That is a fair point that I would concede to readily. My main issue with the summary/video is that it implies that MySQL is not appropriate for any use due to the OP's perception of flaws. Perhaps MySQL is not appropriate for his use in his highly strict operating environment for banking/science/medicine, etc.... but it's fine for government work!:-)
... oh and consumer-facing websites as you mentioned.
I find myself at a loss for words regarding you being stoned and bewildered. How about try smoking less dope so that you can think more normal? Allow me to hold your hand through this...specifically...
Someone entering a date of February 31st is a "strange situation", and is one that should have been caught by at least one level of data validation prior to attempting to store it in the database. That is but one of numerous examples of "strange situations" presented in the video, which I did in fact attentively watch in its entirety. If there is a solid case to be made for a switch to Postgres from MySQL then I want to see it and I was hoping to see it in this video, but alas I did not.
"Obscure error codes" are when you are searching for something of interest with your favorite search engine and you see a result that looks very promising and click on it only to be greeted with the likes of "Server 500 Error - System administrators have been notified". To the average end user, that is an obscure result and entirely worthless, and may have been the result of some operational condition breaking as a result of unforgivingly strict database server such as PostGres.
And by the way, it is absolutely necessary for MySQL to accept strings as integers and perform an atol() operation on them because the MySQL syntax allows you to quote all data values in the statement. Thus '0' and 0 are equivalent when directed to a numeric field. A value like 'A' going to the same numeric field would naturally translate to a 0. That's just common sense when you understand how the database works. If you're on board with forcing a user to input a number when a number is expected through input sanitizing/validation, then you should be equally OK with blocking February 31st at the same level.
Does this score points with delinquent juveniles? It's a counterproductive addition that makes the whole posting appear specious with respect to academic and scientific relevance.
I beg to differ - it's all a matter of philosophy. Do you want something that's a stubborn mule of a server that fights your every attempt to get something done, or would you prefer something that is more forgiving and let's you later discover your own personal logic flaws with a, "haha! whoops! There, fixed!" moment? The video for me only serves to further reinforce the reason I use MySQL. For one thing, I have never made any of the bone-headed programmer errors that the host illustrated, but I appreciate the way MySQL handles "strange" situations gracefully. My guess is that this has allowed Google to fill itself up with far more useful pages that have content on them than pages with an obscure error code because of yet another strict condition being broken with Postgres.
Sounds a little corporate, but I think everyone would benefit from *free* access to street-view quality satellite photos that are in the public domain. And maybe even, oh I don't know, updated regularly?
I think it's kind of interesting, though I recall kids being penalized more for being socially awkward, not for being smart. I realize there is some overlap, but it is not an exclusive relationship - there were plenty of... er... academically challenged kids that were equally awkward and who were tormented accordingly. The punks just couldn't get enough of preying on the weak, smart or no.
All criticisms aside, it seems to me that the immediate problem can be addressed with a price adjustment on retail services. This PDF provides some interesting rough figures to play around with on page 4. I am specifically looking at the first figure ($66B in revenue), the second figure (167.9B "pieces of mail" delivered), and comparing with the reported $15.9B loss. Adding $66B revenue (all spent cash) plus the additional $15.9B loss gives us a total of $81.9B operational expenses.
Now divide $66B in revenue by 167.9B pieces of mail delivered and we get an average revenue of about $0.39 per piece of mail delivered - that is less than the current price of a "forever" stamp which is $0.45. That means that some amount of mail is being handled for less than $0.45 which is averaging down the revenue per piece of mail by almost 14%. If we divide our total operational cost of $81.9B by167.9B pieces of mail, we get about $0.49 actual average cost per piece of mail. If we correct for the 14% averaging down, that brings us up to $0.56 per piece of mail.
So I propose raising the base price of the forever stamps from $0.45 to $0.56 and proportionately for other lesser cost mail as well (e.g.post cards, flyers, etc.) Is 11 cents really all that much to ask? This doesn't seem like that big of a problem to me. Furthermore, I think this spoiled new generation of citizens has become so accustomed to their daily conveniences that it takes a hurricane Sandy to remind them of the value of a payphone. Will it take a collapsed postal system to realize the value of mail delivery? How much would it cost you to deliver the same piece of mail via an alternative commercial carrier? (hint: a lot more) How much would it cost you to personally deliver it and use none of them? (hint: unbearably more)
I may not be the oldest cat in the alley here, but I have been cruising the commercialized web since 1995. I've seen a LOT of stuff come and go in web advertising and I must say that I feel like, with very few exceptions, web advertisements don't offend me. I honestly don't understand this foaming at the mouth over ads. Back in the day when they would generate relentless popup windows for which there was no prevention, yeah: seriously annoying. Like, hang it up and go read a book instead annoying. Today, the default browser pop-up blocker is almost completely effective at eliminating the lame stragglers that still haven't gotten the clue on this annoyance.
That aside, ads are worked into the site content, they are tucked off to the side and clearly marked as an advertisement, they are simple graphics without any blinking text. They are quite often relevant to the content I am reading and are a great way to accidentally discover something I didn't even know that I was missing out on. Let's take it back to the 1950's here - I am a consumer, and consumerism is freedom...! But seriously... these things do not bother me at all. If I want to pay attention to them I do. If I don't, I don't. What kind of mental breakdown causes people to have a strong, negative, emotional reaction to this?
Here's the short list of things that still irritate me:
* Advertisements that purport to be content along with a primarily content site. This is deceptive, uninformative, and in my opinion is a departure from journalistic integrity.
* Inline-ads that link specific keywords/phrases in the content that I am reading to some pop-up balloon that opens on mouseover. I want to be able to surf the site and reposition the mouse without being accosted.
* Flash/video content that starts playing (especially with audio) on page load. This is a waste of my limited bandwidth. If I'm waiting for something else to download, the last thing I need is a video stream that I did not request to slow everything down.
That's pretty much it. I'm even ok with the interstitial pages that show an ad before you get to the requested page so long as they have a "skip ad" link to be able to move past it immediately. It just doesn't bother me. Ultimately, as others have mentioned previously, I believe in advertising revenue supported services - it brought us newspapers, then magazines, then radio, television and now the Internet. If you take away that source of revenue then *everything* will either be a paid content model for corporate content (or some puke's blog that I don't care about) and that will be the end of the useful life of the Internet for me.
the difference is that you never know what some a-hole private individual is going to do with video footage of you including, but not limited to:
* Adding it to his private collection of masturbation material
* Posting it on YouTube for everyone to enjoy a good laugh at your expense
* Modify the material and use it for blackmail/extortion/public humiliation
* Worse?
With corporate cameras, odds are much higher that the footage is going onto a temporary buffer which will eventually (usually 1 week to 1 month kind of time frame) be wiped out and replaced by the next day's worth of footage. With corporate cameras, the fixed field of view, the image is general. With an asshat like this guy, you are specifically targeted (reference list above as to why that is a problem). Occasionally we see these situations in the news such as TSA staff intercepting and/or duplicating video/images of passengers moving through the line. That is not acceptable behavior. When they are caught, they should be terminated as their actions are inappropriate.
Pi is a non-terminating irrational number. You can't know it "all"... so conceivably an infinitely long number to represent an unfathomably (and for all intents and purposes, "infinitely") deep volume of data...? Sure, why not? The answer still comes out to 42.
Not only are the issues of scale a problem, but even if there were a plan for revitalization to rework the entire grid, there are only a couple entities with the resources to pull it off. The costs are enormous, the ROI a VERY long term proposition, and the federal/state/local legal resistance to making changes to infrastructure are endless.
For example, I would be all for having underground power and utilities, everywhere. No more unsightly telephone telephone/utility poles that require a continual source of replenishment, and no more risk of something hot falling down and zapping people, objects or landscape which is a common cause of fire. But the costs are enormous. Where would you trench the lines? Who would do all that work? Where would the revenue come from to pay for all that work. It's not as simple as burying an extension cord in your back yard. All totaled, this problem alone is so big that it just doesn't get touched.
And that's just door-to-door delivery. Managing changes to the greater grid infrastructure would be far worse. This is not federally regulated, so it's not like the government can just sweep in, throw a mandate and a bunch of money at it, and make it happen. That would take an act of Congress...
"For example, we could use DC lines for long distance electricity transportation."
Last I looked, Tesla won out over Edison on the A/C vs D/C thing specifically because A/C is more efficient at long distance transmission. Like, a lot more...
Look, I'm not the kind of guy who is interested in overrunning the planet with "progress", but your vision of a future where we cut energy requirements by 80% will never... ever... happen. We have to deal with reality. Reality has it that the masses are not going to cooperatively move toward some idealistic utopia. Beyond the sterile facts, figures, and efficiencies, are people, politics, and chaos in the world that real solutions have to navigate through. That invariably means stepping stones. If technology such as that in the article represents a stepping stone towards a viable solution, I'm all for it. If it means globally reducing dependence upon foreign energy sources, it could be a "win" all around.
If you think you have a better idea, then you should go out and raise a billion dollars and do something about it. The world is waiting. In the meantime, the naysayer thing is a bit tiresome.
... everyone has one, and Anonymous is no exception. Absent a gag order, due process has historically done little to thwart the expression of opinions or free speech, regardless of basis in fact/truth (or lack thereof). AFAIC, provided that they don't pose an obstruction of justice or investigation, Anonymous can discuss whoever they want whenever they want regarding public concerns - that alone does not make them vigilantes. Vigilantes are the ones who haphazardly take action. Speech is not action... hence the expression: actions speak louder than words...
I suppose the greatest risk here is the potential for ruinous libel of their target if they end up being wrong. Would Anonymous apologize or write a check?
I thought nand2tetris sounded pretty interesting. My hopes were deflated when I found that half of the reading material does not exist (chapters 7-12), and that the entire "computer" project is simulated virtual hardware. It's a bit ironic for the author(s) to so emphatica;;y profess a true understanding about computer hardware and then implement the entire concept in software. I was really hoping for some TTL breadboard / wirewrap / soldering... *something* tangible. It looks like interesting reading anyway, though there are already published books that cover most-to-all of this.
For my company, it's every 7 weeks with an 11-week lead time... but it's going to be different for everyone depending on their business requirements. For my company, we must QA/Beta every development release before it makes it to production for general availability. To this end, I have produced a schedule:
* 3 week scrum
* 2 week first-pass QA
* 2 week second-pass QA w/customer Beta
*** dev team starts the next scrum cycle here, overlapping with the 4-week marketing period that follows
* 4 week marketing (documentation, training, customer announcements, press releases, graphic/video collateral production)
At the end of the marketing period, we release on a specific, scheduled date/time for the service window. The advantages are:
* gives our customers structure without surprises
* clear communication both externally and internally
* affords the development team 4 weeks (during QA) to work on internal, non-customer-facing projects for refactoring, tools, monitoring, etc.
* gives plenty of time for the sales/marketing folks to ramp up in preparation for the release
* allows us to get crucial features to customers in as little as 5 weeks by way of the beta program (great for sales prospects on our long sales cycle)
* allows us to maintain a development calendar for the entire year with exact dates that we know we will meet which gives our sales/marketing team visibility into what is coming and when, and where they might want to shift the schedule to re-prioritize as needed
Ahead of each scrum I do a little planning for what major application features we will be adding, I break down each major feature into a set of smaller tasks, must-haves and nice-to-haves, and I ensure that the must-haves can all be achieved within 3 weeks given our resources. We have always been able to complete all the must haves and many nice-to-haves for each scrum cycle. We have never completed all the nice-to-haves, and may never go back to do them unless an internal/customer request has enough pressure behind it to add it to a future scrum cycle.
In terms of ensuring that this is all possible, it comes down to understanding the business requirements early in the project proposal and then delegating the balance of the project management to a single person who understands our application, understands the requirements, and can break the project down into pieces that can be absorbed into the agile methodology. Documentation is kept to a bare minimum until the scrum cycle is completed. We get on-time satisfaction of business requirements every time.
But it wasn't always this way. Two years ago we were still stuck in the classic waterfall project management model and as a result progress with the application stagnated by comparison to our competitors. Management was stuck in their 1980's mentality of planning everything before writing a single line of source code. I personally had to champion an agile approach to software development and demonstrate the advantages that came with it to get the buy-in necessary. At some point you need to "just do it" and get yourself out of the rut.
" It's about building a bond of trust and mutual friendship between the pokemon and trainer, which if properly fostered allows them to accomplish anything together."
I'm not buying it. Superficially, sure, that's the premise of the story that the Pokemon creators want the world to see. Great. But their portrayal, in fact, is a depiction of animals in pit fighting scenarios, and children and adults alike as spectators having the time of their lives subjecting the animals to this. I leave one of the small T.V. in the house on as background noise, usually on Cartoon Network and every morning I catch a portion of the day's Pokemon episode. And every day it's the same thing. Regardless of my feelings about PETA, my feeling about Pokemon is that I would not allow my child to watch that show to give them fun ideas about how to build a "bond of trust" with the cats. There's enough crap out there in the world to give kids bad ideas, and the less parents pay attention to this kind of stuff, the earlier the gears of society begin the process of subverting our youth.
The Voyager record contains audio and image data. I have digital copies of them on CD. it also contains some of the information that the Pioneer 10 plaque had related to reading the disk, and locating Earth's sun, as I posted as an AC above. Here's some more on Voyager's version which came as an improvement to the earlier Pioneer 10 plaque:
"[Carl] Sagan and his associates assembled 116 images and a variety of natural sounds (...) [as well as] musical selections from different cultures and eras, spoken greetings in fifty-five languages, and printed messages..."
If someone was to take a textbook from 50 or 70 years ago that was out of copyright...
You mean like the ones that taught us how women are supposed to be serving in the kitchen, that children should never speak, especially when Father is present, and that Father should not tolerate any insolence from either? Cultural/societal values present themselves in the darnedest places.
It may seem that simple on the surface, but in fact it is not. The language and message carried in books needs to be updated to reflect our current understanding of the world, and current cultural values and norms. Not every year, but every 5? 7? That's pretty normal for public school books to be replaced on 5 to 7 year intervals...
Search the web for the Texas School Board vs. school text books. I saw a documentary on this last year that was pretty enlightening (and alarming). At the end of the day, it's an economic play that determines what books end up getting selected, but during the course of the day, it's the folks in Texas who have a the most prominent voice over the content of the books, nation-wide.
Shifting the burden on to taxpayers instead of individuals actually changes nothing.
Actually, I would submit that shifting the burden does change something in this case. I don't know about the state of affairs in other states, but the California community college school system is over-booked for enrollment, and severely under capitalized from state funding. If the College were to shift to free books for the students, the school would lose out on the revenue stream that comes from all those students marching into the campus book store to pick up their copy, further compounding the funding problem for the schools.
The one possible advantage I foresee here is that the books are NOT free to students, but are instead free to the schools. The schools can (and should) customize their digital copies of the materials to suit their needs. They then sell (low cost) digital copies to pick up their normal margin without the typical overhead, or hard copies either printed and bound on site (moderate cost) or farmed out to a professional (high cost) on low volume print runs. One interesting form factor I have seen is a 3-ring binder version of my Calculus book - students can carry the book a chapter at a time in their binder right along with their notes and not have to carry that 15 lb, 1200 page unabridged version with them all the time. The question is: would the schools be prepared to get into doing all that for themselves?
There is nothing random about the problems selected in the books. They are carefully arranged to ensure that you see the various permutations that are possible to encounter. If it were as easy as randomly generating book material, it would have been done long ago. Furthermore, calculus, I think, would not be one of 50 "core" subjects to be covered.
Slashdot Mirror
That is a fair point that I would concede to readily. My main issue with the summary/video is that it implies that MySQL is not appropriate for any use due to the OP's perception of flaws. Perhaps MySQL is not appropriate for his use in his highly strict operating environment for banking/science/medicine, etc.... but it's fine for government work! :-)
... oh and consumer-facing websites as you mentioned.
I find myself at a loss for words regarding you being stoned and bewildered. How about try smoking less dope so that you can think more normal? Allow me to hold your hand through this...specifically...
Someone entering a date of February 31st is a "strange situation", and is one that should have been caught by at least one level of data validation prior to attempting to store it in the database. That is but one of numerous examples of "strange situations" presented in the video, which I did in fact attentively watch in its entirety. If there is a solid case to be made for a switch to Postgres from MySQL then I want to see it and I was hoping to see it in this video, but alas I did not.
"Obscure error codes" are when you are searching for something of interest with your favorite search engine and you see a result that looks very promising and click on it only to be greeted with the likes of "Server 500 Error - System administrators have been notified". To the average end user, that is an obscure result and entirely worthless, and may have been the result of some operational condition breaking as a result of unforgivingly strict database server such as PostGres.
And by the way, it is absolutely necessary for MySQL to accept strings as integers and perform an atol() operation on them because the MySQL syntax allows you to quote all data values in the statement. Thus '0' and 0 are equivalent when directed to a numeric field. A value like 'A' going to the same numeric field would naturally translate to a 0. That's just common sense when you understand how the database works. If you're on board with forcing a user to input a number when a number is expected through input sanitizing/validation, then you should be equally OK with blocking February 31st at the same level.
Clear as mud, or what?
"... or around 200,000 Blu-ray movie rips."
Does this score points with delinquent juveniles? It's a counterproductive addition that makes the whole posting appear specious with respect to academic and scientific relevance.
I beg to differ - it's all a matter of philosophy. Do you want something that's a stubborn mule of a server that fights your every attempt to get something done, or would you prefer something that is more forgiving and let's you later discover your own personal logic flaws with a, "haha! whoops! There, fixed!" moment? The video for me only serves to further reinforce the reason I use MySQL. For one thing, I have never made any of the bone-headed programmer errors that the host illustrated, but I appreciate the way MySQL handles "strange" situations gracefully. My guess is that this has allowed Google to fill itself up with far more useful pages that have content on them than pages with an obscure error code because of yet another strict condition being broken with Postgres.
Sounds a little corporate, but I think everyone would benefit from *free* access to street-view quality satellite photos that are in the public domain. And maybe even, oh I don't know, updated regularly?
That rover's name is Animosity.
I think it's kind of interesting, though I recall kids being penalized more for being socially awkward, not for being smart. I realize there is some overlap, but it is not an exclusive relationship - there were plenty of... er... academically challenged kids that were equally awkward and who were tormented accordingly. The punks just couldn't get enough of preying on the weak, smart or no.
All criticisms aside, it seems to me that the immediate problem can be addressed with a price adjustment on retail services. This PDF provides some interesting rough figures to play around with on page 4. I am specifically looking at the first figure ($66B in revenue), the second figure (167.9B "pieces of mail" delivered), and comparing with the reported $15.9B loss. Adding $66B revenue (all spent cash) plus the additional $15.9B loss gives us a total of $81.9B operational expenses.
Now divide $66B in revenue by 167.9B pieces of mail delivered and we get an average revenue of about $0.39 per piece of mail delivered - that is less than the current price of a "forever" stamp which is $0.45. That means that some amount of mail is being handled for less than $0.45 which is averaging down the revenue per piece of mail by almost 14%. If we divide our total operational cost of $81.9B by167.9B pieces of mail, we get about $0.49 actual average cost per piece of mail. If we correct for the 14% averaging down, that brings us up to $0.56 per piece of mail.
So I propose raising the base price of the forever stamps from $0.45 to $0.56 and proportionately for other lesser cost mail as well (e.g.post cards, flyers, etc.) Is 11 cents really all that much to ask? This doesn't seem like that big of a problem to me. Furthermore, I think this spoiled new generation of citizens has become so accustomed to their daily conveniences that it takes a hurricane Sandy to remind them of the value of a payphone. Will it take a collapsed postal system to realize the value of mail delivery? How much would it cost you to deliver the same piece of mail via an alternative commercial carrier? (hint: a lot more) How much would it cost you to personally deliver it and use none of them? (hint: unbearably more)
I may not be the oldest cat in the alley here, but I have been cruising the commercialized web since 1995. I've seen a LOT of stuff come and go in web advertising and I must say that I feel like, with very few exceptions, web advertisements don't offend me. I honestly don't understand this foaming at the mouth over ads. Back in the day when they would generate relentless popup windows for which there was no prevention, yeah: seriously annoying. Like, hang it up and go read a book instead annoying. Today, the default browser pop-up blocker is almost completely effective at eliminating the lame stragglers that still haven't gotten the clue on this annoyance.
That aside, ads are worked into the site content, they are tucked off to the side and clearly marked as an advertisement, they are simple graphics without any blinking text. They are quite often relevant to the content I am reading and are a great way to accidentally discover something I didn't even know that I was missing out on. Let's take it back to the 1950's here - I am a consumer, and consumerism is freedom...! But seriously... these things do not bother me at all. If I want to pay attention to them I do. If I don't, I don't. What kind of mental breakdown causes people to have a strong, negative, emotional reaction to this?
Here's the short list of things that still irritate me:
* Advertisements that purport to be content along with a primarily content site. This is deceptive, uninformative, and in my opinion is a departure from journalistic integrity.
* Inline-ads that link specific keywords/phrases in the content that I am reading to some pop-up balloon that opens on mouseover. I want to be able to surf the site and reposition the mouse without being accosted.
* Flash/video content that starts playing (especially with audio) on page load. This is a waste of my limited bandwidth. If I'm waiting for something else to download, the last thing I need is a video stream that I did not request to slow everything down.
That's pretty much it. I'm even ok with the interstitial pages that show an ad before you get to the requested page so long as they have a "skip ad" link to be able to move past it immediately. It just doesn't bother me. Ultimately, as others have mentioned previously, I believe in advertising revenue supported services - it brought us newspapers, then magazines, then radio, television and now the Internet. If you take away that source of revenue then *everything* will either be a paid content model for corporate content (or some puke's blog that I don't care about) and that will be the end of the useful life of the Internet for me.
the difference is that you never know what some a-hole private individual is going to do with video footage of you including, but not limited to:
* Adding it to his private collection of masturbation material
* Posting it on YouTube for everyone to enjoy a good laugh at your expense
* Modify the material and use it for blackmail/extortion/public humiliation
* Worse?
With corporate cameras, odds are much higher that the footage is going onto a temporary buffer which will eventually (usually 1 week to 1 month kind of time frame) be wiped out and replaced by the next day's worth of footage. With corporate cameras, the fixed field of view, the image is general. With an asshat like this guy, you are specifically targeted (reference list above as to why that is a problem). Occasionally we see these situations in the news such as TSA staff intercepting and/or duplicating video/images of passengers moving through the line. That is not acceptable behavior. When they are caught, they should be terminated as their actions are inappropriate.
"... then he loses the phone."
At which point you lose your parental advantages. That's quite the paradox...
Pi is a non-terminating irrational number. You can't know it "all"... so conceivably an infinitely long number to represent an unfathomably (and for all intents and purposes, "infinitely") deep volume of data...? Sure, why not? The answer still comes out to 42.
... are there any protections for the "crowd" in case one of the scientists loses their marbles?
*rimshot*
Not only are the issues of scale a problem, but even if there were a plan for revitalization to rework the entire grid, there are only a couple entities with the resources to pull it off. The costs are enormous, the ROI a VERY long term proposition, and the federal/state/local legal resistance to making changes to infrastructure are endless.
For example, I would be all for having underground power and utilities, everywhere. No more unsightly telephone telephone/utility poles that require a continual source of replenishment, and no more risk of something hot falling down and zapping people, objects or landscape which is a common cause of fire. But the costs are enormous. Where would you trench the lines? Who would do all that work? Where would the revenue come from to pay for all that work. It's not as simple as burying an extension cord in your back yard. All totaled, this problem alone is so big that it just doesn't get touched.
And that's just door-to-door delivery. Managing changes to the greater grid infrastructure would be far worse. This is not federally regulated, so it's not like the government can just sweep in, throw a mandate and a bunch of money at it, and make it happen. That would take an act of Congress...
"For example, we could use DC lines for long distance electricity transportation."
Last I looked, Tesla won out over Edison on the A/C vs D/C thing specifically because A/C is more efficient at long distance transmission. Like, a lot more...
Look, I'm not the kind of guy who is interested in overrunning the planet with "progress", but your vision of a future where we cut energy requirements by 80% will never... ever... happen. We have to deal with reality. Reality has it that the masses are not going to cooperatively move toward some idealistic utopia. Beyond the sterile facts, figures, and efficiencies, are people, politics, and chaos in the world that real solutions have to navigate through. That invariably means stepping stones. If technology such as that in the article represents a stepping stone towards a viable solution, I'm all for it. If it means globally reducing dependence upon foreign energy sources, it could be a "win" all around.
If you think you have a better idea, then you should go out and raise a billion dollars and do something about it. The world is waiting. In the meantime, the naysayer thing is a bit tiresome.
... everyone has one, and Anonymous is no exception. Absent a gag order, due process has historically done little to thwart the expression of opinions or free speech, regardless of basis in fact/truth (or lack thereof). AFAIC, provided that they don't pose an obstruction of justice or investigation, Anonymous can discuss whoever they want whenever they want regarding public concerns - that alone does not make them vigilantes. Vigilantes are the ones who haphazardly take action. Speech is not action... hence the expression: actions speak louder than words...
I suppose the greatest risk here is the potential for ruinous libel of their target if they end up being wrong. Would Anonymous apologize or write a check?
I thought nand2tetris sounded pretty interesting. My hopes were deflated when I found that half of the reading material does not exist (chapters 7-12), and that the entire "computer" project is simulated virtual hardware. It's a bit ironic for the author(s) to so emphatica;;y profess a true understanding about computer hardware and then implement the entire concept in software. I was really hoping for some TTL breadboard / wirewrap / soldering... *something* tangible. It looks like interesting reading anyway, though there are already published books that cover most-to-all of this.
For my company, it's every 7 weeks with an 11-week lead time ... but it's going to be different for everyone depending on their business requirements. For my company, we must QA/Beta every development release before it makes it to production for general availability. To this end, I have produced a schedule:
* 3 week scrum
* 2 week first-pass QA
* 2 week second-pass QA w/customer Beta
*** dev team starts the next scrum cycle here, overlapping with the 4-week marketing period that follows
* 4 week marketing (documentation, training, customer announcements, press releases, graphic/video collateral production)
At the end of the marketing period, we release on a specific, scheduled date/time for the service window. The advantages are:
* gives our customers structure without surprises
* clear communication both externally and internally
* affords the development team 4 weeks (during QA) to work on internal, non-customer-facing projects for refactoring, tools, monitoring, etc.
* gives plenty of time for the sales/marketing folks to ramp up in preparation for the release
* allows us to get crucial features to customers in as little as 5 weeks by way of the beta program (great for sales prospects on our long sales cycle)
* allows us to maintain a development calendar for the entire year with exact dates that we know we will meet which gives our sales/marketing team visibility into what is coming and when, and where they might want to shift the schedule to re-prioritize as needed
Ahead of each scrum I do a little planning for what major application features we will be adding, I break down each major feature into a set of smaller tasks, must-haves and nice-to-haves, and I ensure that the must-haves can all be achieved within 3 weeks given our resources. We have always been able to complete all the must haves and many nice-to-haves for each scrum cycle. We have never completed all the nice-to-haves, and may never go back to do them unless an internal/customer request has enough pressure behind it to add it to a future scrum cycle.
In terms of ensuring that this is all possible, it comes down to understanding the business requirements early in the project proposal and then delegating the balance of the project management to a single person who understands our application, understands the requirements, and can break the project down into pieces that can be absorbed into the agile methodology. Documentation is kept to a bare minimum until the scrum cycle is completed. We get on-time satisfaction of business requirements every time.
But it wasn't always this way. Two years ago we were still stuck in the classic waterfall project management model and as a result progress with the application stagnated by comparison to our competitors. Management was stuck in their 1980's mentality of planning everything before writing a single line of source code. I personally had to champion an agile approach to software development and demonstrate the advantages that came with it to get the buy-in necessary. At some point you need to "just do it" and get yourself out of the rut.
" It's about building a bond of trust and mutual friendship between the pokemon and trainer, which if properly fostered allows them to accomplish anything together."
I'm not buying it. Superficially, sure, that's the premise of the story that the Pokemon creators want the world to see. Great. But their portrayal, in fact, is a depiction of animals in pit fighting scenarios, and children and adults alike as spectators having the time of their lives subjecting the animals to this. I leave one of the small T.V. in the house on as background noise, usually on Cartoon Network and every morning I catch a portion of the day's Pokemon episode. And every day it's the same thing. Regardless of my feelings about PETA, my feeling about Pokemon is that I would not allow my child to watch that show to give them fun ideas about how to build a "bond of trust" with the cats. There's enough crap out there in the world to give kids bad ideas, and the less parents pay attention to this kind of stuff, the earlier the gears of society begin the process of subverting our youth.
The Voyager record contains audio and image data. I have digital copies of them on CD. it also contains some of the information that the Pioneer 10 plaque had related to reading the disk, and locating Earth's sun, as I posted as an AC above. Here's some more on Voyager's version which came as an improvement to the earlier Pioneer 10 plaque:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record
"[Carl] Sagan and his associates assembled 116 images and a variety of natural sounds (...) [as well as] musical selections from different cultures and eras, spoken greetings in fifty-five languages, and printed messages..."
Thanks for that link to sensible-math-education - after a quick scan, it looks like an interesting read!
If someone was to take a textbook from 50 or 70 years ago that was out of copyright...
You mean like the ones that taught us how women are supposed to be serving in the kitchen, that children should never speak, especially when Father is present, and that Father should not tolerate any insolence from either? Cultural/societal values present themselves in the darnedest places.
It may seem that simple on the surface, but in fact it is not. The language and message carried in books needs to be updated to reflect our current understanding of the world, and current cultural values and norms. Not every year, but every 5? 7? That's pretty normal for public school books to be replaced on 5 to 7 year intervals...
Search the web for the Texas School Board vs. school text books. I saw a documentary on this last year that was pretty enlightening (and alarming). At the end of the day, it's an economic play that determines what books end up getting selected, but during the course of the day, it's the folks in Texas who have a the most prominent voice over the content of the books, nation-wide.
Shifting the burden on to taxpayers instead of individuals actually changes nothing.
Actually, I would submit that shifting the burden does change something in this case. I don't know about the state of affairs in other states, but the California community college school system is over-booked for enrollment, and severely under capitalized from state funding. If the College were to shift to free books for the students, the school would lose out on the revenue stream that comes from all those students marching into the campus book store to pick up their copy, further compounding the funding problem for the schools.
The one possible advantage I foresee here is that the books are NOT free to students, but are instead free to the schools. The schools can (and should) customize their digital copies of the materials to suit their needs. They then sell (low cost) digital copies to pick up their normal margin without the typical overhead, or hard copies either printed and bound on site (moderate cost) or farmed out to a professional (high cost) on low volume print runs. One interesting form factor I have seen is a 3-ring binder version of my Calculus book - students can carry the book a chapter at a time in their binder right along with their notes and not have to carry that 15 lb, 1200 page unabridged version with them all the time. The question is: would the schools be prepared to get into doing all that for themselves?
There is nothing random about the problems selected in the books. They are carefully arranged to ensure that you see the various permutations that are possible to encounter. If it were as easy as randomly generating book material, it would have been done long ago. Furthermore, calculus, I think, would not be one of 50 "core" subjects to be covered.