What about the privacy of the other people involved in an email? Did they consent to be part of gmail's targeted advertising profiling? Perhaps emailing a gmail account implicitly does so but that is not the case when you upload everything on your own.
What about the privacy of those you correspond with? If they send an email to a gmail account that is one thing, but you are unilaterally deciding to have them participate in the targeted advertising profiling.
Yup, I'm really highly concerned that an advertiser might learn that I like electronics and am a huge computer geek. Because there's no other way they could know that.
Are you concerned that your emails "leak" such information about those that you are corresponding with? Are they OK with this? If they sent their email to a gmail account that's one thing, you could argue they implicitly agreed to the profiling. However by uploading all your emails to gmail there is no such implicit agreement.
Actually I was thinking along the lines of social/cultural anthropology. Much as some researchers are now digging through land fills from the 1940s and 1950s, corporate and government document archives, etc. Tossing in a few personal document archives might be interesting.
There is nothing unwritten about it. Google is quite up front in their agreement that they data mine your emails for targeted advertising purposes. I agree that there is nothing wrong with this, but I disagree that most people are aware of this.
In your will donate your archive to science. I'm sure it would make an interesting thesis project for some PhD candidates out there. I'm seriously, consider this.
And now the poster becomes an advertiser's dream come true in addition to being a hostile lawyer's dream come true.;-)
Remember that from Google's perspective gmail is a tool to better profile you for targeted advertising. Make sure you are OK with that before giving them access to all your emails.
Abandon trying to do this with an email client app's archive. It is doubtful they are designed or tested with this amount of data in mind. Maybe you could set up your own email server with a web front end. Or perhaps the best route would be to use MySQL or some other database and build a web front end for browsing, searching, etc.
It may be true that it was useful, but I wish they hadn't made so many buisness majors do punch-card programming. I can't tell you how fucking sick I am of hearing some 40-something break into how they took programming in college, so they "know a little about it". This has been from entry level workers to CEO's. None of them had, or have a clue.
We computer science majors are guilty of such things too. For example we take an electrical engineering class or two and think we know how to design hardware. My first job out of college was doing a kernel for a custom motherboard. The hardware guys were a little distant until they got to know me and saw that while I could often follow/participate in conversations I had no delusion about being proficient in electrical engineering, but more importantly I did not cry wolf and blame the hardware when I didn't understand why the software was crashing.
I had a similar experience in the mid-70's, although the reason given was a bit different. The reason given was along the lines of we should learn how to structure and write our code carefully because programming in a batch environment with cards made fixing bugs so painful.
So did you write out your programs by hand on Fortran coding forms, a specialized pad of paper with 80 columns and color coding to indicate label, comment, code, continuation and sequence number fields?
We were told that in the really bad old days programmers filled out these forms by hand and gave them to data entry people who punched your cards for you. Some old timers had two bottlenecks to kiss up to.:-)
The professor through Unix was the way it was because of punched cards? Are you remembering that right? Unix was an interactive system from the beginning.
The punch card influence manifested in the preference for keeping things brief, ideally within 80 columns. Some may focus on brevity due to "efficiency", 300 baud connections and such but 80 column terminal displays and 80 column printers also contributed to brevity.
Also while Unix was preferably used interactively there were environments where people were restricted to batch jobs. In another post I mentioned students taking cobol classes in the school of business being restricted to batch even though terminals were plentiful around campus.
At my university in the 1980s there were two "programming" degrees. The school of science offered Computer Science (CS) and the school of business offered Computer Information Systems (CIS). This is not standard nomenclature, at other universities CIS is from the school of mathematics or science. The CIS folks were still using punch cards for their COBOL programming. I knew a few folks who transferred to CS because of the requirement to use punch cards. Terminals were plentiful around campus but CIS wouldn't let people use them.
Punch cards can be a pretty useful educational tool. In the 1980s I had an intro to computer science class where we had to write our first programming assignment in fortran(*) using punch cards. Second and subsequent assignments would use terminals. The professor explained that doing so was terribly obsolete but that this experience would help us understand why some computer languages (fortran in particular) and some operating systems (including unix) are the way they are. He added that the deck of blank punch cards we would have to buy would also provide us with plenty of book marks for the rest of our years in college.
(*) Fortran was only used in this intro computer science class. This class was required for many engineering and science majors who were more likely to use fortran than computer science majors. Unexpectedly in the mid 1990s I actually used fortran as my company was contracted to move some chemistry software from mainframes to personal computers.
Answering my own question:
"Results of the present study show for the first time that C. parvum oocysts exposed to undiluted laundry bleach for as long as 120 min are infectious for animals. Although bleach is widely used as a bacterial and viral disinfectant, the present findings indicate that under practical conditions it is not an effective disinfectant for C. parvum oocysts." http://aem.asm.org/cgi/reprint/61/2/844.pdf
Be very careful with the clorox method. The clorox product line is quite different today and you probably do not want to use the versions with stain removers and other additives for water purification. From the clorox website:
"Disinfection of Drinking Water (Potable) ... Only Clorox Regular-Bleach, of all the bleaches mentioned on this website, is approved for sanitization and disinfection...."
Also, does this approach work from bacteria to virus to cryptosporidium? My understanding is that the old school iodine tablets don't work on the later and that the military and NGOs have moved to chlorine dioxide based tablets. Much better tasting too. The caveat is that it takes something like 4 hours to kill the crypto compared to something like 15 to 30 minutes for the lesser "bugs". Being chlorine based maybe clorox could work with crypto but they don't seem to offer concentration or time guidelines. Perhaps they are just addressing North American concerns, maybe their sites for other parts of the world offer advice?
Is no longer capable of satisfying the bloated expectations of parasitic wall-streeters because it basically just produces an unsexy commodity in quantity, like steel or potatoes.
Wall street has no problem with low margin commodity type companies. They just expect them to describe themselves as one and to act like one, not to pretend that they are still a growth company when all that differentiated them has come to pass.
Dell's problem is its founding business model - mass-assemble PCs using standardization and volume to bring costs down - doesn't work on any of the new electronics markets.
As I see it, they either need to embrace their role as a builder of boxes...
Dell's problem is that the novel and leading practices that they pioneered are now standard practices. They no longer have the manufacturing, assembly and distribution advantages they once had. This is one of the reasons they have been so eager to grow into new markets with new products.
Also prices have collapsed since Dell's glory days. Even with higher quality corporate oriented products Dell would still merely be selling "commodity" products at a low margin. Not commodity as in cheap stuff but commodity as in fairly indistinguishable from comparable products from other companies.
Sadly I think Dell is a little more likely to be on a Gateway-like path than an HP- or IBM-like path. Michael Dell's advice on what to do with Apple in 1997 may come back to haunt him: "What would I do? I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders".
"Ping" has an established meaning among a very small segment of computer users. [...]
Don't forget the large segment of PC gamers. Console games typically do not show ping but virtually all PC games do.
I can only imagine the annoying trademark battles to come starting ~3 years from now...
The general definition of ping is about getting attention. To most gamers a ping time, if it even goes by that term in the game, indicates how long it takes to get another machine's attention. They rarely know about a ping command even *when* a game has a built-in console offering one.
"Ping" has an established meaning among a very small segment of computer users.
That was true before online gaming went mainstream. Now even the most ungeeky (even female!) computer users tend to connect "ping" with "latency" (even if the word "latency" still makes their eyes glaze over).
While the percentage of online gamers who are aware of the networking definition of ping may be greater than that of computer users in general I think it would still be a small segment of the total online gamers population. Its more likely the average online gamer just knows how to interpret a game's onscreen latency indicator like they know how to interpret cell phone bars.
However if we go with your "ping" associated with "latency" argument the name still works for Apple. When you get pinged by someone else regarding a song you are late in hearing about it, just like you are late in getting those gaming packets.
Sometimes I wonder why it isn't possible to declare/register a PGP public key as official, and use that to authentify oneself.
I mean, with that even email can be secure.
An imperfect systems can still be useful. If card/scanner misuse is on the order of handwritten signature misuse then replacing dead trees with some bits might be a good idea in many situations.
The pgp digital sig proves it was sent by your computer perhaps, but not necessarily sent by you. There is a genuine need for biometrics to be involved. Note that a handwritten signature is a form of biometric ID and like the card/scanner system it can be faked. This is why for more important situations a signature must be witnessed and possible notarized. The card/scanner system can similarly escalate the process for more important situation. For example when someone uses a bank's ATM a swipe and a pin are sufficient. When they walk up to a teller for larger transactions then a swipe and a pin could be augmented with a photo being displayed on the teller's screen. Banks often have such photos for embedding into ATM and credit cards.
The experience gained over the last few months means they should be able to cap this one very quickly.
Thankfully that is not the case. My understanding is that it is in about 300 feet of water. They have many decades of experience dealing with problems at that depth.
Anyway "ping" already has some well established (and very specific) meaning in the computer world. I'm surprised Apple would choose that specific word for their newest gimmick. Especially since it is already loaded with such uncool, geeky history.
"Ping" has an established meaning among a very small segment of computer users. A group that is quite capable of recognizing social networking use versus networking diagnostic use. Trademarks are assigned in specific product/service classes and social networking and computer system administration are probably sufficiently distant. For example "facebook" had to be trademarked in multiple service classes: entertainment services, technological services, social services,... FWIW "ping" is trademarked in various computer networking and service contexts and these marks are unrelated to the unix command.
Among the general population "ping" may be understood to mean getting someone's attention but if asked where the word came from you are probably more likely to get a reference to submarines and sonar than the unix utility. Wiki is merely an example of written by techies for techies, a convenient place to look up technical details. Non-technical use of "ping" does not need a reference page hence the wiki bias. Given the widely accepted definition of getting someone's attention Apple did a pretty good job at naming this feature.
Slashdot Mirror
What about the privacy of the other people involved in an email? Did they consent to be part of gmail's targeted advertising profiling? Perhaps emailing a gmail account implicitly does so but that is not the case when you upload everything on your own.
What about the privacy of those you correspond with? If they send an email to a gmail account that is one thing, but you are unilaterally deciding to have them participate in the targeted advertising profiling.
Yup, I'm really highly concerned that an advertiser might learn that I like electronics and am a huge computer geek. Because there's no other way they could know that.
Are you concerned that your emails "leak" such information about those that you are corresponding with? Are they OK with this? If they sent their email to a gmail account that's one thing, you could argue they implicitly agreed to the profiling. However by uploading all your emails to gmail there is no such implicit agreement.
Actually I was thinking along the lines of social/cultural anthropology. Much as some researchers are now digging through land fills from the 1940s and 1950s, corporate and government document archives, etc. Tossing in a few personal document archives might be interesting.
Perhaps the best route would be to use MySQL or some other FOSS database and build a web front end for browsing, searching, etc
There is nothing unwritten about it. Google is quite up front in their agreement that they data mine your emails for targeted advertising purposes. I agree that there is nothing wrong with this, but I disagree that most people are aware of this.
In your will donate your archive to science. I'm sure it would make an interesting thesis project for some PhD candidates out there. I'm seriously, consider this.
And now the poster becomes an advertiser's dream come true in addition to being a hostile lawyer's dream come true. ;-)
Remember that from Google's perspective gmail is a tool to better profile you for targeted advertising. Make sure you are OK with that before giving them access to all your emails.
Abandon trying to do this with an email client app's archive. It is doubtful they are designed or tested with this amount of data in mind. Maybe you could set up your own email server with a web front end. Or perhaps the best route would be to use MySQL or some other database and build a web front end for browsing, searching, etc.
I have kept every every email I have ever sent or received since 1990 with the exception of junk mail (though I kept a lot of that as well) ...
You are a hostile lawyer's fantasy come true. ;-)
It may be true that it was useful, but I wish they hadn't made so many buisness majors do punch-card programming. I can't tell you how fucking sick I am of hearing some 40-something break into how they took programming in college, so they "know a little about it". This has been from entry level workers to CEO's. None of them had, or have a clue.
We computer science majors are guilty of such things too. For example we take an electrical engineering class or two and think we know how to design hardware. My first job out of college was doing a kernel for a custom motherboard. The hardware guys were a little distant until they got to know me and saw that while I could often follow/participate in conversations I had no delusion about being proficient in electrical engineering, but more importantly I did not cry wolf and blame the hardware when I didn't understand why the software was crashing.
I had a similar experience in the mid-70's, although the reason given was a bit different. The reason given was along the lines of we should learn how to structure and write our code carefully because programming in a batch environment with cards made fixing bugs so painful.
So did you write out your programs by hand on Fortran coding forms, a specialized pad of paper with 80 columns and color coding to indicate label, comment, code, continuation and sequence number fields?
:-)
We were told that in the really bad old days programmers filled out these forms by hand and gave them to data entry people who punched your cards for you. Some old timers had two bottlenecks to kiss up to.
The professor through Unix was the way it was because of punched cards? Are you remembering that right? Unix was an interactive system from the beginning.
The punch card influence manifested in the preference for keeping things brief, ideally within 80 columns. Some may focus on brevity due to "efficiency", 300 baud connections and such but 80 column terminal displays and 80 column printers also contributed to brevity.
Also while Unix was preferably used interactively there were environments where people were restricted to batch jobs. In another post I mentioned students taking cobol classes in the school of business being restricted to batch even though terminals were plentiful around campus.
At my university in the 1980s there were two "programming" degrees. The school of science offered Computer Science (CS) and the school of business offered Computer Information Systems (CIS). This is not standard nomenclature, at other universities CIS is from the school of mathematics or science. The CIS folks were still using punch cards for their COBOL programming. I knew a few folks who transferred to CS because of the requirement to use punch cards. Terminals were plentiful around campus but CIS wouldn't let people use them.
Punch cards can be a pretty useful educational tool. In the 1980s I had an intro to computer science class where we had to write our first programming assignment in fortran(*) using punch cards. Second and subsequent assignments would use terminals. The professor explained that doing so was terribly obsolete but that this experience would help us understand why some computer languages (fortran in particular) and some operating systems (including unix) are the way they are. He added that the deck of blank punch cards we would have to buy would also provide us with plenty of book marks for the rest of our years in college.
(*) Fortran was only used in this intro computer science class. This class was required for many engineering and science majors who were more likely to use fortran than computer science majors. Unexpectedly in the mid 1990s I actually used fortran as my company was contracted to move some chemistry software from mainframes to personal computers.
Answering my own question:
"Results of the present study show for the first time that C. parvum oocysts exposed to undiluted laundry bleach for as long as 120 min are infectious for animals. Although bleach is widely used as a bacterial and viral disinfectant, the present findings indicate that under practical conditions it is not an effective disinfectant for C. parvum oocysts."
http://aem.asm.org/cgi/reprint/61/2/844.pdf
Be very careful with the clorox method. The clorox product line is quite different today and you probably do not want to use the versions with stain removers and other additives for water purification. From the clorox website:
... Only Clorox Regular-Bleach, of all the bleaches mentioned on this website, is approved for sanitization and disinfection. ..."
"Disinfection of Drinking Water (Potable)
Also, does this approach work from bacteria to virus to cryptosporidium? My understanding is that the old school iodine tablets don't work on the later and that the military and NGOs have moved to chlorine dioxide based tablets. Much better tasting too. The caveat is that it takes something like 4 hours to kill the crypto compared to something like 15 to 30 minutes for the lesser "bugs". Being chlorine based maybe clorox could work with crypto but they don't seem to offer concentration or time guidelines. Perhaps they are just addressing North American concerns, maybe their sites for other parts of the world offer advice?
Is no longer capable of satisfying the bloated expectations of parasitic wall-streeters because it basically just produces an unsexy commodity in quantity, like steel or potatoes.
Wall street has no problem with low margin commodity type companies. They just expect them to describe themselves as one and to act like one, not to pretend that they are still a growth company when all that differentiated them has come to pass.
Dell's problem is its founding business model - mass-assemble PCs using standardization and volume to bring costs down - doesn't work on any of the new electronics markets.
As I see it, they either need to embrace their role as a builder of boxes ...
Dell's problem is that the novel and leading practices that they pioneered are now standard practices. They no longer have the manufacturing, assembly and distribution advantages they once had. This is one of the reasons they have been so eager to grow into new markets with new products.
Also prices have collapsed since Dell's glory days. Even with higher quality corporate oriented products Dell would still merely be selling "commodity" products at a low margin. Not commodity as in cheap stuff but commodity as in fairly indistinguishable from comparable products from other companies.
Sadly I think Dell is a little more likely to be on a Gateway-like path than an HP- or IBM-like path. Michael Dell's advice on what to do with Apple in 1997 may come back to haunt him: "What would I do? I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders".
"Ping" has an established meaning among a very small segment of computer users. [...]
Don't forget the large segment of PC gamers. Console games typically do not show ping but virtually all PC games do. I can only imagine the annoying trademark battles to come starting ~3 years from now...
The general definition of ping is about getting attention. To most gamers a ping time, if it even goes by that term in the game, indicates how long it takes to get another machine's attention. They rarely know about a ping command even *when* a game has a built-in console offering one.
"Ping" has an established meaning among a very small segment of computer users.
That was true before online gaming went mainstream. Now even the most ungeeky (even female!) computer users tend to connect "ping" with "latency" (even if the word "latency" still makes their eyes glaze over).
While the percentage of online gamers who are aware of the networking definition of ping may be greater than that of computer users in general I think it would still be a small segment of the total online gamers population. Its more likely the average online gamer just knows how to interpret a game's onscreen latency indicator like they know how to interpret cell phone bars.
However if we go with your "ping" associated with "latency" argument the name still works for Apple. When you get pinged by someone else regarding a song you are late in hearing about it, just like you are late in getting those gaming packets.
Sometimes I wonder why it isn't possible to declare/register a PGP public key as official, and use that to authentify oneself. I mean, with that even email can be secure.
An imperfect systems can still be useful. If card/scanner misuse is on the order of handwritten signature misuse then replacing dead trees with some bits might be a good idea in many situations.
The pgp digital sig proves it was sent by your computer perhaps, but not necessarily sent by you. There is a genuine need for biometrics to be involved. Note that a handwritten signature is a form of biometric ID and like the card/scanner system it can be faked. This is why for more important situations a signature must be witnessed and possible notarized. The card/scanner system can similarly escalate the process for more important situation. For example when someone uses a bank's ATM a swipe and a pin are sufficient. When they walk up to a teller for larger transactions then a swipe and a pin could be augmented with a photo being displayed on the teller's screen. Banks often have such photos for embedding into ATM and credit cards.
The experience gained over the last few months means they should be able to cap this one very quickly.
Thankfully that is not the case. My understanding is that it is in about 300 feet of water. They have many decades of experience dealing with problems at that depth.
Remember, Apple in the seventies used to host music events.
I believe that was the eighties and it was Steve Wozniak's person project.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Us_festival
Anyway "ping" already has some well established (and very specific) meaning in the computer world. I'm surprised Apple would choose that specific word for their newest gimmick. Especially since it is already loaded with such uncool, geeky history.
"Ping" has an established meaning among a very small segment of computer users. A group that is quite capable of recognizing social networking use versus networking diagnostic use. Trademarks are assigned in specific product/service classes and social networking and computer system administration are probably sufficiently distant. For example "facebook" had to be trademarked in multiple service classes: entertainment services, technological services, social services, ... FWIW "ping" is trademarked in various computer networking and service contexts and these marks are unrelated to the unix command.
Among the general population "ping" may be understood to mean getting someone's attention but if asked where the word came from you are probably more likely to get a reference to submarines and sonar than the unix utility. Wiki is merely an example of written by techies for techies, a convenient place to look up technical details. Non-technical use of "ping" does not need a reference page hence the wiki bias. Given the widely accepted definition of getting someone's attention Apple did a pretty good job at naming this feature.