There are a couple like this that I've heard of. Their commitment is to get as much traction as possible out of every dollar by minimizing administrative costs, etc. This one claims upward of 96% going to feed the hungry around the world: http://www.foodforthepoor.org/

/. summary must be wrong.Gizmag itself states in the caption, "this one will be the largest ever flown, spanning a whopping 15,543 square feet, or 1,444 square meters."

I was gonna say - roughly 20x20 feet never sounded so exciting before!

The article mentions that they would have very specific requirements for the method by which data is protected. Not having seen the specifics, if they get too specific, I would be rather suspicious of the law becoming a barrier to future improvements - what they think of today as being "the right way" to do it doesn't mean it's the ONLY way and could end up being prohibitive based on the architecture of the system in question. I'm just sayin...

Just curious if anyone has experience managing large, mechanical disk arrays, if you installed an array of such a size using identical hard drives and bringing everything online relatively at the same time, would there be an increased likelihood of ALL the drives dying at roughly the same time? Could failure statistics bite you with enough simultaneous failures to negate redundancy?

I don't know about your forefathers, but mine are not imaginary. I think.

Anyway, I don't think profitability is necessarily even the right thing to attribute the rise/fall of innovation. What is more alarming to me is the general feeling that the walls are closing in on us with respect to legal barriers to accomplishment. The U.S. in particular has adopted an increasing mentality of "you can't do that", and is reinforced by extended copyright, asinine patent, and punitive damages to anyone who so much as moves in a direction that someone else has already thought of. How many viable businesses, processes, and potential jobs are sitting locked away in the patent system right now just waiting for someone to get their act together? How come I can't dig a hole in my yard without the county demanding cash for a permit or they put me out on the street?

We have paralyzed ourselves, and I'm sure this same dysfunction is spreading...

There are quite a few interesting posts in this thread, so I just picked yours to respond to. For background, I've been programming for more than 20 years, professionally for almost 15. I started with BASIC, expanded to Borland Pascal, graduated to assembly language, then went on to C, Perl, PHP and am currently immersed in web application development as the department manager.

In the past five years I have been the hiring manager for both in-house product development and out-sourced professional services. I have experimented with a range of programmers including brilliant high-school drop-outs, green college graduates, and hardened industry veterans. Ultimately I have found that a given position needs a developer who is specifically well-suited to it. If I'm looking for new, cool, whiz-bang, the brilliant hacks are great to throw at the job. If I'm looking for carefully considered back-end architecture, there is no substitute for a hardened veteran. In the middle are the production coders who follow orders but don't yet have the problem solving skills or experience necessary to always produce elegant work - and often that's OK: lower pay, keep them busy, deal with problems as they arise, each gains experiential points as they continue.

Two elements that are vital across the board are passion for software development and a penchant for problem solving. I have fired a handful who lacked either or both. As a team leader, my focus is on having the right person on task, not the cheapest one. I don't know if that's a rarity in the management world, but from some of the earlier comments, it's clear that there is a disconnect between what HR thinks and what engineering needs and that gap should be narrowed. Do companies really want 25 developers producing garbage at rock bottom prices, or 8 super-stars at 3x the price - quality over quantity...

PS: The original question is ridiculous to begin with; You're never too old to learn, but understand that learning the language syntax in a week is very difference from having a deep understanding of the problems unique to the environment it is applied to - that takes years, and you just have to DO IT.

This was the first thing that came to mind for me as well, however the next thought was: are the CAM programs actually have any reason to optimize the path? Once an area is machined out, there's nothing to prevent the tool from crossing that same area repeatedly without any cost to the machine unless they are truly designed to minimize running time... (?) I have never worked with CAM software, so just curious...

"Free Speech is something to be valued and not used anonymously."

Frankly, I'm surprised at the number of people taking this attitude lately. It goes along hand in hand with the thinking, "if you don't want anyone to know about it, you probably shouldn't be doing it." I, for one, think people should be less judgmental of situational considerations they are not privy to and just accept that situations do exist which break from over-simplified reasoning.

For example, it is essential to enable expression of dissent anonymously; if what you have to say is certain to anger some folks, then there is a real risk to life and limb. Suggesting that it should not have been said if it was going to bring the speaker harm is a false argument. It would be impossible to bring about change in the face of tyranny if nobody speaks for fear of their lives. There are many places in the world that suffer from this plight, please don't encourage the U.S. to become one of them.

Well there you have it - Americans have invented nothing of interest. Except freedom; they hate us for our freedom. You can take our innovations, but you can't take our FREEDOM! Oh wait that was Scottish...ish.

Puh-lease. Asia and Europe have all kinds of goodies broadly available to the consumer markets that Americans only daydream about. I think that copyright, patent, NIMBY, and the generally sue-happy you-can't-do-that American disposition have a lot to do with why some companies don't even bother pursuing business here. We were innovative when we came up with things like the light bulb, telephone, transistor, velcro, nuclear warhead, etc. but it's been a long time since anything interesting has developed at all.

This should go without saying, but there is a general movement towards dropping the requirement for users to type the (worthless|redundant) "www."whateveryouwant.com into the browser. For one thing it reduces confusion: if your website is www.yoursite.com then your email address should be AnonymousCoward@www.yoursite.com - but it's not: you have to drop the www. in order to deliver correctly. Making the default behavior work based on DNS and/or protocol (port address) whenever possible is widely appreciated. It removes the "www." from google.com, etc.

P.S. - This has been a contentious issue since at least 1997 which was when I tuned in, and it is generally accepted that the "assholes" are the ones on the "www." side :)

For more than one reason, I feel like unless it's the original hardware, it's just not the same experience. Like a replica kit car, or anniversary edition knock-offs of the original action figures.

I keep three boxes in deep storage:
#1) ~70-80 different ISA, VLB, and PCI adapter boards for VGA, IDE, audio, and general I/O
#2) ~10 different motherboards ranging from 286 20Mhz to Pentium 2 600Mhz, and CPU's and RAM to match
#3) ~5 AT power supplies, switches, LED's, leads/cables, and ~10 different floppy/CDROM/ZIP drives

All that plus a single AT chassis to reconfigure my goodies into when the urge arises and I'm set.

One of the biggest motivators for me as a developer actually is the accessibility of the ISA bus for experimentation and learning. You can play around with things on this bus and work at reasonable speeds without necessarily needing an oscilloscope or having to work around all the PCI bus drama.

The spec changed. The implementations did not. Given IE's continued browser market share dominance and lack of support on still prevalent platforms, this can't be done without breaking compatibility. *shrug*

I like IE-bashing as much as the next guy, but the above is false. This is not a problem with IE, it's a restriction of the HTTPS protocol which encrypts the request headers preventing name-based virtual hosts from being an option.

"I'm pretty sure this means you can have more than one webserver/hostname entry, all with the same IP, and use host header names (IIS) or Name-based Virtual Host Support (Apache/others) to determine which site and certificate to connect the user to."

... and you would be incorrect. Name-based Virtual Hosting cannot be done with HTTPS. The reason is that the name of what is being requested is also encrypted in the SSL data. The only way for a web server such as Apache to know what virtual host to use is to look at the name. In order to get the name it would have to SSL decrypt the request. In order to SSL decrypt the request it needs to know what SSL key to use. In order to know what key to use, it would need to look it up in the name-based virtual host record. In order to do that, it needs to know the name... oops.