So, I can't get to the product pages, so I can't figure out what this thing is doing.
What is it projecting *against*? Lasers don't just stop in mid-air. Is there a sheet of glass we're not seeing? Is there a fog-screen? Does it do one of those tricks where you look into a parabolic missor and the reflections cause the image to appear in front?
I want to believe, but I don't have enough info to make a rational guess. I have to assume, though, that it's just smoke and mirrors. It always is.
So, I there's this revolutionary idea: we call it language. It allows one to serialize a concept into "words" using a "grammar" to tie them together into meaning.
Unfortunately, the writeup doesn't seem to take this into consideration. I see all these words, but they make no sense.
I read the damn writeup here three or four times, assuming I missed the noun referred to by "make them stand out". I gave up. Then I read the last sentence and wondered "That's 'That's'" referring to?
I know we grouse and moan about bad grammar her, but come on. That writeup doesn't even make sense.
Well. In the universe where "IT professionals" sit down at a Mac, or linux box, and say "Where's the start button"?
Not making this up. I've seen it personally more than once.
Moral of the story: Windows is "user friendly" because people have no idea that something could operate differently, or that there could be better ways.
I am not a rocket scientist... but I imagine that, yes, perhaps it is the best we can do.
That is to say, given some caveats. Reading about the aborted space plane, it seems that we're having trouble developing materials that can really take the heat of re-entry. Ablating blast shields, while not re-usable, work really, *really* well.
Furthermore, the shuttle was just too complex. The ability to make machinery that complex that performs reliably is perhaps many years ahead of us, and we're ( I think rightfully ) impatient to do this work now, not in 100 years. Also consider the DC X ( or whatever it was called, Delta Clipper? ) which had such problems with cracks in the carbon fuel tanks and such. This stuff is *complicated*. We should continue researching it, but we need something that works *now*, not in x * 10 years. The Apollo tech worked, reliably. We can use our experience with the Shuttle to improve it. I say run with it.
I think the return to simplicity will do a lot for our space program. Plus, the experience we gain will aid in addressing the couple points I made above. Basically, I think we need more real experience in space before we design pie in the sky spacecraft. I personally think it's kind of like the "walk before you run" adage. The space shuttle represents us trying to run, before we really mastered crawling...
The coffee shops I frequent get *plenty* of money from me. I'm not just some ass who walks in and opens his laptop. I buy coffee, I buy breakfast. I pay for refills.
And, "middle of nowhere"? You mean, one block from the world bank? One block from the whitehouse? Two blocks from farragut west? If by middle of nowhere you mean the _Heart_ of downtown business-district DC then, by god, you must live in New Delhi.
I agree with you 100%. I check my mail, and now and then do some googling for technical matters. The last thing I want to do is abuse it -- it's like the story about killing the goose that laid the golden eggs.
Why pay, when "linksys" and "default" are free?
on
The Case for Free WiFi?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
There's a lot of coffee shops around me ( Washington DC ) which have pay wireless access. I've never felt the need to do so -- even though 90% of the time I spend working on my personal programming projects is done in coffee shops in the morning before work, and internet access would be helpful ( looking up documentation, etc ).
What I've done, instead, is ride my bike around to find coffee shops which either provide free access, or which are near or beneath offices with "default" or "linksys" WAPs without passwords.
In fact, it's gotten to the point that I know off the top of my head about a half-dozen free WAPs in my area which I can use. I see no reason to pay for access when I can just ride my bike down the street to a place where the inept sysadmins don't know any better.
In fact, at one of these coffee shops, ( Caribou Coffee, Pennsyvania Ave & 17th ) there was at one point so many unsecured WAPs that I had to use the "Air Traffic Control" Dashboard widget to select the one I wanted, since there were, literally, four WAPs named "linksys" running on ( I think ) channel 11. The Airport menu bar selector didn't work very well in that situation.
Charging for wireless is basically a fool's errand. Few will use it, and, I have to assume, you'll be lucky to make up the outlay for the service, unless you roll your own billing machanism.
Not only that, but you're absolutely free to use C++ with Cocoa, via Objective-C++.
In one of my programs, with about a 60 kloc codebase, I have a full and I'd like to believe rich 100% Aqua gui, written in Cocoa, acting as a front end to the engine which is 100% cross platform C++ ( brought over from linux where I originally wrote it ). In fact, my program's about 90% pure C++, and the binding to the Cocoa gui is fairly clean and extensible.
Apple has done a wonderful job, I found it a real pleasure to develop. And, to all the haters, if they care to listen: It took me about 1 weekend to become comfortable with ObjectiveC.
If ObjectiveC is your primary complaint, then, please burn your programmer hat. You don't deserve the title. Any programmer worth his salt can generally pick up a language fairly quickly ( admittedly, funcitonal languages are a different matter ).
Finally, ObjectiveC & Cocoa are hardly new, or creaky. They've undergone *years* of development and R&D, starting in the 80's with NextStep. They make for an amazingly solid and robust development environment.
I felt that way over ten years ago, when I bought an Atari Lynx... funny how it goes. Beautiful systems, beautiful potential. And nothing happens.
( well, except for the UMD movie stuff )
You know, I don't think most people really hate flash with the all-consuming, burning fearsome hate that you do. You know, the kind of hate you seem to have, where I can just imagine you waking up in the middle of the night, white-knuckled, screaming about how to your dying breath you vow to kill every flash player you see, and to educate the masses about it's evils.
I think most people look at a flash animation and think how cool it is that they can see nice animations, without a huge download, and they can play games, etc etc. Sure, banner ads are annoying, but they're annoying when they're not animated, too.
And who the hell really cares if an ad is taking up some CPU. It's not like I'm paying by the cycle here, it's essentially free. I scroll off the page and it stops. Big deal. "Oh noes, the flash ad is taking away 3 seconds of valuable processing time from seti-at-home".
And, before you say "not everybody's on a god-box", it should be mentioned this is coming from somebody on a fairly meager old 12" powerbook.
OK, I'm ranting, but I'm tired of everybody who says they've blocked flash getting a +5 insightful. It isn't insightful. It's about as insightful as when people whinge on an on about how enlightened they are for not having a TV set, or cable, or how they don't like pop music ( by the way, I'm guilty of all that and more ).
Both sides of the argument are valid. But what you're missing here is that Windows, Linux, OS X, etc are actively developed systems. Security through obscurity may be a stupid path for MS to take, but at least they *do* release patches.
How often does OS/2 get updated? And what are the odds that the ATM machines will get the latest patches if/when they come out?
OS/2 may or may not be dead in the water, but it probably is. Making the job of finding buffer overflows and other exploits ridiculously easy for a EOL'd system just seems like foolhardy behavior to me.
That's a really, really good point. We're still approaching security by looking for buffer overruns, insecure hashing, etc etc.
Meanwhile, a lot of FOSS hackers are adding feature after feature without making certain that those features are safe. As they say, the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing.
Hey, you made my day. I am the father of Slicker -- it started as an attempt to write something for KDE along the lines of (classic) Mac OS's tabbed finder windows. See my posts in the Gentoo forum where I posted about its development: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-29746-highlig ht-.html
So, basically what happened was simple. I really was only interested in using it as a way to access Konq, as panels which would slide out based on mouse-to-screen edge movements. I made it relatively plugin-extendable and people whipped up all sorts of nice extensions, like terminal access, K-Menu access, etc etc. People also wanted it to become a sourceforge project and more public, which I was fine with. So, I handed it off, and it promptly died since the people who took it on bickered day and night about website design and themability, and never bothered to write any code.
I then moved on to OS X, where I continued the work that matters to me ( robotics & AI ).
I have to assume that was an honest mixup, either on the part of the interviewer or just absent-mindedness on the part of the engineer.
In my experience, OpenGL ( and presumably DirectX since the two are just APIs for the same hardware, but I could be wrong ) default to a max of eight lights. So, using shaders to emulate 10 or more lights would make sense.
It seems -- and this may be somewhat cynical of me -- that an ancient geek would have had a life approximately like thus ( where the timeline is from pre-history up to, say, the 17th or 18th century:
1) Born into violence, filth, and disease. 2) Eek out a life of scavenging or farming, paying taxes to your lord, having some children, most of whom will die before a couple years old, until: 3) war, or some other tribal/religious/cultural dispute. 4) death at 20.
This hypothetical geek from BCE 5000 or AD 1600 might have been the next Einstein, or Stephen Hawking, or anything we can imagine. But he'd never have had the time, opportunity or resources to do anything with it.
We're NOT smarter than previous humans, we just have an *unprecendented* level of peace and prosperity. We have developed a culture where people have the opportunity *not* to toil and die at an early age.
Finally, this success isn't evenly distributed, yet. A fair amount of humanity still lives the way our ancestors did centuries ago.
So, first and foremost, I'm a programmer. Been programming for years, and it defines a hell of a lot about how I think.
I imagine I'm not the only one here like this. So, I gotta ask, does anybody else have problems ( internally, cognitively ) with this series being 1-indexed, instead of zero?
I mean, whenever I try to refer to "Star Wars: A New Hope" I always say "The third movie", because "Phantom menace" is the zero'th movie. This just makes more sense to me. Then I realize it's 1-indexed, and I stall cognitively like a backfiring yugo as I think... "shit, it's the *fourth*" movie...
Not that I'm suggesting they change the numbering, obviously. I'm just sayin'.
Slashdot Mirror
So, I can't get to the product pages, so I can't figure out what this thing is doing.
What is it projecting *against*? Lasers don't just stop in mid-air. Is there a sheet of glass we're not seeing? Is there a fog-screen? Does it do one of those tricks where you look into a parabolic missor and the reflections cause the image to appear in front?
I want to believe, but I don't have enough info to make a rational guess. I have to assume, though, that it's just smoke and mirrors. It always is.
So, I there's this revolutionary idea: we call it language. It allows one to serialize a concept into "words" using a "grammar" to tie them together into meaning. Unfortunately, the writeup doesn't seem to take this into consideration. I see all these words, but they make no sense. I read the damn writeup here three or four times, assuming I missed the noun referred to by "make them stand out". I gave up. Then I read the last sentence and wondered "That's 'That's'" referring to? I know we grouse and moan about bad grammar her, but come on. That writeup doesn't even make sense.
I can't tell if that's a typo or not. Either way: Bravo.
Well. In the universe where "IT professionals" sit down at a Mac, or linux box, and say "Where's the start button"?
Not making this up. I've seen it personally more than once.
Moral of the story: Windows is "user friendly" because people have no idea that something could operate differently, or that there could be better ways.
People will always manage to find something to gripe about. They always do. This is why Apple will always be a niche player.
( I love my Powerbook, btw )
I am not a rocket scientist... but I imagine that, yes, perhaps it is the best we can do.
That is to say, given some caveats. Reading about the aborted space plane, it seems that we're having trouble developing materials that can really take the heat of re-entry. Ablating blast shields, while not re-usable, work really, *really* well.
Furthermore, the shuttle was just too complex. The ability to make machinery that complex that performs reliably is perhaps many years ahead of us, and we're ( I think rightfully ) impatient to do this work now, not in 100 years. Also consider the DC X ( or whatever it was called, Delta Clipper? ) which had such problems with cracks in the carbon fuel tanks and such. This stuff is *complicated*. We should continue researching it, but we need something that works *now*, not in x * 10 years. The Apollo tech worked, reliably. We can use our experience with the Shuttle to improve it. I say run with it.
I think the return to simplicity will do a lot for our space program. Plus, the experience we gain will aid in addressing the couple points I made above. Basically, I think we need more real experience in space before we design pie in the sky spacecraft. I personally think it's kind of like the "walk before you run" adage. The space shuttle represents us trying to run, before we really mastered crawling...
The coffee shops I frequent get *plenty* of money from me. I'm not just some ass who walks in and opens his laptop. I buy coffee, I buy breakfast. I pay for refills.
And, "middle of nowhere"? You mean, one block from the world bank? One block from the whitehouse? Two blocks from farragut west? If by middle of nowhere you mean the _Heart_ of downtown business-district DC then, by god, you must live in New Delhi.
I agree with you 100%. I check my mail, and now and then do some googling for technical matters. The last thing I want to do is abuse it -- it's like the story about killing the goose that laid the golden eggs.
There's a lot of coffee shops around me ( Washington DC ) which have pay wireless access. I've never felt the need to do so -- even though 90% of the time I spend working on my personal programming projects is done in coffee shops in the morning before work, and internet access would be helpful ( looking up documentation, etc ).
What I've done, instead, is ride my bike around to find coffee shops which either provide free access, or which are near or beneath offices with "default" or "linksys" WAPs without passwords.
In fact, it's gotten to the point that I know off the top of my head about a half-dozen free WAPs in my area which I can use. I see no reason to pay for access when I can just ride my bike down the street to a place where the inept sysadmins don't know any better.
In fact, at one of these coffee shops, ( Caribou Coffee, Pennsyvania Ave & 17th ) there was at one point so many unsecured WAPs that I had to use the "Air Traffic Control" Dashboard widget to select the one I wanted, since there were, literally, four WAPs named "linksys" running on ( I think ) channel 11. The Airport menu bar selector didn't work very well in that situation.
Charging for wireless is basically a fool's errand. Few will use it, and, I have to assume, you'll be lucky to make up the outlay for the service, unless you roll your own billing machanism.
Not only that, but you're absolutely free to use C++ with Cocoa, via Objective-C++.
In one of my programs, with about a 60 kloc codebase, I have a full and I'd like to believe rich 100% Aqua gui, written in Cocoa, acting as a front end to the engine which is 100% cross platform C++ ( brought over from linux where I originally wrote it ). In fact, my program's about 90% pure C++, and the binding to the Cocoa gui is fairly clean and extensible.
Apple has done a wonderful job, I found it a real pleasure to develop. And, to all the haters, if they care to listen: It took me about 1 weekend to become comfortable with ObjectiveC.
If ObjectiveC is your primary complaint, then, please burn your programmer hat. You don't deserve the title. Any programmer worth his salt can generally pick up a language fairly quickly ( admittedly, funcitonal languages are a different matter ).
Finally, ObjectiveC & Cocoa are hardly new, or creaky. They've undergone *years* of development and R&D, starting in the 80's with NextStep. They make for an amazingly solid and robust development environment.
I felt that way over ten years ago, when I bought an Atari Lynx... funny how it goes. Beautiful systems, beautiful potential. And nothing happens. ( well, except for the UMD movie stuff )
You know, I don't think most people really hate flash with the all-consuming, burning fearsome hate that you do. You know, the kind of hate you seem to have, where I can just imagine you waking up in the middle of the night, white-knuckled, screaming about how to your dying breath you vow to kill every flash player you see, and to educate the masses about it's evils.
I think most people look at a flash animation and think how cool it is that they can see nice animations, without a huge download, and they can play games, etc etc. Sure, banner ads are annoying, but they're annoying when they're not animated, too.
And who the hell really cares if an ad is taking up some CPU. It's not like I'm paying by the cycle here, it's essentially free. I scroll off the page and it stops. Big deal. "Oh noes, the flash ad is taking away 3 seconds of valuable processing time from seti-at-home".
And, before you say "not everybody's on a god-box", it should be mentioned this is coming from somebody on a fairly meager old 12" powerbook.
OK, I'm ranting, but I'm tired of everybody who says they've blocked flash getting a +5 insightful. It isn't insightful. It's about as insightful as when people whinge on an on about how enlightened they are for not having a TV set, or cable, or how they don't like pop music ( by the way, I'm guilty of all that and more ).
Why, that would be a violation of the DMCA!
"Why don't you love America?"
Both sides of the argument are valid. But what you're missing here is that Windows, Linux, OS X, etc are actively developed systems. Security through obscurity may be a stupid path for MS to take, but at least they *do* release patches.
How often does OS/2 get updated? And what are the odds that the ATM machines will get the latest patches if/when they come out?
OS/2 may or may not be dead in the water, but it probably is. Making the job of finding buffer overflows and other exploits ridiculously easy for a EOL'd system just seems like foolhardy behavior to me.
That's a really, really good point. We're still approaching security by looking for buffer overruns, insecure hashing, etc etc.
Meanwhile, a lot of FOSS hackers are adding feature after feature without making certain that those features are safe. As they say, the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing.
Hey, you made my day. I am the father of Slicker -- it started as an attempt to write something for KDE along the lines of (classic) Mac OS's tabbed finder windows. See my posts in the Gentoo forum where I posted about its development: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-29746-highlig ht-.html
So, basically what happened was simple. I really was only interested in using it as a way to access Konq, as panels which would slide out based on mouse-to-screen edge movements. I made it relatively plugin-extendable and people whipped up all sorts of nice extensions, like terminal access, K-Menu access, etc etc. People also wanted it to become a sourceforge project and more public, which I was fine with. So, I handed it off, and it promptly died since the people who took it on bickered day and night about website design and themability, and never bothered to write any code.
I then moved on to OS X, where I continued the work that matters to me ( robotics & AI ).
But anyway, it had potential!
I have to assume that was an honest mixup, either on the part of the interviewer or just absent-mindedness on the part of the engineer.
In my experience, OpenGL ( and presumably DirectX since the two are just APIs for the same hardware, but I could be wrong ) default to a max of eight lights. So, using shaders to emulate 10 or more lights would make sense.
If you watch to the end of the video, you'll see the note saying "Remember, nice guys finish last".
Hey, that's good -- she should enjoy it too, fellas. I don't see the problem, they're teaching positive sexual relations here.
( Perhaps everybody's up at arms because here in America, we do it missionary only, and *only* when we need a baby. )
I don't mean to be snarky, but a *lot* of people use their computers for a hell of a lot more than IM.
You might get the teeny-bopper crowd, though. If it's *really* cool, like, Apple-cool.
Don't forget how *satisfying* it is to sit in traffic for hours.
It seems -- and this may be somewhat cynical of me -- that an ancient geek would have had a life approximately like thus ( where the timeline is from pre-history up to, say, the 17th or 18th century:
1) Born into violence, filth, and disease.
2) Eek out a life of scavenging or farming, paying taxes to your lord, having some children, most of whom will die before a couple years old, until:
3) war, or some other tribal/religious/cultural dispute.
4) death at 20.
This hypothetical geek from BCE 5000 or AD 1600 might have been the next Einstein, or Stephen Hawking, or anything we can imagine. But he'd never have had the time, opportunity or resources to do anything with it.
We're NOT smarter than previous humans, we just have an *unprecendented* level of peace and prosperity. We have developed a culture where people have the opportunity *not* to toil and die at an early age.
Finally, this success isn't evenly distributed, yet. A fair amount of humanity still lives the way our ancestors did centuries ago.
The awesome part is that that means BeOS is DONE. And OS2/Warp. And AmigaOS...
Doesn't seem like a "Nothing to see here" situation. They're just admitting it's R&D.
I mean, obviously, they also hope to stir up investors and get good press, but, who wouldn't want to do that?
So, first and foremost, I'm a programmer. Been programming for years, and it defines a hell of a lot about how I think.
I imagine I'm not the only one here like this. So, I gotta ask, does anybody else have problems ( internally, cognitively ) with this series being 1-indexed, instead of zero?
I mean, whenever I try to refer to "Star Wars: A New Hope" I always say "The third movie", because "Phantom menace" is the zero'th movie. This just makes more sense to me. Then I realize it's 1-indexed, and I stall cognitively like a backfiring yugo as I think... "shit, it's the *fourth*" movie...
Not that I'm suggesting they change the numbering, obviously. I'm just sayin'.
P.S. They *all* sucked.
Sure, I'm not a linux or BSD guy. I run OS X, I'm out of all these loops. But get this quote:
I've tried never to say this on slashdot, but: LOL.