Because I had no idea what I was getting into, had never been up there before (had been through the attraction on the ground), and the guy who took me up there basically dropped me off and said "ok, next time the cab comes around, jump on the top, there's an outlet for you to use"
So I had to make do with what I had. I was long done with the work before he came back, so I had to ride up there around and around, which was not only annoying, but scary.
Having to work on top of the Universal Studios Florida King Kong attraction tram car while moving around the track with guests in the cab below. It is way up in the air, a flat cement surface far below. As it goes around the track, it shakes violently as Kong grabs the car etc. (it's essentially a simulator ride suspended from above), and it's covered in leaking hydraulic fluid, making it very slippery on the catwalk. There are no rails. I had one electrical outlet up there, which I could either use for the power of my laptop, or a small AC light I brought, but not both.
Would be very nice, it may take me too long to learn the jargon of professional references, this is a personal interest of mine. I have an engineering background, not biology.
My background is engineering too - circuit design, programming, etc. I picked up the knowledge of biological neural nets from my interest in artificial ones.
As for the pure electrical vs electro-mechanical differences, I do not see them as a big deal, because the electrical sides alone are totally different too. In the end you break the actual neuron's actions into cause/effect relationships and model those relationships. It is not like an artificial neuron in a computer 'fires' via opening and closing ion channels in a cell membrane anyway. Right?
It is correct that artificial neurons in a computer are simply arriving at values, not even firing at all, let alone in a cell membrane. It's also true that you're tring to model the neuron's actions from cause/effect. Here's the rub - today's artificial neural nets are in their infancy, and really aren't that great at mimicking what the brain does. That's my point. Today, artificial neural nets have to be trained first to do any sort of recognition job (there are a few self-learning nets, but I won't get into that, and those have very specialized purposes), and one neural net that recognizes faces in a crowd would be terrible at recognizing items on a table. The brain is able to recognize all sorts of things and how to process them, and it's learning mode is ongoing. Scientists today have no idea how to model this behavior. A real neuron does not just come up with a fire/no fire rule with an output of 1 based solely on weighted inputs. A real neuron fires with varing amounts of electrical current, and also, the chemical receptors in the neuron can change whether or not it fires at all! The chemical side of things has not been modeled at all.
So I expect that as we learn how to make neural nets more like how our actual brain works, including things like variable voltage firing, and modeling what affect the chemical swirl in the brain actually does to the net itself, we'll find the model becomes more complex and requires the artificial neuron itself to require more computing power. Hence my suggestion that possibly a computer core might be allocated to a single artificial neuron.
I think it is obvious that multiple cores will be useful in this kind of research/application though. If for no other reason than they are both parallel processes.
I guess we'll find out. Ever consider what a parallel process in your own body might be? Here's a fun one that most people can relate to - Have you ever had the experience of someone behind you saying something you couldn't quite hear so you said "What?" and then a moment later you knew what they said and you say to yourself, "Why did I just say 'What?'? I know what they said!". Here's why that happens. When your ears hear that somone said something, two parallel processes start at the same time. The first of these is a quick and dirty "phrase matching" process that simply says "What phrase did that person just say? Do I recognize that whole thing?" This process takes a short amount of time because it's trying to match a huge phrase, and if the sounds uttered were not that discernable (noisy or low), this process returns "Nope, no idea what the person said", causing you to say "What?". But the other process, that was started at the same time as the first process, hasn't finished yet. This process is slow and methodical. It takes each sound and slowly compares them to other sounds you've heard and slowly pieces together the puzzle of what each word you heard was". This takes a while, certainly longer than the first
I am not sure if you are asking for specific professional references or just more info.
I run two companies, so I'm not sure I can find time to look up a bunch of work I have studied for years. I certainly have the literary resources, but finding an actual reference to theory may take a while. If you're simply looking for online references or books that describe natural and artificial neurons, I know plenty. Let me know what you're looking for.
It's not so much that values/weights are an invalid way of generating a neural network. That's the basic for almost all nets I know of. There are two issues. The most straightforward issue is that these neurons generate a fire/don't fire result, which could be thought of as a 0 or 1 answer. Some studies have shown that the human brain doesn't really work this way. They certainly do fire, but not the brain is electo/chemical, and sometimes the chemicals between neurons change without an electrical firing. This is key. However, the issue could be simplified by saying that the results might be better with a -10VDC to 10VDC analogue value rather than a simply binary computer-related 0 or 1.
The second issue is partially related - these computer-based neural nets fundamentally do not work the way our brains do, as they are purely electrical and not chemical - so the issue is that because they don't fundamentally work like a brain does, then in order to actually achieve conscieousness and real usefullness, maybe "thought", the way these neurons work needs to be more complex, thus my suggestion of a core attributed to one neuron. It may not need that much processing or it may need much more, and certainly I believe that under this model we're talking about millions or billions of "cores", but overall, for the sake of this conversation, I am simply saying that these are precursors to things that will indeed support more accurate representations of how the brain works. It's difficult to make Von-Neumann architecture machines (computers as we know them today) to do this effort.
This comment does not exactly apply to the question put forth about performance of existing apps under multiple cores. However, I would like to bring up that, in my opinion, given my experience with artificial Neural networks and related work, that I expect, in some form or another, that it is likely that one could fairly easily argue:
1) The number of cores is going to increase 2) The current concept of an artificial Neuron having some sort of value, with weights attributed to it is too simple for how our human brains realy work, and therefore need more than a simple value and one algorithm, such that it will likely need to be replaced with a more complex model of values and algorithms, and the work on such that requires a mini-process or in this case "a core"
I expect that given that there will be an increased amount of cores, probably with an increase similiar to hard disc, processor, or memory increases of the past (1 10MB hard disc increasing to 500GB today), that we will have thousands or even hundreds of thousands of cores.
As we learn more about how the brain works I believe that 2) will be accepted as true at some point.
So I expect that more and more new software will attempt to be more intuitive, as more and more people begin to agree that the software we have now in general is crap, in that it doesn't help the layman as much as it could do their jobs.
This intuitiveness will likely be in the form of artificial Neural Nets, paving the way for computing systems to begin to act like the science fiction computer systems we think of in "the future".
People (apparently you) seem to think that the only possibility is running Windows and this utility on some nice and pat environment. Rarely is this the case with most of us here. I may have to fix some computer by shoving a CDrom in the computer and running a utility because there is some problem. So if the utility won't run because the OS is confused (which MS OSs often get confused) then there's no way to fix the problem. Essentially they would have shot themselves in the foot.
If some MS exec decides that win.com (or whatever) is protected fine, but leave the utilities and similiar ilk alone. Protecting the world is great at some boardroom meeting, but reality is quite different.
YES seriously. Not because the copy of Windows that happens to be running on the current machine is not paid for, but because it's lame to have to worry about copying utilities around from machine to machine and all of a sudden have some problem because Microsoft f'd with it.
Microsoft doesn't get it. It's very obvious. They add features they would like, not what the rest of the world actually wants.
Well I don't know whether or not these things happened to others or not. I only worked in tech support for a few years. Frankly, I own and run two companies now, I don't have time to post stuff, I rarely do it on Slashdot, and I certainly have never once in my life typed the info I did on this issue before in my life, nor have I read it on any site before. I have told others verbally, but that's it. The only story that happened to me that I have heard from others at all is a similar story about the cdrom being used as a cupholder. I heard this like 10 years later. I don't really have time to be commenting this stuff either, but I thought I thought it cool that there was finally something I had experience in that I could contribute, and wouldn't you know right off the bat somebody things I made it up for reasons I don't know. It's not like anybody here has any idea who I am, where I live, what I do, or anything else. I have better things to do than post bogus stories about when I was a teenager.
I don't blame you your view, and I guess I'm done bothering to convince you that these things happened to me. Many other similar things happened, but none of them are as interesting. Except for, maybe, the sales girl Donna that worked at our reps office in Arizona kept calling me for internal/inhouse T.S. because she trusted my experience, and after a while we got to be friends, and then she invited me to visit her in Phoenix, to which I did. She tried to fax a picture of herself to me, but the company office nazi Aimee ripped it up (there was no internet at the time to speak of), so when I got to the airport in Arizona I had no idea what she looked like. An hour passed and finally I heard this totally familar voice behind me talking to the person at the counter looking for me and I could tell it was her. We had a great weekend needless to say and dated for about a year. So I'm pretty positive this is not a tech support story that has been told before (not that it's that big of a deal). I guess you could argue I made the whole thing up.
I figured somebody would say that. It's really easy to put others down when you make guesses about the truth.
Each and every one of those things happened to me personally while working at Franklin Telecommunications in Westlake, CA between 1987 and 1988. It may be that people make the same kinds of mistakes over and over, I don't know. But I can tell you all kinds of details about any one of the stories if anyone cares... in fact...I think I still have the xerox copy of the floppy somewhere.
Ok I have a few stories from my days in tech support. Now you have to remember, these are the OLD days of computers - DOS and such.
1) I had a guy call and say that his Seagate ST225 20MB MFM drive was acting up. He said he was getting "Massive read errors" but that it used to work fine. I asked him if something changed. He said he wife had cleaned the computer recently, and I started to ask him "Did she bump any cables" when he says "Is there a preferred cleaning fluid for cleaning hard drive platters?" I said "Excuse me?" He said his wife had opened the drive and had cleaned the platters with Windex. I said "Sir, you can't even open the drive unless you're in a cleanroom". His response "Well my wife is pretty throughout usually - it's a pretty clean room". Doh!
2) I had a lady complain that her floppy wouldn't fit in the drive. She said she finally got it to fit but couldn't get it back out again. I asked her to what kind of drive and she says "The little new one". I asked her what she did to get it to actually go in, and she says "Well, the only way I could get it to fit was to fold it in half, but then it seemed to fit fine". She was trying to put a 5 1/4" floppy in a 3 1/2" bay.
3) Once a secreatary had trouble with a CMS tape backup drive. It would backup her computer just fine with no errors, but could never restore - it always said the tape was blank. So we replaced the drive several times with no luck. Finally, we sent her a new larger tape drive and she said "Well now I can't fit it on top of my monitor because there's no room between her monitor and the shelf above it". I said "You store your tape drive on top of your monitor?" She confirmed this. Apparently there was a massive amount of RF coming out of the vents in the top of her monitor, degaussing and erasing her tapes as she recorded them. As soon as she sat it on her desktop next to the computer, it worked fine.
4) I asked a guy once to ship his drive back to us in popcorn. So yes indeed, that's what he did!
5) Once we received a drive back without an RMA number, which normally we would reject. There was one slip of paper with the drive that just said "BAD" in big penciled letters on the paper. So for the heck of it, I had the test people try the drive out. As soon as they plugged in power, the drive started to sputter and jump around on the table like an offset motor. People were jumping out of the way. I said "Ok, so his description is accurate (LOL) and go ahead and replace it without an RMA number".
6) I once got a call that a guy had some trouble with his system. I forget what the problem was, but we corrected it fairly quickly over the phone. He then thanked me and continued that he really liked the system, and his parting words before he hung up were "oh and I really like the cupholder, that was a nice bonus, bye!" and hung up. I can only assume he was talking about the cdrom drive.
7) Once a guy had one of our modem floppies (5 1/4") with the install s/w, and the s/w didn't work and I suspected a virus after he explained what it did/said. So knowing that we give out thousands of these, I wanted to make sure this wasn't on every disc we sent out so I asked him to make a copy of it for me. A week later I got a letter with a photocopy of the disc included.
Oh I am sure there are more, but I have to get back to work.
Some of us program things that will always and only be on one platform, and for us at least, we require real-time accuracy and access to the lowest levels of the processor. I am not opposed to the idea of using an intrepreted language, but as it is, I have to convert C++ to C, then to assembly, then hand-tuned to optimize, so I doubt this will be an option for us for a long time if ever. Yes the hardware will increase in speed across the board, but our capabilities/features per box would expand to match ( to soak up all available resources )
I'm too tired tonight to really get into this (1am) but maybe tomorrow. I do Halloween stuff professionally, with serious theme park gear. Checkout http://www.rivertoncemetery.com./
One fun party idea if this matches with your theming, is to stack a bunch of TVs in a pile. The older the better, different sizes. It's best if they're all black and white, but it doesn't matter. Stack some sideways, some upside down. Plug them all in, turn them all on, so that they're all playing static. Then I like to take one or two odd random ones (at least turned the correct way) and wire them to the same DVD or VCR, and playback wihtout audio (I assume you have loud tunes at this party) old black and white movies. Some good choices are Frankenstein, Mummy, The Fly, Them, Dracula, Nosferatu (my fav), or something like this. Also Metropolis is ok.
If you can afford to jack up the TVs, paint them jet black (except the screen) with some silver paint dripped down the side of some. Gives it a retro techno post-apocalypse big-brother feel.
Another idea is to run a fine copper wire around each half of the seat of the toilet in the bathroom, and run each side to a terminal of a transformer, and hook that transformer to a 9V battery. When the person is using the toilet, you connect the battery (or push a button) and it momentarily sends a jolt to the person's bare a*s. DISCLAIMER - this can injure people if they are sensitive to elecricity because it F's with your heart, or if the current is too strong. Use with extreme caution and at your own risk, and make sure you use a low enough transformer.
On using fog - if you can make an elongated wooden box with a fan at one end, and put regular ice in a bowl in the box, then hook up a dryer hose to each end of the box, and run your fog machine into one end, this will "chill" the fog to keep it lying low in the house. Otherwise you need a Liquid Nitrogen rig to put out fog that's denser than air and will sink to the floor like dry ice.
Make a giant skull facade over your front door so that people walk through the mouth to enter.
Have a friend sit a styrofoam stylist's head with a scary mask draped over it on his head. Have him put on a big athletic sweatshirt over his head so the hood of the sweatshirt is around the fake head. His actual head is below where the zipper is. Have him stand against the wall with his hands hidden on the wall where people walk by to get to the front door. Have him practice acting like a dummy and standing funny (proped) against the wall. You can add other imbellishments to make it look like a dummy. When people walk by, they think he's a fake dummy, and he can jump at them and scare them. This works will little to no effort (get a mask), but requires a patient and well-propped up guy who practices.
Do NOT use candles outdoors for any reason. Use them indoors only if there is someone to supervise who is sober. I do not recommend them despite their good looks. One note - you can buy broken candles by the pound (cheap) if you ask around (I forget in my old age).
You can make tombstones out of styrofoam covered in plaster of paris (get at Home Depot for cheap, not hobby store). Take pictures of gravestones from old cemeteries or find off of the Net. Do a good job or don't bother.
You can paint light bulbs red, blue, or green, if you don't want to buy the ready made ones at Home Depot. Use High-Temp paint, and test them before using them.
A fun twist at parties is to look up All Hallows Eve or All Saints Day/All Souls Day. Halloween is a traditional Druids Thanksgiving before it was a Christian holiday (what you may find may shock you in the truth of it all). You can also use info from an Irish or British All Hallowees Eve. Tell fortunes by the fire by roasting walnuts. Use a snapapple (Halloween also called SnapApple night). Serve Irish soul-cakes to the guests (they're pretty good to eat and very cool in theme IMHO). Some years I
It's fine that good-natured philosophers sat down and took their own and others ideas such as "love thy neighbor as thy self" and put them together in a book for us to learn from. In fact, it's wonderful. However, throughout history, cult* leaders have used such wise words of wisdom to show that they are the ones that know the way and people should listen to them and not someone else. Besides the words of wisdom in the Bible (mostly common sense) is the account of Jesus, and if it doesn't look like someone after the fact wrote his life and death in the way they wished it was (history has always been written by the victors of wars) then I don't know what does.
The process of giving people truths, then spinning them with your own version of the truth after that, is common. Make the falsehoods look like truth, look like they make sense. Mix the false with the true, and people will believe it all. People use this method to control others and put themselves on a pedastal - and that *IS* the human nature you're talking about that destroys ourselves. So I guess I agree with you. Then of course the coup de grâce is when the Bible uses the circular logic of saying that God is omnipotent and onmniscient, and God's hand wrote this through the authors, so everything in the Bible is true, including this statement!
I am a scientist. Every day I re-evaluate 100% of what I'm told is truth by other scientists, and I re-evaluate my own findings. I assume they're false until proven, or as close to being proven true as possible. As soon as something comes along to disprove something I believe is fact, I'm excited that humans are just a little bit closer to understanding the actual facts. Religious people on the other hand, look for things to prove them right, and are reluctant to listen to things that prove them wrong. I would be too.
Fact: The more educated a people are as a whole, the less religious they are as a whole.
*cult: The only difference between a cult and a religion is the number of people that follow the doctrine.
Electricity is a theory too, and you can't prove it by holding it in your hand, but that doesn't mean the methods the scientists came up with to explain it aren't valid. Evolution is as close to a fact as anyone who holds an ancient half-history half-fiction book needs. The fact that the book itself says it's fact doesn't make it fact, and this should be obvious to anyone with all their teeth.
God may exist, but if he/she does, for all intents and purposes he set forth Evolotion and all that entails as his/her handywork, plus the mountains and mountains and mountains of corroborating evidence to prove it. The Bible is a book a group of people wrote to serve their own purposes. Convieniently, it fit their purposes for their day and age.
I doubt a God as stated in the Bible would devalue women so much as to send his son and not his daughter, instead of the reality that a man wrote the Bible ages ago when women weren't even remotely treated equally. Reality may hurt, but it's still reality.
My family prays for me, and if what they want happens they say "It could only be God" but if it doesn't, they don't say anything. Funny. They look for things to fit their dogma, and close their ears when it doesn't.
Conversely, scientists slowly and usually sheepishly turn in white-papers with their findings and their conclusions after giving it to colleagues to read over, and the community carefully takes the new information into consideration, always with the suspicious eye. Only when information, data, results has not been found by any known means to be wrong does it get elevated to the "might be true" status. Then only after many other documents corroborating it are similarly published does the original data/results get elevated to "probably true". Scientists are so ready concede incorrect results, and religious people are so ready to say they're right for no other reason than they decide they are.
Religous texts fail the moment they are put to half the scrutiny that scientists who pursue Evolution as you say as a "theory", put to it every day. Even if scraps of the texts are true, the parts concerning scientific interest fail miserably.
Slashdot Mirror
Because I had no idea what I was getting into, had never been up there before (had been through the attraction on the ground), and the guy who took me up there basically dropped me off and said "ok, next time the cab comes around, jump on the top, there's an outlet for you to use"
So I had to make do with what I had. I was long done with the work before he came back, so I had to ride up there around and around, which was not only annoying, but scary.
Now don't ya think that if I could have brought a power strip, I would have?
Having to work on top of the Universal Studios Florida King Kong attraction tram car while moving around the track with guests in the cab below. It is way up in the air, a flat cement surface far below. As it goes around the track, it shakes violently as Kong grabs the car etc. (it's essentially a simulator ride suspended from above), and it's covered in leaking hydraulic fluid, making it very slippery on the catwalk. There are no rails. I had one electrical outlet up there, which I could either use for the power of my laptop, or a small AC light I brought, but not both.
This is a good start for an online reference:
http://www.ai-junkie.com/ann/evolved/nnt2.html
Would be very nice, it may take me too long to learn the jargon of professional references, this is a personal interest of mine. I have an engineering background, not biology.
My background is engineering too - circuit design, programming, etc. I picked up the knowledge of biological neural nets from my interest in artificial ones.
As for the pure electrical vs electro-mechanical differences, I do not see them as a big deal, because the electrical sides alone are totally different too. In the end you break the actual neuron's actions into cause/effect relationships and model those relationships. It is not like an artificial neuron in a computer 'fires' via opening and closing ion channels in a cell membrane anyway. Right?
It is correct that artificial neurons in a computer are simply arriving at values, not even firing at all, let alone in a cell membrane. It's also true that you're tring to model the neuron's actions from cause/effect. Here's the rub - today's artificial neural nets are in their infancy, and really aren't that great at mimicking what the brain does. That's my point. Today, artificial neural nets have to be trained first to do any sort of recognition job (there are a few self-learning nets, but I won't get into that, and those have very specialized purposes), and one neural net that recognizes faces in a crowd would be terrible at recognizing items on a table. The brain is able to recognize all sorts of things and how to process them, and it's learning mode is ongoing. Scientists today have no idea how to model this behavior. A real neuron does not just come up with a fire/no fire rule with an output of 1 based solely on weighted inputs. A real neuron fires with varing amounts of electrical current, and also, the chemical receptors in the neuron can change whether or not it fires at all! The chemical side of things has not been modeled at all.
So I expect that as we learn how to make neural nets more like how our actual brain works, including things like variable voltage firing, and modeling what affect the chemical swirl in the brain actually does to the net itself, we'll find the model becomes more complex and requires the artificial neuron itself to require more computing power. Hence my suggestion that possibly a computer core might be allocated to a single artificial neuron.
I think it is obvious that multiple cores will be useful in this kind of research/application though. If for no other reason than they are both parallel processes.
I guess we'll find out. Ever consider what a parallel process in your own body might be? Here's a fun one that most people can relate to - Have you ever had the experience of someone behind you saying something you couldn't quite hear so you said "What?" and then a moment later you knew what they said and you say to yourself, "Why did I just say 'What?'? I know what they said!". Here's why that happens. When your ears hear that somone said something, two parallel processes start at the same time. The first of these is a quick and dirty "phrase matching" process that simply says "What phrase did that person just say? Do I recognize that whole thing?" This process takes a short amount of time because it's trying to match a huge phrase, and if the sounds uttered were not that discernable (noisy or low), this process returns "Nope, no idea what the person said", causing you to say "What?". But the other process, that was started at the same time as the first process, hasn't finished yet. This process is slow and methodical. It takes each sound and slowly compares them to other sounds you've heard and slowly pieces together the puzzle of what each word you heard was". This takes a while, certainly longer than the first
T,
I am not sure if you are asking for specific professional references or just more info.
I run two companies, so I'm not sure I can find time to look up a bunch of work I have studied for years. I certainly have the literary resources, but finding an actual reference to theory may take a while. If you're simply looking for online references or books that describe natural and artificial neurons, I know plenty. Let me know what you're looking for.
It's not so much that values/weights are an invalid way of generating a neural network. That's the basic for almost all nets I know of. There are two issues. The most straightforward issue is that these neurons generate a fire/don't fire result, which could be thought of as a 0 or 1 answer. Some studies have shown that the human brain doesn't really work this way. They certainly do fire, but not the brain is electo/chemical, and sometimes the chemicals between neurons change without an electrical firing. This is key. However, the issue could be simplified by saying that the results might be better with a -10VDC to 10VDC analogue value rather than a simply binary computer-related 0 or 1.
The second issue is partially related - these computer-based neural nets fundamentally do not work the way our brains do, as they are purely electrical and not chemical - so the issue is that because they don't fundamentally work like a brain does, then in order to actually achieve conscieousness and real usefullness, maybe "thought", the way these neurons work needs to be more complex, thus my suggestion of a core attributed to one neuron. It may not need that much processing or it may need much more, and certainly I believe that under this model we're talking about millions or billions of "cores", but overall, for the sake of this conversation, I am simply saying that these are precursors to things that will indeed support more accurate representations of how the brain works. It's difficult to make Von-Neumann architecture machines (computers as we know them today) to do this effort.
Hope that helps.
Jeff
This comment does not exactly apply to the question put forth about performance of existing apps under multiple cores. However, I would like to bring up that, in my opinion, given my experience with artificial Neural networks and related work, that I expect, in some form or another, that it is likely that one could fairly easily argue:
1) The number of cores is going to increase
2) The current concept of an artificial Neuron having some sort of value, with weights attributed to it is too simple for how our human brains realy work, and therefore need more than a simple value and one algorithm, such that it will likely need to be replaced with a more complex model of values and algorithms, and the work on such that requires a mini-process or in this case "a core"
I expect that given that there will be an increased amount of cores, probably with an increase similiar to hard disc, processor, or memory increases of the past (1 10MB hard disc increasing to 500GB today), that we will have thousands or even hundreds of thousands of cores.
As we learn more about how the brain works I believe that 2) will be accepted as true at some point.
So I expect that more and more new software will attempt to be more intuitive, as more and more people begin to agree that the software we have now in general is crap, in that it doesn't help the layman as much as it could do their jobs.
This intuitiveness will likely be in the form of artificial Neural Nets, paving the way for computing systems to begin to act like the science fiction computer systems we think of in "the future".
Just my two-cents guess...
People (apparently you) seem to think that the only possibility is running Windows and this utility on some nice and pat environment. Rarely is this the case with most of us here. I may have to fix some computer by shoving a CDrom in the computer and running a utility because there is some problem. So if the utility won't run because the OS is confused (which MS OSs often get confused) then there's no way to fix the problem. Essentially they would have shot themselves in the foot.
If some MS exec decides that win.com (or whatever) is protected fine, but leave the utilities and similiar ilk alone. Protecting the world is great at some boardroom meeting, but reality is quite different.
YES seriously. Not because the copy of Windows that happens to be running on the current machine is not paid for, but because it's lame to have to worry about copying utilities around from machine to machine and all of a sudden have some problem because Microsoft f'd with it.
Microsoft doesn't get it. It's very obvious. They add features they would like, not what the rest of the world actually wants.
Hi,
Well I don't know whether or not these things happened to others or not. I only worked in tech support for a few years. Frankly, I own and run two companies now, I don't have time to post stuff, I rarely do it on Slashdot, and I certainly have never once in my life typed the info I did on this issue before in my life, nor have I read it on any site before. I have told others verbally, but that's it. The only story that happened to me that I have heard from others at all is a similar story about the cdrom being used as a cupholder. I heard this like 10 years later. I don't really have time to be commenting this stuff either, but I thought I thought it cool that there was finally something I had experience in that I could contribute, and wouldn't you know right off the bat somebody things I made it up for reasons I don't know. It's not like anybody here has any idea who I am, where I live, what I do, or anything else. I have better things to do than post bogus stories about when I was a teenager.
I don't blame you your view, and I guess I'm done bothering to convince you that these things happened to me. Many other similar things happened, but none of them are as interesting. Except for, maybe, the sales girl Donna that worked at our reps office in Arizona kept calling me for internal/inhouse T.S. because she trusted my experience, and after a while we got to be friends, and then she invited me to visit her in Phoenix, to which I did. She tried to fax a picture of herself to me, but the company office nazi Aimee ripped it up (there was no internet at the time to speak of), so when I got to the airport in Arizona I had no idea what she looked like. An hour passed and finally I heard this totally familar voice behind me talking to the person at the counter looking for me and I could tell it was her. We had a great weekend needless to say and dated for about a year. So I'm pretty positive this is not a tech support story that has been told before (not that it's that big of a deal). I guess you could argue I made the whole thing up.
I figured somebody would say that. It's really easy to put others down when you make guesses about the truth.
Each and every one of those things happened to me personally while working at Franklin Telecommunications in Westlake, CA between 1987 and 1988. It may be that people make the same kinds of mistakes over and over, I don't know. But I can tell you all kinds of details about any one of the stories if anyone cares... in fact...I think I still have the xerox copy of the floppy somewhere.
Ok I have a few stories from my days in tech support. Now you have to remember, these are the OLD days of computers - DOS and such.
1) I had a guy call and say that his Seagate ST225 20MB MFM drive was acting up. He said he was getting "Massive read errors" but that it used to work fine. I asked him if something changed. He said he wife had cleaned the computer recently, and I started to ask him "Did she bump any cables" when he says "Is there a preferred cleaning fluid for cleaning hard drive platters?" I said "Excuse me?" He said his wife had opened the drive and had cleaned the platters with Windex. I said "Sir, you can't even open the drive unless you're in a cleanroom". His response "Well my wife is pretty throughout usually - it's a pretty clean room". Doh!
2) I had a lady complain that her floppy wouldn't fit in the drive. She said she finally got it to fit but couldn't get it back out again. I asked her to what kind of drive and she says "The little new one". I asked her what she did to get it to actually go in, and she says "Well, the only way I could get it to fit was to fold it in half, but then it seemed to fit fine". She was trying to put a 5 1/4" floppy in a 3 1/2" bay.
3) Once a secreatary had trouble with a CMS tape backup drive. It would backup her computer just fine with no errors, but could never restore - it always said the tape was blank. So we replaced the drive several times with no luck. Finally, we sent her a new larger tape drive and she said "Well now I can't fit it on top of my monitor because there's no room between her monitor and the shelf above it". I said "You store your tape drive on top of your monitor?" She confirmed this. Apparently there was a massive amount of RF coming out of the vents in the top of her monitor, degaussing and erasing her tapes as she recorded them. As soon as she sat it on her desktop next to the computer, it worked fine.
4) I asked a guy once to ship his drive back to us in popcorn. So yes indeed, that's what he did!
5) Once we received a drive back without an RMA number, which normally we would reject. There was one slip of paper with the drive that just said "BAD" in big penciled letters on the paper. So for the heck of it, I had the test people try the drive out. As soon as they plugged in power, the drive started to sputter and jump around on the table like an offset motor. People were jumping out of the way. I said "Ok, so his description is accurate (LOL) and go ahead and replace it without an RMA number".
6) I once got a call that a guy had some trouble with his system. I forget what the problem was, but we corrected it fairly quickly over the phone. He then thanked me and continued that he really liked the system, and his parting words before he hung up were "oh and I really like the cupholder, that was a nice bonus, bye!" and hung up. I can only assume he was talking about the cdrom drive.
7) Once a guy had one of our modem floppies (5 1/4") with the install s/w, and the s/w didn't work and I suspected a virus after he explained what it did/said. So knowing that we give out thousands of these, I wanted to make sure this wasn't on every disc we sent out so I asked him to make a copy of it for me. A week later I got a letter with a photocopy of the disc included.
Oh I am sure there are more, but I have to get back to work.
Ciao!
Some of us program things that will always and only be on one platform, and for us at least, we require real-time accuracy and access to the lowest levels of the processor. I am not opposed to the idea of using an intrepreted language, but as it is, I have to convert C++ to C, then to assembly, then hand-tuned to optimize, so I doubt this will be an option for us for a long time if ever. Yes the hardware will increase in speed across the board, but our capabilities/features per box would expand to match ( to soak up all available resources )
I'm too tired tonight to really get into this (1am) but maybe tomorrow. I do Halloween stuff professionally, with serious theme park gear. Checkout http://www.rivertoncemetery.com./
One fun party idea if this matches with your theming, is to stack a bunch of TVs in a pile. The older the better, different sizes. It's best if they're all black and white, but it doesn't matter. Stack some sideways, some upside down. Plug them all in, turn them all on, so that they're all playing static. Then I like to take one or two odd random ones (at least turned the correct way) and wire them to the same DVD or VCR, and playback wihtout audio (I assume you have loud tunes at this party) old black and white movies. Some good choices are Frankenstein, Mummy, The Fly, Them, Dracula, Nosferatu (my fav), or something like this. Also Metropolis is ok.
If you can afford to jack up the TVs, paint them jet black (except the screen) with some silver paint dripped down the side of some. Gives it a retro techno post-apocalypse big-brother feel.
Another idea is to run a fine copper wire around each half of the seat of the toilet in the bathroom, and run each side to a terminal of a transformer, and hook that transformer to a 9V battery. When the person is using the toilet, you connect the battery (or push a button) and it momentarily sends a jolt to the person's bare a*s. DISCLAIMER - this can injure people if they are sensitive to elecricity because it F's with your heart, or if the current is too strong. Use with extreme caution and at your own risk, and make sure you use a low enough transformer.
On using fog - if you can make an elongated wooden box with a fan at one end, and put regular ice in a bowl in the box, then hook up a dryer hose to each end of the box, and run your fog machine into one end, this will "chill" the fog to keep it lying low in the house. Otherwise you need a Liquid Nitrogen rig to put out fog that's denser than air and will sink to the floor like dry ice.
Make a giant skull facade over your front door so that people walk through the mouth to enter.
Have a friend sit a styrofoam stylist's head with a scary mask draped over it on his head. Have him put on a big athletic sweatshirt over his head so the hood of the sweatshirt is around the fake head. His actual head is below where the zipper is. Have him stand against the wall with his hands hidden on the wall where people walk by to get to the front door. Have him practice acting like a dummy and standing funny (proped) against the wall. You can add other imbellishments to make it look like a dummy. When people walk by, they think he's a fake dummy, and he can jump at them and scare them. This works will little to no effort (get a mask), but requires a patient and well-propped up guy who practices.
Do NOT use candles outdoors for any reason. Use them indoors only if there is someone to supervise who is sober. I do not recommend them despite their good looks. One note - you can buy broken candles by the pound (cheap) if you ask around (I forget in my old age).
You can make tombstones out of styrofoam covered in plaster of paris (get at Home Depot for cheap, not hobby store). Take pictures of gravestones from old cemeteries or find off of the Net. Do a good job or don't bother.
You can paint light bulbs red, blue, or green, if you don't want to buy the ready made ones at Home Depot. Use High-Temp paint, and test them before using them.
A fun twist at parties is to look up All Hallows Eve or All Saints Day/All Souls Day. Halloween is a traditional Druids Thanksgiving before it was a Christian holiday (what you may find may shock you in the truth of it all). You can also use info from an Irish or British All Hallowees Eve. Tell fortunes by the fire by roasting walnuts. Use a snapapple (Halloween also called SnapApple night). Serve Irish soul-cakes to the guests (they're pretty good to eat and very cool in theme IMHO). Some years I
It's fine that good-natured philosophers sat down and took their own and others ideas such as "love thy neighbor as thy self" and put them together in a book for us to learn from. In fact, it's wonderful. However, throughout history, cult* leaders have used such wise words of wisdom to show that they are the ones that know the way and people should listen to them and not someone else. Besides the words of wisdom in the Bible (mostly common sense) is the account of Jesus, and if it doesn't look like someone after the fact wrote his life and death in the way they wished it was (history has always been written by the victors of wars) then I don't know what does.
The process of giving people truths, then spinning them with your own version of the truth after that, is common. Make the falsehoods look like truth, look like they make sense. Mix the false with the true, and people will believe it all. People use this method to control others and put themselves on a pedastal - and that *IS* the human nature you're talking about that destroys ourselves. So I guess I agree with you. Then of course the coup de grâce is when the Bible uses the circular logic of saying that God is omnipotent and onmniscient, and God's hand wrote this through the authors, so everything in the Bible is true, including this statement!
I am a scientist. Every day I re-evaluate 100% of what I'm told is truth by other scientists, and I re-evaluate my own findings. I assume they're false until proven, or as close to being proven true as possible. As soon as something comes along to disprove something I believe is fact, I'm excited that humans are just a little bit closer to understanding the actual facts. Religious people on the other hand, look for things to prove them right, and are reluctant to listen to things that prove them wrong. I would be too.
Fact: The more educated a people are as a whole, the less religious they are as a whole.
*cult: The only difference between a cult and a religion is the number of people that follow the doctrine.
Creationism: An Argument Against Reason
Warning to Creationists: Plug your ears and close your eyes. Don't read this webpage. Run away, hide!
Creationism: An Argument Against Reason
Warning to Creationists: Plug your ears and close your eyes. Don't read this webpage. Run away, hide!
Poppycock.
Electricity is a theory too, and you can't prove it by holding it in your hand, but that doesn't mean the methods the scientists came up with to explain it aren't valid. Evolution is as close to a fact as anyone who holds an ancient half-history half-fiction book needs. The fact that the book itself says it's fact doesn't make it fact, and this should be obvious to anyone with all their teeth.
God may exist, but if he/she does, for all intents and purposes he set forth Evolotion and all that entails as his/her handywork, plus the mountains and mountains and mountains of corroborating evidence to prove it. The Bible is a book a group of people wrote to serve their own purposes. Convieniently, it fit their purposes for their day and age.
I doubt a God as stated in the Bible would devalue women so much as to send his son and not his daughter, instead of the reality that a man wrote the Bible ages ago when women weren't even remotely treated equally. Reality may hurt, but it's still reality.
My family prays for me, and if what they want happens they say "It could only be God" but if it doesn't, they don't say anything. Funny. They look for things to fit their dogma, and close their ears when it doesn't.
Conversely, scientists slowly and usually sheepishly turn in white-papers with their findings and their conclusions after giving it to colleagues to read over, and the community carefully takes the new information into consideration, always with the suspicious eye. Only when information, data, results has not been found by any known means to be wrong does it get elevated to the "might be true" status. Then only after many other documents corroborating it are similarly published does the original data/results get elevated to "probably true". Scientists are so ready concede incorrect results, and religious people are so ready to say they're right for no other reason than they decide they are.
Religous texts fail the moment they are put to half the scrutiny that scientists who pursue Evolution as you say as a "theory", put to it every day. Even if scraps of the texts are true, the parts concerning scientific interest fail miserably.
Now if only you could log on to a Quake Arena or Half-Life server on-board and play coach section against business class.
Die, CEO of so and so, die!
Signatures? ÒöÈon't need no stinking signatures!
Hey I might need some work...(*maybe*).
Give me an email, and tell me what you know and how much you want an hour.
jeff@graniteprecision.com