Rule number 1: You will lose the first few copies of some important paper, like your senior thesis. Get into the habit of making multiple backups early so that it's an ingrained habit when you get down to the crucial semesters. Five backups on separate CD-ROMs or various other devices is not too many. Yes, I am hypercautious, why do you ask? (My friend Ruth lost 3 copies of hers. Damned floppies!)
Think about how long it would take to rewrite the paper.
Rule number 2: Learn to plan your time now. This applies double if you found high school easy. Your study habits probably aren't up to snuff, and many colleges fail to get this point across. It's not an unreasonable idea to take classes in study methods.
Programming classes tend to expand to take up about 4 times what they took at the begining of the semester. You must be prepared for this.
Rule number 3: Explore more than just the class listings.
Of course, College is all about exploration. Don't limit yourself to interesting classes and recreational pharmaceuticals. Find out all the resources students have on campus. You might discover not only clubs, gyms and recreational things, but study and tutoring services, counseling for the tough times, cheap legal services (which we hope you won't need, of course) and facilities like darkrooms and sound studios.
Oh, and Rule 4: The amount of beer required to make you feel like you are a hip sexy guy is exactly equal to the amount required to make the person you are interested in think you are a drunken idiot.
You're in college. Learn how to be hip and sexy without alcohol. Here's the first clue: acquire self confidence. Learning a martial art is useful for this.
Actually, now that I look at the bottom of the mouse in the picture more closely, I see its listed as a class 1 laser product, which is considered not harmful to the eye.
Anyway, it's still really just about being able to use it on a large variety of surfaces.
You might not b able to use of a computer monitor, but a highly polished desk or a crappy mirror.
If you read the 3dPGU posting, right under the diagram showing the comparison to the old style optical mouse, it says "Already you might be surprised to know that this mouse has had no issues with any surface I have tried it on, including a mirror. It states that you shouldn't use it with reflective surfaces but I wanted to see what this thing could do."
In fact, I would bet they said not to use it on mirrors and surfaces like that more because of the safety issue of bouncing the laser off the mirror. There should be plenty of surface imperfections in a typical mirror for the thing to read.
Well, you could certainly spend a lot of money on servers. On the other hand: a few figures for you:
CA basic TDM recording system useful for professional recording: $25,000.
A high end recording console: $600,000 -$1,000,000.
High end compressor: $2500.
Number needed in a typical recording: 4-20, depending on the music.
High end reverb unit: $50,000
Building a high end recording studio, not including equipment: Twice the cost of just the building. (Recording studio have double walls, floors and ceilings, with special sound dampaneing spacers, sound baffling ducting for the HVAC, and astonishing amounts of wiring. Plus nothing can be prefabbed that is larger than a sheet of drywall.)
Renting the studio, hiring musicians, paying a good producer, for ten songs aimed at the pop market: $250,000.
A Stradivarius violin: $5-10 million.
And all that before you can even attempt to turn a profit on any of it.
If you think about it, what Gosling is saying is "okay, after 20 years of technical innovation, we can toss out everything but the four wheel and the round steering wheel, and let the user decide how it should be from there. Huge engine, or tiny. 2 seats, 4, 8? A giant cargo box, or a sleek aero dynamic wing shape. 3D interior window with 2D title bar, or a 3D title bar, or even 4D.
Right now what we have is a beast where you have to fit your ideas onto the seats and box they give you. The widget libraries have done a great job getting around that limitation, but they'd be better off without it.
Well, this is getting off topic, but this is one thing that irritates me. Klipper is clearly a daemon. I might have guessed that if it had been named klipperd. Even better if I could find a man page on it.
Of course, I don't know what it's like now, my system is pretty old. But it strikes me that people have gone to a great deal of trouble to make this software, and then didn't quite finish the job.
I'd like to think that a simple to maintain system might free up peoples heads to do the whole job. But I'm leading quickly to one of my rants about the FOSS world, so maybe I'll just stop now.
Perhaps I'll sum it up:
It's unreasonable to expect users to search as many as five different places to find the documentation for an executable installed on their own system.
To be honest, I don't know. I'd never heard of it. I just started it up, and it's running, but there's no interface showing, so I suspect the answer is "no".
I think skipping off the atmosphere might be considered dangerous. And think about how much fuel you'd spend controlling the thing, instead of the control surfaces usable in the atmosphere.
There's also the time spent landing. You might have to take tenfold the amount of time to reduce the heat load to wear convential aircraft metal could take it. (Average orbit speed for the shuttle is about 17000 mph. Landing speed is 215 mph.)
Is it possible to build a craft that can use wing lift all the way up to LEO?
To a useful LEO, no. I think that would require that there be atmosphere all the way up to said LEO.
LEO is considered to be any orbit below about 1500 kilometers. 100 kilometers is the agreed upon border between atmosphere and space.
is that the Space Shuttle literally "falls" out of orbit in a very steep dive
My understanding is that it does this because a shallower descent would cuase the shuttle to skip off the atmosphere like a stone off a pond.
In any case, you have to ablate that energy somehow. What you are getting rid of is the potential stored in the ship by boosting it into orbit. You must either use the atmosphere to slow you down, or rocket fuel. Reusable tiles are cheaper than fuel for this, and probably safer.
This like saying that once cars could go faster than it was safe to, no more innovation was needed.
What would happen if such a windowing system appeared would be this: the GTK+ folks, the QT folks, and some Xlib folks would port their libraries to the new system, add in a few missing things, and we'd have the same thing we have now, but faster, and easier to maintain.
It would also move importants bits out of the server, like the paste buffers and so on, into plain user space, where they could more easily be standardized. Free of the legacy swamp of X, clean designs could spring forth, and innovation could happen.
For instance, I'd love for there to be an easy to use clipboard stack, that could hold as many clips as there was diskspace, and an interface to help maintain it. Click the clip you want, second button it into place. This would make things like document editing easier, and make using the clipboard less of an annoyance.
Good typing means wrists raised in order to get the most strength and endurance, needed with the old manual typewriters. This also means better blood flow, which prevents RSI, at least to some degree.
It also means less time waiting for your hands to catch up with your mind, and so gets out of the way of the creative process.
They, however, have chosen to not allow any previously government funded software.
No, they exclude only government funded software not commercially available. And most government contractors, especially the smaller ones, will happily license their software to you.
Actually, I can think of one (very, very, very dumb) reason why they might need their IP's: some coder put code in a product that makes the product work differently under their IP address range. Then they lost the source code and only have binaries left, which must keep working.
This was precisely the case for a piece of code a former employer of mine had. In that case, however, the developers were smart enough to say "Yeah, we'll just isolate those machines, put 'em on their own network."
in a real book, you don't flip the pages all that often
Unless, of course, you are searching back a bunch of pages quickly, like people do all the time while reading novels with tricky plots.
The ability to flip quickly through a book is a powerful search mechanism. I remember the shape of important pages, how the text was arranged. I'd bet that people do this in other ways as well, such as remembering the first line of a page, or words along the outside edge.
A very real fact about humans and most other animals: image matters. All the desire for fairness doesn't matter.
Bad social skills produces cognitive dissonance in regular folks, just like bad facts produces it in geek kind. This is important because geeks need to communicate some important ideas to society at large, but so long as society is concentrating on your too tight raggy T-shirt, or the unkempt hair, they don't hear your message.
It's not just that you aren't like them. No one talking to Richard Feynman would have thought he was "just a regular guy". But he communicated very well, so people listened. And a big part of that communication is presentation.
Elitest talk, snide remarks, ignorance of audience reaction (eyes glazing, nervous glances away, etc.), unkempt appearance, all these things tell the people you are talking to that you dislike them.
They'll dislike you right back, and worse, they won't give you money.
The ubergeek who is designing NOC's and getting multimillion dollar budgets to do it is someone who can talk to the suits, who can even wear one and look comfortable. Someone who can make them smile.
Social skills are the API to humans. Ignore them at your peril.
Volunteers, yes. And should they ever want jobs, would this work be a good resume piece? Or would the prospective employer criticize it to pieces while pointing out how MicroStupid got this right years ago, right after Macintosh did?
Come on, folks, the volunteers are failing to get already solved problems right. Why should anyone expect them to get the hard stuff?
Re:milaf, if you could expand a bit...
on
Effective XML
·
· Score: 1
You can represent arbitrarily complex data quite well with C syntax. It'd be quite easy to parse, and lots of people know it already.
You are missing the point. It's a display, it can already do those things. The important part is that it is particularly useful for the purpose of augmenting your memory without having the augmentation be a big part of the interaction, such as having to look up notes on a PDA or ask a person in the room what something is, and having to explain that you have amnesia.
It allows the wearer to appear to be be more normal, in much the same way hearing aids do.
Given that it's a research project, why don't you cut them a break? Yes, they want the computer to be entirely contained within a false tooth, and earring and an eyelash, and be powered by body heat. Until then, it's a vest so it's not a giant lump hanging off a belt.
But instead of reacting to someone's post about the thing, and making yourself look like an uninformed nincompoop, go read the site, where you can find out things like this, and understand just why they made the design choices they did.
For instance, when they started the design of the Mithril, the Sharp Zaurus didn't exist, and no other PDA has anywhere near the power they needed.
To view the MIThril as a general computing device is to miss the point. It can be one (it's actually two:-) but it's function is to be an always available PDA. The project is trying to make it into a tool that actively assists you in a variety of ways. One way is to provide a map of the area you are in, with a "you are here" pointer that updates as you walk. The uses for this in professional work are immeasurable. Soldiers, fire fighters, warehouse workers, couriers, police, and many other would find this useful.
Another function they're researching is for the wearable to be aware of your context, and give you hints that you might want. For instance, the wearable might search your database of people you have met, and remind you who you are talking to at a conference.
In short, equating the MIThril with the box on your desktop is the wrong view. Look at it as a super PDA, and you are heading in the right direction.
1. AJFA is actually pretty well belanced, though I'll agree the kick sucked. If you boost low end it comes out. I guess they decided they wanted a click drum rather than a kick drum.
2. I'm not buying an album so I can hear how it would have sounded if I were crammed to one side. Equally, the band won't be standing on one side of the stage. Also, a live situation will have reverb, because it's in a real room. This helps balancing quite a bit.
3. ditto.
4. Steve ever produce a mainstream band? I've only ever heard Big Black, which had not great production. On the other hand, they had killer songs, like "Precious Thing" and "Kerosene". Amazing writing can make up for a lot. Of course, they were still never on the big charts.
I listened to the Answers vorbis. You are a good band. However:
1. The Bass is buried. I could only hear it during the guitar solo. Even then it had no presence, which is sad because the bassist seems like he or she is decently skilled. More bass in the bass!
2. The drums were balanced incorrectly. The sounded like they were off to the left some. It left me feeling like I was looking at stage left the whole time. The kick, which should probably be in the center, isn't.
3. The guitar was also off to the left.
4. It sounds utterly dry, no reverb at all. A little reverb makes all the difference in making a song sound big.
This is why the big studios get the big bucks. Their engineers won't make these mistakes. A good producer wouldn't accept it either. By professional standards, this is a good demo, nothing more.
It is a good demo, though. I wish you luck in your career.
More importantly, the cookie is stored on the user's computer, not Google's. Google might be forced to collect the info, but it's a losing proposition. Anyone with a modicum of paranoia refuses the cookie, or tosses it now and again.
Slashdot Mirror
Rule number 1: You will lose the first few copies of some important paper, like your senior thesis. Get into the habit of making multiple backups early so that it's an ingrained habit when you get down to the crucial semesters. Five backups on separate CD-ROMs or various other devices is not too many. Yes, I am hypercautious, why do you ask? (My friend Ruth lost 3 copies of hers. Damned floppies!)
Think about how long it would take to rewrite the paper.
Rule number 2: Learn to plan your time now. This applies double if you found high school easy. Your study habits probably aren't up to snuff, and many colleges fail to get this point across. It's not an unreasonable idea to take classes in study methods.
Programming classes tend to expand to take up about 4 times what they took at the begining of the semester. You must be prepared for this.
Rule number 3: Explore more than just the class listings.
Of course, College is all about exploration. Don't limit yourself to interesting classes and recreational pharmaceuticals. Find out all the resources students have on campus. You might discover not only clubs, gyms and recreational things, but study and tutoring services, counseling for the tough times, cheap legal services (which we hope you won't need, of course) and facilities like darkrooms and sound studios.
Oh, and Rule 4: The amount of beer required to make you feel like you are a hip sexy guy is exactly equal to the amount required to make the person you are interested in think you are a drunken idiot.
You're in college. Learn how to be hip and sexy without alcohol. Here's the first clue: acquire self confidence. Learning a martial art is useful for this.
Have all the fun you can.
Actually, now that I look at the bottom of the mouse in the picture more closely, I see its listed as a class 1 laser product, which is considered not harmful to the eye.
Anyway, it's still really just about being able to use it on a large variety of surfaces.
You might not b able to use of a computer monitor, but a highly polished desk or a crappy mirror.
But, sure, it's mostly marketing hype.
If you read the 3dPGU posting, right under the diagram showing the comparison to the old style optical mouse, it says "Already you might be surprised to know that this mouse has had no issues with any surface I have tried it on, including a mirror. It states that you shouldn't use it with reflective surfaces but I wanted to see what this thing could do."
In fact, I would bet they said not to use it on mirrors and surfaces like that more because of the safety issue of bouncing the laser off the mirror. There should be plenty of surface imperfections in a typical mirror for the thing to read.
Well, you could certainly spend a lot of money on servers. On the other hand: a few figures for you:
CA basic TDM recording system useful for professional recording: $25,000.
A high end recording console: $600,000 -$1,000,000.
High end compressor: $2500.
Number needed in a typical recording: 4-20, depending on the music.
High end reverb unit: $50,000
Building a high end recording studio, not including equipment: Twice the cost of just the building.
(Recording studio have double walls, floors and ceilings, with special sound dampaneing spacers, sound baffling ducting for the HVAC, and astonishing amounts of wiring. Plus nothing can be prefabbed that is larger than a sheet of drywall.)
Renting the studio, hiring musicians, paying a good producer, for ten songs aimed at the pop market: $250,000.
A Stradivarius violin: $5-10 million.
And all that before you can even attempt to turn a profit on any of it.
But I want it ALL!
I think people have visions of the R&D staff sweating over each multiple of precision.
"Boss, we got it up to 13 times."
"Not good enough! We need twenty if we're going to compete!"
No. They switched from a non-collimated light source, an LED, to a collimated source, a laser. DING! 20x more accurate.
The real point is that it can track on surfaces that it couldn't before.
The write up mentions mirrors for a reason.
If you think about it, what Gosling is saying is "okay, after 20 years of technical innovation, we can toss out everything but the four wheel and the round steering wheel, and let the user decide how it should be from there. Huge engine, or tiny. 2 seats, 4, 8? A giant cargo box, or a sleek aero dynamic wing shape. 3D interior window with 2D title bar, or a 3D title bar, or even 4D.
Right now what we have is a beast where you have to fit your ideas onto the seats and box they give you. The widget libraries have done a great job getting around that limitation, but they'd be better off without it.
Well, this is getting off topic, but this is one thing that irritates me. Klipper is clearly a daemon. I might have guessed that if it had been named klipperd. Even better if I could find a man page on it.
Of course, I don't know what it's like now, my system is pretty old. But it strikes me that people have gone to a great deal of trouble to make this software, and then didn't quite finish the job.
I'd like to think that a simple to maintain system might free up peoples heads to do the whole job. But I'm leading quickly to one of my rants about the FOSS world, so maybe I'll just stop now.
Perhaps I'll sum it up:
It's unreasonable to expect users to search as many as five different places to find the documentation for an executable installed on their own system.
To be honest, I don't know. I'd never heard of it. I just started it up, and it's running, but there's no interface showing, so I suspect the answer is "no".
I think skipping off the atmosphere might be considered dangerous. And think about how much fuel you'd spend controlling the thing, instead of the control surfaces usable in the atmosphere.
There's also the time spent landing. You might have to take tenfold the amount of time to reduce the heat load to wear convential aircraft metal could take it. (Average orbit speed for the shuttle is about 17000 mph. Landing speed is 215 mph.)
Is it possible to build a craft that can use wing lift all the way up to LEO?
To a useful LEO, no. I think that would require that there be atmosphere all the way up to said LEO.
LEO is considered to be any orbit below about 1500 kilometers. 100 kilometers is the agreed upon border between atmosphere and space.
is that the Space Shuttle literally "falls" out of orbit in a very steep dive
My understanding is that it does this because a shallower descent would cuase the shuttle to skip off the atmosphere like a stone off a pond.
In any case, you have to ablate that energy somehow. What you are getting rid of is the potential stored in the ship by boosting it into orbit. You must either use the atmosphere to slow you down, or rocket fuel. Reusable tiles are cheaper than fuel for this, and probably safer.
This like saying that once cars could go faster than it was safe to, no more innovation was needed.
What would happen if such a windowing system appeared would be this: the GTK+ folks, the QT folks, and some Xlib folks would port their libraries to the new system, add in a few missing things, and we'd have the same thing we have now, but faster, and easier to maintain.
It would also move importants bits out of the server, like the paste buffers and so on, into plain user space, where they could more easily be standardized. Free of the legacy swamp of X, clean designs could spring forth, and innovation could happen.
For instance, I'd love for there to be an easy to use clipboard stack, that could hold as many clips as there was diskspace, and an interface to help maintain it. Click the clip you want, second button it into place. This would make things like document editing easier, and make using the clipboard less of an annoyance.
Good typing means wrists raised in order to get the most strength and endurance, needed with the old manual typewriters. This also means better blood flow, which prevents RSI, at least to some degree.
It also means less time waiting for your hands to catch up with your mind, and so gets out of the way of the creative process.
No, they exclude only government funded software not commercially available. And most government contractors, especially the smaller ones, will happily license their software to you.
Actually, I can think of one (very, very, very dumb) reason why they might need their IP's: some coder put code in a product that makes the product work differently under their IP address range. Then they lost the source code and only have binaries left, which must keep working.
This was precisely the case for a piece of code a former employer of mine had. In that case, however, the developers were smart enough to say "Yeah, we'll just isolate those machines, put 'em on their own network."
in a real book, you don't flip the pages all that often
Unless, of course, you are searching back a bunch of pages quickly, like people do all the time while reading novels with tricky plots.
The ability to flip quickly through a book is a powerful search mechanism. I remember the shape of important pages, how the text was arranged. I'd bet that people do this in other ways as well, such as remembering the first line of a page, or words along the outside edge.
A very impressive tool is Network Intercept from Sandstorm. http://www.sandstorm.com.
It makes most tools look like looking at a raw byte stream.
A very real fact about humans and most other animals: image matters. All the desire for fairness doesn't matter.
Bad social skills produces cognitive dissonance in regular folks, just like bad facts produces it in geek kind. This is important because geeks need to communicate some important ideas to society at large, but so long as society is concentrating on your too tight raggy T-shirt, or the unkempt hair, they don't hear your message.
It's not just that you aren't like them. No one talking to Richard Feynman would have thought he was "just a regular guy". But he communicated very well, so people listened. And a big part of that communication is presentation.
Elitest talk, snide remarks, ignorance of audience reaction (eyes glazing, nervous glances away, etc.), unkempt appearance, all these things tell the people you are talking to that you dislike them.
They'll dislike you right back, and worse, they won't give you money.
The ubergeek who is designing NOC's and getting multimillion dollar budgets to do it is someone who can talk to the suits, who can even wear one and look comfortable. Someone who can make them smile.
Social skills are the API to humans. Ignore them at your peril.
Volunteers, yes. And should they ever want jobs, would this work be a good resume piece? Or would the prospective employer criticize it to pieces while pointing out how MicroStupid got this right years ago, right after Macintosh did?
Come on, folks, the volunteers are failing to get already solved problems right. Why should anyone expect them to get the hard stuff?
You can represent arbitrarily complex data quite well with C syntax. It'd be quite easy to parse, and lots of people know it already.
You are missing the point. It's a display, it can already do those things. The important part is that it is particularly useful for the purpose of augmenting your memory without having the augmentation be a big part of the interaction, such as having to look up notes on a PDA or ask a person in the room what something is, and having to explain that you have amnesia.
It allows the wearer to appear to be be more normal, in much the same way hearing aids do.
Given that it's a research project, why don't you cut them a break? Yes, they want the computer to be entirely contained within a false tooth, and earring and an eyelash, and be powered by body heat. Until then, it's a vest so it's not a giant lump hanging off a belt.
But instead of reacting to someone's post about the thing, and making yourself look like an uninformed nincompoop, go read the site, where you can find out things like this, and understand just why they made the design choices they did.
For instance, when they started the design of the Mithril, the Sharp Zaurus didn't exist, and no other PDA has anywhere near the power they needed.
To view the MIThril as a general computing device is to miss the point. It can be one (it's actually two :-) but it's function is to be an always available PDA. The project is trying to make it into a tool that actively assists you in a variety of ways. One way is to provide a map of the area you are in, with a "you are here" pointer that updates as you walk. The uses for this in professional work are immeasurable. Soldiers, fire fighters, warehouse workers, couriers, police, and many other would find this useful.
Another function they're researching is for the wearable to be aware of your context, and give you hints that you might want. For instance, the wearable might search your database of people you have met, and remind you who you are talking to at a conference.
In short, equating the MIThril with the box on your desktop is the wrong view. Look at it as a super PDA, and you are heading in the right direction.
1. AJFA is actually pretty well belanced, though I'll agree the kick sucked. If you boost low end it comes out. I guess they decided they wanted a click drum rather than a kick drum.
2. I'm not buying an album so I can hear how it would have sounded if I were crammed to one side. Equally, the band won't be standing on one side of the stage. Also, a live situation will have reverb, because it's in a real room. This helps balancing quite a bit.
3. ditto.
4. Steve ever produce a mainstream band? I've only ever heard Big Black, which had not great production. On the other hand, they had killer songs, like "Precious Thing" and "Kerosene". Amazing writing can make up for a lot. Of course, they were still never on the big charts.
I listened to the Answers vorbis. You are a good band. However:
1. The Bass is buried. I could only hear it during the guitar solo. Even then it had no presence, which is sad because the bassist seems like he or she is decently skilled. More bass in the bass!
2. The drums were balanced incorrectly. The sounded like they were off to the left some. It left me feeling like I was looking at stage left the whole time. The kick, which should probably be in the center, isn't.
3. The guitar was also off to the left.
4. It sounds utterly dry, no reverb at all. A little reverb makes all the difference in making a song sound big.
This is why the big studios get the big bucks. Their engineers won't make these mistakes. A good producer wouldn't accept it either. By professional standards, this is a good demo, nothing more.
It is a good demo, though. I wish you luck in your career.
More importantly, the cookie is stored on the user's computer, not Google's. Google might be forced to collect the info, but it's a losing proposition. Anyone with a modicum of paranoia refuses the cookie, or tosses it now and again.