Like many of her fans, Anne had an entire bookshelf devoted to her. My deepest condolances to her family and close friends.

The problem is that when someone has a website that exposes corruption (say in the Met Police), the site is usually shutdown preety quickly or the owner intimidated into removing the hosting services.

This is not action against illegal acts, this is action by the police to protect each other from being foudn to have broken the law.

The best It book I had (a russian programmer stole it).
Its coverage on bounded non determinacy was inspired for its day.

is a perfect example of how scientific code should not be written. Mad rush, tweaked to get the results they wanted and no way to replicate results.
Furthermore many of the tweaks to gain the expected results made no sense whatsoever - they were simply fudges.

Writing software is a science not an art form. If you treat it as some form of black art - as the UK folks did then you deserve the ridicule you get.

If you reply with but non-deterministic systems are non bounded and hence cannot be proven, Then you need to read Dijkstra's A Discipline of Programming - this puts forward a very simple seven state bounded model for ND systems mathematical provability and if you canot understand this book then dont try and build modelling systems.

IMHO Unless you apply a the science of programming all you are doing is hacking something together - and if it does what you expect that is more luck than anything.

This is actually something I have been investigating for some time. There are businesses out there who provide staff with mobile (smart) phones and then pay for expensive but buggy apps to make the phone a useful device for staff. Then and only then are company IT and security staff involved and the nightmare of trying to stop these phones from infecting the companies networks. The idea of using a modified version of android as a trusted work specific client with applications integrated and locked from installation of games etc - it is a *work* phone - makes a lot of sense to some companies. Android for me is a brilliant and cheap way for a lot of people to get into developing apps for phones. However for companies the idea of allowing staff to install apps that maybe trojans means android has to be tailored to meet the needs of the business. And unlike winphones etc the apps final product can be reviewed by internal or third party security. So android is a low end consumer/developer toy and at the same time could become the base for secured corporate integration. A good example is the use of android tablets with custom software being used as POS terminals in resteraunts and clubs - integrated with backend systems that may be homebrew or COTS where "Lite" terminals were never envisaged.

This is the response I got from ML when complaining about a 100K image laden pile of HTML tag soup one of thier customers had sent to my address as well as three of my spamtraps. Note ML first asked if I would provide the domain(s) of my spamtraps so they could ask thier cleint to add my spamtraps to thier stoplist.

full discussion on the now defunct spam-l list - note that NOONE stodd up for ML.
Pretty much every commenting stated that ML are hot on inbound spam and dont give a shit about outbound.
They consider themselves TBTB (too big to block)

Messagelabs_Support wrote:

        Hi Jacqui

        I am writing from Messagelabs in regards to a matter whereby you have been receiving unsolicited mail.

        We have been in contact with the senders of this mail and they have agreed to remove you from their mailing lists.

I would have expected that you would have been asking for details
so that you can ask them to provide proof of opt-in to yourself.
Given the above statement there is no way I could provide unredacted information
without compromising what is to all intents a spam trap.

        However, for them to do so, could you please let us know the full e-mail address that this is being sent to as in your posts you have removed the domain name.

You are joking? They have not only hit "web-scrape only" addresses that are
now used as spam traps ( with the odd real request) but they have hit real
life spam traps on systems I manage. This (to me) screams list purchase
or they are running a very cheap web crawler.

        Once we have this we can go back to our client and get them to remove you from your list.

No thanks - obviously you believe that the UBE your client "excretes"
is more important than your reputation. Did you bother to look at the
content (including the very large in-line images) and tag soup HTML.
I ran it through S::A and is screamed SPAM at me!

        We look forward to hearing from you so that we can get this resolved.

I dont know what I can say to this. You obviously have no interest in stopping
these people sending out this trash.

Jacqui

Add: assignment is "copy" for all types except Object where copy by reference is used.

This makes "deep copy" code a nightmare and even versions of deep copy code in toolkits such as jquery do not work in all cases.

I have been working on a jquery based app using a modified Jquery based SOAP::Lite client and have hit this problem a number of times.

Jacqui

The crays full immersion coolant model hit a big problem - the coanda effect.

This is where layer of fluid near the actual component flows much slower than actual flow - in layers slowing down exponentially as it gets closer to the stationary components.

For air this is not too much of a problem - only a very fine layer of stationary air over compenents that does not affect cooling. But with liquids the effect is both noticable and severely impacts coolant flow over hot surfaces - with some then "next gen" cray chips actually boiling the fluid. As todays chips run much hotter and generate a lot more heat than those Cray chips I can see this being a major problem today...

Crays fix for this was to move from full fluid immersion to immersion in droplets 'injected' using a car fuel injector.
This got everywhere and evaporated taking the heat away from components.

Rumor has it that during devlopment, engineers bought fuel injectors for a wide range of cars and the ones for certain porsche worked best so they bought the entire stock of fuel injectors for this car in the mid-west and used them...

I remember staff at cray giving away Porsche style sunglasses with Cray written on them instead of Porsche and when I enquired why - the above was the tale I was told by sales staff.

Whether true or not is something else - the cray sales staff in those days had a seriously odd sense of humor...

It does not feel real.

I have worked on auction sites that present cataligues for major auction houses.
The revenue stream was in three parts

  1) charge for display of the catalogue
  2) transfer of e-bids to the auction house
  3) collation and analysis of winning bids.

Reports based upon the latter was the biggest money maker...

Jacqui

Hmm speed is pretty critical. SOmeone impacted my '86 volvo 760 some years ago in a brand new
vauxhall. I was stationary at light ne decided to try and get through the red light but did not
see me stopped in front.

He shunted my car through the lights and the imact pushed the radio console out. I turned off the engine
and had to push the console backinto place.

WHen we checked over both cars and exchanged details the front of his car to the radiator was crushed to pulp.
My volvo had a scratch on the rear bumper - he never even got *near* paintwork.

When I spoke to my mechanic he asked me to estimate the speed and I said just uunder 30MPH. He told me
the impact absorbers in the frame were rated for this and did nto have to be replaced. tests proved he
was right.

I also rememebr a photo from a news article about someone who fell asleep at the wheel and drove into
a concrete motorway bridge and 70 in a car simialr to mine (but with air bags). He walked away unscratched.

SO, crumple zones are not the only solution to low and high speed crashes - btu they are the only cheap solution
that results in very high insurance costs...

Jacqui

One option is to run Pg over openMosix.
You do NOT get fault tolerance (on a process level) and YMMV
depending upon hardware and application requirements.