lately (Like Amazon's Mechanical Turk). Seems like an interesting way to deal with tasks that are not easy problems to solve with computers. I know that there are other sites out there, with different models, but still the same basic idea.From a worker perspective it seems like many of the tasks are VERY low paid, which lends itself to people quickly loosing interest, and therefor not having a very reliable base of workers. So in my mind it seems like most of the current models will fail to be successful in the long run. I've been wondering what it would take to make a thriving community of both workers and requestors that would be fair and equitable for both. The key seems to be pricing, because of the low pricing, it seems that the lowest common denominator of people do the work. By providing a better way to determine costs and payments, you could create a much more equitable system that benefits everyone. Workers get more work that pays more, and requestors get a better quality of workers to complete their tasks. The question is, how does this happen?
It seems that instead of Requestors selecting the price, there needs to be some way of determining cost based on time spent, skillset needed and/or user feedback. There might also be a voting or bidding system that could fulfill some of the same purposes. I'm still trying to come up with a concrete idea . . . we'll see what happens.
for our state machines, but they seemed way to heavyweight, and since it sounds like they are rearchitecting the system for version 4.0 (To finally get it right hopefully?). I decided to steer clear.
has always seemed very interesting to me as a software developer. Unfortunately there are only certain projects and applications that lend themselves to this kind of architecture. Most applications are tightly coupled and even if they can be "distributed", it's likely that the best you'll get is multiple CPU's on the same host computer. Some tasks can be distributed across multiple computers that are co-located and/or have high speed interconnects like most super computers these days. But even many of these tasks require that the systems are the same hardware/OS/etc, and thinking back to my college class on parallel processing, they can be hard to write well (so they run efficiently and correctly). There really are relatively few projects that fit this mold of being able to be widely distributed across different machines that only communicate on an infrequent basis. But it is a really cool concept, that seems to be gaining more traction in the commercial world as well as these kinds of collaborative volunteer projects.
much in the past, so I'm trying to force myself to learn and use it for my class documentation. After some rough sketches on paper and whiteboards. I have tried using 
to create the diagrams. This has not gone well. Visio seems to force a very strict form of UML, if there is some sort of informal notes, or attributes I want to add, it is almost impossible.