[This is a true semi-relevant story that I posted to Reddit a few years back.]
Many years ago, I got a field report of a few systems that were turning themselves off during the night without warning or seemingly a reason. We had some temperature-monitoring software that would automatically shut the system down if it got too hot, and the logs showed that was what was happening. But it was November and the systems were in snowy regions, so too-hot didn't make sense.
A quick look through the code showed me the problem. The programmer was reading the current temperature from the hardware as an unsigned byte instead of a signed one (as the data sheet for the part specified), so that an actual temperature of -1 C (which is crazy cold for a system) was being read as 255 C, and so it would shut down immediately. Later investigation found that the affected systems were in unheated loading dock areas.
The fix was, of course, easy, but testing it required putting the system in our kitchen freezer (with the various cables coming out for power, the monitor, and so on). The CEO walked in while I was sitting there with a keyboard, mouse, and monitor seemingly hooked up to the refrigerator and just said, "I don't think that I should ask what you're doing."
I don't know that you can really take suggestions on what should be your charities. You want to find those groups and issues that you're interested and hopefully passionate about. That said, this is my list, sorted with those that I'm most charitable towards first: * Local public schools (who also get my time running a tech club and other activities) * SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) * Southern Poverty Law Center * Planned Parenthood * The Planetary Society * National Organization for Women Foundation * GEDMatch (DNA matching tools) * Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) * Comic Book Legal Defense Fund * Wikimedia
Based on my experience with my YouTube content and monetization, YouTube also pays $0.001 ($1 per 1000 views). My channel is at nearly a million views (total, not per month), so it's not huge, but it's not trivial, either. I don't know if they pay different rates to different people / channels, though.
Or a smart phone that she carries on her person (e.g. shirt pocket or on an arm band) that alerts when it is no longer vertical, such as if she's on the ground or slumped over?
I think that "rrrybgdts" would be a poor password, as a Google search shows it's a common "word" and is used as a user name on a bunch of sites, so it could easily end up in a password dictionary.
The clearly-Indian-accented fellow called last week and I knew immediately that it was this scam. I am not Indian, but know many and I love international movies. I said, "Hey, you're Indian; let's talk about Indian movies!" Him: "No, sir, I'm not Indian; I'm American." Me: "Clearly from your accent, English is not your first language." Him: "No, sir, English is the only language I speak." Me (in my best Hindi, but I only know this phonetically): "." ("I speak Hindi.") Him (very surprised): "You're Indian, too?!?!" Me: "Let's talk movies! Have you seen _The Three Idiots_? How about _English Vinglish_? _RA-One (Rawan)_? _Barfi_?" So we chatted for a few minutes and then it was time for me to go.
Everyone should see _The Three Idiots_; it's a great movie!
What's the purpose of sending a shutdown signal to an abandoned probe? If it is abandoned, does it matter if you shut it down or not?
You have to do a clean shutdown or the memory isn't freed. If the probe were destroyed, that would be memory which could never, ever be allocated by anyone ever again.
It really starts to add up. A few thousand probes and you're talking hundreds of kilobytes.
I forgot: * _TCP/IP Illustrated. Volume 1_ by Stevens.
I know the list is light on academic books -- I many other books due to college and grad school computer science, but the're not something that I look at very often.
Off the top of my head: * _Programming Pearls_ by Bentley * _Debugging the Development Process_ by Maguire * _Cuckoo's Egg_ by Stoll * _Windows Internals_ by Russinovich and Solomon if you're doing low-level Windows work. * _Code Complete_ McConnell and _Writing Solid Code_ by Maguire are good for someone just getting their first programming job.
JLS is just OK, IMHO. But _Illusions_ is one of my favorites. And his _One_ is one of the worst books that I've ever finished. So the same author is on my Best and Worst lists.
I'm assuming that you're a decent programmer or whatever your forte is, so I'll limit it to that type of book where there are two clear winners. _Debugging the Development Process_ by Maguire and _Programming Pearls_ by Bentley. The first will make you a better engineer and the second a better programmer.
MOUSE Squad is a nationwide organization which teaches computer skills by organizing a school helpdesk which is able to handle most day-to-day problems with the school's computer equipment. They've been around for 10+ years and hundreds of schools participate.
I've just become involved with it at my son's middle school, so I'll be working with them for the next few years.
While I haven't read all of Kube-McDowell's novels, I've read most. His first, _Emprise_, is wonderful --I've read it maybe 5 times over the years, though the sequels are so-so. He has a few other good ones, and a few misses. Allegedly, his Star Wars novels are pretty good.
As far as I know, _The Adolescence of P-1_ is Ryan's only novel, but what a gem it is. I've read it about every 5 years since 1977. One of the first intelligent computer novels.
I have, but didn't think much of it. The best that I can say is that it's a great title, interesting cover, and, unfortunately, was what I expected from a Kilgore Trout novel.
How does the car know to stop at the drive-thru speaker? How does it then know when to go again and pull up to the drive-thru pay window? And same again for the pick-up window? And later in the video, how does it know that it's time to choose a parking space?
So clearly there is some human control, none of which could be done by someone who is actually fully blind? So in this case, was the 95%-blind person doing something (gas/brake, voice commands), or was a sighted person controlling it in some way?
Basically, how does a driver (sighted or not) communicate decisions to the car that are beyond the scope of "driving"?
I was a TA for a few CS classes.
One method we used was to compile everyone's code and look at the size of the object file. If two programs produced the same size object file, then it was most likely a case where someone copied code, but then changed variable names and comments.
Another easy method (which only works with smaller classes) was to have everyone come in to "demo" and explain their program. The folks that cheated were not able to explain their work.
I'm positive that is not the first case, and I would assume that there are many others.
The one that I'm directly aware of was a few years ago, circa July 2005. See this nice writeup for detail.
I contribute to a web site called Gullible.Info, which, as you might guess from the name, is 100% anti-fact-checked information. That is, guaranteed false.
The site had posted a "fact" that Timothy Leary claimed to have discovered a new color called "gendale". This "fact" eventually made its way into the Wikipedia article about Leary by someone who didn't understand the background of Gullible.Info. From there, it made its way into the large UK newspaper The Guardian (within an article about Leary). By that time, it had been removed from Wikipedia due to lacking a source. However, after The Guardian publication, it was then added back in since there was now a "good" source. (Although it was later removed when the owner of Gullible.Info pointed out to the folks involved that Gullible.Info was hardly authoritative and no information coming from it can be trusted.)
Note that at no time was anyone intentionally causing incorrect information to appear on Wikipedia. In each case, the people involved were acting in good faith, albeit with misplaced trust.
I needed to burn through my vacation time at my job once ("use it or lose it"), so I became a substitute teacher. I did it every Friday until I got my vacation time way down.
It was a good fit; it was useful, very different from my day job, made reasonable $$$ (though only about 1/4 of my day job), and plus I was still paid due to my vacation time. Surprisingly, the first few times were quite tiring -- I went home a took a nap!
I also considered teaching a community college course, which might also work for the original poster.
It does seem that a large part of the T-1 price is due to the upload speed. If we compare it to symmetric DSL, it is priced similarly. Here are the prices that I just got from http://www.att.com/dsl:
I think that the antitrust argument can be easily refuted by searching for "search engine" on Google. If Google were really manipulating the results (and maybe even if it weren't), you'd expect "Google" to be the first result returned.
But it's not.
In fact, the first three are: Dogpile, AltaVista, and MetaCrawler. The next 10 are: Google UK, Google, MSN, Yahoo, Netscape, HotBot, FreeFind, Lycos, Mamma, and Vivisimo.
So, if they were manipulating results, wouldn't that be an obvious place to start?
While Watchmen is one of the strongest pieces of comic book "literature", it unfortunately relies on a pre-knowledge of the super-hero genre. I feel that it can't be appreciated on its own, since it is essentially a deconstruction of prior work.
I believe that the most shining example of a work that is accessible to "outsiders" is easily Maus by Art Spiegelman. (Don't just take my word for it, it won a Pulitzer Prize!) At its core, it's the true story of the author's father's experiences surrounding the Nazi Germany concentration camps. Heavy stuff, but told in a way that is accessible by even a 10-year-old. Highly recommended!
A few other examples of excellent work that stand on their own would be V for Vendetta by Alan Moore, Cerebus: Jaka's Story by Dave Sim, Batman: Year One or the Sin City series by Frank Miller, Torso by Brian Michael Bendis, anything by Jaime or Gilbert Hernandez, Box Office Poison by Alex Robinson, or Stuck Rubber Baby by Howard Cruse. Your local comic shop would have any of these works, and you can always skim them prior to purchase.
I'm with Blockbuster, and overall, I'm pretty satisfied. For me, the big selling point was the in-store rental coupons since there are times that someone in my family really wants to watch a movie. For example, we see a movie and then decide to see the sequel, or a friend mentions a very interesting movie that I want to get on the way home.
But anyway... I'm here to talk about distribution centers.
I live about 5 miles away from one of Blockbuster's distribution centers, and for the first few months, that seemed to be where I got all (or at least most) of the DVDs from. But suddenly things changed, and they all started coming from another center which is about 200 miles away. While the close one always had overnight shipping, the far one was overnight only about half the time. I asked Blockbuster and they basically said "too bad, you can't change it, it based on super-complex algorithms that change minute-by-minute" and other hand-waving. But basically, their answer came down to "the post office says that both of those centers should give you 1-day delivery" -- and I looked it up at USPS.com, and sure enough, that is what they say. However, I still want my movies to come from the close distribution center instead of the far one.
But anyway, what I REALLY want to ask is... Has anyone every tried returning a movie -- on purpose -- the the wrong (closer) distribution center? As long as I used the same sleves, but changed the address with a label, it seems that it should work fine. But I'm reticent to try it since the DVD might then get "lost". Has anyone done this before?
Slashdot Mirror
[This is a true semi-relevant story that I posted to Reddit a few years back.]
Many years ago, I got a field report of a few systems that were turning themselves off during the night without warning or seemingly a reason. We had some temperature-monitoring software that would automatically shut the system down if it got too hot, and the logs showed that was what was happening. But it was November and the systems were in snowy regions, so too-hot didn't make sense.
A quick look through the code showed me the problem. The programmer was reading the current temperature from the hardware as an unsigned byte instead of a signed one (as the data sheet for the part specified), so that an actual temperature of -1 C (which is crazy cold for a system) was being read as 255 C, and so it would shut down immediately. Later investigation found that the affected systems were in unheated loading dock areas.
The fix was, of course, easy, but testing it required putting the system in our kitchen freezer (with the various cables coming out for power, the monitor, and so on). The CEO walked in while I was sitting there with a keyboard, mouse, and monitor seemingly hooked up to the refrigerator and just said, "I don't think that I should ask what you're doing."
I don't know that you can really take suggestions on what should be your charities. You want to find those groups and issues that you're interested and hopefully passionate about. That said, this is my list, sorted with those that I'm most charitable towards first:
* Local public schools (who also get my time running a tech club and other activities)
* SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence)
* Southern Poverty Law Center
* Planned Parenthood
* The Planetary Society
* National Organization for Women Foundation
* GEDMatch (DNA matching tools)
* Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF)
* Comic Book Legal Defense Fund
* Wikimedia
Based on my experience with my YouTube content and monetization, YouTube also pays $0.001 ($1 per 1000 views). My channel is at nearly a million views (total, not per month), so it's not huge, but it's not trivial, either. I don't know if they pay different rates to different people / channels, though.
Or a smart phone that she carries on her person (e.g. shirt pocket or on an arm band) that alerts when it is no longer vertical, such as if she's on the ground or slumped over?
I think that "rrrybgdts" would be a poor password, as a Google search shows it's a common "word" and is used as a user name on a bunch of sites, so it could easily end up in a password dictionary.
The clearly-Indian-accented fellow called last week and I knew immediately that it was this scam. I am not Indian, but know many and I love international movies. I said, "Hey, you're Indian; let's talk about Indian movies!" Him: "No, sir, I'm not Indian; I'm American." Me: "Clearly from your accent, English is not your first language." Him: "No, sir, English is the only language I speak." Me (in my best Hindi, but I only know this phonetically): " ." ("I speak Hindi.") Him (very surprised): "You're Indian, too?!?!" Me: "Let's talk movies! Have you seen _The Three Idiots_? How about _English Vinglish_? _RA-One (Rawan)_? _Barfi_?" So we chatted for a few minutes and then it was time for me to go.
Everyone should see _The Three Idiots_; it's a great movie!
What's the purpose of sending a shutdown signal to an abandoned probe? If it is abandoned, does it matter if you shut it down or not?
You have to do a clean shutdown or the memory isn't freed. If the probe were destroyed, that would be memory which could never, ever be allocated by anyone ever again.
It really starts to add up. A few thousand probes and you're talking hundreds of kilobytes.
I find the standard practice to be nuke windows form orbit
It's the only way to be sure.
I forgot:
* _TCP/IP Illustrated. Volume 1_ by Stevens.
I know the list is light on academic books -- I many other books due to college and grad school computer science, but the're not something that I look at very often.
Off the top of my head:
* _Programming Pearls_ by Bentley
* _Debugging the Development Process_ by Maguire
* _Cuckoo's Egg_ by Stoll
* _Windows Internals_ by Russinovich and Solomon if you're doing low-level Windows work.
* _Code Complete_ McConnell and _Writing Solid Code_ by Maguire are good for someone just getting their first programming job.
That gives them until 15 October!
JLS is just OK, IMHO. But _Illusions_ is one of my favorites. And his _One_ is one of the worst books that I've ever finished. So the same author is on my Best and Worst lists.
I'm assuming that you're a decent programmer or whatever your forte is, so I'll limit it to that type of book where there are two clear winners. _Debugging the Development Process_ by Maguire and _Programming Pearls_ by Bentley. The first will make you a better engineer and the second a better programmer.
MOUSE Squad is a nationwide organization which teaches computer skills by organizing a school helpdesk which is able to handle most day-to-day problems with the school's computer equipment. They've been around for 10+ years and hundreds of schools participate. I've just become involved with it at my son's middle school, so I'll be working with them for the next few years.
While I haven't read all of Kube-McDowell's novels, I've read most. His first, _Emprise_, is wonderful --I've read it maybe 5 times over the years, though the sequels are so-so. He has a few other good ones, and a few misses. Allegedly, his Star Wars novels are pretty good. As far as I know, _The Adolescence of P-1_ is Ryan's only novel, but what a gem it is. I've read it about every 5 years since 1977. One of the first intelligent computer novels.
I completely agree,and the two books are fairly different. The first is a Crichton, and the second I-don't-know-who.
I have, but didn't think much of it. The best that I can say is that it's a great title, interesting cover, and, unfortunately, was what I expected from a Kilgore Trout novel.
How does the car know to stop at the drive-thru speaker? How does it then know when to go again and pull up to the drive-thru pay window? And same again for the pick-up window? And later in the video, how does it know that it's time to choose a parking space? So clearly there is some human control, none of which could be done by someone who is actually fully blind? So in this case, was the 95%-blind person doing something (gas/brake, voice commands), or was a sighted person controlling it in some way? Basically, how does a driver (sighted or not) communicate decisions to the car that are beyond the scope of "driving"?
I was a TA for a few CS classes. One method we used was to compile everyone's code and look at the size of the object file. If two programs produced the same size object file, then it was most likely a case where someone copied code, but then changed variable names and comments. Another easy method (which only works with smaller classes) was to have everyone come in to "demo" and explain their program. The folks that cheated were not able to explain their work.
I'm positive that is not the first case, and I would assume that there are many others.
The one that I'm directly aware of was a few years ago, circa July 2005. See this nice writeup for detail.
I contribute to a web site called Gullible.Info, which, as you might guess from the name, is 100% anti-fact-checked information. That is, guaranteed false.
The site had posted a "fact" that Timothy Leary claimed to have discovered a new color called "gendale". This "fact" eventually made its way into the Wikipedia article about Leary by someone who didn't understand the background of Gullible.Info. From there, it made its way into the large UK newspaper The Guardian (within an article about Leary). By that time, it had been removed from Wikipedia due to lacking a source. However, after The Guardian publication, it was then added back in since there was now a "good" source. (Although it was later removed when the owner of Gullible.Info pointed out to the folks involved that Gullible.Info was hardly authoritative and no information coming from it can be trusted.)
Note that at no time was anyone intentionally causing incorrect information to appear on Wikipedia. In each case, the people involved were acting in good faith, albeit with misplaced trust.
I needed to burn through my vacation time at my job once ("use it or lose it"), so I became a substitute teacher. I did it every Friday until I got my vacation time way down. It was a good fit; it was useful, very different from my day job, made reasonable $$$ (though only about 1/4 of my day job), and plus I was still paid due to my vacation time. Surprisingly, the first few times were quite tiring -- I went home a took a nap! I also considered teaching a community college course, which might also work for the original poster.
It does seem that a large part of the T-1 price is due to the upload speed. If we compare it to symmetric DSL, it is priced similarly. Here are the prices that I just got from http://www.att.com/dsl:
AT&T Business Class DSL
Download/upload speeds (users/monthly price)
Multi-IP IDSL 144-144Kbps ($142.45)
SDSL 192-192Kbps ($142.45)
SDSL 384-384Kbps ($179.95)
SDSL 768-768Kbps ($188.96)
SDSL 1.1-1.1Mbps ($244.96)
SDSL 1.5-1.5Mbps ($279.96)
I think that the antitrust argument can be easily refuted by searching for "search engine" on Google. If Google were really manipulating the results (and maybe even if it weren't), you'd expect "Google" to be the first result returned.
But it's not.
In fact, the first three are: Dogpile, AltaVista, and MetaCrawler. The next 10 are: Google UK, Google, MSN, Yahoo, Netscape, HotBot, FreeFind, Lycos, Mamma, and Vivisimo.
So, if they were manipulating results, wouldn't that be an obvious place to start?
I believe that the most shining example of a work that is accessible to "outsiders" is easily Maus by Art Spiegelman. (Don't just take my word for it, it won a Pulitzer Prize!) At its core, it's the true story of the author's father's experiences surrounding the Nazi Germany concentration camps. Heavy stuff, but told in a way that is accessible by even a 10-year-old. Highly recommended!
A few other examples of excellent work that stand on their own would be V for Vendetta by Alan Moore, Cerebus: Jaka's Story by Dave Sim, Batman: Year One or the Sin City series by Frank Miller, Torso by Brian Michael Bendis, anything by Jaime or Gilbert Hernandez, Box Office Poison by Alex Robinson, or Stuck Rubber Baby by Howard Cruse. Your local comic shop would have any of these works, and you can always skim them prior to purchase.
I'm with Blockbuster, and overall, I'm pretty satisfied. For me, the big selling point was the in-store rental coupons since there are times that someone in my family really wants to watch a movie. For example, we see a movie and then decide to see the sequel, or a friend mentions a very interesting movie that I want to get on the way home. But anyway... I'm here to talk about distribution centers. I live about 5 miles away from one of Blockbuster's distribution centers, and for the first few months, that seemed to be where I got all (or at least most) of the DVDs from. But suddenly things changed, and they all started coming from another center which is about 200 miles away. While the close one always had overnight shipping, the far one was overnight only about half the time. I asked Blockbuster and they basically said "too bad, you can't change it, it based on super-complex algorithms that change minute-by-minute" and other hand-waving. But basically, their answer came down to "the post office says that both of those centers should give you 1-day delivery" -- and I looked it up at USPS.com, and sure enough, that is what they say. However, I still want my movies to come from the close distribution center instead of the far one. But anyway, what I REALLY want to ask is... Has anyone every tried returning a movie -- on purpose -- the the wrong (closer) distribution center? As long as I used the same sleves, but changed the address with a label, it seems that it should work fine. But I'm reticent to try it since the DVD might then get "lost". Has anyone done this before?