Is it just me, or does "a single sign-on and identity management solution" sound an awful lot like Passport? I was under the impression that once eBay told them to take a hike, the long-shunned Passport was finally going to be given the ignoble burial it deserves.
So in desperation, Sun is reaching for a life preserver made of cast iron.
Of course, this could be an entirely new, unworkable "a single sign-on and identity management solution," that will be just as distrusted and irrelevant as Passport was. People don't even trust Microsoft to handle their e-mail without infecting their machine, much less keeping their "identity" secure.
I was listening to National Pravda Radio when they did an interview with Terry Gilliam. He said that he had been one of the three finalists for the job of directing the first Harry Potter movie, but only because J. K. Rowling had wanted to see him direct it. He said he felt stupid that he'd actually believed he had a chance when the studio was dead-set against it. Then there was the following exchange, which is as close to verbatim as I can remember it:
Gilliam: Eventually they went with another director, and since the film made over $300 million, that was obviously the right decision.
NPR: What did you think of the movie when it came out?
Most government primary and secondary schools don't care about saving costs by using cheaper alternatives. You see, they effectively pay nothing for their proprietary software -- the schools' owners, the respective Departments of Education do. And the mandarins therein don't like anything that rocks the boat, and are thus greatly threatened by Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Nothing rocks an ICT boat like FOSS does.
The larger an organization, the slower it moves. The more insulated from the free market an organization, the more bureaucratic and hidebound it is.
A federal bureaucracy is, by defintion, among the slowest and most hide-bound of organizations. Remember, all bureaucracies run not on incentives (i.e., making a profit) but on constraints (i.e., following rules). These constraints lead to organizations that are manifestly inefficient compared with their private-sector counterparts. Absent signs from the marketplace that its methods aren't working, a government agency might persist in pursuing an unsuccessful strategy for years. As James Q. Wilson notes in his book Bureaucracy, "the Ford Motor Company should not have made the Edsel, but if the government had owned Ford it would still be making Edsels." Remember, America's federal government pursued a welfare program aimed at ending poverty a full decade after it was obvious that it was having exactly the opposite of the desired effect.
In America, this problem is somewhat ameliorated by the doctrine of Federalism, which incorporates the idea of subsidiarity, i.e. that government functions should devolve to the smallest unit of government which can carry them out. The federal government should not undertake something which can be handled by a state government. A state government should not undertake a function which can be handled by a county government, etc., all the way down to, in this case, a local school board. (Let us admit here that America's system of federalism has been steadily erroded for the last 70 years or so).
By centralizing their software buying decisions in their federal educational bureaucracy, Australia's education establishment persists in error when a smaller, more nimble organization would moved on to a more optimal solution, i.e. using software which isn't an expensive, kludgy, virus-and-security hole riddled piece of crap.
...am I the only one who has received some 30 pump an dump stock spam scams from Wysak Petroleum? (Yap Internation and Emerson Oil & Gas aren't far behind.) I've copied enforcement@sec.gov on all my spamcop comlaints, so far without avail.
If anyone has a good e-mail address to get their domain yanked, that would be a good start. Here's the DNS info:
wysak.com Registrant: Domains by Proxy, Inc. DomainsByProxy.com 15511 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353 Scottsdale, Arizona 85260 United States Registered through: GoDaddy.com (http://www.godaddy.com/ Domain Name: WYSAK.COM Created on: 06-May-03 Expires on: 28-Mar-09 Last Updated on: 09-Jun-04 Administrative Contact: Private, Registration WYSAK.COM@domainsbyproxy.com Domains by Proxy, Inc. DomainsByProxy.com 15511 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353 Scottsdale, Arizona 85260 United States (480) 624-2599 Technical Contact: Private, Registration WYSAK.COM@domainsbyproxy.com Domains by Proxy, Inc. DomainsByProxy.com 15511 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353 Scottsdale, Arizona 85260 United States (480) 624-2599 Domain servers in listed order: DNS1.INFINITEBANG.COM DNS2.INFINITEBANG.C OM Registry Status: REGISTRAR-LOCK
Currently trying: abuse@domainsbyproxy.com, root@INFINITEBANG.COM, abuse@godaddy.com terryu@telus.net,
You have all the freedom in the world to say just about anything you want on your OWN press (i.e., your own server and your own blog). You have NO right to say what you want on somneone else's press or blog. And if you violate the terms and conditions of the site in question, don't be surprised if bannination ensues.
You have the right to speak, but no one is required to listen.
You have no right to use anyone else's press, be it my web page, HP's blog, or Fox News. Freedom of the Press doesn't override the right to do what you want with your own private property. This seems to be a distinction that eludes many these days...
"To make the timelines as 'legitimate' as possible, we are encouraged to use NYT articles."
Correction: "To most easily make the timelines accord with our liberal preconceptions, we are encouraged to use NYT articles because they most closely agree withour own biases."
There was once a time when The New York Times carried the ring of Absolute Objective Truth. That day is long passed.
Not a day goes by that bloggers don't uncover factual errors in the NYT, and the Times longstanding liberal bias has only become more pronounced over the last four years. The fact that even their theater, architecture and fasion critics feel a need to insert left-wing commentary into their pieces tells you how pervasive liberal bias at the times has become. Even the occasional good story they do must be considered inaccurate and biased until proven otherwise.
20 years ago my roommate and I had a subscription to the The New York Times, even though we lived in Texas, because the local paper was so bad. Today, I seldom bother to read a NYT article for free unless someone sends me a link; I'm certainly not going to pay for it. Why should I, when I have hundreds of papers willing to supply me online news for free?
While having more women in IT would be a Good Thing, the statement "it is difficult to see how CS can match expected future demand for IT workers without raising women's participation at the undergraduate level" is specious. Other ways to fill demand would be:
Let in more foreign immigrant CS workers
Conduct more training on the job rather than at universities.
As demand shrinks, wages will rise, luring more people into the field. That's what's known as "suppply and demand."
That's just off the top of my head in a couple of minutes. I'm sure the reason the Computer Research Association found it "difficult to see" these reasons are that none of them are in the Computer Research Association's financial interest to promote as alternatives.
That would be Aldus with Pagemaker in 1980
http://desktoppub.about.com/od/history/
I know it's a real hardship to actually read your own links, but perhaps if you had taken this unprecidented step you would see that they list Pagemaker as coming out in "the mid-1980s," not 1980. Further, if you had actually read the article linked from that page, you would have found this: "1985 - Aldus develops PageMaker for the Mac, the first "desktop publishing" application."
If you have any further difficulties with basic reading comprehension, please let us know.
I've had two: the regular CD reader on a PowerMac 8500 (1996), and the superdrive on my duel 1 GHz PowerMac G4. neither has ever given me any problems.
Maybe you should avoid buuying cheap PC components, or else expecting to replace it every two years as the cost of going cheap.
I also have a Sony jambox circa 1989 on which the CD player is slightly flakey but still functional. Ditto a 5 disc Teac CD player from around 1997. Maybe it's just you.;-)
Ganna Ray bursters play an important role in Greg Egan's far-future SF novel Diaspora. Unfortunately for us, we don't have the option available to the novel's post-human conscious software characters of escaping an impending gamma-ray burster by migrating to a higher spacetime geometry...
I, for one, welcome our new Exoskeleton Overlords!
on
Commercial Exoskeletons
·
· Score: 3, Informative
An exoskeleton would be potentially useful for urban combat (punching through doors, knowck down walls, etc.), but probably less than you might think. Short of just walking through wall, an exoskeleton would probably be difficult to maneuver in dense environments, and those using early models would be at a lot greater risk of accidental immobilization (i.e., a sitting duck) and other potentially fatal equipment failures than someone in, say, a tank.
Alas, for Robert A. Heinlein's vision of Powersuits in Starship Troopers, exoskeletons, like those giant Japanese Mechs, are very cool in fiction, but probably not terribly useful in reality compared to more mundane alternatives.
Beware! Soon we'll drill down into the lair of the evil Dero (i.e., "Detrimental Robots"), who have been beaming their alien mind control rays at humanity throughout recorded history! Richard Shaver and Ray Palmer have revealed all! Stop while there's still time!
I can think of absolutely agnuone who could be classified as a GnuLinux extremist. After all, everyone gnuws real extremists have such a narrow view of the world that the absolutely insist that others adopt their gnu terminology for the sake of ideological correctness. Certainly, I don't gunw agnuone in the GnuLinux community that this criticism applies gnu.
To study the effects of different nuclear weapon designs, there are basically two approaches:
Throw massive amounts of computing power at the problem (as done here), or:
Actually set off a nuclear weapon.
Having massive computing power in the hands of Lawrence Livermore scientists reduces or even eliminates the need for U.S. nuclear forces to actually detonate nuclear and thermonuclear explosions.
Of course, some people would prefer to see the United States undertake unilateral nuclear disarmament, something they've been advocating since SANE/FREEZE was telling us we could trust the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Only today they claim we can trust Kim Il Jong and the mullahs of Iran more than the democratically elected government of the United States, just as they claimed we could trust Leonid Breshnev and Yuri Andropov more than we could trust Ronald Reagan. Their views are every bit as ill-conceived now as they were then.
For those not up up on the twists and turns of the semiconductor industry, be aware that Freescale is Motorola's semiconductor division spinoff. They were responsible (with IBM) for the PowerPC, and developed the AltiVec (aka "Velocity Engine") vector processing technology used in current Apple PowerMacs. They still do a lot of microcontrollers for embeded devices.
Just thought I'd clear up that potential confusion...
To Texas, that is. No state income tax. No insane "city" income tax like they have in the Big Apple. 2700 square foot houses can be had for $175,000 or less.
So, if you're a New York company that hires programmers, consider relocating (either in toto or a subsidiary) to Texas, where your dollar goes further, and you get to keep more of it.
We have BBQ, TexMex, and sane gun laws (i.e., the law-abiding can own one). What we lack: 3 months of snow, subways, and george Steinbrenner.
In other shocking news, water may be wet, Rosie O'Donnell will not be Playboy's next centerfold, and the sons of deposed generals in Nigeria don't have $10 million to wire to your bank account.
I would like to say that this has no chance of suceeding, but unfotunately there's already one example of a company (Rambus) having their people attending a standards committee (JEDEC) in public while working to patent the same technologies in private. And they almost got away with it.
Slashdot Mirror
So in desperation, Sun is reaching for a life preserver made of cast iron.
Of course, this could be an entirely new, unworkable "a single sign-on and identity management solution," that will be just as distrusted and irrelevant as Passport was. People don't even trust Microsoft to handle their e-mail without infecting their machine, much less keeping their "identity" secure.
Gilliam: Eventually they went with another director, and since the film made over $300 million, that was obviously the right decision.
NPR: What did you think of the movie when it came out?
Gilliam: Crap.
A federal bureaucracy is, by defintion, among the slowest and most hide-bound of organizations. Remember, all bureaucracies run not on incentives (i.e., making a profit) but on constraints (i.e., following rules). These constraints lead to organizations that are manifestly inefficient compared with their private-sector counterparts. Absent signs from the marketplace that its methods aren't working, a government agency might persist in pursuing an unsuccessful strategy for years. As James Q. Wilson notes in his book Bureaucracy, "the Ford Motor Company should not have made the Edsel, but if the government had owned Ford it would still be making Edsels." Remember, America's federal government pursued a welfare program aimed at ending poverty a full decade after it was obvious that it was having exactly the opposite of the desired effect.
In America, this problem is somewhat ameliorated by the doctrine of Federalism, which incorporates the idea of subsidiarity, i.e. that government functions should devolve to the smallest unit of government which can carry them out. The federal government should not undertake something which can be handled by a state government. A state government should not undertake a function which can be handled by a county government, etc., all the way down to, in this case, a local school board. (Let us admit here that America's system of federalism has been steadily erroded for the last 70 years or so).
By centralizing their software buying decisions in their federal educational bureaucracy, Australia's education establishment persists in error when a smaller, more nimble organization would moved on to a more optimal solution, i.e. using software which isn't an expensive, kludgy, virus-and-security hole riddled piece of crap.
(Yap Internation and Emerson Oil & Gas aren't far behind.) I've copied enforcement@sec.gov on all my spamcop comlaints, so far without avail.
If anyone has a good e-mail address to get their domain yanked, that would be a good start. Here's the DNS info:
wysak.com
Registrant: Domains by Proxy, Inc.
DomainsByProxy.com
15511 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353
Scottsdale, Arizona 85260 United States
Registered through: GoDaddy.com (http://www.godaddy.com/
Domain Name: WYSAK.COM
Created on: 06-May-03
Expires on: 28-Mar-09
Last Updated on: 09-Jun-04
Administrative Contact: Private, Registration WYSAK.COM@domainsbyproxy.com
Domains by Proxy, Inc.
DomainsByProxy.com
15511 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353
Scottsdale, Arizona 85260 United States
(480) 624-2599
Technical Contact: Private, Registration WYSAK.COM@domainsbyproxy.com
Domains by Proxy, Inc.
DomainsByProxy.com
15511 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353
Scottsdale, Arizona 85260
United States
(480) 624-2599
Domain servers in listed order:
DNS1.INFINITEBANG.COM
DNS2.INFINITEBANG.
Registry Status: REGISTRAR-LOCK
Currently trying: abuse@domainsbyproxy.com, root@INFINITEBANG.COM, abuse@godaddy.com
terryu@telus.net,
president@wysak.com bounces
root@wysak.com bounces
sales@wysak.com bounces
abuse@infinitebang.com bounces
You have the right to speak, but no one is required to listen.
You have no right to use anyone else's press, be it my web page, HP's blog, or Fox News. Freedom of the Press doesn't override the right to do what you want with your own private property. This seems to be a distinction that eludes many these days...
"To make the timelines as 'legitimate' as possible, we are encouraged to use NYT articles."
Correction: "To most easily make the timelines accord with our liberal preconceptions, we are encouraged to use NYT articles because they most closely agree withour own biases."
Not a day goes by that bloggers don't uncover factual errors in the NYT, and the Times longstanding liberal bias has only become more pronounced over the last four years. The fact that even their theater, architecture and fasion critics feel a need to insert left-wing commentary into their pieces tells you how pervasive liberal bias at the times has become. Even the occasional good story they do must be considered inaccurate and biased until proven otherwise.
20 years ago my roommate and I had a subscription to the The New York Times, even though we lived in Texas, because the local paper was so bad. Today, I seldom bother to read a NYT article for free unless someone sends me a link; I'm certainly not going to pay for it. Why should I, when I have hundreds of papers willing to supply me online news for free?
That should be "As supply shrinks, wages will rise," not "As demand shrinks, wages will rise."
That's just off the top of my head in a couple of minutes. I'm sure the reason the Computer Research Association found it "difficult to see" these reasons are that none of them are in the Computer Research Association's financial interest to promote as alternatives.
I know it's a real hardship to actually read your own links, but perhaps if you had taken this unprecidented step you would see that they list Pagemaker as coming out in "the mid-1980s," not 1980. Further, if you had actually read the article linked from that page, you would have found this: "1985 - Aldus develops PageMaker for the Mac, the first "desktop publishing" application."
If you have any further difficulties with basic reading comprehension, please let us know.
Maybe you should avoid buuying cheap PC components, or else expecting to replace it every two years as the cost of going cheap.
I also have a Sony jambox circa 1989 on which the CD player is slightly flakey but still functional. Ditto a 5 disc Teac CD player from around 1997. Maybe it's just you. ;-)
I can see a $499 Mac Mini filling the needs of a lot of government agencies. And it's immunity to viruses and spyware is a big bonus.
Alas, for Robert A. Heinlein's vision of Powersuits in Starship Troopers, exoskeletons, like those giant Japanese Mechs, are very cool in fiction, but probably not terribly useful in reality compared to more mundane alternatives.
Lawrence Person, Science Fiction Writer
>
Having massive computing power in the hands of Lawrence Livermore scientists reduces or even eliminates the need for U.S. nuclear forces to actually detonate nuclear and thermonuclear explosions.
Of course, some people would prefer to see the United States undertake unilateral nuclear disarmament, something they've been advocating since SANE/FREEZE was telling us we could trust the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Only today they claim we can trust Kim Il Jong and the mullahs of Iran more than the democratically elected government of the United States, just as they claimed we could trust Leonid Breshnev and Yuri Andropov more than we could trust Ronald Reagan. Their views are every bit as ill-conceived now as they were then.
Just thought I'd clear up that potential confusion...
So, if you're a New York company that hires programmers, consider relocating (either in toto or a subsidiary) to Texas, where your dollar goes further, and you get to keep more of it.
We have BBQ, TexMex, and sane gun laws (i.e., the law-abiding can own one). What we lack: 3 months of snow, subways, and george Steinbrenner.
Up to you.
"Why the did you send me Greatest Lesbian Porn Volumes 1-69? I didn't fill out an order form for it!"
"Sir, we show that you've signed up for Amazon's 1-Think Shopping(tm), and you clearly wanted to buy it."