Wells Fargo said it is “premature to comment.” Bank of America told ABC News it “supports the concept,” but is “studying the details.” Citigroup said it’s too “early” to “speculate.”

“We think that early in the history of time, even before man walked upright, there was already a need for man to be propped up by others.  Originally this was done by small communities where they would gather berries and share with each other.  Over time, as man became upright, he made small tools and started to put seed in the ground.  Later, animals were used to cultivate food.  A barter system was established, where one man would trade his goods for goods from another.  Over time, a monetary system was established in cultures and then goods could be traded for ‘money’.  In the 1800s in the western United States, man started to speculate for gold.  Then government created Social Security and f***ed it all up.  But these bailouts sure help us – the banks.”

I make no guarantee of accuracy, nor do I take any responsibility for how well you perform on the exam.  It is up to you to study appropriately.  That being said, please add comments to this post about omissions or mistakes, and I will make every effort to correct them.

A    =    L    +   OE    <–    Revs     +    Exps

127.0.0.1  www.google.com

I should be directed to my local machine, right?  Well, as long as you aren’t using Chrome, it works fine.  Also, putting in any other address would have been fine.  However, Chrome apparently is going to bypass that pesky hosts file when it “thinks it knows” what you want.  Ehh!

One additional side note…in an incredible act of generosity, Tyson Foods has agreed to send up to 200,000 pounds of protein-based foods (chicken, etc.) to six Bay Area food banks in exchange for comments. Comments! They’ll provide 100 pounds per comment on this post. This is a way to make a donation with barely any effort whatsoever, so if you could, please take a minute of your time and go leave a comment over there.

Like she said: minimal effort… chicken for the needy!

Google is great about making adding new features.  They’re always coming up with new things that I might like.  But I hate the new iGoogle design.  Tabs on the left instead of on top, applications (like BeTwitteredand The OFFICIAL Dilbert Widget) that don’t work, embedded Google apps (like Gmail) that take away features of the full-fledged app.

I have the CNN.com and ESPN.com widgets, and instead of just providing links, now I’m forcefed the summary that goes along with those feeds, as terrible as they are.  Finally, they put all of the tabs on the left, so I lost all kinds of real estate on the main part of the screen.

ARRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH.

/Product means “go find the Product element that are my children”.  The engine only needs to look at child nodes relative to the current location.

//Product means “go find all of the Product elements that are a descendant of mine – I don’t care where they are at”.   This means that if your document is 50 levels deep, the engine will look through each and every one of them to find a product element.  If you have 10,000 elements to look through and then you have to go diving down the tree as well, it is obviously a more expensive than it needs to be.

Sometimes you don’t know where the element will reside in your XML document, so // makes sense.  However, if you know where you are looking, you should always use /.  Neither is “wrong”, but one can be a LOT more expensive than the other.

I’ve seen two XPath queries written today – one at work and one on the web, and both of them were using the inefficient double slash (//).  I hope this helps anybody who is doing any querying using XPath.