Comment Cleveland! (Score 1) 127
Cleveland has a growing technology sector. It's highly affordable, we have awesome restaurants and breweries and fantastic cultural sights (art museum, PlayhouseSquare, etc.).
Comment Re: Of two minds (Score 1) 331
Correct. The IDE runs only on WinXP. 7, 8, 10, no go.
Comment 25+ years (Score 2) 620
I was working in a system in 2009 which had code commits as far back as 1983.
Comment Re: US: Welcome to the present (Score 2) 449
We have neither the money nor the vacation time to go anywhere.
Comment SimCity (Score 5, Informative) 429
If I learned anything from SimCity it was to never let your reactor stay online beyond its intended life - unless you have disasters turned off, of course.
Comment Source Code License (Score 3, Interesting) 265
This brings up a question. My organization replaced our old ERP and CRM-like system which was bought 20 years ago with the source code and heavily customized. The administration (through thir consultants-ugh) declined to buy the source code licenses for the new applications because "modern organizations don't buy source code licenses anymore." Now, predictably, people are upset because we cannot tailor the apps to our business rules. My question is whether the statement of the consultant is crap or not: do companies nor buy the source code license and solely rely on vendors to make changes via upgrades or custom programming?
Comment Lockheed Martin (Score 5, Insightful) 186
Looking at the NARA article, as soon as I saw that some big IT contract was given to Lockheed Martin I saw all I needed to know about this initiative.
Comment Tweaking and submitting (Score 2) 306
Tweaking and submitting would be removing the plagiarism, which would still be caught on the instructor side. I fail to see the conflict here.
Submission + - Do You Buy the Source License for Your Vendor Apps
dg41 writes: I work for a large inner-city school district. Recently, we implemented two new enterprise systems to replace our in-house systems for tracking student and financial data. We had developed our previous system over 15 years, and had made several customizations to the source code to meet our business needs. With our new systems, our management was told that organizations don't buy source code licenses for enterprise apps anymore. While the application's source code license is available, management doesn't see its purchase as a priority. My question is, for your vendor applications, do you buy the source code license? If you do, do you use it to determine how the application functions, or do you actually make changes to their source? In your experience, do vendors accept customer patches and integrate it into their base product, like an open-source project?
Journal Journal: So long, slashdot 5
This account will be inactive starting today, May 22 2011.
Slashdot has gained over a million new users since I joined a few years ago, and those users include so many wannabes, trolls, and astroturfers. Slashdot has gone from being a place with many knowledgeable regulars to a place where trolling, "snarkiness", fanbois, and haters are together the majority, all but drowning out the voices of the more knowledgeable and serious.
Comment All well and good until... (Score 1) 124
This is all well-and-good until someone accidentally knocks out the power. Then all of that stuff needs recomputed if it's not stored to disk.
Comment At least you have one (Score 1) 244
Our legacy system was a "hey only one person can write files to this directory but you can copy the files to this directory for developmenstuction" setup. When I mentioned source control I was looked at like I was the new kid telling them what to do because they had no problems with their current system (in their minds). Rough stuff.
Comment The lost city of... (Score 1) 309
Atlanta!
One Year Later, USPS Looks Into Gamefly Complaint 183
Last April, we discussed news that video game rental service GameFly had complained to the USPS that a large quantity of their game discs were broken in transit, accusing the postal service of giving preferential treatment to more traditional DVD rental companies like Netflix. Now, just over a year later, an anonymous reader sends word that the USPS has responded with a detailed inquiry into GameFly's situation (PDF). The inquiry's 46 questions (many of which are multi-part) cover just about everything you could imagine concerning GameFly's distribution methods. Most of them are simple, yet painstaking, in a way only government agencies can manage. Here are a few of them:
"What threshold does GameFly consider to be an acceptable loss/theft rate? Please provide the research that determined this rate. ... What is the transportation cost incurred by GameFly to transport its mail from each GameFly distribution center to the postal facility used by that distribution center? ... Please describe the total cost that GameFly would incur if it expanded its distribution network to sixty or one hundred twenty locations. In your answer, please itemize costs separately. ... Does the age of a gaming DVD or the number of times played have more effect on the average life cycle of a gaming DVD?"
The Neo-Geo Song 70
At least 50% of my paychecks would be converted into tokens and put into one of many Neo-Geo machines at the arcade when I was in high school. It's good that my favorite old games finally have an anthem.
