The findings of the study states the exact opposite of the headline and the link to the article. But I supose the current headline does have a certain...'truthiness' to it that will help drive up click throughs.
I guess some of these groups have a rather large following, but how about actually linking to their page or to a wiki that describes what they do? For those of us lazy American's too lazy to cut and paste.
I have to work with a 3rd party database where all table names are 3 or 4 characters and all begin with the letter 'r'
I kid you not. rls for lease info, rlsb for additional lease info, rhs for historical lease info, rar for invoice info, rarb for invoice assessment info and on and on. I swear someone was on crack when they made that decision.
That's the same kind of crap my supervisor is sticking too. Word docs in random places on the network. A few months ago he decided to reorganize them. That royally screwed with everyone and we are still having issues finding documents. Even with Google Desktop installed (the only way I could handle this crap) I still wind up grabbing cached copies half the time.
We have no change tracking, no access control, no versioning, etc... on most of the docs. Some of the docs are checked into Visual Source Safe, which is atleast something, but it means making a one line change to a document is now a 5 minute process. The supervisor is very insistant that 'Track Changes' is turned on, even though it makes documents un-readable, and provides no real value for version tracking on the document.
In any case, documentation through assorted Word documents has to be one of the worst solutions I've had to deal with in an enterprise environment. Even Lotus Notes has better tools for this type of information colaboration.
"Now, the bad part is, we want to create "God Books" for each one of our servers detailing EVERYTHING about it and how to bring it back from the dead, if needed."
It's called Norton Ghost;)
But yeah, that documentation is incredibly helpful if you need to build the same functionality on new hardware, or if you need to upgrade a system.
I'm working hard at convincing my management to impliment a Wikipedia style documentation system. I've demoed some of the possibilities and it looks like a great tool for it. So good that I've recently installed Media Wiki for another large company looking for a documentation system. For its ease of use, configurability, and built in functionality, it is truely a great tool.
Now if I can just convince the last supervisor that Media Wiki is better than MS Word with Track Changes turned on (shudder!).
Unless they specificly said that they want to see a sample that shows your understanding of x, y, and z, that is exactly what it is.
Exceptional code may be worth its weight in gold, but maintainable code is worth its weight in diamonds.
Comment your code blocks, ensure proper indention, use hungarian notation for your variable names (or any standard, just be consistant through out!), etc... Clean, ledgible, and easily understood is the key to a good 'demo' app.
The purpose of a code sample isn't to check your understanding of complexe theory, or your ability to whip out amazing code. It's a quick quality check. I ask for a code sample usually, not to check for skill, but to check for finish. Are variables named appropriately? Are methods and members appropriately commented? Are stack limits checked? etc... nothing real fancy, just a quick snippet to make sure the coder can produce maintainable code.
I think the last time I handed someone a code sample it was a very simple contact list app. Nothing more than a hand full of textboxes and a tiny data layer that talked to Access. Took maybe 4 hours to write. There was nothing fancy or impressive in the code, but I spent the majority of the time making sure that the code was consistantly written and inline with most industry standards.
It's been a good while since I looked into wind, but I remember a wind mapping study that estimated the state of South Dakata has enough potential wind energy to power the entire western half of the US. But as you found out, at this point, it's just not economical to do. And with the huge supply of coal we have, it wont be economical for another 100 years.
I feel your pain. That situation was a bit of a hypothetical. I've spent a good portion of my day flipping through bug reports that the users have submitted as "Incorrect functionality." I open the documentation to find what the correct functionality is only to find that the situation is either not documented, or documented saying the exact opposite.
A very good point! Although I wouldn't say the two sets are completely disconnected. Developing an application in VB6 (shudder) is vastly different than developing an app in VB.Net/C#/Java. Both of which differ greatly from developing ASP.Net/JSP. There is overlap though, and I agree that there is not a need for each language to have it's own development book.
I would strongly disagree with that statement. There will always be a debate as to whether a CS degree is an engineering degree, but the act of engineering a solution is greatly different than that of following a very specific set of instruction to create code.
I disagree with your assessment. I have known numerous great coders. But there is a huge difference between a software developer and a coder. Developing software takes a significantly larger knowledge body than coding. Sure, I can grab a few top-of-their-class code gurus, stick them in a dungeon with jolt and an complete requirements list and expect a somewhat decent application. But what about gathering and assessing that requirements list? developing a test plan? determining differences between the spec and the user's needs? implementing a maintenance strategy... the list goes on and on. A good programmer will give you good code. A good developer will give you a good product.
There are thousands of books on programing in different languages. The same 'Hello World' code slapped into chapter 1 of each of them. But how many books are there that can help a good programmer become a good developer?
With a preface like this: Knowing him to be an intelligent and helpful member of the Groovy development team, I rushed to suggest that I could review it for him. I assumed this would be a bit of a biased review. I think your assessment is accurate. The review author is ass sucking and complains only when he realised he got a hair in his mouth.
Not saying it's a bad book. I agree strongly with his statement about recent college grads needing more knowledge about how to develop software. It's just hard to take the review serious with the bias that came along with it.
One of my papers in college was on the feasability of distributed electricity generation and I came to 3 primary conclusions:
1) Centralized energy generation is usually cleaner and more efficient 2) The price of silicone limits the adaptation of building integrated solar arrays (solar shingles for instance) 3) Distributed electricity generation will not likely replace the need for centralized energy generation, but it can reduce the need for MORE centralized energy generation as demand grows.
There have since been some great advances in photo voltaic cells that have increased efficiency and decreased silicon requirements. And with government/industry incentives, replacing an ageing roof with a new photovoltaic roof is getting competetive against a standard replacement roof.
. Converting a perfectly viable fuel like Alcohol into hydrogen is pointless: You lose energy in the conversion and you still release the carbon into the atmosphere.
The carbon you are releasing is carbon that has already been removed from the atmosphere. It's called 'Carbon-nuetral' for a reason.
reducing the overall energy yield from the raw fuel and still not reducing carbon emissions.
Reducing energy yield, yes. Reducing efficiency, no. Hydrogen/electric cars are significantly more efficient than gas ICE cars. So while you have less energy to use when you put the fuel in the vehicle, you use less energy to get the same output from the vehicle using hydrogen.
Metal hydride storage uses some pretty expensive, toxic and dangerous materials and still does not achieve the hydrogen storage density of more common and safer-to-handle fuels such as gasoline and diesel fuel.
This is a technical problem awaiting a solution. Same as the efficiency of harvesting hydrogen. Using current technology, it would be impossible to replace 100% of the US's road fleet with hydrogen. But, given 20 years of technology and investment, I wouldn't be surprised to see 30% of the US's road fleet to be replaced by hydrogen.
People love to shoot down alternative fuels because they aren't able to replace ALL of the vehicles on the road. It drives me crazy. There is no singular fuel source that will. Sure Diesel's can use soy and algae, but you'll be hard pressed to get the fuel production high enough to grow the diesel market greatly. Ethanol is a craptastic option (in the US) but it will reduce the consumption of petroleum gasoline. Improvements in the quantity and cleanliness of centralized power production will also help pave the way for pure electric vehicles. No single option will be able to replace 100% of our current petrol based fuel economy, but a combination of all of them will likely replace enough of the market, that the instability in the oil segment will be heavily mitigated.
uhg, my inability to express this analogy is frustrating me. Your first paragraph is what I was posting about. If the only change enacted on the environment is to melt either the submerged, or non-submerged ice, and no other effect is allowed.
While I was writing it, I was applying the logic such that you could replace the submerged half of the formula with dry land. If you break it out into two sperate formulas (submerged ice melting reduced total volume, non-submerged ice melting increases total volume) and you can assume that the volume of water displaced equals the total volume of the ice above and below the water line, then you can state that: ice that is not submerged will increase the volume of water by the same amount as what it would have displaced if it were partially submerged, and the inverse of that for finding the volume of water displace by the submerged ice. When dealing with the two formulas together, the net change in a controled environment is 0.
Since you can then figure out water volume of non-submerged ice, you can then figure out how much volume you are adding to the water body by melting ice that is on dry land.
My ability to work formulas and functions far exceeds my ability to express those formulas in the english language.;) So here's a picture of what I was attempting to express.
Ice ~~~ = No change in sea level (or extremely small change) Ice
I assure you my comprehension of high school physics is not in question;) My ability to express that knowledge using the english language (I claim Pascal as my native tongue:P) can most definately be questioned.
If you melt _only_ the sumbmerged ice, the water volume will decrease. If you melt _only_ the ice above the water, the water volume will increase. Obviously this is not actually possible to do, I was attempting to express that the melting of ice over water does not matter as the total change is negligable. But if you melt ice that isn't supported by water, the total water volume will increase.
Exactly. If you melt _only_ the ice that is below the water line, you will have less total volume than you did with the ice. If you melt _only_ the ice that is above the waterline, you will have more total volume than you did with the ice. If you melt _all_ of the ice, both above and below the waterline, you will have virtually the same volume. I say virtually and negligable because there will be other effects that take place in the real world that also affect local sea level. Not a huge amount mind you, but likely more than a nanometer;)
Yes, which means the same mass takes more volume. When submerged ice (the majority of the ice in question) melts, it becomes more dense (same mass, less volume) which means it actually LOWERS the water level. Add in the amount of ice that is above water in the Artic channel, and the total change in water levels will be negligible.
I think someone missed the sarcasm in that post. Point being, they are almost always NOT in their right to say that so-and-so behavior isn't acceptable in public. Public decency is a very touchy subject, and any legal limitations on non-endangering public activity needs to be scrutinized with extreme care.
Slashdot Mirror
The findings of the study states the exact opposite of the headline and the link to the article. But I supose the current headline does have a certain...'truthiness' to it that will help drive up click throughs.
-Rick
Defining key terms, expressing measurements in standard and metric, appropriate link to the article. Well done!
-Rick
I guess some of these groups have a rather large following, but how about actually linking to their page or to a wiki that describes what they do? For those of us lazy American's too lazy to cut and paste.
-Rick
I have to work with a 3rd party database where all table names are 3 or 4 characters and all begin with the letter 'r'
I kid you not. rls for lease info, rlsb for additional lease info, rhs for historical lease info, rar for invoice info, rarb for invoice assessment info and on and on. I swear someone was on crack when they made that decision.
-Rick
Media Wiki does 2/3 of that. I've seen it successfully set up on both LAMP and WIMP systems.
-Rick
That's the same kind of crap my supervisor is sticking too. Word docs in random places on the network. A few months ago he decided to reorganize them. That royally screwed with everyone and we are still having issues finding documents. Even with Google Desktop installed (the only way I could handle this crap) I still wind up grabbing cached copies half the time.
We have no change tracking, no access control, no versioning, etc... on most of the docs. Some of the docs are checked into Visual Source Safe, which is atleast something, but it means making a one line change to a document is now a 5 minute process. The supervisor is very insistant that 'Track Changes' is turned on, even though it makes documents un-readable, and provides no real value for version tracking on the document.
In any case, documentation through assorted Word documents has to be one of the worst solutions I've had to deal with in an enterprise environment. Even Lotus Notes has better tools for this type of information colaboration.
-Rick
"Now, the bad part is, we want to create "God Books" for each one of our servers detailing EVERYTHING about it and how to bring it back from the dead, if needed."
;)
It's called Norton Ghost
But yeah, that documentation is incredibly helpful if you need to build the same functionality on new hardware, or if you need to upgrade a system.
-Rick
I'm working hard at convincing my management to impliment a Wikipedia style documentation system. I've demoed some of the possibilities and it looks like a great tool for it. So good that I've recently installed Media Wiki for another large company looking for a documentation system. For its ease of use, configurability, and built in functionality, it is truely a great tool.
Now if I can just convince the last supervisor that Media Wiki is better than MS Word with Track Changes turned on (shudder!).
-Rick
Unless they specificly said that they want to see a sample that shows your understanding of x, y, and z, that is exactly what it is.
Exceptional code may be worth its weight in gold, but maintainable code is worth its weight in diamonds.
Comment your code blocks, ensure proper indention, use hungarian notation for your variable names (or any standard, just be consistant through out!), etc... Clean, ledgible, and easily understood is the key to a good 'demo' app.
-Rick
The purpose of a code sample isn't to check your understanding of complexe theory, or your ability to whip out amazing code. It's a quick quality check. I ask for a code sample usually, not to check for skill, but to check for finish. Are variables named appropriately? Are methods and members appropriately commented? Are stack limits checked? etc... nothing real fancy, just a quick snippet to make sure the coder can produce maintainable code.
I think the last time I handed someone a code sample it was a very simple contact list app. Nothing more than a hand full of textboxes and a tiny data layer that talked to Access. Took maybe 4 hours to write. There was nothing fancy or impressive in the code, but I spent the majority of the time making sure that the code was consistantly written and inline with most industry standards.
-Rick
It's been a good while since I looked into wind, but I remember a wind mapping study that estimated the state of South Dakata has enough potential wind energy to power the entire western half of the US. But as you found out, at this point, it's just not economical to do. And with the huge supply of coal we have, it wont be economical for another 100 years.
-Rick
I feel your pain. That situation was a bit of a hypothetical. I've spent a good portion of my day flipping through bug reports that the users have submitted as "Incorrect functionality." I open the documentation to find what the correct functionality is only to find that the situation is either not documented, or documented saying the exact opposite.
-Rick
A very good point! Although I wouldn't say the two sets are completely disconnected. Developing an application in VB6 (shudder) is vastly different than developing an app in VB.Net/C#/Java. Both of which differ greatly from developing ASP.Net/JSP. There is overlap though, and I agree that there is not a need for each language to have it's own development book.
-Rick
I would strongly disagree with that statement. There will always be a debate as to whether a CS degree is an engineering degree, but the act of engineering a solution is greatly different than that of following a very specific set of instruction to create code.
-Rick
I disagree with your assessment. I have known numerous great coders. But there is a huge difference between a software developer and a coder. Developing software takes a significantly larger knowledge body than coding. Sure, I can grab a few top-of-their-class code gurus, stick them in a dungeon with jolt and an complete requirements list and expect a somewhat decent application. But what about gathering and assessing that requirements list? developing a test plan? determining differences between the spec and the user's needs? implementing a maintenance strategy... the list goes on and on. A good programmer will give you good code. A good developer will give you a good product.
There are thousands of books on programing in different languages. The same 'Hello World' code slapped into chapter 1 of each of them. But how many books are there that can help a good programmer become a good developer?
-Rick
With a preface like this: Knowing him to be an intelligent and helpful member of the Groovy development team, I rushed to suggest that I could review it for him. I assumed this would be a bit of a biased review. I think your assessment is accurate. The review author is ass sucking and complains only when he realised he got a hair in his mouth.
Not saying it's a bad book. I agree strongly with his statement about recent college grads needing more knowledge about how to develop software. It's just hard to take the review serious with the bias that came along with it.
-Rick
One of my papers in college was on the feasability of distributed electricity generation and I came to 3 primary conclusions:
1) Centralized energy generation is usually cleaner and more efficient
2) The price of silicone limits the adaptation of building integrated solar arrays (solar shingles for instance)
3) Distributed electricity generation will not likely replace the need for centralized energy generation, but it can reduce the need for MORE centralized energy generation as demand grows.
There have since been some great advances in photo voltaic cells that have increased efficiency and decreased silicon requirements. And with government/industry incentives, replacing an ageing roof with a new photovoltaic roof is getting competetive against a standard replacement roof.
-Rick
. Converting a perfectly viable fuel like Alcohol into hydrogen is pointless: You lose energy in the conversion and you still release the carbon into the atmosphere.
The carbon you are releasing is carbon that has already been removed from the atmosphere. It's called 'Carbon-nuetral' for a reason.
reducing the overall energy yield from the raw fuel and still not reducing carbon emissions.
Reducing energy yield, yes. Reducing efficiency, no. Hydrogen/electric cars are significantly more efficient than gas ICE cars. So while you have less energy to use when you put the fuel in the vehicle, you use less energy to get the same output from the vehicle using hydrogen.
Metal hydride storage uses some pretty expensive, toxic and dangerous materials and still does not achieve the hydrogen storage density of more common and safer-to-handle fuels such as gasoline and diesel fuel.
This is a technical problem awaiting a solution. Same as the efficiency of harvesting hydrogen. Using current technology, it would be impossible to replace 100% of the US's road fleet with hydrogen. But, given 20 years of technology and investment, I wouldn't be surprised to see 30% of the US's road fleet to be replaced by hydrogen.
People love to shoot down alternative fuels because they aren't able to replace ALL of the vehicles on the road. It drives me crazy. There is no singular fuel source that will. Sure Diesel's can use soy and algae, but you'll be hard pressed to get the fuel production high enough to grow the diesel market greatly. Ethanol is a craptastic option (in the US) but it will reduce the consumption of petroleum gasoline. Improvements in the quantity and cleanliness of centralized power production will also help pave the way for pure electric vehicles. No single option will be able to replace 100% of our current petrol based fuel economy, but a combination of all of them will likely replace enough of the market, that the instability in the oil segment will be heavily mitigated.
-Rick
Thanks, I needed a chuckle after this thread!
-Rick
uhg, my inability to express this analogy is frustrating me. Your first paragraph is what I was posting about. If the only change enacted on the environment is to melt either the submerged, or non-submerged ice, and no other effect is allowed.
While I was writing it, I was applying the logic such that you could replace the submerged half of the formula with dry land. If you break it out into two sperate formulas (submerged ice melting reduced total volume, non-submerged ice melting increases total volume) and you can assume that the volume of water displaced equals the total volume of the ice above and below the water line, then you can state that: ice that is not submerged will increase the volume of water by the same amount as what it would have displaced if it were partially submerged, and the inverse of that for finding the volume of water displace by the submerged ice. When dealing with the two formulas together, the net change in a controled environment is 0.
Since you can then figure out water volume of non-submerged ice, you can then figure out how much volume you are adding to the water body by melting ice that is on dry land.
-Rick
My ability to work formulas and functions far exceeds my ability to express those formulas in the english language. ;) So here's a picture of what I was attempting to express.
Ice
~~~ = No change in sea level (or extremely small change)
Ice
Ice
~~~ = Increase in sea level
Land
-Rick
I assure you my comprehension of high school physics is not in question ;) My ability to express that knowledge using the english language (I claim Pascal as my native tongue :P) can most definately be questioned.
If you melt _only_ the sumbmerged ice, the water volume will decrease. If you melt _only_ the ice above the water, the water volume will increase. Obviously this is not actually possible to do, I was attempting to express that the melting of ice over water does not matter as the total change is negligable. But if you melt ice that isn't supported by water, the total water volume will increase.
-Rick
Exactly. If you melt _only_ the ice that is below the water line, you will have less total volume than you did with the ice. If you melt _only_ the ice that is above the waterline, you will have more total volume than you did with the ice. If you melt _all_ of the ice, both above and below the waterline, you will have virtually the same volume. I say virtually and negligable because there will be other effects that take place in the real world that also affect local sea level. Not a huge amount mind you, but likely more than a nanometer ;)
-Rick
Yes, which means the same mass takes more volume. When submerged ice (the majority of the ice in question) melts, it becomes more dense (same mass, less volume) which means it actually LOWERS the water level. Add in the amount of ice that is above water in the Artic channel, and the total change in water levels will be negligible.
-Rick
I think someone missed the sarcasm in that post. Point being, they are almost always NOT in their right to say that so-and-so behavior isn't acceptable in public. Public decency is a very touchy subject, and any legal limitations on non-endangering public activity needs to be scrutinized with extreme care.
-Rick