Actually,
It'd be more like the cab driver asking you "Are you sure you don't want the "Holidee Inn", which is cheaper but over in a bad part of town?"
You speak the truth. "Back in the day", in many vertical markets (and still a lot today), there was "one" platform for any given application. That meant a specific model of a given PC or a line. I worked for a place who originally had the one true platform which was an IBM PS/2 Model 30 with certain revisions only allowed.
It was pretty strict. The software checked all over the place to make sure it was being fooled. Really, really, really paranoid about it.
But in the end, maybe it was worth. Worked like a charm for 10+ years. When that product was discontinued they went to generic Dell boxes where two apparently identical models will have different video cards, hard drive brands, or even motherboards. Very annoying when you are trying to get a very good idea of what happens with a specific machine over time.
Part of what you say is true, part of is a matter of enabling parents through technology.
One thing is parental locks on television, or the "V-chip". Telling producers to self-rate thier own programs, and forcing TVs to allow you to block based on ratings enables good parenting and involved parenting.
Without it, the only way to make sure your kids are watching TV you have approved is to remove the TV when you aren't home, or can't supervise. Clearly the TV shouldn't be a babysitter, but also clearly, a parent cannot watch a child 24/7 after they reach a certain age. There will be unsupervised time and it will grow as the child grows.
Banning or blocking content or games is not smart, and it doesn't work well, and it should be required. But allowing parents the option - enforcing products of content to allow parents to block objectionable content - is a good bargain for all involved.
The other option is that parents will just block all content, which ends up harming content producers. I am not all that old, and have younger siblings who were living at home with my parents when the V-chip thing happened. When I was growing up me and my old siblings had no access to TV or video games because it wasn't feasible for my parents to supervise us and they didnt want us to be exposed to material which may be above our maturity level. So we went without largely, except for carefully supervised TV events and the Nintendo my parents go us and literally kept locked up save for special occasions. With my younger siblings and now nieces and nephews they have more access thanks to the ability to regulate the content displayed based on identity. My parents have a TV with multiple pass codes. It defaults to the lowest level.
I guess I am saying that technology is really generally an enabler of better parenting. The major problem is that it becomes a surrogate parent and babysitter for kids. Very often the technology is used pro-actively.
Honestly,
It's just that the loons are much more visible, thanks to the Internet.
Go out and talk to some real people, like neighbors. Most are just normal people. Yeah, some fruit loops, but mostly, just normal.
And how did that proposal go?
Ohh. Shot down? Determined to be illegal regulation?
Bummer.
My point is strue and stands. The public airwaves a public resource, and must be used as such.
Everything else you can publish or say virtually anything you want.
You are a liar.
They protect us from hearing the "seven words" over the *public* airwaves.
The *public* airwaves.
You want to say any of the words? GO AHEAD. But not over the public airwaves.
Most business need a line-of-business or vertical market application for day to day use.
General purpose apps are great for general purposes, but many many many businesses are based of regional vertical market applications.
Stuff like point of sale systems for stores, software for furniture stores to schedule deliveries and inventory, medical billing software which is highly regionalized, software for denists offices, software for small banks, software for warehouse management, software for small movie rental stores, etc.
General purpose computing is doing great. But for vertical markets small niche vendors are doing great.
So true. It's crappy markup at the worst. Really, really, really bad.
But it's still formatted. And it can still be done in a formatted way - though with much more work.
Along with what I suggested before devising some semantic tags that you can convert later to real markup might be handy for long blocks of text.. much like how BBCode takes unstructure text and makes it somewhat structured enough to be workable.
That's the best way. Really.
You want the data to be in a structured format. Semantically structured if possible, but at least structured.
Define a bunch of templates. Use a templating system like smarty or whatever to make it happen.
Give your users a simple form - HTML, Windows, Java, whatever, that selects a template and reads in a list of fields from the template. Dynamically generate the form fields to be filled based on the template. Store the data. To generate a page start from the master record - be it in a database, an xml file, or whatever. Load the template and fill the data from the relational store.
If you do it right you can even substitute different rendering layers and get an X/HTML version, a Word version, and a PDF version without any real substantial work.
This also helps (1) create consistent documents, (2) create documents for more than one target format, (3) create searchable content with rich meta-data and (4) move to a more robust system later without tons of extra work.
I've done it before, and if you spend a week engineering the solution properly it'll last years.
I am sure the powers that be recognize that political sites, by their contentious nature, draw huge traffic.
Look over the most heavily commented upon articles. They usually have heavily provactive stuff in the description.
Comments equals page views equals profits.
It's the same reason the nightly news will always run a story about a spectacular firey car accident, a freak decapitation, or 800-lb man stuck in his house before an article say, examining internation relations, trade policy, or a union membership drive.
Investigation doesn't mean guilt, or that it was even a crime.
Grand juries are high-powered investigation tools with wide latitude to subpeoena and seek the truth.
The test will be to see what indictiments - if any - are handed down from the Grand Jury.
Yes, they do work very well. They are strongly enforced and effective.
Every day people win retaliation lawsuits against government agencies and corporations.
That's because they aren't whistleblowers. And because "she-who-can't-be-named" hasn't suffered consequences as a result of this debacle. She has a comfortable stateside job. If she were, say, demoted or fired, she'd have a clear cut case, she'd be reinstated with back pay and damages, and that's that.
How can people protect themselves from retribution
without it?
The law explicitly and strongly protects whisteblowers. Report something illegal or shady, and you are protected. If you are fired - as happens - you will be awarded massive damages and be set for life. It happens again and again.
The fact is that anonymous sources, 99% of the time, are used for ill, not for good. They used for petty personal reasons.
Watergate is a great example. Felt was loser, a passed over whiner. He was pissed at Nixon. He knew Nixon had some dirt on his hands, and so he took him down out of revenge. Nixon deserved to go down, but the press enables non-transparent government by propping anonymous sources.
There are probably 5 or maybe 10 cases where newspaper should have used anonymous sources in the last decade. Instead they are constantly used, day in and day out, to avoid scrutiny, transparency, and verification.
You've obviously never been attacked by an anonymous source; it sucks!
The whole problem here is that irksome press that insists on *reporting* that our elected officials are crooks and liars. Make those inside sources identify themselves publicly, and stop the truth in its tracks!
The press uses anonymous sources non-stop for everything when there is no legitimate reason.
For one, they are lazy. For two, they know they are being used and they don't care. They want access. It's all about access.
If you have a bonafide case where a person is afraid for his/her safety, fine.
Funny you should mention Watergate. Felt was a sore loser - a passed over paper pusher pissed at Nixon. Was Nixon a crook? Absolutely. The fact is though that Felt should have come forward out of conscience as soon as something fishy was going on.
The press enables non-transparent government, internal backstabbing, and petty back and forth that is *harmful* to the country. Politicans need to be kept lawful and honest; that's an honest role of the media. The pursuit of that goal should not corrupt them.
Well being that if a few loudmouths hadn't made an issue of it, it would never have come up for a vote, yeah, actually. A few loud politicans make a big deal out of nothing, and then, it gets the attention of the rest of the jackasses.
Thanks but you fail. Ms. Clinton is not a victim here, she is the crook.
Re:Something borrowed, nothing new
on
IE7 Bugs and Reviews
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I have no idea about you, but I used to work in a shop that 100% MS. The company made a strategic decision to use MS products at the highest level, considered options and alternatives, and made a big dollar commitment.
It was always really annoying that in the IT department no matter the problem one guy always suggested that "well, we have an old pentium box around here.. we could throw Linux and XXX package and hack together some Perl scripts and be finished with this project by tomorrow".
No matter the problem it was always "well, Linux is better".
And you know, it did hurt his career. He's an IT guy in an all MS shop. He knew it when he applied.
The reason you see a lot of momentum towards any vendor - especially MS - is that it's just easier to stay with one vendor and yah deal with their crap. It makes no sense to have 200 Windows servers and then 2 Linux boxes.
Yeah, you know, djdns is more secure and faster than Windows DNS, but you know what, not so much that it makes it worth having a seperate platform, and having those boxes able to be admin'd by one or two guys instead of the normal admin team of 15.
I am happy for all (us) Linux/OSS geeks. But man, if you are place isn't an OSS friendly place, deal with it! Don't go around all the time (1) exaggerating how much easier some OSS solution would be and (2) bad mouthing everything and by proxy everyone up the chain. It's just career suicide!
Finally, about blatant stealing.
Remember when MS added the "infobar" to report blocked pop-ups and crap like that to IE6 with XP SP2?
Odd how that's in FireFox now, pixel-per-pixel copied! It's a two way street.
Quick standard pattern matching would be worked around in a matter hours or maybe days, and would be rendered useless. Whatever patterns MS determined were good indicators of phishing would be circumvented.
Slashdot Mirror
In fact they are more likely to go up. The incidence of rear-end collisons is higher in traffic-camera "protected" intersections.
Actually, It'd be more like the cab driver asking you "Are you sure you don't want the "Holidee Inn", which is cheaper but over in a bad part of town?"
You speak the truth. "Back in the day", in many vertical markets (and still a lot today), there was "one" platform for any given application. That meant a specific model of a given PC or a line. I worked for a place who originally had the one true platform which was an IBM PS/2 Model 30 with certain revisions only allowed. It was pretty strict. The software checked all over the place to make sure it was being fooled. Really, really, really paranoid about it. But in the end, maybe it was worth. Worked like a charm for 10+ years. When that product was discontinued they went to generic Dell boxes where two apparently identical models will have different video cards, hard drive brands, or even motherboards. Very annoying when you are trying to get a very good idea of what happens with a specific machine over time.
Part of what you say is true, part of is a matter of enabling parents through technology. One thing is parental locks on television, or the "V-chip". Telling producers to self-rate thier own programs, and forcing TVs to allow you to block based on ratings enables good parenting and involved parenting. Without it, the only way to make sure your kids are watching TV you have approved is to remove the TV when you aren't home, or can't supervise. Clearly the TV shouldn't be a babysitter, but also clearly, a parent cannot watch a child 24/7 after they reach a certain age. There will be unsupervised time and it will grow as the child grows. Banning or blocking content or games is not smart, and it doesn't work well, and it should be required. But allowing parents the option - enforcing products of content to allow parents to block objectionable content - is a good bargain for all involved. The other option is that parents will just block all content, which ends up harming content producers. I am not all that old, and have younger siblings who were living at home with my parents when the V-chip thing happened. When I was growing up me and my old siblings had no access to TV or video games because it wasn't feasible for my parents to supervise us and they didnt want us to be exposed to material which may be above our maturity level. So we went without largely, except for carefully supervised TV events and the Nintendo my parents go us and literally kept locked up save for special occasions. With my younger siblings and now nieces and nephews they have more access thanks to the ability to regulate the content displayed based on identity. My parents have a TV with multiple pass codes. It defaults to the lowest level. I guess I am saying that technology is really generally an enabler of better parenting. The major problem is that it becomes a surrogate parent and babysitter for kids. Very often the technology is used pro-actively.
Honestly, It's just that the loons are much more visible, thanks to the Internet. Go out and talk to some real people, like neighbors. Most are just normal people. Yeah, some fruit loops, but mostly, just normal.
And how did that proposal go? Ohh. Shot down? Determined to be illegal regulation? Bummer. My point is strue and stands. The public airwaves a public resource, and must be used as such. Everything else you can publish or say virtually anything you want.
You are a liar. They protect us from hearing the "seven words" over the *public* airwaves. The *public* airwaves. You want to say any of the words? GO AHEAD. But not over the public airwaves.
Most business need a line-of-business or vertical market application for day to day use. General purpose apps are great for general purposes, but many many many businesses are based of regional vertical market applications. Stuff like point of sale systems for stores, software for furniture stores to schedule deliveries and inventory, medical billing software which is highly regionalized, software for denists offices, software for small banks, software for warehouse management, software for small movie rental stores, etc. General purpose computing is doing great. But for vertical markets small niche vendors are doing great.
Congress should just get it over with and change the law to allow EULAs on printed works?"
They do, but in the real world, they are called contracts and have many more regulations and protections.
I've had to sign contracts before to have access to various documents. It's not all that unusual.
So true. It's crappy markup at the worst. Really, really, really bad. But it's still formatted. And it can still be done in a formatted way - though with much more work. Along with what I suggested before devising some semantic tags that you can convert later to real markup might be handy for long blocks of text.. much like how BBCode takes unstructure text and makes it somewhat structured enough to be workable.
That's the best way. Really. You want the data to be in a structured format. Semantically structured if possible, but at least structured. Define a bunch of templates. Use a templating system like smarty or whatever to make it happen. Give your users a simple form - HTML, Windows, Java, whatever, that selects a template and reads in a list of fields from the template. Dynamically generate the form fields to be filled based on the template. Store the data. To generate a page start from the master record - be it in a database, an xml file, or whatever. Load the template and fill the data from the relational store. If you do it right you can even substitute different rendering layers and get an X/HTML version, a Word version, and a PDF version without any real substantial work. This also helps (1) create consistent documents, (2) create documents for more than one target format, (3) create searchable content with rich meta-data and (4) move to a more robust system later without tons of extra work. I've done it before, and if you spend a week engineering the solution properly it'll last years.
I am sure the powers that be recognize that political sites, by their contentious nature, draw huge traffic. Look over the most heavily commented upon articles. They usually have heavily provactive stuff in the description. Comments equals page views equals profits. It's the same reason the nightly news will always run a story about a spectacular firey car accident, a freak decapitation, or 800-lb man stuck in his house before an article say, examining internation relations, trade policy, or a union membership drive.
Not to take a side, but it's not hard to see the GOP argument here.
Fetus, embryo, pre-born child = innocent.
Capital criminal = guilty.
The general line of thinking is that if you violate or nearly violate someelse's right to life your own life is forfeit as a penalty.
It's not exactly rocket science.
Merits aside, really, it's not a mystery!
Investigation doesn't mean guilt, or that it was even a crime. Grand juries are high-powered investigation tools with wide latitude to subpeoena and seek the truth. The test will be to see what indictiments - if any - are handed down from the Grand Jury.
Yes, they do work very well. They are strongly enforced and effective. Every day people win retaliation lawsuits against government agencies and corporations.
That's because they aren't whistleblowers. And because "she-who-can't-be-named" hasn't suffered consequences as a result of this debacle. She has a comfortable stateside job. If she were, say, demoted or fired, she'd have a clear cut case, she'd be reinstated with back pay and damages, and that's that.
How can people protect themselves from retribution without it?
The law explicitly and strongly protects whisteblowers. Report something illegal or shady, and you are protected. If you are fired - as happens - you will be awarded massive damages and be set for life. It happens again and again. The fact is that anonymous sources, 99% of the time, are used for ill, not for good. They used for petty personal reasons. Watergate is a great example. Felt was loser, a passed over whiner. He was pissed at Nixon. He knew Nixon had some dirt on his hands, and so he took him down out of revenge. Nixon deserved to go down, but the press enables non-transparent government by propping anonymous sources. There are probably 5 or maybe 10 cases where newspaper should have used anonymous sources in the last decade. Instead they are constantly used, day in and day out, to avoid scrutiny, transparency, and verification. You've obviously never been attacked by an anonymous source; it sucks!
The whole problem here is that irksome press that insists on *reporting* that our elected officials are crooks and liars. Make those inside sources identify themselves publicly, and stop the truth in its tracks!
The press uses anonymous sources non-stop for everything when there is no legitimate reason. For one, they are lazy. For two, they know they are being used and they don't care. They want access. It's all about access. If you have a bonafide case where a person is afraid for his/her safety, fine. Funny you should mention Watergate. Felt was a sore loser - a passed over paper pusher pissed at Nixon. Was Nixon a crook? Absolutely. The fact is though that Felt should have come forward out of conscience as soon as something fishy was going on. The press enables non-transparent government, internal backstabbing, and petty back and forth that is *harmful* to the country. Politicans need to be kept lawful and honest; that's an honest role of the media. The pursuit of that goal should not corrupt them.
The best thing is to ditch anonymous sources.
Doesn't mean they are anyless the hypocrites, though.
Wow!
HTML 4.01!
Awesome! That we can continue to download hundreds and hundreds of bytes of crappy HTML for ever!
There is a role for management to play in strategic IT planning. Most IT people can't see the forest, just trees.
So the management can set large IT goals and stragety, and IT makes it happen. That's a good workflow.
Sometimes depending on the goals that includes platform choice (mainframe v. PC, etc).
Well being that if a few loudmouths hadn't made an issue of it, it would never have come up for a vote, yeah, actually. A few loud politicans make a big deal out of nothing, and then, it gets the attention of the rest of the jackasses.
Thanks but you fail. Ms. Clinton is not a victim here, she is the crook.
I have no idea about you, but I used to work in a shop that 100% MS. The company made a strategic decision to use MS products at the highest level, considered options and alternatives, and made a big dollar commitment.
It was always really annoying that in the IT department no matter the problem one guy always suggested that "well, we have an old pentium box around here.. we could throw Linux and XXX package and hack together some Perl scripts and be finished with this project by tomorrow".
No matter the problem it was always "well, Linux is better".
And you know, it did hurt his career. He's an IT guy in an all MS shop. He knew it when he applied.
The reason you see a lot of momentum towards any vendor - especially MS - is that it's just easier to stay with one vendor and yah deal with their crap. It makes no sense to have 200 Windows servers and then 2 Linux boxes.
Yeah, you know, djdns is more secure and faster than Windows DNS, but you know what, not so much that it makes it worth having a seperate platform, and having those boxes able to be admin'd by one or two guys instead of the normal admin team of 15.
I am happy for all (us) Linux/OSS geeks. But man, if you are place isn't an OSS friendly place, deal with it! Don't go around all the time (1) exaggerating how much easier some OSS solution would be and (2) bad mouthing everything and by proxy everyone up the chain. It's just career suicide!
Finally, about blatant stealing.
Remember when MS added the "infobar" to report blocked pop-ups and crap like that to IE6 with XP SP2?
Odd how that's in FireFox now, pixel-per-pixel copied! It's a two way street.
Quick standard pattern matching would be worked around in a matter hours or maybe days, and would be rendered useless. Whatever patterns MS determined were good indicators of phishing would be circumvented.