heh. with Harry Potter, Lemony Snicket, and the Narnia series under my belt, AND HHKTTG, I tried to read Rings aloud to them. They just don't have the patience. Kids these days.
My revenge: Their kids won't have the patience to sit through Jackson's LoTR movies.
I didn't read Tolkien aloud, but I read Rowling's works aloud (except the 7th) - and they were excruciating. Especially the 5th one. I think she was making a conscious effort to maintain a high many adverbs-per-sentence rate for some reason.
Tolkien is poetry by comparison.
One thing I noticed as I re-read Rings before the movie release: RoTK's prose was markedly different. It was almost like a different person, or maybe he was doing a lot of bible reading at the time, I don't know. It was very stilted, and not as pleasant as the first two books. I know that it was overshadowed by very dark plot happenings - but when you're reading the work of a linguistics professor, you tend to pay attention to details. (when I read Rings the first two times, I admit, I didn't notice or pay attention to style at all. I was just a dumb kid though.)
(honestly, I'd use rats - they're MUCH heartier and smarter). Implant them with say, a gieger counter, such that the rat (only the rat) receives a stimulus when the detector is set off.
Then train the rat to associate food with counter ticks. (run him through a maze, with a radiation source under the cheese).
Finally, along with the geiger counter, you've also implanted a gps receiver, and a transmitter.
Rat finds the secret, hidden nuclear bomb lab, and transmits the coordinates back to the spooks.
The President famously didn't want to follow through on Richard Clarke's anti-terrorism efforts because he was tired of "swatting at flies".
well to continue on with that analogy (beating that dead horse) -
. the horse was tired of swatting at flies, so it kicked down the barn, trampled its owner, who previously fed and took care of it, and then the horse, still penned in, starved to death.
Well, gee, I wonder if you beat the dealer at single-deck blackjack after he deals you two kings of spades, would the house be obligated to pay, or would you be more likely to find yourself beat up in the alley behind the casino. . . ?
. . . where we (-erm, the "slashdot community") concluded (and I agree. . . ) that half of America's grad students and faculty are foreign, not because America is losing technical leadership, but because they're coming here because that's where the funding and facilities are.
Well, it's the same with these tech jobs. Only - we're preventing these students from making the transition from academia into the professional sector, because of these protectionist work rules. I'm as vocal an opponent as anyone to H1B expansion. But they're either going to work here, in the US, for American companies, or they're going to go back to their home company with a Masters or PhD, and work for a foreign company.
If they stay here - they spend a good chunk of their income here. They pay taxes here. And the American company, remains competetive.
If they go back home, they take that knowledge and expertise with them, and a foreign company uses it as an economic club against us. Or the American company shuts down domestic operations, and opens up an overseas R&D branch - which is not as bad, but is still a death-knell for American competitiveness and American jobs.
What I'd really like to see are some feel-good provisions on beefing up enforcement against abuses of the H1B system, since these abuses are rampant. Unfortunately, nobody currently in government seems interested in cracking down on any kind of law enforcement towards employers these days.
The only folks who care are prez Bush, for demagogic purposes,
Well, basically, the Manned Mars Mission plan, was to kill the ISS and Shuttle. (even though that sandbags the Houston pork, where they run manned spaceflight out of). The beauty of this plan is like the war plan in Iraq. Landing a man on Mars, and getting out of Iraq, happen 20 years down the road, on some other president's watch.
The real objectives of these programs occur NOW, while he's in office.
well, the project lead should have known whether his team had the critical skills necessary to accomplish the task, or whether his team was going to have a 'learning' experience. Of course, you're always going to learn new things on almost any project. But if the project failed BECAUSE of that - then that is the fault of the person who planned it - and also, IMO, the fault of Project Planning methodology in general (or what they're calling "Systems Engineering" these days) - which has, as a specific goal, removal of the planner, from the details of the implementation. If the planner does not know the details, then he does not know the technology, and does not know what kinds of licensing and proprietary corners he could be painted into, and does not know whether his team has the critical skills necessary to accomplish the task.
I'm more of a low-level guy myself, so I'm not sure I understand what the benefits are of removing the architect from the implementation details are, but the downsides are pretty strongly evident. I see it happen all the time.
Why the fuck do we have to spend so much money on killing each other?
Simple market economics: because some people are willing to spend that much. Really. Why would some guy spend $80,000 on a Mercedes when an old Chevy can get him to and from work?
Well, whether it's a stick, or a sword, or a gun, or a remote-control plane, or a robot, it's just a fucking tool.
The tool will make it easier for the person controlling that tool to perform a certain task.
The morality of that task, is entirely up to the person controlling that tool.
It will be easier to wipe out a bunch of ruthless terrorists concealing themselves among innocent, defenseless, civilians.
And it will also be easier to wipe out a bunch of innocent, defenseless, civilians - and triumphantly report to a compliant newsmedia that you have just wiped out the terrorists.
When we dissected frogs in high school biology, after the first day, we stored them overnight in a cooler. Next day, at the start of class, I stimulated the frog's heart with a probe (no electricity, just physical pressure), and it resumed beating - just for a minute or two - he didn't get up and grab a top hat and cane and start singing show tunes. . . he was pinned down anyway.
99% ads? Well, look at the situation with MTV in 1980.
MTV is the channel that ushered in the Cable TV age in America.
Cable TV replace ad-supported over-the-air broadcast tv, which was ad-supported. Cable's draw was that the customer paid for cable service, and therefor, the content was supposed to be ad free.
But there were channels with ads.
Then there were channels like MTV - where the content was music videos, which, in the 1970's, served the purpose of being promotional devices for bands to concert promoters and record store chains.
So - the old model was; customer watched ad-supported entertainment content, for free. the new model was; customer paid a monthly fee, to watch ad-supported content, and the content was ads.
Get it? Yet, MTV was the "coolest" thing there was, in American culture, through the decade of the 1980's.
For me, the thing that a Blog brings to the table (that the tech journos used to) was name-reputation. When I go to a blog, it's usually the reputation of the operator that draws me there, that the operator is not a shill, and is not regurgitating press releases, that the operator cares about technology, and that the enterprise isn't just a money making one - (ie. pump the next vendor for eyeballs, etc.)
In this vein - the notion that, when they're still small, in audience, that scale supports comments. Too big an audience, and the comments get overwhelmed with spam and crapflooding (slashdot, for some reason, seems to have survived this better than most others, for some reason). But it's in comments where the audience can question the articles, and say, "hey, this is crap" - or actually chime in with more information, THAT is where I find incredible value that the CNETs of the world just can't come close to competing.
I hate to think that it's simple a technological problem with handling a large audience, and I prefer to think that it's more of a problem with the motivation behind the people who run the site. But that's fueled by appearances and suspicions - no real experience. But there is a strong impact on design, (commented on elsewhere on this thread) - and I think that's more of a side effect to these other factors. But it's also a pretty crucial factor in itself.
While I'd agree that your characterization of "appliance computer" as a computer that has been "crippled" is accurate; it is also incomplete.
If all you want is a device that does X, and packaging a computer as an appliance that does only X saves both development costs, and administrative overhead, then I'd say it's a damn useful crippled computer.
I wouldn't want to have an appliance as a desktop system to do my accounting/web browsing and email.
But I wouldn't want to have to deal with all the administrative overhead of managing software installs, disk space, etc. for something that's just slinging video to my TV, or web pages.
"appliance" is a much abused buzzword - I'll give you that. But they're damn handy for a lot of infrastructure tasks (routers, anyone?).
Speaking for the hapless contractors here; A lot of us want to do the right thing, and some of us are even smart enough to do it. Even fewer still, are given the budget and schedule by our superiors to actually accomplish that. And that's IF and ONLY IF, the *customer* can communicate a set of concise, static requirements (and then, actually commit to funding them through the lifetime of the program). Which as we know, in the whole field of IT, let alone Defense Contracting, happens all the time, right?
In my experience, I'll pick one specific program, where we were given requirements to build a system, without any real regard to infosec practices - and after 5+ years of development, 6 months before delivery, one group associated with our customer drops a load of security requirements on us. (ie. we found these specific vulnerabilities, two sets, in two rounds of "testing" - fix them) - we hired an independent engineering firm to analyze it, and they came up with a different set of specific vulnerabilities. Now; prior to that time, those of us who had a clue about system security, did our best to try to instill good design and practices - but if you contract with the government to build a product to do X, and you deem that it's best if the product does X+1, and you spend the government's money to do that without a contract mod, that's called FRAUD. Unfortunate, but true. And at the time - the customer was dragging their feet on the original contract - trying to REDUCE scope, not expand it to include security.
So after this group got our customer thinking about security, and in the mood to talk about contract mods, we did our own homework, and proposed to build the system to DISA spec (instead of fixing vulnerabilities piecemeal, we would re-architect parts of the system to improve overall posture, and proactively address a lot of structural problems) - and as we built up that proposal, one of our contacts started sending all these DoD directives to us "you _shall_ fix this vulnerability, you _shall_ adhere to this standard. . . " etc. - some of these items were demanding things like; we MUST run Windows XP machines, configured a certain way, membered to their Domain Controller, all applications MUST be dotNET, etc. just really apeshit crazy stuff that had nothing to do with sound security engineering. And in the end, the customer refused to even pay for the first set of vulnerabilities that were found, and instead, used it as an excuse to de-fund the entire program; after 5+ years of development. Which put things on hold for 6 months, which caused a brain-drain as some of our best engineers (myself included) left the company. During this time, a lot of high-powered, high-priced executives and managers were jetting all over the place, spending time in replan meetings. WEEKS AND WEEKS. In the end; the customer rejected the plan because we couldn't deploy on their schedule - yet had we not spent 3 months talking about it, we could have hit their schedule. You have to understand what this does for morale in the trenches. ..
So yes - at the outset, my (previous) employer completely dropped the ball when they spec-ed out this program, by agreeing to develop a system that was so hole-ey (in our defense, it was never intended to be connected to the public internet, and was to be deployed in a secured facility - security was deemed to be an ADMINISTRATIVE problem, not a design problem). They compounded the error, by not pushing back and sticking to their guns when the new security assessment that wasn't in the original requirements came down. But the customer should have said something sooner, and they should have presented a single message, a single standard, instead of having four separate entities jump in and tell us how we had to do it. And *KNOWLEDGABLE* points of contacts would have helped. The people I was told to talk to - with our customer, had no freaking clue, and strung us along for months out of sheer incompetence. (In the end, they were happy to be rid of us, and sub-out a replace
Dissing southerners for racism is not racism. The "south" is not a race. At best, it's a culture. People can CHOOSE their culture, behavior, and beliefs. A person can not CHOOSE his or her race. That is why racism is inherently immoral in all cases, and cultural chauvanism, is or is not moral, dependent on circumstance. A culture's value can be relatively "wrong" - but there is also a universal "wrongness" (like embedded racism, or sexism) - and it is morally correct to discourage a culture that perpetuates such universal wrongness.
DISH Network successfully sued the crap out of Microsoft for flaws in WebTV (which Microsoft actually just bought - they didn't develop those boxes). This was after DISH's customers sued DISH in a class action. (DISH settled out of court, for a few PPV coupons).
Slashdot Mirror
Snape is in love with Harry's (dead) mother.
For this reason, he is conflicted in his allegiances.
heh. with Harry Potter, Lemony Snicket, and the Narnia series under my belt, AND HHKTTG, I tried to read Rings aloud to them. They just don't have the patience. Kids these days.
My revenge:
Their kids won't have the patience to sit through Jackson's LoTR movies.
I didn't read Tolkien aloud, but I read Rowling's works aloud (except the 7th) - and they were excruciating. Especially the 5th one. I think she was making a conscious effort to maintain a high many adverbs-per-sentence rate for some reason.
Tolkien is poetry by comparison.
One thing I noticed as I re-read Rings before the movie release: RoTK's prose was markedly different. It was almost like a different person, or maybe he was doing a lot of bible reading at the time, I don't know. It was very stilted, and not as pleasant as the first two books. I know that it was overshadowed by very dark plot happenings - but when you're reading the work of a linguistics professor, you tend to pay attention to details. (when I read Rings the first two times, I admit, I didn't notice or pay attention to style at all. I was just a dumb kid though.)
I mean; think about it.
(honestly, I'd use rats - they're MUCH heartier and smarter).
Implant them with say, a gieger counter, such that the rat (only the rat) receives a stimulus when the detector is set off.
Then train the rat to associate food with counter ticks. (run him through a maze, with a radiation source under the cheese).
Finally, along with the geiger counter, you've also implanted a gps receiver, and a transmitter.
Rat finds the secret, hidden nuclear bomb lab, and transmits the coordinates back to the spooks.
QED.
The President famously didn't want to follow through on Richard Clarke's anti-terrorism efforts because he was tired of "swatting at flies".
well to continue on with that analogy (beating that dead horse) -
. the horse was tired of swatting at flies, so it kicked down the barn, trampled its owner, who previously fed and took care of it, and then the horse, still penned in, starved to death.
Aureas with Caesar's head on them, I'd imagine.
Render unto Caesar, that which is Caesar's.
Well, gee, I wonder if you beat the dealer at single-deck blackjack after he deals you two kings of spades, would the house be obligated to pay, or would you be more likely to find yourself beat up in the alley behind the casino. . . ?
. . . where we (-erm, the "slashdot community") concluded (and I agree. . . ) that half of America's grad students and faculty are foreign, not because America is losing technical leadership, but because they're coming here because that's where the funding and facilities are.
Well, it's the same with these tech jobs. Only - we're preventing these students from making the transition from academia into the professional sector, because of these protectionist work rules. I'm as vocal an opponent as anyone to H1B expansion. But they're either going to work here, in the US, for American companies, or they're going to go back to their home company with a Masters or PhD, and work for a foreign company.
If they stay here - they spend a good chunk of their income here. They pay taxes here. And the American company, remains competetive.
If they go back home, they take that knowledge and expertise with them, and a foreign company uses it as an economic club against us. Or the American company shuts down domestic operations, and opens up an overseas R&D branch - which is not as bad, but is still a death-knell for American competitiveness and American jobs.
What I'd really like to see are some feel-good provisions on beefing up enforcement against abuses of the H1B system, since these abuses are rampant. Unfortunately, nobody currently in government seems interested in cracking down on any kind of law enforcement towards employers these days.
The only folks who care are prez Bush, for demagogic purposes,
Well, basically, the Manned Mars Mission plan, was to kill the ISS and Shuttle. (even though that sandbags the Houston pork, where they run manned spaceflight out of). The beauty of this plan is like the war plan in Iraq. Landing a man on Mars, and getting out of Iraq, happen 20 years down the road, on some other president's watch.
The real objectives of these programs occur NOW, while he's in office.
Well, actually the FINAL solution is to kill all the humans. No more humans, no mission to mars. Landing problem solved.
You're welcome.
- The Martians.
Oh, there's lots of people who have wasted plenty of time on unproven things.
..
I won't provide examples, because the first one that comes to my mind is flamewar-provoking. Just think about it for a second or two. .
You need to send your IT guys to S&R for a MONTH, not a week. Otherwise, you will miss that last day of the month, when 90% of the activity occurs.
well, the project lead should have known whether his team had the critical skills necessary to accomplish the task, or whether his team was going to have a 'learning' experience. Of course, you're always going to learn new things on almost any project. But if the project failed BECAUSE of that - then that is the fault of the person who planned it - and also, IMO, the fault of Project Planning methodology in general (or what they're calling "Systems Engineering" these days) - which has, as a specific goal, removal of the planner, from the details of the implementation. If the planner does not know the details, then he does not know the technology, and does not know what kinds of licensing and proprietary corners he could be painted into, and does not know whether his team has the critical skills necessary to accomplish the task.
I'm more of a low-level guy myself, so I'm not sure I understand what the benefits are of removing the architect from the implementation details are, but the downsides are pretty strongly evident. I see it happen all the time.
Obviously, the solution to that little problem is to immediately ban the sale of all explosives materials such as propane, and gasoline.
*sigh* yeah.
I remember.
It didn't really become the cultural movement in that first year though. It took a couple of years to really build up steam.
Why the fuck do we have to spend so much money on killing each other?
Simple market economics: because some people are willing to spend that much.
Really.
Why would some guy spend $80,000 on a Mercedes when an old Chevy can get him to and from work?
Well, whether it's a stick, or a sword, or a gun, or a remote-control plane, or a robot, it's just a fucking tool.
The tool will make it easier for the person controlling that tool to perform a certain task.
The morality of that task, is entirely up to the person controlling that tool.
It will be easier to wipe out a bunch of ruthless terrorists concealing themselves among innocent, defenseless, civilians.
And it will also be easier to wipe out a bunch of innocent, defenseless, civilians - and triumphantly report to a compliant newsmedia that you have just wiped out the terrorists.
Robots do not change the fundamental calculus.
When we dissected frogs in high school biology, after the first day, we stored them overnight in a cooler. Next day, at the start of class, I stimulated the frog's heart with a probe (no electricity, just physical pressure), and it resumed beating - just for a minute or two - he didn't get up and grab a top hat and cane and start singing show tunes. . . he was pinned down anyway.
99% ads?
Well, look at the situation with MTV in 1980.
MTV is the channel that ushered in the Cable TV age in America.
Cable TV replace ad-supported over-the-air broadcast tv, which was ad-supported. Cable's draw was that the customer paid for cable service, and therefor, the content was supposed to be ad free.
But there were channels with ads.
Then there were channels like MTV - where the content was music videos, which, in the 1970's, served the purpose of being promotional devices for bands to concert promoters and record store chains.
So - the old model was; customer watched ad-supported entertainment content, for free.
the new model was; customer paid a monthly fee, to watch ad-supported content, and the content was ads.
Get it?
Yet, MTV was the "coolest" thing there was, in American culture, through the decade of the 1980's.
For me, the thing that a Blog brings to the table (that the tech journos used to) was name-reputation. When I go to a blog, it's usually the reputation of the operator that draws me there, that the operator is not a shill, and is not regurgitating press releases, that the operator cares about technology, and that the enterprise isn't just a money making one - (ie. pump the next vendor for eyeballs, etc.)
In this vein - the notion that, when they're still small, in audience, that scale supports comments. Too big an audience, and the comments get overwhelmed with spam and crapflooding (slashdot, for some reason, seems to have survived this better than most others, for some reason). But it's in comments where the audience can question the articles, and say, "hey, this is crap" - or actually chime in with more information, THAT is where I find incredible value that the CNETs of the world just can't come close to competing.
I hate to think that it's simple a technological problem with handling a large audience, and I prefer to think that it's more of a problem with the motivation behind the people who run the site. But that's fueled by appearances and suspicions - no real experience. But there is a strong impact on design, (commented on elsewhere on this thread) - and I think that's more of a side effect to these other factors. But it's also a pretty crucial factor in itself.
While I'd agree that your characterization of "appliance computer" as a computer that has been "crippled" is accurate; it is also incomplete.
If all you want is a device that does X, and packaging a computer as an appliance that does only X saves both development costs, and administrative overhead, then I'd say it's a damn useful crippled computer.
I wouldn't want to have an appliance as a desktop system to do my accounting/web browsing and email.
But I wouldn't want to have to deal with all the administrative overhead of managing software installs, disk space, etc. for something that's just slinging video to my TV, or web pages.
"appliance" is a much abused buzzword - I'll give you that. But they're damn handy for a lot of infrastructure tasks (routers, anyone?).
Speaking for the hapless contractors here;
.
A lot of us want to do the right thing, and some of us are even smart enough to do it. Even fewer still, are given the budget and schedule by our superiors to actually accomplish that. And that's IF and ONLY IF, the *customer* can communicate a set of concise, static requirements (and then, actually commit to funding them through the lifetime of the program). Which as we know, in the whole field of IT, let alone Defense Contracting, happens all the time, right?
In my experience, I'll pick one specific program, where we were given requirements to build a system, without any real regard to infosec practices - and after 5+ years of development, 6 months before delivery, one group associated with our customer drops a load of security requirements on us. (ie. we found these specific vulnerabilities, two sets, in two rounds of "testing" - fix them) - we hired an independent engineering firm to analyze it, and they came up with a different set of specific vulnerabilities. Now; prior to that time, those of us who had a clue about system security, did our best to try to instill good design and practices - but if you contract with the government to build a product to do X, and you deem that it's best if the product does X+1, and you spend the government's money to do that without a contract mod, that's called FRAUD. Unfortunate, but true. And at the time - the customer was dragging their feet on the original contract - trying to REDUCE scope, not expand it to include security.
So after this group got our customer thinking about security, and in the mood to talk about contract mods, we did our own homework, and proposed to build the system to DISA spec (instead of fixing vulnerabilities piecemeal, we would re-architect parts of the system to improve overall posture, and proactively address a lot of structural problems) - and as we built up that proposal, one of our contacts started sending all these DoD directives to us "you _shall_ fix this vulnerability, you _shall_ adhere to this standard. . . " etc. - some of these items were demanding things like; we MUST run Windows XP machines, configured a certain way, membered to their Domain Controller, all applications MUST be dotNET, etc. just really apeshit crazy stuff that had nothing to do with sound security engineering. And in the end, the customer refused to even pay for the first set of vulnerabilities that were found, and instead, used it as an excuse to de-fund the entire program; after 5+ years of development. Which put things on hold for 6 months, which caused a brain-drain as some of our best engineers (myself included) left the company. During this time, a lot of high-powered, high-priced executives and managers were jetting all over the place, spending time in replan meetings. WEEKS AND WEEKS. In the end; the customer rejected the plan because we couldn't deploy on their schedule - yet had we not spent 3 months talking about it, we could have hit their schedule. You have to understand what this does for morale in the trenches. .
So yes - at the outset, my (previous) employer completely dropped the ball when they spec-ed out this program, by agreeing to develop a system that was so hole-ey (in our defense, it was never intended to be connected to the public internet, and was to be deployed in a secured facility - security was deemed to be an ADMINISTRATIVE problem, not a design problem). They compounded the error, by not pushing back and sticking to their guns when the new security assessment that wasn't in the original requirements came down. But the customer should have said something sooner, and they should have presented a single message, a single standard, instead of having four separate entities jump in and tell us how we had to do it. And *KNOWLEDGABLE* points of contacts would have helped. The people I was told to talk to - with our customer, had no freaking clue, and strung us along for months out of sheer incompetence. (In the end, they were happy to be rid of us, and sub-out a replace
Dissing southerners for racism is not racism. The "south" is not a race. At best, it's a culture. People can CHOOSE their culture, behavior, and beliefs. A person can not CHOOSE his or her race. That is why racism is inherently immoral in all cases, and cultural chauvanism, is or is not moral, dependent on circumstance. A culture's value can be relatively "wrong" - but there is also a universal "wrongness" (like embedded racism, or sexism) - and it is morally correct to discourage a culture that perpetuates such universal wrongness.
DISH Network successfully sued the crap out of Microsoft for flaws in WebTV (which Microsoft actually just bought - they didn't develop those boxes). This was after DISH's customers sued DISH in a class action. (DISH settled out of court, for a few PPV coupons).
While at the same time, apolitical Germans like Ferdinand Porsche were tossed into prison on false charges.