The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age.
The first 2/3 is mandatory reading, while the end is bit lofty. If you're in a hurry even the prologue (by Linus) is useful enough, covering the book's essence in a few pages.
The name of colleague of mine is Harald Inge Vestbø. As we use initials a lot at our company, he is mainly referred to as HIV. Even his email is hiv@...
What we really need is a PC emulator - for the current crop of modern PC OSs!
I have an Atari ST emulator and an Amiga emulator installed to play Carrier Command, Dungeon Master and more. But I still can't play my old original PC games on WinXP without rebooting with a DOS floppy.
One particular kind of application that will benefit enormously from the 64bit integer registers is chess engines. Today most chess engines use several 64bit integers (bitboards) to hold the state of the board (one for black knights, one for white pawns etc).
With this datastructure, for instance obtaining the free or occupied squares is easily done by oring them together. In today's 32bit CPUs this requires a few instructions, in the Itanium (or any 64bit CPU) this is only one.
Play a little chess on the net at http://mobilsjakk.no. This service (my employer's service in fact) would definitely benefit from being run on a server with dual itaniums:)
This is my experience as well. In fact, this is our 'secret' and why we always are growing and always have lots of work.
Regarding ethical policy, check out my company's pages at www.systorvest.com. In short we base our ethical policy on the Perfect Information Scenario: if anyone knew everything about us we would still come out on top.
Sadly, I know a lot of consultants who wouldn't.
A side benefit of doing ethical busines without exceptions is that no client will even ask for anything on the fringe (special bonus, special discount, special commission etc) as they wouldn't want to portray themselves as unethical to someone who has a track record of ethical business.
I've been trying out.NET in two projects for the last couple of months (using beta1).
There is a lot of stuff here that we've already got with servlets and other non-MS technology, but MS as usual packs it with a quite good IDE and quite some code is generated for you (For the purists among us: this is optional).
A very promising part of it all is ASP.NET (formerly ASP+) which has 'server-based GUI-elements'. This is really just a framework handling programmatic manipulation of forms, listboxes etc so you're finally not having to do Print "$e"; and so on. It gets especially handy handling tables listing data with alternating colors and such.
I just couldn't bring myself to touch the darn VBScript or JScript in ASP so the new language C# (almost like Java - but alas, an all new object model to learn) was really what made ASP.NET attractive to me at all.
"The term billion should be avoided since in most countries outside the USA (including the UK) it means a million-million (prefix tera), whereas in the USA it means a thousand million (prefix giga). Likewise the term trillion means million-million-million (prefix exa) in most countries outside the USA"
...but it was two simultaneous players with a mouse each playing simultaneously on one computer with one screen split down the middle. Settlers ? Settlers II ? It was running under DOS way back when. Obviously the game implemented everything from interrupts to game logic.
In northern europe we have used the PIC16C84 and 16F84 for some time on pirate satellite tv subscription cards. There's plenty of schematics for programmers [hw] out there. If anyone is in need of an actual human to code it I have experience that isn't suitable for my CV;)
Oh man.... while I was a student we used to manufacture cards and programmers and sell them as kits to earn some doe... those were the days.
let me just say that this is an understatement. i don't think i've ever used a 3.5" that lasted more than a week. and this isn't just with one drive, either! as amazing as it seems, i don't think i _ever_ lost anything i put on 5.25" (which admittedly wasn't very much). but 3.5" disks are almost entirely useless. i don't store _anything_ on those suckers that is even of marginal importance.
I feel your pain. In fact I feel like a soulbrother or something. When I have to use floppies (which is getting more and more rare) I always save it twice (with another extension) or use two floppies. My two last computers I have made without any floppy at all and just use bootalble CDs and CD-R or CD-RW for storage. Man, what an improvement this is.
Siemens has developed a free-for-non-commercial-use small webproxy designed to be installed on either a client machine or server (Win98/NT/2K only mind you). It has lots of configurable options including eliminating popups and graphics of user-definable sizes (provided the IMG links contain HEIGHT and WIDTH attributes the proxy doesn't even load them). I have used it for a year now and I am very happy with it. Speeds up the browsing and reduces visual noise.
Go to http://www.webwasher.de (English site). A separate company called Webwasher.com AG now promotes it, but it was originally designed by Siemens.
I am very concerned with uptime as my domain gets all my mail from my clients. I've tried three different hosting sites in the lower price range and have earned these lessons:
-Call them before you sign up. If nobody answers (in office ours in their timezone), they're not worth it. You need to be confident that someone will pick up the phone and answer your questions when your site is down.
-Mail them about some tech issue before you sign up. If they respond after a day or two, forget it.
-Examine their site for uptime-guarantees. If it's worse than 99% or better than 99.999% they're not serious about it. One site advertised '100% uptime guarantee' but said that outages under 10 mins didn't count. These guys are clueless and just not worth your business. An uptime-guarantee usually only means that you don't pay for the months where it's not fulfilled, but it at least shows they know what uptime is all about.
-Examine their site for bandwidth-pricing. If it's 'unlimited' they're just not serious and will kick you when traffic increases (or at least throttle your site down to the point of turning visitors away).
-Examine their site for diskspace or bandwith overuse policy. If they just give your visitors a page with 'this site has spent its monthly bandwith quota' then stay away. What you want is to be billed for the extra usage (maybe including mild slowdowns), not turn visitors away.
-Check out their references. Are they having a lot of customers? What kind of customers? Any kind of high-volume sites? Relevant reference sites means experience which in turn shows they know what they are doing. It also assures you that they have room for your growth.
-Check out the company's start-up date. The longer they have been in business, the better.
And last, but certainly not least: when trouble comes knocking on your door in the form of excessive downtime, lost mail or heavily delayed mail: don't hesitate, go somewhere else within 24 hours.
Personal experience: www.pair.com - technically very good, but their lower priced accounts only serve static pages (no PHP or DB). They also take some time answering questions by mail. Have been in the business for some time.
www.digitalspace.net - very reasonable pricing, but they are not always picking up their phone and they are quite slow answering technical issues. Fairly recent start-up.
www.webquarry.com - ok pricing, quick support and have been in the business for some time. Maybe 'rock solid', but not very sophisticated (although this is seen as a plus for many). If you sign up with them, please mention user 'feg' as your referral as it'll earn me a free month;)
Slashdot Mirror
The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age.
The first 2/3 is mandatory reading, while the end is bit lofty. If you're in a hurry even the prologue (by Linus) is useful enough, covering the book's essence in a few pages.
The single line of code failure causing the AT&T incident was: lacking a break at the end of a case in a C-style switch.
The name of colleague of mine is Harald Inge Vestbø. As we use initials a lot at our company, he is mainly referred to as HIV. Even his email is hiv@...
What we really need is a PC emulator - for the current crop of modern PC OSs!
I have an Atari ST emulator and an Amiga emulator installed to play Carrier Command, Dungeon Master and more. But I still can't play my old original PC games on WinXP without rebooting with a DOS floppy.
How hard can it be? A PC emulator for the PC!
And I just bought a DVD+RW drive yesterday.
One particular kind of application that will benefit enormously from the 64bit integer registers is chess engines. Today most chess engines use several 64bit integers (bitboards) to hold the state of the board (one for black knights, one for white pawns etc).
:)
With this datastructure, for instance obtaining the free or occupied squares is easily done by oring them together. In today's 32bit CPUs this requires a few instructions, in the Itanium (or any 64bit CPU) this is only one.
Play a little chess on the net at http://mobilsjakk.no. This service (my employer's service in fact) would definitely benefit from being run on a server with dual itaniums
..and the next step will no doubt be Judge Dredd.
Better be a nice guy in when this comes along.
This is my experience as well. In fact, this is our 'secret' and why we always are growing and always have lots of work.
Regarding ethical policy, check out my company's pages at www.systorvest.com. In short we base our ethical policy on the Perfect Information Scenario: if anyone knew everything about us we would still come out on top.
Sadly, I know a lot of consultants who wouldn't.
A side benefit of doing ethical busines without exceptions is that no client will even ask for anything on the fringe (special bonus, special discount, special commission etc) as they wouldn't want to portray themselves as unethical to someone who has a track record of ethical business.
Ethical business rewards handsomly.
I've been trying out .NET in two projects for the last couple of months (using beta1).
There is a lot of stuff here that we've already got with servlets and other non-MS technology, but MS as usual packs it with a quite good IDE and quite some code is generated for you (For the purists among us: this is optional).
A very promising part of it all is ASP.NET (formerly ASP+) which has 'server-based GUI-elements'. This is really just a framework handling programmatic manipulation of forms, listboxes etc so you're finally not having to do Print "$e"; and so on. It gets especially handy handling tables listing data with alternating colors and such.
I just couldn't bring myself to touch the darn VBScript or JScript in ASP so the new language C# (almost like Java - but alas, an all new object model to learn) was really what made ASP.NET attractive to me at all.
From the conscise guide to the metric system:
"The term billion should be avoided since in most countries outside the USA (including the UK) it means a million-million (prefix tera), whereas in the USA it means a thousand million (prefix giga). Likewise the term trillion means million-million-million (prefix exa) in most countries outside the USA"
Case closed.
...but it was two simultaneous players with a mouse each playing simultaneously on one computer with one screen split down the middle. Settlers ? Settlers II ? It was running under DOS way back when. Obviously the game implemented everything from interrupts to game logic.
Here in Norway, we all have four weeks of vacation. Thaht's why my company (and some more) are offering five weeks ;)
4 weeks is not unreasonable, don't give up!
In northern europe we have used the PIC16C84 and 16F84 for some time on pirate satellite tv subscription cards. There's plenty of schematics for programmers [hw] out there. If anyone is in need of an actual human to code it I have experience that isn't suitable for my CV ;)
Oh man.... while I was a student we used to manufacture cards and programmers and sell them as kits to earn some doe... those were the days.
let me just say that this is an understatement. i don't think i've ever used a 3.5" that lasted more than a week. and this isn't just with one drive, either! as amazing as it seems, i don't think i _ever_ lost anything i put on 5.25" (which admittedly wasn't very much). but 3.5" disks are almost entirely useless. i don't store _anything_ on those suckers that is even of marginal importance.
I feel your pain. In fact I feel like a soulbrother or something. When I have to use floppies (which is getting more and more rare) I always save it twice (with another extension) or use two floppies. My two last computers I have made without any floppy at all and just use bootalble CDs and CD-R or CD-RW for storage. Man, what an improvement this is.
Siemens has developed a free-for-non-commercial-use small webproxy designed to be installed on either a client machine or server (Win98/NT/2K only mind you). It has lots of configurable options including eliminating popups and graphics of user-definable sizes (provided the IMG links contain HEIGHT and WIDTH attributes the proxy doesn't even load them). I have used it for a year now and I am very happy with it. Speeds up the browsing and reduces visual noise.
Go to http://www.webwasher.de (English site). A separate company called Webwasher.com AG now promotes it, but it was originally designed by Siemens.
I am very concerned with uptime as my domain gets all my mail from my clients. I've tried three different hosting sites in the lower price range and have earned these lessons:
;)
-Call them before you sign up. If nobody answers (in office ours in their timezone), they're not worth it. You need to be confident that someone will pick up the phone and answer your questions when your site is down.
-Mail them about some tech issue before you sign up. If they respond after a day or two, forget it.
-Examine their site for uptime-guarantees. If it's worse than 99% or better than 99.999% they're not serious about it. One site advertised '100% uptime guarantee' but said that outages under 10 mins didn't count. These guys are clueless and just not worth your business. An uptime-guarantee usually only means that you don't pay for the months where it's not fulfilled, but it at least shows they know what uptime is all about.
-Examine their site for bandwidth-pricing. If it's 'unlimited' they're just not serious and will kick you when traffic increases (or at least throttle your site down to the point of turning visitors away).
-Examine their site for diskspace or bandwith overuse policy. If they just give your visitors a page with 'this site has spent its monthly bandwith quota' then stay away. What you want is to be billed for the extra usage (maybe including mild slowdowns), not turn visitors away.
-Check out their references. Are they having a lot of customers? What kind of customers? Any kind of high-volume sites? Relevant reference sites means experience which in turn shows they know what they are doing. It also assures you that they have room for your growth.
-Check out the company's start-up date. The longer they have been in business, the better.
And last, but certainly not least: when trouble comes knocking on your door in the form of excessive downtime, lost mail or heavily delayed mail: don't hesitate, go somewhere else within 24 hours.
Personal experience:
www.pair.com - technically very good, but their lower priced accounts only serve static pages (no PHP or DB). They also take some time answering questions by mail. Have been in the business for some time.
www.digitalspace.net - very reasonable pricing, but they are not always picking up their phone and they are quite slow answering technical issues. Fairly recent start-up.
www.webquarry.com - ok pricing, quick support and have been in the business for some time. Maybe 'rock solid', but not very sophisticated (although this is seen as a plus for many). If you sign up with them, please mention user 'feg' as your referral as it'll earn me a free month