This problem is not intrinsic to the UNIX community. We're predominantly a Windows shop (but have recently started porting to UNIX) where everything is driven from the backend APIs. I have reams of anecdotal evidence that this sort of process, while it does work, is sub-par. Here's a quote from one of our lead engineers:
"... I would estimate that we spent several months working on issues that were caused by situations where the underlying [object model] was differnt to the object model that was shown to the user."
My suggestion to flip the process around (i.e. start from user oriented use-cases like the GUI) was rebuffed - the real reason being that the balance of power would shift to a different set of individuals, not to mention a degree of apathy (its how we've always done it, why change?). I haven't quite given up yet - and hope in the end technical merit and common sense will prevail...
billboards that watch you... rf noise?
on
The Year In Ideas
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
This is from: billboards that watch you
Mobiltrak's technology relies on a little-known fact about car radios: they don't just receive signals; they also emit them. A car radio tunes to a particular station by mixing the signal from the ether with its own internally generated signal. It's that faint internal signal that the Mobiltrak dish picks up.
Can someone explain this? From Mobiltrak's FAQ, it implies the "internal signal" is just RF noise - and that its noise signature is different depending upon the station you're tuned into. Is RF noise really that loud? If so, does it also mean its also theoretically possible to determine what any electronic appliance is doing?
Cars cause road rage - which has demonstrable costs. This is proof that cars make people violent. Hell, I've been a victim of a nasty incident myself but the idea of banning cars is ludicrous even though cars cause more injuries and deaths a year than just about everything.
There are always going to be bloody idiots around.
Well, Java is both the language and a virtual machine. Designing a scalable VM is tricky - for example, this article (http://java.sun.com/docs/hotspot/gc/) discusses how garbage collection degrades with the number of processors available. Sun has done a fair amount of research like this to ensure the VM scales, or at least to the extent we understand the tradeoffs when tuning an application (esp. 1.4 VMs).
I feel much more comfortable knowing whether the GPL is upheld or not, rather than leaving it in limbo.
But I believe it will be upheld. I've been following some of the articles by Mogden and Lessig - and they make clear and sensible arguments why GPL is valid. You write code, or a book. Its yours. Your property. Copyright law says its yours, and no one can monkey with it without your permission. GPL grants other people that permission to monkey with it as long as they agree to the conditions laid out. In a nutshell, that's all there is to it. GPL will be upheld.
If GPL is NOT upheld, it will have dramatic ramifications as to what you can and cannot do with your own property - hah - I'd like to see a judge/jury regulate the rights of ownership!
Video gaming is about more than just playing games now... this isn't just about games; this is about hardware, games, and pure unadulterated Marketing.
Huh?
We play games cause they're fun - something no amount of marketing or hardware no matter how good can impart.
The railroad industry and transportation sector isn't such a good example of marketing myopia either. Rail and air are such different beasts, its tantamount to abandoning one business for another. A better example would be to make use of the existing track infrastructure by laying fiber optics across it (I forget which company now) and diversifying to the telecommunications sector.
Yes, probably will. Did a quick search on her... interesting, though I'm generally not a fan of the stream-of-conciousness style of writing. In any case, I'll want to compare her to Ayn Rand.
I've long held an interest of reading accounts of what (extraordinary) schizophrenics go through in their own worlds in their own words. IMO PKD's Valis and Pirsig's Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance are seminal works in this peculiar field. So far, his writings that have been turned into film really just skim upon his twisted view of reality.
Valis has creativity that makes you gasp (well, me anyway): there's a great discourse between Dr. Stone and Horselover Fat that should be mandatory instruction for anyone working in mental health. Horselover Fat is the alter-ego of Philip K Dick. You'd have to read the book to find out why he's such an odd name...
I don't see the ACLU taking on cases necessarily to win them - not that they try to lose, but to argue each case through to the end.. and when everyone sees why they win or lose a case, it will also tell us the strengths and weaknesses of the existing laws.
Squeak (http://www.squeak.org) as in the open-sourced smalltalk implementation has been under the umbrella of Disney for a while now. And the only reason they support it is due to some obscure relationship with their pet mice...
These are impressive. And I've seen hundreds of aerial shots (mostly from a helicopter) as my dad's an urban planner. Considering they spent several hundred thousand bucks charting various air services.. ballooning could be very cost effective, though I'd imagine the logistics of covering vast areas could be a nightmare. Still.
Except for the link you sent, I haven't seen many pics.. just takes too long to load via modem. But have you guys tried out any stereoscopic shots? Seems you could put together some dazzling 3D images.
Borland is certainly concerned.. when they discovered we weren't going to renew our JBuilder licenses with many of us going over to Eclipse, they sent down a product manager to give us a presentation. At the end of the day, it became especially clear to us that we certainly wouldn't fork out US$3000 or even 1000 for JUST an IDE. Instead, we're spending our budget on Together Control Center (which Borland acquired from TogetherSoft) licenses instead, which has superior round trip engineering to Rational Rose. I did try the free UML diagrammer from www.omondo.com - its not bad - but they're light years away from Together/Rose.
At the end of the day, I wouldn't recommend paying much (or at all) for an IDE - especially with Eclipse around. Instead if you've a dozen or more developers, and have a technically competent manager, products like Together and Rose do add tangible benefits to the development process (esp. use-cases, class diagrams, sequence diagrams).
A few years ago I helped my dad out, who is an urban planner, in calculating some population cohorts, which is usually a good indicator of the level of development of a country.
Developing countries have cohorts that look like pyramids - a lot of young people, and much less older people. Developed countries tend to look like chimney stacks since health care is better so there are almost as many older people as there are young.
The problem we have these days is that most HR management don't seem to know how to manage cohorts for the mid to long term. But I suspect the largest, and most successful companies do in fact have guidelines to ensure there is good balance of new and old blood - seems like common sense really.
The philosophy behind buddhism is nicely captured by Zen, which I think is a practical philosophy of life. Zen tries to capture the essence of what buddha tried to teach.
"Zen flesh, zen bones" by Paul Reps is an excellent book to start, and some would argue the only one you'd ever need. I just like its collection of weird and wonderful stories.
Performance analysis from this project to develop a high performance platform for internet services(http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~mdw/proj/sed a/index.html) shows that Java can be better than c/c++.
But in general, if your application involves a fair amount of I/O, the programming language isn't likely to affect performance all that much.
Re:I thought so + a note about chimps
on
Genome Surprise
·
· Score: 1
Indeed, I don't think the numbers mean anything.
I remember reading somewhere that we are nearly (98.5%) genetically identical to chimps. That measly 1.5% is responsible for the gulf of difference between us and our closest primate. Are there any studies out there just focus on that magical 1.5%?
The article may be alluding to something like Command & Conquer (or Warcraft) meets Doom (or Flight Simulator), where you can both play as a grunt or a tactician. Tacticians define missions, and the individuals attempt to execute it. Imagine what a game that would make.
Richard Feynman once observed a flying spinning/wobbling paper plate with a motif on its side, and doodled a surprisingly complex mathematical equation describing its behaviour. When questioned later - WHY??? Hell, because it was fun! Of course, this did lead to his seminal work on quantum mechanics, and a nobel prize.
Sure this pendulum thing seems kind of silly, but may be the feedback mechanism could inspire some new neural network neuron - a precursor to true AI!
You could be just trolling asking a question like that - I'm just glad people don't always experiment with stuff that's always "useful".
I've been using eclipse since 2.0, and have been closely following its development - at first out of curiosity (when I discovered Erich Gamma of the Design Patterns fame was on the project), but have over time learnt a great deal from their articles and best practices...
They probably have the best document about evolving Java APIs, i.e. maintaining backwards compatibility.
Meeting deadlines. When they publish a game plan, they stick to it - very rarely missing their milestones. They've long adopted continuous integration (automated builds, unit tests), and frequent releases.
SWT - their cross platform widget set, which has ports for most windowing systems under the sun. Its a lot faster and looks better than Swing. Its really a very thin JNI layer (C to Java interface) on top of the native APIs, so if you've programmed in GTK, you could take a look at the wrappers and figure out pretty quickly how to use SWT. It does have problems if there are humongous amounts of calls to be made (like with large tables - in which case you can just use Swing).
Anyway, one of my favourite features is its scrapbook that lets you execute Java statements on the fly like an interpreted language.
Worth a try if you haven't experienced it. I should know... there's an unused paid JBuilder license still sitting in my drawer.
Slashdot Mirror
This problem is not intrinsic to the UNIX community. We're predominantly a Windows shop (but have recently started porting to UNIX) where everything is driven from the backend APIs. I have reams of anecdotal evidence that this sort of process, while it does work, is sub-par. Here's a quote from one of our lead engineers:
"... I would estimate that we spent several months working on issues that were caused by situations where the underlying [object model] was differnt to the object model that was shown to the user."
My suggestion to flip the process around (i.e. start from user oriented use-cases like the GUI) was rebuffed - the real reason being that the balance of power would shift to a different set of individuals, not to mention a degree of apathy (its how we've always done it, why change?). I haven't quite given up yet - and hope in the end technical merit and common sense will prevail...
This is from: billboards that watch you
Mobiltrak's technology relies on a little-known fact about car radios: they don't just receive signals; they also emit them. A car radio tunes to a particular station by mixing the signal from the ether with its own internally generated signal. It's that faint internal signal that the Mobiltrak dish picks up.
Can someone explain this? From Mobiltrak's FAQ, it implies the "internal signal" is just RF noise - and that its noise signature is different depending upon the station you're tuned into. Is RF noise really that loud? If so, does it also mean its also theoretically possible to determine what any electronic appliance is doing?
Cars cause road rage - which has demonstrable costs. This is proof that cars make people violent. Hell, I've been a victim of a nasty incident myself but the idea of banning cars is ludicrous even though cars cause more injuries and deaths a year than just about everything.
There are always going to be bloody idiots around.
Well, Java is both the language and a virtual machine. Designing a scalable VM is tricky - for example, this article (http://java.sun.com/docs/hotspot/gc/) discusses how garbage collection degrades with the number of processors available. Sun has done a fair amount of research like this to ensure the VM scales, or at least to the extent we understand the tradeoffs when tuning an application (esp. 1.4 VMs).
I feel much more comfortable knowing whether the GPL is upheld or not, rather than leaving it in limbo.
But I believe it will be upheld. I've been following some of the articles by Mogden and Lessig - and they make clear and sensible arguments why GPL is valid. You write code, or a book. Its yours. Your property. Copyright law says its yours, and no one can monkey with it without your permission. GPL grants other people that permission to monkey with it as long as they agree to the conditions laid out. In a nutshell, that's all there is to it. GPL will be upheld.
If GPL is NOT upheld, it will have dramatic ramifications as to what you can and cannot do with your own property - hah - I'd like to see a judge/jury regulate the rights of ownership!
Tetradotoxin is the main ingredient used to turn people into zombies. Yes, really.. there's a well-documented case - search for Clarvius Narcisse.
Frankly, I'm surprised there hasn't been more research (evil grin)...
Huh?
We play games cause they're fun - something no amount of marketing or hardware no matter how good can impart.
The railroad industry and transportation sector isn't such a good example of marketing myopia either. Rail and air are such different beasts, its tantamount to abandoning one business for another. A better example would be to make use of the existing track infrastructure by laying fiber optics across it (I forget which company now) and diversifying to the telecommunications sector.
Yes, probably will. Did a quick search on her... interesting, though I'm generally not a fan of the stream-of-conciousness style of writing. In any case, I'll want to compare her to Ayn Rand.
I've long held an interest of reading accounts of what (extraordinary) schizophrenics go through in their own worlds in their own words. IMO PKD's Valis and Pirsig's Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance are seminal works in this peculiar field. So far, his writings that have been turned into film really just skim upon his twisted view of reality.
Valis has creativity that makes you gasp (well, me anyway): there's a great discourse between Dr. Stone and Horselover Fat that should be mandatory instruction for anyone working in mental health. Horselover Fat is the alter-ego of Philip K Dick. You'd have to read the book to find out why he's such an odd name...
I don't see the ACLU taking on cases necessarily to win them - not that they try to lose, but to argue each case through to the end.. and when everyone sees why they win or lose a case, it will also tell us the strengths and weaknesses of the existing laws.
Squeak (http://www.squeak.org) as in the open-sourced smalltalk implementation has been under the umbrella of Disney for a while now. And the only reason they support it is due to some obscure relationship with their pet mice...
These are impressive. And I've seen hundreds of aerial shots (mostly from a helicopter) as my dad's an urban planner. Considering they spent several hundred thousand bucks charting various air services.. ballooning could be very cost effective, though I'd imagine the logistics of covering vast areas could be a nightmare. Still.
Except for the link you sent, I haven't seen many pics.. just takes too long to load via modem. But have you guys tried out any stereoscopic shots? Seems you could put together some dazzling 3D images.
Borland is certainly concerned.. when they discovered we weren't going to renew our JBuilder licenses with many of us going over to Eclipse, they sent down a product manager to give us a presentation. At the end of the day, it became especially clear to us that we certainly wouldn't fork out US$3000 or even 1000 for JUST an IDE. Instead, we're spending our budget on Together Control Center (which Borland acquired from TogetherSoft) licenses instead, which has superior round trip engineering to Rational Rose. I did try the free UML diagrammer from www.omondo.com - its not bad - but they're light years away from Together/Rose.
At the end of the day, I wouldn't recommend paying much (or at all) for an IDE - especially with Eclipse around. Instead if you've a dozen or more developers, and have a technically competent manager, products like Together and Rose do add tangible benefits to the development process (esp. use-cases, class diagrams, sequence diagrams).
IRONY: Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately, it kills all its pupils.
IRONY + SARCASM: Smoking is one of the leading causes of statistics.
SARCASM: No, I've set fire to myself for a bit of a laugh. Obviously.
SARCASM + BITCHINESS: I'm not your type. I'm not inflatable.
BITCHINESS: Tight-fisted? If it cost him a penny to *hit, he'd throw up instead.
A few years ago I helped my dad out, who is an urban planner, in calculating some population cohorts, which is usually a good indicator of the level of development of a country.
Developing countries have cohorts that look like pyramids - a lot of young people, and much less older people. Developed countries tend to look like chimney stacks since health care is better so there are almost as many older people as there are young.
The problem we have these days is that most HR management don't seem to know how to manage cohorts for the mid to long term. But I suspect the largest, and most successful companies do in fact have guidelines to ensure there is good balance of new and old blood - seems like common sense really.
The philosophy behind buddhism is nicely captured by Zen, which I think is a practical philosophy of life. Zen tries to capture the essence of what buddha tried to teach.
"Zen flesh, zen bones" by Paul Reps is an excellent book to start, and some would argue the only one you'd ever need. I just like its collection of weird and wonderful stories.
Performance analysis from this project to develop a high performance platform for internet services(http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~mdw/proj/sed a/index.html) shows that Java can be better than c/c++.
But in general, if your application involves a fair amount of I/O, the programming language isn't likely to affect performance all that much.
Indeed, I don't think the numbers mean anything.
I remember reading somewhere that we are nearly (98.5%) genetically identical to chimps. That measly 1.5% is responsible for the gulf of difference between us and our closest primate. Are there any studies out there just focus on that magical 1.5%?
The article may be alluding to something like Command & Conquer (or Warcraft) meets Doom (or Flight Simulator), where you can both play as a grunt or a tactician. Tacticians define missions, and the individuals attempt to execute it. Imagine what a game that would make.
Richard Feynman once observed a flying spinning/wobbling paper plate with a motif on its side, and doodled a surprisingly complex mathematical equation describing its behaviour. When questioned later - WHY??? Hell, because it was fun! Of course, this did lead to his seminal work on quantum mechanics, and a nobel prize.
Sure this pendulum thing seems kind of silly, but may be the feedback mechanism could inspire some new neural network neuron - a precursor to true AI!
You could be just trolling asking a question like that - I'm just glad people don't always experiment with stuff that's always "useful".
I've been using eclipse since 2.0, and have been closely following its development - at first out of curiosity (when I discovered Erich Gamma of the Design Patterns fame was on the project), but have over time learnt a great deal from their articles and best practices...
Anyway, one of my favourite features is its scrapbook that lets you execute Java statements on the fly like an interpreted language.
Worth a try if you haven't experienced it. I should know... there's an unused paid JBuilder license still sitting in my drawer.
What about tuning a Braun Plaque Remover? Brushing for 20 minutes a day - no flippin' dentists in space that's what!