The linked diagramm is a dead giveaway that this is more of a PR stunt than usefull scientific research. No matter what the verdict, fact is: we are putting to much polution into the atmosphere and we need to stop. That's a fact, and no lobbying otherwise will change it.
Excerpt from Interview: MAXIM: "Any plans for a Special Edition of the Holiday Special?" George Lucas: [hangs head] "Right. That's one of those things that happened, and I just have to live with it."
All the interns under my command have been treated extraordinarily well. If you are a nerd/geek and are willing to pitch in and have an open ear to my/our advice you'll have the time of your life working on the crew. Our current intern is just across the hall right now sitting with our two server programmers and enjoys treatment as an equal by all. Up to the point that the team requested he join in on the Sprint Retrospective, which I, Scrum Master, actually didn't think necessary. It wasn't but he was along with us anyway. Aside from that I actually side with him on certain arguments - he's a FOSS/Linux guy like me, some of the others are MS-fanboyz. Nice to have a Padavan from the light side once in a while.
Since I usually handpick my interns - or, like now - am working with one that was handpicked by a fellow geek, they all are avantgarde with their skills. What they lack is experience but I can usually compensate for that on related issues in a few 1on1 sessions. All my interns either where on the light side of the force (FOSS/MS-Adobe sceptics) or have switched under my influence and all of them enjoy good positions and jobs now, also due to my and my colleagues advice on which technologies to aim for, how and what to study and what to watch out for when joining the fray in order to earn a salary.
IT is relatively hermetic and if you've earned your spurs by allready programming as a teenager, like the rest of us, your part of the family allready. We all can relate to your exposed position as the geek/nerd amoung your generations peers and we take pride into showing you that your skills and interests are honored. As far as I'm concerned anyway.
Things like these highlight some of the benefits of the German legislative system. Schavan would've been the better choice for the office of president and she'd've probably said 'Have enough information and my verdict is: Forget it' but never the less I'm positively suprised about this.
Köhler wouldn't have been my President but he has shown balls at other occasions and he has a very polite, neatly shrouded and delicate way of basically saying 'Go fuck yourself' to his party members without publicly hurting any feelings, as soon as day-to-day politics start screwing around again in Germany. He's like a gutter-grid keeping the biggest chunks of crap of the german supreme courts back. Which allready has a hard time keeping up with voiding all the BS Berlin has been coming up with lately.
Having a chancelor (currently Angela Merkel) for every-day politics and a President as mostly symbolic head-of-state does have its benefits, as it gives the President tthe obligation to use his power to prevent long-term-effects of election-term-based decisions and lobby/decoy/special-interest laws. And keeps him out of the regular decision making which gives him and his actions the required authority and weight.
I once built a custom vertical market cross-plattform desktop application in RunRev. The functions of the little app where speced to the last detail and the user interface was designed and drawn out down to the last pixel, Font requirements included. Coaxing the IDE into not sucking by adding 3rd party extensions and such was a bit of a hassle, but all in all the project went very well.
We used RunRev 2.x with various 3rd party extensions including a font-compiling plugin (which in the end didn't work) and a more IDE-like extension of the RunRev enviroment that eased coding.
The visual and object oriented style of building apps in stackware is pretty cool and can be insanely fast, fluent, concurrent and bugsafe. You get concurrent from the first minute on, because Stackware usually uses the DMI approach, which is pretty cool in itself. The way the runtime integrated with it's own DMI (Direct Manipulation Interface) and compiles it's current state into the deployable app is something one has to get used to, but it actually is OOP in its purest form, if you get the hang of it. This sort of developement is a direct descendant of the Smalltalk way of doing things and makes the Java/.Net way look like ancient weedy spagetti-basic.
Yet RunRev uses a PL called TransScript, something like a bizar resemblence of SQL and Lingo that tries to emulate english for dummies. An attempt which, of course, doesn't work. That's the biggest gripe I have about these commercial types of stackware. Building a new PL and throwing out the junk we've got from C and it's ancestors is a good thing, but putting in SQLs failiures of a end-user-interface language is bad and the results are usually accordingly. The one FOSS project that aimes in a stackware direction that I know of is Squeak and it uses Smalltalk, which probably is a way better to go.
Any way you look at it, stackware and visual development has a lot going for it if it is done right. It actually kicks all other dev-methods imaged by Eclipse, Java,.Net, [fill in generic Big-Fat-Appstack here] and whatnot up and down the street, to be honest. I'm not suprised they claim to have saved half a million in costs, and I actually believe it's true.
I use svn for that exact task. Runs everywhere, tools are abundant, CLI-handling is fast and easy. I only use TortoiseSVN on Windows because the Windows shell sucks big time. Do a regular backup of your repository and you've got that in the mix aswell.
I've just explained, over the phone, for the umpteenth time, to my SO how to copy and paste. It can be very frustrating. However there were things she actually did understand. She didn't ask what and where the 'Apple-Key' was, which is a step forward. I expect her to learn it completely in the next half year or so.
If your folks do nothing but surf and mail you should install Linux for them and explain the basics of handling it whenever the need arises. Viruscleaning and virus avoiding is a non-trivial task and I run into these problems quite often. And I'm an expert with 25 years of experience. Being unavailable once in a while is a good thing too for techsupport - if it's something they can easyly figure out for themselves.
Bottom line: n00by? -> You're getting a Unix-based OS (OS X or Ubuntu Linux would be my choice) and a non-admin user account. That's it. Experienced user? -> Here's your box, do with it whatever you want.
Be patient and reteach the basics of computing and surfing over and over again. It'll stick some day.
Presentation software is just a tool. I had a professor who could actually handle it pretty well. He had his slides set up in a very simple but readable manner, they weren't cramped. They were to the point, short and very well planned. And he gave each of his students a miniature printout of the lectures slides, so that everybody could anotate each one by himself with whatever they needed.
He'd use maybe 40 slides in a 90 minute lecture. His talk was educating, informative, sometimes quite humorous and you could actually understand what he was saying simply because he didn't have to hop around 3 chalkboards all the time but could stay put at the podium. He was allways well prepared and his lectures where a feast. And that even though it was a hard subject (IT-electronics subcurriculum in CS).
Bottom line: Presentation software, just like chalkboards, are nothing but tools. Use them badly or in the wrong way and your results will be accordingly (like, f.i., cramped, braindead presentation-slides or crappy handwriting on chalkboards... duh). Use them correctly and you will be able to utilise the benefits that they bring along. It's that simple.
I'd go around about the way you planned. Flash is actually very good for this sort of thing. I'd also look into Air, maybe that's viable for this. I'd be carefull with linux clients though, Flash and the Linux rendering stack don't allways play well together.
Use Linux for the server and look into FOSS streaming servers like Red5. osflash should be your next stop.
See if you can go with OSx on MacMinis for the kiosk systems, they'd be my safest bet and you can do neat stuff with the IR remote and some extra shareware. Remoting and control-wise.
"We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about." - Albert Einstein
Know that your happiness doesn't depend on your salary or wether what you're doing is something you've been doing for 20 years or just 2 months. I'd start cutting it a little thicker. Go part time or reduce your hours and overtime. If you get fired, all the better. You'll have a reason to reorientate. Quite often life needs to kick us in the butt before we get it one with change that is overdue. 2 years ago I was freelance and broke in a dead end in a pointless town. I did my GD, studied CS for 14 weeks (and dropped it again due to a insufficient cost/benefit ratio), did a larger web project that was 60% / 40% idiots all around (a bareable ratio at the time) but in the end it was a dead end. I moved away. Now I got a dayjob in a million in game developement in a company making so much money it's bizar, a fair salary, free breakfast & lunch, smart and nice colleagues that treat me with respect and are gratefull for my experience and advice and lots of fun stuff to do and programm on. And I do something entirely different in my spare time - tango dancing, which is fun and has me catching up on my typical nerdy girl-encounter-deficiency.
And if this life and dayjob becomes a drag one day, I won't take as long to cut lose as last time.
There are countless things out there that are fun to do and to live on. Start trying things out. Now. Wether you're going to be a park ranger, a trucker, a salesman, a freelance IT consultant or an oil rig worker doesn't matter. I personaly have a diploma in performing arts and could even imagine going back to that. You may have something else in your background. Go out and try or put yourself in a situation that either solves your problems in your current occupation or shoves you into the next. Packing up and moving on might be a solution too.
The textbook definition of sexism is discrimination on the grounds of gender. So, unless you ask out men as well, technically you are being sexist.
You're actually right. But I do ask my buddies out to dinner and/or the movies and/or clubbing. Though I wouldn't call it a date, as that term implies the possiblity of intimate interests on my behalf. Which actually *do* apply to gender. To which, the own or the opposite is a matter of sexual orientation.
But that is generally acceptable, since a woman asking me out would call it a date aswell. She wouldn't call asking her friend out a 'date'. Same thing here, and calling her a 'sexist' in this situation would be stressing the generic context of the term just as much.
He mentions geeks asking peer women out for a date as an example for being sexistic. WTF? A single woman amoung dozens of men actually is likely to be asked out for a date more often than each man. How is that sexistic?
That aside I presume this is a vocal few distorting perception of the majority. With feminists and 'manly' programmers alike.
I work for a very successfull and rapidly growing browsergame publisher (currently the largest). We do have the one or other title that was acquired and isn't all that spectacular for geeks and nerds, but we have some very neat originals, some of which have made us big and have had gotten a facelift or two recently (aside of the regular improvements and bugfixes). Since they run on browsers they are naturally x-plattform and require no installation. All are free to play.
Here's my personal favorites list from our portfolio:
OGame, a classic 4X sci-fi/space game with a brand new pimped-out Ajax interface and fresh GFX.... And a cool trailer. (Hint: Try a non-US server if the one you got has old boring table layouts - the community is large and most of us read and write a fluent english:-) )
Ikariam, a Settlers/Civilisation type Browsergame. Scored some prestigious awards recently, including 'Browsergame of the Year 2008'.
Wild Guns, a BG with a Wild West setting. Just has gotten a total redo of the graphics by our art crew. Very neat.
KingsAge, a nice old-school BG, Defender of the Crow / Middle Ages Camelot style.
OK, slashdoters, go flood our servers and have our admins do some extra shifts. Hehehe... *leans back and takes some popcorn*
The old, imho to date unmatched, Palm OS is dead, the new Palm seems to become a screwup, iPhone/iPod Touch is a lockdown nightmare, WinMobile is a no-go and developing, integrating and deploying to Blackb*rrys is like grating your fingernails.
The Matter of fact is: Mobile is a mess, very much the way desktop computers were in the mid-eighties.
We are in dire need of an eqiuvalent to the Arduino platform in the PDA market. Small, cheap, relyable, open standards, with a simple single-touch screen a neat CPU and some run-off-the-mill LitIon battery industry standard. 6 months into the first batch we'll have FOSS programmers and hardware hackers expanding it to be a cellphone for those who want it to be one. THAT is what we need.
Just the open standard equivalent of my oldest colorscreen Palm at the price of 100 Euros and an FOSS OS that comes with it, that's all I ask. It can't be that difficult with hardware prices dropping left right and center.
I've slowly turned to a regular Opera user. Allthough I still use other Browsers too - I'm typing this on Opera and have Firefox 3.5 and Chrome 3.0 up and running right now. All three with a large set of open tabs. After upgrading to Opera 10 I have to say it still leads the way in Browser innovation and more and more it's becoming obvious to me that other Browsers usually just rip it off after after a handfull of point releases. It's the same with the new Firefox UI pictured in the related article.... Which, btw., as other have mentioned allready, does not show a ribbon.
So I can have Windows Zombies unhooked in France? Great. Used correctly this law could raise the bar for internet security and security awarenes on behalf of the end-user.
Wether I use closed-source or FOSS or paid or free (bw. those metrics are ortogonal to one another!) depends entirely on the usage model and my preferences for the job at hand.
Example 1: I'm considering getting back to Video Editing after 9 years of abstinence in order to spice up my website about web technologies. No effing way am I going to hassle around with FOSS Video editors - which practically don't exist. I might look at Blenders Sequencer for an hour to determine if it's usefull or not, but that's about it. I'll probably get Final Cut Express or something like that.
Example 2: ATM I develop PHP in my spare time - my current daytime gig is mostly ActionScript. I've considered PHPEd as an IDE, but I haven't had a Windows Box since about 7 years ago and no way am I switching just for that. With PHPEd out as my IDE of choice I *will* have a fuss getting full roundtrip debugging to work - no matter which x-plattform IDE I choose, so I might aswell get a FOSS one. Eclipse PDT it is then. I am not shelling out money for Komodo or Zend Studio if the amount of work is the same. Which it is.
Example 3: I was working on a clients project on my trusty 12" G4 iBook a few years back. It was laden with apps running side by side, including the Flash MX 2004 Pro IDE. Which was the reason I had gotten it in the first place. Needles to say it was slow as molasses. I chose to turn off my favorite Editor jEdit and get a faster one. TextMate was a worthy candidate. However, it costs 30$ (no problem with that), only runs on OS X (ok, that's a tad tricky, but I'll follow along) and gets its power by extensibility with some kind of C dialect scripting language. Here's the dealbreaker: If I have to learn some scripting language to pimp out my Editor with half the features jEdit has, it better be one that runs *everywhere*. TextMate was ruled out and I chose to bite the bullet and learn Emacs. Usability is beyond bizar - you have to actually actively practice select, copy and paste (no joke!) and you won't get anywhere without a cheatsheet in the first year or two - but it runs *everywhere* and I don't have to learn more about some programming language than I would have had to with TextMate. Only here it is Lisp.
Example 4: I want to highres-scan a picture and print it out on a 1x2 meter banner to hang in my room. I'll have to edit it, remove the rastering and prepare it for 7-color printing. No effing way am I going to attempt that in Gimp, which I work with at least once a week. PS and maybe Corel Photo Paint are the only choice here.
Bottom line: Use the best tool for the job. And invest either your time or your money. Never both.
You've been working on this for *years* without any concept of gaining critical mass within that time? WTF?... Doesn't sound like you're a businessman. Sitting in your basement building a new technology get's you nowhere - other than 'Broke County' - if you don't have a plan or a crew to help you launch it.... whatever...
There is one thing you should keep in mind when building a new mocap system: MoCap is one part, the other part is its software. No matter how cheap the MoCap setup, if the software is too expensive and/or to unwieldy to integrate you won't open new markets.
See to it that your system becomes a standard on its own and is fully integrated into Blender. You have the advantage of having a leading figurehead FOSS project that intersects with your field on which you hop on to the bandwagon. Blender is gaining critical mass as we speak and it's very likely to become an industry standard as soon as they get renderman integrated. Which can't be that long anymore.
Go ask Ton Roosendaal (Blender Project Lead) about his plans on this and have a few from the coreteam look at your MoCap system. You'll be able to use the new input and contacts to get some real world experience and feedback with your system. They've just started working on the next Open Movie, Durian. If your tech is that good, maybe they can allready use it and gather some field data for you, no? On top of that, going the FOSS way isn't the worst thing to do, since you're in the hardware business.
We're pretty much in a simular situation. We chose scrum because we need *some* sort of methodology because our company is growing fast (currently +100 people per year, we're at 300 now). Scrum isn't that ideal for large companies, but since we develop software which changes requirements along the way - games - it's not the worst either. As a seasoned dev it bothers me that I have to do scrum housekeeping part-time and can't spend that time devloping. However I *do* develop and I find that someone has to do the scrum master job, it might as well be the experienced guy on our team. I sit in the same office as our team lead and we've got the seperation of roles pretty well established. My job boils down to going around and keeping up awarenes of our release cycles and project progress tracking and the occasional tooling and process optimisation. I also play a key role when assembling backlogs for the team (including me and the teamlead) and have taken on the grunt work of building loadtests for our app.
It's all about management, and while it sucks to be a manager if you've been a dev for the longest part of your life, it's something that needs to be done and it's better if I can project my experience to the team if I have a key role.
As far as I can see scrum evolving at our place, it's basically a tool to gradually force awareness and responsebilty on to the devs. They learn to predict their time needed and our product owners (teamlead and gamedesigner, both are also part of the team) learn to hone their featuritis and bad prioritising.
I found certain rules to be paramount for implementing a process - of whatever type that may be:
1) The process is for you and your peers. It's not you for the process.
2) If there's no improvement for the people involved, the process is worthless.
3) Personal interaction and communication come first. Tools come very last, if at all. (We use a TWiki for all our Scrum stuff. It has be building the burndowns with calc, but it had us hop into scrum with a zero-fuss approach). I might start looking into Agilo/Trac, but I'm sure as hell not bending over and lubing up for some tool that doesn't fit our variant of the process.... There's some advantage in being a scrum master and having a say in such things as tooling.
4) Know why you are doing scrum and what you want to achieve with it. If you don't have a target it's pointless in a strange self serving way and will implode after a few weeks. Or it will stay and become a drag, which is even worse.
5) Be aware of the partly pointlessness of an agile process in a large corporation and judge the process accordingly. Don't over or undervalue it.
6) Bend the process, tooling and proceedures whenever required. Use the sprint intervals, backlog assembly meetings and sprint reviews to do so.
7) If you are a scrum master, be prepared to kick the ass of your teamlead or product owners if they step out of line or leave the predefined track of rules required for the team to deliver per-sprint predictable results.
8) You may think that you are the superdev, but as they say the first step to a nervous breakdown is overesstimating your importance. Management is a sacrifice, you step back to have the others do the fun stuff. Therefore you get to manage and learn the metaprocess and see how the really big software projects come to life. Moving from dev to scrum master isn't an end all and it does improve your social skills. And you can still start an open source project on the side, if you miss coding.
Last time I checked Subversion was the current prime choice for VC Systems, for various reasons. Widespread availability of tools being the most prominent. Could it be that the summary is bullshitting on this issue? I think so.
Naming for Workstations should be the same way as with servers. Meaning the name should be distinct and not be associated to the function of the workstation or the OS installed. If an Error message pops up I should imediately be able to recognize the computers name. If the box is called 'Linux' and I read 'Linux error' I'm likely to be confused about what is meant.
I've found it best to find a broad naming scheme like Astronomy and go by and name all servers and workstations based on that scheme. 'saturn', 'uranus', 'antares', etc. If you must you can go by and name the servers after planets and the workstations after moons or something like that. Allthough that in itself could allready pose a security risk if some hacker sees the pattern.
This guy is the upper league. I met him a few times at the Blender conference. He's on the OpenGL Standards Team and has forgotten more about coding than most of us will ever learn. Just watching him demonstrate his 3D tools is jawdropping. Listening to him when he talks about 3D and real-time multi-user networking is a feast. He's in the upper league of coding *and* in the upper league of taste and design. If anybody can pull something like this through it's him. Go and watch the demos if you don't believe me.
I only say Euros if it is advice that is worth more. Things I have solid real life experience with. Others get the '2 Cents' or 'two Eurocents'. That advice is actually worth more than 2 Euros, I'd say.
I've had (... still have... in a way such relationships never die) a 16 year relationship with a woman. We have one daughter, 11 years old. My advice on marrige is quite simple: Don't marry. Or marry with a 2-inch thick marriage contract. The simple fact that either of the SOs can walk away, with (nearly) no legal commitments holding them back contributes greatly to respecting each other and acknowledging each others sacrafices that where done for a relationship. And on this aspect of issues i'd like to quote this:
"People who are intensly in Love often forget that for it to last you need to actively maintain it. Emotionally and in your attitude towards your significant other."
Every single day. Don't get me wrong: You can marry, if it is for outside reasons. Maybe you have to marry for tax reasons or because you live in a society where only married couples are accepted. Maybe you or your SO is a federal employee and will have to move to a different state whenever superiors say so and there only are exemptions for married couples. However, what you should do - both of you, at the same time and in the same intensity - is treat each other as if you weren't married. Every day. That's easiest to ensure if you simply don't marry or do so with a thick contract that seals details.
Me and her, we've each had our share of affairs on the side lately and we actually console each other when things get rough or someone of us is lovesick about it. However, we have never lost our respect for one another. I went through a solid stretch of of near flat-out neglegt by her for years, and simply the fact that I knew I could walk out of the door at any time had me stick with her and my responsibilies towards our daughter. If you marry, it should be under circumstances under which you both feel comfortable with your self and are sure that you can give what the other expects of you and what is required to make the others life better than if they were alone.
And if you, after all this advice, *do* marry, *don't* spend huge amounts of money on the wedding. Marry, maybe invite your best friends and families to a dinner or party or something, but don't go into huge dept just for a wedding. The positive effect (bragging rights, etc.) wears of quickly and if that's all your doing it for it's pointless to do anyway. And you get the best marriage effect ('My wife' / 'my husband') anyways.
Congratulations on finding the love of your life and my best wishes to both of you!
Slashdot Mirror
The linked diagramm is a dead giveaway that this is more of a PR stunt than usefull scientific research. No matter what the verdict, fact is: we are putting to much polution into the atmosphere and we need to stop. That's a fact, and no lobbying otherwise will change it.
Excerpt from Interview:
MAXIM: "Any plans for a Special Edition of the Holiday Special?"
George Lucas: [hangs head] "Right. That's one of those things that happened, and I just have to live with it."
Hehe.
By me, that is.
All the interns under my command have been treated extraordinarily well. If you are a nerd/geek and are willing to pitch in and have an open ear to my/our advice you'll have the time of your life working on the crew. Our current intern is just across the hall right now sitting with our two server programmers and enjoys treatment as an equal by all. Up to the point that the team requested he join in on the Sprint Retrospective, which I, Scrum Master, actually didn't think necessary. It wasn't but he was along with us anyway. Aside from that I actually side with him on certain arguments - he's a FOSS/Linux guy like me, some of the others are MS-fanboyz. Nice to have a Padavan from the light side once in a while.
Since I usually handpick my interns - or, like now - am working with one that was handpicked by a fellow geek, they all are avantgarde with their skills. What they lack is experience but I can usually compensate for that on related issues in a few 1on1 sessions. All my interns either where on the light side of the force (FOSS/MS-Adobe sceptics) or have switched under my influence and all of them enjoy good positions and jobs now, also due to my and my colleagues advice on which technologies to aim for, how and what to study and what to watch out for when joining the fray in order to earn a salary.
IT is relatively hermetic and if you've earned your spurs by allready programming as a teenager, like the rest of us, your part of the family allready. We all can relate to your exposed position as the geek/nerd amoung your generations peers and we take pride into showing you that your skills and interests are honored. As far as I'm concerned anyway.
My 2 cents.
Things like these highlight some of the benefits of the German legislative system. Schavan would've been the better choice for the office of president and she'd've probably said 'Have enough information and my verdict is: Forget it' but never the less I'm positively suprised about this.
Köhler wouldn't have been my President but he has shown balls at other occasions and he has a very polite, neatly shrouded and delicate way of basically saying 'Go fuck yourself' to his party members without publicly hurting any feelings, as soon as day-to-day politics start screwing around again in Germany. He's like a gutter-grid keeping the biggest chunks of crap of the german supreme courts back. Which allready has a hard time keeping up with voiding all the BS Berlin has been coming up with lately.
Having a chancelor (currently Angela Merkel) for every-day politics and a President as mostly symbolic head-of-state does have its benefits, as it gives the President tthe obligation to use his power to prevent long-term-effects of election-term-based decisions and lobby/decoy/special-interest laws. And keeps him out of the regular decision making which gives him and his actions the required authority and weight.
My 2 cents.
I once built a custom vertical market cross-plattform desktop application in RunRev. The functions of the little app where speced to the last detail and the user interface was designed and drawn out down to the last pixel, Font requirements included. Coaxing the IDE into not sucking by adding 3rd party extensions and such was a bit of a hassle, but all in all the project went very well.
We used RunRev 2.x with various 3rd party extensions including a font-compiling plugin (which in the end didn't work) and a more IDE-like extension of the RunRev enviroment that eased coding.
The visual and object oriented style of building apps in stackware is pretty cool and can be insanely fast, fluent, concurrent and bugsafe. You get concurrent from the first minute on, because Stackware usually uses the DMI approach, which is pretty cool in itself. The way the runtime integrated with it's own DMI (Direct Manipulation Interface) and compiles it's current state into the deployable app is something one has to get used to, but it actually is OOP in its purest form, if you get the hang of it. This sort of developement is a direct descendant of the Smalltalk way of doing things and makes the Java/.Net way look like ancient weedy spagetti-basic.
Yet RunRev uses a PL called TransScript, something like a bizar resemblence of SQL and Lingo that tries to emulate english for dummies. An attempt which, of course, doesn't work. That's the biggest gripe I have about these commercial types of stackware. Building a new PL and throwing out the junk we've got from C and it's ancestors is a good thing, but putting in SQLs failiures of a end-user-interface language is bad and the results are usually accordingly. The one FOSS project that aimes in a stackware direction that I know of is Squeak and it uses Smalltalk, which probably is a way better to go.
Any way you look at it, stackware and visual development has a lot going for it if it is done right. .Net, [fill in generic Big-Fat-Appstack here] and whatnot up and down the street, to be honest. I'm not suprised they claim to have saved half a million in costs, and I actually believe it's true.
It actually kicks all other dev-methods imaged by Eclipse, Java,
My 2 cents.
I use svn for that exact task. Runs everywhere, tools are abundant, CLI-handling is fast and easy. I only use TortoiseSVN on Windows because the Windows shell sucks big time. Do a regular backup of your repository and you've got that in the mix aswell.
I've just explained, over the phone, for the umpteenth time, to my SO how to copy and paste. It can be very frustrating. However there were things she actually did understand. She didn't ask what and where the 'Apple-Key' was, which is a step forward. I expect her to learn it completely in the next half year or so.
If your folks do nothing but surf and mail you should install Linux for them and explain the basics of handling it whenever the need arises. Viruscleaning and virus avoiding is a non-trivial task and I run into these problems quite often. And I'm an expert with 25 years of experience. Being unavailable once in a while is a good thing too for techsupport - if it's something they can easyly figure out for themselves.
Bottom line:
n00by? -> You're getting a Unix-based OS (OS X or Ubuntu Linux would be my choice) and a non-admin user account. That's it.
Experienced user? -> Here's your box, do with it whatever you want.
Be patient and reteach the basics of computing and surfing over and over again. It'll stick some day.
Presentation software is just a tool. I had a professor who could actually handle it pretty well. He had his slides set up in a very simple but readable manner, they weren't cramped. They were to the point, short and very well planned. And he gave each of his students a miniature printout of the lectures slides, so that everybody could anotate each one by himself with whatever they needed.
He'd use maybe 40 slides in a 90 minute lecture. His talk was educating, informative, sometimes quite humorous and you could actually understand what he was saying simply because he didn't have to hop around 3 chalkboards all the time but could stay put at the podium. He was allways well prepared and his lectures where a feast. And that even though it was a hard subject (IT-electronics subcurriculum in CS).
Bottom line: ... duh). Use them correctly and you will be able to utilise the benefits that they bring along. It's that simple.
Presentation software, just like chalkboards, are nothing but tools. Use them badly or in the wrong way and your results will be accordingly (like, f.i., cramped, braindead presentation-slides or crappy handwriting on chalkboards
I'd go around about the way you planned. Flash is actually very good for this sort of thing. I'd also look into Air, maybe that's viable for this. I'd be carefull with linux clients though, Flash and the Linux rendering stack don't allways play well together.
Use Linux for the server and look into FOSS streaming servers like Red5. osflash should be your next stop.
See if you can go with OSx on MacMinis for the kiosk systems, they'd be my safest bet and you can do neat stuff with the IR remote and some extra shareware. Remoting and control-wise.
"We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about." - Albert Einstein
Know that your happiness doesn't depend on your salary or wether what you're doing is something you've been doing for 20 years or just 2 months. I'd start cutting it a little thicker. Go part time or reduce your hours and overtime. If you get fired, all the better. You'll have a reason to reorientate. Quite often life needs to kick us in the butt before we get it one with change that is overdue. 2 years ago I was freelance and broke in a dead end in a pointless town. I did my GD, studied CS for 14 weeks (and dropped it again due to a insufficient cost/benefit ratio), did a larger web project that was 60% / 40% idiots all around (a bareable ratio at the time) but in the end it was a dead end. I moved away. Now I got a dayjob in a million in game developement in a company making so much money it's bizar, a fair salary, free breakfast & lunch, smart and nice colleagues that treat me with respect and are gratefull for my experience and advice and lots of fun stuff to do and programm on. And I do something entirely different in my spare time - tango dancing, which is fun and has me catching up on my typical nerdy girl-encounter-deficiency.
And if this life and dayjob becomes a drag one day, I won't take as long to cut lose as last time.
There are countless things out there that are fun to do and to live on. Start trying things out. Now. Wether you're going to be a park ranger, a trucker, a salesman, a freelance IT consultant or an oil rig worker doesn't matter. I personaly have a diploma in performing arts and could even imagine going back to that. You may have something else in your background. Go out and try or put yourself in a situation that either solves your problems in your current occupation or shoves you into the next. Packing up and moving on might be a solution too.
Good Luck.
The textbook definition of sexism is discrimination on the grounds of gender. So, unless you ask out men as well, technically you are being sexist.
You're actually right. But I do ask my buddies out to dinner and/or the movies and/or clubbing. Though I wouldn't call it a date, as that term implies the possiblity of intimate interests on my behalf. Which actually *do* apply to gender. To which, the own or the opposite is a matter of sexual orientation.
But that is generally acceptable, since a woman asking me out would call it a date aswell. She wouldn't call asking her friend out a 'date'. Same thing here, and calling her a 'sexist' in this situation would be stressing the generic context of the term just as much.
Thanks.
He mentions geeks asking peer women out for a date as an example for being sexistic. WTF?
A single woman amoung dozens of men actually is likely to be asked out for a date more often than each man. How is that sexistic?
That aside I presume this is a vocal few distorting perception of the majority. With feminists and 'manly' programmers alike.
I work for a very successfull and rapidly growing browsergame publisher (currently the largest). We do have the one or other title that was acquired and isn't all that spectacular for geeks and nerds, but we have some very neat originals, some of which have made us big and have had gotten a facelift or two recently (aside of the regular improvements and bugfixes). Since they run on browsers they are naturally x-plattform and require no installation. All are free to play.
Here's my personal favorites list from our portfolio:
OGame, a classic 4X sci-fi/space game with a brand new pimped-out Ajax interface and fresh GFX. ... And a cool trailer. (Hint: Try a non-US server if the one you got has old boring table layouts - the community is large and most of us read and write a fluent english :-) )
Ikariam, a Settlers/Civilisation type Browsergame. Scored some prestigious awards recently, including 'Browsergame of the Year 2008'.
Wild Guns, a BG with a Wild West setting. Just has gotten a total redo of the graphics by our art crew. Very neat.
KingsAge, a nice old-school BG, Defender of the Crow / Middle Ages Camelot style.
OK, slashdoters, go flood our servers and have our admins do some extra shifts. Hehehe... *leans back and takes some popcorn*
Have fun!
The old, imho to date unmatched, Palm OS is dead, the new Palm seems to become a screwup, iPhone/iPod Touch is a lockdown nightmare, WinMobile is a no-go and developing, integrating and deploying to Blackb*rrys is like grating your fingernails.
The Matter of fact is: Mobile is a mess, very much the way desktop computers were in the mid-eighties.
We are in dire need of an eqiuvalent to the Arduino platform in the PDA market. Small, cheap, relyable, open standards, with a simple single-touch screen a neat CPU and some run-off-the-mill LitIon battery industry standard. 6 months into the first batch we'll have FOSS programmers and hardware hackers expanding it to be a cellphone for those who want it to be one.
THAT is what we need.
Just the open standard equivalent of my oldest colorscreen Palm at the price of 100 Euros and an FOSS OS that comes with it, that's all I ask. It can't be that difficult with hardware prices dropping left right and center.
My 2 cents.
I've slowly turned to a regular Opera user. Allthough I still use other Browsers too - I'm typing this on Opera and have Firefox 3.5 and Chrome 3.0 up and running right now. All three with a large set of open tabs. ... Which, btw., as other have mentioned allready, does not show a ribbon.
After upgrading to Opera 10 I have to say it still leads the way in Browser innovation and more and more it's becoming obvious to me that other Browsers usually just rip it off after after a handfull of point releases. It's the same with the new Firefox UI pictured in the related article.
So I can have Windows Zombies unhooked in France?
Great. Used correctly this law could raise the bar for internet security and security awarenes on behalf of the end-user.
Wether I use closed-source or FOSS or paid or free (bw. those metrics are ortogonal to one another!) depends entirely on the usage model and my preferences for the job at hand.
Example 1:
I'm considering getting back to Video Editing after 9 years of abstinence in order to spice up my website about web technologies.
No effing way am I going to hassle around with FOSS Video editors - which practically don't exist. I might look at Blenders Sequencer for an hour to determine if it's usefull or not, but that's about it. I'll probably get Final Cut Express or something like that.
Example 2:
ATM I develop PHP in my spare time - my current daytime gig is mostly ActionScript. I've considered PHPEd as an IDE, but I haven't had a Windows Box since about 7 years ago and no way am I switching just for that. With PHPEd out as my IDE of choice I *will* have a fuss getting full roundtrip debugging to work - no matter which x-plattform IDE I choose, so I might aswell get a FOSS one. Eclipse PDT it is then. I am not shelling out money for Komodo or Zend Studio if the amount of work is the same. Which it is.
Example 3:
I was working on a clients project on my trusty 12" G4 iBook a few years back. It was laden with apps running side by side, including the Flash MX 2004 Pro IDE. Which was the reason I had gotten it in the first place. Needles to say it was slow as molasses. I chose to turn off my favorite Editor jEdit and get a faster one. TextMate was a worthy candidate. However, it costs 30$ (no problem with that), only runs on OS X (ok, that's a tad tricky, but I'll follow along) and gets its power by extensibility with some kind of C dialect scripting language. Here's the dealbreaker: If I have to learn some scripting language to pimp out my Editor with half the features jEdit has, it better be one that runs *everywhere*. TextMate was ruled out and I chose to bite the bullet and learn Emacs. Usability is beyond bizar - you have to actually actively practice select, copy and paste (no joke!) and you won't get anywhere without a cheatsheet in the first year or two - but it runs *everywhere* and I don't have to learn more about some programming language than I would have had to with TextMate. Only here it is Lisp.
Example 4:
I want to highres-scan a picture and print it out on a 1x2 meter banner to hang in my room. I'll have to edit it, remove the rastering and prepare it for 7-color printing. No effing way am I going to attempt that in Gimp, which I work with at least once a week. PS and maybe Corel Photo Paint are the only choice here.
Bottom line: Use the best tool for the job. And invest either your time or your money. Never both.
My 2 cents.
You've been working on this for *years* without any concept of gaining critical mass within that time? WTF? ... Doesn't sound like you're a businessman. Sitting in your basement building a new technology get's you nowhere - other than 'Broke County' - if you don't have a plan or a crew to help you launch it. ... whatever ...
There is one thing you should keep in mind when building a new mocap system: MoCap is one part, the other part is its software. No matter how cheap the MoCap setup, if the software is too expensive and/or to unwieldy to integrate you won't open new markets.
See to it that your system becomes a standard on its own and is fully integrated into Blender. You have the advantage of having a leading figurehead FOSS project that intersects with your field on which you hop on to the bandwagon. Blender is gaining critical mass as we speak and it's very likely to become an industry standard as soon as they get renderman integrated. Which can't be that long anymore.
Go ask Ton Roosendaal (Blender Project Lead) about his plans on this and have a few from the coreteam look at your MoCap system. You'll be able to use the new input and contacts to get some real world experience and feedback with your system. They've just started working on the next Open Movie, Durian. If your tech is that good, maybe they can allready use it and gather some field data for you, no? On top of that, going the FOSS way isn't the worst thing to do, since you're in the hardware business.
My 2 cents.
We're pretty much in a simular situation. We chose scrum because we need *some* sort of methodology because our company is growing fast (currently +100 people per year, we're at 300 now). Scrum isn't that ideal for large companies, but since we develop software which changes requirements along the way - games - it's not the worst either. As a seasoned dev it bothers me that I have to do scrum housekeeping part-time and can't spend that time devloping. However I *do* develop and I find that someone has to do the scrum master job, it might as well be the experienced guy on our team. I sit in the same office as our team lead and we've got the seperation of roles pretty well established. My job boils down to going around and keeping up awarenes of our release cycles and project progress tracking and the occasional tooling and process optimisation. I also play a key role when assembling backlogs for the team (including me and the teamlead) and have taken on the grunt work of building loadtests for our app.
It's all about management, and while it sucks to be a manager if you've been a dev for the longest part of your life, it's something that needs to be done and it's better if I can project my experience to the team if I have a key role.
As far as I can see scrum evolving at our place, it's basically a tool to gradually force awareness and responsebilty on to the devs. They learn to predict their time needed and our product owners (teamlead and gamedesigner, both are also part of the team) learn to hone their featuritis and bad prioritising.
I found certain rules to be paramount for implementing a process - of whatever type that may be:
1) The process is for you and your peers. It's not you for the process.
2) If there's no improvement for the people involved, the process is worthless.
3) Personal interaction and communication come first. Tools come very last, if at all. (We use a TWiki for all our Scrum stuff. It has be building the burndowns with calc, but it had us hop into scrum with a zero-fuss approach). I might start looking into Agilo/Trac, but I'm sure as hell not bending over and lubing up for some tool that doesn't fit our variant of the process. ... There's some advantage in being a scrum master and having a say in such things as tooling.
4) Know why you are doing scrum and what you want to achieve with it. If you don't have a target it's pointless in a strange self serving way and will implode after a few weeks. Or it will stay and become a drag, which is even worse.
5) Be aware of the partly pointlessness of an agile process in a large corporation and judge the process accordingly. Don't over or undervalue it.
6) Bend the process, tooling and proceedures whenever required. Use the sprint intervals, backlog assembly meetings and sprint reviews to do so.
7) If you are a scrum master, be prepared to kick the ass of your teamlead or product owners if they step out of line or leave the predefined track of rules required for the team to deliver per-sprint predictable results.
8) You may think that you are the superdev, but as they say the first step to a nervous breakdown is overesstimating your importance. Management is a sacrifice, you step back to have the others do the fun stuff. Therefore you get to manage and learn the metaprocess and see how the really big software projects come to life. Moving from dev to scrum master isn't an end all and it does improve your social skills. And you can still start an open source project on the side, if you miss coding.
Last time I checked Subversion was the current prime choice for VC Systems, for various reasons. Widespread availability of tools being the most prominent. Could it be that the summary is bullshitting on this issue? I think so.
Naming for Workstations should be the same way as with servers. Meaning the name should be distinct and not be associated to the function of the workstation or the OS installed. If an Error message pops up I should imediately be able to recognize the computers name. If the box is called 'Linux' and I read 'Linux error' I'm likely to be confused about what is meant.
I've found it best to find a broad naming scheme like Astronomy and go by and name all servers and workstations based on that scheme. 'saturn', 'uranus', 'antares', etc. If you must you can go by and name the servers after planets and the workstations after moons or something like that. Allthough that in itself could allready pose a security risk if some hacker sees the pattern.
This guy is the upper league. I met him a few times at the Blender conference. He's on the OpenGL Standards Team and has forgotten more about coding than most of us will ever learn. Just watching him demonstrate his 3D tools is jawdropping. Listening to him when he talks about 3D and real-time multi-user networking is a feast. He's in the upper league of coding *and* in the upper league of taste and design. If anybody can pull something like this through it's him. Go and watch the demos if you don't believe me.
I only say Euros if it is advice that is worth more. Things I have solid real life experience with. Others get the '2 Cents' or 'two Eurocents'. That advice is actually worth more than 2 Euros, I'd say.
I've had (... still have ... in a way such relationships never die) a 16 year relationship with a woman. We have one daughter, 11 years old. My advice on marrige is quite simple: Don't marry. Or marry with a 2-inch thick marriage contract. The simple fact that either of the SOs can walk away, with (nearly) no legal commitments holding them back contributes greatly to respecting each other and acknowledging each others sacrafices that where done for a relationship. And on this aspect of issues i'd like to quote this:
"People who are intensly in Love often forget that for it to last you need to actively maintain it. Emotionally and in your attitude towards your significant other."
Every single day. Don't get me wrong: You can marry, if it is for outside reasons. Maybe you have to marry for tax reasons or because you live in a society where only married couples are accepted. Maybe you or your SO is a federal employee and will have to move to a different state whenever superiors say so and there only are exemptions for married couples. However, what you should do - both of you, at the same time and in the same intensity - is treat each other as if you weren't married. Every day. That's easiest to ensure if you simply don't marry or do so with a thick contract that seals details.
Me and her, we've each had our share of affairs on the side lately and we actually console each other when things get rough or someone of us is lovesick about it. However, we have never lost our respect for one another. I went through a solid stretch of of near flat-out neglegt by her for years, and simply the fact that I knew I could walk out of the door at any time had me stick with her and my responsibilies towards our daughter. If you marry, it should be under circumstances under which you both feel comfortable with your self and are sure that you can give what the other expects of you and what is required to make the others life better than if they were alone.
And if you, after all this advice, *do* marry, *don't* spend huge amounts of money on the wedding. Marry, maybe invite your best friends and families to a dinner or party or something, but don't go into huge dept just for a wedding. The positive effect (bragging rights, etc.) wears of quickly and if that's all your doing it for it's pointless to do anyway. And you get the best marriage effect ('My wife' / 'my husband') anyways.
Congratulations on finding the love of your life and my best wishes to both of you!
My 2 Euros.