The probability of a cosmic ray at precisely the right angle and speed to cause a single bit error and cause an app to crash is somewhere on the same order as your chances of <unlikely stuff>
At what point in time was that true? Back when 1KB of memory was the norm? 16KB of memory? 64KB? 640KB? 64MB? 1GB?
Has the energy required to alter a single bit changed in the last 30 years? I would guess yes due to the fact that everything seems to be getting smaller and running on lower voltages, but maybe shielding is better these days?
But the main thing is that in the last 30 years we have increased the average amount of memory in the average computer by somewhere around a million times. We also have many many more computers running much more of the time. Everything else being equal (which it probably isn't), there must be a lot more of this going on than you think... (memory corruption caused by cosmic rays that is, not rabid wolves having sex in the back of cars at drive-ins)
I've yet to see memtest86 find an error even though replacing the ram fixed the problem.
Same, but i've not used it much before. It has never found a memory problem that the BIOS test (which we all know is very superficial) didn't find first.
My favourite one was third party ram I put in my HP laptop. It was supposed to be the correct part for use in that model, but it would cause BSoD's and other strangeness. Eventually I figured out that if my phone (CDMA at the time) rang within a few feet of the latop it would BSoD every time. The problem went away when I put HP memory in it. Another identical laptop with the same third party numbered memory did a similar thing, and at one stage decided that every file on the laptop was a virus with obviously hilarious results:) Memory testing showed no problems, although maybe it would have if i'd called my cell phone...
Back in the day(tm) my favourite memory tester was Doom. On a machine that was acting up a bit but wouldn't reveal any obvious problems in any memory tester at the time, Doom would crash the machine in seconds, or minutes at most. If it didn't crash, the machine was probably fine, and I got to play some Doom:)
Memory testing is hard. Problems where a single bit is stuck to 1 or 0 are easy to find. Problems where a bit 'bleeds' into an adjacent bit are almost as easy to find, but then there are all sorts of strange things, like writing all 1's to one address might cause a 0 to change to 1 at another address, sometimes, like when the harddisk is also spinning up at the same time. To completely test a piece of memory you actually need to run a staggering number of tests on it, and you'll still never be quite sure... Easier to just swap memory sticks until it works.
A guy at work got his laptop with Vista on it. Explorer would hang often (Explorer, not IE), and if he tried to arrange his second monitor to the left of his laptop screen, the system would BSoD. (pretty funny, he had his monitor on the left, due to physical desk constraints, but he had to move his mouse off of the right side of his laptop screen where it would appear on the left of his second monitor...). We updated all the latest drivers from HP but to no avail.
Since putting Vista SP1 on though it has been fine - all those problems went away.
I have never seen another Vista machine do that though, so obviously something got broken during the install. If it was Linux I would have been able to fix it myself, but with Vista all we could do was wait for the magic hotfix or sp that might fix the problem.
Anyway, just because you haven't come across an unstable Vista install doesn't mean they don't exist. (or you're a troll and I just got sucked in horribly:)
Just because a government doesn't understand something doesn't make it bad. 'the village' in this context would usually just mean your extended family.
Maybe "it takes more than just a mum and dad to raise a child" would be a better way of putting it.
I like the idea of "it takes a village to raise a child", even though it really isn't practical these days. The good part of that idea is that half the village has probably already had kids and learned a few things along the way, and can possibly offer you some advice should you choose to listen. That's the other part of the problem - parents start out with a firm idea of how it's going to be, and won't listen to reason even when it's not working (speaking from experience:)
Also, given the smaller families these days and the lesser contact with close family once you 'leave the nest', the first real exposure a lot of couples have to a new baby is when it pops out of one of them. It's one hell of a steep learning curve.
Is anyone else reminded of the 'new coke' saga when they hear about Windows 7? I know it's not exactly the same thing (unless Windows 7 turns out to look exactly like XP), but still...
Pfft, when was the last time America nuked a neighboring nation?
I just checked the archives for the last 50 years and there is not one occassion of the Americans nuking any opposing force. I could have looked back further but I expect you'd find exactly the same thing.
You couldn't just carelessly close the door, you had to actively hold the handle up.
That's a very good analogy of why UAC just doesn't work they way they think it does. Just like you get in the habit of always closing the car door with the handle up, you also get in the habit of just clicking 'allow' without thinking about why you are clicking it. It trains users to ignore warning messages.
My first car was a 1963 Morris 850 (mini), and could only be locked from the outside (either by design, or just because it was 30 years old when I got it). Less convenient, but I never ever locked my keys in it.
If it takes you a page of text to write up then it's not a no-brainer.
When Mr WantsToLookAtSmut visits a page promising him the smuttiest smut he's ever seen, but when he goes there he is told "this webpage is incompatible with noscript. Please disable noscript and try again. This page is digitally signed by Microsoft and your bank.", he'll do exactly what he's told. The page is, after all, signed by Microsoft and his bank.
Safe surfing on the web involves lots of judgment calls, often based on past experience and knowledge about the tricks that are possible. My plan is to develop a special training computer containing an arm holding a cardboard tube. The trainee will sit down in front of the computer and be presented with various scenarios that they will encounter on the real internet - nigerian bank scams, chain letters, offers of free porn, 'your bank account will be closed unless you use the following link to log in right now', etc. If they fall for anything like that they get whacked on the head. After 6 months of training they should be ready to access the real internet. Supervised of course.
I don't know why the parent was marked Troll. I'd be a little concerned if one of my fellow soldiers was walking around with a shiny surface strapped to his back.
Skip the solar. You can't anticipate weather in the field like they get.
Or even worse, when we have to blacken the skies to stop the machines, the solar won't work at all! You might be able to plug it into one of your fellow soldiers though...
Then a decade later, the scientific community goes "oops, you were right".
In further news, a sharp jump in gravity waves being detected since this new discovery was announced have now been determined to have been caused by Joe Weber rapidly spinning in his grave.
force their replacement with fluorescent tubes [spiegel.de] containing hazardous mercury
Didn't someone do the sums on this and figure out that the mercury in one of these CFL 'bulbs' was offset by the lower pollution (itself containing some mercury) coming out of the power plant as a result of using the CFL?
Or maybe that was just propaganda from the CFL camp... time to do some reading.
That's my take on it too. This problem should be self limiting. If companies implement hiring practices that mean the best person doesn't get the job then they won't succeed.
If it turns out that this sort of snooping does actually mean that they get a better employee, then good on them. I don't think that's the case though.
The only game that has truly given me a scare was the undress Britney Spears game.
She starts out fully clothed, and you have to perform a task requiring a reasonable amount of concentration. I think it's something like move the mouse through a maze without touching the sides.
After the first round, she says something to you but you can't quite hear it so you turn the volume up. She does take off an item of clothing though.
Same again after the second round, so you turn the volume up a bit more. Or maybe this bit wasn't in there... just the first and last round
Half way through the last round a vaguely scary face appears in place of the game coupled with a loud scream - made even louder by the fact that you now have your volume cranked right up. That made me jump.
Another good one was a video I saw on youtube - a car is shown in the distance driving along a winding road until it goes behind a building or something and never comes out the other side. While you are trying to figure out why it hasn't appeared on the other side a scary face appears coupled with a scream.
While playing a horror game you expect scary things to happen, so it's not a big deal when they do. Not so much when you are undressing a pop star...
So... I guess the answer to the question is to put naked pop stars in your games.
2. Oil is formed by compressing organic material for a long long time.
Correct.
This means that, prior to life, this CO2 was already in the atmosphere.
Partly correct. It was in the atmosphere, but it wasn't all there at the same time.
Meaning, life formed under conditions of higher CO2!!!
Probably incorrect. Volcano's and other natural sources of CO2 have been pumping CO2 into the atmosphere since the world began. Various other natural sinks of CO2 have been removing it for almost as long, keeping the CO2 roughly constant. One of those sinks has been the process of making oil.
So now, we have a situation where: . The earth is naturally producing CO2 at roughly the same rate as it ever did . We are removing trees by the football stadium per day, or hour, or second, or whatever (I believe the football stadium per time unit is the standard unit of measure for tree removal), and so are removing one of the natural sinks of CO2 . We are burning the previously-sinked CO2 from the ground in the form of oil and are putting it back into the atmosphere . As a result, the earth is getting warming and other natural sinks aren't working as well . As a result of the earth getting warmer, more water is being evaporated into the atmosphere
In Australia (or Victoria at least - other states may vary) you can get a 30 day (i think) 'registration' that allows you to drive an otherwise unregistered vehicle for the purposes of getting inspected, repaired, and registered, and covers you for the compulsory insurance.
The vehicle has to be safe for the conditions you are driving it in (eg driving at night with non-working headlights or driving in the rain with non-working wipers would be illegal) and if a cop pulled you over and deemed it unsafe you'd be fined, but otherwise it sounds just the same as your 'ferry permit'.
When I was young and foolish I didn't bother and just drove my unregistered car to the inspection yard and then to the registration site. The inspection is done by private agents so they didn't care, but the registration is done by a government authority, and they didn't care either. If I'd had an accident it could have cost me big time, hence the 'young and foolish' disclaimer.
Maybe it's different in your country, but over here the authorities tend to be pretty reasonable and tend not to be pricks just for the sake of it. There are always exceptions of course...
And if she were to write in her profile that she had a wife, that'd not be okay?
Well... in some countries it could get you arrested, or stoned to death, or burnt to death, or tortured to death if others found out who you were. And it could get Microsoft in trouble for allowing the comment (which is probably what they really care about).
In some countries it is not illegal to 'enjoy the company of barnyard animals', but in other countries Microsoft could well get in trouble for allowing mention of such a topic to go undeleted.
I don't think that banning the person was right, but I can understand why Microsoft might do such a thing. Hopefully the person in question can get her money back and go and join a group with more enlightened rules.
We need facial recognition CAPTCHA's. Something like three physical tasks you need to perform to gain access, eg 'Please place your left index finger on your nose. Accepted. Now please poke out your tongue. Accepted.' etc.
But even that wouldn't be impossible to defeat.
Still... I wonder how a 'Now show us your boobs' instruction would go down:)
I would think that taking this pill after such an event would make it even more hellish. Imagine: you still remember all of those unspeakable things that were done to your family, but you don't feel bad about it.
I think maybe you don't understand what PTSD is. It certainly isn't just 'feeling bad' about something. It's waking every night in absolute terror or waking up fighting. It's having a panic attack every time something reminds you of what happened.
And if you take the pill and then feel bad about not feeling bad about what happened anymore, i'm sure they can develop a pill for that too:p
Slashdot Mirror
At what point in time was that true? Back when 1KB of memory was the norm? 16KB of memory? 64KB? 640KB? 64MB? 1GB?
Has the energy required to alter a single bit changed in the last 30 years? I would guess yes due to the fact that everything seems to be getting smaller and running on lower voltages, but maybe shielding is better these days?
But the main thing is that in the last 30 years we have increased the average amount of memory in the average computer by somewhere around a million times. We also have many many more computers running much more of the time. Everything else being equal (which it probably isn't), there must be a lot more of this going on than you think... (memory corruption caused by cosmic rays that is, not rabid wolves having sex in the back of cars at drive-ins)
Same, but i've not used it much before. It has never found a memory problem that the BIOS test (which we all know is very superficial) didn't find first.
My favourite one was third party ram I put in my HP laptop. It was supposed to be the correct part for use in that model, but it would cause BSoD's and other strangeness. Eventually I figured out that if my phone (CDMA at the time) rang within a few feet of the latop it would BSoD every time. The problem went away when I put HP memory in it. Another identical laptop with the same third party numbered memory did a similar thing, and at one stage decided that every file on the laptop was a virus with obviously hilarious results :) Memory testing showed no problems, although maybe it would have if i'd called my cell phone...
Back in the day(tm) my favourite memory tester was Doom. On a machine that was acting up a bit but wouldn't reveal any obvious problems in any memory tester at the time, Doom would crash the machine in seconds, or minutes at most. If it didn't crash, the machine was probably fine, and I got to play some Doom :)
Memory testing is hard. Problems where a single bit is stuck to 1 or 0 are easy to find. Problems where a bit 'bleeds' into an adjacent bit are almost as easy to find, but then there are all sorts of strange things, like writing all 1's to one address might cause a 0 to change to 1 at another address, sometimes, like when the harddisk is also spinning up at the same time. To completely test a piece of memory you actually need to run a staggering number of tests on it, and you'll still never be quite sure... Easier to just swap memory sticks until it works.
A guy at work got his laptop with Vista on it. Explorer would hang often (Explorer, not IE), and if he tried to arrange his second monitor to the left of his laptop screen, the system would BSoD. (pretty funny, he had his monitor on the left, due to physical desk constraints, but he had to move his mouse off of the right side of his laptop screen where it would appear on the left of his second monitor...). We updated all the latest drivers from HP but to no avail.
Since putting Vista SP1 on though it has been fine - all those problems went away.
I have never seen another Vista machine do that though, so obviously something got broken during the install. If it was Linux I would have been able to fix it myself, but with Vista all we could do was wait for the magic hotfix or sp that might fix the problem.
Anyway, just because you haven't come across an unstable Vista install doesn't mean they don't exist. (or you're a troll and I just got sucked in horribly :)
Just because a government doesn't understand something doesn't make it bad. 'the village' in this context would usually just mean your extended family.
Maybe "it takes more than just a mum and dad to raise a child" would be a better way of putting it.
[citation needed]
Very true.
I like the idea of "it takes a village to raise a child", even though it really isn't practical these days. The good part of that idea is that half the village has probably already had kids and learned a few things along the way, and can possibly offer you some advice should you choose to listen. That's the other part of the problem - parents start out with a firm idea of how it's going to be, and won't listen to reason even when it's not working (speaking from experience :)
Also, given the smaller families these days and the lesser contact with close family once you 'leave the nest', the first real exposure a lot of couples have to a new baby is when it pops out of one of them. It's one hell of a steep learning curve.
I wonder what the emoticon for 'woosh' is...
^:|
or maybe
^ :|
|
|
Is anyone else reminded of the 'new coke' saga when they hear about Windows 7? I know it's not exactly the same thing (unless Windows 7 turns out to look exactly like XP), but still...
I just checked the archives for the last 50 years and there is not one occassion of the Americans nuking any opposing force. I could have looked back further but I expect you'd find exactly the same thing.
That's a very good analogy of why UAC just doesn't work they way they think it does. Just like you get in the habit of always closing the car door with the handle up, you also get in the habit of just clicking 'allow' without thinking about why you are clicking it. It trains users to ignore warning messages.
My first car was a 1963 Morris 850 (mini), and could only be locked from the outside (either by design, or just because it was 30 years old when I got it). Less convenient, but I never ever locked my keys in it.
If it takes you a page of text to write up then it's not a no-brainer.
When Mr WantsToLookAtSmut visits a page promising him the smuttiest smut he's ever seen, but when he goes there he is told "this webpage is incompatible with noscript. Please disable noscript and try again. This page is digitally signed by Microsoft and your bank.", he'll do exactly what he's told. The page is, after all, signed by Microsoft and his bank.
Safe surfing on the web involves lots of judgment calls, often based on past experience and knowledge about the tricks that are possible. My plan is to develop a special training computer containing an arm holding a cardboard tube. The trainee will sit down in front of the computer and be presented with various scenarios that they will encounter on the real internet - nigerian bank scams, chain letters, offers of free porn, 'your bank account will be closed unless you use the following link to log in right now', etc. If they fall for anything like that they get whacked on the head. After 6 months of training they should be ready to access the real internet. Supervised of course.
I don't know why the parent was marked Troll. I'd be a little concerned if one of my fellow soldiers was walking around with a shiny surface strapped to his back.
Or even worse, when we have to blacken the skies to stop the machines, the solar won't work at all! You might be able to plug it into one of your fellow soldiers though...
In further news, a sharp jump in gravity waves being detected since this new discovery was announced have now been determined to have been caused by Joe Weber rapidly spinning in his grave.
According to wikipedia ... assuming a coal fired plant this statement is correct - the total amount of mercury is lesser when using a CFL:
Didn't someone do the sums on this and figure out that the mercury in one of these CFL 'bulbs' was offset by the lower pollution (itself containing some mercury) coming out of the power plant as a result of using the CFL?
Or maybe that was just propaganda from the CFL camp... time to do some reading.
That's my take on it too. This problem should be self limiting. If companies implement hiring practices that mean the best person doesn't get the job then they won't succeed.
If it turns out that this sort of snooping does actually mean that they get a better employee, then good on them. I don't think that's the case though.
The only game that has truly given me a scare was the undress Britney Spears game.
She starts out fully clothed, and you have to perform a task requiring a reasonable amount of concentration. I think it's something like move the mouse through a maze without touching the sides.
After the first round, she says something to you but you can't quite hear it so you turn the volume up. She does take off an item of clothing though.
Same again after the second round, so you turn the volume up a bit more. Or maybe this bit wasn't in there... just the first and last round
Half way through the last round a vaguely scary face appears in place of the game coupled with a loud scream - made even louder by the fact that you now have your volume cranked right up. That made me jump.
Another good one was a video I saw on youtube - a car is shown in the distance driving along a winding road until it goes behind a building or something and never comes out the other side. While you are trying to figure out why it hasn't appeared on the other side a scary face appears coupled with a scream.
While playing a horror game you expect scary things to happen, so it's not a big deal when they do. Not so much when you are undressing a pop star...
So... I guess the answer to the question is to put naked pop stars in your games.
Correct.
Partly correct. It was in the atmosphere, but it wasn't all there at the same time.
Probably incorrect. Volcano's and other natural sources of CO2 have been pumping CO2 into the atmosphere since the world began. Various other natural sinks of CO2 have been removing it for almost as long, keeping the CO2 roughly constant. One of those sinks has been the process of making oil.
So now, we have a situation where:
. The earth is naturally producing CO2 at roughly the same rate as it ever did
. We are removing trees by the football stadium per day, or hour, or second, or whatever (I believe the football stadium per time unit is the standard unit of measure for tree removal), and so are removing one of the natural sinks of CO2
. We are burning the previously-sinked CO2 from the ground in the form of oil and are putting it back into the atmosphere
. As a result, the earth is getting warming and other natural sinks aren't working as well
. As a result of the earth getting warmer, more water is being evaporated into the atmosphere
Can you see the problem?
In Australia (or Victoria at least - other states may vary) you can get a 30 day (i think) 'registration' that allows you to drive an otherwise unregistered vehicle for the purposes of getting inspected, repaired, and registered, and covers you for the compulsory insurance.
The vehicle has to be safe for the conditions you are driving it in (eg driving at night with non-working headlights or driving in the rain with non-working wipers would be illegal) and if a cop pulled you over and deemed it unsafe you'd be fined, but otherwise it sounds just the same as your 'ferry permit'.
When I was young and foolish I didn't bother and just drove my unregistered car to the inspection yard and then to the registration site. The inspection is done by private agents so they didn't care, but the registration is done by a government authority, and they didn't care either. If I'd had an accident it could have cost me big time, hence the 'young and foolish' disclaimer.
Maybe it's different in your country, but over here the authorities tend to be pretty reasonable and tend not to be pricks just for the sake of it. There are always exceptions of course...
Well... in some countries it could get you arrested, or stoned to death, or burnt to death, or tortured to death if others found out who you were. And it could get Microsoft in trouble for allowing the comment (which is probably what they really care about).
In some countries it is not illegal to 'enjoy the company of barnyard animals', but in other countries Microsoft could well get in trouble for allowing mention of such a topic to go undeleted.
I don't think that banning the person was right, but I can understand why Microsoft might do such a thing. Hopefully the person in question can get her money back and go and join a group with more enlightened rules.
How does the similarity of 'netbook' to the generic 'notebook' enter into this?
The problem being that the people in question are not paid enough to be loyal, with the problems that go with that...
We need facial recognition CAPTCHA's. Something like three physical tasks you need to perform to gain access, eg 'Please place your left index finger on your nose. Accepted. Now please poke out your tongue. Accepted.' etc.
But even that wouldn't be impossible to defeat.
Still... I wonder how a 'Now show us your boobs' instruction would go down :)
I think maybe you don't understand what PTSD is. It certainly isn't just 'feeling bad' about something. It's waking every night in absolute terror or waking up fighting. It's having a panic attack every time something reminds you of what happened.
And if you take the pill and then feel bad about not feeling bad about what happened anymore, i'm sure they can develop a pill for that too :p