In Ireland it is impossible to get Buses to run on time. They just don't. They never have and never will.
At least by making the drivers someway responsible (by making them notify the stops) the public can see when the damn things WILL eventually arrive.
I travelled on the Irish bus and rail network for over twenty years until I got a car. It's the worst in the world. I've been on buses that were two hours late leaving or three hours late arriving. I've waited for buses that simply never came. I've even waited at a bus stop that Bus Eireann de-commissioned THAT DAY and never told anyone. They just stopped sending buses that way.
In Germany you can set your watch by the bus. In Ireland you might, might be able to tell what season it is.
Are you sure that real time data is the way to go with this project?
The arrival time would have to be calculated from the speed of the bus, either averaged or real time. Both would be inaccurate in the context of Irish roads. Irish road distances, both on maps and signposts, are INCREDIBLY wrong. Not inaccurate, just plain wrong.
I've driven all over Ireland and the best way to know how far and how long it's going to take to get from point A to point B is to use experience.
Just get the drivers to punch in an estimated arrival time. It'll be right to within five minutes. Their tachys will show whether they were right or wrong.
The drivers of the buses are going to have driven that road before, in those weather conditions, at that time of the day, in the current traffic conditions. They'll know if Mackey the dairy farmer takes his cows across the Miltown Malbay road at 11.30am EVERY day. They'll know if the Oughterard road floods at this time EVERY year and you have to go "the back way".
If you're standing at a stop there is NOTHING more annoying than seeing a delay tick up. If you use realtime data then the times are going to vary wildly depending on the speed of the bus at various moments. If you average it will just be plain wrong, in the west of Ireland there are a lot of sections of bendy roads followed by straight road, this is because a lot of the roads were laid out during famine times. The roads just meandered along, not really going anywhere, the workers didn't care how long they were, they just wanted to get paid and fed. There are roads that go on for miles before just stopping dead, in the middle of nowhere.
For my mind, the best solution would be to let the drivers estimate. It would also be a better solution cost wise. Just get the estimate transmitted to the next stop.
Have you looked at solid state?
on
RAID for Zero-G?
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· Score: 1
Have you looked at a solid state solution. Not really cost effective, but you can certainly guarantee that any launch/re-entry gee's will be catered for.
The government in this country just don't know what they are doing. Like most of the things in this country it probably started life over lunch in Leinster House or Merrion Square. This plan will be shot down or used to distract from other more insidious projected amendments. Microsoft must have learned their FUD from the Irish government. They've been been doing it for 50 years. Anyways it would have to be passed in Europe first and it would only be enforceable after a trip to the court of European Human Rights... Course, we are the country that voted twice on EXACTLY the same referendum. Heh, Kuroshin should cover that, Ireland, where the government likes it's people to say yes. If we don't they'll keep asking until we do...
First, Do you find that the main problem with the new crop of Usability Engineers is that they don't make concrete recommendations, they rarely quote specific examples and to the end user it feels like a bit of a sham? Second, I'm sure you'd agree that there are a lot of issues with website accessibility that could be solved with several easy checks. Do you have your own checklist that people can follow. This would be aimed at the site coder rather than a usability engineer. Third, Do you follow the WAI's and Sec.508? Do you use Bobby or Site Valet or Lift or any of the host of other tools out there that claim to aid usability and accessibility. Fourth, What is your pet hate in Usability and Accessibility? Fifth, Do you think there is a happy medium that you can get to without spending huge amounts of money in redesign on any website.(Suppose that's the same as the checklist really!!!). Sixth, Do you think that there should be an independant third party verification on a site, the third party would be either non-governmental or along the lines of Verisign, before it would be able to be accessed. A sort of SSL cert for Accessibility. Finally, kind of off topic, but, has anyone else found that ANYTHING that's built on.NET is inaccessible, simply due to it's proliferation of javascript in it's default templates and examples that many people are following.
Talk about nasty, hope it was a sharp blade. Now scrapped I could understand, like most MS stuff it's ill-conceived. But to scrape the poor thing. Owwww.
There are millions of CRTs out there helping businesses make money. Now these CRTs and to a lesser extent LCDs are also costing companies money through mainly power costs. There are also some health and safety issues that cost money through the running of lighting and cost of fixtures and fittings, but we'll let these out for now. So, where do you have a CRT monitor and an application environment where high performance in the frame rate isn't an issue? Hmmm, how about every call centre in the world. If an IT manager sees the cost benefits of getting low power consumption monitors he or she will bite. If an accountant sees the numbers they'll bite the arm off the salesman. I can see these taking off in a big way with Call Centres and programming shops. There's a market there for these things, I'd like to see how they do with CAD/CAM apps too.
Seein' as we all want to make beowulf clusters out of toasters and keyrings and coffee makers...... What are the five dream machines that you want to have on, under, near, beside or in you over the next 10 years? And what do you forsee actually happening? And can we make beowulf clusters out of them?
How about http://www.qcad.org this will allow you to take dxf files and output to hpgl. There are a load of hpgl gpl programs out there. Try a search on http://www.freshmeat.net for hpgl. If you are using something like a Roland printer/plotter or a Gerber Edge you're in for a bit of trouble though. They use special print profiles for colour matching and it can be hell trying to get the colours right. Mind you haven't tryed doing it in about 6 years.
Are nice interface and stability the two main points here? If they are then you should look under the hood of OSx, BSD be there. There's not that much difference in what's on a RH7.2/3 installation and an OSx. The reason why Macs have a great reputation for stability is that their hardware is standardised, there's no mucking around with strange devices. It's something that Wintel has been struggling with for years. If the OSx interface were to be ported to x86 I for one would buy it. And probably the associated apps. But if KDE or GNOME were to offer the same features with the same app support then I'd go for them first. OfficeX might be attractive, but so is OpenOffice and that's free leaving more money for the beer... Given the choice between beer and software i'd choose beer everyday of the week. Anyway the whole thing is a moot point as the stated and restated position of Jobs is that there will be NO OSx on x86 ever!!! Darwin's nice though.
I downloaded it and tried to do the old "The quick brown fox jumped over" thing and the thing couldn't handle it. A coupld of us have tried it and we can't get it to do it as quickly as a normal typist or even a graffiti user on a palm. The e-q relationship just doesn't pop up for us. Weird.
Hi, i'm IT Manager for eircom Ennis Information Age Town, we are the world's biggest community based IT project (that I know of) - http://www.ennis.ie
We are involved in providing technological information, aids and supports to the local community. This means everybody acrros the board, from primary school kids (5-12) to secondary school kids. From the smallest community group or charity to the biggest industrial company and everybody in between. We have been doing this now for over three years on a shoestring budget (£15m Irish to be spent over 5 years). The one thing that I've drawn from all of the reaction that we have got, is the need to communicate. Not only with the local populace, but also the world beyond. They (the community) have so many stories to tell and so many different ways of surprising you that you will never be able to cater to everybody. There's a vibe in Ireland at the moment that we are now (post euro) a part of something much bigger (Europe) rather than being just an Island on the edge of the world. We are now more than ever looking abroad to our neighbours for, well, for neighbours. To do what neighbours should do, have a chat, cup of tea (in a national sense, if that makes any sense???). With that in mind...
I do think that your project should be some sort of communication device, It should be for the 8-13 year age group, they will be your most responsive. But you must be prepared to gather as much information as possible from everything that happens. Don't let anything be lost. No matter how small. Think about it like this, in fifty years, or a hundred years, the most informative source of social history isn't going to be the media (newspapers, print, tv, net sites et.al) it'll be the people's own opinions, their reactions. The focus should be on the kids and their actions and reactions. Get them to talk, to interact and listen. From what they give back, there's "gold in them thar' hills".
From a technical point of view there are a few things to consider: Are PDAs the way to go, would the web combined with something like the "soon to be unveiled" electronic paper combined with PDAs be enough, are there other mediums to consider besides the printed (albeit iconic) word. How about video, by 2005 3G will be rolled out to wireless devices, at least in Ireland and the UK anyway. And with the Japanese taking an active interest in Europe the push will be on for this to happen much quicker than that.
Think about the way that kids interact, they play. By playing they bond and grow. Online gaming of a "safe" kind has to be considered. Harry Potter is the biggest weapon us Adults have with our kids today. Take the kids to another land, enchant them, then you can't fail. Just find the hook, that clever piece of marketing that will grab their imagination and will build up the two days in 2005 to be the most important two days of their life.
The photo that's with the article is a fake, clever, but a fake. The perspective on the "iWalk" is all wrong when compared to the fag box and the keyboard. Also the reflected light levels are wrong on the device. I will say this though. If the device is real, i'll be buying one.
If Microsoft want people to send letters to their attorney general, President Bush and their local congressman, then I think that Slashdot reader should oblige and do, JUST THAT. Send letters to your attorney general, President Bush and your local congressman and explain how Microsoft should be hemmed in and how you feel that the future lies in open source.
DO IT, DO IT NOW
You'll fell much better, plus you'll be helping 'ol Billy boy out with those letters.
The "next big thing" problem isn't the issue with these devices. The issue is that the companies that are producing them don't seem to want to sell to the end-user. They only want OEM deals. So the chain would work like this, where OEM-->Distributor-->reseller would be Manufacturer-->Teleco-->end-user/reseller. They are only interested in the big buck, not the long haul. Webpads are a good idea and will work longterm, but some company needs to have the will to stick it out and take the bullet initially. With OSes like Beos and Qnx able to be run on them, not to mention the Linux route then there should be a bright future for them. It could be a huge market. No home needs to have a PC just to browse the web and send mail or maybe listen to a few audio/video streams. If they could get a teleco to bundle one with broadband access and get the revenue stream going on an equipment rental basis then there should be a few shekels to be made somewhere...
Intellicad,Intellicad,Intellicad,Intellicad.......
on
Open-Source CAD Tools?
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· Score: 1
Would someone PLEASE port this to linux. Get me away finally from the WinX platform. Speaking as ex senior tech support for the EMEA area for the package (when Visio was Visio) and as an ACAD user from R.9 onwards. Folks, it IS AutoCad. Albeit circa R.13 without the 3d elements that Mech desktop and Designer brought. The Lisp support is excellent. It would baffle me at this stage to think that people who do 2d would even think of using anything else. One of the things that we pushed for during development was the backwards compatibility to old and current versions of ACAD and DXF. I think they managed this quite successfully. Visio really wanted this product to succeed. In fact Visio/Intellicad people wanted the software pirated so that the schools and college students would "groundswell" the product once they hit the job marketplace. I really can't say enough good things about the package. At the start it did suffer a bit from speed and memory restrictions. Layering was a bit askew for a while but they seem to have got all of those problems sorted out. The most annoying thing really about the package was the lack of documentation for the VBA support. Which ACAD has since replicated. The VBA support was solid and extremely flexible. We did a few test applications for it, one of which was a front-end gui for the package which took away most of the functionality and replaced it with 3 check buttons. New drawing (which then brought you to a new dialog with the various drawing options, base sheet size, template etc. Open drawing and Close the program. Doubt very much if ACAD would allow you to do this.
Best of luck to the people that are continuing the development. You've got at least one customer here.
This is going to end ugly.
The republicans will obstruct Gore right up until the Dec.12 deadline.
If Gore loses the case for the "discarding" of the doctored republican votes then he will have one hope left to save America's faltering democratic principles. To change the votes of the electoral college by appealing to their better nature
The one good and clean thing that will happen from this election though is that after all the shouting is over and done and whoever is in the White house. All of the votes in Florida ARE going to be counted. The liberal laws in Florida will allow this to happen.
We will know, in the end, who should have won.
God help George Bush if he get's to the Whitehouse and hasn't actually won Florida.....
Sun need to take heed and stay with Linux for the Cobalt "appliances". These boxes are the lifeblood and daily bread and butter for thousands of small hosting companies and IT groups. They are a tried and tested solution. If they change ANYTHING on these boxes then they WILL loose customers and not gain a single dollar in increased revenue.
They are well supported both through the OS and the HUGE range of software available for it and through the people that both professionaly support it with their reputation (the customers)and the hard working people at Cobalt who have busted their asses to get the company in it's current position.
Bottom Line:
Keep Linux, It's the corner stone of Cobalt's sucess.
IBM should know better than this. For God's sake, all they had to do was read the standards. My own site has been guilty of the same crime. But changing ALT tags, while time-consuming is a chore at best. It should have been planned for and done in the first place. We are doing so for any new sites we do.
Inclusiveness, that should have been their motto.
I wonder what they would have done with the site for the Special Olympics???
Slashdot Mirror
In Ireland it is impossible to get Buses to run on time. They just don't. They never have and never will.
At least by making the drivers someway responsible (by making them notify the stops) the public can see when the damn things WILL eventually arrive.
I travelled on the Irish bus and rail network for over twenty years until I got a car. It's the worst in the world. I've been on buses that were two hours late leaving or three hours late arriving. I've waited for buses that simply never came. I've even waited at a bus stop that Bus Eireann de-commissioned THAT DAY and never told anyone. They just stopped sending buses that way.
In Germany you can set your watch by the bus. In Ireland you might, might be able to tell what season it is.
Are you sure that real time data is the way to go with this project?
The arrival time would have to be calculated from the speed of the bus, either averaged or real time. Both would be inaccurate in the context of Irish roads. Irish road distances, both on maps and signposts, are INCREDIBLY wrong. Not inaccurate, just plain wrong.
I've driven all over Ireland and the best way to know how far and how long it's going to take to get from point A to point B is to use experience.
Just get the drivers to punch in an estimated arrival time. It'll be right to within five minutes. Their tachys will show whether they were right or wrong.
The drivers of the buses are going to have driven that road before, in those weather conditions, at that time of the day, in the current traffic conditions. They'll know if Mackey the dairy farmer takes his cows across the Miltown Malbay road at 11.30am EVERY day. They'll know if the Oughterard road floods at this time EVERY year and you have to go "the back way".
If you're standing at a stop there is NOTHING more annoying than seeing a delay tick up. If you use realtime data then the times are going to vary wildly depending on the speed of the bus at various moments. If you average it will just be plain wrong, in the west of Ireland there are a lot of sections of bendy roads followed by straight road, this is because a lot of the roads were laid out during famine times. The roads just meandered along, not really going anywhere, the workers didn't care how long they were, they just wanted to get paid and fed. There are roads that go on for miles before just stopping dead, in the middle of nowhere.
For my mind, the best solution would be to let the drivers estimate. It would also be a better solution cost wise. Just get the estimate transmitted to the next stop.
Have you looked at a solid state solution. Not really cost effective, but you can certainly guarantee that any launch/re-entry gee's will be catered for.
Uncle travellin' Matt
The government in this country just don't know what they are doing. Like most of the things in this country it probably started life over lunch in Leinster House or Merrion Square. This plan will be shot down or used to distract from other more insidious projected amendments. Microsoft must have learned their FUD from the Irish government. They've been been doing it for 50 years.
Anyways it would have to be passed in Europe first and it would only be enforceable after a trip to the court of European Human Rights...
Course, we are the country that voted twice on EXACTLY the same referendum.
Heh, Kuroshin should cover that, Ireland, where the government likes it's people to say yes.
If we don't they'll keep asking until we do...
First, Do you find that the main problem with the new crop of Usability Engineers is that they don't make concrete recommendations, they rarely quote specific examples and to the end user it feels like a bit of a sham? .NET is inaccessible, simply due to it's proliferation of javascript in it's default templates and examples that many people are following.
Second, I'm sure you'd agree that there are a lot of issues with website accessibility that could be solved with several easy checks. Do you have your own checklist that people can follow. This would be aimed at the site coder rather than a usability engineer.
Third, Do you follow the WAI's and Sec.508? Do you use Bobby or Site Valet or Lift or any of the host of other tools out there that claim to aid usability and accessibility.
Fourth, What is your pet hate in Usability and Accessibility?
Fifth, Do you think there is a happy medium that you can get to without spending huge amounts of money in redesign on any website.(Suppose that's the same as the checklist really!!!).
Sixth, Do you think that there should be an independant third party verification on a site, the third party would be either non-governmental or along the lines of Verisign, before it would be able to be accessed. A sort of SSL cert for
Accessibility.
Finally, kind of off topic, but, has anyone else found that ANYTHING that's built on
Talk about nasty, hope it was a sharp blade.
Now scrapped I could understand, like most MS stuff it's ill-conceived. But to scrape the poor thing. Owwww.
There are millions of CRTs out there helping businesses make money. Now these CRTs and to a lesser extent LCDs are also costing companies money through mainly power costs. There are also some health and safety issues that cost money through the running of lighting and cost of fixtures and fittings, but we'll let these out for now.
So, where do you have a CRT monitor and an application environment where high performance in the frame rate isn't an issue? Hmmm, how about every call centre in the world. If an IT manager sees the cost benefits of getting low power consumption monitors he or she will bite. If an accountant sees the numbers they'll bite the arm off the salesman. I can see these taking off in a big way with Call Centres and programming shops.
There's a market there for these things, I'd like to see how they do with CAD/CAM apps too.
Seein' as we all want to make beowulf clusters out of toasters and keyrings and coffee makers......
What are the five dream machines that you want to have on, under, near, beside or in you over the next 10 years? And what do you forsee actually happening?
And can we make beowulf clusters out of them?
How about http://www.qcad.org this will allow you to take dxf files and output to hpgl. There are a load of hpgl gpl programs out there. Try a search on http://www.freshmeat.net for hpgl.
If you are using something like a Roland printer/plotter or a Gerber Edge you're in for a bit of trouble though. They use special print profiles for colour matching and it can be hell trying to get the colours right. Mind you haven't tryed doing it in about 6 years.
Are nice interface and stability the two main points here?
If they are then you should look under the hood of OSx, BSD be there. There's not that much difference in what's on a RH7.2/3 installation and an OSx.
The reason why Macs have a great reputation for stability is that their hardware is standardised, there's no mucking around with strange devices. It's something that Wintel has been struggling with for years. If the OSx interface were to be ported to x86 I for one would buy it. And probably the associated apps. But if KDE or GNOME were to offer the same features with the same app support then I'd go for them first.
OfficeX might be attractive, but so is OpenOffice and that's free leaving more money for the beer...
Given the choice between beer and software i'd choose beer everyday of the week. Anyway the whole thing is a moot point as the stated and restated position of Jobs is that there will be NO OSx on x86 ever!!! Darwin's nice though.
I downloaded it and tried to do the old "The quick brown fox jumped over" thing and the thing couldn't handle it. A coupld of us have tried it and we can't get it to do it as quickly as a normal typist or even a graffiti user on a palm. The e-q relationship just doesn't pop up for us. Weird.
Hi, i'm IT Manager for eircom Ennis Information Age Town, we are the world's biggest community based IT project (that I know of) - http://www.ennis.ie
We are involved in providing technological information, aids and supports to the local community. This means everybody acrros the board, from primary school kids (5-12) to secondary school kids. From the smallest community group or charity to the biggest industrial company and everybody in between. We have been doing this now for over three years on a shoestring budget (£15m Irish to be spent over 5 years). The one thing that I've drawn from all of the reaction that we have got, is the need to communicate. Not only with the local populace, but also the world beyond. They (the community) have so many stories to tell and so many different ways of surprising you that you will never be able to cater to everybody. There's a vibe in Ireland at the moment that we are now (post euro) a part of something much bigger (Europe) rather than being just an Island on the edge of the world. We are now more than ever looking abroad to our neighbours for, well, for neighbours. To do what neighbours should do, have a chat, cup of tea (in a national sense, if that makes any sense???). With that in mind...
I do think that your project should be some sort of communication device, It should be for the 8-13 year age group, they will be your most responsive. But you must be prepared to gather as much information as possible from everything that happens. Don't let anything be lost. No matter how small. Think about it like this, in fifty years, or a hundred years, the most informative source of social history isn't going to be the media (newspapers, print, tv, net sites et.al) it'll be the people's own opinions, their reactions. The focus should be on the kids and their actions and reactions. Get them to talk, to interact and listen. From what they give back, there's "gold in them thar' hills".
From a technical point of view there are a few things to consider: Are PDAs the way to go, would the web combined with something like the "soon to be unveiled" electronic paper combined with PDAs be enough, are there other mediums to consider besides the printed (albeit iconic) word. How about video, by 2005 3G will be rolled out to wireless devices, at least in Ireland and the UK anyway. And with the Japanese taking an active interest in Europe the push will be on for this to happen much quicker than that.
Think about the way that kids interact, they play. By playing they bond and grow. Online gaming of a "safe" kind has to be considered. Harry Potter is the biggest weapon us Adults have with our kids today. Take the kids to another land, enchant them, then you can't fail. Just find the hook, that clever piece of marketing that will grab their imagination and will build up the two days in 2005 to be the most important two days of their life.
The photo that's with the article is a fake, clever, but a fake. The perspective on the "iWalk" is all wrong when compared to the fag box and the keyboard. Also the reflected light levels are wrong on the device. I will say this though. If the device is real, i'll be buying one.
If Microsoft want people to send letters to their attorney general, President Bush and their local congressman, then I think that Slashdot reader should oblige and do, JUST THAT. Send letters to your attorney general, President Bush and your local congressman and explain how Microsoft should be hemmed in and how you feel that the future lies in open source.
DO IT, DO IT NOW
You'll fell much better, plus you'll be helping 'ol Billy boy out with those letters.
The "next big thing" problem isn't the issue with these devices. The issue is that the companies that are producing them don't seem to want to sell to the end-user. They only want OEM deals. So the chain would work like this, where OEM-->Distributor-->reseller would be Manufacturer-->Teleco-->end-user/reseller. They are only interested in the big buck, not the long haul. Webpads are a good idea and will work longterm, but some company needs to have the will to stick it out and take the bullet initially. With OSes like Beos and Qnx able to be run on them, not to mention the Linux route then there should be a bright future for them. It could be a huge market. No home needs to have a PC just to browse the web and send mail or maybe listen to a few audio/video streams. If they could get a teleco to bundle one with broadband access and get the revenue stream going on an equipment rental basis then there should be a few shekels to be made somewhere...
Would someone PLEASE port this to linux. Get me away finally from the WinX platform. Speaking as ex senior tech support for the EMEA area for the package (when Visio was Visio) and as an ACAD user from R.9 onwards. Folks, it IS AutoCad. Albeit circa R.13 without the 3d elements that Mech desktop and Designer brought. The Lisp support is excellent. It would baffle me at this stage to think that people who do 2d would even think of using anything else. One of the things that we pushed for during development was the backwards compatibility to old and current versions of ACAD and DXF. I think they managed this quite successfully. Visio really wanted this product to succeed. In fact Visio/Intellicad people wanted the software pirated so that the schools and college students would "groundswell" the product once they hit the job marketplace.
I really can't say enough good things about the package. At the start it did suffer a bit from speed and memory restrictions. Layering was a bit askew for a while but they seem to have got all of those problems sorted out. The most annoying thing really about the package was the lack of documentation for the VBA support. Which ACAD has since replicated. The VBA support was solid and extremely flexible. We did a few test applications for it, one of which was a front-end gui for the package which took away most of the functionality and replaced it with 3 check buttons. New drawing (which then brought you to a new dialog with the various drawing options, base sheet size, template etc. Open drawing and Close the program. Doubt very much if ACAD would allow you to do this.
Best of luck to the people that are continuing the development. You've got at least one customer here.
Will the mis-spelling of public as pubic above mean that this site gets filtered. Ohhhhh.
This is going to end ugly.
The republicans will obstruct Gore right up until the Dec.12 deadline.
If Gore loses the case for the "discarding" of the doctored republican votes then he will have one hope left to save America's faltering democratic principles.
To change the votes of the electoral college by appealing to their better nature
The one good and clean thing that will happen from this election though is that after all the shouting is over and done and whoever is in the White house. All of the votes in Florida ARE going to be counted. The liberal laws in Florida will allow this to happen.
We will know, in the end, who should have won.
God help George Bush if he get's to the Whitehouse and hasn't actually won Florida.....
Sun need to take heed and stay with Linux for the Cobalt "appliances". These boxes are the lifeblood and daily bread and butter for thousands of small hosting companies and IT groups. They are a tried and tested solution. If they change ANYTHING on these boxes then they WILL loose customers and not gain a single dollar in increased revenue. They are well supported both through the OS and the HUGE range of software available for it and through the people that both professionaly support it with their reputation (the customers)and the hard working people at Cobalt who have busted their asses to get the company in it's current position. Bottom Line: Keep Linux, It's the corner stone of Cobalt's sucess.
IBM should know better than this. For God's sake, all they had to do was read the standards. My own site has been guilty of the same crime. But changing ALT tags, while time-consuming is a chore at best. It should have been planned for and done in the first place. We are doing so for any new sites we do.
Inclusiveness, that should have been their motto.
I wonder what they would have done with the site for the Special Olympics???