Huh. The bad guys are winging it. Their modus operandi is basically "load a truck full of HE, drive to target zone, push button." Anybody could go into a basement parking garage in a green jumpsuit with a tape measure and bring out enough information for a decent demolition team to bring down a building. It wouldn't be *precision* but it'd be *effective*. And these guys may not even have to plan for extracting the team before the charges go off. External dimensions of a building wouldn't add much that they could use.
But I agree that it's amazing this hasn't been banned. Not because that would improve security, but because it seems at first that it would.
Wow, it's dangerous enough having people taking snapshots of famous bridges. Now we've got trucks with frickin' laser beams on their heads aiming at the Golden Gate! That's just *gotta* be terrorists.:-)
Um, have you tried reading 1.44MB off a 15-year-old floppy? Was every sector still readable? Magnetic records should be refreshed every 3-5yr. IIRC you get troublesome error rates from ferric oxide after 10 years and from chromium dioxide after 5.
Optical media degrade over time too. Look up "laser rot". You need to check and copy on a regular schedule if your data are precious.
Now I have to weigh in on the other side. Bits don't get eaten by sulfurous air or mildew; silver images do. 100-year-old photos in a trunk in the basement are probably badly damaged. Their selling point is that you couldn't remake them today because the moment has passed by, so they are much better than nothing even if they are in awful shape.
You should access, and probably copy, all of those digitized images every few years whether you are ready to transfer to a shiny new medium or not. Things happen to any storage medium over time, and you want to catch rising error rates while they are still correctable errors.
"Not to mention the fact that the camera you buy today is obsolete a year from now when something better AND cheaper comes along."
Someday more people will notice that absolutely nothing is cheaper than the equipment they already own. "Better" is the only reason to upgrade, and one should always ask, "is this really any better *for me*?"
If I want a camera today, I can go to a store and get one for $100.00 or I can go to my closet and get the one I already have for $0.00. Nobody is ever going to beat the camera I already own on price. I'll replace it when it breaks or I outgrow it.
I often wondered where the Federation gets all that antimatter for their spaceships to run on. Now we know: it's collected from magnetospheric convergence zones or some such [tech].
(Hmmm, we know from "The Doomsday Machine" that the implosion of a Constitution-class ship's engine yields a measly 400-odd megatons, which probably represents about the mass of, say, a shirt button. But that's still a whole lotta antiparticles, given the nature of the things.)
Wow, I beat Slack by a week with my homebrew "distro". If you want an engaging puzzle, try building your own install kit by hand from bits you have lying around on a working system. (For extra points try it with no network and the only removable storage being on USB.)
As a Hoosier I'm not in the least alarmed, and not just because IN is not CA. Here, if a remote vendor doesn't collect sales tax, we're required to figure it ourselves and send it in along with the income tax. Since I pay the same either way, I'd much rather have the vendor send it in for me. He's got to have tax calculation code for *some* state anyway, so why not put in the full set of tax tables?
Win2k gave Windows users the thing they most wanted from an upgrade: it's the first one that didn't crash left and right. What's XP got to recommend it? the lollipop color scheme? Only the negative benefit that MS isn't about to stop support for it (yet). Meanwhile people are tired of having things moved out of familiar places to no visible benefit.
XP is truly an improvement over 2000 mainly in small ways that only a sysadmin could love, and nobody listens to us anymore. They should have left the colors alone and called it Windows 2000 Second Edition.
"The 8 songs." Yes, another problem: recent work doesn't just have a song when it works, but is studded with them like a ham whether they're needed or not. It's overdone and interrupts the flow of the story. A well-timed musical bit will be enjoyed but not noticed as such.
But management who don't understand the processes they manage will perform poorly. You have to care a bit about the specific product in order to manage in ways that maximize performance.
Walt may have wanted to make bags of money but he was also an artist and a storyteller. If you don't love the product it won't love you back.
Animation alone cannot pull in the audience. What is lacking is *storytelling* and that takes writers.
Disney has lately been doing quite a lot of something that they pooh-poohed in the discussion on at least one DVD: more of the same. If cute spotty dogs sell once, sell 'em again. Some days it seems that everything coming out of Disney is "a II movie". Don't give us more dwarves. Let stories end, and tell new ones.
I haven't seen _Treasure Planet_ so I can't say whether it's good or bad, but I've seen the trailer and the concept miserably fails the laugh test. The animation is darned good but what it's telling me is *stupid*.
When most of your new stuff is either ridiculous or retreaded, don't expect to do well.
Oh, it'll be what the true believers at MS think is better. I doubt it'll be something *I* will like better. Most often something new from Microsoft leaves me asking, "why would I want to do that?"
I think that some of the problem is the relentless focus on everything-in-one-place. A small team could design, code, test, debug, document, and deliver a good basic shell in six weeks, and after that they could turn a hundred other teams loose in parallel to develop modular extensions and suchlike. But that wouldn't be Tightly Integrated.
There is a third possibility: that the design is so huge and rambling that the actual shell-ishness will be invisible, buried under mounds of.Net this, GUI that, and COM t'other. Like everything else they do.
Syntax highlighting? You mean "editor", not "CLI".
For better integration with a GUI, see Tcl/Tk.
Take a look at the programmable completion in Bash.
I think there's currently a lot of room for leaving things well enough alone. This is a perfect time and a perfect arena for Microsoft to *not* innovate, but just listen for a change and give the customers what they've been asking for for years, because it works so well in other products. The need to make things new and strange comes from the Marketing department, not the people who actually have to use this stuff.
That's what I needed: now I'll have to rewrite this big pile of scripts in a new language that'll be bigger, slower, and more overcomplexified than Unix shells. Bleh.
At least it will give Microsoft another chance to understand how people really use scripting, which historically they've never grasped very well. CMD has pretty good plain substitution and some nice tricks, and integrates external commands well, but is a lousy procedural language and the interpreter has strange quirks that can make it astoundingly slow. VBscript and Jscript do procedural stuff well but integration with external applications is incredibly hairy and fragile. They've never managed to get sufficient control structures and seamless integration of external programs in the same place.
They certainly have enough good examples to learn from. Tcl, REXX, ${you name it}sh, VMS DCL...the list goes on and on.
I'm trying to remember what year it was the last time I wanted to do word processing. (Not counting the times when I have to cope with people who send me a word processor's stomach contents instead of a finished document.)
I just don't do the kind of work that Apple's customer base do. Everything they're proud of is something that makes me yawn. They would probably feel the same way about the things I'm proudest of. Which is my point: if you want a machine that builds doghouses then so be it, but I don't and I do not believe that the market will ever consist solely of people who do. Saying that "Linux" and Apple are competitors is about as sensible as saying that Centex Homes and Stanley Works are competitors. They make different kinds of products for different sets of customers.
I didn't say I thought it likely that I would actually find a compelling reason to use Apple's hardware. They'd have more value to me as a supplier of other *non*-x86 platforms. If I'm satisfied with x86 I'll probably just go on assembling my own.
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Huh. The bad guys are winging it. Their modus operandi is basically "load a truck full of HE, drive to target zone, push button." Anybody could go into a basement parking garage in a green jumpsuit with a tape measure and bring out enough information for a decent demolition team to bring down a building. It wouldn't be *precision* but it'd be *effective*. And these guys may not even have to plan for extracting the team before the charges go off. External dimensions of a building wouldn't add much that they could use.
But I agree that it's amazing this hasn't been banned. Not because that would improve security, but because it seems at first that it would.
Wow, it's dangerous enough having people taking snapshots of famous bridges. Now we've got trucks with frickin' laser beams on their heads aiming at the Golden Gate! That's just *gotta* be terrorists. :-)
If they still make it, I suppose you could buy a jug of Print-E-Mulsion and spread it on the paper of your choice.
Um, have you tried reading 1.44MB off a 15-year-old floppy? Was every sector still readable? Magnetic records should be refreshed every 3-5yr. IIRC you get troublesome error rates from ferric oxide after 10 years and from chromium dioxide after 5.
Optical media degrade over time too. Look up "laser rot". You need to check and copy on a regular schedule if your data are precious.
Now I have to weigh in on the other side. Bits don't get eaten by sulfurous air or mildew; silver images do. 100-year-old photos in a trunk in the basement are probably badly damaged. Their selling point is that you couldn't remake them today because the moment has passed by, so they are much better than nothing even if they are in awful shape.
Go right ahead and take digital photos of the American Civil War then. They will be in so much better condition than Brady's and more detailed too.
New technology can only do new work better. The best it can do with existing work is to not degrade it very much.
You should access, and probably copy, all of those digitized images every few years whether you are ready to transfer to a shiny new medium or not. Things happen to any storage medium over time, and you want to catch rising error rates while they are still correctable errors.
"Not to mention the fact that the camera you buy today is obsolete a year from now when something better AND cheaper comes along."
Someday more people will notice that absolutely nothing is cheaper than the equipment they already own. "Better" is the only reason to upgrade, and one should always ask, "is this really any better *for me*?"
If I want a camera today, I can go to a store and get one for $100.00 or I can go to my closet and get the one I already have for $0.00. Nobody is ever going to beat the camera I already own on price. I'll replace it when it breaks or I outgrow it.
I often wondered where the Federation gets all that antimatter for their spaceships to run on. Now we know: it's collected from magnetospheric convergence zones or some such [tech].
(Hmmm, we know from "The Doomsday Machine" that the implosion of a Constitution-class ship's engine yields a measly 400-odd megatons, which probably represents about the mass of, say, a shirt button. But that's still a whole lotta antiparticles, given the nature of the things.)
Wow, I beat Slack by a week with my homebrew "distro". If you want an engaging puzzle, try building your own install kit by hand from bits you have lying around on a working system. (For extra points try it with no network and the only removable storage being on USB.)
As a Hoosier I'm not in the least alarmed, and not just because IN is not CA. Here, if a remote vendor doesn't collect sales tax, we're required to figure it ourselves and send it in along with the income tax. Since I pay the same either way, I'd much rather have the vendor send it in for me. He's got to have tax calculation code for *some* state anyway, so why not put in the full set of tax tables?
Win2k gave Windows users the thing they most wanted from an upgrade: it's the first one that didn't crash left and right. What's XP got to recommend it? the lollipop color scheme? Only the negative benefit that MS isn't about to stop support for it (yet). Meanwhile people are tired of having things moved out of familiar places to no visible benefit.
XP is truly an improvement over 2000 mainly in small ways that only a sysadmin could love, and nobody listens to us anymore. They should have left the colors alone and called it Windows 2000 Second Edition.
"The 8 songs." Yes, another problem: recent work doesn't just have a song when it works, but is studded with them like a ham whether they're needed or not. It's overdone and interrupts the flow of the story. A well-timed musical bit will be enjoyed but not noticed as such.
Interesting. I never thought of _The Abolition of Man_ as a children's story.
But management who don't understand the processes they manage will perform poorly. You have to care a bit about the specific product in order to manage in ways that maximize performance.
Walt may have wanted to make bags of money but he was also an artist and a storyteller. If you don't love the product it won't love you back.
Animation alone cannot pull in the audience. What is lacking is *storytelling* and that takes writers.
Disney has lately been doing quite a lot of something that they pooh-poohed in the discussion on at least one DVD: more of the same. If cute spotty dogs sell once, sell 'em again. Some days it seems that everything coming out of Disney is "a II movie". Don't give us more dwarves. Let stories end, and tell new ones.
I haven't seen _Treasure Planet_ so I can't say whether it's good or bad, but I've seen the trailer and the concept miserably fails the laugh test. The animation is darned good but what it's telling me is *stupid*.
When most of your new stuff is either ridiculous or retreaded, don't expect to do well.
Depends. How many modules did the CEO maintain?
Oh, it'll be what the true believers at MS think is better. I doubt it'll be something *I* will like better. Most often something new from Microsoft leaves me asking, "why would I want to do that?"
I think that some of the problem is the relentless focus on everything-in-one-place. A small team could design, code, test, debug, document, and deliver a good basic shell in six weeks, and after that they could turn a hundred other teams loose in parallel to develop modular extensions and suchlike. But that wouldn't be Tightly Integrated.
There is a third possibility: that the design is so huge and rambling that the actual shell-ishness will be invisible, buried under mounds of .Net this, GUI that, and COM t'other. Like everything else they do.
Syntax highlighting? You mean "editor", not "CLI".
For better integration with a GUI, see Tcl/Tk.
Take a look at the programmable completion in Bash.
I think there's currently a lot of room for leaving things well enough alone. This is a perfect time and a perfect arena for Microsoft to *not* innovate, but just listen for a change and give the customers what they've been asking for for years, because it works so well in other products. The need to make things new and strange comes from the Marketing department, not the people who actually have to use this stuff.
"Don't remember if [named pipes]'re exposed at the CLI level, though."
Well, there's one big problem. WSH didn't even have basic file I/O for a long time.
That's what I needed: now I'll have to rewrite this big pile of scripts in a new language that'll be bigger, slower, and more overcomplexified than Unix shells. Bleh.
At least it will give Microsoft another chance to understand how people really use scripting, which historically they've never grasped very well. CMD has pretty good plain substitution and some nice tricks, and integrates external commands well, but is a lousy procedural language and the interpreter has strange quirks that can make it astoundingly slow. VBscript and Jscript do procedural stuff well but integration with external applications is incredibly hairy and fragile. They've never managed to get sufficient control structures and seamless integration of external programs in the same place.
They certainly have enough good examples to learn from. Tcl, REXX, ${you name it}sh, VMS DCL...the list goes on and on.
As simplicity is overrated, sometimes.
I'm trying to remember what year it was the last time I wanted to do word processing. (Not counting the times when I have to cope with people who send me a word processor's stomach contents instead of a finished document.)
I just don't do the kind of work that Apple's customer base do. Everything they're proud of is something that makes me yawn. They would probably feel the same way about the things I'm proudest of. Which is my point: if you want a machine that builds doghouses then so be it, but I don't and I do not believe that the market will ever consist solely of people who do. Saying that "Linux" and Apple are competitors is about as sensible as saying that Centex Homes and Stanley Works are competitors. They make different kinds of products for different sets of customers.
I didn't say I thought it likely that I would actually find a compelling reason to use Apple's hardware. They'd have more value to me as a supplier of other *non*-x86 platforms. If I'm satisfied with x86 I'll probably just go on assembling my own.