That is just not true. Amazon guarantees that the Kindle price will always be less than the dead tree edition. I've never seen the kindle edition of a book which has begun selling trade paperbacks be $9.99. Occasionally the price at Borders or Barnes & Noble will be cheaper because they have the hardcover on sale for 40% off, and the Kindle price is only 30% off the listed hardcover price, though if you can wait a week or two for new releases the price goes down from the price on the release date.
I've owned the original Kindle for over a year now and as a business traveler it's amazing. Instead of stuffing a couple paperbacks in my carry on, I take my kindle. If I'm out of books to read, I browse the amazon store from the terminal, which is substantially cheaper than say Hudson News.
When I travel internationally to non-english speaking countries, meaning no english tv channels, I usually load up half a dozen books in advance to keep me occupied. Since the wireless obviously only works in the states.
Why a kindle and not an book reader app on my laptop? The visual quality of the e-ink display is amazing. I can easily read text from any angle while on the beach in direct sunlight and wearing polarized sunglasses, lets see you do that with a laptop. Additionally the battery life is what makes the device usable. I can read for days between charges with the wireless on and over a week with it off. I do wish they would just list hours of battery life, not weeks of "nominal use" since I'm a heavier reader than most, I've never gotten 2 weeks of charge time with the wireless off, so that metric is useless.
My biggest complaint is that I have to turn off the Kindle for takeoff and landing.
The Chaos Computer Club made a "FreedomStick" for journalists traveling to China to cover the Olympics. It includes software that automatically uses firefox+tor etc.. More Info Here: http://chinesewall.ccc.de/index-en.html
How are you getting modded up? They did not deactivate any content that was already delivered, they only cancelled the subscriptions tied to his amazon account and barred him from the Amazon Store. It may be harsh, but it's not what you think it is.
As a Kindle owner I understand that losing access to amazon.com from your Kindle seems like remote deactivation, but let me assure you it's not the same thing.
1) Any previously purchased books would continue to work. 2) Any books transferred to the device via USB will work just fine 3) The device was not remotely deactivated, he merely lost access to Amazon's services over Whispernet (EVDO).
Cancelling his subscriptions is well within their rights as vendors should they choose that they no longer wish to do business with him, assuming that their contract allows it, which is a safe assumption.
He is still able to use the device to read any number of books bought from other outlets, the problem with that is where else would he buy ebooks? I'm not saying it's right, but I see where Amazon is coming from and I think they have a right to protect their own interests. If he violated their terms of service and had his amazon account suspended, that's his own fault. The fact his Kindle is tied to that account is incidental.
The Level A systems I worked with did stuff like engine monitoring for helicopters; Attitude Displacement Indicators, Horizontal Speed Indicator with slip slide bar, traffic collision avoidance, color weather radar, and 3-d terrain plotting with runways and such for military and commercial aircraft. Basically anything monitoring the health of a critical system or being used for real time navigation needs to be level A.
There are similar requirements for determining how critical mechanical systems are and what sort of redundancy is required. For instance level B systems can be downgraded to level C if you double the hardware to make it redundant.
Developing level A software is all about process. Certification requires that you strictly follow the waterfall model of development to the point of naming the artifacts required to transition to the next phase in development. System Requirements flow to Software Requirements to Design to Detailed Design to Code to Unit Test to Integration Testing and finally System Testing with traceability forwards and backwards from system requirements to system tests, such that every test case and even every line of code, is linked to requirements and design, nothing more, nothing less. Periodically throughout the process the customer might send auditors to observe the adherence to this process and collect artifacts for review. Basically its the worst job ever, its the most tedious, boring thing I've ever accepted money to do. At least no one dies when the Slashdot Editors post a dupe.
The horror you described is for Level C certification. Level B has the requirement of testing each implied else. Meaning for every standalone if statement, you have one test that makes sure it does the right thing when the conditions are true, and a second test which makes sure that thing does not happen when the conditions are not true.
Level A certification requires Modified Condition Decision Coverage (MCDC). The means a test case must exist for every possible logical combination of terms for every conditional expression. These are extensions of the structural coverage requirements for Level C which is only statement coverage, every line has to be exercised at least once by a test case.
This sort of exhaustive testing is done because of a very different operating environment from desktop software. Desktops don't have single bit events. A single bit event occurs when a gamma ray strikes a 0 in RAM and turns it into a 1. As a result some places forbid the use of pointers in their code, since a single bit event could have catastrophic consequences. Every function has to be tested to be able to best withstand random garbage input and fail gracefully since you cannot rely on RAM storing values correctly.
However, the medical industry has similar guidelines for things like X-Ray machines and ventilators, which I believe have a very similar set of best practices codified into a certification process. Depending on the certification level, the cost of testing varies. It is VERY expensive to develop software this way since Test Driven Development doesn't cut it. For these industries the testers need to be independent of the developers meaning developers don't write their own unit tests, which in turn leads to more cumbersome software processes.
I still work in safety critical embedded software, but am eternally thankful I no longer have to worry about certification with a mandated software process. I now write software for boats instead of planes and have started doing model based controls design, test driven development, and in general have tailored the software process to best suit the company. The goal is to produce better software faster, in order to respond to changing business needs, not to fill out checklists to pass audits. The FAA process is the most reliable way to the highest quality software possible; it is not efficient, cheap, or even modern.
I think you missed the point. The point is that this can be repaired with car parts by a mechanic and is more robust than the higher tech units. Having cheaper more robust technology is important for developing nations since it allows first world countries to help bootstrap improvements to their quality of life. While I can't speak to how many hospitals are lacking electricity, I would say this is going to enrich the lives of many people around the world and is definitely a good thing.
You can engineer maintainability. You won't know how successful that effort was until after the maintenance is performed.
Good clean design with tight cohesion, loose coupling, and all those other best practices that were invented over the years can be applied to achieve high internal code quality. Of course if you have a monkey write something as fast as possible and start shipping it as soon as it appears to work, you will pay through the nose later when it comes time to build on that initial code base.
Asus actually maintains its own apt repositories, as does the community. Though I've found some of the community stuff can destabilize your system in a hurry. I just got the 4GB Flash one with the atom processor, it has an atheros wireless chip that can do monitor mode and comes with a lot of stuff bundled already. I personally prefer icewm over kde on something that small, both are pre-installed out of the box. Anyway, since there's no disk to spin, it boots fast. I think its around 11 or 12 seconds average. This is my first sub-notebook so I'm not sure how it stacks up with others on the market, but for the price it was hard to say no.
I would never let end users directly access that data, instead they would get anonymized unique identifiers for working with the data as an end user. That way if their computer is compromised none of the sensitive data would be. That limits the exposure and centralizes the security. Then who cares if the laptop gets stolen, hacked, dunked in liquid nitrogen, etc... There's nothing there to steal even if its the employee trying to steal it.
Yeah, my spot on the BMI says I'm obese, I'm 6' & 250lbs. Except for the fact I go to the gym 3-5 times weekly, run 2-4 miles several times a week, and my actual body fat is around 14%, which is normal/slightly above average for those who are unfamiliar with the metric.
However, there are some really out of shape skinny people. It hardly seems fair that someone who starves themselves and does not exercise is considered to be in better shape than people who eat healthy and weigh more.
The only way to fairly measure fitness would be to administer some sort of physical readiness test like the military does. Being slightly overweight is healthy since you have reserves in case you get sick and should not necessarily count against you.
I believe Git solves this problem by using a completely different paradigm. Git does not use sequential revision ID's, instead the ID is a SHA1 hash of the contents of the repository. This allows all clones to be equal and still merge branches across repositories without messing up the workflow, if I understand it correctly.
A result of this is that individual repositories can have different histories, but when they converge, the revision ID's match up. I also love the feature of being able to digitally sign a tag with a gpg key. I don't claim to be at all an expert at SVN, quite the opposite, its just the basic features of Git fit my development model better than the basic features of SVN.
I avoided calling it a Central Repository in all the training materials I prepared for my coworkers, instead I called it the Authorative Repository. Only a small subset of us have write access to it, so no one can push any branches to it. Instead, approved changes must be pulled to it by myself or the other maintainer, but everyone can read from it if they want to create a remote tracking branch or pull from it. Push was only implemented to allow those familiar with a central repository paradigm to keep the same workflow, it's not a necessary function to work with Git.
The authorative repository is the only one releases will be made from, though since everyone's working repositories are on network drives they are all backed up nightly. Then if they are working offline, they just clone their personal working repository to a local drive. I really like that I can pick and choose which repositories to merge based on the fix or feature, and have the developer working on those branches be able to pull from the authorative repository in the mean time to keep the branch from diverging too far. Maybe something similar can be done with SVN, but I really like how the Git paradigm fits, and even encourages, that workflow.
Thanks, I'll look into it. I haven't gotten rid of the SVN repository yet, in fact we were planning on keeping it live for the next year, just in case.
We've only been using SVN for the last 8 months, so switching SCM's is not a huge ordeal right now. To be honest I'm quite happy with Git so far. There's only a handful of developers at my company so we don't have time to become experts with any tool, and as far as basic features goes, Git works in a way which fits our development paradigm better.
To be fair, with different requirements I'd use Subversion again in a second.
I'm in the process of migrating my department from Subversion to Git for a single very compelling reason. Distributed Development.
I work in the Maritime Industry and frequently have to change software on the fly during Sea Trials. With SVN, revision control while on a boat is impossible since while offline, there is no access to the central repository to check in revisions. Now with Git, I can continue to work productively offline and seamlessly push the day's changes and revision history to a repository on the network drive for nightly backup when returning to the office.
I realize not everyone has the requirements I do for source control, but everyone should pick the SCM Tool which best meets their organization's or personal requirements. Having a working familiarity with several tools is necessary to make an informed decision.
While poor process may explain some of it, I know that American automotive companies are a major force in the microcontroller world, and probably the only reason leaded parts are still made in quantity for many chips. Turns out lead free boards are more vulnerable to vibration, so until the lead free stuff is more durable it is unlikely that cars will use the RoHS compliant parts.
If I make something that has never existed before, I own it. No one has any rights to it unless I say so.
As soon as you tell that story, someone else has created their perception of your universe, which is a unique thing. Do they get to own and control that?
Slashdot Mirror
That is just not true. Amazon guarantees that the Kindle price will always be less than the dead tree edition. I've never seen the kindle edition of a book which has begun selling trade paperbacks be $9.99. Occasionally the price at Borders or Barnes & Noble will be cheaper because they have the hardcover on sale for 40% off, and the Kindle price is only 30% off the listed hardcover price, though if you can wait a week or two for new releases the price goes down from the price on the release date.
I've owned the original Kindle for over a year now and as a business traveler it's amazing. Instead of stuffing a couple paperbacks in my carry on, I take my kindle. If I'm out of books to read, I browse the amazon store from the terminal, which is substantially cheaper than say Hudson News.
When I travel internationally to non-english speaking countries, meaning no english tv channels, I usually load up half a dozen books in advance to keep me occupied. Since the wireless obviously only works in the states.
Why a kindle and not an book reader app on my laptop? The visual quality of the e-ink display is amazing. I can easily read text from any angle while on the beach in direct sunlight and wearing polarized sunglasses, lets see you do that with a laptop. Additionally the battery life is what makes the device usable. I can read for days between charges with the wireless on and over a week with it off. I do wish they would just list hours of battery life, not weeks of "nominal use" since I'm a heavier reader than most, I've never gotten 2 weeks of charge time with the wireless off, so that metric is useless.
My biggest complaint is that I have to turn off the Kindle for takeoff and landing.
What do you think happens to the operators of a pirate radio station? They understood the risks when they asked the question.
The Chaos Computer Club made a "FreedomStick" for journalists traveling to China to cover the Olympics. It includes software that automatically uses firefox+tor etc.. More Info Here: http://chinesewall.ccc.de/index-en.html
How are you getting modded up? They did not deactivate any content that was already delivered, they only cancelled the subscriptions tied to his amazon account and barred him from the Amazon Store. It may be harsh, but it's not what you think it is.
As a Kindle owner I understand that losing access to amazon.com from your Kindle seems like remote deactivation, but let me assure you it's not the same thing.
1) Any previously purchased books would continue to work.
2) Any books transferred to the device via USB will work just fine
3) The device was not remotely deactivated, he merely lost access to Amazon's services over Whispernet (EVDO).
Cancelling his subscriptions is well within their rights as vendors should they choose that they no longer wish to do business with him, assuming that their contract allows it, which is a safe assumption.
He is still able to use the device to read any number of books bought from other outlets, the problem with that is where else would he buy ebooks? I'm not saying it's right, but I see where Amazon is coming from and I think they have a right to protect their own interests. If he violated their terms of service and had his amazon account suspended, that's his own fault. The fact his Kindle is tied to that account is incidental.
The Level A systems I worked with did stuff like engine monitoring for helicopters; Attitude Displacement Indicators, Horizontal Speed Indicator with slip slide bar, traffic collision avoidance, color weather radar, and 3-d terrain plotting with runways and such for military and commercial aircraft. Basically anything monitoring the health of a critical system or being used for real time navigation needs to be level A.
There are similar requirements for determining how critical mechanical systems are and what sort of redundancy is required. For instance level B systems can be downgraded to level C if you double the hardware to make it redundant.
Developing level A software is all about process. Certification requires that you strictly follow the waterfall model of development to the point of naming the artifacts required to transition to the next phase in development. System Requirements flow to Software Requirements to Design to Detailed Design to Code to Unit Test to Integration Testing and finally System Testing with traceability forwards and backwards from system requirements to system tests, such that every test case and even every line of code, is linked to requirements and design, nothing more, nothing less. Periodically throughout the process the customer might send auditors to observe the adherence to this process and collect artifacts for review. Basically its the worst job ever, its the most tedious, boring thing I've ever accepted money to do. At least no one dies when the Slashdot Editors post a dupe.
The horror you described is for Level C certification. Level B has the requirement of testing each implied else. Meaning for every standalone if statement, you have one test that makes sure it does the right thing when the conditions are true, and a second test which makes sure that thing does not happen when the conditions are not true.
Level A certification requires Modified Condition Decision Coverage (MCDC). The means a test case must exist for every possible logical combination of terms for every conditional expression. These are extensions of the structural coverage requirements for Level C which is only statement coverage, every line has to be exercised at least once by a test case.
This sort of exhaustive testing is done because of a very different operating environment from desktop software. Desktops don't have single bit events. A single bit event occurs when a gamma ray strikes a 0 in RAM and turns it into a 1. As a result some places forbid the use of pointers in their code, since a single bit event could have catastrophic consequences. Every function has to be tested to be able to best withstand random garbage input and fail gracefully since you cannot rely on RAM storing values correctly.
However, the medical industry has similar guidelines for things like X-Ray machines and ventilators, which I believe have a very similar set of best practices codified into a certification process. Depending on the certification level, the cost of testing varies. It is VERY expensive to develop software this way since Test Driven Development doesn't cut it. For these industries the testers need to be independent of the developers meaning developers don't write their own unit tests, which in turn leads to more cumbersome software processes.
I still work in safety critical embedded software, but am eternally thankful I no longer have to worry about certification with a mandated software process. I now write software for boats instead of planes and have started doing model based controls design, test driven development, and in general have tailored the software process to best suit the company. The goal is to produce better software faster, in order to respond to changing business needs, not to fill out checklists to pass audits. The FAA process is the most reliable way to the highest quality software possible; it is not efficient, cheap, or even modern.
I think you missed the point. The point is that this can be repaired with car parts by a mechanic and is more robust than the higher tech units. Having cheaper more robust technology is important for developing nations since it allows first world countries to help bootstrap improvements to their quality of life. While I can't speak to how many hospitals are lacking electricity, I would say this is going to enrich the lives of many people around the world and is definitely a good thing.
You can engineer maintainability. You won't know how successful that effort was until after the maintenance is performed.
Good clean design with tight cohesion, loose coupling, and all those other best practices that were invented over the years can be applied to achieve high internal code quality. Of course if you have a monkey write something as fast as possible and start shipping it as soon as it appears to work, you will pay through the nose later when it comes time to build on that initial code base.
Asus actually maintains its own apt repositories, as does the community. Though I've found some of the community stuff can destabilize your system in a hurry. I just got the 4GB Flash one with the atom processor, it has an atheros wireless chip that can do monitor mode and comes with a lot of stuff bundled already. I personally prefer icewm over kde on something that small, both are pre-installed out of the box. Anyway, since there's no disk to spin, it boots fast. I think its around 11 or 12 seconds average. This is my first sub-notebook so I'm not sure how it stacks up with others on the market, but for the price it was hard to say no.
Finally a display suitable for the ultimate comic book reader. Not that it will replace real comics, just augment them like my kindle does with books.
Gentoo. Not only do you get to run KDE 4.1, but you also get to watch it compile from source.
I would never let end users directly access that data, instead they would get anonymized unique identifiers for working with the data as an end user. That way if their computer is compromised none of the sensitive data would be. That limits the exposure and centralizes the security. Then who cares if the laptop gets stolen, hacked, dunked in liquid nitrogen, etc... There's nothing there to steal even if its the employee trying to steal it.
Not if the data being accessed does not have race conditions, ie not being modified.
How does he know it is the US controlling a given satellite? I wonder if any DoD guys looked at the exhibit and said "Hey! That's not one of ours."
Yeah, my spot on the BMI says I'm obese, I'm 6' & 250lbs. Except for the fact I go to the gym 3-5 times weekly, run 2-4 miles several times a week, and my actual body fat is around 14%, which is normal/slightly above average for those who are unfamiliar with the metric.
However, there are some really out of shape skinny people. It hardly seems fair that someone who starves themselves and does not exercise is considered to be in better shape than people who eat healthy and weigh more.
The only way to fairly measure fitness would be to administer some sort of physical readiness test like the military does. Being slightly overweight is healthy since you have reserves in case you get sick and should not necessarily count against you.
I believe Git solves this problem by using a completely different paradigm. Git does not use sequential revision ID's, instead the ID is a SHA1 hash of the contents of the repository. This allows all clones to be equal and still merge branches across repositories without messing up the workflow, if I understand it correctly.
A result of this is that individual repositories can have different histories, but when they converge, the revision ID's match up. I also love the feature of being able to digitally sign a tag with a gpg key. I don't claim to be at all an expert at SVN, quite the opposite, its just the basic features of Git fit my development model better than the basic features of SVN.
I avoided calling it a Central Repository in all the training materials I prepared for my coworkers, instead I called it the Authorative Repository. Only a small subset of us have write access to it, so no one can push any branches to it. Instead, approved changes must be pulled to it by myself or the other maintainer, but everyone can read from it if they want to create a remote tracking branch or pull from it. Push was only implemented to allow those familiar with a central repository paradigm to keep the same workflow, it's not a necessary function to work with Git.
The authorative repository is the only one releases will be made from, though since everyone's working repositories are on network drives they are all backed up nightly. Then if they are working offline, they just clone their personal working repository to a local drive. I really like that I can pick and choose which repositories to merge based on the fix or feature, and have the developer working on those branches be able to pull from the authorative repository in the mean time to keep the branch from diverging too far. Maybe something similar can be done with SVN, but I really like how the Git paradigm fits, and even encourages, that workflow.
Thanks, I'll look into it. I haven't gotten rid of the SVN repository yet, in fact we were planning on keeping it live for the next year, just in case.
We've only been using SVN for the last 8 months, so switching SCM's is not a huge ordeal right now. To be honest I'm quite happy with Git so far. There's only a handful of developers at my company so we don't have time to become experts with any tool, and as far as basic features goes, Git works in a way which fits our development paradigm better.
To be fair, with different requirements I'd use Subversion again in a second.
I'm in the process of migrating my department from Subversion to Git for a single very compelling reason. Distributed Development.
I work in the Maritime Industry and frequently have to change software on the fly during Sea Trials. With SVN, revision control while on a boat is impossible since while offline, there is no access to the central repository to check in revisions. Now with Git, I can continue to work productively offline and seamlessly push the day's changes and revision history to a repository on the network drive for nightly backup when returning to the office.
I realize not everyone has the requirements I do for source control, but everyone should pick the SCM Tool which best meets their organization's or personal requirements. Having a working familiarity with several tools is necessary to make an informed decision.
While poor process may explain some of it, I know that American automotive companies are a major force in the microcontroller world, and probably the only reason leaded parts are still made in quantity for many chips. Turns out lead free boards are more vulnerable to vibration, so until the lead free stuff is more durable it is unlikely that cars will use the RoHS compliant parts.
Linksys has been a division of Cisco for several years now. It's just another brand they own.