The problem with iText is that it used to be MPL, but the maintainer got ticked off at commercial users several years ago and changed to license to AGPL. Apparently now they're relaxing the license for a fee, but they've changed their mind before - no guarantees that they won't change it again.
Considering that this is a statement made by a US agency, and the primary purpose of such an article is to convince the people that are defunding them, primarily the US taxpayer, to continue to fund them, the football field unit is completely appropriate. This is particularly true because most US high schools, and some middle schools have a permanent football field near them, and even parks have football fields temporarily set up from time to time. Anyone in the US who has tried to get an education, and even those who have slept during class, are likely to have walked by football fields enough to understand what the size of them is.
It is certainly more likely that someone in the US will have a feel for the size of 1/2 a football field than 50 yard sticks or 150 ruler lengths. There are very few other standard sized objects on that scale that people have real world experience with. The reality is that most in the US that understand 50 meters will approximate that to 50 yards, and then imagine that distance compared to a football field. NASA is just doing that conversion for those that don't have a feel for meters, and for those that don't realize that a football field is 100 yards.
But, I can close the lid of my laptop and it goes to sleep, open it and it wakes up. I don't have to write wpa-supplicant files by hand, worry about wireless drivers, or anything else. I can watch my DVDs, I can watch internet videos if I want to (as much as I bitch about youtube culture and whatnot, there are occasionally things worth watching that happen to live inside of an embedded flash player), my battery life doesn't suck and I spend a lot less time beating my head against the wall due to "not quite 100% compatible" issues.
Same here. I run Fedora, and I haven't had trouble with any of the above in years - it just works (though I don't watch many DVDs on my laptop, so, to be fair, I can't comment there). Fedora has come a long way in terms of networking and video, and I've heard that Ubuntu has as well. In fact, I've found that some of my cellphone videos play fine on my Fedora laptop, but don't work at all on my wife's Windows 7 laptop. When I moved away from Windows, I piloted with a Mac for awhile, and while the UI was pretty, it drove me absolutely nuts. The editing keys and shortcuts were different for every application. Also, Apple has no concept of a true docking station/port replicator, so every time I had a meeting, I had to unplug and re-plug ten different cables. I also had to carry around a bunch of extra accessories, like a dongle just to connect to a projector. It was so frustrating that when I was told that I had to choose, I happily sent the Mac packing and have used Fedora ever since.
It would be nice if I could get Quicken and Word for Linux, but I found that Word on Mac converts strangely to Windows also, and in some cases worse that OpenOffice, so I didn't see that as a worthy advantage.
They only mention three bounces per pixel, and do not mention samples per pixel. They also don't give any detail about their light sources. If they maintain point light sources, the shadows will always be hard no matter how many bounces or samples they take. If they allow area light sources, and sample it properly, they can do that with a single bounce. And you can do some pretty nice stuff with three bounces.
Re:any chance of an unrated dvd release ?
on
Batman Discussion
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· Score: 2, Informative
Personally, I don't understand how they got away with a PG-13 rating. Two Face's face burning off and the CG work was borderline, but I could have shrugged that off. However, Heath was a little bit too sick and twisted for anything below an R rating. His delivery of 'how I got these scars', and 'why I like to use a knife', was too believable to be comfortable as a PG-13 movie.
I saw at least one person leave with their kid. There was a fair amount of other traffic at the door, but I wasn't keeping track of how many were coming back from the bathroom and how many just left. I think they caught a lot of people off guard.
Last time I interviewed, Intuit and Microsoft mostly asked me ridiculous problems like string word reversals and such, as if I had the C string library committed to memory. I was particularly amused with the Microsoft questions because I had to write a replacement for their CString library four years earlier because it didn't handle DBCS well at the time.
nVidia asked me higher level problems that required much more thought, and was actual problem solving rather than how recently I had used the particular library that the interviewer was working on that day. I wasn't really surprised, but was somewhat amused when I received an offer from nVidia, but not from MS or Intuit.
I ended up taking a better offer elsewhere, but I found the difference in interview styles very striking.
Let's also assume that I said the pace wouldn't change.
By the way, having more downloads than people on earth isn't inconceivable, since no one is restricted to a single download. It's also possible that we'll meet an alien race that will love Firefox. I, for one, welcome our new Firefox loving overlords.
Just another statistic: if I have my dates right, it took IE7 2.5 months to reach 100 million users. Firefox is currently at 23 million and given the current rate (1080/min), FF3 on pace to beat that - even without being distributed as part of an OS (granted, IE7 was only part of volume licensing at that date, and not retail sales).
Even if you do get the address corrected, it will take years before these companies update their databases and work correctly. About a year ago, the US Post Office changed the zip code in the area that I just moved into, and it has been a hassle left and right.
The electric company claimed they didn't offer service to a house that they were currently providing electricity to. My health insurance was changed to an 'out of area' plan even though my dad already had the right provider in the same zip code. Sears wouldn't deliver until I gave them the old, incorrect zip code. Even Google still has it wrong on some maps, but not others (and I filed the bug months ago, but no fix).
Welcome to another series of problems created by software developers who made bad assumptions.
Also, as far as anyone has ever told me and I've ever seen, grad school for engineering and ESPECIALLY for CS is completely worthless for getting a job, and is done almost only by those who wish to go into academia.
As someone who works for a large tech company, let me just say that you've been very misled. The differences aren't immediately obvious, but you need to think a little bit beyond starting salary.
Promotion ceiling. You may start off with a salary that's only 10-15k below someone with an MS, but I have encountered a large number of people who have gone back to school because they can't get promoted without a better degree. In fact, I can't think of anyone I know that's over the age of 35 and doesn't have at least an MS. A large number went back to school after they had kids and continually grumbled about how hard it was with a family.
Job types. Those with BS's are much more likely to find themselves in a low-level position - implementation, support, bug fixing. People with graduate degrees are more likely to be in the design and project lead positions. Not only is this a factor in the promotion issue I already raised, but who do you think is easier to outsource? When times are tough, who are they going to lay off?
Just to emphasize the point, I was planning on stopping with my BS when the.com bust happened, and ended up going back to grad school at a Big 10 university. Applications for graduate schools in 2002 and 2003 were extremely high. High enough that schools were caught off guard when people who they expected to get in to MIT, CMU, Berkeley, etc ended up accepting their offers. Enough accepted that I heard many stories of schools that were overcommitted for financial aid. Unfortunately, I only have one data point for the mixture that were returning students, but around 20-25% of our class were people who had been in successful IT jobs and had gone back to grad school because they had trouble finding jobs. It led to an interesting mix of professional and academic experience.
Now, does this mean that you can't be successful with just a BS? No. Heck, I knew a kid out of high school that was pulling in over 100k managing IT for some small company during the.dot boom. But, he eventually went back to school too.
My point though is that if you want better job security, you want more freedom of action and responsibility, and a better likelihood of higher pay in the long run, the 24 credit hours for the MS is well worth it.
Your desktop can also be stolen, and the disk can crash. Ignoring those issues just makes you more vulnerable. I remember a class at UT-Austin where the prof went to put up his slides and realized the desktop under the podium was missing. Yes, that's right, someone lifted a desktop machine out of a lecture hall in the middle of the day on a crowded campus. And those things are normally locked down and alarmed. Quite surprising. Also, desktop HD's crash just as much as laptops.
I'd say that your argument enforces that laptops are better for most users because it causes some people to actually think about the relevant security and backup issues.
(7) Knowingly and without permission accesses or causes to be accessed any computer, computer system, or computer network.
If I were a lawyer, but I'm not, I'd argue that an SSID broadcast is an active advertisement. My router has an option to disable the SSID broadcast, and it's still perfectly functional. I'm not sure why a decent lawyer wouldn't be able to argue that the SSID broadcast with no access restrictions isn't an advertisement and invitation for use.
Right. Using an advertised free service is the same thing as hooking into someone's unsecured wifi or wardriving the neighbourhood.
Exactly. An unsecured router that is broadcasting its SSID is advertising a free service. At least on my router, you can turn the SSID broadcast off. You can't invite someone to your house and then claim that they were trespassing.
Not for any school that I looked at. Out of state students usually pay more, but almost all of the grad students at the major universities are from out of state. This is because students are encouraged to go somewhere other than their undergrad institution for grad school.
In either case, most PhD's in CS/Engineering degrees have their tuition covered by the university so it often doesn't make a difference. Maybe they can milk a little more out of a fellowship if a student gets one, but I doubt it's enough of a difference for a department to make admission decisions based on this. They're more interesting in the million dollar grants and not the 12k difference in tuition.
In the End CArbon fiber isn't better or worse than a metal plane. It's just different with different things that can go wrong.
This was really the point of Dan Rather's special, even though people are nit-picking at the details. The engineer in question was highlighting scenarios that could be problematic, but his overall argument was that we need the right kind of testing to know what the real issues are. His complaint was that methods created to test and verify aluminum planes have been used to market and argue the merits of carbon fiber, but those tests don't mean anything because the material is different and behaves differently.
The point of the special wasn't to claim that carbon fiber was unsafe, but rather that more thought needs to be put into what the failure scenarios are and how to test/detect them. Instead of addressing those concerns, Boeing and the FAA have been treating carbon fiber as if it were metal, and marching on their merry way.
Unfortunately, we have a bad tendency to wait for disasters to happen before addressing problems. Hydrogen worked as well as helium for blimps... until the Hindenberg blew up.
I work at IBM with some of the folks that designed IA2, so let me fill in what you're missing. There is NO Microsoft-developed code here at all, AFAIK.
Microsoft has an event system (MSAA) in Windows that is designed to pass COM objects from applications to screen readers. They also designed an interface that provides information like an object's role and label (e.g. a button labeled submit). Unfortunately, this interface (IAccessible) has been entirely inadequate, but what do you expect from something designed for Windows 95? Instead of extending the interface, Microsoft has decided to pursue UI Automation, which screen readers don't/can't support yet.
IBM used their experience to design a more complete interface, named IAccessible2. They then showed how you can use the Windows MSAA event system to pass around COM objects that can expose the IAccessible2 interface. Then, they worked with screen reader manufacturers and other companies (Microsoft didn't participate AFAIK) to make sure there was a complete solution - an interface is useless if no one uses it.
Now, for the part Open Office cares about - The real code for OO.org is that you have to implement these interfaces for all of your widgets. For Lotus Note 8, IBM used editors similar to Open Office and implemented and tested this interface for all of these widgets (menus, rich text, yadda yadda). Now IBM is donating some of that code, which has the potential to make Open Office more accessible and more robust with screen readers than Word.
If he'd have taken an intro stats course, he'd understand that trends aren't about the outliers. He does a good job of making a scene because some outliers have changed, but doesn't bother to look at the trends. Or maybe he did, but ignored it because it didn't agree with him.
Heck, you can drop the corrected data into excel and have a trend line in a few minutes. No surprise, it's still increasing.
So stop giving them your cash. I recently quit because the game had changed from entertainment to merely being a way to occupy my time. But, as long as people keep paying them, there's no incentive for them to change.
IBM isn't sanctioning 'playing' Second Life. They're sanctioning business activities in Second Life, hence the guidelines. They're going to have guidelines for anything where employees are doing things on the clock in a public space. Plus, if some guy is burning half his time in some virtual dance club, he's probably not going to look so great when it comes around to evaluations.
But, yes. IBM is a tech company. They have islands in Second Life, and there are certainly people who have legitimate reasons to be exploring and doing things there on the clock, so why would it be a surprise that they'd sanction this?
In fact RedHat makes over a billion dollars a year, based purely on Open Source offerings.
That's nice and all, but a billion dollars is a small deal for IBM. Given their positions today, comparing IBM and RedHat's business models is amusing bar talk at best. Services are a low margin business and software sales are a high margin business. If there's no legal or strategic reason, and people are buying the product, there's no business reason to open source software. RedHat lives on an open source model because they legally have to.
Wheelchairs exist that can climbstairs. If that's the goal, they'd be better off improving on the iBot idea. Watching the movie, this thing looked pretty useless to a quadriplegic because it has no stability. Doing any joystick control would be difficult when each step of the thing throws your entire body from side to side. Plus, it seems ridiculously slow compared to a wheelchair.
It's fine research for robotics, but trying to sell it as an benefit for accessibility is a bit of a stretch at this point.
I'd say there's a different ignorance on the Linux side. I can't count the number of times I've heard an argument that Windows is unstable from people whose last experience with Windows was 98 or ME. Regardless, I think there are still some very good reason why people aren't moving to Linux.
Accessibility - The Linux platform isn't particularly accessible (i.e. An awful experience for blind users). Gnome and the Linux Screen Reader are starting to making progress, but they aren't quite there yet. This is a hindrance for federal procurement, large companies, schools, etc. They can't commit to a platform unless all of their users can use it. And what you use at work and school, you tend to use at home.
Hardware - Yes, it's much better, but it's still awful for even fairly common things. Every time I try to configure my wireless adaptor, it takes a fair amount of hunting. Obviously this isn't helped by the fact that one company will sell the same product with multiple chipsets, but under Windows, it just works. And once I get wireless working, the end result always seems to be that I get shorter range than when running under Windows.
Configuration files - The first things I have to do after installing an FC6 system is edit a configuration file to add higher resolutions. It's also fairly common for Linux applications - samba, vmware, etc - even though their windows counterparts have perfectly nice GUIs for the same configurations.
Overall usability - Again, improved recently, but not there yet. For reference, I've had a computer in front of me since I was three, and have an M.S. in computer science (graphics to be specific). I use Windows daily and FC6 about weekly. When something goes wrong, on Windows, I can play with my configuration and focus on the configuration itself. On Linux, I'm usually trying to figure out the order of the command-line arguments or figuring out the syntax of some configuration file, or something equally mundane. I'd guess about 70% of my Linux issues wouldn't be solved if it weren't for Google.
If it aint broke, don't fix it. People will stay with what they know unless there's a seriously good reason to move.
I'd agree with most of that.. but two comments you made bother me:
1) "would break the database model we've developed"
Which database model is a better design? If the customer wishes result in a better database model, I would call this highly valuable feedback - and shame on you for being lazy. However, if it's a redesign that will only make one person happy while breaking everyone else, then toss it.
2) "that's not counting the fact that my fellow developers, marketers, and I have our own 'brilliant' ideas on how to best improve the program"
I hope that your fellow developers, marketers and yourself are paying for all of the expenses of the product. If you consider your own ideas to always trump your customers', don't be surprised when someone else steals the business. If your marketers are worth their salt though, their ideas are already customer-based.
I generally hear from two groups. The first group chants 'focus on the customer', and has excellent examples of businesses that have failed for ignoring this. The second group chants 'my idea is better' and launches into a technical argument. Perhaps you should first consider if your brilliant idea seems as brilliant to the customer before labeling it brilliant. Unfortunately, it's nearly impossible to do an unbiased evaluation on your own.
That said, I'll add another item to your list of noise - too vague to be actionable. I love suggestions like "make it more intuitive." To who, and how?
He probably used the world-wide workforce number and assumed it was US only. I can only assume he heard a rumor about 40% of some division, and since he didn't understand what that meant he decided to apply it to the global workforce number.
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The problem with iText is that it used to be MPL, but the maintainer got ticked off at commercial users several years ago and changed to license to AGPL. Apparently now they're relaxing the license for a fee, but they've changed their mind before - no guarantees that they won't change it again.
Considering that this is a statement made by a US agency, and the primary purpose of such an article is to convince the people that are defunding them, primarily the US taxpayer, to continue to fund them, the football field unit is completely appropriate. This is particularly true because most US high schools, and some middle schools have a permanent football field near them, and even parks have football fields temporarily set up from time to time. Anyone in the US who has tried to get an education, and even those who have slept during class, are likely to have walked by football fields enough to understand what the size of them is.
It is certainly more likely that someone in the US will have a feel for the size of 1/2 a football field than 50 yard sticks or 150 ruler lengths. There are very few other standard sized objects on that scale that people have real world experience with. The reality is that most in the US that understand 50 meters will approximate that to 50 yards, and then imagine that distance compared to a football field. NASA is just doing that conversion for those that don't have a feel for meters, and for those that don't realize that a football field is 100 yards.
But, I can close the lid of my laptop and it goes to sleep, open it and it wakes up. I don't have to write wpa-supplicant files by hand, worry about wireless drivers, or anything else. I can watch my DVDs, I can watch internet videos if I want to (as much as I bitch about youtube culture and whatnot, there are occasionally things worth watching that happen to live inside of an embedded flash player), my battery life doesn't suck and I spend a lot less time beating my head against the wall due to "not quite 100% compatible" issues.
Same here. I run Fedora, and I haven't had trouble with any of the above in years - it just works (though I don't watch many DVDs on my laptop, so, to be fair, I can't comment there). Fedora has come a long way in terms of networking and video, and I've heard that Ubuntu has as well. In fact, I've found that some of my cellphone videos play fine on my Fedora laptop, but don't work at all on my wife's Windows 7 laptop. When I moved away from Windows, I piloted with a Mac for awhile, and while the UI was pretty, it drove me absolutely nuts. The editing keys and shortcuts were different for every application. Also, Apple has no concept of a true docking station/port replicator, so every time I had a meeting, I had to unplug and re-plug ten different cables. I also had to carry around a bunch of extra accessories, like a dongle just to connect to a projector. It was so frustrating that when I was told that I had to choose, I happily sent the Mac packing and have used Fedora ever since.
It would be nice if I could get Quicken and Word for Linux, but I found that Word on Mac converts strangely to Windows also, and in some cases worse that OpenOffice, so I didn't see that as a worthy advantage.
Shadows could be softer
They only mention three bounces per pixel, and do not mention samples per pixel. They also don't give any detail about their light sources. If they maintain point light sources, the shadows will always be hard no matter how many bounces or samples they take. If they allow area light sources, and sample it properly, they can do that with a single bounce. And you can do some pretty nice stuff with three bounces.
Personally, I don't understand how they got away with a PG-13 rating. Two Face's face burning off and the CG work was borderline, but I could have shrugged that off. However, Heath was a little bit too sick and twisted for anything below an R rating. His delivery of 'how I got these scars', and 'why I like to use a knife', was too believable to be comfortable as a PG-13 movie.
I saw at least one person leave with their kid. There was a fair amount of other traffic at the door, but I wasn't keeping track of how many were coming back from the bathroom and how many just left. I think they caught a lot of people off guard.
Last time I interviewed, Intuit and Microsoft mostly asked me ridiculous problems like string word reversals and such, as if I had the C string library committed to memory. I was particularly amused with the Microsoft questions because I had to write a replacement for their CString library four years earlier because it didn't handle DBCS well at the time.
nVidia asked me higher level problems that required much more thought, and was actual problem solving rather than how recently I had used the particular library that the interviewer was working on that day. I wasn't really surprised, but was somewhat amused when I received an offer from nVidia, but not from MS or Intuit.
I ended up taking a better offer elsewhere, but I found the difference in interview styles very striking.
Let's also assume that I said the pace wouldn't change.
By the way, having more downloads than people on earth isn't inconceivable, since no one is restricted to a single download. It's also possible that we'll meet an alien race that will love Firefox. I, for one, welcome our new Firefox loving overlords.
Just another statistic: if I have my dates right, it took IE7 2.5 months to reach 100 million users. Firefox is currently at 23 million and given the current rate (1080/min), FF3 on pace to beat that - even without being distributed as part of an OS (granted, IE7 was only part of volume licensing at that date, and not retail sales).
Even if you do get the address corrected, it will take years before these companies update their databases and work correctly. About a year ago, the US Post Office changed the zip code in the area that I just moved into, and it has been a hassle left and right.
The electric company claimed they didn't offer service to a house that they were currently providing electricity to. My health insurance was changed to an 'out of area' plan even though my dad already had the right provider in the same zip code. Sears wouldn't deliver until I gave them the old, incorrect zip code. Even Google still has it wrong on some maps, but not others (and I filed the bug months ago, but no fix).
Welcome to another series of problems created by software developers who made bad assumptions.
Also, as far as anyone has ever told me and I've ever seen, grad school for engineering and ESPECIALLY for CS is completely worthless for getting a job, and is done almost only by those who wish to go into academia.
As someone who works for a large tech company, let me just say that you've been very misled. The differences aren't immediately obvious, but you need to think a little bit beyond starting salary.
Promotion ceiling. You may start off with a salary that's only 10-15k below someone with an MS, but I have encountered a large number of people who have gone back to school because they can't get promoted without a better degree. In fact, I can't think of anyone I know that's over the age of 35 and doesn't have at least an MS. A large number went back to school after they had kids and continually grumbled about how hard it was with a family.
Job types. Those with BS's are much more likely to find themselves in a low-level position - implementation, support, bug fixing. People with graduate degrees are more likely to be in the design and project lead positions. Not only is this a factor in the promotion issue I already raised, but who do you think is easier to outsource? When times are tough, who are they going to lay off?
Just to emphasize the point, I was planning on stopping with my BS when the .com bust happened, and ended up going back to grad school at a Big 10 university. Applications for graduate schools in 2002 and 2003 were extremely high. High enough that schools were caught off guard when people who they expected to get in to MIT, CMU, Berkeley, etc ended up accepting their offers. Enough accepted that I heard many stories of schools that were overcommitted for financial aid. Unfortunately, I only have one data point for the mixture that were returning students, but around 20-25% of our class were people who had been in successful IT jobs and had gone back to grad school because they had trouble finding jobs. It led to an interesting mix of professional and academic experience.
Now, does this mean that you can't be successful with just a BS? No. Heck, I knew a kid out of high school that was pulling in over 100k managing IT for some small company during the .dot boom. But, he eventually went back to school too.
My point though is that if you want better job security, you want more freedom of action and responsibility, and a better likelihood of higher pay in the long run, the 24 credit hours for the MS is well worth it.
Your desktop can also be stolen, and the disk can crash. Ignoring those issues just makes you more vulnerable. I remember a class at UT-Austin where the prof went to put up his slides and realized the desktop under the podium was missing. Yes, that's right, someone lifted a desktop machine out of a lecture hall in the middle of the day on a crowded campus. And those things are normally locked down and alarmed. Quite surprising. Also, desktop HD's crash just as much as laptops.
I'd say that your argument enforces that laptops are better for most users because it causes some people to actually think about the relevant security and backup issues.
(7) Knowingly and without permission accesses or causes to be accessed any computer, computer system, or computer network.
If I were a lawyer, but I'm not, I'd argue that an SSID broadcast is an active advertisement. My router has an option to disable the SSID broadcast, and it's still perfectly functional. I'm not sure why a decent lawyer wouldn't be able to argue that the SSID broadcast with no access restrictions isn't an advertisement and invitation for use.
Right. Using an advertised free service is the same thing as hooking into someone's unsecured wifi or wardriving the neighbourhood.
Exactly. An unsecured router that is broadcasting its SSID is advertising a free service. At least on my router, you can turn the SSID broadcast off. You can't invite someone to your house and then claim that they were trespassing.
Not for any school that I looked at. Out of state students usually pay more, but almost all of the grad students at the major universities are from out of state. This is because students are encouraged to go somewhere other than their undergrad institution for grad school.
In either case, most PhD's in CS/Engineering degrees have their tuition covered by the university so it often doesn't make a difference. Maybe they can milk a little more out of a fellowship if a student gets one, but I doubt it's enough of a difference for a department to make admission decisions based on this. They're more interesting in the million dollar grants and not the 12k difference in tuition.
In the End CArbon fiber isn't better or worse than a metal plane. It's just different with different things that can go wrong.
This was really the point of Dan Rather's special, even though people are nit-picking at the details. The engineer in question was highlighting scenarios that could be problematic, but his overall argument was that we need the right kind of testing to know what the real issues are. His complaint was that methods created to test and verify aluminum planes have been used to market and argue the merits of carbon fiber, but those tests don't mean anything because the material is different and behaves differently.
The point of the special wasn't to claim that carbon fiber was unsafe, but rather that more thought needs to be put into what the failure scenarios are and how to test/detect them. Instead of addressing those concerns, Boeing and the FAA have been treating carbon fiber as if it were metal, and marching on their merry way.
Unfortunately, we have a bad tendency to wait for disasters to happen before addressing problems. Hydrogen worked as well as helium for blimps... until the Hindenberg blew up.
I work at IBM with some of the folks that designed IA2, so let me fill in what you're missing. There is NO Microsoft-developed code here at all, AFAIK.
Microsoft has an event system (MSAA) in Windows that is designed to pass COM objects from applications to screen readers. They also designed an interface that provides information like an object's role and label (e.g. a button labeled submit). Unfortunately, this interface (IAccessible) has been entirely inadequate, but what do you expect from something designed for Windows 95? Instead of extending the interface, Microsoft has decided to pursue UI Automation, which screen readers don't/can't support yet.
IBM used their experience to design a more complete interface, named IAccessible2. They then showed how you can use the Windows MSAA event system to pass around COM objects that can expose the IAccessible2 interface. Then, they worked with screen reader manufacturers and other companies (Microsoft didn't participate AFAIK) to make sure there was a complete solution - an interface is useless if no one uses it.
Now, for the part Open Office cares about - The real code for OO.org is that you have to implement these interfaces for all of your widgets. For Lotus Note 8, IBM used editors similar to Open Office and implemented and tested this interface for all of these widgets (menus, rich text, yadda yadda). Now IBM is donating some of that code, which has the potential to make Open Office more accessible and more robust with screen readers than Word.
If he'd have taken an intro stats course, he'd understand that trends aren't about the outliers. He does a good job of making a scene because some outliers have changed, but doesn't bother to look at the trends. Or maybe he did, but ignored it because it didn't agree with him.
Heck, you can drop the corrected data into excel and have a trend line in a few minutes. No surprise, it's still increasing.
So stop giving them your cash. I recently quit because the game had changed from entertainment to merely being a way to occupy my time. But, as long as people keep paying them, there's no incentive for them to change.
Google FTW - http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/28/business/28ebay. html
IBM isn't sanctioning 'playing' Second Life. They're sanctioning business activities in Second Life, hence the guidelines. They're going to have guidelines for anything where employees are doing things on the clock in a public space. Plus, if some guy is burning half his time in some virtual dance club, he's probably not going to look so great when it comes around to evaluations.
But, yes. IBM is a tech company. They have islands in Second Life, and there are certainly people who have legitimate reasons to be exploring and doing things there on the clock, so why would it be a surprise that they'd sanction this?
In fact RedHat makes over a billion dollars a year, based purely on Open Source offerings.
That's nice and all, but a billion dollars is a small deal for IBM. Given their positions today, comparing IBM and RedHat's business models is amusing bar talk at best. Services are a low margin business and software sales are a high margin business. If there's no legal or strategic reason, and people are buying the product, there's no business reason to open source software. RedHat lives on an open source model because they legally have to.
Wheelchairs exist that can climb stairs. If that's the goal, they'd be better off improving on the iBot idea. Watching the movie, this thing looked pretty useless to a quadriplegic because it has no stability. Doing any joystick control would be difficult when each step of the thing throws your entire body from side to side. Plus, it seems ridiculously slow compared to a wheelchair.
It's fine research for robotics, but trying to sell it as an benefit for accessibility is a bit of a stretch at this point.
- Accessibility - The Linux platform isn't particularly accessible (i.e. An awful experience for blind users). Gnome and the Linux Screen Reader are starting to making progress, but they aren't quite there yet. This is a hindrance for federal procurement, large companies, schools, etc. They can't commit to a platform unless all of their users can use it. And what you use at work and school, you tend to use at home.
- Hardware - Yes, it's much better, but it's still awful for even fairly common things. Every time I try to configure my wireless adaptor, it takes a fair amount of hunting. Obviously this isn't helped by the fact that one company will sell the same product with multiple chipsets, but under Windows, it just works. And once I get wireless working, the end result always seems to be that I get shorter range than when running under Windows.
- Configuration files - The first things I have to do after installing an FC6 system is edit a configuration file to add higher resolutions. It's also fairly common for Linux applications - samba, vmware, etc - even though their windows counterparts have perfectly nice GUIs for the same configurations.
- Overall usability - Again, improved recently, but not there yet. For reference, I've had a computer in front of me since I was three, and have an M.S. in computer science (graphics to be specific). I use Windows daily and FC6 about weekly. When something goes wrong, on Windows, I can play with my configuration and focus on the configuration itself. On Linux, I'm usually trying to figure out the order of the command-line arguments or figuring out the syntax of some configuration file, or something equally mundane. I'd guess about 70% of my Linux issues wouldn't be solved if it weren't for Google.
- If it aint broke, don't fix it. People will stay with what they know unless there's a seriously good reason to move.
Anyway, my two cents.I'd agree with most of that.. but two comments you made bother me:
1) "would break the database model we've developed"
Which database model is a better design? If the customer wishes result in a better database model, I would call this highly valuable feedback - and shame on you for being lazy. However, if it's a redesign that will only make one person happy while breaking everyone else, then toss it.
2) "that's not counting the fact that my fellow developers, marketers, and I have our own 'brilliant' ideas on how to best improve the program"
I hope that your fellow developers, marketers and yourself are paying for all of the expenses of the product. If you consider your own ideas to always trump your customers', don't be surprised when someone else steals the business. If your marketers are worth their salt though, their ideas are already customer-based.
I generally hear from two groups. The first group chants 'focus on the customer', and has excellent examples of businesses that have failed for ignoring this. The second group chants 'my idea is better' and launches into a technical argument. Perhaps you should first consider if your brilliant idea seems as brilliant to the customer before labeling it brilliant. Unfortunately, it's nearly impossible to do an unbiased evaluation on your own.
That said, I'll add another item to your list of noise - too vague to be actionable. I love suggestions like "make it more intuitive." To who, and how?
http://www.computerworlduk.com/management/it-busin ess/supplier-relations/news/index.cfm?newsid=2832
He probably used the world-wide workforce number and assumed it was US only. I can only assume he heard a rumor about 40% of some division, and since he didn't understand what that meant he decided to apply it to the global workforce number.