Posts by Infarction

First tip: don't trade just based on someone's advice. Do your own research to make sure you agree with them. This doesn't mean to ignore them, just not to blindly follow.

I'll start with HDY: avoid it. My reason is simple, it just doesn't have enough volume. This makes it more prone to quick jumps and less liquidity. If nobody's trading it when it drops, you'll never get out.

DYN: Bearish outlook. While it's at a several year high, it looks like it's currently running on fumes. Also, it's got a very low value, which leaves litte room for movement one way or the other. I wouldn't touch it, personally. There's bigger fish to fry.

PFE: It looks like it'll break one way or another soon, but cant' tell which. Earnings on July 19th will likely be a driving force, and chart patterns suggest that it could go either up or down. I'd not touch stock on it, 'cause you have to pick sides. It might be feasible to try a 27.5 straddle with September or December options, but the stock'll have to move a few points in either direction to make it profitable; it's not been particularly volatile in the last year though, so the odds of that happening are probably low. Also, 28 has been a point of resistance in the past, so breaking it will require a bit of a push...

Overall: find something more attractive :icon_wink:

I tend to look at certifications as a very good foot in the door. Honestly, I can't see a company hiring a guy with 15 years experience and no certs over a CCIE or MCSE with 10 years. Experience is definitely a key factor in job placement, though certifications will most likely put anyone ahead of the game. I mean, if certifications are useless... what are there so many vendor specific certs?

Ok, I know a guy who has about 15 years (possibly a couple less) at a large corporation. Never had a cert. Senior netword admin, could easily pass the CCIE if he wanted to. But why bother? You think he'd get passed over for a job because he doesn't have a piece of paper?

And a reason to have so many certs: the vendors make money off 'em. 'Nuff said.

If I'm a CIO and my network is run completely off Cisco equipment, then you better believe I'm going to hire the CCIE with 10 years experience most likely using Cisco equipment over the guy with 15 years experience doing who knows what.

"Who knows what" would be revealed during the interview process. If you have two sufficiently experienced people, you choose the better one. Maybe the guy without the certs has something else under his belt from those other 5 years. And having a wider experience is usually thought to be a good thing. Specifics can be learned rather quickly, really. One of the greatest …

Yeah, arch gets rave reviews on the Gentoo forums quite often. If I were to bother installing something again, it'd either be a test run of Fedora 7 or Arch.

Well then you must be gifted.

Different learning style. If I pay attention in lecture and use the material on homeworks or projects, I'll remember it for at least the whole term (some things fade away with time...). That, and my personal belief that finals are a way to measure what I've learned over the quarter rather than the 48 hours leading up to the test, makes finals week fun. I do whatever I want except for the two hours per test... and yes, I do pass my classes as well :P

Most entry level jobs today require either a college degree or a lot of experience. If you are under 50 years old with little or no practical programming experience I would strongly suggest getting your rear end into college and get that degree. I don't know how true it is but I have heard many companies will not hire older people because they can get young recruits directly out of college for a lot less money then they might have to pay an older person with a spouse and family to support. In USA that might be more true on both coasts then in the midwest where I live.

I think they also favor the younger crowd a little hoping to get a longer time return on what training they put into their recruits. If you keep 'em happy, they'll stay longer, which can be cost-effective in an industry with a really high turnover. And at least on the west coast, they're not afraid to pay college recruits well either :icon_wink:

I have actually found the arch and gentoo community the nicest and most knowledgeable.

++ for Gentoo, haven't been to the arch forums

Second, Debian is the #1 distro that is 100% NON-Coorerate... unlike RedHat, SuSE and others Debian is 100% created and maintained by the Open Source Community with 0 burdens of business/money to dilute it.

Debian, maybe, but Ubuntu definitely has a corporation funding it. not that there's anything wrong with that.

For instance... want to install LAMP? ( Linux Apache MySQL PHP/PERL/Python )

It's about the same on just about any distro...
<package manager name> <install flags> apache php mysql python perl

And Finally... Ubuntu is the only distro that I know of ( or care about at this point ) that offers a very distinctive DESKTOP and SERVER variation to choose.

Fedora/CentOS would be a desktop/server combo. Gentoo has different profiles depending on which you want.

Ubuntu also has the BEST user comminity support in the form of FORUMS,
...
In contrast all other Distros lack this amazing Forum support on a scale that is clear, easy, useable and bottom line give you your answer without having to read for hours on end reading peoples rambling post...

Good help is typically easy to find for most distros. Actually, I had a harder time getting solutions back when I was having problems with Ubuntu.

Go Ubuntu... it is the furture of the 'Linux Distro'.

God I hope not...

I've also heard some poor things about HP-Compaq laptops. My dad and sister each have one, and they've had a couple problems but nothing major. My Toshiba's been fine for the little over two years I've had it, but if you've had problems it's understandable that you'd want something else. Sony has a very good rep, and the Macbooks are pretty popular. If you look at dells, go for some of the pricier ones within your budget. You get what you pay for...

I voted CCIE, but it really comes down to experience...

Also, programming certs (like for Java, VB, etc...) are worthless, and A+ are a dime a dozen. CCIE, MCSE, and RHCE (and maybe, just maybe, CCSP) are probably the only ones of any great value on the list.

BS in Computer Science.

No, it doesn't suit my interests. Plus it'd be too expensive :P

Back on the subject of college, I'm graduating in a week!! So excited to be done with school finally:icon_cheesygrin:

Actually I have "aptituded" btw, I have a question about debian: why do people apt-get something when aptitude is the far superior tool? I bet your debian system cannot boot up in 9 seconds!

Whether you use aptitue or apt-get, the programs are the same; boot time won't be affected. That said, isn't the difference basically a command-line vs. a GUI? (I've not used aptitude before...) Some people prefer a CLI application...

Wow guys, that was one of the greatest hijackings I've seen in a long time...

CCNA lasts 3 years. As to Cisco vs. Microsoft, they're completely different and it depends on what you're doing.

[edit:] I took it in high school

My CCNA expires in a week or so. I passed easily the first time. No interest in renewing though, it didn't do anything for me...

CCNA is easy

I'm too lazy to read the rest of what you guys wrote... :P

lol.. Myspace sucks, I hope they all switch to facebook :)

Good god, I'd quit the site. Keep MySpace users to MySpace and facebook to facebook.

Wow, I missed out on a bit of the thread :(

Everyone here seems to want to "over clock" their cpu. How and why do you overclock? The cpu that I have picked out runs at 3.2 ghz, I don't think I would want it any faster if it means a shorter life span. A duo core cpu would jax the price up a bit from what I was looking at.

A 3.2GHz processor really isn't all that great anymore. I've got one. My dual core system runs circles around it. Seriously, get a dual core machine. It's really not that much more expensive, especially if the prices you quoted were accurate. It'll be a faster chip too, so in a simplified manner it'll be like having 2 faster ones instead.

Iv heard people overclocking low end intel core 2 duos to over 3 ghz!

The Core 2 is stable up to 4GHz on air cooling according to Wikipedia. It surely has hella fans on it, but still...

Yea, intel has always run their processors at really high clock-speeds.. but they are inefficient, and operating at those speeds does not really give them much of an advantage..

I'm assuming that "always" refers to the P4 and P-D lines. The P4 took a very complicated design with a ton of pipeline stages, allowing the clock speed to increase. The design was much more inefficient though, especially if branch prediction went wrong. The Pentium M and later (including Core …

FYI, South Park is trashy drivel. It also (as mentioned) doesn't fit this thread.

On 32-bit stuff (which is most everything still) the Core 2 blows AMD out of the water last I checked. It also comes with a price tag to match. There aren't a lot of 64-bit benchmarks, so comparing the two at that level is tough; easier to say that they're probably about equal. Power consumption (and thus heat) for each brand is now comparable (early Athlons were very hot, and then Pentium 4 chips were pretty bad as well).

AMD has a reputation for being more friendly for over-clocking, but that's your call. The Core 2 Extreme (which is priced at like $1000?) is supposed to be one of the best CPUs for overclocking, but it costs as much as an entire system. Personally, I don't overclock my stuff. I like to get as much life out of 'em as possible...

almost all mobos have thermal cutoffs now, so the temperature throttling shouldn't be a big deal. And most OSs also use dynamic throttling to keep pace with actualy CPU usage, so having a heat problem would probably mean you need to fix your ventilation.

my guess would be that whatever service you're expecting is not running on the server...

I don't know for sure how long mine took, but probably around an hour...

Enron's stock started turning down before it crashed. There were some pretty good signs that something was going down, if you knew where to look (especially at insider trading information).

I'm not a fan at all of Pentium 4 chips. They had high clock speeds but relatively poor performance and high energy usage. Get a newer chip, and one with 2 cores. An Athlon X2 3800+ is also about $75 on newegg and you can find a comparable motherboard to fit it.

It requires experience and education, but a lot of it is also choosing the right time to invest, the right stock to invest in, etc.. luck.

Replace luck with research and effort. And being able to withstand the psychological impact of a loss. There are many successful traders who do quite well by having a developed system, not lots of luck points...

most implies a single answer, lest multiple be tied... :P

Yes, similar to most other Americans I was attracted to the stock market at the thought of making a high return, and earning money quickly.. However, I have realized that it is more luck than anything.. even the most knowledgeable and intelligent traders lose money.. But, I'm only 18, so I haven't made much working.. I mostly invest in technology mutual funds and occasionally a few stocks that I think will do well.. Once I start college I will probably liquidate everything and stop investing until I make enough money to do so.. Unless the U.S. economy encounters huge inflation, in which case I will buy some U.S. bonds and lock in a high interest rate. (probably not b/c Greenspan predicted a recession to hit soon)

There is so much wrong with your post. It's not a matter of luck, it's a matter of education and experience. Knowing how to make money when the trade goes against you. Knowing how to make money on stocks that don't move. Knowing what signals work under current market conditions. And then doing all of those.

And for the $20k courses: you could either have an awesome computer, or some idea of how to make a ton of money.... your call.

I think I said in a previous post, I count a single grey reputation from a newbie that I help worth more than the 200 or more points I received during the past few months in the geeks lounge.

Well said

> if you have to ask, get ubuntu
While quite simple, that's surprisingly well put. :)

My total was right about $450

I find having a backup plan and/or exit strategy is a requirement. Any trade should have a minimal loss compared to the expected return. I tend to prefer trading periodic companies though, and my trading style is definitely my own. I don't know how well it'd do, since I haven't touched in in about 9 months though...

> I think im too young to play the stockmarket
Better to learn when you're young... I started learning when I was 18, which was retrospectively a couple years later than I should have...

I just built a cheap box to run Vista on a couple weeks ago. I was on a tight budget so I stuck with a AMD Athlon64 X2 3800+, 2GB of RAM, and an ASUS M2NPV-VM motherboard. Don't know how the mobo shapes up on reviews, but it's working just fine. I've even got mine just using shared memory for video, which saves the cost of a graphics card, and the mobo has 2 IDE buses and 4 SATA ports. It's also got an AM2 socket, so there's room can upgrade the processor later if you feel like it, and a PCI-E x16 if you want to throw a GPU in. I put a 400W power supply in, just to be on the save side. For the case, PSU, mobo, CPU, and RAM I spent under $500, and carried over two HDDs and a DVD-burner from another computer.

If you're not concerned with cost, look into getting an Intel Core 2 Duo, but I've not looked into parts for those at all (like I said, I was on a budget).

As to CPU cooling, you'll want to use whatever comes with your new processor. Usually different sockets have the fan mount differently, and most processors come with the proper fan, so why not use the proper piece?

from the security whitepaper:

Many other solutions require servers to receive incoming packets at a public IP address. The GoToMyPC host establishes a persistent TCP connection to the GoToMyPC broker (poll.gotomypc.com) that allows it to be notified if any connect requests have been received. The host will attempt to keep the connection open by sending TCP “keep alive” packets approximately every 60 seconds. This makes GoToMyPC completely compatible with application proxy firewalls, dynamic IP addresses and network/port address translation (NAT/PAT).

I have a few accounts at OptionsXpress but I haven't put much thought into them for the last 2 years except in the summers. I prefer short-term trading (not day-trading, but a week to a couple months) with options or long-term options to use in diagonal spreads, and school would just get me distracted too much. I'll be getting back into it again once I have a less hectic schedule.

Most of mine are in the coffee house mainly because I haven't been in the mood to go to the software development forums so much lately.

> Anyone got any fillings while on the subject of teeth?
I have a ton. I have 2 on the same tooth even. Kinda lacked in the tooth-brushing area while I was a kid...

and thread necromancy looks like :P

Do you really want to give Microsoft that kind of power? If software companies had to have all their software verified through Microsoft, then Microsoft would own the whole damn industry!

My post which you quoted was referring to drivers, not any software. As I previously distinguished, drivers are in a unique position of having a lot of trust from the kernel. As to the rest of the software industry, they've mostly become rather reliant on how open the WinAPI has been. With Vista's security setting set to the max, you'd find most of your software non-functional due to the kernel being locked down too tight. My point going along the thread has been that Microsoft gets the blame when their OS is compromised by 3rd party software. If they lock down their OS to prevent that, the software breaks. If they don't, they get bad rep for having an insecure product. Why shouldn't they be allowed to take measures against that?

I'd guess that it's due to how floating point values are stored imprecisely in memory, causing the weird results to come up on rare occasions.

Well, making companies pay Microsoft to verify their drivers isn't right.. The user should be able to install whatever driver he/she pleases..

If the average user (i.e. not very tech-knowledgeable) installs random drivers and their computer crashes, do you think they'll blame the driver or the OS? And if Microsoft does bother to test the drivers, why do you think they should do it for free? Most of the bad rep Microsoft has gotten for instable systems is hardly their fault.

> He seems like a nice guy, an idiot though (his entire fortune is to be given to charity!)
That's all it takes to be an idiot? Here I thought it was a good thing to give money to charity. I wonder how Warren Buffet ranks on that idiot scale as well...

As to the topic of drivers, Microsoft is learning that backwards compatibility isn't the great thing it was a decade ago. Hopefully they'll cut it off to not even support pre-Vista stuff by time Vienna comes out. And driver signing seems like a good idea to me; drivers are probably the software that the kernel trusts the most. They should be tested accordingly (especially since Microsoft tends to get the blame when someone else releases a buggy driver).

The new version of Office has a file format using XML. Vista itself has very little to do with XML, and it's certainly not based on it.

I think the rep system is horribly broken by an unfixable human element. It has lost all meaning.

Toonami edits the shows pretty heavily too, I believe. Adult Swim has had a couple good series on, but dubs tend to suck as a general rule. And the selection is still quite limited.

As Rashakil says, when you have a stack allocated variable, the stack pointer will be incremented to account for it at the beginning of the function. This is much different from allocating on the heap, which has its own algorithms to compute where to allocate the space. And the operation of incrementing the stack pointer will happen each time the function is called anyways, whether you use a stack-allocated array or a heap allocated one. The heap operation would likely be much slower.

I'd say to just keep writing code for now, when you get to the 4-year school they'll have plenty of resources. You might consider reading a couple books on algorithms or software development, and try applying those concepts on your own projects (algorithms would probably apply more, depending on what you're writing).

That is true, but let us not forget that you can also do friend operator overloading with a rhs and lhs parameters

True, but the error was because it should only be one.