1. Make all your data available to anybody. 2. Make all your analysis software available to anybody.
The point of science is to let other try to replicate your experiments and analysis to see if they get they same answer. When CRU starts doing these things, wake me up. I'm not really interested in what blue-ribbon committees of politicians think of their science.
Start building kits, and study what goes into them. If you are into ham radio, there are loads of interesting radios and accessories you can build. The EleCraft K2 is an outstanding radio, a great kit, and has a great community of builder/hackers -- check out discussion list. Don't discount the learning experience of a kit, especially if you take the time to analyze what the designer did. You will learn a great deal about the components, about practical assembly techniques that you can use in your own design, and how to put the whole works together into something that functions. Along the way you will accumulate tools and valuable experience.
So I have this theory that Apple only did it this way to avoid have to single out Adobe by saying: "no fsck'ing Flash". They just banned everything in order to be even-handed and avoid making the Flashocracy even more upset. Personally, I think Flash needs to die, die quickly, and die completely. So let Flash die, and then El Steevo can lighten up on the development tool controls again.
Blatantly behaviorist. Extrinsic motivators are easily extinguished. We need to find and nurture intrinsic motivators. Unfortunately, this is hard, and the educational establishment is looking for easy solutions. Go read "Punished by Rewards" by Alphie Kohn
EMC2 is excellent, but it is machine control software. Eats gcode, drives motors. The piece that is missing is the CAM software that goes between a CAD package and a machine control package like EMC2 -- something to *make* the gcode from a 3D CAD file.
Good point about EMC2, it has Mach3 and the others well beaten. And I really think open source 3D CAD will get there in the not too distant future. It's bridging that gap with good gcode that is a difficult problem, and the longer I look at it the uglier it looks. Of course, for most hobbyists a highly optimized path isn't the point -- we aren't doing volume production on a Mazak where seconds count. But even just trying to drive a Tormach or a Fireball V90 with open source code, which are reasonable goals, I think, are difficult problems.
I'm starting to get involved in CNC machining (hobbyist level). One of the things that is quite clear is that there are really no good open source CAM packages. For that matter, open source 3D CAD has a long way to go, although I have great hopes for FreeCAD (not ready yet, but huge progress in the past year). If someone out there is looking for a challenge, take a look at 3D CAM, starting with 3-axis milling. Toolpath planning is *hard*. Your problem: Here is an arbitrary chunk of arbitrary metal. Here is a list of arbitrarily shaped tools. Here is the work envelop of your machine. Here is a table of chiploads that won't break the tools. Here is a 3D CAD file. Produce gcode. gcode that will not break the tools, not crash into fixtures, not crash the machine, and can start with roughing cuts to carve the initial block to something close, and plan finishing cuts that give you the desired surface finish at the end. A do your debugging where a "crash" can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars in broken tools and machinery.
"what should I avoid?" You should avoid taking on politically dangerous and thankless tasks that make no contribution to the bottom line as your first assignment at a new company. Seriously, the tech issues here are secondary. First, figure out the politics. Next, make sure your second assignment contributes to the company's bottom line. Sorry to sound like a grumpy old fart here, but hey, I'm a grumpy gray-beard that has seen this movie before and I don't like the ending.
The article is unclear if e-mail has been expanded to support multiple user logins. This to me is the deal-breaker with an iPad -- I'd have one sitting on the coffee table today if it had support for multiple user logins to keep e-mail sorted and private. But I'm not going to get an iPad for each member of the household just to keep e-mail private. So is that fixed or not? When they fix it, instant sale. Until then, nope.
It's ridiculous how little BW I use on my Verizon account each month, and how much I get charged for it. So I'm not surprised the high bandwidth users will be hunted down and charged. They do that to low bandwidth users. They do it to everybody. They're not treating high BW users any differently from anybody else.
Re:It's not a computer, it's a living-room applian
on
iPad Review
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· Score: 1
If it is a coffee table appliance, then where is the user account login? I would have bought one for the coffee table already, but lack of user accounts is a deal breaker. E-mail is useless without user accounts. Web browsing is nearly so -- my wife doesn't want my bookmarks to clutter hers, and I don't want her bookmark clutter in mine, and as for the kid's bookmarks.... well, you get the point.
I'm with you, brother. Ubuntu has always seemed like obfuscated Linux to me. It's very windows-y. And broken in silly ways. And difficult to fix because it has been obfuscated. I'm currently running system with Slackware, Gentoo, Arch, and Ubuntu. And 3 OS X systems, which are of course BSD based. Ubuntu is my least favorite of all. What people see in it is beyond me.
... why does everyone assume it is a software bug? I agree that it very well could be an undiscovered software bug. But there are so many more sources of erroneous behavior in an embedded system that *even* *if* the software were flawless (ummm... just go with me a minute...:) an automotive environment can cause all manner of strange glitches. I work with robots, lots of DC motors causing commutation noise on the power supply, long (several inch) distances between units that must talk to each other and therefore may have a different opinion as to ground reference voltage... many things can get wacky. Even flawless code needs a watchdog timer to get you out of weird states that power glitches that put you into. Power supply spikes can cause the program counter to jump to very odd places, with odd, corrupted stuff in RAM. Ground level shifting can cause communication glitches. CAN bus is *extremely* robust, so bad data should not get through... but what does get through? Does the system as a whole get into a weird state if packets drop?
The "Hello World" book using Python is aimed straight at kids, and I'm using it with my daughter. It's good. Previously reviewed here on SlashDot. Also, I've used Gambas. Either is good for kids. The 1xx-in-one type kits are good, too. My 10 year old daughter has gotten to the point where she begs to do PC board layout -- so right now she has a project going (using gEDA) to build a "game" with 8 push buttons, 8 led's, and an AVR microcontroller. Mind you, she is not yet capable of designing either the hardware or the software, so I walk her through all the steps. But she loves the connect-the-dots part, and I let her lead the way on the design decisions and help her fill in the parts she can't do yet.
After you homeschool a while, you realize exactly the opposite. Our homeschooled daughter goes to three homeschool coop classes per week, soccer, gymnastics, art class, and string ensemble every week, and other ad hoc activities a couple of times per month. She gets plenty of time to interact with other kids, and in fact is very quick to make new friends and mix into new situations. In part, I think, because she has no conception of the "us versus them" of a normal grade school environment. There are plenty of opportunities to develop socially outside of the state-controlled school system.
Oh... why do we homeschool? Because they don't teach organic chemistry and pre-calculus in the 5th grade. She would go out of her nut in a normal school from lack of challenge.
Its just you. My experience is exactly the opposite. I've been tolerating the ads most places lately, mainly out of being too lazy to install ad blockers. Yesterday I was finally pushed over the edge by some site with "float over the content" ads with obscene amounts of animation. I installed flashblock and life is now much better.
Just consider that. How big is your school? How big is your town? How many nutters do you think there are in a student body population of 50,000 students, just based on raw probability?
I did grad school at the Minneapolis campus. Let's see... December... daytime highs might be above zero F, certainly not if measured in C. Less than 8 hours of daylight right now. That *is* an environmental stress, even if your car *does* start reliably and have a good heater, which would make it an atypical student car.
Consider the situation: High pressure professional program, a University so large that the people in the administration to whom you are just a student ID number are... just a staff ID number to the management.
Yes, I'd worry about my students becoming unhinged. At any point in time, any population that large will have several people who are deeply hurting inside.
Just so nobody takes my comments to negatively: U of M can be a great place, but you have to make your own way it in.
This question seems to be a FAQ and SlashDot. Here is an approximation of what I posted last time. It is/was the actual policy at a Fortune 500 technology company during a time when I was the PHB that had to pay for the 24x7 coverage on a particular server.
For your 40 hrs/week, you get your regular pay. For your time "on the pager", you get 25% of your regular hourly, until such time as it goes off. From the time the pager goes off, until you clear the trouble ticket, you get 100% plus any applicable shift/holiday/overtime premium.
If you can dial in remotely and fix the problem, great for everyone. If not, you must be able to get from wherever you are to the server room in 30 minutes. 100% of the time you are on the pager, you must be in condition to work, ie: sober.
So... does that sound like getting paid 25% for doing nothing? Not to me. You can't get more than a 30 minute drive from the plant -- so no ski trips for you that weekend. Going to a party? Better have cranberry juice. You are getting paid for making yourself available.
My company had a policy that the cost of 24x7 coverage came out of the budget of the PHB demanding it. A very good policy, IMHO. Its too easy to ask for it otherwise, without considering the consequences, both in terms of dollar cost, and in terms of quality of life for the employees that provide the coverage.
Indeed. People should chose thier license they way they choose a screwdriver, not they way they choose a religion. GPL serves some goals better, BSD servers other goals better. Clarify your goals, and choose the license that best serves them.
Who knows if that was truly the case here, but I can believe that it applies in some cases. Grown-up programmers don't put that slosh in the comments to begin with. Sadly, you see a fair amount of that in close-source code. Less than in the old days, but still too much.
If someone with clout finds out that their IP is being imported without a license, the FBI raids a dock-side warehouse in Los Angeles. Good luck getting their attention for this one. But still, somebody with standing and who cares enough could be filing the paperwork. In this case, because physical goods are involved, there is a pressure point with the manufacturer.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Make all your data available to anybody.
2. Make all your analysis software available to anybody.
The point of science is to let other try to replicate your experiments and analysis to see if they get they same answer. When CRU starts doing these things, wake me up. I'm not really interested in what blue-ribbon committees of politicians think of their science.
Start building kits, and study what goes into them. If you are into ham radio, there are loads of interesting radios and accessories you can build. The EleCraft K2 is an outstanding radio, a great kit, and has a great community of builder/hackers -- check out discussion list. Don't discount the learning experience of a kit, especially if you take the time to analyze what the designer did. You will learn a great deal about the components, about practical assembly techniques that you can use in your own design, and how to put the whole works together into something that functions. Along the way you will accumulate tools and valuable experience.
So I have this theory that Apple only did it this way to avoid have to single out Adobe by saying: "no fsck'ing Flash". They just banned everything in order to be even-handed and avoid making the Flashocracy even more upset. Personally, I think Flash needs to die, die quickly, and die completely. So let Flash die, and then El Steevo can lighten up on the development tool controls again.
Blatantly behaviorist. Extrinsic motivators are easily extinguished. We need to find and nurture intrinsic motivators. Unfortunately, this is hard, and the educational establishment is looking for easy solutions. Go read "Punished by Rewards" by Alphie Kohn
EMC2 is excellent, but it is machine control software. Eats gcode, drives motors. The piece that is missing is the CAM software that goes between a CAD package and a machine control package like EMC2 -- something to *make* the gcode from a 3D CAD file.
Good point about EMC2, it has Mach3 and the others well beaten. And I really think open source 3D CAD will get there in the not too distant future. It's bridging that gap with good gcode that is a difficult problem, and the longer I look at it the uglier it looks. Of course, for most hobbyists a highly optimized path isn't the point -- we aren't doing volume production on a Mazak where seconds count. But even just trying to drive a Tormach or a Fireball V90 with open source code, which are reasonable goals, I think, are difficult problems.
I'm starting to get involved in CNC machining (hobbyist level). One of the things that is quite clear is that there are really no good open source CAM packages. For that matter, open source 3D CAD has a long way to go, although I have great hopes for FreeCAD (not ready yet, but huge progress in the past year). If someone out there is looking for a challenge, take a look at 3D CAM, starting with 3-axis milling. Toolpath planning is *hard*. Your problem: Here is an arbitrary chunk of arbitrary metal. Here is a list of arbitrarily shaped tools. Here is the work envelop of your machine. Here is a table of chiploads that won't break the tools. Here is a 3D CAD file. Produce gcode. gcode that will not break the tools, not crash into fixtures, not crash the machine, and can start with roughing cuts to carve the initial block to something close, and plan finishing cuts that give you the desired surface finish at the end. A do your debugging where a "crash" can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars in broken tools and machinery.
"what should I avoid?" You should avoid taking on politically dangerous and thankless tasks that make no contribution to the bottom line as your first assignment at a new company. Seriously, the tech issues here are secondary. First, figure out the politics. Next, make sure your second assignment contributes to the company's bottom line. Sorry to sound like a grumpy old fart here, but hey, I'm a grumpy gray-beard that has seen this movie before and I don't like the ending.
The article is unclear if e-mail has been expanded to support multiple user logins. This to me is the deal-breaker with an iPad -- I'd have one sitting on the coffee table today if it had support for multiple user logins to keep e-mail sorted and private. But I'm not going to get an iPad for each member of the household just to keep e-mail private. So is that fixed or not? When they fix it, instant sale. Until then, nope.
It's ridiculous how little BW I use on my Verizon account each month, and how much I get charged for it. So I'm not surprised the high bandwidth users will be hunted down and charged. They do that to low bandwidth users. They do it to everybody. They're not treating high BW users any differently from anybody else.
If it is a coffee table appliance, then where is the user account login? I would have bought one for the coffee table already, but lack of user accounts is a deal breaker. E-mail is useless without user accounts. Web browsing is nearly so -- my wife doesn't want my bookmarks to clutter hers, and I don't want her bookmark clutter in mine, and as for the kid's bookmarks.... well, you get the point.
I'm with you, brother. Ubuntu has always seemed like obfuscated Linux to me. It's very windows-y. And broken in silly ways. And difficult to fix because it has been obfuscated. I'm currently running system with Slackware, Gentoo, Arch, and Ubuntu. And 3 OS X systems, which are of course BSD based. Ubuntu is my least favorite of all. What people see in it is beyond me.
... why does everyone assume it is a software bug? I agree that it very well could be an undiscovered software bug. But there are so many more sources of erroneous behavior in an embedded system that *even* *if* the software were flawless (ummm... just go with me a minute... :) an automotive environment can cause all manner of strange glitches. I work with robots, lots of DC motors causing commutation noise on the power supply, long (several inch) distances between units that must talk to each other and therefore may have a different opinion as to ground reference voltage... many things can get wacky. Even flawless code needs a watchdog timer to get you out of weird states that power glitches that put you into. Power supply spikes can cause the program counter to jump to very odd places, with odd, corrupted stuff in RAM. Ground level shifting can cause communication glitches. CAN bus is *extremely* robust, so bad data should not get through... but what does get through? Does the system as a whole get into a weird state if packets drop?
http://gaming.nv.gov/tech_main.htm
Just goes to show the government *can* develop competence with technology if they consider the issue important enough.
FreeCAD https://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/free-cad/index.php?title=Main_Page has made huge progress recently.
The "Hello World" book using Python is aimed straight at kids, and I'm using it with my daughter. It's good. Previously reviewed here on SlashDot. Also, I've used Gambas. Either is good for kids. The 1xx-in-one type kits are good, too. My 10 year old daughter has gotten to the point where she begs to do PC board layout -- so right now she has a project going (using gEDA) to build a "game" with 8 push buttons, 8 led's, and an AVR microcontroller. Mind you, she is not yet capable of designing either the hardware or the software, so I walk her through all the steps. But she loves the connect-the-dots part, and I let her lead the way on the design decisions and help her fill in the parts she can't do yet.
After you homeschool a while, you realize exactly the opposite. Our homeschooled daughter goes to three homeschool coop classes per week, soccer, gymnastics, art class, and string ensemble every week, and other ad hoc activities a couple of times per month. She gets plenty of time to interact with other kids, and in fact is very quick to make new friends and mix into new situations. In part, I think, because she has no conception of the "us versus them" of a normal grade school environment. There are plenty of opportunities to develop socially outside of the state-controlled school system.
Oh... why do we homeschool? Because they don't teach organic chemistry and pre-calculus in the 5th grade. She would go out of her nut in a normal school from lack of challenge.
Its just you. My experience is exactly the opposite. I've been tolerating the ads most places lately, mainly out of being too lazy to install ad blockers. Yesterday I was finally pushed over the edge by some site with "float over the content" ads with obscene amounts of animation. I installed flashblock and life is now much better.
Flash is the cancer of the web.
Just consider that. How big is your school? How big is your town? How many nutters do you think there are in a student body population of 50,000 students, just based on raw probability?
I did grad school at the Minneapolis campus. Let's see... December... daytime highs might be above zero F, certainly not if measured in C. Less than 8 hours of daylight right now. That *is* an environmental stress, even if your car *does* start reliably and have a good heater, which would make it an atypical student car.
Consider the situation: High pressure professional program, a University so large that the people in the administration to whom you are just a student ID number are... just a staff ID number to the management.
Yes, I'd worry about my students becoming unhinged. At any point in time, any population that large will have several people who are deeply hurting inside.
Just so nobody takes my comments to negatively: U of M can be a great place, but you have to make your own way it in.
This question seems to be a FAQ and SlashDot. Here is an approximation of what I posted last time. It is/was the actual policy at a Fortune 500 technology company during a time when I was the PHB that had to pay for the 24x7 coverage on a particular server.
For your 40 hrs/week, you get your regular pay. For your time "on the pager", you get 25% of your regular hourly, until such time as it goes off. From the time the pager goes off, until you clear the trouble ticket, you get 100% plus any applicable shift/holiday/overtime premium.
If you can dial in remotely and fix the problem, great for everyone. If not, you must be able to get from wherever you are to the server room in 30 minutes. 100% of the time you are on the pager, you must be in condition to work, ie: sober.
So... does that sound like getting paid 25% for doing nothing? Not to me. You can't get more than a 30 minute drive from the plant -- so no ski trips for you that weekend. Going to a party? Better have cranberry juice. You are getting paid for making yourself available.
My company had a policy that the cost of 24x7 coverage came out of the budget of the PHB demanding it. A very good policy, IMHO. Its too easy to ask for it otherwise, without considering the consequences, both in terms of dollar cost, and in terms of quality of life for the employees that provide the coverage.
I nominate this for "Best nerd joke of 2009".
Indeed. People should chose thier license they way they choose a screwdriver, not they way they choose a religion. GPL serves some goals better, BSD servers other goals better. Clarify your goals, and choose the license that best serves them.
*sheesh* Just what we need. A way to distribute stale, broken, un-optimized binaries everywhere all at once.
Who knows if that was truly the case here, but I can believe that it applies in some cases. Grown-up programmers don't put that slosh in the comments to begin with. Sadly, you see a fair amount of that in close-source code. Less than in the old days, but still too much.
If someone with clout finds out that their IP is being imported without a license, the FBI raids a dock-side warehouse in Los Angeles. Good luck getting their attention for this one. But still, somebody with standing and who cares enough could be filing the paperwork. In this case, because physical goods are involved, there is a pressure point with the manufacturer.