My grandparents lived on the landing approach path to JFK, out in Floral Park. When the Concorde came in, you freakin' knew it was the Concorde. It was a lot louder than the other airplanes on that approach, and it was nice that it only went over twice a day (It was a very cool airplane, and we'd go out to look, at least for the morning landing).
I dunno about "normal cruising speed", but on "approach to JFK" it was a hell of a lot louder than the 747s, DC10s and similar of the late '70s and early '80s. Looking at the approach profiles I see that the aircraft were probably at about 2k feet over Floral Park. I reject your statement, from experience.
See, for example, "Effect of adaptive cruise control systems on traffic flow.", Davis LC., which suggests that if just 20% of drivers used ACC we'd eliminate traffic jams (although traffic would flow more slowly at high densities, it wouldn't have the non-laminar jam behavior it does now). So, yes, depending on how you define "congestion", it could happen with a fairly low adoption rate.
And others have mentioned that you could also have closer follow distance, so you could probably at least double vehicles per lane-hour throughput.
The heck with hacking, does this mean we're going to equip deer with WiFi, and fine children who ride near the street on tricycles that aren't equipped?
Cooperative communication can be used for things like platooning and adaptive cruise control, but it has to be augmented by enough situational awareness to understand what's happening without cooperation. So the "safety" thing doesn't make any sense to me: If you're depending on inter-vehicle communication for safety, all it takes is an unequipped roadway participant, or a failed transceiver, to create a dangerous situation.
It takes several nights (and several hours per night) of viewing, but the most dramatic "wow, there's really stuff happening up there!" class project I've seen is calculating the orbital periods of Jupiter's moons. With just a 'scope, if you look at Jupiter, and then use a stopwatch to find the times for each of the moons going out of frame, and then have your kids plot those points out on graph paper. Do this at hour intervals for 3 nights running, you can then fit sine curves to the points and see what the orbital period of the moons is.
You can also do this with a digital camera with a decent sized lens (most of the SLRs with the 1.6 or so multiplier and a 300mm lens will work well), just counting pixels of separation.
The "wow, that's not just static" realization can be profound.
I haven't built a web page yet for this experiment, but I do have a spreadsheet to do the graphing automatically, drop me an email if you'd like further class materials and maybe that'll get me to build the page for this.
In my case, because I got run out of several other places when I asked if I could boot an Ubuntu live CD in order to check for compatibility, but the OfficeDepot guy said "sure, no problem".
And because I've twice gotten some really good answers to "what have you got in the back that was returned that you really don't want to deal with and will cut me a radical deal on?" question.
When I was in college the one professor who taught me the most, and especially the most that has helped my career, told me "publish, publish, publish!"
I didn't stay in academia, I've never had a peer-reviewed article in a major paper, but I've taken his advice to heart and it's served me well. I get my name out there as much as I can.
Back in the '90s, Ed Catmull, of Pixar fame, emailed me out of the blue on the basis of a discussion I participated in on comp.graphics.algorithms, and I went to work there for a while. That's my most dramatic episode of making a good contact online, but it's far from the only one.
I've had recruiters who actually knew what I was looking for contact me (rather than the usual annoyance of keyword matching on Dice), and they already knew what it would take to get me to move (One email started something like "I see you just bought a house in wine country, I can't imagine moving here is attractive, but the client told me to contact you anyway", which got my attention, because he cared enough to find out who I was. Even though "wine country" is a bit of a stretch... I suppose he was being nice).
I don't really like the social networking sites, and I rarely send invites because I feel like that's something of an imposition, but I gladly receive them because things that raise my visibility have, so far, been good for my career and my life.
If you're a software person I can strongly recommend the Atmel STK-500 microcontroller development board. There's great Linux support for the development tools (using the gcc toolchain), so you can develop the software end of things in your favorite environment, and the microcontrollers can run just fine with internal clocks, so the only external connections you need are Vcc (Usually 2, 3 or 4 batteries) and ground.
With a microcontroller and the knowledge that you have to put a resistor in most places to limit the current flow, you don't have to know much more than Ohm's law, Current = Voltage / Resistance and that you can't pull more than about.1 amps (current, aka 100 milliamps) off of a microcontroller pin to do a lot of cool stuff.
That and one of your favorite "download our board layout software and order custom boards from it", ExpressPCB's software works fine under Linux, and you can be making your own kits fairly soon.
In fact, I just made an order of a few PCB boards to give me some basic break-out for an ATMega16 with a real-time clock. Minimum order is going to leave me with a few extra boards, and I can probably scrape together a spare LCD or two and share some code, if you're near Petaluma California drop me an email (I'm easy to find on the web) and I'll see if I've got parts to share.
If the $80 for the STK-500 is too much, there are even plans out there for a parallel port programmer that should work with the boards I just ordered. And, yes, I'll be putting full project details out there as this particular device goes forward, since this is the first hardware I've done that doesn't have a client.
I was an Apple kid myself, but recently I was touring a company that makes high end guitars that's run by a guy who's got a hackerly technical bent, and they've got CNC machines that they rigged up back in the early '80s with C64s that are still running on those same C64s.
That was the most awesome testament I've seen to what computing used to be, I'm not sure I'd even trust a modern microcontroller to run reliably for 25 years in an industrial environment.
Doh. Thank you. Will read more carefully next time.
And I'm not sure what it adds to the discussion, but I did recently go through exactly this problem, although I was the one who wanted to incorporate the code. I eventually ended up solving the problem in other ways because Microsoft's ways of writing COM objects had changed in the intervening years so it was reasonable to just rewrite, but I did send an email to the original author asking for, among other things, explicit license.
Never got a response, so if anything maybe that's an indication that I need to start attaching "Released To The Public Domain" on things that I consider one-offs that I don't care if people use.
Or, as the other poster down a bit mentioned about homework assignments, have my email sig GPL everything just to make a point.
If there's a question on the license, then I think it's totally reasonable for ScuttleMonkey to go to his project lead and say "I'm uncomfortable that we don't have an explicit license for this code, we need to contact the original author and obtain a license or an acknowledgement of a release to the public domain".
I don't attach a license or explicit release to every piece of code I've posted to forums or newsgroups or what-have-you over the years, and I have had every expectation that many of those would get copied and pasted into applications without attribution. I'd prefer it if, when that stuff ended up inside an app, there were a note saying "here's the original source" because when I've stumbled across such code it's sometimes made it easier to figure out what it's supposed to be doing, but I don't expect it.
If ScuttleMonkey has an indication that the original license is not something that allows incorporation into the code, then it's totally reasonable to escalate this one over the lead's head early on, but it sounds like this was something picked up off a site like CodeProject.com, where it's completely reasonable to assume that the intent of the poster was that this code be incorporated and adapted without further license terms.
I just spent two days on jury duty in the Marin Civic Center, a Frank Lloyd Wright designed monstrosity built during his "Ming the Merciless" phase. It's a wonderfully dated building, you've seen it in all sorts of low budget sci-fi movie and, and from the outside it brings to mind the swingin' sixties, wide collars and hot tub parties.
Spend a few days in the building and all of those quirks are less endearing. Wright not only designed far beyond his materials, the air flow within the building sucks so the environment is often uncomfortable, the restrooms feel like an afterthought, and I had to double-check that I hadn't just let my self into an electrical panel access closet at least once, there's no sense whatsoever of the changing needs of a building, traffic and work flows are stuck in 1960s procedures or modern lines and people management have been awkwardly introduced around his designs, and a fellow juror reaffirmed that the courtrooms make one feel like we're stuck in the midst of an ongoing alien abduction.
Wright, Gehry and their ilk are overrated hacks, but they're appreciated by the same pointy-haired types who spec a problem into oblivion and then blame the engineers when their hallucinations can't actually be built problem free, so the worship goes on. I think the poster up above who compared the divide between architects and structural engineers to that of web designers versus programmers is dead on. there are, indeed, great designers, but as anyone who has, say, tried to pay their bills on a service provider's web site recently can tell you, they're far less common than the hacks who talk a good line and will make the logo bigger while destroying usability.
Huh. I don't know what's going on, but the other day I sat down on the couch to fire up Vista. Turned on the laptop, selected that option from the Grub menu, went into the kitchen, came back, it got to the login screen. I entered my password.
Just about the time I pressed enter, my sweety came in and turned on her computer. It booted and she was logged in to a usable desktop before Vista had gotten me from the login prompt to the desktop.
I'm guessing there's some errant process that's looking for something network related and timing out or something, but I've no clue how to track it down. Might be time to re-install Vista, but I've only had the bloody thing for a few months, and only used it to write an installer for a friend's software, so aside from removing a lot of the adware that came with it I think I've only put Visual C# Express and NSIS on it.
And I really don't look forward to putting a Microsoft OS on a dual-boot machine as the second install.
Admittedly it comes up really fast from hibernate, but since I usually boot into Ubuntu and hibernate leaves the drives dirty so I can't mount 'em from the Linux side, I try to not do that (ie: it's not the first button next to the search box, at least by default).
Yeah, well, the Mac is in the same boat. You'd be a fool to go Carbon, but it's been equally pushed over the past few years, and that leaves you with Cocoa and Objective-C glue code.
So on the Mac you choose between Carbon and Cocoa, on X based systems you choose between Qt or Gtk. And Wx is an option on all of the platforms, so if you're going to count that as yet another standard you have to count it on Windows, Mac and X.
Just take a picture of your GPS so that you have an EXIF timestamp correlated with your GPS clock, and have one of the parameters to your script being a picture name and the GPS clock time that the picture was taken. At that point all you have to do is take your track data from your GPS and correlate it with your timestamps on your picture.
I keep buying compact flourescents in the hopes that they'll work out for me, but the darned things seem to have a half-life of about half a year. They get dimmer and dimmer until we end up switching back to incandescents so that we stop bumping into furniture.
I love the concept, I'm a fan of lower energy usage, and when I've put in new fixtures I tend towards regular flourescent so that I've got the light with the lower bills, but until someone can show me how disposing of a CF bulb every half year is worth the carbon savings, I remain a skeptic, and I'll have the incandescents that we keep around so that we can see 'til we get to the store to buy anothe CF bulb.
Or maybe there's something else wrong that I just haven't diagnosed yet, or I haven't found *the* magical brand (I've tried a number of different ones).
I think we're veering off-topic here, so I'll mention that and hopefully get a little lenience from those with "off-topic" moderator points, but you ask "how exactly would you like to answer questions from your children after their viewing a collection of still images from a hardcore porn movie dealing with rape and/or bondage?"
I'd point out that people like to play cowboys and indians, people like to play cops and robbers, and you can play at both of those games without actually scalping people or shooting the horses out from underneath them, or stealing stuff or busting out of jail. This is a basic lesson that kids need to learn anyway: fantasy isn't reality, and actions done in play with consenting playmates aren't the same thing as actions done in earnest with consequences.
And what "...if you found your 16-year-old son had "discovered" porn and was clearly one of the percentage of the population that responds to this with addictive behavior..."?
Well, I'm pseudo-uncle to at least one kid in that age range who, based on family history, is at high risk for alcoholism and obsessive-compulsive behavior. Being that age, he's also discovering drugs and alcohol (although, luckily, he's been to Europe a number of times and at least has basic experiences with wine). The particular focus of the addiction can change, it can be internet porn, computer gaming, or good old cheap beer, the larger issue is making sure that people making decisions can keep their eyes on the longer-term goals, and understand what impact the shorter-term trade-offs they're making have on those longer term goals: How's that five dollars at Starbuck's impacting your desire to buy a house? How's that half-bottle of Jack impacting your ability to maintain a relationship?
Yes, these sound like easy answers to complex questions. I don't mean them that way. Every time (and it's happened a number of times) I've had the "drug talk" with a teenager I have to get past the fact that the kid has noticed that the fear mongers were lying to them, past the fact that they know adults who casually use drugs and alcohol who don't have any problems, through to the "some do, some don't, the challenge is being able to see your own behavior in the larger context". And seeing that in ourselves is hard. Really hard.
And maybe so far I've just lucked out, that the kids I've seen grow out of these phases had the right genetics or the right other parenting or were just lucky. I won't claim omniscience, and I've not had the parenting experience, just the "'adult' they could talk to" experience.
But a symptom is just that, obsession can take many forms, discerning fantasy from reality, short term payoff from long-term impacts, is the real thing that needs to be addressed, and targeting one particular focus won't really help the underlying behavior and psychological needs.
I see a lot of people are suggesting that you mention the difficulties of merging external code changes into your own custom code base, but one thing I don't see emphasized enough in this thread is some way to communicate that given that there's already a lot of value out there, the value that the code can build on top of your changes may be worth giving back for.
Yes, you've got a (perceived) competitive advantage by hiding stuff away, but maybe you can quantify how much of an advantage that really is (I'd guess a few months worth), and propose that after that time patches get sent back upstream.
Or point out that other people have built some amazing things (I mean, you're using them, after all), and that if you have patches of general interest then they'd be able to build those amazing things on top of your patches of general interest.
I'm a coder too, I often don't understand how the pointy haired ones think either, but if you can start with something that isn't a bug fix for which you can quantify the competitive advantage (measured in months), get them to release that back into the code, and then demonstrate that people were building on top of that feature and giving that back to the code, then I think you've got a good start on putting justifiable dollar amounts on offering patches back to the community.
And once you've got dollar amounts, you're half-way to a business case.
Or maybe you'll discover that, in fact, your competitors just gobble up your fixes and don't give back anything themselves. I honestly don't know the answer to that one, but I think focusing on one feature and change that you can put direct quantifiable values to will give you and your management that answer.
Re:Maybe back issues of electronics magazines?
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Inexpensive EEG Devices?
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Steve Ciarcia did a system back in the '80s in Byte magazine that I remember primarily because I was reading through it and thought "why's he using batteries and doing so much work to isolate this side of the board from the other?", and then realized the possible problems that could stem from power supply failure or getting RS-232 voltages on to the probe side of the board. But whenever I go back to those old circuits I'm shocked by the complexity of the designs, mostly because we now have a much better array of integrated circuits and complete devices.
I've looked at the OpenEEG circuit a bit, and while my hardware experience is limited to building things like stepper motor drivers I've considered building it and hooking it up to myself. If you have trouble with the analog side of the board you might try looking around in the old-school guitarists in your area; I've found a number of guys who played back in the '70s who got really good at analog electronics and noise shielding because they got into building their own pre-amps.
And as others in this thread and elsewhere have said, once you build the hardware you've done the easy parts. You're looking for fairly small low frequency signals in a world full of very big low frequency signals. So put a value on your time and know that a lot of what you'll be doing is signal processing on a bigger CPU, not just using a microcontroller to feed small measurements to that big CPU.
I loathe CAPTCHA, although I may end up implementing it on my system. I could also be convinced that a "which of these N pictures are kittens?" test might work.
I run a small old-school weblog on my own content management system. Middling PageRank (6 or so), a couple of hundred readers. I just had the spambots discover my Wiki, but in the process of cleaning up that mess I was shocked and amazed by the emergent behavior I'm seeing in spambots. Every form on my site that could get random info plugged into it, including search fields and new user account information; I'm going to have to make new user accounts far less easy to get. All of a sudden I'd ballooned from under a thousand registered users to forty-five hundred.
I don't like verified email accounts, and I think those are going to get attacked fairly soon too, but some sort of way to more strongly tie an identifier to an actual human has to fit into the mix.
One of the things I'm excited about is the notion of cross-site identifiers, like OpenID, and distributed reputation. Something that lets my site collaborate with other sites and say "I trust this URL". Users will still have to jump through the "are you a human" test, but will only have to do so once within the confines of a trust network.
As others have noted, this is something crying out for a social solution, not a technological one, but I'll indulge the "build your own" technological fetish for a moment.
Monitoring for falls uses off-the-shelf accelerometers. Another poster in this thread mentioned a BlueTooth enabled heart monitor, of which there appear to be several. The hard bit is notification.
Take a look at the Telit GM682 for the cell phone portion of your control. You can get 'em in quantity one from Spark Fun, and probably other places. It's basically a cell phone with a serial port that takes AT style commands, and is great for mobile hacking applications. After that it's just a microcontroller or a Gumstix depending on where your power consumption, weight, and processing power curves meet.
Given my experiences with cell phone coverage and reliability, I'd have your actual dead-man switch on your server somewhere, and have it trigger if it didn't get an "alive" signal from the device you carry every so often, because it sounds like you'd far rather trigger false positives than have a false negative.
Agreed. Not only are the the electric scooters that follow the standard scooter design foldable, lighter, and much cheaper, when the batteries run down they're still usable as a conventional scooter.
When the batteries on the Segway run down you've got a 70 lb brick.
I just read Code Name Ginger, which doesn't really ever throw the hard punches, but as I read the book I wondered two things:
1. What was the honest reaction of all the guys hired in total secrecy when the discovered what the project was? During the interview process, nobody will tell you what it is. So you move yourself and your family out to New Hampshire, where you're pretty much committed to the job 'cause Kamen's company is the only high tech employer around, and you discover you're working on a scooter. The pay is okay, but, really, was the culture such that you could then say "what are you guys thinking and how do we turn this into a real product?", or are you then stuck building out someone else's vision?
2. How could they miss that the people they showed it to who thought it was cool were all people with obscene amounts of disposable income? Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and John Doerr get together to look at the project, and even in a crowd with those kinds of financial resources one out of three calls "bullshit". Kinda. Surely even with Kamen's pathological secrecy complex there was someone else outside the company they could have found for some honest reaction.
I'm also shocked and amazed at the "it's better to build a manufacturing process from scratch than show anyone else our product" mindset. If you think that you've got one great idea, you're deluding yourself. If, on the other hand, you think you can continually out-innovate and don't need to constantly remind yourself of the novelty of your one great idea by keeping it secret, then you've got a chance in the marketplace.
Unfortunately, there's so much money in the front end of this process that there's no way they can let anyone else take the patented bits and run with it, the royalties the investors will expect are going to be far too high for anyone else to take a derivative product to market, so while there are some interesting things that I can foresee coming out of balancing on two wheels, it's only going to be sometime after the patents run out that we actually see interesting products.
I used to inline skate around Raccoon Mountain. The first time I ever got my brake smoking was a descent on that loop...
But I digress. Just wanted to say that Raccoon Mountain isn't unique, there are quite a few pumped storage facilities around the world. A quick search turns up Blenheim-Gilboa in the Catskills, Muddy Run in Pennsylvania, Bear Swamp in Massachusetts, Alta Mesa in Southern California... Lots and lots.
I built a jig to hold my D60 with a macro lens mounted and a slide at a distance that let me get full coverage. Run with the lens open pretty wide, use my light box as a fairly even light source (blurred out by the shallow depth of field of a wide open macro lens) and it's been a fantastic scanner.
I should build a slide feeder, but even as it is, with a couple of rails built out of styrene that I have to manually drop a slide into, I've been through hundreds of slides by just hanging out a few evenings, and it takes a heck of a lot longer to annotate and organize the results than it does to shoot 'em in the first place.
I haven't gotten to scanning negatives yet, but with the right filter I can correct the color cast, and then just reverse the image and do final color balance as a bulk process (I may shoot those as RAW). So building a little styrene jig that'll hold a negative flat and let me adjust it one frame at a time is on the task list.
Yeah, it may not be at the full resolution of modern Velvia with a prime lens on a tripod, but a few people who care now have prints of 60(!) year old images that otherwise would still be moldering in a cardboard box in the top of a closet somewhere.
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My grandparents lived on the landing approach path to JFK, out in Floral Park. When the Concorde came in, you freakin' knew it was the Concorde. It was a lot louder than the other airplanes on that approach, and it was nice that it only went over twice a day (It was a very cool airplane, and we'd go out to look, at least for the morning landing).
I dunno about "normal cruising speed", but on "approach to JFK" it was a hell of a lot louder than the 747s, DC10s and similar of the late '70s and early '80s. Looking at the approach profiles I see that the aircraft were probably at about 2k feet over Floral Park. I reject your statement, from experience.
Anyone taking bets on how long until we see the first "Carpool is 1 or more persons per vehicle" sign?
See, for example, "Effect of adaptive cruise control systems on traffic flow.", Davis LC., which suggests that if just 20% of drivers used ACC we'd eliminate traffic jams (although traffic would flow more slowly at high densities, it wouldn't have the non-laminar jam behavior it does now). So, yes, depending on how you define "congestion", it could happen with a fairly low adoption rate.
And others have mentioned that you could also have closer follow distance, so you could probably at least double vehicles per lane-hour throughput.
The heck with hacking, does this mean we're going to equip deer with WiFi, and fine children who ride near the street on tricycles that aren't equipped?
Cooperative communication can be used for things like platooning and adaptive cruise control, but it has to be augmented by enough situational awareness to understand what's happening without cooperation. So the "safety" thing doesn't make any sense to me: If you're depending on inter-vehicle communication for safety, all it takes is an unequipped roadway participant, or a failed transceiver, to create a dangerous situation.
It takes several nights (and several hours per night) of viewing, but the most dramatic "wow, there's really stuff happening up there!" class project I've seen is calculating the orbital periods of Jupiter's moons. With just a 'scope, if you look at Jupiter, and then use a stopwatch to find the times for each of the moons going out of frame, and then have your kids plot those points out on graph paper. Do this at hour intervals for 3 nights running, you can then fit sine curves to the points and see what the orbital period of the moons is.
You can also do this with a digital camera with a decent sized lens (most of the SLRs with the 1.6 or so multiplier and a 300mm lens will work well), just counting pixels of separation.
The "wow, that's not just static" realization can be profound.
I haven't built a web page yet for this experiment, but I do have a spreadsheet to do the graphing automatically, drop me an email if you'd like further class materials and maybe that'll get me to build the page for this.
In my case, because I got run out of several other places when I asked if I could boot an Ubuntu live CD in order to check for compatibility, but the OfficeDepot guy said "sure, no problem".
And because I've twice gotten some really good answers to "what have you got in the back that was returned that you really don't want to deal with and will cut me a radical deal on?" question.
When I was in college the one professor who taught me the most, and especially the most that has helped my career, told me "publish, publish, publish!"
I didn't stay in academia, I've never had a peer-reviewed article in a major paper, but I've taken his advice to heart and it's served me well. I get my name out there as much as I can.
Back in the '90s, Ed Catmull, of Pixar fame, emailed me out of the blue on the basis of a discussion I participated in on comp.graphics.algorithms, and I went to work there for a while. That's my most dramatic episode of making a good contact online, but it's far from the only one.
I've had recruiters who actually knew what I was looking for contact me (rather than the usual annoyance of keyword matching on Dice), and they already knew what it would take to get me to move (One email started something like "I see you just bought a house in wine country, I can't imagine moving here is attractive, but the client told me to contact you anyway", which got my attention, because he cared enough to find out who I was. Even though "wine country" is a bit of a stretch... I suppose he was being nice).
I don't really like the social networking sites, and I rarely send invites because I feel like that's something of an imposition, but I gladly receive them because things that raise my visibility have, so far, been good for my career and my life.
Whoops. Meant to say that the ExpressPCB software works fine under Linux using WINE.
Sorry.
If you're a software person I can strongly recommend the Atmel STK-500 microcontroller development board. There's great Linux support for the development tools (using the gcc toolchain), so you can develop the software end of things in your favorite environment, and the microcontrollers can run just fine with internal clocks, so the only external connections you need are Vcc (Usually 2, 3 or 4 batteries) and ground.
With a microcontroller and the knowledge that you have to put a resistor in most places to limit the current flow, you don't have to know much more than Ohm's law, Current = Voltage / Resistance and that you can't pull more than about .1 amps (current, aka 100 milliamps) off of a microcontroller pin to do a lot of cool stuff.
That and one of your favorite "download our board layout software and order custom boards from it", ExpressPCB's software works fine under Linux, and you can be making your own kits fairly soon.
In fact, I just made an order of a few PCB boards to give me some basic break-out for an ATMega16 with a real-time clock. Minimum order is going to leave me with a few extra boards, and I can probably scrape together a spare LCD or two and share some code, if you're near Petaluma California drop me an email (I'm easy to find on the web) and I'll see if I've got parts to share.
If the $80 for the STK-500 is too much, there are even plans out there for a parallel port programmer that should work with the boards I just ordered. And, yes, I'll be putting full project details out there as this particular device goes forward, since this is the first hardware I've done that doesn't have a client.
I was an Apple kid myself, but recently I was touring a company that makes high end guitars that's run by a guy who's got a hackerly technical bent, and they've got CNC machines that they rigged up back in the early '80s with C64s that are still running on those same C64s.
That was the most awesome testament I've seen to what computing used to be, I'm not sure I'd even trust a modern microcontroller to run reliably for 25 years in an industrial environment.
Doh. Thank you. Will read more carefully next time.
And I'm not sure what it adds to the discussion, but I did recently go through exactly this problem, although I was the one who wanted to incorporate the code. I eventually ended up solving the problem in other ways because Microsoft's ways of writing COM objects had changed in the intervening years so it was reasonable to just rewrite, but I did send an email to the original author asking for, among other things, explicit license.
Never got a response, so if anything maybe that's an indication that I need to start attaching "Released To The Public Domain" on things that I consider one-offs that I don't care if people use.
Or, as the other poster down a bit mentioned about homework assignments, have my email sig GPL everything just to make a point.
If there's a question on the license, then I think it's totally reasonable for ScuttleMonkey to go to his project lead and say "I'm uncomfortable that we don't have an explicit license for this code, we need to contact the original author and obtain a license or an acknowledgement of a release to the public domain".
I don't attach a license or explicit release to every piece of code I've posted to forums or newsgroups or what-have-you over the years, and I have had every expectation that many of those would get copied and pasted into applications without attribution. I'd prefer it if, when that stuff ended up inside an app, there were a note saying "here's the original source" because when I've stumbled across such code it's sometimes made it easier to figure out what it's supposed to be doing, but I don't expect it.
If ScuttleMonkey has an indication that the original license is not something that allows incorporation into the code, then it's totally reasonable to escalate this one over the lead's head early on, but it sounds like this was something picked up off a site like CodeProject.com, where it's completely reasonable to assume that the intent of the poster was that this code be incorporated and adapted without further license terms.
I just spent two days on jury duty in the Marin Civic Center, a Frank Lloyd Wright designed monstrosity built during his "Ming the Merciless" phase. It's a wonderfully dated building, you've seen it in all sorts of low budget sci-fi movie and, and from the outside it brings to mind the swingin' sixties, wide collars and hot tub parties.
Spend a few days in the building and all of those quirks are less endearing. Wright not only designed far beyond his materials, the air flow within the building sucks so the environment is often uncomfortable, the restrooms feel like an afterthought, and I had to double-check that I hadn't just let my self into an electrical panel access closet at least once, there's no sense whatsoever of the changing needs of a building, traffic and work flows are stuck in 1960s procedures or modern lines and people management have been awkwardly introduced around his designs, and a fellow juror reaffirmed that the courtrooms make one feel like we're stuck in the midst of an ongoing alien abduction.
Wright, Gehry and their ilk are overrated hacks, but they're appreciated by the same pointy-haired types who spec a problem into oblivion and then blame the engineers when their hallucinations can't actually be built problem free, so the worship goes on. I think the poster up above who compared the divide between architects and structural engineers to that of web designers versus programmers is dead on. there are, indeed, great designers, but as anyone who has, say, tried to pay their bills on a service provider's web site recently can tell you, they're far less common than the hacks who talk a good line and will make the logo bigger while destroying usability.
Huh. I don't know what's going on, but the other day I sat down on the couch to fire up Vista. Turned on the laptop, selected that option from the Grub menu, went into the kitchen, came back, it got to the login screen. I entered my password.
Just about the time I pressed enter, my sweety came in and turned on her computer. It booted and she was logged in to a usable desktop before Vista had gotten me from the login prompt to the desktop.
I'm guessing there's some errant process that's looking for something network related and timing out or something, but I've no clue how to track it down. Might be time to re-install Vista, but I've only had the bloody thing for a few months, and only used it to write an installer for a friend's software, so aside from removing a lot of the adware that came with it I think I've only put Visual C# Express and NSIS on it.
And I really don't look forward to putting a Microsoft OS on a dual-boot machine as the second install.
Admittedly it comes up really fast from hibernate, but since I usually boot into Ubuntu and hibernate leaves the drives dirty so I can't mount 'em from the Linux side, I try to not do that (ie: it's not the first button next to the search box, at least by default).
Yeah, well, the Mac is in the same boat. You'd be a fool to go Carbon, but it's been equally pushed over the past few years, and that leaves you with Cocoa and Objective-C glue code.
So on the Mac you choose between Carbon and Cocoa, on X based systems you choose between Qt or Gtk. And Wx is an option on all of the platforms, so if you're going to count that as yet another standard you have to count it on Windows, Mac and X.
Just take a picture of your GPS so that you have an EXIF timestamp correlated with your GPS clock, and have one of the parameters to your script being a picture name and the GPS clock time that the picture was taken. At that point all you have to do is take your track data from your GPS and correlate it with your timestamps on your picture.
Poof! Instant geolocation.
I keep buying compact flourescents in the hopes that they'll work out for me, but the darned things seem to have a half-life of about half a year. They get dimmer and dimmer until we end up switching back to incandescents so that we stop bumping into furniture.
I love the concept, I'm a fan of lower energy usage, and when I've put in new fixtures I tend towards regular flourescent so that I've got the light with the lower bills, but until someone can show me how disposing of a CF bulb every half year is worth the carbon savings, I remain a skeptic, and I'll have the incandescents that we keep around so that we can see 'til we get to the store to buy anothe CF bulb.
Or maybe there's something else wrong that I just haven't diagnosed yet, or I haven't found *the* magical brand (I've tried a number of different ones).
I think we're veering off-topic here, so I'll mention that and hopefully get a little lenience from those with "off-topic" moderator points, but you ask "how exactly would you like to answer questions from your children after their viewing a collection of still images from a hardcore porn movie dealing with rape and/or bondage?"
I'd point out that people like to play cowboys and indians, people like to play cops and robbers, and you can play at both of those games without actually scalping people or shooting the horses out from underneath them, or stealing stuff or busting out of jail. This is a basic lesson that kids need to learn anyway: fantasy isn't reality, and actions done in play with consenting playmates aren't the same thing as actions done in earnest with consequences.
And what "...if you found your 16-year-old son had "discovered" porn and was clearly one of the percentage of the population that responds to this with addictive behavior..."?
Well, I'm pseudo-uncle to at least one kid in that age range who, based on family history, is at high risk for alcoholism and obsessive-compulsive behavior. Being that age, he's also discovering drugs and alcohol (although, luckily, he's been to Europe a number of times and at least has basic experiences with wine). The particular focus of the addiction can change, it can be internet porn, computer gaming, or good old cheap beer, the larger issue is making sure that people making decisions can keep their eyes on the longer-term goals, and understand what impact the shorter-term trade-offs they're making have on those longer term goals: How's that five dollars at Starbuck's impacting your desire to buy a house? How's that half-bottle of Jack impacting your ability to maintain a relationship?
Yes, these sound like easy answers to complex questions. I don't mean them that way. Every time (and it's happened a number of times) I've had the "drug talk" with a teenager I have to get past the fact that the kid has noticed that the fear mongers were lying to them, past the fact that they know adults who casually use drugs and alcohol who don't have any problems, through to the "some do, some don't, the challenge is being able to see your own behavior in the larger context". And seeing that in ourselves is hard. Really hard.
And maybe so far I've just lucked out, that the kids I've seen grow out of these phases had the right genetics or the right other parenting or were just lucky. I won't claim omniscience, and I've not had the parenting experience, just the "'adult' they could talk to" experience.
But a symptom is just that, obsession can take many forms, discerning fantasy from reality, short term payoff from long-term impacts, is the real thing that needs to be addressed, and targeting one particular focus won't really help the underlying behavior and psychological needs.
I see a lot of people are suggesting that you mention the difficulties of merging external code changes into your own custom code base, but one thing I don't see emphasized enough in this thread is some way to communicate that given that there's already a lot of value out there, the value that the code can build on top of your changes may be worth giving back for.
Yes, you've got a (perceived) competitive advantage by hiding stuff away, but maybe you can quantify how much of an advantage that really is (I'd guess a few months worth), and propose that after that time patches get sent back upstream.
Or point out that other people have built some amazing things (I mean, you're using them, after all), and that if you have patches of general interest then they'd be able to build those amazing things on top of your patches of general interest.
I'm a coder too, I often don't understand how the pointy haired ones think either, but if you can start with something that isn't a bug fix for which you can quantify the competitive advantage (measured in months), get them to release that back into the code, and then demonstrate that people were building on top of that feature and giving that back to the code, then I think you've got a good start on putting justifiable dollar amounts on offering patches back to the community.
And once you've got dollar amounts, you're half-way to a business case.
Or maybe you'll discover that, in fact, your competitors just gobble up your fixes and don't give back anything themselves. I honestly don't know the answer to that one, but I think focusing on one feature and change that you can put direct quantifiable values to will give you and your management that answer.
Steve Ciarcia did a system back in the '80s in Byte magazine that I remember primarily because I was reading through it and thought "why's he using batteries and doing so much work to isolate this side of the board from the other?", and then realized the possible problems that could stem from power supply failure or getting RS-232 voltages on to the probe side of the board. But whenever I go back to those old circuits I'm shocked by the complexity of the designs, mostly because we now have a much better array of integrated circuits and complete devices.
I've looked at the OpenEEG circuit a bit, and while my hardware experience is limited to building things like stepper motor drivers I've considered building it and hooking it up to myself. If you have trouble with the analog side of the board you might try looking around in the old-school guitarists in your area; I've found a number of guys who played back in the '70s who got really good at analog electronics and noise shielding because they got into building their own pre-amps.
And as others in this thread and elsewhere have said, once you build the hardware you've done the easy parts. You're looking for fairly small low frequency signals in a world full of very big low frequency signals. So put a value on your time and know that a lot of what you'll be doing is signal processing on a bigger CPU, not just using a microcontroller to feed small measurements to that big CPU.
I loathe CAPTCHA, although I may end up implementing it on my system. I could also be convinced that a "which of these N pictures are kittens?" test might work.
I run a small old-school weblog on my own content management system. Middling PageRank (6 or so), a couple of hundred readers. I just had the spambots discover my Wiki, but in the process of cleaning up that mess I was shocked and amazed by the emergent behavior I'm seeing in spambots. Every form on my site that could get random info plugged into it, including search fields and new user account information; I'm going to have to make new user accounts far less easy to get. All of a sudden I'd ballooned from under a thousand registered users to forty-five hundred.
I don't like verified email accounts, and I think those are going to get attacked fairly soon too, but some sort of way to more strongly tie an identifier to an actual human has to fit into the mix.
One of the things I'm excited about is the notion of cross-site identifiers, like OpenID, and distributed reputation. Something that lets my site collaborate with other sites and say "I trust this URL". Users will still have to jump through the "are you a human" test, but will only have to do so once within the confines of a trust network.
As others have noted, this is something crying out for a social solution, not a technological one, but I'll indulge the "build your own" technological fetish for a moment.
Monitoring for falls uses off-the-shelf accelerometers. Another poster in this thread mentioned a BlueTooth enabled heart monitor, of which there appear to be several. The hard bit is notification.
Take a look at the Telit GM682 for the cell phone portion of your control. You can get 'em in quantity one from Spark Fun, and probably other places. It's basically a cell phone with a serial port that takes AT style commands, and is great for mobile hacking applications. After that it's just a microcontroller or a Gumstix depending on where your power consumption, weight, and processing power curves meet.
Given my experiences with cell phone coverage and reliability, I'd have your actual dead-man switch on your server somewhere, and have it trigger if it didn't get an "alive" signal from the device you carry every so often, because it sounds like you'd far rather trigger false positives than have a false negative.
Agreed. Not only are the the electric scooters that follow the standard scooter design foldable, lighter, and much cheaper, when the batteries run down they're still usable as a conventional scooter.
When the batteries on the Segway run down you've got a 70 lb brick.
I just read Code Name Ginger, which doesn't really ever throw the hard punches, but as I read the book I wondered two things:
1. What was the honest reaction of all the guys hired in total secrecy when the discovered what the project was? During the interview process, nobody will tell you what it is. So you move yourself and your family out to New Hampshire, where you're pretty much committed to the job 'cause Kamen's company is the only high tech employer around, and you discover you're working on a scooter. The pay is okay, but, really, was the culture such that you could then say "what are you guys thinking and how do we turn this into a real product?", or are you then stuck building out someone else's vision?
2. How could they miss that the people they showed it to who thought it was cool were all people with obscene amounts of disposable income? Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and John Doerr get together to look at the project, and even in a crowd with those kinds of financial resources one out of three calls "bullshit". Kinda. Surely even with Kamen's pathological secrecy complex there was someone else outside the company they could have found for some honest reaction.
I'm also shocked and amazed at the "it's better to build a manufacturing process from scratch than show anyone else our product" mindset. If you think that you've got one great idea, you're deluding yourself. If, on the other hand, you think you can continually out-innovate and don't need to constantly remind yourself of the novelty of your one great idea by keeping it secret, then you've got a chance in the marketplace.
Unfortunately, there's so much money in the front end of this process that there's no way they can let anyone else take the patented bits and run with it, the royalties the investors will expect are going to be far too high for anyone else to take a derivative product to market, so while there are some interesting things that I can foresee coming out of balancing on two wheels, it's only going to be sometime after the patents run out that we actually see interesting products.
I used to inline skate around Raccoon Mountain. The first time I ever got my brake smoking was a descent on that loop...
But I digress. Just wanted to say that Raccoon Mountain isn't unique, there are quite a few pumped storage facilities around the world. A quick search turns up Blenheim-Gilboa in the Catskills, Muddy Run in Pennsylvania, Bear Swamp in Massachusetts, Alta Mesa in Southern California... Lots and lots.
I built a jig to hold my D60 with a macro lens mounted and a slide at a distance that let me get full coverage. Run with the lens open pretty wide, use my light box as a fairly even light source (blurred out by the shallow depth of field of a wide open macro lens) and it's been a fantastic scanner.
I should build a slide feeder, but even as it is, with a couple of rails built out of styrene that I have to manually drop a slide into, I've been through hundreds of slides by just hanging out a few evenings, and it takes a heck of a lot longer to annotate and organize the results than it does to shoot 'em in the first place.
I haven't gotten to scanning negatives yet, but with the right filter I can correct the color cast, and then just reverse the image and do final color balance as a bulk process (I may shoot those as RAW). So building a little styrene jig that'll hold a negative flat and let me adjust it one frame at a time is on the task list.
Yeah, it may not be at the full resolution of modern Velvia with a prime lens on a tripod, but a few people who care now have prints of 60(!) year old images that otherwise would still be moldering in a cardboard box in the top of a closet somewhere.