These guys don't appear to be marketing to (or, perhaps, to be) the sharpest tools in the shed, though. They have a "Test your website's security!" link on their page. So I plugged in www.microsoft.com...what I got back was mostly a display of the HTML of the www.microsoft.com page, and some scare text saying "The following HTML code was copied from your site. Enough information to make an exact copy of your web site? With Anti-HTML you can protect all or some parts of your code." I feel like writing to them and explaining how HTML and HTTP work...but I suspect they know just fine; they're just marketing to idiots, of whom there is rarely a shortage.
The enhanced explorer nodes for "My Pictures" and "My Music" look like something I might use
Think carefully before you say something like that. I recently discovered a very annoying thing about XP: it tries to figure out what the contents of your directories are and choose an "appropriate" way to display them. I discovered this when I looked at a directory I keep MP3s in and discovered that I didn't get the same Explorer display as for other directories.
(Screenshot here.)
Note that "Date Modified" is not one of the columns! You wanted to sort your MP3s by date? Sorry, Microsoft has decided you shouldn't. Please note I did not choose this behavior; Windows just started doing it on its own. It looks like you can turn it off (View/Choose Details...) but the fact that the GUI is making decisions for me about how I should visualize stuff is highly annoying. (But that's Microsoft for you.)
As a teacher, I found that there are MANY people, children and adults who may have good verbal skills, but are completely incapable of using the written word.
Agreed - my own boss is reasonably coherent when speaking, but his writing is complete garbage. (I swear he just picks a random word for the subject of his email.)
However, I think there's some confusion here between "a written test" and "a test of writing". At one of my old employers, I was on a committee that created a "technical screening questionnaire" - a multiple-choice test. I think it's a decent idea, although I wouldn't place too much weight in it, but it doesn't tell you anything about how they write. Part of the problem is that any fool can grade a multiple-choice test - "did he check the correct box?" - but judging writing is a lot harder.
OTOH, I thought although the first book was better than the second book, as a movie, the second one is superior. Better acting, better special effects, more of a specific plot to keep things moving along. This one's definitely darker and gorier (not that there's a/lot/ of gore) than the first one too.
The cultural role of High School is to give people the basic skill set needed to live on their own, be a functional member of society, and not be a burden to the state.
IMO, the cultural role of high school (and elementary school too, for that matter) has less to do with teaching you any particular skill and lots more to do with teaching you to sit still for eight hours a day, take orders from someone you don't care about and don't like, and do work you have no particular skill for or interest in...because this is what "modern society" wants: adults who will sit still, do work they hate, taking orders from a boss they hate, and not quit/go insane/kill someone. After all, if you weren't properly indoctrinated, you might get crazy ideas, like that what you want matters, or that you should have a say in things...
Ah, but it's not quite as clear as you make it out to be.
The card doesn't have information about you.
You think.
The card-info can't be changed after voting.
You think.
At the latest one, you could put it back in, and check if it contained the right vote.
You can check that it shows you the same thing you entered, yes.
The government knows that you have voted (it is required) once. (see above: ID-reg)
I thought you said it didn't have any information about you. But you say that the card contains both the vote and an identifier that can be tied to an individual.
The cards get collected from around the votingdistrict, shoved into a coutingcomputer.
Where you hope they get read accurately.
The whole problem is that everything looks great. But there's no real accountability that you've described to us. There's no proof that your vote ever gets recorded on the card, or that it can't be changed later, or that what you put on the card is what got transferred to the central computer. The existence of the card is a plus, though - it means there's some physical evidence of your vote - but the data on it is just electronic, and subject to being changed with no record of the change.
Also on the web, you can see me getting flamed on cypherpunks newsgroup for accidentally sending HTML email. Not particularly something I'm proud of.
Ayup. When I search for my real name, I find mostly my home page stuff, but generally on the first page of results is also a letter I wrote to a stupid underground 'zine years ago, disagreeing with them, and since they were the editors, they of course got the last word. It's all pretty pointless now, and I would rather not have it come up so closely associated with my name, but there it is.
maybe that's the wrong time to discover you would have rather been doing management.
Wot, you mean "would rather have been part of the problem?"
(Cue old Muppet Show routine where Fozzy complains that all he ever gets to do is clean up, Kermit suggests he find another job, and Fozzy says, "What, and leave show business?")
There are mountains near the Nazca plains. (And it's "Nazca". Ain't no "nasca" about it.)
You can see the designs from there.
So you can't make out all of them from the ground. So what? It's not that hard to plot out a design on a small scale and then enlarge it. (For example, standing on a street corner in Manhattan, you can't tell that (almost) the whole island is a giant grid pattern, although it is. I have visions of future "ufologists" claiming that this proves the island was laid out for the benefit of flying-saucer-riding aliens...)
ICBW (don't use Windows much, even at work), but you have to hit C-A-D to change your password. That's horribly unintuitive, if you ask me. I spent quite a long time searching for something in the control panel, or anything that would let you do it. It's pretty bizarre, especially since MS seems devoted to giving you a program or control panel applet for every piddling task you might ever want to accomplish.
Years ago, I had to make a documentation website for work. Since I was learning javascript at the time, I decided to play around with it: between noon and 1pm, the last letter of one of the links didn't take you to the linked page, but instead changed the site logo to a picture of Fritz the Cat. I think the only person who ever noticed was one guy who was looking at the source and couldn't figure out what that javascript did...
I agree in part. But the critical word in your statement is "good" program management. That's the tough part. In my experience with IT projects (not necessarily programming), either the project manager is "one of the techies" or he isn't. If he is, he usually takes the techies' side and demands proper specs, testing, etc., and then the rest of the business whines to upper management that he's being a "bottleneck", and then he gets replaced. If he isn't a techie, he usually fails to understand why the techies are always griping about the lack of meaningful specs, time pressure, etc, and he exists only to help the business side push harder. Finding someone who crosses between the two sides (which you do mention) is damn tough, and such a person is worth a lot.
Yeah, but the point is "I wouldn't!" I don't know, maybe the Japanese-language manuals for US products are just as funny - but there seems to be something about English that convinces every manufacturer that, sure, he can write it himself, no professional translator needed. Maybe it's because English is so widespread - almost everybody thinks he can speak some English - whereas an American knows he can't speak Japanese or Italian.
Ayup. The problem, like you say, seems to be that almost every Flash "designer" seems to be focussed on using it to make things fly around, bounce, change colors, etc..
I suppose this isn't technically the fault of Flash and its creators - you can do useful stuff with it, like How Stuff Works has - but when there's already a perfectly good way to present static text and images (and even moving images, sort of) and you invent something like Flash, what the hell do you _think_ it's going to be used for? The old quip still applies: it's called "Flash" because it's the opposite of "substance".
Amen to that. At one company where I worked, we did a password-cracking check, and broke the password of one user who liked to consider himself technical. (It was something lame like "brian56", of course.) We forced him to change his password at his next login, and he got mad, and he actually said "My password isn't weak!" So we asked him, "Then how did we crack it in less than 30 minutes?" He didn't have a good answer for that one, but he still wasn't happy about it.
I think the general point is a good one: Outsource things that are not your core business. If you suggested to a hospital that they print their own letterhead, they'd look at you like you had rocks in your head; suggest that their run their own IT department, and they'll take you seriously.
(The analogy is not perfect, of course, since letterhead's a pure commodity, and an IT infrastructure is not.)
HOWEVER... There are a lot of counter-examples. A lot of companies (and divisions thereof) don't seem to understand exactly what their core business is. I worked at the Circle-M Ranch (no, not the real Circle-M Ranch, the batwing M place), and while about 60% of the systems group was (long-term) contractors, the cafeteria staff was all employees!
That's a crude example, but my current employer is another one. We're the internet arm of a publishing firm, with our own programmers, content writers, DBAs, QA, and sysadmins. So when we needed to create custom code and content for our app server, what did we do? Outsourced, despite the fact that we had enough expertise in-house and we were more answerable to management than outsiders were.
That brings me to another point about outsourcing: they aren't very answerable to you long-term. Sure, you can have a contract with explicit standards...but if the contractor doesn't live up to the standards, chances are they get paid anyway, partly because in a large IT project it's very easy to conceal blame by confusing issues. The contractor may also try to ensure that you hire them again by ensuring that nobody but them understands your infrastructure after they're done with it. And if you don't hire them again - hey, the way a lot of companies are these days, there was a good chance they wouldn't get hired again anyway.
OK, granted, I was kind of pissed off in general yesterday, and I probably spoke more harshly than I should have, for which I apologize. Still -
Did you read what I said? I pretty clearly stated that that this may have changed. Check your history.
Yes, you did state that this may have changed. Did you check it? You're obviously at a computer with internet access, as evidenced by the fact you're posting on Slashdot. It takes about 60 seconds to check what the current licensing situation is for Solaris, but you didn't do it, preferring to talk off the top of your head.
I think you're out of line. You make points for which you provide no evidence, and you seem to be arguing for your right to do so. Maybe I wouldn't talk to you like that in person, but I'm a pretty blunt person, and I call a spade a spade - I've told off my bosses to their faces - and maybe you would punch me in the nose.:-) If I think you're talking shit, I'm going to call you on it. If you think I'm talking shit, I want you to call me on it! I'm sorry you think I'm a prick. I apologize for speaking so rudely. You seem like a pretty clued individual, and maybe you do have a good reason for saying what you do. Truce?
Strictly IM[E|O]: (some of these things Konqueror may already have; I honestly don't use it very much these days, so if I missed something, believe me, I'm not trolling.)
Opera generally renders pages better than Konqueror. That's a biggie.
Very fast and easy switching of preferences. For example, changing identifying the browser from Opera to IE with one mouse click, or changing from displaying images to no images to only already-loaded images with one click. The "author mode/user mode" toggle is a fantastic idea. How many times have you come across a page where the text is 6 point type in dark blue on a dark red background, or something similarly unreadable? Being able to fix that with one click is a great thing.
Mouse gestures. (Working mouse gestures, not "oh, download and install this extra component...")
An interface that's both MDI and SDI - you can have multiple windows and tabs within a single window at the same time.
Very integrated search (and now translation!) capabilities. There's a search field in the address bar, and you can highlight text in a window and right-click to search for that text or translate it.
Lastly, I think it's a good idea to support anyone who writes software for Linux, even if it is commercial software. I'd hate to see Opera fail and then have people point to it as an example of why you just can't bother to compete with Microsoft. In the long run, that's going to hurt us a lot more than paying the $39 will.
Ease of use for what? They're both Unix; they're about the same thing from a user standpoint, except that Solaris actually has some useful troubleshooting tools. Solaris' iostat, for example, absolutely destroys the freeware version available for Linux. Hot-swapping devices is also very mature under Solaris; I wouldn't dare try using Linux's hot-swapping in a production environment.
If you're going to be using open source software (ie Apache), its simply better supported under Linux.
Again, bullcrap. Do you have any evidence at all to support this? Apache works fine under Solaris and has for years. Many, many people run Apache on Solaris. Where's your evidence for the idea that problems with Apache on Solaris don't get fixed as fast as problems with Apache on Linux?
Lastly, when I read about Solaris being free-as-in-beer -- that's only for educational users. (This may have changed, I only read about when they started offering it for free) The corprate user (Solaris' primary audience) still has to pay.
Well, now we know you're talking out of your ass. Solaris 7 and 8 (and soon, 9) have been free for all hosts with eight or fewer processors, except for media cost (which is admittedly rather inflated). For everyone.
Look, I'm not gratuitously bashing Linux - I'm typing this on a Linux machine. I run Linux at home and at work. But I would suggest that you go out and get a few years of experience using both of them in "enterprise" environments. You will quickly discover what Linux's shortcomings are.
Somewhat OT, but...Solaris does ship with GCC. It's on the "Software Companion" CD. Even if you don't have that CD, it's one freaking download from sunfreeware.com. Frankly, the fact that you weren't aware of or discounted both of these things inclines me to think you didn't have the experience in-house to properly evaluate your options.
So what was that you were saying about "hoover have lost their trade mark"? Your general point is correct, though - in the US legal system, you must aggressively defend your trademarks.
Excellent point. A lot of people still know Latin or ancient Greek (well, relatively "a lot"), but very few know the kind of Low Latin that people spoke in the centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire, or Middle English, despite those being closer to us in time. Too bad the Catholic church switched to the vulgate, or we'd be assured of Latin's survival for at least another thousand years or so...
Slashdot Mirror
These guys don't appear to be marketing to (or, perhaps, to be) the sharpest tools in the shed, though. They have a "Test your website's security!" link on their page. So I plugged in www.microsoft.com...what I got back was mostly a display of the HTML of the www.microsoft.com page, and some scare text saying "The following HTML code was copied from your site. Enough information to make an exact copy of your web site? With Anti-HTML you can protect all or some parts of your code." I feel like writing to them and explaining how HTML and HTTP work...but I suspect they know just fine; they're just marketing to idiots, of whom there is rarely a shortage.
(Screenshot here.)
Note that "Date Modified" is not one of the columns! You wanted to sort your MP3s by date? Sorry, Microsoft has decided you shouldn't. Please note I did not choose this behavior; Windows just started doing it on its own. It looks like you can turn it off (View/Choose Details...) but the fact that the GUI is making decisions for me about how I should visualize stuff is highly annoying. (But that's Microsoft for you.)
seecolon.org? Nah, that sounds _way_ too much like a goatse.cx link...
OTOH, I thought although the first book was better than the second book, as a movie, the second one is superior. Better acting, better special effects, more of a specific plot to keep things moving along. This one's definitely darker and gorier (not that there's a /lot/ of gore) than the first one too.
The card doesn't have information about you. You think.
The card-info can't be changed after voting. You think.
At the latest one, you could put it back in, and check if it contained the right vote. You can check that it shows you the same thing you entered, yes.
The government knows that you have voted (it is required) once. (see above: ID-reg) I thought you said it didn't have any information about you. But you say that the card contains both the vote and an identifier that can be tied to an individual.
The cards get collected from around the votingdistrict, shoved into a coutingcomputer. Where you hope they get read accurately.
The whole problem is that everything looks great. But there's no real accountability that you've described to us. There's no proof that your vote ever gets recorded on the card, or that it can't be changed later, or that what you put on the card is what got transferred to the central computer. The existence of the card is a plus, though - it means there's some physical evidence of your vote - but the data on it is just electronic, and subject to being changed with no record of the change.
No, no, no...
"World's Oldest Man Killed By Jealous Husband"
(Cue old Muppet Show routine where Fozzy complains that all he ever gets to do is clean up, Kermit suggests he find another job, and Fozzy says, "What, and leave show business?")
ICBW (don't use Windows much, even at work), but you have to hit C-A-D to change your password. That's horribly unintuitive, if you ask me. I spent quite a long time searching for something in the control panel, or anything that would let you do it. It's pretty bizarre, especially since MS seems devoted to giving you a program or control panel applet for every piddling task you might ever want to accomplish.
Years ago, I had to make a documentation website for work. Since I was learning javascript at the time, I decided to play around with it: between noon and 1pm, the last letter of one of the links didn't take you to the linked page, but instead changed the site logo to a picture of Fritz the Cat. I think the only person who ever noticed was one guy who was looking at the source and couldn't figure out what that javascript did...
I agree in part. But the critical word in your statement is "good" program management. That's the tough part. In my experience with IT projects (not necessarily programming), either the project manager is "one of the techies" or he isn't. If he is, he usually takes the techies' side and demands proper specs, testing, etc., and then the rest of the business whines to upper management that he's being a "bottleneck", and then he gets replaced. If he isn't a techie, he usually fails to understand why the techies are always griping about the lack of meaningful specs, time pressure, etc, and he exists only to help the business side push harder. Finding someone who crosses between the two sides (which you do mention) is damn tough, and such a person is worth a lot.
Yeah, but the point is "I wouldn't!" I don't know, maybe the Japanese-language manuals for US products are just as funny - but there seems to be something about English that convinces every manufacturer that, sure, he can write it himself, no professional translator needed. Maybe it's because English is so widespread - almost everybody thinks he can speak some English - whereas an American knows he can't speak Japanese or Italian.
I suppose this isn't technically the fault of Flash and its creators - you can do useful stuff with it, like How Stuff Works has - but when there's already a perfectly good way to present static text and images (and even moving images, sort of) and you invent something like Flash, what the hell do you _think_ it's going to be used for? The old quip still applies: it's called "Flash" because it's the opposite of "substance".
Amen to that. At one company where I worked, we did a password-cracking check, and broke the password of one user who liked to consider himself technical. (It was something lame like "brian56", of course.) We forced him to change his password at his next login, and he got mad, and he actually said "My password isn't weak!" So we asked him, "Then how did we crack it in less than 30 minutes?" He didn't have a good answer for that one, but he still wasn't happy about it.
HOWEVER... There are a lot of counter-examples. A lot of companies (and divisions thereof) don't seem to understand exactly what their core business is. I worked at the Circle-M Ranch (no, not the real Circle-M Ranch, the batwing M place), and while about 60% of the systems group was (long-term) contractors, the cafeteria staff was all employees!
That's a crude example, but my current employer is another one. We're the internet arm of a publishing firm, with our own programmers, content writers, DBAs, QA, and sysadmins. So when we needed to create custom code and content for our app server, what did we do? Outsourced, despite the fact that we had enough expertise in-house and we were more answerable to management than outsiders were.
That brings me to another point about outsourcing: they aren't very answerable to you long-term. Sure, you can have a contract with explicit standards...but if the contractor doesn't live up to the standards, chances are they get paid anyway, partly because in a large IT project it's very easy to conceal blame by confusing issues. The contractor may also try to ensure that you hire them again by ensuring that nobody but them understands your infrastructure after they're done with it. And if you don't hire them again - hey, the way a lot of companies are these days, there was a good chance they wouldn't get hired again anyway.
I think you're out of line. You make points for which you provide no evidence, and you seem to be arguing for your right to do so. Maybe I wouldn't talk to you like that in person, but I'm a pretty blunt person, and I call a spade a spade - I've told off my bosses to their faces - and maybe you would punch me in the nose. :-) If I think you're talking shit, I'm going to call you on it. If you think I'm talking shit, I want you to call me on it! I'm sorry you think I'm a prick. I apologize for speaking so rudely. You seem like a pretty clued individual, and maybe you do have a good reason for saying what you do. Truce?
- Opera generally renders pages better than Konqueror. That's a biggie.
- Very fast and easy switching of preferences. For example, changing identifying the browser from Opera to IE with one mouse click, or changing from displaying images to no images to only already-loaded images with one click. The "author mode/user mode" toggle is a fantastic idea. How many times have you come across a page where the text is 6 point type in dark blue on a dark red background, or something similarly unreadable? Being able to fix that with one click is a great thing.
- Mouse gestures. (Working mouse gestures, not "oh, download and install this extra component...")
- An interface that's both MDI and SDI - you can have multiple windows and tabs within a single window at the same time.
- Very integrated search (and now translation!) capabilities. There's a search field in the address bar, and you can highlight text in a window and right-click to search for that text or translate it.
Lastly, I think it's a good idea to support anyone who writes software for Linux, even if it is commercial software. I'd hate to see Opera fail and then have people point to it as an example of why you just can't bother to compete with Microsoft. In the long run, that's going to hurt us a lot more than paying the $39 will.Look, I'm not gratuitously bashing Linux - I'm typing this on a Linux machine. I run Linux at home and at work. But I would suggest that you go out and get a few years of experience using both of them in "enterprise" environments. You will quickly discover what Linux's shortcomings are.
Somewhat OT, but...Solaris does ship with GCC. It's on the "Software Companion" CD. Even if you don't have that CD, it's one freaking download from sunfreeware.com. Frankly, the fact that you weren't aware of or discounted both of these things inclines me to think you didn't have the experience in-house to properly evaluate your options.
So what was that you were saying about "hoover have lost their trade mark"? Your general point is correct, though - in the US legal system, you must aggressively defend your trademarks.
Excellent point. A lot of people still know Latin or ancient Greek (well, relatively "a lot"), but very few know the kind of Low Latin that people spoke in the centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire, or Middle English, despite those being closer to us in time. Too bad the Catholic church switched to the vulgate, or we'd be assured of Latin's survival for at least another thousand years or so...