With outsourcing they'll move the the business halfway around the earth if needed, it's not really the pipe they come for. You'll get nowhere without a talent pool that's interesting to somebody.
And because it's a gamble they can afford to make, instead of trying to play the stock market and such. Usually it's either young people who got nothing to lose but time or middle aged people where the kids stand on their own and they're not dependent on the next paycheck to support a family. If you want more money, you find a better job or ask for a raise. If you want a chance at making much more money or bombing totally, you found/join a start-up. Most of them fail miserably, a few are wildly successful.
You are assuming the masses are with you. First you lose the propaganda war, then you lose everything else. They'll outlaw Bitcoin. Outlaw TOR. Outlaw VPN. Outlaw proxies. Close down open wifis. If you're not the facebook-posting, cell phone-wearing, credit card using transparent type you'll be targeted. They'll find something because almost everybody breaks the law in some way, then hang you out to dry as another posted child of crooks trying to fly below the radar.
They don't need to force you to do anything, just give the right incentive. For example if I wanted to go on a bus ride it's now twice as much paying by cash as using electronic cards/app/cell phone, to improve service time and stop robberies. And make it really really stupid to pay in cash unless you really want to hide where you're going. So they get to build a pretty good profile on where you go every day, I suppose it's not a big secret but it's certainly big data. If they can track 95% of the people 95% of the time, they will find the time to find out what those last 5% are.
Your right because clearly starting up your little games faster should be top priority of any operating system.
Not any operating system, just one that has interactive users. When I turn on my computer I want to use it right now, boot time is dead time. When I click any application I want to use it right now, load time is dead time. If I click a button in the application I want a response right now, reaction time is dead time. If you're running a server, who really cares as it should be >99.99% up, use staggered boot and launch some huge backend processing service once it doesn't matter at all. But when it's my consumer device I hate fingertapping time, it's not that I really need those five seconds back but it's very, very annoying. I kind of accepted it when computers were slow as molasses, but I very rarely accept that I need to wait for my gigahertz quadcore CPU feeding off an SSD to do anything. YMMV, but I think there's more people in my camp than yours.
If they've got 300 people with degrees and a little bit of experience, surely many of them are old enough to have commitments at home. You might be taking your 10 year old to soccer practice, well they might have their first baby or whatever. Plenty there will have time consuming hobbies and not show up, no matter what phase of life they're in it's far from everyone each time. And to be honest, if they're 25 and single they probably don't want to have the 40+ married guy with them any more than you want to see them hit on chicks rather than be with your family. Don't worry you'll be fine, they'll be fine and certainly in a company that size surely there's enough people to hang out with that are in the same situation for the social gatherings you do join in on. Maybe if you'd said 30, but 300? That's plenty.
Not to mention that hadn't Torvalds developed the Linux kernel, we would still be waiting for the Hurd to take off. One could argue that Linux is binding resources (volunteer coders) that could be otherwise engaged into developing the Hurd had Linux not existed, but I simply doubt that developers would follow Stallman the way they follow Torvalds.
Alternative history is always a wild guess, but it's unlikely nothing would have happened for 20+ years. Maybe one of the BSDs, maybe an EGCS-style fork from HURD or an entirely different project would have filled some of the void. I doubt any of them could have taken it quite as far as Linus has though, with Android I assume Linux is the world's most popular OS kernel by number of devices.
Considering how many times you need to do this (read the length of a block of data, then the data) it's strange that we haven't implemented a standard variable length encoding like with UTF-8. Example:
00000000 - 01111111: (7/8 effective bits) 10000000 00000000- 10111111 11111111: (14/16 effective bits) 11000000 2x00000000 - 110111111 2x11111111: (21/24 effective bits) 11100000 3x00000000 - 11101111 3x11111111 (28/32 effective bits) 11110000 4x00000000 - 11110111 4x11111111 (35/40 effective bits) 11111000 5x00000000 - 11111011 5x11111111 (42/48 effective bits) 11111100 6x00000000 - 11111101 6x11111111 (49/56 effective bits) 11111110 7x00000000 - 11111110 7x11111111 (56/64 effective bits) 11111111 00000000 + data - 11111111 01111111 + data indicates array 0-127 characters long 11111111 10000000 00000000 + data - 11111111 10111111 11111111 + data indicates array 0-16383 characters long 11111111 11000000 00000000 00000000 + data - 11111111 11011111 11111111 11111111 + data indicates array 0-(2^21-1) characters long 11111111 11100000 00000000 00000000 00000000 + data - 11111111 11101111 11111111 11111111 11111111 + data indicates array 0-(2^28-1) characters long ... and so on until 11111111 11111111 8x00000000 + data - 11111111 11111111 8x11111111 + data indicates array 0-(2^64-1) characters long.
It should be rather easy to implement the encoding/decoding function like "readByteArrayFromFile" just ONCE so that the array and size of array you get is identical or the function will fail. You peek at it, allocate X bytes, copy X bytes and if there's not X bytes to read return NULL.
Note I'm not defending the behavior of the ad companies here. However, if she was really serious about wanting privacy about that sort of thing, I would think the common-sense course of action would be to stay off Facebook completely. Everyone knows that whatever you do there is mined mercilessly for data, but there's absolutely no reason one has to be on there, other than they *enjoy the features of the service* (this author apparently included).
Not unless your circle of good friends intersects with the circle of walking Facebook-feeds, they want to check in and tag and tweet and instagram everything that's their choice, that I don't is my choice and we're trying to meet somewhere in the middle. Practically that means I have a Facebook account, the privacy settings are basically dialed back to an empty page so I can respond to events, messages and such but when we're together they have a pretty damn good shadow profile of me anyway. Particularly with face recognition I'm sure they can tag meg in pictures from the friend list whether my friends do it or not, so I've stopped bothering there as well as long as my timeline is empty. I wouldn't be surprised if they show up with Google Glass, but there I might draw the line.
The problems of generation are solveable - we just need a way to harness something like a Sun (e.g. Dyson spheres). The problem you really have is how do you concentrate that energy onto a point such that it generates a laser?
Well, if you have a Dyson sphere you can shoot a laser from every point on the surface facing the target, they won't be perfectly aligned but they will pass through the same volume of space, like a magnifying glass effect with lasers. That should make a rather nice bug zapper.
I still think the primary reason people use DSLRs to shoot video is even simpler, overlapping jobs and overlapping skill set. I mean if you want someone to make a video of your wedding, you probably want wedding photos as well. Pretty much everything about making a good photo (focus, exposure, composition, lighting etc.) can be applied to making a good video. So when you're thousands of dollars invested in camera, lenses and you know it inside and out, you'll still be a better man on your DSLR than a rental broadcast cam with cine lenses. While still cams can make decent video dedicated video cameras generally can't take stills any professional photographer would want to use, so if you buy one you're deeply committed to being a film maker. Most simply aren't so purebred.
good lighting conditions aren't all that rare for most people. we usually don't hang around in poorly lit situations. we're talking about civilians, not pro photographers here, i hope that goes without saying.
Your average indoor setting is not a "good" lighting condition, our eyes adapt but generally there is way, way less light used indoors than you get on a sunny or even overcast day. A family living room has maybe 50 lux of illumination, an overcast day 1000 lux and direct sunlight 10000 lux. I don't care because the cell phone is about capturing the situation, but if I wanted technically good photos I'd use something else.
3) Some sort of revenue sharing scheme so that any contributors to the code receive a portion of the funds collected.
This is where your logic has a flaw so big you could drive a semitrailer through it, standards are set but open source evolves. Let's say version 1 is created and you charge $10/copy. Now a person makes a patch and wants $2 for his work, does he now charge $12? Then this becomes a pyramid scheme of accumulating prices where you want to get it in early, no matter what anyone does with the project later you get $10 practically forever. That guy who contributed a small patch to Linux in 1992 would still collect royalties on it. He might be dead but the estate will collect until the copyright expires a century later. Also nobody could use any part derived from that project in any other project without incurring a cascade of payments to use a snippet so each project becomes a walled garden.
The other alternative is that "somebody" decides how much to charge and how to distribute it, but can you imagine the conflicts of interest here? The original authors will claim this their work is 99% and the patch 1%, the patcher will claims the opposite. Any system you can think of with votes, lines of codes, feature points and so on would be abused to absurdity to control the revenue flow. And what happens with absentees, forks and attempted coups would be common if you don't need everyone to agree yet if you can't do anything without approval from everyone who ever wrote any of the code it's totally stillborn. And that's not even considering the practical issues of a collection organization who'd generously dip into those funds for administration, infringement lawsuits and so on who also have their own agenda.
Forking a project would be totally impossible, today you can take the code and drop all difficult personalities, dysfunctional organizations and start your entirely own project. But if those people have revenue demands on the code, you can't get rid of them. A variation of this is probably to write people out of the code and take over their revenue, that could certainly get the conflict level up. Accusations that people are copy-pasting code, changing variable and function names then claiming it as their "own" part now would flourish. Once you directly tie the code to cash, you're introducing so many terrible effects I don't think you realize what you're asking for. People get *nasty* about money.
At some point having a 'rover' in say, the Oort cloud or on Pluto, is just to inefficient and humans will need to be closer or it will be the grand children of the original scientists analyzing the results of the vehicle launched by the grand parents. In this example it can take up to two decades to reach Pluto alone and even light can take 4 to 7 hours to get to Pluto from Earth. This would imply that we would send a command to move an inch or two and the next day get a response about that movement. This is science at a slugs pace.
Nice straw man you have there, too bad we already have autonomous systems that operate far smarter than that. The Mars rovers have a worst case 40 minute round trip (2x20 minutes) so drive-by-wire is already out of the question, they receive driving commands and instructions to use scientific instruments on points of interest once per martian day (24h 40min) and have rather advanced hazard avoidance systems to prevent it from getting stuck, its on-site generated maps are already more detailed than what can be sent back to earth. A 7 hours delay to Pluto doesn't really make any difference in how it would operate, within the solar system we're good handing out daily instructions from Earth. Outside the solar system we don't have any practical means of going with or without people, so that's a moot point right now.
And this is the best PR stunt they could make instead of just tossing it, recovering that video has next to no practical value for SpaceX. A little geek challenge while they wait for the next test closer to land that'll probably be filmed from many angles.
This standard should be applied to legal documents, such as License agreements, Insurance agreement, What your ELA is more than 100 words long, you don't expect anyone to read this do you? Agreement Invalid. If you need longer it should ensure that people understand what they are agreeing to, maybe run a 1 year course of something.
You do realize that even the 3 clause BSD licence is more than double that with 220 words? And that one basically says "do what you like, but we take no responsibility" and if you have a license that actually tries to say anything like the GPL 3.0 it is 4632 words, not including the preamble or how to apply. How many years of your life would you like to waste? If anybody cared, we'd rather see the development of "standard terms and conditions" which would be several thousand words long but also widely deployed on most COTS software. They generally want my money, which means as long as I pay them and they deliver something I want to pay for nobody really cares what the contract says.
That usually takes one of two forms, either they want to terminate it because they don't like my use or I want to terminate it because they're not delivering as promised. Since they write the contract and most don't care, the contract says they can terminate you for anything, any time and they promise essentially nothing. Practically I figure that the courts will protect me if there's anything really unconscionable in the contract and if they need an excuse to terminate they'll find it and it won't be worth fighting it in court anyway so the actual legal text almost doesn't matter. A license doesn't have to be negotiated, if an author wants to tell me "it's the GPLv3 or not at all" is just the same as an EULA saying "it's these terms or not at all", both sides don't have to give anything.
In real life I've met very few geeks who were genuinely mean. Most seem to believe in fair play, following the rules, good citizenship, do unto others.., etc.. However at first glance their poor social skills can make them seem uncaring.
Characters on a TV show aren't sampled from the average because the viewers would be bored to death. Sheldon was a rather over the top character right from the very beginning, even among the four of them he was the odd one. Throwing in a little superiority complex where he doesn't feel like he's getting enough recognition for his genius and making ploys to show how much smarter he is than everybody else seemed a not too unlikely phase that gave them a lot of stories to write. In fact, they needed to shake up the other characters a bit or it would be "The Sheldon Show", once they three other characters to play with in their own right Sheldon could step back a little again. He's not representative but are there Sheldons out there.... I think yes.
So I think the question-poster should instead investigate other ways to modulate their own behaviour (e.g. put a holder in the car, in a very visible location, that says "PHONE BATTERY GOES HERE", and always pull out the battery before turning on the car).
So what percentage of cell phone users does that actually work for these days?
However, I think they are vastly over-estimating their customers pain threshold. Especially when 3rd parties are starting to produce their own content and could offer a much more pleasant experience as a selling point.
Wasn't that exactly what people here on/. said about music like 10+ years ago, with the Internet all those independent artists would take over and the bland mainstream crap go away because everyone could so easily find music to their personal taste? I'm quite sure that didn't happen and that if it hasn't happened by now it's not going to happen. YouTube videos aren't a competition, even amateur film makers tends to fall miserably short on one or more aspects unlike music where one or a few talented musicians actually can make kick ass music. As long as they can take away all the other ways to get it (but good luck on that) they've got you over a barrel. People want to see the major blockbusters and they won't swap Lord of the Rings or The Dark Knight or The Avengers for amateur hour.
Well, if monitors will have DRM-signed EDID with physical dimensions, I'm sure we could have DRM-signed lumen ratings for projectors. That would be a quite good proxy. Of course the MPAA will probably just assume that you've invited all your friends and family to watch the movie, but hey... I'm sure they'll generously offer to install IR sensors and charge you by number of viewers instead.
That's why requiring a big upfront whole signed specification is useless. Users may not know what they want exactly, but they're very good at knowing it when they see it; they know exactly what problem they want to solve. Your job is to understand the problem well enough to build a solution;
No, they're very good at knowing that this is not the solution. What most people want is a computer that's practically mind-reading like on Star Trek, always understanding every nuance of an instruction and providing you with relevant information and solutions no matter how vague and ambigious the request. They may have a capacity planning problem, but you're not going to solve their problem. Maybe their real problem is that they're understaffed. Maybe their real problem is that their supply, demand and availability data is crap. Maybe their problem is executives rushing certain orders turning everything else into havoc. Maybe if you get coal as input your system can squeeze, shape and polish it into a diamond but if you get shit in, you'll have shit out no matter how much you spray it with perfume.
My impression is that if you've gotten to the point where you throw up "solution" after "solution" and they keep shooting them down you're on a death march project, people can stay unsatisified forever or at least until the money runs out and the project is cancelled as a gigantic failure. I agree that trying to figuring everything up front before coding behing is rather futile, but even in iterative design specs should precede code. If you haven't got good user stories, mock-ups, process flows descriptions and some real commitment and buy-in that this will solve the problem then there's really no chance that you'll be able to code an acceptable solution. You still have to drag it out of them, just in smaller pieces.
Or just set it to "click to run", that way a redirect to a malicious website will do nothing, a compromised banner ad will do nothing so they'd have to compromise actual flash content on a site you use. For bonus points you don't see flash ads. And if it gets too annoying to do a single click extra, you can always set up an exception for that site.
Personally what I miss the most these days is a setting to really block everything from opening up a new tab/window, no matter what link I clicked. Despite having popup-protection the scummy sites always find a way to open a new tab/window when you click a link, I'd like to just disable it. Either right-click, open in new tab/window or create a new tab (Ctrl-T/Ctrl-N) should be the absolutely only way. The rest you can block like a popup.
Well, it depends on how many problems people avoid before they become traffic problems. For example imagine that ahead of you there is a truck with apparently a poorly secured load, you can see it moving, ropes fraying so you hit the brakes and give yourself a wide gap in case it spills all over the road. That drunk pedestrian who looks like any moment he'll swerve into the road, maybe we should pass him with extra margin. Those kids that just sent a soccer ball across the road, is anyone running to get it without paying attention. That truck coming down a hill at an awful speed honking his horn, you have the right of way but maaaaaaaybe he's trying to tell you something. It might have 360 degree vision and lightning reflexes, but it might also need them to get out of situations a person would avoid altogether based on a deeper understanding of the world around him.
oh, right, you drive so much better then everyone else..just like everyone else is.
It's not that hard to beat the average and the ones who drag it down tend to not give a fuck. One is teenagers, I wasn't very good back then but hey the only way to get experience is to drive and you couldn't pry the license from the cold, dead hands of most them. Resulting in several total car wrecks and at least one person in my class who died in a 100 mph crash not that long after graduation. The other is the elderly, my mom finally gave up driving so now I can quite openly say that she should have given it up years ago. Realistically though, what are their options? Bicycle? Not a chance. Public transport? For a few things I guess, but mostly too far to walk and not going when and where it needs to go. Taxi? Possible I guess, but a simple trip to our cabin (1 hour drive x2 for trip/return x2 because they'll charge you both ways since they don't get return passengers) becomes hideously expensive even with the money saved on not having a car.
The same goes for everyone else with some health problem that really suggests they probably shouldn't be operating a motor vehicle and they know it. I think most families with small children would go crazy without cars, back when we didn't have cars we also mostly had stay-at-home moms. Or we're just temporarily impaired, like I've almost fallen asleep at the wheel and mostly likely only the rumble strips on the side kept me on the road. And even then I didn't stop, it was at the end of a five hour drive but I was only half an hour from my bed so I chanced it, loud blaring music, open windows to get fresh air rushing and caused myself a little pain to keep the body in alert mode. Stupid? Dangerous? Sure. But the alternatives sucked donkey balls, which is exactly why it doesn't matter if you're above or below average - you're not going to give it up anyway.
It should be good enough if the car's AI can say, in effect, "Listen, human, I can't take responsibility for driving in this snow storm. If you're comfortable driving in it, go ahead and take manual control. Otherwise, we're staying right here."
And if you're in the middle of some remote mountain pass, you haven't driven in ages since it handles regular conditions just fine and and the car just says "nuh uh, I'm not moving another inch" then what? It's not like staying to freeze is a real option, it's basically forcing you to take over at the worst possible time. It might be enough, but my guess not until a huge court case decides it's enough.
Unfortunately, not even nearly as intriguing as a mysteriously missing plane or the daily weather report for most of the humans presently making up "humanity".
Well, most of the time nothing newsworthy happens with the occasional huge discovery but it's practically impossible to average it out. CERN discovers the Higgs boson, off the scale news. The years of design, construction, testing, ramp-up and so on what's there to report but "we're working on it, we were working on it yesterday and we'll keep working on it tomorrow", it's not a process built to entertain an audience. Just because it's important doesn't mean there's a whole lot to say about it until it's done, unless you're interested in tedious technical details. Also as far as media companies are concerned, all their competitors will have the exact same story so it's market neutral, they're all looking for unique material that'll send all the traffic to their site. As a businessman I'd rather push an exclusive story about something less important than being one of a thousand reporting the same thing.
Slashdot Mirror
With outsourcing they'll move the the business halfway around the earth if needed, it's not really the pipe they come for. You'll get nowhere without a talent pool that's interesting to somebody.
And because it's a gamble they can afford to make, instead of trying to play the stock market and such. Usually it's either young people who got nothing to lose but time or middle aged people where the kids stand on their own and they're not dependent on the next paycheck to support a family. If you want more money, you find a better job or ask for a raise. If you want a chance at making much more money or bombing totally, you found/join a start-up. Most of them fail miserably, a few are wildly successful.
You are assuming the masses are with you. First you lose the propaganda war, then you lose everything else. They'll outlaw Bitcoin. Outlaw TOR. Outlaw VPN. Outlaw proxies. Close down open wifis. If you're not the facebook-posting, cell phone-wearing, credit card using transparent type you'll be targeted. They'll find something because almost everybody breaks the law in some way, then hang you out to dry as another posted child of crooks trying to fly below the radar.
They don't need to force you to do anything, just give the right incentive. For example if I wanted to go on a bus ride it's now twice as much paying by cash as using electronic cards/app/cell phone, to improve service time and stop robberies. And make it really really stupid to pay in cash unless you really want to hide where you're going. So they get to build a pretty good profile on where you go every day, I suppose it's not a big secret but it's certainly big data. If they can track 95% of the people 95% of the time, they will find the time to find out what those last 5% are.
Your right because clearly starting up your little games faster should be top priority of any operating system.
Not any operating system, just one that has interactive users. When I turn on my computer I want to use it right now, boot time is dead time. When I click any application I want to use it right now, load time is dead time. If I click a button in the application I want a response right now, reaction time is dead time. If you're running a server, who really cares as it should be >99.99% up, use staggered boot and launch some huge backend processing service once it doesn't matter at all. But when it's my consumer device I hate fingertapping time, it's not that I really need those five seconds back but it's very, very annoying. I kind of accepted it when computers were slow as molasses, but I very rarely accept that I need to wait for my gigahertz quadcore CPU feeding off an SSD to do anything. YMMV, but I think there's more people in my camp than yours.
If they've got 300 people with degrees and a little bit of experience, surely many of them are old enough to have commitments at home. You might be taking your 10 year old to soccer practice, well they might have their first baby or whatever. Plenty there will have time consuming hobbies and not show up, no matter what phase of life they're in it's far from everyone each time. And to be honest, if they're 25 and single they probably don't want to have the 40+ married guy with them any more than you want to see them hit on chicks rather than be with your family. Don't worry you'll be fine, they'll be fine and certainly in a company that size surely there's enough people to hang out with that are in the same situation for the social gatherings you do join in on. Maybe if you'd said 30, but 300? That's plenty.
Not to mention that hadn't Torvalds developed the Linux kernel, we would still be waiting for the Hurd to take off. One could argue that Linux is binding resources (volunteer coders) that could be otherwise engaged into developing the Hurd had Linux not existed, but I simply doubt that developers would follow Stallman the way they follow Torvalds.
Alternative history is always a wild guess, but it's unlikely nothing would have happened for 20+ years. Maybe one of the BSDs, maybe an EGCS-style fork from HURD or an entirely different project would have filled some of the void. I doubt any of them could have taken it quite as far as Linus has though, with Android I assume Linux is the world's most popular OS kernel by number of devices.
Considering how many times you need to do this (read the length of a block of data, then the data) it's strange that we haven't implemented a standard variable length encoding like with UTF-8. Example:
00000000 - 01111111: (7/8 effective bits)
10000000 00000000- 10111111 11111111: (14/16 effective bits)
11000000 2x00000000 - 110111111 2x11111111: (21/24 effective bits)
11100000 3x00000000 - 11101111 3x11111111 (28/32 effective bits)
11110000 4x00000000 - 11110111 4x11111111 (35/40 effective bits)
11111000 5x00000000 - 11111011 5x11111111 (42/48 effective bits)
11111100 6x00000000 - 11111101 6x11111111 (49/56 effective bits)
11111110 7x00000000 - 11111110 7x11111111 (56/64 effective bits)
11111111 00000000 + data - 11111111 01111111 + data indicates array 0-127 characters long
11111111 10000000 00000000 + data - 11111111 10111111 11111111 + data indicates array 0-16383 characters long
11111111 11000000 00000000 00000000 + data - 11111111 11011111 11111111 11111111 + data indicates array 0-(2^21-1) characters long
11111111 11100000 00000000 00000000 00000000 + data - 11111111 11101111 11111111 11111111 11111111 + data indicates array 0-(2^28-1) characters long
... and so on until
11111111 11111111 8x00000000 + data - 11111111 11111111 8x11111111 + data indicates array 0-(2^64-1) characters long.
It should be rather easy to implement the encoding/decoding function like "readByteArrayFromFile" just ONCE so that the array and size of array you get is identical or the function will fail. You peek at it, allocate X bytes, copy X bytes and if there's not X bytes to read return NULL.
Note I'm not defending the behavior of the ad companies here. However, if she was really serious about wanting privacy about that sort of thing, I would think the common-sense course of action would be to stay off Facebook completely. Everyone knows that whatever you do there is mined mercilessly for data, but there's absolutely no reason one has to be on there, other than they *enjoy the features of the service* (this author apparently included).
Not unless your circle of good friends intersects with the circle of walking Facebook-feeds, they want to check in and tag and tweet and instagram everything that's their choice, that I don't is my choice and we're trying to meet somewhere in the middle. Practically that means I have a Facebook account, the privacy settings are basically dialed back to an empty page so I can respond to events, messages and such but when we're together they have a pretty damn good shadow profile of me anyway. Particularly with face recognition I'm sure they can tag meg in pictures from the friend list whether my friends do it or not, so I've stopped bothering there as well as long as my timeline is empty. I wouldn't be surprised if they show up with Google Glass, but there I might draw the line.
The problems of generation are solveable - we just need a way to harness something like a Sun (e.g. Dyson spheres). The problem you really have is how do you concentrate that energy onto a point such that it generates a laser?
Well, if you have a Dyson sphere you can shoot a laser from every point on the surface facing the target, they won't be perfectly aligned but they will pass through the same volume of space, like a magnifying glass effect with lasers. That should make a rather nice bug zapper.
I still think the primary reason people use DSLRs to shoot video is even simpler, overlapping jobs and overlapping skill set. I mean if you want someone to make a video of your wedding, you probably want wedding photos as well. Pretty much everything about making a good photo (focus, exposure, composition, lighting etc.) can be applied to making a good video. So when you're thousands of dollars invested in camera, lenses and you know it inside and out, you'll still be a better man on your DSLR than a rental broadcast cam with cine lenses. While still cams can make decent video dedicated video cameras generally can't take stills any professional photographer would want to use, so if you buy one you're deeply committed to being a film maker. Most simply aren't so purebred.
good lighting conditions aren't all that rare for most people. we usually don't hang around in poorly lit situations. we're talking about civilians, not pro photographers here, i hope that goes without saying.
Your average indoor setting is not a "good" lighting condition, our eyes adapt but generally there is way, way less light used indoors than you get on a sunny or even overcast day. A family living room has maybe 50 lux of illumination, an overcast day 1000 lux and direct sunlight 10000 lux. I don't care because the cell phone is about capturing the situation, but if I wanted technically good photos I'd use something else.
3) Some sort of revenue sharing scheme so that any contributors to the code receive a portion of the funds collected.
This is where your logic has a flaw so big you could drive a semitrailer through it, standards are set but open source evolves. Let's say version 1 is created and you charge $10/copy. Now a person makes a patch and wants $2 for his work, does he now charge $12? Then this becomes a pyramid scheme of accumulating prices where you want to get it in early, no matter what anyone does with the project later you get $10 practically forever. That guy who contributed a small patch to Linux in 1992 would still collect royalties on it. He might be dead but the estate will collect until the copyright expires a century later. Also nobody could use any part derived from that project in any other project without incurring a cascade of payments to use a snippet so each project becomes a walled garden.
The other alternative is that "somebody" decides how much to charge and how to distribute it, but can you imagine the conflicts of interest here? The original authors will claim this their work is 99% and the patch 1%, the patcher will claims the opposite. Any system you can think of with votes, lines of codes, feature points and so on would be abused to absurdity to control the revenue flow. And what happens with absentees, forks and attempted coups would be common if you don't need everyone to agree yet if you can't do anything without approval from everyone who ever wrote any of the code it's totally stillborn. And that's not even considering the practical issues of a collection organization who'd generously dip into those funds for administration, infringement lawsuits and so on who also have their own agenda.
Forking a project would be totally impossible, today you can take the code and drop all difficult personalities, dysfunctional organizations and start your entirely own project. But if those people have revenue demands on the code, you can't get rid of them. A variation of this is probably to write people out of the code and take over their revenue, that could certainly get the conflict level up. Accusations that people are copy-pasting code, changing variable and function names then claiming it as their "own" part now would flourish. Once you directly tie the code to cash, you're introducing so many terrible effects I don't think you realize what you're asking for. People get *nasty* about money.
At some point having a 'rover' in say, the Oort cloud or on Pluto, is just to inefficient and humans will need to be closer or it will be the grand children of the original scientists analyzing the results of the vehicle launched by the grand parents. In this example it can take up to two decades to reach Pluto alone and even light can take 4 to 7 hours to get to Pluto from Earth. This would imply that we would send a command to move an inch or two and the next day get a response about that movement. This is science at a slugs pace.
Nice straw man you have there, too bad we already have autonomous systems that operate far smarter than that. The Mars rovers have a worst case 40 minute round trip (2x20 minutes) so drive-by-wire is already out of the question, they receive driving commands and instructions to use scientific instruments on points of interest once per martian day (24h 40min) and have rather advanced hazard avoidance systems to prevent it from getting stuck, its on-site generated maps are already more detailed than what can be sent back to earth. A 7 hours delay to Pluto doesn't really make any difference in how it would operate, within the solar system we're good handing out daily instructions from Earth. Outside the solar system we don't have any practical means of going with or without people, so that's a moot point right now.
And this is the best PR stunt they could make instead of just tossing it, recovering that video has next to no practical value for SpaceX. A little geek challenge while they wait for the next test closer to land that'll probably be filmed from many angles.
This standard should be applied to legal documents, such as License agreements, Insurance agreement, What your ELA is more than 100 words long, you don't expect anyone to read this do you? Agreement Invalid. If you need longer it should ensure that people understand what they are agreeing to, maybe run a 1 year course of something.
You do realize that even the 3 clause BSD licence is more than double that with 220 words? And that one basically says "do what you like, but we take no responsibility" and if you have a license that actually tries to say anything like the GPL 3.0 it is 4632 words, not including the preamble or how to apply. How many years of your life would you like to waste? If anybody cared, we'd rather see the development of "standard terms and conditions" which would be several thousand words long but also widely deployed on most COTS software. They generally want my money, which means as long as I pay them and they deliver something I want to pay for nobody really cares what the contract says.
That usually takes one of two forms, either they want to terminate it because they don't like my use or I want to terminate it because they're not delivering as promised. Since they write the contract and most don't care, the contract says they can terminate you for anything, any time and they promise essentially nothing. Practically I figure that the courts will protect me if there's anything really unconscionable in the contract and if they need an excuse to terminate they'll find it and it won't be worth fighting it in court anyway so the actual legal text almost doesn't matter. A license doesn't have to be negotiated, if an author wants to tell me "it's the GPLv3 or not at all" is just the same as an EULA saying "it's these terms or not at all", both sides don't have to give anything.
In real life I've met very few geeks who were genuinely mean. Most seem to believe in fair play, following the rules, good citizenship, do unto others.., etc.. However at first glance their poor social skills can make them seem uncaring.
Characters on a TV show aren't sampled from the average because the viewers would be bored to death. Sheldon was a rather over the top character right from the very beginning, even among the four of them he was the odd one. Throwing in a little superiority complex where he doesn't feel like he's getting enough recognition for his genius and making ploys to show how much smarter he is than everybody else seemed a not too unlikely phase that gave them a lot of stories to write. In fact, they needed to shake up the other characters a bit or it would be "The Sheldon Show", once they three other characters to play with in their own right Sheldon could step back a little again. He's not representative but are there Sheldons out there.... I think yes.
So I think the question-poster should instead investigate other ways to modulate their own behaviour (e.g. put a holder in the car, in a very visible location, that says "PHONE BATTERY GOES HERE", and always pull out the battery before turning on the car).
So what percentage of cell phone users does that actually work for these days?
However, I think they are vastly over-estimating their customers pain threshold. Especially when 3rd parties are starting to produce their own content and could offer a much more pleasant experience as a selling point.
Wasn't that exactly what people here on /. said about music like 10+ years ago, with the Internet all those independent artists would take over and the bland mainstream crap go away because everyone could so easily find music to their personal taste? I'm quite sure that didn't happen and that if it hasn't happened by now it's not going to happen. YouTube videos aren't a competition, even amateur film makers tends to fall miserably short on one or more aspects unlike music where one or a few talented musicians actually can make kick ass music. As long as they can take away all the other ways to get it (but good luck on that) they've got you over a barrel. People want to see the major blockbusters and they won't swap Lord of the Rings or The Dark Knight or The Avengers for amateur hour.
Well, if monitors will have DRM-signed EDID with physical dimensions, I'm sure we could have DRM-signed lumen ratings for projectors. That would be a quite good proxy. Of course the MPAA will probably just assume that you've invited all your friends and family to watch the movie, but hey... I'm sure they'll generously offer to install IR sensors and charge you by number of viewers instead.
That's why requiring a big upfront whole signed specification is useless. Users may not know what they want exactly, but they're very good at knowing it when they see it; they know exactly what problem they want to solve. Your job is to understand the problem well enough to build a solution;
No, they're very good at knowing that this is not the solution. What most people want is a computer that's practically mind-reading like on Star Trek, always understanding every nuance of an instruction and providing you with relevant information and solutions no matter how vague and ambigious the request. They may have a capacity planning problem, but you're not going to solve their problem. Maybe their real problem is that they're understaffed. Maybe their real problem is that their supply, demand and availability data is crap. Maybe their problem is executives rushing certain orders turning everything else into havoc. Maybe if you get coal as input your system can squeeze, shape and polish it into a diamond but if you get shit in, you'll have shit out no matter how much you spray it with perfume.
My impression is that if you've gotten to the point where you throw up "solution" after "solution" and they keep shooting them down you're on a death march project, people can stay unsatisified forever or at least until the money runs out and the project is cancelled as a gigantic failure. I agree that trying to figuring everything up front before coding behing is rather futile, but even in iterative design specs should precede code. If you haven't got good user stories, mock-ups, process flows descriptions and some real commitment and buy-in that this will solve the problem then there's really no chance that you'll be able to code an acceptable solution. You still have to drag it out of them, just in smaller pieces.
Or just set it to "click to run", that way a redirect to a malicious website will do nothing, a compromised banner ad will do nothing so they'd have to compromise actual flash content on a site you use. For bonus points you don't see flash ads. And if it gets too annoying to do a single click extra, you can always set up an exception for that site.
Personally what I miss the most these days is a setting to really block everything from opening up a new tab/window, no matter what link I clicked. Despite having popup-protection the scummy sites always find a way to open a new tab/window when you click a link, I'd like to just disable it. Either right-click, open in new tab/window or create a new tab (Ctrl-T/Ctrl-N) should be the absolutely only way. The rest you can block like a popup.
Well, it depends on how many problems people avoid before they become traffic problems. For example imagine that ahead of you there is a truck with apparently a poorly secured load, you can see it moving, ropes fraying so you hit the brakes and give yourself a wide gap in case it spills all over the road. That drunk pedestrian who looks like any moment he'll swerve into the road, maybe we should pass him with extra margin. Those kids that just sent a soccer ball across the road, is anyone running to get it without paying attention. That truck coming down a hill at an awful speed honking his horn, you have the right of way but maaaaaaaybe he's trying to tell you something. It might have 360 degree vision and lightning reflexes, but it might also need them to get out of situations a person would avoid altogether based on a deeper understanding of the world around him.
oh, right, you drive so much better then everyone else..just like everyone else is.
It's not that hard to beat the average and the ones who drag it down tend to not give a fuck. One is teenagers, I wasn't very good back then but hey the only way to get experience is to drive and you couldn't pry the license from the cold, dead hands of most them. Resulting in several total car wrecks and at least one person in my class who died in a 100 mph crash not that long after graduation. The other is the elderly, my mom finally gave up driving so now I can quite openly say that she should have given it up years ago. Realistically though, what are their options? Bicycle? Not a chance. Public transport? For a few things I guess, but mostly too far to walk and not going when and where it needs to go. Taxi? Possible I guess, but a simple trip to our cabin (1 hour drive x2 for trip/return x2 because they'll charge you both ways since they don't get return passengers) becomes hideously expensive even with the money saved on not having a car.
The same goes for everyone else with some health problem that really suggests they probably shouldn't be operating a motor vehicle and they know it. I think most families with small children would go crazy without cars, back when we didn't have cars we also mostly had stay-at-home moms. Or we're just temporarily impaired, like I've almost fallen asleep at the wheel and mostly likely only the rumble strips on the side kept me on the road. And even then I didn't stop, it was at the end of a five hour drive but I was only half an hour from my bed so I chanced it, loud blaring music, open windows to get fresh air rushing and caused myself a little pain to keep the body in alert mode. Stupid? Dangerous? Sure. But the alternatives sucked donkey balls, which is exactly why it doesn't matter if you're above or below average - you're not going to give it up anyway.
It should be good enough if the car's AI can say, in effect, "Listen, human, I can't take responsibility for driving in this snow storm. If you're comfortable driving in it, go ahead and take manual control. Otherwise, we're staying right here."
And if you're in the middle of some remote mountain pass, you haven't driven in ages since it handles regular conditions just fine and and the car just says "nuh uh, I'm not moving another inch" then what? It's not like staying to freeze is a real option, it's basically forcing you to take over at the worst possible time. It might be enough, but my guess not until a huge court case decides it's enough.
Unfortunately, not even nearly as intriguing as a mysteriously missing plane or the daily weather report for most of the humans presently making up "humanity".
Well, most of the time nothing newsworthy happens with the occasional huge discovery but it's practically impossible to average it out. CERN discovers the Higgs boson, off the scale news. The years of design, construction, testing, ramp-up and so on what's there to report but "we're working on it, we were working on it yesterday and we'll keep working on it tomorrow", it's not a process built to entertain an audience. Just because it's important doesn't mean there's a whole lot to say about it until it's done, unless you're interested in tedious technical details. Also as far as media companies are concerned, all their competitors will have the exact same story so it's market neutral, they're all looking for unique material that'll send all the traffic to their site. As a businessman I'd rather push an exclusive story about something less important than being one of a thousand reporting the same thing.