Do you diff your project's documentation when you get back from vacation? Generally, if there's a large change to the project, the official documentation is updated, RFE bugs are filed (and later closed), the revision control systems for docs and code will show matching changes, and there will be a certain amount of e-mail traffic between developers (first discussing proper implementation, later informing other parties about changes that may affect them).
While the changes are fully documented in the appropriate places, it's immensely faster to read a paragraph of text explaining the change and the reasoning behind it than to search through the documentation to find the same information. Add to it that we generally get organizational changes through E-mail (changes to the org chart, HR representation, etc), and I see plenty of things that belong in an E-mail.
And well you should, if you're pushing work that should be yours onto the other person, but that's a problem whether or not they were out on vacation. There *are* situations where a two-line E-mail will save your coworker from chasing through logs on a bug-tracker, looking at code reviews, etc, to figure out what changed while they were gone. That is, I could send an absent coworker a summary e-mail that would save them considerable time when they return, and if I didn't do that, then I should get in just as much trouble for wasting their time as I should for sending them something that will be invalid by the time they get back.
My mobile apps: Null set. I'm not interested in developing for Apple hardware, and I don't want to do the testing for the heterogenous crapshoot of Android hardware. That's why I said in my last post "I haven't seriously considered mobile development".
so at the very worst all you've lost is your time?
Because my time is worth much more than the fee and the development hardware I would have to buy. If I could eliminate a week of testing due to having a more restrictive platform, I've made up the difference in dev costs.
Then again, that same perception (the value of my time) is why I haven't seriously considered mobile development. I don't think I'd make my money back for the time investment, at this point.
Why bother paying to develop for the #2 platform (12% sales) when you can develop for the #1 platform (85% sales) for free?
Because the users of the #2 platform have already demonstrated a predisposition toward paying more than they have to for things, and I've seen claims that Apple users will pay more for apps. The iOS platform is also less fragmented than the Android platform, so there are fewer device configurations that you have to account for.
Disclaimer: That's all word-of-mouth to me. I'm not a mobile app developer, but those are some of the arguments that I've seen others make.
There's a Heinlein short story that covers the scenario (still on Earth), but in a independent "reservation" for exiles, called Coventry. Someone opts to go there as punishment for a crime, expecting an individualist anarchic utopia, but finding another little world of corrupt governments, unethical bureaucracies, etc.
I've used an Android torrent app (also, an iOS one on a jailbroken iPod Touch). My LTE connection is a significant fraction of the speed of my cable internet connection. If I had my hardwired pipe saturated, and I "just had to" have something ASAP, I could imagine running a torrent on my phone. Or if I were a high schooler trying to hide my activities from tech-savvy parents, or something.
OK...those are kind of contrived scenarios. You might be surprised by some of the stupid things people do with tech, though.
VTD-XML is a dual-licensed piece of software. From their FAQ:
If you don't like the restriction of GPL, XimpleWare also offers flexible commercial licenses for VTD-XML [contact info follows]
The software is distributed for free provided certain license terms are followed, and otherwise, a license can be purchased for it as a commercial product. This seems to be a case where the GPL-licensed version of the software was inappropriate, and Versata should've paid for a license. I think that it can be argued that there are real damages in this case.
It's standard C and C++ (and Java, for that matter). It's the pre-increment operator (Returns the incremented value, rather than the original value). Post-increment has to save the previous value, so that it can increment the variable and store it, then return the original value. Pre-increment doesn't have to make the extra copy, since what's being stored is the same as what's being returned. Most of the time, the difference is optimized away anyhow; the compiler realizes that you aren't immediately using the return value, so it just pre-increments the value without creating any extra copy.
We use 24 fields at 320*270, interlaced vertically and horizontally, to provide a true 1920x1080 resolution picture to our customers, with field updates at 60FPS. Never mind that the whole screen only updates 2.5 times per second; we believe that this provides a full-quality experience, avoids upscaling the image, and nicely lines our pockets with your hard-earned, sweet, sweet cash.
It's like a horizontally-interlaced version of 1080i, rather than 1080p. Imagine sweeping the view from left to right. Depending on the speed of rotation, there's a chance that the part of the screen that's under the even fields on one frame will be under the odd fields on the next frame. Overall, I'm sure it's better-quality than upscaled 960x1080p video would have been, but noticeably inferior to progressive-scan 1920x1080 video at 60fps (which is what Sony originally advertised it as, apparently).
I'm with you on the 1200-line monitors, though. The shape is much more pleasant than a 16:9 screen, and it can fit more information on it.
Show me a bridge with a couple million moving parts, designed and built by a team of 5 people within 2 years and we'll be looking at two vaguely comparable structures. Also, the same bridge must be (without adjustment) equally suitable for placement in 10,000 different environments.
Bridges are built for reliability above all else. Most software is built for speed and flexibility. Apples and oranges.
It's useful to know how the CPU itself functions in the sense that the less of the computer is a black box, the more you'll understand of how to manipulate it.
Practically...well, my employer's codebase is a few dozen megabytes of C++ and Java source code, scripts in half a dozen languages, and maybe 10k of assembly for a time-critical section of code that a lot of compilers don't seem to get right if compiled from C. I've had to look at compiler-generated assembly code maybe twice in the last 6 years to diagnose some weird compiler bugs. Other than that? No, assembly hasn't been directly useful. I'd agree that bitwise manipulation *has* been though, and also an understanding of how C++ vtables work, how structs go into memory, etc.
On a hobby level, my interests skew toward the low-level view of things (emulation, reverse engineering DOS games, etc), and of course it's been absolutely indispensable in that realm of endeavor.
I graduated about 7 years ago, and we certainly had to learn that then (at least lexing and parsing). We never got to code generation, but I think that's because the professor was incompetent. It was certainly on the syllabus, after all.
I've got a couple of little boxes under my TVs that: can be controlled by my phone or a tablet (and not only Apple-produced ones), can stream video (and not only from 1 specific company). Maybe there's some niche they could've marketed to, but it doesn't come to mind.
And Jerry Gibson, a professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, says he's going to introduce the metric into two classes this year. For a winter quarter class on information theory, he will ask students to use the score to evaluate lossless compression algorithms. In a spring quarter class on multimedia compression, he will use the score in a similar way, but in this case, because the Weissman Score doesn't consider distortion introduced in lossy compression, he will expect the students to weight that factor as well.
The scoring method as stated is only useful for evaluating lossless compression. One could also take into account the resemblance of the output to the input to allow a modified version of the score to evaluate lossy compression.
It sounds more like an IoT prototyping board. The RJ-45 and wireless are for the "Internet" part of that, and the USB and GPIO are the interfaces to the "Things".
Bags still went through X-Rays then, and a determined person can still get weapons through security *now*. I'm more worried about someone coming into a school with an AK and grenades than I am the same thing on an airplane. Before, the assumption if someone showed up armed on a plane was that they were going to have it flown somewhere to ransom the passengers, and that you'd be best off staying quiet and giving the hijacker what they wanted. Now, you'd have a crowd of people tackling the guy, and there'd be no chance of a hijacking anyhow with the reinforced cockpit bulkheads. Those changes alone would mean that there are many more-attractive targets in the country.
You can believe what you want, but a tiger-repelling rock is still a tiger-repelling rock.
Very few phones work on both CDMA2000 networks (Verizon and Sprint) and GSM networks (AT&T and T-Mobile), and they're hard to find in U.S. stores.
If true (I don't keep track of which phones are available through whom and do what), I don't see what bearing that has on whether it's a good idea or a bad one to make it easier to force carriers to unlock the handsets that they sell. Even if there were *no* dual-network phones, you'd be able to move between a choice between two carriers (and the MVNOs of each), and that's better than being forced to buy a new phone.
Mail order doesn't let you hold the phone and get a feel for its size, weight, screen, and buttons before you buy.
Well, I can't argue with that; if you don't have physical access to a device, then you can't judge it first-hand based on its physical attributes. In my case, I went to the store of my chosen carrier, tried out their phones in the store, and bought a variant online that the store didn't carry. Having the opportunity to handle a phone before buying it varies on a case-by-case basis so much that I'm not quite sure why you mentioned it.
I never said that an airplane was a public place; I said that an airport is. 13 years ago, I could walk off the street up to a gate without a ticket. If it weren't for the current security paranoia, I'd still be able to do so.
But that has little if nothing to do with law about "public spaces".
Defaria's comment, which I was replying to, seemed to badly confuse ownership, privacy, public access, etc, and was basically verging on being a conspiracy theory rant. I was trying to bring them back down to earth and temporarily ignoring the question of who, if anyone, was behaving reasonably in the situation.
Denver International Airport is owned and operated by the City and County of Denver Department of Aviation. It's public land. That aside, your comment doesn't make sense. Privately owned property can be operated as a public place, without affecting the ownership of the property. If I owned a restaurant, it would be my private property. By opening it for business and inviting customers in, it remains my privately-owned property, but it also becomes a public place, since I'm admitting the public to it. At night, when I close for the evening, I'm denying access to the public, and it's no longer a public place. That changes in the morning when I open the restaurant again.
None of that has anything to do with privacy, government regulation, government taxation, etc. Further, if you've let someone into your house, you haven't lost ownership of anything. You haven't even lost ownership if you open your house to the public; you've just made it a public space, until you say otherwise. If you invite specific friends in (rather than the public at large), not only does it stay in your possession, but it's also still a private place.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you diff your project's documentation when you get back from vacation? Generally, if there's a large change to the project, the official documentation is updated, RFE bugs are filed (and later closed), the revision control systems for docs and code will show matching changes, and there will be a certain amount of e-mail traffic between developers (first discussing proper implementation, later informing other parties about changes that may affect them).
While the changes are fully documented in the appropriate places, it's immensely faster to read a paragraph of text explaining the change and the reasoning behind it than to search through the documentation to find the same information. Add to it that we generally get organizational changes through E-mail (changes to the org chart, HR representation, etc), and I see plenty of things that belong in an E-mail.
And well you should, if you're pushing work that should be yours onto the other person, but that's a problem whether or not they were out on vacation. There *are* situations where a two-line E-mail will save your coworker from chasing through logs on a bug-tracker, looking at code reviews, etc, to figure out what changed while they were gone. That is, I could send an absent coworker a summary e-mail that would save them considerable time when they return, and if I didn't do that, then I should get in just as much trouble for wasting their time as I should for sending them something that will be invalid by the time they get back.
My mobile apps: Null set. I'm not interested in developing for Apple hardware, and I don't want to do the testing for the heterogenous crapshoot of Android hardware. That's why I said in my last post "I haven't seriously considered mobile development".
so at the very worst all you've lost is your time?
Because my time is worth much more than the fee and the development hardware I would have to buy. If I could eliminate a week of testing due to having a more restrictive platform, I've made up the difference in dev costs.
Then again, that same perception (the value of my time) is why I haven't seriously considered mobile development. I don't think I'd make my money back for the time investment, at this point.
Why bother paying to develop for the #2 platform (12% sales) when you can develop for the #1 platform (85% sales) for free?
Because the users of the #2 platform have already demonstrated a predisposition toward paying more than they have to for things, and I've seen claims that Apple users will pay more for apps. The iOS platform is also less fragmented than the Android platform, so there are fewer device configurations that you have to account for.
Disclaimer: That's all word-of-mouth to me. I'm not a mobile app developer, but those are some of the arguments that I've seen others make.
There's a Heinlein short story that covers the scenario (still on Earth), but in a independent "reservation" for exiles, called Coventry. Someone opts to go there as punishment for a crime, expecting an individualist anarchic utopia, but finding another little world of corrupt governments, unethical bureaucracies, etc.
I've used an Android torrent app (also, an iOS one on a jailbroken iPod Touch). My LTE connection is a significant fraction of the speed of my cable internet connection. If I had my hardwired pipe saturated, and I "just had to" have something ASAP, I could imagine running a torrent on my phone. Or if I were a high schooler trying to hide my activities from tech-savvy parents, or something.
OK...those are kind of contrived scenarios. You might be surprised by some of the stupid things people do with tech, though.
...But they'll still become the sole basis of at least half of the comment threads.
If you don't like the restriction of GPL, XimpleWare also offers flexible commercial licenses for VTD-XML [contact info follows]
The software is distributed for free provided certain license terms are followed, and otherwise, a license can be purchased for it as a commercial product. This seems to be a case where the GPL-licensed version of the software was inappropriate, and Versata should've paid for a license. I think that it can be argued that there are real damages in this case.
It's standard C and C++ (and Java, for that matter). It's the pre-increment operator (Returns the incremented value, rather than the original value). Post-increment has to save the previous value, so that it can increment the variable and store it, then return the original value. Pre-increment doesn't have to make the extra copy, since what's being stored is the same as what's being returned. Most of the time, the difference is optimized away anyhow; the compiler realizes that you aren't immediately using the return value, so it just pre-increments the value without creating any extra copy.
And why ++i is faster than i++?
We use 24 fields at 320*270, interlaced vertically and horizontally, to provide a true 1920x1080 resolution picture to our customers, with field updates at 60FPS. Never mind that the whole screen only updates 2.5 times per second; we believe that this provides a full-quality experience, avoids upscaling the image, and nicely lines our pockets with your hard-earned, sweet, sweet cash.
--No one, Ever.
It's like a horizontally-interlaced version of 1080i, rather than 1080p. Imagine sweeping the view from left to right. Depending on the speed of rotation, there's a chance that the part of the screen that's under the even fields on one frame will be under the odd fields on the next frame. Overall, I'm sure it's better-quality than upscaled 960x1080p video would have been, but noticeably inferior to progressive-scan 1920x1080 video at 60fps (which is what Sony originally advertised it as, apparently).
I'm with you on the 1200-line monitors, though. The shape is much more pleasant than a 16:9 screen, and it can fit more information on it.
Weird. My data structures class was in Java, and we handled those just fine there.
Show me a bridge with a couple million moving parts, designed and built by a team of 5 people within 2 years and we'll be looking at two vaguely comparable structures. Also, the same bridge must be (without adjustment) equally suitable for placement in 10,000 different environments.
Bridges are built for reliability above all else. Most software is built for speed and flexibility. Apples and oranges.
It's useful to know how the CPU itself functions in the sense that the less of the computer is a black box, the more you'll understand of how to manipulate it.
Practically...well, my employer's codebase is a few dozen megabytes of C++ and Java source code, scripts in half a dozen languages, and maybe 10k of assembly for a time-critical section of code that a lot of compilers don't seem to get right if compiled from C. I've had to look at compiler-generated assembly code maybe twice in the last 6 years to diagnose some weird compiler bugs. Other than that? No, assembly hasn't been directly useful. I'd agree that bitwise manipulation *has* been though, and also an understanding of how C++ vtables work, how structs go into memory, etc.
On a hobby level, my interests skew toward the low-level view of things (emulation, reverse engineering DOS games, etc), and of course it's been absolutely indispensable in that realm of endeavor.
I graduated about 7 years ago, and we certainly had to learn that then (at least lexing and parsing). We never got to code generation, but I think that's because the professor was incompetent. It was certainly on the syllabus, after all.
I've got a couple of little boxes under my TVs that: can be controlled by my phone or a tablet (and not only Apple-produced ones), can stream video (and not only from 1 specific company). Maybe there's some niche they could've marketed to, but it doesn't come to mind.
And Jerry Gibson, a professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, says he's going to introduce the metric into two classes this year. For a winter quarter class on information theory, he will ask students to use the score to evaluate lossless compression algorithms. In a spring quarter class on multimedia compression, he will use the score in a similar way, but in this case, because the Weissman Score doesn't consider distortion introduced in lossy compression, he will expect the students to weight that factor as well.
The scoring method as stated is only useful for evaluating lossless compression. One could also take into account the resemblance of the output to the input to allow a modified version of the score to evaluate lossy compression.
It sounds more like an IoT prototyping board. The RJ-45 and wireless are for the "Internet" part of that, and the USB and GPIO are the interfaces to the "Things".
Bags still went through X-Rays then, and a determined person can still get weapons through security *now*. I'm more worried about someone coming into a school with an AK and grenades than I am the same thing on an airplane. Before, the assumption if someone showed up armed on a plane was that they were going to have it flown somewhere to ransom the passengers, and that you'd be best off staying quiet and giving the hijacker what they wanted. Now, you'd have a crowd of people tackling the guy, and there'd be no chance of a hijacking anyhow with the reinforced cockpit bulkheads. Those changes alone would mean that there are many more-attractive targets in the country.
You can believe what you want, but a tiger-repelling rock is still a tiger-repelling rock.
Very few phones work on both CDMA2000 networks (Verizon and Sprint) and GSM networks (AT&T and T-Mobile), and they're hard to find in U.S. stores.
If true (I don't keep track of which phones are available through whom and do what), I don't see what bearing that has on whether it's a good idea or a bad one to make it easier to force carriers to unlock the handsets that they sell. Even if there were *no* dual-network phones, you'd be able to move between a choice between two carriers (and the MVNOs of each), and that's better than being forced to buy a new phone.
Mail order doesn't let you hold the phone and get a feel for its size, weight, screen, and buttons before you buy.
Well, I can't argue with that; if you don't have physical access to a device, then you can't judge it first-hand based on its physical attributes. In my case, I went to the store of my chosen carrier, tried out their phones in the store, and bought a variant online that the store didn't carry. Having the opportunity to handle a phone before buying it varies on a case-by-case basis so much that I'm not quite sure why you mentioned it.
But that has little if nothing to do with law about "public spaces".
Defaria's comment, which I was replying to, seemed to badly confuse ownership, privacy, public access, etc, and was basically verging on being a conspiracy theory rant. I was trying to bring them back down to earth and temporarily ignoring the question of who, if anyone, was behaving reasonably in the situation.
The concept reminds me of a reverse-Vac-Man, where the dimples go in, instead of out.
Denver International Airport is owned and operated by the City and County of Denver Department of Aviation. It's public land. That aside, your comment doesn't make sense. Privately owned property can be operated as a public place, without affecting the ownership of the property. If I owned a restaurant, it would be my private property. By opening it for business and inviting customers in, it remains my privately-owned property, but it also becomes a public place, since I'm admitting the public to it. At night, when I close for the evening, I'm denying access to the public, and it's no longer a public place. That changes in the morning when I open the restaurant again.
None of that has anything to do with privacy, government regulation, government taxation, etc. Further, if you've let someone into your house, you haven't lost ownership of anything. You haven't even lost ownership if you open your house to the public; you've just made it a public space, until you say otherwise. If you invite specific friends in (rather than the public at large), not only does it stay in your possession, but it's also still a private place.