Yes but you need something in order to set the direction for the team. That you later on find out better ways and alternative ways of doing things is quite natural.
From the interview is seems like not only did the "designer" fail to write things down, he also changed his opinion every other day and got into fights with the people who were now working on "wrong" things without being told that the design changed. From the article it seems like he's a sociopath (may seem like a strong term, but the basic "tell tale signs" indicate it).
Is it just me, or does the whole Q/A session seem like a personal attack by either a very informed player, or by somebody who used to work at the company.
You mean it seemed like he was a programmer as the link (in the Slashdot write up) is labelled a riviting Q/A with one of the former programmers. Or that in the actual Q and A the first answer (when he is asked what his relation was with the product answers: I was one of the RoT's programmers.
I wonder what intriguing insights you will have on the follow up article you forsee.;-)
Personally I'd be more surprised if this wasn't the reason that the projet failed. Lack of direction and leadership is really bad for any project. When the people who are supposed to be leading and directing are working against the rest of the team nothing good comes out of it.
The problem is that the algorithms used are not new. In general it's referred to as "flow analysis" in graph theory (IIRC I could be wrong and can't be bothered to check my books/google). Anyways, graph theory has been around for a few hundred years so, which means it's pretty well established. Anyone who spends a lot of time solving these problems just haven't had a formal education (the algorithms are presented in computer science 101 basically) or they just don't like to look at what other people have done.
BTW this relates to the toll road problem as toll roads are a special case were free ways have no cost. Same algorithm can be used though.
But I do agree with you that this is a case of the patent system "working". It's stupid, but that's by design.
Well, most of the quotes seem to along the lines of "Well the French are cowards and wouldn't even help us out when we took back their country from the Germans during WW2."
Now I get annoyed by some French mentality as much as anyone but that's just US revisionist history. It's really a quite offensive thing to say. You can still see the scars that the two world wars have left. Anyone who claims that people weren't trying to fight back during the German invasions just don't know what the hell they are talking about.
It's not like the US came charging to the rescue neither. They were dragged kick and screaming into the war (though there were many who joined voluntarily).
Furthermore it could be noteworthy to see how none of these witty people comment that France (and other nations) were actually correct. The US and UK didn't have any solid evidence that Irak was producing WMD. They just made it up and when the French called them on it they were called cowardly bastards.
Well, they are still bastards, but for other reasons.;-)
Really? I started my first IT business almost 17 years ago.
Don't take it the wrong way but I can't understand what a 14 year old (assuming your age in the Blog is correct) could do in 1989 in the IT business. During the WWW craze I could see that, but before? But as others have said "IT" is a pretty vague term and thus me may just have the same idea of what you do.
Eg personally I work as a consultant developing (among other things) software for mobile phones. I'd say that's "IT" but the requirements I have on salary etc are vastly different that someone working tech-support at the same company as me.
I'd have to say that I'd be very wary of working for someone that payed me minimum wage and then promised bonuses. But again, that may depend vastly on what area of IT you are working in.
Because the bonus depends on things that are outside of my control.
Not really. If the contract is drawn up correctly (read: by a lawyer), then there will actually be very few things "outside of your control" when it comes to deliverables and payment.
I believe his point isn't that he contract is in error and thus no pay is received. The point is that unless I get to decide how much the project is sold for then I have no control of if the project is feasable at all.
Eg, you sell a project planning it will take 1 month to fishing. It's actually only feasable to finish in 2 months time and thus I have two options: 1) Work like hell to make it in 1 month. (If possible). This means I'd get a "normal" bonus and so would you. In this case you had done a big error and should reasonably not get any bonus while I should get it all since I got the project finished. (Note that this can be extremely important wrt good will to the customer.) 2) I can finish it in 2 months and not get a bonus either month.
But what about new stuff? Will someone with a really innovative idea open source it from the beginning? And even worse: will we notice?
Bittorrent? Of course, that was preceeded by the arguably superior (and also OSS) SwarmCast which never caught on. Otherwise I'd say that there is quite a bit of research which is done in an OSS manner... but most people never hear of this. (Eg someone got excited about the innovating idea of running physics simulations on a GPU on ArsForums. This has been done for years on GPGPU, with plenty of OSS programs.)
Generally I'd say that there isn't much innovation in CSS neither.
In my opinion the big bonus with OSS compared to CSS is that most innovations are not really new. Taking something old and making it better is more common, and in some ways more useful. And naturally this is quite a bit easier with OSS than with CSS.
Since the Xbox 360 used an MS-made CPU, I would wager that the key is on the CPU itself.
From what I've read this is the case. Actually the CPU has a crypto engine on it so all verification is made on chip. That will make it very hard to extract the keys from the machine.
always (and here I truly am saying "always") hash collisions.
Yes, but with any decent cryptographic hash you will not be able to find collisions without brute force. Brute forcing is not feasable unless you have a long time to wait.
Furthermore even if you did find a collision it probably wouldn't do anything useful.
If you are talking about the encryption/signing then you are wrong. People are still trying to brute force the Xbox keys. Basically by the time you have made a significant dent in the keyspace the console is long obsolete anyways.
This would be true even if you used every computer on Earth.
Alternative Hits Water 28,700,000 Purple 3,770,000 Grass 4,560,000 Trees 8,390,000
On the first question a simple query actually returned more hits for hair than fur. If you put the question in quotation marks you get the results 1,040 to 579 in favour of "fur".
There are actually people doing research on giving programs "common sense" like this by doing clever things with electronically available information.
Well, you know how dogs tend to chase anything that is running away?
Seriously though, perhaps you should ask some guy friends for hints? As I wrote in my long rant above these girls I know couldn't see what they were doing wrong neither. (They didn't exactly try run away though.)
Good luck though, it sounds like a pretty bad situation for you. I hope you manage to make them get the point.
They shouldn't be as big as Wikipedia itself and thus not be linked as frequently. As such they shouldn't pose as big of a "problem" as Wikipedia itself. And if you imply that there are sites that are "borrowing" Wikipedia content, adding ads and then Google bombing "for the win" then that's really an issue with Google and not Wikipedia.
3. AJAX. It's worth a look if you want to stay within the browser's window. And that means you should get good Javascript/CSS/XML/HTML books.
4. Firefox-as-UI-platform. This is related to the above. I am just beginning to get into this and it looks very promising. Other people know far more than I do. The GreaseMonkey extension is great fun to play with.
There is quite a lot you can do with just this since the OP seems to want a way to hack around with webpages. And with some creativity you wouldn't even need to run a local server.
Look at Tiddly Wiki for an example of what you can create with some creative ECMA scripting. (In short, it's a wiki encapsulated in a single.html page, which you store on your local file system.)
GreaseMonkey has already been mentioned. But it may be worth to point out that this does pretty much exactly what the OP wants. It lets you mangle webpages as you download them via client side ECMA scripts.
Otherwise I agree with the idea of trying Python. It's a good demonstration of the progress that computer languages have made in the last 20 years.
Sci-Fi is about breaking the constraints and tired plots of conventional stories. This means fantastic things like aliens, robots, artificial intelligence and time travel. Not rehashing the stale concept that the rest of the universe really isn't so different from home and we'll never really evolve past the emotions and biases we've got right now.
Of course Sci-Fi is a genre predominantly filled with crap. And I don't just mean the standard 90% of crap, but pretty much all crap.
Science Fiction on the other hand tend to focus on new and interesting ideas and/or make comments on us in a context which doesn't freak people out (as easily).
I think it's sad that we still, to this day, can count the number of actual genuine Science Fiction material on TV shows or the big screen on one hand. Typically it's just an excuse to blow things up a lot and to have someone dish out witty one-liners. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it isn't Science Fiction.
Personally I'd love to see a mini-series set in the universe of Ian M Banks Culture series. Given the nature of the books you could have a completely free storyline too, completely unrelated to the books.
In WindowsXP (which is the only I have available wrt Windows) you do the following very obvious (yeah, right;-) steps:
Control Panel -> Regional and Language options -> Languages (a tab) -> [Details...]. Now you can add new languages or new keyboard layouts to existing ones.
Really I only know about it since I'm not a native English speaker. And since I added new languages to it a while back.
Oh and at the bottom of that screen (Text services and Input languages) you can edit if you want a language bar (helps you change setup with the mouse) or you can bind shortcut keys to a specific language/keyboard layout. (This last feature was one I haven't seen before.)
In my experience Windows really has a lot of good features. Unfortunately no-one seems to know about them. And I have no idea why people think Windows is more user friendly than Linux. In the latter the keyboard layout seems easy to find and edit.
Been out at a club a group of people and some drunk guy wanders up to one of the girls and says something. Naturally since it's a club it's impossible to hear anything so she leans closer and braces herself on him (it's a crowded dance floor and people are getting shoved around). So the guy comes back several times and asks her again.
Afterwards she (and the other girls) are really annoyed by the creep (well he was a creep, even I as a guy'd say that). So me and the other guys have to explain that if you are going to expect any results you have to control your body language.
Don't get closer to him. Don't fucking touch him (unless it's to violently apply your knees to his groin if he's really not getting it) unless you want to entice him. Don't smile or shrug unless you want him to hit on you. Give him a stare of death and mouth "Oh I hope you didn't try to hit on me". Unless he's really drunk he'll get the idea. Or his friends will get the idea and drag him off once he's made enough of a fool of himself.
To the grand-parent: If all the guys you say no to are pestering you afterwards then go take a course on how to show body language. I bet you can learn this at any decent (female, if you prefer it that way) self defence class, a normal martial arts group or just join an amateur theatre group. You quite apparently need to be more assertive with how you tell people off. And let me be clear. Be particularly clear to the guys you actually care about. No need to be mean, just assertive.
That's why there is a WAP-HTTP gateway on your mobile providers network. If you request a HTML page the gateway can reformat the page to WML and make it easier for the phone to render.
BTW this is basically how the new Opera Mini browser works as well. Only they have their own intermediary language which they convert the HTML to.
Seems like all layouts have their problems. The Svorak does a similar thing as regular Swedish keyboard and puts all the programming characters in hard to reach places.
Perhaps the best is to just learn one for english/coding and keep on using Qwerty for Swedish. I imagine that learning two new at the same time is a bad idea.
At least, that was the case the last time I looked into it.
Look into it some more then.
I actually don't know about admin rights to install. As we all have admin on our own computers at work. Adding a Dvorak layout to my XP computer took about 30 seconds.
But changing the settings takes about a Left SHIFT + ALT press to change. You can also have different keyboard settings and change them by simply clicking.
Takes all of 5 seconds.
Learning to use it, well, that's a different story.
A few weeks ago my stumplings on the net brought me to the site of David Seah. Among other things he had designed a simple sheet which you print out and can use for basic time tracking. The central idea is really that you should reward yourself for getting something done (good for all of us procrastinators) but it also works as a rudimentary time tracker.
It seems like he has now put up some new versions of it. Other versions and comments are found under "The printable CEO" on that site. I though it was a pretty neat concept, although I haven't gotten around to testing it (yeah, I'm a hardcore procrastinator).
For more complete tips on time managing he also comments on his own methods (in Excel) for tracking his own time.
It seems like they (Microsoft) have actually tried to make the X360 hard to hack. AFAIK it only executes signed code and the certificates it validates code against are stored on the CPU. That will make it quite a bit harder than the Xbox to hack.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes but you need something in order to set the direction for the team. That you later on find out better ways and alternative ways of doing things is quite natural.
From the interview is seems like not only did the "designer" fail to write things down, he also changed his opinion every other day and got into fights with the people who were now working on "wrong" things without being told that the design changed. From the article it seems like he's a sociopath (may seem like a strong term, but the basic "tell tale signs" indicate it).
You mean it seemed like he was a programmer as the link (in the Slashdot write up) is labelled a riviting Q/A with one of the former programmers. Or that in the actual Q and A the first answer (when he is asked what his relation was with the product answers: I was one of the RoT's programmers.
I wonder what intriguing insights you will have on the follow up article you forsee.
Personally I'd be more surprised if this wasn't the reason that the projet failed. Lack of direction and leadership is really bad for any project. When the people who are supposed to be leading and directing are working against the rest of the team nothing good comes out of it.
The problem is that the algorithms used are not new. In general it's referred to as "flow analysis" in graph theory (IIRC I could be wrong and can't be bothered to check my books/google). Anyways, graph theory has been around for a few hundred years so, which means it's pretty well established. Anyone who spends a lot of time solving these problems just haven't had a formal education (the algorithms are presented in computer science 101 basically) or they just don't like to look at what other people have done.
BTW this relates to the toll road problem as toll roads are a special case were free ways have no cost. Same algorithm can be used though.
But I do agree with you that this is a case of the patent system "working". It's stupid, but that's by design.
Well, most of the quotes seem to along the lines of "Well the French are cowards and wouldn't even help us out when we took back their country from the Germans during WW2."
;-)
Now I get annoyed by some French mentality as much as anyone but that's just US revisionist history. It's really a quite offensive thing to say. You can still see the scars that the two world wars have left. Anyone who claims that people weren't trying to fight back during the German invasions just don't know what the hell they are talking about.
It's not like the US came charging to the rescue neither. They were dragged kick and screaming into the war (though there were many who joined voluntarily).
Furthermore it could be noteworthy to see how none of these witty people comment that France (and other nations) were actually correct. The US and UK didn't have any solid evidence that Irak was producing WMD. They just made it up and when the French called them on it they were called cowardly bastards.
Well, they are still bastards, but for other reasons.
Listen to this: Asterisk - Open-Source VoIP PBX.
Don't take it the wrong way but I can't understand what a 14 year old (assuming your age in the Blog is correct) could do in 1989 in the IT business. During the WWW craze I could see that, but before? But as others have said "IT" is a pretty vague term and thus me may just have the same idea of what you do.
Eg personally I work as a consultant developing (among other things) software for mobile phones. I'd say that's "IT" but the requirements I have on salary etc are vastly different that someone working tech-support at the same company as me.
I'd have to say that I'd be very wary of working for someone that payed me minimum wage and then promised bonuses. But again, that may depend vastly on what area of IT you are working in.
I believe his point isn't that he contract is in error and thus no pay is received. The point is that unless I get to decide how much the project is sold for then I have no control of if the project is feasable at all.
Eg, you sell a project planning it will take 1 month to fishing. It's actually only feasable to finish in 2 months time and thus I have two options:
1) Work like hell to make it in 1 month. (If possible). This means I'd get a "normal" bonus and so would you. In this case you had done a big error and should reasonably not get any bonus while I should get it all since I got the project finished. (Note that this can be extremely important wrt good will to the customer.)
2) I can finish it in 2 months and not get a bonus either month.
Bittorrent? Of course, that was preceeded by the arguably superior (and also OSS) SwarmCast which never caught on. Otherwise I'd say that there is quite a bit of research which is done in an OSS manner... but most people never hear of this. (Eg someone got excited about the innovating idea of running physics simulations on a GPU on ArsForums. This has been done for years on GPGPU, with plenty of OSS programs.)
Generally I'd say that there isn't much innovation in CSS neither.
In my opinion the big bonus with OSS compared to CSS is that most innovations are not really new. Taking something old and making it better is more common, and in some ways more useful. And naturally this is quite a bit easier with OSS than with CSS.
From what I've read this is the case. Actually the CPU has a crypto engine on it so all verification is made on chip. That will make it very hard to extract the keys from the machine.
Yes, but with any decent cryptographic hash you will not be able to find collisions without brute force. Brute forcing is not feasable unless you have a long time to wait.
Furthermore even if you did find a collision it probably wouldn't do anything useful.
If you are talking about the encryption/signing then you are wrong. People are still trying to brute force the Xbox keys. Basically by the time you have made a significant dent in the keyspace the console is long obsolete anyways.
This would be true even if you used every computer on Earth.
The second question run through Google:
Alternative Hits
Water 28,700,000
Purple 3,770,000
Grass 4,560,000
Trees 8,390,000
On the first question a simple query actually returned more hits for hair than fur. If you put the question in quotation marks you get the results 1,040 to 579 in favour of "fur".
There are actually people doing research on giving programs "common sense" like this by doing clever things with electronically available information.
Is running away good enough body language?
Well, you know how dogs tend to chase anything that is running away?
Seriously though, perhaps you should ask some guy friends for hints? As I wrote in my long rant above these girls I know couldn't see what they were doing wrong neither. (They didn't exactly try run away though.)
Good luck though, it sounds like a pretty bad situation for you. I hope you manage to make them get the point.
So?
They shouldn't be as big as Wikipedia itself and thus not be linked as frequently. As such they shouldn't pose as big of a "problem" as Wikipedia itself. And if you imply that there are sites that are "borrowing" Wikipedia content, adding ads and then Google bombing "for the win" then that's really an issue with Google and not Wikipedia.
Or is there something I'm missing?
There is quite a lot you can do with just this since the OP seems to want a way to hack around with webpages. And with some creativity you wouldn't even need to run a local server.
Look at Tiddly Wiki for an example of what you can create with some creative ECMA scripting. (In short, it's a wiki encapsulated in a single
GreaseMonkey has already been mentioned. But it may be worth to point out that this does pretty much exactly what the OP wants. It lets you mangle webpages as you download them via client side ECMA scripts.
Otherwise I agree with the idea of trying Python. It's a good demonstration of the progress that computer languages have made in the last 20 years.
Next time try:
"Your search here" -site:wikipedia.org
in the Google search field.
Of course Sci-Fi is a genre predominantly filled with crap. And I don't just mean the standard 90% of crap, but pretty much all crap.
Science Fiction on the other hand tend to focus on new and interesting ideas and/or make comments on us in a context which doesn't freak people out (as easily).
I think it's sad that we still, to this day, can count the number of actual genuine Science Fiction material on TV shows or the big screen on one hand. Typically it's just an excuse to blow things up a lot and to have someone dish out witty one-liners. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it isn't Science Fiction.
Personally I'd love to see a mini-series set in the universe of Ian M Banks Culture series. Given the nature of the books you could have a completely free storyline too, completely unrelated to the books.
You mean how to add a keyboard layout?
;-) steps:
In WindowsXP (which is the only I have available wrt Windows) you do the following very obvious (yeah, right
Control Panel -> Regional and Language options -> Languages (a tab) -> [Details...]. Now you can add new languages or new keyboard layouts to existing ones.
Really I only know about it since I'm not a native English speaker. And since I added new languages to it a while back.
Oh and at the bottom of that screen (Text services and Input languages) you can edit if you want a language bar (helps you change setup with the mouse) or you can bind shortcut keys to a specific language/keyboard layout. (This last feature was one I haven't seen before.)
In my experience Windows really has a lot of good features. Unfortunately no-one seems to know about them. And I have no idea why people think Windows is more user friendly than Linux. In the latter the keyboard layout seems easy to find and edit.
I've seen this happen to female friends of mine.
Been out at a club a group of people and some drunk guy wanders up to one of the girls and says something. Naturally since it's a club it's impossible to hear anything so she leans closer and braces herself on him (it's a crowded dance floor and people are getting shoved around). So the guy comes back several times and asks her again.
Afterwards she (and the other girls) are really annoyed by the creep (well he was a creep, even I as a guy'd say that). So me and the other guys have to explain that if you are going to expect any results you have to control your body language.
Don't get closer to him. Don't fucking touch him (unless it's to violently apply your knees to his groin if he's really not getting it) unless you want to entice him. Don't smile or shrug unless you want him to hit on you. Give him a stare of death and mouth "Oh I hope you didn't try to hit on me". Unless he's really drunk he'll get the idea. Or his friends will get the idea and drag him off once he's made enough of a fool of himself.
To the grand-parent: If all the guys you say no to are pestering you afterwards then go take a course on how to show body language. I bet you can learn this at any decent (female, if you prefer it that way) self defence class, a normal martial arts group or just join an amateur theatre group. You quite apparently need to be more assertive with how you tell people off. And let me be clear. Be particularly clear to the guys you actually care about. No need to be mean, just assertive.
Feel free to be mean to the creeps.
That's why there is a WAP-HTTP gateway on your mobile providers network. If you request a HTML page the gateway can reformat the page to WML and make it easier for the phone to render.
BTW this is basically how the new Opera Mini browser works as well. Only they have their own intermediary language which they convert the HTML to.
Seems like all layouts have their problems. The Svorak does a similar thing as regular Swedish keyboard and puts all the programming characters in hard to reach places.
Perhaps the best is to just learn one for english/coding and keep on using Qwerty for Swedish. I imagine that learning two new at the same time is a bad idea.
At least, that was the case the last time I looked into it.
Look into it some more then.
I actually don't know about admin rights to install. As we all have admin on our own computers at work. Adding a Dvorak layout to my XP computer took about 30 seconds.
But changing the settings takes about a Left SHIFT + ALT press to change. You can also have different keyboard settings and change them by simply clicking.
Takes all of 5 seconds.
Learning to use it, well, that's a different story.
A few weeks ago my stumplings on the net brought me to the site of David Seah. Among other things he had designed a simple sheet which you print out and can use for basic time tracking. The central idea is really that you should reward yourself for getting something done (good for all of us procrastinators) but it also works as a rudimentary time tracker.
It seems like he has now put up some new versions of it. Other versions and comments are found under "The printable CEO" on that site. I though it was a pretty neat concept, although I haven't gotten around to testing it (yeah, I'm a hardcore procrastinator).
For more complete tips on time managing he also comments on his own methods (in Excel) for tracking his own time.
I think the proper Python alternative to RoR is something like Turbo Gears.
It seems like they (Microsoft) have actually tried to make the X360 hard to hack. AFAIK it only executes signed code and the certificates it validates code against are stored on the CPU. That will make it quite a bit harder than the Xbox to hack.
I bet someone will manage in the end though.