Uh, yeah. India is run by a regressive ideology that restricts access to computers and the Internet in order to suppress feminism.
Back in the 1970s, I read about an interesting social experiment that was done in India. The experimenters picked a number of villages at random, and made arrangements to supply the local clinic with various kinds of birth-control methods at a reasonable price. Then they started watching the vital statistics.
A year or so later, they reported that 9 months after the experiment started, the birth rate dropped to nearly zero in all of the villages.
An interesting followup they reported was that they were curious about the well-known attitude in India that it was good to have many children. When they asked the women in these villages, they found that the actually attitude was subtly different: Most said that it was good for other people to have many children.
I've read a number of other observations that birth control is easily available in a lot of India, but totally unavailable in other parts. The availability is strongly correlated with the political power of the local religious leaders, as it is in much of the rest of the world.
I wonder if that birth-control study's report is still available somewhere? There was a followup report from people in India that they couldn't find it in any of their academic libraries.
Like it or lump it, these people aren't being mugged of their rights, they have to willingly sign them away.
Yeah, they should all be like me. I've never signed one of those recording-company predatory contracts. Who am I? You've probably never heard of me or any of the groups that I'm in, though I've actually been on a number of music albums.
Actually, last week I was playing at a gig, and a fellow came up and told us that he'd just ordered the group's CD online. He'd listened to it on my web site (no clips; just MP3s of all the tracks). Then he decided that he wanted a copy. We told him (with a grin) that he should have waited and bought it from us directly, so he wouldn't have to pay shipping. He shrugged and said that he hadn't known we'd be playing there so soon.
If they don't understand what they're signing, they should get a lawyer.
Yeah, right; your typical starving artist can afford maybe 5-10 minutes of the typical contract-lawyer's time.
These days, any aspiring artist should just stay the hell away from anything that requires signing any contract or dealing with any lawyer. Just put your stuff online, and make a name for yourself. When people start asking you about your CD, you start making one. But if you deal with the companies or the lawyers, they'll own you and everything you create. (And probably your firstborn child and anything s/he creates.)
And pay attention to the "net neutrality" issue. If it goes the wrong way, the telecomm companies will own everything you create. And read your ISP's contract carefully; there's a good chance that they own anything you put on one of their machines. (My web site is on my own machine, and my ISP is speakeasy, who doesn't block ports 25 or 80.)
Silver bullets were presumed to be much more precise in firing than normal lead bullets...
I remember seeing the explanation of this in an old Lone Ranger movie: Because a silver bullet is so expensive, you don't fire them off in volleys like people do with lead bullets. You take careful aim before you pull the trigger.
Unfortunately, the usual management approach with silver software bullets is to supply them to the entire staff, and demand that they be fired at every target at every opportunity.
There's a serious danger of metaphor overload here. But sometimes it help if you have some idea why the metaphor arose.
Yeah, or maybe there's be a concensus that "We really don't know.";-)
I've long thought it would be fun (if ultimately meaningless) to learn that, as a person with mostly European ancestry, I might be part Neandertal. It'd be even more fun to verify that they were among my personal ancestors. Then when someone called me a Neandert[h]al, I could say "How'd you know?" with an evil grin. But I'm not very hopeful that I'll ever know for sure.
One thing that stands out is that those are all methods that involve studying and comparing populations. What's the likelyhood that we'll ever have a single population of closely-related Neandertals with well-preserved DNA?
If we were talking about the possibility that modern Europeans are, say, 30% Neandertal and 70% Cro Magnon, we might be able to do some sort of general population study. But that's not the situation. Nobody thinks the Neandertals could have contributed even 1% of modern European genes. The question isn't how much they contributed, but whether they contributed any genes at all. So good evidence that a single gene is of Neandertal origin would pretty much settle the question. But it doesn't seem likely that this can ever be done with the fragmentary evidence that's available. And a negative proof would seem to require determining with certainty the actual origin of every allele of every gene in the modern population, something which is also rather unlikely.
If I had to make a bet, I'd bet that the Neandertal question will remain a boundary case, with not enough evidence to convince the "reasonable doubters" on either side.
Of course, we might some day find a grave full of Neandertals that, like the famous mammoths, have been deep-frozen for 40,000 years and contain intact cells with good DNA. (But we'd better find them fast, before the permafrost all melts.;-)
Now, nobody really knows much at this point. But something that I found interesting was that, via John Hawks, "Neandertals will be within the human range of variation for most genes."
Something I've never heard explained: How exactly can we determine the specific origin of an allele of a gene?
Suppose there were a particular allele that arose as a mutation in one particular Neandertal, and it was sufficiently beneficial that it spread to the entire human species. How would we determine this? How would we show that it arose, say, in Europe 150,000 years ago, versus in Asia 180,000 years ago or in Africa 140,000 years ago? Or would we just list it as a "human" allele and assume that its origin was in Africa?
Even if an allele is found only in modern Europeans, and is also found in a Neandertal sample, how would we know where it originated? It could have been a mutation that happened 40,000 years ago in Europe, but how do we know which population produced it?
There seems to be a lot of hand waving here, but it's hard to find any actual information on how we can determine the origin of a specific allele. Given the incomplete, damaged nature of fossil DNA, it doesn't seem likely that claims about specific origins can ever be really convincing to anyone with a properly skeptical scientific attitude.
We are leaving our prints everywhere so the chance of someone lifting them and copying them is real.
These days, we also have to worry about someone lifting and copyrighting our prints. And then suing us for infringement when we lift a glass of something.
And if we leave some hair or skin cells behind, we'll find that out DNA is patented and we're hauled into court for yet another violation.
One of the big reasons for google's success is that it doesn't give you a "rich user experience". The main web page is utterly plain and simple. You type in a word or phrase. You get back a page with a lot more text, but its layout is again simple and obvious. Granted, you can click the "advanced search" and see something more complicated. But they've carefully hidden the "rich user interface" behind something that's simple and obvious.
Google's ads are an example of the same. No "rich" ads; just small, unobtrusive chunks of text. Nothing distracting and annoying, so people don't look for ways to turn them off.
I like wikipedia for the same reason. No flash or pizzazz; just simple, plain, easy to use, and informative.
When I see something touted with a phrase like "rich user experience", my natural reaction (after more than a decade of web use) is to shudder and go on to something that's more likely to be useful and informative.
[I]t's the graphic artists who have messed everything up. People who are insistant about they want this font here and that font there and this needs to be 2 pixels to the left but that needs to be mint yellow...
Dvorak seems to be firmly in the camp of that kind of graphic "artist". His basic complaint is that when he looks at his pages from different browsers, "The real problem is that no two browsers--let alone no two versions of any one browser--interpret CSS the same way!"
He seems to fail (or refuse) to understand that this is inherent in the job. Thus, I looked at his article on a Mac Powerbook with a 1440-pixel-wide screen, and found that he forces the width to (approx) 800 pixels. So I tried to read it on my Blackberry (240x160) and my wife's Treo (240x320). Each of them tried to do something useful with his reader-hostile width setting, and of course they come out looking different that he wants. But he doesn't understand that I can't add pixels to either of these PDAs. Or maybe he thinks that people like us shouldn't be allowed to read his stuff on our personal electronic toys.
He does make it clear that he thinks that CSS should make things look the same everywhere. This is clearly a physical impossibility. At least it's clear to me, and probably to anyone with the slightest bit of user friendliness.
I'd say let him complain. And when we find software that interprets his idiotic CSS so that we can read his stuff, we should send nice, supportive messages to the softwares' authors, so they understand that we're on their side.
Actually, that Treo tries to render his pages as 800 pixels wide, so you have to scroll left and right to read it. I think I'll send a nastygram to the culprits who foisted that software on us.;-)
And it would be nice if browsers generally gave us a way to override things like width= attributes, so things work right in the current window. Just because I have a larger screen (1600x1200 on my linux workstation) doesn't necessarily mean that I want to dedicate the full screen to one web page. I'd much rather that a browser allow me to size its window, and then do the best to make web pages work in that window despite the attempts by people like Dvorak to make it difficult. I wonder which browsers actually give us that ability?
In my case, I'm the finder. And the usual search algorithm is exhaustive search.
I'm waiting for google to come up with a solution to this one. Maybe putting an RFID chip into everything would help. I have wondered occasionally what sort of "consumer" RFID readers might be coming available. And can I use any with a linux or OSX laptop? Or with a PalmOS or RIM gadget, for that matter.
Another way to get nerdy on this topic is to note that "rice grain" and "tomato seed" are both dubious because of the wide variation in the sizes of such seeds.
Much better would be the "barley seed", which was used as a unit of measurement in medieval Europe. The reason was that over a wide range of growing conditions, barley produced seeds that were very close to the same size. In fact, one of the historic definitions of "inch" was eight barley seeds. For most purposes back then, this was good enough, and the standard of length was easily available nearly anywhere.
Of course, another criticism is that we really want to know the volume of this new memory chip. Or even better, a precise description of its shape. A rice grain and a tomato seed may be close to the same size, but their shapes are radically different. I'd guess that the tomato seed is closer to the actual shape of this chip, but the chip is likely to be closer to square than your typical tomato seed. TFA doesn't seem to lead to a clear picture of the chip itself; it's not clear whether that thing in the middle of the pencils is just the chip or the chip plus some extra stuff for connectivity, insulation, etc.
one would assume 'carefull' means researching what you are doing,...
One might assume that, but one would often be wrong.
I've found that, when a management type asks why something is taking so long, "We're trying to be very careful" is invariably accepted as an explanation. This implies that "careful" indeed implies time to at least a good many people.
Problems with computer security are almost always due to users' (and admins') lack of knowledge of potential problems. The only real solution to such problems is research and study of what is known of the problem.
Unfortunatelly, there are a lot of roadblocks to achieving true enlightenment. And most of the roadblocks are intentionally placed there by those with knowledge. You can see this by reading just about any discussion of how to deal with new security exploits. Inevitably, a good part of the discussion is over how much information should be released to the general public. And the people who have the information usually argue "If I released my information, all the evil hackers in the world would use it."
So they keep the information secret, and they do so intentionally. The main effect of this on you and me is that our own research is stymied. We can't determine whether our computers are susceptible, or if they are, what we should be doing to block exploits.
Very often we hear the advice to "Be careful" but we don't find the information that we need to do anything carefully. Such advice is a form of blaming the victim: "I told you to be careful, but your machine was infected. You dummy; you should have been more careful. It's not my fault, because I warned you."
But warning people of a vague, unspecified problem without including information on what to look out for isn't usually very helpful at all. Your response to "Be careful" should be something like "You turkey; at least give me a clue as to what I should be looking out for."
When someone tells you "Be careful", you should listen carefully to see what useful information they include. If there's none, they you should understand that their warning was merely at attempt to shift the blame to you.
This phrase is a common tipoff to one of the main problems.
The computer doesn't give a damn how careful you are. If you spend hours carefully crafting a chunk of code that, through your ignorance, has a big security hole, all your care hasn't helped a bit. You have merely produced bad code.
OTOH, someone with good knowledge of the subject might toss off a 30-second routine that, due to their understanding, is highly secure.
Carefulness has little to do with doing a good job. Carefully doing it wrong is merely doing it wrong, no matter how careful you are. And doing it right is doing it right, even if you hardly gave it a thought.
What we need here isn't useless exhortations to "be careful". What we need is education about how code gets into trouble, and training in writing code that doesn't have problems.
Yeah, I routinely write code that checks input. But if there's some hidden gotcha that I don't know about (typically in some library routine that's not visible to me), I'm quite aware that my careful checking might do little good.
Windows is lacking many significant features and qualities required of an enterprise operating system. In practice, it is deployed, but in comparison to other operating systems, I believe it is difficult to deploy and maintain on a large scale. Even on a small scale, it is not easy to protect.
This reminds me of an attempt at satire that I read a few years ago (maybe here). Someone remarked that if you were in the business of doing computer support work for small businesses, you'd be a fool to sell them any sort of unix-based system, especially linux or OSX. You'd send one person in for half a day to install it and teach people to use it. Then you wouldn't hear from them again until they needed an upgrade. But if you sell them a Microsoft-based system, not only can you bill for a week of several people's time for the install and teaching; they'll be calling you back to fix problems several times a week. Once a small business has 20 or 30 employees, they'll have one of your people on location full time to keep the computers running. If your income is from billable time, it's obvious which you should be pushing on any customers gullible enough to listen to your advice.
When I read this, I thought of a number of acquaintances who are in the business of small-business computer support. So I sent them copies. They all replied in the same way: This is satire? That's exactly how it works. I'd be a fool to recommend something like linux or a Mac. Yeah, contrary to what everyone thinks they know, you can get quite good business software for linux or OSX (or Solaris or HP-UX or...). Of course it's slightly different from the MS software; it has to be because it's better. (If it worked the same way as MS's stuff, it would be just as difficult to use. Duh.;-) But mostly, I'd be an utter fool to advise a system that won't give me the maximum billable hours. And yes, my customers do mostly fall for this. Why would I disillusion them?
My conclusion from all this was that life can be very difficult for satirists. But then, I've heard this from satirists. They're constantly complaining about how difficult it is to satirize people who respond by doing something even more outrageous than anything that a sensible satirist would ever dare publish.
In particular, writers trying to satirize the computer industry complain that computer people so often take their satire and use it as specs.
[H]undreds of millions of corporate workstations running Windows without problems and hundreds of millions of users refute your insane claims.
Hmmm... Where do you work that you see this? In my capacity of software developer, I've spent a fair amount of time around various kinds of users in various kinds of corporate environments. Almost always, what I see looking over people's shoulders is a lot of stumbling around trying to get things to work right, mixed with a lot of grumbling about how much they hate "the computer".
If they are among the minority who use a non-MS computer at home, they aren't quite as general in their condemnation of "computers". Those users will tell you how much they hate Microsoft crap, and really wish their employers would allow them to use a decent computer. This happens no matter what their other computer is, which leads one to make an obvious inference: MS Windows is a major source of problems for most users, and they don't tell you how well it runs. Rather, they complain constantly about the crappy computer they have to work with.
Maybe some day I'll run across a place like you describe, where there are no problems with Windows and the users love it. Maybe such places exist. But I haven't seen one yet.
It is a bit disappointing that most of them just attribute the problem to "computers", and have no curiosity about what non-MS computers might be like. But then, if you follow media coverage of computer issues, you see the same thing. Every time there's a new piece of malware making its rounds, listen to the reporters' wording. They usually describe it as causing problems for "computers", and you hardly ever hear the brand name of the susceptible computers. To reporters, as with corporate workers, there is no difference between one computer and the next, and they're all full of problems. (Except for the occasional reporter who identifies with the "literary" crowd and uses a Mac.;-)
On OS X, you have the option of creating a "Master Password" that has the ability to unlock any encrypted home directories.
Interesting. So if I download a new encryption package, or implement my own, and encrypt my stuff with it, OSX can use this Master Password to crack the new encryption scheme and decrypt my stuff.
I wonder if the NSA knows about this OSX feature. Or did they maybe help Apple develop it?
In any case, a decryption routine that can decrypt anything, including a new encryption scheme that nobody at Apple had ever heard about (because it didn't exist until today) is certainly an interesting technical development. I wonder where I can read about its algorithm...
My wife likes to tell people that her first job title was "computer". That was back around 1970, when she got a job at a New York state surveyor's office. Her job was to do calculations required in surveying. She used several gadgets to assist in most of the calculations, of course, and those gadgets were called "calculators". Then for inexplicable reasons her job title got applied to some of the fancier calculators, so they had to change the job title to avoid the obvious confusion.
The defiition of "computer" is a bit odd. Technically it's defined as a device that stores its software in the same memory as its data. The definition doesn't actually require that it "compute" anything, though of course if it doesn't, its software is a bit pointless. But this sort of definition came about because the first programmable computing devices used different kinds of hardware to store data and programs. The idea of storing programs in writable memory was a major technical advance back in the 1940s, making it possible to write programs that manipulated other programs. This turned out to be such an important innovation that the resulting "stored-program calculators" were treated as an entirely new kind of beast, sufficiently different that a new name was needed for them.
There was a book on the topic published recently, called "When Computers Were Women".
[I]t is also confusing that they use "binary search" to mean "searching inside binary files", and not binary search in its usual sense.
Come now, my good fellow; surely you don't expect computer people to start to honor precedence in their terminology. Why, that would be, uh, I think the word is "unprecedented".
We computer geeks have a long tradition of taking someone else's terminology and recycling it with meanings at odds with the earlier use. And in this case, the writer(s) probably thought they were inventing a new phrase. Chances are that they've never heard of binary trees, much less anything to do with using them for sorting and searching.
Most people who develop software also have to maintain it,...
What???? This may be true with open-source software, but I've yet to see a company that did things this way. The norm is that developers, testers, maintainers and users are four separate groups that are kept as far apart as management can manage.
This does go a long way toward explaining why there's so much crappy software Out There.
No flame intended, but that's one thing that confounds me - the USA, of all nations, seem to rely on ActiveX-based online banking.
Over the last couple years, the three banks that my wife and I deal with have all changed their online stuff to work with OSX and linux (or, more likely, with standards-compliant browsers like firefox, opera, safari, etc.). I know a number of people who do computing work for local banks, and they all tell similar stories about how this happened.
At first, the bank's management took the expected approach: Only Microsoft is significant, and we don't have to deal with any other kind of computers, because only a few hobbyists and hackers use them. But after bring up their MS-only online systems, they found that a lot of customers quietly resisted switching. The interesting thing was that this included most of the bank's computer experts. This got the managers' attention, of course, and they asked questions.
Their own computer guys' reply was generally of the form "There's no way I'll ever trust my personal bank-account information to any spyware-laden Microsoft systems." They'd also comment on how it's not just viruses and worms and such; MS software itself is well known for "calling home" and sending assorted information about what's on your computer. The software's innards are secret so you can't know what it's doing, and some of this data is encoded or encrypted so you can't tell what it is. You might use such systems at work, but only a fool would use such a system for their personal banking information. When the managers said that they used the online banking from their home Windows box, the IT guys would repeat "Only a fool...."
The message got through. The management realized that they were maybe getting the computer-ignorant customers to use their online banking system, but nobody with any knowledge of computers was willing to risk it until it was made secure. Not even the fellows who implemented the bank's web site would trust it. Solving this required making it work with non-MS software. So eventually management gave in, and ordered changes to make it all work with non-MS software.
Actually, I was one of the first to use our accounts from our OSX and linux boxes. Since I do lots of web testing, I've installed nearly every browser I can on my machines. Some of them (especially opera) could pretend to be IE on Windows, and I found that the online banking stuff worked ok with AgentID spoofing. It wasn't that the banks' sites didn't work with non-MS software; it was just that their code checked the AgentID string and refused to deal with non-MS software. So I went ahead and learned to use their online stuff. It wasn't very good at first, but they're getting much better now.
And these days, I can go in from firefox or safari or opera without spoofing, and they don't kick me off. This may not be true of all US banks, but it's true of the three in the Boston area where I have accounts. They seem to do everything via https:/// links now, so I'm more likely to trust that the intermediate sites (Verizon;-) aren't nabbing my account numbers and passwords. And, of course, I have the sense to never click on a link that purports to point to a bank. I'm not yet convinced that any browser will correctly warn me of fake URLs.
The US armed forces have enough spending power to convince even Microsoft to pony up the source code. And they do.
I wonder how often they actually recompile the code and verify that it's byte-for-byte identical to the binaries that Microsoft sent them.
This is, of course, usually straightforward with any unix-based software, where often all you need to do is cd to the right directory and type "make", then run diff on the output and the delivered binary. I know from experience that it's usually not straightforward with MS software, where each build is usually a set of idiosyncratic scripts that are hard for a newbie to get right the first (or Nth) time.
Of course, there are a few linux apps whose installs aren't exactly exemplars of transparency. (I've been trying to get php+mysql+apache installed on a linux, OSX and Windows system lately, and I haven't succeeded with any of them;-)
Slashdot Mirror
... to the Brave New World.
Uh, yeah. India is run by a regressive ideology that restricts access to computers and the Internet in order to suppress feminism.
Back in the 1970s, I read about an interesting social experiment that was done in India. The experimenters picked a number of villages at random, and made arrangements to supply the local clinic with various kinds of birth-control methods at a reasonable price. Then they started watching the vital statistics.
A year or so later, they reported that 9 months after the experiment started, the birth rate dropped to nearly zero in all of the villages.
An interesting followup they reported was that they were curious about the well-known attitude in India that it was good to have many children. When they asked the women in these villages, they found that the actually attitude was subtly different: Most said that it was good for other people to have many children.
I've read a number of other observations that birth control is easily available in a lot of India, but totally unavailable in other parts. The availability is strongly correlated with the political power of the local religious leaders, as it is in much of the rest of the world.
I wonder if that birth-control study's report is still available somewhere? There was a followup report from people in India that they couldn't find it in any of their academic libraries.
How is the situation today arguably different than when they were being busted for the payola scandals a few decades ago?
Easy one. Today, payola is legal.
Like it or lump it, these people aren't being mugged of their rights, they have to willingly sign them away.
Yeah, they should all be like me. I've never signed one of those recording-company predatory contracts. Who am I? You've probably never heard of me or any of the groups that I'm in, though I've actually been on a number of music albums.
Actually, last week I was playing at a gig, and a fellow came up and told us that he'd just ordered the group's CD online. He'd listened to it on my web site (no clips; just MP3s of all the tracks). Then he decided that he wanted a copy. We told him (with a grin) that he should have waited and bought it from us directly, so he wouldn't have to pay shipping. He shrugged and said that he hadn't known we'd be playing there so soon.
If they don't understand what they're signing, they should get a lawyer.
Yeah, right; your typical starving artist can afford maybe 5-10 minutes of the typical contract-lawyer's time.
These days, any aspiring artist should just stay the hell away from anything that requires signing any contract or dealing with any lawyer. Just put your stuff online, and make a name for yourself. When people start asking you about your CD, you start making one. But if you deal with the companies or the lawyers, they'll own you and everything you create. (And probably your firstborn child and anything s/he creates.)
And pay attention to the "net neutrality" issue. If it goes the wrong way, the telecomm companies will own everything you create. And read your ISP's contract carefully; there's a good chance that they own anything you put on one of their machines. (My web site is on my own machine, and my ISP is speakeasy, who doesn't block ports 25 or 80.)
Silver bullets were presumed to be much more precise in firing than normal lead bullets ...
I remember seeing the explanation of this in an old Lone Ranger movie: Because a silver bullet is so expensive, you don't fire them off in volleys like people do with lead bullets. You take careful aim before you pull the trigger.
Unfortunately, the usual management approach with silver software bullets is to supply them to the entire staff, and demand that they be fired at every target at every opportunity.
There's a serious danger of metaphor overload here. But sometimes it help if you have some idea why the metaphor arose.
Yeah, or maybe there's be a concensus that "We really don't know." ;-)
I've long thought it would be fun (if ultimately meaningless) to learn that, as a person with mostly European ancestry, I might be part Neandertal. It'd be even more fun to verify that they were among my personal ancestors. Then when someone called me a Neandert[h]al, I could say "How'd you know?" with an evil grin. But I'm not very hopeful that I'll ever know for sure.
One thing that stands out is that those are all methods that involve studying and comparing populations. What's the likelyhood that we'll ever have a single population of closely-related Neandertals with well-preserved DNA?
;-)
If we were talking about the possibility that modern Europeans are, say, 30% Neandertal and 70% Cro Magnon, we might be able to do some sort of general population study. But that's not the situation. Nobody thinks the Neandertals could have contributed even 1% of modern European genes. The question isn't how much they contributed, but whether they contributed any genes at all. So good evidence that a single gene is of Neandertal origin would pretty much settle the question. But it doesn't seem likely that this can ever be done with the fragmentary evidence that's available. And a negative proof would seem to require determining with certainty the actual origin of every allele of every gene in the modern population, something which is also rather unlikely.
If I had to make a bet, I'd bet that the Neandertal question will remain a boundary case, with not enough evidence to convince the "reasonable doubters" on either side.
Of course, we might some day find a grave full of Neandertals that, like the famous mammoths, have been deep-frozen for 40,000 years and contain intact cells with good DNA. (But we'd better find them fast, before the permafrost all melts.
Now, nobody really knows much at this point. But something that I found interesting was that, via John Hawks, "Neandertals will be within the human range of variation for most genes."
Something I've never heard explained: How exactly can we determine the specific origin of an allele of a gene?
Suppose there were a particular allele that arose as a mutation in one particular Neandertal, and it was sufficiently beneficial that it spread to the entire human species. How would we determine this? How would we show that it arose, say, in Europe 150,000 years ago, versus in Asia 180,000 years ago or in Africa 140,000 years ago? Or would we just list it as a "human" allele and assume that its origin was in Africa?
Even if an allele is found only in modern Europeans, and is also found in a Neandertal sample, how would we know where it originated? It could have been a mutation that happened 40,000 years ago in Europe, but how do we know which population produced it?
There seems to be a lot of hand waving here, but it's hard to find any actual information on how we can determine the origin of a specific allele. Given the incomplete, damaged nature of fossil DNA, it doesn't seem likely that claims about specific origins can ever be really convincing to anyone with a properly skeptical scientific attitude.
We are leaving our prints everywhere so the chance of someone lifting them and copying them is real.
These days, we also have to worry about someone lifting and copyrighting our prints. And then suing us for infringement when we lift a glass of something.
And if we leave some hair or skin cells behind, we'll find that out DNA is patented and we're hauled into court for yet another violation.
..., a rich user experience, ...
Well, right there's one of the warning phrases.
One of the big reasons for google's success is that it doesn't give you a "rich user experience". The main web page is utterly plain and simple. You type in a word or phrase. You get back a page with a lot more text, but its layout is again simple and obvious. Granted, you can click the "advanced search" and see something more complicated. But they've carefully hidden the "rich user interface" behind something that's simple and obvious.
Google's ads are an example of the same. No "rich" ads; just small, unobtrusive chunks of text. Nothing distracting and annoying, so people don't look for ways to turn them off.
I like wikipedia for the same reason. No flash or pizzazz; just simple, plain, easy to use, and informative.
When I see something touted with a phrase like "rich user experience", my natural reaction (after more than a decade of web use) is to shudder and go on to something that's more likely to be useful and informative.
That tsunami will hit Fiji 3 hours later.
Try Majorca instead. No tsunami there until March 13, 2047.
[I]t's the graphic artists who have messed everything up. People who are insistant about they want this font here and that font there and this needs to be 2 pixels to the left but that needs to be mint yellow...
;-)
Dvorak seems to be firmly in the camp of that kind of graphic "artist". His basic complaint is that when he looks at his pages from different browsers, "The real problem is that no two browsers--let alone no two versions of any one browser--interpret CSS the same way!"
He seems to fail (or refuse) to understand that this is inherent in the job. Thus, I looked at his article on a Mac Powerbook with a 1440-pixel-wide screen, and found that he forces the width to (approx) 800 pixels. So I tried to read it on my Blackberry (240x160) and my wife's Treo (240x320). Each of them tried to do something useful with his reader-hostile width setting, and of course they come out looking different that he wants. But he doesn't understand that I can't add pixels to either of these PDAs. Or maybe he thinks that people like us shouldn't be allowed to read his stuff on our personal electronic toys.
He does make it clear that he thinks that CSS should make things look the same everywhere. This is clearly a physical impossibility. At least it's clear to me, and probably to anyone with the slightest bit of user friendliness.
I'd say let him complain. And when we find software that interprets his idiotic CSS so that we can read his stuff, we should send nice, supportive messages to the softwares' authors, so they understand that we're on their side.
Actually, that Treo tries to render his pages as 800 pixels wide, so you have to scroll left and right to read it. I think I'll send a nastygram to the culprits who foisted that software on us.
And it would be nice if browsers generally gave us a way to override things like width= attributes, so things work right in the current window. Just because I have a larger screen (1600x1200 on my linux workstation) doesn't necessarily mean that I want to dedicate the full screen to one web page. I'd much rather that a browser allow me to size its window, and then do the best to make web pages work in that window despite the attempts by people like Dvorak to make it difficult. I wonder which browsers actually give us that ability?
In my case, I'm the finder. And the usual search algorithm is exhaustive search.
I'm waiting for google to come up with a solution to this one. Maybe putting an RFID chip into everything would help. I have wondered occasionally what sort of "consumer" RFID readers might be coming available. And can I use any with a linux or OSX laptop? Or with a PalmOS or RIM gadget, for that matter.
Another way to get nerdy on this topic is to note that "rice grain" and "tomato seed" are both dubious because of the wide variation in the sizes of such seeds.
Much better would be the "barley seed", which was used as a unit of measurement in medieval Europe. The reason was that over a wide range of growing conditions, barley produced seeds that were very close to the same size. In fact, one of the historic definitions of "inch" was eight barley seeds. For most purposes back then, this was good enough, and the standard of length was easily available nearly anywhere.
Of course, another criticism is that we really want to know the volume of this new memory chip. Or even better, a precise description of its shape. A rice grain and a tomato seed may be close to the same size, but their shapes are radically different. I'd guess that the tomato seed is closer to the actual shape of this chip, but the chip is likely to be closer to square than your typical tomato seed. TFA doesn't seem to lead to a clear picture of the chip itself; it's not clear whether that thing in the middle of the pencils is just the chip or the chip plus some extra stuff for connectivity, insulation, etc.
one would assume 'carefull' means researching what you are doing, ...
One might assume that, but one would often be wrong.
I've found that, when a management type asks why something is taking so long, "We're trying to be very careful" is invariably accepted as an explanation. This implies that "careful" indeed implies time to at least a good many people.
Problems with computer security are almost always due to users' (and admins') lack of knowledge of potential problems. The only real solution to such problems is research and study of what is known of the problem.
Unfortunatelly, there are a lot of roadblocks to achieving true enlightenment. And most of the roadblocks are intentionally placed there by those with knowledge. You can see this by reading just about any discussion of how to deal with new security exploits. Inevitably, a good part of the discussion is over how much information should be released to the general public. And the people who have the information usually argue "If I released my information, all the evil hackers in the world would use it."
So they keep the information secret, and they do so intentionally. The main effect of this on you and me is that our own research is stymied. We can't determine whether our computers are susceptible, or if they are, what we should be doing to block exploits.
Very often we hear the advice to "Be careful" but we don't find the information that we need to do anything carefully. Such advice is a form of blaming the victim: "I told you to be careful, but your machine was infected. You dummy; you should have been more careful. It's not my fault, because I warned you."
But warning people of a vague, unspecified problem without including information on what to look out for isn't usually very helpful at all. Your response to "Be careful" should be something like "You turkey; at least give me a clue as to what I should be looking out for."
When someone tells you "Be careful", you should listen carefully to see what useful information they include. If there's none, they you should understand that their warning was merely at attempt to shift the blame to you.
You have to be very careful ...
This phrase is a common tipoff to one of the main problems.
The computer doesn't give a damn how careful you are. If you spend hours carefully crafting a chunk of code that, through your ignorance, has a big security hole, all your care hasn't helped a bit. You have merely produced bad code.
OTOH, someone with good knowledge of the subject might toss off a 30-second routine that, due to their understanding, is highly secure.
Carefulness has little to do with doing a good job. Carefully doing it wrong is merely doing it wrong, no matter how careful you are. And doing it right is doing it right, even if you hardly gave it a thought.
What we need here isn't useless exhortations to "be careful". What we need is education about how code gets into trouble, and training in writing code that doesn't have problems.
Yeah, I routinely write code that checks input. But if there's some hidden gotcha that I don't know about (typically in some library routine that's not visible to me), I'm quite aware that my careful checking might do little good.
Windows is lacking many significant features and qualities required of an enterprise operating system. In practice, it is deployed, but in comparison to other operating systems, I believe it is difficult to deploy and maintain on a large scale. Even on a small scale, it is not easy to protect.
...). Of course it's slightly different from the MS software; it has to be because it's better. (If it worked the same way as MS's stuff, it would be just as difficult to use. Duh. ;-) But mostly, I'd be an utter fool to advise a system that won't give me the maximum billable hours. And yes, my customers do mostly fall for this. Why would I disillusion them?
This reminds me of an attempt at satire that I read a few years ago (maybe here). Someone remarked that if you were in the business of doing computer support work for small businesses, you'd be a fool to sell them any sort of unix-based system, especially linux or OSX. You'd send one person in for half a day to install it and teach people to use it. Then you wouldn't hear from them again until they needed an upgrade. But if you sell them a Microsoft-based system, not only can you bill for a week of several people's time for the install and teaching; they'll be calling you back to fix problems several times a week. Once a small business has 20 or 30 employees, they'll have one of your people on location full time to keep the computers running. If your income is from billable time, it's obvious which you should be pushing on any customers gullible enough to listen to your advice.
When I read this, I thought of a number of acquaintances who are in the business of small-business computer support. So I sent them copies. They all replied in the same way: This is satire? That's exactly how it works. I'd be a fool to recommend something like linux or a Mac. Yeah, contrary to what everyone thinks they know, you can get quite good business software for linux or OSX (or Solaris or HP-UX or
My conclusion from all this was that life can be very difficult for satirists. But then, I've heard this from satirists. They're constantly complaining about how difficult it is to satirize people who respond by doing something even more outrageous than anything that a sensible satirist would ever dare publish.
In particular, writers trying to satirize the computer industry complain that computer people so often take their satire and use it as specs.
[H]undreds of millions of corporate workstations running Windows without problems and hundreds of millions of users refute your insane claims.
... Where do you work that you see this? In my capacity of software developer, I've spent a fair amount of time around various kinds of users in various kinds of corporate environments. Almost always, what I see looking over people's shoulders is a lot of stumbling around trying to get things to work right, mixed with a lot of grumbling about how much they hate "the computer".
;-)
Hmmm
If they are among the minority who use a non-MS computer at home, they aren't quite as general in their condemnation of "computers". Those users will tell you how much they hate Microsoft crap, and really wish their employers would allow them to use a decent computer. This happens no matter what their other computer is, which leads one to make an obvious inference: MS Windows is a major source of problems for most users, and they don't tell you how well it runs. Rather, they complain constantly about the crappy computer they have to work with.
Maybe some day I'll run across a place like you describe, where there are no problems with Windows and the users love it. Maybe such places exist. But I haven't seen one yet.
It is a bit disappointing that most of them just attribute the problem to "computers", and have no curiosity about what non-MS computers might be like. But then, if you follow media coverage of computer issues, you see the same thing. Every time there's a new piece of malware making its rounds, listen to the reporters' wording. They usually describe it as causing problems for "computers", and you hardly ever hear the brand name of the susceptible computers. To reporters, as with corporate workers, there is no difference between one computer and the next, and they're all full of problems. (Except for the occasional reporter who identifies with the "literary" crowd and uses a Mac.
On OS X, you have the option of creating a "Master Password" that has the ability to unlock any encrypted home directories.
...
Interesting. So if I download a new encryption package, or implement my own, and encrypt my stuff with it, OSX can use this Master Password to crack the new encryption scheme and decrypt my stuff.
I wonder if the NSA knows about this OSX feature. Or did they maybe help Apple develop it?
In any case, a decryption routine that can decrypt anything, including a new encryption scheme that nobody at Apple had ever heard about (because it didn't exist until today) is certainly an interesting technical development. I wonder where I can read about its algorithm
I propose we use the word "bitswitcher".
;-)
I'd suggest something like "bitmuncher".
My wife likes to tell people that her first job title was "computer". That was back around 1970, when she got a job at a New York state surveyor's office. Her job was to do calculations required in surveying. She used several gadgets to assist in most of the calculations, of course, and those gadgets were called "calculators". Then for inexplicable reasons her job title got applied to some of the fancier calculators, so they had to change the job title to avoid the obvious confusion.
The defiition of "computer" is a bit odd. Technically it's defined as a device that stores its software in the same memory as its data. The definition doesn't actually require that it "compute" anything, though of course if it doesn't, its software is a bit pointless. But this sort of definition came about because the first programmable computing devices used different kinds of hardware to store data and programs. The idea of storing programs in writable memory was a major technical advance back in the 1940s, making it possible to write programs that manipulated other programs. This turned out to be such an important innovation that the resulting "stored-program calculators" were treated as an entirely new kind of beast, sufficiently different that a new name was needed for them.
There was a book on the topic published recently, called "When Computers Were Women".
[I]t is also confusing that they use "binary search" to mean "searching inside binary files", and not binary search in its usual sense.
Come now, my good fellow; surely you don't expect computer people to start to honor precedence in their terminology. Why, that would be, uh, I think the word is "unprecedented".
We computer geeks have a long tradition of taking someone else's terminology and recycling it with meanings at odds with the earlier use. And in this case, the writer(s) probably thought they were inventing a new phrase. Chances are that they've never heard of binary trees, much less anything to do with using them for sorting and searching.
Most people who develop software also have to maintain it, ...
What???? This may be true with open-source software, but I've yet to see a company that did things this way. The norm is that developers, testers, maintainers and users are four separate groups that are kept as far apart as management can manage.
This does go a long way toward explaining why there's so much crappy software Out There.
No flame intended, but that's one thing that confounds me - the USA, of all nations, seem to rely on ActiveX-based online banking.
...."
;-) aren't nabbing my account numbers and passwords. And, of course, I have the sense to never click on a link that purports to point to a bank. I'm not yet convinced that any browser will correctly warn me of fake URLs.
Over the last couple years, the three banks that my wife and I deal with have all changed their online stuff to work with OSX and linux (or, more likely, with standards-compliant browsers like firefox, opera, safari, etc.). I know a number of people who do computing work for local banks, and they all tell similar stories about how this happened.
At first, the bank's management took the expected approach: Only Microsoft is significant, and we don't have to deal with any other kind of computers, because only a few hobbyists and hackers use them. But after bring up their MS-only online systems, they found that a lot of customers quietly resisted switching. The interesting thing was that this included most of the bank's computer experts. This got the managers' attention, of course, and they asked questions.
Their own computer guys' reply was generally of the form "There's no way I'll ever trust my personal bank-account information to any spyware-laden Microsoft systems." They'd also comment on how it's not just viruses and worms and such; MS software itself is well known for "calling home" and sending assorted information about what's on your computer. The software's innards are secret so you can't know what it's doing, and some of this data is encoded or encrypted so you can't tell what it is. You might use such systems at work, but only a fool would use such a system for their personal banking information. When the managers said that they used the online banking from their home Windows box, the IT guys would repeat "Only a fool
The message got through. The management realized that they were maybe getting the computer-ignorant customers to use their online banking system, but nobody with any knowledge of computers was willing to risk it until it was made secure. Not even the fellows who implemented the bank's web site would trust it. Solving this required making it work with non-MS software. So eventually management gave in, and ordered changes to make it all work with non-MS software.
Actually, I was one of the first to use our accounts from our OSX and linux boxes. Since I do lots of web testing, I've installed nearly every browser I can on my machines. Some of them (especially opera) could pretend to be IE on Windows, and I found that the online banking stuff worked ok with AgentID spoofing. It wasn't that the banks' sites didn't work with non-MS software; it was just that their code checked the AgentID string and refused to deal with non-MS software. So I went ahead and learned to use their online stuff. It wasn't very good at first, but they're getting much better now.
And these days, I can go in from firefox or safari or opera without spoofing, and they don't kick me off. This may not be true of all US banks, but it's true of the three in the Boston area where I have accounts. They seem to do everything via https:/// links now, so I'm more likely to trust that the intermediate sites (Verizon
The US armed forces have enough spending power to convince even Microsoft to pony up the source code. And they do.
;-)
I wonder how often they actually recompile the code and verify that it's byte-for-byte identical to the binaries that Microsoft sent them.
This is, of course, usually straightforward with any unix-based software, where often all you need to do is cd to the right directory and type "make", then run diff on the output and the delivered binary. I know from experience that it's usually not straightforward with MS software, where each build is usually a set of idiosyncratic scripts that are hard for a newbie to get right the first (or Nth) time.
Of course, there are a few linux apps whose installs aren't exactly exemplars of transparency. (I've been trying to get php+mysql+apache installed on a linux, OSX and Windows system lately, and I haven't succeeded with any of them