The folks at SkyTower have a wonderful explanation for why this would be a useful technology. They have a similar technology that is supposed to use solar power and, will, eventually, if they can get it to work, also have fuel cells to store energy for night flying.
The basic idea, if you're too lazy to read their web site, is that they make wonderfully cheap substitutions for satallites with some of the small footprint advantages that the cell phone network has.
The laser powered system would have the advantage of not needing to store energy for night flying.
Of course, it's doubtful that a lowly photovoltaic system could be efficient or light enough for this to scale well. The Canadian SHARP microwave powered aircraft is likely much more practical and has had lots of research behind it.
The Canadian SHARP microwave powered aircraft scaled very well. One version had a 4.5m wing span. There's a picture of it at the link above.
I suspect that the microwave rectenna system is more efficient than using a photovoltaic cell and would probably work better on cloudy days too.
The project that probably will fail due to scaling issues is the LightCraft. It'll require so much power that laser dispersion, air heating and other such problems will ultimately limit it's lifing power.
Yeah. I was thinking the same thing, though I thought it was a University that had done it rather than the NSA. I can even remember the picture in the article showing some guy plugging in an apple talk cable to an Apple Newton MessagePad on a huge rack full of the things.
You beat me to posting this because I was trying to find a reference to this, but I'm not finding anything on google. If anyone out there has a more solid lead on this topic please post it.
Actually, it's a slightly more modern eComstation box. Also CDS also makes a Windows and a Linux version.
Besides, old computers cost nothing and can still be put to lots of uses such as killer voicemail/fax platforms or NoCatAuth routers and web servers (good enough for a DSL pipe).
Also, my old eComstation box has a REAL voice modem instead of one of those useless winmodems. If you want to do quality voicemail, you almost have to use an older computer.
I don't understand why everyone doesn't do this. It kicks ass over those Radio Shack answering machines. Having full control over the scripting means I can do stuff like have a different greeting message for different callers, do fax on demand and even kick off shell scripts by punching in various codes. Before DSL became available, I had it set up so that I could call my computer, punch in the password and initiate a script that would hang up the phone, dial up my ISP and send me an email with the dynamically assigned IP address so I could "home from work". The possibilities are endless.
Another one of the suggestions that is particularly effective is to simply to screen all of your incoming calls. I use a combination of an answering machine (actually my computer running PMFax Pro) with a SIT tone leader and Caller-id. Occationally, a telemarketter won't get the hint and will call every day until I resort to the script, but that's rare these days.
Since I started using these techniques, telemarketting calls have gone from five or six a day to once a month.
The case is so ugly you'd think someone at Dell *designed* it.
It's a reference design. It's not supposed to compete with the snazzy design that their customers will create, just show the design engineers how the thing goes together.
The damage Palm did to the general publics' perception of the usefulness of the pen interface is truly sad.
I know the Apple Message Pad (A.K.A Newton) was overpriced and that Apple was not responsive to user demands. However, they clearly showed that the pen interface could be more than just effective. The Newton OS showed that the pen interface could be clearly superior in many cases. Now, nobody in their right mind would even consider taking notes to a lecture on a pen based device or mini keyboard device, but the Newton showed that it was actually easier to take plain text notes on a PDA with a pen than with a laptop. Even some simple diagrams embedded in the notes on the fly were possible, though equations and formulas for a physics lecture were not really an option. I used to regularly compose emails or get started on longer documents on the train between work and home. Most modern PDA's and other mobile devices are effectively useless for anything beyond the shortest data entry task such as setting an appointment or adding an address book entry.
Instead of improving the performance and making these things the ultimate data input platforms, the introduction of the Palm devices doomed us to inferior technologies. Palm sacraficed good handwriting recognition, to reduce the computing burden and make it possible to reduce the cost of the devices by using less capable hardware. Although this was a brilliant marketing choice that killed the Newton, it also swept the PDA market at the time and overwhelmed any chance that the public would associate pen devices as the fantastic data input devices that they could easily have been.
The almost universal dislike of the pen interface held by the public, in my opinion, can be squarely put on the shoulders of Palm. Now, virtually every PDA out there is designed to be a read-mostly device that people on the go can use to access their data when they can't get to their PC. Although that is a compelling use for such devices to a small market segment, it amounts to a complete abandonment of the market for devices that could have become the prefered data input method for many people.
Going back to the note taking example, pen devices are quieter and less disruptive than using a laptop. Lots of people take pen and paper notes at business meetings, but feel that using a laptop to take notes is too disruptive. A good PDA like the Newton can work better than both. A laptop is hard to setup and has serious start up time, battery life / power supply issues and reliability issues. A good PDA kicks butt in these situtaions. Had the technology been developed much at all, I'm sure that the diagram and formula issues could have been handled. Now, we'll never know.
The folks at Xerox pioneered this field, but like other things they pioneered, others seem to be the ones taking it to market. One good overview of the topic mentions that
Xerox has a history of failing to commercialise great ideas developed inside PARC
.
It's too bad it's taken them so long to get Gyricon technology to market, but it's good that something better seems to have come along.
I was dumb enough to sign up with, what was called Network Solutions at the time. Then during a moment of shear stupidity, I renewed... till 2007!
I really want to get away from these jerks. There seem to be lots of registrars out there, but I've heard horror stories about totally unresponsive registrars that are glad to take your money, but ignore you if there's any problem at all. Also, if I switch, doesn't that just improve Verisign's profit margin? I've paid till 2007, now they don't have to do anything at all for that money. If I transfer to another registrar does Verisign get to keep my money?
I think you've got a good point, though I suspect that it has more to do with the way that technology has changed so that hardware hacking is no longer a viable hobby for most.
Most people just buy whole computers and, perhaps, plug in a few boards if they're really adept. Practically nobody buys soldering irons, transistors and blank pc boards any more. With the demise of the hobbyist market companies like Heathkit have had to change their stripes. The efficiency of multi-layer boards, wave soldering machines and surface mount devices means a hobbyist can't even make something for themselves for less than twice what it costs to buy it complete.
I suppose all of this has manifested itself at electronics stores by putting downward pressure on the demand for knowlegable staff. All the geeks have moved on to software, where the knowlege base is online, not in the store.
That's a sorry way to look at it. Where I grew up, electronics stores were the incubators of electronics geeks, hardware and software hackers. Young geeks would drool over the possibility of a job at the local A1 Electronics where there were plenty of opportunities to get their hands on stuff they, otherwise, couldn't afford. These kids were real experts and were quite willing to work for peanuts just for the chance to be around a place like that. After a tenure at one of these stores, many of them went on to become engineers or software developers.
Why Fry's isn't mining such resources for employees now is a mystery to me. Did the geeks go somewhere else or are the store owners just too dumb to spot a fantastic resource?
Qtopia also had licensing problems because the Zaurus uses an SD card, which, like DVD technology, is heavily patented. This prevented Qtopia from making that code available. Somehow the OPIE folks found a way around this. Definite Kudos in order here.
This is just another example of the need for vigilent against those nasty closed hardware specifications like DVD and SD. They're technologies intended to control the user rather than give us new capabilities. That's why I recoomend that people try to support MMC rather than SD when we have a choice. Incidentally, the Zaurus is one of those rare devices that supports both, so when you buy your cards, buy an MMC rather than an SD if you can.
How do you deal with being sweaty all day long at work?
I had a really sweet (not sweat;) deal when I worked at Micron Technology in Boise ID. The busses there have bike racks on them and I lived on a hill. All I had to do was hop on the bike, roll down the hill and pop the bike on the rack on the bus. Then I enjoyed a nice leisurely ride to work while reading my magazine. With this setup, I could wear normal clothes in the morning and not need to have a shower when I got to work. Then, I could change into the cycling clothes I had in the paniers and put my work clothes back in the paniers for the 12 mile ride home. Heck, I could even do a little grocery shopping on the trip home if I had to.
Some people seemed to think that this would take a lot of time, but the bike commute was 45 minutes and driving took 30 minutes with all of the traffic, so I got 45 minutes of exercise, plus 30 minutes of reading, avoided the hassle of driving and it only cost me 15 minutes a day!
Unfortunately, I now live in New Jersey where it's not even safe to drive a car, let alone a bike, the roads are in horrible shape and I work from home, so there's no commute. Ah well, good things never last.
Porting or creating a mini version might be difficult because Palm's Java support is somewhat lacking. It would probably be a lot of work to get a port of MoneyDance working on J2ME, MID Profile.
This release is a real coup for MoneyDance's author, Sean Reilly. A while ago, he sold MoneyDance to Apgen. At first this worked out really well because they added a lot of resources to the project and development really took off.
Unfortunately, when Apgen's fortunes started to fade with the end of the.com bubble, the MoneyDance staff was slowly laid off until even Sean was let go.
Like many other zombie probjects, the MoneyDance web page was not taken down and Apgen was still selling it even though nobody was home. There was no support at all. The mailing list was a scary place then. It took months for people to figure out what was going on. Apgen didn't respond at all to help requests and the list turned to a big discussion on what the alternatives were.
Somehow, Sean managed to get the rights to MoneyDance back just a few months ago and started working on the new version that he just released.
Lots of good ideas have sunk in the last year or so of economic trouble in the software industry. Most will never resurface and have been lost forever. This is a real coup for Sean and the MoneyDance users that Sean was able to resurect this fine project and produce a new version in such a short time.
The Apgen folks have been very quiet about the whole thing for obvious reasons, but I think they are an example to follow. They made a valiant effort to promote MoneyDance, but when it didn't work out they set MoneyDance free instead of locking it up and throwing away the key. For some strange reason, this isn't the norm.
What? It's a Java application. It works the same on both systems. Heck, I've been using MoneyDance for years on OS/2 and find that it works just great. Platform should make no difference at all.
You must be thinking of something else or using a really bad JVM on Linux. Some older linuxen use Kafe as their default JVM and Kafe has lots of bugs. Perhaps that's your problem. Try it with Blackdown's JVM instead.
Debugging hasn't improved much because it's really the wrong tool to ensure program quality. Debuggers don't prevent coders from creating bad programs. At best debuggers are after-the fact, symptom oriented fire fighting tools that often point to more deeply seated problems than individual atomic bugs. Also, don't forget that in modern object oriented code, the old linear debugging techinques often produce results that are different than the actual program will because of threading, race condition and other issues.
The inadequacies of debugging (not just the dubuggers themselves) as a method of ensuring quality is why methodologies like agile programming and extreme programming are garnering so much interest from developers. It's also why there has been an explosion of tools that can help with the creation of good software with fewer bugs, easier maintenance and a better chance of actually solving user problems. In the Java world, there is junit, mockobjects and log4J , that can all be used with ant so that tests can be automatically run with every build and source control systems can be automatically updated. One approach is the Naked Objects framework, which is a combinination of a design methodology and tools in one package that has advantages like the easy rapid prototyping and automatic user story docuemtation.
For example if you were using the Naked Objects framework to create a system, you might take the following approach (simplified here for posting):
Start with an Exploration phase, which includes:
Meeting of developers, administrators and end users to discuss the nature of the problem and brainstorm possible ways to implement the solution.
Create a rough prototype immediately (Frameworks like Naked Objects makes rapid prototyping like this easy).
Go back to the meeting, have everybody play with the code and make more suggestions and changes. Demonstrate the prototype frequently to elicit feedback.
Repeat (often) till people are mostly happy with the results.
This prevents the all-to-common situation where a written specification results in excellent software that doesn't actually solve any of the problems that the users have.
Specification Phase:
Use what you've learned to write a specification that includes lots of special case scenarios (use-cases, user stories etc.)
Delivery Phase:
Throw out all of the code you've already written... maybe keep the class and method names, but no actual functional code
Write the tests FIRST. This includes unit tests, acceptance tests and corresponding documentation.
Write the code to implement various user stories and test frequently.
Auto-generate user training manual, which is based on the acceptance test code.
Deploy to beta testers and be amazed at how happy they are with the product and how few bugs there are.
Notice that approaches like this emphasize getting the design right and doing constant testing to ensure that the code that is delivered actually does the job that is expected of it. Debugging is rarely required when such methodologies are used, though profiling can be of some use.
Several other posters mention SPAM, but I didn't get the impression from the article that SPAM was necessissarily the primary means of pushing this. I'm sure there was some, but the impression I got was that this was a combination of word of mouth, "sign up for updates on our website" and articles on political news sites and blogs. Sending 800,000 unsolicited text messages, just before voting time would likely piss people off and result in you losing by a landslide... not winning. I suspect that most of these people signed up for updates or reminders.
Not so bad, and easier way to fix the problem
on
When Profiling Goes Wrong
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· Score: 5, Informative
First of all, it's clear that many of the previous posters don't really know how TiVo works and I'd like to clarify what's going on. First of all, the primary mode of operation is where the viewer picks what they want to record ahead of time. TiVo only records stuff based on its' suggestion algorithms when there's extra space on the drive. Viewer selected shows always have priority over shows recorded by Tivo based on suggestions. The end result is that, occationally, viewers get a surprise in the "Now Playing" screen. Usually, it's a pleasant surprise or something that the viewer might not have even been aware was available and presents an opportunity to see something extra.
As the article points out, the suggestion algoritm isn't perfect, but if it gets off target, it's fairly easy to correct... even though the users in the article obviously hadn't figured out the most efficient way to do so. The suggestion system works by allowing the viewer to press the "Thumbs Up" or "Thumbs Down" button. Strangely enough you can give a show up to three thumbs up or down (most people I know only have two thumbs;). The algorithm uses these ratings to find shows that have been catagorized the same way as shows that the user has rated highly. One thing that most people don't realize is that any show selected for recording automatically gets one thumb up. Naturally, for this system to work, show catagorizations have to be accurate, which isn't always the case.
The users in the article who recorded lots of shows to counter the ratings were doing things the hard way. A much easier way is simply to go to the suggestions screen where TiVo supplies a list of recommended shows that it thinks the viewer might want to see. From there, it's easy to just give three thumbs down to each of the shows that the viewer doesn't like. On a lucky day the show that caused the problem in the first place will appear as a re-run, so the problem can be fixed quickly. This can be repeated until the suggestions screen only shows stuff that the viewer likes.
Section 4.2 of the memo points out that closed source software stifles the development of software skills because students aren't allowed to see the source code. this is especially sad since young students are exactly the sort of people who are motivated and curious enough to actually take the time to investigate source code and learn from it.
What I'd like to point out is that many of these motivated students will try to learn about whatever system they're given even if the information isn't readily (legally) available... they'll hack and decompile to learn stuff on their own. The unfortunate consequence is that a group of talented, motivated and intelligent people are subtly encouraged to commit criminal acts to build their skills and learn more simply because the systems they are using are closed source. It's no wonder that the public has latched onto the idea that a hacker is a bad person.
Providing these promissing, budding software engineers with open source systems to learn on makes it much easier for them to learn much more information without forcing them to commit criminal acts. I think it makes a lot more sense to encourage the curious students to learn as much as they can and to hack away to improve systems rather than scold them, discourage them and ultimately lead them towards a state of mind that glorifies theft and cracking.
Naked Objects is a Java framework designed to allow developers to get back to the central ideas of true Obect Oriented design and development, which, naturally includes proper OO User Interfaces.
Even though so many developers use OO languages, they often end up with designs that harken back to the bad old days of data processing - data fed into procedure oriented programs. OOUI is in an even sadder state. Most deisgns seem to use the UI to cloak what's going on in the underlying object model (if there is one). It's especially ironic when you realize that some of the few programs that acutally use truly OOUI's are the Integrated Development Environments that those same developers use to create those horrible UI's. Can't they even see what's right in front of them?
Current design philosophy ends up giving the users horrible interfaces that just get in the way of actually getting the job done. Even worse, this process oriented view of the world treats the users as slaves to our machines that can do pattern recoginition better than the machine can. The Naked Objects approach, views the users as problem solvers and provides several different ways to accomplish a task. You've seen it before in spread sheets, drawing programs and IDE's. Naked Objects brings this level of expressiveness to every program and frees the user to be creative rather than just some cog in a machine.
So throw off your GUI and expose your business objects for the world to manipulate! Rejoice in the Naked Objects philosophy and free yourself of all that cruft weighing you down. So run free and let your objects swing in the breeze and... er, um... you get the idea:)
wait till google news points at your community newspaper
Yeah. I was surprised that they don't have the "cached" version links like they do for regular web pages. Then again, this is a beta service right now. Maybe they'll add cached stories once they learn the hard way, a few times, that it's needed. I'm sure that if they cache the banner ad links too, that nobody will be too upset with them caching stories.
I stand corrected. I'm definitely not up on my Slayer history. Not being one of those who has an extensive collection of Buffy DVDs to refer to I was relying on my all-too-faulty memory. Having done a little retroactive research, I have discovered that Kendra was apparently Jamaican and showed up in several episodes... ultimately dying in the Becoming 1 episode. There are several web sites devoted to Kendra including kendra-slayer.com where you can find out much more as I should have before posting my original message.
Slashdot Mirror
The folks at SkyTower have a wonderful explanation for why this would be a useful technology. They have a similar technology that is supposed to use solar power and, will, eventually, if they can get it to work, also have fuel cells to store energy for night flying.
The basic idea, if you're too lazy to read their web site, is that they make wonderfully cheap substitutions for satallites with some of the small footprint advantages that the cell phone network has.
The laser powered system would have the advantage of not needing to store energy for night flying.
Of course, it's doubtful that a lowly photovoltaic system could be efficient or light enough for this to scale well. The Canadian SHARP microwave powered aircraft is likely much more practical and has had lots of research behind it.
The Canadian SHARP microwave powered aircraft scaled very well. One version had a 4.5m wing span. There's a picture of it at the link above.
I suspect that the microwave rectenna system is more efficient than using a photovoltaic cell and would probably work better on cloudy days too.
The project that probably will fail due to scaling issues is the LightCraft. It'll require so much power that laser dispersion, air heating and other such problems will ultimately limit it's lifing power.
Yeah. I was thinking the same thing, though I thought it was a University that had done it rather than the NSA. I can even remember the picture in the article showing some guy plugging in an apple talk cable to an Apple Newton MessagePad on a huge rack full of the things.
You beat me to posting this because I was trying to find a reference to this, but I'm not finding anything on google. If anyone out there has a more solid lead on this topic please post it.
Actually, it's a slightly more modern eComstation box. Also CDS also makes a Windows and a Linux version.
Besides, old computers cost nothing and can still be put to lots of uses such as killer voicemail/fax platforms or NoCatAuth routers and web servers (good enough for a DSL pipe).
Also, my old eComstation box has a REAL voice modem instead of one of those useless winmodems. If you want to do quality voicemail, you almost have to use an older computer.
I don't understand why everyone doesn't do this. It kicks ass over those Radio Shack answering machines. Having full control over the scripting means I can do stuff like have a different greeting message for different callers, do fax on demand and even kick off shell scripts by punching in various codes. Before DSL became available, I had it set up so that I could call my computer, punch in the password and initiate a script that would hang up the phone, dial up my ISP and send me an email with the dynamically assigned IP address so I could "home from work". The possibilities are endless.
For more practical answers on what to do, Junkbusters has lots of good advice. In particluar, their Anti-telemarketing script works wonders.
Another one of the suggestions that is particularly effective is to simply to screen all of your incoming calls. I use a combination of an answering machine (actually my computer running PMFax Pro) with a SIT tone leader and Caller-id. Occationally, a telemarketter won't get the hint and will call every day until I resort to the script, but that's rare these days.
Since I started using these techniques, telemarketting calls have gone from five or six a day to once a month.
It's a reference design. It's not supposed to compete with the snazzy design that their customers will create, just show the design engineers how the thing goes together.
The damage Palm did to the general publics' perception of the usefulness of the pen interface is truly sad.
I know the Apple Message Pad (A.K.A Newton) was overpriced and that Apple was not responsive to user demands. However, they clearly showed that the pen interface could be more than just effective. The Newton OS showed that the pen interface could be clearly superior in many cases. Now, nobody in their right mind would even consider taking notes to a lecture on a pen based device or mini keyboard device, but the Newton showed that it was actually easier to take plain text notes on a PDA with a pen than with a laptop. Even some simple diagrams embedded in the notes on the fly were possible, though equations and formulas for a physics lecture were not really an option. I used to regularly compose emails or get started on longer documents on the train between work and home. Most modern PDA's and other mobile devices are effectively useless for anything beyond the shortest data entry task such as setting an appointment or adding an address book entry.
Instead of improving the performance and making these things the ultimate data input platforms, the introduction of the Palm devices doomed us to inferior technologies. Palm sacraficed good handwriting recognition, to reduce the computing burden and make it possible to reduce the cost of the devices by using less capable hardware. Although this was a brilliant marketing choice that killed the Newton, it also swept the PDA market at the time and overwhelmed any chance that the public would associate pen devices as the fantastic data input devices that they could easily have been.
The almost universal dislike of the pen interface held by the public, in my opinion, can be squarely put on the shoulders of Palm. Now, virtually every PDA out there is designed to be a read-mostly device that people on the go can use to access their data when they can't get to their PC. Although that is a compelling use for such devices to a small market segment, it amounts to a complete abandonment of the market for devices that could have become the prefered data input method for many people.
Going back to the note taking example, pen devices are quieter and less disruptive than using a laptop. Lots of people take pen and paper notes at business meetings, but feel that using a laptop to take notes is too disruptive. A good PDA like the Newton can work better than both. A laptop is hard to setup and has serious start up time, battery life / power supply issues and reliability issues. A good PDA kicks butt in these situtaions. Had the technology been developed much at all, I'm sure that the diagram and formula issues could have been handled. Now, we'll never know.
I was dumb enough to sign up with, what was called Network Solutions at the time. Then during a moment of shear stupidity, I renewed... till 2007!
I really want to get away from these jerks. There seem to be lots of registrars out there, but I've heard horror stories about totally unresponsive registrars that are glad to take your money, but ignore you if there's any problem at all. Also, if I switch, doesn't that just improve Verisign's profit margin? I've paid till 2007, now they don't have to do anything at all for that money. If I transfer to another registrar does Verisign get to keep my money?
Advice?
I think you've got a good point, though I suspect that it has more to do with the way that technology has changed so that hardware hacking is no longer a viable hobby for most.
Most people just buy whole computers and, perhaps, plug in a few boards if they're really adept. Practically nobody buys soldering irons, transistors and blank pc boards any more. With the demise of the hobbyist market companies like Heathkit have had to change their stripes. The efficiency of multi-layer boards, wave soldering machines and surface mount devices means a hobbyist can't even make something for themselves for less than twice what it costs to buy it complete.
I suppose all of this has manifested itself at electronics stores by putting downward pressure on the demand for knowlegable staff. All the geeks have moved on to software, where the knowlege base is online, not in the store.
That's a sorry way to look at it. Where I grew up, electronics stores were the incubators of electronics geeks, hardware and software hackers. Young geeks would drool over the possibility of a job at the local A1 Electronics where there were plenty of opportunities to get their hands on stuff they, otherwise, couldn't afford. These kids were real experts and were quite willing to work for peanuts just for the chance to be around a place like that. After a tenure at one of these stores, many of them went on to become engineers or software developers.
Why Fry's isn't mining such resources for employees now is a mystery to me. Did the geeks go somewhere else or are the store owners just too dumb to spot a fantastic resource?
Qtopia also had licensing problems because the Zaurus uses an SD card, which, like DVD technology, is heavily patented. This prevented Qtopia from making that code available. Somehow the OPIE folks found a way around this. Definite Kudos in order here.
This is just another example of the need for vigilent against those nasty closed hardware specifications like DVD and SD. They're technologies intended to control the user rather than give us new capabilities. That's why I recoomend that people try to support MMC rather than SD when we have a choice. Incidentally, the Zaurus is one of those rare devices that supports both, so when you buy your cards, buy an MMC rather than an SD if you can.
I had a really sweet (not sweat;) deal when I worked at Micron Technology in Boise ID. The busses there have bike racks on them and I lived on a hill. All I had to do was hop on the bike, roll down the hill and pop the bike on the rack on the bus. Then I enjoyed a nice leisurely ride to work while reading my magazine. With this setup, I could wear normal clothes in the morning and not need to have a shower when I got to work. Then, I could change into the cycling clothes I had in the paniers and put my work clothes back in the paniers for the 12 mile ride home. Heck, I could even do a little grocery shopping on the trip home if I had to.
Some people seemed to think that this would take a lot of time, but the bike commute was 45 minutes and driving took 30 minutes with all of the traffic, so I got 45 minutes of exercise, plus 30 minutes of reading, avoided the hassle of driving and it only cost me 15 minutes a day!
Unfortunately, I now live in New Jersey where it's not even safe to drive a car, let alone a bike, the roads are in horrible shape and I work from home, so there's no commute. Ah well, good things never last.
No, it does not.
However, there is an extension mechanism developer's toolkit, so you could add a synchronization mechanism.
Porting or creating a mini version might be difficult because Palm's Java support is somewhat lacking. It would probably be a lot of work to get a port of MoneyDance working on J2ME, MID Profile.
This release is a real coup for MoneyDance's author, Sean Reilly. A while ago, he sold MoneyDance to Apgen. At first this worked out really well because they added a lot of resources to the project and development really took off.
.com bubble, the MoneyDance staff was slowly laid off until even Sean was let go.
Unfortunately, when Apgen's fortunes started to fade with the end of the
Like many other zombie probjects, the MoneyDance web page was not taken down and Apgen was still selling it even though nobody was home. There was no support at all. The mailing list was a scary place then. It took months for people to figure out what was going on. Apgen didn't respond at all to help requests and the list turned to a big discussion on what the alternatives were.
Somehow, Sean managed to get the rights to MoneyDance back just a few months ago and started working on the new version that he just released.
Lots of good ideas have sunk in the last year or so of economic trouble in the software industry. Most will never resurface and have been lost forever. This is a real coup for Sean and the MoneyDance users that Sean was able to resurect this fine project and produce a new version in such a short time.
The Apgen folks have been very quiet about the whole thing for obvious reasons, but I think they are an example to follow. They made a valiant effort to promote MoneyDance, but when it didn't work out they set MoneyDance free instead of locking it up and throwing away the key. For some strange reason, this isn't the norm.
What? It's a Java application. It works the same on both systems. Heck, I've been using MoneyDance for years on OS/2 and find that it works just great. Platform should make no difference at all.
You must be thinking of something else or using a really bad JVM on Linux. Some older linuxen use Kafe as their default JVM and Kafe has lots of bugs. Perhaps that's your problem. Try it with Blackdown's JVM instead.
The inadequacies of debugging (not just the dubuggers themselves) as a method of ensuring quality is why methodologies like agile programming and extreme programming are garnering so much interest from developers. It's also why there has been an explosion of tools that can help with the creation of good software with fewer bugs, easier maintenance and a better chance of actually solving user problems. In the Java world, there is junit, mockobjects and log4J , that can all be used with ant so that tests can be automatically run with every build and source control systems can be automatically updated. One approach is the Naked Objects framework, which is a combinination of a design methodology and tools in one package that has advantages like the easy rapid prototyping and automatic user story docuemtation.
For example if you were using the Naked Objects framework to create a system, you might take the following approach (simplified here for posting):
Notice that approaches like this emphasize getting the design right and doing constant testing to ensure that the code that is delivered actually does the job that is expected of it. Debugging is rarely required when such methodologies are used, though profiling can be of some use.
As the article points out, the suggestion algoritm isn't perfect, but if it gets off target, it's fairly easy to correct... even though the users in the article obviously hadn't figured out the most efficient way to do so. The suggestion system works by allowing the viewer to press the "Thumbs Up" or "Thumbs Down" button. Strangely enough you can give a show up to three thumbs up or down (most people I know only have two thumbs;). The algorithm uses these ratings to find shows that have been catagorized the same way as shows that the user has rated highly. One thing that most people don't realize is that any show selected for recording automatically gets one thumb up. Naturally, for this system to work, show catagorizations have to be accurate, which isn't always the case.
The users in the article who recorded lots of shows to counter the ratings were doing things the hard way. A much easier way is simply to go to the suggestions screen where TiVo supplies a list of recommended shows that it thinks the viewer might want to see. From there, it's easy to just give three thumbs down to each of the shows that the viewer doesn't like. On a lucky day the show that caused the problem in the first place will appear as a re-run, so the problem can be fixed quickly. This can be repeated until the suggestions screen only shows stuff that the viewer likes.
What I'd like to point out is that many of these motivated students will try to learn about whatever system they're given even if the information isn't readily (legally) available... they'll hack and decompile to learn stuff on their own. The unfortunate consequence is that a group of talented, motivated and intelligent people are subtly encouraged to commit criminal acts to build their skills and learn more simply because the systems they are using are closed source. It's no wonder that the public has latched onto the idea that a hacker is a bad person.
Providing these promissing, budding software engineers with open source systems to learn on makes it much easier for them to learn much more information without forcing them to commit criminal acts. I think it makes a lot more sense to encourage the curious students to learn as much as they can and to hack away to improve systems rather than scold them, discourage them and ultimately lead them towards a state of mind that glorifies theft and cracking.
I posted my reply just before yours, so you probably didn't see it when you posted yours :)
Naked Objects is a Java framework designed to allow developers to get back to the central ideas of true Obect Oriented design and development, which, naturally includes proper OO User Interfaces.
Even though so many developers use OO languages, they often end up with designs that harken back to the bad old days of data processing - data fed into procedure oriented programs. OOUI is in an even sadder state. Most deisgns seem to use the UI to cloak what's going on in the underlying object model (if there is one). It's especially ironic when you realize that some of the few programs that acutally use truly OOUI's are the Integrated Development Environments that those same developers use to create those horrible UI's. Can't they even see what's right in front of them?
Current design philosophy ends up giving the users horrible interfaces that just get in the way of actually getting the job done. Even worse, this process oriented view of the world treats the users as slaves to our machines that can do pattern recoginition better than the machine can. The Naked Objects approach, views the users as problem solvers and provides several different ways to accomplish a task. You've seen it before in spread sheets, drawing programs and IDE's. Naked Objects brings this level of expressiveness to every program and frees the user to be creative rather than just some cog in a machine.
So throw off your GUI and expose your business objects for the world to manipulate! Rejoice in the Naked Objects philosophy and free yourself of all that cruft weighing you down. So run free and let your objects swing in the breeze and... er, um... you get the idea :)
wait till google news points at your community newspaper
Yeah. I was surprised that they don't have the "cached" version links like they do for regular web pages. Then again, this is a beta service right now. Maybe they'll add cached stories once they learn the hard way, a few times, that it's needed. I'm sure that if they cache the banner ad links too, that nobody will be too upset with them caching stories.
I stand corrected. I'm definitely not up on my Slayer history. Not being one of those who has an extensive collection of Buffy DVDs to refer to I was relying on my all-too-faulty memory. Having done a little retroactive research, I have discovered that Kendra was apparently Jamaican and showed up in several episodes... ultimately dying in the Becoming 1 episode. There are several web sites devoted to Kendra including kendra-slayer.com where you can find out much more as I should have before posting my original message.