Case in point -- I had a hard drive suffer a mechanical failure which prevented me from being able to read much of the disk -- enough to know that at least some of the data remained intact. This being the case, I don't know how reliable an attempt to write data (zeros or random data) would be. However, it is quite likely that much of the data on the platters remains perfectly intact, and would be accessible if one had the equipment to pop open the drive, and replace the failed read/write head.
In a situation like this, bet your ass the drive needs to be thoroughly and physically destroyed.
My long-time best friend and I both joined OKCupid, mostly for fun, about the same time, and over the several years or so I was using the site, she was always my highest match. And what do you know, we got married, and are living happily ever after. So I think the algorithm is accurate, anyway.
This might be okay if you are SO constrained you can't afford one register's worth of temp space, but if you're into performance, this is 4-8x slower than using a temp variable, in every language I've tried it on. Run your own benchmarks, see what I mean. Also, don't obfuscate your code, just to be "clever".
You know, socialism isn't outlawed by the U.S. Constitution. I'm in favor of the government doing whatever it can do better then big business, e.g. replace the joke of a medical insurance system with a single payer government run system.
I've no particular problem with socialism in general, nor the government providing more and more services. However, the Tenth Amendment specifically states that any powers not granted to the Federal Government by the Constitution are reserved for the States or the People. That means that if the Constitution doesn't have a section on Federally-owned businesses, then the government can't own one.
On the other hand, it also means that any government-owned companies would have to be owned at the state level, and then it's totally okay with the Constitution.
Disk space is so cheap that I don't bother "ripping" my DVDs -- I use the "dd" command to make a byte-for-byte copy of the DVD, and then play the iso directly. MPlayer will play the movie, though it doesn't do so well with DVD menus. I mostly use XBMC these days, and it handles DVD menus flawlessly.
To rip: $ dd if=/dev/dvdrom of=My.Movie.iso
To play: $ gmplayer -dvd-device My.Movie.iso dvd:///
You already have this option... call up your local provider, and ask for a dedicated T1 line. Depending on your location, you can probably get one for only a few hundred dollars a month. You get a quality of service agreement, that guarantees 1.5 Mbps all the time with no limitations and some specific up-time guarantee.
The rest of us are quite happy to share a fat pipe with a ton of other users. We realize that most people aren't using the pipe simultaneously, and that most of the time, we get close to the top speed of 6 Mbps, and even on the rare occasions when it's fairly busy we get speeds that are still very respectable. And we don't mind that our total bandwidth is capped at a certain pre-determined amount (like 40 GB per month in my case). That's plenty of room for me to download all the video I need, still get the latest ISOs for my Linux distros, and infinitely more than anyone might use for e-mail, web surfing, gaming, and chatting (which is all the average user seems to do).
With the tiered service plans my cable provider offers, I could upgrade to an even faster connection with an even higher cap, and it would only cost me another $10 or $15 a month. But I'm pretty happy with my over-sold service the way it is, so why upgrade? If you REALLY need to saturate a high speed connection continuously, then you shouldn't be whining about consumer-grade connections... you should be paying for an enterprise connection.
My browser is already set up to use the keyboard the way I want it... PLEASE do not try to be "cute" and override them. I want a nice static web page that navigates the exact same way that every other web page navigates. I don't want a web page that updates dynamically -- that's why I turned off the freakin' television. And I don't want to have to learn new keyboard bindings for every web site with a clever hacker at the wheel.
It all depends on a lot of things, of course! Do you have any experience? What is your work background? If all of your experience is customer service at Best Buy, then you're probably not going to have much luck, going in cold.
You've got several options, none of which are easy.
Do you know someone in the field who would take you on at their company? A friend? A parent of a friend? Knowing someone is always the best way to find a job.
Are you willing to relocate to a better job market? You'll have to pay for it yourself though, if you don't have any experience.
Would you consider an unpaid internship? Non-profits are frequently in desperate need of IT professionals who work for beans.
Have you considered going to school? Either to a real college, or even to a community college, where you can get an AS in IT in two years without much effort or expense (and the economy might be better in two years anyway). There are also plenty of professional schools, and certifications you can get, though I think those are not as desirable/credible -- it depends on the sort of positions you're looking at.
There are definitely jobs as a technician that do not require a degree, but will give you experience that could lead to a systems administration job. Particularly if you're willing to do shift work.
Consider a job in software quality assurance. There's a desperate need for people in that area, and a lot of times, you end up pulling systems administration duty as part of that job. I got my first job, without a degree, doing QA for a small start up, and ended up as lab administrator. But I did finish my degree, and then some, and life is much better now.
I would happily spend *all* my time downgrading each and every result pointing to experts(-)exchange.com
I used to feel that way too, except that when you click on one of their links and scroll all the way to the bottom, you actually get the real answer -- otherwise google wouldn't bother to index the page. It is annoying though.
A mirror doesn't "absorb all the energy and then re-emit it", at least not in any meaningful sense.
Check your quantum physics. In fact, there are only a couple of ways that photons interact with matter... if there's no interaction at all, the photons pass right through. That's "transparency". There's also the photoelectric effect, where photons interact with electrons, which rise to higher energy states, absorbing the photons. The new configurations aren't stable, so the electrons rapidly fall back to their original state, which emits a new photon. On a reflective surface, the atoms are aligned in such a way that the new photons are lined up very precisely, such that they match the photons that were absorbed. Otherwise, you might get a spectral reflection (i.e. shiny), but not coherent. In non-reflective surfaces, the photons are absorbed and the electrons either remain in their excited state, or photons are emitted that are different than the photons that were absorbed (for example, when you shine a black light on a white surface, the emitted photons are at a different wavelength than the absorbed photons). Either way, the entropy of the material is increased (i.e. it is heated), though the entropy is obviously greater when no new photon is re-emitted. There are other quantum interactions possible at higher energies, but the idea is the same.
There's a good layman's explanation here, and a more comprehensive look in Dick Feynman's book.
also laser is light, therefore someone just needs to diffract or reflect the stream to be protected ? is that right ?
Not quite... a reflecting surface has to absorb all the energy and then re-emit it when it is reflected. With a regular mirror, it's a piece of glass with a silvered back. This would rapidly heat up and destroy the glass, and the silvering. With a highly reflective metal surface, it would still heat it up and destroy its reflective properties with hasty abandon. Do a google search for anti-missile lasers to read how a laser weapon actually works.
We could support roughly 10 times more people with the same amount of arable land if everyone was vegetarian.
Maybe I'm feeling glib, but as an alternative, we could just kill off 90% of people, and the rest of us can continue to eat meat. Or we could work to reverse desertification, so we have more useful land for a variety of purposes, and offer more than abstinence-only education in our schools, to help control over-population caused by accidents. Whatever it takes, but meat stays on the menu.
Let's see how your Markov chain reacts, when I send a photo and ask a dead simple question such as "describe what you see in the photo".
Appropriate response: "I'm sorry, I don't download files from random strangers... haven't you been following the news about all the ways you can get spyware and viruses?"
That's what I would say, even if it weren't a Turing Test.
I've been using ZoneEdit for years and they're great. Free for small domains, and really cheap for huge domains. It never, ever breaks. And it's super easy to work with.
While I agree with the notion of bulletproof data centers, I think one of the points of all these experiments, is that if you can save $100,000 a month on A/C and environmental costs, at the expense of reducing the life of $500,000 worth of hardware by 20%, you actually save money, because you spend so much more maintaining the environment than you do on the hardware itself -- as long as you plan for hardware failure and have appropriate backups (which you should anyway). On the other hand, if your hardware is worth a lot more, relative to your expenses, or if your hardware failure rate would increase sufficiently, then this approach wouldn't make any sense. It's all cost-benefit analysis.
For more "advanced" topics, there are whole books on Swing, Spring, Servlets, JSPs, EJBs, etc... each with their own encyclopedia of information -- you should definitely learn the core language first, and then decide which of these frameworks interest you, and pick one at a time to learn. Most places will hire you if you have solid Java skills, and will expect you to be able to figure out the framework.
There are many books on individual aspects of the Java language, such as Java Concurrency in Practice -- if you really want to be a Java expert. Most of those job listings you see don't require anywhere near that level of expertise, though.
I just sat through the four and a half hours of the opening ceremony that was aired last night on NBC here in the States (thank you TiVo), and as far as I can tell, it matched the order listed on Wikipedia pretty well. Even when they cut to commercial (shockingly infrequently), when they came back, the announcers went quickly through the missed countries, to catch back up to real time. Considering the soundtrack playing in the background while the countries were being read over the public address system in three languages, it would be pretty obvious if they skipped around, and the music and crowd noise suddenly changed. Politics aside, that's one of the coolest cultural and artistic displays I've ever seen.
As a former gymnast, I can say that the new system is definitely more fair -- if you have two perfect routines, the one with the higher difficulty wins. Also, it means that you don't have to keep changing the system -- as routines include more difficult elements, the start value becomes higher. And you can keep a standard set of deductions for things like bending your knees, or not maintaining a toe point, or falling on your ass.
On the other hand, as a fan of the sport, the new system is more confusing, because when it was out of ten, everyone knows that a 9.9 is really good, but now, is a 16.5 really good? Or a 17.3? As it turns out, a 16.5 might win gold on one event, but not even medal on another. But I think anyone who actually follows the sport will be able to keep up, for the casual once-every-four-years viewer, they can just concentrate on the shiny medal thingie hanging around the necks of the folks on the podium at the end.
I started with a company as a summer intern back in 1997, and it turned into a career as a software engineer. I got the internship through my college. Besides making it easy to get a job, an internship is the best way to learn all of the skills you need to prepare you for the "real world", since colleges don't seem to be too good at that, at least in the programming arena. Internships (in computer science) tend to pay pretty well, you're not expected to know much, coming in, and the sky's the limit for what you can do with it.
Check with the college first -- you might even be able to get credits for your internship. Another place to look would be craiglist or other job boards -- they have listings for internships. Finally, troll the web for companies in your area that interest you, and send them an e-mail asking if they would consider bringing you on as an intern.
By the way, when I'm reading resumes of recent grads, I'd call in a student with a 3.0 and an internship before I'd consider a student with a 4.0 who has never stepped off campus.
I'm no a "superstar". But I'm a solid experienced programmer who does it for fun. I spent ten years with one company -- growing with it from an intern in a six person company to a senior engineer in a nine hundred person company. I got bored, and I left. Since then, I've been going to grad school, and browsing job listings looking for that "perfect job" for when I decide I should go back to work. I've talked to dozens of recruiters and been to a number of interviews, and I've taken a few short term jobs, mostly for fun, or to see what it's like, but mostly I take it easy, and do the school thing.
So I've looked at a lot of job listings and talked to a lot of recruiters, and one huge problem I've found is that recruiters tend to know next to nothing about the positions they're recruiting for. I got a cold call from a recruiter the other day for a position that isn't something I would ever do because I'd been one of the people who built the software that they were implementing at their client -- sort of like trying to recruit Ian Murdock to help implement Debian at your client site. A little bit of overkill.
Her problem was that all she had to go on was the name of the software and a long list of programming languages. She didn't know what any of it meant, and was just looking for resumes that contained those keywords. To help her out, I explained to her (in small words) the architecture of the product she's recruiting for, and the different types of experts available, and told her what questions to ask to see if people are a match for the position. It won't help her judge their quality, but at least it'll point her toward people who might be interested.
Speaking of long lists of programming languages... there are so many job listings that list all major programming languages or all major operating systems. That's... stupid. How many projects use five different programming languages? And who'd want to work on one that did? I usually know most of the languages listed, but it makes me suspect that the author of the listing doesn't know what they're talking about.
So the important things, I suppose, are to make sure that your job advertisements are fairly specific to what you're doing -- don't advertise J2EE if you are writing your own threading and server code, don't advertise "Core Java" if you're looking for someone to program JSPs. And if you want to scare off the lesser programmers, mention "scary" algorithms that might come in handy -- "familiarity with Q-learning a plus" or something like that.
The submitter is the author of the blog, and is merely paraphrasing the whitepaper written by the author of the software -- and that is two years old. Nothing new or interesting here, just someone trying to draw eyeballs to his blog.
Noise issues (property owners near the airports got highly vocal about having to replace cracked windows from the occasional sonic booms)
I grew up less than ten miles from Dulles International Airport in Virginia, and when I was a kid, the highlight of my day was to see the Concorde flying overhead. It didn't matter where we were or what we were doing, if one of my family or I saw it flying overhead, we'd immediately stop what we were doing, and just gaze at it until it vanished from view.
I was heartbroken when they stopped flying to Dulles, even if I was never able to fly on it, and devastated when they grounded the fleet altogether -- it was like a little piece of me died.
All of the air traffic overhead is noisy and obnoxious, but the Concorde, at least, was the height of cool, and I miss it, and would love to see a similar project launched... even if I'm still too poor to take advantage of it.
Yes, because there's nothing the general audience adores more than a 20 hour movie, of which 15 hours are shots of people walking, accented by the occasional 2 hour Ent song.
Dammit, yes, WE want a 20 hour movie with a two hour Ent song. For you, they made "Eragon" and "Dumb and Dumber". Let US have a movie for a change.
Slashdot Mirror
Case in point -- I had a hard drive suffer a mechanical failure which prevented me from being able to read much of the disk -- enough to know that at least some of the data remained intact. This being the case, I don't know how reliable an attempt to write data (zeros or random data) would be. However, it is quite likely that much of the data on the platters remains perfectly intact, and would be accessible if one had the equipment to pop open the drive, and replace the failed read/write head.
In a situation like this, bet your ass the drive needs to be thoroughly and physically destroyed.
My long-time best friend and I both joined OKCupid, mostly for fun, about the same time, and over the several years or so I was using the site, she was always my highest match. And what do you know, we got married, and are living happily ever after. So I think the algorithm is accurate, anyway.
This might be okay if you are SO constrained you can't afford one register's worth of temp space, but if you're into performance, this is 4-8x slower than using a temp variable, in every language I've tried it on. Run your own benchmarks, see what I mean. Also, don't obfuscate your code, just to be "clever".
I've no particular problem with socialism in general, nor the government providing more and more services. However, the Tenth Amendment specifically states that any powers not granted to the Federal Government by the Constitution are reserved for the States or the People. That means that if the Constitution doesn't have a section on Federally-owned businesses, then the government can't own one.
On the other hand, it also means that any government-owned companies would have to be owned at the state level, and then it's totally okay with the Constitution.
Disk space is so cheap that I don't bother "ripping" my DVDs -- I use the "dd" command to make a byte-for-byte copy of the DVD, and then play the iso directly. MPlayer will play the movie, though it doesn't do so well with DVD menus. I mostly use XBMC these days, and it handles DVD menus flawlessly.
To rip: $ dd if=/dev/dvdrom of=My.Movie.iso
To play: $ gmplayer -dvd-device My.Movie.iso dvd:///
You already have this option... call up your local provider, and ask for a dedicated T1 line. Depending on your location, you can probably get one for only a few hundred dollars a month. You get a quality of service agreement, that guarantees 1.5 Mbps all the time with no limitations and some specific up-time guarantee.
The rest of us are quite happy to share a fat pipe with a ton of other users. We realize that most people aren't using the pipe simultaneously, and that most of the time, we get close to the top speed of 6 Mbps, and even on the rare occasions when it's fairly busy we get speeds that are still very respectable. And we don't mind that our total bandwidth is capped at a certain pre-determined amount (like 40 GB per month in my case). That's plenty of room for me to download all the video I need, still get the latest ISOs for my Linux distros, and infinitely more than anyone might use for e-mail, web surfing, gaming, and chatting (which is all the average user seems to do).
With the tiered service plans my cable provider offers, I could upgrade to an even faster connection with an even higher cap, and it would only cost me another $10 or $15 a month. But I'm pretty happy with my over-sold service the way it is, so why upgrade? If you REALLY need to saturate a high speed connection continuously, then you shouldn't be whining about consumer-grade connections... you should be paying for an enterprise connection.
My browser is already set up to use the keyboard the way I want it... PLEASE do not try to be "cute" and override them. I want a nice static web page that navigates the exact same way that every other web page navigates. I don't want a web page that updates dynamically -- that's why I turned off the freakin' television. And I don't want to have to learn new keyboard bindings for every web site with a clever hacker at the wheel.
This sounds an awful lot like Van Eck Phreaking, which was first described in 1985... this doesn't sound like anything particularly novel....
It all depends on a lot of things, of course! Do you have any experience? What is your work background? If all of your experience is customer service at Best Buy, then you're probably not going to have much luck, going in cold.
You've got several options, none of which are easy.
You've got plenty of options... good luck!
--brian
I used to feel that way too, except that when you click on one of their links and scroll all the way to the bottom, you actually get the real answer -- otherwise google wouldn't bother to index the page. It is annoying though.
Actually, I thought it was built at Utopia Planitia in orbit around Mars... but maybe that was later starships, like the Enterprise D...
Check your quantum physics. In fact, there are only a couple of ways that photons interact with matter... if there's no interaction at all, the photons pass right through. That's "transparency". There's also the photoelectric effect, where photons interact with electrons, which rise to higher energy states, absorbing the photons. The new configurations aren't stable, so the electrons rapidly fall back to their original state, which emits a new photon. On a reflective surface, the atoms are aligned in such a way that the new photons are lined up very precisely, such that they match the photons that were absorbed. Otherwise, you might get a spectral reflection (i.e. shiny), but not coherent. In non-reflective surfaces, the photons are absorbed and the electrons either remain in their excited state, or photons are emitted that are different than the photons that were absorbed (for example, when you shine a black light on a white surface, the emitted photons are at a different wavelength than the absorbed photons). Either way, the entropy of the material is increased (i.e. it is heated), though the entropy is obviously greater when no new photon is re-emitted. There are other quantum interactions possible at higher energies, but the idea is the same.
There's a good layman's explanation here, and a more comprehensive look in Dick Feynman's book.
Not quite... a reflecting surface has to absorb all the energy and then re-emit it when it is reflected. With a regular mirror, it's a piece of glass with a silvered back. This would rapidly heat up and destroy the glass, and the silvering. With a highly reflective metal surface, it would still heat it up and destroy its reflective properties with hasty abandon. Do a google search for anti-missile lasers to read how a laser weapon actually works.
Maybe I'm feeling glib, but as an alternative, we could just kill off 90% of people, and the rest of us can continue to eat meat. Or we could work to reverse desertification, so we have more useful land for a variety of purposes, and offer more than abstinence-only education in our schools, to help control over-population caused by accidents. Whatever it takes, but meat stays on the menu.
Appropriate response: "I'm sorry, I don't download files from random strangers... haven't you been following the news about all the ways you can get spyware and viruses?"
That's what I would say, even if it weren't a Turing Test.
I've been using ZoneEdit for years and they're great. Free for small domains, and really cheap for huge domains. It never, ever breaks. And it's super easy to work with.
While I agree with the notion of bulletproof data centers, I think one of the points of all these experiments, is that if you can save $100,000 a month on A/C and environmental costs, at the expense of reducing the life of $500,000 worth of hardware by 20%, you actually save money, because you spend so much more maintaining the environment than you do on the hardware itself -- as long as you plan for hardware failure and have appropriate backups (which you should anyway). On the other hand, if your hardware is worth a lot more, relative to your expenses, or if your hardware failure rate would increase sufficiently, then this approach wouldn't make any sense. It's all cost-benefit analysis.
-brian
I really like O'Reilly's Java in a Nutshell. Between that and Sun's online Java Tutorial and API Reference, you should be able to get a good start with the language itself.
For more "advanced" topics, there are whole books on Swing, Spring, Servlets, JSPs, EJBs, etc... each with their own encyclopedia of information -- you should definitely learn the core language first, and then decide which of these frameworks interest you, and pick one at a time to learn. Most places will hire you if you have solid Java skills, and will expect you to be able to figure out the framework.
There are many books on individual aspects of the Java language, such as Java Concurrency in Practice -- if you really want to be a Java expert. Most of those job listings you see don't require anywhere near that level of expertise, though.
I just sat through the four and a half hours of the opening ceremony that was aired last night on NBC here in the States (thank you TiVo), and as far as I can tell, it matched the order listed on Wikipedia pretty well. Even when they cut to commercial (shockingly infrequently), when they came back, the announcers went quickly through the missed countries, to catch back up to real time. Considering the soundtrack playing in the background while the countries were being read over the public address system in three languages, it would be pretty obvious if they skipped around, and the music and crowd noise suddenly changed. Politics aside, that's one of the coolest cultural and artistic displays I've ever seen.
As a former gymnast, I can say that the new system is definitely more fair -- if you have two perfect routines, the one with the higher difficulty wins. Also, it means that you don't have to keep changing the system -- as routines include more difficult elements, the start value becomes higher. And you can keep a standard set of deductions for things like bending your knees, or not maintaining a toe point, or falling on your ass.
On the other hand, as a fan of the sport, the new system is more confusing, because when it was out of ten, everyone knows that a 9.9 is really good, but now, is a 16.5 really good? Or a 17.3? As it turns out, a 16.5 might win gold on one event, but not even medal on another. But I think anyone who actually follows the sport will be able to keep up, for the casual once-every-four-years viewer, they can just concentrate on the shiny medal thingie hanging around the necks of the folks on the podium at the end.
I started with a company as a summer intern back in 1997, and it turned into a career as a software engineer. I got the internship through my college. Besides making it easy to get a job, an internship is the best way to learn all of the skills you need to prepare you for the "real world", since colleges don't seem to be too good at that, at least in the programming arena. Internships (in computer science) tend to pay pretty well, you're not expected to know much, coming in, and the sky's the limit for what you can do with it.
Check with the college first -- you might even be able to get credits for your internship. Another place to look would be craiglist or other job boards -- they have listings for internships. Finally, troll the web for companies in your area that interest you, and send them an e-mail asking if they would consider bringing you on as an intern.
By the way, when I'm reading resumes of recent grads, I'd call in a student with a 3.0 and an internship before I'd consider a student with a 4.0 who has never stepped off campus.
--brian
Let me tell you a story...
I'm no a "superstar". But I'm a solid experienced programmer who does it for fun. I spent ten years with one company -- growing with it from an intern in a six person company to a senior engineer in a nine hundred person company. I got bored, and I left. Since then, I've been going to grad school, and browsing job listings looking for that "perfect job" for when I decide I should go back to work. I've talked to dozens of recruiters and been to a number of interviews, and I've taken a few short term jobs, mostly for fun, or to see what it's like, but mostly I take it easy, and do the school thing.
So I've looked at a lot of job listings and talked to a lot of recruiters, and one huge problem I've found is that recruiters tend to know next to nothing about the positions they're recruiting for. I got a cold call from a recruiter the other day for a position that isn't something I would ever do because I'd been one of the people who built the software that they were implementing at their client -- sort of like trying to recruit Ian Murdock to help implement Debian at your client site. A little bit of overkill.
Her problem was that all she had to go on was the name of the software and a long list of programming languages. She didn't know what any of it meant, and was just looking for resumes that contained those keywords. To help her out, I explained to her (in small words) the architecture of the product she's recruiting for, and the different types of experts available, and told her what questions to ask to see if people are a match for the position. It won't help her judge their quality, but at least it'll point her toward people who might be interested.
Speaking of long lists of programming languages... there are so many job listings that list all major programming languages or all major operating systems. That's... stupid. How many projects use five different programming languages? And who'd want to work on one that did? I usually know most of the languages listed, but it makes me suspect that the author of the listing doesn't know what they're talking about.
So the important things, I suppose, are to make sure that your job advertisements are fairly specific to what you're doing -- don't advertise J2EE if you are writing your own threading and server code, don't advertise "Core Java" if you're looking for someone to program JSPs. And if you want to scare off the lesser programmers, mention "scary" algorithms that might come in handy -- "familiarity with Q-learning a plus" or something like that.
Good luck!
--brian
The submitter is the author of the blog, and is merely paraphrasing the whitepaper written by the author of the software -- and that is two years old. Nothing new or interesting here, just someone trying to draw eyeballs to his blog.
I grew up less than ten miles from Dulles International Airport in Virginia, and when I was a kid, the highlight of my day was to see the Concorde flying overhead. It didn't matter where we were or what we were doing, if one of my family or I saw it flying overhead, we'd immediately stop what we were doing, and just gaze at it until it vanished from view.
I was heartbroken when they stopped flying to Dulles, even if I was never able to fly on it, and devastated when they grounded the fleet altogether -- it was like a little piece of me died.
All of the air traffic overhead is noisy and obnoxious, but the Concorde, at least, was the height of cool, and I miss it, and would love to see a similar project launched... even if I'm still too poor to take advantage of it.
--brian
Dammit, yes, WE want a 20 hour movie with a two hour Ent song. For you, they made "Eragon" and "Dumb and Dumber". Let US have a movie for a change.