I can't run the executable "firefox.exe" at work because it "has been disabled by the administrator." Solution? Rename to firefox2.exe.
The only pain comes when firefox is updated... it leaves the firefox2.exe executable from the previous installation, and adds the new firefox.exe to the install folder. It then becomes a dumb little task to update all the icons and shortcuts scattered about my system.
Wish there was some way to specify, during install, the resulting executable name. Of course, I have to be one of the maybe twenty people in the world who needs this, so maybe it's not worth the miniscule bloat.
The ACM International Collegiate Programming Competition is in no way a barometer for quality of CS teaching. I am the perfect example.
As a sophomore in college, I participated in the regional ICPC having only taken 1.5 semesters of college-level CS classes and 0 semesters in high school. I was on a good team, and we took first in our regional.
I finished up that semester, and was halfway through the next when we got to World Finals (ie: 2.5 semesters under my belt: intro, data structures, 0.5*(digital systems, assembly)). Our team tied for 11th. This was 2002.
Ever since then, I haven't gotten back to Worlds. Here are the reasons: first retry, we got hung up on input...kept getting IO errors => luck (or lack thereof). next retry: placed 2nd which is usually a ticket to Worlds...except rules stated only one team per school goes to Worlds, and guess who beat us. last retry: we just plain had an off-day.
OK, sure. I can accept the fact that my teammates were the main reason the first year we went. But the fact remains: I know plenty about this contest. And what I can say with certainty is that the results of this competition have absolutely no bearing on industry performance. Most problems in the contest are too abstract for real-life implementations. Seriously, how often will you need to implement a string hamming distance program... much less one that runs in O(m*n) time? This contest deals with three abilities: recognizing the type of algorithm needed given a short statement (and knowing a crapload of algorithms to pick from), fast typing, and speedy debugging skills.
Often, the mantra for a difficult problem becomes: it doesn't need to work for all cases... just the ones the judges use. Sometimes that boils down to brute force, exponential even, with a few optimizations.
Not winning the ICPC just means you didn't have enough experience with the problems came up on the contest. And since the problems aren't the kind you'll be implementing in real-life, you have to practice LOTS.
Winning the ICPC means you have some damn good abilities.... just not necessarily ones that translate well into industry.
OK, so the idea of a national ID card being attached to the emergency military bill sucks.
And requiring such a national ID card to fly in an airplace sucks.
And a lot of other things about this ID thing suck.
But there is one upside to this: reduction of election fraud. If you're required to scan in when you vote, voter disenfranchisement should plummet... assuming Diebold doesn't get it's slimy hands on the system, of course. Sorry Chicago, no more "Vote early, vote often" of yore.
Am I the only one who immediately thinks about cycling when a slashdot title includes "Trek" sans "Star"? And does that mean I have to turn in my membership punchcard?
While obviously not the main reason most people use IM, some of us do have friends on different continents with whom we'd like to have conversations. Phone is out of the question, and email is too choppy.
Surprisingly enough, NASA uses, almost exclusively, a blend of UNIX (for number crunching) and Mac OS (for desktops). Recently some Linux has entered the fray, mostly on servers. On a recent trip to Langley (NASA, not CIA), the only wintel machine I saw was running X over the network.
Former governor Lee Dreyfus once described Madison as:
25 square miles surrounded by reality
He couldn't have been further from the truth (well, except that the city is ~90 square miles now). A monopoly on cable services (up yours Charter!), protests at least once a week, and now a capitol building wanting to impose a download tax? Tell me again why I chose to stay in Madison?
So, what about the n-119 applicants who didn't find out about the so-called "hack" before it was exposed? I hardly think none of them would have done the same.
Your comment may be insightful, but it's far from the whole truth.
Lockheed Martin et al may certainly have screwups from time to time, but not all aerospace companies are like that. I, for example, work at a small aerospace company (~90 employees) and we have a typical small business attitude: if we don't achieve near-perfection, we're toast.
But yes, there are also small businesses that have big problems. We, for instance, received a 8-figure contract because another small aerospace company was not cutting it. But NASA was so impressed with our previous work, they just transferred the contract to us.
Check out vprMatrix. These x86 laptops are fairly decent in quality (my ~3 year old laptop still works great), and they're designed by F. A. Porsche GmbH. The thing has style.
Will windowing ever be removed from the Windows (yes, I know it sounds odd) kernel so that an older machine might run Windows sans graphics? To me, this is one of the great benefits to UNIX/Linux. "What are we going to do with that old box in the corner?" "Eh, just put Linux on it and have it run a small website." You don't need a windowing environment to serve webpages.
Someone modify the white-hat code into some other white-hat code...except instead of just doing a mkdir or opening IE, show a typical joe-blow user exactly how dangerous this really is. I don't know how... perhaps display a dialog box that says something to the effect of:
Windows and Internet Explorer have a very large security problem between them. So great is this hole that the webpage you just visited is capable of shutting down your computer. If you don't believe me, wait one minute. If you don't want the shutdown to occur, click "Cancel." Oh, and by the way, check your desktop...
And have the program put a Firefox link on the user's desktop.
Now I realize that this may make some people cringe: "But you're making people think that Firefox users are hackers!" The idea is not to send anyone the link to this quasi-malicious page. The idea is to put a link to it in your AIM/Yahoo! Messenger/forum sig/etc. Show it to friends. Word of mouth is incredibly powerful, as you may know.
but "motion" cannot be described in "microns." I think you mean "cheap displacement sensor".
And viscoelasticity is not necessarily a plastic-related thing. Some metals and composites may strain in a viscoelastic manner. Biological tissue is also generally deemed viscoelastic. Basically, it means: the amount of stress in the material is proportional to the rate at which it is displaced (or strained, in more correct terms).
Last Friday (Nov. 19) was a big milestone for many small companies like Robter Zubrin's. This is when NASA announced its 2004 SBIR Phase I awards. And yes, this Gashopper is one of them.
Check them all out at: http://sbir.gsfc.nasa.gov/SBIR/sbir2004/phase1/awa rds/2004topic.html There's really some innovative stuff going on. Also, to the future rocket scientists out there: if you want to work in aerospace, this is an excellent site to find small companies doing NASA subcontracting.
In a typical chemical rocket, you burn and coast. During the burn, you have micro- or macro-g conditions (depending on numerous factors). During the coast, however, you have micro-gravity...so micro, in fact, you could consider it zero-g.[1]
With these engines, however, you don't have a coast period. You are continually in a burn state and therefore are continually accelerating, producing a micro-g environment. Granted, the acceleration is near-trivial, but it's still "near-weightless." Perhaps the only zero-g period with this type of craft is halfway to its destination, bewteen when the engine is shut off, the craft is turned around, and the engine is turned back on for deceleration.
[1]Before you chastise me, floating around in orbit is not a 2-body problem. You still have the sun, moon, earth, and self....among other diminutive gravitational forces to other bodies.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't run the executable "firefox.exe" at work because it "has been disabled by the administrator." Solution? Rename to firefox2.exe.
The only pain comes when firefox is updated... it leaves the firefox2.exe executable from the previous installation, and adds the new firefox.exe to the install folder. It then becomes a dumb little task to update all the icons and shortcuts scattered about my system.
Wish there was some way to specify, during install, the resulting executable name. Of course, I have to be one of the maybe twenty people in the world who needs this, so maybe it's not worth the miniscule bloat.
The ACM International Collegiate Programming Competition is in no way a barometer for quality of CS teaching. I am the perfect example.
As a sophomore in college, I participated in the regional ICPC having only taken 1.5 semesters of college-level CS classes and 0 semesters in high school. I was on a good team, and we took first in our regional.
I finished up that semester, and was halfway through the next when we got to World Finals (ie: 2.5 semesters under my belt: intro, data structures, 0.5*(digital systems, assembly)). Our team tied for 11th. This was 2002.
Ever since then, I haven't gotten back to Worlds. Here are the reasons: first retry, we got hung up on input...kept getting IO errors => luck (or lack thereof). next retry: placed 2nd which is usually a ticket to Worlds...except rules stated only one team per school goes to Worlds, and guess who beat us. last retry: we just plain had an off-day.
OK, sure. I can accept the fact that my teammates were the main reason the first year we went. But the fact remains: I know plenty about this contest. And what I can say with certainty is that the results of this competition have absolutely no bearing on industry performance. Most problems in the contest are too abstract for real-life implementations. Seriously, how often will you need to implement a string hamming distance program... much less one that runs in O(m*n) time? This contest deals with three abilities: recognizing the type of algorithm needed given a short statement (and knowing a crapload of algorithms to pick from), fast typing, and speedy debugging skills.
Often, the mantra for a difficult problem becomes: it doesn't need to work for all cases... just the ones the judges use. Sometimes that boils down to brute force, exponential even, with a few optimizations.
Not winning the ICPC just means you didn't have enough experience with the problems came up on the contest. And since the problems aren't the kind you'll be implementing in real-life, you have to practice LOTS.
Winning the ICPC means you have some damn good abilities.... just not necessarily ones that translate well into industry.
I've already see how a worm spreads. Especially one that initially grows exponentially with a time constant of 8.5 seconds. Yes, 8.5 seconds.
Slammer
Pay attention to the time and infected hosts data at the bottom.
OK, so the idea of a national ID card being attached to the emergency military bill sucks.
And requiring such a national ID card to fly in an airplace sucks.
And a lot of other things about this ID thing suck.
But there is one upside to this: reduction of election fraud. If you're required to scan in when you vote, voter disenfranchisement should plummet... assuming Diebold doesn't get it's slimy hands on the system, of course. Sorry Chicago, no more "Vote early, vote often" of yore.
01100110011101012
Of course for China, that's 2.9% while for the US, it's 13.5%.
Check for yourself: http://www.census.gov/ipc/prod/wp02/tabA-04.pdf
Hooray for manipulating statistics!
Am I the only one who immediately thinks about cycling when a slashdot title includes "Trek" sans "Star"? And does that mean I have to turn in my membership punchcard?
While obviously not the main reason most people use IM, some of us do have friends on different continents with whom we'd like to have conversations. Phone is out of the question, and email is too choppy.
Surprisingly enough, NASA uses, almost exclusively, a blend of UNIX (for number crunching) and Mac OS (for desktops). Recently some Linux has entered the fray, mostly on servers. On a recent trip to Langley (NASA, not CIA), the only wintel machine I saw was running X over the network.
Slight oversimplification, but the idea is there.
Oh and by the way, IAARS (I am a rocket scientist).
Could we just sell her for $30k? We could fund a bunch of projects with that!
(lay off. i know it's a joke)
He couldn't have been further from the truth (well, except that the city is ~90 square miles now). A monopoly on cable services (up yours Charter!), protests at least once a week, and now a capitol building wanting to impose a download tax? Tell me again why I chose to stay in Madison?
yeah, but does it run lin...
oh, nevermind
So, what about the n-119 applicants who didn't find out about the so-called "hack" before it was exposed? I hardly think none of them would have done the same.
Your comment may be insightful, but it's far from the whole truth.
Lockheed Martin et al may certainly have screwups from time to time, but not all aerospace companies are like that. I, for example, work at a small aerospace company (~90 employees) and we have a typical small business attitude: if we don't achieve near-perfection, we're toast.
But yes, there are also small businesses that have big problems. We, for instance, received a 8-figure contract because another small aerospace company was not cutting it. But NASA was so impressed with our previous work, they just transferred the contract to us.
Be careful with your generalizations.
Check out vprMatrix. These x86 laptops are fairly decent in quality (my ~3 year old laptop still works great), and they're designed by F. A. Porsche GmbH. The thing has style.
Will windowing ever be removed from the Windows (yes, I know it sounds odd) kernel so that an older machine might run Windows sans graphics? To me, this is one of the great benefits to UNIX/Linux. "What are we going to do with that old box in the corner?" "Eh, just put Linux on it and have it run a small website." You don't need a windowing environment to serve webpages.
Someone modify the white-hat code into some other white-hat code...except instead of just doing a mkdir or opening IE, show a typical joe-blow user exactly how dangerous this really is. I don't know how... perhaps display a dialog box that says something to the effect of:
And have the program put a Firefox link on the user's desktop.
Now I realize that this may make some people cringe: "But you're making people think that Firefox users are hackers!" The idea is not to send anyone the link to this quasi-malicious page. The idea is to put a link to it in your AIM/Yahoo! Messenger/forum sig/etc. Show it to friends. Word of mouth is incredibly powerful, as you may know.
And if that doesn't work, go out and buy some speakers that go up to 11.
Silly rabbit, you can't apply SP1 & 2 without rebooting between them.
but "motion" cannot be described in "microns." I think you mean "cheap displacement sensor".
And viscoelasticity is not necessarily a plastic-related thing. Some metals and composites may strain in a viscoelastic manner. Biological tissue is also generally deemed viscoelastic. Basically, it means: the amount of stress in the material is proportional to the rate at which it is displaced (or strained, in more correct terms).
Last Friday (Nov. 19) was a big milestone for many small companies like Robter Zubrin's. This is when NASA announced its 2004 SBIR Phase I awards. And yes, this Gashopper is one of them.
a rds/2004topic.html There's really some innovative stuff going on. Also, to the future rocket scientists out there: if you want to work in aerospace, this is an excellent site to find small companies doing NASA subcontracting.
Check them all out at: http://sbir.gsfc.nasa.gov/SBIR/sbir2004/phase1/aw
Free Art Test. Are you an artist? Find out Free. Premiere Home Study Program. aff.
--that's all i got from google's sponsored link.
You have missed something...technically.
In a typical chemical rocket, you burn and coast. During the burn, you have micro- or macro-g conditions (depending on numerous factors). During the coast, however, you have micro-gravity...so micro, in fact, you could consider it zero-g.[1]
With these engines, however, you don't have a coast period. You are continually in a burn state and therefore are continually accelerating, producing a micro-g environment. Granted, the acceleration is near-trivial, but it's still "near-weightless." Perhaps the only zero-g period with this type of craft is halfway to its destination, bewteen when the engine is shut off, the craft is turned around, and the engine is turned back on for deceleration.
[1]Before you chastise me, floating around in orbit is not a 2-body problem. You still have the sun, moon, earth, and self....among other diminutive gravitational forces to other bodies.
If they're in Northern USA or Canada, alls they gotta do is look up tonight. Killer auroras in the skies... at least in my neck of the woods.