In Silicon Valley, thousands of geeks drive by the airship hangers at Moffett Field every day. They're so large, clouds sometimes form in them. But the beaches of Santa Cruz are a few miles away, so I guess there'll be no indoor resort in Sunnyvale.
Well, I'm not going to defend anything AOL does. I could spend hours telling you all the things I don't like about them,
But the business of them being able to snoop on their customers is just standard law. If you own a server, you have to right to monitor files on that server.
People get all righteous when they hear about somebody snooping on their email or chats. ISPs are sleazy! The FBI has no respect for privacy! But the bottom line is that emails and chats go over big, open connections. Even if it were totally illegal for people to listen in, you couldn't assume that it wasn't happening.
If you're worried about the privacy of your communications, you should encrypt them. There's simply no other way to ensure that nobody's listening in.
NextStep may be the platform on which OS X was built. (Just as NextStep itself was built on Project Mach.) But OS X is hardly a continuation of NextStep. How many NextStep applications have migrated to OS X?
The ideas been spinning around since the early 90s at least.
A lot longer than that. The concept of a simple "information appliance" has been around at least as long as the PC. That's the concept that's actually right for most people, and if computer development were driven solely by consumer needs that's what we'd already have.
But new technology isn't created solely by the market -- that just gives a massive economic incentive. The actual creation of new products is done by all those geeks and hackers who can't stop themselves from fiddling with technology.
The first serious consumer computer was the Apple II. Which was not what Wozniak had in mind when he designed it -- he wanted a system that other geeks, like himself, would enjoy playing with. So he built in concepts of openness and expandability that dominate PC design to this very day. Which means that everybody who uses a computer needs a tame Wozniak nearby to keep their computer working.
This has always been true, but Microsoft's security woes, driven by their need to fiddle and hack and featurize themselves to death, is rubbing everybody's nose in the fact. So all of a sudden, everybody's talking about "the end of the PC". And it's not a bad idea -- it's just not clear who's going to make that fundamental change. Because the people who create all the tech just don't think that way.
BTW, the rise of the laptop is hardly evidence of "the PC forever". A laptop actually is more of a "post-PC" system than any desktop, since laptops are, by design, much less configurable. And in theory, you could have a laptop which never needs to have anything installed on it. If you need new software, you just run it off a server. Not practical without pervasive networking, of course, but that's fast becomming a reality.
But laptops aren't going to be the post-PC either -- they're still designed around the idea that a computer is an open system you keep adding components to. It's just that the components are software rather than hardware. And despite all this talk of "Post PC", I don't see that changing any time soon.
I'm sorry, what are you trying to say? You tell me I'm wrong, then you point me at a Wikipedia article that says the same thing I said. And what does the etymology of "Holland" have to do with anything?
When you say "the word spacing may change a little", you're really underestimating the problem. If you ever do anything more than really simple memos with no nested lists, no complex tables, and no charts, you find yourself in a real mess trying to import documents from another vendor. It's something you can deal with if you just want to read other people's documents -- but normal business workflow requires that people pass documents back and forth, making changes and annotations. You simply can't do that without standardizing on a format. And I don't mean RTF, which is effectively a Microsoft proprietary format, despite Redmond's past attempts to get it adopted as "neutral".
Technically, I suppose you're right. But Microsoft's past attempts to promote RTF as an open format have little practical meaning nowadays. I mean, if an unsuccessful platform is your best example of non-Microsoft development of RTF-based software, it doesn't say much for as an industry standard. A "standard" technology that only one company fully implements is, for all practical purposes, proprietary.
And although it's easier to find documentation for RTF than for Word native, the latter does exists. You just have to have the right developer's license to see it. I don't know whether products like OpenOffice, AbiWord, and WordPerfect, use that documentation, or whether they just reverse-engineer the files. But however they go about it, they don't do any worse a job reading Word native format than reading RTF.
So, yeah, characterizing RTF as "7-bit native" is a slight oversimplification. But not one that really matters to anybody trying to find a neutral format.
I am looking forward to an automatted "potty tracker" that keeps track of how often I and my coworkers visit the restroom each day.
The civil rights and privacy lawyers will have a lot of fun with that one. Increased visits to the commode might be a symptom of goofing off, but it might also be a symptom of a medical condition that an employer has no business knowing about. In particular, it's a symptom of benign prostate hypoplasia, a condition most men experience as they get older. An employer that makes personnel decisions on that kind of data is letting himself in for lawsuits based on disability- and age-discrimination statutes.
Which doesn't mean some brain dead manager won't do it anyway...
Wrong. Holland is a large province in The Netherlands that sort of dominates Dutch politics and history. (Administratively, it's two provinces nowadays.) Some people use "Holland" and "The Netherlands" interchangably, just as some people say "England" when they mean "Great Britain". But just as Scots and Welshpeople resent being called "English", I suspect that a lot of Frieslanders and Brabantians resent being called Hollanders.
You think RTF is "vendor neutral"? It's simply a 7-bit-safe version of Word's native format. There are lots of third-party tools that read and write RTF, but the same is true of Word native. Either way, you run up against all the formatting issues you always get when you're importing and exporting unstructured formats.
HTML is only vendor neutral if you don't use any vendor-specific extensions. So you can't just say, "Everybody save your files as HTML". You also have to forbid anybody using apps (such as Word) that save to a non-standard HTML.
In theory, you can create an XML-based format that looks the same in Word, OpenOffice, FrameMaker, and any other XML-aware app. But doing so means designing a schema in extreme nit-picking detail, and writing a lot of transformations to get that XML in and out of all the apps that need to read or write it. It's a lot of work, and nobody does it unless they have a specific application that requires highly-structured information. Like if you have a huge set of technical documentation that you need to update a lot. (I was involved in just such a project -- and the politics of converting all those documents to XML cost me my job.) Or if you have invoices or similar business documents that need to go into or out of a web services app.
But for the big mass of unstructured documents, there just isn't a vendor-neutral solution, and nobody has any real incentive to create one. The solution remains the same: standardize on certain specific applications. Which boils down to using OpenOffice if you hate giving money to Bill and/or want a platform-neutral solution. Otherwise you standardize on Microsoft Office, because it's what everybody knows how to use.
Well, that's not exactly "vendor neutral", since only one vendor supports it. Of course, that one vendor is an open-source project, and the format is well-documented XML. So if you want to break out of the Microsoft orbit, it's the obvious first choice.
XML isn't a format. It's a language for creating formats. Saying "we'll use XML" is like saying "we'll use an SQL database". It's a step, but only a small one. The big decisions remain.
Without Flexcar, she would have had to meet the expense of keeping the car around for those odd occasions...
And once she's paid all those expenses, she pretty much has to use the car all the time, even if mass transit is available, since the slight extra expense of using the car day-to-day is usually less than transit fares.
There must be millions of people who own and use cars for just that reason, and it has a pretty nasty environmental and economic impact. Which is the main motivation behind the organization that does car sharing in my area.
Then again, there are millions of people who wouldn't give up their cars for any reason. Are these the folks who complain most loudly about gas prices?
If you're running software that's more than a decade old you need to know what the limits of your software are.
Indeed. I get the impression that Boeing is very unmotivated when it comes to keeping its IS technology up to date. Until recently, they were still using slips of paper to track the process of assembling their airplanes!
What's particularly disturbing is that nothing was done about this during the big Y2K push 5 years ago. Of course, the official goal of Y2K efforts was to make sure your computers didn't crash on 1/1/2000. But it's pretty hard to separate Y2K bugs from other clock bugs, and I think most places didn't even try. Easier to fix or document the bugs than to classify them. I was involved with the Y2K effort at SGI, and we looked at everything from leap year bugs to the Unix 16-bit clock overflow -- which won't occur until 2038!
As I understand it, the DMCA forbids any exchange of information relating to circumvention of copyright. And note that AOL has every right to monitor conversations on its servers. The only thing that prevents this from happening is the difficulty of monitoring millions of online conversations. And possibly somebody is working on that.
Is this a serious abridgement of your right to free speech? You betcha. But so far they're getting away with it.
I have to admit that the Adaptive Filter in Firefox seems to have similar effectiveness. (Since I don't own my email server, I have to rely on client-side solutions.) I still get nervous about not seeing all my email.
Slashdot Mirror
If we spent as much money on space exploration as we spent on lame-ass movies, everbody would own a comet by now!
In Silicon Valley, thousands of geeks drive by the airship hangers at Moffett Field every day. They're so large, clouds sometimes form in them. But the beaches of Santa Cruz are a few miles away, so I guess there'll be no indoor resort in Sunnyvale.
But the business of them being able to snoop on their customers is just standard law. If you own a server, you have to right to monitor files on that server.
People get all righteous when they hear about somebody snooping on their email or chats. ISPs are sleazy! The FBI has no respect for privacy! But the bottom line is that emails and chats go over big, open connections. Even if it were totally illegal for people to listen in, you couldn't assume that it wasn't happening.
If you're worried about the privacy of your communications, you should encrypt them. There's simply no other way to ensure that nobody's listening in.
So how many PCI slots does your laptop have?
NextStep may be the platform on which OS X was built. (Just as NextStep itself was built on Project Mach.) But OS X is hardly a continuation of NextStep. How many NextStep applications have migrated to OS X?
An "Ask Slashdot" that provokes an interesting discussion? That's not allowed! Are we all out of clueless lame-ass questions, or what?
But new technology isn't created solely by the market -- that just gives a massive economic incentive. The actual creation of new products is done by all those geeks and hackers who can't stop themselves from fiddling with technology.
The first serious consumer computer was the Apple II. Which was not what Wozniak had in mind when he designed it -- he wanted a system that other geeks, like himself, would enjoy playing with. So he built in concepts of openness and expandability that dominate PC design to this very day. Which means that everybody who uses a computer needs a tame Wozniak nearby to keep their computer working.
This has always been true, but Microsoft's security woes, driven by their need to fiddle and hack and featurize themselves to death, is rubbing everybody's nose in the fact. So all of a sudden, everybody's talking about "the end of the PC". And it's not a bad idea -- it's just not clear who's going to make that fundamental change. Because the people who create all the tech just don't think that way.
BTW, the rise of the laptop is hardly evidence of "the PC forever". A laptop actually is more of a "post-PC" system than any desktop, since laptops are, by design, much less configurable. And in theory, you could have a laptop which never needs to have anything installed on it. If you need new software, you just run it off a server. Not practical without pervasive networking, of course, but that's fast becomming a reality.
But laptops aren't going to be the post-PC either -- they're still designed around the idea that a computer is an open system you keep adding components to. It's just that the components are software rather than hardware. And despite all this talk of "Post PC", I don't see that changing any time soon.
I'm sorry, what are you trying to say? You tell me I'm wrong, then you point me at a Wikipedia article that says the same thing I said. And what does the etymology of "Holland" have to do with anything?
What? Research it myself? What's "Ask Slashdot" for, then?
When you say "the word spacing may change a little", you're really underestimating the problem. If you ever do anything more than really simple memos with no nested lists, no complex tables, and no charts, you find yourself in a real mess trying to import documents from another vendor. It's something you can deal with if you just want to read other people's documents -- but normal business workflow requires that people pass documents back and forth, making changes and annotations. You simply can't do that without standardizing on a format. And I don't mean RTF, which is effectively a Microsoft proprietary format, despite Redmond's past attempts to get it adopted as "neutral".
And although it's easier to find documentation for RTF than for Word native, the latter does exists. You just have to have the right developer's license to see it. I don't know whether products like OpenOffice, AbiWord, and WordPerfect, use that documentation, or whether they just reverse-engineer the files. But however they go about it, they don't do any worse a job reading Word native format than reading RTF.
So, yeah, characterizing RTF as "7-bit native" is a slight oversimplification. But not one that really matters to anybody trying to find a neutral format.
I also object to the stereotyping of robots as "automatons".
Mauve is so 90s!
Which doesn't mean some brain dead manager won't do it anyway...
Wrong. Holland is a large province in The Netherlands that sort of dominates Dutch politics and history. (Administratively, it's two provinces nowadays.) Some people use "Holland" and "The Netherlands" interchangably, just as some people say "England" when they mean "Great Britain". But just as Scots and Welshpeople resent being called "English", I suspect that a lot of Frieslanders and Brabantians resent being called Hollanders.
HTML is only vendor neutral if you don't use any vendor-specific extensions. So you can't just say, "Everybody save your files as HTML". You also have to forbid anybody using apps (such as Word) that save to a non-standard HTML.
In theory, you can create an XML-based format that looks the same in Word, OpenOffice, FrameMaker, and any other XML-aware app. But doing so means designing a schema in extreme nit-picking detail, and writing a lot of transformations to get that XML in and out of all the apps that need to read or write it. It's a lot of work, and nobody does it unless they have a specific application that requires highly-structured information. Like if you have a huge set of technical documentation that you need to update a lot. (I was involved in just such a project -- and the politics of converting all those documents to XML cost me my job.) Or if you have invoices or similar business documents that need to go into or out of a web services app.
But for the big mass of unstructured documents, there just isn't a vendor-neutral solution, and nobody has any real incentive to create one. The solution remains the same: standardize on certain specific applications. Which boils down to using OpenOffice if you hate giving money to Bill and/or want a platform-neutral solution. Otherwise you standardize on Microsoft Office, because it's what everybody knows how to use.
Well, that's not exactly "vendor neutral", since only one vendor supports it. Of course, that one vendor is an open-source project, and the format is well-documented XML. So if you want to break out of the Microsoft orbit, it's the obvious first choice.
XML isn't a format. It's a language for creating formats. Saying "we'll use XML" is like saying "we'll use an SQL database". It's a step, but only a small one. The big decisions remain.
There must be millions of people who own and use cars for just that reason, and it has a pretty nasty environmental and economic impact. Which is the main motivation behind the organization that does car sharing in my area.
Then again, there are millions of people who wouldn't give up their cars for any reason. Are these the folks who complain most loudly about gas prices?
Grandson (who hasn't a clue, but can't admit it): Well, you see, relative to me, you're old, but relative to a sea turtle, you're young...
(Long silence.)
Old Man: So. From this, your Einstein makes a living?
What's particularly disturbing is that nothing was done about this during the big Y2K push 5 years ago. Of course, the official goal of Y2K efforts was to make sure your computers didn't crash on 1/1/2000. But it's pretty hard to separate Y2K bugs from other clock bugs, and I think most places didn't even try. Easier to fix or document the bugs than to classify them. I was involved with the Y2K effort at SGI, and we looked at everything from leap year bugs to the Unix 16-bit clock overflow -- which won't occur until 2038!
I'm pretty sure "Overrated" is shorthand for, "Oh, shut up!"
Is this a serious abridgement of your right to free speech? You betcha. But so far they're getting away with it.
I have to admit that the Adaptive Filter in Firefox seems to have similar effectiveness. (Since I don't own my email server, I have to rely on client-side solutions.) I still get nervous about not seeing all my email.