Wow. You must have low expectations. I cannot stand VS.NET. It has none of the refactoring and proper working code completetion tools that Eclipse and Netbeans has. I personally think its a horrid IDE.
Wow. Says it all really. The fact that you cannot stand VS.Net probably in no way hampered your ability to find the options you like. I know of at least three refactoring add-ins for C#, one of which (at least) integrates itself directly into the IDE and menus. And thats 30 seconds with Google and not having a clear idea of what refactoring is. As far as code completion goes, I'm not sure what you thought was missing. Granted I stopped using IDE's for Java back in 2000, so I'm not sure of Eclipse (et al)'s capabilities. I'm fairly certain that automatically finishing what I am typing, automatically doing braces/etc, etc is probably the case though. Or maybe giving you the option to add event handlers (press tab to generate) or the functions the event handlers point to (press tab to generate) or setting up your namespace and class templates, as well as auto-completion (even in HTML view for ASP.Net)...I digress.
As for the syntax of C#, when they get proper exception handling and stop allowing VB style code to enter in, I'll be happy.
Define proper. As far as I can tell the only difference between try/catch/finally in Java and in C# is that classes that throw exceptions must(can? my Java is several versions out of date and rusty) be declared with "throws exception". cascading catches are supported, custom exception objects, no exception object at all for a "catch all", etc. But don't take my word for it, here is google to the rescue again.
As far as the rest of your ill-formed sentance, I think your implying there is VB-syntax code in (or required by) C#. Please to be showing me an example.
Disclaimer: My work desk has a windows and a linux box on it, I abhor ASP.Net, and learned/used Java before C# or VB.Net.
I know how you feel. Some days I can't wait to get back to work with a particularly interesting piece of functionality, etc. Then there are days like yesterday when I find out MS has cancelled the tool I need. Then I find out Visio can output XML and decide I'll toss some symbols on the page and try to duplicate it's output....which, upon opening the output and finding that it required 76k+ lines of xml to save my seven symbols, I decided to give up for the day and went back to trying to interact with active directory from Python:P
Which in the end was a lot more satisfying, and more importantly, did not include 76k+ lines to ~100 line noise ratio.
(this is pre-coffee#2, if that explains the verbal ticks present in the message)
It's not just the icon, it's the functionality. Although if you notice, MS Windows still has the question mark mouse cursor, which in my mind could only be used for the exact same functionality (click an icon, click a GUI element for more info on it). I'm also fairly certain there was plenty of prior art, I just can't remember where I saw this particular funcitonality in the past (though I now I have seen it):P
Personally I could care less about the whole Mac vs IBM compat. box (or this magic 'Wintel' you speak of). However, I found it amusing that you define "upgrade" as a faster CPU, more memory, and a board that supports it. Generally when lookng for examples the first thing we think of is that which we would like ourselves. I agree that (in most cases) it is more costly to upgrade a CPU when you purchase your motherboard without looking ahead. The motherboard I bought a coule years back with a P4 1.6 (400fsb series) would have only allowed me to upgrade to a P4 3-ish (800 fsb northwood). The last motherboard I bought (about 1.5 yrs ago) without upgrading my CPU would also allow me to upgrade to any Intel P4 on the market. Perhaps it is merely because you are a Mac owner that you don't realize the broad range of upgradeable hardware in the average box. Video cards, audio cards, more memory, larger storage space, optical storage, extra NICs, home automation components, additional USB/1394 ports, integrated wireless, video capture, tape drives, a wide variety of input devices, Compact Flash/Smart/etc card reader bays, ir towers/bays, bluetooth, a wide variety of gaming devices, harddrive controllers, system monitoring hardware,...
Perhaps you would like a faster CPU upgrade, but don't classify capability to upgrade in general with your specific needs. I'll stick with my windows and Linux systems on their current architecture, I prefer the cheaper replacement parts if something breaks and the greater number of upgrade paths to choose from (as well as manufacturers, etc).
Just because you kind find situations were this doesn't fit (not that I agree with your examples) does not mean it is a bad idea. In fact, storage of historical data would not be dificult, simply tie another system to this system and have it store data as it is asynchronously sent. At first this seems a little hokey, why use two systems when one would do the job, but you could set up a fairly nice alert-based historical system with somehting like this and a standard db. Here's my logic, if this system can handle 100,000 transactions and your database can't then you use this system as the first line for incoming data. That data is processed and sent back out base on the rules you define. Maybe you have one set of rules that are alerts to other applications and one set that define what data will be stored historically. The historical rules could be used to treat your common database as a real-time historian, only sending changes greater then certain percentages or certain percentage deltas. This condenses your data and, provided you have sleected tight enough constraints, only loses minor fluctuations in the value that don't mater down the road. In the meantime your applications on the other side have already received the data asynchronously, which means no polling loops, etc.
Of course, this all seems to be fairly similar to most ofthe run of the mill OPC servers out tere that don'tstore historical data, except for the added rules layer. Most OPC servers I have dealt with just let you sign up to receive all the data from a single point in an asynchronous manner. Not sure that they would be complex in terms of what they choose to send. Course, several of them handle as many or more transactions per second, so who knows.
Stock trading errors: I would say that you probably would want historical data stored for this, though not for the reason you say. If an f-up does occur, like a trade being made based on data, etc, then the only reason you would want historical data at that point is to figure out which part of your system broke down. Was it the trader making a bad choice, the remote application calculating somehting wrong with the passed data, the rules defined in the database being incorrectly defined, the data collector feeding the data to the database, or on a way outside chance, a bug in the database that somehow misrepresented one piece of data but was never noticed before when your company tested everything out (and I assume your company would test everything before balancing a $10 millon trade on it). I don't understand why something _has_ to be written some time. There are plety of Manufacturing systems out there that only deal in real-time data and don't store historical data (I mention this because I worked in that field for a while). Granted there are a lot of things you can do with historical data that can help make you mor emoney, but if you can make it right now without the historical pieces then you probably don't know what your missing and are still raking in the money.
In any case, I agree that historical data can be very imprtant, disagree that it's lack in this situation is a fatal flaw, and again am reminded that there are people out there that would not see a problem with your stock example and probably would create an entire system to do exactly that (wuithout seeing the slew of possible problems we mentioned). It all comes down to using the tools that fit the job. This is just one more tool with a variety of uses that does not include directly replacing a standard historical database.:P
Unfortunatly, that may not be the case. Take, for example, Microsoft's XAML that is a more complex markup langauge than standard HTML. They are basically going to use this as the foundation for how UI elements are defined/made/etc in Avalon. Granted it is not an actual programming language, and it will act similarly to ASP.Net with HTML and it's extra bucket of XML tags (asp:Label, etc), but I can't help but wonder how long it will be until they bundle in common functionality as extra attributes (like click events and stuff, but without the Javascript/VBScript fallback in HTML). XAML will basically be a compileable interface layer for any code you have embedded inside CDATA sections or behind the scenes in a C# class or the like.
My point is that, though XAML is not what I would specify as a programing language, it is typed in XML (though with MS it will probably be drag and drop and put useless line breaks all over the place as well as replace any compliant tags with non-compliant versions). If MS can do it, I'm sure it won't be long before someone else does.
Do I think XAML and it's ilk have a future? Yes. Being able to define displays in a common language that is parseable and at least partially open (since it is all text ad they can't very well tell us to imagine the interface without putting down tags) is handy. I doubt it will be very long before other interface "languages" become common for other platforms. Do I think writing "programs" will happen in XML? No, not even approaching the level of early VB. In order to create an XML based programming language that is as simple as lining up your object hierarchy, etc (not just wrting code with tags), someone will have to write all the chunks of code that go behind every tag call. And yes, I know that happens now, but think about how much more highly the limitations will be when you have a tag-based language that will invariably end up with drag and drop displays. At it's best I think I could see it being a glorified scritping language, at it's worst a programming language that has nothing to do with programing, where each tag you drop is a small process that has nothing to do with programming concepts but instead represents several lines or paragraphs of code.
Then again, I coudl be wrong. Perhaps someone will make a useful language based on XML. Maybe programmers will flock to it in the millions despite the existence of languages like Lisp (just keep tacking on parans till it works). I somehow doubt it. Give me a } anytime to close a function.
You have to be careful with the nifty long hosts file. I have one that is about 17,000 lines long that I had to stop using. Got tired of windows lagging out for 7-9 minutes on the "preparing Network Connections" stage of loadup to scan it all...and when you edit it...compared to my usual 2 minute startup time that was fairly painful:P
Probably one of those somewhat cheap headphone sets they make for joggers were the radio and etc ae built into the headset. If your broadcasting over FM and mowing the lawn then you just grab your headphone son the way out the door and akesure they're sitll tuned into whatever blank channel you use for your transmission.
From what I gathered this would be more like altering an ammo pack to give you full ammo and full health in a modified quake level. Ie, the user has to download the level and gets their previous definiton files for the ammo pack overwritten so then the next time they play locally they have magic bullets o' health.
I completely agre. I have a friend that is in that other 1%. He's a professional photographer that has gone digital. he has been planning on purchasing a wireless camera for a while so that the pictures he takes could be stored directly to his laptop, allowing for greater storage space and faster transfer times - ie, faster if you consider it hapepening every time you take a picture instead of all several hundred when your eager to get back on the road and head home.
But at the same time I'm sure he wil be just as, if not more so, ineterested in the "cosmetic tweaks" of higher resolution and quality lens systems. In fact, I would go so far to say that more people will probably be interested in the "cosmetic tweaks" then the wifi, if disregard the group of pepople that think everything is better with wifi (Sweet, my oatmeal spoon has WiFi...now I can transmit the flavor of my oatmeal straight to my blog. Why didn't they think of this earlier?!?).
A pirate walks into a bar with a ship's wheel down the front of his pants and a parrot perched on top of it. The bartender gives hime a look and asks, "What's the deal with that parrot?" The pirate looks at the parrot and then back up, "Arrr! He's Driving Me Nuts"
I agree with your sentiments, despite what other may say. That is/was the biggest turn off for Gimp for me. I actually find it to be an obstacle in using the program because there is nothing tying them together (maybe it's a coneptual gap, I don't like having to think about it every time). I don't necessarally need my applications to all have slide-out tool panes like Visual Studio, but a background container with the option to dock windows on the sides or toolbar does wonders for keeping all the various bits of the application together, allowing me to focus on doing what I am doing without accidentally switching focus to a browser or terminal I left open. Sure once I get everything shuffled to another window I don't worry as much, and some people might be comfortable "outside the box" with their applications, but I would prefer to stay inside the box, thank you. I don't think this is a revolutionary interface design concept, I think it is an interesting one that doesn't quite work as well as was expected.
If I am going to work on an application then my preference would be to siomply work on it, without pausing every 5 seconds to think about where to find a toolbox i sent to the background. Now in window 3 of 4 and crap, did I lose 4 somewhere? That's one of the elements I liked about Paintshop Pro: the floating, dockable, collapsible menus. Everything was kept in the one application area and you could pretty much put the boxes anywhere you wanted, but being inside that window made the toolboxes naturally belong to the application. Plus I could get more screen acreage simply by allowing them to collapse, without losing them into the background.
I'm not sure I seee your "single point of failure". Knowing a card design does not necesarally equate to being able to duplicate a card that will allow you access to specific places you would like to go.
Right now there are multiple (and when I say multiple I'm guessing in excess of 100) differant card designs for various departments, contractors, etc. If I was going to set out to duplicate an ID card my first step would be to gather up 30 or so of these and start trying to make my own copies of the easiest ones. Additionally, these cards will likely be tied into a main system somewhere, not on the card. This means that in order to make yuour own card you would need to copy an existing card. But, the additional capability of biometric signatures, etc mean that you also have to convince the card reader/camera/whatever that you are the peson who's card you stole. Granted very low security buildings probably won't have biometrics, guards, etc, but what are you doing trying to get into a low security building? Might as well just take the guided tour.
The fact that the current system is virtually unmanageable by the government does not necessarally make it that much harder for "evildoers" to "do evil" with it. It in fact provides multiple points of penetration or weak links. The fact that it is virtually unmaneagable means that there are that many more ways to break it. Or, in other words, it has many, many points of failure because any one will give you access to at least one or two buildings (at which point you can start clubbing your way to the top to get other badges, walk to other buildings, etc).
This also seems to be a bootstraping argument to me. It is not, in fact, like a homogenous network. With a homogenous network, any point of failure (i'm thinking viruses) can take the whole system down. Trying to find a hole in the system (we're talking about a single door access system I'm guessing) means your already going to have found a hole in firewalls, etc that allowed you access to this locked down computer, as I highly doubt they are going to put a webserver on it and let it announce to the world "Hi, I'm the point of failure for the whole card system, hack me to add a card id and access level". I'd be surprised if it was on a network that was externally accessible at all.
Yes, but the SDK's, API's, etc. that are bundled into most of the industrial apps I have worked with are all tied very heavily to MS products (if they are available at all).
The biggest break I have seen are some of the HMIs that still run on Solaris boxes and the data interfaces that hook into them to send the data to historians (on Windows boces). In some cases there areexcel plugins that are sold with products that are given tie-ins to VBA. Or some trending apps I have seen actually have a VBA coding section similar to Office products. This doesn't give you a lot of room to use Java. Granted you could use it if you really wanted to go to the extra work (writing VBA/VB/.Net apps that were basically interfaces for the Java app into the VBA/VB/.Net interfaces) but in most cases you would end up having to rewrite large portions of the SDK's/etc and still have most of the work being done from that middle interface, with bare tie-in classes in Java that just hooked into the objects in the interface.
So yes it could be done, just as I could write an ERP system all by myself from the ground up in any given language. Whether it is practical or not is the real issue.
-T
Re:Scary (saracasm)
on
A .Net CPU
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· Score: 2, Informative
I've seen.Net moving in quite heavily in the manufacturing world. This is one sector that MS has a strong hold on simply because there are so few people that want to sit down and write the hundreds of communications drivers, etc needed to create manufacturing data systems. Or maybe because once you buy a manufacturing system you don't want to switch brands until you get back out of the hole with it:P A lot of the products I have seen (both data collection and warehouse-type) are moving to.Net SDK's, and a lot of internal application programming seems to be moving that way also. The last major project I did was:
1 part config client and 1 part server
"please maximize uptime"
"please maximize scanning capabilities"
"please correct our last 9 months of errors and get it on the shelf in 2 months or less".Net was the available choice (unless you consider VB6 as a valid choice...*shudder*) and despite the fact that the only other competing product was written in C++ (we think) we also managed to turn out a more efficient server (not that I don't think i could have made it even faster in C++, I just expected the other company's to suck that badly:P).
A lot of internal app's get written in.Net, as the valid choices are generally VB6 vs VC++ vs some flavor of.Net vs Excel VBA (you think I'm kidding). The few other languages the make it onto the plate are generally as bad as VB6, so I prefer to leave them unmentioned. About the only time I have seen it go beyond this is the few times I introduced the power of bash scripting something on my laptop's preferred partition (ie, not windows);).
As opposed to the felony grand larceny and felony computer tampering charges they had already received? The fact that those charges were added later by the judge could mean a couple of things: 1) They did the math and realized that there weren't anywhere near enough small startup telco's in NY to use all the parts 2) More evidence was found showing that they had planned to sell it to a certain location, ie email, letters, whatever seized durting a search (that would have almost assuredly happened in a crime this size) 3) As another poster said, moving that much specialized stolen equipment in the state it was stolen from would be stupid (to say the least). And while they were stupid to knock out the 911 system, they were in and out and almost on the road, so one mistake only caught them.
The point of his rebuttal, which you seemed to have missed, is that there are a great number of factors that were not included in the analysis, not that any one example that he provided was the missing link. It is not up to the original poster to prove whether or not his suggested possible situations were, in fact, possible or probable, but instead up to the originators to factor that into their statistics. The idea was that the original poster was able to read the documented statistics (using the word documented loosely since this has not been verified or even published) and easily think of a large number of possible factors that were not considered.
In short, the data provided by the original poster consisted of pointing out factors that were not considered, not to provide raw data to refute any claims made in the document.
Not to mention that Steam's release state has always been about one step behind the name of it's release status. For instance, I was on the open beta, Steam should have been pre-alpha at that point. There were still numerous disastorous errors occuring, often resulting in the all too frequent "uninstall, reinstall" or "delete your game directly, re-download" solutions. When Steam went full release it may have been up to about beta in my book. Hell, the little "Remember Me" option for username and password was still non-functional, people were still having serious problems with it ("delete your binary settings file, etc"). The day they pushed down an update that pushed 1/3rd of the users offline...that was classic. So much for "Release" quality.
All in all, Steam has been a joke in my book. It really isn't that big a deal for an app (simple client/server type app, only slightly more complicated then a chat interface), yet it has been over a year since it went open beta and they are still shoving weekly and bi-weekly patches down the tubes to us. In a year I could have written and tested something like that by myself. It makes me worry about the stability and quality of the HL2 code. Yes, Steam and HL2 are likely differant developers, maybe even differant QA (if they have it), but to allow such a horrible product out the door under the words "Public Release" worries me. Especially considering any "minor" bugs in HL2 that go out the door in "version 1.0" can be easily updated via Steam, they may end up with twice as many (or more) bugs in the first version since they have an easier patch delivery system.
I expect HL2 to be bug-ridden for at least the first 3 months, in some cases unplayable. The combination of bad judgement and bad practices with Steam and the fact that Steam is available as a mandatory, automatic update service, means that bugs will can be ignored longer and that the game can be shipped before all the bugs are taken care of, under the [possibly erroneous] assumption that the developers can knock more bugs out before the game actually gets played (due to the patch delivery system).
In any case, thats my thoughts on the matter. Steam is an example I will be using for many years on why you should use good software engineering practices and testing. I thank Valve for giving me that great an example on why testing is necessary before release.
I'm seeing $150k for 2001 according to census data (and that still sounds low) with a mean income of $244k. Strange, maybe we hear so much about "rich" people on the news that we just naturally assume the "top 5%" they are referring to are all multi-millionaires.
According to the Tax Foundation, the split point for the top 5% for income tax was $126k in 2002, though I don't know if that was adjusted or non-adjusted.
Anyways, I certainly don't feel rich but apparently i'm in the top 25%, so I guess that means what, upper middle class? No wonder I pay so much in taxes...
The funny thing is, Sprint already offers several mini TV apps that include news from sources such as: AP and Reuters, Fox, ABC News, NPR, CBS, etc. So I guess there's a bunch of jobs out there already doing this:)
There's also a mini-app to let you watch local TV straight on your phone, not sure if it is pre-processed by sprint or if the hardware was alrady built in to receive TV signals.
The apps look like they range from $3.95 - $9.99 per month, and I assume that part of that money gets kicked back to the originator.
Now I haven't actualy bought acces to any of these apps, so I don't know if they're drastically differant, but it seems to be fairly similar from reading the descriptions.
My guess is he makes between 175k and 300k a year (depending on what got included in that $50k). Granted this is still doing fairly good, but we don't know what type of income it is, what is family situation is like, etc. For all we know he has to pay out rent for an office every month, the money is tied up in investment, etc. Or he could be including property taxes, social security, etc (dunno if that was straight state/fed tax or everything short of 401/IRA).
I hate how people term 6-figures incomes as "rich". I guarantee if my father and mother had managed 100k a year between them we wouldn't have been rich growing up (as it was we had half of that). Heck, maybe I would have gotten new clothes (as opposed to almost always used clothing), etc. We would have actually been what I consider middle class. Then again, 5 kids are expensive.
Look at the raw numbers, score one sale for CompUSA even if they made only spare change on the deal. Sure they don't mark up their products on the same scale as furniture stores, but even so...
Also look at the happy shopper who will be returning to CompUSA first.
The problem with BestBuy's outlook is that they are considering any sale at less then sticker price to be a profit loss. Did you actually send in a rebate form? Thats a profit loss to them, though luckily the odds say that there were 3 more people that didn't mail it in. I would be willing to bet they are still making more money off un-mailed rebates then the "devil" shoppers are costing them. That is one reason they switched to the rebate model from the sale model.
So basically Best Buy is receiving a profit hit on the expected 3/4 of non-mailed rebate forms. They would likely start complaining if everyone suddenly mailed in all of their rebate forms from all of their sales.
With four sales you get the sale price * 4 (from the store perspective). With four sales of a rebated item you get the sale price * 4 + 3 * rebate amount. With multiple rebates the percentage increases (in favor of the store).
I say we should give them a choice: 1) Suck it up and stop being whiny 2) Take it out on the customer but by government mandate be forced to set aside all rebate money in seperate accounts with a computer system that tracks sales vs rebate periods. When a rebate is not claimed in the 90(?) day period, the money goes straight to charity without the tax write off.
Or it's a wakeup call for organizations that told their members to seek out people that looked like they were doing exit polls.
I find it bordering on hilarious that people continue to scream the mantra "Exit Polls, Exit Polls, Exit Polls" but seem to ignore two other significant factors: 1) Pre-election polls that were widely disparate from exit polls 2) The very act of publishing exit poll information in the middle of the voting day affects the results
The release of the mid-day exit polls likely drove even more Bush supporters to the polling places, while making Kerry supporters complacent.
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Wow. Says it all really. The fact that you cannot stand VS.Net probably in no way hampered your ability to find the options you like.
I know of at least three refactoring add-ins for C#, one of which (at least) integrates itself directly into the IDE and menus. And thats 30 seconds with Google and not having a clear idea of what refactoring is.
As far as code completion goes, I'm not sure what you thought was missing. Granted I stopped using IDE's for Java back in 2000, so I'm not sure of Eclipse (et al)'s capabilities. I'm fairly certain that automatically finishing what I am typing, automatically doing braces/etc, etc is probably the case though. Or maybe giving you the option to add event handlers (press tab to generate) or the functions the event handlers point to (press tab to generate) or setting up your namespace and class templates, as well as auto-completion (even in HTML view for ASP.Net)...I digress.
Define proper. As far as I can tell the only difference between try/catch/finally in Java and in C# is that classes that throw exceptions must(can? my Java is several versions out of date and rusty) be declared with "throws exception". cascading catches are supported, custom exception objects, no exception object at all for a "catch all", etc. But don't take my word for it, here is google to the rescue again.
As far as the rest of your ill-formed sentance, I think your implying there is VB-syntax code in (or required by) C#. Please to be showing me an example.
Disclaimer: My work desk has a windows and a linux box on it, I abhor ASP.Net, and learned/used Java before C# or VB.Net.
What bloat? There's no bloat...
:P
I know how you feel. Some days I can't wait to get back to work with a particularly interesting piece of functionality, etc. Then there are days like yesterday when I find out MS has cancelled the tool I need. Then I find out Visio can output XML and decide I'll toss some symbols on the page and try to duplicate it's output....which, upon opening the output and finding that it required 76k+ lines of xml to save my seven symbols, I decided to give up for the day and went back to trying to interact with active directory from Python
Which in the end was a lot more satisfying, and more importantly, did not include 76k+ lines to ~100 line noise ratio.
(this is pre-coffee#2, if that explains the verbal ticks present in the message)
-T
It's not just the icon, it's the functionality. Although if you notice, MS Windows still has the question mark mouse cursor, which in my mind could only be used for the exact same functionality (click an icon, click a GUI element for more info on it). I'm also fairly certain there was plenty of prior art, I just can't remember where I saw this particular funcitonality in the past (though I now I have seen it) :P
-T
Personally I could care less about the whole Mac vs IBM compat. box (or this magic 'Wintel' you speak of). However, I found it amusing that you define "upgrade" as a faster CPU, more memory, and a board that supports it. Generally when lookng for examples the first thing we think of is that which we would like ourselves. ...
I agree that (in most cases) it is more costly to upgrade a CPU when you purchase your motherboard without looking ahead. The motherboard I bought a coule years back with a P4 1.6 (400fsb series) would have only allowed me to upgrade to a P4 3-ish (800 fsb northwood). The last motherboard I bought (about 1.5 yrs ago) without upgrading my CPU would also allow me to upgrade to any Intel P4 on the market.
Perhaps it is merely because you are a Mac owner that you don't realize the broad range of upgradeable hardware in the average box. Video cards, audio cards, more memory, larger storage space, optical storage, extra NICs, home automation components, additional USB/1394 ports, integrated wireless, video capture, tape drives, a wide variety of input devices, Compact Flash/Smart/etc card reader bays, ir towers/bays, bluetooth, a wide variety of gaming devices, harddrive controllers, system monitoring hardware,
Perhaps you would like a faster CPU upgrade, but don't classify capability to upgrade in general with your specific needs. I'll stick with my windows and Linux systems on their current architecture, I prefer the cheaper replacement parts if something breaks and the greater number of upgrade paths to choose from (as well as manufacturers, etc).
-T
Just because you kind find situations were this doesn't fit (not that I agree with your examples) does not mean it is a bad idea. In fact, storage of historical data would not be dificult, simply tie another system to this system and have it store data as it is asynchronously sent. At first this seems a little hokey, why use two systems when one would do the job, but you could set up a fairly nice alert-based historical system with somehting like this and a standard db.
:P
Here's my logic, if this system can handle 100,000 transactions and your database can't then you use this system as the first line for incoming data. That data is processed and sent back out base on the rules you define. Maybe you have one set of rules that are alerts to other applications and one set that define what data will be stored historically. The historical rules could be used to treat your common database as a real-time historian, only sending changes greater then certain percentages or certain percentage deltas. This condenses your data and, provided you have sleected tight enough constraints, only loses minor fluctuations in the value that don't mater down the road. In the meantime your applications on the other side have already received the data asynchronously, which means no polling loops, etc.
Of course, this all seems to be fairly similar to most ofthe run of the mill OPC servers out tere that don'tstore historical data, except for the added rules layer. Most OPC servers I have dealt with just let you sign up to receive all the data from a single point in an asynchronous manner. Not sure that they would be complex in terms of what they choose to send. Course, several of them handle as many or more transactions per second, so who knows.
Stock trading errors: I would say that you probably would want historical data stored for this, though not for the reason you say. If an f-up does occur, like a trade being made based on data, etc, then the only reason you would want historical data at that point is to figure out which part of your system broke down. Was it the trader making a bad choice, the remote application calculating somehting wrong with the passed data, the rules defined in the database being incorrectly defined, the data collector feeding the data to the database, or on a way outside chance, a bug in the database that somehow misrepresented one piece of data but was never noticed before when your company tested everything out (and I assume your company would test everything before balancing a $10 millon trade on it).
I don't understand why something _has_ to be written some time. There are plety of Manufacturing systems out there that only deal in real-time data and don't store historical data (I mention this because I worked in that field for a while). Granted there are a lot of things you can do with historical data that can help make you mor emoney, but if you can make it right now without the historical pieces then you probably don't know what your missing and are still raking in the money.
In any case, I agree that historical data can be very imprtant, disagree that it's lack in this situation is a fatal flaw, and again am reminded that there are people out there that would not see a problem with your stock example and probably would create an entire system to do exactly that (wuithout seeing the slew of possible problems we mentioned). It all comes down to using the tools that fit the job. This is just one more tool with a variety of uses that does not include directly replacing a standard historical database.
-T
Unfortunatly, that may not be the case. Take, for example, Microsoft's XAML that is a more complex markup langauge than standard HTML. They are basically going to use this as the foundation for how UI elements are defined/made/etc in Avalon. Granted it is not an actual programming language, and it will act similarly to ASP.Net with HTML and it's extra bucket of XML tags (asp:Label, etc), but I can't help but wonder how long it will be until they bundle in common functionality as extra attributes (like click events and stuff, but without the Javascript/VBScript fallback in HTML).
XAML will basically be a compileable interface layer for any code you have embedded inside CDATA sections or behind the scenes in a C# class or the like.
My point is that, though XAML is not what I would specify as a programing language, it is typed in XML (though with MS it will probably be drag and drop and put useless line breaks all over the place as well as replace any compliant tags with non-compliant versions). If MS can do it, I'm sure it won't be long before someone else does.
Do I think XAML and it's ilk have a future? Yes. Being able to define displays in a common language that is parseable and at least partially open (since it is all text ad they can't very well tell us to imagine the interface without putting down tags) is handy. I doubt it will be very long before other interface "languages" become common for other platforms.
Do I think writing "programs" will happen in XML? No, not even approaching the level of early VB. In order to create an XML based programming language that is as simple as lining up your object hierarchy, etc (not just wrting code with tags), someone will have to write all the chunks of code that go behind every tag call. And yes, I know that happens now, but think about how much more highly the limitations will be when you have a tag-based language that will invariably end up with drag and drop displays. At it's best I think I could see it being a glorified scritping language, at it's worst a programming language that has nothing to do with programing, where each tag you drop is a small process that has nothing to do with programming concepts but instead represents several lines or paragraphs of code.
Then again, I coudl be wrong. Perhaps someone will make a useful language based on XML. Maybe programmers will flock to it in the millions despite the existence of languages like Lisp (just keep tacking on parans till it works). I somehow doubt it. Give me a } anytime to close a function.
-T
You have to be careful with the nifty long hosts file. I have one that is about 17,000 lines long that I had to stop using. Got tired of windows lagging out for 7-9 minutes on the "preparing Network Connections" stage of loadup to scan it all...and when you edit it...compared to my usual 2 minute startup time that was fairly painful :P
Probably one of those somewhat cheap headphone sets they make for joggers were the radio and etc ae built into the headset. If your broadcasting over FM and mowing the lawn then you just grab your headphone son the way out the door and akesure they're sitll tuned into whatever blank channel you use for your transmission.
From what I gathered this would be more like altering an ammo pack to give you full ammo and full health in a modified quake level. Ie, the user has to download the level and gets their previous definiton files for the ammo pack overwritten so then the next time they play locally they have magic bullets o' health.
-T
I completely agre. I have a friend that is in that other 1%. He's a professional photographer that has gone digital. he has been planning on purchasing a wireless camera for a while so that the pictures he takes could be stored directly to his laptop, allowing for greater storage space and faster transfer times - ie, faster if you consider it hapepening every time you take a picture instead of all several hundred when your eager to get back on the road and head home.
But at the same time I'm sure he wil be just as, if not more so, ineterested in the "cosmetic tweaks" of higher resolution and quality lens systems. In fact, I would go so far to say that more people will probably be interested in the "cosmetic tweaks" then the wifi, if disregard the group of pepople that think everything is better with wifi (Sweet, my oatmeal spoon has WiFi...now I can transmit the flavor of my oatmeal straight to my blog. Why didn't they think of this earlier?!?).
-T
A pirate walks into a bar with a ship's wheel down the front of his pants and a parrot perched on top of it.
:)
The bartender gives hime a look and asks, "What's the deal with that parrot?"
The pirate looks at the parrot and then back up, "Arrr! He's Driving Me Nuts"
Arr Matey
I agree with your sentiments, despite what other may say. That is/was the biggest turn off for Gimp for me. I actually find it to be an obstacle in using the program because there is nothing tying them together (maybe it's a coneptual gap, I don't like having to think about it every time). I don't necessarally need my applications to all have slide-out tool panes like Visual Studio, but a background container with the option to dock windows on the sides or toolbar does wonders for keeping all the various bits of the application together, allowing me to focus on doing what I am doing without accidentally switching focus to a browser or terminal I left open.
Sure once I get everything shuffled to another window I don't worry as much, and some people might be comfortable "outside the box" with their applications, but I would prefer to stay inside the box, thank you. I don't think this is a revolutionary interface design concept, I think it is an interesting one that doesn't quite work as well as was expected.
If I am going to work on an application then my preference would be to siomply work on it, without pausing every 5 seconds to think about where to find a toolbox i sent to the background. Now in window 3 of 4 and crap, did I lose 4 somewhere?
That's one of the elements I liked about Paintshop Pro: the floating, dockable, collapsible menus. Everything was kept in the one application area and you could pretty much put the boxes anywhere you wanted, but being inside that window made the toolboxes naturally belong to the application. Plus I could get more screen acreage simply by allowing them to collapse, without losing them into the background.
I'm not sure I seee your "single point of failure". Knowing a card design does not necesarally equate to being able to duplicate a card that will allow you access to specific places you would like to go.
Right now there are multiple (and when I say multiple I'm guessing in excess of 100) differant card designs for various departments, contractors, etc. If I was going to set out to duplicate an ID card my first step would be to gather up 30 or so of these and start trying to make my own copies of the easiest ones.
Additionally, these cards will likely be tied into a main system somewhere, not on the card. This means that in order to make yuour own card you would need to copy an existing card. But, the additional capability of biometric signatures, etc mean that you also have to convince the card reader/camera/whatever that you are the peson who's card you stole. Granted very low security buildings probably won't have biometrics, guards, etc, but what are you doing trying to get into a low security building? Might as well just take the guided tour.
The fact that the current system is virtually unmanageable by the government does not necessarally make it that much harder for "evildoers" to "do evil" with it. It in fact provides multiple points of penetration or weak links. The fact that it is virtually unmaneagable means that there are that many more ways to break it. Or, in other words, it has many, many points of failure because any one will give you access to at least one or two buildings (at which point you can start clubbing your way to the top to get other badges, walk to other buildings, etc).
This also seems to be a bootstraping argument to me. It is not, in fact, like a homogenous network. With a homogenous network, any point of failure (i'm thinking viruses) can take the whole system down. Trying to find a hole in the system (we're talking about a single door access system I'm guessing) means your already going to have found a hole in firewalls, etc that allowed you access to this locked down computer, as I highly doubt they are going to put a webserver on it and let it announce to the world "Hi, I'm the point of failure for the whole card system, hack me to add a card id and access level". I'd be surprised if it was on a network that was externally accessible at all.
I'm fairly certain the idea was not to make a proper Hypercube, but to make something reminiscent of the movie Hypercube :)
Now would that be the crack security team as in sniffing it or smoking it? :P
Yes, but the SDK's, API's, etc. that are bundled into most of the industrial apps I have worked with are all tied very heavily to MS products (if they are available at all).
The biggest break I have seen are some of the HMIs that still run on Solaris boxes and the data interfaces that hook into them to send the data to historians (on Windows boces). In some cases there areexcel plugins that are sold with products that are given tie-ins to VBA. Or some trending apps I have seen actually have a VBA coding section similar to Office products. This doesn't give you a lot of room to use Java. Granted you could use it if you really wanted to go to the extra work (writing VBA/VB/.Net apps that were basically interfaces for the Java app into the VBA/VB/.Net interfaces) but in most cases you would end up having to rewrite large portions of the SDK's/etc and still have most of the work being done from that middle interface, with bare tie-in classes in Java that just hooked into the objects in the interface.
So yes it could be done, just as I could write an ERP system all by myself from the ground up in any given language. Whether it is practical or not is the real issue.
-T
I've seen .Net moving in quite heavily in the manufacturing world. This is one sector that MS has a strong hold on simply because there are so few people that want to sit down and write the hundreds of communications drivers, etc needed to create manufacturing data systems. Or maybe because once you buy a manufacturing system you don't want to switch brands until you get back out of the hole with it :P .Net SDK's, and a lot of internal application programming seems to be moving that way also. .Net was the available choice (unless you consider VB6 as a valid choice...*shudder*) and despite the fact that the only other competing product was written in C++ (we think) we also managed to turn out a more efficient server (not that I don't think i could have made it even faster in C++, I just expected the other company's to suck that badly :P).
.Net, as the valid choices are generally VB6 vs VC++ vs some flavor of .Net vs Excel VBA (you think I'm kidding). The few other languages the make it onto the plate are generally as bad as VB6, so I prefer to leave them unmentioned. About the only time I have seen it go beyond this is the few times I introduced the power of bash scripting something on my laptop's preferred partition (ie, not windows) ;).
:)
A lot of the products I have seen (both data collection and warehouse-type) are moving to
The last major project I did was:
1 part config client and 1 part server
"please maximize uptime"
"please maximize scanning capabilities"
"please correct our last 9 months of errors and get it on the shelf in 2 months or less"
A lot of internal app's get written in
Ok, enough rambling
-T
As opposed to the felony grand larceny and felony computer tampering charges they had already received?
The fact that those charges were added later by the judge could mean a couple of things:
1) They did the math and realized that there weren't anywhere near enough small startup telco's in NY to use all the parts
2) More evidence was found showing that they had planned to sell it to a certain location, ie email, letters, whatever seized durting a search (that would have almost assuredly happened in a crime this size)
3) As another poster said, moving that much specialized stolen equipment in the state it was stolen from would be stupid (to say the least). And while they were stupid to knock out the 911 system, they were in and out and almost on the road, so one mistake only caught them.
The point of his rebuttal, which you seemed to have missed, is that there are a great number of factors that were not included in the analysis, not that any one example that he provided was the missing link.
It is not up to the original poster to prove whether or not his suggested possible situations were, in fact, possible or probable, but instead up to the originators to factor that into their statistics. The idea was that the original poster was able to read the documented statistics (using the word documented loosely since this has not been verified or even published) and easily think of a large number of possible factors that were not considered.
In short, the data provided by the original poster consisted of pointing out factors that were not considered, not to provide raw data to refute any claims made in the document.
Not to mention that Steam's release state has always been about one step behind the name of it's release status. For instance, I was on the open beta, Steam should have been pre-alpha at that point. There were still numerous disastorous errors occuring, often resulting in the all too frequent "uninstall, reinstall" or "delete your game directly, re-download" solutions.
When Steam went full release it may have been up to about beta in my book. Hell, the little "Remember Me" option for username and password was still non-functional, people were still having serious problems with it ("delete your binary settings file, etc").
The day they pushed down an update that pushed 1/3rd of the users offline...that was classic. So much for "Release" quality.
All in all, Steam has been a joke in my book. It really isn't that big a deal for an app (simple client/server type app, only slightly more complicated then a chat interface), yet it has been over a year since it went open beta and they are still shoving weekly and bi-weekly patches down the tubes to us. In a year I could have written and tested something like that by myself. It makes me worry about the stability and quality of the HL2 code. Yes, Steam and HL2 are likely differant developers, maybe even differant QA (if they have it), but to allow such a horrible product out the door under the words "Public Release" worries me. Especially considering any "minor" bugs in HL2 that go out the door in "version 1.0" can be easily updated via Steam, they may end up with twice as many (or more) bugs in the first version since they have an easier patch delivery system.
I expect HL2 to be bug-ridden for at least the first 3 months, in some cases unplayable. The combination of bad judgement and bad practices with Steam and the fact that Steam is available as a mandatory, automatic update service, means that bugs will can be ignored longer and that the game can be shipped before all the bugs are taken care of, under the [possibly erroneous] assumption that the developers can knock more bugs out before the game actually gets played (due to the patch delivery system).
In any case, thats my thoughts on the matter. Steam is an example I will be using for many years on why you should use good software engineering practices and testing. I thank Valve for giving me that great an example on why testing is necessary before release.
-T
I'm seeing $150k for 2001 according to census data (and that still sounds low) with a mean income of $244k. Strange, maybe we hear so much about "rich" people on the news that we just naturally assume the "top 5%" they are referring to are all multi-millionaires.
According to the Tax Foundation, the split point for the top 5% for income tax was $126k in 2002, though I don't know if that was adjusted or non-adjusted.
Anyways, I certainly don't feel rich but apparently i'm in the top 25%, so I guess that means what, upper middle class? No wonder I pay so much in taxes...
The funny thing is, Sprint already offers several mini TV apps that include news from sources such as: :)
AP and Reuters, Fox, ABC News, NPR, CBS, etc. So I guess there's a bunch of jobs out there already doing this
There's also a mini-app to let you watch local TV straight on your phone, not sure if it is pre-processed by sprint or if the hardware was alrady built in to receive TV signals.
The apps look like they range from $3.95 - $9.99 per month, and I assume that part of that money gets kicked back to the originator.
Now I haven't actualy bought acces to any of these apps, so I don't know if they're drastically differant, but it seems to be fairly similar from reading the descriptions.
My guess is he makes between 175k and 300k a year (depending on what got included in that $50k). Granted this is still doing fairly good, but we don't know what type of income it is, what is family situation is like, etc. For all we know he has to pay out rent for an office every month, the money is tied up in investment, etc. Or he could be including property taxes, social security, etc (dunno if that was straight state/fed tax or everything short of 401/IRA).
I hate how people term 6-figures incomes as "rich". I guarantee if my father and mother had managed 100k a year between them we wouldn't have been rich growing up (as it was we had half of that). Heck, maybe I would have gotten new clothes (as opposed to almost always used clothing), etc. We would have actually been what I consider middle class. Then again, 5 kids are expensive.
-T
Look at the raw numbers, score one sale for CompUSA even if they made only spare change on the deal. Sure they don't mark up their products on the same scale as furniture stores, but even so...
Also look at the happy shopper who will be returning to CompUSA first.
The problem with BestBuy's outlook is that they are considering any sale at less then sticker price to be a profit loss. Did you actually send in a rebate form? Thats a profit loss to them, though luckily the odds say that there were 3 more people that didn't mail it in. I would be willing to bet they are still making more money off un-mailed rebates then the "devil" shoppers are costing them. That is one reason they switched to the rebate model from the sale model.
So basically Best Buy is receiving a profit hit on the expected 3/4 of non-mailed rebate forms. They would likely start complaining if everyone suddenly mailed in all of their rebate forms from all of their sales.
With four sales you get the sale price * 4 (from the store perspective). With four sales of a rebated item you get the sale price * 4 + 3 * rebate amount. With multiple rebates the percentage increases (in favor of the store).
I say we should give them a choice:
1) Suck it up and stop being whiny
2) Take it out on the customer but by government mandate be forced to set aside all rebate money in seperate accounts with a computer system that tracks sales vs rebate periods. When a rebate is not claimed in the 90(?) day period, the money goes straight to charity without the tax write off.
Wanna bet which one they would choose?
Or it's a wakeup call for organizations that told their members to seek out people that looked like they were doing exit polls.
I find it bordering on hilarious that people continue to scream the mantra "Exit Polls, Exit Polls, Exit Polls" but seem to ignore two other significant factors:
1) Pre-election polls that were widely disparate from exit polls
2) The very act of publishing exit poll information in the middle of the voting day affects the results
The release of the mid-day exit polls likely drove even more Bush supporters to the polling places, while making Kerry supporters complacent.