Philip Torrone mentioned a "rumor" on the Engadget Podcast the other day that, to protest Apple's suits against fan sites, a number of those sites were planning to disrupt the keynote by having people stand up at some point during it and start shouting "Stop suing us! Stop suing us!"
I would say this seems to give some credence to Philip's report...
Because in Windows, the standard file search typically works like this:
Start -> Search... -> For Files and Folders
enter some search terms in the "Containing text:" field
click "Search Now"
go get a master's degree
come back to find a list of files that have nothing to do with what you were searching for.
MS's standard search is really, really bad (though they claim that the new MSN Desktop Search fixes that) -- and forget about using it to find stuff stored outside the filesystem, like in your e-mail. So there's lots of room for innovation and improvement for the 90% of the world that uses Windows.
I bought that #*#$@ing book when it first came out. And proceeded to waste prodigious amounts of time trying to make even the simplest code samples from it work. It turned out that the code samples were riddled with typos that made them un-runnable.
The book is, quite honestly, a waste of your time and money. Maybe they've since gone back and fixed the errors, but considering that it's still in the 1st edition (which targeted Mozilla 1.0 -- god only knows how much has changed between that and Firefox 1.0) I seriously doubt it.
Aaron J. Seigo summarizes his reasoning in his blog: 'If the applications people want are available on Windows, they will tend to stick with Windows...by porting software to Windows, we eliminate the majority of the competitive advantage of Free Software desktops in the eyes of the overwhelming majority of consumers while Microsoft has all the rope they need to shut the door once again on us
This is so utterly, utterly wrong I don't even know where to begin.
Look. When it comes to the average user, the challenge is not getting them to ditch Windows for Gentoo. It is getting them to accept open source as a concept. The average user out there has a mind that is freighted with misconceptions about OSS products:
They are for geeks only
They are hard to use
They are lower quality than their commercial equivalents
They are less secure than their commercial equivalents
... and on and on and on. People have a seriously hard time wrapping their brain around the notion that there is software out there for free that is better than the stuff they are paying for.
This is why OSS products on Windows are insanely important -- because they provide a gentle way for people to experiment with OSS and learn just how wrong those misconceptions are. When I set someone who just wants to create a few PDFs of Word documents up with PDFCreator, or show them how Firefox stops them from getting infested with spyware, these are steps that encourage them to not reject open source solutions out of hand, which many, many of them do right now.
Will all of these people end up as full fledged GNU/Linux users? Of course not. But a lot will. It just takes time. And even the ones that don't will be growing the user base of lots of other valuable projects -- and not doubting the local IT guy's sanity when he starts talking about dropping IIS on the company Web server for Apache.
What the heck is an MPA? I think you mean that O'Keefe is an MBA.
No, MPA is correct -- "Master of Public Administration". It's what many undergraduate poli sci majors get when they grow up (if they are not seduced by the siren song of a JD).
Sean O'Keefe earned his Bachelor of Arts in 1977 from Loyola University in New Orleans, Louisiana, and his Master of Public Administration degree in 1978 from The Maxwell School.
Games don't necessarily require "bazillions of dollars" to make.
How much technical expense does it take to come up with a game like Bejeweled? Or Chris Sawyer's original Roller Coaster Tycoon?
EA's business model is mega-budget games with mega-expensive licenses and mega-production costs, but that doesn't mean that's the only way to make games.
I've come to the conclusion that the primary function of these types of "Czars" is to do one thing -- generate B-roll. Actually solving energy/drug/homeland security/IP/etc. problems is beside the point.
For those of you lucky enough to not have to deal with media on a regular basis, here's what I mean. When the TV types do a story on a subject, they typically build it by combining a tiny amount of actual news footage -- i.e. footage of something important happening -- with a larger amount of stock footage of people, places, and things that are related to the event in question.
Example -- if you're watching a story about a bill passing Congress, there will usually be a part where you hear the reporter talking while you see a visual of the Capitol Building looking pretty in the springtime.
That visual is "B-roll" -- stock footage that they can use over and over again, any time they need to do a story on a particular subject.
So what does this have to do with Czars? Well, think about it. If a problem rises to a high enough level of prominence that the Executive Branch is supposed to start paying attention to it, the TV people are going to need some B-roll -- some visual shorthand -- to indicate that. And many times they're going to use footage of the President getting off a helicopter, walking across the White House lawn, etc. as that B-roll, while the reporter's voice-over explains that "the Department of Justice announced today that heroin claimed the lives of 500 more ghetto children last year..."
No President wants his image associated with stuff like that -- it's bad media. So he appoints a "Czar". Now the TV types have new instant visual shorthand they can use, instead of the President. So now when they're looking for B-roll to put under narration like "Maps of secret U.S. nuclear facilities were found today in an Afghan cave", they can just reach for the footage of Tom Ridge looking constipated at the podium. And now people associate Tom Ridge with bad news about bearded killers, and not the President.
You can share your requirements for better network deployability in Bug ID # 231062 in Bugzilla (I'm not gonna link directly to the bug since Bugzilla just blocks traffic from Slashdot anyway). That would help the devs improve the packages and get you the sort of thing you're talking about.
If the Bush administration wanted to get a mantra of "Mission Accomplished" out for the entire war they would have repeated it at every opportunity. That didn't happen. Why? Because the purpose of the "Mission Accomplished" banner was to thank the sailors.
Oh, of course. And that is why it was printed by the White House, and positioned on the carrier so that it would included right above the President's head in all the pictures of him speaking at the podium. Because it was to thank the sailors.
By the way, who is it that keeps saying that the United States is in a war that is going to last years? The Bush administration.
Yes, once it became clear that Iraq was a quagmire and not a stroll down Lollipop Lane, they did start talking about Iraq like that. Unfortunately that was after President Flight Suit made his speech.
But please, if you have some special insight into why it isn't possible for the President's group to print and bring the sign as part of their thanking the sailors, please tell us.
The most elaborate -- and criticized -- White House event so far was Mr. Bush's speech aboard the Abraham Lincoln announcing the end of major combat in Iraq. White House officials say that a variety of people, including the president, came up with the idea, and that Mr. Sforza embedded himself on the carrier to make preparations days before Mr. Bush's landing in a flight suit and his early evening speech.
Media strategists noted afterward that Mr. Sforza and his aides had choreographed every aspect of the event, even down to the members of the Lincoln crew arrayed in coordinated shirt colors over Mr. Bush's right shoulder and the "Mission Accomplished" banner placed to perfectly capture the president and the celebratory two words in a single shot. The speech was specifically timed for what image makers call "magic hour light," which cast a golden glow on Mr. Bush.
"If you looked at the TV picture, you saw there was flattering light on his left cheek and slight shadowing on his right," Mr. King said. "It looked great."
Funny how when the banner seemed like a great idea, they weren't saying anything about "we just brought it to thank the sailors", no?
Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, is considered a possible successor for either Rumsfeld or Powell. She has let it be known that she does not want to remain in her current role in the second term, and officials say her path is up or out...
out out out out out out out out out out out out out out out out out out out out out out out out out out out
Both of the aforementioned men are in the Navy, and our guest knew someone on the Lincoln that day. The "Mission Accomplished" banner was actually meant for the crew members of the ship - they had just finished their nine month stint away from home, and had "accomplished" their mission. It wasn't meant for Bush's visit.
Sorry, but this is one of those after-the-fact rationalizations that people have invented to justify the banner once it became clear just how ridiculous it was.
How so, you ask? Well, if it was a banner meant for the ship's crew, to celebrate the completion of their mission, why did the White House make up the banner and bring it to the ship? Not the sort of thing you would expect if it was just something the Navy does as a matter of course at the end of a long voyage.
The President and his people are saying that the banner was the "Navy's idea" so they don't have to take responsibility for their gaffe. But then blaming the troops for the Commander in Chief's screw-ups is something the GOP is getting pretty comfortable doing these days.
All PCs are disposable. Even your $4000 server. After all, a 10 year old $4000 server often isn't even worth $100 now.
Except that each of those "disposable" PCs are loaded with toxic materials and poisonous metals, including lead, cadmium, chromium, and mercury. Every time we "throw away" a PC its husk (including all those nasty metals) has to go somewhere. To see what happens where many of them end up, see the BBC's photo-essay "Recycling Poison: Inside China's E-Waste Workshops":
[Y]oung teenagers work long hours amid noxious fumes, recycling computers from the US and Europe. The industry has turned four villages in Guiyu, Guangdong province, into toxic waste tips. Drinking water is now brought by lorries from 30 kilometres away.
So even if we can afford to throw away yesterday's systems and have "somebody else deal with it", it may be wiser in the long run to reduce and re-use than to let those systems pile up all around us.
I feel almost like I've taken a dive on Alvin myself... I work for an ocean conservation group, and this summer one of our staff scientists got the chance to go along on a NOAA expedition that used Alvin to dive on some Alaskan seamounts (mountains at the bottom of the ocean).
Before he left for the trip, I talked him into keeping a journal of it for our organizational blog. Each time he made a new entry, he would e-mail it to me from Alvin's mother ship in the Gulf of Alaska, and then I would post it to the site in as close to real-time as possible. (He wanted to post the entries directly, but we were lucky to get e-mail access for him aboard ship, much less a reliable Web connection.)
You can read the archived journal here: Jon's Journal
(The software defaults to showing the journal entries in reverse chronological order, so the one on top is the last one. Scroll to the bottom and read up to start from the beginning.)
We both just kind of figured it would be something interesting to try, but the result was really cool -- he did a great job describing what it's like to be on an Alvin expedition.
It was actually near the end of his trip that I first heard that Alvin was slated for retirement. From a mechanical perspective, it makes sense; she's seen a lot of wear under some of the most demanding conditions imaginable. It's that very history that makes it hard to imagine seeing her put to pasture, I guess. Here's hoping that we as a people have the vision and commitment to keep exploring the paths down which Alvin took those first tentative steps.
Lexicon suggests there is serious problems with the software and will brief Davis at midnight that night at the Amsterdam Hard Rock Cafe on the details.
This is where participants in international intrigue are meeting these days to exchange secrets: exotic locales like the Hard Rock Cafe?
I'm not sure how you get "demonstrably trying to work something out" from "to date" and "earlier contacts". "To date" just means "nothing we've seen so far indicates a collaboration, but who knows, tomorrow anything could happen". "earlier contacts" just refers to the contacts detailed in the report (none of which ever developed into a collaboration between Hussein and al-Q).
"so, in other words, they were demonstrably TRYING to work something out."
No. Read the whole report. It details each contact and how none of them ever went farther than initial explorations -- and even those were more bin Laden hedging his bets against the Taliban dumping him than they were a result of a close affinity with Hussein.
"Actually, after re-reading this several times, what is it saying that wasn't said in the first sentence?"
It's pretty clear. No evidence exists that corroborates the Administration's charge that Iraq was somehow aiding al Qaeda. None. Zippo. Zilch.
"If the Joker and the Penguin were in talks with one another, but Batman couldn't prove that they actually had collaberated on anything, does that really make a difference?"
Actually, it's more like if the Joker had lunch with a distant cousin of his, and then Batman grabbed the cousin and threw him in jail, insisting all the time that he was another super-villain.
People do tend to expect that if you're going to blitz into a country, overturn the government, and install your own regime, that you at least do so based on some actual facts.
No substantive links, but there were links between Iraq and al Qaeda. In fact, in the very chapter you refer to, some of the ties between Bin Laden, al Qaeda, and Iraqi officials are outlined. (Also see Chapter 10.)
Those "ties" are pretty loose: mostly theoretical discussions between al-Q and Iraq about having al-Q move to Iraq should Afghanistan no longer be as welcoming as it had been. They read less like a story of criminals in cahoots and more like an apartment dweller considering options for what to do when his lease ends.
As the report points out:
But to date we have seen no evidence that these or the earlier contacts ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship. Nor have we seen evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States.
Why stop at reading "excerpts" of the 9/11 Commission Report?
Read the whole thing. (I did.) If you think the report somehow says that Bush did the right thing in invading Iraq, you clearly haven't been reading the right "excerpts". (Like, say, Chapter 2's detailing of the lack of substantive links between Iraq and al Qaeda.)
Um, the 1st WTC attack had nothing to do with al Qaeda. It was orchestrated by the Egyptian terror group Al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya, the same network that was behind the 1997 attack on tourists in Luxor, Egypt.
al-Islamiyya are now loosely affiliated with al Q as part of a general network of terrorist groups -- but that was a late-1990s development.
"Wow. Bush is kickin' ass and taking names."
Too bad they're the wrong asses and wrong names, huh?
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I'm a sock puppet. That's why my UID is so low, right? This is kind of rich coming from an Anonymous Coward...
Philip Torrone mentioned a "rumor" on the Engadget Podcast the other day that, to protest Apple's suits against fan sites, a number of those sites were planning to disrupt the keynote by having people stand up at some point during it and start shouting "Stop suing us! Stop suing us!"
I would say this seems to give some credence to Philip's report...
Remember, he wrote this in 1999. The state-of-the-art "enterprise" version of Windows then was what, NT 3.5?
Windows has come a long way since then. Keep the essay in context.
Because in Windows, the standard file search typically works like this:
MS's standard search is really, really bad (though they claim that the new MSN Desktop Search fixes that) -- and forget about using it to find stuff stored outside the filesystem, like in your e-mail. So there's lots of room for innovation and improvement for the 90% of the world that uses Windows.
Yes, there is. And it sucks.
I bought that #*#$@ing book when it first came out. And proceeded to waste prodigious amounts of time trying to make even the simplest code samples from it work. It turned out that the code samples were riddled with typos that made them un-runnable.
The book is, quite honestly, a waste of your time and money. Maybe they've since gone back and fixed the errors, but considering that it's still in the 1st edition (which targeted Mozilla 1.0 -- god only knows how much has changed between that and Firefox 1.0) I seriously doubt it.
This is so utterly, utterly wrong I don't even know where to begin.
Look. When it comes to the average user, the challenge is not getting them to ditch Windows for Gentoo. It is getting them to accept open source as a concept. The average user out there has a mind that is freighted with misconceptions about OSS products:
... and on and on and on. People have a seriously hard time wrapping their brain around the notion that there is software out there for free that is better than the stuff they are paying for.
This is why OSS products on Windows are insanely important -- because they provide a gentle way for people to experiment with OSS and learn just how wrong those misconceptions are. When I set someone who just wants to create a few PDFs of Word documents up with PDFCreator, or show them how Firefox stops them from getting infested with spyware, these are steps that encourage them to not reject open source solutions out of hand, which many, many of them do right now.
Will all of these people end up as full fledged GNU/Linux users? Of course not. But a lot will. It just takes time. And even the ones that don't will be growing the user base of lots of other valuable projects -- and not doubting the local IT guy's sanity when he starts talking about dropping IIS on the company Web server for Apache.
Oh my GOD was that game addictive... let us bow before the altar of Speedball!
No, MPA is correct -- "Master of Public Administration". It's what many undergraduate poli sci majors get when they grow up (if they are not seduced by the siren song of a JD).
From O'Keefe's bio:
Um, I believe you mean "popped", there, Skippy. Unless you mean to imply that the caps will be wielded by an angry Pontiff ... ;-)
Games don't necessarily require "bazillions of dollars" to make.
How much technical expense does it take to come up with a game like Bejeweled? Or Chris Sawyer's original Roller Coaster Tycoon?
EA's business model is mega-budget games with mega-expensive licenses and mega-production costs, but that doesn't mean that's the only way to make games.
There is more truth to this than you know.
I've come to the conclusion that the primary function of these types of "Czars" is to do one thing -- generate B-roll. Actually solving energy/drug/homeland security/IP/etc. problems is beside the point.
For those of you lucky enough to not have to deal with media on a regular basis, here's what I mean. When the TV types do a story on a subject, they typically build it by combining a tiny amount of actual news footage -- i.e. footage of something important happening -- with a larger amount of stock footage of people, places, and things that are related to the event in question.
Example -- if you're watching a story about a bill passing Congress, there will usually be a part where you hear the reporter talking while you see a visual of the Capitol Building looking pretty in the springtime.
That visual is "B-roll" -- stock footage that they can use over and over again, any time they need to do a story on a particular subject.
So what does this have to do with Czars? Well, think about it. If a problem rises to a high enough level of prominence that the Executive Branch is supposed to start paying attention to it, the TV people are going to need some B-roll -- some visual shorthand -- to indicate that. And many times they're going to use footage of the President getting off a helicopter, walking across the White House lawn, etc. as that B-roll, while the reporter's voice-over explains that "the Department of Justice announced today that heroin claimed the lives of 500 more ghetto children last year..."
No President wants his image associated with stuff like that -- it's bad media. So he appoints a "Czar". Now the TV types have new instant visual shorthand they can use, instead of the President. So now when they're looking for B-roll to put under narration like "Maps of secret U.S. nuclear facilities were found today in an Afghan cave", they can just reach for the footage of Tom Ridge looking constipated at the podium. And now people associate Tom Ridge with bad news about bearded killers, and not the President.
No problem... btw, for some reason they haven't updated the web page to reflect this yet, but they do have an MSI for 1.0 final. Here's a direct link:
MSI package for Firefox 1.0 final
Enjoy :-)
This may not be as far away as you think:
MSI packages for Firefox
You can share your requirements for better network deployability in Bug ID # 231062 in Bugzilla (I'm not gonna link directly to the bug since Bugzilla just blocks traffic from Slashdot anyway). That would help the devs improve the packages and get you the sort of thing you're talking about.
Wow, how does that Kool-Aid taste?
Oh, of course. And that is why it was printed by the White House, and positioned on the carrier so that it would included right above the President's head in all the pictures of him speaking at the podium. Because it was to thank the sailors.
Yes, once it became clear that Iraq was a quagmire and not a stroll down Lollipop Lane, they did start talking about Iraq like that. Unfortunately that was after President Flight Suit made his speech.
Please acquaint yourself with what the President's image doctors were saying before it became clear the banner had backfired:
Funny how when the banner seemed like a great idea, they weren't saying anything about "we just brought it to thank the sailors", no?
out out out out out out out out out out out out out out out out out out out out out out out out out out out
/me crosses fingers...
Sorry, but this is one of those after-the-fact rationalizations that people have invented to justify the banner once it became clear just how ridiculous it was.
How so, you ask? Well, if it was a banner meant for the ship's crew, to celebrate the completion of their mission, why did the White House make up the banner and bring it to the ship? Not the sort of thing you would expect if it was just something the Navy does as a matter of course at the end of a long voyage.
The President and his people are saying that the banner was the "Navy's idea" so they don't have to take responsibility for their gaffe. But then blaming the troops for the Commander in Chief's screw-ups is something the GOP is getting pretty comfortable doing these days.
Except that each of those "disposable" PCs are loaded with toxic materials and poisonous metals, including lead, cadmium, chromium, and mercury. Every time we "throw away" a PC its husk (including all those nasty metals) has to go somewhere. To see what happens where many of them end up, see the BBC's photo-essay "Recycling Poison: Inside China's E-Waste Workshops":
So even if we can afford to throw away yesterday's systems and have "somebody else deal with it", it may be wiser in the long run to reduce and re-use than to let those systems pile up all around us.
I feel almost like I've taken a dive on Alvin myself... I work for an ocean conservation group, and this summer one of our staff scientists got the chance to go along on a NOAA expedition that used Alvin to dive on some Alaskan seamounts (mountains at the bottom of the ocean).
Before he left for the trip, I talked him into keeping a journal of it for our organizational blog. Each time he made a new entry, he would e-mail it to me from Alvin's mother ship in the Gulf of Alaska, and then I would post it to the site in as close to real-time as possible. (He wanted to post the entries directly, but we were lucky to get e-mail access for him aboard ship, much less a reliable Web connection.)
You can read the archived journal here: Jon's Journal
(The software defaults to showing the journal entries in reverse chronological order, so the one on top is the last one. Scroll to the bottom and read up to start from the beginning.)
We both just kind of figured it would be something interesting to try, but the result was really cool -- he did a great job describing what it's like to be on an Alvin expedition.
It was actually near the end of his trip that I first heard that Alvin was slated for retirement. From a mechanical perspective, it makes sense; she's seen a lot of wear under some of the most demanding conditions imaginable. It's that very history that makes it hard to imagine seeing her put to pasture, I guess. Here's hoping that we as a people have the vision and commitment to keep exploring the paths down which Alvin took those first tentative steps.
As opposed to a sober and sensible name like YELP?
Don't know George W. Bush very well, do you??? ;-)
This is where participants in international intrigue are meeting these days to exchange secrets: exotic locales like the Hard Rock Cafe?
I miss the Cold War...
I'm not sure how you get "demonstrably trying to work something out" from "to date" and "earlier contacts". "To date" just means "nothing we've seen so far indicates a collaboration, but who knows, tomorrow anything could happen". "earlier contacts" just refers to the contacts detailed in the report (none of which ever developed into a collaboration between Hussein and al-Q). "so, in other words, they were demonstrably TRYING to work something out." No. Read the whole report. It details each contact and how none of them ever went farther than initial explorations -- and even those were more bin Laden hedging his bets against the Taliban dumping him than they were a result of a close affinity with Hussein. "Actually, after re-reading this several times, what is it saying that wasn't said in the first sentence?" It's pretty clear. No evidence exists that corroborates the Administration's charge that Iraq was somehow aiding al Qaeda. None. Zippo. Zilch. "If the Joker and the Penguin were in talks with one another, but Batman couldn't prove that they actually had collaberated on anything, does that really make a difference?" Actually, it's more like if the Joker had lunch with a distant cousin of his, and then Batman grabbed the cousin and threw him in jail, insisting all the time that he was another super-villain. People do tend to expect that if you're going to blitz into a country, overturn the government, and install your own regime, that you at least do so based on some actual facts.
Those "ties" are pretty loose: mostly theoretical discussions between al-Q and Iraq about having al-Q move to Iraq should Afghanistan no longer be as welcoming as it had been. They read less like a story of criminals in cahoots and more like an apartment dweller considering options for what to do when his lease ends.
As the report points out:
Pretty much says it all, no?
Why stop at reading "excerpts" of the 9/11 Commission Report?
Read the whole thing. (I did.) If you think the report somehow says that Bush did the right thing in invading Iraq, you clearly haven't been reading the right "excerpts". (Like, say, Chapter 2's detailing of the lack of substantive links between Iraq and al Qaeda.)
Um, the 1st WTC attack had nothing to do with al Qaeda. It was orchestrated by the Egyptian terror group Al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya, the same network that was behind the 1997 attack on tourists in Luxor, Egypt.
al-Islamiyya are now loosely affiliated with al Q as part of a general network of terrorist groups -- but that was a late-1990s development.
Too bad they're the wrong asses and wrong names, huh?