Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that
on
Fire Your IT Boss
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· Score: 1
The spec can only be wrong in so far as it specifies something that is theoretically impossible, other than that it is by definition correct (in the former case the developers will raise a change request).
The question is what if sales, documentation and support don't tell the customers what they're getting.
says who? the CCA? I'm not subject to their rules because I've never signed a contract with them and there is no law making the DVD-CCA the legal authority since CSS stopped being trade-secret protected.
How about if I make a DVD and DRM it up with CSS? Can manufacturers then make these devices so their customers can play my DVDs as they are now fully licensed and authorised to do?
They could get a CSS licence from somebody else other than the DVD-CCA. The DVD-CCA has no special authority to license the use of a CSS descrambler than any content producer.
Since CSS isn't a trade secret anymore (it is PD knowledge now) nobody is prohibited from implementing it on trade secret grounds.
Since CSS was never patented, nobody is prohibited from implementing it on patent grounds.
Since each CSS implementation is an independent work rather than derived, nobody is prohibited from implementing it on copyright grounds.
I'll give them a licence for free. Here you go. I hereby license you all, each and every one.
and where is the investment market? That's right, its in popular mechanics and new scientist and discover. They've just gone straight to the investment market.
Your problem is that you're reading the same journals as bluesky investors. If you don't want to read about new discoveries, don't read the periodicals that investors read.
"You propose your plan to the angel investors like everyone else?"
How do you find an angel investor? We either get scientists making a buzz when they've got something good, or a constant barrage of angel investors advertising that they'd like a scientist to propose a plan.
"Lots of people have sufficiently rich family to create a material science startup"
The question is whether *these* people have sufficiently rich families.
but if I don't like tilapia and order grouper then if the restaurant gives me tilapia to be sure I still get the opportunity to dine on grouper then I've just got the fish that exactly isn't grouper and that I can't eat - how has that helped me in my quest to eat grouper?
they should just say "we have no grouper would you like to choose something else?"
This is not the same technology. This uses evanescent waves - ie, it doesn't transmit its energy (well, it transmits some - currently 25% - to the environment). Rather it sets up a changing field in such a way that varying the changing field can "pump" energy via "tunneling" from one device to the other without the energy travelling through the free space inbetween or being absorbed by other things.
This is kind of like going from todays computers to quantum computers. It's kind of the same thing, but it's a really big deal.
Rather than scale down the size for laptops, I want to see them scale up the power for electric cars. Being able to deliver 150kW without a hefty cable and without a risk of electrocution would be a wonderful advancement - and being able to charge just by parking without having to plug in... yes please.
"It sounds like this can absorb and release heat as fast"
So do you think this gives off EM radiation as an electric field is applied or that it just heats up rapidly as it becomes ordered so that a heatsink can take the heat away (thus "gives off heat" as per the article), and removal of the electric field will then cause it to return to a colder temperature.
Since they suggest heat exchangers I going to guess that it warms with an electric field and cools without rather than gives of EM.
An EM device would be cool (pun intended) because you could place a grid of the material in relation to a grid of reflectors that forced the EM to a black panel behind which would be connected to a heat sink and physically insulated from the rest of the fridge and you'd be totally solid state.
500+ years ago scientists thought the earth was flat.
No they didn't. Please critically research your urban legends and "everybody knows" factoids before helping to propagate misinformation. This is how war, prejudice, and religion start.
#define MAX_LENGTH 8 ... char binnumber[MAXLENGTH+1]; ... int n = scanf("%8s%n", binnumber, &length);/* scanff - yuk */ if (n != 1)/* do some error handling */ // no strlen now
and oh-god he's unrolled a loop and isn't checking for termination correctly... ARGH! Never unroll your loops! This is so bad there must be more stuff I haven't seen yet.
This has to be an ironic example. Please say it is.
Coders that write code that needs a ruler to find the start of a block get fired much more frequently than those who don't. How many inches is the ruler you use? More than one and something is very wrong.
All these formulaic alignment and whitespace techniques are workarounds for the fact that your code is too complicated and not structured enough.
Unless somebody commits the cardinal sin of cutting and pasting some code then interlacing the two differing contexts in among the pasted bit - and reordering the pasted bit.
Now that is nightmare code. And it is all too common - especially among embedded developers (where embedded seems to be a synonym for who cares they're going to be stuck with us).
Isn't "anonymously" already a negation composed as an- (without) onymus (name, latin from greek "onoma") -ly (having the qualities of).
So the negation would be "onymously".
How's that for language trolling:)
Actually, English is supposed to be a fun language (since modern leyman's English is mostly created by poets), so ananonymously would also be correct as was your non-anonmyously:) I'm just playing with ya.
I keep hearing people pro open source code say "I can check it!" Well can you? Have you done so - in a project spanning more than a few thousand lines of code? I've checked a few lines here and there that interest me, other people check the lines that interest them. An awful lot of stuff gets checked.
With proprietary code there are someone I can call and they are by contract obliged to fix problems within a certain time frame. But that doesn't mean they will and it doesn't mean you get to sue them, and if you do win in court, it doesn't mean that your business is still viable. This is the big proprietary fallacy "There is someone to blame", you can blame all you want, meanwhile you're on the dole because you/can't/ get stuck in, fix it, and carry on your business. With Open Source you can be sure that the worst case isn't financially devastating.
With OSS we don't have [the vendor fixing things on demand], yes, we can log a bug in whatever bug tracker they use and hope someone will address our issue, but we have no guarantee. I know vendors that just tell you its a feature and that crippling your business is what you paid for. They still make money because not everybody hits the problem but you can't switch because your budget is already spent on this "solution" and hiring more employees is a different budget and never gets accounted as the TCO of the solution in question. A small business will notice but a small business will already be dead by this point.
With OSS we of course got the good fortune of being able to go through the source code and try to fix the code ourselves... right? Have you ever even considered just how bloody huge the code base is for something like a database? There are no serious OSS databases where you will have a problem with bug filing or serious bug fixing. Since there is only one serious OSS database (PostgreSQL), this is quite easy to determine. PostgreSQL has a great reputation and the chance of you having to fork out on demand for a bug to be fixed is as slim as with the proprietary vendor. You can also buy a support contract from many of the core developers. OSS and money are not mutually exclusive.
but at some point the project grows so big that anyone using it needs to have someone they can call at 4 am in the morning to help them. So get a support contract on your OSS software and call them.
Oh and just because some software is proprietary it doesn't mean you don't have access to the source code, even at Microsoft you can buy access to the source. Buy access? Even after paying for the support contract? surely you should be able to pay for the support contract and have the source for nothing extra, along with the right to extend the functionality and a vendor receptive to the idea of including your work to take the support burden on themselves under you support contract?
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The spec can only be wrong in so far as it specifies something that is theoretically impossible, other than that it is by definition correct (in the former case the developers will raise a change request).
The question is what if sales, documentation and support don't tell the customers what they're getting.
says who? the CCA? I'm not subject to their rules because I've never signed a contract with them and there is no law making the DVD-CCA the legal authority since CSS stopped being trade-secret protected.
How about if I make a DVD and DRM it up with CSS? Can manufacturers then make these devices so their customers can play my DVDs as they are now fully licensed and authorised to do?
They could get a CSS licence from somebody else other than the DVD-CCA. The DVD-CCA has no special authority to license the use of a CSS descrambler than any content producer.
Since CSS isn't a trade secret anymore (it is PD knowledge now) nobody is prohibited from implementing it on trade secret grounds.
Since CSS was never patented, nobody is prohibited from implementing it on patent grounds.
Since each CSS implementation is an independent work rather than derived, nobody is prohibited from implementing it on copyright grounds.
I'll give them a licence for free. Here you go. I hereby license you all, each and every one.
Ah yes, V for Vendetta which /actually/ portrayed Natalie Portman naked and petrified.
"shop it to the investment market"
and where is the investment market? That's right, its in popular mechanics and new scientist and discover. They've just gone straight to the investment market.
Your problem is that you're reading the same journals as bluesky investors. If you don't want to read about new discoveries, don't read the periodicals that investors read.
"You propose your plan to the angel investors like everyone else?"
How do you find an angel investor? We either get scientists making a buzz when they've got something good, or a constant barrage of angel investors advertising that they'd like a scientist to propose a plan.
"Lots of people have sufficiently rich family to create a material science startup"
The question is whether *these* people have sufficiently rich families.
but if I don't like tilapia and order grouper then if the restaurant gives me tilapia to be sure I still get the opportunity to dine on grouper then I've just got the fish that exactly isn't grouper and that I can't eat - how has that helped me in my quest to eat grouper?
they should just say "we have no grouper would you like to choose something else?"
"the diner would be denied the experience of dining just because ingredients are not available. "
You mean if a restaurant hasn't got any white tuna in I can't go and buy a steak?"
This is not the same technology. This uses evanescent waves - ie, it doesn't transmit its energy (well, it transmits some - currently 25% - to the environment). Rather it sets up a changing field in such a way that varying the changing field can "pump" energy via "tunneling" from one device to the other without the energy travelling through the free space inbetween or being absorbed by other things.
This is kind of like going from todays computers to quantum computers. It's kind of the same thing, but it's a really big deal.
Rather than scale down the size for laptops, I want to see them scale up the power for electric cars. Being able to deliver 150kW without a hefty cable and without a risk of electrocution would be a wonderful advancement - and being able to charge just by parking without having to plug in... yes please.
"It sounds like this can absorb and release heat as fast"
So do you think this gives off EM radiation as an electric field is applied or that it just heats up rapidly as it becomes ordered so that a heatsink can take the heat away (thus "gives off heat" as per the article), and removal of the electric field will then cause it to return to a colder temperature.
Since they suggest heat exchangers I going to guess that it warms with an electric field and cools without rather than gives of EM.
An EM device would be cool (pun intended) because you could place a grid of the material in relation to a grid of reflectors that forced the EM to a black panel behind which would be connected to a heat sink and physically insulated from the rest of the fridge and you'd be totally solid state.
500+ years ago scientists thought the earth was flat.
No they didn't. Please critically research your urban legends and "everybody knows" factoids before helping to propagate misinformation. This is how war, prejudice, and religion start.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth for references on the flat earth error.
The next step for the Pwnie Awards judges will gather in an undisclosed location
So how will they know where to go?
Whoops, I got carried away with the number of bugs and didn't fix one that I meant to properly:
#define TO_STR_INTERNAL(chars) ##chars
#define TO_STR(chars) TO_STR_INTERNAL(chars)
int n = scanf("%" TO_STR(MAX_LENGTH) "s%n", binnumber, &length); /* scanf - yuk */
Yuk
That should have:
#define MAX_LENGTH 8
...
... /* scanff - yuk */ /* do some error handling */
// no strlen now
char binnumber[MAXLENGTH+1];
int n = scanf("%8s%n", binnumber, &length);
if (n != 1)
and oh-god he's unrolled a loop and isn't checking for termination correctly... ARGH! Never unroll your loops! This is so bad there must be more stuff I haven't seen yet.
This has to be an ironic example. Please say it is.
separate_with_underscores
In case you're interested, this is called snake case
Coders that write code that needs a ruler to find the start of a block get fired much more frequently than those who don't. How many inches is the ruler you use? More than one and something is very wrong.
All these formulaic alignment and whitespace techniques are workarounds for the fact that your code is too complicated and not structured enough.
Unless somebody commits the cardinal sin of cutting and pasting some code then interlacing the two differing contexts in among the pasted bit - and reordering the pasted bit.
Now that is nightmare code. And it is all too common - especially among embedded developers (where embedded seems to be a synonym for who cares they're going to be stuck with us).
if your program looks like:
if (sadf ~= /asdfijdfasd/) { ;aiosejfo;saiehnf
dafdijseoifnjseoifjeasdpfjase;oifn
a;seoifnmoeawnfsaoeinf
a;seoifjas;oeinfaef
as;efijesfoijes
} else {
lidnrglsodrnigas
oihjesofnseoanf
}
like the typical perl program, then I can understand
if it's C or C++ then
if (a.is_good()) {
a.modify_with(b);
a.change_for(c);
a.do_something_according_to(d);
} else {
a.report_error();
b.report_unused();
c.report_buggered(d);
}
It is a little less of a sensible rule. Coding standards will be peculiar to each languages idiomatic use.
Anti-proton doesn't get a cool name? Electron's taking negatron just leaves anti-protons with... antitron? That sucks!
How about "krupton" (loosly "shadow particle")?
Lots of people who own their own homes would take a lifetime to earn $100. However they don't have gutters on their homes :)
Isn't "anonymously" already a negation composed as an- (without) onymus (name, latin from greek "onoma") -ly (having the qualities of).
So the negation would be "onymously".
How's that for language trolling :)
Actually, English is supposed to be a fun language (since modern leyman's English is mostly created by poets), so ananonymously would also be correct as was your non-anonmyously :) I'm just playing with ya.
How does a "hole" differ from a positron?
Its rest mass.There isn't a manual but you installed it anyway? You deserve everything you get :)
Have you ever even considered just how bloody huge the code base is for something like a database? There are no serious OSS databases where you will have a problem with bug filing or serious bug fixing. Since there is only one serious OSS database (PostgreSQL), this is quite easy to determine. PostgreSQL has a great reputation and the chance of you having to fork out on demand for a bug to be fixed is as slim as with the proprietary vendor. You can also buy a support contract from many of the core developers. OSS and money are not mutually exclusive. but at some point the project grows so big that anyone using it needs to have someone they can call at 4 am in the morning to help them. So get a support contract on your OSS software and call them. Oh and just because some software is proprietary it doesn't mean you don't have access to the source code, even at Microsoft you can buy access to the source. Buy access? Even after paying for the support contract? surely you should be able to pay for the support contract and have the source for nothing extra, along with the right to extend the functionality and a vendor receptive to the idea of including your work to take the support burden on themselves under you support contract?