realize that everyone here may have been had by some l33t h4xor renaming a file.
~ Mike
I just did a search of my old, old emails, and it looks like usenet-access.com used iBill as well (back in the day, I downloaded DreamCast backups).
In my case, every piece of information in the database entry is wrong (according to the email I found from the original purchase), since I've moved four time since I bought the account.
Hmmph. I'm in the same boat as you. This sucks.
When can I pre-order one?
Given the trouble I had getting an Xbox 360 (still don't have it) and a PS2 (I had to write a script to crawl amazon.com and make an alarm go off when it found "add to cart"), I'd like to just plain pre-order one this time, and save all the hassle.
Interesting. :-)
How is the HDTV connected to the PC? Also, what sort of display do you have? My experience with the DVI connectivity between the TV, and my PC was that the display was recognized as a 1024x768 display, and that was the maxmimum resolution my video card would drive. I suppose this might be dependent on drivers as well?
Yeah. as near as I can tell, this should be possible. "All it would take" (famous last words) is an understanding by the graphics subsystem that the pixel units are non-square, so that it knows my display will effectively stretch the 4:3 picture horizontally. On a standard monitor, the picture might appear squished, but on my plasma, it'll appear normal, if a little lower res than you might expect. However, from 10 feet, I don't think the resolution will made a difference, as I won't ever be composing an email on it. ;)
I guess i'll have to play the "wait and see" game, since I know XP won't do it (tried it for a good day or two) and I'm not sure Vista will either.
Here's an important question:
I have a 1024 x 768 plasma display. The chipset supports this resolution, but does the driver in the mini support a widescreen 16:9 display with rectangular pixels and a 4:3 resolution, like many plasmas?