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User: ADRA

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  1. Work in the right direction on Getting Started Developing With OpenStreetMap Data · · Score: 4, Informative

    For a project I'm working on, I started to play around with the OpenStreetMap data as a source for locations (from a guy who's never used GIS info systems), so I think I'd be a good insight into getting started with using this great resource.

    Notes:
    - I develop in Java mostly, but I have a generally well rounded skill set.

    Firstly, I had to make the jump to Postgress and PostGIS, which are annoying to setup if you're not familiar with them. I had a MySQL instance running, but for the life of me, I couldn't get osmosis to import before getting the setup just right, which unfortunately wasnt' as simple and stright forward as I'd have liked to see in any docs. So after finally banging PostGIS over the head enough to accept the import, I was hit with a huge knowledge gap on how to actually access spatial and hstore based data. Admittedly, once you get the handle of them, the SQL access the data is quite expressive and powerful.

    For DB imports, I used Osmosis for data import. I couldn't find any stand-alone Java based libaries for actually using the DB data which would help a lot (maybe I'll end up writing an open source one if it doesn't already exist). So, I basically dropped down to writing PostGIS based SQL queries, which is really quite expressive and well structured when the data is good (depends on the world region, mostly good for North America from what I found so far).

    Secondly, there was the OpenStreetMap data itself. As someone who primarily wants to work on geographic barriers and political boundaries, there's a big disconnect between the polygons of the system and the political ones. Generally, there's always a node (think of a pin on a map) to represent a proper place name (New york city for instance) and a polygon that encompass what New York's political boundaries are, but quite often there won't be explicit ties between the two, so you're left with bridging the two yourself constructing queries for where nodes are within city / state / country / etc.. Anyways, thats as far as I've gotten so far, so good luck!

    Some links that helped me:
    http://www.postgresql.org/docs...
    http://postgis.net/docs/manual...
    http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/... (Make sure to read carefully, becase its rather unforgiving and terse about bad environment setups)

  2. Re:Overrated on Snowden Demystified: Can the Government See My Junk? · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The alternative is to what? Take a 'high ground' approach where you're ignored by the populace at large? Rule #1 of effective speaking is to talk to your audience. If you can't be willing to meet people even half way, you'll never convince them to take action.

  3. Bring back... on Google: Less Than One Percent of Android Devices Are Affected By Harmful Apps · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    AppOps, tyvm. Done.

  4. Re:Maybe because the movies were not that good? on Why More 'Star Wars' Actors Don't Become Stars · · Score: 1, Interesting

    The harry potter kids are still making in-roads. The twilight guy made his break from Harry potter ironically. Who knows what's coming for the rest. Shay la bouf or whatever was a tool before transformers and he was a tool afterwards. Although well known before Titanic, Leonardo certainly became a household name from the movie. Kate Winslet is a good actress, but nobody would've known her if it wasn't for the movie. Practically the entire cast of Saving Private Ryan became significantly more marketable after the movie. Go back and watch all the stars who really broke out from it.. amazing.

    If nothing else can be said about it, a AAA movie will get you screen exposure. What you turn that into has a large part on your abilities, the parts you take, and who you know (and a ton of luck).

  5. Use cases on Google Unveils the Chromebit: an HDMI Chromebook Dongle · · Score: 1

    Well I personally have no use cases for something like this, but thinking about the economic low end I see this as a win. There are a lot more HDMI capable TV's than there are PC's, so if they can create a good input device / internet solution, I'd consider this a win. The problem is that inputs will most likely be non-ideal and internet's expensive (unless you're 'sharing' a neighbors connection). I wish em' luck finding new ways of getting computing resources into the hands of everyone though.

  6. Re:Good riddance: Worst Buy and Future Crap on Best Buy Kills Off Future Shop · · Score: 1

    Well at the time (probably up till now), future shop staff were commision. That was one big diff between the two units.

    If you want pushy, try visiting Visions. They make car salesmens and realtors look classy!

  7. Re:I just went to BestBuy... on Best Buy Kills Off Future Shop · · Score: 1

    *shudder* the worst thing you could ever do is buy compters hardware at a retail chain. Their margins are astronomical compared to the small very lean computer resailers that have been doing good business for many years. The only time I look at retail for computers is during boxing day / black friday, and even then its unlikely to convert a sale unless its been very discounted (and at least comparable to other shops prices).

  8. Re:N4N? on Ellen Pao Loses Silicon Valley Gender Bias Case Against Kleiner Perkins · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Because surprisingly enough, most of the people on this site work, and of those workers, many work in technology. Furthermore, many work in America with jobs held by companies that are required to abide by laws. Once an important / relevant law causes a cascade of business changes (think the whole API copyright fight between Oracle and Google), people reading this site will care. A LOT.

    I know you're a troll an all that, but sadly, many don't see how immediate any change like this can have to their own lives. I personally think discrimination bias should absolutely be investigated and addressed on a case by case basis, though considering they found no obvious discrimination then mission accomplished! Just like John Oliver's Infrastructure segment: "Congratulations guys, nothing happened!".

  9. Re:Dangerous Precedent on Quebec Plans To Require Website Blocking, Studies New Internet Access Tax · · Score: 2

    Did you miss how the US does block international internet casinos in direct opposition to their WIPO obligations? Did you miss how some tiny island nations notable for their internet gambling can now consume all US IP for nothing and legally (at least to WIPO treaties)?

    This was years ago now, but the US has long ago jumped down that hole.

  10. Re:Ugh. Let it die. on The X-Files To Return · · Score: 3, Insightful

    BSG was a rewrite of a terrible though nostalgic 70's TV show. X-Files for its time was pretty good. If they can reboot the franchise, why wouldn't the quality of the show improve in this case? Right, it doesn't fit your narrative.

    The fact that TV has gotten better is a testament to modern TV's higher standards, and we can all applaud that. As for if the show's any good, only time will tell. Flaming a production we know essentially nothing about seems a little disingenuous.

  11. Re:From a simpler era on South Korea Begins To Deprecate ActiveX · · Score: 1

    At least since the Java 1.4-ish era of security, depending on the security manager in place, you could retain complete sandbox mode while allowing for specific access to sensitive information (like fs access) on demand. it certainly is laborious having to continually prompt users to let them do things. I would've leaned more toward android like security bundling where you'd have to specifically 'install' the applet, but then it has some level of systems integration with a bundle of security permissions granted all up front (and rare sensitive ones granted on demand like I think IOS does it), but hell hindsight is 20/20. Oracle could still hypothetically do it, but with the boondoggle of JavaFX, who knows if there's anyone with creativity, 'balls', and buy-in left in the company to make it happen.

  12. Re:From a simpler era on South Korea Begins To Deprecate ActiveX · · Score: 1

    Javascript itself is a plugin. Any concept of distinction is flawed. Lets say in the panaea of worlds, Oracle gave Java tech and all its reference impl's away for free BSD styled. What if anything would be the harm of writing browser scripts in Java vs. Javascript vs. go vs. .net-whatever, etc.. if every single browser developer had access to native embeddable runtimes embedded into the tool?

    Java already has a great sandboxing system that was unfortunately broken badly by their native/nsapi plugin layer, but allows for very fine grained control over what a hosted application can do and interact with. If it was free/open and had some developer support, they'd be a good contender for a second browser based language. There are plenty more languages/runtimes just as suitable for the task given time to develop a sensible language/runtime security fence for untrusted sources as well as the arduous task of fixing up all the broken framework security holes that are now left exposed to hackers, which is the main reason that ActiveX died so horribly. This also happens to be another vector for recent Java based exploits.)

  13. Re:Who has the rights to the moon's resources? on Billionaire Teams Up With NASA To Mine the Moon · · Score: 1

    The only outcome will be peaceful and relatively fair compomise or war. So depending on which aspect favors the parties in contention, either of them are likely possibilities.

  14. Re:Israel got a lot of heat for much lesser offens on Quebecker Faces Jail For Not Giving Up Phone Password To Canadian Officials · · Score: 1

    "Should we begin divesting from Canada's corporations"
    You should've been anyways, the Canadian economy is tanking like mad> Correction, if you weren't an idiot, you'd be buying heavy in Canada right now, since the exchange rate and relative weakness in the Canadian economy makes for some sweet low hanging fruit.

  15. Re:Pales to UE4 on Source 2 Will Also Be Free · · Score: 2

    You mean Half-life 2 deathmatch (which nobody played and Valve practically abandoned day 1)? No, we're talking about Half-life the single player experience. If Valve refuses to do a single player release then they should license the IP to a trusted dev do do it for them.

    As for supported valve games, you have:
      - DOTA 2 ~ 1.1m people playing it right now
      - Counter-strike:Global Offensive ~ 300k people playing it right now
      - TF2 ~68k
      - Garry's Mod ~42k
      - Counter-strike:Source ~11k

    So yeah, they have a lot of games that people still play regularly.
    http://store.steampowered.com/...

  16. Re:Heinlein and politics on 'The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress' Coming To the Big Screen · · Score: 1

    "Starship Troopers the movie was lots of fun, but had very little to do with the book."

    Reading the book recently, I can tell you that besides dropping the other aliens and turning the "highly trained soldiers of discression with pocket nukes when things go south" into jarheads, the book is story-wise pretty close to the book.

    The huge distinction of the two was that the book takes itself seriously, and does a very good job at reinforcing the case for why their society took the course of events that they did. The movie took the opposite tact by ridiculing the entire system of governance and parodying the much more militarian nature of the society. Depending on your political stripes, you could lean with either take on the story material, but personally I enjoyed both (though the movie was a little heavy on the zany side).

    Oh side note, Is Warhammer based loosely on troopers? Throughout the read, I kept remembering similarities to the architypes that game played (only video games, never played the tabletop).

  17. Re:I Read All of Heinlein's Stuff on 'The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress' Coming To the Big Screen · · Score: 1

    His writing was certainly libertarian in nature varing from basically none to extreme. That said, his stories were always written well enough that you often don't realize/care about his politics bleeding int the pages.

    His tendencies are more about frontier self-sufficience and the use of one's own (naturally brilliant though often fluke) ability to survive extrodinary situations. The formula generally works because his stories are written to play well against this formula while still being quite enjoyable (for the most part).

    I'm really looking forward to the film, since mistress is one of my favorites from him.

  18. Re:Quality of the solution. on Invented-Here Syndrome · · Score: 2

    An OS? God, you're such a young lazy punk. Get the hell off my lawn!

  19. Re:About time... on Invented-Here Syndrome · · Score: 1

    I know this post is supposed to be considered a critisism, but I'm not seeing it. Its exactly what should be done. Minimize the amount of work necessary to complete your work. I am the laziest programmer on earth, and if I can save an hour by dropping in a well tested cleanly interfaced library that meets my requirements, I'm going to do it.

    "Nobody ever writes anything from bare metal, no complex algorithms, nothing"
    No, people don't re-invent the wheel that already exists because we are too busy doing work that maximizes productivity. If I want to circle jerk about challenging and personally satisfying code, I do that at home because at work I'm paid to build. I don't get paid to pat myself on the back.

  20. Re:About time... on Invented-Here Syndrome · · Score: 1

    Meh, having the same number of code lines (highly dubious) then realizing that you implemented something wrong is just a waste of time for everyone. Why so quickly dismiss the expertese of the people writing (and maintaining) these libraries who in all likelyhood have much higher expertese in that one area of development? Instead, you write an in-house job that takes significantly longer (even if the LOC -may- comparible) then you realize it doesn't work. Your opinions are to bite the bullet and replace using off the shelf, or fight through the crap wasting more time and money.

    All the above paragraph of course depends on what you're writing. If you can write the code in a day or two, I'd say its acceptible to eschew known libs'frameworks. If you're writing a very very tiny chunk of an existing library, you may be better served not dealing with the cognitive load and learning curve to introduce the new library. But, you also have to ask yourself if your currently fragile and developing system will ever have its requirements change and if so, will your implementation meet those future demands (Yes slippery slope and all that). Most of the time, built-frameworks were written by many hands for many different projects and they learned to support areas of expansion which are probably most likely to occur in the average project.

    On the flip side, there are times where libraries and frameworks should be looked at skeptically, and it usually revolves around active engagement. If there isn't much or any active development on a product, its either reached its peak goal (something like log4j perhapse is a good example) vs. some dude's web templating engine that may have been brilliant when it was written 5 years ago, but has long been abandoned. It may end up being the perfect fit for your project and team, but it means having to learn and support that potentially unknown blob of functionality. That's when a library/framework can become a boat anchor, especially when it becomes a core function of your system.

    From personal experience, I started a junior dev job on a several million line project where we were so highly coupled to a vendor's library that when vendor decided to stop supporting it, we were left dealing with the countless defects that came from it every time we needed to use it differently (sadly more often than anyone wanted). Lots of drama, blah blah, but by the time I left the company, little was done to fix it, which isn't surprising since they allowed the library in to begin with.

  21. Re:Bugs in Win 7 UI on Users Decry New Icon Look In Windows 10 · · Score: 1

    To be fair for OP, I've seen this behaviour as well form my Windows 7 machine. I know difinitively that I've seen it from in explorer file search results, but pretty sure I've seen it from basic tree navigation as well.

  22. Re:The temptation to jump ship on The Case Against E-readers -- Why Digital Natives Prefer Reading On Paper · · Score: 1

    Yup, PDF's are bad on e-readers, but at least you can transcode them to native using something like calibre. Its not perfect obviously, but a whole lot better than suffering throught the squinting problem.

  23. Take your space on How Walking With Smartphones May Have Changed Pedestrian Etiquette · · Score: 4, Informative

    Too many people period are idiots about not negotiating equitable space that I just bowl them down. I'm taller and large bigger than most, so if I think they're being oblivious or careless, down they go! Being a dick about sharing a laneway is a dick move and the only ONLY way to punish it is to not yield.

    If you wanted to be an uber dick, you'd pick up their phone and throw it away, but that's too much for me =) Oh, that goes double for movie theatre texters! Die in a pit of hell assholes!

  24. It was dumb at first glace on L.A. School Superintendent Folds on Laptops-For-Kids Program · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Its still dumb now. Just have good public access to computers for educational purposes (for all) and maybe a few set aside for people with specifically high enough permissions for programming and such. 95% or higher computer work in school is research, and everyone should absolutely have access to use it. Do kids need them at home? Nope, but it'd help. If a family is willing to get a cheap computer / tablet / etc. for their kid, that's their imperitive. But for those unable/unwilling to pay for a computer, they should still have access to materials. But assuming unlimited portability is more of a pipe dream unless you're footing the bill. My libraries have had computers for going on 2 decades now, and they've worked great for what they do, supply people with access to information.

  25. Re:Let's see if HTTP/2 is adopted faster than IPv6 on HTTP/2 Finalized · · Score: 1

    IPv6 needs 100% buy-in from all participants or else you need to run/pay for bridging services who converts between the two. HTTP/2 is backward compatible meaning any participants will transparently fall back on HTTP 1/1.1 if it's not supported. Plus, there are far fewer vendors of HTTP servers / clients than there are for IPv4 based software and hardware products.