Hey, I whole-heartedly agree! The US has moved from a manufacturing economy to an "imaginary" intellectual property economy. We can now simply sit back and relax while collecting the wealth of the world through software licenses, copyright royalties, heck, even just patent licenses. And the rest of the world just takes it! They love western culture and will pay through the nose for licensed brand items, even if it was produced and manufactured in their own backyard for a fraction of the price! And hell, even if they go and produce some of their own culture, we'll collect distribution royalties on the compression codec licensing!
Doesn't that sorta remind you of the Stamp Tax we owed to the British monarchy back in the day, just for printing our own newspapers. And they even unironically call these payments "royalties" to this day. Hmm, I wonder how that sort of empiricism worked out for them in the past?
I don't think protectionism is the cure, though, more likely part of the disease. ITAR and EAR only made it more effective for companies to produce high technology outside of the US, a lot of space tech on the international market nowadays actively advertises "no US technology" as a primary feature, since it makes it much, much easier to export and even just to talk about space tech without submitting to all kinds of protectionist export control red tape and bureaucracy. We just need to stay ahead the old fashioned way, through education and efficient resource utilization to stay smarter and leaner and faster than the competition. Trying to maintain, 'ahem', competitive inequality through paperwork backed by the threat of economic & conventional warfare isn't conducive to progress for anyone, just the few that want to retard the system so they can collect money for a short spell until some sort of revolution (technological or social) inevitably occurs to tip the balance of power.
Ha, yeah, amazing how far I had to scroll down to find anyone actually trying to answer the guy's solicitation for alternatives:P
No mention of LyX yet. No, it's not WYSIWYG, it's better. I do all of my serious reports in it. Though I do turn to Word and OO.org and its ilk for mail merge envelope labels and fax cover sheets. It tosses out latex, and it's a good feeling to run "make" on your report every so often and get all of your updated graphics and diagrams included and published simultaneously in linked html, single-page html, and printable pdf.
I haven't come to use gnumeric as much as OO.o Calc, but it's good for quickly viewing csv data. For other projects I'll whip up scripts in octave + gnuplot. Unfortunately, it does take time to learn, but it's much easier feeding it new sets of data and just getting out plots and analysis in your reports without lots of mindless fumbling with spreadsheet cells. It's a different way of thinking to run a script to generate your plots rather than constantly tweaking a spreadsheet.
Not as featureful as PowerPoint, but I've been using Impress!ve (formerly known as keyjnote or something like that) to present PDF slides. Also works on directories of images. It's missing a lot of the "distracting" features of PowerPoint such as builds, but has a lot things that help focus, such as slide sorter views and spotlights. And pretty OpenGL transitions.
I wouldn't go so far as to remove OO.org / LibreOffice from your toolbox, but there are plenty of other ways to work that provide some compelling advantages over the tired old approach.
Well, as they point out in engineering classes, you'll always need C / ASM for doing direct hardware interfaces. There's going to be a lot more plugging in computers to sensors and actuators in the not-too-distant future.
As far as logic goes, I tend to stick with bash for simple tasks, and python for complex tasks.
We stay away from perl for maintainability reasons. But I suppose it's OK to have a few perl one-liners scattered about your bash scripts to make certain things easier, as long as you explain what they're doing. PHP is mostly deprecated for new development for similar reasons, but it's tolerated since there's a lot of useful php out there.
C++ is just a mess. Python tends to be much more readable and maintainable, mostly works on the first try, and if you really need to, you can accelerate the performance critical parts with pypy / psyco, or write an optimized module in C if really necessary.
For large projects, I'd recommend getting familiar with all the other helpful software, like build systems and revision control. Stuff that will help keep you sane, like make and mercurial.
Gee, thanks for getting the Mario Brother's 1up sound effect stuck in my head. It's not something I associate at all with my experiences with Apple products:-P
Word up. I've been a T-Mobile customer for just over a decade now (originally signed up as Voicestream).
I've pretty much always bought unlocked phones from elsewhere to use on their network. It's nice that they actually give those people a discounted monthly plan now for not subsidizing phone handsets, without signing for 1-2 year contracts. This often turns out to be cheaper in the long run.
Is that supposed to be the punchline? Does anyone even know what an architect does?
And yes, "Systems Architect" has actually been my job title at some point in time. Possibly because I got too close to grasping exactly what a "Systems Engineer" does. (something to do with being the gap-filler in an organization, which includes unwrapping boxes, delivering stuff to customer sites, and sometimes odd programming... sometimes).
A bit of history... supposedly these guys were one of the founding members of CentOS so they could adapt it for use in Linux clusters. http://www.caoslinux.org/
There were some other efforts to repackage RHEL according to their terms for redistribution, such as White Box Linux, but I think that one was run by librarians and eventually petered out.
Interesting to note that the CaOS people have started to migrate their newer Perceus development to Debian lately, though RHEL / CentOS is still supported.
Also, since CentOS aims to be binary identical to RHEL, a lot of shops tend to do all their development and testing on CentOS machines, then shell out for the full RHEL when they deliver to customers.
Heh, I have a mod point left, but I guess I'll keep it in reserve...
You had a valid point, but I think you got downmodded more based on your tone than your content. Maybe the mods just had trouble selecting the "flamebait" entry;-P
How soon can we speculate on converting old offshore oil rigs for housing?!
Oh, I don't know... I think buildings of that scale were just too difficult to plan and construct for.
Yes, isolated skyscrapers are pretty wonky, more for type-A business dorks that want to be "above" everyone else. I think the more modernized, livable version consists of buildings that are still rather high, but have linked green roof parks, and central atriums. Some examples:
You'll notice the "Lilycity" towers have more of an internal ring or courtyard, so they kinda create interior spaces that people can relate to. Hopefully they can find some success starting off with relatively small projects they can link together.
It doesn't sound like they should need to commute between towers all that much. If so, yeah, just the 1000m elevator ride to the transit level will be pretty hard on their ears:P
Maybe for stage 2 we could put a massive orbital platform that could snag the spaceship with a tether and accelerate it the rest of the way? Then when they're ready to return then could use a big slingshot to slow it down for the drop. Would need to work out the math for that... Ech, low earth orbit doesn't really start until 200km. And even then it'd need to accelerate from roughly 0 to about 8km/s.
Aw geez, now I'm going to have even more awesomebar envy whenever I have to use a different browser for whatever reason:P Also now I'm going to want some sort of RSS feed / notification for whenever my search terms on certain sites come up with new entries (e.g., like the craigslist app on Android).
I don't suppose there's an easy way to use some kind of shorthand for googling "site:slashdot.org foobar" , is there?
Hmm, I do all my googling from the search bar / URL awesomebar. Hell, even if my browser doesn't happen to support awesomebar, opendns returns a page with a google query to whatever text I typed.
I don't recall the last time I actually did a search from google.com.
Well, thanks, maybe, due to your valiant effort and self-sacrifice, on the next politics thread (attached to a nonpolitical story), we might get it right on the first try.:-)
Hmm, actually, anyone in the know care to enlighten us with some explanation of how the LHC decided to jump straight from protons (atomic #1) to Iron (atomic #26, atomic weight 55) ? And will Lead or Uranium be forthcoming? ^_^
It's sad that PCs have usable lifespans (with the help of upgrades) of 5-10 years, but laptops go out of date in maybe 3-5 years, and smartphones are probably down to 1-2 years. You can see where all of the money is nowadays... the things with the shortest lifespans and planned obsolescence (laptops without Vista/Win7 drivers, and smartphones that no longer get OS updates abound!)
I wish more laptops had upgradable GPUs. Some high-end ones do. That's pretty much the only thing keeping me from reusing the big beautiful displays on some of my older laptops... And also what keeps me from throwing money away at cheap laptops with crappy integrated graphics.
Wish there were more cheap "luggable" PC options around... It would actually be pretty sweet to have some sort of "transformer" PC based around a little KVM connected to a nanoITX PC, maybe even powered by some battery packs.
Meh, I've been fairly happy with Dell laptops for that sort of thing. Just try to stick to parts that are used with their corporate laptops. Most of their midrange Inspiron lines are compatible with parts from their long-support-cycle Latitude corporate line.
I've replaced plenty of keyboards, and upgraded CPUs and even a GPU in some of my Dell laptops. Plus if you're friendly with your IT guys from work, they might even let you grab some extra parts from them;-P
I played with Flock once. It was a bit interesting, but not as neat as, say, simply having my smartphone pull down and merge address book entries from Facebook, GMail, etc.
I like the StumbleUpon approach much better. But I still wouldn't share any of my browsing habits with anyone on Facebook or Twitter, no. I pretty much only occasionally share URLs with the people in my IRC channel. But I suppose that just goes to show how old skool I am:P
It depends on who has control over access to the devices / clouds. Just make sure the evidence can only be collected with a subpoena related to a criminal investigation. No crime, no access.
For me, it'd be great if my device logs were admissible as evidence supporting my innocence. But in politics and law, it seems to depend more on the lawyer's ability to cast doubt on data and bring it down to who can make the more effective delivery of "truthiness". Which is why I avoid both of those fields like the plague.
Wayland is a lightweight display server for the Linux desktop. Started by Kristian Høgsberg, one of Intel OSTC member,[1] the software's stated goal is "every frame is perfect, by which I mean that applications will be able to control the rendering enough that we'll never see tearing, lag, redrawing or flicker"
Nah, Flash vids are still pretty crappy quality, both under Windows and Linux (I end up viewing them with vlc/tmp/Flash* )
I admit I was pretty impressed with Netflix streaming ever since it first came out... they got a lot of the technology right with their player. No vertical sync artifacts, good postprocessing to smooth out the compression artifacts (very little "blockiness" from excessive quantization), and they must be using some decent error correction since I rarely see any corruption from dropped packets that I've seen with other streaming services (livecast, etc.)
Ha... torrents managed to pass "the wife test", in that I installed uTorrent on her laptop and she actually started using it routinely (mostly to download the Soviet-era productions she grew up with to show to our kids)
Oh, I suppose I could add a PS3 to the fray, once we finish waiting for GT5 to come out. (My PS2 was merely an accessory for my G25 wheel).
But yeah, we do use Netflix quite a bit too, if only so we don't have to allocate / manage extra disk space for much of the crud out there.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, I whole-heartedly agree! The US has moved from a manufacturing economy to an "imaginary" intellectual property economy. We can now simply sit back and relax while collecting the wealth of the world through software licenses, copyright royalties, heck, even just patent licenses. And the rest of the world just takes it! They love western culture and will pay through the nose for licensed brand items, even if it was produced and manufactured in their own backyard for a fraction of the price! And hell, even if they go and produce some of their own culture, we'll collect distribution royalties on the compression codec licensing!
Doesn't that sorta remind you of the Stamp Tax we owed to the British monarchy back in the day, just for printing our own newspapers. And they even unironically call these payments "royalties" to this day. Hmm, I wonder how that sort of empiricism worked out for them in the past?
I don't think protectionism is the cure, though, more likely part of the disease. ITAR and EAR only made it more effective for companies to produce high technology outside of the US, a lot of space tech on the international market nowadays actively advertises "no US technology" as a primary feature, since it makes it much, much easier to export and even just to talk about space tech without submitting to all kinds of protectionist export control red tape and bureaucracy. We just need to stay ahead the old fashioned way, through education and efficient resource utilization to stay smarter and leaner and faster than the competition. Trying to maintain, 'ahem', competitive inequality through paperwork backed by the threat of economic & conventional warfare isn't conducive to progress for anyone, just the few that want to retard the system so they can collect money for a short spell until some sort of revolution (technological or social) inevitably occurs to tip the balance of power.
Hey! Remember before there was Word and even Linux, we used to use WordPerfect under DOS? They're still around!
Anyone actually use it and have crap to say about it? ^_^
Ha, yeah, amazing how far I had to scroll down to find anyone actually trying to answer the guy's solicitation for alternatives :P
No mention of LyX yet. No, it's not WYSIWYG, it's better. I do all of my serious reports in it. Though I do turn to Word and OO.org and its ilk for mail merge envelope labels and fax cover sheets. It tosses out latex, and it's a good feeling to run "make" on your report every so often and get all of your updated graphics and diagrams included and published simultaneously in linked html, single-page html, and printable pdf.
I haven't come to use gnumeric as much as OO.o Calc, but it's good for quickly viewing csv data. For other projects I'll whip up scripts in octave + gnuplot. Unfortunately, it does take time to learn, but it's much easier feeding it new sets of data and just getting out plots and analysis in your reports without lots of mindless fumbling with spreadsheet cells. It's a different way of thinking to run a script to generate your plots rather than constantly tweaking a spreadsheet.
Not as featureful as PowerPoint, but I've been using Impress!ve (formerly known as keyjnote or something like that) to present PDF slides. Also works on directories of images. It's missing a lot of the "distracting" features of PowerPoint such as builds, but has a lot things that help focus, such as slide sorter views and spotlights. And pretty OpenGL transitions.
I wouldn't go so far as to remove OO.org / LibreOffice from your toolbox, but there are plenty of other ways to work that provide some compelling advantages over the tired old approach.
Well, as they point out in engineering classes, you'll always need C / ASM for doing direct hardware interfaces. There's going to be a lot more plugging in computers to sensors and actuators in the not-too-distant future.
As far as logic goes, I tend to stick with bash for simple tasks, and python for complex tasks.
We stay away from perl for maintainability reasons. But I suppose it's OK to have a few perl one-liners scattered about your bash scripts to make certain things easier, as long as you explain what they're doing. PHP is mostly deprecated for new development for similar reasons, but it's tolerated since there's a lot of useful php out there.
C++ is just a mess. Python tends to be much more readable and maintainable, mostly works on the first try, and if you really need to, you can accelerate the performance critical parts with pypy / psyco, or write an optimized module in C if really necessary.
For large projects, I'd recommend getting familiar with all the other helpful software, like build systems and revision control. Stuff that will help keep you sane, like make and mercurial.
lol, that' s why you have to learn how to do all your parallel development using xargs in bash! :-P
-- cluster engineer
Gee, thanks for getting the Mario Brother's 1up sound effect stuck in my head. It's not something I associate at all with my experiences with Apple products :-P
Drips and "eeps", on the other hand...
Word up. I've been a T-Mobile customer for just over a decade now (originally signed up as Voicestream).
I've pretty much always bought unlocked phones from elsewhere to use on their network. It's nice that they actually give those people a discounted monthly plan now for not subsidizing phone handsets, without signing for 1-2 year contracts. This often turns out to be cheaper in the long run.
Is that supposed to be the punchline? Does anyone even know what an architect does?
And yes, "Systems Architect" has actually been my job title at some point in time. Possibly because I got too close to grasping exactly what a "Systems Engineer" does. (something to do with being the gap-filler in an organization, which includes unwrapping boxes, delivering stuff to customer sites, and sometimes odd programming... sometimes).
A bit of history... supposedly these guys were one of the founding members of CentOS so they could adapt it for use in Linux clusters.
http://www.caoslinux.org/
There were some other efforts to repackage RHEL according to their terms for redistribution, such as White Box Linux, but I think that one was run by librarians and eventually petered out.
Interesting to note that the CaOS people have started to migrate their newer Perceus development to Debian lately, though RHEL / CentOS is still supported.
Also, since CentOS aims to be binary identical to RHEL, a lot of shops tend to do all their development and testing on CentOS machines, then shell out for the full RHEL when they deliver to customers.
Heh, I have a mod point left, but I guess I'll keep it in reserve...
You had a valid point, but I think you got downmodded more based on your tone than your content. Maybe the mods just had trouble selecting the "flamebait" entry ;-P
How soon can we speculate on converting old offshore oil rigs for housing?!
Oh, I don't know... I think buildings of that scale were just too difficult to plan and construct for.
Yes, isolated skyscrapers are pretty wonky, more for type-A business dorks that want to be "above" everyone else. I think the more modernized, livable version consists of buildings that are still rather high, but have linked green roof parks, and central atriums. Some examples:
http://blog.urbangreencouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/eco-building415.jpg
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_LyxZsaQuZO8/SjetV6OrEUI/AAAAAAAAFYs/SV-2Cwo0XBU/s400/8+Awesome+and+Wonderful+Green+Roofs+1.jpg
http://www.sierraclubgreenhome.com/cms/wp-content/uploads/green-roof-2.bmp
You'll notice the "Lilycity" towers have more of an internal ring or courtyard, so they kinda create interior spaces that people can relate to. Hopefully they can find some success starting off with relatively small projects they can link together.
It doesn't sound like they should need to commute between towers all that much. If so, yeah, just the 1000m elevator ride to the transit level will be pretty hard on their ears :P
Yeah, blame Hollywood physics trumping actual physics yet again.
Slightly off topic, but did anyone else notice in the overhead pics that these things look fractal derived?
Oh, nothing's ever off topic on slashdot! Yes! I was immediately excited that the structure resembled part of my master's thesis!
http://hairball.mine.nu/~rwa2/school/ense799/arcologysim_20070521/mainthesis-node35.html#2336
Maybe for stage 2 we could put a massive orbital platform that could snag the spaceship with a tether and accelerate it the rest of the way? Then when they're ready to return then could use a big slingshot to slow it down for the drop.
Would need to work out the math for that...
Ech, low earth orbit doesn't really start until 200km. And even then it'd need to accelerate from roughly 0 to about 8km/s.
Living in a gravity well sucks
Aw geez, now I'm going to have even more awesomebar envy whenever I have to use a different browser for whatever reason :P Also now I'm going to want some sort of RSS feed / notification for whenever my search terms on certain sites come up with new entries (e.g., like the craigslist app on Android).
I don't suppose there's an easy way to use some kind of shorthand for googling "site:slashdot.org foobar" , is there?
Thanks for the tip ;)
Hmm, I do all my googling from the search bar / URL awesomebar. Hell, even if my browser doesn't happen to support awesomebar, opendns returns a page with a google query to whatever text I typed.
I don't recall the last time I actually did a search from google.com.
Well, thanks, maybe, due to your valiant effort and self-sacrifice, on the next politics thread (attached to a nonpolitical story), we might get it right on the first try. :-)
Hmm, actually, anyone in the know care to enlighten us with some explanation of how the LHC decided to jump straight from protons (atomic #1) to Iron (atomic #26, atomic weight 55) ? And will Lead or Uranium be forthcoming? ^_^
Word up!
It's sad that PCs have usable lifespans (with the help of upgrades) of 5-10 years, but laptops go out of date in maybe 3-5 years, and smartphones are probably down to 1-2 years. You can see where all of the money is nowadays... the things with the shortest lifespans and planned obsolescence (laptops without Vista/Win7 drivers, and smartphones that no longer get OS updates abound!)
I wish more laptops had upgradable GPUs. Some high-end ones do. That's pretty much the only thing keeping me from reusing the big beautiful displays on some of my older laptops... And also what keeps me from throwing money away at cheap laptops with crappy integrated graphics.
Wish there were more cheap "luggable" PC options around... It would actually be pretty sweet to have some sort of "transformer" PC based around a little KVM connected to a nanoITX PC, maybe even powered by some battery packs.
Meh, I've been fairly happy with Dell laptops for that sort of thing. Just try to stick to parts that are used with their corporate laptops. Most of their midrange Inspiron lines are compatible with parts from their long-support-cycle Latitude corporate line.
I've replaced plenty of keyboards, and upgraded CPUs and even a GPU in some of my Dell laptops. Plus if you're friendly with your IT guys from work, they might even let you grab some extra parts from them ;-P
I played with Flock once. It was a bit interesting, but not as neat as, say, simply having my smartphone pull down and merge address book entries from Facebook, GMail, etc.
I like the StumbleUpon approach much better. But I still wouldn't share any of my browsing habits with anyone on Facebook or Twitter, no. I pretty much only occasionally share URLs with the people in my IRC channel. But I suppose that just goes to show how old skool I am :P
It depends on who has control over access to the devices / clouds. Just make sure the evidence can only be collected with a subpoena related to a criminal investigation. No crime, no access.
For me, it'd be great if my device logs were admissible as evidence supporting my innocence. But in politics and law, it seems to depend more on the lawyer's ability to cast doubt on data and bring it down to who can make the more effective delivery of "truthiness". Which is why I avoid both of those fields like the plague.
Ha, first line of that wikipedia article:
Wayland is a lightweight display server for the Linux desktop. Started by Kristian Høgsberg, one of Intel OSTC member,[1] the software's stated goal is "every frame is perfect, by which I mean that applications will be able to control the rendering enough that we'll never see tearing, lag, redrawing or flicker"
Last screenshot on the Wayland site:
http://wayland.freedesktop.org/clutter-flowers.png
Oh well, sounds interesting. Hope they have a good time reinventing all the network transparency and other features...
As an aside, does anyone know what phone makers are good about keeping updates coming?
Um, anything supported by CyanogenMOD? I specifically shopped for a phone on their list.
Not as convenient as OTA updates, sure. But there's enough good stuff in there to make it well worth the effort to flash from 2.1 to 2.2
Nah, Flash vids are still pretty crappy quality, both under Windows and Linux (I end up viewing them with vlc /tmp/Flash* )
I admit I was pretty impressed with Netflix streaming ever since it first came out... they got a lot of the technology right with their player. No vertical sync artifacts, good postprocessing to smooth out the compression artifacts (very little "blockiness" from excessive quantization), and they must be using some decent error correction since I rarely see any corruption from dropped packets that I've seen with other streaming services (livecast, etc.)
Ha... torrents managed to pass "the wife test", in that I installed uTorrent on her laptop and she actually started using it routinely (mostly to download the Soviet-era productions she grew up with to show to our kids)
Oh, I suppose I could add a PS3 to the fray, once we finish waiting for GT5 to come out. (My PS2 was merely an accessory for my G25 wheel).
But yeah, we do use Netflix quite a bit too, if only so we don't have to allocate / manage extra disk space for much of the crud out there.