Is anyone going to study what happens when you suck a bazillion joules of energy out of the the wind? Why don't we convert the entire gulf stream to energy? We don't need that pesky gulf stream that bad, do we?
We work with development partners. We use GitHub as a shared repository - works good, and separate repositories can ensure nothing goes to production without you pushing it. Manage permissions correctly to prevent them from going places you don't want them.
On the merits of outsourcing in general, in our case it makes sense. I can't make sense of your case.
I think this almost falls into the 'no shit, Sherlock' camp. I'm glad someone with credentials is finally saying it. Please pass it along to the geo-thermal guys, who seem to think that sucking energy from the inside of this planet will never have an effect. Oh, and the wave-power-generation guys need to know too - they'll be disturbing ecologies and water flow patterns for miles around - who knows how far those effects will cascade? Scale counts - oil consumption wasn't a problem until we scaled it out - the same fate awaits any terrestrial energy source we scale.
There are only two places to get energy: 1. Earth, 2. Not Earth. Given a choice, I'll choose 2.
GUI vs. Command Line. I lived through that argument in the 80's and 90's. With a GUI, syntax problems go away - IF you can figure out how to find/launch the GUI. On the command line, all commands are available in one spot, but the syntax can be challenging. We really just traded one problem for another.
But for those of us who run production shops, a GUI isn't scriptable and is therefore not testable. Command line scripts can be tested in an offline environment, emailed around, put under version control, and printed out for enjoyable bathroom reading. Who doesn't love command line scripts???
John Stewart had an author on a few weeks ago that claimed a disproportionate percentage of CEOs were sociopaths - i.e. those for whom guilt and conscience have little meaning.
99% Fi and 1% Sci does not a sci-fi make. Wake the fuck up sci-fi writers! It's the heretofore unthought-of gizmos, and the unique ways they're used to get out of mind-blowing situations (replete with explosions and such) that makes a sci-fi. The crap you guys have been writing lately (I'm looking at you, SG Universe and Caprica!) got you your commercially-viable mainstream audience, but you alienated (ha ha) us real sci-fi fans. You suck, go away. And hence forth, be known as Fi-Sci writers, correctly leading with the ratio of drivel, to cool.
I've been watching Caprica, and Stargate Universe. Both suffer from the same disease that infected BSG from the start: Tooooo much 'Fi', and not enough 'Sci'. Do we really have to sit through 57 minutes of character/story-building crap to get 3 minutes of the science-y part? Cripes, these new sci-FI's are more like soap operas than anything else - a total fucking snooze-fest. These writers better get over themselves and figure out what makes a sci-fi show cool to watch. Hint: If it could happen in a western or a soap opera, cut it from the script.
What he's saying about all these devices about to happen probably rings true for most/. readers, including me. The problem is that visionaries have been saying it for years. Legal chafing between content providers, carriers, patent holders. et. al. has slowed the roll-out of super-toys to a crawl. He who can predict how fast the lawyers will move is the true visionary.
How much heat can we suck out of the earth before we start noticing effects? When we first sipped from oil deposits we thought the supply was unlimmited - so we built billions oil-fueled cars and painted ourselves into a corner. Would someone with real credentials please stand up and say what needs to be said: Geo-thermal is a finite supply - and at some level of human consumption mining it will destabilize our planet.
Given that, in the majority of cases, solution #1 will be no better than 10% better than solution #2, is paying 200% worth it? What guarantee do you have that the succeeding project (of a slightly differing nature) would be better executed by the team winning the first? Life is fraught with such complications, rendering generalizations of this sort moot.
With the exception of the 'magic ink', I proposed this exact mechanism on Slashdot about 18 months ago. I'd provide a link to the post, but it was a comment on someone else's thread, and apparently they get purged after a time. Ain't that ducky? I've finally proven to my own satisfaction that I'm far smarter than everyone keeps telling me, and the proof is gone. Maryland, if you're looking for someone with a huge ego to help out with that/my system, drop me a line.
Typical of a government bureaucracy, this law misses the point. All the studies I've heard about indicate that hands-free or not, talking on the phone takes your mind off of driving and that's what causes the accidents. I'm not aware of any statistically significant variance in accident rates between hands-free or not. When will we start electing scientists instead of money-fueled politicians? In my life, I hope?
So the patch code for Vista et al won't fit on XP? Hardly suprising - I believe that was a different tcp/ip stack. What MS is actually saying is they won't spend the time/effort/money to develop a patch tailored for the XP stack. There's no such thing as infeasible in this business, only 'too expensive' or 'not in our political best interest'.
About six months Rupert was saying his papers we're going to a paid model, and he sounded awfully darn sure it was the only business model that really made sense. Now his son is saying the model won't work because other organizations give it away (read 'advertising supported model') for free? Anyone else enjoying the irony here? Somebody better explain to Rupert how this tubey-thing works.
Processed foods and raw meat, I usually buy organic. Raw fruits & veggies, I'll buy organic if the price and quality are within my tolerances. I buy/eat a lot more of the latter than the former (which is now why I'm now 30 pounds lighter and all my health problems have disappeared). I've never been under the impression that organic fruits & veggies have 'better' nutrition, although some folks do believe that. I buy organic for what's NOT in it: preservatives, dyes, hormones, antibiotics, etc. And I'm not alone.
As usual, the media tells half the story in an attempt to sensationalize it. John Stewart, please take this one on?
This is based on my own personal experience and resulting opinions, so please accept it as such - I'm not a doctor or nutritionist. First, if you have to work out to maintain a decent weight/shape, you're eating the wrong foods. I dropped my weight from 230 lbs to 185 (I'm 6'1) in six months by adhering to one simple rule: Don't eat processed foods. Fruits & veggies, nuts & berries, home-cooked bread, meat & fish - all good. Anything that comes in a box, can or jar - bad. The food supply has changed radically in the last 30 years, and we're simply not biologically adapted to tolerate it that well. The result is weight gain and sickness - high blood pressure, cholesterol, diabetes, etc. etc. Eat like a cave man, man! If we weren't eating it 5000 years ago, we probably shouldn't be eating it today.
Full disclosure: That was 3 years ago. I've added back into my diet small amounts of cheese, eggs, and some staples that do come in bottles - soy sauce, ketchup, mayonnaise, and the like, but I try to choose products containing the fewest possible chem-lab ingredients. I now maintain a weight of 190-195. Oh, and all my health problems from 3 years ago have disappeared, including that sometimes-painful bump on my wrist.
Our minds seem to handle this for us in daily life. While enduring repetitive travel (commuting, for instance), we tune out a little, our minds wander, and the more often we travel the route, the less 'immersive' the experience becomes.
Computer games could mimick this to some degree, perhaps by increasing your maximum allowable speed each time you travel a given route. This should probably be a gradual increase of some kind, perhaps asymptotic towards an eventual uber-max, would be a good place to start.
Wrong. Canadian content in radio and TV is essentially 'legislated' - you can't get/keep a broadcast license unless you include the minimum amount of Canadian content (~ 30 hrs/week for tv). This is one reason the Canadian broadcasters are loosing money hand-over-fist, and one reason my employer has been petitioning the CRTC to reduce/eliminate that requirement. So far, no luck. So we have to sell a bunch of TV stations that can't make money because they're forced to broadcast a significant amount of material that doesn't draw noticeable advertising revenue.
Now it looks like they want to screw up Canadian participation on the Internet. I sincerely wish these self-important politicians would retire before they cost more families their income.
Earth and Beyond was the last MMO I played - loved it! Totally pissed when EA shut it down. Amazed at their stupidity, I could never understand why they didn't leverage the game as a conduit to move top-level players into another game or level with enticements/rewards, etc. Instead, they told us they didn't want our monthly $12.95 anymore and pissed off a huge cadre of devotees. I swore I'd never give EA another penny (and I haven't). Hopefully, many others did likewise. I'm hoping these bastards will go broke and their IP will be bought up by someone with a seat on the clue train.
Long before Windows, virtual memory was 'invented'. Given that, the term has a specific meaning. As others have mentioned, it is a method for making programs believe they have unlimited memory space, whilst sharing the actual available physical memory between numerous programs. This 'feature' has a cost - references to memory must be translated from a virtual address to a physical one, by memory management hardware (and sometimes software). Until most recently, Intel processors used a separate chip to manage this. AMD put their memory controller onboard a few years ago. In terms of memory performance, Intel lagged for the past few years because their outboard memory controller consumed extra time to do its job. Moving the controller onboard removes an electrical interface or two, thus speeding things up and generally improving efficiencies.
The original post, I thought, was brilliant. Why are we devoting all this chip real estate (or, in the past, chips), to sharing a rare resource (memory) when that resource is no longer rare? Grant, virtual memory gives us other advantages such as ensuring one program doesn't write in the memory space of another, but surely there are other ways to do that. If we did away with virtual memory and returned to the old (ack! DOS) days of physical memory references, we could devote that chip real estate, power quota, etc to other worthwhile pursuits, like making my twitter pages load faster.
I worked as a software engineer for one of Alcan Aluminum's hot mills for about 5 years. Our little group of 4 software engineers built systems for internal use, just like you do. We were heavily involved in process control, data collection/dissemination, and adaptive tuning. This stuff is the heart and soul of your competitive advantage - it differentiates you from your competitors. Doing it better (higher quality) usually translates into superior competitive advantage. That would be my sales pitch, were it mine to make.
Sadly, our boss turned to the dark side, eventually saying things like "We're an aluminum company, not a software company". If this happens, leave. Alcan subsequently when on a packaged software buying spree. The result? Anyone who can pay the price of admission can buy packaged software, and that levels the playing field. Say goodbye to competitive advantage.
Slashdot Mirror
Is anyone going to study what happens when you suck a bazillion joules of energy out of the the wind? Why don't we convert the entire gulf stream to energy? We don't need that pesky gulf stream that bad, do we?
We work with development partners. We use GitHub as a shared repository - works good, and separate repositories can ensure nothing goes to production without you pushing it. Manage permissions correctly to prevent them from going places you don't want them.
On the merits of outsourcing in general, in our case it makes sense. I can't make sense of your case.
I think this almost falls into the 'no shit, Sherlock' camp. I'm glad someone with credentials is finally saying it. Please pass it along to the geo-thermal guys, who seem to think that sucking energy from the inside of this planet will never have an effect. Oh, and the wave-power-generation guys need to know too - they'll be disturbing ecologies and water flow patterns for miles around - who knows how far those effects will cascade? Scale counts - oil consumption wasn't a problem until we scaled it out - the same fate awaits any terrestrial energy source we scale.
There are only two places to get energy: 1. Earth, 2. Not Earth. Given a choice, I'll choose 2.
GUI vs. Command Line. I lived through that argument in the 80's and 90's. With a GUI, syntax problems go away - IF you can figure out how to find/launch the GUI. On the command line, all commands are available in one spot, but the syntax can be challenging. We really just traded one problem for another.
But for those of us who run production shops, a GUI isn't scriptable and is therefore not testable. Command line scripts can be tested in an offline environment, emailed around, put under version control, and printed out for enjoyable bathroom reading. Who doesn't love command line scripts???
John Stewart had an author on a few weeks ago that claimed a disproportionate percentage of CEOs were sociopaths - i.e. those for whom guilt and conscience have little meaning.
Couldn't agree more. He was my science-hero when I was a kid. Besides, he threw LIGHTNING BOLTS!
99% Fi and 1% Sci does not a sci-fi make. Wake the fuck up sci-fi writers! It's the heretofore unthought-of gizmos, and the unique ways they're used to get out of mind-blowing situations (replete with explosions and such) that makes a sci-fi. The crap you guys have been writing lately (I'm looking at you, SG Universe and Caprica!) got you your commercially-viable mainstream audience, but you alienated (ha ha) us real sci-fi fans. You suck, go away. And hence forth, be known as Fi-Sci writers, correctly leading with the ratio of drivel, to cool.
I've been watching Caprica, and Stargate Universe. Both suffer from the same disease that infected BSG from the start: Tooooo much 'Fi', and not enough 'Sci'. Do we really have to sit through 57 minutes of character/story-building crap to get 3 minutes of the science-y part? Cripes, these new sci-FI's are more like soap operas than anything else - a total fucking snooze-fest. These writers better get over themselves and figure out what makes a sci-fi show cool to watch. Hint: If it could happen in a western or a soap opera, cut it from the script.
What he's saying about all these devices about to happen probably rings true for most /. readers, including me. The problem is that visionaries have been saying it for years. Legal chafing between content providers, carriers, patent holders. et. al. has slowed the roll-out of super-toys to a crawl. He who can predict how fast the lawyers will move is the true visionary.
How much heat can we suck out of the earth before we start noticing effects? When we first sipped from oil deposits we thought the supply was unlimmited - so we built billions oil-fueled cars and painted ourselves into a corner. Would someone with real credentials please stand up and say what needs to be said: Geo-thermal is a finite supply - and at some level of human consumption mining it will destabilize our planet.
I lasted 15 mins max in this game. Woke up when my head hit the keyboard.
Given that, in the majority of cases, solution #1 will be no better than 10% better than solution #2, is paying 200% worth it? What guarantee do you have that the succeeding project (of a slightly differing nature) would be better executed by the team winning the first? Life is fraught with such complications, rendering generalizations of this sort moot.
With the exception of the 'magic ink', I proposed this exact mechanism on Slashdot about 18 months ago. I'd provide a link to the post, but it was a comment on someone else's thread, and apparently they get purged after a time. Ain't that ducky? I've finally proven to my own satisfaction that I'm far smarter than everyone keeps telling me, and the proof is gone. Maryland, if you're looking for someone with a huge ego to help out with that/my system, drop me a line.
Typical of a government bureaucracy, this law misses the point. All the studies I've heard about indicate that hands-free or not, talking on the phone takes your mind off of driving and that's what causes the accidents. I'm not aware of any statistically significant variance in accident rates between hands-free or not. When will we start electing scientists instead of money-fueled politicians? In my life, I hope?
So the patch code for Vista et al won't fit on XP? Hardly suprising - I believe that was a different tcp/ip stack. What MS is actually saying is they won't spend the time/effort/money to develop a patch tailored for the XP stack. There's no such thing as infeasible in this business, only 'too expensive' or 'not in our political best interest'.
About six months Rupert was saying his papers we're going to a paid model, and he sounded awfully darn sure it was the only business model that really made sense. Now his son is saying the model won't work because other organizations give it away (read 'advertising supported model') for free? Anyone else enjoying the irony here? Somebody better explain to Rupert how this tubey-thing works.
This is great news for The Associated Press. Now they don't have to dive off of suicide hill all alone. Splat... splat.
Processed foods and raw meat, I usually buy organic. Raw fruits & veggies, I'll buy organic if the price and quality are within my tolerances. I buy/eat a lot more of the latter than the former (which is now why I'm now 30 pounds lighter and all my health problems have disappeared). I've never been under the impression that organic fruits & veggies have 'better' nutrition, although some folks do believe that. I buy organic for what's NOT in it: preservatives, dyes, hormones, antibiotics, etc. And I'm not alone.
As usual, the media tells half the story in an attempt to sensationalize it. John Stewart, please take this one on?
This is based on my own personal experience and resulting opinions, so please accept it as such - I'm not a doctor or nutritionist. First, if you have to work out to maintain a decent weight/shape, you're eating the wrong foods. I dropped my weight from 230 lbs to 185 (I'm 6'1) in six months by adhering to one simple rule: Don't eat processed foods. Fruits & veggies, nuts & berries, home-cooked bread, meat & fish - all good. Anything that comes in a box, can or jar - bad. The food supply has changed radically in the last 30 years, and we're simply not biologically adapted to tolerate it that well. The result is weight gain and sickness - high blood pressure, cholesterol, diabetes, etc. etc. Eat like a cave man, man! If we weren't eating it 5000 years ago, we probably shouldn't be eating it today.
Full disclosure: That was 3 years ago. I've added back into my diet small amounts of cheese, eggs, and some staples that do come in bottles - soy sauce, ketchup, mayonnaise, and the like, but I try to choose products containing the fewest possible chem-lab ingredients. I now maintain a weight of 190-195. Oh, and all my health problems from 3 years ago have disappeared, including that sometimes-painful bump on my wrist.
Our minds seem to handle this for us in daily life. While enduring repetitive travel (commuting, for instance), we tune out a little, our minds wander, and the more often we travel the route, the less 'immersive' the experience becomes.
Computer games could mimick this to some degree, perhaps by increasing your maximum allowable speed each time you travel a given route. This should probably be a gradual increase of some kind, perhaps asymptotic towards an eventual uber-max, would be a good place to start.
as is currently done with radio and TV content
Wrong. Canadian content in radio and TV is essentially 'legislated' - you can't get/keep a broadcast license unless you include the minimum amount of Canadian content (~ 30 hrs/week for tv). This is one reason the Canadian broadcasters are loosing money hand-over-fist, and one reason my employer has been petitioning the CRTC to reduce/eliminate that requirement. So far, no luck. So we have to sell a bunch of TV stations that can't make money because they're forced to broadcast a significant amount of material that doesn't draw noticeable advertising revenue.
Now it looks like they want to screw up Canadian participation on the Internet. I sincerely wish these self-important politicians would retire before they cost more families their income.
Earth and Beyond was the last MMO I played - loved it! Totally pissed when EA shut it down. Amazed at their stupidity, I could never understand why they didn't leverage the game as a conduit to move top-level players into another game or level with enticements/rewards, etc. Instead, they told us they didn't want our monthly $12.95 anymore and pissed off a huge cadre of devotees. I swore I'd never give EA another penny (and I haven't). Hopefully, many others did likewise. I'm hoping these bastards will go broke and their IP will be bought up by someone with a seat on the clue train.
Long before Windows, virtual memory was 'invented'. Given that, the term has a specific meaning. As others have mentioned, it is a method for making programs believe they have unlimited memory space, whilst sharing the actual available physical memory between numerous programs. This 'feature' has a cost - references to memory must be translated from a virtual address to a physical one, by memory management hardware (and sometimes software). Until most recently, Intel processors used a separate chip to manage this. AMD put their memory controller onboard a few years ago. In terms of memory performance, Intel lagged for the past few years because their outboard memory controller consumed extra time to do its job. Moving the controller onboard removes an electrical interface or two, thus speeding things up and generally improving efficiencies.
The original post, I thought, was brilliant. Why are we devoting all this chip real estate (or, in the past, chips), to sharing a rare resource (memory) when that resource is no longer rare? Grant, virtual memory gives us other advantages such as ensuring one program doesn't write in the memory space of another, but surely there are other ways to do that. If we did away with virtual memory and returned to the old (ack! DOS) days of physical memory references, we could devote that chip real estate, power quota, etc to other worthwhile pursuits, like making my twitter pages load faster.
I want to see Al Gore get involved. How about a ManBearPig release?
I worked as a software engineer for one of Alcan Aluminum's hot mills for about 5 years. Our little group of 4 software engineers built systems for internal use, just like you do. We were heavily involved in process control, data collection/dissemination, and adaptive tuning. This stuff is the heart and soul of your competitive advantage - it differentiates you from your competitors. Doing it better (higher quality) usually translates into superior competitive advantage. That would be my sales pitch, were it mine to make.
Sadly, our boss turned to the dark side, eventually saying things like "We're an aluminum company, not a software company". If this happens, leave. Alcan subsequently when on a packaged software buying spree. The result? Anyone who can pay the price of admission can buy packaged software, and that levels the playing field. Say goodbye to competitive advantage.