If I were applying for jobs, I'd be dubious about one that required an explicit "test" as part of the interview process, since it's hard to know what you mean by "test". Are you going to test my typing speed, or whether I know obscure language trivia (quick: Where was Bjarne Stroustrup working when he invented C++? How do you pronounce "Bjarne Stroustrup"? What does "restrict" mean in C?), or whether it's really a standard interview in disguise.
A normal technical interview process really should be a "test", for all intents and purposes. It's fairly easy to put a candidate in front of a whiteboard and figure out whether the candidate can write a function in your language of choice. (At least, it's easier to test coding ability than many other professional jobs.)
The Gamasutra article (the article with actual content, not wild speculation) is based on BREW -- a Qualcomm proprietary runtime with no Linux involved.
For the 777, one test Boeing performed was bending the wing to 150% of its maximum rated load to make sure the wing was structurally sound. The all-aluminum wing shattered at 153%, which makes for a great video: Boeing 777 Wing Ultimate Load Test. (The video is from the PBS documentary miniseries Twenty-First Century Jet.)
When I'm flying and I see the wing bobbing up and down outside my window, I try not to think about seeing this video. (Of course, I know the loads are different, but then I have to convince my reptile brain.)
Last summer my wife bought a Toshiba notebook. It came with Windows XP Home and the manufacturer refused to send a real install cd. (Even with a new copy of Windows, though, the system was still cheaper than the other notebooks she looked at with comparable specs; this one cost US$1k, at which point IBM notebooks are barely getting started.) When she opened the bok, a sticker on the shrinkwrap said:
" . . . Notwithstanding anything to the contrary in any third party License Agreement or product documentation supplied with your PC, TAIS does not accept the return of component parts, or bundled software, that have been removed from the PC system. Pro-rata refunds on individual PC components or bundled software, including the operating system, will not be granted. If you wish to return a complete PC system, contact the TAIS dealer where you purchased the product, and comply with the dealer's standard return policies and procedures."
So, yeah, Toshiba won't let you return the operating system by itself.
I've been using Mozilla, in some capacity or another, for almost six years, and it's been the only browser I've used (on purpose) for at least five years. So I was confused when Firefox showed up on the scene and suddenly attracted attention. What is it that makes Firefox better than Mozilla? Firefox has tabbed browsing, and pop-up blocking, and all that, but Mozilla did it all two years ago.
Did you read the parenthetical note at the bottom of the page?
(Increases in life expectancy are a factor in the long-range financing of Social Security; but other factors, such as the sheer size of the "baby boom" generation, are much larger determinants of Social Security's future financial obligations.)
Unfortunately, Table 2 (Americans Age 65 or Older 1880-1990) is not cross-referenced to the total population of the United States, which makes it harder to determine exactly how big of a chunk those 65 or older make of the population.
I'm going to post a bunch of line noise to Usenet and wait for news to happen. Then I'll "discover" a one-time pad that will "decrypt" my line noise to reveal an account of the event. Then I can declare myself to be a great psychic and attract followers world-wide.
(Note to the cryptologically challenged: given an arbitrary cyphertext, a one-time pad can be constructed to make the "decrypted" plaintext read whatever one pleases.)
I know what it is, and my uid is lower than the original poster. So there!
I'm downloading the episode now. I watched the first two seasons on DVD two weeks ago and thought they were great. A little bizarre, perhaps, but definately amusing.
Of course, if your audience is savvy, you can't impress them with cool tech, you could always do the science discussion route and explain binary numbers. But, they're a little young for that.
When I was in second or third grade, I was bored out of my skull with the pathetic math assignments I was given (spend a week adding three-digit numbers; spend another week adding three-digit numbers with a carry; spend another week adding three-digit numbers with *two* carries), so my father (an electrical engineer) taught me to convert the decimal numbers to binary, add them in binary, and convert the answer back to decimal. I thought it was great fun and enjoyed my math assignments after that point.:)
Of course, that experience might have warped me for life, since now I'm a computer engineer...
That was in the little booklet that came with the iPod, which I read the day after I got it when I wanted to know what to do. (Try reading the booklet if you still have it -- it'll take ten minutes, and you'll know more than you do now.)
As other repliers have suggested, hold the Menu and Play/Pause buttons for several seconds will reboot the iPod; you'll see the (black-and-white) Apple logo as the little computer reboots. (I recall the booklet telling me to toggle the Hold switch before resetting, which doesn't actually seem to be necessary, but it does remind me to make sure Hold isn't enabled, which will prevent the reset sequence from working.)
the librarians... have told me that putting a book in their system costs $30
Putting a book in a library collection is not as easy as taking it from the Donations bucket and putting randomly on the shelves. For the book to be useful, it has to be cataloged, which means not only entering the title and author from the title page, but figuring out where to shelve it in the library's specific collection (some libraries may be content to throw, for example, all programming books in one section, while others may wish to seperate the Perl books from the Python books, and the MFC books from the Linux kernel internals books), and figuring out what subject headings to use. (I've seen the binder containing the canonical rules for English-language cataloging -- it's decidedly non-trivial.) Amazon and Google have done great things to increase the availability of knowledge, but it still takes a well-trained human to figure out the optimal metadata for a book.
(It still boggles my mind that Amazon refuses to do the Right Thing while searching for authors -- if I click on the "William Gibson" link while looking at, say, Neuromancer (not an affiliate link, don't worry), I end up at a search page that shows me not only books by William Gibson the sci-fi author, but Lord of the Flies (which was written by
by William Golding and illustrated by Ben Gibson), and books about William Shakespear written by someone with Gibson somewhere in the name, and all sorts of outrageous results that no respectable librarian would be caught dead with. But I digress.)
In addition to the cataloging, a book must also be properly protected in order to not disintegrate prematurely. Most (if not all) of the library books I've checked out have at least library-grade clear tape protecting the cover and the spine; publishers offer higher-strength library bindings for many books as well. This protection costs money, both in terms of the staff time (and training) and the materials used.
All of this costs money -- perhaps not nearly as much as the US$30 figure quoted above, but definately significantly above US$0.
There are shortcuts to the lengthy acquisitions process. Some book distributors who sell books specifically to libraries offer MARC records (the canonical format for exchanging library catalog information) on a CD they ship with the box of books. These distributors also have access to higher-strength bindings and automated processes for securing and labeling a book to library specifications. All of these methods work only with new books, though, which is why it may in fact be cheaper to buy a book new than to move a used donation through the acquisitions process.
As of kernel 2.4.22, HFS+ support is part of the official kernel; however, it's still suggested to get the latest and greatest version here.
I recently acquired a new third-generation iPod and decided that following the steps to convert it to a fat32 filesystem in Linux was scarrier than compiling hfs+ support into my kernel. (Besides, I thought it would be fun to run some arbitrary filesystem.:) )
Current iPods work on both Windows and Mac OS at the same time.
Not quite. Current third-generation iPods ship with HFS+ filesystems ("Mac flavor") but come with Windows software to convert them to fat32 filesystems ("Windows flavor").
All third-generation iPods (the ones you can buy from Apple these days) ship as Mac iPods, but the included Windows software will convert it to a Windows iPod.
(If I recall correctly, first-generation iPods were Mac only (although it wasn't all that hard to hack together support for Windows, since the HFS+ filesystem is well doccumented, so it didn't stop some people), and second-generation iPods came in distinct retail Mac and Windows flavors that were pre-loaded with the appropiate filesystem.)
I tried [Debian] once - packages were way too old for my taste
Odds are you'll get flamed by a handful of Debian fanboys and applauded by a handful of Debian haters. I fit squarely in the "Debian fanboy" category, but I'm going to try to stay away from flaming.
Debian's distribution system has three tiers: stable, testing, and unstable. The stable release is the one you complained about having "way too old" packages, which is fully legitimate -- Debian's stable packages are old. The theory is to maintain a consistent, fully-supported system that is Really Stable, while maintaining the ability to provide security updates when necessary. This is especially useful on production servers, where it's a Bad Idea to change *anything* without contemplating it first. It works well for systems that shouldn't need coddling to maintain; if I were building a Debian system for my mother I'd use stable.
Obviously, stable won't work for everyone. For those who like the bleeding edge, there's unstable, which contains the Latest and Greatest Software (much of it prerelease; all of it updated frequently). Unstable might break everything, but when it works, you get Mozilla 1.5 without having to think about it and everything New and Improved!
And then there's testing, which contains all of the New and Improved! packages from unstable after they've had a few weeks to sit and haven't had any bug reports filed against them. Testing is good for those who don't feel compelled to live on the edge but don't want to live in 2001, either.
Debian isn't for everyone, but that's why Linux is free software -- "free" as in "freedom".
It's not immediately apparent from the photo, but the drive's heads actually cut completely through the platter, leaving the rest of the drive hanging by a thread.
This drive was in an old server I covertly colocated at my high school many years ago, right before I graduated. Three weeks later, the server stopped responding. Two months later, one of my co-conspirator managed to gain access to the poor machine, which he reported as making a whole lot of noise. I opened the drive, washed out the copious quantity of platter filings, and stared in amazement at the catastrophic head crash. My conclusion is that the head crashed, for whatever reason (probably physical trauma), and spun blisfully for the next two months, grinding the platter down with every revolution.
(I never bothered to contemplate data recovery, since I didn't have any money to throw at it and the data didn't matter anyway. I'm still curious, though, exactly how much of it could have been recovered.)
I find it difficult to imagine that the unnamed monitoring company hasn't overstepped its bounds. Perhaps you should send a calm e-mail to your customers explaining the issue at hand. Compare the once-per-second monitoring to calling a call center every second to check that it still works, or perhaps walking in and out through the front door of a store just to check if it still works. Both things are fine in moderation, but every second is entirely too much.
The monitoring company may have crossed some legal lines as well. Have your company's lawyer review your state's relevant laws and send a polite but firm cease-and-desist to the monitoring company, threatening relevant legal action. Don't insist that they stop alltogether, but suggest they exercise the legally-ambigious "common sense" and "good judgement" the rest of us seem to have figured out.
I'm shutting down my tracker now, since it doesn't look like anyone's still downloading, and I imagine the official site is fairly uncrowded. Thanks for participating in my little experiment. With any luck, I might have some brilliant analyses on the sucess of this experiment in the near future.
Say, how does bittorent scale thru a slashdotting?
The short answer is that we're about to find out.:) The advantage of BitTorrent is that everyone who downloads automatically uploads as well, turning the Slashdot effect back on itself, at least in theory. The only real concern would be the tracking server, since it's the only non-redundant piece of the network. So far, twenty minutes into the experiment, my tracker isn't breaking a sweat.
Slashdot Mirror
If I were applying for jobs, I'd be dubious about one that required an explicit "test" as part of the interview process, since it's hard to know what you mean by "test". Are you going to test my typing speed, or whether I know obscure language trivia (quick: Where was Bjarne Stroustrup working when he invented C++? How do you pronounce "Bjarne Stroustrup"? What does "restrict" mean in C?), or whether it's really a standard interview in disguise.
A normal technical interview process really should be a "test", for all intents and purposes. It's fairly easy to put a candidate in front of a whiteboard and figure out whether the candidate can write a function in your language of choice. (At least, it's easier to test coding ability than many other professional jobs.)
The Gamasutra article (the article with actual content, not wild speculation) is based on BREW -- a Qualcomm proprietary runtime with no Linux involved.
For the 777, one test Boeing performed was bending the wing to 150% of its maximum rated load to make sure the wing was structurally sound. The all-aluminum wing shattered at 153%, which makes for a great video: Boeing 777 Wing Ultimate Load Test. (The video is from the PBS documentary miniseries Twenty-First Century Jet.)
When I'm flying and I see the wing bobbing up and down outside my window, I try not to think about seeing this video. (Of course, I know the loads are different, but then I have to convince my reptile brain.)
So what you're telling me is that major extinctions happen without human intervention? Who knew? (Just don't tell the endangered species people.)
Last summer my wife bought a Toshiba notebook. It came with Windows XP Home and the manufacturer refused to send a real install cd. (Even with a new copy of Windows, though, the system was still cheaper than the other notebooks she looked at with comparable specs; this one cost US$1k, at which point IBM notebooks are barely getting started.) When she opened the bok, a sticker on the shrinkwrap said:
So, yeah, Toshiba won't let you return the operating system by itself.
No, the winners will get coupons for 5 cents off their next spam run with the spammers, and the lawyers will still get rich quick.
I've been using Mozilla, in some capacity or another, for almost six years, and it's been the only browser I've used (on purpose) for at least five years. So I was confused when Firefox showed up on the scene and suddenly attracted attention. What is it that makes Firefox better than Mozilla? Firefox has tabbed browsing, and pop-up blocking, and all that, but Mozilla did it all two years ago.
I still need to get tamper-resistant Torx bits for it, though. :)
Did you read the parenthetical note at the bottom of the page?
Unfortunately, Table 2 (Americans Age 65 or Older 1880-1990) is not cross-referenced to the total population of the United States, which makes it harder to determine exactly how big of a chunk those 65 or older make of the population.
I'm going to post a bunch of line noise to Usenet and wait for news to happen. Then I'll "discover" a one-time pad that will "decrypt" my line noise to reveal an account of the event. Then I can declare myself to be a great psychic and attract followers world-wide.
(Note to the cryptologically challenged: given an arbitrary cyphertext, a one-time pad can be constructed to make the "decrypted" plaintext read whatever one pleases.)
I know what it is, and my uid is lower than the original poster. So there!
I'm downloading the episode now. I watched the first two seasons on DVD two weeks ago and thought they were great. A little bizarre, perhaps, but definately amusing.
Until NASA's servers manage to recover from the demand, here's a Torrent for your downloading enjoyment.
When I was in second or third grade, I was bored out of my skull with the pathetic math assignments I was given (spend a week adding three-digit numbers; spend another week adding three-digit numbers with a carry; spend another week adding three-digit numbers with *two* carries), so my father (an electrical engineer) taught me to convert the decimal numbers to binary, add them in binary, and convert the answer back to decimal. I thought it was great fun and enjoyed my math assignments after that point. :)
Of course, that experience might have warped me for life, since now I'm a computer engineer...
That was in the little booklet that came with the iPod, which I read the day after I got it when I wanted to know what to do. (Try reading the booklet if you still have it -- it'll take ten minutes, and you'll know more than you do now.)
As other repliers have suggested, hold the Menu and Play/Pause buttons for several seconds will reboot the iPod; you'll see the (black-and-white) Apple logo as the little computer reboots. (I recall the booklet telling me to toggle the Hold switch before resetting, which doesn't actually seem to be necessary, but it does remind me to make sure Hold isn't enabled, which will prevent the reset sequence from working.)
Putting a book in a library collection is not as easy as taking it from the Donations bucket and putting randomly on the shelves. For the book to be useful, it has to be cataloged, which means not only entering the title and author from the title page, but figuring out where to shelve it in the library's specific collection (some libraries may be content to throw, for example, all programming books in one section, while others may wish to seperate the Perl books from the Python books, and the MFC books from the Linux kernel internals books), and figuring out what subject headings to use. (I've seen the binder containing the canonical rules for English-language cataloging -- it's decidedly non-trivial.) Amazon and Google have done great things to increase the availability of knowledge, but it still takes a well-trained human to figure out the optimal metadata for a book.
(It still boggles my mind that Amazon refuses to do the Right Thing while searching for authors -- if I click on the "William Gibson" link while looking at, say, Neuromancer (not an affiliate link, don't worry), I end up at a search page that shows me not only books by William Gibson the sci-fi author, but Lord of the Flies (which was written by by William Golding and illustrated by Ben Gibson), and books about William Shakespear written by someone with Gibson somewhere in the name, and all sorts of outrageous results that no respectable librarian would be caught dead with. But I digress.)
In addition to the cataloging, a book must also be properly protected in order to not disintegrate prematurely. Most (if not all) of the library books I've checked out have at least library-grade clear tape protecting the cover and the spine; publishers offer higher-strength library bindings for many books as well. This protection costs money, both in terms of the staff time (and training) and the materials used.
All of this costs money -- perhaps not nearly as much as the US$30 figure quoted above, but definately significantly above US$0.
There are shortcuts to the lengthy acquisitions process. Some book distributors who sell books specifically to libraries offer MARC records (the canonical format for exchanging library catalog information) on a CD they ship with the box of books. These distributors also have access to higher-strength bindings and automated processes for securing and labeling a book to library specifications. All of these methods work only with new books, though, which is why it may in fact be cheaper to buy a book new than to move a used donation through the acquisitions process.
As of kernel 2.4.22, HFS+ support is part of the official kernel; however, it's still suggested to get the latest and greatest version here.
I recently acquired a new third-generation iPod and decided that following the steps to convert it to a fat32 filesystem in Linux was scarrier than compiling hfs+ support into my kernel. (Besides, I thought it would be fun to run some arbitrary filesystem. :) )
Not quite. Current third-generation iPods ship with HFS+ filesystems ("Mac flavor") but come with Windows software to convert them to fat32 filesystems ("Windows flavor").
All third-generation iPods (the ones you can buy from Apple these days) ship as Mac iPods, but the included Windows software will convert it to a Windows iPod.
(If I recall correctly, first-generation iPods were Mac only (although it wasn't all that hard to hack together support for Windows, since the HFS+ filesystem is well doccumented, so it didn't stop some people), and second-generation iPods came in distinct retail Mac and Windows flavors that were pre-loaded with the appropiate filesystem.)
This is one of the times I wished Slashdot had a (-1: Stupid) or (-1: Wrong) moderation. I'll leave it to the other comments to explain why.
This is a duplicate story; see previous one here.
Odds are you'll get flamed by a handful of Debian fanboys and applauded by a handful of Debian haters. I fit squarely in the "Debian fanboy" category, but I'm going to try to stay away from flaming.
Debian's distribution system has three tiers: stable, testing, and unstable. The stable release is the one you complained about having "way too old" packages, which is fully legitimate -- Debian's stable packages are old. The theory is to maintain a consistent, fully-supported system that is Really Stable, while maintaining the ability to provide security updates when necessary. This is especially useful on production servers, where it's a Bad Idea to change *anything* without contemplating it first. It works well for systems that shouldn't need coddling to maintain; if I were building a Debian system for my mother I'd use stable.
Obviously, stable won't work for everyone. For those who like the bleeding edge, there's unstable, which contains the Latest and Greatest Software (much of it prerelease; all of it updated frequently). Unstable might break everything, but when it works, you get Mozilla 1.5 without having to think about it and everything New and Improved!
And then there's testing, which contains all of the New and Improved! packages from unstable after they've had a few weeks to sit and haven't had any bug reports filed against them. Testing is good for those who don't feel compelled to live on the edge but don't want to live in 2001, either.
Debian isn't for everyone, but that's why Linux is free software -- "free" as in "freedom".
It's not immediately apparent from the photo, but the drive's heads actually cut completely through the platter, leaving the rest of the drive hanging by a thread.
This drive was in an old server I covertly colocated at my high school many years ago, right before I graduated. Three weeks later, the server stopped responding. Two months later, one of my co-conspirator managed to gain access to the poor machine, which he reported as making a whole lot of noise. I opened the drive, washed out the copious quantity of platter filings, and stared in amazement at the catastrophic head crash. My conclusion is that the head crashed, for whatever reason (probably physical trauma), and spun blisfully for the next two months, grinding the platter down with every revolution.
(I never bothered to contemplate data recovery, since I didn't have any money to throw at it and the data didn't matter anyway. I'm still curious, though, exactly how much of it could have been recovered.)
I find it difficult to imagine that the unnamed monitoring company hasn't overstepped its bounds. Perhaps you should send a calm e-mail to your customers explaining the issue at hand. Compare the once-per-second monitoring to calling a call center every second to check that it still works, or perhaps walking in and out through the front door of a store just to check if it still works. Both things are fine in moderation, but every second is entirely too much.
The monitoring company may have crossed some legal lines as well. Have your company's lawyer review your state's relevant laws and send a polite but firm cease-and-desist to the monitoring company, threatening relevant legal action. Don't insist that they stop alltogether, but suggest they exercise the legally-ambigious "common sense" and "good judgement" the rest of us seem to have figured out.
I'm shutting down my tracker now, since it doesn't look like anyone's still downloading, and I imagine the official site is fairly uncrowded. Thanks for participating in my little experiment. With any luck, I might have some brilliant analyses on the sucess of this experiment in the near future.
The short answer is that we're about to find out. :) The advantage of BitTorrent is that everyone who downloads automatically uploads as well, turning the Slashdot effect back on itself, at least in theory. The only real concern would be the tracking server, since it's the only non-redundant piece of the network. So far, twenty minutes into the experiment, my tracker isn't breaking a sweat.