I know, but I was talking about the page rank feature that makes sure you get relevant results when you do a search, where a site/document gets a higher rank if more sites/documents link to it..DOC files or PDFs don't link to anything, so I can't see how using Google technology to index a corporate intranet with tons of these files would be more useful than an ordinary "flat" keyword search engine.
The only problem with this that I can see as that most internal documents a company would be interested in aren't HTML documents that link to each other. So how are they going to page rank thousands upon thousands of stand alone.DOC files?
While I agree with you "Hitler's Willing Executioners" had its flaws, as does any historical treatise, it lacked the sensationalism and outright conjecture of "IBM and the holocaust". Goldhagen was one-sided, the IBM guy made things up.
The statement "did not actively work with the Nazi's" is inaccurate. Punch card systems design inherently required hands-on involvement from IBM, or a subsidiary shell company that elaborate mechanics were deployed to keep a river of profits flowing to IBM headquarters. In a time (the 1930's) when most businesses were struggling to stay afloat, IBM was expanding at an exponential rate, thanks in large part to Hitler Germany's rabid adoption of Hollerith technology. Each "application" had to be uniquely designed - and involved heavy participation by an IBM analyst to design the precise card question and response holes, and each set of machines needed calibrated. Also, IBM controlled the paper stock supply and the raw card inventory could only be obtained from IBM.
That's right, they sold a product, namely "efficient data storage, retrieval and manipulation". Just like IBM does today. If it had happened sixty years later, the nazis would've bought a relational database plus support, from IBM, say, or from Oracle. The machines and services IBM sold were used for a wide variety of purposes. Tax records, population data, accounting, basically every task the government performed. Yes, the quaint little extras of nazi-style government as well, but in principle it was nothing more than an early and succesful attempt to automate government.
As for the book, I'd be really careful about taking what it says at face value. "IBM and the Holocaust", unlike "Hitler's Willing Executioners" (a good, if frightening read) is not the sturdy historical treatise you seem to think it is (hence my "not this again" comment in my earlier post). Most historians feel the "facts" presented in the book are conjecture at best, served up in a sensationalist fashion to arouse interest in the book.
I don't normally go around flaming people for the stuff they post, but this is ridiculous. I hope it's a troll, in which case I'll gladly admit to having been had, but just in case it isn't (after all, someone did in all seriousness write that ridiculous book you're referring to) allow me to set you straight.
The German subsidiary of IBM sold data processing technology to the nazis. True. It was tried and tested technology, they didn't actively work with the nazis to further refine it, it was already there. It just so happened that the nazis had an extremely effective administration already in place, so the IBM machines could be used as efficiently as possible. Furthermore, when the nazis created new sets of administrative data (pertaining, for instance, to the Final Solution) they were smart enough to set it up in such a way as to be able to feed it more easily to the nice and shiny Holleriths they had. Makes sense, no?
From this does not follow that "IBM was responsible for the holocaust" and you're way out of line if you're suggesting that the PC and Internet we use today wouldn't have existed if it weren't for the nazis looking for an efficient system to structure the murder of six million Jews
You're forgetting that most users aren't "power users". Also, most "power users" tend to be able to learn a new piece of software rather easily, because they're not afraid of computers (like ordinary users are).
The basics haven't changed at all, though. They've just added extra fl^H^Hstuff, fixed a few bugs etc. You can switch from Word 1.0 (Mac) to WordXP and be up and running in no time.
A good point. Unless they're going to add plugin functionality to wine (although I can't imagine a driver functioning well if it's a plugin) before they LGPL it, this is going to do more harm than good.
Face it: the only reason you would want to use wine is so you can run proprietary, closed windows software anyway, so any political arguments for making wine lgpl are basically moot.
Well, that is what I meant. Microsoft control the document format and that, I think, is one reason why government agencies should avoid using Microsoft products. I'm all for freedom and doing things any way you want, but I feel very strongly about forcing civil servants to save their documents in an open file format.
That, and making them use software that doesn't have any sneaky back doors in it. At least with open source, you can spot them if they're there.
Speaking from experience, the worst security problem is the users themselves, not some back door a US agency snuck into the software you use. Some years ago, a friend of mine got himself a nice old laptop that was no longer being used over where his father worked. As soon as he got it, he took it to me so we could figure out how to turn it into a portable music making device. It turned out that nearly all of the software was still installed and that no one had bothered to wipe the hard disk before giving away the computer. Documents were easily recovered by using Undelete. Needless to say, we were amazed at this...
the guy's dad worked for the Dutch military police!
Choosing software JUST because it's open sourced is just as bad as choosing software just because it's closed.
No it isn't. Not if you're a government: it's a really bad idea to give a commercial entity complete control over all of your documents (which are, or should be, public). I'm no open source / free software zealot by a long stretch of the imagination, but I've never understood why governments do this. IMHO, your public responsibilities as a government agency far outweigh the reduced ease of use civil servants may experience when working with something that isn't Microsoft.
HTML/XML. Given the right office suite (I know MSOffice can do this, not too sure about Star/OpenOffice) users can edit these documents any way they like. Sure, the resulting HTML may not be nice and slim enough for the web, but it's more than adequate for office use.
My own rough unscientific study shows that you don't know what you're talking about. Musicians that make music on their computers (there's a whole lot of them nowadays) take their computers with them on stage when they perform. Macs, mostly, because most of the musicians you'll have heard of will have started doing their thing back in the day when there wasn't any reasonable audio app. for PCs. Not anymore. So now there's an increasing amount of PC-musicians starting to get good and playing live as well. Trust me, I've seen them do it. No glitches, crashes, nothing, and yes, it was CD quality. Get with the times.
game makers will continue to put out good games. Top of my head, Black and White
Hmm... I'd say you just named the one title most of my friends (and myself) consider to be a prime example of "looks good but sucks". No one I know played it for more than a few hours, because in the end it turned out to be Populous With Extras That Take Away The Fun. I'm really glad I was smart enough to try the warez version instead of coughing up the full USD 50 for it like most of my buddies.
Depends. In my experience, Unreal engine games tend to be choppy on most hardware, but at least they work. If your hardware can't handle a Q3A engine game, however, you're pretty much screwed.
Well, maybe it's just a matter of having a large collection of older games from which you can pick out the true gems. Sure, we all remember Donkey Kong, Pac Man and Mario, and we claim these games (or others, if you're so inclined) are proof that "older games are better", but we conveniently forget about all the crap titles that came out as well. Guess what? Last year there was a slew of crap games and maybe one or two good ones, just like in 1982.
Re:Nothing beats the quality
on
Non-MP3 Codecs?
·
· Score: 2
Well, I *was* talking about the perfect case. *Theoretically*, vinyl is superior to digital audio. In practice it doesn't really make a difference for the reasons you brought up, except for one thing: vinyl is "easier to listen to" than cd-quality audio (try it: you'll find you grow tired after listening to a few cd's because your brain is straining to "fill in the gaps" as it were, trying to compensate for the lack of extremely high frequencies not present in digital audio with a resolution of 44.1 kHz. You can't really hear those frequencies, but they do serve to smoothe out the sound. This effect is even stronger with lower quality digital audio, such as 22.05 kHz audio, MP3, WMA or MiniDisc. Supposedly, the new "supercd's" no longer suffer from this).
Well, yes, you're right. But as far as "PCM files on audio CD's" are concerned: if you open an audio CD in data mode (i.e. as if it were a CD-ROM), you'll find a.CDA file for every track. The audio data in these.CDA files can be extracted quite easily, if you let your audio editor import them as "raw" audio data.
Re:Nothing beats the quality
on
Non-MP3 Codecs?
·
· Score: 2
Bullshit. Vinyl is analog, hence has an infinite resolution and infinite bit depth. Something no digital audio scheme can match. The catch, of course, is that most tracks that get pressed to vinyl these days ("dance music") are made on computers and are, therefore, of a lesser quality anyway, even though they end up on "hi fi" vinyl.
.WAV *is* PCM. With headers that differ from the PCM files on audio CD's (.CDA). As has been pointed out elsewhere, PCM is simply a way to describe audio data using ones and zeroes. There's no compression involved.
Not this lame old argument again. PDF gains nothing, as far as tamper proofing goes
I didn't say they're perfect, but if you're going to tamper with a PDF, you'll need to know what you're doing, whereas any idiot can (unintentionally) mess up a Word doc. But yes, I agree with you in that it's primarily a matter of perception. Or, to be really mean, I'll say it's a document format that lets the layout guys keep their jobs. Let's just say it's the former...
In my opinion, it isn't truly good until it can be freely converted back and forth into other usable, edit-able formats.
First of all, it is editable, though not as easily as.doc.
Second of all, part of the appeal of PDF is precisely the fact that you can't edit them unless you have some specific tools to do this. Believe it or not, but a lot of businesses find a technology that allows them to share documents electronically without running the risk of someone tampering with them quite convenient. Why do you think it is fax machines are still used as widely as they are?
I happen to think that PDF's are really convenient, they even allow for fill in the blank forms that make it possible (in the Netherlands at least) to interact with all sorts of government agencies without having to go through the tedious process of calling them up, asking them to send a form to you (which they always fail to do unless you remind them at least three times over the course of three weeks), filling it out and sending it back (causing it to "get lost in the mail" (room, I suppose)). Now I just download the PDF, complete the form and mail it back. Done.
Slashdot Mirror
I know, but the point is, they usually don't.
I know, but I was talking about the page rank feature that makes sure you get relevant results when you do a search, where a site/document gets a higher rank if more sites/documents link to it. .DOC files or PDFs don't link to anything, so I can't see how using Google technology to index a corporate intranet with tons of these files would be more useful than an ordinary "flat" keyword search engine.
The only problem with this that I can see as that most internal documents a company would be interested in aren't HTML documents that link to each other. So how are they going to page rank thousands upon thousands of stand alone .DOC files?
While I agree with you "Hitler's Willing Executioners" had its flaws, as does any historical treatise, it lacked the sensationalism and outright conjecture of "IBM and the holocaust". Goldhagen was one-sided, the IBM guy made things up.
The statement "did not actively work with the Nazi's" is inaccurate. Punch card systems design inherently required hands-on involvement from IBM, or a subsidiary shell company that elaborate mechanics were deployed to keep a river of profits flowing to IBM headquarters. In a time (the 1930's) when most businesses were struggling to stay afloat, IBM was expanding at an exponential rate, thanks in large part to Hitler Germany's rabid adoption of Hollerith technology. Each "application" had to be uniquely designed - and involved heavy participation by an IBM analyst to design the precise card question and response holes, and each set of machines needed calibrated. Also, IBM controlled the paper stock supply and the raw card inventory could only be obtained from IBM.
That's right, they sold a product, namely "efficient data storage, retrieval and manipulation". Just like IBM does today. If it had happened sixty years later, the nazis would've bought a relational database plus support, from IBM, say, or from Oracle. The machines and services IBM sold were used for a wide variety of purposes. Tax records, population data, accounting, basically every task the government performed. Yes, the quaint little extras of nazi-style government as well, but in principle it was nothing more than an early and succesful attempt to automate government.
As for the book, I'd be really careful about taking what it says at face value. "IBM and the Holocaust", unlike "Hitler's Willing Executioners" (a good, if frightening read) is not the sturdy historical treatise you seem to think it is (hence my "not this again" comment in my earlier post). Most historians feel the "facts" presented in the book are conjecture at best, served up in a sensationalist fashion to arouse interest in the book.
Not this again.
I don't normally go around flaming people for the stuff they post, but this is ridiculous. I hope it's a troll, in which case I'll gladly admit to having been had, but just in case it isn't (after all, someone did in all seriousness write that ridiculous book you're referring to) allow me to set you straight.
The German subsidiary of IBM sold data processing technology to the nazis. True. It was tried and tested technology, they didn't actively work with the nazis to further refine it, it was already there. It just so happened that the nazis had an extremely effective administration already in place, so the IBM machines could be used as efficiently as possible. Furthermore, when the nazis created new sets of administrative data (pertaining, for instance, to the Final Solution) they were smart enough to set it up in such a way as to be able to feed it more easily to the nice and shiny Holleriths they had. Makes sense, no?
From this does not follow that "IBM was responsible for the holocaust" and you're way out of line if you're suggesting that the PC and Internet we use today wouldn't have existed if it weren't for the nazis looking for an efficient system to structure the murder of six million Jews
You're forgetting that most users aren't "power users". Also, most "power users" tend to be able to learn a new piece of software rather easily, because they're not afraid of computers (like ordinary users are).
The basics haven't changed at all, though. They've just added extra fl^H^Hstuff, fixed a few bugs etc. You can switch from Word 1.0 (Mac) to WordXP and be up and running in no time.
A good point. Unless they're going to add plugin functionality to wine (although I can't imagine a driver functioning well if it's a plugin) before they LGPL it, this is going to do more harm than good.
Face it: the only reason you would want to use wine is so you can run proprietary, closed windows software anyway, so any political arguments for making wine lgpl are basically moot.
Assuming Microsoft stuff actually is easy to use in the first place, which is debatable.
Well, ok, but at least they already *know* how to use Word. You won't believe how resistant "ordinary users" are to learning something new.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't OpenOffice use zipped XML as a native file format already?
Well, that is what I meant. Microsoft control the document format and that, I think, is one reason why government agencies should avoid using Microsoft products. I'm all for freedom and doing things any way you want, but I feel very strongly about forcing civil servants to save their documents in an open file format.
That, and making them use software that doesn't have any sneaky back doors in it. At least with open source, you can spot them if they're there.
Speaking from experience, the worst security problem is the users themselves, not some back door a US agency snuck into the software you use. Some years ago, a friend of mine got himself a nice old laptop that was no longer being used over where his father worked. As soon as he got it, he took it to me so we could figure out how to turn it into a portable music making device. It turned out that nearly all of the software was still installed and that no one had bothered to wipe the hard disk before giving away the computer. Documents were easily recovered by using Undelete. Needless to say, we were amazed at this ...
the guy's dad worked for the Dutch military police!
Choosing software JUST because it's open sourced is just as bad as choosing software just because it's closed.
No it isn't. Not if you're a government: it's a really bad idea to give a commercial entity complete control over all of your documents (which are, or should be, public). I'm no open source / free software zealot by a long stretch of the imagination, but I've never understood why governments do this. IMHO, your public responsibilities as a government agency far outweigh the reduced ease of use civil servants may experience when working with something that isn't Microsoft.
HTML/XML. Given the right office suite (I know MSOffice can do this, not too sure about Star/OpenOffice) users can edit these documents any way they like. Sure, the resulting HTML may not be nice and slim enough for the web, but it's more than adequate for office use.
My own rough unscientific study shows that you don't know what you're talking about. Musicians that make music on their computers (there's a whole lot of them nowadays) take their computers with them on stage when they perform. Macs, mostly, because most of the musicians you'll have heard of will have started doing their thing back in the day when there wasn't any reasonable audio app. for PCs. Not anymore. So now there's an increasing amount of PC-musicians starting to get good and playing live as well. Trust me, I've seen them do it. No glitches, crashes, nothing, and yes, it was CD quality. Get with the times.
game makers will continue to put out good games. Top of my head, Black and White
Hmm... I'd say you just named the one title most of my friends (and myself) consider to be a prime example of "looks good but sucks". No one I know played it for more than a few hours, because in the end it turned out to be Populous With Extras That Take Away The Fun. I'm really glad I was smart enough to try the warez version instead of coughing up the full USD 50 for it like most of my buddies.
Depends. In my experience, Unreal engine games tend to be choppy on most hardware, but at least they work. If your hardware can't handle a Q3A engine game, however, you're pretty much screwed.
Well, maybe it's just a matter of having a large collection of older games from which you can pick out the true gems. Sure, we all remember Donkey Kong, Pac Man and Mario, and we claim these games (or others, if you're so inclined) are proof that "older games are better", but we conveniently forget about all the crap titles that came out as well. Guess what? Last year there was a slew of crap games and maybe one or two good ones, just like in 1982.
Well, I *was* talking about the perfect case. *Theoretically*, vinyl is superior to digital audio. In practice it doesn't really make a difference for the reasons you brought up, except for one thing: vinyl is "easier to listen to" than cd-quality audio (try it: you'll find you grow tired after listening to a few cd's because your brain is straining to "fill in the gaps" as it were, trying to compensate for the lack of extremely high frequencies not present in digital audio with a resolution of 44.1 kHz. You can't really hear those frequencies, but they do serve to smoothe out the sound. This effect is even stronger with lower quality digital audio, such as 22.05 kHz audio, MP3, WMA or MiniDisc. Supposedly, the new "supercd's" no longer suffer from this).
Well, yes, you're right. But as far as "PCM files on audio CD's" are concerned: if you open an audio CD in data mode (i.e. as if it were a CD-ROM), you'll find a .CDA file for every track. The audio data in these .CDA files can be extracted quite easily, if you let your audio editor import them as "raw" audio data.
Bullshit. Vinyl is analog, hence has an infinite resolution and infinite bit depth. Something no digital audio scheme can match. The catch, of course, is that most tracks that get pressed to vinyl these days ("dance music") are made on computers and are, therefore, of a lesser quality anyway, even though they end up on "hi fi" vinyl.
.WAV *is* PCM. With headers that differ from the PCM files on audio CD's (.CDA). As has been pointed out elsewhere, PCM is simply a way to describe audio data using ones and zeroes. There's no compression involved.
Not this lame old argument again. PDF gains nothing, as far as tamper proofing goes
...
I didn't say they're perfect, but if you're going to tamper with a PDF, you'll need to know what you're doing, whereas any idiot can (unintentionally) mess up a Word doc. But yes, I agree with you in that it's primarily a matter of perception. Or, to be really mean, I'll say it's a document format that lets the layout guys keep their jobs. Let's just say it's the former
In my opinion, it isn't truly good until it can be freely converted back and forth into other usable, edit-able formats.
.doc.
First of all, it is editable, though not as easily as
Second of all, part of the appeal of PDF is precisely the fact that you can't edit them unless you have some specific tools to do this. Believe it or not, but a lot of businesses find a technology that allows them to share documents electronically without running the risk of someone tampering with them quite convenient. Why do you think it is fax machines are still used as widely as they are?
I happen to think that PDF's are really convenient, they even allow for fill in the blank forms that make it possible (in the Netherlands at least) to interact with all sorts of government agencies without having to go through the tedious process of calling them up, asking them to send a form to you (which they always fail to do unless you remind them at least three times over the course of three weeks), filling it out and sending it back (causing it to "get lost in the mail" (room, I suppose)). Now I just download the PDF, complete the form and mail it back. Done.