You were lucky. I worked in a Top Secret facility and we were required to disassemble the drives, and remove each platter. Then using a belt sander, we had to scrub them down to bare metal. These metal pieces were then taken to an incinerator that would mostly melt what was left.
The cool part was being able to recycle the magnesium casings on those giant-sized drives (about a foot wide, 8 inches tall, and about 2 feet long). I made a few hundred dollars on that!
I don't know what the big deal was, though. Our facility only handled... oh wait, someone's at the door...
As I said, I can't cite any references, and I can only base what I say on what my friends who deal with special ed and ESL (English as a 2nd language).
When I say the dual-language kids learn their languages slower, I'm talking about when they are very young. If I recall correctly, kids in the dual-language environment tend to take a longer time to start talking compared to single-language kids. When testing for vocabulary and comprehension, even in early preschool, these kids are a bit behind. But they quickly catch up to their single-language peers and then are left with a better ability to acquire languages.
It would actually make sense that as adults they might have a tendency to excel in the use of language - evidenced by your two examples.
But I'm not sure about a single-language kid having his brain on idle. My guess is that the brain is busy doing tons of things and that if one kid is slowed down by learning two languages, the other kid probably has part of the brain busy doing other things.
It's my belief that the idea that we only use 10% of our brain is not quite true. From a biological point of view, a brain is very expensive. It requires a lot of materials and minerals to build and maintain, and requires lots of oxygen to keep functional. While evolution may leave us with vestigal features like appendixes*, it's not likely to evolve such a large and expensive feature only to never use it. So that leads me to believe that it's more of a zero-sum situation. If more of the brain is dedicated to one task, then less of it is left for other things.
So, I wonder what things that kids growing up with dual-languages might tend to have less developed. For example, might they tend to have less capability at mathematics? Or spatial relationships? Coordination? Or any tendency at all?
Of course, it's also possible that in early development, dual-language learning might actually cause the brain to increase in "power", taking advantage of potential that would not have been developed otherwise.
But I still doubt that we build a lot of cabability that is never used. There might be potential that as the brain is being built, but it seems most logical to me that our brains would only build enough capacity to get things done.
* I recently heard a discussion on NPR where a researcher was saying that we end up with extra stuff in our DNA because it's an expensive process to cull the unnecessary stuff. The DNA we have apparently contains a lot of unused material (maybe this refutes my ideas on the brain), and while it's expensive to make more DNA than the organism needs, there's little evolutionary advantage to cutting it out - it's safer to just turn off parts of it.
I can't cite any studies, but my friend, who is a special-ed teacher, says that research indicates that children growing up dual-language house-holds learn both languages very well. But they also tend to develop slower in either language. So, in your case, you learned Malayalam and English to full fluency. But compared to other children only learning English or Malayalam, they learned their one langauge faster. So strangely, you seem, by some measures, developmentally impaired.
Of course, once you finally catch up, you now have a much easier ability to learn new languages.
This all pretty makes sense to me. You're learning two languages, not one, so of course it takes longer. What I wonder, though, is what might you be be giving up to have gained the ability to quickly master languages?
And a character in Sum of All Fears, the book, actually refers to a movie that had the same scenario - I think it was "Black Sunday".
Have you ever noticed how you never see George Bush and Clancy in the same place at the same time? It's clear to me that Clancy is really the president, being an expert on all government conspiracy kinds of things, and is only dressing up as a dufus, pretending to the president.
The only problem with that is that many of those broad-leaf trees don't have seeds that are leaf-shaped. The oak has the acorn, the walnut has the... walnut, and the same with chestnuts.
Of course, there are those cool trees with the whirly-bird seeds. I love those!
I would guess that if he hit the stump at any kind of angle, the blade could have pushed directly against the stump and twirled the mower up into the air.
I'm just saying most people shopping at the mall are not there to buy a big purchase like a computer.
Apple does well, and Sony probably will, because they have more to sell besides just computers. Not only that, but they're known for more than just computers.
Plus, who shops at the mall with $1500, ready to buy a computer?
Sony may work because they sell lots of stuff that is cheap enough to inspire impulsive purchases. You go in, look at the neat gadgets, and the next thing you know, you whip out your credit card, and buy a $250 mp3 player.
A PC store is just not going to have the volume of sales in a mall setting to support it.
It reminds me of a story about Henry Ford. From a website I just googled:
"Henry Ford is said to have instructed his engineers to search the junk yards for old Ford automobiles, and determine which parts had not worn out. Then the engineers were to make those parts weaker, not stronger, because obviously Ford had wasted money in making them too strong, or at least stronger than they should have been."
I'm going to try posting this and hope the lameness filters don't get me.
I hope this helps! If you find any mistakes, please feel free to contact me. If you find it really useful, I'd love to hear about it.
I'd release this under the GPL, but darn, it just doesn't seem like there's enough there to bother. I mean... can you really GPL some config scripts?
I found it helpful to configure the Linux stuff on one computer, then using a bootable Linux CD (I didn't want the local box slowed down by unnecessary services like networking), I put it on a server, called lin.tgz. I then booted on another machine with the bootable cd, and applied it to the/dev/hda2. If that was mounted to/lin, you'd then need to do a "chroot/lin" and then run/sbin/lilo to get lilo installed.
Good luck!
Linux Rebuilder By Dale Frakes Write-up version 0.1, 19 October 2004, 4:17AM
This set of tools helps automate the process of keeping a Windows box with a consistent image. It works similarly to "Deep Freeze" by storing an image of the Windows system and all its software on a Linux partition. The computer boots into Linux, which restores this image to the Windows partition (overwriting whatever the user did before). It then reboots into Windows.
** Installing/Setup **
The scripts as I have written them use tar/gzip to make the image of the Windows partition. This is because I was working on Win98 boxes that use FAT32 (which Linux can easily read and write). Linux does not yet reliably write NTFS, so to use this on an NTFS based Windows system, such as Windows 2000, or Windows XP, the scripts will need to be rewritten using dd/gzip rather than tar/gzip.
Here are the basic steps: 1) Install Windows on your computer. If you are using one drive, partition that drive in half (or, if you know how much space you'll need, just a little more than that). Install all your applications and customize the Windows "image" so that it is exactly the way you want it to be each time you reboot. 2) Install some Linux version on the other half. Keep it small, since you won't need networking, X, or much else. 3) Create a/rebuilder directory and place the following files in that directory: getimage, putimage, rebuilder, win_reboot 4) Modify/etc/rc.local to point to/rebuilder/rebuilder 5) Modify/etc/lilo.conf to match the menu options in my lilo.conf. Run lilo. 6) Create a/images directory to store the image.
For FAT32 systems using tar/gzip, you'll need to add an entry to your/etc/fstab to mount/dev/hda1 to/win.
** Useful Points ** There are two main keys to why this thing works pretty well. First, lilo can invoke the same kernel with different options. The menu options I place in lilo.conf do this. The other key is contained in the win_reboot file. By invoking lilo with the -R option followed by a boot label, (eg. "lilo -R Windows"), lilo will override its default boot option on the next reboot.
There are two other nice features that work nicely. The first one is that while the kernel is loading, the keyboard cannot interrupt the process. This is great for keeping someone from hijacking the system. The second is that by putting the line "password=""" in lilo.conf will password protect the boot options that do not have a "bypass" in them. This allows the user to do some things, like boot directly into Windows, or even rebuild the Windows partition, but not make a new image of the Windows partition.
If you're going to do a dd/gzip option, you'll want to wipe your Windows partition's empty space. From the documentation for g4u, there is a link to a program called nulfile, which will fill up the empty space with 0's. http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/
I got a lot of responses in my e-mail, which is great!
I realize now that I have not documented how to install the thing very well. I'll get an e-mail out to everyone tomorrow afternoon (I'm in Portland, so that's Pacific Daylight Time).
To answer a question, I used slackware because it was small, and easy to install just the basics that I needed.
I once set up a similar system using a small linux installation.
1) set up windows on half the drive 2) install a small version of linux on the other partition 3) make an image of the windows drive that is stored on the linux side 3) I set up some rudimentary scripting that worked with lilo boot options.
Normal operation is to boot to Linux, then extract the windows image over the windows partition. It then reboots. You can feed lilo an option to override its default boot option and go directly into windows. On next reboot, you go back into linux.
I even set flags where you can turn off the auto-rebuilding, set it for daily rebuilding only (first boot of the day), or make it strictly manual "your computer is goofy? Okay, reboot, and select rebuild. Get some coffee and come back".
As another poster said, you do have to turn off all the auto-updates because they'll continually trigger. But it is so nice to not have to tend to the machines until you want to do those updates.
I don't have the setup on a website, but if you're interested, send an e-mail to username dfrakes at the new google email service. I'd be glad to send my scripts along along.
We had a lab of win98 boxes - all PII-300's or less that would rebuild their 1.5GB windows image in about 11 minutes. I used tar/gzip for the image, but it can work just as well with dd/gzip and may even go faster. In that case, the smaller your windows drive, the better your performance will be.
It was great in an academic computer lab where the users shouldn't be messing with things!
Sadly, in my last job, they used Lotus Notes for e-mail. The client was really slow, so it was often much much faster to use the web-based access. Which, even though it's provided by IBM, only works with IE. WTF?!
That's where Mr. Pimp comes in. He might look all flashy and pretty, but he's a businessman. He doesn't take kindly to you cutting off a source of his cash-flow, and probably wouldn't have a problem cutting off stuff from you as well.
You don't think these girls hook up with Pimps because they like doing what they do for money and then give it to someone else. They get protection of sorts, so it's usually a bad idea to double-cross or harm a hooker you haven't paid to harm.
But when I saw the article's title, I imagined one of these little smart cars on the freeway, the first thing I imagined was it getting squished in between a Ford Exploder on one side and a Chevy Suburban on the other. They wouldn't even notice because it would be no worse than a pothole!
SUVs might be the reason people won't buy these things, but it won't be the people unwilling to give up their SUVs, but the people unwilling to play dodge-ball with their car being the ball.
Slashdot Mirror
You were lucky. I worked in a Top Secret facility and we were required to disassemble the drives, and remove each platter. Then using a belt sander, we had to scrub them down to bare metal. These metal pieces were then taken to an incinerator that would mostly melt what was left.
The cool part was being able to recycle the magnesium casings on those giant-sized drives (about a foot wide, 8 inches tall, and about 2 feet long). I made a few hundred dollars on that!
I don't know what the big deal was, though. Our facility only handled... oh wait, someone's at the door...
Right on! Isn't there are "rule" somewhere about using the full form of an acronym before using the acronym?
A google for LM comes up with all kinds of things. Logistics Management, Land Mines.
As I said, I can't cite any references, and I can only base what I say on what my friends who deal with special ed and ESL (English as a 2nd language).
When I say the dual-language kids learn their languages slower, I'm talking about when they are very young. If I recall correctly, kids in the dual-language environment tend to take a longer time to start talking compared to single-language kids. When testing for vocabulary and comprehension, even in early preschool, these kids are a bit behind. But they quickly catch up to their single-language peers and then are left with a better ability to acquire languages.
It would actually make sense that as adults they might have a tendency to excel in the use of language - evidenced by your two examples.
But I'm not sure about a single-language kid having his brain on idle. My guess is that the brain is busy doing tons of things and that if one kid is slowed down by learning two languages, the other kid probably has part of the brain busy doing other things.
It's my belief that the idea that we only use 10% of our brain is not quite true. From a biological point of view, a brain is very expensive. It requires a lot of materials and minerals to build and maintain, and requires lots of oxygen to keep functional. While evolution may leave us with vestigal features like appendixes*, it's not likely to evolve such a large and expensive feature only to never use it. So that leads me to believe that it's more of a zero-sum situation. If more of the brain is dedicated to one task, then less of it is left for other things.
So, I wonder what things that kids growing up with dual-languages might tend to have less developed. For example, might they tend to have less capability at mathematics? Or spatial relationships? Coordination? Or any tendency at all?
Of course, it's also possible that in early development, dual-language learning might actually cause the brain to increase in "power", taking advantage of potential that would not have been developed otherwise.
But I still doubt that we build a lot of cabability that is never used. There might be potential that as the brain is being built, but it seems most logical to me that our brains would only build enough capacity to get things done.
Snopes, the amazing source that it is (tongue-in-cheek), does discuss this idea of only 10% usage of the brain: http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/10percnt.htm
* I recently heard a discussion on NPR where a researcher was saying that we end up with extra stuff in our DNA because it's an expensive process to cull the unnecessary stuff. The DNA we have apparently contains a lot of unused material (maybe this refutes my ideas on the brain), and while it's expensive to make more DNA than the organism needs, there's little evolutionary advantage to cutting it out - it's safer to just turn off parts of it.
I can't cite any studies, but my friend, who is a special-ed teacher, says that research indicates that children growing up dual-language house-holds learn both languages very well. But they also tend to develop slower in either language. So, in your case, you learned Malayalam and English to full fluency. But compared to other children only learning English or Malayalam, they learned their one langauge faster. So strangely, you seem, by some measures, developmentally impaired.
Of course, once you finally catch up, you now have a much easier ability to learn new languages.
This all pretty makes sense to me. You're learning two languages, not one, so of course it takes longer. What I wonder, though, is what might you be be giving up to have gained the ability to quickly master languages?
> What your describing is "Sum of All Fears."
And a character in Sum of All Fears, the book, actually refers to a movie that had the same scenario - I think it was "Black Sunday".
Have you ever noticed how you never see George Bush and Clancy in the same place at the same time? It's clear to me that Clancy is really the president, being an expert on all government conspiracy kinds of things, and is only dressing up as a dufus, pretending to the president.
The only problem with that is that many of those broad-leaf trees don't have seeds that are leaf-shaped. The oak has the acorn, the walnut has the... walnut, and the same with chestnuts.
Of course, there are those cool trees with the whirly-bird seeds. I love those!
I have already received November editions of most of the magazines I get. It's only October 24th.
I would guess that if he hit the stump at any kind of angle, the blade could have pushed directly against the stump and twirled the mower up into the air.
She turned me into a newt! ... ... ...
I got better.
I'm just saying most people shopping at the mall are not there to buy a big purchase like a computer.
Apple does well, and Sony probably will, because they have more to sell besides just computers. Not only that, but they're known for more than just computers.
Plus, who shops at the mall with $1500, ready to buy a computer?
Sony may work because they sell lots of stuff that is cheap enough to inspire impulsive purchases. You go in, look at the neat gadgets, and the next thing you know, you whip out your credit card, and buy a $250 mp3 player.
A PC store is just not going to have the volume of sales in a mall setting to support it.
It reminds me of a story about Henry Ford. From a website I just googled:
"Henry Ford is said to have instructed his engineers to search the junk yards for old Ford automobiles, and determine which parts had not worn out. Then the engineers were to make those parts weaker, not stronger, because obviously Ford had wasted money in making them too strong, or at least stronger than they should have been."
> 99% +/- 10% is far better than 99.9% +/- .01%
.01% an indication that your process is better, or more precise?
Maybe... but when you compare the two, isn't 99.9% +/-
99% +/- 10% might get you within range of your prediction, but the more precise result may actually indicate that your predictions are not complete.
As for me, I suppose I'd prefer my data and analysis be sound, even if it means I have to revise my predictions.
I'm kind of partial to the ethanol for fuel. That way, I can actually get work to pay for filling my hip flask!
Of course, then I might need to carry two of them.
I'm going to try posting this and hope the lameness filters don't get me.
/dev/hda2. If that was mounted to /lin, you'd then need to do a "chroot /lin" and then run /sbin/lilo to get lilo installed.
/rebuilder directory and place the following files in that directory: getimage, putimage, rebuilder, win_reboot /etc/rc.local to point to /rebuilder/rebuilder /etc/lilo.conf to match the menu options in my lilo.conf. Run lilo. /images directory to store the image.
/etc/fstab to mount /dev/hda1 to /win.
I hope this helps! If you find any mistakes, please feel free to contact me. If you find it really useful, I'd love to hear about it.
I'd release this under the GPL, but darn, it just doesn't seem like there's enough there to bother. I mean... can you really GPL some config scripts?
I found it helpful to configure the Linux stuff on one computer, then using a bootable Linux CD (I didn't want the local box slowed down by unnecessary services like networking), I put it on a server, called lin.tgz. I then booted on another machine with the bootable cd, and applied it to the
Good luck!
Linux Rebuilder
By Dale Frakes
Write-up version 0.1, 19 October 2004, 4:17AM
This set of tools helps automate the process of keeping a Windows box with a consistent image. It works similarly to "Deep Freeze" by storing an image of the Windows system and all its software on a Linux partition. The computer boots into Linux, which restores this image to the Windows partition (overwriting whatever the user did before). It then reboots into Windows.
** Installing/Setup **
The scripts as I have written them use tar/gzip to make the image of the Windows partition. This is because I was working on Win98 boxes that use FAT32 (which Linux can easily read and write). Linux does not yet reliably write NTFS, so to use this on an NTFS based Windows system, such as Windows 2000, or Windows XP, the scripts will need to be rewritten using dd/gzip rather than tar/gzip.
Here are the basic steps:
1) Install Windows on your computer. If you are using one drive, partition that drive in half (or, if you know how much space you'll need, just a little more than that). Install all your applications and customize the Windows "image" so that it is exactly the way you want it to be each time you reboot.
2) Install some Linux version on the other half. Keep it small, since you won't need networking, X, or much else.
3) Create a
4) Modify
5) Modify
6) Create a
For FAT32 systems using tar/gzip, you'll need to add an entry to your
** Useful Points **
There are two main keys to why this thing works pretty well. First, lilo can invoke the same kernel with different options. The menu options I place in lilo.conf do this. The other key is contained in the win_reboot file. By invoking lilo with the -R option followed by a boot label, (eg. "lilo -R Windows"), lilo will override its default boot option on the next reboot.
There are two other nice features that work nicely. The first one is that while the kernel is loading, the keyboard cannot interrupt the process. This is great for keeping someone from hijacking the system. The second is that by putting the line "password=""" in lilo.conf will password protect the boot options that do not have a "bypass" in them. This allows the user to do some things, like boot directly into Windows, or even rebuild the Windows partition, but not make a new image of the Windows partition.
If you're going to do a dd/gzip option, you'll want to wipe your Windows partition's empty space. From the documentation for g4u, there is a link to a program called nulfile, which will fill up the empty space with 0's. http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/
(If you like imaging, check out g4
It's me again!
I got a lot of responses in my e-mail, which is great!
I realize now that I have not documented how to install the thing very well. I'll get an e-mail out to everyone tomorrow afternoon (I'm in Portland, so that's Pacific Daylight Time).
To answer a question, I used slackware because it was small, and easy to install just the basics that I needed.
I once set up a similar system using a small linux installation.
1) set up windows on half the drive
2) install a small version of linux on the other partition
3) make an image of the windows drive that is stored on the linux side
3) I set up some rudimentary scripting that worked with lilo boot options.
Normal operation is to boot to Linux, then extract the windows image over the windows partition. It then reboots. You can feed lilo an option to override its default boot option and go directly into windows. On next reboot, you go back into linux.
I even set flags where you can turn off the auto-rebuilding, set it for daily rebuilding only (first boot of the day), or make it strictly manual "your computer is goofy? Okay, reboot, and select rebuild. Get some coffee and come back".
As another poster said, you do have to turn off all the auto-updates because they'll continually trigger. But it is so nice to not have to tend to the machines until you want to do those updates.
I don't have the setup on a website, but if you're interested, send an e-mail to username dfrakes at the new google email service. I'd be glad to send my scripts along along.
We had a lab of win98 boxes - all PII-300's or less that would rebuild their 1.5GB windows image in about 11 minutes. I used tar/gzip for the image, but it can work just as well with dd/gzip and may even go faster. In that case, the smaller your windows drive, the better your performance will be.
It was great in an academic computer lab where the users shouldn't be messing with things!
Sadly, in my last job, they used Lotus Notes for e-mail. The client was really slow, so it was often much much faster to use the web-based access. Which, even though it's provided by IBM, only works with IE. WTF?!
I'd be happy with this scenario:
-Go to the grocery store's website.
-Pick out all of the items I would like to purchase (prices listed).
-Recieve an order number.
-Go to the store.
I'd even be happier if at this point, you show up at a drive-up area, swipe your credit card, and your order is loaded in your car for you.
Clearly, that catipult did not do a very good job of getting the darn thing into orbit. Maybe they should give it a longer arm?
I can alsmost see a "be your own boss" infomercial coming on!
That's where Mr. Pimp comes in. He might look all flashy and pretty, but he's a businessman. He doesn't take kindly to you cutting off a source of his cash-flow, and probably wouldn't have a problem cutting off stuff from you as well.
You don't think these girls hook up with Pimps because they like doing what they do for money and then give it to someone else. They get protection of sorts, so it's usually a bad idea to double-cross or harm a hooker you haven't paid to harm.
Your average American family got by with a single mid-sized sedan for decades, and considered themselves the envy of the world in doing so.
That was before Costco and 100 count packs of toilet paper and 20 gallon buckets of laundry soap.
I drive a dodge Neon, which is no behemouth.
But when I saw the article's title, I imagined one of these little smart cars on the freeway, the first thing I imagined was it getting squished in between a Ford Exploder on one side and a Chevy Suburban on the other. They wouldn't even notice because it would be no worse than a pothole!
SUVs might be the reason people won't buy these things, but it won't be the people unwilling to give up their SUVs, but the people unwilling to play dodge-ball with their car being the ball.
And people bitch about putting out product that's "just a beta", not a finished product - can't do it all.
Yeah, but I don't pay for my gmail account. I had to pay for Windows when I bought my computer.