I would not suggest iPad 2. It suffers from horrible lags when web browsing that are frustrating to the point of unusability. Obviously, it doesn't handle flash sites. It has much less available in the way of quality free apps. The user interface is dumbed down or broken in many little ways that make the experience one long chain of annoyances.
Why do people make this stuff up? It's OK to hate something and not use it without the FUD. You can find legitimate weak spots on any platform but at least have the guts to specifically call them out so we can discuss or debunk.
"Obviously, it doesn't handle flash sites." is a fact, the rest could be considered opinion - it is possible neither are made up.
I'd use the app, and not disclose shit about it. If you get laid off they can write a support contract if they need to.
If you've got that much time on your hands, you might just code it to periodically "expire..." since they didn't pay you to make it in the first place, they certainly shouldn't have a say in how it does, or doesn't work. Just don't expect to use them as reference for future employment.
You shouldn't be too hung up on job description and title. You are being paid for your time at the office, if you can write the apps on the clock, then consider them part of your job and a demonstration of why you should be promoted when a position becomes available, or retained when layoffs come around.
Oh, and don't write anything that makes your position redundant, that's just... the mark of a non-critical thinker. If you are writing apps off the clock, don't write them for work, find some other interest in your life and write apps for that - if you don't have other interests outside of the crappy job you describe, I'd consider getting out and living a life a much higher priority than trolling/. for advice on how to get paid for writing software that nobody asked for.
I'm curious what fund raising for celiac disease is truly needed. As someone with it, it's as simple as not eating gluten, and that's as simple as not eating grains (they're not good for you anyway). The only trouble is eating out or with otherwise unlabelled food.
My son has been on a Gluten Free diet for seven years now, if nothing else, the growing awareness (popularity, if you will) of GF during that time has made it much easier for us to find food for him (and now, me) - not sure if we're Celiac or not, he gets pretty seriously wigged out (mental fog) from gluten, as for me, I had some fairly annoying arthritis symptoms in the knees and wrists that go away if I stay off the gluten/grains. I really like the GF shelf tags that are starting to show up in our grocery store, and the (still too few and far between) products that are making an effort to go GF.
Without "awareness" campaigning, I don't think this would have happened (7 years ago, most people looked at you like you had two heads when you told them you don't let your child eat wheat), and awareness, like anything else, costs money. Sad but true. I think "GF awareness/acceptance" still has a long way to go.
Don't get me wrong, I'd like to see every coal fired plant in the Western Hemisphere shut down and replaced with 1.3x the nuclear generation capacity. But, what I want are "new" nuclear plant designs, "new" like the stuff they were coming up with in the 1980s after TMI and 30 years of experience in running the things. The big accidents have not happened because of the age of the plants, but I do believe the big accidents could have been a lot smaller if the old plant designs had been retired and replaced with new ones. We shouldn't be limping these things from the 1960s along and refusing to build new capacity, but, that's the "Green" mentality - fight the fight, regardless of whether or not your obstructions and protests are actually making things worse instead of better.
Moore's Law is doing a lot for space, but it isn't making lift cost to orbit any cheaper. Also, the really cutting edge microchips don't play well with high energy electrons beaming into them.
They werent designed with a maximum lifespan in mind. the "design lifespan" was based on financial decisions, but it was never the intent to make the plants only last 40 years.
additionally, they didnt have computers and methods to compute very specifically what 40 years would do to a plant or vessel, and we are finding that they went so far overboard in the conservatisms that we can easily get to 60 years and still maintain more than the required safety margins with no compromise in safety.
And, yet, in less than 60 years, we have had, what, like four "once a millenia" nuclear power generation disaster events so far?
A) are you a military pilot with thousands of hours in high-performance jets? If not, forget anything resembling a "pilot" seat.
In my opinion, NASA shouldn't have this stupid fixation on pilots.
Agree, totally. However, I happen to know a company that was bidding on UAS (unmanned) patrol of the launch area at Kennedy, they put together a good proposal with a tremendous efficacy for expenditure ratio compared to manned aerial patrols (in other words, take just one manned plane out of the sky pre-launch and have a bunch of drones up for the same money, get better coverage). The proposal was killed, outright, shot in the back of the head by a high level admin who stated categorically "we do manned missions here, we are not interested in any kind of unmanned systems."
Kind of like homophobia, but against robots. And, most of what Kennedy launches are, in fact, robots.
Lack of communicative ability manifests not only in the speaker/writer, but also the listener/reader. Going off the deep end about whose fault it was is usually a case of "three more fingers pointing back at you..."
Yet you continue to argue slippery slope fallacy based on nothing but absolute science fiction.
A fusion reaction under water can burn all the water in the oceans? Really? We've actually done the "bomb under water" thing and the oceans are still here, guy.
And, you continue to miss the point, I am not worried about these things, these are the things that the media pumps up about the "science" they report on, past and present. I left out the black hole from the LHC...
There's a sick cosmic irony in flying to space on the rockets of your former competitors. Considering the cool stuff NASA was doing with Apollo there isn't an excuse for not having a moon base by now.
Actually, it's the same good excuse as for why nobody has built a permanent underwater city yet... not economically viable. Sure, we could do it, but, why? Actually, I believe that if we said "damn the accountants" and did it anyway (Lunar or undersea), we'd get a good ROI from all the spinoff from the R&D required to pull it off - that's how it worked developing heavy lift ICBMs with a "for all mankind" glossy PR campaign painted on them.
I interviewed with NRC in 1991, they had "just approved" a new "advanced, passive cooling, highly safe" reactor design then. I asked the interviewer what my prospects were in an industry that hadn't built a single new facility in over 15 years, his response: "Oh, quite good, these new designs are coming online real soon now...."
Fast forward 20 years... new design approved, but, will it be built? Or, will we continue to operate reactors that are dependent on powered pumps for cooling water, designed in the 1960s for a 30 year maximum lifespan? The correct answer is likely not the good answer.
most closed and patent-restricted technologies out there. Teaching ARM is the equivalent to teaching Visual Basic Programming, common but very closed architecture.
And, is there room for more than one or two competing products in this niche?
If, by niche, you mean sub $100 ready to go project boards with USB and HDMI? I don't know of any others just lying around at the moment. Beagle / Panda are getting close, but they are a) bigger, and b) more expensive.
In the sub $100 project board space, there always seems to be room for a bunch of players, kind of like "free games."
A) are you a military pilot with thousands of hours in high-performance jets? If not, forget anything resembling a "pilot" seat.
B) do you regularly publish world-class scientific papers, travel the world on exotic geology expeditions, and run highly successful educational programs all across the world? Or, any three or four similar accomplishments, before age 25... If not, you're not competitive in the "outstanding scientist" category.
C) are you a talented engineer or other professional? If so, you're more valuable on the ground than in front of the world television spotlight.
Sorry to be cynical, when I was 6 years old (1973) "astronaut" was a valid answer to the "what do you want to be when you grow up?" question. In 1973, space travel seemed like it was "going places," but, so far, it hasn't. You would have been much more realistic if you aspired to be a NFL quarterback or highly recognized movie star starting at age 6 in 1973.
Let's hope things are better than they seem for the future of space travel, now nearly 40 years later.
I designed a small space for 6 workstations that was used for 2 years, it was pretty popular among the students, they hung out there and worked all hours of the day and night, usually 4 or 5 of the workstations were occupied during "normal working" hours. Then, I was asked to design the upgraded lab with 18 terminals in a larger space. The main thing I asked for from a lighting/facility aspect was workspace spotlights (in those days, incandescent lights in a can which throw a spot on the desk but not on the screens - today I'd go LED), and I asked for 72" desks because our students worked in pairs. I arranged the 18 desks in a sort of random/scattered layout (both for the 6 and 18 terminal labs), which put most workstations in a semi-isolated space, usually with at most one other workstation in a "hey, can you tell me..." line of sight asking distance.
Well, it was 20+ years ago, so I don't remember if I actually got the can-spots or not, what I do remember was that the man in charge said "thanks a lot for the design, but we're going to lay them out in rows so that when a visitor looks in the window from the hallway they will see all the screens, it's impressive." Yeah, it was impressive alright. The desks shrank to 54" to make 3 rows of 6 work in the available space, people were on each other's elbows all the time and, generally speaking, no more than 3 or 4 workstations were ever occupied at a time because people felt cramped if more than half the terminals were full, so they generally stayed away except for absolutely required lab time.
And, I do agree - I am the guy that puts my FTP and HTTP ports on random numbers, not because I think it makes them secure, but because I believe that, in practice, they will take more than 30,000 times as long to fall to the hackers (probably much longer since most hackers spend their time banging away on 21 and 80 instead of searching the whole space.)
However, I would much rather have some kind of responsibility among the press about spreading this tripe around - not sure how to do that without putting a muzzle on them, and the muzzle is arguably worse than the stuff they spout about. The scientists need to do the studies in order to understand what's possible and what's possible to do about it. The public may need to know a bit about what's possible, though I think we (the public) are woefully under-informed on reality and over-fed on Hollywood hype.
Don't get me wrong. Study of viruses, EMP, nuclear fusion, and all manner of potentially highly destructive things is good - extrapolating the results for the general public (virus can kill everyone, EMP can demolish society, fusion explosion underwater can create a chain reaction burning all the water in the oceans...) is what I am opposed to.
Slashdot Mirror
I would not suggest iPad 2. It suffers from horrible lags when web browsing that are frustrating to the point of unusability. Obviously, it doesn't handle flash sites. It has much less available in the way of quality free apps. The user interface is dumbed down or broken in many little ways that make the experience one long chain of annoyances.
Why do people make this stuff up? It's OK to hate something and not use it without the FUD. You can find legitimate weak spots on any platform but at least have the guts to specifically call them out so we can discuss or debunk.
"Obviously, it doesn't handle flash sites." is a fact, the rest could be considered opinion - it is possible neither are made up.
I'd use the app, and not disclose shit about it. If you get laid off they can write a support contract if they need to.
If you've got that much time on your hands, you might just code it to periodically "expire..." since they didn't pay you to make it in the first place, they certainly shouldn't have a say in how it does, or doesn't work. Just don't expect to use them as reference for future employment.
You shouldn't be too hung up on job description and title. You are being paid for your time at the office, if you can write the apps on the clock, then consider them part of your job and a demonstration of why you should be promoted when a position becomes available, or retained when layoffs come around.
Oh, and don't write anything that makes your position redundant, that's just... the mark of a non-critical thinker. If you are writing apps off the clock, don't write them for work, find some other interest in your life and write apps for that - if you don't have other interests outside of the crappy job you describe, I'd consider getting out and living a life a much higher priority than trolling /. for advice on how to get paid for writing software that nobody asked for.
I'm curious what fund raising for celiac disease is truly needed. As someone with it, it's as simple as not eating gluten, and that's as simple as not eating grains (they're not good for you anyway). The only trouble is eating out or with otherwise unlabelled food.
My son has been on a Gluten Free diet for seven years now, if nothing else, the growing awareness (popularity, if you will) of GF during that time has made it much easier for us to find food for him (and now, me) - not sure if we're Celiac or not, he gets pretty seriously wigged out (mental fog) from gluten, as for me, I had some fairly annoying arthritis symptoms in the knees and wrists that go away if I stay off the gluten/grains. I really like the GF shelf tags that are starting to show up in our grocery store, and the (still too few and far between) products that are making an effort to go GF.
Without "awareness" campaigning, I don't think this would have happened (7 years ago, most people looked at you like you had two heads when you told them you don't let your child eat wheat), and awareness, like anything else, costs money. Sad but true. I think "GF awareness/acceptance" still has a long way to go.
Don't get me wrong, I'd like to see every coal fired plant in the Western Hemisphere shut down and replaced with 1.3x the nuclear generation capacity. But, what I want are "new" nuclear plant designs, "new" like the stuff they were coming up with in the 1980s after TMI and 30 years of experience in running the things. The big accidents have not happened because of the age of the plants, but I do believe the big accidents could have been a lot smaller if the old plant designs had been retired and replaced with new ones. We shouldn't be limping these things from the 1960s along and refusing to build new capacity, but, that's the "Green" mentality - fight the fight, regardless of whether or not your obstructions and protests are actually making things worse instead of better.
A great little router that you hook up to a spare HDMI in on your 50" flat-screen for one helluva network status display.
Moore's Law is doing a lot for space, but it isn't making lift cost to orbit any cheaper. Also, the really cutting edge microchips don't play well with high energy electrons beaming into them.
They werent designed with a maximum lifespan in mind. the "design lifespan" was based on financial decisions, but it was never the intent to make the plants only last 40 years.
additionally, they didnt have computers and methods to compute very specifically what 40 years would do to a plant or vessel, and we are finding that they went so far overboard in the conservatisms that we can easily get to 60 years and still maintain more than the required safety margins with no compromise in safety.
And, yet, in less than 60 years, we have had, what, like four "once a millenia" nuclear power generation disaster events so far?
A) are you a military pilot with thousands of hours in high-performance jets? If not, forget anything resembling a "pilot" seat.
In my opinion, NASA shouldn't have this stupid fixation on pilots.
Agree, totally. However, I happen to know a company that was bidding on UAS (unmanned) patrol of the launch area at Kennedy, they put together a good proposal with a tremendous efficacy for expenditure ratio compared to manned aerial patrols (in other words, take just one manned plane out of the sky pre-launch and have a bunch of drones up for the same money, get better coverage). The proposal was killed, outright, shot in the back of the head by a high level admin who stated categorically "we do manned missions here, we are not interested in any kind of unmanned systems."
Kind of like homophobia, but against robots. And, most of what Kennedy launches are, in fact, robots.
Lack of communicative ability manifests not only in the speaker/writer, but also the listener/reader. Going off the deep end about whose fault it was is usually a case of "three more fingers pointing back at you..."
You know the Tesla Roadster has nothing to do with gaming or computer hardware, right?
And there is a need for that... Ohhh so much of a need...
Lust is lust.
I never liked GoDaddy much in the first place.
Yet you continue to argue slippery slope fallacy based on nothing but absolute science fiction.
A fusion reaction under water can burn all the water in the oceans? Really? We've actually done the "bomb under water" thing and the oceans are still here, guy.
And, you continue to miss the point, I am not worried about these things, these are the things that the media pumps up about the "science" they report on, past and present. I left out the black hole from the LHC...
"While being fit is important for space vocations, I suspect most of the fitness requirements center around looking sexy for TV."
For a supposedly smart person you are extremely ignorant of the physical rigors of high velocity travel.
But, he's also right that you need to look good for promotional purposes.
There's a sick cosmic irony in flying to space on the rockets of your former competitors. Considering the cool stuff NASA was doing with Apollo there isn't an excuse for not having a moon base by now.
Actually, it's the same good excuse as for why nobody has built a permanent underwater city yet... not economically viable. Sure, we could do it, but, why? Actually, I believe that if we said "damn the accountants" and did it anyway (Lunar or undersea), we'd get a good ROI from all the spinoff from the R&D required to pull it off - that's how it worked developing heavy lift ICBMs with a "for all mankind" glossy PR campaign painted on them.
I interviewed with NRC in 1991, they had "just approved" a new "advanced, passive cooling, highly safe" reactor design then. I asked the interviewer what my prospects were in an industry that hadn't built a single new facility in over 15 years, his response: "Oh, quite good, these new designs are coming online real soon now...."
Fast forward 20 years... new design approved, but, will it be built? Or, will we continue to operate reactors that are dependent on powered pumps for cooling water, designed in the 1960s for a 30 year maximum lifespan? The correct answer is likely not the good answer.
so they seem to be giving the middle finger to the USB specs.
Like the iPad?
most closed and patent-restricted technologies out there. Teaching ARM is the equivalent to teaching Visual Basic Programming, common but very closed architecture.
So it's not really open....
Take a look at Qt on Pi...
And, is there room for more than one or two competing products in this niche?
If, by niche, you mean sub $100 ready to go project boards with USB and HDMI? I don't know of any others just lying around at the moment. Beagle / Panda are getting close, but they are a) bigger, and b) more expensive.
In the sub $100 project board space, there always seems to be room for a bunch of players, kind of like "free games."
What the heck is the attraction of these stupid mini and micro USB connectors anyway?
The Raspberry heads stated that they wanted to be compatible with cheap phone chargers...
Serious Question
Which major distributions still come with KDE as the default option.
Serious answer: Kubuntu.
Short answer: no.
Longer answer:
A) are you a military pilot with thousands of hours in high-performance jets? If not, forget anything resembling a "pilot" seat.
B) do you regularly publish world-class scientific papers, travel the world on exotic geology expeditions, and run highly successful educational programs all across the world? Or, any three or four similar accomplishments, before age 25... If not, you're not competitive in the "outstanding scientist" category.
C) are you a talented engineer or other professional? If so, you're more valuable on the ground than in front of the world television spotlight.
Sorry to be cynical, when I was 6 years old (1973) "astronaut" was a valid answer to the "what do you want to be when you grow up?" question. In 1973, space travel seemed like it was "going places," but, so far, it hasn't. You would have been much more realistic if you aspired to be a NFL quarterback or highly recognized movie star starting at age 6 in 1973.
Let's hope things are better than they seem for the future of space travel, now nearly 40 years later.
I designed a small space for 6 workstations that was used for 2 years, it was pretty popular among the students, they hung out there and worked all hours of the day and night, usually 4 or 5 of the workstations were occupied during "normal working" hours. Then, I was asked to design the upgraded lab with 18 terminals in a larger space. The main thing I asked for from a lighting/facility aspect was workspace spotlights (in those days, incandescent lights in a can which throw a spot on the desk but not on the screens - today I'd go LED), and I asked for 72" desks because our students worked in pairs. I arranged the 18 desks in a sort of random/scattered layout (both for the 6 and 18 terminal labs), which put most workstations in a semi-isolated space, usually with at most one other workstation in a "hey, can you tell me..." line of sight asking distance.
Well, it was 20+ years ago, so I don't remember if I actually got the can-spots or not, what I do remember was that the man in charge said "thanks a lot for the design, but we're going to lay them out in rows so that when a visitor looks in the window from the hallway they will see all the screens, it's impressive." Yeah, it was impressive alright. The desks shrank to 54" to make 3 rows of 6 work in the available space, people were on each other's elbows all the time and, generally speaking, no more than 3 or 4 workstations were ever occupied at a time because people felt cramped if more than half the terminals were full, so they generally stayed away except for absolutely required lab time.
And, I do agree - I am the guy that puts my FTP and HTTP ports on random numbers, not because I think it makes them secure, but because I believe that, in practice, they will take more than 30,000 times as long to fall to the hackers (probably much longer since most hackers spend their time banging away on 21 and 80 instead of searching the whole space.)
However, I would much rather have some kind of responsibility among the press about spreading this tripe around - not sure how to do that without putting a muzzle on them, and the muzzle is arguably worse than the stuff they spout about. The scientists need to do the studies in order to understand what's possible and what's possible to do about it. The public may need to know a bit about what's possible, though I think we (the public) are woefully under-informed on reality and over-fed on Hollywood hype.
Don't get me wrong. Study of viruses, EMP, nuclear fusion, and all manner of potentially highly destructive things is good - extrapolating the results for the general public (virus can kill everyone, EMP can demolish society, fusion explosion underwater can create a chain reaction burning all the water in the oceans...) is what I am opposed to.