Memtest86 is the usual test tool for a couple of reasons (and only one of those is price).
Chances are very good you have a problem. Definitely worth checking it out.
1) Re-run the test and see if the error is in the same place. If it is, you can pretty much guarantee the RAM is bad at that position. 2) Swap the memory out and try again. You're best to do this while you still can under warranty.
Bottom line is you're not paranoid and you probably do have a problem. You can either deal with it up front or live with a compromised system that eventually bites you on the backside.
A good manager doesn't necessarily need to be knowledgeable about technology; they need to trust the engineers working for them to make correct decisions.
Rubbish! The best managers I ever had were ex-techies. Management is not the same regardless of industry etc. You have to understand what you're trying to manage. You don't have to be an elite coder or even an ex-elite coder, but you better be able to talk the talk and understand what those above and below you are saying.
You wouldn't pull a foreman from a construction site off the job and stick him in an IT shop would you? If you just though yes I would, you're just plain wrong.
You have a B.S. in Comp Sci and you think you're an excellent programmer? You could be some kind of genius but that's probably not true. They say it takes about 10 years of constant effort to become good at something. More likely than not you're either not being critical enough of your own work or you're not taking on big challenges.
Think about what an excellent programmer will have accomplished. If you've made major contributions to a kernel or file system, solved a major problem in computer science, or on the IT side been the lead on a large commercial project and been able to build a reusable framework out of the experience, that MIGHT put you in the excellent programmer category.
It's one thing to sell yourself and be confident. It's another to delude yourself into thinking you've reached the pinnacle of your potential and therefore become complacent.
It seems to me you really ought to lay out a 5-10 year plan and work out what you want your goals to actually be. Realize that as opportunities and obstacles present yourself you have to stay flexible and might not achieve those exact goals, but without any goals to start with you'll not be working towards anything and therefore will probably just coast along making only incidental achievements.
By the way my Masters is in Astronomy. It hasn't hurt my IT career which is going well, but then again I do NOT want to be a business manager. For what I'm doing right now, more degrees won't help. The ability to learn that I developed from my Astronomy Masters has put me in excellent stead for work and personal life. I'm not afraid to delve into a topic I barely understand and I can plow through terminology to get to the essence of a practical problem. Wouldn't trade that for anything.
Applied science? You must mean engineering. If we say that a scientist attempts to discover the rules by which the natural world operates via observation and reason, then applied science isn't science, because its aim is not to understand the natural world.
You can personally define it any way you like. To take that to the absurd for illustrative purposes, you could exclude any science that doesn't deal with understanding chocolate cakes. It just probably won't agree with the accepted definition that the rest of the world uses.
Applying a snobbish elitist and non-standard definition isn't very constructive. Pun intended.
Pure science isn't the only kind of science. The knowledge gained about practical application also requires use of the scientific method and codifies knowledge in a useful and practical way that takes into account subtleties that pure methods cannot. A classical example in celestial mechanics is perturbation theory. The N-body problem isn't one that's easily solved for the general case. There's no easy formula. However there are methods for refining the orbit of a planet or minor body based on successive estimations.
Actually, an earlier question would be "is there a tipping point?" With enough negative feedback, there simply isn't one.
Also, if we have already reached a tipping point, there's no point in worrying about it; there's nothing we can do anyway, we're headed to Venus
Even after you reach a tipping point it's possible, though it would require extraordinary effort to reverse things. Your argument that we should just not worry about it if there is anything we can do to slow things down or reverse them is just irresponsible.
Of course, his opinion on this seems utterly pointless to me. The man is a physicist, specializing in solid-state and quantum physics. He's no more qualified to analyze the science behind climate change than an electrical engineer is to build a bridge.
Even a layperson can debunk bad science if the logic the scientists are presenting is obviously flawed or false. Now whoever does this needs to be able to look at the detail and will come to a point where their knowledge is inadequate and they need to concede one or more points, or learn enough to read the presented evidence.
In this case denying that humanity is having an impact on the environment, even with a basic knowledge of what's going on seems stupid to me. With the amount of CO2 we're spewing into the atmosphere, at best the question is where's the tipping point and have we reached it (and all evidence points to the fact we have). That doesn't mean we should treat our scientist as holy and untouchable. You'd think in this day and age we could remove more of the bias created by scientific association and accreditation bodies. (No where is this more evident than medicine, where practioners routinely abuse the scientific process to their own ends. Doctors in particular seem to be arrogant and all too willing to ignore factual evidence....and who hasn't heard of a scientific paper or trial which was biased)
We ALL need to be involved in the environment and we ALL need to think critically. The process needs to be a genuine and intellgent attempt to analyse what's going on, rather than a biased attempt to prove things are the way we want them to be.
In one case you're talking about a legal form of gambling. Staying away from the stock market at the moment is good advice all round.
In the second you're talking about store owners paying for the use of a piece of land, which is a limited resource and prevents others from using it. This does not at all compare to having something continue to list on an online store.
You're either incapable of logical thought or much more likely an AC troll.
Apple always wants to have its cake and eat it too. Apparently now it's the height of turtleneck fashion and style to take money away from a vendor because a customer is unhappy and changes his or her mind. Apple arrogance. What's the bet I'm modded flamebait, but if it were any other company I'd be modded insightful. If Apple wants to licence and control content, and forces this reimbursement policy on it's devs, Apple should have some moral obligation to return their share of the money too. Makes me sick.
Openness implies lower barriers to entry. If they control the technology, they control the admission price. If you want to play on our 'cloud' then it's going to cost a CAL.
Put another way "All your base are belong to US, not THEM!!!!". Cloud computing is not about giving you the ability to do new things. It's about tying you to the network for everything you do including what you can currently do independently then charging a mint when they've got you by the balls. They don't want to share that wealth with others, and how do they get you by the balls if you can just go elsewhere when you're fed up? I don't know why people can't see the "cloud" concept for the power grab that it is.
On the other hand, if you're not already programming, you're wasting your time. Programmers are (mostly) like writers or artists. You can't help it. You get sucked into it even if you fight it. If you didn't get sucked into it, you'll be a crappy programmer when you get out of college no matter how good an education you get, because you've already proven that you're not, at core, a programmer. You were handed the test and you failed. LUCKY YOU, REALLY.
The first computer company I worked in was unusual. I hadn't gotten my degree at that point. The boss liked to hire straight out of high school and pay minimum wage. It was an almost exactly 50-50 split between men and women. Small company of about 20 people. The guys were typical computer guys. Loved tech, pizza and coke. The girls were mostly in their early 20s. Some were married, others weren't. Only one had a child. The girls had no interest in technology beyond the job itself. At this stage I was far from being a good programmer. I had a lot of learning and to be honest a bit of growing up to do. I was 18 and had just been through a shitstorm in my personal life (and dropped out of a Uni degree I was hating).
Guess who were the better programmers at the company. The girls. The ones with no interest in computers outside of work. They were REALLY good programmers. Solid, dependable. I haven't worked with better or more dedicated since. Mow there were more knowledgeable people out there - these girls didn't know any compiler theory. However for the business apps they were programming their knowledge and skill was rock solid.
It's a compelling myth that you have to LOVE your work to be good at it. It's just not true. In fact my advice is to expect that there's a good chance you'll burn your passion out in whatever you do in a few years. That's what can happen if you do something - anything - for many many hours and many many years, especially when you don't get to choose exactly what you're doing. If you love it, it might make a good career. Then again if you really REALLY love it you might not want to risk it, and may prefer to keep it a hobby.
Option 2 is quite desirable if you choose other companies. HP is a mess. Oracle only likes the top end of town.
Option 3 could happen. People have admitted their mistakes in the past. Hell CEOs seem to admit their mistakes and get a few million dollars as a parting gift. All the products could survive with other patronage.
How about an option 4 - Sun picks itself back up off the floor. Sun isn't so far gone that this is impossible.
It is a kind of perverse incentive: I produce a crap product, I'm free to do whatever I want; I produce a great product that millions depend upon, now all my freedoms reg. the product are taken away. And oh, now I'm "too big to fail" so I can put my snout in the public trough whenever I want.
No. You completely misunderstand. You can produce plenty of nice products. It's when you start to buy up all the competition who also makes similar or related nice products that we have a problem because:
a) There's no competition b) If your ships sinks we no longer have alternatives
That's not a disincentive to produce good things. Only a disincentive from buying up lots of related good things. You can improve your product. You can also produce something new that's completely unrelated and really nice. Diversity is important.
Clearly all this proves is that we really don't know that much about what's going on in the universe. I'm getting tired these kinds of posts every time something unexpected is observed.
Me too. It took me 3 years of study to not understand much about what's going on in Astronomy, and I haven't even covered the entire breadth of topics I wanted to (let alone depth)...but I guess I should just throw away my Astronomy degree since some slashdot troll thinks we don't know anything...
On the other side, it's always annoying the need of connecting to internet to register an offline game
No, it's not just annoying. It means they have control to prevent you from using the software. The company can go bust, change hands, close down a division, decide the software is too old, and you're stuck with install media that is useless. Not to mention, tough luck if you're wanting to install somewhere and you don't have net access.
Yeah. I bought this PC, but didn't have enough money left over to buy Vista. So the machine is only using 3GB of the RAM:( Clearly this means Vista is better than XP.
Call me when Google uses a "small team" to convert a couple of hundred undocumented or poorly documented apps written in C and running on an old system like VMS since the mid-80s. Then I'll still have concerns about the business case during an economic downturn.
I see this story has been tagged "Pipedream". I don't know what kind of pipe people are smoking these days, but to me it doesn't sound like any kind of pleasant or desirable dream to have one company in control of so many things we depend on...even more so during an economic downturn.
No, they were not. The immense majority of currently living Germans were not even planned at the time of the Nazis. Guilt is not inherited, you know...
If I have to bear witness to another buzzword in a slashdot article title, I will turn Richard Stallman into a Juicer and ship him in a crate to Slashdot HQ. Because nothing says mega-damage like a character from RIFTS. I swear I will. He's already half-way there. You've seen his code, you know he's already got a caffeine drip. It won't be hard. Plus, I'm kinda bloated and cranky right now, so I might just come with. Don't tempt me
PMS fueled tantrum about slashdot buzzword usage, threatening to use RMS as a weapon. Can I just say I'm in awe. It sounds like some plot out of a twisted remake of Wizard of Oz.
Thank you, Mr. Uninformed Ranter. It has been said, again and again that if Steam's servers are taken offline, access controls will be removed.
Well then that's alright. I mean if some company has promised to remove restrictions that should be good enough for anyone. After all a company's first priority when going bankrupt is to honour all its promises....
In case you didn't detect it the above is sarcasm. If you believe such promises you have been role playing in fantasy land way too long.
For goodness sake the company you're blindly believing just came up with a new type of DRM and is trying to sell everyone the idea that it's not DRM. Get a clue.
Slashdot Mirror
Memtest86 is the usual test tool for a couple of reasons (and only one of those is price).
Chances are very good you have a problem. Definitely worth checking it out.
1) Re-run the test and see if the error is in the same place. If it is, you can pretty much guarantee the RAM is bad at that position.
2) Swap the memory out and try again. You're best to do this while you still can under warranty.
Bottom line is you're not paranoid and you probably do have a problem. You can either deal with it up front or live with a compromised system that eventually bites you on the backside.
A good manager doesn't necessarily need to be knowledgeable about technology; they need to trust the engineers working for them to make correct decisions.
Rubbish! The best managers I ever had were ex-techies. Management is not the same regardless of industry etc. You have to understand what you're trying to manage. You don't have to be an elite coder or even an ex-elite coder, but you better be able to talk the talk and understand what those above and below you are saying.
You wouldn't pull a foreman from a construction site off the job and stick him in an IT shop would you? If you just though yes I would, you're just plain wrong.
I am an excellent programmer
You have a B.S. in Comp Sci and you think you're an excellent programmer? You could be some kind of genius but that's probably not true. They say it takes about 10 years of constant effort to become good at something. More likely than not you're either not being critical enough of your own work or you're not taking on big challenges.
Think about what an excellent programmer will have accomplished. If you've made major contributions to a kernel or file system, solved a major problem in computer science, or on the IT side been the lead on a large commercial project and been able to build a reusable framework out of the experience, that MIGHT put you in the excellent programmer category.
It's one thing to sell yourself and be confident. It's another to delude yourself into thinking you've reached the pinnacle of your potential and therefore become complacent.
It seems to me you really ought to lay out a 5-10 year plan and work out what you want your goals to actually be. Realize that as opportunities and obstacles present yourself you have to stay flexible and might not achieve those exact goals, but without any goals to start with you'll not be working towards anything and therefore will probably just coast along making only incidental achievements.
By the way my Masters is in Astronomy. It hasn't hurt my IT career which is going well, but then again I do NOT want to be a business manager. For what I'm doing right now, more degrees won't help. The ability to learn that I developed from my Astronomy Masters has put me in excellent stead for work and personal life. I'm not afraid to delve into a topic I barely understand and I can plow through terminology to get to the essence of a practical problem. Wouldn't trade that for anything.
Applied science? You must mean engineering. If we say that a scientist attempts to discover the rules by which the natural world operates via observation and reason, then applied science isn't science, because its aim is not to understand the natural world.
You can personally define it any way you like. To take that to the absurd for illustrative purposes, you could exclude any science that doesn't deal with understanding chocolate cakes. It just probably won't agree with the accepted definition that the rest of the world uses.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applied_science
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/applied%20science
Applying a snobbish elitist and non-standard definition isn't very constructive. Pun intended.
Pure science isn't the only kind of science. The knowledge gained about practical application also requires use of the scientific method and codifies knowledge in a useful and practical way that takes into account subtleties that pure methods cannot. A classical example in celestial mechanics is perturbation theory. The N-body problem isn't one that's easily solved for the general case. There's no easy formula. However there are methods for refining the orbit of a planet or minor body based on successive estimations.
There is no engineering without science.
Engineers are scientists, of a sort.
No, they're not. They "merely" apply science to specific well-known problems.
You just said no, then admitted they're applied scientists, and somehow that got you modded up.
Actually, an earlier question would be "is there a tipping point?" With enough negative feedback, there simply isn't one.
Also, if we have already reached a tipping point, there's no point in worrying about it; there's nothing we can do anyway, we're headed to Venus
Even after you reach a tipping point it's possible, though it would require extraordinary effort to reverse things. Your argument that we should just not worry about it if there is anything we can do to slow things down or reverse them is just irresponsible.
Of course, his opinion on this seems utterly pointless to me. The man is a physicist, specializing in solid-state and quantum physics. He's no more qualified to analyze the science behind climate change than an electrical engineer is to build a bridge.
Even a layperson can debunk bad science if the logic the scientists are presenting is obviously flawed or false. Now whoever does this needs to be able to look at the detail and will come to a point where their knowledge is inadequate and they need to concede one or more points, or learn enough to read the presented evidence.
In this case denying that humanity is having an impact on the environment, even with a basic knowledge of what's going on seems stupid to me. With the amount of CO2 we're spewing into the atmosphere, at best the question is where's the tipping point and have we reached it (and all evidence points to the fact we have). That doesn't mean we should treat our scientist as holy and untouchable. You'd think in this day and age we could remove more of the bias created by scientific association and accreditation bodies. (No where is this more evident than medicine, where practioners routinely abuse the scientific process to their own ends. Doctors in particular seem to be arrogant and all too willing to ignore factual evidence....and who hasn't heard of a scientific paper or trial which was biased)
We ALL need to be involved in the environment and we ALL need to think critically. The process needs to be a genuine and intellgent attempt to analyse what's going on, rather than a biased attempt to prove things are the way we want them to be.
In one case you're talking about a legal form of gambling. Staying away from the stock market at the moment is good advice all round.
In the second you're talking about store owners paying for the use of a piece of land, which is a limited resource and prevents others from using it. This does not at all compare to having something continue to list on an online store.
You're either incapable of logical thought or much more likely an AC troll.
Apple always wants to have its cake and eat it too. Apparently now it's the height of turtleneck fashion and style to take money away from a vendor because a customer is unhappy and changes his or her mind. Apple arrogance. What's the bet I'm modded flamebait, but if it were any other company I'd be modded insightful. If Apple wants to licence and control content, and forces this reimbursement policy on it's devs, Apple should have some moral obligation to return their share of the money too. Makes me sick.
Openness implies lower barriers to entry. If they control the technology, they control the admission price. If you want to play on our 'cloud' then it's going to cost a CAL.
Put another way "All your base are belong to US, not THEM!!!!". Cloud computing is not about giving you the ability to do new things. It's about tying you to the network for everything you do including what you can currently do independently then charging a mint when they've got you by the balls. They don't want to share that wealth with others, and how do they get you by the balls if you can just go elsewhere when you're fed up? I don't know why people can't see the "cloud" concept for the power grab that it is.
Old apps need to be able to communicate on the network too. They're not all isolated.
On the other hand, if you're not already programming, you're wasting your time. Programmers are (mostly) like writers or artists. You can't help it. You get sucked into it even if you fight it. If you didn't get sucked into it, you'll be a crappy programmer when you get out of college no matter how good an education you get, because you've already proven that you're not, at core, a programmer. You were handed the test and you failed. LUCKY YOU, REALLY.
The first computer company I worked in was unusual. I hadn't gotten my degree at that point. The boss liked to hire straight out of high school and pay minimum wage. It was an almost exactly 50-50 split between men and women. Small company of about 20 people. The guys were typical computer guys. Loved tech, pizza and coke. The girls were mostly in their early 20s. Some were married, others weren't. Only one had a child. The girls had no interest in technology beyond the job itself. At this stage I was far from being a good programmer. I had a lot of learning and to be honest a bit of growing up to do. I was 18 and had just been through a shitstorm in my personal life (and dropped out of a Uni degree I was hating).
Guess who were the better programmers at the company. The girls. The ones with no interest in computers outside of work. They were REALLY good programmers. Solid, dependable. I haven't worked with better or more dedicated since. Mow there were more knowledgeable people out there - these girls didn't know any compiler theory. However for the business apps they were programming their knowledge and skill was rock solid.
It's a compelling myth that you have to LOVE your work to be good at it. It's just not true. In fact my advice is to expect that there's a good chance you'll burn your passion out in whatever you do in a few years. That's what can happen if you do something - anything - for many many hours and many many years, especially when you don't get to choose exactly what you're doing. If you love it, it might make a good career. Then again if you really REALLY love it you might not want to risk it, and may prefer to keep it a hobby.
Option 2 is quite desirable if you choose other companies. HP is a mess. Oracle only likes the top end of town.
Option 3 could happen. People have admitted their mistakes in the past. Hell CEOs seem to admit their mistakes and get a few million dollars as a parting gift. All the products could survive with other patronage.
How about an option 4 - Sun picks itself back up off the floor. Sun isn't so far gone that this is impossible.
It is a kind of perverse incentive: I produce a crap product, I'm free to do whatever I want; I produce a great product that millions depend upon, now all my freedoms reg. the product are taken away. And oh, now I'm "too big to fail" so I can put my snout in the public trough whenever I want.
No. You completely misunderstand. You can produce plenty of nice products. It's when you start to buy up all the competition who also makes similar or related nice products that we have a problem because:
a) There's no competition
b) If your ships sinks we no longer have alternatives
That's not a disincentive to produce good things. Only a disincentive from buying up lots of related good things. You can improve your product. You can also produce something new that's completely unrelated and really nice. Diversity is important.
Clearly all this proves is that we really don't know that much about what's going on in the universe.
I'm getting tired these kinds of posts every time something unexpected is observed.
Me too. It took me 3 years of study to not understand much about what's going on in Astronomy, and I haven't even covered the entire breadth of topics I wanted to (let alone depth)...but I guess I should just throw away my Astronomy degree since some slashdot troll thinks we don't know anything...
On the other side, it's always annoying the need of connecting to internet to register an offline game
No, it's not just annoying. It means they have control to prevent you from using the software. The company can go bust, change hands, close down a division, decide the software is too old, and you're stuck with install media that is useless. Not to mention, tough luck if you're wanting to install somewhere and you don't have net access.
to run Vista. Finally h/w is catching up!!
Yeah. I bought this PC, but didn't have enough money left over to buy Vista. So the machine is only using 3GB of the RAM :( Clearly this means Vista is better than XP.
Exactly.
Call me when Google uses a "small team" to convert a couple of hundred undocumented or poorly documented apps written in C and running on an old system like VMS since the mid-80s. Then I'll still have concerns about the business case during an economic downturn.
I see this story has been tagged "Pipedream". I don't know what kind of pipe people are smoking these days, but to me it doesn't sound like any kind of pleasant or desirable dream to have one company in control of so many things we depend on...even more so during an economic downturn.
No, they were not. The immense majority of currently living Germans were not even planned at the time of the Nazis. Guilt is not inherited, you know...
I hear a lot of people aren't planned either.
Want to get a lot of people to test your Javascript? Call it version one and release it.
Sergey Brin, is that you??? No wait you said version one not version one beta. Never mind.
If I have to bear witness to another buzzword in a slashdot article title, I will turn Richard Stallman into a Juicer and ship him in a crate to Slashdot HQ. Because nothing says mega-damage like a character from RIFTS. I swear I will. He's already half-way there. You've seen his code, you know he's already got a caffeine drip. It won't be hard. Plus, I'm kinda bloated and cranky right now, so I might just come with. Don't tempt me
PMS fueled tantrum about slashdot buzzword usage, threatening to use RMS as a weapon. Can I just say I'm in awe. It sounds like some plot out of a twisted remake of Wizard of Oz.
It's called Google Beta.
As soon as the rabid "It's still DRM" crowd either
There's a well thought out, rational and unbiased beginning to an argument if ever I Saw one.
Thank you, Mr. Uninformed Ranter. It has been said, again and again that if Steam's servers are taken offline, access controls will be removed.
Well then that's alright. I mean if some company has promised to remove restrictions that should be good enough for anyone. After all a company's first priority when going bankrupt is to honour all its promises....
In case you didn't detect it the above is sarcasm. If you believe such promises you have been role playing in fantasy land way too long.
For goodness sake the company you're blindly believing just came up with a new type of DRM and is trying to sell everyone the idea that it's not DRM. Get a clue.