Most of the decent science programming that I recall was from quite a few years ago.
There was Cosmos, of course, though I got really tired of the camera shots of Carl Sagan staring out of his spaceship window. In fact, I almost didn't make it past the initial show after those sappy scenes. Someone thing about it rubbed me the wrong way in a major way. (And don't even get me started about Pachelbel's Canon...)
From about '74/'75 -- at least that's when it aired in Chicago -- there was 'The Ascent of Man'. I loved listening to Jacob Bronowski in that series. Maybe it was the frumpy old school professor demeanor.
There was `Connections' with James Burke. That was always interesting. Haven't heard much from Burke in the past several years.
'Nova' is still on but the content seems to be repetitive. (Either that or I'm seeing reruns.:-) )
I like the `Scientific American' show (or whatever the name is) hosted by Alan Alda. Even though there are times when I can't stand him, the topics are interesting and the shows are well done. They're not being shown much around here any more.
Not really a television show but a series that I really liked as a kid was the films put out by Bell Science. Oh come on, you all remember the films with the young, black haired guy who always wore a white shirt and tie and was sort of the comic relief to Dr. Frank Baxter, the straight-laced, older, bald fellow with the glasses who always wore a suit. There was a curtain in their lab that used to get pulled back to reveal a screen where animated characters would explain the scientific principles. 'Hemo the Magnificent' was one of the films. (It was shown -- probably excerpted -- for some years in an exhibit at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry. I remember being pretty disappointed when they took that exhibit down.) I seem to recall that these two guys were also in 'Donald Duck in Mathemagics Land'. I still remember learning about the Coriolis Effect via the animation in 'The Unchained Goddess'. Good stuff. I have a few of those films on laserdisk and my kids love 'em. (Don't have 'Hemo' or 'Mathemagics Land', though.:-( )
Certified 'Old Farts' will remember that Walter Cronkite -- once he finished rehashing WWII on 'The 20th Century' -- had a science/technology-related show called (not surprisingly) 'The 21st Century'. Probably inspired by the moon program, it covered advances in science that, I guess, we were all going to be benefitting from by the 21st century. I cannot recall how good the shows were. It'd be interesting to see them again if only to see how close the show came to predicting the way things eventually turned out. Or how far off they were.
There was another show that I used to catch years ago (infrequently, as it seemed to get scheduled at odd times) on one of the local PBS stations. I think it was called 'Physical Universe' or something like that. It had a real clean cut lecturer speaking in an auditorium complete with lab table in front of a bunch of students. There were some simple but, IMHO, effective computer graphics showing some of the physical principles being talked about. Pretty low budget, I'd guess, but interesting. Anyone know if it's still being aired?
If the current crop of science shows isn't working out too well, they could bring back any of the above series and exceed the quality of the current science programming by an order of magnitude or two. Heck even the animated 'Science Court' is better than what I've seen lately. I've got two grade school age children who are interested in science and it'd be nice if the networks or PBS could mix some decent science programming into the Saturday morning schedule. And I don't mean at 5:30 AM, either.
Someone had mentioned the Discovery Channel and that made me laugh. There were some Sat. AM science shows that I used to watch when I was a kid. One of them was called 'Discovery 67'. If memory serves, it was on for a couple of years. Heck, for
Really. So IBM develops a product and promptly decides to kill it in favor of a new product they would rather persue. Apparently, SCO believes IBM was supposed to have had a brain wipe before moving onto their next project. Didn't SCO wind up with a copy of AIX-on-Itanium that they could have run with? This is fraud? I'm thinking that SCO was looking forward to merely riding along while IBM did all the difficult work of developing Monterey into a usable product. When the cache of IBM's name was no longer associated with Monterey, SCO finds they don't have the ability to make the new OS a standard. And then Darl comes along years later to cry foul.
And, so would it be fraud, I guess, to use the fairly common practice of Company A buying competitor B's software product and then raising the license fees to levels that effectively kill it off in favor of Company A's product. Or lifting the guts of B's (now A's) software and incorporating it into Company A's product. Then leaving Company B's former customers with a product that they are unable to use on newer releases of operating systems (as Company A has no intention of keeping it up to date) and leaving them no alternative but to use Company A's product (which they never wanted in the first place).
This happens all the time. The only difference is that most of the time it's the end-users of the software that get the short end of the stick. In Monterey's case, there weren't any users to get screwed. Only a corporation. But corporations have lawyers, end-users don't.
``A novice's greatest fear is sitting in front of a motionless command prompt with no idea what to type; or, as so frequently happens, knowing a command that he copied verbatim from a document discovered on the internet somewhere, but with no idea of what it means or how to alter it if it doesn't behave exactly as advertised.''
Just how is the above is different than the following:
``A novice's greatest fear is sitting in front of a motionless dialog box prompt with no idea what to click; or, as so frequently happens, knowing a menu option that he discovered on the internet somewhere, but with no idea of what it does or how to undo it if it doesn't behave exactly as advertised.''
Just call me curious. Computers are complex machines. Expect to be befuddled once in a while. It's not a cash register that makes change for you when you press the button marked "hamburger".
``We ran across this once before when Tidwell was here. How'd he do it?" And everyone stands around with their thumb up their ass making a bunch of grunting noises trying to sound like they remember how to do it.''
And, of course, while they're grunting, they all recall that the reason that Tidwell isn't around to fix the problem is that his boss got sick and tired of his not documenting his procedures.:-) As much as everyone bitches and complains about it, documentation is important; especially for the odd little things that Tidwell knew how to do. Even if it's only an email, it's better than nothing. And, finally, I'd be wondering why none of the guys never had the curiousity to ask 'ol Tidwell what it was that he was doing to solve that problem. (And if he refused to tell you, then you know that management had another good reason for getting rid of him.)
``Slackware is a "hard" distro? I think the installer and package manager aren't too bad. It's no portage or apt-get but it's alright.''
I started with Slackware back in the mid-'90s. I'd have to agree that it was a hard distribution to work with. At least back then, anyway. (Getting X set up took several evenings and a few scary sessions where you never knew whether your monitor would survive.) Since those days of yore, some friends have switched to Slackware from other distributions and they find it fairly simple. Of course they're not newbies tackling it any more, so...
Getting back to the original question: I'd suggest, if his employer can see that he's covered for the week and not getting yanked out of class to respond to a pager, that the fellow take the week-long class. Immerse yourself in it. Back when I was beginning to get into UNIX, I found that what worked best for me was to convert my system to run nothing else. It was DOS, Windows, VMS, and a bunch of other OSes at work but at home it was all UNIX all the time. (Technically it was Coherent but you get the idea.)
If he can swing it, I suggest getting a hold of a system that he can dedicate to use with his distribution of choice. Highly recommended. You wouldn't want to be screwing around and experimenting with dual booting the home Windows box and risking the wife's Christmas card list and the kids' term papers. (Not if you want to stay off their sh*t list, that is.) That way you can mess that system up, troubleshoot it, and fix it.
If you're not interested in fixing fouled up systems right off the bat, try doing some projects. I found several semi-work-related projects where I do some of the work at home on the new system. For example, we had some old FORTRAN code that some coworkers wanted converted to C. Heck, writing web pages for the intranet at work could be done at home on the Linux system. You'll learn one or more text editors along the way and most likely pick up some basic administrative skills at the same time. Anyway, I found it helped to have some goal when learning the new OS rather than just flipping around and trying things out randomly. Of course, YMMV.
It doesn't take a CS degree to be successful in IT. Most of the people that I encountered in IT early in my career were not CS majors. (Well we didn't call it "IT" back then; it was Data Processing.) They were EE majors or from some other science program. One of my first bosses was very highly regarded for his computer skills and his background was EE and broadcasting. For some reason I kept running into a lot of physics grads who were crack programmers. A close friend has been doing quite well in the IT field after taking a degree in English and a brief stint teaching high school English. The missus was doing quite well as a programmer before the kids were born. And her degree was in Fine Arts.
``Websites are marked as "favorites" because they're favored websites to visit. It doesn't have to be positive or negative in connotation, and I'm betting there are less than 1% of people who even think about that, you being one of them.''
There are some web sites that I have to "bookmark" on the corporate intranet that I truly loath having to visit either because I can't stand the thought of having to use the content on that site or because it's so gawd-awfully designed. I have zero enthusiasm for those sites but, gosh, I guess they must be my "favorites". To make me file those URLs as "favorites" is presumptuous and insulting. It's Disney-like happy talk. Calling it "Cool Sites" would have been just as annoying.
``Websites are marked as "favorites" because they're favored websites to visit. It doesn't have to be positive or negative in connotation..
Sure guys. Let's all make sure we have a "folder" under "Favorites" where we'll store the URLs for root canal and colorectal exam specialists. No negative connotations, mind you. These are just some of our favorite things to do.
I've downloaded the IE7 fix you referred to and it doesn't work or at least the version I got earlier this month, v0.6.1, didn't work (it is pre-V1.x, after all). There's supposed to be a fix out soon from what I've seen on the discussion site. I wound up trashing a good deal of work on a web site because IE5 and IE6 don't believe in properly rendering pages using standard features of CSS. Floats, for one, seem to be fatally broken in IE[5|6].
I'm waiting for the next IE7.css with bated breath. The best thing would be for Microsoft to get it's head out of, um, uh, I mean, into making software that's compliant with generally accepted web standards instead of foisting their internal "standards" on the world.
You know that Microsoft will never cough up any compensation to Edwards for the work he's done. If MS does release a new IE, he may just have to console himself with the thought that he was the guy who embarassed them into doing the early release.
``... and the artists may get a pittance at least.''
Which artist? The original or the hack that produced the Muzak version?
A long time ago, I ran into a coworker while doing some late night grocery shopping. While we were talking, we both stopped, started listening to the piped-in music, and nearly simultaneously said "Omigod!" The song was a Muzak version of "Synchronicity II". Somehow I can't imagine that the member of the Police wanted this. Or even to be paid for something like that being done to one of their songs. (On the other hand, maybe one of them did and that's what split the band up.:-) )
... there is an important distinction between playing the music from your car radio and the music at a dentist's office. The dentists's office is a commercial establishment,...''
Wasn't there a story about some music publishing group in some country to make cab driver pay royalties if they played music in their cabs. In that instance, if memory serves, the group was claiming that the car was a commercial establishment so the cab driver was supposed to pay royalties. I'm sure somebody out there remembers a URL to that story. (I would be surprised if/. hadn't covered that one.)
Boy-oh-boy, that's gotta be tough. "CS101: Introduction to Point-n-Click", "CS110: Introduction to Powerpoint Animation Techniques" (and the follow-up course: "CS210: Intermediate Powerpoint Animation Techniques") and the popular elective "CS495: Advanced Regedit".
... that there's been a bunch of these ``Experienced [application-name] user tries Linux program and doesn't like it.'' articles? Could this be a little astroturf activity? I wonder how bad the criticism would have been if they discovered that, say, the GIMP's menus were exactly like Photoshop's. (``Well, these Linux programs aren't original. They just copy other software.'') And if the Linux program is different in some way from a Windows product or some other commercial software package, well that's a negative as well. There's just no pleasing some people, eh?
Any more, I see these articles and laugh. This one, for example, could have been titled: ``Long-time Photoshop user discovers that the GIMP isn't Photoshop!''. Might have been a more accurate headline, IMHO.
Suing magazines that do comparative studies of a family of products? Maybe Consumer Reports had better start watching their back. Good grief! The gall of some people! Mentioning competitors in the same web page/article/paragraph/sentence.
I was studying image compression back in the late '70s/early '80s. Textbooks were already discussing this technology before then. (My ``bible'' in those days was Digital Image Processing by William Pratt (1978). How long did it take to get a textbook published back then?) It was being done in hardware by then, too. Motorola demoed real-time image compression at NAECON in 1980 (IIRC). OK, Motorola used Hadamard transforms (fast floating point was still expensive back in those days) but others were using DCT back then, though. I want to say RCA or GE (can't remember which one now) had a piece of equipment that I seem to recall was doing essentially what whould now be called JPEG encoding. We acquired some of this prototype equipment from WPAFB way back then. I know this was prior to 1982. How these dweebs can claim a patent on this sort of image compression is a bit beyond me.
``If you're willing to change "beyond our capabilities" to "expensive and our customers don't care anyway" then I think you've on the right track.''
That works for me as well though you seem even more cynical than me. (I do have to wonder how much of Microsoft's Secure Software push was purely PR and that little, if anything, really was done once they found out what a rat's nest their software is and how expensive and time consuming the process would really take. Jeez, now who's sounding cynical?).
I'd agree that John Q. Public probably doesn't care that much. But I'll bet that losing the contents of his family's PC for the fifth time due to a worm will change that attitude pretty quickly.
I do know that many businesses are getting more than a little pissed off at the amount of time and money that have to devote to handling Microsoft-related security incidents. One estimate that I saw where I work was several thousand man-hours and just under $500K just to deal with Blaster. Just being proactive in protecting your infrastructure from breaches that could result from flaws (sorry. that should read ``design features'') in Microsoft products is hideously expensive.
``... this is a fairly transparent effort to get on the government gravy train.''
Dunno about that. These companies wouldn't (probably) receive direct funding from the Feds. But I suppose that benefitting from a Federally-mandated software development process amounts to the same thing. And, maybe, these guys are hoping that the public won't catch on to that.
``Why would you ask the Department of Homeland Security to regulate your work?''
Especially when the chief of the DHS's IT group had to quit after it was discovered that the person's credentials came from an unaccredited school (some people went so far as to call it a diploma mill). Yep, these are certainly the folks I'd want assuring others that a given programmer is capable of writing secure code. They can't even get their own background checks right!
and that these are going to result in secure software? So they still believe in Silver Bullets.
Sounds like all these software houses -- who have been touting the superiority of the proprietary development model and decrying the open source development methodology for some years now -- cannot seem to figure out how to adapt their "superior" process to produce secure software. Oh, and let's get academia involved to educate future software developers in the proper way to create secure software. Which means, I take it, that the proprietary software houses have been unable to get their current developers to produce secure software. Following this plan will result in the first crop of (supposedly) secure software developers getting their first jobs in, oh, about 2015.
So... I see this report and the suggestions contained in it as an indication that that Microsoft (and others but predominantly MS) has utterly failed in the attempt to introduce security into their product lines. Even after all of Bill Gates's pep talks and internal memoes. Now they think that creating a bunch of undergraduate courses in secure programming, certifications, and awards to software companies will somehow result in a new breed of software that won't be susceptible to worms and viruses. To me that says: ``We, the proprietary software industry have finally come to realize that writing secure software is quite beyond our capabililties and we make these suggestions so that other people can figure this out for us so that we merely have to hire new people who are already trained to do this. And, of course, these programs should be paid for by the Government.'' No. Strike that. They'd be paid for by you and me. Twice. First in the taxes that would go to create these educational programs and the certification organizations. Then, again, when the price of the software goes up because, well, now it's secure software and that's worth paying extra for isn't it?
Funny that open source software -- and, to be fair, some proprietary software -- isn't anywhere nearly as vulnerable to the sorts of attacks that Microsoft's is. Because, it seems, those Neanderthal open source programmers didn't have the insight to include features that automatically run code by clicking on mail attachments, include scripting languages inside applications that have the ability to destroy user data or launch unrelated programs that damage the local and/or remote systems, or,... (the list goes on).
Wonder where all those open source programmers managed to learn about writing secure software (yes, yes, yes... I am aware even OSS can occasionally have bugs that affect security) without a college program, certifications, and industry awards? And how do they do it without a government subsidy? Oh, yeah. I forgot. They're able to do it because they don't have some pinhead from Marketing ranting and raving that seven new features need to be in the product in time for the next trade show and there is no time to waste with any discussions about how these features destroy the integrity of the software. Companies like Microsoft won't create more secure software once these programs are in place. Even if they are able to grab every straight-A, magna cum laude graduate of these programs in the country. Why? Because these poor folks are still going to have to answer to some pinhead from Marketing ranting and raving that all these new features need to be in the product in time for the next trade show.
I sure as hell hope that some articulate luminaries in the open source development community have the opportunity to submit a report to the folks that are going to be reviewing this piece of tripe. The opposing viewpoint and an alternate plan needs to be heard.
(Heh. If reading the summary got me this ticked off, imagine if I'd read the entire report!)
I'm tempted more and more to flat out refuse plug-in downloads rather than requesting confirmaton because I'm fed up with the darned Flash advertisements. Just say ``No!'' to dancing bologna.
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Well, all UNIXes have daemons but only BSD has the little demon mascot.
Don't tell me you have a KSHE Pig Hat...
Aw, heck. You beat me to the draw on that reply.
Japanese kids are watching someone do Fourier transforms on TV. American kids are watching "Illuminating Television".
Most of the decent science programming that I recall was from quite a few years ago.
There was Cosmos, of course, though I got really tired of the camera shots of Carl Sagan staring out of his spaceship window. In fact, I almost didn't make it past the initial show after those sappy scenes. Someone thing about it rubbed me the wrong way in a major way. (And don't even get me started about Pachelbel's Canon...)
From about '74/'75 -- at least that's when it aired in Chicago -- there was 'The Ascent of Man'. I loved listening to Jacob Bronowski in that series. Maybe it was the frumpy old school professor demeanor.
There was `Connections' with James Burke. That was always interesting. Haven't heard much from Burke in the past several years.
'Nova' is still on but the content seems to be repetitive. (Either that or I'm seeing reruns. :-) )
I like the `Scientific American' show (or whatever the name is) hosted by Alan Alda. Even though there are times when I can't stand him, the topics are interesting and the shows are well done. They're not being shown much around here any more.
Not really a television show but a series that I really liked as a kid was the films put out by Bell Science. Oh come on, you all remember the films with the young, black haired guy who always wore a white shirt and tie and was sort of the comic relief to Dr. Frank Baxter, the straight-laced, older, bald fellow with the glasses who always wore a suit. There was a curtain in their lab that used to get pulled back to reveal a screen where animated characters would explain the scientific principles. 'Hemo the Magnificent' was one of the films. (It was shown -- probably excerpted -- for some years in an exhibit at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry. I remember being pretty disappointed when they took that exhibit down.) I seem to recall that these two guys were also in 'Donald Duck in Mathemagics Land'. I still remember learning about the Coriolis Effect via the animation in 'The Unchained Goddess'. Good stuff. I have a few of those films on laserdisk and my kids love 'em. (Don't have 'Hemo' or 'Mathemagics Land', though. :-( )
Certified 'Old Farts' will remember that Walter Cronkite -- once he finished rehashing WWII on 'The 20th Century' -- had a science/technology-related show called (not surprisingly) 'The 21st Century'. Probably inspired by the moon program, it covered advances in science that, I guess, we were all going to be benefitting from by the 21st century. I cannot recall how good the shows were. It'd be interesting to see them again if only to see how close the show came to predicting the way things eventually turned out. Or how far off they were.
There was another show that I used to catch years ago (infrequently, as it seemed to get scheduled at odd times) on one of the local PBS stations. I think it was called 'Physical Universe' or something like that. It had a real clean cut lecturer speaking in an auditorium complete with lab table in front of a bunch of students. There were some simple but, IMHO, effective computer graphics showing some of the physical principles being talked about. Pretty low budget, I'd guess, but interesting. Anyone know if it's still being aired?
If the current crop of science shows isn't working out too well, they could bring back any of the above series and exceed the quality of the current science programming by an order of magnitude or two. Heck even the animated 'Science Court' is better than what I've seen lately. I've got two grade school age children who are interested in science and it'd be nice if the networks or PBS could mix some decent science programming into the Saturday morning schedule. And I don't mean at 5:30 AM, either.
Someone had mentioned the Discovery Channel and that made me laugh. There were some Sat. AM science shows that I used to watch when I was a kid. One of them was called 'Discovery 67'. If memory serves, it was on for a couple of years. Heck, for
Really. So IBM develops a product and promptly decides to kill it in favor of a new product they would rather persue. Apparently, SCO believes IBM was supposed to have had a brain wipe before moving onto their next project. Didn't SCO wind up with a copy of AIX-on-Itanium that they could have run with? This is fraud? I'm thinking that SCO was looking forward to merely riding along while IBM did all the difficult work of developing Monterey into a usable product. When the cache of IBM's name was no longer associated with Monterey, SCO finds they don't have the ability to make the new OS a standard. And then Darl comes along years later to cry foul.
And, so would it be fraud, I guess, to use the fairly common practice of Company A buying competitor B's software product and then raising the license fees to levels that effectively kill it off in favor of Company A's product. Or lifting the guts of B's (now A's) software and incorporating it into Company A's product. Then leaving Company B's former customers with a product that they are unable to use on newer releases of operating systems (as Company A has no intention of keeping it up to date) and leaving them no alternative but to use Company A's product (which they never wanted in the first place).
This happens all the time. The only difference is that most of the time it's the end-users of the software that get the short end of the stick. In Monterey's case, there weren't any users to get screwed. Only a corporation. But corporations have lawyers, end-users don't.
Just how is the above is different than the following:
Just call me curious. Computers are complex machines. Expect to be befuddled once in a while. It's not a cash register that makes change for you when you press the button marked "hamburger".
And, of course, while they're grunting, they all recall that the reason that Tidwell isn't around to fix the problem is that his boss got sick and tired of his not documenting his procedures. :-) As much as everyone bitches and complains about it, documentation is important; especially for the odd little things that Tidwell knew how to do. Even if it's only an email, it's better than nothing. And, finally, I'd be wondering why none of the guys never had the curiousity to ask 'ol Tidwell what it was that he was doing to solve that problem. (And if he refused to tell you, then you know that management had another good reason for getting rid of him.)
I started with Slackware back in the mid-'90s. I'd have to agree that it was a hard distribution to work with. At least back then, anyway. (Getting X set up took several evenings and a few scary sessions where you never knew whether your monitor would survive.) Since those days of yore, some friends have switched to Slackware from other distributions and they find it fairly simple. Of course they're not newbies tackling it any more, so...
Getting back to the original question: I'd suggest, if his employer can see that he's covered for the week and not getting yanked out of class to respond to a pager, that the fellow take the week-long class. Immerse yourself in it. Back when I was beginning to get into UNIX, I found that what worked best for me was to convert my system to run nothing else. It was DOS, Windows, VMS, and a bunch of other OSes at work but at home it was all UNIX all the time. (Technically it was Coherent but you get the idea.)
If he can swing it, I suggest getting a hold of a system that he can dedicate to use with his distribution of choice. Highly recommended. You wouldn't want to be screwing around and experimenting with dual booting the home Windows box and risking the wife's Christmas card list and the kids' term papers. (Not if you want to stay off their sh*t list, that is.) That way you can mess that system up, troubleshoot it, and fix it.
If you're not interested in fixing fouled up systems right off the bat, try doing some projects. I found several semi-work-related projects where I do some of the work at home on the new system. For example, we had some old FORTRAN code that some coworkers wanted converted to C. Heck, writing web pages for the intranet at work could be done at home on the Linux system. You'll learn one or more text editors along the way and most likely pick up some basic administrative skills at the same time. Anyway, I found it helped to have some goal when learning the new OS rather than just flipping around and trying things out randomly. Of course, YMMV.
It doesn't take a CS degree to be successful in IT. Most of the people that I encountered in IT early in my career were not CS majors. (Well we didn't call it "IT" back then; it was Data Processing.) They were EE majors or from some other science program. One of my first bosses was very highly regarded for his computer skills and his background was EE and broadcasting. For some reason I kept running into a lot of physics grads who were crack programmers. A close friend has been doing quite well in the IT field after taking a degree in English and a brief stint teaching high school English. The missus was doing quite well as a programmer before the kids were born. And her degree was in Fine Arts.
There are some web sites that I have to "bookmark" on the corporate intranet that I truly loath having to visit either because I can't stand the thought of having to use the content on that site or because it's so gawd-awfully designed. I have zero enthusiasm for those sites but, gosh, I guess they must be my "favorites". To make me file those URLs as "favorites" is presumptuous and insulting. It's Disney-like happy talk. Calling it "Cool Sites" would have been just as annoying.
Sure guys. Let's all make sure we have a "folder" under "Favorites" where we'll store the URLs for root canal and colorectal exam specialists. No negative connotations, mind you. These are just some of our favorite things to do.
I've downloaded the IE7 fix you referred to and it doesn't work or at least the version I got earlier this month, v0.6.1, didn't work (it is pre-V1.x, after all). There's supposed to be a fix out soon from what I've seen on the discussion site. I wound up trashing a good deal of work on a web site because IE5 and IE6 don't believe in properly rendering pages using standard features of CSS. Floats, for one, seem to be fatally broken in IE[5|6].
I'm waiting for the next IE7.css with bated breath. The best thing would be for Microsoft to get it's head out of, um, uh, I mean, into making software that's compliant with generally accepted web standards instead of foisting their internal "standards" on the world.
You know that Microsoft will never cough up any compensation to Edwards for the work he's done. If MS does release a new IE, he may just have to console himself with the thought that he was the guy who embarassed them into doing the early release.
Actually, I think that was the Girls Scouts. Doesn't make ASCAP any less scummy. Maybe even scummier.
Which artist? The original or the hack that produced the Muzak version?
A long time ago, I ran into a coworker while doing some late night grocery shopping. While we were talking, we both stopped, started listening to the piped-in music, and nearly simultaneously said "Omigod!" The song was a Muzak version of "Synchronicity II". Somehow I can't imagine that the member of the Police wanted this. Or even to be paid for something like that being done to one of their songs. (On the other hand, maybe one of them did and that's what split the band up. :-) )
I would have suggested a loop of the dentist scene in 'Marathon Man' ("Is it safe? Is it safe?")
Ah, but that would probably have the poor dentist running afoul of the MPAA or whatever the Canadian equivalent is.
... depending on your point of view.
Wasn't there a story about some music publishing group in some country to make cab driver pay royalties if they played music in their cabs. In that instance, if memory serves, the group was claiming that the car was a commercial establishment so the cab driver was supposed to pay royalties. I'm sure somebody out there remembers a URL to that story. (I would be surprised if /. hadn't covered that one.)
Boy-oh-boy, that's gotta be tough. "CS101: Introduction to Point-n-Click", "CS110: Introduction to Powerpoint Animation Techniques" (and the follow-up course: "CS210: Intermediate Powerpoint Animation Techniques") and the popular elective "CS495: Advanced Regedit".
... that there's been a bunch of these ``Experienced [application-name] user tries Linux program and doesn't like it.'' articles? Could this be a little astroturf activity? I wonder how bad the criticism would have been if they discovered that, say, the GIMP's menus were exactly like Photoshop's. (``Well, these Linux programs aren't original. They just copy other software.'') And if the Linux program is different in some way from a Windows product or some other commercial software package, well that's a negative as well. There's just no pleasing some people, eh?
Any more, I see these articles and laugh. This one, for example, could have been titled: ``Long-time Photoshop user discovers that the GIMP isn't Photoshop!''. Might have been a more accurate headline, IMHO.
Suing magazines that do comparative studies of a family of products? Maybe Consumer Reports had better start watching their back. Good grief! The gall of some people! Mentioning competitors in the same web page/article/paragraph/sentence.
I was studying image compression back in the late '70s/early '80s. Textbooks were already discussing this technology before then. (My ``bible'' in those days was Digital Image Processing by William Pratt (1978). How long did it take to get a textbook published back then?) It was being done in hardware by then, too. Motorola demoed real-time image compression at NAECON in 1980 (IIRC). OK, Motorola used Hadamard transforms (fast floating point was still expensive back in those days) but others were using DCT back then, though. I want to say RCA or GE (can't remember which one now) had a piece of equipment that I seem to recall was doing essentially what whould now be called JPEG encoding. We acquired some of this prototype equipment from WPAFB way back then. I know this was prior to 1982. How these dweebs can claim a patent on this sort of image compression is a bit beyond me.
That works for me as well though you seem even more cynical than me. (I do have to wonder how much of Microsoft's Secure Software push was purely PR and that little, if anything, really was done once they found out what a rat's nest their software is and how expensive and time consuming the process would really take. Jeez, now who's sounding cynical?).
I'd agree that John Q. Public probably doesn't care that much. But I'll bet that losing the contents of his family's PC for the fifth time due to a worm will change that attitude pretty quickly.
I do know that many businesses are getting more than a little pissed off at the amount of time and money that have to devote to handling Microsoft-related security incidents. One estimate that I saw where I work was several thousand man-hours and just under $500K just to deal with Blaster. Just being proactive in protecting your infrastructure from breaches that could result from flaws (sorry. that should read ``design features'') in Microsoft products is hideously expensive.
Dunno about that. These companies wouldn't (probably) receive direct funding from the Feds. But I suppose that benefitting from a Federally-mandated software development process amounts to the same thing. And, maybe, these guys are hoping that the public won't catch on to that.
Especially when the chief of the DHS's IT group had to quit after it was discovered that the person's credentials came from an unaccredited school (some people went so far as to call it a diploma mill). Yep, these are certainly the folks I'd want assuring others that a given programmer is capable of writing secure code. They can't even get their own background checks right!
The report that is...
So they propose that:
- certifications
- awards
- educational programs
and that these are going to result in secure software? So they still believe in Silver Bullets.Sounds like all these software houses -- who have been touting the superiority of the proprietary development model and decrying the open source development methodology for some years now -- cannot seem to figure out how to adapt their "superior" process to produce secure software. Oh, and let's get academia involved to educate future software developers in the proper way to create secure software. Which means, I take it, that the proprietary software houses have been unable to get their current developers to produce secure software. Following this plan will result in the first crop of (supposedly) secure software developers getting their first jobs in, oh, about 2015.
So... I see this report and the suggestions contained in it as an indication that that Microsoft (and others but predominantly MS) has utterly failed in the attempt to introduce security into their product lines. Even after all of Bill Gates's pep talks and internal memoes. Now they think that creating a bunch of undergraduate courses in secure programming, certifications, and awards to software companies will somehow result in a new breed of software that won't be susceptible to worms and viruses. To me that says: ``We, the proprietary software industry have finally come to realize that writing secure software is quite beyond our capabililties and we make these suggestions so that other people can figure this out for us so that we merely have to hire new people who are already trained to do this. And, of course, these programs should be paid for by the Government.'' No. Strike that. They'd be paid for by you and me. Twice. First in the taxes that would go to create these educational programs and the certification organizations. Then, again, when the price of the software goes up because, well, now it's secure software and that's worth paying extra for isn't it?
Funny that open source software -- and, to be fair, some proprietary software -- isn't anywhere nearly as vulnerable to the sorts of attacks that Microsoft's is. Because, it seems, those Neanderthal open source programmers didn't have the insight to include features that automatically run code by clicking on mail attachments, include scripting languages inside applications that have the ability to destroy user data or launch unrelated programs that damage the local and/or remote systems, or, ... (the list goes on).
Wonder where all those open source programmers managed to learn about writing secure software (yes, yes, yes... I am aware even OSS can occasionally have bugs that affect security) without a college program, certifications, and industry awards? And how do they do it without a government subsidy? Oh, yeah. I forgot. They're able to do it because they don't have some pinhead from Marketing ranting and raving that seven new features need to be in the product in time for the next trade show and there is no time to waste with any discussions about how these features destroy the integrity of the software. Companies like Microsoft won't create more secure software once these programs are in place. Even if they are able to grab every straight-A, magna cum laude graduate of these programs in the country. Why? Because these poor folks are still going to have to answer to some pinhead from Marketing ranting and raving that all these new features need to be in the product in time for the next trade show.
I sure as hell hope that some articulate luminaries in the open source development community have the opportunity to submit a report to the folks that are going to be reviewing this piece of tripe. The opposing viewpoint and an alternate plan needs to be heard.
(Heh. If reading the summary got me this ticked off, imagine if I'd read the entire report!)
Perhaps this guy was hoping the patent examiners hadn't read too much science fiction but couldn't ``Buy Jupiter'' by Asimov count as prior art?
:-)
I'm tempted more and more to flat out refuse plug-in downloads rather than requesting confirmaton because I'm fed up with the darned Flash advertisements. Just say ``No!'' to dancing bologna.