I don't think the Linden Lab PR success is all that strange. Second Life is an inherently more interesting concept that something like WOW. When writing about WOW you can sum it up in sentence: "Kill monsters online with your friends and do the same thing next year." That doesn't quite cover it... but it covers 90% of what WOW is all about.
Try summing up Second Life in one sentence while simultaneously covering 90% of the truth -- you'll fail. There have been some terse summaries above but they miss lots of interesting information that could pack a magazine article. This demonstrates why it is such a more interesting topic for journalists.
For a good instrumentation electronics lab you need: an oscilloscope, a spectrum analyzer, and a wave generator. Fortunately, these can be found for really cheap via www.govliquidation.com. You'll probably pay more for pickup and shipping than the equipment itself, unless you are close enough to pick them up yourself.
At my work we have four people who stand at their desks, and I've got three others queued up to have their desks lifted so they can try it too. Dunno if they feel more productive, but so far everyone who has tried it has stuck with it and have not asked to have their tables lowered. Two of the four who stand also sometimes sit on a stool.
I'm sure I know someone who is not using Firefox, but everyone I know well enough to know what they are using... uses Firefox. That's why I'm always suprised to find out the real numbers are as low as they are.
OTOH, I work in the tech industry in San Francisco so I'm probably in the middle of a very un-average sub-group of the population.
I spoke at length with an Expo rep at Linux World last year about the blackdog. This is what I remember....
No, it does not need to reboot the terminal. The gadget shows up as a USB drive. You then start up an app (or it is automatically started on connection if that is enabled on the Windows terminal) which runs a virtual server on the host terminal that acts like a virtual DHCP VPN X-server router box. The blackdog then uses the host's virtual router for all of its network traffic.
Since the host is now running an X-server, you can run all of your applications on the blackdog but have them rendered on the host screen. None of your document data ever lives on the host.
Ok, I'll admit that assertion was not provably correct.
You make a good point that screenshots are moving toward photorealism. To extend the idle debate (doesn't that describe the vast majority of/. comment threads?;-) the quality of prints from color/photo printers are fast becoming standard household items, so the market for selling real prints of our digital images will be a vanishing niche. I'm sure flickr has other ways to monetize their image storage system, I just don't know what they all are.
Flickr is hoping to use its 'online gallery of your pictures' to eventually leverage services like: "We'll send you real prints of your photos for real $". No one will ever use flickr's photo printing services to get real prints of screenshots.
That said, it may be that the screenshot galleries are drawing a lot of views. If flickr can generate revenue from pure traffic then they may want to support public browsing of screenshot images, otherwise someone else (snapzilla?) will be able to fill that niche and deflate some of the potential traffic of the flickr service.
(1) capacitive switches -- inexpensive, digital (on/off) This reverses the idea of protecting a high-impedance circuit from stray capacitance introduced by a limb or finger -- turn your accidental 'people detector' into just that:
(2) frustrated internal reflection -- not necessarily cheap (needs a camera), or easy (needs video analysis) but can handle multi-touch and large screens The idea is to shine light in from the side of a class or plastic screen, and have a camera look at the backscatter introduced by finger contact, which scatters the sidways light rather than allow it to reflect at the bounary. The camera turns the touch events into a video stream which is then analyzed to compute touch events.
(3) strain gages -- not necessarily cheap ($5 - $8 for each strain gage) but can provide a very sensitive analog signal with wide dynamic range. Put some strain gages on several centimeters of half-inch square steel tube and you can easily measure touch events, as well as strong pushes.
I do the following to help recover fromu RSI in my fingers (not wrists):
1) I use a FingerWorks TouchStream keyboard. Unfortunately, they don't make them anymore and they cost $600+ on eBay.
2) I run 'xwrits' in the background which reminds me to take a break. I also try to remember to take little short 10+ second breaks in between -- I drop my hands to my sides, relax, and take a few deep breaths.
3) I wear warm clothes (always long sleeves). Typing with cold fingers is teh suck.
4) I excercise my shoulders and arms when I take a break. I stretch them over my head. I stand up and swing them around in circles to help the blood flow. I also throw darts, do the dishes, or other short activities that are more active.
5) I take about 200 mg of Vitamin B-6 every day. Someone once told me this trick and I was desperate enough to try anything. It works for me, and I've been battling RSI for about two years now, so I've had my periods where I've forgotten to take the vitamins and have been able to correlate the ups and downs. If you try this out, for best results first overdose on the Vitamin B-6 (~ 600 mg daily -- 200 mg at each meal) for one week. Then drop down to 400 mg daily for another week, then 200 or 100 daily. Prolonged overdose of B-6 causes dry skin for me, but short stints help speed up the recovery phase.
6) Finally, I gave up caffine and soda because I noticed it made me less likely to take breaks. Instead, I drink lots of water so that I HAVE to take breaks. With more frequent breaks I found I would get less sleepy. If I do get drowsy I just take a break and and am awake when I get back. I'm talking SHORT breaks. Five or ten minutes of walking around is not enough knock me too far from concentration on what I was just working on.
Ligaments don't get a lot of direct blood flow, so they take longer to heal than skin and muscle. The short breaks throughout the day help the blood flow and can repair and prevent RSI. That's my theory anyway.
If you believe in the _ideals_ of Free Software then you should release your code under the GNU licence without breaking the law.
If you just want to give back to the community with little obligation on your own part then release it anonymously and let someone else run with it.
If you're looking for work then by all means contact the company, show them what you did and explain to them why they should pay you to maintain their linux drivers -- if they're smart they'll recognized a great opportunity to expand into a market that they didn't otherwise have time or resources to pursue. If that fails then figure out what you really want to do, write your resume, and apply to a company that is actually doing something cool and can recognize real talent, like Google or Linden Lab.
As I recall, PCB could try to autoroute, but it never worked well for me.
The poster's requirements suggest that he/she should just shell out the $400 for a real Eagle license.
An alternative would be to get the PCP source code and start adding the needed functionality. That effort would reveal Eagle' price to be a real bargain.
The MMO genre has a lot of potential when it comes to entertainment. As it gets easier to roll out MMO's (there are lots of up and coming third-party tools for creating MMO worlds and content) you'll see many new niche worlds. A dedicated handful of designers will be able to roll out an interesting virtual space for some niche market you've never heard of (like Alien Abduction Roleplayers or something) that has 100k customers world wide. Also, the worlds will become more free-form (like Eve Online) to allow the players themselves to provide a great deal of the content themselves.
While EA and Sony go after 'established' online genres (sports, killing orcs) you'll see plenty of smaller teams successfully building for everybody else.
I don't see consolidation in the next five years, rather expansion.
The multi-touch tablet is only a matter of time. Below is a link to a pdf on Cypress's capacitive switch array technology (think iPod wheel or other MP3 player sliders).
Here is a link to the technology used to detect the touches (I scarfed this link from a forum post on fingerfans.dreamhosters.com, thanks to eelfinnTy for posting it):
I think the touchscreen is backlit with a projector. The scattered light from the touches is probably infra-red and could be measured by an IR camera located back with the projector, which is how the device could be 'scalable to very large installations'.
Very cool, but the slimline version for a tablet PC is still a few years away.
You have my permission to say that *I* submitted the story instead of the 'problem user'. I will never contest a submission in my name. Feel free to use my link to point at whatever you want.
Definitely ask something. No questions from the candidate could indicate disinterest in the job.
Also, don't hesitate to ask the exact same question from different interviewers in the same interview series, especially questions about the corporate culture -- you may find you get different answers.
We buy hundreds of white 1U pizzaboxen from SiliconMechanics.com every month (not only are they white, but they are also blank -- we net boot debian GNU/linux onto them ourselves). SM has an excellent record for replacing broken parts, although we're never in an emergency when something breaks since we deploy backup hardware for everything. If something breaks we can switch to the current backup, start converting a spare machine to be the new backup, and then take our time getting the broken hardware fixed, its all under warranty.
All of our vanilla services: mail, web, and even database are on white boxen from SM. We have some black box stuff for heavy mass storage.
I just bought today some USB cables to splice the home and car chargers to have a female USB plug on the end, which will accept the male USB -> tiny DC plug adapter on the other end. This will allow me to carry a very small USB-->DC adapter with me and charge the phone wherever I can find a USB port (home, work, and travelling laptop, basically).
Just about anything that is low-power and needs 5V or less* could be plugged into a USB port.
* For less than 5V a diode could be used to drop the voltage.
_Treason_ is my first choice when recommending scifi to somone who hasn't yet explored the medium. It would be a good book for teenage girls. Unfortunately it is out of print and is difficult to find in used bookstores.
I would agree with this. If you haven't been able to learn programming over the years of messing with computers you will need some impetus in the form of a homework assignment.
Also, you should take a class in using the CLI if you haven't already picked up much proficiency yet. Using the CLI on *NIX as a serious tool will provide more opportunities to learn programming. I just recently decided to learn a little BASH programming to manage all of the CLI aliases I was putting into my ~/.aliases file -- so I relearned how to write functions in BASH -- it was a fun little sidetrack from my normal day.
Slashdot Mirror
Perverts.
That only took one word.
See? With that enlightened response you just achieved about 10% accuracy. Fail.
I don't think the Linden Lab PR success is all that strange. Second Life is an inherently more interesting concept that something like WOW. When writing about WOW you can sum it up in sentence: "Kill monsters online with your friends and do the same thing next year." That doesn't quite cover it... but it covers 90% of what WOW is all about.
Try summing up Second Life in one sentence while simultaneously covering 90% of the truth -- you'll fail. There have been some terse summaries above but they miss lots of interesting information that could pack a magazine article. This demonstrates why it is such a more interesting topic for journalists.
They must have read this webpage:
http://doesrailsscale.com/
For a good instrumentation electronics lab you need: an oscilloscope, a spectrum analyzer, and a wave generator. Fortunately, these can be found for really cheap via www.govliquidation.com. You'll probably pay more for pickup and shipping than the equipment itself, unless you are close enough to pick them up yourself.
Yeah, it does.
http://secondlife.com/community/linux-alpha.php
At my work we have four people who stand at their desks, and I've got three others queued up to have their desks lifted so they can try it too. Dunno if they feel more productive, but so far everyone who has tried it has stuck with it and have not asked to have their tables lowered. Two of the four who stand also sometimes sit on a stool.
I'm sure I know someone who is not using Firefox, but everyone I know well enough to know what they are using... uses Firefox. That's why I'm always suprised to find out the real numbers are as low as they are.
OTOH, I work in the tech industry in San Francisco so I'm probably in the middle of a very un-average sub-group of the population.
I spoke at length with an Expo rep at Linux World last year about the blackdog. This is what I remember....
No, it does not need to reboot the terminal. The gadget shows up as a USB drive. You then start up an app (or it is automatically started on connection if that is enabled on the Windows terminal) which runs a virtual server on the host terminal that acts like a virtual DHCP VPN X-server router box. The blackdog then uses the host's virtual router for all of its network traffic.
Since the host is now running an X-server, you can run all of your applications on the blackdog but have them rendered on the host screen. None of your document data ever lives on the host.
http://www.projectblackdog.com/
Carry it with you wherever you go.
Plug it in via USB.
Athenticate using your fingerprint.
Use it on the most comprimised public terminal.
I've never used one.
Ok, I'll admit that assertion was not provably correct.
/. comment threads? ;-) the quality of prints from color/photo printers are fast becoming standard household items, so the market for selling real prints of our digital images will be a vanishing niche. I'm sure flickr has other ways to monetize their image storage system, I just don't know what they all are.
You make a good point that screenshots are moving toward photorealism. To extend the idle debate (doesn't that describe the vast majority of
Flickr is hoping to use its 'online gallery of your pictures' to eventually leverage services like: "We'll send you real prints of your photos for real $". No one will ever use flickr's photo printing services to get real prints of screenshots.
That said, it may be that the screenshot galleries are drawing a lot of views. If flickr can generate revenue from pure traffic then they may want to support public browsing of screenshot images, otherwise someone else (snapzilla?) will be able to fill that niche and deflate some of the potential traffic of the flickr service.
(1) capacitive switches -- inexpensive, digital (on/off)
h tm
m e3/strain.html
This reverses the idea of protecting a high-impedance circuit from stray capacitance introduced by a limb or finger -- turn your accidental 'people detector' into just that:
http://www.discovercircuits.com/C/capacitance-sw.
(2) frustrated internal reflection -- not necessarily cheap (needs a camera), or easy (needs video analysis) but can handle multi-touch and large screens
The idea is to shine light in from the side of a class or plastic screen, and have a camera look at the backscatter introduced by finger contact, which scatters the sidways light rather than allow it to reflect at the bounary. The camera turns the touch events into a video stream which is then analyzed to compute touch events.
http://mrl.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirsense/index.html
(3) strain gages -- not necessarily cheap ($5 - $8 for each strain gage) but can provide a very sensitive analog signal with wide dynamic range.
Put some strain gages on several centimeters of half-inch square steel tube and you can easily measure touch events, as well as strong pushes.
http://www.omega.com/literature/transactions/volu
Here is a simple, inexpensive (if you make it yourself) amplifier for strain gages that I've tried, and can vouch that it works well:
http://www.staramp.com/
I do the following to help recover fromu RSI in my fingers (not wrists):
1) I use a FingerWorks TouchStream keyboard. Unfortunately, they don't make them anymore and they cost $600+ on eBay.
2) I run 'xwrits' in the background which reminds me to take a break. I also try to remember to take little short 10+ second breaks in between -- I drop my hands to my sides, relax, and take a few deep breaths.
3) I wear warm clothes (always long sleeves). Typing with cold fingers is teh suck.
4) I excercise my shoulders and arms when I take a break. I stretch them over my head. I stand up and swing them around in circles to help the blood flow. I also throw darts, do the dishes, or other short activities that are more active.
5) I take about 200 mg of Vitamin B-6 every day. Someone once told me this trick and I was desperate enough to try anything. It works for me, and I've been battling RSI for about two years now, so I've had my periods where I've forgotten to take the vitamins and have been able to correlate the ups and downs. If you try this out, for best results first overdose on the Vitamin B-6 (~ 600 mg daily -- 200 mg at each meal) for one week. Then drop down to 400 mg daily for another week, then 200 or 100 daily. Prolonged overdose of B-6 causes dry skin for me, but short stints help speed up the recovery phase.
6) Finally, I gave up caffine and soda because I noticed it made me less likely to take breaks. Instead, I drink lots of water so that I HAVE to take breaks. With more frequent breaks I found I would get less sleepy. If I do get drowsy I just take a break and and am awake when I get back. I'm talking SHORT breaks. Five or ten minutes of walking around is not enough knock me too far from concentration on what I was just working on.
Ligaments don't get a lot of direct blood flow, so they take longer to heal than skin and muscle. The short breaks throughout the day help the blood flow and can repair and prevent RSI. That's my theory anyway.
Good luck.
If you believe in the _ideals_ of Free Software then you should release your code under the GNU licence without breaking the law.
If you just want to give back to the community with little obligation on your own part then release it anonymously and let someone else run with it.
If you're looking for work then by all means contact the company, show them what you did and explain to them why they should pay you to maintain their linux drivers -- if they're smart they'll recognized a great opportunity to expand into a market that they didn't otherwise have time or resources to pursue. If that fails then figure out what you really want to do, write your resume, and apply to a company that is actually doing something cool and can recognize real talent, like Google or Linden Lab.
As I recall, PCB could try to autoroute, but it never worked well for me.
The poster's requirements suggest that he/she should just shell out the $400 for a real Eagle license.
An alternative would be to get the PCP source code and start adding the needed functionality. That effort would reveal Eagle' price to be a real bargain.
The MMO genre has a lot of potential when it comes to entertainment. As it gets easier to roll out MMO's (there are lots of up and coming third-party tools for creating MMO worlds and content) you'll see many new niche worlds. A dedicated handful of designers will be able to roll out an interesting virtual space for some niche market you've never heard of (like Alien Abduction Roleplayers or something) that has 100k customers world wide. Also, the worlds will become more free-form (like Eve Online) to allow the players themselves to provide a great deal of the content themselves.
While EA and Sony go after 'established' online genres (sports, killing orcs) you'll see plenty of smaller teams successfully building for everybody else.
I don't see consolidation in the next five years, rather expansion.
The multi-touch tablet is only a matter of time. Below is a link to a pdf on Cypress's capacitive switch array technology (think iPod wheel or other MP3 player sliders).
Capacitive Key Scan
All they need to do is make such array's transparent and they can turn a touchscreen into a keyboard or other interactive device.
Here is a link to the technology used to detect the touches (I scarfed this link from a forum post on fingerfans.dreamhosters.com, thanks to eelfinnTy for posting it):
http://mrl.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirsense/index.html
I think the touchscreen is backlit with a projector. The scattered light from the touches is probably infra-red and could be measured by an IR camera located back with the projector, which is how the device could be 'scalable to very large installations'.
Very cool, but the slimline version for a tablet PC is still a few years away.
You have my permission to say that *I* submitted the story instead of the 'problem user'. I will never contest a submission in my name. Feel free to use my link to point at whatever you want.
Definitely ask something. No questions from the candidate could indicate disinterest in the job.
Also, don't hesitate to ask the exact same question from different interviewers in the same interview series, especially questions about the corporate culture -- you may find you get different answers.
We buy hundreds of white 1U pizzaboxen from SiliconMechanics.com every month (not only are they white, but they are also blank -- we net boot debian GNU/linux onto them ourselves). SM has an excellent record for replacing broken parts, although we're never in an emergency when something breaks since we deploy backup hardware for everything. If something breaks we can switch to the current backup, start converting a spare machine to be the new backup, and then take our time getting the broken hardware fixed, its all under warranty.
All of our vanilla services: mail, web, and even database are on white boxen from SM. We have some black box stuff for heavy mass storage.
My new phone uses a 5V @ 350 mA charger.
I just bought today some USB cables to splice the home and car chargers to have a female USB plug on the end, which will accept the male USB -> tiny DC plug adapter on the other end. This will allow me to carry a very small USB-->DC adapter with me and charge the phone wherever I can find a USB port (home, work, and travelling laptop, basically).
Just about anything that is low-power and needs 5V or less* could be plugged into a USB port.
* For less than 5V a diode could be used to drop the voltage.
I meant the rewritten version which was just called _Treason_.
_Treason_ is my first choice when recommending scifi to somone who hasn't yet explored the medium. It would be a good book for teenage girls. Unfortunately it is out of print and is difficult to find in used bookstores.
I would agree with this. If you haven't been able to learn programming over the years of messing with computers you will need some impetus in the form of a homework assignment.
Also, you should take a class in using the CLI if you haven't already picked up much proficiency yet. Using the CLI on *NIX as a serious tool will provide more opportunities to learn programming. I just recently decided to learn a little BASH programming to manage all of the CLI aliases I was putting into my ~/.aliases file -- so I relearned how to write functions in BASH -- it was a fun little sidetrack from my normal day.