JP Morgan Chase, 90K employees, $650 billion in assets. Not as many employees, but Wells Fargo is rated as the 5th or 6th largest bank and JP is around 3rd. We have.NET projects of all types flying around here. Of course, we have projects using pretty much anything you can think of... but my point is that C# isn't particularly rare. Furthermore, I have friends at two other large firms -- Bank of America and Merrill Lynch, and they're both reporting the same thing, C# is alive and well. VB.NET too, apparently (I was personally hoping C# would put a bullet in its head).
I've worked at five other companies I'd consider very large, and I've never seen anything that would filter something as blatantly innocuous as F#.
Since you asked, if I had moderator points, I WOULD moderate your post as Overrated, as suggested by my opening comment "Insightful? Please." I disagree, I did not find your post at all insightful, which is precisely what the Overrated moderation is for. Normally I try very hard to moderate useful content up, rather than moderate down.
But before you click Reply, consider this: had somebody rated you Interesting, I wouldn't have used the Overrated moderation had it been available. Ah ha, someone who actually knows the difference between Insightful and Interesting. Sadly the distinction appears to be lost on most of the moderators around here.
First of all, I've been working in a probably-much-larger (one of the largest) financial institutions for six years, and I see C# all over the place. So much for anecdotes.
Second, I've been working for various large companies since Internet-based e-mail started, and I've never seen anything that would filter F#. So much for speculation.
It's actually called an "octothorpe". Search for the earliest C# discussions on/.... various linguist geeks babbled about this endlessly, even getting into minutiae about a hash being right-angle lines but a sharp note being angular, etc etc.
No, I'm not a language geek so yes, it was mostly a boring conversation.:)
Just goes to show you what quality products can do when put to the test.
Of course, you have to have quality test matter, which is what the students provided.
Looks to me like nVidia provided the test material.
but having your speedometer, tach, oil pressure blah blah in front of you so you dont have to look away from the road
Pontiac has put limited HUDs in certain model cars for many years. It was first introduced in the Bonneville SSEi models, in the early 90's as I recall. I had one a few years back in a Grand Prix GTP. They only show speed and turn signals but they're fantastic. I drove the Grand Prix frequently for about a year and it's actually difficult to get used to looking down at a speedometer again.
They use a simple reverse-image LED inside the dashboard which reflects off a mirror aimed up at the windshield. The output appears to be hovering at the lower edge of your vision about a foot or two in front of the car. You can control brightness and you can raise or lower the image (a switch tilts the mirror in the dash). Admittedly, I did always wish it showed more information (particularly RPM). However, that would probably be too much distraction for your average driver.
Sadly, I gather GM owns several patents on this, so nobody else can offer it. I'd pay stupid amounts of money to have it on every car I own, though. It's that useful.
HUDs aside, though, see-through screens would be awful for exactly the same reason nobody really uses see-through windows on their desktop except for a short-term "gee whiz" effect. If see-through surfaces were so great, we'd all be using transparencies for output (B5-style) instead of PWP -- Plain White Paper.:)
Damn, now you've got me jonesin' for a HUD again. Maybe I'll build one into my race car... heh heh...
...we also lost the ability to improve the software. Anyone who wanted a feature that was not added lost out.
That's the relevent point!
And that is where GPL fails. I happened to stumble across a perfect case in point two days ago. I was trying to decide if I wanted DishNetwork's PVR or the DirectTV TiVo package. (As a side note, TiVo has better features. The DishNetwork offering is basically a HDD-based VCR.) On the DishNetwork site, they had a link to http://208.45.37.181/ which was labled as the GPL compliance information for their Linux-based PVR.
If you actually go to that site, you'll see this caveat (my emphasis added):
In compliance with the terms of the GPL, we are making this source code available to the public to download. Please note that the DishPVR 721 software also includes some proprietary elements that are not subject to the GPL. You cannot create a working DishPVR 721 software build without the additional proprietary code.
So lah-dee-frickin-da, you can see some of the code, but you can't do anything useful with it. As illustrated by that site, it was pretty easy for them to build upon the free labor of "the community", and comply with the rules of the GPL, yet prevent the publicly accessible portions from being useful to anyone. What's the point? To hijack (and paraphrase) an excellent sig I've seen on/. recently, "Open Source is like working for DishNetwork without getting paid."
Speaking as a person who owns several thousand sci-fi novels and has read thousands more, I've never understood the fascination with Gibson. He's a mediocre writer at best, and the stuff geeks should be most interested in from his novels are generally the least well thought-out parts of his stories.
Sorry if it sounds like flamebait, it isn't intended that way, but old WG just isn't that hot, IMHO...
Tell me something. Why is it that MS refuses to deal directly with it's own customers? Why should it sell thru OEMs etc. and support thru the web?
MS doesn't refuse to deal with it's customers. In OEM situations, the user is not Microsoft's customer, the OEM is, and part of the OEM license clearly states that the OEM has to support it, not MS.
Want another example of this from a different industry? Buy a Mercedes from a major aftermarket tuner like RennTech who makes significant pre-sales upgrades. Your warranty is honored by RennTech, not Mercedes.
Examples abound. Hell, my beer fridge at home is identical to a Sanyo model except for a sheet of brushed aluminum laminate, but if I called Sanyo, they'd just tell me to call the "OEM".
Re:Why are we always nitpicking?
on
Shuttle Politics
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· Score: 1
Indeed. Until recently, American astronauts were soldiers...
And the whole series is out of print. I made the mistake of loaning out the books, and about half of them mysteriously disappeared. ("Dude, I returned it to you like a year ago...")
I've been ordering used copies as I can find them, but it's a hit or miss proposition at best. A fantastic series though.
that's the kicker...what's "properly encoded?" For microsoft it probably means WMA and ASF or WMV, but I have a large part of my music collection in mp3 (like 90% of the world)
Do you have an XBOX? It uses MP3 internally. I'm not saying you aren't making a good point (MS loves to pimp it's formats and we all know they're sucking that DRM tit) but still... it does use MP3 today...
This is somewhat off-topic, but am I the only one who hates the fact that slashdot appears to be completely unaware of "year" as a unit of time? The article you referenced is identified this way:
and only one or two got through, you'd lose at least 10 milion people
Not all warheads are aimed at large population centers. For example, Kings Bay, Georgia, a submarine base, has an extremely small local population but it warrants something like 12 warheads due to its military value.
I know a guy who does his job-cost estimating on a 1978 Northstar, which is a Z80 machine. It's just a roughly 500-line BASIC program, so I offered to rewrite it for him free of cost to run on his 2GHz P4, but basically the machine has never given him any trouble and he's happy with it. You should see the printer, it's enormous.
I have a CMP-25 in my truck. I was happy with it at first, but I have some major gripes:
1. It's really difficult to find a HDD it likes. You can only use 5200 RPM drives which are increasingly difficult to find, and certain brands apparently work better than others. I had six old drives laying around, and I could only use two of them in the player. One has died, and the other is in my wife's truck, so the player in my truck doesn't work right now. Sucks.
2. I had to send one unit back repeatedly for repairs. SSI is Taiwanese, and it's very difficult to find somebody who can speak English. They were nice enough, but repairs took forever and my unit came back with some serious scratches (it's mounted out of site, so no big deal).
3. Using a regular HDD means your drive will have a short life. Mine lasted about a year in my big truck, and about two years so far in my smaller truck (which spends less time off-roading and less time outside in the heat). I expected this, but coupled with it being so picky about HDDs, it could be a problem.
4. The PC bay is a pain in the ass, frankly. It won't work unless it's the master on the IDE channel, limiting what you can use that channel for in many cases. Also it isn't hot swap, which means you have to power down and reboot any time you want to mess with it.
5. The latching mechanism is fairly flimsy and cheap. It has to be latched for the unit to power-up, but I've seen the metal tab on the latch miss the mark and bend the plastic of the bay before. Lame for something this expensive.
Overall though, I'm still happy with it when it works. At the time of purchase, I considered it buying something sort of on the cutting edge (two years ago), and even now I don't really regret it. I will probably eventually rip it out and give it away, and use the AUX input on my Pioneer head unit for a portable MP3 player (I have a couple Archoses I love), but it's not half-bad in spite of the issues I mentioned.
The PhatNoise Jukebox and Kenwood MusicKeg are the same product, but they're sold separately. Kenwood just licenses it from PhatNoise, they didn't buy it outright. I have a Kenwood, but I'd recommend the PhatNoise product because Kenwood changes the MusicKeg so it only works with Kenwood head units -- which mostly suck.
It's a pretty nice unit, though. I only had minor problems which a BIOS upgrade fixed, and as long as you do your homework and pick a decent head unit, it works very transparently and does everything the guy in the article wanted.
If you're so inclined, you can take the disc cartridge and play it through your PC in the house, too. I don't as I have a much larger MP3 collection on my network at home.
Really the cartdige system is my sole gripe: they're extremely expensive, although the PhatNoise people told me they're solid-state and I shouldn't worry about shock problems -- I have one mounted in the Viper that I road race and drag race fairly often).
I move that all references to Jakob Nielsen should be preceded with the disclaimer "self-proclaimed usability expert". One's very first encounter with his grasp of usability -- his website -- is a profoundly unpleasant experience. If you actually read most of what he says, it amounts to a mish-mash of rants about his personal opinion on how he wishes everything was different. As far as I can tell, there really isn't much this guy actually likes. He rarely offers any sort of hard data to back up his claims. Years ago I personally knew several folks who worked in two companies that specialized in contract usability testing. I worked at a place which contracted with them, and being interested in UI issues, I was already familiar with Jakob and other "icons" in the field, leading me to solicit their personal opinions over lunch and so on. Let's just say the comments were "unfavorable". (And for you VB junkies out there, the same goes for that nutcase Alan Cooper.)
Granted, this is somewhat tangential to the main point of the topic, but just because Jakob unveils a new decree does not make it so. I cringe every time I see his name in a new/. article...
Your comments about Fox are interesting in light of the fact that I often compare Fox and their global affiliate, SkyNews. It's interesting to see how the same company (essentially) spins the war differently for their different markets.
(My sig is the opening line from the movie Fight Club.)
Imagine, not needing springs anymore, the suspension links ARE the springs
You'll always want springs, they're too useful to get rid of. And as you note, if you made other parts of the suspension do double-duty as springs, well, you still have springs.
The important question isn't to speculate whether you can get rid of springs, it's to speculate whether you can make better springs, either by making them more efficient, or equally efficient with a weight or cost savings. Unfortunately the site is already slashdotted, so I don't know if the article mentions those kind of details, but if it doesn't, it's a huge assumption you're making. Many materials can return to a reasonable facsimilie of their original shape after deformation, but to do so repeatedly over time in a highly predictable and consistent fashion at rates in ranges suited to a suspension system... well, it's almost impossible to beat a plain old cheap steel coils. Even high-end SAE 9254 hot-formed steel racing-grade springs are only a couple hundred bucks for a set of four...
This reminds me of the predictions (I know you're not predicting) that eventually we'd all be driving around in Nitinol ("memory metal") cars that after a fender bender could be popped back into shape with a blow dryer...
Actually it's funny you'd mention the "media bias" thing, as that is another place where I often reference Limbaugh to make a point. And believe me, I'm not an ardent follower of the guy, he just happens to be on the radio during my drive home (I do occasionally agree with him). I find it almost painfully hilarious that the Rush-style far-right and the slashdot-style far-left both complain about the SAME media sources as being biased. However, it probably deserves mentioning that I'm all over the board in terms of whether I'm conservative or liberal, and unfortunately I still have trouble taking that as a sign that the media isn't biased...
Things sure are changing a lot and fast. If you don't pay attention, you won't recognize the country you live in anymore. The language is changing underneath us, too. "Partisan" used to mean something about a bias for one political party or the other. Now it simply means you don't like Bush and therefore shouldn't be listened to. People who do favor Bush are never partisan.
Funny. On almost a daily basis you can listen to the rightest-of-the-right-wingers himself, Rush Limbaugh, use the word "partisan" to refer to both liberals and conservatives equally.
So tell us again how and why things change a lot, and fast?
I wonder if this will bring Silicon Graphics back into the favor of Intel boxes - for awhile they were okay with WinNT and Intel boxes, but then they dropped all of that - presumably for a higher profit margin and less hassle of maintaining multiple systems (also likely some break in business politics - perhaps someone at MS pissed someone off at SGI).
I was friends with several SGI employees when SGI decided to ditch their Intel/WinNT support. Two of my friends were directly involved with the NT-related operations. The decision was mainly related to a series of falling-outs with Microsoft over things like the Fahrenheit relationship. Officially it was attributed to cost-cutting and re-focusing on core competencies, though (SGI has been in a bad way financially for quite a long time).
These days a large part of their revenue stream depends heavily on service contracts for their custom hardware. It would take a seriously impressive balancing act for them to support commodity hardware and remain afloat...
(As a side note, since their custom hardware is so heavily graphics oriented, when things go wrong it often does really interesting things... like an entire render-job where everything ends up with the same bump map, but is otherwise normal...)
Slashdot Mirror
I've worked at five other companies I'd consider very large, and I've never seen anything that would filter something as blatantly innocuous as F#.
Since you asked, if I had moderator points, I WOULD moderate your post as Overrated, as suggested by my opening comment "Insightful? Please." I disagree, I did not find your post at all insightful, which is precisely what the Overrated moderation is for. Normally I try very hard to moderate useful content up, rather than moderate down.
But before you click Reply, consider this: had somebody rated you Interesting, I wouldn't have used the Overrated moderation had it been available. Ah ha, someone who actually knows the difference between Insightful and Interesting. Sadly the distinction appears to be lost on most of the moderators around here.
First of all, I've been working in a probably-much-larger (one of the largest) financial institutions for six years, and I see C# all over the place. So much for anecdotes.
Second, I've been working for various large companies since Internet-based e-mail started, and I've never seen anything that would filter F#. So much for speculation.
Now if I just had some moderator points. :P :)
It's actually called an "octothorpe". Search for the earliest C# discussions on /. ... various linguist geeks babbled about this endlessly, even getting into minutiae about a hash being right-angle lines but a sharp note being angular, etc etc.
No, I'm not a language geek so yes, it was mostly a boring conversation. :)
Looks to me like nVidia provided the test material.
Pontiac has put limited HUDs in certain model cars for many years. It was first introduced in the Bonneville SSEi models, in the early 90's as I recall. I had one a few years back in a Grand Prix GTP. They only show speed and turn signals but they're fantastic. I drove the Grand Prix frequently for about a year and it's actually difficult to get used to looking down at a speedometer again.
They use a simple reverse-image LED inside the dashboard which reflects off a mirror aimed up at the windshield. The output appears to be hovering at the lower edge of your vision about a foot or two in front of the car. You can control brightness and you can raise or lower the image (a switch tilts the mirror in the dash). Admittedly, I did always wish it showed more information (particularly RPM). However, that would probably be too much distraction for your average driver.
Sadly, I gather GM owns several patents on this, so nobody else can offer it. I'd pay stupid amounts of money to have it on every car I own, though. It's that useful.
HUDs aside, though, see-through screens would be awful for exactly the same reason nobody really uses see-through windows on their desktop except for a short-term "gee whiz" effect. If see-through surfaces were so great, we'd all be using transparencies for output (B5-style) instead of PWP -- Plain White Paper. :)
Damn, now you've got me jonesin' for a HUD again. Maybe I'll build one into my race car... heh heh...
That's the relevent point!
And that is where GPL fails. I happened to stumble across a perfect case in point two days ago. I was trying to decide if I wanted DishNetwork's PVR or the DirectTV TiVo package. (As a side note, TiVo has better features. The DishNetwork offering is basically a HDD-based VCR.) On the DishNetwork site, they had a link to http://208.45.37.181/ which was labled as the GPL compliance information for their Linux-based PVR.
If you actually go to that site, you'll see this caveat (my emphasis added):
In compliance with the terms of the GPL, we are making this source code available to the public to download. Please note that the DishPVR 721 software also includes some proprietary elements that are not subject to the GPL. You cannot create a working DishPVR 721 software build without the additional proprietary code.
So lah-dee-frickin-da, you can see some of the code, but you can't do anything useful with it. As illustrated by that site, it was pretty easy for them to build upon the free labor of "the community", and comply with the rules of the GPL, yet prevent the publicly accessible portions from being useful to anyone. What's the point? To hijack (and paraphrase) an excellent sig I've seen on /. recently, "Open Source is like working for DishNetwork without getting paid."
Sorry if it sounds like flamebait, it isn't intended that way, but old WG just isn't that hot, IMHO...
MS doesn't refuse to deal with it's customers. In OEM situations, the user is not Microsoft's customer, the OEM is, and part of the OEM license clearly states that the OEM has to support it, not MS.
Want another example of this from a different industry? Buy a Mercedes from a major aftermarket tuner like RennTech who makes significant pre-sales upgrades. Your warranty is honored by RennTech, not Mercedes.
Examples abound. Hell, my beer fridge at home is identical to a Sanyo model except for a sheet of brushed aluminum laminate, but if I called Sanyo, they'd just tell me to call the "OEM".
Indeed. Until recently, American astronauts were soldiers...
I've been ordering used copies as I can find them, but it's a hit or miss proposition at best. A fantastic series though.
How bizarre. Thank you, but why on earth would anyone want to exclude the year? Oh well... fixed now... I never noticed that option.
Do you have an XBOX? It uses MP3 internally. I'm not saying you aren't making a good point (MS loves to pimp it's formats and we all know they're sucking that DRM tit) but still... it does use MP3 today...
This is somewhat off-topic, but am I the only one who hates the fact that slashdot appears to be completely unaware of "year" as a unit of time? The article you referenced is identified this way:
Posted by timothy on Saturday July 06, @09:33AM
What the...?
Not all warheads are aimed at large population centers. For example, Kings Bay, Georgia, a submarine base, has an extremely small local population but it warrants something like 12 warheads due to its military value.
Here is a blurb on the machine: Northstar Horizon
What is a "picture orbiter"?
1. It's really difficult to find a HDD it likes. You can only use 5200 RPM drives which are increasingly difficult to find, and certain brands apparently work better than others. I had six old drives laying around, and I could only use two of them in the player. One has died, and the other is in my wife's truck, so the player in my truck doesn't work right now. Sucks.
2. I had to send one unit back repeatedly for repairs. SSI is Taiwanese, and it's very difficult to find somebody who can speak English. They were nice enough, but repairs took forever and my unit came back with some serious scratches (it's mounted out of site, so no big deal).
3. Using a regular HDD means your drive will have a short life. Mine lasted about a year in my big truck, and about two years so far in my smaller truck (which spends less time off-roading and less time outside in the heat). I expected this, but coupled with it being so picky about HDDs, it could be a problem.
4. The PC bay is a pain in the ass, frankly. It won't work unless it's the master on the IDE channel, limiting what you can use that channel for in many cases. Also it isn't hot swap, which means you have to power down and reboot any time you want to mess with it.
5. The latching mechanism is fairly flimsy and cheap. It has to be latched for the unit to power-up, but I've seen the metal tab on the latch miss the mark and bend the plastic of the bay before. Lame for something this expensive.
Overall though, I'm still happy with it when it works. At the time of purchase, I considered it buying something sort of on the cutting edge (two years ago), and even now I don't really regret it. I will probably eventually rip it out and give it away, and use the AUX input on my Pioneer head unit for a portable MP3 player (I have a couple Archoses I love), but it's not half-bad in spite of the issues I mentioned.
It's a pretty nice unit, though. I only had minor problems which a BIOS upgrade fixed, and as long as you do your homework and pick a decent head unit, it works very transparently and does everything the guy in the article wanted.
If you're so inclined, you can take the disc cartridge and play it through your PC in the house, too. I don't as I have a much larger MP3 collection on my network at home.
Really the cartdige system is my sole gripe: they're extremely expensive, although the PhatNoise people told me they're solid-state and I shouldn't worry about shock problems -- I have one mounted in the Viper that I road race and drag race fairly often).
Granted, this is somewhat tangential to the main point of the topic, but just because Jakob unveils a new decree does not make it so. I cringe every time I see his name in a new /. article...
(My sig is the opening line from the movie Fight Club.)
You'll always want springs, they're too useful to get rid of. And as you note, if you made other parts of the suspension do double-duty as springs, well, you still have springs.
The important question isn't to speculate whether you can get rid of springs, it's to speculate whether you can make better springs, either by making them more efficient, or equally efficient with a weight or cost savings. Unfortunately the site is already slashdotted, so I don't know if the article mentions those kind of details, but if it doesn't, it's a huge assumption you're making. Many materials can return to a reasonable facsimilie of their original shape after deformation, but to do so repeatedly over time in a highly predictable and consistent fashion at rates in ranges suited to a suspension system... well, it's almost impossible to beat a plain old cheap steel coils. Even high-end SAE 9254 hot-formed steel racing-grade springs are only a couple hundred bucks for a set of four...
This reminds me of the predictions (I know you're not predicting) that eventually we'd all be driving around in Nitinol ("memory metal") cars that after a fender bender could be popped back into shape with a blow dryer...
Actually it's funny you'd mention the "media bias" thing, as that is another place where I often reference Limbaugh to make a point. And believe me, I'm not an ardent follower of the guy, he just happens to be on the radio during my drive home (I do occasionally agree with him). I find it almost painfully hilarious that the Rush-style far-right and the slashdot-style far-left both complain about the SAME media sources as being biased. However, it probably deserves mentioning that I'm all over the board in terms of whether I'm conservative or liberal, and unfortunately I still have trouble taking that as a sign that the media isn't biased...
Funny. On almost a daily basis you can listen to the rightest-of-the-right-wingers himself, Rush Limbaugh, use the word "partisan" to refer to both liberals and conservatives equally.
So tell us again how and why things change a lot, and fast?
I was friends with several SGI employees when SGI decided to ditch their Intel/WinNT support. Two of my friends were directly involved with the NT-related operations. The decision was mainly related to a series of falling-outs with Microsoft over things like the Fahrenheit relationship. Officially it was attributed to cost-cutting and re-focusing on core competencies, though (SGI has been in a bad way financially for quite a long time).
These days a large part of their revenue stream depends heavily on service contracts for their custom hardware. It would take a seriously impressive balancing act for them to support commodity hardware and remain afloat...
(As a side note, since their custom hardware is so heavily graphics oriented, when things go wrong it often does really interesting things... like an entire render-job where everything ends up with the same bump map, but is otherwise normal...)
Because the Bush administration is fundamentally corrupt and the sooner you guys kick that fucker out of the White House the better.
Name a U.S. administration within the last 30 years that isn't fundamentally corrupt.
Name a government that isn't fundamentally corrupt.