uDIG seems the best of the free ones, if a bit slow at times.
As an aside I'm curious to know if anyone has used Manifold, the website does seem to claim it does everything you might possibly want for one low-low price:)
The problem isn't that the license doesn't allow it, the license does, its just that its common courtesy to contribute back to the project if you are making money or a large enterprise working on it.
There usually isn't a budget code for "common courtesy" though, and even if the members of staff involved feel they should contribute they might be wary of being asked to justify having spent their budget on something they could have got for free. Projects that want to get money need to offer additional formal services in return for it, whether it be support or membership of a board to help shape future development.
(This is a UK-viewpoint, also I just know about this from the Local Government IT side - I'm not a Traffic Engineer)
What we do is offer to issue these to community groups who some basic safety training and are told to be clear if asked that they are not issuing penalties. The "concerned members of the public" then sit out with the device and it keeps a log of the speeds recorded. They then return this to us and the log is used as evidence alongside their submission to decide if a more formal study is carried out possibly leading to traffic calming measures. Showing people they're exceeding the speed limit often helps in itself and one of the possible things done to help is a static version of this device that still doesn't issue penalties. The devices also have the ability to be set with a limit to how fast they show on the screen to prevent people using them to show off.
I wouldn't suggest trying to build a device yourself, there are often cases reported where the suspect has been acquitted due to the device being incorrectly calibrated and I imagine everyone would try this angle when they found it was something done by amateurs. That said some people seem to do fine with just a hair dryer...
Anywhere where someone doesn't have a Hot Plug. I'm also curious what the behaviour is if someone leaves the power on but plugs the sata into a different computer.
I ended up going with the MSG-free variety (the sodium content was roughly 1/8 that of the standard beef stock from any other brand, and 1/4 the sodium in the "low sodium" varieties), but the free market wouldn't let me avoid corn syrup as well.
It could be argued that the free-market was working correctly as despite the product range not being ideal you were still willing to buy one of them.
It's not so effective from the other side of the fence. It depends of course on what systems the individual council has put in place but for those that have gone to the trouble of developing a GIS based system that automatically creates enquires in their works management system having e-mails turn up from random 3rd party websites isn't especially efficient.
How about coding yours so that it loads resources it needs from a copy of the original game which you leave it up to the end-user to acquire? This is how Quake reimplementations work and ID don't seem to have complained about it.
It is indeed sad, but life is sad that way. If you don't think about the dollar worth, more human lives are lost. As she said in the article, the deceased himself, had he known the costs of his care could be used to vaccinate a tremendous amount of third-world children - he would have preferred the money be spent that way.
Or thinking less altrustically, a person might have a better life if instead of the money being spent to prolong their life at the end if was given to them in the prime of their life to have experiences that wouldn't otherwise have been open to them.
The problem though is that for the adverts to be relevent, either based on knowning the users interests or their location would have some privacy implications. It would work better, for the user at least if you could give the advertising network a list of subjects for adverts you would find acceptable. The problem with this though is that a lot of advertising exists precicely to try to sell things to people that they don't already think they need.
It depends what the application needs to do, some capabilities are only available to self-signed binaries, others are restricted to formally certified applications. I've found the self-signing process from a developers point of view to be relatively painless so I don't mind that but what has annoyed me is that each symbian version has a slightly different set of APIs and it's frustrating to find that you can't do something on a phone that's less than 2 years old with no option to upgrade the OS.
There was the TestDrive system used for distributing ID games however I think that's a few years later than 1993 and possibly doesn't work in the same way; it worked by unencrypting a full copy of the game held on the same CD as the shareware one.
We do that now with Dell stock references, there are some downsides though - some users struggle to give them accurately over the phone and they're hard to memorise. I've also found a few cases where the person setting up the machine has done an inadvertent typo in the hostname, but that should improve now we're doing the 'hostname from BIOS' thing.
The previous system, which I preferred was to create the hostname from a two character OS shortcode and a sequential number - NT001, 2K001, XP001. If a machine is reinstalled to a new OS it gets a number in a high range, XP800 etc.
These are easy to give over the phone and memorise but the main advantage is that when a user calls you immediately know the OS of the PC and the approximate age of the hardware without having to consult your inventory database. Another useful thing is if you're having problems with connections to an application you can tell the OS of those clients which are able to connect to see if there's a pattern without needing to cross-check. If you do do this you still need to have the stock reference as the primary key in any inventory databases in case the OS (and hence hostname) changes.
It's certainly a very "shiny" product but the speed is average even amongst USB external enclosures. The supplied software is also rather quirky; the way it works is that it claims to always have a 2Tb partition and then fudges the amount of free space accordingly. The monitoring software also seems to require being run as an administrator.
One other thing about them which amused me was that whilst they support hot removal of drives the lack of caddies has meant they've had to put warning stickers advising you to turn the unit off for 15 minutes before doing so to avoid being burnt. Nice.
It might be that the poor performance occurs when you're on a computer that only has USB1 support. On Dells this was added later than you might expect.
You might find you got better performance if you were to use a CD to hold most of the static software and the USB for just your home directory.
It's just a shame that (as far as I can tell) they're not planning to have functionality which allows you to set custom defaults for new games. Whenever I get a new game I change WASD to UHJK (left handed) and always think it should be able to do this automatically somehow.
The bit about who will maintain the systems is especially true. I've been involved in situations where a user has had some IT skills over and above what is required to do their job and has taken over some of the IT responsibility. When they leave their replacement is chosen on the basis of the criteria of their position - not what they've been doing, often because there simply isn't the budget to hire someone with those skills, leaving a vacuum.
Another problem if you are the user is that if you have a process that takes 3 hours and you automate it so it takes 5 minutes your work will expand to fill the saved time. Do this a couple of time and if the automation breaks you will neither have the time to do the process manually or to fix it and you'll get it in the neck when people notice jobs aren't being done.
The media would eat this up and the free publicity would be worth its weight in cheetos. No sane business would do this as it goes against the "our liability shall be the value of the device" clause that is used in almost all situations of this kind. They would end up with thousands of letters from people claiming to have told a technician that their XBox was say, filled with precious saved games and demanding compensation for their "lost time" when the device is wiped during the repair process.
Also we don't know that what is said to have happened happened. For all we know it could have been...
Step 1) Take photos of autographed XBox Step 2) Post in normal, undecorated XBox with a few smudges Step 3) Profit (hopefully)
If this situation were to come up again the correct thing would be to ask either "Can I send in my XBox without a case" or "Can I swap the case with another device" - I'm not saying that this is less likely to go horribly wrong at the factory, in all likelihood they'd refuse to repair it but then you can complain about having been told differently while not having lost your precious doodles.
If there is something on the internet that you feel would make a positive impression on a prospective employer highlight it specifically in your CV.
For example:
I am an active member of the Linux community, regularly posting on the Linux Kernel mailing list. My contributions can be found at here
That way you're not relying on their detective skills to locate all the best bits, as well as there being no confusion about whether this is you or not.
I would not recommend random searching for information about people you're considering hiring as you may find out more than you wanted to know. We had a candidate at work who had put on his CV he did some LJ related programming so as this obviously implied ownership of an LJ we had a look for it. On it he expressed a love for water sports, bondage and other such activities - I'm not suggesting in the slightest that this would be a reason not to hire someone however this is information that many people keep private and which he might not have wanted to share with his future colleagues, meaning that for all his time there we would have to be careful not to make reference to it. Awkward. Luckily for us he also mentioned on his journal that he was suspended by his current employer for computer misuse and that he didn't care about our job, he was just going to scam interview expenses so we told him he'd been unsuccessful with a clear conscience.
These cards cost hundreds of dollars but they can't handle an assembly with 100 parts in a CAD model simply because they barely have any OpenGL hardware in them. A car, airplane, etc has millions of parts. If you're using an Autodesk 07 product it will likely have looked to see what graphics hardware and driver version you have, not found it in it's hardware database and disabled all the 3D acceleration.
You could try having a look on the Autodesk website and downloading the latest XML computability file and see if your card is now supported but if it's a consumer card this is unlikely and you're probably just going to have to go into the options and enable it manually. Before you do this it's also worth doing some research on the Autodesk website and elsewhere about your card - while most of them are disabled unnecessarily to be on the safe side there are some which do have rendering problems.
Slashdot Mirror
uDIG seems the best of the free ones, if a bit slow at times.
As an aside I'm curious to know if anyone has used Manifold, the website does seem to claim it does everything you might possibly want for one low-low price :)
The problem isn't that the license doesn't allow it, the license does, its just that its common courtesy to contribute back to the project if you are making money or a large enterprise working on it.
There usually isn't a budget code for "common courtesy" though, and even if the members of staff involved feel they should contribute they might be wary of being asked to justify having spent their budget on something they could have got for free. Projects that want to get money need to offer additional formal services in return for it, whether it be support or membership of a board to help shape future development.
(This is a UK-viewpoint, also I just know about this from the Local Government IT side - I'm not a Traffic Engineer)
What we do is offer to issue these to community groups who some basic safety training and are told to be clear if asked that they are not issuing penalties. The "concerned members of the public" then sit out with the device and it keeps a log of the speeds recorded. They then return this to us and the log is used as evidence alongside their submission to decide if a more formal study is carried out possibly leading to traffic calming measures. Showing people they're exceeding the speed limit often helps in itself and one of the possible things done to help is a static version of this device that still doesn't issue penalties. The devices also have the ability to be set with a limit to how fast they show on the screen to prevent people using them to show off.
I wouldn't suggest trying to build a device yourself, there are often cases reported where the suspect has been acquitted due to the device being incorrectly calibrated and I imagine everyone would try this angle when they found it was something done by amateurs. That said some people seem to do fine with just a hair dryer...
Anywhere where someone doesn't have a Hot Plug. I'm also curious what the behaviour is if someone leaves the power on but plugs the sata into a different computer.
I ended up going with the MSG-free variety (the sodium content was roughly 1/8 that of the standard beef stock from any other brand, and 1/4 the sodium in the "low sodium" varieties), but the free market wouldn't let me avoid corn syrup as well.
It could be argued that the free-market was working correctly as despite the product range not being ideal you were still willing to buy one of them.
It's not so effective from the other side of the fence. It depends of course on what systems the individual council has put in place but for those that have gone to the trouble of developing a GIS based system that automatically creates enquires in their works management system having e-mails turn up from random 3rd party websites isn't especially efficient.
As someone pointed out, Quake opensourced the engine, not the content.
Indeed - which is why nQuake and others want you to provide pak1.pak from the full game to get textures and other content.
How about coding yours so that it loads resources it needs from a copy of the original game which you leave it up to the end-user to acquire? This is how Quake reimplementations work and ID don't seem to have complained about it.
It is indeed sad, but life is sad that way. If you don't think about the dollar worth, more human lives are lost. As she said in the article, the deceased himself, had he known the costs of his care could be used to vaccinate a tremendous amount of third-world children - he would have preferred the money be spent that way.
Or thinking less altrustically, a person might have a better life if instead of the money being spent to prolong their life at the end if was given to them in the prime of their life to have experiences that wouldn't otherwise have been open to them.
The problem though is that for the adverts to be relevent, either based on knowning the users interests or their location would have some privacy implications. It would work better, for the user at least if you could give the advertising network a list of subjects for adverts you would find acceptable. The problem with this though is that a lot of advertising exists precicely to try to sell things to people that they don't already think they need.
...if it's that you really want to be an IT teacher rather than a Chemistry teacher maybe you could get a new job? :)
It depends what the application needs to do, some capabilities are only available to self-signed binaries, others are restricted to formally certified applications. I've found the self-signing process from a developers point of view to be relatively painless so I don't mind that but what has annoyed me is that each symbian version has a slightly different set of APIs and it's frustrating to find that you can't do something on a phone that's less than 2 years old with no option to upgrade the OS.
There was the TestDrive system used for distributing ID games however I think that's a few years later than 1993 and possibly doesn't work in the same way; it worked by unencrypting a full copy of the game held on the same CD as the shareware one.
We do that now with Dell stock references, there are some downsides though - some users struggle to give them accurately over the phone and they're hard to memorise. I've also found a few cases where the person setting up the machine has done an inadvertent typo in the hostname, but that should improve now we're doing the 'hostname from BIOS' thing.
The previous system, which I preferred was to create the hostname from a two character OS shortcode and a sequential number - NT001, 2K001, XP001. If a machine is reinstalled to a new OS it gets a number in a high range, XP800 etc.
These are easy to give over the phone and memorise but the main advantage is that when a user calls you immediately know the OS of the PC and the approximate age of the hardware without having to consult your inventory database. Another useful thing is if you're having problems with connections to an application you can tell the OS of those clients which are able to connect to see if there's a pattern without needing to cross-check. If you do do this you still need to have the stock reference as the primary key in any inventory databases in case the OS (and hence hostname) changes.
They should skip the games and move straight to the Illustrated Primers, there's no better way of propagating British cultural memes.
Rhod Gilbert on Afghanistan
It's certainly a very "shiny" product but the speed is average even amongst USB external enclosures. The supplied software is also rather quirky; the way it works is that it claims to always have a 2Tb partition and then fudges the amount of free space accordingly. The monitoring software also seems to require being run as an administrator.
One other thing about them which amused me was that whilst they support hot removal of drives the lack of caddies has meant they've had to put warning stickers advising you to turn the unit off for 15 minutes before doing so to avoid being burnt. Nice.
If you're interested in this area the book "The Victorian Internet" by Tom Standage is quite interesting.
It might be that the poor performance occurs when you're on a computer that only has USB1 support. On Dells this was added later than you might expect.
You might find you got better performance if you were to use a CD to hold most of the static software and the USB for just your home directory.
It's just a shame that (as far as I can tell) they're not planning to have functionality which allows you to set custom defaults for new games. Whenever I get a new game I change WASD to UHJK (left handed) and always think it should be able to do this automatically somehow.
The bit about who will maintain the systems is especially true. I've been involved in situations where a user has had some IT skills over and above what is required to do their job and has taken over some of the IT responsibility. When they leave their replacement is chosen on the basis of the criteria of their position - not what they've been doing, often because there simply isn't the budget to hire someone with those skills, leaving a vacuum.
Another problem if you are the user is that if you have a process that takes 3 hours and you automate it so it takes 5 minutes your work will expand to fill the saved time. Do this a couple of time and if the automation breaks you will neither have the time to do the process manually or to fix it and you'll get it in the neck when people notice jobs aren't being done.
Also we don't know that what is said to have happened happened. For all we know it could have been...
Step 1) Take photos of autographed XBox
Step 2) Post in normal, undecorated XBox with a few smudges
Step 3) Profit (hopefully)
If this situation were to come up again the correct thing would be to ask either "Can I send in my XBox without a case" or "Can I swap the case with another device" - I'm not saying that this is less likely to go horribly wrong at the factory, in all likelihood they'd refuse to repair it but then you can complain about having been told differently while not having lost your precious doodles.
If there is something on the internet that you feel would make a positive impression on a prospective employer highlight it specifically in your CV.
For example:
I am an active member of the Linux community, regularly posting on the Linux Kernel mailing list. My contributions can be found at here
That way you're not relying on their detective skills to locate all the best bits, as well as there being no confusion about whether this is you or not.
I would not recommend random searching for information about people you're considering hiring as you may find out more than you wanted to know. We had a candidate at work who had put on his CV he did some LJ related programming so as this obviously implied ownership of an LJ we had a look for it. On it he expressed a love for water sports, bondage and other such activities - I'm not suggesting in the slightest that this would be a reason not to hire someone however this is information that many people keep private and which he might not have wanted to share with his future colleagues, meaning that for all his time there we would have to be careful not to make reference to it. Awkward. Luckily for us he also mentioned on his journal that he was suspended by his current employer for computer misuse and that he didn't care about our job, he was just going to scam interview expenses so we told him he'd been unsuccessful with a clear conscience.
You could try having a look on the Autodesk website and downloading the latest XML computability file and see if your card is now supported but if it's a consumer card this is unlikely and you're probably just going to have to go into the options and enable it manually. Before you do this it's also worth doing some research on the Autodesk website and elsewhere about your card - while most of them are disabled unnecessarily to be on the safe side there are some which do have rendering problems.
...the tape? :)