Sailor, Platinum and Pilot are the big three Japanese brands. You can generally get them outside of Japan but there might be Japan exclusives and the prices might be better in Japan.
SAIC also screwed up the FBI's Virtual Case File, NSA's Trailblazer, New York's CityTime (with a extra helping of fraud thrown in). It would be interesting to hear of any software project they did do which was not a multi hundred million dollar software engineering disaster.
Make a contract with yourself. Set the times of the day when you shouldn't be screwing around on the internet. Get a program that takes screenshots of what is on your monitor every ten minutes or so. At the end of the day use those screenshots to estimate how much you spent screwing around on the internet inside "work time". For each hour spent, donate $10 (or more) to a hated poltical candiate's run for president. For example, Sarah Palin for President 2012.
If you are giving Sarah more than $100 each week, I think you should seek advice from a professional.
Yeah, i've been to Beijing and people don't really seem to drive in lanes there. It would be really nice if they could get this to work, but it seems a bit utopian.
Slapping a 25% tariff on Chinese imports would be a terrible move from a diplomatic point of view. The CCP's main pillars of legitimacy are the economy and protecting national honour. If the U.S. put a 25% tariff on Chinese imports the CCP would likely hit back hard or else they would look weak to the Chinese public. Mr Krugman should think of who lends the money to pay for U.S. deficits.
Hurrah for white (or brown) noise. If you are in an environment that is full of chat and conversation its great for blocking all that out. You can still hear that people are talking , but you can't understand what they are saying so you can more easily block it out. Wonderful if you are a bit of an introvert and want a little bit of mental isolation in cubeland, or even worse, an open plan office.
The problem with the SimplyNoise site is that the track only lasts 30 seconds or so and then repeats, so every 30 seconds you hear an annoying click. Instead, download Audacity which can generate a brown noise track as long as you want. I have a 30 minute brown noise track as an MP3 which I have on repeat.
The facts can speak for themselves. Most laypeople don't have the time or training to make sense of them, so depend on reputation. So who would you trust, a reputable scientist or a partisan crackpot?
Ian Wishart also publishes a magazine called "Investigate" which instead of doing investigative journalism publishes rumors and exaggerations. On the front cover of his magazine once he claimed to have the "smoking gun" that the Prime Ministers' husband was gay. The "evidence" was a photograph of him kissing somebody who was a close relative, so no he wasn't gay.
PostgreSQL was not an object-oriented database, it was an object-relational database. Despite not living up to some people's exceptions that that it would replace the relational database object-oriented databases were not a "huge failure". They are useful for applications where relational databases were not suitable, for example CAD (as mentioned in the article).
> I hate the F-Lock key with a passion.
I haven't managed to hit f-lock by accident. The older Microsoft keyboards didn't remember the f-lock state between reboots. THAT was annoying.
No, that chapter is not from Concepts, Techniques, and Models but most of the programming models mentioned in that PDF are covered in more depth in CTM.
SQL is popular because it was the query language that was available in the Oracle and IBM relational databases, which were the first relational database products to come to market. SQL subsequently became an ISO standard. Eventually all relational database vendors switched to SQL. Other DBMSs (Ingres, Informix, Postgres) originally used QUEL which was thought by many to be superior to SQL eventually switched as SQL became dominant/the standard. (Although QUEL can still be used with Ingres). There may be other reasons, but I think that in large part these are the reasons why SQL is dominant today.
Relational databases became popular because the declarative high level query language was less time consuming to write queries in than earlier non-relational database.
SQL is far from the perfect query language though. It's syntax is often bizarre and confounding, and has many non relational extensions (column ordering, duplicate tuples in a relation).