Penmanship? Holy shit, I'd be screwed. I haven't hand written anything larger than a post-it note or a check (to pay a bill) since approximately late 1985. That's twenty years of keyboarding and maybe twenty minutes of handwriting.
Unless you plan on having your techs spend the day hand-writing notes or your computers have pen interfaces, consider moving the essay to a computer with a keyboard and a spell checker. Given that that is at least on par with the 'minimal set' of interface they will have access to on a daily basis at work anyways, you will likely get a much stronger insight into who they are from a literary perspective.
Where are you located? I have an 8 drive ripping RAIC setup and if you are close enough to drop them by, my system averages less than 1 minute per CD. Granted that's still a full day of ripping, but... I'm sure we could work something out. General geography is enough to get started, I should be able to tell if you are within a few hours driving with that (no need to say city or zip or anything.)
While you are charting, chart up one of disk space over time. I was amazed to see that the rate of increase for disk space is even faster than the increase in physical memory and CPU speed, year to year over the past two decades.
And in case anybody is wondering : First machines I was exposed to (school / friends) :
Timex Sinclair zx1000 or something like that
Commodore PET w/ tape drive
Apple ][ w/ floppy drive and green screen
My personal machine history :
Vic-20
Commodore 64 (with VicModem 300 and tape drive!)
386SX/16 (mono VGA, 1M memory, no HD)
. upgraded 386 to 2M memory and a used 40M (ST251-1) for another $250
486DX-40MHz
486DX/4-133MHz w/ 4M
PII/300 w/ 4M
. added my first Voodoo card : Voodoo2 w/ 12M for the low, low price of $324 out the door
. then upgraded to 16M of memory for the low, low price of $400)
. upgraded the CPU to a Celeron 900MHz, added two 9G SCSI drives and an AMI MegaRAID card (16M r/w cache!) for about another $200
. gave it away to a friend for free two years later
Dell PowerEdge 500sc 1.2GHz Celeron w/ 1G memory (still have this one)
Dell PowerEdge 600sc P4 2.4GHz w/ 512M memory
Dell Dimension 4600 P4 2.8GHz (HT) w/ 1G memory
My current four machine cluster* of PowerEdge 400sc 'servers' -
. Four P4 2.8 GHz (HT) machines on a GigE network with an aggregate 1.3T drive space and just shy of 8G physical memory.
The C=64 will always be my favorite, though - rest in peace, Jumpman!
* and yes, I Beowulf'ed them, ran the skyvase ray-trace in 3 seconds. Had a few runs showing 2 seconds, but they were far and few between.
He wasn't talking about the cartoons. He was talking about how all the WASP countries were going to get pushed a little too far over the Muslim reaction to some cartoons, and gathering up all the Muslims and putting them into concentration camps, since every other solution to get them to be nice has been tried unsuccessfully (infering that the Final Solution, however, would probably work.)
There was actually a way to get the original Doom to do this. It took three machines, each with a single monitor, networked, to do it - but it could be done. Or so I heard. I never actually saw it working.
I agree with you, but here's one thought : take the temperature at which your machine quits working (overheats) as a baseline - if they have increased the distance from that temperature (downward) by a certain thermal range - that delta would be the same measured in any current normal scale (Celcius, Farenheit, Kelvin.)
I'm guessing, but something tells me that 18% isn't going to be that delta.
Not to mention you can't exactly throw a Linksys router (hardware firewall) inbetween you and the wall when you are on dialup. This is about like having sex without a condom and thinking 'well she is a little slow, so she probably doesn't have any diseases.'
Actually, unless they recently changed it - California property taxes are based on the purchase price of the house. The bubble could pop, a $1.1M stand alone house (1100 sf, 3/2/1) could drop in real value to say... $400 per square foot (which is still astronomical, but less than half the purchase price) and the home owner is still on the hook for whatever the tax rate is * his purchase price. Even worse, since all the houses around him are being sold for half what he paid, the real estate value in his down drops in half so the tax rate doubles (so in theory the city still gets the same amount of money) - now he is paying twice in taxes what he was, on a house worth half what he paid for it.
So not only fucked, but double fucked. And even worse than that if he has to sell it, because he will be $400k in the hole.
That's funny, only because I'm having a heck of a time getting IE to run on my SuSE Linux 10 machine, the one I use to do all my web surfing. Until I figure that one out, I with the GP, not going back to sites that are broken in Firefox.
Which is why the analysis of algorithms is such an important aspect of software engineering. A thousand clowns with six weeks of Java training (and a certificate) are not going to make a system any more efficient, and will continue to throw brute force at the issue (shit I would be happy if they would just teach them how to use a damn switch/case statement instead of pyramiding if/then/else if/then/else statements) - but a single software engineer of epic quality that comes up with a new approach to the problem could turn it from technologically unviable to trivial, almost overnight.
I would admit to already having solved that problem, if I didn't think I would be dead by morning.
The Dell 2001fp does 1600x1200 native and you can get them somewhere in the $450 price range. Granted that's not $120, but given the differences between LCD and CRT you might want to look into it.
I use a 21" CRT at work at 1600x1200 all day, and my 20" LCD at 1600x1200 at home all night and the difference is, well, like day and night.
Want the easiest way to see the difference between CRT and LCD? Go somewhere you can see both. Stand back about 10 feet or so, chomp your teeth. The CRT display will bounce all over and make a general mess of uberFlicker, and the LCD will remain rock solid. Once you see it, you will realize what you are subjecting yourself to all day. If I could get a 20" LCD at work (they will get me a 19, but it will only do 1280x1024 and I need the additional real estate) I would do it in a heart beat. I have considered buying myself a 20" LCD and walking it in the front door, the benefit far outweighing the cost.
You can get the 1G flash drive Apple micro ipod (or whatever they call it) for less than that, and it plays music. And everybody will like you, because you will be cool. (And everybody knows that Apple charges double what everybody else charges, because they can.)
Hmmm. If only there was a way to fit those massive 1G flash drives in your pocket, without resorting to that Swiss folding technology.
Pursuit of happiness. Look it up sometime. Not only is it a right, it is one of the God Given Rights given to all men, from which all other rights are derived.
Maybe this phrase will help clear things up :
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness . . . "
(And if porn doesn't make you happy, you probably aren't doing it right.)
That is ridiculous, and does not follow. Actually it is pretty simple.
As far as most of us know, cracking RSA (and DES, and all the 'good' encryption) can be done, but it can only be done via brute force (ie, trying different keys until one is found that works.) There is a little more to it than that, but lets just say it is incredibly time and processor intensive. Just like SETI.
One of three things has happened at the NSA, you can pretty well bet : 1. Every year computers get twice as fast, for free. 2. The can add more machines without removing the old ones, (thing Beowulf.) 3. They came up with an algorythm that is faster than brute force, but haven't let on.
That third one is the most scary - it is like when the Enigma was cracked. No longer did it take brute force... they just applied their 'crack' and cranked out the answers. Even if it hasn't happened, the combination of 1 and 2 mean that anything that takes brute force doesn't necessarily take a lot of time. Heck, my home Beowulf can outrun the $5.5M Cray mainframe AND the $150,000 IBM cluster that matched it back in 1999, on the same benchmark (skyvase.pov)
RSA / DES keeps the honest people honest, and it keeps the first level bad people honest - but the days of keeping the hardcore bad guys honest are pretty much over.
Have you ever seen the ~artwork~ done by someone in the package in question? Maybe GIMP isn't actually a noun, but in this case a verb (as in 'use this package to gimp your artwork'.)
Bah. The terrorists don't have the brains or the balls to do this. Those Al Qaeda pussies tremble in their pig-skin boots when they think about the Indian military and government powers!
I dare them to try a massive attack against the Indian government, infrastructure, and all those juicy tech centers. I double dare them. I triple dog dare them.
There. I did it. The fabled triple dog dare from the Christmas Story, right here for all the world to see. If those terrorists don't take that one, well... well, well the world will know what they are made of (not much, if they don't,) Google pictures or no Google pictures.
I guess that settles that. What's next on my agenda after 'making the world a safer place'?
Very no-nonsense. To the point. Direct. Shit I like you already. Maybe you should set aside the interviewing for a while and start a cult following of no-nonsense, to the point, direct people. It would be a refreshing change for the world.
First company I ever worked for - the day I interviewed I explained somewhat under my breath that I was glad to have been able to make it to the interview as we were down a guy at the place where I was currently employed and I was coming off of back to back double shifts (16 hours on, 8 hours off, 16 hours on - like 90 hours worked that week.
And nobody in the room even flinched.
I should have taken that as a clue that the 40 hour work week was but a joke at place, but it was my first 'real job' and I wasn't in a position to be picky right out of college. There are 168 hours in a week, and for some of the employees at that company there were 168 hours in a work week (except those guys were hourly - I was salary (a weak salary, but it was salary.))
I'm much happier now (coincidentally, I'm not there anymore.)
Sony reported that over the past eight months it shipped more than 4.7 million CDs with the so-called XCP copy protection. Source
Figure a thousand dollars in damages per. Actually Texas is suing for $100,000 per documented instance, but I will be lenient and generous on this one.
That's a potential for maybe $3Billion.
Germany was on the hook for about $33B - so yea, I was off by a power of ten, but don't forget I was using a very light $1,000 per, not the $100,000 per that Texas is suing for - if I was, it would be a dollar total 10x the amount of damage (dollar figure, not adjusted for inflation) caused by Germany in WWI.
I was wrong, but only by a single order of magnitude - which is close enough when you are dealing global disasters (which in the long run I envision it to be, at least for music sales/grin)
The CD is dead and Sony fucking killed it with their rootkit stunt.
Quite honestly I don't trust commercially packaged CDs any more, because of a) the rootkit stunt in the first place, and b) the passive agressive bullshit they pulled with their 'fix'... and none of my CDs were on the list, and none of my computers were affected. It was an entire year before anybody had a clue that the rootkit was out there - and in the past year and a half the technology of evil has gotten even better.
I mean get real - after Japan pulled their shit in 1941-1944 - the world didn't trust them to have a military. After Germany pulled their shit during WWI - the world didn't let them a military. After Sony pulled this rootkit business, causing potentially more damage in not adjusted for inflation dollars (not including lives, just trashed hardware - and yea, that's just a guess if anybody wants to do the math) than the Germans caused in WWI - I don't trust them not to do it again.
Perhaps CD sales are down 40% specifically because of the Sony rootkit, and I say they deserved it. That's still 60% more sales than they got from me this season.
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Penmanship? Holy shit, I'd be screwed.
I haven't hand written anything larger than a post-it note or a check (to pay a bill) since approximately late 1985. That's twenty years of keyboarding and maybe twenty minutes of handwriting.
Unless you plan on having your techs spend the day hand-writing notes or your computers have pen interfaces, consider moving the essay to a computer with a keyboard and a spell checker. Given that that is at least on par with the 'minimal set' of interface they will have access to on a daily basis at work anyways, you will likely get a much stronger insight into who they are from a literary perspective.
Forget price - I have two more important questions :
1. Does it stop bullets?
2. Does it come in black?
If the answer to those two questions is yes, count me in for one if the price tag is less than five digits.
Where are you located? ... I'm sure we could work something out. General geography is enough to get started, I should be able to tell if you are within a few hours driving with that (no need to say city or zip or anything.)
I have an 8 drive ripping RAIC setup and if you are close enough to drop them by, my system averages less than 1 minute per CD. Granted that's still a full day of ripping, but
While you are charting, chart up one of disk space over time.
I was amazed to see that the rate of increase for disk space is even faster than the increase in physical memory and CPU speed, year to year over the past two decades.
And in case anybody is wondering :
First machines I was exposed to (school / friends) :
Timex Sinclair zx1000 or something like that
Commodore PET w/ tape drive
Apple ][ w/ floppy drive and green screen
My personal machine history :
Vic-20
Commodore 64 (with VicModem 300 and tape drive!)
386SX/16 (mono VGA, 1M memory, no HD)
. upgraded 386 to 2M memory and a used 40M (ST251-1) for another $250
486DX-40MHz
486DX/4-133MHz w/ 4M
PII/300 w/ 4M
. added my first Voodoo card : Voodoo2 w/ 12M for the low, low price of $324 out the door
. then upgraded to 16M of memory for the low, low price of $400)
. upgraded the CPU to a Celeron 900MHz, added two 9G SCSI drives and an AMI MegaRAID card (16M r/w cache!) for about another $200
. gave it away to a friend for free two years later
Dell PowerEdge 500sc 1.2GHz Celeron w/ 1G memory (still have this one)
Dell PowerEdge 600sc P4 2.4GHz w/ 512M memory
Dell Dimension 4600 P4 2.8GHz (HT) w/ 1G memory
My current four machine cluster* of PowerEdge 400sc 'servers' -
. Four P4 2.8 GHz (HT) machines on a GigE network with an aggregate 1.3T drive space and just shy of 8G physical memory.
The C=64 will always be my favorite, though - rest in peace, Jumpman!
* and yes, I Beowulf'ed them, ran the skyvase ray-trace in 3 seconds. Had a few runs showing 2 seconds, but they were far and few between.
He wasn't talking about the cartoons. He was talking about how all the WASP countries were going to get pushed a little too far over the Muslim reaction to some cartoons, and gathering up all the Muslims and putting them into concentration camps, since every other solution to get them to be nice has been tried unsuccessfully (infering that the Final Solution, however, would probably work.)
But he said it like it was a bad thing.
Oh I dunno.
I hear Kenya has lions and tigers.
There was actually a way to get the original Doom to do this. It took three machines, each with a single monitor, networked, to do it - but it could be done.
Or so I heard. I never actually saw it working.
I agree with you, but here's one thought : take the temperature at which your machine quits working (overheats) as a baseline - if they have increased the distance from that temperature (downward) by a certain thermal range - that delta would be the same measured in any current normal scale (Celcius, Farenheit, Kelvin.)
I'm guessing, but something tells me that 18% isn't going to be that delta.
Not to mention you can't exactly throw a Linksys router (hardware firewall) inbetween you and the wall when you are on dialup.
This is about like having sex without a condom and thinking 'well she is a little slow, so she probably doesn't have any diseases.'
Heck, it will at least lower your property taxes.
... $400 per square foot (which is still astronomical, but less than half the purchase price) and the home owner is still on the hook for whatever the tax rate is * his purchase price. Even worse, since all the houses around him are being sold for half what he paid, the real estate value in his down drops in half so the tax rate doubles (so in theory the city still gets the same amount of money) - now he is paying twice in taxes what he was, on a house worth half what he paid for it.
Actually, unless they recently changed it - California property taxes are based on the purchase price of the house.
The bubble could pop, a $1.1M stand alone house (1100 sf, 3/2/1) could drop in real value to say
So not only fucked, but double fucked. And even worse than that if he has to sell it, because he will be $400k in the hole.
This eliminates sites that use Flash "incompetently"
I'll take 'All of them' for $200, Alex.
That's funny, only because I'm having a heck of a time getting IE to run on my SuSE Linux 10 machine, the one I use to do all my web surfing.
Until I figure that one out, I with the GP, not going back to sites that are broken in Firefox.
... people should be able to ...
To quote Tommy Lee Jones :
A person is smart.
People are dumb.
Which is why the analysis of algorithms is such an important aspect of software engineering.
A thousand clowns with six weeks of Java training (and a certificate) are not going to make a system any more efficient, and will continue to throw brute force at the issue (shit I would be happy if they would just teach them how to use a damn switch/case statement instead of pyramiding if/then/else if/then/else statements) - but a single software engineer of epic quality that comes up with a new approach to the problem could turn it from technologically unviable to trivial, almost overnight.
I would admit to already having solved that problem, if I didn't think I would be dead by morning.
The Dell 2001fp does 1600x1200 native and you can get them somewhere in the $450 price range. Granted that's not $120, but given the differences between LCD and CRT you might want to look into it.
I use a 21" CRT at work at 1600x1200 all day, and my 20" LCD at 1600x1200 at home all night and the difference is, well, like day and night.
Want the easiest way to see the difference between CRT and LCD? Go somewhere you can see both. Stand back about 10 feet or so, chomp your teeth.
The CRT display will bounce all over and make a general mess of uberFlicker, and the LCD will remain rock solid. Once you see it, you will realize what you are subjecting yourself to all day. If I could get a 20" LCD at work (they will get me a 19, but it will only do 1280x1024 and I need the additional real estate) I would do it in a heart beat. I have considered buying myself a 20" LCD and walking it in the front door, the benefit far outweighing the cost.
Only $160 for a 1G Swiss Army USB Knife?
Damnnn.
You can get the 1G flash drive Apple micro ipod (or whatever they call it) for less than that, and it plays music. And everybody will like you, because you will be cool.
(And everybody knows that Apple charges double what everybody else charges, because they can.)
Hmmm. If only there was a way to fit those massive 1G flash drives in your pocket, without resorting to that Swiss folding technology.
Pursuit of happiness.
Look it up sometime.
Not only is it a right, it is one of the God Given Rights given to all men, from which all other rights are derived.
Maybe this phrase will help clear things up :
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness . . . "
(And if porn doesn't make you happy, you probably aren't doing it right.)
That is ridiculous, and does not follow.
... they just applied their 'crack' and cranked out the answers. Even if it hasn't happened, the combination of 1 and 2 mean that anything that takes brute force doesn't necessarily take a lot of time. Heck, my home Beowulf can outrun the $5.5M Cray mainframe AND the $150,000 IBM cluster that matched it back in 1999, on the same benchmark (skyvase.pov)
Actually it is pretty simple.
As far as most of us know, cracking RSA (and DES, and all the 'good' encryption) can be done, but it can only be done via brute force (ie, trying different keys until one is found that works.) There is a little more to it than that, but lets just say it is incredibly time and processor intensive. Just like SETI.
One of three things has happened at the NSA, you can pretty well bet :
1. Every year computers get twice as fast, for free.
2. The can add more machines without removing the old ones, (thing Beowulf.)
3. They came up with an algorythm that is faster than brute force, but haven't let on.
That third one is the most scary - it is like when the Enigma was cracked. No longer did it take brute force
RSA / DES keeps the honest people honest, and it keeps the first level bad people honest - but the days of keeping the hardcore bad guys honest are pretty much over.
And yes, I mean the gvmt.
I presumed it meant 'Linux for black people'.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Have you ever seen the ~artwork~ done by someone in the package in question?
Maybe GIMP isn't actually a noun, but in this case a verb (as in 'use this package to gimp your artwork'.)
Bah. The terrorists don't have the brains or the balls to do this.
... well, well the world will know what they are made of (not much, if they don't,) Google pictures or no Google pictures.
Those Al Qaeda pussies tremble in their pig-skin boots when they think about the Indian military and government powers!
I dare them to try a massive attack against the Indian government, infrastructure, and all those juicy tech centers.
I double dare them.
I triple dog dare them.
There. I did it. The fabled triple dog dare from the Christmas Story, right here for all the world to see. If those terrorists don't take that one, well
I guess that settles that.
What's next on my agenda after 'making the world a safer place'?
Very no-nonsense. To the point. Direct.
Shit I like you already.
Maybe you should set aside the interviewing for a while and start a cult following of no-nonsense, to the point, direct people.
It would be a refreshing change for the world.
First company I ever worked for - the day I interviewed I explained somewhat under my breath that I was glad to have been able to make it to the interview as we were down a guy at the place where I was currently employed and I was coming off of back to back double shifts (16 hours on, 8 hours off, 16 hours on - like 90 hours worked that week.
And nobody in the room even flinched.
I should have taken that as a clue that the 40 hour work week was but a joke at place, but it was my first 'real job' and I wasn't in a position to be picky right out of college. There are 168 hours in a week, and for some of the employees at that company there were 168 hours in a work week (except those guys were hourly - I was salary (a weak salary, but it was salary.))
I'm much happier now (coincidentally, I'm not there anymore.)
Sony reported that over the past eight months it shipped more than 4.7 million CDs with the so-called XCP copy protection.
/grin)
Source
Figure a thousand dollars in damages per.
Actually Texas is suing for $100,000 per documented instance, but I will be lenient and generous on this one.
That's a potential for maybe $3Billion.
Germany was on the hook for about $33B - so yea, I was off by a power of ten, but don't forget I was using a very light $1,000 per, not the $100,000 per that Texas is suing for - if I was, it would be a dollar total 10x the amount of damage (dollar figure, not adjusted for inflation) caused by Germany in WWI.
I was wrong, but only by a single order of magnitude - which is close enough when you are dealing global disasters (which in the long run I envision it to be, at least for music sales
The CD is dead and Sony fucking killed it with their rootkit stunt.
... and none of my CDs were on the list, and none of my computers were affected. It was an entire year before anybody had a clue that the rootkit was out there - and in the past year and a half the technology of evil has gotten even better.
Quite honestly I don't trust commercially packaged CDs any more, because of a) the rootkit stunt in the first place, and b) the passive agressive bullshit they pulled with their 'fix'
I mean get real - after Japan pulled their shit in 1941-1944 - the world didn't trust them to have a military.
After Germany pulled their shit during WWI - the world didn't let them a military.
After Sony pulled this rootkit business, causing potentially more damage in not adjusted for inflation dollars (not including lives, just trashed hardware - and yea, that's just a guess if anybody wants to do the math) than the Germans caused in WWI - I don't trust them not to do it again.
Perhaps CD sales are down 40% specifically because of the Sony rootkit, and I say they deserved it. That's still 60% more sales than they got from me this season.