> Look, I like Google. If I could have gotten in on the IPO I'd have been there.
> But by the time mortals were allowed in the price was insane and heading higher.
Then where were you? "Mortals" were permitted access to the Google IPO, unlike most IPOs. There was lots of time prior to that point to put in bids to buy at the IPO price, which ended up being $85. It was even well-covered by our newspaper, having about 5 front-page stories on the IPO process for "mortals" in the weeks prior to the event. I don't know how you missed it!
Personally, I bought some of the $85 IPO. I sold it a few months later at $180, just before the Google employees got the opportunity to sell the bulk of their options. I had reasoned, incorrectly as it turns out, that many employees would sell their shares at those levels, thus perhaps doubling the number of available shares (the "supply"), which would then cause a large drop in the price. As it turns out, no such drop occurred.
Lack of FTP warning "destroys" hard drive...
on
10 Computer Mishaps
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· Score: 1
[This was an article that I submitted to RISKS 13 years ago...]
In 1991, a co-worker asked me how to re-partition his hard drive. I told him that this was a silly idea, considering that he had lots of space and the partitions didn't get into anyone's way. He just wanted to do it because it was "better".
Anyway, after explaining that he would have to save all of the old data some place (and suggesting that he not use millions of floppies, but instead FTP it up to our Unix system), he went away.
About an hour later, he came back asking for PKzipFix. I asked him why, and he told me that PKunzip was complaining that he had a bad ZIP file. I went over to his desk, and after about 15 minutes of questioning, I realized what had happened.
He had PKzip-ed each of his partitions and FTP-ed them up to the system. Unfortunately, he did not specify BINARY mode, and so it only transferred ASCII characters and converted CRLFs to LFs. Since he had reformatted his drive, all of that data was lost...
The RISK was that FTP had no warning message of the following sort:
WARNING: Non-ASCII characters found while in ASCII mode.
I suppose that some further argument could be made that BINARY mode should be the default (instead of the data-modifying ASCII mode)...
I'm not sure which pictures you're referring to, but it's easy to get a picture of the Milky Way -- just look up! The Milky Way is all around us since we're part of it. In every direction, we can see stars that are part of the Milky Way.
As far as "pictures" of the galaxy as a whole (where it is shown as a spiral, which us near the end of one arm), those are computer generated based on the locations and distances of the stars around us or are sometimes just pictures of other spiral galaxies which we are just told is the Milky Way.
How do we know we're in a spiral galaxy? By the distribution of the stars around us. In most directions, we see a relatively few amount of stars. However, on a clear night away from city lights, it's easy to see the "glow" of the cross section of the Milky Way (and the center) in one swath across the sky -- this is us looking at the Milky Way end-wise. And then by mapping the distances and locations of all the stars, a 3-D map of the galaxy can be created, and that map then looks like a spiral (just like many other galaxies).
About 15 years ago, a bunch of folks (including Danny Hillis [sic] of Connection Machines, I believe) made a "computer" that could play tic-tac-toe using only Tinker Toys; namely, given a tic-tac-toe grid, it could make a good next move. There's was a good writeup in Scientific American, among other places. Inspired by this, my office mate (Brian Totty) and I tried to see what we could do computationally with just standard Legos (no Expert set, since that would have been fairly easy since it contains gears and such). We came up with nothing. We came up with a way of building an AND gate, but without a NOT or a NOR, we couldn't do any useful computation. Perhaps someone more clever than us might come up with a better Lego architecture...
The World's hardest puzzle (Funny and Insightful)
on
Programming Puzzles
·
· Score: 1
This is paraphrased from _The Zen of Programming_, a semi-humorous book of some note.
The CEO of a game company hires a consultant to design the world's most difficult picture puzzle. After thinking about it for some time, the consultant does as he is asked and returns to the CEO's office. He brings with him a box full of pieces, which he dumps on the CEO's desk.
The consultant explains that there are two ways to make a picture puzzle difficult. The first is to make the shapes similar, and the second is to make the colors similar. The consultant has done both, making the shapes the same and the colors the same.
The CEO exclaims, "But these are just a bunch of identical black squares -- a child could put this together!"
"Such as it is in life," the consultant continues, "Often the most difficult puzzles are the easiest to solve."
I'm sure that the technology exists, but it's just a bit too... Je ne sais quois?
Plus this seemingly came out a few months ago and/. is the first I'm hearing of it... I would have thought the press would have been all over this...
And to top it all off -- genetically-engineered NightSave Deer (http://www.genetiate.com/nightsave.html)?
However, someone else had the same idea as me:
http://www.okpatents.com/phosita/archives/2004/08/ hoax_or_horror.html
I used to do something similar back in grad school with our laser printers. The CPU inside the laster printers (some version of a Motorola 68000) was more powerful than the machines that we had on our desks, and they had a fair amount of memory as well. So, for some computations, I'd write little PostScript programs, have the laster printer churn on it overnight (of course, no one could print in the meantime), and then print out the answer when it was done.
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> But by the time mortals were allowed in the price was insane and heading higher.
Then where were you? "Mortals" were permitted access to the Google IPO, unlike most IPOs. There was lots of time prior to that point to put in bids to buy at the IPO price, which ended up being $85. It was even well-covered by our newspaper, having about 5 front-page stories on the IPO process for "mortals" in the weeks prior to the event. I don't know how you missed it!
Personally, I bought some of the $85 IPO. I sold it a few months later at $180, just before the Google employees got the opportunity to sell the bulk of their options. I had reasoned, incorrectly as it turns out, that many employees would sell their shares at those levels, thus perhaps doubling the number of available shares (the "supply"), which would then cause a large drop in the price. As it turns out, no such drop occurred.
In 1991, a co-worker asked me how to re-partition his hard drive. I told him that this was a silly idea, considering that he had lots of space and the partitions didn't get into anyone's way. He just wanted to do it because it was "better".
Anyway, after explaining that he would have to save all of the old data some place (and suggesting that he not use millions of floppies, but instead FTP it up to our Unix system), he went away.
About an hour later, he came back asking for PKzipFix. I asked him why, and he told me that PKunzip was complaining that he had a bad ZIP file. I went over to his desk, and after about 15 minutes of questioning, I realized what had happened.
He had PKzip-ed each of his partitions and FTP-ed them up to the system. Unfortunately, he did not specify BINARY mode, and so it only transferred ASCII characters and converted CRLFs to LFs. Since he had reformatted his drive, all of that data was lost...
The RISK was that FTP had no warning message of the following sort:
WARNING: Non-ASCII characters found while in ASCII mode.
I suppose that some further argument could be made that BINARY mode should be the default (instead of the data-modifying ASCII mode)...
I'm not sure which pictures you're referring to, but it's easy to get a picture of the Milky Way -- just look up! The Milky Way is all around us since we're part of it. In every direction, we can see stars that are part of the Milky Way.
As far as "pictures" of the galaxy as a whole (where it is shown as a spiral, which us near the end of one arm), those are computer generated based on the locations and distances of the stars around us or are sometimes just pictures of other spiral galaxies which we are just told is the Milky Way.
How do we know we're in a spiral galaxy? By the distribution of the stars around us. In most directions, we see a relatively few amount of stars. However, on a clear night away from city lights, it's easy to see the "glow" of the cross section of the Milky Way (and the center) in one swath across the sky -- this is us looking at the Milky Way end-wise. And then by mapping the distances and locations of all the stars, a 3-D map of the galaxy can be created, and that map then looks like a spiral (just like many other galaxies).
About 15 years ago, a bunch of folks (including Danny Hillis [sic] of Connection Machines, I believe) made a "computer" that could play tic-tac-toe using only Tinker Toys; namely, given a tic-tac-toe grid, it could make a good next move. There's was a good writeup in Scientific American, among other places. Inspired by this, my office mate (Brian Totty) and I tried to see what we could do computationally with just standard Legos (no Expert set, since that would have been fairly easy since it contains gears and such). We came up with nothing. We came up with a way of building an AND gate, but without a NOT or a NOR, we couldn't do any useful computation. Perhaps someone more clever than us might come up with a better Lego architecture...
This is paraphrased from _The Zen of Programming_, a semi-humorous book of some note. The CEO of a game company hires a consultant to design the world's most difficult picture puzzle. After thinking about it for some time, the consultant does as he is asked and returns to the CEO's office. He brings with him a box full of pieces, which he dumps on the CEO's desk. The consultant explains that there are two ways to make a picture puzzle difficult. The first is to make the shapes similar, and the second is to make the colors similar. The consultant has done both, making the shapes the same and the colors the same. The CEO exclaims, "But these are just a bunch of identical black squares -- a child could put this together!" "Such as it is in life," the consultant continues, "Often the most difficult puzzles are the easiest to solve."
I'm sure that the technology exists, but it's just a bit too... Je ne sais quois? Plus this seemingly came out a few months ago and /. is the first I'm hearing of it... I would have thought the press would have been all over this...
And to top it all off -- genetically-engineered NightSave Deer (http://www.genetiate.com/nightsave.html)?
However, someone else had the same idea as me:
http://www.okpatents.com/phosita/archives/2004/08/ hoax_or_horror.html
I used to do something similar back in grad school with our laser printers. The CPU inside the laster printers (some version of a Motorola 68000) was more powerful than the machines that we had on our desks, and they had a fair amount of memory as well. So, for some computations, I'd write little PostScript programs, have the laster printer churn on it overnight (of course, no one could print in the meantime), and then print out the answer when it was done.