"I'm convinced that the "good guys" (and we ARE them, by & large) cannot win against an insidious, merciless, and determined enemy by being Dudley Do-Right and playing with one hand tied behind their back. "
You really aren't paying attention to what the issue is, are you?
You've fallen hook line and sinker for the Neocon talking points.
This isn't about the government's ability to get a wire tap and listen to those conversations. No one is trying to block that.
This is about the fact that the constitution requires the government to get a damn warrant.
During the Clinton administration, laws were passed allowing them to get those warrants after the fact, up to 72 hours after placing them!
Tell me, how is requiring the government to be accountable for it's actions going to give the terrorists a leg up?
How the HELL is requiring the government to follow the constitution, to actually leave a damn paper trail of who they're spying on, going to help terrorist?
I'm sorry, but just because Apple does it is no reason for Microsoft to do it. Are they so slavishly dedicated to cloning Aqua that they're even copying the annoying mistakes???
There's one more aspect to this that pisses me off. The Mac startup sound is short. Just a couple of seconds. The current XP startup sound is several times longer, and I have a sinking suspicion that Microsoft will make a longer, louder and more annoying startup sound for Vista.
Ultimately, we won't know anything until the game is out, or we at least have a demo. Screen shots won;t tell us much, because they could deliberately go for a "The developers phoned it in" look regardless of the game play.
I'm keeping in mind that it's the game company footing the bill for developing the game. This could very well be a case of the developers approaching PA and the Pa guys responding with "What the Hell, it's not going to cost us anything."
The main point I was trying to get at, is that in terms of PA's longevity, a failed computer game won't hurt them. Naturally, a successful game would be far better for them, but I think what you said about PA's fan base is spot on. The fans are there because they enjoy the comic, and it's not as if a failed computer game will somehow harm PA's credability when mocking the video game industry.
We're talking about a large course library full of complex graphics, charts and equations, not to mention a convoluted outline structure. You're recommending it be maintained it in a system designed to handle documents far more complex, that's been refined and optimized over the course of decades???
But, but, if we did THAT we'd be using something other than the commonly known Microsoft product!
All sarcasm aside, I did bring up the prospect of using something other than MS Word to maintain the courses. The response I got from the company owner was that "If it was better than Word, no one would use Word."
Basically, he was a Microsoft fanboy, and as far as he was concerned, if there was a Microsoft product that could conceivably be used to do something, then it HAD to be the BEST solution for the task.
One of the sales guys convinced him to let the sales staff try using Microsoft Publisher. That experiment ended as soon as they tried to take the document to the company that the owner ALWAYS used for large production jobs. They found out that the EPS documents Publisher produced were NOT actual EPS documents, and the firm in question didn't take Publisher files.
I never did convince the company owner that Frontpage wasn't the best web design package on the planet. He would always criticize me for using Homesite, vi or Dreamweaver, because, in his logic, "If it comes from Microsoft, it's the best in the market."
Of course this same the same guy who referred to programmers as "Glorified typists" so you can tell what he though of the tech staff.
It's been my experience that Open Office tends to do a better job parsing older DOC files than the latest and greatest Word.
For example, I was working at a company that did a massive upgrade from Office 95 to Office 2000. Most the documents were Insurance and Securities courses, some close to 700 pages in length, complete with complex formatting and layout.
The process of reformatting the documents was long and painful, until I started using the then Beta Open Office to convert the documents to the newest Office format.
While some fiddling was still necessary, most of the tables and floating text boxes came through just fine. The first sample course I did required an hour of reformatting after my conversion, where it has needed over six hours of editing if Word 2000 was used straight from the Word 95 document.
Palm's decision to dump their OS is a good one. I've found the OS to be buggy, unstable and unreliable. Hell, it's memory management is so poor Nethack was never ported to it! My experiences with a Tungsten 2 were so bad that I ended up smashing the damn thing against the wall and going back to a paper day planner.
And you know what, I'm glad I made the transition. It's easier to look up data in the paper day planner, it's not delicate, and all I have to do is transcribe my changes into my computer once or twice a week to have a backup. Every now and then I just print up a fresh copy of the relevant pages and shred the old ones.
"Oh Noes! You can't encrypt PAPER!" I've heard a few technophiles say.
You know what, the basic Palm OS doesn't come with encryption, and the encryption applications that I experimented with were unstable and prone to data corruption.
Aside from the OS problems, I swore off Palm brand devices in general because of the miserable tech support I got. (This was BEFORE I smashed it against the wall) The bottom line is I never got any real assistance, and the replies I did get were computer generated e-mail based on keyword matching.
To make matters worse, the SOBs stalled me at every turn, and they didn't give me authorization to mail the sucker in for repair until AFTER the 30 day warranty had expired. The result was that if I'd sent it in, it would have cost me about $100, plus shipping and handling, and that was only if there was something minor wrong.
Now there you go, applying logic to an Urban Myth. Shame on you.:)
The versions of the myth I'd heard indicated that Goldfish only have a three second memory PERIOD, with no long term memory. In other words, a Goldfish only remembers the last three seconds of existence, and nothing before.
By training the fish, they demonstrated the existence of long term memory and the ability to store somewhat complex information in that long term memory, thus busting the "Goldfish have a three second memory" myth.
Aside from making too much sense for a government project, your plan has a political disadvantage.
Be it a politician showing off for his constituency, or an employee trying to gain power in an organization, small, incremental steps like the ones you describe are too "subtle."
Hell, in the private sector I've been accused of "lacking vision" for proposing incremental changes similar to the ones you describe.
Pointy Haired Bosses want to show off MASIVE strides that they can claim credit for, not smaller projects. It doesn't matter how much progress is actually made. All that matters is how much impact it LOOKS like you're having.
You're thinking like a tech trying to actually resolve the problem. In order to understand how this colossal mess came to be, you have to look at if from the viewpoint of a political battle. It's not about fixing the problems, but LOOKING like you're fixing them.
Imagine for a moment you've been placed in charge of a road system that's in terrible disrepair. A major highway elevated cuts through the center of town and it's falling to pieces. The roads are a warren of side streets and even the locals get lost often due to the poor signage.
Do you:
A: Begin a far reaching plan to revitalize the road system though effective, thorough and competent maintenance, repaving roads and replacing small, hard to read road signs with larger, more visible markers, thus making it easier to navigate the city
B: Begin a misguided plan to move the aging elevated highway underground, requiring you to tunnel through landfill and under rivers, in an area with a subway system that's as random and disordered as the roads above.
If you're a tech, you choose Option A. If you're a politician, you choose Option B, because it provides a LOT of photo opportunities whenever some new segment of the new tunnel system opens. It also provides lots of publicity due to all the "advanced technology" and "top level engineering" needed to pull it off.
It's time to start bidding on government programming contracts.
Imagine, being paid loads of money and not having to produce anything functional, with the worst repercussion being having to change your company name before bidding on a new contract.
Not trolling here, I just want to know if this sucker will sync with my Mac's address book, calendar and the like. I didn't see any mention of such functionality on the linked web sites.
Andromeda was originally intended to be about the last Federation starship after the collapse of the Federation. Roddenberry's ideas were turned around a bit because the current keepers of Star Trek didn't want to "destroy" the universe and damage their cash cow.
If you watch the show, especially the episodes when they were still using one of the writers from Bab 5, you can even see how some of the "Andromeda" aliens mapped to the Star Trek species they were based on.
In short, Roddenberry WANTED to trash the Federation and run the universe from a point of collapse and chaos. What happened was that his notes got used to start a new show, the "Federation" got renamed the "Confederacy" and it was treated to a decent special effects budget and not much else.
If you watch it as a post Federation show, and mentally map some of the alien species to their Trek counterparts, the show actually becomes watchable.
After all, Shatner taught all of us to look beyond the acting.:)
I've had to interface with Blackboard before, and it's a piss poor LMS, especially if you want to get any data into or out of it without entering it all by hand.
Imagine for a moment that at the dawn of the PC era some jackass had built an OS that lost data on a regular basis, didn't run reliably and could be trusted with your information for just about as far as you could throw the computer it was running on. Then imagine that the user interface made DOS 1.0 look like Mac OS X by comparison.
Now imagine they patented "Process to control a microprocessor or other electronic device" and with the enforcement of that patent shut down Microsoft, Apple and every flavor of Unix.
That's what Blackboard is trying to do to the Learning Management System industry with this patent. One of the worst products in the market is trying to shut down everyone else with legal wrangling.
Sooo, You're saying that there are still some Americans who are protected by the rights stripped away by the Patriot Act? Because all the earlier post is saying is that a lot of our rights were stripped away by the Patriot Act.
Oh, right, the wealthy and powerful. THEY'RE still enjoying the Bill of Rights, not because of any laws supporting them anymore, but because they're too powerful for the police to go after them without significant public outcry.
The company tried using Publisher for a single document.
Then they tried sending a Publisher file to their preferred printing company. (Financial Campus' owner was a part owner of the printing firm)
It turned out their hardware couldn't use Publisher files, and the Publisher generated EPS files were apparently a Microsoft Specific variant on EPS that their systems couldn't parse.
So Publisher was similarly discarded, and the owner continued to insist Word was the "Best tool for the job."
I used to work for a company now called Financial Campus.
Their stock and trade is Securities and Insurance Course ware. When I started there, they were in the midst of a massive project to migrate from Word perfect to Word for all heir courses.
That's right, they maintained 200 plus page securities courses in Word, running on Windows 95 and 98.
One problem with this was the fact that word always formatted the document for your "Default Printer" which in this case caused things like floating text boxes and graphics to move around the page. Every time someone worked with the files on a new computer they had to start by reformatting the document for their desktop. (Shared printers were a novel concept at the company, which was another part of the problem.)
I tried to get the company to at least try Quark, Pagemaker and the like. It got shot down for two reasons. First, they couldn't pirate them as easily as they could Word 98 and 2000, so it would be too expensive. The second reason blew my mind.
The owner told me: "I never even heard of these things. What do you think Word is for anyway? Do you think they became the biggest company on the planet by selling crap? I'm not shelling out hundreds of dollars for something inferior to Word."
The company owner had a very clear and definitive, "If it's from Microsoft, it MUST be the best product available" attitude.
Slashdot Mirror
"I'm convinced that the "good guys" (and we ARE them, by & large) cannot win against an insidious, merciless, and determined enemy by being Dudley Do-Right and playing with one hand tied behind their back. "
You really aren't paying attention to what the issue is, are you?
You've fallen hook line and sinker for the Neocon talking points.
This isn't about the government's ability to get a wire tap and listen to those conversations. No one is trying to block that.
This is about the fact that the constitution requires the government to get a damn warrant.
During the Clinton administration, laws were passed allowing them to get those warrants after the fact, up to 72 hours after placing them!
Tell me, how is requiring the government to be accountable for it's actions going to give the terrorists a leg up?
How the HELL is requiring the government to follow the constitution, to actually leave a damn paper trail of who they're spying on, going to help terrorist?
Uhm, you DID know that sterility was one of the known side effects of those things, didn't you?
I'm sorry, but just because Apple does it is no reason for Microsoft to do it. Are they so slavishly dedicated to cloning Aqua that they're even copying the annoying mistakes???
There's one more aspect to this that pisses me off. The Mac startup sound is short. Just a couple of seconds. The current XP startup sound is several times longer, and I have a sinking suspicion that Microsoft will make a longer, louder and more annoying startup sound for Vista.
Ultimately, we won't know anything until the game is out, or we at least have a demo. Screen shots won;t tell us much, because they could deliberately go for a "The developers phoned it in" look regardless of the game play.
I'm keeping in mind that it's the game company footing the bill for developing the game. This could very well be a case of the developers approaching PA and the Pa guys responding with "What the Hell, it's not going to cost us anything."
The main point I was trying to get at, is that in terms of PA's longevity, a failed computer game won't hurt them. Naturally, a successful game would be far better for them, but I think what you said about PA's fan base is spot on. The fans are there because they enjoy the comic, and it's not as if a failed computer game will somehow harm PA's credability when mocking the video game industry.
I don't expect a failed video game to be a problem for Penny Arcade.
This could just be a set up for a series of comics about failed and poorly thought out video game tie-ins.
Keep in mind that Penny Arcade has too much self deprecating humor for the failure of the video game to be a problem.
Based on the first game title, I'd suspect they EXPECT the game to be terrible.
We're talking about a large course library full of complex graphics, charts and equations, not to mention a convoluted outline structure. You're recommending it be maintained it in a system designed to handle documents far more complex, that's been refined and optimized over the course of decades???
But, but, if we did THAT we'd be using something other than the commonly known Microsoft product!
All sarcasm aside, I did bring up the prospect of using something other than MS Word to maintain the courses. The response I got from the company owner was that "If it was better than Word, no one would use Word."
Basically, he was a Microsoft fanboy, and as far as he was concerned, if there was a Microsoft product that could conceivably be used to do something, then it HAD to be the BEST solution for the task.
One of the sales guys convinced him to let the sales staff try using Microsoft Publisher. That experiment ended as soon as they tried to take the document to the company that the owner ALWAYS used for large production jobs. They found out that the EPS documents Publisher produced were NOT actual EPS documents, and the firm in question didn't take Publisher files.
I never did convince the company owner that Frontpage wasn't the best web design package on the planet. He would always criticize me for using Homesite, vi or Dreamweaver, because, in his logic, "If it comes from Microsoft, it's the best in the market."
Of course this same the same guy who referred to programmers as "Glorified typists" so you can tell what he though of the tech staff.
It's been my experience that Open Office tends to do a better job parsing older DOC files than the latest and greatest Word.
For example, I was working at a company that did a massive upgrade from Office 95 to Office 2000. Most the documents were Insurance and Securities courses, some close to 700 pages in length, complete with complex formatting and layout.
The process of reformatting the documents was long and painful, until I started using the then Beta Open Office to convert the documents to the newest Office format.
While some fiddling was still necessary, most of the tables and floating text boxes came through just fine. The first sample course I did required an hour of reformatting after my conversion, where it has needed over six hours of editing if Word 2000 was used straight from the Word 95 document.
Palm's decision to dump their OS is a good one. I've found the OS to be buggy, unstable and unreliable. Hell, it's memory management is so poor Nethack was never ported to it! My experiences with a Tungsten 2 were so bad that I ended up smashing the damn thing against the wall and going back to a paper day planner.
And you know what, I'm glad I made the transition. It's easier to look up data in the paper day planner, it's not delicate, and all I have to do is transcribe my changes into my computer once or twice a week to have a backup. Every now and then I just print up a fresh copy of the relevant pages and shred the old ones.
"Oh Noes! You can't encrypt PAPER!" I've heard a few technophiles say.
You know what, the basic Palm OS doesn't come with encryption, and the encryption applications that I experimented with were unstable and prone to data corruption.
Aside from the OS problems, I swore off Palm brand devices in general because of the miserable tech support I got. (This was BEFORE I smashed it against the wall) The bottom line is I never got any real assistance, and the replies I did get were computer generated e-mail based on keyword matching.
To make matters worse, the SOBs stalled me at every turn, and they didn't give me authorization to mail the sucker in for repair until AFTER the 30 day warranty had expired. The result was that if I'd sent it in, it would have cost me about $100, plus shipping and handling, and that was only if there was something minor wrong.
Now there you go, applying logic to an Urban Myth. Shame on you. :)
The versions of the myth I'd heard indicated that Goldfish only have a three second memory PERIOD, with no long term memory. In other words, a Goldfish only remembers the last three seconds of existence, and nothing before.
By training the fish, they demonstrated the existence of long term memory and the ability to store somewhat complex information in that long term memory, thus busting the "Goldfish have a three second memory" myth.
The Mythbusters taught Goldfish how to navigate a maze, and found the Goldfish remembered how to navigate the maze two weeks later.
Aside from making too much sense for a government project, your plan has a political disadvantage.
Be it a politician showing off for his constituency, or an employee trying to gain power in an organization, small, incremental steps like the ones you describe are too "subtle."
Hell, in the private sector I've been accused of "lacking vision" for proposing incremental changes similar to the ones you describe.
Pointy Haired Bosses want to show off MASIVE strides that they can claim credit for, not smaller projects. It doesn't matter how much progress is actually made. All that matters is how much impact it LOOKS like you're having.
You're thinking like a tech trying to actually resolve the problem. In order to understand how this colossal mess came to be, you have to look at if from the viewpoint of a political battle. It's not about fixing the problems, but LOOKING like you're fixing them.
Imagine for a moment you've been placed in charge of a road system that's in terrible disrepair. A major highway elevated cuts through the center of town and it's falling to pieces. The roads are a warren of side streets and even the locals get lost often due to the poor signage.
Do you:
A: Begin a far reaching plan to revitalize the road system though effective, thorough and competent maintenance, repaving roads and replacing small, hard to read road signs with larger, more visible markers, thus making it easier to navigate the city
B: Begin a misguided plan to move the aging elevated highway underground, requiring you to tunnel through landfill and under rivers, in an area with a subway system that's as random and disordered as the roads above.
If you're a tech, you choose Option A. If you're a politician, you choose Option B, because it provides a LOT of photo opportunities whenever some new segment of the new tunnel system opens. It also provides lots of publicity due to all the "advanced technology" and "top level engineering" needed to pull it off.
That's it. I've had it.
I've spent too many years working my rear off.
It's time to start bidding on government programming contracts.
Imagine, being paid loads of money and not having to produce anything functional, with the worst repercussion being having to change your company name before bidding on a new contract.
Not trolling here, I just want to know if this sucker will sync with my Mac's address book, calendar and the like. I didn't see any mention of such functionality on the linked web sites.
If .VOM isn't taken yet, you could start a country with THAT as your top level domain.
Well, I did say "some aliens."
I did like the way they made a more realistic use of physics in a number of areas.
The show had a lot of promise.
"Oh, wait - they did that series"
And then did everything they could to kill it.
Of course they then learned that you can't stop the signal.
Trekkers are Old Hat. Browncoats Unite!
Andromeda was originally intended to be about the last Federation starship after the collapse of the Federation. Roddenberry's ideas were turned around a bit because the current keepers of Star Trek didn't want to "destroy" the universe and damage their cash cow.
:)
If you watch the show, especially the episodes when they were still using one of the writers from Bab 5, you can even see how some of the "Andromeda" aliens mapped to the Star Trek species they were based on.
In short, Roddenberry WANTED to trash the Federation and run the universe from a point of collapse and chaos. What happened was that his notes got used to start a new show, the "Federation" got renamed the "Confederacy" and it was treated to a decent special effects budget and not much else.
If you watch it as a post Federation show, and mentally map some of the alien species to their Trek counterparts, the show actually becomes watchable.
After all, Shatner taught all of us to look beyond the acting.
I've had to interface with Blackboard before, and it's a piss poor LMS, especially if you want to get any data into or out of it without entering it all by hand.
Imagine for a moment that at the dawn of the PC era some jackass had built an OS that lost data on a regular basis, didn't run reliably and could be trusted with your information for just about as far as you could throw the computer it was running on. Then imagine that the user interface made DOS 1.0 look like Mac OS X by comparison.
Now imagine they patented "Process to control a microprocessor or other electronic device" and with the enforcement of that patent shut down Microsoft, Apple and every flavor of Unix.
That's what Blackboard is trying to do to the Learning Management System industry with this patent. One of the worst products in the market is trying to shut down everyone else with legal wrangling.
Personally, I want to see this in a Boot from CD distro.
Or a firmware replacement for my Linksys router...
So, you never got past the Handshake phase?
That's very Homophobic.
Apple calls the color: Misty Ice Pop
I think that means it's red
Sooo, You're saying that there are still some Americans who are protected by the rights stripped away by the Patriot Act? Because all the earlier post is saying is that a lot of our rights were stripped away by the Patriot Act.
Oh, right, the wealthy and powerful. THEY'RE still enjoying the Bill of Rights, not because of any laws supporting them anymore, but because they're too powerful for the police to go after them without significant public outcry.
The company tried using Publisher for a single document.
Then they tried sending a Publisher file to their preferred printing company. (Financial Campus' owner was a part owner of the printing firm)
It turned out their hardware couldn't use Publisher files, and the Publisher generated EPS files were apparently a Microsoft Specific variant on EPS that their systems couldn't parse.
So Publisher was similarly discarded, and the owner continued to insist Word was the "Best tool for the job."
I used to work for a company now called Financial Campus.
Their stock and trade is Securities and Insurance Course ware. When I started there, they were in the midst of a massive project to migrate from Word perfect to Word for all heir courses.
That's right, they maintained 200 plus page securities courses in Word, running on Windows 95 and 98.
One problem with this was the fact that word always formatted the document for your "Default Printer" which in this case caused things like floating text boxes and graphics to move around the page. Every time someone worked with the files on a new computer they had to start by reformatting the document for their desktop. (Shared printers were a novel concept at the company, which was another part of the problem.)
I tried to get the company to at least try Quark, Pagemaker and the like. It got shot down for two reasons. First, they couldn't pirate them as easily as they could Word 98 and 2000, so it would be too expensive. The second reason blew my mind.
The owner told me: "I never even heard of these things. What do you think Word is for anyway? Do you think they became the biggest company on the planet by selling crap? I'm not shelling out hundreds of dollars for something inferior to Word."
The company owner had a very clear and definitive, "If it's from Microsoft, it MUST be the best product available" attitude.