Last tickets I bought from Rygge to Stansted cost as 79NOK each way (about £7) + the £6. So that's £26 return. Since it's only a weekend, we use backpacks for carry-on which is actually the only thing free on RyanAir these days... pretty sure they charge extra for a pilot. If you book the bus a month beforehand, it's £9 each way. Oh... and as you mentioned, prices in Norway are expensive, so the backpacks are empty going there. We buy clothing when we get there. Just bring toiletries. And there's some fee for using a non-RyanAir Visa which covers the processing fee. So, it's about £50 per person for flight and bus. And then on this end, Rygge is in a deserted area, nothing but corn and cows near by. So, I drive my Prius to and from the airport and park on a shoulder outside of the garage. About another £12 for gas.
The kicker of it is... if I buy cigarettes (as a smoker) at the airport coming home, I pay £35 a carton which would cost me £100 a carton here in Norway. I can bring one and my wife can bring one. That saves me £130 which covers almost the cost of 3 of us... then getting 8 new outfits of clothing (2 each) saves us about another £150. So, between the tickets, the cigarettes and the lower cost of food while we're there. A single trip to London is better than free:) My kids even save money since they'll save up their allowance, birthday and christmas money for these trips because even shopping at Hamley's is 1/3 the cost of shopping at the discount mart here in Oslo.
Of course, I should quite smoking... but even if I did so, it would still cost almost nothing to be there.
P.S. I absolutely love that town. I would never live there, but I love coming there for visits.:)
I think it goes both ways. I'm not saying that documentation needs to cover every aspect of the code, but proper top-level design documents make a great deal of sense. A document or two per project which explains how it should work. Too often, I go back to code I wrote earlier without documentation and some guys "Hacked around" to make something work and more or less completely destroyed the entire design. The result is having to go back and demangle what they have done.
It would be great if people were better about spending more time hacking around before modifying certain code, there's no reason that code in a given module or at least function should be so inconsistent. At the very least, if the original coder consistently used "index" as a variable name in there code, adding "idx" to it is ugly. Also, if the practice in the existing code is to employ the use of an iterator to traverse a collection, to then start searching by reference is not only ugly, but could be dangerous. A proper collection iterator should be able to readjust itself if another thread modifies the collection or should properly mutex the collection. Of course, when the new guy checks in his code, everything works, but then when you write code that modifies the collection elsewhere, the whole thing falls to pieces because the design hadn't been followed.
I tend to work on far more complex code than most. I write real-time systems processing hundreds of megabytes of data from dozens of processing cores... and I count cycles at times (though I don't write assembler, I do often lay my C++ code out in a way that it compiles more efficiently). So, design is critical.
Oh... and doxygen is the greatest thing since.... screw the sliced bread... it doesn't have anything on doxygen:)
I'm an atheist and I really am not sure about my wife. I think she wants to believe, but I don't make it very easy to hehe.
To me, the marriage itself is irrelevant. Actually, not entirely, I live in a country other than my own and the marriage initially made that possible. But that's not the reason we got married. Marriage was very important to her and her family... who are Christians.
There are no duties or privileges that are not applicable within a responsible relationship that requires marriage to make so. Also, a formal announcement and a legal binding are two entirely different things. In fact, I'm a strong believer that people should be able to get legally bound in every way that marriage suggests no matter what their sex, religion or even how many there are. I think if four old ladies are living in a house together and they are all that each other has in the world, they should be able to get "legally married" so that from every perspective which the government is concerned, they are as codependent as a married couple. If one decides to leave, they can choose to hire a lawyer or sit before a mediator to decide what that person should take away from the relationship.
It's so sad and pathetic that we live in a world where marriage and divorce is a concern of the government. What's even more humorous is that the people who are most adamant regarding marriage and the government are the ones who are also most vocal about wanting the government to be smaller and have a lesser impact on their lives.
Sure, there's a gazillion lines of COBOL code out there in banking, it would take FOREVER to replace, though there are more modern banking systems which provide a solid starting point and it could be done and it might cost less than running IBM mainframes. But there's another great reason for COBOL.
COBOL is a crippled language. Unlike most other languages where all the code is written in that language... or maybe with the help of one more language. COBOL is an insanely retarded language. COBOL is generally only used for processing things. RPG-IV or something similar is used for terminal user interfaces, web based systems can communicate with the COBOL back end and then COBOL would perform the transactions required. COBOL itself doesn't even store the data. Even though COBOL often has a crippled internal ISAM or possibly can use SQL. More often than not, COBOL is linked to a DB/2 database... which is more of a large scale ISAM as opposed to a SQL server. Think of it as the data store used by an SQL server. Records are searched for using archaic search methods based on classic database structures... more like how it was done with dBase, FoxPro or Clipper.
While I don't recommend writing code in COBOL... you should consider the mainframe model of development.
1) The web interface DOES NOT query data directly from the data store. Instead, it requests data from a broken on another server.
2) The other server is connected using a non-IP protocol. The only method of requesting data from the other server is through a simpler interface which is fully known. You can't ask for credit card numbers for example. This can be accomplished using Ethernet, but avoid using IP. It's far too big and hard to understand. Using Infiniband as a link is great because you can use MPI over Infiniband to send a message asking for data and then wait for a result. This sounds more expensive than it is... but Infiniband is pretty damn cheap until you need fabric switches. Point to point is pretty easy on the wallet. The key is, any machine accessing data on the database should not under any circumstance be able to define its own query. Add a new function with parameters for each query. It must be explicit.
2a) Ultimate paranoia. Critical information such as credit cards and social security numbers exist on a separate payment processing machine hidden behind that machine. All communication with that machine is performed over a dedicated data link such as a high speed serial port (you can get them in megabit+ speeds these days) and all queries performed on that machine will be 100% explicit and will guarantee that there is no possible means of requesting anything other than the last 4 digits of either number. Transactions are sent to that machine, it performs the transaction and responds back with "Yes or no!". If a single user has multiple credit cards... there can be a query function which returns the card type and the last 4 digits only.
3) Just like an IBM mainframe. NO C/C++ code compiled native. This is simply because C and C++ lack proper memory management for secure systems. People still use pointers when they should use classes and there's no run-time checking on these things. Instead run inside a VM type environment. I recommend using a web server running on top of Mono or on top of Java. Not a web server running Mono or Java inside of them. This way, there's a much higher amount of security involved. Yes, this can still go wrong... but the chances are much lower. Make it a requirement that all classes and functions which are used in the system are compiled for the virtual machine and DOES NOT call out of the VM... unless there is no alternative.
4) Port 443 is the only open port on the systems... no exception. If you run netstat -a there should be absolutely no ports listening other than HTTPS.
5) Hardware based load balancing proxy server. These are expensiveish... but if you get a hardware based proxy server that load balances by proxying HTTPS requests across your web servers, it'll m
Secure coding is not that secure. It takes more than just code to guarantee security. Secure coding checklists are generally made reactively. When we learn about a new way to hack, we add another layer.
For the moment, we're pretty damn sure that a LightHTTPd and Linux or OpenBSD box is going to be rock solid regarding security. Though, there are still regularly security fixes coming out. Sure, it's not as often as earlier, but it still happens.
There are cases like mine where my FaceBook is never logged off and my wife can read it any time she wants. The reason is, there's nothing to hide. I've classically been "The Safe Guy" on FaceBook and at the office and elsewhere. Women will hang around me and even flirt a bit with me because they know that not only do I enjoy the attention, but that there's just no way that I'm going to be a risk to them. I'm also the guy who will bring them safely home at the end of the night if they drink to much.
You make the presumption that it's an issue that it's easier for people to get caught. And yet, men acting inappropriately or stupidly probably only accounts for about half of the cases. Some guy adding his ex from high school or someone else that his wife is jealous of (and it works reversing the genders as well) probably accounts for a lot also. People are extremely insecure at times. All my ex-girlfriends which didn't turn out to be nut jobs (and even one or two that did) are on my friends list. I also have the captain of the high school cheer leading team and others which my wife could easily get jealous of if she didn't understand me well enough to know that friends are friends... wife is wife. You do some things with friends, you do some more things with wife:)
Now, there's another big reason for it. Women or men who got married too quickly, found out that they screwed up... maybe getting married too young, got married for the money, got married just to throw a wedding (watch TLC sometime, Bridezilla, Left at the Alter, etc...) and once the dream wedding was over, there was no point to the marriage. All kinds of reasons people get married when they really shouldn't have and then FaceBook is a great way to come up with "evidence" against their spouse so they can get out of it without getting too burned.
So, FaceBook is probably just something that magnifies problems for some people. Jealous and insecure people were able to lie to themselves beforehand and pretend like it's just their imagination and now they got some confirmation it wasn't. Guys who act like assholes behind their wive's backs get talked about. People who were looking for a way out to begin with can find things more easily. In short, Facebook is really nothing more than a tool.
Now, for the real solution to this problem. DON'T GET MARRIED. Marriage is a religious commitment between two people before an audience and some god of some type. In most religions, it's expected to be for life. If you and your girl are two people who are the types to not "stick together through thick and thin" then getting married in the first place is a lie. In modern times where a woman is able to put food on her own table, buy her own cloths and if necessary put a roof over her own head, there's absolutely no good reason for marriage other than religious belief. If you have kids together and are worried about the issue of custody if one of the parent die, there are civil unions and contractual agreements for that. You don't have to get legally married to have a wedding party. You don't have to get legally married to get some guy in a funny costume or hat ask you if you love each other. Legal marriage is an institution which says "I'll make a promise to this lady because I love her and I don't want her to ever worry about where her next meal is coming from. I legally take the responsibility of this woman and promise that since she is incapable of taking care of herself if need be, this will take care of that." and to a woman it says "I'm too weak to care for myself and I need some legal protection that makes it so he can't just run off to be with someone else without some form of legal and financial repercussion. So even if he does ditch me for someone who's willing to do things I'm not, he'll owe me for life". Civil union allows all the things like "If the decision comes whether to take me off of life support, I want this person to choose", but so does a living will.
Just remember, marriage is designed to protect the weaker gender. Oh... marriage is also the core of the entire divorce attorney business.
I'm an old dog in the business as well my friend. I'm 36 years old. The difference is, with a brief exception (needed a rest) I've been pumping out code for the past 20 years on a professional level. Yes, I've worked full time as a programmer from the age of 16 after dropping out of high school. Initially, I worked for places that were so cheap that they would prefer a wet behind the ears kind of kid. Later I worked as a consultant, bouncing from contract to contract. During that time, I did some night courses and also made a few bucks doing homework for other students since I couldn't afford to pay the tuition for those classes myself. So I gained the education on someone else's dime.
Eventually, I got a job working for real companies that went big and now, given my resume, the lack of university degree became less important. But, while I'm not overly concern about finding my next job, I do know that I'll have a bit of a hard time finding it if I go through the normal channels.. meaning applying for a job through a recruiter or whatever where I'm just another schmuck.
Here's the real problem with old guys like us. We might be meticulous, but we're slow and don't have the energy that the younger guy has. That guy is going to make up for lack of talent with persistence and a desperate need to prove him/herself. Additionally, the skill set you mention is specifically "A young man's game".
I do have several recommendations for you.
1) You've been in sales which means you know lots of guys in ties. Take advantage of it. Get a consulting position to produce something they need. There are a tons of companies who would like to make themselves present on phones. Find a way to merge the tech together and make it happen.
2) Find something you really want to do and make it happen. One app at $1 a piece might make you a few thousand bucks. 10 apps might make you several tens of thousands. Pick projects which take 1 month to complete on your own. Stuff which has genuine need. Ask people about things they think is missing from the phones. Build it.
3) Play the jesus card. You don't have to be religion and as long as you're not walking around with pentagrams tattooed to your forehead, you can go from church to church offering to make an app for organizing the church functions. Things like a bulletin board for the ladies groups. Stuff like that. They'd pay like hell, but after you've made it once, you'd charge $1 for it and alter it just a little for each church you "customize it for" or skin it for. With a bit more work, you can automate the process and allow the churches to log into your site, pay $100 and make their own version with a few clicks.
4) Find a few more "old dogs" and work together with them to make something bigger. You'd be surprised how easy it is to find guys who are recent retirees that was to get involved in something "new" and have a reason to jabber like they used to. The alternative is for them to go to church and die slowly. And to them, you're a youngster, not an oldy.
I'd tell you about my upcoming plan... but I'm convinced that there's only room for one of this in the market.. and it'll take 3-6 months before someone else decided to do it cheaper than me and knocks me off the market. So, I have to make what I can as fast as I can:)
These days... I'm a 36 year old guy with 20 years C++ programming experience in senior level positions, and I started programming BASIC on a Commodore PET when I was 6 years old. What I have learned since which makes a huge difference between the guy who is an awesome C++ coder and the guy who is an awesome C++ coder with 10 years experience is how natural the structure of code develops itself when you're writing it. I am just about finished with a module I'm working on for a fairly complex protocol implementation which now weighs in at 50,000 lines of code (much of it comments and white space). Everything was "designed" and is there is extensive error checking and logging.
I won't say a young guy wouldn't have the skills to do this. What I will say however is that after 10 years, you'll have spent a great deal of time pissed about how other people write code. You'll eventually learn to fix instead of rewrite. And when you write new code, you'll set a standard for the other developers to live up to. I used to say that the way you could judge a new programmer best is to see how long it takes before he's been working on nearly a million lines of legacy code written by 50 people over 10 years and say "We need to rewrite this"... which almost certainly is true... but not practical. Then how bright he/she really is is measured based on how long the developer takes to recognize that the code can never be rewritten in whole... and instead finds a way to adapt where necessary and clean up what they can when they feel it's useful.
Sadly, I have been through many projects so far where we've spent ages and even massive numbers of hours trying to decided whether or not to switch to a string class. And then arguing over how to handle unicode. Some will say "There needs to be an 8-bit class and a 16-bit class, sub-classed from a common class", others will say "The string class should use a void * internally and store the string data as 8-bit unless there are unicode characters in it. At which time it should be 16-bit", then guys like me will say "I don't care how the class stores the data internally as long as it has calls to receive it as either unicode or Latin-1.". Of course, while everyone else is arguing, then I or another will simply sit down and write the class and say "Done... here it is... use it. If you want it done 'better' then fix it. But this is the interface".
There are billions of lines of code based on code written during times when systems were more limited. A developer with more experience will have been in the industry long enough that they will understand why certain choices were made the way they were and then, change what should be changed or understand why some things were done the way they were. I still intentionally code some things the old fashioned ways to make it perform better. There's really no reason that code designed to pack bits into a stream should be heavily object oriented. A flat design is nicer for that.
So... There is a benefit to programmers that are "A Bit Old School".
But... I will say this... the 27 year old guy who sits to the right of me... even though his coding style is not quite refined and sometimes he introduces structural complexity beyond reason to make sure "He uses the right pattern". He gets the job done as well. Sadly, documentation is an after thought for him, but there's no reason if he and I were to apply for the same job somewhere else that they should pay more for me than for him.
Frankly... if you're being mocked... you're obviously not being ignored.:)
However, you should seriously look at the real issue with modern protests... pretty much anything "Post hippy". Protests can have legitimate, decent looking and well presented people involved with them. But it doesn't take long for the "Causies" to come running. These are pretty much the tea party of causes. They read the head line and haul ass to be part of the protest... they don't know what the protest is really about, but they come running.
Occupy Wall Street was pathetic. I mean really. A bunch or whiny little cry babies who were protesting what was happening on wall street without having the slightest clue about what it was. They were just pointing at the gamblers in expensive suits and saying "It's your fault". The wall street assholes were responding by saying "I didn't hear people complain when we increased the value of their 401Ks by 300%" which in itself was idiotic since if that money were invested in building companies instead of being day traded or high speed traded, then those people would be adding 100% more money themselves, then maybe the investment would only rise by an equal 100% given a 200% yield at the time, but the artificial inflation of the dollar would be dramatically less during the same period of time and that 200% increase would actually yield substantially greater buying power for the 401K holder. Let's also remember that most of those people who are so dependent on their 401K will need to "borrow from it" during their unemployment since their money is being used to gamble instead of secure the health of the companies they work for. The protesters didn't understand any of this... the most vocal ones were the ones who got the Ph.D. in social anthropology, ran up $200,000 at prestigious schools by using loans to live for 8 years instead of working a job and now are pissed that they aren't qualified for anything other than wearing a paper hat at McDonalds... or working as a professor in social anthropology at a lesser university.
Let's be straight about this... if you go to the university and you study something. Before you decide to run up $200,000 in debt in a Ph.D., you should identify whether you can pay back the loan using one of the jobs that are realistically attainable in your chosen field. No one forces a person to run up $200,000 in debt. If you're studying computer science, make sure that what you're studying is applicable to a real job... not some imaginary job that Oracle, Microsoft or IBM are claiming will be hot in 5 years. What's worse is, if you're an engineer, then your job description is always going to be "Find a way to solve a problem using the tools available to you. Then make it happen". So, if you're an engineer who couldn't plan that there would be problems like "I will need to find a job that will pay down my loans" followed by "I have graduated, now I need to find a way to pay my loans". etc... Then you are in fact the shittiest engineer on the planet. You can't even handle the simplest requirement of being an engineer which is "People come to you to find ways to solve problems.".
So, when you see an engineer on wall street talking about how they couldn't figure out a way to solve their own problem... umm... really? Get off your ass and figure it out. You want to know why you don't have a job? It's because you suck at what it is you're supposed to do.
Modern protesters are a joke. What's worse is that protesters don't generally understand the first thing about politics. The fact is, if everyone who participated in occupy wall street would have each chipped in $10 and then collectively used that money to hire a few lobbyists to go straight to the politicians... far more would have been accomplished.
Protests have their place. But the fact is... raising $10 from each person opposed to the TSA and running a real campaign with lobbying and campaign contributions to politicians willing to make the change desired would be so much more effective than any form of protesting. It is impossible in modern times to run a protest without the freaks showing up and ruining all your credibility and making you look like a laughing stock.
I'd imagine that the TSAs biggest financial expense is rubber gloves. Those things aren't cheap. Sure, when you're buying 2.5 billion pairs a year, the price decreases per unit. You need to have latex free ones as well, I'd imagine they cost more. And then there's the insurance related to the injuries sustained while trying to make an impressive snapping sound as you put them on. Then there's the issue of disposal... after they enter a persons rectum, they are considered medical waste.
First of all, I doubt that Steven would introduce the employee as "My bitch", he would certainly be more respectful than that. He would probably refer to the person as "My technical assistant" or "The genius that makes it possible for me to communicate".
The circles that he would travel in would be quite prestigious. In the science community he'd be regularly in the presence of some of the greatest minds alive today. In the political community, he's among the "Rock Stars" that politicians want to have pictures of themselves standing next to... as if the association would make them smarter.
On top of that... companies focused on making hardware/software solutions would almost certainly consider a person who worked directly with Steven Hawkings on his accessibility solutions as an ideal CTO for their company. If a person is interested in accessibility solutions as a career and would be interested in starting a business, obtaining government grants or simply raising money for the company would be simple having had that position earlier.
I'd imagine that there are even some great UN posts for someone who held this position. Technical adviser or chairman of this committee of another.
So... while the pay sucks majors balls... if a person sticks around in this position for 4-5 years... they can almost certainly gain the visibility and even a certain level of prestige which would secure their future indefinitely.
Oh... the fact that the person could in theory learn something along the way or even have the opportunity to test their system upgrades by having high level conversations about theoretical physics with a person, who though not as amazing as the press makes him, but still certainly capable of holding his own might be a big bonus for some.
If I weren't married with kids, I would seriously consider this position.
One room of my house has been converted into a mini-theater/game room. We have two projectors (the little one I though would be good enough... but wasn't and a much better one which cost me less than $1000 and is REALLY great). It allows us to play multi-player games together, but more importantly, we have a 120" movie screen with surround sound, two couches, bean bag chairs, a popcorn machine, a drink dispenser and a mini-fridge. And no... we're not fat:)
I built this room up when 3D movies came out. It's too damn hard to find a movie theater anymore where I don't have to wear a shitty pair of plastic glasses that give me head aches from the 3D or the unfamiliar pressure on my temples (sadly I lied about being fat... I have a really fat head... hopefully it means I have room for a bigger brain but more likely is a deformity). Last time I took the family to the theater, it cost me $18 a ticket (I'm in Norway), that's $72 just for tickets. Then two medium buckets of popcorn, 4 drinks and a pack of candy for each of us ran about another $50. That's $122 to go to the movies. Oh... and I had to pay for parking as well. That was another $20. So $142 for a movie. Sometimes we even had to pay for the cheap ass glasses... that adds up to another $20. So, now we're up to $162.
I can go online and purchase a film from iTunes, it costs $10-$20. If I rent, it's $2-$5. Popcorn costs us about $0.50 a bucket. Drinks cost $1 each. Candy costs $3 a pack (as we tend to purchase over priced, imported reeses peanut butter cups). Worst cast, $39, but more often closer to $29.
The movie room altogether cost probably about $2000 and since the kids and I spend probably 1/4 of our recreation time in there, it is paid off QUICKLY. Even if we did a movie night every other week, it still would have paid for itself in less than a year.
We stopped going to the theater for many reasons, but 3D (stupid glasses to see crappy picture quality) is the biggest one. Ticket prices was #2. Parking #3. Overpriced junk food #4.
OH!!!!! One more thing. Last time I went to the movies, they actually played 40 minutes of advertisements before starting the film. NO SHIT!!! 40 Minutes!!!! I clocked it. After gouging me for a fortune in tickets and junk food... they then forced me to watch 40 minutes of advertisements before seeing the 92 minute film!!! ARE YOU SERIOUS?!?!!?!? The kids were already out of drinks before the f-ing advertisements were over.
For a good laugh... I can buy round trip tickets to London for $100 a person (after taxes and transportation to and from the airport as well as parking), for a total of $400 between us. Then pay about $120 for a motel room for us. Even eating out every meal, we'd save about $10 per meal, or $60 in total. So, $460 for a weekend trip to London for the whole family. $162 times 3 is $486. So it actually costs me less to go to London with the whole family for a weekend than to go to three movies.
Unity3D meets many different needs... you can code pretty much any type of game, but think of Unity3D as the Visual Basic of game design. It has nearly everything you need in a single IDE which also has full C# language support. If you wanted to teach the kids things like game programming theory like rendering and shading... well that's something else altogether. If you want to teach them how to make an actual game... use an engine like this.
Unreal Engine 3 is also nice, but I don't think it's nearly as intuitive. A bit out of reach even for really bright teenagers.
I do however recommend trying to convince the kids to read a book on game/3D programming as you go along... like a homework assignment. There are a few really good ones which cover the math involved in the first few chapters and if you help them a little, you can teach them about the power of matrices... which needless to say is pretty much the entire underlying foundation of game engine programming.
Also, writing a game without an engine is total insanity when teaching if for no other reason but audio synchronization. I have used months at a time in the past just coding high granularity, event based audio code. That topic along is far beyond the scope of when you could teach in a 1 day a week course to kids. Stick to a premade engine.
I have owned many phones. I have played with hundreds of phones (through my previous job) and what I can say about iPhone (being an iPhone 4 addict myself) is that it is a "Does everything passably well or better phone". Sony has tried so hard to make a "Game Phone" or a "Walkman Phone". Nokia tries to make "Music phones" or "Ovi Phones". Blackberry tries to make "Messenger phones". HTC tries to make "movie phones"
iPhone tries to make a phone that plays music well, plays films well, reads mail well, runs games well, interacts with the Apple stores well etc... In short, they make phones that do a little of this and a little of that and while it doesn't do any one thing particularly awesome like those specialized phones do, it does each one of the things it does... well.
iPhone is a marketing miracle. Apple converted itself from a tech company to a fashion company. They don't try to make cheap phones so everyone can afford one. They focus on making the phone do the things they want it to do and then they sell it to people who can afford them. I am 100% locked into Apple products. I have purchased tons of stuff on the Apple stores and make use of iCloud for phone books and everything. The personal cost to switch away from them would require me to replaced 3 iPads, 4 iPhones and an Apple TV. I have ditched my person iPad recently as I never used it for more than watching films and now I have a Windows 8 Tablet (Series 7 Slate), and from there I can run iTunes... the full version.
This is a new era of telephones. We should stop categorizing phones as smart phones and instead categorize the ones which don't run Android, iOS or Windows Phone (yeh... tried BlackBerry... recently... not really in the same category) as junk phones or tossers. It is just plain stupid to call a Android Phone with a 66Mhz processor and 32megs of RAM a smart phone and yet, they sell by the millions.
Windows Phone is pretty nice. I would seriously consider using a Windows Phone for a year. But as I said, I'm locked into iPhone. Which is ok... at least it's a phone from a a bunch of crooks that know they're a bunch of crooks. Google is a truly scary bunch of crooks because they don't realize they are crooks. And Microsoft well... they're actually much better than ever before. They almost seem honest in comparison these days.
I really don't want Apple, Microsoft or Google to crush one another... I like having options. Now if Office Live 365 works on Android devices... Android might even be pretty good if they ever make it to a real laptop. Apple really needs to make iDevices be able to switch between iOS and OS X. Microsoft is on the right track... but they'l have to fight for it. I'm pretty sure... Microsoft's future is going to be based on people using their mobile phones as their PC and simply docking it with a mouse, screen an keyboard. So, as opposed to getting people to switch to Windows Phone, it's more of an issue of making Windows Phone as good as possible so that when PCs are small enough to be used as phones, they'll be ready.
The fact that paper records are utter crap to begin with and all survey information should be computerized anyway, it doesn't matter what system the measurement was made in the first place, a user should be able to click and choose which unit of measurement they would prefer to see... even if it's the Ramses II cubit (the cubit changed over time).
Of course, in Europe, we still use inches quite bit... the difference is, we don't purchase a 2x4 anymore, we purchase as 38x89 instead. The discrepancy in the conversion is that the metric conversion measures the wood after it's been dried and planed where the U.S. version measure before hand.
I have seen carpenters measuring using the width of their thumbs which is actually where inches come from in the first place.
For most other things, the imperial system is pretty much dead. On my recent trips to England... I have seen that with the exception of the ever-important pint, they have also made the change over to metric.
But as I said, you have good and bad points. There's absolutely no reason that in a world such as ours, we'd have to depend on a given measurement unit. Hell, I don't see any reason programs like AutoCad for example couldn't be changed to allow you to specify new measurement schemes as well. For example, if you were to design a solar sail, you might design it using metric since a full sized sail would be many meters wide and high. Though a proper solar sail would likely be produced by "knitting" a sheet of carbon atoms. Therefore, when passing the design to manufacturing, it might make sense to supply the measurements relative to the width of a carbon atom. Like 9.8123 billion carbon atoms in length and 82.995 billion carbon atoms in width and 1 carbon atom in depth. Just make a screen in the software which allows you to define your own measurement system and how to display it.
I am an American... and strange one... I can perform ASE/Imperial/Metric conversions subconsciously without a problem and have never really had an issue using one or the other. I find myself playing video games at times and hearing my wife ask me how many milliliters 1.5 cups is when she's baking from one of my recipes. We don't own any cup measures.
The problem is... while metric is obviously mathematically easier since you can easily think "100cm is a meter and 1000 meters is a kilometer and therefore 100,000 cm is a kilometer" instead of "There are 3 feet in a yard and there are 5280 feet in a mile and therefore there is 1760 yards in a mile." people still need a calculator to handle the math because multiplying 5 by 100,000 is too complex for the average person. Yes... really.
Americans are actually better in arithmetic because of the screwed up ASE system of measurement.
P.S. - We do not use Imperial measure in the U.S., we use ASE. There is a discrepancy between the two systems with regards to measurement of liquid volume. This is because, when you transport a gallon of wine from England to Boston using a barrel on a wooden sailing ship, some of the wine evaporates and the English would not accept less money for delivering less wine. Therefore, 1 U.S. gallon is approximately 0.832 imperial gallons.
My home server is a machine which I've been running for the past 20 years in one form or another. It's never been completely rebuilt, though sometimes I have come close as I've replaced everything but the case itself. But I like to think of it as the ever evolving server.
Currently, it is an entirely passively cooled system and with the exception of the drives making clicking sounds on occasion is utterly silent.
1) Big roomy case. I'm using an I&S 4U rack mount case which has room for 8 vertically mounted 5.25" hard drives. I have a homegrown rack made out of kitchen counter top material and rack rails and a few screws mounted on rubber coated wheels as well. This makes it even quieter. 2) I lied about the 100% passively cooled. The power supply is not passively cooled, but by using a 1000w power supply for a system which uses about 100watts at peak load, the fan on the power supply serves as the CPU fan as well. I have to put my head up to the machine to hear it though. Search and you will find one... they're easy to come by. 3) 8x 2TB Seagate 5900RPM drives. They're cheap (or were before the "shortage") though I'd use 3TB or hold off for 4TB drives now. 4) Highpoint Rocket RAID 2720. It has 8 ports on it and has proven its worth already (I'm using the previous model, but this one is better) since I run RAID 5 and have survived two hard drive failures in the past year. The 2720 is worth its weight in gold because it has full support for SAS expanders, so this controller is actually useful for hooking up 24 drives without fans by using the EJ240 SAS expander in another case. 5) Using super cheap $1 each 3.5" to 5.25" brackets, I mount the 8 hard drives vertically in the chassis. This leaves A LOT of room to keep them cool passively. Perfect!
These are the easy parts... the trickier part is getting the right motherboard for the software. I personally run Windows Home Server 2011 which is perfect for my needs. I bought a copy from an online vendor for $35. It has DLNA, has something like Time Machine for Windows computers and with some other downloads, I have NFS and AFS+ support. I added a licensed copy of Alcohol 120% which allows me to mount CD/DVD images on other computers as iSCSI and it even emulates the copy protection schemes, so when I buy a game DVD, I can use it from any computer in the house without having to use NO-DVD cracks. I also run Air Video Server which allows me to play pretty much any file from the server to iDevices without reencoding.
So that's the point.. being able to encode multiple streams for streaming in real time and still being passively cooled. At the moment, I'm using a power hogging Core 2 Quad Q8400 CPU.... I'm not pleased with the power consumption and I have been running a few trial runs to see if a 45W Core i5 2500T would work for my needs. Using Intel QuickSync, it is proving to be a perfect solution as the CPU, even when re-encoding videos uses almost no power. Also, but moving the video card into the CPU, it eliminates most of the remaining power foot print of the system.
Then the last remaining item was purchasing memory which is low power as well. I tried 10 different sets of DIMMS and eventually found that power usage on RAM could vary as much as 10 watts for 8gigs.
I log power consumption of the machine 24/7 and find that the machine uses 25 watts when it is idling and peaks at 100 watts in bursts. Overall, the average power consumption of the machine is 37 watts.... less than the cable set top box provided to me by Altibox in Norway. (with the core i5... it's closer to 65watts with the Q8400 and the graphics in the chipset).
Oh... ONE LAST THING... the boot drive. I don't boot from the RAID. I boot from an SSD. I bought a cheap 60GB SSD for $60 from a "fire sale" which is slow... only 120MB/sec.
I'm sure that using Myth server or something else on Linux, this configuration would work well for you too. It's a little pricey... but it gives me 14TB of formatted space. If low power 4TB drives come out sometime soon... I may replace the 8 drives with 4 of those and then just add one as needed... I can afford losing the last 2TB since I'm not using all 14TB just yet.
I just want to see if I understand this correctly. You're suggesting that the world's biggest and most powerful processor company who has shown repetitively that they can produce the processors capable of the greatest performance per watt for general purpose computing shouldn't be able to produce an efficient processor as well?
I'm just wondering... do you really believe that the inefficiency you're talking about is related to an instruction set? Really? It's actually like saying that people are less efficient if they speak Mandarin as opposed to English though maybe more efficient if they speak Spanish. There are obviously advantages and disadvantages of each instruction set, but in truth, all a processor is is a device capable of processing a list of instructions.
Now, to compare it to something more intelligent... if you can cope with intelligence... I hope so.
It is possible to write directions to the your house for someone. Assuming that you have a starting point, you can provide instructions with multiple levels of detail. You can put a great deal of effort into every minute detail and even over compensate. On option you have is :
"Try every single road in this town until you find a blue house with a purple roof and a green football flag on the lawn". The alternative would be
"Take this road to this road. You'll recognize this road because of the gas station at the corner on your left side. Turn right at this intersection." and so forth.
Which is more efficient? It doesn't matter what language or instruction set you write it in... what matters is the quality of the instructions you provide.
Desktop operating systems which are generally what's run on x86 processors tend to be written by people who know they have access to what feels like unlimited CPU power. The operating systems focus entirely on user experience and not specifically on efficiency. If an OS is designed to be efficient and usable, then there's much to be gained. At this point in time, we're limited to pathetic half breeds like versions of linux that are so covered in band-aids to make it run on small devices you almost want to cry, Symbian which wasn't functional, but was power efficient. Windows CE which was the same... a few others and soon a version of Windows 8 that will be similar to how Linux has been bastardized to run on small devices.
Android has had some of the greatest work done on it to make it more efficient. To compensate for the obvious short-comings in the Linux kernel, Android implements itself on top of something similar to Java which in effect makes it more power efficient. It's not that Java itself or Java programmers are more efficient. It's that by having a virtual machine layer that performs more "traffic control" on the system, power efficiency can be more easily achieved. This would be true for an MSIL or LLVM virtual machine as well. The extra layer makes it so that the virtual machine can do things like shut down or decrease the priority of a given virtual processor as a software function and makes it so that software developers don't have to instrument their apps to achieve it.
The next really big difference between Android/IOS and a desktop OS is simple. All the applications written for these OSes are designed to be run on telephones or "power efficient devices". You could in theory put these operating systems on any processor and their power performance will be quite good.
So... while I'd like to hear from you why you think Intel can't do power efficient, I doubt you'd have much to offer other than stupid buzzy wordy kinda snips.
I did some experiments a long while back... the most interesting one was releasing a VNC viewer to Version Tracker which during installation popped up a huge license message which highlighted in bold print "Do Not Install This App... It includes a trojan and by clicking continue below, it will also gain root access and add the text 'Ha Ha Ha' to the heading of every Word and text document on your file system". It did not actually do that, but it did actually call home and provide statistics regarding the number of times the installer was opened, whether the user just clicked through, whether there was any form of anti-virus on the computer I knew how to check for and then it would call home each time the VNC viewer was run afterwards. As a bonus feature, it also popped up a fake "look-alike" dialog to ask for the administrator password to install the program... it would then pretend like the user typed something wrong and then pop-up the real dialog. I didn't transmit the passwords... but I did collect stats of who actually typed their password.
Shockingly, because Mac users were so damn gung ho on how absolutely secure their OS was, there was an over 90% installation rate. 40% used the application more than once. It took 6 weeks for the app to be taken down... and people were still downloading it even though the comments screamed about how it was a virus.
Microsoft Windows 7 is EXTREMELY secure now because of several things...
1) People DON'T trust Windows apps like the used to... they're skeptical about viruses.
2) People run anti-virus software... which may be useless on zero-day bugs and often can be more harmful to the user experience than any virus they can block, but they run it.
3) Microsoft bought a gazillion anti-virus vendors and has produced one of the best anti-virus programs I've ever seen... they give it away for free... they respond QUICKLY to new viruses and by having access to all system internals, produce applications that can remove even the nastiest viruses from the system.
4) Microsoft now listens to their anti-virus group and makes changes to the OS to make it more secure from user blunder. Things like the ever annoying "Are you sure you want to run this app?" and also, in Windows 8, trying to deter the user from installing applications that are in their central online as harmful or incompatible.
Apple iOS is pretty damn secure because it's a bit harder for the vendor of a malicious app to get an app into the app store. If someone chose to add a virus/trojan/etc... to the app store, it's taken down very quickly if it's detected as such (unless we're talking about apple approved trojans) and the amount of information that has to be gathered on an app developer before they can publish an app makes it much harder to put things there without there being some recourse. Unlike the rest of the Apple Stores, it's not possible to purchase through PayPal. A developer has to use some identifying form of payment. Prepaid credit cards do however work... so if you get one of those and forge some info on it... you're good. Still... quite a big obstacle.
Mac OS X is still a rats nest of security hell as almost no one installs anti-virus software on it. The Anti-virus companies don't even take it seriously since the market for Mac sucks... most Mac anti-virus software really only checks to make sure you're not transmitting known Windows viruses through e-mail. People still trust it too much and the market for Mac is still probably heavily dominated by people who want to use FaceBook but can't find the 'Any Key'. They bought the Mac because the guy at the store said "You want a Mac because you don't ever have to worry about viruses" and they trusted the guy who was obviously a highly educated computer expert working for $10 an hour at a company who treats their employees like slaves and makes them wear a stupid blue shirt.
BlackBerry... haha I won't even begin to bash how useless their device security is. What'
That's a bit haughty Socratic tone to suggest a person is a being a bit "haughty", though given your use of the term, if I had thought that one up, I'd have been saving it for ages before getting a chance to use it. Thought... I have to admit... leaving haughty aside, I can clearly see the Socratic presentation of his explanation. Though, from that same perspective, if we were to be more precise... the fact that he reaches a conclusion in the end as opposed to ending with a deeper question invalidates your point almost entirely. Socrates... at least in Plato's representation of him would never have closed it at the end.
You may be right about the bonuses... it might be the best strategy a company executive can do at the moment... best for them and best for us. There are simply too many companies who have execs who perform well when the getting is good... but are entirely incapable of actually doing what needs to be done when times are rough. There will be a lot of big businesses going the way of the dodo in the next few years because too many execs sold their companies futures during "the good times" and left them running without a nest egg.
I had no intention of buying magnetic storage until the prices went back to sane levels... but since up until now, I have gladly paid extra for the 5 year warranty, and have even used it twice... effectively getting 2 drives out of the 70 or so I have purchased for my house over the past decade. It may have been cheaper for me to get the 1 year warranty drives, but somehow, I feel a sense of comfort that the company I'm purchasing from has made an me an invested interest as I have them.
This just means that I'll buy my future drives based on price and that most likely ends up being Samsung.
I don't vote because I don't have a voting district or state and therefore I am added to the "just in case" tally which is for expats.... it has never been and never will be counted.
I do however talk about politics and try to influence the votes of others. I don't tell them who to vote for, I ask them to justify their choice and will educate them either way.
Gore you might say wouldn't have gone to war with Iraq. Some would also say that the Taliban almost certainly wouldn't have targeted the U.S. during a Gore administration. We can make all kinds of guesses like this. But in reality, you need to understand one single, simple fact about Gore. He does no represent the American people. GWB did a much better job of representing the American people. Sure the middle class hated him, but the rednecks and the rich people loved him.
Gore was a terrible choice for president because he was too stupid. Really... yes, he was a million times smarter than GWB... but GWB didn't ever pretend to be smart. Gore isn't that bright.... but he and a huge number of idiots think he's a genius of some sort. I won't say Gore isn't smart for a politician, hell, probably one of the smartest presidential candidates we've had in a while. But he was a total moron on a biblical scale when he ran for president. He spent so much time bashing GWBs intelligence (which just wasn't necessary as GWBs intelligence was... well I can't find the words... just it isn't nice to pick on slow people) that he offended the majority of the U.S voting population who actually have to look up to see GWB on the intelligence food chain.
GWB was the absolute best American president in a long time because he was exactly what the voting majority wanted and deserved. He was a moron that was just short of drooling. When you're in a democracy, you're not voting for who will do the best job. You're voting for who you think represents you best. Then the candidate with the majority of votes wins. If you've watched Fox, the Disney Channel, hell even Discovery at times, TLC... ok... pretty much any TV station with high rating in the U.S., you might have noticed that every single one of them has been getting rich by glorifying how great it is to be stupid. Disney is doing it from age 3 until Fox takes over. In a society where a brand like Diesel can make a fortune selling T-Shirts which glorify how being smart is for losers and stupid rules, can you seriously tell me that an intelligent president is what best represents the U.S.?
The U.S. almost never has produced anything truly amazing from within... except when it was socially funded. I use the term social instead of federal to make a point. NASA is a social organization. A government owned company producing products and producing jobs etc... And it got us to the moon. But we don't like socialism, so that's bad right? The U.S. practically invented modern Physics with Albert Einstein, Julius Robert Oppenheimer and others... Wait...we imported those guys... actually nearly every great advance in the U.S. in the past hundred years has been by foreigners we imported to America. At the very least, whatever wasn't made by the first generation immigrants was done by the second generation immigrants. After all, by third generation, we don't have to work hard anymore... we can simply stand on the shoulders of giants.
The truth is, the average american is fat and lazy. Shops for nearly half their shit at walmart. Is wasteful as sin. Is entirely self absorbed and before paying one more hard earned red cent on improving the lives of their neighbors and therefore increasing their own personal value twice as much as holding onto the the money, they will shoot off their noses to spite their faces. We believe that because we can jam a military invasion with a million trigger happy assholes all fighting for some god down someones throat that we're superior to everyone else. We have a pathetically low level of education. We want the government to fix it, but we don't want a big government controlling how we t
Class action suits almost always are about lawyers "representing a large group of people" enter court and attempt to win a suit against a large company with deep pockets. The problem is, to win that large sum of money, it depends on a few things.
1) There are enough people involved in the class action to make the judge see the suit as needed. 1,000 people is great... but getting 1.5 million people to sign up on a web site is far better. I have received many e-mails about products I registered suggesting I should spend 25 minutes of my time filling out a web form with gobs of personal information to be part of a class action suit for something I bought. If there's a problem with my product and I need it fixed, then I don't need the money, I want the product fixed. Screw this "you can receive money as part of the settlement" gig.
2) The amount being sued for has to be small enough that the company being attacked doesn't see it as cheaper to fight it than to pay it. So for a huge company like Sony, it can't be more than $10-30 million. If it's more, then Sony will fight it and whether they win or lose, they most likely will manage to negotiate the original amount downward.
3) The lawyer needs to justify the case financially. No lawyer is going to take on a case like "My toy won't run linux anymore" on principle. They need to eat and they probably bought a PS3 to play BluRays back when it was the only BluRay player... as a status symbol. They probably never even played a game on it and more than likely wouldn't know what Linux was if a penguin beat them with an iceberg. All they know is that a big corporation advertised one thing and then reneged on it and there's a bunch of people who are grumpy about it. This is a meal ticket to them. They'll invest a year or two of their lives in a gamble that they can either force a settlement or get a judge to make an award. From that settlement, the lawyer will take 30-50% off the top + additional legal fees.
After the administrative fee of handling the payouts, the lawyer divvy up the remaining 30% among the people who participated in the class action. After winning the $30,000,000 and getting down to the remaining $10,000,000. A database of all known PlayStation 3 owners will be spammed with mails about the class action and how they should now file to receive their winnings. Roughly a million people will sign up to receive their payment... either the whole thing through a PayPal transfer or the full amount minus a $2.50 fee for posting a paper check. In the end, the people that were so called represented will receive $7.50 - $10, and their playstation still won't run Linux. And to get the $7.50 to $10, they'll have invested half an hour of work. Assuming you can afford a PlayStation 3, that's not a lot.
It's not worth it... it's a waste of time and all it's doing is making Sony raise the costs to customers to cover these wasteful legal expenses.
Do you really think that making lawyers fat is the way you want the legal system to work?
It's time that class action suits are altered to say that "Either you sue for enough to make sure all the plaintiffs get some value out of it or no go.". Alternatively, maybe "Either fix the problem that spawned the problem plus a legal fee or nothing".
I have worked on the development team as one of the primary developers of a product which had in a period of 5 years roughly 2.5 million bug reports with approximately 10 million users. In modern times, that's not really that much anymore, hell the guy writing MineCraft would laugh at such small numbers.
In any case here are some of the things to consider. 1) The majority of people submitting bugs are thoroughly incapable of writing anything meaningful. 2) The job of filtering through bugs (even on a small project for a hundred or so users) is a lot of work and you need dedicated staff for this. College students, summer interns, temp workers, anything. You need to have someone actually sitting, reading the bug reports, marking them as duplicates, reproducing them and then documenting them with more meanuing than a user can write. That person/people will be responsible for contacting the users to find out more about the bug if necessary. 3) An open line of dialog between the developers and the users will NOT be productive. It will make the users feel special, but users have a terrible habit of thinking that they can start coming to the developer all the time with every problem they have. 4) $10 an hour for a bug hunting monkey will save you hundreds of dollars for that same hour of well paid developer time. In addition, it will help a young computer wanna-be gain meaningful experience to put on their resume/cv. 5) Bugs need to be prioritized and assigned. You should make sure that things like crashes in the billing system which could cause invoices to get lost are fixed before (and by the right person) bugs in the inventory system database. (For example). While inventory is a critical component of a business, if a bill gets lost, instead of a delay in a shipment, you'll lose the payment altogether. 6) As others have mentioned... automatic crash reporting is necessary. It's usually not that hard to implement in most languages. I'm sure there's a function for it in.NET so that when a YSOD occurs, you can gather the trace log, maybe take an automatic screen shot, etc... adding a key logger to your app (not a malicious one) so that all events are logged (pretty easy by overloading the application event handler) for the past minute is useful too. This should allow you to know what was clicked and in what order.
Large scale deployment of applications is utterly unmanageable without a proper support system for the developers. An extra employee is a big expense, but if the management decided to develop the project internally instead of farming it out, they volunteered to take on the additional expenses of development. Get the bug boys/girls in and get them sorting. It's a shitty clerical job, but it will save the company tons of money in the long run.
I have found that crap movies are still crap on my 46" Sony Bravia in a dark room and great movies are still great on my 110" 720p projector setup which I watch on a wall I painted gray a few years ago which has screw holes in some intrusive places.
Oddly enough, the quality of the content is far more interesting to me than the quality of my setup. But, poor H.264 encoding quality is unacceptable at any resolution. This is 2011, even real-time encoding using Intel QuickSync at 5Mbps is pretty damn good quality for 720p. I will admit that video encoded using a long look-ahead on x264 at 9Mbps with proper settings is far superior... but I don't see any real benefits from that to 1080p48 at 50Mbps on BluRay.
Which reminds me... I am planning on using screen paint on the wall for a Christmas gift to myself... I should order that.
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Last tickets I bought from Rygge to Stansted cost as 79NOK each way (about £7) + the £6. So that's £26 return. Since it's only a weekend, we use backpacks for carry-on which is actually the only thing free on RyanAir these days... pretty sure they charge extra for a pilot. If you book the bus a month beforehand, it's £9 each way. Oh... and as you mentioned, prices in Norway are expensive, so the backpacks are empty going there. We buy clothing when we get there. Just bring toiletries. And there's some fee for using a non-RyanAir Visa which covers the processing fee. So, it's about £50 per person for flight and bus. And then on this end, Rygge is in a deserted area, nothing but corn and cows near by. So, I drive my Prius to and from the airport and park on a shoulder outside of the garage. About another £12 for gas.
:) My kids even save money since they'll save up their allowance, birthday and christmas money for these trips because even shopping at Hamley's is 1/3 the cost of shopping at the discount mart here in Oslo.
:)
The kicker of it is... if I buy cigarettes (as a smoker) at the airport coming home, I pay £35 a carton which would cost me £100 a carton here in Norway. I can bring one and my wife can bring one. That saves me £130 which covers almost the cost of 3 of us... then getting 8 new outfits of clothing (2 each) saves us about another £150. So, between the tickets, the cigarettes and the lower cost of food while we're there. A single trip to London is better than free
Of course, I should quite smoking... but even if I did so, it would still cost almost nothing to be there.
P.S. I absolutely love that town. I would never live there, but I love coming there for visits.
I think it goes both ways. I'm not saying that documentation needs to cover every aspect of the code, but proper top-level design documents make a great deal of sense. A document or two per project which explains how it should work. Too often, I go back to code I wrote earlier without documentation and some guys "Hacked around" to make something work and more or less completely destroyed the entire design. The result is having to go back and demangle what they have done.
.... screw the sliced bread... it doesn't have anything on doxygen :)
It would be great if people were better about spending more time hacking around before modifying certain code, there's no reason that code in a given module or at least function should be so inconsistent. At the very least, if the original coder consistently used "index" as a variable name in there code, adding "idx" to it is ugly. Also, if the practice in the existing code is to employ the use of an iterator to traverse a collection, to then start searching by reference is not only ugly, but could be dangerous. A proper collection iterator should be able to readjust itself if another thread modifies the collection or should properly mutex the collection. Of course, when the new guy checks in his code, everything works, but then when you write code that modifies the collection elsewhere, the whole thing falls to pieces because the design hadn't been followed.
I tend to work on far more complex code than most. I write real-time systems processing hundreds of megabytes of data from dozens of processing cores... and I count cycles at times (though I don't write assembler, I do often lay my C++ code out in a way that it compiles more efficiently). So, design is critical.
Oh... and doxygen is the greatest thing since
I'm an atheist and I really am not sure about my wife. I think she wants to believe, but I don't make it very easy to hehe.
To me, the marriage itself is irrelevant. Actually, not entirely, I live in a country other than my own and the marriage initially made that possible. But that's not the reason we got married. Marriage was very important to her and her family... who are Christians.
There are no duties or privileges that are not applicable within a responsible relationship that requires marriage to make so. Also, a formal announcement and a legal binding are two entirely different things. In fact, I'm a strong believer that people should be able to get legally bound in every way that marriage suggests no matter what their sex, religion or even how many there are. I think if four old ladies are living in a house together and they are all that each other has in the world, they should be able to get "legally married" so that from every perspective which the government is concerned, they are as codependent as a married couple. If one decides to leave, they can choose to hire a lawyer or sit before a mediator to decide what that person should take away from the relationship.
It's so sad and pathetic that we live in a world where marriage and divorce is a concern of the government. What's even more humorous is that the people who are most adamant regarding marriage and the government are the ones who are also most vocal about wanting the government to be smaller and have a lesser impact on their lives.
Sure, there's a gazillion lines of COBOL code out there in banking, it would take FOREVER to replace, though there are more modern banking systems which provide a solid starting point and it could be done and it might cost less than running IBM mainframes. But there's another great reason for COBOL.
COBOL is a crippled language. Unlike most other languages where all the code is written in that language... or maybe with the help of one more language. COBOL is an insanely retarded language. COBOL is generally only used for processing things. RPG-IV or something similar is used for terminal user interfaces, web based systems can communicate with the COBOL back end and then COBOL would perform the transactions required. COBOL itself doesn't even store the data. Even though COBOL often has a crippled internal ISAM or possibly can use SQL. More often than not, COBOL is linked to a DB/2 database... which is more of a large scale ISAM as opposed to a SQL server. Think of it as the data store used by an SQL server. Records are searched for using archaic search methods based on classic database structures... more like how it was done with dBase, FoxPro or Clipper.
While I don't recommend writing code in COBOL... you should consider the mainframe model of development.
1) The web interface DOES NOT query data directly from the data store. Instead, it requests data from a broken on another server.
2) The other server is connected using a non-IP protocol. The only method of requesting data from the other server is through a simpler interface which is fully known. You can't ask for credit card numbers for example. This can be accomplished using Ethernet, but avoid using IP. It's far too big and hard to understand. Using Infiniband as a link is great because you can use MPI over Infiniband to send a message asking for data and then wait for a result. This sounds more expensive than it is... but Infiniband is pretty damn cheap until you need fabric switches. Point to point is pretty easy on the wallet. The key is, any machine accessing data on the database should not under any circumstance be able to define its own query. Add a new function with parameters for each query. It must be explicit.
2a) Ultimate paranoia. Critical information such as credit cards and social security numbers exist on a separate payment processing machine hidden behind that machine. All communication with that machine is performed over a dedicated data link such as a high speed serial port (you can get them in megabit+ speeds these days) and all queries performed on that machine will be 100% explicit and will guarantee that there is no possible means of requesting anything other than the last 4 digits of either number. Transactions are sent to that machine, it performs the transaction and responds back with "Yes or no!". If a single user has multiple credit cards... there can be a query function which returns the card type and the last 4 digits only.
3) Just like an IBM mainframe. NO C/C++ code compiled native. This is simply because C and C++ lack proper memory management for secure systems. People still use pointers when they should use classes and there's no run-time checking on these things. Instead run inside a VM type environment. I recommend using a web server running on top of Mono or on top of Java. Not a web server running Mono or Java inside of them. This way, there's a much higher amount of security involved. Yes, this can still go wrong... but the chances are much lower. Make it a requirement that all classes and functions which are used in the system are compiled for the virtual machine and DOES NOT call out of the VM... unless there is no alternative.
4) Port 443 is the only open port on the systems... no exception. If you run netstat -a there should be absolutely no ports listening other than HTTPS.
5) Hardware based load balancing proxy server. These are expensiveish... but if you get a hardware based proxy server that load balances by proxying HTTPS requests across your web servers, it'll m
Secure coding is not that secure. It takes more than just code to guarantee security. Secure coding checklists are generally made reactively. When we learn about a new way to hack, we add another layer.
For the moment, we're pretty damn sure that a LightHTTPd and Linux or OpenBSD box is going to be rock solid regarding security. Though, there are still regularly security fixes coming out. Sure, it's not as often as earlier, but it still happens.
The code is only part of the problem.
There are cases like mine where my FaceBook is never logged off and my wife can read it any time she wants. The reason is, there's nothing to hide. I've classically been "The Safe Guy" on FaceBook and at the office and elsewhere. Women will hang around me and even flirt a bit with me because they know that not only do I enjoy the attention, but that there's just no way that I'm going to be a risk to them. I'm also the guy who will bring them safely home at the end of the night if they drink to much.
:)
You make the presumption that it's an issue that it's easier for people to get caught. And yet, men acting inappropriately or stupidly probably only accounts for about half of the cases. Some guy adding his ex from high school or someone else that his wife is jealous of (and it works reversing the genders as well) probably accounts for a lot also. People are extremely insecure at times. All my ex-girlfriends which didn't turn out to be nut jobs (and even one or two that did) are on my friends list. I also have the captain of the high school cheer leading team and others which my wife could easily get jealous of if she didn't understand me well enough to know that friends are friends... wife is wife. You do some things with friends, you do some more things with wife
Now, there's another big reason for it. Women or men who got married too quickly, found out that they screwed up... maybe getting married too young, got married for the money, got married just to throw a wedding (watch TLC sometime, Bridezilla, Left at the Alter, etc...) and once the dream wedding was over, there was no point to the marriage. All kinds of reasons people get married when they really shouldn't have and then FaceBook is a great way to come up with "evidence" against their spouse so they can get out of it without getting too burned.
So, FaceBook is probably just something that magnifies problems for some people. Jealous and insecure people were able to lie to themselves beforehand and pretend like it's just their imagination and now they got some confirmation it wasn't. Guys who act like assholes behind their wive's backs get talked about. People who were looking for a way out to begin with can find things more easily. In short, Facebook is really nothing more than a tool.
Now, for the real solution to this problem.
DON'T GET MARRIED. Marriage is a religious commitment between two people before an audience and some god of some type. In most religions, it's expected to be for life. If you and your girl are two people who are the types to not "stick together through thick and thin" then getting married in the first place is a lie. In modern times where a woman is able to put food on her own table, buy her own cloths and if necessary put a roof over her own head, there's absolutely no good reason for marriage other than religious belief. If you have kids together and are worried about the issue of custody if one of the parent die, there are civil unions and contractual agreements for that. You don't have to get legally married to have a wedding party. You don't have to get legally married to get some guy in a funny costume or hat ask you if you love each other. Legal marriage is an institution which says "I'll make a promise to this lady because I love her and I don't want her to ever worry about where her next meal is coming from. I legally take the responsibility of this woman and promise that since she is incapable of taking care of herself if need be, this will take care of that." and to a woman it says "I'm too weak to care for myself and I need some legal protection that makes it so he can't just run off to be with someone else without some form of legal and financial repercussion. So even if he does ditch me for someone who's willing to do things I'm not, he'll owe me for life". Civil union allows all the things like "If the decision comes whether to take me off of life support, I want this person to choose", but so does a living will.
Just remember, marriage is designed to protect the weaker gender. Oh... marriage is also the core of the entire divorce attorney business.
I'm an old dog in the business as well my friend. I'm 36 years old. The difference is, with a brief exception (needed a rest) I've been pumping out code for the past 20 years on a professional level. Yes, I've worked full time as a programmer from the age of 16 after dropping out of high school. Initially, I worked for places that were so cheap that they would prefer a wet behind the ears kind of kid. Later I worked as a consultant, bouncing from contract to contract. During that time, I did some night courses and also made a few bucks doing homework for other students since I couldn't afford to pay the tuition for those classes myself. So I gained the education on someone else's dime.
.. and it'll take 3-6 months before someone else decided to do it cheaper than me and knocks me off the market. So, I have to make what I can as fast as I can :)
Eventually, I got a job working for real companies that went big and now, given my resume, the lack of university degree became less important. But, while I'm not overly concern about finding my next job, I do know that I'll have a bit of a hard time finding it if I go through the normal channels.. meaning applying for a job through a recruiter or whatever where I'm just another schmuck.
Here's the real problem with old guys like us. We might be meticulous, but we're slow and don't have the energy that the younger guy has. That guy is going to make up for lack of talent with persistence and a desperate need to prove him/herself. Additionally, the skill set you mention is specifically "A young man's game".
I do have several recommendations for you.
1) You've been in sales which means you know lots of guys in ties. Take advantage of it. Get a consulting position to produce something they need. There are a tons of companies who would like to make themselves present on phones. Find a way to merge the tech together and make it happen.
2) Find something you really want to do and make it happen. One app at $1 a piece might make you a few thousand bucks. 10 apps might make you several tens of thousands. Pick projects which take 1 month to complete on your own. Stuff which has genuine need. Ask people about things they think is missing from the phones. Build it.
3) Play the jesus card. You don't have to be religion and as long as you're not walking around with pentagrams tattooed to your forehead, you can go from church to church offering to make an app for organizing the church functions. Things like a bulletin board for the ladies groups. Stuff like that. They'd pay like hell, but after you've made it once, you'd charge $1 for it and alter it just a little for each church you "customize it for" or skin it for. With a bit more work, you can automate the process and allow the churches to log into your site, pay $100 and make their own version with a few clicks.
4) Find a few more "old dogs" and work together with them to make something bigger. You'd be surprised how easy it is to find guys who are recent retirees that was to get involved in something "new" and have a reason to jabber like they used to. The alternative is for them to go to church and die slowly. And to them, you're a youngster, not an oldy.
I'd tell you about my upcoming plan... but I'm convinced that there's only room for one of this in the market
These days... I'm a 36 year old guy with 20 years C++ programming experience in senior level positions, and I started programming BASIC on a Commodore PET when I was 6 years old. What I have learned since which makes a huge difference between the guy who is an awesome C++ coder and the guy who is an awesome C++ coder with 10 years experience is how natural the structure of code develops itself when you're writing it. I am just about finished with a module I'm working on for a fairly complex protocol implementation which now weighs in at 50,000 lines of code (much of it comments and white space). Everything was "designed" and is there is extensive error checking and logging.
I won't say a young guy wouldn't have the skills to do this. What I will say however is that after 10 years, you'll have spent a great deal of time pissed about how other people write code. You'll eventually learn to fix instead of rewrite. And when you write new code, you'll set a standard for the other developers to live up to. I used to say that the way you could judge a new programmer best is to see how long it takes before he's been working on nearly a million lines of legacy code written by 50 people over 10 years and say "We need to rewrite this"... which almost certainly is true... but not practical. Then how bright he/she really is is measured based on how long the developer takes to recognize that the code can never be rewritten in whole... and instead finds a way to adapt where necessary and clean up what they can when they feel it's useful.
Sadly, I have been through many projects so far where we've spent ages and even massive numbers of hours trying to decided whether or not to switch to a string class. And then arguing over how to handle unicode. Some will say "There needs to be an 8-bit class and a 16-bit class, sub-classed from a common class", others will say "The string class should use a void * internally and store the string data as 8-bit unless there are unicode characters in it. At which time it should be 16-bit", then guys like me will say "I don't care how the class stores the data internally as long as it has calls to receive it as either unicode or Latin-1.". Of course, while everyone else is arguing, then I or another will simply sit down and write the class and say "Done... here it is... use it. If you want it done 'better' then fix it. But this is the interface".
There are billions of lines of code based on code written during times when systems were more limited. A developer with more experience will have been in the industry long enough that they will understand why certain choices were made the way they were and then, change what should be changed or understand why some things were done the way they were. I still intentionally code some things the old fashioned ways to make it perform better. There's really no reason that code designed to pack bits into a stream should be heavily object oriented. A flat design is nicer for that.
So... There is a benefit to programmers that are "A Bit Old School".
But... I will say this... the 27 year old guy who sits to the right of me... even though his coding style is not quite refined and sometimes he introduces structural complexity beyond reason to make sure "He uses the right pattern". He gets the job done as well. Sadly, documentation is an after thought for him, but there's no reason if he and I were to apply for the same job somewhere else that they should pay more for me than for him.
Frankly... if you're being mocked... you're obviously not being ignored. :)
However, you should seriously look at the real issue with modern protests... pretty much anything "Post hippy". Protests can have legitimate, decent looking and well presented people involved with them. But it doesn't take long for the "Causies" to come running. These are pretty much the tea party of causes. They read the head line and haul ass to be part of the protest... they don't know what the protest is really about, but they come running.
Occupy Wall Street was pathetic. I mean really. A bunch or whiny little cry babies who were protesting what was happening on wall street without having the slightest clue about what it was. They were just pointing at the gamblers in expensive suits and saying "It's your fault". The wall street assholes were responding by saying "I didn't hear people complain when we increased the value of their 401Ks by 300%" which in itself was idiotic since if that money were invested in building companies instead of being day traded or high speed traded, then those people would be adding 100% more money themselves, then maybe the investment would only rise by an equal 100% given a 200% yield at the time, but the artificial inflation of the dollar would be dramatically less during the same period of time and that 200% increase would actually yield substantially greater buying power for the 401K holder. Let's also remember that most of those people who are so dependent on their 401K will need to "borrow from it" during their unemployment since their money is being used to gamble instead of secure the health of the companies they work for. The protesters didn't understand any of this... the most vocal ones were the ones who got the Ph.D. in social anthropology, ran up $200,000 at prestigious schools by using loans to live for 8 years instead of working a job and now are pissed that they aren't qualified for anything other than wearing a paper hat at McDonalds... or working as a professor in social anthropology at a lesser university.
Let's be straight about this... if you go to the university and you study something. Before you decide to run up $200,000 in debt in a Ph.D., you should identify whether you can pay back the loan using one of the jobs that are realistically attainable in your chosen field. No one forces a person to run up $200,000 in debt. If you're studying computer science, make sure that what you're studying is applicable to a real job... not some imaginary job that Oracle, Microsoft or IBM are claiming will be hot in 5 years. What's worse is, if you're an engineer, then your job description is always going to be "Find a way to solve a problem using the tools available to you. Then make it happen". So, if you're an engineer who couldn't plan that there would be problems like "I will need to find a job that will pay down my loans" followed by "I have graduated, now I need to find a way to pay my loans". etc... Then you are in fact the shittiest engineer on the planet. You can't even handle the simplest requirement of being an engineer which is "People come to you to find ways to solve problems.".
So, when you see an engineer on wall street talking about how they couldn't figure out a way to solve their own problem... umm... really? Get off your ass and figure it out. You want to know why you don't have a job? It's because you suck at what it is you're supposed to do.
Modern protesters are a joke. What's worse is that protesters don't generally understand the first thing about politics. The fact is, if everyone who participated in occupy wall street would have each chipped in $10 and then collectively used that money to hire a few lobbyists to go straight to the politicians... far more would have been accomplished.
Protests have their place. But the fact is... raising $10 from each person opposed to the TSA and running a real campaign with lobbying and campaign contributions to politicians willing to make the change desired would be so much more effective than any form of protesting. It is impossible in modern times to run a protest without the freaks showing up and ruining all your credibility and making you look like a laughing stock.
Rubber gloves.
I'd imagine that the TSAs biggest financial expense is rubber gloves. Those things aren't cheap. Sure, when you're buying 2.5 billion pairs a year, the price decreases per unit. You need to have latex free ones as well, I'd imagine they cost more. And then there's the insurance related to the injuries sustained while trying to make an impressive snapping sound as you put them on. Then there's the issue of disposal... after they enter a persons rectum, they are considered medical waste.
First of all, I doubt that Steven would introduce the employee as "My bitch", he would certainly be more respectful than that. He would probably refer to the person as "My technical assistant" or "The genius that makes it possible for me to communicate".
The circles that he would travel in would be quite prestigious. In the science community he'd be regularly in the presence of some of the greatest minds alive today. In the political community, he's among the "Rock Stars" that politicians want to have pictures of themselves standing next to... as if the association would make them smarter.
On top of that... companies focused on making hardware/software solutions would almost certainly consider a person who worked directly with Steven Hawkings on his accessibility solutions as an ideal CTO for their company. If a person is interested in accessibility solutions as a career and would be interested in starting a business, obtaining government grants or simply raising money for the company would be simple having had that position earlier.
I'd imagine that there are even some great UN posts for someone who held this position. Technical adviser or chairman of this committee of another.
So... while the pay sucks majors balls... if a person sticks around in this position for 4-5 years... they can almost certainly gain the visibility and even a certain level of prestige which would secure their future indefinitely.
Oh... the fact that the person could in theory learn something along the way or even have the opportunity to test their system upgrades by having high level conversations about theoretical physics with a person, who though not as amazing as the press makes him, but still certainly capable of holding his own might be a big bonus for some.
If I weren't married with kids, I would seriously consider this position.
One room of my house has been converted into a mini-theater/game room. We have two projectors (the little one I though would be good enough... but wasn't and a much better one which cost me less than $1000 and is REALLY great). It allows us to play multi-player games together, but more importantly, we have a 120" movie screen with surround sound, two couches, bean bag chairs, a popcorn machine, a drink dispenser and a mini-fridge. And no... we're not fat :)
I built this room up when 3D movies came out. It's too damn hard to find a movie theater anymore where I don't have to wear a shitty pair of plastic glasses that give me head aches from the 3D or the unfamiliar pressure on my temples (sadly I lied about being fat... I have a really fat head... hopefully it means I have room for a bigger brain but more likely is a deformity). Last time I took the family to the theater, it cost me $18 a ticket (I'm in Norway), that's $72 just for tickets. Then two medium buckets of popcorn, 4 drinks and a pack of candy for each of us ran about another $50. That's $122 to go to the movies. Oh... and I had to pay for parking as well. That was another $20. So $142 for a movie. Sometimes we even had to pay for the cheap ass glasses... that adds up to another $20. So, now we're up to $162.
I can go online and purchase a film from iTunes, it costs $10-$20. If I rent, it's $2-$5. Popcorn costs us about $0.50 a bucket. Drinks cost $1 each. Candy costs $3 a pack (as we tend to purchase over priced, imported reeses peanut butter cups). Worst cast, $39, but more often closer to $29.
The movie room altogether cost probably about $2000 and since the kids and I spend probably 1/4 of our recreation time in there, it is paid off QUICKLY. Even if we did a movie night every other week, it still would have paid for itself in less than a year.
We stopped going to the theater for many reasons, but 3D (stupid glasses to see crappy picture quality) is the biggest one. Ticket prices was #2. Parking #3. Overpriced junk food #4.
OH!!!!! One more thing. Last time I went to the movies, they actually played 40 minutes of advertisements before starting the film. NO SHIT!!! 40 Minutes!!!! I clocked it. After gouging me for a fortune in tickets and junk food... they then forced me to watch 40 minutes of advertisements before seeing the 92 minute film!!! ARE YOU SERIOUS?!?!!?!? The kids were already out of drinks before the f-ing advertisements were over.
For a good laugh... I can buy round trip tickets to London for $100 a person (after taxes and transportation to and from the airport as well as parking), for a total of $400 between us. Then pay about $120 for a motel room for us. Even eating out every meal, we'd save about $10 per meal, or $60 in total. So, $460 for a weekend trip to London for the whole family. $162 times 3 is $486. So it actually costs me less to go to London with the whole family for a weekend than to go to three movies.
Unity3D meets many different needs... you can code pretty much any type of game, but think of Unity3D as the Visual Basic of game design. It has nearly everything you need in a single IDE which also has full C# language support. If you wanted to teach the kids things like game programming theory like rendering and shading... well that's something else altogether. If you want to teach them how to make an actual game... use an engine like this.
Unreal Engine 3 is also nice, but I don't think it's nearly as intuitive. A bit out of reach even for really bright teenagers.
I do however recommend trying to convince the kids to read a book on game/3D programming as you go along... like a homework assignment. There are a few really good ones which cover the math involved in the first few chapters and if you help them a little, you can teach them about the power of matrices... which needless to say is pretty much the entire underlying foundation of game engine programming.
Also, writing a game without an engine is total insanity when teaching if for no other reason but audio synchronization. I have used months at a time in the past just coding high granularity, event based audio code. That topic along is far beyond the scope of when you could teach in a 1 day a week course to kids. Stick to a premade engine.
I have owned many phones. I have played with hundreds of phones (through my previous job) and what I can say about iPhone (being an iPhone 4 addict myself) is that it is a "Does everything passably well or better phone". Sony has tried so hard to make a "Game Phone" or a "Walkman Phone". Nokia tries to make "Music phones" or "Ovi Phones". Blackberry tries to make "Messenger phones". HTC tries to make "movie phones"
iPhone tries to make a phone that plays music well, plays films well, reads mail well, runs games well, interacts with the Apple stores well etc... In short, they make phones that do a little of this and a little of that and while it doesn't do any one thing particularly awesome like those specialized phones do, it does each one of the things it does... well.
iPhone is a marketing miracle. Apple converted itself from a tech company to a fashion company. They don't try to make cheap phones so everyone can afford one. They focus on making the phone do the things they want it to do and then they sell it to people who can afford them. I am 100% locked into Apple products. I have purchased tons of stuff on the Apple stores and make use of iCloud for phone books and everything. The personal cost to switch away from them would require me to replaced 3 iPads, 4 iPhones and an Apple TV. I have ditched my person iPad recently as I never used it for more than watching films and now I have a Windows 8 Tablet (Series 7 Slate), and from there I can run iTunes... the full version.
This is a new era of telephones. We should stop categorizing phones as smart phones and instead categorize the ones which don't run Android, iOS or Windows Phone (yeh... tried BlackBerry... recently... not really in the same category) as junk phones or tossers. It is just plain stupid to call a Android Phone with a 66Mhz processor and 32megs of RAM a smart phone and yet, they sell by the millions.
Windows Phone is pretty nice. I would seriously consider using a Windows Phone for a year. But as I said, I'm locked into iPhone. Which is ok... at least it's a phone from a a bunch of crooks that know they're a bunch of crooks. Google is a truly scary bunch of crooks because they don't realize they are crooks. And Microsoft well... they're actually much better than ever before. They almost seem honest in comparison these days.
I really don't want Apple, Microsoft or Google to crush one another... I like having options. Now if Office Live 365 works on Android devices... Android might even be pretty good if they ever make it to a real laptop. Apple really needs to make iDevices be able to switch between iOS and OS X. Microsoft is on the right track... but they'l have to fight for it. I'm pretty sure... Microsoft's future is going to be based on people using their mobile phones as their PC and simply docking it with a mouse, screen an keyboard. So, as opposed to getting people to switch to Windows Phone, it's more of an issue of making Windows Phone as good as possible so that when PCs are small enough to be used as phones, they'll be ready.
The fact that paper records are utter crap to begin with and all survey information should be computerized anyway, it doesn't matter what system the measurement was made in the first place, a user should be able to click and choose which unit of measurement they would prefer to see... even if it's the Ramses II cubit (the cubit changed over time).
Of course, in Europe, we still use inches quite bit... the difference is, we don't purchase a 2x4 anymore, we purchase as 38x89 instead. The discrepancy in the conversion is that the metric conversion measures the wood after it's been dried and planed where the U.S. version measure before hand.
I have seen carpenters measuring using the width of their thumbs which is actually where inches come from in the first place.
For most other things, the imperial system is pretty much dead. On my recent trips to England... I have seen that with the exception of the ever-important pint, they have also made the change over to metric.
But as I said, you have good and bad points. There's absolutely no reason that in a world such as ours, we'd have to depend on a given measurement unit. Hell, I don't see any reason programs like AutoCad for example couldn't be changed to allow you to specify new measurement schemes as well. For example, if you were to design a solar sail, you might design it using metric since a full sized sail would be many meters wide and high. Though a proper solar sail would likely be produced by "knitting" a sheet of carbon atoms. Therefore, when passing the design to manufacturing, it might make sense to supply the measurements relative to the width of a carbon atom. Like 9.8123 billion carbon atoms in length and 82.995 billion carbon atoms in width and 1 carbon atom in depth. Just make a screen in the software which allows you to define your own measurement system and how to display it.
I am an American... and strange one... I can perform ASE/Imperial/Metric conversions subconsciously without a problem and have never really had an issue using one or the other. I find myself playing video games at times and hearing my wife ask me how many milliliters 1.5 cups is when she's baking from one of my recipes. We don't own any cup measures.
The problem is... while metric is obviously mathematically easier since you can easily think "100cm is a meter and 1000 meters is a kilometer and therefore 100,000 cm is a kilometer" instead of "There are 3 feet in a yard and there are 5280 feet in a mile and therefore there is 1760 yards in a mile." people still need a calculator to handle the math because multiplying 5 by 100,000 is too complex for the average person. Yes... really.
Americans are actually better in arithmetic because of the screwed up ASE system of measurement.
P.S. - We do not use Imperial measure in the U.S., we use ASE. There is a discrepancy between the two systems with regards to measurement of liquid volume. This is because, when you transport a gallon of wine from England to Boston using a barrel on a wooden sailing ship, some of the wine evaporates and the English would not accept less money for delivering less wine. Therefore, 1 U.S. gallon is approximately 0.832 imperial gallons.
My home server is a machine which I've been running for the past 20 years in one form or another. It's never been completely rebuilt, though sometimes I have come close as I've replaced everything but the case itself. But I like to think of it as the ever evolving server.
Currently, it is an entirely passively cooled system and with the exception of the drives making clicking sounds on occasion is utterly silent.
1) Big roomy case. I'm using an I&S 4U rack mount case which has room for 8 vertically mounted 5.25" hard drives. I have a homegrown rack made out of kitchen counter top material and rack rails and a few screws mounted on rubber coated wheels as well. This makes it even quieter.
2) I lied about the 100% passively cooled. The power supply is not passively cooled, but by using a 1000w power supply for a system which uses about 100watts at peak load, the fan on the power supply serves as the CPU fan as well. I have to put my head up to the machine to hear it though. Search and you will find one... they're easy to come by.
3) 8x 2TB Seagate 5900RPM drives. They're cheap (or were before the "shortage") though I'd use 3TB or hold off for 4TB drives now.
4) Highpoint Rocket RAID 2720. It has 8 ports on it and has proven its worth already (I'm using the previous model, but this one is better) since I run RAID 5 and have survived two hard drive failures in the past year. The 2720 is worth its weight in gold because it has full support for SAS expanders, so this controller is actually useful for hooking up 24 drives without fans by using the EJ240 SAS expander in another case.
5) Using super cheap $1 each 3.5" to 5.25" brackets, I mount the 8 hard drives vertically in the chassis. This leaves A LOT of room to keep them cool passively. Perfect!
These are the easy parts... the trickier part is getting the right motherboard for the software. I personally run Windows Home Server 2011 which is perfect for my needs. I bought a copy from an online vendor for $35. It has DLNA, has something like Time Machine for Windows computers and with some other downloads, I have NFS and AFS+ support. I added a licensed copy of Alcohol 120% which allows me to mount CD/DVD images on other computers as iSCSI and it even emulates the copy protection schemes, so when I buy a game DVD, I can use it from any computer in the house without having to use NO-DVD cracks. I also run Air Video Server which allows me to play pretty much any file from the server to iDevices without reencoding.
So that's the point.. being able to encode multiple streams for streaming in real time and still being passively cooled. At the moment, I'm using a power hogging Core 2 Quad Q8400 CPU.... I'm not pleased with the power consumption and I have been running a few trial runs to see if a 45W Core i5 2500T would work for my needs. Using Intel QuickSync, it is proving to be a perfect solution as the CPU, even when re-encoding videos uses almost no power. Also, but moving the video card into the CPU, it eliminates most of the remaining power foot print of the system.
Then the last remaining item was purchasing memory which is low power as well. I tried 10 different sets of DIMMS and eventually found that power usage on RAM could vary as much as 10 watts for 8gigs.
I log power consumption of the machine 24/7 and find that the machine uses 25 watts when it is idling and peaks at 100 watts in bursts. Overall, the average power consumption of the machine is 37 watts.... less than the cable set top box provided to me by Altibox in Norway. (with the core i5... it's closer to 65watts with the Q8400 and the graphics in the chipset).
Oh... ONE LAST THING... the boot drive. I don't boot from the RAID. I boot from an SSD. I bought a cheap 60GB SSD for $60 from a "fire sale" which is slow... only 120MB/sec.
I'm sure that using Myth server or something else on Linux, this configuration would work well for you too. It's a little pricey... but it gives me 14TB of formatted space. If low power 4TB drives come out sometime soon... I may replace the 8 drives with 4 of those and then just add one as needed... I can afford losing the last 2TB since I'm not using all 14TB just yet.
I just want to see if I understand this correctly. You're suggesting that the world's biggest and most powerful processor company who has shown repetitively that they can produce the processors capable of the greatest performance per watt for general purpose computing shouldn't be able to produce an efficient processor as well?
I'm just wondering... do you really believe that the inefficiency you're talking about is related to an instruction set? Really? It's actually like saying that people are less efficient if they speak Mandarin as opposed to English though maybe more efficient if they speak Spanish. There are obviously advantages and disadvantages of each instruction set, but in truth, all a processor is is a device capable of processing a list of instructions.
Now, to compare it to something more intelligent... if you can cope with intelligence... I hope so.
It is possible to write directions to the your house for someone. Assuming that you have a starting point, you can provide instructions with multiple levels of detail. You can put a great deal of effort into every minute detail and even over compensate. On option you have is :
"Try every single road in this town until you find a blue house with a purple roof and a green football flag on the lawn".
The alternative would be
"Take this road to this road. You'll recognize this road because of the gas station at the corner on your left side. Turn right at this intersection." and so forth.
Which is more efficient? It doesn't matter what language or instruction set you write it in... what matters is the quality of the instructions you provide.
Desktop operating systems which are generally what's run on x86 processors tend to be written by people who know they have access to what feels like unlimited CPU power. The operating systems focus entirely on user experience and not specifically on efficiency. If an OS is designed to be efficient and usable, then there's much to be gained. At this point in time, we're limited to pathetic half breeds like versions of linux that are so covered in band-aids to make it run on small devices you almost want to cry, Symbian which wasn't functional, but was power efficient. Windows CE which was the same... a few others and soon a version of Windows 8 that will be similar to how Linux has been bastardized to run on small devices.
Android has had some of the greatest work done on it to make it more efficient. To compensate for the obvious short-comings in the Linux kernel, Android implements itself on top of something similar to Java which in effect makes it more power efficient. It's not that Java itself or Java programmers are more efficient. It's that by having a virtual machine layer that performs more "traffic control" on the system, power efficiency can be more easily achieved. This would be true for an MSIL or LLVM virtual machine as well. The extra layer makes it so that the virtual machine can do things like shut down or decrease the priority of a given virtual processor as a software function and makes it so that software developers don't have to instrument their apps to achieve it.
The next really big difference between Android/IOS and a desktop OS is simple. All the applications written for these OSes are designed to be run on telephones or "power efficient devices". You could in theory put these operating systems on any processor and their power performance will be quite good.
So... while I'd like to hear from you why you think Intel can't do power efficient, I doubt you'd have much to offer other than stupid buzzy wordy kinda snips.
Try learning something
I did some experiments a long while back... the most interesting one was releasing a VNC viewer to Version Tracker which during installation popped up a huge license message which highlighted in bold print "Do Not Install This App... It includes a trojan and by clicking continue below, it will also gain root access and add the text 'Ha Ha Ha' to the heading of every Word and text document on your file system". It did not actually do that, but it did actually call home and provide statistics regarding the number of times the installer was opened, whether the user just clicked through, whether there was any form of anti-virus on the computer I knew how to check for and then it would call home each time the VNC viewer was run afterwards. As a bonus feature, it also popped up a fake "look-alike" dialog to ask for the administrator password to install the program... it would then pretend like the user typed something wrong and then pop-up the real dialog. I didn't transmit the passwords... but I did collect stats of who actually typed their password.
Shockingly, because Mac users were so damn gung ho on how absolutely secure their OS was, there was an over 90% installation rate. 40% used the application more than once. It took 6 weeks for the app to be taken down... and people were still downloading it even though the comments screamed about how it was a virus.
Microsoft Windows 7 is EXTREMELY secure now because of several things...
1) People DON'T trust Windows apps like the used to... they're skeptical about viruses.
2) People run anti-virus software... which may be useless on zero-day bugs and often can be more harmful to the user experience than any virus they can block, but they run it.
3) Microsoft bought a gazillion anti-virus vendors and has produced one of the best anti-virus programs I've ever seen... they give it away for free... they respond QUICKLY to new viruses and by having access to all system internals, produce applications that can remove even the nastiest viruses from the system.
4) Microsoft now listens to their anti-virus group and makes changes to the OS to make it more secure from user blunder. Things like the ever annoying "Are you sure you want to run this app?" and also, in Windows 8, trying to deter the user from installing applications that are in their central online as harmful or incompatible.
Apple iOS is pretty damn secure because it's a bit harder for the vendor of a malicious app to get an app into the app store. If someone chose to add a virus/trojan/etc... to the app store, it's taken down very quickly if it's detected as such (unless we're talking about apple approved trojans) and the amount of information that has to be gathered on an app developer before they can publish an app makes it much harder to put things there without there being some recourse. Unlike the rest of the Apple Stores, it's not possible to purchase through PayPal. A developer has to use some identifying form of payment. Prepaid credit cards do however work... so if you get one of those and forge some info on it... you're good. Still... quite a big obstacle.
Mac OS X is still a rats nest of security hell as almost no one installs anti-virus software on it. The Anti-virus companies don't even take it seriously since the market for Mac sucks... most Mac anti-virus software really only checks to make sure you're not transmitting known Windows viruses through e-mail. People still trust it too much and the market for Mac is still probably heavily dominated by people who want to use FaceBook but can't find the 'Any Key'. They bought the Mac because the guy at the store said "You want a Mac because you don't ever have to worry about viruses" and they trusted the guy who was obviously a highly educated computer expert working for $10 an hour at a company who treats their employees like slaves and makes them wear a stupid blue shirt.
BlackBerry... haha I won't even begin to bash how useless their device security is. What'
That's a bit haughty Socratic tone to suggest a person is a being a bit "haughty", though given your use of the term, if I had thought that one up, I'd have been saving it for ages before getting a chance to use it. Thought... I have to admit... leaving haughty aside, I can clearly see the Socratic presentation of his explanation. Though, from that same perspective, if we were to be more precise... the fact that he reaches a conclusion in the end as opposed to ending with a deeper question invalidates your point almost entirely. Socrates... at least in Plato's representation of him would never have closed it at the end.
You may be right about the bonuses... it might be the best strategy a company executive can do at the moment... best for them and best for us. There are simply too many companies who have execs who perform well when the getting is good... but are entirely incapable of actually doing what needs to be done when times are rough. There will be a lot of big businesses going the way of the dodo in the next few years because too many execs sold their companies futures during "the good times" and left them running without a nest egg.
I had no intention of buying magnetic storage until the prices went back to sane levels... but since up until now, I have gladly paid extra for the 5 year warranty, and have even used it twice... effectively getting 2 drives out of the 70 or so I have purchased for my house over the past decade. It may have been cheaper for me to get the 1 year warranty drives, but somehow, I feel a sense of comfort that the company I'm purchasing from has made an me an invested interest as I have them.
This just means that I'll buy my future drives based on price and that most likely ends up being Samsung.
I don't vote because I don't have a voting district or state and therefore I am added to the "just in case" tally which is for expats.... it has never been and never will be counted.
I do however talk about politics and try to influence the votes of others. I don't tell them who to vote for, I ask them to justify their choice and will educate them either way.
Gore you might say wouldn't have gone to war with Iraq. Some would also say that the Taliban almost certainly wouldn't have targeted the U.S. during a Gore administration. We can make all kinds of guesses like this. But in reality, you need to understand one single, simple fact about Gore. He does no represent the American people. GWB did a much better job of representing the American people. Sure the middle class hated him, but the rednecks and the rich people loved him.
Gore was a terrible choice for president because he was too stupid. Really... yes, he was a million times smarter than GWB... but GWB didn't ever pretend to be smart. Gore isn't that bright.... but he and a huge number of idiots think he's a genius of some sort. I won't say Gore isn't smart for a politician, hell, probably one of the smartest presidential candidates we've had in a while. But he was a total moron on a biblical scale when he ran for president. He spent so much time bashing GWBs intelligence (which just wasn't necessary as GWBs intelligence was... well I can't find the words... just it isn't nice to pick on slow people) that he offended the majority of the U.S voting population who actually have to look up to see GWB on the intelligence food chain.
GWB was the absolute best American president in a long time because he was exactly what the voting majority wanted and deserved. He was a moron that was just short of drooling. When you're in a democracy, you're not voting for who will do the best job. You're voting for who you think represents you best. Then the candidate with the majority of votes wins. If you've watched Fox, the Disney Channel, hell even Discovery at times, TLC... ok... pretty much any TV station with high rating in the U.S., you might have noticed that every single one of them has been getting rich by glorifying how great it is to be stupid. Disney is doing it from age 3 until Fox takes over. In a society where a brand like Diesel can make a fortune selling T-Shirts which glorify how being smart is for losers and stupid rules, can you seriously tell me that an intelligent president is what best represents the U.S.?
The U.S. almost never has produced anything truly amazing from within... except when it was socially funded. I use the term social instead of federal to make a point. NASA is a social organization. A government owned company producing products and producing jobs etc... And it got us to the moon. But we don't like socialism, so that's bad right? The U.S. practically invented modern Physics with Albert Einstein, Julius Robert Oppenheimer and others... Wait...we imported those guys... actually nearly every great advance in the U.S. in the past hundred years has been by foreigners we imported to America. At the very least, whatever wasn't made by the first generation immigrants was done by the second generation immigrants. After all, by third generation, we don't have to work hard anymore... we can simply stand on the shoulders of giants.
The truth is, the average american is fat and lazy. Shops for nearly half their shit at walmart. Is wasteful as sin. Is entirely self absorbed and before paying one more hard earned red cent on improving the lives of their neighbors and therefore increasing their own personal value twice as much as holding onto the the money, they will shoot off their noses to spite their faces. We believe that because we can jam a military invasion with a million trigger happy assholes all fighting for some god down someones throat that we're superior to everyone else. We have a pathetically low level of education. We want the government to fix it, but we don't want a big government controlling how we t
doesn't he realize that those same young people consider Nokia to be "The Granny Phone Company"?
Class action suits almost always are about lawyers "representing a large group of people" enter court and attempt to win a suit against a large company with deep pockets. The problem is, to win that large sum of money, it depends on a few things.
1) There are enough people involved in the class action to make the judge see the suit as needed. 1,000 people is great... but getting 1.5 million people to sign up on a web site is far better. I have received many e-mails about products I registered suggesting I should spend 25 minutes of my time filling out a web form with gobs of personal information to be part of a class action suit for something I bought. If there's a problem with my product and I need it fixed, then I don't need the money, I want the product fixed. Screw this "you can receive money as part of the settlement" gig.
2) The amount being sued for has to be small enough that the company being attacked doesn't see it as cheaper to fight it than to pay it. So for a huge company like Sony, it can't be more than $10-30 million. If it's more, then Sony will fight it and whether they win or lose, they most likely will manage to negotiate the original amount downward.
3) The lawyer needs to justify the case financially. No lawyer is going to take on a case like "My toy won't run linux anymore" on principle. They need to eat and they probably bought a PS3 to play BluRays back when it was the only BluRay player... as a status symbol. They probably never even played a game on it and more than likely wouldn't know what Linux was if a penguin beat them with an iceberg. All they know is that a big corporation advertised one thing and then reneged on it and there's a bunch of people who are grumpy about it. This is a meal ticket to them. They'll invest a year or two of their lives in a gamble that they can either force a settlement or get a judge to make an award. From that settlement, the lawyer will take 30-50% off the top + additional legal fees.
After the administrative fee of handling the payouts, the lawyer divvy up the remaining 30% among the people who participated in the class action. After winning the $30,000,000 and getting down to the remaining $10,000,000. A database of all known PlayStation 3 owners will be spammed with mails about the class action and how they should now file to receive their winnings. Roughly a million people will sign up to receive their payment... either the whole thing through a PayPal transfer or the full amount minus a $2.50 fee for posting a paper check. In the end, the people that were so called represented will receive $7.50 - $10, and their playstation still won't run Linux. And to get the $7.50 to $10, they'll have invested half an hour of work. Assuming you can afford a PlayStation 3, that's not a lot.
It's not worth it... it's a waste of time and all it's doing is making Sony raise the costs to customers to cover these wasteful legal expenses.
Do you really think that making lawyers fat is the way you want the legal system to work?
It's time that class action suits are altered to say that "Either you sue for enough to make sure all the plaintiffs get some value out of it or no go.". Alternatively, maybe "Either fix the problem that spawned the problem plus a legal fee or nothing".
I have worked on the development team as one of the primary developers of a product which had in a period of 5 years roughly 2.5 million bug reports with approximately 10 million users. In modern times, that's not really that much anymore, hell the guy writing MineCraft would laugh at such small numbers.
.NET so that when a YSOD occurs, you can gather the trace log, maybe take an automatic screen shot, etc... adding a key logger to your app (not a malicious one) so that all events are logged (pretty easy by overloading the application event handler) for the past minute is useful too. This should allow you to know what was clicked and in what order.
In any case here are some of the things to consider.
1) The majority of people submitting bugs are thoroughly incapable of writing anything meaningful.
2) The job of filtering through bugs (even on a small project for a hundred or so users) is a lot of work and you need dedicated staff for this. College students, summer interns, temp workers, anything. You need to have someone actually sitting, reading the bug reports, marking them as duplicates, reproducing them and then documenting them with more meanuing than a user can write. That person/people will be responsible for contacting the users to find out more about the bug if necessary.
3) An open line of dialog between the developers and the users will NOT be productive. It will make the users feel special, but users have a terrible habit of thinking that they can start coming to the developer all the time with every problem they have.
4) $10 an hour for a bug hunting monkey will save you hundreds of dollars for that same hour of well paid developer time. In addition, it will help a young computer wanna-be gain meaningful experience to put on their resume/cv.
5) Bugs need to be prioritized and assigned. You should make sure that things like crashes in the billing system which could cause invoices to get lost are fixed before (and by the right person) bugs in the inventory system database. (For example). While inventory is a critical component of a business, if a bill gets lost, instead of a delay in a shipment, you'll lose the payment altogether.
6) As others have mentioned... automatic crash reporting is necessary. It's usually not that hard to implement in most languages. I'm sure there's a function for it in
Large scale deployment of applications is utterly unmanageable without a proper support system for the developers. An extra employee is a big expense, but if the management decided to develop the project internally instead of farming it out, they volunteered to take on the additional expenses of development. Get the bug boys/girls in and get them sorting. It's a shitty clerical job, but it will save the company tons of money in the long run.
I have found that crap movies are still crap on my 46" Sony Bravia in a dark room and great movies are still great on my 110" 720p projector setup which I watch on a wall I painted gray a few years ago which has screw holes in some intrusive places.
Oddly enough, the quality of the content is far more interesting to me than the quality of my setup. But, poor H.264 encoding quality is unacceptable at any resolution. This is 2011, even real-time encoding using Intel QuickSync at 5Mbps is pretty damn good quality for 720p. I will admit that video encoded using a long look-ahead on x264 at 9Mbps with proper settings is far superior... but I don't see any real benefits from that to 1080p48 at 50Mbps on BluRay.
Which reminds me... I am planning on using screen paint on the wall for a Christmas gift to myself... I should order that.