I agree completely with your solution. Physical destruction of the media is best and a ballpeen hammer is usually pretty effective. Although when I was younger and had more time, we would take hard drives destined for destruction out to the range. That NeXT Cube hard drive suffered a fatal wound by a 7.62mm round at approximately 1000 meters.
I've found some interesting stuff on hard drives purchased second hand including tax forms from apparently a CPA, medical records, patent applications, and most interestingly, a fair bit of data that I will not talk about on a NeXT cube off eBay that was originally purchased from a government auction. I was surprised as it was the only cube I had seen with it's hard drive intact. (All hard drives were erased or physically destroyed, because I am a nice guy).
The interesting thing is that protocols for the destruction of data have existed for magnetic media since before the hard drive. With the advent of the hard drive and higher density media, other protocols have come into place, but the solution is not a technical one. It is the hardest of all solutions...... Behavioral change.
Yeah, I found this out last time I was in St. Louis and it scared me. I was able to confirm that his records were indeed present, but could not get to them yet.
Thanks for the feedback though. Every little bit helps.
OK, here is the deal. Keeping secrets is simple for one reason: You have to fact check each new bit of classified information with a whole database of older information in order to decide whether or not something has bearing. It is often easier to simply start classifying everything that *might* have some bearing on national security than it is to actually go looking all of the time. So, what we are left with is an increasingly chaotic and poorly indexed "database" of national security "secrets" that are costing the taxpayer more and more to maintain and data mine. The problem of over exuberance with classification of documents is simply that costs of declassification to preserve history start spiraling out of control.
The thing that absolutely amazed me has been investigating my Grandfathers history. Many of his records going back to WWII are still classified and it was only a few years ago that he had certain medals delivered to his family after the declassification of other records. Of course it is likely that they do not have any real bearing on todays issues, and nobody likely checks them anymore against new issues, but the amount of history that is being kept away from American citizens is stunning. I am not saying that declassification is easy. Quite the contrary, it takes skilled analysis to sit down and go through documents line by line and word for word while retaining a comprehensive knowledge of current and past events that may or may not have bearing on the request.
Although I am very familiar with the history of Visicalc as it was one of the first programs I bought for my Apple ][+ back in 1982, I am happy to see articles like this on Slashdot. We need more stories about this history of computing and the Internet to educate all the N003Ies out here.
Did the boss immediately sign up for anger managment classes?
No. He tried to yell at me for walking out on him, to which I simply turned around and said "Daryl, fsck you".
Did you get a raise for being so mature?
No, I left and started my own company. Turned around, sold it, bought a house and went back to school.
Did the boss apologize and promise never to do it again?
No. Daryl was/is an asshole and is irredeemable. And since this is a response to an anonymous coward, if this is you Daryl, you still have it, don't you?
Did you suddenly become more sexually attractive to your coworkers?
Excuse me? Where did this come from? Maybe it is you Daryl, as that is just the sort of thing that you would say.
Did you get ignored?
Quite the contrary. I left and took half the company with me.
Did your career stop advancing at that job?
Yeah. I ate their lunch.
Did you get branded a scapegoat?
Hardly.
Did you get reassigned to something nasty?
If making more money is nasty, then sure.
Did you get fired?
See above.
Look, the point is that life is too short to allow yourself to be abused. By anyone. Although, people set their own priorities and if making the lease payment on your Mercedes is more important to you than standing up for yourself or others, then that is your choice. Just don't expect me to want to work with you.
Sure I've been pissed off. I absolutely have even used harsh language. I have also had to raise my voice to an employee before. However, I have never resorted to violence like throwing chairs or dishes or berating anybody in front of others. My students and employees have learned that because of this, I will never betray them nor will I cross the line. I hope that this instills trust.
he's the CEO of what the most powerful company on earth, give or take?. he can do whatever the fuck he wants. if he does something oh so terrible, tell the board and let them fire him. otherwise, you just sound like a snively little brat cause you can't handle people shouting or getting angry.
Have some more respect for yourself. If you cannot deal with people without resorting to childish antics then I simply don't want to work with you. I try and surround myself with employees and students who are capable of mature communication, who are smarter than me, and who have strong work ethics. That is the way you create great stuff that has class and does what it was designed to do.
He looks a bit like Tony Soprano on that article's picture, this is truly scary.I kind of half imagine him like Scarface at the end of the Pacino movie.
Hardly. This is the sort of crap that you expect from the overly indulged geek who becomes CEO or from the jock CEO. Look, anytime somebody exhibits this sort of behavior, there is something fundamentally wrong with their character. I've had a boss in the past that pulled this kind of crap on me and I simply told him that it would not be acceptable behavior and I would not tolerate it. I then walked out of the room treating him like the child he was. The guy leaving for Google made the right decision.
OK, so all of you knuckleheads that are responding to the parent post by making glib comments about no hurricanes earlier in history...... Read the post! Although I suppose you are corroborating my suspicions of the prevailing wisdom here, please note that the sea levels and flooding due to storm surge and such are what I was talking about. As the overall temperature increases, sea level rises leading to more problems with flooding. I might also say that more than one climatologist has suggested that more and stronger hurricanes might be expected from global warming as well.
I can see it now, given the remarkable anti-intellectualism sweeping the nation (and Slashdot recently) we are going to be seeing comments here like "Awww, them dang scientists. What do they know? There is no evidence for global warming just like there is no evidence for evolution. (or is that evulushun?)
Seriously though, the hurricane bearing down on New Orleans right now should give folks something to think about with respect to global warming. Specifically, the higher the water levels, the more potential damage that could occur from smaller storms. The big ones, like Katrina will deliver even more damage further inland than ever before. So, the evidence is mounting to the point where even the Bush administration is having to acknowledge that global warming is a reality.
It's never too late to go back to college and it should not make you an outsider. The nice thing about higher education in my experience has been that if you are interested in something, there will be somebody willing to talk. The cool thing about rhodopsin is that given the anatomy and physiology of the retina, a photoreceptor can capture a single photon making it a highly optimized system.
Anytime someone takes the easy way out to belittle another group the audience gains some insight into that person's critical thinking skills. The smiley does nothing...
Chill dude. Actually, I thought the smiley took care of it and revealed my comment to be the good natured ribbing that it was. In our neuroscience program the psychologists and basic neuroscientists (yes, there is some overlap) are always getting playful digs in at one another. No big deal, eh?
BTW, chances are a good many of those "cognitive scientists" in the Air Force are PhDs in experimental psychology - psychologists - within the domain of Cognitition and/or Perception.
Yes, a good friend of mine did some of the work related to pilots situational awareness of real versus high contrast renderings of targets. And he is, by training a psychologist, thus my familiarity with the work.
-- As a "neuroscientist" have ever bothered to follow-up on the history of many of those you might reference?
Your grammar is falling off a bit there. Got you a little hot under the collar? Like I said, chill dude. It was good natured ribbing from one "neuroscientist" to another.
If you can't process or retain any visual information, you're blind. Why does it matter if it's a low level or high level failure?
The classic demonstration of low level versus high level functionality has to do with something called a "true cortical blindness". In these cases, trauma or stroke (whatever) that damages occipital cortex may in some rare cases render a person functionally blind. However, when you throw a ball at them, strangely, they are able to catch it. Obviously there is some visual function related to vision taking place. What is happening here is that the tectum or visual centers in the brainstem whose functionality is orienting to place and timing are perfectly intact. However, visual centers related to conscious perception of what is being seen are damaged. All other visual pathways are intact.
Blindness is a poor and imprecise term for this finding and these findings are simply an extension of work performed in situational awareness. As one who's research deals with the neuroscience of vision and blindness, I have to say that "attention" or even "situational awareness: would be a better word/term, rather than "blindness". No offense to the authors of this study, but that sort of terminology might be expected of psychologists.:-) Seriously though, blindness implies a fundamental defect in the visual processing pathways as opposed to a failure to bring attention to a change in presentation due to conflicts of attention in higher or associative cortical processing. Now, if they demonstrated a lack of visual evoked potential in cortex, that might be something.
The failure to attend to or notice changes in your environment due to more traffic in cortical associative areas is not surprising really, and has long been known by cognitive scientists working with Air Force pilots. The more tasks required or stress induced upon a situation will degrade attentive performance and result in missing changes introduced into the environment.
For all you gamers out there, this is sort of an intuitive concept, right? How many times have you missed the doorbell, telephone or significant other trying to get ahold of you in the middle of a Doom/Marathon/Unreal fragfest? You increase the number of participants (and thus tasks to attend to) and you decrease your situational awareness of your immediate surroundings.
When you are talking about significantly large amounts of data (hundreds of GBs to TBs) it is actually faster and cheaper to put it on a hard drive and FedEx or (insert your favorite delivery company here) and ship it. Bandwidth is not free (even for those in Universities where a portion of our indirect costs go to pay for bandwidth) and when you factor in time required to transmit GB to TB of info, it is much more efficient to use "sneakernet" or "shipnet".
This of course is leading many folks who deal with large databases to look at options such as moving the application to the data rather than pull data through the network. What does this mean for the media companies? It may eventually have an effect rendering the methodology much like that of the current TV/radio paradigm in that large repositories of media will be constantly available waiting for an application to travel to the database to query and assemble your media request.
but that bringing up GWB's stance on intelligent design in a discussion of scientist's creating movies is off-topic
Actually it is not off topic as we in the sciences are suffering a dramatic reduction in funding in the NIH, DARPA and other funding agencies. This is happening at the same time as a change in education in the USA with more and more students not enrolling in the sciences or engineering. This is also happening at a time when the religious right is trying to push their agenda through an administration that got elected based upon their votes.
So, comments by our CINC that appear to pander to the right end endorse an agenda that does nothing to help our science and engineering problem in this country are very much related.
This is the leader of the free world who has shown a repeated disdain for intellectualism and rigorous thought. He did not listen to the analysts at the CIA and told them to go back again and again until they came up with the data he wanted to see. This is not how to run science or a country. What should have been done as with any hypothesis is to form that hypothesis (Iraq had WMD) and then attempt to disprove that theory rather than find evidence to support it. When you failed to disprove that theory, then you act and possibly take a country to war.
The lack of scientific and engineering education in this country has implications for all facets of society.
2. Beat up on Micrsooft
I call it like I see it. Microsoft has done some cool stuff and some not so cool stuff. Most of the folks on Slashdot are not stupid and they call it like they see it as well.
3. ???
What?
4. Karma profits!
The way it should go is that you should be brave enough to stand up for what you believe. If there is a price to pay, so be it, but hey dude. I've got karma to burn and burn and burn.
I would love to see more science and engineering being taught and endorsed by the federal government, but it does not help that our POTUS is endorsing the teaching of Intelligent Design (ID) as a science rather than the religiously biased belief system that it is. I don't have a problem with ID being taught as long as it can be taught along with other philosophy and religious curricula.
Bogus. What Michael (the author of the linked article) seems to think is that Apple made the switch for entirely reasons of CPU speed. The reality is much more complicated than that and encompasses reasons of yes, CPU speed, but also platform flexibility, heat, management of media rights and others. I covered some of these reasons here back on June 9th, but the future of media management is central to their strategy and was one of the driving forces behind the move. Additionally, Michael goes on to state that Macintosh users will "first have to suffer through a period of uncertainty and forced upgrades.". I also talked about this in my article, but to summarize, there really is no uncertainty about this process. It is going forward and most users will not notice or care about whether their Macintosh has an Intel or a PPC inside of it. They just want their computers to work as seamlessly as they have before and help them manage their lives and be more productive. Users will not have to be making any tough decisions as both platforms will be supported for years and years to come. Apple has proven this ability by maintaining parity between the PPC and Intel codebases already since the beginning of OS X and is showing the industry how to proceed when it comes to backwards and forwards compatibility.
Any other objection that Michael has to this switch has to do with OS X not being able to run on commodity PC hardware. Well,.......yeah. As we used to say when we were kids, "No Duh". Why would Apple want to get into the game of supporting literally millions of combinations of hardware compatibility issues and troubleshooting? Why? Where is the income from that going to come from? They already make available (and will continue to) make Darwin available for PPC and Intel, so if you want to swing that way, go for it.
Don't get me wrong. I really do appreciate what he has done with Linspire, but it is not OS X and I cannot imagine that Apple will simply hand over their technologies.
Like anything else in the technology world, Microsoft is behind the times a bit eh?:-) Either that, or Apple is testing a new version of their Reality Distortion Field that possesses visual enhancements on an entirely new level. I always knew that Apple has some great technology.
Seriously though, Microsoft's effort is still in development and what mattered to them was not the data per se, but the codebase behind the data as Microsoft is not interested (historically) in providing people with data or resources as much as they are interested in making money. Once the infrastructure is in place, Microsoft will wrap their map technology into other bits of software to sell GIS functionality in their handheld OS and other applications. It is an entirely different way of business than Google's model which wants to deliver information to people and make their product easy to use and informative even during development. They are smart enough to realize this approach builds a customer base much more effectively than if they were to get access to free, or almost free (and therefore less useful) data with which to populate their databases. It is an investment that has paid off along with their easy to use and intuitive interfaces deliver.
It just boggles the mind that people would throw out a Windows machine and then replace it with another! Windows machine which is immediately susceptible and commonly infected within twenty minutes or so of being re-connected to the Internet. This happens often even before you have time to install updates. The old fool me once, fool me twice adage comes to mind.
The smarter move would be to migrate to a system that is less affected by worms/virus/security issues. For the vast majority, I would think that system would be OS X. But hey, that's just me. If your time is that valuable that you would simply replace your system rather than wiping it and reinstalling the OS, you think that you would either be smart enough to think different. Of course clicking on the referenced article makes you sit through an ad for Dell unless you dismiss the ad, so what does that mean?:-) Interestingly in the linked article, Dr. Wong does replace her HP system with a Powerbook. This has been our experience as well. We have replaced most of our Windows based systems with Macs running OS X leaving our Windows systems headless and sitting behind a Macintosh and a firewall with respect to the Internet. For grad student systems, giving them a Mac is the best possible solution. They can download all the software they want, surf the web and write their email all on the same system they use for their data analysis without worry and I'm not getting calls or visits to my office saying "Ummmmmmm. I think my system is infected" Time devoted to troubleshooting has gone to essentially nothing. Additionally, the last meeting I had down in our computer science department revealed that a good portion of the faculty were also switching from Windows/Linux/SGI to OS X. That was encouraging for a whole lot of reasons.
Your phone call to my home at 5:58 pm was documented. You did nothing illegal, but please know that even though it was tagged as anonymous, statistics were recorded. Please keep reading.
You should know that I was hired, partly based upon my history and honesty. So, I am going to be honest with you now: I am hiding nothing and prefer my life that way so that I can focus on my work and not on what was said or when it was said. Because of this, many facts about me are available to the general public and on the Internet. However, because of research collaborations, there are "sensitive" projects that we are engaged in. Those sensitive projects require that I report contacts such as phone calls that are *hang ups* and queries as to identity among other specifics. Most of them are telemarketers, but very rarely, some of them have ulterior motives. Your phone call was documented and reported as are the contents of my postings on Slashdot concerning your call. It's a hassle, but I am required to do so. Please understand that I am not upset or angry with you at all and appreciate your point with respect to the article and the phone call, but am telling you this to be totally honest with you. I am also documenting that your phone call was not malicious in nature and that it was linked to this discussion, so don't worry about it as nothing will happen as a result of this specific incident. I just wanted to be straightforward with you about this.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree completely with your solution. Physical destruction of the media is best and a ballpeen hammer is usually pretty effective. Although when I was younger and had more time, we would take hard drives destined for destruction out to the range. That NeXT Cube hard drive suffered a fatal wound by a 7.62mm round at approximately 1000 meters.
I've found some interesting stuff on hard drives purchased second hand including tax forms from apparently a CPA, medical records, patent applications, and most interestingly, a fair bit of data that I will not talk about on a NeXT cube off eBay that was originally purchased from a government auction. I was surprised as it was the only cube I had seen with it's hard drive intact. (All hard drives were erased or physically destroyed, because I am a nice guy).
The interesting thing is that protocols for the destruction of data have existed for magnetic media since before the hard drive. With the advent of the hard drive and higher density media, other protocols have come into place, but the solution is not a technical one. It is the hardest of all solutions...... Behavioral change.
Yeah, I found this out last time I was in St. Louis and it scared me. I was able to confirm that his records were indeed present, but could not get to them yet.
Thanks for the feedback though. Every little bit helps.
OK, here is the deal. Keeping secrets is simple for one reason: You have to fact check each new bit of classified information with a whole database of older information in order to decide whether or not something has bearing. It is often easier to simply start classifying everything that *might* have some bearing on national security than it is to actually go looking all of the time. So, what we are left with is an increasingly chaotic and poorly indexed "database" of national security "secrets" that are costing the taxpayer more and more to maintain and data mine. The problem of over exuberance with classification of documents is simply that costs of declassification to preserve history start spiraling out of control.
The thing that absolutely amazed me has been investigating my Grandfathers history. Many of his records going back to WWII are still classified and it was only a few years ago that he had certain medals delivered to his family after the declassification of other records. Of course it is likely that they do not have any real bearing on todays issues, and nobody likely checks them anymore against new issues, but the amount of history that is being kept away from American citizens is stunning. I am not saying that declassification is easy. Quite the contrary, it takes skilled analysis to sit down and go through documents line by line and word for word while retaining a comprehensive knowledge of current and past events that may or may not have bearing on the request.
Why didn't you just download the torrent?
Funny. Truly funny.
Although I am very familiar with the history of Visicalc as it was one of the first programs I bought for my Apple ][+ back in 1982, I am happy to see articles like this on Slashdot. We need more stories about this history of computing and the Internet to educate all the N003Ies out here.
How did it turn out?
Pretty well.
Did the boss immediately sign up for anger managment classes?
No. He tried to yell at me for walking out on him, to which I simply turned around and said "Daryl, fsck you".
Did you get a raise for being so mature?
No, I left and started my own company. Turned around, sold it, bought a house and went back to school.
Did the boss apologize and promise never to do it again?
No. Daryl was/is an asshole and is irredeemable. And since this is a response to an anonymous coward, if this is you Daryl, you still have it, don't you?
Did you suddenly become more sexually attractive to your coworkers?
Excuse me? Where did this come from? Maybe it is you Daryl, as that is just the sort of thing that you would say.
Did you get ignored?
Quite the contrary. I left and took half the company with me.
Did your career stop advancing at that job?
Yeah. I ate their lunch.
Did you get branded a scapegoat?
Hardly.
Did you get reassigned to something nasty?
If making more money is nasty, then sure.
Did you get fired?
See above.
Look, the point is that life is too short to allow yourself to be abused. By anyone. Although, people set their own priorities and if making the lease payment on your Mercedes is more important to you than standing up for yourself or others, then that is your choice. Just don't expect me to want to work with you.
Sure I've been pissed off. I absolutely have even used harsh language. I have also had to raise my voice to an employee before. However, I have never resorted to violence like throwing chairs or dishes or berating anybody in front of others. My students and employees have learned that because of this, I will never betray them nor will I cross the line. I hope that this instills trust.
he's the CEO of what the most powerful company on earth, give or take?. he can do whatever the fuck he wants. if he does something oh so terrible, tell the board and let them fire him. otherwise, you just sound like a snively little brat cause you can't handle people shouting or getting angry.
Have some more respect for yourself. If you cannot deal with people without resorting to childish antics then I simply don't want to work with you. I try and surround myself with employees and students who are capable of mature communication, who are smarter than me, and who have strong work ethics. That is the way you create great stuff that has class and does what it was designed to do.
He looks a bit like Tony Soprano on that article's picture, this is truly scary.I kind of half imagine him like Scarface at the end of the Pacino movie.
Hardly. This is the sort of crap that you expect from the overly indulged geek who becomes CEO or from the jock CEO. Look, anytime somebody exhibits this sort of behavior, there is something fundamentally wrong with their character. I've had a boss in the past that pulled this kind of crap on me and I simply told him that it would not be acceptable behavior and I would not tolerate it. I then walked out of the room treating him like the child he was. The guy leaving for Google made the right decision.
OK, so all of you knuckleheads that are responding to the parent post by making glib comments about no hurricanes earlier in history...... Read the post! Although I suppose you are corroborating my suspicions of the prevailing wisdom here, please note that the sea levels and flooding due to storm surge and such are what I was talking about. As the overall temperature increases, sea level rises leading to more problems with flooding. I might also say that more than one climatologist has suggested that more and stronger hurricanes might be expected from global warming as well.
I can see it now, given the remarkable anti-intellectualism sweeping the nation (and Slashdot recently) we are going to be seeing comments here like "Awww, them dang scientists. What do they know? There is no evidence for global warming just like there is no evidence for evolution. (or is that evulushun?)
Seriously though, the hurricane bearing down on New Orleans right now should give folks something to think about with respect to global warming. Specifically, the higher the water levels, the more potential damage that could occur from smaller storms. The big ones, like Katrina will deliver even more damage further inland than ever before. So, the evidence is mounting to the point where even the Bush administration is having to acknowledge that global warming is a reality.
It's never too late to go back to college and it should not make you an outsider. The nice thing about higher education in my experience has been that if you are interested in something, there will be somebody willing to talk. The cool thing about rhodopsin is that given the anatomy and physiology of the retina, a photoreceptor can capture a single photon making it a highly optimized system.
Good luck.
Anytime someone takes the easy way out to belittle another group the audience gains some insight into that person's critical thinking skills. The smiley does nothing...
Chill dude. Actually, I thought the smiley took care of it and revealed my comment to be the good natured ribbing that it was. In our neuroscience program the psychologists and basic neuroscientists (yes, there is some overlap) are always getting playful digs in at one another. No big deal, eh?
BTW, chances are a good many of those "cognitive scientists" in the Air Force are PhDs in experimental psychology - psychologists - within the domain of Cognitition and/or Perception.
Yes, a good friend of mine did some of the work related to pilots situational awareness of real versus high contrast renderings of targets. And he is, by training a psychologist, thus my familiarity with the work.
-- As a "neuroscientist" have ever bothered to follow-up on the history of many of those you might reference?
Your grammar is falling off a bit there. Got you a little hot under the collar? Like I said, chill dude. It was good natured ribbing from one "neuroscientist" to another.
If you can't process or retain any visual information, you're blind. Why does it matter if it's a low level or high level failure?
The classic demonstration of low level versus high level functionality has to do with something called a "true cortical blindness". In these cases, trauma or stroke (whatever) that damages occipital cortex may in some rare cases render a person functionally blind. However, when you throw a ball at them, strangely, they are able to catch it. Obviously there is some visual function related to vision taking place. What is happening here is that the tectum or visual centers in the brainstem whose functionality is orienting to place and timing are perfectly intact. However, visual centers related to conscious perception of what is being seen are damaged. All other visual pathways are intact.
If you want to make the effect comprehensible to Joe Sixpack,....
Yes, but they also use the term in their peer reviewed paper in addition to the popular press articles.
"Hysterical blindness" is an accepted term for a condition...
Situational awareness.
And how about those poor "stripe-blind" kittens that were reared with nothing but strong vertical or horizontal lines...
That is a form of "cortical blindness" that is real and has to do with developmental defects in the visual pathways.
Obviously, the next step is to see whether the inputs briefly shut down, or if the input is ignored because of a rush of brain activity.
$100 says it is the latter and if I were reviewing this paper, I would suggest just that experiment prior to acceptance for publication.
Blindness is a poor and imprecise term for this finding and these findings are simply an extension of work performed in situational awareness. As one who's research deals with the neuroscience of vision and blindness, I have to say that "attention" or even "situational awareness: would be a better word/term, rather than "blindness". No offense to the authors of this study, but that sort of terminology might be expected of psychologists. :-) Seriously though, blindness implies a fundamental defect in the visual processing pathways as opposed to a failure to bring attention to a change in presentation due to conflicts of attention in higher or associative cortical processing. Now, if they demonstrated a lack of visual evoked potential in cortex, that might be something.
The failure to attend to or notice changes in your environment due to more traffic in cortical associative areas is not surprising really, and has long been known by cognitive scientists working with Air Force pilots. The more tasks required or stress induced upon a situation will degrade attentive performance and result in missing changes introduced into the environment.
For all you gamers out there, this is sort of an intuitive concept, right? How many times have you missed the doorbell, telephone or significant other trying to get ahold of you in the middle of a Doom/Marathon/Unreal fragfest? You increase the number of participants (and thus tasks to attend to) and you decrease your situational awareness of your immediate surroundings.
When you are talking about significantly large amounts of data (hundreds of GBs to TBs) it is actually faster and cheaper to put it on a hard drive and FedEx or (insert your favorite delivery company here) and ship it. Bandwidth is not free (even for those in Universities where a portion of our indirect costs go to pay for bandwidth) and when you factor in time required to transmit GB to TB of info, it is much more efficient to use "sneakernet" or "shipnet".
This of course is leading many folks who deal with large databases to look at options such as moving the application to the data rather than pull data through the network. What does this mean for the media companies? It may eventually have an effect rendering the methodology much like that of the current TV/radio paradigm in that large repositories of media will be constantly available waiting for an application to travel to the database to query and assemble your media request.
but that bringing up GWB's stance on intelligent design in a discussion of scientist's creating movies is off-topic
Actually it is not off topic as we in the sciences are suffering a dramatic reduction in funding in the NIH, DARPA and other funding agencies. This is happening at the same time as a change in education in the USA with more and more students not enrolling in the sciences or engineering. This is also happening at a time when the religious right is trying to push their agenda through an administration that got elected based upon their votes.
So, comments by our CINC that appear to pander to the right end endorse an agenda that does nothing to help our science and engineering problem in this country are very much related.
1. Beat up on George W. Bush
This is the leader of the free world who has shown a repeated disdain for intellectualism and rigorous thought. He did not listen to the analysts at the CIA and told them to go back again and again until they came up with the data he wanted to see. This is not how to run science or a country. What should have been done as with any hypothesis is to form that hypothesis (Iraq had WMD) and then attempt to disprove that theory rather than find evidence to support it. When you failed to disprove that theory, then you act and possibly take a country to war.
The lack of scientific and engineering education in this country has implications for all facets of society.
2. Beat up on Micrsooft
I call it like I see it. Microsoft has done some cool stuff and some not so cool stuff. Most of the folks on Slashdot are not stupid and they call it like they see it as well.
3. ???
What?
4. Karma profits!
The way it should go is that you should be brave enough to stand up for what you believe. If there is a price to pay, so be it, but hey dude. I've got karma to burn and burn and burn.
I would love to see more science and engineering being taught and endorsed by the federal government, but it does not help that our POTUS is endorsing the teaching of Intelligent Design (ID) as a science rather than the religiously biased belief system that it is. I don't have a problem with ID being taught as long as it can be taught along with other philosophy and religious curricula.
Bogus. What Michael (the author of the linked article) seems to think is that Apple made the switch for entirely reasons of CPU speed. The reality is much more complicated than that and encompasses reasons of yes, CPU speed, but also platform flexibility, heat, management of media rights and others. I covered some of these reasons here back on June 9th, but the future of media management is central to their strategy and was one of the driving forces behind the move. Additionally, Michael goes on to state that Macintosh users will "first have to suffer through a period of uncertainty and forced upgrades.". I also talked about this in my article, but to summarize, there really is no uncertainty about this process. It is going forward and most users will not notice or care about whether their Macintosh has an Intel or a PPC inside of it. They just want their computers to work as seamlessly as they have before and help them manage their lives and be more productive. Users will not have to be making any tough decisions as both platforms will be supported for years and years to come. Apple has proven this ability by maintaining parity between the PPC and Intel codebases already since the beginning of OS X and is showing the industry how to proceed when it comes to backwards and forwards compatibility.
.......yeah. As we used to say when we were kids, "No Duh". Why would Apple want to get into the game of supporting literally millions of combinations of hardware compatibility issues and troubleshooting? Why? Where is the income from that going to come from? They already make available (and will continue to) make Darwin available for PPC and Intel, so if you want to swing that way, go for it.
Any other objection that Michael has to this switch has to do with OS X not being able to run on commodity PC hardware. Well,
Don't get me wrong. I really do appreciate what he has done with Linspire, but it is not OS X and I cannot imagine that Apple will simply hand over their technologies.
Like anything else in the technology world, Microsoft is behind the times a bit eh? :-) Either that, or Apple is testing a new version of their Reality Distortion Field that possesses visual enhancements on an entirely new level. I always knew that Apple has some great technology.
Seriously though, Microsoft's effort is still in development and what mattered to them was not the data per se, but the codebase behind the data as Microsoft is not interested (historically) in providing people with data or resources as much as they are interested in making money. Once the infrastructure is in place, Microsoft will wrap their map technology into other bits of software to sell GIS functionality in their handheld OS and other applications. It is an entirely different way of business than Google's model which wants to deliver information to people and make their product easy to use and informative even during development. They are smart enough to realize this approach builds a customer base much more effectively than if they were to get access to free, or almost free (and therefore less useful) data with which to populate their databases. It is an investment that has paid off along with their easy to use and intuitive interfaces deliver.
It just boggles the mind that people would throw out a Windows machine and then replace it with another! Windows machine which is immediately susceptible and commonly infected within twenty minutes or so of being re-connected to the Internet. This happens often even before you have time to install updates. The old fool me once, fool me twice adage comes to mind.
:-) Interestingly in the linked article, Dr. Wong does replace her HP system with a Powerbook. This has been our experience as well. We have replaced most of our Windows based systems with Macs running OS X leaving our Windows systems headless and sitting behind a Macintosh and a firewall with respect to the Internet. For grad student systems, giving them a Mac is the best possible solution. They can download all the software they want, surf the web and write their email all on the same system they use for their data analysis without worry and I'm not getting calls or visits to my office saying "Ummmmmmm. I think my system is infected" Time devoted to troubleshooting has gone to essentially nothing. Additionally, the last meeting I had down in our computer science department revealed that a good portion of the faculty were also switching from Windows/Linux/SGI to OS X. That was encouraging for a whole lot of reasons.
The smarter move would be to migrate to a system that is less affected by worms/virus/security issues. For the vast majority, I would think that system would be OS X. But hey, that's just me. If your time is that valuable that you would simply replace your system rather than wiping it and reinstalling the OS, you think that you would either be smart enough to think different. Of course clicking on the referenced article makes you sit through an ad for Dell unless you dismiss the ad, so what does that mean?
Your phone call to my home at 5:58 pm was documented. You did nothing illegal, but please know that even though it was tagged as anonymous, statistics were recorded. Please keep reading.
You should know that I was hired, partly based upon my history and honesty. So, I am going to be honest with you now: I am hiding nothing and prefer my life that way so that I can focus on my work and not on what was said or when it was said. Because of this, many facts about me are available to the general public and on the Internet. However, because of research collaborations, there are "sensitive" projects that we are engaged in. Those sensitive projects require that I report contacts such as phone calls that are *hang ups* and queries as to identity among other specifics. Most of them are telemarketers, but very rarely, some of them have ulterior motives. Your phone call was documented and reported as are the contents of my postings on Slashdot concerning your call. It's a hassle, but I am required to do so. Please understand that I am not upset or angry with you at all and appreciate your point with respect to the article and the phone call, but am telling you this to be totally honest with you. I am also documenting that your phone call was not malicious in nature and that it was linked to this discussion, so don't worry about it as nothing will happen as a result of this specific incident. I just wanted to be straightforward with you about this.
With the best of intentions....
BWJones