If you have patents or patents pending, you're sweet. If you don't, then basically you're having to trust the other party, who it sounds like have more laywers than you (read up on Trade Secret law). If you don't trust the other party, why are you going to do a deal with them?
NZ's only residential DSL supplier is Telecom NZ (various other parties onsell it with their own international bandwidth for slightly less in some cases). NZ$1 ~= US$0.42
Domestic only midband DSL 128kbps/128kbps midband for ~$NZ65. No static IP, no servers. Data cap of ~10GB/month from some providers.
Broadband DSL has traffic charges at a variety of rates depending on how much you pay up front for - 2Mbps/250kbps & 400MB traffic for ~$NZ61 + $0.18/MB over 400MB; up to 1000MB traffic for ~$NZ900 + $0.11/MB over 1000MB. Static IP for an extra $NZ27 per month. Run what you like, but watch out for $10,000 bills if your kids install Morpheous and leave it running for 3 months.
Some other providers supply DSL-like connections to commercial customers - we get 2Mbps for NZ$400ish from Clear, who don't supply high-speed connections to domestic customers (for the most part). In a few areas there's cable internet available, and there is high-speed wireless available in some areas too, for I think costs more or less comparable to DSL.
One company is pushing for a multi-ISP service with normal downloads through your regulay dial-up ISP, and sattelite-download on demand through their system at speeds of up to 1Mbps for when you want high-speed downloads. Sounds like a mad plan to me. - see http://www.getultra.info/. It might be good if you live in a rural area, because that's the best you're going to get, but I can't see it being a huge success, especially when the setup costs are around NZ$550.
We had (dot-com bust-up means that we no longer do anything) a reasonably comprehensive review process as part of our development process. The whole project team (developers, managers and QA) would show up to a project kick-off where the requirements would be discussed, and then meet again for a design review. This made sure that everyone was on the same wavelength, and had some idea of how the rest of the project hung together. Then the coders went off and did lower-level design and coding, and the QA folk wrote test plans and tests. Once the coding was largely complete then code reviews were done, and then the formal testing by the QA engineers.
The code reviews were moderated by a QA engineer, and the author and a reviewer or two. Because we had a coding standard (it wasn't too heavy, and had good buy-in from the developers) the review could concerntrate on making sure that the logic of the code was correct, and that all the requirements that were supposed to be covered were sorted. This usually took an hour or two, plus about that in preparation too. Everyone's code got reviewed, not just junior coders, so that everyone was exposed to all sorts of code, and junior people or those new to a language could learn from seniors and pick up house idioms.
This might sound a little over the top, and sometimes it was, so if everyone involved in a project agreed, we decided which steps to skip or shrink. This meant that we could use the full process for big or important projects, but left us with a structure for smaller, quicker projects. Our usual project timeframe was in the few weeks to few months, and this seemed to work. It's just a pity our company got bought by an organisation whose business plan didn't involve revenue.
This just in from Wired- Typo-Loving Squatter Squashed
. It looks as is Mr Zuccarini has been kicked in the 'nads, in a legal manner, under the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection act by Electronics Boutique. It seems he mouse-traps on his typo-pages and gets a cut for each click. Which is quite handy, because he has to pay $500,000 in damages.
Here's a grab from the page - he's not one of the little guys.
Zuccarini could not be reached for comment. In proceedings before the court, however, the ruling said he admitted that he earned between $800,000 and $1 million annually from the thousands of domain names he has registered.
You could be right there:-). The thing that makes Grafitti good is that you can pick up the thing in the shop and write your name on it with only two attempts. Unistrokes is designed for the user that has used the system for more than half an hour, not for moving things off shelves..
While Unistroke might look ugly, It was designed that the most common characters are also the fastest to draw. These little gestural languages are surprisingly easy to pick up. My masters thesis was on a Unistrokes-derived music input language, and non-computer users could be fluent in the (admitedly small sub-) set of signs in about 5 minutes, but these were experienced musicians. While the subset was small, with music, the vast majority of things you might like to write can be expressed in very few symbols.
Also worthy of note is that while the basic idea can be written on the back of an envelope, the devil is in the details, and there are a lot of details in producing a working handwriting system. Unistrokes is probably the result of a decade of PARC work in trying things that didn't even start to fly.
The unistroke alphabet was introduced to the world in Goldberg, D. & Richardson, C. (1993). Touch typing with a stylus. SIGGRAPH Video Review 88, New York: ACM., so presumably is was invented some years before.
Also of possible interest to the interested public is the work of Bill Buxton, and his Input Research Group at the University of Toronto. He discusses unistrokes, among other things in his chapter on Touch, Gesture and Marking. He's also a good speaker, and if you get a chance to hear him speak, grab it.
Slashdot Mirror
Ask Google for the pulsedata BrailleNote
If you have patents or patents pending, you're sweet. If you don't, then basically you're having to trust the other party, who it sounds like have more laywers than you (read up on Trade Secret law). If you don't trust the other party, why are you going to do a deal with them?
Domestic only midband DSL 128kbps/128kbps midband for ~$NZ65. No static IP, no servers. Data cap of ~10GB/month from some providers.
Broadband DSL has traffic charges at a variety of rates depending on how much you pay up front for - 2Mbps/250kbps & 400MB traffic for ~$NZ61 + $0.18/MB over 400MB; up to 1000MB traffic for ~$NZ900 + $0.11/MB over 1000MB. Static IP for an extra $NZ27 per month. Run what you like, but watch out for $10,000 bills if your kids install Morpheous and leave it running for 3 months.
Some other providers supply DSL-like connections to commercial customers - we get 2Mbps for NZ$400ish from Clear, who don't supply high-speed connections to domestic customers (for the most part). In a few areas there's cable internet available, and there is high-speed wireless available in some areas too, for I think costs more or less comparable to DSL.
One company is pushing for a multi-ISP service with normal downloads through your regulay dial-up ISP, and sattelite-download on demand through their system at speeds of up to 1Mbps for when you want high-speed downloads. Sounds like a mad plan to me. - see http://www.getultra.info/. It might be good if you live in a rural area, because that's the best you're going to get, but I can't see it being a huge success, especially when the setup costs are around NZ$550.
Google "low-profile pci video card"
Yeesh.
We had (dot-com bust-up means that we no longer do anything) a reasonably comprehensive review process as part of our development process. The whole project team (developers, managers and QA) would show up to a project kick-off where the requirements would be discussed, and then meet again for a design review. This made sure that everyone was on the same wavelength, and had some idea of how the rest of the project hung together. Then the coders went off and did lower-level design and coding, and the QA folk wrote test plans and tests. Once the coding was largely complete then code reviews were done, and then the formal testing by the QA engineers.
The code reviews were moderated by a QA engineer, and the author and a reviewer or two. Because we had a coding standard (it wasn't too heavy, and had good buy-in from the developers) the review could concerntrate on making sure that the logic of the code was correct, and that all the requirements that were supposed to be covered were sorted. This usually took an hour or two, plus about that in preparation too. Everyone's code got reviewed, not just junior coders, so that everyone was exposed to all sorts of code, and junior people or those new to a language could learn from seniors and pick up house idioms.
This might sound a little over the top, and sometimes it was, so if everyone involved in a project agreed, we decided which steps to skip or shrink. This meant that we could use the full process for big or important projects, but left us with a structure for smaller, quicker projects. Our usual project timeframe was in the few weeks to few months, and this seemed to work. It's just a pity our company got bought by an organisation whose business plan didn't involve revenue.
I second the call for Purify. While it's expensive, so am I.
This just in from Wired- Typo-Loving Squatter Squashed . It looks as is Mr Zuccarini has been kicked in the 'nads, in a legal manner, under the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection act by Electronics Boutique. It seems he mouse-traps on his typo-pages and gets a cut for each click. Which is quite handy, because he has to pay $500,000 in damages.
Here's a grab from the page - he's not one of the little guys.
Zuccarini could not be reached for comment. In proceedings before the court, however, the ruling said he admitted that he earned between $800,000 and $1 million annually from the thousands of domain names he has registered.
You could be right there :-). The thing that makes Grafitti good is that you can pick up the thing in the shop and write your name on it with only two attempts. Unistrokes is designed for the user that has used the system for more than half an hour, not for moving things off shelves..
While Unistroke might look ugly, It was designed that the most common characters are also the fastest to draw. These little gestural languages are surprisingly easy to pick up. My masters thesis was on a Unistrokes-derived music input language, and non-computer users could be fluent in the (admitedly small sub-) set of signs in about 5 minutes, but these were experienced musicians. While the subset was small, with music, the vast majority of things you might like to write can be expressed in very few symbols.
Also worthy of note is that while the basic idea can be written on the back of an envelope, the devil is in the details, and there are a lot of details in producing a working handwriting system. Unistrokes is probably the result of a decade of PARC work in trying things that didn't even start to fly.
The unistroke alphabet was introduced to the world in Goldberg, D. & Richardson, C. (1993). Touch typing with a stylus. SIGGRAPH Video Review 88, New York: ACM., so presumably is was invented some years before.
Also of possible interest to the interested public is the work of Bill Buxton, and his Input Research Group at the University of Toronto. He discusses unistrokes, among other things in his chapter on Touch, Gesture and Marking. He's also a good speaker, and if you get a chance to hear him speak, grab it.