Agreed. If I was only in a place for two days or less, then I almost never got any work done, except for maybe an hour or less at the train station or airport.
I never had anyone ever ask me to access my computer, and I've had my fair share on enhanced pat downs. But yes, definitely use the feature to have your hard drive encrypted, since all your banking info etc will be on it.
If you stay at a hostel first, then you'll make friends to hang out with later, when you've moved into a short term lease apartment. Might even find flat mates. You don't want to miss out on the social connections of hostels while traveling for 2-3 years.
I found that when you have exciting things to do, then you really focus on working when you are working. You don't mess around on the Internet when you could instead be at the beach or partying. It's funny, when everyone else is bitching about bad weather, you're glad because that's the perfect time to work, and make more money for more fun later.
Traveling while working allows you to not just visit places, but stay for weeks and months, and get to experience actually living there. When you first arrive at a place, it usually only takes 3-5 days to see all the top sights. The thing is, you won't know until you're actually there if it's a place you would like to stay longer in, or if that's good enough, and you can move on. So planning ahead to segregate time as travel or life isn't necessarily doable. And instead of spurting between making money and spending money, it's a lot easier to budget with a semi-stable income and expense profile.
I recently did this myself, traveled for a year and a half through Europe, Australia and Hawaii, while writing software to pay the bills. It was much easier than saving up that much money before hand, and the work was more stable and dependable than trying to find temporary work at each new location. I stuck to countries with good Internet access, where I didn't have to worry about getting mugged or my rig stolen.
Some hostels provide free wifi, but in many cases it's painfully slow, and many hostels charge for wifi, but it can often be by the hour or for really small amounts of data. Basically they're assuming that you're just emailing and facebooking. Many do have a quiet area, but it might not be setup well for plugging in a laptop, and ergonomically sitting there for hours at a time. What worked best for me was to plan on participating with the other hostelers at all the peak times, such as the shared breakfast and possibly shared dinner times, and either afternoon treks or late night partying. Then I worked in all the gaps in-between, usually the late morning, afternoons, and before supper. Staying in the hostel quiet area all that time was very unappealing, so I would use any rooftop patio, or cafe, or pubs that aren't busy and so will allow you to camp out for hours after you've finished your meal, if asked nicely. Libraries are very good, as well as any post secondary schools that might be nearby. When I found a cafe with good wifi, I would return often, and they would usually accommodate me, even asking other patrons to move for me so I could access a plugin!
Since not every place has good cheap/free wifi, it quickly became necessary to get local SIMs for my iPhone, and get data plans that allow for tethering. Luckily in most places outside of North America, getting 1 GB pay as you go is pretty cheap and easy. At times I got 1.5 or 3 GB. It did take some effort to make sure that a wireless provider allowed both tethering and VPN through that tethering, so I could access my company's intranet for SVN etc. Also, having a local SIM will facilitate with communicating with fellow hostelers and locals that you meet. People seem to mostly stick to SMS, WhatsApp, iMessage and Facebook for messaging and coordinating meeting up.
I always kept a very current Time Machine backup of my computer, which I stored separately from my computer bag, which saved the day when my computer did eventually get stolen. Don't rely on a computer that you can't afford to replace. If you can, keep your home insurance up, to cover your possessions abroad, like I did. Also, I use CrashPlan for an offsite backup, in case I lost everything. This helped get back my very most recent work that I hadn't yet backed up to my Time Machine. But beware, your data plan or limited wifi will not readily support regular backing up everything. I added rules to CrashPlan to not backup any temporary or built files, and I would regularly use the feature that allows suspending backing up for several hours, until I was back on a free wifi. Also, don't let your computer automatically download updates. It can take a while for an online backup service to upload everything for the first complete backup, so start that process well before leaving. I used Mozy first, and didn't like how slow it was and the trouble I had restoring files, so I needed to start all over again with CrashPlan. Also, a padded water proof or resistant computer case is a must. Many times I went to a cafe it wasn't raining, but on my return it was. Always lock up your computer in your locker in your room. Not every hostel has lockers in the rooms.
The main thing, is to not shut yourself off from the other backpackers, but to find a balance of socialising, seeing all the sights, relaxing, and also fitting in your work that will pay the bills. This way you will have an even better time than those who are not working but must live within a tight budget as they're burning through their savings.
If everything was sourced this way, we'd be better able to see if multiple sources were all in agreement, or if a single source was being disproportionately referenced.
If your document relies on another document, then your server could cache that other document, and serve it up. That way it's fault tolerant, and version preserving. Then the browser could provide a way to link to the other document's real URL, and show if it's still available, and how it's changed since then. It could summarise the deltas to the quoted portion of the document, and the document a a whole.
So you need to link to a version of the document. That way if/when it changes, your original intent is preserved, and then the user can follow the version history to what's current, to also see what has changed. And if the links are bidirectional, then there's a mechanism for you to know that what you quoted has been updated, so you can then know if you have to revise your own document.
So, for example, if your document was about treating ulcers, and you linked to a document about the causes of ulcers, then when they figured out that ulcers were caused by bacteria, and updated their document, that bidirectional link could provide a means for you to be notified to update your treatment document. Version 1 of your treatment document would be consistent with version 1 of the causes document, and your version 2 could then be consistent with their version 2.
This would then reflect the changing nature of our understanding of the world, and facilitate rippling new information from one area across all other related areas.
With DRAM, you have to power the memory, or it loses the data. You would have to use a completely different type of memory to actually power it down, regardless of whether it's currently being read from or written to.
Actually, they are. Basically, they're taking what's ready, or close to ready, and releasing that as Java 7, and then releasing the stuff that won't be ready for more than a year as Java 8.
I think we're actually agreeing on how open source software models work. I'm just acknowledging that what balances out the risk of giving up control is that there's an inherent inertia towards customers staying with you. If the inherent momentum was away, then no one would do it. And it's not so much a problem with facing competition, the problem is when someone takes the open product and gives it away for free, since their efforts are subsidised by some other revenue stream (like Google's advertising). In effect, they're leveraging one business into another. And that's a game that not everyone can play, especially not small players.
I've commented elsewhere that Sun should have known better. But they were probably busy fighting the last war, like everyone does. They were fighting Microsoft on the server and the desktop, and didn't realise the battle had shifted to the cellphone. They ignored Moore's Law, and lost.
I'm just pointing out that the legalities are less relevant. Sun's fate is less relevant. We should be concerned about the future of the open source business model, which I'm concerned that Google has fractured.
The cell phone market is now completely embroiled in litigation. Just about every company in that space is now involved in several patent lawsuits. It's going to be interesting to see what the outcome will be. Personally I believe in patents, but only when they follow the non-obvious, no prior art rule. But I can see why people are against them, when the are de facto not following the rules.
The First Google phone was released around a year ago, and so it itself must have been in development for a while, and Android must have been in development for at least a year or two before that. With Java, things were looking bright with OpenJDK, and all the JSRs that were shaping Java 1.5 and 1.6 were very community driven. And then Apache started complaining about getting locked out of the tests. So, maybe it was related to Android, and maybe it was just the pandora's box that Apache was opening.
It's bizarrely ludicrous to say that Google could have made exactly the same thing, which is a clone of Java, had Java not laid out all the pieces in the open. And that doesn't address the simple question of, why did they try to make a Java clone, why didn't they just make their own unique thing, if they could have done this all on their own. Obviously they're benefiting somehow, and leveraging something, if they're bothering to clone Java instead of simply using their own language and libraries and vm. Why didn't they use Go?
Java solves very specific problems that require PhD level input, and take a lot of community feedback to get exactly right for everyone. To say that Google could have just pulled them out of their ass, and didn't hugely benefit from absconding with that, is so beyond clueless. How many man years of effort would it take to replicate these features, without in any way copying, or reading, or learning from Java code:
- The Calendar functionality of handling Gregorian calendars and all the lunar calendars, for all the timezones, with all the ever changing day light savings rules.
- All the localisation rules of the hundreds of countries in the world, for their currencies, times, dates, decimal values, etc.
- The IEEE floating point standard, which even the hardware implementations have bugs in, which have to be worked around, as optimally as possible.
[Those are the most detail oriented features I can think of before getting back to work, that have zero glitzy flash to them, which have to be exactly right, in bazillions of cases, that took years and years to implement. There are thousands of other examples in the class libraries of other problems they've solved]
Keep in mind that Google leveraged both Linux and Java, which each solve many of these issues (except floating point), and so Google has no track record of solving these kinds of problems. And they've been refined over 15 years in Java alone. So to say that Google could just throw all that together, on their own, in a timely fashion, is really naive.
I think that the open source product model is inherently brittle. You're hoping that the additional market uptake, from it being open, will offset the risk of someone forking your code and competing against you. Typically, people don't, since you're the established name, and probably understand the code better, and can add new functionality faster than anyone else who's come later to the game. But it's still a risk.
In this particular case, Java and the JVM have existed long enough, that outsiders have gained sufficient expertise, that they can compete against the originating company. And that's been exasperated by the code being more open and more available. Along comes Google, who doesn't actually have to compete with Sun, in that they don't have to directly sell their Java derived product, instead they can give it away, as they plan on making money from the apps and the advertising. So now, we've established that the open source model isn't so much threatened by direct competition, as it is from orthogonal businesses, who will take it and dissolve your market as they make money in some other, indirect way.
So while I'm generally against software patents (especially the patent troll scenario of the patent holder not having implemented anything, which is not the case here), I first and foremost want my field to be a place where people can actually make a living, and not have everything stolen out from underneath them.
Everyone here seems to revel in their little lawyer ability to talk about copyright and patents. That's great, I'm glad we're all educated about that. But it seems to be getting in the way of comprehending the simple situation of someone absconding with other's work, and collapsing their revenue stream, and how that could drastically affect future investment and development for the entire industry.
But yes, let's continue on the discussion of the specifics. Google (via Harmony) copied the java libraries. That's alright, because it's open source. And it's even more alright, because they did it clean-room reverse engineered. But, don't tell me for a second that the source being open didn't help those clean room efforts. There are tonnes of APIs that are just not sufficiently javadoc'd to get the exact same behaviour. The untainted reverse engineers can still ask questions which tainted people can answer, because the tainted people have a better understanding of the libraries, from having seen the code. And the people who've made the Java -> dex conversion, and the people who've worked on Dalvik have definitely read some of the source, and benefited from it. So, clearly, openning the source could only be done, with a hope of continuing to maintain the IP, by relying on the software patents. Without them, Sun would have been idiots to open anything up at all ala GPL.
With your WINE example, it's actually completely different, in how it actually affects Windows. Windows is a near monopoly that has resisted a lot of direct competition. WINE will never collapse their market. And WINE doesn't somehow corrupt and fork Windows, it actually tries to be as compatible as possible. Google is taking the Java community of developers, and guiding them to make apps that will not work in a JVM. They are taking and removing from the Java community. WINE reinforces the Windows community. It actually makes people less likely to develop for Linux, and instead target Windows, and tell people to run WINE. So while Microsoft might lose some box sales of Windows because of it, their developer community and market as a whole, are reinforced by it.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree, I'm a Candian and I use spelt, as well as kamut.
An ancient Eastern knowledge, predating our modern string theory by millenia!
Agreed. If I was only in a place for two days or less, then I almost never got any work done, except for maybe an hour or less at the train station or airport.
Think of it not as an alternative to vacation/traveling, but an alternative to living/working in the same city you always have.
I never had anyone ever ask me to access my computer, and I've had my fair share on enhanced pat downs. But yes, definitely use the feature to have your hard drive encrypted, since all your banking info etc will be on it.
If you stay at a hostel first, then you'll make friends to hang out with later, when you've moved into a short term lease apartment. Might even find flat mates. You don't want to miss out on the social connections of hostels while traveling for 2-3 years.
I found that when you have exciting things to do, then you really focus on working when you are working. You don't mess around on the Internet when you could instead be at the beach or partying. It's funny, when everyone else is bitching about bad weather, you're glad because that's the perfect time to work, and make more money for more fun later.
Traveling while working allows you to not just visit places, but stay for weeks and months, and get to experience actually living there. When you first arrive at a place, it usually only takes 3-5 days to see all the top sights. The thing is, you won't know until you're actually there if it's a place you would like to stay longer in, or if that's good enough, and you can move on. So planning ahead to segregate time as travel or life isn't necessarily doable. And instead of spurting between making money and spending money, it's a lot easier to budget with a semi-stable income and expense profile.
I recently did this myself, traveled for a year and a half through Europe, Australia and Hawaii, while writing software to pay the bills. It was much easier than saving up that much money before hand, and the work was more stable and dependable than trying to find temporary work at each new location. I stuck to countries with good Internet access, where I didn't have to worry about getting mugged or my rig stolen.
Some hostels provide free wifi, but in many cases it's painfully slow, and many hostels charge for wifi, but it can often be by the hour or for really small amounts of data. Basically they're assuming that you're just emailing and facebooking. Many do have a quiet area, but it might not be setup well for plugging in a laptop, and ergonomically sitting there for hours at a time. What worked best for me was to plan on participating with the other hostelers at all the peak times, such as the shared breakfast and possibly shared dinner times, and either afternoon treks or late night partying. Then I worked in all the gaps in-between, usually the late morning, afternoons, and before supper. Staying in the hostel quiet area all that time was very unappealing, so I would use any rooftop patio, or cafe, or pubs that aren't busy and so will allow you to camp out for hours after you've finished your meal, if asked nicely. Libraries are very good, as well as any post secondary schools that might be nearby. When I found a cafe with good wifi, I would return often, and they would usually accommodate me, even asking other patrons to move for me so I could access a plugin!
Since not every place has good cheap/free wifi, it quickly became necessary to get local SIMs for my iPhone, and get data plans that allow for tethering. Luckily in most places outside of North America, getting 1 GB pay as you go is pretty cheap and easy. At times I got 1.5 or 3 GB. It did take some effort to make sure that a wireless provider allowed both tethering and VPN through that tethering, so I could access my company's intranet for SVN etc. Also, having a local SIM will facilitate with communicating with fellow hostelers and locals that you meet. People seem to mostly stick to SMS, WhatsApp, iMessage and Facebook for messaging and coordinating meeting up.
I always kept a very current Time Machine backup of my computer, which I stored separately from my computer bag, which saved the day when my computer did eventually get stolen. Don't rely on a computer that you can't afford to replace. If you can, keep your home insurance up, to cover your possessions abroad, like I did. Also, I use CrashPlan for an offsite backup, in case I lost everything. This helped get back my very most recent work that I hadn't yet backed up to my Time Machine. But beware, your data plan or limited wifi will not readily support regular backing up everything. I added rules to CrashPlan to not backup any temporary or built files, and I would regularly use the feature that allows suspending backing up for several hours, until I was back on a free wifi. Also, don't let your computer automatically download updates. It can take a while for an online backup service to upload everything for the first complete backup, so start that process well before leaving. I used Mozy first, and didn't like how slow it was and the trouble I had restoring files, so I needed to start all over again with CrashPlan. Also, a padded water proof or resistant computer case is a must. Many times I went to a cafe it wasn't raining, but on my return it was. Always lock up your computer in your locker in your room. Not every hostel has lockers in the rooms.
The main thing, is to not shut yourself off from the other backpackers, but to find a balance of socialising, seeing all the sights, relaxing, and also fitting in your work that will pay the bills. This way you will have an even better time than those who are not working but must live within a tight budget as they're burning through their savings.
That sounds more like a poor communication of exactly what to measure.
Or perhaps they meant Chrome OS Gnu / Linux?
You're repeating Nazi propaganda. Are you in the Hitler Youth or something?
O, then mark that link as no-cache, and then it's unstable, but whatever, that's the price you pay.
Also, the partial quoting as inlined content that he suggests would probably fall under fair use if it's small enough.
If everything was sourced this way, we'd be better able to see if multiple sources were all in agreement, or if a single source was being disproportionately referenced.
If your document relies on another document, then your server could cache that other document, and serve it up. That way it's fault tolerant, and version preserving. Then the browser could provide a way to link to the other document's real URL, and show if it's still available, and how it's changed since then. It could summarise the deltas to the quoted portion of the document, and the document a a whole.
So you need to link to a version of the document. That way if/when it changes, your original intent is preserved, and then the user can follow the version history to what's current, to also see what has changed. And if the links are bidirectional, then there's a mechanism for you to know that what you quoted has been updated, so you can then know if you have to revise your own document.
So, for example, if your document was about treating ulcers, and you linked to a document about the causes of ulcers, then when they figured out that ulcers were caused by bacteria, and updated their document, that bidirectional link could provide a means for you to be notified to update your treatment document. Version 1 of your treatment document would be consistent with version 1 of the causes document, and your version 2 could then be consistent with their version 2.
This would then reflect the changing nature of our understanding of the world, and facilitate rippling new information from one area across all other related areas.
With DRAM, you have to power the memory, or it loses the data. You would have to use a completely different type of memory to actually power it down, regardless of whether it's currently being read from or written to.
Actually, they are. Basically, they're taking what's ready, or close to ready, and releasing that as Java 7, and then releasing the stuff that won't be ready for more than a year as Java 8.
These are Oracle's plans for Java:
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/java/java-platform-2010-174690.html?msgid=3-2517886426txt
These are Oracle's plans for Java:
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/java/java-platform-2010-174690.html?msgid=3-2517886426txt
These are Oracle's plans for Java:
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/java/java-platform-2010-174690.html?msgid=3-2517886426txt
I think we're actually agreeing on how open source software models work. I'm just acknowledging that what balances out the risk of giving up control is that there's an inherent inertia towards customers staying with you. If the inherent momentum was away, then no one would do it. And it's not so much a problem with facing competition, the problem is when someone takes the open product and gives it away for free, since their efforts are subsidised by some other revenue stream (like Google's advertising). In effect, they're leveraging one business into another. And that's a game that not everyone can play, especially not small players.
I've commented elsewhere that Sun should have known better. But they were probably busy fighting the last war, like everyone does. They were fighting Microsoft on the server and the desktop, and didn't realise the battle had shifted to the cellphone. They ignored Moore's Law, and lost.
I'm just pointing out that the legalities are less relevant. Sun's fate is less relevant. We should be concerned about the future of the open source business model, which I'm concerned that Google has fractured.
The cell phone market is now completely embroiled in litigation. Just about every company in that space is now involved in several patent lawsuits. It's going to be interesting to see what the outcome will be. Personally I believe in patents, but only when they follow the non-obvious, no prior art rule. But I can see why people are against them, when the are de facto not following the rules.
The First Google phone was released around a year ago, and so it itself must have been in development for a while, and Android must have been in development for at least a year or two before that. With Java, things were looking bright with OpenJDK, and all the JSRs that were shaping Java 1.5 and 1.6 were very community driven. And then Apache started complaining about getting locked out of the tests. So, maybe it was related to Android, and maybe it was just the pandora's box that Apache was opening.
I'm reading a lot of black and white in your comment.
Your great grand parent post explains exactly how Harmony and Google have taken from Java, and how that was enabled by the code being open.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1818368&cid=33878852
It's bizarrely ludicrous to say that Google could have made exactly the same thing, which is a clone of Java, had Java not laid out all the pieces in the open. And that doesn't address the simple question of, why did they try to make a Java clone, why didn't they just make their own unique thing, if they could have done this all on their own. Obviously they're benefiting somehow, and leveraging something, if they're bothering to clone Java instead of simply using their own language and libraries and vm. Why didn't they use Go?
Java solves very specific problems that require PhD level input, and take a lot of community feedback to get exactly right for everyone. To say that Google could have just pulled them out of their ass, and didn't hugely benefit from absconding with that, is so beyond clueless. How many man years of effort would it take to replicate these features, without in any way copying, or reading, or learning from Java code:
- The Calendar functionality of handling Gregorian calendars and all the lunar calendars, for all the timezones, with all the ever changing day light savings rules.
- All the localisation rules of the hundreds of countries in the world, for their currencies, times, dates, decimal values, etc.
- The IEEE floating point standard, which even the hardware implementations have bugs in, which have to be worked around, as optimally as possible.
[Those are the most detail oriented features I can think of before getting back to work, that have zero glitzy flash to them, which have to be exactly right, in bazillions of cases, that took years and years to implement. There are thousands of other examples in the class libraries of other problems they've solved]
Keep in mind that Google leveraged both Linux and Java, which each solve many of these issues (except floating point), and so Google has no track record of solving these kinds of problems. And they've been refined over 15 years in Java alone. So to say that Google could just throw all that together, on their own, in a timely fashion, is really naive.
I think that the open source product model is inherently brittle. You're hoping that the additional market uptake, from it being open, will offset the risk of someone forking your code and competing against you. Typically, people don't, since you're the established name, and probably understand the code better, and can add new functionality faster than anyone else who's come later to the game. But it's still a risk.
In this particular case, Java and the JVM have existed long enough, that outsiders have gained sufficient expertise, that they can compete against the originating company. And that's been exasperated by the code being more open and more available. Along comes Google, who doesn't actually have to compete with Sun, in that they don't have to directly sell their Java derived product, instead they can give it away, as they plan on making money from the apps and the advertising. So now, we've established that the open source model isn't so much threatened by direct competition, as it is from orthogonal businesses, who will take it and dissolve your market as they make money in some other, indirect way.
So while I'm generally against software patents (especially the patent troll scenario of the patent holder not having implemented anything, which is not the case here), I first and foremost want my field to be a place where people can actually make a living, and not have everything stolen out from underneath them.
Everyone here seems to revel in their little lawyer ability to talk about copyright and patents. That's great, I'm glad we're all educated about that. But it seems to be getting in the way of comprehending the simple situation of someone absconding with other's work, and collapsing their revenue stream, and how that could drastically affect future investment and development for the entire industry.
But yes, let's continue on the discussion of the specifics. Google (via Harmony) copied the java libraries. That's alright, because it's open source. And it's even more alright, because they did it clean-room reverse engineered. But, don't tell me for a second that the source being open didn't help those clean room efforts. There are tonnes of APIs that are just not sufficiently javadoc'd to get the exact same behaviour. The untainted reverse engineers can still ask questions which tainted people can answer, because the tainted people have a better understanding of the libraries, from having seen the code. And the people who've made the Java -> dex conversion, and the people who've worked on Dalvik have definitely read some of the source, and benefited from it. So, clearly, openning the source could only be done, with a hope of continuing to maintain the IP, by relying on the software patents. Without them, Sun would have been idiots to open anything up at all ala GPL.
With your WINE example, it's actually completely different, in how it actually affects Windows. Windows is a near monopoly that has resisted a lot of direct competition. WINE will never collapse their market. And WINE doesn't somehow corrupt and fork Windows, it actually tries to be as compatible as possible. Google is taking the Java community of developers, and guiding them to make apps that will not work in a JVM. They are taking and removing from the Java community. WINE reinforces the Windows community. It actually makes people less likely to develop for Linux, and instead target Windows, and tell people to run WINE. So while Microsoft might lose some box sales of Windows because of it, their developer community and market as a whole, are reinforced by it.
Haha nope, although I did get a -1 Redundant, which was amusing since all the Google fanboys are repeating each other's points, and getting modded up.