And thus the reason for so many lawyers in the world.... the law is grey and their job is to tint it in the eyes of the jury/judge as close to black or white as they can to get the outcome you pay them to get. So either don't commit crimes or be willing to pay a lot to persuade reality in your favor.
Almost forgot... you could take a page out of SCO's book and disclose your obfuscated copy of the Linux kernel;-p That might keep them busy drooling for a while until they realize what they're looking at hehehe
Just add a similar clause for them on to the contract and see them groan... why should you bear the burden of discovery alone? You've got ideas you want to develop later right? So they need to disclose ALL of their ongoing development efforts in all areas of their business and don't let them off easy... if it looks like they're skimping on areas you know they're doing work in call them out.
Or you could follow the letter of the law and disclose a bunch of dumb ideas you had when you were ten and let them know that it might take you a while to get up to the present day.
Hmmm I once had this idea about how to train a monkey by dipping his feet in red paint so he'd know not to climb on the table anymore, then there was my GIJOE para-glider apparatus... it almost worked too!
Seriously, where is the solid/liquid waste sanitizer that will be self-cleaning, self-disposing, etc.... I'd love to pay a little more on electric bill and get rid of my sewage costs and reduce my water needs... make it a recycling unit that outputs fertilizer for my yard even better (after blasting it with UV rays of course), maybe even mixing it in to a cistern of water that is used to feed my sprinklers with an herbicide pellet thrown in once a month to boot.
Where's my smart house that is smart about everyday things... forget the 'avatar' that tells me stock prices or whatever, just make it a more efficient house please.
Hmmm an IE only technology with no participation from the typography community. Found this link Glyphgate on that page... which looks much more impressive and by the same team apparently but still commercial software so no that useful...
What I'd really get excited about would be free server software with a per typeface license fee or something that could be passed on to the client or not if the font was free.
Hmmm on a more serious note... will Google license any Good fonts for use? There are ways to do this... you can allow people to download a font to their system for viewing your page but licensing is prohibitive... when will a temporary use method be devised and DRM scheme created...
I'm thinking this is a cool idea both for Writely and for web pages in general... being able to provide a display only typeface which can also be embedded in a PDF for offline viewing or printing purposes. Adobe where are you on this?
Well just for arguments sake a Gecko based IE would broadcast a Gecko user-agent so that wouldn't be an issue. Not being a windows user I wouldn't know anything about IE plugins... I'm guessing your talking about stuff like toolbars and key logger spyware and such though... which I'm fairly certain all the 'important' ones are available for Gecko... er Firefox and plus they'd get all the FF plugins not available for IE for free. Licensing... yeah that's the embarassment part but it's Microsoft... if they wanted to do it they've got the funds and would have a hell of a lot more available without spending what they've spent on updating IE and could have used what's left to work out the other issues you mentioned.
Good to here that the app is untied from the OS somewhat but I hope they thought ahead and allowed for abstracting calls to rendering so they could point IE to updated rendering dlls or whatever so that when they have the time to upgrade standards compliance they don't have to worry about breaking OS components.
If IE7 is a separate program from the windowing system in Vista? or in the release for XP? cause if it's not then there won't be any more of a roadmap for updating compliance than there was for IE6.
When the entire OS depends on one standard and the entire internet needs another... well this is Microsoft not the W3C so which standard will win out in Windows?
This is the problem with tightly integrated solutions... you can't just update one component, you have to do them all at once due to dependencies.
They should have simply released IE using the GECKO rendering engine and added a bunch of MS crap on top in the form of plugins and a theme.... would have saved them a lot of money and after a little initial embarassment they would have been congratulated on making a GREAT business decision.
I bet the Gold and Platinum wasn't precious metals... he probably spent the money on a Gold digging Platinum Blonde and of course plenty of V1agra, so sorry AOL the money is long gone, re-spent on Vera Wang, Plastic Surgery and Facials at the local Spa....
How about belief in a universal constant? Not all Christians or other religious believers think of God as some guy floating in the clouds waiting for us to die... or even working 'miracles' that defy physics, etc.
God, Religion, Spirituality ARE all man made concepts, much like writing, mathematics and the scientific method.... they are tools for guiding your life and how you live it ALL of them. Yes, some people use them as excuses for making selfish decisions or as tools for manipulating their peers... I'm still referring to ALL of them. Other people use them as frameworks for creating and maintaining positive social relationships and furthering human progress and enlightenment as a species.
Look at any organization that has been around long enough and you will find people who have corrupted it's precepts, knowingly and unknowingly, for good or bad. IT happens. In the end though I don't think you should throw out science because it's used to 'oppress' 90% of the world's population through threat of force, do you? I also don't think you should throw out religion and belief in a higher power (which could mean anything) because it's used as an excuse to impoverish ignorant people or attempts to prevent adults from pursuing adult relationships or any of the other things it is guilty/accused of.
One of the big precepts of Christianity at least is that all humans are born with free will.. the ability and God given right to choose our own fate. In the absence of such a faith based concept (how do you prove/disprove that?) where might we be as a society?
Many people choose to ignore all of the very important values and beliefs which Christianity and Religions in general have contributed to human society and law... assuming somehow that those values would have arisen to importance without such a mechanism in place... but look at history and cultures with differing beliefs and you will find that they did not arise automatically and there was never a guarantee of such things as freedom, liberty or justice or anything else that we take for granted.
Just read the article.... hmmm what a dumb task request... i was wrong, they are looking for something that applies to all data everywhere. Billions of dollars have been spent on this in the past 20 years.... there are several patented algorithms from EMC, from DataDomain, from Avamar Technologies and others which deal specifically with this question... commonality factoring is what they call them.
Why not just call up the experts then and ask them to demonstrate what they can do.
Hmmm I didn't read the article but i was under the impression that this was for online compression of the database itself... ie: there ARE lots of ways to compress it offline and why would they be asking for something so general which applies to all data eveywhere offline.... so with that assumption I was suggesting ways to reduce the data set within the live database.
Easiest thing I can think of without getting too complicated is to create an index of all words on the site and then do replacement in the page compositions with pointers.
This should compress the archive as a whole substantially....
Next would be to use an incremental versioning system for incremental edits. Rather than keeping a copy of all article versions... just keep what's changed and pointers back to the original... though this may already be happening (not too familiar with how wikis store versions).
hmm well that's all I can think of on a Sunday evening. Oh yeah.. use some hashing techniques in there somewhere.. something like what is used in Content Addressed Storage archiving systems... that software manages to get huge compression losslessly across diverse sets of text-type data easily.
Hmmm actually if the knowledge and rights to the product of a business were jointly owned by all members of the company then #2 should be a possibility.
There are many companies where the employees could 'fork' and start up their own competing company if leadership misbehaves... in small companies this tends to happen already.
The barrier for this is of course things like patents, copyright, etc. where the product and IP are owned by the leadership via a trustee relationship and so the employees can not just simply split with them and start their own enterprise... they'd have nothing to sell.
So if I want to build a dynamic query, which is basically a decision tree, using select menus.... and pull the info from a db... I have to load up all the possible combinations of select menus which could be 9*9*9 (9 options with 9 2nd options and 9 3rd options) and then HIDE all but 3 of the menus?
Or maybe I should reload the page each time someone makes a selection which since it's being built from a db means no cacheing and thus there will be a refresh of the rest of the page?
NO. Instead I will use javascript and an asynchronous call to a server-side script which will perform a db query and return html with fresh select menu and options and then use javascript again to write it out to the document in a DIV with id of X.
Now IF browser developers, et al would introduce XForms and expose the DOM via some other standard scripting language I would gladly use that alternative instead.
For those without javascript enabled browers... I will refresh their browser 3 times and populate the form elements the old fashioned way.... calling the document as the forms action and passing whatever vars need be....
BUT I won't simply discard AJAX for vanilla form processing, there's no need to.
hmmmm so then it will be really nice when the induction charging pads are supported... ie: use the phone for a mouse on the pad and charge it at the same time....
Remember that you've already got experience in the Engineeering industry.... how many people there did you meet who were also CS people and could write enhancements to the software they used on the job???
Build on what you know. Go to school get a CS degree and find out how you can focus on Engineering related CS ASAP... there is a lot of demand for CS people who also know a particular industry from real life experience. You'll be able to talk with your bosses about their problems from a place of knowledge and will be better prepared to write the kind of software they are looking for than someone without your experience.
Regarding filmstrip view.... in OS X... go to a folder of pics.. or one with pics in it, use Spotlight to filter by.jpg or whatever, then select all files and right click and pick Slideshow (yes I know it sounds like a lot of mousework but it's actually really quick when you do it). Now pick the little icon in the floater toolbar instead of watching a slideshow, pick the index sheet option
Now if you're on a laptop this might be underwhelming, but on my 30 inch HD display I can look at hundreds of photos in a table grid that is simply awesome to view.
BTW I don't have any trouble connecting to the Samba fileservers at work.... and I've used niutils (the thing that generates Spotlight metadata) to create Spotlight search indexes for them as well. If there were more macs on the network I could even save them on the server so others could use them.
Just to be fair.... OS X apps really do the full install the first time you run the app... ie: they copy all the support files they need to the Library/Application Support/ dir and generate preference plist files as needed, etc. Registration of the product is handled after the copy as well... etc. So it's not just a drag/drop operation. Apple does however understand that if you break up configuration into multiple time-shifted events, then it seems like a much simpler operation and of course since most of the config happens behind the scenes without dialogue boxes, etc. the user doesn't even realize it's happening... which is good and bad.
OTOH... more complicated apps do in fact have installers... and apps which want to present a EULA or a quick start guide also present a dialogue window at the very least.
What's nice still is that simple applications that should be easy to install ARE and more complicated apps that you really don't want to believe are that simple to install DO have installers.
Dude is that why I keep seeing pr0n that looks slightly mangled? I thought it was just amateur encoding jobs... now you're telling me i'm watching encrypted messages while.... NOW I feel dirty... it's like some guy was talking to me while i was... ewwwww...
Apparently this publicly announced and publicly available project can be considered R&D? Who knew that such applications which have been around for more than a decade in a commercially available and pretty much final form minus the 'social' aspect, would count as research and development = notice lowercase... that's how much I think of this concept.
Did i really miss something of significance here or is this YASNT (Yet Another Social Networking Toy)?
Seems to me Microsoft keeps rolling out new applications just to prove that they can do betas too.... but with out any target. These toys, I'll call them toys cause they seem to server no inherent purpose, are applications looking for an audience. Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't the wisdom of the ages dictate that first you find a need and then deliver a solution? Even ye' olde Buggy whip had a purpose during it's day.
Ah but as you know, you may have rebelled as a child but you learned what a good diet consists of and saw examples of how to eat healthy... bottom line is that you can't unlearn things, especially taught to you young.... AND children who are never exposed to those same lessons will never have learned them and so won't know where to start as adults made more difficult by having learned bad habits at an early age.
Slashdot Mirror
And thus the reason for so many lawyers in the world.... the law is grey and their job is to tint it in the eyes of the jury/judge as close to black or white as they can to get the outcome you pay them to get. So either don't commit crimes or be willing to pay a lot to persuade reality in your favor.
for those of us who haven't seen the ribbon ui in action
Almost forgot... you could take a page out of SCO's book and disclose your obfuscated copy of the Linux kernel ;-p That might keep them busy drooling for a while until they realize what they're looking at hehehe
Just add a similar clause for them on to the contract and see them groan... why should you bear the burden of discovery alone? You've got ideas you want to develop later right? So they need to disclose ALL of their ongoing development efforts in all areas of their business and don't let them off easy... if it looks like they're skimping on areas you know they're doing work in call them out.
Or you could follow the letter of the law and disclose a bunch of dumb ideas you had when you were ten and let them know that it might take you a while to get up to the present day.
Hmmm I once had this idea about how to train a monkey by dipping his feet in red paint so he'd know not to climb on the table anymore, then there was my GIJOE para-glider apparatus... it almost worked too!
Seriously, where is the solid/liquid waste sanitizer that will be self-cleaning, self-disposing, etc.... I'd love to pay a little more on electric bill and get rid of my sewage costs and reduce my water needs... make it a recycling unit that outputs fertilizer for my yard even better (after blasting it with UV rays of course), maybe even mixing it in to a cistern of water that is used to feed my sprinklers with an herbicide pellet thrown in once a month to boot.
Where's my smart house that is smart about everyday things... forget the 'avatar' that tells me stock prices or whatever, just make it a more efficient house please.
Hmmm an IE only technology with no participation from the typography community. Found this link Glyphgate on that page... which looks much more impressive and by the same team apparently but still commercial software so no that useful...
What I'd really get excited about would be free server software with a per typeface license fee or something that could be passed on to the client or not if the font was free.
Hmmm on a more serious note... will Google license any Good fonts for use? There are ways to do this... you can allow people to download a font to their system for viewing your page but licensing is prohibitive... when will a temporary use method be devised and DRM scheme created...
I'm thinking this is a cool idea both for Writely and for web pages in general... being able to provide a display only typeface which can also be embedded in a PDF for offline viewing or printing purposes. Adobe where are you on this?
Well just for arguments sake a Gecko based IE would broadcast a Gecko user-agent so that wouldn't be an issue. Not being a windows user I wouldn't know anything about IE plugins... I'm guessing your talking about stuff like toolbars and key logger spyware and such though... which I'm fairly certain all the 'important' ones are available for Gecko... er Firefox and plus they'd get all the FF plugins not available for IE for free. Licensing... yeah that's the embarassment part but it's Microsoft... if they wanted to do it they've got the funds and would have a hell of a lot more available without spending what they've spent on updating IE and could have used what's left to work out the other issues you mentioned.
Good to here that the app is untied from the OS somewhat but I hope they thought ahead and allowed for abstracting calls to rendering so they could point IE to updated rendering dlls or whatever so that when they have the time to upgrade standards compliance they don't have to worry about breaking OS components.
If IE7 is a separate program from the windowing system in Vista? or in the release for XP? cause if it's not then there won't be any more of a roadmap for updating compliance than there was for IE6.
When the entire OS depends on one standard and the entire internet needs another... well this is Microsoft not the W3C so which standard will win out in Windows?
This is the problem with tightly integrated solutions... you can't just update one component, you have to do them all at once due to dependencies.
They should have simply released IE using the GECKO rendering engine and added a bunch of MS crap on top in the form of plugins and a theme.... would have saved them a lot of money and after a little initial embarassment they would have been congratulated on making a GREAT business decision.
New Scientist.com Latest News is a great page, the site's okay too... but too many subscription only articles these days.
I bet the Gold and Platinum wasn't precious metals... he probably spent the money on a Gold digging Platinum Blonde and of course plenty of V1agra, so sorry AOL the money is long gone, re-spent on Vera Wang, Plastic Surgery and Facials at the local Spa....
How about belief in a universal constant? Not all Christians or other religious believers think of God as some guy floating in the clouds waiting for us to die... or even working 'miracles' that defy physics, etc.
God, Religion, Spirituality ARE all man made concepts, much like writing, mathematics and the scientific method.... they are tools for guiding your life and how you live it ALL of them. Yes, some people use them as excuses for making selfish decisions or as tools for manipulating their peers... I'm still referring to ALL of them. Other people use them as frameworks for creating and maintaining positive social relationships and furthering human progress and enlightenment as a species.
Look at any organization that has been around long enough and you will find people who have corrupted it's precepts, knowingly and unknowingly, for good or bad. IT happens. In the end though I don't think you should throw out science because it's used to 'oppress' 90% of the world's population through threat of force, do you? I also don't think you should throw out religion and belief in a higher power (which could mean anything) because it's used as an excuse to impoverish ignorant people or attempts to prevent adults from pursuing adult relationships or any of the other things it is guilty/accused of.
One of the big precepts of Christianity at least is that all humans are born with free will.. the ability and God given right to choose our own fate. In the absence of such a faith based concept (how do you prove/disprove that?) where might we be as a society?
Many people choose to ignore all of the very important values and beliefs which Christianity and Religions in general have contributed to human society and law... assuming somehow that those values would have arisen to importance without such a mechanism in place... but look at history and cultures with differing beliefs and you will find that they did not arise automatically and there was never a guarantee of such things as freedom, liberty or justice or anything else that we take for granted.
Just read the article.... hmmm what a dumb task request... i was wrong, they are looking for something that applies to all data everywhere. Billions of dollars have been spent on this in the past 20 years.... there are several patented algorithms from EMC, from DataDomain, from Avamar Technologies and others which deal specifically with this question... commonality factoring is what they call them.
Why not just call up the experts then and ask them to demonstrate what they can do.
Hmmm I didn't read the article but i was under the impression that this was for online compression of the database itself... ie: there ARE lots of ways to compress it offline and why would they be asking for something so general which applies to all data eveywhere offline.... so with that assumption I was suggesting ways to reduce the data set within the live database.
Easiest thing I can think of without getting too complicated is to create an index of all words on the site and then do replacement in the page compositions with pointers.
ie: "approximately 990,000" according to WikiPedia itself but with slang, etc. make it a cool million.
This should compress the archive as a whole substantially....
Next would be to use an incremental versioning system for incremental edits. Rather than keeping a copy of all article versions... just keep what's changed and pointers back to the original... though this may already be happening (not too familiar with how wikis store versions).
hmm well that's all I can think of on a Sunday evening. Oh yeah.. use some hashing techniques in there somewhere.. something like what is used in Content Addressed Storage archiving systems... that software manages to get huge compression losslessly across diverse sets of text-type data easily.
Hmmm actually if the knowledge and rights to the product of a business were jointly owned by all members of the company then #2 should be a possibility.
There are many companies where the employees could 'fork' and start up their own competing company if leadership misbehaves... in small companies this tends to happen already.
The barrier for this is of course things like patents, copyright, etc. where the product and IP are owned by the leadership via a trustee relationship and so the employees can not just simply split with them and start their own enterprise... they'd have nothing to sell.
"With proper layout and CSS"
So if I want to build a dynamic query, which is basically a decision tree, using select menus.... and pull the info from a db... I have to load up all the possible combinations of select menus which could be 9*9*9 (9 options with 9 2nd options and 9 3rd options) and then HIDE all but 3 of the menus?
Or maybe I should reload the page each time someone makes a selection which since it's being built from a db means no cacheing and thus there will be a refresh of the rest of the page?
NO. Instead I will use javascript and an asynchronous call to a server-side script which will perform a db query and return html with fresh select menu and options and then use javascript again to write it out to the document in a DIV with id of X.
Now IF browser developers, et al would introduce XForms and expose the DOM via some other standard scripting language I would gladly use that alternative instead.
For those without javascript enabled browers... I will refresh their browser 3 times and populate the form elements the old fashioned way.... calling the document as the forms action and passing whatever vars need be....
BUT I won't simply discard AJAX for vanilla form processing, there's no need to.
hmmmm so then it will be really nice when the induction charging pads are supported... ie: use the phone for a mouse on the pad and charge it at the same time....
Remember that you've already got experience in the Engineeering industry.... how many people there did you meet who were also CS people and could write enhancements to the software they used on the job???
Build on what you know. Go to school get a CS degree and find out how you can focus on Engineering related CS ASAP... there is a lot of demand for CS people who also know a particular industry from real life experience. You'll be able to talk with your bosses about their problems from a place of knowledge and will be better prepared to write the kind of software they are looking for than someone without your experience.
Regarding filmstrip view.... in OS X... go to a folder of pics.. or one with pics in it, use Spotlight to filter by .jpg or whatever, then select all files and right click and pick Slideshow (yes I know it sounds like a lot of mousework but it's actually really quick when you do it). Now pick the little icon in the floater toolbar instead of watching a slideshow, pick the index sheet option
Now if you're on a laptop this might be underwhelming, but on my 30 inch HD display I can look at hundreds of photos in a table grid that is simply awesome to view.
BTW I don't have any trouble connecting to the Samba fileservers at work.... and I've used niutils (the thing that generates Spotlight metadata) to create Spotlight search indexes for them as well. If there were more macs on the network I could even save them on the server so others could use them.
Just to be fair.... OS X apps really do the full install the first time you run the app... ie: they copy all the support files they need to the Library/Application Support/ dir and generate preference plist files as needed, etc. Registration of the product is handled after the copy as well... etc. So it's not just a drag/drop operation. Apple does however understand that if you break up configuration into multiple time-shifted events, then it seems like a much simpler operation and of course since most of the config happens behind the scenes without dialogue boxes, etc. the user doesn't even realize it's happening... which is good and bad.
OTOH... more complicated apps do in fact have installers... and apps which want to present a EULA or a quick start guide also present a dialogue window at the very least.
What's nice still is that simple applications that should be easy to install ARE and more complicated apps that you really don't want to believe are that simple to install DO have installers.
Dude is that why I keep seeing pr0n that looks slightly mangled? I thought it was just amateur encoding jobs... now you're telling me i'm watching encrypted messages while.... NOW I feel dirty... it's like some guy was talking to me while i was... ewwwww...
Apparently this publicly announced and publicly available project can be considered R&D? Who knew that such applications which have been around for more than a decade in a commercially available and pretty much final form minus the 'social' aspect, would count as research and development = notice lowercase... that's how much I think of this concept.
Did i really miss something of significance here or is this YASNT (Yet Another Social Networking Toy)?
Seems to me Microsoft keeps rolling out new applications just to prove that they can do betas too.... but with out any target. These toys, I'll call them toys cause they seem to server no inherent purpose, are applications looking for an audience. Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't the wisdom of the ages dictate that first you find a need and then deliver a solution? Even ye' olde Buggy whip had a purpose during it's day.
Ah but as you know, you may have rebelled as a child but you learned what a good diet consists of and saw examples of how to eat healthy... bottom line is that you can't unlearn things, especially taught to you young.... AND children who are never exposed to those same lessons will never have learned them and so won't know where to start as adults made more difficult by having learned bad habits at an early age.