The problem is not what Excel and DBs can do, but rather their overall design, their presentation as products. Read the first message I posted, rather than just the response to the feature quibbles. If Excel were packaged with a DB that took over all functions except GUI, the "Excel culture" would be stronger, and the quality of code in spreadsheets would be a lot higher than the article we're discussing reports.
Databases have better tools for supporting even that crazy, fragile ("arbitrary, unstructured") shit. That's why an architecture that makes Excel just the GUI for a database helps reduce the craziness and fragility. While leaving a simple, familiar spreadsheet GUI off the database makes it harder to use. Making them separate, usually unrelated apps has weakened both.
How about "broadband telcos' shabby internetworking and bandwidth oversubscription melts down when customers consume what they paid for during World Cup"?
Not as snappy a headline. I'd make a better one if telcos paid me the marketing budget that produced the headline on this story.
Well of course any org (or person) needs a policy on record authority, on top of any tools - whether they're software, paper or wetware. Even using an accounting firm is no longer any guarantee of accountability, as Arthur Andersen and Enron proved for an entire industry.
There's no reason that turning Excel into merely the GUI for an RDBMS has to kill its flexibility, if the implementation is done well. Many have tried, a few have succeeded at least partially. If more development had gone into the scriptable RDBMS path than into reinventing incompatible macros and rebuilding "DB versions", we'd probably have a client/server system as flexible, manageable, and powerful as Excel seemed 12-20 years ago. But in today's terms. And the "best practices" to go with using its features.
Who's got the rest of the software that combines multiple SW radios with phased arrays of smart antennas? A mobile "phone" that can transceive in any band without any required registration (of frequency, time or code) because its signal is unique due to its unique spatial position. Bandwidth would be limited only by the power efficiency of the electronics.
"Coordination" is already being tested out in the "527 committees" which can spend money on a candidate's behalf as long as they don't coordinate with the candidate or their campaign.
"Who you are" is not that hard to establish once only live humans are allowed to spend that money - corporations would be prohibited from those expenses, just as they'd be prohibited from any other public political expenses. That person would have to register with the election committee, just as 527 committees register now. Once exposed to legal liability for fraud without the benefit of a corporation's protections, a lot fewer people will front for others, and will be more easily caught.
The point is to make things better. Politics is a business of endless incremental improvements and setbacks, with occasional watersheds that were approached gradually. Distributed and archived communications like the Internet and the Web rebalance the organizational efficiencies in favor of the people. When we use them to get to clear common goals, we'll get there. My cynicism shadows my hope only in worrying if it will be too late, and there will be nothing left to win back for ourselves.
I'm amazed at the rut Excel traps IT-based businesses in. Excel was once the best thing computers did, apart from screensavers and ahead of email. But by the late 1990s Excel should have become merely the GUI for relational databases. Even cheap/free ones like MS-Access and MySQL, if not Oracle, Postgres, SQL-Server. Excel should have had macros programmable in the exact same language as actual databases, like VB (not VBA), Perl or something unique to its vertical integration. Upgrading from the starter DB to the enterprise DB should have been a matter of installing the new backend on the network, and configuring the Excel client.
If that path were taken, Excel would be a manageable platform. Instead, it's trapped in the early 1990s desktop, with all its limitations to collaboration, performance, maintenance and dataflow. Every improvement in those areas is a one shot deal, a hack on a once-elegant app now hacked to death.
Maybe the new generation of open formats and distributed computing services offer a chance to try again. Excel will probably include those, just diluted by all the wrong ways retained as its "legacy".
So you buy a TV commercial for him. If you don't coordinate with him, you can say whatever you want - as long as your commercial includes the citation of who you are. That leaves Smith's opponents to reply with TV they buy with money they do raise. If you do coordinate, or you don't cite who you are, you're exposed to legal liability, and thereby bad publicity for your candidate. The Internet makes it much cheaper, easier and much more likely for voters to find out about those "friends", and reporters, too.
There's no way to eliminate the influence of money without limiting people's expression of their money. But we're talking about alternatives. Donations to a race rather than to a candidate minimize the bribery of cash in a candidate's pockets. They also minimize the unequal expenditure on promotion, though they don't eliminate it.
When you look at campaign finance and expense, rarely do two candidates spend the about same amount to get close results. Big money gets spent to compensate for big differences. The minimization of unequal promotion budgets will allow those differences to be more obvious. And outside compensations will be less effective when they're provided by people who are themselves a liability.
The system is now rigged for razor-thin margins at great cost. Like any security measure that can restore the big margins to legitimate operators by disproportionately multiplying costs for attackers, without creating significant barriers of legitimate access, the finance reform I describe is compelling. If the bad guys weren't running the system, it would be installed by now.
Can someone publish the recorded, noninteractive machinima of a thrilling victory in the game? Maybe a 3-part series, about 90 minutes each, pausing at meaningful points in the plot? Get a champion player as the "actor", record the stream of game events, play them back in the engine. Is that technically possible with Half-Life2, or any video RPG? Maybe an open source engine...
To be "fair", or rather to be protected from abuse, no one should be allowed to bribe any public official.
Humans (and only humans, not "artificial persons" like corporations of any kind) have to be allowed to donate money to politics. Otherwise, only the "media incumbents" will be known to voters enough to get elected. A real campaign finance law would allow only human American citizens to donate money only to the race itself, drawn upon equally by everyone registered on the ballot. Including the candidate themself, so rich people can't just buy what they need to get elected. The elections commissions escrowing the money could keep any remaining after the election to subsidize their budget overseeing the election.
Watch as everyone on the ballot gets an equal chance to communicate with voters, and the amount spent on promotion plunges towards the minimum required to get their message out. Watch as the political campaign consultant class shrinks, especially among those dedicated to the bribery industry. And watch the bribery plummet as its legal laundering venue disappears, disconnecting any contributions from any benefit to any specific candidate.
With so much of the highest-level CPU design going into GPUs, and so many of the most wily consumers of the fastest GPUs going to any lengths possible to trick them out, I'm surprised there's not a lot more development of GPGPU, harnessing these processors for general purpose computing.
Given the qualifications and interests of that joint community, I'd expect to see a "PCI network" that parallelizes MP3 encoding on much cheaper MFLOPS GPU HW by now.
Maybe actually playing the games is eating up too much time.
All those corporate contributions are obviously bribes. They should be illegal - corporations shouldn't be allowed to bribe any public official.
But some of them are stupid bribes. When the official doesn't produce results for the corporate briber, the official has not done anything wrong, except maybe allow the appearance of doing something wrong, which costs the system in ease of telling the difference.
When the official continues (or starts) to work against that corporate interest or agenda, though receiving a failed bribe, that official has gotten funded by the corporation to work against that corporation. When the result serves the people, and not just some corporate competitor, that official has my respect for doing it right.
When officials get bribed by corporations, but work against them, including outlawing corporate bribery, they're heroes.
FWIW, we are a nation founded explicitly on distrust of the government. Anyone whose politics is based on trust is a sucker and a liability. The best officials to elect are those most easily caught and damaged when they do something wrong. That's accountability, which has been reduced (in the words of George Bush Jr) to an "accountability moment" one day every two or four years. Between which politicians rely on "trust" to avoid getting caught.
What conspiracy theory? The elections on those days are scheduled by the Constitution. Karl Rove, I know you dropped the "policy advisor" job to concentrate on politics, but really, this Anonymous whining Coward posting gig is beneath you. Why not just outsource it to your swiftboat vendors, like usual?
Bloomberg has been one of the biggest fundraisers for Bush, since he "switched parties" from Democrat to Republican to get Giuliani's endorsement in the 2001 NYC mayor election. And for 5 years his news network has ignored Bush's attacks on science, like the rest of the mass media. Now that everyone is hearing how Bush destroys science to please the retards who want to vote down the "brainy" people to their level of medieval slavery, there's a big backlash. Especially in NYC, where being smart is second only to being rich as the ticket to being rich.
Bloomberg is talking science in the public speeches for the media, and raising money for BushCo behind the scenes. Just like Arafat used to talk diplomacy in English on TV, and terror in Arabic through the grapevine.
For about 30 years, I've been staring at PC monitors from whatever chair is available, in whatever triangle with the keyboard and my body happened to be easily adjustable. My eyesight, which started at a little better than 20/20 in both eyes, is now better than 20/16.
I did switch from CRT to LCD after about 10 years. And I use two very different action keyboards on my desk. And I refused to learn "touchtyping", preferring instead a John Entwhistle approach to 10-fingered hypersonic hunt and peck. But my PC rigs seem to have served more as exercise equipment than torture chamber. Maybe I'm just lucky to be born PC-shaped.
I guess telling the truth about how Bush has destroyed even the basis of the 2nd Amendment, after all the others, makes me a target for flamethrowers, though TrollMods shouldn't penalize me.
But at least the zombie Bush army is down around 30%, with moderation's rounding. When I'm getting something like 20% "Flamebait", "Troll", "Offtopic" or "Overrated" TrollMods, at least Slashdot will reflect the overall US state of sanity.
Just because you don't care about your privacy doesn't mean I don't. When someone steals your ID from JetBlue or some other careless, unaccountable corporate violator of their privacy policies, you're free to catch up with the value of privacy. You say "the over-reaching government issue" like it's some abstraction that matters only in some vague principle. But my right to privacy is my right, even if you think you can waive yours.
JetBlue promised not to send its passengers' personal data to Homeland Security (or anyone else). But they did, they lied to cover it up, and were exposed. And they never were held accountable.
Expect every packet on their WiFi to be sniffed, analyzed and sent to the highest bidder. Including, but not limited to, DHS.
Slashdot Mirror
When I zoom in or out, it looks different, so it's not mandelbrotty.
The problem is not what Excel and DBs can do, but rather their overall design, their presentation as products. Read the first message I posted, rather than just the response to the feature quibbles. If Excel were packaged with a DB that took over all functions except GUI, the "Excel culture" would be stronger, and the quality of code in spreadsheets would be a lot higher than the article we're discussing reports.
Databases have better tools for supporting even that crazy, fragile ("arbitrary, unstructured") shit. That's why an architecture that makes Excel just the GUI for a database helps reduce the craziness and fragility. While leaving a simple, familiar spreadsheet GUI off the database makes it harder to use. Making them separate, usually unrelated apps has weakened both.
How about "broadband telcos' shabby internetworking and bandwidth oversubscription melts down when customers consume what they paid for during World Cup"?
Not as snappy a headline. I'd make a better one if telcos paid me the marketing budget that produced the headline on this story.
We should invade Iraq for nonexistent WMD, because once we're bogged down there, we can get the oil!
Well of course any org (or person) needs a policy on record authority, on top of any tools - whether they're software, paper or wetware. Even using an accounting firm is no longer any guarantee of accountability, as Arthur Andersen and Enron proved for an entire industry.
There's no reason that turning Excel into merely the GUI for an RDBMS has to kill its flexibility, if the implementation is done well. Many have tried, a few have succeeded at least partially. If more development had gone into the scriptable RDBMS path than into reinventing incompatible macros and rebuilding "DB versions", we'd probably have a client/server system as flexible, manageable, and powerful as Excel seemed 12-20 years ago. But in today's terms. And the "best practices" to go with using its features.
TeX can be very productive as long as people don't waste any of your time talking about pronouncing "Tex" as "techh" (*clears throat*).
Just like Linux productivity jumped when people stopped wasting any time talking about pronouncing it "lihnuhks" vs "lienuhks".
Who's got the rest of the software that combines multiple SW radios with phased arrays of smart antennas? A mobile "phone" that can transceive in any band without any required registration (of frequency, time or code) because its signal is unique due to its unique spatial position. Bandwidth would be limited only by the power efficiency of the electronics.
"Coordination" is already being tested out in the "527 committees" which can spend money on a candidate's behalf as long as they don't coordinate with the candidate or their campaign.
"Who you are" is not that hard to establish once only live humans are allowed to spend that money - corporations would be prohibited from those expenses, just as they'd be prohibited from any other public political expenses. That person would have to register with the election committee, just as 527 committees register now. Once exposed to legal liability for fraud without the benefit of a corporation's protections, a lot fewer people will front for others, and will be more easily caught.
The point is to make things better. Politics is a business of endless incremental improvements and setbacks, with occasional watersheds that were approached gradually. Distributed and archived communications like the Internet and the Web rebalance the organizational efficiencies in favor of the people. When we use them to get to clear common goals, we'll get there. My cynicism shadows my hope only in worrying if it will be too late, and there will be nothing left to win back for ourselves.
I'm amazed at the rut Excel traps IT-based businesses in. Excel was once the best thing computers did, apart from screensavers and ahead of email. But by the late 1990s Excel should have become merely the GUI for relational databases. Even cheap/free ones like MS-Access and MySQL, if not Oracle, Postgres, SQL-Server. Excel should have had macros programmable in the exact same language as actual databases, like VB (not VBA), Perl or something unique to its vertical integration. Upgrading from the starter DB to the enterprise DB should have been a matter of installing the new backend on the network, and configuring the Excel client.
If that path were taken, Excel would be a manageable platform. Instead, it's trapped in the early 1990s desktop, with all its limitations to collaboration, performance, maintenance and dataflow. Every improvement in those areas is a one shot deal, a hack on a once-elegant app now hacked to death.
Maybe the new generation of open formats and distributed computing services offer a chance to try again. Excel will probably include those, just diluted by all the wrong ways retained as its "legacy".
So you buy a TV commercial for him. If you don't coordinate with him, you can say whatever you want - as long as your commercial includes the citation of who you are. That leaves Smith's opponents to reply with TV they buy with money they do raise. If you do coordinate, or you don't cite who you are, you're exposed to legal liability, and thereby bad publicity for your candidate. The Internet makes it much cheaper, easier and much more likely for voters to find out about those "friends", and reporters, too.
There's no way to eliminate the influence of money without limiting people's expression of their money. But we're talking about alternatives. Donations to a race rather than to a candidate minimize the bribery of cash in a candidate's pockets. They also minimize the unequal expenditure on promotion, though they don't eliminate it.
When you look at campaign finance and expense, rarely do two candidates spend the about same amount to get close results. Big money gets spent to compensate for big differences. The minimization of unequal promotion budgets will allow those differences to be more obvious. And outside compensations will be less effective when they're provided by people who are themselves a liability.
The system is now rigged for razor-thin margins at great cost. Like any security measure that can restore the big margins to legitimate operators by disproportionately multiplying costs for attackers, without creating significant barriers of legitimate access, the finance reform I describe is compelling. If the bad guys weren't running the system, it would be installed by now.
Can someone publish the recorded, noninteractive machinima of a thrilling victory in the game? Maybe a 3-part series, about 90 minutes each, pausing at meaningful points in the plot? Get a champion player as the "actor", record the stream of game events, play them back in the engine. Is that technically possible with Half-Life2, or any video RPG? Maybe an open source engine...
Unions are corporations.
To be "fair", or rather to be protected from abuse, no one should be allowed to bribe any public official.
Humans (and only humans, not "artificial persons" like corporations of any kind) have to be allowed to donate money to politics. Otherwise, only the "media incumbents" will be known to voters enough to get elected. A real campaign finance law would allow only human American citizens to donate money only to the race itself, drawn upon equally by everyone registered on the ballot. Including the candidate themself, so rich people can't just buy what they need to get elected. The elections commissions escrowing the money could keep any remaining after the election to subsidize their budget overseeing the election.
Watch as everyone on the ballot gets an equal chance to communicate with voters, and the amount spent on promotion plunges towards the minimum required to get their message out. Watch as the political campaign consultant class shrinks, especially among those dedicated to the bribery industry. And watch the bribery plummet as its legal laundering venue disappears, disconnecting any contributions from any benefit to any specific candidate.
With so much of the highest-level CPU design going into GPUs, and so many of the most wily consumers of the fastest GPUs going to any lengths possible to trick them out, I'm surprised there's not a lot more development of GPGPU, harnessing these processors for general purpose computing.
Given the qualifications and interests of that joint community, I'd expect to see a "PCI network" that parallelizes MP3 encoding on much cheaper MFLOPS GPU HW by now.
Maybe actually playing the games is eating up too much time.
All those corporate contributions are obviously bribes. They should be illegal - corporations shouldn't be allowed to bribe any public official.
But some of them are stupid bribes. When the official doesn't produce results for the corporate briber, the official has not done anything wrong, except maybe allow the appearance of doing something wrong, which costs the system in ease of telling the difference.
When the official continues (or starts) to work against that corporate interest or agenda, though receiving a failed bribe, that official has gotten funded by the corporation to work against that corporation. When the result serves the people, and not just some corporate competitor, that official has my respect for doing it right.
When officials get bribed by corporations, but work against them, including outlawing corporate bribery, they're heroes.
FWIW, we are a nation founded explicitly on distrust of the government. Anyone whose politics is based on trust is a sucker and a liability. The best officials to elect are those most easily caught and damaged when they do something wrong. That's accountability, which has been reduced (in the words of George Bush Jr) to an "accountability moment" one day every two or four years. Between which politicians rely on "trust" to avoid getting caught.
Moderation -1
100% Flamebait
TrollMods think "look at the condition the country's in" is "Flamebait". Just because they're burning the country to the ground.
Moderation -1
70% Troll
30% Underrated
Ah, silly TrollMods, if only I could provoke Karl Rove into a predictable response on Slashdot. He could call me a jihadmunist!
What conspiracy theory? The elections on those days are scheduled by the Constitution. Karl Rove, I know you dropped the "policy advisor" job to concentrate on politics, but really, this Anonymous whining Coward posting gig is beneath you. Why not just outsource it to your swiftboat vendors, like usual?
"an event even more catastrophic than the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks"
Would that be the November 7, 2006 Congressional elections? Or the November 4, 2008 elections, showing exceptionally long-range planning?
Bloomberg has been one of the biggest fundraisers for Bush, since he "switched parties" from Democrat to Republican to get Giuliani's endorsement in the 2001 NYC mayor election. And for 5 years his news network has ignored Bush's attacks on science, like the rest of the mass media. Now that everyone is hearing how Bush destroys science to please the retards who want to vote down the "brainy" people to their level of medieval slavery, there's a big backlash. Especially in NYC, where being smart is second only to being rich as the ticket to being rich.
Bloomberg is talking science in the public speeches for the media, and raising money for BushCo behind the scenes. Just like Arafat used to talk diplomacy in English on TV, and terror in Arabic through the grapevine.
For about 30 years, I've been staring at PC monitors from whatever chair is available, in whatever triangle with the keyboard and my body happened to be easily adjustable. My eyesight, which started at a little better than 20/20 in both eyes, is now better than 20/16.
I did switch from CRT to LCD after about 10 years. And I use two very different action keyboards on my desk. And I refused to learn "touchtyping", preferring instead a John Entwhistle approach to 10-fingered hypersonic hunt and peck. But my PC rigs seem to have served more as exercise equipment than torture chamber. Maybe I'm just lucky to be born PC-shaped.
No, Liebrtarians just say they do.
Moderation +1
70% Insightful
30% Flamebait
I guess telling the truth about how Bush has destroyed even the basis of the 2nd Amendment, after all the others, makes me a target for flamethrowers, though TrollMods shouldn't penalize me.
But at least the zombie Bush army is down around 30%, with moderation's rounding. When I'm getting something like 20% "Flamebait", "Troll", "Offtopic" or "Overrated" TrollMods, at least Slashdot will reflect the overall US state of sanity.
Just because you don't care about your privacy doesn't mean I don't. When someone steals your ID from JetBlue or some other careless, unaccountable corporate violator of their privacy policies, you're free to catch up with the value of privacy. You say "the over-reaching government issue" like it's some abstraction that matters only in some vague principle. But my right to privacy is my right, even if you think you can waive yours.
JetBlue promised not to send its passengers' personal data to Homeland Security (or anyone else). But they did, they lied to cover it up, and were exposed. And they never were held accountable.
Expect every packet on their WiFi to be sniffed, analyzed and sent to the highest bidder. Including, but not limited to, DHS.