I haven't seen an episode of the fourth season yet, nor do I plan to. I just lost interest when I started feeling like the writers didn't know where they were really heading.
It's not a "feeling" that the writers didn't know where the show was heading, it's fact. I watched the pilot mini-series, but didn't start watching the show regularly until about halfway into season 1, and thought it was great. Followed season 2 with growing disinterest, though - just didn't seem like they had a plan. I think that's when I started to worry.
During the season break (or was it the mid-season break?) I downloaded the BSG official podcast. The podcast was recorded during a writers' session where they were talking about where the story left off, and directions they could take. That was the moment I realized the writers had no clue where the show was going. They plan it by the "pod" (half-seasons on SciFi are called "pods", they said) and intentionally leave the story hanging at a place where they could pick it up at the next pod and take it in any number of directions.
What got me was that the writers were making a list of "don'ts" for the new pod. They didn't want it to become a race with the Cylons to find Earth, they didn't want episodes to be a "clue hunt" for the directions to Earth, etc. All these things, yet that's exactly what they did when the next pod started. So I gave it the next pod, then realized they managed to hit every "don't", and quit watching.
I heard about the "final Five" or whatever, and I'll probably pick it up on a wiki somewhere who the "final Five" turned out to be. But I won't watch the final episode to find out. Sorry.
[...]
surely the fact that THE STUDENTS ARE ALREADY PAYING FOR USE OF THESE RESOURCES should mean that they owe the university nothing, and anything outside of normal coursework is theirs to call their own.
I work at a public research university, and last I checked, students do not pay millions of $$ to attend the university. Do students at your research universities pay that much?? I know private schools are more expensive, but damn...
The faculty researcher generally gets a grant to support his/her research, and is supported by the university system (infrastructure, work space, time to conduct research, etc.) Sure, students pay tuition to attend university - but that tuition supports things like the IT infrastructure (email, student records, web, network, etc.), physical infrastructure (buildings, classrooms, maintenance, upkeep, etc.) and only a tiny portion of that tuition goes to support research infrastructure.
If a student uses significant university resources to create his/her idea (or, has this idea while working as a research assistant) the university can expect to have a claim on that idea (i.e. a patent.)
I forget where I read it, but someone once pointed out that if you need a new computer at work you should go in asking for $10,000,000 - then when you get laughed out of the office and come back asking for a ridiculous gaming rig that costs $5000 you might just get it.
It's the same theory, in my view.
In the real world, most companies have a standard desktop/laptop spec. How it works in our office: if you ask for a laptop, you get a choice of 3 different laptops. If you want a desktop: you have a "choice" of 1 model. Each of these costs us less than $2500 (the spending limit before it becomes "capital equipment".)
They're all beefy systems, for what they do: Managers usually get the lightweight laptop with less memory and SSD drive (runs Office, Firefox, email just fine.) Developers who need mobility usually go for the heavier, decked-out top-end laptop. Developers who rarely leave their desks usually choose the desktop with gobs of memory and a huge hard drive. And the desktop support folks only have to support 4 different systems, and systems are interchangeable (for example: if a user brings in a laptop with a bad hard drive, we just give them a spare laptop of the same model and copy over the data. That's a 5 minute tech support visit, and the user is back to work.)
I had a person come to me about 3 weeks ago, asking for an awesome development rig, about $4000-5000. Probably for the same reason you mention here - get denied, go back later asking for something smaller but still more awesome/expensive than the "standard" systems, hoping to get approved on that request.
They didn't get it. We asked their manager to write a justification for the nonstandard system, realized it was a bulls--- request, and the developer eventually ordered one of the standard models.
A relative of mine (name withheld) was working at Microsoft at the time, in their MS Office division. He told me some great stories about this "animated help assistant" they were working on for the next release.
The best bit, and most telling, was the huge political infighting about what the avatar would be. One group lobbied for a cartoon dude wearing a Microsoft t-shirt, because you should have the concept that "Microsoft is helping you" or some such. Another group wanted a cartoon dog to answer questions - they argued that version 1 of whatever Microsoft did would suck, that the avatar would often misunderstand questions so would give wrong answers, thus it would be better to have a smart dog occasionally get it wrong, than a Microsoft guy look stupid.
This person left Microsoft before the avatar was decided, so I don't know why Microsoft decided a magic, talking paperclip was the best solution.
What your post really tells me is that a Windows power-user can do things faster in Vista, using hotkeys. That's great for you. My mom is not a power-user. She doesn't remember hotkeys - she only knows how to use the mouse, click on icons and navigate menus to find things. Vista was a huge mess for her, because things were different and had moved to places where she couldn't find them.
This is what's wrong with Microsoft's usability.
I'd guess that almost all Windows users are not power-users. Vista isn't all that great an improvement for them.
I recommend GNU Robots. It's a game/diversion where you construct a program for a little robot, then watch him explore a world. The world is filled with baddies that can hurt you, objects that you can bump into, and food that you can eat. The goal of the game is to collect as many prizes as possible before are killed by a baddie or you run out of energy.
The GNU Robots playing field is filled with food (increases energy), prizes (to increase your score), walls (which you can bump into), and baddies (which can inflict damage.)
The robot program is written in Scheme. Fairly simple for kids to pick up. Heck, I don't even know Scheme, and I wrote several successful robot programs. (I also wrote GNU Robots.)
Personally I think it does the exact opposite. I think Far Cry 2 *may* have done this. But if I line up a head shot (sniper) and put a bullet in the AIs head and he doesn't die, then this makes it seem far less realistic to me--especially when I let loose two shots to be sure and then aim down for a direct body shot and the guy still somehow manages to stand.
A lot of games let you put the gun into "aimed" mode, also called "iron sights" mode. It's a lot more accurate that way. Resistance 2 does this. When fired in normal mode, the shot has quite a bit of randomness to it - using "iron sights", the shot is almost dead-on.
I think this adds appropriate realism to the game. I play as though normal mode is "firing from the hip". Good when you need to make quick progress (walking) and need to be ready. But when you have the opportunity (behind cover, etc) switching to "aimed" mode makes your shots more accurate. As you'd expect.
Now if only developers would realize that a.357 Magnum is not more accurate than a Carbine rifle, even when you "aim" the pistol... in FPS games, I usually pick up the pistol because it's like a tiny sniper rifle (I'm looking at you, Killzone.) Ever fire a real gun? A pistol is fairly lightweight, with a short barrel, and as a result has wide variance in accuracy (for most shooters.) A rifle is much easier to use IRL.
I'd bet on the biosphere surviving. It might not survive in a state that we'd like but it would survive.
fire off as many nukes as you like but come back in 10 million years and you'll find whatever the rats evolved into hunting each other through the forests of asia [...]
That, or they will have developed metal casings for their mutated remains, and roll about shrieking "Ex-ter-min-ate!"
I saw something like this on television once, so it must be true.
I was really looking forward to buying GTA4 for the PC. I am the proud owner of GTA3, GTA:VC, and GTA:SA. But I can't buy GTA4, and this was so deeply dissapointing I actually sent Rockstar/Take2 a physical paper letter (which I am sure they will laugh at, ball up, and throw in the trash).
Take it from someone who's actually played GTA4 (on the PS3) - you aren't missing much. Gotta say, this version isn't as interesting or exciting as the GTA3 or GTA:SA.
"Having written a piece of software as part of my research employment, I now face (and will later face again, with other software I've developed), the issue of intellectual property rights. The legal department stated that if I was paid by the University to produce the software, the University would own all rights to it. This is supposedly black and white, not a gray area. However, I was hired as a research student, not directly by the University, and also via a research award (NSERC).
This comes down to contract work. If you are hired (as a research student) and part of your job is to write software, then any software you write for them belongs to them. It really is that black-and-white. You find this in industry as well as the education market. It's a very standard thing.
I work in central IT at a large university, and any programs or scripts I write for them as part of my job belongs to the university. (Specifically, copyright is assigned to the Regents of the university. If I were to leave, I don't get to take any of that with me.)
When we hire contractors to do programming, it's the same deal. Any programs they write when they are here belong to the university. Kind of sucks for them, since I'm sure they get stuck writing the same set of procedures everywhere they go, but they have to keep re-writing it (not re-use code written for a previous employer) because the code belongs to the person paying the contract.
Furthermore, it turns out that faculty members here, in fact, retain their intellectual rights to any software they write.
Yes, but the faculty's job is to advance the educational mission of the university. They are also paid to do research. And to publish. When a faculty person writes a book, it's their name on the cover, not "University of ___". So yes, if a faculty person writes a program (as part of their research) they maintain the rights to it.
To put things a little closer to your situation, let's say a researcher needed to have a particularly complicated program to analyze something, and the researcher realized it was too far above his/her head. So the researcher turns to a member of the CS faculty, and contracts with them to write the program. Guess who owns the IP rights to the program?The researcher who contracted the work. Even though the person who wrote the program is faculty at the same university, it was contract work, so the person who contracted the work (not who did the work) gets to keep the IP.
(That is, unless they arranged something else in the contract... as research faculty would probably do anyway. But it made my point.)
I thought Shadow of the Colossus for PS2 did dynamic music extremely well. As you wandered around, you got a certain type of music. As you spotted a colossus, the music shifted. And when you entered "combat" with the colossus, the music became much more tense.
A level that demonstrates this perfectly is the level with the flying colossus in the desert. You come down to the plains, the music is almost calming. As you watch the colossus appear and fly around you, the music definitely changes to build anticipation. And when you jump onto the colossus, the music evokes excitement and danger.
My degree is in physics, not CS - so forgive me if this is a stupid idea. But I work at a university, and once suggested to a CS professor to assign students in the "Compilers" class the problem of: invent a programming language that supports basic (defined) sets of procedures. But you can only use the character set of a punch card: A-Z (uppercase), 0-9, 72 columns, etc.
(Students who take "Compilers" are often given a project to create a programming language, but they are allowed the full ASCII character set. This idea would scale that back a bit.)
I thought it would be interesting to see how students would design their programming languages with that limitation. Would they create LISP-like structures? Would it instead look like BASIC or FORTRAN? Or would students implement a C-like language using the smaller character set?
Students today don't learn about FORTRAN, and they learn LISP (or SCHEME) only if they take an "AI" class. I thought students could learn a lot by giving them a scenario faced by early pioneers of computer science. They would gain first-hand understanding why certain programming languages are designed they way they are.
But the CS professor I spoke with didn't think students would learn anything from this, that it was too "artificial" a problem for them. Ah well.
However, there are issues to keep in mind. You must keep it professional, so no vulgarity, rudeness, or jokes about loss of data. Certainly, you should avoid all the '-isms' like the plague. And, just as important, it should be clear that the Easter Eggs do not break security in any way.
In short, make it secure, polite, fun and it should be cool.
The first company I worked for was also the only company where they put in an Easter Egg with corporate approval. But it was very simple - in the Help-About screen, if you typed the company name, you got a digital photo of the developers.
It was a small company in the early '90s, and the CEO wanted to give the developers some special recognition.
In other words, "We had an idea, and we've got no idea how to actually implement it, but if the MoD gives us a bunch of money we'll happily spend it."
The irony is, I recall something like this being tested in the field by the US military about 10 years ago. A device was fitted into an artillery shell, so instead of explosives you had a little radio transmitter. A little window on the side of the shell housed a cheap black & white camera.
Fire the shell "long" so it passes well over your intended target. As the shell spins, the camera transmits it's bird's-eye view back to a receiver via radio.
Yes, you got a 360 view of everything, so the operator had to tweak a monitor to get a picture of the ground area (the only part worth looking at.) And it was fuzzy black & white, but at least you could see where the enemy positions were (tanks, troops, artillery) even if they were hidden from your ground observers (i.e. behind a screen or hill.) In theory, it gave you the tactical advantage you needed to fire for effect.
But that was late-1990's. Combat and the way of waging battle has changed a lot since then.
Google should develop a really good plugin for OpenOffice.org that makes it a client for Google Docs. It should handle uploading, downloading, synchronizing, merging conflicts, etc.
[...]
This is a really good idea. I'd be satisfied if it only supported upload/download (that is, Google Docs becomes another place for OpenOffice.org to save docs.) This might make it easier for people to migrate to Google Docs if we didn't have to upload everything before using Docs.
The truth is, iTunes is an average music player. Though the UI is simple and good like most Apple products, it has lagged in features compared to music players available on Linux and Windows. [...] Despite the many faults, many of us continued to use iTunes because of the lack of options available.
iTunes plays music? Really?
I must not have realized, since all I use iTunes for is to purchase stuff from the iTunes Music Store, and put it on my iPod. Seriously, that's all I use iTunes for. It's a program to buy stuff, and an iPod loader. I've never used iTunes to play music because I'm always on the road when I do that.
Yes, I know that other programs exist to dump tracks to my iPod, but they miss the critical first piece: purchase stuff from the iTunes Music Store. I find ITMS very convenient, and I really like the price point of $1 per song, so I can just buy the 1-2 songs that I like from a CD without shelling out $20 for a physical disc with 2 good songs on it.
... are you seriously citing your knowledge of radar screens based on an Atari game?
Laugh now, but when the revolution comes, I am the one who will fly the TIE fighters to save humanity. I have countless hours of simulation time to prove it.:-)
Similar training has also taught me the best way to win a firefight (like let's say, Iraq or Vietnam or WW2 Germany) is to bunny hop diagonally, then make a rocket-jump to higher ground! Seriously, the guvmint needs to apply this to our armed forces training now!
This is actually easier to do than you might imagine. My old house was essentially a Faraday Cage. You could NOT get a wireless signal more then 1 foot outside it. Why? Aluminum Siding. Add in aluminum powder tinted windows (triple layer UV and thermal glass) and the only leakage was straight up through the roof.
My in-laws have a similar accidental Faraday cage around their house. Except in their case, they have stucco siding. It's the steel mesh all around the house that provides the cage.
Just try to get a cell phone signal more than a foot from a window on the first floor. In the basement, you get nothing whatsoever.
Their 2nd floor is another story (no pun intended.) The roof slopes quite severely, so about 1/2 the 2nd floor is actually surrounded by "roof". No steel mesh there.
Actually, not quite that simple. My top-level page currently gives 66 validation errors. Guess how many are from content I've had to include from a third party, where I have no control over their standards compliance? 66 of them - 65 are from WebRing, 1 is from a news feed.
For those of you who are bad at math, that's all of the errors on that page. Note that all my other pages validate just fine, since I don't include third-party content there.
Being part of the WebRing is still important for my site, so I have to live with the 65 errors. Not much I can do about it, so I wrote some code into the PHP to not display the WebRing content if I pass it a flag/option, and I use that flag when I validate since I know I'll get errors otherwise.
- Can I use OpenOffice to create "Word formatted resumes" and forward them to potential employers? Or is this like when I used GEOSwrite, and nobody could read the file, except another Commodore 64 user?
In short: yes.
I am fortunate that I can run Linux at work. I'm a manager of an IT shop for a large university, and I write a lot of docs for what I do. I have my default OpenOffice Writer format set to DOC format, and everything works just fine. I can share my docs with others in my office, and no one is aware that the doc was written with OpenOffice. Formatting is preserved, and especially because I have the Microsoft Fonts installed, everything looks just like MS Word.
Many of my coworkers have been upgraded the new version of MS Office, so I get a fair number of DOCX files now. I use the ODF converter to read them, and send back a DOC file (no one seems to notice, or care if they do.) But I'm really looking forward to the DOCX compatibility in OpenOffice 3.0!
For me, the issue was No native Linux version. Yes, there's the Linux version provided by the CrossOver guys, and that's great. I've used it a few times. But it takes forever to launch, and is generally a little slow. A native application would be better.
I'll look at Chrome again when there's a native version for Linux.
Will NVIDIA's ailing chipset business get a shot in the arm next week?
I got my tetanus booster shot yesterday, with my usual side-effects (kind of like having the flu.) I can tell you, a "shot in the arm" for NVIDIA doesn't sound too good right now.:-)
I think mostly they'd like to dilute "Open Source" to mean any code with source code. This is important to them because it's the rights connected to Open Source that scare Microsoft (and others). If you can call it Open Source when there isn't even the right to compile the code, or to use the information you get from reading it, customers don't have a reason to ask for it any longer.
I'd mod you up, if you weren't already at "5". This is exactly what's going on with Microsoft's "open source" concept; another example of embrace-extend-extinguish. They've embraced the idea of open source software, and now they're trying to "extend" the definition to mean software with source code but with no rights to use it or extend it.
Now, a company is approaching me to continue my changes. They want to keep the improvements to themselves, which is possible since the project is published under the BSD license. That's fair, as they have all the rights to the work they pay for in full. However, they also want me to sign a non-competition clause, which would bar me from ever working on and publishing results for the original open source project itself, even if done separately, in my free time. How would you approach such a decision? On one side, they'd provide resources to work on an interesting project. On the other, it would make me an outcast in the project's community. Moreover, they would take ownership of not just what they paid for, but also my changes leading up to this moment, and I wouldn't be able to continue on my original codebase in an open source manner if I sign their contract.
This seems like a pretty clear decision to me; don't take it.
So what is at stake (if I understand you correctly) is that this company wants to pay you for your work on free software, but in exchange you must give up your freedoms (non-compete, cannot work on this project ever again.)
I don't know your financial situation, but unless you're really strapped for cash, I don't recommend you take this offer. Agreeing to sell your freedoms (even part of your freedoms, since it seems to affect your work only this project) rarely ends well.
Yes, I second your suggestion to use Google Apps for Domains. I use this for my personal email, and I just re-use my domain. In the setup instructions, Google tells you what to put in your DNS so that email is handled properly through GMail. Works great!! People will email you at _______@example.com (or whatever) but it actually is handled by GMail.:-)
You can use the GMail web interface (I prefer it) or access via a standard mail client program (my wife prefers to do this instead.)
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I haven't seen an episode of the fourth season yet, nor do I plan to. I just lost interest when I started feeling like the writers didn't know where they were really heading.
It's not a "feeling" that the writers didn't know where the show was heading, it's fact. I watched the pilot mini-series, but didn't start watching the show regularly until about halfway into season 1, and thought it was great. Followed season 2 with growing disinterest, though - just didn't seem like they had a plan. I think that's when I started to worry.
During the season break (or was it the mid-season break?) I downloaded the BSG official podcast. The podcast was recorded during a writers' session where they were talking about where the story left off, and directions they could take. That was the moment I realized the writers had no clue where the show was going. They plan it by the "pod" (half-seasons on SciFi are called "pods", they said) and intentionally leave the story hanging at a place where they could pick it up at the next pod and take it in any number of directions.
What got me was that the writers were making a list of "don'ts" for the new pod. They didn't want it to become a race with the Cylons to find Earth, they didn't want episodes to be a "clue hunt" for the directions to Earth, etc. All these things, yet that's exactly what they did when the next pod started. So I gave it the next pod, then realized they managed to hit every "don't", and quit watching.
I heard about the "final Five" or whatever, and I'll probably pick it up on a wiki somewhere who the "final Five" turned out to be. But I won't watch the final episode to find out. Sorry.
[...] surely the fact that THE STUDENTS ARE ALREADY PAYING FOR USE OF THESE RESOURCES should mean that they owe the university nothing, and anything outside of normal coursework is theirs to call their own.
I work at a public research university, and last I checked, students do not pay millions of $$ to attend the university. Do students at your research universities pay that much?? I know private schools are more expensive, but damn ...
The faculty researcher generally gets a grant to support his/her research, and is supported by the university system (infrastructure, work space, time to conduct research, etc.) Sure, students pay tuition to attend university - but that tuition supports things like the IT infrastructure (email, student records, web, network, etc.), physical infrastructure (buildings, classrooms, maintenance, upkeep, etc.) and only a tiny portion of that tuition goes to support research infrastructure.
If a student uses significant university resources to create his/her idea (or, has this idea while working as a research assistant) the university can expect to have a claim on that idea (i.e. a patent.)
I forget where I read it, but someone once pointed out that if you need a new computer at work you should go in asking for $10,000,000 - then when you get laughed out of the office and come back asking for a ridiculous gaming rig that costs $5000 you might just get it. It's the same theory, in my view.
In the real world, most companies have a standard desktop/laptop spec. How it works in our office: if you ask for a laptop, you get a choice of 3 different laptops. If you want a desktop: you have a "choice" of 1 model. Each of these costs us less than $2500 (the spending limit before it becomes "capital equipment".)
They're all beefy systems, for what they do: Managers usually get the lightweight laptop with less memory and SSD drive (runs Office, Firefox, email just fine.) Developers who need mobility usually go for the heavier, decked-out top-end laptop. Developers who rarely leave their desks usually choose the desktop with gobs of memory and a huge hard drive. And the desktop support folks only have to support 4 different systems, and systems are interchangeable (for example: if a user brings in a laptop with a bad hard drive, we just give them a spare laptop of the same model and copy over the data. That's a 5 minute tech support visit, and the user is back to work.)
I had a person come to me about 3 weeks ago, asking for an awesome development rig, about $4000-5000. Probably for the same reason you mention here - get denied, go back later asking for something smaller but still more awesome/expensive than the "standard" systems, hoping to get approved on that request. They didn't get it. We asked their manager to write a justification for the nonstandard system, realized it was a bulls--- request, and the developer eventually ordered one of the standard models.
A relative of mine (name withheld) was working at Microsoft at the time, in their MS Office division. He told me some great stories about this "animated help assistant" they were working on for the next release.
The best bit, and most telling, was the huge political infighting about what the avatar would be. One group lobbied for a cartoon dude wearing a Microsoft t-shirt, because you should have the concept that "Microsoft is helping you" or some such. Another group wanted a cartoon dog to answer questions - they argued that version 1 of whatever Microsoft did would suck, that the avatar would often misunderstand questions so would give wrong answers, thus it would be better to have a smart dog occasionally get it wrong, than a Microsoft guy look stupid.
This person left Microsoft before the avatar was decided, so I don't know why Microsoft decided a magic, talking paperclip was the best solution.
What your post really tells me is that a Windows power-user can do things faster in Vista, using hotkeys. That's great for you. My mom is not a power-user. She doesn't remember hotkeys - she only knows how to use the mouse, click on icons and navigate menus to find things. Vista was a huge mess for her, because things were different and had moved to places where she couldn't find them.
This is what's wrong with Microsoft's usability.
I'd guess that almost all Windows users are not power-users. Vista isn't all that great an improvement for them.
I recommend GNU Robots. It's a game/diversion where you construct a program for a little robot, then watch him explore a world. The world is filled with baddies that can hurt you, objects that you can bump into, and food that you can eat. The goal of the game is to collect as many prizes as possible before are killed by a baddie or you run out of energy.
The GNU Robots playing field is filled with food (increases energy), prizes (to increase your score), walls (which you can bump into), and baddies (which can inflict damage.)
The robot program is written in Scheme. Fairly simple for kids to pick up. Heck, I don't even know Scheme, and I wrote several successful robot programs. (I also wrote GNU Robots.)
Personally I think it does the exact opposite. I think Far Cry 2 *may* have done this. But if I line up a head shot (sniper) and put a bullet in the AIs head and he doesn't die, then this makes it seem far less realistic to me--especially when I let loose two shots to be sure and then aim down for a direct body shot and the guy still somehow manages to stand.
A lot of games let you put the gun into "aimed" mode, also called "iron sights" mode. It's a lot more accurate that way. Resistance 2 does this. When fired in normal mode, the shot has quite a bit of randomness to it - using "iron sights", the shot is almost dead-on.
I think this adds appropriate realism to the game. I play as though normal mode is "firing from the hip". Good when you need to make quick progress (walking) and need to be ready. But when you have the opportunity (behind cover, etc) switching to "aimed" mode makes your shots more accurate. As you'd expect.
Now if only developers would realize that a .357 Magnum is not more accurate than a Carbine rifle, even when you "aim" the pistol ... in FPS games, I usually pick up the pistol because it's like a tiny sniper rifle (I'm looking at you, Killzone.) Ever fire a real gun? A pistol is fairly lightweight, with a short barrel, and as a result has wide variance in accuracy (for most shooters.) A rifle is much easier to use IRL.
I'd bet on the biosphere surviving. It might not survive in a state that we'd like but it would survive. fire off as many nukes as you like but come back in 10 million years and you'll find whatever the rats evolved into hunting each other through the forests of asia [...]
That, or they will have developed metal casings for their mutated remains, and roll about shrieking "Ex-ter-min-ate!"
I saw something like this on television once, so it must be true.
I was really looking forward to buying GTA4 for the PC. I am the proud owner of GTA3, GTA:VC, and GTA:SA. But I can't buy GTA4, and this was so deeply dissapointing I actually sent Rockstar/Take2 a physical paper letter (which I am sure they will laugh at, ball up, and throw in the trash).
Take it from someone who's actually played GTA4 (on the PS3) - you aren't missing much. Gotta say, this version isn't as interesting or exciting as the GTA3 or GTA:SA.
"Having written a piece of software as part of my research employment, I now face (and will later face again, with other software I've developed), the issue of intellectual property rights. The legal department stated that if I was paid by the University to produce the software, the University would own all rights to it. This is supposedly black and white, not a gray area. However, I was hired as a research student, not directly by the University, and also via a research award (NSERC).
This comes down to contract work. If you are hired (as a research student) and part of your job is to write software, then any software you write for them belongs to them. It really is that black-and-white. You find this in industry as well as the education market. It's a very standard thing.
I work in central IT at a large university, and any programs or scripts I write for them as part of my job belongs to the university. (Specifically, copyright is assigned to the Regents of the university. If I were to leave, I don't get to take any of that with me.)
When we hire contractors to do programming, it's the same deal. Any programs they write when they are here belong to the university. Kind of sucks for them, since I'm sure they get stuck writing the same set of procedures everywhere they go, but they have to keep re-writing it (not re-use code written for a previous employer) because the code belongs to the person paying the contract.
Furthermore, it turns out that faculty members here, in fact, retain their intellectual rights to any software they write.
Yes, but the faculty's job is to advance the educational mission of the university. They are also paid to do research. And to publish. When a faculty person writes a book, it's their name on the cover, not "University of ___". So yes, if a faculty person writes a program (as part of their research) they maintain the rights to it.
To put things a little closer to your situation, let's say a researcher needed to have a particularly complicated program to analyze something, and the researcher realized it was too far above his/her head. So the researcher turns to a member of the CS faculty, and contracts with them to write the program. Guess who owns the IP rights to the program? The researcher who contracted the work. Even though the person who wrote the program is faculty at the same university, it was contract work, so the person who contracted the work (not who did the work) gets to keep the IP.
(That is, unless they arranged something else in the contract ... as research faculty would probably do anyway. But it made my point.)
I thought Shadow of the Colossus for PS2 did dynamic music extremely well. As you wandered around, you got a certain type of music. As you spotted a colossus, the music shifted. And when you entered "combat" with the colossus, the music became much more tense.
A level that demonstrates this perfectly is the level with the flying colossus in the desert. You come down to the plains, the music is almost calming. As you watch the colossus appear and fly around you, the music definitely changes to build anticipation. And when you jump onto the colossus, the music evokes excitement and danger.
My degree is in physics, not CS - so forgive me if this is a stupid idea. But I work at a university, and once suggested to a CS professor to assign students in the "Compilers" class the problem of: invent a programming language that supports basic (defined) sets of procedures. But you can only use the character set of a punch card: A-Z (uppercase), 0-9, 72 columns, etc.
(Students who take "Compilers" are often given a project to create a programming language, but they are allowed the full ASCII character set. This idea would scale that back a bit.)
I thought it would be interesting to see how students would design their programming languages with that limitation. Would they create LISP-like structures? Would it instead look like BASIC or FORTRAN? Or would students implement a C-like language using the smaller character set?
Students today don't learn about FORTRAN, and they learn LISP (or SCHEME) only if they take an "AI" class. I thought students could learn a lot by giving them a scenario faced by early pioneers of computer science. They would gain first-hand understanding why certain programming languages are designed they way they are.
But the CS professor I spoke with didn't think students would learn anything from this, that it was too "artificial" a problem for them. Ah well.
The first company I worked for was also the only company where they put in an Easter Egg with corporate approval. But it was very simple - in the Help-About screen, if you typed the company name, you got a digital photo of the developers.
It was a small company in the early '90s, and the CEO wanted to give the developers some special recognition.
In other words, "We had an idea, and we've got no idea how to actually implement it, but if the MoD gives us a bunch of money we'll happily spend it."
The irony is, I recall something like this being tested in the field by the US military about 10 years ago. A device was fitted into an artillery shell, so instead of explosives you had a little radio transmitter. A little window on the side of the shell housed a cheap black & white camera.
Fire the shell "long" so it passes well over your intended target. As the shell spins, the camera transmits it's bird's-eye view back to a receiver via radio.
Yes, you got a 360 view of everything, so the operator had to tweak a monitor to get a picture of the ground area (the only part worth looking at.) And it was fuzzy black & white, but at least you could see where the enemy positions were (tanks, troops, artillery) even if they were hidden from your ground observers (i.e. behind a screen or hill.) In theory, it gave you the tactical advantage you needed to fire for effect.
But that was late-1990's. Combat and the way of waging battle has changed a lot since then.
Google should develop a really good plugin for OpenOffice.org that makes it a client for Google Docs. It should handle uploading, downloading, synchronizing, merging conflicts, etc. [...]
This is a really good idea. I'd be satisfied if it only supported upload/download (that is, Google Docs becomes another place for OpenOffice.org to save docs.) This might make it easier for people to migrate to Google Docs if we didn't have to upload everything before using Docs.
The truth is, iTunes is an average music player. Though the UI is simple and good like most Apple products, it has lagged in features compared to music players available on Linux and Windows. [...] Despite the many faults, many of us continued to use iTunes because of the lack of options available.
iTunes plays music? Really?
I must not have realized, since all I use iTunes for is to purchase stuff from the iTunes Music Store, and put it on my iPod. Seriously, that's all I use iTunes for. It's a program to buy stuff, and an iPod loader. I've never used iTunes to play music because I'm always on the road when I do that.
Yes, I know that other programs exist to dump tracks to my iPod, but they miss the critical first piece: purchase stuff from the iTunes Music Store. I find ITMS very convenient, and I really like the price point of $1 per song, so I can just buy the 1-2 songs that I like from a CD without shelling out $20 for a physical disc with 2 good songs on it.
... are you seriously citing your knowledge of radar screens based on an Atari game?
Laugh now, but when the revolution comes, I am the one who will fly the TIE fighters to save humanity. I have countless hours of simulation time to prove it. :-)
Similar training has also taught me the best way to win a firefight (like let's say, Iraq or Vietnam or WW2 Germany) is to bunny hop diagonally, then make a rocket-jump to higher ground! Seriously, the guvmint needs to apply this to our armed forces training now!
This is actually easier to do than you might imagine. My old house was essentially a Faraday Cage. You could NOT get a wireless signal more then 1 foot outside it. Why? Aluminum Siding. Add in aluminum powder tinted windows (triple layer UV and thermal glass) and the only leakage was straight up through the roof.
My in-laws have a similar accidental Faraday cage around their house. Except in their case, they have stucco siding. It's the steel mesh all around the house that provides the cage.
Just try to get a cell phone signal more than a foot from a window on the first floor. In the basement, you get nothing whatsoever.
Their 2nd floor is another story (no pun intended.) The roof slopes quite severely, so about 1/2 the 2nd floor is actually surrounded by "roof". No steel mesh there.
It is very simple http://validator.w3.org/
Actually, not quite that simple. My top-level page currently gives 66 validation errors. Guess how many are from content I've had to include from a third party, where I have no control over their standards compliance? 66 of them - 65 are from WebRing, 1 is from a news feed.
For those of you who are bad at math, that's all of the errors on that page. Note that all my other pages validate just fine, since I don't include third-party content there.
Being part of the WebRing is still important for my site, so I have to live with the 65 errors. Not much I can do about it, so I wrote some code into the PHP to not display the WebRing content if I pass it a flag/option, and I use that flag when I validate since I know I'll get errors otherwise.
If there's a better way, let me know.
- Can I use OpenOffice to create "Word formatted resumes" and forward them to potential employers? Or is this like when I used GEOSwrite, and nobody could read the file, except another Commodore 64 user?
In short: yes.
I am fortunate that I can run Linux at work. I'm a manager of an IT shop for a large university, and I write a lot of docs for what I do. I have my default OpenOffice Writer format set to DOC format, and everything works just fine. I can share my docs with others in my office, and no one is aware that the doc was written with OpenOffice. Formatting is preserved, and especially because I have the Microsoft Fonts installed, everything looks just like MS Word.
Many of my coworkers have been upgraded the new version of MS Office, so I get a fair number of DOCX files now. I use the ODF converter to read them, and send back a DOC file (no one seems to notice, or care if they do.) But I'm really looking forward to the DOCX compatibility in OpenOffice 3.0!
For me, the issue was No native Linux version. Yes, there's the Linux version provided by the CrossOver guys, and that's great. I've used it a few times. But it takes forever to launch, and is generally a little slow. A native application would be better.
I'll look at Chrome again when there's a native version for Linux.
Will NVIDIA's ailing chipset business get a shot in the arm next week?
I got my tetanus booster shot yesterday, with my usual side-effects (kind of like having the flu.) I can tell you, a "shot in the arm" for NVIDIA doesn't sound too good right now. :-)
I think mostly they'd like to dilute "Open Source" to mean any code with source code. This is important to them because it's the rights connected to Open Source that scare Microsoft (and others). If you can call it Open Source when there isn't even the right to compile the code, or to use the information you get from reading it, customers don't have a reason to ask for it any longer.
I'd mod you up, if you weren't already at "5". This is exactly what's going on with Microsoft's "open source" concept; another example of embrace-extend-extinguish. They've embraced the idea of open source software, and now they're trying to "extend" the definition to mean software with source code but with no rights to use it or extend it.
Guess which is the next step?
Now, a company is approaching me to continue my changes. They want to keep the improvements to themselves, which is possible since the project is published under the BSD license. That's fair, as they have all the rights to the work they pay for in full. However, they also want me to sign a non-competition clause, which would bar me from ever working on and publishing results for the original open source project itself, even if done separately, in my free time. How would you approach such a decision? On one side, they'd provide resources to work on an interesting project. On the other, it would make me an outcast in the project's community. Moreover, they would take ownership of not just what they paid for, but also my changes leading up to this moment, and I wouldn't be able to continue on my original codebase in an open source manner if I sign their contract.
This seems like a pretty clear decision to me; don't take it.
So what is at stake (if I understand you correctly) is that this company wants to pay you for your work on free software, but in exchange you must give up your freedoms (non-compete, cannot work on this project ever again.)
I don't know your financial situation, but unless you're really strapped for cash, I don't recommend you take this offer. Agreeing to sell your freedoms (even part of your freedoms, since it seems to affect your work only this project) rarely ends well.
Yes, I second your suggestion to use Google Apps for Domains. I use this for my personal email, and I just re-use my domain. In the setup instructions, Google tells you what to put in your DNS so that email is handled properly through GMail. Works great!! People will email you at _______@example.com (or whatever) but it actually is handled by GMail. :-)
You can use the GMail web interface (I prefer it) or access via a standard mail client program (my wife prefers to do this instead.)