This is why working at google is awesome. Internal code reviewer is big news.
I use the tool in question, it's good.
Also I've used perforce at a previous company. Generally most people who talk about SCMs and reference CVS as a potential replacement/alternative to P4 really do not know what they are talking about. P4 has it's problems, granted, but if you are looking to maintain a massive code base, there really are few choices. Atomic change lists, they are fantastic.
I doubt that BC would go down the path of US-style multi-payer health care. I'd say alberta is the most likely province to do so.
But in BC, it is true, if you are wealthy you are expected to pay into MSP (medical services plan) - this essentially acts like a healthcare premium in the US. There is usage fees (co-pays), which does suck, but the argument was to reduce medical overusage and waste (parents taking children to the doctor just for a cold, etc).
I doubt that the BC population would allow the dismantling of the healthcare system - most the country regards medical care as a basic human right. The only people that disagree are neo-conservatives who want to introduce an American-style "free" market system. My suspicion is that the people arguing for this are hoping to form their own Canadian HMOs and rape the living shit out of the country. Every dollar in a healthcare system not spent on Doctors or actual real medical care is wasted.
Except if you think about it, the chance of needing the services of a hospital or a doctor is 100% in any reasonable time frame. Even in a 1 year time frame, the chances of going to a doctor are very high. 5 years, 10 years - now we are pretty much at 100%.
To call it insurance is not really accurate anymore. The HMO system pretty much admits that everyone is going to see a doctor, so the strategy is to control costs via excessive management and oversight. A surgeon in this thread noted that HMOs are essentially bastards in many ways, refusing basic needs. There is HMO horror story websites - if you believe them, thousands of people have been killed by HMO methology.
In a more macro scale economic, the HMO system is stupidly inefficient. A study noted that in the US, 25% of health care dollars went to administration costs. In Canada, which does not have an oversight administration, only 2% of health costs went to administration. Generally in Canada if you medically require something, you get it. There is an issue of waiting lines for certain things, but I've seen plenty of waiting lines in the US for various things. Money will solve all your waiting line problems in both Countries, so there is no huge difference.
Except in Canada its legitimate to be unemployed or partially employed doing random contract things. In the US, that would be highly unadvisable. Even with good health care, you're always 1 disaster from financial ruin - to the point of utter and complete financial failure. Bye house, bye car, bye everything. It happens. A study noted that 50% of bankruptcies were health care cost related.
Most of the civilized world would, I think, call you a cold heartless bastard.
I would like to point out, that anytime you make a bet that you won't get sick, that is a supremely stupid bet, unless it is a very very short term bet. The chance you will need doctor services in the next 10 years is 100%. It's only 'nearly 100%' if you eschew routine things such as yearly checkups.
The problem is that health insurance is being run as an INSURANCE company. The point of society and government is to spread large individual expenses over portions of the population. That road you drove on - you could never pay for it, nor could you and everyone who drove on it pay for it via tolls. Sames goes for healthcare.
Also not every HMO (which is not traditional health insurance - not the same as indemnity insurance) is a for-profit institution.
By the way, I view the health insurance situation in the US as a global competitive liability. The healthcare system reduces individual employer flexibility - you can't just change jobs if you are relying on it for healthcare coverage. Your parting shot in your post was "quit your job and get a new one". Why should one choose their employer based on something tangential as healthcare?
The employer lockin caused by health coverage also impedes the free market of workers. It provides artificial barriers for workers to move from bad companies to other companies or to work for themselves. Strangely enough, you aren't really toeing the standard line of American Entrepreneurialism. After all, isnt the ideal to work for yourself? One that is impossible apparently...
One of the GP posters said that they didn't trust the government to run healthcare, that they would screw it up. Well, certainly with that expectation, yeah they would screw it up. The problem isn't that government screws up everything it touches (it certainly ruined the nuclear weapons programme in the 50s, lost that war apparently), it's just people expect the government to be screwups, thus when they are, people don't complain. After all, the overall health of Canadians with a government run healthcare system is higher than Americans, so clearly the concept of government can't be all that bad - it works for our friends up north, no?
This comment is revealing, as well as the GP. The GP talks about the amazing memory, speed, etc, etc the lists a whole HUGE list of UI problems that demonstrate the designers were thinking of a mouse-interaction paradigm, not a cell phone. Meaning any action is not very efficient - you need to look at the screen too much to activate simple functions, you need to press too many buttons to enable simple functionality, etc.
As for the yahoo guy - well 'keeping users in mind' is not really enough when it comes to design. That thought line is essentially sheer arrogance - it belies an attitude of "we know our users, and we can accommodate their needs" - the arrogance is that they think they know what their users want. Time after time, house after house, many engineering firms have been surprised over and over that what they THOUGHT users cared about, turned out to be completely 110% wrong.
All of these reasons is why I am waiting with bated breath for the iPhone. I know that steve jobs will REFUSE to put the Apple brand on anything as poorly usable, weak willed as the current Nokia/Symbian phones.
One other thing, I looked at a Symbian phone a few years ago. I really didn't like it - the UI was slow, basic functions were SLOW. Hit "dial" to bring up the last calls... why the HELL does this take more than 50-100 ms? Why is it taking 1 second? I blame the Java underpinnings. I think Java has encouraged an entire generation of programmers to code without performance considerations. Hell Java makes it hard to code for performance, since I find it's computation model does not map cleanly in my mind to actual on the chip execution. The development culture also discourages any of that line of thought. You generally accidently stumble into poorly performing solutions, which is remarkable considering how much power we have in computers these days. The dynamic-dispatch nature of Objective C seems positively high performance in comparison.
Making users delighted is all about doing what they expect. The technophiles are clearly in control at Nokia. I hope Apple puts them out of business, because Nokia will have earned it.
I'm confused then - how are the democrats and republicans both "spend spend spend" while the market thinks that the democrats will restore fiscal prudence to the government?
"Now, the republicans and dems are virtually the same when it comes to fiscal policy (spend, spend, spend) "
Your statement is not borne out by the evidence. See:
"In the bond market, Treasury prices ended higher, sending yields lower, after a significant Democratic party victory in the mid-term congressional elections was viewed as ushering in an era of increased fiscal prudence."
Re:That depends on a lot more than you think
on
Microsoft or Google?
·
· Score: 1
I work at Kirkland - it's not really a sales office, it's a dev office. Looking at the google jobs page there is 26 types of engineering openings, and 12 operations and IT types of openings. Of course "types of openings" isnt the same as "jobs" but the basic point is this: Kirkland has lots of engineering work. I'm sitting in my office right there now.
For those who are not from Seattle, Kirkland is in between Redmond and Seattle. I live in Seattle myself.
The parent is 100% correct. I just started with Google, and for what it's worth, there is a Kirkland office if you want to work in Seattle but not Mountain View. There are other offices, all listed on google's job page.
My impression of Google is this - people work hard, and play hard. But also while people work hard, you are supported in maintaining a quality of life.
48 V equipment is COTS - just not for the PC industry. The telco industry uses 48 V all over the place. I remember cisco's 2000 line of routers having a 48 V DC feed/plug.
Of course, how do you know Google isn't doing exactly what you mention? No one knows what really happens inside those giant datacentres. Protect the competitive secrets I guess.
If you've ever read the Xoogler's blog then you'd know that google doesn't exactly build machines the way you and I might. Meaning, your assumption of a case is fairly presumptive.
This is exactly why I dropped Linux and went to OS X - the 4th major revision sports feature such as better basic-string handling (!!) and better programming APIs. What about overall user experience, look and feel, performance, desktop integration, printing, and so on. Things that real world people really care about. You know, those people, the USERS who are trying to accomplish tasks.
And this my friends is why Linux will never take over the desktop.
Of course, Unix already has taken over the desktop - it's called OS X.
Interestingly enough as you recompile for 64 bits, you also need more memory as you get more memory. Now your memory alignment is now 8 bytes not 4 bytes, and your pointers are much later.
I'd like to take a moment to rail against most commonly accepted forms of parallel education. I'm sure you were taught about threads, critical sections, semaphores, shared memory, etc.
These are all inherently dangerous and difficult to program concepts. Write some application that is flexible and can run with N threads - usually this is hard, the best solution from Java-land is the concurrency toolkit which defines units of work which can be parallelized by a thread pool.
However, there _is_ another way. "CSP" - communicating sequential programs. This is a method of writing naturally parallel systems that do not have the disadvantages of all of the above. (Standard concurrency debugging suggestion in java: "make the method synchronized") A practical example of this is the programming language Erlang. Ericsson invented this language to write high performance telco gear. Their ATM switch line is written in it. In Erlang you have many many 'processes' (not traditional OS processes, but defined in the VM) which cannot share memory - the only way they can communicate is via async messages. You can build a synchronous call on top of async messages pretty trivially (after all, all syncronous network protocols are based on IP which is asynchronous). You never have to worry about memory stomps, or critical sections. You _do_ have to design your applications differently, but it is most definitely worth it.
Another interesting thing about this is your applications naturally parallelize. The "R11" release was just put out, which included SMP support. The previous versions would only use 1 CPU, but this version will use all your CPUs, which means if you have multiple processes ready to run, they'll run on as many CPUs you have! Instant SMP support, no redesign, no RECOMPILE necessary.
This kind of language technology is what is necessary to get us to the next level. A similar thing is possible with Functional languages such as OCaml, Haskell, etc.
I've been working in the industry for 5 years and I'm currently working on a Erlang project. My company was fairly conservative in terms of languages, there was a standing order (until about 2000) "no C++".
I think the parent was fairly clear - you are not getting what you think you're paying for. You are _not_ getting a honest accounting of a business. Only the appearance of one. Remember, that the external auditing companies that are being paid for this stuff are the exact same ones that were complicit in the Enron thing.
Some of the SOX stuff is reasonable - although most large companies are already doing that. But some of the other parts are more or less insane. Like the infamous section 404 - everytime I push a particular piece of software I need to audit that. I need to do extra paperwork that does not really improve anything, since I'm not doing anything new but filing out some bit of electronic retardedness.
The section 404 stuff is ridiculous. Why do we need individual audits of software pushes? I push a 1 line change, I need to fill out a SOX thing.
In the end, all the big problems happen at the exec/policy/corp level. And those people are always part of the "good-old-boys club" (Not girls, BOYS. Girls not allowed. You know, period stuff and all of that.). If you are part of the club, you don't get punished, unless you severely embarrass everyone else as Lay and Enron did.
We need better corporate governance. This legislation was ill concieved and simpleminded. Just the way the crafters wanted it - because SOX does not prevent Enron 2. Just the way it was designed. Looks like it should be effective though.
What the fuck are you talking about? Did you even _read_ the fucking blog entry?!
The GoDaddy dude was complaining about rules that allow for a slanted playing field.
As you well know (or maybe not?), free markets only work if there is a equal playing field for all. The intent was the.EU domain land-rush was supposed to be fair. As the GoDaddy CEO points out in an easy to read manner, the playing field was in fact not fair, and allowed for cheaters to invade the system.
Ideas are not copyrightable, patentable or trademarkable.
Patents cover physical inventions (and apparently software?) that represent the incarnation of an idea. Copyrights cover the written word "implementation" of an idea.
Plagiarism generally isn't covered by the courts. Of course the old joke is "when you copy from one its plagiarism, when you copy from many it's research".
This lawsuit shouldn't go anywhere - at least in an ideal (or even partially ideal) world.
except its not a post-geography world. Eventually it will become so, but it'll probably take the transformative power of the singularity to do so.
Consider start ups. Where do they happen? Silicon valley, boston, maybe seattle. Why does a start up which needs to conserve cash, do so in some of the most expensive real estate markets in the world?! That is just insane, right? Don't underestimate the power of face-to-face communications, along with the power of being able to recruit and hire locally. No VC will give you money without meeting face to face, possibly even on a weekly basis.
People like to think that the internet has made geography obsolete, and people like to trumpet those projects that were done with one person living on each continent. But for every success story (there is only 1 or 2 of those) there is thousands, or tens of thousands of failures. I would never outsource to anywhere, even across the street - you lose control, and you need to know exactly what you want before you do that. I wouldn't want to work for a company that is like that (boeing?).
After spending part of 2005 writing an app in Java, I must say, I don't really like it. I started out very excited about eclipse, and hibernate, and I wrote a huge pile of code, and got many things working quickly. But in the end, I didn't feel like I had much control. The ability to tune and analyze performance was not really there. Furthermore, the whole community of Java-heads seem to be "performance, not a problem". My problem domain involves large data sets (~ 1 GB in ram or more), so I really couldn't go with this general outlook. It's not that Java performance isn't a problem, most people doing Java tend to do heavily SQL/IO bound apps, so most of the advice I got or read was along the lines of "create an index" and so on. Getting information on what the VM is doing in Java is a little difficult, even though in theory its all there, and Sun should be providing really cool tools to see what your app is doing.
Of course I wasn't prepared to buy the very expensive performance tools, but if I had, maybe I'd feel better.
I'm moving onto C++/Python and erlang. See ya later Java.
While film isn't dead yet, 35 mm film most certainly is. While nothing can touch the resolution of medium format, or large format, in the 35 mm area, some new cameras really push the edge of 35 mm film resolution.
Specifically I'm talking about the Canon 5D - which I own. It is such a cool camera, and the pictures BLOW my mind. The camera is a full sized sensor - no more lens multiplication factor - and is 12 mega pixels. The native size is 4368x2912. By up-sampling it in the RAW conversion you can extract even more resolution and detail.
The big deal about this camera is that most DSLR cameras have a focal length multiplication factor. This means that beautiful "normal" lens becomes a short portrait lens. Good news if you shoot portraits, but bad news if you do scenes or landscape.
The best thing about the 5D is it has the resolution and sensor size of a Canon 1Ds Mk-II (what a name!), but the camera is much smaller and lighter. The price is also more reasonable for the 5D, while not "cheap", its accessible, and the price will only come down.
My company's HQ is an old VA's hospital. I don't work in that particular building, but I've heard the 'older' side of the building haunted. The building has a 'main' portion and a newer front that was built onto in part to hold the older part up and give it structural re-enforcement.
One of the floors was apparently for... the crazy people. Doors are apparently thicker than all the other floors. I've never spent enough time in the building to investigate that however.
Perhaps I should go visit there... tonight... at 2am... dun dun dunnnn
Science and engineering is NOT AS HARD as you make it out...
especially if you have a teacher who teaches... the concepts! What an idea!
Anyways, saying a subject is hard is no excuse to pay $40k/yr for a teacher who can't even speak the prevailing language. What kind of B.S. is that? Having a burned out grad student teaching an upper level engineering class... That is just an insult, slap in the face!
Guess what, that shit doesn't seem to happen in Canada:-)
Those are easily defeatable - spammers will get a class C just to sign up for accounts, or use zombie computers, etc. The captcha (jpeg verification you talk about) is also defeatable, no matter how hard it is. The bottom line is its a cruel world out there, and I think this is an interesting and novel way to do the turing test.
Just get an invite from someone you know, or use a invite spooler service.
Being an actual _owner_ of the new mouse, I can attest to the fact that the mouse is still tactile. You can feel the left and right click, and you can also feel the scrolling on the scroll button. Obviously its a bit more subtle than a big-assed scroll wheel, but I really can't figure out if the ball is rolling or not.
I haven't exactly played games with it yet, but don't get the feeling like you can't tell by touch when the button clicks and the ball rolls. It might be that they are using the speaker to vibrate the ball to give the tactile feedback.
Slashdot Mirror
This is why working at google is awesome. Internal code reviewer is big news.
I use the tool in question, it's good.
Also I've used perforce at a previous company. Generally most people who talk about SCMs and reference CVS as a potential replacement/alternative to P4 really do not know what they are talking about. P4 has it's problems, granted, but if you are looking to maintain a massive code base, there really are few choices. Atomic change lists, they are fantastic.
I used to live in BC, I now live in WA state.
I doubt that BC would go down the path of US-style multi-payer health care. I'd say alberta is the most likely province to do so.
But in BC, it is true, if you are wealthy you are expected to pay into MSP (medical services plan) - this essentially acts like a healthcare premium in the US. There is usage fees (co-pays), which does suck, but the argument was to reduce medical overusage and waste (parents taking children to the doctor just for a cold, etc).
I doubt that the BC population would allow the dismantling of the healthcare system - most the country regards medical care as a basic human right. The only people that disagree are neo-conservatives who want to introduce an American-style "free" market system. My suspicion is that the people arguing for this are hoping to form their own Canadian HMOs and rape the living shit out of the country. Every dollar in a healthcare system not spent on Doctors or actual real medical care is wasted.
Except if you think about it, the chance of needing the services of a hospital or a doctor is 100% in any reasonable time frame. Even in a 1 year time frame, the chances of going to a doctor are very high. 5 years, 10 years - now we are pretty much at 100%.
To call it insurance is not really accurate anymore. The HMO system pretty much admits that everyone is going to see a doctor, so the strategy is to control costs via excessive management and oversight. A surgeon in this thread noted that HMOs are essentially bastards in many ways, refusing basic needs. There is HMO horror story websites - if you believe them, thousands of people have been killed by HMO methology.
In a more macro scale economic, the HMO system is stupidly inefficient. A study noted that in the US, 25% of health care dollars went to administration costs. In Canada, which does not have an oversight administration, only 2% of health costs went to administration. Generally in Canada if you medically require something, you get it. There is an issue of waiting lines for certain things, but I've seen plenty of waiting lines in the US for various things. Money will solve all your waiting line problems in both Countries, so there is no huge difference.
Except in Canada its legitimate to be unemployed or partially employed doing random contract things. In the US, that would be highly unadvisable. Even with good health care, you're always 1 disaster from financial ruin - to the point of utter and complete financial failure. Bye house, bye car, bye everything. It happens. A study noted that 50% of bankruptcies were health care cost related.
Most of the civilized world would, I think, call you a cold heartless bastard.
I would like to point out, that anytime you make a bet that you won't get sick, that is a supremely stupid bet, unless it is a very very short term bet. The chance you will need doctor services in the next 10 years is 100%. It's only 'nearly 100%' if you eschew routine things such as yearly checkups.
The problem is that health insurance is being run as an INSURANCE company. The point of society and government is to spread large individual expenses over portions of the population. That road you drove on - you could never pay for it, nor could you and everyone who drove on it pay for it via tolls. Sames goes for healthcare.
Also not every HMO (which is not traditional health insurance - not the same as indemnity insurance) is a for-profit institution.
By the way, I view the health insurance situation in the US as a global competitive liability. The healthcare system reduces individual employer flexibility - you can't just change jobs if you are relying on it for healthcare coverage. Your parting shot in your post was "quit your job and get a new one". Why should one choose their employer based on something tangential as healthcare?
The employer lockin caused by health coverage also impedes the free market of workers. It provides artificial barriers for workers to move from bad companies to other companies or to work for themselves. Strangely enough, you aren't really toeing the standard line of American Entrepreneurialism. After all, isnt the ideal to work for yourself? One that is impossible apparently...
One of the GP posters said that they didn't trust the government to run healthcare, that they would screw it up. Well, certainly with that expectation, yeah they would screw it up. The problem isn't that government screws up everything it touches (it certainly ruined the nuclear weapons programme in the 50s, lost that war apparently), it's just people expect the government to be screwups, thus when they are, people don't complain. After all, the overall health of Canadians with a government run healthcare system is higher than Americans, so clearly the concept of government can't be all that bad - it works for our friends up north, no?
This comment is revealing, as well as the GP. The GP talks about the amazing memory, speed, etc, etc the lists a whole HUGE list of UI problems that demonstrate the designers were thinking of a mouse-interaction paradigm, not a cell phone. Meaning any action is not very efficient - you need to look at the screen too much to activate simple functions, you need to press too many buttons to enable simple functionality, etc.
As for the yahoo guy - well 'keeping users in mind' is not really enough when it comes to design. That thought line is essentially sheer arrogance - it belies an attitude of "we know our users, and we can accommodate their needs" - the arrogance is that they think they know what their users want. Time after time, house after house, many engineering firms have been surprised over and over that what they THOUGHT users cared about, turned out to be completely 110% wrong.
All of these reasons is why I am waiting with bated breath for the iPhone. I know that steve jobs will REFUSE to put the Apple brand on anything as poorly usable, weak willed as the current Nokia/Symbian phones.
One other thing, I looked at a Symbian phone a few years ago. I really didn't like it - the UI was slow, basic functions were SLOW. Hit "dial" to bring up the last calls... why the HELL does this take more than 50-100 ms? Why is it taking 1 second? I blame the Java underpinnings. I think Java has encouraged an entire generation of programmers to code without performance considerations. Hell Java makes it hard to code for performance, since I find it's computation model does not map cleanly in my mind to actual on the chip execution. The development culture also discourages any of that line of thought. You generally accidently stumble into poorly performing solutions, which is remarkable considering how much power we have in computers these days. The dynamic-dispatch nature of Objective C seems positively high performance in comparison.
Making users delighted is all about doing what they expect. The technophiles are clearly in control at Nokia. I hope Apple puts them out of business, because Nokia will have earned it.
I'm confused then - how are the democrats and republicans both "spend spend spend" while the market thinks that the democrats will restore fiscal prudence to the government?
re:
s iteid=mktw&guid=%7B6E79BD26-CD0B-4C87-ABD6-0F20E90 68305%7D
"Now, the republicans and dems are virtually the same when it comes to fiscal policy (spend, spend, spend) "
Your statement is not borne out by the evidence. See:
"In the bond market, Treasury prices ended higher, sending yields lower, after a significant Democratic party victory in the mid-term congressional elections was viewed as ushering in an era of increased fiscal prudence."
from
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/story.aspx?
The market is making the exact opposite argument you are.
Now, who is more correct, some guy on slashdot, or thousands of people investing real money? I'm going to go with the market.
By Joy of Tech, don't forget about your Jobs-o-Lantern:
8 83.html
http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/
Scary! Wooo!!
I work at Kirkland - it's not really a sales office, it's a dev office. Looking at the google jobs page there is 26 types of engineering openings, and 12 operations and IT types of openings. Of course "types of openings" isnt the same as "jobs" but the basic point is this: Kirkland has lots of engineering work. I'm sitting in my office right there now.
For those who are not from Seattle, Kirkland is in between Redmond and Seattle. I live in Seattle myself.
WRT to cash, it would be worth pointing out that Google has 10 billion and more in assets. Microsoft has about 40-50 billion.
So I think google will be outlasting this "Web 2.0" collapse you speak of.
Also, what if I don't like kayaking or Tibet?
The parent is 100% correct. I just started with Google, and for what it's worth, there is a Kirkland office if you want to work in Seattle but not Mountain View. There are other offices, all listed on google's job page.
My impression of Google is this - people work hard, and play hard. But also while people work hard, you are supported in maintaining a quality of life.
48 V equipment is COTS - just not for the PC industry. The telco industry uses 48 V all over the place. I remember cisco's 2000 line of routers having a 48 V DC feed/plug.
Of course, how do you know Google isn't doing exactly what you mention? No one knows what really happens inside those giant datacentres. Protect the competitive secrets I guess.
If you've ever read the Xoogler's blog then you'd know that google doesn't exactly build machines the way you and I might. Meaning, your assumption of a case is fairly presumptive.
This is exactly why I dropped Linux and went to OS X - the 4th major revision sports feature such as better basic-string handling (!!) and better programming APIs. What about overall user experience, look and feel, performance, desktop integration, printing, and so on. Things that real world people really care about. You know, those people, the USERS who are trying to accomplish tasks.
And this my friends is why Linux will never take over the desktop.
Of course, Unix already has taken over the desktop - it's called OS X.
Interesting class. Looks pretty standard for a US/Canada education.
No, in fact I mean CSP - see http://www.usingcsp.com/
Have a look at yaws: http://yaws.hyber.org/ a high performance webserver written in Erlang.
Interestingly enough as you recompile for 64 bits, you also need more memory as you get more memory. Now your memory alignment is now 8 bytes not 4 bytes, and your pointers are much later.
I'd like to take a moment to rail against most commonly accepted forms of parallel education. I'm sure you were taught about threads, critical sections, semaphores, shared memory, etc.
These are all inherently dangerous and difficult to program concepts. Write some application that is flexible and can run with N threads - usually this is hard, the best solution from Java-land is the concurrency toolkit which defines units of work which can be parallelized by a thread pool.
However, there _is_ another way. "CSP" - communicating sequential programs. This is a method of writing naturally parallel systems that do not have the disadvantages of all of the above. (Standard concurrency debugging suggestion in java: "make the method synchronized") A practical example of this is the programming language Erlang. Ericsson invented this language to write high performance telco gear. Their ATM switch line is written in it. In Erlang you have many many 'processes' (not traditional OS processes, but defined in the VM) which cannot share memory - the only way they can communicate is via async messages. You can build a synchronous call on top of async messages pretty trivially (after all, all syncronous network protocols are based on IP which is asynchronous). You never have to worry about memory stomps, or critical sections. You _do_ have to design your applications differently, but it is most definitely worth it.
Another interesting thing about this is your applications naturally parallelize. The "R11" release was just put out, which included SMP support. The previous versions would only use 1 CPU, but this version will use all your CPUs, which means if you have multiple processes ready to run, they'll run on as many CPUs you have! Instant SMP support, no redesign, no RECOMPILE necessary.
This kind of language technology is what is necessary to get us to the next level. A similar thing is possible with Functional languages such as OCaml, Haskell, etc.
I've been working in the industry for 5 years and I'm currently working on a Erlang project. My company was fairly conservative in terms of languages, there was a standing order (until about 2000) "no C++".
I think the parent was fairly clear - you are not getting what you think you're paying for. You are _not_ getting a honest accounting of a business. Only the appearance of one. Remember, that the external auditing companies that are being paid for this stuff are the exact same ones that were complicit in the Enron thing.
Some of the SOX stuff is reasonable - although most large companies are already doing that. But some of the other parts are more or less insane. Like the infamous section 404 - everytime I push a particular piece of software I need to audit that. I need to do extra paperwork that does not really improve anything, since I'm not doing anything new but filing out some bit of electronic retardedness.
The section 404 stuff is ridiculous. Why do we need individual audits of software pushes? I push a 1 line change, I need to fill out a SOX thing.
In the end, all the big problems happen at the exec/policy/corp level. And those people are always part of the "good-old-boys club" (Not girls, BOYS. Girls not allowed. You know, period stuff and all of that.). If you are part of the club, you don't get punished, unless you severely embarrass everyone else as Lay and Enron did.
We need better corporate governance. This legislation was ill concieved and simpleminded. Just the way the crafters wanted it - because SOX does not prevent Enron 2. Just the way it was designed. Looks like it should be effective though.
What the fuck are you talking about? Did you even _read_ the fucking blog entry?!
.EU domain land-rush was supposed to be fair. As the GoDaddy CEO points out in an easy to read manner, the playing field was in fact not fair, and allowed for cheaters to invade the system.
The GoDaddy dude was complaining about rules that allow for a slanted playing field.
As you well know (or maybe not?), free markets only work if there is a equal playing field for all. The intent was the
Ideas are not copyrightable, patentable or trademarkable.
Patents cover physical inventions (and apparently software?) that represent the incarnation of an idea.
Copyrights cover the written word "implementation" of an idea.
Plagiarism generally isn't covered by the courts. Of course the old joke is "when you copy from one its plagiarism, when you copy from many it's research".
This lawsuit shouldn't go anywhere - at least in an ideal (or even partially ideal) world.
except its not a post-geography world. Eventually it will become so, but it'll probably take the transformative power of the singularity to do so.
Consider start ups. Where do they happen? Silicon valley, boston, maybe seattle. Why does a start up which needs to conserve cash, do so in some of the most expensive real estate markets in the world?! That is just insane, right? Don't underestimate the power of face-to-face communications, along with the power of being able to recruit and hire locally. No VC will give you money without meeting face to face, possibly even on a weekly basis.
People like to think that the internet has made geography obsolete, and people like to trumpet those projects that were done with one person living on each continent. But for every success story (there is only 1 or 2 of those) there is thousands, or tens of thousands of failures. I would never outsource to anywhere, even across the street - you lose control, and you need to know exactly what you want before you do that. I wouldn't want to work for a company that is like that (boeing?).
After spending part of 2005 writing an app in Java, I must say, I don't really like it. I started out very excited about eclipse, and hibernate, and I wrote a huge pile of code, and got many things working quickly. But in the end, I didn't feel like I had much control. The ability to tune and analyze performance was not really there. Furthermore, the whole community of Java-heads seem to be "performance, not a problem". My problem domain involves large data sets (~ 1 GB in ram or more), so I really couldn't go with this general outlook. It's not that Java performance isn't a problem, most people doing Java tend to do heavily SQL/IO bound apps, so most of the advice I got or read was along the lines of "create an index" and so on. Getting information on what the VM is doing in Java is a little difficult, even though in theory its all there, and Sun should be providing really cool tools to see what your app is doing.
Of course I wasn't prepared to buy the very expensive performance tools, but if I had, maybe I'd feel better.
I'm moving onto C++/Python and erlang. See ya later Java.
While film isn't dead yet, 35 mm film most certainly is. While nothing can touch the resolution of medium format, or large format, in the 35 mm area, some new cameras really push the edge of 35 mm film resolution.
Specifically I'm talking about the Canon 5D - which I own. It is such a cool camera, and the pictures BLOW my mind. The camera is a full sized sensor - no more lens multiplication factor - and is 12 mega pixels. The native size is 4368x2912. By up-sampling it in the RAW conversion you can extract even more resolution and detail.
The big deal about this camera is that most DSLR cameras have a focal length multiplication factor. This means that beautiful "normal" lens becomes a short portrait lens. Good news if you shoot portraits, but bad news if you do scenes or landscape.
The best thing about the 5D is it has the resolution and sensor size of a Canon 1Ds Mk-II (what a name!), but the camera is much smaller and lighter. The price is also more reasonable for the 5D, while not "cheap", its accessible, and the price will only come down.
My company's HQ is an old VA's hospital. I don't work in that particular building, but I've heard the 'older' side of the building haunted. The building has a 'main' portion and a newer front that was built onto in part to hold the older part up and give it structural re-enforcement.
... the crazy people. Doors are apparently thicker than all the other floors. I've never spent enough time in the building to investigate that however.
One of the floors was apparently for
Perhaps I should go visit there... tonight... at 2am... dun dun dunnnn
Science and engineering is NOT AS HARD as you make it out...
:-)
especially if you have a teacher who teaches... the concepts! What an idea!
Anyways, saying a subject is hard is no excuse to pay $40k/yr for a teacher who can't even speak the prevailing language. What kind of B.S. is that? Having a burned out grad student teaching an upper level engineering class... That is just an insult, slap in the face!
Guess what, that shit doesn't seem to happen in Canada
Those are easily defeatable - spammers will get a class C just to sign up for accounts, or use zombie computers, etc. The captcha (jpeg verification you talk about) is also defeatable, no matter how hard it is. The bottom line is its a cruel world out there, and I think this is an interesting and novel way to do the turing test.
Just get an invite from someone you know, or use a invite spooler service.
Being an actual _owner_ of the new mouse, I can attest to the fact that the mouse is still tactile. You can feel the left and right click, and you can also feel the scrolling on the scroll button. Obviously its a bit more subtle than a big-assed scroll wheel, but I really can't figure out if the ball is rolling or not.
I haven't exactly played games with it yet, but don't get the feeling like you can't tell by touch when the button clicks and the ball rolls. It might be that they are using the speaker to vibrate the ball to give the tactile feedback.