This is not about discovering the oceans and what lives there or the geology of the depths. This about helping Shell (the sponsor) create cheaper technogolies such that they can drill for oil. The requirements they have laid out are weak, for example "depth of up to 4,000 meters". The ocean deepest point is almost 11,000 meters. The drilling technology in the future will be reaching 4,000 meters.
I usually envisage Xprizes as advancing the worlds technologies on a shoestring budget in areas that we have limited knowledge, such as sending a rocket to the moon and taking a photo of the surface and beaming it back to Earth.
It sounds like the start-up is in need of a business analyst (BA). And this could well be the role of your accountant friend. I am an experienced business analyst with a technical background, although I know many business analysts who have little or no technical background. The role of the business analyst is to work with the stakeholders (e.g. developers, users, management, etc) to design solutions (technical or not). The business analyst creates documentation (user stories, business requirements, business logic flow diagrams, etc) by working with the stakeholders. The developers and testers then use this documentation to develop the solution. There are many business analysis books out there, one of the most popular is the BABOK (Business Analyst Body of Knowledge), see https://www.iiba.org/babok-gui.... It has many tools that a BA requires. But I don't recommend your friend becomes a full blown BA, but it may help to learn some tools and techniques described in the BABOK.
I always see the Business Analyst as an interpreter or go-between, between the business and the developers. And the Business Analyst uses tools (i.e. methods of documentation) to formally describe what the customers want.
I don't know where you get your figures from, but this well referenced wikipedia page has different stats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Yes, the train journey did take twice as long (when there is no traffic) for my specific commute. But the train was always more reliable (since I did not have to deal with traffic), more comfortable (I could walk around and stretch my legs), less stressful and I could read a book or do work, or even sleep on the trains. In fact I could work in the train such that I could reduce my hours in the office. Often, between major cities it is much faster taking the train, between Bern and Zurich it takes 1 h 34 min by car (without traffic), by train it's always 55 minutes. It's great for business meetings, you prepare on the way there, and relax on the way back.
I lived in Switzerland for many years. We did not have a car, but relied on public transport. But the public transport system there is fantastic, it was fast and efficient. I could purchase a pass to cover almost all the trains, buses, boats, cable cars, etc in the country. This pass was valid for a year and was not cheap, but cheaper than a car. It's the infrastructure that made this possible as well as the social situation. With one ticket/pass you are able to travel on all public transport providers, even if they are operated by different companies. It was possible to rent cars on an hourly basis (see https://www.mobility.ch/), and these cars are available at all main stations and within 5 minutes walk from our house we had around 10 different cars available for rent. All public transport is clean and safe and it runs to time.
Not only does the infrastructure support this, many people use it. In fact the country is proud of it's public transport system. I found that when I took a bus in Los Angeles, it tended to be poorer people taking buses, it was delayed and dirty. In Switzerland all people use the public transport. If you want a bit more space, you can opt for 1st class and pay twice the price, 1st class tends to be devoid of families and tends to be quiter.
If he did voluntarily return to the US this would be yet again a very brave move from him. The first very brave move was to leave the US and release the information he had.
I agree it's a business problem. MS Office has some pretty good versioning support built into it and multiple people can edit a document at the same time, if you know how to set it up. There should a technical person in your wife's company that understands how MS Office and other tools work. They should train the staff on the capabilities and the staff should come up with a process that works for everyone.
With SharePoint you can have MS Office documents versioned, it is basic versioning, not like git where you can have branches and things like that. For other types of documents, it's a matter of defining a process and naming convention on how to keep a track of items.
The talk was given at the recent Linux Conf Australia (in New Zealand). It shows that AMD supports OpenCL 2.0, while Nvidia only support version 1.1 (released in 2010). I spoke to the speaker after his talk and he said Nvidia are basically dragging their heals with regard to supporting more recent versions. Nvidia also request unconvential features be put into the spec, and then never implement those features. Obvisouly Nvidia are doing well with their own CUDA language and seem to be trying to create a walled garden. It sounds like if you are going for openness and not for speed, then you could look at Intel or AMD (both support version 2.0).
One step back, two steps forward. This is how I see it. Battery tech will evolve and so will the energy efficiency of the devices. It may be slow with regard to today's pace.
It's like saying the browser is a step back from the standard desktop environment. It is, but it also allows you to do so much more.
I second that. I have LastPass on my mobile, on various WebBrowsers at home and work. Although the free version could be suficient for your child. I paid for the premium version which gives me the mobile option, and it's cheap, at only around $12/year (last time I looked). So for all websites I have different passwords which all have high entropy (think 16 characters, uppercase, lower case, numbers and special characters).
I only need to remember a few passwords which I don't store in LassPass, e.g. bank, email, etc.
I worked in a large financial services company in Switzerland. We were one of the most intense users of a particular risk & control application. We understood each corner of this application and with each new release we analysed each change in detail. This was necessary to weigh-up the value of upgrading or not, or timing the upgrade appropriately. Some seemingly insignificant change could be a show-stopper for our users.
You can optimize your connection using an optimizing proxy hardwired to the Internet. The proxy can reduce some of the latency by doing dns lookups for you and reducing page sizes. It won't make real time apps like VOIP any better. There are also services like this available: http://www.vortexvpn.com/ or Opera browser, etc. I think even Chrome has it available.
We all know how StackOverflow works. You can always ask or answer a question, but other privileges are based on your reputation. Reputation is only gained by creating good questions and answers. It takes work to get a good reputation on StackOverflow.
I actually don't know what Wikimedia has in place, but it could implement a similar reputation based approach as StackOverflow. Of course the algorithm and mechanism would be different since Wikipedia is not a Q&A site.
To make things even harder, they could implement a reputation killer. For example: if user A improved the score of user B, then user B gets nuked because they are one of these PR firms, then user A should suffer a major reputation dive.
While I'm at it... Instead of Wikipedia begging for money once a year, they could implement a wikipedia.com site which has some light advertising. By default all users go to wikipedia.org, but for those who want can manually redirect to wikipedia.com. I would be glad to support such a system.
I was one of those 175'000 customers who trialled it. And I have to say the speed was reasonable and you can't complain about free WiFi on the street. We were travelling NZ for 6 months and we used it all over the place. It tended to be the most reliable connection you could find, even better than sitting in a café and using their WiFi.
Animation Research Limited in New Zealand pioneered this way back in 1992 for the America's Cup in San Diego. It was revolutionary, what's in the article above is just evolutionary.
Try this service and see how it compares to yours: https://www.vortexvpn.com/ See if you get the same behaviour. You get 1GB of free data, if you email support I can give you more. I could also open port 443 if they seem to be shaping non-Http(s) traffic. I have had it running for a few days. There is a server in Dublin you could use.
I would disagree with your post and most of the "don't work and travel - it's a waste" posts. Because I have found that living in one place for a longer period of time you get to learn about the city you are in, much more than a typical tourist. You will get to appreciate how things operate in a different country, the good, the bad and the ugly.
As long as you understand that you will very likely get robbed, or have your laptop stolen at some point,
I would disagree that it is "very likely" that you will get robbed. I have traveled loads (I am the end of our 9 month travel around the world) with computers, fancy smart phones, etc. I have never been robbed or had anything stolen (except a $25 city map that I left sitting around for a while). I am cautious and take care of my belongings. As long as you take care of your things and be aware of people around you, do not look like a typical tourist and dress down, you should be okay.
China if you want internet you may want to get a service like Boingo. Free internet is difficult to find in China if you have no Chinese phone number, because the government wants to keep tabs on who you are, so to get free Internet you typically get sent a txt/sms.
I have tried working while travelling. I have found that although a hotel advertises that it has wifi, it can be flakey (I have had to ask reception to reboot the router every 30 minutes) or the signal in your room is weak and useless.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right. But it's about furthering the technology.
This is not about discovering the oceans and what lives there or the geology of the depths. This about helping Shell (the sponsor) create cheaper technogolies such that they can drill for oil. The requirements they have laid out are weak, for example "depth of up to 4,000 meters". The ocean deepest point is almost 11,000 meters. The drilling technology in the future will be reaching 4,000 meters.
I usually envisage Xprizes as advancing the worlds technologies on a shoestring budget in areas that we have limited knowledge, such as sending a rocket to the moon and taking a photo of the surface and beaming it back to Earth.
It sounds like the start-up is in need of a business analyst (BA). And this could well be the role of your accountant friend. I am an experienced business analyst with a technical background, although I know many business analysts who have little or no technical background. The role of the business analyst is to work with the stakeholders (e.g. developers, users, management, etc) to design solutions (technical or not). The business analyst creates documentation (user stories, business requirements, business logic flow diagrams, etc) by working with the stakeholders. The developers and testers then use this documentation to develop the solution. There are many business analysis books out there, one of the most popular is the BABOK (Business Analyst Body of Knowledge), see https://www.iiba.org/babok-gui.... It has many tools that a BA requires. But I don't recommend your friend becomes a full blown BA, but it may help to learn some tools and techniques described in the BABOK.
I always see the Business Analyst as an interpreter or go-between, between the business and the developers. And the Business Analyst uses tools (i.e. methods of documentation) to formally describe what the customers want.
I don't know where you get your figures from, but this well referenced wikipedia page has different stats:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Yes, the train journey did take twice as long (when there is no traffic) for my specific commute. But the train was always more reliable (since I did not have to deal with traffic), more comfortable (I could walk around and stretch my legs), less stressful and I could read a book or do work, or even sleep on the trains. In fact I could work in the train such that I could reduce my hours in the office. Often, between major cities it is much faster taking the train, between Bern and Zurich it takes 1 h 34 min by car (without traffic), by train it's always 55 minutes. It's great for business meetings, you prepare on the way there, and relax on the way back.
I lived in Switzerland for many years. We did not have a car, but relied on public transport. But the public transport system there is fantastic, it was fast and efficient. I could purchase a pass to cover almost all the trains, buses, boats, cable cars, etc in the country. This pass was valid for a year and was not cheap, but cheaper than a car. It's the infrastructure that made this possible as well as the social situation. With one ticket/pass you are able to travel on all public transport providers, even if they are operated by different companies. It was possible to rent cars on an hourly basis (see https://www.mobility.ch/), and these cars are available at all main stations and within 5 minutes walk from our house we had around 10 different cars available for rent. All public transport is clean and safe and it runs to time.
Not only does the infrastructure support this, many people use it. In fact the country is proud of it's public transport system. I found that when I took a bus in Los Angeles, it tended to be poorer people taking buses, it was delayed and dirty. In Switzerland all people use the public transport. If you want a bit more space, you can opt for 1st class and pay twice the price, 1st class tends to be devoid of families and tends to be quiter.
If he did voluntarily return to the US this would be yet again a very brave move from him. The first very brave move was to leave the US and release the information he had.
I agree it's a business problem. MS Office has some pretty good versioning support built into it and multiple people can edit a document at the same time, if you know how to set it up. There should a technical person in your wife's company that understands how MS Office and other tools work. They should train the staff on the capabilities and the staff should come up with a process that works for everyone.
With SharePoint you can have MS Office documents versioned, it is basic versioning, not like git where you can have branches and things like that. For other types of documents, it's a matter of defining a process and naming convention on how to keep a track of items.
Why don't all you guys out there try it first. In the meantime time I may just go for the vasectomy.
This, among other things was discussed in the Kernel Report, at the recent Linux Conf in Auckland, New Zealand:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Have a look at this talk, namely 8 min 30 seconds into the talk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The talk was given at the recent Linux Conf Australia (in New Zealand). It shows that AMD supports OpenCL 2.0, while Nvidia only support version 1.1 (released in 2010). I spoke to the speaker after his talk and he said Nvidia are basically dragging their heals with regard to supporting more recent versions. Nvidia also request unconvential features be put into the spec, and then never implement those features. Obvisouly Nvidia are doing well with their own CUDA language and seem to be trying to create a walled garden. It sounds like if you are going for openness and not for speed, then you could look at Intel or AMD (both support version 2.0).
... and they say you shouldn't use Wikipedia as a source.
One step back, two steps forward. This is how I see it. Battery tech will evolve and so will the energy efficiency of the devices. It may be slow with regard to today's pace.
It's like saying the browser is a step back from the standard desktop environment. It is, but it also allows you to do so much more.
All this from someone who does not wear a watch.
I second that. I have LastPass on my mobile, on various WebBrowsers at home and work. Although the free version could be suficient for your child. I paid for the premium version which gives me the mobile option, and it's cheap, at only around $12/year (last time I looked). So for all websites I have different passwords which all have high entropy (think 16 characters, uppercase, lower case, numbers and special characters).
I only need to remember a few passwords which I don't store in LassPass, e.g. bank, email, etc.
I would consider it weird to see MS Windows or even more weird would be OSX in those places.
I use fslint. It does more than just find duplicate images.
I worked in a large financial services company in Switzerland. We were one of the most intense users of a particular risk & control application. We understood each corner of this application and with each new release we analysed each change in detail. This was necessary to weigh-up the value of upgrading or not, or timing the upgrade appropriately. Some seemingly insignificant change could be a show-stopper for our users.
You can optimize your connection using an optimizing proxy hardwired to the Internet. The proxy can reduce some of the latency by doing dns lookups for you and reducing page sizes. It won't make real time apps like VOIP any better. There are also services like this available: http://www.vortexvpn.com/ or Opera browser, etc. I think even Chrome has it available.
Yeah, because Wikipedia has an army of lawyers ready to be deployed. That's why they are always running low on funds.
We all know how StackOverflow works. You can always ask or answer a question, but other privileges are based on your reputation. Reputation is only gained by creating good questions and answers. It takes work to get a good reputation on StackOverflow.
I actually don't know what Wikimedia has in place, but it could implement a similar reputation based approach as StackOverflow. Of course the algorithm and mechanism would be different since Wikipedia is not a Q&A site.
To make things even harder, they could implement a reputation killer. For example: if user A improved the score of user B, then user B gets nuked because they are one of these PR firms, then user A should suffer a major reputation dive.
While I'm at it... Instead of Wikipedia begging for money once a year, they could implement a wikipedia.com site which has some light advertising. By default all users go to wikipedia.org, but for those who want can manually redirect to wikipedia.com. I would be glad to support such a system.
I was one of those 175'000 customers who trialled it. And I have to say the speed was reasonable and you can't complain about free WiFi on the street. We were travelling NZ for 6 months and we used it all over the place. It tended to be the most reliable connection you could find, even better than sitting in a café and using their WiFi.
Animation Research Limited in New Zealand pioneered this way back in 1992 for the America's Cup in San Diego. It was revolutionary, what's in the article above is just evolutionary.
Some pix I could find of the original, seem to be not many around:
http://arl.co.nz/index.php/arl-news/131-what-does-it-take-to-be-world-class
http://arl.co.nz/index.php/arl-company/arl-history
Here is was Animation Research Limited are working to today:
http://virtualeye.tv/index.php/the-sports/virtual-eye-sailing
Try this service and see how it compares to yours:
https://www.vortexvpn.com/
See if you get the same behaviour. You get 1GB of free data, if you email support I can give you more. I could also open port 443 if they seem to be shaping non-Http(s) traffic. I have had it running for a few days. There is a server in Dublin you could use.
I would disagree with your post and most of the "don't work and travel - it's a waste" posts. Because I have found that living in one place for a longer period of time you get to learn about the city you are in, much more than a typical tourist. You will get to appreciate how things operate in a different country, the good, the bad and the ugly.
As long as you understand that you will very likely get robbed, or have your laptop stolen at some point,
I would disagree that it is "very likely" that you will get robbed. I have traveled loads (I am the end of our 9 month travel around the world) with computers, fancy smart phones, etc. I have never been robbed or had anything stolen (except a $25 city map that I left sitting around for a while). I am cautious and take care of my belongings. As long as you take care of your things and be aware of people around you, do not look like a typical tourist and dress down, you should be okay.
I agree with above post. I have done this in Switzerland and New Zealand. Libraries often have a café attached where you can buy drinks and work at the same time. Some libraries have limits on how much data you can use up, typically around 100 MB. Some also charge per session. Check out the libraries before you decide to move to a place for a month. Because you may find the have no wifi or charge huge fees.
Cafés with Internet can be hard to find in Switzerland. Starbucks will only give you 1 hour high bandwidth per day.
China if you want internet you may want to get a service like Boingo. Free internet is difficult to find in China if you have no Chinese phone number, because the government wants to keep tabs on who you are, so to get free Internet you typically get sent a txt/sms.
I have tried working while travelling. I have found that although a hotel advertises that it has wifi, it can be flakey (I have had to ask reception to reboot the router every 30 minutes) or the signal in your room is weak and useless.