So you can't be bothered to find out anything about what Netflix is asking, but you know that Netflix is asking ISP's to pay money?
Uh thats pretty much the definition of the peering dance, try to "upsell" your free peers into purchasing transit from you. Its not Netflix asking for money its the ISPs asking netflix to pay the isp. After all, I pay my ISP for traffic, so some MBA thinks netflix should pay too.
ring ring Dell support this is "John" how may I help you? Ah hi John, this is Steve at microsoft I'd like to open a support ticket because I'm having trouble transferring $3B as part of a private equity buyout. OK Steve while I do the needful opening a support ticket I have some tasks for you, I was wondering if you could reboot the computer. Well John the problem is on your website, I'm trying to paypal you $3M and I'm getting an error message about.. Please do the needful Steve and simply click the start button, then shutdown... No John this is windows 8 there is no start button anymore Oh so sorry Steve let me pull up the correct script... Ah I see you are needing to restore windows from your install partition, which will reinstall all the crapware and drivers and a unpatched version of windows from 2010 complete with 57 varieties of security hole, but we don't charge extra for that. OK John (Steve humors John, and fumbles around for his iPad to use instead, pretending just so they can get past the script) I'm not really sure where to go with this, other than it should probably end with "steve" from microsoft throwing a chair, or "developers develpers developers" or somesuch nonsense.
I thought Netflix was agreeing to deliver the content to the peering point of the ISP's choice - the only cost to the ISP is a port on their border gateway and a cheap peering interconnect.
I can't be bothered to find out, but I assumed this was part of the peering dance that has been going on for two decades or whatever between all players on the internet.
Basically the network engineering dept knows its universally a win to peer for "free" as much as possible with as many other people as possible rather than pay for transit. However the MBAs on both sides of a peering arrangement love to dance around with daydreams of bonuses in their heads of getting the other guy to purchase transit instead of freely peer. So historically you've always had idiotic showdowns (slowdowns?) and dumb marketing tricks (we only peer with other tier 1 providers... whats a tier 1 provider? Well its anyone we either a) want to peer with or b) couldn't get to pay us for transit, that's the def of a tier 1 provider).
Free preprints for physics and astronomy (and a lot of other stuff, just no bio). I'd like to see more of those too. I think every time aaronson posts something on his blog it should hit/. for example.
I've seen some truly inscrutable theoretical physics and mathematics stories here where half the comments were "LOLWTF someone explain,"
I can agree with that. From the front page of Nature Chemisty (paywall alert) we've got
"Molecular cages" by Cooper, mistakes in this summary are solely my fault, something like you can now nano-engineer a really tiny pasta strainer to catch certain specific molecular shapes, in this paper some ridiculously small hydrocarbons. Holy cow Cool! This would make a decent/. submission.
vs
"Catalytic Cascades" by Wang which is WTF for me, and I got pretty far along in ochem and quant before I switched to CS. I mean I'm vaguely familiar with his inputs and outputs but whats going on in between is... I'm guessing this would not make a decent/. submission, at least not by me, at least at my current level of understanding of this paper.
WRT vary with age, its kind of important to note the study sliced and diced at 2 hrs, 24 hrs, and 72 hrs... not like a decade later or whatever. So they did an acute study not a chronic study like most/.ers seem to assume. So... 2 hours after getting whacked in the head, you're whacked in the head... I was getting the impression from/. comments that this persisted for "a long time" but apparently not.
coming up with a good stand is probably going to affect usability much ore an the camera.
Talk to a real photographer or optical dude about depth of focus, which is going to be a big deal. The "ideal stand" from a focusing standpoint may not be flat, although that's going to screw up astigmatism of the lens system (square won't be square on the screen)... Also lighting is incredibly important. Its surprising how much noise and garbage your eyes filter out on a live model that is glaring ugly on a fixed image, and (real) photographers are experts at using tech to filter that stuff out before it hits the camera. Find a pro who specializes in graphics art business static photos, like the guy who takes pix of food for the local restaurants, not a wedding photographer whos mostly good at avoiding photos showing zits... although some wedding photographers do good static work like staged pixs of rings and decorations and stuff.
I'm mystified why it has to be a webcam, other than the joy of complexity.
I am personally involved in two "scenes" where other participants a couple decades grayer than myself need similar tech and both use plain ole cameras hooked up to TVs.
I can easily solder 0402 SMD by hand (I kid you not, and I've assembled working N5AC microwave oscillator kits to prove it.. the main vco inductor is a 0402 as are a bunch of the bypass caps. Also I know several model machinists (of the homemade steam engine variety) who use toolpost mounted microscopes to see little stuff, also some of them are pretty young, like the guys trying to machine a research medical adapter between a hypo needle and some medical research "thing".
Anyway the killer for hand/eye coordination is latency. A simple camcorder is fast enough, a webcam no freaking way. Also the "boot time" of a camcorder is faster than any PC, not to mention "application launch". No software updates, no viruses (other than the ones you're looking at under the microscope LOL).
I do know that one huge user of "webcam glued to gear" is medical examiners / pathologists because its easier to import CSI style evidence into a report edited on a computer if you use a webcam. Otherwise stay away from webcams !
If you fire anything fast enough, it wouldn't be considered safe
Low density is the key. I suppose I have to officially discourage this kind of activity, but in the early 90s my friends and I had indoor potato gun fights using balls of crumpled paper as ammo. Virtually harmless projectiles even at point blank range assuming you use gas fuel and not liquid fuel. Liquid fuel sets the projectile on fire, which sounds cool but usually isn't unless you're on dueling pontoon boats pretending you're re-enacting naval battles, which is a whole nother story. One broken glass window, but that was heavily debated as being due to the sonic backblast of the potato gun itself rather than the projectile which might not have hit the window anyway. It is obviously capable of knocking stuff off shelves or pix off walls. Frankly running around screaming like lunatics caused more injuries than the projectile itself. Its a fun way to play tag, a little more "sporting" than merely using NERF weaponry.
I would imagine a DRY sponge or a mooshy foam ball would be pretty safe at anything below supersonic.
while I'm able to get in and out of bed easily without hitting the protruding shelf, it gets more complicated if you're ever have "company."
Funniest line in the whole article, not a concern on/. especially not after installing the "camera mount" over the bed. At least have the discretion to install a tiny web cam instead of trying to use an ipad for your "home movie making"
Seriously though been there done that with the exercise machine, and milk crates are rickety (and $10 a piece?) but concrete construction blocks from home depot work better and are cheaper. Nice and heavy. Unless you're really hard core and use mortar, my advice is use cheapie orange cargo straps to clamp the bricks together, otherwise collapse is inevitable. You don't need DOT rated 5000 lb straps, just enough that "washing machine vibration" won't slowly gradually topple them. Duct tape might work too. Obviously this is more appealing in the "homemade basement" home decorating class of gym than the "I'm trendy let me show off my shiny new expensive unused gym" upstairs. The truly hardcore who build their own power rack out of cedar 4x4 landscaping posts in their basement will probably attach the tablet to the power rack. I don't have enough ceiling height for a power rack in my basement so I don't have this "problem". (and no a weight lifting power rack isn't 19 inches wide unless your body is totally weird)
For a couple decades I've done the treadmill in front of the TV and behind the couch thing. The idea was walk while watching TV. Rather than walking a lot, I ended up not watching TV a lot. Almost as positive of an outcome, I guess. Anyway a phone/tablet with hdmi out is an obvious solution to the treadmill display desire.
using an app that was written in the 60's, unchanged
The problem is not the app, but the databases.
I work, today, with new code looking at old columns that are "char" and worked around Y2K by calling today "year 113". So all code reads the column and adds 1900 to the column. We're pretty well Fed when that column hits year 2156.
There are solutions, but they're a hell of a lot more complicated than "recompile the app" (what is this, a iphone?)
Even "business logic" needs serious work. So the paper form has two digits for year, should the OCR read "13" as 1913 or 2013? Even worse, if that's a year of birth, both are totally realistic. You can't fix a paper form by recompiling a data analysis app.
They're probably talking about endless dependency stream style bugs.
For example. Say your shitty GPS rx curls up and dies with the 32 bit roll over. So it either stops sending fixes to the moving map or the moving map decides not to accept post-32-bit timestamps as part of the NMEA stream. Either way the position becomes static so the calculate airspeed drops to zero. Normally it would cross check against the two tubes, but those are clogged by ice today. So the autopilot shoves the stick far over because the planes in a stall and floors the engine.
Assuming the plane doesn't crash (and it probably won't... this is hardly the first time in aviation history that an autopilot broke) will get the trouble ticket for a broken autopilot, then has to work backward to figure out the moving map is broke, move back to find the GPS is broke...
Even funnier would be really shitty arithmetic implementations. Like a "one" value in bit 32 is somehow, accidentally the MSB/LSB/something now added to the lat/lon. Again pissing off the autopilot into thinking you're now suddenly 15000 miles off course and need to enter a gentle turn to the north to correct. The odds of that being unnoticed and there being a mountain there are actually pretty low, but its still going to be an unholy PITA to investigate and "solve".
Or overzealous security monster type paranoid "24 tv show fan" type firewall type design.. Why, the date "has" to be pre-32 bit, right? So filter anything "wrong" out. Whoops that makes the engine computer crash. Well thats annoying. Or the GPS isn't broken at all, but the moving map display interpretation code actually is broken. Overall just as annoying as hell.
Also a timestamp, in addition to being referenced to 0 = somesuch date, also can be used with offsets. So add a signed integer "-60" to the timestamp signed integer to get a signed integer representing about a minute ago. Since you'll be spending a lot of time adding signed ints to a timestamp, you may as well make the thing a signed int, rather than having to screw up and debug a zillion crappy bug filled homemade implementations of "uint + int = uint". Most of the bugs are dealing with extreme values and rollovers... most of them.
On the bright side, at least they didn't use BCD or floats. floats would have been pretty funny, crontab entries not running because of rounding errors and stuff like that.
As a guy who likes chemistry, I enjoy seeing more posts recently about chem, but I'd like a little more "real stuff" like Milstein's recent paper from like last week, about a catalytic alcohol to hydrogen converter using ruthenium under pretty normal-ish conditions instead of weird oxidizers or high pressures (the full paper unfortunately lives behind a very expensive legacy paywall publisher) rather than "I haz autographs". For example the paper goes in a "here's a fun way to make carboxylic acids" direction but my first thought was "here's a fun way to make lots of hydrogen easily using a liq fuel". I would have to think about it for awhile but from a thermodynamic perspective, wouldn't you get higher system efficiency by stripping H2 off alcohol then running it thru a fuel cell, then burning the semi-acidic remainder in a traditional IC engine, probably with some weird carb/fuel injection adjustments? OTOH I bet the exhaust of a carboxolic acid fueled IC engine is pretty icky to clean up.
But no we gots "I haz autographs" instead. I guess it could be worse.
If your boss says he intends to come hard on anyone probing his systems without his approval
Then there's somebody who's never been on the internet or read an actual logfile. That policy will disappear in about one days experience on the net. That's the point I'm trying to make.
Its 2013. Does anyone out there seriously call the FBI / NSA / CIA / lawyer every time some script kiddie runs a standard script from a compromised machine overseas? This is the kind of attitude you hear from people in the 90s before/around when they first connected to the internet. "Somebody pinged me, I better send a page to the CEO that we're being hacked and block all ICMP too". It also sounds a lot like the people who try to track down Every Single Spammer who sends them email. That idea goes away real quick too.
This is the real internet not an episode of "24".
That's not to say logs should be ignored. Just don't overreact to them. Going nuclear is overreacting. Doing pretty much anything in direct response to a script kiddie is overreacting (proper indirect response is running the same tools against your own servers, keeping stuff up to date and patched, sensible firewall rules, etc)
P.S. does anyone know of a tool that can be used to design postgresql database schemas and export create/update scripts? (like mysql workbench does for mysql)
Could it be as simple as keep using mysql workbench (which I've never used) and pipe it thru SQLfairy aka SQL::Translator (a sourceforge project) to convert from mysql to postgresql?
I have a simple automated system that mysqldumps all my schema, then shoves them thru sqlfairy to convert to DOT (you'd be converting to postgresql, which I know sqlfairy claims to be able to do), then shoves the DOTs thru graphviz to convert to png diagrams, then creates a simple webpage to link to each db diagram. Easy and fast and fun and automatic. Also pretty boring unless you properly define your foreign keys.
Over the decades I've found its rather hard to machine translate, expect plenty of hand editing fine tuning unless its truly a miracle product and the format specs on both sides are incredibly well defined, or are very simple..
Did he bust you for error bars / sig figs? How many sigma was your "signal" above the noise? "pointed toward" doesn't sound like a firm result, so I can see the old prof getting kinda wound up if you wrote a relatively strong conclusion in English language prose, but provided math showing a very weak conclusion. That's "TV commercial logic" not scientific logic. Still the guy was a bastard about it, because he didn't explain his (likely) reasoning to you, or at least he didn't do it very well.
Narrowing the error bars is a long tradition in physics... you don't have to announce the precise discovery of "whatever" to make a good experiment, so your hypothesis could have been fine tuned... "Can you reduce your std deviation to less than 0.1 m/s with that relatively crude gear, and if so, what is the result?" would have been a decent "real world" experimental hypothesis. I know that "science fairs" demand certain firm outcomes which make them "not science" so you gotta play along to win, but...
A scientist should also run experiments multiple times to see if the results are repeatable before publishing those results.
Won't help. I studied to be a chemist (admittedly a long time ago) and by far the biggest non-ethical problem out there is contamination.
So it turns out that your peculiar reaction you're studying is iron catalyzed, in fact its incredibly sensitive to iron, but no one in the world knows that yet. And your reagents are contaminated. Or your glassware, which you thought was brand new and/or well cleaned, is contaminated. Or your lab is downwind of a hematite ore processor and the room dust is contaminated.
Sure, you say, test everything. Well there isn't time/money for that, but for the sake of argument we'll assume there is. What if dust from the hematite ore processor is far larger than the filter paper pores in filtration stage of your overall process? Test the reagents and product all you want but you'll never find iron anywhere except room dust (which you already knew about) and the debris in the filter paper (which you assume was contaminated by room dust AFTER removal from the apparatus)
The most important thing is this is the norm in chemistry, not an outlier. Chemistry is not math or CS, sometimes stuff just doesn't work or just works for no apparent reason. Unlike some technologies, detailed modeling of "why" "how" often doesn't happen for years, decades, centuries after the ChemEng team has been selling product / papers have been written.
A very important lesson is analysis paralysis. So you live downwind of a hematite ore crusher. And you know it. And periodic tests of your lab show iron enriched house dust. But you can't go around testing everything, because you're surrounded by millions of things to test for. You're a gardener, god only knows whats on your hands. Skin oil of certain blood types is a contaminant? Your breath has a tinge of ethanol in it from last night? Maybe its your perfume / cologne / antiperspirant / nail polish? The point of discovery is its literally unknown... maybe wearing nitrile gloves instead of old fashioned latex "does something" good or bad to the reaction.
I think the main thing "slashdotter IT people" need to understand is most chemistry and most chemical engineering runs somewhat less than 6 sig figs. This is incomprehensible to IT people... if your T1 or whatever LAN had a BER worse than 1e5 you'd call it in for repair... If you got one thousand read errors when you read a 1 gig DVD, you'd throw out that DVD. If your processor runs at 1500 mips then at a six sig fig error rate it would crash about 1500 times per second. The bad news is six sig figs is actually pretty good work for a chemistry lab. Certainly undergrads could never aspire it that level, both skill and experience and specialized equipment....
Please spare me the details of one peculiar quantitative analysis technique that in one weird anecdote measured once in tiny fractions of a ppt. The overall system cannot be "cleaner" than the filthiest link in the entire system. Is the hand soap in your lab spectrographically pure? The unused toilet paper in the bathroom? All of your hoods and benches and storage cabinets are in a verified and tested cleanroom environment? Seriously? The drinking cooler and lab fridge also only hold spectrographically pure substances? Please no anecdotes.
Ah thank you AC it took 3 of us but we finally figured everything out about the malapropism.
Still confused as to what the "manifest" means, exactly. I googled for "it is manifest in" and its a cross cultural (no kidding!) religious phrase more or less boiling down to "it is acting as or becoming a part of" or something like that. Concatenation, or perhaps more like instantiate a class. I think the original review author is writing something like its officially a textbook (self description?) but what REALLY makes it a textbook is daring to demand a price over $100. I can dig that. Or even whip out the "Grok".
I have no useful/. car analogy other than maybe re-enacting the classic "how many slashdotters does it take to change a light bulb?"
Maybe. Don't necessarily have to buy... What if instead of (or in addition to) smelly piles of crapware being installed on each shipped machine, MS "demanded" that steam be installed on each new machine? Same end result more or less.
Slashdot Mirror
So you can't be bothered to find out anything about what Netflix is asking, but you know that Netflix is asking ISP's to pay money?
Uh thats pretty much the definition of the peering dance, try to "upsell" your free peers into purchasing transit from you. Its not Netflix asking for money its the ISPs asking netflix to pay the isp. After all, I pay my ISP for traffic, so some MBA thinks netflix should pay too.
ring ring ..
Dell support this is "John" how may I help you?
Ah hi John, this is Steve at microsoft I'd like to open a support ticket because I'm having trouble transferring $3B as part of a private equity buyout.
OK Steve while I do the needful opening a support ticket I have some tasks for you, I was wondering if you could reboot the computer.
Well John the problem is on your website, I'm trying to paypal you $3M and I'm getting an error message about
Please do the needful Steve and simply click the start button, then shutdown...
No John this is windows 8 there is no start button anymore
Oh so sorry Steve let me pull up the correct script... Ah I see you are needing to restore windows from your install partition, which will reinstall all the crapware and drivers and a unpatched version of windows from 2010 complete with 57 varieties of security hole, but we don't charge extra for that.
OK John (Steve humors John, and fumbles around for his iPad to use instead, pretending just so they can get past the script)
I'm not really sure where to go with this, other than it should probably end with "steve" from microsoft throwing a chair, or "developers develpers developers" or somesuch nonsense.
I thought Netflix was agreeing to deliver the content to the peering point of the ISP's choice - the only cost to the ISP is a port on their border gateway and a cheap peering interconnect.
I can't be bothered to find out, but I assumed this was part of the peering dance that has been going on for two decades or whatever between all players on the internet.
Basically the network engineering dept knows its universally a win to peer for "free" as much as possible with as many other people as possible rather than pay for transit. However the MBAs on both sides of a peering arrangement love to dance around with daydreams of bonuses in their heads of getting the other guy to purchase transit instead of freely peer. So historically you've always had idiotic showdowns (slowdowns?) and dumb marketing tricks (we only peer with other tier 1 providers... whats a tier 1 provider? Well its anyone we either a) want to peer with or b) couldn't get to pay us for transit, that's the def of a tier 1 provider).
The GOP does not have very sophisticated get out the vote tools.
Evangelical Christianity?
Paywalls are a problem when it comes to sharing chemical research with a wider audience, but they're a factor in physics, astronomy,
http://arxiv.org/
Free preprints for physics and astronomy (and a lot of other stuff, just no bio). I'd like to see more of those too. I think every time aaronson posts something on his blog it should hit /. for example.
I've seen some truly inscrutable theoretical physics and mathematics stories here where half the comments were "LOLWTF someone explain,"
I can agree with that. From the front page of Nature Chemisty (paywall alert) we've got
"Molecular cages" by Cooper, mistakes in this summary are solely my fault, something like you can now nano-engineer a really tiny pasta strainer to catch certain specific molecular shapes, in this paper some ridiculously small hydrocarbons. Holy cow Cool! This would make a decent /. submission.
vs
"Catalytic Cascades" by Wang which is WTF for me, and I got pretty far along in ochem and quant before I switched to CS. I mean I'm vaguely familiar with his inputs and outputs but whats going on in between is ... I'm guessing this would not make a decent /. submission, at least not by me, at least at my current level of understanding of this paper.
WRT vary with age, its kind of important to note the study sliced and diced at 2 hrs, 24 hrs, and 72 hrs... not like a decade later or whatever. So they did an acute study not a chronic study like most /.ers seem to assume. So... 2 hours after getting whacked in the head, you're whacked in the head... I was getting the impression from /. comments that this persisted for "a long time" but apparently not.
So... you love Tory, eh?
It would be funnier if he was Tory... /. does seem like the kind of place those guys would hang out.
coming up with a good stand is probably going to affect usability much ore an the camera.
Talk to a real photographer or optical dude about depth of focus, which is going to be a big deal. The "ideal stand" from a focusing standpoint may not be flat, although that's going to screw up astigmatism of the lens system (square won't be square on the screen)... Also lighting is incredibly important. Its surprising how much noise and garbage your eyes filter out on a live model that is glaring ugly on a fixed image, and (real) photographers are experts at using tech to filter that stuff out before it hits the camera. Find a pro who specializes in graphics art business static photos, like the guy who takes pix of food for the local restaurants, not a wedding photographer whos mostly good at avoiding photos showing zits... although some wedding photographers do good static work like staged pixs of rings and decorations and stuff.
I'm mystified why it has to be a webcam, other than the joy of complexity.
I am personally involved in two "scenes" where other participants a couple decades grayer than myself need similar tech and both use plain ole cameras hooked up to TVs.
I can easily solder 0402 SMD by hand (I kid you not, and I've assembled working N5AC microwave oscillator kits to prove it.. the main vco inductor is a 0402 as are a bunch of the bypass caps. Also I know several model machinists (of the homemade steam engine variety) who use toolpost mounted microscopes to see little stuff, also some of them are pretty young, like the guys trying to machine a research medical adapter between a hypo needle and some medical research "thing".
Anyway the killer for hand/eye coordination is latency. A simple camcorder is fast enough, a webcam no freaking way. Also the "boot time" of a camcorder is faster than any PC, not to mention "application launch". No software updates, no viruses (other than the ones you're looking at under the microscope LOL).
I do know that one huge user of "webcam glued to gear" is medical examiners / pathologists because its easier to import CSI style evidence into a report edited on a computer if you use a webcam. Otherwise stay away from webcams !
This is to compete with the Winphone and Nokia markets.
Talk about aiming for a low market share. Can firefox break even if they only sell a thousand?
If you fire anything fast enough, it wouldn't be considered safe
Low density is the key. I suppose I have to officially discourage this kind of activity, but in the early 90s my friends and I had indoor potato gun fights using balls of crumpled paper as ammo. Virtually harmless projectiles even at point blank range assuming you use gas fuel and not liquid fuel. Liquid fuel sets the projectile on fire, which sounds cool but usually isn't unless you're on dueling pontoon boats pretending you're re-enacting naval battles, which is a whole nother story. One broken glass window, but that was heavily debated as being due to the sonic backblast of the potato gun itself rather than the projectile which might not have hit the window anyway. It is obviously capable of knocking stuff off shelves or pix off walls. Frankly running around screaming like lunatics caused more injuries than the projectile itself. Its a fun way to play tag, a little more "sporting" than merely using NERF weaponry.
I would imagine a DRY sponge or a mooshy foam ball would be pretty safe at anything below supersonic.
while I'm able to get in and out of bed easily without hitting the protruding shelf, it gets more complicated if you're ever have "company."
Funniest line in the whole article, not a concern on /. especially not after installing the "camera mount" over the bed. At least have the discretion to install a tiny web cam instead of trying to use an ipad for your "home movie making"
Seriously though been there done that with the exercise machine, and milk crates are rickety (and $10 a piece?) but concrete construction blocks from home depot work better and are cheaper. Nice and heavy. Unless you're really hard core and use mortar, my advice is use cheapie orange cargo straps to clamp the bricks together, otherwise collapse is inevitable. You don't need DOT rated 5000 lb straps, just enough that "washing machine vibration" won't slowly gradually topple them. Duct tape might work too. Obviously this is more appealing in the "homemade basement" home decorating class of gym than the "I'm trendy let me show off my shiny new expensive unused gym" upstairs. The truly hardcore who build their own power rack out of cedar 4x4 landscaping posts in their basement will probably attach the tablet to the power rack. I don't have enough ceiling height for a power rack in my basement so I don't have this "problem". (and no a weight lifting power rack isn't 19 inches wide unless your body is totally weird)
For a couple decades I've done the treadmill in front of the TV and behind the couch thing. The idea was walk while watching TV. Rather than walking a lot, I ended up not watching TV a lot. Almost as positive of an outcome, I guess. Anyway a phone/tablet with hdmi out is an obvious solution to the treadmill display desire.
using an app that was written in the 60's, unchanged
The problem is not the app, but the databases.
I work, today, with new code looking at old columns that are "char" and worked around Y2K by calling today "year 113". So all code reads the column and adds 1900 to the column. We're pretty well Fed when that column hits year 2156.
There are solutions, but they're a hell of a lot more complicated than "recompile the app" (what is this, a iphone?)
Even "business logic" needs serious work. So the paper form has two digits for year, should the OCR read "13" as 1913 or 2013? Even worse, if that's a year of birth, both are totally realistic. You can't fix a paper form by recompiling a data analysis app.
and your loans will be like 500K
Per textbook
They're probably talking about endless dependency stream style bugs.
For example. Say your shitty GPS rx curls up and dies with the 32 bit roll over. So it either stops sending fixes to the moving map or the moving map decides not to accept post-32-bit timestamps as part of the NMEA stream. Either way the position becomes static so the calculate airspeed drops to zero. Normally it would cross check against the two tubes, but those are clogged by ice today. So the autopilot shoves the stick far over because the planes in a stall and floors the engine.
Assuming the plane doesn't crash (and it probably won't... this is hardly the first time in aviation history that an autopilot broke) will get the trouble ticket for a broken autopilot, then has to work backward to figure out the moving map is broke, move back to find the GPS is broke...
Even funnier would be really shitty arithmetic implementations. Like a "one" value in bit 32 is somehow, accidentally the MSB/LSB/something now added to the lat/lon. Again pissing off the autopilot into thinking you're now suddenly 15000 miles off course and need to enter a gentle turn to the north to correct. The odds of that being unnoticed and there being a mountain there are actually pretty low, but its still going to be an unholy PITA to investigate and "solve".
Or overzealous security monster type paranoid "24 tv show fan" type firewall type design.. Why, the date "has" to be pre-32 bit, right? So filter anything "wrong" out. Whoops that makes the engine computer crash. Well thats annoying. Or the GPS isn't broken at all, but the moving map display interpretation code actually is broken. Overall just as annoying as hell.
Also a timestamp, in addition to being referenced to 0 = somesuch date, also can be used with offsets. So add a signed integer "-60" to the timestamp signed integer to get a signed integer representing about a minute ago. Since you'll be spending a lot of time adding signed ints to a timestamp, you may as well make the thing a signed int, rather than having to screw up and debug a zillion crappy bug filled homemade implementations of "uint + int = uint". Most of the bugs are dealing with extreme values and rollovers ... most of them.
On the bright side, at least they didn't use BCD or floats. floats would have been pretty funny, crontab entries not running because of rounding errors and stuff like that.
anti-social fuck-wits who think that their religious beliefs justify their behavior
thats the best possible outcome, but more likely it'll turn into our own homegrown teabillies vs the muslims battle.
I wish I could route around the local teabillies as damage...
As a guy who likes chemistry, I enjoy seeing more posts recently about chem, but I'd like a little more "real stuff" like Milstein's recent paper from like last week, about a catalytic alcohol to hydrogen converter using ruthenium under pretty normal-ish conditions instead of weird oxidizers or high pressures (the full paper unfortunately lives behind a very expensive legacy paywall publisher) rather than "I haz autographs". For example the paper goes in a "here's a fun way to make carboxylic acids" direction but my first thought was "here's a fun way to make lots of hydrogen easily using a liq fuel". I would have to think about it for awhile but from a thermodynamic perspective, wouldn't you get higher system efficiency by stripping H2 off alcohol then running it thru a fuel cell, then burning the semi-acidic remainder in a traditional IC engine, probably with some weird carb/fuel injection adjustments? OTOH I bet the exhaust of a carboxolic acid fueled IC engine is pretty icky to clean up.
But no we gots "I haz autographs" instead. I guess it could be worse.
If your boss says he intends to come hard on anyone probing his systems without his approval
Then there's somebody who's never been on the internet or read an actual logfile. That policy will disappear in about one days experience on the net. That's the point I'm trying to make.
Its 2013. Does anyone out there seriously call the FBI / NSA / CIA / lawyer every time some script kiddie runs a standard script from a compromised machine overseas? This is the kind of attitude you hear from people in the 90s before/around when they first connected to the internet. "Somebody pinged me, I better send a page to the CEO that we're being hacked and block all ICMP too". It also sounds a lot like the people who try to track down Every Single Spammer who sends them email. That idea goes away real quick too.
This is the real internet not an episode of "24".
That's not to say logs should be ignored. Just don't overreact to them. Going nuclear is overreacting. Doing pretty much anything in direct response to a script kiddie is overreacting (proper indirect response is running the same tools against your own servers, keeping stuff up to date and patched, sensible firewall rules, etc)
P.S. does anyone know of a tool that can be used to design postgresql database schemas and export create/update scripts? (like mysql workbench does for mysql)
Could it be as simple as keep using mysql workbench (which I've never used) and pipe it thru SQLfairy aka SQL::Translator (a sourceforge project) to convert from mysql to postgresql?
I have a simple automated system that mysqldumps all my schema, then shoves them thru sqlfairy to convert to DOT (you'd be converting to postgresql, which I know sqlfairy claims to be able to do), then shoves the DOTs thru graphviz to convert to png diagrams, then creates a simple webpage to link to each db diagram. Easy and fast and fun and automatic. Also pretty boring unless you properly define your foreign keys.
Over the decades I've found its rather hard to machine translate, expect plenty of hand editing fine tuning unless its truly a miracle product and the format specs on both sides are incredibly well defined, or are very simple..
Did he bust you for error bars / sig figs? How many sigma was your "signal" above the noise? "pointed toward" doesn't sound like a firm result, so I can see the old prof getting kinda wound up if you wrote a relatively strong conclusion in English language prose, but provided math showing a very weak conclusion. That's "TV commercial logic" not scientific logic. Still the guy was a bastard about it, because he didn't explain his (likely) reasoning to you, or at least he didn't do it very well.
Narrowing the error bars is a long tradition in physics... you don't have to announce the precise discovery of "whatever" to make a good experiment, so your hypothesis could have been fine tuned... "Can you reduce your std deviation to less than 0.1 m/s with that relatively crude gear, and if so, what is the result?" would have been a decent "real world" experimental hypothesis. I know that "science fairs" demand certain firm outcomes which make them "not science" so you gotta play along to win, but...
I've been watching this project for awhile, and it seems to function a lot more like a flash mob than a live-blog.
A scientist should also run experiments multiple times to see if the results are repeatable before publishing those results.
Won't help. I studied to be a chemist (admittedly a long time ago) and by far the biggest non-ethical problem out there is contamination.
So it turns out that your peculiar reaction you're studying is iron catalyzed, in fact its incredibly sensitive to iron, but no one in the world knows that yet. And your reagents are contaminated. Or your glassware, which you thought was brand new and/or well cleaned, is contaminated. Or your lab is downwind of a hematite ore processor and the room dust is contaminated.
Sure, you say, test everything. Well there isn't time/money for that, but for the sake of argument we'll assume there is. What if dust from the hematite ore processor is far larger than the filter paper pores in filtration stage of your overall process? Test the reagents and product all you want but you'll never find iron anywhere except room dust (which you already knew about) and the debris in the filter paper (which you assume was contaminated by room dust AFTER removal from the apparatus)
The most important thing is this is the norm in chemistry, not an outlier. Chemistry is not math or CS, sometimes stuff just doesn't work or just works for no apparent reason. Unlike some technologies, detailed modeling of "why" "how" often doesn't happen for years, decades, centuries after the ChemEng team has been selling product / papers have been written.
A very important lesson is analysis paralysis. So you live downwind of a hematite ore crusher. And you know it. And periodic tests of your lab show iron enriched house dust. But you can't go around testing everything, because you're surrounded by millions of things to test for. You're a gardener, god only knows whats on your hands. Skin oil of certain blood types is a contaminant? Your breath has a tinge of ethanol in it from last night? Maybe its your perfume / cologne / antiperspirant / nail polish? The point of discovery is its literally unknown... maybe wearing nitrile gloves instead of old fashioned latex "does something" good or bad to the reaction.
I think the main thing "slashdotter IT people" need to understand is most chemistry and most chemical engineering runs somewhat less than 6 sig figs. This is incomprehensible to IT people... if your T1 or whatever LAN had a BER worse than 1e5 you'd call it in for repair... If you got one thousand read errors when you read a 1 gig DVD, you'd throw out that DVD. If your processor runs at 1500 mips then at a six sig fig error rate it would crash about 1500 times per second. The bad news is six sig figs is actually pretty good work for a chemistry lab. Certainly undergrads could never aspire it that level, both skill and experience and specialized equipment....
Please spare me the details of one peculiar quantitative analysis technique that in one weird anecdote measured once in tiny fractions of a ppt. The overall system cannot be "cleaner" than the filthiest link in the entire system. Is the hand soap in your lab spectrographically pure? The unused toilet paper in the bathroom? All of your hoods and benches and storage cabinets are in a verified and tested cleanroom environment? Seriously? The drinking cooler and lab fridge also only hold spectrographically pure substances? Please no anecdotes.
Ah thank you AC it took 3 of us but we finally figured everything out about the malapropism.
Still confused as to what the "manifest" means, exactly. I googled for "it is manifest in" and its a cross cultural (no kidding!) religious phrase more or less boiling down to "it is acting as or becoming a part of" or something like that. Concatenation, or perhaps more like instantiate a class. I think the original review author is writing something like its officially a textbook (self description?) but what REALLY makes it a textbook is daring to demand a price over $100. I can dig that. Or even whip out the "Grok".
I have no useful /. car analogy other than maybe re-enacting the classic "how many slashdotters does it take to change a light bulb?"
Maybe. Don't necessarily have to buy... What if instead of (or in addition to) smelly piles of crapware being installed on each shipped machine, MS "demanded" that steam be installed on each new machine? Same end result more or less.