Previously, so-called RIA applications were limited to those with Flash and JavaScript expertise. These advances may open this field up further to Java and Ruby developers who don't know JavaScript. This puts less cognitive burden on the individual developer which, on the whole tends to be a good thing.
(1) Ruby is a big deal now (1a) Slashdot's original/core constituency was, unless I'm hugely mistaken, programmers. I was one of the early(ish) ones (used 22003). (2) Mongrel is a very big deal now -- in the Ruby on Rails community especially (3) Zed developed Mongrel and therefore has some serious cred in the Ruby community.
The Rails team has indicated that there is an AWFUL lot of code that would have to be rewritten to make Rails thread-safe. Ezra, on the other hand, wrote Merb from the ground up to be thread-safe.
A simple compare/contrast of Rails to Merb: Rails is "one size fits all" but allows you to bolt on other stuff (via plugins) whereas Merb allows you to pick your own "front end" (View) and "back end" (Model/ORM) layer (limited to a handful of ORMs AFAIK).
I suspect that Rails will continue to be popular with former PHPers, et al whereas many people with deeper programming background will either slide toward Merb or write lots of Rails plugins.
For some odd reason, neither Slashdot nor the GamePolitics site made it simple to find the original CSM survey. After a little digging through GamePolitics, here is the link: http://www.commonsensemedia.org/news/specials/question1.
I was leaning toward Hillary until I read this survey. She really intends to spend millions of dollars just to (1) determine the effects of games on children (how many times has this already been done in academia?) and (2) to police vendors based on ESRB ratings that are only slightly less suspect than MPAA ratings? This is insane. I'd far prefer to see those same tax dollars put back into the school systems to better educate the children.
Follow the link above and read for yourself. But, to summarize, Clinton and Edwards both skew closely to Romney on this issue. Obama seems the only one who prefers to educate parents and then let them decide what is best.
Perhaps my vote in the caucuses will yet go to Obama...
I had the pleasure of taking Randy's first course on "User Interfaces" back in 92 or 93. How many courses have you heard of where the professor begins the first class by assailing the poor UIs of clock radios and VCRs only to immediately smash them Gallagher style in front of a classroom of undergrads. Randy was one of three truly inspirational teachers that I had the pleasure of studying under during my entire formal education. I still retain and use much of the knowledge that I learned from him.
Link to this story everywhere that you can! The mainstream media almost certainly won't carry it because they have a vested interest here. If you have a friend in one of those states, call him/her! Call your senator!
Exsqueeze me? Sure, in this context, the non-Hollywood owned conservative/libertarian may be the good guy; however, the last time that I checked, most of the legislation that is getting passed these days has to have the backing of some if not all of the Republican party to make it through congress.
In short, if this bill makes it through congress, you'll have some Republicans to thank for it as well.
Initially, not only does your water have to be cooled but you aren't running that fan with a handcrank either, are you? You're powering that fan with electricity which has to be generated from somewhere else as well.
Environmentally friendly? Not really. Ingenious solution for a college student without A/C? Yep.;)
First, I want to say that I have no business or personal association with Frey Technologies; I just use their product.
Personally, I use SageTV (http://www.sage.tv) at home. I have a RAID-5 w/ 500GB as my server and two clients w/ one attached to an HDTV. Generally, I've been extremely pleased with Sage. The developers reward users who take initiative to develop for the product by providing an API (under NDA) to allow them to further extend the application.
Unlike Windows MCE, most PVRs, include SageTV, record in an unencrypted MPEG2 format which may be easily archived in numerous fashions at the choosing of the user. Also, SageTV does not put any limitations upon which machines on a network are authorized to playback particular recordings.
My only complaint is that I've gone through 2 PVR-250MCE cards. The symptoms that I experience is that recordings stutter or skip frames. I've double-checked and the problem is definitely within the recording and not playbakc. Perhaps the cards suffer from a heat problem?
SageTV is awesome. Hands down. Go try it; they have a 14 day free demo available. If you already have a capture card, give it a go.
Re:Finally something to address this....
on
Are You Annoying?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Sounds like a leadership problem to me. And, before I continue, I'm currently a softare engineer who is also a technical lead on a small team. I believe that I know where's you're coming from.
When you boil it down, the workplace behaviors that you're describing reads like a combination of intellectual elitism and childish insecurity.
What the article didn't address is the commonly held, and still sometimes too true, stereotype that "nerds don't have good social skills". I've encountered my fair share of alpha geek wannabe's and been one myself (although I'd like to believe that I've since reformed).
I believe that leadership at your company, and you should take a role here as well, should attempt to subtly curb the intellectual elitism quotient. Not being a leadership expert (no pointy hair here just yet...), I believe that there is a component of tolerance, on your's and your cultures part, that has to remain but tempered by some degree of discipline.
As you stated, clearly, you aren't the only person troubled by this insecure behavior--because, if someone is always struggling to be ahead of everyone else, they must have some fear of inferiority, right? Take offenders aside, on an individual basis, and take the time to explain your concerns to them. Assuming that you have some degree of authority in your workplace, and that the individual in question has the slightest concern over maintaining a steady paycheck, it ought to act as a cold splash of water in the face.
The trick here is that you don't want to alienate your team members while you're disciplining them. You don't want to bitch slap them (well, ok, maybe you do) but a line has to be drawn and they have to understand where that line is.
I'm on my eighth tech job, having moved around a lot by choice early on in my career, and every workplace has had some alpha geek quotient. The more rudderless the team has been, the worse that quotient gets out of hand. (I feel like a pointy hair wannabe saying this but) I truely believe that leadership is the key here.
("Glider"? Using diving planes to add a significant forward component to upward/downward motion is well understood. But a "glider" is something else - a high-speed device with significant aerodynamic lift - initially powered by atmospheric thermal energy in the form of updrafts storing energy by raising a NON-bouyant craft against gravity, then trading this stored energy for momentum as necessary by gliding downward. Raising a neutrally-bouyant object stores no energy.)
In fairness to the design, I believe that the movie displayed on their page explains that they pump the helium out of the plane while at altitude. At that point, the plane is no longer flying as a lighter than air vehicle ans is now ballistic save for its glide planes.
However, I don't believe that this violates the 2nd law. Don't give up on me just yet. It's not a plane or a rocket using thrust for lift but an object that uses helium to become bouyant.
Does it require as much energy to pump the amounts of helium that this bird would need to fly as it does to push it up their conventionally? Probably not. Does it require some sort of refuelling? The skeptic in me says yes but I wouldn't jump to that conclusion outright.
I'm sorry but there's no way that the cargo capacity of this vehicle can be a purely linear function of its length. Granted I'm just an engineer (and not in the aerospace field) but it must be something resembling a logarithmic curve. You have to take into account that simply increasing the length of the vehicle, say to 200', just makes your 30'xX' aircraft now 200'xX' according to your assumptions. You're forgetting that there would almost certainly be an increase in width--although not necessarily a proportional to the vehicle's length.
Come on,/. readers. Mod better. And, no, this isn't a troll. The technical accuracy of this person's observations break down at the ~75'/10 people assumption and they break down badly.
Honestly, I'm quite confused by their steadfast attachment to 640x480 camera phones. On my recent trip to Japan, I noted at least one PDA-Phone that had a 1.3 MPixel camera attached. Perhaps European/American/Chinese users are considered less demanding camera-phone users than the Japanese? How much more would a 1.3 have cost SE to include versus the puny 640x480?
And, for our next trick, we absolutely won't replace the electoral college with internet voting. Even if it were secure, it would take the power out of the hands of the elite and give it to the people.
However, wouldn't it be nice if we (the US, if you can forgive my inclusive pronoun) were a democracy instead of a republic? If internet voting is good for the goose, then shouldn't it be good for the gander? We just need to replace those old and moldy voting booths with shiny new internet-enabled booths.
Of course, as a programmer, I'll believe the voting scheme is "secure" when monkeys fly out of my butt.
... they'll be telling us that we don't need the airline industry anymore because of the newly invented Heisenburg Compensator.
It's not always the students who pay the money...
on
Professors vs. WiFi
·
· Score: 2
... but frequently the parents. In American culture, at least, it is assumed that, if you are bright, that you will attend college. For plenty, it's almost as though college attendance is mandatory. Sure, it's easy to say, "If the student doesn't want to be in college, then they ought not to be in college." However, that's far easier said than done when parents control the purse strings.
So, for some students, college is as burdensome as high school.
The end result, for these students, is that they are the same underachievers in college as in high school.
Wi-Fi just gives them a new outlet for goofing off.
Honestly, I'm not trying to troll; however, isn't it quite possible that the author of this book that you put forward himself has a bias and only represents in his book those facts that serve his argument? Color my skeptical, but an inaccurate conclusion is an eminently likely result from an incomplete data set.
... to speak for myself, I tend to work in environments where TTM (Time To Market) is crucial, the "team" tends to be me and maybe another engineer, completing the required feature set in the alotted (and fairly short) time span is mandatory, and maintability is placed on the sacrificial altar of needing everything and needing it yesterday.
Elegant design is a wonderful thing and, personally, I prefer to take my time, weigh my options, come up with a design, and attack. However, typically, most of that time I would like to be spending on design is usually better spent building the product and fufilling that feature set.
I can't say that I've spent a lot of time on Struts. I had a go at it on my last job for about six months. Ultimately, given the above constraints, I developed the perspective that for a product that will move through multiple maintainers hands, that will be around for a while, and will have to mature over time, it's wonderful. However, when you need your product written yesterday, Struts will just slow you down with all of the added abstractions that the architecture enforces.
Dr. Atkins does not describe his diet as a high fat diet. He perhaps misleads a little in the book, perhaps to sell his product a little better, but, at a few points, he makes very clear that Atkins is not a high fat diet. However, this is a common misconception among Atkins detractors.
In his book, Dr. Atkins recommends low fat sources of protein, i.e., skinless chicken, although he occasionally mentions eggs, bacon, etc.
Before I profess my undying love for my Empeg, allow me to point out why Sony will never produce the in-dash dream audio dream device: they are a music publisher.
The MEX-1HD is a fixed single DIN unit that can rip music from a CD in situ and store it to an internal and, I believe, non-upgradable hard drive.
The Sonic Blue RioCar/Empeg, one of which I was fortunate enough to obtain some two or so months ago, is a Linux-based pull-out single DIN device that supports up to 2 2.5" laptop hard drives with a maximum supported capacity of 128GB total.
The MEX-1HD could never hope to compete with the Empeg... except that Sonic Blue decided that they couldn't break into the good ol' boys club that is the car audio market with such an expensive (at the time, $1200 on up) device.
However, as Sonic Blue has ceased production of Empeg devices, you can now purchase them on E-bay. Many of the Empeg vendors on E-bay bought the last of the Empegs/RioCars (the name is virtually interchangeable in that Empeg Mk2 == RioCar) during a fire sale from Sonic Blue and are selling them in brand new, still in the packaging, condition.
If you choose to get a RioCar/Empeg, be sure to check out the Rio Car Site
The article failed to address how said mobile phone obtains power. You still need a respectable amount of juice to transmit. Current day power sources for cell phones still aren't that small -- although some Pac Rim outfit has a watch cell phone. However, even a power source that small isn't suitable to fit inside someone's mouth!
Slashdot Mirror
Previously, so-called RIA applications were limited to those with Flash and JavaScript expertise. These advances may open this field up further to Java and Ruby developers who don't know JavaScript. This puts less cognitive burden on the individual developer which, on the whole tends to be a good thing.
Because of Ruby:
(1) Ruby is a big deal now
(1a) Slashdot's original/core constituency was, unless I'm hugely mistaken, programmers. I was one of the early(ish) ones (used 22003).
(2) Mongrel is a very big deal now -- in the Ruby on Rails community especially
(3) Zed developed Mongrel and therefore has some serious cred in the Ruby community.
The Rails team has indicated that there is an AWFUL lot of code that would have to be rewritten to make Rails thread-safe. Ezra, on the other hand, wrote Merb from the ground up to be thread-safe.
A simple compare/contrast of Rails to Merb: Rails is "one size fits all" but allows you to bolt on other stuff (via plugins) whereas Merb allows you to pick your own "front end" (View) and "back end" (Model/ORM) layer (limited to a handful of ORMs AFAIK).
I suspect that Rails will continue to be popular with former PHPers, et al whereas many people with deeper programming background will either slide toward Merb or write lots of Rails plugins.
For some odd reason, neither Slashdot nor the GamePolitics site made it simple to find the original CSM survey. After a little digging through GamePolitics, here is the link: http://www.commonsensemedia.org/news/specials/question1.
I was leaning toward Hillary until I read this survey. She really intends to spend millions of dollars just to (1) determine the effects of games on children (how many times has this already been done in academia?) and (2) to police vendors based on ESRB ratings that are only slightly less suspect than MPAA ratings? This is insane. I'd far prefer to see those same tax dollars put back into the school systems to better educate the children.
Follow the link above and read for yourself. But, to summarize, Clinton and Edwards both skew closely to Romney on this issue. Obama seems the only one who prefers to educate parents and then let them decide what is best.
Perhaps my vote in the caucuses will yet go to Obama...
... can you cite some more specifics, either here, or on your blog post, about the limitations that you encountered?
I had the pleasure of taking Randy's first course on "User Interfaces" back in 92 or 93. How many courses have you heard of where the professor begins the first class by assailing the poor UIs of clock radios and VCRs only to immediately smash them Gallagher style in front of a classroom of undergrads. Randy was one of three truly inspirational teachers that I had the pleasure of studying under during my entire formal education. I still retain and use much of the knowledge that I learned from him.
Godspeed Randy.
Link to this story everywhere that you can! The mainstream media almost certainly won't carry it because they have a vested interest here. If you have a friend in one of those states, call him/her! Call your senator!
Exsqueeze me? Sure, in this context, the non-Hollywood owned conservative/libertarian may be the good guy; however, the last time that I checked, most of the legislation that is getting passed these days has to have the backing of some if not all of the Republican party to make it through congress.
In short, if this bill makes it through congress, you'll have some Republicans to thank for it as well.
Initially, not only does your water have to be cooled but you aren't running that fan with a handcrank either, are you? You're powering that fan with electricity which has to be generated from somewhere else as well.
;)
Environmentally friendly? Not really. Ingenious solution for a college student without A/C? Yep.
So what impact does this have on the anime fansubbing community? It was a legelly grey area to begin with...
First, I want to say that I have no business or personal association with Frey Technologies; I just use their product.
Personally, I use SageTV (http://www.sage.tv) at home. I have a RAID-5 w/ 500GB as my server and two clients w/ one attached to an HDTV. Generally, I've been extremely pleased with Sage. The developers reward users who take initiative to develop for the product by providing an API (under NDA) to allow them to further extend the application.
Unlike Windows MCE, most PVRs, include SageTV, record in an unencrypted MPEG2 format which may be easily archived in numerous fashions at the choosing of the user. Also, SageTV does not put any limitations upon which machines on a network are authorized to playback particular recordings.
My only complaint is that I've gone through 2 PVR-250MCE cards. The symptoms that I experience is that recordings stutter or skip frames. I've double-checked and the problem is definitely within the recording and not playbakc. Perhaps the cards suffer from a heat problem?
SageTV is awesome. Hands down. Go try it; they have a 14 day free demo available. If you already have a capture card, give it a go.
Sounds like a leadership problem to me. And, before I continue, I'm currently a softare engineer who is also a technical lead on a small team. I believe that I know where's you're coming from.
When you boil it down, the workplace behaviors that you're describing reads like a combination of intellectual elitism and childish insecurity.
What the article didn't address is the commonly held, and still sometimes too true, stereotype that "nerds don't have good social skills". I've encountered my fair share of alpha geek wannabe's and been one myself (although I'd like to believe that I've since reformed).
I believe that leadership at your company, and you should take a role here as well, should attempt to subtly curb the intellectual elitism quotient. Not being a leadership expert (no pointy hair here just yet...), I believe that there is a component of tolerance, on your's and your cultures part, that has to remain but tempered by some degree of discipline.
As you stated, clearly, you aren't the only person troubled by this insecure behavior--because, if someone is always struggling to be ahead of everyone else, they must have some fear of inferiority, right? Take offenders aside, on an individual basis, and take the time to explain your concerns to them. Assuming that you have some degree of authority in your workplace, and that the individual in question has the slightest concern over maintaining a steady paycheck, it ought to act as a cold splash of water in the face.
The trick here is that you don't want to alienate your team members while you're disciplining them. You don't want to bitch slap them (well, ok, maybe you do) but a line has to be drawn and they have to understand where that line is.
I'm on my eighth tech job, having moved around a lot by choice early on in my career, and every workplace has had some alpha geek quotient. The more rudderless the team has been, the worse that quotient gets out of hand. (I feel like a pointy hair wannabe saying this but) I truely believe that leadership is the key here.
("Glider"? Using diving planes to add a significant forward component to upward/downward motion is well understood. But a "glider" is something else - a high-speed device with significant aerodynamic lift - initially powered by atmospheric thermal energy in the form of updrafts storing energy by raising a NON-bouyant craft against gravity, then trading this stored energy for momentum as necessary by gliding downward. Raising a neutrally-bouyant object stores no energy.)
In fairness to the design, I believe that the movie displayed on their page explains that they pump the helium out of the plane while at altitude. At that point, the plane is no longer flying as a lighter than air vehicle ans is now ballistic save for its glide planes.
However, I don't believe that this violates the 2nd law. Don't give up on me just yet. It's not a plane or a rocket using thrust for lift but an object that uses helium to become bouyant.
Does it require as much energy to pump the amounts of helium that this bird would need to fly as it does to push it up their conventionally? Probably not. Does it require some sort of refuelling? The skeptic in me says yes but I wouldn't jump to that conclusion outright.
I'm sorry but there's no way that the cargo capacity of this vehicle can be a purely linear function of its length. Granted I'm just an engineer (and not in the aerospace field) but it must be something resembling a logarithmic curve. You have to take into account that simply increasing the length of the vehicle, say to 200', just makes your 30'xX' aircraft now 200'xX' according to your assumptions. You're forgetting that there would almost certainly be an increase in width--although not necessarily a proportional to the vehicle's length.
/. readers. Mod better. And, no, this isn't a troll. The technical accuracy of this person's observations break down at the ~75'/10 people assumption and they break down badly.
Come on,
Honestly, I'm quite confused by their steadfast attachment to 640x480 camera phones. On my recent trip to Japan, I noted at least one PDA-Phone that had a 1.3 MPixel camera attached. Perhaps European/American/Chinese users are considered less demanding camera-phone users than the Japanese? How much more would a 1.3 have cost SE to include versus the puny 640x480?
And, for our next trick, we absolutely won't replace the electoral college with internet voting. Even if it were secure, it would take the power out of the hands of the elite and give it to the people.
However, wouldn't it be nice if we (the US, if you can forgive my inclusive pronoun) were a democracy instead of a republic? If internet voting is good for the goose, then shouldn't it be good for the gander? We just need to replace those old and moldy voting booths with shiny new internet-enabled booths.
Of course, as a programmer, I'll believe the voting scheme is "secure" when monkeys fly out of my butt.
... they'll be telling us that we don't need the airline industry anymore because of the newly invented Heisenburg Compensator.
... but frequently the parents. In American culture, at least, it is assumed that, if you are bright, that you will attend college. For plenty, it's almost as though college attendance is mandatory. Sure, it's easy to say, "If the student doesn't want to be in college, then they ought not to be in college." However, that's far easier said than done when parents control the purse strings.
So, for some students, college is as burdensome as high school.
The end result, for these students, is that they are the same underachievers in college as in high school.
Wi-Fi just gives them a new outlet for goofing off.
... that routinely forces me to question the wisdom of staying in this career in the first place.
Honestly, I'm not trying to troll; however, isn't it quite possible that the author of this book that you put forward himself has a bias and only represents in his book those facts that serve his argument? Color my skeptical, but an inaccurate conclusion is an eminently likely result from an incomplete data set.
... to speak for myself, I tend to work in environments where TTM (Time To Market) is crucial, the "team" tends to be me and maybe another engineer, completing the required feature set in the alotted (and fairly short) time span is mandatory, and maintability is placed on the sacrificial altar of needing everything and needing it yesterday.
Elegant design is a wonderful thing and, personally, I prefer to take my time, weigh my options, come up with a design, and attack. However, typically, most of that time I would like to be spending on design is usually better spent building the product and fufilling that feature set.
I can't say that I've spent a lot of time on Struts. I had a go at it on my last job for about six months. Ultimately, given the above constraints, I developed the perspective that for a product that will move through multiple maintainers hands, that will be around for a while, and will have to mature over time, it's wonderful. However, when you need your product written yesterday, Struts will just slow you down with all of the added abstractions that the architecture enforces.
Dr. Atkins does not describe his diet as a high fat diet. He perhaps misleads a little in the book, perhaps to sell his product a little better, but, at a few points, he makes very clear that Atkins is not a high fat diet. However, this is a common misconception among Atkins detractors.
In his book, Dr. Atkins recommends low fat sources of protein, i.e., skinless chicken, although he occasionally mentions eggs, bacon, etc.
Before I profess my undying love for my Empeg, allow me to point out why Sony will never produce the in-dash dream audio dream device: they are a music publisher.
The MEX-1HD is a fixed single DIN unit that can rip music from a CD in situ and store it to an internal and, I believe, non-upgradable hard drive.
The Sonic Blue RioCar/Empeg, one of which I was fortunate enough to obtain some two or so months ago, is a Linux-based pull-out single DIN device that supports up to 2 2.5" laptop hard drives with a maximum supported capacity of 128GB total.
The MEX-1HD could never hope to compete with the Empeg... except that Sonic Blue decided that they couldn't break into the good ol' boys club that is the car audio market with such an expensive (at the time, $1200 on up) device.
However, as Sonic Blue has ceased production of Empeg devices, you can now purchase them on E-bay. Many of the Empeg vendors on E-bay bought the last of the Empegs/RioCars (the name is virtually interchangeable in that Empeg Mk2 == RioCar) during a fire sale from Sonic Blue and are selling them in brand new, still in the packaging, condition.
If you choose to get a RioCar/Empeg, be sure to check out the Rio Car Site
The article failed to address how said mobile phone obtains power. You still need a respectable amount of juice to transmit. Current day power sources for cell phones still aren't that small -- although some Pac Rim outfit has a watch cell phone. However, even a power source that small isn't suitable to fit inside someone's mouth!
You forget that a good percentage of /. users are gainfully employed and a smaller percentage are well rewarded for their work. ;)
/.ers are married. While I can't fathom the notion, I suppose it's possible.
And the "Love" poll, a few polls back, indicated that several