No bloody kidding. Yeah, the kid was doing what he shouldn't have, but who the hell develops something as critical as switch controls for a $#@!@% tram that can be so easily overridden. I don't buy this "not exposed" BS. That's why, in the old days of manual switches, you had padlocks on them to stop the earlier, low-tech version of this stunt.
Actually there weren't padlocks everywhere -- we don't have trams here any more, but I know there were a lot of switches around in the system that weren't protected by padlocks, or anything more special than the unlikeliness of the general public carrying crowbars with them from day to day. It wasn't that uncommon for many switches to be left completely open so the driver could jump out and change it if necessary. I'm sure there was the occasional accident from time to time thanks to the occasional idiot, but people here were actually trusted not to meddle with things like that. And for the most part they didn't.
I really don't see what the big deal is with this. A 14 year old kid was playing some games, caused some accidents, people got hurt (not seriously) because of his stupidity. You'd expect he's going to get into a lot of trouble for it, and it sounds like he is. Yes, you could start trying to put all kinds of security systems in place to prevent potential meddling by terrorists and idiots, but the reality is that it'll cost a lot of money that could be better spent on other things, and it'd be completely redundant in all but a few places. You can bet if this was something that happened there a lot, there probably would be better security on the points.
If someone's really intent on sabotaging a tram system, there are plenty of ways to do it besides simply overriding the switches. It can be done easily enough with a few rocks in strategic places, which would either cause derailments, or potential-injury-causing emergency stops -- and this is exactly what the kid caused according to the article. The only difference here is that he used a method that nobody thought would be as likely.
The best way to combat something like this isn't necessarily to put lots of draconian technical security in the system which people will only try to break or work around. It's far better to just try and educate people so they won't be as motivated to do this kind of thing in the first place, and be prepared for the occasional accident -- maybe with better safety features so there are less likely to be injuries during something like a derailment or an emergency stop.
From what I've heard, even the Bill/Melinda Gates Foundation computer donations come with restrictions on usage of Linux and OSS. So they still want Linux and OSS destroyed and helping kids is only PR. IMO.
I haven't seen the restrictions to which you're referring, but this could easily be the case if the foundation isn't actually donating real money. It could just as easily be leveraging donations from Microsoft and counting the donation amount as the retail value of any software that's used, in which case it's completely understandable that there would be restrictions on using non-Microsoft software.
Still blatant PR of course, but maybe not with destruction of OSS being the number one priority. It's really difficult to tell without knowing exactly what the donations are and what is stated about the restrictions.
The headline of the article implies that this is intended to be some kind of environmental decision, but nothing in the article appears to back it up. In fact, the guy quoted is primarily going on about the much-improved accessibility of the budget. It'll now actually be possible for people to get it (rather than forking out an impossible $200 just to read it), and being in an electronic form, it's much easier to search through and index, not to mention only reading or printing the bits you happen to be interested in.
At the moment I'm working at a government department (non-US) where we've been publishing information online for a while now,. People love it, both inside the organisation and those in the general public (journalists, opposition politicians, economists, and whoever else may have an interest). This is largely to do with the Official Information Act which, in New Zealand, basically states that government departments have to make available whatever information people ask for, unless there's a good reason not to. Over time it's resulted in most government entities publishing large amounts of information even when it's not requested, on the assumption that someone may ask for it sooner or later.
The annual budget is probably one of the most important blocks of information and it's also one of the hardest, because it tends to be full of massive amounts of tables and figures from all over the place and from all kinds of different sources and people who often like to do things in very different ways. Even in a small country it's a big logistical exercise. Recently redeveloping the website to make things more accessible was a 2 to 3 year job, simply because of the amount of historical data that had to be gone through and re-formatted with more accessible markup, with people either using scripts or just manually trawling through it. I guess the nice thing about it now, though, is that there are systems in place to make sure that new data gets marked up usefully in the first place.
Budgets are huge things to manage, as much because of the massive amounts of organisation that have to go into collecting the information and compiling it all together in a way that can be printed at all. Hopefully getting it out as a PDF would be the first step for the White House towards getting it more accessible.
Maybe Ada is helpful for learning concurrent programming and safe typing, but I'll wait for the opinion of a slightly less partial party.
You might be right, but just because they're involved in Ada doesn't necessarily make them biased towards it -- it does mean that they probably know a lot about it. What actually matters are their teaching qualifications and their understanding of what's important.
They might just as easily have come to be involved in Ada because it met all their requirements as a good language with flying colours. If they have experience teaching and working with other teachers and teaching in other languages, then I think it's perfectly reasonable for them to comment on this and be given some credibility. (As it is, I can't personally tell for sure just how much experience they've had.)
If you ignore everything someone says simply because it looks like they have a reason for saying it, there would be almost nothing to listen to. After all, who else is going to stand up and say that a language like Ada is better for something besides the people who actually design and use it? They are the people who would understand it best, after all... and there would have to be a lot of them before anyone even tries to run a visibly independent review.
When the elections are over, the winning party needs to form a government, and they do this by making a coalition with one or two other parties so they represent more than 50% of the voting people in the country. This way all major opinions should be represented in a government. A new party might not be a part of a new government, but they are able to use there representation power in the parlement, for example when new laws are discussed and voted for.
We have a similar system in New Zealand (Mixed Member Proportional) with a lot of smaller parties. Our governments are usually coalitions with one larger party, and a couple of smaller parties to get them over 50%. I definitely prefer this over the previous system that we had (First Past the Post) which resulted in a two party system with the occasional independent, but I still have trouble accepting that perhaps 48% of the representatives should be stuck in a position where they have little influence to represent their constituents' views besides yelling insults across the floor.
This does mean there are compromises, but usually what happens is that the compromises go from the middle-left to the extreme left, or vice-versa, notably because there aren't any smaller parties that hang around the middle. (They wouldn't distinguish themselves enough to get votes if they did.)
This does mean that more views are getting considered, but those views tend to be the more extreme views on one side, with no consideration given to the other side at all, except for the occasional negotiations that occur when the larger party in the government can't convince its partners to vote a particular way. It's not a two party system, but it's still polarising two separate groups which are either in government, or out of government.
I've never spent much time studying election systems, but I'd be interested to see any that result in everyone who's elected having to work together to make decisions from time to time. If everyone who was elected actually had an opportunity to have some input into things, it might give them something to do other than continuously shout insults.
I'd have thought they'd mostly be competing with long-distance shipping, where speed of delivery isn't necessarily critical. If the developed world is going to try and cut down on carbon emissions and pollutants (which ships are great at even though it's largely ignored), or at least try to make it look as such and start taxing the use of cargo ships much more highly, massive heavy-lift airships might become more cost effective if a few problems are figured out.
I would rather my kids be exposed to sex and violence early on in life enough to be able to look at it objectively and not be suprised when they are older and suddenly see something violent and react in the same way that most of the sheep do.
I'll focus on violence in this post. Maybe they exist, but I've never known a child to be suddenly shocked through being exposed to a violent video game. I'm sure violent video games would influence children to think differently about certain things, and I have thought that maybe people get confused quite a lot from being unguided about violence in both video games and TV though, both children and adults.
If you want to expose your kids to violence, shouldn't it at least be realistic so as to be properly educational? There's a huge difference between being exposed to violence in the form of running around the levels of a FPS game compared with being exposed to violence in the form of seeing how many Iraqi civilians get blown up every month as a result of all the conflict and political decisions around the world. The first isn't really violence at all -- it's complete fantasy with no direct consequences that's designed to make people think it's violence.
I definitely don't want to advocate violence, but the world really is a violent place as soon as people get out of their sheltered lives and I think it's better for everyone if there's a better understanding of what violence actually is, rather than sheltering people from the real violence and substituting it with lots of pretend violence..
Isn't that a bigger victory for linux?
The relative market share increase of linux being about 1.5 times that of the mac...
It's all statistics, and personally I'm not sure that comparing proportional increases in market share is very relevant if they were very different to start off with. Keep in mind that in absolute user number terms, Macs still gained a lot more users than Linux.
If each OS gained the same absolute number of users every year then Macs would be getting a larger number every year and Linux will always be trailing, and trailing by increasing amounts after each iteration. If the number of people who take up a new system/OS is directly proportional to the number of people already using it then yeah, it is a better result for Linux.
I'd be really surprised if that was the case. Chances are something else that's unrelated will happen well before the relative usage of each system is even significantly different, and huge numbers of people to migrate to either one or the other.
Anyway, I think the whole OS race thing is a bit pointless -- I don't care if Linux is popular or if Macs are popular, as long as my OS of choice works well for me and doesn't stop me from doing what I want to do. What matters more than anything is that there's diversity of OSs available, which all implement similar APIs and standards. This would prevent people from getting locked into any one particular OS, and it'd make it much easier for developers to write portable software.
What piss me off is people disbelieving in God's existence just because they can't scientifically prove it.
I don't outright disbelieve in the christian god. I do believe that there are a hell of a lot of things that are much more likely, to the extent that devoting my time or energy to the christian god isn't really worth it.
To add to this, I'm very sceptical about organised religion, which seems to be little more than a collection of people telling other people that their ideas about existence and gods are correct. Frequently people tell other people that their ideas are non-negotiable, and go as far as trying to force other people to believe, or to suppress other people's views. Organised religion is frequently used as a method of control, often by people who have no interest in the religion themselves but have simply found it's an easy way to manipulate others. It's also frequently at the roots of all kinds of things that I personally consider bad (wars, famine, corruption, suppressing speech and useful debate, and generally suppressing people's rights).
If it doesn't work in Firefox, I'm not interested.
It doesn't really matter, because Microsoft would be moronic not to have a backup site for users whose systems won't support Silverlight, for whatever reason. Possibly even a backup system that's 100% as good as the Silverlight system, and perhaps even better if it runs faster with less crap, and is just as informative.
What this would do is make sure that everyone who visits microsoft.com using MSIE and Windows will be repeatedly told that they should install Silverlight support for an enhanced experience, and will be given a very easy way to do so. (Click here, then trust this downloaded installer because it's signed by Microsoft.) That's a lot of people, and would easily spread it enough to make it feasible for other businesses to start considering it.
I agree with you completely on this. And after taking a look at his recent postings on his weblog, I'm now much more convinced that he's probably just someone who's a real irritation to work with.
I understand that things have really hurt this guy and made him angry, but I don't think this is the way to go about improving things. It may be a good way for him to vent his frustration, but I would say that if you want people to take you seriously, it's better to write down your criticism in a civil manner, with examples of what you are criticizing and, for even better results, suggestions for how to improve things.
That, or just put it somewhere where a potential slashdot submitter isn't going to find it. If you're used to having a website or weblog that almost nobody reads, it can sometimes be easy to just blurt things out with the expectation that it's still not going to be read by anyone. I have no idea if that's what happened in this case, but if people get wasted or depressed (or even just have a bit to drink), I could fully understand how this ended up getting published. If it wasn't something like that, then maybe he's just like that.
Either way, I bet he wasn't expecting to see it linked from Slashdot the next morning. You can't really count on slashdot editors acting responsibly, though.
Is this definitely just coming with SP3, or has it been around for longer? I hit this issue, or a very similar one, in our organisation several months ago. A user had some old Word 2.0 documents stored on a network drive (from the mid 1990's, before we enforced the use of a DMS), and they wouldn't open in Word 2003. The error dialog that Word displayed only mentioned the registry policy settings (without specifically saying the version was old), and I eventually found a knowledge base article that described the registry hack.
There are 50 buttons on that remote because the device does SO much stuff. You paid for it, and you'll need a way to control it. Personally, I -use- those buttons, so I don't find them to be annoying.
Many remotes are still hideously designed, though. It's not necessarily bad to have 52 buttons, but it is generally bad to have 52 identical rectangular buttons on a standard template rectangular remote that has to have a light shone onto it and be carefully looked at before the user can figure out which button they're about to press. There are plenty of things that can make a remote control more useful, but it usually costs money and effort to move away from the cheap, template designs. This extra effort doesn't market well, because the remotes rarely get displayed with the TV in the store -- they're just thrown into the box once someone's already decided to buy it.
As far as paying for a lot of features, there are a lot of features that really aren't necessary, even if you think you need them. VCRs used to be horrible to use, because setting the timers on them were often very difficult. It was only relatively recently that someone realised that setting the timer was pointless -- pressing buttons to set a time isn't even the user's primary goal when they're doing it. All they want is to record a program, and it's a hell of a lot easier if you can simply tell the device to record that program, and have it figure out all the necessary start and end time details.
You can argue that there are basic users and there are expert users, but the only real difference is how much either is willing to trade off between complexity of the system, and ability to control it. Every user has a set of goals, which are likely to be very similar. You can bet that a basic user of a system would love to have the better-targeted audio and visual quality if they didn't need to learn about all of the details in the controls to get it. The difficult trick with usability is being able to identify what the goals are likely to be, and make it so that everyone can get what they want without having to complicate the system with unnecessary middle-steps to get it.
it seems naive to believe that there are such "teams of experts" designing remote controls and whatnot. Here's the thing: Consumers don't think about usability at all when they buy, and as a simple consequence of that no time or effort is spent on it.
It was either Donald Norman or Jef Raskin (I forget who, and I can't currently check) who related a description in one of their books about designing a remote control for a new model of television. Whoever it was had been very enthusiastic to have finally been hired by a company, based on their qualifications, to design them a really good remote control that would actually incorporate lots of usability concepts and be easy and convenient to use. They were just settling into identifying the users during the first week, only to find that the manufacturer was already wanting a final design so it gould get to market on time. I think they went with the standard rectangular 52 button remote.
These things have such short lifecycles that unless there's a good motivation for it, there's very little effort and money spent on designing the little things that won't get someone to buy it. The company wanted a good remote control, but if they couldn't get it immediately, it wasn't important enough. I fully agree with you that most people don't typically buy things because of good design, they buy them because of features, which is a real shame.
I have a serious problem with observers criticising something for being old [un-novel] without being more specific about how "new" might be more advantageous.
He's just come back from a research conference, and his point is with how new ideas get developed in a research environment. Right or wrong, he's not saying that open source isn't great, more stable, or a good choice for businesses and individual users who want something stable, reliable and useful. What he has said is that from his own observations, OSS is not a great model for fostering creativity and encouraging people to innovate and try radical new ways of doing things.
I'm not sure I fully agree with his view as he's stated because there are certainly some innovative ideas out there that have benefited a lot from OSS. He does have some merit with his arguments, though. Many of the popular OSS apps tend to be the ones that re-engineer ideas from closed source products.
I frequently argue for it in various specific projects. But a politically correct dogma holds that open source is automatically the best path to creativity and innovation, and that claim is not borne out by the facts.
He's not saying that Open Source isn't great. He's just come back from a conference of researchers, and is saying that from a research perspective (which is not necessarily production), innovation and creativity doesn't tend to come through in open source projects, even if it is only the 1 in 10 closed source projects that actually have something new. You've just claimed that you don't care about innovation and creativity for the production software you use in your business, but would rather have something stable. I don't follow why you have a problem with his opinion -- there's no relation.
Suspend/resume doesn't work as reliably (hard restart required every ~5 resumes)
I started my laptop on Feisty, and since upgrading to Gutsy I noticed that the hibernation was broken. On some further examination though, I noticed that this problem seems very specific to the Kernel. If I boot gutsy to the 2.6.10 kernel, hibernate works fine. Without wanting to imply that this should be okay for Ubuntu as a distribution, you might still find that it works again if you boot to an earlier kernel, or try compiling your own and fiddle with the configuration.
Because it points out flaws in Linux it's biased in some way? I did try Linux as my desktop, and it wasn't up to par, which is why I'm back on Windows. For basic web surfing and email, $450 for a Vista Home Basic PC probably is a better buy.
Without wanting to comment on any bias in the article, I would have thought that a Linux-based desktop would be perfect for basic web surfing and email. In fact, five years ago when I was finally able to drop the need to open an Access database on my home PC, I realised that I only used my home PC for email and web browsing, and that I could finally dump Windows 98 for a Linux desktop and not regret it a bit. I use XP and Vista at work because that's what I'm employed to write software for, but I haven't ever had it at home since then.
I just came back from a holiday meeting more relatives where I was asked to take a look at yet another PC that's acting broken. It's a budget PC running Windows XP for little more than web browsing and email. Unfortunately they're so afraid to run Windows XP that they won't do so without crippling it with megabucks worth of frustratingly stupid Norton utilities, none of which cope well with the budget 256 MB of RAM. Notably, there's so much swapping due to the crap starting up that it takes an agonising 10 minutes after switching on before the desktop starts responding to user actions and it's possible to actually do anything. Ironically, the initial problem I was asked to look at was her inability to properly install a Norton upgrade that she'd been frightened into paying yet another $80 for.
Other people's experiences may have been different, but this is fairly typical of the web surfing and email Windows systems that I've come across at people's homes -- they're either crippled and slow (or they're expensive high=end systems), or they're completely overrun with spyware and viruses. It's up to each person to decide what's best for them, but personally I think that a well configured Linux-based system can be an excellent desktop for email and web browsing, if there's a way to get it to people and reliably support them on occasion.
For the record, I agree with you. But it's for emotional reasons; I couldn't really make a logical case for allowing your kids to inherit physical property, but not intellectual property.
Well there is the whole argument that intellectual property is nothing more than a legal construct, which makes a virtual form of "property" out of nothing. (The whole "if I copy it, they still have it" point of view.)
My personal view is that copyright is a good thing, but the terms are far too long. I think it's a great thing that creators can profit from their work, and that it's useful to have a legal construct to make sure they have a chance to profit from it before other people drop in and plagiarise it, denying any profit for the person who created it and reducing the incentive to create. I also think it's beneficial for existing IP to be able to be passed on as inheritance. If Tolkien was intending to provide for his family through releasing LOTR, but dropped dead the day of publication, it'd seem unfair to leave his family in a completely unprotected state.
Having said this, the length of copyright terms and their perpetual extensions thanks to broken corporate business models are ridiculous. Copyrights shouldn't need to be longer than 7 years as an automatic term. Anything longer than that should require regular renewals, up to a specified maximum length of time, so that the only works that continue to be restricted are those which a creator has actually demonstrated an interest in.
Across the board copyright extensions are much of the reason why so many works are simply disappearing these days. Short of lots of work tracking down copyright holders and paying royalties, it's illegal to preserve them.
It's a hard point to argue if you had only two options, food, or a laptop, the food seems a better choice.
I'm sceptical about the OLPC programme for certain reasons, but I'm even more sceptical about Dvorak, whose crap is rarely anything more than trolling for readers and selling advertising. I also think it's gratuitous to give him credit for raising this issue -- people have been criticising the OLPC project about this for years.
As much as "absolute poverty" is a problem, there are more kids in the world than those living in absolute poverty. I was in Peru 6 months ago and I could easily see the demographics where the OLPC project might actually be beneficial. Distribution of food is a big problem in some places around the world, but in other places there are a lot of kids who'd benefit from decent education much more than they'd benefit from more food. Trying to suggest that we should solve all the problems of the lowest common denominator before even glancing at anything else is absurd.
I do have doubts about the merits of simply throwing laptops at children and expecting them to become more educated. Trying to use a laptop as if it's a teacher seems similar to trying to use a television as if it's a babysitter. Having said that though, I think it's worth noting that the laptops produced by the OLPC project are very different from typical Windows-running (or even Linux-running) laptops in western countries. I haven't been fortunate enough to have seen one, but it sounds like they're fundamentally designed both at the hardware and software level with teaching in mind, including encouraging kids to think about what's going on inside. The stated mission of the project isn't to teach kids about computers, it's to teach kinds about thinking, problem solving and creativity. They should really be considered their own category of teaching tool rather than confusing them with what people think of as day-to-day crappy crashing laptops.
With good teachers and good teaching programmes, it sounds like these laptops could be very beneficial for certain demographics of children in developing countries. I guess my own scepticism about the project is because so much media focus is on getting durable laptops to children, without necessarily giving them a good learning environment and useful teachers to go with it. Perhaps I'm wrong about this.
I'd mod this up if I could, but it looks as if that's already happened in the time I've been previewing my response.
I'm in mixed minds because although a taser is a torture device, I still think it's better to be able to use a Taser rather than shoot someone dead, if a police officer doesn't have an option.
What confuses me a bit though is why there don't even seem to be basic steps by many of the various police forces to design the system to make it hard for Tasers to be used outside of those boundaries. There are plenty of systematic changes that could be made which would help to prevent stupid use of Tasers by police, but as far as I can tell this isn't happening in a lot of places.
A good start would be to make sure that no officer is licensed to use a Taser until they've been on a comprehensive training course that includes technical training and ethical training, probably giving them an example of the pain. (Making sure they're informed about some of the well known experients in the subject would be a good start.) Realistically, a Taser should never be used without the expectation that the targeted person might die as a consequence.
It'd also be very beneficial to make it an automatic requirement that paperwork be filed (and published) to justify every time a taser is discharged, and to have an automatic requirement for an independent legal body to investigate each use of a taser, and prosecute the police and/or officers involved if it's appropriate to do so.
I'm not completely against the idea of letting police use Tasers, but I do find the way that some police are getting away with some ridiculous abuses of it to be quite abhorrent. If they can't design a system to make sure it's used properly, then I fully agree that they shouldn't have them at all.
Cleaner APIs and more efficient libraries are nice. For the end user, where's the meat of this release? Okay now it supports Widgets. Well, that can be sort of useful if there is a good selection of them.
I appreciate what you're saying, but I don't think every release of a product should have to force obvious new features down a user's throat, and I'm quite happy to not be excited. Some apps you just don't want to change too much. The kernel is one of these, because it's expensive to update apps for new APIs, and a GUI/desktop is another, because major changes result in more re-training costs (either personal or within an organisation).
Personally I don't have much need for a new spellchecker or grammar checker, but to me they sound like things that would be better implemented as apps or plugins. It might be that you now actually get these after a while, if the cleaner APIs and more efficient libraries make it easier for someone to develop and integrate them effectively.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually there weren't padlocks everywhere -- we don't have trams here any more, but I know there were a lot of switches around in the system that weren't protected by padlocks, or anything more special than the unlikeliness of the general public carrying crowbars with them from day to day. It wasn't that uncommon for many switches to be left completely open so the driver could jump out and change it if necessary. I'm sure there was the occasional accident from time to time thanks to the occasional idiot, but people here were actually trusted not to meddle with things like that. And for the most part they didn't.
I really don't see what the big deal is with this. A 14 year old kid was playing some games, caused some accidents, people got hurt (not seriously) because of his stupidity. You'd expect he's going to get into a lot of trouble for it, and it sounds like he is. Yes, you could start trying to put all kinds of security systems in place to prevent potential meddling by terrorists and idiots, but the reality is that it'll cost a lot of money that could be better spent on other things, and it'd be completely redundant in all but a few places. You can bet if this was something that happened there a lot, there probably would be better security on the points.
If someone's really intent on sabotaging a tram system, there are plenty of ways to do it besides simply overriding the switches. It can be done easily enough with a few rocks in strategic places, which would either cause derailments, or potential-injury-causing emergency stops -- and this is exactly what the kid caused according to the article. The only difference here is that he used a method that nobody thought would be as likely.
The best way to combat something like this isn't necessarily to put lots of draconian technical security in the system which people will only try to break or work around. It's far better to just try and educate people so they won't be as motivated to do this kind of thing in the first place, and be prepared for the occasional accident -- maybe with better safety features so there are less likely to be injuries during something like a derailment or an emergency stop.
I haven't seen the restrictions to which you're referring, but this could easily be the case if the foundation isn't actually donating real money. It could just as easily be leveraging donations from Microsoft and counting the donation amount as the retail value of any software that's used, in which case it's completely understandable that there would be restrictions on using non-Microsoft software.
Still blatant PR of course, but maybe not with destruction of OSS being the number one priority. It's really difficult to tell without knowing exactly what the donations are and what is stated about the restrictions.
The headline of the article implies that this is intended to be some kind of environmental decision, but nothing in the article appears to back it up. In fact, the guy quoted is primarily going on about the much-improved accessibility of the budget. It'll now actually be possible for people to get it (rather than forking out an impossible $200 just to read it), and being in an electronic form, it's much easier to search through and index, not to mention only reading or printing the bits you happen to be interested in.
At the moment I'm working at a government department (non-US) where we've been publishing information online for a while now,. People love it, both inside the organisation and those in the general public (journalists, opposition politicians, economists, and whoever else may have an interest). This is largely to do with the Official Information Act which, in New Zealand, basically states that government departments have to make available whatever information people ask for, unless there's a good reason not to. Over time it's resulted in most government entities publishing large amounts of information even when it's not requested, on the assumption that someone may ask for it sooner or later.
The annual budget is probably one of the most important blocks of information and it's also one of the hardest, because it tends to be full of massive amounts of tables and figures from all over the place and from all kinds of different sources and people who often like to do things in very different ways. Even in a small country it's a big logistical exercise. Recently redeveloping the website to make things more accessible was a 2 to 3 year job, simply because of the amount of historical data that had to be gone through and re-formatted with more accessible markup, with people either using scripts or just manually trawling through it. I guess the nice thing about it now, though, is that there are systems in place to make sure that new data gets marked up usefully in the first place.
Budgets are huge things to manage, as much because of the massive amounts of organisation that have to go into collecting the information and compiling it all together in a way that can be printed at all. Hopefully getting it out as a PDF would be the first step for the White House towards getting it more accessible.
But you can safely bet that a lot of people will print it.
You might be right, but just because they're involved in Ada doesn't necessarily make them biased towards it -- it does mean that they probably know a lot about it. What actually matters are their teaching qualifications and their understanding of what's important.
They might just as easily have come to be involved in Ada because it met all their requirements as a good language with flying colours. If they have experience teaching and working with other teachers and teaching in other languages, then I think it's perfectly reasonable for them to comment on this and be given some credibility. (As it is, I can't personally tell for sure just how much experience they've had.)
If you ignore everything someone says simply because it looks like they have a reason for saying it, there would be almost nothing to listen to. After all, who else is going to stand up and say that a language like Ada is better for something besides the people who actually design and use it? They are the people who would understand it best, after all... and there would have to be a lot of them before anyone even tries to run a visibly independent review.
We have a similar system in New Zealand (Mixed Member Proportional) with a lot of smaller parties. Our governments are usually coalitions with one larger party, and a couple of smaller parties to get them over 50%. I definitely prefer this over the previous system that we had (First Past the Post) which resulted in a two party system with the occasional independent, but I still have trouble accepting that perhaps 48% of the representatives should be stuck in a position where they have little influence to represent their constituents' views besides yelling insults across the floor.
This does mean there are compromises, but usually what happens is that the compromises go from the middle-left to the extreme left, or vice-versa, notably because there aren't any smaller parties that hang around the middle. (They wouldn't distinguish themselves enough to get votes if they did.)
This does mean that more views are getting considered, but those views tend to be the more extreme views on one side, with no consideration given to the other side at all, except for the occasional negotiations that occur when the larger party in the government can't convince its partners to vote a particular way. It's not a two party system, but it's still polarising two separate groups which are either in government, or out of government.
I've never spent much time studying election systems, but I'd be interested to see any that result in everyone who's elected having to work together to make decisions from time to time. If everyone who was elected actually had an opportunity to have some input into things, it might give them something to do other than continuously shout insults.
I'd have thought they'd mostly be competing with long-distance shipping, where speed of delivery isn't necessarily critical. If the developed world is going to try and cut down on carbon emissions and pollutants (which ships are great at even though it's largely ignored), or at least try to make it look as such and start taxing the use of cargo ships much more highly, massive heavy-lift airships might become more cost effective if a few problems are figured out.
I'll focus on violence in this post. Maybe they exist, but I've never known a child to be suddenly shocked through being exposed to a violent video game. I'm sure violent video games would influence children to think differently about certain things, and I have thought that maybe people get confused quite a lot from being unguided about violence in both video games and TV though, both children and adults.
If you want to expose your kids to violence, shouldn't it at least be realistic so as to be properly educational? There's a huge difference between being exposed to violence in the form of running around the levels of a FPS game compared with being exposed to violence in the form of seeing how many Iraqi civilians get blown up every month as a result of all the conflict and political decisions around the world. The first isn't really violence at all -- it's complete fantasy with no direct consequences that's designed to make people think it's violence.
I definitely don't want to advocate violence, but the world really is a violent place as soon as people get out of their sheltered lives and I think it's better for everyone if there's a better understanding of what violence actually is, rather than sheltering people from the real violence and substituting it with lots of pretend violence..
It's all statistics, and personally I'm not sure that comparing proportional increases in market share is very relevant if they were very different to start off with. Keep in mind that in absolute user number terms, Macs still gained a lot more users than Linux.
If each OS gained the same absolute number of users every year then Macs would be getting a larger number every year and Linux will always be trailing, and trailing by increasing amounts after each iteration. If the number of people who take up a new system/OS is directly proportional to the number of people already using it then yeah, it is a better result for Linux.
I'd be really surprised if that was the case. Chances are something else that's unrelated will happen well before the relative usage of each system is even significantly different, and huge numbers of people to migrate to either one or the other.
Anyway, I think the whole OS race thing is a bit pointless -- I don't care if Linux is popular or if Macs are popular, as long as my OS of choice works well for me and doesn't stop me from doing what I want to do. What matters more than anything is that there's diversity of OSs available, which all implement similar APIs and standards. This would prevent people from getting locked into any one particular OS, and it'd make it much easier for developers to write portable software.
I don't outright disbelieve in the christian god. I do believe that there are a hell of a lot of things that are much more likely, to the extent that devoting my time or energy to the christian god isn't really worth it.
To add to this, I'm very sceptical about organised religion, which seems to be little more than a collection of people telling other people that their ideas about existence and gods are correct. Frequently people tell other people that their ideas are non-negotiable, and go as far as trying to force other people to believe, or to suppress other people's views. Organised religion is frequently used as a method of control, often by people who have no interest in the religion themselves but have simply found it's an easy way to manipulate others. It's also frequently at the roots of all kinds of things that I personally consider bad (wars, famine, corruption, suppressing speech and useful debate, and generally suppressing people's rights).
It doesn't really matter, because Microsoft would be moronic not to have a backup site for users whose systems won't support Silverlight, for whatever reason. Possibly even a backup system that's 100% as good as the Silverlight system, and perhaps even better if it runs faster with less crap, and is just as informative.
What this would do is make sure that everyone who visits microsoft.com using MSIE and Windows will be repeatedly told that they should install Silverlight support for an enhanced experience, and will be given a very easy way to do so. (Click here, then trust this downloaded installer because it's signed by Microsoft.) That's a lot of people, and would easily spread it enough to make it feasible for other businesses to start considering it.
I agree with you completely on this. And after taking a look at his recent postings on his weblog, I'm now much more convinced that he's probably just someone who's a real irritation to work with.
That, or just put it somewhere where a potential slashdot submitter isn't going to find it. If you're used to having a website or weblog that almost nobody reads, it can sometimes be easy to just blurt things out with the expectation that it's still not going to be read by anyone. I have no idea if that's what happened in this case, but if people get wasted or depressed (or even just have a bit to drink), I could fully understand how this ended up getting published. If it wasn't something like that, then maybe he's just like that.
Either way, I bet he wasn't expecting to see it linked from Slashdot the next morning. You can't really count on slashdot editors acting responsibly, though.
Thanks, that would explain it. I guess Slashdot is just very late (as often happens).
Is this definitely just coming with SP3, or has it been around for longer? I hit this issue, or a very similar one, in our organisation several months ago. A user had some old Word 2.0 documents stored on a network drive (from the mid 1990's, before we enforced the use of a DMS), and they wouldn't open in Word 2003. The error dialog that Word displayed only mentioned the registry policy settings (without specifically saying the version was old), and I eventually found a knowledge base article that described the registry hack.
Many remotes are still hideously designed, though. It's not necessarily bad to have 52 buttons, but it is generally bad to have 52 identical rectangular buttons on a standard template rectangular remote that has to have a light shone onto it and be carefully looked at before the user can figure out which button they're about to press. There are plenty of things that can make a remote control more useful, but it usually costs money and effort to move away from the cheap, template designs. This extra effort doesn't market well, because the remotes rarely get displayed with the TV in the store -- they're just thrown into the box once someone's already decided to buy it.
As far as paying for a lot of features, there are a lot of features that really aren't necessary, even if you think you need them. VCRs used to be horrible to use, because setting the timers on them were often very difficult. It was only relatively recently that someone realised that setting the timer was pointless -- pressing buttons to set a time isn't even the user's primary goal when they're doing it. All they want is to record a program, and it's a hell of a lot easier if you can simply tell the device to record that program, and have it figure out all the necessary start and end time details.
You can argue that there are basic users and there are expert users, but the only real difference is how much either is willing to trade off between complexity of the system, and ability to control it. Every user has a set of goals, which are likely to be very similar. You can bet that a basic user of a system would love to have the better-targeted audio and visual quality if they didn't need to learn about all of the details in the controls to get it. The difficult trick with usability is being able to identify what the goals are likely to be, and make it so that everyone can get what they want without having to complicate the system with unnecessary middle-steps to get it.
It was either Donald Norman or Jef Raskin (I forget who, and I can't currently check) who related a description in one of their books about designing a remote control for a new model of television. Whoever it was had been very enthusiastic to have finally been hired by a company, based on their qualifications, to design them a really good remote control that would actually incorporate lots of usability concepts and be easy and convenient to use. They were just settling into identifying the users during the first week, only to find that the manufacturer was already wanting a final design so it gould get to market on time. I think they went with the standard rectangular 52 button remote.
These things have such short lifecycles that unless there's a good motivation for it, there's very little effort and money spent on designing the little things that won't get someone to buy it. The company wanted a good remote control, but if they couldn't get it immediately, it wasn't important enough. I fully agree with you that most people don't typically buy things because of good design, they buy them because of features, which is a real shame.
He's just come back from a research conference, and his point is with how new ideas get developed in a research environment. Right or wrong, he's not saying that open source isn't great, more stable, or a good choice for businesses and individual users who want something stable, reliable and useful. What he has said is that from his own observations, OSS is not a great model for fostering creativity and encouraging people to innovate and try radical new ways of doing things.
I'm not sure I fully agree with his view as he's stated because there are certainly some innovative ideas out there that have benefited a lot from OSS. He does have some merit with his arguments, though. Many of the popular OSS apps tend to be the ones that re-engineer ideas from closed source products.
From the article:
He's not saying that Open Source isn't great. He's just come back from a conference of researchers, and is saying that from a research perspective (which is not necessarily production), innovation and creativity doesn't tend to come through in open source projects, even if it is only the 1 in 10 closed source projects that actually have something new. You've just claimed that you don't care about innovation and creativity for the production software you use in your business, but would rather have something stable. I don't follow why you have a problem with his opinion -- there's no relation.
I started my laptop on Feisty, and since upgrading to Gutsy I noticed that the hibernation was broken. On some further examination though, I noticed that this problem seems very specific to the Kernel. If I boot gutsy to the 2.6.10 kernel, hibernate works fine. Without wanting to imply that this should be okay for Ubuntu as a distribution, you might still find that it works again if you boot to an earlier kernel, or try compiling your own and fiddle with the configuration.
Without wanting to comment on any bias in the article, I would have thought that a Linux-based desktop would be perfect for basic web surfing and email. In fact, five years ago when I was finally able to drop the need to open an Access database on my home PC, I realised that I only used my home PC for email and web browsing, and that I could finally dump Windows 98 for a Linux desktop and not regret it a bit. I use XP and Vista at work because that's what I'm employed to write software for, but I haven't ever had it at home since then.
I just came back from a holiday meeting more relatives where I was asked to take a look at yet another PC that's acting broken. It's a budget PC running Windows XP for little more than web browsing and email. Unfortunately they're so afraid to run Windows XP that they won't do so without crippling it with megabucks worth of frustratingly stupid Norton utilities, none of which cope well with the budget 256 MB of RAM. Notably, there's so much swapping due to the crap starting up that it takes an agonising 10 minutes after switching on before the desktop starts responding to user actions and it's possible to actually do anything. Ironically, the initial problem I was asked to look at was her inability to properly install a Norton upgrade that she'd been frightened into paying yet another $80 for.
Other people's experiences may have been different, but this is fairly typical of the web surfing and email Windows systems that I've come across at people's homes -- they're either crippled and slow (or they're expensive high=end systems), or they're completely overrun with spyware and viruses. It's up to each person to decide what's best for them, but personally I think that a well configured Linux-based system can be an excellent desktop for email and web browsing, if there's a way to get it to people and reliably support them on occasion.
Well there is the whole argument that intellectual property is nothing more than a legal construct, which makes a virtual form of "property" out of nothing. (The whole "if I copy it, they still have it" point of view.)
My personal view is that copyright is a good thing, but the terms are far too long. I think it's a great thing that creators can profit from their work, and that it's useful to have a legal construct to make sure they have a chance to profit from it before other people drop in and plagiarise it, denying any profit for the person who created it and reducing the incentive to create. I also think it's beneficial for existing IP to be able to be passed on as inheritance. If Tolkien was intending to provide for his family through releasing LOTR, but dropped dead the day of publication, it'd seem unfair to leave his family in a completely unprotected state.
Having said this, the length of copyright terms and their perpetual extensions thanks to broken corporate business models are ridiculous. Copyrights shouldn't need to be longer than 7 years as an automatic term. Anything longer than that should require regular renewals, up to a specified maximum length of time, so that the only works that continue to be restricted are those which a creator has actually demonstrated an interest in.
Across the board copyright extensions are much of the reason why so many works are simply disappearing these days. Short of lots of work tracking down copyright holders and paying royalties, it's illegal to preserve them.
I'm sceptical about the OLPC programme for certain reasons, but I'm even more sceptical about Dvorak, whose crap is rarely anything more than trolling for readers and selling advertising. I also think it's gratuitous to give him credit for raising this issue -- people have been criticising the OLPC project about this for years.
As much as "absolute poverty" is a problem, there are more kids in the world than those living in absolute poverty. I was in Peru 6 months ago and I could easily see the demographics where the OLPC project might actually be beneficial. Distribution of food is a big problem in some places around the world, but in other places there are a lot of kids who'd benefit from decent education much more than they'd benefit from more food. Trying to suggest that we should solve all the problems of the lowest common denominator before even glancing at anything else is absurd.
I do have doubts about the merits of simply throwing laptops at children and expecting them to become more educated. Trying to use a laptop as if it's a teacher seems similar to trying to use a television as if it's a babysitter. Having said that though, I think it's worth noting that the laptops produced by the OLPC project are very different from typical Windows-running (or even Linux-running) laptops in western countries. I haven't been fortunate enough to have seen one, but it sounds like they're fundamentally designed both at the hardware and software level with teaching in mind, including encouraging kids to think about what's going on inside. The stated mission of the project isn't to teach kids about computers, it's to teach kinds about thinking, problem solving and creativity. They should really be considered their own category of teaching tool rather than confusing them with what people think of as day-to-day crappy crashing laptops.
With good teachers and good teaching programmes, it sounds like these laptops could be very beneficial for certain demographics of children in developing countries. I guess my own scepticism about the project is because so much media focus is on getting durable laptops to children, without necessarily giving them a good learning environment and useful teachers to go with it. Perhaps I'm wrong about this.
I'd mod this up if I could, but it looks as if that's already happened in the time I've been previewing my response.
I'm in mixed minds because although a taser is a torture device, I still think it's better to be able to use a Taser rather than shoot someone dead, if a police officer doesn't have an option.
What confuses me a bit though is why there don't even seem to be basic steps by many of the various police forces to design the system to make it hard for Tasers to be used outside of those boundaries. There are plenty of systematic changes that could be made which would help to prevent stupid use of Tasers by police, but as far as I can tell this isn't happening in a lot of places.
A good start would be to make sure that no officer is licensed to use a Taser until they've been on a comprehensive training course that includes technical training and ethical training, probably giving them an example of the pain. (Making sure they're informed about some of the well known experients in the subject would be a good start.) Realistically, a Taser should never be used without the expectation that the targeted person might die as a consequence.
It'd also be very beneficial to make it an automatic requirement that paperwork be filed (and published) to justify every time a taser is discharged, and to have an automatic requirement for an independent legal body to investigate each use of a taser, and prosecute the police and/or officers involved if it's appropriate to do so.
I'm not completely against the idea of letting police use Tasers, but I do find the way that some police are getting away with some ridiculous abuses of it to be quite abhorrent. If they can't design a system to make sure it's used properly, then I fully agree that they shouldn't have them at all.
I appreciate what you're saying, but I don't think every release of a product should have to force obvious new features down a user's throat, and I'm quite happy to not be excited. Some apps you just don't want to change too much. The kernel is one of these, because it's expensive to update apps for new APIs, and a GUI/desktop is another, because major changes result in more re-training costs (either personal or within an organisation).
Personally I don't have much need for a new spellchecker or grammar checker, but to me they sound like things that would be better implemented as apps or plugins. It might be that you now actually get these after a while, if the cleaner APIs and more efficient libraries make it easier for someone to develop and integrate them effectively.