I've posted here before on the subject, but I have a Motion-based production-quality system continuously monitoring my house. I have a handful of cameras, both wired and wireless, that cover various areas (yes, I'm being intentionally vague. Security by obscurity *is* sometimes helpful.)
I have a password-protected web server that allows me to check out what's going on, but for the most part, I just let it run. It's been going for years now.
It has produced footage and stills that have been used in a continuing police investigation.
Additionally, Motion has one of the top two most friendly mailing lists for projects I've worked with.
I used to work in one or more Aerospace-related companies. At one of these companies, there was a concerted drive to get people to report fraud, waste, and/or abuse of corporate and/or tax dollars. So they put boxes up for anonymous tips. There were a few problems with this:
- you had to badge in to the buildings and individual office clusters. - areas were compartmentalized, so only a few people would/could know what was going on in a given office - buildings, hallways, etc, were under continuous video surveillance.
Not surprisingly, there was not a lot of success with this program.
Similarly, in a lot of Big Secret Government Conspiracies [tm], there are a limited number of people who have access to information. A sufficiently damaging leak can almost always be identified (Deep Throat being a notable exception). Because of this, anonymity is somewhat less valuable than we like to think it is.
The power to enforce laws, defend whistleblowers, and protect those who reveal abuse seems to me to be more important.
Isn't this just going to devolve into fanboy vote scamming?
I mean, if you look at the discussion boards, you see a lot of partisanship along the lines of "Linux Sucks" and "BSD is teh fuxx0r." I see more energy spent surrounding certain software packages in the slamming of competing projects than actual development and improvements. It's not universal, but I see more of it than I'd like.
Also, who do you trust to rate a project? It's authors? Its users? Rabid fanboys of a competing project?
The same problem exists with Zagat, incidentally. Anyone can rate a restaurant, including restaurant owners, investors, competitors, etc. While this doens't matter when there are lots of ratings, the more obscure entries with lower traffic are unreliable.
Oh. And:
The problem with Open Source is that everyone feels necessary to write some diatribe with a sentence starting with "The problem with Open Source is that..."
I'm biased, since I've contributed to the project, but CMS Made Simple http://www.cmsmadesimple.org/ is a straightforward, PHP-based approach that is designed to port "mostly static" sites into content management.
It is actually about managing content, unlike most of the PHP CMSes which are really more designed to be portal systems.
It's fairly lightweight, works with a variety of databases, is localized into a lot of languages, and is GPLed.
I got into this system after reviewing a whole big stack of other so-called CMS products, and either found them to be portal systems that did content management only if you tortured them for a while, or much too complicated and slow for the kind of thing I needed.
That's not to say it's the right solution to all problems! It has weaknesses if you need to have multiple independent protected areas in a site, lacks a lot of the "portal" features like user-facing login and registration, etc.
The latest census reports indicate that there are 13.7 trillion software pirates in China, as compared to 1.2 thousand in the US.
Furthermore, 1.7 million Americans are employed in ammunition factories, 2.5 million Americans are employed stuffing little uranium pellets into our nuclear warheads, and the rest of the Americans work at McDonald's or The Gap.
Just because something is popular, doesn't necessarily mean it sucks.
It took me many years to learn that lesson. My favorite saying in response to something being deemed "popular" or widely acclaimed was "Yeah, and the Big Mac is the best selling meal in America."
For Genealogy data, the de-facto standard file format is GEDCOM. Originally created by the LDS Church (the Mormons), virtually any decent genealogy program will support the format.
While it's a somewhat ugly text-based, flat-file format, it does permit organization of information in ways that will be useful to genealogists and researchers.
After I give them a dopeslap for not keeping their data current.
When your starting point is a Mac that has a 40MB hard drive, your perspective is understandable.
Some of us have/had data on old 8" floppies or 5.25" floppies, back from the days when a 5MB hard drive was $2,000 and the size of a Dell server.
It wasn't so easy to keep data current in those days. If you were lucky, you had a serial port, and could tranfer to a later generation machine. But disk formats were not standardized the way they are today: just try reading a hard-sectored floppy on a drive that doesn't understand 'em.
Unlike today, there wasn't a situation of three or four physical interface standards that have great backwards compatibility. Often, drive interfaces were customized to specific make/models, e.g., a Kaypro II, or a TRS-80 Model III, and wouldn't work with anything else.
(If you or anyone knows a cheap service to grab data off of 20-year-old hard-sectored, 40-track, DSDD 5.25" floppies, let me know!)
Since relevance is primarily a function of perception, is it possible for someone to only seem relevant?
Interesting question.
Perhaps I would have been better served by the word "significant." But that sentence just wouldn't have the dismissive quality that I was seeking.
And yet, by discussing whether or not he's relevant and/or significant, I fear I have fallen headlong into his trap. Ah, well. It beats doing real work.
And every time I've heard it, it's been from a northerner...
Well, being in Virginia, you'd have a better perspective than I would, seeing as I learned the language in Los Angeles (as far as I can tell, US Geography is non-Euclidian: West is completely orthogonal to North/South, while East is not. After all, Los Angeles is well south of Mason-Dixon if you measure by latitude.)
I will admit to merely parroting sources, rather than having done the research myself. Interestingly, though, at least two of these sources are from Charlottesville. I'll actually be visiting them this coming weekend, so I'll ask around.
Um. I think you're refering to the Communist City, not the Communist State. And it's "The People's Republic of Berkeley," not San Francisco.
San Francisco can't be Communist because of its enduring religious basis. I believe it is still officially titled the "Democratic Republic of Saint Francis The Fog-Shrouded."
Oh, but you're still wrong. The Communist City is "The People's Republic of Santa Monica." Or was. Until it became home of the Cultural Elite. I understand that the city council recently had the name updated to "Bay City Media And Wealth Hub Go Away You Filthy Peasant." At least that's the name of the city that was on my last parking ticket there.
Um... sorry to pick a fight with a Cultured Type, but "y'all" is actually singular.
The cognoscenti would point out that if you wish to refer to a group of individuals, the correct construction is "all y'all."
There are also the New Jersey Dixie constructions of "youse all," "alls youse," and "alls youse all," but I fear these do not truly fall under the scope of the discussion at hand.
And isn't a Cultured Type really just some dude with some stray acidophilus?
In the old days, there was one big (relatively) powerful computer with a bunch of terminals hanging off of it. This computer was called a Mainframe.
As time went on and miniaturization progressed, people wanted their own department computer, so they could have more CPU time available.
Then they wanted their own desktops.
Then they wanted to network their desktop machines, so they could share data.
Then some applications started sharing CPU and other resources over the network.
But all these networked machines were a big configuration hassle for IT. They envisioned "thin clients" and similar solutions.
Now machines are so powerful that users can have their own virtual PCs running on a central server, so they can just have dumb terminals on their desks.
There's a lesson in here somewhere. As soon as the network comes back, I'll google for it and find out what that lesson is.
The Aerospace Corporation is a federally funded research and development center (FFRDC), located in lovely El Segundo, California. El Segundo is also home to Los Angeles' Hyperion sewage processing plant, a Chevron refinery, the Los Angeles Air Force Base, and numerous other aerospace-themed venues that hearken back to the good ol' days (The Proud Bird, The Wild Goose, etc.).
I suspect you're remembering stuff running on TRS-80s or Apple IIs.
Why is software slower today? Well, it does a lot more. For example, think about how many pixels things move around today. My first computer, a TRS-80, had a monochrome screen resolution of 128x48 (today my phone has a 320x320 screen that shows 64k colors).
In the old days, if you wrote a game, you did it in hand-opimized assembler for a simple processor. (today, compilers will, in general, out-optimize a human being, because processors are much more complex, with multiple pipelines, etc). It didn't move around much memory, and the complexity was relatively small. Consider action games today: they present full screens at 800x600 or higher in full color, refreshing dozens or even hundreds of times a second. Consider the difference in updating 1024 bytes (TRS-80 screen) versus 1440000 bytes (800x600 in 24-bit color). That's a lot more work, no matter how you slice it. Bus speeds are only a few hundred times faster than they were, while the data transfered has gone up by over a thousand times.
What's more, the game logic ("AI") has improved considerably, the data structures gotten more complex, maps have expanded considerably, etc.
All that being said, a lot of languages/libraries are fairly cavalier when it comes to memory utilization and such efficiencies. Languages today are, in general, more oriented towards maintainability than performance (although I'm sure many people will disagree).
Slashdot Mirror
Motion is excellent.
I've posted here before on the subject, but I have a Motion-based production-quality system continuously monitoring my house. I have a handful of cameras, both wired and wireless, that cover various areas (yes, I'm being intentionally vague. Security by obscurity *is* sometimes helpful.)
I have a password-protected web server that allows me to check out what's going on, but for the most part, I just let it run. It's been going for years now.
It has produced footage and stills that have been used in a continuing police investigation.
Additionally, Motion has one of the top two most friendly mailing lists for projects I've worked with.
I used to work in one or more Aerospace-related companies. At one of these companies, there was a concerted drive to get people to report fraud, waste, and/or abuse of corporate and/or tax dollars.
So they put boxes up for anonymous tips. There were a few problems with this:
- you had to badge in to the buildings and individual office clusters.
- areas were compartmentalized, so only a few people would/could know what was going on in a given office
- buildings, hallways, etc, were under continuous video surveillance.
Not surprisingly, there was not a lot of success with this program.
Similarly, in a lot of Big Secret Government Conspiracies [tm], there are a limited number of people who have access to information. A sufficiently damaging leak can almost always be identified (Deep Throat being a notable exception). Because of this, anonymity is somewhat less valuable than we like to think it is.
The power to enforce laws, defend whistleblowers, and protect those who reveal abuse seems to me to be more important.
Isn't this just going to devolve into fanboy vote scamming?
..."
I mean, if you look at the discussion boards, you see a lot of partisanship along the lines of "Linux Sucks" and "BSD is teh fuxx0r." I see more energy spent surrounding certain software packages in the slamming of competing projects than actual development and improvements. It's not universal, but I see more of it than I'd like.
Also, who do you trust to rate a project? It's authors? Its users? Rabid fanboys of a competing project?
The same problem exists with Zagat, incidentally. Anyone can rate a restaurant, including restaurant owners, investors, competitors, etc. While this doens't matter when there are lots of ratings, the more obscure entries with lower traffic are unreliable.
Oh. And:
The problem with Open Source is that everyone feels necessary to write some diatribe with a sentence starting with "The problem with Open Source is that
I'm biased, since I've contributed to the project, but CMS Made Simple http://www.cmsmadesimple.org/ is a straightforward, PHP-based approach that is designed to port "mostly static" sites into content management.
It is actually about managing content, unlike most of the PHP CMSes which are really more designed to be portal systems.
It's fairly lightweight, works with a variety of databases, is localized into a lot of languages, and is GPLed.
I got into this system after reviewing a whole big stack of other so-called CMS products, and either found them to be portal systems that did content management only if you tortured them for a while, or much too complicated and slow for the kind of thing I needed.
That's not to say it's the right solution to all problems! It has weaknesses if you need to have multiple independent protected areas in a site, lacks a lot of the "portal" features like user-facing login and registration, etc.
Anyway, check it out!
Check your figures.
The latest census reports indicate that there are 13.7 trillion software pirates in China, as compared to 1.2 thousand in the US.
Furthermore, 1.7 million Americans are employed in ammunition factories, 2.5 million Americans are employed stuffing little uranium pellets into our nuclear warheads, and the rest of the Americans work at McDonald's or The Gap.
Thank you! Now I can continue to quote hm in good faith!
"I invented the term Object-Oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind."
- Alan Kay
I don't know if this is a true quotation, or is apocryphal, but it's good enough to throw around at random.
I'm sure Mr. Kay will not have any problem finding a job, should he so desire one. Regardless, I wish him the best of luck.
Or, say, what Microsoft did with Windows, going from version 3.11 to version 95.
Or Xbox to Xbox 360, so as not to seem lesser than Playstation 2.
Actually, they also did a big leap with Word, so they could synchronize Word for Windows with Word for Mac.
Marketers always screw around with version numbers, hoping to make things seem "bigger, better, newer."
True 'nuff.
Just because something is popular, doesn't necessarily mean it sucks.
It took me many years to learn that lesson. My favorite saying in response to something being deemed "popular" or widely acclaimed was "Yeah, and the Big Mac is the best selling meal in America."
I don't know if the various software packages commonly support it, though.
I think many of the recent ones do. (Of course, there are still the products that don't really support GEDCOM at all, but they're the minority.)
Then there are a lot of hybrid solutions (like used by phpGedView, for example) which will support only "external" media.
I suspect that, eventually, they will all support the embedded media.
For Genealogy data, the de-facto standard file format is GEDCOM. Originally created by the LDS Church (the Mormons), virtually any decent genealogy program will support the format.
While it's a somewhat ugly text-based, flat-file format, it does permit organization of information in ways that will be useful to genealogists and researchers.
After I give them a dopeslap for not keeping their data current.
When your starting point is a Mac that has a 40MB hard drive, your perspective is understandable.
Some of us have/had data on old 8" floppies or 5.25" floppies, back from the days when a 5MB hard drive was $2,000 and the size of a Dell server.
It wasn't so easy to keep data current in those days. If you were lucky, you had a serial port, and could tranfer to a later generation machine. But disk formats were not standardized the way they are today: just try reading a hard-sectored floppy on a drive that doesn't understand 'em.
Unlike today, there wasn't a situation of three or four physical interface standards that have great backwards compatibility. Often, drive interfaces were customized to specific make/models, e.g., a Kaypro II, or a TRS-80 Model III, and wouldn't work with anything else.
(If you or anyone knows a cheap service to grab data off of 20-year-old hard-sectored, 40-track, DSDD 5.25" floppies, let me know!)
You're one of us now!
Gabba gabba hey!
You're one of us now.
Gabba gabba hey!
My license plate is "RM -RF *"
(I've pasted in the hyphen, probably illegally.)
I was once asked if I wasn't worried about being wiped out.
I explained that I backup in my driveway every morning.
Since relevance is primarily a function of perception, is it possible for someone to only seem relevant?
Interesting question.
Perhaps I would have been better served by the word "significant." But that sentence just wouldn't have the dismissive quality that I was seeking.
And yet, by discussing whether or not he's relevant and/or significant, I fear I have fallen headlong into his trap. Ah, well. It beats doing real work.
Yeah, not only that, but he misuses the word "comprise."
A totality comprises its parts; parts do not comprise a totality.
Oh, and as for his opinion? Who gives a shit? He's just trying to fan the flames of outraged reaction to make himself seem relevant.
I only mentioned Charlottesville because you're there. Otherwise, I would have just said "around central Virginia."
That being said, my sources were born and bred in C-ville.
And every time I've heard it, it's been from a northerner...
d ialect/maps.html
Well, being in Virginia, you'd have a better perspective than I would, seeing as I learned the language in Los Angeles (as far as I can tell, US Geography is non-Euclidian: West is completely orthogonal to North/South, while East is not. After all, Los Angeles is well south of Mason-Dixon if you measure by latitude.)
I will admit to merely parroting sources, rather than having done the research myself. Interestingly, though, at least two of these sources are from Charlottesville. I'll actually be visiting them this coming weekend, so I'll ask around.
I went through a struggle to track down the dialect survey, only to discover it doesn't have "y'all" at all. There are some interesting items, however:
http://cfprod01.imt.uwm.edu/Dept/FLL/linguistics/
Um. I think you're refering to the Communist City, not the Communist State. And it's "The People's Republic of Berkeley," not San Francisco.
San Francisco can't be Communist because of its enduring religious basis. I believe it is still officially titled the "Democratic Republic of Saint Francis The Fog-Shrouded."
Oh, but you're still wrong. The Communist City is "The People's Republic of Santa Monica." Or was. Until it became home of the Cultural Elite. I understand that the city council recently had the name updated to "Bay City Media And Wealth Hub Go Away You Filthy Peasant." At least that's the name of the city that was on my last parking ticket there.
Um... sorry to pick a fight with a Cultured Type, but "y'all" is actually singular.
The cognoscenti would point out that if you wish to refer to a group of individuals, the correct construction is "all y'all."
There are also the New Jersey Dixie constructions of "youse all," "alls youse," and "alls youse all," but I fear these do not truly fall under the scope of the discussion at hand.
And isn't a Cultured Type really just some dude with some stray acidophilus?
Yeah. I mean, who needs to share their interests with their friends anyway?
I thought the whole point of those headphone thingies was so no-one could talk to you, and thereby discover that you have no friends.
At least, back in the day, that's what Walkmen were all about.
In the old days, there was one big (relatively) powerful computer with a bunch of terminals hanging off of it. This computer was called a Mainframe.
As time went on and miniaturization progressed, people wanted their own department computer, so they could have more CPU time available.
Then they wanted their own desktops.
Then they wanted to network their desktop machines, so they could share data.
Then some applications started sharing CPU and other resources over the network.
But all these networked machines were a big configuration hassle for IT. They envisioned "thin clients" and similar solutions.
Now machines are so powerful that users can have their own virtual PCs running on a central server, so they can just have dumb terminals on their desks.
There's a lesson in here somewhere. As soon as the network comes back, I'll google for it and find out what that lesson is.
The name includes the "The".
The Aerospace Corporation is a federally funded research and development center (FFRDC), located in lovely El Segundo, California. El Segundo is also home to Los Angeles' Hyperion sewage processing plant, a Chevron refinery, the Los Angeles Air Force Base, and numerous other aerospace-themed venues that hearken back to the good ol' days (The Proud Bird, The Wild Goose, etc.).
I suspect you're remembering stuff running on TRS-80s or Apple IIs.
Why is software slower today? Well, it does a lot more. For example, think about how many pixels things move around today. My first computer, a TRS-80, had a monochrome screen resolution of 128x48 (today my phone has a 320x320 screen that shows 64k colors).
In the old days, if you wrote a game, you did it in hand-opimized assembler for a simple processor. (today, compilers will, in general, out-optimize a human being, because processors are much more complex, with multiple pipelines, etc). It didn't move around much memory, and the complexity was relatively small.
Consider action games today: they present full screens at 800x600 or higher in full color, refreshing dozens or even hundreds of times a second. Consider the difference in updating 1024 bytes (TRS-80 screen) versus 1440000 bytes (800x600 in 24-bit color). That's a lot more work, no matter how you slice it. Bus speeds are only a few hundred times faster than they were, while the data transfered has gone up by over a thousand times.
What's more, the game logic ("AI") has improved considerably, the data structures gotten more complex, maps have expanded considerably, etc.
All that being said, a lot of languages/libraries are fairly cavalier when it comes to memory utilization and such efficiencies. Languages today are, in general, more oriented towards maintainability than performance (although I'm sure many people will disagree).
Particularly in the case when you want to send out millions of spams.