One of my favorite fantasy series was the Black Company series by Glen Cook.
They are, generally, written in a low-fantasy style in a high-fantasy world. The main character is the doctor and historian for a mercenary company.
The first three are really good. I've read the rest simply to continue the story, but the quality starts to go downhill. Here's the titles that I can remember.
The Black Company: Excellent Shadows Linger: Very Good The White Rose: Excellent
The Silver Spike: Okay Shadow Games: Very Good Dreams of Steel: Okay She is the Darkness: Okay Bleak Seasons: Okay
Why in the world would any individual go through the time and effort to rebuild this list? Could their be any benefit to them when we all know that some asshole lawyer will eventually shut the site down by claiming some infringment of the Sony Bono DCMA DRM copywrite extension Disney Fritz Hollins act of 2004?
As a lawyer (or someone who works with them) I'm sure your response will be "just hire your own lawyer to defend yourself". But, I don't think that makes great financial sense for a non-paid volunteer trying to provide a resource for the community.
There really needs to be a "Good Samaritan" law that protects volunteers from corporations and thier lawyers...
Senario 1: Hi Mr. Web Site Maintainer. We here at Fantasy PCI-SIG need to protect our copyright. Please remove your logo since it may cause confusion in the marketplace. This is a purely legal decision because we both know that the "marketplace" knows the difference between your database and our product, but, unfortunatly the lawyers made us do it. We apologize for the inconvienece and please keep up your good work.
Senario 2: Yo. We will sue you. You mean nothing to us. Our lawyers are fed on the blood of babies and will leave you and your family destitute. We know where you live. We know where you work. When we are through with you your parents won't recognize your corpse.
What was described was senario 2. Maybe I have a thin skin, I'd "take the ball home with me" as well if faced with that kind of letter. This is another case of attacking with lawyers when a little bit of respect would have achieved a far better end.
Just because a programmer has an "incredible aptitude for detail and complexity" doesn't mean that anyone else will ever be able to read or use his code. I've worked with a couple of programmers where Jalopy was the savior in trying to facilitiate communications. The things the poster listed as problems cover just about everything but sitting down and pounding out LOC. They are also the things that separate the "lone hacker" from the "team of software engineers". In my experience, they are also the things that may make the genius programmers less efficient in the short term but make the vast majority of average programmers more efficient in the long term (and I place myself in the group of average programmers).
It's really fucking sad that the needs of the developers needs to play second fiddle to the needs of the secretaries making Powerpoint slides. Expecially in a environment like NASA where one would assume that engineers have some clout.
What next? NASA will decree that all engineers need to buy all of their tools from Pep Boys because that's where the upper management takes their cars to be fixed.
Not exactly. What I am suggesting is that when self-proclaimed "liberatarians" claim that the free expression of capitolism involves only the manufacturing costs they are not considering the "true costs" of manufacturing.
It's not a "penalty" to ask that a manufacturer consider the cost of cleanup from the manufacture of their product whether cleanup consists of removing heavy metal contamination from a stream or paying thier incremental cost for trauma centers and additional police.
Having an item reflect the true costs rather than the manufacturing costs is not necessarily socialist (nor, for that matter is it libertarian). For example, I live upstream of you. I manufacture motherboards. My cost to manufacture motherboards is $90 since I take advantage of free toxic waste disposal in MY stream.
Unfortunately, the manufacturing costs for your downstream bottled water plant just went from $0.50 to $50 since you need to clean the impurities from that water that I just dumped in there.
I believe the original poster's idea was somthing similar. If (and I don't know if this is true of what the real numbers are) the cost due to gun violence to support trauma centers and forensic specialists and additional jails works out to $5000 a bullet, then everyone who buys a bullet for $1 is getting a $4999 welfare check from those of us that don't buy bullets. I wouldn't call that liberatarian, either.
Hah! I caught you. You've skimmed $13,000,000,000 out of your calculations. Do you work for Enron? For a mere $1,000,000,000 I promise I won't tell anyone.
I doubt that anybody would want to wait for images upwards of 50MB or bigger media files to be saved to disk every couple of minutes.
Once again, it would depend on how the application decided to handle the auto saves. In an application like Photoshop, for example, the autosave might simple save the Undo queue. If the application were to crash, the Undo queue could be run from back to front on your original file to recreate the changes. This would, of course, be slower than simply loading the changed file, but much better than losing all your work.
1. Get out a rifle and start shooting out the city lights. That way everyone can enjoy the show. 2. Hey, if you are shooting things anyway, start taking out the nearby buildings so everyone has a nice field of view. 3. Fuck it. Just start blowing shit up. Its a lot more visually exciting and it doesn't matter if you are facing Leo or not.
"It locks the text down to one paper layout format"
Exactly... This is the entire purpose of PDF. Having been "locked down" you can take that PDF file down to your local service bureau, print shop, publisher, graphic designer or whatever and have a good possibility that what you pick up at the end of the day matches the file you submitted in the first place.
I think that XML and PDF make the perfect complementary technologies. Store your data in XML where it can be retargeted for a million purposes. When you need to get a final product out the door, create a PDF and lock down your design.
Why does microsoft have to pay licensing fees for use of PDF? I may be wrong, but I thought PDF is an open format. You can go down to adobe.com and get the specification. This doesn't mean, of course, that Acrobat is free (as in beer) but Microsoft supposedly has some programmers hanging around in Redmond. Maybe they could be put to work...
The only advantage I saw in working in the public sector was the increased vacation time and you had a better chance of getting away with a mere 40 hour week.
My current contractor job pays 6.67 vacation hours and 4 sick hours a month after two years, my old job in a state government office had 9 hours of vaction time and 8 sick hours a month after two years.
It makes a difference when you can take a long weekend and still have a two week vacation later in the year (and, under a contractor, your chance of taking that vacation may be pretty slim).
BTW, the worst combination is working for a "cost center" in a state office where the work you do directly funds the budget for your department. Your department has no money for training, conferences, equipment, full staffing or any other benefit. The department's only way of making additional money is by increasing prices, but any price increase is vetoed by some other (non-cost center) administrative department.
So he files his patent and 5 months later EBay founder Omidyar starts his auction site. How is this contrary to what we'd all like the ideal patent process to be?
I think what bothers me is that in the fast-paced world of the dot com boom it took three years for the patent application to be granted. In those years, while the patent application was secret, Omidyar turned his idea into a huge business that is one of the few internet success stories of the time. I am sure that Woolston feels justified in defending his patent. I am sure that EBay feels justified that the patent doesn't apply. In the end, they both may be right; the patent system is broken when it ignores any attempt at identifying "obviousness", allows any real-word process to be transported to the internet and considered an "innovation", takes years for patents to be granted, allows monopolies to exist for over a decade, and allows business process patents to exist in the first place.
Off topic, but if I read another "i'm going to patent 'breathing'" posts I think my head might explode.
In my defense here is the blub from the apple store:
iDVD 2.1 Software Upgrade $19.95 Explore the magic of DVD creation with iDVD 2.1 on Mac OS X and in minutes create eye-popping DVDs that rival Hollywood's best. Improving the simplicity and power of iDVD 2, the 2.1 upgrade adds support for AppleScript, DVD-ROM data support to make hybrid DVDs, and enhances overall performance.
In related news: the OS X.2 operating system is free!*
Not to imply that you are a moron, but if the software is FREE (as you imply with the word FREE written in your post in capitol letters) how come the Apple Store charges $19.95 for the upgrade?
If I want to purchase a faster, better, more compatible DVD-/+/*/R/W/RW for my Mac I can't use iDVD. Right? I have a legal copy of iDVD, but I can't use it. Right?
All of this is because the RIAA gave "Watch out for that Tree" Bono (or was it Hollings) and non-technical "representitives" a boatload of cash and got poorly designed and probably unconstitutional legislation that is being used to quash technical progress and piss of the very people that generally like to support a company like Apple.
Off topic: wouldn't it be ironic if code from DeCSS was used in the iDVD software?
Japan develops the PlayStation 2, Taiwan builds a game system that looks like a PS2 but has the technology of a 20-year-old Famicom system inside. Which do you think is better?
This is one of the best arguments against patents I've heard so far. The best product wins when monopoly power is removed from the equation.
No, he should be forced to give up his ideas in his head!
"Uhhmmmm, here's my idea. It's a process for getting source code from machine language. First, you need a big stack of plutoninum. This is used to power the time machine. You need to make direct psychic contact with the source code's origininal programmer or his or her parents (due to the psychic link between the generations). You set the time on the time machine to Mayan Real Time..."
"...and then the genetically modified, flying monkeys emerge from the time machine with the source code!"
Slashdot Mirror
One of my favorite fantasy series was the Black Company series by Glen Cook.
They are, generally, written in a low-fantasy style in a high-fantasy world. The main character is the doctor and historian for a mercenary company.
The first three are really good. I've read the rest simply to continue the story, but the quality starts to go downhill. Here's the titles that I can remember.
The Black Company: Excellent
Shadows Linger: Very Good
The White Rose: Excellent
The Silver Spike: Okay
Shadow Games: Very Good
Dreams of Steel: Okay
She is the Darkness: Okay
Bleak Seasons: Okay
Why in the world would any individual go through the time and effort to rebuild this list? Could their be any benefit to them when we all know that some asshole lawyer will eventually shut the site down by claiming some infringment of the Sony Bono DCMA DRM copywrite extension Disney Fritz Hollins act of 2004? As a lawyer (or someone who works with them) I'm sure your response will be "just hire your own lawyer to defend yourself". But, I don't think that makes great financial sense for a non-paid volunteer trying to provide a resource for the community. There really needs to be a "Good Samaritan" law that protects volunteers from corporations and thier lawyers...
I'm afraid I have to disagree...
Senario 1: Hi Mr. Web Site Maintainer. We here at Fantasy PCI-SIG need to protect our copyright. Please remove your logo since it may cause confusion in the marketplace. This is a purely legal decision because we both know that the "marketplace" knows the difference between your database and our product, but, unfortunatly the lawyers made us do it. We apologize for the inconvienece and please keep up your good work.
Senario 2: Yo. We will sue you. You mean nothing to us. Our lawyers are fed on the blood of babies and will leave you and your family destitute. We know where you live. We know where you work. When we are through with you your parents won't recognize your corpse.
What was described was senario 2. Maybe I have a thin skin, I'd "take the ball home with me" as well if faced with that kind of letter. This is another case of attacking with lawyers when a little bit of respect would have achieved a far better end.
Just because a programmer has an "incredible aptitude for detail and complexity" doesn't mean that anyone else will ever be able to read or use his code. I've worked with a couple of programmers where Jalopy was the savior in trying to facilitiate communications. The things the poster listed as problems cover just about everything but sitting down and pounding out LOC. They are also the things that separate the "lone hacker" from the "team of software engineers". In my experience, they are also the things that may make the genius programmers less efficient in the short term but make the vast majority of average programmers more efficient in the long term (and I place myself in the group of average programmers).
It's really fucking sad that the needs of the developers needs to play second fiddle to the needs of the secretaries making Powerpoint slides. Expecially in a environment like NASA where one would assume that engineers have some clout.
What next? NASA will decree that all engineers need to buy all of their tools from Pep Boys because that's where the upper management takes their cars to be fixed.
"all nouns can be verbed"
I guess that proves it...
Not exactly. What I am suggesting is that when self-proclaimed "liberatarians" claim that the free expression of capitolism involves only the manufacturing costs they are not considering the "true costs" of manufacturing.
It's not a "penalty" to ask that a manufacturer consider the cost of cleanup from the manufacture of their product whether cleanup consists of removing heavy metal contamination from a stream or paying thier incremental cost for trauma centers and additional police.
Having an item reflect the true costs rather than the manufacturing costs is not necessarily socialist (nor, for that matter is it libertarian). For example, I live upstream of you. I manufacture motherboards. My cost to manufacture motherboards is $90 since I take advantage of free toxic waste disposal in MY stream.
Unfortunately, the manufacturing costs for your downstream bottled water plant just went from $0.50 to $50 since you need to clean the impurities from that water that I just dumped in there.
I believe the original poster's idea was somthing similar. If (and I don't know if this is true of what the real numbers are) the cost due to gun violence to support trauma centers and forensic specialists and additional jails works out to $5000 a bullet, then everyone who buys a bullet for $1 is getting a $4999 welfare check from those of us that don't buy bullets. I wouldn't call that liberatarian, either.
I guess if they hadn't, you wouldn't be around to post on
Seems to happen all the time on Star Trek. Unless, of course, nose ridges are the result of weird alien DNA.
Hah! I caught you. You've skimmed $13,000,000,000 out of your calculations. Do you work for Enron? For a mere $1,000,000,000 I promise I won't tell anyone.
Could someone give a quick overview of what Struts is/are? Is it a technology, a language, or just a term given to a way of doing things?
Once again, it would depend on how the application decided to handle the auto saves. In an application like Photoshop, for example, the autosave might simple save the Undo queue. If the application were to crash, the Undo queue could be run from back to front on your original file to recreate the changes. This would, of course, be slower than simply loading the changed file, but much better than losing all your work.
Better tips for first timers.
1. Get out a rifle and start shooting out the city lights. That way everyone can enjoy the show.
2. Hey, if you are shooting things anyway, start taking out the nearby buildings so everyone has a nice field of view.
3. Fuck it. Just start blowing shit up. Its a lot more visually exciting and it doesn't matter if you are facing Leo or not.
Just kidding... Thanks for the original tips.
Exactly... This is the entire purpose of PDF. Having been "locked down" you can take that PDF file down to your local service bureau, print shop, publisher, graphic designer or whatever and have a good possibility that what you pick up at the end of the day matches the file you submitted in the first place.
I think that XML and PDF make the perfect complementary technologies. Store your data in XML where it can be retargeted for a million purposes. When you need to get a final product out the door, create a PDF and lock down your design.
Why does microsoft have to pay licensing fees for use of PDF? I may be wrong, but I thought PDF is an open format. You can go down to adobe.com and get the specification. This doesn't mean, of course, that Acrobat is free (as in beer) but Microsoft supposedly has some programmers hanging around in Redmond. Maybe they could be put to work...
I just drove on the Washington D.C. Beltway for a couple of hours to get from Alexandria to Rockville. Are you saying that the Club of Rome was wrong?
The only advantage I saw in working in the public sector was the increased vacation time and you had a better chance of getting away with a mere 40 hour week.
My current contractor job pays 6.67 vacation hours and 4 sick hours a month after two years, my old job in a state government office had 9 hours of vaction time and 8 sick hours a month after two years.
It makes a difference when you can take a long weekend and still have a two week vacation later in the year (and, under a contractor, your chance of taking that vacation may be pretty slim).
BTW, the worst combination is working for a "cost center" in a state office where the work you do directly funds the budget for your department. Your department has no money for training, conferences, equipment, full staffing or any other benefit. The department's only way of making additional money is by increasing prices, but any price increase is vetoed by some other (non-cost center) administrative department.
I think what bothers me is that in the fast-paced world of the dot com boom it took three years for the patent application to be granted. In those years, while the patent application was secret, Omidyar turned his idea into a huge business that is one of the few internet success stories of the time. I am sure that Woolston feels justified in defending his patent. I am sure that EBay feels justified that the patent doesn't apply. In the end, they both may be right; the patent system is broken when it ignores any attempt at identifying "obviousness", allows any real-word process to be transported to the internet and considered an "innovation", takes years for patents to be granted, allows monopolies to exist for over a decade, and allows business process patents to exist in the first place.
Off topic, but if I read another "i'm going to patent 'breathing'" posts I think my head might explode.
In related news: the OS X.2 operating system is free!*
* Shipping and Hangling charge of $129 applies.
Not to imply that you are a moron, but if the software is FREE (as you imply with the word FREE written in your post in capitol letters) how come the Apple Store charges $19.95 for the upgrade?
If I want to purchase a faster, better, more compatible DVD-/+/*/R/W/RW for my Mac I can't use iDVD. Right? I have a legal copy of iDVD, but I can't use it. Right?
All of this is because the RIAA gave "Watch out for that Tree" Bono (or was it Hollings) and non-technical "representitives" a boatload of cash and got poorly designed and probably unconstitutional legislation that is being used to quash technical progress and piss of the very people that generally like to support a company like Apple.
Off topic: wouldn't it be ironic if code from DeCSS was used in the iDVD software?
This is one of the best arguments against patents I've heard so far. The best product wins when monopoly power is removed from the equation.
No, he should be forced to give up his ideas in his head!
"Uhhmmmm, here's my idea. It's a process for getting source code from machine language. First, you need a big stack of plutoninum. This is used to power the time machine. You need to make direct psychic contact with the source code's origininal programmer or his or her parents (due to the psychic link between the generations). You set the time on the time machine to Mayan Real Time..."
"...and then the genetically modified, flying monkeys emerge from the time machine with the source code!"
How about a Java feature that allowed you to assign a default class type to another object at compile time.
... } ... }
Vector c = new (MyDataObject)Vector();
It would clarify a lot of code in that you would know what the programmer intended to store in that collection.
Another possibility.
class Vector extends Array implements Collection uses TemplatedObject {
void put(TemplatedObject index) {
TemplatedObject get(int index) {
}
where the "uses" keyword acts similarly to the C++ template