Wow, that's one expensive piece of hardware. Wonder if it's really worth that, or if you could get a similar effect using iptables and a little reactive software. At any rate, those numbers I tossed out weren't really serious, and the $2k price tag I tossed out for the server is probably way off base as well.
Yeah, and when the system crashes you've got to reboot it with a flashlight.
Seriously though, this is cool stuff, but probably at the absolute minimum 10 years from seeing mass market application.
I think part of the problem was that he wasn't being particularly careful where he stuck the tape and parts of it were in direct contact with ICs on the board. Also, even though he grounded himself, he then handled the tape which was not grounded and he wasn't wearing a grounding strap. The first place the tape went of course was on the board (and the ICs) and only later was it stuck to the PCs frame (which was grounded). In addition I don't know if the tape was conductive (I imagine it probably is to a certain extent if it can hold a static charge), but he may have shorted some of the ICs that way as well. But who knows, maybe you're right and the tape didn't have anything to do with it, it was just a DoA card. At any rate, he stuck his sound card into the case using scotch tape and it didn't work. Even if it had worked, it would still be a funny story for the simple fact that he used scotch tape to secure his brand new sound card (which is a lot like attaching a new car bumper using duct tape and zip ties, which sadly I know someone who did just that).
I loved my geometry class in high school because the instructor and I had an understanding. I'd sleep through most of the class and he left me alone because I knew the material and aced all the tests. At the start of the semester he tried to surprise me a few times while I was sleeping with a question, but after asking him to repeat the question (as I had been mostly asleep when he asked it) and answering it correctly, I'd go back to sleep and he'd leave me alone. If it wasn't for that class I probably would have done worse in some of my others as it gave me a good time to catch up on my sleep.
Sadly that doesn't always work. Most of the people they have running the tier 1 support are just script monkeys who know nothing but the script and will tolerate no deviation from it. Occasionally I'm pleasantly surprised when I get connected to one of the tech guys that actually knows what he's doing and works with me, but more often I end up with a monkey.
Yeah, I had a fight with one of my teachers once because he wanted me to write out all the steps when doing long division instead of doing it in my head. He argued that if I didn't write it out I would have mistakes and it would be wrong (hence his excuse for marking it wrong even though it was the right answer, try to figure that logic out). To prove his point he challenged me to a contest, which was to divide a rather large number me doing it entirely in my head, and him writing it out on paper, and the first to complete it with no mistakes would win. I finished about 4 minutes before he did. With the right answer. He said I got lucky and it didn't matter I still had to write out all the steps.
I remember having to go to a parent teacher conference in elementary school because an essay I had written was "too good" and thus the teacher was sure I had plagiarized it. My mother ripped the teacher a new one for that, as she had actually watched me write the paper.
It's not the data that's the issue. It's the pain in the ass of wiping it, spending a day or so re-installing the whole mess, and then I'm right back at square one when the problem all along was a flaky driver that one of the OEMs released. I had this issue most recently with a LinkSys 802.11g USB adapter. It was causing random BSODs. I told the tech I suspected it was the USB adapter as I was only getting the random BSOD when I had the USB adapter plugged in, and yet they still kept making me wipe and re-install the system because when they checked the settings everything was fine. I finally just ate the cost and went out and bought a different 802.11g card and miracle of miracles the problem went away. I don't call tech support because I've got a cable that fell out, or I didn't follow the instructions, I call tech support because there's either a bad driver (or driver conflict which is really the same thing) or a bad piece of hardware. No matter what if I'm calling it's not going to be a half hour fix, and if I reformat and re-install you've just put the problem off for a little while not fixed it. I think from now on I'm just going to narrow the problem down as best I can and return whatever it is for an exchange and skip the tech support hoops entirely. That's how I switched from being an ATI customer to a nVidia one. I installed a game and it's brain dead installer screwed up my graphics drivers for the ATI card I had trying to install an outdated version of DirectX. When I went to ATIs website to download new drivers they had screwed up the driver downloads so you couldn't actually download any of them (the link from the download driver page redirected you back to the main homepage, which then linked back to the download driver page). This being one of several problems I had run across with ATI lately I finally said screw it and just went out and bought an nVidia card.
Excellent post. Now, how about this, is Pi something that is measured, or is itself a form of measurement and thus wholly human defined? Does it exist independent of humanity or is it simply a human construct used to convey information about the shape of a thing to other humans? Of course at this point we're entirely into philosophical territory and this has really ceased to be relevant to much of anything.
Yes, after seeing the responses I should have been more specific. I should have said the numeric definition of Pi. As it is several people have given the formula to calculate Pi as well as a verbal definition of the formula such as the one you gave.
At least a reboot fixes it. Back in the Win9? days nothing short of a complete driver un-install, reboot, re-install, reboot cycle would fix the network stack. Also depending on the exact drivers you have to have them in a specific order, and sometimes they required reboots between installing different drivers. Getting even a simple TCP/IP network setup back then was such a pain in the ass it's no wonder most of the ISPs had custom installers. I was used to working on Linux systems back then and it completely blew my mind at the time that I couldn't just un-install and re-install the one wonky network driver, I had to re-install all of them.
I sometimes wonder if this type of person is a byproduct of the American education system (although I know it's not exclusive to America, I've also heard that the British and Indian school systems are very similar). It seems to me it's designed around (for the most part) rewarding individuals that memorize and repeat word for word an exact set of instructions or information. The few exceptions I see to this are usually in the Mathematics, Science or English departments but even then it's pretty rare. I wasn't until I got into College that I even had an instructor expect any member of the class to synthesize new understanding from previous knowledge, prior to that it was always "Here's the formula you need to use under this specific set of circumstances, memorize it for the test". In fact the few times I actually tried to ask questions in grade school to attempt to apply some new knowledge to other problems I usually got yelled at for "skipping ahead".
I think a lot of that stems from the flaky behavior that Win 95 and 98 used to show in their network driver stack. I remember doing trouble shooting on those systems and standard procedure was to completely remove all network drivers before doing anything with them because just changing a setting could often get them out of whack and once they got corrupted that was it. I was always amazed that you can have a screwed up network stack, uninstall the whole thing and re-install setting all the exact same settings and it would work the second time around. It was also very very picky about the order you installed things in, get that wrong and it wouldn't work either. Thankfully they finally fixed it in XP.
My friend once called me to come over to his house and help him figure out why his new sound card wasn't working. I was somewhat surprised he had called me as he actually has a fairly good grasp of computers and can usually figure out the problems after doing a bit of research on the web. When I got there I took one look at his computer and new exactly what the problem was. He couldn't find the screws for the PCI slots in his system, so he had scotch taped his sound card into the computer. If he had used electrical tape, or maybe even duct tape he probably would have been fine, but scotch tape carries a pretty strong static electric charge. Fried his sound card trying to hold it into the computer.
If after all that I can't get it solved in a reasonable time frame, I usually just format the system and install Linux. I'll usually decide I want to play some new game in a month or so and buy a new computer. Typically I can get 3 or 4 years out of one before it starts acting up. Considering MS is trying to kill it off I may pickup a copy of XP though so I have the option of doing a real re-install without having the OEMs disk install all the crapware that I always have to spend the first hour with a new system removing.
Probably the same category I end up in when I call to find out if the DSL service is down in my area and they tell me to re-install my drivers. Thankfully they've improved their support greatly since the last time they told me that and the tech I talked to on the most recent call not only knew what he was talking about, he actually helped me improve the configuration on my router. I was very impressed. Normally when you tell them you have a router they insist it's not supported and to disconnect it immediately. Maybe I got lucky and was connected to a Tier 3 that was slumming it for the day.
Reboots I don't mind. Power cycling I don't mind. Unplugging it all and plugging it back in I don't mind. I draw the line at using those damn wipe and restore disks. There are a couple OEMs I no longer use because when I called for tech support and the reboot and connection check failed to find the problem they told me to restore to the base image from the computers installation cd. That's not a solution, and the problem will most likely return, but only after it's taken me a few days to re-install whatever piece of software caused the problem in the first place.
Your chance of being hit by a meteor is less than the chance of the Earth being hit by a meteor. But the chance of you being hit by a meteor if you are outside the earths atmosphere is actually greater because most small meteorites burn up in the Earths atmosphere before reaching sea level.
Nice. Although I would counter that that's the definition of the formula to calculate Pi, and not Pi itself. Of course at this point we've basically descended into semantic bickering and since I was only half serious in my original post I'm going to leave it at this.
Cool commercials, I had never seen them before. Then again, I don't watch much TV. I'll concede that word of mouth alone may not make a game or system a top seller, but it definitely wouldn't hurt. I also wasn't trying to claim that Wii Sports was a "generic model" to selling millions of games, but rather an example where word of mouth had a major impact on sales. I would be very interested to see very fine grained sales figures for games, as I would bet there's a discernible jump or decline in sales of a game when for instance a major site like Penny Arcade either rates favorably or poorly a particular game. I know it was primarily on the recommendation of Penny Arcade that I bought the original Katamari Damacy, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
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Wow, that's one expensive piece of hardware. Wonder if it's really worth that, or if you could get a similar effect using iptables and a little reactive software. At any rate, those numbers I tossed out weren't really serious, and the $2k price tag I tossed out for the server is probably way off base as well.
Yeah, and when the system crashes you've got to reboot it with a flashlight.
Seriously though, this is cool stuff, but probably at the absolute minimum 10 years from seeing mass market application.
You have just got to love a text editor that copies an entire file into memory before displaying it.
Humongously Bad Interface. That's the internal name for all new MS APIs.
Cisco Router: ~$700
Server to run it on: ~$2000
Beta testing Microsofts new server 2008 in a production environment: Priceless
I think part of the problem was that he wasn't being particularly careful where he stuck the tape and parts of it were in direct contact with ICs on the board. Also, even though he grounded himself, he then handled the tape which was not grounded and he wasn't wearing a grounding strap. The first place the tape went of course was on the board (and the ICs) and only later was it stuck to the PCs frame (which was grounded). In addition I don't know if the tape was conductive (I imagine it probably is to a certain extent if it can hold a static charge), but he may have shorted some of the ICs that way as well. But who knows, maybe you're right and the tape didn't have anything to do with it, it was just a DoA card. At any rate, he stuck his sound card into the case using scotch tape and it didn't work. Even if it had worked, it would still be a funny story for the simple fact that he used scotch tape to secure his brand new sound card (which is a lot like attaching a new car bumper using duct tape and zip ties, which sadly I know someone who did just that).
I loved my geometry class in high school because the instructor and I had an understanding. I'd sleep through most of the class and he left me alone because I knew the material and aced all the tests. At the start of the semester he tried to surprise me a few times while I was sleeping with a question, but after asking him to repeat the question (as I had been mostly asleep when he asked it) and answering it correctly, I'd go back to sleep and he'd leave me alone. If it wasn't for that class I probably would have done worse in some of my others as it gave me a good time to catch up on my sleep.
Sadly that doesn't always work. Most of the people they have running the tier 1 support are just script monkeys who know nothing but the script and will tolerate no deviation from it. Occasionally I'm pleasantly surprised when I get connected to one of the tech guys that actually knows what he's doing and works with me, but more often I end up with a monkey.
Yeah, I had a fight with one of my teachers once because he wanted me to write out all the steps when doing long division instead of doing it in my head. He argued that if I didn't write it out I would have mistakes and it would be wrong (hence his excuse for marking it wrong even though it was the right answer, try to figure that logic out). To prove his point he challenged me to a contest, which was to divide a rather large number me doing it entirely in my head, and him writing it out on paper, and the first to complete it with no mistakes would win. I finished about 4 minutes before he did. With the right answer. He said I got lucky and it didn't matter I still had to write out all the steps.
I remember having to go to a parent teacher conference in elementary school because an essay I had written was "too good" and thus the teacher was sure I had plagiarized it. My mother ripped the teacher a new one for that, as she had actually watched me write the paper.
It's not the data that's the issue. It's the pain in the ass of wiping it, spending a day or so re-installing the whole mess, and then I'm right back at square one when the problem all along was a flaky driver that one of the OEMs released. I had this issue most recently with a LinkSys 802.11g USB adapter. It was causing random BSODs. I told the tech I suspected it was the USB adapter as I was only getting the random BSOD when I had the USB adapter plugged in, and yet they still kept making me wipe and re-install the system because when they checked the settings everything was fine. I finally just ate the cost and went out and bought a different 802.11g card and miracle of miracles the problem went away. I don't call tech support because I've got a cable that fell out, or I didn't follow the instructions, I call tech support because there's either a bad driver (or driver conflict which is really the same thing) or a bad piece of hardware. No matter what if I'm calling it's not going to be a half hour fix, and if I reformat and re-install you've just put the problem off for a little while not fixed it. I think from now on I'm just going to narrow the problem down as best I can and return whatever it is for an exchange and skip the tech support hoops entirely. That's how I switched from being an ATI customer to a nVidia one. I installed a game and it's brain dead installer screwed up my graphics drivers for the ATI card I had trying to install an outdated version of DirectX. When I went to ATIs website to download new drivers they had screwed up the driver downloads so you couldn't actually download any of them (the link from the download driver page redirected you back to the main homepage, which then linked back to the download driver page). This being one of several problems I had run across with ATI lately I finally said screw it and just went out and bought an nVidia card.
Excellent post. Now, how about this, is Pi something that is measured, or is itself a form of measurement and thus wholly human defined? Does it exist independent of humanity or is it simply a human construct used to convey information about the shape of a thing to other humans? Of course at this point we're entirely into philosophical territory and this has really ceased to be relevant to much of anything.
Yes, after seeing the responses I should have been more specific. I should have said the numeric definition of Pi. As it is several people have given the formula to calculate Pi as well as a verbal definition of the formula such as the one you gave.
At least a reboot fixes it. Back in the Win9? days nothing short of a complete driver un-install, reboot, re-install, reboot cycle would fix the network stack. Also depending on the exact drivers you have to have them in a specific order, and sometimes they required reboots between installing different drivers. Getting even a simple TCP/IP network setup back then was such a pain in the ass it's no wonder most of the ISPs had custom installers. I was used to working on Linux systems back then and it completely blew my mind at the time that I couldn't just un-install and re-install the one wonky network driver, I had to re-install all of them.
I sometimes wonder if this type of person is a byproduct of the American education system (although I know it's not exclusive to America, I've also heard that the British and Indian school systems are very similar). It seems to me it's designed around (for the most part) rewarding individuals that memorize and repeat word for word an exact set of instructions or information. The few exceptions I see to this are usually in the Mathematics, Science or English departments but even then it's pretty rare. I wasn't until I got into College that I even had an instructor expect any member of the class to synthesize new understanding from previous knowledge, prior to that it was always "Here's the formula you need to use under this specific set of circumstances, memorize it for the test". In fact the few times I actually tried to ask questions in grade school to attempt to apply some new knowledge to other problems I usually got yelled at for "skipping ahead".
I think a lot of that stems from the flaky behavior that Win 95 and 98 used to show in their network driver stack. I remember doing trouble shooting on those systems and standard procedure was to completely remove all network drivers before doing anything with them because just changing a setting could often get them out of whack and once they got corrupted that was it. I was always amazed that you can have a screwed up network stack, uninstall the whole thing and re-install setting all the exact same settings and it would work the second time around. It was also very very picky about the order you installed things in, get that wrong and it wouldn't work either. Thankfully they finally fixed it in XP.
My friend once called me to come over to his house and help him figure out why his new sound card wasn't working. I was somewhat surprised he had called me as he actually has a fairly good grasp of computers and can usually figure out the problems after doing a bit of research on the web. When I got there I took one look at his computer and new exactly what the problem was. He couldn't find the screws for the PCI slots in his system, so he had scotch taped his sound card into the computer. If he had used electrical tape, or maybe even duct tape he probably would have been fine, but scotch tape carries a pretty strong static electric charge. Fried his sound card trying to hold it into the computer.
If after all that I can't get it solved in a reasonable time frame, I usually just format the system and install Linux. I'll usually decide I want to play some new game in a month or so and buy a new computer. Typically I can get 3 or 4 years out of one before it starts acting up. Considering MS is trying to kill it off I may pickup a copy of XP though so I have the option of doing a real re-install without having the OEMs disk install all the crapware that I always have to spend the first hour with a new system removing.
Probably the same category I end up in when I call to find out if the DSL service is down in my area and they tell me to re-install my drivers. Thankfully they've improved their support greatly since the last time they told me that and the tech I talked to on the most recent call not only knew what he was talking about, he actually helped me improve the configuration on my router. I was very impressed. Normally when you tell them you have a router they insist it's not supported and to disconnect it immediately. Maybe I got lucky and was connected to a Tier 3 that was slumming it for the day.
Reboots I don't mind. Power cycling I don't mind. Unplugging it all and plugging it back in I don't mind. I draw the line at using those damn wipe and restore disks. There are a couple OEMs I no longer use because when I called for tech support and the reboot and connection check failed to find the problem they told me to restore to the base image from the computers installation cd. That's not a solution, and the problem will most likely return, but only after it's taken me a few days to re-install whatever piece of software caused the problem in the first place.
Your chance of being hit by a meteor is less than the chance of the Earth being hit by a meteor. But the chance of you being hit by a meteor if you are outside the earths atmosphere is actually greater because most small meteorites burn up in the Earths atmosphere before reaching sea level.
Nice. Although I would counter that that's the definition of the formula to calculate Pi, and not Pi itself. Of course at this point we've basically descended into semantic bickering and since I was only half serious in my original post I'm going to leave it at this.
Cool commercials, I had never seen them before. Then again, I don't watch much TV. I'll concede that word of mouth alone may not make a game or system a top seller, but it definitely wouldn't hurt. I also wasn't trying to claim that Wii Sports was a "generic model" to selling millions of games, but rather an example where word of mouth had a major impact on sales. I would be very interested to see very fine grained sales figures for games, as I would bet there's a discernible jump or decline in sales of a game when for instance a major site like Penny Arcade either rates favorably or poorly a particular game. I know it was primarily on the recommendation of Penny Arcade that I bought the original Katamari Damacy, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
Pi? I've certainly never seen a complete definition of it, only approximations.
Quick throw it a cheeseburger!!!