That's fine if it costs a huge amount more to produce than it generates, we're not looking to build a power plant here.
If you could produce antimatter at 1:1,000 ratio to the energy required, we could easily generate that much on earth. It's the ability to store huge amounts of energy in a small form that's important for space travel.:)
I see this as a potentially positive development. In my view, it will end up like the patent system (not that I'm making any value judgements about the patent office, don't jump on that). Countries will each balance their individual values against others. Just as IBM and HP have numerous conflicting patents, and as long as they're balanced in their infringements nobody has to sue, different countries will balance their regional restrictions (ie, China will allow political discussions, the US will allow communist or anti-US sentiment) and all that will be cut out is the truly universally damaging content. (Child pornography, primarily).
That's just a hope though, realistically it'll probably just be the US throwing it's weight around trying to impose it's views on the world.
I just about posted a site which has excellent high-quality copies of great space pics, but at the last minute realized the intelligence of directing thousands of people to simultaneously download large pics from a small-ish university server...
That said, www.space.com has a good gallery, as does NASA if you dig for it. A search on google for "high definition space photographs" turns up a good selection as well, so happy hunting!
The article does bring up the following mental picture:
"What do you think would happen if we could build cheap little credit card floor cleaners that match your linoleum? You could toss them on the floor and all you notice is that your floor is always clean and the cockroaches are nervous,"
I just can't help but laugh out loud at the thought of cockroaches developing a complex because of the moving floor. lol!
As someone who's been through what you're describing more often than I would have liked, I'll strongly advise you to bring in a consultant to oversee and direct the refactoring process.
The reasons for this are many.
You bring in a fresh viewpoint, someone who isn't married to any particular design decision or strategy. This is one of the biggest stumbling blocks in re-implementing existing code.
You bring in rationalized realism. A consultant to oversee such a process is able to make rational and reasoned projections about timeframes and milestones, and can be held to them. Without a voice of authority it will often end up being a battle of wills between you and your manager(s), each side having it's own ideas about what is, and isn't, possible. You might tell your manager something will take 2 months, and you may or may not be right, and he may or may not believe you. But if a percieved "expert" says it will take 2 months, the manager will have no choice but to agree, and he's likely right to boot.
You'll learn something. You really will. My first interactions with consultants tended to be dismissive, after all, who knew my code better than I? But what they have to teach isn't technical so much as it is organizational and structural. I learned a great deal about how to get things done, skills which served me very well as an employee and now as a consultant myself.
Inviting in an outside professional is a difficult thing to do, it requires admitting that you need help, and freeing up additional funds to pay for it. But in a situation such as yours it will not only pay for itself, but will make your job much easier and stress-free. The only real problem is the difficulty of finding a truly qualified consultant with experience and insight into your particular situation. But that's a topic for a different reply.;)
More matters than just language. If you were running on an NT/2000 machine you would be best off using either ASP/COM or ASP.Net. (crippleware anyone?) But being on a *nix platform, you would probably be best off going with a Java servlet solution.
Java and the J2EE not inherently any faster than any other technology, but has a huge advantage because of vendor support. Everyone's scrambling over eachother to provide the best and fastest implementation of the J2EE platform, and the results are trickling down to free servers.
A good example would be the Orion J2EE server, which if benchmarks are to be believed is far and away the fastest solution. Find it at:
www.orionserver.com
I use it myself, and can vouch for ease of use and speed, though I haven't done any benchmarking.
Check out some amazing benchmarking figures for it at: http://www.orionserver.com/benchmarks/benchmark.ht ml
Considering the number of points of contact to the internet, any numerical system would likely need 12 digits or more anyways. So why not just use ip addresses?
You have to appreciate their p.o.v though, they're going to have hundreds of students handing in code of varying levels of legibility. Trust me, marking that is no easy task. Requiring it to work under a given platform goes a long way towards helping the TA's.
At my school, for instance, they now use Java for first year programming. They provide an environment, and if you want to code in a different setup they give you the information. Java solves this problem a little, since it's fairly standard.
And once you're halfway through second year, what language you code in is irrelevant. Sometimes they limit you to a collection of 3-4, (C, C++, Modula-3, etc) but by and large you can do what you want.
Of course, every school won't have the resources (and TA's) to do that. But then again, if they did, maybe we'd have more competition in the ACM contest.;) (Go Waterloo!)
Of all the possible offshore locations for a company interested in doing shady business, Cayman's a pretty poor one. Unlike many other island-countries in the area, Cayman maintains good relations with the US and lacks the kind of corruption that would let you get around that. More likely, a company would incorporate in Cayman because of the insane tax benefits. But I think I'll go check out their office just to find out, since I'm vacationing to Cayman this week anyways.:) sun... surf... beaches... relaxation... hundreds of miles away from my computer... ack!
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That's fine if it costs a huge amount more to produce than it generates, we're not looking to build a power plant here.
:)
If you could produce antimatter at 1:1,000 ratio to the energy required, we could easily generate that much on earth. It's the ability to store huge amounts of energy in a small form that's important for space travel.
I see this as a potentially positive development. In my view, it will end up like the patent system (not that I'm making any value judgements about the patent office, don't jump on that). Countries will each balance their individual values against others. Just as IBM and HP have numerous conflicting patents, and as long as they're balanced in their infringements nobody has to sue, different countries will balance their regional restrictions (ie, China will allow political discussions, the US will allow communist or anti-US sentiment) and all that will be cut out is the truly universally damaging content. (Child pornography, primarily).
That's just a hope though, realistically it'll probably just be the US throwing it's weight around trying to impose it's views on the world.
I just about posted a site which has excellent high-quality copies of great space pics, but at the last minute realized the intelligence of directing thousands of people to simultaneously download large pics from a small-ish university server...
That said, www.space.com has a good gallery, as does NASA if you dig for it. A search on google for "high definition space photographs" turns up a good selection as well, so happy hunting!
The article does bring up the following mental picture:
"What do you think would happen if we could build cheap little credit card floor cleaners that match your linoleum? You could toss them on the floor and all you notice is that your floor is always clean and the cockroaches are nervous,"
I just can't help but laugh out loud at the thought of cockroaches developing a complex because of the moving floor. lol!
As someone who's been through what you're describing more often than I would have liked, I'll strongly advise you to bring in a consultant to oversee and direct the refactoring process.
;)
The reasons for this are many.
You bring in a fresh viewpoint, someone who isn't married to any particular design decision or strategy. This is one of the biggest stumbling blocks in re-implementing existing code.
You bring in rationalized realism. A consultant to oversee such a process is able to make rational and reasoned projections about timeframes and milestones, and can be held to them. Without a voice of authority it will often end up being a battle of wills between you and your manager(s), each side having it's own ideas about what is, and isn't, possible. You might tell your manager something will take 2 months, and you may or may not be right, and he may or may not believe you. But if a percieved "expert" says it will take 2 months, the manager will have no choice but to agree, and he's likely right to boot.
You'll learn something. You really will. My first interactions with consultants tended to be dismissive, after all, who knew my code better than I? But what they have to teach isn't technical so much as it is organizational and structural. I learned a great deal about how to get things done, skills which served me very well as an employee and now as a consultant myself.
Inviting in an outside professional is a difficult thing to do, it requires admitting that you need help, and freeing up additional funds to pay for it. But in a situation such as yours it will not only pay for itself, but will make your job much easier and stress-free. The only real problem is the difficulty of finding a truly qualified consultant with experience and insight into your particular situation. But that's a topic for a different reply.
Just in case you really did want to know and were afraid to ask, it's called "Jailbait" because it's under 16 (megs). ;)
Sure you can, I'm reading it right now in Beijing. :)
More matters than just language. If you were running on an NT/2000 machine you would be best off using either ASP/COM or ASP.Net. (crippleware anyone?) But being on a *nix platform, you would probably be best off going with a Java servlet solution.t ml
Java and the J2EE not inherently any faster than any other technology, but has a huge advantage because of vendor support. Everyone's scrambling over eachother to provide the best and fastest implementation of the J2EE platform, and the results are trickling down to free servers.
A good example would be the Orion J2EE server, which if benchmarks are to be believed is far and away the fastest solution. Find it at: www.orionserver.com
I use it myself, and can vouch for ease of use and speed, though I haven't done any benchmarking.
Check out some amazing benchmarking figures for it at: http://www.orionserver.com/benchmarks/benchmark.h
Considering the number of points of contact to the internet, any numerical system would likely need 12 digits or more anyways. So why not just use ip addresses?
You have to appreciate their p.o.v though, they're going to have hundreds of students handing in code of varying levels of legibility. Trust me, marking that is no easy task. Requiring it to work under a given platform goes a long way towards helping the TA's. ;) (Go Waterloo!)
At my school, for instance, they now use Java for first year programming. They provide an environment, and if you want to code in a different setup they give you the information. Java solves this problem a little, since it's fairly standard.
And once you're halfway through second year, what language you code in is irrelevant. Sometimes they limit you to a collection of 3-4, (C, C++, Modula-3, etc) but by and large you can do what you want.
Of course, every school won't have the resources (and TA's) to do that. But then again, if they did, maybe we'd have more competition in the ACM contest.
Of all the possible offshore locations for a company interested in doing shady business, Cayman's a pretty poor one. Unlike many other island-countries in the area, Cayman maintains good relations with the US and lacks the kind of corruption that would let you get around that. More likely, a company would incorporate in Cayman because of the insane tax benefits. But I think I'll go check out their office just to find out, since I'm vacationing to Cayman this week anyways. :) sun... surf... beaches... relaxation... hundreds of miles away from my computer... ack!