His older works are available from QuietVision, and they will hopefully be publishing new work by him in the not-too-distant future. Fans of his work should also check out The Continuing Time Mailing List for more information on DKM's ongoing projects.
[shrug] I use CSS, JavaScript, etc.... and amazingly, my pages still look fine in Netscape 4+, IE 4+, Mozilla, and Opera. I write the code using Mozilla to check my work, then test the pages in Netscape, IE, and Opera. Maybe 1% of the time I find a small, easily fixed bug in the way the pages display in one of those browsers (usually IE, no surprise.) I fix the bug and voila: a working page.
"Sorry, dude, but youhave no clue what you're talking about."
Bullshit. It is _easier_ to code a site that will display properly in all browsers than to write a browser-specific site. So-called "web developers" who use allegedly WYSIWYG site-building tools and wouldn't know a line of standard HTML if it bit them in the ass may disagree, but I'm no more worried about their opinion when I'm building a Web site than I am about the opinion of the Flat Earth Society when I'm reading a map. I make my living writing Web pages that _work_.
I don't mind them charging ...
on
Qt Released For OS X
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
... I just wish they didn't charge so _much_. Never having been a free software zealot, I don't mind paying for software that's truly useful, as this certainly is. But as a starving student, I just can't pay the kind of prices they're charging. I didn't see anything in their academic license section about prices available to individual students. The excellent student prices available on Metrowerks products are one of the main reasons I've stuck with CodeWarrior as my primary dev environment for so long, even though I haven't been wild about their more recent releases in a number of other ways.
It would be great if TrollTech learned this lesson. Remember, today's poor CS students are tomorrow's pro developers...
This is the first time I can think of where some politico who was talking about some horrible piece of legislation which was opposed in an organized fashion by the open-source community actually changed his mind. Am I being wildly optimistic in thinking that the online petitions, EFF lobbying, etc. made a difference, and might make a difference in the future? Or was there some other factor at work here?
Yes, exactly. You have the right to use force, including deadly force, to keep someone from robbing your house if you catch him in the act. You do not have the right to say, "Hmmm, I think that guy might possibly have stolen something from me a year ago" and break into his house to see.
From the Constitution of the United States of America:
---
Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Amendment V
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
Amendment VI
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.
Amendment VII
In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.
---
In other words, under American law, people are not supposed to be punished for acts they have allegedly committed unless the state (not private bodies, including corporations) has shown in a court of law that a) they have actually committed those acts, and b) the proof of the act has been gathered and presented in accordance with the law.
There is a very good reason why almost half of the Bill of Rights deals with this issue.
I don't think this is a troll; it's a legitimate question. Fortunately, there's a legitimate answer. And that is...
The open-source/free-software (hereafter os/fs) landscape is constantly changing. Some projects (e.g. Mozilla) are better about putting out constant updates than others, but the fact is that os/fs in general is a rapidly evolving world, and limitations that existed a year or a month or even a week ago might not exists today. So it's worth checking on a regualr basis to see what solutions exist.
Also, not only are the technologies changing, but so are the skillsets that grow up around them. It seems to me that what the poster was asking about was what kind of experiences people have had with migrating from M$ to os/fs solutions. Well, it's perfectly reasonable to think that someone might have useful knowledge to share about this migration process that they didn't have last time the subject came up.
I think that in the long run, this might be a good way to get the PHB's to recognize the value of os/fs. M$ pushes its projects on the basis of M$ itself being this huge, monolithic entity that will always be there. That's probably true [sigh] but the countervailing os/fs argument is that monoliths don't (and in fact can't) respond to user needs and create new opportunities the way distributed, open projects can. Put it in terms b-school grads will understand: these days, os/fs is at the cutting edge of innovation, and if your business doesn't get with the times, it will be left behind by faster, more agile competitors.
It's true that the Net offers better immediate news than TV and radio (with the possible exception of NPR) these days. But for long-term, in-depth analysis, I still rely on that oh-so-retro source, the newspaper, for three reasons:
1. There's a level of fact-checking in print journalism that doesn't exist in any other news source. I'm not claiming that newspaper reporters never make mistakes, by any means, but I get the strong feeling that the information they provide is more accurate by an order of magnitude than anything that comes out of my TV, radio, or computer.
2. Generally, when we commit words to paper, we feel that they have more import than if we speak them or type them on a computer, and thus we are more careful about what we say. Newspaper articles in the wake of the 11 September attacks were much less overheated and emotional than reporting from any other source.
3. Similarly, reading something on paper is a fundamentally different experience from hearing it on the radio, watching it on TV, or reading it on screen. I can read and reread at my own pace, thinking carefully about the information I'm taking in, which I can't do with CNN. And newspapers hold my attention, unlike the Net where something different is only a mouse click away.
Don't get me wrong here -- I very much like the instant access to information I get on the Net, and I do get an increasing amount of my information there. But until both Net journalism and the experience of receiving it are up to print standards -- and they aren't, by a long shot -- the newspaper will remain my primary source for the information I use to shape my views on world events.
Re:He SHOULD care about the competition...
on
Torvalds Tells All
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
[yawn] I'm so sick of people quoting "The Art of War" and "On War" and "The Book of Five Rings" and other military classics in reference to software development. First of all, as several other posters have pointed out, L.T. sees himself primarily as a programmer, not a businessman -- he doesn't define other OS'es as "the enemy" and therefore doesn't worry about ancient military wisdom. Second, and perhaps more important, even more business-oriented programmers are fools if they think military advice translates to any business, especially software. No matter what the Japanese say, business _isn't_ war.
Whatever happend to that fabled Japanese "business is war" economy, anyway? Oh, that's right -- all those warrior businessmen had a couple of decades of success with their slash'n'burn tactics, then kept going with it and drove one of the world's largest economies straight into the toilet.
There's a lesson here, one which Microsoft and Oracle and Sun should learn really fast: war is about killing people and breaking things, and business (ideally) is about empowering people and building a stable, lasting structure to create good products. These are not only different goals, they're opposite and mutually incompatible goals, and techniques that work for one simply _do not work_ for the other.
I've seen this from both sides, by the way -- I was in the Air Force when A.F. leadership went through a "TQM" craze. It didn't work worth a damn then, and "Sun Tzu's Guide To Crushing The Competition In The Global Marketplace" doesn't work now.
"I think I would just tell the EU 'If you fellas don't like the way we do business, we can go back to Seattle.'"
To which the appropriate European response would be, "Okay, don't let the door hit you in the ass (or arse, since most Europeans speak British English) on the way out. See, there's this fellow named Linus..."
M$ needs the EU a hell of a lot more than the EU needs M$. M$, as far as I can tell, is running into the limits of growth in the US; this isn't a political/judicial problem as much as it is a simple economic one. Gates, Ballmer et al know this, and they also know that Europe, software-wise, is about where the US was five years ago -- which happens to be the period M$ was experiencing the greatest growth period in its history. They simply cannot walk away from the EU.
Personally, I hope the EU sends them back to Redmond with their tails between their legs. A mass European movement to open-source would have a more powerful effect on the worldwide software market than anything the current US Justic Dept. is likely to do, that's for damn sure...
Yep, phpMyAdmin is great; really everything you'll ever need to administer your MySQL database. Once a month or so I drop into command-line access via telnet to do a big, tricky query, but that's more a "because I can" kind of thing -- phpMyAdmin always allows you to execute queries directly if you want.
As far as user front ends go -- just write everything in PHP. Look at the phpMyAdmin code if you want some ideas; they don't mind! Anyone with a decent amount of Web development and general programming knowledge can whip up a good-looking, functional PHP-based Web interface for a MySQL database in a very short time.
Yes, exactly. The reason the space program has produced such useful spin-off technologies (it is, in fact, one of only two government programs that has paid for itself and then some, the other being the GI Bill) is because space exploration requires completely new technology, not just better implementations of old tech. Those who object to the spin-off argument for space exploration never seem to understand that there is simply no other field which has consistently produced so many truly innovative solutions to hard problems.
The article talks about "the fledgling science of biometrics, a method of identifying people by scanning and quantifying their unique physical characteristics."
That's not all biometrics is. "Biometrics" generally just means "biological measurement," and is a wide-ranging field of study covering biostatistics, various types of bioengineering (e.g. the development of various medical monitoring devices), clinical data analysis, etc. Its use in this context is just another example, IMO, of PHB's adopting buzzwords they barely understand. (Cf. "six sigma" -- how many biztypes can tell what a sigma is, or why six of them is important?) I think it's very unfortunate that biometrics scientists, most of whom are decent people working on research that will serve only to help people, will find themselves lumped in with assholes who want to make a quick buck (or quid) helping their governments take away the rights of their fellow citizens.
Expand the military's own information warfare efforts considerably. Have military units -- the real, in-uniform type -- ready to respond to situations like this. Give them good training which will serve them well in civilian life. Probably make most (though by no means all) of the units Guard or Reserve rather than active, so that they can usefully apply their skills in civilian life at times when people aren't, say, crashing airliners into skyscrapers. Guard would be particularly good since they could then be called upon by state governments as well as the federal government.
Large municipalities (e.g., NYC and Washington, DC) might also want to consider city government agencies for the same purpose.
Basically, we have militaries, police departments, fire depts. etc for a reason: some functions are too vital to be left up to corporations whose primary purpose is profit, not public service. (A good example of this is the trend away from city-funded paramedic services to private ambulance companies a few years ago; most big cities are now realizing this just doesn't work, and that it's better for ambulance service to be provided either by fire departments or by separate city agencies such as NYC*EMS.) If we consider communication to be as important as national defense, law enforcement, fire protection, and emergency medical services, then it should receive the same governmental priority, not a half-assed semi-volunteer solution run by PHB's.
To those who say, oh, geeks are too individualistic for this to ever work, or geeks are out-of-shape slobs who could never make it through Basic, or whatever: well, I served in the Army as an infantryman and in the Air Force as a medic, and now I'm a working DBA/Webmaster who just got into a very good CS Master's program. The stereotypes are only true if we let them be...
No, we have a small number of poorly designed studies that seem to show that prayer unknown to the patient has an impact, and a number of better-designed studies that show no such thing. Every major "double-blind" study which has shown an effect from prayer on healing has later turned out to be unblinded indeed, with the personnel conducting the study having discarded evidence which didn't fit their hypotheses. Irwin Tessman, among others, has shown this quite thoroughly.
As far as the subject of this article goes: astronomers (and biologists, and geologists) are under no more obligation to consider the beliefs of creationists than historians are to consider the beliefs of Holocaust-deniers, or geographers are to consider the beliefs of the Flat Earth Society.
"The fact that the infrastructure has gotten so big and so few of the truly UN-connected (i.e. non western countries, disadvantaged schools) have gotten connected in the meantime makes me relegate this infrastructure expansion to the trash bin with the dutch tulip craze."
Okay, fair enough, but a couple of paragraphs later...
"It has to become like the car. People said the car wouldn't penetrate certain levels of society either you know."
Yes, exactly. These things always take time, and it's always the rich who get it first. Well, okay, the very first are the inventors (who are usually, themselves, reasonably well-off) but then, in order, it's:
1) The rich in rich countries
2) The rich in poor countries and the middle class in rich countries
3) The poor in rich countries and the (usually small) middle class in poor countries
4) Absolutely everybody
Note that the automobile is still going through this process -- I'd put it at about stage 3.5 -- but nobody denies the ubiquity of the automobile, or doubts that it will get even more ubiquitous in the future. Air travel is at about 2.7. Antibiotics, 3.9. Radio, 4. TV, just about exactly on 3. Etc. I'm sure I could come up with some other examples, but you get the idea. This is a technological growth pattern that is neither new nor unique to any one technology.
Internet connectivity I'd say is at about 2.5, which may not be all that great -- but considering that the idea of mass connection to the Net is only about two decades old by the most generous possible measure (counting Compuserve et seq as part of "the Net" -- if you only count the Internet as such, I'd say less than a decade, since 99% of the population had never heard of it before the advent of the WWW) it's not doing that badly. Unless things really go to hell for some reason, I predict stage 3 within the next few years and stage 4 no later than 2020.
So don't write off the Net. The "Bruce Sterling world" will be here soon enough.
"The threat of terrorism is not the same now as it has always been, it has escalated in severity and consequences since 1993, both from sources internal and abroad."
Silly me; I thought we were talking about how the world has changed since Sept. 11, 2001, not since 1993. (And why did you pick 1993, particularly?)
"Quit inventing rights that didn't exist 200 years ago, and then pretending we are turning into Nazis if we have to modify them."
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
The Nazis, of course, did not hold these truths to be self-evident at all. Neither did the Communists. Neither, apparently, does John Ashcroft. Neither, apparently, do you. I still have enough faith in my fellow Americans to hope that, once the current panic dies down a bit, these will prove to be exceptions to the rule.
I am the Lord thy Language God, who hath delivered thee out of the land of bad spelling, and this I say unto thee:
Thou shalt speak of one "bacterium" and many "bacteria."
Thou shalt speak of one "virus" and many "viruses."
Thou shalt not speak of many "bacterium," and neither shalt thou speak of "virii" ever again in My hearing; for "bacterium" is singular, and "virii" is not a word, and is an abomination in My ears.
Honor these laws which I have given thee, that thy days be long and thy communications be clear.
Yes, it is a different world. The threat of terrorism is exactly the same as it was, of course, and so is the need to protect civil liberties (the latter being one of the few eternal constants in society, I'd say -- not civil liberties themselves, regrettably, but the need to protect them.) But two important things have changed:
1) The forces in government which would like to take away our rights in the name of national security now feel they have the perfect excuse, and
2) Otherwise intelligent people are so convinced that "the world is different now" that they'll let these would-be tyrants get away with it.
Actually, I did read the article. IIRC, the author points out that file and creator type are not part of the Mac's resource fork, but rather its data fork. So while such information is certainly metadata, there's no good reasons that other OS's shouldn't be able to interpret Mac file type information. (Application type is a little trickier, I admit, but that should be information which a user is free to ignore anyway.)
I strongly agree with the author's contention that suffixes are a lousy way to identify file type, and as a long-term Mac guy, I'm dismayed that MacOS X (which is in almost every other respect a great OS) is moving so strongly in the direction of suffix-identified files.
In any case, none of that is directly relevant here. The IE flaw has to do with the Mac as a file client, not a server.
At this point, it seems that Very Big and Very Small are at two ends of a spectrum which looks a lot like a circle (kind of like left-wing and right-wing.) IOW, the same structures, e.g. strings, which manifest themselves at the smallest levels of matter, also seem to manifest on a grand, nearly universal scale. Human-scale (i.e. Newtonian) physics may actually be the exception to otherwise universal rules, an island of what we call normality in a sea of micro- and mega-scale weirdness.
Because nobody really expects business majors to know anything except the latest business jargon. Business school is for people who want to say "I went to college" but don't want to do any work.
Slashdot Mirror
His older works are available from QuietVision, and they will hopefully be publishing new work by him in the not-too-distant future. Fans of his work should also check out The Continuing Time Mailing List for more information on DKM's ongoing projects.
Okay, as an addendum: I shouldn't have said "all browsers," I should have said, "all modern browsers."
[shrug] I use CSS, JavaScript, etc. ... and amazingly, my pages still look fine in Netscape 4+, IE 4+, Mozilla, and Opera. I write the code using Mozilla to check my work, then test the pages in Netscape, IE, and Opera. Maybe 1% of the time I find a small, easily fixed bug in the way the pages display in one of those browsers (usually IE, no surprise.) I fix the bug and voila: a working page.
"Sorry, dude, but youhave no clue what you're talking about."
Go fuck yourself.
Bullshit. It is _easier_ to code a site that will display properly in all browsers than to write a browser-specific site. So-called "web developers" who use allegedly WYSIWYG site-building tools and wouldn't know a line of standard HTML if it bit them in the ass may disagree, but I'm no more worried about their opinion when I'm building a Web site than I am about the opinion of the Flat Earth Society when I'm reading a map. I make my living writing Web pages that _work_.
... I just wish they didn't charge so _much_. Never having been a free software zealot, I don't mind paying for software that's truly useful, as this certainly is. But as a starving student, I just can't pay the kind of prices they're charging. I didn't see anything in their academic license section about prices available to individual students. The excellent student prices available on Metrowerks products are one of the main reasons I've stuck with CodeWarrior as my primary dev environment for so long, even though I haven't been wild about their more recent releases in a number of other ways.
...
It would be great if TrollTech learned this lesson. Remember, today's poor CS students are tomorrow's pro developers
This is the first time I can think of where some politico who was talking about some horrible piece of legislation which was opposed in an organized fashion by the open-source community actually changed his mind. Am I being wildly optimistic in thinking that the online petitions, EFF lobbying, etc. made a difference, and might make a difference in the future? Or was there some other factor at work here?
Yes, exactly. You have the right to use force, including deadly force, to keep someone from robbing your house if you catch him in the act. You do not have the right to say, "Hmmm, I think that guy might possibly have stolen something from me a year ago" and break into his house to see.
From the Constitution of the United States of America:
---
Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Amendment V
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
Amendment VI
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.
Amendment VII
In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.
---
In other words, under American law, people are not supposed to be punished for acts they have allegedly committed unless the state (not private bodies, including corporations) has shown in a court of law that a) they have actually committed those acts, and b) the proof of the act has been gathered and presented in accordance with the law.
There is a very good reason why almost half of the Bill of Rights deals with this issue.
I don't think this is a troll; it's a legitimate question. Fortunately, there's a legitimate answer. And that is ...
The open-source/free-software (hereafter os/fs) landscape is constantly changing. Some projects (e.g. Mozilla) are better about putting out constant updates than others, but the fact is that os/fs in general is a rapidly evolving world, and limitations that existed a year or a month or even a week ago might not exists today. So it's worth checking on a regualr basis to see what solutions exist.
Also, not only are the technologies changing, but so are the skillsets that grow up around them. It seems to me that what the poster was asking about was what kind of experiences people have had with migrating from M$ to os/fs solutions. Well, it's perfectly reasonable to think that someone might have useful knowledge to share about this migration process that they didn't have last time the subject came up.
I think that in the long run, this might be a good way to get the PHB's to recognize the value of os/fs. M$ pushes its projects on the basis of M$ itself being this huge, monolithic entity that will always be there. That's probably true [sigh] but the countervailing os/fs argument is that monoliths don't (and in fact can't) respond to user needs and create new opportunities the way distributed, open projects can. Put it in terms b-school grads will understand: these days, os/fs is at the cutting edge of innovation, and if your business doesn't get with the times, it will be left behind by faster, more agile competitors.
It's true that the Net offers better immediate news than TV and radio (with the possible exception of NPR) these days. But for long-term, in-depth analysis, I still rely on that oh-so-retro source, the newspaper, for three reasons:
1. There's a level of fact-checking in print journalism that doesn't exist in any other news source. I'm not claiming that newspaper reporters never make mistakes, by any means, but I get the strong feeling that the information they provide is more accurate by an order of magnitude than anything that comes out of my TV, radio, or computer.
2. Generally, when we commit words to paper, we feel that they have more import than if we speak them or type them on a computer, and thus we are more careful about what we say. Newspaper articles in the wake of the 11 September attacks were much less overheated and emotional than reporting from any other source.
3. Similarly, reading something on paper is a fundamentally different experience from hearing it on the radio, watching it on TV, or reading it on screen. I can read and reread at my own pace, thinking carefully about the information I'm taking in, which I can't do with CNN. And newspapers hold my attention, unlike the Net where something different is only a mouse click away.
Don't get me wrong here -- I very much like the instant access to information I get on the Net, and I do get an increasing amount of my information there. But until both Net journalism and the experience of receiving it are up to print standards -- and they aren't, by a long shot -- the newspaper will remain my primary source for the information I use to shape my views on world events.
[yawn] I'm so sick of people quoting "The Art of War" and "On War" and "The Book of Five Rings" and other military classics in reference to software development. First of all, as several other posters have pointed out, L.T. sees himself primarily as a programmer, not a businessman -- he doesn't define other OS'es as "the enemy" and therefore doesn't worry about ancient military wisdom. Second, and perhaps more important, even more business-oriented programmers are fools if they think military advice translates to any business, especially software. No matter what the Japanese say, business _isn't_ war.
Whatever happend to that fabled Japanese "business is war" economy, anyway? Oh, that's right -- all those warrior businessmen had a couple of decades of success with their slash'n'burn tactics, then kept going with it and drove one of the world's largest economies straight into the toilet.
There's a lesson here, one which Microsoft and Oracle and Sun should learn really fast: war is about killing people and breaking things, and business (ideally) is about empowering people and building a stable, lasting structure to create good products. These are not only different goals, they're opposite and mutually incompatible goals, and techniques that work for one simply _do not work_ for the other.
I've seen this from both sides, by the way -- I was in the Air Force when A.F. leadership went through a "TQM" craze. It didn't work worth a damn then, and "Sun Tzu's Guide To Crushing The Competition In The Global Marketplace" doesn't work now.
"I think I would just tell the EU 'If you fellas don't like the way we do business, we can go back to Seattle.'"
..."
...
To which the appropriate European response would be, "Okay, don't let the door hit you in the ass (or arse, since most Europeans speak British English) on the way out. See, there's this fellow named Linus
M$ needs the EU a hell of a lot more than the EU needs M$. M$, as far as I can tell, is running into the limits of growth in the US; this isn't a political/judicial problem as much as it is a simple economic one. Gates, Ballmer et al know this, and they also know that Europe, software-wise, is about where the US was five years ago -- which happens to be the period M$ was experiencing the greatest growth period in its history. They simply cannot walk away from the EU.
Personally, I hope the EU sends them back to Redmond with their tails between their legs. A mass European movement to open-source would have a more powerful effect on the worldwide software market than anything the current US Justic Dept. is likely to do, that's for damn sure
Yep, phpMyAdmin is great; really everything you'll ever need to administer your MySQL database. Once a month or so I drop into command-line access via telnet to do a big, tricky query, but that's more a "because I can" kind of thing -- phpMyAdmin always allows you to execute queries directly if you want.
As far as user front ends go -- just write everything in PHP. Look at the phpMyAdmin code if you want some ideas; they don't mind! Anyone with a decent amount of Web development and general programming knowledge can whip up a good-looking, functional PHP-based Web interface for a MySQL database in a very short time.
Yes, exactly. The reason the space program has produced such useful spin-off technologies (it is, in fact, one of only two government programs that has paid for itself and then some, the other being the GI Bill) is because space exploration requires completely new technology, not just better implementations of old tech. Those who object to the spin-off argument for space exploration never seem to understand that there is simply no other field which has consistently produced so many truly innovative solutions to hard problems.
The article talks about "the fledgling science of biometrics, a method of identifying people by scanning and quantifying their unique physical characteristics."
That's not all biometrics is. "Biometrics" generally just means "biological measurement," and is a wide-ranging field of study covering biostatistics, various types of bioengineering (e.g. the development of various medical monitoring devices), clinical data analysis, etc. Its use in this context is just another example, IMO, of PHB's adopting buzzwords they barely understand. (Cf. "six sigma" -- how many biztypes can tell what a sigma is, or why six of them is important?) I think it's very unfortunate that biometrics scientists, most of whom are decent people working on research that will serve only to help people, will find themselves lumped in with assholes who want to make a quick buck (or quid) helping their governments take away the rights of their fellow citizens.
Expand the military's own information warfare efforts considerably. Have military units -- the real, in-uniform type -- ready to respond to situations like this. Give them good training which will serve them well in civilian life. Probably make most (though by no means all) of the units Guard or Reserve rather than active, so that they can usefully apply their skills in civilian life at times when people aren't, say, crashing airliners into skyscrapers. Guard would be particularly good since they could then be called upon by state governments as well as the federal government.
...
Large municipalities (e.g., NYC and Washington, DC) might also want to consider city government agencies for the same purpose.
Basically, we have militaries, police departments, fire depts. etc for a reason: some functions are too vital to be left up to corporations whose primary purpose is profit, not public service. (A good example of this is the trend away from city-funded paramedic services to private ambulance companies a few years ago; most big cities are now realizing this just doesn't work, and that it's better for ambulance service to be provided either by fire departments or by separate city agencies such as NYC*EMS.) If we consider communication to be as important as national defense, law enforcement, fire protection, and emergency medical services, then it should receive the same governmental priority, not a half-assed semi-volunteer solution run by PHB's.
To those who say, oh, geeks are too individualistic for this to ever work, or geeks are out-of-shape slobs who could never make it through Basic, or whatever: well, I served in the Army as an infantryman and in the Air Force as a medic, and now I'm a working DBA/Webmaster who just got into a very good CS Master's program. The stereotypes are only true if we let them be
No, we have a small number of poorly designed studies that seem to show that prayer unknown to the patient has an impact, and a number of better-designed studies that show no such thing. Every major "double-blind" study which has shown an effect from prayer on healing has later turned out to be unblinded indeed, with the personnel conducting the study having discarded evidence which didn't fit their hypotheses. Irwin Tessman, among others, has shown this quite thoroughly.
As far as the subject of this article goes: astronomers (and biologists, and geologists) are under no more obligation to consider the beliefs of creationists than historians are to consider the beliefs of Holocaust-deniers, or geographers are to consider the beliefs of the Flat Earth Society.
"The fact that the infrastructure has gotten so big and so few of the truly UN-connected (i.e. non western countries, disadvantaged schools) have gotten connected in the meantime makes me relegate this infrastructure expansion to the trash bin with the dutch tulip craze."
...
Okay, fair enough, but a couple of paragraphs later
"It has to become like the car. People said the car wouldn't penetrate certain levels of society either you know."
Yes, exactly. These things always take time, and it's always the rich who get it first. Well, okay, the very first are the inventors (who are usually, themselves, reasonably well-off) but then, in order, it's:
1) The rich in rich countries
2) The rich in poor countries and the middle class in rich countries
3) The poor in rich countries and the (usually small) middle class in poor countries
4) Absolutely everybody
Note that the automobile is still going through this process -- I'd put it at about stage 3.5 -- but nobody denies the ubiquity of the automobile, or doubts that it will get even more ubiquitous in the future. Air travel is at about 2.7. Antibiotics, 3.9. Radio, 4. TV, just about exactly on 3. Etc. I'm sure I could come up with some other examples, but you get the idea. This is a technological growth pattern that is neither new nor unique to any one technology.
Internet connectivity I'd say is at about 2.5, which may not be all that great -- but considering that the idea of mass connection to the Net is only about two decades old by the most generous possible measure (counting Compuserve et seq as part of "the Net" -- if you only count the Internet as such, I'd say less than a decade, since 99% of the population had never heard of it before the advent of the WWW) it's not doing that badly. Unless things really go to hell for some reason, I predict stage 3 within the next few years and stage 4 no later than 2020.
So don't write off the Net. The "Bruce Sterling world" will be here soon enough.
"The threat of terrorism is not the same now as it has always been, it has escalated in severity and consequences since 1993, both from sources internal and abroad."
Silly me; I thought we were talking about how the world has changed since Sept. 11, 2001, not since 1993. (And why did you pick 1993, particularly?)
"Quit inventing rights that didn't exist 200 years ago, and then pretending we are turning into Nazis if we have to modify them."
The Nazis, of course, did not hold these truths to be self-evident at all. Neither did the Communists. Neither, apparently, does John Ashcroft. Neither, apparently, do you. I still have enough faith in my fellow Americans to hope that, once the current panic dies down a bit, these will prove to be exceptions to the rule.
I am the Lord thy Language God, who hath delivered thee out of the land of bad spelling, and this I say unto thee:
Thou shalt speak of one "bacterium" and many "bacteria."
Thou shalt speak of one "virus" and many "viruses."
Thou shalt not speak of many "bacterium," and neither shalt thou speak of "virii" ever again in My hearing; for "bacterium" is singular, and "virii" is not a word, and is an abomination in My ears.
Honor these laws which I have given thee, that thy days be long and thy communications be clear.
Yes, it is a different world. The threat of terrorism is exactly the same as it was, of course, and so is the need to protect civil liberties (the latter being one of the few eternal constants in society, I'd say -- not civil liberties themselves, regrettably, but the need to protect them.) But two important things have changed:
...
1) The forces in government which would like to take away our rights in the name of national security now feel they have the perfect excuse, and
2) Otherwise intelligent people are so convinced that "the world is different now" that they'll let these would-be tyrants get away with it.
Can you spell "Reichstag?" I knew you could
Actually, I did read the article. IIRC, the author points out that file and creator type are not part of the Mac's resource fork, but rather its data fork. So while such information is certainly metadata, there's no good reasons that other OS's shouldn't be able to interpret Mac file type information. (Application type is a little trickier, I admit, but that should be information which a user is free to ignore anyway.)
I strongly agree with the author's contention that suffixes are a lousy way to identify file type, and as a long-term Mac guy, I'm dismayed that MacOS X (which is in almost every other respect a great OS) is moving so strongly in the direction of suffix-identified files.
In any case, none of that is directly relevant here. The IE flaw has to do with the Mac as a file client, not a server.
The Mac has always played nice on the Web. What are you talking about?
At this point, it seems that Very Big and Very Small are at two ends of a spectrum which looks a lot like a circle (kind of like left-wing and right-wing.) IOW, the same structures, e.g. strings, which manifest themselves at the smallest levels of matter, also seem to manifest on a grand, nearly universal scale. Human-scale (i.e. Newtonian) physics may actually be the exception to otherwise universal rules, an island of what we call normality in a sea of micro- and mega-scale weirdness.
Because nobody really expects business majors to know anything except the latest business jargon. Business school is for people who want to say "I went to college" but don't want to do any work.