I think it’s safe to say that the SP1 update officially sucks balls. It took over an hour to update my machine, and others are reportedly experiencing more problems, even after the install.
… and how to wake up has some tips on how to make things go a little more smootlyDo any of these sound like your company? Ouch.
Our appeal for corporate Scrooges—tales of office parties canceled, miserly bonuses, and pathetic gifts—generated a generous response. Nearly 200 Slate readers wrote in, providing enough fodder for several episodes of The Office. We heard from employees of car dealerships, doctors, and small law firms, but also from blue workers at blue chips, including Burberry, Dow Jones, Goldman Sachs, Disney, Wells Fargo, and Wal-Mart.
This is a creative way to create fractal images using Christmas ornaments.
It’s a little easier to see the images of the camera lens in this photo. Look at the three Cantor sets formed by the number of reflections of the camera lens on the three spheres. Math in action!
A funny, yet strangely beautiful, office prank.
That’s right. My team and I tin foiled a fellow designer’s cubicle. So here’s the background: a fellow designer left for vacation this past week. He intends to return the Tuesday after Christmas. What he doesn’t even know yet is that my boss, fellow designer and myself used over 500 square feet of tin foil and wrapped up EVERYTHING in his cube!
Bill Gates made some interesting comments regarding DRM during a recent meeting with a group of bloggers.
According to TechCrunch:
Gates said that no one is satisfied with the current state of DRM, which “causes too much pain for legitmate buyers†while trying to distinguish between legal and illegal uses. He says no one has done it right, yet. There are “huge problems†with DRM, he says, and “we need more flexible models, such as the ability to “buy an artist out for life†(not sure what he means). He also criticized DRM schemes that try to install intelligence in each copy so that it is device specific.
His short term advice: “People should just buy a cd and rip it. You are legal then.â€
Here’s another logical paradox for you to ponder.
A highly superior being from another part of the galaxy presents you with two boxes, one open and one closed. In the open box there is a thousand-dollar bill. In the closed box there is either one million dollars or there is nothing. You are to choose between taking both boxes or taking the closed box only. But there’s a catch.
The being claims that he is able to predict what any human being will decide to do. If he predicted you would take only the closed box, then he placed a million dollars in it. But if he predicted you would take both boxes, he left the closed box empty. Furthermore, he has run this experiment with 999 people before, and has been right every time.
What do you do?
On the one hand, the evidence is fairly obvious that if you choose to take only the closed box you will get one million dollars, whereas if you take both boxes you get only a measly thousand. You’d be stupid to take both boxes.
On the other hand, at the time you make your decision, the closed box already is empty or else contains a million dollars. Either way, if you take both boxes you get a thousand dollars more than if you take the closed box only.
This is a long, but very interesting article on index funds.
As Google’s historic August 2004 IPO approached, the company’s senior vice president, Jonathan Rosenberg, realized he was about to spawn hundreds of impetuous young multimillionaires. They would, he feared, become the prey of Wall Street brokers, financial advisers, and wealth managers, all offering their own get-even-richer investment schemes. Scores of them from firms like J.P. Morgan Chase, UBS, Morgan Stanley, and Presidio Financial Partners were already circling company headquarters in Mountain View with hopes of presenting their wares to some soon-to-be-very-wealthy new clients.
Rosenberg didn’t turn the suitors away; he simply placed them in a holding pattern. Then, to protect Google’s staff, he proposed a series of in-house investment teach-ins, to be held before the investment counselors were given a green light to land. Company founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page and CEO Eric Schmidt were excited by the idea and gave it the go-ahead.
Brush up on your logical deduction skills for your next tech interview.
One of the most classic puzzles involving balls is figuring out the odd one out using common balance. There are many levels of puzzles based on the same concept for different levels of interviews - Simple ones for phone interviews to the most gruelling 1 hour hard work needing hard ones.
Problem space
The general problem is you will be given n balls and one of them is either heavier or lighter and you are asked to find out the minimum number of weighings using a common balance required to find out the odd one out.
Here’s a brief interview with Futurama co-creator David X. Cohen on the upcoming, new season of Futurama.
It’s the good news everyone has been waiting for! A new season of “Futurama”—the brilliant, animated sci-fi comedy from “Simpsons” creator Matt Groening and executive producer David X. Cohen—is finally being produced for a 2008 release.
It’s still not determined whether the new episodes will debut on Comedy Central or DVD, but we’re too excited to care! We pinned down Cohen to get the skinny on what we can expect when “Futurama” reawakens from its cryo-sleep.
Related:
This is a disturbingly funny call between George Vaccaro and Verizon, trying to teach them basic math.
From Slashdot:
Blogger George Vaccaro recently had a problem with his Verizon based on an unfortunate miscommunication of currency. The crux of the matter was that he was quoted .002 cents per kilobyte for data during a trip to Canada but was charged .002 dollars. Normally this would have been an easy fix, however several humorous calls later the Verizon reps still were unable to discern the difference between the two rates. You really have to hear it to believe it. Kudos George, you have the patience of a saint.
This is a useful guide to check before purchasing cheap DVD media.
Not all media is good. In fact, with the high influx of cheap media from Taiwan, China and Hong Kong, I’d venture to say most media is bad. This review guide is meant to shed some light on who manufactures and brands good and not so good quality DVD media.
Use this list as an assistant when selecting what media to buy and use. It shows what generally works as the best media. Individual results may very, depending on the burner and how the media chooses to cooperate, though typically not by much. Read the advanced topics guide after becoming familiar with the basics presented on this page.
From The Daily WTF, here is another amusing tale of developer woe, huge piles of money flushed down the tubes, and clueless management.
The Peter Devil wasn’t very good at delivering bad news. He also wasn’t very good at delivering good news, neutral news, making decisions, motivating employees, or, just about anything else that a CTO is supposed to do. But — bad news — it just wasn’t his thing. He notified, via email, a team of over fifty employees that they’d be jobless in two weeks Unfortunately, the Vancouver office will be disbanded on August 23; we’ll need everyone to pull together and make an extra effort to finish up the Integration Project and transition the remaining work to us here in Toronto.
Following the astounding claim that a professor has “solved” the problem of division by zero, and inexplicably reported by BBC as seemingly legitimate news (imagine my head exploding at this point), here’s an article describing the obvious problems with the claim.
Tons of folks have been writing to me this morning about the BBC story about an idiot math teacher who claims to have solved the problem of dividing by zero. This is an absolutely infuriating story, which does an excellent job of demonstrating what total innumerate idiots reporters are.
What this guy has done is invent a new number, which he calls “nullity”. This number is not on the number line, can’t be compared to other numbers by less than or greater than, etc. In other words, he’s given a name to the basic mathematical concept of “undefined”, and proclaimed that this is somehow a solution to a deep and important problem.
Here’s a hack that may allow you to access sites that let Google in to index them but require regular users to register.
Ever experienced this? You ask Google to look something up; the engine returns with a number of finds, but if you try to open the ones with the most promising content, you are confronted with a registration page instead, and the stuff you were looking for will not be revealed to you unless you agree to a credit card transaction first…. The lesson you should have learned here is: Obviously Google can go where you can’t.
Here’s a post on how community-driven sites like Digg succumb to their own popularity.
The idea is fine, but one thing is forgotten… People are sheep. People don’t vote things up they disagree with, don’t like or don’t know anything about. So we see a kind of convergence. The stuff that toes the community line, that most people agree with and that doesn’t challenge people too much gets voted up, whilst the stuff on the fringes, the niche stuff, disappears. The community attracts people who enjoy its content, and so content becomes stale, repetitive and dull.
This is a funny take on Hollywood’s portrayal of computer programming.
Following up our article: Top 20 Hackers in Film History and Vibrant’s Top 10 Servers in the movies, I felt obligated to dispel some of the notions about programming that these movies endorse. I understand that Hollywood needs to dress things up to make them more entertaining, but in the case of programmers, code, and hackers they’ve done more than dress things up - they’ve morphed a little stuffed teddy bear into a cybernetic polar bear covered in christmas lights and phosphorescent hieroglyphics with a fog machine pumping rainbow smoke out of his ass. In other words, they’ve layered a ridiculous amount of extravagance on top of something that in reality is very grounded.
This looks like a good howto on pan roasting your own coffee beans.
The only way to understand a coffee is to roast it. Depending on how far you roast a coffee it can have a strikingly different flavor and body in the cup once brewed.
Typically speaking the lighter roasts will have more origin character (the beans actual flavors rather than roast induced flavor) and acidity with a muted body or mouth feel. However if you stop the roast too soon before the roast has fully developed the coffee will have a sour and/or grassy flavor. A hint of sourness in some coffees in my opinion can be a wonderful thing, but too much and well…YUCK!
Medium roasts can create a balance between the sometimes raw, aggressive origin character and the intense carbony roast flavors. Medium roasts will also have a heavier body than lighter roasts.
Darker roasts will have a pronounced roast flavor which are often carbony, pungent and sharp. Most of the beans flavor will have been replaced with roast flavors and body is usually at it’s heaviest. But roast too far and the coffee can be destroyed, with a thin body and an ashy, charcoal and/or burnt rubber taste!
If you are stuck in a position where you need to open one of the new Word, Excel or Powerpoint 2007 document formats, but have an older version of Office, grab this compatibility update from Microsoft.
Of course, you should avoid opening dangerous Microsoft Office documents you receive from others, especially considering that there is currently a zero-day exploit for Word documents that has not been patched yet. You’ve been warned!
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