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Comment Re:By not having the situation in the first place (Score 1) 304

by klahnako (#39102343) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: How Do You Deal With Priorities Inflation In IT Projects?

I have heard the priority queue is very effective at communicating the limited IT resources. Upper management, the product team, and especially marketing will have a hard time watching features move down queue as more TOP TOP items get added. At first it is hard for them to give up some features for others, but with *rigorous* defense, the whole company can be made to accept the queue, and come to terms with the limited IT resources.

Comment OLAP (Score 3, Insightful) 129

by klahnako (#38707948) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Changing Career From OLTP To OLAP Dev

From my limited experience, the OLAP community is small and/or behind walled gardens, the tools are poor and closed source, and potential employers are only interested if you have experience in *their* BI tools (Pentaho, Microstrategy, Cognos, etc). Microsoft appears to be the only one trying to establish a theoretical basis for BI, but their efforts are starting to show age despite their being so much more that can be done in the field. Finally, you will be misunderstood by the majority of Rails/PHP/Web developers: The same one who think Key-Value stores and NoSQL are the height of modern technology.

That said, BI can be technically satisfying. If you get down to the SQL/MDX you will appreciate what a database can do; which allows questions to be phrased succinctly. I have seen too much code written in procedural languages (Javascript being the worst of them) that are many lines long and run atrociously slow, that can be restated in SQL (or MDX) simply, and run a 1000x faster. I love that fact there are no loops!

From a business perspective, you have much more exposure to management and other departments: You will have improved visibility in the company, and your worth will be inflated - as you will be the one that satisfies management's appetite for more information to help make decisions.
Biotech

How a Key Enzyme Repairs Sun-Damaged DNA 97

Posted by kdawson from the one-proton-and-one-electron dept.
BraveHeart writes "Researchers have long known that mammals, including humans, lack a key enzyme — one possessed by most of the animal kingdom and even plants — that reverses severe sun damage. For the first time, researchers have witnessed how this enzyme works at the atomic level to repair sun-damaged DNA. 'Normal sunscreen lotions convert UV light to heat, or reflect it away from our skin. A sunscreen containing photolyase could potentially heal some of the damage from UV rays that get through.'"
Image

Recession Cuts Operation That Uses Hair To Clean Up Oil 119

Posted by samzenpus from the hair-today-gone-tomorrow dept.
Matter of Trust, a nonprofit that uses human hair scraps to make mats to clean up oil spills, finds itself with 18,000 pounds of hair and nobody to process it. Lisa Gautier, who runs the organization, says that the recession has closed many of the textile makers that produced the mats and the warehouse that stored them. Unfortunately for Lisa the hair keeps piling up. From the article: "Hair is good at soaking up oil because, up close, the strands are shaped like a palm tree with scalelike cuticles. Drops of oil naturally cling inside those cuticles, says Blair Blacker, chief executive of the World Response Group. A pound of hair can pick up one quart of oil in a minute, and it can be wrung out and reused up to 100 times, Mrs. Gautier says."
Earth

Debunking a Climate-Change Skeptic 807

Posted by kdawson from the so-many-notes-mister-mozart dept.
DJRumpy writes "The Danish political scientist Bjørn Lomborg won fame and fans by arguing that many of the alarms sounded by environmental activists and scientists — that species are going extinct at a dangerous rate, that forests are disappearing, that climate change could be catastrophic — are bogus. A big reason Lomborg was taken seriously is that both of his books, The Skeptical Environmentalist (in 2001) and Cool It (in 2007), have extensive references, giving a seemingly authoritative source for every one of his controversial assertions. So in a display of altruistic masochism that we should all be grateful for (just as we're grateful that some people are willing to be dairy farmers), author Howard Friel has checked every single citation in Cool It. The result is The Lomborg Deception, which is being published by Yale University Press next month. It reveals that Lomborg's work is 'a mirage,' writes biologist Thomas Lovejoy in the foreword. '[I]t is a house of cards. Friel has used real scholarship to reveal the flimsy nature' of Lomborg's work."

Comment More than just an Insurance Question (Score 2, Informative) 253

by klahnako (#30442398) Attached to: Extended Warranty Purchases Up 10% This Year

My biggest consideration when getting one of these warranties is how long it will be gone for repair. Look at the fine print to find how long the company has to make the repair. It has been my experience that the maximum allowed time *will* be the time it takes to repair. Can you go that long without your device? I know I can not wait the requisite 60/90 days, so I do not purchase the warranties.

Comment Re:Yes, go for it. (Score 1) 918

by klahnako (#27354375) Attached to: With a Computer Science Degree, an Old Man At 35?

As long as you display energy and enthusiasm during the interview, your age will not be a factor.

I know a retiree that took up Python programming for fun, and he was better than most developers I know. Meeting with him, and working with him, showed me that all the cognitive science/superstition is wrong: The brain does *NOT* degrade over time, it is only your attitude.

I am now 35, I still love programming, and I can be a hacker forever!!

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