A few nights ago my band was playing at one of the local Casino showrooms, and I noticed these new LOTR machines. I did a double take! Most of you probably do not frequent Casinos (nor would I, except for my gigs there), but they have all these movie-themed slot machines; Wizard Of Oz, Dirty Dancing, etc. But LOTR machines just seem really strange for some reason. Funny.... no Ocean's Eleven ones.

I use it daily for my work and the kid's machine runs it. I'll drop them some $$$ next time.

Both my wife and I changed companies within the last year and a half where we have better work environments and significantly better salaries. We're both software engineers.

I'm almost 54. Going strong and doing what I love. My wife is 45 and also a software engineer. I had a project end about 9 months ago and had to find a position within 4 weeks. Lots of work, even for a guy my age (Southern California).

Well, as a counter example, I was sick of ads on my Droid "Free" metronome app, so I wrote an ad-free one, and yes, it was produced via "Good Will". And unlike the ad-festooned apps, mine comes with both Cowbell and Fart sounds!

That's what JNI is for. Write your performance-critical code in C.

Things falling on people kill people. From the photos in TFA it looks like the're using unreinforced masonry. This is deadly in earthquake zones, but this situation has more to do with local building codes and enforcement than seismic potential.

In the current state of earthquake prediction, the actual prediction of *when* an earthquake will occur is not all that reliable. However the prediction of how much ground acceleration can be expected from potential seismic activity is reliable and building codes can be created accordingly.

Arrggg!!! I meant: Little 'b' means 'bits'.

Little 'b' means bytes.

My reading of the article was that they didn't feel Oracle was resourcing the projects appropriately so they took the ball to start their own game, so to speak. I take it the products in TFA are competitors to Microsoft's Active Directory and Oracle's own SSO system (but more distributed since they seem to be incorporating OAuth).

Gee. I was going to buy a little single engine Cessna, but I guess I can spring for a 747 since you can pick one up for only $50,000.

I depends on what you're polling. If you're polling your preferred ntp server and you typically expect it to be up, use geometric up to some maximum(e.g. 120 sec).

OP Here. Good to know. But it seems like there's a downside to thousands of open sockets sitting around doing nothing but sending keep-alives.