"When Congress approved the stimulus bill, it made a point of setting up a Web site called Recovery.gov to allow citizens to track all those billions in spending. But if you've gone looking for it, you might have stumbled across another, very similarly named site, Recovery.com.
The dot-com version is not run by the government, but it also tracks the stimulus -- and much of its information is more up to date. In fact, it has spending information that the government won't have until October, and its data provide a sneak peak into how the stimulus spending is going.
The site is run by Onvia, a Seattle company that collects and sells data on government procurement. Whatever the layer of government -- whether state, county, school district or local water board -- Onvia wants to know what's being purchased."
I joined a startup, and there wasn't enough desk space for me and one other guy.
So we had our terminals set up in the conference room. Every time there was a meeting, we would go sit at the desk of somebody who was in the meeting and use their terminal.
Fortunately they got their second round of funding and we got our own desks after a month or so!
Stack overflow took an interesting approach, and only uses OpenID. They don't even have a non-OpenID option.
Proprietor Jeff Atwood discusses some of the tradeoff at his blog.
Any accessing the Volokh Conspiracy in a way that violates these terms is unauthorized, and according to the Justice Department is a federal crime that can lead to your arrest and imprisonment for up to one year for every visit to the blog.
The idea is that you can scale up your service dynamically to meet demand. If you have a single dedicated host, you will have trouble when you exceed the capacity of that host, but if you are on one of these cloud services they will be able to manage the scaling for you.
It also means that you can go bankrupt on your first slashdotting!
Thats a good point, but don't forget that Apple isn't dropping support for FireWire overall, just on the low-end laptops. If you're doing anything approaching serious AV work you're probably not doing it on the low-end laptop.
But it does make me wonder about how to hook my videocam up!
- cash bonus when your invention is accepted into the program - cash bonus when your application is filed - cash bonus and shiny plaque when your patent is granted
current employer:
- cash bonus and shiny plaque when your patent is granted
all employers, as far as I know
- general policy is cash payment, no royalty sharing - if you have a big-deal patent, they may work out a deal with you - you assign all rights to them - if you leave the company during the process, you don't get any more payments
Here's one of my patents so you can know I'm not making this up.
- install a new oracle on a dedicated box. If there data set is small, you can do it for free with XE (express edition). If not, you will have to pay $750 (list price) for SE1 (standard edition one).
- set up oracle replication so that you publish changes from the main server to the new server
- do these tables have data for multiple customers? If so, create views to filter other customers out. From your description it sounds like this customer has its own dedicated schema, so that's not a problem.
- make the schema read-only.
- turn on auditing so you can keep a log of their queries. This will be quite useful to them!
- disclaim that the internal table structure may change. If they want some guarantees regarding the table structure, that can be taken into account with the views.
The nice thing is that (a) you can charge for all this, and (b) it makes the customer happy. I imagine they want to do excel query directly on the tables, so you can imagine this would make their life a lot easier.
Gratuitous career advice... drop the BOFH attitude, instead think of how you can make an awesome environment for your customers.
Slashdot Mirror
...it's not super-secret!
Consider this scenario:
This is in fact a typical use case for Golden Gate, which has just been acquired by Oracle.
http://www.goldengate.com/
Here's an interesting note on NPR relating to a private company that is aggregating the same data.
http://recovery.com/
"When Congress approved the stimulus bill, it made a point of setting up a Web site called Recovery.gov to allow citizens to track all those billions in spending. But if you've gone looking for it, you might have stumbled across another, very similarly named site, Recovery.com.
The dot-com version is not run by the government, but it also tracks the stimulus -- and much of its information is more up to date. In fact, it has spending information that the government won't have until October, and its data provide a sneak peak into how the stimulus spending is going.
The site is run by Onvia, a Seattle company that collects and sells data on government procurement. Whatever the layer of government -- whether state, county, school district or local water board -- Onvia wants to know what's being purchased."
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112893572&ps=cprs
Oh great, another intra-molecular impedance denier!
I joined a startup, and there wasn't enough desk space for me and one other guy.
So we had our terminals set up in the conference room. Every time there was a meeting, we would go sit at the desk of somebody who was in the meeting and use their terminal.
Fortunately they got their second round of funding and we got our own desks after a month or so!
but I'd be intrigued to find out what needs Oracle answers that PostgreSQL can't!
I like PostgreSQL a lot, but RAC (real application clustering) lets us scale our Oracle database nicely by adding boxes to the existing cluster.
and why doesn't it happen to my car???
Are you willing to pay higher taxes to offer streaming in several formats?
Dude, how much does that cost? They're paying $150 million for the thing!
Faraday cages work great. I put my wifi base station in one and haven't been troubled by it since!
Stack overflow took an interesting approach, and only uses OpenID. They don't even have a non-OpenID option. Proprietor Jeff Atwood discusses some of the tradeoff at his blog.
Here are some interesting notes from Trygve M. H. Reenskaug, who originated the term "Model/View/Controller" while at Xerox PARC in the 70's.
http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~trygver/themes/mvc/mvc-index.html
He seems to be a pretty remarkable character... still hacking at the age of 78, with a note on his new project:
Orin Kerr, one of Lori Drew's attorneys, is a regular blogger at the libertarian legal blog The Volokh Conspiracy.
http://volokh.com/
He has a summary here:
"What does the Lori Drew Verdict Mean?"
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2008_11_23-2008_11_29.shtml#1227728513
and has updated the blog's terms of use:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2008_11_23-2008_11_29.shtml#1227896387
It's only an easter egg for true geeks, but I used this value as an encryption seed:
Hexdumping the executable shows:
Since it's the file encryption seed, nobody can ever change it without destroying the program's ability to decrypt old files!
Of course! Coz they're friggin spiders!
I release all of my open source software using my pseudonym "Linus Torvalds".
For the humor-impaired, it's a pun:
make (earn) money vs. make (design) money
referring to the often asked question, how do you make money with free software.
get it?
The idea is that you can scale up your service dynamically to meet demand. If you have a single dedicated host, you will have trouble when you exceed the capacity of that host, but if you are on one of these cloud services they will be able to manage the scaling for you.
It also means that you can go bankrupt on your first slashdotting!
Thats a good point, but don't forget that Apple isn't dropping support for FireWire overall, just on the low-end laptops. If you're doing anything approaching serious AV work you're probably not doing it on the low-end laptop.
But it does make me wonder about how to hook my videocam up!
Note that the filing date was 1988.
old employer:
- cash bonus when your invention is accepted into the program
- cash bonus when your application is filed
- cash bonus and shiny plaque when your patent is granted
current employer:
- cash bonus and shiny plaque when your patent is granted
all employers, as far as I know
- general policy is cash payment, no royalty sharing
- if you have a big-deal patent, they may work out a deal with you
- you assign all rights to them
- if you leave the company during the process, you don't get any more payments
Here's
one of my patents so you can know I'm not making this up.
"No really babe, I've got a mutation in my monogamy gene. I HAVE to sleep around, or I'll die."
"I'm OK with that."
If we've been bombed back to the stone age, then the reinforced concrete cover should keep everyone out, right?
just keep the current trajectory of making them harder and harder to read, and then only the bots will be able to give the right answer!
No, if you're lucky, they'll include a key. If you're not, they'll include a hacksaw.
Or if you're really unlucky, a machete.
- install a new oracle on a dedicated box. If there data set is small, you can do it for free with XE (express edition). If not, you will have to pay $750 (list price) for SE1 (standard edition one).
- set up oracle replication so that you publish changes from the main server to the new server
- do these tables have data for multiple customers? If so, create views to filter other customers out. From your description it sounds like this customer has its own dedicated schema, so that's not a problem.
- make the schema read-only.
- turn on auditing so you can keep a log of their queries. This will be quite useful to them!
- disclaim that the internal table structure may change. If they want some guarantees regarding the table structure, that can be taken into account with the views.
The nice thing is that (a) you can charge for all this, and (b) it makes the customer happy. I imagine they want to do excel query directly on the tables, so you can imagine this would make their life a lot easier.
Gratuitous career advice... drop the BOFH attitude, instead think of how you can make an awesome environment for your customers.