There was a creepy sense of mercantilism infused in the event. Several corporations sponsored displays and there was no real local connection to anything. Although some of the presenters were from universities in Chicago, I expected to see some local mad scientists with cool stuff on card tables. I guess Wired magazine, being from the Left Coast, thinks of Chicago as a technological back-water. Here to edu-ma-cate us Midwest yokels.
Speaking of presenters, there were honest-to-goodness researchers and scientists at the booths. Yes, there were marketroids and students-with-summer-jobs but there were people there with real answers to questions. I asked the guy at the wind turbine booth some questions that I've never heard a straight answer to:
1. Are you reducing the noise of wind turbines? (People who live close to turbine farms complain about the hum.) His answer: They have added acoustic foam and have moved around some of the electronics to make things quieter.
2. How do wind turbines affect the flights of migratory birds? His answer: Radar shows that birds have learned to fly around the turbines. The incidents of birds flying into the turbines are few and the same as any other tall structure.
There were some other cool things: The next uniform for US soldiers makes them look like RoboCop. It looks like the next big thing in video games is using video cameras to make your body a part of the game. They just need to figure out how to make it easy enough for frustrated dads to set up after Christmas.
Never use a Wiki for documentation! Instead, you need a documentation maintainer to handle submissions. They will ensure that your documentation is clear, complete, correct, current, and consistent. This is hard work that goes largely unrecognized by the rest of the Open Source community.
Consider your documentation maintainer a part of your team. Give them CVS privileges. Don't disrespect them because they don't contribute massive amounts of source code. Answer their questions quickly and in a friendly manner.
If they have a problem explaining a feature, it may be a usability problem with your interface. Also, users will find a bug but will complain that the manual is wrong. So documentation maintainers are a source of good bug reports. Don't ignore their input because they're not an active programmer!
DocBook is the standard markup language for the major Open Source projects, so learn it.
One thing that the mozilla development community needs badly right now is a php.net, wiki-style website to encourage anyone and everyone to frequently update documentation easily and in small pieces.
Wikis don't work for technical documentation! In order for technical documentation to be usable, it has to be clear, complete, correct, and current. That is the bare minimum. In order for it to be good, it also has to be consistent.
Wikis don't guarantee any of the above criteria. Wiki advocates have even argued against completeness because it discourages participation. They've also decided against correctness in favor of a neutral point-of-view. Many under-edited contributions from different people also guarantee duplication, contradiction, and inconsistency. If anyone tries to straighten out the mess, then revert wars are the result.
So take it from a documentation volunteer, the best results are produced by a central maintainer. The maintainer coordinates contributions and edits them with the reader in mind. The maintainer can either be a person or a team, depending on the size of the task.
Still, English has been moving since Old English from a tense and ending based grammar and towards a word order based grammar (think of how weird "yoda talk" seems, even when it isn't technically grammatically incorrect, and understand it just fine you can)
> Admittedly, not too much open-source in that field.
You've got to be joking! I've been doing software synthesis for a least a decade with Csound, long before VST. VST plug-ins are a proverbial drop in the bucket compared to the rich history of software synthesis. For more information about the field, I'd suggest The Computer Music Tutorial by Curtis Roads.
Look at Linux MIDI & Sound page and tell me there aren't "much" open source soft synths. Besides Csound, pd and jMax might be worth investigating.
I misread the post, I thought the complaints were about the speed of its FFTW, the Fastest Fourier Transform in the West! I thought the author wanted to criticize the quality of its fourier transform functions.
> and maybe half the fluff removed that will have no bearing on real-world employment?
Do you plan on spending the rest of your life at work? In ten years, do you think you'll be doing the exact same job using the exact same technology anyway? At $60,000, I think it would be cheaper to get the Java and.Net certs on your own.
There's something to be said about a liberal arts education (as opposed to a purely vocational one) that prepares you for a life of continual learning. While being a well-rounded individual may not be much of a resume-booster, it's a nice life-booster.
Consider the idea of software design patterns borrowed from the field of architecture. I submit that someone with a broad liberal arts education would be better able to formulate and clearly communicate such an idea than someone who is merely trained like a circus chimp.
> The Open Group, along with IBM, has published a 500-word document that it hopes developers will endorse. > From the article: Open standards create more options to address IT needs... > From the article: The subjection - or "lock-in" - of developers to single-vendor technology constitutes a denial of self-determination... > From the article: Cooperation among all developers is called for to increase awareness, adoption, and protection of open standards
IBM needs to practice what it preaches and break its own "lock-in" first. I'm referring to its single vendor Lotus Notes technology. What would I like for them to submit to a standards body? Let's see: the Notes database and document formats, standard grammars for LotusScript and its formula languages, Domino classes/API, etc.
> From the article: "... many companies are moving away from India as the place to outsource, because of the labor churn [emphasis mine] that is taking place in India."
Sorry, no hablo business jargon... Does anyone know what "labor churn" means? I really hope it doesn't mean making butter out of human beings.
Here's a quote from the Rolling Stone article to ponder: "You're not making that much money off records anymore, so until people can figure out how to make a rewritable Hanes Beefy-T, merch is one of the last bastions of individuality, commerce and style that an artist has left."
>...the barely-clad, drug-crazed, orange, under-age youngsters... Zombies.
> Give me some good old-fashioned guitar-based rock any day. Slayer, Voivod or even Metallica...
> Who the wants to pay to go to NYC, and get harassed by facist policemen searching for bin Laden in every subway car?
How about an Native American reservation then? Finding one with a casino might fulfill the need for a nightlife that others have mentioned.
> If I were holding a conference like this, I'd find some depressed mid-western or just rural city that is cheap as shit and as easy as possible to get to.
I think you're on to something. People are complaining about nothing to do, but consider The Burning Man. It's in the middle of the desert, for crying out loud! In the midwest, your spouses and kids could explore nature while you're hacking away: horse rides, biking/hiking trails, camping, fishing, etc.
> A small college town might do; it would have to be close enough to an airport serviced by Southwestern for cheap flights, that you could run a shuttle van back and forth to get people to it.
Don't forget about Amtrak or Greyhound either!
I can think of several college towns that might fit the bill: Urbana-Champaign, IL; Columbia, MO; and Lawrence, KS. I know all three have live music scenes. The computer science program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is considered top-rate. They also have a spiffy new building to show off.
> Sure, if you hold it in Bumfuck, Iowa, it'll be a whole lot cheaper, but what are the attendees going to do between talks or after hours? Watch the corn? Cow tipping?
Good point. If people bring their spouses or children, they might want to do something else during the day...
I can think of something easier to access in the rural midwest than big cities: Nature. I know server room dwellers might not appreciate it but I can imagine horse riding, canoe trips, whitewater rafting, water skiing, hiking/biking trails, camping, cave exploring (spleunking), rock climbing, hang gliding, hot air balloon trips, etc.
Human beings also disagree. Someone will change an article... Then someone else will undo that change... The original "editor" will re-do his change... This is called an edit war. It either ends by attrition or intervention by a human administrator.
> it's better than any print encyclopedia for depth, breadth, and quality. [emphasis mine]
LOL! You should spend an afternoon reading some print encyclopedias. Take some time to notice the lack of spam, off-topic rants, duplicate articles, contradictory comments, "placeholder" articles with cursory content, etc.
> For size comparisons, the English Wikipedia has 90.1 million words across 300,000 articles, compared to Britannica's 55 million words across 85,000 articles.
How much of Wikipedia's content is unclear, incomplete, contradictory, off-topic, duplicated, or just plain wrong?
> shortage of PHP/MySQL developers is probably the biggest long term problem facing the project.
The biggest long term problem facing the project is human nature. Let's leave it at that.
> Grass-roots efforts like this don't prove there is a pent-up demand for technical documentation that starts from first principles.
Oops... That should have read: "Grass-roots efforts like this do prove there is a pent-up demand for technical documentation that starts from first principles."
When the "Submit" and "Preview" buttons are next to each other, accidents like this sometimes happen.
The next time someone knocks the quality of Open Source documentation written by volunteers, consider the quality of the work by our professional colleagues. Grass-roots efforts like this don't prove there is a pent-up demand for technical documentation that starts from first principles.
In the meantime, someone needs to teach the good professor DocBook...
Slashdot Mirror
All the big kids are playing with polymer clay now.
This Chicago-lander would like to give a shout out to the *other* St. Louis music scene: http://www.stlpunk.com/
Also worth noting, St. Louis has an actual community radio station: KDHX
There was a creepy sense of mercantilism infused in the event. Several corporations sponsored displays and there was no real local connection to anything. Although some of the presenters were from universities in Chicago, I expected to see some local mad scientists with cool stuff on card tables. I guess Wired magazine, being from the Left Coast, thinks of Chicago as a technological back-water. Here to edu-ma-cate us Midwest yokels.
Speaking of presenters, there were honest-to-goodness researchers and scientists at the booths. Yes, there were marketroids and students-with-summer-jobs but there were people there with real answers to questions. I asked the guy at the wind turbine booth some questions that I've never heard a straight answer to:
1. Are you reducing the noise of wind turbines? (People who live close to turbine farms complain about the hum.) His answer: They have added acoustic foam and have moved around some of the electronics to make things quieter.
2. How do wind turbines affect the flights of migratory birds? His answer: Radar shows that birds have learned to fly around the turbines. The incidents of birds flying into the turbines are few and the same as any other tall structure.
There were some other cool things: The next uniform for US soldiers makes them look like RoboCop. It looks like the next big thing in video games is using video cameras to make your body a part of the game. They just need to figure out how to make it easy enough for frustrated dads to set up after Christmas.
> How useful are wikis for OS projects?
Never use a Wiki for documentation! Instead, you need a documentation maintainer to handle submissions. They will ensure that your documentation is clear, complete, correct, current, and consistent. This is hard work that goes largely unrecognized by the rest of the Open Source community.
Consider your documentation maintainer a part of your team. Give them CVS privileges. Don't disrespect them because they don't contribute massive amounts of source code. Answer their questions quickly and in a friendly manner.
If they have a problem explaining a feature, it may be a usability problem with your interface. Also, users will find a bug but will complain that the manual is wrong. So documentation maintainers are a source of good bug reports. Don't ignore their input because they're not an active programmer!
DocBook is the standard markup language for the major Open Source projects, so learn it.
One thing that the mozilla development community needs badly right now is a php.net, wiki-style website to encourage anyone and everyone to frequently update documentation easily and in small pieces.
Wikis don't work for technical documentation! In order for technical documentation to be usable, it has to be clear, complete, correct, and current. That is the bare minimum. In order for it to be good, it also has to be consistent.
Wikis don't guarantee any of the above criteria. Wiki advocates have even argued against completeness because it discourages participation. They've also decided against correctness in favor of a neutral point-of-view. Many under-edited contributions from different people also guarantee duplication, contradiction, and inconsistency. If anyone tries to straighten out the mess, then revert wars are the result.
So take it from a documentation volunteer, the best results are produced by a central maintainer. The maintainer coordinates contributions and edits them with the reader in mind. The maintainer can either be a person or a team, depending on the size of the task.
Still, English has been moving since Old English from a tense and ending based grammar and towards a word order based grammar (think of how weird "yoda talk" seems, even when it isn't technically grammatically incorrect, and understand it just fine you can)
Frustrated it makes me. Understand it, I do not.
WebMonkey has an introduction (thankfully Flash-free) to the related subject of "toy" cameras.
> Admittedly, not too much open-source in that field.
You've got to be joking! I've been doing software synthesis for a least a decade with Csound, long before VST. VST plug-ins are a proverbial drop in the bucket compared to the rich history of software synthesis. For more information about the field, I'd suggest The Computer Music Tutorial by Curtis Roads.
Look at Linux MIDI & Sound page and tell me there aren't "much" open source soft synths. Besides Csound, pd and jMax might be worth investigating.
I misread the post, I thought the complaints were about the speed of its FFTW, the Fastest Fourier Transform in the West! I thought the author wanted to criticize the quality of its fourier transform functions.
> Wikipedia Hits Million-Entry Mark
...but sources reveal that 995,000 of those entries are just stubs.
> and maybe half the fluff removed that will have no bearing on real-world employment?
Do you plan on spending the rest of your life at work? In ten years, do you think you'll be doing the exact same job using the exact same technology anyway? At $60,000, I think it would be cheaper to get the Java and .Net certs on your own.
There's something to be said about a liberal arts education (as opposed to a purely vocational one) that prepares you for a life of continual learning. While being a well-rounded individual may not be much of a resume-booster, it's a nice life-booster.
Consider the idea of software design patterns borrowed from the field of architecture. I submit that someone with a broad liberal arts education would be better able to formulate and clearly communicate such an idea than someone who is merely trained like a circus chimp.
Here's the sheet music for "This Land Is Your Land":/ this_land.html
http://www.themomi.org/museum/Guthrie/sheet_music
> The Open Group, along with IBM, has published a 500-word document that it hopes developers will endorse.
> From the article: Open standards create more options to address IT needs...
> From the article: The subjection - or "lock-in" - of developers to single-vendor technology constitutes a denial of self-determination...
> From the article: Cooperation among all developers is called for to increase awareness, adoption, and protection of open standards
IBM needs to practice what it preaches and break its own "lock-in" first. I'm referring to its single vendor Lotus Notes technology. What would I like for them to submit to a standards body? Let's see: the Notes database and document formats, standard grammars for LotusScript and its formula languages, Domino classes/API, etc.
> Folks need to understand that food doesn't grow on trees...
Um, yes it does. It's called fruit!
> From the article: "... many companies are moving away from India as the place to outsource, because of the labor churn [emphasis mine] that is taking place in India."
Sorry, no hablo business jargon... Does anyone know what "labor churn" means? I really hope it doesn't mean making butter out of human beings.
>> How would you eat then?
> Concerts. It's how artists make their real money anyway....
You might be onto something. Rolling Stone had an article about this recently: Touring revenue doesn't come from ticket sales, but from selling merch. (Merch is short for merchandise.)
Here's a quote from the Rolling Stone article to ponder: "You're not making that much money off records anymore, so until people can figure out how to make a rewritable Hanes Beefy-T, merch is one of the last bastions of individuality, commerce and style that an artist has left."
> ...the barely-clad, drug-crazed, orange, under-age youngsters... Zombies.
> Give me some good old-fashioned guitar-based rock any day. Slayer, Voivod or even Metallica...
Do you really want to hold up metal fans as exemplars? LOL! You obviously haven't seen Heavy Metal Parking Lot or even The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years.
For the record, I like both metal and techno.
> Who the wants to pay to go to NYC, and get harassed by facist policemen searching for bin Laden in every subway car?
How about an Native American reservation then? Finding one with a casino might fulfill the need for a nightlife that others have mentioned.
> If I were holding a conference like this, I'd find some depressed mid-western or just rural city that is cheap as shit and as easy as possible to get to.
I think you're on to something. People are complaining about nothing to do, but consider The Burning Man. It's in the middle of the desert, for crying out loud! In the midwest, your spouses and kids could explore nature while you're hacking away: horse rides, biking/hiking trails, camping, fishing, etc.
> A small college town might do; it would have to be close enough to an airport serviced by Southwestern for cheap flights, that you could run a shuttle van back and forth to get people to it.
Don't forget about Amtrak or Greyhound either!
I can think of several college towns that might fit the bill: Urbana-Champaign, IL; Columbia, MO; and Lawrence, KS. I know all three have live music scenes. The computer science program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is considered top-rate. They also have a spiffy new building to show off.
> Sure, if you hold it in Bumfuck, Iowa, it'll be a whole lot cheaper, but what are the attendees going to do between talks or after hours? Watch the corn? Cow tipping?
Good point. If people bring their spouses or children, they might want to do something else during the day...
I can think of something easier to access in the rural midwest than big cities: Nature. I know server room dwellers might not appreciate it but I can imagine horse riding, canoe trips, whitewater rafting, water skiing, hiking/biking trails, camping, cave exploring (spleunking), rock climbing, hang gliding, hot air balloon trips, etc.
> Human beings notice junk and fix it.
Human beings also disagree. Someone will change an article... Then someone else will undo that change... The original "editor" will re-do his change... This is called an edit war. It either ends by attrition or intervention by a human administrator.
> it's better than any print encyclopedia for depth, breadth, and quality. [emphasis mine]
LOL! You should spend an afternoon reading some print encyclopedias. Take some time to notice the lack of spam, off-topic rants, duplicate articles, contradictory comments, "placeholder" articles with cursory content, etc.
> "Today Wikipedia reached the 300,000 article mark.
LOL! How much of that content was shoveled in from somewhere else?
> It has everything that a traditional encyclopedia would, but also many things that would never get written about
Like web vandalism, edit wars, and SEO attempts...
> For size comparisons, the English Wikipedia has 90.1 million words across 300,000 articles, compared to Britannica's 55 million words across 85,000 articles.
How much of Wikipedia's content is unclear, incomplete, contradictory, off-topic, duplicated, or just plain wrong?
> shortage of PHP/MySQL developers is probably the biggest long term problem facing the project.
The biggest long term problem facing the project is human nature. Let's leave it at that.
> Am I the only person who finds Mr. Nielson's site to be painful to use?
You think his site is bad, you should look at those he inspires. Try following this two-column layout with ugly ASCII graphics. It gives me a headache.
> I mean, would it kill him to learn basic typography?
Ok, I'll bite... Where do you learn basic typography? Do you have a URL or at least an ISBN#?
> Grass-roots efforts like this don't prove there is a pent-up demand for technical documentation that starts from first principles.
Oops... That should have read: "Grass-roots efforts like this do prove there is a pent-up demand for technical documentation that starts from first principles."
When the "Submit" and "Preview" buttons are next to each other, accidents like this sometimes happen.
This reminds me of the article: "If nobody reads the manual, why are bookshops overflowing with computing books?"
The next time someone knocks the quality of Open Source documentation written by volunteers, consider the quality of the work by our professional colleagues. Grass-roots efforts like this don't prove there is a pent-up demand for technical documentation that starts from first principles.
In the meantime, someone needs to teach the good professor DocBook...