Agreed; Agile is a specific methodology that is quite orderly and efficient.
Too often, though, sloppy managers let the project run wild, zero specs, zero plans, do what you feel like doing how you feel like doing it, the deadline is yesterday, so there's no time to plan anything, the customer is our alpha-tester - and they call it "agile development" because "total brothel development" doesn't have the right ring in the name. And people who see such projects really believe this is what Agile is all about.
...in job description, is preparation of your workplace for performing work, and leaving it in order upon leaving. Then booting up the computer should be paid for.
If it is not, then the employer should hire someone to do that for you.
The only other option is if you're paid per service, not per hour, say, per customer served.
Heh. I think you underestimate scales of the market.
I develop free (as in beer) firmware that is useless for any other hardware than manufactured by our company. Firmware: Free but useless if you don't pay for the hardware.
In my previous job, I was making free (to use) software with millions of users, thing is the software was never to leave the door of the company, it ran on our server farm and users were connecting to it through WWW. Web apps: Free, but never distributed.
These two account for more than half of existing software industry.
At an earlier job, I needed to write converters and other tools for data for machines I was using. My job was to get the work done, nobody told me to write that software, but it appeared essential for the work. It never left the company, not that anyone would find much use for it. Closeware: Free, never used outside.
Before that, I was doing admin and freelance work. I would write small scripts and various little tools that got the problems solved. The employer never cared what I do with them, they wanted their equipment to work, that's all. Ad-hoc problem solving programs: Free, but you pay for service, not for software.
In the meantime I was finishing my studies. My thesis involved a rather big software project. Obviously, I couldn't demand the university pays for my program before I present it. University-made software: Free, paid for in form of passing exams or getting a degree.
Oh, and I wrote a couple of small programs just for fun or for solving problems that nagged me, and released them as GNU. Free Software: Free, just because.
It's that he's not against paid software development, he's against (not adamantly, but somewhat) paid software.
It's as in "you pay for my time, skill and materials I use to produce, then you get the product I made" versus "you pay for the product, it's none of your business where I got it from or how much it cost me to obtain it." Socialist "Good pay for good work" versus capitalist "supply and demand regulate the price".
I wonder how it deals with wear protection mechanisms.
Flash-based memory media are a true bastard to recover deleted data from. As long as you're using filesystem, moving files around and so on, everything is just dandy. But when you try to access raw media, unused space, it becomes messy. Mapping of a sector of the media to a set of memory cells may change without notice, sectors get reordered and so on. As long as you're in userspace, this is entirely transparent, but down by the hardware, where you work to recover the deleted data, it becomes a serious problem.
One of reasons why tools like Eraser are useless for flash media.
Just a small clarification, though very unlikely to be applicable in this case. * Patent law -- where you really do have to work to avoid infringement! -- doesn't apply to photographs.
It does, when the patent is about technique of photography. Applying specific filters, lenses, postprocessing etc. It -might- apply to objects in the picture if they influence the photo as a whole, say, incandescent ultraviolet lamp outlining the subject with a weird halo, or a specific calibration panel which is later used to adjust the picture settings, but they must be an element of the technique of photography, not the subject of the photo. So, patent claims don't apply here.
The issue with the "New Zork Times" is that the "New York Times" certainly does sound similar, and the purpose of the "New Zork Times" was for something "related" to journalism...
OTOH, knowing some of ZORK, that would fall well within fair use for purpose of parody.
Of course others pick the solutions like momentum comparisons, directional gradients and so on. They are very nice mathematically and elegant solutions, but... DAMNED UNRELIABLE. They work very well in theory. In practice, you spend 90% time fighting white noise, 9% replacing computationally intensive algorithms with predefined results, and 1% by doing solid (but rather simple) maths to get the final result.
Oh, and second that much to get image from the camera into a format where you can read or set value of a single pixel in the image, but that's up to you.
First, mount the camera in a consistent way and give it consistent light so that the image doesn't change. Will save a LOT of work with aligning the picture you take and finding the arrows.
You work on b&w. If it's RGB, just average (r+g+b)/3.
- Take a few pics of the meter, combine them removing the arrows from the shots (using shop). That is your "neutral" picture. You keep one, forever. - Take "current" picture. The one to be read. - Run both through median (replace pixel value at (x,y) with the middle out of sorted pixel values from square (x-1,y-1):(x+1,y+1) - removing extreme noise pixels. - Run both through gaussian blur (average value over square square (x-1,y-1):(x+1,y+1), softens edges getting rid of off-by-one errors on various edge areas. - extract the arrows by substracting one from the other: dif(x,y)=abs(org(x,y)-cur(x,y)). - binarize: change grayscale to 1-bit palette (p(x,y)=(p(x,y)thr)?0:1) pick threshold that gives clearest images of the arrows. - median again to clean up the edges. - denote detection zones - count each arrow as a separate image.
Now you have a set of images ready for proper recognition. You might calculate center of mass if you wish, by averaging the position of all the set pixels, or just preset the center in the axis.
Calculate distance from center to edge (nearest transition from 1 to 0) for all angles (transform radial-euclidean where applicable). The angle with maximum distance is the direction of the arrow. Alternatively you may examine a circle at fixed distance from center, detecting pixels set on the circumference.
Transform the result (in radians) to decimal. Round down (preferably basing on result from lower value). Add up results from the wheels.
I can perfectly well imagine someone purposely piping all the user input to root shell for easy debug and development, then forgetting to disable it in the release version.
Since NASA seems to be stuck in the tar pit of safety, security and budget cuts, it's highly unlikely to see any of 'minor but constant' progress from them - they can only afford a few highly outstanding projects that must be polished till they shine, because any failure is unacceptable, and which are scheduled for dates like 2015, 2030 or so. They can't afford what was a standard 'in the early days', 50 failed tests in a row, a lot of improvisation and fixing problems as they appear. Back then, when a $1mln piece of equipment got destroyed, you built another and slapped an additional $500 subsystem on top of it. Currently you build a $1mln piece of equipment with a $20mln fault-prevention subsystem and it will not fail, at least in theory. Which takes maybe half the money but 10 times as much time than 40 iterations of the $1mln 'retry' method.
Russia is stuck with commercial. They do a lot of it and are great at it, cheap, fast, simple, tested thousands of time in practice, with small iterative improvements but without any huge breakthroughs, not much science is being done.
It's China and India that push for scientific advances, big and fast. They took a sprint in the race to catch up, and they are really the motor of the progress, budget is subject for negotiation, deadlines are not, if it fails, that's okay, we just try again, prevent 90% of expected accidents and hope for the best about the remaining 10%, make prayers and sacrifices to Murphy and prefer to have a half-working solution in a month than a fully-working one in five years.
Some astronauts will lose lives. Billions of dollars worth of equipment will become junk. But the science will be getting done, and on good schedule. (for the people who are still alive)
Actually, a piece of software optimized for a very specific, limited platform like Amiga 500, running faster than software written for a very general and not very well defined platform like >2GHZ x86, well, that's way too common.
Sometimes it's better to apologize than ask permission.
My bet is that if Google nicely asked the authors guild for permission for just what the settlement resulted in, before taking any steps, they would be outright denied. Only by first -doing- and only then settling the permission matters, not only they got the desired result, they got it months ahead of time.
the wheels are travelling on the ground at mach 1.4, if they were uncovered the top of the wheel would be travelling at mach 2.8 with regards to the local airflow....and the surface of the wheel accelerates from zero to mach 2.8 on distance of diameter of half the circumference of the wheel.
Say, the wheel is 1m diameter. The circumference is pi meters. 2.8 mach is 953m/s. That's 0.00164s to travel half the circumference (distance of half of turn of the wheel). 2.8m/s / 0.00164s. 1698m/s^2, that's 173 g. And that's the bottom cap on the actual value, because it's not linear and doesn't take the upward motion into account.
In other words, the fact the wheels aren't ripped apart by centrifugal/centripetal force.
8. Shut up. This is to stop the terrorists. And you don't want to support terrorism, do you? 9. Shut up. This is to protect the children. And you don't want to support pedophilia, do you? 10. This is a classified information you were not authorised to obtain. Please lay on the ground face down and place your hands on your head.
OTOH obviously in the world of recession people will surely abandon all the free applications and switch to expensive commercial closed-source software.
When money's tight, nobody's gonna use what is free when you can have an expensive alternative, and everyone will pay big $$$ for upgrades instead of seeking a way to improve the source code themselves.
Not over weekend. The shops with supplies are closed. Over monday and tuesday, yes. And with some spare $2000 to get it running.
I'd have to get my compressor running in reverse. Get a tank that is big enough and openable to put stuff in it. It should generate enough vacuum. Modify an old 8-track tape recorder to accept adhesive tape. Grab x-ray chemistry set and some blanks, from medical supply shop. Of course this first version would require the x-rayed item to withstand vacuum but it's enough for starters. With some technology and money, fitting the xray emitter in a device the size of a cigarette box would be rather easy. It's a walkman minus the electronics and "eject" but plus airtight case (with mechanics encased inside to avoid problems with pressurised joints).
Confusing 'users' with 'customers'. It's like you sell elk urine as a perfume, and claim 99% of perfume users love the elk urine smell.
Nope.
99% of perfume users hate elk urine smell and don't buy it. The 0.99% who buy it and love it are weird perverts who feel turned on by the smell. The remaining 0.01% are clueless morons who didn't know what they are buying.
Yep, from people who -bought- the game, possibly well over 90% don't know and don't care. OTOH the rampaging piracy is in a major part influenced by DRM. If they surveyed -users- and not just -customers- they might come up with a totally different number.
There are trojans in the wild, that hijack the HTML renderer component. The certificate matches, the secure connection matches, the OTP code matches, it's just the amount entered and the target account number that differs between what is displayed on the confirmation screen and what is being sent over the net. You think you're signing a $10 ebay transaction, while what you just signed is $10k for an account in Philippines.
In other words: computer display and keyboard are not trusted devices anymore. You type one thing, see the same thing appear, but a different thing is being sent.
The solution is one-time confirmation code sent as SMS, including some signed transaction details (amount and some digits from the target account number). It's about impossible to hijack both the computer and the GSM transmission.
I was in the voting commission once. A guy took a ballot at one location, but didn't put it in the urn. He handed it to a friend, who unnoticed, placed two ballots (his one, and that other one) in our urn. As result, we had one more ballot than we should have. We have recounted the ballots and signatures three times. We checked stamps on the ballots (all are stamped with the mumber of the commission). The stamps weren't clear on all the ballots, meaning we couldn't decipher if they all are ours.
By a common consensus (of people from 7 or so political parties) we destroyed one random invalid vote ballot and kept the case secret. We didn't want to imagine the bureaucratic hell we'd have to go through to solve this one by legal means.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed; Agile is a specific methodology that is quite orderly and efficient.
Too often, though, sloppy managers let the project run wild, zero specs, zero plans, do what you feel like doing how you feel like doing it, the deadline is yesterday, so there's no time to plan anything, the customer is our alpha-tester - and they call it "agile development" because "total brothel development" doesn't have the right ring in the name. And people who see such projects really believe this is what Agile is all about.
...in job description, is preparation of your workplace for performing work, and leaving it in order upon leaving. Then booting up the computer should be paid for.
If it is not, then the employer should hire someone to do that for you.
The only other option is if you're paid per service, not per hour, say, per customer served.
Heh. I think you underestimate scales of the market.
I develop free (as in beer) firmware that is useless for any other hardware than manufactured by our company. Firmware: Free but useless if you don't pay for the hardware.
In my previous job, I was making free (to use) software with millions of users, thing is the software was never to leave the door of the company, it ran on our server farm and users were connecting to it through WWW. Web apps: Free, but never distributed.
These two account for more than half of existing software industry.
At an earlier job, I needed to write converters and other tools for data for machines I was using. My job was to get the work done, nobody told me to write that software, but it appeared essential for the work. It never left the company, not that anyone would find much use for it. Closeware: Free, never used outside.
Before that, I was doing admin and freelance work. I would write small scripts and various little tools that got the problems solved. The employer never cared what I do with them, they wanted their equipment to work, that's all. Ad-hoc problem solving programs: Free, but you pay for service, not for software.
In the meantime I was finishing my studies. My thesis involved a rather big software project. Obviously, I couldn't demand the university pays for my program before I present it. University-made software: Free, paid for in form of passing exams or getting a degree.
Oh, and I wrote a couple of small programs just for fun or for solving problems that nagged me, and released them as GNU. Free Software: Free, just because.
It's that he's not against paid software development, he's against (not adamantly, but somewhat) paid software.
It's as in "you pay for my time, skill and materials I use to produce, then you get the product I made" versus "you pay for the product, it's none of your business where I got it from or how much it cost me to obtain it." Socialist "Good pay for good work" versus capitalist "supply and demand regulate the price".
I wonder how it deals with wear protection mechanisms.
Flash-based memory media are a true bastard to recover deleted data from. As long as you're using filesystem, moving files around and so on, everything is just dandy. But when you try to access raw media, unused space, it becomes messy. Mapping of a sector of the media to a set of memory cells may change without notice, sectors get reordered and so on. As long as you're in userspace, this is entirely transparent, but down by the hardware, where you work to recover the deleted data, it becomes a serious problem.
One of reasons why tools like Eraser are useless for flash media.
Just a small clarification, though very unlikely to be applicable in this case.
* Patent law -- where you really do have to work to avoid infringement! -- doesn't apply to photographs.
It does, when the patent is about technique of photography. Applying specific filters, lenses, postprocessing etc. It -might- apply to objects in the picture if they influence the photo as a whole, say, incandescent ultraviolet lamp outlining the subject with a weird halo, or a specific calibration panel which is later used to adjust the picture settings, but they must be an element of the technique of photography, not the subject of the photo. So, patent claims don't apply here.
The issue with the "New Zork Times" is that the "New York Times" certainly does sound similar, and the purpose of the "New Zork Times" was for something "related" to journalism...
OTOH, knowing some of ZORK, that would fall well within fair use for purpose of parody.
Of course others pick the solutions like momentum comparisons, directional gradients and so on. They are very nice mathematically and elegant solutions, but... DAMNED UNRELIABLE. They work very well in theory. In practice, you spend 90% time fighting white noise, 9% replacing computationally intensive algorithms with predefined results, and 1% by doing solid (but rather simple) maths to get the final result.
Oh, and second that much to get image from the camera into a format where you can read or set value of a single pixel in the image, but that's up to you.
First, mount the camera in a consistent way and give it consistent light so that the image doesn't change. Will save a LOT of work with aligning the picture you take and finding the arrows.
You work on b&w. If it's RGB, just average (r+g+b)/3.
- Take a few pics of the meter, combine them removing the arrows from the shots (using shop). That is your "neutral" picture. You keep one, forever.
- Take "current" picture. The one to be read.
- Run both through median (replace pixel value at (x,y) with the middle out of sorted pixel values from square (x-1,y-1):(x+1,y+1) - removing extreme noise pixels.
- Run both through gaussian blur (average value over square square (x-1,y-1):(x+1,y+1), softens edges getting rid of off-by-one errors on various edge areas.
- extract the arrows by substracting one from the other: dif(x,y)=abs(org(x,y)-cur(x,y)).
- binarize: change grayscale to 1-bit palette (p(x,y)=(p(x,y)thr)?0:1) pick threshold that gives clearest images of the arrows.
- median again to clean up the edges.
- denote detection zones - count each arrow as a separate image.
Now you have a set of images ready for proper recognition. You might calculate center of mass if you wish, by averaging the position of all the set pixels, or just preset the center in the axis.
Calculate distance from center to edge (nearest transition from 1 to 0) for all angles (transform radial-euclidean where applicable). The angle with maximum distance is the direction of the arrow. Alternatively you may examine a circle at fixed distance from center, detecting pixels set on the circumference.
Transform the result (in radians) to decimal. Round down (preferably basing on result from lower value). Add up results from the wheels.
I can perfectly well imagine someone purposely piping all the user input to root shell for easy debug and development, then forgetting to disable it in the release version.
Since NASA seems to be stuck in the tar pit of safety, security and budget cuts, it's highly unlikely to see any of 'minor but constant' progress from them - they can only afford a few highly outstanding projects that must be polished till they shine, because any failure is unacceptable, and which are scheduled for dates like 2015, 2030 or so. They can't afford what was a standard 'in the early days', 50 failed tests in a row, a lot of improvisation and fixing problems as they appear. Back then, when a $1mln piece of equipment got destroyed, you built another and slapped an additional $500 subsystem on top of it. Currently you build a $1mln piece of equipment with a $20mln fault-prevention subsystem and it will not fail, at least in theory. Which takes maybe half the money but 10 times as much time than 40 iterations of the $1mln 'retry' method.
Russia is stuck with commercial. They do a lot of it and are great at it, cheap, fast, simple, tested thousands of time in practice, with small iterative improvements but without any huge breakthroughs, not much science is being done.
It's China and India that push for scientific advances, big and fast. They took a sprint in the race to catch up, and they are really the motor of the progress, budget is subject for negotiation, deadlines are not, if it fails, that's okay, we just try again, prevent 90% of expected accidents and hope for the best about the remaining 10%, make prayers and sacrifices to Murphy and prefer to have a half-working solution in a month than a fully-working one in five years.
Some astronauts will lose lives.
Billions of dollars worth of equipment will become junk.
But the science will be getting done, and on good schedule. (for the people who are still alive)
Blah.
$cd somefolder
only junk
$rm -Rf *
somejunkfile: permission denied.
$su -
Password:
#rm -Rf *
It was Solaris, ~root was /
So many replies and I still don't see the No. People who run as root all the time are either n00bs or morons. contradicted.
Actually, a piece of software optimized for a very specific, limited platform like Amiga 500, running faster than software written for a very general and not very well defined platform like >2GHZ x86, well, that's way too common.
Sometimes it's better to apologize than ask permission.
My bet is that if Google nicely asked the authors guild for permission for just what the settlement resulted in, before taking any steps, they would be outright denied. Only by first -doing- and only then settling the permission matters, not only they got the desired result, they got it months ahead of time.
the wheels are travelling on the ground at mach 1.4, if they were uncovered the top of the wheel would be travelling at mach 2.8 with regards to the local airflow. ...and the surface of the wheel accelerates from zero to mach 2.8 on distance of diameter of half the circumference of the wheel.
Say, the wheel is 1m diameter. The circumference is pi meters. 2.8 mach is 953m/s. That's 0.00164s to travel half the circumference (distance of half of turn of the wheel). 2.8m/s / 0.00164s. 1698m/s^2, that's 173 g.
And that's the bottom cap on the actual value, because it's not linear and doesn't take the upward motion into account.
In other words, the fact the wheels aren't ripped apart by centrifugal/centripetal force.
The main stated reason of introducing RFID passports in GB was to facilitate entry of GB citizens into US.
So, bullshit.
8. Shut up. This is to stop the terrorists. And you don't want to support terrorism, do you?
9. Shut up. This is to protect the children. And you don't want to support pedophilia, do you?
10. This is a classified information you were not authorised to obtain. Please lay on the ground face down and place your hands on your head.
OTOH obviously in the world of recession people will surely abandon all the free applications and switch to expensive commercial closed-source software.
When money's tight, nobody's gonna use what is free when you can have an expensive alternative, and everyone will pay big $$$ for upgrades instead of seeking a way to improve the source code themselves.
Not over weekend. The shops with supplies are closed. Over monday and tuesday, yes. And with some spare $2000 to get it running.
I'd have to get my compressor running in reverse. Get a tank that is big enough and openable to put stuff in it. It should generate enough vacuum. Modify an old 8-track tape recorder to accept adhesive tape. Grab x-ray chemistry set and some blanks, from medical supply shop.
Of course this first version would require the x-rayed item to withstand vacuum but it's enough for starters. With some technology and money, fitting the xray emitter in a device the size of a cigarette box would be rather easy. It's a walkman minus the electronics and "eject" but plus airtight case (with mechanics encased inside to avoid problems with pressurised joints).
That's cause he got it on xrays, which is obviously before xmas.
Only in 'Nam it was found black meat is an excellent cannon fodder.
Q: What is the difference between an orange?
A: A banana.
Confusing 'users' with 'customers'.
It's like you sell elk urine as a perfume, and claim 99% of perfume users love the elk urine smell.
Nope.
99% of perfume users hate elk urine smell and don't buy it.
The 0.99% who buy it and love it are weird perverts who feel turned on by the smell.
The remaining 0.01% are clueless morons who didn't know what they are buying.
Yep, from people who -bought- the game, possibly well over 90% don't know and don't care. OTOH the rampaging piracy is in a major part influenced by DRM. If they surveyed -users- and not just -customers- they might come up with a totally different number.
There are trojans in the wild, that hijack the HTML renderer component. The certificate matches, the secure connection matches, the OTP code matches, it's just the amount entered and the target account number that differs between what is displayed on the confirmation screen and what is being sent over the net. You think you're signing a $10 ebay transaction, while what you just signed is $10k for an account in Philippines.
In other words: computer display and keyboard are not trusted devices anymore. You type one thing, see the same thing appear, but a different thing is being sent.
The solution is one-time confirmation code sent as SMS, including some signed transaction details (amount and some digits from the target account number). It's about impossible to hijack both the computer and the GSM transmission.
Heh.
I was in the voting commission once.
A guy took a ballot at one location, but didn't put it in the urn.
He handed it to a friend, who unnoticed, placed two ballots (his one, and that other one) in our urn. As result, we had one more ballot than we should have.
We have recounted the ballots and signatures three times. We checked stamps on the ballots (all are stamped with the mumber of the commission). The stamps weren't clear on all the ballots, meaning we couldn't decipher if they all are ours.
By a common consensus (of people from 7 or so political parties) we destroyed one random invalid vote ballot and kept the case secret. We didn't want to imagine the bureaucratic hell we'd have to go through to solve this one by legal means.