Here's my theory: the techs there aren't against TPB and they know they can do a crappy job of blocking but still look like they were following orders. Everyone wins (except those who can't figure out how to use OpenDNS).
The whiz-bang effects on a Mac actually serve a purpose. For example, I use Exposé every minute two. The animation makes it obvious how the windowing system is rearranging your windows, so you know what happened. Without that it would be a joltingly confusing experience. Another example - the window minimize animation, while a little excessive, moves quickly and makes it very clear where your window went when you minimize it.
I can't speak for the MS ripoff of these features but I imagine they are not nearly as completely thought out.
I wonder if that memory requirement is only for compiling the library? 512MB of heap memory as a minimum requirement at runtime is completely absurd - what's the point of performance gains from better threading when the user's machine is swapping like mad?
The easy way to answer this question is to compile and run a sample application I suppose...
There is indeed a playable version of this game, hidden in the nooks and crannies of the Internet, and playable via emulator. Desert Bus is exactly as described. You actually have to sit there and control the bus instead of just holding down the accelerator key and leaving, because it has a steering alignment problem. It is comedic genius.
Here's a hint: rich people willing to spend absurd amounts of money to extend their lives by 6 months fund most of medical research. I do research at a medical school, and I've never heard of this. In the USA, the NIH funds most basic research, and drug companies pay for developing drugs. Rich people do contribute something, but not nearly as much as you imply.
However, I don't get the obsession with texting that some teenagers have. Why text when you can talk? It's a heck of a lot easier, and texting is a literal pain to (I don't get how someone can type 200 texts a day and not have their fingers fall off). Would you rather they disturb you with loud chatter? Texting is quiet.
Texting is also a lot like email. It doesn't require that the other person stop whatever they are doing to receive the message. Unlike voicemail, messages can be parsed by the recipient faster than realtime. Texting can be done in areas with low signal levels where calls would be garbled or dropped. And you can exchange small pieces of information with multiple people much more easily than with voice.
Texting is IMHO incredibly overpriced for the bandwidth it provides, but apparently the market will bear it because of its advantages for certain communication needs...so I don't get the obsession some people have with bashing texting over talking. Welcome to the 21st century;)
I don't think they would agree with those implications. Circumstances would depend though - did you write the software as part of your role as an employee? Were you paid to do it? If not - if you did it in your free time - then it's absolutely yours, and you effectively just gave them a free license. But that's a different story than the original thread, which was the notion that student employees can routinely keep the rights to things that they do in their capacity as institutional employees, which they generally can't.
The question hinges on this: 1) did they pay you to do the work? and 2) did you use their resources to do it (computers they probably don't care). If the answer to either is 'yes', you probably don't own it. I'm a scientist, and I definitely couldn't patent my work I accomplished as a grad student on my own and keep the rights. Where I was, I'm pretty sure that applied to software too.
Note in the GPL discussion, you are definitely the author, but to GPL it you have to also have the rights to it. This could be because they have no claim (you did it outside your role with the school), or because they give up their claim.
I wasn't paid to do this, though I did use the school's radio station, which includes some non-computer elements, to develop and test it. Because the school provides a broadcast to the community at large as a service, one might argue that supporting that effort is a "role with the school." Despite this, the lawyer I spoke to didn't imply that the school had any claim whatsoever to what I wrote, which is what I thought was notable.
Also as an undergrad, I wrote software as part of paid research assistant positions, and I don't think there is any doubt that the school owns that. I'm a grad student now, and I'm under no delusions that anything I write as part of my graduate research isn't owned by my current institution. (Though they have a surprisingly liberal profit-sharing agreement, which is probably because commercialization doesn't happen that often here.)
It's a system designed to run a radio station when nobody is there, and it wasn't coursework.
I think you may have missed the point of my post. The idea that the lawyer said I could apply the GPL to it implies that I was legally the author, which means that I could also have commercialized it, and the school would have little recourse (IANAL though).
When I was an undergrad, I wrote an app using school-owned computers for the internal use of the campus radio station. I then wanted to GPL it, so I called the university's legal office. The lawyer I spoke to seemed to be confused about why I was even calling her, because of course I'm allowed to do what I want with it. Probably things are different there for grad students though.
To echo the comments of the Penny Arcade artists (http://www.penny-arcade.com/2005/10/19):
Jack Thompson, in my opinion, is an idiot who does a lot to hurt his own cause. If he gets silenced by being disbarred, it may actually be a net negative for the video game playing public, because he might be replaced by someone who is actually good at convincing people that video games are somehow the root cause of school killings.
It's not as simple as an mp3 player. For example what radio technologies will the phone support? GSM, CDMA, WCDMA, HSDPA... That part is relatively easy. They buy a GSM or CDMA (or whatever) chip from somebody like Qualcomm and plug it into their phone design.
With smart phones one of most important thing for me is 3rd party apps. A smart phone is not much of use if there are no apps for it. Other manufacturers already have operating system that they have been using for a long time and there are a lot apps for them. Maybe Apple will have midp support, which is OK, but not quite like running native applications. If their computers are any guide, it's a reasonable guess that Apple will provide all the relevant software with their smartphone to cover 90% of use cases: Web, email, PIM, etc., so most people won't need clunky and slow J2ME software from a 3rd party. It would be nice if J2ME support was included, because I really like the Google Maps application, and I don't want to migrate away from Gmail (there's a nifty J2ME app) in favor of.Mac or POP/IMAP for email.
or let Mac users run our app from Parallels... Not this Mac user. I bought a Mac because I like the way a Mac works. To use your app, I'd have buy a copy of Windows and a copy of Parallels, and then run them - and some people think the Java VM is bloated! And I'd have to deal with the Windows app not being well integrated with the rest of the system. The only way this will work is if there is no serious competition in your market segment.
Most of the other complaints also apply to the iPod - works only with supplied software (theoretically, both players have workarounds), not compatible with other on-line stores, DRM, yada yada yada.
iTunes is actually good software. Apple's music store is well-implemented. DRM is evil, but Apple does a pretty good job hiding it from you. So most people don't need or want alternatives to the Apple stuff.
In the reviewer's opinion, the MS software, music store, and DRM issues are so bad that the ability to use alternatives would be a real selling point. At the end of the day, why would anyone spend $300 on a Zune when they could spend the same $300 on a iPod and feel like they are getting a vastly superior experience on their Windows box?
"This Christmas I have decided to give all of my friends and relatives our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ from the church I go to. In addition, I plan to help them disavow their previous faith, if any, read the Bible, and then introduce them to living as a Christian for their everyday tasks. What sort of post-conversion changes should be made to Christianity to make it easy for everyday people to use? What extra faith-based initiatives should be installed? Should I stick with the default denomination, or would Southern Baptist be a better choice? Is there anything else that should be done to maximize the utility of their lives, as well as make their first experience with Jesus a great one?"
Are you sure your all your friends and relatives actually want Linux, terrific though it may be, rather than having it forced down their throats?
How does MythTV's Commercial Detection work? Surprisingly well. Ever wonder how it does such a good job of identifying commercials?
There are three key indicators that MythTV uses from recorded content to identify commercials.
A blank frame is many times sandwiched in-between the television show and the commercials. The most simple form of detecting commercials is to search for blank frames in the video feed. The problem with this is that it can be very misleading. There can be a blank frame anywhere. Just because there is a blank frame, doesn't mean it's a commercial break. You could easily end up with commercials marked as part of the show and parts of the show marked as commercial.
WE HAVE LOW, LOW PRICES! COME ON DOWN TO CRAZY TED'S USED CARS AND GET THE DEAL OF A CENTURY!
Scene transitions are another indicator. A scene transition is a cut between one video of something and a video of something else. A simple example would be in a newscast where someone is being interviewed. While the anchor is asking the question, you may see both the anchor and the person being interviewed. When the person being interviewed starts to answer the question, the scene "cuts" to a close-up of the face of the person answering the question. In regards to commercials, there is a scene transition "cut" between each commercial. Each commercial usually is unrelated to the next. The last frame of one commercial would be totally different from the first frame of the next. Looking for patterns in scene transitions is one way to identify commercials. Five groups of 30 second scenes all grouped together may be a good indication of a block of commercials. This method works better than the blank frame method, but also isn't foolproof. There's no reason scene changes in a show might not mimic commercials, and vis-versa.
PUNCH THE MONKEY!
The third indicator of commercials that MythTV uses I find rather ironic. Bugs, also referred to as DOGS (Digital On-Screen Graphics), or Watermarks. A Bug is that little TV station logo in usually the bottom right corner of your screen during a TV show. I find this ironic because one of the reasons or it being there is to build channel awareness in the world of digital video recorders like MythTV. Since DVR users usually find shows by name rather than by channel, they are less concerned with which station a show is on than are other viewers. MythTV watches for these things. Because the digital watermarks are generally not shown during commercials, identifying one and then watching for it is a good indication of when a commercial break starts or stops. While much more complicated to implement than watching for the blank frame or screen transition, in theory it's probably the most effective in some circumstances. Because in practice they are hard to identify on some stations, the actual implementation can be error prone.
BEEF: IT'S WHAT'S FOR DINNER.
MythTV looks for all three of these identifiers to locate commercials. It breaks each show up into scenes, and then applys a series of score for the scene based on looking at all three factors in relation to one another, especially taking timing and patterns into account. Based on the final score of a scene, it's either (essentially) dropped into the show bucket or the commercial bucket. It's not a black/white type thing. Because of the scoring, there are a whole range of grays in the middle. You end up with scenes that looks "more" like commercials or "more" like show content, and they are then flagged as such.
I've been quite impressed at the quality of the commercial flagger that MythTV has implemented. In my experience, the system does an excellent job.
Commercial flagging is set globally in:
Utilties/Setup -> Setup -> TV Settings-> General
Do you have ideas or talent that can help increase the quality of this great tool? Check out and contribute to the MythTV commercial flagging developers' wiki.
There was a time when information was distributed with books. Students would read them and learn... Too much to ask?
Been anywhere near a university science department in the past several years? As a PhD student in computational biology, I obtain the vast majority of my information from the Internet. Books are nice but don't contain the latest information. I'm taking a class at the moment that doesn't even have a textbook - it's taught entirely from lecture notes and relevant papers. PubMed is absolutely indispensable, as is unfettered access to the websites of other research groups in my particular subfield.
(You're an obvious troll but I could imagine otherwise reasonable people saying something like that, hence my response.)
# Keep only one credit card, one that has no annual fee and as low interest rate as possible. # Never use it, unless everything below fails and what you are buying is an absolute necessity like food. Except if you are 18 and need to establish some credit, then you can allow yourself to charge whatever you know you can pay on the next bill. # Buy everything except cars, homes, and educations with cash.
While most of your post is solid, this part is not good advice. When it comes time to get that loan for the car, home, or education, you want a long-standing positive credit history to get a low interest rate. Credit cards are the way to create one.
Use a credit card for everything but treat it like a debit card and never carry a balance. This way you can collect points/miles, establish and maintain a credit rating, not have to carry wads of easily lost or stolen cash around, and enjoy side benefits such as the ability to do a chargeback on a fraudulent merchant.
According to Trolltech's site, this phone uses the BCM2121 chip, which doesn't seem to support EDGE, limiting its users to significantly slower plain GPRS.
Simply run a hash on the email you want to send to, and skip it if it matches a hash in the registry.
Don't be ridiculous. All the spammer needs to do is check his/her entire database and save all addresses that cause a hash match. Sounds like 10 lines of Perl and an hour or two on a single PC.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's my theory: the techs there aren't against TPB and they know they can do a crappy job of blocking but still look like they were following orders. Everyone wins (except those who can't figure out how to use OpenDNS).
The whiz-bang effects on a Mac actually serve a purpose. For example, I use Exposé every minute two. The animation makes it obvious how the windowing system is rearranging your windows, so you know what happened. Without that it would be a joltingly confusing experience. Another example - the window minimize animation, while a little excessive, moves quickly and makes it very clear where your window went when you minimize it.
I can't speak for the MS ripoff of these features but I imagine they are not nearly as completely thought out.
In one case, things are getting worse, and in the other, things are getting better. The former is damned while the latter is lauded. Simple.
I wonder if that memory requirement is only for compiling the library? 512MB of heap memory as a minimum requirement at runtime is completely absurd - what's the point of performance gains from better threading when the user's machine is swapping like mad?
The easy way to answer this question is to compile and run a sample application I suppose...
There is indeed a playable version of this game, hidden in the nooks and crannies of the Internet, and playable via emulator. Desert Bus is exactly as described. You actually have to sit there and control the bus instead of just holding down the accelerator key and leaving, because it has a steering alignment problem. It is comedic genius.
Texting is also a lot like email. It doesn't require that the other person stop whatever they are doing to receive the message. Unlike voicemail, messages can be parsed by the recipient faster than realtime. Texting can be done in areas with low signal levels where calls would be garbled or dropped. And you can exchange small pieces of information with multiple people much more easily than with voice.
Texting is IMHO incredibly overpriced for the bandwidth it provides, but apparently the market will bear it because of its advantages for certain communication needs...so I don't get the obsession some people have with bashing texting over talking. Welcome to the 21st century
I don't think they would agree with those implications. Circumstances would depend though - did you write the software as part of your role as an employee? Were you paid to do it? If not - if you did it in your free time - then it's absolutely yours, and you effectively just gave them a free license. But that's a different story than the original thread, which was the notion that student employees can routinely keep the rights to things that they do in their capacity as institutional employees, which they generally can't.
The question hinges on this: 1) did they pay you to do the work? and 2) did you use their resources to do it (computers they probably don't care). If the answer to either is 'yes', you probably don't own it. I'm a scientist, and I definitely couldn't patent my work I accomplished as a grad student on my own and keep the rights. Where I was, I'm pretty sure that applied to software too.
Note in the GPL discussion, you are definitely the author, but to GPL it you have to also have the rights to it. This could be because they have no claim (you did it outside your role with the school), or because they give up their claim.
I wasn't paid to do this, though I did use the school's radio station, which includes some non-computer elements, to develop and test it. Because the school provides a broadcast to the community at large as a service, one might argue that supporting that effort is a "role with the school." Despite this, the lawyer I spoke to didn't imply that the school had any claim whatsoever to what I wrote, which is what I thought was notable.Also as an undergrad, I wrote software as part of paid research assistant positions, and I don't think there is any doubt that the school owns that. I'm a grad student now, and I'm under no delusions that anything I write as part of my graduate research isn't owned by my current institution. (Though they have a surprisingly liberal profit-sharing agreement, which is probably because commercialization doesn't happen that often here.)
It's a system designed to run a radio station when nobody is there, and it wasn't coursework.
I think you may have missed the point of my post. The idea that the lawyer said I could apply the GPL to it implies that I was legally the author, which means that I could also have commercialized it, and the school would have little recourse (IANAL though).
When I was an undergrad, I wrote an app using school-owned computers for the internal use of the campus radio station. I then wanted to GPL it, so I called the university's legal office. The lawyer I spoke to seemed to be confused about why I was even calling her, because of course I'm allowed to do what I want with it. Probably things are different there for grad students though.
...does it run Windows? You were joking, but the device apparently actually can run Windows.To echo the comments of the Penny Arcade artists (http://www.penny-arcade.com/2005/10/19):
Jack Thompson, in my opinion, is an idiot who does a lot to hurt his own cause. If he gets silenced by being disbarred, it may actually be a net negative for the video game playing public, because he might be replaced by someone who is actually good at convincing people that video games are somehow the root cause of school killings.
Most of the other complaints also apply to the iPod - works only with supplied software (theoretically, both players have workarounds), not compatible with other on-line stores, DRM, yada yada yada.
iTunes is actually good software. Apple's music store is well-implemented. DRM is evil, but Apple does a pretty good job hiding it from you. So most people don't need or want alternatives to the Apple stuff.
In the reviewer's opinion, the MS software, music store, and DRM issues are so bad that the ability to use alternatives would be a real selling point. At the end of the day, why would anyone spend $300 on a Zune when they could spend the same $300 on a iPod and feel like they are getting a vastly superior experience on their Windows box?
It's an unlocked GSM phone, so it should work with many carriers in many countries. What carriers exclude handsets by model number?
"This Christmas I have decided to give all of my friends and relatives our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ from the church I go to. In addition, I plan to help them disavow their previous faith, if any, read the Bible, and then introduce them to living as a Christian for their everyday tasks. What sort of post-conversion changes should be made to Christianity to make it easy for everyday people to use? What extra faith-based initiatives should be installed? Should I stick with the default denomination, or would Southern Baptist be a better choice? Is there anything else that should be done to maximize the utility of their lives, as well as make their first experience with Jesus a great one?"
Are you sure your all your friends and relatives actually want Linux, terrific though it may be, rather than having it forced down their throats?
How does MythTV's Commercial Detection work? Surprisingly well. Ever wonder how it does such a good job of identifying commercials?
There are three key indicators that MythTV uses from recorded content to identify commercials.
A blank frame is many times sandwiched in-between the television show and the commercials. The most simple form of detecting commercials is to search for blank frames in the video feed. The problem with this is that it can be very misleading. There can be a blank frame anywhere. Just because there is a blank frame, doesn't mean it's a commercial break. You could easily end up with commercials marked as part of the show and parts of the show marked as commercial.
WE HAVE LOW, LOW PRICES! COME ON DOWN TO CRAZY TED'S USED CARS AND GET THE DEAL OF A CENTURY!
Scene transitions are another indicator. A scene transition is a cut between one video of something and a video of something else. A simple example would be in a newscast where someone is being interviewed. While the anchor is asking the question, you may see both the anchor and the person being interviewed. When the person being interviewed starts to answer the question, the scene "cuts" to a close-up of the face of the person answering the question. In regards to commercials, there is a scene transition "cut" between each commercial. Each commercial usually is unrelated to the next. The last frame of one commercial would be totally different from the first frame of the next. Looking for patterns in scene transitions is one way to identify commercials. Five groups of 30 second scenes all grouped together may be a good indication of a block of commercials. This method works better than the blank frame method, but also isn't foolproof. There's no reason scene changes in a show might not mimic commercials, and vis-versa.
PUNCH THE MONKEY!
The third indicator of commercials that MythTV uses I find rather ironic. Bugs, also referred to as DOGS (Digital On-Screen Graphics), or Watermarks. A Bug is that little TV station logo in usually the bottom right corner of your screen during a TV show. I find this ironic because one of the reasons or it being there is to build channel awareness in the world of digital video recorders like MythTV. Since DVR users usually find shows by name rather than by channel, they are less concerned with which station a show is on than are other viewers. MythTV watches for these things. Because the digital watermarks are generally not shown during commercials, identifying one and then watching for it is a good indication of when a commercial break starts or stops. While much more complicated to implement than watching for the blank frame or screen transition, in theory it's probably the most effective in some circumstances. Because in practice they are hard to identify on some stations, the actual implementation can be error prone.
BEEF: IT'S WHAT'S FOR DINNER.
MythTV looks for all three of these identifiers to locate commercials. It breaks each show up into scenes, and then applys a series of score for the scene based on looking at all three factors in relation to one another, especially taking timing and patterns into account. Based on the final score of a scene, it's either (essentially) dropped into the show bucket or the commercial bucket. It's not a black/white type thing. Because of the scoring, there are a whole range of grays in the middle. You end up with scenes that looks "more" like commercials or "more" like show content, and they are then flagged as such.
I've been quite impressed at the quality of the commercial flagger that MythTV has implemented. In my experience, the system does an excellent job.
Commercial flagging is set globally in:
Utilties/Setup -> Setup -> TV Settings-> General
Do you have ideas or talent that can help increase the quality of this great tool? Check out and contribute to the MythTV commercial flagging developers' wiki.
Been anywhere near a university science department in the past several years? As a PhD student in computational biology, I obtain the vast majority of my information from the Internet. Books are nice but don't contain the latest information. I'm taking a class at the moment that doesn't even have a textbook - it's taught entirely from lecture notes and relevant papers. PubMed is absolutely indispensable, as is unfettered access to the websites of other research groups in my particular subfield.
(You're an obvious troll but I could imagine otherwise reasonable people saying something like that, hence my response.)
Terrific post - if I had mod points they would be yours!
# Keep only one credit card, one that has no annual fee and as low interest rate as possible.
# Never use it, unless everything below fails and what you are buying is an absolute necessity like food. Except if you are 18 and need to establish some credit, then you can allow yourself to charge whatever you know you can pay on the next bill.
# Buy everything except cars, homes, and educations with cash.
While most of your post is solid, this part is not good advice. When it comes time to get that loan for the car, home, or education, you want a long-standing positive credit history to get a low interest rate. Credit cards are the way to create one.
Use a credit card for everything but treat it like a debit card and never carry a balance. This way you can collect points/miles, establish and maintain a credit rating, not have to carry wads of easily lost or stolen cash around, and enjoy side benefits such as the ability to do a chargeback on a fraudulent merchant.
According to Trolltech's site, this phone uses the BCM2121 chip, which doesn't seem to support EDGE, limiting its users to significantly slower plain GPRS.
Simply run a hash on the email you want to send to, and skip it if it matches a hash in the registry.
Don't be ridiculous. All the spammer needs to do is check his/her entire database and save all addresses that cause a hash match. Sounds like 10 lines of Perl and an hour or two on a single PC.
By my calculations that means that congressmen can be bought for less than $400K. My, my, my what an insanely great ROI.
If that's all it costs, why hasn't the Slashdot/EFF/etc crowd bought itself a congresscritter or two? Honestly, that isn't a lot of money.
You can download 3 of the mixes from the game from the official site: http://www.ddrmariomix.com/ (warning: Flash monstrosity)