Has anyone really read these books from page to page?
Also, are they really relevant when you are starting your career? These seem more into the category of making you competent in the field of algorithms research, rather than something a person starting a career should read.
> Has anyone really read these books from page to page?
I recently finished reading the first three, and have started on the fourth (with a detour to read "fascicle 1.1 on MMIX"). I started the series planning to work every single problem. That turned out to be just a little unrealistically ambitious - I settled for _attempting_ every single problem except for the "unsolved research problems" (in some cases, just figuring out what the problem was asking for left me with a sense of accomplishment). Even so, I ended up spending a year on each volume, reading/working problems for a half hour a day or so. On the one hand, I loved these books, and really enjoyed reading/working through them, but - recommended before beginning one's software development career? You'll need to know a fair amount of calculus to make sense of a lot of it, and it'll take quite a while to get through. It's questionable how relevant it really is, fascinating as the subject matter is.
I've read 3 pages and I started on one exercise: I'm the better for it. Someday I hope to find the energy to read 3 more pages. If I'm really energetic I'll attempt another exercise as well.
No need to scrape Open Food Facts, they kindly offer a download of the whole database as csv, rdf or mongodb dump: https://world.openfoodfacts.org/data
It is 100% crowd sourced open data under the ODbL licence (same as OpenStreetMap).
Thanks for that correction. I recall there being a clear reason why I couldn't use their data in my app. But maybe I had it wrong. I remember reading that if my app collected new data about foods and I was using the OFF db, I had to commit to making all my data free and open. I was worried about the possible case that personal food consumption data would be vulnerable to that share-alike constraint.
No, no worries about personal consumption. What the OdBL requires you to do is to add missing products. Not add data outside the scope of the original database.
(I'm a Open Food Facts admin)
Also please don't scrape us, since we release nightly dumps of the DB :)
Thanks for clarifying that. And that's great that those DB downloads are available. I didn't like the idea of scraping the data in the first place so never went that route.
Feel free to ping me at pierre openfoodfacts.org
We have a online discussion chat, if you want to integrate OFF at some point, and have questions about the OdBL
Hello SoloX5. Open Food Facts contributor here.
I absolutely love examine.com. Would any of your data be reusable under some open license or is it a strictly proprietary database?
Honestly - we've been meaning to release an API once we get our new backend out. Of course that's been the hiccup - it's been almost ready for far too long :)
Ping me via www.examine.com/contact/ and lets see if we can make it happen.
You're right lucb1e: OSM is definitely good enough to replace proprietary sources (aka Google Maps) for this use-case in the Netherlands...
...but the Netherlands and Denmark are the only two countries I know of where addresses data have been opened by the government (are there other?). In most other countries, this is still an ongoing fight, and crowd-sourced data is still not on par with the proprietary offering.
The good news is that we are working on it: see for instance here (in French) for the ongoing grassroots effort in France (started a few months ago, already 18 million addresses compiled):
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_France/WikiPr...
...or this meeting in London which took place yesterday(!) and was the kick-off of a similar effort in the UK with some funding from the cabinet office:
http://lanyrd.com/2014/openaddresses/
Web version unusable on a 7" android tablet (1280x800): the left side of the gaming area is out of the screen, neither scrolling nor resizing seem allowed. Same problem in landscape and portrait mode.
This is unfortunately a known issue. The web version isn't responsive which makes it unplayable on small screens. A fix for this is coming soon though!
That is not totally true: there is a fundamental difference between a closed source OS purposefully locked by its maker, and an open source OS tentatively locked by a mere distributor.
On almost every Android phone, you can just flash the entire OS and replace it with a plain vanilla one or your own custom build. Try that with an iPhone...
well. On older iPhones with known issues in the bootloader, you could in theory also replace the apple OS with something completely different (remember the Android on iPhone 3G videos earlier this year?).
The fact that HTC and other vendors are sloppier in securing their phones (remember the discussions about Motorola's e-fuse?) doesn't make these phones more "open" in the "freedom" sense.
It just means that it's easier to exploit them to install a different OS.
Now the Android OS of course is open source, but what good is that if there's no device available that actually allows you to officially install your own build? This also means that my earlier comments are about the phones, not the OS itself.
The Nexus One does officially allow you to install your own build. Google gives you the directions to "unlock" your N1 bootloader, which granted, voids the warranty, but is a "sanctioned" method for flashing your phone's firmware.
Alternately, the OpenMoko FreeRunner is a "truly free" phone, and has its own distribution of Android available in which you have total control of the entire hardware and software stack.
While, as you said, you can "in theory" replace Apple's OS -- with Android, it's a practical possibility since the OS is available for you to tinker.
But I totally agree, this declared "openness" is bullshit. The situation with Android ROMs right now is almost identical to the situation with Windows Mobile and nobody would claim that is open.
My own custom build? That sounds wonderful. What phones/carriers allow this without jailbreaking? What stores/carriers sell those phones to consumers?
Before I customize it, how do I get/build a fully functional current vanilla version? By fully functional I mean all of the things normally needed/expected by default (like the app store for instance).
Does each carrier post source to their builds so I can modify what the phone came with?
There are many developers on this site. Have ANY of you built Android from source and used that on your phone? How did it work out?
What phones/carriers allow this without jailbreaking? What stores/carriers sell those phones to consumers?
T-Mobile and my local carrier Cincinnati Bell are both happy to recommend and "sell"/refer you to a Nexus One. CBW even has a couple N1's on display in their premiere display case, and a rep even asked me about what ROM I used on my N1, and said he used CyanogenMod on his.
Does each carrier post source to their builds so I can modify what the phone came with?
The carriers aren't the ones writing the software; you'd have to talk with HTC, Motorola, Samsung about that. Some carriers make specific requests, like Sprint putting their NASCAR app on, or Verizon's exclusive Skype app, but that's an app, not Android.
Have ANY of you built Android from source and used that on your phone? How did it work out?
I've had multiple attempts over the past couple years to build my own Android ROM, most recently with Cyanogen's mass of repos on Github, but either I wasn't looking in the right spot, or there wasn't enough documentation for me to figure out how to build it all on my own, so I failed on that aspect.
However, MoDaCo forum has the concept of "kitchens" where you can customize what features you want to include/exclude from various ROMs, and allows you to generate "your own" ROM that you can then flash to your phone, and I personally find this extremely attractive, even if I don't use it for myself because I like what the "vanilla" Cyanogen build includes.
All that said, you do however have multiple valid points, and I don't disagree with you on any of them.
I don't have any hard data, but I would guess a majority of the users of the Latex+Dropbox combo are not on Windows. All those various nix users will not find any useful meat in this post. It would have been nice to submit it under a title like: Using Latex with Dropbox on Windows
True. Translating the script to linux is however just a matter of exchanging some of the bash commands with corresponding shell syntax. Frankly, I don't have access to a linux box right now. Maybe you could give it a try to convert it?
