jbaiter

I think he means the >1000 pirated ebooks that the guy offers for download on his personal website...

I think those values are really skewed... According to their graph, average monthly net income in Germany is over $4000, I don't know any developer here who earns that much. I guess a lot of folks entered their income before taxes, which is more realistic. If you earn $4000 before taxes in Germany, you get to take home roughly half of that after taxes and the mandatory social security and health insurance payments.

I think it's language-independent, there's just two implementations available, one in Perl and one in Ruby.

I fully agree. I gave my grandmother (born in 1941) a computer running Ubuntu 9.10 in 2009. Ever since then I've only had to fix things three times, I think, twice because of hardware failures and once because an update broke her Desktop. She's on 12.10 now, without me playing any part in the upgrading process, without her breaking her workflow.

A great one I found out about recently is 'watch'. Periodically calls a command and refreshes the screen with its stdout.

> hiring random "programmers" who have history or psychology degrees and think they can program because they made a form in PHP.

That's pretty unfair to people coming from history or psychology who actually can write good code. Just because you don't have a degree in CS doesn't mean your code is shit. This is purely anecdotal, but my predecessor at my current job was a CS graduate and wrote code like in the OP.

OT, but an English translation of that (excellent, btw) book was released last year by Princeton Architectural Press: https://www.papress.com/html/book.details.page.tpl?isbn=9781...

Looks nice, I submitted some patches to a similar project a few years ago (Mnemosyne, Python+PyQt). What algorithm are you using for scheduling the repetitions? The unmodified SM2 or Anki's derivate of it?

I built a tool to help with scanning books in a more efficient manner:

http://github.com/jbaiter/spreads

http://spreads.readthedocs.org

With it, going from a physical book to a digitized, postprocessed and OCRed PDF takes around 30-40 minutes for an average 300-400pg book with no pictures/illustrations.

My (rather lofty, I ad mit) motivation was to make it as easy as possible for people to free printed information from their pyhsical shackles and enable them to share it (I'm currently working on a plugin that allows the user to directly upload a scanned book to the Internet Archive).

The inspiration for it came after I purchased a kit for Daniel Reeds' incredible DIYBookScanner[1] and built it on a free weekend. Upon toying with it, I realized that, while there was a lot of great software available for helping with the scanning and postprocessing, using it required a lot of often tedious manual interactions that could easily be automated.

The tool basically handles all communication with the capture devices (cameras, but the code is kept rather general as to allow for the usage of mobile phones or flatbed scanners) and calls a bunch of 3rd party applications to deal with postprocessing and output generation.

I learned a lot about multithreading/multiprocessing in Python, got to brush up my PySide knowledge and am currently learning AngularJS by developing a webinterface for it, to allow the headless control of Raspberry Pi-connected scanners.

[1] http://www.diybookscanner.org/

This is seriously awesome, great idea!

Agreed, if they weren't located in the US, they'd be my dream employer...

> I don't see any advantage in using XML to be honest

Well, it's great for what it was intended for: structured documents. I work at a library, where I'm dealing with thousands of digitized books and I haven't yet found a proper non-XML alternative to something like TEI.

At my workplace all of the legacy projects use XSLT as the templating language for our Cocoon (Java Framework) web applications. Complete and utter clusterfuck, let me tell you...

I've been trying to use it after reading about it on reddit, but so far I've been unsucessful at getting mpv to do "real" fullscreen. I'm using XMonad with a xmobar at the top of the screen, and with all --fstype modes I've tried, it has always been laid over the actual video. Has anybody been able to get it to do fullscreen with xmonad?

How about the ACLU and the EFF?

Great design and usability, and from briefly scanning through it, excellent advice to boot. I would love to have this in a nice hardcover edition!

Indeed, the mere fact that ZSNES is on this list makes it basically worthless. While it had its benefits a while ago (when people were running 500Mhz machines with 128MB RAM), there is no reason to use it to day, except for the fact that a few fan translations and romhacks require some of its bugs and inaccuracies. If you don't want your CPU to be at 90% when playing a game from 1992 (this is bsnes/higan, the requirements are this high because it strives for 100% accurate emulation) use Snes9x, for which byuu (author of bsnes/higan) has ported many of his discoveries and improvements.

I just ran the exploit on a 64bit machine and it worked as expected, I got root privileges.

This is awesome, I've been starting to get into Django over the last few weekends, and this is a godsend!

I wholeheartedly agree. I recently finished a 4-year B.A. in History (in Germany, mind you, so my decision wasn't hard on me in a financial way). I didn't double-major in CS or anything, but kept programming and IT stuff as a hobby, contributed to Open Source projects, helped with IT-related problems at university and generally tried to learn something new all the time (The recent surge in online classes like Coursera and Udacity has helped a lot). Now I'm fully employed, directly from University, as a software developer.

Is/was my degree useless? No way. Those 4 years of studying history and doing lots of research (I think I wrote around 15 papers in those years, around 70% of which were on subjects with little previous research done before) have taught me to choose my sources wisely, to reflect on my own thinking critically (this is a prime asset as a historian, you cannot uncritically let your own preconceptions of the world direct your decisions) and to generally try to see things (and especially abstractions and thought-systems) from as many different sides as possible. All great skills to have if you code for a living.

I might not be as well versed in theoretical computer science as a CS graduate from a good(!) program, but I am familiar enough with the territory that I can pick up new areas/technologies/algorithms rather quickly and it prevents me from getting the "I graduated in CS, I know everything and do not have to make any effort any more"-attitude that I've e.g. seen in my predecessor at the current job I have (he used unsalted md5-hashes for passwords, wrote Java classes that are >10k lines long and used a mix of zip-archives of his Eclipse-workbench and hundreds of commented-out LOCs as a form of version control)

This is a point that has also been made by German historian Eckhard Höffner[1]. He claims that one of the main reasons for Germany's rise as an industrial power during the 19th century was its very lax copyright regulations that allowed a rapid distribution of pirate prints of publications to every corner of Germany, thus creating a very large reading public that would later flock to universities and engineering schools and fuel Germany's innovative economy.

So far there hasn't been an English translation, although Ars Technica, Wired and the English edition of the Spiegel carried good reviews/summaries[2][3][4]

[1] Eckhard Höffner: Geschichte und Wesen des Urheberrechts. Verlag Europäische Wirtschaft, 2010, ISBN 978-3930893164 (2 Tomes).

[2] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/08/drool-britannia-d...

[3] http://www.wired.com/business/2010/08/copyright-germany-brit...

[4] http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/no-copyright-l...