this is TRULY scary. do a search of your loal neighborhood and see how many lawyers' names come up.
I did notice a lot of lawyers names when I searched. Interestingly enough, however, when I did a search by my zip code no names came up for my town, or any town within 40 miles. At 50 miles a few names came up and at 75 miles hundreds of names came up. So much for finding out how much my "neighboors" donated...
If you are feeling bored, do a Google search for things like "Make Money Fast" or something like that, and then repeatedly click on the ads to open in a new tab. Then when you get tired, close your browser. You'll never see the pages that load, but whoever paid to get listed on Google will be out another 25 cents or so...;-)
Good point! I didn't even realize they still made those when I made my post...:-)
As for the smell, I've always noticed the bleach smell from whites during the wash cycle, not the dry cycle. Other then that I don't really notice much smell at all, just a lot of humidity. Speaking of humidity, venting the dryer indoor during the winter this will also reduce static electricity and such since these are caused by low humidity.
We visited Rockcliffe Mansiona couple of years ago. During the tour the group went through the basement, and the tour guides made the remark that, because the owners were rich, it was not proper for them to hang their clothes outside where everyone could see, so instead they had them hung in the basement.
So I'm thinking - the basement! It's already damp enough in a basement, and then to add all this additional moisture. I wondered how long it took the clothes to dry in such a cool moist environment. Later when we moved to a new house with a walk in attic I realized it would make the perfect place to dry clothes. The attic is easily the warmest place during the summer, having no roof insulation and full exposure to the sun. And being indoors the air quality is good, no worries about dust or smoke getting in the clothes.
For those of you concerned about the earth who have any indoor area that is large enough to hang clothes and which gets hot in the non-winter months, simply hang your clothes there when its hot, and when its cold vent the exhaust from your dryer through ladies' hose (aka panty hose) back into the house. Why waste heat during the winter or generate it unnecessarily during the summer?
I went on to eBay, there was a copy up for bid at a starting bid of $3.00, nobody else bid, I got it for $3.00 plus $3.50 shipping,
This may be off topic, but I refuse the buy any item that costs more to ship then the purchase price, just on the principle of the thing. Actually I won't even buy items any of those stupid "as seen on TV" carp since they usually charge an average of 50% of the purchase price for shipping. When they decide to truthfully disclose the "total cost of buying" then I will consider doing business with them. Same goes for all those sites that won't tell you how much shipping is before you enter all your personal info. But, I guess like spammers, as long as enough people put up with this rubbish, the sellers will keep on pulling it.
Haven't you been watching tv for the past 10 years. Anyone can get a wonderful apartment in Manhattan, with bedrooms and large kitchens, and never have to work! All you need are acquantances.
See, no one ever told you life was gonna be this way.
Your job's a joke, you're broke, and you have a two bedroom Manhattan apartment!
Either way, I'm sure Apple's selling the systems to Pixar at-cost anyway
This is about the third time I've read this remark, in +5 comments no less. Why on earth would anyone assume this to be true? If you own a grocery store would you just walk in and take anything you wanted without paying for it? Maybe. But more likely you would pay just like everyone else, and the profits would flow back to you. For the same reason, I would not assume Pixar was getting any special deals just because Jobs is CEO of both companies. Sure, he's the CEO of both companies, but all Apple employees are not also Pixar employees.
I used to use this scheme for web sites (e.g. commerce). I would basically take the url (for example amazon.com) and transpose letters on the keyboard in some way. Then one day one of my passwords didn't work. Turns out the company had been aquired by another company (or vice versa maybe?) and so the company name no longer matched my password.
Now I just use the Keychain (OS X). I can just hit keys randomly and never see the password, then copy to the clipboard and paste into the browser when I'm ready to log on.
Re:The first law of debugging
on
Debugging
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"The most likely source of the current bug is the fix you made to the last one."
Actually that's a corollary to the first law, which is:
"Every bug fix will cause two more."
Re:Heisenbugs...
on
Debugging
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Heisenbugs are almost always caused by buffer overflows.
In my experience with embedded systems, a Heisenbug is almost always caused by un-initialized data. You wind up assuming a particular value whereas you originally didn't plan on doing that. What value the data actually turns out to be is highly dependant on things like where in memory the code loads, how big the executable is, and so forth. Adding debugging statements will shift all the code after it up in memory and often make the bug go away and behave differently.
Another interesting bug that is unrelated to the Heisenbug is when you port (for example) ANSI C code from one platform to another and code that originally worked starts doing weird things. For example, the C compiler under a BSD would allow modulo 0 and produce a zero result, which was incidentally what was wanted. Moved the code to Linux and started getting core dumps, because modulo 0 was considered dividing by zero. Some problems like this actually turn out to be Heisenbugs, for example due to differences in the way memory is malloc-ed on different systems. For example, suppose you accidentally malloc a pointer rather then its contents. One one OS you wind up allocating more memory than you need, but have no problems because addresses start fairly low in memory. On another OS memory addresses start somewhere else and you start getting weird errors due to lack of memory.
I talked to my service provider and they told me 'just pull the power plug out of the wall when that happens'.
Ok, now the screen dimmed a little and I heard the hard drive spin down, but the pop ups are still a comin! Oh, and something about "battery level at 98%" or something.
"What's the fastest growing Linux distro? This really solid article on InternetNews.com contains interviews with the Debian Project leader, the founder of Mandrake, SuSe, Red Hat and TurboLinux to get their take on who's the biggest and who's the baddest on the distro block."
Debian Project Leader: "The faster growing Linux distro is Debian."
Mandrake Founder: "No, its Mandrake."
SuSe Founder: "Guess again, it's SuSe!"
Red Hat: "We feel the faster growing distro is Red Hat."
TurboLinux: "Our title says it all - we are the faster growing distro!"
If I see the color blue in a dream, where is the radiation?
In your dream silly. And if you carry a pair of dream-calipers and dream you're measuring the wavelength of the color, you'll find it reads around 470 nm... By the way, if you are arguing that your dream is the same as reality, we have someone who should talk to you.
But you just argued that exact thing! Why should a pair of dream-calipers measure the wavelength of blue to be around 470nm? And why stop at dreaming? If I want to I can imagine the color of blue - I can literally "see" it in my head, yet there is no blue light anywhere in my head, only electrical impulses.
I think the problem is that there are two components of reality: there is what is really out there, and there is our perception of it. Our perception is more or less the encoding our brain uses to represent sensory inputs in a form it can process. Who knows if two people's brains would have the same internal representation of blue? If I could "record" my thoughts and "play them back" in your brain, what would you "see" when I played back me imagining the color blue? Until such an experiment is done (and how would one begin without having first solved the differences in encoding one is trying to determine) there is really no way of knowing that our perception of reality is the same. We both live in the same reality, but your perception of blue, the color, is subjective.
I've heard this before - take a nap, take a break, take your mind off it. It doesn't really work for me. I don't ever recall the answer to a problem coming to me in a dream. My dreams are already really strange, a kind of parallel reality where the laws of physics don't apply.
On a few occasions I thought I had come up with a really brilliant idea: an idea for a great novel, or the solution to a tricky problem - but when I woke up it turned out to be nonsense, or what I dreamed was a problem was really not one, so I wound up dreaming up a clever way of preventing people from walking into the sides of buildings, or to keep gasoline from accumulating on the bottoms of their shoes - something inane like that.
The only advantage I have found to taking a break is that sometimes when I work too long I drop into negative productivity - I am just trying so hard but am so tired I am hindering myself. So in that case, a break just brings me back to where I should be, not really any kind of breakthrough. However going away from something for very long also tends to make me lose interest in it, so there is a drawback to that approach too.
When I played way to much chess, I would dream about crushing openings and elegant solutions to sticky situations.
At one point in the past I liked to occasionally play roulette. After a couple hours of sitting at the table in the evening I would dream all night about roulette numbers, but in a kind of nightmarish jumble. Same thing after driving all day, the moment I close my eyes I see a jumble of moving roads, making no sense.
I've had the exact same problem with Maxtor drives... under Mac OS X!
I RMA'ed the first drive, the replacement worked when I first got it, but a couple weeks later the problem re-occurred. Basically I was using the external drive as a backup so wasn't using it very frequently.
Same problem - the backup would copy 50-100MB until it hit large file, then would simply hang and not write any more data to the drive - would have to power it off and back on.
The neat thing is that you do not need to buy hardware from IBM to run software written for the IBM PC.
A neat thing to the user, for sure. But this is perhaps the reason why Windows has such a reputation for being unreliable. When you don't control the hardware you basically wind up having to support every implementation that comes along. More debugging requires to maintain the same level of quality...
There are MANY more states of matter than solid, liquid, and gas. There's plasma, 2-dimensional fluids, 1-dimensional crystals, ambiplasma of partcies and antiparticles, photon crystals, and lots of others.
I thought the states of matter were a function of temperature (energy level). From that I've come up with my list of states of matter:
1. Super-solid: includes BEC (Bose-Einstein Condensate), this new discovery, neutron star stuff, etc.
2. Solid
3. Liquid
4. Gas
5. Plasma - ionized gas; too hot for electrons to remain around nucleii
6. Electroweak - matter above the energy state at which electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces unify
7. Electrostrong - matter above the energy state at which electromagnetic, weak and strong nuclear forces unify.
8. GUT matter - above the energy state at which all forces are unified.
I believe that state 6 and maybe (???) state 7 is achievable in a particle accelerator. State 8 only exists early in the universe, maybe before the plank time?
The other "states" you mentioned would see to me to be more analogous to fractal (or partial) dimensions and not directly considered states.
Just my 2 cents.
a car can be kept going almost indefinitly on the money buying a new car would cost you if you are willing to get your hands dirty (car repair is really, really easy most of the time)
Considering the fact that many things in modern cars today are computer controlled etc. etc., I have to ask what you mean by this. What exactly am I, the average car owner, able to easily repair under the hood of my car? (I mean, stuff that has to be fixed before the car will continue to run properly, no cosmetic stuff or body damage that doesn't affect drivability.)
Not at all, to be quite honest, and how does that answer my question?
Then you do not have a fuel budget. That is to say, if you have a fixed amount you have budgeted (can spend) on fuel costs, at some point a rise in fuel costs will force you to cut back.
I'll grant you that gas is dirty cheap in the U.S. - most things you drink cost more per gallon then gas (unless you buy the store brand in some cases) and so a big rise in gas prices won't cause much increase percentage wise to most people. But it will make a difference for some, and gasoline consumption will decrease. B.P. make may more gross profit per gallon but they will sell fewer gallons.
Or they may not make more profit per gallon. If the increase is due solely to taxation, then B.P. might actually make less profit.
Slashdot Mirror
this is TRULY scary. do a search of your loal neighborhood and see how many lawyers' names come up.
I did notice a lot of lawyers names when I searched. Interestingly enough, however, when I did a search by my zip code no names came up for my town, or any town within 40 miles. At 50 miles a few names came up and at 75 miles hundreds of names came up. So much for finding out how much my "neighboors" donated...
If you are feeling bored, do a Google search for things like "Make Money Fast" or something like that, and then repeatedly click on the ads to open in a new tab. Then when you get tired, close your browser. You'll never see the pages that load, but whoever paid to get listed on Google will be out another 25 cents or so... ;-)
Good point! I didn't even realize they still made those when I made my post... :-)
As for the smell, I've always noticed the bleach smell from whites during the wash cycle, not the dry cycle. Other then that I don't really notice much smell at all, just a lot of humidity. Speaking of humidity, venting the dryer indoor during the winter this will also reduce static electricity and such since these are caused by low humidity.
We visited Rockcliffe Mansiona couple of years ago. During the tour the group went through the basement, and the tour guides made the remark that, because the owners were rich, it was not proper for them to hang their clothes outside where everyone could see, so instead they had them hung in the basement.
So I'm thinking - the basement! It's already damp enough in a basement, and then to add all this additional moisture. I wondered how long it took the clothes to dry in such a cool moist environment. Later when we moved to a new house with a walk in attic I realized it would make the perfect place to dry clothes. The attic is easily the warmest place during the summer, having no roof insulation and full exposure to the sun. And being indoors the air quality is good, no worries about dust or smoke getting in the clothes.
For those of you concerned about the earth who have any indoor area that is large enough to hang clothes and which gets hot in the non-winter months, simply hang your clothes there when its hot, and when its cold vent the exhaust from your dryer through ladies' hose (aka panty hose) back into the house. Why waste heat during the winter or generate it unnecessarily during the summer?
I went on to eBay, there was a copy up for bid at a starting bid of $3.00, nobody else bid, I got it for $3.00 plus $3.50 shipping,
This may be off topic, but I refuse the buy any item that costs more to ship then the purchase price, just on the principle of the thing. Actually I won't even buy items any of those stupid "as seen on TV" carp since they usually charge an average of 50% of the purchase price for shipping. When they decide to truthfully disclose the "total cost of buying" then I will consider doing business with them. Same goes for all those sites that won't tell you how much shipping is before you enter all your personal info. But, I guess like spammers, as long as enough people put up with this rubbish, the sellers will keep on pulling it.
[/rant off]
Haven't you been watching tv for the past 10 years. Anyone can get a wonderful apartment in Manhattan, with bedrooms and large kitchens, and never have to work! All you need are acquantances.
See, no one ever told you life was gonna be this way.
Your job's a joke, you're broke, and you have a two bedroom Manhattan apartment!
If I remember right from my chemistry class many moon ago...
;-)
The H+ ion is Hydronium,
while OH- is hydroxide
Therefore it could just as well be called Hydronium Hydroxide.
My favorite though is still "Aqua Hydra"
Either way, I'm sure Apple's selling the systems to Pixar at-cost anyway
This is about the third time I've read this remark, in +5 comments no less. Why on earth would anyone assume this to be true? If you own a grocery store would you just walk in and take anything you wanted without paying for it? Maybe. But more likely you would pay just like everyone else, and the profits would flow back to you. For the same reason, I would not assume Pixar was getting any special deals just because Jobs is CEO of both companies. Sure, he's the CEO of both companies, but all Apple employees are not also Pixar employees.
I used to use this scheme for web sites (e.g. commerce). I would basically take the url (for example amazon.com) and transpose letters on the keyboard in some way. Then one day one of my passwords didn't work. Turns out the company had been aquired by another company (or vice versa maybe?) and so the company name no longer matched my password.
Now I just use the Keychain (OS X). I can just hit keys randomly and never see the password, then copy to the clipboard and paste into the browser when I'm ready to log on.
"The most likely source of the current bug is the fix you made to the last one."
Actually that's a corollary to the first law, which is:
"Every bug fix will cause two more."
Heisenbugs are almost always caused by buffer overflows.
In my experience with embedded systems, a Heisenbug is almost always caused by un-initialized data. You wind up assuming a particular value whereas you originally didn't plan on doing that. What value the data actually turns out to be is highly dependant on things like where in memory the code loads, how big the executable is, and so forth. Adding debugging statements will shift all the code after it up in memory and often make the bug go away and behave differently.
Another interesting bug that is unrelated to the Heisenbug is when you port (for example) ANSI C code from one platform to another and code that originally worked starts doing weird things. For example, the C compiler under a BSD would allow modulo 0 and produce a zero result, which was incidentally what was wanted. Moved the code to Linux and started getting core dumps, because modulo 0 was considered dividing by zero. Some problems like this actually turn out to be Heisenbugs, for example due to differences in the way memory is malloc-ed on different systems. For example, suppose you accidentally malloc a pointer rather then its contents. One one OS you wind up allocating more memory than you need, but have no problems because addresses start fairly low in memory. On another OS memory addresses start somewhere else and you start getting weird errors due to lack of memory.
I talked to my service provider and they told me 'just pull the power plug out of the wall when that happens'.
Ok, now the screen dimmed a little and I heard the hard drive spin down, but the pop ups are still a comin! Oh, and something about "battery level at 98%" or something.
"What's the fastest growing Linux distro? This really solid article on InternetNews.com contains interviews with the Debian Project leader, the founder of Mandrake, SuSe, Red Hat and TurboLinux to get their take on who's the biggest and who's the baddest on the distro block."
Debian Project Leader: "The faster growing Linux distro is Debian."
Mandrake Founder: "No, its Mandrake."
SuSe Founder: "Guess again, it's SuSe!"
Red Hat: "We feel the faster growing distro is Red Hat."
TurboLinux: "Our title says it all - we are the faster growing distro!"
If I see the color blue in a dream, where is the radiation?
In your dream silly. And if you carry a pair of dream-calipers and dream you're measuring the wavelength of the color, you'll find it reads around 470 nm... By the way, if you are arguing that your dream is the same as reality, we have someone who should talk to you.
But you just argued that exact thing! Why should a pair of dream-calipers measure the wavelength of blue to be around 470nm? And why stop at dreaming? If I want to I can imagine the color of blue - I can literally "see" it in my head, yet there is no blue light anywhere in my head, only electrical impulses.
I think the problem is that there are two components of reality: there is what is really out there, and there is our perception of it. Our perception is more or less the encoding our brain uses to represent sensory inputs in a form it can process. Who knows if two people's brains would have the same internal representation of blue? If I could "record" my thoughts and "play them back" in your brain, what would you "see" when I played back me imagining the color blue? Until such an experiment is done (and how would one begin without having first solved the differences in encoding one is trying to determine) there is really no way of knowing that our perception of reality is the same. We both live in the same reality, but your perception of blue, the color, is subjective.
I'm abusing my power as Slashdot editor
Includes a choice quote from Microsoft spokesman Jim Desler: 'We wanted to do this in a way that's going to foster his interest in technology'.
At first glance I thought it said fester
I've heard this before - take a nap, take a break, take your mind off it. It doesn't really work for me. I don't ever recall the answer to a problem coming to me in a dream. My dreams are already really strange, a kind of parallel reality where the laws of physics don't apply.
On a few occasions I thought I had come up with a really brilliant idea: an idea for a great novel, or the solution to a tricky problem - but when I woke up it turned out to be nonsense, or what I dreamed was a problem was really not one, so I wound up dreaming up a clever way of preventing people from walking into the sides of buildings, or to keep gasoline from accumulating on the bottoms of their shoes - something inane like that.
The only advantage I have found to taking a break is that sometimes when I work too long I drop into negative productivity - I am just trying so hard but am so tired I am hindering myself. So in that case, a break just brings me back to where I should be, not really any kind of breakthrough. However going away from something for very long also tends to make me lose interest in it, so there is a drawback to that approach too.
When I played way to much chess, I would dream about crushing openings and elegant solutions to sticky situations.
At one point in the past I liked to occasionally play roulette. After a couple hours of sitting at the table in the evening I would dream all night about roulette numbers, but in a kind of nightmarish jumble. Same thing after driving all day, the moment I close my eyes I see a jumble of moving roads, making no sense.
I've had the exact same problem with Maxtor drives... under Mac OS X!
I RMA'ed the first drive, the replacement worked when I first got it, but a couple weeks later the problem re-occurred. Basically I was using the external drive as a backup so wasn't using it very frequently.
Same problem - the backup would copy 50-100MB until it hit large file, then would simply hang and not write any more data to the drive - would have to power it off and back on.
The neat thing is that you do not need to buy hardware from IBM to run software written for the IBM PC.
A neat thing to the user, for sure. But this is perhaps the reason why Windows has such a reputation for being unreliable. When you don't control the hardware you basically wind up having to support every implementation that comes along. More debugging requires to maintain the same level of quality...
There are MANY more states of matter than solid, liquid, and gas. There's plasma, 2-dimensional fluids, 1-dimensional crystals, ambiplasma of partcies and antiparticles, photon crystals, and lots of others.
I thought the states of matter were a function of temperature (energy level). From that I've come up with my list of states of matter:
1. Super-solid: includes BEC (Bose-Einstein Condensate), this new discovery, neutron star stuff, etc.
2. Solid
3. Liquid
4. Gas
5. Plasma - ionized gas; too hot for electrons to remain around nucleii
6. Electroweak - matter above the energy state at which electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces unify
7. Electrostrong - matter above the energy state at which electromagnetic, weak and strong nuclear forces unify.
8. GUT matter - above the energy state at which all forces are unified.
I believe that state 6 and maybe (???) state 7 is achievable in a particle accelerator. State 8 only exists early in the universe, maybe before the plank time?
The other "states" you mentioned would see to me to be more analogous to fractal (or partial) dimensions and not directly considered states.
Just my 2 cents.
I'm sure they've calculated that only about 40% (or whatever) of the actual songs will be redeemed
Everyone who isn't going to redeem your free song, please send it to me...
I want to beat the $29,500 record...
a car can be kept going almost indefinitly on the money buying a new car would cost you if you are willing to get your hands dirty (car repair is really, really easy most of the time)
Considering the fact that many things in modern cars today are computer controlled etc. etc., I have to ask what you mean by this. What exactly am I, the average car owner, able to easily repair under the hood of my car? (I mean, stuff that has to be fixed before the car will continue to run properly, no cosmetic stuff or body damage that doesn't affect drivability.)
Wow. That is one of the most insightful posts I've read in a while. I'd mod you up if I ever got to moderate...
Not at all, to be quite honest, and how does that answer my question?
Then you do not have a fuel budget. That is to say, if you have a fixed amount you have budgeted (can spend) on fuel costs, at some point a rise in fuel costs will force you to cut back.
I'll grant you that gas is dirty cheap in the U.S. - most things you drink cost more per gallon then gas (unless you buy the store brand in some cases) and so a big rise in gas prices won't cause much increase percentage wise to most people. But it will make a difference for some, and gasoline consumption will decrease. B.P. make may more gross profit per gallon but they will sell fewer gallons.
Or they may not make more profit per gallon. If the increase is due solely to taxation, then B.P. might actually make less profit.