Project Gutenberg collects sheet music. Unfortunately they don't have much available yet, and little of it is brass music. The number of renaissance trumpet solo pieces is essentially nil, sorry about that.:-)
I've had some luck hunting MIDI files on the net and cleaning them up for printing in Sibelius or Finale. Unfortunately it requires a lot of work as most songs must be rearranged to suit the ensemble. I've done this mostly on vocal music (renaissance mixed quartet) and classic jazz. The trick is to separate the relevant MIDI tracks, adjust the notes to the nearest 1/8th or 1/16th (most apps have tools for this), extract the melody and chorus parts, and tie them all together in a new file.
The system is meant to protect non-cheating students. That means that if you don't cheat, you have no reason to complain. By reverse-perverse logic, you're implicitly owning up you have an interest in cheating by raising issues about Turnitin.com.
I don't think the students are particularly concerned about IP rights. What they object to is that Turnitin.com makes a profit by using students' intellectual property against the students.
One can argue that, like Google, Turnitin.com only indexes a search database. The problem here is that Turnitin.com allows (without your consent) a select user group to find information that you haven't intended for distribution. Google on the other hand *has* your consent (i.e. robots.txt) and lets the whole world find information that *you* have put on public display.
All estimation methods are based on reducing the uncertainty, by splitting the problem in smaller pieces and getting a better understanding of each individual piece.
Problems can however be sliced in many ways. People commonly split the problem in smaller pieces using a work breakdown structure (WBS) that is either deliverable-centric or activity-centric or both. But you can also split the estimation method itself into an estimate and a calculation.
Let's say that your developers can do on average 15 lines of code per hour and that your programming language of choice needs 30 code lines per function point. You use one of the many available function point methods to estimate the work for feature X to 35 function points. Thus an average developer will require 70 man work hours to implement feature X. An experienced developer will need less time, while a trainee will need vastly more and also some handholding. This method requires that you find out the metrics for your company.
Also remember that your estimate is only an estimate, and you can adjust the quality i.e. certainty of the estimate. Sometimes a quick educated guess is sufficient, like when Mr. Sales Guy wonders whether feature X is large enough to affect the price of a project. Other times you must spend hours or days on analysing the problem from various viewpoints, e.g. when scoping and pricing a complete customer project.
You're carrying around a tiny computer with your entire music collection stored on it, but you need to rely on a second computer to manage it? This makes no sense to me. Where's the command, back at home? [...] The iPod is a result of amazing marketing. People ask for it by name, and have no idea what it will or won't do for them. Without the ability to queue songs, like a jukebox, the huge capacity makes no sense to me.
To answer your implicit question, yes, the iPod contains the ability to create on-the-go playlists. I don't know if it updates on the fly, though.
There's a certain similarity between the iPod and the Palm Pilot. Before, there were devices attempting to contain all your data and provide full control of it in an extremely cramped form factor. Then suddenly there appears on the market this device which is primarily an offline viewer with quite simplistic data synchronization and lacking justabout any kind of wholesale data management. It turns out to be just the thing people want, sparking the [INSERT NAME HERE] revolution with tremendous hype and becoming wildly successful.
In both cases, the users give up control over the details ("tactics"), and gain command over the whole data set ("strategy")... if you don't have to mind the trees, you'll find you are free to watch the forest.
The iPod is now in the spot where Palm was in 1999. It's been on the market for 3-4 years and has a huge market share. Technology- and feature-wise, it still provides less than the competition. Synchronization- and data-management-wise, it's still miles ahead of the competition.
In contrast to the floundering Palm Inc., Apple and the iPod are here to stay for a while. It took six or seven years for the Palm competitors to catch up, and they only managed to because Palm did not have a sense of direction. The key elements for Apple is Steve Jobs providing undisputed leadership and the iTunes Music Store providing the missing link in the value chain. That is, Apple knows where they are headed and they have a complete solution. Of the competitors, only Sony is (was!) in a position to do the same and they just managed to lose an immense amount of brand value with the DRM CD thing.
I believe that, when people buy an iPod, they get an "offline music listening solution" that fulfills their needs quite exactly. It doesn't really matter that the iPod is an underpowered and feature-lacking device or iTunes a draconian control-grabbing application, as long as the combination rocks. The hype is unfortunately directed towards the iPod device instead of the complete solution.
Making it so that the iPod will ONLY play music loaded onto it via iTunes frustrates me and makes me feel restricted, like they want me to ONLY use it the way they want me to.
You might have missed the point of the iPod. Remember that computers are great at handling large amounts of tiny pieces of information, and great at performing rule-based actions. Managing your MP3 player manually is like editing your web site using a text editor. Sure, you have 100% control. Sure, your HTML looks exactly like you want it to. But it just doesn't scale. Have more than N pages, you need a content management system. iTunes is your content management system for music. Stop micromanaging, give up control, gain command.
Anyway I read that story and it didn't appear to me that [Bill Gates] was trying to solve it by memorization, but rather that after an hour, seeing hundreds of rolls, he remembered many of them, which isn't all that surprising. What I got out of the story, is that he persistently kept at the problem trying many different ideas until he finally got it, even after everyone else in the group had solved it or quit.
Ah... this explains a lot about Microsoft. Persistently keep at the problem, trying different ideas until you finally get it... after hundreds of tries, you might see the pattern. Problem is, this method is not "where do you want to go today?", but rather "where did you want to go yesterday?".
Apple's method, incidentally, is "here's where you want to go tomorrow, in style". Ha!:-)
This is probably the most hypocritical and narrow-minded "Ask Slashdot" thing I've read. Ever. Of all the issues related to the use of gasoline in America, we must now discuss how to keep the school buses going.
- What about the gas price in other countries? Gas prices in the US are reaching, what, over half the global average? Get some perspective! Over where I live, the price of gas is so high that we can't afford dedicated school buses. The kids typically walk or bike to school. Of course, we have more and smaller schools, where teachers and students actually know each other by name, so there are fewer drug abusers and petty criminals and neighbourhoods are pretty safe.
- What about meddling in the middle-east? How many wars do you need to start in order to protect the oil supply? Each time you fill up your car, you can say to yourself: "Here goes 1/100 of our war casualties. Thanks, dude... whoever you were!"
- And what about the environment issues? The US alone causes so much pollution it's not even funny. Bush refuses to sign the Kyoto agreement, the government rewrites scientific reports to downplay issues... I don't know, this is like peeing in the swimming pool and then maintaining that it doesn't smell and even if it does it's not related to us peeing in it.
Nope, Apple got it right: it's a question about ergonomics. The most popular command-key shortcuts (Cmd-Z, X, C, V, A, S, F, Q, W) are situated around the lower left of the keyboard, i.e. where the command key is on a Mac keyboard. You can use your thumb to hit the command-key, which is a clear ergonomic advantage.
In this particular case, the ctrl key is way off in the corner of the keyboard, so you must strain your thumb to death or use your (comparatively weak) pinkie. Duh.
I've had a Leatherman Micra on my keychain for almost 5 years now. It's the best thing I have on this keychain next to the keys. [...] Get one of those and one of those quick release dual keyrings, remove the one ring and attach the Micra (or a Juice if you want pliers. [...] Right now, I got a Micra and a Mag-Lite Solitare flashlight on my keyring.
I second this. I have had a similar combination for slightly over four years and can only recommend it. The Micra's scissors are strong and much more useful than pliers, and the quick-release keyring is just great.
I went for a Photon MicroLight LED flashlight which is small enough but somewhat lacking in power. I'd like to change it for something brighter and more durable, but I use it so infrequently that it's not worth it.
If a privacy-minded user deposits $20 to get an anonymous library card, she can check out The Terror State without identifying herself. Her account balance is temporarily reduced by $15, and when the library checks the CD back in (in good condition), her balance is restored to its original value.
Borrowing The Terror State from your local library: $20
Parking your car anywhere: $50
Fast lane at the airport, bypassing extra security checks: $100k
Bypassing all important security checks: $10m
Bypassing all security checks and paying for it with American oil money: priceless.
I'm working at a Canadian telecom research lab. They are looking into the creation of tools that would facilitate the development of mobile applications. Symbian OS seems to be the lead target platform candidate. There is however a small crowd that is pushing for Microsoft stuff (Pocket PC and Smartphone). How do other systems (Linux and PalmOS) stack up? What would the Slashdot community advise by way of a choice of an operating system for mobile?
Your question does not make any sense. Choose whatever your end users are using. If you don't know that, ask them. Do some market research.
There are zillions of toolkits that "facilitate development of mobile applications". Many of these are cross-platform, covering the OS with a badly integrated and resource-intensive layer (think J2ME/MIDP) which end up providing a crappy end user experience.
Others aim at providing utility libraries for a single platform, such as cryptography, XML, synchronization or networking utilities. Since OS vendors continuously improve their platforms, these 3rd-party toolkits have a really short lifetime. Building single-platform development tools also requires deep knowledge of the target platform; usually you acquire the deep knowledge FIRST and THEN choose the platform.
Finally, assuming that you DO have deep knowledge of all available platforms, you should already know what platform to choose. No need to Ask SlashDot.
Which is the better machine? Which one is quicker? Even if I wanted to do video editing (which I don't, but who knows, one day I might).
Good question. Buy the Dell, install Linux on it and stick it on an Ethernet cable somewhere out of earshot. Then buy a Mac mini and use that for web surfing, reading mail, development, whatever. For the price of one Apple G5, you get one server where an overloaded Tomcat won't disturb your workflow, and one workstation capable of video editing.
What do you mean by the right price? Maybe I want the hardware only, and am willing to pay $400 for that, instead of $500 for both. But I don't have that option from Apple
What do you mean by "maybe I want the hardware only"?
Isn't it the best kept secret of the IT industry that Apple software just absolutely rocks, and you would have to pay $500 or more to get even close to the same functionality that now comes bundled with the Mac mini? In which case the nifty hardware that you so highly covet would be, essentially, a free add-on to make the software run.
You spent 100usd on a 512 shuffle. You get a.8g player that plays songs randomly. Thats it. [...] Which was the better buy for "your" situation considering my n200 has shuffle mode also?
To be fair, you also get: a neckstrap, earbuds and an USB plug.
Now to the breaking news: having shuffle mode on your MP3 player is NOT the same as having the MP3 player integrate seamlessly with your PC and automatically updating itself with a randomized selection of your favourite music. This, and the bling-white-earphones-bling factor, are the two major selling points for the iPod Shuffle. They are not mentioned in the feature list, so you would have missed them. Sorry. Your loss.
Granted, the line-in-to-MP3 recording feature of the Muvo is very nifty. It means that I can rip analog music straight to the Muvo instead of digitally to my PC... erm, sorry, no, I mean that I can rip analog music anywhere, unless I left the converter cable at home... er, sorry, no, forget that one, anyway when I got the stuff ripped into the Muvo, I can just move the stuff manually to my PC and then change the MP3 tags, so I can see them on the backlit display. Yup. Can't understand why Apple hasn't incorporated that into the iPod.
However, the server's life on the Net is in your hands.
Ye-e-esss... just post the news on Slashdot, that ought to take care of the server's life on the net. Good idea!
On the other hand, it could be that the 37 different rootkits are so busy 0wnz0ring each other, that the web service just MIGHT get enough peace to run for the required 96 hours.;-)
They are just beaurocrats from head to toe. It's more important to get that piece of paper done already so they can move over to the next stuff that needs to be dealt with. They don't care what's on that paper, it just needs to get away and disappear from their sight.
Lawrence Lessig blogged a similar take on the subject.
In other words, the EU Council has just stated that form is more important than meaning, and that it is more important that the bureaucrats are able to create legislation quickly and effortlessly than the legislation being fair and correct.
This is the crappiest thing I've heard in a long while! What's next, stopping citizens from seeing official documents because it creates unnecessary expenses and only whiners ask to see them anyway? Or removing the right to vote for all citizens of the EU, because recurring elections could hamper the ability of EU politicians to make long-term plans?
He has a point. Most of the user interface stuff is done by parts of the brain that aren't doing the primary work.
That's how it should work. However, on Windows you have to spend brain processing power on solving petty UI issues. Given that the human brain can keep 7 ± 2 items in its working memory, I find it astonishing that people put up with spending the three or four topmost "slots" on solving immediate problems with the Windows user interface!
When people say Mac OS X is more "intuitive" than Windows, they really mean that the Mac requires one or possibly two slots of your precious brainpower, tops.
Tammet is creating his own language, strongly influenced by the vowel and image-rich languages of northern Europe. (He already speaks French, German, Spanish, Lithuanian, Icelandic and Esperanto.) The vocabulary of his language - "Mänti", meaning a type of tree - reflects the relationships between different things. The word "ema", for instance, translates as "mother", and "ela" is what a mother creates: "life". "Päike" is "sun", and "päive" is what the sun creates: "day". Tammet hopes to launch Mänti in academic circles later this year, his own personal exploration of the power of words and their inter-relationship.
Disregarding the misspellings, all those words are straight from a Finnish or Estonian dictionary. "Mänty" is a pine tree, "päivä" is day, "pälke" means glimmer or glint. "Emä" and "elä" are the root words of mother and life, respectively. And "tammi" (tammet) is oak.
Finnish is a weird but logical language with a lot of nuances and forms that are not present in other languages. I'm not sure what Tammet is trying to do, but he's apparently just exploring the relationships between words in Finnish. Anything else would either not make sense, or be simple plagiarism. Too bad the reporter got stuck on the words and made such a big issue of it.
Tammet's not the first one to ponder on the Finnish language. It's well known that J.R.R Tolkien got hooked on Finnish at an early age and re-used some ideas in his works.
--Bud
Re:A (compartively) new way of encoding byte-strea
on
Low Tech Gutenberg?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
...an embedded reader which does not require an external source of energy.
No no, you've got the specs wrong. The embedded reader is based on reflective technology and absolutely REQUIRES an external energy source. Best results may be achieved using a giant ball of flaming gas positioned above and behind the user's shoulder. This is actually the preferred source of energy, since giant flaming balls of gas are abundant on this world. In this case you don't have to worry so much about environmental conditions, e.g. even backscatter works fine.
If the giant ball of flaming gas is hidden behind solid objects ("gone where the sun don't shine") and/or is difficult to position (e.g. due to lack of levers and/or fixed points from which to move the Earth), you must simply rely on backscatter from other planetary objects or produce your own energy e.g. by incinerating animal fats.
Microsoft announced that they will integrate the electronic identification into the Windows Software so they can deliver more security and privacy on the internet.
So true, and yet so much marsh gas.
On one hand, it's hard to see how improving the user's authentication level would stop crackers and virus writers from breaking into Windows boxes.
On the other hand, given Microsoft's track record in internet security, it's hard to see how they could ever deliver less. Anything they do is sure to INCREASE the security level. And no, this is NOT funny.
There are basically three different ways you can go to get out of programming:
Specialist: acquire deep knowledge. Find a field you're really interested in (not easy), learn more about it (easy if you're academically inclined), and try to find related jobs to become an expert on that. Fits nicely with academic studies too. The problem is to find a field that you are really interested in and won't be hopelessly outdated in ten years. I remember a famous retired expert saying in an interview that thanks to his one hobby, he hadn't had to work a single day in his life. (Can't remember his name, though.)
Consultant: acquire wide knowledge. Try to keep ahead and pick up the basics of interesting new technologies, then learn more about the ones which seem worthwhile. Become the one your coworkers turn to when they want to know more about new technologies. Later, you can become a technology consultant, tech lead or CTO.
Managerial: per aspera ad astra. Go for project manager or group manager positions and try to climb the traditional career ladder. Problem is, programmers are not natural-born leaders and a programming-centric CV is not likely to get you a job as a manager. Besides, there are thousands of economy students with just enough tech skills competing for the same jobs.
There is no step four... no, seriously: become a plumber, motorcycle repair man, NPO secretary, journalist, gardener... anything, as long as you're freelancing, self-employed or working in a smallish company. The computer is such a generally useful appliance nowadays and there are so many people who distrust technology and computers as something incomprehensible, irrational and magical, that you will find your 1337 pr0gr4mz0r 5ki11z to be a real asset. Bug the accounting lady until you get the billing addresses for the last five years, dump them into a database and - whammo - instant CRM system. Move the inventory books into Excel, then write a macro to highlight items that, given average consumption, will be out of stock in two weeks - whammo - instant ERP system... etc etc.
he position was listed as full-time but they want me to come on as contractor because the approval is easier to get. Then, I am told they would move me to full-time.
You can approach this from a wage negotiation point-of-view. Figure out what additional expenses (taxes, insurance) you'll need to pay in order to get the same benefits as any full-time employee. Sum up your expenses using Excel. Then show them your calculations and say, I'll need X % more gross income because of this, this and this, and because the job position is less secure. Chances are they will either back off and hire you as a full-time employee, or hire you at the higher wage but then fire you when the project is done, at which point you'll have some savings to live on until you find a new job. Or they may re-hire you as a full-time employee at a "normal" wage because that's easier for all of you.
Slashdot Mirror
Project Gutenberg collects sheet music. Unfortunately they don't have much available yet, and little of it is brass music. The number of renaissance trumpet solo pieces is essentially nil, sorry about that. :-)
I've had some luck hunting MIDI files on the net and cleaning them up for printing in Sibelius or Finale. Unfortunately it requires a lot of work as most songs must be rearranged to suit the ensemble. I've done this mostly on vocal music (renaissance mixed quartet) and classic jazz. The trick is to separate the relevant MIDI tracks, adjust the notes to the nearest 1/8th or 1/16th (most apps have tools for this), extract the melody and chorus parts, and tie them all together in a new file.
--Bud
The system is meant to protect non-cheating students. That means that if you don't cheat, you have no reason to complain. By reverse-perverse logic, you're implicitly owning up you have an interest in cheating by raising issues about Turnitin.com.
I don't think the students are particularly concerned about IP rights. What they object to is that Turnitin.com makes a profit by using students' intellectual property against the students.
One can argue that, like Google, Turnitin.com only indexes a search database. The problem here is that Turnitin.com allows (without your consent) a select user group to find information that you haven't intended for distribution. Google on the other hand *has* your consent (i.e. robots.txt) and lets the whole world find information that *you* have put on public display.
--Bud
All estimation methods are based on reducing the uncertainty, by splitting the problem in smaller pieces and getting a better understanding of each individual piece.
Problems can however be sliced in many ways. People commonly split the problem in smaller pieces using a work breakdown structure (WBS) that is either deliverable-centric or activity-centric or both. But you can also split the estimation method itself into an estimate and a calculation.
Let's say that your developers can do on average 15 lines of code per hour and that your programming language of choice needs 30 code lines per function point. You use one of the many available function point methods to estimate the work for feature X to 35 function points. Thus an average developer will require 70 man work hours to implement feature X. An experienced developer will need less time, while a trainee will need vastly more and also some handholding. This method requires that you find out the metrics for your company.
Also remember that your estimate is only an estimate, and you can adjust the quality i.e. certainty of the estimate. Sometimes a quick educated guess is sufficient, like when Mr. Sales Guy wonders whether feature X is large enough to affect the price of a project. Other times you must spend hours or days on analysing the problem from various viewpoints, e.g. when scoping and pricing a complete customer project.
--Bud
This is just the way to succeed! Build up a customer base around your current service level, then improve your margins by degrading the service.
--Bud
You're carrying around a tiny computer with your entire music collection stored on it, but you need to rely on a second computer to manage it? This makes no sense to me. Where's the command, back at home? [...] The iPod is a result of amazing marketing. People ask for it by name, and have no idea what it will or won't do for them. Without the ability to queue songs, like a jukebox, the huge capacity makes no sense to me.
To answer your implicit question, yes, the iPod contains the ability to create on-the-go playlists. I don't know if it updates on the fly, though.
There's a certain similarity between the iPod and the Palm Pilot. Before, there were devices attempting to contain all your data and provide full control of it in an extremely cramped form factor. Then suddenly there appears on the market this device which is primarily an offline viewer with quite simplistic data synchronization and lacking justabout any kind of wholesale data management. It turns out to be just the thing people want, sparking the [INSERT NAME HERE] revolution with tremendous hype and becoming wildly successful.
In both cases, the users give up control over the details ("tactics"), and gain command over the whole data set ("strategy")... if you don't have to mind the trees, you'll find you are free to watch the forest.
The iPod is now in the spot where Palm was in 1999. It's been on the market for 3-4 years and has a huge market share. Technology- and feature-wise, it still provides less than the competition. Synchronization- and data-management-wise, it's still miles ahead of the competition.
In contrast to the floundering Palm Inc., Apple and the iPod are here to stay for a while. It took six or seven years for the Palm competitors to catch up, and they only managed to because Palm did not have a sense of direction. The key elements for Apple is Steve Jobs providing undisputed leadership and the iTunes Music Store providing the missing link in the value chain. That is, Apple knows where they are headed and they have a complete solution. Of the competitors, only Sony is (was!) in a position to do the same and they just managed to lose an immense amount of brand value with the DRM CD thing.
I believe that, when people buy an iPod, they get an "offline music listening solution" that fulfills their needs quite exactly. It doesn't really matter that the iPod is an underpowered and feature-lacking device or iTunes a draconian control-grabbing application, as long as the combination rocks. The hype is unfortunately directed towards the iPod device instead of the complete solution.
--Bud
Making it so that the iPod will ONLY play music loaded onto it via iTunes frustrates me and makes me feel restricted, like they want me to ONLY use it the way they want me to.
You might have missed the point of the iPod. Remember that computers are great at handling large amounts of tiny pieces of information, and great at performing rule-based actions. Managing your MP3 player manually is like editing your web site using a text editor. Sure, you have 100% control. Sure, your HTML looks exactly like you want it to. But it just doesn't scale. Have more than N pages, you need a content management system. iTunes is your content management system for music. Stop micromanaging, give up control, gain command.
--Bud
Anyway I read that story and it didn't appear to me that [Bill Gates] was trying to solve it by memorization, but rather that after an hour, seeing hundreds of rolls, he remembered many of them, which isn't all that surprising. What I got out of the story, is that he persistently kept at the problem trying many different ideas until he finally got it, even after everyone else in the group had solved it or quit.
Ah... this explains a lot about Microsoft. Persistently keep at the problem, trying different ideas until you finally get it... after hundreds of tries, you might see the pattern. Problem is, this method is not "where do you want to go today?", but rather "where did you want to go yesterday?".
Apple's method, incidentally, is "here's where you want to go tomorrow, in style". Ha! :-)
--Bud
This is probably the most hypocritical and narrow-minded "Ask Slashdot" thing I've read. Ever. Of all the issues related to the use of gasoline in America, we must now discuss how to keep the school buses going.
- What about the gas price in other countries? Gas prices in the US are reaching, what, over half the global average? Get some perspective! Over where I live, the price of gas is so high that we can't afford dedicated school buses. The kids typically walk or bike to school. Of course, we have more and smaller schools, where teachers and students actually know each other by name, so there are fewer drug abusers and petty criminals and neighbourhoods are pretty safe.
- What about meddling in the middle-east? How many wars do you need to start in order to protect the oil supply? Each time you fill up your car, you can say to yourself: "Here goes 1/100 of our war casualties. Thanks, dude... whoever you were!"
- And what about the environment issues? The US alone causes so much pollution it's not even funny. Bush refuses to sign the Kyoto agreement, the government rewrites scientific reports to downplay issues... I don't know, this is like peeing in the swimming pool and then maintaining that it doesn't smell and even if it does it's not related to us peeing in it.
--Bud
Nope, Apple got it right: it's a question about ergonomics. The most popular command-key shortcuts (Cmd-Z, X, C, V, A, S, F, Q, W) are situated around the lower left of the keyboard, i.e. where the command key is on a Mac keyboard. You can use your thumb to hit the command-key, which is a clear ergonomic advantage.
In this particular case, the ctrl key is way off in the corner of the keyboard, so you must strain your thumb to death or use your (comparatively weak) pinkie. Duh.
--Bud
I've had a Leatherman Micra on my keychain for almost 5 years now. It's the best thing I have on this keychain next to the keys. [...] Get one of those and one of those quick release dual keyrings, remove the one ring and attach the Micra (or a Juice if you want pliers. [...] Right now, I got a Micra and a Mag-Lite Solitare flashlight on my keyring.
I second this. I have had a similar combination for slightly over four years and can only recommend it. The Micra's scissors are strong and much more useful than pliers, and the quick-release keyring is just great.
I went for a Photon MicroLight LED flashlight which is small enough but somewhat lacking in power. I'd like to change it for something brighter and more durable, but I use it so infrequently that it's not worth it.
--Bud
If a privacy-minded user deposits $20 to get an anonymous library card, she can check out The Terror State without identifying herself. Her account balance is temporarily reduced by $15, and when the library checks the CD back in (in good condition), her balance is restored to its original value.
Borrowing The Terror State from your local library: $20
Parking your car anywhere: $50
Fast lane at the airport, bypassing extra security checks: $100k
Bypassing all important security checks: $10m
Bypassing all security checks and paying for it with American oil money: priceless.
--Bud
I'm working at a Canadian telecom research lab. They are looking into the creation of tools that would facilitate the development of mobile applications. Symbian OS seems to be the lead target platform candidate. There is however a small crowd that is pushing for Microsoft stuff (Pocket PC and Smartphone). How do other systems (Linux and PalmOS) stack up? What would the Slashdot community advise by way of a choice of an operating system for mobile?
Your question does not make any sense. Choose whatever your end users are using. If you don't know that, ask them. Do some market research.
There are zillions of toolkits that "facilitate development of mobile applications". Many of these are cross-platform, covering the OS with a badly integrated and resource-intensive layer (think J2ME/MIDP) which end up providing a crappy end user experience.
Others aim at providing utility libraries for a single platform, such as cryptography, XML, synchronization or networking utilities. Since OS vendors continuously improve their platforms, these 3rd-party toolkits have a really short lifetime. Building single-platform development tools also requires deep knowledge of the target platform; usually you acquire the deep knowledge FIRST and THEN choose the platform.
Finally, assuming that you DO have deep knowledge of all available platforms, you should already know what platform to choose. No need to Ask SlashDot.
--Bud (mobile developer since 1997)
Which is the better machine? Which one is quicker? Even if I wanted to do video editing (which I don't, but who knows, one day I might).
Good question. Buy the Dell, install Linux on it and stick it on an Ethernet cable somewhere out of earshot. Then buy a Mac mini and use that for web surfing, reading mail, development, whatever. For the price of one Apple G5, you get one server where an overloaded Tomcat won't disturb your workflow, and one workstation capable of video editing.
--Bud
What do you mean by the right price? Maybe I want the hardware only, and am willing to pay $400 for that, instead of $500 for both. But I don't have that option from Apple
What do you mean by "maybe I want the hardware only"?
Isn't it the best kept secret of the IT industry that Apple software just absolutely rocks, and you would have to pay $500 or more to get even close to the same functionality that now comes bundled with the Mac mini? In which case the nifty hardware that you so highly covet would be, essentially, a free add-on to make the software run.
--Bud
You spent 100usd on a 512 shuffle. You get a .8g player that plays songs randomly. Thats it. [...] Which was the better buy for "your" situation considering my n200 has shuffle mode also?
To be fair, you also get: a neckstrap, earbuds and an USB plug.
Now to the breaking news: having shuffle mode on your MP3 player is NOT the same as having the MP3 player integrate seamlessly with your PC and automatically updating itself with a randomized selection of your favourite music. This, and the bling-white-earphones-bling factor, are the two major selling points for the iPod Shuffle. They are not mentioned in the feature list, so you would have missed them. Sorry. Your loss.
Granted, the line-in-to-MP3 recording feature of the Muvo is very nifty. It means that I can rip analog music straight to the Muvo instead of digitally to my PC... erm, sorry, no, I mean that I can rip analog music anywhere, unless I left the converter cable at home... er, sorry, no, forget that one, anyway when I got the stuff ripped into the Muvo, I can just move the stuff manually to my PC and then change the MP3 tags, so I can see them on the backlit display. Yup. Can't understand why Apple hasn't incorporated that into the iPod.
But the FM radio is really nifty. Honest.
--Bud
However, the server's life on the Net is in your hands.
Ye-e-esss... just post the news on Slashdot, that ought to take care of the server's life on the net. Good idea!
On the other hand, it could be that the 37 different rootkits are so busy 0wnz0ring each other, that the web service just MIGHT get enough peace to run for the required 96 hours. ;-)
--Bud
They are just beaurocrats from head to toe. It's more important to get that piece of paper done already so they can move over to the next stuff that needs to be dealt with. They don't care what's on that paper, it just needs to get away and disappear from their sight.
Lawrence Lessig blogged a similar take on the subject.
--Bud
In other words, the EU Council has just stated that form is more important than meaning, and that it is more important that the bureaucrats are able to create legislation quickly and effortlessly than the legislation being fair and correct.
This is the crappiest thing I've heard in a long while! What's next, stopping citizens from seeing official documents because it creates unnecessary expenses and only whiners ask to see them anyway? Or removing the right to vote for all citizens of the EU, because recurring elections could hamper the ability of EU politicians to make long-term plans?
--Bud
He has a point. Most of the user interface stuff is done by parts of the brain that aren't doing the primary work.
That's how it should work. However, on Windows you have to spend brain processing power on solving petty UI issues. Given that the human brain can keep 7 ± 2 items in its working memory, I find it astonishing that people put up with spending the three or four topmost "slots" on solving immediate problems with the Windows user interface!
When people say Mac OS X is more "intuitive" than Windows, they really mean that the Mac requires one or possibly two slots of your precious brainpower, tops.
--Bud
Tammet is creating his own language, strongly influenced by the vowel and image-rich languages of northern Europe. (He already speaks French, German, Spanish, Lithuanian, Icelandic and Esperanto.) The vocabulary of his language - "Mänti", meaning a type of tree - reflects the relationships between different things. The word "ema", for instance, translates as "mother", and "ela" is what a mother creates: "life". "Päike" is "sun", and "päive" is what the sun creates: "day". Tammet hopes to launch Mänti in academic circles later this year, his own personal exploration of the power of words and their inter-relationship.
Disregarding the misspellings, all those words are straight from a Finnish or Estonian dictionary. "Mänty" is a pine tree, "päivä" is day, "pälke" means glimmer or glint. "Emä" and "elä" are the root words of mother and life, respectively. And "tammi" (tammet) is oak.
Finnish is a weird but logical language with a lot of nuances and forms that are not present in other languages. I'm not sure what Tammet is trying to do, but he's apparently just exploring the relationships between words in Finnish. Anything else would either not make sense, or be simple plagiarism. Too bad the reporter got stuck on the words and made such a big issue of it.
Tammet's not the first one to ponder on the Finnish language. It's well known that J.R.R Tolkien got hooked on Finnish at an early age and re-used some ideas in his works.
--Bud
No no, you've got the specs wrong. The embedded reader is based on reflective technology and absolutely REQUIRES an external energy source. Best results may be achieved using a giant ball of flaming gas positioned above and behind the user's shoulder. This is actually the preferred source of energy, since giant flaming balls of gas are abundant on this world. In this case you don't have to worry so much about environmental conditions, e.g. even backscatter works fine.
If the giant ball of flaming gas is hidden behind solid objects ("gone where the sun don't shine") and/or is difficult to position (e.g. due to lack of levers and/or fixed points from which to move the Earth), you must simply rely on backscatter from other planetary objects or produce your own energy e.g. by incinerating animal fats.
--Bud
Microsoft announced that they will integrate the electronic identification into the Windows Software so they can deliver more security and privacy on the internet.
So true, and yet so much marsh gas.
On one hand, it's hard to see how improving the user's authentication level would stop crackers and virus writers from breaking into Windows boxes.
On the other hand, given Microsoft's track record in internet security, it's hard to see how they could ever deliver less. Anything they do is sure to INCREASE the security level. And no, this is NOT funny.
--Bud
There are basically three different ways you can go to get out of programming:
My 4 cents,
--Bud
Man Builds 7-Foot Tall Grandfather From Lego ?
Now *that* would be impressive!
Yes, and then he could kill (or at least dismantle) his own grandfather without even going back in time, and get double paradox bonus points.
Actually, it just goes to show that time may be circular, but LEGO bricks are mostly square, with knobs on.
--Bud
he position was listed as full-time but they want me to come on as contractor because the approval is easier to get. Then, I am told they would move me to full-time.
You can approach this from a wage negotiation point-of-view. Figure out what additional expenses (taxes, insurance) you'll need to pay in order to get the same benefits as any full-time employee. Sum up your expenses using Excel. Then show them your calculations and say, I'll need X % more gross income because of this, this and this, and because the job position is less secure. Chances are they will either back off and hire you as a full-time employee, or hire you at the higher wage but then fire you when the project is done, at which point you'll have some savings to live on until you find a new job. Or they may re-hire you as a full-time employee at a "normal" wage because that's easier for all of you.
--Bud