I've worked with
Brew, and it's very similar: any
idiot can download and play with the SDK, but to run an app on a real device, even if only for testing, you need to jump through hoops to get licenses. Which is just about impossible
to do if you're not with a company. As
a result, there is zero hobbyist use of Brew.
A shame; you can do cool stuff with it.
I've downloaded the iPhone SDK and played with it. I can think of a number of applications I'd like
to write for my iPod Touch, and hope some day
Apple will accept me as a developer so I can do so. Or come up with some other way to make it possible. It seems counter-productive to hype the SDK, but then clamp
down so hard on actually being able to do anything with it.
Anybody who is any good is going to have ideas,
and an enlightened organization will find a way to
accomodate them.
The ground rules where I work are pretty clear: we are expected to spend a bit of
time playing with things on the side. Some of these
have become products. We are
expected to refrain from hacking important servers, flooding the network with garbage and
similar misdeeds.
If we break something, we are expected to fix it. I have all sort of things hanging off the network,
have all sort of SDKs and neat little boxes and things kicking around, and, as a senior technical person, am expected to
show good judgement in what I do with them.
If I come up with something really neat, my boss wants to know about it.
Should have got an off-the-shelf mapping solution for your reverse geocoding. Send lat/lon to webservice, get back address.
We did. It worked well. We weren't totally stupid.
As for RF, we worked with 1X CDMA (worked well, but expensive to use), ReFLEX (two-way paging; cheap, worked well) and GPRS (lousy hardware, RF coverage issues).
Dude, you just made the former owner of that busted startup cry. You should feel ashamed.
While the rest of us laugh.
Actually, mapping wasn't the problem. We had good solutions. When we started Google Maps didn't have terms for commercial use, so we used another package. It worked fine.
I work for what's left of a company that actually managed to go bust developing this stuff.
We faced several challenges with the technology. Power consumption gave us ulcers, as did mobile network coverage. This is a non-issue in the city, but just wait until you're out of town.
GPS wanders around enough from fix to fix, even with WAAS, that it can be tricky to compare fixes to detect movement, or to track movement of less than 50 meters. Oh, and the GPS needs to be able to hear satellite signals. Good luck on that.
Finally, once you have a fix back at your server, you need to make it meaningful to the user. They do not generally want a bare latitude and longitude. They want to know what street their car is on. When the parents want to know if the kids take the car too far from home, they want to enter a street address, not a latitude and longitude. This is harder to get right than it looks.
Favourite application: tracking sub-prime used cars so repo men can find them.
Technically clueless users wouldn't know what to do anyway.
Technically savvy users need little more than an IP address and a beer to
do the right thing. Hell, our sysadmins consult with me to help
figure out how to do things right.
The middle ground is the one that makes me nervous. The nouveau-techie little
bit of knowledge types are the ones that scare me.
I've installed and configured everything in my cubicle, and have root/admin
access as well, because I need it. This is as it should be. I do not have root access to our main file server, because
I do not need it. This is also as it should be.
I always get a chuckle out of the April Fools RFCs, though there haven't been many the last few
years.
Our standing joke around the office for a long time was RFC 3514
RFC 3514, The Security Flag in the IPv4 Header.
RFC 2324 is probably my
personal favourite.
RFC 3252 may have been too clever for its own good,
and some people may not have gotten the joke.
I find Linux to be a congenial programming environment, where I can noodle together scripts and programs to get things done.
It provides lots of sharp tools that make things easy.
It doesn't get in the way like certain other OSs I could mention. It doesn't squander system
resources on non-essentials (ditto), and I can tune it to
allocate resources where they are needed. Oh, and did I mention? It just
plain works!
I wish they had spent the money on actually figuring out how to get around
the mess that is downtown Nanaimo. The street grid dates back to the 19th century, and it
shows. Ugh.
Who needs streets when there are more malls to build! From the B.C. Ferries terminal to the north edge
of town you pass at least 4 enclosed malls, plus numerous strip malls.
I tried it with my old version of Firefox (dismal), but found the source
interesting.
The whole philosphy of testing is not "I hope it works" but "I bet I can break it!".
Good test cases are diabolical, probing boundary conditions and generally trying very
hard to mess things up. Typical input data doesn't look like
something any sane programmer would write.
NTSC came first. PAL was developed afterwards, once people saw how NTSC worked and thought of ways to
fiddle with it. There was no real battle; TV systems in new countries tended to be NTSC or PAL or SECAM according
to which country gave them the best deal on TV gear.
I have multi-system video gear (unusual for Canada) and routinely watch PAL tapes and DVDs. The video
quality is indeed better, but I'm not sure it's that much better.
Use a long lens. A telescope is handy; 300mm will be about right to shoot the Moon rising through the trees or other scenery,
as it will be doing here during the eclipse. Real closeups will need 1000 to 2000mm focal length.
Bracket heavily. During the last good eclipse I shot from 1/2 to 10 seconds during totality at f/8.
Enjoy. The weather forecast here (Vancouver) is not favourable. The eclipse last August
was almost completely clouded out too. Sigh.
Indeed. I live in Canada, and am governed by Canadian law. Not U.S. law.
I was recently on a tour in Costa Rica, and the U.S. folks all automatically assumed
that the movies on my iPod were somehow illegal, even though I ripped them from
legitimately purchased DVDs for my own personal use, and haven't the slightest intention of putting
them on BitTorrent or any similar network (which is not fair use). Fair Use seems to have
disappeared from the U.S. psyche.
Circumventing CSS to rip DVDs
isn't a crime in Canada (yet...), but I wonder what the legal/DMCA status is of such an
ineffective, discredited system.
A couple of years ago Jamie and Adam did an interview with Slashdot, and
they explained that while they would love to do some computer
myths, they just don't work on camera. Unless you take
a spammer out to the bomb range, I suppose.:-)
I can only think of one computer hardware myth offhand, about CDs
fragmenting when CDROM drives spun them too fast.
Slashdot Mirror
I think its a fascinating development. Anytime we can fit things together like that, there must be more interesting science just around the corner.
...laura whose ancestors came to Canada relatively recently (Loyalists on one side, circa 1900 on the other)
It's entirely possible that he really did have only a 6 bit character set. It was 1978, after all.
...laura
I've worked with Brew, and it's very similar: any idiot can download and play with the SDK, but to run an app on a real device, even if only for testing, you need to jump through hoops to get licenses. Which is just about impossible to do if you're not with a company. As a result, there is zero hobbyist use of Brew. A shame; you can do cool stuff with it.
I've downloaded the iPhone SDK and played with it. I can think of a number of applications I'd like to write for my iPod Touch, and hope some day Apple will accept me as a developer so I can do so. Or come up with some other way to make it possible. It seems counter-productive to hype the SDK, but then clamp down so hard on actually being able to do anything with it.
...laura
Anybody who is any good is going to have ideas, and an enlightened organization will find a way to accomodate them.
The ground rules where I work are pretty clear: we are expected to spend a bit of time playing with things on the side. Some of these have become products. We are expected to refrain from hacking important servers, flooding the network with garbage and similar misdeeds. If we break something, we are expected to fix it. I have all sort of things hanging off the network, have all sort of SDKs and neat little boxes and things kicking around, and, as a senior technical person, am expected to show good judgement in what I do with them.
If I come up with something really neat, my boss wants to know about it.
...laura
We did. It worked well. We weren't totally stupid.
As for RF, we worked with 1X CDMA (worked well, but expensive to use), ReFLEX (two-way paging; cheap, worked well) and GPRS (lousy hardware, RF coverage issues).
...laura
Actually, mapping wasn't the problem. We had good solutions. When we started Google Maps didn't have terms for commercial use, so we used another package. It worked fine.
...laura
Two ways: APRS, as already mentioned, or look for open WiFi and use it.
We tried the latter. It almost worked.
...laura
I work for what's left of a company that actually managed to go bust developing this stuff.
We faced several challenges with the technology. Power consumption gave us ulcers, as did mobile network coverage. This is a non-issue in the city, but just wait until you're out of town.
GPS wanders around enough from fix to fix, even with WAAS, that it can be tricky to compare fixes to detect movement, or to track movement of less than 50 meters. Oh, and the GPS needs to be able to hear satellite signals. Good luck on that.
Finally, once you have a fix back at your server, you need to make it meaningful to the user. They do not generally want a bare latitude and longitude. They want to know what street their car is on. When the parents want to know if the kids take the car too far from home, they want to enter a street address, not a latitude and longitude. This is harder to get right than it looks.
Favourite application: tracking sub-prime used cars so repo men can find them.
...laura
Let's see if I've got this right.
Consumers upgrade to high-speed internet. They pay for it.
When they actually start to use it, the ISPs start bitching about bandwidth and demanding more money.
...laura
Depends on how technically savvy the users are.
Technically clueless users wouldn't know what to do anyway.
Technically savvy users need little more than an IP address and a beer to do the right thing. Hell, our sysadmins consult with me to help figure out how to do things right.
The middle ground is the one that makes me nervous. The nouveau-techie little bit of knowledge types are the ones that scare me.
I've installed and configured everything in my cubicle, and have root/admin access as well, because I need it. This is as it should be. I do not have root access to our main file server, because I do not need it. This is also as it should be.
...laura
I always get a chuckle out of the April Fools RFCs, though there haven't been many the last few years.
Our standing joke around the office for a long time was RFC 3514 RFC 3514, The Security Flag in the IPv4 Header. RFC 2324 is probably my personal favourite. RFC 3252 may have been too clever for its own good, and some people may not have gotten the joke.
...laura
This reminds me of an old joke:
Q: A Marketing executive and an RIAA lawyer jump off the top of a 50 story building. Who hits the ground first?
A: Who the hell cares?
laura, not a fan of .NET
I find Linux to be a congenial programming environment, where I can noodle together scripts and programs to get things done. It provides lots of sharp tools that make things easy.
It doesn't get in the way like certain other OSs I could mention. It doesn't squander system resources on non-essentials (ditto), and I can tune it to allocate resources where they are needed. Oh, and did I mention? It just plain works!
...laura
Been there, done that.
...laura, proudly Canadian
I wish they had spent the money on actually figuring out how to get around the mess that is downtown Nanaimo. The street grid dates back to the 19th century, and it shows. Ugh.
Who needs streets when there are more malls to build! From the B.C. Ferries terminal to the north edge of town you pass at least 4 enclosed malls, plus numerous strip malls.
...laura
I tried it with my old version of Firefox (dismal), but found the source interesting.
The whole philosphy of testing is not "I hope it works" but "I bet I can break it!". Good test cases are diabolical, probing boundary conditions and generally trying very hard to mess things up. Typical input data doesn't look like something any sane programmer would write.
...laura
For the sake of completeness:
People Are Lavender
Séquentiel couleur avec mémoire
PAL has its critics, but I'm not one of them. Is it possible to be a fan of SECAM? Inquiring minds want to know.
...laura
Apples and oranges.
NTSC came first. PAL was developed afterwards, once people saw how NTSC worked and thought of ways to fiddle with it. There was no real battle; TV systems in new countries tended to be NTSC or PAL or SECAM according to which country gave them the best deal on TV gear.
I have multi-system video gear (unusual for Canada) and routinely watch PAL tapes and DVDs. The video quality is indeed better, but I'm not sure it's that much better.
...laura
And that's where the problem lies: CLEAR THE FUCKING AISLES!
If you need to put a carryon in the overhead bin, fine. But get out of the aisle while you do it, so others can get past you.
Oh, and shoot the people who don't understand that "Rows 27 to 33" does not include Row 15.
...laura
1. Build exaflop computer.
2. ???
3. Profit!
...laura
Use a long lens. A telescope is handy; 300mm will be about right to shoot the Moon rising through the trees or other scenery, as it will be doing here during the eclipse. Real closeups will need 1000 to 2000mm focal length.
Bracket heavily. During the last good eclipse I shot from 1/2 to 10 seconds during totality at f/8.
Enjoy. The weather forecast here (Vancouver) is not favourable. The eclipse last August was almost completely clouded out too. Sigh.
...laura
Indeed. I live in Canada, and am governed by Canadian law. Not U.S. law.
I was recently on a tour in Costa Rica, and the U.S. folks all automatically assumed that the movies on my iPod were somehow illegal, even though I ripped them from legitimately purchased DVDs for my own personal use, and haven't the slightest intention of putting them on BitTorrent or any similar network (which is not fair use). Fair Use seems to have disappeared from the U.S. psyche.
Circumventing CSS to rip DVDs isn't a crime in Canada (yet...), but I wonder what the legal/DMCA status is of such an ineffective, discredited system.
...laura
Didn't you mean spherical isotropic tigers? Precision, please!
...laura
A couple of years ago Jamie and Adam did an interview with Slashdot, and they explained that while they would love to do some computer myths, they just don't work on camera. Unless you take a spammer out to the bomb range, I suppose. :-)
I can only think of one computer hardware myth offhand, about CDs fragmenting when CDROM drives spun them too fast.
...laura
A colleague of mine asks this question of every new hire. Almost every engineering type has answered "Meccano!"
He was flabbergasted when one summer student had no idea what either was.
...laura