True that RAID is not backup. But backing up to a RAID array IS backup. If you're going to say "RAID is not backup", you really need to clarify this distinction, because you are necessarily trying to inform people who don't understand the distinction.
If you're backing up to a ZFS RAIDZ array, or something comparable, then it can also be defined as a *good* backup. And an *awesome* backup if it's offsite.
If you want to "mess with ZFS" then build a box that will accomodate many hard drives, use Ubuntu plus ZFS-Fuse (I've tried FreeBSD and OpenSolaris, but with Ubuntu I don't have to worry about whether my hardware is supported). More than a year ago, I built a quad-core phenom box for about $1000 that has 6 1TB hard drives. I have bays to accomodate 5 more drives, and could hack an internal space for 4 more. This is not even a full tower, just a carefully chosen but ultimately cheap enclosure - not even my first choice. Ubuntu automatically spins down the drives when they aren't used, so heat isn't too bad, especially if you split the storage into multiple zpools. With eSata, I could hack together an enclosure for at least several more drives.
You can get a PCI board with 8 SATA ports for $100 - it's not going to have bandwidth for full-throttle concurrent access on all, sure, but you don't need that for home use, nor for most other uses that are truly storage oriented rather than access oriented. With the prices of 2TB drives now, I could have 30TB of raw storage inside this, at a cost of around $140 per drive, or $2100. Plus another $100 for another PCI SATA board. But I have plenty of space as it is.
ZFS-Fuse is not hard to install and set up. And after you get it set up, you can learn everything you need to know about ZFS to get your pools working in about 5 minutes, with your choice of data replication strategies. I prefer mirroring rather than raidz or any raid solution, because you can detach mirrors and thus rearrange the storage pools if you need to. Not something you would do in an enterprise, but flexibility is nice for home use.
I use this to archive and work with 1080p AVCHD video (yes, home movies, recitals, kids' plays and the like) over the network. I usually transcode and use local storage while working with it. It works great. You would of course need far more bandwidth to actually work with uncompressed video. But seriously - are you actually producing true uncompressed 1080p video? One hour would be over 600GB. It's difficult and expensive to get storage with enough bandwidth to even play it smoothly, and you'd want 16GB RAM to hold one minute in memory. The applications for true uncompressed video could be considered "worth it" don't stray far outside of scientific data IMHO. You almost have to be using some compression, even if it's very light or even lossless. Yes, I know pros do some crazy stuff, but it's all wasted with the narrow bandwidth and low resolution of the finished product. Unless you're producing IMAX or 4K digital cinema perhaps?
Crossing guards at school zones provide more safety than issuing a camera-ticket after the fact, AND are cheaper than installing and maintaining cameras.
Let's give him them the actual facts about the camera's role so people can get educated.
A camera captured a picture of a guy taking off his shirt and glancing at the bomb-car. A totally innocent guy who glanced at a parked car. A complete red herring, one which fortunately appears not to have completely derailed the investigation. So at least they've learned that cameras aren't ALL that.
I actually heard somebody on NPR make the assertion that cameras still provide good evidence because eyewitnesses can be unreliable and the cameras could *exonerate* innocent people. Well, at least somebody has contemplated some type of good, however rare and unlikely, that could come from surveillance cameras. Some good arguments were also made, about cameras taking officers off the streets with their huge installation and maintenance expense and the need to watch hours of footage to try to obtain evidence which may or may not even be in a recording.
On the one hand, you're completely correct in each element of your argument. But as whole, I'm going to have to disagree.
I'm all over the pen and paper, and I'm all over actual books, and so forth. But what happens on all those occasions when I actually want to save something permanently, and/or it's a pain to find a pen and paper (read: always in my life)? Normally, I open up my laptop, or phone, open an app, maybe have to activate the touchscreen keyboard... iPad, turn on, hit one icon, jot note in my handwriting. Yes, the Palm Pilot could do this - I loved them. They were tiny and had crappy displays, unfortunately. I would, to this day, love to see a large full color Palm Pilot running the classic Palm OS. The iPad is like Palm Pilots because of the large base of useful applications that are relatively easy to develop. It's unfortunate that the iPad is not as open as the Palm Pilots, but we're also in a different era of device security threats.
So you're right, nothing here is revolutionary. Literally, nothing. It's just the tool of this particular time. No, I wouldn't give it to my three year old, probably. My point was that it's easy enough to use that if I did, my three year old could actually turn it on, start the coloring app, and use it. It is that easy to use, and at the same time you can use it to get real work done, and for entertainment. I read numerous books on a Palm Pilot. The iPad would make that even more of a joy.
Although it's not revolutionary, putting this all together in one device that's easy to use and beautiful IS paradigm shifting. It sets expectations. It says, "You know those little screens people carry around in sci-fi movies? Here's one you can actually buy and use." Sorry, but your Casio was a very pale reflection of that vision, which lacked even what the Palm Pilot tried to deliver. No, the iPad does not fully deliver on it either, but it's getting remarkably close. So close that yes, I think it's cool. So close that I could do almost my entire job as an IT director for a small tech startup on it, by using it to connect to servers and occasionally a remote desktop. Plus I could do things that I love to do, but don't really like doing on my laptop, which is literally with me always.
Sorry to get snarky, but, oh yeah, that was you that got snarky. I completely dismissed the iPad myself until I read some reviews saying that the hands-on gives you a completely new experience. So I went and played with one, and while I wasn't nearly as wowed as the reviewers, they were at least a little bit right.
I'll tell you exactly what I want an iPad for - no matter how much money I spend on a laptop, I can't draw on the screen. Okay, HP makes one that looks decent for that, but Windows tablets are well proven to be awful for usability. With an iPad, I could hit one icon and then draw a picture, scratch out a small map, take handwritten notes with, say, a small map or maybe an equation. NONE of this is possible with any previous product with any real level of real-world usability. It's something that the old Palm Pilots hit on, but the iPad has a really usable size and the best screen around. You can get a stylus that works with it for $15, or make your own with conductive foam apparently. You can probably put something together pretty easily that would be more accurate.
It has that functionality plus most of the common functionality of a laptop, and maybe even better for web/video/books - that's a winner. No company has ever delivered on the promise to put something like this in our hands - we've seen it on Star Trek, in movies. It has to be simple and just work, or it fails to deliver on the promise. You get a device like this that a three year old can use to color a picture or watch a movie, and an adult can use to read, communicate, jot notes, and even produce at least some things - who wouldn't want that? It's got all bases covered. Maybe I'll be able to get one by the next version and maybe it will come with a webcam. Yes, I might wish for it to be a full linux device, or have the full BSD subsystem, but in a very big way that might actually break my idea of what I want it to be.
If someone sold a capacitive overlay on my Macbook screen for $100 or less, I'd take that as an acceptable but still not ideal substitute.
Before you spring for Apple Remote Desktop, make sure you understand what you're getting. I'm not sure if I'd call it misnamed, but it provides extremely little in the way of what you would actually call "remote desktop" functionality. The screen sharing it uses is equal to what is built-in - it's just vnc. It does allow you to curtain the remote machine, but that doesn't work well...at all.
Apple Remote Desktop is NOT in any way a terminal server product. Aquaconnect does that. To some extent, Vine Server (which is just VNC) will provide that as well (if you use Vine Server and Vine VNC client, you can log in multiple desktop sessions on a single machine simultaneously).
Apple Remote Desktop is a product aimed at _managing_ computers on your network, and maybe providing help desk support. It has reporting features, so that info on all clients can be regularly obtained. It also allows you to push applications, run installers, and run scripts on a bunch of remote Macs. Frankly though, they need to be on your LAN for it to work really well, though it does work over the internet if you have a static IP address for the remote machine. In combination with OS X server (for policy settings), you can have pretty good control of desktops on your network.
Nope, you have to take it further. If the designer of the product can't figure it out, it's not too confusing - it's intentionally misleading. But frankly, the designer should know that it's obfuscation. Except he's probably taking orders from above that say "give me x", where x will be put together with a bunch of other stuff to produce another product or even just a situation that is intentionally misleading. The key is that the parts are incomprehensible (meaning generally that there is complexity which is unjustifiable outside of a larger plan [generally a plan to deceive]), and the parts do not _explicitly_ violate the letter of the law (so they are potentially defensible). That's the way our financial system and our corporate system operate with regard to the law, and that's the reason our laws have to be "patched" from time to time. Lobbying efforts mean that new loopholes and bugs are intentionally written into any patch.
I say all of this as someone with an ivy league law degree who used to practice law. I turned down opportunities early on to enter that ecosystem, because I saw exactly what was happening. Whenever I questioned the situation, people got very defensive and sometimes angry, but their defenses were very telling. They as much as admitted it would blow up, but essentially said you have to keep ahead of the herd to "succeed". The strategy of the successful in this country is to walk on the backs of others, with spiked heels if necessary. I saw a lot of people, including many attorneys, work (mentally) very hard to ignore this reality and convince themselves that this is not the case, and that if they just do their jobs right, it will all work out.
Yeah, I see bicyclists riding on pretty narrow roads around here all the time. Roads that have no shoulder, that are quite well noted for having accidents because of this, and on which people have a tendency to break the speed limit (which by the way I have a serious problem with all of these things, as they caused my wife to have a very dangerous rollover accident when an oncoming, speeding car crossed the median and then, of course, just kept going since there was no collision).
I like bicycles. I wish there were more appropriate places to ride them, and I also wish that more roads were appropriate places to ride. But the people who ride bikes on these roads are idiots. They seriously endanger both themselves and others, regardless of any right they have to ride their bikes on those roads. They do however cause people to slow down (to well below the speed limit), which is nice, but the cost-benefit on that is definitely not a winner.
Take a step back here, guys. This system is NOT being implemented for children entering school, or anything like that. It is being used for children who are actually entering the juvenile justice system. Kids who are already very much in trouble. These kids are already being pigeonholed by caseworkers, DAs, judges, probation officers, and a host of outsiders of the system such as school officials.
They are actually trying to use some actual data to try to direct these kids within the justice system. That's not such a terrible thing - in fact, it's what people in the system who are trying to do the right thing are trying to do - get kids the help they need to save their future. Like anybody, I would hope that the software is not blindly relied upon, but the people in the system are still going to be there. It's pretty hard right now to fight for a kid to get the attention they need and be directed the way they should in that system. Because these are kids who are already being judged by the law, there's not really any worse situation they can get into. They can already have a judge or caseworker who arbitrarily hates them, or who wants to help them. The factors for re-offending are already being examined, it's just that now some software can spit out a report based on these factors.
Adobe is seriously upset about this, while they have basically said "no big deal" to a shift to HTML5. That's because Adobe doesn't make money from Flash - they make money from the tools to develop and design for Flash. They have the hearts and minds of the developers and designers, and switching their tools to run on something other than Flash seems to be part of their plan. In fact, it would be incredibly shortsighted if it wasn't part of their plan.
But I think Apple is doing better than just "anticompetitive" behavior, which would be reason enough. Fine, the A4 is just an ARM. I seriously believe Apple that although they might not be preparing for a platform shift in the near term, that this is a completely rational step to prepare for another almost-certain platform shift in the long term. Even if they don't know what architecture that might entail.
They own that game since it's their vertical, and absolutely nothing can help Adobe or any other company keep up. Adobe has already shown enough lack of ability to keep up when they so delayed moving their Mac tools to native x86 - it took a couple of years. So Apple says - if you want on our bandwagon, you have to keep up. And to keep up, you have to do it our way.
Somehow I didn't notice your reply - sorry about that. I completely agree with you. The real problem is that Microsoft was successfully able to divert attention away from the truly open, interoperable standards with with this OOXML tactic. The fact that Microsoft doesn't support OOXML is damning evidence that this is the case. I believe you are right that Microsoft will never fully support any standard. As much as I like Apple and Google, I'm afraid that these and others have in some cases picked up on the roaring success of this tactic.
I'm not a coder or developer. But, whether on the business side or technical side (I've been both), I've found that companies that insist on something like resumes in Word format stick to many internal policies that impede getting work done. Often, this is a misguided attempt to comply with some perceived directive or regulation, but generally it could be implemented with a simple procedure and no impediment. In other words, companies like these tend to be full of managers who don't know how to do things in a clear, straightforward manner and actually get things done.
Yes, I learned to avoid even applying to such companies. People who insist on a single standard from an outsider tend to be closed minded and inflexible, especially when that standard typically results in documents whose formatting gets completely messed up just because you have a different printer (Word actually changes things like line breaks and page breaks depending on printer, and I've had it completely destroy a resume's formatting based on that difference alone). Looking bad to a potential employer because they use a different brand of printer is not cool. Judging a potential employee because Microsoft products do this does not say good things about a manager's intelligence or character.
People who want PDFs or plain text resumes (often depending on the type of position) tend to be good people to work for. People who at least accept PDFs or plain text without prejudice also tend to be decent.
And, by the way, working on your resume either during work hours or on an employer-owned machine just to use that expensive copy of Word (a program I have no personal use for) legally is also not a very slick move in my humble opinion.
You may be in the majority of large corporate culture, but I can assure you that mindset is not in any way normal.
Okay, you got your facts wrong. They pushed OOXML through a standards body to make it a new open standard, ostensibly to address the clamoring for interoperability. So really, it's not that they fail to support their own format, it's that they fail to support the format that they tried to set up as a new standard of interoperability.
In other words, the point is that this kind of proves that Microsoft rammed the OOXML standard through not to help achieve interoperability, but to prevent governments and companies from switching to other standards which truly do provide openness and a greater level of interoperability. It's evidence of further anticompetitive conduct by a company with a functional monopoly.
Well, see, that's why we need further development of AI - so we can have software to enforce human behavior perfectly.
Seriously though, to pass whatever poor process they develop, they really do need software that will force people to input SOMETHING into some text field. Even if it's just a smiley face.
It will nominally enforce an audit trail that any auditor or investigator could theoretically use to make some type of determination. But in reality it provides a mechanism for reminders to people to follow existing process and policy, and that's something.
He was specifically tasked with "sourcing Document Control software to meet ISO 9001 standards". The only reasonable way that this task can be interpreted is as an assignment to actually source software which will ENFORCE ISO 9001 standards.
What nobody here seems to understand, is that this guy is saying that Adobe doesn't stand or fall on the future of Flash. Flash is so common and useful because Adobe made great tools for designers and developers, regardless of the problems with Flash. It's still going to take a while for other technologies to catch up in that area. When those tools are developed, for whatever technologies are adopted - I bet Adobe will be making some of the best tools, and that a whole lot of designers and developers will choose the Adobe tools.
It's freakishly easy to move the buttons. A single config file in gnome. People have been doing this to make Ubuntu look more like OS X for a long time. Of course, what would be really nice is if they would put this option in the GUI.
Yeah, the freedom to deny others' freedom. That's great.
I really, really like a great deal of BSD licensed projects. I really, really hope there is always someone willing to distribute the source in addition to however else they may distribute it, so that others can enjoy the same freedom to stand on the work of others. But it's not guaranteed in any way. Some projects are a single person's decision away from becoming effectively non-free because nobody has the responsibility to keep them free, even if they use, distribute, and profit from them extensively.
It would be pretty cool to see someone field-strip, clean, and reassemble a military mobile data center in a shipping container. Including rewiring for network and power.
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True that RAID is not backup. But backing up to a RAID array IS backup. If you're going to say "RAID is not backup", you really need to clarify this distinction, because you are necessarily trying to inform people who don't understand the distinction.
If you're backing up to a ZFS RAIDZ array, or something comparable, then it can also be defined as a *good* backup. And an *awesome* backup if it's offsite.
If you want to "mess with ZFS" then build a box that will accomodate many hard drives, use Ubuntu plus ZFS-Fuse (I've tried FreeBSD and OpenSolaris, but with Ubuntu I don't have to worry about whether my hardware is supported). More than a year ago, I built a quad-core phenom box for about $1000 that has 6 1TB hard drives. I have bays to accomodate 5 more drives, and could hack an internal space for 4 more. This is not even a full tower, just a carefully chosen but ultimately cheap enclosure - not even my first choice. Ubuntu automatically spins down the drives when they aren't used, so heat isn't too bad, especially if you split the storage into multiple zpools. With eSata, I could hack together an enclosure for at least several more drives.
You can get a PCI board with 8 SATA ports for $100 - it's not going to have bandwidth for full-throttle concurrent access on all, sure, but you don't need that for home use, nor for most other uses that are truly storage oriented rather than access oriented. With the prices of 2TB drives now, I could have 30TB of raw storage inside this, at a cost of around $140 per drive, or $2100. Plus another $100 for another PCI SATA board. But I have plenty of space as it is.
ZFS-Fuse is not hard to install and set up. And after you get it set up, you can learn everything you need to know about ZFS to get your pools working in about 5 minutes, with your choice of data replication strategies. I prefer mirroring rather than raidz or any raid solution, because you can detach mirrors and thus rearrange the storage pools if you need to. Not something you would do in an enterprise, but flexibility is nice for home use.
I use this to archive and work with 1080p AVCHD video (yes, home movies, recitals, kids' plays and the like) over the network. I usually transcode and use local storage while working with it. It works great. You would of course need far more bandwidth to actually work with uncompressed video. But seriously - are you actually producing true uncompressed 1080p video? One hour would be over 600GB. It's difficult and expensive to get storage with enough bandwidth to even play it smoothly, and you'd want 16GB RAM to hold one minute in memory. The applications for true uncompressed video could be considered "worth it" don't stray far outside of scientific data IMHO. You almost have to be using some compression, even if it's very light or even lossless. Yes, I know pros do some crazy stuff, but it's all wasted with the narrow bandwidth and low resolution of the finished product. Unless you're producing IMAX or 4K digital cinema perhaps?
Crossing guards at school zones provide more safety than issuing a camera-ticket after the fact, AND are cheaper than installing and maintaining cameras.
Let's give him them the actual facts about the camera's role so people can get educated.
A camera captured a picture of a guy taking off his shirt and glancing at the bomb-car. A totally innocent guy who glanced at a parked car. A complete red herring, one which fortunately appears not to have completely derailed the investigation. So at least they've learned that cameras aren't ALL that.
I actually heard somebody on NPR make the assertion that cameras still provide good evidence because eyewitnesses can be unreliable and the cameras could *exonerate* innocent people. Well, at least somebody has contemplated some type of good, however rare and unlikely, that could come from surveillance cameras. Some good arguments were also made, about cameras taking officers off the streets with their huge installation and maintenance expense and the need to watch hours of footage to try to obtain evidence which may or may not even be in a recording.
On the one hand, you're completely correct in each element of your argument. But as whole, I'm going to have to disagree.
I'm all over the pen and paper, and I'm all over actual books, and so forth. But what happens on all those occasions when I actually want to save something permanently, and/or it's a pain to find a pen and paper (read: always in my life)? Normally, I open up my laptop, or phone, open an app, maybe have to activate the touchscreen keyboard... iPad, turn on, hit one icon, jot note in my handwriting. Yes, the Palm Pilot could do this - I loved them. They were tiny and had crappy displays, unfortunately. I would, to this day, love to see a large full color Palm Pilot running the classic Palm OS. The iPad is like Palm Pilots because of the large base of useful applications that are relatively easy to develop. It's unfortunate that the iPad is not as open as the Palm Pilots, but we're also in a different era of device security threats.
So you're right, nothing here is revolutionary. Literally, nothing. It's just the tool of this particular time. No, I wouldn't give it to my three year old, probably. My point was that it's easy enough to use that if I did, my three year old could actually turn it on, start the coloring app, and use it. It is that easy to use, and at the same time you can use it to get real work done, and for entertainment. I read numerous books on a Palm Pilot. The iPad would make that even more of a joy.
Although it's not revolutionary, putting this all together in one device that's easy to use and beautiful IS paradigm shifting. It sets expectations. It says, "You know those little screens people carry around in sci-fi movies? Here's one you can actually buy and use." Sorry, but your Casio was a very pale reflection of that vision, which lacked even what the Palm Pilot tried to deliver. No, the iPad does not fully deliver on it either, but it's getting remarkably close. So close that yes, I think it's cool. So close that I could do almost my entire job as an IT director for a small tech startup on it, by using it to connect to servers and occasionally a remote desktop. Plus I could do things that I love to do, but don't really like doing on my laptop, which is literally with me always.
Sorry to get snarky, but, oh yeah, that was you that got snarky. I completely dismissed the iPad myself until I read some reviews saying that the hands-on gives you a completely new experience. So I went and played with one, and while I wasn't nearly as wowed as the reviewers, they were at least a little bit right.
That and an ssh client is all I need, so yes, I do believe I want one.
I'll tell you exactly what I want an iPad for - no matter how much money I spend on a laptop, I can't draw on the screen. Okay, HP makes one that looks decent for that, but Windows tablets are well proven to be awful for usability. With an iPad, I could hit one icon and then draw a picture, scratch out a small map, take handwritten notes with, say, a small map or maybe an equation. NONE of this is possible with any previous product with any real level of real-world usability. It's something that the old Palm Pilots hit on, but the iPad has a really usable size and the best screen around. You can get a stylus that works with it for $15, or make your own with conductive foam apparently. You can probably put something together pretty easily that would be more accurate.
It has that functionality plus most of the common functionality of a laptop, and maybe even better for web/video/books - that's a winner. No company has ever delivered on the promise to put something like this in our hands - we've seen it on Star Trek, in movies. It has to be simple and just work, or it fails to deliver on the promise. You get a device like this that a three year old can use to color a picture or watch a movie, and an adult can use to read, communicate, jot notes, and even produce at least some things - who wouldn't want that? It's got all bases covered. Maybe I'll be able to get one by the next version and maybe it will come with a webcam. Yes, I might wish for it to be a full linux device, or have the full BSD subsystem, but in a very big way that might actually break my idea of what I want it to be.
If someone sold a capacitive overlay on my Macbook screen for $100 or less, I'd take that as an acceptable but still not ideal substitute.
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
That's why he suggested that law professors and students do it. You know - academia.
Practically speaking, this is the exact role played by academia. Parse and make things understandable, then teach.
Before you spring for Apple Remote Desktop, make sure you understand what you're getting. I'm not sure if I'd call it misnamed, but it provides extremely little in the way of what you would actually call "remote desktop" functionality. The screen sharing it uses is equal to what is built-in - it's just vnc. It does allow you to curtain the remote machine, but that doesn't work well...at all.
Apple Remote Desktop is NOT in any way a terminal server product. Aquaconnect does that. To some extent, Vine Server (which is just VNC) will provide that as well (if you use Vine Server and Vine VNC client, you can log in multiple desktop sessions on a single machine simultaneously).
Apple Remote Desktop is a product aimed at _managing_ computers on your network, and maybe providing help desk support. It has reporting features, so that info on all clients can be regularly obtained. It also allows you to push applications, run installers, and run scripts on a bunch of remote Macs. Frankly though, they need to be on your LAN for it to work really well, though it does work over the internet if you have a static IP address for the remote machine. In combination with OS X server (for policy settings), you can have pretty good control of desktops on your network.
Nope, you have to take it further. If the designer of the product can't figure it out, it's not too confusing - it's intentionally misleading. But frankly, the designer should know that it's obfuscation. Except he's probably taking orders from above that say "give me x", where x will be put together with a bunch of other stuff to produce another product or even just a situation that is intentionally misleading. The key is that the parts are incomprehensible (meaning generally that there is complexity which is unjustifiable outside of a larger plan [generally a plan to deceive]), and the parts do not _explicitly_ violate the letter of the law (so they are potentially defensible). That's the way our financial system and our corporate system operate with regard to the law, and that's the reason our laws have to be "patched" from time to time. Lobbying efforts mean that new loopholes and bugs are intentionally written into any patch.
I say all of this as someone with an ivy league law degree who used to practice law. I turned down opportunities early on to enter that ecosystem, because I saw exactly what was happening. Whenever I questioned the situation, people got very defensive and sometimes angry, but their defenses were very telling. They as much as admitted it would blow up, but essentially said you have to keep ahead of the herd to "succeed". The strategy of the successful in this country is to walk on the backs of others, with spiked heels if necessary. I saw a lot of people, including many attorneys, work (mentally) very hard to ignore this reality and convince themselves that this is not the case, and that if they just do their jobs right, it will all work out.
Yeah, I see bicyclists riding on pretty narrow roads around here all the time. Roads that have no shoulder, that are quite well noted for having accidents because of this, and on which people have a tendency to break the speed limit (which by the way I have a serious problem with all of these things, as they caused my wife to have a very dangerous rollover accident when an oncoming, speeding car crossed the median and then, of course, just kept going since there was no collision).
I like bicycles. I wish there were more appropriate places to ride them, and I also wish that more roads were appropriate places to ride. But the people who ride bikes on these roads are idiots. They seriously endanger both themselves and others, regardless of any right they have to ride their bikes on those roads. They do however cause people to slow down (to well below the speed limit), which is nice, but the cost-benefit on that is definitely not a winner.
Take a step back here, guys. This system is NOT being implemented for children entering school, or anything like that. It is being used for children who are actually entering the juvenile justice system. Kids who are already very much in trouble. These kids are already being pigeonholed by caseworkers, DAs, judges, probation officers, and a host of outsiders of the system such as school officials.
They are actually trying to use some actual data to try to direct these kids within the justice system. That's not such a terrible thing - in fact, it's what people in the system who are trying to do the right thing are trying to do - get kids the help they need to save their future. Like anybody, I would hope that the software is not blindly relied upon, but the people in the system are still going to be there. It's pretty hard right now to fight for a kid to get the attention they need and be directed the way they should in that system. Because these are kids who are already being judged by the law, there's not really any worse situation they can get into. They can already have a judge or caseworker who arbitrarily hates them, or who wants to help them. The factors for re-offending are already being examined, it's just that now some software can spit out a report based on these factors.
There's not much to see here.
Adobe is seriously upset about this, while they have basically said "no big deal" to a shift to HTML5. That's because Adobe doesn't make money from Flash - they make money from the tools to develop and design for Flash. They have the hearts and minds of the developers and designers, and switching their tools to run on something other than Flash seems to be part of their plan. In fact, it would be incredibly shortsighted if it wasn't part of their plan.
But I think Apple is doing better than just "anticompetitive" behavior, which would be reason enough. Fine, the A4 is just an ARM. I seriously believe Apple that although they might not be preparing for a platform shift in the near term, that this is a completely rational step to prepare for another almost-certain platform shift in the long term. Even if they don't know what architecture that might entail.
They own that game since it's their vertical, and absolutely nothing can help Adobe or any other company keep up. Adobe has already shown enough lack of ability to keep up when they so delayed moving their Mac tools to native x86 - it took a couple of years. So Apple says - if you want on our bandwagon, you have to keep up. And to keep up, you have to do it our way.
Somehow I didn't notice your reply - sorry about that. I completely agree with you. The real problem is that Microsoft was successfully able to divert attention away from the truly open, interoperable standards with with this OOXML tactic. The fact that Microsoft doesn't support OOXML is damning evidence that this is the case. I believe you are right that Microsoft will never fully support any standard. As much as I like Apple and Google, I'm afraid that these and others have in some cases picked up on the roaring success of this tactic.
I'm not a coder or developer. But, whether on the business side or technical side (I've been both), I've found that companies that insist on something like resumes in Word format stick to many internal policies that impede getting work done. Often, this is a misguided attempt to comply with some perceived directive or regulation, but generally it could be implemented with a simple procedure and no impediment. In other words, companies like these tend to be full of managers who don't know how to do things in a clear, straightforward manner and actually get things done.
Yes, I learned to avoid even applying to such companies. People who insist on a single standard from an outsider tend to be closed minded and inflexible, especially when that standard typically results in documents whose formatting gets completely messed up just because you have a different printer (Word actually changes things like line breaks and page breaks depending on printer, and I've had it completely destroy a resume's formatting based on that difference alone). Looking bad to a potential employer because they use a different brand of printer is not cool. Judging a potential employee because Microsoft products do this does not say good things about a manager's intelligence or character.
People who want PDFs or plain text resumes (often depending on the type of position) tend to be good people to work for. People who at least accept PDFs or plain text without prejudice also tend to be decent.
And, by the way, working on your resume either during work hours or on an employer-owned machine just to use that expensive copy of Word (a program I have no personal use for) legally is also not a very slick move in my humble opinion.
You may be in the majority of large corporate culture, but I can assure you that mindset is not in any way normal.
Okay, you got your facts wrong. They pushed OOXML through a standards body to make it a new open standard, ostensibly to address the clamoring for interoperability. So really, it's not that they fail to support their own format, it's that they fail to support the format that they tried to set up as a new standard of interoperability.
In other words, the point is that this kind of proves that Microsoft rammed the OOXML standard through not to help achieve interoperability, but to prevent governments and companies from switching to other standards which truly do provide openness and a greater level of interoperability. It's evidence of further anticompetitive conduct by a company with a functional monopoly.
Well, see, that's why we need further development of AI - so we can have software to enforce human behavior perfectly.
Seriously though, to pass whatever poor process they develop, they really do need software that will force people to input SOMETHING into some text field. Even if it's just a smiley face.
It will nominally enforce an audit trail that any auditor or investigator could theoretically use to make some type of determination. But in reality it provides a mechanism for reminders to people to follow existing process and policy, and that's something.
He was specifically tasked with "sourcing Document Control software to meet ISO 9001 standards". The only reasonable way that this task can be interpreted is as an assignment to actually source software which will ENFORCE ISO 9001 standards.
What nobody here seems to understand, is that this guy is saying that Adobe doesn't stand or fall on the future of Flash. Flash is so common and useful because Adobe made great tools for designers and developers, regardless of the problems with Flash. It's still going to take a while for other technologies to catch up in that area. When those tools are developed, for whatever technologies are adopted - I bet Adobe will be making some of the best tools, and that a whole lot of designers and developers will choose the Adobe tools.
It's freakishly easy to move the buttons. A single config file in gnome. People have been doing this to make Ubuntu look more like OS X for a long time. Of course, what would be really nice is if they would put this option in the GUI.
This is one of the funniest comments I've ever read.
Yeah, the freedom to deny others' freedom. That's great. I really, really like a great deal of BSD licensed projects. I really, really hope there is always someone willing to distribute the source in addition to however else they may distribute it, so that others can enjoy the same freedom to stand on the work of others. But it's not guaranteed in any way. Some projects are a single person's decision away from becoming effectively non-free because nobody has the responsibility to keep them free, even if they use, distribute, and profit from them extensively.
You work at a University Press. You do NOT work for a for-profit textbook publisher. There is a difference.
Sorry you're stuck with poor work processes. Better ones exist.
It would be pretty cool to see someone field-strip, clean, and reassemble a military mobile data center in a shipping container. Including rewiring for network and power.
That would make nice team contest.