There seems to be a widespread assumption in modern western societies that free time = wasted time.
Somehow there's an expectation that people should use every waking moment to do something "productive". The best example of this trend are Blackberries and how they so often are used to extend one's working hours to to every single free moment we had left.
Especially in Anglo-Saxon societies, people are expected to work continuously, eat at their desks,have no breaks and take work home with them - it's nuts: half the mid-level decision makers seem to be in a constant state of overstressed exhaustion, so no wonder overall corporate productivity is low, wrong decisions are common and a state of barely contained chaos is the rule. Nobody is thinking of the big picture - they're all keeping up with the flow of data (95% worthless chaff) and running around putting out fires.
And now this article...
This is totally against the way the brain works - people absolutely need some sort of mental "decompression" time. Passive consumption of intellectually-undemanding TV entertainment is a form of relaxation and release from everyday stress.
Television might be crap, but it serves a purpose - entertainment without requiring any effort: call it chewing-gum for the brain.
Taking software development as a job will spoil it as a hobby.
(I should know)
In the current market, it's not even a financially sound choice: you should have noticed by now the comments about how hard it is to find work as a Junior Developer - take it as a warning.
If you do manage to punch through the no-job-unless-ur-senior barrier that the service outsourcing trend has raised in IT, then life isn't too bad, though nowadays, unless you're a very specialized freelancer, software developers are paid barely above less specialized jobs.
Given the frequency of posts here on Slashdot about redundancies, outsourced jobs and in general overworking and death marches (don't get me started on that), I'm amazed nobody else has come out and said it before me: "Nowadays, working in IT sucks... big time".
Testing has the added advantage of being a place where its low paid and turnover is high so its a good place to get started in IT.
It's also an extraordinarily repetitive and boring occupation. The only fun you can get out of it is if you get the chance to automate some of the testing (try going for server side component testing if u can, not GUI testing).
What you really need to worry about is pen thieves.
Really... in every place I worked in which was open office or cubicles or had more than one person per office my pens would mysteriously disappear from my desk.
Naturally I had to start engaging in "repossessing operations" and get my pens back from other people's desks. I advice you to get into the same habit: just make sure to repossess only the pens which look the newest.
Those of us doing server side development for any medium to large company will have already been doing multi-threaded and/or multi-process applications for ages now: - When Intel was still a barely known brand, other companies were already selling heavy-iron machines with multiple CPUs for use in heavy server-side environments (didn't ran Windows though). Multi-cores are just a variant of the multiple-CPU concept.
The spread of Web applications just made highly multi-threaded server-side apps even more widespread - they tend naturally to have multiple concurrent users (<rant>though some web-app developers seem to be sadly unaware of the innate multi-threadness of their applications... until "strange" problems start randomly to pop-up</rant>).
As for thick client apps, for anything but the simplest programs one always needs at least 2 threads, one for GUI painting and another one for processing (either that or some fancy juggling a la Windows 3.1)
So, does this article means that Japan, China, India and Russia had no multi-CPU machines until now... or is this just part of a PR campaign to sell an architecture which, in desktops, is fast growing beyond it's usefulness (a bit like razors with 4 and 5 blades)
Re:FTP is BAD! About DAMN time THAT makes press
on
FTP Hacking on the Rise
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Well, when the username is "guest" and the password is "anyemail@example.com" it hardly needs encrypting.
PS: The typical way to anonymously access and FTP server is using the "guest" or "anonymous" usernames and any e-mail address as password. This is actually the way a browser will access an ftp:// URL.
It's not the US troops that are terrorists, it's the guys that sent them to Iraq in the first place that are the real terrorists.
With regards to those which are usually called terrorists, you've clearly accepted the ultra-simplified picture of the "terrorist" that some Western governments push.
The "only purpose" of terrorists is not "wholesale slaughter of civilians". There are many kinds of so called terrorists, falling into 2 big classes: 1) People that are fighting against an occupation by a foreign power. This pretty much describes most of the groups that setup roadside bombs against enemy soldiers in Iraq. It also describes some (though not all) of the groups in Palestine. In other times they would be called Freedom-Fighters or The Resistance. The are not real terrorists - they just have been painted as terrorists by the press of the countries which are the occupying power or their allies. 2) People that want to force others to live according to their rules. That would be groups like Al-Queda (who want to install a world califfate working according to their vision of Islam) or some Palestinian groups (such as Hamas) which are against all Jews and the mere existence of Israel (thus, way beyond fighting to free Palestine).
The first group are not really terrorists (they've just been branded as terrorists so to turn public opinion against them), while the second group are doing what they're doing because they want to impose their will on others - in other words, for power.
In my experience, most people which are exceptionally gifted in dealing with technology and/or creating and navigating complex logical structures (which is what programs are) are quite inept when it comes to dealing with people (especially people from different professional backgrounds) or complex social situations.
This is by no means an absolute rule - some people manage to successfully straddle both domains.
In my view, this explains why so many people fail to success when promoted from technical positions to management (the skills that count the most in management have to do with dealing with people).
Fortunately, "dealing with people" skills can be learned up to a point, though for technical people that often requires one to be willing to step out of one's comfort zone (which is why so many don't even try).
I suggest a passive water cooling system. I've been using a Reserator from Zalman for this. You can eliminate both the CPU and the GPU fan with one of these without compromising in performance (actually you can overclock both your CPU and your GPU with one of these). Since it has no fans it's very quiet (it does have a water pump which can become noisy if not tightly fit to the bottom of the water tower, just replace it with an external pump - it's a lot easier to wrap a water pump in sound-dampening material than it is to sound-proof a fan).
The next step is a power source with a 12 inch fan instead of the traditional 9 inch fan ones (larger = slower = quieter). Power sources with 12'' fans are quite common nowadays.
After that there are noise reduction cradles for your hard-disks and sound proofing for your computer case...
Just beware that the quest for a silent PC is a never ending one. Once you get rid of the loudest sounding noise source in your PC, you start to notice the noise from the previous second loudest source.
It all starts with thinking "We know better than everybody else".
Some use weapons and explosives to try and impose their "enlightened" will on others (or scare others into compliance), others form pressure groups to get politicians to pass laws to impose their "enlightened" will on others (or scare others into compliance).
Both groups think they know best. Both groups try to impose their view on others. Both groups, directly or indirectly use force to impose their will on others (how many people get shot in police raids because they're drug users?).
Here's a couple of quick and cheap tricks for turning your existing computer greener:
Get one of these Intelli Panel or similar (there are other brands). Basically it's an "intelligent" panel where you plug your computer to a master socket and all the peripherals to the other sockets. When the computer is on, all the other sockets get power, when the computer is off, all the other sockets have no power. If you add up the trickle power consumed in standby mode by the power sources of all the peripherals (usually at least 3 - monitor, printer and loudspeakers) you will see that this thing pays itself after a while (for the typical techie setup this thing pays itself in no time)
Under-clock your CPU. Really! Just do the exact opposite of all those over-clocking articles: reduce the frequency (say, 10%), reduce the Voltage if possible, remove the enormous fan from the top of your CPU cooler. The power vs frequency behaviour of a CPU is non-linear - especially at the top of it's frequency range - so a small reduction in speed = a large reduction in power consumed. See http://download.microsoft.com/download/9/8/f/98f3fe47-dfc3-4e74-92a3-088782200fe7/TWDT05003_WinHEC05.ppt (page 13) for an example. Ditching the fan and getting a quieter machine in the process is just a pleasant side effect of this.
Under-clock the GPU and memory of your graphics card. (i bet that at this point most hard-core gamers out there are doubting my geek credentials). Ditch the fan if you can. Same rationale as for the CPUs.
If you still have a CRT monitor, get an LCD one instead. No explanation needed here IMHO
This should be enough to save you quite some $$$ in your energy bill and polish up your green credentials.
For a more radical approach, consider getting a notebook instead of a desktop for your next upgrade: notebooks will, by design, consume less power than desktops.
As seen from outside the US, the fact that even you "unbiased" media almost always frames questions, issues and events as having only two sides, one being a Democrat-like side and the other a Republican-like side, pretty much shows there is a bias against views from outside the establishment.
Compared with countries with real democratic vote (proportional representation), the US' political dialog is almost a monologue.
Couple that to a blind, unquestioning nationalism and a full US-centric news coverage, and it pretty much looks like the American people are trained from birth to not challenge the establishment.
That would explain why the US is full of "political dynasties"...
My example of somebody that enjoys porn but doesn't want his church group to know about it is meant to be and example of "hide from other's unethical behavior".
The "others unethical behavior" in that example is the part where some members of his church group, upon discovering something he does in the privacy of his home without harming anybody, would treat him badly because they find his behavior immoral.
I'm neither defending nor attacking anonymity: I'm just pointing out that being anonymous reduces the risk of social exclusion or other repercussions for those that want to do things which society frowns upon or which are bad for others.
This affects as much somebody that's interested in porn and don't want their church group to know about it as somebody which is stalking and harassing somebody else via the Internet.
Anonymity is just as good at liberating someone from the claws of moralists as it is at protecting the aggressor from the consequences of his/her acts. Anonymity is neither inherently good or bad - it's just another factor affecting the actions of people in a social context.
3 words: - Good Taste and Experience (well, 4 words, but who's counting)
I'm a Software developer. I've done my own web page designs in the past and I've worked together with graphics designers to create dynamic websites (meaning, sites that have executable code running on the back-end).
Those guys (and gals) can come up with novel, elegant, visually attractive designs again and again and again By comparison, the sites i design (which don't look that bad) are crap.
Most developers i know suffer the same problem as me: we tend to go towards the utilitarian, maybe with some pretty colors thrown in, but no elegance. We can copy somebody else's layout but we have trouble coming up with something which is both fresh and attractive.
Graphics design is not a discipline deeply rooted in logic: it's really all about making something that's pleasing, and pleasure is hardly an easy to measure something defined by hard-rules.
One can take a purely logical approach to designing a web site, including the good looks part of it. Usually the end result is something which will make the viewers vaguely remember some other site they've seen before... probably because you've based the looks of your site on something that already exists.
My advice, pay a web design company to come up with the basic image for the site and design some basic categories of pages (home page, about us page, products menus, template page about a product) and build up the rest of the site based on the image they created (in other words copy their style).
Cultural & Legal
on
Ethics In IT
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Ethics in IT is just a reflection of ethics in the world at large - what people tend to do or not to do is usually a reflection of what they believe that others expect them to do or not to do.
Often this is for cultural or even legal reasons: for example, in Holland it's forbidden by law in a company to check the web access logs for an employee unless there is reason to believe that employee is misusing the company resources or doing something illegal, while in the UK an employee can expect that anything done via the company network will be watched.
The main differences that affect the actions of people in a position of power in an IT environment and in an equivalent non-IT environment are:
Anonymity: the belief that "nobody will know who i really am" means that some will do online certain actions that are shunned by society at large. While acting behind an alias which cannot be traced back to the real world persona many, free of social pressures and/or direct repercussions for their actions, will act online in ways that they would not act offline (I suggest you study MMORPGs for this).
Decoupling from reality: often one's actions do not have a visible component in the "real" world. At it's most basically, it's easier to be unpleasant when the target is somebody you've never met personally.
The lower likelihood of being caught: the risk of being caught is a strong factor when considering whether or not to act in a way which might be perceived as unethical, illegal or socially unacceptable. In the "virtual" world it's easier to do some actions without being caught. For example, consider the workers in the mail room in a company vs the e-mail server administrators in that company: for whom would it be easier to read somebody else's messages without leaving a trace...
Why would an European want to visit the States occasionally? It's only a single country you know.
There's a whole planet out there, and to get into most countries one does not need to go through the same kind of abusive border control.
Many people out there are hardly keen on visiting the US. Many people out there are hardly keen on visiting North Korea. Many people out there are hardly keen on visiting Sierra Leone: when the downsides of visiting any one country outweigh the upsides, one goes somewhere else.
Now, i do agree that limiting oneself to a third of the world (either only the Americas, the Euroasian continent or Oceania, no islands) is dumb.
That said, i don't see the point of going to the US the way things are now (DISCLAIMER: I live in Europe and I've been to the US before 9/11). Personally I'd rather go visit Canada.
This whole fixation with explosives is overly concentrating on a single kind of terrorist attack.
Consider that a plane is an airtight, pressurized box full of people. An airborne poison would be enough to kill everybody on board (maybe with the exception of those in the cockpit) in an horrendous way.
Given that the point of terrorism is to force the other side to react by instilling fear in them (and yes, the terrorists are winning), a plane full of people which clearly had died in horrible pain should be a lot more effective than one which crashed in the ocean and of which just a couple of pieces was recovered.
XML in the frontend ... WTF????
on
The Future of XML
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The future of XML is where it's past is: in the back-end, connecting systems designed by different teams and even different companies.
I've been working with XML ever since it first came out and the whole XML on the front-end is a fad that comes and goes periodically.
The pros of XML
There are a gazillion libraries out there to parse and process XML. Any idiot can pick an XML library and in 5 minutes enable his/her program to read and write XML. This means less development work is needed to get the data into and out of the messages and more time can be used for actually dealing with the data itself (as in, figuring out what should it be and what to do with it).
Build-in validation. This is great when different teams are doing 2 sides of an interface between 2 system using XML as the transport format: basically the XML Schema acts as the de facto Interface Requirements Specification - it lists all fields, their type, their mandatory status, their location in the data structure and, if well done, even their allowed values or minimum and maximum values. If both the sender and the receiver actually enable validation of the XML messages against the schema, then in practice it's close to impossible for a sender to create a message which breaks the receiver. However, when both the sender and the receiver are being developed by the same team, this is a lot less useful.
People can actually open an XML message and check it with standard text editor. This is only good for relatively small messages though - if whatever is generating the messages doesn't put end of lines anywhere, for big messages interpreting it's contents is still a head ache
Cons of XML
XML is the best file expansion scheme known to man. Encoding something in XML can easily turn 10KB worth of data into an 1MB monstrosity - just try encoding an n-by-m matrix of integers into XML without using fancy tricks like (non-XML) separators to see what i mean
High memory usage for parsers. This is both related to the first con listed and to the fact that the most common standard used to represent an XML document in memory in an Object Oriented language (DOM), actually uses one object per XML entity (elements, attributes, etc) - which means that an XML document is further expanded when loaded into memory (unless your element and attribute names are really large, the memory footprint of a DOM entity is usually bigger than the XML representation of that entity)
Parsing XML can be a lot slower than parsing most binary formats. This is again related to the cons listed above
High cross dependency between different parts of the file. More specifically, in order to reach any element inside an XML stream, the whole stream up to that point has to be parse.
The pros and cons mean that the best place to use XML is for interoperability between systems/applications developed by different teams/vendors where not much data is sent around and processing is not time sensitive. This does cover some front-end applications where the data can be generated by a program done by one vendor and read by a program done by a different vendor. It does, however, not cover files which are meant to be written and read by the same application.
The second best place is to quickly add support for a tree structured storage format for data to an application (for example, for a config file), since you can just pick-up one of the XML libraries out there and half your file format problems will be solved (you still have to figure out and develop the "what to put in there" and "where to put it" part, but need not worry about most of the mechanics of generating, parsing and validating the file)
And the ultimate in energy efficiency is... the 0 Volt processor
Yes, this marvel of technology will be completely silent, generate no heat whatsoever and emit no electromagnetic radiation at all. This bleeding edge device is so efficient that it requires no energy source.
The only slight stumble block we are facing in the development of this wonderful device is the difficulty in determining which bits are set at 1 and which at 0 since the electrical level for both is the same. I'm sure further research will solve this...
If 'grey goo' could happen from nanotech or biotech, then bacteria would have done it already.
If it had happened on this planet we wouldn't be here to talk about it. Clearly it's a case of the results of the "experiment" dictating the existence of the "observer".
Reminds me of the old days of ZX Spectrum computers when all that most of my friends knew of Basic was typing J " " (LOAD "" ) Which was all that you needed to know to run a game.
Some things never change.
This post brought to you by the "I'm getting old" department;)
Slashdot Mirror
There seems to be a widespread assumption in modern western societies that free time = wasted time.
...
Somehow there's an expectation that people should use every waking moment to do something "productive". The best example of this trend are Blackberries and how they so often are used to extend one's working hours to to every single free moment we had left.
Especially in Anglo-Saxon societies, people are expected to work continuously, eat at their desks,have no breaks and take work home with them - it's nuts: half the mid-level decision makers seem to be in a constant state of overstressed exhaustion, so no wonder overall corporate productivity is low, wrong decisions are common and a state of barely contained chaos is the rule. Nobody is thinking of the big picture - they're all keeping up with the flow of data (95% worthless chaff) and running around putting out fires.
And now this article
This is totally against the way the brain works - people absolutely need some sort of mental "decompression" time. Passive consumption of intellectually-undemanding TV entertainment is a form of relaxation and release from everyday stress.
Television might be crap, but it serves a purpose - entertainment without requiring any effort: call it chewing-gum for the brain.
Taking software development as a job will spoil it as a hobby.
... big time".
(I should know)
In the current market, it's not even a financially sound choice: you should have noticed by now the comments about how hard it is to find work as a Junior Developer - take it as a warning.
If you do manage to punch through the no-job-unless-ur-senior barrier that the service outsourcing trend has raised in IT, then life isn't too bad, though nowadays, unless you're a very specialized freelancer, software developers are paid barely above less specialized jobs.
Given the frequency of posts here on Slashdot about redundancies, outsourced jobs and in general overworking and death marches (don't get me started on that), I'm amazed nobody else has come out and said it before me: "Nowadays, working in IT sucks
It's also an extraordinarily repetitive and boring occupation. The only fun you can get out of it is if you get the chance to automate some of the testing (try going for server side component testing if u can, not GUI testing).
What you really need to worry about is pen thieves.
... in every place I worked in which was open office or cubicles or had more than one person per office my pens would mysteriously disappear from my desk.
Really
Naturally I had to start engaging in "repossessing operations" and get my pens back from other people's desks. I advice you to get into the same habit: just make sure to repossess only the pens which look the newest.
Those of us doing server side development for any medium to large company will have already been doing multi-threaded and/or multi-process applications for ages now:
... until "strange" problems start randomly to pop-up</rant>).
... or is this just part of a PR campaign to sell an architecture which, in desktops, is fast growing beyond it's usefulness (a bit like razors with 4 and 5 blades)
- When Intel was still a barely known brand, other companies were already selling heavy-iron machines with multiple CPUs for use in heavy server-side environments (didn't ran Windows though). Multi-cores are just a variant of the multiple-CPU concept.
The spread of Web applications just made highly multi-threaded server-side apps even more widespread - they tend naturally to have multiple concurrent users (<rant>though some web-app developers seem to be sadly unaware of the innate multi-threadness of their applications
As for thick client apps, for anything but the simplest programs one always needs at least 2 threads, one for GUI painting and another one for processing (either that or some fancy juggling a la Windows 3.1)
So, does this article means that Japan, China, India and Russia had no multi-CPU machines until now
Well, when the username is "guest" and the password is "anyemail@example.com" it hardly needs encrypting.
PS: The typical way to anonymously access and FTP server is using the "guest" or "anonymous" usernames and any e-mail address as password. This is actually the way a browser will access an ftp:// URL.
So, how do they expect to make money out of it: do they have a patent on a key part of the "platform" or something?
Terrorists would exist no mater what.
The problem is that some of the actions of the US and Israel have helped turn what would be a "bunch of wackos" into a "torrent of wannabe martyrs"
US actions didn't create terrorism, they just turned terrorism from a puny pest into a huge monster.
It's not the US troops that are terrorists, it's the guys that sent them to Iraq in the first place that are the real terrorists.
With regards to those which are usually called terrorists, you've clearly accepted the ultra-simplified picture of the "terrorist" that some Western governments push.
The "only purpose" of terrorists is not "wholesale slaughter of civilians". There are many kinds of so called terrorists, falling into 2 big classes:
1) People that are fighting against an occupation by a foreign power. This pretty much describes most of the groups that setup roadside bombs against enemy soldiers in Iraq. It also describes some (though not all) of the groups in Palestine. In other times they would be called Freedom-Fighters or The Resistance. The are not real terrorists - they just have been painted as terrorists by the press of the countries which are the occupying power or their allies.
2) People that want to force others to live according to their rules. That would be groups like Al-Queda (who want to install a world califfate working according to their vision of Islam) or some Palestinian groups (such as Hamas) which are against all Jews and the mere existence of Israel (thus, way beyond fighting to free Palestine).
The first group are not really terrorists (they've just been branded as terrorists so to turn public opinion against them), while the second group are doing what they're doing because they want to impose their will on others - in other words, for power.
Terrorism is not an end into itself, it's a tool.
In my experience, most people which are exceptionally gifted in dealing with technology and/or creating and navigating complex logical structures (which is what programs are) are quite inept when it comes to dealing with people (especially people from different professional backgrounds) or complex social situations.
This is by no means an absolute rule - some people manage to successfully straddle both domains.
In my view, this explains why so many people fail to success when promoted from technical positions to management (the skills that count the most in management have to do with dealing with people).
Fortunately, "dealing with people" skills can be learned up to a point, though for technical people that often requires one to be willing to step out of one's comfort zone (which is why so many don't even try).
I suggest a passive water cooling system. I've been using a Reserator from Zalman for this. You can eliminate both the CPU and the GPU fan with one of these without compromising in performance (actually you can overclock both your CPU and your GPU with one of these). Since it has no fans it's very quiet (it does have a water pump which can become noisy if not tightly fit to the bottom of the water tower, just replace it with an external pump - it's a lot easier to wrap a water pump in sound-dampening material than it is to sound-proof a fan).
...
The next step is a power source with a 12 inch fan instead of the traditional 9 inch fan ones (larger = slower = quieter). Power sources with 12'' fans are quite common nowadays.
After that there are noise reduction cradles for your hard-disks and sound proofing for your computer case
Just beware that the quest for a silent PC is a never ending one. Once you get rid of the loudest sounding noise source in your PC, you start to notice the noise from the previous second loudest source.
It all starts with thinking "We know better than everybody else".
Some use weapons and explosives to try and impose their "enlightened" will on others (or scare others into compliance), others form pressure groups to get politicians to pass laws to impose their "enlightened" will on others (or scare others into compliance).
Both groups think they know best. Both groups try to impose their view on others. Both groups, directly or indirectly use force to impose their will on others (how many people get shot in police raids because they're drug users?).
This should be enough to save you quite some $$$ in your energy bill and polish up your green credentials.
For a more radical approach, consider getting a notebook instead of a desktop for your next upgrade: notebooks will, by design, consume less power than desktops.
As seen from outside the US, the fact that even you "unbiased" media almost always frames questions, issues and events as having only two sides, one being a Democrat-like side and the other a Republican-like side, pretty much shows there is a bias against views from outside the establishment.
...
Compared with countries with real democratic vote (proportional representation), the US' political dialog is almost a monologue.
Couple that to a blind, unquestioning nationalism and a full US-centric news coverage, and it pretty much looks like the American people are trained from birth to not challenge the establishment.
That would explain why the US is full of "political dynasties"
My example of somebody that enjoys porn but doesn't want his church group to know about it is meant to be and example of "hide from other's unethical behavior".
The "others unethical behavior" in that example is the part where some members of his church group, upon discovering something he does in the privacy of his home without harming anybody, would treat him badly because they find his behavior immoral.
I'm neither defending nor attacking anonymity: I'm just pointing out that being anonymous reduces the risk of social exclusion or other repercussions for those that want to do things which society frowns upon or which are bad for others.
This affects as much somebody that's interested in porn and don't want their church group to know about it as somebody which is stalking and harassing somebody else via the Internet.
Anonymity is just as good at liberating someone from the claws of moralists as it is at protecting the aggressor from the consequences of his/her acts. Anonymity is neither inherently good or bad - it's just another factor affecting the actions of people in a social context.
3 words:
... probably because you've based the looks of your site on something that already exists.
- Good Taste and Experience
(well, 4 words, but who's counting)
I'm a Software developer. I've done my own web page designs in the past and I've worked together with graphics designers to create dynamic websites (meaning, sites that have executable code running on the back-end).
Those guys (and gals) can come up with novel, elegant, visually attractive designs again and again and again By comparison, the sites i design (which don't look that bad) are crap.
Most developers i know suffer the same problem as me: we tend to go towards the utilitarian, maybe with some pretty colors thrown in, but no elegance. We can copy somebody else's layout but we have trouble coming up with something which is both fresh and attractive.
Graphics design is not a discipline deeply rooted in logic: it's really all about making something that's pleasing, and pleasure is hardly an easy to measure something defined by hard-rules.
One can take a purely logical approach to designing a web site, including the good looks part of it. Usually the end result is something which will make the viewers vaguely remember some other site they've seen before
My advice, pay a web design company to come up with the basic image for the site and design some basic categories of pages (home page, about us page, products menus, template page about a product) and build up the rest of the site based on the image they created (in other words copy their style).
Often this is for cultural or even legal reasons: for example, in Holland it's forbidden by law in a company to check the web access logs for an employee unless there is reason to believe that employee is misusing the company resources or doing something illegal, while in the UK an employee can expect that anything done via the company network will be watched.
The main differences that affect the actions of people in a position of power in an IT environment and in an equivalent non-IT environment are:
Why would an European want to visit the States occasionally? It's only a single country you know.
There's a whole planet out there, and to get into most countries one does not need to go through the same kind of abusive border control.
Many people out there are hardly keen on visiting the US. Many people out there are hardly keen on visiting North Korea. Many people out there are hardly keen on visiting Sierra Leone: when the downsides of visiting any one country outweigh the upsides, one goes somewhere else.
Now, i do agree that limiting oneself to a third of the world (either only the Americas, the Euroasian continent or Oceania, no islands) is dumb.
That said, i don't see the point of going to the US the way things are now (DISCLAIMER: I live in Europe and I've been to the US before 9/11). Personally I'd rather go visit Canada.
This whole fixation with explosives is overly concentrating on a single kind of terrorist attack.
Consider that a plane is an airtight, pressurized box full of people. An airborne poison would be enough to kill everybody on board (maybe with the exception of those in the cockpit) in an horrendous way.
Given that the point of terrorism is to force the other side to react by instilling fear in them (and yes, the terrorists are winning), a plane full of people which clearly had died in horrible pain should be a lot more effective than one which crashed in the ocean and of which just a couple of pieces was recovered.
I've been working with XML ever since it first came out and the whole XML on the front-end is a fad that comes and goes periodically.
The pros of XML
Cons of XML
The pros and cons mean that the best place to use XML is for interoperability between systems/applications developed by different teams/vendors where not much data is sent around and processing is not time sensitive. This does cover some front-end applications where the data can be generated by a program done by one vendor and read by a program done by a different vendor. It does, however, not cover files which are meant to be written and read by the same application.
The second best place is to quickly add support for a tree structured storage format for data to an application (for example, for a config file), since you can just pick-up one of the XML libraries out there and half your file format problems will be solved (you still have to figure out and develop the "what to put in there" and "where to put it" part, but need not worry about most of the mechanics of generating, parsing and validating the file)
And the ultimate in energy efficiency is ... the 0 Volt processor
...
Yes, this marvel of technology will be completely silent, generate no heat whatsoever and emit no electromagnetic radiation at all. This bleeding edge device is so efficient that it requires no energy source.
The only slight stumble block we are facing in the development of this wonderful device is the difficulty in determining which bits are set at 1 and which at 0 since the electrical level for both is the same. I'm sure further research will solve this
If it had happened on this planet we wouldn't be here to talk about it. Clearly it's a case of the results of the "experiment" dictating the existence of the "observer".
Actually, the margin of error in their study is directly proportional to the depth their head went up their assess when they pulled the numbers out.
Reminds me of the old days of ZX Spectrum computers when all that most of my friends knew of Basic was typing J " "
;)
(LOAD "" )
Which was all that you needed to know to run a game.
Some things never change.
This post brought to you by the "I'm getting old" department