While the summary makes it sound like this is some breakthrough idea, there are several similar sites out there:
Breakthrough idea, maybe not. A different realization with distinct advantages, maybe.
https://www.sharelatex.com/ [sharelatex.com]
This lacks continuously-updated rendering, which I think is a key feature of writelatex.
http://spandex.io/ [spandex.io]
This looks like it might actually be better than writelatex for most uses (I particularly like the advertised dropbox integration, and revision control features), though it has the distinct disadvantage for use where I work that, unlike writelatex, the UI is completely borked with IE8 (yes, I know that I shouldn't be using IE and especially not out-of-date IE, but I don't get to dictate that at my workplace.)
Do it with MySQL and a programming language of your choice and output to spreadsheet.
I mostly agree, but MySQL is probably the wrong choice of database. For most things that you would consider using a spreadsheet for, you probably aren't concerned with multiple users with concurrent access, so you don't need a DB server, and SQLite is a much better choice.
If you do need a DB server for some reason to back your spreadsheet-like analysis, PostgreSQL is probably a much better choice (if nothing else, because of the much richer query functionality; CTEs, particularly, are very useful for analysis.)
The Bronze star while being a 'combat' medal doesn't require one to participate in combat to receive it.
It does for an award with the "V" device.
This new medal's requirement of 'extraordinary achievement' would indeed seem to place it higher then the bronze star. Point of fact 'extraordinary' is the same wording found on the service crosses; the second highest award after only the medal of honor.
"Extraordinary" isn't the issue, its "acheivement" (as opposed to "heroism", "gallantry", or "valor"). The service crosses are all valor awards (like the Silver Star, the Army DFC or the other services DFC with "V" device, and the Bronze Star with "V" device, and unlike the Distinguished Warfare Medal, the non-Army DFC without "V", and Bronze Star without "V".)
What really irritates me and a lot of other service members is it's ranking in the 'order of precedence'. What I've read is it ranks above some combat medals, specifically the Bronze Star, which is really pissing off the 'boots on the ground' troops and I don't blame them for being mad.
That's certainly understandable, though its perhaps worth noting that there are already non-valor medals that rank above the Bronze Star; the Silver Star has been, for a very long time, the lowest ranking medal for valor which has no medals above it which are not also for valor.
If you look at the new Distinguished Warfare Medal as a step down from the Distinguished Flying Cross issued as an acheivement rather than valor award (as all services except the Army use the DFC without the "v" device), it makes some sense (and, unlike the acheivement version of the DFC which it ranks below, the DWM is restricted to award for acheivement that has a direct impact on combat or military operations.)
When you promote mediocrity, then you _encourage_ mediocrity.
Certainly, remote warfare involves less personal danger than traditional combat (at least, as long as the US retains is overwhelming superiority in capacity to conducting remote warfare), but that hardly means that the people conducting it in general, and more specifically the people that would be awarded decorations for outstanding performance in the context of conducting it, are in any way engaging in "mediocrity".
IMO, medals aren't intended so much to prove what you did, but to show you that the chain of command recognizes the significance of what you did (and, to provide a visible-in-certain-contexts reminder to others that you did something that the chain of command recognized as important.)
Some would say that recognition of service is done with, oh, I don't know, a pay packet for instance. You get paid for your service. Medals are for going above and beyond.
Some decorations are simply for what you got assigned to do (campaign medals like those for the Iraq or Afghanistan campaign, for instance.) Its recognition of the importance of what you got assigned to do.
Some decorations are for being part of a group that did more than expected (unit decorations.)
Many decorations are, as you suggest, for personally going above and beyond the usual expectations -- but even those are not all relevant to combat. Some are specifically for direct involvement in combat. Some are for notable (but not necessarily heroic) non-combat service. Some are for non-combat service in combat theater. Some are specifically for heroism in a non-combat context. And now one is specifically for service directly related to combat performed from outside of the combat theater. In the broad scope of things, I don't see the last as not fitting in with the spectrum that exists for the rest.
I don't get a medal for showing up for work in the morning.
Most places, you don't get medals for going above and beyond, either. The military isn't like most places.
Isn't the whole point of medals to reward someone for putting their life on the line to protect their country?
No. The point of military medals, generally, is to recognize notable (for a wide range of definitions of "notable") service. Some medals are specifically about putting one's life on the line, some are not.
Quite frequently, there is a distinction between those that can be awarded for combat service and those that can be awarded for non-combat service; there are two aspects that typically distingish the former: direct and immediate combat impact, and personal risk in the theater of combat. (There's also some for non-combat service in a combat theater.)
Adding a reasonably high-level award specifically for service that involves direct and immediate combat impact that is performed from a location remote from combat makes perfect sense (well, inasmuch as the rest of the system of distinctions between military awards does, in any case.)
Of course, voting for a non-primary party will in fact be a wasted vote until such time as that party garners enough votes to challenge the primary parties, at which point we'll have three primary parties which are all just as bad as one another
No, we'll have two, just a different two: our electoral system structurally makes it so that a new party being competitive means (and usually follows rather than leads) an existing major party ceasing to be competitive.
If this is true (which it is), then logic would dictate that it is pointless to represent a progress bar in measurements of time.
It makes sense to use a time estimate alongside a progress bar (as long as it is clear that it is an estimate, which is usually the case.) If the time estimate gets stuck (except, perhaps, on the last increment on which an update is possible to the progress bar, where it s quite possibly that even a reasonably non-optimistic method would eventually asymptotically approach 0), its a sign that the estimation method being used to produce the time estimate is probably poor.
The problem with this is that the application can only recalculate estimated remaining time when it has new information. It doesn't get new information in the middle of performing an operation, only when operations are complete.
Incorrect. Assuming that you aren't writing a single-threaded application where the whole app is blocked on the operation, the application gets new information essentially continuously, as the total elapsed time of the current operation changes as fast as the system clock does. For a time estimate presented alongside a progress bar (which is a different thing than the progress bar itself), this can be useful information.
Technically speaking, it's not the progress that's going backwards
Technically speaking, that's that's exactly what the progress bar, which is a UI element, is doing, and it shouldn't be.
it's just that you're adding more tasks to the right of the bar (thereby making longer, and making the progress appear to have gone backwards).
If the actual UI element is not getting longer, you are not making the bar longer. You are making the numerical value that the UI library maps to the right end of the bar longer, causing, for the same numerical progress value, the progress bar displayed on the UI to actually go backwards (not "appear to have gone backwards".) This is bad design, and completely fails to understand the purpose of a progress bar. If taking an exceptional code path means you have more steps to get from Milestone A to Milestone B, that doesn't either move the current progress backwards or make "done" somewhere else other than where it was before, it means that there are more intermediate subdivisions between Milestone A and Milestone B and, assuming that each of those steps takes the same time as the fewer steps on the normal path between those milestones, progress between the fixed points representing each of those milestones on the progress bar should be slower. The bar still ought to move forward.
many of them should ``go backwards'' all the time, as would any half-way honest estimate without an oracle; the installer found a special case and has to run another code branch to replace something that's already been done; download drivers; etc.
A progress bar should always measure a nondecreasing progress metric with a fixed endpoint, so it should never either go backwards or (as some other posts in this subthread suggest) get longer.
Having to take a longer code path to reach a progress point on the main scenario means that you should have slower progress through that segment. If you need to explain the exceptional condition to the user, you should do that; winding the progress bar backwards or extending it really doesn't address that need. Overloading a UI element that does a good job at clearly communicating one type of information to try to communicate information that it is no good at communicating just produces confusion.
A common open-source base implementation for core features of a class of applications for which interoperability is an important feature isn't the same thing as a monopoly. It doesn't have any of the problems that come from a monopoly (it may have some of the problems associated with monoculture, which is a different issue than a monopoly.)
Diversity is power. Since everyone walks into a different direction, and then on top of that can take the best of everybody else.
That's actually the selling point of having a common base open source implementation. Everyone can focus their development efforts on their unique interests, and at the same time pull in the common features from the base rather than, if they want features that someone else has, having to reinvent the wheel to implement on top of a different base engine.
It saves time to imitate instead of innovating, yes.
No, it saves time to pull from upstream rather than reinventing the wheel for common features, which frees up resources for innovating for innovative features. This means that features that are intended to work the same across browsers actually will, while more resources are available for each vendor to implement new features.
ow that they've switched to webkit, can anybody tell me what makes them different from Chrome now?
Everything other than the rendering engine?
Well, not everything, since they are switching to V8 Javascript engine, as well.
OTOH, differentiation on lots of axes may not be as important to them as being able to drive the web in the direction they want. Opera-pushed changes to web standards may be easier get accepted by other browser vendors (and, consequently, standards bodies on which those vendors sit) if, when Opera pays the cost to develop their implementation, they've already automatically got patches to WebKit to implement them -- plus, Opera doesn't have to expend as much effort reimplementing new and widely used features from other vendors if they can just pull them in from upstream.
Working from a common open source base means that each vendor can focus on what they want to do that is new rather than duplicating other vendors' work.
"Cyberpace" is a metaphor. Used as such, it is sometimes useful, but, like all metaphors, it can be misleading if taken as a literal description; the internet is obvious not a literal physical place.
Is "cyberspace" a stupid term? No. Is it sometimes used stupidly? Yes.
"IT" is not "programming", so "IT Project Management" should have nothing to do with managing programming projects.
IT is "Information Technology", and developing IT systems includes, as its main component, programming. "Projects" are closed-ended development efforts.
IT is generally service level jobs keeping a computer information infrastructure working, which may need some programming.
Yes, many IT jobs meet that description, because most IT isn't IT projects, its maintenance and operations of existing IT infrastructure and systems.
But usually programming is very often done outside the IT group.
More specifically, when programming is being done on a product intended to be marketed to external customers as part of the organizations general business (as is the case of much programming done by firms in the IT industry to start with), programming is usually done in the "product development" group, since, in relation to the organizations business operations, that is what the purpose of the programming effort is. But that's true of whatever activity develops an organizations products for market, whether that involves computer programming, designing hardware, or designing boardgames. The name of the organizational entity in this case generally reflects the relation to the company's business efforts, not the discipline.
When programming is being done for the developing organization's own use (especially when the organization doesn't produce software for the market as part of its usual line of business), its typically done in an application development group that is part of the organization's overall IT group.
That suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of encryption.
Actually, it suggest to me that the BBC understands exactly the reasons that the use of encryption to implement DRM is incompatible with open source (which they state outright that they believe it is), but that, as they have an interest in getting DRM specified in HTML and know that there are open source proponents who oppose this especially if it excludes open source solutions, hold out the false hope of "This may enable an open-source solution that we have not yet conceived to come to market", which some open source proponents who don't understand why DRM is fundamentally incompatible with it might grab on to and, with irrational hope for open source, actually believe that standardizing DRM will actually enable open source solutions to replace closed ones.
PS: Of course Richard Stallman was again all correct about cloud services: Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman
Actually, Stallman was wrong on that, starting with confusing out "renting out services run on someone else's computers" (which is the actual source of the "trap", insofar as it exists, that he refers to, and is a practice nearly as old as business use of computers) with "cloud computing" (which is a set of technologies relating to dynamic allocation of resources -- virtual servers, etc. -- which has many applications, including, but not limited to, more efficiently implementing the kind of remote third-party services which have been around forever in which Stallman sees a "trap".)
Some universities have distinguished between non-interactive mass lectures and interactive small-group tutorials for hundreds of years.
The distinctive thing about this is using technology to break the lecture part out of fixed time and space, which has all kinds of utility (reducing the need for physical space, increasing convenience for learners, and, for pre-university levels that often are stuck with a fixed amount of classroom time, allowing more classroom time to be used in a tutorial mode rather than a lecture mode.)
He, personally, is not infallible to start with; the doctrine of Papal infallibility holds that statements of the Pope made ex cathedra on matters of faith and morals are infallible. When he stops being Pope, he can no longer make ex cathedra statements as Pope, and therefore cannot make statements that would be held to be infallible by reason of the doctrine of Papal infallibility.
In this context, I'll be repeating myself: if you fail one of the necessary components, all the others are wastage (even you reduce their cost to zero, it's still wasted time).
This would only make any sense if one took as given that the value of education is the minimum value of any of its components. I don't see any reason to believe this is the case, and plenty of reason to believe that its not and that individual elements of education can have value on their own, even when not integrated into an ideal spectrum of elements of equal quality, and that improving one element can improve the overall results (though, whether it improves results for any individual learner may be less certain) even if you aren't improving all the elements.
I would say that the closest this comes to a valid point is that for each element, there is a point at which disproportionate investment in that element is inefficient in producing improvement in results and you can get better value spending the same amount of effort improving other elements.
Slashdot Mirror
Breakthrough idea, maybe not. A different realization with distinct advantages, maybe.
This lacks continuously-updated rendering, which I think is a key feature of writelatex.
This looks like it might actually be better than writelatex for most uses (I particularly like the advertised dropbox integration, and revision control features), though it has the distinct disadvantage for use where I work that, unlike writelatex, the UI is completely borked with IE8 (yes, I know that I shouldn't be using IE and especially not out-of-date IE, but I don't get to dictate that at my workplace.)
I mostly agree, but MySQL is probably the wrong choice of database. For most things that you would consider using a spreadsheet for, you probably aren't concerned with multiple users with concurrent access, so you don't need a DB server, and SQLite is a much better choice. If you do need a DB server for some reason to back your spreadsheet-like analysis, PostgreSQL is probably a much better choice (if nothing else, because of the much richer query functionality; CTEs, particularly, are very useful for analysis.)
It does for an award with the "V" device.
"Extraordinary" isn't the issue, its "acheivement" (as opposed to "heroism", "gallantry", or "valor"). The service crosses are all valor awards (like the Silver Star, the Army DFC or the other services DFC with "V" device, and the Bronze Star with "V" device, and unlike the Distinguished Warfare Medal, the non-Army DFC without "V", and Bronze Star without "V".)
That's certainly understandable, though its perhaps worth noting that there are already non-valor medals that rank above the Bronze Star; the Silver Star has been, for a very long time, the lowest ranking medal for valor which has no medals above it which are not also for valor.
If you look at the new Distinguished Warfare Medal as a step down from the Distinguished Flying Cross issued as an acheivement rather than valor award (as all services except the Army use the DFC without the "v" device), it makes some sense (and, unlike the acheivement version of the DFC which it ranks below, the DWM is restricted to award for acheivement that has a direct impact on combat or military operations.)
Certainly, remote warfare involves less personal danger than traditional combat (at least, as long as the US retains is overwhelming superiority in capacity to conducting remote warfare), but that hardly means that the people conducting it in general, and more specifically the people that would be awarded decorations for outstanding performance in the context of conducting it, are in any way engaging in "mediocrity".
IMO, medals aren't intended so much to prove what you did, but to show you that the chain of command recognizes the significance of what you did (and, to provide a visible-in-certain-contexts reminder to others that you did something that the chain of command recognized as important.)
Some decorations are simply for what you got assigned to do (campaign medals like those for the Iraq or Afghanistan campaign, for instance.) Its recognition of the importance of what you got assigned to do.
Some decorations are for being part of a group that did more than expected (unit decorations.)
Many decorations are, as you suggest, for personally going above and beyond the usual expectations -- but even those are not all relevant to combat. Some are specifically for direct involvement in combat. Some are for notable (but not necessarily heroic) non-combat service. Some are for non-combat service in combat theater. Some are specifically for heroism in a non-combat context. And now one is specifically for service directly related to combat performed from outside of the combat theater. In the broad scope of things, I don't see the last as not fitting in with the spectrum that exists for the rest.
Most places, you don't get medals for going above and beyond, either. The military isn't like most places.
No. The point of military medals, generally, is to recognize notable (for a wide range of definitions of "notable") service. Some medals are specifically about putting one's life on the line, some are not.
Quite frequently, there is a distinction between those that can be awarded for combat service and those that can be awarded for non-combat service; there are two aspects that typically distingish the former: direct and immediate combat impact, and personal risk in the theater of combat. (There's also some for non-combat service in a combat theater.) Adding a reasonably high-level award specifically for service that involves direct and immediate combat impact that is performed from a location remote from combat makes perfect sense (well, inasmuch as the rest of the system of distinctions between military awards does, in any case.)
Which spent the 1990s-2000s buying each other up, including the biggest of them buying AT&T and taking its name.
No, we'll have two, just a different two: our electoral system structurally makes it so that a new party being competitive means (and usually follows rather than leads) an existing major party ceasing to be competitive.
It makes sense to use a time estimate alongside a progress bar (as long as it is clear that it is an estimate, which is usually the case.) If the time estimate gets stuck (except, perhaps, on the last increment on which an update is possible to the progress bar, where it s quite possibly that even a reasonably non-optimistic method would eventually asymptotically approach 0), its a sign that the estimation method being used to produce the time estimate is probably poor.
Time estimates predict the future, and face that problem. Progress bars report the past, and do not.
Incorrect. Assuming that you aren't writing a single-threaded application where the whole app is blocked on the operation, the application gets new information essentially continuously, as the total elapsed time of the current operation changes as fast as the system clock does. For a time estimate presented alongside a progress bar (which is a different thing than the progress bar itself), this can be useful information.
Technically speaking, that's that's exactly what the progress bar, which is a UI element, is doing, and it shouldn't be.
If the actual UI element is not getting longer, you are not making the bar longer. You are making the numerical value that the UI library maps to the right end of the bar longer, causing, for the same numerical progress value, the progress bar displayed on the UI to actually go backwards (not "appear to have gone backwards".) This is bad design, and completely fails to understand the purpose of a progress bar. If taking an exceptional code path means you have more steps to get from Milestone A to Milestone B, that doesn't either move the current progress backwards or make "done" somewhere else other than where it was before, it means that there are more intermediate subdivisions between Milestone A and Milestone B and, assuming that each of those steps takes the same time as the fewer steps on the normal path between those milestones, progress between the fixed points representing each of those milestones on the progress bar should be slower. The bar still ought to move forward.
A progress bar should always measure a nondecreasing progress metric with a fixed endpoint, so it should never either go backwards or (as some other posts in this subthread suggest) get longer.
Having to take a longer code path to reach a progress point on the main scenario means that you should have slower progress through that segment. If you need to explain the exceptional condition to the user, you should do that; winding the progress bar backwards or extending it really doesn't address that need. Overloading a UI element that does a good job at clearly communicating one type of information to try to communicate information that it is no good at communicating just produces confusion.
A common open-source base implementation for core features of a class of applications for which interoperability is an important feature isn't the same thing as a monopoly. It doesn't have any of the problems that come from a monopoly (it may have some of the problems associated with monoculture, which is a different issue than a monopoly.)
That's actually the selling point of having a common base open source implementation. Everyone can focus their development efforts on their unique interests, and at the same time pull in the common features from the base rather than, if they want features that someone else has, having to reinvent the wheel to implement on top of a different base engine.
No, it saves time to pull from upstream rather than reinventing the wheel for common features, which frees up resources for innovating for innovative features. This means that features that are intended to work the same across browsers actually will, while more resources are available for each vendor to implement new features.
Well, not everything, since they are switching to V8 Javascript engine, as well.
OTOH, differentiation on lots of axes may not be as important to them as being able to drive the web in the direction they want. Opera-pushed changes to web standards may be easier get accepted by other browser vendors (and, consequently, standards bodies on which those vendors sit) if, when Opera pays the cost to develop their implementation, they've already automatically got patches to WebKit to implement them -- plus, Opera doesn't have to expend as much effort reimplementing new and widely used features from other vendors if they can just pull them in from upstream.
Working from a common open source base means that each vendor can focus on what they want to do that is new rather than duplicating other vendors' work.
What, you prefer "prima donna"?
"Cyberpace" is a metaphor. Used as such, it is sometimes useful, but, like all metaphors, it can be misleading if taken as a literal description; the internet is obvious not a literal physical place.
Is "cyberspace" a stupid term? No. Is it sometimes used stupidly? Yes.
IT is "Information Technology", and developing IT systems includes, as its main component, programming. "Projects" are closed-ended development efforts.
Yes, many IT jobs meet that description, because most IT isn't IT projects, its maintenance and operations of existing IT infrastructure and systems.
More specifically, when programming is being done on a product intended to be marketed to external customers as part of the organizations general business (as is the case of much programming done by firms in the IT industry to start with), programming is usually done in the "product development" group, since, in relation to the organizations business operations, that is what the purpose of the programming effort is. But that's true of whatever activity develops an organizations products for market, whether that involves computer programming, designing hardware, or designing boardgames. The name of the organizational entity in this case generally reflects the relation to the company's business efforts, not the discipline.
When programming is being done for the developing organization's own use (especially when the organization doesn't produce software for the market as part of its usual line of business), its typically done in an application development group that is part of the organization's overall IT group.
Actually, it suggest to me that the BBC understands exactly the reasons that the use of encryption to implement DRM is incompatible with open source (which they state outright that they believe it is), but that, as they have an interest in getting DRM specified in HTML and know that there are open source proponents who oppose this especially if it excludes open source solutions, hold out the false hope of "This may enable an open-source solution that we have not yet conceived to come to market", which some open source proponents who don't understand why DRM is fundamentally incompatible with it might grab on to and, with irrational hope for open source, actually believe that standardizing DRM will actually enable open source solutions to replace closed ones.
Actually, Stallman was wrong on that, starting with confusing out "renting out services run on someone else's computers" (which is the actual source of the "trap", insofar as it exists, that he refers to, and is a practice nearly as old as business use of computers) with "cloud computing" (which is a set of technologies relating to dynamic allocation of resources -- virtual servers, etc. -- which has many applications, including, but not limited to, more efficiently implementing the kind of remote third-party services which have been around forever in which Stallman sees a "trap".)
The distinctive thing about this is using technology to break the lecture part out of fixed time and space, which has all kinds of utility (reducing the need for physical space, increasing convenience for learners, and, for pre-university levels that often are stuck with a fixed amount of classroom time, allowing more classroom time to be used in a tutorial mode rather than a lecture mode.)
He, personally, is not infallible to start with; the doctrine of Papal infallibility holds that statements of the Pope made ex cathedra on matters of faith and morals are infallible. When he stops being Pope, he can no longer make ex cathedra statements as Pope, and therefore cannot make statements that would be held to be infallible by reason of the doctrine of Papal infallibility.
This would only make any sense if one took as given that the value of education is the minimum value of any of its components. I don't see any reason to believe this is the case, and plenty of reason to believe that its not and that individual elements of education can have value on their own, even when not integrated into an ideal spectrum of elements of equal quality, and that improving one element can improve the overall results (though, whether it improves results for any individual learner may be less certain) even if you aren't improving all the elements.
I would say that the closest this comes to a valid point is that for each element, there is a point at which disproportionate investment in that element is inefficient in producing improvement in results and you can get better value spending the same amount of effort improving other elements.