Many times a group is unwilling to submit comment/non-code changes for a module (due to the return values changing say) to source control because they don't want to have so many modules change for what they see as a "trivial" fix in another module. It's tough to get some of those changes through many review procedures and this is what causes comments in "callers" code to be outdated. Use the comments as a guide, not as gospel.
The biggest problem I have with going through code (as a contractor, I tend to read a lot of new "to me" code) is the case where you're dealing with 2nd or third generation code, the original developers are long gone, and the intent of the routines has changed but the header/interface comments have not. One has to read and understand the code in order to make the changes and while the comments might be helpful, they also might be outdated and wrong. Too many times I've found a comment beside a routine call that say one thing and when I go into the routine, find it's something totally different. I am especially careful about comments that talk about expected return values or side effects. These generally aren't a problem on release 1.0 code but there's a lot of jobs out there dealing with release 5 versions of things where the comments might not have kept pace with the product.
If we don't watch out, networks will go to the CNN format where the show is only a portion of the screen with crap in windows elsewhere. Think of what they could do by going to letterbox format and then using "banner advertisements" in the bands above and/or below. The up side to something like this is then we could get 30 minutes of programming instead of 22 in a half hour show.
Re:I don't remember any contractors at Lotus.
on
ORBZ Shuts Down
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5th and 6th floor 1RS/CAM. DomDoc, API group, DMS. Considering the mail servers were run by IS in LDB, I don't think you get much more mainstream than that. There were about 100+ of us contractors laidoff last July from Cambridge/Westford as part of the cost savings program.
As for Exchange, I don't hold that in high regard either. I had to write an interface to that as part of the Entrust project.
The DEC mail system wasn't a MS product either. Just real software written to fill a need, used daily by the entire company rather than written to fill a marketing brochure. The beep wasn't important, it was just the reassurance that the mail actually made it to the other end in a reasonable time. There was no reason for AIM or Sametime since the mail was just as reliable and there was no need question if it got there. Most of my days at DEC I rarely used a phone because the email was so much easier and less intrusive and the etiquette of timely reading/replying was in place. Spam was a thing of the future and generally email was considered something worthy of your attention.
I worked in Lotus for the last 6+ years as a contractor and was appalled at the mail system. I came out of a DEC/Compaq background and never realized how nice it was to send mail and here the "new mail" beeps within the group cubicles immediately after sending. Even within the mail group we had people that couldn't fix simple configurations on the servers and I think I got 3 "failure" messages about mail not getting out while I was running about 60% success rate on sending outside mail. I kept my external shell account so I could send mail I needed to make sure got there and never relied on the system for anything "timely". IBM has been a good influence on them in terms of software reliablity but there's an underlying problem with the software and IBM destroyed the Lotus culture that was the one positive about working there. I wouldn't imagine Domino has much of a future with WebSphere in the picture. Lotus software is looking more and more EOL.
A Smart USB hub with built in USB ID Masquerading.
Seriously, most manufacturers have used something similar to this in the past. They'll pick a custom connector that they hold the patent on or make the interface proprietary. This was the rage before PCs started pushing FOR standards in order to allow multiply sourced options.
While it is certainly possible to support the Wintel hardware world on a BSD basis for OS X, they lose all the capabilities they've been able to build into the system based on a known, limited hardware standard. There's a lot of duplicate effort that is saved by being able to specify the hardware features/interface instead of trying to accomodate it as it runs in different directions. If you support legacy Wintel boxes, you're going to dilute the effort to the point where OS X is just as mediocre as Windoze
Unless they paid money for it like all the big marketting firms do. This information has been available for sale for years. Amazon already keeps a history profile on us and markets it. How do you think they do the recommendations and the context sensitive banner ads. That information stopped being private years ago. You're just fighting it being given away for free.
It wouldn't be a violation if it doesn't cross into private areas or look at a specific subset of people involved. Surveillence in public areas isn't protected against
I was laid off with about 100 other contract workers last july. The market here is so depressed that the recruiters are leaving in droves. The few programming jobs that are getting posted are very vertical niches and as someone that always had a broad background in development, the positions are going to the couple of people that have been doing one thing for 15 years. it's tough going from $160k to unemployment when you've been working steady for 20+ years. Doesn't help when your kid's financial aid forms go back 3 years for income. So, here I am working with agencies that used to call weekly with people I've never heard of that have no idea what any of the buzzwords they get asked for mean. You want fries with that?
Yeah, we used to have company meetings on the days they washed our building windows because invariably the rope for the scaffolding hung in the line of sight.
And you're making the assumption that there isn't a queuing latency in your times as well. If it truely is a server farm then there is some overhead in getting the request serviced but that is included in the overhead of.2 or.6 seconds and their costs (remember we were talking DRAM versus HD) are reduced by being able to do the same job with less hardware (plus some percentage for hot spares and peak usage)
Do the math. If they can service your request in a third the time, they can service three times as many hits with the same hardware. We're talking maximum load, not your convenience
They make their money on hits served so speed is far more cost effective than cost of storage medium. If they can speed up serviing hits, they're ahead of the game.
The costs stated are the continuing costs of tracking the satellite versus turning a deaf ear and ignoring it. Deep Space Net time isn't free, they have to allocate it and maintain the dishes used.
One of the important things to remember is that just like Apollo 13, these guys are where they are for coming up with innovative fixes to tough problems. This is just another great rehearsal for a situation that could just as easily come up with human life at stake. This is why these guys are kept on the project long after the system gets put into cruise mode. It's just another case of "I've done so much with so little for so long that now I'm attempting the impossible with nothing." You have to push the boundries to find where they are in practice. Also, real problems are far more challenging than anything they might have considered in simulation.
I think the dawn of the decline was back in the laserdisk game days when games became series of decision points with binary outcomes. I can still remember standing next to players that were ranting "right left up left left" without anything like "shoot him and then go over there and get that one before he comes down this side". Certainly there were formulas for advancing levels in the shoot 'em ups but in the decision tree games there were limited numbers of paths that made the game a fixed sequence of meaningless moves far sooner. The video game escaped the randomness of the pinball game in order to limit playtime and generate revenue.
Yeah, that industry has been where he's rediscovered things we had in the 80s just to announce them as "new". I'm amazed that IJCAI didn't boo him off the stage but then again, it's a new Microsoft influenced generation from the AI heyday of the 80s
Which is why they take their time and choose their days. it was nice and clear and blue on saturday but they postponed due to high altitude clouds. Just like the shuttle, they have to consider the entire flightpath before launch.
Slashdot Mirror
Many times a group is unwilling to submit comment/non-code changes for a module (due to the return values changing say) to source control because they don't want to have so many modules change for what they see as a "trivial" fix in another module. It's tough to get some of those changes through many review procedures and this is what causes comments in "callers" code to be outdated. Use the comments as a guide, not as gospel.
The biggest problem I have with going through code (as a contractor, I tend to read a lot of new "to me" code) is the case where you're dealing with 2nd or third generation code, the original developers are long gone, and the intent of the routines has changed but the header/interface comments have not. One has to read and understand the code in order to make the changes and while the comments might be helpful, they also might be outdated and wrong. Too many times I've found a comment beside a routine call that say one thing and when I go into the routine, find it's something totally different. I am especially careful about comments that talk about expected return values or side effects. These generally aren't a problem on release 1.0 code but there's a lot of jobs out there dealing with release 5 versions of things where the comments might not have kept pace with the product.
If we don't watch out, networks will go to the CNN format where the show is only a portion of the screen with crap in windows elsewhere. Think of what they could do by going to letterbox format and then using "banner advertisements" in the bands above and/or below. The up side to something like this is then we could get 30 minutes of programming instead of 22 in a half hour show.
for your amusement
5th and 6th floor 1RS/CAM. DomDoc, API group, DMS. Considering the mail servers were run by IS in LDB, I don't think you get much more mainstream than that. There were about 100+ of us contractors laidoff last July from Cambridge/Westford as part of the cost savings program.
As for Exchange, I don't hold that in high regard either. I had to write an interface to that as part of the Entrust project.
The DEC mail system wasn't a MS product either. Just real software written to fill a need, used daily by the entire company rather than written to fill a marketing brochure. The beep wasn't important, it was just the reassurance that the mail actually made it to the other end in a reasonable time. There was no reason for AIM or Sametime since the mail was just as reliable and there was no need question if it got there. Most of my days at DEC I rarely used a phone because the email was so much easier and less intrusive and the etiquette of timely reading/replying was in place. Spam was a thing of the future and generally email was considered something worthy of your attention.
I worked in Lotus for the last 6+ years as a contractor and was appalled at the mail system. I came out of a DEC/Compaq background and never realized how nice it was to send mail and here the "new mail" beeps within the group cubicles immediately after sending. Even within the mail group we had people that couldn't fix simple configurations on the servers and I think I got 3 "failure" messages about mail not getting out while I was running about 60% success rate on sending outside mail. I kept my external shell account so I could send mail I needed to make sure got there and never relied on the system for anything "timely". IBM has been a good influence on them in terms of software reliablity but there's an underlying problem with the software and IBM destroyed the Lotus culture that was the one positive about working there. I wouldn't imagine Domino has much of a future with WebSphere in the picture. Lotus software is looking more and more EOL.
A Smart USB hub with built in USB ID Masquerading.
Seriously, most manufacturers have used something similar to this in the past. They'll pick a custom connector that they hold the patent on or make the interface proprietary. This was the rage before PCs started pushing FOR standards in order to allow multiply sourced options.
While it is certainly possible to support the Wintel hardware world on a BSD basis for OS X, they lose all the capabilities they've been able to build into the system based on a known, limited hardware standard. There's a lot of duplicate effort that is saved by being able to specify the hardware features/interface instead of trying to accomodate it as it runs in different directions. If you support legacy Wintel boxes, you're going to dilute the effort to the point where OS X is just as mediocre as Windoze
Unless they paid money for it like all the big marketting firms do. This information has been available for sale for years. Amazon already keeps a history profile on us and markets it. How do you think they do the recommendations and the context sensitive banner ads. That information stopped being private years ago. You're just fighting it being given away for free.
It wouldn't be a violation if it doesn't cross into private areas or look at a specific subset of people involved. Surveillence in public areas isn't protected against
I was laid off with about 100 other contract workers last july. The market here is so depressed that the recruiters are leaving in droves. The few programming jobs that are getting posted are very vertical niches and as someone that always had a broad background in development, the positions are going to the couple of people that have been doing one thing for 15 years. it's tough going from $160k to unemployment when you've been working steady for 20+ years. Doesn't help when your kid's financial aid forms go back 3 years for income. So, here I am working with agencies that used to call weekly with people I've never heard of that have no idea what any of the buzzwords they get asked for mean. You want fries with that?
Yeah, we used to have company meetings on the days they washed our building windows because invariably the rope for the scaffolding hung in the line of sight.
Why do you think they learn to fly inverted?
And you're making the assumption that there isn't a queuing latency in your times as well. If it truely is a server farm then there is some overhead in getting the request serviced but that is included in the overhead of .2 or .6 seconds and their costs (remember we were talking DRAM versus HD) are reduced by being able to do the same job with less hardware (plus some percentage for hot spares and peak usage)
Do the math. If they can service your request in a third the time, they can service three times as many hits with the same hardware. We're talking maximum load, not your convenience
They make their money on hits served so speed is far more cost effective than cost of storage medium. If they can speed up serviing hits, they're ahead of the game.
Ummmm... That's what this is? electro-magnetic propulsion of a magnetically levitated vehicle.
and flip off the offending drivers so you can keep both hands on the wheel?
It's the continuing cost of tracking that add up to the $12 million versus just turning it off.
The costs stated are the continuing costs of tracking the satellite versus turning a deaf ear and ignoring it. Deep Space Net time isn't free, they have to allocate it and maintain the dishes used.
One of the important things to remember is that just like Apollo 13, these guys are where they are for coming up with innovative fixes to tough problems. This is just another great rehearsal for a situation that could just as easily come up with human life at stake. This is why these guys are kept on the project long after the system gets put into cruise mode. It's just another case of "I've done so much with so little for so long that now I'm attempting the impossible with nothing." You have to push the boundries to find where they are in practice. Also, real problems are far more challenging than anything they might have considered in simulation.
I think the dawn of the decline was back in the laserdisk game days when games became series of decision points with binary outcomes. I can still remember standing next to players that were ranting "right left up left left" without anything like "shoot him and then go over there and get that one before he comes down this side". Certainly there were formulas for advancing levels in the shoot 'em ups but in the decision tree games there were limited numbers of paths that made the game a fixed sequence of meaningless moves far sooner. The video game escaped the randomness of the pinball game in order to limit playtime and generate revenue.
This plane is also in the running for the Mars flights. They did a balloon drop of an uppowered version to test it out. Started at 101k feet
p la ne/
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n0108/14mars
Yeah, that industry has been where he's rediscovered things we had in the 80s just to announce them as "new". I'm amazed that IJCAI didn't boo him off the stage but then again, it's a new Microsoft influenced generation from the AI heyday of the 80s
Which is why they take their time and choose their days. it was nice and clear and blue on saturday but they postponed due to high altitude clouds. Just like the shuttle, they have to consider the entire flightpath before launch.