How come I never think of these things when I post my FIRST comment? D'OH:
- Who teaches the Discrete Math (Discrete Structures) courses? At my school it is the CS department, but some schools pass this off to Math professors who have no CS background and don't teach the course geared toward CS students.
- Do the professors speak English (or whatever language you do?) - DONT flame me, it's a real problem. Many of our professors have accents that take a few classes (or longer) to get used to. Try sitting in on a class or two if you can, and make sure the professor is CLEAR, LOUD and WILLING TO EXPLAIN things to students.
(OK, I'm done now...)
This is a bit more general than what you asked, it's essentially a list of the "Do I want to go here?" interview procedure I used.
- What kind of computing facilities are available. Specifically what does the CS department have available exclusively to it (for example at my school (Hofstra University - http://cs.hofstra.edu) there are two dedicated CS labs, one with Windows PCs and one with Sun workstations.
- The background of the professors. It always helps to find a department with professors interested in the same things you are. Also don't forget to check out the ADJUNCT FACULTY (some are good, some suck).
- Do professors teach classes? or are you stuck with TAs until you get to upper level courses?
- How do people who graduated from the CS program do in the job market?
- What are the other students like? Go during the semester (a little late now, but try the summer session students). TALK to the students, find out how they feel about the CS program, professors, etc.
- What language is used in programming courses? (If there arent any programming courses, RUN AWAY!) My idea of "acceptable" answers are C, C++ and Java. VB, Ada, Pascal, Fortran, FORTH, COBOL and BASIC should send you running. Lisp should make you cower in fear (although you'll probably see some of these languages in a programming languages course later on...)
- Theoretical or Practical view of CS? Theory loads you up with algorithms, practical teaches you how to implement them in one or two languages. My preference is the theoretical methodology. Anyone can learn a programming language, but algorithms are fundamental.
While I am sure there are plenty of universities like the ones you speak of, I know at least my school (Hofstra University (CS)) has made an attempt to bring a bit of the real world into the classroom with the Software Engineering (CSC-190) course).
While it's only one course, it is a step in the right direction IMO.
The real problem is that pin that you pushed back through the plastic. If you can get at the back side of the connector and push the pin back out (WITHOUT opening the actual HDD case (where the platters are), that should suffice (well, that and VERY CAREFULLY putting the cable on so as not to bend, recede or BREAK any more pins!).
Of course, if any of the pins snapped you now have some really fun soldering to attempt (to either reattach the pin or hook the cable directly to the drive as someone else suggested).
If the drive isn't big and the data isn't important, you might want to just get a new drive (especially if the pins are broken). Otherwise I have a bunch of drives with bent pins (including one where to put the cable on I had to have it at a 45 degree angle to get it over the bent pins on one side of the connector) that are working fine (provided I dont try to remove and reattach their cables).
Of course this still doesnt address the hard drive noise - With no fans you really notice the clicking of your disk, as well as the disk spin noise if you have 7200+RPM disks.
Maybe it's time to look at some of the solid-state disk postings too?
Apple's G4 Cube, aside from looking cool with the right lighting, tackled this problem. Their solution was to put HUGE heatsinks on the CPU and vid card chips, leave a large area at the top of the case for hot air to get out, perforate the bottom profusely and stand the machine about 4-6" off the desk, letting convection do the cooling.
They also pulled out the power supply, which I think would be a must for ANY fan-less system. Putting this heat-generating monster outside the case significantly drops the temperature (and provides the user a GREAT foot-warmer).
Finally, as many other readers have said, look at ways to reduce heat generation - slower or cooler CPU & vid card, lower RPMs on your hard drive, etc. The G4 can blow quite warm when I'm giving it a workout and it's only 400MHz, I think anything over 5-600 may be beyond the limits of convection cooling.
If you're going to go with an NT solution, it would make sense to buy a $5-800 mid-range PC system and slap on a copy of W2K server (dont recall the price offhand).
This would be capable of acting as your mail/dhcp/domain auth server in the same way as a *NIX box like the ones described by myself and others above, and would save the cost (money, equipment and time) of admining two machines.
Before anyone starts flaming or modding me down for mentioning the W-Word, a properly secured W2K or NT box (disable all unneded services, ditch IIS) is secure enough for most environments as long as the admin keeps up with service packs and security fixes. There's a windows update link on the start menu - USE IT.
If your company isn't dead set on having a commercial solution, a commodity PC ($500 or less) with samba, dhcpd and a pop/imap daemon would more than suffice for your needs. Windows 2000 domain support isn't all it could be, but if all you need to do is set up file/print sharing and login authentication for the domain that will work.
This has the advantage of costing only whatever you spend on the PC and your time setting it up (Linux/BSD & the associated programs listed above are all freely available), but unfortunately you would be on your own to admin and support it. In the end I think that it would balance out in the company's favor though, as well as providing relatively easy upgrade paths for the future.
Check out http://www.telescopes-earth.com , they have a fairly good selection of telescopes from
cheap $100 models to several thousand dollar scopes with integrated GPS and Star Finder systems.
I personally have a Celestron C-102 (lists for just over $500 on their site) which isn't the greatest scope in the world but I find it more than adequate.
The site also sells accessories (additional lenses, filters, etc), which are useful for people like me who usually have a camera attached to their telescope:)
I have to weigh in even though this is probably redundant and going to cost me karma
The current "inclusion convention" for email is just to do whatever my mail program wants, normally "stick my reply over the quoted text". This results in huge messages, often with 10 or 20 quoted messages under them which bear little or no relevance to the current line of discussion.
The end result for me is long, confusing email that eats space on my mail server (I'm an IMAP user).
In most cases I advocate the FIRST quoting style described in the jargon file - it makes the most sense for any email over 10 lines. It makes the most sense when reading over the email and it is the style I myself use. Additionally, I berate people frequently for not trimming off irrelevant stuff from their messages - If something is 6 levels back and hasn't been replied to chances are it wont spark discussion on the 7th mail.
Well I can't say it authoritatively, but patches have probably been out since the very beginnings of programming - at the very least since the beginning of UNIX.
When you think about it, all the Unices, commercial or free, have always released patches. In Linux and the open-source BSDs these are released as source code (diffs or checked out of CVS), in the commercial world binary patches that either replace or edit a portion of the files on your computer are often released to address security or functionality problems. I honestly can't think of any other major piece of software (OS, app suite, windowing system) that hasn't released at least one "apply this today or your computer may explode" patch.
As for the "why" of releasing broken software, I can personally attest to the fact that most companies probably DON'T know about the problems until they come up in the real world. When my company tests software we try to think up extreme or improbable cases along with the mundane, but invariably we miss something.
IMHO the releasing of buggy software isn't necessarially bad - but on the other hand if you KNOW a bug exists and it is fesable to resolve before a release, that should be the prefered solution (as opposed to a patch later).
As for the average number of patches a piece of code requires, the codebase for the larges application I am currently working on has had well over 100 internal patches (things which didn't cause functionality problems but still should have been fixed). These fixes were sent to customers in 10 seperate external patches (a patch that increments the z in x.y.z versioning) which also fixed functionality problems that we discovered in additional testing or that the users reported.
For larger-scale examples, check out the lists of patches for solaris (www.sun.com) and MS Windows (windowsupdate.microsoft.com - assuming it's back up)
OK, if you walk into the temple and they're sacrificing penguins or daemons, turn around and walk out FAST! (If on the other hand they're sacrificing WinXP CDs, kindly let the rest of us know so we can join the fun:))
Seriously now, bring copies of every major distribution you can think of - off the top of my head at least RedHat (7.2), Debian (Potato or Woody, whatever the latest stable release is) and SlackWare (haven't kept up but whatever the latest is). I've also heard good things about Mandrake and SuSE but I've never used either personally.
Make sure you bring something that works on Macs too just in case (you may want to actually spring for a copy of OSX if they are running recent Mac hardware. Also, on the off chance that they have some genuinely freaky hardware, bringing along a NetBSD CD couldn't hurt.
You should also bring along soft copies of every howto you think you'll need (and at least hard copies of everything you'll need to get a system installed and running in case you hit any snags). Since you said your Spanish is marginal, you may want to run some of the howtos through babelfish. The translations are quite honestly crappy, but they're good enough that they should be workable.
This is a really cool idea, there would need to be some way of verifying the information the plugin was getting though, or someone could just feed your server an "attack" fingerprint that matches
a normal hit and you would wind up denying legitemate users.
This idea sounds a lot like the ORBS/RBL for sendmail.
I think there is some value to this article for new admins - it highlights most of the common things you will see in your log files if someone is poking at your site.
By the same token, most well-written CGIs will block these sorts of attacks (and hopefully if you are writing CGIs you will have enough knowledge (and common sense) to write them in a reasonably secure manner).
I wonder if they do have a facility to emulate the/. effect. I didn't see anything in the
projects list, although there was one project that I guess is close
(although they concentrate on blocking the traffic surge rather than handling the load).
Slashdot Mirror
How come I never think of these things when I post my FIRST comment? D'OH: - Who teaches the Discrete Math (Discrete Structures) courses? At my school it is the CS department, but some schools pass this off to Math professors who have no CS background and don't teach the course geared toward CS students. - Do the professors speak English (or whatever language you do?) - DONT flame me, it's a real problem. Many of our professors have accents that take a few classes (or longer) to get used to. Try sitting in on a class or two if you can, and make sure the professor is CLEAR, LOUD and WILLING TO EXPLAIN things to students. (OK, I'm done now...)
This is a bit more general than what you asked, it's essentially a list of the "Do I want to go here?" interview procedure I used.
- What kind of computing facilities are available. Specifically what does the CS department have available exclusively to it (for example at my school (Hofstra University - http://cs.hofstra.edu) there are two dedicated CS labs, one with Windows PCs and one with Sun workstations.
- The background of the professors. It always helps to find a department with professors interested in the same things you are. Also don't forget to check out the ADJUNCT FACULTY (some are good, some suck).
- Do professors teach classes? or are you stuck with TAs until you get to upper level courses?
- How do people who graduated from the CS program do in the job market?
- What are the other students like? Go during the semester (a little late now, but try the summer session students). TALK to the students, find out how they feel about the CS program, professors, etc.
- What language is used in programming courses? (If there arent any programming courses, RUN AWAY!) My idea of "acceptable" answers are C, C++ and Java. VB, Ada, Pascal, Fortran, FORTH, COBOL and BASIC should send you running. Lisp should make you cower in fear (although you'll probably see some of these languages in a programming languages course later on...)
- Theoretical or Practical view of CS? Theory loads you up with algorithms, practical teaches you how to implement them in one or two languages. My preference is the theoretical methodology. Anyone can learn a programming language, but algorithms are fundamental.
- Anything else you want to know.
While I am sure there are plenty of universities like the ones you speak of, I know at least my school (Hofstra University (CS)) has made an attempt to bring a bit of the real world into the classroom with the Software Engineering (CSC-190) course).
While it's only one course, it is a step in the right direction IMO.
Only if you took Advanced Punishm^H^H^H^H^H^Hlacement classes :)
The real problem is that pin that you pushed back through the plastic. If you can get at the back side of the connector and push the pin back out (WITHOUT opening the actual HDD case (where the platters are), that should suffice (well, that and VERY CAREFULLY putting the cable on so as not to bend, recede or BREAK any more pins!).
Of course, if any of the pins snapped you now have some really fun soldering to attempt (to either reattach the pin or hook the cable directly to the drive as someone else suggested).
If the drive isn't big and the data isn't important, you might want to just get a new drive (especially if the pins are broken). Otherwise I have a bunch of drives with bent pins (including one where to put the cable on I had to have it at a 45 degree angle to get it over the bent pins on one side of the connector) that are working fine (provided I dont try to remove and reattach their cables).
Of course this still doesnt address the hard drive noise - With no fans you really notice the clicking of your disk, as well as the disk spin noise if you have 7200+RPM disks.
Maybe it's time to look at some of the solid-state disk postings too?
Apple's G4 Cube, aside from looking cool with the right lighting, tackled this problem. Their solution was to put HUGE heatsinks on the CPU and vid card chips, leave a large area at the top of the case for hot air to get out, perforate the bottom profusely and stand the machine about 4-6" off the desk, letting convection do the cooling.
They also pulled out the power supply, which I think would be a must for ANY fan-less system. Putting this heat-generating monster outside the case significantly drops the temperature (and provides the user a GREAT foot-warmer).
Finally, as many other readers have said, look at ways to reduce heat generation - slower or cooler CPU & vid card, lower RPMs on your hard drive, etc. The G4 can blow quite warm when I'm giving it a workout and it's only 400MHz, I think anything over 5-600 may be beyond the limits of convection cooling.
... but then you'd probably wind up in jail for DMCA Violations anyway.
So much for innovation and advancement.
If you're going to go with an NT solution, it would make sense to buy a $5-800 mid-range PC system and slap on a copy of W2K server (dont recall the price offhand).
This would be capable of acting as your mail/dhcp/domain auth server in the same way as a *NIX box like the ones described by myself and others above, and would save the cost (money, equipment and time) of admining two machines.
Before anyone starts flaming or modding me down for mentioning the W-Word, a properly secured W2K or NT box (disable all unneded services, ditch IIS) is secure enough for most environments as long as the admin keeps up with service packs and security fixes. There's a windows update link on the start menu - USE IT.
If your company isn't dead set on having a commercial solution, a commodity PC ($500 or less) with samba, dhcpd and a pop/imap daemon would more than suffice for your needs. Windows 2000 domain support isn't all it could be, but if all you need to do is set up file/print sharing and login authentication for the domain that will work.
This has the advantage of costing only whatever you spend on the PC and your time setting it up (Linux/BSD & the associated programs listed above are all freely available), but unfortunately you would be on your own to admin and support it. In the end I think that it would balance out in the company's favor though, as well as providing relatively easy upgrade paths for the future.
Check out http://www.telescopes-earth.com , they have a fairly good selection of telescopes from
:)
cheap $100 models to several thousand dollar scopes with integrated GPS and Star Finder systems.
I personally have a Celestron C-102 (lists for just over $500 on their site) which isn't the greatest scope in the world but I find it more than adequate.
The site also sells accessories (additional lenses, filters, etc), which are useful for people like me who usually have a camera attached to their telescope
I have to weigh in even though this is probably redundant and going to cost me karma
:)
The current "inclusion convention" for email is just to do whatever my mail program wants, normally "stick my reply over the quoted text". This results in huge messages, often with 10 or 20 quoted messages under them which bear little or no relevance to the current line of discussion.
The end result for me is long, confusing email that eats space on my mail server (I'm an IMAP user).
In most cases I advocate the FIRST quoting style described in the jargon file - it makes the most sense for any email over 10 lines. It makes the most sense when reading over the email and it is the style I myself use. Additionally, I berate people frequently for not trimming off irrelevant stuff from their messages - If something is 6 levels back and hasn't been replied to chances are it wont spark discussion on the 7th mail.
This has been my theraputic rant for the day
Well I can't say it authoritatively, but patches have probably been out since the very beginnings of programming - at the very least since the beginning of UNIX.
When you think about it, all the Unices, commercial or free, have always released patches. In Linux and the open-source BSDs these are released as source code (diffs or checked out of CVS), in the commercial world binary patches that either replace or edit a portion of the files on your computer are often released to address security or functionality problems. I honestly can't think of any other major piece of software (OS, app suite, windowing system) that hasn't released at least one "apply this today or your computer may explode" patch.
As for the "why" of releasing broken software, I can personally attest to the fact that most companies probably DON'T know about the problems until they come up in the real world. When my company tests software we try to think up extreme or improbable cases along with the mundane, but invariably we miss something.
IMHO the releasing of buggy software isn't necessarially bad - but on the other hand if you KNOW a bug exists and it is fesable to resolve before a release, that should be the prefered solution (as opposed to a patch later).
As for the average number of patches a piece of code requires, the codebase for the larges application I am currently working on has had well over 100 internal patches (things which didn't cause functionality problems but still should have been fixed). These fixes were sent to customers in 10 seperate external patches (a patch that increments the z in x.y.z versioning) which also fixed functionality problems that we discovered in additional testing or that the users reported.
For larger-scale examples, check out the lists of patches for solaris (www.sun.com) and MS Windows (windowsupdate.microsoft.com - assuming it's back up)
Hope this helped a little.
OK, if you walk into the temple and they're sacrificing penguins or daemons, turn around and walk out FAST! (If on the other hand they're sacrificing WinXP CDs, kindly let the rest of us know so we can join the fun :))
Seriously now, bring copies of every major distribution you can think of - off the top of my head at least RedHat (7.2), Debian (Potato or Woody, whatever the latest stable release is) and SlackWare (haven't kept up but whatever the latest is). I've also heard good things about Mandrake and SuSE but I've never used either personally.
Make sure you bring something that works on Macs too just in case (you may want to actually spring for a copy of OSX if they are running recent Mac hardware. Also, on the off chance that they have some genuinely freaky hardware, bringing along a NetBSD CD couldn't hurt.
You should also bring along soft copies of every howto you think you'll need (and at least hard copies of everything you'll need to get a system installed and running in case you hit any snags). Since you said your Spanish is marginal, you may want to run some of the howtos through babelfish. The translations are quite honestly crappy, but they're good enough that they should be workable.
Best of luck - You'll probably need it!
One possible solution I came up with was to UUEncode the data, then store it in a text field.
I never actually implemented this, but it should be fairly easy to do (either outside the DB or using a Postgres user-defined function.
The existing BLOB support is documented briefly Here, but quite honestly it... well sucks.
I can't resist:
>The traffic between data centers is encrypted with
>proprietary DoD software.
mail president@securenet.gov -s "SuperSecret Stuff" `rot13 secrets`
:)
Maybe I'll win that bet I made with my highschool physics professor that I could break at least one before I die! :)
Seriously though, this is cool stuff, I'd read the actual paper when it gets published but I'm sure I'd drown in a see of evil mathematics.
This is a really cool idea, there would need to be some way of verifying the information the plugin was getting though, or someone could just feed your server an "attack" fingerprint that matches a normal hit and you would wind up denying legitemate users. This idea sounds a lot like the ORBS/RBL for sendmail.
I think there is some value to this article for new admins - it highlights most of the common things you will see in your log files if someone is poking at your site.
By the same token, most well-written CGIs will block these sorts of attacks (and hopefully if you are writing CGIs you will have enough knowledge (and common sense) to write them in a reasonably secure manner).
At the least it's worth a quick five-minute scan.
I wonder if they do have a facility to emulate the /. effect. I didn't see anything in the
projects list, although there was one project that I guess is close
(although they concentrate on blocking the traffic surge rather than handling the load).
I can't help but think about this in terms of how much raw power I could get out of it as a Beowulf cluster
Mommy..... Buy me that for christmas?