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Comment Show Equal Investment in College Hires (Score 3, Insightful) 365

I'm fine with H1B sponsorship, so long as a company can show they put an equal about of time, money and resources into college hire and training programs. When I first started programming it was very common for me to see programming interns and college hires. I consult with many mid and large companies, and I haven't seen a programming intern in 7 years. I've seen two college hires in that time as well. At some point in the 2000s some bone headed bean counter figured they could pay an H1B about the same as a college hire. If that's the case, hire the "experienced" resource. The problem is that created a devastating hole in Junior level programmers for almost a decade. Now companies are finally starting to hire college folks again they want to increase the H1B levels again, and repeat the cycle over again.

Comment Re:The DC-10 was killed by poor management. (Score 1) 112

Was it an actual DC-10?

Delta operated the DC-10 twice, once on lease from United before the L-1011s could be delivered (retired in 77), and again when Delta acquired Western Airlines in 1987 (Retired a couple years later in 1989). They did keep the Lockhead L-1011s Tristars into the 2000s and they are often confused for the DC-10.

Comment Re:The DC-10 was killed by poor management. (Score 2) 112

Huh? Northwest Airlines flew them until 2007. What killed the plane for commercial service is the same thing that killed every other tri-jet. Third Engine meant higher costs both in terms of fuel and maintenance. On the other hand cargo airlines love the tri and quad jets because of the high MOTW and ALR ratings, plus they can buy them for a song in the secondary market.

Comment Sophos UTM - Turn Key - Free for Home Use (Score 1) 238

By far the best solution I've come across. It's a enterprise class product you can use at home for free. All you need is a PC with a couple NICs. I use a cheap fanless Dual Core 2GHZ Atom machine with a couple gig of RAM. It's a turn key solution with a lot of options.

It has all the whiz bang VPN and firewall features you'd want. Plus a bunch of intrusion detection, malware and virus features. Really the list feature list is huge. The only limit is the home edition is limited to 50 active devices.

Comment Re:Exactly: it's not about R, it's about statistic (Score 1) 387

Indeed. It helps that R is the learning language many stats programs use in college these days. Often the college kids no more than the experienced Matlab/SAS folks. It also helps that many "big data" databases will natively run R code. HP Vertica in fact will split and optimize R between all the nodes in the cluster.

R is definitely a language on the rise for big data applications.

Comment Re:Anthropometrics (Score 1) 819

American, Delta and United are the top three airlines in the US. Seat maps and seat assignments can change several times between time of purchase and flight. That's because routing can change every time there are Irregular Operations (IROPS) and the fleet movement changes to deal with it. I.e. Weather, Mechanical issues, etc.

None of the top three airlines have homogenous configurations. American is a mix of US Airways and American, United is a mix of Continental and United and Delta is a Mix of Northwest, TWA, and a slew of secondary market planes from Airtran, various Red Chinese carriers and European carriers and Delta.

Southwest only has 737s and coach class, but they have 5 different versions of that plane with drastically different capacities.

Comment Re:Anthropometrics (Score 1) 819

That's great, and I use these sites all the time. BUT, the majority of flyers are casual leisure passengers. They are unlikely to figure out which of the dozen 757 configurations Delta offers they are flying on. They just don't fly often enough. I think the model would be turned on it's head if minimum seat pitch was a required to be shown when presenting prices.

Comment Re:What's the point? (Score 1) 511

I think that's a pretty dated view of Java. If I'm writing a web service endpoint most of the heavy lifting happens with some very simple method/class @Annotations. My controller classes tend to be in the tens of lines, not hundreds of lines.

The days of writing a some inordinately overthought out factory pattern are long gone for a lot of stuff and the JVM does all sorts of optimizations to make the performance gap between VM and Native pretty small.

Comment Language VS The Virtual Machine VS Client (Score 4, Interesting) 511

There almost needs to be two separate considerations. From a language standpoint Java is a bit middle of the road. It has some well known pain factors, but more or less it's one of the easier OO languages to master. It's used in a lot of high profile web site.

The VM on the other hand does a lot of interesting things under the covers that make the language quite fast. When JRuby hit the scene it was faster than the core ruby project at quite a few things because the VM was doing all sorts of optimizations behind the scenes. Also, because the Java OP code is so stable with relatively few changes per major release you have a bit of a boom in languages you can run inside the Java VM. You get all the benefits of the R&D Sun and Oracle put into JIT, while retaining the ability to do interesting and contemporary things with your language.

Clojure, Groovy, Scala, Python being the primary languages with another 16 that can compile to Java Op code.

Were Java fails mostly is as a client application, running with some sort of Windows GUI. Sure, you can do it, but it realistically people who do Java Swing apps are writing some sort of thick client that could almost always could run inside a contemporary browser without any plugins.

Comment Re:There is a big construction boom in Germany... (Score 1) 442

The US has way more generation facilities that it really needs. The issue is entirely political with the 500 or so companies that make of the "grid". You're unlikely to see a solution to that because it would put a number of facilities out of business.

I'd also point out that Germany's accelerated decommissioning of nuclear power plants (all shutdown in 8 years) has a lot more to do with the coal plants than the increase in renewables.

Comment Re:Expert?? (Score 3, Insightful) 442

To be fair the two largest HVAC providers in the US already offer predictive modeling services for regulating power consumption. Many times having complex interactions with market based supply/demand power pricing that's common in the commercial applications and buildings. We have models and systems already in the market place that take into account a number of these issues.

Currently in the HVAC arena all the predictive models are predicated on still storing the energy in the form of chilled water. The systems figure out demand for the next day and determine the optimal time at night to chill down thousands of gallons of water based on the market (or predicted market) off peak power prices.

Be that as it may we have off peak facilities for a reason. As you pointed out getting the grid to handle this would be no easy task. The grid is made of 500 or so different companies, most of which are only obligated to serve in the interest of the community it serves. As such we have way more generation capability than we have transmission capability. Good luck getting a majority of the companies to agree. Previous attempts by the feds to use it's power (2005 during the Bush administration) was thwarted by congress. So, I guess my main point is it's not a technology issue, we already do a lot of the stuff he's proposing in the off-peak market. What we have a political problem with transmission.

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