Nevertheless, we're talking about the company that bought MCI, not MCI itself. They have the right to call themselve MCI if they choose, but it's also true that this is the company that used be called Worldcom.
You started to say something interesting and useful, then your attention wandered. Inquiring minds want to know: if the problem with SSO isn't technical, what is it?
I used to do that. Then I would misremember key bits of the passphase and get locked out. And what about the obvious security flaw? People might overhear you muttering song lyrics every time you log in.
Nowadays I generate strong passwords using Roboform, which also remembers and enters them for me. Comes with a Palm app that allows you to carry around passwords with you, and generate strong password when you're away from your computer.
But let me get to the key point on my post: show some respect. People are not lazy just because they lack memory skills. Or the patience to enter a 30-character password every time they access a secure web site. Fine, it works for you. Doesn't give you any moral superiority.
And I'll say it one more time: we need non-Password authentication. Means redoing our ID infrastructure, but we need to do that anyway.
As a C# booster, you're making two big mistakes. First, you're focusing on a few features (good support for GUI development, garbage collection) that are important to you but probably not to everybody. Second, you're underestimating the acceptance level of Java, which does indeed have a lot of developers and users, though not nearly as many as its boosters would like.
The C++ way of doing things (huge and hyper-flexible syntax, programmer-directed memory management, objects built on primitive data structures, etc., etc.) is a big, well-established development culture. Both Java and C# represent rebellions against this culture. In point of fact, C# is basically an evolution of Java, and exists mainly because Microsoft people (in particular Ander Hejlsberg, who's been leading the anti-C++ resistance since his Borland days) couldn't accept many of Sun's design choices for Java. People who make the switch away from C++ are making a major change in the working philosophy. So it's not really useful to compare C# with C++. It's a lot more useful to compare C# with the other big anti-C++ language: Java.
All it does is to legitimize microsofts attempt at monoplizing another market with yet another windows-only product exactly similar to an exsisting multi-platform product....it's their modus-operandi.
I agree that Microsoft works that way -- when they decide they have to be the dominant player in a particular market. But there's no evidence that Microsoft wants to dominate the Linux market, or that they even take it seriously. MS doesn't control Mono. They just give it token support as a token gesture towards interoperability.
I'll say it again: MS is a big company with lots of people in lots of suborganizations. These people do not have one unifed goal. Indeed, the goals of one group often run at cross purposes to the goals at another. You can't always assume you understand Microsoft's motives for doing something based soley on how Microsoft (or rather, one particular arm of Microsoft) behaved in the past.
I don't think the MPAA stays up nights worrying about sneakernet distrubtion of pirated content. People already have unlimited offline storage in the form of burnable DVDs. A person who lets people plug in and copy can distribute maybe one or two movies a day to people he knows. On the Internet that same person can distribute as many movies as he can find the bandwidth for, and to anybody on the planet.
People have been using sneakernet to share electronic content since the invention of audio mag tape. The entertainment industry's never been happy about it, but they never went into panic mode until the Internet created a direct, fast one-to-one connection between millions of strangers.
As others have said, you're quite sane. Keeping this kind of data on servers is a good principle, too often ignored in practice.
This particular episode is a special case of a general problem. Every place I've ever worked, I've seen problems with people keeping data on their workstations that should be on servers. This happened even at place with strict policies against using workstation storage for anything except basic software. People will always get around the rules, because it's easier (though not safer) to work with data locally.
You are quite correct. The truth is that the Google's "beta" software is really production quality. I've used (hell, I've helped release) "final" versions that had more kinks than Google Maps.
"Beta" is just a word, and Google is using it to play the "Underpromise and Overdeliver" game.
Look at the pictures side by side. The "after" pictures are not manipulated versions of the "before" pictures -- they're different pictures. These people are vain as hell (excuse me, heck) and probably get new head shots every week.
Even if you convinced me that for some strange reason (vanity?) somebody was manipulating these pictures, that's really not proof of anything. What settles the issue is the actual content of the site. Move away from the standard conspiracy "proofs" and look at the site as a whole. There's just too much long-winded, solemn nonsense that a satirist would never have to patience to generate. And even if they did, they'd try to make more of it funny.
This is just one of those lame stories that some conspiracy freak put out there, and that everybody passes on without checking the facts for themselves. It's up there with the sewer alligators and the dead bodies embedded in Hoover Dam.
Now excuse me, I'm late for my Illuminati meeting.
That said, how do we know if the variations are small? Only 1 bit can change a huge negative number into a huge positive number in a standard integer (Okay, I haven't looked at the bit layout of an integer lately but I think it's encoded like this. If not, you still get my point right?).
Sure, if you continue to use an encoding that doesn't tolerate errors. The math is beyond me, but I know there are ways to encode numbers so that a single-bit error nudges a value slightly, instead of changing it in wildly unpredictable ways.
Also, a lot of computing deals mainly with string values, like the Google example in the story. Even without a random element in the calculations, it's hard to predict exactly what page will come out on top of a Google ranking. If the ordering's slightly different, nobody will care.
And that's assuming that Google's secret algorithms don't already have a random element. Something I wouldn't rule out!
Actually the original star trek didn't suffer from that problem very much. Its politics were very middlle-of-the-road.
Maybe by today's standards. In the 1960s they were pretty out there, with a multiracial cast, thinly disguised references to the Vietnam war, and a lot of other stuff.
As I said, Roddenbery was a classic liberal. I saw a pilot for a TV show he tried to do before Star Trek, staring DeForest Kelly (!) as a crusading liberal lawer. The pilot was about the evils of the death penalty!
Perhaps one reason TOS doesn't seem very PC is the ability of the writers to write with some subtlety about controversial topics. Roddenberry wasn't very subtle, of course. But, contrary to myth, he did not dominate the writing for TOS the way he did later on.
Get real. An episode costs something like $50 million to produce. Lately, Enterprise has been lucky if it drew 2 million viewers. How many people will pay $25 to watch a TV show? For this one, I wouldn't pay $5.
That has nothing to do with nuclear energy. Instead, they're simply following a fad some left-leaning city governments have for banning nuclear weapons within their borders. They don't actually intend to arrest the next Army convoy passing through with tactical nukes -- it's "symbolic". I've always found that kind of posturing lame, even though I'm pretty much anti-nuke myself.
Good point. I'd even argue that the first season was less PC then previous STs. The writers seemed to want to get away from the moral lectures of previous Treks, and write "hard" SF stories. That'd be a good idea, except they seemed to know little or no actual science. I stopped watching when they met aliens who didn't have any water, but did have "something similar". Hello! High school chemistry!
I might have been encouraged when the Reeves-Stevens started taking a lead role in Enterprise script writing, since they've done some decent SF in the past. Alas, they're also the worst kind of Trekkies. So when their fiction enters the Star Trek universe it just continues or prequels stories from their favorite TOS episodes, however unpromising the concept. Thus the excruciating Kirk Returns stories. And the upcoming Enterprise episodes which manages to make a serious plot out of the famous (and rather silly) smooth-headded Klingon mystery.
Well, maybe they'll get around to explaining my favorite mystery: why did Picard's Starfleet feel the need to totally redesign its uniforms three times???!!!
...little more than a container for P.C./lefty proselytization...
Which pretty much describes Star Trek in general, or indeed anything with Gene Roddenberry's name on it. I mean, St. Gene was pretty much a stereotype of the Big L Liberal. If "PC" bothers you, why did you ever watch Star Trek in the first place?
The manipulations may be obvious to you. They're not to me. Perhaps if you pointed out specific pictures you thought had been manipulated.
The guy who wrote the museumofhoaxes page seems to think that the hoaxer is this this guy. If he spent 5 minutes reading the guy's web material, he'd realize that he's quite sincere, though not very bright.
Finally, notice how OBJECTIVE is distributing this banner demanding that the Landover site be shut down. I can't believe a spoofer would come up with the slogan "He didn't give His life to be mocked!", no matter how mock-serious he was trying to be.
It's pretty easy to "prove" that something on the web is bogus. You pick at little inconsistencies, and you ignore the contrary evidence. I've been accused of being a non-existant person more than once. The last time was on Slashdot, where I had a story accepted gushing about a new TV show I was enthusiastic about. Several people "proved" that I was a pseudo-person invented just to plug the show. Never mind that already had a couple thousand Slashdot posts in my history!
If there's proof that this is a hoax on the site you linked to, you'll have to point me to it. All I see is a bare assertion, based on the name "Paley".
The fact that you can't find any mention of "Fellowship University" means nothing. It's probably an unaccredited school with a "campus" in somebody's church.
When this site was first mentioned on Slashdot, about 3 years ago, I spent some time googling the people mentioned on the site, and they all seemed to have a pretty big presence in the anti-evolution community, with lots of essays "proving" that evolution is bogus. All of it thoroughly ignorant, but much to detailed to be a hoax. It's lame, of course, but by the standards of crankdom, not that lame. There are a lot of self-taught "scientists" out there.
I don't feel like digging up this material again just to argue with you, but you can probably find it yourself if you look.
Agreed. Speaking of which, has anybody noticed an upsurge in lame AC lurkers on Slashdot lately?
A lot of Internet problems stem from people abusing their ability to do things anonymously. Spam is a prime example. It woulnd't be such a nasty problem is a return address were a real proof of identity, not something easily forged.
Slashdot Mirror
Nevertheless, we're talking about the company that bought MCI, not MCI itself. They have the right to call themselve MCI if they choose, but it's also true that this is the company that used be called Worldcom.
You started to say something interesting and useful, then your attention wandered. Inquiring minds want to know: if the problem with SSO isn't technical, what is it?
There actually is a PowerPC port of WINE. For obvious reasons, it only offers source compatibility with Windows.
Nowadays I generate strong passwords using Roboform, which also remembers and enters them for me. Comes with a Palm app that allows you to carry around passwords with you, and generate strong password when you're away from your computer.
But let me get to the key point on my post: show some respect. People are not lazy just because they lack memory skills. Or the patience to enter a 30-character password every time they access a secure web site. Fine, it works for you. Doesn't give you any moral superiority.
And I'll say it one more time: we need non-Password authentication. Means redoing our ID infrastructure, but we need to do that anyway.
Yeah, dead people are really lousy performers. Except Bruce Willis, of course.
The C++ way of doing things (huge and hyper-flexible syntax, programmer-directed memory management, objects built on primitive data structures, etc., etc.) is a big, well-established development culture. Both Java and C# represent rebellions against this culture. In point of fact, C# is basically an evolution of Java, and exists mainly because Microsoft people (in particular Ander Hejlsberg, who's been leading the anti-C++ resistance since his Borland days) couldn't accept many of Sun's design choices for Java. People who make the switch away from C++ are making a major change in the working philosophy. So it's not really useful to compare C# with C++. It's a lot more useful to compare C# with the other big anti-C++ language: Java.
I'll say it again: MS is a big company with lots of people in lots of suborganizations. These people do not have one unifed goal. Indeed, the goals of one group often run at cross purposes to the goals at another. You can't always assume you understand Microsoft's motives for doing something based soley on how Microsoft (or rather, one particular arm of Microsoft) behaved in the past.
People have been using sneakernet to share electronic content since the invention of audio mag tape. The entertainment industry's never been happy about it, but they never went into panic mode until the Internet created a direct, fast one-to-one connection between millions of strangers.
This particular episode is a special case of a general problem. Every place I've ever worked, I've seen problems with people keeping data on their workstations that should be on servers. This happened even at place with strict policies against using workstation storage for anything except basic software. People will always get around the rules, because it's easier (though not safer) to work with data locally.
"Beta" is just a word, and Google is using it to play the "Underpromise and Overdeliver" game.
But that's still entropy. Planned obsolesence is something the species does to protect itself against entropy, at the expense of the individual.
Yes, I learned about Hamming codes in school. I'm proud to say that I was flunked out the encoding class by David Huffman himself!
Even if you convinced me that for some strange reason (vanity?) somebody was manipulating these pictures, that's really not proof of anything. What settles the issue is the actual content of the site. Move away from the standard conspiracy "proofs" and look at the site as a whole. There's just too much long-winded, solemn nonsense that a satirist would never have to patience to generate. And even if they did, they'd try to make more of it funny.
This is just one of those lame stories that some conspiracy freak put out there, and that everybody passes on without checking the facts for themselves. It's up there with the sewer alligators and the dead bodies embedded in Hoover Dam.
Now excuse me, I'm late for my Illuminati meeting.
Also, a lot of computing deals mainly with string values, like the Google example in the story. Even without a random element in the calculations, it's hard to predict exactly what page will come out on top of a Google ranking. If the ordering's slightly different, nobody will care.
And that's assuming that Google's secret algorithms don't already have a random element. Something I wouldn't rule out!
As I said, Roddenbery was a classic liberal. I saw a pilot for a TV show he tried to do before Star Trek, staring DeForest Kelly (!) as a crusading liberal lawer. The pilot was about the evils of the death penalty!
Perhaps one reason TOS doesn't seem very PC is the ability of the writers to write with some subtlety about controversial topics. Roddenberry wasn't very subtle, of course. But, contrary to myth, he did not dominate the writing for TOS the way he did later on.
Get real. An episode costs something like $50 million to produce. Lately, Enterprise has been lucky if it drew 2 million viewers. How many people will pay $25 to watch a TV show? For this one, I wouldn't pay $5.
That has nothing to do with nuclear energy. Instead, they're simply following a fad some left-leaning city governments have for banning nuclear weapons within their borders. They don't actually intend to arrest the next Army convoy passing through with tactical nukes -- it's "symbolic". I've always found that kind of posturing lame, even though I'm pretty much anti-nuke myself.
How can you cheer for something that will eventually kill you?
I might have been encouraged when the Reeves-Stevens started taking a lead role in Enterprise script writing, since they've done some decent SF in the past. Alas, they're also the worst kind of Trekkies. So when their fiction enters the Star Trek universe it just continues or prequels stories from their favorite TOS episodes, however unpromising the concept. Thus the excruciating Kirk Returns stories. And the upcoming Enterprise episodes which manages to make a serious plot out of the famous (and rather silly) smooth-headded Klingon mystery.
Well, maybe they'll get around to explaining my favorite mystery: why did Picard's Starfleet feel the need to totally redesign its uniforms three times???!!!
The guy who wrote the museumofhoaxes page seems to think that the hoaxer is this this guy. If he spent 5 minutes reading the guy's web material, he'd realize that he's quite sincere, though not very bright.
Also, note that the OBJECTIVE web site was originally hosted by a Christian hosting company. Not a logical place to host a spoof!
Finally, notice how OBJECTIVE is distributing this banner demanding that the Landover site be shut down. I can't believe a spoofer would come up with the slogan "He didn't give His life to be mocked!", no matter how mock-serious he was trying to be.
It's pretty easy to "prove" that something on the web is bogus. You pick at little inconsistencies, and you ignore the contrary evidence. I've been accused of being a non-existant person more than once. The last time was on Slashdot, where I had a story accepted gushing about a new TV show I was enthusiastic about. Several people "proved" that I was a pseudo-person invented just to plug the show. Never mind that already had a couple thousand Slashdot posts in my history!
The fact that you can't find any mention of "Fellowship University" means nothing. It's probably an unaccredited school with a "campus" in somebody's church.
When this site was first mentioned on Slashdot, about 3 years ago, I spent some time googling the people mentioned on the site, and they all seemed to have a pretty big presence in the anti-evolution community, with lots of essays "proving" that evolution is bogus. All of it thoroughly ignorant, but much to detailed to be a hoax. It's lame, of course, but by the standards of crankdom, not that lame. There are a lot of self-taught "scientists" out there.
I don't feel like digging up this material again just to argue with you, but you can probably find it yourself if you look.
A lot of Internet problems stem from people abusing their ability to do things anonymously. Spam is a prime example. It woulnd't be such a nasty problem is a return address were a real proof of identity, not something easily forged.
So put a tip jar on your site.
Those atheistic "geeks" used their evil "slashdot effect" to bring down a Christian web site!