Want to tell your IP phone where the call manager is? DHCP. Want to tell your Netware clients where the nearest replica server is? DHCP. Still using WINS for some strange reason? DHCP.
So can it also tell my wife where her keys are? If so, I'll be adopting it right away.
(I've been looking for a key-chain gadget that combines GPS and wifi capabilities. I could write my own program that queries it and tells me where she left it. Then the only remaining problem would be the not-so-good accuracy, to within about 5 or 6 meters, for "civilian" GPS. That's not good enough; we need access to the under-a-meter accuracy of the military channel if we're gonna find those keys).
[i]Half[/i] the time you can't 'plop' your current GCC-compiled code onto a sun or intel compiler and have it compile without huge headaches...
Heh. Last week, I upgraded a RedHat system to the latest knoppix. It has gcc, but almost nothing in my tool library (around a thousand routines in several hundred files) compiles clean.
Mostly, it's warnings that a call of strlen() or fgets() or some other standard C routine is incompatible with the default declaration. WTF, "default declaration"? Much of the code #includes most of the common.h files that used to declare those things. Where did they move the declarations? Initial grepping through/usr/include found sheer insanity, which seems to be due to extensive use of multiply-nested #ifdefs to handle things like threading. This has the side effect of making it a challenge to find the actual declarations. But I'll find them. And my own code with be peppered with yet more #ifdefs to handle this.
It's an old story, of course. Any C programmer who tries to write portable code stumbles across it all the time. It's mostly annoying now because for over a decade, my linux code had almost always ported to new linux distros with very few such problems. But I suppose those days are now over. I also had a similar experience with testing on ubuntu recently, which adds evidence that portability is becoming materially more difficult.
I suspect that PCC won't be any more of a challenge than gcc and the linux libs have become. Especially since I still have #ifdefs for dealing with Solaris, and the last time I tested on Solaris (less than a year ago), everything compiled clean without problems. Going to PCC will likely produce no more hair pulling than gcc+linux does now.
And here I was thinking that all modern compilers were designed correctly with a front-end and back-end. So much for academics.
Yeah; it can be quite impressive how effectively the legal system can mess up good engineering design. Especially when combined with the tactics of the "market leader" commercial corporations.
You do realize that GCC was a duplication of effort? If it wasn't for licensing obsessives you'd still be using PCC right now.
Yeah, but back in the 80s and early 90s, there was still a lot of worry over the fact that much of unix[TM] was in fact owned by AT&T. This was a potential sword over the head of a lot of projects.
I recall back around 92, when I worked on a project at Digital, and I heard a number of the internal discussions of the fact that DEC had Sys/V running on their machines, but seemed only interested in selling BSD-derived unix systems. The general understanding seemed to be that the company lawyers were very worried that anything linked to the Sys/V system libraries could in fact be owned by AT&T. The worry was that, if Digital sold software linked to these libraries (and thus contained an AT&T copyright notice), and the software became a best seller, AT&T could come along and claim the software as theirs, and the courts would agree.
As far as I know, this didn't ever get tested in court. The effect of that was apparently to make lawyers advise that the legal status was undefined. The legal status of commercial software linked to BSD libraries was a lot clearer to the lawyers, so they advised going with BSD until someone else paid for the court battle with AT&T.
I never actually talked to any of Digital's lawyers about this, though, so it might all have been just corporate mythology. Still, as society becomes more litigious and the laws dealing with software become murkier, it's something worth thinking about. And we might note that AT&T copyrights on the original unix code have been in the courts lately; that's part of what the SCO case is all about.
Most complaints on the GIMP relate to it not copying Adobe enough.
Hmmm... I've commented a couple times on my experiences with trying to learn GIMP. I don't complain that it doesn't copy Adobe, because I haven't yet succeeded in doing anything useful with Photoshop, either. My complain might be summarized as: I read several GIMP docs, and tried the examples. All I ever managed to do was to seriously damage all the photos that I tried to modify. My main reaction was usually "WTF is it doing????" I never managed to make any controlled changes that were what I wanted. All those image operations obviously do something, but I could never quite understand what, or how to use them constructively to make the changes that I wanted.
My guess is that the main problem is in the documentation (for both GIMP and Photoshop). I don't yet speak the jargon, and most of the docs are effectively gibberish to me. That is, I see a lot of English words in puzzling sequences that tell me that I don't really understand how those words are being used. The docs are written to teach those who already know the jargon. I haven't yet stumbled across anything that explains the jargon to a novice like me.
So I don't advertise myself as a graphics expert. Maybe some day, when someone comes out with a good intro learning doc, I'll learn it. Until then, I'll continue to treat both of them as abstruse monsters that it's best to avoid.
... US soldiers get to see how effective terrorist tactics are against an better trained and equipped force, and bring that knowledge and experience back home...
Hmmm... The same lesson seems to have been "learned" by US soldiers back in the 1960s and 70s. But there's little evidence that the general population or the political system has incorporated any of the lessons. The current US government certainly didn't learn anything from Vietnam; few if any of them were over there, and they seem to be actively inviting the same sort of fiasco. A current joke: "How is Iraq different from Vietnam? George Bush has been to Iraq."
It's also quite clear that the current crop of US soldiers have never been taught anything about the Vietnam War. It's a topic that's rarely if ever mentioned in the history classes in the US school system, for which history seems to have stopped 50 or 60 years ago. What little is known by the current crop of military recruits was mostly learned from Hollywood movies. See "Rambo" for details.
It's true that military historians have studied guerilla warfare in great detail. But there seems to be little evidence that our leaders have ever looked at such studies. To see a detailed example of this, google for "Battle of Algiers". This is a thoroughly documented topic. George Bush and his crowd claim to have read the famous book about it. But looking at their actions, you'd conclude that most have only seen the movie, if that. They certainly didn't learn any of the lessons, because they're making the same mistakes that the historians describe the French government making back in the 1950s, with the same results.
History definitely does seem to be repeating itself. And it doesn't even rhyme...
Try 600,000 [US Arabic speakers], by the last census.
Such numbers are notoriously variable, as they depend on your definition. Here's an interesting article on the general topic. They mention that different studies differ by around a factor of two for the number of "speakers" of English, Spanish and Hindi. I've read a number of similar discussions that mention such problems as whether children are counted (probably not if you're counting voters or looking to hire translators) or whether there's any sort of social or political stigma to knowledge of a language (as often happens with minority languages).
But your other points are quite relevant. Translation is a difficult job at best, and doesn't usually pay what it's worth. When you add in social stigmas and official repression, it's not at all surprising that government agencies might have problems hiring translators for an "enemy" language. Even when there are people capable of doing the job (perhaps with a bit of training), they often have good reasons to not want to get involved.
I propose to suspend Godwin's law for this article,...
Heh; good suggestion.
In high school, I took a couple years of German from a teacher who was born here in the US, of German immigrant parents. She taught us a lot of German proverbs, and one of the first (also the title of a well-known folk song) was "die Gedanken sind frei", or "[my/our] Thoughts are Free". Her point was that the sort of repression recently imposed by the Nazis wasn't at all an aberration in German-speaking society; it was really just an extreme case of something with a long history in that society and many others. The proverb (and song) long predate the Nazis, and make the point that the authorities may be able to punish you for what you do or say, but they can't control your thoughts. She commented that she had often heard older Germans (in Germany and the US) muttering this phrase or quietly humming the final line of the song when some political big-wig said or did something that threatened citizens freedoms. She made it clear that this was often as appropriate in the US as in other countries.
It was sorta fun being taught such quiet resistance in German. Some of us did understand that, contrary to all the propaganda telling us how free we were, her job could well be in danger if certain people in the local government understood what she was teaching her students.
(Another lesson explained why that "die" in the proverb isn't best translated literally to English as "the", and why a pronoun is a better translation in such cases. It's a subtlety that the above wikipedia page gets wrong. It's sorta like why, when Kennedy declared "Ich bin ein Berliner", he was actually telling the audience that he was a jelly-filled doughnut.;-)
We can now easily predict that the German government will soon find it difficult to hire people with an admitted knowledge of computer security topics. If you were German, would you admit to such knowledge to an official questioner?
Sorta like how the US government has been complaining about the difficulty of hiring Arabic translators, despite the statistics from a few years back saying that there were several million US residence who were fluent in Arabic. (And, contrary to the jokes going around, they aren't all gay.;-)
It's commonly known as "shooting yourself in the foot".
Allows you to turn scripting off (including most flash) on a per-domain basis.
That doesn't do you much good if the ads and the content are both video from the same domain. In my example of the Daily Show, the ads and content are all video from the comedycentral.com domain, and the pages make heavy use of scripts. So you must allow scripts to see the content, and that turns on the ads, too.
Funny thing about their site is that the usual failure mode has ads running but not the content videos. You'd think if they could make one work, they could make them all work. Dunno how they messed up so badly.
But most of their good stuff is mirrored on various (mostly political) blogs, so it's not hard to find. And the bloggers usually have the sense to not let their ads get in the way of people seeing their content. In fact, they usually link to ads on ad sites, so you can block them by domain. And few blogs make significant use of scripts, for obvious reasons, so noscript mostly just blocks ads.
Technologies like Flash and AJAX and all the other technologies surrounding and supporting them can add a great deal of value to a website, but only if done correctly.
True, perhaps. But if I enable them, I find that the Web is full of sites that abuse them and attempt to take over my cpu. As a "client", I can't know beforehand what a site may attempt to do to my machine. So my only sensible approach is to use a browser (browsers, actually) that let me disable such horrors.
I'm sorry for the very few sites that use such tools appropriately. But the fact is that the Web has been colonized by arrogant folks who think that it's OK to attack their client's machines. That's what humans are like, mostly. So the few honest folks suffer.
Sorry 'bout dat. Really, I am. Web 2.0 sounded so cool at first. But I learned how it could be abused. And I learned to defend against the abuse.
One of my favorite examples is the ComedyCentral.com site. I've tried looking at the Daily Show online off and on. It has never worked. Recently, they apparently listened to their customers, and did a radical revision. As a result, it totally bogged my machine down, and my only recourse was to "kill -9" my browser. What had they done? Each page had around 8-10 separate flash movies. One was content, the rest were ads. My machine can't do 8-10 flash movies simultaneously. I installed flashblock in firefox and seamonkey, and verified that this was the problem. If I let just one flash movie (the content) run, it worked fine, but with flashblock disabled, everything hangs due to the competition. It's just one example of what web developers can to do a "customer".
Maybe Web 3.0 will find a way to do it so that my machine can't be attacked via my browser, and I can leave such things enabled. Maybe. I don't have great hopes, though; the marketers will find any loophole in the implementations to get at the client's cpu.
I do wish I could be more positive about all this.
Your plan involves getting on a plane, telling everyone to turn off their phones, then trusting your life to their obedience.
My plan involves making sure that the plane won't fall out of the sky and kill everyone if someone forgets they have a phone in their bag.
Still think my plan is bad?
And the current story is even worse than that. It's more like: You get on a plane, the crew tells everyone to turn off their phones, everyone on the plane pulls out their phone and does whatever it takes to turn it off. You take to the air - and some of those "off" phones start broadcasting.
This could be classified as a "UI" problem. It appears that the iPhone has a UI that lets the user turn it off, and it appears to be off. The screen goes blank, and poking around at the screen gets no response. Only the "on" button works. But the phone really isn't "off" in the usual sense. It's just sleeping, with an internal alarm set to go off and wake it up periodically.
It appears that this wasn't made at all clear to the users. This is normal for current UIs. The developers know that most of their users are dummies who will be terrified by a UI that requires any learning or understanding. So they dumb it down to the point that it's totally misleading about such important things as whether the phone is on or off. "Users don't need to understand that."
Maybe soon it'll turn into a real case where an oversimplified, misleading UI causes a bunch of deaths. So far it seems to have only produced some outrageous bills, but it's likely just a matter of time...
Third, the reality is that the cell phone WILL be in the environment. Whether by intention or by accident, the phone will be there on a fairly regular basis. Ether someone will forget the ban, forget they have the phone, or both,...
Or, as happened in this story, someone has dutifully turned their phone off, but the damned phone knows better. More and more, we have "intelligent" gadgets like this that don't do what the user thinks they're doing.
You'd think that the "off" setting would mean what almost everyone expects it to mean, but it's obvious that Apple doesn't think like this. And reading the comments here makes it clear that a lot of/. readers think it's quite proper for an "off" gadget to still broadcast a signal.
It reminds me of an article that P.J.O'Rourke wrote years ago for the National Lampoon. It was a list of ethnic groups, with a nasty, insulting characterization of each group. My favorite was Canadians, who were described as being just like white Americans, only more boring.
It can be fun to read such things, and recognize yourself in all the groups that you belong to.
I am a bit puzzled by the comment that Windows is "not a bad operating system". By all the rating criteria I know of, it's easily the worst system that I've ever used. At least on a small computer. (I'd admit that IBM's mainframe systems, which once upon a time I was sorta forced to learn, are all good competitors for the title "worst computer system ever". But those are a totally different sort of beast, and comparing them with the likes of Windows, linux, Solaris, OSX, etc. would be like comparing an auto with a railroad locomotive. Such comparisons are rather pointless.;-)
[Reagan] was one of the worst presidents we've ever had by any metric...
Yes, but he played national doddering grandfather so well; how could anyone not love him?
One of my all-time favorite cartoons was just after the 1988 election, showing a smiling Ronald Reagan walking in the door and shouting out "Nancy! I got the part!!!"
I think that and a healthy dose of the usual HR obliviousness ("10 years experience with Windows XP" anyone?) explain it pretty well.
There certainly is a lot of that. Hiring managers do tend to make guesses^Westimates of how much experience with X might be needed, and not being techies themselves, they are often not aware of minor details such as how long X might have been around. It's the old "Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity" adage.
But my talks with HR people have made it clear that it's not always ignorance or stupidity. In some (probably unknowable) fraction of the cases, the long list of impossible requirements is often done intentionally, to minimize the chances that an actually "qualified" applicant will show up.
If you want to see a blatant explanation of this, youtube has an interesting video that you might enjoy. It's a lawyer giving a talk that's essentially a HOWTO on the topic. There are also a number of followup videos that show you some of the debate.
Similarly, salaries of IT professionals world-wide are projected to stagnate or possibly fall due to the large pool of qualified applicants in the market today.
Hmmm... In my experience, the pool of "qualified applicants" has fallen to almost zero.
The explanation is well known to us software people. I remember back in the 1980s, when I ran across an ad for people with at least five years experience in a certain popular DB system. At the time, that DB system had been available from its vendor for almost 3 years.
These, a different variant of this approach is being used more and more. I've registered with a number of the well-known online job sites, and I get a dozen or so job descriptions every day. A number of my friends do this, too. It's quite rare to see a job description that any of us is qualified for. We get the descriptions because some fraction of the keywords match words in our resumes. However, each description has at least one requirement that I don't have. It seems fairly clear that for most of these, the probability is close to zero that a person exists anywhere on the planet with experience that matches every requirement. There is usually a list of other "nice to have" things, but those don't really matter if you don't have the required experiences.
We've tested a few of them that are sorta close by replying, with a more up-to-date resume, but typically there's no response at all. When we get a response, it's usually that we aren't qualified (but they'll keep our resumes in their DB in case an appropriate job comes up).
I have talked to a few HR people, to, of course, and they agree the approach is to write the job requirements to that nobody will actually be qualified. This gives them two options: One is that, if after a phone call they like you, they can say that they'll consider you although you're not qualified, but they may have trouble persuading their managers to pay you the stated rate due your lack of qualifications. So the intent is downward pressure on pay scales, because everyone is now "unqualified".
Alternatively, of course, this is done so that they can report that they couldn't find anyone in the country (the US in my case) that is qualified, so they'll just have to outsource the job. Or maybe look for a H1-B immigrant to hire as a trainee at a much lower salary. Or, of course, a student trainee or intern that can be hired for much less than even the immigrants.
Actually, I did have a 2-year job a few years ago, and interestingly it was a project for a UK firm that had outsourced the task to an American software company. But I got this job because I knew several of the people who owned the company. The team did include several H1-B people (and a couple of Canadians;-). My part of the task was a single requirement that they literally couldn't find anywhere else in the world. I was a bit puzzled by that, because it was actually just a tricky bit of programming of some abstract math and pattern matching (in C), but I didn't quibble.
Anyway, it doesn't seem like "globalization" is the whole explanation here. Rather, IT employees have learned how to classify everyone, even the most experienced, as unqualified for any current job. So you accept an entry-level wage, or you are dismissed as unqualified.
That the correlation was run at ALL implies that someone was 'looking for something'...
Well, of course is does. That's why people do correlations. It's a standard (;-) practice in scientific work, to cut down on wasted time looking at the wrong thing. Any time you find a correlation, you have good reason to suspect that there's something going on. You just don't know exactly what, and that's why the "Correlation doesn't mean causation" mantra was invented.
After publishing a significant correlation, the conventional scientific followup is "Further research is needed" to discover the reason behind that correlation (if any). But this doesn't mean that the correlation was bogus or that there was no causation. What it means is that there's a high probability that there's some connection behind the correlation, and we should investigate further to learn what the connection might be.
The recent vote in Sweden, is, of course, a good example of what's often dismissed as "anecdotal evidence". This is another thing that is frequently dismissed for political reasons, when the proper response is to note the isolated occurrence as indicating some possibility (since it did happen), and wonder whether it might be part of some pattern. At which point you start looking for existing data that you can feed to your statistical software, to narrow the search somewhat.
Or, if you have a bit of experience in the industry, you can just cynically comment that it's perfectly obvious to any idiot what's going on, and go on to the next news story.
You said (paraphrasing) "The system only works if people of good character are actively involved."
Congratulations, you've just described everything that involves people. In the entire world. In the entire history of humanity.
How true. And sometimes the best thing to do is to get the "people of good character" actively involved with the current organizations. But all too often, this turns out to be a sinkhole that just ignores those people, because the "special interests" (as we say here in the US) have control and you can't get it away from them. So then you fork the organization, and try to start up a new one that does a better job.
We even have examples like groklaw as a poster child showing what a handful of malcontents can do with a blog and a bit of time. And what is now the Internet was once a dozen or so hackers hooking up modems to phone lines at 2 or 3 universities.
This sort of thing has happened repeatedly in the past, sometimes calmly, sometimes with a lot of lives lost (as in political independence movements). I'll bet that this time, no actual lives will be lost (at least not within the standards orgs), so it's probably safe to join this one. Maybe it'll go nowhere. Maybe it'll be an effective news-gathering and technical bitching society. Maybe it'll be the next big standards organization.
So I'd suggest that any interested person here go join up, get yourself a low membership number, and check in occasionally to see what if anything is happening. Or maybe even try to start some discussions.
(Actually, my main worry about openiso.org is how many ISPs will censor a site whose name has "penis" right in the middle. This was a problem for expertsexchange.com at first, until they changed their name to "experts-exchange.com".;-)
Re:Like the famous "Gore won Florida"?
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Why Myths Persist
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I can't tell you how many people I know who believe Gore won Florida and base it on the idea that major media sources verified it. You can go show them the opposite and they don't care.
Well, I've found a fairly successful way to convince them. I just point out that Bush won the Florida vote, 5 to 4. There's a brief pause, as they figure out what I meant, and they usually admit (often with a grin) that I'm right.
After all, what votes other than those 9 actually mattered?
Since when can the State Secret privilege be used to keep secret a program that is probably illegal?
When was it ever used for anything else?
State secrets are always used to hide things from the state's own citizens. The pretense that secrets are things kept from other governments is just silly, because other governments are rarely a direct threat to any rulers (Saddam Hussein being one of the rare exceptions;-). Threats to rulers mostly come from their own citizens, so that's who must be kept in the dark about the government's shady activities.
Of course, if you watch any [HB]ollywood spy movies, you understand all of this.;-)
So, uhhhh, when will Americans start to realize that there's just a wee bit of fascism taking hold of their nation?
Hey, lots of us realized this and understood back in the 1950s, when President Eisenhower warned us about the growing power of the "military-industrial complex". And we've been pointing it out publicly ever since then, whenever there's an opportunity.
Americans don't march in a lock-step formation, however. Like the people of so many other countries, it's not really accurate to judge us all by the actions of a few. Even if those few managed to get elected to a high office. And even if around half the voters seem to agree with them.
Some of us have moved to other countries, of course, though it's sorta hard to find one that doesn't have this problem. Others have faced the fact that we might as well stick around and try to fight it. If we lose, everyone in the world loses, since we now have "one remaining super-power" and there's no longer a safe haven anywhere. So our choice isn't really to find a better place. Our choice is to fight it where we can, or ignore it and hope it'll go away.
Or maybe just mix up a batch of Margaritas, on this long weekend at the end of summer.
Slashdot Mirror
Want to tell your IP phone where the call manager is? DHCP. Want to tell your Netware clients where the nearest replica server is? DHCP. Still using WINS for some strange reason? DHCP.
So can it also tell my wife where her keys are? If so, I'll be adopting it right away.
(I've been looking for a key-chain gadget that combines GPS and wifi capabilities. I could write my own program that queries it and tells me where she left it. Then the only remaining problem would be the not-so-good accuracy, to within about 5 or 6 meters, for "civilian" GPS. That's not good enough; we need access to the under-a-meter accuracy of the military channel if we're gonna find those keys).
[i]Half[/i] the time you can't 'plop' your current GCC-compiled code onto a sun or intel compiler and have it compile without huge headaches ...
.h files that used to declare those things. Where did they move the declarations? Initial grepping through /usr/include found sheer insanity, which seems to be due to extensive use of multiply-nested #ifdefs to handle things like threading. This has the side effect of making it a challenge to find the actual declarations. But I'll find them. And my own code with be peppered with yet more #ifdefs to handle this.
Heh. Last week, I upgraded a RedHat system to the latest knoppix. It has gcc, but almost nothing in my tool library (around a thousand routines in several hundred files) compiles clean.
Mostly, it's warnings that a call of strlen() or fgets() or some other standard C routine is incompatible with the default declaration. WTF, "default declaration"? Much of the code #includes most of the common
It's an old story, of course. Any C programmer who tries to write portable code stumbles across it all the time. It's mostly annoying now because for over a decade, my linux code had almost always ported to new linux distros with very few such problems. But I suppose those days are now over. I also had a similar experience with testing on ubuntu recently, which adds evidence that portability is becoming materially more difficult.
I suspect that PCC won't be any more of a challenge than gcc and the linux libs have become. Especially since I still have #ifdefs for dealing with Solaris, and the last time I tested on Solaris (less than a year ago), everything compiled clean without problems. Going to PCC will likely produce no more hair pulling than gcc+linux does now.
And here I was thinking that all modern compilers were designed correctly with a front-end and back-end. So much for academics.
Yeah; it can be quite impressive how effectively the legal system can mess up good engineering design. Especially when combined with the tactics of the "market leader" commercial corporations.
You do realize that GCC was a duplication of effort? If it wasn't for licensing obsessives you'd still be using PCC right now.
Yeah, but back in the 80s and early 90s, there was still a lot of worry over the fact that much of unix[TM] was in fact owned by AT&T. This was a potential sword over the head of a lot of projects.
I recall back around 92, when I worked on a project at Digital, and I heard a number of the internal discussions of the fact that DEC had Sys/V running on their machines, but seemed only interested in selling BSD-derived unix systems. The general understanding seemed to be that the company lawyers were very worried that anything linked to the Sys/V system libraries could in fact be owned by AT&T. The worry was that, if Digital sold software linked to these libraries (and thus contained an AT&T copyright notice), and the software became a best seller, AT&T could come along and claim the software as theirs, and the courts would agree.
As far as I know, this didn't ever get tested in court. The effect of that was apparently to make lawyers advise that the legal status was undefined. The legal status of commercial software linked to BSD libraries was a lot clearer to the lawyers, so they advised going with BSD until someone else paid for the court battle with AT&T.
I never actually talked to any of Digital's lawyers about this, though, so it might all have been just corporate mythology. Still, as society becomes more litigious and the laws dealing with software become murkier, it's something worth thinking about. And we might note that AT&T copyrights on the original unix code have been in the courts lately; that's part of what the SCO case is all about.
or
3. they object to the restriction on their freedom?
or
4. they like competition and choice, even if the "market leader" is pretty good.
or
5. they've learned that a monoculture isn't good for the ecology (even if the "market leader" is pretty good).
Well, my immediate thought when I read "Python 3000" was that they are switching to using the release date as the version number.
My second thought was that they've realized and are being honest with us about how long it'll take to release a version that works right.
They're smart guys.
Most complaints on the GIMP relate to it not copying Adobe enough.
... I've commented a couple times on my experiences with trying to learn GIMP. I don't complain that it doesn't copy Adobe, because I haven't yet succeeded in doing anything useful with Photoshop, either. My complain might be summarized as: I read several GIMP docs, and tried the examples. All I ever managed to do was to seriously damage all the photos that I tried to modify. My main reaction was usually "WTF is it doing????" I never managed to make any controlled changes that were what I wanted. All those image operations obviously do something, but I could never quite understand what, or how to use them constructively to make the changes that I wanted.
Hmmm
My guess is that the main problem is in the documentation (for both GIMP and Photoshop). I don't yet speak the jargon, and most of the docs are effectively gibberish to me. That is, I see a lot of English words in puzzling sequences that tell me that I don't really understand how those words are being used. The docs are written to teach those who already know the jargon. I haven't yet stumbled across anything that explains the jargon to a novice like me.
So I don't advertise myself as a graphics expert. Maybe some day, when someone comes out with a good intro learning doc, I'll learn it. Until then, I'll continue to treat both of them as abstruse monsters that it's best to avoid.
... US soldiers get to see how effective terrorist tactics are against an better trained and equipped force, and bring that knowledge and experience back home ...
... The same lesson seems to have been "learned" by US soldiers back in the 1960s and 70s. But there's little evidence that the general population or the political system has incorporated any of the lessons. The current US government certainly didn't learn anything from Vietnam; few if any of them were over there, and they seem to be actively inviting the same sort of fiasco. A current joke: "How is Iraq different from Vietnam? George Bush has been to Iraq."
...
Hmmm
It's also quite clear that the current crop of US soldiers have never been taught anything about the Vietnam War. It's a topic that's rarely if ever mentioned in the history classes in the US school system, for which history seems to have stopped 50 or 60 years ago. What little is known by the current crop of military recruits was mostly learned from Hollywood movies. See "Rambo" for details.
It's true that military historians have studied guerilla warfare in great detail. But there seems to be little evidence that our leaders have ever looked at such studies. To see a detailed example of this, google for "Battle of Algiers". This is a thoroughly documented topic. George Bush and his crowd claim to have read the famous book about it. But looking at their actions, you'd conclude that most have only seen the movie, if that. They certainly didn't learn any of the lessons, because they're making the same mistakes that the historians describe the French government making back in the 1950s, with the same results.
History definitely does seem to be repeating itself. And it doesn't even rhyme
Try 600,000 [US Arabic speakers], by the last census.
Such numbers are notoriously variable, as they depend on your definition. Here's an interesting article on the general topic. They mention that different studies differ by around a factor of two for the number of "speakers" of English, Spanish and Hindi. I've read a number of similar discussions that mention such problems as whether children are counted (probably not if you're counting voters or looking to hire translators) or whether there's any sort of social or political stigma to knowledge of a language (as often happens with minority languages).
But your other points are quite relevant. Translation is a difficult job at best, and doesn't usually pay what it's worth. When you add in social stigmas and official repression, it's not at all surprising that government agencies might have problems hiring translators for an "enemy" language. Even when there are people capable of doing the job (perhaps with a bit of training), they often have good reasons to not want to get involved.
I propose to suspend Godwin's law for this article, ...
;-)
Heh; good suggestion.
In high school, I took a couple years of German from a teacher who was born here in the US, of German immigrant parents. She taught us a lot of German proverbs, and one of the first (also the title of a well-known folk song) was "die Gedanken sind frei", or "[my/our] Thoughts are Free". Her point was that the sort of repression recently imposed by the Nazis wasn't at all an aberration in German-speaking society; it was really just an extreme case of something with a long history in that society and many others. The proverb (and song) long predate the Nazis, and make the point that the authorities may be able to punish you for what you do or say, but they can't control your thoughts. She commented that she had often heard older Germans (in Germany and the US) muttering this phrase or quietly humming the final line of the song when some political big-wig said or did something that threatened citizens freedoms. She made it clear that this was often as appropriate in the US as in other countries.
It was sorta fun being taught such quiet resistance in German. Some of us did understand that, contrary to all the propaganda telling us how free we were, her job could well be in danger if certain people in the local government understood what she was teaching her students.
(Another lesson explained why that "die" in the proverb isn't best translated literally to English as "the", and why a pronoun is a better translation in such cases. It's a subtlety that the above wikipedia page gets wrong. It's sorta like why, when Kennedy declared "Ich bin ein Berliner", he was actually telling the audience that he was a jelly-filled doughnut.
We can now easily predict that the German government will soon find it difficult to hire people with an admitted knowledge of computer security topics. If you were German, would you admit to such knowledge to an official questioner?
;-)
Sorta like how the US government has been complaining about the difficulty of hiring Arabic translators, despite the statistics from a few years back saying that there were several million US residence who were fluent in Arabic. (And, contrary to the jokes going around, they aren't all gay.
It's commonly known as "shooting yourself in the foot".
Got it. Had it for a couple years, actually.
Allows you to turn scripting off (including most flash) on a per-domain basis.
That doesn't do you much good if the ads and the content are both video from the same domain. In my example of the Daily Show, the ads and content are all video from the comedycentral.com domain, and the pages make heavy use of scripts. So you must allow scripts to see the content, and that turns on the ads, too.
Funny thing about their site is that the usual failure mode has ads running but not the content videos. You'd think if they could make one work, they could make them all work. Dunno how they messed up so badly.
But most of their good stuff is mirrored on various (mostly political) blogs, so it's not hard to find. And the bloggers usually have the sense to not let their ads get in the way of people seeing their content. In fact, they usually link to ads on ad sites, so you can block them by domain. And few blogs make significant use of scripts, for obvious reasons, so noscript mostly just blocks ads.
Technologies like Flash and AJAX and all the other technologies surrounding and supporting them can add a great deal of value to a website, but only if done correctly.
True, perhaps. But if I enable them, I find that the Web is full of sites that abuse them and attempt to take over my cpu. As a "client", I can't know beforehand what a site may attempt to do to my machine. So my only sensible approach is to use a browser (browsers, actually) that let me disable such horrors.
I'm sorry for the very few sites that use such tools appropriately. But the fact is that the Web has been colonized by arrogant folks who think that it's OK to attack their client's machines. That's what humans are like, mostly. So the few honest folks suffer.
Sorry 'bout dat. Really, I am. Web 2.0 sounded so cool at first. But I learned how it could be abused. And I learned to defend against the abuse.
One of my favorite examples is the ComedyCentral.com site. I've tried looking at the Daily Show online off and on. It has never worked. Recently, they apparently listened to their customers, and did a radical revision. As a result, it totally bogged my machine down, and my only recourse was to "kill -9" my browser. What had they done? Each page had around 8-10 separate flash movies. One was content, the rest were ads. My machine can't do 8-10 flash movies simultaneously. I installed flashblock in firefox and seamonkey, and verified that this was the problem. If I let just one flash movie (the content) run, it worked fine, but with flashblock disabled, everything hangs due to the competition. It's just one example of what web developers can to do a "customer".
Maybe Web 3.0 will find a way to do it so that my machine can't be attacked via my browser, and I can leave such things enabled. Maybe. I don't have great hopes, though; the marketers will find any loophole in the implementations to get at the client's cpu.
I do wish I could be more positive about all this.
Your plan involves getting on a plane, telling everyone to turn off their phones, then trusting your life to their obedience.
...
My plan involves making sure that the plane won't fall out of the sky and kill everyone if someone forgets they have a phone in their bag.
Still think my plan is bad?
And the current story is even worse than that. It's more like: You get on a plane, the crew tells everyone to turn off their phones, everyone on the plane pulls out their phone and does whatever it takes to turn it off. You take to the air - and some of those "off" phones start broadcasting.
This could be classified as a "UI" problem. It appears that the iPhone has a UI that lets the user turn it off, and it appears to be off. The screen goes blank, and poking around at the screen gets no response. Only the "on" button works. But the phone really isn't "off" in the usual sense. It's just sleeping, with an internal alarm set to go off and wake it up periodically.
It appears that this wasn't made at all clear to the users. This is normal for current UIs. The developers know that most of their users are dummies who will be terrified by a UI that requires any learning or understanding. So they dumb it down to the point that it's totally misleading about such important things as whether the phone is on or off. "Users don't need to understand that."
Maybe soon it'll turn into a real case where an oversimplified, misleading UI causes a bunch of deaths. So far it seems to have only produced some outrageous bills, but it's likely just a matter of time
Third, the reality is that the cell phone WILL be in the environment. Whether by intention or by accident, the phone will be there on a fairly regular basis. Ether someone will forget the ban, forget they have the phone, or both, ...
/. readers think it's quite proper for an "off" gadget to still broadcast a signal.
Or, as happened in this story, someone has dutifully turned their phone off, but the damned phone knows better. More and more, we have "intelligent" gadgets like this that don't do what the user thinks they're doing.
You'd think that the "off" setting would mean what almost everyone expects it to mean, but it's obvious that Apple doesn't think like this. And reading the comments here makes it clear that a lot of
It reminds me of an article that P.J.O'Rourke wrote years ago for the National Lampoon. It was a list of ethnic groups, with a nasty, insulting characterization of each group. My favorite was Canadians, who were described as being just like white Americans, only more boring.
;-)
It can be fun to read such things, and recognize yourself in all the groups that you belong to.
I am a bit puzzled by the comment that Windows is "not a bad operating system". By all the rating criteria I know of, it's easily the worst system that I've ever used. At least on a small computer. (I'd admit that IBM's mainframe systems, which once upon a time I was sorta forced to learn, are all good competitors for the title "worst computer system ever". But those are a totally different sort of beast, and comparing them with the likes of Windows, linux, Solaris, OSX, etc. would be like comparing an auto with a railroad locomotive. Such comparisons are rather pointless.
[Reagan] was one of the worst presidents we've ever had by any metric ...
Yes, but he played national doddering grandfather so well; how could anyone not love him?
One of my all-time favorite cartoons was just after the 1988 election, showing a smiling Ronald Reagan walking in the door and shouting out "Nancy! I got the part!!!"
I think that and a healthy dose of the usual HR obliviousness ("10 years experience with Windows XP" anyone?) explain it pretty well.
There certainly is a lot of that. Hiring managers do tend to make guesses^Westimates of how much experience with X might be needed, and not being techies themselves, they are often not aware of minor details such as how long X might have been around. It's the old "Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity" adage.
But my talks with HR people have made it clear that it's not always ignorance or stupidity. In some (probably unknowable) fraction of the cases, the long list of impossible requirements is often done intentionally, to minimize the chances that an actually "qualified" applicant will show up.
If you want to see a blatant explanation of this, youtube has an interesting video that you might enjoy. It's a lawyer giving a talk that's essentially a HOWTO on the topic. There are also a number of followup videos that show you some of the debate.
Similarly, salaries of IT professionals world-wide are projected to stagnate or possibly fall due to the large pool of qualified applicants in the market today.
... In my experience, the pool of "qualified applicants" has fallen to almost zero.
;-). My part of the task was a single requirement that they literally couldn't find anywhere else in the world. I was a bit puzzled by that, because it was actually just a tricky bit of programming of some abstract math and pattern matching (in C), but I didn't quibble.
Hmmm
The explanation is well known to us software people. I remember back in the 1980s, when I ran across an ad for people with at least five years experience in a certain popular DB system. At the time, that DB system had been available from its vendor for almost 3 years.
These, a different variant of this approach is being used more and more. I've registered with a number of the well-known online job sites, and I get a dozen or so job descriptions every day. A number of my friends do this, too. It's quite rare to see a job description that any of us is qualified for. We get the descriptions because some fraction of the keywords match words in our resumes. However, each description has at least one requirement that I don't have. It seems fairly clear that for most of these, the probability is close to zero that a person exists anywhere on the planet with experience that matches every requirement. There is usually a list of other "nice to have" things, but those don't really matter if you don't have the required experiences.
We've tested a few of them that are sorta close by replying, with a more up-to-date resume, but typically there's no response at all. When we get a response, it's usually that we aren't qualified (but they'll keep our resumes in their DB in case an appropriate job comes up).
I have talked to a few HR people, to, of course, and they agree the approach is to write the job requirements to that nobody will actually be qualified. This gives them two options: One is that, if after a phone call they like you, they can say that they'll consider you although you're not qualified, but they may have trouble persuading their managers to pay you the stated rate due your lack of qualifications. So the intent is downward pressure on pay scales, because everyone is now "unqualified".
Alternatively, of course, this is done so that they can report that they couldn't find anyone in the country (the US in my case) that is qualified, so they'll just have to outsource the job. Or maybe look for a H1-B immigrant to hire as a trainee at a much lower salary. Or, of course, a student trainee or intern that can be hired for much less than even the immigrants.
Actually, I did have a 2-year job a few years ago, and interestingly it was a project for a UK firm that had outsourced the task to an American software company. But I got this job because I knew several of the people who owned the company. The team did include several H1-B people (and a couple of Canadians
Anyway, it doesn't seem like "globalization" is the whole explanation here. Rather, IT employees have learned how to classify everyone, even the most experienced, as unqualified for any current job. So you accept an entry-level wage, or you are dismissed as unqualified.
That the correlation was run at ALL implies that someone was 'looking for something' ...
Well, of course is does. That's why people do correlations. It's a standard (;-) practice in scientific work, to cut down on wasted time looking at the wrong thing. Any time you find a correlation, you have good reason to suspect that there's something going on. You just don't know exactly what, and that's why the "Correlation doesn't mean causation" mantra was invented.
After publishing a significant correlation, the conventional scientific followup is "Further research is needed" to discover the reason behind that correlation (if any). But this doesn't mean that the correlation was bogus or that there was no causation. What it means is that there's a high probability that there's some connection behind the correlation, and we should investigate further to learn what the connection might be.
The recent vote in Sweden, is, of course, a good example of what's often dismissed as "anecdotal evidence". This is another thing that is frequently dismissed for political reasons, when the proper response is to note the isolated occurrence as indicating some possibility (since it did happen), and wonder whether it might be part of some pattern. At which point you start looking for existing data that you can feed to your statistical software, to narrow the search somewhat.
Or, if you have a bit of experience in the industry, you can just cynically comment that it's perfectly obvious to any idiot what's going on, and go on to the next news story.
You said (paraphrasing) "The system only works if people of good character are actively involved."
;-)
Congratulations, you've just described everything that involves people. In the entire world. In the entire history of humanity.
How true. And sometimes the best thing to do is to get the "people of good character" actively involved with the current organizations. But all too often, this turns out to be a sinkhole that just ignores those people, because the "special interests" (as we say here in the US) have control and you can't get it away from them. So then you fork the organization, and try to start up a new one that does a better job.
We even have examples like groklaw as a poster child showing what a handful of malcontents can do with a blog and a bit of time. And what is now the Internet was once a dozen or so hackers hooking up modems to phone lines at 2 or 3 universities.
This sort of thing has happened repeatedly in the past, sometimes calmly, sometimes with a lot of lives lost (as in political independence movements). I'll bet that this time, no actual lives will be lost (at least not within the standards orgs), so it's probably safe to join this one. Maybe it'll go nowhere. Maybe it'll be an effective news-gathering and technical bitching society. Maybe it'll be the next big standards organization.
So I'd suggest that any interested person here go join up, get yourself a low membership number, and check in occasionally to see what if anything is happening. Or maybe even try to start some discussions.
(Actually, my main worry about openiso.org is how many ISPs will censor a site whose name has "penis" right in the middle. This was a problem for expertsexchange.com at first, until they changed their name to "experts-exchange.com".
I can't tell you how many people I know who believe Gore won Florida and base it on the idea that major media sources verified it. You can go show them the opposite and they don't care.
Well, I've found a fairly successful way to convince them. I just point out that Bush won the Florida vote, 5 to 4. There's a brief pause, as they figure out what I meant, and they usually admit (often with a grin) that I'm right.
After all, what votes other than those 9 actually mattered?
The War on Terrorism is even more nebulous than the War on Drugs, the War on Poverty, or any of the other Wars the US is fighting.
...
The War on Poverty did end pretty quickly, when lots of America's poor started asking publicly where they should go to surrender.
Too bad we can't use this logic for the War on Terror.
What we need is a War on Bad Metaphors
Since when can the State Secret privilege be used to keep secret a program that is probably illegal?
;-). Threats to rulers mostly come from their own citizens, so that's who must be kept in the dark about the government's shady activities.
;-)
When was it ever used for anything else?
State secrets are always used to hide things from the state's own citizens. The pretense that secrets are things kept from other governments is just silly, because other governments are rarely a direct threat to any rulers (Saddam Hussein being one of the rare exceptions
Of course, if you watch any [HB]ollywood spy movies, you understand all of this.
So, uhhhh, when will Americans start to realize that there's just a wee bit of fascism taking hold of their nation?
Hey, lots of us realized this and understood back in the 1950s, when President Eisenhower warned us about the growing power of the "military-industrial complex". And we've been pointing it out publicly ever since then, whenever there's an opportunity.
Americans don't march in a lock-step formation, however. Like the people of so many other countries, it's not really accurate to judge us all by the actions of a few. Even if those few managed to get elected to a high office. And even if around half the voters seem to agree with them.
Some of us have moved to other countries, of course, though it's sorta hard to find one that doesn't have this problem. Others have faced the fact that we might as well stick around and try to fight it. If we lose, everyone in the world loses, since we now have "one remaining super-power" and there's no longer a safe haven anywhere. So our choice isn't really to find a better place. Our choice is to fight it where we can, or ignore it and hope it'll go away.
Or maybe just mix up a batch of Margaritas, on this long weekend at the end of summer.