Dang. I discovered a really vicious Chrome bug last week and was saving it for the competition. I was really hoping to win a copy of the Chrome browser!
Mod parent up! If OP spends a lot if time around WiFi, this is a very interesting option. I have not tried it myself, but am considering it for when my contract expires.
One of the features, apparently, of MMS is that the associated text is not restricted to 160 characters. This means that if you are sending a text message that is quite long via MMS, it does not get broken up like it would over SMS. For this reason, apparently, some phones (iPhones and probably others) now choose MMS as the default medium, even if there is no non-ASCII content to the message. This would be okay, maybe (I mean, who enjoys waiting for the second half of a text to arrive when it's split the message mid-word?), except OP and others have phones that cannot receive MMS messages at all. This means that if a person sends a short message, he may get it, but if the same iPhone user sends a longer message it will silently fail.
I never observed this problem with my trusty Nokia 1100, for instance, but I can see that it would be a problem if I hadn't succumbed to the siren call of Android.
Of course, what is missing is how how you refer to the impending Thursday when "next Thursday" refers to the immediate Thursday plus a week. The idiom is "this Thursday" for the Thursday of this week and "next Thursday" for the Thursday of next week.
I have worked as a draftsman for an architect. The fact that you have to obtain surveys, visit the site, create drawings and models, and calculate your bids is exactly what I was talking about. Especially the fact that only the selected architect gets paid. You were claiming that if X (e.g., 6) creators submit work then a full X-1 (e.g., 5) creators get paid, which is not the case unless you only have two competing for the prize.
As I said in another thread, this is definitely not sufficient compensation for the work as created from scratch, but may be enough compensation for releasing an already-created work under a permissive license. But this is probably not an issue because the time frame (4 months, at this point) is nowhere near enough time to create a textbook from scratch. The contest participant must already have something in the works; If you have already put in this much effort without the promise of a contract, then $20,000 and the assurance that it will be used by an institution (Saylor) right out of the gate may be enough to tip those scales.
A competition tends to mean X people create a work, and X-1 people don't get paid anything for that work.
No, this competition means that X people create a work, only 1 gets paid, and only 1 gets used by Saylor. Complaining about this is like complaining that only one architect gets paid for a construction job when 6 architects went to the trouble of creating bids.
One killer problem is $20K is way too little to develop a completely new 400 page textbook. Its gonna take at least 1, maybe 2 years of fairly concentrated effort. And $20K/yr is probably way too much to keep it up to date. The solution is not to award money for new books but to award money to pull a currently project gutenberg free public domain book up to current standards.
Seems to me that the prize is not being offered as an incentive to create a textbook, but to release a textbook with a permissive license. They have extended the deadline; I cannot tell how long this prize has been out there. (It's certainly the first I've heard of it.) But as you say, there is far too little time to create a text from scratch. If I were working on a textbook, though, this might be the incentive I need to release it to the world.
Also, the whole point of having a permissive license is that the corrections and updates can be made by the community, so compensation for keeping the text modern is not such an issue.
In the same note, there is nothing about the prize which seems to preclude an update to existing public-domain texts. But as another poster said, this might mean more effort than creating something from scratch.
No kidding. From the summary, I thought this would be a guide to sourcing parts. Once I started reading, I quickly started losing interest since I didn't already have the kit to assemble. Next week: "Applying toothpaste to your own toothbrush."
Oops, sorry. Car analogy: "Refueling your own hatchback."
I, for one, enjoy browsing at -1. The modifiers are appreciated, but I want to see it all. Occasionally there's something down there that is really worth reading, and I can skim through the crap fast enough that it's a reasonable tradeoff.
Slashdot Mirror
Dang. I discovered a really vicious Chrome bug last week and was saving it for the competition. I was really hoping to win a copy of the Chrome browser!
Mod parent up! If OP spends a lot if time around WiFi, this is a very interesting option. I have not tried it myself, but am considering it for when my contract expires.
One of the features, apparently, of MMS is that the associated text is not restricted to 160 characters. This means that if you are sending a text message that is quite long via MMS, it does not get broken up like it would over SMS. For this reason, apparently, some phones (iPhones and probably others) now choose MMS as the default medium, even if there is no non-ASCII content to the message. This would be okay, maybe (I mean, who enjoys waiting for the second half of a text to arrive when it's split the message mid-word?), except OP and others have phones that cannot receive MMS messages at all. This means that if a person sends a short message, he may get it, but if the same iPhone user sends a longer message it will silently fail.
I never observed this problem with my trusty Nokia 1100, for instance, but I can see that it would be a problem if I hadn't succumbed to the siren call of Android.
Talking about Jews and their dietary constraints does not an anti-Semite make.
The sum of the powers of *Whoosh* is not equal to the power of the hypotenuse of *Whoosh* for any integral power greater than two.
I have an elegant proof for this conjecture, but I can't type it here on slashdot because it requires Unicode.
Of course, what is missing is how how you refer to the impending Thursday when "next Thursday" refers to the immediate Thursday plus a week. The idiom is "this Thursday" for the Thursday of this week and "next Thursday" for the Thursday of next week.
Supercenturions are fairly rare...
No kidding! It's been ages since the Roman Army assigned more than 100 soldiers to the command of one officer!
Do you like me? Check one:
o - No
I have worked as a draftsman for an architect. The fact that you have to obtain surveys, visit the site, create drawings and models, and calculate your bids is exactly what I was talking about. Especially the fact that only the selected architect gets paid. You were claiming that if X (e.g., 6) creators submit work then a full X-1 (e.g., 5) creators get paid, which is not the case unless you only have two competing for the prize.
As I said in another thread, this is definitely not sufficient compensation for the work as created from scratch, but may be enough compensation for releasing an already-created work under a permissive license. But this is probably not an issue because the time frame (4 months, at this point) is nowhere near enough time to create a textbook from scratch. The contest participant must already have something in the works; If you have already put in this much effort without the promise of a contract, then $20,000 and the assurance that it will be used by an institution (Saylor) right out of the gate may be enough to tip those scales.
A competition tends to mean X people create a work, and X-1 people don't get paid anything for that work.
No, this competition means that X people create a work, only 1 gets paid, and only 1 gets used by Saylor. Complaining about this is like complaining that only one architect gets paid for a construction job when 6 architects went to the trouble of creating bids.
Free for the same people who use Mozilla Firefox and Apache web server.
One killer problem is $20K is way too little to develop a completely new 400 page textbook. Its gonna take at least 1, maybe 2 years of fairly concentrated effort. And $20K/yr is probably way too much to keep it up to date. The solution is not to award money for new books but to award money to pull a currently project gutenberg free public domain book up to current standards.
Seems to me that the prize is not being offered as an incentive to create a textbook, but to release a textbook with a permissive license. They have extended the deadline; I cannot tell how long this prize has been out there. (It's certainly the first I've heard of it.) But as you say, there is far too little time to create a text from scratch. If I were working on a textbook, though, this might be the incentive I need to release it to the world.
Also, the whole point of having a permissive license is that the corrections and updates can be made by the community, so compensation for keeping the text modern is not such an issue.
In the same note, there is nothing about the prize which seems to preclude an update to existing public-domain texts. But as another poster said, this might mean more effort than creating something from scratch.
How do you certify the timestamps, then?
Should I aim for a 0.135% blood alcohol content, or will I need more when first starting out?
Also note that none of them apply to the crabby cancer carver-on-a-stick.
I think that bug fixes and security patches might be one reason, but maybe they will be backported.
SOPA would let the DHS remove entries from your phone's address book. Does that fix it?
I am living in my car, you insensitive clod!
No kidding. From the summary, I thought this would be a guide to sourcing parts. Once I started reading, I quickly started losing interest since I didn't already have the kit to assemble. Next week: "Applying toothpaste to your own toothbrush."
Oops, sorry. Car analogy: "Refueling your own hatchback."
They're those flat shiny things that ISOs come on.
Does it have its own soundtrack or something?
I always knew about:mozilla was missing something...
All the more reason not to use it on a public profile.
These are the makings of the worst money laundering scheme ever.
I, for one, enjoy browsing at -1. The modifiers are appreciated, but I want to see it all. Occasionally there's something down there that is really worth reading, and I can skim through the crap fast enough that it's a reasonable tradeoff.
Let's ban everyone with a UID within {437} U {100000,...}, in that case.