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I'm sorry you've come to the conclusion that we're in hopeless disagreement with each other. I assure you, you're jumping to conclusions. I've always railed against the proliferation of proprietary, opaque file formats & etc. (remember, I used LaTeX against orders, ffs).

You're ignoring my point completely in order to make a stand for your own job security

I'll cop to the job security charge, but in my defense, you're the one with the vast, complex problem to solve. I'm someone who (theoretically :-) can solve it.

The entire problem can be eliminated by making the data more consistent in the first place.

I'm one of the loudest advocates for this.

What you fail to understand is this is as it is! This is IT. *We* didn't create this clusterfuck, but this is our reality! It is among the youngest sciences out there. We're going to have to go through a lot of !@#$ before it's as solid as other professions. COBOL programmers are still valuable, ffs. There's going to be a lot of deadwood to wade through on the way, and more's created as we speak. I've been fighting this crap since '75 or so. With respect, suck it up. This is IT. Idiots out there created a mess. For our own reasons, we choose to work within that mess. These are our dragons.

dbi_list_schema.pl

Cry me a river.

Your fantasy world that geeks + money = results ignores the amount of pain and suffering that these bad designs are creating in the first place.

You appear to be blaming this on me. Why? I'm well aware there's a vast amount of dumbth in IT. Not every geek is worth the air they breath. I know of Sun Certified engineers who can't use ls to list a directory. Such is life.

Your argument is essentially that of the Luddite.

If that's really the impression you got, then I've obviously failed to express myself cogently. My apology.

All I'm asking is, is it really worth six months of a postdoc's time to bang their head on this to figure it out, or might a competent specialist manage to get that data for you in a week? When do you want it? How cheap are you? What's the postdoc really want to do? Bang their head on data conversion for six months, or do something with the data?

Wouldn't it be smarter to budget for data conversion specialists in the first place?

We had one large BBS in Calgary called Nucleus which eventually turned ISP (and a LOT of 1 to <10 line dial-ups...ahhhh the good ole' days). When I first joined Nuke, it was $20 or $30 Cdn/mo and around 30 lines. it quickly grew over a year to 100+ lines, lots of door game/muds, chat/trivia, and most importantly Gamecon. I successfully dropped my GPA by 1.0+ points by staying up late fragging in doom][. It was the most fun a geek could have with his pants on. For pants off entertainment, one had to socialize in the chat area. It had no rocket launchers/shotgun so it wasn't as appealing.

For instance, WW2 bombers had accuracies on the order of hundreds or even thousands of yards

Hundreds. From the early 40s the allies had the Norden bomb sight and other gyro-stabilised sights available, with which accuracies of 150 yards could be achieved, 617 squadron apparently could achieve accuracies of 125 yards at altitudes of 20k feet. The USAAF 8th Air Force apparently had much lower accuracy, however 617 squadron were a specialist squadron and hey, how accurate do you need to be when carpet bombing industrial complexes? However, high-precision bombing was indeed quite possible in WWII.

... than any Napster-like-protocols clients as morpheus or Kazaa... it's stable, easy, and on Gnutella protocol you can search anything...
Download Gnucleus and happy downloading
:)

Yes, this message was written over broadband. I didn't ever say the Aussie broadband situation wasn't bad. I have great respect for the country's history as well, so don't take it personally mmmkay? Now, let me put it to you this way. Telstra is an Australian-based company, if I'm not mistaken, and a very successful one at that. It is traded on the Australian stock exchange. That means that some people in your country, though perhaps not yourself or the original slashdot poster, actually support this company. This is called dollar voting. A company can't succeed unless people actually buy its products. While you support a company, no matter if you like it, your complaints are meaningless. Action speaks louder than words.

Now let me tell you how it is here. In this Canadian city, we have one real telephone company, Telus. We also have one cable company, Shaw. This is by no means a tiny city either, though not huge. Shaw provides cable-based broadband service. When they first provided it about 5 years ago, their service was horrible. We had outages for weeks sometimes, DNS problems, poor tech support (they specifically told many non-Windows users that in spite of the problem being their fault they wouldn't correct it because the people weren't using Windows). It was pure bullshit. They have improved some in that time but man did they ever suck and they were about the only option until cheap home DSL arrived. Initially it was only 3 real companies who provided it. CADvision, Nucleus, and Telus. Telus still to this day has bandwidth limits and poor tech support. Being the only telephone company around they have an attitude of not caring about the concerns of customers because they assume those customers have no choice, which is mostly true. CADvision was a decent provider, heck before I had cable all I did was connect via 14.4 modem through them. Then it was eaten by PSInet and went downhill. Now, it's been eaten by Telus. Yep, phone company now owns two of the largest ISPs in the city. Nucleus is still around and isn't half bad.

But you know all that took 5 years to really happen here and I don't ask you to pity me because that'd be the pussy thing to do. If I want change, I'll bloody well get out there and make it happen but you know what? I don't give a shit. I made my point in the parent post and there are much more pressing things in the world to worry about than whether or not you can apt-get update your debian packages or play Quake 3 Arena with decent latency.

- ACPlus

The fact of the matter, however, is that the people who write censorware(*) -- the software itself, the software used to develop the "blacklist," and so on -- are generally members of the Western computing community. Some of them, and their friends, are Slashdot readers. They are members of user groups. They can be identified. They should be made persona non grata.

One might say that if person Z didn't work for the censorware companies, another would, so we can hardly fault person Z. Ridiculous. One might as well say that since there will always be people who write viruses, there is no fault in writing and distributing your own. Censorware aimed at choking off the free speech of an entire people is a damned sight more noxious than a virus. (I am reminded of Jack London's description of "scabs" (strikebreakers), which is perhaps extreme in the labor context in our day but may find some analogy here.)

(* Excepting people who write genuinely multipurpose software tools. And I'd except people who write software which is by its nature limited to filtering for a not-large number of machines -- i.e., for home or business use -- though perhaps not everyone would.)

In the more well-connected communities there are some local providers that have gotten into the DSL market. In Calgary, this includes Nucleus Information Services and Cadvision and probably a few others. The phone company (yes, the ONE phone company) here which also provides DSL is Telus Communications. I know that in many communities such competition does not exist, however.

The second major fscking fault a lot of people are making is beleieving that the Pentagram, a star with five (penta-five) points, is the Star of David. The Star of David has SIX points and is most easily drawn using two triangles... Please spread the word!..

Thank you.
//Frisco
--
"At the end of the journey, all men think that their youth was Arcadia..." -Goethe