I'm not surprised it has made so little difference.
As we know, technical solutions are rarely enough to protect data. Human processes and policies can be much more important.
Personally I prefer the UK approach, the Data Protection Act. No doubt it is flawed, and sadly not enforced as rigorously as it should be, but the concept is better. Rather than mandate specific technological approaches, it imposes a set of general requirements on any organisation that holds personal data:
Data may only be used for the specific purposes for which it was collected.
Data must not be disclosed to other parties without the consent of the individual whom it is about, unless there is legislation or other overriding legitimate reason to share the information (for example, the prevention or detection of crime). It is an offence for Other Parties to obtain this personal data without authorisation.
Individuals have a right of access to the information held about them, subject to certain exceptions (for example, information held for the prevention or detection of crime).
Personal information may be kept for no longer than is necessary.
Personal information may not be transmitted outside the EEA unless the individual whom it is about has consented or adequate protection is in place, for example by the use of a prescribed form of contract to govern the transmission of the data.
Subject to some exceptions for organisations that only do very simple processing, and for domestic use, all entities that process personal information must register with the Information Commissioner.
Entities holding personal information are required to have adequate security measures in place. Those include technical measures (such as firewalls) and organisational measures (such as staff training).
The DPA is one of the few generally excellent pieces of legislation in the UK. It's just a shame that the Information Commisioner's Office that enforces it isn't as active as it could be. But it gives you quite a bit of power to take on companies yourself.
And yet Apple will still probably sell a metric assload of new MacBooks.
Saying that hundreds of users are pissed off just means there is a small but vocal minority who are annoyed.
The vast majority of MacBook users and potential buyers couldn't care less what FW is, and probably don't even know what it is.
As a number of commentators have pointed out, the vast majority of consumer grade video cameras now use USB. Seriously, if you don't like the product, don't buy it. Is it really that hard?
Not off the top of my head, it's been almost ten years since I left uni.
However I do remember reading a paper about what is now called "life logging", storing everything you do and recording, dating back from the 1960's. It was totally impractical then.
One good example of what I mean is the so-called "Mother of all Demos", given by Doug Engelbart in 1968. Look it up on YouTube, I'm sure the video will be up there. It demonstrated concepts that were well ahead of their time, some of which have only recently entered the wider world. Check it out, it's a fascinating video.
My tutor at university used to get us to produce reports on old papers from the really early days of compsci, the 50's and 60's.
What amazed me was how many great ideas were put forward which just couldn't have been implemented successfully at the time, and how many have turned up again many years later as "new" ideas.
There are many ideas that were invented decades ago, but people have just forgotten about.
It makes you wonder what great ideas and discoveries are lying hidden in old journals that no-one ever reads.
So much for the new levels of openness and transparency that the Olympics were supposed to usher in.
While I was hopeful in the early days of the olympics, four years ago, I got a reality check later on when it became obvious that the Chinese government was determined that this was going to be a very tightly controlled operation.
This isn't really a surprise, the Moscow olympics didn't end the cold war, and the Munich olympics didn't stop WWII.
China visibly and provably improving its human rights and freedoms should have been a prerequisite of being given the olympics, not just a half-hearted, vague promise (with fingers crossed) to sort of improve, without actually changing things. Expecting China to follow through once it had secured the event was foolish in hindsight. By that point the IOC had no sanction, they were never going to take it away, China knew that, so they could do what they liked.
What I particularly object to (in addition to the whole concept) is the capricious nature of many blocks. BoingBoing has been blocked by a number of blocklist companies, not because of anything rude or illegal, but because they had articles about filtering companies
At the end of the day, you have a human organisation making decisions, and even in the best of worlds that will be open to abuse.
As a brit, I welcome our Aussie friends to the panopticon of fear.
"The robot was developed using characteristics of plants normally grown for ornamental purposes."
And
"If a person's voice becomes louder than a certain level, the flower buds will come into bloom, and the stem shakes slightly to suggest a greeting. When the room lights up, the buds open and close, and when music is played, the plant dances."
What kind of plants do they keep around there! Do they also eat meat and sing like Levi Stubbs?
Remember kids, never feed a plant that moves on its own and likes the taste of blood.
As I said, I will, but it is low down my priority list because there are other things that will actually make a difference to my site's users that I need to do first.
HTML standards compliance is, for most people, irrelevant. It's like using perfect grammar, it's a good thing to have, but failing doesn't make you unintelligible. Only when your grammar is really bad, or your standards compliance is utterly terrible, do you become unintelligible (to man and browser), at which point it becomes a problem.
Nice way to get more budget, "OMG the terrorists are going to control our nukes from their iPhones!!!11!! You must give us lot of money to protect you".
I know there are threats, and I know that a lot needs to be done about them, but this kind of scaremongering is getting boring after nearly a decade.
This is a real problem, there is no need to exaggerate it. You use unsupported hyperbole at your peril, after a while no-one will take you seriously. Especially now, when budgets are under so much scrutiny.
In many ways these financial problems could be great for civil liberties, constructing a surveillance society costs real money. Just take a look at the UK ID scheme, it will cost billions.
You only need to make one mistake in your markup to be non-compliant. I would be interested to see what the degree of failure is for the other 95.87% of sites. My website, Wii Fit Forum currently fails on six counts, all just simple errors in the code which I plan to fix. But currently, the site displays just fine, so I have more important things to worry about. I think this is the same for many publishers.
Unfortunately for the novice, the ignorant, the lazy or the just plain error-prone (the last two are me), the W3C and the browser industry do not make it that easy to be compliant.
HTML standards are the current prime example of the old joke "the great thing about standards is that there are so many of them". The W3C really needs to stop pissing around with all this semantic web crap, and concentrate on making what is already there work better.
We need a single standard which embodies all the best elements of the existing ones in a coherent form, and then the browers manufacturers need to get their arses in gear and implement it properly. The novice developer is currently confronted with a mish-mash of alternative doc-types, each of which has different pros and cons, and which may or may not work properly depending on your browser. It needs to be done soon, not over a ten year timescale.
When you can stop worrying about whether your site will work in various browsers, then people will spend more time on compliance. Until then, people will worry about the important things, such as their readers being able to see their site properly.
I know I should treat standards with more importance, but while the current mess persists it is hard to care.
If you don't like their product then you are free to use something else, a huge number of people are very happy with their products. If they tried to provide everything that you, and everyone, else wants (which will of course be different things), then the end result would be a mess. There are *always* people who don't like a product. 37s are just honest about this and don't try to make out that their products will be right for everyone.
Out of curiosity, what did you move to? Basecamp is too expensive for me, so I'm on the lookout for something that that does that kind of job.
Here's a function that generates the infinite list of fibbonacci numbers:
fibs x y = x : (fibs y (x + y))
You have just demonstrated thermian's point.
How often do you actually need to generate infinite sequences? I have never needed to do that outside of a functional programming class.
I'm a big fan of alternative programming languages, I've used some 20 or so since I started 20 years ago. I did a fair amount of commercial Prolog development after I left university, I really like Prolog. It makes certain things really easy and it's a joy to code certain types of solutions in, but I'm never going to write a web-app, or a word-processor in Prolog.
Many of these languages are very clever when it comes to doing certain things, but how often do you actually need to do those things?
The truth is that the vast majority of the software out there does pretty dull, mostly procedural jobs. That's why the main languages in use are just dull variations on the procedural, C/Java/Perl style. No matter how much maths geeks go on about functional programming, procedural systems will always be more suited and easier to use for most of the problems out there.
That isn't to say there is no place for these alternative languages, but it's a smaller one which you probably won't see very often.
My understanding was that current techniques in game graphics were developed because they require less computing power to achieve a similar level of quality; or to put it another way, they produce better quality for the same amount of computation.
If this is the case, why not just use the increasing processing power to produce better quality graphics using the current optimized techniques?
Am I missing something? Intel's argument seems a bit like saying we should get rid of QuickSort and go back to Bubble sort, because we now have the processing power to do it quickly. Is there something about ray-tracing vs current polygon techniques that means that the difference is actually narrowing as processor power increases?
Is this just a processor company - unsurprisingly - suggesting that we use more processing power, or is there something concrete to their argument that I've missed?
Yep, a Google appliance (or equivalent, there are others on the market such as X1) is the way to go.
I set up a Google Mini for indexing an internal wiki, our bug tracking system, and some other systems, and it is very straight-forward.
I know the original question mentioned meta-data, but you have to ask yourself if the meta-data is going to be maintained well enough that the search index will be valid. Going the Google Appliance route is so much simpler. It takes a bit of tweaking to set up the search restrictions, but once up and running, it works flawlessly. Most importantly, it doesn't require everyone to make sure that all their document meta-data is perfect.
Google appliance pricing is really quite cheap when you compare it to the time cost of setting up a meta-data driven system.
Meta-data is one of those things that seems like a really good idea, but like all plans, doesn't tend to survive contact with the enemy, which in this case is the user.
The total includes the energy used by desktop computers and monitors (which makes up two-thirds of the total)
So "The Internet" makes up 3.13%, not 9.4%
The other 6.27% is from desktop computers. Which may or may not be doing "internet stuff" at any moment in time. Lumping all desktop machines into the count is disingenuous.
It's still a bigger number than I would have thought. And it is a bit of an eye opener to realize how much power all those PCs are using up.
Something that a lot of people missed when the DS and PSP were introduced, was the price point.
Taking a look at Argos (major UK retailer, the kind of place many people buy these things from)...
* PSP : 180GBP * Nintendo DS : 90GBP
PSP games start at 30GBP and go up to 35. DS games start at 15 and go up to 30.
The DS is not selling to the kind of people who will put down 200quid for a graphics card just to play the latest blood-fest, it sells to the huge number of casual gamers who want something fun. For the price of a PSP you can buy a DS and three games.
The DS also sells to parents buying presents and I imagine it did a hell of a lot better over christmas than the PSP.
This is exactly what happened with the original gameboy. When I was a kid I, and most of my friends had gameboys. They may not have been colour like the Sega Gamegear or Atari Lynx, but our parents could afford them, the batteries lasted an age, and the games were fantastic. Colour would have been great, but it wasn't worth the money (and the power drain)
Sheer brute force power is not everything when it comes to these sorts of machines. Nintendo understands this. The handheld market is not just a portable version of the mainstream. It is a whole other beast.
* Spam e-mail redirects you to the spoof site. Presents identical page to the real site. * You enter your details, which are automatically passed through to the real site to automatically login the scammers. * Spoof site works as a proxy between you and the bank up until the point when you logout * At that point it empties your account.
While this scenario is pretty complex to set up none of it is beyond the wit of most decent web-coders, and we have seen the scammers get progressivley more sophisticated over the last few years.
I expect it to happen within the next few years. Criminals tend to adapt to security measures. PINs for Credit Cards have just meant that criminals have to watch people type them into a few machines, and then rob you (or get a pro pick-pocket to lift it).
The same goes for failing systems. The case of the court database simply exposes the problems inherent in the system.
Technology has a habit of enhancing things, the bad as well as the good. The problem isn't the technology, but the problem it exposes (in the cited case: the inconsistencies in rulings by judges, and the natural human bias in any such system).
This is like tax avoidance (as opposed to evasion) where you avoid paying taxes by taking advantage of loopholes in the system. If a method of evasion becomes popular then the system gets fixed to close the hole.
Any patent lawyer who didn't use this kind of research would be failing their client. The same goes for Copyright law. The problem isn't really that people like the RIAA are taking advantage of a broken system, but that the system is broken in the first place. Fix the system and the RIAAs of this world will have to find something else to do with their time.
Hopefully, once this sort of thing becomes common-place, something might be done about the inconsistencies in the judicial system.
Is it really right that identical cases tried in different courts should result in different verdicts?
Technology is just making the world a smaller places, so that suddenly the differences and inconsistencies are side-by-side and can be seen more clearly for what they are.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not surprised it has made so little difference.
As we know, technical solutions are rarely enough to protect data. Human processes and policies can be much more important.
Personally I prefer the UK approach, the Data Protection Act. No doubt it is flawed, and sadly not enforced as rigorously as it should be, but the concept is better. Rather than mandate specific technological approaches, it imposes a set of general requirements on any organisation that holds personal data:
The DPA is one of the few generally excellent pieces of legislation in the UK. It's just a shame that the Information Commisioner's Office that enforces it isn't as active as it could be. But it gives you quite a bit of power to take on companies yourself.
And yet Apple will still probably sell a metric assload of new MacBooks.
Saying that hundreds of users are pissed off just means there is a small but vocal minority who are annoyed.
The vast majority of MacBook users and potential buyers couldn't care less what FW is, and probably don't even know what it is.
As a number of commentators have pointed out, the vast majority of consumer grade video cameras now use USB. Seriously, if you don't like the product, don't buy it. Is it really that hard?
Not off the top of my head, it's been almost ten years since I left uni.
However I do remember reading a paper about what is now called "life logging", storing everything you do and recording, dating back from the 1960's. It was totally impractical then.
One good example of what I mean is the so-called "Mother of all Demos", given by Doug Engelbart in 1968. Look it up on YouTube, I'm sure the video will be up there. It demonstrated concepts that were well ahead of their time, some of which have only recently entered the wider world. Check it out, it's a fascinating video.
Drat, I meant the Berlin olympics of 1936. Sigh, it's going to be one of those days.
My tutor at university used to get us to produce reports on old papers from the really early days of compsci, the 50's and 60's.
What amazed me was how many great ideas were put forward which just couldn't have been implemented successfully at the time, and how many have turned up again many years later as "new" ideas.
There are many ideas that were invented decades ago, but people have just forgotten about.
It makes you wonder what great ideas and discoveries are lying hidden in old journals that no-one ever reads.
While I was hopeful in the early days of the olympics, four years ago, I got a reality check later on when it became obvious that the Chinese government was determined that this was going to be a very tightly controlled operation.
This isn't really a surprise, the Moscow olympics didn't end the cold war, and the Munich olympics didn't stop WWII.
China visibly and provably improving its human rights and freedoms should have been a prerequisite of being given the olympics, not just a half-hearted, vague promise (with fingers crossed) to sort of improve, without actually changing things. Expecting China to follow through once it had secured the event was foolish in hindsight. By that point the IOC had no sanction, they were never going to take it away, China knew that, so they could do what they liked.
I'm actually surprised that it is that low.
What I particularly object to (in addition to the whole concept) is the capricious nature of many blocks. BoingBoing has been blocked by a number of blocklist companies, not because of anything rude or illegal, but because they had articles about filtering companies
At the end of the day, you have a human organisation making decisions, and even in the best of worlds that will be open to abuse.
As a brit, I welcome our Aussie friends to the panopticon of fear.
Seriously, someone has actually created a game of catch on the Wii.
He said it was because...
Simulated catch, robot dogs, and now robot plants.
At the risk of sounding all "get of my lawn", this kind of thing is pretty depressing.
And
What kind of plants do they keep around there! Do they also eat meat and sing like Levi Stubbs?
Remember kids, never feed a plant that moves on its own and likes the taste of blood.
Much like the collision between a server full of astronomy pictures and slashdot.
Nothing survives.
Oh, and as the mass increases, time slows down in the vicinity. Or at least that's how it seems.
As I said, I will, but it is low down my priority list because there are other things that will actually make a difference to my site's users that I need to do first. HTML standards compliance is, for most people, irrelevant. It's like using perfect grammar, it's a good thing to have, but failing doesn't make you unintelligible. Only when your grammar is really bad, or your standards compliance is utterly terrible, do you become unintelligible (to man and browser), at which point it becomes a problem.
Nice way to get more budget, "OMG the terrorists are going to control our nukes from their iPhones!!!11!! You must give us lot of money to protect you".
I know there are threats, and I know that a lot needs to be done about them, but this kind of scaremongering is getting boring after nearly a decade.
This is a real problem, there is no need to exaggerate it. You use unsupported hyperbole at your peril, after a while no-one will take you seriously. Especially now, when budgets are under so much scrutiny.
In many ways these financial problems could be great for civil liberties, constructing a surveillance society costs real money. Just take a look at the UK ID scheme, it will cost billions.
You only need to make one mistake in your markup to be non-compliant. I would be interested to see what the degree of failure is for the other 95.87% of sites. My website, Wii Fit Forum currently fails on six counts, all just simple errors in the code which I plan to fix. But currently, the site displays just fine, so I have more important things to worry about. I think this is the same for many publishers.
Unfortunately for the novice, the ignorant, the lazy or the just plain error-prone (the last two are me), the W3C and the browser industry do not make it that easy to be compliant.
HTML standards are the current prime example of the old joke "the great thing about standards is that there are so many of them". The W3C really needs to stop pissing around with all this semantic web crap, and concentrate on making what is already there work better.
We need a single standard which embodies all the best elements of the existing ones in a coherent form, and then the browers manufacturers need to get their arses in gear and implement it properly. The novice developer is currently confronted with a mish-mash of alternative doc-types, each of which has different pros and cons, and which may or may not work properly depending on your browser. It needs to be done soon, not over a ten year timescale.
When you can stop worrying about whether your site will work in various browsers, then people will spend more time on compliance. Until then, people will worry about the important things, such as their readers being able to see their site properly.
I know I should treat standards with more importance, but while the current mess persists it is hard to care.
You have just helped demonstrate their point.
If you don't like their product then you are free to use something else, a huge number of people are very happy with their products. If they tried to provide everything that you, and everyone, else wants (which will of course be different things), then the end result would be a mess. There are *always* people who don't like a product. 37s are just honest about this and don't try to make out that their products will be right for everyone.
Out of curiosity, what did you move to? Basecamp is too expensive for me, so I'm on the lookout for something that that does that kind of job.
Paul
And I have no interest in Java and Sun, so I think they should not be covered on Slashdot either.
If we followed your logic, there would be nothing on slashdot. If you don't care, don't read.
This thread will be nothing but one big slashvertisement for some company that nobody would otherwise know or care about.
You mean, apart from the several hundred thousand readers of their blogs on management and software development.
Or indeed many people who use Ruby on Rails? They are the guys behind that. Whether you use/like it, you have probably heard of it.
Just because you don't know who they are, doesn't mean that others don't, and it doesn't stop what they have to say being interesting.
Perhaps we should have no more articles that mention any companies, just in case you don't know who they are?
Here's a function that generates the infinite list of fibbonacci numbers: fibs x y = x : (fibs y (x + y))
You have just demonstrated thermian's point.
How often do you actually need to generate infinite sequences? I have never needed to do that outside of a functional programming class.
I'm a big fan of alternative programming languages, I've used some 20 or so since I started 20 years ago. I did a fair amount of commercial Prolog development after I left university, I really like Prolog. It makes certain things really easy and it's a joy to code certain types of solutions in, but I'm never going to write a web-app, or a word-processor in Prolog.
Many of these languages are very clever when it comes to doing certain things, but how often do you actually need to do those things?
The truth is that the vast majority of the software out there does pretty dull, mostly procedural jobs. That's why the main languages in use are just dull variations on the procedural, C/Java/Perl style. No matter how much maths geeks go on about functional programming, procedural systems will always be more suited and easier to use for most of the problems out there.
That isn't to say there is no place for these alternative languages, but it's a smaller one which you probably won't see very often.
Paul
My understanding was that current techniques in game graphics were developed because they require less computing power to achieve a similar level of quality; or to put it another way, they produce better quality for the same amount of computation.
If this is the case, why not just use the increasing processing power to produce better quality graphics using the current optimized techniques?
Am I missing something? Intel's argument seems a bit like saying we should get rid of QuickSort and go back to Bubble sort, because we now have the processing power to do it quickly. Is there something about ray-tracing vs current polygon techniques that means that the difference is actually narrowing as processor power increases?
Is this just a processor company - unsurprisingly - suggesting that we use more processing power, or is there something concrete to their argument that I've missed?
Yep, a Google appliance (or equivalent, there are others on the market such as X1) is the way to go.
I set up a Google Mini for indexing an internal wiki, our bug tracking system, and some other systems, and it is very straight-forward.
I know the original question mentioned meta-data, but you have to ask yourself if the meta-data is going to be maintained well enough that the search index will be valid. Going the Google Appliance route is so much simpler. It takes a bit of tweaking to set up the search restrictions, but once up and running, it works flawlessly. Most importantly, it doesn't require everyone to make sure that all their document meta-data is perfect.
Google appliance pricing is really quite cheap when you compare it to the time cost of setting up a meta-data driven system.
Meta-data is one of those things that seems like a really good idea, but like all plans, doesn't tend to survive contact with the enemy, which in this case is the user.
Paul
This week's book of the week on Radio 4 is "Red Moon Rising", which is all about the building of Sputnik.
Available on Listen Again each day: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/book_week.shtml
So "The Internet" makes up 3.13%, not 9.4%
The other 6.27% is from desktop computers. Which may or may not be doing "internet stuff" at any moment in time. Lumping all desktop machines into the count is disingenuous.
It's still a bigger number than I would have thought. And it is a bit of an eye opener to realize how much power all those PCs are using up.
It's apt... The first mention was the specification, the second was the implementation body. Welcome to the world of Ada :)
Paul (Ex Ada coder)
Something that a lot of people missed when the DS and PSP were introduced, was the price point.
Taking a look at Argos (major UK retailer, the kind of place many people buy these things from)...
* PSP : 180GBP
* Nintendo DS : 90GBP
PSP games start at 30GBP and go up to 35. DS games start at 15 and go up to 30.
The DS is not selling to the kind of people who will put down 200quid for a graphics card just to play the latest blood-fest, it sells to the huge number of casual gamers who want something fun. For the price of a PSP you can buy a DS and three games.
The DS also sells to parents buying presents and I imagine it did a hell of a lot better over christmas than the PSP.
This is exactly what happened with the original gameboy. When I was a kid I, and most of my friends had gameboys. They may not have been colour like the Sega Gamegear or Atari Lynx, but our parents could afford them, the batteries lasted an age, and the games were fantastic. Colour would have been great, but it wasn't worth the money (and the power drain)
Sheer brute force power is not everything when it comes to these sorts of machines. Nintendo understands this. The handheld market is not just a portable version of the mainstream. It is a whole other beast.
* Spam e-mail redirects you to the spoof site. Presents identical page to the real site.
* You enter your details, which are automatically passed through to the real site to automatically login the scammers.
* Spoof site works as a proxy between you and the bank up until the point when you logout
* At that point it empties your account.
While this scenario is pretty complex to set up none of it is beyond the wit of most decent web-coders, and we have seen the scammers get progressivley more sophisticated over the last few years.
I expect it to happen within the next few years. Criminals tend to adapt to security measures. PINs for Credit Cards have just meant that criminals have to watch people type them into a few machines, and then rob you (or get a pro pick-pocket to lift it).
Paul
...is to enforce it absolutly.
The same goes for failing systems. The case of the court database simply exposes the problems inherent in the system.
Technology has a habit of enhancing things, the bad as well as the good. The problem isn't the technology, but the problem it exposes (in the cited case: the inconsistencies in rulings by judges, and the natural human bias in any such system).
This is like tax avoidance (as opposed to evasion) where you avoid paying taxes by taking advantage of loopholes in the system. If a method of evasion becomes popular then the system gets fixed to close the hole.
Any patent lawyer who didn't use this kind of research would be failing their client. The same goes for Copyright law. The problem isn't really that people like the RIAA are taking advantage of a broken system, but that the system is broken in the first place. Fix the system and the RIAAs of this world will have to find something else to do with their time.
Hopefully, once this sort of thing becomes common-place, something might be done about the inconsistencies in the judicial system.
Is it really right that identical cases tried in different courts should result in different verdicts?
Technology is just making the world a smaller places, so that suddenly the differences and inconsistencies are side-by-side and can be seen more clearly for what they are.
Paul