This has come up before - in Martin Fowler's book, "Refactoring", he makes the controversial claim that sometimes comments are indicative of a need to change the code.
Consider the different types of comment: - boilerplate comment at the top of a file: helps noone but lawyers. - change history comment: better use your source control tool to maintain this. - comment before a class: does this mean the class is badly named, or too complex? - comment before a method: ditto. - comment inside a method: could be a smaller method screaming to get out. Also heavily commented code is quite commonly just explaining away stupid code tricks.
Nobody's suggesting that all comments are bad, just that a lot of the time adding comments is a poor substitute for fixing whats wrong with the code. Of course sometimes its the language thats the problem:)
Anyone else read the complaint? It has the patents attached. The interesting thing is the statement of origin of these patents. There is a paragraph reading "This is a continuation in part of the failed application XXXXXX in 1992, which was a continuation in part of application YYYYY in 1988, now US Patent No ZZZZ, which was a continuation in part...." And so on, back to the early 1980s, with some patents being granted on the way.
IANAL, but doesnt this make PanIP's case somewhat stronger (in yet another disgusting way)? It appears to be a submarine patent like the US filing of the BT one - it keeps getting changed for years and years until it becomes financially interesting to get it approved, the filing is so long ago that noone has a hope of prior art (even though the original filing was for something completely different)
The Open University in the UK had a series of short programmes called "Hollywood Science", which checks out the scientific credibility of scenes from films, presented by Robert Llewelyn (of "Scrapheap Challenge" aka "Junkyard Wars" fame).
They have a website here with information from the shows.
The simulation of Paul Newmans stomach in "Cool Hand Luke" was particularly gruesome...
You could send your design as a cad file to Toybuilders and they'll 3d print you one.
However as you've already made your model you'll want it scanned. There are companies that will do this for you too - though they dont quote prices like Toybuilders do, so I guess it'll be expensive.
I noticed from Neco's page that a Rapid Prototyping and Manufacturing exhibition is taking place in Cincinatti on Tuesday (29th April) until May 2. If you get the list of exhibitors I am sure someone will be able to help.
RDF - the XML format for metadata - essentially describes relationships between resources and is a superset of the problem area you describe. I had a cursory look to see if people had taken the obvious step of using diagram tools to edit rdf and yes they have:
You might also be interested in They Rule which draws some interesting social networks!
While this is all standard 2d editing (I think the 3d editing thing is nonsense btw, unless you actually have a 3d coordinate system then you are actually describing a 2d network diagram) there are other visualisation options which may be interesting. Mindmapping tools allow you to navigate the network of concepts may be interesting as are star trees. Both provide a focussed view on a small part of a much larger network with some context information to help you choose how to navigate. They are more useful for display than authoring.
I followed some of the links to k12ltsp and was wondering how schools afforded the servers required... then I found this
With second hand kit they are mostly running PCs as diskless X-terminals; but this needs hefty CPU & memory from the server (see here for SunRay server requirements, for comparison). Often the clients are capable of something more, but you will have a range from crap to very very crap PCs, so how do you balance the load correctly, instead of just having 2 client configs, thick and thin?
Their solution: turn your terminals + server cluster into an OpenMosix cluster, so you claw back every last drop of CPU power on your network. NICE!!
Obviously this moves more load onto the network, and I'd like to see how that scaled - but this is a really cool solution to building a network from second hand kit.
I watched all of that series (there is a book of the series too, called Underworld IIRC). Graham Hancock has been banging on about pre-ice age global civilisation for some time and had previously made one of a pair of programs presenting the case for this on land (looking at Angkor Wat, the Pyramids, and Easter Island as having been built by the remnants of an older global civilisation). The interesting thing with those programs - and with the current set - was that space was given over to the conventional viewpoint to explain these things away.
The earlier assertions looked pretty tenuous. The new programs covered underwater structures off the coast of India (supposedly remnants of the Indus civilisation, and the origin of the flood stories in the Bhagavad Gita); between India and Sri Lanka; off the southern tip of Japan; and some others.
The case for most of these was pretty much debunked by a geologist he dived with, who said they arent cities at all but natural rock formations. The Indus city had by far the strongest case, as trawling had pulled up artifacts that did appear to be man made (such as a long cylindrical stone with a hole drilled through its centre, presumed to be a bead).
On the whole I wasnt convinced, but you have to give some time to Graham as he at least attempts to find real solid evidence for his claims, and allows contrary opinions into his work.
Fortress model considered harmful.
on
Software Fortresses
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Reading the article I was struck that I'd seen Bruce Schneier denigrating the 'passive defence' fortress security model in the past, and a quick search found the article - What Military History can Teach Network Security.
I'm not going to completely denigrate Roger Sessions here. At some point in a system components have to trust each other. However that point is not actually the firewall, which was Schneiers point - you need application level security. And Roger explicitly mentions firewalls as a fortress implementation technology (yes they may well be the walls but I wouldnt want them implementing the door as well).
A second problem with his model is the fact that he lets anyone at all through the door, after the guard ok's them. This is the kind of thing that led to problems in the early days of the web. Perl's taint model is better, and in Roger's world represents every messenger from the outside being followed round the fortress by a guard, or better still, sending someone out on a horse to parley instead of letting the messenger in in the first place.
To sum up, anyone implementing the security model as described in that article would actually be repeating an old set of mistakes (which curiously went by the same name, and Roger hasn't noticed). It does not describe an 'improved' level of security, rather it describes pretty much what is on the ground in most places. That may well have been his intent, though, time will tell.
The tiff spec originally used striped chunks of image, ie exactly what you might expect to be dumped directly from the buffer of a fax or scanner. (later they added square tiles, which made it easier to embed jpeg encoded images in tiff). While it is technically possible to encode the whole tiff in a single strip (of compressed image data), thus screwing any attempt at random access, the standard says you shouldnt do this and aims for small strips - in terms of memory.
This has nothing to do with how large the strips are in pixels though. If you viewer wanted to load a 100 pixel square region and the page width is 1M pixels, you will actually be forced to load at least 100x1M pixels into memory.
Bottom line is that in general tiff is a poor format for very large images. And while other image formats are different, they, too, are often not designed for random access to areas of a much larger image. If you really have large images then you should consider storing them in a different format, or even creating a client-server viewer so you don't have to install a gig of ram on the desktop of everyone who wants to look at the image. Depends on your app though. For photoshopping, just add more ram, for a db of x-ray images you would probably want to store images in a format designed for random access to small areas by remote client machines, and various thumnail levels for image navigation.
BTW I deal with A1 scans and I'm pretty sure the (proprietary and fairly crap) image viewer we use takes the client-server approach. I dont speak as an expert in this area but I have written software to convert TIFFs to other formats in the past.
EROS claims to checkpoint the memory of the system - its running state - rather than have programs explicitly serialize state to save and so on. By doing this they can make a machine shut down and reboot in a matter of seconds into a consistent state with your programs apparently still running. This is different from hibernation - you can take the machine down at any time by pulling the plug and this will work.
Its a different axis of filesystem from the 'store more metadata' stuff in this thread, but IMHO its a more interesting way to go. EROS's storage is transactional - to the extent that what is on disk always presents a consistent picture of what was in memory; user-level transactions are dealt with in programs. Its unclear from the register article whether the Be filesystem had this level of integrity.
Funny seeing people demanding fortresses of solitude. Actually, there have been studies of better working environments and isolation tanks didn't rate.
Peopleware (by DeMarco and Lister -http://www1.fatbrain.com/asp/bookinfo/bookinfo.as p?theisbn=0932633439&vm= ) describes an IBM effort in this direction which ended up with people working in shared team areas (not fully open plan, not tiny shared cubes either) with backs to the centre so that each others screens could be seen.
More topically, Extreme Programming actually has quite a lot to say on office layout. You can see one example here: http://www.xprogramming.com/xpmag/c3space.htm
I have to agree to some extent with the naysayers though. Interruptions to flow can be a disaster in shared spaces if there is no check on interactions. If you can get people to shut up for a few hours a day though sharing an office space is fairly productive.
I dont believe it! Was it only me who found the score of LOTR overbearing, with inappropriate emphasis? I thought it was the worst thing about the movie and other people I spoke to agreed...
You want a good score? How bout last year's Couching Tiger, or this year, Mulholland Drive? Badalamente's music was the main source of tension in the whole first half of the film. These were noticably incredible scores. The LOTR score was yet another swooping orchestra.
I corresponded for a while with Robert Lang in the mid-90s about this. I provided him with a handwaving proof of one of his conjectures (referred to obliquely in the 'Art of Origami' paragraph). This is only of historical interest now, but its still out there on the net: http://origami.kvi.nl/articles/circles.ps ( incidentally all the origamis produced by the method in this paper do actually fold flat, and look like little mountain ranges with a long open pocket at their base)
As it turns out, a more concrete, and practical proof had been published in Japanese (tiling the plane with both triangles and quadrilaterals, not just triangles as in my paper). Some mathematicians in the states were sufficiently intrigued by my description of this on sci.math to have a closer look into paper folding, and came up with a proof that deciding if a given pattern of folds is flat-foldable is actually NP-complete.
All kudos to Robert. He has really put a lot of hard science into his origami programs and he is a truly impressive folder. I would recommend his book 'Origami Sea Animals' to anyone who wants their jaw to drop.
Also in Glasgow. I don't get it. They sell them at train stations - never seen them anywhere else - meaning they expect you to buy a self heating tin of tasteless instant gack, instead of walking into one of the many coffee shops in every station and buying a fresh, tasty, coffee for a similar price?
Metric as a measure of programmer productivity are crap, agreed. Metrics are not intriniscally bad however. One good use for metrics is to use them to identify 'hot spots' of potential trouble when doing QA reviews of code... saves you some time reading all of the code so that you can concentrate on the places which may well be badly wrong.
Have you read Martin Fowler's Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code?
Theres a view that comments are actually a sign of *bad* coding, because: * a comment before a method may indicate that the method is poorly named, not well focussed, or has too many arguments & options * a comment within a method may indicate that a method is overly long and there is a smaller method crying to be factored out. * comments are often used to help describe overly complex tricks in software. The solution is not to comment but to simplify the code. * sometimes comments are just there because QA tools insist on them (when the method name told you everything that would be in the comment) * boilerplate comments with change logs really should be managed by your SCM tool (I have to agree with one of the other replies here!)
Like every rule it doesnt apply in every case. However it is worth thinking about. It isnt an excuse to go strip out all your comments - all I'm saying is that the _need_ for a comment is often an indication that the _code_is_bad_. Martin's book has some good examples demonstrating refactoring code to remove comments.
REST is a great ideal, but still has limited applicability on the web. If you've read Roy Fielding's original REST thesis ( http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm ) you'll see that one thing which is ruled out by REST as misfeatures of HTTP is cookies (of any kind). Quote: 'The same functionality should have been accomplished via anonymous authentication and true client-side state'. (BTW in a different section he effectively rules out url-rewriting schemes too).
Ok. So _right_now_, how would you support a session? you can have javascript in a frameset and conduct the session in a child frame, or use some client-side technology (applet, flash, activex) to achieve the goal...since none of the browsers actually support this philosophy! So if you go down this line you'd be at the mercy of the balkanization of the browsers. Roy's architecture is bang on the money but unsupportable at present.
Another thing to note is the security side of things. The REST philosophy is based partly on the notion that HTTP scales because intermediate caches (and firewalls) can understand the semantics of messages. But to a large extent, intermediate caching is the antithesis of security. (Dont get me wrong: understandable semantics is fine, and is the argument Paul Prescod is making; And the REST URL-based architecture is far better than having your firewall figure out that SOAPAction might be important too).
It is definitely a Good Thing to strive for REST - your site will scale better - but REST really describes a web that we had (before cookies) and will not have again for a browser generation or so.
To save you the time reading the whole document? Most summarizers just pull what they think are the most relevant sentences out of the document (rather than attempt to write a summary from scratch). This results in quite readable, and essentially human-generated summaries.
And as for 'probably cheaper' - well yes if you want to guarantee you get something that makes sense back. However, the expense can only be justified if you want a summary for use in (say) a presentation, or you want to read a review. If you want to see abstracts of dozens of documents in order to decide if any are worth reading a computer is way cheaper and faster; 50wpm and 1GHz just don't compare for that task.
I dont know of anything that does what you want off-the-shelf for little or no money. However, one step up from the 20-questions game approach is to get your system to optimise the decision tree.
What you are trying to do here is supply incomplete information about a problem, in order to classify it, so you can suggest a fix. There is an algorithm (the ID3 algorithm, see eg http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~ddd/cap6635/Fall-97/Short -papers/2.htm) which can construct an optimal decision tree for classifying supplied data.
In order for ID3 to work you need to supply it with examples where the data was classified correctly. This translates to faults where the problem was identified and resolved; you can learn from previous examples simply by treating every resolved problem as part of your training set (and rebuild your decision tree).
You will also need to decide what data you are going to use for classification. This is simply done: when you fail to resolve a problem, ask the engineer what question should have been asked to identify the problem; something which takes a finite number of responses. Treat every question as having N 'known' responses (things that engineers have answered) and 1 'other' answer (this allows you to classify problems when data is incomplete, or known but not used in existing classified problems).
This approach would probably work. I've thought about using it before when I ran a helpdesk. But, it is fairly restrictive (questions have to be completely independent, for example, so that ID3 can reorder the decision tree), and the questions engineers supply might not help to learn much (eg: if the problem turned out to be the 'flange widget being loose' then the engineer might suggest 'is the flange widget loose' as a question; instead of the better question - 'Q: is there a loose widget? A: Yes, the flange widget.')
When I thought about writing this I thought it would also be useful to allow the engineer to add text suggesting how to determine the answer to the question ('examine all 6 washers under the grommit hinge') and an explanation of why the question is being asked, to teach the engineers ('loose or worn washers can rattle about. The gromit hinge washers have been prone to this in the past')
Anyway, hope this helped a little showing you how you could create a trainable system. As other posters have commented, CLIPS and the like require the rules to be written in the first place. ID3 is actually simple enough that you could code this yourself without much trouble, and downloadable implementations exist on the net. There are incremental variants (search for ID5) which avoid rebuilding the whole decision tree when a new solved problem is added.
For more sophisticated systems that actually try to do this right, take a look at the expert systems faq: http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/faqs/ai/exp ert/part1/faq.html , and machine learning faqs: http://www.andypryke.com/university/ai_ml.html
You tried a Brompton? (US distributor site is at http://www.bromptonbike.com/ main site http://www.bromptonbicycle.co.uk/) folk have told me they're not too bad to ride, but never had a use for one myself...or I'd buy one in a shot. Nice little movie of the bike being folded here... http://www.bromptonbike.com/Welcome/fold_movie.htm l
Weight goes as low as 10.7 kilos. (23.5 lbs), not the lightest folding bike (Bike Friday claim their Crusoe is 16 lbs)
Theres a site with a whole bunch of user reviews of the various folding bikes here (http://www.bikeaccess.net/folding_db.cfm). Interestingly these seem to be almost universally positive, and don't compare models - possibly because the things are so damn expensive noone ever rides more than one make?
Totally agree with all the comments on making yourself visible. One of my friends was killed on his morning commute - be careful out there.
1) You have no idea whether Kodak actually use this - the first patent, for example, would seem to cover introspection and/or the java activation framework. It seems likely that a kodak image browser might well use these ideas - just not as publicly as sun.
2) Supposed you were a lone inventor, and patented your idea for eg everlasting bubble gum. Now some big company, say, Slugworth Chocolates, comes along, starts producing your stuff without your permission, promotes it more than you can possibly afford, and thus you never make any money out of your invention.
This is precisely why we have patents. There are many reasons to criticise the patent process, but complaining that a big company is doing more with an idea than its inventor, and thus should be exempt from the law, is not among them.
The system is clearly based on resonant frequencies of bonds in the molecules of the taggant. They actually say 'submolecular' not subatomic on their site.
Someone else mentioned that this makes sense if you say UV instead of RF - well that may be true but its hardly new. Here for example is a UV taggant that works on that principal.
It may well be that their selling point is that they _are_ using RF taggants because its too easy to check if a UV taggant has been applied to something (one of the uses of UV powder tags is to check which employee has touched eg a secure terminal. You have been warned!)
This has been driven by the EU recommendation to consider open source mentioned in the past on Slashdot.
Main body are these recommendations:
UK Government will consider OSS solutions alongside proprietary ones in IT procurements. Contracts will be awarded on a value for money basis.
UK Government will only use products for interoperability that support open standards and specifications in all future IT developments.
UK Government will seek to avoid lock-in to proprietary IT products and services.
UK Government will obtain full rights to bespoke software code that it procures and all customisations of COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) packages that it uses wherever this achieves value for money.
UK Government will explore further the possibilities of using OSS as the default exploitation route for Government funded R&D software by academic research institutes
... which all seems pretty laudable.
BTW: PLEASE DON'T SEND COMMENTS TO GOVTALK if you are just going to say 'me too'. The 7 comments that are there are all pro-open source and we dont want to sound like fanatics, do we? Remember how a lot of the comments to the EU on patent law were essentially ignored for this reason - don't duplicate the arguments of others.
Disclaimer: I don't work for the UK government, but I write software that gets sold to them. Which includes a lot of open source stuff. I just happened to be reading that policy today before I read/....
Slashdot Mirror
This has come up before - in Martin Fowler's book, "Refactoring", he makes the controversial claim that sometimes comments are indicative of a need to change the code.
:)
Consider the different types of comment:
- boilerplate comment at the top of a file: helps noone but lawyers.
- change history comment: better use your source control tool to maintain this.
- comment before a class: does this mean the class is badly named, or too complex?
- comment before a method: ditto.
- comment inside a method: could be a smaller method screaming to get out.
Also heavily commented code is quite commonly just explaining away stupid code tricks.
Nobody's suggesting that all comments are bad, just that a lot of the time adding comments is a poor substitute for fixing whats wrong with the code. Of course sometimes its the language thats the problem
-Baz
Anyone else read the complaint? It has the patents attached. The interesting thing is the statement of origin of these patents. There is a paragraph reading "This is a continuation in part of the failed application XXXXXX in 1992, which was a continuation in part of application YYYYY in 1988, now US Patent No ZZZZ, which was a continuation in part...."
And so on, back to the early 1980s, with some patents being granted on the way.
IANAL, but doesnt this make PanIP's case somewhat stronger (in yet another disgusting way)? It appears to be a submarine patent like the US filing of the BT one - it keeps getting changed for years and years until it becomes financially interesting to get it approved, the filing is so long ago that noone has a hope of prior art (even though the original filing was for something completely different)
-Baz
The Open University in the UK had a series of short programmes called "Hollywood Science", which checks out the scientific credibility of scenes from films, presented by Robert Llewelyn (of "Scrapheap Challenge" aka "Junkyard Wars" fame).
They have a website here with information from the shows.
The simulation of Paul Newmans stomach in "Cool Hand Luke" was particularly gruesome...
-Baz
You could send your design as a cad file to Toybuilders and they'll 3d print you one.
However as you've already made your model you'll want it scanned. There are companies that will do this for you too - though they dont quote prices like Toybuilders do, so I guess it'll be expensive.
I noticed from Neco's page that a Rapid Prototyping and Manufacturing exhibition is taking place in Cincinatti on Tuesday (29th April) until May 2. If you get the list of exhibitors I am sure someone will be able to help.
Cheers,
Baz
RDF - the XML format for metadata - essentially describes relationships between resources and is a superset of the problem area you describe. I had a cursory look to see if people had taken the obvious step of using diagram tools to edit rdf and yes they have:
Using DIA and GraMToR and GraphViz and IsaViz and lots lots more
You might also be interested in They Rule which draws some interesting social networks!
While this is all standard 2d editing (I think the 3d editing thing is nonsense btw, unless you actually have a 3d coordinate system then you are actually describing a 2d network diagram) there are other visualisation options which may be interesting. Mindmapping tools allow you to navigate the network of concepts may be interesting as are star trees. Both provide a focussed view on a small part of a much larger network with some context information to help you choose how to navigate. They are more useful for display than authoring.
Hope something in here is useful
-Baz
I followed some of the links to k12ltsp and was wondering how schools afforded the servers required ... then I found this
With second hand kit they are mostly running PCs as diskless X-terminals; but this needs hefty CPU & memory from the server (see here for SunRay server requirements, for comparison). Often the clients are capable of something more, but you will have a range from crap to very very crap PCs, so how do you balance the load correctly, instead of just having 2 client configs, thick and thin?
Their solution: turn your terminals + server cluster into an OpenMosix cluster, so you claw back every last drop of CPU power on your network. NICE!!
Obviously this moves more load onto the network, and I'd like to see how that scaled - but this is a really cool solution to building a network from second hand kit.
-Bazzargh
Hmmm... wonder where could we put that?
I watched all of that series (there is a book of the series too, called Underworld IIRC). Graham Hancock has been banging on about pre-ice age global civilisation for some time and had previously made one of a pair of programs presenting the case for this on land (looking at Angkor Wat, the Pyramids, and Easter Island as having been built by the remnants of an older global civilisation). The interesting thing with those programs - and with the current set - was that space was given over to the conventional viewpoint to explain these things away.
The earlier assertions looked pretty tenuous. The new programs covered underwater structures off the coast of India (supposedly remnants of the Indus civilisation, and the origin of the flood stories in the Bhagavad Gita); between India and Sri Lanka; off the southern tip of Japan; and some others.
The case for most of these was pretty much debunked by a geologist he dived with, who said they arent cities at all but natural rock formations. The Indus city had by far the strongest case, as trawling had pulled up artifacts that did appear to be man made (such as a long cylindrical stone with a hole drilled through its centre, presumed to be a bead).
On the whole I wasnt convinced, but you have to give some time to Graham as he at least attempts to find real solid evidence for his claims, and allows contrary opinions into his work.
Reading the article I was struck that I'd seen Bruce Schneier denigrating the 'passive defence' fortress security model in the past, and a quick search found the article - What Military History can Teach Network Security.
I'm not going to completely denigrate Roger Sessions here. At some point in a system components have to trust each other. However that point is not actually the firewall, which was Schneiers point - you need application level security. And Roger explicitly mentions firewalls as a fortress implementation technology (yes they may well be the walls but I wouldnt want them implementing the door as well).
A second problem with his model is the fact that he lets anyone at all through the door, after the guard ok's them. This is the kind of thing that led to problems in the early days of the web. Perl's taint model is better, and in Roger's world represents every messenger from the outside being followed round the fortress by a guard, or better still, sending someone out on a horse to parley instead of letting the messenger in in the first place.
To sum up, anyone implementing the security model as described in that article would actually be repeating an old set of mistakes (which curiously went by the same name, and Roger hasn't noticed). It does not describe an 'improved' level of security, rather it describes pretty much what is on the ground in most places. That may well have been his intent, though, time will tell.
-Baz
The tiff spec originally used striped chunks of image, ie exactly what you might expect to be dumped directly from the buffer of a fax or scanner. (later they added square tiles, which made it easier to embed jpeg encoded images in tiff). While it is technically possible to encode the whole tiff in a single strip (of compressed image data), thus screwing any attempt at random access, the standard says you shouldnt do this and aims for small strips - in terms of memory.
This has nothing to do with how large the strips are in pixels though. If you viewer wanted to load a 100 pixel square region and the page width is 1M pixels, you will actually be forced to load at least 100x1M pixels into memory.
Bottom line is that in general tiff is a poor format for very large images. And while other image formats are different, they, too, are often not designed for random access to areas of a much larger image. If you really have large images then you should consider storing them in a different format, or even creating a client-server viewer so you don't have to install a gig of ram on the desktop of everyone who wants to look at the image. Depends on your app though. For photoshopping, just add more ram, for a db of x-ray images you would probably want to store images in a format designed for random access to small areas by remote client machines, and various thumnail levels for image navigation.
BTW I deal with A1 scans and I'm pretty sure the (proprietary and fairly crap) image viewer we use takes the client-server approach. I dont speak as an expert in this area but I have written software to convert TIFFs to other formats in the past.
-Baz
5900/tcp open vnc
Good job they're not running XP then or they'd be violating their own license
... and not just dev nodes in the filesystem.
EROS claims to checkpoint the memory of the system - its running state - rather than have programs explicitly serialize state to save and so on. By doing this they can make a machine shut down and reboot in a matter of seconds into a consistent state with your programs apparently still running. This is different from hibernation - you can take the machine down at any time by pulling the plug and this will work.
Its a different axis of filesystem from the 'store more metadata' stuff in this thread, but IMHO its a more interesting way to go. EROS's storage is transactional - to the extent that what is on disk always presents a consistent picture of what was in memory; user-level transactions are dealt with in programs. Its unclear from the register article whether the Be filesystem had this level of integrity.
-Baz
Funny seeing people demanding fortresses of solitude. Actually, there have been studies of better working environments and isolation tanks didn't rate.
s p?theisbn=0932633439&vm= ) describes an IBM effort in this direction which ended up with people working in shared team areas (not fully open plan, not tiny shared cubes either) with backs to the centre so that each others screens could be seen.
Peopleware (by DeMarco and Lister -http://www1.fatbrain.com/asp/bookinfo/bookinfo.a
More topically, Extreme Programming actually has quite a lot to say on office layout. You can see one example here: http://www.xprogramming.com/xpmag/c3space.htm
I have to agree to some extent with the naysayers though. Interruptions to flow can be a disaster in shared spaces if there is no check on interactions. If you can get people to shut up for a few hours a day though sharing an office space is fairly productive.
-Baz
I dont believe it! Was it only me who found the score of LOTR overbearing, with inappropriate emphasis? I thought it was the worst thing about the movie and other people I spoke to agreed...
You want a good score? How bout last year's Couching Tiger, or this year, Mulholland Drive? Badalamente's music was the main source of tension in the whole first half of the film. These were noticably incredible scores. The LOTR score was yet another swooping orchestra.
-Baz (feeling tired and opinionated today)
I corresponded for a while with Robert Lang in the mid-90s about this. I provided him with a handwaving proof of one of his conjectures (referred to obliquely in the 'Art of Origami' paragraph). This is only of historical interest now, but its still out there on the net:
( incidentally all the origamis produced by the method in this paper do actually fold flat, and look like little mountain ranges with a long open pocket at their base)
http://origami.kvi.nl/articles/circles.ps
As it turns out, a more concrete, and practical proof had been published in Japanese (tiling the plane with both triangles and quadrilaterals, not just triangles as in my paper). Some mathematicians in the states were sufficiently intrigued by my description of this on sci.math to have a closer look into paper folding, and came up with a proof that deciding if a given pattern of folds is flat-foldable is actually NP-complete.
All kudos to Robert. He has really put a lot of hard science into his origami programs and he is a truly impressive folder. I would recommend his book 'Origami Sea Animals' to anyone who wants their jaw to drop.
-Baz
Also in Glasgow. I don't get it. They sell them at train stations - never seen them anywhere else - meaning they expect you to buy a self heating tin of tasteless instant gack, instead of walking into one of the many coffee shops in every station and buying a fresh, tasty, coffee for a similar price?
Naffcafe', no thanks.
Metric as a measure of programmer productivity are crap, agreed. Metrics are not intriniscally bad however. One good use for metrics is to use them to identify 'hot spots' of potential trouble when doing QA reviews of code... saves you some time reading all of the code so that you can concentrate on the places which may well be badly wrong.
Have you read Martin Fowler's Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code?
Theres a view that comments are actually a sign of *bad* coding, because:
* a comment before a method may indicate that the method is poorly named, not well focussed, or has too many arguments & options
* a comment within a method may indicate that a method is overly long and there is a smaller method crying to be factored out.
* comments are often used to help describe overly complex tricks in software. The solution is not to comment but to simplify the code.
* sometimes comments are just there because QA tools insist on them (when the method name told you everything that would be in the comment)
* boilerplate comments with change logs really should be managed by your SCM tool (I have to agree with one of the other replies here!)
Like every rule it doesnt apply in every case. However it is worth thinking about. It isnt an excuse to go strip out all your comments - all I'm saying is that the _need_ for a comment is often an indication that the _code_is_bad_. Martin's book has some good examples demonstrating refactoring code to remove comments.
-Baz
REST is a great ideal, but still has limited applicability on the web. If you've read Roy Fielding's original REST thesis ( http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation /top.htm ) you'll see that one thing which is ruled out by REST as misfeatures of HTTP is cookies (of any kind). Quote: 'The same functionality should have been accomplished via anonymous authentication and true client-side state'. (BTW in a different section he effectively rules out url-rewriting schemes too).
Ok. So _right_now_, how would you support a session? you can have javascript in a frameset and conduct the session in a child frame, or use some client-side technology (applet, flash, activex) to achieve the goal...since none of the browsers actually support this philosophy! So if you go down this line you'd be at the mercy of the balkanization of the browsers. Roy's architecture is bang on the money but unsupportable at present.
Another thing to note is the security side of things. The REST philosophy is based partly on the notion that HTTP scales because intermediate caches (and firewalls) can understand the semantics of messages. But to a large extent, intermediate caching is the antithesis of security. (Dont get me wrong: understandable semantics is fine, and is the argument Paul Prescod is making; And the REST URL-based architecture is far better than having your firewall figure out that SOAPAction might be important too).
It is definitely a Good Thing to strive for REST - your site will scale better - but REST really describes a web that we had (before cookies) and will not have again for a browser generation or so.
-Baz
To save you the time reading the whole document? Most summarizers just pull what they think are the most relevant sentences out of the document (rather than attempt to write a summary from scratch). This results in quite readable, and essentially human-generated summaries.
And as for 'probably cheaper' - well yes if you want to guarantee you get something that makes sense back. However, the expense can only be justified if you want a summary for use in (say) a presentation, or you want to read a review. If you want to see abstracts of dozens of documents in order to decide if any are worth reading a computer is way cheaper and faster; 50wpm and 1GHz just don't compare for that task.
I dont know of anything that does what you want off-the-shelf for little or no money. However, one step up from the 20-questions game approach is to get your system to optimise the decision tree.
t -papers/2.htm) which can construct an optimal decision tree for classifying supplied data.
p ert/part1/faq.html , and machine learning faqs: http://www.andypryke.com/university/ai_ml.html
What you are trying to do here is supply incomplete information about a problem, in order to classify it, so you can suggest a fix. There is an algorithm (the ID3 algorithm, see eg http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~ddd/cap6635/Fall-97/Shor
In order for ID3 to work you need to supply it with examples where the data was classified correctly. This translates to faults where the problem was identified and resolved; you can learn from previous examples simply by treating every resolved problem as part of your training set (and rebuild your decision tree).
You will also need to decide what data you are going to use for classification. This is simply done: when you fail to resolve a problem, ask the engineer what question should have been asked to identify the problem; something which takes a finite number of responses. Treat every question as having N 'known' responses (things that engineers have answered) and 1 'other' answer (this allows you to classify problems when data is incomplete, or known but not used in existing classified problems).
This approach would probably work. I've thought about using it before when I ran a helpdesk. But, it is fairly restrictive (questions have to be completely independent, for example, so that ID3 can reorder the decision tree), and the questions engineers supply might not help to learn much (eg: if the problem turned out to be the 'flange widget being loose' then the engineer might suggest 'is the flange widget loose' as a question; instead of the better question - 'Q: is there a loose widget? A: Yes, the flange widget.')
When I thought about writing this I thought it would also be useful to allow the engineer to add text suggesting how to determine the answer to the question ('examine all 6 washers under the grommit hinge') and an explanation of why the question is being asked, to teach the engineers ('loose or worn washers can rattle about. The gromit hinge washers have been prone to this in the past')
Anyway, hope this helped a little showing you how you could create a trainable system. As other posters have commented, CLIPS and the like require the rules to be written in the first place. ID3 is actually simple enough that you could code this yourself without much trouble, and downloadable implementations exist on the net. There are incremental variants (search for ID5) which avoid rebuilding the whole decision tree when a new solved problem is added.
For more sophisticated systems that actually try to do this right, take a look at the expert systems faq: http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/faqs/ai/ex
You tried a Brompton? (US distributor site is at http://www.bromptonbike.com/ main site http://www.bromptonbicycle.co.uk/) folk have told me they're not too bad to ride, but never had a use for one myself...or I'd buy one in a shot. Nice little movie of the bike being folded here... http://www.bromptonbike.com/Welcome/fold_movie.htm l
Weight goes as low as 10.7 kilos. (23.5 lbs), not the lightest folding bike (Bike Friday claim their Crusoe is 16 lbs)
Theres a site with a whole bunch of user reviews of the various folding bikes here (http://www.bikeaccess.net/folding_db.cfm). Interestingly these seem to be almost universally positive, and don't compare models - possibly because the things are so damn expensive noone ever rides more than one make?
Totally agree with all the comments on making yourself visible. One of my friends was killed on his morning commute - be careful out there.
Now that is a crap argument.
1) You have no idea whether Kodak actually use this - the first patent, for example, would seem to cover introspection and/or the java activation framework. It seems likely that a kodak image browser might well use these ideas - just not as publicly as sun.
2) Supposed you were a lone inventor, and patented your idea for eg everlasting bubble gum. Now some big company, say, Slugworth Chocolates, comes along, starts producing your stuff without your permission, promotes it more than you can possibly afford, and thus you never make any money out of your invention.
This is precisely why we have patents. There are many reasons to criticise the patent process, but complaining that a big company is doing more with an idea than its inventor, and thus should be exempt from the law, is not among them.
Someone else mentioned that this makes sense if you say UV instead of RF - well that may be true but its hardly new. Here for example is a UV taggant that works on that principal.
It may well be that their selling point is that they _are_ using RF taggants because its too easy to check if a UV taggant has been applied to something (one of the uses of UV powder tags is to check which employee has touched eg a secure terminal. You have been warned!)
This has been driven by the EU recommendation to consider open source mentioned in the past on Slashdot.
Main body are these recommendations:
BTW: PLEASE DON'T SEND COMMENTS TO GOVTALK if you are just going to say 'me too'. The 7 comments that are there are all pro-open source and we dont want to sound like fanatics, do we? Remember how a lot of the comments to the EU on patent law were essentially ignored for this reason - don't duplicate the arguments of others.
Disclaimer: I don't work for the UK government, but I write software that gets sold to them. Which includes a lot of open source stuff. I just happened to be reading that policy today before I read /. ...
Cheers, Baz