I'm certain with XP and less certain with Vista (I don't use it for production work) that I can get better performance by forcing everything but EXPLORER.EXE to use the second core at a low priority.
Then as I run programs, they automatically go to the first core (with EXPLORER.EXE).
This allows me to run FOLDING, an RSS reader, LogMeIn all the time but on the second core.
I especially notice a difference when I copying files at the command prompt.
The program is called PROCESS.EXE and can be found at:
Well, generally speaking, solar is a great idea, but as you've already established, solar is insufficient due to it's relative lack of density. That should not become the end of the discussion though.
My Manhattan-based ISP and telecom company runs a small data center, and we have researched this issue in depth. What we ended up with is a co-generation system.
Instead of buying a diesel or natural gas generator for power back-up against grid outages which becomes an unproductive sunk cost as soon as paid for we purchased a micro-turbine co-generation system, and now make our own primary power using natural gas at a net savings per KWH to grid power. The grid becomes our back-up.
The project cost came out to about the same as the generator option, but we've significantly lowered both our operating costs (even net of contract costs) and our environmental footprint.
We needed only 60kw, and are initially using only about 1/2 of that. In a MW-scale facility a natural gas fuel cell would probably become the technology of choice, and would accomplish much the same thing.
The key to why co-generation is a big improvement environmentally (and the source of even greater operating cost savings than I've yet indicated) is that the heat exhaust from the turbine-electric generation stage is harnessed to drive our air conditioning compressors without consuming additional fuel. In effect, we've reduced our electrical load requirements by about 1/3 by eliminating air conditioning as an electrically-driven application (other than the circulation fans and controls).
Had we owned the building we are in, we would have scaled the project up enough to serve the electric, HVAC and hot water needs of the other tenants as well. There are already a few commercial and condo buildings in NYC being operated this way, but word of the availability of this technology at such small scale is not yet widely known about by decision makers. It has a great future though.
Solar and wind are sexy because they represent the pure forms of their type totally fuel-free and environmentally benign power sources. Co-generation is more akin to trading an SUV for a Prius.
On the other hand, it was totally cost-effective vs. a reliability-only investment, works in urban centers (even as just a commercial tenant), and makes a meaningful difference today.
Down the road a little, we may add a limited amount of rooftop solar to cover the now tiny amount of differential in our daytime usage when staff are present (our corporate offices are at the same location). Now that our 24/7 base-load is covered efficiently our remaining peak demand has become something solar actually can be expected to address.
About two summers ago, when I was working (as a stagier) in a company that's massively using StarOffice and truly were having difficulties (mostly in international files), OpenOffice 1.1 had been the "savior" thanks to its UNICODE interface. That's how I've met OpenOffice, and moslty its presentation module. (I can say, it's as good as PPT, and import works quite well; still it sometimes erases part of graphics in your presentation, which is not that cool!!). When I've installed some "recent" Linux versions I've remarked that they all had OOo bundled, so keeping OOo on my drive would probably be a good idea...
So I kept both OOo and MSOffice2k on my drive. I'm not such an "active" office user, so the Office product I'm using should not be that important... Yet, I also knew that OOo supported cool things as PDF export; and that it never had such big issues when opening "everyday office files"...
Problems started when I've started to write my lessons (mostly in physics, so with a lot of graphics) as office files: my Word file was not properly opened on anywhere else then my PC! That was... bad... sad... But I did not care much. Still, I had to someday!!
Than, one year and a half later, that day came. I printed those files as PS and then converted to PDF; hopefully that worked perfectly )suppose PDF is mostly optimized for vectoral graphics). Finally pushed by Word's double-crash in the middle of a work (and I tell you, it wasn't heavy work!), I decided to move everything to OOo... Anyways, even at the university I was used to installing (and sometimes compiling) and therefore using OOo's Windows, Linux or Solaris versions when nothing else was available (nothing including some real bad office apps).
So today I'm now with only OOo 1.1.0 on my PC. No office files on my drive (I know I don't have much Office files but they all have some specific importance, therefore their layout is important to me) are opened "very weirdly" for the moment (and I've remarked that Word conversion is better in the 1.1.1 beta, so that's a good point). Also, French spellcheck module (or plugin) seems to work as good as in my old Office product (but there's no Turkish spell checker available!! Evil or Very Mad); so that's somehow "something I can live with". One big issue: why doesn't OOo have Access??? (database module).
Disclaimer: Strictly playing the devil's advocate here, but I propose a thought experiment:
Imagine if you went to the Ford/GM Manufacturing plant, threw 55% the cost of a new car through the window and then stole one of the new cars on the lot. About 40% of the cost of a new vehicle is materials and labor, with another 10% paying for pensions and whatnot for employees, and about 2.5% profit (so they double their profit). The other 50% is engineering, transportation to the dealer, paying the dealer, etc, etc. So the car company doesn't lose out on anything, except the part that I pay for; in fact, they actually just doubled their profit. I suspect that they'd still be pretty pissed off.
A lot of people on slashdot argue that downloading copyrighted material isn't theft, because you aren't denying the record companies the use of what you are accused of stealing. I understand the difference, the car company is selling a physical product, whereas music is much more intangible. But what happens if, in 100 years, we all have nono-assemblers in our garages? Should it be acceptible for me to download the plans to any car I want without paying for the engineering, advertising, and saftey testing? I'm not saying that I'm on the record companies side, just posing a little thought experiment.
=Smidge=
Don't believe the hype re SOA...
on
The Zen of SOA
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· Score: -1
Ever since.Net, Microsoft has been bombarding us with "The Glory of Web Services". Even though a lot of this is aimed at programmers, Microsoft was especially targeting its management level audience. Most of my coding buddies recognized Microsoft's hype for what it was. We remembered the days of "The Glory of Component Services", and before that "The Glory of MTS" (and don't forget DCOM). It was the same speech, regurgitated and changed a little bit for a new transfer protocol and data format. No more applications! Now you just have a bunch of components that just fit magically together to create usable, scalable services. What could be better? Easy deployment? Oh my god, pinch me, I must be dreaming. We've all seen that, tried it, and figured out that its not that easy, isn't that fast, and isn't the silver bullet Microsoft claimed it was.
So we added it to our list of tools to use when the specific need arose. And just when I started to notice that I wasn't being pounded on the head web services propaganda every time I read a white paper or technical article, a new term come onto the horizon. "Service Oriented Architecture" What is this? Something new and exciting? Something grand that will save the project? A new silver bullet? Hmm.lets see here.its.just.oh, web services. Crap.
Now, I'm not claiming that SOA and web services were invented by Microsoft. Actually the push seemed to start big in the Java world for SOA, and I guess Microsoft figured it better jump on the band wagon and get with the picture, so its started hyping it as well. And then what do you know, but all that media hype had to eventually sink into the pointy haired project managers, and they started insisting on turning all business logic and data logic (everything that wasn't the bare bones UI) into web services. Apparently, according to Microsoft, this was going to cut development time and costs, cut deployment time and costs, scale better, be more maintainable, be more stable, more secure, and more extensible. What else could you ask for? And Microsoft wouldn't push something that's inefficient, right? (acho-databinding.excuse me) Next thing you knew, it seemed like everything NEEDED to be a web service. I have several consultant friends who jumped on this bandwagon (as a consultant, you go where the money is right?) and have done dozens of projects where web services were used as the binding glue between the UI, business layer, data layer and the database. I even know of one ASP.Net project where the client UI layer was nothing but a big xml interpretation engine that built pages based on XML passed to it from a web service. It just interpreted the xml to build its UI dynamically, and then passed all response info back into the web services to handle the response. Web services handled everything else. Amazing! I know of several Fortune 100 companies who have implemented extensive systems where all logic is a mass collection of web services. All done in C#, Windows OS and SQL Server.
Again, what's so wrong with this? Well, what is a web service's greatest benefit? What is the reason you might want to use this tool? Its platform independent. It can take data from platform A and fairly seamlessly give it to platform B. It can do so synchronously or asynchronously. It can communicate through firewalls via http/s. Ok, for this list of requirements it is truly a wonderful tool. I've worked on several web service projects communicating between Windows and AS/400 and Unix. I've also worked on projects where I needed to call a secure service that resided outside the corporate network. Again, web services fit this bill very well.
But in the Windows world, why would you want to use a web service to communicate between two Windows servers, inside the same network? You have several options for this, almost all of which are faster and more efficient that serializing objects to XML, then passing XML over http to get de-serialized back to an object and then used (and then
One million for 7 songs?! How does something like that even get in to court? Can you imagine if I stole $6.93 (.99 x 7) worth of beef jerky from 7-11? Do you think the court would even hear a case where they wanted a million for my crime?
This is the new business model of the recording industry, which is exactly like the old model. Overcharge your customers and when that doesn't work, overcharge and extort from your customers to make up for shortfalls you generated because you have a crappy product.
There's only so much "drug money", oops CD purchases, the listening public will bestow on ungrateful addicts, oops recording artists...
(Yes I'm bitter this morning; still need my meth, oops coffee.)
As pesky as the Bill of Rights can be to swift justice and severe vengeance, I do remember something about the the accused having a right to face their accuser. If the Intoxilyzer uses buggy firmware that results in inaccurate readings, then the accused has every right to question it. The company that makes the Intoxilyzer must be held responsible for its actions as well. Someday, somewhere, some company will step up and say, "Yes, we knew our product was faulty. But we have shareholders who will sell our stock in a heartbeat if we miss our mark in any quarter."
Holding both the accuser and the accused responsible for their actions is what helps create a society based on the rule of law. Otherwise, we'd be a police state. As a practicing trial attorney I *much* prefer the former.
Possibly. But my desktop is 5 yo and Mrs Smidge's desktop is going on 10...! The reason? We don't game, just appliance the heck out of it. No need to upgrade. Same thing with our vehicles, we just fix 'em and take xtra care with preventive maintenance.
One of the important factors that was overlooked other than the inefficiency of DC over large distances is the risk of electric shock. DC is unforgiving and anyone who receives a shock at the higher voltage levels will have very little to no chance of survival as DC current polarizes the blood and there is no way to reverse that effect in time to save that person.
See the following for a basic description of what this is about.
The difference between direct and alternating voltages and currents is that one swings negative to positive thereby reversing the polarity of the potential while with dc everything is a constant supply and thus more harmful.
Hmm. If you're like most people, I'm guessing that you don't have a lot of experience with physics. (Well, not in the formal sense, anyway! Most people are expert physicists on an intuitive level, with such remarkable skill that they can lift objects, understand reflections in a mirror, and even catch a flying ball!) So I'll try to keep this frosty-posty on a very basic level, and I apologize in advance if I start spouting jargon or go too fast. If you _do_ have a bit of a physics background, my apologies for the simple explanation that follows. I'll label some particularly important paragraphs with "***".
For the record, you won't need any "scholarly journals" here unless you want to get very cutting edge indeed (or unless you want to go back many decades or centuries to the original writings that discussed the concept). The vast majority of what we know about momentum can be found in textbooks: it is one of the most basic concepts in physics. Also, keep in mind that while momentum is a fundamental part of physics, the word has many (related) meanings in colloquial English, too. I'd guess that a play named _Momentum_ will draw on a wide range of those.
*** So, what is momentum? The first and most basic statement of the concept of momentum comes from Newton's First Law of Motion: "An object in motion will remain in motion unless acted on by an outside force." (That's sometimes called the "Law of Inertia"; "inertia" and "momentum" are closely related concepts.) In physics, an object's "momentum" can be thought of as the "amount of motion" that it has: the greater its momentum, the harder it is to stop it or to turn it in another direction.
*** What makes an object harder to stop? Well, the faster it's moving, the more you have to slow it down, so momentum must depend on speed. (In fact, it turns out that the direction is important, too; physicists call speed in a specified direction "velocity".) And the heaver it is, the harder you have to push to slow it down, so momentum must depend on "mass" (which is a physicist's technical term for what we normally think of as weight).
***The formal mathematical definition of momentum (in classical physics) is the product of those two quantities:
momentum = mass * velocity
To give a few examples, a flying gnat is fast but its mass is very low, so it doesn't have much momentum. That means that it's easy for a gnat to turn around and buzz in another direction (which you've probably seen firsthand). On the other hand, a slowly rolling car still has a lot of momentum because it's so very heavy: it would be hard to push one to a stop even at very low speeds. As yet another example, a bullet is pretty lightweight, but when it is fired from a gun its enormous speed gives it very high momentum (and if a person tragically gets in its way, the effort of absorbing all that momentum will break their flesh and bones).
*** Now, as I mentioned earlier, "velocity" implies not just speed but direction. So since momentum is proportional to velocity, momentum always has a direction, too. That's a very fundamental fact about momentum! Changing an object's direction can be just as hard as stopping it completely.
*** Another remarkable fact about momentum is that the _total_ amount of momentum in a system will never change. Physicists call this rule "Conservation of Momentum", and they say that "momentum is conserved".
For example, if you're playing pool and you hit the cue ball into the eight ball, when the cue ball slows down the eight ball will start moving to make up the difference. If your shot is perfectly straight, the cue ball may stop moving entirely while the eight ball rolls away with the same velocity that the cue ball used to have. (It would _have_ to be the same velocity: because the balls have the same mass, conservation of momentum m
Social Intelligence is a skill that can be taught and learned. That is how most people get it although somewhat unconsciously. Inherent personality does play a role which is why "Nerds" have to work harder at learning it.
Seconded. And for me, when I graduated college two and a half years ago, I went into the job market with not experience, but with code samples. If you're starting out at entry-level and wanna have a damn good chance of getting the job, you gotta have an app of some sorts that you can demonstrate to potential employers so they get a better idea of your programming style and whether you were able to apply the concepts that you learned to that said app.
The way I managed to get my code samples was through my Senior Project, in which I wrote two J2ME demo games for two different handsets (both MIDP1 and 2). One month after graduation, I interviewed for a mobile game developer and had my samples on hand to give to the employer. As a result, I was hired by them shortly thereafter and managed to hold on to that job up until early last year when I was let go. Even after that, I still had connections to the mobile industry and I was taken care of with more work up until last summer, but at least I came away with experience and contacts, something valuable in this economy. Without those code samples, God knows where I could of ended up, probably doing code for some dodgy come and go Hedge Fund, but the fact remains the same: just like artists have samples of their work, so should software engineers. said app.
Also, OP should broaden his search and not just focus on IT given the state of this dismal economy. In other words, build up your digital portfolio to showcase to employers when interviewing for whatever entry-level software engineer position matches your skills. The important thing right now is to get your foot on the door and pop your cherry with some professional experience. Best of luck to you in this fierce job market.
=Smidge=
Re:Sad news. His postings were a lot better...
on
Roland Piquepaille Dies
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· Score: -1, Troll
He'll definitely be missed by some of us.
No. He won't. Roland promised to marry me, but he cheated on me. He cheated it all straights and he cheated on his taxes! He's a monster, a louser, and I'm glad he's dead. I'm happy about it don't you see?
Via con dios, Roland. You were a prick in this life and I can only suspect your ghost will haunt Slashdot for all eternity, posting/trolling your blog links as news. People like you were the reason a -1 modifier was made and I can only suspect St. Peter will give YOU a -1 when you show up before the pearly gates.
You mean-spirited asshole, I honestly hope you get your 72 virgins in the here-after AND I HOPE THEY ARE ALL MALE.
Meh. Just another excuse to snoop on people without justification. If a warrant is issued then at least there is a paper trail leading back to who applied for the warrant any why. If this law goes through then it will be a free-for-all and history has demonstrated very well what happens then.
Also, as far as I'm aware, UK security services have been doing this for some time, this simply makes it legal. Given the majority of the population are not very tech savvy their solution wouldn't need to be that complex, although I imagine its more complex than just a key logger. The only evidence I have for this is talking to people who work in these organizations. The advice to me was get using TOR (although I can never configure it right) so maybe its not too complex, or maybe they were double bluffing me. Who knows? I'm guessing the arrest levels aren't so high because they would have to arrest almost everyone under 30 who's been on a computer. Once they've got the logistics sorted I'm sure they'll happily cart us to the gulag though.
Listen peeps: AT&T subsidizes the price of every phone it carries, by about $200. So that phone you got a few months ago for free was actually about $200. Youâ(TM)ve probably seen these un-subsidized prices if youâ(TM)ve ever damaged a phone and had to purchase a new one at full price.
The idea is that AT&T will make up that $200 over the course of your two-year contract. So about $8.33 per month goes toward paying down that subsidy. When you get toward the end of two years, youâ(TM)ll be eligible for an upgrade, which is essentially the ability to purchase a new phone at the subsidized price, as long as you commit to another two-year contract.
Maybe not the most ideal plan in the world, but it keeps the apparent cost of mobile phones low, and gets people in the door.
When the original iPhone came out, the arrangement was unique: AT&T wasnâ(TM)t going to subsidize a cent of it in exchange for some flexibilities they allowed to Apple (such as at-home activation). Since there was no subsidy, AT&T lifted the âoeupgradeâ policy for existing AT&T account holders, and allowed them to purchase the iPhone at the standard retail price everyone else paid.
But the iPhone 3G is indeed subsidized, and so the upgrade plan is back in effect. If you currently use a phone subsidized by AT&T, and you arenâ(TM)t currently eligible for an upgrade (you arenâ(TM)t nearing your contactâ(TM)s two-year anniversary), you will need to pay the full, un-subsidized price for the iPhone 3G. In this case, that works out to either $199+200 or $299+200, hence the $399 and $499 prices.
If you already own an iPhone, AT&T doesnâ(TM)t need to get back their lost subsidy, so you get to pay the standard $199/$299 price.
Slashdot Mirror
I run both XP and Vista on Core2Duo processors.
I'm certain with XP and less certain with Vista (I don't use it for production work) that I can get better performance by forcing everything but EXPLORER.EXE to use the second core at a low priority.
Then as I run programs, they automatically go to the first core (with EXPLORER.EXE).
This allows me to run FOLDING, an RSS reader, LogMeIn all the time but on the second core.
I especially notice a difference when I copying files at the command prompt.
The program is called PROCESS.EXE and can be found at:
http://www.beyondlogic.org/consulting/processutil/processutil.htm
It is a manual process but it is pretty simple to create a batch file to do the dirty work.
=Smidge=
Agreed. SP's a dope.
=Smidge=
PaganCoxComb: If you work for a dead-tree newspaper company you really need to rethink your raison d'etre.
=Smidge=
I remember playing this in real life during high school... (Disclaimer: I attended HS in the mid-80s in So. Cali.)
=Smidge=
Well, generally speaking, solar is a great idea, but as you've already established, solar is insufficient due to it's relative lack of density. That should not become the end of the discussion though.
My Manhattan-based ISP and telecom company runs a small data center, and we have researched this issue in depth. What we ended up with is a co-generation system.
Instead of buying a diesel or natural gas generator for power back-up against grid outages which becomes an unproductive sunk cost as soon as paid for we purchased a micro-turbine co-generation system, and now make our own primary power using natural gas at a net savings per KWH to grid power. The grid becomes our back-up.
The project cost came out to about the same as the generator option, but we've significantly lowered both our operating costs (even net of contract costs) and our environmental footprint.
We needed only 60kw, and are initially using only about 1/2 of that. In a MW-scale facility a natural gas fuel cell would probably become the technology of choice, and would accomplish much the same thing.
The key to why co-generation is a big improvement environmentally (and the source of even greater operating cost savings than I've yet indicated) is that the heat exhaust from the turbine-electric generation stage is harnessed to drive our air conditioning compressors without consuming additional fuel. In effect, we've reduced our electrical load requirements by about 1/3 by eliminating air conditioning as an electrically-driven application (other than the circulation fans and controls).
Had we owned the building we are in, we would have scaled the project up enough to serve the electric, HVAC and hot water needs of the other tenants as well. There are already a few commercial and condo buildings in NYC being operated this way, but word of the availability of this technology at such small scale is not yet widely known about by decision makers. It has a great future though.
Solar and wind are sexy because they represent the pure forms of their type totally fuel-free and environmentally benign power sources. Co-generation is more akin to trading an SUV for a Prius.
On the other hand, it was totally cost-effective vs. a reliability-only investment, works in urban centers (even as just a commercial tenant), and makes a meaningful difference today.
Down the road a little, we may add a limited amount of rooftop solar to cover the now tiny amount of differential in our daytime usage when staff are present (our corporate offices are at the same location). Now that our 24/7 base-load is covered efficiently our remaining peak demand has become something solar actually can be expected to address.
=Smidge=
About two summers ago, when I was working (as a stagier) in a company that's massively using StarOffice and truly were having difficulties (mostly in international files), OpenOffice 1.1 had been the "savior" thanks to its UNICODE interface. That's how I've met OpenOffice, and moslty its presentation module. (I can say, it's as good as PPT, and import works quite well; still it sometimes erases part of graphics in your presentation, which is not that cool!!). When I've installed some "recent" Linux versions I've remarked that they all had OOo bundled, so keeping OOo on my drive would probably be a good idea...
So I kept both OOo and MSOffice2k on my drive. I'm not such an "active" office user, so the Office product I'm using should not be that important... Yet, I also knew that OOo supported cool things as PDF export; and that it never had such big issues when opening "everyday office files"...
Problems started when I've started to write my lessons (mostly in physics, so with a lot of graphics) as office files: my Word file was not properly opened on anywhere else then my PC! That was ... bad ... sad ... But I did not care much. Still, I had to someday!!
Than, one year and a half later, that day came. I printed those files as PS and then converted to PDF; hopefully that worked perfectly )suppose PDF is mostly optimized for vectoral graphics). Finally pushed by Word's double-crash in the middle of a work (and I tell you, it wasn't heavy work!), I decided to move everything to OOo... Anyways, even at the university I was used to installing (and sometimes compiling) and therefore using OOo's Windows, Linux or Solaris versions when nothing else was available (nothing including some real bad office apps).
So today I'm now with only OOo 1.1.0 on my PC. No office files on my drive (I know I don't have much Office files but they all have some specific importance, therefore their layout is important to me) are opened "very weirdly" for the moment (and I've remarked that Word conversion is better in the 1.1.1 beta, so that's a good point). Also, French spellcheck module (or plugin) seems to work as good as in my old Office product (but there's no Turkish spell checker available!! Evil or Very Mad); so that's somehow "something I can live with". One big issue: why doesn't OOo have Access??? (database module).
=Smidge=
Disclaimer: Strictly playing the devil's advocate here, but I propose a thought experiment:
Imagine if you went to the Ford/GM Manufacturing plant, threw 55% the cost of a new car through the window and then stole one of the new cars on the lot. About 40% of the cost of a new vehicle is materials and labor, with another 10% paying for pensions and whatnot for employees, and about 2.5% profit (so they double their profit). The other 50% is engineering, transportation to the dealer, paying the dealer, etc, etc. So the car company doesn't lose out on anything, except the part that I pay for; in fact, they actually just doubled their profit. I suspect that they'd still be pretty pissed off.
A lot of people on slashdot argue that downloading copyrighted material isn't theft, because you aren't denying the record companies the use of what you are accused of stealing. I understand the difference, the car company is selling a physical product, whereas music is much more intangible. But what happens if, in 100 years, we all have nono-assemblers in our garages? Should it be acceptible for me to download the plans to any car I want without paying for the engineering, advertising, and saftey testing? I'm not saying that I'm on the record companies side, just posing a little thought experiment.
=Smidge=
Ever since .Net, Microsoft has been bombarding us with "The Glory of Web Services". Even though a lot of this is aimed at programmers, Microsoft was especially targeting its management level audience. Most of my coding buddies recognized Microsoft's hype for what it was. We remembered the days of "The Glory of Component Services", and before that "The Glory of MTS" (and don't forget DCOM). It was the same speech, regurgitated and changed a little bit for a new transfer protocol and data format. No more applications! Now you just have a bunch of components that just fit magically together to create usable, scalable services. What could be better? Easy deployment? Oh my god, pinch me, I must be dreaming. We've all seen that, tried it, and figured out that its not that easy, isn't that fast, and isn't the silver bullet Microsoft claimed it was.
So we added it to our list of tools to use when the specific need arose. And just when I started to notice that I wasn't being pounded on the head web services propaganda every time I read a white paper or technical article, a new term come onto the horizon. "Service Oriented Architecture" What is this? Something new and exciting? Something grand that will save the project? A new silver bullet? Hmm.lets see here.its.just.oh, web services. Crap.
Now, I'm not claiming that SOA and web services were invented by Microsoft. Actually the push seemed to start big in the Java world for SOA, and I guess Microsoft figured it better jump on the band wagon and get with the picture, so its started hyping it as well. And then what do you know, but all that media hype had to eventually sink into the pointy haired project managers, and they started insisting on turning all business logic and data logic (everything that wasn't the bare bones UI) into web services. Apparently, according to Microsoft, this was going to cut development time and costs, cut deployment time and costs, scale better, be more maintainable, be more stable, more secure, and more extensible. What else could you ask for? And Microsoft wouldn't push something that's inefficient, right? (acho-databinding.excuse me) Next thing you knew, it seemed like everything NEEDED to be a web service. I have several consultant friends who jumped on this bandwagon (as a consultant, you go where the money is right?) and have done dozens of projects where web services were used as the binding glue between the UI, business layer, data layer and the database. I even know of one ASP.Net project where the client UI layer was nothing but a big xml interpretation engine that built pages based on XML passed to it from a web service. It just interpreted the xml to build its UI dynamically, and then passed all response info back into the web services to handle the response. Web services handled everything else. Amazing! I know of several Fortune 100 companies who have implemented extensive systems where all logic is a mass collection of web services. All done in C#, Windows OS and SQL Server.
Again, what's so wrong with this? Well, what is a web service's greatest benefit? What is the reason you might want to use this tool? Its platform independent. It can take data from platform A and fairly seamlessly give it to platform B. It can do so synchronously or asynchronously. It can communicate through firewalls via http/s. Ok, for this list of requirements it is truly a wonderful tool. I've worked on several web service projects communicating between Windows and AS/400 and Unix. I've also worked on projects where I needed to call a secure service that resided outside the corporate network. Again, web services fit this bill very well.
But in the Windows world, why would you want to use a web service to communicate between two Windows servers, inside the same network? You have several options for this, almost all of which are faster and more efficient that serializing objects to XML, then passing XML over http to get de-serialized back to an object and then used (and then
One million for 7 songs?! How does something like that even get in to court? Can you imagine if I stole $6.93 (.99 x 7) worth of beef jerky from 7-11? Do you think the court would even hear a case where they wanted a million for my crime?
This is the new business model of the recording industry, which is exactly like the old model. Overcharge your customers and when that doesn't work, overcharge and extort from your customers to make up for shortfalls you generated because you have a crappy product.
There's only so much "drug money", oops CD purchases, the listening public will bestow on ungrateful addicts, oops recording artists...
(Yes I'm bitter this morning; still need my meth, oops coffee.)
=Smidge=
As pesky as the Bill of Rights can be to swift justice and severe vengeance, I do remember something about the the accused having a right to face their accuser. If the Intoxilyzer uses buggy firmware that results in inaccurate readings, then the accused has every right to question it. The company that makes the Intoxilyzer must be held responsible for its actions as well. Someday, somewhere, some company will step up and say, "Yes, we knew our product was faulty. But we have shareholders who will sell our stock in a heartbeat if we miss our mark in any quarter."
Holding both the accuser and the accused responsible for their actions is what helps create a society based on the rule of law. Otherwise, we'd be a police state. As a practicing trial attorney I *much* prefer the former.
=Smidge=
People are probably just buying laptops...
Possibly. But my desktop is 5 yo and Mrs Smidge's desktop is going on 10...! The reason? We don't game, just appliance the heck out of it. No need to upgrade. Same thing with our vehicles, we just fix 'em and take xtra care with preventive maintenance.
=Smidge=
One of the important factors that was overlooked other than the inefficiency of DC over large distances is the risk of electric shock. DC is unforgiving and anyone who receives a shock at the higher voltage levels will have very little to no chance of survival as DC current polarizes the blood and there is no way to reverse that effect in time to save that person.
See the following for a basic description of what this is about.
http://www.cdc.gov/eLCOSH/docs/d0500/d000543/section2.html
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/electric/shock.html
The difference between direct and alternating voltages and currents is that one swings negative to positive thereby reversing the polarity of the potential while with dc everything is a constant supply and thus more harmful.
=Smidge=
has a funny sinking feeling, as if it missed a beat.
Naw you're thinking of the feeling that comes just after restarting RAD and finding your workspace hosed.
=Smidge=
Hmm. If you're like most people, I'm guessing that you don't have a
lot of experience with physics. (Well, not in the formal sense,
anyway! Most people are expert physicists on an intuitive level, with
such remarkable skill that they can lift objects, understand
reflections in a mirror, and even catch a flying ball!) So I'll try to
keep this frosty-posty on a very basic level, and I apologize in advance if I
start spouting jargon or go too fast. If you _do_ have a bit of a
physics background, my apologies for the simple explanation that
follows. I'll label some particularly important paragraphs with "***".
For the record, you won't need any "scholarly journals" here unless you
want to get very cutting edge indeed (or unless you want to go back
many decades or centuries to the original writings that discussed the
concept). The vast majority of what we know about momentum can be
found in textbooks: it is one of the most basic concepts in physics.
Also, keep in mind that while momentum is a fundamental part of
physics, the word has many (related) meanings in colloquial English,
too. I'd guess that a play named _Momentum_ will draw on a wide range
of those.
*** So, what is momentum? The first and most basic statement of the
concept of momentum comes from Newton's First Law of Motion: "An object
in motion will remain in motion unless acted on by an outside force."
(That's sometimes called the "Law of Inertia"; "inertia" and "momentum"
are closely related concepts.) In physics, an object's "momentum" can
be thought of as the "amount of motion" that it has: the greater its
momentum, the harder it is to stop it or to turn it in another
direction.
*** What makes an object harder to stop? Well, the faster it's moving,
the more you have to slow it down, so momentum must depend on speed.
(In fact, it turns out that the direction is important, too; physicists
call speed in a specified direction "velocity".) And the heaver it is,
the harder you have to push to slow it down, so momentum must depend on
"mass" (which is a physicist's technical term for what we normally
think of as weight).
***The formal mathematical definition of momentum (in classical
physics) is the product of those two quantities:
momentum = mass * velocity
To give a few examples, a flying gnat is fast but its mass is very low,
so it doesn't have much momentum. That means that it's easy for a gnat
to turn around and buzz in another direction (which you've probably
seen firsthand). On the other hand, a slowly rolling car still has a
lot of momentum because it's so very heavy: it would be hard to push
one to a stop even at very low speeds. As yet another example, a
bullet is pretty lightweight, but when it is fired from a gun its
enormous speed gives it very high momentum (and if a person tragically
gets in its way, the effort of absorbing all that momentum will break
their flesh and bones).
*** Now, as I mentioned earlier, "velocity" implies not just speed but
direction. So since momentum is proportional to velocity, momentum
always has a direction, too. That's a very fundamental fact about
momentum! Changing an object's direction can be just as hard as
stopping it completely.
*** Another remarkable fact about momentum is that the _total_ amount
of momentum in a system will never change. Physicists call this rule
"Conservation of Momentum", and they say that "momentum is conserved".
For example, if you're playing pool and you hit the cue ball into the
eight ball, when the cue ball slows down the eight ball will start
moving to make up the difference. If your shot is perfectly straight,
the cue ball may stop moving entirely while the eight ball rolls away
with the same velocity that the cue ball used to have. (It would
_have_ to be the same velocity: because the balls have the same mass,
conservation of momentum m
Social Intelligence is a skill that can be taught and learned. That is how most people get it although somewhat unconsciously. Inherent personality does play a role which is why "Nerds" have to work harder at learning it.
Seconded. And for me, when I graduated college two and a half years ago, I went into the job market with not experience, but with code samples. If you're starting out at entry-level and wanna have a damn good chance of getting the job, you gotta have an app of some sorts that you can demonstrate to potential employers so they get a better idea of your programming style and whether you were able to apply the concepts that you learned to that said app.
The way I managed to get my code samples was through my Senior Project, in which I wrote two J2ME demo games for two different handsets (both MIDP1 and 2). One month after graduation, I interviewed for a mobile game developer and had my samples on hand to give to the employer. As a result, I was hired by them shortly thereafter and managed to hold on to that job up until early last year when I was let go. Even after that, I still had connections to the mobile industry and I was taken care of with more work up until last summer, but at least I came away with experience and contacts, something valuable in this economy. Without those code samples, God knows where I could of ended up, probably doing code for some dodgy come and go Hedge Fund, but the fact remains the same: just like artists have samples of their work, so should software engineers. said app.
Also, OP should broaden his search and not just focus on IT given the state of this dismal economy. In other words, build up your digital portfolio to showcase to employers when interviewing for whatever entry-level software engineer position matches your skills. The important thing right now is to get your foot on the door and pop your cherry with some professional experience. Best of luck to you in this fierce job market.
=Smidge=
He'll definitely be missed by some of us.
No. He won't. Roland promised to marry me, but he cheated on me. He cheated it all straights and he cheated on his taxes! He's a monster, a louser, and I'm glad he's dead. I'm happy about it don't you see?
He's dead! He's dead, he's dead, he's dead, he's dead, he's dead. I'm happy about it!
=Smidge=
Via con dios, Roland. You were a prick in this life and I can only suspect your ghost will haunt Slashdot for all eternity, posting/trolling your blog links as news. People like you were the reason a -1 modifier was made and I can only suspect St. Peter will give YOU a -1 when you show up before the pearly gates.
You mean-spirited asshole, I honestly hope you get your 72 virgins in the here-after AND I HOPE THEY ARE ALL MALE.
What the bloody fuck does your sig mean?
=Smidge=
Role Playing Game. Think WoW in real-life. (Yes, it exists.)
=Smidge=
Now we know...what God does with all those kittens.
Um...what? Masturbates to pictures of Famke Janssen while he kills them?
Haven't tried SUSE or Fedora though.
I believe Odd-Job used his 'fedora' as a deadly weapon. Some Jim Bond movie or some such.
=Smidge=
I like how there's a little pussy on the cover; given Ubuntu's user-base that's probably fitting.
>WFT?
WFT Weatherford International (stock symbol)
WFT Waterfront (real estate)
WFT World Family Tree (genealogy)
WFT Wet Film Thickness (Coating Measured in Microns)
WFT Wire-Fox Terrier (dog breed)
WFT Windowed Fourier Transform
WFT World Fisheries Trust
WFT Wingfold Transmission
WFT Web File Transfer
WFT Wireless File Transmitter
WTF?
=Smidge=
You are wrong....Voyager was the best.
=Smidge=
Meh. Just another excuse to snoop on people without justification. If a warrant is issued then at least there is a paper trail leading back to who applied for the warrant any why. If this law goes through then it will be a free-for-all and history has demonstrated very well what happens then.
Also, as far as I'm aware, UK security services have been doing this for some time, this simply makes it legal. Given the majority of the population are not very tech savvy their solution wouldn't need to be that complex, although I imagine its more complex than just a key logger. The only evidence I have for this is talking to people who work in these organizations. The advice to me was get using TOR (although I can never configure it right) so maybe its not too complex, or maybe they were double bluffing me. Who knows? I'm guessing the arrest levels aren't so high because they would have to arrest almost everyone under 30 who's been on a computer. Once they've got the logistics sorted I'm sure they'll happily cart us to the gulag though.
=Smidge=
Listen peeps: AT&T subsidizes the price of every phone it carries, by about $200. So that phone you got a few months ago for free was actually about $200. Youâ(TM)ve probably seen these un-subsidized prices if youâ(TM)ve ever damaged a phone and had to purchase a new one at full price.
The idea is that AT&T will make up that $200 over the course of your two-year contract. So about $8.33 per month goes toward paying down that subsidy. When you get toward the end of two years, youâ(TM)ll be eligible for an upgrade, which is essentially the ability to purchase a new phone at the subsidized price, as long as you commit to another two-year contract.
Maybe not the most ideal plan in the world, but it keeps the apparent cost of mobile phones low, and gets people in the door.
When the original iPhone came out, the arrangement was unique: AT&T wasnâ(TM)t going to subsidize a cent of it in exchange for some flexibilities they allowed to Apple (such as at-home activation). Since there was no subsidy, AT&T lifted the âoeupgradeâ policy for existing AT&T account holders, and allowed them to purchase the iPhone at the standard retail price everyone else paid.
But the iPhone 3G is indeed subsidized, and so the upgrade plan is back in effect. If you currently use a phone subsidized by AT&T, and you arenâ(TM)t currently eligible for an upgrade (you arenâ(TM)t nearing your contactâ(TM)s two-year anniversary), you will need to pay the full, un-subsidized price for the iPhone 3G. In this case, that works out to either $199+200 or $299+200, hence the $399 and $499 prices.
If you already own an iPhone, AT&T doesnâ(TM)t need to get back their lost subsidy, so you get to pay the standard $199/$299 price.
Hopefully, this clarifies things a bit.
=Smidge=