I think at the moment, the order goes Exxon, Microsoft, PetroChina, then Apple.
That probably means that there is not much more upside for Apple shares. For the most part, they are selling expensive consumer toys that people can live without. Look at the products associated with the other companies on the list. If the consumer should ever lose discretionary spending power which company's products do you think they'd stop buying first?
I don't really consider myself a UI person nor a big fan of CSS, but at work I am forced to review code written by junior web developers so I've seen many good and bad examples of CSS. I looked at the source of the site and I have to say that it uses CSS very elegantly. What really impressed me was the fact that it rendered almost perfectly on my Blackberry. I'm so tired of seeing regular sites crap out while rendering on the Blackberry and WAP-specific sites only using the left third of the display. Hmmm... maybe CSS isn't so bad after all.
I've been coding for Win32 for about 10 years now. I still prefer Visual C++ 6 over any of the.NET versions.
Unfortunately, it is time to move on as Microsoft is dropping support for Visual Studio 6. If you do not want to write managed code, you can still use Visual C++.NET. However, getting a 10 year old project written VC++ 6.0 to compile under VS.NET is no mean feat. For example, some of the ATL templates have changed over the years and may no longer be compatible with your code. For our case, we have decided to rewrite many of our legacy C++ applications as.NET managed code whenever major functionality was added.
In 1994, 16MB desktop memory costs around $600. Now, you can get 2GB for under $200. It is not really unreasonable to expect newer software to be written in such a way to take advantage of this extra memory. There is really not much point in developing a generic desktop OS that can still fit into 16MB.
But since a cheesy little pull-down-generating server-side script is "programming," there's PHB-fodder about having already done dev work before all of the requirements are described.
The flip side of this is that after showing marketing a semi-functional prototype that is pretty close to what they are looking for, there is often a tendency to assume that the project is near the code-complete phase and that a majority of the resources can be reallocated elsewhere. Just leave a couple of developers on the project to polish up the code and the installation program... then ship it!
Because of this, I usually like to leave an obvious (from the UI perspective) piece of functionality missing from the functional prototypes. This makes it clear to the management and marketing types that there is more work to be done. They don't really care that the prototype is non-scalable and has the web server making direct database calls, whereas the real implementation would need the web server going through middle-tier business components, data access layers, etc.
The point is I could have benefited and at the same time made a contribution back to the community if my company didn't have to give up the entire farm.
But if that one line is important enough to be used, then the author has the right to restrict its usage.
On a few occasions at work, I needed some encryption and compression routines that I knew were available in some GPL-licensed libraries. I would have needed to make minor improvements over the existing GPL code for the routines to suite my purposes. However, I could not make use of this opportunity to use and improve the existing code. I think that it is ridiculous that 50 million lines of proprietary code that cost millions of dollars to write should suddenly become available to all just because a 200 line compression routine was used. I would have been more than happy to give back my improvements on the compression routines to the public. Instead, I had to purchase third party software and integrate that into our distribution. It is not the cost of the third party software that's the problem, but that each third party dependency destabilizes our software product and increases maintenance complexity.
I've been running XP SP1 for almost a year without any problems. I only bothered to upgrade to SP2 last week. I run the box behind a NAT router (no port forwarding, except for the few times I forward port 6881 for BitTorrent) and I also use a non-admin user for normal everyday use. I only log in as admin to install software or make configuration changes. Other than turning Symantec auto-updates, I don't bother with the security of this box too often.
The point is, doing a few simple things can keep a not-so-updated version of Windows XP safe. I even use IE to browse pr0n sites and malicious ActiveX's won't even install. The only thing that I pick up is the occasional spyware cookie, which I doesn't really bother me.
The default settings caused logging in and out of a machine to take at least five times longer than pre-Mozilla
Thanks for the info. We use roaming profiles at work and I installed Firefox some time back. Soon after that, it started taking 5 minutes for me to log off Windows. After reading this, I peeked into the my user profile and found over 500 MB of cached junk in the Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox folder!
Another thing that would help Mozilla is some kind of toolkit that would make plugins as easy to write and deploy as ActiveX controls. In the business environment, there are many instances where trusted thick-client code need to be deployed over the web simply because HTML based technologies are not good enough (e.g. a trading book application with a grid of 1000 rows by 500 columns). Many of these IE-only sites are password protected https sites that most outsiders never know about because they serve private clients, but there are many of them out there.
Yes, this is especially true for setup patterns that trigger a long term trend. However, when this happens it also means that short term traders trading off short term patterns are getting killed.
And you're kind of wrong in a third way too; if I buy $100 of Yahoo stock post-IPO, I'm buying them from some other guy who might be using that money to invest elsewhere.
I think you missed the point. If you buy Yahoo! post-IPO, you are still contributing to raising its price in the secondary markets. Yahoo! (or for that matter anyone else who owns the shares) can use it to purchase other securities or fund investements.
You are obviously not too familiar with securities swaps. I work in the financial software industry and recently completed a complex module in which institutional investors can pucharse IPO shares from the underwriting syndicate in terms of shares of another company. Swaps are not just done in the fixed income worlds(bonds) but also in equities (stock, convertibles, etc.)
While I don't really know about CPU design, I'd say that this is a possible reason for stopping clock improvements, since as speed gets higher, latency would keep growing.
Which is where the L2 cache plays an important role. The combination of both the speed and size matter. In fact, the newer 3.0 GHz Prescott core with 1MB L2 is typically slower than the older 3.0 GHz Northwood with only a 512K L2. This is so because Intel had to slow down the Prescott's L2 to 70% of the Northwoods in order to keep the core from overheating, to the extent that it more than offset the advantage of the larger size.
At home I run a small farm of overclocked P4 3.0s for a DC project. I have a mix of both cores, and it is obvious that the newer core is slower and has less headroom for overclocking .
how else are you supposed to navigate the internet????
There are more effective ways to navigate the internet.
For http services, try search engines. Much more effective than randomly scanning hosts for open port 80. For other services like ftp, if the owner of the host really intended for the service to be used by the general public, it is probably listed on some web page with a description of the contents.
If you are more interested in the fact that my host has an open port XXX than the actual content behind port XXX, then I question your motives. If you are looking for open ports on my host associated with services without content (such as 25, 1080), again I ask you why? If I never told you you could use my open relay, you really should not (even if I didn't know I had one running).
Slashdot Mirror
I think at the moment, the order goes Exxon, Microsoft, PetroChina, then Apple.
That probably means that there is not much more upside for Apple shares. For the most part, they are selling expensive consumer toys that people can live without. Look at the products associated with the other companies on the list. If the consumer should ever lose discretionary spending power which company's products do you think they'd stop buying first?
Smallest EC2 instance costs us about $100/month + change to run 24/7. Almost the price of a low-end dedicated server.
I recently finished this site: http://www.oneofakindpasta.com/
... maybe CSS isn't so bad after all.
I don't really consider myself a UI person nor a big fan of CSS, but at work I am forced to review code written by junior web developers so I've seen many good and bad examples of CSS. I looked at the source of the site and I have to say that it uses CSS very elegantly. What really impressed me was the fact that it rendered almost perfectly on my Blackberry. I'm so tired of seeing regular sites crap out while rendering on the Blackberry and WAP-specific sites only using the left third of the display. Hmmm
Big deal. So you just see more line-backers on your football games (and basketball games).
I've been coding for Win32 for about 10 years now. I still prefer Visual C++ 6 over any of the .NET versions.
.NET. However, getting a 10 year old project written VC++ 6.0 to compile under VS.NET is no mean feat. For example, some of the ATL templates have changed over the years and may no longer be compatible with your code. For our case, we have decided to rewrite many of our legacy C++ applications as .NET managed code whenever major functionality was added.
Unfortunately, it is time to move on as Microsoft is dropping support for Visual Studio 6. If you do not want to write managed code, you can still use Visual C++
Unlike working in Java you can't dig into the class library source code
.NET Reflector 4.0? The disassembled code should be fairly readable to give you an idea of what it does.
Can't you just use the IL Disassembler with
In 1994, 16MB desktop memory costs around $600. Now, you can get 2GB for under $200. It is not really unreasonable to expect newer software to be written in such a way to take advantage of this extra memory. There is really not much point in developing a generic desktop OS that can still fit into 16MB.
But since a cheesy little pull-down-generating server-side script is "programming," there's PHB-fodder about having already done dev work before all of the requirements are described.
... then ship it!
The flip side of this is that after showing marketing a semi-functional prototype that is pretty close to what they are looking for, there is often a tendency to assume that the project is near the code-complete phase and that a majority of the resources can be reallocated elsewhere. Just leave a couple of developers on the project to polish up the code and the installation program
Because of this, I usually like to leave an obvious (from the UI perspective) piece of functionality missing from the functional prototypes. This makes it clear to the management and marketing types that there is more work to be done. They don't really care that the prototype is non-scalable and has the web server making direct database calls, whereas the real implementation would need the web server going through middle-tier business components, data access layers, etc.
No, it did not really cross my mind at the time. I will consider this option should I come into a similar situation in future.
The point is I could have benefited and at the same time made a contribution back to the community if my company didn't have to give up the entire farm.
But if that one line is important enough to be used, then the author has the right to restrict its usage.
On a few occasions at work, I needed some encryption and compression routines that I knew were available in some GPL-licensed libraries. I would have needed to make minor improvements over the existing GPL code for the routines to suite my purposes. However, I could not make use of this opportunity to use and improve the existing code. I think that it is ridiculous that 50 million lines of proprietary code that cost millions of dollars to write should suddenly become available to all just because a 200 line compression routine was used. I would have been more than happy to give back my improvements on the compression routines to the public. Instead, I had to purchase third party software and integrate that into our distribution. It is not the cost of the third party software that's the problem, but that each third party dependency destabilizes our software product and increases maintenance complexity.
I've been running XP SP1 for almost a year without any problems. I only bothered to upgrade to SP2 last week. I run the box behind a NAT router (no port forwarding, except for the few times I forward port 6881 for BitTorrent) and I also use a non-admin user for normal everyday use. I only log in as admin to install software or make configuration changes. Other than turning Symantec auto-updates, I don't bother with the security of this box too often.
The point is, doing a few simple things can keep a not-so-updated version of Windows XP safe. I even use IE to browse pr0n sites and malicious ActiveX's won't even install. The only thing that I pick up is the occasional spyware cookie, which I doesn't really bother me.
The default settings caused logging in and out of a machine to take at least five times longer than pre-Mozilla
Thanks for the info. We use roaming profiles at work and I installed Firefox some time back. Soon after that, it started taking 5 minutes for me to log off Windows. After reading this, I peeked into the my user profile and found over 500 MB of cached junk in the Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox folder!
Another thing that would help Mozilla is some kind of toolkit that would make plugins as easy to write and deploy as ActiveX controls. In the business environment, there are many instances where trusted thick-client code need to be deployed over the web simply because HTML based technologies are not good enough (e.g. a trading book application with a grid of 1000 rows by 500 columns). Many of these IE-only sites are password protected https sites that most outsiders never know about because they serve private clients, but there are many of them out there.
Yes, this is especially true for setup patterns that trigger a long term trend. However, when this happens it also means that short term traders trading off short term patterns are getting killed.
And you're kind of wrong in a third way too; if I buy $100 of Yahoo stock post-IPO, I'm buying them from some other guy who might be using that money to invest elsewhere.
I think you missed the point. If you buy Yahoo! post-IPO, you are still contributing to raising its price in the secondary markets. Yahoo! (or for that matter anyone else who owns the shares) can use it to purchase other securities or fund investements.
You are obviously not too familiar with securities swaps. I work in the financial software industry and recently completed a complex module in which institutional investors can pucharse IPO shares from the underwriting syndicate in terms of shares of another company. Swaps are not just done in the fixed income worlds(bonds) but also in equities (stock, convertibles, etc.)
While I don't really know about CPU design, I'd say that this is a possible reason for stopping clock improvements, since as speed gets higher, latency would keep growing.
Which is where the L2 cache plays an important role. The combination of both the speed and size matter. In fact, the newer 3.0 GHz Prescott core with 1MB L2 is typically slower than the older 3.0 GHz Northwood with only a 512K L2. This is so because Intel had to slow down the Prescott's L2 to 70% of the Northwoods in order to keep the core from overheating, to the extent that it more than offset the advantage of the larger size.
At home I run a small farm of overclocked P4 3.0s for a DC project. I have a mix of both cores, and it is obvious that the newer core is slower and has less headroom for overclocking .
how else are you supposed to navigate the internet????
There are more effective ways to navigate the internet.
For http services, try search engines. Much more effective than randomly scanning hosts for open port 80. For other services like ftp, if the owner of the host really intended for the service to be used by the general public, it is probably listed on some web page with a description of the contents. If you are more interested in the fact that my host has an open port XXX than the actual content behind port XXX, then I question your motives. If you are looking for open ports on my host associated with services without content (such as 25, 1080), again I ask you why? If I never told you you could use my open relay, you really should not (even if I didn't know I had one running).