I wish they wouldn't give people's names out if they are only accused. I could accuse Pat Robertson (say) of molesting children, but it wouldn't make it true. Tell us after there's a conviction.
And yes, that way some people who did wrong but were not convicted go unreported, but better that than destroy someone's life in error. We have no idea if the person mentioned actually did anything to the boy or not.
A few people have asked whether DB2 is going to support XQuery, or said that it won't, or that putting XML in databases is stupid, or that there are no advantages to having XML in relational databases.
The IBM article does say that their Viper product will support XML Query (it's also known as XQuery).
So yes, looks like they will be supporting XML Query.
Is it a good thing? Some pretty smart people seem to think it's a good idea, so maybe it's worth at least taking the time to listen to them.
If the only XML you've dealt with is the result of marking up relational tables, you might not see much advantage.
If you have a lot of XML documents, though (say, five million) that all validate to an XML Schema, you know some things about them. You might know, for example, that all of the price elements contain numbers. You might know that the description elements may contain embedded partnumber elements intermixed with the text, and that those partnumber elements contain part numbers formatted a particular way.
A database can build an index based on this sort of information, and can do very efficient searches and "joins".
You might also think about what you could do if you had all of the XHTML documents from some major Web site (perhaps an Intranet corporate site, or maybe your own personal site) stored in a database in such a way that you could easily make different views of the information.
I think the real niche for XQuery might be as middleware: the ability to run queries against multiple databases, whether XML or relational or flat file or whatever, without caring about how the data is stored, can be very interesting, not to say useful.
ISO SQL has also standardised on how to map between SQL and XML Query data types, and on how to evaluate XML Query expressions embedded in SQL expressions. The Java Community Process has been working on XQJ, a way to reach out to XQuery data stores from within Java.
The XML Query Home Page (disclaimer: I maintain this) lists some 45 implementations, both proprietary and open source. Not all of these are complete, but, as others have noted here, XML Query is a W3C Candidate Recommendation: we're asking for public feedback from implementors, and trying to make sure that the specification is clear and precise enough that implementations all work the same way.
I think XML Query support in SQL databases is likely to become pretty widespread. Until it is, you can also use some open source implementations that support JDBC, as well as one or other of the commercial implementations that support query optimisation over external SQL-based data stores.
I won't suggest a programming language because that's not what you're asking...
A good theoretical undergraduate computer science degree should teach you things like algorithmic complexity, finite state machines and automata theory, sets and group theory (if your middle or high school didn't do that already), graph theory, data structures, and a bunch of other groundwork.
As other have said, you can pick up the MIT coursework for free, but what you can't get is the sessions with a tutor, the late-night hacking sessions in the computer room with other students, the time spent talking with others sharing the same path.
Short of going back to school, look at some university text books, and maybe get involved in a programming project with other people, so that you can interact with people who do know this stuff and you can ask the questions. Some people find that hanging out on IRC can help them if they are isolated, but find a good place where there are people with a wide range of skills and backgrounds.
There are also programmer-specific blogging sites (e.g. Advogato.org) that you can read and where you can ask questions.
There is an advantage to using strongly-typed compiled programming language (e.g. Haskel, ML or CAML) in that you have to understand what you're doing and get it right before the program will compile, forcing you to step back and think at an earlier stage. Not everyone likes this, though, and (as I promised!) I'm not going to say that there's a particular language you should learn first. The important part, as you so clearly know, is the understanding of the underlying concepts.
Beware, by the way, that some course text books are primarily for reference, and some are a lot easier to read (obviously) than others. Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming is a classic, but it's also pretty hard going, especially if you don't have a mathematical background.
You should also pick up an Introduction to Mathematics book (at University level) if you're not comfortable with reading mathematical notation (forall, exists, set membership, etc) as it's widely used in computer science.
I once wrote a preprocessor for troff(1) that drew diagrams showing how to wire various types of serial cable.
Today I'd probably consider using GraphViz (open source graph renderer that takes a simple text description and figures out the best layout), perhaps with a simple database backend to let you update the information over the Web and draw a new picture automatically.
I'm assuming you got the images of the hardware from the manufacturer's Web site; you could use the same images in GraphViz, with a little work, but the result would be something that, once set up, could keep the pictures up-to-date automatically, suitable for printing out and sticking on the cabinet doors:-)
The hard part is getting everyone to keep the information up to date. Making sure the end of every cable is clearly labeled (e.g. with a wide cable tie, a luggage tag, or a sharpie pen used to write on the connector or the cable) can help a lot.
For my collection of images scanned from antiquarian books I am now using an Epson E10000 3200dpi scanner that does A3+ (18"x12" roughly) and am very happy with it. I generally scan in Windows because the Linux Sane interface doesn't know how to focus the lens.
For your little sister you might want something rugged, depending on how little she is:-) For sheet music, though, larger than letter size is worth considering: there are several A3/tabloid scanners around. You will need at least 300dpi (native, not interpolated) for OCR, and possibly higher.
A USB interface is the simplest, although if you have firewire on your computer that may be faster.
For graphic art work you need to be able to do colour calibration. For OCR, you probably will use grayscale most of the time. You can get some good solid greyscale sheet-fed scanners on ebay pretty cheaply, although make sure they're in your area: I wouldn't trust the shipping.
As others have said, look for TWAIN, and for scanners that work on multiple operating systems.
If you do a lot of scanning you'll need extra hard disk storage and a way to back it up, such as a DVD writer or a tape drive.
The GNOME project has some open source accessibility tools that are very easy to set up and use; the major Linux distributions such as Mandriva already include them. See the Gnome Accessibility Project pages for a good overview.
There is an on-screen keyboard; there's also Dasher a predictive text entry system which some people find useful and which can be used via a pointer device.
I'll also mention that there are pointer devices that use a dot on your forehead, so you move your head, which can be useful for people who have tremors in their hands; another option can be foot pedals. The Dasher page mentions use of an eye-tracker.
As others have mentioned, voice-over-IP can be useful, and tools like gnome-meeting and an always-on webcam might be worth considering.
The World Wide Web Consortium also has some resources about accessibility.
In the UK it is sometimes awarded for an undergraduate course whose final year consists of higher-level courses and a major research project
and, under North America, The master's degree is intermediate between a bachelor's degree and a doctorate.
People in the UK generally are (or used to be) unlikely to get a Master's unless they are going on to do a PhD and didn't get a First or 2-1 (an "A" if you prefer). But in North America un undergraduate degree isn't valued as much (and is perhaps easier to get), so e.g. employers or research institutes may look for a master's.
So what I meant is that the names are not exactly equivalent, not that someone with a Master's degree from the US, going to the UK, will be treated as if they had only an undergraduate degree!
Start by asking yourself what you expect to get out of studying in another country, and why that country in particular.
There are some Canadian universities that at least at one time were very good for post-graduate graphics work, for example, and I think one in Singapore.
Note also that a Masters in North America is treated like a BSc in the UK, so you'll probably have to do a Master's before you can do further studies, but the master's degree in the US might only be one year. So there are some differences in terminology.
One approach to help you decide might be to investigate authors of up-to-date graduate level text books, and people who are publishing interesting papers (e.g. ACM SIGGRAPH), see where they are teaching, and see what some of their past students have done.
Another obvious approach is to compare the Web sites of some of the schools (as they call them) that interest you, and see what the course looks like. If the Masters in Graphics requires a course in Adobe PhotoShop and another in Adobe Illustrator, it's probably not what you want! (and yes, there are courses with such requirements).
The level of teaching varies wildly, much more than you might expect, as does the cost. Canada tends to be cheapr than the US if that helps any.
If you are going abroad to get a different experience, you'll find Kentucky State University very different from the University of California, and that in turn is different from MIT (in Cambridge, MA, a conurbation with Boston). My husband did a degree in Fine Art in upstate New York (maybe 8 hours' drive from New York city) and the people in the town there are very conservative and "redneck", openly racist and homophobic (e.g. a pizza store that didn't serve blacks), but on the other hand a wonderful faculty and campus. Horrible weather though, with nine feet of snow in one or two weeks in the winter, and over 100F with high humidity in the summer.
In general the two coasts of the US tend to be more tolerant than the middle of the country. If you are not white, the North is a better bet than the South.
So, narrow down your choices by listing your priorities, and maybe post them here. Then go and do some research. You can also email people teaching computer graphics, or working in industry, and ask their opinion, but make sure you do some research first, so you don't just waste their time.
I used to have a T28. It was a really good phone and I liked it a lot.
I switched to a Motorola V300 because I needed to learn about newer features such as Internet access.
Every now and again I think about going back to the T28. The Motorola phone has a button on the outside of the phone that changes the ring mode. I usually have the phone on Vibrate + Ring, but while I'm carrying it around it often sets itself to Silent and I miss calls. A friend with the same phone sawed off the button.
The alarm clock on the V300 is also (at least with the Rogers setup) literally over 50 keypresses to change the time and enable.
The timezone changing has two modes: change timezone automatically when you travel, or don't. The T28 could ask you, "Update time to..." when it got sent a new timezone, and that was massively more useful, because not all providers send the information, so the time on my Motorola phone is unreliable when I travel.
The keypad and calling is OK, although the red Off button goes to speakerphone mode during a call, and you have to press it again to end the call, being careful to use two short presses as one long press would turn off the phone altogether. I note that the phone company makes money if you can't hang up without going through speakerphone mode for a few seconds. Bastards.
I don't want another Motorola phone based on my experience.
I just got back from the WWW 2005 World Wide Web Conference, where I ran a session about the future of XML. A week from now I'm off to Amsterdam for XTech (used to be XML Europe).
Conferences can be useful not just for papers but also to meet people who are doing interesting work, and to try and get a feel for recent ideas. In many ways I prefer them to the journals.
Some people dismiss research and say they are in "the real world" but in fact universities and research laboratories are real places; I've seen them! I would not feel comfortable saying that one aspect of society is more important or more "real" than another. Yes, follow recent research, find some conferences to go to and some blogs to read, and maybe follow some journals.
Be more productive at work because you're smart, not just because you're whipped harder:-)
Many times I've seen someone solve a problem by knowing an algorithm or technique, or by knowing how to find one, where another programmer was entirely stuck or took weeks to do something that might have been done in a few days.
However, the quantity of DDoS attacks on the net using forged src addresses indicates that it's not an unusual situation. Part of the problem is home users without a firewall at all, of course. (a software firewall can be disabled by a sufficiently sophisticated virus, for outgoing packets, of course, since it's software).
right, it's egress at the ISP boundary going out, and ingres at the boundary coming in -- we're not disagreeing I think, just looking at it from opposite ends:-)
At any rate, yes, spoofed addresses are what makes it all but impossible to deal with DDOS attacks these days.
Some ISPs are doing customer-level ingres filtering -- e.g. if the "other end" of the cable modem gets a packet whose src address is not that of the cable modem, drop it on the floor, it's forged.
The ease of infecting home XP systems remotely means you sometimes find teenagers with tens of thousands of zombie computers at their control. They can sell them to spammers, too.
The ease of doing massive DDoS attacks is why I stopped running an IRC server, and also stopped a research project I was doing related to inter-protocol messaging. It wasn't worth the hassle.
Fighting back is hard if you don't know who to fight, but in the case of extortion, (1) document everything on paper, (2) keep timestamped printed IRC logs of all conversations, and full email printouts; (3) ask some other people to print copies of their IRC logs when appropriate. Then contact the RCMP (or if you are in the USA, the FBI, but in the USA you need to show financial damage of $5,000 or more). Don't wait until it's all over before contacting them.
One day you might not want to be a systems administrator. Or you night find that because of advances in Microsoft Windows fewer staff are needed. Or the company you work for might switch to Linux, and you suddenly find your skills don't transfer over as well as you had hoped, and some newer college kid gets your job. You might find that some aspects of system administration get outsourced to a virtual call centre in India.
In a lot of large companies, to get into management, you need a degree. Experience alone isn't enough.
> The University will waste your time and money with classes that have no bearing on your job. No. Life is about more than a job, and university will give yuo a much broader perspective. Unless you want to be a corporate drone or slave for the rest ofyour life, you need to about things that you might not choose to study by yourself. And one day you'll need the contacts, too, the people you met, and the ability to take a longer-term view of life.
A trade school is OK perhaps if you want to be a tradesman, but think of all the CP/M administration skills people learned at trade schools. Not heard of CP/M? Try MS-DOS. What will you learn? Windows 98? Windows XP? It'll be as obsolete within five years. So you need to learn how to learn, and to do that you need to go to the right place for you, and no-one else can tell you where that is.
Try to talk to people who graduated, and see if you can find people similar to yourself.
Your interests will also change (mine did) as you encounter new ideas. The more new ideas you encounter early on, the better idea you'll have of what you want to do, what interests you, what you're good at. The money isn't wasted., unless you throw it away by ignoring the oportunities.
My husband (yes, we're a same-sex couple) went back to university to study art in his 40s.
University courses are geared to high-energy teens and twenties people. The workload might not seem all that high at the time, but when you're older it can also be harder to learn new things, at least partly becuase you have to unlearn a lot of assumptions.
A common reason to go back to school is a career change and all that knowledge you picked up doesn't help you as much as you might think.
But if you're going back to study computer science after being a COBOL programmer for twenty years, you'll find that that you have a lot more habits you have to break: getting a degree isn't about getting a job of work done or writing working code, it's about convincing your teachers that you understand what they are telling you, even if you don't agree with it. And that too can be hard.
Even living in a dorm room can be difficult when you're older, if you don't "fit in" very well, depending on the university of course.
Every now and then a map I drew about 15 years ago of a fragment of a quasi-mediaeval European town shows up. I was fed up of American maps of "mediaeval cities" in which there were perfectly square city blocks with a FedEx drop-off box on every corner.
On Linux today I'd probably look at using either Grass (a fairly complex GIS program for the hard-core enthusiast) or a vector-based drawing program such as Inkscape.
It's useful to have a drawing program that handles layers (Inkscape does these days), and a vector-based rather than bitmap program is good because (1) the maps print OK, (2) when you ditch that old 640x480 screen and go for 24,000 x 9,000 pixels:-) you can still find the map, and (3) you can zoom without it getting blocky, and (4) you can edit it later.
If you insist on using a raster/bitmap program like GIMP, use a separate layer for everything and keep text layers as text for as ong as possible, so you can edit them. Maps with spelling errors look really stupid. Plus it's neat to be able to go back and add detail during the campaign.
If you give the players a copy of the map file, export it to a bitmap first, with the layers containing your own notes well hidden! Or first save the file, then carefully delete the layers you don't want them to see, and then save a copy under a different name and send that. But that process is error-prone especially if you're tired.
I sometimes gave players incorrect maps, e.g. badly remembered or done with "poor cartography", and they'd end up piecing the truth up from the obvious contradictions. E.g. one had an entire country whose existence was censored:-)
There are a number of clip-art fonts around with map symbols. Some are commercial (I'm sure you respect commercial licences, since you want the GPL to be respected, right?) such as Adobe's Carta, but there are some free ones too. There are also some low-cost fonts especially for making RPG maps by David Nalle at Fontcraft's Scriptorium. I think they have some non-Free non-free software for Microsoft Windows too.
An alternative to clip art fonts is to make your own symbol library, e.g. by drawing pointy muontains and so forth with a pencil, colouring them with crayons, and scanning the result before and after adding colour. You could then trace these in a program like Inkscape, too.
I've been working on scanning images from antiquarian books for a few years, and recently started opening the process up so others can help out. The current state is at Pictures from old books; the new collaborative site will be fromoldbooks.org (since there are textual transcriptions as well as images), probably in a month or so.
Why not have your patent policy say that if you want to be part of the standard, you donate your patent to the public domain The patent policy is only effective if the major patent holders in any given area participate in the development of the specification. So the patent policy is a compromise, a sort of uneasy truce, so that we can try to keep the Web free. If we ask too much of patent holders, they simply walk away. We lost some even with the policy we have.
It's not like there aren't a large number of strong computer scientists that couldn't create other viable protocols. Success of a specification isn't just about elegance of design. If it was, I don't know that SGML, HTML and XML would have got very far. It's about widespread adoption. For that to happen, you have to have buy-in of the major players. Otherwise they go off and do something on their own and impose it on people, which they vastly prefer doing.
So you end up putting in features to support legacy systems (pretty much everyone does this -- remember GECOS constants in C?) and you end up trying hard to get the big players involved.
IBM makes over $4bn, as I recall, from licensing patents to other firms. It's hard to persuade them to give patents away. They're the largest in our business, but most other big organizations have large patent portfolios. They use them to fend off attacks: Oh, you want to charge us a royalty on our Gizmo because it uses X? Well, your gizmo uses Y, Z, W and P, and those are just as expensive!
The people bickering are lawyers with (generally) no interest in or knowledge of the technical details, so arguments go beyond technical details. The argument taht they get early experience is a good one, and it's a lot of why some of our (W3C) Working Groups have to be member-confidential: because some significant players wouldn't participate otherwise.
It'd be great to live in a world where everyone was honest and trustworthy and friendly and didn't wear shoes, but, unfortunately, we don't live in such a world. We can (and do) try to change the world,but until it changes, or while it changes, we also have to live with it as it is today.
That's a bit of a general answer, but I hope it makes things clearer!
When people get involved in developing a spec, and at the same time patent things that are necessary to implement that spec ("essential", as the patent lawyers say), and then submerge, wait until the spec is widely adopted, and then announce their patent, this is sometimes called a submarine patent attack.
It's partly to prevent these that we (W3C) have our patent policy, which requires all participants to sign an agreement saying (more or less) they agree to let people implement the spec without paying royalties, even if they own patents that would otherwise apply.
It's all a big mess -- and patents also don't fit well with the GPL, of course, and neither does our patent policy, although FSF participated and we did the best we could: the problem is that you might want to take, say, an HTTP server, and re-use the network code for some other server. But if someone has a patent on servers, to which they have granted royalty free use for HTTP only, you may now have to pay them a royalty for the code.
Patents are intended to encourage innovation by ensuring inventors get royalties. Unfortunately the current system seems to have some disadvantages.
Note: I have no idea whether the slashdot story is correct in this instance about this patent, nor, if the patent is essential to implementing IPv6, whether Microsoft plans to enforce royalties or forbid implementations.
True, I was trying to reply in the context of the original question. If you subcontract to a fulfillment house, for example, you may well have to supply fields provided by their Web service API or whatever. But if you design some flexibility into your system from the beginning, the extra customer service can help you grow, and even if you have to deal with a small percentage of orders by hand or weed them out and send them to a separate agent it might still be worth it, as long as you can do the filtering automatically.
Maybe you are shipping things that your country doesn't allow to be sent to those places, I don't know. I don't see anything wrong with sending things to Romania or Nigeria, as long as you get paid.
If you require that my billing address match the shipping address, you had beeter not be in the gift business. I have many times sent people christmas or birthday presents that I ordered online. I paid, and the item was shipped elsewhere. Even Amazon manages this.
The relational model is an approximation, of course, and where it doesn't quite fit, you have to decide whether to lose a few customers or to tweak your model.
In the case of addresses, "use alternative address for this customer" is just fine for most purposes, especially if the final printed package will be checked by a human when the label is fastened, and fits within a relational database.
If you are on a slow dialup connection at 9600 baud, the difference between 2K and 10K is approx. 8 seconds, but with compression this is likely to fall to less than half that, and you're likely to be waiting far, far longer for the images (like the icons by every slashdot story).
You will still download the content for the side banners, since that's in the main HTML document and not CSS (CSS is too limited in generating content to make actual ads with links in them).
So really what you're doing is making a few pages download faster but making a lot of pages look uglier or be harder to navigate and use.
A well-designed site using XHTML and CSS downloads faster, because there's no need to use <font> elements, there are fewer tables, fewer images.
Rather than trying to make other people's Web sites break for you, have you considered writing to the webmaster of the sites that cause you problems, politely explaining why they should spend more money developing their Web site?
How did you gather statistical evidence suggesting the ratio of useful to bad CSS is 1:1000? Most people don't notice CSS at all when it's done well, so opinions tend to be skewed here, I suspect. But I'd be very interested to see some independent research in this area.
Slashdot Mirror
I wish they wouldn't give people's names out if they are only accused. I could accuse Pat Robertson (say) of molesting children, but it wouldn't make it true. Tell us after there's a conviction.
And yes, that way some people who did wrong but were not convicted go unreported, but better that than destroy someone's life in error. We have no idea if the person mentioned actually did anything to the boy or not.
A few people have asked whether DB2 is going to support XQuery, or said that it won't, or that putting XML in databases is stupid, or that there are no advantages to having XML in relational databases.
The IBM article does say that their Viper product will support XML Query (it's also known as XQuery).
So yes, looks like they will be supporting XML Query.
Is it a good thing? Some pretty smart people seem to think it's a good idea, so maybe it's worth at least taking the time to listen to them.
If the only XML you've dealt with is the result of marking up relational tables, you might not see much advantage.
If you have a lot of XML documents, though (say, five million) that all validate to an XML Schema, you know some things about them. You might know, for example, that all of the price elements contain numbers. You might know that the description elements may contain embedded partnumber elements intermixed with the text, and that those partnumber elements contain part numbers formatted a particular way.
A database can build an index based on this sort of information, and can do very efficient searches and "joins".
You might also think about what you could do if you had all of the XHTML documents from some major Web site (perhaps an Intranet corporate site, or maybe your own personal site) stored in a database in such a way that you could easily make different views of the information.
I think the real niche for XQuery might be as middleware: the ability to run queries against multiple databases, whether XML or relational or flat file or whatever, without caring about how the data is stored, can be very interesting, not to say useful.
ISO SQL has also standardised on how to map between SQL and XML Query data types, and on how to evaluate XML Query expressions embedded in SQL expressions. The Java Community Process has been working on XQJ, a way to reach out to XQuery data stores from within Java.
The XML Query Home Page (disclaimer: I maintain this) lists some 45 implementations, both proprietary and open source. Not all of these are complete, but, as others have noted here, XML Query is a W3C Candidate Recommendation: we're asking for public feedback from implementors, and trying to make sure that the specification is clear and precise enough that implementations all work the same way.
I think XML Query support in SQL databases is likely to become pretty widespread. Until it is, you can also use some open source implementations that support JDBC, as well as one or other of the commercial implementations that support query optimisation over external SQL-based data stores.
The virus signed an exclusive press contract? Now I'm *really* worried. A literate virus?
I won't suggest a programming language because that's not what you're asking...
A good theoretical undergraduate computer science degree should teach you things like algorithmic complexity, finite state machines and automata theory, sets and group theory (if your middle or high school didn't do that already), graph theory, data structures, and a bunch of other groundwork.
As other have said, you can pick up the MIT coursework for free, but what you can't get is the sessions with a tutor, the late-night hacking sessions in the computer room with other students, the time spent talking with others sharing the same path.
Short of going back to school, look at some university text books, and maybe get involved in a programming project with other people, so that you can interact with people who do know this stuff and you can ask the questions. Some people find that hanging out on IRC can help them if they are isolated, but find a good place where there are people with a wide range of skills and backgrounds.
There are also programmer-specific blogging sites (e.g. Advogato.org) that you can read and where you can ask questions.
There is an advantage to using strongly-typed compiled programming language (e.g. Haskel, ML or CAML) in that you have to understand what you're doing and get it right before the program will compile, forcing you to step back and think at an earlier stage. Not everyone likes this, though, and (as I promised!) I'm not going to say that there's a particular language you should learn first. The important part, as you so clearly know, is the understanding of the underlying concepts.
Beware, by the way, that some course text books are primarily for reference, and some are a lot easier to read (obviously) than others. Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming is a classic, but it's also pretty hard going, especially if you don't have a mathematical background.
You should also pick up an Introduction to Mathematics book (at University level) if you're not comfortable with reading mathematical notation (forall, exists, set membership, etc) as it's widely used in computer science.
Hope this helps!
I once wrote a preprocessor for troff(1) that drew diagrams showing how to wire various types of serial cable.
:-)
Today I'd probably consider using GraphViz (open source graph renderer that takes a simple text description and figures out the best layout), perhaps with a simple database backend to let you update the information over the Web and draw a new picture automatically.
I'm assuming you got the images of the hardware from the manufacturer's Web site; you could use the same images in GraphViz, with a little work, but the result would be something that, once set up, could keep the pictures up-to-date automatically, suitable for printing out and sticking on the cabinet doors
The hard part is getting everyone to keep the information up to date. Making sure the end of every cable is clearly labeled (e.g. with a wide cable tie, a luggage tag, or a sharpie pen used to write on the connector or the cable) can help a lot.
Liam
For my collection of images scanned from antiquarian books I am now using an Epson E10000 3200dpi scanner that does A3+ (18"x12" roughly) and am very happy with it. I generally scan in Windows because the Linux Sane interface doesn't know how to focus the lens.
:-) For sheet music, though, larger than letter size is worth considering: there are several A3/tabloid scanners around. You will need at least 300dpi (native, not interpolated) for OCR, and possibly higher.
For your little sister you might want something rugged, depending on how little she is
A USB interface is the simplest, although if you have firewire on your computer that may be faster.
For graphic art work you need to be able to do colour calibration. For OCR, you probably will use grayscale most of the time. You can get some good solid greyscale sheet-fed scanners on ebay pretty cheaply, although make sure they're in your area: I wouldn't trust the shipping.
As others have said, look for TWAIN, and for scanners that work on multiple operating systems.
If you do a lot of scanning you'll need extra hard disk storage and a way to back it up, such as a DVD writer or a tape drive.
The GNOME project has some open source accessibility tools that are very easy to set up and use; the major Linux distributions such as Mandriva already include them. See the Gnome Accessibility Project pages for a good overview.
There is an on-screen keyboard; there's also Dasher a predictive text entry system which some people find useful and which can be used via a pointer device.
I'll also mention that there are pointer devices that use a dot on your forehead, so you move your head, which can be useful for people who have tremors in their hands; another option can be foot pedals. The Dasher page mentions use of an eye-tracker.
As others have mentioned, voice-over-IP can be useful, and tools like gnome-meeting and an always-on webcam might be worth considering.
The World Wide Web Consortium also has some resources about accessibility.
From the wikipedia article you mention:
In the UK it is sometimes awarded for an undergraduate course whose final year consists of higher-level courses and a major research project
and, under North America, The master's degree is intermediate between a bachelor's degree and a doctorate.
People in the UK generally are (or used to be) unlikely to get a Master's unless they are going on to do a PhD and didn't get a First or 2-1 (an "A" if you prefer). But in North America un undergraduate degree isn't valued as much (and is perhaps easier to get), so e.g. employers or research institutes may look for a master's.
So what I meant is that the names are not exactly equivalent, not that someone with a Master's degree from the US, going to the UK, will be treated as if they had only an undergraduate degree!
Start by asking yourself what you expect to get out of studying in another country, and why that country in particular.
There are some Canadian universities that at least at one time were very good for post-graduate graphics work, for example, and I think one in Singapore.
Note also that a Masters in North America is treated like a BSc in the UK, so you'll probably have to do a Master's before you can do further studies, but the master's degree in the US might only be one year. So there are some differences in terminology.
One approach to help you decide might be to investigate authors of up-to-date graduate level text books, and people who are publishing interesting papers (e.g. ACM SIGGRAPH), see where they are teaching, and see what some of their past students have done.
Another obvious approach is to compare the Web sites of some of the schools (as they call them) that interest you, and see what the course looks like. If the Masters in Graphics requires a course in Adobe PhotoShop and another in Adobe Illustrator, it's probably not what you want! (and yes, there are courses with such requirements).
The level of teaching varies wildly, much more than you might expect, as does the cost. Canada tends to be cheapr than the US if that helps any.
If you are going abroad to get a different experience, you'll find Kentucky State University very different from the University of California, and that in turn is different from MIT (in Cambridge, MA, a conurbation with Boston). My husband did a degree in Fine Art in upstate New York (maybe 8 hours' drive from New York city) and the people in the town there are very conservative and "redneck", openly racist and homophobic (e.g. a pizza store that didn't serve blacks), but on the other hand a wonderful faculty and campus. Horrible weather though, with nine feet of snow in one or two weeks in the winter, and over 100F with high humidity in the summer.
In general the two coasts of the US tend to be more tolerant than the middle of the country. If you are not white, the North is a better bet than the South.
So, narrow down your choices by listing your priorities, and maybe post them here. Then go and do some research. You can also email people teaching computer graphics, or working in industry, and ask their opinion, but make sure you do some research first, so you don't just waste their time.
Liam
I used to have a T28. It was a really good phone and I liked it a lot.
I switched to a Motorola V300 because I needed to learn about newer features such as Internet access.
Every now and again I think about going back to the T28. The Motorola phone has a button on the outside of the phone that changes the ring mode. I usually have the phone on Vibrate + Ring, but while I'm carrying it around it often sets itself to Silent and I miss calls. A friend with the same phone sawed off the button.
The alarm clock on the V300 is also (at least with the Rogers setup) literally over 50 keypresses to change the time and enable.
The timezone changing has two modes: change timezone automatically when you travel, or don't. The T28 could ask you, "Update time to..." when it got sent a new timezone, and that was massively more useful, because not all providers send the information, so the time on my Motorola phone is unreliable when I travel.
The keypad and calling is OK, although the red Off button goes to speakerphone mode during a call, and you have to press it again to end the call, being careful to use two short presses as one long press would turn off the phone altogether. I note that the phone company makes money if you can't hang up without going through speakerphone mode for a few seconds. Bastards.
I don't want another Motorola phone based on my experience.
I just got back from the WWW 2005 World Wide Web Conference, where I ran a session about the future of XML. A week from now I'm off to Amsterdam for XTech (used to be XML Europe).
:-)
Conferences can be useful not just for papers but also to meet people who are doing interesting work, and to try and get a feel for recent ideas. In many ways I prefer them to the journals.
Some people dismiss research and say they are in "the real world" but in fact universities and research laboratories are real places; I've seen them! I would not feel comfortable saying that one aspect of society is more important or more "real" than another. Yes, follow recent research, find some conferences to go to and some blogs to read, and maybe follow some journals.
Be more productive at work because you're smart, not just because you're whipped harder
Many times I've seen someone solve a problem by knowing an algorithm or technique, or by knowing how to find one, where another programmer was entirely stuck or took weeks to do something that might have been done in a few days.
Liam
My firewall is doing that.
However, the quantity of DDoS attacks on the net using forged src addresses indicates that it's not an unusual situation. Part of the problem is home users without a firewall at all, of course. (a software firewall can be disabled by a sufficiently sophisticated virus, for outgoing packets, of course, since it's software).
Best,
Liam
irc.sorcery.net did survive, but I took away the two servers I had there. It wasn't worth the hassle, and I was also worried about liability.
Liam
right, it's egress at the ISP boundary going out, and ingres at the boundary coming in -- we're not disagreeing I think, just looking at it from opposite ends :-)
At any rate, yes, spoofed addresses are what makes it all but impossible to deal with DDOS attacks these days.
Thanks for posting the link.
Liam
Some ISPs are doing customer-level ingres filtering -- e.g. if the "other end" of the cable modem gets a packet whose src address is not that of the cable modem, drop it on the floor, it's forged.
The ease of infecting home XP systems remotely means you sometimes find teenagers with tens of thousands of zombie computers at their control. They can sell them to spammers, too.
The ease of doing massive DDoS attacks is why I stopped running an IRC server, and also stopped a research project I was doing related to inter-protocol messaging. It wasn't worth the hassle.
Fighting back is hard if you don't know who to fight, but in the case of extortion, (1) document everything on paper, (2) keep timestamped printed IRC logs of all conversations, and full email printouts; (3) ask some other people to print copies of their IRC logs when appropriate. Then contact the RCMP (or if you are in the USA, the FBI, but in the USA you need to show financial damage of $5,000 or more). Don't wait until it's all over before contacting them.
Good luck!
Liam
One day you might not want to be a systems administrator. Or you night find that because of advances in Microsoft Windows fewer staff are needed. Or the company you work for might switch to Linux, and you suddenly find your skills don't transfer over as well as you had hoped, and some newer college kid gets your job. You might find that some aspects of system administration get outsourced to a virtual call centre in India.
In a lot of large companies, to get into management, you need a degree. Experience alone isn't enough.
> The University will waste your time and money with classes that have no bearing on your job.
No. Life is about more than a job, and university will give yuo a much broader perspective. Unless you want to be a corporate drone or slave for the rest ofyour life, you need to about things that you might not choose to study by yourself. And one day you'll need the contacts, too, the people you met, and the ability to take a longer-term view of life.
A trade school is OK perhaps if you want to be a tradesman, but think of all the CP/M administration skills people learned at trade schools. Not heard of CP/M? Try MS-DOS. What will you learn? Windows 98? Windows XP? It'll be as obsolete within five years. So you need to learn how to learn, and to do that you need to go to the right place for you, and no-one else can tell you where that is.
Try to talk to people who graduated, and see if you can find people similar to yourself.
Your interests will also change (mine did) as you encounter new ideas. The more new ideas you encounter early on, the better idea you'll have of what you want to do, what interests you, what you're good at. The money isn't wasted., unless you throw it away by ignoring the oportunities.
Liam
My husband (yes, we're a same-sex couple) went back to university to study art in his 40s.
University courses are geared to high-energy teens and twenties people. The workload might not seem all that high at the time, but when you're older it can also be harder to learn new things, at least partly becuase you have to unlearn a lot of assumptions.
A common reason to go back to school is a career change and all that knowledge you picked up doesn't help you as much as you might think.
But if you're going back to study computer science after being a COBOL programmer for twenty years, you'll find that that you have a lot more habits you have to break: getting a degree isn't about getting a job of work done or writing working code, it's about convincing your teachers that you understand what they are telling you, even if you don't agree with it. And that too can be hard.
Even living in a dorm room can be difficult when you're older, if you don't "fit in" very well, depending on the university of course.
Liam
Every now and then a map I drew about 15 years ago of a fragment of a quasi-mediaeval European town shows up. I was fed up of American maps of "mediaeval cities" in which there were perfectly square city blocks with a FedEx drop-off box on every corner.
:-) you can still find the map, and (3) you can zoom without it getting blocky, and (4) you can edit it later.
:-)
Pro Fantasy used some of my pictures and plans of castles from my pictures and texts from old books Web site, so I link back to them, but as far as I can tell their products or for Microsoft Windows. They gave me a free Castles program, but I didn't try it under WINE.
On Linux today I'd probably look at using either Grass (a fairly complex GIS program for the hard-core enthusiast) or a vector-based drawing program such as Inkscape.
It's useful to have a drawing program that handles layers (Inkscape does these days), and a vector-based rather than bitmap program is good because (1) the maps print OK, (2) when you ditch that old 640x480 screen and go for 24,000 x 9,000 pixels
If you insist on using a raster/bitmap program like GIMP, use a separate layer for everything and keep text layers as text for as ong as possible, so you can edit them. Maps with spelling errors look really stupid. Plus it's neat to be able to go back and add detail during the campaign.
If you give the players a copy of the map file, export it to a bitmap first, with the layers containing your own notes well hidden! Or first save the file, then carefully delete the layers you don't want them to see, and then save a copy under a different name and send that. But that process is error-prone especially if you're tired.
I sometimes gave players incorrect maps, e.g. badly remembered or done with "poor cartography", and they'd end up piecing the truth up from the obvious contradictions. E.g. one had an entire country whose existence was censored
There are a number of clip-art fonts around with map symbols. Some are commercial (I'm sure you respect commercial licences, since you want the GPL to be respected, right?) such as Adobe's Carta, but there are some free ones too. There are also some low-cost fonts especially for making RPG maps by David Nalle at Fontcraft's Scriptorium. I think they have some non-Free non-free software for Microsoft Windows too.
An alternative to clip art fonts is to make your own symbol library, e.g. by drawing pointy muontains and so forth with a pencil, colouring them with crayons, and scanning the result before and after adding colour. You could then trace these in a program like Inkscape, too.
Liam
I've been working on scanning images from antiquarian books for a few years, and recently started opening the process up so others can help out. The current state is at Pictures from old books; the new collaborative site will be fromoldbooks.org (since there are textual transcriptions as well as images), probably in a month or so.
Why not have your patent policy say that if you want to be part of the standard, you donate your patent to the public domain
The patent policy is only effective if the major patent holders in any given area participate in the development of the specification. So the patent policy is a compromise, a sort of uneasy truce, so that we can try to keep the Web free. If we ask too much of patent holders, they simply walk away. We lost some even with the policy we have.
It's not like there aren't a large number of strong computer scientists that couldn't create other viable protocols.
Success of a specification isn't just about elegance of design. If it was, I don't know that SGML, HTML and XML would have got very far. It's about widespread adoption. For that to happen, you have to have buy-in of the major players. Otherwise they go off and do something on their own and impose it on people, which they vastly prefer doing.
So you end up putting in features to support legacy systems (pretty much everyone does this -- remember GECOS constants in C?) and you end up trying hard to get the big players involved.
IBM makes over $4bn, as I recall, from licensing patents to other firms. It's hard to persuade them to give patents away. They're the largest in our business, but most other big organizations have large patent portfolios. They use them to fend off attacks: Oh, you want to charge us a royalty on our Gizmo because it uses X? Well, your gizmo uses Y, Z, W and P, and those are just as expensive!
The people bickering are lawyers with (generally) no interest in or knowledge of the technical details, so arguments go beyond technical details. The argument taht they get early experience is a good one, and it's a lot of why some of our (W3C) Working Groups have to be member-confidential: because some significant players wouldn't participate otherwise.
It'd be great to live in a world where everyone was honest and trustworthy and friendly and didn't wear shoes, but, unfortunately, we don't live in such a world. We can (and do) try to change the world,but until it changes, or while it changes, we also have to live with it as it is today.
That's a bit of a general answer, but I hope it makes things clearer!
Liam
When people get involved in developing a spec, and at the same time patent things that are necessary to implement that spec ("essential", as the patent lawyers say), and then submerge, wait until the spec is widely adopted, and then announce their patent, this is sometimes called a submarine patent attack.
It's partly to prevent these that we (W3C) have our patent policy, which requires all participants to sign an agreement saying (more or less) they agree to let people implement the spec without paying royalties, even if they own patents that would otherwise apply.
It's all a big mess -- and patents also don't fit well with the GPL, of course, and neither does our patent policy, although FSF participated and we did the best we could: the problem is that you might want to take, say, an HTTP server, and re-use the network code for some other server. But if someone has a patent on servers, to which they have granted royalty free use for HTTP only, you may now have to pay them a royalty for the code.
Patents are intended to encourage innovation by ensuring inventors get royalties. Unfortunately the current system seems to have some disadvantages.
Note: I have no idea whether the slashdot story is correct in this instance about this patent, nor, if the patent is essential to implementing IPv6, whether Microsoft plans to enforce royalties or forbid implementations.
Liam
True, I was trying to reply in the context of the original question. If you subcontract to a fulfillment house, for example, you may well have to supply fields provided by their Web service API or whatever. But if you design some flexibility into your system from the beginning, the extra customer service can help you grow, and even if you have to deal with a small percentage of orders by hand or weed them out and send them to a separate agent it might still be worth it, as long as you can do the filtering automatically.
Liam
Maybe you are shipping things that your country doesn't allow to be sent to those places, I don't know. I don't see anything wrong with sending things to Romania or Nigeria, as long as you get paid.
If you require that my billing address match the shipping address, you had beeter not be in the gift business. I have many times sent people christmas or birthday presents that I ordered online. I paid, and the item was shipped elsewhere. Even Amazon manages this.
Liam
Thanks for the reply - you make a good point.
The relational model is an approximation, of course, and where it doesn't quite fit, you have to decide whether to lose a few customers or to tweak your model.
In the case of addresses, "use alternative address for this customer" is just fine for most purposes, especially if the final printed package will be checked by a human when the label is fastened, and fits within a relational database.
Liam
If you are on a slow dialup connection at 9600 baud, the difference between 2K and 10K is approx. 8 seconds, but with compression this is likely to fall to less than half that, and you're likely to be waiting far, far longer for the images (like the icons by every slashdot story).
You will still download the content for the side banners, since that's in the main HTML document and not CSS (CSS is too limited in generating content to make actual ads with links in them).
So really what you're doing is making a few pages download faster but making a lot of pages look uglier or be harder to navigate and use.
A well-designed site using XHTML and CSS downloads faster, because there's no need to use <font> elements, there are fewer tables, fewer images.
Rather than trying to make other people's Web sites break for you, have you considered writing to the webmaster of the sites that cause you problems, politely explaining why they should spend more money developing their Web site?
How did you gather statistical evidence suggesting the ratio of useful to bad CSS is 1:1000? Most people don't notice CSS at all when it's done well, so opinions tend to be skewed here, I suspect. But I'd be very interested to see some independent research in this area.
Liam