Interestingly enough, it was common practice to provide output codes that referred to actual printed manuals rather than wasting memory on a stirng of characters that actually told what the message was. When the code came up, and they didn't immediately know what it was, they grabbed the big white notebook and looked it up. Believe me, when you have 1K of RAM to work with, you would much rather output 42 (1 byte integer) rather than the string "The answer to life, the universe, and everything" (49 bytes including the null terminator).
This is where the whole term debugging computers came from, literally a bug got into the works of one of the early computer.
From Wikipedia:
While working on a Mark II Computer at Harvard University, her associates discovered a moth stuck in a relay and thereby impeding operation, whereupon she remarked that they were "debugging" the system. Though the term computer bug cannot be definitively attributed to Admiral Hopper, she did bring the term into popularity.[7] The remains of the moth can be found in the group's log book at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.[8]
And Yes, I know that the term bug was used in aeronautics even before that...
I have done my share of interviewing and working with the people I decided to hire (a very important distinction). The biggest recommendation I can give is to hire those people who wow you. Don't hire the "they are ok" folk and especially not the "clueless" or worse ones. If they are intelligent and have enough experience behind them regardless of age, they can pick up anything they need to know. I filled most positions I interviewed for with the wow crowd and was very happy and only resorted to the "ok" crowd for a few of the seats that I just could not seem to fill. I discovered that I should have waited until I found more of the wow crowd.
10 Watt Solar Panel : $250.00
Price of electricity: $0.0775 / Kilowatt Hour
You have to leave the Solar panel in the bright sunlight for 100 hours, which is over a week at 12 hours a day, just to product ONE kilowatt Hour of electricity that you could have purchased for approximately 8 Cents.
Now lets extrapolate on that.
1 Week = $0.08
1 Year = $4.16
10 Years = $41.60
50 Years = $253.00
So, you would have to purchase one of these, hook it up to a power storage system, and run it in perfect conditions for 50 years just to pay for itself...
Oh, wait... don't forget shipping!!! Another 5 years to cover shipping charges.
I wonder what would happen if you changed the law so that if the defendant was representing themselves, then the plaintiff could not employ council to represent them. This would force RIAA to send their top level executive to courts all over the US... might slow things down a bit if nothing else. Or, if you take the viewpoint of the RIAA representing the recording artists then the artists themselves would have to show up in court... either all of them that RIAA represents (that would be a big courtroom) or force the RIAA to indicate exactly which artist(s) had been violated by each particular defendant.
Backup location : Protection Against
Drive Mirroring : Single Drive Failure
External HD : Server Meltdown
Safety Deposit : Building burns down
Different City : Natural Disaster (Flood / Earthquake)
Different State : Natural Disaster (Hurricane)
Different Country : War
Orbit : Global Thermonuclear War
Voyager Spacecraft: Alien Invasion
Buy a new hard drive for your laptop and do a basic minimal install on it. (If they keep your laptop, nothing to find.) Store whatever data you need on the internet somewhere (even your home/business server), travel with nothing on your HD other than the OS. Then work exclusively with online data and / or create a RAM disk for local temporary storage. Then put the data back on the network and shutdown your laptop... poof data gone. Then come back into the US.
This is becoming more and more common practice as it doesn't matter if your data is incriminating or not, it is company business and is therefore confidential.
I should have been more specific. I moved from the UK to the USA a while back and my WoW account is set to the UK as the country. Well you cannot change the country on the change address page, you MUST contact support to do this. I have used their webform and supplied a Utility bill and gov't ID to them. I have requested the change of country several times in each of the different ways I have been able to, webform, email, and phone and still have not received any type of answer back. Even a "We have received your request" or "We are working on it" or anything at all. The lack of communication is what is most annoying.
I have been trying to reach Blizzard for the past 3 months and have yet to get a response. Email, Webform, telephone... nothing works. They just won't respond at all.
I think most consumers would be able to do the math
Really? When was the last time you paid for something with cash and the teller hit "enter" too quickly and needed help determining how much change to give you?
Never underestimate the lack of math skills the average person has.
Actually, in pure dark, solar cells are 100% efficient today... of course so is my cat, this table I'm working on, and the sunflower seeds in my stomach. Zero energy shining on them produces zero energy out... 100% efficient.
Well no, the angle doesn't change the amount of energy hitting the panel.
Actually it does, but not because of the angle but because of the amount of and characteristics of the atmosphere the sunlight travels through to get to the solar panel. For example, at dawn, the sunlight travels through more air than at noon and that air is generally cooler and denser. While at sunset, the sun travels through more air (than at noon) and the air is generally much warmer. At noon, it is much less air to travel through and the temperature is usually somewhere between the coolest and hottest of the day.
The inflection point against grid electricity is still years off, however, if you start to compare it to oil / fuel prices you start to see a different scenario. As fuel prices continue to increase and more and more vehicles incorporate electrical power, I suspect we will see Solar Voltaic cells start start to be incorporated into these vehicles as they would extend the range as well as giving "free" fuel to these vehicles. For example, how would you like to come back from vacation to a fully charged electric / hybrid car just because you parked in the open air lot while you were gone for two weeks?
On this note, I can suddenly see the top floor of parking garages becoming MUCH more popular and the first to fill up rather than the last. In fact, and I actually hesitated to state this in case it gives someone ideas (on the other had this is a great place to publish it as it will prevent a patent in the future), I can see parking garages charging a premium for the open top floor as electic / hybrid vehicles with solar panels become popular.
Remember that solar cell run along at about 15% efficiency. Therefore a 40% increase means that it will bump up to something like 20%. Also, many of these improvements are not cumulative as they cannot be used together or have not been tested together so we don't know. Then we have to find some way of keeping them clean as even a little dirt will reduce the output of solar cells a great deal. Also, strangely, solar cells work most efficiently when they are cool... a bit contradictory to their optimal sun environment. This is one of the reasons you don't see massive solar reflective farms pointing at Solar Voltaic cells, but at a reservoir which is heated to gaseous state (steam in the case of water, but they often use something more dense than water nowadays) with passive / reflected solar power and used to turn turbines.
I can just see it now as large buildings in cities are being built / retrofitted with these solar panels there will be a huge legal battle as the next piece of land to the south (north for those in the upside down hemisphere) is built upon and the sun is blocked... time to go buy up all the south (north) coast land while it is still cheap. Oh wait... too late.
I know we will all nit pick this to death so here is mine...
From the FAQ:
"The sun is an inexhaustible source of clean power."
Well, not quite. I know that we cannot exhaust it just by using it's normal emissions as we would place no additional drain on the sun's resources by using solar power than if we didn't exist, however, the suns normal processes will eventual exhaust even it's vast resources of Hydrogen and then start "burning" (there you go, nit pick me now) hydrogen which will drastically change its characteristics. I do however agree that we (everyone alive today and probably the human race in general) won't really care by that time because, hopefully, everyone alive today will be long dead by then and, again hopefully, the human race will have moved on to the rest of the galaxy (galaxies?) by then and look back at "the birth place of mankind" with fond memories but the loss of the Earth due to the sun running out of Hydrogen will be a fairly minor news item.
Re:RAID5 is stupid, RAID 10 or no RAID
on
What NAS To Buy?
·
· Score: 1
And not just backup, but off site storage of your backup media. Think of it like this.
Raid: Protects against a drive failure On-site backup: protects against machine failure Off-site backup: protects against Fire Another City backup: protects against natural disasters (think Katrina) Another continent backup: protects against War South pole backup: Protects against world war Extra-planetary backup: protects against nuclear war Extra-solar backup: protects against alien invasion
Always think about the scale of what you are trying to backup and at which point you no longer care what happens to your data. For my personal information I usually stop at the flood stage. This means that my really important stuff is stored locally, backed up locally, and backed up in another city.
The USA has about 9,200,000 sq km, or about 30 times the area. Now we (the USA) have covered this out to supply power, telephone, cable tv, and internet but have not been able to cover every single residence with redundancy on these services.
Japan is slightly smaller than California, a large state, but still only one of 50.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know how much it is going to be, but I understand Microsoft will be charging admission to get in.
Ah, but will it fly and successfully land the Lunar Lander simulator (http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/07/20/1447236)?
Interestingly enough, it was common practice to provide output codes that referred to actual printed manuals rather than wasting memory on a stirng of characters that actually told what the message was. When the code came up, and they didn't immediately know what it was, they grabbed the big white notebook and looked it up. Believe me, when you have 1K of RAM to work with, you would much rather output 42 (1 byte integer) rather than the string "The answer to life, the universe, and everything" (49 bytes including the null terminator).
If you are really good, yes. Most can reach 2048, or 4096... much beyond this starts to get too easy to lose your place.
This is where the whole term debugging computers came from, literally a bug got into the works of one of the early computer.
From Wikipedia:
While working on a Mark II Computer at Harvard University, her associates discovered a moth stuck in a relay and thereby impeding operation, whereupon she remarked that they were "debugging" the system. Though the term computer bug cannot be definitively attributed to Admiral Hopper, she did bring the term into popularity.[7] The remains of the moth can be found in the group's log book at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.[8]
And Yes, I know that the term bug was used in aeronautics even before that...
I have done my share of interviewing and working with the people I decided to hire (a very important distinction). The biggest recommendation I can give is to hire those people who wow you. Don't hire the "they are ok" folk and especially not the "clueless" or worse ones. If they are intelligent and have enough experience behind them regardless of age, they can pick up anything they need to know. I filled most positions I interviewed for with the wow crowd and was very happy and only resorted to the "ok" crowd for a few of the seats that I just could not seem to fill. I discovered that I should have waited until I found more of the wow crowd.
Actually, the king of all calls is the FAKE Prison / jail call to your parents... when you are 16... and out with their car!
10 Watt Solar Panel : $250.00
Price of electricity: $0.0775 / Kilowatt Hour
You have to leave the Solar panel in the bright sunlight for 100 hours, which is over a week at 12 hours a day, just to product ONE kilowatt Hour of electricity that you could have purchased for approximately 8 Cents.
Now lets extrapolate on that.
1 Week = $0.08
1 Year = $4.16
10 Years = $41.60
50 Years = $253.00
So, you would have to purchase one of these, hook it up to a power storage system, and run it in perfect conditions for 50 years just to pay for itself...
Oh, wait... don't forget shipping!!! Another 5 years to cover shipping charges.
New Laptop: $599 New Laptop with Solar Lid: $850 Now how many of those do you think they will sell?
I wonder what would happen if you changed the law so that if the defendant was representing themselves, then the plaintiff could not employ council to represent them. This would force RIAA to send their top level executive to courts all over the US... might slow things down a bit if nothing else. Or, if you take the viewpoint of the RIAA representing the recording artists then the artists themselves would have to show up in court... either all of them that RIAA represents (that would be a big courtroom) or force the RIAA to indicate exactly which artist(s) had been violated by each particular defendant.
Backup location : Protection Against
Drive Mirroring : Single Drive Failure
External HD : Server Meltdown
Safety Deposit : Building burns down
Different City : Natural Disaster (Flood / Earthquake)
Different State : Natural Disaster (Hurricane)
Different Country : War
Orbit : Global Thermonuclear War
Voyager Spacecraft: Alien Invasion
Add one more and your bits roll over so when you get back to zero you are at 1024.
Buy a new hard drive for your laptop and do a basic minimal install on it. (If they keep your laptop, nothing to find.) Store whatever data you need on the internet somewhere (even your home/business server), travel with nothing on your HD other than the OS. Then work exclusively with online data and / or create a RAM disk for local temporary storage. Then put the data back on the network and shutdown your laptop... poof data gone. Then come back into the US.
This is becoming more and more common practice as it doesn't matter if your data is incriminating or not, it is company business and is therefore confidential.
Yep, wow-europe.com and called the UK support number internationally.
I should have been more specific. I moved from the UK to the USA a while back and my WoW account is set to the UK as the country. Well you cannot change the country on the change address page, you MUST contact support to do this. I have used their webform and supplied a Utility bill and gov't ID to them. I have requested the change of country several times in each of the different ways I have been able to, webform, email, and phone and still have not received any type of answer back. Even a "We have received your request" or "We are working on it" or anything at all. The lack of communication is what is most annoying.
I have been trying to reach Blizzard for the past 3 months and have yet to get a response. Email, Webform, telephone... nothing works. They just won't respond at all.
I think most consumers would be able to do the math
Really? When was the last time you paid for something with cash and the teller hit "enter" too quickly and needed help determining how much change to give you?
Never underestimate the lack of math skills the average person has.
Actually, in pure dark, solar cells are 100% efficient today... of course so is my cat, this table I'm working on, and the sunflower seeds in my stomach. Zero energy shining on them produces zero energy out... 100% efficient.
Well no, the angle doesn't change the amount of energy hitting the panel.
Actually it does, but not because of the angle but because of the amount of and characteristics of the atmosphere the sunlight travels through to get to the solar panel. For example, at dawn, the sunlight travels through more air than at noon and that air is generally cooler and denser. While at sunset, the sun travels through more air (than at noon) and the air is generally much warmer. At noon, it is much less air to travel through and the temperature is usually somewhere between the coolest and hottest of the day.
The inflection point against grid electricity is still years off, however, if you start to compare it to oil / fuel prices you start to see a different scenario. As fuel prices continue to increase and more and more vehicles incorporate electrical power, I suspect we will see Solar Voltaic cells start start to be incorporated into these vehicles as they would extend the range as well as giving "free" fuel to these vehicles. For example, how would you like to come back from vacation to a fully charged electric / hybrid car just because you parked in the open air lot while you were gone for two weeks?
On this note, I can suddenly see the top floor of parking garages becoming MUCH more popular and the first to fill up rather than the last. In fact, and I actually hesitated to state this in case it gives someone ideas (on the other had this is a great place to publish it as it will prevent a patent in the future), I can see parking garages charging a premium for the open top floor as electic / hybrid vehicles with solar panels become popular.
Remember that solar cell run along at about 15% efficiency. Therefore a 40% increase means that it will bump up to something like 20%. Also, many of these improvements are not cumulative as they cannot be used together or have not been tested together so we don't know. Then we have to find some way of keeping them clean as even a little dirt will reduce the output of solar cells a great deal. Also, strangely, solar cells work most efficiently when they are cool... a bit contradictory to their optimal sun environment. This is one of the reasons you don't see massive solar reflective farms pointing at Solar Voltaic cells, but at a reservoir which is heated to gaseous state (steam in the case of water, but they often use something more dense than water nowadays) with passive / reflected solar power and used to turn turbines.
I can just see it now as large buildings in cities are being built / retrofitted with these solar panels there will be a huge legal battle as the next piece of land to the south (north for those in the upside down hemisphere) is built upon and the sun is blocked... time to go buy up all the south (north) coast land while it is still cheap. Oh wait... too late.
I know we will all nit pick this to death so here is mine...
From the FAQ:
"The sun is an inexhaustible source of clean power."
Well, not quite. I know that we cannot exhaust it just by using it's normal emissions as we would place no additional drain on the sun's resources by using solar power than if we didn't exist, however, the suns normal processes will eventual exhaust even it's vast resources of Hydrogen and then start "burning" (there you go, nit pick me now) hydrogen which will drastically change its characteristics. I do however agree that we (everyone alive today and probably the human race in general) won't really care by that time because, hopefully, everyone alive today will be long dead by then and, again hopefully, the human race will have moved on to the rest of the galaxy (galaxies?) by then and look back at "the birth place of mankind" with fond memories but the loss of the Earth due to the sun running out of Hydrogen will be a fairly minor news item.
And not just backup, but off site storage of your backup media. Think of it like this.
Raid: Protects against a drive failure
On-site backup: protects against machine failure
Off-site backup: protects against Fire
Another City backup: protects against natural disasters (think Katrina)
Another continent backup: protects against War
South pole backup: Protects against world war
Extra-planetary backup: protects against nuclear war
Extra-solar backup: protects against alien invasion
Always think about the scale of what you are trying to backup and at which point you no longer care what happens to your data. For my personal information I usually stop at the flood stage. This means that my really important stuff is stored locally, backed up locally, and backed up in another city.
Well, the main reason is that Japan has a total area of about 375,000 sq km.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ja.html
The USA has about 9,200,000 sq km, or about 30 times the area. Now we (the USA) have covered this out to supply power, telephone, cable tv, and internet but have not been able to cover every single residence with redundancy on these services.
Japan is slightly smaller than California, a large state, but still only one of 50.