I have made the mistake of using cum in my postings on slashdot, which always seems to delight and amuse the sixth-grade-male mentality prevalent.
For those who are ignunt: It is precisely the latin conjuction meaning "with", as in:
"I think this new photocopier-cum-papershredder is a disaster waiting to happen." Think of the word "cumulative"
Fuck a duck... I get my fifteen minutes of fame and it's on slashdot... I'm growing out my beard and movin' to Afghanistan I tells ya:)
To justify my question a little (and I was surprised to see it moderated funny, and even more surprised to see it presented to the interviewee) I honestly had never heard of the guy... I went to the provided link to be presented with a single [EMBED] - so no information there.
My gripe was not with Chris, it lies with the editors who assume that all geeks represent an amorphous fanbase, and surely we all know who some niche artist is. Had the story been prefaced by, say another article, "Geeky rapper finds rhymes for All Your Base Are Belong To Us", or had that been included in the summary, then I (and based on some of the comments attached to my posting, others) could have said, "Oh. A Geek Rapper. Not my cup o' tea, but kinda cool".
Not quite 20 years ago, I was sharing a house in Boston with another hacker. One day, the office manager from work had to come pick up some documents, and was horrified to find how we lived. There was a room, possibly labeled "kitchen" on the architectural drawings, but we had converted into "computer room" (well, with that 240V 50A outlet in there, where else were we going to plug in the VAX?)
She took pity upon us, and she and one of her girlfriends came to give the place a good de-toxing. She explained, that the two-geeks-in-full-geek-mode funk could be eliminated by opening windows, which she explained were movable devices, and not the transparent-aluminum bricks we had hitherto assumed them to be. (She got mega geek points for the obscure transparent aluminum reference).
One of the other things I learned in that house, was this:
A container of
Seven Delights from the neighborhood chinese place, turns into Seventh Circle of Hell if you leave it on the counter and fly off the next morning for a three-week project at Stanford.
I do not mean to cast aspersions on D and D players, but if IDF says
that people who indulge in fantasy games, as a statistical group, have
personality traits that make them a lower security risk, then I am
inclined to believe them.
After all, these people have some of the best clinical and
occupational psychologists in the world working for them.
One possible characteristic not mentioned in TFA was: People who
role-play might be more inclined to game the system - definitely not a
desirable personality trait to have in personnel deployed in sensitive positions.
... I walk in the door from going to the Gigante to buy some food, and find this story. To think my change might help make a (much needed) dent in the Microsoft mindset here in Mexico makes me smile
So long as they have n copies of a popular title and m > n people who want that title, someone has to wait in line.
They have made the decision (and not entirely unreasonable) that the people who use the service the least get to be further in front of the line than the people who use it the most.
If this offends you so much, you can buy a few million DVDs, set up a customer service and distribution organization and run your own competing service, and deal with people who whine that your arbitrary decision for who gets first dibs is somehow unfair.
TANSTAAFL
(In interest of full disclosure, I have never used Netflix, nor do I work for them. I am a new (and happy) customer of Blockbusters' competing product.)
Well, yes, all three batteries could have failed, and all thre sets of rectifiers feeding those batteries could have failed. But that is a particularly unlikely event.
Well, what you caught is that: Only a small fraction of the total energy from my hot plate went into my egg (And you're right -- it was kinda overcooked... it's challenging to prepare breakfast and do thermodynamics in your head).
The argument could be made that the CPU-powered-block-of-metal cooker would suffer similar inefficiencies, thus requiring the same amount of energy overkill...
Another error was a more serious procedural error: I started timing from cold-pan/cold-oil, not from hot-pan/hot-oil... so that really does throw the whole experiment into disrepute. Oh well... it was fun anyway. And a damn sight more belivable than TFA
Unfortunately for the world, you're right -- clumsy carpenters seem to be capable of reproducing faster than killing themselves with power tools and electrical equipment. More the pity.
I went into internet stuff in 1989 from the telco business, and was absolutely horrified at the lack of rigor that most vendors were putting into their implementations.
I remember one consulting client (dialup ISP in central California), who was single homed. I explained "You guys really should have at least two and preferably three network feeds." Their CTO told me "But we only can afford one T1 of bandwidth right now."
"Take whatever budget you have, divide it in three, and get that much from three vendors...You are better off with three 256k fracs than a single point of failure."
"No way! We're a serious ISP... we can't have a fractional T1" said the CTO.
"Your absolute failure to understand will come back to haunt you some day."
Getting back to the Sunnyvale facility: As to the specifics -- getting two UPS feeds was pretty easy -- one came from the inverter that was "supposed" to feed us, and one from the cage row opposite us. It was getting the third, which required a construction order to run a conduit thirty-someodd feet from the other side of the room that took an act of deity.
When I built out our facility in Kansas City, I forewent UPSes entirely and just ran the whole kit-and-kaboodle on Sun and cisco gear with -48VDC inputs. There was a small 4kVA inverter to supply the handful of non-mission-critical things I could not get in DC supply versions (e.g. tape stacker, drop lights, couple of Wyse 50s.
Well, someone else has pointed out that the entire site is bogus parody, and we've all got fishhooks in our mouths.
None of their stuff comes close to the article in the April 1982 (1983?) "Doctor Kilobyte's Personal Popular Recreational Micro Computer World Journal" (Creative Computing's superfamous parody edition) on adding a bolt-on turbocharger to your PDP 11/34.
Oh, sure -- there are a myriad of ways to 'pump up' the output of a VR - but none of these techniques were drawn on their schematic, nor included in their construction photos.
Remember the SSM 4K Static Ram board for the S100? It used a 7805 with a shunt resistance. It would fail catastrophically if you built the kit with the low-power version of the 2102. (Hint: The 7805 can source current but not sink any.)
Schematic was checked before my first posting, a later AC's post notwithstanding. It shows the 12V rail from a PC power supply going into a 7805 and feeding all of the CPUs from the output. This was, in fact, what caused me to post in the first place
I can imagine designing a system that used a 20W heater to heat a very large mass of metal to a suitable temperature to fry an egg, with sufficient heat capacity to keep that temperature throughout the cooking of the egg
Now, assume a mass of copper (Specific Heat of 0.385 Joule/g/C)
I just fried an egg, using my little hotplate. I used a deep-fry thermometer to measure the temperature of the oil at 135C near the middle of the cooking process (just before I turned the egg). From raw egg to breakfast was 3 minutes 30 seconds (plus or minus 15... It's difficult to juggle an egg a hotplate a fry pan and a stopwatch without setting the kitchen on fire!)
So, I soaked 850 (power output of hot plate) watts into my breakfast for 210 seconds, or a total energy input of 178.5 kJ. So, how much copper do I need to heat to a 135, such that after sucking out 175,000 joules it will be about 120. Fifteen degree drop , 175000 joules, comes to about 30 kg of copper.
To heat 30 kg of copper to that 135 in the first place (from an ambient of, let's say 25) will take 110 * 30000 * 38.5 equals 1.27 MJ.
At twenty watts, a mere 17.6 hours, assuming your heater and the block of copper are in a perfectly insulated space. Putting it in the real world will make it take longer (in fact, probably an infinite amount of time because of radiation loss).
...indeed. In the time since my previous posting, I went and looked at the hotplate I have in my kitchen, and it dissipates 850W... So, even if they could configure a handful of CPUs (with no clock feeding them) as heaters, it would take 42 of them to give the equivalent to a pretty pathetic cooking appliance.
I re-assert: This article is 100% unadulterated bullshit
... there are a lot of companies using very bad practices.
When I was at Random DotBomb dot Com and we were building out a cage at a colo facility in Sunnyvale, I asked for three circuits to our cage, each circuit from a different UPS.
They looked at me like I had three heads.
"But, it's UPS power... why do you want diversity?" -- they asked stupidly.
I responded, Because sometimes UPSes fail. Sometimes Lefty the Lectrician turns off the wrong breaker. Sometimes Clumsy the Carpenter buzzes his Sawzall into a 480V riser (A failure mode I remember happening -- the world is short one clumsy carpenter ).
Some weeks after I made this irrational demand, they did have a UPS failure -- and a spectacular one at that -- remember, these are not the itty bitty 3 kVA units we use to keep our systems at home running, but enormous units capable of supplying 277/480 at 150 amperes -- with a spray of hot metal and slagged semiconductors and fire shooting out.
Despite this catastrophic failure, which caused considerable strife to some of our cage-neighbors, our pathetic wannabe site kept going.
Let me understand... one of the dominant pastimes of the slashdot communal consciousness is playing computer games, and you have the audacity to ask What is it good for??
Well, if nothing else it's an excuse to go visit the big room with the blue ceiling. And since Kiwi summers are during winter for the vast majority of us, it sounds like a great time to enjoy their version of the big room while our neighbors are up to their tits in snowbanks.
...which is why you don't see Big Name Stars hanging out in the MythTV fora asking for help. If you're Mick Jagger or Elton John, you are too busy getting chicks or dick (or both) to care. You just give some company a big pile of money and they make the technology work for you.
Slashdot Mirror
I have made the mistake of using cum in my postings on slashdot, which always seems to delight and amuse the sixth-grade-male mentality prevalent.
For those who are ignunt: It is precisely the latin conjuction meaning "with", as in: "I think this new photocopier-cum-papershredder is a disaster waiting to happen." Think of the word "cumulative"
Fuck a duck ... I get my fifteen minutes of fame and it's on slashdot ... I'm growing out my beard and movin' to Afghanistan I tells ya :)
To justify my question a little (and I was surprised to see it moderated funny, and even more surprised to see it presented to the interviewee) I honestly had never heard of the guy ... I went to the provided link to be presented with a single [EMBED] - so no information there.
My gripe was not with Chris, it lies with the editors who assume that all geeks represent an amorphous fanbase, and surely we all know who some niche artist is. Had the story been prefaced by, say another article, "Geeky rapper finds rhymes for All Your Base Are Belong To Us", or had that been included in the summary, then I (and based on some of the comments attached to my posting, others) could have said, "Oh. A Geek Rapper. Not my cup o' tea, but kinda cool".
Not quite 20 years ago, I was sharing a house in Boston with another hacker. One day, the office manager from work had to come pick up some documents, and was horrified to find how we lived. There was a room, possibly labeled "kitchen" on the architectural drawings, but we had converted into "computer room" (well, with that 240V 50A outlet in there, where else were we going to plug in the VAX?)
She took pity upon us, and she and one of her girlfriends came to give the place a good de-toxing. She explained, that the two-geeks-in-full-geek-mode funk could be eliminated by opening windows, which she explained were movable devices, and not the transparent-aluminum bricks we had hitherto assumed them to be. (She got mega geek points for the obscure transparent aluminum reference).
One of the other things I learned in that house, was this:
Blockquoth the Anonymous Coward:
D'oh! Yeah -- of course I meant higherI do not mean to cast aspersions on D and D players, but if IDF says that people who indulge in fantasy games, as a statistical group, have personality traits that make them a lower security risk, then I am inclined to believe them.
After all, these people have some of the best clinical and occupational psychologists in the world working for them.
One possible characteristic not mentioned in TFA was: People who role-play might be more inclined to game the system - definitely not a desirable personality trait to have in personnel deployed in sensitive positions.
Works out to 36.6 pixels/inch
Who the fuck are you, and why do I care?
Piss commacomma moan
So long as they have n copies of a popular title and m > n people who want that title, someone has to wait in line.
They have made the decision (and not entirely unreasonable) that the people who use the service the least get to be further in front of the line than the people who use it the most.
If this offends you so much, you can buy a few million DVDs, set up a customer service and distribution organization and run your own competing service, and deal with people who whine that your arbitrary decision for who gets first dibs is somehow unfair.
TANSTAAFL
(In interest of full disclosure, I have never used Netflix, nor do I work for them. I am a new (and happy) customer of Blockbusters' competing product.)
Well, yes, all three batteries could have failed, and all thre sets of rectifiers feeding those batteries could have failed. But that is a particularly unlikely event.
If I had points I would moderate your post doubleplusgood
Well, what you caught is that: Only a small fraction of the total energy from my hot plate went into my egg (And you're right -- it was kinda overcooked ... it's challenging to prepare breakfast and do thermodynamics in your head).
The argument could be made that the CPU-powered-block-of-metal cooker would suffer similar inefficiencies, thus requiring the same amount of energy overkill ...
Another error was a more serious procedural error: I started timing from cold-pan/cold-oil, not from hot-pan/hot-oil ... so that really does throw the whole experiment into disrepute. Oh well ... it was fun anyway. And a damn sight more belivable than TFA
Unfortunately for the world, you're right -- clumsy carpenters seem to be capable of reproducing faster than killing themselves with power tools and electrical equipment. More the pity.
I went into internet stuff in 1989 from the telco business, and was absolutely horrified at the lack of rigor that most vendors were putting into their implementations.
I remember one consulting client (dialup ISP in central California), who was single homed. I explained "You guys really should have at least two and preferably three network feeds." Their CTO told me "But we only can afford one T1 of bandwidth right now."
"Take whatever budget you have, divide it in three, and get that much from three vendors...You are better off with three 256k fracs than a single point of failure."
"No way! We're a serious ISP ... we can't have a fractional T1" said the CTO.
"Your absolute failure to understand will come back to haunt you some day."
Getting back to the Sunnyvale facility: As to the specifics -- getting two UPS feeds was pretty easy -- one came from the inverter that was "supposed" to feed us, and one from the cage row opposite us. It was getting the third, which required a construction order to run a conduit thirty-someodd feet from the other side of the room that took an act of deity.
When I built out our facility in Kansas City, I forewent UPSes entirely and just ran the whole kit-and-kaboodle on Sun and cisco gear with -48VDC inputs. There was a small 4kVA inverter to supply the handful of non-mission-critical things I could not get in DC supply versions (e.g. tape stacker, drop lights, couple of Wyse 50s.
Well, someone else has pointed out that the entire site is bogus parody, and we've all got fishhooks in our mouths.
None of their stuff comes close to the article in the April 1982 (1983?) "Doctor Kilobyte's Personal Popular Recreational Micro Computer World Journal" (Creative Computing's superfamous parody edition) on adding a bolt-on turbocharger to your PDP 11/34.
Oh, sure -- there are a myriad of ways to 'pump up' the output of a VR - but none of these techniques were drawn on their schematic, nor included in their construction photos.
Remember the SSM 4K Static Ram board for the S100? It used a 7805 with a shunt resistance. It would fail catastrophically if you built the kit with the low-power version of the 2102. (Hint: The 7805 can source current but not sink any.)
Schematic was checked before my first posting, a later AC's post notwithstanding. It shows the 12V rail from a PC power supply going into a 7805 and feeding all of the CPUs from the output. This was, in fact, what caused me to post in the first place
Well, let me backpedal a bit on my flat denial.
I can imagine designing a system that used a 20W heater to heat a very large mass of metal to a suitable temperature to fry an egg, with sufficient heat capacity to keep that temperature throughout the cooking of the egg
Now, assume a mass of copper (Specific Heat of 0.385 Joule/g/C)
I just fried an egg, using my little hotplate. I used a deep-fry thermometer to measure the temperature of the oil at 135C near the middle of the cooking process (just before I turned the egg). From raw egg to breakfast was 3 minutes 30 seconds (plus or minus 15 ... It's difficult to juggle an egg a hotplate a fry pan and a stopwatch without setting the kitchen on fire!)
So, I soaked 850 (power output of hot plate) watts into my breakfast for 210 seconds, or a total energy input of 178.5 kJ. So, how much copper do I need to heat to a 135, such that after sucking out 175,000 joules it will be about 120. Fifteen degree drop , 175000 joules, comes to about 30 kg of copper.
To heat 30 kg of copper to that 135 in the first place (from an ambient of, let's say 25) will take 110 * 30000 * 38.5 equals 1.27 MJ.
At twenty watts, a mere 17.6 hours, assuming your heater and the block of copper are in a perfectly insulated space. Putting it in the real world will make it take longer (in fact, probably an infinite amount of time because of radiation loss).
Learn the difference between heat and temperature
...indeed. In the time since my previous posting, I went and looked at the hotplate I have in my kitchen, and it dissipates 850W ... So, even if they could configure a handful of CPUs (with no clock feeding them) as heaters, it would take 42 of them to give the equivalent to a pretty pathetic cooking appliance.
I re-assert: This article is 100% unadulterated bullshit
How can a single 7805 rated for a maximum Icc of 1A provide the couple dozen amperes to provide even the output equivalent to an Easy-bake oven?
My inner child just got the shit kicked out of him by my inner skeptic who says, This should have waited a few weeks for 1 April
When I was at Random DotBomb dot Com and we were building out a cage at a colo facility in Sunnyvale, I asked for three circuits to our cage, each circuit from a different UPS.
They looked at me like I had three heads.
"But, it's UPS power ... why do you want diversity?" -- they asked stupidly.
I responded, Because sometimes UPSes fail. Sometimes Lefty the Lectrician turns off the wrong breaker. Sometimes Clumsy the Carpenter buzzes his Sawzall into a 480V riser (A failure mode I remember happening -- the world is short one clumsy carpenter ).
Some weeks after I made this irrational demand, they did have a UPS failure -- and a spectacular one at that -- remember, these are not the itty bitty 3 kVA units we use to keep our systems at home running, but enormous units capable of supplying 277/480 at 150 amperes -- with a spray of hot metal and slagged semiconductors and fire shooting out.
Despite this catastrophic failure, which caused considerable strife to some of our cage-neighbors, our pathetic wannabe site kept going.
Let me understand ... one of the dominant pastimes of the slashdot communal consciousness is playing computer games, and you have the audacity to ask What is it good for??
Well, if nothing else it's an excuse to go visit the big room with the blue ceiling. And since Kiwi summers are during winter for the vast majority of us, it sounds like a great time to enjoy their version of the big room while our neighbors are up to their tits in snowbanks.