I still use http://finance.yahoo.com/ for tracking my stocks, which I think is pretty good and keep coming back to it each time I go and try out other finance/stock market sites. However I admit I haven't really looked around for (free) alternatives in the last year or so. Anyone know of any good alternative (free) stock market/investing/finance sites?
but I think they have an in built proficiency at transmitting it, especially when phones get passed around (e.g. "Hey Brad, Jake's on the phone, he wants to talk to you.")
larger or more regularly (e.g. rectangular) shaped fields. It essentially guarantees an overlap of approx 13% (1-sqrt(3)/2) of the diameter of the lawnmower cutting circle, merely in an effort to reduce the overlap in the number of turns. If the same field was made larger, the 13% cost would far outweigh the gains made in reducing the turn overlap.
A rectangular path would easily eliminate the 13% waste and then the problem could be reduced to minimizing the number of turns.
What I don't like about a grade system is that it inherently doesn't take into account future improvements in technology.
An A+ in 2011 will probably mean around 50 miles/gallon (e.g. Prius). An A+ in 2025 will hopefully mean 100 miles/gallon or better. So will a 2011 Prius get the same A+ grade on a dealer's lot in 2025?
I'm currently working at a major US tech company, and have worked at 2 other major US tech companies prior to this, and in every case except one, the source code I have inherited from some in-house coder is utter crap. Magically, every one of these in-house coders has an "Western" name, one was Canadian, the rest American. I'm talking about single source files for thousands of lines of code, 10+ classes (many unrelated to each other), functions written by copy-pasting the internal code of other deprecated methods, so that even if the deprecated methods are removed, the code lives on disguised under a different name. These guys couldn't even just call the deprecated methods, they had to copy-paste the internal implementation so that the ugliness of their work wouldn't be easily apparent. I've inherited code where the nuts and bolts were wrong, e.g. wrong numerical integration routines, incorrect convergence on non-linear curve fits, etc. were just wrong, but it would have been painstaking and laborious to figure that out and verify the results, so of course, those in-house coders just skipped that part. In another company, these in-house coders developed, over 2 years, a solution to synchronize databases, which required data transfer to the tune of 16x the total size (in bytes) of the database - involving a lot of unnecessary XML conversions, and it too had a lot of copy-pasted code. So strangely, some of what the HCL CEO has said is true, as much as I hate to admit it.
For some companies, the reason for outsourcing is that in the end, GOOD coders are rare, and BAD coders are plenty. That's true in the US as it is overseas. Why pay top dollar for bad code in the US when you can get similarly bad code by outsourcing for much cheaper? Many US companies offer fairly competitive starting salaries, at least twice as much as the 35k or 40k reported here for other software houses, often more, if they can find those GOOD coders here locally. It is simply that GOOD coders are in fact rare, and many companies recognize that. So I can see why they might as well just outsource since the quality isn't going to be much better by recruiting an army of (expensive) BAD coders locally.
If, as the article claims, oxytocin "induces a desire to reciprocate [trust]", whether it could form the basis of some sort of truth serum? Inject some oxytocin into somebody who has something to hide, and introduce this person to an actor who pretends to be very trusting. I wonder if this would encourage the oxytocin-induced person to reveal secrets once sufficient trust is gained by the actor...
Yeah, planting trees and regrowing forests to absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide is just too f***in' hard. So instead lets start converting 10 000 cubic km of limestone into lime and dump it in the sea. That's a heck of a lot cheaper and easier. Onwards with deforestation!
I can see how this approach of embedding the source code in a "rich" document can be advantageous. Much of the code I write involves numerical/mathematical algorithms that might implement several formulae. In-code documentation (the kind that we are all used to) is essentially plaintext, so it becomes very difficult to describe mathematical formulae that require special symbols or superscripts/subscripts etc. With a "rich" document, I would gain the power of expressing the mathematical logic natively as well as using simple text-formatting like boldface, italics, etc. For example, if I am calculating the standard deviation for a set of data and my formula is unique (which it isn't in the example below) so I want to include the formula with my in-code plaintext documentation, it would look like:
// Calculate standard deviation using "unique" formula: // stddev = sqrt((sum of (x_i - x_avg)^2 from 1 to N) / N) ...
The plaintext comment becomes just as "difficult" to read than the actual code itself. So embedding source code within a "rich" document would make it easier to include mathematical expressions in the documentation with the actual code that implements it right afterwards.
However I do acknowledge that it is very unlikely that I will write an extensive expose of my algorithms/code like that available on sample literate programming websites (unless I am publishing a paper or book). I guess the difference is whether a piece of code is meant to be a discourse where every detail needs explaining, or whether I can assume that anyone with interest in my source code would "easily" be able to understand most of the undocumented steps. So if I use a well known standard deviation formula, I would simply omit the second line of the documentation above, but if I switch to a unique formula then I would include the second line.
The other reason they were named with "C", as I recall, is because it would be easier to find the fonts in a list/drop-down if they were all close together on the list, rather than one beginning with T (Tahoma, Times New Roman) and the other beginning with A (Arial) etc.
IT companies providing transportation has been a common thing in Bangalore for many years as well (decades in the case of establishments in other areas like aircraft maintenance, defense, etc), especially those located in Software Technology Parks. The same thing is true of major call centres. However the main difference in Bangalore is that the Parks tend to be located quite a distance outside the city, so the transportation helps bring commuters out of the city, whereas in the Bay Area the buses help bring employees into the Valley. Also different is in Bangalore you see both luxury buses as well as very ordinary buses bringing employees to work and back home, but not nearly the same level of "luxury" (wireless internet etc) as in the Bay Area. But yes, this concept is not new from Google, and while I don't have the numbers from Bangalore, I wouldn't be surprised to find a much larger scale of the implementation (in terms of number of people transported).
I'm in Dr. Cooperstock's General Relativity (GR) class this semester. I must agree, he's a great teacher, and definitely a little quirky. Also he's quite old and some of that quirkiness may come from age.
As an aside, what's different about his lectures is that he uses a transparency roll and an overhead projector instead of the blackboard, and writes/derives everything with us in class, unlike many other professors who merely present slide shows or just talk a lot and write very little (very common among astronomy professors). I really dislike slideshows, and prefer Dr. Cooperstock's method because as he does so, we learn about how he thinks, why he makes the decisions he makes in the derivations, and the usual pitfalls in dealing with all the notation used in GR. That for me is far more valuable than just seeing an amalgamation of details presented on slide shows with a short verbal summary from a professor. Any textbook could provide me with that. The other advantage with the transparency roll is that if we ever need to go back to a previous lecture to revisit something that was discussed there, he just has to put up the roll corresponding to that lecture, and we have it right there in front of us. If we missed any lecture notes, we can just borrow the transparency rolls from him and copy the notes from them.
Back to the topic, I believe that what's important is that we must realize that dark matter is still just a hypothesis. There may be overwhelming signs pointing to something that we call dark matter, but this paper reminds us that dark matter is still only just a hypothesis. It is one of the easiest hypotheses to make, because simply adding a spherical distribution of dark matter to a galactic halo produces the observed rotation curve, but is not the simplest, because it postulates the existence of particles that we cannot yet prove to exist, at least not in such large quantities. If simplicity is a valid reason to accept or refute theories, then Dr. Cooperstock's model appears to me to be simpler because it requires fewer postulates to make things work.
However there are other observations such as satellite galaxies and gravitational lensing and galaxy clusters, all of which appear to require a huge amount of dark matter that we cannot observe. While Dr. Cooperstock's model may not explain all of these yet, this is work that has yet to be done, and so his model cannot be ruled out. One must realize that dark matter is really just a fudge factor to make the theory work out the same way as observations. Until there is good evidence from astronomers and from particle physicists, the arena should be open and impartial to other candidate hypotheses. It is good to see that despite most of the world jumping on to the dark matter band wagon, there are people who stand back and persist with their own ideas. We've seen this happen so many times in history.
Besides, it is still possible that despite GR explaining the galactic rotational curves, dark matter may still exist, but then its role and distribution would change. Oh, the fun of physics...
I can't believe this, a company is proactive in issuing a product recall and all you can do is think about all your bad experiences that you've had in the past? It seems to me like the problems you list are not uncommon across almost every company selling tech products across the industry. In any case, your post is quite irrelevant, because it appears that the problem regarding the memory is an industry-wide problem, not an HP-specific one.
I take it as a good thing that HP is first to recall such a large volume of shipped products, whereas look what their main competitors in the laptop segment are up to - Dell is still "evaluating" and I've no idea what IBM is up to.
It's a shame that the recall isn't issued by the memory/chipset manufacturers themselves, since they are primarily responsible for the flaw, even though laptop vendors in general are also somewhat responsible for letting the flaw go unnoticed for so long.
HP doesn't have a perfect track record, but give credit where credit is due. A company that issues a comprehensive product recall, despite it being an "industry-wide problem" and despite it probably being something relatively minor/obscure (which is why it escaped detection for so long), is one that to me cares more for their products than what you've described above.
I myself am primarily a Dell customer (which isn't saying much), but I give HP the edge in being more proactive in this particular case. For all you know, they could have just shrugged their shoulders and pointed fingers at the memory/chipset manufacturers.
Regarding monetary losses, I'm sure there is some sort of sharing of cost-of-replacement between the various companies responsible for this product recall.
Yup, looks like they eventually just skipped Milestones 3 and 4, as these have been removed from the roadmap on their website. So looks like they did change their business plan at least once during the 24 hour period.
The advantage for a 24-hour company is you don't have to convince your investors about a change in business plan, there's just not enough time. Not that it was too difficult to convince your investors about anything during the dot-com boom.
Of course, it's also too little time to have your product from the "early" days make it to the Way Back Machine. So when the project eventually dies, it will be a cold, lonely death, without many memories archived on the internet.
I squeezed in just before the polls closed at 5:00 PM in Bangalore. I was a little rushed because all the security people kept telling me to hurry up so that they could go home. However the election in my constituency was very peaceful, unlike someother areas.
Interestingly Indian media is not as vocal about the relatively small incidents of violence when compared to the international media.
The electronic voting machines felt a little awkward. There was no feedback to tell me that I had actually voted for the right person, and no mechanism that I could tell to correct myself had I pressed the wrong button. In fact one of the instructions for voters that came out in the Times of India today mentioned that we should make sure the election commission employees monitoring the election didn't "accidentally" press one of our buttons for us.
I would have liked the machine to somehow tell me (either through a display or by printing a little paper receipt) that I had voted for the right person.
Also, one of the women election commission workers was looking down on my machine as I proceeded to push my button. I had to give her a really ugly look, "Do you mind?". She shrugged and went and sat down on her chair. There were representatives from all the political parties contesting for the seat from my constituency.
What's probably not as common in the West is that there were about 10 people contesting from my constituency alone. One each from the major national parties (BJP/NDA, Congress), a couple from the major state parties and a few independents. I think the choice in the West is usually never more than 3 or 4.
After voting each voter is marked with a small drop of ink between the nail and the skin on the forefinger of the left hand. Not sure what they do if you are handicapped.
A state-wide holiday was declared to encourage people to vote. However in some areas it was just too hot in north of the state so the turnout was quite poor (40%-ish) whereas in my state on average I think it is around 60%. I'm sure there were many other factors that affected the voter turnout.
The national parties are promising between 10-12% economic growth, which has probably never been achieved in India's post-independence history. Let's see how things pan out, although it appears the ruling BJP-led alliance will dominate. The question is by how much.
All in all, it still felt good to cast a vote, although numerically the bigger the democracy the smaller the net value of each vote.
is on her website. We are really a big bunch of nerds on Slashdot. We talk about how hot and sexy Elin is, but nobody actually calls her up:)
Make the server faster...
on
Superball!
·
· Score: 1
for the next ball drop by making the jpg images smaller (they link to the large size ones anyway), or by possibly shifting the "album" of pictures to another page instead of the main event page.
On Slashdot we complain about people posting who do not RTFA. When websites like yours are created without any performance issues in mind, we readers really have little choice.
You guys seem to know Slashdot, so come on, you should be able to at least create an event page more efficient at handling traffic, than the one with dozens of 384x288 sized jpgs.
TopCoder does require programmers to think and act fast, with little time for software design, but the code you are required to produce is definitely stable, robust and high-performance.
All the solutions are put through extensive tests which are aimed at testing the stability, robustness and performance of the solution.
High quality, now that is something that is very subjective, and I agree, not a priority in TopCoder.
For me, the best part of competing in TopCoder is to come up with a stable, robust and high-performance solution to a program first, and then look at other people's solutions and realize just how much more stable, more robust and higher-performance your solution could have been!
Slashdot Mirror
I still use http://finance.yahoo.com/ for tracking my stocks, which I think is pretty good and keep coming back to it each time I go and try out other finance/stock market sites. However I admit I haven't really looked around for (free) alternatives in the last year or so. Anyone know of any good alternative (free) stock market/investing/finance sites?
but I think they have an in built proficiency at transmitting it, especially when phones get passed around (e.g. "Hey Brad, Jake's on the phone, he wants to talk to you.")
larger or more regularly (e.g. rectangular) shaped fields. It essentially guarantees an overlap of approx 13% (1-sqrt(3)/2) of the diameter of the lawnmower cutting circle, merely in an effort to reduce the overlap in the number of turns. If the same field was made larger, the 13% cost would far outweigh the gains made in reducing the turn overlap. A rectangular path would easily eliminate the 13% waste and then the problem could be reduced to minimizing the number of turns.
What I don't like about a grade system is that it inherently doesn't take into account future improvements in technology. An A+ in 2011 will probably mean around 50 miles/gallon (e.g. Prius). An A+ in 2025 will hopefully mean 100 miles/gallon or better. So will a 2011 Prius get the same A+ grade on a dealer's lot in 2025?
I'm currently working at a major US tech company, and have worked at 2 other major US tech companies prior to this, and in every case except one, the source code I have inherited from some in-house coder is utter crap. Magically, every one of these in-house coders has an "Western" name, one was Canadian, the rest American. I'm talking about single source files for thousands of lines of code, 10+ classes (many unrelated to each other), functions written by copy-pasting the internal code of other deprecated methods, so that even if the deprecated methods are removed, the code lives on disguised under a different name. These guys couldn't even just call the deprecated methods, they had to copy-paste the internal implementation so that the ugliness of their work wouldn't be easily apparent. I've inherited code where the nuts and bolts were wrong, e.g. wrong numerical integration routines, incorrect convergence on non-linear curve fits, etc. were just wrong, but it would have been painstaking and laborious to figure that out and verify the results, so of course, those in-house coders just skipped that part. In another company, these in-house coders developed, over 2 years, a solution to synchronize databases, which required data transfer to the tune of 16x the total size (in bytes) of the database - involving a lot of unnecessary XML conversions, and it too had a lot of copy-pasted code. So strangely, some of what the HCL CEO has said is true, as much as I hate to admit it.
For some companies, the reason for outsourcing is that in the end, GOOD coders are rare, and BAD coders are plenty. That's true in the US as it is overseas. Why pay top dollar for bad code in the US when you can get similarly bad code by outsourcing for much cheaper? Many US companies offer fairly competitive starting salaries, at least twice as much as the 35k or 40k reported here for other software houses, often more, if they can find those GOOD coders here locally. It is simply that GOOD coders are in fact rare, and many companies recognize that. So I can see why they might as well just outsource since the quality isn't going to be much better by recruiting an army of (expensive) BAD coders locally.
If, as the article claims, oxytocin "induces a desire to reciprocate [trust]", whether it could form the basis of some sort of truth serum? Inject some oxytocin into somebody who has something to hide, and introduce this person to an actor who pretends to be very trusting. I wonder if this would encourage the oxytocin-induced person to reveal secrets once sufficient trust is gained by the actor...
Yeah, planting trees and regrowing forests to absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide is just too f***in' hard. So instead lets start converting 10 000 cubic km of limestone into lime and dump it in the sea. That's a heck of a lot cheaper and easier. Onwards with deforestation!
However I do acknowledge that it is very unlikely that I will write an extensive expose of my algorithms/code like that available on sample literate programming websites (unless I am publishing a paper or book). I guess the difference is whether a piece of code is meant to be a discourse where every detail needs explaining, or whether I can assume that anyone with interest in my source code would "easily" be able to understand most of the undocumented steps. So if I use a well known standard deviation formula, I would simply omit the second line of the documentation above, but if I switch to a unique formula then I would include the second line.
The other reason they were named with "C", as I recall, is because it would be easier to find the fonts in a list/drop-down if they were all close together on the list, rather than one beginning with T (Tahoma, Times New Roman) and the other beginning with A (Arial) etc.
IT companies providing transportation has been a common thing in Bangalore for many years as well (decades in the case of establishments in other areas like aircraft maintenance, defense, etc), especially those located in Software Technology Parks. The same thing is true of major call centres. However the main difference in Bangalore is that the Parks tend to be located quite a distance outside the city, so the transportation helps bring commuters out of the city, whereas in the Bay Area the buses help bring employees into the Valley. Also different is in Bangalore you see both luxury buses as well as very ordinary buses bringing employees to work and back home, but not nearly the same level of "luxury" (wireless internet etc) as in the Bay Area. But yes, this concept is not new from Google, and while I don't have the numbers from Bangalore, I wouldn't be surprised to find a much larger scale of the implementation (in terms of number of people transported).
I'm in Dr. Cooperstock's General Relativity (GR) class this semester. I must agree, he's a great teacher, and definitely a little quirky. Also he's quite old and some of that quirkiness may come from age.
As an aside, what's different about his lectures is that he uses a transparency roll and an overhead projector instead of the blackboard, and writes/derives everything with us in class, unlike many other professors who merely present slide shows or just talk a lot and write very little (very common among astronomy professors). I really dislike slideshows, and prefer Dr. Cooperstock's method because as he does so, we learn about how he thinks, why he makes the decisions he makes in the derivations, and the usual pitfalls in dealing with all the notation used in GR. That for me is far more valuable than just seeing an amalgamation of details presented on slide shows with a short verbal summary from a professor. Any textbook could provide me with that. The other advantage with the transparency roll is that if we ever need to go back to a previous lecture to revisit something that was discussed there, he just has to put up the roll corresponding to that lecture, and we have it right there in front of us. If we missed any lecture notes, we can just borrow the transparency rolls from him and copy the notes from them.
Back to the topic, I believe that what's important is that we must realize that dark matter is still just a hypothesis. There may be overwhelming signs pointing to something that we call dark matter, but this paper reminds us that dark matter is still only just a hypothesis. It is one of the easiest hypotheses to make, because simply adding a spherical distribution of dark matter to a galactic halo produces the observed rotation curve, but is not the simplest, because it postulates the existence of particles that we cannot yet prove to exist, at least not in such large quantities. If simplicity is a valid reason to accept or refute theories, then Dr. Cooperstock's model appears to me to be simpler because it requires fewer postulates to make things work.
However there are other observations such as satellite galaxies and gravitational lensing and galaxy clusters, all of which appear to require a huge amount of dark matter that we cannot observe. While Dr. Cooperstock's model may not explain all of these yet, this is work that has yet to be done, and so his model cannot be ruled out. One must realize that dark matter is really just a fudge factor to make the theory work out the same way as observations. Until there is good evidence from astronomers and from particle physicists, the arena should be open and impartial to other candidate hypotheses. It is good to see that despite most of the world jumping on to the dark matter band wagon, there are people who stand back and persist with their own ideas. We've seen this happen so many times in history.
Besides, it is still possible that despite GR explaining the galactic rotational curves, dark matter may still exist, but then its role and distribution would change. Oh, the fun of physics...
I can't believe this, a company is proactive in issuing a product recall and all you can do is think about all your bad experiences that you've had in the past? It seems to me like the problems you list are not uncommon across almost every company selling tech products across the industry. In any case, your post is quite irrelevant, because it appears that the problem regarding the memory is an industry-wide problem, not an HP-specific one.
I take it as a good thing that HP is first to recall such a large volume of shipped products, whereas look what their main competitors in the laptop segment are up to - Dell is still "evaluating" and I've no idea what IBM is up to.
It's a shame that the recall isn't issued by the memory/chipset manufacturers themselves, since they are primarily responsible for the flaw, even though laptop vendors in general are also somewhat responsible for letting the flaw go unnoticed for so long.
HP doesn't have a perfect track record, but give credit where credit is due. A company that issues a comprehensive product recall, despite it being an "industry-wide problem" and despite it probably being something relatively minor/obscure (which is why it escaped detection for so long), is one that to me cares more for their products than what you've described above.
I myself am primarily a Dell customer (which isn't saying much), but I give HP the edge in being more proactive in this particular case. For all you know, they could have just shrugged their shoulders and pointed fingers at the memory/chipset manufacturers.
Regarding monetary losses, I'm sure there is some sort of sharing of cost-of-replacement between the various companies responsible for this product recall.
Yup, looks like they eventually just skipped Milestones 3 and 4, as these have been removed from the roadmap on their website. So looks like they did change their business plan at least once during the 24 hour period.
The advantage for a 24-hour company is you don't have to convince your investors about a change in business plan, there's just not enough time. Not that it was too difficult to convince your investors about anything during the dot-com boom.
Of course, it's also too little time to have your product from the "early" days make it to the Way Back Machine. So when the project eventually dies, it will be a cold, lonely death, without many memories archived on the internet.
I squeezed in just before the polls closed at 5:00 PM in Bangalore. I was a little rushed because all the security people kept telling me to hurry up so that they could go home. However the election in my constituency was very peaceful, unlike some other areas.
Interestingly Indian media is not as vocal about the relatively small incidents of violence when compared to the international media.
The electronic voting machines felt a little awkward. There was no feedback to tell me that I had actually voted for the right person, and no mechanism that I could tell to correct myself had I pressed the wrong button. In fact one of the instructions for voters that came out in the Times of India today mentioned that we should make sure the election commission employees monitoring the election didn't "accidentally" press one of our buttons for us.
I would have liked the machine to somehow tell me (either through a display or by printing a little paper receipt) that I had voted for the right person.
Also, one of the women election commission workers was looking down on my machine as I proceeded to push my button. I had to give her a really ugly look, "Do you mind?". She shrugged and went and sat down on her chair. There were representatives from all the political parties contesting for the seat from my constituency.
What's probably not as common in the West is that there were about 10 people contesting from my constituency alone. One each from the major national parties (BJP/NDA, Congress), a couple from the major state parties and a few independents. I think the choice in the West is usually never more than 3 or 4.
After voting each voter is marked with a small drop of ink between the nail and the skin on the forefinger of the left hand. Not sure what they do if you are handicapped.
A state-wide holiday was declared to encourage people to vote. However in some areas it was just too hot in north of the state so the turnout was quite poor (40%-ish) whereas in my state on average I think it is around 60%. I'm sure there were many other factors that affected the voter turnout.
The national parties are promising between 10-12% economic growth, which has probably never been achieved in India's post-independence history. Let's see how things pan out, although it appears the ruling BJP-led alliance will dominate. The question is by how much.
All in all, it still felt good to cast a vote, although numerically the bigger the democracy the smaller the net value of each vote.
No LISP either :(
is on her website. We are really a big bunch of nerds on Slashdot. We talk about how hot and sexy Elin is, but nobody actually calls her up :)
for the next ball drop by making the jpg images smaller (they link to the large size ones anyway), or by possibly shifting the "album" of pictures to another page instead of the main event page.
On Slashdot we complain about people posting who do not RTFA. When websites like yours are created without any performance issues in mind, we readers really have little choice.
You guys seem to know Slashdot, so come on, you should be able to at least create an event page more efficient at handling traffic, than the one with dozens of 384x288 sized jpgs.
That's not entirely true.
TopCoder does require programmers to think and act fast, with little time for software design, but the code you are required to produce is definitely stable, robust and high-performance.
All the solutions are put through extensive tests which are aimed at testing the stability, robustness and performance of the solution.
High quality, now that is something that is very subjective, and I agree, not a priority in TopCoder.
For me, the best part of competing in TopCoder is to come up with a stable, robust and high-performance solution to a program first, and then look at other people's solutions and realize just how much more stable, more robust and higher-performance your solution could have been!