columbo

Hrm... odd kind of article from a place called "The Aviatonist" I mean it is interesting but RC controlled UAVs have been around since the 70's, with prototypes going back to the 40's.

        Only on February 26, 1973, during testimony before the                   
        United States House Committee on Appropriations, the 
        U.S. military officially confirmed that they had been 
        utilizing UAVs in Southeast Asia (Vietnam).[13] Over
        5,000 U.S. airmen had been killed and over 1,000 more 
        were either missing in action (MIA) or captured 
        (prisoners of war/POW). The USAF 100th Strategic 
        Reconnaissance Wing had flown approximately 3,435 UAV 
        missions during the war[14] at a cost of about 554 
        UAVs lost to all causes. In the words of USAF 
  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmanned_aerial_vehicle#History

Yeah the touch-screen has been a problem - especially when trying to give something out to the general unwashed public. No amount of protective cover would have helped us when some guy or gal decided to punch one of the screens in a few months back. Meh.

By 2" thick I was talking more about a box with the touch-screen in the front with a simple plastic protective layer and a hinge you can flip open to reveal the internals. That way replacing the screen is just a dispatch-call. Or something to that effect.

Basically something that can be mounted semi-permanently, the same way as a television screen, and with the most common parts (the screen) accessible by a technician so they can be replaced when broken.

As someone working on a hardware project one of the biggest challenges we have is finding a tablet that is cheap, mass-produceable, and rugged enough to stand up for months/years of abuse. This might do the trick.

Our only options so far has been very cheap knock-off tablets and the questionable long term viability of the pengpod.

It's too bad nobody has made a 'cheap-hacker-tablet' something that might be 2" thick and weigh 4-6lbs but have a touch-screen, metal body, usb ports, screw placements for mounting, and easy to access replacable hardware.

This is another great example of why you can't take successful people and distil them down to their base components and say "ah, this is what made him great!"

I believe being a loud-abrasive-dictator works for Linus because he is famous for being a loud-abrasive-dictator.

That's not important. What is important is the reader. Let's be clear on a few things

#1 - Linus doesn't run a business. He's the kernel admin, he's a popular figure, he manages millions of lines of code. That's an entirely different game than what is necessary to run a small/mid/large business. Comparing the two is an apples-to-hammers comparison.

In a business, or small open source project, you have to be willing to deal with what you get. You will make sacrifices, it wont be easy. You might have this great idea but only 2 people are willing to work the occasional weekend on it; are you about to start an email chain calling them all dogshit coders?

Linus doesn't have that problem. He's famous for being Linus. You are not famous for being you.

#2 - YOU need to know how to be critical and polite. I don't care what Linus gets to do. You as a developer, you as a person who isn't famous, you as someone working in a team must (MUST) learn how to give constructive criticism.

"Bob, This isn't up to our quality standards, here's an example (cite)".

Easy, no frills, no shit-sandwich, no sugar-coated-political-correct-everyone-holds-hands-and-sings-around-the-campfire filler text. It's clear and it gets straight to the point. Learn how to do this, or fight an uphill battle with diminishing returns.

Linus can start a project tomorrow and have a hundred developers working on it, you cannot.

#3 - I'd take Linus' opinion on business culture with about the same size of salt as I would when listening to Jonathan Ive's opinion on middle-eastern-politics.

Everyone gets to have an opinion on something. I'm sure Tim Cook has an opinion on healthcare, and Bill Gates has an opinion on footwear. This doesn't make them experts on the subject or even any more informed than your average person. They're famous for doing X, listen to their opinions on X, take everything else as amateur opinion.

Linus is the kernal admin. I want to know how he manages 15 million lines of code, I want to know how he forks/branches/merges this code, how he handles bugs, how he tests it, and how work is handed out. I want to get his opinion on managing code not managing people. He doesn't deal with payroll, 401ks, employee vacations or benefits, he doesn't care about retention, he cares about code.

It's crazy to think about the precedent this sets. I mean, what about public works, books, music & articles? Could this be considered a terrorist threat these days?

        The only way to fix it is to flush it all away. 
        Any fucking time. Any fucking day. Learn to swim,
        I'll see you down in Arizona bay. Some say a comet 
        will fall from the sky. Followed by meteor showers
        and tidal waves. Followed by faultlines that cannot 
        sit still. Followed by millions of dumbfounded 
        dipshits. Some say the end is near. Some say we'll 
        see armageddon soon. I certainly hope we will cuz I 
        sure could use a vacation from this Silly shit, 
        stupid shit...  
  

I'm sure there are better examples, more scholarly ones, but that was the first off the top of my head.

> If a companies working conditions are really that dangerous you can work in another factory or educate yourself and become skilled enough to be worth while to please.

> Call me calloused,

Well, not so much calloused as much as completely, laughably, uneducated. The idea that someone in the 1920's-forward can just "get some skills or work someplace else" shows a complete lack of the most basic understanding of what life was like, and still is like today for the working class.

Off Topic: Having just browsed over this website I have to say it has a great layout for depth-heavy articles. Better than any news site that I can think of. Great images, uncluttered, and a wide variety of topics. Very nice!

Well kind-of but not exactly... there is job corps: http://www.jobcorps.gov/home.aspx

Basic trade skills, pays you for earning a GED, most of the centres are rual so it's hard to fall into 'temptation'. Overall a great program.

I use dropbox as a client facing equivalent of FTP.

That way the client can have programmers/designers change their UI without needing any access into the server. It also allows me to share each site and doesn't bring the entire headache of managing accounts. I simply share the yoursite.com folder to the client. If a client has multiple sites it's just as easy to share all of them.

Patent Trolls are one of the reasons I've kept my small business under the radar and rely on word of mouth or known clients to spread it.

I just can't afford it, and I'd rather open source the whole damn thing over giving some random slimeball in texas a dime.

I've read about Patent Litigation/Troll Insurance, has anyone tried this? Recommendations?

Have you considered starting with Grails? It's a much easier jump into the "java-ish" world. The main benefit is you can choose to run a grails application and rely on java jars for when you need performance boosts.

I'm really surprised at the performance of C#... honest no-flame question: how is possible it that Python is beating C#? I've been out of the .NET world for several years, almost a decade, but I always assumed they would be at Java level performance.

edit add: This is really fantastic work

Because his most powerful weapon is controlling the public discourse.

If he goes entirely silent then the government will step in to fill the void: "His girlfriend's a stripper, he's a hacker terrorist, his neighbors say he's weird, he might be a soviet spy, he did it all for the attention, he's not an American."

If he speaks out on a daily basis the news media will eventually grow tired of the story and move on leaving him to be a 3rd page story when he's arrested.

His best option right now is to stay in front of the news for as long as possible until some solution is worked out. In the meantime staying positive with the American people will do more good for his eventual trial.

> The first two are focussing on positive emotions and ignore the important role negativity plays.

There's no definition of either that I know of that includes "positive emotions" and ignores "negative emotions". That's a made up definition.

> Smilarly, confidence does not in any way equate capability.

Never said it did. I also never said these were the only things you need. But you do need them.

There's no way forward without going to specifics. I guess I'd need to see an example of 5 or 10 industry leaders or greats, from any industry; Linus Torvald, Mary Roach, Warren Buffett, Jon Stwart etc... that did not have energy, enthusiasm and confidence.

Everyone seems to be stuck on the word "project"

It's unquestionable that you need energy, excitement and confidence to be good at something. Anything from being a doctor, lawyer to professional athlete.

So let's clarify these words before we start the strawmen arguments of "So lawyers should be jumping for joy and act like Billy Mays in the courtroom, right columbo?"

Energetic (Possessing, exerting, or displaying energy.) - You need to have energy about what you do. Stephen King is energetic about writing horror fiction. He doesn't high-five everyone around him but you can tell he puts his energy into his books.

Excitement (A feeling of great enthusiasm and eagerness) - What you do needs to excite you. It should be something that keeps you up at night thinking about it. A good surgeon should be excited to learn about new techniques and discoveries in his field.

Confidence (a feeling or consciousness of one's powers or of reliance on one's circumstances) - You absolutely must know that you are going to sink that next basket. You don't need to walk around like you're the best person at the game but you need to believe that you yourself have the ability.

So yes, you need these traits to excel. To argue this is really just leading towards a debate of "Well I choose a narrow definition of excitement and since doctors aren't that then it is irrelevant".

Projection (The act of projecting or the condition of being projected.) is going to be the only thing people can fall back on. I don't believe they are saying to fake some part, but it definitely is not what I'm saying. Having these traits leads to projecting these traits. Your excitement, confidence and energy comes out when you talk about what you love to do. It just does.

> The problem with never allowing questions with lots of upvotes to be closed is twofold:

You could always make the number of moderators required to close a topic increase as the topic rises in popularity.

A +4 question might need 2 moderators to close but a +2000 question might need 12 moderators to close.

> Why is everyone convinced he won't have a fair trial?

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/manning-treatment-i...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp#C...

> Is a result where he ends up in jail an unfair result?

NO. If we had set a high bar for wanting a free and fair trial (which we haven't) then the case would be decided in an open manner which could very well end in jail time, community service or some equivalent. I fully support that process.

> You mean the promises to arrest him for releasing confidential information?

Being arrested and facing a fair trial isn't anyone's fear.

Being arrested, placed in solitary confinment for months on end, subjected to technically-not-torture-torture, threats against your family all the while having your entire character destroyed thread by thread until the day you stand in front of a show room to argue why you should only receive 50 years of prison time instead of 500 is another story.

If we truly lived in a fair and free society I would be championing his arrest, if anything simply for the truth to come out. As it stands it is hard to believe a truly fair trial is something that even exists anymore.

It's a good question, and it really depends.

I have one system where clojure performs better than java. It's not an apples-to-apples comparison as the java source is very rigid and stateful. There's a ton of recalculations being done and there's almost no way to thread it out because the current implementation relies heavily on mutation. The clojure equivalent is much smaller and just overpowers the java implementation due to the ease of threading (pmap, memoize). In that specific example I was looking at maybe 20x performance increase?

I have another test where I cannot even get close to java performance. Even after adding in type specific checks. In that example java wins because it's a native/primitive java implementation. Even without threading the java side wins because it's been reduced to such a simplistic operation (500 lines of java code using only primitive types) that the overhead of clojure can't beat it. In this test java is about 5x fastar than the clojure equivalent.

It really depends on what you are doing I tend to think of it like raw java > clojure > over engineered java... In some instances it can be very, very powerful.

I think the percentage is interesting, but it adds nothing for either side of the debate (either for or against). I'm not challenging you, I'm talking about the people going back to that number in the thread you posted.

* I don't even know how to setup a master password and have never heard of the option being available in FF or Chrome. I also don't know what it does. Does it replace all password boxes with a master-password that you enter which then pulls down the appropriate password? Is it a keychain?

Saying "X people don't use this feature" could mean anything. It could mean the feature is buried in the system, or that the feature isn't descriptive enough, or that the feature is hard to understand... it doesn't default to being "people clearly don't want that feature".

[*] I could research it, but I'm giving you my current uneducated opinion to make a point.

SO is great for what it is, direct answers from questions. It is hard to think back to the days of pre-SO when most answers had to come from books (!)

It is not designed, and will never be a place to foster discussions, or encourage exploration. I'm NOT complaining about SO, this is just how it is designed.

This kind of content, for example, is not something SO would create:

http://www.techempower.com/blog/2013/05/17/frameworks-round-...

https://github.com/skx/static-site-generators

Since we don't have a SO for discussions we still rely on information from individual research and/or the modern-day newsgroup (reddit, forums). I wish there was a place to fully explore nebulous unanswerable questions like "Which web UI framework is fastest to develop in?" or "What is the best way to start a 2d platform game today (in 2013)?"

This isn't an easy problem to solve, the questions above aren't really there to get an answer but to start a discussion. For both questions I want to know what is popular (TODAY, not in 2006), active, has been tested, and personal experience. I want to see a collection of people submitting their own takes until a top-five is produced where further study can be made.

Eh... yes and no.. and in some cases oh-god-no (http://thelettervsixtim.es/)

When I was able to get a hold of arcade/snes/nes games on emulators I replayed all of my hardest games. I beat all of my top twenty in a weekend.

How? Because all the emulators came with Quick Save & Quick Load. F5 and F6 are the major reasons why games are easy these days. It's a night and day difference. Playing some of the ultra-hard NES games became a walk in the park; really just repeat the last action until success. I even beat the arcade versions of Ghosts & Goblins, then Ghouls and Ghosts in about an hour for each.

I've been playing a ton of nethack lately and I really wish games like Skyrim and other open-world-games had a 'permadeath' difficulty setting. Sure, I can choose to play that way, but I like it incorporated into the game. I want a system where it difficulty is just a percentage of more guys & less ammo, rather difficulty should be a fundamental change to the game.

Meh.

Buy three ebooks from different accounts, render them to pain text, diff them and take out the differences.

Why three? The assumption is 2 books would have the correct value and 1 book would have the copyrighted value.

Though I don't see this as DRM. I've done this before on a much smaller scale to track things as they enter the wild. It's just security through obscurity, the digital equivalent of a tracking collar without any of the benefits, like guaranteed uniqueness.

It's also crazy overkill. Here's a much simpler way to do it: At the end of every period randomly decide to add an extra space. Hardly noticeable. Spread (again random) between 1024 and 2048 of these over the entire document. Count them up... now you have a pretty decent identifier without having to do any sort of special logic to the words themselves. To the average person it's not noticeable, it doesn't require messing with the original document, and it can be made unique enough to be a digital fingerprint. Of course this house of cards falls apart when you know the secret.

I've used a ton of bugtrackers, GitHub is the only one I've been able to hand to a non-techy client so they can create bugs.

This has been a huge frustration for me when it comes to bug tracking. I have multiple clients who just aren't technical people and when they see the wall of options that bugzilla and mantis offer it causes them to give up and email me directly. I even tried vbulletin for awhile, but that had its own problems.

GitHub (once you get past the signup) is perfect in this regard. Just open a ticket and then comment on it.

I wish GitHub had more in regards to bug tracking, for example being able to create states (open, in progress, closed) as well as labels.

These days I'm sure there are comparable solutions but having the issue system through github means one less service I need to track, which is also nice (client gets code, client has issue tracking, done).

With all that said I wouldn't use github issue tracking for complex multi-stage applications where the environment is an important factor in the problem.

I was thinking of something similar years ago. Except replace google image search with wikimedia and so you'll have access to public domain images (and possibly higher resolution files).

I don't believe we'll ever see developers tossing out their IDEs to edit things through the web, but this as an API this is a huge open ended solution towards automated testing.

You are doing some clojure work, you commit it, the unit tests run and fail. Clojure can tell you exactly what function failed with what data and it could commit a file for you to execute in your repl.

Using the ability to edit/create files through a webservice means the CI server running the Clojure tests could dynamically add or edit files showing the real failure over some pretty-print error message. You could check into the branch and open up user_104_error.clj and see the data that caused the problem.

When you solve the problem the CI server could automatically delete these files from the git repository, or maybe keep them around just to keep testing them.

Automated code modification into the version control system really could be interesting new ground in continuous integration and testing.

That and just last week I committed a file with the javascript url hardcoded to http://localhost/sit/js/api.js and wanted to change that back before anyone noticed.

> Since you can not choose military commanders, how useful is that for you?

Huh?

http://www.defense.gov/News/NewsArticle.aspx?ID=45870

I may not be able to sit in and vote for a commander but every appointment has the backing of an elected official that can be replaced.

As a civilian everything the military does is of interest to me and should be made open - your argument of "you may not understand it" is irrelevant. I want to know everything from how much they spend on toothpaste to how many civilians have died.

Hrm? I have... there really is no difference. With PBR and other American Adjunct Beers ( http://beeradvocate.com/lists/style/38 ) It has little to to about taste and everything to do with not wanting to buy from the 3 industrial leaders that own 90% of the market.

Same could be said about flank steak which used to be a cheap cut of steak. After Fajitas got popular the price tripled

[1989] http://www.nytimes.com/1989/04/26/garden/how-a-humble-cut-go...

Now about PBR... being from the Midwest and a bit of a beer snob PBR was largely the defacto-standard because it was the cheapest lawnmower beer that wasn't a BMC (Bud-Miller-Coors).

The same could be said about lobster - there's a story behind it.

Sure, 'they're all made up'... so is the value of gold, but they also have some interesting history behind them if you are willing to go beyond the surface.

Volunteering at a non-profit is one thing, but you should never work for free at a for-profit company. Never. To go even farther, any for-profit company unable to pay even a reduced rate, equity return, or a sales commission shouldn't be hiring.