That position was banking - underwriting debt, and some general fixed income related i-banking.
On another note, I just walked off a plane into Jersey, where I was supposed to have an interview on Thursday. I had arranged to meet up with one of the partners of this hedge fund/private equity shop for a quick coffee. An hour later it turned into an interview. Basically it was 30 minutes of behavioural questions, my favourite of which was "Which would you prefer: to beg for forgiveness or to ask for permission?". I was planning to prepare for those questions over the next 3 days - but hey, its over with now, and I had heaps of fun.
Wish me luck!
When Genius Failed
on
Defining Google
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The basic story is of a hedge fund in the mid to late 1990's, and its dramatic rise and spectacular failure. The fund hired only the best of the best, and amongst its cadre of partners were 2 Nobel prize winners for economics. These people were bright. Their prime failing came down to two points.
They had an unfailing belief in their Nobel prize winning understanding of how markets operate. After losing almost $4 billion in 3 months, these views were revised.
With no management structure in place, everyone was afraid of stepping on eachothers toes, and timely decisions weren't made.
Whilst on the topic of finance, long interviews here are no exception. I recently applied for an internship at a certain bank. The application process was completed on-line. After about 10 pages of copying from my resume and short essays, I clicked submit -- only to find out that I was now ready to complete the on-line math and communication skills tests. These took about an hour each, and were graded instantly. I made it past the first stage. If I do progress further, I am expecting a few days of interviews, as this is the norm even for internship positions.
Shareholders approved the deal at $24. Please note that almost 70% of PSFT's shareholders are currently institutional investors who have seen value in Oracle's offer for a long time. The analysts concensus is that PSFT is worth around $21/per share. So $24/share assumed some synergies. At $30/Share, ORCL could still afford the deal, but it would no longer be accretive (increase ORCL's EPS post-merger). So PSFT knew they could get away with asking for 26.50.
Although the title sounds exactly like what you are looking for, it doesn't really talk about music made by primes. Having studied some number theory, I found the math in the book to be fairly basic - but it does give an interesting account of the history of the people involved.
If you are interested in getting a high-level grasp of the questions involved in the distribution of prime numbers (hint: zeros of the Riemann Zeta function, perhaps http://mathworld.wolfram.com/RiemannZetaFunctionZe ros.html), then this book is worth the read - even if you have no math background.
At first i thought this post was stupid
on
Our Friend, The Meter
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
READ - Click on posters link
This evening, I learned that one meter equals 39.3700787 inches. While this may come as no surprise to some people, it was one to me - for years, I had mistakenly believed a meter was 39.77 inches, and now I know it's basically 39.37.
Of course, I'm not alone in my confusion. A bit of research on Google revealed quite a few different conversions from meters to inches. Here are some of them:
* 38 inches according to a page at Arkansas State University and another at Microflex Technologies.
* 38.16 inches according to a rounding-happy math teacher at Norfolk Collegiate School in Virginia.
* 38.37 inches according to Honeywell's Sensotec folks.
* 38.8 inches according to some numerological babble
* 39 inches according to Fife Products and some folks who sell quilting products.
* 39.14 inches according to the specifications on a measuring wheel for engineers. (uh-oh!)
* 39.15 inches according to an October 30 2002 entry in a blog.
* 39.21 inches according to Richard Bowles.
* 39.27 inches according to pages at University of Wisconsin Stevens Point and the National Optical Astronomy Observatory.
* 39.28 inches according to Jonathan Brooks at Penn State University.
* 39.3 inches according to some laser folks.
* 39.34 inches according to a page about photography, and another about a role-playing game. Hey, it's only a game, their meters can be whatever length they want.
* 39.36 inches according to some ham radio sorts and some NASA folks among others. Pretty close... but... shouldn't NASA know better by now?
* 39.38 inches according to people who race 1-meter model yachts, talk about prehistory in California, and, um, other NASA folks. Again, pretty close!
* 39.39 inches according to someone ranting against metric (how ironic), as well as a page about UFOs.
* 39.4 inches according to a list of conversions from a company that makes electric motors and such things, and the Secretary of the Navy.
* 39.45 inches according to a set of math problems from a university in the Philippines.
* 39.5 inches according to a space.com article on liquid lenses.
* 39.54 inches according to Mark Moburg in this mailing list archive.
* 39.6 inches according to a page about magnetic therapy.
* 39.7 inches according to pages from Des Moines Area Community College and some rounding-happy laser people.
* 39.77 inches according to a page about carpet-weaving in Turkey and another site that sells S-Video Cables and lots of other cables. (See, I wasn't alone!)
* 39.79 inches according to InterlinkBT (now Turck)'s information on DeviceNet Pre-molded Fieldbus cables (below table).
* 39.87 inches, according to a textfile compiling handy (if wrong) conversions for common weights and measures, from O'Reilly.
* 39.97 inches, according to the Science Glossary developed by teachers in the Poughkeepsie (New York) City School District for the 2001-2002 school year, and according to the zoning laws on satellite dishes in Springfield Township, Ohio.
* 40 inches, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Once again, the correct answer is right around 39.37 inches. Remember that - it'll be on the quiz!
Depending on your personal definition of 'open'. But I purchased the full source to x86/SPARC off the Sun site 4 years ago - it cost me around $40. They canned that program pretty quick.
I'm also looking to buy a digital camera, but I'm having trouble finding out exactly how much linux support there is for various models. The linux firewire site has a list of cameras and the usual "works" or "doesnt work" descriptions for linux support, but as I'm sure we all know, there are various levels of "works" when it comes to linux.
Does anyone here have any actual experience of using a digital camera under linux?
A recent experiment designed by German neurologists at the University of Lubeck now provides scientific proof for the phenomenon.
Hmm. I thought experiments provided evidence of a phenomenon. Here's a thought experiment - How do you prove a phenomenon? Induction? Contrapositive? Experimental results?
Disclaimer: I was a sun nut. I have moved to Linux/x86 as it is cheaper; so take everything with a grain of salt. However, it is quite clear that most of the complaints raised in the article stem from "i'm not used to solaris/sun, therefore its not good", rather than any intrinsic complaints.
That means that you can have Windows XP Pro running in a window in CDE (the standard UNIX desktop environment) or on a separate monitor that can be connected to the SunPCI card itself. This is not a software emulator -- it's actually Windows XP running on the SunPCI through Solaris -- so there is no measurable loss in performance while using the SunPCI.
SunPCI cards have been around for a while
Apple used to do this
In the late 80's I had a 8088 ISA daughterboard which sat inside my 8086.
There is a performance loss. On my Ultra workstation I ran a development database, and used the SunPCI for Outlook and other things. The SunPCI card maps 'C:' to a file sitting in your home directory. There is contention for the drive. Addition of another drive fixes this.
The keyboard and mouse (which add $25 to the cost of the machine) can best be described as "painful." Extremely painful.
Keyboards are a pretty personal issue. Without saying what he/she felt was wrong, most people will not know whether their experience will be similar.
From my experience with sun keyboards from IPX's to Ultra's, I've found them quite to my liking.
The complaints about the size of the keyboard and the redundant keys just illustrates a lack of knowledge of how useful they can be.
Solaris is an excellent operating system in terms of stability, reliability, and professional support, but you'll find it quite difficult to set up and maintain it on your own and it can be difficult to find much software for it.
sunfreeware.com
This guy is contradicting himself. He states in the opening line that there is excellent professional support, but later complains that there is no large friendly support community. In my experience, I've only ever needed to contact Sun when the sh*t has hit the fan. Most of my support came from many of the useful sun related lists and web pages. GIYF (google is your friend)
...plan on spending some time every now and then fooling with installing various programs and editing files just so you can get Linux binary compatibility or even just install a simple program like The GIMP.... Um, download required libraries or packages, build/install. Compile GIMP, run GIMP. Sounds pretty familiar to the Linux experience to me. What crack was he on with "Linux binary compatibility...".
Solaris in its current form can never be Free Software or even open-source because of all of the proprietary code that it contains.
I have the Solaris 8 Intel and SPARC source CD's sitting right here. They were available to purchase for around $40 from sun.com a year back or so. This offer was open to everyone. I'm just a hobbyist dude, not a governmental organisation, eductaional institution -- i.e., I certainly stand no chance in hell of getting the Windows XP source code.
The entire section on Licencing is just meaningless crap.
The conclusion gets it spot on:
It serves unique purposes in many important industries, in niches that IA32 (x86) or Apple PPC systems cannot support due to software and architectural constraints, therefore it cannot truly be compared with such systems. If it stands up to other machines in its class is a determination that I have yet to make...
Lets fill our nice websites with ugly gifs
on
Stopping The 56K Hate
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Wonderful, hard to read GIF banners added to thousands of sites around the world will surely help the needs of those of us who often surf through lynx to cut through most of the crap that people decide is 'better said' with an image.
Maybe the article was forwarded from one journalist to another inside the ABC, and was thus yanked by their lawyers, fearing litigation.
But sersiously, I can't see
how this law is workable (like most of the recent stupidity when it comes to Internet regulation)
how any attourney general would consider allowing a case like this to even reach the courts unless something was fairly obviously being done with bad intentions
if i dont mark my work with an internationally accepted copyright symbol, how is that work copyright. I have heard that all original work is considered copyright, but if this is so, why does everything still have (C) on it.
if the reproduction of unmarked (ie, no (C)) works was illegal, then email is not the least of our concerns. One could argue that fashion choice is a form of expression, and thus television crews which may inadvertantly show bystanders may be illegally infringing on their copyrights. and thats just too silly to be law
josh
tell me about low bandwidth.. im running that off a 56k modem. but its good for when i have a small source file that i change, and I want ppl to be able to access it for updates. for my larger material, i have a mirror in the states.
I guess you havent used either of those services.
Satellite is provided by an american group called DirecPC. (I have worked at a company that somehow, although being in the CBD were convinced to use Satellite) The downstream connection is fast, but upstream is only over a modem. Downstream speeds are capped after the first three months. Just go on the DirecPC newsgroup and ask if anyone there would recommend the service. Its an absolute Joke.
Sure cable is an option, unless you actually want to USE the internet. As a self proclaimed geek, I love the idea of fast bandwidth, but Im stuck using 56k permanent modem connection because it offers me static IP and no stupid restrictions to running servers or having a network.
If i lied to optus or telstra and said "Ya, I want fast cable to look at porn and play quake" then they would give it to me.. but if i said "Hi, im a software developer and i need to run an ftp site so customers can get stuff from me" they would tell me to fuck off - regardless of the fact that the software is GPL, and im not making any profit.
They still consider it a business use - fuck them.
PS: Whoever told you optus@home was uncapped was smoking far too much crack.
At my current job I'm involved in setting up a high-speed network for transferring near broadcast quality film footage between editing houses in Melbourne.
As you may imagine, when rumours of ADSL started in june, I was straight on the phone to Telstra. They assured me that our company was a prime subject for their trial service, and after a few more phone calls, we were scheduled to have ADSL installed within the next few days.
The deal for the trial service would be $170 initial cost, and $160 per month, for 1.5mbit downstream, and 256k up. Knowing how Telstra and Optus both have VERY restrictive AUP's for their cable services (basically banning networks or anything useful) and not allocating static IP's - i asked about the AUP for ADSL. Not to my suprise, no static IP's were available, but I was very suprised to know that the pricing was a flat rate price independant of usage, plus there seemed to be no restriction on running a network, or any servers off that network. I was very impressed. Not wanting to be 'sucked in' by a sales woman who
told me all these wonderful things, I asked her if she knew whether that AUP was going to change after the trial period. She said 'No, but their may be some restructuring of the price', going on to tell me that it would most likely be cheaper as more people take it up.
Well. It has been over 2 months since our company was supposed to receive our ADSL trial service, and now the trial is over. After calling Telstra back for about the 30th time (i keep a log of all my calls) I found out that we were able to get ADSL now on a non-trial basis now that the 'technology was finalised' - quite excited I gave my details (for the 30th time), and was about to sign up when i quickly asked "So, is it still $160 per month"
The response from the sales guy was "No, its much cheaper now, $115" - that was fine by me, but I asked about any other changes.. thats when I lost my cool.. Basically Telstra have moved towards the
same AUP as for Cable, absolutely restricting usage of the services to no servers, minimal network etc...
Anyway, to cut a long story short, we now have a microwave network planned, for a few thousand dollars we get 10Mb/s connection, with no AUP and no usage cost. Its faster, but perhaps more expensive, but I can't stand companies fucking around and assuming what you should be doing with networking services.
In short, ADSL will probably be fine for windows users at home (not so good for us UNIX geeks), and for small businesses. Medium to large businesses are best to go for fibre (which is becoming a great deal cheaper around the cities), or dare i say it -- ISDN.
Once again, Australian telco's have shown that they have no desire to make life easier for us.
(For those who dont know, Telstra's slogan is "Making Life Easier")
I guess no one bothered to read the source to the page you are currently looking at.
Up the top you will find (just above the banner ad), a 1x1 pixel image (or javascript) that slashdot uses to track which pages are being viewed. Of course, I trust slashdot, but really, as people have already mentioned, you dont need that image to track where people are going; you can just look at the server logs.
Of course, the problem with getting doubleclick to load the image is that all your surfing is tracked at a single point, and its easier to correlate your behaviours.
If this worries you, just make your nameserver point doubleclick.net elsewhere (i point it to a cgi script which tracks refferers, so i can see who is doing what) - and bob is your uncle.
It goes without saying that you shouldn't have notify on in your zone file Unless you want to be silly.
Being a final year med student, who as done a fair bit of form filling whilst working the rounds at hospitals, i realise there are lots of legal reasons why doctors cant automatically fill out forms. You cant have 'the usual options' selected, to make your life easier, because the whole point is that you think about the choices you make before you submit the form. If a form has redundant fields, its either because its a badly designed form, or because it has been shown that people need to fill the same thing out twice to double check what they are doing. Imagine how much easier it would be for a doctor to screw up if instead of having to write a patient name and number down, for a pharmacy order, he only wrote the number -- what happens if he/she screws up a digit -- then there is nothing for the pharmacist to cross check against.
-- Once again, a stupid question has been posted to Ask Slashdot.
At the 1988 World Expo I saw 2 fujistu 3-axis arms being shown off as 'dancing in sync' and the crowd was loving it... What idiots... these things have millimeter/millisecond accuracy and do far more complex jobs all over the world for less banal jobs. But cover some arms in fabric and the crowd goes nuts.
I think you will find it pretty hard these days to find a field which is considered outside the realm of robotics... In fact i would consider food production to be very much in the realm of robotics... You really think there is some guy making all the TV dinners you love ? Slaving over a hot stove out the back of grandma's house ? pah! Its robots...
Did you even read the article ? Where does it say that the robot actually looks at the burgers ? And you are obviously quite unfamiliar with the level of robots out there in industry. There are plenty of examples of robots that do far more complex observation and feedback than flipping burgers - assuming that any feedback is involved in this particular robot. The fact is that those industrial robots dont appeal to the wanna-be hip reader majority of slashdot - people like you want to hear abour stupid uses of rather old technology as long as you have a cool story to tell your friends the next time you see them on IRC. If you only had half a clue about the technology involved in, for example, spraying the patterns and oil-protectant coating on the mcdonalds burger wrappers that you so enjoy... But that would hardly make mention on slashdot. But just FYI, the paper that comes out fluctuates in thickness in the order of microns, and if you spray on too little coating, oil can impregnate your burger wrapper, making it look oily.. if you put on too much coating, then you waste money. The result is that laser interferometry is used to calculate surface maps on the fly to adjust the coating spray rates in real time. Thats a bit more fucking complicated than replacing the dude who flips the burgers in the end....
Slashdot Mirror
That position was banking - underwriting debt, and some general fixed income related i-banking.
On another note, I just walked off a plane into Jersey, where I was supposed to have an interview on Thursday. I had arranged to meet up with one of the partners of this hedge fund/private equity shop for a quick coffee. An hour later it turned into an interview. Basically it was 30 minutes of behavioural questions, my favourite of which was "Which would you prefer: to beg for forgiveness or to ask for permission?". I was planning to prepare for those questions over the next 3 days - but hey, its over with now, and I had heaps of fun.
Wish me luck!
The basic story is of a hedge fund in the mid to late 1990's, and its dramatic rise and spectacular failure. The fund hired only the best of the best, and amongst its cadre of partners were 2 Nobel prize winners for economics. These people were bright. Their prime failing came down to two points.
Whilst on the topic of finance, long interviews here are no exception. I recently applied for an internship at a certain bank. The application process was completed on-line. After about 10 pages of copying from my resume and short essays, I clicked submit -- only to find out that I was now ready to complete the on-line math and communication skills tests. These took about an hour each, and were graded instantly. I made it past the first stage. If I do progress further, I am expecting a few days of interviews, as this is the norm even for internship positions.
Let me re-phrase that. So $24/share assumed that ORCL would be better off buying market share from PSFT :)
Shareholders approved the deal at $24. Please note that almost 70% of PSFT's shareholders are currently institutional investors who have seen value in Oracle's offer for a long time. The analysts concensus is that PSFT is worth around $21/per share. So $24/share assumed some synergies. At $30/Share, ORCL could still afford the deal, but it would no longer be accretive (increase ORCL's EPS post-merger). So PSFT knew they could get away with asking for 26.50.
Just another MBA student passing through.
"The Music of The Primes" by Marcus du Sautoy, Harper Collings 2004.0 935588/qid=1099578709/sr=8-3/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i3_xgl 14/103-5861881-0888602
e ros.html), then this book is worth the read - even if you have no math background.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/006
Although the title sounds exactly like what you are looking for, it doesn't really talk about music made by primes. Having studied some number theory, I found the math in the book to be fairly basic - but it does give an interesting account of the history of the people involved.
If you are interested in getting a high-level grasp of the questions involved in the distribution of prime numbers (hint: zeros of the Riemann Zeta function, perhaps http://mathworld.wolfram.com/RiemannZetaFunctionZ
READ - Click on posters link
This evening, I learned that one meter equals 39.3700787 inches. While this may come as no surprise to some people, it was one to me - for years, I had mistakenly believed a meter was 39.77 inches, and now I know it's basically 39.37.
Of course, I'm not alone in my confusion. A bit of research on Google revealed quite a few different conversions from meters to inches. Here are some of them:
* 38 inches according to a page at Arkansas State University and another at Microflex Technologies.
* 38.16 inches according to a rounding-happy math teacher at Norfolk Collegiate School in Virginia.
* 38.37 inches according to Honeywell's Sensotec folks.
* 38.8 inches according to some numerological babble
* 39 inches according to Fife Products and some folks who sell quilting products.
* 39.14 inches according to the specifications on a measuring wheel for engineers. (uh-oh!)
* 39.15 inches according to an October 30 2002 entry in a blog.
* 39.21 inches according to Richard Bowles.
* 39.27 inches according to pages at University of Wisconsin Stevens Point and the National Optical Astronomy Observatory.
* 39.28 inches according to Jonathan Brooks at Penn State University.
* 39.3 inches according to some laser folks.
* 39.34 inches according to a page about photography, and another about a role-playing game. Hey, it's only a game, their meters can be whatever length they want.
* 39.36 inches according to some ham radio sorts and some NASA folks among others. Pretty close... but... shouldn't NASA know better by now?
* 39.38 inches according to people who race 1-meter model yachts, talk about prehistory in California, and, um, other NASA folks. Again, pretty close!
* 39.39 inches according to someone ranting against metric (how ironic), as well as a page about UFOs.
* 39.4 inches according to a list of conversions from a company that makes electric motors and such things, and the Secretary of the Navy.
* 39.45 inches according to a set of math problems from a university in the Philippines.
* 39.5 inches according to a space.com article on liquid lenses.
* 39.54 inches according to Mark Moburg in this mailing list archive.
* 39.6 inches according to a page about magnetic therapy.
* 39.7 inches according to pages from Des Moines Area Community College and some rounding-happy laser people.
* 39.77 inches according to a page about carpet-weaving in Turkey and another site that sells S-Video Cables and lots of other cables. (See, I wasn't alone!)
* 39.79 inches according to InterlinkBT (now Turck)'s information on DeviceNet Pre-molded Fieldbus cables (below table).
* 39.87 inches, according to a textfile compiling handy (if wrong) conversions for common weights and measures, from O'Reilly.
* 39.97 inches, according to the Science Glossary developed by teachers in the Poughkeepsie (New York) City School District for the 2001-2002 school year, and according to the zoning laws on satellite dishes in Springfield Township, Ohio.
* 40 inches, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Once again, the correct answer is right around 39.37 inches. Remember that - it'll be on the quiz!
Depending on your personal definition of 'open'. But I purchased the full source to x86/SPARC off the Sun site 4 years ago - it cost me around $40. They canned that program pretty quick.
I'm also looking to buy a digital camera, but I'm having trouble finding out exactly how much linux support there is for various models. The linux firewire site has a list of cameras and the usual "works" or "doesnt work" descriptions for linux support, but as I'm sure we all know, there are various levels of "works" when it comes to linux.
Does anyone here have any actual experience of using a digital camera under linux?
Hmm. I thought experiments provided evidence of a phenomenon. Here's a thought experiment - How do you prove a phenomenon? Induction? Contrapositive? Experimental results?
I thought not.
:)
h tml#gimp
or just spend about 15 seconds going to
http://www.sunfreeware.com/programlistsparc8.
The 2500 has IIIi CPU. The Blade 2000 is the only one offering a III, afaik.
- I have the Solaris 8 Intel and SPARC source CD's sitting right here. They were available to purchase for around $40 from sun.com a year back or so. This offer was open to everyone. I'm just a hobbyist dude, not a governmental organisation, eductaional institution -- i.e., I certainly stand no chance in hell of getting the Windows XP source code.
- The entire section on Licencing is just meaningless crap.
The conclusion gets it spot on:so did eddie mcguires house.
read story here
Wonderful, hard to read GIF banners added to thousands of sites around the world will surely help the needs of those of us who often surf through lynx to cut through most of the crap that people decide is 'better said' with an image.
how this law is workable (like most of the recent stupidity when it comes to Internet regulation)
how any attourney general would consider allowing a case like this to even reach the courts unless something was fairly obviously being done with bad intentions
if i dont mark my work with an internationally accepted copyright symbol, how is that work copyright. I have heard that all original work is considered copyright, but if this is so, why does everything still have (C) on it.
if the reproduction of unmarked (ie, no (C)) works was illegal, then email is not the least of our concerns. One could argue that fashion choice is a form of expression, and thus television crews which may inadvertantly show bystanders may be illegally infringing on their copyrights. and thats just too silly to be law josh
1- you are on Crack
2- don't date a coder.
3- procreate!
jdigital.
(hopefully linux demo will be out for dreamhack2k)
tell me about low bandwidth.. im running that off
:)
a 56k modem. but its good for when i have a small
source file that i change, and I want ppl to be
able to access it for updates.
for my larger material, i have a mirror in the states.
if you dont like my cgi script, then f*** off
why do i want to run my own ftp server --
to serve files funnily enough.
go to my web page (http://www.i2pi.com/)
i do lots of stuff that I wouldnt be able to do legally with a cable connection.
sure, there is nothing stopping me from doing it anyway, but i prefer to take my business elsewhere.
I guess you havent used either of those services.
Satellite is provided by an american group called DirecPC. (I have worked at a company that somehow, although being in the CBD were convinced to use Satellite) The downstream connection is fast, but upstream is only over a modem. Downstream speeds are capped after the first three months. Just go on the DirecPC newsgroup and ask if anyone there would recommend the service. Its an absolute Joke.
Sure cable is an option, unless you actually want to USE the internet. As a self proclaimed geek, I love the idea of fast bandwidth, but Im stuck using 56k permanent modem connection because it offers me static IP and no stupid restrictions to running servers or having a network.
If i lied to optus or telstra and said "Ya, I want fast cable to look at porn and play quake" then they would give it to me.. but if i said "Hi, im a software developer and i need to run an ftp site so customers can get stuff from me" they would tell me to fuck off - regardless of the fact that the software is GPL, and im not making any profit.
They still consider it a business use - fuck them.
PS: Whoever told you optus@home was uncapped was smoking far too much crack.
At my current job I'm involved in setting up a high-speed network for transferring near broadcast quality film footage between editing houses in Melbourne.
As you may imagine, when rumours of ADSL started in june, I was straight on the phone to Telstra. They assured me that our company was a prime subject for their trial service, and after a few more phone calls, we were scheduled to have ADSL installed within the next few days.
The deal for the trial service would be $170 initial cost, and $160 per month, for 1.5mbit downstream, and 256k up. Knowing how Telstra and Optus both have VERY restrictive AUP's for their cable services (basically banning networks or anything useful) and not allocating static IP's - i asked about the AUP for ADSL. Not to my suprise, no static IP's were available, but I was very suprised to know that the pricing was a flat rate price independant of usage, plus there seemed to be no restriction on running a network, or any servers off that network. I was very impressed. Not wanting to be 'sucked in' by a sales woman who told me all these wonderful things, I asked her if she knew whether that AUP was going to change after the trial period. She said 'No, but their may be some restructuring of the price', going on to tell me that it would most likely be cheaper as more people take it up.
Well. It has been over 2 months since our company was supposed to receive our ADSL trial service, and now the trial is over. After calling Telstra back for about the 30th time (i keep a log of all my calls) I found out that we were able to get ADSL now on a non-trial basis now that the 'technology was finalised' - quite excited I gave my details (for the 30th time), and was about to sign up when i quickly asked "So, is it still $160 per month"
The response from the sales guy was "No, its much cheaper now, $115" - that was fine by me, but I asked about any other changes.. thats when I lost my cool.. Basically Telstra have moved towards the same AUP as for Cable, absolutely restricting usage of the services to no servers, minimal network etc...
Anyway, to cut a long story short, we now have a microwave network planned, for a few thousand dollars we get 10Mb/s connection, with no AUP and no usage cost. Its faster, but perhaps more expensive, but I can't stand companies fucking around and assuming what you should be doing with networking services.
In short, ADSL will probably be fine for windows users at home (not so good for us UNIX geeks), and for small businesses. Medium to large businesses are best to go for fibre (which is becoming a great deal cheaper around the cities), or dare i say it -- ISDN.
Once again, Australian telco's have shown that they have no desire to make life easier for us.
(For those who dont know, Telstra's slogan is "Making Life Easier")
I guess no one bothered to read the source to the page you are currently looking at.
Up the top you will find (just above the banner ad), a 1x1 pixel image (or javascript) that slashdot uses to track which pages are being viewed. Of course, I trust slashdot, but really, as people have already mentioned, you dont need that image to track where people are going; you can just look at the server logs.
Of course, the problem with getting doubleclick to load the image is that all your surfing is tracked at a single point, and its easier to correlate your behaviours.
If this worries you, just make your nameserver point doubleclick.net elsewhere (i point it to a cgi script which tracks refferers, so i can see who is doing what) - and bob is your uncle.
It goes without saying that you shouldn't have notify on in your zone file
Unless you want to be silly.
Being a final year med student, who as done a fair bit of form filling whilst working the rounds at hospitals, i realise there are lots of legal reasons why doctors cant automatically fill out forms. You cant have 'the usual options' selected, to make your life easier, because the whole point is that you think about the choices you make before you submit the form. If a form has redundant fields, its either because its a badly designed form, or because it has been shown that people need to fill the same thing out twice to double check what they are doing. Imagine how much easier it would be for a doctor to screw up if instead of having to write a patient name and number down, for a pharmacy order, he only wrote the number -- what happens if he/she screws up a digit -- then there is nothing for the pharmacist to cross check against.
-- Once again, a stupid question has been posted to Ask Slashdot.
shouldn't your read be !read(fd,RandBuf,1) as per the Buf-Fix that was posted :)
At the 1988 World Expo I saw 2 fujistu 3-axis arms being shown off as 'dancing in sync' and the crowd was loving it... What idiots... these things have millimeter/millisecond accuracy and do far more complex jobs all over the world for less banal jobs. But cover some arms in fabric and the crowd goes nuts.
I think you will find it pretty hard these days to find a field which is considered outside the realm of robotics... In fact i would consider food production to be very much in the realm of robotics... You really think there is some guy making all the TV dinners you love ? Slaving over a hot stove out the back of grandma's house ? pah! Its robots...
Did you even read the article ?
Where does it say that the robot actually looks at the burgers ?
And you are obviously quite unfamiliar with the level of robots out there in industry. There are plenty of examples of robots that do far more complex observation and feedback than flipping burgers - assuming that any feedback is involved in this particular robot. The fact is that those industrial robots dont appeal to the wanna-be hip reader majority of slashdot - people like you want to hear abour stupid uses of rather old technology as long as you have a cool story to tell your friends the next time you see them on IRC.
If you only had half a clue about the technology involved in, for example, spraying the patterns and oil-protectant coating on the mcdonalds burger wrappers that you so enjoy... But that would hardly make mention on slashdot. But just FYI, the paper that comes out fluctuates in thickness in the order of microns, and if you spray on too little coating, oil can impregnate your burger wrapper, making it look oily.. if you put on too much coating, then you waste money. The result is that laser interferometry is used to calculate surface maps on the fly to adjust the coating spray rates in real time. Thats a bit more fucking complicated than replacing the dude who flips the burgers in the end....