You forgot about Firebug. Web development is so much easier with Firebug, but it FF3 has disabled the plugin. As beautiful as FF3 is, I dreadfully miss Firebug. The Web Developer Toolbar is largely inferior.
Agreed. I would take this one step further to suggest that it would only be a matter of time before the cryptographic key would get broken, unless we're talking about installing 2048-bit+ encryption keys (1024 isn't safe anymore...PC World Article).
Since we're big on talking about terrorism in the US, I think that one of the biggest concerns would be a massive denial of service attack against cell phone providers to place the phones in their network in "Please turn off your cell phone during the movie" mode.
To be honest, collaboration tools aren't anything new. I recall that several years ago, Sun Microsystems released Java Studio Enterprise (can't remember the version) that boasted of the ability to collaborate on projects -- even allowing multiple developers to simultaneously edit the same class file. It additionally had the same chat features that were mentioned in this "UNA-cycle" software. I recall grabbing a version of that software for free from their website.
Surprisingly, as Sun moved on to endorse NetBeans, I haven't seen a plug-in for NetBeans that provides the same collaboration features (correct me if I'm wrong). What happened? Nevertheless, the collab tool WILL appear someday and once again, we'll receive complaints from De Goes, et al. The important thing is that as open-source communities, we are practicing unity and demonstrating that together we can develop products that rival proprietary business applications.
I don't intend to toot my horn, but I wanted to give you my perspective, being a 2006 graduate from a liberal arts college.
I attended Houghton College, a small Christian liberal arts college near Buffalo and Rochester, New York. The CS department consisted of one professor, Wei Hu. Though the entire weight of the CS department was on one professor, Wei had a hardcore Chinese work ethic and managed to leverage both 100-level teaching with advanced special topics courses in areas such as Machine Learning, Bioinformatics, Neural Networking, Encryption, and plenty of other topics that you would find in many of the high calibur institutions. The one advantage I had at Houghton was that I had one-on-one experience my entire way through. As a result, I had the opportunity to write a Bachelor's Thesis on machine learning and pattern classification and was greatly challenged in the process.
In addition to my CS degree (and of course, a math major), I took advantage of the liberal arts environment and tacked on minors in Spanish and Bible. As a result, I obtained a pretty well-rounded education and though, at the time I didn't think I could use all of my concentrations in one field, my background in artificial intelligence and Spanish have given me a drive to pursue Natural Language Processing in grad school.
Finally, the real test comes in comparison with your peers that graduated from other non-liberal arts schools. The biggest question for a liberal arts student is "How does my education compare with a technical school?" I was initially intimidated with the thought of working closely with peers from a tech school when I first began interning my Junior year, but I quickly found that we shared much of the same programming skill sets. My advantage was that my liberal arts education aided me in the business side of operations and enabled me to communicate technical material clearly with the higher level managers. In my IT professional career, this has given me the ability to influence the decisions of management by providing technical advice to support their marketing and sales campaigns.
Like some of the other posters have mentioned, it depends on how self motivated you are. There are always a group of students that care to a minimal extent -- these students could still get by at Houghton. However, I wouldn't consider them to be competitive. On the other hand, if you have good motivation and you find yourself in a small liberal arts college, you may be able to leverage the smaller student population to get more one-on-one time with your professors and advisors to do the work that really matches your career goals.
My recommendation: pair up a strong liberal arts institution with a good grad program. You'll get a good foundation in LA and if you're really motivated, you'll be able to extend into the hardcore level in grad school. The theory is more important in college, anyway. If your liberal arts institution focuses on theory, jump on it. The programming part is the easiest to pick up.
The problem is that charging a flat rate wouldn't accomplish much when it comes to addressing peak usage.
It's really starting to sound like the direction the electric industry is moving towards in the United States. I work as an IT developer at PPLSolutions, a subsidiary of PPL Corporation. Many areas throughout the country (e.g. Texas, New York, etc.) are deregulating energy to allow the market to dictate the cost of electricity (or gas). As a result, PPLSolutions is in the business of complex billing: creating billing calculations that reflect competition in the market, on/off peak usage, and other tariffs.
The reason I bring this up is that in a deregulated market energy is not sold at a constant price. You have to account for congestion on the power lines (similar to bandwidth), demand, line loss, to name a few factors. Energy suppliers purchase and sell energy at different rates each hour to minimize cost and maximize profit.
Chances are that if ISP's were to start billing for usage, they would enter a similar market to the deregulated energy market, where they would not just be charging a flat rate per KB, but rather, they would want to factor in the use of various DNS's, the amount of fiber (or cable/satellite) that your packets need to travel, and additionally would factor in on and off peak hours to your bill.
It gets even more complex, when you consider that people access websites around the world: if DNS's were to charge ISP's for routing requests to the corresponding servers, then each DNS might charge a different amount based on their own on/off peak hours and so on. Wrapping all of that into a customer's bill is going to be complex, if not hectic.
Likewise, it will likely result in people changing their browsing habits to avoid on peak charges (similar to night and weekend cell phone plans). I don't know if people would have enough patience to deal with this kind of pricing model (especially commercial and industrial companies). This kind of billing model would either change the way people use the internet, or would cause outrage altogether.
The one plus is that it will keep people like me in business.
I agree. It becomes similar to the "Cooks in the Kitchen" analogy that is constant taught in Microeconomics. There is a point at which adding additional resources and people to address an issue becomes detrimental to the efficiency of the project. In the case of Microsoft and Yahoo, you have the issue of disparate systems and management teams with differing goals, not to mention senior architects and developers that will likely radically disagree on the direction of their projects.
Did I mention the bloat of having to maintain both camps with additional project managers and supervisors to keep them all moving in the same direction?
Microsoft should continue to pull fresh minds from the pool of recent graduates (Bachelors/Masters/Ph.D) and allow their fresh legs to do the hard work of catching up with Google.
All those technical ramifications for no jet packs are certainly valid, but what about those poor organizations against operating machinery while under the influence?
MADF just doesn't make any sense, unless you have a speech impediment.
It would be more interesting performing as much processing on the phone as possible (for instance to reduce bandwidth and/or latency).
However, a cell phone has hardly the processing power to be able to perform image classification, let alone against a database of trained patterns. It might be able to extract one or two features from an image, such as RGB concentrations and hue/luminescence, but today's cell phones would have great difficulty extracting text from an image -- something that Accenture's "hack" can't yet do.
With the diminishing costs to maintain back-end servers, or the popularization of volunteering CPU time toward distributed computing, I'd recommend letting this kind of processing be done elsewhere, and to place some pressure on cell phone companies to lower the price their data plans.
In my opinion, I would rather focus using this technology towards language translation. It's really the same concept (n times more complicated, though). Transmit recorded sound to a back-end system which would be responsible for breaking the language into phonemes, eliminating noise, contextualizing the sentences, performing a rough translation, and localizing the sentence to the target vernacular. Of course, we'd first have to figure all of this out before employing the cell phone part.
Realistically, enabling a cell phone for computer vision or speech recognition/translation is more of an IT-based integration effort than it is cutting-edge research. The real research is being conducted in universities.
So all I have to do is record a crappy album while I'm on my one hour lunch break (preferably in the bathroom for the acoustics), make some outrageous claim to the RIAA that I'm making a worthless CD that will act as jail bait, and release it on a public website with ambiguous wording, making it sound almost as if it's free to distribute over the Internet, and then quit my day job?
Sounds too easy. Whoops, I forgot the part where I'd probably only make $20 out of that $1.5 million per CD. Can I take my resignation letter back?
I would like to see a write up on how the businesses that have outsourced all of their IT staff and customer care to India are faring in this Internet blackout. Run, shareholders, run!
I work in an IT organization of a subsidiary of a Fortune 500 utilities corporation. Our group has virtually NO documentation in an electronic or paper format for all of the source code and data modeling we have constructed over our 6+ years in business. Essentially all we have are a couple of Visio diagram that describe the data models, our nightly batch process from an essentially useless high level and a few Word documents outlining one or two not-so-business-critical processes. The real business process knowledge is distributed among the heads of the developers. Of course, several of our IT staff are nearing retirement age, so documentation becomes a critical issue.
I have personally recommended creating our own company wiki, as I believe that by allowing all employees the opportunity to document their work as they get the time and to be able to actively correct any incorrect documentation. Not to mention, an intern being paid 2/3 of the entry level salary could maintain the wiki with relative ease, saving the company much more money than adopting a Sharepoint solution (IMO). My IT manager and supervisor both would like to adopt the wiki idea, but being in a large corporation, we need approval from the right people to get it into place.
You are right in saying that your efforts toward documentation will fall short if management isn't actively supporting your initiative. My experience within Fortune 500 companies is that management will generally not put much emphasis in a project unless it provides business value that also benefits their earnings per share. Sometimes businesses focus more on capital projects and making money than process improvement initiatives (especially when it could greatly reduce the training time for new/transitioned employees or contractors), which have the benefit of bringing down sustenance costs.
Now wouldn't it just tick off all of those Apple enthusiasts that bought the iPhone two days ago for $400 if Apple already dropped the phone's price to $150? Personally, I think the OpenMoko phone is cooler anyway. Linux geeks and design nuts, unite!
Interesting that you mention Jesus Camp. Jesus Camp serves as a double-edged sword. The movie exhibits both the wrong kind of Christianity (one that is frowned upon within the very source that these Christians use as a basis for their lives) and serves a challenge to the authentic to reinforce why honesty is the best policy. I thoroughly enjoyed watching Jesus Camp, as it artfully demonstrates the wrong way to go about ministry (much like the practices of the Church of Scientology). Esoteric teachings are certainly not a viable way of teaching truth; neither is deception.
I'm thinking the Running Man (1987) would be exciting.
The year is 2008. Corporations don't bid the highest for a wireless spectrum. They bid for their lives. Of course, they'd still have to compete with Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Final Fantasy was one of my favorite game series, but I'm thinking that Microsoft is trying to make us feel like their operating systems are like MMORPG's. Kind of like FFXI (why do you exist?), Microsoft is taking the same tactic of designing a world filled with problems and inviting developers and hackers to register and join in the never ending, yet ever-so-tedious, quest of fixing (or exploiting) the crises. I hope that Windows 7 will at least let us choose a neat avatar.
I don't see why they wouldn't just bundle Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) runtime within Office 2009 and provide the opportunity to use that or OOXML. I think I would have more confidence in a VB.NET macro written by someone who doesn't have a clue about object-oriented development, rather than hang on to insecure and deprecated technology.
Careful what you say about writing the code in any CLR language. I doubt that anyone would like to see a macro written in a.NET rendition of COBOL or Fortran. LISP wouldn't be so bad, though.;-)
Stem cells my foot. People just want to see if they can create lizardmen and minotaurs. Those WoW enthusiasts need to calm down with their grass root politics.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe DARPA should sponsor The Pirate Bay's efforts to encrypt internet traffic instead. Different goals, but same means. Wouldn't that be ironic?
Not to worry. I bet they can still model ER diagrams. They seem to have the one-to-many relationship down.
I personally find that bawling like a Wookie seems to break up telemarketers' momentum.
Let me propose an action plan to stop C02 emissions:
You forgot about Firebug. Web development is so much easier with Firebug, but it FF3 has disabled the plugin. As beautiful as FF3 is, I dreadfully miss Firebug. The Web Developer Toolbar is largely inferior.
Agreed. I would take this one step further to suggest that it would only be a matter of time before the cryptographic key would get broken, unless we're talking about installing 2048-bit+ encryption keys (1024 isn't safe anymore...PC World Article).
Since we're big on talking about terrorism in the US, I think that one of the biggest concerns would be a massive denial of service attack against cell phone providers to place the phones in their network in "Please turn off your cell phone during the movie" mode.
To be honest, collaboration tools aren't anything new. I recall that several years ago, Sun Microsystems released Java Studio Enterprise (can't remember the version) that boasted of the ability to collaborate on projects -- even allowing multiple developers to simultaneously edit the same class file. It additionally had the same chat features that were mentioned in this "UNA-cycle" software. I recall grabbing a version of that software for free from their website.
Surprisingly, as Sun moved on to endorse NetBeans, I haven't seen a plug-in for NetBeans that provides the same collaboration features (correct me if I'm wrong). What happened? Nevertheless, the collab tool WILL appear someday and once again, we'll receive complaints from De Goes, et al. The important thing is that as open-source communities, we are practicing unity and demonstrating that together we can develop products that rival proprietary business applications.
I don't intend to toot my horn, but I wanted to give you my perspective, being a 2006 graduate from a liberal arts college.
I attended Houghton College, a small Christian liberal arts college near Buffalo and Rochester, New York. The CS department consisted of one professor, Wei Hu. Though the entire weight of the CS department was on one professor, Wei had a hardcore Chinese work ethic and managed to leverage both 100-level teaching with advanced special topics courses in areas such as Machine Learning, Bioinformatics, Neural Networking, Encryption, and plenty of other topics that you would find in many of the high calibur institutions. The one advantage I had at Houghton was that I had one-on-one experience my entire way through. As a result, I had the opportunity to write a Bachelor's Thesis on machine learning and pattern classification and was greatly challenged in the process.
In addition to my CS degree (and of course, a math major), I took advantage of the liberal arts environment and tacked on minors in Spanish and Bible. As a result, I obtained a pretty well-rounded education and though, at the time I didn't think I could use all of my concentrations in one field, my background in artificial intelligence and Spanish have given me a drive to pursue Natural Language Processing in grad school.
Finally, the real test comes in comparison with your peers that graduated from other non-liberal arts schools. The biggest question for a liberal arts student is "How does my education compare with a technical school?" I was initially intimidated with the thought of working closely with peers from a tech school when I first began interning my Junior year, but I quickly found that we shared much of the same programming skill sets. My advantage was that my liberal arts education aided me in the business side of operations and enabled me to communicate technical material clearly with the higher level managers. In my IT professional career, this has given me the ability to influence the decisions of management by providing technical advice to support their marketing and sales campaigns.
Like some of the other posters have mentioned, it depends on how self motivated you are. There are always a group of students that care to a minimal extent -- these students could still get by at Houghton. However, I wouldn't consider them to be competitive. On the other hand, if you have good motivation and you find yourself in a small liberal arts college, you may be able to leverage the smaller student population to get more one-on-one time with your professors and advisors to do the work that really matches your career goals.
My recommendation: pair up a strong liberal arts institution with a good grad program. You'll get a good foundation in LA and if you're really motivated, you'll be able to extend into the hardcore level in grad school. The theory is more important in college, anyway. If your liberal arts institution focuses on theory, jump on it. The programming part is the easiest to pick up.
The problem is that charging a flat rate wouldn't accomplish much when it comes to addressing peak usage.
It's really starting to sound like the direction the electric industry is moving towards in the United States. I work as an IT developer at PPLSolutions, a subsidiary of PPL Corporation. Many areas throughout the country (e.g. Texas, New York, etc.) are deregulating energy to allow the market to dictate the cost of electricity (or gas). As a result, PPLSolutions is in the business of complex billing: creating billing calculations that reflect competition in the market, on/off peak usage, and other tariffs.
The reason I bring this up is that in a deregulated market energy is not sold at a constant price. You have to account for congestion on the power lines (similar to bandwidth), demand, line loss, to name a few factors. Energy suppliers purchase and sell energy at different rates each hour to minimize cost and maximize profit.
Chances are that if ISP's were to start billing for usage, they would enter a similar market to the deregulated energy market, where they would not just be charging a flat rate per KB, but rather, they would want to factor in the use of various DNS's, the amount of fiber (or cable/satellite) that your packets need to travel, and additionally would factor in on and off peak hours to your bill.
It gets even more complex, when you consider that people access websites around the world: if DNS's were to charge ISP's for routing requests to the corresponding servers, then each DNS might charge a different amount based on their own on/off peak hours and so on. Wrapping all of that into a customer's bill is going to be complex, if not hectic.
Likewise, it will likely result in people changing their browsing habits to avoid on peak charges (similar to night and weekend cell phone plans). I don't know if people would have enough patience to deal with this kind of pricing model (especially commercial and industrial companies). This kind of billing model would either change the way people use the internet, or would cause outrage altogether.
The one plus is that it will keep people like me in business.
I agree. It becomes similar to the "Cooks in the Kitchen" analogy that is constant taught in Microeconomics. There is a point at which adding additional resources and people to address an issue becomes detrimental to the efficiency of the project. In the case of Microsoft and Yahoo, you have the issue of disparate systems and management teams with differing goals, not to mention senior architects and developers that will likely radically disagree on the direction of their projects. Did I mention the bloat of having to maintain both camps with additional project managers and supervisors to keep them all moving in the same direction? Microsoft should continue to pull fresh minds from the pool of recent graduates (Bachelors/Masters/Ph.D) and allow their fresh legs to do the hard work of catching up with Google.
All those technical ramifications for no jet packs are certainly valid, but what about those poor organizations against operating machinery while under the influence?
MADF just doesn't make any sense, unless you have a speech impediment.
Too bad. I would've wanted to see his flying roundhouse kick while strapped to a jet pack finisher on Walker Texas Ranger.
However, a cell phone has hardly the processing power to be able to perform image classification, let alone against a database of trained patterns. It might be able to extract one or two features from an image, such as RGB concentrations and hue/luminescence, but today's cell phones would have great difficulty extracting text from an image -- something that Accenture's "hack" can't yet do.
With the diminishing costs to maintain back-end servers, or the popularization of volunteering CPU time toward distributed computing, I'd recommend letting this kind of processing be done elsewhere, and to place some pressure on cell phone companies to lower the price their data plans.
In my opinion, I would rather focus using this technology towards language translation. It's really the same concept (n times more complicated, though). Transmit recorded sound to a back-end system which would be responsible for breaking the language into phonemes, eliminating noise, contextualizing the sentences, performing a rough translation, and localizing the sentence to the target vernacular. Of course, we'd first have to figure all of this out before employing the cell phone part.
Realistically, enabling a cell phone for computer vision or speech recognition/translation is more of an IT-based integration effort than it is cutting-edge research. The real research is being conducted in universities.
So all I have to do is record a crappy album while I'm on my one hour lunch break (preferably in the bathroom for the acoustics), make some outrageous claim to the RIAA that I'm making a worthless CD that will act as jail bait, and release it on a public website with ambiguous wording, making it sound almost as if it's free to distribute over the Internet, and then quit my day job?
Sounds too easy. Whoops, I forgot the part where I'd probably only make $20 out of that $1.5 million per CD. Can I take my resignation letter back?
I would like to see a write up on how the businesses that have outsourced all of their IT staff and customer care to India are faring in this Internet blackout. Run, shareholders, run!
I work in an IT organization of a subsidiary of a Fortune 500 utilities corporation. Our group has virtually NO documentation in an electronic or paper format for all of the source code and data modeling we have constructed over our 6+ years in business. Essentially all we have are a couple of Visio diagram that describe the data models, our nightly batch process from an essentially useless high level and a few Word documents outlining one or two not-so-business-critical processes. The real business process knowledge is distributed among the heads of the developers. Of course, several of our IT staff are nearing retirement age, so documentation becomes a critical issue.
I have personally recommended creating our own company wiki, as I believe that by allowing all employees the opportunity to document their work as they get the time and to be able to actively correct any incorrect documentation. Not to mention, an intern being paid 2/3 of the entry level salary could maintain the wiki with relative ease, saving the company much more money than adopting a Sharepoint solution (IMO). My IT manager and supervisor both would like to adopt the wiki idea, but being in a large corporation, we need approval from the right people to get it into place.
You are right in saying that your efforts toward documentation will fall short if management isn't actively supporting your initiative. My experience within Fortune 500 companies is that management will generally not put much emphasis in a project unless it provides business value that also benefits their earnings per share. Sometimes businesses focus more on capital projects and making money than process improvement initiatives (especially when it could greatly reduce the training time for new/transitioned employees or contractors), which have the benefit of bringing down sustenance costs.
Now wouldn't it just tick off all of those Apple enthusiasts that bought the iPhone two days ago for $400 if Apple already dropped the phone's price to $150? Personally, I think the OpenMoko phone is cooler anyway. Linux geeks and design nuts, unite!
Interesting that you mention Jesus Camp. Jesus Camp serves as a double-edged sword. The movie exhibits both the wrong kind of Christianity (one that is frowned upon within the very source that these Christians use as a basis for their lives) and serves a challenge to the authentic to reinforce why honesty is the best policy. I thoroughly enjoyed watching Jesus Camp, as it artfully demonstrates the wrong way to go about ministry (much like the practices of the Church of Scientology). Esoteric teachings are certainly not a viable way of teaching truth; neither is deception.
Anyone find this ironic that ICANN has made this request around Martin Luther King Jr.'s holiday?
Final Fantasy was one of my favorite game series, but I'm thinking that Microsoft is trying to make us feel like their operating systems are like MMORPG's. Kind of like FFXI (why do you exist?), Microsoft is taking the same tactic of designing a world filled with problems and inviting developers and hackers to register and join in the never ending, yet ever-so-tedious, quest of fixing (or exploiting) the crises. I hope that Windows 7 will at least let us choose a neat avatar.
I don't see why they wouldn't just bundle Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) runtime within Office 2009 and provide the opportunity to use that or OOXML. I think I would have more confidence in a VB.NET macro written by someone who doesn't have a clue about object-oriented development, rather than hang on to insecure and deprecated technology. Careful what you say about writing the code in any CLR language. I doubt that anyone would like to see a macro written in a .NET rendition of COBOL or Fortran. LISP wouldn't be so bad, though. ;-)
If it can show me the hit points and magic points of my foes, then sign me up for a beta test!
Stem cells my foot. People just want to see if they can create lizardmen and minotaurs. Those WoW enthusiasts need to calm down with their grass root politics.
Unless it works in miles, the US will never be able to use it. We don't fathom kilometers here.