As another poster mentions, pneumatic valve actuation in motorsports is not to meant to do away with fixed cam timing -- there's still a conventional camshaft present. In F1, MotoGP and similar sports, pneumatic valves are there to be able to run engines at higher rpm (> 18,000 rpm) without valve float, which is what happens when you rely on spring-actuated valve return. In sporting applications, it's not so bad to have fixed valve timing, so long as you have fine control of ignition timing and dynamic fuel maps.

Camless engines have been tried by BMW and maybe others in 1980's using electromagnetic actuation with computer controlled timing. I believe it didn't work well with the manufacturing and materials of the time. Another approach was tried by Lamborghini with a mechanical camshaft that had variable lobe profile from side to side and the camshaft could slide back and forth with servo motor that was computer controlled to maintain a match between effective cam lobe and rpm. Would be very interesting to see a system like that pushed further with modern electronics and metallurgy.

And of course we already have total cylinder shutdown on many production vehicles. I think this is generally done through hydraulic valve lifters that can be manipulated by cutting off oil pressure and closing the valve (no air or fuel gets in, but maybe a secondary compression release valve is opened).

You can use free email providers without their GUI. Use IMAP and SMTP. Google, Yahoo, and AOL all offer it.

I don't understand why there's such a hard push to get more women involved in IT. But whatever, I'm wondering about this point about making an impact. I work for an ed-tech company. No company is perfect or without its share of strife or controversy, but most of us still feel some kind of connection to the mission and cautiously relish the notion that our work is at least not meaningless or worse -- actively contributing to societal problems. We have folks who came to us from the public sector as well as big technology companies and finance. Many took a pay cut. Many of us volunteer outside of work. I think we have a somewhat higher-than-usual contingent of women within engineering, but I don't think about it often. What I do notice is that even when the work is stressful or other problems flare up, I love the people I work with. I have been in software engineering from the start and am now about halfway through my career. Having been in a few different start-ups and some bigger companies, I haven't felt as good about working for a corporation as I do now on a personal level in a long time -- not since the days when I was working for a small start-up with an equally socially conscious mission. I didn't think I would find that feeling again, but I have and it makes a big difference for me as a person and as a techie.

Beautifully said! It's unfortunate that density (terseness) is frequently brought out under the auspices of "power".

It's sometimes referred to as "a sense of direction". You can memorize major interchanges or other key points you need to hit. Getting a little off course along the way doesn't need to invalidate your whole plan. Anyway, it's not an all or nothing proposition. I've benefited from others' GPS gadgets and I've also seen GPS gadgets fail, lose power, go missing, or be inadequate in some other way. It's nice to know how to use technology and how to support yourself if it isn't available.

You're asking two questions:

Why would North Korea attempt this, if it was indeed them?

North Korean society is not as isolated as it once was, in part thanks to smuggled IT, especially on the borders. North Korean population is starting to watch South Korean television and generally consume international news sources more and more, which means North Korean leadership is either finding themselves the ones at a certain informational disadvantage, not quite knowing if they are sitting on a powder keg of dissent, or they feel they know what's going on and want to reign public opinion in. Either way, showing they are still a player on the international stage, even with something so ridiculous as a "made you look" kind of stunt, probably does the job, sad as it is.

How would US investigators know that it is North Korea, if it was indeed them?

Not everything is being disclosed. It's possible that the investigators or those in charge of public relations on the western side are overplaying strength of evidence. In some way, if there is a desire to tie this to North Korean, then this is a perfect opportunity, regardless of whether it can proven or not. In that way, it makes sense from an international relations point of view. At the same time, there may well be counter-intelligence shedding light on this, that the western authorities don't feel they can disclose. What's peculiar about that, is that situations like this give governments good information without ability to act on it for fear of erasing an intelligence advantage somewhere else. This was the case with the Rosenbergs. At the time of their conviction and execution, intelligence officials knew of their innocence, but the evidence for that was obtained through covert means and could not have been used, thus the tragic events were allowed to unfold. In the end, it's very hard for anyone not involved in this to parse out what's really going on.

It should probably use all of those data points. Sometimes people want to branch off the main thread of discussion. Letting users create a new thread by changing the subject is a nice intuitive work flow.

Part of the problem is that a lot of standards around email are very old and focus on the mechanics of composing, transmitting, and accessing individual messages. If you're in the business of modernizing or even simply creating a normal modern email client, when it comes to more recent concepts like conversation threads, HTML, address books, calendar integration, documents, and other collaborative workflows, things aren't so clear. On the one hand, there are guidelines and room to innovate, on the other hand some ecosystems proliferate specific patterns that don't work at all in other ecosystems, but both are called email. The calendars are handled in Google domains vs Exchange are not the same, while solving same basic problems.

I had an interesting experience at my company this year. We switched from Exchange to Gmail and many people were initially excited about the possibility of using their own email clients of choice. It was always known that even if this was possible, many of our normal workflows would require using web interfaces beyond the native client. But even with that caveat, in the end our IT decided not to open IMAP to us for fear of end-user problems or complications they did not want to be responsible for.

Seems like there aren't many responses here talking about columnar databases. This a class of relational databases very well suited for data warehousing. I have been working with Vertica, which is a proprietary technology, but the license terms are much more favorable and fair than what you get out of Oracle (they aren't comparable anyway). It's a mindset change when you get into columnar databases, but on the whole they can be simpler than what you get trying to tune a traditional relational database for big data warehousing purposes.

You will still need to think about your ETL and reporting technologies. This can be difficult depending on the nature and stability of your data and reporting customers' needs. On the whole, some things to think about are adherence to standards, not being afraid to operate multiple data marts, separating different reporting functions into different applications (internal vs external, raw data extracts vs analytics, etc.), and look at some map-reduce technologies (some shared-nothing databases give you that under the hood for free, some make it explicit, like Hadoop).

I love nedit also. Nobody seems to be familiar with it, but between the editor and all the standard POSIX and modern version control commands, I don't know what else I need unless there is a complicated SDK involved.

This is barely a real problem. As someone else mentioned, it's not difficult to use revision numbers. Even today, there are inventory systems that understand compatibility between aftermarket manufacturers and OEM. I worked on a rudimentary system like that myself -- it's not rocket science. But there may be two things in this particular story that are worth looking into:

Firstly, did GM or its suppliers intentionally reuse a part number to obfuscate the change in design tied to known safety issues. Not saying they did. Maybe they didn't, but it would be great to clear that up in open court.

Secondly, is there a standard industry practice to reuse part numbers in general, where part numbers become misleading in relation to fit or compatibility? There is sometimes incentive on the part of manufacturers to publish obfuscated specifications or withhold this kind of information altogether as an anti-competitive measure against small repair shops (in favor of dealer networks) or to undercut aftermarket manufacturers' ability to improve on original designs.

It seems Yahoo have made IMAP access to email free.

I used to not have to go to too many meetings and the ones I attended were often superfluous and not targeted -- just like what you're describing. Right now I find myself in a role that requires me to attend and lead a lot of meetings. Some days, all I do is talk and listen to others. There is a skill in getting the most out of a meeting and assembling them such that they are productive and minimally invasive to other people's workload. A badly prepared meeting is terrible and can often be handled with chat, email, or phone. But I've also been in many 30 minute face-to-face conversations, often in front of a whiteboard, that quickly revealed important information, honed in on some bigger reality or idea than what any one participant had coming into it, or prevented a huge mistake -- all in a timely manner in way that could not have been done any other way. Meetings like that need the right people in the room, no other people in the room, and everyone to be focused and open-minded. Acting smug or bored as though this time spent is not real work sabotages it for everyone and indeed turns into a waste of time. But it's not the fault of the meeting, but of the individual unwilling to work with others.

I disagree with much of this. Naming things after discoverers is no worse than what's going on now with names for important libraries, frameworks, or products. Why should I make celery part of my architecture? I like tomatoes better anyway. Single-letter symbols can be confusing when used to denote specific things, but when applies to abstractions, computer science does the same thing. A good example of the latter is the contrast between common style conventions for Java class names as opposed to generics arguments. In mathematics, especially applied mathematics like engineering, more concrete variables are often given subscripts or longer variable symbols. Here's a good example.

Interesting point. My organization is probably neither on the forefront nor stuck in the past when it comes to enterprise architecture and development process. But what I'm witnessing is a desire to empower teams while maintaining a coherent operations structure. We want the best of both worlds -- flexible resource allocation and scaling, yet individualized development environments designed to fulfill needs of teams focused on specific areas of the whole enterprise before getting their stuff to a bigger integration point. Going ever deeper down the VM rabbit hole is how we plan to do it.

Not all organizations have the same needs, but this additional tier of virtualization is an interesting proposition. On the one hand, it has a lot of potential. On the other hand, we are already struggling to understand what goes on in our production environment during critical performance times or when troubleshooting complex problems or incidents. Are we overengineering it? Time will tell.

I suppose a lot depends on your definition of illiteracy. When I said "can't read", I meant "can't read". As in, cannot make sense of a paragraph of text and the school system is not going to help them. I know this because I work in the education industry and my wife is a teacher herself. We're not talking about "doesn't meet grade standard". We're talking about generations of kids leaving each successive grade further away from being able to succeed, nay function, in society and the schools still pouring all resources into additional assessing of kids without additional teaching. Was this your experience in school? It wasn't mine. Because I was fortunate enough to have been shielded from those schools by adults in my life who put me on a different path and made sure I stayed there. We're not talking about better schools and worse schools. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of forgotten kids without a future. If you want to compare that with the Middle Ages and say that our job is done, I call BS. People are suffering, so our job is not done. And what used to exist even less than a century ago, was a network of personal training through apprenticeships that all but guaranteed some decent living standard. This does not exist anymore.

No, we don't all have it easy. Some of us do. You're speculating about the rest despite your smiley. Ever worked a minimum wage job for 60 hours a week outdoors without additional prospects? Ever got sick and couldn't do anything about it? Ever live with constant fear of the next day?

Is that the bar you'd like to set for ourselves as a society? That we barely keep our destitute breathing?