Microsoft isn't even asking, they're telling: "A good user experience of Blender on Windows is good for your project/community and good for Microsoft." One suggestion would be to stop telling them what is good for their project.
Another would be to send someone who has a reputation of contributing to their project, or to open source in general, as the wording there is very business-partnership-like which is an immediate turn-off to most people, or as said by parent, they could actually start paying someone to contribute to the project. If they were serious about it, they would shut their mouths for a year and quietly start a program where employees can spend 5 hours a week working on an open source project and get paid to do it (this will never happen).
This sounds a lot more like "making them an offer they can't refuse" than an honest attempt to contribute.
I think the question could stand to be a little more specific in terms of the definitions of "code" and "running," but I'm sure somewhere someone is using punch cards to machine things ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Numerical_Control ). I've seen a lot of ancient machines like this, mostly because they are designed for very long lifetimes, but also because generally they are given the tlc of the machinists that use them.
There is no replacement for actually seeing how someone who does something for a living actually uses their tools and solves the problems of their profession. In addition, they will have the tools you will need. If you can find an EE who wants to learn about cs/programming, all the better.
Come up with a project of reasonable difficulty and work on it together. Embedded stuff is excellent for this because there is a good mix of hardware and software. The results will also be much more satisfying as there is twice as much effort going into it, and more importantly, you will be making sure that the software is of high quality, and the ee will be making sure the hardware is of high quality.
I'm an ee, and I can say from experience that this kind of knowledge exchange is much faster and more rewarding (because you're also helping the other person avoid the myriad of pitfalls in your area of expertise). There no reason to start off by reading a book when you can have someone tutor you (in exchange for your knowledge of course:)). If the practical experience intrigues you, THEN pick up a book and learn more about the theory behind it.
There's no way to gain anything from this scenario. Tell them to pay an unbiased, uninterested professional to do it. Imagine they give you the disk(s) and, however unlikely, it breaks while you're copying it. Imagine you find something really unflattering about the person. Imagine you find something that you think is relevant, but you're unsure of whether to tell them about it. There is nothing you could find on that disk that results in a positive outcome. Someone who does data recovery for a living will have the tools and experience to provide the best chances possible of finding what the family wants, _especially_ if they are going to use the findings for legal reasons/money.
I was just about to post the same thing, this should be modded up. I think this logic makes perfect sense. I would be VERY willing to pay, say, $10 for every vote I made in such a system.
It would be much more convenient as well, there would be much shorter lines, and people already know where their atms are. There must be a reason why banking companies aren't pushing for this themselves. However, even in spite of their lack of interest, it seems it should be possible to set up some kind of new company that the current system just treats as a new bank in their system. They already have the capability to add support for a new bank at (almost) any atm.
In terms of privacy, while who you voted for is currently private, the fact that you are voting is not. With atms, this privacy would be possible.
Furthermore, this could replace absentee ballots since you can use atms while abroad (for a large price).
In the least it should be possible to use this secure connection (who knows what protocol they use in terms of what can be displayed to the user and read from the input buttons though).
I see no problem with allowing XP, if MS wants to pay for the development. Sugar is so slow and unusable (yes I've used it recently and thoroughly) that it actually gives XP a chance (but not a good one) of achieving comparable responsiveness.
Sugar is a blatant reinvention of the wheel, with the motivation being to evangelize a particular type of interface.
A well designed os is invisible to and unnoticed by the user. I think the same thing is true for a window manager (which is what sugar boils down to at the end of the day). They should just pick a simple X implementation that meets their requirements, pick a simple window manager _that is actually being used daily by people in the real world_ and move on to the applications and content, which is what really matters.
With sugar they're falling into the windows trap of "the users are idiots, let's bend over backwards to dumb down the interface." I think smart kids are going to be pissed when they realize no one in developed countries uses sugar, and they see how fast their system can run without sugar. The smart kids are really the ones olpc should be targeting, because they are the ones that will grow up to make a difference in these countries.
I realize this is off topic, but what are the options for cheap worm drives? I've looked and it seems like all the commercial offerings target businesses. I would love to have a truly permanent storage for my documents and collected media. Why don't they make a drive with a standard form factor that I can afford, both in terms of cost/GB and cost of the drive itself?
Furthermore, it seems like the most common solution for this today is to use different drivers which don't allow rewriting with an ordinary hdd. This is not what I'm looking for.
WARNING: digression
This may be a pipedream, but I am looking for something where it is impossible to alter the history of the drive without physically destroying the medium. Magnetic tape is still erasable, and I think this is suboptimal.
What I am am wishing for, abstractly, is an array of fuses (1TB*8 of them:)). Each fuse is a FSM with 3 states: BLANK, ZERO, and ONE. each fuse starts as BLANK, and a write operation causes a transition to ZERO or ONE. These are the only two transitions.
Intuitively it seems like it should be possible to store this state chemically, and read and write to it electrically/magnetically somehow (as an ee/cs person, the chemical part is the magic part of me:)).
To go even further, you don't need a guarantee that when you try to write ZERO or ONE that you will end in the desired state, since you can just read what you just wrote to verify it wrote what you wanted. If it didn't, then write to the next block saying that the last block is bad (even if that write fails, you can then say the last two blocks are bad, and so on).
I envision this system as a lower step on the memory hierarchy, below the hdd (with an hdd effectively acting as a cache). What prevents this from existing/ being popular?
"nitwit social worker" is pretty offensive. The problem I have with your argument is that you assume everyone is omnipotent, and therefore it is their fault when their decisions affect them adversely (because they were full informed). Granted, most of us are idiots and do things we know will hurt us, but a good portion of the people who "screw their life up" do so because they don't know a better way of doing things (or they don't fully comprehend the consequences). The whole point of social work is to show people how they can change their lives for the better, not to mettle.
Society would be a shitty place if everyone acted as you prescribe. If everyone only picks up their own garbage, eventually the ground will be covered in garbage, because everyone will drop something eventually, and not knowing it's theirs, they won't pick it up, and neither can anyone else. Imagine that principle carried over into all aspects of society.
Generally things grow with time, and for most people using java I think it would be hard to argue the recent changes make the language worse (compare code from 1.4.1 to 1.5 and 1.6). I think Sun has done about as well as they could have in terms of choosing and implementing JSRs, I would argue they've done a better job than if it was done by a straight democracy of the parties involved.
Honestly, why not, what does the US have to lose? As long as they can verify that the applicants actually have skills that are in high demand, and that these companies are willing to commit to employing them for a long period of time (say 5 years), why not let them immigrate here? What does the US have to lose?
I'm an american "worker" and I think my job would probably be one of the first filled under such a policy. I think it would be much better to fire me and fill my job with someone who is willing to work for less (if that's really the optimal thing to do), so that I can learn some new skills and work in an area where my skills are valued more highly.
I would much rather know that my employer values my work that little that I can be replaced that "easily" (I mean no disrespect to the immigrants that would fill the job), than work for years ignorant of the fact that there's a 1000 people out there that could do my job just as well as I can, and the only reason I have the job is because I was born here.
I think there's no question that arbitrarily holding the system out of equilibrium is a bad thing (as much as I dislike agreeing with Mr. Gates), but the real question is why do all these intelligent people want to live and work here? I thought the rest of the world passionately hated the US?
Isn't this a contradiction that this many intelligent people want to immigrate here, while at the same time they hate our policy and government? By saying you want to live and work here aren't you admitting that living and working conditions (which one could argue are a result of our policy and government) are better in our country than they are in whatever country you came from? Again, I mean no disrespect and I'm certainly no fan of the current administration, I am just ignorant of the motivations for wanting to live and work in the US.
...isn't that what apple did with OS X? Honestly why is this such a hard pill to swallow for them? Can someone explain why they refuse to do it (especially if now they are breaking reverse binary compatibility anyway)?
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Another would be to send someone who has a reputation of contributing to their project, or to open source in general, as the wording there is very business-partnership-like which is an immediate turn-off to most people, or as said by parent, they could actually start paying someone to contribute to the project. If they were serious about it, they would shut their mouths for a year and quietly start a program where employees can spend 5 hours a week working on an open source project and get paid to do it (this will never happen).
This sounds a lot more like "making them an offer they can't refuse" than an honest attempt to contribute.
I think the question could stand to be a little more specific in terms of the definitions of "code" and "running," but I'm sure somewhere someone is using punch cards to machine things ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Numerical_Control ). I've seen a lot of ancient machines like this, mostly because they are designed for very long lifetimes, but also because generally they are given the tlc of the machinists that use them.
Come up with a project of reasonable difficulty and work on it together. Embedded stuff is excellent for this because there is a good mix of hardware and software. The results will also be much more satisfying as there is twice as much effort going into it, and more importantly, you will be making sure that the software is of high quality, and the ee will be making sure the hardware is of high quality.
I'm an ee, and I can say from experience that this kind of knowledge exchange is much faster and more rewarding (because you're also helping the other person avoid the myriad of pitfalls in your area of expertise). There no reason to start off by reading a book when you can have someone tutor you (in exchange for your knowledge of course:)). If the practical experience intrigues you, THEN pick up a book and learn more about the theory behind it.
There's no way to gain anything from this scenario. Tell them to pay an unbiased, uninterested professional to do it. Imagine they give you the disk(s) and, however unlikely, it breaks while you're copying it. Imagine you find something really unflattering about the person. Imagine you find something that you think is relevant, but you're unsure of whether to tell them about it. There is nothing you could find on that disk that results in a positive outcome. Someone who does data recovery for a living will have the tools and experience to provide the best chances possible of finding what the family wants, _especially_ if they are going to use the findings for legal reasons/money.
It would be much more convenient as well, there would be much shorter lines, and people already know where their atms are. There must be a reason why banking companies aren't pushing for this themselves. However, even in spite of their lack of interest, it seems it should be possible to set up some kind of new company that the current system just treats as a new bank in their system. They already have the capability to add support for a new bank at (almost) any atm.
In terms of privacy, while who you voted for is currently private, the fact that you are voting is not. With atms, this privacy would be possible.
Furthermore, this could replace absentee ballots since you can use atms while abroad (for a large price).
In the least it should be possible to use this secure connection (who knows what protocol they use in terms of what can be displayed to the user and read from the input buttons though).
Sugar is a blatant reinvention of the wheel, with the motivation being to evangelize a particular type of interface.
A well designed os is invisible to and unnoticed by the user. I think the same thing is true for a window manager (which is what sugar boils down to at the end of the day). They should just pick a simple X implementation that meets their requirements, pick a simple window manager _that is actually being used daily by people in the real world_ and move on to the applications and content, which is what really matters.
With sugar they're falling into the windows trap of "the users are idiots, let's bend over backwards to dumb down the interface." I think smart kids are going to be pissed when they realize no one in developed countries uses sugar, and they see how fast their system can run without sugar. The smart kids are really the ones olpc should be targeting, because they are the ones that will grow up to make a difference in these countries.
Furthermore, it seems like the most common solution for this today is to use different drivers which don't allow rewriting with an ordinary hdd. This is not what I'm looking for.
WARNING: digression
This may be a pipedream, but I am looking for something where it is impossible to alter the history of the drive without physically destroying the medium. Magnetic tape is still erasable, and I think this is suboptimal.
What I am am wishing for, abstractly, is an array of fuses (1TB*8 of them:)). Each fuse is a FSM with 3 states: BLANK, ZERO, and ONE. each fuse starts as BLANK, and a write operation causes a transition to ZERO or ONE. These are the only two transitions.
Intuitively it seems like it should be possible to store this state chemically, and read and write to it electrically/magnetically somehow (as an ee/cs person, the chemical part is the magic part of me:)).
To go even further, you don't need a guarantee that when you try to write ZERO or ONE that you will end in the desired state, since you can just read what you just wrote to verify it wrote what you wanted. If it didn't, then write to the next block saying that the last block is bad (even if that write fails, you can then say the last two blocks are bad, and so on).
I envision this system as a lower step on the memory hierarchy, below the hdd (with an hdd effectively acting as a cache). What prevents this from existing/ being popular?
"nitwit social worker" is pretty offensive. The problem I have with your argument is that you assume everyone is omnipotent, and therefore it is their fault when their decisions affect them adversely (because they were full informed). Granted, most of us are idiots and do things we know will hurt us, but a good portion of the people who "screw their life up" do so because they don't know a better way of doing things (or they don't fully comprehend the consequences). The whole point of social work is to show people how they can change their lives for the better, not to mettle. Society would be a shitty place if everyone acted as you prescribe. If everyone only picks up their own garbage, eventually the ground will be covered in garbage, because everyone will drop something eventually, and not knowing it's theirs, they won't pick it up, and neither can anyone else. Imagine that principle carried over into all aspects of society.
Generally things grow with time, and for most people using java I think it would be hard to argue the recent changes make the language worse (compare code from 1.4.1 to 1.5 and 1.6). I think Sun has done about as well as they could have in terms of choosing and implementing JSRs, I would argue they've done a better job than if it was done by a straight democracy of the parties involved.
There's snow in Baghdad because hell is freezing over, that's unrelated.
I'm an american "worker" and I think my job would probably be one of the first filled under such a policy. I think it would be much better to fire me and fill my job with someone who is willing to work for less (if that's really the optimal thing to do), so that I can learn some new skills and work in an area where my skills are valued more highly.
I would much rather know that my employer values my work that little that I can be replaced that "easily" (I mean no disrespect to the immigrants that would fill the job), than work for years ignorant of the fact that there's a 1000 people out there that could do my job just as well as I can, and the only reason I have the job is because I was born here.
I think there's no question that arbitrarily holding the system out of equilibrium is a bad thing (as much as I dislike agreeing with Mr. Gates), but the real question is why do all these intelligent people want to live and work here? I thought the rest of the world passionately hated the US?
Isn't this a contradiction that this many intelligent people want to immigrate here, while at the same time they hate our policy and government? By saying you want to live and work here aren't you admitting that living and working conditions (which one could argue are a result of our policy and government) are better in our country than they are in whatever country you came from? Again, I mean no disrespect and I'm certainly no fan of the current administration, I am just ignorant of the motivations for wanting to live and work in the US.
...isn't that what apple did with OS X? Honestly why is this such a hard pill to swallow for them? Can someone explain why they refuse to do it (especially if now they are breaking reverse binary compatibility anyway)?