I used to work for a PC assembler. After a while you ended up knowing the numbers through sheer experience.
A mid range Pentium 4 (at the time 2.4Gz?) with the overheat cut off sent at 90 degrees, and no heatsink would run for about 60 seconds from room temp - ie just long enough to get into the BIOS Health screen and watch the numbers climb - if you were fast.
The same machine, with heat sink fitted but not properly would last longer, but not enough to do anything substantial with.
With the heatsink fitted, but it's fan unconnected the machine would last quite a while - possibly long enough to make it through QC if there wasn't much software to install - maybe as much as an hour. I'm almost certain some shipped. (note: the company in question went bankrupt. They aren't really missed)
This is timely, if nothing else.
I've spent the last working day wrestling with what turned out to be SELinux, while trying to write a postfix filter.
The way these work is postfix gives emails as command line options and STDIO, and the software (usually) connects to SMTP on an alternative port to move the email on.
Except with SELinux running (which is installed by default in some distros), it fails. Silently.
Please, take it away!
I have less than perfect vision (detail follows), and I find the easiest to read screens are the simple black (or dark coloured) text on a white background.
I have an eye condition known as Kerataconus, where due to it's thinning, my cornea bulges in a conic shape. This is understood to be a genetic condition, but research to identify which genes are involved is still ongoing. In practice this means I can have trouble reading fine detail, and while it isn't constant (near detail, by which I mean 10cm away) is much easier than far detail, even given relative scaling) it can vary in severity over time.
Unfortunately there are only three ways of dealing with this:
the ever popular ignore it, just try to adapt with the vision you have
Get contact lenses. And by this I mean hard, expensive £70/eye lenses.
Get corneal grafts, for which there's a shortage of donors, although genetics aren't actually that important in this case
Despite this condition I'm currently making a good living as a Unix programmer....
Because at the moment, there are less than 10 in existence?
Because the bed of a reprap seems to be less than the part of a single one?
Because I don't have the space in my flat to house the components to *build* a reprap, and I'm going to sulk until you stop talking about them?
In the end, if you want to run an operation like this, you end up doing something like the Qeng Ho in Vernor Vinge's excellent "A Deepness in the Sky".
Your fleet *is* the company. From what little information you gather, you take things with you that are probably tradeable at destination, and as well you take tools that can work on a wide variety of raw materials, in case you have to do this work yourself (if the locals aren't friendly, aren't at the right tech speed, or just aren't). If you're running to and from a base in the middle, you'll end up having to work out what home base might find useful when you get back from extrapolation of your current trends, while being aware that commodity consumables probably won't cut it.
Having worked with (possibly alongside is closer) Adam in the past, that's not the point.
In all probability, this hasn't occurred to him.
It would still be interesting to test, but let's face it, isn't bashing windows the main point here.
Whether such and such getting_more_obscure_hardware breaks is one thing, but it breaks in windows!
And in truth, if your security is compromised to the point where people can plug things in, it's essentially useless anyway.
On reflection, I may have missed a few points out.
The starting linked lists consists of the depot as both the origin and the final destination. It may be worth preparing a few core stops, say 2 or 3 stops that are furthest from the average / centre.
Bear in mind that this was a courier, operating in a postcode / suburb based area, and returning to base, the local airport.
While not being a perfect solution, it's much better than the one in place, which is very random - possibly centered around the drivers getting rid of the largest parcels first....
Actually, this is a very real problem, with very real applications.
Consider: My flatmate (translation: person I share a flat with) was at one time a courier. When he arrived at work (at 5 am) he'd be given a number of packages to be dropped off. Usually around 40, all within his "patch", a postcode based area. He'd usually then spend the next hour in the back of his van grouping them together into groups. Given that he was expected to come back for a second load in the early afternoon, this meant he usually had time for a sneaky nap in the middle of the day, before finishing around 4:30 - 5pm or so.
The company he worked for kept rolling out hand-held computer systems aimed at tracking the parcels, but never really tried to get into route optimization - despite the fact that improving delivery runs could result in quicker delivery runs, thus (possibly) reducing the number of drivers needed to service a given supply of packages.
My solution (which was only designed mentally rather than written into a working system) was simpler than finding the ideal route by brute force.
You only really need one utility algorithim - a way of determining the distance/time between two points. Once you have that, it's a relatively easy task.
Create a linked list of points, initially consisting of only your starting point and the drop furthest away. The traverse the list for each new drop, and insert it between the two adjoining points that it's closest to. The route you'll end up with, while possibly not perfect, will end up with a lot of short journeys between close locations.
Easy-ish.
Re:My problem with Mensa's standards...
on
MSN Sponsors Mensa
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· Score: 1
Bear in mind that, according to their admission testing, at no time can more than 2% of the population be members of Mensa (assuming universal application)
This is a big assumption. Last time I ran the numbers, British Mensa had, of it's 2% of theoretically eligible members, a membership of about 2%. Of those members the vast majority never attend events (it's somewhere in the 2% range, on my rubbish evidence).
2 percent of 2 percent is not a big number. The population of Great Britain is about 60 Million, I believe. You do the math.
If anything, this highlights the problems that Mensa has at the moment.
Mensa's goals are (paraphrased): "To foster human intelligence, to research human intelligence, and provide a social forum for it's members" By and large, it's mainly only this last one that ever happens. By far and away the most popular regular Mensa meeting in London, England is the pub crawl.
Mensa is a Social Club. Members often have very little in common, but a common ability to think. While there is a qualification of a top 2% IQ score for entry, only a tiny percentage actually apply.
For the record, I'm not entirely comfortable with corporate sponsorship of Mensa. The fact that it's Microsoft is something I really don't like. But it's just my opinion - by policy, Mensa has no opinions
(disclaimer: the author is a member of British Mensa, and sits on the London organising committee (LocSec forum)(
The original SF calls for an elevator - ie counterweights and elevator cages. All this is is a single line - stage 1 if you will. Initially we'll have to be shooting rocks up by rocket so we can bring them back down again as counterweight....
The situation would presumably be different if they had a monopoly (I say presumably because I don't know about New Zealand law) but that can't be said of CD duplication.
Well - I left NZ about two years ago. At this time there were 2 pressing plants in the country - Software Images and Stebbings. For a while Software Images where the only game in town, but they were nice and friendly to do business with.
For the record, New Zealand law allows for copyrighted goods to be imported by people other than the copyright holders - Parallel Imports are very much legal.
You are kidding, right? I have work to do that needs to be done in a command processing environment.
I have 550 WMA files that I want to convert to mp3, but some rubbish software (Media Player) has added track names, and put them all into an artist/album tree. If I had a command line conversion tool, I could just write a perl script to create a batch file to do all the renaming so I can use mp3 tools to work with it (like under Linux).
These files are 1/6 of my total music collection which is currently in storage elsewhere, but I'd like to have access to it all eventually
Under Linux+bash, I had a 1-liner command line script to count the albums per artist that my CDDB player had seen. About 6 filters - I can't work out how I'd do this in windows......
It's definitely gone. Dematerialised or whatever. That photo was taken in January...
Mind you, that's absolutely a broken chameleon circuit. Who'd expect to see a call-box like that in London? Even a red phone-booth would be a rare sighting.....
when the huge universe of MS Office documents becomes available for processing by any programmer
I beg you pardon? Smelly programmers can keep their hands off my documents. If I wanted you to have them, I'd have emailed them to you as plaintext. I wasn't aware the the Office license meant my documents were common property....
"I bear in mind that for most of the period since the police call box was
taken out of service, the only sight the public at large would have had of this item of street furniture has been in the TV programme Dr Who, provided by the BBC where it is a Tardis, a fictional time travelling machine with the external appearance of a police box," ruled Mr Sherlock.
Eh? If it was taken out of service, how did I manage to get a photo taken of me next to one? For the excessively keen, this TARDIS is outside Earls Court Underground Station, in London, England.
Currently the only free domain is the internet, rest everything from transport to what you eat to what adv you watch is in hands of "control". Such legistlations will eliminate freedom on internet also. This is the beginning, soon more and more rules will come.. like what email you send what chat you do, which software you download
Too many people these days seem to mis-understand freedom. Just because an article a reporter writes isn't printed is not freedom-related. It's the editor or owner expressing theirs.
I freely agree that the governments are getting a little heavy-handed, but many other things are just other people expressing their freedom.
It's not just you. This would have been bad. But it's just yet another gaffe from a familiar source.
David Blunkett has a habit of putting legislation into action that is far too heavy handed - think about his post-Sept 11 proposals, or his reaction to refugee housing. Thankfully most of it seems to get filtered out by due process.
He does seem to act a bit rashly, and seems to leap before he looks too often. I sometimes wonder if his presence is reverse-discrimination in action (he was blind from birth).
Re:Tales from the inside.
on
Disconnecting
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· Score: 2
An Anonymous Coward wrote: Huh? What was the point of this story? This was a "yes, this happened to me too, but kinda different" response. I genuinely thought people might be interested, strangely enough. Especially the point that getting out isn't any easier when you're on the inside...
Tales from the inside.
on
Disconnecting
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· Score: 2
I almost had a problem leaving my ISP - although it's hard to tell whether I actually did or not.
In mid-1999 I changed job, from research science to an ISP. I got free, unlimited dial-up as part of my contract. Then in mid-February 2001 I was laid off. Some comments were made about falling revenues and low currencies...
Shortly after this I moved overseas for a while (12 months so far) for a taste of the world. While I got 12 months free access as part of redundancy, dial-up access isn't so much use if it's with a regional ISP (Australia+NZ) located on the other side of the planet (I'm in England).
But I do have contacts on the inside, and my bosses are very reluctant to lose customers. After talking via email to people in Human Resources I got switched to Marketing's weirdest account type, the "Anytime". Quite why we (programming department) let this one slip past is anyone's guess, but what they want, they get. If it's possible and legal.
Get this: nothing a month, nasty expensive connect time of NZ$2.95/hour (IIRC), but it comes with the free 5 email addresses and 10Mb web space. No cost, no need to change my email or web addresses (always a big hassle) and no downside. I mean - it's not like I want international call charges and and connect charges just for 56k - which almost certainly won't happen with some of the line quality and delay issues I've had on some voice calls.....
This is going to sound like a me too post, but I'd actually considered writing something like this in perl but been hampered by the fact that I don't own a computer...
Consider though:
Use a server running apache to create little tasks and accept requests by sending out XML packets as replies.
A languauge that can upgrade itself on the fly (I need *this* version library, go fetch..)
Home parallel processing.... wish I had hardware so I could code it.. (redunancy/relocation/poor - should end soon though....)
I know this is going to prove what a hideous geek I am, but it's an automatic purchase-on-sight order here. As will be a DVD player if it's only available on that media.
An interesting comment on the movie itself though: As a New Zealander, I only recognised 1 location specifically. There were a lot of nice "top of mountain ranges" that could be anywhere, but just one said to me, I've been there.
I think the river where Arwen challenges the Ringwraiths to follow her across, while ferrying Frodo to Rivendell is the Waikato. Specifically, a rapid called Fuljames, at Ngaaparua (highly questionable spelling). It's just below a hydro power station - no need for special effects shots.
Slashdot Mirror
A mid range Pentium 4 (at the time 2.4Gz?) with the overheat cut off sent at 90 degrees, and no heatsink would run for about 60 seconds from room temp - ie just long enough to get into the BIOS Health screen and watch the numbers climb - if you were fast.
The same machine, with heat sink fitted but not properly would last longer, but not enough to do anything substantial with.
With the heatsink fitted, but it's fan unconnected the machine would last quite a while - possibly long enough to make it through QC if there wasn't much software to install - maybe as much as an hour. I'm almost certain some shipped. (note: the company in question went bankrupt. They aren't really missed)
This is timely, if nothing else. I've spent the last working day wrestling with what turned out to be SELinux, while trying to write a postfix filter. The way these work is postfix gives emails as command line options and STDIO, and the software (usually) connects to SMTP on an alternative port to move the email on. Except with SELinux running (which is installed by default in some distros), it fails. Silently. Please, take it away!
I have an eye condition known as Kerataconus, where due to it's thinning, my cornea bulges in a conic shape. This is understood to be a genetic condition, but research to identify which genes are involved is still ongoing. In practice this means I can have trouble reading fine detail, and while it isn't constant (near detail, by which I mean 10cm away) is much easier than far detail, even given relative scaling) it can vary in severity over time.
Unfortunately there are only three ways of dealing with this:
- the ever popular ignore it, just try to adapt with the vision you have
- Get contact lenses. And by this I mean hard, expensive £70/eye lenses.
- Get corneal grafts, for which there's a shortage of donors, although genetics aren't actually that important in this case
Despite this condition I'm currently making a good living as a Unix programmer....Because at the moment, there are less than 10 in existence? Because the bed of a reprap seems to be less than the part of a single one? Because I don't have the space in my flat to house the components to *build* a reprap, and I'm going to sulk until you stop talking about them?
In the end, if you want to run an operation like this, you end up doing something like the Qeng Ho in Vernor Vinge's excellent "A Deepness in the Sky".
Your fleet *is* the company. From what little information you gather, you take things with you that are probably tradeable at destination, and as well you take tools that can work on a wide variety of raw materials, in case you have to do this work yourself (if the locals aren't friendly, aren't at the right tech speed, or just aren't). If you're running to and from a base in the middle, you'll end up having to work out what home base might find useful when you get back from extrapolation of your current trends, while being aware that commodity consumables probably won't cut it.
Having worked with (possibly alongside is closer) Adam in the past, that's not the point. In all probability, this hasn't occurred to him. It would still be interesting to test, but let's face it, isn't bashing windows the main point here. Whether such and such getting_more_obscure_hardware breaks is one thing, but it breaks in windows! And in truth, if your security is compromised to the point where people can plug things in, it's essentially useless anyway.
I can see how you would think that.
On reflection, I may have missed a few points out.
The starting linked lists consists of the depot as both the origin and the final destination. It may be worth preparing a few core stops, say 2 or 3 stops that are furthest from the average / centre.
Bear in mind that this was a courier, operating in a postcode / suburb based area, and returning to base, the local airport.
While not being a perfect solution, it's much better than the one in place, which is very random - possibly centered around the drivers getting rid of the largest parcels first....
Actually, this is a very real problem, with very real applications.
Consider:
My flatmate (translation: person I share a flat with) was at one time a courier. When he arrived at work (at 5 am) he'd be given a number of packages to be dropped off. Usually around 40, all within his "patch", a postcode based area. He'd usually then spend the next hour in the back of his van grouping them together into groups. Given that he was expected to come back for a second load in the early afternoon, this meant he usually had time for a sneaky nap in the middle of the day, before finishing around 4:30 - 5pm or so.
The company he worked for kept rolling out hand-held computer systems aimed at tracking the parcels, but never really tried to get into route optimization - despite the fact that improving delivery runs could result in quicker delivery runs, thus (possibly) reducing the number of drivers needed to service a given supply of packages.
My solution (which was only designed mentally rather than written into a working system) was simpler than finding the ideal route by brute force.
You only really need one utility algorithim - a way of determining the distance/time between two points. Once you have that, it's a relatively easy task.
Create a linked list of points, initially consisting of only your starting point and the drop furthest away.
The traverse the list for each new drop, and insert it between the two adjoining points that it's closest to. The route you'll end up with, while possibly not perfect, will end up with a lot of short journeys between close locations.
Easy-ish.
This is a big assumption. Last time I ran the numbers, British Mensa had, of it's 2% of theoretically eligible members, a membership of about 2%. Of those members the vast majority never attend events (it's somewhere in the 2% range, on my rubbish evidence).
2 percent of 2 percent is not a big number. The population of Great Britain is about 60 Million, I believe. You do the math.
Mensa's goals are (paraphrased): "To foster human intelligence, to research human intelligence, and provide a social forum for it's members" By and large, it's mainly only this last one that ever happens. By far and away the most popular regular Mensa meeting in London, England is the pub crawl.
Mensa is a Social Club. Members often have very little in common, but a common ability to think. While there is a qualification of a top 2% IQ score for entry, only a tiny percentage actually apply.
For the record, I'm not entirely comfortable with corporate sponsorship of Mensa. The fact that it's Microsoft is something I really don't like. But it's just my opinion - by policy, Mensa has no opinions
(disclaimer: the author is a member of British Mensa, and sits on the London organising committee (LocSec forum)(
The original SF calls for an elevator - ie counterweights and elevator cages. All this is is a single line - stage 1 if you will. Initially we'll have to be shooting rocks up by rocket so we can bring them back down again as counterweight....
Well - I left NZ about two years ago. At this time there were 2 pressing plants in the country - Software Images and Stebbings. For a while Software Images where the only game in town, but they were nice and friendly to do business with.
For the record, New Zealand law allows for copyrighted goods to be imported by people other than the copyright holders - Parallel Imports are very much legal.
I have 550 WMA files that I want to convert to mp3, but some rubbish software (Media Player) has added track names, and put them all into an artist/album tree. If I had a command line conversion tool, I could just write a perl script to create a batch file to do all the renaming so I can use mp3 tools to work with it (like under Linux).
These files are 1/6 of my total music collection which is currently in storage elsewhere, but I'd like to have access to it all eventually
Under Linux+bash, I had a 1-liner command line script to count the albums per artist that my CDDB player had seen. About 6 filters - I can't work out how I'd do this in windows......
It's definitely gone. Dematerialised or whatever. That photo was taken in January...
Mind you, that's absolutely a broken chameleon circuit. Who'd expect to see a call-box like that in London? Even a red phone-booth would be a rare sighting.....
Right! That does it, I'm going down there to look.
I beg you pardon? Smelly programmers can keep their hands off my documents. If I wanted you to have them, I'd have emailed them to you as plaintext. I wasn't aware the the Office license meant my documents were common property....
Eh? If it was taken out of service, how did I manage to get a photo taken of me next to one? For the excessively keen, this TARDIS is outside Earls Court Underground Station, in London, England.
No, it's just unfortunate. He seems to not think his ideas through enough. It was just the best phrase to match.
Too many people these days seem to mis-understand freedom. Just because an article a reporter writes isn't printed is not freedom-related. It's the editor or owner expressing theirs.
I freely agree that the governments are getting a little heavy-handed, but many other things are just other people expressing their freedom.
David Blunkett has a habit of putting legislation into action that is far too heavy handed - think about his post-Sept 11 proposals, or his reaction to refugee housing. Thankfully most of it seems to get filtered out by due process.
He does seem to act a bit rashly, and seems to leap before he looks too often. I sometimes wonder if his presence is reverse-discrimination in action (he was blind from birth).
An Anonymous Coward wrote:
Huh? What was the point of this story?
This was a "yes, this happened to me too, but kinda different" response. I genuinely thought people might be interested, strangely enough. Especially the point that getting out isn't any easier when you're on the inside...
In mid-1999 I changed job, from research science to an ISP. I got free, unlimited dial-up as part of my contract. Then in mid-February 2001 I was laid off. Some comments were made about falling revenues and low currencies...
Shortly after this I moved overseas for a while (12 months so far) for a taste of the world. While I got 12 months free access as part of redundancy, dial-up access isn't so much use if it's with a regional ISP (Australia+NZ) located on the other side of the planet (I'm in England).
But I do have contacts on the inside, and my bosses are very reluctant to lose customers. After talking via email to people in Human Resources I got switched to Marketing's weirdest account type, the "Anytime". Quite why we (programming department) let this one slip past is anyone's guess, but what they want, they get. If it's possible and legal.
Get this: nothing a month, nasty expensive connect time of NZ$2.95/hour (IIRC), but it comes with the free 5 email addresses and 10Mb web space. No cost, no need to change my email or web addresses (always a big hassle) and no downside . I mean - it's not like I want international call charges and and connect charges just for 56k - which almost certainly won't happen with some of the line quality and delay issues I've had on some voice calls.....
Because my mobile is just a cheap job, on a cheap prepay plan....
Consider though:
- Use a server running apache to create little tasks and accept requests by sending out XML packets as replies.
- A languauge that can upgrade itself on the fly (I need *this* version library, go fetch..)
Home parallel processingAn interesting comment on the movie itself though: As a New Zealander, I only recognised 1 location specifically. There were a lot of nice "top of mountain ranges" that could be anywhere, but just one said to me, I've been there.
I think the river where Arwen challenges the Ringwraiths to follow her across, while ferrying Frodo to Rivendell is the Waikato. Specifically, a rapid called Fuljames, at Ngaaparua (highly questionable spelling). It's just below a hydro power station - no need for special effects shots.