There was a very early Dilbert cartoon (which I cannot seem to find on-line right now) that covered thituation perfectly. It was the early four panel design.
First panel showed a slob dressed in a cheap suit with the caption "This look says I don't care about my apearence or my job, loath me"
Second pannel shows a better dressed guy with the caption "This look says I am up and coming, respect me"
Third panel shows a woman in a power suit with the caption "This look says I'm upper management, fear me"
Final panel shows a scuffy guy in shorts and a tee-shirt with a long unkempt beard with the caption "This look says I know how the computer system works, worship me"
Will dressing up make me code better than if I come in shorts (or sweats)? Will it magicly make me produce fewer bugs?
There is a line of thought that this is in fact true. Never mind that it is complete BS, there are marketing types and managers who believe it. You know, the same group who can't tell you what their requirements for the new system are are the same ones who think that if you dress like them, then you will magicly be able to code faster with fewer bugs. Personally, I think their ties are too tight, cutting off oxygen to their brains.
True story. I worked with a guy who had a previous job at a financial house, where this philosophy was taken to the extreme. Not only did he have to wear a suit and tie to work each dasy, his manager actually measued his moustach one time to see if it was too long!!
This is because the rules for contests winnings in Qubec are comnpletely different then anywhere else in North America. If I recall correctly, the major difference is that a percentage of the potential winnings has to be given to the Qubec government as a tax for the contest to be run there, even if it is not won by a Qubecor. That an a whole lot more paper work means that residents of Qubec are excluded from most contests run in North America.
Are you going to include a real-time clock in the game so us lowly players know when to quit playing so as to be able to schedule the lower priority but still necessary activities such as sleep, studying and work into our lives?
Hmm, could be, although I always thought it was because the first con was in Lake Geneva History of GenCon
From the above web page 1968: The first Gen Con was held in the Lake Geneva Horticultural Hall (a.k.a. 4H Hall) and was sponsored by the Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Association, with around 100 people in attendance.
Also on the page 1977: Gen Con expanded into the Playboy resort, where the Playboy Bunnies were delivering drinks and were later banned in the gaming area for being a disruption. Old timers are still nostalgic about that year.
btw, scroll down for a pic of a girl(?) in a cation tape bikini
GenCon has moved around in the past, but generally it stays in the same spot for consecutive years. It previously spent many years in Milwaukee, before outgrowing the convention centre facilities, and the hotel capacity, before that (and well before my time), it was held in Lake Geneva WI(?), hence the title. There have also been several GenCon spin-offs, the first being GenCon UK, and now GenCon Europe, and GenCon solCal.
How about including a list of anonymous email forwarding servers (preferably in another country) on the contact page. If they wanted to get fancy, they could include a section or page on how to use anonymous email if the user doen't trust the list given.
Then again, a typewritten letter stuffed in an envelope with no return address and correct postage is probably just as secure.
Why on God's green earth would a programmer not use all of the processor(s)?
My thoughts exactly. It seems whoever wrote this article, and the 'people' who they 'supposably' interviewed, don't know how modern systems are programmed. Have these guys ever heard of threads? Multiple processors allow for a much larger thread pool, hence increasing performance. Modern OS's handle the scheduling of threads as well as, if not better then most humans, hence scheduling has become a non-issue in almost all cases, and to top it all off, I havn't heard of anyone having an issue with in-order vs out-of-ordering processing in years because its mostly transparent to the user and in most cases to the developer.
As an avid gamer, and as a student who is completing a masters in IS, I have been keeping an eye on the next generation of consoles. Now I am not an EE, however I know enough about how computers work, and what is being done with the new processors to call BS on this entire article. The new processors, and the general trend in computing in general is towards multiple processor systems, meaning the programming paradigm will have to change in order to utilise all all the systems power. Whoever wrote this article doesn't seem to understand this, and as a result is just plain wrong on almost every point.
Anyways, I was at this demo You were!, any chance that you could write up a review of what was said and presented? Inquiring minds want to know.
The real limitation of the Cell processor would be context switches Why would this matter? The PPC core would handle the interrupts, and as I understand it, the SPUs would be treated like vector processors, which would be assigned a work unit and would process that till completion. Was something else said durring the presentation?
It's double-precision floating-point performance isn't very good (about 1/10 of the speed)--all us science types really value double precision performance. Yes, but even at that slower speed, the cell is still among the fastest processors for doing double precision calculations, and if Sony et all actually make as many cell processors as they claim, it will probably be among the cheapest as well ($ per GFlop).
Unfortuanately, the satellite image isn't of a high enough resolution to see it in google maps. If anyone from Google is reading this, please upload high resolution pictures of a place called Vegerville, Alberta, Canada so you can have a true and authentic Easter Egg in Google maps. Giant Easter Egg Another pic more info
Want to bet on there being a "Leak" of PS3 pics and video happening a few hours before the Microsoft Show. I thought not.
It took me a while to figure out Sony's strategy here, as I thought it would be best for them to wait till after MS shows what the XBox 2 can do in order to tweak their demo. I believe Sony's strategy here (and before when they scheduled their news confrence 3 hours before Microsofts) is to have a direct comparison between the two consoles, hence robbing MS of any advantage of launching early. More or less the same strategy they took with the Sega Dreamcast. IF (notice thats a big if) the PS3 is a 1Thz machine, then that would make it about an order of magnitude more powerful then the XBox2/next/360, meaning people would wait for it to be released and not buy the Xbox. Then again, Sony could just hype it that way and get the same result.
The end result will be instead of the XBox2 getting a couple of dedicated pages in gaming mags and websites, and then showcasing the PS3 a month later, those mags and websites will instead print comparison pictures of each system side by side. This helps Sony much more then it helps Microsoft.
Eclipse has the "Visual Editor" plugin too create GUI's. Its now part of the standard plugins, so you can download and install it from inside Eclipse using the add/update software menuitem in the help menu. The VE does takes a while to learn, and still needs a bit of polishing, but its definately useable. I just completed a small project for school using it, and after I learned how to use it, it was the easiest Java GUI that I had ever put together.
GOSLING aka Getting Open Source Logic INto Government.
Their website is a bit out of date, but there is people working on it. Last I heard, the groups leader is helping set up a working group to investigate cost savings from using Open Source products, and he spoke of the savings that could be acrued from using a version of an Open Source product like Open Office vs. the continuing licenceing costs of using MS products. Yes, the price saving were evident even if they customised the suit to do the things they need, and doing their own maintenance.
An area where women are very common in IT
on
Women Leaving I.T.
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Government.
I have worked for the various government agencies and departments for 8 years now, and the number of women working in IT is definitely above average for the IT field. I attribute this to the fact that they are not being driven out of the field here. As a government employee, we have steady and predictable hours with little overtime. Vacation time is quite generous, and family related leave is available. These working conditions are not only attractive to women, but also to the men that I have worked with as well. I knew one guy who took a 20% pay cut (transferring to government from the private sector) so that he could have dinner with his family on a regular basis. I know another who is taking parental leave shortly so he can raise his daughter while his wife goes back to work early (in the private sector, she also works in IT).
I think the problem here is that the expected working conditions in the (North American private sector) IT field are atrocious. Long hours, unpaid overtime, arcane technology that is constantly changing is what's wrong with the IT industry. Women leaving the field in droves are just a symptom of a deeper running illness.
AD&D no longer exists.
A few years back, Wizards of the Coast (who bought out TSR, and were then bought out by Hasbro) released a new version of the rules. At the same time, they reverted the system to the old name; Dungeons and Dragons (D&D). Version numbers are now added to the name, so it became D&D3e, for the 3rd editition of the rules. As they released an 'update' to the rules just over a year ago, the most up to date version is called D&D3.5
OK, I'm an idiot.
After shooting my mouth off, I went to the adblock extension home page, and found out that there is a simpler way of Adblocking flash, and it look like there is a way of clicking on overlays to disable them. Adblock extension
I would like this opertunity to thank the Adblock team for making such a good extension and making the web a safer and saner place to surf.
Giggle. What I see when I click on that page is a blank screen (I've already Adblocked all the advertisements from that site) and a link that says, continue on to the story. Simply annoying, with no redeming features for IGN or me. I expect someone will write a Firefox extension to identify and skip these inter-page-ads sometime soon.
I tend to surf with Mozilla, Flash disabled, and Javascript disabled (through the use of the PrefBar extension), and have never seen a "floater" anywhere
Good for you. Prefbar is one of my favorite extensions for Firefox. Too bad it hasn't been updated in a while. Anyways, one of the few times that I saw a floater, I ran into a problem with flashblocker installed. Firefox, by default, puts a opaque box where the flash is suppost to go. In my case, this covered most of the screen, and covered up the parts I was trying to read. Anyways, I had to launch the flash to find the button used to close it. Very annoying.
When content providers are acting as proxies and adverts appear to come from the same domain and content management system as the content... then adverts will be VERY hard to block.
Actually, this depends on how they do it. I've seen lots of sites that host the advertising used on their site, and not the advertisers proxy. Sites that do this, usually have the ads stored in their own directory, something like/ads or/advertisment, or even/sponsors. The adblock plug-in for firefox allows wildcards, so you just have to put in a wild card in the ad dir, and presto, all the ads stored in that dir are gone. This even works for proxy servers that are numbered, like 2.annoying.advertising.proxy.com. just replace the 2 with a *, and it, and any advertising from any of the annoying.advertising.proxy.com domain no longer appear.
However, adversisers, and some ad driven web sites are getting wist to these tricks, and are hiding the ads in the same directory they use for their content, something like/images. Now, putting a wild card into this directory means that none of the images are loaded for this site, not just the ads. These sites are also advoiding keywords that can be filtered out. Like having the word advertisement appear in the image name as it is possible to filter them out too easily.
I have seen these floating DHTML ads for a few years now, and they are quite annoying. Fortunately, they were few and far between, however this situation has to be fixed now before it becomes problematic. First of all, turning off Flash does not work, as Firefox puts an opaque placeholder graphic in its place, which covers up the content. One solution is to make that box semi-transparent, so you can see whats underneath it. I had to launch flash a couple of times, just to be able to launch the animation so I could an embedded butten to close it. Also, Firefox should never allow the right click mouse menu to be overridden (I have no problem with stuff being added to it). This would allow you to right click on flash or DHTML floating images, and Adblock them. Firefox currently allows you to neither. To ad block flash, you have to click on the Adblock icon on the lower right hand corner of the browser, and search for embeded objects. For DHTML, its even worse.
Fortunately, the Open source nature of Firefox will allow this issue to be resolved well before it becomes mainstream, and several years before anyone over at Microsoft event thinks about doing something about it.
Yup, thats what the specs for the PS2 say. From my understanding its really hard to achieve this in practice, and then only by programming some routines in assembly, and having the right data flow.
Anyways, just for fun, google for xbox gflops to see what some people claim that system can do. I've seen claims of up to 120 Gflops for an xbox. Xbox GFLOPS
Dark Matter isn't the only theory about why astronomical data doesn't fit theory. Another theory is called MOND, MOdified Newtonion Dynamics, and it postulates Newtons gravety theory might break down at astronomical distances (instead of inverse square it might be something else) A modified version of Newtons gravety creation have been created to fit the astronomical data, but there is no explanation about why the force of gravity should change over vast distances. There was an article in New Scientist magazine a few weeks back about how the guys behind the MOND theory think that there may be two types of gravity, and it might explain the discrepency in the location of the Pioneer probes.
Hmmm, Take Two is also the pubisher behind Rockstar games. Maybe they could spice things up by making a cross-over between the Civ franchise and the GTA series. Think of it, you could lead you army in first person into your opponents capital, storm his palace, and kill him in one-to-one combat with a spear, and then jack his chariot for a triumphant entry back to your safe house / palace. The only problem with this plan is that the in game leader would have more of a life then I currently do.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to find a tee-shirt with this on it.
There is a line of thought that this is in fact true. Never mind that it is complete BS, there are marketing types and managers who believe it. You know, the same group who can't tell you what their requirements for the new system are are the same ones who think that if you dress like them, then you will magicly be able to code faster with fewer bugs. Personally, I think their ties are too tight, cutting off oxygen to their brains.
True story. I worked with a guy who had a previous job at a financial house, where this philosophy was taken to the extreme. Not only did he have to wear a suit and tie to work each dasy, his manager actually measued his moustach one time to see if it was too long!!
This is because the rules for contests winnings in Qubec are comnpletely different then anywhere else in North America. If I recall correctly, the major difference is that a percentage of the potential winnings has to be given to the Qubec government as a tax for the contest to be run there, even if it is not won by a Qubecor. That an a whole lot more paper work means that residents of Qubec are excluded from most contests run in North America.
Are you going to include a real-time clock in the game so us lowly players know when to quit playing so as to be able to schedule the lower priority but still necessary activities such as sleep, studying and work into our lives?
History of GenCon
From the above web page
1968: The first Gen Con was held in the Lake Geneva Horticultural Hall (a.k.a. 4H Hall) and was sponsored by the Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Association, with around 100 people in attendance.
Also on the page
1977: Gen Con expanded into the Playboy resort, where the Playboy Bunnies were delivering drinks and were later banned in the gaming area for being a disruption. Old timers are still nostalgic about that year.
btw, scroll down for a pic of a girl(?) in a cation tape bikini
GenCon has moved around in the past, but generally it stays in the same spot for consecutive years. It previously spent many years in Milwaukee, before outgrowing the convention centre facilities, and the hotel capacity, before that (and well before my time), it was held in Lake Geneva WI(?), hence the title. There have also been several GenCon spin-offs, the first being GenCon UK, and now GenCon Europe, and GenCon solCal.
Then again, a typewritten letter stuffed in an envelope with no return address and correct postage is probably just as secure.
My thoughts exactly. It seems whoever wrote this article, and the 'people' who they 'supposably' interviewed, don't know how modern systems are programmed. Have these guys ever heard of threads? Multiple processors allow for a much larger thread pool, hence increasing performance. Modern OS's handle the scheduling of threads as well as, if not better then most humans, hence scheduling has become a non-issue in almost all cases, and to top it all off, I havn't heard of anyone having an issue with in-order vs out-of-ordering processing in years because its mostly transparent to the user and in most cases to the developer.
As an avid gamer, and as a student who is completing a masters in IS, I have been keeping an eye on the next generation of consoles. Now I am not an EE, however I know enough about how computers work, and what is being done with the new processors to call BS on this entire article. The new processors, and the general trend in computing in general is towards multiple processor systems, meaning the programming paradigm will have to change in order to utilise all all the systems power. Whoever wrote this article doesn't seem to understand this, and as a result is just plain wrong on almost every point.
You were!, any chance that you could write up a review of what was said and presented? Inquiring minds want to know.
The real limitation of the Cell processor would be context switches
Why would this matter? The PPC core would handle the interrupts, and as I understand it, the SPUs would be treated like vector processors, which would be assigned a work unit and would process that till completion. Was something else said durring the presentation?
It's double-precision floating-point performance isn't very good (about 1/10 of the speed)--all us science types really value double precision performance.
Yes, but even at that slower speed, the cell is still among the fastest processors for doing double precision calculations, and if Sony et all actually make as many cell processors as they claim, it will probably be among the cheapest as well ($ per GFlop).
OK, so are they going to get Arthur C. Clark to come in and type "emerge world" if the probe needs an update while it is orbiting Europa?
Unfortuanately, the satellite image isn't of a high enough resolution to see it in google maps. If anyone from Google is reading this, please upload high resolution pictures of a place called Vegerville, Alberta, Canada so you can have a true and authentic Easter Egg in Google maps.
Giant Easter Egg
Another pic
more info
It took me a while to figure out Sony's strategy here, as I thought it would be best for them to wait till after MS shows what the XBox 2 can do in order to tweak their demo. I believe Sony's strategy here (and before when they scheduled their news confrence 3 hours before Microsofts) is to have a direct comparison between the two consoles, hence robbing MS of any advantage of launching early. More or less the same strategy they took with the Sega Dreamcast. IF (notice thats a big if) the PS3 is a 1Thz machine, then that would make it about an order of magnitude more powerful then the XBox2/next/360, meaning people would wait for it to be released and not buy the Xbox. Then again, Sony could just hype it that way and get the same result.
The end result will be instead of the XBox2 getting a couple of dedicated pages in gaming mags and websites, and then showcasing the PS3 a month later, those mags and websites will instead print comparison pictures of each system side by side. This helps Sony much more then it helps Microsoft.
The Street finds its own uses for things - uses the manufacturers never imagined.
William Gibson
Eclipse has the "Visual Editor" plugin too create GUI's. Its now part of the standard plugins, so you can download and install it from inside Eclipse using the add/update software menuitem in the help menu. The VE does takes a while to learn, and still needs a bit of polishing, but its definately useable. I just completed a small project for school using it, and after I learned how to use it, it was the easiest Java GUI that I had ever put together.
GOSLING aka Getting Open Source Logic INto Government.
Their website is a bit out of date, but there is people working on it. Last I heard, the groups leader is helping set up a working group to investigate cost savings from using Open Source products, and he spoke of the savings that could be acrued from using a version of an Open Source product like Open Office vs. the continuing licenceing costs of using MS products. Yes, the price saving were evident even if they customised the suit to do the things they need, and doing their own maintenance.
I have worked for the various government agencies and departments for 8 years now, and the number of women working in IT is definitely above average for the IT field. I attribute this to the fact that they are not being driven out of the field here. As a government employee, we have steady and predictable hours with little overtime. Vacation time is quite generous, and family related leave is available. These working conditions are not only attractive to women, but also to the men that I have worked with as well. I knew one guy who took a 20% pay cut (transferring to government from the private sector) so that he could have dinner with his family on a regular basis. I know another who is taking parental leave shortly so he can raise his daughter while his wife goes back to work early (in the private sector, she also works in IT).
I think the problem here is that the expected working conditions in the (North American private sector) IT field are atrocious. Long hours, unpaid overtime, arcane technology that is constantly changing is what's wrong with the IT industry. Women leaving the field in droves are just a symptom of a deeper running illness.
A few years back, Wizards of the Coast (who bought out TSR, and were then bought out by Hasbro) released a new version of the rules. At the same time, they reverted the system to the old name; Dungeons and Dragons (D&D). Version numbers are now added to the name, so it became D&D3e, for the 3rd editition of the rules. As they released an 'update' to the rules just over a year ago, the most up to date version is called D&D3.5
A short history of D&D can be found here
And the official home page for D&D can be found here
After shooting my mouth off, I went to the adblock extension home page, and found out that there is a simpler way of Adblocking flash, and it look like there is a way of clicking on overlays to disable them. Adblock extension
I would like this opertunity to thank the Adblock team for making such a good extension and making the web a safer and saner place to surf.
The article suggests that most people who click on these, are doing so by accident while trying to close them.
Giggle. What I see when I click on that page is a blank screen (I've already Adblocked all the advertisements from that site) and a link that says, continue on to the story. Simply annoying, with no redeming features for IGN or me. I expect someone will write a Firefox extension to identify and skip these inter-page-ads sometime soon.
Good for you. Prefbar is one of my favorite extensions for Firefox. Too bad it hasn't been updated in a while. Anyways, one of the few times that I saw a floater, I ran into a problem with flashblocker installed. Firefox, by default, puts a opaque box where the flash is suppost to go. In my case, this covered most of the screen, and covered up the parts I was trying to read. Anyways, I had to launch the flash to find the button used to close it. Very annoying.
Actually, this depends on how they do it. I've seen lots of sites that host the advertising used on their site, and not the advertisers proxy. Sites that do this, usually have the ads stored in their own directory, something like /ads or /advertisment, or even /sponsors. The adblock plug-in for firefox allows wildcards, so you just have to put in a wild card in the ad dir, and presto, all the ads stored in that dir are gone. This even works for proxy servers that are numbered, like 2.annoying.advertising.proxy.com. just replace the 2 with a *, and it, and any advertising from any of the annoying.advertising.proxy.com domain no longer appear.
However, adversisers, and some ad driven web sites are getting wist to these tricks, and are hiding the ads in the same directory they use for their content, something like /images. Now, putting a wild card into this directory means that none of the images are loaded for this site, not just the ads. These sites are also advoiding keywords that can be filtered out. Like having the word advertisement appear in the image name as it is possible to filter them out too easily.
I have seen these floating DHTML ads for a few years now, and they are quite annoying. Fortunately, they were few and far between, however this situation has to be fixed now before it becomes problematic. First of all, turning off Flash does not work, as Firefox puts an opaque placeholder graphic in its place, which covers up the content. One solution is to make that box semi-transparent, so you can see whats underneath it. I had to launch flash a couple of times, just to be able to launch the animation so I could an embedded butten to close it. Also, Firefox should never allow the right click mouse menu to be overridden (I have no problem with stuff being added to it). This would allow you to right click on flash or DHTML floating images, and Adblock them. Firefox currently allows you to neither. To ad block flash, you have to click on the Adblock icon on the lower right hand corner of the browser, and search for embeded objects. For DHTML, its even worse.
Fortunately, the Open source nature of Firefox will allow this issue to be resolved well before it becomes mainstream, and several years before anyone over at Microsoft event thinks about doing something about it.
Anyways, just for fun, google for xbox gflops to see what some people claim that system can do. I've seen claims of up to 120 Gflops for an xbox. Xbox GFLOPS
Dark Matter isn't the only theory about why astronomical data doesn't fit theory. Another theory is called MOND, MOdified Newtonion Dynamics, and it postulates Newtons gravety theory might break down at astronomical distances (instead of inverse square it might be something else) A modified version of Newtons gravety creation have been created to fit the astronomical data, but there is no explanation about why the force of gravity should change over vast distances. There was an article in New Scientist magazine a few weeks back about how the guys behind the MOND theory think that there may be two types of gravity, and it might explain the discrepency in the location of the Pioneer probes.
Hmmm, Take Two is also the pubisher behind Rockstar games. Maybe they could spice things up by making a cross-over between the Civ franchise and the GTA series. Think of it, you could lead you army in first person into your opponents capital, storm his palace, and kill him in one-to-one combat with a spear, and then jack his chariot for a triumphant entry back to your safe house / palace. The only problem with this plan is that the in game leader would have more of a life then I currently do.