Sweet, I'm going to have to boot into windows when I get windows when I get home to try this out again. I have been following this project from the sidelines for a while now ever since I read his book, and have to admit to being a little giddy about seeing it actually getting somewhere.
I know that they popular trend on slashdot is to love or hate ideas and people, and that is what most of the posts will be about, but my opinion of Raskin has never been one of idol worship or supreme cynicism of anything visionary. I (false)started grad school a couple of years ago, with all sorts of ideas about how to make computing environments better, more pleasant more powerful, only to find that all my "revolutionary ideas" had already been thought of before, sometimes decades ago, and have sat on the shelf ever since. There was really no fundamental research for me to do - all the ideas had already been thought of, and were waiting for someone to do the grunt work of turning them into a practical working system. I became very disillusioned with what I was doing at school - the whole program seemed like a big sham - everyone pretended as if they were doing meaningful research but not one thesis seemed to be anything more than BS. Because of that, and other personal reasons, I dropped out after one semester.
Raskin was one of many of the researchers who ideas I latched onto. I don't know if I agree with all of his ideas, but really want to seem them attempted in something more than a simple proof-of-concept. Universities are not interested in practical grunt work - even if it is pushing the boarders. The huge amount of risk involved in creating an operating environment to compete with MS, not to mention the fact that the ideas are still just ideas, means that no one would dare take this on as a business venture. It seems that the open source community is really the entity most capable of doing projects like this.
Right now the project has mainly focused on the text-editing portion of Raskins ideas, which while interesting, are for the most part a known quantity - they are an incremental improvements on the ideas used in the Canon Cat. What I am really interested in is how they can be expanded to a system environment. For those that haven't read about him, he talks about a computing environment where there are no applications, just documents and tools that act on documents. This would create an incredible amount of flexibility, as is effectively bringing the Unix philosophy to the GUI world. Or alternately it takes the plug-in, undo and scripting functionality that the most powerful applications have and bringing it to the system level, so that everything has those features "for free", and they all interoperate for free, since you don't have a bunch of applications each with their own different, incompatible and likely proprietary methods. You now just have the core document objects, and a bunch of small tools that interface the document object. Apple's CoreData also has me really interested as it seems to implement many of the technical requirements that I have concluded such a system will need.
My other half keeps reminding me that all the attempts at wonderful unified systems have failed, and that it is ugly systems that are good at gluing together disparate, but existing technologies that succeed. But I don't care. I still would like to see it tried even if it does fail.
I wondered about that too. The large head creates the impression of a cute child, and well, Marvin is neither cute nor childish. I don't think the TV series Marvin wasn't any better though. I always imagined that Marvin would appear as thought the designers wanted him to appear sleek, but utterly failed, and instead came across as cheap looking. I definately did not see him as very tall, as he was in the TV series, but not child looking either, more stout around 5".
I do know I have the habit of overlooking or forgetting details about character descriptions when reading books, so my ideas might not match some factual details (which I would check before making anything like a film). And I am also aware that Marvin's personality was GPP prototype and somewhat of a failure by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, so there really isn't any logical reason that his appearance should match his personality. But neither of the Marvin designs seen thus far are at all satisfying to me.
Yeah, you are only required to accept legal tender to pay off a preexisting debt. But this was a preexisting debt.
He had bought the radio the day before, and the employee then told him that the installation fee was waived because of a mixup, so he went home thinking the transaction was complete. The next day Best Buy called him and told him that if he didn't come in and pay the installation fee they would call the police. So he came in and tried to pay off the pre-existing debt with legal tender. The cashier then called the police because she thought it was fake.
So employees of this store broke the law at least once during the transaction. The manager should definitely be sued, and the staff sacked.
Rocky Mountain, so yeah that would be the same region as University of Saskatchewan. I went to New Mexico Tech, and I remember Calgary and Alberta dominiating back then. Fun times.
Auto use represents less than half the oil consumed, and SUV represent an even smaller persentage of that piece. The majority of oil is consumed for heating and generating electricity.
That's not correct. In the US over 2/3 the oil is used for transportation. Futhermore, the amount of oil used for heating has been dropping every year (in real quantities - barrels/day, not just percentage) since 1978, while the amount used for transportation is growing. source. It is relatively easy to convert stationary applications to use another fuel, but we don't (yet) have a suitable mobile fuel that is as economical as oil.
That's what seperated the teams that attended (all of which are excellent) from the teams that won.
I can't speak for MIT or the other teams that went, but I have participated in the regional contests several times before, and for us it was something that we did in our spare time. Our only preperation was three local contests through-out the year and at most a couple days before each contest practicing problems. I'm sure that the US teams going to internationals a lot spend more time than that, but I don't think it even compares to the asian teams.
The asian schools take a great deal of pride in winning this contest and they have dedicated teams that spent tons of time working on this event. It is almost the same as if they were representing their country in the olympics. In fact that's a perfect analogy. Like this contest, the olympics have little direct practical application - how does jumping over a really tall pole make you a better worker in any job? The point of the contest is to simply performance for the sake of performance - to challenge yourself to the end of your abilities and prove that you can be the best in the world. This is a cultural attitude that the US doesn't really have in academics. The people here that are good in engineering are pragmatists that want to get a job done, and look at these contests as a fun diversion, not a matter of national dignity.
PS, our school seems doomed to place 3rd or 4th every year, foiled by those pesky canadians yet again:) Some day, when you aren't paying attention though we'll get you. Some day. Or maybe I should just go to canada when I finally decide to go back to grad school:)
No kidding. The grandparent should be moderated troll. Before accusing someone he know nothing about of cheating, perhaps he could have check the past results and see that this school (along with all the other leaders) has performed very well at every contest in recent history, including winning the 2002 contest in Honolulu, Hawaii. Or maybe the US coordinators were in a conspiricy againt the US teams as well.
Probably has more to do with students being inclined to compete in the various US-based ACM competitions rather than travel to China.
That's not true. The way the contest works is the world is broken up into regions. The people who place first and second at regionals (and occasionally a few honorable mentions) are allowed to move on to the international competition.
Here are the regions for North America, and here are the list of teams that went to compete in the international competition - 11 North American regions, 25 North American teams. I sincerely doubt that anyone who won a regional competition here in the US would forgo the opportunity to compete in the internationals, and if they did, I think the third place team would go in their place.
The US did send teams, they just didn't win. Oh, and if you look at past contests you will see that they schools that did well this year, have historically dominated the contest.
This information is a little out of date and only what I picked up while setting up a Mini-ITX MythTV box (I'm not involved in the EPIA development) so there may be inaccuracies, but is mostly correct for the most part.
The driver situation for the EPIA boards has been less than desirable. The VIA engineers were very supportive of linux and wrote drivers for all the chipsets on their boards, including accelerated XFree86 drivers, video out, hardware video encoding, etc. They were even cool enough to release the source to everything the were allowed to (some stuff was restricted because of third parties). But they did a poor job of keeping the binary driver packages up-to-date, and couldn't seem to decide which distros they were going to support, so you had the situation where this driver was packaged for these three distros, and that driver was packed for these other 4 distros.
Eventually, some people got frustrated and forked the code, vastly improving it - this is the Unichrome project. But they also considered it to be in development, and so only made the source available. And there was still the hassle of dealing with the few closed source drivers. The best distro by far for EPIA became gentoo, probably because it was easier to maintain and use an up-to-date source package than a binary one, and most of the EPIA community gravitated over there.
I don't know why the other distos didn't include unichrome drivers - perhaps they were just waiting for them to stop being beta. (Some may include them now, it has been at least 6 months since I checked). Anyway this appears to be a simple gentoo live-CD with the drivers in question. And that kicks ass. An OS that works out of the box will save newbies all sorts of time - I spent a couple weekends just figuring out where to find the newest versions of all the various drivers. And it really isn't a whole new distro - it is just a live-CD of existing distro. Considering how easy people have made it to roll your own live-CD, it makes a heck of a lot of sense for somone to do this.
The telcoms have no problems with WiFi hotspots because the city pays for the connection that is feeding the WAP. As far as they are concerned, the city is just another customer. Where they have a problem is when the city tries to compete with them by providing the broadband connections themselves.
How is this insightfull? It is normal for there to be a string of articles from the same editor. They work in shifts, splitting time between the different tasks. Just look at the last couple days. Prior to Zonk, there was a string of stories posted by samzenpus, then timothy, then CmdrTaco, then timothy, then CmdrTaco, then timothy, then back to Zonk, and then samzenpus, etc.
I agree. One TLD that I do wish they had created from the beginning, however, is a personal website TLD, like.per, or.me, or even.ws. That is one very common type of web site that did not fit very well into any of the original TLD categories (I know.org was supposed to be the preferred one, but I am not an organization), so you ended up with people using.net,.org, and.com indiscriminately for personal web sites. Of course, introducing one now wouldn't help any, especially since the TLDs have become so diluted.
According to the editors (from a post in one of these threads a while back) it is because he, unlike most of the potential slashdot submitters, can actually write a decent summary. You wouldn't think that would be very hard, but just look at how many blurbs there are with incorrect grammar, and convoluted sentences. Then look at how many put jump into details without explaining what the story is about, and put links on words that don't make sense. And these are just the submissions that are actually approved. I can imagine that the editors get an awful lot of junk submitted.
Simular implants have been used to treat severe, otherwise untreatable, depression. I read about it in the economist . I think non-subscribers can get to that, but if not plentfy of other sites are reporting on it as well.
how far behind is the space station at this point?
Hehe, when I was in elementary school I remember hearing about how great the space station (then S.S. Freedom) was going to be when it was built. Expected completion date - the late 80's.
No it isn't. I bought a low-end PC, a gaming console, 4 wireless controllers, and a nice 36" progressive scan television for less what it would have cost me to buy the components for a decent gaming PC. And I can play any game over a couple years old on my low-end PC.
Gaming PC's are ridiculously expensive for what they do - the video card alone costs far more than a gaming console and a half dozen games. Not what I would call economy.
Re:What's wrong with finder?
on
Hacking Mac OS X
·
· Score: 3, Informative
John Siracusa of Ars Technica has written up a very fine
article about the problems with the OS X finder. I'd give my opinions on the matter, but I have to get back to work.
Since nearly all typesetting is done electronically these days, I wonder if they shouldn't just have publishers send them the raw typesetting documents in addition to a hardcopy. It wouldn't be much work for the LOC to write (or buy) software to convert all the common typesetting formats into whatever standard format(s) they would like to use internally, and for dispersion to the public.
It would certainly be smarter than scanning them in themselves, or demanding extra work on the publishers part to to convert to a format like PDF that might not be preferable 100 years from now. Heck for all I know they may very well be doing what I said - I know nothing about how the LOC works:)
The application's purpose is to run various tests using GPIB communications, with NI-DAQ hardware for instrument control and dump results into a database, all of which I'm comfortable with.
How large is this program? From you description, it sounds like a simple test and mesurement application, and you have done those sort of things in the past. It also sounds like the real task you are being assigned is not to "port and localize", but to make an application that "does pretty much the same thing as the one we have in japan". Does your boss expect the Japanese program and the American program to have an identical code base when all is said and done? Does he care at all if you use the same code, or just wants something that words?
Localization can be a fairly difficult job - it involves making code that can adapt to all sorts of different languages and cultural expectation, by changing just a few translation files and not the entire code base. If that is what you boss wants then I agree with everyone else that you are up for trouble. But it sounds to me that you don't need to go that far. You just want to manually adapt a program to english, so you have something to use in-house. Get familiar with what the program does, and ask yourself if you could do that from scratch, given your knowledge of test and measurement programming. Don't automatically freak out if it is bigger in scope than anything you've done before, so long as the individual chunks seem managable to you. If you can handle them I wouldn't worry - you'll survive.
I'd also talk to you boss about what your constraints are. If all the code (variable / class/ function names) is not in english, and if it is a small program, it might be better to write the code from scratch in english using the existing software as a guideline and reference, not a code base. I am porting some code written by a german, and it is really tricky to figure out what the code does when all the variable names are randoms strings to me. If the code is very readable, and all you need to do is change the prompts and dates to english and what-not, then by all means use the existing code.
I would definately try and figure out how you technical ability stands up against this project very soon. Take a good look at the timeframe you have. If this project slips will it prevent or delay the product line? Most importantly be very upfront with your boss if you have any doubts about fulfilling his tasks. Better you warn him upfront then he find out when the project fails. If you decide you are in over your head, and your boss is inflexable, I would start looking for other jobs in case you become a scapegoat. Regardless, enjoy your trip to Japan. That alone is a wonderfull opportunity, and you should take full advantage of it.
Well, no, because the deeper problem isn't the precise definition of the word, but that the adjective is being applied to the wrong thing. Saying "the dubious developers" means that there are doubts about the developers, not that the developers have doubts about Mono. If it had been phrased "developers who are dubious of mono", that would have been better, and "skeptical developers" would have been better still.
- It's not right for content creators/originators/owners/licensors to expect to be able to protect their content; if their content needs protection, their business model is dying;
- All "information" and "ideas", which includes music, software, text, and other unique works, should be allowed to freely flow between people in an unlimited fashion without any encumbrances of ownership;
I disagree with these two points. I think that the concept of copyright is a fundamentally sound and good thing, and it is merely some aspects of our implementation in the US that I take issue with. Imagine that a creator (I'll use the pronoun 'you') makes a work, and is give copyright (limited government granted monopoly) over it. Even if you decided to never give the works to anyone who doesn't pay an exorbitant fee, the world is not any worse off than before you created the work, and if you chooses a decent licensing , then the world is arguably better. However, you also drew from your experiences in society when creating a work, so you can't claim all the credit, nor can you specifically credit everyone that influenced you. Time limited copyright is a great solution to this. You are given control for a brief time so you can get your due for the creative effort you put out, and then the work goes into the public domain, to benefit society as a whole as due for the intangible influence it has had on the work.
Contrast this to patents, where once you patent an idea you have control over every commercial implementation of that idea, regardless of whether the other person thought of it independently. That's the big difference - copyright only gives you control over what you created, whereas patents give you control over what other people create. I think that you have a right to be hoarder, but not an exploiter.
I have two big beefs with DRM and they have nothing to do with a disdain for copyright. The first is that I, as a citizen, think it is wrong and totalitarian for our electronic devices to police us. While I respect copyright and think it is good, if something this extreme is required to prevent widespread violation of copyright laws, then they are not democratic laws. Personally, I don't think it is. I think most people are willing to respect copyright, and the few leechers are unavoidable, but tolerable (like any crime). Furthermore, these devices cannot properly enforce the law because it impossible to know the circumstances surrounding the copying of data. Our copyright law is quite nuanced, and it is that way for a reason. Yet all DRM is by nature overzealous in its restrictions, preventing many legitimate actions. Lastly, it is the citizens who should be deciding copyright laws, not media cartels as is effectively the case with DRM.
The second problem I have with DRM is from an engineering / market perspective. DRM by necessity (else it wont work), requires an entity who lords over all who would create electronic media devices. If they wish to comply with the law they must conform to the standards set by this body, including paying any patent royalties involved in the DRM, maintaining trade secrets, and basically doing whatever this entity puts in its contract. That is an illegal and harmful monopoly - and it hurts the industry, as well as the consumers, while fattening the pocket and power of some gatekeeper who is doing nothing for their money but being an impediment.
The only instance where I, as a consumer, would tolerate DRM is in a rental situation, where I did not "own" a work, but was merely paying to see a presentation of it. For example, if there was a digital set-top-box, where I could download and watch any series ever created for a reasonable price, I wouldn't care if the device attempted to prevent me from copying shows. I am paying for a service not a product, and as long as the service meets my needs, I don't care how it is implemented. If I am paying for a product, however, then I better be able to do everything that copyright laws allows me to do, when I w
There are two things needed to learn a new system quickly - a good reference giving the details of every function in the SDK, and documents giving the big picture. The former is pretty easy to understand how to do well and there are good tools like javadoc or Doxygen that help with this task.
The latter is the one that is lacking most often. You can see very quickly whether a geek or technical writer was in charge of the documentation. If it was a geek this document is non-existent, and at best you have few code examples to help you get the big picture.
If it was done by technical writers it is extremely verbose, baby-stepping you through everything. This is something that mangers have a hard time understanding - if documentation is so overwhelming that it is faster and easer to learn by jumping into the code, then you are not much better off than when you had no documentation at all.
My suggestion would be to write a document that you would like to read. Give a quick overview of the organization / concepts of your libraries, and then quick code examples demonstrating how they fit together. If there is something that seems to verbose, or explains things that every computer programmer should know, either take it out or maintain two documents - the "expert" overview and the tutorial.
If there are any common pitfalls/misconceptions with your SDK (and you can't change the SDK to improve the situation) make sure they are in there. It is sometimes hard to write this yourself as you are already familiar with the SDK, and so you may not think to put down some things. For this reason, you should get help from people who are programmers but are not familiar with the SDK yet and/or are in the process of learning it. If there are any common questions, that means the documentation is lacking in that area. And of course this does not supersede the need for more in-depth (and well commented) code examples.
Slashdot Mirror
Sweet, I'm going to have to boot into windows when I get windows when I get home to try this out again. I have been following this project from the sidelines for a while now ever since I read his book, and have to admit to being a little giddy about seeing it actually getting somewhere.
I know that they popular trend on slashdot is to love or hate ideas and people, and that is what most of the posts will be about, but my opinion of Raskin has never been one of idol worship or supreme cynicism of anything visionary. I (false)started grad school a couple of years ago, with all sorts of ideas about how to make computing environments better, more pleasant more powerful, only to find that all my "revolutionary ideas" had already been thought of before, sometimes decades ago, and have sat on the shelf ever since. There was really no fundamental research for me to do - all the ideas had already been thought of, and were waiting for someone to do the grunt work of turning them into a practical working system. I became very disillusioned with what I was doing at school - the whole program seemed like a big sham - everyone pretended as if they were doing meaningful research but not one thesis seemed to be anything more than BS. Because of that, and other personal reasons, I dropped out after one semester.
Raskin was one of many of the researchers who ideas I latched onto. I don't know if I agree with all of his ideas, but really want to seem them attempted in something more than a simple proof-of-concept. Universities are not interested in practical grunt work - even if it is pushing the boarders. The huge amount of risk involved in creating an operating environment to compete with MS, not to mention the fact that the ideas are still just ideas, means that no one would dare take this on as a business venture. It seems that the open source community is really the entity most capable of doing projects like this.
Right now the project has mainly focused on the text-editing portion of Raskins ideas, which while interesting, are for the most part a known quantity - they are an incremental improvements on the ideas used in the Canon Cat. What I am really interested in is how they can be expanded to a system environment. For those that haven't read about him, he talks about a computing environment where there are no applications, just documents and tools that act on documents. This would create an incredible amount of flexibility, as is effectively bringing the Unix philosophy to the GUI world. Or alternately it takes the plug-in, undo and scripting functionality that the most powerful applications have and bringing it to the system level, so that everything has those features "for free", and they all interoperate for free, since you don't have a bunch of applications each with their own different, incompatible and likely proprietary methods. You now just have the core document objects, and a bunch of small tools that interface the document object. Apple's CoreData also has me really interested as it seems to implement many of the technical requirements that I have concluded such a system will need.
My other half keeps reminding me that all the attempts at wonderful unified systems have failed, and that it is ugly systems that are good at gluing together disparate, but existing technologies that succeed. But I don't care. I still would like to see it tried even if it does fail.
hehe
I wondered about that too. The large head creates the impression of a cute child, and well, Marvin is neither cute nor childish. I don't think the TV series Marvin wasn't any better though. I always imagined that Marvin would appear as thought the designers wanted him to appear sleek, but utterly failed, and instead came across as cheap looking. I definately did not see him as very tall, as he was in the TV series, but not child looking either, more stout around 5".
I do know I have the habit of overlooking or forgetting details about character descriptions when reading books, so my ideas might not match some factual details (which I would check before making anything like a film). And I am also aware that Marvin's personality was GPP prototype and somewhat of a failure by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, so there really isn't any logical reason that his appearance should match his personality. But neither of the Marvin designs seen thus far are at all satisfying to me.
Eight US newspapers and the Associated Press agency have thrown their support behind three bloggers sued by Apple.
BBC is just reporting on the story.
Yeah, you are only required to accept legal tender to pay off a preexisting debt. But this was a preexisting debt.
He had bought the radio the day before, and the employee then told him that the installation fee was waived because of a mixup, so he went home thinking the transaction was complete. The next day Best Buy called him and told him that if he didn't come in and pay the installation fee they would call the police. So he came in and tried to pay off the pre-existing debt with legal tender. The cashier then called the police because she thought it was fake.
So employees of this store broke the law at least once during the transaction. The manager should definitely be sued, and the staff sacked.
Rocky Mountain, so yeah that would be the same region as University of Saskatchewan. I went to New Mexico Tech, and I remember Calgary and Alberta dominiating back then. Fun times.
Auto use represents less than half the oil consumed, and SUV represent an even smaller persentage of that piece. The majority of oil is consumed for heating and generating electricity.
That's not correct. In the US over 2/3 the oil is used for transportation. Futhermore, the amount of oil used for heating has been dropping every year (in real quantities - barrels/day, not just percentage) since 1978, while the amount used for transportation is growing. source. It is relatively easy to convert stationary applications to use another fuel, but we don't (yet) have a suitable mobile fuel that is as economical as oil.
That's what seperated the teams that attended (all of which are excellent) from the teams that won.
:) Some day, when you aren't paying attention though we'll get you. Some day. Or maybe I should just go to canada when I finally decide to go back to grad school :)
I can't speak for MIT or the other teams that went, but I have participated in the regional contests several times before, and for us it was something that we did in our spare time. Our only preperation was three local contests through-out the year and at most a couple days before each contest practicing problems. I'm sure that the US teams going to internationals a lot spend more time than that, but I don't think it even compares to the asian teams.
The asian schools take a great deal of pride in winning this contest and they have dedicated teams that spent tons of time working on this event. It is almost the same as if they were representing their country in the olympics. In fact that's a perfect analogy. Like this contest, the olympics have little direct practical application - how does jumping over a really tall pole make you a better worker in any job? The point of the contest is to simply performance for the sake of performance - to challenge yourself to the end of your abilities and prove that you can be the best in the world. This is a cultural attitude that the US doesn't really have in academics. The people here that are good in engineering are pragmatists that want to get a job done, and look at these contests as a fun diversion, not a matter of national dignity.
PS, our school seems doomed to place 3rd or 4th every year, foiled by those pesky canadians yet again
No kidding. The grandparent should be moderated troll. Before accusing someone he know nothing about of cheating, perhaps he could have check the past results and see that this school (along with all the other leaders) has performed very well at every contest in recent history, including winning the 2002 contest in Honolulu, Hawaii. Or maybe the US coordinators were in a conspiricy againt the US teams as well.
Probably has more to do with students being inclined to compete in the various US-based ACM competitions rather than travel to China.
That's not true. The way the contest works is the world is broken up into regions. The people who place first and second at regionals (and occasionally a few honorable mentions) are allowed to move on to the international competition.
Here are the regions for North America, and here are the list of teams that went to compete in the international competition - 11 North American regions, 25 North American teams. I sincerely doubt that anyone who won a regional competition here in the US would forgo the opportunity to compete in the internationals, and if they did, I think the third place team would go in their place.
The US did send teams, they just didn't win. Oh, and if you look at past contests you will see that they schools that did well this year, have historically dominated the contest.
This information is a little out of date and only what I picked up while setting up a Mini-ITX MythTV box (I'm not involved in the EPIA development) so there may be inaccuracies, but is mostly correct for the most part.
The driver situation for the EPIA boards has been less than desirable. The VIA engineers were very supportive of linux and wrote drivers for all the chipsets on their boards, including accelerated XFree86 drivers, video out, hardware video encoding, etc. They were even cool enough to release the source to everything the were allowed to (some stuff was restricted because of third parties). But they did a poor job of keeping the binary driver packages up-to-date, and couldn't seem to decide which distros they were going to support, so you had the situation where this driver was packaged for these three distros, and that driver was packed for these other 4 distros.
Eventually, some people got frustrated and forked the code, vastly improving it - this is the Unichrome project. But they also considered it to be in development, and so only made the source available. And there was still the hassle of dealing with the few closed source drivers. The best distro by far for EPIA became gentoo, probably because it was easier to maintain and use an up-to-date source package than a binary one, and most of the EPIA community gravitated over there.
I don't know why the other distos didn't include unichrome drivers - perhaps they were just waiting for them to stop being beta. (Some may include them now, it has been at least 6 months since I checked). Anyway this appears to be a simple gentoo live-CD with the drivers in question. And that kicks ass. An OS that works out of the box will save newbies all sorts of time - I spent a couple weekends just figuring out where to find the newest versions of all the various drivers. And it really isn't a whole new distro - it is just a live-CD of existing distro. Considering how easy people have made it to roll your own live-CD, it makes a heck of a lot of sense for somone to do this.
The telcoms have no problems with WiFi hotspots because the city pays for the connection that is feeding the WAP. As far as they are concerned, the city is just another customer. Where they have a problem is when the city tries to compete with them by providing the broadband connections themselves.
How is this insightfull? It is normal for there to be a string of articles from the same editor. They work in shifts, splitting time between the different tasks. Just look at the last couple days. Prior to Zonk, there was a string of stories posted by samzenpus, then timothy, then CmdrTaco, then timothy, then CmdrTaco, then timothy, then back to Zonk, and then samzenpus, etc.
I agree. One TLD that I do wish they had created from the beginning, however, is a personal website TLD, like .per, or .me, or even .ws. That is one very common type of web site that did not fit very well into any of the original TLD categories (I know .org was supposed to be the preferred one, but I am not an organization), so you ended up with people using .net, .org, and .com indiscriminately for personal web sites. Of course, introducing one now wouldn't help any, especially since the TLDs have become so diluted.
According to the editors (from a post in one of these threads a while back) it is because he, unlike most of the potential slashdot submitters, can actually write a decent summary. You wouldn't think that would be very hard, but just look at how many blurbs there are with incorrect grammar, and convoluted sentences. Then look at how many put jump into details without explaining what the story is about, and put links on words that don't make sense. And these are just the submissions that are actually approved. I can imagine that the editors get an awful lot of junk submitted.
Simular implants have been used to treat severe, otherwise untreatable, depression. I read about it in the economist . I think non-subscribers can get to that, but if not plentfy of other sites are reporting on it as well.
how far behind is the space station at this point?
Hehe, when I was in elementary school I remember hearing about how great the space station (then S.S. Freedom) was going to be when it was built. Expected completion date - the late 80's.
I bought my PC for both. It's called economy.
No it isn't. I bought a low-end PC, a gaming console, 4 wireless controllers, and a nice 36" progressive scan television for less what it would have cost me to buy the components for a decent gaming PC. And I can play any game over a couple years old on my low-end PC.
Gaming PC's are ridiculously expensive for what they do - the video card alone costs far more than a gaming console and a half dozen games. Not what I would call economy.
John Siracusa of Ars Technica has written up a very fine article about the problems with the OS X finder. I'd give my opinions on the matter, but I have to get back to work.
Since nearly all typesetting is done electronically these days, I wonder if they shouldn't just have publishers send them the raw typesetting documents in addition to a hardcopy. It wouldn't be much work for the LOC to write (or buy) software to convert all the common typesetting formats into whatever standard format(s) they would like to use internally, and for dispersion to the public.
:)
It would certainly be smarter than scanning them in themselves, or demanding extra work on the publishers part to to convert to a format like PDF that might not be preferable 100 years from now. Heck for all I know they may very well be doing what I said - I know nothing about how the LOC works
The application's purpose is to run various tests using GPIB communications, with NI-DAQ hardware for instrument control and dump results into a database, all of which I'm comfortable with.
How large is this program? From you description, it sounds like a simple test and mesurement application, and you have done those sort of things in the past. It also sounds like the real task you are being assigned is not to "port and localize", but to make an application that "does pretty much the same thing as the one we have in japan". Does your boss expect the Japanese program and the American program to have an identical code base when all is said and done? Does he care at all if you use the same code, or just wants something that words?
Localization can be a fairly difficult job - it involves making code that can adapt to all sorts of different languages and cultural expectation, by changing just a few translation files and not the entire code base. If that is what you boss wants then I agree with everyone else that you are up for trouble. But it sounds to me that you don't need to go that far. You just want to manually adapt a program to english, so you have something to use in-house. Get familiar with what the program does, and ask yourself if you could do that from scratch, given your knowledge of test and measurement programming. Don't automatically freak out if it is bigger in scope than anything you've done before, so long as the individual chunks seem managable to you. If you can handle them I wouldn't worry - you'll survive.
I'd also talk to you boss about what your constraints are. If all the code (variable / class/ function names) is not in english, and if it is a small program, it might be better to write the code from scratch in english using the existing software as a guideline and reference, not a code base. I am porting some code written by a german, and it is really tricky to figure out what the code does when all the variable names are randoms strings to me. If the code is very readable, and all you need to do is change the prompts and dates to english and what-not, then by all means use the existing code.
I would definately try and figure out how you technical ability stands up against this project very soon. Take a good look at the timeframe you have. If this project slips will it prevent or delay the product line? Most importantly be very upfront with your boss if you have any doubts about fulfilling his tasks. Better you warn him upfront then he find out when the project fails. If you decide you are in over your head, and your boss is inflexable, I would start looking for other jobs in case you become a scapegoat.
Regardless, enjoy your trip to Japan. That alone is a wonderfull opportunity, and you should take full advantage of it.
That is all.
Well, no, because the deeper problem isn't the precise definition of the word, but that the adjective is being applied to the wrong thing. Saying "the dubious developers" means that there are doubts about the developers, not that the developers have doubts about Mono. If it had been phrased "developers who are dubious of mono", that would have been better, and "skeptical developers" would have been better still.
- It's not right for content creators/originators/owners/licensors to expect to be able to protect their content; if their content needs protection, their business model is dying;
- All "information" and "ideas", which includes music, software, text, and other unique works, should be allowed to freely flow between people in an unlimited fashion without any encumbrances of ownership;
I disagree with these two points. I think that the concept of copyright is a fundamentally sound and good thing, and it is merely some aspects of our implementation in the US that I take issue with. Imagine that a creator (I'll use the pronoun 'you') makes a work, and is give copyright (limited government granted monopoly) over it. Even if you decided to never give the works to anyone who doesn't pay an exorbitant fee, the world is not any worse off than before you created the work, and if you chooses a decent licensing , then the world is arguably better. However, you also drew from your experiences in society when creating a work, so you can't claim all the credit, nor can you specifically credit everyone that influenced you. Time limited copyright is a great solution to this. You are given control for a brief time so you can get your due for the creative effort you put out, and then the work goes into the public domain, to benefit society as a whole as due for the intangible influence it has had on the work.
Contrast this to patents, where once you patent an idea you have control over every commercial implementation of that idea, regardless of whether the other person thought of it independently. That's the big difference - copyright only gives you control over what you created, whereas patents give you control over what other people create. I think that you have a right to be hoarder, but not an exploiter.
I have two big beefs with DRM and they have nothing to do with a disdain for copyright. The first is that I, as a citizen, think it is wrong and totalitarian for our electronic devices to police us. While I respect copyright and think it is good, if something this extreme is required to prevent widespread violation of copyright laws, then they are not democratic laws. Personally, I don't think it is. I think most people are willing to respect copyright, and the few leechers are unavoidable, but tolerable (like any crime). Furthermore, these devices cannot properly enforce the law because it impossible to know the circumstances surrounding the copying of data. Our copyright law is quite nuanced, and it is that way for a reason. Yet all DRM is by nature overzealous in its restrictions, preventing many legitimate actions. Lastly, it is the citizens who should be deciding copyright laws, not media cartels as is effectively the case with DRM.
The second problem I have with DRM is from an engineering / market perspective. DRM by necessity (else it wont work), requires an entity who lords over all who would create electronic media devices. If they wish to comply with the law they must conform to the standards set by this body, including paying any patent royalties involved in the DRM, maintaining trade secrets, and basically doing whatever this entity puts in its contract. That is an illegal and harmful monopoly - and it hurts the industry, as well as the consumers, while fattening the pocket and power of some gatekeeper who is doing nothing for their money but being an impediment.
The only instance where I, as a consumer, would tolerate DRM is in a rental situation, where I did not "own" a work, but was merely paying to see a presentation of it. For example, if there was a digital set-top-box, where I could download and watch any series ever created for a reasonable price, I wouldn't care if the device attempted to prevent me from copying shows. I am paying for a service not a product, and as long as the service meets my needs, I don't care how it is implemented. If I am paying for a product, however, then I better be able to do everything that copyright laws allows me to do, when I w
There are two things needed to learn a new system quickly - a good reference giving the details of every function in the SDK, and documents giving the big picture. The former is pretty easy to understand how to do well and there are good tools like javadoc or Doxygen that help with this task.
The latter is the one that is lacking most often. You can see very quickly whether a geek or technical writer was in charge of the documentation. If it was a geek this document is non-existent, and at best you have few code examples to help you get the big picture.
If it was done by technical writers it is extremely verbose, baby-stepping you through everything. This is something that mangers have a hard time understanding - if documentation is so overwhelming that it is faster and easer to learn by jumping into the code, then you are not much better off than when you had no documentation at all.
My suggestion would be to write a document that you would like to read. Give a quick overview of the organization / concepts of your libraries, and then quick code examples demonstrating how they fit together. If there is something that seems to verbose, or explains things that every computer programmer should know, either take it out or maintain two documents - the "expert" overview and the tutorial.
If there are any common pitfalls/misconceptions with your SDK (and you can't change the SDK to improve the situation) make sure they are in there. It is sometimes hard to write this yourself as you are already familiar with the SDK, and so you may not think to put down some things. For this reason, you should get help from people who are programmers but are not familiar with the SDK yet and/or are in the process of learning it. If there are any common questions, that means the documentation is lacking in that area. And of course this does not supersede the need for more in-depth (and well commented) code examples.