First Circle is one of the best (and hardest) songs that my former jazz orchestra played - I was on drums. We used a score from UNC, I believe.
You're right that the time signature is effectively 22/8. Our charts were written in 12/8+10/8 alternating (22 beats) but there were 4 bars of 12/8 and one of 8/8 at the end of the verses. I think the solo sections were mostly 12/8.
The song works best if the whole band feels the accented rhythms, rather than explicitly counting everything. But when it comes together, it is a powerful piece of music.
> This strikes me as an attempt by the Royal Canadian Mint to disintermediate credit card companies by offering a new, low-cost, "irrevocable," centrally-controlled payment system.
This seems to be exactly what they're doing. From the Developer Guide, Background page: "The emerging digital economy must be able to accommodate small-value transactions, such as micro transactions (under $10) and nano-transactions (under $1). The Mint hopes that software developers and entrepreneurs will use MintChip to ignite trade and commerce for these very-low-value markets."
The title of this post equates MintChip to BitCoin, but the two appear to have significantly different goals. MintChip may end up being the digital equivalent of pocket change.
I don't quite recall what they told the rest of us, but another 20% of the remaining employees submitted their resignation within a few weeks. Those who stuck it out were given the option to receive payment as stock and take a pay cut.
I think they may have considered your colicky-baby-nursery idea as a way to make up for office space costs, but they eventually settled on renting 33% of the floorspace to another company.
It's quite stressful when even half the people you know get laid off.
I worked at a startup that began expanding very quickly in early 2008 (i.e., the worst possible time in recent history). When the economy collapsed that summer and they couldn't raise capital, they had to do layoffs.
That in itself isn't really interesting, but the way they carried out the layoffs was... suboptimal. At some point on a Tuesday, they had the HR manager walking around the cubicle areas, tapping people on the shoulder and calling them in for a meeting. After that, they would return to their desk, pack up their stuff, and leave the building forever.
No one really knew what was going on and those of us who hadn't been tapped by this "Angel of Death" were confused and afraid that we would be next on the list. It wasn't until after the herd was culled that management told the rest of us what happened.
I'm no HR expert, but there must have been a better way to do that.
As I understand it (as a regular on the ZeroMQ and Crossroads mailing lists), the reasons are as follows:
1) Trademark issues - the original developers of ZMQ have been prohibited from using the ZeroMQ trademark and, thus, from making official releases.
2) The new ZeroMQ contribution policy[1], in which pull requests are merged without review and then later reverted/enhanced if necessary, is seen as incompatible with the goals of some of the lead developers. These developers prefer a more rigorous review policy.
There are more reasons, but from what I can tell, those are the main ones that haven't fully been covered here.
EventSourcing/CQRS (Command/Query Responsibility Segregation) is gaining a bit of traction in the .NET community. There are some great presentations[1], blogs[2][3] and projects[4] related to this architecture.