How does a government rep meeting with a Microsoft security developer make the government's concerns regarding the security (or rather the lack of security) any less of a worry? (Or are they just giving the government folks a chance to meet the goofs responsible for the travesty that is Microsoft's idea of security?)
How does meeting with Microsoft and being allowed to see portions of their precious source code make your data any less captive?
``Has anybody proposed an open standard for such gadgets so that new wristwatch-data-service providers can enter the market when the old provider leaves?''
Oh, sure. The manufacturing sector should suffer because you want to use the same technology for more than a few years. Where would our world economy be if we didn't replace (every few years) all our LPs with 8-track tapes, our 8-track tapes with cassettes, our cassettes with CDs, our CDs with music DVDs, etc. And that's just how music listeners help to maintain world economic growth. Get with the program!!!:-)
``Some apps have weird defaults and if you're not
careful, you end up with your file in a strange location.''
Perhaps I'm just lucky but I've never had that problem (files getting placed in strange locations) when using a UNIX-based tool. It happens quite often in Windows, though, with Office wanting to put everything under 'My Documents' instead of in the project directory where the darned file was supposed to go. Having said that, UNIX tools sometimes will put a file in an unexpected place but only when you launch them from a GUI which tends to make the app believe that the starting directory should be $HOME. Personally, I don't find that too much of a problem since I tend to work in an xterm most of the time and find it easier to keep my hands on the keyboard but I can see the viewpoint of others who (somehow:-) ) do most of their work with a mouse.
I sort of like the idea of searching by keywords. Heck this has been available in various word processors for quite some time. The problem is that you have to bend over backwards to save the documents with keywords. Plus you have to go through the effort of assigning meaningful keywords to the documents. Then you have to remember what keywords have been used in the documents. Saving a file and not assigning any keywords to it makes it ``unfindable'' in a later keyword search. But forgetting the keywords makes it just as unfindable. Now a keyword search system that incorporated Roget's Thesaurus so that a keyword search for ``cats'' would find something wiht a keyword ``feline'' would be something.
``Should my porn directory be organized into movies, stills and texts or perhaps perverted, spicy and nice?''
I'll bet there's a heated debate on that topic currently raging on some ``alt'' Usenet group.
I don't know about anyone else, but I write in my books with pencil, pen, and highlighter to mark important sections, etc. This waterproof book would make that much, much harder to do unless I used a permanent marker. Though there are certainly some speciality applications for this -- I'm sure that mariners will love that their shipboard library is much safer -- just what's the purpose of a waterproof book anyway? For the general public, that is. (Of course, I'm sure all the numbnuts that have made posts about pr0n will have to reply.)
``...corporate IT departments who support a large number of Windows-only commercial applications tend to view open source solutions as a time burden (these are the same IT departments whose days are consumed with applying Windows patches or verifying license compliance).''
Well, duh! Of course they don't see open source as anything as a time burden. They don't have any free time what with all that Windows patching they need to do.
For some reason, when I read that I couldn't help think of some old 50's science fiction movie where they'd be calling in the Flying Wing to take out the monster.
As someone else already pointed out: it's ``berserk'' and not ``berzerk''. Maybe you were thinking of an old record label.:-)
At a former employer, it was considered blasphemous to suggest that the web designer should have to test the pages using the same access that a typical visitor might be using. As a result, the page designs looked great when management approved them. Of course, they were reviewing the pages using the company intranet and the poor visitor was attempting to view them using the 56Kb (or usually 28Kb) dialup connection.
``Slow Server Response Times''
``Overly Long Download Times'' (etc.)
My experience with sites that seem overly slow is that they tend to put up web pages that have to load banner ads from other sites (doubleclick, et al). If you disable those 3rd party image loads, things tend to load much faster. (Though this sometimes causes other problems which make me less likely to be a return visitor.)
The server problems that drive me up the wall are the broken database queries. Crimeny, can't they do just a little testing?
``What I hate is a FAQ that is really just a marketing brochure.''
Well, that tells you who decided that that there should even be a FAQ page: the marketing folks.
A technical FAQ would probably derive the company of the profit associated with you calling them for support and, if written well enough, eliminate the need for a support or maintenance contract altogether.
I think the ``pet peeve'' has to do with the overriding of the user's desired font size in the first place. Why force the user to ``zoom'' at all? If I want to see pages in a 12pt font, then quit making me screw around with my browser settings and making me reload the page. I tend to stop going to sites where I have to resize the font size to 120% or 150% on every page I visit on the site. It's gets incredibly annoying after a few pages.
If the web page designer is interested in having people visit, and maybe click on some of the ads -- that are supposed to be providing revenue -- on their pages, they'll make it easier and not harder for the user to read the pages in the first place. Forcing them to reconfigure the font size on each page (and waiting for the ads to reload again) is just going to result in the visitor saying ``Forget it!'' after a while.
IMHO, HTML is not a page layout language and the web sites that understand this will have the happiest visitors.
``I could not find pricing on Veritas *anywhere* on the web, other than "*CALL*"''
Jeez! You mean the same guy who does the ads in the back of the stereo and camera magazines is now doing web pages?:-)
As for Veritas... I suspect the reason that they have no prices is that they'd just put you off wanting to use their software. Plus they probably will be flexible in the pricing anyway if they think that they could negotiate a little bit to get you to sign the license agreement. (Just watch out when they decide that the discount you originally got will no longer be available when it's time to renew the support agreement. And, of course, they've got you by the short hairs as it would be pretty disruptive to switch backup software.)
``You aren't still using tables for layout are you?''
Good Grief, No! I've done surgery on a few things (too often for my taste) that I've downloaded from the 'net to remove references to pixels in font sizes and table widths, replacing them with pts and percentages. I just don't understand the need for specifying these in pixels. Ever see some of these web pages when you run your browser at 1800x1600 or similar high resolution? It's ridiculous.
``For some reason, many websites seem to be optimized for 805-pixel-wide...''
Wouldn't it be nice if web designers stopped dictating the size you need to run your browser? One designer tells me I'm supposed to run my browser at 800x600, another at 1024x768, and another at some oddball resolution. (Which tells me one thing: they're using the browser at full screen and I'd bet that it's on a Windows box as well.) A pox on all who don't use the ``width=NN%'' option on tables.
I can just imagine what the meetings with the Wireless, DoD, and FCC people are like. Some years ago, I was involved in developing a PC software package that was being used by the FAA to determine whether proposed FM transmitters were going to adversely affect ILS approaches. (And before anyone chimes in with some comment about FM not being in the ILS band, consider IM harmonics.) While I never got to attend any of the meetings with the broadcasters (or the wannabees), the FCC, and the FAA, I was told that the discussions were quite heated and that our software was under attack by the broadcasters at every step of the way despite it's abililty to predict interference quite nicely and verified by flight test measurements numerous times. (One of the more interesting results was an audio recording of a ball game recorded from the front end of an ILS receiver). And like krlynch's comment on old radar equipment, it would have been unacceptable to allow a new transmitter that would force existing GA aircraft to undergo expensive avionics upgrades merely because someone decided that a new easy listening FM station was `needed'.
Based on that experience, my guess is that the moneyed Wireless interests will be fighting this battle from an economic point of view and not from a technical one. (Unless they want to make the ridiculous argument that all of the existing equipment that they're interfering with should be replaced.) What'll be interesting is the stand that the FCC takes as (at least), traditionally, the party that interferes with an existing spectrum's use is the party that has to make a change. With the Powell FCC seemingly happy to cowtow to whatever economic argument they are presented with, it makes you wonder whether the traditional policy will continue to hold sway. Or will an airliner collision or two be needed before the use of the spectrum for radar is protected?
``The two sides are lobbying the FCC to see the truth of their beliefs.''
(emph. mine)
Good grief I surely hope that's not what's happening. Whatever happened to presenting data that demonstrates that the interference whether exists or does not? The FCC should not be listening to anyone's ``beliefs''.
My personal email accounts are spam-free and I'm not doing anything in the way of filtering. On the other hand, at work, where there are supposedly junk mail filters in place, I tend to see about 50%-75% of the email as junk. And that's not counting the stuff that I'm filtering into the Trash folder by filtering on my desktop. (So until the folks running the company's email infrastructure can get their poop in a pile, I can at least deal with it within my mail client.)
As a few other posters noted, co-workers can be the source of an awful lot of junk email. And much of that can be more time consuming to deal with than the obvious spam. Seeing bizaare, Unicode-like characters is a dead giveaway of a piece of junk email and make it quite easy to get rid of. But... the message from HR that contains a Powerpoint slideshow announcing the new look of the HR intranet site actually takes far longer to deal with.
``We are hopeful that the broadcast flag will enable content providers to release more of their programming in HDTV format and drive the market forward providing new options for consumers.''
Oh yah. That's just what we've been waiting for: ``Just Shoot Me'' on HDTV. Hollywood blockbusters 18 months after they were released as rentals, butchered in order to fit into a two hour time slot, further butchered to make room for commercials, on HDTV.
``You don't have to spend 24 hours a day and 7 days a week working on art to be an artist.''
Yep. It's a little known fact that Rembrandt knocked off most of his paintings just to unwind on Saturdays after mowing the grass and sweeping out the garage.:-)
Who even thinks the whole ``world of artists and waiters'' argument is convincing to anybody and even possible? Of course, if anyone would like to see such a world, it'd be companies like Disney. After a long day of serving drinks to Disney execs, we'd all just go home and watch our Disney-approved (and government enforced) TV sets supplied with Disney-approved content at times dictated by an office at Disney corporate headquarters.
``...the independent movie scene is getting better quality-wise and funding wise.''
Could explain some of the frenzied legal activity you see nowadays by the major movie corps. To hear them tell it just about every movie loses money. I wonder which ``problem'' is making them lose the most money:
internet-``piracy'' (A truckload of crap, btw. I consider myself a typical internet user and I'm too lazy/impatient to download a linux distribution ISO image let alone an entire movie... and I have the broadband connection that the MPAA seems to think is the beginning of the end for their industry)
low-budget indie films that audience seem to enjoy more than the overblown, the-plot-sucked-but-the-explosions-were-great Hollywood fare
Anyone else read the logo at the top of the first link and burst out laughing:
``Silicon Image
All Digital - No Limits''
Then they proceed to provide quotes from people like Lelyveld extolling the virtues of the S.I. content control.
Don't know about any of the rest of you but, just a few years ago if someone mentioned the phrase ``secure interconnections'' to me I would have been thinking something like ``Ah, a connector that provide a tight electrical connection that won't fall off'' and not an attack on my fair use of a broadcast signal.
``What about all those frigin "free" AOL disks being sent to our homes?''
Heck, AOL could at least make them CD-RW disks! At least in the old days, AOL was nice enough to send me a scratch floppy every couple of weeks that I could use to make copies of files that I schlepped between the office and home.
Slashdot Mirror
How does a government rep meeting with a Microsoft security developer make the government's concerns regarding the security (or rather the lack of security) any less of a worry? (Or are they just giving the government folks a chance to meet the goofs responsible for the travesty that is Microsoft's idea of security?)
How does meeting with Microsoft and being allowed to see portions of their precious source code make your data any less captive?
Oh, sure. The manufacturing sector should suffer because you want to use the same technology for more than a few years. Where would our world economy be if we didn't replace (every few years) all our LPs with 8-track tapes, our 8-track tapes with cassettes, our cassettes with CDs, our CDs with music DVDs, etc. And that's just how music listeners help to maintain world economic growth. Get with the program!!! :-)
Perhaps I'm just lucky but I've never had that problem (files getting placed in strange locations) when using a UNIX-based tool. It happens quite often in Windows, though, with Office wanting to put everything under 'My Documents' instead of in the project directory where the darned file was supposed to go. Having said that, UNIX tools sometimes will put a file in an unexpected place but only when you launch them from a GUI which tends to make the app believe that the starting directory should be $HOME. Personally, I don't find that too much of a problem since I tend to work in an xterm most of the time and find it easier to keep my hands on the keyboard but I can see the viewpoint of others who (somehow :-) ) do most of their work with a mouse.
I sort of like the idea of searching by keywords. Heck this has been available in various word processors for quite some time. The problem is that you have to bend over backwards to save the documents with keywords. Plus you have to go through the effort of assigning meaningful keywords to the documents. Then you have to remember what keywords have been used in the documents. Saving a file and not assigning any keywords to it makes it ``unfindable'' in a later keyword search. But forgetting the keywords makes it just as unfindable. Now a keyword search system that incorporated Roget's Thesaurus so that a keyword search for ``cats'' would find something wiht a keyword ``feline'' would be something.
I'll bet there's a heated debate on that topic currently raging on some ``alt'' Usenet group.
I don't know about anyone else, but I write in my books with pencil, pen, and highlighter to mark important sections, etc. This waterproof book would make that much, much harder to do unless I used a permanent marker. Though there are certainly some speciality applications for this -- I'm sure that mariners will love that their shipboard library is much safer -- just what's the purpose of a waterproof book anyway? For the general public, that is. (Of course, I'm sure all the numbnuts that have made posts about pr0n will have to reply.)
Well, duh! Of course they don't see open source as anything as a time burden. They don't have any free time what with all that Windows patching they need to do.
For some reason, when I read that I couldn't help think of some old 50's science fiction movie where they'd be calling in the Flying Wing to take out the monster.
As someone else already pointed out: it's ``berserk'' and not ``berzerk''. Maybe you were thinking of an old record label. :-)
Could this be a new measure of how well something is aligned with the public's best interests? If the BSA doesn't like it, it's gotta be good?
Works for me!
At a former employer, it was considered blasphemous to suggest that the web designer should have to test the pages using the same access that a typical visitor might be using. As a result, the page designs looked great when management approved them. Of course, they were reviewing the pages using the company intranet and the poor visitor was attempting to view them using the 56Kb (or usually 28Kb) dialup connection.
My experience with sites that seem overly slow is that they tend to put up web pages that have to load banner ads from other sites (doubleclick, et al). If you disable those 3rd party image loads, things tend to load much faster. (Though this sometimes causes other problems which make me less likely to be a return visitor.)
The server problems that drive me up the wall are the broken database queries. Crimeny, can't they do just a little testing?
Well, that tells you who decided that that there should even be a FAQ page: the marketing folks.
A technical FAQ would probably derive the company of the profit associated with you calling them for support and, if written well enough, eliminate the need for a support or maintenance contract altogether.
I think the ``pet peeve'' has to do with the overriding of the user's desired font size in the first place. Why force the user to ``zoom'' at all? If I want to see pages in a 12pt font, then quit making me screw around with my browser settings and making me reload the page. I tend to stop going to sites where I have to resize the font size to 120% or 150% on every page I visit on the site. It's gets incredibly annoying after a few pages.
If the web page designer is interested in having people visit, and maybe click on some of the ads -- that are supposed to be providing revenue -- on their pages, they'll make it easier and not harder for the user to read the pages in the first place. Forcing them to reconfigure the font size on each page (and waiting for the ads to reload again) is just going to result in the visitor saying ``Forget it!'' after a while.
IMHO, HTML is not a page layout language and the web sites that understand this will have the happiest visitors.
Jeez! You mean the same guy who does the ads in the back of the stereo and camera magazines is now doing web pages? :-)
As for Veritas... I suspect the reason that they have no prices is that they'd just put you off wanting to use their software. Plus they probably will be flexible in the pricing anyway if they think that they could negotiate a little bit to get you to sign the license agreement. (Just watch out when they decide that the discount you originally got will no longer be available when it's time to renew the support agreement. And, of course, they've got you by the short hairs as it would be pretty disruptive to switch backup software.)
Good Grief, No! I've done surgery on a few things (too often for my taste) that I've downloaded from the 'net to remove references to pixels in font sizes and table widths, replacing them with pts and percentages. I just don't understand the need for specifying these in pixels. Ever see some of these web pages when you run your browser at 1800x1600 or similar high resolution? It's ridiculous.
Well, nothing except that they've already commandeered the Back button to pop up/under more ads when the hapless user tries to use it.
Wouldn't it be nice if web designers stopped dictating the size you need to run your browser? One designer tells me I'm supposed to run my browser at 800x600, another at 1024x768, and another at some oddball resolution. (Which tells me one thing: they're using the browser at full screen and I'd bet that it's on a Windows box as well.) A pox on all who don't use the ``width=NN%'' option on tables.
OOLCAY ITAY
;-)
I can just imagine what the meetings with the Wireless, DoD, and FCC people are like. Some years ago, I was involved in developing a PC software package that was being used by the FAA to determine whether proposed FM transmitters were going to adversely affect ILS approaches. (And before anyone chimes in with some comment about FM not being in the ILS band, consider IM harmonics.) While I never got to attend any of the meetings with the broadcasters (or the wannabees), the FCC, and the FAA, I was told that the discussions were quite heated and that our software was under attack by the broadcasters at every step of the way despite it's abililty to predict interference quite nicely and verified by flight test measurements numerous times. (One of the more interesting results was an audio recording of a ball game recorded from the front end of an ILS receiver). And like krlynch's comment on old radar equipment, it would have been unacceptable to allow a new transmitter that would force existing GA aircraft to undergo expensive avionics upgrades merely because someone decided that a new easy listening FM station was `needed'.
Based on that experience, my guess is that the moneyed Wireless interests will be fighting this battle from an economic point of view and not from a technical one. (Unless they want to make the ridiculous argument that all of the existing equipment that they're interfering with should be replaced.) What'll be interesting is the stand that the FCC takes as (at least), traditionally, the party that interferes with an existing spectrum's use is the party that has to make a change. With the Powell FCC seemingly happy to cowtow to whatever economic argument they are presented with, it makes you wonder whether the traditional policy will continue to hold sway. Or will an airliner collision or two be needed before the use of the spectrum for radar is protected?
Good grief I surely hope that's not what's happening. Whatever happened to presenting data that demonstrates that the interference whether exists or does not? The FCC should not be listening to anyone's ``beliefs''.
My personal email accounts are spam-free and I'm not doing anything in the way of filtering. On the other hand, at work, where there are supposedly junk mail filters in place, I tend to see about 50%-75% of the email as junk. And that's not counting the stuff that I'm filtering into the Trash folder by filtering on my desktop. (So until the folks running the company's email infrastructure can get their poop in a pile, I can at least deal with it within my mail client.)
As a few other posters noted, co-workers can be the source of an awful lot of junk email. And much of that can be more time consuming to deal with than the obvious spam. Seeing bizaare, Unicode-like characters is a dead giveaway of a piece of junk email and make it quite easy to get rid of. But... the message from HR that contains a Powerpoint slideshow announcing the new look of the HR intranet site actually takes far longer to deal with.
Oh yah. That's just what we've been waiting for: ``Just Shoot Me'' on HDTV. Hollywood blockbusters 18 months after they were released as rentals, butchered in order to fit into a two hour time slot, further butchered to make room for commercials, on HDTV.
Yep. It's a little known fact that Rembrandt knocked off most of his paintings just to unwind on Saturdays after mowing the grass and sweeping out the garage. :-)
Who even thinks the whole ``world of artists and waiters'' argument is convincing to anybody and even possible? Of course, if anyone would like to see such a world, it'd be companies like Disney. After a long day of serving drinks to Disney execs, we'd all just go home and watch our Disney-approved (and government enforced) TV sets supplied with Disney-approved content at times dictated by an office at Disney corporate headquarters.
Could explain some of the frenzied legal activity you see nowadays by the major movie corps. To hear them tell it just about every movie loses money. I wonder which ``problem'' is making them lose the most money:
(I know which reason I'd pick.)
Explains a lot doesn't it.
You're too soft. I'd dial up the stargate next to the black hole and toss 'em through.
Anyone else read the logo at the top of the first link and burst out laughing:
Then they proceed to provide quotes from people like Lelyveld extolling the virtues of the S.I. content control.
Don't know about any of the rest of you but, just a few years ago if someone mentioned the phrase ``secure interconnections'' to me I would have been thinking something like ``Ah, a connector that provide a tight electrical connection that won't fall off'' and not an attack on my fair use of a broadcast signal.
Heck, AOL could at least make them CD-RW disks! At least in the old days, AOL was nice enough to send me a scratch floppy every couple of weeks that I could use to make copies of files that I schlepped between the office and home.