In any (decent) corporate IT infrastructure (in the European Union at least), just because you are a systems admin or e-mail/collaboration/other admin, does not mean that you can access individual user acoounts - the most you are allowed is, at the request of the user, to reset a password or, at the request of a competent authority, change an account type.
Isn't it time online services were required to disclose who and how your account is accessed rather than the bland catch-all "we respect your privacy" bollocks?
Richard Dawkins devotes a whole chapter to exactly this problem in his "Unweaving the Rainbow". It comes down to understanding the statistical probability of a chance match for the particular test method - of which there are many and some are just bad. Until lawyers can articulate this in court, juries will have problems...
I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned Ramez Elmasri & Shamkant Navathe's "Fundamentals of Database Systems".
It is a weighty academic tome but it is thorough and likely to rid you of many bad design habits. I have many gripes with it, but principally - as far as your issues are concerned - that it should have dealt with normalisation at an earlier stage and pulled the whole issue more clearly out from the wider discussion on functional dependencies.
Written Declarations in the European Parliament have no weight whatsoever, except as a possible litmus test of Members interest.
Such a declaration has to be signed by a majority of the Members for it to be valid (very few manage this) and even then all they can do is propose that the European Commission take some action - they have no force or mandate whatsover - it is more like a non-binding petition of members, and favoured by Members and Groups with little or no political clout within the institution.
To label the lead story as "EU To Monitor All Internet Searches" is FUD straight from Journalism 101, week 1...
We've been using Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Services (BPOS) since its launch last year. All the advantages of managing our own infrastructure without any of the disadvantages of actually managing it.
For mail, the synchronisation between the Exchange server and Outlook clients using AJAX is simply the best for in office, online and on the road, offline mail management from different client machines.
The help and support is 24/7 with impressive turnaround of incidents.
"I believe in standards, so let's use mine" seems to be the call from Google here.
Rather than accepting that there are whole eco-systems of standards development in which everybody plays according to a set of groundrules, Google's attitude refelcts a continued pomposity that they are better than anyone else and if you don't agree, tough shit, we'll do it anyway.
Evolution theory should teach them that it's not about the survival of the fittest or strongest - but survival of the most adaptable.
If they really wanted to achieve the objective of their gamed and controlled Open Handset Alliance, they would have brought their issues and work to an existing forum, consortium and standards body: they would risk not being able to control the outcome; but gain a wealth of input and fresh ideas from the community - that is surely the real spirit in which Open Source initiatives flourish. .
So, Google - do you support open standards or do just want to get your own way the whole time?
I was recently asked for a copy of a paper (sic!) that I wrote and presented seven years ago for the European Parliament on this problem, and have decided to make it more freely available: you can download "In Praise of paper" at http://www.pensive.eu/file/65.ppsx
There is nothing objectionable about a public authority insisting that all users respect the chosen technology platform. In any other area except technology, the insistence of a group of users to do what they damned well pleased, would be grounds for dismissal - "No, I'm gonna write everything in gold ink on black paper and send messages on heart shaped post-it notes". Even in other aspects of technology use, such an attitude would be unacceptable - " I don't give a fuck about your 11 by 8in paper formats, I'm gonna print everything on A3 and insist on having a printer and supplies to back up my 'right'. Screw you". No, dear user - screw you. If you don't like the idea of belonging to an organisation, with organisational policies and rules, go and work somewhere where you can spread your wings and exercise your desired freedom...
I use OneNote on a ThinkPad Tablet PC. I hand-write notes and diagrams, OneNote converts them later; I add keyboard-entered text when I can, particularly with key text, keywords and metadata that OneNote can search and retrieve very efficiently and effectively. It has still to be one of the best software products that Microsoft have ever released.
Although a competitor product, and if it is definitely open source that you are looking for rather than richer-featured proprietary solutions, take a look at Ontopia Open Source, a "subject-centric" alternative to classic text-string based search engines. It uses the ISO 13250 Topic Maps standard which encapsulates all subjects, associations and related data in XML. All engines using the Topic Maps standard are particularly strong in faceted classification, handling complex queries and query classes and, by its nature, offers a user interface that allows user to intuitively move from subject to subject
Why restrict to gaming?
With the desire to move us away from GUI (and CLI for/.ers) and towards "natural user interface" using gestures, it would seem like the next obvious step from the need - still - to interact directly with a surface (whether The Surface, or other multi-touch screen interface).
It shouldn't be too big a leap to imagine doing away with the kludgy remote control for any home/leisure digital content environment (home server, media centre, iTunes, etc)
I agree
I have the Squeezeboox software installed on a Windows Home Server that is dedicated to managing all household media files (music, photos, video, etc) and run several squeezebox units in different rooms(either just the base unit linked to high quality and more powerful external compotents - amp and speakers; or the larger squeezebox unit with built in amp and speakers for smaller rooms). One good function is the possibility to have different units stream the same music or channel to different units simultaneously.
Not true. What are APIs and the whole SOA paradigm about? Being able to work between heterogeneous systems with predictable behaviours at agreed interoperability points. I don't always want nor need to know what goes on in the "black box" as long as it behaves according to spec. - For example, I don't need Bluetooth or GSM source code to know how to work with these specs - unless you are insisting on some moral right to be able to access whatever anyone else has created. That is then the debate about open source, not open standards.
The biggest issue for the European Interoperability framework is that its first version pissed nearly everyone off by failing at every definition.
The biggest hurdle was to support "open standards" with an objective definition that didn't cut the European Standards Organisations (ESOs) out of the institutional picture. Of the three ESOs, two of their business models are based on selling copies of their standards to make money - which flies in the face of the part of the "open standard" definition that requires free access...
The issue of a "spectrum of openness" is only a secondary issue, invesnted to help around that dilemma: instead of a boolean "this is | is not an open standard", the compromise was to have instead a scale. Who gets to judge where something sits on the spectrum? Well, that now is the sticking point. Best bets would be for an agreed set of criteria, but let any agency who wants to use a particular standard make up their own mind.
This will mean that some will conclude that MSFT Office OOXML is totally open and others that it sucks; or that IETF RFC 2616 is totally open and others that it's managed by a non-recognised standards body, and therefore is not a standard....
This will run and run...
... I'd love Microsoft to respond and block the PITA updaters from Sun, Adobe and others that regularly screw up a perfectly working and secure configuration on Windows (Vista and 7), insisting on my attention despite being told where to get off and in any case requiring admin privileges to just go online and download even more bloatware.
And then they whine because MSFT are making it more difficult. It's as if they're saying "please make your OS more flexible so that we can still run our badly designed software..."
Oh wait, I forgot, that's a business model...
There are such experts out there but not necessarily US citizens. Given the shortage, will the administration consider the opportunity of bringing in "aliens" as outweighing the understandable concern for such sensitive posts?
...and therefore are bound by legislation concerning the legality, truthfulness and honesty of the content. the appropriate authority would be the advertising standards authority or ombudsman for the relevant geographic area
I'd echo that sentiment - even go a bit further: many open source projects become "de facto" proprietary software. So many inter-dependent modules from different versions and builds of a myriad of open source elemens, coupled with (deliberately?) poor documentation, often locks a client into an expensive long-term dependency with a single contractor or supplier. Senior managers often still pay up because the "but it's all open source" mantra still holds its magic.
A recent example I witnessed was an online collaboration platform that was costing more than $1m to maintain each year for a user base of some 50,000 users - when the project started 15 years ago, there were admittedly few even proprietary solutions on the market, but after more than $30M spent, and a total dependency on a single contractor. An alternative contractor was proposed but was going to charge more than that just to document the existing infarstructure. You would have thought that when in a hole, they would stop digging....
The intelligent money would surely be on open source solutions to convert from one proprietary platform to another, coupled with the consultancy contract to perform the switch - leaving clients an open field of tried and tested, documented and well supported commercial solutions, and the door open to switch when they want.
Who tested their sites? geeks?
Apple's sites overall design suck: one flagrant example of piss-poor design: CSS pages, used to control display in https secure pages, are themselves stored in non-secure areas. So every https request - on the Apple Developer site for example - leads to an end user warning: "This webpage contains content that will not be delivered using a secure HTTPS connection, which could compromise the security of the entire webpage. Display non-secure content?" I spoke to a typical Apple developer whose reply was simply: "yeah, that's not important, it can be safely ignored..."
As ever, poor design leads to users have lower performance expectations, hence such shortcuts - a common vector for security breaches.
Yeah, iPhone - great and easy to program...just wait an eternity for a garage full of spotty interms to finally get around to approving it for release - that's a whole other ball game.
Maybe Apple could organise an iPhone programming contest? All contestants must check in all non Apple technologies at the door, refuse to talk to anyone else, deny they've participated, accept unconditionally that the rules of the competition are not stable and maybe changed at any time without notice, not share their code or results with anyone else and let the aforementioned garage full of spotty interns make the jury and all the decisions, without review or explanation.
But if you win, oh glory be.....
Slashdot Mirror
In any (decent) corporate IT infrastructure (in the European Union at least), just because you are a systems admin or e-mail/collaboration/other admin, does not mean that you can access individual user acoounts - the most you are allowed is, at the request of the user, to reset a password or, at the request of a competent authority, change an account type.
Isn't it time online services were required to disclose who and how your account is accessed rather than the bland catch-all "we respect your privacy" bollocks?
Richard Dawkins devotes a whole chapter to exactly this problem in his "Unweaving the Rainbow". It comes down to understanding the statistical probability of a chance match for the particular test method - of which there are many and some are just bad. Until lawyers can articulate this in court, juries will have problems...
I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned Ramez Elmasri & Shamkant Navathe's "Fundamentals of Database Systems". It is a weighty academic tome but it is thorough and likely to rid you of many bad design habits. I have many gripes with it, but principally - as far as your issues are concerned - that it should have dealt with normalisation at an earlier stage and pulled the whole issue more clearly out from the wider discussion on functional dependencies.
Written Declarations in the European Parliament have no weight whatsoever, except as a possible litmus test of Members interest.
Such a declaration has to be signed by a majority of the Members for it to be valid (very few manage this) and even then all they can do is propose that the European Commission take some action - they have no force or mandate whatsover - it is more like a non-binding petition of members, and favoured by Members and Groups with little or no political clout within the institution.
To label the lead story as "EU To Monitor All Internet Searches" is FUD straight from Journalism 101, week 1...
Surely the difference can be accounted for by all those Higg's bosuns that we just know are floating around out there?
We've been using Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Services (BPOS) since its launch last year. All the advantages of managing our own infrastructure without any of the disadvantages of actually managing it.
For mail, the synchronisation between the Exchange server and Outlook clients using AJAX is simply the best for in office, online and on the road, offline mail management from different client machines.
The help and support is 24/7 with impressive turnaround of incidents.
"I believe in standards, so let's use mine" seems to be the call from Google here.
Rather than accepting that there are whole eco-systems of standards development in which everybody plays according to a set of groundrules, Google's attitude refelcts a continued pomposity that they are better than anyone else and if you don't agree, tough shit, we'll do it anyway.
Evolution theory should teach them that it's not about the survival of the fittest or strongest - but survival of the most adaptable.
If they really wanted to achieve the objective of their gamed and controlled Open Handset Alliance, they would have brought their issues and work to an existing forum, consortium and standards body: they would risk not being able to control the outcome; but gain a wealth of input and fresh ideas from the community - that is surely the real spirit in which Open Source initiatives flourish.
. So, Google - do you support open standards or do just want to get your own way the whole time?
I was recently asked for a copy of a paper (sic!) that I wrote and presented seven years ago for the European Parliament on this problem, and have decided to make it more freely available: you can download "In Praise of paper" at http://www.pensive.eu/file/65.ppsx
...I have nothing to worry about, it doesn't affect me...
With apologies to Pastor Martin Niemöller
There is nothing objectionable about a public authority insisting that all users respect the chosen technology platform. In any other area except technology, the insistence of a group of users to do what they damned well pleased, would be grounds for dismissal - "No, I'm gonna write everything in gold ink on black paper and send messages on heart shaped post-it notes". Even in other aspects of technology use, such an attitude would be unacceptable - " I don't give a fuck about your 11 by 8in paper formats, I'm gonna print everything on A3 and insist on having a printer and supplies to back up my 'right'. Screw you". No, dear user - screw you. If you don't like the idea of belonging to an organisation, with organisational policies and rules, go and work somewhere where you can spread your wings and exercise your desired freedom...
I use OneNote on a ThinkPad Tablet PC. I hand-write notes and diagrams, OneNote converts them later; I add keyboard-entered text when I can, particularly with key text, keywords and metadata that OneNote can search and retrieve very efficiently and effectively. It has still to be one of the best software products that Microsoft have ever released.
Although a competitor product, and if it is definitely open source that you are looking for rather than richer-featured proprietary solutions, take a look at Ontopia Open Source, a "subject-centric" alternative to classic text-string based search engines. It uses the ISO 13250 Topic Maps standard which encapsulates all subjects, associations and related data in XML. All engines using the Topic Maps standard are particularly strong in faceted classification, handling complex queries and query classes and, by its nature, offers a user interface that allows user to intuitively move from subject to subject
Why restrict to gaming? /.ers) and towards "natural user interface" using gestures, it would seem like the next obvious step from the need - still - to interact directly with a surface (whether The Surface, or other multi-touch screen interface).
With the desire to move us away from GUI (and CLI for
It shouldn't be too big a leap to imagine doing away with the kludgy remote control for any home/leisure digital content environment (home server, media centre, iTunes, etc)
I agree
I have the Squeezeboox software installed on a Windows Home Server that is dedicated to managing all household media files (music, photos, video, etc) and run several squeezebox units in different rooms(either just the base unit linked to high quality and more powerful external compotents - amp and speakers; or the larger squeezebox unit with built in amp and speakers for smaller rooms). One good function is the possibility to have different units stream the same music or channel to different units simultaneously.
Not true. What are APIs and the whole SOA paradigm about? Being able to work between heterogeneous systems with predictable behaviours at agreed interoperability points. I don't always want nor need to know what goes on in the "black box" as long as it behaves according to spec. - For example, I don't need Bluetooth or GSM source code to know how to work with these specs - unless you are insisting on some moral right to be able to access whatever anyone else has created. That is then the debate about open source, not open standards.
The biggest issue for the European Interoperability framework is that its first version pissed nearly everyone off by failing at every definition.
The biggest hurdle was to support "open standards" with an objective definition that didn't cut the European Standards Organisations (ESOs) out of the institutional picture. Of the three ESOs, two of their business models are based on selling copies of their standards to make money - which flies in the face of the part of the "open standard" definition that requires free access...
The issue of a "spectrum of openness" is only a secondary issue, invesnted to help around that dilemma: instead of a boolean "this is | is not an open standard", the compromise was to have instead a scale. Who gets to judge where something sits on the spectrum? Well, that now is the sticking point. Best bets would be for an agreed set of criteria, but let any agency who wants to use a particular standard make up their own mind.
This will mean that some will conclude that MSFT Office OOXML is totally open and others that it sucks; or that IETF RFC 2616 is totally open and others that it's managed by a non-recognised standards body, and therefore is not a standard....
This will run and run...
... I'd love Microsoft to respond and block the PITA updaters from Sun, Adobe and others that regularly screw up a perfectly working and secure configuration on Windows (Vista and 7), insisting on my attention despite being told where to get off and in any case requiring admin privileges to just go online and download even more bloatware.
And then they whine because MSFT are making it more difficult. It's as if they're saying "please make your OS more flexible so that we can still run our badly designed software..."
Oh wait, I forgot, that's a business model...
There are such experts out there but not necessarily US citizens. Given the shortage, will the administration consider the opportunity of bringing in "aliens" as outweighing the understandable concern for such sensitive posts?
that should have been "retailers' own review sites"...
...and therefore are bound by legislation concerning the legality, truthfulness and honesty of the content. the appropriate authority would be the advertising standards authority or ombudsman for the relevant geographic area
After all, only programmers know how to count "properly"...0, 1, 2, ...
I'd echo that sentiment - even go a bit further: many open source projects become "de facto" proprietary software. So many inter-dependent modules from different versions and builds of a myriad of open source elemens, coupled with (deliberately?) poor documentation, often locks a client into an expensive long-term dependency with a single contractor or supplier. Senior managers often still pay up because the "but it's all open source" mantra still holds its magic.
A recent example I witnessed was an online collaboration platform that was costing more than $1m to maintain each year for a user base of some 50,000 users - when the project started 15 years ago, there were admittedly few even proprietary solutions on the market, but after more than $30M spent, and a total dependency on a single contractor. An alternative contractor was proposed but was going to charge more than that just to document the existing infarstructure. You would have thought that when in a hole, they would stop digging....
The intelligent money would surely be on open source solutions to convert from one proprietary platform to another, coupled with the consultancy contract to perform the switch - leaving clients an open field of tried and tested, documented and well supported commercial solutions, and the door open to switch when they want.
Who tested their sites? geeks? Apple's sites overall design suck: one flagrant example of piss-poor design: CSS pages, used to control display in https secure pages, are themselves stored in non-secure areas. So every https request - on the Apple Developer site for example - leads to an end user warning: "This webpage contains content that will not be delivered using a secure HTTPS connection, which could compromise the security of the entire webpage. Display non-secure content?" I spoke to a typical Apple developer whose reply was simply: "yeah, that's not important, it can be safely ignored..." As ever, poor design leads to users have lower performance expectations, hence such shortcuts - a common vector for security breaches.
"Man is endowed with a brain and a penis and just enough blood to make one function at a time"
Yeah, iPhone - great and easy to program...just wait an eternity for a garage full of spotty interms to finally get around to approving it for release - that's a whole other ball game. Maybe Apple could organise an iPhone programming contest? All contestants must check in all non Apple technologies at the door, refuse to talk to anyone else, deny they've participated, accept unconditionally that the rules of the competition are not stable and maybe changed at any time without notice, not share their code or results with anyone else and let the aforementioned garage full of spotty interns make the jury and all the decisions, without review or explanation. But if you win, oh glory be.....