If you had 16mb of RAM, Win95 was noticably bitchy compared to Win3.1. You needed at least 32mb of RAM, and at least a Pentium 120 to really have it go decently. That was a top-of-the-line computer until fall 1996.
Pfft! I installed win95 on a 486/33 with 20 meg of ram and 250 meg of harddrive space!
Alright, alright, so even notepad ran extremely slow...
Re:spammer's low-tech way
on
Defeating Captcha
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The best part is that *no* advance in captcha technology can really fix this. It's no longer a race against OCR technology, the whole can't be plugged by switching to object-based (rather than text based), neither can it be stopped by switching to audio-based captcha.
While I don't doubt there are some people out there like that, my fixes all involve things like:
replacing code that takes 2 minutes to run 2,000 similar queries
with 3 queries that do the exact same work in under a second
(neither of these guys had ever used a LEFT JOIN, much less a temporary table!)
and
replacing code that loads an entire 100,000 file into an array that takes 1 gig of ram and brings the server to it's knees
with code that processess the file 5,000 lines at a time, reducing memory usage to under well 30 meg.
Regardless of all that, I do what any good programmer would: communicate with my co-workers. Lack of communication, such as you mention, is certainly unacceptable.
In 20 years C++, Java, and.NET likely won't be cutting edge anymore (we hope now). So those skills don't work to well... you need to retrain anyway.
Yeah, and? A real programmer is not "A C++ Programmer" or "A Java Programmer". A real programmer can attain a level of proficiency equal to that of his/her perfered language in *any* language in a matter of months, if not far less. "Retraining" is just part of being a programer.
I started programming at my current job -- your standard LAMP operation -- six months ago. I'd never touch PHP, or any query language before in my life. My boss has been using both for at least 2 years, and our other developer claims 5 years of experience. In 6 months, I've become the go-to guy for both of them -- I can (and consistantly do) rewrite the inefficient parts of their code to execute exponentially faster, and make it much easier to read.
Real programming is a fundemental understanding of how to write algorithms efficiently, code clearly, picking the right tools for the job, and knowing how to use them correctly. You never have to "retrain" any of that.
If Rate(Intel) > Rate(AMD) as you assert, then how in the world can Time(Intel) NOT be
You argue that since intels processors operate at a higher frequency than AMD processors, that an intel processor will inevitably complete any task faster than an AMD.
You completely neglect the fact that each instruction takes a different number of cycles to execute!
A crude, and almost certainly incorrect example: Given an intel processor at 3.6 ghz and an AMD proc at say, 2.8 ghz, assume it takes the intel processor 5 clock cycles to calculate the product of "2 * 2". Assume the AMD processor can do the same multiplication in 2 clock cycles. Clearly 2 cycles at 2.8 ghz is far faster than 5 at 3.6 ghz.
This becomes even more complex when you consider the more complex instructions each processor boasts: for example, the MMX instruction set. MMX provides vector math functionality, meaning you can do certain calculations in a single instruction (but multiple clock cycles) that would have otherwise required many instructions, and therefore many more clock cycles.
Also, consider the Pentium M, which performs tasks twice as fast per Ghz as the Pentium 4!
What it all comes down to, is Mhz/Ghz is only part of processor performance! That's part of why it's far more useful to consider things like: "How long does it take this computer to render a 3 billion poly 3d image?"
I could do two of 'em for ya, if only I could whistle at 270 bpm.
God damn, does Mark Morton just tear up the bridge in Lamb of God's Vigil.
And it's pretty hard to mimic King and Haneman's thrashing in "Raining Blood" by whistling.
You're right about a lot of mainstream music though -- all the Kelly Clarksons, Bowling for Soups, and whoever else are producing stuff that no one will care about in a decade. But pop music isn't new -- I mean, come on. Your generation gave us crap like YMCA, Video Killed the Radio Star, and the disco version of the Star Wars theme.
And honestly, how many of the thousands of games from that same era really stand up to the test of time? Dozens, certainly. And I can name dozens of modern games that are just as fun to play (Diablo, Warcraft, Quake, GTA, The Sims, Everquest). But in both 2005 and 1975, 90% of everything (games and music alike) is, and was, crap!
I was doing an inventory job (and hey, I was 17 making $20/hr. -- I was happy) which involved reading serial numbers off the backs of a lot of computers.
We got into some manager's office, and saw a SPARCstation on his desk, with a monitor on top. At first I tried just turning the case a little with the monitor still up there, but it wouldn't budge. We moved the monitor, and the case still wouldn't move!
That's when I noticed the coke can next to it. The top was sealed, but a quick squeeze revealed it was completely empty. What's more, the empty coke can wasn't coming off the desk either!
Appearantly, the coke had leaked out the bottom (probably through some intentionally created hole) and leaked under the SPARCStation, mixing with whatever veneer was on the desk to create some sort of superadhesive. The SPARCStation, of course, is perfectly flat on the bottom, with no LRF at all, meaning there was a massive contact area. I ended up leaning over the thing and reading the serial numbers upside-down, 'cause there was no way in hell that case was gonna move without the desk coming with it!
It's funny, because I didn't see people bitching and moaning about the government mandating all TV be digital in a few years... and that actually DOES obsolete the majority of displays out there right now.
The HDTV mandate allows for a relatively cheap adapter. This standard does not.
A startup I worked for, State Software had a full out API developed that did the exact same thing back in 2001 -- used a hidden IFRAME to pass javascript objects to and from a server. It was enterprise ready... But it was proprietary, and while they recieved quite a bit of attention from the biggest names in ECommerce apps, they never did get any real sales/installations.
Erm, yes. You are correct. No mass is converted. However, the energy of the system still remains constant, as in the equation in my original grandparent post.
It's clearly been a little too long since Chemistry 1.
Burn something. Thanks to the Law of Conservation of Energy -- a special case of relativity -- the total energy of the system remains constant, even though some mass was converted to heat (energy)!
For example, if you burn a log, E(unburnt log) = E(released heat) + E(smoke and other released gasses) + E(charred remains of log). Every time you light a cigarette, you're converting mass to energy.
Similarly, the atomic bomb uses this same principal (but far more efficiently) to convert a very small mass of plutonium to a massive ammount of energy.
I think applications like LAN parties are the only real application of this. It'd be great for any sort of conference, state fair, or similar large, high density, public gathering. Sure, maybe it's not the best solution for a 128 player FPS, but it's good enough to serve a large DEFCON conference room, or the like.
In any more permanent situation, cat5 will probably work a lot more satisfactorily.
That would require a governing body to officially distinguish between porn and art. Internationally.
A U.S. law forcing porn.coms to move to.xxx would obviously only affect a small portion of porn sites.
No one loses inventory when you download music. If you shoplift a CD, then the store loses inventory.
And you can't 'return' a downloaded audio file, so there's really no equivalent fraud.
Is downloading unlisenced music wrong? Yes. Is it shoplifting? No.
Copyright violation is immoral and illegal. It is not theft.
If you watch the video, the axels clearly have quite a lot of play, shifting around 6 inches or so on the stairs, so that all 6 wheels are pretty much continuously in contact with the ground.
... I was waiting for someone to point out the fact that no real browsers pass acid2.
And lord knows firefox not only crashes on me once every week or two, and chews up ungodly ammounts of ram, and doesn't garbage collect in a timely manner.
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If you had 16mb of RAM, Win95 was noticably bitchy compared to Win3.1. You needed at least 32mb of RAM, and at least a Pentium 120 to really have it go decently. That was a top-of-the-line computer until fall 1996.
Pfft! I installed win95 on a 486/33 with 20 meg of ram and 250 meg of harddrive space!
Alright, alright, so even notepad ran extremely slow...
The best part is that *no* advance in captcha technology can really fix this. It's no longer a race against OCR technology, the whole can't be plugged by switching to object-based (rather than text based), neither can it be stopped by switching to audio-based captcha.
While I don't doubt there are some people out there like that, my fixes all involve things like: replacing code that takes 2 minutes to run 2,000 similar queries with 3 queries that do the exact same work in under a second (neither of these guys had ever used a LEFT JOIN, much less a temporary table!) and replacing code that loads an entire 100,000 file into an array that takes 1 gig of ram and brings the server to it's knees with code that processess the file 5,000 lines at a time, reducing memory usage to under well 30 meg. Regardless of all that, I do what any good programmer would: communicate with my co-workers. Lack of communication, such as you mention, is certainly unacceptable.
In 20 years C++, Java, and .NET likely won't be cutting edge anymore (we hope now). So those skills don't work to well... you need to retrain anyway.
Yeah, and? A real programmer is not "A C++ Programmer" or "A Java Programmer". A real programmer can attain a level of proficiency equal to that of his/her perfered language in *any* language in a matter of months, if not far less. "Retraining" is just part of being a programer.
I started programming at my current job -- your standard LAMP operation -- six months ago. I'd never touch PHP, or any query language before in my life. My boss has been using both for at least 2 years, and our other developer claims 5 years of experience. In 6 months, I've become the go-to guy for both of them -- I can (and consistantly do) rewrite the inefficient parts of their code to execute exponentially faster, and make it much easier to read.
Real programming is a fundemental understanding of how to write algorithms efficiently, code clearly, picking the right tools for the job, and knowing how to use them correctly. You never have to "retrain" any of that.
If Rate(Intel) > Rate(AMD) as you assert, then how in the world can Time(Intel) NOT be You argue that since intels processors operate at a higher frequency than AMD processors, that an intel processor will inevitably complete any task faster than an AMD. You completely neglect the fact that each instruction takes a different number of cycles to execute! A crude, and almost certainly incorrect example: Given an intel processor at 3.6 ghz and an AMD proc at say, 2.8 ghz, assume it takes the intel processor 5 clock cycles to calculate the product of "2 * 2". Assume the AMD processor can do the same multiplication in 2 clock cycles. Clearly 2 cycles at 2.8 ghz is far faster than 5 at 3.6 ghz. This becomes even more complex when you consider the more complex instructions each processor boasts: for example, the MMX instruction set. MMX provides vector math functionality, meaning you can do certain calculations in a single instruction (but multiple clock cycles) that would have otherwise required many instructions, and therefore many more clock cycles. Also, consider the Pentium M, which performs tasks twice as fast per Ghz as the Pentium 4! What it all comes down to, is Mhz/Ghz is only part of processor performance! That's part of why it's far more useful to consider things like: "How long does it take this computer to render a 3 billion poly 3d image?"
I could do two of 'em for ya, if only I could whistle at 270 bpm. God damn, does Mark Morton just tear up the bridge in Lamb of God's Vigil. And it's pretty hard to mimic King and Haneman's thrashing in "Raining Blood" by whistling. You're right about a lot of mainstream music though -- all the Kelly Clarksons, Bowling for Soups, and whoever else are producing stuff that no one will care about in a decade. But pop music isn't new -- I mean, come on. Your generation gave us crap like YMCA, Video Killed the Radio Star, and the disco version of the Star Wars theme. And honestly, how many of the thousands of games from that same era really stand up to the test of time? Dozens, certainly. And I can name dozens of modern games that are just as fun to play (Diablo, Warcraft, Quake, GTA, The Sims, Everquest). But in both 2005 and 1975, 90% of everything (games and music alike) is, and was, crap!
That reminds me of one!
I was doing an inventory job (and hey, I was 17 making $20/hr. -- I was happy) which involved reading serial numbers off the backs of a lot of computers.
We got into some manager's office, and saw a SPARCstation on his desk, with a monitor on top. At first I tried just turning the case a little with the monitor still up there, but it wouldn't budge. We moved the monitor, and the case still wouldn't move!
That's when I noticed the coke can next to it. The top was sealed, but a quick squeeze revealed it was completely empty. What's more, the empty coke can wasn't coming off the desk either!
Appearantly, the coke had leaked out the bottom (probably through some intentionally created hole) and leaked under the SPARCStation, mixing with whatever veneer was on the desk to create some sort of superadhesive. The SPARCStation, of course, is perfectly flat on the bottom, with no LRF at all, meaning there was a massive contact area. I ended up leaning over the thing and reading the serial numbers upside-down, 'cause there was no way in hell that case was gonna move without the desk coming with it!
Yeah... On a PDC, the local user database IS the domain user database.
That's really all a PDC is... A NT box with a shared user database.
It's funny, because I didn't see people bitching and moaning about the government mandating all TV be digital in a few years... and that actually DOES obsolete the majority of displays out there right now.
The HDTV mandate allows for a relatively cheap adapter. This standard does not.
So I wonder if these ads cost you money each time you drive past one of the billboards
Last I heard, there's no charge for bluetooth datatransfer. Bluetooth is like wifi, not like SMS.
I bought this awesome VCR a while back... It's great. High quality video. I can even record my own stuff right off TV!
I heard of this upcoming thing called DVD... supposed to be a lot better than VHS, but it will require an entirely new television/monitor!
It's crap if you ask me! Down with these evil companies trying to force me to buy a new television/monitor!
You can make a DVD player work with a 20 year old TV, no sweat. This standard, on the other hand, obsoletes every display currently on the market.
Every day at work, I use two database passwords, two email passwords, two unix logins, two CMS admin passwords, and a postage service password.
...Seriously, how can you call yourself a professional if your memory's that far gone?
We have an employee in her 50s who can't remember a single one.
Well, actually, she's not with us anymore.
Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP, for the uninitiated
A startup I worked for, State Software had a full out API developed that did the exact same thing back in 2001 -- used a hidden IFRAME to pass javascript objects to and from a server. It was enterprise ready... But it was proprietary, and while they recieved quite a bit of attention from the biggest names in ECommerce apps, they never did get any real sales/installations.
Actually, a closing ?> tag also serves as a ; That code is perfectly legal, albeit sloppy
Erm, yes. You are correct. No mass is converted. However, the energy of the system still remains constant, as in the equation in my original grandparent post.
It's clearly been a little too long since Chemistry 1.
There's a simple example of E = MC^2:
Burn something. Thanks to the Law of Conservation of Energy -- a special case of relativity -- the total energy of the system remains constant, even though some mass was converted to heat (energy)!
For example, if you burn a log, E(unburnt log) = E(released heat) + E(smoke and other released gasses) + E(charred remains of log). Every time you light a cigarette, you're converting mass to energy.
Similarly, the atomic bomb uses this same principal (but far more efficiently) to convert a very small mass of plutonium to a massive ammount of energy.
And hey, Energy being converted into matter!
I think applications like LAN parties are the only real application of this. It'd be great for any sort of conference, state fair, or similar large, high density, public gathering. Sure, maybe it's not the best solution for a 128 player FPS, but it's good enough to serve a large DEFCON conference room, or the like.
In any more permanent situation, cat5 will probably work a lot more satisfactorily.
The average computer uses as much as seventeen swimming pools worth of coal to run on any given day.
l
t ml
1 ton of coal produces 2,500 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity
1 pound of coal produces 1.25 kilowatt-hours
From:
http://www.teachcoal.org/lessonplans/how_much.htm
It looks like an hour of active computer use should use no more than 200 watt-hours in an hour.
From:
http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/computers.h
200 X 24 = 4800 = 4.8kwh/day = Under 4 lbs. of coal.
I think the grandparent post got the words "day" and "year" mixed up. Easy mistake. Half the time I get carded, I tell the bartender I'm 22 days old.
Asside from google.com.au, there are likely also google adsense ads on all sorts of .au domains.
That would require a governing body to officially distinguish between porn and art. Internationally. A U.S. law forcing porn .coms to move to .xxx would obviously only affect a small portion of porn sites.
That'd make for one huge pregnancy test!
No one loses inventory when you download music. If you shoplift a CD, then the store loses inventory. And you can't 'return' a downloaded audio file, so there's really no equivalent fraud. Is downloading unlisenced music wrong? Yes. Is it shoplifting? No. Copyright violation is immoral and illegal. It is not theft.
If you watch the video, the axels clearly have quite a lot of play, shifting around 6 inches or so on the stairs, so that all 6 wheels are pretty much continuously in contact with the ground.
i.e. it *is* articulated between the axels.
... I was waiting for someone to point out the fact that no real browsers pass acid2. And lord knows firefox not only crashes on me once every week or two, and chews up ungodly ammounts of ram, and doesn't garbage collect in a timely manner.