This week is the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Solar Physics Division, which explains the timing of the press release.
There have been a number of talks regarding the long solar minimum, and although I've been avoiding most of the oral sessions, there was one by Frank Hill (another NSO person) yesterday showing that um... okay, I can't remember what the axii on the graphs were, but that the general activity below the 'surface' of the sun was showing a more gradual ramp up than the last solar minimum, but we're roughly at the same level of activity as when we started cycle 23.
(disclaimer -- I'm not a solar physicist, but I am an affiliate SPD member... I'd link to the abstract, but the system won't give me a useful URL)
I'm surprised that there were quite a few programs not mentions on the DMS wikipedia page -- People might consider them to be more as repository software than DMS (or RMS), but some other ones to mention that would be useful to managing already existing documents:
And if you're looking for librarians with an IT background, in the libraries they're called "Systems Librarians". You might also check out the oss4lib and code4lib communities.
I can assure you that the University's IT office is underfunded enough that even if they wanted to go out of their way to scan your computer for anything else (they do not), they would not be able to.
Speaking as someone who has worked in an university's IT department for 7 years. (although, that was 6 years ago), I can assure you that there are people who work late and do things on their own time with university resources. (sure, it might just be the 5pm game of whatever the FPS of the week is, but we also have the person who decided to set up a porn site on the university's general use webserver (okay, this was 1996?97 or so), but there's also the folks who are just curious, and have less ethics than necessary.
... and then there's the case where Student Judicial Services or some government agency asks for us to monitor someone -- make copies of all e-mail going in/out of their accounts, etc. If the charges get dropped, you'll never hear about it, but we had an employee (in our department) convicted of child porn, a faculty member convicted for stealing from a federal grant, etc, etc.
... so, I'd have to say that odds are, they are able to scan a whole lot more than you think, and if they have students working in the IT department, there's probably scanning going on outside of the university's policies.
Anyone yet find a way to manually load your calendar or address book? iTunes moves the files over, but I can't find a way to get the Pre to look at them.
(Palm's "Data Transfer Assistant", for Macs requires 10.5, and I'm still on 10.4)
So I search on "space physics virtual observatory"... and it prompts me to give 5 examples so I do (VSO, VMO, VHO, ViTMO, ViRBO)... and well, it populated a grid with the top result for "VSO" which is "VSO Software" not "The Virtual Solar Observatory" (in all fairness, the Virtual Solar Observatory doesn't show up under the search, "Space Physics Virtual Observatory VSO", but it does show up under "Virtual Observatory VSO"... so I start with the search "Virtual Observatory" (which brings up astronomy VOs, not space physics VOs) and add "VSO"... and it still gives me "VSO Software".
So... it might be useful for some fields, but not all.
(it _was_ able to tell me the countries of the nighttime VOs, though, which is handy... although all of the items in the list weren't VOs.)
I took a class from Sun once on one of the iPlanet line of servers (Messaging, I think.. might've been Directory). Anyway, the example domains we were supposed to use were numbered... something like 'iplanet1.com' 'iplanet2.com', etc, rather than using subdomains in the iplanet space. For the life of me, I was having problems getting things to work, when no one else did.
Sure enough, the one I had been assigned by the instructor was actually registered -- no one else's was.
So no only is it unprofessional, but it can break things... either screw up someone else, or turn your documentation into crap. (and it might be registered when the book/documentation/etc is written, but that doesn't mean it'll always be true)
Just from reading the abstract, it sounds more like templating -- I know the basic structure of your format, so I can go in and replace the strings (content) between the parts that are structural. Or, to modify the template, I could hide the content, and allow you to modify just the structural part... and I could present it in any number of ways to allow you to edit it.
XSLT is more one-directional, and there isn't the mapping made to relate how things go back into the original file.
It's a simple capitalistic endeavor -- determine who is willing to pay for what (and how much).
Craigslist isn't free -- they charge for real estate ads in some markets. Then there's the requirement for government entities to publish announcements and bids for contracts. I'm guessing there's other legal requirements for people to post some types of information (death notices?).
The newspapers just need to figure out which parts of the paper can be used to subsidize other parts... as general ads are down, they can either try lowering the price (in an attempt to get more total money), or find other ways to capitalize on what they have. (I used to work at an ISP that was co-located at a small newspaper (they got free bandwidth, we got free space) -- they printed some specialty newspapers when the state government was in session and some other stuff that wasn't just their normal business... they also saved money by switching to VoIP back in 1998 to link themselves to the other papers the company owned)
Our local newspaper (different area now) would take advertisements for events based on column inches / color / etc... but they haven't yet put up a calendar system so I could pay to have them list my event for a given number of weeks and have people easily find it on their website. Newspapers could easily re-invent themselves as local portal sites and possibly charge for combined membership / subscription or access to some 'premium' sections.
Okay, maybe that's a bit harsh, but with any RPG or table top wargame, be it D&D / Shadow Run / Battle Tech / Car Wars / Toon! / Paranoia / GURPs / WH40k (I'm just the listing the ones I played growing up), you had to be able to get a group together, find a convenient place for everyone, etc.
With some of 'em, where there's progress from session to session rather than stand-alone sessions, you need to get everyone to be able to show up every time -- which is a problem as people work different schedules, have kids, move further away, etc.
With online gaming, you could just drop in for an hour or two, meet up with the party, drop out when life calls (as opposed to the night when one of the player's (now wife) kept calling every hour and keeping him on the phone for 20-30 min at a time, not understanding how EVERYONE else had to stop while it was going on.
I admit, I don't play WoW -- I did play EverQuest for a bit, and I mudded for years in college, but our group tended to stick to more private groupings -- We did a fair number of LAN parties in the years after college, then later would coordinate times for Diablo, StarCraft, Age of Empires, Warcraft III, Command & Conquer, Neverwinter Nights, Dawn of War, etc. Sometimes LAN parties, but normally just a normal weeknight where we didn't have to deal with travel (as one now lives 500 miles away and the others would still take up to 2 hrs each way w/ travel, setup, etc.)
So... the point is... MMOs are more convenient than face to face. Yes, they're less imaginative, yes, they can be less social, but we can get a game together in under an hour if someone feels the need to unwind from a stressful day at work, whereas a day of WH40K gaming might require weeks to prepare (gotta modify my figures to deal with some rules change / new tactics, etc.)
With film, unless you had your own dark room setup, you'd have to turn over the roll of film to someone else to develop -- meaning they could either (1) refuse to give you the prints, (2) report you to police if they didn't like your photos, or (3) make copies. There are photo labs that cater to artists that might not be as much as a problem, but you wouldn't want to drop your roll off at the local drugstore or "(x) Hour Photo" place at the mall.
Polaroids didn't have this problem for this particular use.
How fucking hard is it to strip non-numeric characters from a string?
Damned hard, based on my testing over the last few years.
As an exercise in futility -- the next time you're buying something online, try entering your credit card number with spaces in it, so it's legible, and easier to compare to what's on your card.
It used to be that it'd occasionally work -- but I don't think I've had a single success in the last year or two. They either put in limits so I can't type enough characters, or it gets rejected with no useful message but works fine without them.
... on another note, I once had a member number for a company that on the membership card had a leading zero -- their site worked fine for years. They upgraded the site, and I couldn't log on anymore. After an hour with customer service, they finally told me to log in without the leading zero, and it worked.
Some of the folks using TeX are also owners of Mathematica, IDL and other software that costs thousands of dollars per license -- because it increases their productivity.
It's not an issue of cost, it's an issue of the benefit for the cost -- and I don't think there will be the benefit unless MS Word decouples the content from the presentation. (which allows the TeX users to write their paper once, and then have it formatted correctly for whatever journal it'll be published in) As for becoming unreadable -- so long as you can export it to PDF, Post Script, or whatever, you're fine for archiving.
And would MS Word replace InDesign? I don't think so, but if they've got this support in MS Word, I can only assume they'll bring it over to MS Publisher, and they might be able to pick up some users.
I don't know that I'd say 'most', but there are quite a few that do.
My recommendation would be to look at the potential employer's education benefits packages... some go by dollar amount per year, some by number of classes per semester. Almost all have a clause that say you have to repay any benefit if you break employment within 1 or 2 years after finishing the class, but some universities take the reverse approach that you have to put time in before you're eligible. Some pay before the class, others pay after you've passed the class. (I was under three different benefits packages while working on my degree... and the company got sold, so I don't know what my current situation is)
Once you're on the job for a while, if you like the place, you can look at what would actually be of use to the company (not entirely altruistic -- it makes you more valuable) and you find interesting -- sometimes, it's cross training in a different field. My master's is in information science, not computer science. (of course, my undergrad isn't computer science either, so I'm still debating on a comp.sci. degree, but I have a comp.sci PhD/part time faculty to bounce questions off of.)
And *always* talk to HR before starting classes -- I had one employer tell me that I'd get reimbursed if I got an A or B, and only had to get special permission if I took more than two classes per semester. What they didn't tell me was that I had to get 'regular' permissions before taking ANY class -- so the report cards come in, I turn them in, and they ask me why I didn't file the pre-class paperwork to justify that the course was related to what my job. And of course, by then, I'm already into the second semester, so had to eat the cost of two classes.
Take for instance your GPU -- it's just a processor that's tuned to do one specific task. Now, imagine that Oracle could take Sun's experience to customize a chip for the type of instructions that their database used a lot. Sure, the chip might not compete on all tasks, but if they could give a simple drop-in oracle appliance (or even a mysql appliance, and make money by selling hardware and support for it), they might have a reason to stay in the hardware business.
Now, I don't think that they should actually make the chips -- just design them for the right balance of power consumption / integer performance / floating point / cache / whatever makes sense for their applications.
Oh -- and to answer your question -- Sun is Oracle's recommended software platform. And Sun bought the Cray assets from SGI -- the E10k and other 5 digit models are descendants of that line. SPARC are highly reliable, high performance processors (or at least, they were back when I used to work on Suns... from 1995-2003) -- but it's like RAID -- if you can throw 10 cheaper processors at it, do we really need the one big one? And that all depends on what you're trying to run on it.
Software disabling is *not* enough in these situations, as they anything that can be turned off with software can be turned back on with software
This has been a problem for quite some time, however, there are some places that are normally camera-averse that don't have the same restrictions on laptops with cameras. (it's a bit more obvious if you're trying to take a picture in a courtroom with a laptop camera, whereas a phone based camera can be more easily palmed
In other cases, the limitations may be based on the resolution of the camera (you can't use it as easily to make copies of vital documents when it's 640x480)... I've been told even NRL allows low-res cameras on the base now -- they used to confiscate them at the security gate.
I remember bringing up the issue of the cameras to an Apple government rep back when they showed their first laptops with them... unfortunately, it was so long ago that I can't remember what the response was, and I don't work at a place where they're restricted so I've never had to follow up.
Due to US government privacy policies, we're not allowed to 'share information with third parties' which makes all hosted analytics solutions forbidden.
I've gotten a hell of a lot more than that in a single day. Coming from a botnet, so rate limiting by IP didn't work. They tried about 5 times per common english name as a login in mostly alphabetical order, hitting machines that had SSH open to the world.
It used to happen every couple of weeks, with thousands of attempts per machine. They'd probably still be trying if the security folks hadn't decided to outlaw us being so promiscuous.
But if you count it like that, they can't take into account the 30 seconds of breathing that you did while looking at the e-mail, and deciding to delete it or not, and they can't over-inflate their numbers.
Serenity: about 190,000 (lost 'by more than 40,000 votes')
Myyearbook: 147,637
Gaia: 114,427
From that, we know that Tranquility is under 114,427... but we also know the relative percentages of the 4 that NASA proposed (which gives us: Earthrise : 24k; Legacy : 35k; Venture: 21k), the total number of votes, and that there were another 4 above Tranquility in the rankings... even if there was a multi-way tie between Xenu/Socialvibe/Buddy/Ubuntu and Tranquility, and Synergy and Vision got negligible results... Tranquility couldn't have gotten more than 86k votes.
The only things missing to convert them into a "proper" body like Lawyers or Accountants is to institute some sort of entrance exam (which is difficult unless you test only on the lowest common pieces), and for members to start including initials after their names
It's more than just the exam itself -- you need a little bit of infrastructure to deal with people checking on someone's credentials, possibly require them to re-up their license every couple of years (possibly just a token fee, other times, they're required to submit proof of CE credits), but most importantly, you need an investigative branch.
If someone accuses someone of violating the code, you need people to be able to determine if the person did it, if it was a negligent act, etc. And then a process of revoking the license (usually, involves notifying the licensure boards in other states).
The problems that are going to come up are in getting the rights to review the code (it might be that you put it into the bylaws, but then you'll still get companies bitching about revealing their code to outsiders), and we'll get to the question of what qualifies as negligent -- you have to consider what the standards were when they wrote it -- a y2k issue in code from 1999: negligent... from 1991: probably not. In some cases, it might not be the original author who was negligent, but some later maintainer, so you'd almost require everyone to archive their revision control.
it may be that we'd have to do something like CMMI -- to be a member, you have to adhere to a given documentation standard so that your work can be audited and investigated.
Yep. And I have a CivE undergrad from an ABET accredited school, and I've done programming work for a state Board of Licensure for engineers and architects. But I've never taken the FE/EIT or PE tests. I do have Brainbench certificates as a Web Developer, Web Designer and Web Administrator, but they're not really worth anything. (I got bored one month, with an unlimited license, and got certified in 26 jobs)
If you're a licensed engineer, and you're shown to be neglectful, you can lose your license. Wouldn't you love for there to be some sort of repercussions for bad programming? Be it crappy voting machines, or the electrical grid shutting down, or a lost satellite? As it is, maybe company folds, the programmers/managers/whomever make a new company, and continue to spew their malware-by-negligence into society.
A doctor might be able to kill half a dozen people before he's caught... a CivE might lose a building and kill a few thousand (assuming that it wasn't an explosive failure)... but with software, who knows? Medical instruments, nuclear reactors, etc... the possibilities are *huge*.
Those numbers only work when your personal interest rate is 0, which is rarely the case.
Realistically, you need to adjust for the time value of money. ($100 now is worth more than $100 27 years from now, as I could make interest off of it)
So, if we assume that the savings are every month, with a 3% interest rate compounded monthly, we'd have (12x27) payments of about $49,617 each with 0.25% interest per period:
Which works out to just over $11 million. The install cost would have to be less than this, to deal with the reoccurring costs of maintenance of the new system.
Oh... and if the interest rate were 6%? That $11mil estimate would be cut to under $8mil, or about 1/2 of your estimate. In a good market where we might be able to make 18% return, over 27 years, it's worth less than $3.3M.
Now, I don't know how much container ships cost, but if I can add another ship and move more containers, that may give me a better benefit for the same cost.
(and, I know you later said that the actual savings were higher -- but the point is, you should _never_ just multiply reoccurring costs or savings by the number of periods to get the equivalent present value, especially for periods of years.)
But what about the people who are given pictures of what to code, and so there's very little actual 'design' aspect of it?
(I'm not saying that hand crafting code isn't an artistic process -- It's one of the many tasks I've do, I just don't deal too much with the graphics / colors / etc aspect of it... that's left to the designers... I deal with taking someone else's design, figuring out what it'd take to implement it in HTML, and then write the programs to generate it dynamically and interface with the database)
When I've had a job where that was my primary task, we normally differentiated the two groups as 'Designers' vs. 'Developers', where I fell into the Developer group. At my current job, I still make a few web applications, but it's not my primary focus -- mostly back-end work (database, a little sysadmin, SOAP interfaces, a whole bunch of automated tasks to feed the interfaces), with various clients, including a web-based app.
The 'official' job titles I've had, once you strip out the 'Junior', 'Senior', 'Lead', 'Principal', etc:
Programmer/Analyst
Multimedia Applications Analyst
Systems Programmer
Systems Engineer
Software Engineer
(I'd personally steer away from the 'engineer' titles if I could -- as those in the field aren't PEs.)
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I would assume that they'd have to pay you 9 times the cost of the silicon product.
This week is the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Solar Physics Division, which explains the timing of the press release.
There have been a number of talks regarding the long solar minimum, and although I've been avoiding most of the oral sessions, there was one by Frank Hill (another NSO person) yesterday showing that um ... okay, I can't remember what the axii on the graphs were, but that the general activity below the 'surface' of the sun was showing a more gradual ramp up than the last solar minimum, but we're roughly at the same level of activity as when we started cycle 23.
(disclaimer -- I'm not a solar physicist, but I am an affiliate SPD member ... I'd link to the abstract, but the system won't give me a useful URL)
I'm surprised that there were quite a few programs not mentions on the DMS wikipedia page -- People might consider them to be more as repository software than DMS (or RMS), but some other ones to mention that would be useful to managing already existing documents:
And if you're looking for librarians with an IT background, in the libraries they're called "Systems Librarians". You might also check out the oss4lib and code4lib communities.
Speaking as someone who has worked in an university's IT department for 7 years. (although, that was 6 years ago), I can assure you that there are people who work late and do things on their own time with university resources. (sure, it might just be the 5pm game of whatever the FPS of the week is, but we also have the person who decided to set up a porn site on the university's general use webserver (okay, this was 1996?97 or so), but there's also the folks who are just curious, and have less ethics than necessary.
... and then there's the case where Student Judicial Services or some government agency asks for us to monitor someone -- make copies of all e-mail going in/out of their accounts, etc. If the charges get dropped, you'll never hear about it, but we had an employee (in our department) convicted of child porn, a faculty member convicted for stealing from a federal grant, etc, etc.
... so, I'd have to say that odds are, they are able to scan a whole lot more than you think, and if they have students working in the IT department, there's probably scanning going on outside of the university's policies.
Anyone yet find a way to manually load your calendar or address book? iTunes moves the files over, but I can't find a way to get the Pre to look at them.
(Palm's "Data Transfer Assistant", for Macs requires 10.5, and I'm still on 10.4)
So I search on "space physics virtual observatory" ... and it prompts me to give 5 examples so I do (VSO, VMO, VHO, ViTMO, ViRBO) ... and well, it populated a grid with the top result for "VSO" which is "VSO Software" not "The Virtual Solar Observatory" (in all fairness, the Virtual Solar Observatory doesn't show up under the search, "Space Physics Virtual Observatory VSO", but it does show up under "Virtual Observatory VSO" ... so I start with the search "Virtual Observatory" (which brings up astronomy VOs, not space physics VOs) and add "VSO" ... and it still gives me "VSO Software".
So ... it might be useful for some fields, but not all.
(it _was_ able to tell me the countries of the nighttime VOs, though, which is handy ... although all of the items in the list weren't VOs.)
I took a class from Sun once on one of the iPlanet line of servers (Messaging, I think .. might've been Directory). Anyway, the example domains we were supposed to use were numbered ... something like 'iplanet1.com' 'iplanet2.com', etc, rather than using subdomains in the iplanet space. For the life of me, I was having problems getting things to work, when no one else did.
Sure enough, the one I had been assigned by the instructor was actually registered -- no one else's was.
So no only is it unprofessional, but it can break things ... either screw up someone else, or turn your documentation into crap. (and it might be registered when the book/documentation/etc is written, but that doesn't mean it'll always be true)
Just from reading the abstract, it sounds more like templating -- I know the basic structure of your format, so I can go in and replace the strings (content) between the parts that are structural. Or, to modify the template, I could hide the content, and allow you to modify just the structural part ... and I could present it in any number of ways to allow you to edit it.
XSLT is more one-directional, and there isn't the mapping made to relate how things go back into the original file.
It's a simple capitalistic endeavor -- determine who is willing to pay for what (and how much).
Craigslist isn't free -- they charge for real estate ads in some markets. Then there's the requirement for government entities to publish announcements and bids for contracts. I'm guessing there's other legal requirements for people to post some types of information (death notices?).
The newspapers just need to figure out which parts of the paper can be used to subsidize other parts ... as general ads are down, they can either try lowering the price (in an attempt to get more total money), or find other ways to capitalize on what they have. (I used to work at an ISP that was co-located at a small newspaper (they got free bandwidth, we got free space) -- they printed some specialty newspapers when the state government was in session and some other stuff that wasn't just their normal business ... they also saved money by switching to VoIP back in 1998 to link themselves to the other papers the company owned)
Our local newspaper (different area now) would take advertisements for events based on column inches / color / etc ... but they haven't yet put up a calendar system so I could pay to have them list my event for a given number of weeks and have people easily find it on their website. Newspapers could easily re-invent themselves as local portal sites and possibly charge for combined membership / subscription or access to some 'premium' sections.
Okay, maybe that's a bit harsh, but with any RPG or table top wargame, be it D&D / Shadow Run / Battle Tech / Car Wars / Toon! / Paranoia / GURPs / WH40k (I'm just the listing the ones I played growing up), you had to be able to get a group together, find a convenient place for everyone, etc.
With some of 'em, where there's progress from session to session rather than stand-alone sessions, you need to get everyone to be able to show up every time -- which is a problem as people work different schedules, have kids, move further away, etc.
With online gaming, you could just drop in for an hour or two, meet up with the party, drop out when life calls (as opposed to the night when one of the player's (now wife) kept calling every hour and keeping him on the phone for 20-30 min at a time, not understanding how EVERYONE else had to stop while it was going on.
I admit, I don't play WoW -- I did play EverQuest for a bit, and I mudded for years in college, but our group tended to stick to more private groupings -- We did a fair number of LAN parties in the years after college, then later would coordinate times for Diablo, StarCraft, Age of Empires, Warcraft III, Command & Conquer, Neverwinter Nights, Dawn of War, etc. Sometimes LAN parties, but normally just a normal weeknight where we didn't have to deal with travel (as one now lives 500 miles away and the others would still take up to 2 hrs each way w/ travel, setup, etc.)
So ... the point is ... MMOs are more convenient than face to face. Yes, they're less imaginative, yes, they can be less social, but we can get a game together in under an hour if someone feels the need to unwind from a stressful day at work, whereas a day of WH40K gaming might require weeks to prepare (gotta modify my figures to deal with some rules change / new tactics, etc.)
Close, but a missing detail --
With film, unless you had your own dark room setup, you'd have to turn over the roll of film to someone else to develop -- meaning they could either (1) refuse to give you the prints, (2) report you to police if they didn't like your photos, or (3) make copies. There are photo labs that cater to artists that might not be as much as a problem, but you wouldn't want to drop your roll off at the local drugstore or "(x) Hour Photo" place at the mall.
Polaroids didn't have this problem for this particular use.
Damned hard, based on my testing over the last few years.
As an exercise in futility -- the next time you're buying something online, try entering your credit card number with spaces in it, so it's legible, and easier to compare to what's on your card.
It used to be that it'd occasionally work -- but I don't think I've had a single success in the last year or two. They either put in limits so I can't type enough characters, or it gets rejected with no useful message but works fine without them.
... on another note, I once had a member number for a company that on the membership card had a leading zero -- their site worked fine for years. They upgraded the site, and I couldn't log on anymore. After an hour with customer service, they finally told me to log in without the leading zero, and it worked.
Some of the folks using TeX are also owners of Mathematica, IDL and other software that costs thousands of dollars per license -- because it increases their productivity.
It's not an issue of cost, it's an issue of the benefit for the cost -- and I don't think there will be the benefit unless MS Word decouples the content from the presentation. (which allows the TeX users to write their paper once, and then have it formatted correctly for whatever journal it'll be published in) As for becoming unreadable -- so long as you can export it to PDF, Post Script, or whatever, you're fine for archiving.
And would MS Word replace InDesign? I don't think so, but if they've got this support in MS Word, I can only assume they'll bring it over to MS Publisher, and they might be able to pick up some users.
I don't know that I'd say 'most', but there are quite a few that do.
My recommendation would be to look at the potential employer's education benefits packages ... some go by dollar amount per year, some by number of classes per semester. Almost all have a clause that say you have to repay any benefit if you break employment within 1 or 2 years after finishing the class, but some universities take the reverse approach that you have to put time in before you're eligible. Some pay before the class, others pay after you've passed the class. (I was under three different benefits packages while working on my degree ... and the company got sold, so I don't know what my current situation is)
Once you're on the job for a while, if you like the place, you can look at what would actually be of use to the company (not entirely altruistic -- it makes you more valuable) and you find interesting -- sometimes, it's cross training in a different field. My master's is in information science, not computer science. (of course, my undergrad isn't computer science either, so I'm still debating on a comp.sci. degree, but I have a comp.sci PhD/part time faculty to bounce questions off of.)
And *always* talk to HR before starting classes -- I had one employer tell me that I'd get reimbursed if I got an A or B, and only had to get special permission if I took more than two classes per semester. What they didn't tell me was that I had to get 'regular' permissions before taking ANY class -- so the report cards come in, I turn them in, and they ask me why I didn't file the pre-class paperwork to justify that the course was related to what my job. And of course, by then, I'm already into the second semester, so had to eat the cost of two classes.
It's not routers -- it's specialty appliances.
Take for instance your GPU -- it's just a processor that's tuned to do one specific task. Now, imagine that Oracle could take Sun's experience to customize a chip for the type of instructions that their database used a lot. Sure, the chip might not compete on all tasks, but if they could give a simple drop-in oracle appliance (or even a mysql appliance, and make money by selling hardware and support for it), they might have a reason to stay in the hardware business.
Now, I don't think that they should actually make the chips -- just design them for the right balance of power consumption / integer performance / floating point / cache / whatever makes sense for their applications.
Oh -- and to answer your question -- Sun is Oracle's recommended software platform. And Sun bought the Cray assets from SGI -- the E10k and other 5 digit models are descendants of that line. SPARC are highly reliable, high performance processors (or at least, they were back when I used to work on Suns ... from 1995-2003) -- but it's like RAID -- if you can throw 10 cheaper processors at it, do we really need the one big one? And that all depends on what you're trying to run on it.
Software disabling is *not* enough in these situations, as they anything that can be turned off with software can be turned back on with software
This has been a problem for quite some time, however, there are some places that are normally camera-averse that don't have the same restrictions on laptops with cameras. (it's a bit more obvious if you're trying to take a picture in a courtroom with a laptop camera, whereas a phone based camera can be more easily palmed
In other cases, the limitations may be based on the resolution of the camera (you can't use it as easily to make copies of vital documents when it's 640x480) ... I've been told even NRL allows low-res cameras on the base now -- they used to confiscate them at the security gate.
I remember bringing up the issue of the cameras to an Apple government rep back when they showed their first laptops with them ... unfortunately, it was so long ago that I can't remember what the response was, and I don't work at a place where they're restricted so I've never had to follow up.
Due to US government privacy policies, we're not allowed to 'share information with third parties' which makes all hosted analytics solutions forbidden.
I've gotten a hell of a lot more than that in a single day. Coming from a botnet, so rate limiting by IP didn't work. They tried about 5 times per common english name as a login in mostly alphabetical order, hitting machines that had SSH open to the world.
It used to happen every couple of weeks, with thousands of attempts per machine. They'd probably still be trying if the security folks hadn't decided to outlaw us being so promiscuous.
For some reason, I see 'Louisiana', and I think 'swamp', and from there, we get to 'Swamp Thing'.
So who's going to protect us from the Human-Plant hybrids?
But if you count it like that, they can't take into account the 30 seconds of breathing that you did while looking at the e-mail, and deciding to delete it or not, and they can't over-inflate their numbers.
That was my reaction when I saw the show last night, too.
They not only decided to ignore the write-in winner, but also to ignore the winner amongst the 'finalist' names that NASA had selected.
Based on numbers reported from MSNBC:
From that, we know that Tranquility is under 114,427 ... but we also know the relative percentages of the 4 that NASA proposed (which gives us: Earthrise : 24k; Legacy : 35k; Venture: 21k), the total number of votes, and that there were another 4 above Tranquility in the rankings ... even if there was a multi-way tie between Xenu/Socialvibe/Buddy/Ubuntu and Tranquility, and Synergy and Vision got negligible results ... Tranquility couldn't have gotten more than 86k votes.
It's more than just the exam itself -- you need a little bit of infrastructure to deal with people checking on someone's credentials, possibly require them to re-up their license every couple of years (possibly just a token fee, other times, they're required to submit proof of CE credits), but most importantly, you need an investigative branch.
If someone accuses someone of violating the code, you need people to be able to determine if the person did it, if it was a negligent act, etc. And then a process of revoking the license (usually, involves notifying the licensure boards in other states).
The problems that are going to come up are in getting the rights to review the code (it might be that you put it into the bylaws, but then you'll still get companies bitching about revealing their code to outsiders), and we'll get to the question of what qualifies as negligent -- you have to consider what the standards were when they wrote it -- a y2k issue in code from 1999: negligent ... from 1991: probably not. In some cases, it might not be the original author who was negligent, but some later maintainer, so you'd almost require everyone to archive their revision control.
it may be that we'd have to do something like CMMI -- to be a member, you have to adhere to a given documentation standard so that your work can be audited and investigated.
Yep. And I have a CivE undergrad from an ABET accredited school, and I've done programming work for a state Board of Licensure for engineers and architects. But I've never taken the FE/EIT or PE tests. I do have Brainbench certificates as a Web Developer, Web Designer and Web Administrator, but they're not really worth anything. (I got bored one month, with an unlimited license, and got certified in 26 jobs)
If you're a licensed engineer, and you're shown to be neglectful, you can lose your license. Wouldn't you love for there to be some sort of repercussions for bad programming? Be it crappy voting machines, or the electrical grid shutting down, or a lost satellite? As it is, maybe company folds, the programmers/managers/whomever make a new company, and continue to spew their malware-by-negligence into society.
A doctor might be able to kill half a dozen people before he's caught ... a CivE might lose a building and kill a few thousand (assuming that it wasn't an explosive failure) ... but with software, who knows? Medical instruments, nuclear reactors, etc ... the possibilities are *huge*.
Those numbers only work when your personal interest rate is 0, which is rarely the case.
Realistically, you need to adjust for the time value of money. ($100 now is worth more than $100 27 years from now, as I could make interest off of it)
So, if we assume that the savings are every month, with a 3% interest rate compounded monthly, we'd have (12x27) payments of about $49,617 each with 0.25% interest per period:
PV(A) = (49_617 / 0.0025) * ( 1 - (1 / 1.0025**(12*27) ) )
Which works out to just over $11 million. The install cost would have to be less than this, to deal with the reoccurring costs of maintenance of the new system.
Oh ... and if the interest rate were 6%? That $11mil estimate would be cut to under $8mil, or about 1/2 of your estimate. In a good market where we might be able to make 18% return, over 27 years, it's worth less than $3.3M.
Now, I don't know how much container ships cost, but if I can add another ship and move more containers, that may give me a better benefit for the same cost.
(and, I know you later said that the actual savings were higher -- but the point is, you should _never_ just multiply reoccurring costs or savings by the number of periods to get the equivalent present value, especially for periods of years.)
But what about the people who are given pictures of what to code, and so there's very little actual 'design' aspect of it?
(I'm not saying that hand crafting code isn't an artistic process -- It's one of the many tasks I've do, I just don't deal too much with the graphics / colors / etc aspect of it ... that's left to the designers ... I deal with taking someone else's design, figuring out what it'd take to implement it in HTML, and then write the programs to generate it dynamically and interface with the database)
When I've had a job where that was my primary task, we normally differentiated the two groups as 'Designers' vs. 'Developers', where I fell into the Developer group. At my current job, I still make a few web applications, but it's not my primary focus -- mostly back-end work (database, a little sysadmin, SOAP interfaces, a whole bunch of automated tasks to feed the interfaces), with various clients, including a web-based app.
The 'official' job titles I've had, once you strip out the 'Junior', 'Senior', 'Lead', 'Principal', etc:
(I'd personally steer away from the 'engineer' titles if I could -- as those in the field aren't PEs.)