She suggested that we try to write up a brief description of what we wanted and how much it would cost...
I don't understand why this story is tagged with git and svn then asks how much it will cost. Check out Gitstack, roll your own git on Linux, or any of a million ways to do svn or cvs... I mean, every version control system I've used in the past ten years has been free. I mean, if you're talking about... what, SourceSafe? Is there some crappy IBM like ClearCase thing? You think you need to pay for an online service? I don't think you need to move this off your own personal servers unless you want it open sourced. What features are the tagged version control systems missing that you need to request funds for?
Here's how I explain version control to non-techies: "Remember that time you had to work on a group project and you started writing a word document in MS Office and then you passed it out to the group while you still worked on it and then you got four more versions back with corrections and updates and you just started cursing out your computer? Yeah. Believe it or not, they fixed that problem for software a very long time ago and it's dirt cheap. In fact, if developers follow simple rules, those versioning nightmares you had with your group's powerpoint and other Microsoft files never happens."
People have dealt with this problem in other realms for a long time so you just need to find something to relate it to that they've experienced and it'll start clicking much faster. Failing that, wikipedia has visuals.
To speak about open hardware, there’s a device called Milkymist One based on an FPGA with an embedded LM32 processor. It’s as open as possible and is actually used in production (as opposed to mere hacking) to create some nice video effects.
I went to their site and I see one youtube video of a two man show using it and some screen shots. That's what you call "in production"? If I send you a video of my Raspberry Pi rendering Mandelbrot patterns in front of a crowded room, will you call it "in production?" Furthermore the first thing they say on their site:
Milkymist One
The Milkymist One is an experimental hardware appliance for live video effects.
I appreciate this blog's spirit and he has some valid points (like making it more durable) but he's really overselling some of these devices. He goes so far as to suggest TI's Beagle Board and casually dismisses that it's six or seven times the cost of the Raspberry Pi's Model A. I don't even... know where to start. I own six Raspberry Pis and one Arduino Mega 2560. They cost me roughly the same.
Yeah I know you're going to think I'm a tinfoil hat guy but basically anything you bring to China should be considered as compromised. iPod, tablet, computer, phone, etc. If you don't use burners, you should definitely at the very least wipe them and start over when you get back into the states. Anything you leave alone in your hotel room probably won't be left alone. Put removable tape over your cameras on these devices.
Also, if you're going to encrypt your traffic, keep in mind that most encryption standards will be broken so if you can set your encryption and you have a speedy machine then set it as high as possible. Basically, you can assume that any sensitive stuff and all of your stuff you send over anything will simply be recorded and written to disc. It's not a question of if they break the encryption. It's a question of when. Make sure none of it matters and you're dead and buried by the time they can break that. The Chinese government is in it for the long game. They are not above corporate espionage.
My personal option would to bring simple devices, treat them as burners and simply enjoy a vacation from work.
As per usual, it's sloppy shorthand for "do not like".
As per usual, it's just someone calling a political party what it calls itself. They are talking about Golden Dawn. If you'd like to go into Wikipedia and change the political position of Golden Dawn to "do not like" from "Far-right" I think you will find that both liberal and conservative editors will tell you to take a hike.
I'd simply point out that UK high schools have surpassed their intro course and ask them at what point they plan to give you a better education in computers than a foreign government can give its kids.
If you really wanted to go the extra mile and spend a little bit of money on this "letter" you could buy a small SD flash card and spend $25 on a Raspberry Pi and work through this tutorial as you work through your intro course. Then when you're done you can get the Raspberry Pi to start and have the sole purpose be to display your letter to the staff. Just mail them the Raspberry Pi, the flash card, a USB to USB Micro cord and a short HDMI cable. Just write instructions to plug it into a USB port and monitor then in the letter explain how you used the GNU Toolchain and wrote the rest of this code yourself. It might be too much for some of the other students but it was cheaper than the textbook. If you can do it then your once great alma mater is selling its students short.
A letter can be crumpled up and thrown away. A Raspberry Pi can as well but I guarantee it's going to hurt like hell;-)
Humans evolved eyes to forage and see danger. We should stop looking at back lit squares since that's not what our eyes were evolved to do. No good came from looking at back lit squares.
No good came from feeding them corn.
No good at all. Unless, of course, you mean we preserved top soil by stopping massive herds from turning the entire nation into a dust bowl. Or perhaps the good that comes from us being able to furnish an ever growing population with food? There are some valid complaints about feed cattle feed corn. Saying there is nothing good doing it is a bit of a hyperbole.
I can't see how feeding them gummy worms will turn out well.
It'll turn out just fine. As someone who grew up on a farm, there is a certain ratio of what you feed your cattle. You give them a safe percentage of raffage mixed with ground feed mixed with whatever you want. You know they're not giving them straight up gummy bears but rather cutting the already diverse mixture of what makes for a healthy cow. Yes, some farmers mix in antibiotics into cattle feed, yes some farmers engineer their feeds to make cattle produce more milk or become more bulky for a higher profit. And those can have consequences -- probably worse consequences than gummy bears! I do not understand, however, why we get to be engineers with computers yet when a farmer does their own experiments with altering a diet or using a pesticide that the FDA says is safe, we can sit here in our armchairs and condemn them for that sort of innovation. Do you think farmers sit at home and demand you stop using any computers because the lead that foreign manufacturing plants releases will someday affect their farmland?
We picked Amazon as a first place to start because most of our users are also regular users of Amazon, and it pays us to make your Amazon journey get off to a faster start. Typing Super “queen marking cage” Just Worked for me this morning. I am now looking forward to my game of Ultimate Where’s Waldo hunting down the queens in my bee colonies, Ubuntu will benefit from the fact that I chose to search Amazon that way, Amazon benefits from being more accessible to a very discerning, time-conscious and hotkey-friendly audience.
Cool, thanks for at least being honesty about that part. Although I don't understand why this wasn't the front-and-center thesis of your blog post. You're getting paid to bring us to Amazon faster. Okay. You can opt out of it but it's enabled by default. Okay. I get that. It's okay, nobody's going to fault you if you're trying to figure out new revenue models. But you should really be up front with your user base about it or you're going to get some seriously knee jerk reactions that might doom your product before it's out the door (regardless of how true it is). You're running damage control now and that probably could have been avoided if your floated this out in front of "leaked" screenshots.
I'm also really curious about this next part of your answer to this question:
But there are many more kinds of things you can search through with Unity scopes. Most of them won’t pay Ubuntu a cent, but we’ll still integrate them into the coolest just-ask-and-you’ll-receive experience. I want us to do this because I think we can make the desktop better.
So what happens when it's time to integrate and "bring the user faster" to Barnes & Noble? What happens when you've "integrated" with both Amazon, B&N, Abe's Books, eBay, Go Hastings, etc and I type in "Ender's Game"? What happens when the outfit that sold you your "queen marking cage" doesn't sell them on Amazon and there's middle men re-listing everything at a higher price on Amazon on the chance that someone with a default scope searches for it through Ubuntu? I have reservations that this move is making an already omnipotent Amazon unduly more powerful...
Developers should concentrate on creating software.
Totally agreed, environments getting screwed up has lead to a lot of sacrificed man hours.
There are already tons of tools that help with the install and configuration state of software. Use InstallShield and the various Visual Studio install and config helpers. Visual Studio itself has many debugger functions available, and there are tons of extra helper plugins if required.
I think that's a bit overkill. Where I work we concentrate on having a unified development environment across boxes. Note that I said environment and not integrated development environment. While the IDE is important, we instead concentrate on maintaining a shell script that points to where things are installed so that there is a commonality in environment variables across boxes. We also like to zip up things that can be just zipped and unzipped and avoid the whole InstallShield mess altogether. So if we're using an agreed upon JDK, we put it in some directory of the zip (like dev/tools/jdkx.x.x) and then in that zip's environment scripts we point at that for JAVA_HOME. Then in Eclipse or Visual Studio or whatever you can tell it to find the preferred java runtime by pointing it at that environment string. In this way, we've managed to keep our development environment diverse with a large toolbox as well as possible to run in Linux, Windows, Cygwin and sometimes OSX (okay, we don't have OSX machines here but theoretically it'd be possible).
Nothing sucks more than sitting down at some coworkers box to help them and saying "What? Why doesn't this command work?" oh, "I guess I don't have that alias" or "I must have a different version of maven" or "I think I'm missing that Ruby gem" or "I don't know, I messed with Visual Studio a bunch and it hasn't worked since." Those are your nightmare scenarios and we try to make our dev box setup wiki page to avoid that at all costs. Two big things to focus on are a common environment and a diverse toolbox.
The problem here is that since Google has been awarded this patent, then other companies like Facebook or any other website CANNOT offer anonymity!
That's absolutely false. One of the primary purposes of the patent systems is to identify areas of "innovation" very precisely so that people can license these ideas. There is the 'carrot' way of doing this whereby you would approach Google and ask them how much they want for you to license a patent and, since there's nothing forcing Google to license those ideas, the alternative is "stick licensing." So if Facebook wanted to use anonymity in this specific way, the courts would need to determine how much damage this did to Google. I really can't see anyone in their right mind claiming much in damages in that situation. At that point both companies should agree on some form of licensing based on what damages the court found.
Anonymity itself cannot be patented since the concept is very very old. So Facebook would be free to invent an alternative way to offer its users anonymity than the very specific way presented by Google. Your jump from Google's patent to generic anonymity shows that you do not understand then intense and rigorous legalese that patents must follow. That demonstration is another issue entirely (and the biggest blocker to Stack Exchange's proposal).
If you read the above as a defense of patents, you're wrong. I'm trying to help you understand that patents are bad but hyperbole doesn't help anyone when they're trying to make the system better. I don't want a world where we have no intellectual property laws and ideas are stolen wholesale... however I also don't like what software patents are doing today and I feel like we need to find a better approach to this complicated problem.
You're right but the bigger threat isn't from a political player. The biggest threat is retaliation from your employer, your customers, your neighbors and maybe even your family. Imagine if your father-in-law found out you voted one way instead of another and didn't want you in the family because of it.
So the big concern I have is how these barcodes work. Are they public? Are they encrypted? And what I mean by encrypted is if the value is scrambled to link back to the original voter.
The reason I feel like this is unfortunately necessary is that it would be easy to sneak
in votes that had just some barcode if it didn't have to be decrypted and validated. And without this 1-to-1 validation, how do we determine that the recorded votes for each person were truly and validly made? Unfortunately, if you want election boards to be perfect in their methodology, you should give them one of these to check against citizen lists or an external third party.
My suggestion would be to give users a randomly generated number that is then one way hashed with their SSN. Then that information can be published online and anyone can take their autogenerated number and plug it into the hash with their SSN. If they fear retaliation or if they fear their boss might demand the number from them to check on them, they can merely opt for the official to destroy their number. You can also implement laws protecting those numbers although we all know a solution without regulation is the best.
But I don't think you can get around an election official knowing who voted for what if you want accurate and secure election counts. It's a trade off but hopefully the may other laws we have protection people from politically motivated attacks remain.
If the barcodes are done right, it might be a valid way to assure there is no voter fraud. I guess the big question is: do we have evidence for a lot of voter fraud such that we need this?
Why Troll Bridge? Why not another Discworld novel or short story? Perfect length? Was it the easiest to envision? Requires the least special effects? Your favorite of the Discworld stories? The only one you could secure the rights to?
At Slashdot we have a love/hate relationship with Hollywood. While it produces some of our favorite movies, it also has a lot of criticism directed at it. We rant about the MPAA, copyright law, Hollywood accounting and even the general stagnation of its creativity. As an (apparent) outsider to that who also wants to make films, how do you view Hollywood? Inspiration? Repressive? Hostile? A future paycheck?
What were the best and worst parts about your experience running a Kickstarter campaign? Whether it be about the Kickstarter site in particular or generic to any "crowdsourcing" platform. Any advice to anyone thinking about launch such a campaign? (and please don't say simply "do it" -- any words of caution about how you structure and suggest the price your reward tiers?)
If OS X and iOS are bad then iTunes is a crime against humanity. And I think that's because the original program came from outside Apple.
I feel like Apple's UI can be compared to Disney's take over of animation stylings. Before Disney, you could find a whole variety of animation styles. But the vision of Disney was to make everything round and smooth and beautiful. Every animation cel was to look like a masterpiece portrait -- because that was the general populace's desired art at the time. And that's what Disney was trying to make, animated art. You might have found a sharp edge on a villain like Jafar in Aladdin but the main character would be round and warm. Others tried to mimic the stylings and it became a de facto standard mostly because it sold.
Similarly, Apple has done their UIs to be as beautiful as possible. And they've done it really well and it's expensive (I'd imagine both computationally and price). And both Steve Jobs and Walt Disney appeared to be this monolithic men pushing this new way (in reality it's probably a bunch of artists in a cohesive team) but they've both come and gone. And Apple clings to that vision but the vision never changes.
What happened to Disney was another production house, Nickelodeon, slowly discovered that square and rigid corners were not only acceptable but Spongebob Squarepants became an icon. Gross humor could be applied to shows like Ren & Stimpy and some people enjoyed this more than the safe beauty of Disney. Disney has no grit because Walt Disney wouldn't allow it. Disney got into disagreements with Pixar about Toy Story 2 and I think it is best if they left Pixar separate from Disney despite the acquisition. Similarly in the future Apple will be usurped by someone who is willing to experiment and deviate. Jobs is dead so Apple is committed to his vision... probably until they go under. They'll acquire new ideas along the way with their massive piles of cash but what happens when those visions are at odds with The Great Master who has transcended to Nirvana? That's still a long way off but these rumblings of criticism just show you can make another interface that is completely the opposite of Apple and actually do well.
Well, I don't know much about what an average Bangladeshi village has on hand but I'm going to wager that it's a very wide spectrum. So my personal advice is no matter what you find to be your solution, you should provide the DIY equivalent any DIY-able components of the pieces. In this way you can treat yourself as a one man thinktank and you can publish this stuff under CCBY3.0 and your project may enjoy self sufficiency without requiring your constant attention.
So to start at the core of it, I would personally select a $25 non-ethernet (Type A?) Raspberry Pi, an $8 USB keyboard and $5 flash card. From there those little devices have the RCA Video (analog) out and also an HDMI out. So if one of your computers goes bad, you can always rig it up to one of these little guys. However, I also understand that you need more displays. Now this is where you have the option to become a rockstar superman. If you are not afraid of code and working GPIO pins I would suggest purchasing some of these little guys first getting it to simply display and read across what they are typing and secondly maybe use one row to take in a file that progresses in typing difficult and displays that on the first line while it waits for input and validates on the second line (might even have room to use LEDs or something else on the RPi for score keeper/carrot/stick. If you document all this, it might turn out that the villagers get wise on how to ripe a seven segment display out of anything and hook it up to these GPIO pins?
So how to power this? Well the easy way would be to use what you have already available for power but get some of these guys and daisy chain these guys from one of your existing computers until they don't produce enough power. I would suggest researching that screen and the Pi and figuring out what their power draw is. Maybe get some cheap fuses to protect your hardware. A lot of broken appliances still have good electric motors in them and electric motors often produce energy as turbines if you spin them. Now, the big problem is how do you clean the power if people are cranking these turbines with their hands or connected to a bike's gear set? That's something I'm not much of an expert in. I do know the Pis run off of two rechargeable AA batteries just great but you also have to take care if they're planning to try to charge those batteries with a hand cranked appliance motor. From my understanding it's pretty tough to not screw stuff up if you're dealing with human generated power. Had to keep that steady and to find existing ways to clean it down to what tiny sensitive devices need.
The upswing of all this would be that the RPis are versatile, any of those students could really do a whole bunch of things with these. And if you make this a part of the Raspberry Pi wiki, you might get people helping you with those screens -- might. At least others will be able to use your work.
That's a great promising attitude and good to hear as long as they weren't twirling a diamond studded ivory cane while sipping Hennessy in their top hat and monocle as they spat it out;-)
I'm sitting in a conference room right now next to a gentleman from Dice, and he's just been curious what people are saying; hasn't suggested any comments or messaging at all.
Okay, I would say one thing to him: "There are these nebulous things that set Slashdot apart from the other news sites like Reddit, Digg, etc. These things cannot really be quantified well. Something's can like the comment and moderation system. Somethings cannot like the nice blend of stories and story types on the frontpage (I think the FAQ called it a "breakfast burrito"?). So your message to him should be that the Slashdot staff knows these things and Dice does not. But most importantly the second those things go away, then you are no different from Reddit or CNN's Tech Site or whomever. And it's going to be all the much easier for me to just roll on over to the biggest site that has the same implementation of how I get my news. I'll take my book reviews, comments and ball and play elsewhere. Your autonomy protects that. I love that you stood up to Microsoft and tried to stand up to Scientology. I don't think someone with money at risk looking over your shoulder would have allowed that.
As far as being consumed by a bigger fish, keep in mind that Geeknet (aka SourceForge aka VA, etc) was a bigger fish itself.
Totally agree. Honestly, it felt like you guys might have lost some of your autonomy in that move. I don't criticize it, I don't know the whole story but I wouldn't believe you if you said it had no effect at any point on Slashdot-related decisions. Personally, I prefer a lot of little fish for me to pick from even if it means competing standards and difficulty communicating across sites. I don't like one massive behemoth that dictates what the rules are to everyone who wants to play. So it's a natural worriment to me when yet another bigger fish gobbles you up. Hopefully it isn't negative but I can't help but default to it being negative.
I'm thrilled at the possibility of getting a bigger investment into Slashdot, both from an engineering perspective and an editorial perspective.
I will come back to a site that is under such heavy load that I cannot reach it. I will not come back to a site that is yet another news aggregator no matter how quick their servers are.
I'm glad that they're concerned about the user experience. I'm glad that you're cautiously optimistic (although I also feel like you haven't a choice). My concise fears are about the questions that come down that say "How can we direct more eyeballs at our job listings or perhaps inject job listings into Slashdot without risking too much of the overall Slashdot user experience?" Will you play that game?
This is still pretty new to us, but we've been looking at this as a positive thing
Hey, I mean, you'll have to forgive me if I can't discern whether you're saying that under duress or while you're busily shredding documents or while you're issuing cyanide capsules or if you're genuinely optimistic about the move. So if you have the time, I'd like to know what aspects of this make your statements genuine. As you noted with the Gawker thing, I get a little uptight about my small little things being bought up and consumed by bigger fish. The bigger the fish that eats you up, the more layers of direction come down upon you. People complain about comments being un-editable and static but I love that. It makes this feel permanent, it allows me to verbally pin people down, etc. But if Executive A five layers removed from you decides it needs to be his way, what are you gonna do? On top of that, how would you have handled the Microsoft source code and Scientology spats if there was someone with money looming over you reminding you of the stakes and telling you to back down?
-- we were worried earlier that if we were rolled into a business that focused entirely on news, we'd be expected to conform to company standards -- see the Gawker sites, for example.
Okay, fair enough. However, I know very little about Dice. And to counter your argument, an advertising company bought MySpace which used to be a social networking site. And now, surprise surprise, it's more ads than user created spaces. You can argue that MySpace was dead already. You can argue that some change had to be made. But I want to know why you feel safe to pick this out to be a plus and not a minus for my overall Slashdot addiction. How do I know Slashdot isn't going to become a vector tool to get eyeballs over to Dice's bread and butter jobs site?
If you have doubts or genuine concern, I'm not asking you to be the turkey with the long neck when farmer Dice comes around looking for his first meal so feel free to reply as Anonymous Coward. I mean, I'm not talking about my employer on web forums so I understand but your arguments should stand on their own -- sans Slashdot icon.
Although amateur tardigrade enthusiast Mike Shaw recently made waves by postulating that the animals may be equipped to survive in outer space because they originally came from other planets...
Tardigrade Captain: Okay over there, bring the ship down in that clearing, it looks like there's some specimens there on that asphalt path. *the Tardigrade craft lands in Time Square and the well armed two meter tall Tardigrades disembark* Tardigrade Captain: Oh, for the love of Ursa Major! How ugly these specimens turned out! Look at that one! *the Tardigrade captain gestures toward an Earth female with her jaw agape* Tardigrade Captain: Ewww, what is this on top of them? *the Tardigrade captain reaches for the girls hair with his second set of appendages while the first set rubs saliva down his mouth onto his chest and his tertiary set scratches himself* Tardigrade Officer: *runs a device over the woman* Some sort of fibrous material sir... apparently dead organic material... *the Tardigrade captain withdraws his appendages in terror* Tardigrade Captain: Oh for fuck's sake, another experiment ruined. Gross. GROSS. All of them just gross as all hell! Alright, everybody back on the ship, you know the drill, take off and nuke 'er from orbit... Tardigrade Officer: But... but sir, this colony may be lacking light speed travel but our sensors show a plethora of cultural phenomena -- aggregates of which exist right here in this very metropolis! Tardigrade Captain: You know Jerry, it's always something with you, isn't it? 'Mew mew mew, this civilization has eliminated all evil. Blah blah blah this civilization is one million years old, isn't that worth something?' Now this is the 174th failed experiment we've checked up on and I... *just then an advertisement for Here Comes Honey Boo Boo blares across the Times Square display -- the stupefied Tardigrades watch* Tardigrade Officer: I'll push the button this time.
Obviously I can't really elaborate on algorithms, but suffice it to say your understanding is naive at best - you're talking 2004 type games.
Great so you can't tell me why my understanding of how HFT works is wrong and I'm talking about "2004 type games" which would explain why I read about automated trading algorithms losing Knight Trading $440 million two months ago? Tell me, all those protection measures and penalties, did they protect the company running the automated trading software or the parties who engaged with trading with the automated trading software?
This stuff is almost always blown out of proportion and you'd never read about the actual workings of the regulation and clearing processes which protect all players
"Protect all players" you say? So that would mean that everyone gets paid when someone screws up big time? Well, I bet they're learning their lessons. I think what you mean is that it "protects the big firms that are doing the HFT" while the market is just a big massive beast ripe for the skimming?
And when trading systems do go awry most exchanges have built-in and often automated undo not to mention penalties.
So, when I buy stock in Wal-Mart and my "algorithm" (my brain) was screwed up, where's my automated undo button?
This is a game where someone's loss is almost always another party's gain. There is no way to "protect all parties involved" with that sort of game. It's the nature of the goddamn game.
If you're just some guy taking the highest paying programming job, I'm not mad at you -- that's capitalism. But if you're actually running the show or defending your boss, you and I are basically at polar opposites. HFT doesn't provide anything and receives an insane amount of cash. Betting on arbitrages isn't betting, you're basically taxing everyone else little bits of money and just being a huge fucking leech.
Trading is too fast when it ceases to mean anything. The rate at which these decisions are being made indicates that it is not going through a human mind. The stock market is about people being able to buy and sell securities that allows businesses to raise additional capital. It was originally a very social thing so much so that it could reflect the mood of the populace's strength and development.
Many ordinary Americans have grown wary of the stock market...
Right you are! It's no longer about humans making decisions. It no longer reflects social aspects of a sector or country or world market. It's more and more about what algorithms your "opponents" are using and what your algorithms are set at. And that's where it ceases to make sense. I'm okay with some guy waking up at 3am and reading every newspaper in the world and beating me at stock trading. I'm not okay when the name of the game today is who can pay tons of money to have their own servers set up across the street from a major exchange with a special dedicated fiber going straight to them as they pay off said exchange. That's starting to become so abstracted from the initial concept of a stock exchange that these big firms have walled everyone else out.
... which they see as the playground of Google-esque algorithms, powerful banks and secretive, fast-money trading firms.
If only they were Google-esque algorithms, they'd at least be innovative. SNAFUs have shown they're far from complex and often so stupid they loose hundreds of millions. But, yeah, who in their right mind would play a game like that?
What the algorithms are buying and selling no longer make any sense, the turn around is so insanely quick on these trades that there is no point at which a normal human can say "Oh, that algorithm thinks that Microsoft stock is going up and will hold it for some amount of time." No, instead what's going on is someone put out a big pre-order for Microsoft stock and so the HFT guys are buying stocks at a lower price than that only to turn over and dump them almost instantly as the order actually comes through netting fractions of a penny.
Of course, all the instructors and professors bad-mouth the online classes. Why? Because the online courses are a threat to their jobs, of course.
How is an online course any different that a textbook? To me it has some benefits over a text book like you don't have to read as much, you can just listen. I like to be able to flip back and forth or scan chapters in a textbook -- that's a bit harder in a video lecture. So why aren't instructors and professors calling for the ban of textbooks and criticizing them? Why don't they lynch each other when one writes a really good textbook?
Once an online course is in place, it doesn't require much in the way of instructor intervention.
Listen, man, I'm glad this worked for you. But it's a one way communication channel. The way you say "it doesn't require much in the way of instructor intervention" is pretty indicative that you think teaching is someone shouting at you with your mouth taped shut and your eyes pried open. You should maybe read the article before saying the critique is biased, he talks about what I'm mentioning:
Throughout the course, lectures and exercises veer rapidly between utterly trivial and nigh-impossible. I think this is a reflection of the one-way communication channel, such that Thrun can't have any awareness of what counts as easy and what counts as hard to the students.
Yet you say:
Most of the instructors I've had love the idea that you are forced to come listen to them twice a week, and blanch at the idea that any course could be effective without their brilliant classroom contribution.
I'm pretty sure that's in your best interest. If you're one of the gifted students that hasn't ever needed a professor's help then congratulations but you're not the normal student. If what you're saying is true, the government would only need to dispatch sets of textbooks to each home and stop paying tons of money on public education altogether. But what you're saying isn't true... anyone with an education given to them by several other humans will know that.
*Setting: Microsoft executive officers meeting* Steve Ballmer: Alright you dumbshits, I've been up all night reading about this new "walled garden" thing that Apple has and I want one for Microsoft! Executive #1: Are you serious? Why play their game? We've been gaining developers by opening up to the community and... Steve Ballmer: Shut up and get out, you're fired. Anyone else want to call me a copycat? Executive #2: We could... we could cancel our "free" express version of Visual Studio? Steve Ballmer: That's a good idea but we need something better, something that sends a message to developers developers developers developers that we don't even need them. It used to be about the developers developers developers developers but maybe -- just maybe -- they're like women and you gotta hit 'em a little bit so they appreciate when you're nice to them. I don't just want a measly walled garden, I want a fortressed garden with turrets that shoot anything that moves and has a Guantanamo Bay garden where no one has any rights and developers developers developers developers are tortured while we urinate on copies of the GPL and... Executive #3: Well, my division's about to release the Windows Phone 8 SDK, we could, say, charge $100 for people just to see the API? Steve Ballmer: That's good but it's not quite there yet. That sounds like those Member's Only jackets that weren't really "members only" and anyone with a bennie could pick one up. I mean when I was an up and coming star in this company I bought one and thought that it was a mark of success and then there I was in McDonald's ordering my daily seven quarter pounders with cheese and this fucking teenager has a Members Only jacket on. And so I ask him what club he's a member of that he thinks he can wear this piece of clothing around and he laughs and says 'Dude, it's 2005, every thrift store in the world sells these for $5, it's like, ironic, you know, hipster' and so then I just reach over the counter to strangle the last breath out of his... Executive #3: *AHEM* Wellllll, we could actually make this "members only" and send out invitations to participate in the release of the Windows 8 SDK. Steve Ballmer: YES! That's what I'm talkin' about. That's the kind of innovation and vision this company needs! You just won the income of this dumbass over here... Executive #1: What?! You can't do that! Steve Ballmer: Oh I can. In fact, fuck it, it's retroactive for this fiscal year. You'll get a bill in the mail. Cheer up, your taxes just got a whole lot easier. *huffing and puffing, Ballmer drags a stack of chairs up to the conference table next to the shocked first executive* Steve Ballmer:... or do we have a problem?
There's not much material to those links -- at least nothing even close to addressing the full problem. The "adjusted" code in the first link is trivial. Furthermore, that is how we comment code where I work. I'm surprised there isn't an annotation driven doc-generating friendly comment block at the top of that signature in their example (along with the inline comments)!
The reason editors let you collapse comments is that you sometimes have to make really ugly code -- whether it's for performance or time constraints. And the only way to really describe it actually larger inline blocks that can obfuscate the code. So they make them collapsible for those who have read them already.
Winer also makes the case for providing links in his code to external 'worknotes.'
Yeah, we use an internal wiki.
So, what are your thoughts on useful commenting practices or features, either implemented or on your wishlist?
The biggest complaint I have is people who use comments to explain bad object/procedure/function/method/script/class/whatever naming. For example, a guy I worked with calls everything a "driver." Main method? That's a driver. Class holding the main method? Of course DriverClass. Package? Of course YYY.ZZZ.NNN.Driver. On it goes. Another guy likes to use the verb "interrogate" where as I like to use the verb "inspect" and I think that's just more about your origins (I think he's Spring background while I'm a little more on the Ruby/Groovy side of things). A common and well defined vocabulary inside your team and embedded in your actual code will take you much further than trying to explain it all out in the comments.
Slashdot Mirror
Whelp, time to bust out my narwhal outfit, platform shoes and monocle every time I hit the bars.
Great ice breakers at least.
She suggested that we try to write up a brief description of what we wanted and how much it would cost ...
I don't understand why this story is tagged with git and svn then asks how much it will cost. Check out Gitstack, roll your own git on Linux, or any of a million ways to do svn or cvs ... I mean, every version control system I've used in the past ten years has been free. I mean, if you're talking about ... what, SourceSafe? Is there some crappy IBM like ClearCase thing? You think you need to pay for an online service? I don't think you need to move this off your own personal servers unless you want it open sourced. What features are the tagged version control systems missing that you need to request funds for?
Here's how I explain version control to non-techies: "Remember that time you had to work on a group project and you started writing a word document in MS Office and then you passed it out to the group while you still worked on it and then you got four more versions back with corrections and updates and you just started cursing out your computer? Yeah. Believe it or not, they fixed that problem for software a very long time ago and it's dirt cheap. In fact, if developers follow simple rules, those versioning nightmares you had with your group's powerpoint and other Microsoft files never happens."
People have dealt with this problem in other realms for a long time so you just need to find something to relate it to that they've experienced and it'll start clicking much faster. Failing that, wikipedia has visuals.
To speak about open hardware, there’s a device called Milkymist One based on an FPGA with an embedded LM32 processor. It’s as open as possible and is actually used in production (as opposed to mere hacking) to create some nice video effects.
I went to their site and I see one youtube video of a two man show using it and some screen shots. That's what you call "in production"? If I send you a video of my Raspberry Pi rendering Mandelbrot patterns in front of a crowded room, will you call it "in production?" Furthermore the first thing they say on their site:
Milkymist One
The Milkymist One is an experimental hardware appliance for live video effects.
I appreciate this blog's spirit and he has some valid points (like making it more durable) but he's really overselling some of these devices. He goes so far as to suggest TI's Beagle Board and casually dismisses that it's six or seven times the cost of the Raspberry Pi's Model A. I don't even ... know where to start. I own six Raspberry Pis and one Arduino Mega 2560. They cost me roughly the same.
Yeah I know you're going to think I'm a tinfoil hat guy but basically anything you bring to China should be considered as compromised. iPod, tablet, computer, phone, etc. If you don't use burners, you should definitely at the very least wipe them and start over when you get back into the states. Anything you leave alone in your hotel room probably won't be left alone. Put removable tape over your cameras on these devices.
Also, if you're going to encrypt your traffic, keep in mind that most encryption standards will be broken so if you can set your encryption and you have a speedy machine then set it as high as possible. Basically, you can assume that any sensitive stuff and all of your stuff you send over anything will simply be recorded and written to disc. It's not a question of if they break the encryption. It's a question of when. Make sure none of it matters and you're dead and buried by the time they can break that. The Chinese government is in it for the long game. They are not above corporate espionage.
My personal option would to bring simple devices, treat them as burners and simply enjoy a vacation from work.
As per usual, it's sloppy shorthand for "do not like".
As per usual, it's just someone calling a political party what it calls itself. They are talking about Golden Dawn. If you'd like to go into Wikipedia and change the political position of Golden Dawn to "do not like" from "Far-right" I think you will find that both liberal and conservative editors will tell you to take a hike.
I'd simply point out that UK high schools have surpassed their intro course and ask them at what point they plan to give you a better education in computers than a foreign government can give its kids.
;-)
If you really wanted to go the extra mile and spend a little bit of money on this "letter" you could buy a small SD flash card and spend $25 on a Raspberry Pi and work through this tutorial as you work through your intro course. Then when you're done you can get the Raspberry Pi to start and have the sole purpose be to display your letter to the staff. Just mail them the Raspberry Pi, the flash card, a USB to USB Micro cord and a short HDMI cable. Just write instructions to plug it into a USB port and monitor then in the letter explain how you used the GNU Toolchain and wrote the rest of this code yourself. It might be too much for some of the other students but it was cheaper than the textbook. If you can do it then your once great alma mater is selling its students short.
A letter can be crumpled up and thrown away. A Raspberry Pi can as well but I guarantee it's going to hurt like hell
Cows evolved to eat grass.
Humans evolved eyes to forage and see danger. We should stop looking at back lit squares since that's not what our eyes were evolved to do. No good came from looking at back lit squares.
No good came from feeding them corn.
No good at all. Unless, of course, you mean we preserved top soil by stopping massive herds from turning the entire nation into a dust bowl. Or perhaps the good that comes from us being able to furnish an ever growing population with food? There are some valid complaints about feed cattle feed corn. Saying there is nothing good doing it is a bit of a hyperbole.
I can't see how feeding them gummy worms will turn out well.
It'll turn out just fine. As someone who grew up on a farm, there is a certain ratio of what you feed your cattle. You give them a safe percentage of raffage mixed with ground feed mixed with whatever you want. You know they're not giving them straight up gummy bears but rather cutting the already diverse mixture of what makes for a healthy cow. Yes, some farmers mix in antibiotics into cattle feed, yes some farmers engineer their feeds to make cattle produce more milk or become more bulky for a higher profit. And those can have consequences -- probably worse consequences than gummy bears! I do not understand, however, why we get to be engineers with computers yet when a farmer does their own experiments with altering a diet or using a pesticide that the FDA says is safe, we can sit here in our armchairs and condemn them for that sort of innovation. Do you think farmers sit at home and demand you stop using any computers because the lead that foreign manufacturing plants releases will someday affect their farmland?
This is just a moneymaking scheme.
We picked Amazon as a first place to start because most of our users are also regular users of Amazon, and it pays us to make your Amazon journey get off to a faster start. Typing Super “queen marking cage” Just Worked for me this morning. I am now looking forward to my game of Ultimate Where’s Waldo hunting down the queens in my bee colonies, Ubuntu will benefit from the fact that I chose to search Amazon that way, Amazon benefits from being more accessible to a very discerning, time-conscious and hotkey-friendly audience.
Cool, thanks for at least being honesty about that part. Although I don't understand why this wasn't the front-and-center thesis of your blog post. You're getting paid to bring us to Amazon faster. Okay. You can opt out of it but it's enabled by default. Okay. I get that. It's okay, nobody's going to fault you if you're trying to figure out new revenue models. But you should really be up front with your user base about it or you're going to get some seriously knee jerk reactions that might doom your product before it's out the door (regardless of how true it is). You're running damage control now and that probably could have been avoided if your floated this out in front of "leaked" screenshots.
I'm also really curious about this next part of your answer to this question:
But there are many more kinds of things you can search through with Unity scopes. Most of them won’t pay Ubuntu a cent, but we’ll still integrate them into the coolest just-ask-and-you’ll-receive experience. I want us to do this because I think we can make the desktop better.
So what happens when it's time to integrate and "bring the user faster" to Barnes & Noble? What happens when you've "integrated" with both Amazon, B&N, Abe's Books, eBay, Go Hastings, etc and I type in "Ender's Game"? What happens when the outfit that sold you your "queen marking cage" doesn't sell them on Amazon and there's middle men re-listing everything at a higher price on Amazon on the chance that someone with a default scope searches for it through Ubuntu? I have reservations that this move is making an already omnipotent Amazon unduly more powerful ...
Developers should concentrate on creating software.
Totally agreed, environments getting screwed up has lead to a lot of sacrificed man hours.
There are already tons of tools that help with the install and configuration state of software. Use InstallShield and the various Visual Studio install and config helpers. Visual Studio itself has many debugger functions available, and there are tons of extra helper plugins if required.
I think that's a bit overkill. Where I work we concentrate on having a unified development environment across boxes. Note that I said environment and not integrated development environment. While the IDE is important, we instead concentrate on maintaining a shell script that points to where things are installed so that there is a commonality in environment variables across boxes. We also like to zip up things that can be just zipped and unzipped and avoid the whole InstallShield mess altogether. So if we're using an agreed upon JDK, we put it in some directory of the zip (like dev/tools/jdkx.x.x) and then in that zip's environment scripts we point at that for JAVA_HOME. Then in Eclipse or Visual Studio or whatever you can tell it to find the preferred java runtime by pointing it at that environment string. In this way, we've managed to keep our development environment diverse with a large toolbox as well as possible to run in Linux, Windows, Cygwin and sometimes OSX (okay, we don't have OSX machines here but theoretically it'd be possible).
Nothing sucks more than sitting down at some coworkers box to help them and saying "What? Why doesn't this command work?" oh, "I guess I don't have that alias" or "I must have a different version of maven" or "I think I'm missing that Ruby gem" or "I don't know, I messed with Visual Studio a bunch and it hasn't worked since." Those are your nightmare scenarios and we try to make our dev box setup wiki page to avoid that at all costs. Two big things to focus on are a common environment and a diverse toolbox.
The problem here is that since Google has been awarded this patent, then other companies like Facebook or any other website CANNOT offer anonymity!
That's absolutely false. One of the primary purposes of the patent systems is to identify areas of "innovation" very precisely so that people can license these ideas. There is the 'carrot' way of doing this whereby you would approach Google and ask them how much they want for you to license a patent and, since there's nothing forcing Google to license those ideas, the alternative is "stick licensing." So if Facebook wanted to use anonymity in this specific way, the courts would need to determine how much damage this did to Google. I really can't see anyone in their right mind claiming much in damages in that situation. At that point both companies should agree on some form of licensing based on what damages the court found.
... however I also don't like what software patents are doing today and I feel like we need to find a better approach to this complicated problem.
Anonymity itself cannot be patented since the concept is very very old. So Facebook would be free to invent an alternative way to offer its users anonymity than the very specific way presented by Google. Your jump from Google's patent to generic anonymity shows that you do not understand then intense and rigorous legalese that patents must follow. That demonstration is another issue entirely (and the biggest blocker to Stack Exchange's proposal).
If you read the above as a defense of patents, you're wrong. I'm trying to help you understand that patents are bad but hyperbole doesn't help anyone when they're trying to make the system better. I don't want a world where we have no intellectual property laws and ideas are stolen wholesale
You're right but the bigger threat isn't from a political player. The biggest threat is retaliation from your employer, your customers, your neighbors and maybe even your family. Imagine if your father-in-law found out you voted one way instead of another and didn't want you in the family because of it.
So the big concern I have is how these barcodes work. Are they public? Are they encrypted? And what I mean by encrypted is if the value is scrambled to link back to the original voter.
The reason I feel like this is unfortunately necessary is that it would be easy to sneak in votes that had just some barcode if it didn't have to be decrypted and validated. And without this 1-to-1 validation, how do we determine that the recorded votes for each person were truly and validly made? Unfortunately, if you want election boards to be perfect in their methodology, you should give them one of these to check against citizen lists or an external third party.
My suggestion would be to give users a randomly generated number that is then one way hashed with their SSN. Then that information can be published online and anyone can take their autogenerated number and plug it into the hash with their SSN. If they fear retaliation or if they fear their boss might demand the number from them to check on them, they can merely opt for the official to destroy their number. You can also implement laws protecting those numbers although we all know a solution without regulation is the best.
But I don't think you can get around an election official knowing who voted for what if you want accurate and secure election counts. It's a trade off but hopefully the may other laws we have protection people from politically motivated attacks remain.
If the barcodes are done right, it might be a valid way to assure there is no voter fraud. I guess the big question is: do we have evidence for a lot of voter fraud such that we need this?
Why Troll Bridge? Why not another Discworld novel or short story? Perfect length? Was it the easiest to envision? Requires the least special effects? Your favorite of the Discworld stories? The only one you could secure the rights to?
At Slashdot we have a love/hate relationship with Hollywood. While it produces some of our favorite movies, it also has a lot of criticism directed at it. We rant about the MPAA, copyright law, Hollywood accounting and even the general stagnation of its creativity. As an (apparent) outsider to that who also wants to make films, how do you view Hollywood? Inspiration? Repressive? Hostile? A future paycheck?
What were the best and worst parts about your experience running a Kickstarter campaign? Whether it be about the Kickstarter site in particular or generic to any "crowdsourcing" platform. Any advice to anyone thinking about launch such a campaign? (and please don't say simply "do it" -- any words of caution about how you structure and suggest the price your reward tiers?)
If OS X and iOS are bad then iTunes is a crime against humanity. And I think that's because the original program came from outside Apple.
... probably until they go under. They'll acquire new ideas along the way with their massive piles of cash but what happens when those visions are at odds with The Great Master who has transcended to Nirvana? That's still a long way off but these rumblings of criticism just show you can make another interface that is completely the opposite of Apple and actually do well.
I feel like Apple's UI can be compared to Disney's take over of animation stylings. Before Disney, you could find a whole variety of animation styles. But the vision of Disney was to make everything round and smooth and beautiful. Every animation cel was to look like a masterpiece portrait -- because that was the general populace's desired art at the time. And that's what Disney was trying to make, animated art. You might have found a sharp edge on a villain like Jafar in Aladdin but the main character would be round and warm. Others tried to mimic the stylings and it became a de facto standard mostly because it sold.
Similarly, Apple has done their UIs to be as beautiful as possible. And they've done it really well and it's expensive (I'd imagine both computationally and price). And both Steve Jobs and Walt Disney appeared to be this monolithic men pushing this new way (in reality it's probably a bunch of artists in a cohesive team) but they've both come and gone. And Apple clings to that vision but the vision never changes.
What happened to Disney was another production house, Nickelodeon, slowly discovered that square and rigid corners were not only acceptable but Spongebob Squarepants became an icon. Gross humor could be applied to shows like Ren & Stimpy and some people enjoyed this more than the safe beauty of Disney. Disney has no grit because Walt Disney wouldn't allow it. Disney got into disagreements with Pixar about Toy Story 2 and I think it is best if they left Pixar separate from Disney despite the acquisition. Similarly in the future Apple will be usurped by someone who is willing to experiment and deviate. Jobs is dead so Apple is committed to his vision
Well, I don't know much about what an average Bangladeshi village has on hand but I'm going to wager that it's a very wide spectrum. So my personal advice is no matter what you find to be your solution, you should provide the DIY equivalent any DIY-able components of the pieces. In this way you can treat yourself as a one man thinktank and you can publish this stuff under CCBY3.0 and your project may enjoy self sufficiency without requiring your constant attention.
So to start at the core of it, I would personally select a $25 non-ethernet (Type A?) Raspberry Pi, an $8 USB keyboard and $5 flash card. From there those little devices have the RCA Video (analog) out and also an HDMI out. So if one of your computers goes bad, you can always rig it up to one of these little guys. However, I also understand that you need more displays. Now this is where you have the option to become a rockstar superman. If you are not afraid of code and working GPIO pins I would suggest purchasing some of these little guys first getting it to simply display and read across what they are typing and secondly maybe use one row to take in a file that progresses in typing difficult and displays that on the first line while it waits for input and validates on the second line (might even have room to use LEDs or something else on the RPi for score keeper/carrot/stick. If you document all this, it might turn out that the villagers get wise on how to ripe a seven segment display out of anything and hook it up to these GPIO pins?
So how to power this? Well the easy way would be to use what you have already available for power but get some of these guys and daisy chain these guys from one of your existing computers until they don't produce enough power. I would suggest researching that screen and the Pi and figuring out what their power draw is. Maybe get some cheap fuses to protect your hardware. A lot of broken appliances still have good electric motors in them and electric motors often produce energy as turbines if you spin them. Now, the big problem is how do you clean the power if people are cranking these turbines with their hands or connected to a bike's gear set? That's something I'm not much of an expert in. I do know the Pis run off of two rechargeable AA batteries just great but you also have to take care if they're planning to try to charge those batteries with a hand cranked appliance motor. From my understanding it's pretty tough to not screw stuff up if you're dealing with human generated power. Had to keep that steady and to find existing ways to clean it down to what tiny sensitive devices need.
The upswing of all this would be that the RPis are versatile, any of those students could really do a whole bunch of things with these. And if you make this a part of the Raspberry Pi wiki, you might get people helping you with those screens -- might. At least others will be able to use your work.
The Dice folks simply said, "Let them talk."
That's a great promising attitude and good to hear as long as they weren't twirling a diamond studded ivory cane while sipping Hennessy in their top hat and monocle as they spat it out ;-)
I'm sitting in a conference room right now next to a gentleman from Dice, and he's just been curious what people are saying; hasn't suggested any comments or messaging at all.
Okay, I would say one thing to him: "There are these nebulous things that set Slashdot apart from the other news sites like Reddit, Digg, etc. These things cannot really be quantified well. Something's can like the comment and moderation system. Somethings cannot like the nice blend of stories and story types on the frontpage (I think the FAQ called it a "breakfast burrito"?). So your message to him should be that the Slashdot staff knows these things and Dice does not. But most importantly the second those things go away, then you are no different from Reddit or CNN's Tech Site or whomever. And it's going to be all the much easier for me to just roll on over to the biggest site that has the same implementation of how I get my news. I'll take my book reviews, comments and ball and play elsewhere. Your autonomy protects that. I love that you stood up to Microsoft and tried to stand up to Scientology. I don't think someone with money at risk looking over your shoulder would have allowed that.
As far as being consumed by a bigger fish, keep in mind that Geeknet (aka SourceForge aka VA, etc) was a bigger fish itself.
Totally agree. Honestly, it felt like you guys might have lost some of your autonomy in that move. I don't criticize it, I don't know the whole story but I wouldn't believe you if you said it had no effect at any point on Slashdot-related decisions. Personally, I prefer a lot of little fish for me to pick from even if it means competing standards and difficulty communicating across sites. I don't like one massive behemoth that dictates what the rules are to everyone who wants to play. So it's a natural worriment to me when yet another bigger fish gobbles you up. Hopefully it isn't negative but I can't help but default to it being negative.
I'm thrilled at the possibility of getting a bigger investment into Slashdot, both from an engineering perspective and an editorial perspective.
I will come back to a site that is under such heavy load that I cannot reach it. I will not come back to a site that is yet another news aggregator no matter how quick their servers are.
I'm glad that they're concerned about the user experience. I'm glad that you're cautiously optimistic (although I also feel like you haven't a choice). My concise fears are about the questions that come down that say "How can we direct more eyeballs at our job listings or perhaps inject job listings into Slashdot without risking too much of the overall Slashdot user experience?" Will you play that game?
This is still pretty new to us, but we've been looking at this as a positive thing
Hey, I mean, you'll have to forgive me if I can't discern whether you're saying that under duress or while you're busily shredding documents or while you're issuing cyanide capsules or if you're genuinely optimistic about the move. So if you have the time, I'd like to know what aspects of this make your statements genuine. As you noted with the Gawker thing, I get a little uptight about my small little things being bought up and consumed by bigger fish. The bigger the fish that eats you up, the more layers of direction come down upon you. People complain about comments being un-editable and static but I love that. It makes this feel permanent, it allows me to verbally pin people down, etc. But if Executive A five layers removed from you decides it needs to be his way, what are you gonna do? On top of that, how would you have handled the Microsoft source code and Scientology spats if there was someone with money looming over you reminding you of the stakes and telling you to back down?
-- we were worried earlier that if we were rolled into a business that focused entirely on news, we'd be expected to conform to company standards -- see the Gawker sites, for example.
Okay, fair enough. However, I know very little about Dice. And to counter your argument, an advertising company bought MySpace which used to be a social networking site. And now, surprise surprise, it's more ads than user created spaces. You can argue that MySpace was dead already. You can argue that some change had to be made. But I want to know why you feel safe to pick this out to be a plus and not a minus for my overall Slashdot addiction. How do I know Slashdot isn't going to become a vector tool to get eyeballs over to Dice's bread and butter jobs site?
If you have doubts or genuine concern, I'm not asking you to be the turkey with the long neck when farmer Dice comes around looking for his first meal so feel free to reply as Anonymous Coward. I mean, I'm not talking about my employer on web forums so I understand but your arguments should stand on their own -- sans Slashdot icon.
*looks at Dice's News Page*
*looks at Slashdot*
*begins nervously wringing his hands*
Although amateur tardigrade enthusiast Mike Shaw recently made waves by postulating that the animals may be equipped to survive in outer space because they originally came from other planets ...
Tardigrade Captain: Okay over there, bring the ship down in that clearing, it looks like there's some specimens there on that asphalt path. ... apparently dead organic material ... ... ... but sir, this colony may be lacking light speed travel but our sensors show a plethora of cultural phenomena -- aggregates of which exist right here in this very metropolis! ...
*the Tardigrade craft lands in Time Square and the well armed two meter tall Tardigrades disembark*
Tardigrade Captain: Oh, for the love of Ursa Major! How ugly these specimens turned out! Look at that one!
*the Tardigrade captain gestures toward an Earth female with her jaw agape*
Tardigrade Captain: Ewww, what is this on top of them?
*the Tardigrade captain reaches for the girls hair with his second set of appendages while the first set rubs saliva down his mouth onto his chest and his tertiary set scratches himself*
Tardigrade Officer: *runs a device over the woman* Some sort of fibrous material sir
*the Tardigrade captain withdraws his appendages in terror*
Tardigrade Captain: Oh for fuck's sake, another experiment ruined. Gross. GROSS. All of them just gross as all hell! Alright, everybody back on the ship, you know the drill, take off and nuke 'er from orbit
Tardigrade Officer: But
Tardigrade Captain: You know Jerry, it's always something with you, isn't it? 'Mew mew mew, this civilization has eliminated all evil. Blah blah blah this civilization is one million years old, isn't that worth something?' Now this is the 174th failed experiment we've checked up on and I
*just then an advertisement for Here Comes Honey Boo Boo blares across the Times Square display -- the stupefied Tardigrades watch*
Tardigrade Officer: I'll push the button this time.
Obviously I can't really elaborate on algorithms, but suffice it to say your understanding is naive at best - you're talking 2004 type games.
Great so you can't tell me why my understanding of how HFT works is wrong and I'm talking about "2004 type games" which would explain why I read about automated trading algorithms losing Knight Trading $440 million two months ago? Tell me, all those protection measures and penalties, did they protect the company running the automated trading software or the parties who engaged with trading with the automated trading software?
This stuff is almost always blown out of proportion and you'd never read about the actual workings of the regulation and clearing processes which protect all players
"Protect all players" you say? So that would mean that everyone gets paid when someone screws up big time? Well, I bet they're learning their lessons. I think what you mean is that it "protects the big firms that are doing the HFT" while the market is just a big massive beast ripe for the skimming?
And when trading systems do go awry most exchanges have built-in and often automated undo not to mention penalties.
So, when I buy stock in Wal-Mart and my "algorithm" (my brain) was screwed up, where's my automated undo button?
This is a game where someone's loss is almost always another party's gain. There is no way to "protect all parties involved" with that sort of game. It's the nature of the goddamn game.
If you're just some guy taking the highest paying programming job, I'm not mad at you -- that's capitalism. But if you're actually running the show or defending your boss, you and I are basically at polar opposites. HFT doesn't provide anything and receives an insane amount of cash. Betting on arbitrages isn't betting, you're basically taxing everyone else little bits of money and just being a huge fucking leech.
Key question: when is fast trading too fast?
Trading is too fast when it ceases to mean anything. The rate at which these decisions are being made indicates that it is not going through a human mind. The stock market is about people being able to buy and sell securities that allows businesses to raise additional capital. It was originally a very social thing so much so that it could reflect the mood of the populace's strength and development.
Many ordinary Americans have grown wary of the stock market ...
Right you are! It's no longer about humans making decisions. It no longer reflects social aspects of a sector or country or world market. It's more and more about what algorithms your "opponents" are using and what your algorithms are set at. And that's where it ceases to make sense. I'm okay with some guy waking up at 3am and reading every newspaper in the world and beating me at stock trading. I'm not okay when the name of the game today is who can pay tons of money to have their own servers set up across the street from a major exchange with a special dedicated fiber going straight to them as they pay off said exchange. That's starting to become so abstracted from the initial concept of a stock exchange that these big firms have walled everyone else out.
... which they see as the playground of Google-esque algorithms, powerful banks and secretive, fast-money trading firms.
If only they were Google-esque algorithms, they'd at least be innovative. SNAFUs have shown they're far from complex and often so stupid they loose hundreds of millions. But, yeah, who in their right mind would play a game like that?
What the algorithms are buying and selling no longer make any sense, the turn around is so insanely quick on these trades that there is no point at which a normal human can say "Oh, that algorithm thinks that Microsoft stock is going up and will hold it for some amount of time." No, instead what's going on is someone put out a big pre-order for Microsoft stock and so the HFT guys are buying stocks at a lower price than that only to turn over and dump them almost instantly as the order actually comes through netting fractions of a penny.
Of course, all the instructors and professors bad-mouth the online classes. Why? Because the online courses are a threat to their jobs, of course.
How is an online course any different that a textbook? To me it has some benefits over a text book like you don't have to read as much, you can just listen. I like to be able to flip back and forth or scan chapters in a textbook -- that's a bit harder in a video lecture. So why aren't instructors and professors calling for the ban of textbooks and criticizing them? Why don't they lynch each other when one writes a really good textbook?
Once an online course is in place, it doesn't require much in the way of instructor intervention.
Listen, man, I'm glad this worked for you. But it's a one way communication channel. The way you say "it doesn't require much in the way of instructor intervention" is pretty indicative that you think teaching is someone shouting at you with your mouth taped shut and your eyes pried open. You should maybe read the article before saying the critique is biased, he talks about what I'm mentioning:
Throughout the course, lectures and exercises veer rapidly between utterly trivial and nigh-impossible. I think this is a reflection of the one-way communication channel, such that Thrun can't have any awareness of what counts as easy and what counts as hard to the students.
Yet you say:
Most of the instructors I've had love the idea that you are forced to come listen to them twice a week, and blanch at the idea that any course could be effective without their brilliant classroom contribution.
I'm pretty sure that's in your best interest. If you're one of the gifted students that hasn't ever needed a professor's help then congratulations but you're not the normal student. If what you're saying is true, the government would only need to dispatch sets of textbooks to each home and stop paying tons of money on public education altogether. But what you're saying isn't true ... anyone with an education given to them by several other humans will know that.
*Setting: Microsoft executive officers meeting* ... ... we could cancel our "free" express version of Visual Studio? ... ... ... ... or do we have a problem?
Steve Ballmer: Alright you dumbshits, I've been up all night reading about this new "walled garden" thing that Apple has and I want one for Microsoft!
Executive #1: Are you serious? Why play their game? We've been gaining developers by opening up to the community and
Steve Ballmer: Shut up and get out, you're fired. Anyone else want to call me a copycat?
Executive #2: We could
Steve Ballmer: That's a good idea but we need something better, something that sends a message to developers developers developers developers that we don't even need them. It used to be about the developers developers developers developers but maybe -- just maybe -- they're like women and you gotta hit 'em a little bit so they appreciate when you're nice to them. I don't just want a measly walled garden, I want a fortressed garden with turrets that shoot anything that moves and has a Guantanamo Bay garden where no one has any rights and developers developers developers developers are tortured while we urinate on copies of the GPL and
Executive #3: Well, my division's about to release the Windows Phone 8 SDK, we could, say, charge $100 for people just to see the API?
Steve Ballmer: That's good but it's not quite there yet. That sounds like those Member's Only jackets that weren't really "members only" and anyone with a bennie could pick one up. I mean when I was an up and coming star in this company I bought one and thought that it was a mark of success and then there I was in McDonald's ordering my daily seven quarter pounders with cheese and this fucking teenager has a Members Only jacket on. And so I ask him what club he's a member of that he thinks he can wear this piece of clothing around and he laughs and says 'Dude, it's 2005, every thrift store in the world sells these for $5, it's like, ironic, you know, hipster' and so then I just reach over the counter to strangle the last breath out of his
Executive #3: *AHEM* Wellllll, we could actually make this "members only" and send out invitations to participate in the release of the Windows 8 SDK.
Steve Ballmer: YES! That's what I'm talkin' about. That's the kind of innovation and vision this company needs! You just won the income of this dumbass over here
Executive #1: What?! You can't do that!
Steve Ballmer: Oh I can. In fact, fuck it, it's retroactive for this fiscal year. You'll get a bill in the mail. Cheer up, your taxes just got a whole lot easier.
*huffing and puffing, Ballmer drags a stack of chairs up to the conference table next to the shocked first executive*
Steve Ballmer:
The reason editors let you collapse comments is that you sometimes have to make really ugly code -- whether it's for performance or time constraints. And the only way to really describe it actually larger inline blocks that can obfuscate the code. So they make them collapsible for those who have read them already.
Winer also makes the case for providing links in his code to external 'worknotes.'
Yeah, we use an internal wiki.
So, what are your thoughts on useful commenting practices or features, either implemented or on your wishlist?
The biggest complaint I have is people who use comments to explain bad object/procedure/function/method/script/class/whatever naming. For example, a guy I worked with calls everything a "driver." Main method? That's a driver. Class holding the main method? Of course DriverClass. Package? Of course YYY.ZZZ.NNN.Driver. On it goes. Another guy likes to use the verb "interrogate" where as I like to use the verb "inspect" and I think that's just more about your origins (I think he's Spring background while I'm a little more on the Ruby/Groovy side of things). A common and well defined vocabulary inside your team and embedded in your actual code will take you much further than trying to explain it all out in the comments.