The patent office needs to adopt a simple fact: doing something digitally that has been done physically before (like lending purchased objects just like a used book and music store, or having a digital "shopping cart" like, you know, a shopping cart) is "obvious". Someone will eventually get around to implementing it, so it is not novel and should not be patentable. At best maybe the site should get design patent coverage, or some very specific encryption algorithms should be protected in some way if in fact they are proprietary, but the idea of patenting an entire store concept should be ridiculous.
It's been a long time since I've read Kuhn (it was required in college along with a counter position by someone whose name escapes me), and I remember not fully agreeing with every nuance that he wrote. But I completely agree with parent that Biology has gone through paradigm shifts, and I'd say it's clear that other things have as well. We live in a world where cloning is a reality -- this is a paradigm shift from when it was science fiction. Microbiology changed the way everyone interacts with the world right down to the soap we buy.
Obviously economists are having some identity crises lately that I suspect will be looked back upon as somewhat of a paradigm shift. Chemistry has moved quite far from alchemy and nuclear chemistry was unthinkable or understandable not long ago. Manufacturing went from fully manual through the assembly line and is now in a phase of robotics and desktop printing. Spectrum disorders are fairly recent diagnoses (as a specific category at least), in the psychological sciences. Triceratops were recently reshuffled and we're far more likely to imagine dinosaurs with feathers now than when I was a kid. Don't get me started on the Brontosaurus. Warfare is changing; it's barely important to have a person with a weapon see someone opposing them directly in some cases. The concept of water on other planets is far more accepted and direct evidence is changing common thinking on the topic. We have a near-permanent presence in space. Gender views are changing... gay-rights are probably at a social tipping point, at least in some places, and any social-science is strongly affected.
All of these things are dramatic changes. Are they paradigm shifts? Some of them... one of the problems with paradigm shifts is that they're nearly impossible to see from the inside. And yes, they may appear more subtle than "the earth is round - no it's not" debates, but remember that those took quite a long time for large populations to accept themselves. It's difficult to predict how any new way of looking at something will affect the future, but some of these changes will eventually be looked back upon as paradigm shifts.
Ah, good, I'm glad someone already mentioned this. Big did not deserve to be italicized there not only because 260 million minutes of video isn't "that much" (!) in terms of internet streaming viewers, but the statistics aren't really based on number of minutes of video analyzed... the main statistics are more about viewership and certain events (video startup, video freezing), which could be surrounded by hours of uninteresting video time that didn't really contribute to some of the metrics.
Netflix has, what, 20+ million individual viewers per month? 10 hours a piece isn't hard to imagine. As the parent pointed out youtube is much larger than that.
It's still very interesting analytics. it's not always the size that matters with "big" data. But let's not get carried away with the italics now people... this way madness lies.
To my dismay, I worked on this project. The project started with controversy -- the Oracle bid that beat out SAP like seven years ago was surrounded by complaints. The article skips some details. CSC (Computer Sciences Corp, who is quoted) was the main driver of about $800-million of that spending. It is accurate to say that this change didn't affect them, but that's because hundreds of people had already been laid off or moved of the project between last September and last March.
There's enough blame to go all over the place. Years spent in requirements that weren't turned into code; time spent passing blame back and forth across development teams who were so large and segregated that they rarely communicated properly, both within the Air Force and within CSC and between the other teams. At it's peak I believe the project had roughly 800 people on it. I don't know what the maximum size a development project should have, but it's got to be smaller than that. That number includes everyone, trainers, managers, and some key initial users and testers, but still it's a very high number.
The Air Force tried several times to realign the project, but there were contractual disputes or, once that was over, difficulty deciding what to keep and what to scrap, which lead to a death spiral where everything went back on the drawing board and I think ultimately leadership just lost hope.
It wasn't a complete loss, though. A few small teams, including the one I was previously on, have survived. We built a robust data quality system and are working on some enterprise data dictionary and master data tools, which will help the systems that are left behind. With hundreds of systems supporting a half million users, $1billion probably isn't off the chart -- at least not had this been a successful project, but the worst part is that there's still much work that needs to be done, and now someone will have to start over... again.
I was a fan of the InfoMagic packages, which IIRC included Slackware's entire distro and a huge number of other files. Does anyone else remember Elfos fondly? I have a picture of the CD around here somewhere... I even had a T-shirt.
I was Slackware -> RedHat -> Ubuntu for my primary, but I tried CentOS, Fedora, and Knoppix in there for non-trivial amounts of time. Does Android count?;-)
Also, I played with FreeBSD but that doesn't count for multiple reasons.
I've been working on the Heritage Health Prize that Kaggle is running for over a year now. It's a fantastic way to learn data science and tackle real world problems with real data and a co-op-etitive spirit. The forums and winning solutions are great for learning the art, and if you've never used R, it's a great opportunity to learn it and talk to people that have a ton of experience in the area.
Someone with more recent experience should answer this since, as I said somewhere up above, I haven't used one of these in a while. That said, several of the USB Microscopes I've used work as fairly standards-compliant webcams, particularly (IIRC) with GSPCA and V4L support.
What you won't get on linux is support for computer controlled focus, enabling and disabling lights or any other features that the microscopes have, unless they have explicit linux tools bundled, which some may have, but I have not worked with any so I can't say specifically.
Hear hear. I had one of the old Intel QX microscopes and loved it. Any USB microscope will let a child see things on a nice big screen and many of them, like the QX3, are ruggedized for kids. It's pricey, though, compared to other desktop USB microscopes of which there are many, as other posters are mentioning (search Amazon), but the design should make it worthwhile. I haven't used the software in a while; it was a bit buggy last time I played with it, but hopefully it's improved.
If you really want eyepieces, there are some that do double duty -- Celestron makes entry-level microscopes that have replaceable eyepieces (so you can use it like a traditional microscope or mount a camera on it, but not both at the same time), or ones with LCD screens directly built in instead of traditional viewfinders.
As you near the $250 barrier you can get scopes that start to do double-duty, and your options increase. These are more lab-ready and may need more oversight for a 7-year-old, and frankly I find them harder to use for kids, but the ability to look through an eyepiece to set up and focus a shot and then discover the results on a computer make for good two-person work in parent-child fashion.
Out of points or I'd mod you up for mentioning Future Crew. I still have a 3.5" floating around with some great old demos from that era.
I'm not surprised anyone hasn't heard about the demoscene any more, but it's easy to figure describe: fit the most impressive graphics and sound you can on a very small memory footprint -- 64kb is the common limit now apparently, but I seem to recall some good "anything you can fit on a disk" rules and some impressive 4k demos.
Other than raw coolness, the point is to "do more with less" -- push creativity, efficiency, and algorithm design by artificially limiting resources. It's very impressive stuff, and having been out of touch for a long time, I'm AMAZED at the quality these vids are putting out. Has anyone been able to run the.exe's to verify? My rig keeps failing them -- I imagine it requires specific hardware and software versions.
"a projection from 1981 for rising temperatures [...] has been found to agree well with the observations since then, underestimating the observed trend by about 30%."
Most predictions that are off by 30% aren't really considered "remarkably accurate".
I'm uncertain about this one (i.e. I'm not trying to troll). It's nice that the prediction does seem to chart well, and since the weather can't be accurately predicted 7 days in advance, any climate model that outperforms naive ones over 30 years is an achievement. Still, the point of the (recent) author is clear -- they're trying to emphasize that a warming trend is occurring and that people predicted it 30 years ago using "science" that is still sound -- at least some discussion of why a 30% error rate is acceptable should take place.
Well, you certainly won't find a shortage of opinions on Slashdot.:-)
If you think the software is good enough, then a non-commercial version with limited registration information (e-mail, name), and some very privacy-thoughtful reporting (maybe to ensure that the registered serial numbers are only being used by one machine at a time), should only be a good thing. Getting your software into the hands of the people that might buy it will get them used to it, relying on it, and eventually make them customers. But (as others here have posted), don't abuse the "spying"... if you start to make money by pilfering the free registrations for ancillary information you're just going to annoy your users and they'll be more apt to pirate the software or use fake registration information. Giving them something in return, like forum access for very limited support, is helpful.
Other possible models include giving the software for free and asking payment for support -- nearly all profitable Open Source companies do this, and even if you leave the source closed the business model isn't terribly different. You could publish a "crippleware" version, which I find rather annoying, unless the limits are such that the home and non-commercial users needs are really satisfied, and the only people that need to pay $10k for the software are those to whom it's worth it. I give a nice shout out to Andrea Mosaic for doing this correctly (at a lower price point).
Lastly an option you may have missed may be to ignore it because it isn't a problem. A pirated version by a customer that wouldn't have paid anyway probably doesn't hurt you. A pirated version by a customer that would have paid may actually turn into a sale if they need assistance. When you upgrade, if the pirates liked it, they'll want the next version, so they may buy. It may be pirated by employees or students who years later may remember it and decide to buy it. You never can tell.
In those cases, you're getting your software out there and used; you could take an "all exposure is good exposure" attitude. The fact that you didn't list the name of your software in the original post here means that you may not think that way, or you may outright disagree.
Still, piracy is going to happen. At least you're asking the right questions. Don't let yourself get dragged into a fight with the anonymous masses on the internet, though -- you'll probably lose.
Robert Jordan's books redefined the level of crazy that I will accept from an author. They're fantastic writing, a wonderful, deep, involved storyline, but come ON, the length is way too self-indulgent and unnecessary. The story is nowhere near as complicated (or worthy) as, say, FOUR Lord of the Rings trilogies, but it's substantially longer. The sadness is that it is comparably well written -- length notwithstanding.
I'm currently using four of the books as monitor stands (I actually won't go so far as to use them as doorstops).
More importantly, though, this has changed the way I'll read connected books or watch TV shows. I fear the abandoned story line too much now, and I blame Robert Jordan. "Heroes", the TV show, was a similar letdown... I waited until "Lost" was finished, for fear of it falling into the same pit as "Heroes", and nearly did the same thing with "Battlestar Galactica".
Is there a name for this? Can we call it the "Robert Jordan" effect? -- the situation where you get too involved with an author or storyline and they just go on forever or (no disrespect) die?
And the expanding-storyline theme is amazing. Eight Harry Potter Movies? Really? Five Twilight movies? I love a good trilogy, and (other than the quality of the prequels) appreciate that the Star Wars trilogies are built so that you can watch the original without needing the rest to complete the story. Many authors have interwoven stories and worlds... How many books did Terry Pratchett write? Many of which made reference to one another, but at least they each had an individual story arc. The Ender's Game series is similar... Terry Brooks' series can be read in myriad configurations of trilogies and tetralogies.
ugh... the Jordan series is fantastic in many ways and I'm very glad to see it completed -- I hope the finale lives up to the series -- but please noone ever do this again, or at least give good warning so that we can avoid going down the path until it's complete.
I like the UI the way it has been. For one thing it works better with multiple monitors IMO -- I can pull my toolbars off of the main editing window and take up the full screen with the image unabated. Further, I like being able to move things wherever I want and still be able to see whatever I put behind it; the workspace can be spread out without all the grey area taken up by the useless space between MDI child windows and toolbars and such. I get that people like uniform UIs, but I never really understood why people hated the GIMP's so much except that it wasn't familiar.
Does anyone remember Fractal Painter's old UI? Noone liked that either. *sigh* Of course, I think they had things like icons which would slowly fade and disappear if you never used them... or was that some other piece of software? Brilliant idea in any case -- we should get the GIMP to do that.
Agreed. Training on new technology is both the employer and employee's responsibility, and neither is fulfilling their social contract if they don't keep up.
The last point, though, is way more important. Good developers are way more than just a coder that knows a particular technology or tool.
Paying a premium might make sense for someone that has experience with the new hotness, but only if the rest of their experience is commensurate. Knowing how to communicate well, cooperate on requirements, think efficiently, provide useful documentation, manage bugs, manage your time, maintain client relationships, and just work well as part of a team are all at least as important as any specific tool. A college grad may or may not have those skills, even good interviews can't tell you everything about how a new hire will interact with a team or a client. If you've got a developer you know and trust and that done good work for a long time then it's unlikely the new-hot-skill is worth a premium above years of experience. A new grad isn't likely to have any depth of experience, even in a new technology, so it seems like simple math to justify training up an existing skilled competent asset rather than spending a premium on an unknown quantity.
If we're comparing against a developer that hasn't kept up, and isn't doing those things well, then that's another story.
Still, each case is unique, and the ability to negotiate a salary is almost an unrelated skill to your actual competence as a developer.
I think giving multiple people root access is the opposite direction the original question intended. I think the idea is that you don't want ANY one person to have the ability to bring down, corrupt, or steal from a single system. Considering the recent madness around congressional data, passwords, credit card databases, and thousands of other examples this sort of security seems more and more reasonable.
I work on some unclassified Department of Defense machines, and even to get root access to those machines our admins have to get Top Secret clearances. Of course, this does nothing to ward off incompetence and is only useful for providing increased trust in your single point of failure, (but that trust is important). I assume you're looking for assurances beyond this sort of social-engineering aspect.
The two-key (nuclear) option mentioned is probably workable for a reasonably administered production system. There are several ways to implement a two-person system that could work.
First, routine tasks, or tasks which can be pre-planned (i.e. non-emergency situations) could be scripted on backup environments without the sensitivity or criticality of the production system. This should be standard practice anyway. Once a working tested script is prepared (and that can be a script in the programming sense a la.ksh/.perl or a script in the user-documentation meaning). The production system can require dual authentication for logon before the script could be executed. In a fully automated setting this is a completely technological solution (although I admit that I don't know of a working implementation that is publicly available), but even if there are some manual steps required, holding both key holders responsible and requiring at least over-the-shoulder confirmation is a useful policy.
For more complex tasks, such as recovering physically corrupted data, which really can't be simulated and scripted, dividing responsibilities and ensuring multiple people are in attendance at all times can significantly reduce risk exposure with minimal impact (it doubles your staffing requirement, but only for the hopefully brief periods when this is required). Again, this is not a technical solution, other than having lock boxes or rooms with multiple keys.
It's important to realize of course that you'd have to apply this solution not just to your sysadmin role, but to your physical infrastructure (no one person can access the power button, the fuse box, etc. by themselves), and to each application running on the system, at least for any role that has access to protected areas. This is nigh impossible in a usable system, so the problem gets pretty complicated, but if you really need the security then it may be worth the effort.
I picked up the Epson 2480 when it came out; kind of an earlier version of the 3590. It's fantastic for large volume home-quality photo archiving, but wasn't up to scale for "professional" scans; film, print, or otherwise. I don't know if the 3590 has improved much, but a few tidbits of advice:
I had a lot of photos of varying sizes; even slightly varying, as if from different photo labs, but the same "size". A stack needs to pretty much be exactly the same width or the feeder gets confused.
Keeping the stack in the feeder filled is important. It would be nice if they could increase the capacity, but generally I was feeding 20-30 photos every, well, 15-20 minutes, or longer on higher quality scans.
I improved the quality of scans much better by simply wiping off each print with a lint-free cloth before scanning than I did by changing any settings on the scanner. In fact, the default "Home" mode on Epson's software was very good. Other than removing dust, wiping the photos makes sure none of the photos are stuck together, which makes things go much more smoothly.
Really, tho, great products -- HP had come out with something similar a year or so before the 2480; I forget the product, but it had trouble with scratching the photos that scanned through it. Ouchie. The Epson didn't cause any such trouble.
I'm glad someone mentioned "Good Omens". For anyone who has heard of Neil Gaiman OR Terry Pratchett and hasn't read this book: you're really missing something. It happens that my favorite author for a while was Pratchett, and a good friend of mine was into Gaiman... we recommended the book to each other with serendipitous timing, and it's been a favorite ever since. Highly recommended.
"The 18 programmable "G Keys" allow you to execute macros
I can FINALLY throw away the gooey Gateway programmable keyboards I've kept for the last 12 years... hopefully. I don't know why hardware programmable keyboards ever went away. I'm hoping the programmable nature of this new keyboard doesn't require drivers, (causing Linux problems and whatnot) but I'm not terribly optimistic. Still, I'm hopeful... does anyone know for sure if the macro's are hardware or software based?
The problem is that most of the complaints the Slashdot (and similar) crowd have with patents fall into the "obvious" clause, rather than the "prior-art" clause. The sections you cite here don't appear (I did read them, btw) to deal with that aspect of patent review.
The PodBuddy example is a perfect one for obviousness. Lets grant (without being sure) that no MP3 player car charger/FM transmitter was produced prior to the patent request. That lack of prior art still doesn't mean the request was non-obvious.
Car chargers are the norm for every piece of portable electronic equipment around. If the patent had solely been an MP3 car charger, the claim would be clearly "obvious" (even though the patent may have been granted) to anyone in the electronics product design universe.
Similarly, FM radio transmitters have been typical options for portable audio equipment for ages. Some products (and I had a cheap version of something similar in the early 1990s), allow FM retransmission of ANY headphone compatible device. In fact, the patent referenced in the original story mentions this at one point:
"Stereo transmitters of such type are readily commercially available, and are of appropriate size for incorporation in the modular docking unit."
Is the combining of these two common ideas really patent-worthy? Especially when products such as this one have been around for cell phones since prior to the patent in question. The only difference is that now it's an MP3 player and then it was a cell phone? Shenanigans, I say! This is an obvious progression of technology.
Sure there are a myriad number of other bits in the patent, but all of them are uninteresting. An LED to show on/off status. Variable frequencies of retransmission. 6-foot range. etc. Even the cited patents seem like someone just searched for "mp3" and picked a few. There's a SCUBA audio patent that I can't see having any real relation to the patent in question.
I'm sure patent lawyers have to go through all sorts of nonsense to create and defend patents, and alternately, to try to have them invalidated. Even if the public has a means of having "Prior-Art" cases reexamined (as you pointed out), it's clearly not sufficient. There needs to be a much clearer idea of how "obvious" an invention has to be to pass muster. If a large community of people believes that a patent was "obvious", there should be an easy method of reexamination on those merits as well.
They did... Gizmodo recently carried this blurb about it. Mind you, it's MORE expensive than the Das Keyboard with a somewhat different aesthetic in mind.
The only reason I single out the MUVO TX, tho, is that it is a high-speed USB 2.0 Flash Drive, with almost exactly the same form factor as the models you did review. I know it's hard to draw the line on these reviews; I don't envy you the task, but I doubt there are many multi-function devices that are USB 2.0 and keychain-sized (yet!).
Anyone tried the MUVO TX from Creative? It's a USB 2.0 drive of the same type, but it has built in MP3 and voice recording and a cool AAA Battery carrying case for like $40 more than some of othe models Ars reviewed.
I have NOT tried it, by the way; just seen the marketing, but I'm thinking of buying one... I'd rather have something that is more than just an elaborate drive, and the MUVOs seem to fit the bill.
I was distressed that Ars ignored it in their review, but perhaps they didn't want to have to consider the extra functionality in their comparison?
Okay, now this is the first thread that's made me feel old, and I STARTED college just last decade. C'mon, let me get out of my twenties before you act like my education was dead and now you're revitalizing it.
To wit: based on a new concept - teaching computer science through assembly language [...] This is why the old-timers are often viewed as 'wizards': they had to know assembly language programming.
I object to the use of "old-timers", first and foremost, and I secondly object to the thought that your book is a "new concept".
Assembler may not have been the first thing I learned in my undergraduate CS curriculum, but it was darn near the first thing.
All that said, understanding Assembler is a huge asset to learning general Computer Science. If you want to know how any other language works, you need a grounding in Assembler concepts. Still, this is nothing revolutionary, and CowboyNeal should be flogged for posting such a story without at least a review from someone other than the author.
Exactly because it isn't a big deal, and in fact it seems to be the best way to do it -- but without the computer. [...] Throw out the computers and punch card machines, spend more on voter education, and go back to a technology that works better, faster, and for less -- paper and pencil.
Curiously, I disagree a bit with this. I think computer interfaces could really make the election process better. Some voting ballots are very difficult to decipher or to use properly, as the hanging chad conundrum revealed in Florida. Number two pencils confuse people too for some reason, whether it be filling in dots or arrows or whatever. You also have problems of putting too much information on a limited amount of paper which tends to make the ballot intimidating.
Computers, I suspsect, could make this much easier to understand for people. Some people are intimidated by computers to be sure, but I think that would be more than compensated for by a good user experience. I haven't seen an electronic voting machine, but I'd LOVE a screen that popped up "ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO VOTE FOR AL GORE?" with a big green YES plunger (real, not on screen) and a big red NO plunger people could smack.
I just want it to be auditable; I agree that making the paper vs. the computer the secondary system is semantic in some ways, I don't mind the mentality that the computer is the primary record as long as there IS a secondary one.
Slashdot Mirror
The patent office needs to adopt a simple fact: doing something digitally that has been done physically before (like lending purchased objects just like a used book and music store, or having a digital "shopping cart" like, you know, a shopping cart) is "obvious". Someone will eventually get around to implementing it, so it is not novel and should not be patentable. At best maybe the site should get design patent coverage, or some very specific encryption algorithms should be protected in some way if in fact they are proprietary, but the idea of patenting an entire store concept should be ridiculous.
It's been a long time since I've read Kuhn (it was required in college along with a counter position by someone whose name escapes me), and I remember not fully agreeing with every nuance that he wrote. But I completely agree with parent that Biology has gone through paradigm shifts, and I'd say it's clear that other things have as well. We live in a world where cloning is a reality -- this is a paradigm shift from when it was science fiction. Microbiology changed the way everyone interacts with the world right down to the soap we buy.
Obviously economists are having some identity crises lately that I suspect will be looked back upon as somewhat of a paradigm shift. Chemistry has moved quite far from alchemy and nuclear chemistry was unthinkable or understandable not long ago. Manufacturing went from fully manual through the assembly line and is now in a phase of robotics and desktop printing. Spectrum disorders are fairly recent diagnoses (as a specific category at least), in the psychological sciences. Triceratops were recently reshuffled and we're far more likely to imagine dinosaurs with feathers now than when I was a kid. Don't get me started on the Brontosaurus. Warfare is changing; it's barely important to have a person with a weapon see someone opposing them directly in some cases. The concept of water on other planets is far more accepted and direct evidence is changing common thinking on the topic. We have a near-permanent presence in space. Gender views are changing... gay-rights are probably at a social tipping point, at least in some places, and any social-science is strongly affected.
All of these things are dramatic changes. Are they paradigm shifts? Some of them... one of the problems with paradigm shifts is that they're nearly impossible to see from the inside. And yes, they may appear more subtle than "the earth is round - no it's not" debates, but remember that those took quite a long time for large populations to accept themselves. It's difficult to predict how any new way of looking at something will affect the future, but some of these changes will eventually be looked back upon as paradigm shifts.
Ah, good, I'm glad someone already mentioned this. Big did not deserve to be italicized there not only because 260 million minutes of video isn't "that much" (!) in terms of internet streaming viewers, but the statistics aren't really based on number of minutes of video analyzed... the main statistics are more about viewership and certain events (video startup, video freezing), which could be surrounded by hours of uninteresting video time that didn't really contribute to some of the metrics.
Netflix has, what, 20+ million individual viewers per month? 10 hours a piece isn't hard to imagine. As the parent pointed out youtube is much larger than that.
It's still very interesting analytics. it's not always the size that matters with "big" data. But let's not get carried away with the italics now people... this way madness lies.
To my dismay, I worked on this project. The project started with controversy -- the Oracle bid that beat out SAP like seven years ago was surrounded by complaints. The article skips some details. CSC (Computer Sciences Corp, who is quoted) was the main driver of about $800-million of that spending. It is accurate to say that this change didn't affect them, but that's because hundreds of people had already been laid off or moved of the project between last September and last March.
There's enough blame to go all over the place. Years spent in requirements that weren't turned into code; time spent passing blame back and forth across development teams who were so large and segregated that they rarely communicated properly, both within the Air Force and within CSC and between the other teams. At it's peak I believe the project had roughly 800 people on it. I don't know what the maximum size a development project should have, but it's got to be smaller than that. That number includes everyone, trainers, managers, and some key initial users and testers, but still it's a very high number.
The Air Force tried several times to realign the project, but there were contractual disputes or, once that was over, difficulty deciding what to keep and what to scrap, which lead to a death spiral where everything went back on the drawing board and I think ultimately leadership just lost hope.
It wasn't a complete loss, though. A few small teams, including the one I was previously on, have survived. We built a robust data quality system and are working on some enterprise data dictionary and master data tools, which will help the systems that are left behind. With hundreds of systems supporting a half million users, $1billion probably isn't off the chart -- at least not had this been a successful project, but the worst part is that there's still much work that needs to be done, and now someone will have to start over... again.
I was a fan of the InfoMagic packages, which IIRC included Slackware's entire distro and a huge number of other files. Does anyone else remember Elfos fondly? I have a picture of the CD around here somewhere... I even had a T-shirt.
I was Slackware -> RedHat -> Ubuntu for my primary, but I tried CentOS, Fedora, and Knoppix in there for non-trivial amounts of time. Does Android count? ;-)
Also, I played with FreeBSD but that doesn't count for multiple reasons.
I've been working on the Heritage Health Prize that Kaggle is running for over a year now. It's a fantastic way to learn data science and tackle real world problems with real data and a co-op-etitive spirit. The forums and winning solutions are great for learning the art, and if you've never used R, it's a great opportunity to learn it and talk to people that have a ton of experience in the area.
Someone with more recent experience should answer this since, as I said somewhere up above, I haven't used one of these in a while. That said, several of the USB Microscopes I've used work as fairly standards-compliant webcams, particularly (IIRC) with GSPCA and V4L support.
What you won't get on linux is support for computer controlled focus, enabling and disabling lights or any other features that the microscopes have, unless they have explicit linux tools bundled, which some may have, but I have not worked with any so I can't say specifically.
Hear hear. I had one of the old Intel QX microscopes and loved it. Any USB microscope will let a child see things on a nice big screen and many of them, like the QX3, are ruggedized for kids. It's pricey, though, compared to other desktop USB microscopes of which there are many, as other posters are mentioning (search Amazon), but the design should make it worthwhile. I haven't used the software in a while; it was a bit buggy last time I played with it, but hopefully it's improved.
If you really want eyepieces, there are some that do double duty -- Celestron makes entry-level microscopes that have replaceable eyepieces (so you can use it like a traditional microscope or mount a camera on it, but not both at the same time), or ones with LCD screens directly built in instead of traditional viewfinders.
As you near the $250 barrier you can get scopes that start to do double-duty, and your options increase. These are more lab-ready and may need more oversight for a 7-year-old, and frankly I find them harder to use for kids, but the ability to look through an eyepiece to set up and focus a shot and then discover the results on a computer make for good two-person work in parent-child fashion.
Out of points or I'd mod you up for mentioning Future Crew. I still have a 3.5" floating around with some great old demos from that era.
I'm not surprised anyone hasn't heard about the demoscene any more, but it's easy to figure describe: fit the most impressive graphics and sound you can on a very small memory footprint -- 64kb is the common limit now apparently, but I seem to recall some good "anything you can fit on a disk" rules and some impressive 4k demos.
Other than raw coolness, the point is to "do more with less" -- push creativity, efficiency, and algorithm design by artificially limiting resources. It's very impressive stuff, and having been out of touch for a long time, I'm AMAZED at the quality these vids are putting out. Has anyone been able to run the .exe's to verify? My rig keeps failing them -- I imagine it requires specific hardware and software versions.
I love science. From the article:
Most predictions that are off by 30% aren't really considered "remarkably accurate".
I'm uncertain about this one (i.e. I'm not trying to troll). It's nice that the prediction does seem to chart well, and since the weather can't be accurately predicted 7 days in advance, any climate model that outperforms naive ones over 30 years is an achievement. Still, the point of the (recent) author is clear -- they're trying to emphasize that a warming trend is occurring and that people predicted it 30 years ago using "science" that is still sound -- at least some discussion of why a 30% error rate is acceptable should take place.
Well, you certainly won't find a shortage of opinions on Slashdot. :-)
If you think the software is good enough, then a non-commercial version with limited registration information (e-mail, name), and some very privacy-thoughtful reporting (maybe to ensure that the registered serial numbers are only being used by one machine at a time), should only be a good thing. Getting your software into the hands of the people that might buy it will get them used to it, relying on it, and eventually make them customers. But (as others here have posted), don't abuse the "spying"... if you start to make money by pilfering the free registrations for ancillary information you're just going to annoy your users and they'll be more apt to pirate the software or use fake registration information. Giving them something in return, like forum access for very limited support, is helpful.
Other possible models include giving the software for free and asking payment for support -- nearly all profitable Open Source companies do this, and even if you leave the source closed the business model isn't terribly different. You could publish a "crippleware" version, which I find rather annoying, unless the limits are such that the home and non-commercial users needs are really satisfied, and the only people that need to pay $10k for the software are those to whom it's worth it. I give a nice shout out to Andrea Mosaic for doing this correctly (at a lower price point).
Lastly an option you may have missed may be to ignore it because it isn't a problem. A pirated version by a customer that wouldn't have paid anyway probably doesn't hurt you. A pirated version by a customer that would have paid may actually turn into a sale if they need assistance. When you upgrade, if the pirates liked it, they'll want the next version, so they may buy. It may be pirated by employees or students who years later may remember it and decide to buy it. You never can tell.
In those cases, you're getting your software out there and used; you could take an "all exposure is good exposure" attitude. The fact that you didn't list the name of your software in the original post here means that you may not think that way, or you may outright disagree.
Still, piracy is going to happen. At least you're asking the right questions. Don't let yourself get dragged into a fight with the anonymous masses on the internet, though -- you'll probably lose.
Robert Jordan's books redefined the level of crazy that I will accept from an author. They're fantastic writing, a wonderful, deep, involved storyline, but come ON, the length is way too self-indulgent and unnecessary. The story is nowhere near as complicated (or worthy) as, say, FOUR Lord of the Rings trilogies, but it's substantially longer. The sadness is that it is comparably well written -- length notwithstanding.
I'm currently using four of the books as monitor stands (I actually won't go so far as to use them as doorstops).
More importantly, though, this has changed the way I'll read connected books or watch TV shows. I fear the abandoned story line too much now, and I blame Robert Jordan. "Heroes", the TV show, was a similar letdown... I waited until "Lost" was finished, for fear of it falling into the same pit as "Heroes", and nearly did the same thing with "Battlestar Galactica".
Is there a name for this? Can we call it the "Robert Jordan" effect? -- the situation where you get too involved with an author or storyline and they just go on forever or (no disrespect) die?
And the expanding-storyline theme is amazing. Eight Harry Potter Movies? Really? Five Twilight movies? I love a good trilogy, and (other than the quality of the prequels) appreciate that the Star Wars trilogies are built so that you can watch the original without needing the rest to complete the story. Many authors have interwoven stories and worlds... How many books did Terry Pratchett write? Many of which made reference to one another, but at least they each had an individual story arc. The Ender's Game series is similar... Terry Brooks' series can be read in myriad configurations of trilogies and tetralogies.
ugh... the Jordan series is fantastic in many ways and I'm very glad to see it completed -- I hope the finale lives up to the series -- but please noone ever do this again, or at least give good warning so that we can avoid going down the path until it's complete.
I like the UI the way it has been. For one thing it works better with multiple monitors IMO -- I can pull my toolbars off of the main editing window and take up the full screen with the image unabated. Further, I like being able to move things wherever I want and still be able to see whatever I put behind it; the workspace can be spread out without all the grey area taken up by the useless space between MDI child windows and toolbars and such. I get that people like uniform UIs, but I never really understood why people hated the GIMP's so much except that it wasn't familiar.
Does anyone remember Fractal Painter's old UI? Noone liked that either. *sigh* Of course, I think they had things like icons which would slowly fade and disappear if you never used them... or was that some other piece of software? Brilliant idea in any case -- we should get the GIMP to do that.
Agreed. Training on new technology is both the employer and employee's responsibility, and neither is fulfilling their social contract if they don't keep up.
The last point, though, is way more important. Good developers are way more than just a coder that knows a particular technology or tool.
Paying a premium might make sense for someone that has experience with the new hotness, but only if the rest of their experience is commensurate. Knowing how to communicate well, cooperate on requirements, think efficiently, provide useful documentation, manage bugs, manage your time, maintain client relationships, and just work well as part of a team are all at least as important as any specific tool. A college grad may or may not have those skills, even good interviews can't tell you everything about how a new hire will interact with a team or a client. If you've got a developer you know and trust and that done good work for a long time then it's unlikely the new-hot-skill is worth a premium above years of experience. A new grad isn't likely to have any depth of experience, even in a new technology, so it seems like simple math to justify training up an existing skilled competent asset rather than spending a premium on an unknown quantity.
If we're comparing against a developer that hasn't kept up, and isn't doing those things well, then that's another story.
Still, each case is unique, and the ability to negotiate a salary is almost an unrelated skill to your actual competence as a developer.
I think giving multiple people root access is the opposite direction the original question intended. I think the idea is that you don't want ANY one person to have the ability to bring down, corrupt, or steal from a single system. Considering the recent madness around congressional data, passwords, credit card databases, and thousands of other examples this sort of security seems more and more reasonable.
I work on some unclassified Department of Defense machines, and even to get root access to those machines our admins have to get Top Secret clearances. Of course, this does nothing to ward off incompetence and is only useful for providing increased trust in your single point of failure, (but that trust is important). I assume you're looking for assurances beyond this sort of social-engineering aspect.
The two-key (nuclear) option mentioned is probably workable for a reasonably administered production system. There are several ways to implement a two-person system that could work.
First, routine tasks, or tasks which can be pre-planned (i.e. non-emergency situations) could be scripted on backup environments without the sensitivity or criticality of the production system. This should be standard practice anyway. Once a working tested script is prepared (and that can be a script in the programming sense a la .ksh/.perl or a script in the user-documentation meaning). The production system can require dual authentication for logon before the script could be executed. In a fully automated setting this is a completely technological solution (although I admit that I don't know of a working implementation that is publicly available), but even if there are some manual steps required, holding both key holders responsible and requiring at least over-the-shoulder confirmation is a useful policy.
For more complex tasks, such as recovering physically corrupted data, which really can't be simulated and scripted, dividing responsibilities and ensuring multiple people are in attendance at all times can significantly reduce risk exposure with minimal impact (it doubles your staffing requirement, but only for the hopefully brief periods when this is required). Again, this is not a technical solution, other than having lock boxes or rooms with multiple keys.
It's important to realize of course that you'd have to apply this solution not just to your sysadmin role, but to your physical infrastructure (no one person can access the power button, the fuse box, etc. by themselves), and to each application running on the system, at least for any role that has access to protected areas. This is nigh impossible in a usable system, so the problem gets pretty complicated, but if you really need the security then it may be worth the effort.
Really, tho, great products -- HP had come out with something similar a year or so before the 2480; I forget the product, but it had trouble with scratching the photos that scanned through it. Ouchie. The Epson didn't cause any such trouble.
Enjoy the scanning!
I'm glad someone mentioned "Good Omens". For anyone who has heard of Neil Gaiman OR Terry Pratchett and hasn't read this book: you're really missing something. It happens that my favorite author for a while was Pratchett, and a good friend of mine was into Gaiman... we recommended the book to each other with serendipitous timing, and it's been a favorite ever since. Highly recommended.
The problem is that most of the complaints the Slashdot (and similar) crowd have with patents fall into the "obvious" clause, rather than the "prior-art" clause. The sections you cite here don't appear (I did read them, btw) to deal with that aspect of patent review.
The PodBuddy example is a perfect one for obviousness. Lets grant (without being sure) that no MP3 player car charger/FM transmitter was produced prior to the patent request. That lack of prior art still doesn't mean the request was non-obvious.
Car chargers are the norm for every piece of portable electronic equipment around. If the patent had solely been an MP3 car charger, the claim would be clearly "obvious" (even though the patent may have been granted) to anyone in the electronics product design universe.
Similarly, FM radio transmitters have been typical options for portable audio equipment for ages. Some products (and I had a cheap version of something similar in the early 1990s), allow FM retransmission of ANY headphone compatible device. In fact, the patent referenced in the original story mentions this at one point:
"Stereo transmitters of such type are readily commercially available, and are of appropriate size for incorporation in the modular docking unit."
Is the combining of these two common ideas really patent-worthy? Especially when products such as this one have been around for cell phones since prior to the patent in question. The only difference is that now it's an MP3 player and then it was a cell phone? Shenanigans, I say! This is an obvious progression of technology.
Sure there are a myriad number of other bits in the patent, but all of them are uninteresting. An LED to show on/off status. Variable frequencies of retransmission. 6-foot range. etc. Even the cited patents seem like someone just searched for "mp3" and picked a few. There's a SCUBA audio patent that I can't see having any real relation to the patent in question.
I'm sure patent lawyers have to go through all sorts of nonsense to create and defend patents, and alternately, to try to have them invalidated. Even if the public has a means of having "Prior-Art" cases reexamined (as you pointed out), it's clearly not sufficient. There needs to be a much clearer idea of how "obvious" an invention has to be to pass muster. If a large community of people believes that a patent was "obvious", there should be an easy method of reexamination on those merits as well.
They did... Gizmodo recently carried this blurb about it. Mind you, it's MORE expensive than the Das Keyboard with a somewhat different aesthetic in mind.
Actually, I think it's "solipsism"...
not to nitpick.
The only reason I single out the MUVO TX, tho, is that it is a high-speed USB 2.0 Flash Drive, with almost exactly the same form factor as the models you did review. I know it's hard to draw the line on these reviews; I don't envy you the task, but I doubt there are many multi-function devices that are USB 2.0 and keychain-sized (yet!).
I'll look forward to the next article, tho.
Anyone tried the MUVO TX from Creative? It's a USB 2.0 drive of the same type, but it has built in MP3 and voice recording and a cool AAA Battery carrying case for like $40 more than some of othe models Ars reviewed.
I have NOT tried it, by the way; just seen the marketing, but I'm thinking of buying one... I'd rather have something that is more than just an elaborate drive, and the MUVOs seem to fit the bill.
I was distressed that Ars ignored it in their review, but perhaps they didn't want to have to consider the extra functionality in their comparison?
Okay, now this is the first thread that's made me feel old, and I STARTED college just last decade. C'mon, let me get out of my twenties before you act like my education was dead and now you're revitalizing it.
To wit: based on a new concept - teaching computer science through assembly language [...] This is why the old-timers are often viewed as 'wizards': they had to know assembly language programming.
I object to the use of "old-timers", first and foremost, and I secondly object to the thought that your book is a "new concept".
Assembler may not have been the first thing I learned in my undergraduate CS curriculum, but it was darn near the first thing.
All that said, understanding Assembler is a huge asset to learning general Computer Science. If you want to know how any other language works, you need a grounding in Assembler concepts. Still, this is nothing revolutionary, and CowboyNeal should be flogged for posting such a story without at least a review from someone other than the author.
Exactly because it isn't a big deal, and in fact it seems to be the best way to do it -- but without the computer. [...] Throw out the computers and punch card machines, spend more on voter education, and go back to a technology that works better, faster, and for less -- paper and pencil.
Curiously, I disagree a bit with this. I think computer interfaces could really make the election process better. Some voting ballots are very difficult to decipher or to use properly, as the hanging chad conundrum revealed in Florida. Number two pencils confuse people too for some reason, whether it be filling in dots or arrows or whatever. You also have problems of putting too much information on a limited amount of paper which tends to make the ballot intimidating.
Computers, I suspsect, could make this much easier to understand for people. Some people are intimidated by computers to be sure, but I think that would be more than compensated for by a good user experience. I haven't seen an electronic voting machine, but I'd LOVE a screen that popped up "ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO VOTE FOR AL GORE?" with a big green YES plunger (real, not on screen) and a big red NO plunger people could smack.
I just want it to be auditable; I agree that making the paper vs. the computer the secondary system is semantic in some ways, I don't mind the mentality that the computer is the primary record as long as there IS a secondary one.