Actually, economically speaking, there is no shortage of celluloid shirt collars or those other items.
A shortage is defined as the condition where the available supply of an item is less than the amount demanded at the prevailing price. (And a surplus is the condition where the supply is greater than that demanded at the prevailing price).
Ivory piano keys are very expensive indeed, and few people demand them. But those that do are willing to pay the prevailing market price, and anyone who is willing to pay that price can find them.
In street terms, a good is in a state of shortage when it can't be found on store shelves and people are clamoring for it.
What's even more bizarre is the claim (in the summary) that some of the images portrayed incest.
Sure, with child porn one could make a reasonable guess -- there is no confusing an image of a 6-year-old as possibly 18. But for "incest images", the only "portrayal" could be from a text label (in the image, or the filename), or some blatanly obvious visual hints in the photos, which would have been *deliberately* placed to convey the idea that the image portrays incest. There is no way to deduce from an image of two naked people, without knowing their identities as well, that they are engaging in incest.
Saying they the images portray incest based on the labels is no more justified than saying that they portray space aliens, or members of the White House staff, or Osama bin Ladin in disguise.
And are images depicting (or just claiming to depict) incest a crime?
Create a throwaway free mail account, who cares if it gets compromised.
Oh, but you might need to check work-related mail, etc...? You're on *vacation*!!!
I don't mean to be a downer, but you've just gotten in to programming at 21, thus presumably are not a CS major -- you don't seriously expect to be paid to write code in the SF Bay Area, do you? (At least not before you graduate). My impression is that the average code jock, as represented on Slashdot, started writing assembly at age 11, and by the time he's entered college has already mastered C and knows with utmost certainty that programming is his future and can't wait to cut his teeth on data structures, algorithms, and Big-Os.
You are way outclassed. I'd be surprised if any potential employer would even let you near a compiler.
Which is pretty much how I started. I had a fine arts degree in design and much less experience even than you have, but I knew that programming was what I wanted to do, more than design. So I first got a short-lived job at a videogame company doing nothing related to programming (translation and graphic design), later got a job at a small software company doing more translation, and after about six years of doing translation, editing, desktop publishing, and localization (still never touched code the whole time), while learning C and an obscure editor macro language in the meantime, my boss (the company president) finally decided, yeah, you obviously have what it takes to write code, so I'll let you do it.
Ten years later, at my last job, I took part in a group interview involving several other software engineers including a kid who'd just recently gotten a Master's in Computer Science, and I was stunned to find that I was the only one who knew what a C++ vtable was.
It probably won't take nearly as long as it did for me (I enjoyed and got good at the other types of work I did along the way), but give yourself some time.
Let's see, I'm typing this on my main PC, which I literally found in someone else's trash four years ago (and its two 40GB hard disk were used freebies from the office). Though I never use it, there's a VFAT partition on one of the disks with Windows 98SE on it. I finally got a DVD drive for it last year.
My laptop, with a 133Mhz Pentium, 48MB RAM, and an 800 x 600 screen, was bought used 10 years ago from a friend who was in grad school (and thus on a tight budget herself). I've been using it quite a bit recently, to learn Lisp programming on (X + IceWM + Emacs).
The internet connection is 100MBps optical fiber, but I just plug my PC in directly for PPPoE -- no wireless router or anything like that.
Got an iPod last year - a 512MB Shuffle which was a hand-me-down from my girlfriend. Until then, my portable music player was a Sony MiniDisc-Walkman, which I still use for live recordings.
My cell phone is seven years old, and it cost nothing when I got it.
Stereo is a 15-year-old Nakamichi receiver, still in good condition -- better than the flaky Sony DVD player I bought four years ago.
OK, maybe I'm just a cheapskate. But really, I can't think of anything that I'd really want to go out and buy - that sort of thing happens only about once a year. (And I could well afford any such thing if I wanted it.) Basically, everything still works, and until it stops working, I feel it's a waste to replace it.
The article mentions David Gans and the WELL as a late-adopter person and institution, respectively. Gans is host of the syndicated "Grateful Dead Hour", and of course the WELL has its roots in '60s counterculture.
They couldn't have picked better examples of late adopters, and interestingly ones that aren't just that way because of psychological inertia, but because they clearly know what they want and what works, and they know that it's not the latest shiny cutting-edge stuff.
Finally, I have always wondered how many returns they get from people who thought that the computer was faulty because it would not run all their software they already owned. It is possible that Walmart wants to avoid losing good will of their less technically inclined customers who think that they are selling broken PCs
I really think that any user who has, in this day and age, actually bought and installed software from external media, understands the concept of "this software runs on Windows" well enough not to confuse OS incompatibility with faulty hardware, and the be aware of it when buying the PC.
And conversely, any user without that level of comprehension (who would try to return the PC) probably doesn't even understand that the software they already own on CD-ROM can be installed in a different machine and would never even think of trying it ; new computer means all new software -- I mean, isn't software part of the computer? Or more likely, the only software they "own" is stuff that was pre-installed on their previous computer with no source media and thus couldn't be reinstalled on a new machine even if they wanted to.
To the "less technically inclined customer" that might buy this PC without understanding that it doesn't run Windows, it doesn't even matter because all he needs is a web browser and mail client, both of which are available and installed (with the Linux version automatically selected) from the internet.
Space stations and Antarctic research stations are self-contained -- their inhabitants do not need to venture outside of them, or obtain anything from the external environment, in order to sustain their existence.
They are not self-sustaining -- they rely on continuous supplies of energy and material from sources outside of their immediate environment. Which is how the one-man Mars station would be.
Better yet, you could, through implanted memories, convince the person that he's not really going to Mars... or that he's already actually on Mars... that he's a secret agent on Mars...
a one-way ticket to mars is setting you up for, at best, a painful death due to starvation or oxygen depletion.
How do you figure that painful death is the best possible outcome?!
The plan involves setting up a habitable environment and maintaining it for the lifetime of the person, and also includes the possibility of providing a means of coming back. The early explorers faced huge risks because they had to rely totally on their own resources. The Mars astronaut would not.
>> Could such an airline be price competitive with current airlines? Could such an airline make any profit? >>
Such a "business-class airline" would be no more competitive with current airlines than a business/first class ticket is "competitive" with an economy ticket on the same plane. It doesn't need to be.
Is champagne price competitive with beer? Does it need to be to be sold at a profit?
No need for top-loading via crane if you use a front-loading 747 freighter, C-5 Galaxy, or An-124. Put wheels on the seating module and rails on the plane. The boarding area has two parallel bays with a railroad switch, just like at a train terminal.
The crucial element is to allow passengers to approach their seats from anywhere -- from the open outside area as well as the interior aisle, from the back as well as the front -- instead of all filing in through a single door.
I have a feeling that 99% of the replies here are misundertanding something crucial. And so is your employer, and so are you. (OK, so it's more likely I'm the one who doesn't understand. But hear me out.)
First off, what is a style guide?
Here's how I would define it.
A style guide is a document which prescribes standards for subjective matters of presentation, which are to be followed for
material created within a specific framework. For example, the material might be written articles for publication in a newspaper.
Or the material might be programs created to run on an OS, or with a GUI or application framework. Or C language source code
written to be read and modified by a programming team.
A style guide's purpose is to enforce consistency among material created by multiple parties (or one party over multiple sessions). This consistency is for the benefit of the end user, not necessarily the creators. And the style guide is for use by the creators, not the end user
A style guide governs presentation, not content. Grammar and article length, not viewpoints or what gets discussed and what doesn't. How a pushbutton looks and behaves, not how it gets drawn on the screen. Code indentation and naming, not what the program does.
A style guide does not prescribe standards that are enforced elsewhere. It doesn't tell writers to properly end their sentences with punctuation, because that's a rule that applies to all writing. It doesn't say that scrollbars in a GUI should not be placed at 45-degree angles, because the GUI API provides no means to do so anyway. It doesn't say that curly braces must be balanced, because the compiler will catch that anyway.
A style guide is the sole authority on the issues it covers. If an issue within the domain of the style guide is not governed by it, then there is no rule on it.
A style guide prescribes standards as the preferred choice among various possible options, none of which is objectively correct or incorrect. The standards take the form of "for such-and-such, do it this... way, not that... way. There are some who do it that... way, but we do it this... way because such-and-such."
A style guide can not be legitimately created by someone who doesn't define the standards in it, and have the authority to decide what to prescribe.
So, if your employer is asking you to make a UI style guide for their software, there is a basic issue that you haven't explicity made clear:
Does this software provide a framework for creating material that should conform to some standard? You say you are creating a user-interface style guide, so is it a user-interface creation tool (or something that allows external components with their own user interfaces)? If that's not what your software does, and the user-interface you're referring to is something that your software uses, rather than provides, then your company is in no position to create a style guide (that is, define standards) for it. Whoever created the GUI (Windows? Mac? QT?..) has already done that, and chances are they've published it, and your software engineers have been following it. Any attempted style guide would be merely descriptive, not prescriptive. It would say "for such-and-such, our software does it this way...", possibly even while the actual standards say to do it that... way.
Now if your software is in fact a UI-creation tool and it's already been created, then allthe content that needs to go into your style guide is already in the heads of, or has already been written by, whoever created the software. You know who to talk to.
And if the software is UI-creation tool but you're still at the design stage, then what you're being asked to do is actually create the standards, not just write a document. Your employer is asking you, a software engineer with no UI expertise, to define the rules which all of your customers, as software developers, will be mandated to follow, and which will in
Oh yeah, I'm sure the service center in Redmond handles special requests to its overseas subcontractors by issuing printed instructions intended directly for the assembly-line workers, and everybody else in between is told just to pass it on without verifying, elaborating, or translating it in any way for the next person in the chain.
In fact maybe the Mexican repairman, after wiping off what he thought might have been valuable signatures, told his supervisor just to make sure he wouldn't get the blame later. And that note was relayed all the way back to Redmond where the Manager of XBox customer services looked at the e-mail and said "What the hell... Spanish gibberish?! Who's Miguel Gonzales? Damned if I know!" and trashed it.
There was obviously a break in the communication chain from MS to their contractors, but I doubt that it had anything to do with to the Mexican worker' lack of English ability.
Let me guess -- are you implying, from Gibbons, that 6500 years ago there was a mere one human woman on the entire planet, from whom everyone alive is descended? And I guess we all know her name...
Because the "Mitochondrial Eve" theory does not identify a purported woman, the only one on the planet, from which everyone who has ever lived descended. Rather it identifies the one woman that everyone alive today is descended from, and who was only one of many alive then, but the only one whose descendants who are alive now. And Gibbons' paper said that this person lived 6500, rather than 100,000, years ago (as described in Sykes' "The Seven Daughters of Eve").
But in her day, there was in turn a common ancestor that everyone alive then was descended from, some thousands of years in the past. And so on, nearly ad infinitum. But alas, we will never be able to identify the time of existence of any of those Eves without analyzing DNA samples from people back then.
Of course logically there must have been that one ultimate Mitochondrial Eve, but assuming she was the product of evolution, it requires arbitrarily defining her as "human" and all of her ancestors as not.
The question is not whether evolution is possible (given enough time and luck, anything is possible), but whether it actually happened.
You're trying to put it in terms like the infinitesimal but non-zero "possibility" of an apple suspending itself mid-air by some sheer random alignment of atoms. But scientific theories such as evolution don't deal with possibilities like that. And they're not formulated as descriptions of phenomena which are theoretically possible but have never been observed. Rather they are formulated as explanations of things which have happened. The phenomenon of evolution has been irrefutably observed as happening, and the theory adequately explains how.
Slashdot Mirror
..."Come on baby take a chance with us, and meet me at the back of the blue bus..."
is kind of stuipid.
Come on, everybody knows there are no violins or violinists in Arkansas.
There are only fiddles and fiddlers.
Actually, economically speaking, there is no shortage of celluloid shirt collars or those other items.
A shortage is defined as the condition where the available supply of an item is less than the amount demanded at the prevailing price. (And a surplus is the condition where the supply is greater than that demanded at the prevailing price).
Ivory piano keys are very expensive indeed, and few people demand them. But those that do are willing to pay the prevailing market price, and anyone who is willing to pay that price can find them.
In street terms, a good is in a state of shortage when it can't be found on store shelves and people are clamoring for it.
What's even more bizarre is the claim (in the summary) that some of the images portrayed incest.
Sure, with child porn one could make a reasonable guess -- there is no confusing an image of a 6-year-old as possibly 18. But for "incest images", the only "portrayal" could be from a text label (in the image, or the filename), or some blatanly obvious visual hints in the photos, which would have been *deliberately* placed to convey the idea that the image portrays incest. There is no way to deduce from an image of two naked people, without knowing their identities as well, that they are engaging in incest.
Saying they the images portray incest based on the labels is no more justified than saying that they portray space aliens, or members of the White House staff, or Osama bin Ladin in disguise.
And are images depicting (or just claiming to depict) incest a crime?
Create a throwaway free mail account, who cares if it gets compromised. Oh, but you might need to check work-related mail, etc...? You're on *vacation*!!!
Come on, an expert on rocket fuel technology named Professor Ben Zinn?
I don't mean to be a downer, but you've just gotten in to programming at 21, thus presumably are not a CS major -- you don't seriously expect to be paid to write code in the SF Bay Area, do you? (At least not before you graduate). My impression is that the average code jock, as represented on Slashdot, started writing assembly at age 11, and by the time he's entered college has already mastered C and knows with utmost certainty that programming is his future and can't wait to cut his teeth on data structures, algorithms, and Big-Os.
You are way outclassed. I'd be surprised if any potential employer would even let you near a compiler.
Which is pretty much how I started. I had a fine arts degree in design and much less experience even than you have, but I knew that programming was what I wanted to do, more than design. So I first got a short-lived job at a videogame company doing nothing related to programming (translation and graphic design), later got a job at a small software company doing more translation, and after about six years of doing translation, editing, desktop publishing, and localization (still never touched code the whole time), while learning C and an obscure editor macro language in the meantime, my boss (the company president) finally decided, yeah, you obviously have what it takes to write code, so I'll let you do it.
Ten years later, at my last job, I took part in a group interview involving several other software engineers including a kid who'd just recently gotten a Master's in Computer Science, and I was stunned to find that I was the only one who knew what a C++ vtable was.
It probably won't take nearly as long as it did for me (I enjoyed and got good at the other types of work I did along the way), but give yourself some time.
There is one thing of which I was a VERY early adopter, though: Slashdot.
Let's see, I'm typing this on my main PC, which I literally found in someone else's trash four years ago (and its two 40GB hard disk were used freebies from the office). Though I never use it, there's a VFAT partition on one of the disks with Windows 98SE on it. I finally got a DVD drive for it last year.
My laptop, with a 133Mhz Pentium, 48MB RAM, and an 800 x 600 screen, was bought used 10 years ago from a friend who was in grad school (and thus on a tight budget herself). I've been using it quite a bit recently, to learn Lisp programming on (X + IceWM + Emacs).
The internet connection is 100MBps optical fiber, but I just plug my PC in directly for PPPoE -- no wireless router or anything like that.
Got an iPod last year - a 512MB Shuffle which was a hand-me-down from my girlfriend. Until then, my portable music player was a Sony MiniDisc-Walkman, which I still use for live recordings.
My cell phone is seven years old, and it cost nothing when I got it.
Stereo is a 15-year-old Nakamichi receiver, still in good condition -- better than the flaky Sony DVD player I bought four years ago.
OK, maybe I'm just a cheapskate. But really, I can't think of anything that I'd really want to go out and buy - that sort of thing happens only about once a year. (And I could well afford any such thing if I wanted it.) Basically, everything still works, and until it stops working, I feel it's a waste to replace it.
The article mentions David Gans and the WELL as a late-adopter person and institution, respectively. Gans is host of the syndicated "Grateful Dead Hour", and of course the WELL has its roots in '60s counterculture.
They couldn't have picked better examples of late adopters, and interestingly ones that aren't just that way because of psychological inertia, but because they clearly know what they want and what works, and they know that it's not the latest shiny cutting-edge stuff.
Finally, I have always wondered how many returns they get from people who thought that the computer was faulty because it would not run all their software they already owned. It is possible that Walmart wants to avoid losing good will of their less technically inclined customers who think that they are selling broken PCs
I really think that any user who has, in this day and age, actually bought and installed software from external media, understands the concept of "this software runs on Windows" well enough not to confuse OS incompatibility with faulty hardware, and the be aware of it when buying the PC.
And conversely, any user without that level of comprehension (who would try to return the PC) probably doesn't even understand that the software they already own on CD-ROM can be installed in a different machine and would never even think of trying it ; new computer means all new software -- I mean, isn't software part of the computer? Or more likely, the only software they "own" is stuff that was pre-installed on their previous computer with no source media and thus couldn't be reinstalled on a new machine even if they wanted to.
To the "less technically inclined customer" that might buy this PC without understanding that it doesn't run Windows, it doesn't even matter because all he needs is a web browser and mail client, both of which are available and installed (with the Linux version automatically selected) from the internet.
I get jerking on even fully buffered flash video in both WindowsXP and Linux using Adobe's Flash plugin.
Me, if the chicks are hot and the action's good, I get jerking regardless of format or buffering...
2. Think of the robots.
Please, won't somebody?!
Space stations and Antarctic research stations are self-contained -- their inhabitants do not need to venture outside of them, or obtain anything from the external environment, in order to sustain their existence.
They are not self-sustaining -- they rely on continuous supplies of energy and material from sources outside of their immediate environment. Which is how the one-man Mars station would be.
Better yet, you could, through implanted memories, convince the person that he's not really going to Mars... or that he's already actually on Mars... that he's a secret agent on Mars...
a one-way ticket to mars is setting you up for, at best, a painful death due to starvation or oxygen depletion.
How do you figure that painful death is the best possible outcome?!
The plan involves setting up a habitable environment and maintaining it for the lifetime of the person, and also includes the possibility of providing a means of coming back. The early explorers faced huge risks because they had to rely totally on their own resources. The Mars astronaut would not.
Get your ass to Mars.
>>
Could such an airline be price competitive with current airlines? Could such an airline make any profit?
>>
Such a "business-class airline" would be no more competitive with current airlines than a business/first class ticket is "competitive" with an economy ticket on the same plane. It doesn't need to be.
Is champagne price competitive with beer? Does it need to be to be sold at a profit?
>>>
(Something about having most of the airframe be doors is probably the weakness of this idea)
>>>
No need for that.
Boeing 747F : http://airways.cz/images/novinky/china-airlines-747f-prague.jpg
Antonov An-124 : http://www.loral.com/inthenews/iPSTAR_1-HiRes.jpg
Lockheed C-5 Galaxy : http://www.512aw.afrc.af.mil/shared/media/photodb/photos/050611-F-9171L-135.jpg
No need for top-loading via crane if you use a front-loading 747 freighter, C-5 Galaxy, or An-124. Put wheels on the seating module and rails on the plane. The boarding area has two parallel bays with a railroad switch, just like at a train terminal.
The crucial element is to allow passengers to approach their seats from anywhere -- from the open outside area as well as the interior aisle, from the back as well as the front -- instead of all filing in through a single door.
I have a feeling that 99% of the replies here are misundertanding something crucial. And so is your employer, and so are you. (OK, so it's more likely I'm the one who doesn't understand. But hear me out.)
First off, what is a style guide?
Here's how I would define it.
A style guide is a document which prescribes standards for subjective matters of presentation, which are to be followed for material created within a specific framework. For example, the material might be written articles for publication in a newspaper. Or the material might be programs created to run on an OS, or with a GUI or application framework. Or C language source code written to be read and modified by a programming team.
A style guide's purpose is to enforce consistency among material created by multiple parties (or one party over multiple sessions). This consistency is for the benefit of the end user, not necessarily the creators. And the style guide is for use by the creators, not the end user
A style guide governs presentation, not content. Grammar and article length, not viewpoints or what gets discussed and what doesn't. How a pushbutton looks and behaves, not how it gets drawn on the screen. Code indentation and naming, not what the program does.
A style guide does not prescribe standards that are enforced elsewhere. It doesn't tell writers to properly end their sentences with punctuation, because that's a rule that applies to all writing. It doesn't say that scrollbars in a GUI should not be placed at 45-degree angles, because the GUI API provides no means to do so anyway. It doesn't say that curly braces must be balanced, because the compiler will catch that anyway.
A style guide is the sole authority on the issues it covers. If an issue within the domain of the style guide is not governed by it, then there is no rule on it.
A style guide prescribes standards as the preferred choice among various possible options, none of which is objectively correct or incorrect. The standards take the form of "for such-and-such, do it this... way, not that... way. There are some who do it that... way, but we do it this... way because such-and-such."
A style guide can not be legitimately created by someone who doesn't define the standards in it, and have the authority to decide what to prescribe.
So, if your employer is asking you to make a UI style guide for their software, there is a basic issue that you haven't explicity made clear:
Does this software provide a framework for creating material that should conform to some standard? You say you are creating a user-interface style guide, so is it a user-interface creation tool (or something that allows external components with their own user interfaces)? If that's not what your software does, and the user-interface you're referring to is something that your software uses, rather than provides, then your company is in no position to create a style guide (that is, define standards) for it. Whoever created the GUI (Windows? Mac? QT?..) has already done that, and chances are they've published it, and your software engineers have been following it. Any attempted style guide would be merely descriptive, not prescriptive. It would say "for such-and-such, our software does it this way...", possibly even while the actual standards say to do it that... way.
Now if your software is in fact a UI-creation tool and it's already been created, then allthe content that needs to go into your style guide is already in the heads of, or has already been written by, whoever created the software. You know who to talk to.
And if the software is UI-creation tool but you're still at the design stage, then what you're being asked to do is actually create the standards, not just write a document. Your employer is asking you, a software engineer with no UI expertise, to define the rules which all of your customers, as software developers, will be mandated to follow, and which will in
Oh yeah, I'm sure the service center in Redmond handles special requests to its overseas subcontractors by issuing printed instructions intended directly for the assembly-line workers, and everybody else in between is told just to pass it on without verifying, elaborating, or translating it in any way for the next person in the chain.
In fact maybe the Mexican repairman, after wiping off what he thought might have been valuable signatures, told his supervisor just to make sure he wouldn't get the blame later. And that note was relayed all the way back to Redmond where the Manager of XBox customer services looked at the e-mail and said "What the hell... Spanish gibberish?! Who's Miguel Gonzales? Damned if I know!" and trashed it.
There was obviously a break in the communication chain from MS to their contractors, but I doubt that it had anything to do with to the Mexican worker' lack of English ability.
Take by analogy a genetic algorithm
Wow, so genetics is a lot like... a genetic algorithm! That makes the concept so much clearer. What a brilliant analogy!
Let me guess -- are you implying, from Gibbons, that 6500 years ago there was a mere one human woman on the entire planet, from whom everyone alive is descended? And I guess we all know her name...
Because the "Mitochondrial Eve" theory does not identify a purported woman, the only one on the planet, from which everyone who has ever lived descended. Rather it identifies the one woman that everyone alive today is descended from, and who was only one of many alive then, but the only one whose descendants who are alive now. And Gibbons' paper said that this person lived 6500, rather than 100,000, years ago (as described in Sykes' "The Seven Daughters of Eve").
But in her day, there was in turn a common ancestor that everyone alive then was descended from, some thousands of years in the past. And so on, nearly ad infinitum. But alas, we will never be able to identify the time of existence of any of those Eves without analyzing DNA samples from people back then.
Of course logically there must have been that one ultimate Mitochondrial Eve, but assuming she was the product of evolution, it requires arbitrarily defining her as "human" and all of her ancestors as not.
The question is not whether evolution is possible (given enough time and luck, anything is possible), but whether it actually happened.
You're trying to put it in terms like the infinitesimal but non-zero "possibility" of an apple suspending itself mid-air by some sheer random alignment of atoms. But scientific theories such as evolution don't deal with possibilities like that. And they're not formulated as descriptions of phenomena which are theoretically possible but have never been observed. Rather they are formulated as explanations of things which have happened. The phenomenon of evolution has been irrefutably observed as happening, and the theory adequately explains how.