Well it's a little off topic but since you did post a link to your rant I have a comment to make. It said:
Second, the guy's listing stuff like being a customer service rep for a credit union on it. Why would I care about your work experience that doesn't relate to this project?
Most HR people care about this because holes in your resume, long periods of time with no discernible activity, are worrisome. It's just SOP to put everything in your resume for whatever period you are covering.
Also you seem to think you will get good people by asking them to give you a free estimate. Perhaps that is normal on the sites you mention but how much time are people supposed to spend giving out free estimates to every person who may be a potential client? I charge for my estimates - doing it properly takes time and my time is valuable - and I would guess that most other contractors whose skills put them in demand also charge. I don't know many good people who will do fixed price contracts - they don't have to. OTOH if a client goes ahead I will frequently write-off the cost of the estimate.
Personally I think it is BS that university personnel can own the work they create while doing their jobs. Being an academic has always been a traditional trade-off: lower wages than industry but more freedom to do what you want and (once you get tenure, which is almost inevitable here) much more job security. To then, on top of all that, get commercial benefits you would never get in industry... yeah it does seem like the taxpayer is getting ripped off.
The way it usually happens at my alma mater is they do most of the work as academic funded research, to which the public has access. Then when it looks commercially promising they start a company that owns the extra bits needed for commercial work. Enough of the work that is commercially necessary is owned by the company, or done on the academic dime but never disclosed, that having access to the public information doesn't do potential competitors any good. So, as far as commercial usefulness goes, they have basically locked up all the work, both academic funded and non-academic funded.
Multiples cores and real parallel processing development is just starting to become expected knowledge for the average application developer.
Multiple cores is a pretty simple concept. Parallel processing is a little more complex but should have been part of any CS degree for the last 30 years at least.
a lot of developers don't bother to understand multi-threading
Multiple threads and processes should have been covered in any good CS degree for at least the last 20 years. You can't understand OS design without knowing this stuff.
Fortunately there are some IDEs that make it easier for developers.
What IDE's make it easier to develop multi-core, parallel processing applications?
It's also a problem when users *think* they can do for themselves because they don't understand the reality of software. It may work for a while but by and large the the situation will gradually degrade into a nightmarish scene. So often I see otherwise smart management types who will ignore IT telling them the *right* thing to do for long term prospects and instead think "oh the users can slap something together that will be good enough and it will be soooo much cheaper than getting IT guys to do it."
Yes. But don't expect that to result in fewer people. Last year there was an editorial on global warming in my local paper. I can still remember the statement that there was no point in bringing up population reduction as it was a non-starter.
Why is that? The whole problem is too many people to be supported in a nice lifestyle by global resources. What happens when the population is so large that absolute minimum heat production for existing starts to become a factor in global warming?
We simply don't need nearly so many people as we have.
The term "worm" precedes that by more than a decade - used by John Brunner in his book Shockwave Rider. Brunner may not have been the first.
As for the efficacy of antivirus software... as stated it is clearly a losing battle. Instead of people paying $20/year for an anti-virus subscription they should contrinbute it to a bounty fund that awards $1,000,000 (or other suitable amounts) for the arrest and conviction of those using virus/worm/malware/etc. to cause problems to others.
Yup. I still see applications failing, or behaving in other ways, such that I know without a doubt they have done something that I would have failed my 20th century students for doing. It's the 21st century... anyone found coding a character buffer as fixed length without a really good reason should be fired. Anyone found coding buffer routines without buffer overflow checks should be fired. And so on, and so on and so on....
In a world where information is power, governments who don't actually represent their people will always try to control the knowledge that their people have access to, lest they loose their grip on them.
Every government I can think of fits that description. Every government keeps secrets from the population and I"m not talking just about secrets necessary for the safety of the country. Every government is run by people whose primary goal is to keep power. Political parties all use the same tools to get and keep power. The ones that don't either don't get power or don't keep it. It's one of the seamier facets of human nature and one we don't seem to be outgrowing.
Wasn't there a kerfuffle a few years back because some part of the government wanted to test people coming to Canada (not sure if it was immigrants or just visitors) from places where TB was common? The politically correct started complaining about racial profiling because, yeah, most TB carriers were coming from a small number of places and were of particular ethnicity.
Well if you are going to get all that nit picky then you shouldn't make statements that are self contradictory, such as:
look closely
"empirical evidence proving"
should never occur in any sentence ever.
Well, as I said, I'm sure the rules would disqualify it. But that's not the real point. The real point is that a solution that would work here on Earth isn't one that would necessarily work on the Moon, and vice versa.
For example, are there density requirements on the craft? If not can I make it a balloon and platform? The balloon not to provide net thrust but to simulate in some ways the reduced weight of the craft, propellant and payload the would exist on the Moon?
Can I put fans around the perimeter of the balloon, again not for thrust but to counteract wind and other turbulence that one would not encounter on the moon?
What about the control systems? They have to work *much* faster here on Earth than they would on the Moon. For example suppose you are 150 feet above ground when the engines cut out. On the moon you have a lot longer to do something about that problem than you do here on Earth.
Required specific impulse, burn rates and so on are all going to be different in a sea level Earth atmosphere than on the Moon.
IOW it seems like the only thing which is really the same is the optics... an actual moon lander and the contest vehicles *look* to be doing the same thing but really they are quite different in most respects. So could they come up with a more useful contest?
There is already more than one drug that is very effective at curing/treating depression. The DEA makes sure they aren't available despite the toll that depression inflicts on millions of sufferers.
For example Amineptine which not only causes release of dopamine but is also a dopamine re-uptake blocker. It is effective, fast acting, doesn't impair cognitive function, may improve sleep and unlike many anti-depressants doesn't reduce libido. However it can increase libido in women, cause spontaneous orgasms in women and generally makes one feel good. We mustn't have that. DEA pressure led to its withdrawal in Europe, Britain and the US.
Or opium which was apparently a traditional, and quite effective, remedy for dysthymia.
Well converting from one coordinate space to another has been a staple of math and physics for centuries so I doubt there is any defensible patent on simply converting from one space to another.
The best solution is completely non-technical... a $10,000,000 bounty for the arrest and conviction (in whatever court you may choose) of the owner of the botnet.
it's usually not all that difficult to tell the difference between a police raid and a home invasion.
Really? Just how many police raid/ home invasions have you been the victim of? Or are you just another armchair quarterback making guesses? There's a little thing called "panic response" which might cause the victim to misinterpret things.
or "Massive over-employment of highway patrol officers" because if the summary is right then 31,000 officers along a path across the US would mean on the order of 1 every 1,000 FEET or 5 per mile...
5) I know this will seem strange to men in the U.S., but women in Brazil generally like men and generally treat them well.
LOL... yeah the difference between US (and Canadian) women and women on most of the rest of the planet is astounding. I was working at a multinational in NA and I had a chat with a female sales rep visiting from the European branch of the company. She commented to me on how fearful the men in the company seemed in their behavior toward women.
I have a java app, and I want it to be able to open a spreadhseet in a popup window, actually many spreadsheets in many popups or client canvasses. I spent a little time looking to see how hard this would be but, IIRC, finding an answer and figuring out how to do it looked like it would be a lengthy and painful affair. Went another route. Better API docs would be a help for sure.
Slashdot Mirror
Well it's a little off topic but since you did post a link to your rant I have a comment to make. It said:
Second, the guy's listing stuff like being a customer service rep for a credit union on it. Why would I care about your work experience that doesn't relate to this project?
Most HR people care about this because holes in your resume, long periods of time with no discernible activity, are worrisome. It's just SOP to put everything in your resume for whatever period you are covering.
Also you seem to think you will get good people by asking them to give you a free estimate. Perhaps that is normal on the sites you mention but how much time are people supposed to spend giving out free estimates to every person who may be a potential client? I charge for my estimates - doing it properly takes time and my time is valuable - and I would guess that most other contractors whose skills put them in demand also charge. I don't know many good people who will do fixed price contracts - they don't have to. OTOH if a client goes ahead I will frequently write-off the cost of the estimate.
In fact, hard disks were the *first* nanotechnology we ever used, anywhere.
You might want to do a little research before making such sweeping claims.
Let me help you... it's all in Quebec. Concentrate your invasion on them and you'll be much more effective. Bring French speaking lawyers.
It depends on the individual university.
Personally I think it is BS that university personnel can own the work they create while doing their jobs. Being an academic has always been a traditional trade-off: lower wages than industry but more freedom to do what you want and (once you get tenure, which is almost inevitable here) much more job security. To then, on top of all that, get commercial benefits you would never get in industry... yeah it does seem like the taxpayer is getting ripped off.
The way it usually happens at my alma mater is they do most of the work as academic funded research, to which the public has access. Then when it looks commercially promising they start a company that owns the extra bits needed for commercial work. Enough of the work that is commercially necessary is owned by the company, or done on the academic dime but never disclosed, that having access to the public information doesn't do potential competitors any good. So, as far as commercial usefulness goes, they have basically locked up all the work, both academic funded and non-academic funded.
Multiples cores and real parallel processing development is just starting to become expected knowledge for the average application developer.
Multiple cores is a pretty simple concept. Parallel processing is a little more complex but should have been part of any CS degree for the last 30 years at least.
a lot of developers don't bother to understand multi-threading
Multiple threads and processes should have been covered in any good CS degree for at least the last 20 years. You can't understand OS design without knowing this stuff.
Fortunately there are some IDEs that make it easier for developers.
What IDE's make it easier to develop multi-core, parallel processing applications?
It's also a problem when users *think* they can do for themselves because they don't understand the reality of software. It may work for a while but by and large the the situation will gradually degrade into a nightmarish scene. So often I see otherwise smart management types who will ignore IT telling them the *right* thing to do for long term prospects and instead think "oh the users can slap something together that will be good enough and it will be soooo much cheaper than getting IT guys to do it."
Yes. But don't expect that to result in fewer people. Last year there was an editorial on global warming in my local paper. I can still remember the statement that there was no point in bringing up population reduction as it was a non-starter.
Why is that? The whole problem is too many people to be supported in a nice lifestyle by global resources. What happens when the population is so large that absolute minimum heat production for existing starts to become a factor in global warming?
We simply don't need nearly so many people as we have.
The term "worm" precedes that by more than a decade - used by John Brunner in his book Shockwave Rider. Brunner may not have been the first.
As for the efficacy of antivirus software... as stated it is clearly a losing battle. Instead of people paying $20/year for an anti-virus subscription they should contrinbute it to a bounty fund that awards $1,000,000 (or other suitable amounts) for the arrest and conviction of those using virus/worm/malware/etc. to cause problems to others.
Yup. I still see applications failing, or behaving in other ways, such that I know without a doubt they have done something that I would have failed my 20th century students for doing. It's the 21st century... anyone found coding a character buffer as fixed length without a really good reason should be fired. Anyone found coding buffer routines without buffer overflow checks should be fired. And so on, and so on and so on....
In a world where information is power, governments who don't actually represent their people will always try to control the knowledge that their people have access to, lest they loose their grip on them.
Every government I can think of fits that description. Every government keeps secrets from the population and I"m not talking just about secrets necessary for the safety of the country. Every government is run by people whose primary goal is to keep power. Political parties all use the same tools to get and keep power. The ones that don't either don't get power or don't keep it. It's one of the seamier facets of human nature and one we don't seem to be outgrowing.
Wasn't there a kerfuffle a few years back because some part of the government wanted to test people coming to Canada (not sure if it was immigrants or just visitors) from places where TB was common? The politically correct started complaining about racial profiling because, yeah, most TB carriers were coming from a small number of places and were of particular ethnicity.
Nope, that's when you call on SG1!
Yeah... not quite as good as being on board yourself but not bad eh?
Well if you are going to get all that nit picky then you shouldn't make statements that are self contradictory, such as: look closely "empirical evidence proving" should never occur in any sentence ever.
Well, as I said, I'm sure the rules would disqualify it. But that's not the real point. The real point is that a solution that would work here on Earth isn't one that would necessarily work on the Moon, and vice versa.
For example, are there density requirements on the craft? If not can I make it a balloon and platform? The balloon not to provide net thrust but to simulate in some ways the reduced weight of the craft, propellant and payload the would exist on the Moon?
Can I put fans around the perimeter of the balloon, again not for thrust but to counteract wind and other turbulence that one would not encounter on the moon?
What about the control systems? They have to work *much* faster here on Earth than they would on the Moon. For example suppose you are 150 feet above ground when the engines cut out. On the moon you have a lot longer to do something about that problem than you do here on Earth.
Required specific impulse, burn rates and so on are all going to be different in a sea level Earth atmosphere than on the Moon.
IOW it seems like the only thing which is really the same is the optics... an actual moon lander and the contest vehicles *look* to be doing the same thing but really they are quite different in most respects. So could they come up with a more useful contest?
There is already more than one drug that is very effective at curing/treating depression. The DEA makes sure they aren't available despite the toll that depression inflicts on millions of sufferers.
For example Amineptine which not only causes release of dopamine but is also a dopamine re-uptake blocker. It is effective, fast acting, doesn't impair cognitive function, may improve sleep and unlike many anti-depressants doesn't reduce libido. However it can increase libido in women, cause spontaneous orgasms in women and generally makes one feel good. We mustn't have that. DEA pressure led to its withdrawal in Europe, Britain and the US.
Or opium which was apparently a traditional, and quite effective, remedy for dysthymia.
I'm sure the rules have something to disqualify it but a $100 model helicopter will do all the things described.
Well converting from one coordinate space to another has been a staple of math and physics for centuries so I doubt there is any defensible patent on simply converting from one space to another.
The best solution is completely non-technical... a $10,000,000 bounty for the arrest and conviction (in whatever court you may choose) of the owner of the botnet.
it's usually not all that difficult to tell the difference between a police raid and a home invasion.
Really? Just how many police raid/ home invasions have you been the victim of? Or are you just another armchair quarterback making guesses? There's a little thing called "panic response" which might cause the victim to misinterpret things.
or "Massive over-employment of highway patrol officers" because if the summary is right then 31,000 officers along a path across the US would mean on the order of 1 every 1,000 FEET or 5 per mile...
5) I know this will seem strange to men in the U.S., but women in Brazil generally like men and generally treat them well.
LOL... yeah the difference between US (and Canadian) women and women on most of the rest of the planet is astounding. I was working at a multinational in NA and I had a chat with a female sales rep visiting from the European branch of the company. She commented to me on how fearful the men in the company seemed in their behavior toward women.
From one of the guys at Seattle Computer Products, across the street from Microsoft, in Bellevue. It started as a CPM clone.
I agree. Especially on Shatner owning the role. Still perhaps there will be a crossover with an appearance by space lawyer Denny Crane...
I have a java app, and I want it to be able to open a spreadhseet in a popup window, actually many spreadsheets in many popups or client canvasses. I spent a little time looking to see how hard this would be but, IIRC, finding an answer and figuring out how to do it looked like it would be a lengthy and painful affair. Went another route. Better API docs would be a help for sure.