For added security, I encrypted this post with Rot-13 *twice*
(Putting on my best Scooby voice) That would be called Rot-Row-13...
Re:Comparing programming to "real world" endeavour
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Software Craftsmanship
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The point I was trying to make (and apparently unsuccessfully) was that the basic foundations of software engineering are quite different than those in the real world.
I know... I'm just going through the process right now and the real world seems as horked up as some of the ugly software projects I've worked on. Call me cynical, but I've got friends in differing areas of engineering - aerospace, mechanical, electrical, genetic - and all of them have nightmare stories of projects that were loosely defined, under funded, impossible deadlines, etc. I'm not saying software engineering sucks less or more - just that these same problems woefully apply to others fields as well.
God help me, I was right there saying amen until you said this does not happen in the real world. I could be exceptionally unlucky, however.... (grin)
Re:Comparing programming to "real world" endeavour
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Software Craftsmanship
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Nothing like this happens in the real world, software is a completely different beast and to contrain it by using realworld analogies might push a few books, but it's not making software engineering or the software being produced any better.
This type of thing happens in the real world ALL THE TIME. Talk to anyone who has had a home built for them. Critical people or equipment doesn't show up on time, structure is far more fluid than people ever suspect, and what was presented to the customer via blueprints and models still may not be what they were expecting.
Engineering is knowing when to say good enough. A component performs as specified in the requirements. That is, if they say they need a hinge that will hold an aluminum door they don't build it out of titanium. For cranking out code, this is really an art. XP touches on this (and goes to far IMHO) about focusing on the task at hand rather than building large frameworks, object models, etc. There is a balance there, but for most construction these days the spec is 'good enough'.
Craftsmanship is taking the time to make sure every stud in the house is square. This is not an engineering requirement - the requirement is to support the wall. This is about polish and taking extra time to 'do things correctly'. It takes time, usually is not budgeted, and is a godsend to the folks having to maintain it down the road. These things also tend to live far beyond everyone's expectations. Think of some of the deep space probes landing on asteroids - craftsmanship. The mars lander comes to mind when you mentioned bolts.
Craftsmanship is also about using the right tool for the job. As I learned some basic carpentry skills, my grandfather would comment 'Any power tool used improperly can be a sander'. This applies to the real world as well as software. Let him that has not done an ugly hack throw the first stone - but duct tape and bailing wire are staples of engineering jokes because they are about getting the job done, but not in an elegant manner.
When I build stuff for others, solid engineering is enough. For my personal projects, I expect craftsmanship.
Course, I have not seen the book, so I may be way off track here...
For those who use Microsoft Outlook Web Access - do yourself a huge favor and run something other than IE before declaring it sucks. Hitting the server with mozilla will give you a smaller feature set, but it is very usable on low bandwidth connections. Since I go through machines like candy, I've always left my mail on the server. Several thousand messages later... and IE takes forever before it caches everything. Whenever I need to search or move folders around I'll switch to IE, but for the day in day out stuff use something else. Heck, webmail makes even Netscape 4 look good.
Fortunately, Macs are damn near infinitely easier to figure out how to operate than PC's.
That was not the point I was trying to make - for Photoshop on a laptop, it is easier and faster than most of the alternatives - but it is different - menu behavior specifically. I traveled with a Tadpole (sparc based laptop running Solaris) for a while. We all ran the same app server / ldap / database, but most of the SE's were lost trying to start things up as soon as they saw it was not Windows (or Linux for that matter). With gobs of RAM I was able to get more work done than the others who had to drag around multiple standard issue Dells that had a physical limit of 512M RAM at the time. When I got pulled into another project leaving my environment (which was a fair mimic of the production system), chaos ensued. Solaris was just enough of a curve ball to miss the deadline. It is not like they were not qualified, the tools were just a bit different.
In the mean time, he's going to get his work done quickly enough to save lives (US soldiers and Iraqi innocents.)
This is a bit of a straw man, but I'll bite. The reality is the US Forces have a limited budget. More lives could be saved by having better satellite uplinks, better lenses on the recon equipment, tanks that went faster on less fuel, more powerful targeting lasers... the list goes on and on. Every standardization is a compromise somewhere down the line. You are a former RATT operator, so why did they not hand everyone an updated set rather than tuning both the old and new series so they could co-operate? Budget would be my guess. I suspect your CO would also have you peeling potatoes if you swapped personal equipment for older gear 'because it would save lives'.
I'm not comforted that your platform bigotry extends so far that it has you placing more importance on some tired two button mouse arguement than on people's lives.
Again - this is not about mac's sux, bill rulz! In an environment where you have to work with a fluid team, you cannot always select what you consider the perfect tool for the job.
I really do feel lost when I get on one of those things. Perhaps that is why my bride wants one... to keep my grubby hands off it. Spending more than a couple minutes at a demo machine would probably fix that. Someday.
Anyhow, I'll be popping over to your side of the pond next week to finish/fix some code that someone dumped without warning. I spend most of my time on the J2EE side of the fence, so nothing like a crash course in MSSOAP and VBScript with a hard deadline approaching. Guess I'm still a little bitter about someone doing their own thing. Still beats camping in the desert however...
I'll be the one pulling the laptop out from underneath the Major's corpse trying to figure out where the heck is the second mouse button went. Faster/better/different is great until you have to take over someones job unexpectedly. More of an occupational hazard in his area... though the Valley is not much safer (job wise).
Security sucked so bad that 19 arabs, some with shady backgrounds that should/would have come up on govt watch lists easily boarded airplanes, hijacked them and turned them into guided bombs, murdering 3000 people.
So quite frankly if knowing that these systems are in place discourages (or gasp, even catches in the act) any terrorist, I'M ALL FOR IT.
The rules for hijacking changed with 9/11. Before that, you quietly behaved, waited for them to land, and went about your business after the negotiations concluded - usually without incident to the passengers. Now hijackers would deal with waves of people actively trying to kill them because they feel boxed into a corner. I know I would attempt to beat someone senseless with my thinkpad (and then some) if they tried to take over an airplane with toenail scissors. I'd say most of the world would be more terrified of a Yankee hollering 'lets roll' than the traditional terrorist action we are just beginning to understand. That said, I'd say the discouragement for future aircraft hijacking is in place...at least in US airspace.
Profiling would not have caught the 19 as suicide bombers - other than possibly holding and turning a few over to INS by accident. It would be foolishness to hamper their travel because of the way they dressed or purchased tickets. I think it might be nice to have a airport security clearance for those of us who do travel significantly. I know I missed a connecting flight because some wanker decided my cellphone having a dead battery was suspicious - and the prop job was smaller than most city buses.
Don't get me wrong - airport security sucked then and still does in my book. It takes real cash to get people who really influence security. For the most part, the 'illusion' of security is good enough to keep the armatures at bay. The cost to catch the pros is prohibitive. If the general masses think airports 'are secure', they are for the most part. I'm just real tired of stupid systems being put unquestionably into service in the name of security. This is one of them.
I should have said long resumes that are packed with useful information are better than short resumes that are difficult to decode.
Amen. The shop I work actually did some hiring and a deluge of resumes poured in. After HR did some preliminary filtering and a couple others did some phone screening, it came down to sorting through some very qualified candidates. Content is king, but extra points were given for those who appear to have solid communication skills. There were some hideous CV's sent in - almost like reading/. posts - except they were looking for cash rather than karma. (whimper)
In general, people who are not interested in you want a short resume.
Someone who is actually interested, who is thinking of spending $80,000 per year in salary and expenses to hire you, will want to know as much as possible about you.
Not true... It says volumes when you can focus a broad range of skills and experience into a couple pages - and sell the business angle too. Surprisingly few techies get the latter. I've seen way to many four plus page CV's that go all the way back to some junior high internship. I've actually seen folks list logo. Argh!
The thing to be afraid of is the short interview... because they will want to know as much as possible about you. Just not on the CV.
Having seen PCs with quality switching power supplies (read: so tolerant of variable voltage that they rely on it to operate) go into spastic fits from slight brownouts, I submit that a "12 volt" automotive power system is a completely inappropriate means of providing juice for commodity PCs, without a lot of help.
In this case, I am somewhat buffered from some of the fluctuations - I'm using gel cells to power the computer and having the car trickle charge the cells. Learned my lesson about tapping the battery the hard way early on. (whimper)
And even once this problem is solved, one must face the issue of how to deal with the issue of doing a clean shutdown when the starter runs, which indisputably causes huge voltage swings that you just don't want a live PC to experience.
The shutdown is less of a problem. I'm booting from DVD and caching/swapping in RAM - no hard drive, read only. It takes a bit to spin up, but the shutdown can be instant without fsck'ing things. The current draw should be low enough to never need to actually power down, however. All I need to power is a 2.8W cpu and about 3W-6W for the mainboard and RAM. I might be able to jump-start the car with the gel-pack array I've got in there now...
It is an issue, however... Got to tackle that one before I can upload to the car.
I have most of the hardware and code complete. My bride would kill me if I did it... (Thought about it, however) The box has to handle Minnesota winters too - which makes for some heat dumping/water proofing issues. That was one of the reasons for building my own chassis.
And then, one day, you come to work and realise that you:
Three: Your IP center burned last night. Four: Your IP center burned last night.
Five: Your backups were in the center. Six: Your backups were in the center.
This may be a funny, but aside from the human tragedy, I know some folks who implemented 'off-site' storage - in the other tower... not sure whether to laugh or cry about that one. [Inigo Montoya voice] "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
Re:I love my Kyocera Smartphone, but...
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Palm PDA Roundup
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· Score: 1
The frequencies generated in portable devices, especially something as overblown as an iPaq, have long been up to radio communications frequencies. Even though the chance is small, the risk of a device jamming communications, transponder, or radar frequencies is not acceptable: in the middle of the night no pilot can avoid the other airliner coming head-on
Not to beat a dead horse, but you realize how insignificant the radio frequencies would be for my 206mhz strongarm CPU? Forget that, do you even know what frequencies are used?
VOR -108mhz and 117.95
Most radio beacons - 190 to 535khz
Most communication ~122.*mhz
VOR/LOC - 108to117.95mhz
DME - 962 to 1213mhz
ELT - 121.5mhz (civilian), not sure about military.
Transponders - 980-1220 MHz
I've actually done a little experimenting to satisfy my sense of self preservation. I tuned the navcom to 206mhz and get no changes in static when I cycle power. Same goes for some of the other frequencies I use. This is when the ipaq is Velcroed above the radio and transponder, not sitting in first class a good 8+ feet behind the cockpit. I cannot detect the ipaq with any of the avionics equipment I use.
The thought that such a device could not only unintentionally broadcast on the same frequency is a bit of a stretch, but theoretically possible. The possibility that the broadcast would have anywhere near enough power to jam any avionics equipment is laughable.
As a side note, most pilots look for other aircraft's lights at night.... I think they are easier to spot than daytime. It is not till you are flying under instrument conditions and larger birds with collision detection gear comes into play.
I was introduced to AD&D about fifteen years ago and played/DM'ed heavily for a few years in college. What stuck, however, was mapping the game mechanics into whatever the programming language or technology I was learning. I think I've done something similar in Pascal, C, C++, VB, Java, data in XML, DOS, Windows, *nix, QT, and PocketPC platforms.
That said, my god how tunes change. I remember when TSR was trying to say they had a patent and/or copyright to the game mechanics and probability tables in alt.rec.adnd.utils (? been too long) The community slammed them hard, and much like slashdot's armchair lawyer'ing - the general consensus was they could get bent on the data charts. The copy for a fireball description was protected by copyright, but a method for calculating damage by rolling 1d6 for each level of the mage? No way! Well, with current one-click patent rulings, I'm sure it is...
If people play, they will buy the books. I've got one of the TSR 'Core Rules' CD - A character generator and all the core books in RTF and a few other formats. Even the cheapest of the bastards went off and purchased a PHB (or stole mine), rather printing the file and make a bootleg copy . I still prefer paper for gaming, but the RTF's were handy for coding.
The in-game helper software was not created or usable. Paper and dice diminished. I watched all the folks who had played AD&D get sucked in by Magic, then Everquest rather than buy the later 2nd Edition or 3rd Edition books. I'm sure this move will bolster homegrown efforts to embrace the OGL and D20 licenses and improve the product. The technical term for this is "Pissing in the wind"...
Re:I love my Kyocera Smartphone, but...
on
Palm PDA Roundup
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· Score: 1, Interesting
I'll buy a separate PDA, 'cause the airlines won't let me use a PDA-phone, even though the phone in my Kyocera SmartPhone powers-off
Hell, they won't let me listen to mp3's on my ipaq until it 'is safe to use portable electronics' bullshit. Headphones - yup, a walkman is sure a problem. When I pilot a Piper Warrior, I use the bloody thing as a nav aid to time waypoints.
Got to love comities and/or profit generators... AA is going down in flames anyhow. The others are just as bad when it comes to policy, however.
Of course, this won't prevent me from using a techincal exploit to rob them. All I need to do is find an ATM in a somewhat secluded place (not hard), put on a ski mask just before I go to work and not take it off while I'm robbing the thing blind.
Or a well aimed laser-pointer while you rob a somewhat public ATM when it is blind....
I've got one of the fanless 533mhz versions for my car MP3 player project. I'd say it was as fast, if not faster than a pII 400. Not a gaming box, but more than enough horsepower to run Office 97 and Mozilla without problems. Guess that is not really saying much, but that is all folks looking for this type of thing might want -- assuming the battery life was solid.
I'd much rather be on a flight without a meal than one with. I can't stand the smell of airplane food, let alone the thought of eating it.
Bahh... you just don't fly enough. The meals in first class are not too bad - usually on par with the stuff in the terminal. You may get your wish anyhow, however. More and more, they don't serve meals on trips - not that this savings will ever be passed back to the consumer...
The thing you have to worry about with using low octane gas in engines setup for high octane gas is detonation (misfires, engine knocking).
My brother-in-law / partner-in-crime is a certified aviation mechanic as well as a pilot - when he rebuilt the engine, the question of what type of fuel we wanted to use came up. The Stitts is classified as experimental, but he informed me I would incur serious bodily harm if he caught me using lower octane fuel. I suspect he was not talking about a crash from engine failure...
The timing / compression issue sounds right. IANAPM (Airframe and Powerplant Mechanic), however.
I don't get this. Why are commercial software vendors being threatened? MS doesn't care because they don't care about Java. IBM? Maybe, maybe not. WebSphere is really about the whole package not each component. Tomcat is a component. JBoss is a component, so probably IBM doesn't care, either. Sun?
They care. Lots. Take BEA or IBM's product. They have a stripped down version of both products that competes with Tomcat - a mere JSP/Servlet container. The 'express' version is largely a marketing tool to fold in the rest of the enterprise software. Not sure about IBM, but BEA's express version is really the full Monty - app server, etc - requiring only a license key to turn on the rest of the product. It is hard to get your foot in the door, and Tomcat tends to get in first because you don't have to worry about accounting or compliance as you start up.
It gets worse with Jboss. The EJB container is the bread and butter for the J2EE market. You may not be able to run the stock market with an open source version, but it is very hard on initial sales. Jboss works very well for limited deployments. At the point where clustering and other things come into play, it starts costing a lot of money. Don't forget most of these folks make cash on the developer licenses as well.
That is not to say the BEA and IBM products are junk. There are a lot of features, debuggers, books, and other things that make it worth having. The XML parsers alone are worth the cost of the 'express' version in a production environment.. It is like a car. Sure a Geo Metro would get you there, but I really like my heated steering wheel and leather seats. That make Tomcat a sport's bike?... Anyhow...
Sun is an odd duck. They use Tomcat as their reference JSP/Servlet engine now. (I think) They were yanking Jboss's chain back when they were trying to become certified - only to release their own EJB container.
I couldn't say how significant this is but my personal experience, from growing up in rural Minnesota in an agricultural community, is that over the last 20-30 years aerial crop dusting became a much less frequent technique for applying chemicals
They are still spraying. (grin) More and more folks are using Helicopters. You drive the fuel/chemical truck on location and land on the truck as a mobile base. Works better for some crops than using a plane.
Alas, tractors work too - depends on the location. For aerial crop dusting, an airstrip may be optional...
eeing as I've never flown a plane and definantelly not the lawnmower with wings kind. How does one go about getting gas? Do you just really fill up the tank, or in a pinch can you throw some standard disel in there?
Most of the locally run airports will have pumps. Some self-serve with a credit card, some full service during the day. For those that don't, bring a hose... Most aircraft don't have locking gas caps. (duck)
Way back when I was learning how to fly, I pumped gas for a small FBO. They let me fly at cost, paid me a bit, and let me experience the glory of blue-juice engineering. Some n00b did just that - ran low on gas and ditched in a little used field because he did not do his math first. He called, I drove a fuel truck for a few hours and filled him up. As a side note, most of those little airports are marked on maps and a good GPS will have them as well. Well worth the cash to have a little box that will always give you a pointer to the nearest field when you have errata in the air.
Usually, the smaller non-turbine stuff will use 100LL, which is pretty close to normal high-octane gas. One might put in normal gasoline in a dire emergency, but running out of fuel and being stranded at an airport is not such a beastie. I suspect it would give you the same problems a Porsche running 95 octane unleaded - with a stalled engine being a serious matter on takeoff. I have a 1958 Stitts playboy with a Continental o200 engine. I could have set it up for normal gasoline, but 100LL is pretty easy to come by.
For the jets and other turbine-powered stuff, they use Jet A, which is essentially kerosene.
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For added security, I encrypted this post with Rot-13 *twice*
(Putting on my best Scooby voice) That would be called Rot-Row-13...
The point I was trying to make (and apparently unsuccessfully) was that the basic foundations of software engineering are quite different than those in the real world.
I know... I'm just going through the process right now and the real world seems as horked up as some of the ugly software projects I've worked on. Call me cynical, but I've got friends in differing areas of engineering - aerospace, mechanical, electrical, genetic - and all of them have nightmare stories of projects that were loosely defined, under funded, impossible deadlines, etc. I'm not saying software engineering sucks less or more - just that these same problems woefully apply to others fields as well.
God help me, I was right there saying amen until you said this does not happen in the real world. I could be exceptionally unlucky, however.... (grin)
Nothing like this happens in the real world, software is a completely different beast and to contrain it by using realworld analogies might push a few books, but it's not making software engineering or the software being produced any better.
This type of thing happens in the real world ALL THE TIME. Talk to anyone who has had a home built for them. Critical people or equipment doesn't show up on time, structure is far more fluid than people ever suspect, and what was presented to the customer via blueprints and models still may not be what they were expecting.
Engineering is knowing when to say good enough. A component performs as specified in the requirements. That is, if they say they need a hinge that will hold an aluminum door they don't build it out of titanium. For cranking out code, this is really an art. XP touches on this (and goes to far IMHO) about focusing on the task at hand rather than building large frameworks, object models, etc. There is a balance there, but for most construction these days the spec is 'good enough'.
Craftsmanship is taking the time to make sure every stud in the house is square. This is not an engineering requirement - the requirement is to support the wall. This is about polish and taking extra time to 'do things correctly'. It takes time, usually is not budgeted, and is a godsend to the folks having to maintain it down the road. These things also tend to live far beyond everyone's expectations. Think of some of the deep space probes landing on asteroids - craftsmanship. The mars lander comes to mind when you mentioned bolts.
Craftsmanship is also about using the right tool for the job. As I learned some basic carpentry skills, my grandfather would comment 'Any power tool used improperly can be a sander'. This applies to the real world as well as software. Let him that has not done an ugly hack throw the first stone - but duct tape and bailing wire are staples of engineering jokes because they are about getting the job done, but not in an elegant manner.
When I build stuff for others, solid engineering is enough. For my personal projects, I expect craftsmanship.
Course, I have not seen the book, so I may be way off track here...
For those who use Microsoft Outlook Web Access - do yourself a huge favor and run something other than IE before declaring it sucks. Hitting the server with mozilla will give you a smaller feature set, but it is very usable on low bandwidth connections. Since I go through machines like candy, I've always left my mail on the server. Several thousand messages later... and IE takes forever before it caches everything. Whenever I need to search or move folders around I'll switch to IE, but for the day in day out stuff use something else. Heck, webmail makes even Netscape 4 look good.
Fortunately, Macs are damn near infinitely easier to figure out how to operate than PC's.
That was not the point I was trying to make - for Photoshop on a laptop, it is easier and faster than most of the alternatives - but it is different - menu behavior specifically. I traveled with a Tadpole (sparc based laptop running Solaris) for a while. We all ran the same app server / ldap / database, but most of the SE's were lost trying to start things up as soon as they saw it was not Windows (or Linux for that matter). With gobs of RAM I was able to get more work done than the others who had to drag around multiple standard issue Dells that had a physical limit of 512M RAM at the time. When I got pulled into another project leaving my environment (which was a fair mimic of the production system), chaos ensued. Solaris was just enough of a curve ball to miss the deadline. It is not like they were not qualified, the tools were just a bit different.
In the mean time, he's going to get his work done quickly enough to save lives (US soldiers and Iraqi innocents.)
This is a bit of a straw man, but I'll bite. The reality is the US Forces have a limited budget. More lives could be saved by having better satellite uplinks, better lenses on the recon equipment, tanks that went faster on less fuel, more powerful targeting lasers... the list goes on and on. Every standardization is a compromise somewhere down the line. You are a former RATT operator, so why did they not hand everyone an updated set rather than tuning both the old and new series so they could co-operate? Budget would be my guess. I suspect your CO would also have you peeling potatoes if you swapped personal equipment for older gear 'because it would save lives'.
I'm not comforted that your platform bigotry extends so far that it has you placing more importance on some tired two button mouse arguement than on people's lives.
Again - this is not about mac's sux, bill rulz! In an environment where you have to work with a fluid team, you cannot always select what you consider the perfect tool for the job.
Damn mods smoking crack again...
I really do feel lost when I get on one of those things. Perhaps that is why my bride wants one... to keep my grubby hands off it. Spending more than a couple minutes at a demo machine would probably fix that. Someday.
Anyhow, I'll be popping over to your side of the pond next week to finish/fix some code that someone dumped without warning. I spend most of my time on the J2EE side of the fence, so nothing like a crash course in MSSOAP and VBScript with a hard deadline approaching. Guess I'm still a little bitter about someone doing their own thing. Still beats camping in the desert however...
I'll be the one pulling the laptop out from underneath the Major's corpse trying to figure out where the heck is the second mouse button went. Faster/better/different is great until you have to take over someones job unexpectedly. More of an occupational hazard in his area... though the Valley is not much safer (job wise).
Security sucked so bad that 19 arabs, some with shady backgrounds that should/would have come up on govt watch lists easily boarded airplanes, hijacked them and turned them into guided bombs, murdering 3000 people.
So quite frankly if knowing that these systems are in place discourages (or gasp, even catches in the act) any terrorist, I'M ALL FOR IT.
The rules for hijacking changed with 9/11. Before that, you quietly behaved, waited for them to land, and went about your business after the negotiations concluded - usually without incident to the passengers. Now hijackers would deal with waves of people actively trying to kill them because they feel boxed into a corner. I know I would attempt to beat someone senseless with my thinkpad (and then some) if they tried to take over an airplane with toenail scissors. I'd say most of the world would be more terrified of a Yankee hollering 'lets roll' than the traditional terrorist action we are just beginning to understand. That said, I'd say the discouragement for future aircraft hijacking is in place...at least in US airspace.
Profiling would not have caught the 19 as suicide bombers - other than possibly holding and turning a few over to INS by accident. It would be foolishness to hamper their travel because of the way they dressed or purchased tickets. I think it might be nice to have a airport security clearance for those of us who do travel significantly. I know I missed a connecting flight because some wanker decided my cellphone having a dead battery was suspicious - and the prop job was smaller than most city buses.
Don't get me wrong - airport security sucked then and still does in my book. It takes real cash to get people who really influence security. For the most part, the 'illusion' of security is good enough to keep the armatures at bay. The cost to catch the pros is prohibitive. If the general masses think airports 'are secure', they are for the most part. I'm just real tired of stupid systems being put unquestionably into service in the name of security. This is one of them.
I should have said long resumes that are packed with useful information are better than short resumes that are difficult to decode.
/. posts - except they were looking for cash rather than karma. (whimper)
Amen. The shop I work actually did some hiring and a deluge of resumes poured in. After HR did some preliminary filtering and a couple others did some phone screening, it came down to sorting through some very qualified candidates. Content is king, but extra points were given for those who appear to have solid communication skills. There were some hideous CV's sent in - almost like reading
In general, people who are not interested in you want a short resume.
Someone who is actually interested, who is thinking of spending $80,000 per year in salary and expenses to hire you, will want to know as much as possible about you.
Not true... It says volumes when you can focus a broad range of skills and experience into a couple pages - and sell the business angle too. Surprisingly few techies get the latter. I've seen way to many four plus page CV's that go all the way back to some junior high internship. I've actually seen folks list logo. Argh!
The thing to be afraid of is the short interview... because they will want to know as much as possible about you. Just not on the CV.
Having seen PCs with quality switching power supplies (read: so tolerant of variable voltage that they rely on it to operate) go into spastic fits from slight brownouts, I submit that a "12 volt" automotive power system is a completely inappropriate means of providing juice for commodity PCs, without a lot of help.
In this case, I am somewhat buffered from some of the fluctuations - I'm using gel cells to power the computer and having the car trickle charge the cells. Learned my lesson about tapping the battery the hard way early on. (whimper)
And even once this problem is solved, one must face the issue of how to deal with the issue of doing a clean shutdown when the starter runs, which indisputably causes huge voltage swings that you just don't want a live PC to experience.
The shutdown is less of a problem. I'm booting from DVD and caching/swapping in RAM - no hard drive, read only. It takes a bit to spin up, but the shutdown can be instant without fsck'ing things. The current draw should be low enough to never need to actually power down, however. All I need to power is a 2.8W cpu and about 3W-6W for the mainboard and RAM. I might be able to jump-start the car with the gel-pack array I've got in there now...
It is an issue, however... Got to tackle that one before I can upload to the car.
What not get a laptop that will take a 12v input?
I have most of the hardware and code complete. My bride would kill me if I did it... (Thought about it, however) The box has to handle Minnesota winters too - which makes for some heat dumping/water proofing issues. That was one of the reasons for building my own chassis.
And then, one day, you come to work and realise that you :
Three: Your IP center burned last night.
Four: Your IP center burned last night.
Five: Your backups were in the center.
Six: Your backups were in the center.
This may be a funny, but aside from the human tragedy, I know some folks who implemented 'off-site' storage - in the other tower... not sure whether to laugh or cry about that one. [Inigo Montoya voice] "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
Not to beat a dead horse, but you realize how insignificant the radio frequencies would be for my 206mhz strongarm CPU? Forget that, do you even know what frequencies are used?
VOR -108mhz and 117.95
Most radio beacons - 190 to 535khz
Most communication ~122.*mhz
VOR/LOC - 108to117.95mhz
DME - 962 to 1213mhz
ELT - 121.5mhz (civilian), not sure about military.
Transponders - 980-1220 MHz
I've actually done a little experimenting to satisfy my sense of self preservation. I tuned the navcom to 206mhz and get no changes in static when I cycle power. Same goes for some of the other frequencies I use. This is when the ipaq is Velcroed above the radio and transponder, not sitting in first class a good 8+ feet behind the cockpit. I cannot detect the ipaq with any of the avionics equipment I use.
The thought that such a device could not only unintentionally broadcast on the same frequency is a bit of a stretch, but theoretically possible. The possibility that the broadcast would have anywhere near enough power to jam any avionics equipment is laughable.
As a side note, most pilots look for other aircraft's lights at night.... I think they are easier to spot than daytime. It is not till you are flying under instrument conditions and larger birds with collision detection gear comes into play.
I was introduced to AD&D about fifteen years ago and played/DM'ed heavily for a few years in college. What stuck, however, was mapping the game mechanics into whatever the programming language or technology I was learning. I think I've done something similar in Pascal, C, C++, VB, Java, data in XML, DOS, Windows, *nix, QT, and PocketPC platforms.
That said, my god how tunes change. I remember when TSR was trying to say they had a patent and/or copyright to the game mechanics and probability tables in alt.rec.adnd.utils (? been too long) The community slammed them hard, and much like slashdot's armchair lawyer'ing - the general consensus was they could get bent on the data charts. The copy for a fireball description was protected by copyright, but a method for calculating damage by rolling 1d6 for each level of the mage? No way! Well, with current one-click patent rulings, I'm sure it is...
If people play, they will buy the books. I've got one of the TSR 'Core Rules' CD - A character generator and all the core books in RTF and a few other formats. Even the cheapest of the bastards went off and purchased a PHB (or stole mine), rather printing the file and make a bootleg copy . I still prefer paper for gaming, but the RTF's were handy for coding.
The in-game helper software was not created or usable. Paper and dice diminished. I watched all the folks who had played AD&D get sucked in by Magic, then Everquest rather than buy the later 2nd Edition or 3rd Edition books. I'm sure this move will bolster homegrown efforts to embrace the OGL and D20 licenses and improve the product. The technical term for this is "Pissing in the wind"...
I'll buy a separate PDA, 'cause the airlines won't let me use a PDA-phone, even though the phone in my Kyocera SmartPhone powers-off
Hell, they won't let me listen to mp3's on my ipaq until it 'is safe to use portable electronics' bullshit. Headphones - yup, a walkman is sure a problem. When I pilot a Piper Warrior, I use the bloody thing as a nav aid to time waypoints.
Got to love comities and/or profit generators... AA is going down in flames anyhow. The others are just as bad when it comes to policy, however.
How do you read big text files without suffering from severe eye strain?"
Wait for the movie, silly...
Of course, this won't prevent me from using a techincal exploit to rob them. All I need to do is find an ATM in a somewhat secluded place (not hard), put on a ski mask just before I go to work and not take it off while I'm robbing the thing blind.
Or a well aimed laser-pointer while you rob a somewhat public ATM when it is blind....
I've got one of the fanless 533mhz versions for my car MP3 player project. I'd say it was as fast, if not faster than a pII 400. Not a gaming box, but more than enough horsepower to run Office 97 and Mozilla without problems. Guess that is not really saying much, but that is all folks looking for this type of thing might want -- assuming the battery life was solid.
I'd much rather be on a flight without a meal than one with. I can't stand the smell of airplane food, let alone the thought of eating it.
Bahh... you just don't fly enough. The meals in first class are not too bad - usually on par with the stuff in the terminal. You may get your wish anyhow, however. More and more, they don't serve meals on trips - not that this savings will ever be passed back to the consumer...
Therefore, it should no longer be called BIOS (Basic IOS)
Call it Embedded Operating System (EmbOS).
Or EmacsOS... It seems it can do most everything else, why not the BIOS too?
The thing you have to worry about with using low octane gas in engines setup for high octane gas is detonation (misfires, engine knocking).
My brother-in-law / partner-in-crime is a certified aviation mechanic as well as a pilot - when he rebuilt the engine, the question of what type of fuel we wanted to use came up. The Stitts is classified as experimental, but he informed me I would incur serious bodily harm if he caught me using lower octane fuel. I suspect he was not talking about a crash from engine failure...
The timing / compression issue sounds right. IANAPM (Airframe and Powerplant Mechanic), however.
I don't get this. Why are commercial software vendors being threatened? MS doesn't care because they don't care about Java. IBM? Maybe, maybe not. WebSphere is really about the whole package not each component. Tomcat is a component. JBoss is a component, so probably IBM doesn't care, either. Sun?
They care. Lots. Take BEA or IBM's product. They have a stripped down version of both products that competes with Tomcat - a mere JSP/Servlet container. The 'express' version is largely a marketing tool to fold in the rest of the enterprise software. Not sure about IBM, but BEA's express version is really the full Monty - app server, etc - requiring only a license key to turn on the rest of the product. It is hard to get your foot in the door, and Tomcat tends to get in first because you don't have to worry about accounting or compliance as you start up.
It gets worse with Jboss. The EJB container is the bread and butter for the J2EE market. You may not be able to run the stock market with an open source version, but it is very hard on initial sales. Jboss works very well for limited deployments. At the point where clustering and other things come into play, it starts costing a lot of money. Don't forget most of these folks make cash on the developer licenses as well.
That is not to say the BEA and IBM products are junk. There are a lot of features, debuggers, books, and other things that make it worth having. The XML parsers alone are worth the cost of the 'express' version in a production environment.. It is like a car. Sure a Geo Metro would get you there, but I really like my heated steering wheel and leather seats. That make Tomcat a sport's bike?... Anyhow...
Sun is an odd duck. They use Tomcat as their reference JSP/Servlet engine now. (I think) They were yanking Jboss's chain back when they were trying to become certified - only to release their own EJB container.
I couldn't say how significant this is but my personal experience, from growing up in rural Minnesota in an agricultural community, is that over the last 20-30 years aerial crop dusting became a much less frequent technique for applying chemicals
They are still spraying. (grin) More and more folks are using Helicopters. You drive the fuel/chemical truck on location and land on the truck as a mobile base. Works better for some crops than using a plane.
Alas, tractors work too - depends on the location. For aerial crop dusting, an airstrip may be optional...
eeing as I've never flown a plane and definantelly not the lawnmower with wings kind. How does one go about getting gas? Do you just really fill up the tank, or in a pinch can you throw some standard disel in there?
Most of the locally run airports will have pumps. Some self-serve with a credit card, some full service during the day. For those that don't, bring a hose... Most aircraft don't have locking gas caps. (duck)
Way back when I was learning how to fly, I pumped gas for a small FBO. They let me fly at cost, paid me a bit, and let me experience the glory of blue-juice engineering. Some n00b did just that - ran low on gas and ditched in a little used field because he did not do his math first. He called, I drove a fuel truck for a few hours and filled him up. As a side note, most of those little airports are marked on maps and a good GPS will have them as well. Well worth the cash to have a little box that will always give you a pointer to the nearest field when you have errata in the air.
Usually, the smaller non-turbine stuff will use 100LL, which is pretty close to normal high-octane gas. One might put in normal gasoline in a dire emergency, but running out of fuel and being stranded at an airport is not such a beastie. I suspect it would give you the same problems a Porsche running 95 octane unleaded - with a stalled engine being a serious matter on takeoff. I have a 1958 Stitts playboy with a Continental o200 engine. I could have set it up for normal gasoline, but 100LL is pretty easy to come by.
For the jets and other turbine-powered stuff, they use Jet A, which is essentially kerosene.