In that case my school is extremely special because our religion teachers were ordinary teachers that just happened to fulfill the requirements to teach about religion. I know that at least one of them only considered the Bible a documents of its time and not something containing supernatural wisdom. (And another one considered his hunting stories more interesting than the currculum but that's a different story.) Either the local churches are remarkably secular, they were asleep when selecting the teachers or the teachers weren't selected by them.
Doesn't need to be a mail client. Perhaps you want a program to keep track of units in BattleTech games. Or an IRC bot that can give you statistics on the performance of football players. Perhaps a friend of yours is organizing a small convention and needs a signup platform that allow paying participants to vote on what's going to happen at the con. Or you write a shell client for eBay that allows you to quickly check on your auctions.
It's not about making software the hiring company would be interested in acquiring, it's about making software that does something you need. The fact that you can use it to illustrate your skills at a later job interview is just a nice bonus. Having a small portfolio of programs that you can coherently talk about allows you to demonstrate that you are indeed proficient at the languages and technologies mentioned on your CV. Maybe your IRC bot isn't revolutionary but in order to build it you had to at least connect an IRC library, some sort of database and code that performs a statistical analysis on the data sets. That doesn't make you a master coder but it does show that you're not completely inept either.
Of course if you don't need any software you don't already have or you don't find coding as a hobby interesting enough to make such software you're not going to end up with anything you can present to anyone. That's how life goes.
And I wouldn't call it unfair, either. Think about it from the perspective of the interviewer: If someone has a portfolio one can assume they have a basic proficiency in the language required. You can skip some of the basic questions and instead ask them about their program, how they approached the problem, which tools they used and why etc. That allows you to see how the applicant works in a real-life scenario. (And, of course, if someone presented someone else's program it's easy to expose them as frauds and remove them from consideration quickly.) Even before the interview you can take a look at their program or website and decide not to invite them to an interview if it turns out to be entirely horrible.
Also, your website won't scale to a hundred thousand concurrent users unless you use a professional RDBMS and powerful servers/pipes and if you have any static content you want to get some help from Akamai, as well. All in all you better have the ability to invest a couple thousand bucks a month if you want to run a website.
Or, of course, you decide that your hobby project is unlikely to be attacked and thus doesn't need a real SSL certificate and that the two dozen users it will probably have won't push your entry-level managed hosting plan beyond its limits. Internet Explorer compatibility is usually not on the list of features unless you're writing a commercial website so SNI is entirely unproblematic if you do decide to get a certificate. (And yes, you can get away with putting "visit the website in any browser other than Internet Explorer" on your application.)
If you can afford three bucks a month for hosting you have everything you need to run a PHP/MySQL-based website. And if it's a web app you built for local use you can (depending on your ISP) just open port 80 on your computer, get a DynDNS account and point them to that if you're too cheap to get some basic hosting. Really, you don't need much to run a portfolio website or simple web service.
I don't know why people see religion class as something problematic. In Germany we have it and it's not like it's about indoctrination. It's about things like how different religions work and how to better understand them or about ethics in the context of what $SCRIPTURE says. You know, things that are actually useful to know if you want to understand where some of the older concepts and values in out society came from.
If you're not of one of the faiths the school offers courses for (or you don't want to deal with what the documents say is your religion) you get what amounts to comparative theology class in that you compare how various faiths deal with the things covered in regular religion class. Again a useful thing to know since you're going to deal with people of various faiths later on even if you're areligious.
Does that mean the steeple has replaced the classroom? No, it just means that we can apply sociology to the Bible. It also means that there's little reason to mention any religious stance on anything in other classes. So it always astounds me that American schools apparently have no space for any studies regarding religion, leading both to idiot lawmakers trying to sneak in the Bible as a textbook elsewhere (hello, Intelligent Design) and to morons who don't even know how Christianity, Judaism and Islam are connected.
Yes, there is Sunday school. But I doubt that it's attended by most people, that each major faith has an equally-popular alternative and that Sunday school will teach comparative theology.
I'd really like that thing if it had some kind of networking instead of HDMI. I'm currently in the market for a cheap, low-power computer I can use as a low-traffic Jabber server. Unfortunately "cheap" and "low-power" don't seem to go well together.
Also, Skype handles non-headset microphones really well. I use my laptop for most non-gaming activities so when I'm playing a game with friends I just put it down nearby and run Skype. I don't need to worry about the fact that the laptop's speakers are blaring into the microphone; Skype does a pretty good job at eliminating feedback.
I tried TeamSpeak but TS absolutely requires a headset or at least headphones if you don't want to be limited to push-to-talk half-duplex communications. Skype wins out on quality here. (And since I refused to "upgrade" from version 2 of the client it even has a decent user interface.)
I found that the game would randomly decide to see or not see people. If you do see them there's random disconnects right from the lobby onwards. It kind of feels like setting up a WINS network. We didn't even make it to the basement in over an hour of trying due to people randomly dropping out of the game and the lobby showing random subsets of who's online.
Then again it does work semi-reliably for two of my friends (except for the lobby) and I have crashing issues so it's probably me who causes the networking issues as well. Still it's weird that random people drop out and not just me.
There's lies, damn lies and Magicka patch logs. My graphics card (Geforce 8800) handles the game just fine but it has an annoying tendency to randomly crash when moving between areas that makes it impossible for me to finish the first act. Between that and the game's pathetic excuse for a multiplayer mode (seriously, Gamespy is leagues ahead of Magicka) it's been a huge disappointment for me.
Magicka has a nice humor but that doesn't do it any good if it simply won't run properly.
I might not have chosen that pronounciation because I was unaware that "enlive" is a word. I know "enliven" but I wouldn't immediately think of that given "kdenlive".
Of course "enlive" could be the name of a different product but in that case I would really shy away from that name. Putting a competitor's name into your product name is a fairly risky move.
In this case it does but depending on how many people misspell which name you might end up with the product getting a much lower rank. I'd still stay away from Disney names.;) Plus it's not that big on the speakability front, either - people who only hear it might end up spelling it "Cinelara", which only gets results because of Google's autocorrection feature.
It's certainly a better name than "Kdenlive", though, although I find Kdenlive to be rather pronouncable if you say "k-den-live". Sounds horrible but is fairly easy to say and to write correctly after having heard it.
The real problem is that product naming is really hard given that you don't want your product to be buried under millions of Google results for the same word in a different context, the namespace of easily-remembered names is limited and you ideally want a name that describes your product, as well.
Open source developers have long just looked for unique names that describe the program and are comfortable to type in a shell. Which is perfectly fine if you don't intend on competing with commercial software as it sidesteps a lot of issues you don't need to optimize for. Once you do compete on the market, however, you should consider a rebranding.
I wouldn't put a name with a Levenshtein difference of 1 to a Disney movie (and to the name of a fairy tale if you're in an English-speaking region) down as having no sensible near-misses.
(Of course the sibling pointed out that the name is actually different from what you remembered, which does put a different kind of damper on your argument regarding that name,)
What the sibling said. I combined the "few syllables means safe" joke with the 1930s-era belief that radioactivity is perfectly safe and wholesome under all circumstances. They pretty much put the stuff in everything from the Revigators the sibling mentioned to ready-made radium-enriched water sold as a health tonic (and discontinued after someone got radiation sickness form it). Toothpaste, suppositories... there was a whole bunch of products made so you could contaminate yourself in the comfort of your own home.
Of course radon is safe. In the 30s you could find that stuff in mouthwash and what not. They stopped using it since, probably because they found cheaper alternatives.
One thing's for sure - complaining that customers "don't understand" your product is not the way forward. It's the kind of talk I always associate from companies who know that they're losing. A bit like when a game developer responds to bad review scores by saying "our game isn't intended for critics".
Hey, if it means more Twisp and Catsby I'm fine with it. Although I think it's more likely we'll see some Nintendo/ICP crossover image macros á la: "F***ing 3D effect. How does it work?"
Anyway, it's a great sentence to laugh about. Not quite in the same league as giant enemy crabs in historical Japan but Nintendo are certainly trying.
Faulty assumptions, I'd guess. Going from the premises that the market will regulate itself well and that some people will pay a slightly higher price it's a viable strategy to sell your book a bit higher than the market average. Of course this goes down the drain when unchecked robots follow this strategy in large enough numbers to distort the average price. In that case the first premise no longer holds and the model spirals out of control.
How about this: If the lawsuit was found to be willfully frivolous the full charges asked for by the plaintiff are leveled... against the plaintiff. Sue someone for a million Dollars for no apparent reason? Perhaps the court believes you that it was a mistake. Do it again? Congratulations, you just made someone rich. If the bar is set high enough only court-as-a-business-model outfits should be affected.
That should cut down on unreasonably high damages, too. After all, you don't want to risk losing that kind of money if your case isn't waterproof.
I agree we wouldn't have this problem if Sony had just killed GeoHot:
1. Sony kills GeoHot.
2. Investigators trace the murder back to Sony.
3. The media report about the murder.
4. The public equates Sony with organized crime.
5. Sony proper makes a public effort of distancing themselves from SCEA, possibly even disbanding the entire division (and probably firing a lot of employees in the process).
6. The bad PR piles up and Sony is marginalized on the American market as nobody wants to deal with them.
Final result: American gamers can count themselves lucky if their PSN even stays up as the American market becomes massively unprofitable for Sony. Then again, many of them wouldn't even want their PS3s anymore because having one means you funded a company that thinks nothing of ordering hits on people they deem dangerous to their bottom line. Cue tons of cheap PS3 offers on eBay.
But yeah, whatever caused this disruption of service wouldn't hit too many gamers. Problem mostly solved.
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In that case my school is extremely special because our religion teachers were ordinary teachers that just happened to fulfill the requirements to teach about religion. I know that at least one of them only considered the Bible a documents of its time and not something containing supernatural wisdom. (And another one considered his hunting stories more interesting than the currculum but that's a different story.) Either the local churches are remarkably secular, they were asleep when selecting the teachers or the teachers weren't selected by them.
Doesn't need to be a mail client. Perhaps you want a program to keep track of units in BattleTech games. Or an IRC bot that can give you statistics on the performance of football players. Perhaps a friend of yours is organizing a small convention and needs a signup platform that allow paying participants to vote on what's going to happen at the con. Or you write a shell client for eBay that allows you to quickly check on your auctions.
It's not about making software the hiring company would be interested in acquiring, it's about making software that does something you need. The fact that you can use it to illustrate your skills at a later job interview is just a nice bonus. Having a small portfolio of programs that you can coherently talk about allows you to demonstrate that you are indeed proficient at the languages and technologies mentioned on your CV. Maybe your IRC bot isn't revolutionary but in order to build it you had to at least connect an IRC library, some sort of database and code that performs a statistical analysis on the data sets. That doesn't make you a master coder but it does show that you're not completely inept either.
Of course if you don't need any software you don't already have or you don't find coding as a hobby interesting enough to make such software you're not going to end up with anything you can present to anyone. That's how life goes.
And I wouldn't call it unfair, either. Think about it from the perspective of the interviewer: If someone has a portfolio one can assume they have a basic proficiency in the language required. You can skip some of the basic questions and instead ask them about their program, how they approached the problem, which tools they used and why etc. That allows you to see how the applicant works in a real-life scenario. (And, of course, if someone presented someone else's program it's easy to expose them as frauds and remove them from consideration quickly.) Even before the interview you can take a look at their program or website and decide not to invite them to an interview if it turns out to be entirely horrible.
Also, your website won't scale to a hundred thousand concurrent users unless you use a professional RDBMS and powerful servers/pipes and if you have any static content you want to get some help from Akamai, as well. All in all you better have the ability to invest a couple thousand bucks a month if you want to run a website.
Or, of course, you decide that your hobby project is unlikely to be attacked and thus doesn't need a real SSL certificate and that the two dozen users it will probably have won't push your entry-level managed hosting plan beyond its limits. Internet Explorer compatibility is usually not on the list of features unless you're writing a commercial website so SNI is entirely unproblematic if you do decide to get a certificate. (And yes, you can get away with putting "visit the website in any browser other than Internet Explorer" on your application.)
If you can afford three bucks a month for hosting you have everything you need to run a PHP/MySQL-based website. And if it's a web app you built for local use you can (depending on your ISP) just open port 80 on your computer, get a DynDNS account and point them to that if you're too cheap to get some basic hosting. Really, you don't need much to run a portfolio website or simple web service.
I don't know why people see religion class as something problematic. In Germany we have it and it's not like it's about indoctrination. It's about things like how different religions work and how to better understand them or about ethics in the context of what $SCRIPTURE says. You know, things that are actually useful to know if you want to understand where some of the older concepts and values in out society came from.
If you're not of one of the faiths the school offers courses for (or you don't want to deal with what the documents say is your religion) you get what amounts to comparative theology class in that you compare how various faiths deal with the things covered in regular religion class. Again a useful thing to know since you're going to deal with people of various faiths later on even if you're areligious.
Does that mean the steeple has replaced the classroom? No, it just means that we can apply sociology to the Bible. It also means that there's little reason to mention any religious stance on anything in other classes. So it always astounds me that American schools apparently have no space for any studies regarding religion, leading both to idiot lawmakers trying to sneak in the Bible as a textbook elsewhere (hello, Intelligent Design) and to morons who don't even know how Christianity, Judaism and Islam are connected.
Yes, there is Sunday school. But I doubt that it's attended by most people, that each major faith has an equally-popular alternative and that Sunday school will teach comparative theology.
She might be heterosexual so it might not be an issue for her.
I'd really like that thing if it had some kind of networking instead of HDMI. I'm currently in the market for a cheap, low-power computer I can use as a low-traffic Jabber server. Unfortunately "cheap" and "low-power" don't seem to go well together.
Also, Skype handles non-headset microphones really well. I use my laptop for most non-gaming activities so when I'm playing a game with friends I just put it down nearby and run Skype. I don't need to worry about the fact that the laptop's speakers are blaring into the microphone; Skype does a pretty good job at eliminating feedback.
I tried TeamSpeak but TS absolutely requires a headset or at least headphones if you don't want to be limited to push-to-talk half-duplex communications. Skype wins out on quality here. (And since I refused to "upgrade" from version 2 of the client it even has a decent user interface.)
I found that the game would randomly decide to see or not see people. If you do see them there's random disconnects right from the lobby onwards. It kind of feels like setting up a WINS network. We didn't even make it to the basement in over an hour of trying due to people randomly dropping out of the game and the lobby showing random subsets of who's online.
Then again it does work semi-reliably for two of my friends (except for the lobby) and I have crashing issues so it's probably me who causes the networking issues as well. Still it's weird that random people drop out and not just me.
There's lies, damn lies and Magicka patch logs. My graphics card (Geforce 8800) handles the game just fine but it has an annoying tendency to randomly crash when moving between areas that makes it impossible for me to finish the first act. Between that and the game's pathetic excuse for a multiplayer mode (seriously, Gamespy is leagues ahead of Magicka) it's been a huge disappointment for me.
Magicka has a nice humor but that doesn't do it any good if it simply won't run properly.
I might not have chosen that pronounciation because I was unaware that "enlive" is a word. I know "enliven" but I wouldn't immediately think of that given "kdenlive".
Of course "enlive" could be the name of a different product but in that case I would really shy away from that name. Putting a competitor's name into your product name is a fairly risky move.
In this case it does but depending on how many people misspell which name you might end up with the product getting a much lower rank. I'd still stay away from Disney names. ;) Plus it's not that big on the speakability front, either - people who only hear it might end up spelling it "Cinelara", which only gets results because of Google's autocorrection feature.
It's certainly a better name than "Kdenlive", though, although I find Kdenlive to be rather pronouncable if you say "k-den-live". Sounds horrible but is fairly easy to say and to write correctly after having heard it.
The real problem is that product naming is really hard given that you don't want your product to be buried under millions of Google results for the same word in a different context, the namespace of easily-remembered names is limited and you ideally want a name that describes your product, as well.
Open source developers have long just looked for unique names that describe the program and are comfortable to type in a shell. Which is perfectly fine if you don't intend on competing with commercial software as it sidesteps a lot of issues you don't need to optimize for. Once you do compete on the market, however, you should consider a rebranding.
I wouldn't put a name with a Levenshtein difference of 1 to a Disney movie (and to the name of a fairy tale if you're in an English-speaking region) down as having no sensible near-misses.
(Of course the sibling pointed out that the name is actually different from what you remembered, which does put a different kind of damper on your argument regarding that name,)
No, we can detect its mass but it doesn't interact electromagnetically with the rest of the device.
Of course CSI Miami would do this through a surveillance camera, zooming into the reflection and determining the eye color of the porn actress.
Whooosh. The whole sig is a collection of language abuses commonly seen on the internet.
What the sibling said. I combined the "few syllables means safe" joke with the 1930s-era belief that radioactivity is perfectly safe and wholesome under all circumstances. They pretty much put the stuff in everything from the Revigators the sibling mentioned to ready-made radium-enriched water sold as a health tonic (and discontinued after someone got radiation sickness form it). Toothpaste, suppositories... there was a whole bunch of products made so you could contaminate yourself in the comfort of your own home.
Why not recommend he light a homeopathic candle while he's at it?
Because all the water makes it really hard to light the candle?
Of course radon is safe. In the 30s you could find that stuff in mouthwash and what not. They stopped using it since, probably because they found cheaper alternatives.
We just need to make sure those heat pumps can't be programmed in JavaScript, then we'll be safe.
One thing's for sure - complaining that customers "don't understand" your product is not the way forward. It's the kind of talk I always associate from companies who know that they're losing. A bit like when a game developer responds to bad review scores by saying "our game isn't intended for critics".
Hey, if it means more Twisp and Catsby I'm fine with it. Although I think it's more likely we'll see some Nintendo/ICP crossover image macros á la: "F***ing 3D effect. How does it work?"
Anyway, it's a great sentence to laugh about. Not quite in the same league as giant enemy crabs in historical Japan but Nintendo are certainly trying.
Great marketing move, Google.
Apple: "Our mobile OS has apps than can show you the stars!"
Google: "Our mobile OS kills astronauts."
I can imagine a number of billionaires who might do that just to troll the market...
Faulty assumptions, I'd guess. Going from the premises that the market will regulate itself well and that some people will pay a slightly higher price it's a viable strategy to sell your book a bit higher than the market average. Of course this goes down the drain when unchecked robots follow this strategy in large enough numbers to distort the average price. In that case the first premise no longer holds and the model spirals out of control.
How about this: If the lawsuit was found to be willfully frivolous the full charges asked for by the plaintiff are leveled... against the plaintiff. Sue someone for a million Dollars for no apparent reason? Perhaps the court believes you that it was a mistake. Do it again? Congratulations, you just made someone rich. If the bar is set high enough only court-as-a-business-model outfits should be affected.
That should cut down on unreasonably high damages, too. After all, you don't want to risk losing that kind of money if your case isn't waterproof.
I agree we wouldn't have this problem if Sony had just killed GeoHot:
1. Sony kills GeoHot.
2. Investigators trace the murder back to Sony.
3. The media report about the murder.
4. The public equates Sony with organized crime.
5. Sony proper makes a public effort of distancing themselves from SCEA, possibly even disbanding the entire division (and probably firing a lot of employees in the process).
6. The bad PR piles up and Sony is marginalized on the American market as nobody wants to deal with them.
Final result: American gamers can count themselves lucky if their PSN even stays up as the American market becomes massively unprofitable for Sony. Then again, many of them wouldn't even want their PS3s anymore because having one means you funded a company that thinks nothing of ordering hits on people they deem dangerous to their bottom line. Cue tons of cheap PS3 offers on eBay.
But yeah, whatever caused this disruption of service wouldn't hit too many gamers. Problem mostly solved.