It's not a zoo or a safari park because the animals won't be segregated, or fed for that matter. No zoo in the world would let the tigers in the zebra enclosure but from the article it sounds like they plan to allow for a natural predator/prey balance.
Humm, makes you wonder if they would be interested in Open Source replacements for some of the extentions in order to free themselves up a little from past agreements.
From you powerpoint presentation which accompanies this announcment I note that several components are not beeing contributed. Namely:
Visual DBA Suite
Spatial Object Library
B1 Security
OpenROAD
Enterprise Access
EDBC
Will these be freely available (but not open), also what process did you go through when deciding what to contribute and what not to? I can imagine that these are areas where you feel you offer more than compeeting Open Source solutions and so you are holding back for now.
This is a shame, especialy with regards the Spatial library as PostgreSQL (via PostGIS) and MySQL (4.1 onwards) already have support for spatial objects and indexing.
I should add that the default param settings are poor, try setting Max Iterations to something more like 3000 and Idle Iterations to 150.
Also, a bit more info on what is happening - the dispay shows three maps, the top left is the actual election result, the top left is the vote pattern at he 'building block' level. Once a run is completed the third map shows the new 'optimized' result.
Some of the earliest software in to perform the task of creating 'optimal' zoning was writen by my professor (Stan Openshaw) back in 1977 - the Automated Zoning Procedure (AZP). It allowed constraints such as minimum population, and objective functions such as equal population, compactness (ratio of area/perimeter) and homogeneity (based on census information).
As a toy to demonstrate how badly you can change the outcome of an election, I wrote a toy demo a few years ago which still seems to be up and running - you can try it out
here
It only implements simple population-based measures, but it does get the point over.
That the the one thing that bothers me about microwave space-earth microwaves, the fact that it has such obvius military applications.
It is not so much the thought of yet another stupidly powerfull weapon, more the though that all the failsafes on a civilian power poject (only beam when laser reflects from reciving station etc) would have workarounds or backdoors put in by the military so that it could be co-opted.
In wich case the failsafes would be 'soft' and could themselves fail.
Usually it's the 80-20 rule, but in open source projects it's more like the 95-5 rule. Open source projects are usually run by one or two people doing most of the work. If you decide to lead an open source project, you must be willing and ready to accept this.
Actualy, if you are about to set out on a new project, its probably best to tell yourself that you are NOT willing and ready to accept this.
6 years ago I started a project called GeoTools and it was, for the main part, excactly that - two people doing most of the work. This was fine for a few years but over time the user/developer ratio got out of hand.
Eventualy it became all but impossible for the two lead developers to support 300+ users and although other developers wanted to contribute it became dificult to 'train' new developers as the knowledge of how things worked existed mainly in the heads of only two individuals who had done 95% of the work.
Two years ago we took the descision to re-design the toolkit from the ground up with as much input from as many people as possible. Since that time we have strived to make sure that as many people as possible have an input into the design process and we keep that process as open as possible by pubishing the IRC sessions in which discussions take place.
The project now has 9 very active developers who are members of a Project Management Committe and a number of other active contributers as well. The end result is that quiries to mailing lists get responded to far more quickly.
Getting other people to work on your project is often - TO START WITH - more effort than just doing the work yourself, but the pay off is HUGE, as you then have someone else who can explain things to others.
If you ever have a contributor who gets stuck or confused and you find yourself thinking 'oh, it will be quicker/easier for me to do this part myself' STOP. Spend the time, help them work out how to do the modification even if it takes a few hours when you could have done it yourself in minutes becuase after you have invested the time in them, they will be able to add things in minutes too, and they can teach others as well.
If you work on a tight, well defined, non-evolving project then most of my ramblings are probably irelelevent if not they they may be of use. The only danger is in investing time in helping developers who then wander off - it happens, but I tend to find that the more you invest in them, the less likely they are to loose intrest.
Excetly, the time to test argument is a strange one. It is possibly valid if you are the only/main developer of an open source project and you are fully aware of the concequences of your edits and modification, at that point the compile time may just become an anoyance.
In a distributed team effort the more tests and checks you can put in place to make sure everything still works the better. Most weakly typed languages allow far too many 'strange' side effects to creep in and if multiple developers are modifying the same code things could get out of hand quickly.
Most large Open Source projects (including the one I set up) use unit tests to make sure one developer does not undo or break the work of another. Running these tests as part of the compile takes up even more time but the protection they provide is invaluable.
The reason he brings it up is that it goes against the other Open Source mantra of 'Release early, release often'.
I guess the combined mantra would become
"Realease as soon as it does something useful, release again as soon as it does somthing better/more than it did before". But that just dosn't have the same ring to it.
"What percentage of CE source code is available?"..."as close to 100% as we can make it -- we can't release sources that belong to other companies."
As it's not 100% anyone who wants to re-distribute CE is going to have to fill in the gaps left by the code MS can't pass on.
As soon as they fill those holes, they will have to pass the new code back to MS.
MS can then ditch the pesky dependance on other companies code, which is probably making a dint in each sale.
Question is, are MS obliged to make the code they get back from this program freely available, if so great, if not then they probaly only have to do this for a year or so, wait till all the holes get filled and release a new version of CE where they have 100% of the code royalty free.
Re:Anyone interested in extending this concept?
on
Geocoding All Content
·
· Score: 1
>who knows anything about attempts to come up with a concept of open source datasets?
There are licences specificaly for data, for example maxmind use what they call an 'Open Data' licence for their GeoIP database: http://www.maxmind.com/download/geoip/d atabase/LIC ENSE.txt
Its not a very good example as it caries an advertising requirement, but its a start.
The IETF have invested a lot of time thinking about these issues. They even have a working group dedicated to it: http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/geopriv-cha rter. html
They have a lot of detailed scenarios for when geolocation would be a good thing and when it would be a bad thing.
For example, one of the big use cases is to enable enhanced 911 (the police know the location of land line numbers) to work over VOIP.
Using IP - country code lookup you can generate maps which show where people are comming from.
For example see: http://www.geotools.org/visitors.html It would be quite easy to add a map like that for a game groups web site or to group players in specific regions.
The lookup is done using the GeoIP database from maxmind.
This is not the first time zip (or other compression algorithms) have been used as an identification tool.
You can do a form of crude language identification using it too, its a bit long winded and you can do far better with other metrics but...
1) Create a load of zip files wich contain large samples of language - one zip file per language
2) Add the file to be identified to each zip file in turn and see which one grows in size by the smallest amount.
Because compresion is based on patterns, the new file will compress the most in the archive which contains the most similar text.
So all we need to do to spot life on other planets is to fill zip files with images from good scifi films (mars attacks seems appropriate) and away we go:)
As a direct result of this/. and other sites linking to SearchKing to run this story the page rank(tm) on goolge will fly up. (given that its based, in some way, on the number of sites that link to a page)
SearchKing will then be able to say, "ha we complained and google fixed it!"
Depends on what was being stored, if the right protocols could be set up then I guess a drive full of my MP3 collection that I could just place next to a BT enabled stereo or in my bag for my BT walkman.
The trick is that if its not data that you need to keep secure and if it can be configured for say read only (or even write only) then its a lot safer.
The thing we all remember about LOGO as kids was the fun graphics. But it's also a full language and it's an exclenet way to learn programming.
StarLogo has been around for a while now (though not in Java) and I've seen it used for some advanced things. For example, I remember being shown an agent based pedestrian model built using the thing if I remember rightly some years ago.
The OpenGIS Consortium is a standards body which has been thinking a lot about the technologies, protocols and infrastructure needed to support the kind of tasks you want to perform. (Acualy, so far a lot of it has been behind closed doors as the Open in OpenGIS tends to come into effect once they think they have the standards right)
You can find out a bit more about one initative that they are involved in here: http://www.openls.org/about.htm And a google on OpenLS will bring you back more.
Now, all that tells you is about the standards, but doesn't give you any tools you actualy need.
[big self plug] I am one of the lead developers of GeoTools2 an open source Java project which is aiming to implement as many of the OGC standards as make sense (and those of other standards groups if they seem appropriate). So far the toolkit will give you the parts you need to read a number of datasources, filter them to show what you want to see and render them using a detailed styling descriptor aimed at geographic information.
It dosn't hook to GPS yet, though the ChaeronGPS library mentioned in other posts may merge well with what we have alrady.
I'm not a mobile map expert, though I would be happy to combine the map rendering expertese I have with someone who is activly developing GPS solutions.
GeoTools2 is available under the LGPL (www.geotools.org), the OGC can be found at www.opengis.org
-- Spell checker (c) Creative Spelling inc. (aka my dyslexic brain)
Or, if you live in Europe...
Time it takes for English warning: 6 seconds.
Time it takes for German warning: 6 seconds.
Time it takes for Spanish warning: 6 seconds.
Time it takes for Norwgen warning: 6 seconds.
Time it takes for French warning: 6 seconds.
Time it takes for....
One film I saw recently had 14 of them, several for lanugaes not in the subtitles list.
Thanfully they tend to be put at the end of the movie after the final credits. Which is much better, though is a fine line somtimes between seeing if there is a 'bonus moment' at the end of the credits and getting stuck in the legal screens.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not a zoo or a safari park because the animals won't be segregated, or fed for that matter. No zoo in the world would let the tigers in the zebra enclosure but from the article it sounds like they plan to allow for a natural predator/prey balance.
Humm, makes you wonder if they would be interested in Open Source replacements for some of the extentions in order to free themselves up a little from past agreements.
Visual DBA Suite
Spatial Object Library
B1 Security
OpenROAD
Enterprise Access
EDBC
Will these be freely available (but not open), also what process did you go through when deciding what to contribute and what not to? I can imagine that these are areas where you feel you offer more than compeeting Open Source solutions and so you are holding back for now.
This is a shame, especialy with regards the Spatial library as PostgreSQL (via PostGIS) and MySQL (4.1 onwards) already have support for spatial objects and indexing.
I should add that the default param settings are poor, try setting Max Iterations to something more like 3000 and Idle Iterations to 150.
Also, a bit more info on what is happening - the dispay shows three maps, the top left is the actual election result, the top left is the vote pattern at he 'building block' level. Once a run is completed the third map shows the new 'optimized' result.
As a toy to demonstrate how badly you can change the outcome of an election, I wrote a toy demo a few years ago which still seems to be up and running - you can try it out here It only implements simple population-based measures, but it does get the point over.
That the the one thing that bothers me about microwave space-earth microwaves, the fact that it has such obvius military applications.
It is not so much the thought of yet another stupidly powerfull weapon, more the though that all the failsafes on a civilian power poject (only beam when laser reflects from reciving station etc) would have workarounds or backdoors put in by the military so that it could be co-opted.
In wich case the failsafes would be 'soft' and could themselves fail.
The main thing that will worry most people is where the fuel is comming from.
Uranium may well be available on Mars, but I can't imagine they will have the facilities to mine it.
If that means they have to take it from Earth then it could be messy if a launch goes wrong.
That said, I guess they won't need much fuel, its not like there are going to be any big cities any time soon...
Actualy, if you are about to set out on a new project, its probably best to tell yourself that you are NOT willing and ready to accept this.
6 years ago I started a project called GeoTools and it was, for the main part, excactly that - two people doing most of the work. This was fine for a few years but over time the user/developer ratio got out of hand.
Eventualy it became all but impossible for the two lead developers to support 300+ users and although other developers wanted to contribute it became dificult to 'train' new developers as the knowledge of how things worked existed mainly in the heads of only two individuals who had done 95% of the work.
Two years ago we took the descision to re-design the toolkit from the ground up with as much input from as many people as possible. Since that time we have strived to make sure that as many people as possible have an input into the design process and we keep that process as open as possible by pubishing the IRC sessions in which discussions take place.
The project now has 9 very active developers who are members of a Project Management Committe and a number of other active contributers as well. The end result is that quiries to mailing lists get responded to far more quickly.
Getting other people to work on your project is often - TO START WITH - more effort than just doing the work yourself, but the pay off is HUGE, as you then have someone else who can explain things to others.
If you ever have a contributor who gets stuck or confused and you find yourself thinking 'oh, it will be quicker/easier for me to do this part myself' STOP. Spend the time, help them work out how to do the modification even if it takes a few hours when you could have done it yourself in minutes becuase after you have invested the time in them, they will be able to add things in minutes too, and they can teach others as well.
If you work on a tight, well defined, non-evolving project then most of my ramblings are probably irelelevent if not they they may be of use. The only danger is in investing time in helping developers who then wander off - it happens, but I tend to find that the more you invest in them, the less likely they are to loose intrest.
Excetly, the time to test argument is a strange one. It is possibly valid if you are the only/main developer of an open source project and you are fully aware of the concequences of your edits and modification, at that point the compile time may just become an anoyance.
In a distributed team effort the more tests and checks you can put in place to make sure everything still works the better. Most weakly typed languages allow far too many 'strange' side effects to creep in and if multiple developers are modifying the same code things could get out of hand quickly.
Most large Open Source projects (including the one I set up) use unit tests to make sure one developer does not undo or break the work of another. Running these tests as part of the compile takes up even more time but the protection they provide is invaluable.
The reason he brings it up is that it goes against the other Open Source mantra of 'Release early, release often'.
I guess the combined mantra would become
"Realease as soon as it does something useful, release again as soon as it does somthing better/more than it did before". But that just dosn't have the same ring to it.
"What percentage of CE source code is available?"..."as close to 100% as we can make it -- we can't release sources that belong to other companies."
As it's not 100% anyone who wants to re-distribute CE is going to have to fill in the gaps left by the code MS can't pass on.
As soon as they fill those holes, they will have to pass the new code back to MS.
MS can then ditch the pesky dependance on other companies code, which is probably making a dint in each sale.
Question is, are MS obliged to make the code they get back from this program freely available, if so great, if not then they probaly only have to do this for a year or so, wait till all the holes get filled and release a new version of CE where they have 100% of the code royalty free.
>who knows anything about attempts to come up with a concept of open source datasets?
d atabase/LIC ENSE.txt
There are licences specificaly for data, for example maxmind use what they call an 'Open Data' licence for their GeoIP database:
http://www.maxmind.com/download/geoip/
Its not a very good example as it caries an advertising requirement, but its a start.
The IETF have invested a lot of time thinking about these issues. They even have a working group dedicated to it:a rter. html
http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/geopriv-ch
They have a lot of detailed scenarios for when geolocation would be a good thing and when it would be a bad thing.
For example, one of the big use cases is to enable enhanced 911 (the police know the location of land line numbers) to work over VOIP.
Using IP - country code lookup you can generate maps which show where people are comming from.
For example see:
http://www.geotools.org/visitors.html
It would be quite easy to add a map like that for a game groups web site or to group players in specific regions.
The lookup is done using the GeoIP database from maxmind.
This is not the first time zip (or other compression algorithms) have been used as an identification tool.
:)
You can do a form of crude language identification using it too, its a bit long winded and you can do far better with other metrics but...
1) Create a load of zip files wich contain large samples of language - one zip file per language
2) Add the file to be identified to each zip file in turn and see which one grows in size by the smallest amount.
Because compresion is based on patterns, the new file will compress the most in the archive which contains the most similar text.
So all we need to do to spot life on other planets is to fill zip files with images from good scifi films (mars attacks seems appropriate) and away we go
But there has been no attempt here to write this as an editorial, to comment on why this disk distribution idea is good/bad etc.
A biased post that talks about a new distro comming out is still way better than this article which is a straight advert.
CLUE - visit OUR web site....
As a direct result of this /. and other sites linking to SearchKing to run this story the page rank(tm) on goolge will fly up. (given that its based, in some way, on the number of sites that link to a page)
SearchKing will then be able to say, "ha we complained and google fixed it!"
Depends on what was being stored, if the right protocols could be set up then I guess a drive full of my MP3 collection that I could just place next to a BT enabled stereo or in my bag for my BT walkman.
The trick is that if its not data that you need to keep secure and if it can be configured for say read only (or even write only) then its a lot safer.
The thing we all remember about LOGO as kids was the fun graphics. But it's also a full language and it's an exclenet way to learn programming.
StarLogo has been around for a while now (though not in Java) and I've seen it used for some advanced things. For example, I remember being shown an agent based pedestrian model built using the thing if I remember rightly some years ago.
PostGIS is indeed an excellent tool for spatial data, and is one of the datasources supported by the GeoTools2 library I mentioned in a previous post.
The OpenGIS Consortium is a standards body which has been thinking a lot about the technologies, protocols and infrastructure needed to support the kind of tasks you want to perform. (Acualy, so far a lot of it has been behind closed doors as the Open in OpenGIS tends to come into effect once they think they have the standards right)
You can find out a bit more about one initative that they are involved in here:
http://www.openls.org/about.htm
And a google on OpenLS will bring you back more.
Now, all that tells you is about the standards, but doesn't give you any tools you actualy need.
[big self plug]
I am one of the lead developers of GeoTools2 an open source Java project which is aiming to implement as many of the OGC standards as make sense (and those of other standards groups if they seem appropriate). So far the toolkit will give you the parts you need to read a number of datasources, filter them to show what you want to see and render them using a detailed styling descriptor aimed at geographic information.
It dosn't hook to GPS yet, though the ChaeronGPS library mentioned in other posts may merge well with what we have alrady.
I'm not a mobile map expert, though I would be happy to combine the map rendering expertese I have with someone who is activly developing GPS solutions.
GeoTools2 is available under the LGPL (www.geotools.org), the OGC can be found at www.opengis.org
--
Spell checker (c) Creative Spelling inc. (aka my dyslexic brain)
Time it takes for English warning: 6 seconds.
Time it takes for German warning: 6 seconds.
Time it takes for Spanish warning: 6 seconds.
Time it takes for Norwgen warning: 6 seconds.
Time it takes for French warning: 6 seconds.
Time it takes for
One film I saw recently had 14 of them, several for lanugaes not in the subtitles list.
Thanfully they tend to be put at the end of the movie after the final credits. Which is much better, though is a fine line somtimes between seeing if there is a 'bonus moment' at the end of the credits and getting stuck in the legal screens.
The old terms and conditions prohibited any automated 'page scraping' so I guess this a leagal and much cleaner way of processing google output.