The Android software works like a charm (except for the occasional forgetting that pages that require logging in won't be logged in -- your receipts, for instance, aren't so simple to print).
On the other hand, HP's software, which only operated while I am on the WiFi, never worked to print a web page (I could print photos). I'd get a blank page, or worse, a black page.
1) A decent ergonomic chair that works for people 2 meters tall 2) A door 3) A manager who will
a) go to the meetings on my behalf and send me the 3-line email with the one detail that I needed to be there for
b) find interesting work for me to do 4) A bonus program that has clear, achievable objectives that pay out at least something if I beat my goals -- don't pull the rug out from under my feet if I've been slaving, just because Sales can't get in the door
I'm guessing that a fair part of the readership here are creative developers, who specialize in finding solutions, elegant code, clever hacks, etc. For those of us, testing sucks. The "fun" is in finding that it can be solved, actually solving the problems to the satisfaction of happy users is deadly dull.
What a degree or certificate in Software Testing would do is help properly select for the type of nit-picking douchebags that are capable of sinking their teeth into an intractable bug, and making sure it gets found, characterized, and fixed or warned against (e.g. don't tell anyone that if you switch games you can get a 10X payout).
It's a similar case to Project Management -- a different class of nit-picking douchebag that has to wheedle us into getting work done on clear goals, rather than exploring the interesting parts of the APIs or rasterbating a stylesheet into getting those prompts to line up in a more pleasing way.
This year, they're not quite good enough. Next year, they'll show some impressive results... but still not yet. When it gets to the point that the software and hardware is safer than a human driver, the insurance companies will lobby to mandate it in every car.
Then comes the fun: 1) Your car won't drive until *you* clean the ice off the cameras. 2) Will you still get arrested for drunk driving if the car is doing the driving? 3) Can your car drive your kids without you? Will it if you let them get ahold of the key even if you don't want it to? 4) No more "come pick me up" -- just phone your car 5) Will you even need a car, or will you just whistle for Uber's robo-cab service for anywhere you need to be?
At first glance, I just want to say, "Hey, Basic Interpreter from the 70's, you're finally getting some respect!" But there are some deep issues that are, even with these techniques, going to be very hard to debug: 1) Large I/O situations -- real time data collection and display. Weather reporting, gaming, etc. How is debugging on the GPU going to be helped by this, would be one of my first questions. 2) Networked, distributed code -- with clients on multiple platforms (CPU, browser, Java version, etc.), and clustered virtual servers, where do you debug? Just locating which side is in error (wrong message being sent, wrong message being heard, wrong result being stored/displayed) is a challenge, and real-time transactions (for instance, race conditions on a resource that could be anything from an interrupt bit to a piano in inventory) further complicate this.
If they ever come up with a debugger that will let me hook into both the client and the server at the same time, that would be brilliant.
I've been trying to come up with the all-time best "Not to sing along to in the TSA line" playlist. Amongst the top songs:
* Janie's Got a Gun - Aerosmith * Boom Boom Boom Boom - Dr. John * If I Had a Rocket Launcher - Bruce Cockburn * Shot With His Own Gun - Elvis Costello (actually about consequences of sex, which makes it doubly good for this list "No, sir, I'm singing a song about a girl getting pregnant!") * I Don't Like Mondays - Boomtown Rats * Tear Down the Wall - Pink Floyd * Rosalita - Bruce Springsteen ("You pick up Little Dynamite, I'm gonna pick up Little Gun") * Crash Into Me - Dave Matthews Band
Around that time, I got into geocaching. I'd walk into the woods with a GPS the size of a paperback book, a digital camera, my flip phone, and a Palm Pilot. Maybe an MP3 player.
Now that's all one device, but... Now everything on my house is on the net: printer, home media server, satellite TV, Blu-Ray, home theater receiver, tablet, media streamer, Twine sensor box
I've been using Netvibes for several years now, and am mostly pleased, partly due to its "widget" mode, which lets me separate posts by feed rather than seeing them piled up by time. It will aggregate facebook, twitter, email (subject lines only), and has various widgets for just about anything: google news searches, ebay bids/sales, stock tracking, etc.
It's mobile interface, however, has some serious flaws: it reports the wrong feed name when you select a post (I think it's showing the one you previously selected), and some feeds don't display at all (TechCrunch and MAKE, I'm looking at you) -- it might just be a matter of selecting a different version of the feed, though.
Smaller, lighter cars would be perfectly safe if they didn't have to share the road with freight. Put it back on trains, river barges or even delta dirigibles, and we could lower the safety standards for cars. Of course the next step is to get rid of the Canyonero-class (http://simpsons.wikia.com/wiki/Canyonero) SUVs, and how do mobile homes, boat trailers, etc. get around?
... only put 1000 of these on newsstands in NY and LA. Nothing in flyover country, nothing for subscribers. I've been looking all over for one of these for tinkering -- should be possible to sideload an app at the very least, and it looks like a spare BB trackball might make navigation of menus possible (I think I have an old Crackberry floating around here somewhere).
If nothing else, this looks like a fun device to hack: break it, and you've lost a few bucks at worst, and the LiON battery alone is worth the magazine cost.
Go watch Robot and Frank, great movie, even if it's pretty obvious that the assistance robot is a person in a robot suit. http://robotandfrank-film.com/
As a customer needing support, using the live chat depends on what I need. If I have to convince someone that something is wrong, like a service level not being met, or anything that I expect to escalate to a supervisor, I'm going to want a live person on a phone. If I have to explicitly spell something out, like my name, I'm happier to use the live chat... but I seem to be able to type about eight or nine times faster than most support staff. Waiting for a reply from the point when it says "Bob is typing..." can be painful.
A game of solitaire tends to be required accompaniment to any live chat support session.
Whoops, forgot Garth Nix: Sabriel is one of the best fantasies I've read, and treats its magic very seriously, very technological. The Keys to the Kingdom is a series my wife loved (I haven't gotten to it).
Some of the classics of SF are awfully dated: theirs are futures which didn't happen. Because of that, Asimov, Heinlein, Andre Norton, Williams and Abrashkin's "Danny Dunn" and other juveniles of that time may be hard to swallow. I'd say that CS Lewis falls in the same category.
Daniel Pinkwater is a genius, with books for all ages:Tooth-Gnasher Superflash is a picture book about test-driving a car, and hopefully it flies and eats other cars; Alan Mendelsohn, The Boy from Mars is about the strangeness of growing up. You can't go wrong with one of his books. Roald Dahl, while written half a century ago, hold up pretty well: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a good gateway drug, and Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator is a little more SFnal Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game" is a tough read for a youngster -- be available for the reader, answer questions, help them along. Some object to Card's politics, and his psychology of cruelty, but it's still a darn good read. Lois McMaster Bujold's "The Warrior's Apprentice" may be a little old for an 8-year-old, but not by much. It's a modern space opera, about someone older but not bigger than an 8-year-old. Scott Westerfeld's "Leviathan", "Peeps" and "Uglies" series are perhaps aimed more at teens, but don't get too adult. His wife, Justine Larbalester, writes great fantasy (How to Ditch your Fairy, Liar). Clive Barker's "Abarat" is sort of an Oz/Wonderland inside-out. Yes, the creator of Pinhead can write kid-safe stuff too. But oops, that's fantasy too. China Mieville's "Railsea" is getting great press, but I haven't had a chance to read. Paulo Bacigalupi's "Shipbreaker" is another I haven't read yet Adam Rex's "The True Meaning of Smekday" is one my wife enjoyed a lot Cory Doctorow's "Little Brother" might work well, if you don't mind your 8-year-old becoming an activist;^)
Well, selling what you design might be a little tough. First off, like cell phones, these things are going to be tied up in all sorts of patents (sure, not as many, but yes, there's going to be license fees). Second, and the biggie, depending on the type of hearing aid, it requires either a simple 510K filing or a whole Premarket Authorization (PMA), which means clinical trials, proof of efficacy, etc. These are medical devices, and subject to regulation. It's what stops people from selling snake-oil medicines and smartphone apps that cure acne.
If all you learn is computer programming, that's all you can do. And you can learn computer science and programming on the net at least as effectively and swiftly on the net. So don't waste your time and precious tuition on that. Join an open-source project and prove you have skills and experience instead of book learning.
Learn a subject matter: biology/pharmacology, and you'll be of interest to the pharmaceutical industry; physics and you'll be useful for games; business and project management and you're useful to everybody; some other form of engineering so you can make the engineers more effective.
If all you know is computer science, you're only useful as a grunt that I'm going to work hard, and never will advance to analysis, subject matter expertise, etc.
Length is still a problem: Did I put spaces between each word? Did I capitalize some of the words? A reasonable compromise, which still defeats most dictionary attacks is to acronymize your phrase:
"Purple Elephants make for a rough Work Day" becomes PEmfarWD. It sill has problems with caps -- make a rule like adjectives and nouns get capitalized, and you may be OK.
It beats the living snot out of the standard soft keyboard, and may be faster than the slider keyboard on my Moto Droid, except that I can use *two* thumbs on the slider. I haven't yet gotten used to the right actions to say, "no, it's not one of those eight words" without having to reswype the whole word -- annoying on lengthy words. It's accuracy is pretty darn good anyway, even if I swerve because I'm going the wrong way toward a letter, it often gets the right word.
Only app I haven't gotten it to work on is Twisty, an interactive fiction interpreter -- it would be a big help there.
If DRM tools read these signatures properly, it should be possible to avoid some of the issues now where you can't copy your own videos, or play a DVD you made of your own band on a DVD player, etc. I'm hopeful there is a signature type of "unsigned" or "Creative Commons" or other ways of saying, "Yes, darn it! Copy me!"
On the other hand, it's more likely that media players will be created that won't play anything that doesn't have a valid signature
I don't see this -- in the long run -- increasing the (cough) security of the media providers. Re-encoding an entire vid with new signatures, after pirating, bowdlerizing, excising, parodying, etc. will just be an annoying step in the process. Here's the fun part: wait until a network finds they can't trim language, nudity, blood, etc. out of a movie they want to air in prime time, and half the TVs refuse to air it because it's been edited!
The original models of the TiVo used a (cludgy) IR repeater to drive sat and cable boxes, and knew how to work with DirecTV. The first HD DVRs for DirecTV were TiVo units, and were wonderful (but slow. Then again, the DirecTV boxes they're still leasing aren't much faster at GUI).
Then the two companies feuded, probably not just because TiVo signed a deal to provide cable HD boxes.
HD DirecTiVos still get a decent price on eBay, although they no longer can receive premium channels such as HBO, since D* moved them to a different sattelite frequency band and codec.
Everything points to a new DirecTV TiVo box coming this year (but they said that last year too), but reports are that it'll be a premium over the current DirecTV DVR fee. It'll have to be spectacular to be worth it -- I get most of my entertainment on Netflix streaming through my Blurry player anyway.
Oh, I'm _very_ good at it. I usually meet or beat my estimates to accomiplish the specifications listed. It's two things that can screw up a schedule: 1) The specifications are just not enough, and more really needs to be done to make it usable, and I want to do the right thing 2) The specifications are exactly what the customer asked for, but not what they want *now* 3) Documentation 4) Bad math
On the other hand, the UI for the setup program for iBaby is a [u]lot[/ul] more fun than the iBaby app itself. Just click cancel before installation completes, or make sure that Wife 1.0 has a firewall.
Has he let us down up until now? Aliens, Terminator, T2, Abyss (not kick-ass amazing, but still a good flick), True Lies... you have to go back to Pirhana to get a stinker, and he was still cutting his chops, and he didn't write it.
And I don't know what trailer the critic watched, but I'm with Sam Worthington: "This is *GREAT*"
Slashdot Mirror
The Android software works like a charm (except for the occasional forgetting that pages that require logging in won't be logged in -- your receipts, for instance, aren't so simple to print).
On the other hand, HP's software, which only operated while I am on the WiFi, never worked to print a web page (I could print photos). I'd get a blank page, or worse, a black page.
... to bankrupt the Chinese government by convincing them they need to build aircraft of matching capabilities.
Hey, that's how we won the cold war against the Soviet Union, but with missles
1) A decent ergonomic chair that works for people 2 meters tall
2) A door
3) A manager who will
a) go to the meetings on my behalf and send me the 3-line email with the one detail that I needed to be there for
b) find interesting work for me to do
4) A bonus program that has clear, achievable objectives that pay out at least something if I beat my goals -- don't pull the rug out from under my feet if I've been slaving, just because Sales can't get in the door
I'm guessing that a fair part of the readership here are creative developers, who specialize in finding solutions, elegant code, clever hacks, etc.
For those of us, testing sucks. The "fun" is in finding that it can be solved, actually solving the problems to the satisfaction of happy users is deadly dull.
What a degree or certificate in Software Testing would do is help properly select for the type of nit-picking douchebags that are capable of sinking their teeth into an intractable bug, and making sure it gets found, characterized, and fixed or warned against (e.g. don't tell anyone that if you switch games you can get a 10X payout).
It's a similar case to Project Management -- a different class of nit-picking douchebag that has to wheedle us into getting work done on clear goals, rather than exploring the interesting parts of the APIs or rasterbating a stylesheet into getting those prompts to line up in a more pleasing way.
This year, they're not quite good enough.
Next year, they'll show some impressive results... but still not yet.
When it gets to the point that the software and hardware is safer than a human driver, the insurance companies will lobby to mandate it in every car.
Then comes the fun:
1) Your car won't drive until *you* clean the ice off the cameras.
2) Will you still get arrested for drunk driving if the car is doing the driving?
3) Can your car drive your kids without you? Will it if you let them get ahold of the key even if you don't want it to?
4) No more "come pick me up" -- just phone your car
5) Will you even need a car, or will you just whistle for Uber's robo-cab service for anywhere you need to be?
At first glance, I just want to say, "Hey, Basic Interpreter from the 70's, you're finally getting some respect!"
But there are some deep issues that are, even with these techniques, going to be very hard to debug:
1) Large I/O situations -- real time data collection and display. Weather reporting, gaming, etc. How is debugging on the GPU going to be helped by this, would be one of my first questions.
2) Networked, distributed code -- with clients on multiple platforms (CPU, browser, Java version, etc.), and clustered virtual servers, where do you debug? Just locating which side is in error (wrong message being sent, wrong message being heard, wrong result being stored/displayed) is a challenge, and real-time transactions (for instance, race conditions on a resource that could be anything from an interrupt bit to a piano in inventory) further complicate this.
If they ever come up with a debugger that will let me hook into both the client and the server at the same time, that would be brilliant.
I've been trying to come up with the all-time best "Not to sing along to in the TSA line" playlist. Amongst the top songs:
* Janie's Got a Gun - Aerosmith
* Boom Boom Boom Boom - Dr. John
* If I Had a Rocket Launcher - Bruce Cockburn
* Shot With His Own Gun - Elvis Costello (actually about consequences of sex, which makes it doubly good for this list "No, sir, I'm singing a song about a girl getting pregnant!")
* I Don't Like Mondays - Boomtown Rats
* Tear Down the Wall - Pink Floyd
* Rosalita - Bruce Springsteen ("You pick up Little Dynamite, I'm gonna pick up Little Gun")
* Crash Into Me - Dave Matthews Band
What else? No rap please, it's just too easy.
Around that time, I got into geocaching. I'd walk into the woods with a GPS the size of a paperback book, a digital camera, my flip phone, and a Palm Pilot. Maybe an MP3 player.
Now that's all one device, but...
Now everything on my house is on the net: printer, home media server, satellite TV, Blu-Ray, home theater receiver, tablet, media streamer, Twine sensor box
Interesting trade.
I've been using Netvibes for several years now, and am mostly pleased, partly due to its "widget" mode, which lets me separate posts by feed rather than seeing them piled up by time. It will aggregate facebook, twitter, email (subject lines only), and has various widgets for just about anything: google news searches, ebay bids/sales, stock tracking, etc.
It's mobile interface, however, has some serious flaws: it reports the wrong feed name when you select a post (I think it's showing the one you previously selected), and some feeds don't display at all (TechCrunch and MAKE, I'm looking at you) -- it might just be a matter of selecting a different version of the feed, though.
It's the good ones. The bad ones can't set up a back door, or subtly corrupt data, and haven't frobbed any SSL keys.
Smaller, lighter cars would be perfectly safe if they didn't have to share the road with freight. Put it back on trains, river barges or even delta dirigibles, and we could lower the safety standards for cars. Of course the next step is to get rid of the Canyonero-class (http://simpsons.wikia.com/wiki/Canyonero) SUVs, and how do mobile homes, boat trailers, etc. get around?
... only put 1000 of these on newsstands in NY and LA. Nothing in flyover country, nothing for subscribers.
I've been looking all over for one of these for tinkering -- should be possible to sideload an app at the very least, and it looks like a spare BB trackball might make navigation of menus possible (I think I have an old Crackberry floating around here somewhere).
If nothing else, this looks like a fun device to hack: break it, and you've lost a few bucks at worst, and the LiON battery alone is worth the magazine cost.
Go watch Robot and Frank, great movie, even if it's pretty obvious that the assistance robot is a person in a robot suit.
http://robotandfrank-film.com/
As a customer needing support, using the live chat depends on what I need.
If I have to convince someone that something is wrong, like a service level not being met, or anything that I expect to escalate to a supervisor, I'm going to want a live person on a phone.
If I have to explicitly spell something out, like my name, I'm happier to use the live chat... but I seem to be able to type about eight or nine times faster than most support staff. Waiting for a reply from the point when it says "Bob is typing..." can be painful.
A game of solitaire tends to be required accompaniment to any live chat support session.
Whoops, forgot Garth Nix: Sabriel is one of the best fantasies I've read, and treats its magic very seriously, very technological. The Keys to the Kingdom is a series my wife loved (I haven't gotten to it).
Some of the classics of SF are awfully dated: theirs are futures which didn't happen. Because of that, Asimov, Heinlein, Andre Norton, Williams and Abrashkin's "Danny Dunn" and other juveniles of that time may be hard to swallow. I'd say that CS Lewis falls in the same category.
Daniel Pinkwater is a genius, with books for all ages:Tooth-Gnasher Superflash is a picture book about test-driving a car, and hopefully it flies and eats other cars; Alan Mendelsohn, The Boy from Mars is about the strangeness of growing up. You can't go wrong with one of his books. ;^)
Roald Dahl, while written half a century ago, hold up pretty well: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a good gateway drug, and Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator is a little more SFnal
Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game" is a tough read for a youngster -- be available for the reader, answer questions, help them along. Some object to Card's politics, and his psychology of cruelty, but it's still a darn good read.
Lois McMaster Bujold's "The Warrior's Apprentice" may be a little old for an 8-year-old, but not by much. It's a modern space opera, about someone older but not bigger than an 8-year-old.
Scott Westerfeld's "Leviathan", "Peeps" and "Uglies" series are perhaps aimed more at teens, but don't get too adult. His wife, Justine Larbalester, writes great fantasy (How to Ditch your Fairy, Liar).
Clive Barker's "Abarat" is sort of an Oz/Wonderland inside-out. Yes, the creator of Pinhead can write kid-safe stuff too. But oops, that's fantasy too.
China Mieville's "Railsea" is getting great press, but I haven't had a chance to read.
Paulo Bacigalupi's "Shipbreaker" is another I haven't read yet
Adam Rex's "The True Meaning of Smekday" is one my wife enjoyed a lot
Cory Doctorow's "Little Brother" might work well, if you don't mind your 8-year-old becoming an activist
Well, selling what you design might be a little tough.
First off, like cell phones, these things are going to be tied up in all sorts of patents (sure, not as many, but yes, there's going to be license fees).
Second, and the biggie, depending on the type of hearing aid, it requires either a simple 510K filing or a whole Premarket Authorization (PMA), which means clinical trials, proof of efficacy, etc. These are medical devices, and subject to regulation. It's what stops people from selling snake-oil medicines and smartphone apps that cure acne.
Read the FDA regulations: http://www.fda.gov/MedicalDevices/DeviceRegulationandGuidance/GuidanceDocuments/ucm127086.htm
It's not cheap to get those done -- there are user fees of $500K and higher for FDA filings.
If all you learn is computer programming, that's all you can do. And you can learn computer science and programming on the net at least as effectively and swiftly on the net. So don't waste your time and precious tuition on that. Join an open-source project and prove you have skills and experience instead of book learning.
Learn a subject matter: biology/pharmacology, and you'll be of interest to the pharmaceutical industry; physics and you'll be useful for games; business and project management and you're useful to everybody; some other form of engineering so you can make the engineers more effective.
If all you know is computer science, you're only useful as a grunt that I'm going to work hard, and never will advance to analysis, subject matter expertise, etc.
Length is still a problem: Did I put spaces between each word? Did I capitalize some of the words?
A reasonable compromise, which still defeats most dictionary attacks is to acronymize your phrase:
"Purple Elephants make for a rough Work Day" becomes PEmfarWD. It sill has problems with caps -- make a rule like adjectives and nouns get capitalized, and you may be OK.
It beats the living snot out of the standard soft keyboard, and may be faster than the slider keyboard on my Moto Droid, except that I can use *two* thumbs on the slider.
I haven't yet gotten used to the right actions to say, "no, it's not one of those eight words" without having to reswype the whole word -- annoying on lengthy words. It's accuracy is pretty darn good anyway, even if I swerve because I'm going the wrong way toward a letter, it often gets the right word.
Only app I haven't gotten it to work on is Twisty, an interactive fiction interpreter -- it would be a big help there.
If DRM tools read these signatures properly, it should be possible to avoid some of the issues now where you can't copy your own videos, or play a DVD you made of your own band on a DVD player, etc.
I'm hopeful there is a signature type of "unsigned" or "Creative Commons" or other ways of saying, "Yes, darn it! Copy me!"
On the other hand, it's more likely that media players will be created that won't play anything that doesn't have a valid signature
I don't see this -- in the long run -- increasing the (cough) security of the media providers. Re-encoding an entire vid with new signatures, after pirating, bowdlerizing, excising, parodying, etc. will just be an annoying step in the process.
Here's the fun part: wait until a network finds they can't trim language, nudity, blood, etc. out of a movie they want to air in prime time, and half the TVs refuse to air it because it's been edited!
The original models of the TiVo used a (cludgy) IR repeater to drive sat and cable boxes, and knew how to work with DirecTV.
The first HD DVRs for DirecTV were TiVo units, and were wonderful (but slow. Then again, the DirecTV boxes they're still leasing aren't much faster at GUI).
Then the two companies feuded, probably not just because TiVo signed a deal to provide cable HD boxes.
HD DirecTiVos still get a decent price on eBay, although they no longer can receive premium channels such as HBO, since D* moved them to a different sattelite frequency band and codec.
Everything points to a new DirecTV TiVo box coming this year (but they said that last year too), but reports are that it'll be a premium over the current DirecTV DVR fee. It'll have to be spectacular to be worth it -- I get most of my entertainment on Netflix streaming through my Blurry player anyway.
Oh, I'm _very_ good at it.
I usually meet or beat my estimates to accomiplish the specifications listed.
It's two things that can screw up a schedule:
1) The specifications are just not enough, and more really needs to be done to make it usable, and I want to do the right thing
2) The specifications are exactly what the customer asked for, but not what they want *now*
3) Documentation
4) Bad math
On the other hand, the UI for the setup program for iBaby is a [u]lot[/ul] more fun than the iBaby app itself.
Just click cancel before installation completes, or make sure that Wife 1.0 has a firewall.
James F*cking Cameron
Has he let us down up until now? Aliens, Terminator, T2, Abyss (not kick-ass amazing, but still a good flick), True Lies... you have to go back to Pirhana to get a stinker, and he was still cutting his chops, and he didn't write it.
And I don't know what trailer the critic watched, but I'm with Sam Worthington: "This is *GREAT*"