From the testimony of Mr. Marc E. Kasowitz before the US Senate Committee on the Judiciary:
One particularly effective illegal strategy involves the following scenario: the short-selling hedge fund selects a target company; the hedge fund then colludes with a so-called independent stock analyst firm to prepare a false and negative "research report" on the target; the analyst firm agrees not to release the report to the public until the hedge fund accumulates a significant short position in the target's stock; once the hedge fund has accumulated that large short position, the report is disseminated widely, causing the intended decline in the price of the target company's stock. The report that is disseminated contains no disclosure that the analyst was paid to prepare the report, or that the hedge fund dictated its contents, or that the hedge fund had a substantial short position in the target's stock. Once the false and negative research report -- misrepresented as "independent" -- has had its intended effect, the hedge fund then closes its position and makes an enormous profit, at the expense of the proper functioning of the markets, harming innocent investors who were unaware that the game was rigged, and damaging the target company itself and its employees.
I can't tell you what problem a national ID card solves
Oooh! I know! I know!
The problem is that right now it's just too darn hard to dig up information on the person whose ID you are checking. Under The Real ID Act, though, the state ID authority (usually the DMV) will be required not only to examine your birth certificate and social security card, but also to scan and create digital copies of them in their system, as well as collecting further information on their forms. This makes the database so created a convenient one stop shopping point for identity theft^Wverification.
Citizens, rest assured that the millions of checkpoints in airports, police cars, banks, and doctor's offices will all keep this information secure, protecting you from Evil and ensuring your continued Freedom. You do want to be Free, don't you? Just hand over the document, and you'll be Free to pass this checkpoint...
So how exactly would these new ID cards be forge-proof?
That's easy. The Official Documents will all be blessed by Homeland Security. The phony knockoffs won't be blessed. That makes it easy to spot the phonies.
Fortunately, we can all rest assured that with these new measures, no Federal, State, or DMV employee will be able to accept a $1500 bribe and produce a phony ID. Now, for $2500...
Heh. The Forrester Research numbers do not include iTunes Gift Card purchases, or iTunes 'allowances'. Their numbers are based solely on credit card transactions for iTunes music purchases.
The fact that Forrester Research was able to examine thousands of your and others credit card transactions over a 27 month period is probably a topic for another/. thread. I'm sure they didn't jot down any persona data, or add anything they learned to any sort of cross-correlated data sets...
The Federal Department of Health and Human Services finished rolling out Windows 2000 in 2004, and is in the process of rolling out Windows XP. It takes longer than you'd think to get hardware software and designated desktop and laptop configurations for various programs all spec'd and tested.
Being a vast centrally administered IT bureaucracy doesn't speed things up, either. When the regional Head Start office in San Francisco needs a change in machine configuration to support an older worker, the request has to be processed through Washington, DC. That can take a while. (21 months in that case, to permit a visual aid utility to be added to the worker's assigned configuration.)
NASA gets to implement an exciting new bureaucracy for the 'return to the moon' in two decades. (Hint: it will always be two decades away.)
Gosh, a base at the lunar South Pole. Where, oh where will NASA and the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation put the training facility? With that keen grasp of science politicians and bureaucrats show, I bet the first major action in this program will be ground breaking for the Ted Stevens Lunar Training Facility just outside Fairbanks, Alaska.
I'll also bet that after the earmarks for studies, research, and ground facilities are in place, that no funds will be available for any actual missions. NASA knows this, too, which is why they'll be hitting up other countries for spare change.
DPS (and the more recent OS X variant DPDF) goes back to 1988, with the introduction of NeXTSTep on the NeXT cube [wikipedia.org].
The Mac OS X window system and the Quartz and PDF rendering layers are completely new in Mac OS X, and do not share any code with the Display PostScript system from NeXTSTEP.
NeXTSTEP event system. 1989. Key structures linked into a hash table, scancode lists, character code lists, and hotkey lists. Traversing each linkage gives one the appropriate ordering.
FDOS disk management. 1973. 8008 assembly language code for managing disk blocks on an 8" floppy. A primary linkage and two secondary linkages.
Prior art on this goes back so far that if it were patented, the patent would have expired and the method would have lapsed into the public domain.
The way I have worked and like to work is to use experienced staff for new development and younger hires for maintenence work. This gives you 6 months to a year to train the new developer, adds depth to the organization and allows the senior staff to focus more on larger issues. After 6-12 months you shift the jr. developer to new design and implenetation, under direction of a senior developer. Eventually you have a new senior developer.
What a very odd thing to do.
In many workplaces, a pattern is used that completely eliminates the need for this training of new developers you write of. When new development is to be done, new employees are hired and assigned to the new development. That way, they learn and understand the software as it is developed. Once development is substantially complete, the same engineers, having an in-depth understanding of the product, become the maintenance engineers for the product. Eventually, as the product becomes obsolete and approaches end of life, the engineers remaining on the project are given the opportunity to explore other possible career positions in the industry.
By having the senior, experienced developers performing all maintenance work, the junior new-hires, fresh out of college, are given free reign to explore and learn the ways of system design on their own, developing a new, fresh crop of seasoned maintenance staff, ready to be given that very special title of Individual Contributor and that special HR ranking Type II Limited.
Re:Captain Obvious and his sidekick, Common Sense
on
You Call This Agile?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
This article appears to be written by Captain Obvious and his sidekick, Common Sense.
But the thing of it is, you see, is that Project Management has trouble seeing the obvious, and needs a regular kick in the pants.
I am regularly asked about how long some feature or other will take to implement, and generally give a response in terms of man-days or man-weeks. What's fun is to see how this is interpreted by a Project Manager.
"This feature will take 5 man-days to implement."
Manager: "So, it will be ready on (20, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5...) the twenty-fifth. I'll put that on the schedule."
"No. I said 5 man-days. That's not the same as calendar days, and we're shut down the 24th and 25th."
Manager: "Oh, right. So, next Tuesday, then."
"No, I said man-days, which are not the same as calendar days. We don't have any one who can start on this at once, and everyone already has work to do."
Manager: "Oh. Well, can you start on this tomorrow, then?"
*SIGH* And these are the folks who are creating all the pretty PERT and GANTT charts for senior management.
"There are not enough engineers with the appropriate skill sets."
That would be the skill set that includes an MS in Software Engineering and a willingness to work for $10/hour.
"The IT work force is not skilled enough and almost never can be skilled enough," said Robert Cresanti, undersecretary of commerce for technology
And just why would that be, Mr. Cresanti?
Lack of education? I'm sure that college costs rising 6.3% from last year for public colleges, and 5.9% for the very expensive private colleges has nothing to do with it.
Oh, but college enrollment is off. I'm sure that has nothing to do with the media drumbeat announcing that entry level engineering positions are being offshored, reducing interest in college majors leading to software and IT positions. [1][2]
Of course, even getting into these college programs requires a high school education with a strong grounding in the fundamentals of mathematics and science. This seems to be a problem area for United States high schools. [3]
Or are you just proclaiming that the US Commerce Department thinks this is an area Americans just can't compete in? Perhaps American nationals should just know their place in life and stick with "Would you like fries with that?" Hey, even H1B Visa Guy has to eat somewhere. At least your suppliers of Freedom Fries will be secure in their ability to find new employees.
Well, Dr. Curry is an unusual sort of evolutionary theorist. He received his PhD in 2005 from the Government Department of the London School of Economics, writing a thesis on "Morality as natural history." He currently teaches Political Theory at New York University in London.
I'm not entirely sure that a strict biological interpretation of his work is appropriate. It seems more appropriate for sociological philosophers (sociologists who failed Statistics).
Microsoft has been signing up companies to license it's WMA DRM for their players, getting all those companies to pay license fees, and agree to provide Microsoft with sample gear for 'PlaysForSure' testing, and also getting them to sign a license agreement to hold Microsoft harmless for any Intellectual Property violations (patents, design infringement, copyright, etc.)
There was just no way Apple would sign that license agreement. Give Microsoft copies to knock off in advance, and agree to hold them harmless (never sue) for any IP violations? No way.
I like the idea of an 80 core processor. Multithreaded applications will work better
Multithreading models from the Windows/Unix/Linux community all assume equal access to system resources such as memory across all threads. They like Uniform Memory Architecture models.
An 80 core system can't really provide a uniform memory access model, as it runs into severe switching and coherency problems. (You want to snoop HOW MANY L1 caches?!??). Fancy interconnects like hyperchannel and Monte Carlo stochastic schemes start getting pinched for bandwidth around 8 cores. With this many cores, you'll wind up with computing meshes of local processors and memory interconnected using some interesting switching scheme. The article even mentions this, with a bit of hand-waving over the issues of bandwidth in shared system resources. "Intel's answer is to attach 256 Mbit of SRAM directly to EACH core. " Interconnect topology is left at a simple tiling scheme, but they are exploring ring topologies.
The result looks remarkably like a transputer mesh. I've programmed these in the past, and the model is rather different than simple multithreading. Being able to decompose the programming problem into a number of independent steps with relatively low communications demands is essential. The ability to reconfigure the interconnect topology to match the problem's data flow is essential to being able to get as much out of the processor set as possible. Without this, one can wind up with lots of idle processors, blocked on data starvation.
Absolutely! One huge benefit that's often overlooked is that pair programming lets the manager assign two programmers to a single cubicle, sharing one desk and computer system. The savings in facilities costs alone can be breathtaking!
When combined with an office space scheme such as Microsoft's Workplace Advantage, which can be reconfigured in minutes to meet rapidly changing staffing and project requirements, square footage and power use per employee is reduced, and management oversight becomes much easier. Combined with the self-monitoring nature of pair programming, productivity rises, and the savvy level 68 partner will find themselves well rewarded.
The trick, of course, was finding ISA graphics cards that could be re-strapped to stay off each other's I/O ports and memory mappings, and drivers that could be set up to attach to the appropriate card. Ah, Windows 3.0 on the EGA card, and a text debugger parked on the Hercules Graphics card. Truly a seamless multi-display experience.
See, what most mortals who don't aspire to CGA/EGA/VGA ISA guruosity think of as 'multiple displays' is that oddity wherein a single graphical user interface actually spans multiple displays, and wussy non-command-line apps can be freely moved about between displays. Sort of like putting Option "Xinerama" "true" in your ServerFlags after setting up your devices and screen relationships, for those who can't handle DOS/Windows and have fled to an X11 world.
Note for Mac OS X Users: You are stuck with 'Xinerama mode' and wussy GUI tools, and will never know the Joy of hacking Xorg.conf, nor the 3117 skillz of tweaking CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT while restrapping ISA cards. Manly skills for manly men. Men who sleep all night and work all day... "Oh, he's a..."
There are extremely tough glasses, eg as used on quality watches.
You might be thinking of sapphire, which is quite hard, and so scratch resistant. It is also brittle, and shatters more easily than glasses or hard plastics. It's also expensive. A piece large enough to cover the iPod Nano display will run about $85 each in lots of 1000, and at 1 mm thick that might be too fragile. I don't know of a vendor who can supply these by the million. They're relatively labor-intensive to make, being sliced from a synthetic sapphire using a diamond saw.
I wonder how the RIAA/MPAA is going to react when they realize one person bought a song or video, but over a million have that exact same copy of that song thanks to the way the Zune works?
Those million would all have to be subscription-paying members of the Argo subscription service, so with the additional revenue stream I suspect the RIAA and MPAA might be happy. For a while. Until they want a bigger piece of the action.
Heh. Most of the press copied this line from the Apple/Creative press release:
Apple will pay Creative $100 million for a paid-up license to use Creative's recently awarded patent in all Apple products.
They were in a hurry, though, and not many caught this:
Apple can recoup a portion of its payment if Creative is successful in licensing this patent to others.
So, Creative now has cash in the bank, 'validation' of its patent with a license from Apple, and an incentive to go forth and seek licenses from others...
Then there's this:
In addition, the companies announced that Creative has joined Apple's "Made for iPod" program and will be announcing their own iPod® accessory products later this year.
Apple puts money into Creative, Creative makes iPod accessories, and a cut of the accessory revenue goes back to Apple.
So... Apple gets rid of some lawsuits, sets things up to make trouble for some other music player makers, and gets another revenue stream. All in all, this doesn't look too bad as a business move for Apple.
find that they've lost the functionality that they have been paying for every month - and place the blame squarely on - guess who? - Tivo.
No, they'll wake up one morning, and discover that their Dish Network DVR that they paid $299 for, or that spiffy HDTV DVR they leased with a $199 fee didn't record the WWF Bust-Upathon last night, and there's this funny message that comes up when they try to set up another recording. Then they'll call Dish Network/Echostar up, and the phone person will read the script about how there's a terrible problem. The next call will be to DirectTV or the cable company.
Unless they get a solicitation to join a class action lawsuit first...
Companies get sued because their plastic product can be SCRATCHED. Just think of the possibilities in suing a company that collected 200-300 dollars a unit for functionality that they then turned completely off.
1. Nod your head continuously any time your boss is addressing your team. This conveys that you agree with everything he says and that you only wish you could have articulated it as brilliantly as he is doing. If his ego is insatiable, his eyes will constantly gravitate in your direction for affirmation. In other words, embrace your inner bobblehead.
2. Disagree with everything the boss says. Go out of your way to contradict her every statement. This shows that you're an independent thinker and way smarter than the rest of the peons you've been thrown in with.
3. Use the same buzzwords as the boss. Make sure what you say is an actionable, user-centric, directionally correct turnkey solution with touchpoints. As you can see, it doesn't even have to make sense if you say it fast enough. For extra points, speak entirely in acronyms.
4. Ask questions during company meetings that have no purpose other than to showcase your tremendous intellect. If the CIO is talking about reorganizing the help desk, don't be afraid to raise your hand and ask what effect the current business strategy will have on the next quarter's profit margin. For an added bonus, ask this question at the end of a meeting. (See next point.)
5. Don't make any major presentations during the course of a regular meeting. Wait until the meeting organizer is wrapping up and makes the perfunctory "does anyone have anything else?" request. Then you launch into your spiel, assuring that everyone has to pay attention to what you say. Sure, they may hate you for making the meeting run long, but you'll have made an impression.
6. Laugh hard at your boss's jokes. The higher placed the boss, the greater your laughter should be. If it's the CIO, feign uncontrollable mirth by intermittently wiping tears from your eyes.
7. Be at work 23 hours per day. Be there when your boss gets in and when she leaves. Even if your workload only constitutes about 3 1/2 hours, stretch it out with coffee breaks, four-hour lunches, non-work-related web browsing, and general co-worker chit chat. After all, productivity is measured by your physical presence not actual turnaround.
8. Pay close attention to whatever phone/PDA/gadget the boss uses. Do a great deal of research on it, then casually let the boss know that you're looking for a new phone/PDA/gadget with particular features--namely the exact ones that his model is known for. The boss will instantly recommend his own gadget, so that when you buy it yourself, he thinks you took his advice, rather than merely copied his purchase.
Shamelessly ripped from "The Trivia Geek" at TechRepublic
This includes fairly large things like their display buffer (remember; all windows on OS X are double-buffered). When you invoke dashboard, they all get swapped back in. This takes a long time; in many cases it would be quicker to just discard the out-of-core copy and start a new one
For window backing stores, your wish is granted. For NSWindow:
setOneShot: Sets whether the window device that the receiver manages should be freed when it's removed from the screen list (and another one created if it's returned to the screen) to flag.
Slashdot Mirror
From the testimony of Mr. Marc E. Kasowitz before the US Senate Committee on the Judiciary:
& wit_id=5486
One particularly effective illegal strategy involves the
following scenario: the short-selling hedge fund selects a
target company; the hedge fund then colludes with a so-called
independent stock analyst firm to prepare a false and negative
"research report" on the target; the analyst firm agrees not to
release the report to the public until the hedge fund
accumulates a significant short position in the target's stock;
once the hedge fund has accumulated that large short position,
the report is disseminated widely, causing the intended decline
in the price of the target company's stock. The report that is
disseminated contains no disclosure that the analyst was paid to
prepare the report, or that the hedge fund dictated its
contents, or that the hedge fund had a substantial short
position in the target's stock. Once the false and negative
research report -- misrepresented as "independent" -- has had
its intended effect, the hedge fund then closes its position and
makes an enormous profit, at the expense of the proper
functioning of the markets, harming innocent investors who were
unaware that the game was rigged, and damaging the target
company itself and its employees.
http://judiciary.senate.gov/testimony.cfm?id=1972
Student exercise: Compare and contrast with the movement of AAPL stock shares before and after this report came out.
I can't tell you what problem a national ID card solves
Oooh! I know! I know!
The problem is that right now it's just too darn hard to dig up information on the person whose ID you are checking. Under The Real ID Act, though, the state ID authority (usually the DMV) will be required not only to examine your birth certificate and social security card, but also to scan and create digital copies of them in their system, as well as collecting further information on their forms. This makes the database so created a convenient one stop shopping point for identity theft^Wverification.
Citizens, rest assured that the millions of checkpoints in airports, police cars, banks, and doctor's offices will all keep this information secure, protecting you from Evil and ensuring your continued Freedom. You do want to be Free, don't you? Just hand over the document, and you'll be Free to pass this checkpoint...
So how exactly would these new ID cards be forge-proof?
That's easy. The Official Documents will all be blessed by Homeland Security. The phony knockoffs won't be blessed. That makes it easy to spot the phonies.
Fortunately, we can all rest assured that with these new measures, no Federal, State, or DMV employee will be able to accept a $1500 bribe and produce a phony ID. Now, for $2500...
Heh. The Forrester Research numbers do not include iTunes Gift Card purchases, or iTunes 'allowances'. Their numbers are based solely on credit card transactions for iTunes music purchases.
/. thread. I'm sure they didn't jot down any persona data, or add anything they learned to any sort of cross-correlated data sets...
The fact that Forrester Research was able to examine thousands of your and others credit card transactions over a 27 month period is probably a topic for another
The Federal Department of Health and Human Services finished rolling out Windows 2000 in 2004, and is in the process of rolling out Windows XP. It takes longer than you'd think to get hardware software and designated desktop and laptop configurations for various programs all spec'd and tested.
Being a vast centrally administered IT bureaucracy doesn't speed things up, either. When the regional Head Start office in San Francisco needs a change in machine configuration to support an older worker, the request has to be processed through Washington, DC. That can take a while. (21 months in that case, to permit a visual aid utility to be added to the worker's assigned configuration.)
A one year wait is downright snappy.
NASA gets to implement an exciting new bureaucracy for the 'return to the moon' in two decades. (Hint: it will always be two decades away.)
Gosh, a base at the lunar South Pole. Where, oh where will NASA and the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation put the training facility? With that keen grasp of science politicians and bureaucrats show, I bet the first major action in this program will be ground breaking for the Ted Stevens Lunar Training Facility just outside Fairbanks, Alaska.
I'll also bet that after the earmarks for studies, research, and ground facilities are in place, that no funds will be available for any actual missions. NASA knows this, too, which is why they'll be hitting up other countries for spare change.
DPS (and the more recent OS X variant DPDF) goes back to 1988, with the introduction of NeXTSTep on the NeXT cube [wikipedia.org].
The Mac OS X window system and the Quartz and PDF rendering layers are completely new in Mac OS X, and do not share any code with the Display PostScript system from NeXTSTEP.
Oy vey.
NeXTSTEP event system. 1989. Key structures linked into a hash table, scancode lists, character code lists, and hotkey lists. Traversing each linkage gives one the appropriate ordering.
FDOS disk management. 1973. 8008 assembly language code for managing disk blocks on an 8" floppy. A primary linkage and two secondary linkages.
Prior art on this goes back so far that if it were patented, the patent would have expired and the method would have lapsed into the public domain.
The way I have worked and like to work is to use experienced staff for new development and younger hires for maintenence work. This gives you 6 months to a year to train the new developer, adds depth to the organization and allows the senior staff to focus more on larger issues. After 6-12 months you shift the jr. developer to new design and implenetation, under direction of a senior developer. Eventually you have a new senior developer.
What a very odd thing to do.
In many workplaces, a pattern is used that completely eliminates the need for this training of new developers you write of. When new development is to be done, new employees are hired and assigned to the new development. That way, they learn and understand the software as it is developed. Once development is substantially complete, the same engineers, having an in-depth understanding of the product, become the maintenance engineers for the product. Eventually, as the product becomes obsolete and approaches end of life, the engineers remaining on the project are given the opportunity to explore other possible career positions in the industry.
By having the senior, experienced developers performing all maintenance work, the junior new-hires, fresh out of college, are given free reign to explore and learn the ways of system design on their own, developing a new, fresh crop of seasoned maintenance staff, ready to be given that very special title of Individual Contributor and that special HR ranking Type II Limited.
This article appears to be written by Captain Obvious and his sidekick, Common Sense.
But the thing of it is, you see, is that Project Management has trouble seeing the obvious, and needs a regular kick in the pants.
I am regularly asked about how long some feature or other will take to implement, and generally give a response in terms of man-days or man-weeks. What's fun is to see how this is interpreted by a Project Manager.
"This feature will take 5 man-days to implement."
Manager: "So, it will be ready on (20, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5...) the twenty-fifth. I'll put that on the schedule."
"No. I said 5 man-days. That's not the same as calendar days, and we're shut down the 24th and 25th."
Manager: "Oh, right. So, next Tuesday, then."
"No, I said man-days, which are not the same as calendar days. We don't have any one who can start on this at once, and everyone already has work to do."
Manager: "Oh. Well, can you start on this tomorrow, then?"
*SIGH* And these are the folks who are creating all the pretty PERT and GANTT charts for senior management.
"There are not enough engineers with the appropriate skill sets."
4 ,111202,00.htmlc e.php
That would be the skill set that includes an MS in Software Engineering and a willingness to work for $10/hour.
"The IT work force is not skilled enough and almost never can be skilled enough," said Robert Cresanti, undersecretary of commerce for technology
And just why would that be, Mr. Cresanti?
Lack of education? I'm sure that college costs rising 6.3% from last year for public colleges, and 5.9% for the very expensive private colleges has nothing to do with it.
Oh, but college enrollment is off. I'm sure that has nothing to do with the media drumbeat announcing that entry level engineering positions are being offshored, reducing interest in college majors leading to software and IT positions. [1][2]
Of course, even getting into these college programs requires a high school education with a strong grounding in the fundamentals of mathematics and science. This seems to be a problem area for United States high schools. [3]
Or are you just proclaiming that the US Commerce Department thinks this is an area Americans just can't compete in? Perhaps American nationals should just know their place in life and stick with "Would you like fries with that?" Hey, even H1B Visa Guy has to eat somewhere. At least your suppliers of Freedom Fries will be secure in their ability to find new employees.
1. http://www.computerworld.com/printthis/2006/0,481
2. http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos110.htm#outlook
3. http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/05/25/news/scien
4. http://www.ed.gov/inits/TIMSS/overview.html
Well, Dr. Curry is an unusual sort of evolutionary theorist. He received his PhD in 2005 from the Government Department of the London School of Economics, writing a thesis on "Morality as natural history." He currently teaches Political Theory at New York University in London.
Thesis: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/archive/00000441/
I'm not entirely sure that a strict biological interpretation of his work is appropriate. It seems more appropriate for sociological philosophers (sociologists who failed Statistics).
Its C.
Microsoft has been signing up companies to license it's WMA DRM for their players, getting all those companies to pay license fees, and agree to provide Microsoft with sample gear for 'PlaysForSure' testing, and also getting them to sign a license agreement to hold Microsoft harmless for any Intellectual Property violations (patents, design infringement, copyright, etc.)
There was just no way Apple would sign that license agreement. Give Microsoft copies to knock off in advance, and agree to hold them harmless (never sue) for any IP violations? No way.
It's on the schedule for 2008.
And about time,too! So,who do you think will be next? Neil or Marvin Bush?
I like the idea of an 80 core processor. Multithreaded applications will work better
Multithreading models from the Windows/Unix/Linux community all assume equal access to system resources such as memory across all threads. They like Uniform Memory Architecture models.
An 80 core system can't really provide a uniform memory access model, as it runs into severe switching and coherency problems. (You want to snoop HOW MANY L1 caches?!??). Fancy interconnects like hyperchannel and Monte Carlo stochastic schemes start getting pinched for bandwidth around 8 cores. With this many cores, you'll wind up with computing meshes of local processors and memory interconnected using some interesting switching scheme. The article even mentions this, with a bit of hand-waving over the issues of bandwidth in shared system resources. "Intel's answer is to attach 256 Mbit of SRAM directly to EACH core. " Interconnect topology is left at a simple tiling scheme, but they are exploring ring topologies.
The result looks remarkably like a transputer mesh. I've programmed these in the past, and the model is rather different than simple multithreading. Being able to decompose the programming problem into a number of independent steps with relatively low communications demands is essential. The ability to reconfigure the interconnect topology to match the problem's data flow is essential to being able to get as much out of the processor set as possible. Without this, one can wind up with lots of idle processors, blocked on data starvation.
There's a reason for that...
I found pair programming to be very efficient.
Absolutely! One huge benefit that's often overlooked is that pair programming lets the manager assign two programmers to a single cubicle, sharing one desk and computer system. The savings in facilities costs alone can be breathtaking!
When combined with an office space scheme such as Microsoft's Workplace Advantage, which can be reconfigured in minutes to meet rapidly changing staffing and project requirements, square footage and power use per employee is reduced, and management oversight becomes much easier. Combined with the self-monitoring nature of pair programming, productivity rises, and the savvy level 68 partner will find themselves well rewarded.
The trick, of course, was finding ISA graphics cards that could be re-strapped to stay off each other's I/O ports and memory mappings, and drivers that could be set up to attach to the appropriate card. Ah, Windows 3.0 on the EGA card, and a text debugger parked on the Hercules Graphics card. Truly a seamless multi-display experience.
See, what most mortals who don't aspire to CGA/EGA/VGA ISA guruosity think of as 'multiple displays' is that oddity wherein a single graphical user interface actually spans multiple displays, and wussy non-command-line apps can be freely moved about between displays. Sort of like putting Option "Xinerama" "true" in your ServerFlags after setting up your devices and screen relationships, for those who can't handle DOS/Windows and have fled to an X11 world.
Note for Mac OS X Users: You are stuck with 'Xinerama mode' and wussy GUI tools, and will never know the Joy of hacking Xorg.conf, nor the 3117 skillz of tweaking CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT while restrapping ISA cards. Manly skills for manly men. Men who sleep all night and work all day... "Oh, he's a..."
On behalf of Simon, Ian, and the gang, you're welcome!
It's a neat feature that is amazingly hard to get right.
There are extremely tough glasses, eg as used on quality watches.
You might be thinking of sapphire, which is quite hard, and so scratch resistant. It is also brittle, and shatters more easily than glasses or hard plastics. It's also expensive. A piece large enough to cover the iPod Nano display will run about $85 each in lots of 1000, and at 1 mm thick that might be too fragile. I don't know of a vendor who can supply these by the million. They're relatively labor-intensive to make, being sliced from a synthetic sapphire using a diamond saw.
I wonder how the RIAA/MPAA is going to react when they realize one person bought a song or video, but over a million have that exact same copy of that song thanks to the way the Zune works?
Those million would all have to be subscription-paying members of the Argo subscription service, so with the additional revenue stream I suspect the RIAA and MPAA might be happy. For a while. Until they want a bigger piece of the action.
Heh. Most of the press copied this line from the Apple/Creative press release:
Apple will pay Creative $100 million for a paid-up license to use Creative's recently awarded patent in all Apple products.
They were in a hurry, though, and not many caught this:
Apple can recoup a portion of its payment if Creative is successful in licensing this patent to others.
So, Creative now has cash in the bank, 'validation' of its patent with a license from Apple, and an incentive to go forth and seek licenses from others...
Then there's this:
In addition, the companies announced that Creative has joined Apple's "Made for iPod" program and will be announcing their own iPod® accessory products later this year.
Apple puts money into Creative, Creative makes iPod accessories, and a cut of the accessory revenue goes back to Apple.
So... Apple gets rid of some lawsuits, sets things up to make trouble for some other music player makers, and gets another revenue stream. All in all, this doesn't look too bad as a business move for Apple.
find that they've lost the functionality that they have been paying for every month - and place the blame squarely on - guess who? - Tivo.
No, they'll wake up one morning, and discover that their Dish Network DVR that they paid $299 for, or that spiffy HDTV DVR they leased with a $199 fee didn't record the WWF Bust-Upathon last night, and there's this funny message that comes up when they try to set up another recording. Then they'll call Dish Network/Echostar up, and the phone person will read the script about how there's a terrible problem. The next call will be to DirectTV or the cable company.
Unless they get a solicitation to join a class action lawsuit first...
Companies get sued because their plastic product can be SCRATCHED. Just think of the possibilities in suing a company that collected 200-300 dollars a unit for functionality that they then turned completely off.
1. Nod your head continuously any time your boss is addressing your team. This conveys that you agree with everything he says and that you only wish you could have articulated it as brilliantly as he is doing. If his ego is insatiable, his eyes will constantly gravitate in your direction for affirmation. In other words, embrace your inner bobblehead.
2. Disagree with everything the boss says. Go out of your way to contradict her every statement. This shows that you're an independent thinker and way smarter than the rest of the peons you've been thrown in with.
3. Use the same buzzwords as the boss. Make sure what you say is an actionable, user-centric, directionally correct turnkey solution with touchpoints. As you can see, it doesn't even have to make sense if you say it fast enough. For extra points, speak entirely in acronyms.
4. Ask questions during company meetings that have no purpose other than to showcase your tremendous intellect. If the CIO is talking about reorganizing the help desk, don't be afraid to raise your hand and ask what effect the current business strategy will have on the next quarter's profit margin. For an added bonus, ask this question at the end of a meeting. (See next point.)
5. Don't make any major presentations during the course of a regular meeting. Wait until the meeting organizer is wrapping up and makes the perfunctory "does anyone have anything else?" request. Then you launch into your spiel, assuring that everyone has to pay attention to what you say. Sure, they may hate you for making the meeting run long, but you'll have made an impression.
6. Laugh hard at your boss's jokes. The higher placed the boss, the greater your laughter should be. If it's the CIO, feign uncontrollable mirth by intermittently wiping tears from your eyes.
7. Be at work 23 hours per day. Be there when your boss gets in and when she leaves. Even if your workload only constitutes about 3 1/2 hours, stretch it out with coffee breaks, four-hour lunches, non-work-related web browsing, and general co-worker chit chat. After all, productivity is measured by your physical presence not actual turnaround.
8. Pay close attention to whatever phone/PDA/gadget the boss uses. Do a great deal of research on it, then casually let the boss know that you're looking for a new phone/PDA/gadget with particular features--namely the exact ones that his model is known for. The boss will instantly recommend his own gadget, so that when you buy it yourself, he thinks you took his advice, rather than merely copied his purchase.
Shamelessly ripped from "The Trivia Geek" at TechRepublic
This includes fairly large things like their display buffer (remember; all windows on OS X are double-buffered). When you invoke dashboard, they all get swapped back in. This takes a long time; in many cases it would be quicker to just discard the out-of-core copy and start a new one
For window backing stores, your wish is granted. For NSWindow:
setOneShot:
Sets whether the window device that the receiver manages should be freed when it's removed from the screen list (and another one created if it's returned to the screen) to flag.
- (void)setOneShot:(BOOL)flag