Yep. People only call me at work when they really need get a hold of me. I accomplish this by not letting the company pay for a phone so it does not have to be listed on the company contact list and then I give out my number or call only those I trust with it.

My solution to the email flood is to use lots of server side rules. Most emails are moved immediately to some subfolder under my inbox unless I've whitelisted the person or subject for some reason. I can check the subfolder when I like but its not automatically synced to remote devices. The primary inbox is left for emails that are presumably worth an immediate notification. Automated reports and notices get their own private hole to reside in. Its a little bit of work but it has held up so far.

Symbolic links aka Junctions were added in Windows XP so it is a decade old at least. What is missing was a good built in tool to use them but that is what Mark Russinovich is for.

Each FS have their merits. I don't really need to have README.TXT, Readme.txt, readme.txt coexist in the same folder at the same time so I prefer that part of FAT32/NTFS anyway.

I total agree. My boss pretty much discarded his middle layer in geronimo and rewrote the php layer to directly use the database instead of webservice because performance was so poor on our critical monitoring website.

We use a lot of Java and it just sucks memory and performance like there is no tomorrow. We have one server that we just had to up the memory from 5 GB to 7 GB to 10 GB because the fracken java app was doing god knows what with what should be at most 500 MB of data. I'm sure its bad code and one day we will get a fix from the vendor but this is not the first time I've seen this though never of that magnitude.

On topic we also use a Java Webstart based thick-client HMI and not a week goes by that most I get one comment or another about how much memory it using on users desktops (minimum 256 but usually 400 or so) and how crappy it looks (using swing widgets). My laptop only has 2 GB and between this app, firefox and eclipse I have nothing left and for anything else and have to play games with what apps I have open or risk running off the swap drive. I've only ever used one Java client application that was so well performing, well behaved and nice looking that I didn't know it was Java and was surprised by it usually that is not the case.

I agree it will be rooted but also that Amazon will fight rooting like apple. I think the main reason though will be so people cannot circumvent the onscreen ads on lower price models which would be the first thing I would do. It will be interesting how this shakes out.

I couldn't say why some peoples eyes hurt since that is not my area of expertise but I can tell you that my eyes hurt after reading on my nook color after a couple of hours. I also have a first gen kindle and do not have the same problem with it. I am a software developer and am in front of computer screens all day reading text of monitors without issue.

Maybe its a quality of light issue or refresh rates or something but it happens at least in my experience.

In the end I would put money on tablets winning the battle over e-ink over time unless e-ink vendors can put out some quality color screens that update quickly fairly soon just because they are more versatile at the moment.

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While I did not work in video games, I had similar experiences while working in Canada. Those tax breaks were huge for our company even though I would not call what we did R&D.

One coworker got headhunted into a much better position just due to the fact that he had hands on experience in getting these tax breaks for our company and a sizable bonus based on a percentage of the money he could get for the new company.

We had some Windows and Linux (CentOS) servers that were running on real hardware. We consolidated them to a VMware ESXi host. The windows images moved over seamlessly and without issue. The core linux box with svn, wiki, bug tracker, ... would not migrate properly so we ended up reinstalling the OS and migrating the apps and data by hand. Overall the windows box took the time to copy the data + 15 minutes and Linux took time to copy the data twice and half a day to troubleshoot and reinstall.

Nothing was particularly special in the configurations of either that I recall. I suppose we used the wrong version of linux or something. Also not sure if a HAL would help or hurt here or if it was something with vmware but it wasn't as easy as you pointed out above.

Maybe if one of the Windows images had trouble it would have been 1+ days instead of .5 days or something but then again they didn't.

When I graduated 50% of my Chemical Engineering class was female at that time, all my good friends then were female and one could easily have been a fashion model if she wanted it. Most focused on premed or biochemical.

And William H McNeill breached the subject in Plagues and Peoples in 1976 regarding the rise of Christianity with the black death although maybe not a blunt as perhaps latter literature.

While I don't disagree that PLCs are way over priced. $100,000 sounds a bit too high for a PLC even if its a safety PLC with redundancy. We should be talking $5000 per PLC and then $1000-2000 per IO module (1 IO = 4-8 analog, 16 digital, 6 Thermocouples, ...) before vendor discounts. We instrumented a some sophisticated stuff for $50000 with Rockwell DeviceNet and that was at least a full panel (like 8 racks full of IO). When we switched to custom embedded controllers the cost was something like $3000 for the equivalent hardware. Admittedly their software has a lower barrier of entry and far less development cost but is useful for prototyping before going into full scale production.

Not completely true. ProfiNet, Modbus/TCP, EtherNet/IP, FINS, BACnet are all communication over ethernet tcp/ip stacks to the scada system and capable of issuing write commands. But then again perhaps prisons are using DCS style hardwired systems. Now the control system operating drives, switches, sensors or whatever are generally going to use some other system like Modbus, CAN, I2C, ... but even then EtherCAT, EtherNet/IP are industrially used for plcs to talk to drives and sensors if you want.

The scada system capable of controlling the PLCs should be isolated from the internet but I've seen more than my fair share of the the other. I'm sure the prisons are more paranoid and heck there are probably 500 different contractors writing the control logic in 1500 different ways out there so if one were hacked it would like be an isolated incident. Stuxnet exploited the fact that the centrifuges used a common geometry layout so it new what addresses corresponded to what and could manipulate that. It was still super clever though.

The biggest problem is that most of those ethernet protocols used in scada have zero authentication or security around it. If you can talk to it you can do a lot of bad bad things without any passwords. Usually the HMI is responsible for authentication but who says you have to use the HMI like stuxnet. They may try to protect the control logic with passwords but usually that is just for show in the systems that support it and would not withstand any dedicated effort for very long.

I'm more worried about DNP3 substations than prisons since power companies tend to have a unified system and spread out over long distances though they know that.