The patent is for building the blinky lights device, not operating it. If you want to build a case that does the same thing, talk to Apple. If you want to write some app that changes the colours based on system load, look it up in the API document.
The guy's not interested in the actual contents of the samples (at time of selection/extraction), and the format of mp3 streams and frames is very well documented. In a few hours I wrote a fairly neat little command line utility to go through an mp3 file, and only keep valid audio frames, stripping off ID3 tags, and various funky frames that shouldn't be there, like frames with invalid layer or frequency values, etc. Just post a help wanted notice at the local CS department hangout/lounge, it's not a big job. There may even already be suitable filters for Audacity (though something programmatic would work better, depending on volume of the recordings), or command-line tools that could accept a simple front-end to accomplish something similar.
I know a few people who shave with a straight razor (and it's the only kind of a shave you'll get in a barber shop), and Gilette and Schick are still alive and kicking today. If you're going into space for a few months/years, why wouldn't you bring the things you're used to?
It is very easy to remain gender neutral in English, unlike many other languages where all nouns, verbs and others have to be inflected depending on the gender of whatever you're talking about, or to.
And in Poland, the last name is often different between husband and wife (*ski/*ska). English is not considered to be one of the easiest languages for nothing. Only English natives have trouble spelling; count yourselves lucky, your language is trivial.
If you don't progress and just leave yourself doing technical work, eventually you may become too senior/expensive when layoffs time comes around. You'll just have to (and probably want to after a while, trust me) branch out into supervisory roles, project management roles, architecture roles, etc, while still retaining some technical duties.
Actually, anyone notice this new wizzy installer some apps use (some MS ones too) that will prompt you when it finds locked files and which app has it opened, and allows you to close it and continue. Locked files is always a problem when installing anything on Windows, and this definitely saves a reboot or two.
Well, some of the fear comes from unfamiliarity with the legal system. There's the general idea that anyone can sue anyone for any reason, and that IS largely true in the US. I don't know, I think all it would take to send me into a heart attack is a single legalese letter, no matter how difficult it may be for the company to follow through. I'd just fold after seeing the bill from my lawyer for his first 10 hours, which, if the lawsuit has any merit, is easily achievable.
Exactly. I have the disposable 2-week contacts, I can sleep in them even though it's not recommended, but at least you can still be spontenaeus. You don't need to carry all the contact gear with you all the time, and the lenses are actually quite hardy. I've been thinking about the 1-month ones you can leave in 24x7, but I'm not sure they're quite approved yet, and haven't really proven themselves yet, for me anyways. I'll look into them again when I run out next time in about 2 years.
The only sucky thing about contacts is they're not so great around water, which is a bit of a bummer. I got caught in heavy rain a couple of times, and it's much less fun when you can't see a damn thing. Oddly enough, I'm never bothered by dust or any irritants getting under the lens, not sure why you have that problem (dry eyes maybe?).
I'm no legal expert, or a scholar of the GPL, but I call bullshit. You're saying that every project that distributes binaries, needs to make a copy of their build environment (and source to it?) available as well. That's fucking retarded, putting it mildly.
Well, sure enough, the GPL exempts the environment from the source code requirement, provided it is generally available (kernel, compiler, linker, libc, etc). A modified gcc that still produces the same functional code as a regular publically available gcc may be skirting the gray area here. Question: Do you have the tools to build a binary from the source given? Yes. Q: Is it the exact same binary as distributed? No (due to environment differences). Q: Is it functionally the same binary? Yes. So what is the problem?
The source to the binaries IS available. The tool to munge said code and tag it uniquely need not be released.
If you take a copy of gcc, modify it to automagically tag the binaries it produces, you don't have to distribute your changes to gcc, as long as you keep this version of gcc in-house. As long as the source will still compile and work with an un-modified gcc, they're fine. Anyhow, the tagging is a little gray to me... the GPL does not stipulate the binary generated from obtained source need be exactly the same, bit for bit (given variations between gcc and linker versions, etc), just that the bits have the same functionality.
BTW, I, for one, think $50 for source is reasonable, if a little steep. After all, they have to pay someone to burn the CD and then pay to get it shipped. That AOL can do it for pennies is irrelevant. They're not AOL. Source distribution is the cost of doing business under GPL, they're not gonna swallow it, they'll pass it on like every other business does. Maybe when they're doing volume like AOL, they'll invest in a 3rd party burning service and then it'll be pennies a copy.
I had a 486DX50, and it was FAST. Certainly could play Doom full-screen with sound and music with no issues at all. I remember it came with a cheesy video card which I bumped up to 512k (IIRC) to get some of the higher resolutions, but Doom just required 320x200 anyways.
Was it Doom that you could run @ 320x400 and see a 'preview' of the next frame?
With enough of the right skills you can talk your way out of the town. In fact, you can pretty much talk and sneak your way out of anything given the right class (I'd usually play half-elf or human) in Arcanum. I actually really liked the game (except for the map), it didn't have too much tedium like killing giant spiders for the first 10 hours, and even the graphics style grew on me.
Cancer is not a binary state. They come in various forms and differ in how widespread and how severe they are. There's a difference betwen a cancer you can treat with some surgery and pills, and a two week death sentence.
of course all broadcasters already keep recordings of all their output, so this is a no-op for them.
Well, yes and no.
Practically all shows, whether sitcoms or special events, are of course taped by the PRODUCERS. I can see a station keeping tapes of its news shows, for example, or any live material. But I very much doubt any TV station or radio station tapes everything they beam out. Why would they? All the shows they broadcast are either produced by them (so they have tapes) or syndicated. Capturing the live signal is pointless from their perspective. So if some joker in the control room decided to interject a couple of frames of a naked boobie, there'd be no record.
I'm sure there's some cost involved here. Does your ISP backup to tape all the traffic going across their routers? All the mail? All their non-access/non-billing related logs? Don't think so.
I'm in Canada (with Scotiabank, but friends with others tell me the same story), and I NEVER had to pay to deposit money. And, unlike so many of our neighbours in the US, we don't pay extra to talk to a teller either.
If you're paying to deposit a cheque, ask about what kind of account you have. Some of the 'my first bank account' type programs, or very restrictive ones for high credit risks or people with no income, or the regular, but very basic accounts, those may have some charges like that, for example, free 10 ATM transactions and 5 cheques per month, after that you pay a service fee. If you consistantly carry a positive balance on your account, you can always switch to something better. Or close your account and move to a credit union.
It must have been rushed... I don't normally notice this kind of stuff (suspension of disbelief?) when I'm enjoying a movie, but I did notice quite a few problems listed, aside from the painfully obvious: anything remotely connected to the fusion device, which is to say half the plot (but hey, it's comic-based). Especially the car-through-cafe-window. That was just stupid. But also the webbing at the end, that was also very very obvious. So many things just looked really unfinished.
BTW, in these kinds of lists, the notes always say 'CLEARLY visible' (crew, equipment, fx, etc). I look at the scene carefully when watching a movie again, and almost never see anything, certainly not CLEARLY. And never on DVDs... do they clean these kinds of mistakes up in DVD production?
He still made out better than most employees who contribute to their company. It depends on your contract (if you have one), and the kind of company. Part of it is that anything of significance in a large company REQUIRES a team effort; even if you have a great idea and spearhead a project and push for it, and it happens to pay off, you're still standing on the shoulders of giants, or paper pushers at least. There are all kinds of people actually making things happen. Did anyone else get $10M? Options? Don't think so.
What about the reverse of the coin? Should people working for money losing departments (support, customer service, etc) give money back to the company? Can't have it both ways. Sometimes you make the company tons of money, sometimes you're not so hot. Either way, at the end of the day you get a paycheque. If there's a bonus, that's just gravy.
So? He took the options instead of cash, a gamble in other words. Stock tanked after merger, options remained under water, expired, end of story. I'm sure no one would complain if the stock went through the roof and the guy ended up with much more than $135M.
That's some shitty testing, that MAY qualify as unit testing, if you're short on time, which obviously you're not since you're testing every input. QA and unit testing concerns itself with valid input, yes, but more importantly, corner cases, edge cases, and error/failure conditions. What happens when your input has an error? (In the case of tee, all input is valid, and just duplicated.) What happens when you can't read from input stream? Can't write to one of your outputs? What SHOULD happen? How does it recover?
Basically, your requirements/design set out all the inputs, and what is considered valid, and what should happen in all the invalid cases. Then you test your valid cases and verify that it works. Then you test your error cases, and verify that they fail properly.
A bug (when found in any case) may be a defect, but a defect is not necessarily a bug. For example, defect: importing file is slow. It's a legitimate defect. Point me to the corresponding bug.
I VERY SERIOUSLY doubt Microsoft, or any company for that matter, software or otherwise, has a ZERO DEFECT policy, for ANY milestone or commercial release. There are ALWAYS defects outstanding. On one of the projects I am currently on, any defects rated less than Critical or High (essentially a showstopper) will not stop a release. (I don't necessarily agree with it, but it's a flexible policy. If someone makes a stink about their defect, or a decent workaround is not available, that's different, that's a missing feature.) Any software product of any significant complexity does not have a state called Zero Defect.
No, Microsoft has probably never delivered a "great" piece of software. Good, certainly. Good enough in most cases. Sometimes, downright hostile.
Sure, no company sets out to build bad software. OF COURSE they build GREAT software. Just like every company respects all their employees, cares about their customers, and stands behind their product. And they all have great and admirable mission statements and corporate values. But reality NEVER looks as good as the shiny piece of paper.
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Why would you be 'not surprised'? It's a COMPUTER! If it can do it once, it can do it a million times.
The patent is for building the blinky lights device, not operating it. If you want to build a case that does the same thing, talk to Apple. If you want to write some app that changes the colours based on system load, look it up in the API document.
The guy's not interested in the actual contents of the samples (at time of selection/extraction), and the format of mp3 streams and frames is very well documented. In a few hours I wrote a fairly neat little command line utility to go through an mp3 file, and only keep valid audio frames, stripping off ID3 tags, and various funky frames that shouldn't be there, like frames with invalid layer or frequency values, etc. Just post a help wanted notice at the local CS department hangout/lounge, it's not a big job. There may even already be suitable filters for Audacity (though something programmatic would work better, depending on volume of the recordings), or command-line tools that could accept a simple front-end to accomplish something similar.
I know a few people who shave with a straight razor (and it's the only kind of a shave you'll get in a barber shop), and Gilette and Schick are still alive and kicking today. If you're going into space for a few months/years, why wouldn't you bring the things you're used to?
Maybe he hasn't seen Dungeons and Dragons? And maybe you've forgotten the title of this Ask Slashdot.
It is very easy to remain gender neutral in English, unlike many other languages where all nouns, verbs and others have to be inflected depending on the gender of whatever you're talking about, or to.
And in Poland, the last name is often different between husband and wife (*ski/*ska). English is not considered to be one of the easiest languages for nothing. Only English natives have trouble spelling; count yourselves lucky, your language is trivial.
If you don't progress and just leave yourself doing technical work, eventually you may become too senior/expensive when layoffs time comes around. You'll just have to (and probably want to after a while, trust me) branch out into supervisory roles, project management roles, architecture roles, etc, while still retaining some technical duties.
Actually, anyone notice this new wizzy installer some apps use (some MS ones too) that will prompt you when it finds locked files and which app has it opened, and allows you to close it and continue. Locked files is always a problem when installing anything on Windows, and this definitely saves a reboot or two.
In most of US, not having a car means your job prospects become severely limited, just at the time when you can't afford to be picky.
Well, some of the fear comes from unfamiliarity with the legal system. There's the general idea that anyone can sue anyone for any reason, and that IS largely true in the US. I don't know, I think all it would take to send me into a heart attack is a single legalese letter, no matter how difficult it may be for the company to follow through. I'd just fold after seeing the bill from my lawyer for his first 10 hours, which, if the lawsuit has any merit, is easily achievable.
Exactly. I have the disposable 2-week contacts, I can sleep in them even though it's not recommended, but at least you can still be spontenaeus. You don't need to carry all the contact gear with you all the time, and the lenses are actually quite hardy. I've been thinking about the 1-month ones you can leave in 24x7, but I'm not sure they're quite approved yet, and haven't really proven themselves yet, for me anyways. I'll look into them again when I run out next time in about 2 years.
The only sucky thing about contacts is they're not so great around water, which is a bit of a bummer. I got caught in heavy rain a couple of times, and it's much less fun when you can't see a damn thing. Oddly enough, I'm never bothered by dust or any irritants getting under the lens, not sure why you have that problem (dry eyes maybe?).
I'm no legal expert, or a scholar of the GPL, but I call bullshit. You're saying that every project that distributes binaries, needs to make a copy of their build environment (and source to it?) available as well. That's fucking retarded, putting it mildly.
Well, sure enough, the GPL exempts the environment from the source code requirement, provided it is generally available (kernel, compiler, linker, libc, etc). A modified gcc that still produces the same functional code as a regular publically available gcc may be skirting the gray area here. Question: Do you have the tools to build a binary from the source given? Yes. Q: Is it the exact same binary as distributed? No (due to environment differences). Q: Is it functionally the same binary? Yes. So what is the problem?
The source to the binaries IS available. The tool to munge said code and tag it uniquely need not be released.
If you take a copy of gcc, modify it to automagically tag the binaries it produces, you don't have to distribute your changes to gcc, as long as you keep this version of gcc in-house. As long as the source will still compile and work with an un-modified gcc, they're fine. Anyhow, the tagging is a little gray to me... the GPL does not stipulate the binary generated from obtained source need be exactly the same, bit for bit (given variations between gcc and linker versions, etc), just that the bits have the same functionality.
BTW, I, for one, think $50 for source is reasonable, if a little steep. After all, they have to pay someone to burn the CD and then pay to get it shipped. That AOL can do it for pennies is irrelevant. They're not AOL. Source distribution is the cost of doing business under GPL, they're not gonna swallow it, they'll pass it on like every other business does. Maybe when they're doing volume like AOL, they'll invest in a 3rd party burning service and then it'll be pennies a copy.
I had a 486DX50, and it was FAST. Certainly could play Doom full-screen with sound and music with no issues at all. I remember it came with a cheesy video card which I bumped up to 512k (IIRC) to get some of the higher resolutions, but Doom just required 320x200 anyways.
Was it Doom that you could run @ 320x400 and see a 'preview' of the next frame?
With enough of the right skills you can talk your way out of the town. In fact, you can pretty much talk and sneak your way out of anything given the right class (I'd usually play half-elf or human) in Arcanum. I actually really liked the game (except for the map), it didn't have too much tedium like killing giant spiders for the first 10 hours, and even the graphics style grew on me.
Cancer is not a binary state. They come in various forms and differ in how widespread and how severe they are. There's a difference betwen a cancer you can treat with some surgery and pills, and a two week death sentence.
Well, yes and no.
Practically all shows, whether sitcoms or special events, are of course taped by the PRODUCERS. I can see a station keeping tapes of its news shows, for example, or any live material. But I very much doubt any TV station or radio station tapes everything they beam out. Why would they? All the shows they broadcast are either produced by them (so they have tapes) or syndicated. Capturing the live signal is pointless from their perspective. So if some joker in the control room decided to interject a couple of frames of a naked boobie, there'd be no record.
I'm sure there's some cost involved here. Does your ISP backup to tape all the traffic going across their routers? All the mail? All their non-access/non-billing related logs? Don't think so.
I'm in Canada (with Scotiabank, but friends with others tell me the same story), and I NEVER had to pay to deposit money. And, unlike so many of our neighbours in the US, we don't pay extra to talk to a teller either.
If you're paying to deposit a cheque, ask about what kind of account you have. Some of the 'my first bank account' type programs, or very restrictive ones for high credit risks or people with no income, or the regular, but very basic accounts, those may have some charges like that, for example, free 10 ATM transactions and 5 cheques per month, after that you pay a service fee. If you consistantly carry a positive balance on your account, you can always switch to something better. Or close your account and move to a credit union.
It must have been rushed... I don't normally notice this kind of stuff (suspension of disbelief?) when I'm enjoying a movie, but I did notice quite a few problems listed, aside from the painfully obvious: anything remotely connected to the fusion device, which is to say half the plot (but hey, it's comic-based). Especially the car-through-cafe-window. That was just stupid. But also the webbing at the end, that was also very very obvious. So many things just looked really unfinished.
BTW, in these kinds of lists, the notes always say 'CLEARLY visible' (crew, equipment, fx, etc). I look at the scene carefully when watching a movie again, and almost never see anything, certainly not CLEARLY. And never on DVDs... do they clean these kinds of mistakes up in DVD production?
If you're really high up in the company, you're management, and therefore you aren't union.
He still made out better than most employees who contribute to their company. It depends on your contract (if you have one), and the kind of company. Part of it is that anything of significance in a large company REQUIRES a team effort; even if you have a great idea and spearhead a project and push for it, and it happens to pay off, you're still standing on the shoulders of giants, or paper pushers at least. There are all kinds of people actually making things happen. Did anyone else get $10M? Options? Don't think so.
What about the reverse of the coin? Should people working for money losing departments (support, customer service, etc) give money back to the company? Can't have it both ways. Sometimes you make the company tons of money, sometimes you're not so hot. Either way, at the end of the day you get a paycheque. If there's a bonus, that's just gravy.
So? He took the options instead of cash, a gamble in other words. Stock tanked after merger, options remained under water, expired, end of story. I'm sure no one would complain if the stock went through the roof and the guy ended up with much more than $135M.
That's some shitty testing, that MAY qualify as unit testing, if you're short on time, which obviously you're not since you're testing every input. QA and unit testing concerns itself with valid input, yes, but more importantly, corner cases, edge cases, and error/failure conditions. What happens when your input has an error? (In the case of tee, all input is valid, and just duplicated.) What happens when you can't read from input stream? Can't write to one of your outputs? What SHOULD happen? How does it recover?
Basically, your requirements/design set out all the inputs, and what is considered valid, and what should happen in all the invalid cases. Then you test your valid cases and verify that it works. Then you test your error cases, and verify that they fail properly.
A bug (when found in any case) may be a defect, but a defect is not necessarily a bug. For example, defect: importing file is slow. It's a legitimate defect. Point me to the corresponding bug.
I VERY SERIOUSLY doubt Microsoft, or any company for that matter, software or otherwise, has a ZERO DEFECT policy, for ANY milestone or commercial release. There are ALWAYS defects outstanding. On one of the projects I am currently on, any defects rated less than Critical or High (essentially a showstopper) will not stop a release. (I don't necessarily agree with it, but it's a flexible policy. If someone makes a stink about their defect, or a decent workaround is not available, that's different, that's a missing feature.) Any software product of any significant complexity does not have a state called Zero Defect.
No, Microsoft has probably never delivered a "great" piece of software. Good, certainly. Good enough in most cases. Sometimes, downright hostile.
Sure, no company sets out to build bad software. OF COURSE they build GREAT software. Just like every company respects all their employees, cares about their customers, and stands behind their product. And they all have great and admirable mission statements and corporate values. But reality NEVER looks as good as the shiny piece of paper.