Wasn't It originally protection?
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Is IP Property?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I thought that originally patent law was supposed to protect the individual inventor, to give them time to make some profit off of their invention rather then having to compete directly with companies that already had the resources/retail connections/whatever to produce his product, profit off of it, and leave him sitting there wondering why he bothered having the idea in the first place.
I concede that the recent flurry of corporate activity concerning IP has turned it into almost a corporate owned environment because they finally realized they could pay people to sit around and think up ideas for the company, thus pre-emptively getting rights to the IP instead of that employee getting the full rights... Plus there is the fact that now individuals are running into stonewalls trying to create their own products (whether or not you make a dime, it is still a product) based on technology that is considered to be someone's IP.
I grant that IP is a terrible title for patents, copyrights, et al, and the corporations are running amuck with the current laws, but I fail to see how abolishing the laws that protect an individuals invention from corporate theft is really good for that individual. Yes it leads to a more open society in that there is no protection for inventions, etc, but at the same time it also means that inventors have less (read: no) incentive to continue inventing products, or if they do invent them there is no incentive to release them. At least now they are released (under protection for a time, then for all) fairly quickly. With nothing to look forward to but Big-O'l-company taking the idea and turning it into their next product line, why would individuals bother releasing it to the world at all? And if there is no incentive to the individual to create new ideas, how is society freer?
And also realize that doing away with IP rights (such as patents) does not necessarally affect the big corporations heavily in terms of patents. In fact, I think very little would change for corporations because they can always fall back on trade secrets while still screwing the little guy that invented something in his garage and has no such protections.
Saying that getting rid of IP would suddenly make a freer society is short-sighted. The commentary that various political parties weigh in stronger on one side of the argument then the other is less than meaningless without knowing exactly how the question was asked and who was asked. It boils down to opinion and FUD, ie "Democrats want a freer society and care about you and me, Republicans want a closed society and don't give a damn about you unles you own a corporation"...without getting to deep into politics, I think the recent antics by politicians on both sides of that fence tend to show they both care most about who is putting money in their pockets...
Challenge #1: Re-write the interface
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Google Code Jam 2004
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· Score: 4, Informative
yep, thefirst challenge will be to rewrite the TopCoder interface to convince it that it does not need 100% of the CPU...that 5-10 second pauses while your typing code should NOT occur...that in a timed competition it is not reasonable to make someone go back and retype something 5 lines earlier simplybecause the interface froze up...
I mean crashes are on thing, you would expect the connection to get lost occasionally (try every time I have tried to do a practice problem), but c'mon, who hosts a coding competition with an interface that idles at 100% CPU usage?
I feel your pain. The last time I had a land-line in this town was in 98 with Southern Bell. As I was moving (new place already had phone acct) I closed out the acount, went in and paid the final amount in person, and double-triple checked the account was paid off.
What do you know, in 2002 an entry showed up on my credit report for a collection ageny for $80-odd dollars that has a last activity date back in 99 but a submission date of 02. Call them up and they say they are acting on behalf of BellSouth. They have no proof that I owe any money beyond a bill from BellSouth, didn't bother attempting to contact me (a simple snail mail letter would have worked), etc, etc. My fault for calling them, I finally ended up paying them, but will never use Bellsouth again as a residential or commercial client.
I mean when the final bill and matching (dated, accepted) check from the bank aren't proof enough and they are allowed to just barf on my credit with anything they want, why bother doing business with them.
I seem to recall quite an uproar surrounding the seizure before. People yelling about the government raping the constituion, etc.
Glad I was one of the people that decided to wait and see what it was all about instead of taking it as a sign that our government was overextending itself. Not that they don't, but I'm guessing this isn't one of those times if everyone on staff got felony charges.
I'm waiting forthe same thing to occur. IANAL but even with the move to Felony status for criminal Copyright infringement I would think there would be a gaping hole to argue right aorund the wording of:
'willfully and for purpose of commercial advantage or private financial gain.'
I mean obviously civil copyright infringement has occurred, but I would expect someone to take it on based on the financial gain angle. I mean would saying that the infringed upon company lost money (not easily proven) even qualify as financial gain for an individual if that individual did not receive money or use it to get ahead while in competition with the copyright holder?
The RICO laws seem to be begging for use in this situation...
Apreche raises a good point, mod him up (I'm mod point-les right now).
The best source of Open Source developers your going to find that will work on developiung MS products in their freetime are going to be found in the Windows user groups. These are the people that run into the little problems here and there, consistently, over and over, for weeks and weeks on end. Some of them would probably bribe you to let them get in there and fix the problems. I say some because it doesn't matter wat community your part of, there is always someone who would prefer to whine to doing real work.
So start with a small windows groups of developers. Maybe give them IE as a starting place since it is not an essential product, but rather a bundled one (ie, it doesn't directly have a price). See if you can get them interested in implementing some of the newer standards, or re-implementing CSS or the JScript DOM to match the standards. Don't ask them to help, offer limited access to a SourceShare archive and a tasklist, let them work on it as they please. I'm willing to bet you'll find a lot of work getting done, especially after one of them comes back from an especially painful application install or intranet development.
I have been in the grey area, ie not a fanatic about either Linux or Windows, for years. I develop (for work) primarily with VS.Net, with occasional Web Devel mostly aimed at IE. I prefer Linux these days simply because everything happens for a reason. With Windows it's all black magic even when I kind of know what is going on under the hood based on how the system acts. It's the difference between training Gorillas based on watchng them for several years or training chimps after being given Gods notes on how and why he built them.
-T
Re:It may very well be time to re-evaluate...
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Cheating Made Easy
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· Score: 1
The problem with raising the bar for students is if the colleges (public and private) raise the bar to the type of level you suggest, they will not make as much money. Universities, at least the portions that make decisions on admissions and such, have become businesses. They do not want to cut down the population to those that want to learn or want to be there for higher learning in a specialized field, they want every last body they can shove in the door without hurting their own statistics.
So we blame Microsoft for what was ultimately the laziness of the developers/designers of the "broken" applications?
Lets ignore the thousands of applications that didn't break and concentrate only on the ones that assumed they would get access to any ports they wanted. How much longer would it have taken to write a little error checking? Wouldn't that have made sense? Even pre-massive-number-of-firewall products, I never would have assumed that a given port wouldn't already be in use by some other application, or even with the growth in home internet service I wouldn't assume there would even be a NIC in the machine.
A simple error catching routine could display a message explainaing that the absence of internet connectivity or blockage by firewalls could cause features x, y, and z not to work. I could write one in several languages at about 2 minutes per. New firewall on by default? Roll-out a very simple update that updates the message to supply a link to opening a port on XP if you have installed SP2.
No, this isn't Microsoft's fault for finally supplying default security, this is the fault of lazy developes or designers who tried to shortcut their way to product release.
Heh, yep. If only the API were free, that would solve all her problems.
It wouldn't conceivably increase the amount of attacks on her no longer upgraded API, it wouldn't decrease the cost of upgrading to somehting like XP, it wouldn't automatically install firewall software for her. Please, decamp and find a real reason that making the Windows API would be a good thing. Ifthe Windows API were open and free, the only thing tat woudl change is that there would be even more exploits for this older system unless you knew where to find the couple dedicated hackers who wanted to patch together their own upgrades.
As for not being able to switch OS's, I don't see how that would be any easier if she was running Linux, except that in order to run it for the past 6 years she would have to be more familiar with all the in's and outs ofthe system, costing her the time she could have been doing other things. And switching from a Mac (or upgrading to MacOS X) would be just as much of a problem, except that Mac would cost even more to upgrade.
I'm finding the gross number of "We were so poor that..." posts kind of amusing. They all generally make the point that people that have money don't understand those that don't have it unless they themselves did not have it at one point.
Of course I see a couple of these stories and have to laugh at what people consider "poverty". Only one or two have entered the territory I consider "poverty".
In my mind, having cable takes you out of the poverty level. Having a television at all takes you out of poverty. Owning a computer takes you above poverty. Poverty means not being able to afford non-essentials like those items.
I look back and consider myself having come out of poverty around age 9 or 10 when we got a black & white TV. I remember thinking back when I was 5 or 6 and visiting the neighbors how rich they must be for having indoor lighting, plumbing, and this cool TV thing. I was 8 when we got electricity. Granted times have changed and that was the 80's, but commodities are still commodities. The idea of poverty is that you don't have a commodity based lifestyle, that you will go hungry if you instead spend the money on unnecessary items. As much time as all of us spend on the computer, it just isn't a necessary item to continue living for the majority of the public. It is still a commodity rather then a necessity. Electricity has become more necessary, a phone is generally necessary, water is somewhat necessary, those I would qualify near the upper limits of poverty, but crossing the lines to non-necessary appliances (necessary depending on rural vs urban) means that while you may be less then middle class, you are no longer impoverished.
Even the above poster (who I wasn't singling out by posting at this level, just using it as an example), talks about how they received a washing machine from their parents who then went and bought a new one.
While I was no longer poor and had a washing machine in my house by the time I graduated highschool, there is no way I would have gotten it as a going to college present. Those things are expensive. We did have a computer at the time, but only because it was necessary to my fathers occupation.
I find myself able to get glued to the television easily now, though that is compared to 20 years ago when I didn't have a television. I went to the library. I have over 500 books on my shelves (now, then I had none). I have a bad habit of being a packrat because everything is re-useable for something. I have an infinite level of disdain for any political candidate that pretends they know what poor was like because they only got such-and-such an allowance while going to their Ivy League college after moving out of their parents mansion(s).
In 2003 a single person (roughly, this is just a guideline) had to make less then $8,980 to be considered to be in poverty. 3 people had to make less then $15,260. Spending $100 for a P3 level computer (if they have access to ebay somehow) is a stretch when it means spending 10% of their monthly income when they could eat a little better and maybe get a toy or school supplies for their kid. Or maybe that would b my priorities and people making that little would rather eat rice and beans 24/7/4/12 and have a cheap computer. Of course, the fact that i visited many of the poorest neighborhoods quite frequently when I deliverd pizza belied that, for the majority at least.
While I agree with the general thrust of your commentary, I feel I have to point out the major fallacy in your supporting points: "They also don't want children to wonder why they can't research papers on gay rights or learn about breast cancer"
The purpose of fighting against the proposed filtering programs twofold. One, because the ALA believes people have a right to access constitutionally protected material in a public institution, and Two, because even with a definition of obscenity/et al, the tests of filtering software show that there are many cases whee the software will let through "obscene" items while also suppressing non-"obscene", First Amendment protected items.
The reason I pointed out the particular phrase above is because it gives rhe wrong impression. The ALA does not want to support children's questioning of why materials are blocked because the basis of that statement is that materials are blocked.
I too believe in parents having to take responsibility for parenting their children, unfortunatly I am a conservative, which in these environs generally means everything I say, regardless of content or logic, is either incorrect or gross inflation of some party line.
Interesting no one else caught this, but one basis for your argument is that the companies that have ired you in the past were being dominated by non-degree programmers...as an argument that degree's are so much less important then experience, this is lacking. On the other hand, as an argument that you worked for managers that were capable of making good decisions based on limited input, you have given almost enough info.
(Don't take that the wrong way, I have just worked for enough managers that took the inverted approach: Hmm, Action A failed 15 times already, Action B worked the last time I tried it, ok, we'll go with Action A...)
The biggest failing I have seen in self-taught developers is that while they are generally good programmers (having taught themselves due to a true interest) that is about as close as they come to Software Engineers. Software Lifecycle isn't just a Buzzword (or if it is in some circles, it isn't in mine). Defining problems in detail, writing documentation, writing specs, creating test plans and implementing them, maintainable documentation (as well as code), etc. are things that most self-taught programmers I have dealt with don't do. I don't blame them, none of that is really fun (except maybe the design part), but that is the difference between being a developer and a softare engineer, the engineering principles.
The best self-taught developer I have ever worked with had less than 2 years of experience and a masters in mechanical engineering. The worst was a badass code hacker (10-12 yrs exp at the very least) who could code in just about anything, fast...when they gave me his project he was 10 months into it, it was supposedly two demos (same front-end, differant server data sources/api's/etc) in final testing, and neither would compile. I threw it out (after wasting 2 weeks on it) and rewrote the whole system (and demo) in under two months for the first data system. Add 2 more weeks for the second. And it had minimal documentation. And built-in debugging logs. And an install package. And hooks to the unfinished help files.
So yes, if I needed a program to run in one situation ever and needed it yesterday and didn't care about maintaining it I wouldn't mind as much having a developer with no engineering background, but if I was turning something out that had to be maintained, had to run with 99.99% uptime, had to be well documented, and had to be easily upgradeable, well give me the engineer with less programming experience.
For the record my job title is Director, my degree is CS, and I have never bothered with cert's (not enough hours in the day).
Yes, but the $20 to $50 per foot of wiring has generally already been installed. You can't save the $200 for the wireless sensor if you already have truckloads of DCS equipment reading the data, talking to your overly expensive Cimplicity HMI, OPC interface, OSI PI Server, Intellution interface, RSView, etc.
While there are still manufacturing/power plants out there that are working without automation, I haven't seen one in a while. Nearly all of them have automated teir systems and are currently monitoring per-second and sub-second data. You can't say your going to save them the price of their install if they are using existing automation systems to get their alarms.
As far as the price is concerned, these companies will lay down money in the area of 6 figures to set up just the software for their automation systems at one site, I doubt they will notice the difference between cost of wiring and cost of wireless.
Think wireless in large areas. You set up a mesh network over a square mile or more and you want to make sure that even if a device or two goes down someone would still be able to make a connection (self-healing as it were). Thats where wireless mesh networking comes into play. Obviously you wouldn't have the need for this type of equipment in your home anymore than I would try to go out and setup up a large wireless MAN with Linksys home units...unless you wanted to take advantage of the fact that mesh nodes generally are higher power than your standard home node, in which case you would have better distance for your connections.
Intel tested centrino tech in their labs to be useable to 91m, I know a tech who is currently setting up a mesh network with another companies mesh nodes that has gotten plus 300m [i]through 2 houses[/i].
I don't expect Joe Sixpack to set up a mesh network (mesh would imply more than one node) because I wouldn't expect Joe sixpack to setup a neighborhood network, same difference.
Wireless mesh networks are not to far in the future, I know for a fact of several being installed in the mid-west of the US and several more tat will be installed in the next 8 months (though I can't say more about location). To say mesh etwroking is far in the future isa bit inaccurate, unless your measuring in Universal Ticks...
Better yet, and something I have been considering for a while, lets just all mail them stuff.
Coupons, blank paper, AOL CD's, etc. Anything and everything that is relatively light (cheap to mail) and totally useless (and legal). Snail spam them.
I have a place spamming me 8 times a day to buy drugs right now, I checked out their whois, did the normal email to abuse, etc. Only response was to bump up how many emails I'm getting. I think I'm going to start sending them a brick a day. i'll call it the "brick-a-day" club. I'll address it with the from and to address being theirs, then I'll include a little card to thank them for joining the "brick-a-say" club as well as the email address they are spamming. If it's a PO box they are going to get quite upset after a while (the place that rents them the box) and will force them to move on. If it doesn't work I'llupgrade them to the platinum member level- "CinderBlock-of-the-day"
Eventually something will happen, even if it is the postal inspectors looking into it or the domain registrar selling their domain due to invalid contact info, or anything. Bring on your little digital email spams, I have something for you...
First I would ay that if the boss loses control of people when they remove themselves from his immediate presence, he probably shouldn't be the boss.
Second, I agree that working from home does require a work ethic, but I think that, as in the case of the boss radius, this is something that hurts productivity whether or not the employee is at the office. Sure you will get employees that will end up working even les from home, and guess what, they'll get fired.
To the poster way down further who thought working rom home is a myth, I believe that they are simply in denial and only disbelieve because they can't do it so no one else ought to be allowed to either.
I work from home. I save an hour of commute time each day and no longer have to share an office with someone else. I have a home office setup and I still stick to the same sleep schedule. I find the biggest problem is not that I don't work enough, but instead that I often work to much. I am also a manager, so while I can't keep tabs on employees every minute of the day, I do expect them to work. I give them tasks and get daily (or even more often) updates on their progress. We set up source sharing (CVS) and have a VPN. Company cel phones mean we can be reached at our "desks", company laptop mean we can have an impromptu meeting if need be or can travel to a site and take our development/testing tools with us.
I agree that the employee with a poor work ethic would not do well in this type of environment, but I don't hire employee with poor work ethics because they cost me productivity in any environment. I rarely require my own employees to work outside oftheir schedules just because thy have access to their computers and unless we are on a heavy deadline I do my utmost to ensure they are not working on work stuff in their off time.
For the record, I'm a software engineer and designer for a small software development company with only two offices (offices as in groups of offices, not as in two desks:P) and a few partner companies. We could pay for yet another ofice space, but we don't see the purpose.
I don't see the connection your trying to draw here. How is it beter for Verizon to not hand out personal information compared to MGM allowing the ISP to act as an intermediary? True I didn't see information that COmcast argued to be an intermediary or turned down requests for personal information, or even tat MGM themselves decided to be nice and not request it.
I think in the end MGM/Comcast learned from the Verizon issue and in this case MGM contacted Comcast and asked Comcast to pass on the news. I think this is a much nicer way to face the situatio than instantly trying to drag a slew of unknown people into court. Instead you ask the ISP to warn the unknown people and ask for apologies.
Hell, it' basically a "We know your doing it, we would rather not take the time to go after you, could you please stop" type of thing.
[scene - A man standing in a white coat in front of a panel of blinking lights with a large red button. Panel attached to wall with a small viewing glass]
[Joe - frantically mashing the big button and peering through the window, laughing in a slightly mad fashion]
[Enter Bob, stage right - also dressed in a white coat]
Bob: [steady, staid tones] Joe, what are you doing?
Joe: [excited] It kept saying "Bad Disk Sector", "Bad Disk Sector", "Bad Disk Sector", so I so I threw it against the wall, then I stepped on it, then, then, then it was still in one piece so....
Bob: [still steady]: Joe, you do realize that every time you push that button it sends another electron shooting down the particle accelarator...
Joe: [laughing unsteadily and still frantically pushing button]
Bob: And each time the particle accelerator fires it uses one tenth of our available power....
Joe: [unceasing in his manic button pressing]
Bob: Are you sure we have the reserves for this?
[cue blinking light above station] [cue overhead voice] Voice: Reserve Depleted, Switching to External Power Source
Joe: [giggling] ooOooh I think I got it good that time
[cue crackling electronics]
[Cue joe stops, steps back confused]
[Cue lights down, single muffled spot on scientists]
Joe: Umm...Bob, What Happened?
Bob: I believe that was the North-East US blacking out...I'm not sure they'll be happy when we tell them you were using the particle accelerator to get even with your floppy disk
Joe: Well, well, well, we'll just tell them we were doing a study, yeah, a study on, um, maximum data transfer rates, yeah, and, um, it took longer then we thought?
I know this is on the second page and likely won't be read by many, but felt the need to interject with something that has been hinted at but not made very clear.
The issue isn't that Linux or any GPL'd software is merely a tool (or at least it shouldn't be). That isn't what makes his argument so asinine, though it is part of it.
No, the real thing that makes this statement and subsequent "stepping down" asinine and, well, stupid, is that no one decided to go to war because they were running GPL'd software.
Think about it for a second. A lot of people have made posts, both serious and humurous, about tools and not using things the military uses, but what it all boils down to is that whether or not the military was using GPL'd software, they still would have gone into Iraq.
Example: Say you have an epiphany and come up with an AI algorithm for image recognition that is centuries before it's time. You create the base objects or code to let other packages use it for whatever they want, GPL it, and release. Now the military sees this image recognition software and decides they will use it to replace current portions of their target acquisition software to make more exact hits with missiles, etc. Is it your personal fault each time one of these missiles hits a target? Think about it. Yes you software was directly responsible for that missile hitting a target BUT your softare is also responsible for it being that much more exact and reducing civilian casualties.
In the end, the military exists to fight. The military (as a conceptual group) was fighting wars before gun powder, before computers, before flight, etc. Some inventions have brought greater bloodhsed, larger wars, more frequent wars, etc.
But in creating a better version of a tool used in minimizing casualties why would you get upset at the military using it?
Obviously the previous example could be used to argue that with greater accuracy more people would be targeted by missiles than current technologies allow, etc. But the software itself does not choose to start a war.
Instead of complaining about the software being used during the war, and then also complaining about the casualties that are a result of the war, perhaps your time would be beter spent developing even more stable, reliable, and EXACT systems for the military. reduce friendly fire, reduce civilian casualties, etc.
Frankly I see this as a cheap way to get publicity and if I were the next leader of the group I was ask for him to leave as he obviouly doesn't have the groups interests in mind (GPL and the fact that he would use them to gain self-publicity) and can't string together a logical argument.
I have 5 common passwords I use for email accounts, websites, etc. I try not to use the same one for a website that I use for the email acct I give that website, but sometimes I fail:P Luckily I generally give out forwarding addresses now in stead of actual account addresses so that means fewer site admins casually reading my email for me.. My 2 main passwords each have a random core that is then altered by something machine specific. In some cases it is a portion of the network name and ip address, sometimes it is a service and name, etc.
Both of them are a result of the "slap your hands down on the keyboard and see what comes out" method, so I have a random mix of letters and numbers as the base, no words with letters replaced with numbers or any of that silliness
But my super, high security, enter this machine and the world will self-destruct password is super-duperhard to guess...ooh, candy bar, ok I give, it's God, no, really, why don't you believe m? See, here is a yellow Post-It (tm) with the word on it...no no, your looking at it backwards, and ignore the "doof" next to it and the "klim, sgge" under it...
Yep, I don't see this as a valid study or listing, they probably cross indexed the list of wireless schools with the customer list to make this one. I know for a fact that wireless coverage at my univ. was decent 3 years ago (most of the academic, some of the business section) and has only increased coverage since, but they didn't make the list at all. Might be because the website doesn't mention it, I mean why call a place whern you can jut loo kat the website and guess?
I have checked my email from the lawn, heck, i played halflife from the lawn after i figurd out which direction to face to reduce the glare on my laptop screen...maybe acording to intel it has something to do with land size rather than building percentages. I know they have only dveeloped barely 1/4th of the land they're stting on...
I think the major problem I have seen people talking about is that many building look the same. Even in controlled circumstances (ie, a user who is part of the project doing the test against maybe a few thousand buildings) I can't see how you would get back only a single correct result. Many buildings are built from the same guidelines, so the system will receive a lot of pictures of either blank walls (people taking a picture at street level of the bulding across the way) or angled images of partial skylines (anything from facing down the street parallel to the ground to perpendicular to the street facing straight up).
I'm assuming the dastabase will actually be storing numeric data on the major points that define the buildings, perhaps length of major lines, points, etc. What would then happen is an incoming picture would be reduced to the same level and type of descriptive data and compared to existing data, similar to facial recognition. The answer with the highest degree of confidence would be sent back as the 'correct' you-are-here location. The problem I see with this is that with facial recognition systems there is enough similarity in faces to create a nodal map of the human face than attempt to use those relationships as a face print, but not enough similarity to for the measured ratios to change according to distance. Once you find the eyes, nose, and mouth or other distinguishing features you have a rough idea of orientation and distance and at that point only have to scale the values. Unfortunatly with single buildings you have hundreds that are square, square, and square. Mirrored buildings may actually work better in this situation. With multiple building pictures (ie, 20 degrees-ish from parallel with the ground, facing down the street for a tunnel-like picture) you have a much higher chance of results, but the angle is going to become a significant issue. Even if your initial images are taken with a panoramic imaging system while driving down the street, then corrected for lense curvature, etc. you are still going to be facing the situation where you receive a picture that boils down to vertical line, vertical line, vertical line, vertical line. Even the higher angled pictures that included more of a city scape type image down the street would have difficulty comparing two sections of even the same city that was all tall office buildings with minimal to no architectural artistry (like wrd balcoinies every few floors, etc).
On the other hand, where I could see this working is in significantly unique surroundings, such as in front of unique buildings or on a street with relatively unique sets of buildings. Where many images will return a large group of results with similar confidance for a street of tall, new age office buildings, a street with a variety of building ages, with available cornices and all manner of architectural choices might be able to return a pretty confidant choice at multiple imaging angles even if they were not truly unique enough for an across the street photo.
It will be interesting to see what happens with this project. I think that even if it does not prove feasible in the end, pushing the limits of image recognition and current systems capabilities further will be worth it and provide us with many more opportunities in other areas.
Ah, but pretend your not you. Pretend in fact that your a slightly smarter than average computer user who has heard of Linux but would get lost on the step "Download this ISO and burn it to disk".
What Element is doing is making Linux machines targeted at people that aren't alrady more than halfway to IT people. You know, one of those things that is supposedly holding Linuc back from being adopted by mainstream arguments.
In everything I have read that started out "Linux would be great for the desktop market if..." They start off with installs and end up at support. Well, here we have a machine that my mother could use for her email, word processing, etc with phone support that isn't my phone number.
I'm wondering what kind of alterations they made to applications, but if they attempted to "wizard"-ize things like first load of the email client and stuff like that (can't get on the website, but have been there before) than they could market to the group of people that think it's all magic buttons and lights inside the case.
I work from home, which means a guaranteed 9+ hour stretch of having to be indoors. Then I get off work and have to play a few minutes of stress relief in the form of HL or BF1942. By that time I have to go sit down and relax cuz I'm tired from the long work day. After about 30 minutes of that my computer chimes and starts up Stargate, so 50/50 chance I'll watch it live rather than let it record it (I never go back to watch the recorded ones, wierd I know). Then I or my fiance makes dinner (she has now come home from work). Then I sit with her for a while, then a little more gaming or work on a side project. Then bed time.
Complete list of Leaving the House: - I smoke and my cat has fragile respiratory (projectile cat snot sucks) so I smoke outside. 15-ish trips/day tothe side patio - We just moved a month ago and have a horrendous lawn, so 3 afternoons outside doing yardwork and 1 trip to Lowes for way to expensive equipment - Food shopping. I eat better than my fiance (I grew up eating fresh food) so I have to be there to do stuff like order the deli meat and pick out fruit and such. Haven't signed up for the Lowes food delivery pogram yet:)
Food shopping and buying cigarettes are the only reoccurring trips out of the driveway. Sometimes it worries me that I don't leave as much as I used to, but one plus side is that for the first time in 6 years I am putting less than average mileage on my car...and while I do enjoy things that can't be done at my house, there are many more things that I enjoy more at my house. Plus we have pampas grass. It's evil. I cut the 12 foot one down to two feet, I feel the need for a maniacal laugh coming on....
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I thought that originally patent law was supposed to protect the individual inventor, to give them time to make some profit off of their invention rather then having to compete directly with companies that already had the resources/retail connections/whatever to produce his product, profit off of it, and leave him sitting there wondering why he bothered having the idea in the first place.
I concede that the recent flurry of corporate activity concerning IP has turned it into almost a corporate owned environment because they finally realized they could pay people to sit around and think up ideas for the company, thus pre-emptively getting rights to the IP instead of that employee getting the full rights...
Plus there is the fact that now individuals are running into stonewalls trying to create their own products (whether or not you make a dime, it is still a product) based on technology that is considered to be someone's IP.
I grant that IP is a terrible title for patents, copyrights, et al, and the corporations are running amuck with the current laws, but I fail to see how abolishing the laws that protect an individuals invention from corporate theft is really good for that individual. Yes it leads to a more open society in that there is no protection for inventions, etc, but at the same time it also means that inventors have less (read: no) incentive to continue inventing products, or if they do invent them there is no incentive to release them. At least now they are released (under protection for a time, then for all) fairly quickly. With nothing to look forward to but Big-O'l-company taking the idea and turning it into their next product line, why would individuals bother releasing it to the world at all? And if there is no incentive to the individual to create new ideas, how is society freer?
And also realize that doing away with IP rights (such as patents) does not necessarally affect the big corporations heavily in terms of patents. In fact, I think very little would change for corporations because they can always fall back on trade secrets while still screwing the little guy that invented something in his garage and has no such protections.
Saying that getting rid of IP would suddenly make a freer society is short-sighted. The commentary that various political parties weigh in stronger on one side of the argument then the other is less than meaningless without knowing exactly how the question was asked and who was asked. It boils down to opinion and FUD, ie "Democrats want a freer society and care about you and me, Republicans want a closed society and don't give a damn about you unles you own a corporation"...without getting to deep into politics, I think the recent antics by politicians on both sides of that fence tend to show they both care most about who is putting money in their pockets...
yep, thefirst challenge will be to rewrite the TopCoder interface to convince it that it does not need 100% of the CPU...that 5-10 second pauses while your typing code should NOT occur...that in a timed competition it is not reasonable to make someone go back and retype something 5 lines earlier simplybecause the interface froze up...
I mean crashes are on thing, you would expect the connection to get lost occasionally (try every time I have tried to do a practice problem), but c'mon, who hosts a coding competition with an interface that idles at 100% CPU usage?
-T
I feel your pain. The last time I had a land-line in this town was in 98 with Southern Bell. As I was moving (new place already had phone acct) I closed out the acount, went in and paid the final amount in person, and double-triple checked the account was paid off.
What do you know, in 2002 an entry showed up on my credit report for a collection ageny for $80-odd dollars that has a last activity date back in 99 but a submission date of 02. Call them up and they say they are acting on behalf of BellSouth. They have no proof that I owe any money beyond a bill from BellSouth, didn't bother attempting to contact me (a simple snail mail letter would have worked), etc, etc. My fault for calling them, I finally ended up paying them, but will never use Bellsouth again as a residential or commercial client.
I mean when the final bill and matching (dated, accepted) check from the bank aren't proof enough and they are allowed to just barf on my credit with anything they want, why bother doing business with them.
I seem to recall quite an uproar surrounding the seizure before. People yelling about the government raping the constituion, etc.
Glad I was one of the people that decided to wait and see what it was all about instead of taking it as a sign that our government was overextending itself. Not that they don't, but I'm guessing this isn't one of those times if everyone on staff got felony charges.
I'm waiting forthe same thing to occur.
IANAL but even with the move to Felony status for criminal Copyright infringement I would think there would be a gaping hole to argue right aorund the wording of:
'willfully and for purpose of commercial advantage or private financial gain.'
I mean obviously civil copyright infringement has occurred, but I would expect someone to take it on based on the financial gain angle. I mean would saying that the infringed upon company lost money (not easily proven) even qualify as financial gain for an individual if that individual did not receive money or use it to get ahead while in competition with the copyright holder?
The RICO laws seem to be begging for use in this situation...
Apreche raises a good point, mod him up (I'm mod point-les right now).
The best source of Open Source developers your going to find that will work on developiung MS products in their freetime are going to be found in the Windows user groups. These are the people that run into the little problems here and there, consistently, over and over, for weeks and weeks on end. Some of them would probably bribe you to let them get in there and fix the problems. I say some because it doesn't matter wat community your part of, there is always someone who would prefer to whine to doing real work.
So start with a small windows groups of developers. Maybe give them IE as a starting place since it is not an essential product, but rather a bundled one (ie, it doesn't directly have a price). See if you can get them interested in implementing some of the newer standards, or re-implementing CSS or the JScript DOM to match the standards. Don't ask them to help, offer limited access to a SourceShare archive and a tasklist, let them work on it as they please. I'm willing to bet you'll find a lot of work getting done, especially after one of them comes back from an especially painful application install or intranet development.
I have been in the grey area, ie not a fanatic about either Linux or Windows, for years. I develop (for work) primarily with VS.Net, with occasional Web Devel mostly aimed at IE. I prefer Linux these days simply because everything happens for a reason. With Windows it's all black magic even when I kind of know what is going on under the hood based on how the system acts. It's the difference between training Gorillas based on watchng them for several years or training chimps after being given Gods notes on how and why he built them.
-T
The problem with raising the bar for students is if the colleges (public and private) raise the bar to the type of level you suggest, they will not make as much money.
Universities, at least the portions that make decisions on admissions and such, have become businesses. They do not want to cut down the population to those that want to learn or want to be there for higher learning in a specialized field, they want every last body they can shove in the door without hurting their own statistics.
So we blame Microsoft for what was ultimately the laziness of the developers/designers of the "broken" applications?
Lets ignore the thousands of applications that didn't break and concentrate only on the ones that assumed they would get access to any ports they wanted. How much longer would it have taken to write a little error checking? Wouldn't that have made sense?
Even pre-massive-number-of-firewall products, I never would have assumed that a given port wouldn't already be in use by some other application, or even with the growth in home internet service I wouldn't assume there would even be a NIC in the machine.
A simple error catching routine could display a message explainaing that the absence of internet connectivity or blockage by firewalls could cause features x, y, and z not to work. I could write one in several languages at about 2 minutes per. New firewall on by default? Roll-out a very simple update that updates the message to supply a link to opening a port on XP if you have installed SP2.
No, this isn't Microsoft's fault for finally supplying default security, this is the fault of lazy developes or designers who tried to shortcut their way to product release.
Heh, yep. If only the API were free, that would solve all her problems.
It wouldn't conceivably increase the amount of attacks on her no longer upgraded API, it wouldn't decrease the cost of upgrading to somehting like XP, it wouldn't automatically install firewall software for her.
Please, decamp and find a real reason that making the Windows API would be a good thing. Ifthe Windows API were open and free, the only thing tat woudl change is that there would be even more exploits for this older system unless you knew where to find the couple dedicated hackers who wanted to patch together their own upgrades.
As for not being able to switch OS's, I don't see how that would be any easier if she was running Linux, except that in order to run it for the past 6 years she would have to be more familiar with all the in's and outs ofthe system, costing her the time she could have been doing other things. And switching from a Mac (or upgrading to MacOS X) would be just as much of a problem, except that Mac would cost even more to upgrade.
I'm finding the gross number of "We were so poor that..." posts kind of amusing. They all generally make the point that people that have money don't understand those that don't have it unless they themselves did not have it at one point.
Of course I see a couple of these stories and have to laugh at what people consider "poverty". Only one or two have entered the territory I consider "poverty".
In my mind, having cable takes you out of the poverty level. Having a television at all takes you out of poverty. Owning a computer takes you above poverty. Poverty means not being able to afford non-essentials like those items.
I look back and consider myself having come out of poverty around age 9 or 10 when we got a black & white TV. I remember thinking back when I was 5 or 6 and visiting the neighbors how rich they must be for having indoor lighting, plumbing, and this cool TV thing. I was 8 when we got electricity.
Granted times have changed and that was the 80's, but commodities are still commodities. The idea of poverty is that you don't have a commodity based lifestyle, that you will go hungry if you instead spend the money on unnecessary items. As much time as all of us spend on the computer, it just isn't a necessary item to continue living for the majority of the public. It is still a commodity rather then a necessity. Electricity has become more necessary, a phone is generally necessary, water is somewhat necessary, those I would qualify near the upper limits of poverty, but crossing the lines to non-necessary appliances (necessary depending on rural vs urban) means that while you may be less then middle class, you are no longer impoverished.
Even the above poster (who I wasn't singling out by posting at this level, just using it as an example), talks about how they received a washing machine from their parents who then went and bought a new one.
While I was no longer poor and had a washing machine in my house by the time I graduated highschool, there is no way I would have gotten it as a going to college present. Those things are expensive. We did have a computer at the time, but only because it was necessary to my fathers occupation.
I find myself able to get glued to the television easily now, though that is compared to 20 years ago when I didn't have a television. I went to the library. I have over 500 books on my shelves (now, then I had none). I have a bad habit of being a packrat because everything is re-useable for something. I have an infinite level of disdain for any political candidate that pretends they know what poor was like because they only got such-and-such an allowance while going to their Ivy League college after moving out of their parents mansion(s).
In 2003 a single person (roughly, this is just a guideline) had to make less then $8,980 to be considered to be in poverty. 3 people had to make less then $15,260. Spending $100 for a P3 level computer (if they have access to ebay somehow) is a stretch when it means spending 10% of their monthly income when they could eat a little better and maybe get a toy or school supplies for their kid.
Or maybe that would b my priorities and people making that little would rather eat rice and beans 24/7/4/12 and have a cheap computer. Of course, the fact that i visited many of the poorest neighborhoods quite frequently when I deliverd pizza belied that, for the majority at least.
While I agree with the general thrust of your commentary, I feel I have to point out the major fallacy in your supporting points:
"They also don't want children to wonder why they can't research papers on gay rights or learn about breast cancer"
The purpose of fighting against the proposed filtering programs twofold. One, because the ALA believes people have a right to access constitutionally protected material in a public institution, and Two, because even with a definition of obscenity/et al, the tests of filtering software show that there are many cases whee the software will let through "obscene" items while also suppressing non-"obscene", First Amendment protected items.
The reason I pointed out the particular phrase above is because it gives rhe wrong impression. The ALA does not want to support children's questioning of why materials are blocked because the basis of that statement is that materials are blocked.
I too believe in parents having to take responsibility for parenting their children, unfortunatly I am a conservative, which in these environs generally means everything I say, regardless of content or logic, is either incorrect or gross inflation of some party line.
Interesting no one else caught this, but one basis for your argument is that the companies that have ired you in the past were being dominated by non-degree programmers...as an argument that degree's are so much less important then experience, this is lacking. On the other hand, as an argument that you worked for managers that were capable of making good decisions based on limited input, you have given almost enough info.
(Don't take that the wrong way, I have just worked for enough managers that took the inverted approach:
Hmm, Action A failed 15 times already, Action B worked the last time I tried it, ok, we'll go with Action A...)
The biggest failing I have seen in self-taught developers is that while they are generally good programmers (having taught themselves due to a true interest) that is about as close as they come to Software Engineers. Software Lifecycle isn't just a Buzzword (or if it is in some circles, it isn't in mine). Defining problems in detail, writing documentation, writing specs, creating test plans and implementing them, maintainable documentation (as well as code), etc. are things that most self-taught programmers I have dealt with don't do. I don't blame them, none of that is really fun (except maybe the design part), but that is the difference between being a developer and a softare engineer, the engineering principles.
The best self-taught developer I have ever worked with had less than 2 years of experience and a masters in mechanical engineering. The worst was a badass code hacker (10-12 yrs exp at the very least) who could code in just about anything, fast...when they gave me his project he was 10 months into it, it was supposedly two demos (same front-end, differant server data sources/api's/etc) in final testing, and neither would compile. I threw it out (after wasting 2 weeks on it) and rewrote the whole system (and demo) in under two months for the first data system. Add 2 more weeks for the second. And it had minimal documentation. And built-in debugging logs. And an install package. And hooks to the unfinished help files.
So yes, if I needed a program to run in one situation ever and needed it yesterday and didn't care about maintaining it I wouldn't mind as much having a developer with no engineering background, but if I was turning something out that had to be maintained, had to run with 99.99% uptime, had to be well documented, and had to be easily upgradeable, well give me the engineer with less programming experience.
For the record my job title is Director, my degree is CS, and I have never bothered with cert's (not enough hours in the day).
Yes, but the $20 to $50 per foot of wiring has generally already been installed. You can't save the $200 for the wireless sensor if you already have truckloads of DCS equipment reading the data, talking to your overly expensive Cimplicity HMI, OPC interface, OSI PI Server, Intellution interface, RSView, etc.
While there are still manufacturing/power plants out there that are working without automation, I haven't seen one in a while. Nearly all of them have automated teir systems and are currently monitoring per-second and sub-second data. You can't say your going to save them the price of their install if they are using existing automation systems to get their alarms.
As far as the price is concerned, these companies will lay down money in the area of 6 figures to set up just the software for their automation systems at one site, I doubt they will notice the difference between cost of wiring and cost of wireless.
Think wireless in large areas. You set up a mesh network over a square mile or more and you want to make sure that even if a device or two goes down someone would still be able to make a connection (self-healing as it were). Thats where wireless mesh networking comes into play.
Obviously you wouldn't have the need for this type of equipment in your home anymore than I would try to go out and setup up a large wireless MAN with Linksys home units...unless you wanted to take advantage of the fact that mesh nodes generally are higher power than your standard home node, in which case you would have better distance for your connections.
Intel tested centrino tech in their labs to be useable to 91m, I know a tech who is currently setting up a mesh network with another companies mesh nodes that has gotten plus 300m [i]through 2 houses[/i].
I don't expect Joe Sixpack to set up a mesh network (mesh would imply more than one node) because I wouldn't expect Joe sixpack to setup a neighborhood network, same difference.
-T
Wireless mesh networks are not to far in the future, I know for a fact of several being installed in the mid-west of the US and several more tat will be installed in the next 8 months (though I can't say more about location).
To say mesh etwroking is far in the future isa bit inaccurate, unless your measuring in Universal Ticks...
-T
Better yet, and something I have been considering for a while, lets just all mail them stuff.
Coupons, blank paper, AOL CD's, etc. Anything and everything that is relatively light (cheap to mail) and totally useless (and legal). Snail spam them.
I have a place spamming me 8 times a day to buy drugs right now, I checked out their whois, did the normal email to abuse, etc. Only response was to bump up how many emails I'm getting. I think I'm going to start sending them a brick a day. i'll call it the "brick-a-day" club. I'll address it with the from and to address being theirs, then I'll include a little card to thank them for joining the "brick-a-say" club as well as the email address they are spamming. If it's a PO box they are going to get quite upset after a while (the place that rents them the box) and will force them to move on. If it doesn't work I'llupgrade them to the platinum member level- "CinderBlock-of-the-day"
Eventually something will happen, even if it is the postal inspectors looking into it or the domain registrar selling their domain due to invalid contact info, or anything. Bring on your little digital email spams, I have something for you...
-T
First I would ay that if the boss loses control of people when they remove themselves from his immediate presence, he probably shouldn't be the boss.
:P) and a few partner companies. We could pay for yet another ofice space, but we don't see the purpose.
Second, I agree that working from home does require a work ethic, but I think that, as in the case of the boss radius, this is something that hurts productivity whether or not the employee is at the office. Sure you will get employees that will end up working even les from home, and guess what, they'll get fired.
To the poster way down further who thought working rom home is a myth, I believe that they are simply in denial and only disbelieve because they can't do it so no one else ought to be allowed to either.
I work from home. I save an hour of commute time each day and no longer have to share an office with someone else. I have a home office setup and I still stick to the same sleep schedule. I find the biggest problem is not that I don't work enough, but instead that I often work to much. I am also a manager, so while I can't keep tabs on employees every minute of the day, I do expect them to work. I give them tasks and get daily (or even more often) updates on their progress. We set up source sharing (CVS) and have a VPN. Company cel phones mean we can be reached at our "desks", company laptop mean we can have an impromptu meeting if need be or can travel to a site and take our development/testing tools with us.
I agree that the employee with a poor work ethic would not do well in this type of environment, but I don't hire employee with poor work ethics because they cost me productivity in any environment. I rarely require my own employees to work outside oftheir schedules just because thy have access to their computers and unless we are on a heavy deadline I do my utmost to ensure they are not working on work stuff in their off time.
For the record, I'm a software engineer and designer for a small software development company with only two offices (offices as in groups of offices, not as in two desks
-T
I don't see the connection your trying to draw here. How is it beter for Verizon to not hand out personal information compared to MGM allowing the ISP to act as an intermediary? True I didn't see information that COmcast argued to be an intermediary or turned down requests for personal information, or even tat MGM themselves decided to be nice and not request it.
I think in the end MGM/Comcast learned from the Verizon issue and in this case MGM contacted Comcast and asked Comcast to pass on the news. I think this is a much nicer way to face the situatio than instantly trying to drag a slew of unknown people into court. Instead you ask the ISP to warn the unknown people and ask for apologies.
Hell, it' basically a "We know your doing it, we would rather not take the time to go after you, could you please stop" type of thing.
[scene - A man standing in a white coat in front of a panel of blinking lights with a large red button. Panel attached to wall with a small viewing glass]
:)
[Joe - frantically mashing the big button and peering through the window, laughing in a slightly mad fashion]
[Enter Bob, stage right - also dressed in a white coat]
Bob: [steady, staid tones] Joe, what are you doing?
Joe: [excited] It kept saying "Bad Disk Sector", "Bad Disk Sector", "Bad Disk Sector", so I so I threw it against the wall, then I stepped on it, then, then, then it was still in one piece so....
Bob: [still steady]: Joe, you do realize that every time you push that button it sends another electron shooting down the particle accelarator...
Joe: [laughing unsteadily and still frantically pushing button]
Bob: And each time the particle accelerator fires it uses one tenth of our available power....
Joe: [unceasing in his manic button pressing]
Bob: Are you sure we have the reserves for this?
[cue blinking light above station]
[cue overhead voice]
Voice: Reserve Depleted, Switching to External Power Source
Joe: [giggling] ooOooh I think I got it good that time
[cue crackling electronics]
[Cue joe stops, steps back confused]
[Cue lights down, single muffled spot on scientists]
Joe: Umm...Bob, What Happened?
Bob: I believe that was the North-East US blacking out...I'm not sure they'll be happy when we tell them you were using the particle accelerator to get even with your floppy disk
Joe: Well, well, well, we'll just tell them we were doing a study, yeah, a study on, um, maximum data transfer rates, yeah, and, um, it took longer then we thought?
[cue final lights down]
I know this is on the second page and likely won't be read by many, but felt the need to interject with something that has been hinted at but not made very clear.
The issue isn't that Linux or any GPL'd software is merely a tool (or at least it shouldn't be). That isn't what makes his argument so asinine, though it is part of it.
No, the real thing that makes this statement and subsequent "stepping down" asinine and, well, stupid, is that no one decided to go to war because they were running GPL'd software.
Think about it for a second. A lot of people have made posts, both serious and humurous, about tools and not using things the military uses, but what it all boils down to is that whether or not the military was using GPL'd software, they still would have gone into Iraq.
Example: Say you have an epiphany and come up with an AI algorithm for image recognition that is centuries before it's time. You create the base objects or code to let other packages use it for whatever they want, GPL it, and release.
Now the military sees this image recognition software and decides they will use it to replace current portions of their target acquisition software to make more exact hits with missiles, etc.
Is it your personal fault each time one of these missiles hits a target? Think about it. Yes you software was directly responsible for that missile hitting a target BUT your softare is also responsible for it being that much more exact and reducing civilian casualties.
In the end, the military exists to fight. The military (as a conceptual group) was fighting wars before gun powder, before computers, before flight, etc. Some inventions have brought greater bloodhsed, larger wars, more frequent wars, etc.
But in creating a better version of a tool used in minimizing casualties why would you get upset at the military using it?
Obviously the previous example could be used to argue that with greater accuracy more people would be targeted by missiles than current technologies allow, etc. But the software itself does not choose to start a war.
Instead of complaining about the software being used during the war, and then also complaining about the casualties that are a result of the war, perhaps your time would be beter spent developing even more stable, reliable, and EXACT systems for the military. reduce friendly fire, reduce civilian casualties, etc.
Frankly I see this as a cheap way to get publicity and if I were the next leader of the group I was ask for him to leave as he obviouly doesn't have the groups interests in mind (GPL and the fact that he would use them to gain self-publicity) and can't string together a logical argument.
I have 5 common passwords I use for email accounts, websites, etc. I try not to use the same one for a website that I use for the email acct I give that website, but sometimes I fail :P Luckily I generally give out forwarding addresses now in stead of actual account addresses so that means fewer site admins casually reading my email for me..
My 2 main passwords each have a random core that is then altered by something machine specific. In some cases it is a portion of the network name and ip address, sometimes it is a service and name, etc.
Both of them are a result of the "slap your hands down on the keyboard and see what comes out" method, so I have a random mix of letters and numbers as the base, no words with letters replaced with numbers or any of that silliness
But my super, high security, enter this machine and the world will self-destruct password is super-duperhard to guess...ooh, candy bar, ok I give, it's God, no, really, why don't you believe m? See, here is a yellow Post-It (tm) with the word on it...no no, your looking at it backwards, and ignore the "doof" next to it and the "klim, sgge" under it...
Yep, I don't see this as a valid study or listing, they probably cross indexed the list of wireless schools with the customer list to make this one.
I know for a fact that wireless coverage at my univ. was decent 3 years ago (most of the academic, some of the business section) and has only increased coverage since, but they didn't make the list at all.
Might be because the website doesn't mention it, I mean why call a place whern you can jut loo kat the website and guess?
I have checked my email from the lawn, heck, i played halflife from the lawn after i figurd out which direction to face to reduce the glare on my laptop screen...maybe acording to intel it has something to do with land size rather than building percentages. I know they have only dveeloped barely 1/4th of the land they're stting on...
I think the major problem I have seen people talking about is that many building look the same. Even in controlled circumstances (ie, a user who is part of the project doing the test against maybe a few thousand buildings) I can't see how you would get back only a single correct result.
Many buildings are built from the same guidelines, so the system will receive a lot of pictures of either blank walls (people taking a picture at street level of the bulding across the way) or angled images of partial skylines (anything from facing down the street parallel to the ground to perpendicular to the street facing straight up).
I'm assuming the dastabase will actually be storing numeric data on the major points that define the buildings, perhaps length of major lines, points, etc. What would then happen is an incoming picture would be reduced to the same level and type of descriptive data and compared to existing data, similar to facial recognition. The answer with the highest degree of confidence would be sent back as the 'correct' you-are-here location.
The problem I see with this is that with facial recognition systems there is enough similarity in faces to create a nodal map of the human face than attempt to use those relationships as a face print, but not enough similarity to for the measured ratios to change according to distance. Once you find the eyes, nose, and mouth or other distinguishing features you have a rough idea of orientation and distance and at that point only have to scale the values.
Unfortunatly with single buildings you have hundreds that are square, square, and square. Mirrored buildings may actually work better in this situation.
With multiple building pictures (ie, 20 degrees-ish from parallel with the ground, facing down the street for a tunnel-like picture) you have a much higher chance of results, but the angle is going to become a significant issue. Even if your initial images are taken with a panoramic imaging system while driving down the street, then corrected for lense curvature, etc. you are still going to be facing the situation where you receive a picture that boils down to vertical line, vertical line, vertical line, vertical line. Even the higher angled pictures that included more of a city scape type image down the street would have difficulty comparing two sections of even the same city that was all tall office buildings with minimal to no architectural artistry (like wrd balcoinies every few floors, etc).
On the other hand, where I could see this working is in significantly unique surroundings, such as in front of unique buildings or on a street with relatively unique sets of buildings. Where many images will return a large group of results with similar confidance for a street of tall, new age office buildings, a street with a variety of building ages, with available cornices and all manner of architectural choices might be able to return a pretty confidant choice at multiple imaging angles even if they were not truly unique enough for an across the street photo.
It will be interesting to see what happens with this project. I think that even if it does not prove feasible in the end, pushing the limits of image recognition and current systems capabilities further will be worth it and provide us with many more opportunities in other areas.
Ah, but pretend your not you. Pretend in fact that your a slightly smarter than average computer user who has heard of Linux but would get lost on the step "Download this ISO and burn it to disk".
What Element is doing is making Linux machines targeted at people that aren't alrady more than halfway to IT people. You know, one of those things that is supposedly holding Linuc back from being adopted by mainstream arguments.
In everything I have read that started out "Linux would be great for the desktop market if..." They start off with installs and end up at support. Well, here we have a machine that my mother could use for her email, word processing, etc with phone support that isn't my phone number.
I'm wondering what kind of alterations they made to applications, but if they attempted to "wizard"-ize things like first load of the email client and stuff like that (can't get on the website, but have been there before) than they could market to the group of people that think it's all magic buttons and lights inside the case.
I work from home, which means a guaranteed 9+ hour stretch of having to be indoors. Then I get off work and have to play a few minutes of stress relief in the form of HL or BF1942. By that time I have to go sit down and relax cuz I'm tired from the long work day. After about 30 minutes of that my computer chimes and starts up Stargate, so 50/50 chance I'll watch it live rather than let it record it (I never go back to watch the recorded ones, wierd I know). Then I or my fiance makes dinner (she has now come home from work). Then I sit with her for a while, then a little more gaming or work on a side project. Then bed time.
:)
Complete list of Leaving the House:
- I smoke and my cat has fragile respiratory (projectile cat snot sucks) so I smoke outside. 15-ish trips/day tothe side patio
- We just moved a month ago and have a horrendous lawn, so 3 afternoons outside doing yardwork and 1 trip to Lowes for way to expensive equipment
- Food shopping. I eat better than my fiance (I grew up eating fresh food) so I have to be there to do stuff like order the deli meat and pick out fruit and such. Haven't signed up for the Lowes food delivery pogram yet
Food shopping and buying cigarettes are the only reoccurring trips out of the driveway. Sometimes it worries me that I don't leave as much as I used to, but one plus side is that for the first time in 6 years I am putting less than average mileage on my car...and while I do enjoy things that can't be done at my house, there are many more things that I enjoy more at my house. Plus we have pampas grass. It's evil. I cut the 12 foot one down to two feet, I feel the need for a maniacal laugh coming on....