I recently went through dice.com when looking for a job. I posted my resume on a Friday eve and began poking through the list of programming jobs in the Des Moines area. The following Tuesday I was hired. I had been posting my resume to employers for two months prior to that, but because I have no degree I was never able to get even a second glance (despite my 9 years experience).
I received in total about 8 call backs for offers/interviews (of which 3 were from agencies) before I hid my resume there.
I had such a positive experience, I have to recomend them any chance I get.
There is so much competition to find the oldest fossils... it really makes me question the dating on this.
Sometimes, things have been re-dated and re-dated each time coming up with dramatically older dates.
As a matter of fact, I've heard of incidents where people took samples from living animals, for example, a mollusk, and the dating shows them as being many thousands of years old.
In a book written by Charles Darwin, he meets with an archaeologist digging on Galapagos Island. He watches in amazement as they routinely discard interesting looking samples because there's no way they can be old enough to be found at the depth. This is done routinely even today... if a scientific measurement is not inline with expectations, it's discarded and assumed to be inaccurate.
How can we possibly find the truth when researches are both highly motivated to find older and older fossils, and therefore closed minded to ideas that might jeopardize what the currently believe?
If you think about it, who is the scraggler of the bunch in the CPU market? Sun. So, how can Sun get another chance? Bring down Intel. But how can Sun bring down Intel? Boost AMD. What has Sun been doing in their ads lately? "Opteron Rules" and etc. Sun likely has a bigger marketing budget than AMD for the Opteron CPUs. Since Dell competes with Sun and customers are now saying, "I hear the Opteron is a good CPU and I need one in my data center... guess I'll have to buy a Sun..."
It's forcing Dell to expand their product offering in order to remain competitive with Sun. This ads credibility to AMD and takes away some sales from Intel.
Sun would love for AMD to bite into Intel's profit margins because it's easier to take on a competitor with 40% market share than with 80% market share.
This is probably mindless rambling, and I likely have no clue what I'm talking about, but I see this as a win for Sun. Even if they don't get more sales, at least their marketing department can chalk up a win for moving the buzz off of Intel and onto AMD (who is one of their partners).
By the way, I really dislike seeing posts by AMD fan boys... who on earth swears allegiance to a CPU? I'm merely excited to see improved competition which should fuel innovation and drop prices. Yeah! I'll buy Intel or AMD or whatever that gives me the best performance for my $$$. I want a cheap fast computer and I don't care if it's powered by ephedrine doped hamsters (imagine the logo for that CPU!).
I have a friend in India who says that he would use iTunes store if it were available, but because it isn't he simply uses peer-to-peer.
As the iTunes store becomes available across the world it will help legitimize the online music industry. I think there are a lot of people in the world who don't have the option to go and buy the music they want to listen to. If they could, they would.
Of course there are a lot of people who will jump at the opportunity to get something for free if they can, but no one is stopping these now, so it's not really the point. But if you give everyone the opportunity to pay for the music, many will. I think this is a good thing.
Speaking of online music sales, I'm really looking forward to another price war. Come on guys, we need a legit iTunes competitor to drive down the prices!
I really like the idea of summer of code. I've been watching a few projects to see how they were doing. Unfortunately, few had any kind running progress and there really weren't many summaries.
It would be cool if more would tell the world how things turned out. I noticed that some of the NetBSD projects didn't get completed in time. I suspect that some organizations might be afraid to summarize because they would show that the projects didn't get completed, but I say that's OK. In business some projects get started and then scrapped before completion; it's how life goes.
But if there were more summaries out there, I think we could see more commercial organizations stepping up and taking an active and visible role in financing the future of interesting OSS projects.
I've been wating for something usable since January of 2004 and even earlier. However, I will say that Looking Glass has been very influential. That new feature in OS X Tiger that allows you to see 3d widgets has the same "flip over for options" feature that was demoed with LG3D.
Will this ever become a usable project? I don't think so, but every time a profound new innovation like this appears it affects the other products that came out in later years. There is some good stuff here and I suspect we'll see it pop-up in very unusual places.
Admittedly, it probably does far less than a power based computer. It runs at 1 MIPS, has only 64 bytes of RAM and spends most of its time sleeping, but on the plus side, it costs less than $10 to build and while sleeping uses about.05 watts of power.
Mine went up. I got all the bounces because it couldn't be delivered or forwarded to the intended recipient.
Every little hickup causes me to get somewhere around 700 e-mails. This was more than a little hickup, but I actually didn't get as many as usual.
I will say that there is one thing worse than SPAM. That is BOUNCED SPAM. With SPAM you can look at the subject or the recipient and delete it without hesitation. With BOUNCED SPAM you get a delivery notification from postmaster. Hmm... is it important or is it just bounced spam. Better open it to see for sure. Yikes!
I was up running traceroute at 3:30 am (CDT) this morning. At first they always stopped in ATT's network, presumably the pop between them and Level 3. When level 3's website came up (about 3:45) my pager stopped beeping but I still couldn't get a route to my servers. At that point the traceroute stopped at a POP for Level 3 in New York. The pings just kept getting bounced back and forth between two servers.
All said and told, I was down for about 45 minutes. I use a service called "Web Site Pulse" that monitors my network/servers and their connection to my servers came up about 15 min before I could see them.
(Normally that would seem like a bad thing, but in the case of a major tier 1 backbone being down, the normal scenarios all go out the window)
It's kinda funny, cause it's always the new guys who get stuck doing night-time duty at the NOC where my datacenter is. I always feel bad because it seems like the worst problems happen at night-time. When I called there (it would have been about 4:15 am where he was) the guy was obviously freaked out.
Uh, everyone uses a Tier 1. The only way you can not use a Tier 1 is if you access one of your ISPs web servers. Otherwise you get routed through a Tier 1.
Are you asking if ATMs use the internet, then, yes, some do. Slammer a few years ago took out Bank of America and others. That was the day the Internet felt like it stood still.
The biggies learned their lesson and now should survive. I suspect the small guys, your average mall/convienence store ATM, would go black and start spewing money across the floor.
From a legal standpoint, E-bay is not an auction. In their FAQ they have a reply to the questions about why the closing time doesn't change to last-bid + 5 minutes or similar. Basically, if they did that they would be regulated like an auction which would add much complexity and legal red tape to their service.
That's a paraphrase. Their FAQ is so big that it's hard to find answers to specific questions.
Magazine's aren't expensive because it costs a lot to produce them - they're expensive because:
a: They want people to feel their product is valueable, and people associate cost with value
b: Related to a, if they give it away too cheap they can't make as much money on ad sales because advertisers know peple think of free magazines as worthless
c: People are willing to pay the cover price
Magazine's make their money on ad sales. So do newspapers. The money that you pay for the coverprice is largely just profit for the newsstand and the middle man who gets the magazines to the newsstand. That's why magazine's offer such discounts for people to subscribe - the more readers they have, the more they make on ad sales, but they can't give the mags away (see point b).
Don't kid yourself... this stuff is hard. Let's take just one specific example: Detecting an obstacle such as barbed wire at a distance far enough away to avoid it.
First realize that if you're traveling at 20mph (the average speed you need to maintain in order to complete the course and be competitive) that means you're traveling at 30 feet per second. If the sensors detect an obstacle and within.25 seconds instruct the vehicle to stop you've traveled 7.5 feet. At least another 20 feet will pass before the vehicle comes to a stop. That means you need to detect any obstacles at least 30 feet ahead of you, and really, that's cutting it close, since the course may be off road. I'd be uncomfortable with my sensors if they didn't have a range of 50 - 70 feet.
So, how do you detect barbed wire from a range of 50 feet? First of all, it's hard for our eyes to see barbed wire at that range. The primary way we can do this is to spot the fence posts. However our eyes are better than any optical sensor you can equip a robot with. Since the fence posts can be 30 feet apart you'd need aproximately a 30 degree field of vision. However, a simple web cam will not cut it... you'll need high resolution, which means lots of graphics processing power. If you can't process 10 frames per second then you're going to increase your stopping distance and therefore you'll need to increase the range at which you detect obstacles.
And that's just to spot the fence post! How does the computer equipment know the difference between a fence post holding a string of impassible barbed wire and some ordinary obstacle that the vehicle can merely avoid?
Let's go a step further... how do you detect any object at 50 feet? Keep in mind the economics... the prize is $2mil. That's if you win. That's if you finish. Who can afford to invest $1mil on sensors and computer equipment just for a *chance* to win? No one. There are no promissed govt. contracts, no special deals for the winner. This automatically precludes spending $50,000 - $100,000 on a single sensor capable of detecting obstacles at that distance.
Even having a chance at winning this contest will require a team of brilliant individuals each specialized in a certain area. Plus, you'll need brilliant fund-raisers. I'll be surprised if anyone completes this course with less than $150,000 invested in equipment. You'll need programmers, someone who knows the mechanics of the vehicle, someone who knows the sensors. You'll need to deal with the heat (the vehicle will probably spend a lot of timing traveling under 10mph which is not ideal for cooling), rugged terain. This is a challenging assignment. Hats off to the folks who cross the finish line, if anyone makes it. (last year no one came close)
I used this technique to bounce my imap mail to gmail. Since AOL supports IMAP protocol, set up Pine to access the IMAP server at AOL, set up SMTP access and then "bounce" your mail over to gmail. Instructions are at: http://www.aaltonen.us/archive/2004/04/26/tip-batc h-forward-email/
Two notes:
Gmail will preserve the dates on the messages, but will display the date that the message was received by gmail servers. When you click the message the correct date will show.
If you overload a server between you and gmail some of your mail may be bounced back to the original sender.
War is not the opposite of peace. Peace is a state of mind, and the opposite of peace is unrest. When people experience unrest they respond in different ways; one such way is war.
War is a corrective action utilized to restore peace by removing the cause of unrest. Sometimes it is used appropriately, other times it is not. For example, the French revolution was a war to correct the imbalance between aristocracy and commoners. I doubt that there was any other way to start this corrective process that would have yielded better results.
Compare war to a fever. Your body uses a fever as part of the process to fight off an infection. You don't cure the fever, you cure the infection, which then causes the fever to leave. Likewise, you don't stop a war, you find the root cause of unrest, solve this to restore peace, and then war will naturally end. *In theory*
Sometimes, no satisfactory compromise can be found; such is the case when two people groups adamantly want exclusive occupation of a certain place on the map.
It is a myth that we will someday have world peace. It is against our nature to be 100% satisfied with the status quo; there will always be pressure, there will always be unrest, discontent and inequality. We can sooner eradicate all testosterone from the world than achieve world peace.
You see, the same conditions that can bring about war also can bring about progress and great achievement!
I do *not* condone violence as a means of expression, such as used in terrorism. Terrorism is not war, it is a way for someone with little power (aka influence) to get heard, similar to the way a particular person may become the "squeaky wheel" in order to get extra attention.
As a matter of fact, I consider terrorism to be a great cause of unrest (think of all the people in London who will be afraid of the mass-transit system now) and needs to be quickly and thoroughly dealt with.
On my P133MHz with 32MB of RAM, the Ubuntu live CD didn't work at all (it says it needs 128). The installer also failed to work.
I tried out Damn Small Linux and the live cd worked perfectly. I then followed the instructions to install it to the hard drive and everything went exactly as you would hope.
The complete, running system (DSL) takes up 200MB not counting the swap partition, and the OS is very fast and responsive.
For everything P2 128MB Ram and better I suggest Ubuntu - it runs great.
Slashdot Mirror
I recently went through dice.com when looking for a job. I posted my resume on a Friday eve and began poking through the list of programming jobs in the Des Moines area. The following Tuesday I was hired. I had been posting my resume to employers for two months prior to that, but because I have no degree I was never able to get even a second glance (despite my 9 years experience).
I received in total about 8 call backs for offers/interviews (of which 3 were from agencies) before I hid my resume there.
I had such a positive experience, I have to recomend them any chance I get.
I'd give my left hand for a two-handed touch screen. ;-)
There is so much competition to find the oldest fossils... it really makes me question the dating on this.
Sometimes, things have been re-dated and re-dated each time coming up with dramatically older dates.
As a matter of fact, I've heard of incidents where people took samples from living animals, for example, a mollusk, and the dating shows them as being many thousands of years old.
In a book written by Charles Darwin, he meets with an archaeologist digging on Galapagos Island. He watches in amazement as they routinely discard interesting looking samples because there's no way they can be old enough to be found at the depth. This is done routinely even today... if a scientific measurement is not inline with expectations, it's discarded and assumed to be inaccurate.
How can we possibly find the truth when researches are both highly motivated to find older and older fossils, and therefore closed minded to ideas that might jeopardize what the currently believe?
I second RC ProAm. What an awesome game.
How old do you think a kid has to be to have the dexterity and coordination to play this game?
If you think about it, who is the scraggler of the bunch in the CPU market? Sun. So, how can Sun get another chance? Bring down Intel. But how can Sun bring down Intel? Boost AMD. What has Sun been doing in their ads lately? "Opteron Rules" and etc. Sun likely has a bigger marketing budget than AMD for the Opteron CPUs. Since Dell competes with Sun and customers are now saying, "I hear the Opteron is a good CPU and I need one in my data center... guess I'll have to buy a Sun..."
It's forcing Dell to expand their product offering in order to remain competitive with Sun. This ads credibility to AMD and takes away some sales from Intel.
Sun would love for AMD to bite into Intel's profit margins because it's easier to take on a competitor with 40% market share than with 80% market share.
This is probably mindless rambling, and I likely have no clue what I'm talking about, but I see this as a win for Sun. Even if they don't get more sales, at least their marketing department can chalk up a win for moving the buzz off of Intel and onto AMD (who is one of their partners).
By the way, I really dislike seeing posts by AMD fan boys... who on earth swears allegiance to a CPU? I'm merely excited to see improved competition which should fuel innovation and drop prices. Yeah! I'll buy Intel or AMD or whatever that gives me the best performance for my $$$. I want a cheap fast computer and I don't care if it's powered by ephedrine doped hamsters (imagine the logo for that CPU!).
I have a friend in India who says that he would use iTunes store if it were available, but because it isn't he simply uses peer-to-peer.
As the iTunes store becomes available across the world it will help legitimize the online music industry. I think there are a lot of people in the world who don't have the option to go and buy the music they want to listen to. If they could, they would.
Of course there are a lot of people who will jump at the opportunity to get something for free if they can, but no one is stopping these now, so it's not really the point. But if you give everyone the opportunity to pay for the music, many will. I think this is a good thing.
Speaking of online music sales, I'm really looking forward to another price war. Come on guys, we need a legit iTunes competitor to drive down the prices!
I really like the idea of summer of code. I've been watching a few projects to see how they were doing. Unfortunately, few had any kind running progress and there really weren't many summaries.
It would be cool if more would tell the world how things turned out. I noticed that some of the NetBSD projects didn't get completed in time. I suspect that some organizations might be afraid to summarize because they would show that the projects didn't get completed, but I say that's OK. In business some projects get started and then scrapped before completion; it's how life goes.
But if there were more summaries out there, I think we could see more commercial organizations stepping up and taking an active and visible role in financing the future of interesting OSS projects.
I've been wating for something usable since January of 2004 and even earlier. However, I will say that Looking Glass has been very influential. That new feature in OS X Tiger that allows you to see 3d widgets has the same "flip over for options" feature that was demoed with LG3D.
Will this ever become a usable project? I don't think so, but every time a profound new innovation like this appears it affects the other products that came out in later years. There is some good stuff here and I suspect we'll see it pop-up in very unusual places.
I can't wait to see where.
I guess that's because on the breadboard the LEDs are the correct direction. In the schematic they're backwards. Ooops. :-]
It works on the breadboard just fine.
I just designed a complete computer that uses less than 3 watts! (more details)
Admittedly, it probably does far less than a power based computer. It runs at 1 MIPS, has only 64 bytes of RAM and spends most of its time sleeping, but on the plus side, it costs less than $10 to build and while sleeping uses about .05 watts of power.
Imagine a beowolf cluster of these babies!
Mine went up. I got all the bounces because it couldn't be delivered or forwarded to the intended recipient.
Every little hickup causes me to get somewhere around 700 e-mails. This was more than a little hickup, but I actually didn't get as many as usual.
I will say that there is one thing worse than SPAM. That is BOUNCED SPAM. With SPAM you can look at the subject or the recipient and delete it without hesitation. With BOUNCED SPAM you get a delivery notification from postmaster. Hmm... is it important or is it just bounced spam. Better open it to see for sure. Yikes!
I was up running traceroute at 3:30 am (CDT) this morning. At first they always stopped in ATT's network, presumably the pop between them and Level 3. When level 3's website came up (about 3:45) my pager stopped beeping but I still couldn't get a route to my servers. At that point the traceroute stopped at a POP for Level 3 in New York. The pings just kept getting bounced back and forth between two servers. All said and told, I was down for about 45 minutes. I use a service called "Web Site Pulse" that monitors my network/servers and their connection to my servers came up about 15 min before I could see them. (Normally that would seem like a bad thing, but in the case of a major tier 1 backbone being down, the normal scenarios all go out the window) It's kinda funny, cause it's always the new guys who get stuck doing night-time duty at the NOC where my datacenter is. I always feel bad because it seems like the worst problems happen at night-time. When I called there (it would have been about 4:15 am where he was) the guy was obviously freaked out.
Uh, everyone uses a Tier 1. The only way you can not use a Tier 1 is if you access one of your ISPs web servers. Otherwise you get routed through a Tier 1.
Are you asking if ATMs use the internet, then, yes, some do. Slammer a few years ago took out Bank of America and others. That was the day the Internet felt like it stood still.
The biggies learned their lesson and now should survive. I suspect the small guys, your average mall/convienence store ATM, would go black and start spewing money across the floor.
Or maybe they'd just go black.
From a legal standpoint, E-bay is not an auction. In their FAQ they have a reply to the questions about why the closing time doesn't change to last-bid + 5 minutes or similar. Basically, if they did that they would be regulated like an auction which would add much complexity and legal red tape to their service.
That's a paraphrase. Their FAQ is so big that it's hard to find answers to specific questions.
Magazine's aren't expensive because it costs a lot to produce them - they're expensive because:
a: They want people to feel their product is valueable, and people associate cost with value
b: Related to a, if they give it away too cheap they can't make as much money on ad sales because advertisers know peple think of free magazines as worthless
c: People are willing to pay the cover price
Magazine's make their money on ad sales. So do newspapers. The money that you pay for the coverprice is largely just profit for the newsstand and the middle man who gets the magazines to the newsstand. That's why magazine's offer such discounts for people to subscribe - the more readers they have, the more they make on ad sales, but they can't give the mags away (see point b).
Don't kid yourself... this stuff is hard. Let's take just one specific example: Detecting an obstacle such as barbed wire at a distance far enough away to avoid it.
.25 seconds instruct the vehicle to stop you've traveled 7.5 feet. At least another 20 feet will pass before the vehicle comes to a stop. That means you need to detect any obstacles at least 30 feet ahead of you, and really, that's cutting it close, since the course may be off road. I'd be uncomfortable with my sensors if they didn't have a range of 50 - 70 feet.
First realize that if you're traveling at 20mph (the average speed you need to maintain in order to complete the course and be competitive) that means you're traveling at 30 feet per second. If the sensors detect an obstacle and within
So, how do you detect barbed wire from a range of 50 feet? First of all, it's hard for our eyes to see barbed wire at that range. The primary way we can do this is to spot the fence posts. However our eyes are better than any optical sensor you can equip a robot with. Since the fence posts can be 30 feet apart you'd need aproximately a 30 degree field of vision. However, a simple web cam will not cut it... you'll need high resolution, which means lots of graphics processing power. If you can't process 10 frames per second then you're going to increase your stopping distance and therefore you'll need to increase the range at which you detect obstacles.
And that's just to spot the fence post! How does the computer equipment know the difference between a fence post holding a string of impassible barbed wire and some ordinary obstacle that the vehicle can merely avoid?
Let's go a step further... how do you detect any object at 50 feet? Keep in mind the economics... the prize is $2mil. That's if you win. That's if you finish. Who can afford to invest $1mil on sensors and computer equipment just for a *chance* to win? No one. There are no promissed govt. contracts, no special deals for the winner. This automatically precludes spending $50,000 - $100,000 on a single sensor capable of detecting obstacles at that distance.
Even having a chance at winning this contest will require a team of brilliant individuals each specialized in a certain area. Plus, you'll need brilliant fund-raisers. I'll be surprised if anyone completes this course with less than $150,000 invested in equipment. You'll need programmers, someone who knows the mechanics of the vehicle, someone who knows the sensors. You'll need to deal with the heat (the vehicle will probably spend a lot of timing traveling under 10mph which is not ideal for cooling), rugged terain. This is a challenging assignment. Hats off to the folks who cross the finish line, if anyone makes it. (last year no one came close)
Holy cow, I almost ROFL'd. My head was like 4 inches from the floor. If I'd laughed any harder I would have been out of my chair.
Windows?
http://www.aaltonen.us/archive/2004/04/26/tip-bat
Two notes:
Oh, flashblock rocks!
Where have you been all my life?
War is not the opposite of peace. Peace is a state of mind, and the opposite of peace is unrest. When people experience unrest they respond in different ways; one such way is war.
War is a corrective action utilized to restore peace by removing the cause of unrest. Sometimes it is used appropriately, other times it is not. For example, the French revolution was a war to correct the imbalance between aristocracy and commoners. I doubt that there was any other way to start this corrective process that would have yielded better results.
Compare war to a fever. Your body uses a fever as part of the process to fight off an infection. You don't cure the fever, you cure the infection, which then causes the fever to leave. Likewise, you don't stop a war, you find the root cause of unrest, solve this to restore peace, and then war will naturally end. *In theory*
Sometimes, no satisfactory compromise can be found; such is the case when two people groups adamantly want exclusive occupation of a certain place on the map.
It is a myth that we will someday have world peace. It is against our nature to be 100% satisfied with the status quo; there will always be pressure, there will always be unrest, discontent and inequality. We can sooner eradicate all testosterone from the world than achieve world peace.
You see, the same conditions that can bring about war also can bring about progress and great achievement!
I do *not* condone violence as a means of expression, such as used in terrorism. Terrorism is not war, it is a way for someone with little power (aka influence) to get heard, similar to the way a particular person may become the "squeaky wheel" in order to get extra attention.
As a matter of fact, I consider terrorism to be a great cause of unrest (think of all the people in London who will be afraid of the mass-transit system now) and needs to be quickly and thoroughly dealt with.
I've often wished for better searching on e-bay, so I can see this helping dramatically.
On my P133MHz with 32MB of RAM, the Ubuntu live CD didn't work at all (it says it needs 128). The installer also failed to work. I tried out Damn Small Linux and the live cd worked perfectly. I then followed the instructions to install it to the hard drive and everything went exactly as you would hope. The complete, running system (DSL) takes up 200MB not counting the swap partition, and the OS is very fast and responsive. For everything P2 128MB Ram and better I suggest Ubuntu - it runs great.