There's more detail about the doubling scheme used at Wikipedia. The hilarious part there is that one of the sample posted checks recipient's name obfuscated, yet all of Knuth's bank information is completely clear.
Why does this story sound familiar...right, because I've heard it twice before. In 2003 it was AOL who cut them off, then in 2005 Level 3 did the same thing.
While it seems Sprint is to blame here, when I see Cogent on the bad end of this so many times I can't help but wonder how many of these problems are brought on by their own management. It's not too often you get to see a pair of N/A results on the health report, but as you can read that's exactly what happened in 2005 as well.
The data from Google's study say that lowering drive temperatures to below 35C increases their failure rate, particularly when they're new. I'm not sure I agree with the entirety of their methodology, but it's certainly persuasive enough that I've switched to aiming for 35-40C rather than sub-30C. That normally means the same basic approach you outlined, putting a single large and slow fan in front of the drives, but with some way to slow it down even further than the defaults if necessary. I don't hesitate like I used to in mounting drives in adjacent bays either.
I suspect the true cause of the correlation you suggest (drives >750GB fail more often) is mainly due to the switch to the perpendicular recording methods that started in larger capacity drive around that same time.
If you take a look at the newegg reviews, you'll find 16% of them give the 1TB 7200.11 drive a 1 star review, most of which are because of DOA or D shortly after A. So it's not just you who noticed.
Seagate's Barracuda line had a good run with high reliability for quite a while. If you check the reliability database at storagereview (unfortunately you have to go through some trouble to become a member and see the data), the Barracuda ATA III, IV, and V are ranked near the top--92, 90, and 96th percentile respectively. Then things went way downhile--7200.7 hits 88, the 7200.8 at 49, and the 7200.9 at 43. That matches my own anecdotal experience.
Sometime after the 750GB drives came out reliability took a further dive south. I believe that was caused by switching a large amount of production to a new plant in Thailand (the reliable models came out of Singapore). That seems to be the inevitable way hard drive manufacturing works--whenever some company moves to a new facility, quality dives for a few years afterward. I predict that 5 or 10 years from now talk will be about how reliable the old Thai drives were compared to the new junk coming out of [new country of origin].
I hate to disrupt a good theory with references, but What's So Difficult? 64-bit Edition claims the main issue is that rewriting the JIT compiler to emit 64-bit code is non-trivial.
'Official' English is mostly controlled by people who know what "innumerate" means, which apparently you don't because you used this other word instead of it. Finding a short list of people also misusing a made-up word via Google does not qualify as precedent for introducing it into the language. It takes a vast swath of illiteracy to launch that sort of thing.
If you're going to wander around criticising other people's education, you really should be more careful about solidifying your own first you know.
P.S. you seemed suspicious of my personal numeracy. Unlike the person you were criticising, I assure you my two CS degrees are from a rather difficult engineering school.
The cultural problem is a lot bigger than just money. I'll believe schools will change the minute I grab the paper one week and there's a science and/or math section as big as the sports section.
Easy answer: uninstall Truecrypt before you reach the border, so it doesn't look like you used any encryption, then put it back again when you get home. While that's not going to stop a pro who has your laptop from figuring out what happened, you're way less likely to set off any "this guy has something to hide" alarms at the border if there's no obvious sign that you ever had encryption software installed.
Right, and when the data moved past 1,048,576 rows the whole thing crashed and took the market with it. Little known fact: the.com crash in 2000 was actually caused by exceeding the earlier limit of 65536 rows.
If you do that often enough, the software running the site should pick up the collusion and kick you out. Quoth wikipedia on poker cheating: "online poker cardrooms keep records of every hand played, and collusion can often be detected by finding any of several detectable patterns (such as folding good hands to a small bet, as it is known that another player has a better hand)". I expect any poker site I play at is using software to check for basic cheating like that, but of course the same sort of incompetent corporate mindset that leads to regular reports of companies losing massive numbers of credit cards also applies here.
I personally keep my own stats with Poker Tracker, and it's not unusual for players who do that to report suspected cheaters to the site themselves as well. Many people carefully scrutinize every hand they lose looking for patterns like those that pop up in collusion. If Alice and Bob regularly play at the same table but never end up at a river showdown against one another, that's really suspicious.
You need $25K in order to open a day trading account. I started playing on-line poker with $10 a friend transferred to my account. Playing poker against people from all around the world is really entertaining. Even back when I lost money doing it, the penny tables didn't cost me that much per hour while I was learning relative to things that were equally entertaining.
Playing Texas Hold'Em on-line is not a strict sucker bet, since the other players are certainly not optimal, particularly in no-limit play. While the house is unquestionably the big winner, if you're a good player you'll win on average against people who aren't, and therefore run a steady profit. I've made enough money playing at UltimateBet to withdraw the original $100 stake I put in to play after doubling it, and now play only with the profit there. Small change, sure, but now it's entertainment for me with a consistent rate of return.
It's a fun outlet, and there are actual lessons you can learn there that apply to the real world. For example, I have more than once lost a hand where I was more than a 900:1 favorite after pushing all-in after the flop--there were only two cards left in the deck that could be dealt to my opponent for them to win, and they got them both. That's not the play being rigged, that's sheer statistics. Play several thousand hands, and you discover that things that happen only very infrequently nonetheless still do happen. That really gives you a gut feeling for gambler's risk of ruin that you don't get any other way. If everyone operating in the financial markets had such experience there wouldn't be so many companies in the middle of meltdown right now after taking on excessively leveraged risk.
After fighting some obnoxiously loud video card fans for a while I swapped my main desktop system over to a Gigabyte GV-NX86T256H, which is a fanless 8600GT. That seemed to be the cheapest product level capable of dual DVI output, and I have my doubts about whether a more powerful card can run with passive cooling effectively.
I'm pretty happy with mine, it is hard to get good gaming performance from a fanless design though without the whole thing overheating (as you can tell from the amount of negative comments listed at newegg). And said overheating is rough on the components, too. The impression I got from culling through lots of reviews of this type of product is that if you switch to a passively cooled video card, you do remove fan failure from the list of problems--but instead you're significantly more likely to have a failure in the voltage regulator or other hot component that ends up with a much shorter lifespan because there's no active cooling.
And how do you know that the hacked DVD you downloaded isn't installing some sort of trojan or keylogger? Sure, Eddie11c seems like a straight-up guy, but who really knows? There is some comfort to using the original media and knowing that you don't need to rely on a a future pipeline of hacked updates.
Re:I really want a copy of this...
on
Clean Code
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
If you're operating in integers with a fixed range, computing n*(n+1)/2 might overflow in situations where computing the sum via a series of additions will not. You need to consider which of (n,n+1) is even, divide only that one by two, then multiply by the other odd term to get something that is both a fast computation and utilizes the full range of the integer size you're working with.
While the above might seem simply pedantic, consider the case where a program built using a naive sum approach that needed the full range was broken by replacing it with the multiplication-based approach. That sort of issue, where clever code is more fragile than the simple implementation, is one reason some programmers shy away from being too clever.
If you don't get the "it worked" follow-ups to the list, others looking through the list archives trying to resolve the same issue don't know whether a) the proposed solution really worked, or b) the person just gave up or resolved it another way. It's unfortunate that Viktor doesn't understand confirmed answers are therefore useful for reducing his long-term support workload.
If you check sources such as Wikipedia, "professional" jobs are ones requiring a large amount of academic study or training. Following any reasonable definition, sales and HR aren't professional positions, so let's ignore those.
To become a lawyer, you have to pass the bar examination. Accounts have to pass the Uniform Certified Public Accountant Examination. These tests are really hard and extensive. Professional certifications of similar difficulty include the professional engineer exam, the actuarial exams, and the array of tests the various forms of medical doctor go through.
Since there are no similarly extensive and universally recognized tests for the IT industry, that's why employers and up doing their own tests instead (usually badly). I recommend taking at look at the typical requirements for the US Bar exam. They're not only quite a bit more extensive than any job interview you'll ever get, I would wager it's a more difficult test to pass than any computer-related certification available as well. That sort of thing is one of the major reasons any lawyer is respected as a professional and presumed to have a well known basic competence, while there is no such certainty with any IT person.
Right, because simple text blocks always are enough to prevent people from sending dicey messages. That stopped the spammers, right?
If you'll excuse me, I have to check out this bugm3n0t.c0m site, I hear Facebook just Streisanded it into higher popularity. (What? Oh, that's been a verb since 1987 actually)
Having everyone gather around to mock one employee is a classic team-building exercise, he saved the restaurant a bundle on training doing that himself.
The intelligent design mess was done by the Kansas State Board of Education. According to Wikipedia's sources, that was primarily a Republican driven agenda. The guy you should said you would vote for? Odds are good he's aligned with them, and that (particularly when you also stare at his voting record on things like abortion) his idea of "Quality Education" and "Family Values" are religiously based. Congratulations on your informed voting stance.
The group I was talking about, the Kansas Association of School Boards, is a completely different. In fact, if you look at their legislative agenda for the year I brought up the voting record for, you'll find it says "KASB believes a district's curriculum should be established by the local board of education". Not only are they not involved, they encourage that state-level decisions like the intelligent design mess not even happen.
Now, if you want to go take a look at that document, and then comment on whether opposing the agenda they lay out there is consistent with supporting education, then we might have something useful to talk about. I suggest you bring references.
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This is why I use good heaphones and cover myself with these.
There's more detail about the doubling scheme used at Wikipedia. The hilarious part there is that one of the sample posted checks recipient's name obfuscated, yet all of Knuth's bank information is completely clear.
Sprint can suck my balls
They can't reach them because you're on a Cogent link.
Why does this story sound familiar...right, because I've heard it twice before. In 2003 it was AOL who cut them off, then in 2005 Level 3 did the same thing.
While it seems Sprint is to blame here, when I see Cogent on the bad end of this so many times I can't help but wonder how many of these problems are brought on by their own management. It's not too often you get to see a pair of N/A results on the health report, but as you can read that's exactly what happened in 2005 as well.
The data from Google's study say that lowering drive temperatures to below 35C increases their failure rate, particularly when they're new. I'm not sure I agree with the entirety of their methodology, but it's certainly persuasive enough that I've switched to aiming for 35-40C rather than sub-30C. That normally means the same basic approach you outlined, putting a single large and slow fan in front of the drives, but with some way to slow it down even further than the defaults if necessary. I don't hesitate like I used to in mounting drives in adjacent bays either.
I suspect the true cause of the correlation you suggest (drives >750GB fail more often) is mainly due to the switch to the perpendicular recording methods that started in larger capacity drive around that same time.
If you take a look at the newegg reviews, you'll find 16% of them give the 1TB 7200.11 drive a 1 star review, most of which are because of DOA or D shortly after A. So it's not just you who noticed.
Seagate's Barracuda line had a good run with high reliability for quite a while. If you check the reliability database at storagereview (unfortunately you have to go through some trouble to become a member and see the data), the Barracuda ATA III, IV, and V are ranked near the top--92, 90, and 96th percentile respectively. Then things went way downhile--7200.7 hits 88, the 7200.8 at 49, and the 7200.9 at 43. That matches my own anecdotal experience.
Sometime after the 750GB drives came out reliability took a further dive south. I believe that was caused by switching a large amount of production to a new plant in Thailand (the reliable models came out of Singapore). That seems to be the inevitable way hard drive manufacturing works--whenever some company moves to a new facility, quality dives for a few years afterward. I predict that 5 or 10 years from now talk will be about how reliable the old Thai drives were compared to the new junk coming out of [new country of origin].
The kind who would think the Flash player was a good idea in the first place.
I hate to disrupt a good theory with references, but What's So Difficult? 64-bit Edition claims the main issue is that rewriting the JIT compiler to emit 64-bit code is non-trivial.
'Official' English is mostly controlled by people who know what "innumerate" means, which apparently you don't because you used this other word instead of it. Finding a short list of people also misusing a made-up word via Google does not qualify as precedent for introducing it into the language. It takes a vast swath of illiteracy to launch that sort of thing.
If you're going to wander around criticising other people's education, you really should be more careful about solidifying your own first you know.
P.S. you seemed suspicious of my personal numeracy. Unlike the person you were criticising, I assure you my two CS degrees are from a rather difficult engineering school.
Well maybe if you'd went to liberal arts school you'd know you can't just make up words like "illnumerate" just because they make sense.
The cultural problem is a lot bigger than just money. I'll believe schools will change the minute I grab the paper one week and there's a science and/or math section as big as the sports section.
Easy answer: uninstall Truecrypt before you reach the border, so it doesn't look like you used any encryption, then put it back again when you get home. While that's not going to stop a pro who has your laptop from figuring out what happened, you're way less likely to set off any "this guy has something to hide" alarms at the border if there's no obvious sign that you ever had encryption software installed.
Right, and when the data moved past 1,048,576 rows the whole thing crashed and took the market with it. Little known fact: the .com crash in 2000 was actually caused by exceeding the earlier limit of 65536 rows.
If you do that often enough, the software running the site should pick up the collusion and kick you out. Quoth wikipedia on poker cheating: "online poker cardrooms keep records of every hand played, and collusion can often be detected by finding any of several detectable patterns (such as folding good hands to a small bet, as it is known that another player has a better hand)". I expect any poker site I play at is using software to check for basic cheating like that, but of course the same sort of incompetent corporate mindset that leads to regular reports of companies losing massive numbers of credit cards also applies here.
I personally keep my own stats with Poker Tracker, and it's not unusual for players who do that to report suspected cheaters to the site themselves as well. Many people carefully scrutinize every hand they lose looking for patterns like those that pop up in collusion. If Alice and Bob regularly play at the same table but never end up at a river showdown against one another, that's really suspicious.
You need $25K in order to open a day trading account. I started playing on-line poker with $10 a friend transferred to my account. Playing poker against people from all around the world is really entertaining. Even back when I lost money doing it, the penny tables didn't cost me that much per hour while I was learning relative to things that were equally entertaining.
Playing Texas Hold'Em on-line is not a strict sucker bet, since the other players are certainly not optimal, particularly in no-limit play. While the house is unquestionably the big winner, if you're a good player you'll win on average against people who aren't, and therefore run a steady profit. I've made enough money playing at UltimateBet to withdraw the original $100 stake I put in to play after doubling it, and now play only with the profit there. Small change, sure, but now it's entertainment for me with a consistent rate of return.
It's a fun outlet, and there are actual lessons you can learn there that apply to the real world. For example, I have more than once lost a hand where I was more than a 900:1 favorite after pushing all-in after the flop--there were only two cards left in the deck that could be dealt to my opponent for them to win, and they got them both. That's not the play being rigged, that's sheer statistics. Play several thousand hands, and you discover that things that happen only very infrequently nonetheless still do happen. That really gives you a gut feeling for gambler's risk of ruin that you don't get any other way. If everyone operating in the financial markets had such experience there wouldn't be so many companies in the middle of meltdown right now after taking on excessively leveraged risk.
After fighting some obnoxiously loud video card fans for a while I swapped my main desktop system over to a Gigabyte GV-NX86T256H, which is a fanless 8600GT. That seemed to be the cheapest product level capable of dual DVI output, and I have my doubts about whether a more powerful card can run with passive cooling effectively.
I'm pretty happy with mine, it is hard to get good gaming performance from a fanless design though without the whole thing overheating (as you can tell from the amount of negative comments listed at newegg). And said overheating is rough on the components, too. The impression I got from culling through lots of reviews of this type of product is that if you switch to a passively cooled video card, you do remove fan failure from the list of problems--but instead you're significantly more likely to have a failure in the voltage regulator or other hot component that ends up with a much shorter lifespan because there's no active cooling.
And that, children, is where the Iceweasel came from.
And how do you know that the hacked DVD you downloaded isn't installing some sort of trojan or keylogger? Sure, Eddie11c seems like a straight-up guy, but who really knows? There is some comfort to using the original media and knowing that you don't need to rely on a a future pipeline of hacked updates.
If you're operating in integers with a fixed range, computing n*(n+1)/2 might overflow in situations where computing the sum via a series of additions will not. You need to consider which of (n,n+1) is even, divide only that one by two, then multiply by the other odd term to get something that is both a fast computation and utilizes the full range of the integer size you're working with.
While the above might seem simply pedantic, consider the case where a program built using a naive sum approach that needed the full range was broken by replacing it with the multiplication-based approach. That sort of issue, where clever code is more fragile than the simple implementation, is one reason some programmers shy away from being too clever.
If you don't get the "it worked" follow-ups to the list, others looking through the list archives trying to resolve the same issue don't know whether a) the proposed solution really worked, or b) the person just gave up or resolved it another way. It's unfortunate that Viktor doesn't understand confirmed answers are therefore useful for reducing his long-term support workload.
If you check sources such as Wikipedia, "professional" jobs are ones requiring a large amount of academic study or training. Following any reasonable definition, sales and HR aren't professional positions, so let's ignore those.
To become a lawyer, you have to pass the bar examination. Accounts have to pass the Uniform Certified Public Accountant Examination. These tests are really hard and extensive. Professional certifications of similar difficulty include the professional engineer exam, the actuarial exams, and the array of tests the various forms of medical doctor go through.
Since there are no similarly extensive and universally recognized tests for the IT industry, that's why employers and up doing their own tests instead (usually badly). I recommend taking at look at the typical requirements for the US Bar exam. They're not only quite a bit more extensive than any job interview you'll ever get, I would wager it's a more difficult test to pass than any computer-related certification available as well. That sort of thing is one of the major reasons any lawyer is respected as a professional and presumed to have a well known basic competence, while there is no such certainty with any IT person.
Right, because simple text blocks always are enough to prevent people from sending dicey messages. That stopped the spammers, right?
If you'll excuse me, I have to check out this bugm3n0t.c0m site, I hear Facebook just Streisanded it into higher popularity. (What? Oh, that's been a verb since 1987 actually)
And if what you wanted was a nerdy rather geeky wedding band, it's hard to beat The Nerds.
Having everyone gather around to mock one employee is a classic team-building exercise, he saved the restaurant a bundle on training doing that himself.
The intelligent design mess was done by the Kansas State Board of Education. According to Wikipedia's sources, that was primarily a Republican driven agenda. The guy you should said you would vote for? Odds are good he's aligned with them, and that (particularly when you also stare at his voting record on things like abortion) his idea of "Quality Education" and "Family Values" are religiously based. Congratulations on your informed voting stance.
The group I was talking about, the Kansas Association of School Boards, is a completely different. In fact, if you look at their legislative agenda for the year I brought up the voting record for, you'll find it says "KASB believes a district's curriculum should be established by the local board of education". Not only are they not involved, they encourage that state-level decisions like the intelligent design mess not even happen.
Now, if you want to go take a look at that document, and then comment on whether opposing the agenda they lay out there is consistent with supporting education, then we might have something useful to talk about. I suggest you bring references.