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.
Having used this myself, the problems were numerous. First of all, it's effectively a new currency, so you have to explicitly convert your cash money into this form. This sucks. But because it's meant for small purchases, you'll only ever have pocket change on there, which means your balance runs out all the time. The card doesn't display its value, so you risk looking like an idiot and pissing off every customer behind you when they see you tried to pay the 'fancy way' and failed.
Of course, today things are different, and the web is hugely important, and most of us carry smartphones. But do you really want your ability to use money to be tied to your phone's flakey battery?
Yeah, I agree with this statement. The title comparing MintChip to BitCoin is probably somewhat misleading. MintChip won't provide the decentralized currency system that BitCoin does, but as an alternative to credit cards, it does seem very appealing!
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.
Did management explain that this was surely the only round of lay-offs, and did people manage to stifle their laughter, or keep from rolling their eyes so hard as to snap their optic nerve?
I bet installing a nursery for colicky babies in the now-empty cubicles would have less of an impact on productivity.
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.
The first startup I worked for called a company meeting and pretty much said everybody was laid off except those who were told beforehand that they weren't. The kicker is, I was a contractor (at that point) and wasn't allowed in the company meetings. I came in the following monday and worked half a day in an empty office before one of the HR people asked me what I was doing.
That actually sounds nice when compared to one company I worked for. They laid off our entire development team via an email. Adding injury to insult, nobody has received their final paycheck.
Thats more common than you think unfortunately - Ive seen that exact scenario happen a couple times. That or calling everyone into a room and telling them they have been laid off.
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.
"CQRS is not eventual consistency, it is not eventing, it is not messaging, it is not having separated models for reading and writing, nor is it using event sourcing."
It is gaining a lot of traction simply because it seems like a complicated and cool way to solve an uncommon problem. I fear that Event Sourcing will soon become a over-engineered hammer for the wrong nail.
If it were me, I would use CQRS principles, with a relational backend as my source model. Then when the need for scale arises, use ETL to either non-relational db or no-db for queries.
