I'm increasingly of the opinion that for all but the simplest of sites, there just aren't any good "off the shelf" content management systems, unless you have no problem with your site looking like the default installation of whichever CMS you chose.
Here's the logic: 1. A very basic site (read: a blog) with a very basic CMS is generally not hard to set up.
2. The technical issue: as sites get more complicated, the level of sophistication required by the user to install and maintain them increases. (In the extreme case, I submit Xaraya, a CMS so complicated that trying to create a site as simple as "I just want a page with our contact information on it!" becomes an exercise capable of inducing intra-cranial hemmorage). Additionally, any templating system required grows more and more arcane, until it is essentially indistingushable from the actual programming language in which it's written.For example: the easiest way of getting a Drupal site laid out and usable quickly is to use the PHPTemplate plugin - in other words, to just write PHP code. David Heinemeier Hansson, no stranger to controversy, went a step further than this and labeled general-purpose CMSes "pipe dreams," and said "I believe the time has come to mark a date in the not too distant future for celebrating the death of the general-purpose content management system." (Not like he doesn't have his own thing to push, but that's as may be. See also Jeff Veen's frustration with open source CMSes
3. The social issue: as the content management system grows more and more complicated, they become more and more intractable for the average end user. Responsibility for day to day site updates is pushed to the IT department, which is absolutely not where it belongs. (Once again, I give you the one, the only, Jeffrey Veen.)
Hint: When ever you hear somebody say "Our employees are our greatest asset" they're lying, or they don't understand basic accounting, or they're slavers and illegal after-market organ transplanters.
Don't go into debt. You need to decide what your priorities are- enjoying your job, or that new house and new car.
Or the life of your child.
I submit this as a hypothetical to make a larger point, so bear with me a moment. In November of '04, my wife and I were lucky enough to have a beautiful baby girl. Unfortunately, our daughter's arrival was early by twelve weeks. Statistically, doctors at her hospital put her chances of survival at 75%: better than even odds, to be sure, but still pretty terrifying when you're a new parent.
After a stay in neo-natal intensive care lasting just over eighty days, our daughter was finally ready to come home. Fortunately, my wife and I both had decent jobs with good health insurance, so when we saw the bill for our daughter's care, the total came to just over a thousand dollars.
The actual cost of her care? According to our insurance company, over half a million dollars.
The larger point I mentioned? Please don't assume that everyone who is in debt is there because they can't control their spending. Not everyone will be as lucky as we were.
You are seeking to crucify only thoose you disagree with politically for doing the same thing (albiet in Bigger numbers) that the democrats did. I say, I don't care. Kick all of them out of office.
No. I'm seeking to prosecute those who broke the law first. The niceties of campaign finance reform can be addressed after we take care of the actual, you know, felons.
So far, in this particular case, that would seem to be only Republicans.
So the $500,000 To democrats, and the $50,000 to Harry Reid were just business as usual?
As I said in my post: they were donations from the tribes to the Democrats. Distasteful maybe, but that's lobbying in Washington these days. Illegal? Definitely not. And this isn't just an ethics issue, this is a straight-up pay for play indictment issue.
Or put differently: Republicans and Democrats both got paid. But Republicans got paid more, and the money they got was gotten illegally. To quote Marshall, whom I referenced above, "to the best of my knowledge no credible claim has been made that any Democrat is even under investigation in the Abramoff scandal, let alone facing potential indictment. At least half a dozen Republicans have been so named in press reports, with varying degrees of specificity."
For that matter, the entire rise of K street under the Clinton Administration was accidental?
Are you suggesting that the GOP's largely successful plan to lock in lobbyist jobs and lobbyist dollars to the Republican party is Clinton's fault?
That's a new one.
There is no doubt that the Republicans need to clean ship, before the next election, or the voters will do it for them. But for Democrats to act like they arn't also affect by this, didn't go to the Signature resturant, or didn't stop by the sky boxes is pushing truth past the spin zone.
So far, it doesn't look like there's anything to accuse them off except impropriety. And that's just sleazy, not breaking the law.
Like I said: the Democrats don't have clean hands on this. In fact, near as I can make out, nobody in Washington does. But so far, it looks like no Democrat broke the law with regards to the Abramoff issue, and unless that changes, the insistence that this is a "bipartisan scandal" is best confined to obviously partisan talking heads...
But wait, what am I thinking? You just used the phrase "spin zone."
So now you get one side pissed off because of a percieved inaccuracy (and literally, they are right), and the other side feeling like they have to defend themselves (which they should), and then it's a flame war and OMG! LIKE THE END of the WORLD or something!
For disclosure: I tend to lean leftwards, and most of the time will side with Ds over Rs. With that in mind, this is an example of how trying to go the middle route can leave you with the wrong idea.
Yes, it's true that some of Abramoff's clients (specifically, I'm referring to the Indian tribes involved in the Casino scandal) donated money to Democrats. However, that's neither surprising nor even suspect, although many find it distateful. After all, the tribes are one of the parties which apparently got bilked by Abramaoff.
The issue is that Abramoff seems to have been involved in money-laundering and outright vote-buying schemes. These activities seem to have included Republicans, and only Republicans. And before I'm accused of partisan Republican bashing, reflect for a second on why the dirty parties might all happen to be Republicans in this case:
1. Jack Abramoff is a die-hard, lifelong Republican. Why would he be funneling money to the other side? 2. The Republicans control the House, Senate, and White House. Why would you funnel money to someone who can't deliver what you need?
The sad truth of the matter is that the current state of affairs can be traced back to the Congressional ascendency of the Republican Party back in 94. Tom DeLay (you may have heard of him?) then started the "K Street Project," in which lobbyists were pressured to hire Republicans (and only Republicans) if they wanted access to party leaders, and to give money to Republicans (and only Republicans). Since that sort of political patronage is the lifesblood of Washington, it wasn't too long before the Democrats were more or less frozen out of the process.
Anyhoo: The Washington Post actually does have a quick primer on the project up. But for consistantly good reporting on the subject from an honest to god journalist who knows how to keep a good blog, you should check out Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo. (Warning: Marshall is pretty obivously anti-Republican, but he's also pretty obviously completely fair in his reporting. Once you get around the sarcasm.)
(Disclaimer: I have been out of the cognitive science game for a long, long time, and was only a student even back then.)
Based on the extremely short treatment his essay is given in the review, Ellerman's The Semantics Differentiation of Minds and Machines sounds like a tired rehash of Searle's "Chinese Room" argument - that is to say, a restatement of an argument that I didn't find that compelling the first time around. Douglas Hofstadter, writing about Searle's essay, called it "religious diatribe against AI, masquerading as a serious scientific argument."
Can anyone who read Ellerman's essay comment on how it differs from Searle's?
As an aside, for awhile we actually had an editor reading Slashdot articles and correcting grammatical mistakes. Turns out it doesn't really matter much. People found other things to complain about. It's almost as if some percentage of the population wants to complain. And they will find something to complain about no matter what. Perhaps by leaving a few typos on the site, I am making their day a little easier! Leave them some low hanging fruit I guess.
No wonder he was unsatisfied with the results. Why fix the minor issues when they do such a good job of obscuring the real ones?
Re:Frequent Shopping Card @ Grocery Store
on
Myware and Spyware
·
· Score: 1
"One two three fouuuur five, six seven eight niiiine ten, eleven twel-el-el-el-elve!" (note the exclamation point is very important). Only on the last verse.;)
Re:Frequent Shopping Card @ Grocery Store
on
Myware and Spyware
·
· Score: 2, Funny
When I read the phone number, I couldn't help singing it. Only there aren't enough digits in a standard US phone number to sing, "One two three fouuuur five, six seven eight niiiine ten, eleven twelve."
No offense, because I can understand where you're coming from, but surely you can see the flaw in your own reasoning.
I was sick and tired of my old doctor. He was always telling me what to do. So I got a new doctor. The first day I went into the office, I picked up his reflex hammer and started trying to put it up my nose. "Hey, dude," my new doctor said. "Quit that, you're gonna hurt yourself."
"Dammit, Doc!" I said. "Can't you see that I only came here in the first place because I don't want you telling me what to do!"
Translation: if you want it to be stable and easy, and you go with branches labled "testing" and "unstable," you kinda forfeit the right to complain later, regardless of how well you take constructive criticism.
(For a later conversation: semantic differences between "endless fiddling around and careful management" and "mucho tweaked.")
In my last job, I put in about a year as an intern, then worked for an additional eight years at the same place. By my last year there, I was sysadmin, web guy, dba, and first line tech support dude. Usually, I'd wind up dispatching an intern to deal with tech support calls whenever possible.
One call had me responding to a guy whose keyboard was, bar none, the most disgusting I've ever seen. He had left for the day, and I picked up the keyboard because he'd left a USB device plugged into it. Something like a metric ton of dander, hair, and bread/cracker/cookie crumbs fell out of it.
A few weeks later, the building administrator (read: not my boss) sent me a note explaining to me why I needed (read: ordering me) to go to everyone's keyboard, blow out the keys with compressed air, wipe them down, check every key for motility, and wipe down the monitors. After a brief consultation with my boss, I replied that I trusted our employees to be able to handle those maintenance tasks themselves, although I'd be happy to help if there was a specific problem.
All this is by way of saying: some people just don't think about it, and some people just want it to be someone else's problem. But it's your mess, so clean it up, for chrissake.
I've given up trying to explain this stuff to non-techies. They're on their own. If they're the sort who has to ask questions, they won't stop asking questions.
Oh, I agree. But the issue isn't that they're asking questions. I appreciate that tons of people are tired of countless tech support calls, but that's not really what I'm after.
What I want to do is to see people stop making snap decisions which, to a techie, are obviously, horribly, wrong. Just to the point where they think, "Hey, maybe I should check with someone who knows about this stuff before I [ buy software I don't need | install this spyware | fail to back any of my stuff up ]" Just a little bit of thought, enough for someone to pull back and say, "I'm out of my league and need help."
My father asks "I think the computer you gave me is out of date, it tells me that I don't have the required component to view this website"
That sounds like IE's "You must install additional components to display this web page" error. When it's happened to me, it's because I was on some gadget site or another and followed a link to a page which wanted to render some Japanese characters.
Drawn from repeated conversations with family, the top three things that I wish novices knew:
1. Just because you saw it on the Internet doesn't make it true. This applies equally to politics, science, and "YOUR COMPUTER HAS BEEN INFECTED BY SPYWARE! CLICK HERE TO REMOVE!" (reference: my aunt, who spent about thirty bucks downloading sketchy looking "web accelerator" software because a popup told her that she needed it desperately.)
2. Messages/windows/random stuff which appears on your screen does so as a result of programs running on your computer. Sometimes they're from the operating system, sometimes from a program you launched, and sometimes from software which is trying to hide from you. Your first hint that something is wrong here will often be, "Huh. I wonder where that window came from?" (reference: the countless tech support calls I've had from people who failed to connect the porn adverts appearing from out of nowhere with the "one thousand cool smiley-faces in your email!!!!!" software they downloaded.)
3. It's surprisingly easy to render a computer completely inoperable. Back up your data accordingly, and make sure you have easy access to your install/rescue media. (reference: personal experience)
Thanks for the heads up - looks like an interesting product. For some reason, I just have a mental block about CA.
I find their price schedule pretty funny, though. The difference between their "Enterprise Maintenance" and "Value Maintenance" support packages appears to be that the first gets you 24x7 phone support, while the second only gives you 12x5. How much do you have to pay to get the additional 108 hours of weekly coverage? Two dollars.
...Is he right, and what actual products exist for OS X that would protect against infections?
My stock response: "The truth is, viruses just aren't a huge threat on the Mac right now. However, my religion precludes me from advising you to not buy anti-virus software."
It's not like you don't have options though. You can get anti-virus software from: Symantec Sophos Intego McAfee (Virex, included with a.Mac membership) And, of course, there's always Clam AV, along with the ClamXav front end for OS X.
In the case of horror films, what is scarrier: that some alien worms are just spread around town squirting nasty things into people which makes them die while spraying alien jelly stuff over everything...
Sounds like that one sorority party I went to once in college.
"At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge," said the gentleman, taking up a pen, "it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor and Destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir."
"Are there no prisons?" asked Scrooge.
"Plenty of prisons," said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.
"And the Union workhouses?" demanded Scrooge. "Are they still in operation?"
"They are. Still," returned the gentleman, "I wish I could say they were not."
"The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?" said Scrooge.
"Both very busy, sir."
"Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course," said Scrooge. "I'm very glad to hear it."
Slashdot Mirror
While this is a network jump, rather than a drop-and-catch, there is an example a bit closer to home that bears mentioning.
I mean, it's even the same guy.
I'm increasingly of the opinion that for all but the simplest of sites, there just aren't any good "off the shelf" content management systems, unless you have no problem with your site looking like the default installation of whichever CMS you chose.
Here's the logic:
1. A very basic site (read: a blog) with a very basic CMS is generally not hard to set up.
2. The technical issue: as sites get more complicated, the level of sophistication required by the user to install and maintain them increases. (In the extreme case, I submit Xaraya, a CMS so complicated that trying to create a site as simple as "I just want a page with our contact information on it!" becomes an exercise capable of inducing intra-cranial hemmorage). Additionally, any templating system required grows more and more arcane, until it is essentially indistingushable from the actual programming language in which it's written.For example: the easiest way of getting a Drupal site laid out and usable quickly is to use the PHPTemplate plugin - in other words, to just write PHP code. David Heinemeier Hansson, no stranger to controversy, went a step further than this and labeled general-purpose CMSes "pipe dreams," and said "I believe the time has come to mark a date in the not too distant future for celebrating the death of the general-purpose content management system." (Not like he doesn't have his own thing to push, but that's as may be. See also Jeff Veen's frustration with open source CMSes
3. The social issue: as the content management system grows more and more complicated, they become more and more intractable for the average end user. Responsibility for day to day site updates is pushed to the IT department, which is absolutely not where it belongs. (Once again, I give you the one, the only, Jeffrey Veen.)
Well, they don't exactly depreciate.
Or the life of your child.
I submit this as a hypothetical to make a larger point, so bear with me a moment. In November of '04, my wife and I were lucky enough to have a beautiful baby girl. Unfortunately, our daughter's arrival was early by twelve weeks. Statistically, doctors at her hospital put her chances of survival at 75%: better than even odds, to be sure, but still pretty terrifying when you're a new parent.
After a stay in neo-natal intensive care lasting just over eighty days, our daughter was finally ready to come home. Fortunately, my wife and I both had decent jobs with good health insurance, so when we saw the bill for our daughter's care, the total came to just over a thousand dollars.
The actual cost of her care? According to our insurance company, over half a million dollars.
The larger point I mentioned? Please don't assume that everyone who is in debt is there because they can't control their spending. Not everyone will be as lucky as we were.
Including working in CMYK end-to-end? Or with 16-bit RAW?
So, what if it's his business decision?
No. I'm seeking to prosecute those who broke the law first. The niceties of campaign finance reform can be addressed after we take care of the actual, you know, felons.
So far, in this particular case, that would seem to be only Republicans.
Hee.
"Now, why would you assume that I knew kara-te?"
As I said in my post: they were donations from the tribes to the Democrats. Distasteful maybe, but that's lobbying in Washington these days. Illegal? Definitely not. And this isn't just an ethics issue, this is a straight-up pay for play indictment issue.
Or put differently: Republicans and Democrats both got paid. But Republicans got paid more, and the money they got was gotten illegally. To quote Marshall, whom I referenced above, "to the best of my knowledge no credible claim has been made that any Democrat is even under investigation in the Abramoff scandal, let alone facing potential indictment. At least half a dozen Republicans have been so named in press reports, with varying degrees of specificity."
Are you suggesting that the GOP's largely successful plan to lock in lobbyist jobs and lobbyist dollars to the Republican party is Clinton's fault?
That's a new one.
So far, it doesn't look like there's anything to accuse them off except impropriety. And that's just sleazy, not breaking the law.
Like I said: the Democrats don't have clean hands on this. In fact, near as I can make out, nobody in Washington does. But so far, it looks like no Democrat broke the law with regards to the Abramoff issue, and unless that changes, the insistence that this is a "bipartisan scandal" is best confined to obviously partisan talking heads...
But wait, what am I thinking? You just used the phrase "spin zone."
Jeez. Are you my long lost twin brother or something? ;)
;) )
(You actually posted first, but I was still writing my response when you hit submit.
For disclosure: I tend to lean leftwards, and most of the time will side with Ds over Rs. With that in mind, this is an example of how trying to go the middle route can leave you with the wrong idea.
Yes, it's true that some of Abramoff's clients (specifically, I'm referring to the Indian tribes involved in the Casino scandal) donated money to Democrats. However, that's neither surprising nor even suspect, although many find it distateful. After all, the tribes are one of the parties which apparently got bilked by Abramaoff.
The issue is that Abramoff seems to have been involved in money-laundering and outright vote-buying schemes. These activities seem to have included Republicans, and only Republicans. And before I'm accused of partisan Republican bashing, reflect for a second on why the dirty parties might all happen to be Republicans in this case:
1. Jack Abramoff is a die-hard, lifelong Republican. Why would he be funneling money to the other side?
2. The Republicans control the House, Senate, and White House. Why would you funnel money to someone who can't deliver what you need?
The sad truth of the matter is that the current state of affairs can be traced back to the Congressional ascendency of the Republican Party back in 94. Tom DeLay (you may have heard of him?) then started the "K Street Project," in which lobbyists were pressured to hire Republicans (and only Republicans) if they wanted access to party leaders, and to give money to Republicans (and only Republicans). Since that sort of political patronage is the lifesblood of Washington, it wasn't too long before the Democrats were more or less frozen out of the process.
Anyhoo: The Washington Post actually does have a quick primer on the project up. But for consistantly good reporting on the subject from an honest to god journalist who knows how to keep a good blog, you should check out Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo. (Warning: Marshall is pretty obivously anti-Republican, but he's also pretty obviously completely fair in his reporting. Once you get around the sarcasm.)
(Disclaimer: I have been out of the cognitive science game for a long, long time, and was only a student even back then.)
Based on the extremely short treatment his essay is given in the review, Ellerman's The Semantics Differentiation of Minds and Machines sounds like a tired rehash of Searle's "Chinese Room" argument - that is to say, a restatement of an argument that I didn't find that compelling the first time around. Douglas Hofstadter, writing about Searle's essay, called it "religious diatribe against AI, masquerading as a serious scientific argument."
Can anyone who read Ellerman's essay comment on how it differs from Searle's?
No wonder he was unsatisfied with the results. Why fix the minor issues when they do such a good job of obscuring the real ones?
"One two three fouuuur five, six seven eight niiiine ten, eleven twel-el-el-el-elve!" (note the exclamation point is very important). ;)
Only on the last verse.
When I read the phone number, I couldn't help singing it. Only there aren't enough digits in a standard US phone number to sing, "One two three fouuuur five, six seven eight niiiine ten, eleven twelve."
Translation: if you want it to be stable and easy, and you go with branches labled "testing" and "unstable," you kinda forfeit the right to complain later, regardless of how well you take constructive criticism.
(For a later conversation: semantic differences between "endless fiddling around and careful management" and "mucho tweaked.")
I think you answered your own question. (hint: look for the dollar sign.)
In my last job, I put in about a year as an intern, then worked for an additional eight years at the same place. By my last year there, I was sysadmin, web guy, dba, and first line tech support dude. Usually, I'd wind up dispatching an intern to deal with tech support calls whenever possible.
One call had me responding to a guy whose keyboard was, bar none, the most disgusting I've ever seen. He had left for the day, and I picked up the keyboard because he'd left a USB device plugged into it. Something like a metric ton of dander, hair, and bread/cracker/cookie crumbs fell out of it.
A few weeks later, the building administrator (read: not my boss) sent me a note explaining to me why I needed (read: ordering me) to go to everyone's keyboard, blow out the keys with compressed air, wipe them down, check every key for motility, and wipe down the monitors. After a brief consultation with my boss, I replied that I trusted our employees to be able to handle those maintenance tasks themselves, although I'd be happy to help if there was a specific problem.
All this is by way of saying: some people just don't think about it, and some people just want it to be someone else's problem. But it's your mess, so clean it up, for chrissake.
Oh, I agree. But the issue isn't that they're asking questions. I appreciate that tons of people are tired of countless tech support calls, but that's not really what I'm after.
What I want to do is to see people stop making snap decisions which, to a techie, are obviously, horribly, wrong. Just to the point where they think, "Hey, maybe I should check with someone who knows about this stuff before I [ buy software I don't need | install this spyware | fail to back any of my stuff up ]" Just a little bit of thought, enough for someone to pull back and say, "I'm out of my league and need help."
That sounds like IE's "You must install additional components to display this web page" error. When it's happened to me, it's because I was on some gadget site or another and followed a link to a page which wanted to render some Japanese characters.
Drawn from repeated conversations with family, the top three things that I wish novices knew:
1. Just because you saw it on the Internet doesn't make it true. This applies equally to politics, science, and "YOUR COMPUTER HAS BEEN INFECTED BY SPYWARE! CLICK HERE TO REMOVE!" (reference: my aunt, who spent about thirty bucks downloading sketchy looking "web accelerator" software because a popup told her that she needed it desperately.)
2. Messages/windows/random stuff which appears on your screen does so as a result of programs running on your computer. Sometimes they're from the operating system, sometimes from a program you launched, and sometimes from software which is trying to hide from you. Your first hint that something is wrong here will often be, "Huh. I wonder where that window came from?" (reference: the countless tech support calls I've had from people who failed to connect the porn adverts appearing from out of nowhere with the "one thousand cool smiley-faces in your email!!!!!" software they downloaded.)
3. It's surprisingly easy to render a computer completely inoperable. Back up your data accordingly, and make sure you have easy access to your install/rescue media. (reference: personal experience)
Independent RPGs fo' life, yo!
Thanks for the heads up - looks like an interesting product. For some reason, I just have a mental block about CA.
I find their price schedule pretty funny, though. The difference between their "Enterprise Maintenance" and "Value Maintenance" support packages appears to be that the first gets you 24x7 phone support, while the second only gives you 12x5. How much do you have to pay to get the additional 108 hours of weekly coverage? Two dollars.
My stock response: "The truth is, viruses just aren't a huge threat on the Mac right now. However, my religion precludes me from advising you to not buy anti-virus software."
It's not like you don't have options though. You can get anti-virus software from:
Symantec
Sophos
Intego
McAfee (Virex, included with a
And, of course, there's always Clam AV, along with the ClamXav front end for OS X.
Sounds like that one sorority party I went to once in college.
Well, since this guy.