I can imagine a minor use for this kind of thing: Have appliances disclose operating conditions, such as energy used, detected faults and things like that. Our fridge is already doing some cool stuff locally, without a net; it keeps track of when during the day we open it and when we don't, and goes into a lower-energy mode when we're unlikely to open the door for a long while. Makes a noticeable difference in our power bill.
But in practice, any such system will of course be maker-specific, demand a particular version of Windows/OSX/iOS/Android, and be completely locked to a vendor application that is buggy, incomplete and with an UI that is epic in its awfulness.
If you had a response time of a week for issues, and you had to work enough unpaid overtime that you left rather than facing an intolerable work situation then quite obviously you were not able to handle it with the staffing at hand.
And that would be one feasible setting. I expect a fair number of people to choose to disclose nothing at all.
But if I am in control over what is disclosed, I would probably elect to show some information. Keywords on the kinds of thing I'm interested in and that sort of data. If I control the information flow I'd be happy to use it to get better, more relevant information back.
Yes - but what kind, right? There are many girls with cups and other specialities you may not want to stumble upon accidentally - or particularily be on the lookout for, interests depending.
Seriously, this kind of thing would be a good step toward a system where you will have control of what to release to sites and advertisers; and where you may actually want to do so, since it benefits you along with them.
Re:They shot themselves in the foot
on
The Last GUADEC?
·
· Score: 1
"ok, so basically a language nobody gives a flying fuck about......ok, just wanted to clear that up...."
You know, there's good ways to make people care about and like a project. Constructive responses, attempts to help the curious potential new convert - even a simple straightforward admission that some particular thing is not (yet) possible can go a long way towards creating a good feeling about it.
That's not what I got from posting about my small, idiosyncratic corner case. I've gotten a mix of verbal abuse (including all-new to me words for feces), diatribes about why the alternatives all suck, and people basically telling me I'm an idiot for wanting to do something odd or off-beat.
This may surprise you, I know, but it does not make me more likely to jump on the bandwagon, try to find a solution with the software or want to communicate with the user community in any way. It makes me a lot less likely to want to do so.
Avoiding Qt and its user community, and just continue with GTK2 seems like a good short-term solution to me. Longer term I'll just focus more on Android I guess. People in that development community are really friendly and approachable.
Re:They shot themselves in the foot
on
The Last GUADEC?
·
· Score: 1
"But you can't expect the Qt developers to create and maintain bindings for everyone's pet language out there..."
Those bindings are very incomplete and for a dialect I don't use. And of course I don't "demand my bindings" or anything like it; that would be silly, even presumptuous. All I did was point out one small area where in my (no doubt rare and unusual) case GTK ends up being the better choice.
Re:They shot themselves in the foot
on
The Last GUADEC?
·
· Score: 1
Ah - Scheme, as I mentioned in the original comment.
But once again, I have little opinion either way between Qt and GTK. I've worked with both at times, and with well-supported languages (such as Python) there's no major difference in usability. Most difference people really care about is really about KDE and Gnome, and I can frankly do without either.
Re:They shot themselves in the foot
on
The Last GUADEC?
·
· Score: 1
"Wow, you really had to think about that one, didn't you."
Nope. I'm interested in Ubuntu Mobile, and I recently wanted to see if there were bindings to my current favourite language to play around in. Since I looked for it only a few days ago it's what came to mind.
Again, I have nothing much against Qt. With Unity I can stay away from both Gnome and KDE and their multi-year infight. And with so much memory and disk in even very small machines today I simply don't have to care what toolkit other people use to develop their software. Having two (or three) sets of libraries installed and running at the same time doesn't really affect performance in any meaningful way any longer.
Re:They shot themselves in the foot
on
The Last GUADEC?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I don't have any religious attachement to either toolkit, and I don't care one bit which one I use as a user. But there's GTK bindings to all kinds of languages out there since it's relatively easy to do, whereas there's far fewer for Qt. I can't seem to find any decent bindings for Scheme for instance. I can only assume it's because Qt is quite tightly tied to C++, and languages that don't mesh well with it will have trouble interfacing with it.
The internet. Other people are fundamentally more interesting to us than flat characters, and the net gives us lots of human conflict on a daily basis to follow. My guess is the Reality TV boom is caused by the same thing; a way for television to compete with the constant online drama.
I don't annotate papers themselves any longer; not even before I got the tablet. I add notes in Zotero instead, as that gives me a fighting chance to actually find my notes again when I need them...
Zotero works fine on the desktop. But I lack something similar (but more lightweight) for the tablet. Ideally something that lets me dump 100 or so papers into the tablet; search them; and add notes and tags. Then export those notes and tags back to Zotero.
I got the Tablet Z a while ago. It is indeed surprisingly good at reading research paper PDFs and the like. The screen is still smaller than a real A4 paper, but it's very readable, even with my middle-aged eyes. Single-column PDFs look great in portait format, and dense dual-column papers real well zoomed in a bit so you see mostly one column at a time.
Acrobat Reader is decent for reading such material. It won't have more than one paper open at the same time, though, and won't (as far as I can tell) let me flip directly between two pages of the same file. Sony Reader had a function where it treated each half or each quarter of the document as a separate page, and let you flip back and forth by half a page; I wish that was available here.
I use Sony's small-app notepad to take notes while I read. It sits as a pop-up in the corner of the screen and doesn't interfere with reading. Works OK, though note export is lacking a bit.
In fact, it feels there must be a nice niche market for a PDF reader adapted for indexing and reading papers on Android devices. I haven't found any yet, though.
I would never get a non-fiction eBook with DRM. Fortunately, at least O'Reilly and Pragmatic Programmers ship DRM free so I feel comfortable buying those.
My major problem is work-related books. DRM is unacceptable of course (if you rely on it for work, any risk of losing access is bad). But my employers generally balk at paying rather substantial sums for just a file, whereas paying for a physical book is OK. I'm sure that will change over time, but bor now I stick with paper for all work stuff.
Many "sharing economy" businesses are merely hobbies, without the assurances and sustainability of a real business.
Exactly. A hobby, without the work guarantees, deadlines and quality control of a professional. Possibly very good, but also possibly slipshod, late, and not according to spec. Any professional that can't compete against a hobbyist probably doesn't belong in the market at all.
In many areas the difference between top end of "amateur" and "professional" is not talent or the quality of the work itself. It's being able to correctly estimate the difficulty and time of any job; of executing on time, on budget, always. But too often small businesses fail in execution. And when execution is the edge they have, that spells disaster in the long term.
So... I'm very far from what you'd call an unrepentent capitalist (by US standards I probably count as communist-light). But the thrust of his argument seems to be (correct me if I get it wrong):
* Consumers are much better informed and able to find the best combination of price and value than before;
* That hurts providers that are neither able to offer lower prices or better value. Or, in other words, those providers that previously managed to stay afloat only because their customers were poorly informed.
And from a consumer point of view, I have a hard time seeing what is immoral about that.
If I today have the choice of a chain coffee house with so-so cofee but good prices and generous laptop policies on one hand, and a gourmet shop run by an enthusiast with fifteen kinds of blow-your-mind taste sensation coffees on the other; why would I go to the old coffee shop in between where neither the coffee, service or price is anything special?
But these US companies do business in the EU. If, say, Google really truly only existed in the US it'd be one thing, but they do not. They make a good deal of their income from advertising and services in the EU; have facilities, offices and data centers there; most have daughter companies in the area.
Put it this way: EU car makers must follow US safety standards for the vehicles they export to the US, right? Even though they don't actually make them there, or have the head office there or anything. So, if you're an online business and solicit users and income in the EU it's jsut as reasonable that you have to follow local laws for that business as well.
I've never managed to make voice input useful on my Android phone. The reliability is just much too low. I use three languages: Swedish, English and Japanese, and recognition fails all the time with all three of them, including my native Swedish. I end up doing mor ekeystrokes to correct the voice input than it would have taken me to simply type it in the first place.
But what makes it worse is that it doesn't handle foreign words at all. Try to search for "Osaka" or "Watanabe" in English (or Swedish), and you will most likely never manage to get it recognized correctly.
I live in Japan, so I often look for local places or events, and many of my contacts have Japanese names. But with this restriction I can't use voice input for any of it. Initiating phone calls, writing emails and the rest is all basically undoable.
Of course, I could switch to Japanese input - but then I can't look for Swedish or English names or other things. And all those nifty voice actions that are supposed to make voice hands-free use possible only work in English, and only if you've set the phone UI to English as well. Yes, really. I can't have my phone in my native Swedish, select English-language vioce input and have actions work.
So the only thing that would possibly interest me about this feature is how to turn it off permanently.
Well... You eat your own cells all the time, and in practice you probably get a serving of other peoples' sloughed-off cells with every meal you have. I guess it's really more a matter of intent: If you're not getting the stuff from a human body (or arrange for the human to become "body" in the first place) then you may well decide this is not really cannibalism no matter what DNA the cells happen to contain. It comes from a mouse, so it's basically a mouse liver.
Why you'd want to eat mouse livers is another question of course, though chicken liver is delicious, so why not?
I was not saying to do away with the mean altogether. What I'm saying is that the median is a much more informative statistic than the mean for non-Gaussian distributions. You're trying to get at the "typical" value for a population, but for strongly non-Gaussian distributions the mean is not actually very typical.
A good example would be salaries for a whole economy, or yearly income for musicians. The mean will be skewed by a small population of individuals with a very high income, giving you a misleadingly high mean when the typical worker or musician actually makes quite a bit less.
Giving both the mean and the median would be the best option; that would give you a sense of skewness of the distribution as well.
I'm pretty sure* the distribution is not Gaussian, so the mean is a misleading statistic. At least add the median as well.
Also, as others have pointed out, there seems to be some rather problematic methodological issues with the way age is defined and used in the data set.
* This is Slashdot; you didn't think I would go and actually check, do you?
You already can install and use Firefox OS apps anywhere "real" Firefox is availalbe (ie. the crippleware version in IOS is excepted). That's actually a pretty compelling point in favour: Write your app, and have it run anywhere Firefox can run. And I bet that depending on the requirements of your app you can convert it to a regular hosted web app as well, and have it accessible to the Apple faithful and other browser users too.
Slashdot Mirror
I can imagine a minor use for this kind of thing: Have appliances disclose operating conditions, such as energy used, detected faults and things like that. Our fridge is already doing some cool stuff locally, without a net; it keeps track of when during the day we open it and when we don't, and goes into a lower-energy mode when we're unlikely to open the door for a long while. Makes a noticeable difference in our power bill.
But in practice, any such system will of course be maker-specific, demand a particular version of Windows/OSX/iOS/Android, and be completely locked to a vendor application that is buggy, incomplete and with an UI that is epic in its awfulness.
"Like support the Ubuntu Edge for $60 and get a Ubuntu T-Shirt."
They do now. $50 gives you an Edge T-shirt as well as recognition as founder.
If you had a response time of a week for issues, and you had to work enough unpaid overtime that you left rather than facing an intolerable work situation then quite obviously you were not able to handle it with the staffing at hand.
And that would be one feasible setting. I expect a fair number of people to choose to disclose nothing at all.
But if I am in control over what is disclosed, I would probably elect to show some information. Keywords on the kinds of thing I'm interested in and that sort of data. If I control the information flow I'd be happy to use it to get better, more relevant information back.
Yes - but what kind, right? There are many girls with cups and other specialities you may not want to stumble upon accidentally - or particularily be on the lookout for, interests depending.
Seriously, this kind of thing would be a good step toward a system where you will have control of what to release to sites and advertisers; and where you may actually want to do so, since it benefits you along with them.
"ok, so basically a language nobody gives a flying fuck about......ok, just wanted to clear that up...."
You know, there's good ways to make people care about and like a project. Constructive responses, attempts to help the curious potential new convert - even a simple straightforward admission that some particular thing is not (yet) possible can go a long way towards creating a good feeling about it.
That's not what I got from posting about my small, idiosyncratic corner case. I've gotten a mix of verbal abuse (including all-new to me words for feces), diatribes about why the alternatives all suck, and people basically telling me I'm an idiot for wanting to do something odd or off-beat.
This may surprise you, I know, but it does not make me more likely to jump on the bandwagon, try to find a solution with the software or want to communicate with the user community in any way. It makes me a lot less likely to want to do so.
Avoiding Qt and its user community, and just continue with GTK2 seems like a good short-term solution to me. Longer term I'll just focus more on Android I guess. People in that development community are really friendly and approachable.
"But you can't expect the Qt developers to create and maintain bindings for everyone's pet language out there..."
Those bindings are very incomplete and for a dialect I don't use. And of course I don't "demand my bindings" or anything like it; that would be silly, even presumptuous. All I did was point out one small area where in my (no doubt rare and unusual) case GTK ends up being the better choice.
Ah - Scheme, as I mentioned in the original comment.
But once again, I have little opinion either way between Qt and GTK. I've worked with both at times, and with well-supported languages (such as Python) there's no major difference in usability. Most difference people really care about is really about KDE and Gnome, and I can frankly do without either.
"Wow, you really had to think about that one, didn't you."
Nope. I'm interested in Ubuntu Mobile, and I recently wanted to see if there were bindings to my current favourite language to play around in. Since I looked for it only a few days ago it's what came to mind.
Again, I have nothing much against Qt. With Unity I can stay away from both Gnome and KDE and their multi-year infight. And with so much memory and disk in even very small machines today I simply don't have to care what toolkit other people use to develop their software. Having two (or three) sets of libraries installed and running at the same time doesn't really affect performance in any meaningful way any longer.
I don't have any religious attachement to either toolkit, and I don't care one bit which one I use as a user. But there's GTK bindings to all kinds of languages out there since it's relatively easy to do, whereas there's far fewer for Qt. I can't seem to find any decent bindings for Scheme for instance. I can only assume it's because Qt is quite tightly tied to C++, and languages that don't mesh well with it will have trouble interfacing with it.
"Just like for the last 20 years. What changed?"
The internet. Other people are fundamentally more interesting to us than flat characters, and the net gives us lots of human conflict on a daily basis to follow. My guess is the Reality TV boom is caused by the same thing; a way for television to compete with the constant online drama.
"I am SO crestfallen. I just found out I'm still an amateur, even after >30 years of what I thought was success in IT."
IT is the "special needs" child of the professional community :)
I don't annotate papers themselves any longer; not even before I got the tablet. I add notes in Zotero instead, as that gives me a fighting chance to actually find my notes again when I need them...
Zotero works fine on the desktop. But I lack something similar (but more lightweight) for the tablet. Ideally something that lets me dump 100 or so papers into the tablet; search them; and add notes and tags. Then export those notes and tags back to Zotero.
I got the Tablet Z a while ago. It is indeed surprisingly good at reading research paper PDFs and the like. The screen is still smaller than a real A4 paper, but it's very readable, even with my middle-aged eyes. Single-column PDFs look great in portait format, and dense dual-column papers real well zoomed in a bit so you see mostly one column at a time.
Acrobat Reader is decent for reading such material. It won't have more than one paper open at the same time, though, and won't (as far as I can tell) let me flip directly between two pages of the same file. Sony Reader had a function where it treated each half or each quarter of the document as a separate page, and let you flip back and forth by half a page; I wish that was available here.
I use Sony's small-app notepad to take notes while I read. It sits as a pop-up in the corner of the screen and doesn't interfere with reading. Works OK, though note export is lacking a bit.
In fact, it feels there must be a nice niche market for a PDF reader adapted for indexing and reading papers on Android devices. I haven't found any yet, though.
I would never get a non-fiction eBook with DRM. Fortunately, at least O'Reilly and Pragmatic Programmers ship DRM free so I feel comfortable buying those.
My major problem is work-related books. DRM is unacceptable of course (if you rely on it for work, any risk of losing access is bad). But my employers generally balk at paying rather substantial sums for just a file, whereas paying for a physical book is OK. I'm sure that will change over time, but bor now I stick with paper for all work stuff.
Exactly. A hobby, without the work guarantees, deadlines and quality control of a professional. Possibly very good, but also possibly slipshod, late, and not according to spec. Any professional that can't compete against a hobbyist probably doesn't belong in the market at all.
In many areas the difference between top end of "amateur" and "professional" is not talent or the quality of the work itself. It's being able to correctly estimate the difficulty and time of any job; of executing on time, on budget, always. But too often small businesses fail in execution. And when execution is the edge they have, that spells disaster in the long term.
Well, given that you have an income tax in the first place, why would you not pay income on something that is, well, income?
So... I'm very far from what you'd call an unrepentent capitalist (by US standards I probably count as communist-light). But the thrust of his argument seems to be (correct me if I get it wrong):
* Consumers are much better informed and able to find the best combination of price and value than before;
* That hurts providers that are neither able to offer lower prices or better value. Or, in other words, those providers that previously managed to stay afloat only because their customers were poorly informed.
And from a consumer point of view, I have a hard time seeing what is immoral about that.
If I today have the choice of a chain coffee house with so-so cofee but good prices and generous laptop policies on one hand, and a gourmet shop run by an enthusiast with fifteen kinds of blow-your-mind taste sensation coffees on the other; why would I go to the old coffee shop in between where neither the coffee, service or price is anything special?
You still want to get paid for advertisements, services and so on don't you? Anything like that is having a presence in the country.
But these US companies do business in the EU. If, say, Google really truly only existed in the US it'd be one thing, but they do not. They make a good deal of their income from advertising and services in the EU; have facilities, offices and data centers there; most have daughter companies in the area.
Put it this way: EU car makers must follow US safety standards for the vehicles they export to the US, right? Even though they don't actually make them there, or have the head office there or anything. So, if you're an online business and solicit users and income in the EU it's jsut as reasonable that you have to follow local laws for that business as well.
I've never managed to make voice input useful on my Android phone. The reliability is just much too low. I use three languages: Swedish, English and Japanese, and recognition fails all the time with all three of them, including my native Swedish. I end up doing mor ekeystrokes to correct the voice input than it would have taken me to simply type it in the first place.
But what makes it worse is that it doesn't handle foreign words at all. Try to search for "Osaka" or "Watanabe" in English (or Swedish), and you will most likely never manage to get it recognized correctly.
I live in Japan, so I often look for local places or events, and many of my contacts have Japanese names. But with this restriction I can't use voice input for any of it. Initiating phone calls, writing emails and the rest is all basically undoable.
Of course, I could switch to Japanese input - but then I can't look for Swedish or English names or other things. And all those nifty voice actions that are supposed to make voice hands-free use possible only work in English, and only if you've set the phone UI to English as well. Yes, really. I can't have my phone in my native Swedish, select English-language vioce input and have actions work.
So the only thing that would possibly interest me about this feature is how to turn it off permanently.
Well... You eat your own cells all the time, and in practice you probably get a serving of other peoples' sloughed-off cells with every meal you have. I guess it's really more a matter of intent: If you're not getting the stuff from a human body (or arrange for the human to become "body" in the first place) then you may well decide this is not really cannibalism no matter what DNA the cells happen to contain. It comes from a mouse, so it's basically a mouse liver.
Why you'd want to eat mouse livers is another question of course, though chicken liver is delicious, so why not?
I was not saying to do away with the mean altogether. What I'm saying is that the median is a much more informative statistic than the mean for non-Gaussian distributions. You're trying to get at the "typical" value for a population, but for strongly non-Gaussian distributions the mean is not actually very typical.
A good example would be salaries for a whole economy, or yearly income for musicians. The mean will be skewed by a small population of individuals with a very high income, giving you a misleadingly high mean when the typical worker or musician actually makes quite a bit less.
Giving both the mean and the median would be the best option; that would give you a sense of skewness of the distribution as well.
I'm pretty sure* the distribution is not Gaussian, so the mean is a misleading statistic. At least add the median as well.
Also, as others have pointed out, there seems to be some rather problematic methodological issues with the way age is defined and used in the data set.
* This is Slashdot; you didn't think I would go and actually check, do you?
You already can install and use Firefox OS apps anywhere "real" Firefox is availalbe (ie. the crippleware version in IOS is excepted). That's actually a pretty compelling point in favour: Write your app, and have it run anywhere Firefox can run. And I bet that depending on the requirements of your app you can convert it to a regular hosted web app as well, and have it accessible to the Apple faithful and other browser users too.