I was going to respond to one or two other posters, until I realized that about 90% didn't make it past the first section ofthe article...either that or we are reading completely differant articles...Somehow I am missing the "they should have gotten a raise", "the company was a sinking ship", "the company was looking to get bought out by Yahoo", etc comments that I have seen so far...
Tech company that already has speech products on market and is working on better one, is bought out by competitor. VP of R&D ``began agitating for more authority'' as company is being acquired. Denied. Pissed off VP. Said VP then emails his resume and list of 13 coworkers to himself as well as a proposed organizational plan for a new R&D dept. Also starts swapping emails with Yahoo. Goes off to a job at Yahoos brand new speech lab, soon followed by all of the people on his list...
To me this sounds like they were gutted by yahoo, but passively. It doesn't look (from this one article) that Yahoo actiavely recruited them away, but that one pissed off manager asked Yahoo to more or less bribe him, then took everyone he needed to build a new speech lab...I think, if this article portrays things acurately, that the VP is at fault, but that Yahoo might be a little complicit for accepting his plan.
As far as the article claiming this type of litigation is "emerging over the last year", I have to disagree. Maybe it was only newsworthy for the past year, but it was going on before that. Hell, my company was sued two years ago because one of our guys got two other previous coworkers hired on. Their original company attempted to sue us, though I believe it was thrown out since we are in another field completely, didn't actively recruit them, etc. Kind of the opposite of the article in fact (even numbers wise, we hired 3 out of 30+ I think).
Define "metal". A large number of car manufacturers are now producing cars with molded resin panels, with a primary goal of reducing both cost and curb weight. The basic "plastic" weight comparison is to steel. The general market appears to be moving away from steel body panels now, in an attempt to find a lighter solution. Moulded resin is one of those solutions. I am not aware of any car that uses something that could generically be called "plastic". Though I often joke about my car being made out of tupperware, it is actually a glass fiber composite (glass fiber mesh and plastic/resin).
One of the early examples of this type of siding is the Corvette in the 50's. Many people credit GM with pioneering the use of composite plastic as a replacement for steel panels. Ford was replacing steel hoods with composite ones in the mid 90's. Japanese manufacturers have been slower to adopt it, mostly using composite for mirror enclosures, wings, ete, but have been adopting it more quickly recently. I think the Lambourghini diablo might count as a sporty car, guess what was used for the panels? European companies have been using composite panels for a decade or two I believe.
Generally steel was used because of it's implied greater protection. Steel sidepanels were cheaper to buy the materials for, cheaper to fabricate, and if thick enough, could add a miniscule amount of safety in impacts. The greater use of composites has brought their price down, while the other benefits (ie, the weight saving, the inability to rust, greater savings in retooling plants, etc) have allowed car manufacturers to reduce vehicle weights (increasing a vehicles mileage) and reduce costs.
Generally when referring to cars, "metal" sidepanels are steel, as that used to be the trend. A lot of parts in the car that used to be steel are now being replaced by composite aluminum and other alteratives. I think I read somewhere that Audi or BMW (? one of the German manufacturers any) was testing an aluminum composite for body panels. The use of aluminum has been growing for the past couple (few?) decades, as it has a higher strength to weight ratio than steel. Some of the more recent composites (such as aluminum-boron (boron carbide?)) have actually increased that ratio even more.
Oh, and fiber glass is sheet molded composite also, so if we wanted to generalize we could categorize fiberglass in the same group as your "plastic".
but I agree that carbon fiber is lighter than the rest:)
The problem is one of scale. I often see the "Engineers are responsible for peoples lives, one mistake kills many" phrase floated about, especially when debates come up as to whether "Software Engineer" is a realistic job description or position. Generally the argument runs similar to what you have posted: "Real" Engineers that make mistakes cost lives, Software engineers just have a patch to put out. Unfortunatly I find this example to be overly biased. I will agree that there is a proportionately higher level of harm that can be caused by physical engineering. But that does not mean that the level of harm from a "bug" is as negligable as you make it out to be. If I design and develop a piece of production planning software, it needs to do it's job without any bugs, because otherwise it could cause millions in losses. A control suite needs adequate alarm conditions and safeguards because it could otherwise run a piece of equipment into a dangerous (read explosive) state. We don't all write software for general release, there are a great many of us that design and develop software for critical business or produciton requirements, software that can cause great losses to the company, in income or lives.
I agree that a great number of the programmers out there do not qualify as what I would call Softare Engineers. I agree that we do not take a standadized test in order to be qualified as Professional Engineers. But to say that these two facts therefore mean that there can not be Software Engineers is to say that before there was a PE there were no Engineers. And this I find hard to believe.
Engineering is a process. That is why it can be applied to so many disparate fields. Many will add an addendum that it is a process that only applies to physical objects, but that does not make much sense, as it is a process the "engineer" follows, a process of planning and how to plan, developing and how to develop, testing and how to test. This process existed before the PE and this process is the basic model that is used to define the correct way to design and develop software.
In any case, I'd like to continue this but have to hit the shower to get to work, -T
I believe last time I looked there were approx 1400 deaths due to Katrina...lets double it in case I missed some massive updates recently: If we look at general natural disasters in the past century alone, Katrina wouldn't even make the list There are still at least 14 atlantic tropical cyclones (hurricanes) ahead of Katrina in the last 230 years.
But why let a little thing like facts get in the way of a good trolling...
How many more times are you going to paste this post into threads...? I mean, hell, how hard is it to come up with a new story once in a while, maybe misspell some differant words, you know, innovate a little...at least make it interesting for us to read or something, geez...
Yeah, but I believe you still have to call them to activate the service. When I got my Saturn it came equipped with OnStar, and I am fairly certain they said you have to activate it to begin your free year. Makes sense since the car was a 4-month old program car. Now, whether they generally activate it for you or not is a completely differant story (and quite probably dealer specific).
Of course they are. Do you make more money off giving someone exactly what they want, one time, or do you make better money off parading a series of never-quite-what-the-consumer-expects devices, convincing them to upgrade every couple to few years with the expectation that this time the device will do everything your expecting it too...
I'm off the upgrade cycle now. When VM's started coming out for the phones I was all wanting to program on them...until i found out how much it cost just to upload the app to my phone (that phone wouldn't allow app transfers over cable). I've finally gotten to the point where I don't care anymore. Now my requirements are to buy something relatively low weight with a nice long battery charge, decent sound ad upload capabilitiy (as I will have to replace their useless ones with something i can stand), and thats it. Currently my main phone has a camera that I rarely use, voice communicaitons that I haven't bothered with, etc. If I get bored and want to do something cool I'll do it on the handheld...if I get real bored I'l try installing linux on it again:P As for the phone, I have yet to see one that doesn't have a piece of crap OS.
My last cingular phone used to lock up. Basically it would be in a state were I could still interact with it. Except that it no longer accepted incoming calls or messages. Menus would still be navigable and everything. It would stay that way until I tried to make an outgoing call, at which point it would completely lock up. Unfortunatly, since it was my work phone and I didn't get a lot of calls, there were times early on that the phone would be blocking incoming calls for a day before I realized it. Don't give me 30 horrible ringers, give me a phone that doesn't lock up once a week...
If my post had truly backed up yours, I doubt you would be attacking me at the moment.
I can't see my post now, but I believe I was speaking in support of a quote from Clinton, whom I believe is still a Democrat.
You "hope that something positive will come out of reviewing what went wrong", but you don't want to "review" what went wrong - Err...I hope I don't have to explain whats wrong with that statement...
Just as I have a right to be ashamed of the people expending more energy blindly attacking, you have every right to believe I am to blame or that I have earned the blame.
I do not claim to be a Republican, I do have views that do not agree with them, but I do have many views that do. What I find interesting is that one of us made an opinion based off research and one of us is parroting the beliefs or facts as reported from a single partisan source. If some of my sources or views do not agree with what mainstream "Republicans" are saying, than so be it. I am more comfortable drawing an opinion from a wide collection of sources and thought than from a single party line or source....I'll leave off the Winston Churchill quote
Ah blame and some fairly horrible name calling. I'm going to ignore the last paragraph and hope that a little more info will help your point of view.
The governor declared a state of emergancy on the 26th and sent a letter to Bush on the 27th requesting that he also declare a state of emergancy. The letter contained general information about how she was coordinating various groups to handle the crisis as well as the inclusion of FEMA Emergancy Response Team A, that she notes is already on route. Link to letter
Bush declared a state of emergancy the same day he received this request, as has been posted in multiple articles on the internet form various media sources.
In various arguments I have seen some number like 40% of the National Guard in LA being sent overseas, this leaves 60% ofthe National Guard in the state under the control of the governor. Note that while several state-level departments are listed with their responsibilities, the national guard is left out.
The damage was bad, I will not argue with that, it is a fact. I will not get into whether human-caused damage was the fault of humans, other than to mention that every hurricane I lived through I remember some minimal amount of looting occurring. If we were to remove 60%+ ofthe population, than uddenly those looters not only apear to be a larger percentage of the population, but tey have a lot farther they can rome befoe running into resistance. Add the general mayhem of the time and thefact that so many people were in shelters and it makes what was likely a small number of looters seem like a much larger percentage of the population. Although I did find it interesting tat the commisioner of police was quoted saying tat they had arrested 3 looters already by 7:30 the morning of the 29th, less than 1.5 hours after landfall. I'd post the link but unfrtunatly I can't remmber which ofthe "Katrina" news links it was (wasn't any of the 5 I just re-read:P)
I haven't found a link to an article were the governor asked for aid, in fact thats the first I have heard of it (having in fact heard that Bush offered aid but was turned down). I'll add that to my rumor stack for now. Interesting to note that the golf playing is already in that stack too, as I have read articles that state that but also articles that refute it and claim he was at a medicaid convention and not playing golf.
As far as the Levees go, it depends on what you mean when you say responsible. If your talking about the work being done by the Corps of Engineers, I think you will find that getting behind on projects is one of the things they do best. They have a habit of starting projects at a faster rate then they finish them. Bush has been reprimanding them for years for their backlog of projects, that have reached a financial need that is about 7 times that of their annual budget (budget is generally $4bil, backlog is about $27 or $28bil - Found in the Federal budget documents foor 2004 and 2005 for Corps). On top of that, the rumors of an additonal study that they wanted to do are true. There was another study they wanted to do, unfortunatly it was estimated to be completed in 2008.
Additionally, the Levees were Cat 3 level protection. National Geographic had a dgood piece on this with some interesting interview quotes: linkie linkie
I'm going to cut this short, despite having lots of stuff left. As you can tell, I'm not blaming anyone with this, just trying to clarify the facts for the people that want to wantonly blame Bush for everything, despite what the facts say.
One additional comment. I do not agree with a large number of decisions that Clinton made when he was in office. However, having read and seen interviews with him recently, I have to say I was proud of the way he spoke about this situation. He did not rant and rave. He did not (as CNN implied, despite the interview being posted in the same article) blast the current administration. Instead he
I'm thinking it likely had to do with the fact that the Committee on Government Secrecy was enacted during that period, following the end of the cold war, leading to the 25 year rule and the release of tons of material previously marked as secret. From Wikipedia: In 1994 it was estimated that the United States Government had over 1.5 billion pages of classified material that was 25 years old and older.
And if we want to stretch things a bit, i guess we could give Clinton credit for creating this commission (though the only creation reference I have found so far is that it was created by congress, not the president)...
Unfortunatly, Clinton replaced the previous executive order on classification with Executive Order 12958 which, from the way it sounds in Wikipedia, actually drastically increased the number of people that could mark something as secret. Give it a little time to ramp up to speed and for govt. employees and contractors to get used to their new found powers, and suddenly we have growth again. The funniest thing is, knowing how things play out in some office atmospheres (and the number of people with the capability to classify material), theres probably a monthly pool going on in more than one place on who can classify the most stuff in a month or who can classify the most mundane piece of informaiton ever...we're going to get to this stuff in 25 years and find out someone classified their greasy post-it note with a lunch order on it...:P
Or it cold be because the cel equipment is under a flood that is concisered the worst-case scenario for that area. Verizon wireless has a habit of sending out internal newsletters. During the hurricanes in Florida and such they always had a big commentary on "Our communications are still up", etc. This time the letter went out with "Services are down because the equipment is under water. We can't supply a tentative date because we can't get to the equipment to check it's status, because it's under water." (btw, not direct quotes, I don't work for VerizonWireless, my sig other does)
In any case, my guess is they do have something better than "fair-weather" equipment. However, no matter how far up the tower you put your dish, you still have equipment down below under the tower...so apparently they didn't buy the "hurricane proof, waterproof to 2 meters underwater, with attached generator" equipment. They should be ashamed of themselves...
The idea behind this is to allow end-to-end product tracking. Walkmarts frst step is to slowly force all of the manufacturers who fill their shelves with RFID tracking under certain guidelines. By using RFID they will be able to track items much more closely, from when they are shipped to when/where they arrive, to where they happen to be sitting in the warehouse, to the floor, and eventually to the cashier. In the process they will be able to automate more things becuse the unique pallet identifier will be more easily scanned in an automatic fashion, allowing them to map out where particular items are (roughly), provide warnings wen you grab the wrong pallet and start transporting it out the wrong doorway, etc.
Right now Walmart pays manufacturers wen they ship more product. It is the manufacturers duty to keep their shelf full and they get penalized ifthey don't. The long term goal is for Walmart to be able to hold onto their money until the absolute last step. ie, when the cashier scans an item for purchase, that is when Walmart will pay the manufacturer for that item. In other words, Walmart only pays for things when they get sold and until an item is sold they get to hang onto their money, invest it, whatever.
I knew I got something useful out of that meeting:P
There is absolutely no point to.NET when it only runs on windows.
How many companies are purely Windows shops? I would think that given that one fact (and ignoring mono,.GNU, etc) there might be a reason for the existence of.Net.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a.Net zealot by any measure, though I do write a good bit of it at work. Work being mostly a Windows shop with only two linux boxes and one Mac (compared to 5-600 windows boxes). We don't care if Java works on desktops and servers, we're not going to write an applicaiton that will need to run on both. The closest we'll come to that is a distributed application that could easily be C# on one side and Perl on the other because we don't create applications that both have the user interface and server capabilities all bundled into one executable.
And as far as running cel phones to an existing application, we decided to go the web-based route. There is no Java front-end or back-end requirement. Hell, you could easily have a Java front-end and C# back-end if you wanted, but we went with html front-end and C# back-end (though I was pushing for PHP:P ).
i'm not really familiar with.NET, but seeing as it only runs on windows it really makes no sense to me.
And if you work in a mixed shop tat does require application functionality that is exactly the same across multiple platforms, I can see your point. However, in a Microsoft house you have the option of choosing your tools to fit the job. Maybe Java will be the best fit or maybe.Net will be the best fit, but once you choose one then it makes sense to continue using that one technology in most places to standardize your infrastructure as much as possible (software-wise, not necesarally OS-wise).
I definately agree, though perhaps in having that type of use available we actually have a way to "grade" the capabilities of a teacher. I have serious doubts about any 'teacher' that would substitute these clickers or any other type of similar tool for actual discussion.
Hmm, I think I fit your description above and while I don't believe AJAX is stupid, I don't believe I will be using it in the workplace.
Background: I worked solely on grant projects in university settings in 2000-2002. The past few years I have worked entirely in corporate and manufacturing settings on both contract and permenent status.
I understand the business need for having easily deployable, easily updateable applications. But I also understand the relatively ignored (in my experience) need for the company to have an application that will not need continuous maintenance at the pace that I foresee AJAX needing.
AJAX is based upon a single central idea, using Javascript requests to pull data down to the client and manipulate elements on the page. Since we are dealing with Javascript we also have to deal with the the fact that differant browsers have differant implementations of both the language and the DOM for the pages they are rendering. So hacks are introduced to make the AJAX application play well across multiple browsers.
Thats the first problem. We are designing a technology that is based solely on a second, often problematic, technology that continues to mutate and change with each new version of browser that hits the market. Hoping that an application written today, for todays Javascript definitions, with todays understanding of browser interaction, will still work exactly the same after a few more years of growth, bug fixes, patches, and version changes is similar to the hopes held by the developers who wrote many of the business applications I am currently forced to rewrite for newer OS's and patches on older dependancies.
Yes, I like writing web applications, in many circumstances due to the advantages inherent in having a single centralized copy of the application, but I am not willing to take that concept to the extreme of depending on a package of browser hacks. Just as a chain is as weak as it's weakest link, so is AJAX only as strong as the series of hacks that it is composed of.
In a business environment I cannot allow my applications to fail on a timeline measured, not in days, but in hours. No matter how quickly a group of developers responds to a patch that renders portions of AJAX unuseable, I will still have downtime in a web application, whose very existence was sold to management on the precepts of easy maintainability and client-software independance.
And then there is one point that most people miss when talking about server-side (vs client-side) web applications. Greater control of the code environment. With AJAX a great deal of code is executing on the clients machine, dependant on browser settings they may have messed up, anti-spyware applications that might be trying to interupt things, nifty toys they have installed on their desktop that are trying to gain access to their browser and credit-card info, etc. With a server-side application you have total control over the environment that your business logic is running on, total control over the application that is generating your content, etc.
I have been writing dynamic web content and applicaitons for a while now. I think AJAX is pretty nifty, and I might play with it a bit, but I would never bring it into a company atmosphere where business decisions could possibly be based upon it. I would return to thick clients before I deployed an application built on this technology.
Ultimately the use or non-use of this type of package is going to rest on the current development staff of each company. And I can only hope that my next position isn't with a company that chose nifty over maintainability and future-use, because I get a little tired of reverse engineering the last generation of failing apps at each job I take, and I don't see AJAX having the capability to last.
Windows 1-3.x, 3 other versions of NT4, 2000 advanced server, 2000 datacenter, XP 64-bit, XP tablet, XP media center, there are 5 2003's
And the various small versions: CE for embedded devices, several automotive specific versions of CE, Handheld PC, 5 or 6 'Pocket PC' versions, windows mobile, smartphone, CE.Net, NT embedded, XP embedded, storage server 2003, 2000 server appliance kit...
oh yeah, and XBox. And Vista is coming...
Granted only about 10-15 of those ar active, but I think that beats any one distributor for Linux right now, so i guess it depends on whether your deciding on OS vs OS or distribuotor vs distributor (ie, like MS vs RH or something like that, basically which one splits it's attention more)...
Got to love all the windows versions, probably a whole lot more I have never seen and I didn't even list all of the individual CE builds that got sent out on specific devices and such...
The point isn't so much to always get the right answer or to be graded on your response. It's supposed to be a system that keeps the students involved in the class while also giving the teacher an idea on how well the class is picking up the material.
Or at least, thats the approach taken for the Numina project. They use wireless handhelds for student interaction (that belong to the school, no cost to the student). Then they took advantage of having all of those handhelds and built in lab applications and such so they would have a greater set of uses. From the classes I sat in on that were using them, they seemed to go over pretty well. It's all in how the teacher uses the idea.
I shake my head and marvel...poor, closed-minded souls who se nothing but an MS product and think they are on the top of the world for ridiculing it.
*sigh* The trolls do rush to these threads. Meanwhile we who actually try things before denigrating them have found an extremely capable IDE, enjoying the capability to code in/edit Ada, APL, ASml, Caml, Cobol, Delphi, Forth, Eiffel, Fortran, Haskell, Lisp, Lua, Mercury, Mixal, ML, Mondrian, Nemerle, Oberon, Pascal, Perl, PHP, Prolog, Python, RPG, Ruby, Scheme, Smalltalk, C#, C++, J#, VB.Net, XML, HTML, ASP, ASP.Net,...
And what do people say to this? Dismiss it all with a handwave - MS Bah! - and stick to their advanced text editors because they know it. And it's easier.
Well, no arguments there! But I chose not to stck to any one language or editor. Knowing only one editor and having only one toolset was fine on the Commodore Vic-20, and unfortunatly Emacs was never as good as vi:). And when I decide to write an application that will only ever run on Windows...or in a web browser...or in mono...I realized that it would actually take a little work to learn a new IDE. I asked myself if I was man or mouse.
I picked man. I decided to take the brave step and actually learn how to use something beyond a text editor. To learn how to make the editor fill my needs instead of assuming it would limit me to only a small subset of projects. After all, I reasoned, if my sole criteria were "easy to use" and "I already know it", then by the same logic I should have never learned how to use even the best text editor (vi).
Anyway, it's no skin off my nose. So go on, Anti-Microsoft serfs, enjoy your little bag of tricks for your script typewriter! Have your fun. Nobody said that we all had to be professionals! And at least you have one thing to brag about - you didn't bother to expand your skillset because it was MS! And continue to dream those fond dreams of catching Virii in the wild, of creating single script solutions to strip them out of messages, of your own advantages over virus writers who clearly can't know more than VB. An example does not define a set, which is why professionals try to understand what they are talking about before they open their mouths.
Actually, running Exchange does not guarantee you to have IMAP or POP3 access as well. But on the other hand you can always use evolution and it's Exchange connector to connect in any case:)
I am currently logged into this FC3 box using my AD username and password. When I go out to the DFS servers (from this box) I continue to use that authentication. When another user views the shares on this box they always see their home folder as an available share based on their auth info. (Did I mention it automatically uses their Windows auth info to allow them to view the shares and their home folder?) If I log into the box with a user that did not previously have a home folder, it is automatically created, along with various other folders, default X settings, etc. provided they have an Active Directory account. If I VNC into this box I get a login prompt and use my AD auth info to log in. SSH auth's from AD. Basically everything on this box authenticates from AD. Not much is locked down to certain grouops, but a couple groups (like Domain Admins) have some special permissions and accessibility areas. About the only thing I didn't do was define home folders and such in AD, and thats only because the windows side of that (redirecting My Documents, profiles, etc) hasn't been done yet.
As far as monitoring and such goes, we have microsoft and non-MS solutions in place, sometimes interoperating.
Oddly enough this used to be a 100% Microsoft house, and only two systems run Linux at the moment...but they are both completely transparent (ie, look like any other box on the network).
So, no, I don't think there is any assumed lock-in , that you have to use Windows workstations or servers just because your using Active Directory (MS Source Safe, MS DFS, MS Exchange, IIS, etc). I was completely new to Samba when I set this box up and it only took a few days to get Samba, Pam, Kerberos, etc playing well with the MS systems.
Infopath doesn't reequire you to be connected to the data source. It has the capability to cache info for the selections in the form and also can cache submissions you have generated until you reconnect (at which point it syncs te information you enetered back to the main db).
The biggest difference would be the caching and syncing capability. The company trying to sell us on it had several other fairly big features they were touting also, but that was several months ago so I am sort of hazy on the details now.
Funny, the second paragraph implies that the Bush administration is the cause of the current state of the FDA (and it's almost complete lack of anything regarding actual testing or regulation - my thoughts), but your first paragraph used a drug that was accepted by the FDA in 1999, oops:)
Yep, the question is will the correction come before or after 5,000,000 people take the little polka-dot pill that was supposed to solve all of their problems but instead made their left arm fall off...
Of course, the hard part is convincing companies to use their acreage for solar power generation, rather than buying a slew of GE gas powered turbines (180MW/h each for mid-range F-Class turbines). I know of a fairly large backup plant in South Carolina that has between an acre and two acres of space being utilized for turbines. Their maximum hourly capacity is over 2200 MW/h. Not that they could ever get a line of fuel trucks long enough to run that way long, but my point is that it would be exceedingly difficult to convince companies like this to use that same space to generate such a small negligible (by comaprison) percentage of what they were producing.
Slashdot Mirror
I was going to respond to one or two other posters, until I realized that about 90% didn't make it past the first section ofthe article...either that or we are reading completely differant articles...Somehow I am missing the "they should have gotten a raise", "the company was a sinking ship", "the company was looking to get bought out by Yahoo", etc comments that I have seen so far...
Tech company that already has speech products on market and is working on better one, is bought out by competitor. VP of R&D ``began agitating for more authority'' as company is being acquired. Denied. Pissed off VP. Said VP then emails his resume and list of 13 coworkers to himself as well as a proposed organizational plan for a new R&D dept. Also starts swapping emails with Yahoo. Goes off to a job at Yahoos brand new speech lab, soon followed by all of the people on his list...
To me this sounds like they were gutted by yahoo, but passively. It doesn't look (from this one article) that Yahoo actiavely recruited them away, but that one pissed off manager asked Yahoo to more or less bribe him, then took everyone he needed to build a new speech lab...I think, if this article portrays things acurately, that the VP is at fault, but that Yahoo might be a little complicit for accepting his plan.
As far as the article claiming this type of litigation is "emerging over the last year", I have to disagree. Maybe it was only newsworthy for the past year, but it was going on before that. Hell, my company was sued two years ago because one of our guys got two other previous coworkers hired on. Their original company attempted to sue us, though I believe it was thrown out since we are in another field completely, didn't actively recruit them, etc. Kind of the opposite of the article in fact (even numbers wise, we hired 3 out of 30+ I think).
Define "metal". A large number of car manufacturers are now producing cars with molded resin panels, with a primary goal of reducing both cost and curb weight. The basic "plastic" weight comparison is to steel. The general market appears to be moving away from steel body panels now, in an attempt to find a lighter solution. Moulded resin is one of those solutions.
:)
I am not aware of any car that uses something that could generically be called "plastic". Though I often joke about my car being made out of tupperware, it is actually a glass fiber composite (glass fiber mesh and plastic/resin).
One of the early examples of this type of siding is the Corvette in the 50's. Many people credit GM with pioneering the use of composite plastic as a replacement for steel panels. Ford was replacing steel hoods with composite ones in the mid 90's. Japanese manufacturers have been slower to adopt it, mostly using composite for mirror enclosures, wings, ete, but have been adopting it more quickly recently. I think the Lambourghini diablo might count as a sporty car, guess what was used for the panels? European companies have been using composite panels for a decade or two I believe.
Generally steel was used because of it's implied greater protection. Steel sidepanels were cheaper to buy the materials for, cheaper to fabricate, and if thick enough, could add a miniscule amount of safety in impacts. The greater use of composites has brought their price down, while the other benefits (ie, the weight saving, the inability to rust, greater savings in retooling plants, etc) have allowed car manufacturers to reduce vehicle weights (increasing a vehicles mileage) and reduce costs.
Generally when referring to cars, "metal" sidepanels are steel, as that used to be the trend. A lot of parts in the car that used to be steel are now being replaced by composite aluminum and other alteratives. I think I read somewhere that Audi or BMW (? one of the German manufacturers any) was testing an aluminum composite for body panels. The use of aluminum has been growing for the past couple (few?) decades, as it has a higher strength to weight ratio than steel. Some of the more recent composites (such as aluminum-boron (boron carbide?)) have actually increased that ratio even more.
Oh, and fiber glass is sheet molded composite also, so if we wanted to generalize we could categorize fiberglass in the same group as your "plastic".
but I agree that carbon fiber is lighter than the rest
The problem is one of scale. I often see the "Engineers are responsible for peoples lives, one mistake kills many" phrase floated about, especially when debates come up as to whether "Software Engineer" is a realistic job description or position. Generally the argument runs similar to what you have posted: "Real" Engineers that make mistakes cost lives, Software engineers just have a patch to put out. Unfortunatly I find this example to be overly biased.
I will agree that there is a proportionately higher level of harm that can be caused by physical engineering. But that does not mean that the level of harm from a "bug" is as negligable as you make it out to be. If I design and develop a piece of production planning software, it needs to do it's job without any bugs, because otherwise it could cause millions in losses. A control suite needs adequate alarm conditions and safeguards because it could otherwise run a piece of equipment into a dangerous (read explosive) state. We don't all write software for general release, there are a great many of us that design and develop software for critical business or produciton requirements, software that can cause great losses to the company, in income or lives.
I agree that a great number of the programmers out there do not qualify as what I would call Softare Engineers. I agree that we do not take a standadized test in order to be qualified as Professional Engineers. But to say that these two facts therefore mean that there can not be Software Engineers is to say that before there was a PE there were no Engineers. And this I find hard to believe.
Engineering is a process. That is why it can be applied to so many disparate fields. Many will add an addendum that it is a process that only applies to physical objects, but that does not make much sense, as it is a process the "engineer" follows, a process of planning and how to plan, developing and how to develop, testing and how to test. This process existed before the PE and this process is the basic model that is used to define the correct way to design and develop software.
In any case, I'd like to continue this but have to hit the shower to get to work,
-T
Not to minimize katrina, but:
I believe last time I looked there were approx 1400 deaths due to Katrina...lets double it in case I missed some massive updates recently:
If we look at general natural disasters in the past century alone, Katrina wouldn't even make the list
There are still at least 14 atlantic tropical cyclones (hurricanes) ahead of Katrina in the last 230 years.
But why let a little thing like facts get in the way of a good trolling...
How many more times are you going to paste this post into threads...?
I mean, hell, how hard is it to come up with a new story once in a while, maybe misspell some differant words, you know, innovate a little...at least make it interesting for us to read or something, geez...
Yeah, but I believe you still have to call them to activate the service. When I got my Saturn it came equipped with OnStar, and I am fairly certain they said you have to activate it to begin your free year. Makes sense since the car was a 4-month old program car. Now, whether they generally activate it for you or not is a completely differant story (and quite probably dealer specific).
Of course they are. Do you make more money off giving someone exactly what they want, one time, or do you make better money off parading a series of never-quite-what-the-consumer-expects devices, convincing them to upgrade every couple to few years with the expectation that this time the device will do everything your expecting it too...
:P As for the phone, I have yet to see one that doesn't have a piece of crap OS.
I'm off the upgrade cycle now. When VM's started coming out for the phones I was all wanting to program on them...until i found out how much it cost just to upload the app to my phone (that phone wouldn't allow app transfers over cable). I've finally gotten to the point where I don't care anymore. Now my requirements are to buy something relatively low weight with a nice long battery charge, decent sound ad upload capabilitiy (as I will have to replace their useless ones with something i can stand), and thats it. Currently my main phone has a camera that I rarely use, voice communicaitons that I haven't bothered with, etc.
If I get bored and want to do something cool I'll do it on the handheld...if I get real bored I'l try installing linux on it again
My last cingular phone used to lock up. Basically it would be in a state were I could still interact with it. Except that it no longer accepted incoming calls or messages. Menus would still be navigable and everything. It would stay that way until I tried to make an outgoing call, at which point it would completely lock up. Unfortunatly, since it was my work phone and I didn't get a lot of calls, there were times early on that the phone would be blocking incoming calls for a day before I realized it. Don't give me 30 horrible ringers, give me a phone that doesn't lock up once a week...
If my post had truly backed up yours, I doubt you would be attacking me at the moment.
...I'll leave off the Winston Churchill quote
I can't see my post now, but I believe I was speaking in support of a quote from Clinton, whom I believe is still a Democrat.
You "hope that something positive will come out of reviewing what went wrong", but you don't want to "review" what went wrong - Err...I hope I don't have to explain whats wrong with that statement...
Just as I have a right to be ashamed of the people expending more energy blindly attacking, you have every right to believe I am to blame or that I have earned the blame.
I do not claim to be a Republican, I do have views that do not agree with them, but I do have many views that do. What I find interesting is that one of us made an opinion based off research and one of us is parroting the beliefs or facts as reported from a single partisan source. If some of my sources or views do not agree with what mainstream "Republicans" are saying, than so be it. I am more comfortable drawing an opinion from a wide collection of sources and thought than from a single party line or source.
Ah blame and some fairly horrible name calling. I'm going to ignore the last paragraph and hope that a little more info will help your point of view.
:P)
The governor declared a state of emergancy on the 26th and sent a letter to Bush on the 27th requesting that he also declare a state of emergancy. The letter contained general information about how she was coordinating various groups to handle the crisis as well as the inclusion of FEMA Emergancy Response Team A, that she notes is already on route. Link to letter
Bush declared a state of emergancy the same day he received this request, as has been posted in multiple articles on the internet form various media sources.
In various arguments I have seen some number like 40% of the National Guard in LA being sent overseas, this leaves 60% ofthe National Guard in the state under the control of the governor. Note that while several state-level departments are listed with their responsibilities, the national guard is left out.
The damage was bad, I will not argue with that, it is a fact. I will not get into whether human-caused damage was the fault of humans, other than to mention that every hurricane I lived through I remember some minimal amount of looting occurring. If we were to remove 60%+ ofthe population, than uddenly those looters not only apear to be a larger percentage of the population, but tey have a lot farther they can rome befoe running into resistance. Add the general mayhem of the time and thefact that so many people were in shelters and it makes what was likely a small number of looters seem like a much larger percentage of the population. Although I did find it interesting tat the commisioner of police was quoted saying tat they had arrested 3 looters already by 7:30 the morning of the 29th, less than 1.5 hours after landfall. I'd post the link but unfrtunatly I can't remmber which ofthe "Katrina" news links it was (wasn't any of the 5 I just re-read
I haven't found a link to an article were the governor asked for aid, in fact thats the first I have heard of it (having in fact heard that Bush offered aid but was turned down). I'll add that to my rumor stack for now. Interesting to note that the golf playing is already in that stack too, as I have read articles that state that but also articles that refute it and claim he was at a medicaid convention and not playing golf.
As far as the Levees go, it depends on what you mean when you say responsible. If your talking about the work being done by the Corps of Engineers, I think you will find that getting behind on projects is one of the things they do best. They have a habit of starting projects at a faster rate then they finish them. Bush has been reprimanding them for years for their backlog of projects, that have reached a financial need that is about 7 times that of their annual budget (budget is generally $4bil, backlog is about $27 or $28bil - Found in the Federal budget documents foor 2004 and 2005 for Corps). On top of that, the rumors of an additonal study that they wanted to do are true. There was another study they wanted to do, unfortunatly it was estimated to be completed in 2008.
Additionally, the Levees were Cat 3 level protection.
National Geographic had a dgood piece on this with some interesting interview quotes: linkie linkie
I'm going to cut this short, despite having lots of stuff left. As you can tell, I'm not blaming anyone with this, just trying to clarify the facts for the people that want to wantonly blame Bush for everything, despite what the facts say.
One additional comment. I do not agree with a large number of decisions that Clinton made when he was in office. However, having read and seen interviews with him recently, I have to say I was proud of the way he spoke about this situation. He did not rant and rave. He did not (as CNN implied, despite the interview being posted in the same article) blast the current administration. Instead he
I'm thinking it likely had to do with the fact that the Committee on Government Secrecy was enacted during that period, following the end of the cold war, leading to the 25 year rule and the release of tons of material previously marked as secret.
:P
From Wikipedia: In 1994 it was estimated that the United States Government had over 1.5 billion pages of classified material that was 25 years old and older.
And if we want to stretch things a bit, i guess we could give Clinton credit for creating this commission (though the only creation reference I have found so far is that it was created by congress, not the president)...
Unfortunatly, Clinton replaced the previous executive order on classification with Executive Order 12958 which, from the way it sounds in Wikipedia, actually drastically increased the number of people that could mark something as secret. Give it a little time to ramp up to speed and for govt. employees and contractors to get used to their new found powers, and suddenly we have growth again.
The funniest thing is, knowing how things play out in some office atmospheres (and the number of people with the capability to classify material), theres probably a monthly pool going on in more than one place on who can classify the most stuff in a month or who can classify the most mundane piece of informaiton ever...we're going to get to this stuff in 25 years and find out someone classified their greasy post-it note with a lunch order on it...
Or it cold be because the cel equipment is under a flood that is concisered the worst-case scenario for that area.
Verizon wireless has a habit of sending out internal newsletters. During the hurricanes in Florida and such they always had a big commentary on "Our communications are still up", etc. This time the letter went out with "Services are down because the equipment is under water. We can't supply a tentative date because we can't get to the equipment to check it's status, because it's under water."
(btw, not direct quotes, I don't work for VerizonWireless, my sig other does)
In any case, my guess is they do have something better than "fair-weather" equipment. However, no matter how far up the tower you put your dish, you still have equipment down below under the tower...so apparently they didn't buy the "hurricane proof, waterproof to 2 meters underwater, with attached generator" equipment. They should be ashamed of themselves...
The idea behind this is to allow end-to-end product tracking. Walkmarts frst step is to slowly force all of the manufacturers who fill their shelves with RFID tracking under certain guidelines. By using RFID they will be able to track items much more closely, from when they are shipped to when/where they arrive, to where they happen to be sitting in the warehouse, to the floor, and eventually to the cashier.
:P
In the process they will be able to automate more things becuse the unique pallet identifier will be more easily scanned in an automatic fashion, allowing them to map out where particular items are (roughly), provide warnings wen you grab the wrong pallet and start transporting it out the wrong doorway, etc.
Right now Walmart pays manufacturers wen they ship more product. It is the manufacturers duty to keep their shelf full and they get penalized ifthey don't. The long term goal is for Walmart to be able to hold onto their money until the absolute last step. ie, when the cashier scans an item for purchase, that is when Walmart will pay the manufacturer for that item. In other words, Walmart only pays for things when they get sold and until an item is sold they get to hang onto their money, invest it, whatever.
I knew I got something useful out of that meeting
How many companies are purely Windows shops? I would think that given that one fact (and ignoring mono,
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a
And as far as running cel phones to an existing application, we decided to go the web-based route. There is no Java front-end or back-end requirement. Hell, you could easily have a Java front-end and C# back-end if you wanted, but we went with html front-end and C# back-end (though I was pushing for PHP
And if you work in a mixed shop tat does require application functionality that is exactly the same across multiple platforms, I can see your point. However, in a Microsoft house you have the option of choosing your tools to fit the job. Maybe Java will be the best fit or maybe
Carter? Eisenhower?
I definately agree, though perhaps in having that type of use available we actually have a way to "grade" the capabilities of a teacher. I have serious doubts about any 'teacher' that would substitute these clickers or any other type of similar tool for actual discussion.
Hmm, I think I fit your description above and while I don't believe AJAX is stupid, I don't believe I will be using it in the workplace.
Background: I worked solely on grant projects in university settings in 2000-2002. The past few years I have worked entirely in corporate and manufacturing settings on both contract and permenent status.
I understand the business need for having easily deployable, easily updateable applications. But I also understand the relatively ignored (in my experience) need for the company to have an application that will not need continuous maintenance at the pace that I foresee AJAX needing.
AJAX is based upon a single central idea, using Javascript requests to pull data down to the client and manipulate elements on the page. Since we are dealing with Javascript we also have to deal with the the fact that differant browsers have differant implementations of both the language and the DOM for the pages they are rendering. So hacks are introduced to make the AJAX application play well across multiple browsers.
Thats the first problem. We are designing a technology that is based solely on a second, often problematic, technology that continues to mutate and change with each new version of browser that hits the market. Hoping that an application written today, for todays Javascript definitions, with todays understanding of browser interaction, will still work exactly the same after a few more years of growth, bug fixes, patches, and version changes is similar to the hopes held by the developers who wrote many of the business applications I am currently forced to rewrite for newer OS's and patches on older dependancies.
Yes, I like writing web applications, in many circumstances due to the advantages inherent in having a single centralized copy of the application, but I am not willing to take that concept to the extreme of depending on a package of browser hacks. Just as a chain is as weak as it's weakest link, so is AJAX only as strong as the series of hacks that it is composed of.
In a business environment I cannot allow my applications to fail on a timeline measured, not in days, but in hours. No matter how quickly a group of developers responds to a patch that renders portions of AJAX unuseable, I will still have downtime in a web application, whose very existence was sold to management on the precepts of easy maintainability and client-software independance.
And then there is one point that most people miss when talking about server-side (vs client-side) web applications. Greater control of the code environment. With AJAX a great deal of code is executing on the clients machine, dependant on browser settings they may have messed up, anti-spyware applications that might be trying to interupt things, nifty toys they have installed on their desktop that are trying to gain access to their browser and credit-card info, etc. With a server-side application you have total control over the environment that your business logic is running on, total control over the application that is generating your content, etc.
I have been writing dynamic web content and applicaitons for a while now. I think AJAX is pretty nifty, and I might play with it a bit, but I would never bring it into a company atmosphere where business decisions could possibly be based upon it. I would return to thick clients before I deployed an application built on this technology.
Ultimately the use or non-use of this type of package is going to rest on the current development staff of each company. And I can only hope that my next position isn't with a company that chose nifty over maintainability and future-use, because I get a little tired of reverse engineering the last generation of failing apps at each job I take, and I don't see AJAX having the capability to last.
Err...your forgot a few :)
.Net, NT embedded, XP embedded, storage server 2003, 2000 server appliance kit...
Windows 1-3.x, 3 other versions of NT4, 2000 advanced server, 2000 datacenter, XP 64-bit, XP tablet, XP media center, there are 5 2003's
And the various small versions: CE for embedded devices, several automotive specific versions of CE, Handheld PC, 5 or 6 'Pocket PC' versions, windows mobile, smartphone, CE
oh yeah, and XBox. And Vista is coming...
Granted only about 10-15 of those ar active, but I think that beats any one distributor for Linux right now, so i guess it depends on whether your deciding on OS vs OS or distribuotor vs distributor (ie, like MS vs RH or something like that, basically which one splits it's attention more)...
Got to love all the windows versions, probably a whole lot more I have never seen and I didn't even list all of the individual CE builds that got sent out on specific devices and such...
The point isn't so much to always get the right answer or to be graded on your response. It's supposed to be a system that keeps the students involved in the class while also giving the teacher an idea on how well the class is picking up the material.
Or at least, thats the approach taken for the Numina project. They use wireless handhelds for student interaction (that belong to the school, no cost to the student). Then they took advantage of having all of those handhelds and built in lab applications and such so they would have a greater set of uses.
From the classes I sat in on that were using them, they seemed to go over pretty well. It's all in how the teacher uses the idea.
I shake my head and marvel...poor, closed-minded souls who se nothing but an MS product and think they are on the top of the world for ridiculing it.
...
:). And when I decide to write an application that will only ever run on Windows...or in a web browser...or in mono...I realized that it would actually take a little work to learn a new IDE. I asked myself if I was man or mouse.
*sigh* The trolls do rush to these threads. Meanwhile we who actually try things before denigrating them have found an extremely capable IDE, enjoying the capability to code in/edit Ada, APL, ASml, Caml, Cobol, Delphi, Forth, Eiffel, Fortran, Haskell, Lisp, Lua, Mercury, Mixal, ML, Mondrian, Nemerle, Oberon, Pascal, Perl, PHP, Prolog, Python, RPG, Ruby, Scheme, Smalltalk, C#, C++, J#, VB.Net, XML, HTML, ASP, ASP.Net,
And what do people say to this? Dismiss it all with a handwave - MS Bah! - and stick to their advanced text editors because they know it. And it's easier.
Well, no arguments there! But I chose not to stck to any one language or editor. Knowing only one editor and having only one toolset was fine on the Commodore Vic-20, and unfortunatly Emacs was never as good as vi
I picked man. I decided to take the brave step and actually learn how to use something beyond a text editor. To learn how to make the editor fill my needs instead of assuming it would limit me to only a small subset of projects. After all, I reasoned, if my sole criteria were "easy to use" and "I already know it", then by the same logic I should have never learned how to use even the best text editor (vi).
Anyway, it's no skin off my nose. So go on, Anti-Microsoft serfs, enjoy your little bag of tricks for your script typewriter! Have your fun. Nobody said that we all had to be professionals! And at least you have one thing to brag about - you didn't bother to expand your skillset because it was MS! And continue to dream those fond dreams of catching Virii in the wild, of creating single script solutions to strip them out of messages, of your own advantages over virus writers who clearly can't know more than VB. An example does not define a set, which is why professionals try to understand what they are talking about before they open their mouths.
Actually, running Exchange does not guarantee you to have IMAP or POP3 access as well. But on the other hand you can always use evolution and it's Exchange connector to connect in any case :)
Umm...
I am currently logged into this FC3 box using my AD username and password.
When I go out to the DFS servers (from this box) I continue to use that authentication.
When another user views the shares on this box they always see their home folder as an available share based on their auth info. (Did I mention it automatically uses their Windows auth info to allow them to view the shares and their home folder?)
If I log into the box with a user that did not previously have a home folder, it is automatically created, along with various other folders, default X settings, etc. provided they have an Active Directory account.
If I VNC into this box I get a login prompt and use my AD auth info to log in.
SSH auth's from AD.
Basically everything on this box authenticates from AD. Not much is locked down to certain grouops, but a couple groups (like Domain Admins) have some special permissions and accessibility areas.
About the only thing I didn't do was define home folders and such in AD, and thats only because the windows side of that (redirecting My Documents, profiles, etc) hasn't been done yet.
As far as monitoring and such goes, we have microsoft and non-MS solutions in place, sometimes interoperating.
Oddly enough this used to be a 100% Microsoft house, and only two systems run Linux at the moment...but they are both completely transparent (ie, look like any other box on the network).
So, no, I don't think there is any assumed lock-in , that you have to use Windows workstations or servers just because your using Active Directory (MS Source Safe, MS DFS, MS Exchange, IIS, etc).
I was completely new to Samba when I set this box up and it only took a few days to get Samba, Pam, Kerberos, etc playing well with the MS systems.
Infopath doesn't reequire you to be connected to the data source. It has the capability to cache info for the selections in the form and also can cache submissions you have generated until you reconnect (at which point it syncs te information you enetered back to the main db).
The biggest difference would be the caching and syncing capability. The company trying to sell us on it had several other fairly big features they were touting also, but that was several months ago so I am sort of hazy on the details now.
Funny, the second paragraph implies that the Bush administration is the cause of the current state of the FDA (and it's almost complete lack of anything regarding actual testing or regulation - my thoughts), but your first paragraph used a drug that was accepted by the FDA in 1999, oops :)
Yep, the question is will the correction come before or after 5,000,000 people take the little polka-dot pill that was supposed to solve all of their problems but instead made their left arm fall off...
Of course, the hard part is convincing companies to use their acreage for solar power generation, rather than buying a slew of GE gas powered turbines (180MW/h each for mid-range F-Class turbines). I know of a fairly large backup plant in South Carolina that has between an acre and two acres of space being utilized for turbines. Their maximum hourly capacity is over 2200 MW/h. Not that they could ever get a line of fuel trucks long enough to run that way long, but my point is that it would be exceedingly difficult to convince companies like this to use that same space to generate such a small negligible (by comaprison) percentage of what they were producing.
-T