Hey, maybe I shouldn't be critical of such positive mods, but I'm a bit worried that my post has a "5 insightful" mod, with most of the mods being "insightful". This could be taken as a sign of the low quality of a lot of the moderation here. After all, I didn't write anything the least bit original. I was just saying what any number of security people have been saying for longer than I've been involved in computer software. Everything I wrote is common in the technical literature about network security. So there's really nothing "insightful" at all about it on my part. Maybe "informative", since that reasonably applies to writing about specialized knowledge in a forum where people may not be familiar with the specialty. But it takes no insight at all to merely quote what the technical experts have been saying for decades.
I wonder if there's something we can do to improve this sort of mis-moderation? After all, poorly-done positive mods are every bit as misleading as poorly-done negative mods. Both produce poor results that don't help the reader. Anyone got any good suggestions?
Dickie George says the way to fight the cyber cold war is by building security into technology, making it transparent to the end user, continually monitoring networks and updating their security software.
From the earliest days of the ARPAnet that led to the Internet, people have pointed out that it's pointless to build security into the network layer(s). Putting it there is a single point of failure that can be defeated by a single bribe to the right person. And the end users won't know that the network-level security has been compromised. If your security is supplied by a vendor along your message's route, that vendor has access to your message's contents, to do with as they please.
For this reason, it has been long understood that the only real security is in end-to-end encryption. Security at any lower level is merely a waste of cpu cycles and bandwidth. It can't be trusted by the users, who must supply their own security. So the network layer should work on supplying fast, reliable packet transport. Security belongs a higher level, out of control of the companies that deliver the packets.
Note that the most-used widely-available security package, SSL, works solely at the sender and receiver ends of a connection, and relies on the network for nothing but packet transport. And it supplies a list of encryption schemes, so if you learn or suspect that someone along the route has managed to crack your encryption, you can quickly change the scheme without the cooperation of any vendor supplying the links.
It is slowly getting through to a lot of people that the commercial Internet vendors have become a common source of data leaks, for well-understood commercial reasons. So relying on them to supply network-level security is an especially stupid idea. They will simply decode your data, and sell the contents to interested parties without your knowledge. Your only defense against this is to use encryption that they can't decode.
I think you've got it! And you might be the only one. After all, my snide, tongue-in-cheek comment now has a "5, insightful" moderation, and all the mods were "insightful". So none of them got it.
I did like the AC who wrote "pedantics" for "pedants", though. I wonder if that was intentional. Sorta how I always like to mispell the word "misspell" in spelling-flame discussions.;-)
China has raised it standard of living in recent decades but they still suffer from a severe lack of basic freedoms, corruption, and choking pollution.
Hmmm... China's severe lack of basic freedoms is pretty well documented. But I don't recall reading about a similar severe shortage of corruption, or of choking pollution. Where might these shortages be documented?
So I won't be able to give $20 to a friend without: 1) being tracked;...
Yup; and this is exactly why it won't be implemented, not in Estonia, not in the US, not in any other country.
A more illustrative example would be: You want to give $20,000 to your favorite local politician, in exchange for "consideration" during part of the law-making process. This only works well if your "gift" can't be tracked and be made known to the voters (and to legal authorities).
The recent election in the US is a good example. Political gift-giving used to be mostly public information. But recently, our Supreme Court changed the rules, making it legal for anyone to give money to politicians and keep the source of the money a secret. So before this election, political contributions went up roughly an order of magnitude over what they had been in previous elections. Mostly to the Republicans, but the Democrats got a large increase, too.
This would be very difficult with an all-electronic money system. The political system relies on the non-tracability of most of the "gifts". So we can trust that the politicians who got elected won't pass laws that eliminate the money that put them in power.
All the recent news of financial systems being "hacked" and their information made available to the wrong people is all the proof our politicians need that electronic money can't be trusted to keep a secret. So they won't allow it to happen while they're in office.
Well, I used to think that this "attitude" is out of date. But I keep talking to people who express it fairly clearly, often by simply not hearing any comments or questions about non-IBM/MS products. I've even seen this in places where gadgets with Apple logos were visible on a lot of desks.
It can be impressive to walk around yet another company and see all the desktop computers with IBM logos. In the software development places that I mostly work, you hardly ever see that, but out in what passes for the "Real World", it's common.
So I grudgingly admit that the old "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" seems to be alive and well in much of the "business" environment, bizarre as that may seem to an outsider. It's only a bit more complicated by the presence of Dell, who will of course sell you a computer with an IBM logo next to the MS-Window and Intel-Inside logos, if that's what your management wants.
I wonder what the markup on those logo stickers is?
... would be that historically, the "business" community has rarely adopted anything computer-like until it comes out with the IBM logo on it. Back in the 1980s, lots of little companies were marketing desktop computers, but they were considered toys by the business community, until IBM came out with theirs.
Now, I can hear people saying "What about Microsoft, huh?" This is an example that supports the thesis, since Microsoft's first successes were with the machines labelled as "IBM Personal Computers". Furthermore, if you go to ibm.com and look for available small computers, you'll see that all of them are advertised as running "Microsoft Windows 7 Professional Edition"(or sometimes "Vista" or "XP"). This supports the general business-world belief that Microsoft is the software-development division of IBM.
Yes, I've asked business people about this, and I've gotten funny looks, because "everyone knows" that Microsoft is part of IBM. If you try going into an explanation of why this isn't technically true, you merely find yourself dismissed as a geek trying to confuse them with Too Much Information. They don't need to know the details of the arrangement; they just know that "computer" and "IBM machine" are and always have been synonyms, and the small ones run Microsoft software, so Microsoft is IBM's small-computer software developer. That's all they need to know; the rest is left to the hired help to discuss. And they don't order "tablet" computers because they haven't seen one sold by IBM yet.
(Hey, is there one? I don't see it at ibm.com, but that doesn't mean that they don't have one. Sorta like how yes, you can get an IBM PC running linux -- if you can find it to order it. But try digging around at ibm.com to find it. It'll probably take you hours, and you should bookmark the page when you find it, otherwise it'll take you more hours to find it again the next time. Or it'll have moved and your bookmark doesn't work any more. But you can find MS Windows Pro all over the site. I's hard to find tablets there, so IBM probably doesn't sell them -- or doesn't want to.;-)
Anyway, it's likely that Apple has never much marketed to the business community, because like everyone else selling non-IBM-branded stuff, they know that they can't sell enough there for it to be profitable. But they can sell to individual purchasers, who might take their Apple toys along to work with them, and that's fine.
There's an old saying that nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM. Similarly, nobody ever stays in business by trying to sell non-IBM stuff in IBM's market. That's a recipe for disaster and bankruptcy. The folks at Apple are smart enough to understand this, and don't try to sell in an arena where IBM/Microsoft will squash them.
Of course, there may be a third and fourth theory for why Apple stays out of the business arena. Anyone want to explain the others?;-)
The main point of the patent's claims seems to be the selection of protocols based on a set of criteria. I'd wonder how many zillions of examples of "prior art" we can dig up for something that is basically keeping a list of alternative protocols/routes, and selecting one of them.
Thus, part of the "handshake" used in the venerable uucp system was a pair of messages, in which one end effectively says "I have the following protocol packages: X, Q, V1, V2, V3, R7, and C", the other end looks at the list, and send back a message saying "Let's use protocol package R7". The simplest implementation would simply pick the first name in the list that both have, but other versions would pick the fastest or cheapest or most reliable protocol.
The value of this is that it made for easy introduction of new protocols, typically when new hardware became available. Thus, when Ethernet came out, a bunch of people developed on a uucp package for it, and new releases of uucp would contain the Ethernet protocol. Whenever two ends found that they had an Ethernet route to each other, they could use it, but they could still talk to releases without Ethernet as they always had, using an older protocol. Eventually, uucp also had a TCP package, and it was fun watching uucp transfer data via TCP at speeds much faster than FTP or SMTP could. (I think this is probably no longer true, though.)
In any case, the idea of a comm-link setup routine choosing among a list of protocols (or drivers or hardware or however you like to think of it) is a lot older than the events in this story. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find such approaches that date back to the 1950s. After all, it really is something that should be obvious to any competent engineer who has even the simplest computer available to set up the connections.
Well, of course, the suggestion that science is an example of neoteny in humans is mostly a bit of tongue-in-cheek geek humor. But I have read a few fun semi-serious discussions of the idea, which has both problems and merits.
In any case, you obviously grew up with a different bunch of kids than I did. I remember a childhood of constantly exploring and challenging adult misconceptions. My parents also moved several times, and I remember being the one of the kids who quickly knew the most about our new surroundings and neighbors.
I remember an echo of this in high school, where I took courses in several foreign languages. The teachers all commented that I was one of the few who rapidly adopted "non-English" word orders and idioms. I thought it was fun to find new ways of expressing ideas that were structured differently than English. Most of the others didn't seem to find this as much fun.
I suppose the main observation about it all is "people are different from each other". Some kids do accommodate quickly to the beliefs of those around them and show little need to critically examine what they're told. Others are at the other end of the scale, and are the ones who end up as scientists, journalists, and other professions where a critical, exploring outlook is an advantage. (For some of them anyway; we're all familiar with the scientists and journalists who parrot the party line.;-)
At the same time (please, forgive me, here), your homepage is straight out of 1998.
Yeah, that's about right.;-) I do occasionally think of doing a total redesign, but frankly, not many people look at it other than me, and I like something that's just a bunch of cryptically labelled links that I can quickly find and click. There's nothing at all commercial about that page, and never will be.
Are you aware of ways to meet both goals, to provide dynamic behavior AND have a site be accessible? Do you know of any javascript frameworks which would allow this? It seems that wiping out our recent years of progress with javascript would be just that -- rolling back the years. And few clients want that.
There are growing problems with JS, since the big sales now are in small, mobile devices, and those that have JS usually have a stripped-down version that often does a really crappy job of complex web sites. I can spot them easily on my G1 phone or my wife's iPhone.
I suspect that, if you want dynamic behavior and complex content, you should be seriously looking at HTML5. It could supplant most of your use of JS. Of course, HTML5 isn't quite stable yet, but it's good enough that you can use it for a lot of stuff. (As long as you work seriously on fallbacks for IE5.)
I might also note that, like most people familiar with JS, I usually do most browsing with NoScript enabled. I have a couple of demos on my site of some of the nasty things that can be done to you with JS. I don't want those things done to me, so I block JS almost everywhere, and turn it on if I judge a site trustworthy. (And yes, I've been fooled a few times.) Of course, the general public hasn't heard of such things, so they continue to leave JS enabled. But they're buying lots of smartphones and carrying them in their pockets or purses. And the smartphone these days are web-enabled computers. If your business isn't testing with them now, you're losing customers.
So you are wasting the money of your employer against their specific directions? Good thing you are not working for me.
Well, maybe, maybe not. If your overly-strict page formats are interfering with readability on small screens, you could well be losing customers who get frustrated with your awful (from their viewpoint) web site. In that case, you might profit by hiring me to make your site more user-friendly.;-)
I guess it depends on what you want. In several cases, the expected "design" was so bad that other people in the same company were complaining, and asking if we could improve it. I usually replied by 1) agreeing with them, 2) showing them the specs I had that required such bad design, and 3) asking them how I might go about sneaking in improvements without being fired.
Of course, I usually had some ideas already, but it never hurts to get buy-in from the other players.
Part of the problem is that people without much hands-on web experience (which typically includes much of top management) aren't usually aware of the problems until much later, after it has all gone live. Then they get all upset, and start threatening to fire the people who produced something with so many problems. It usually doesn't help to say "We were just following orders"; that doesn't usually endear you to the people who ordered that it be done wrong.
You may not be aware of it, but there's a good chance that many of your employees have done things to help your (potential) customers, without your permission. Before threatening to fire them, you might consider whether you have profited from their subversion.
After all, if you hire someone with expertise in some process, you shouldn't be surprised if they have a different understanding of the problems than you do. That's what you hire them for, right? If not, maybe you should be hiring novices without the expertise.
After all, HTML is easy, and anyone can build a web page. You don't need experts to do such an easy job.;-)
Being like a child is fine when one is young but a menace when one is an adult.
neoteny: The retention of juvenile characteristics in the adult; The sexual maturity of an organism still in its larval stage. [One of several online definitions.]
Some biologists have suggested, not entirely jokingly, that science is a neotenic (or neotenous) evolutionary development in humans. Mature primates generally lose the curiosity that's so visible in juveniles; the adults know everything they need to know about their world, and have no need to learn more. Humans arose as the dominant large species on the planet in part due to our retention of juvenile curiosity in adults.
So you're saying that scientists are a menace to society, right?
(Granted, the story may be a silly example, but it's basically harmless to be curious about unusual features of your environment, and sometimes it turns out to be valuable.)
. the submitter acknowledges the possibility of being wrong, and still has a childlike fascination for the things we all know too much about to be inspired by....
Yeah. And I wonder about the vociferous put-downs that people are posting. After all, there are hundreds of known impact craters scattered around the planet. The US has had several cases of meteors hitting houses in the past few decades (two of them in Connecticut). Some years back, there was a groups of small craters (in the 1-2m size range) in a farming area in China, probably caused by the pieces of a larger rock that broke up in the atmosphere. Just a year or two ago, there was the impact in eastern Africa that was located from calculations based on several photos of the object in the atmosphere.
It's estimate that 1-3m diameter meteors enter the atmosphere at a rate of around 1 per day. Most break up in the air and become a dust fall, but a few hit the ground.
In general, a meteor impact is a reasonably hypothesis if you even have a roughly circular crater, which the aerial photo does have. Granted, it's only roughly circular, but it does have a hill in the center. So an old, weathered crater is a reasonable thing to consider. Or a karst sink, if the area has a lot of calcium rocks.
OTOH, it's not too surprising if "the authorities" don't find it interesting. They probably know of lots of sinkholes and craters in their general vicinity. A new one might not strike them as very interesting, unless there's something really unusual about it.
The best suggestion might be that the fellow get together a few interested friends, read up a bit on amateur archaeological and paleontological digging, and set to work in the depression. If there are any experts on such digging at nearby schools (or mining companies;-), ask them for advice. With a bit of careful digging, they may add a bit to our knowledge of local history. The metals may just be from mining, or the rubble from a recent battlegound or campground or whatever. But even that could add to the store of local historical knowledge.
Instead of trying to discourage them, maybe we could encourage a bit of digging and analysis.
And maybe they will turn up evidence of the first real crash site of an alien spacecraft.;-)
Yes. But, as I said, I've often been explicitly ordered by the people who hired me to produce web pages that only work at one specific width. It doesn't take a lot of research to figure out that this is fairly common.
In some cases, I was able to go back later during the work and remove all the width= and size= attributes from the HTML, and they never noticed. But I've also seen management set up test procedures that explicitly tested for pages that worked in windows that were the "wrong size", and reported this as a failure.
Most of the sites that work this way were built with malice aforethought. The designers (or their bosses) were intentionally excluding viewers with small screens, or with big screens set in a "visually impaired" configuration.
Yeah, well, I also keep pointing out to people that the original design of HTML was intended to make it easy to build documents that would be readable on a very wide range of screen sizes and shapes. This was done by "marking up" the document with hints to the rendering software about the structure of the document, so that the software could format it sensibly on whatever screen you had, or even with no screen for the visually impaired or for people (e.g., drivers and airplane pilots) whose eyes are busy elsewhere.
But the "designers" sorta took over, and worked from the attitude that they were producing a work of art that should only be produced in exactly the same format that they designed. They specified the exact size, shape, and screen position for everything, and did their best to make sure that it wouldn't work well any other way.
With luck (and a bit of encouragement), maybe we can develop a new breed of designer whose aesthetic is based on clarity and comprehensibility for all, not just those with the best eyes and the biggest screens. And maybe we can get the browser makers to add a switch that disables all size= and width= attributes, to help defeat the designers' efforts.
Actually, people are always complaining about the way my screens are covered with lots of small windows, each using the smallest fonts that I can read. This window currently uses a 10-point font, which most people looking over my shoulder can't read because they're farther away than I am and/or don't have eyes as good as mine. But that doesn't matter. I have some visually-impaired friends. And sometimes my only Net access is via my G1 phone or my wife's iPhone. So I'm learning to design for them. Now if I could just figure out how to persuade people to pay me to work on such "design". I think it'd make the world a better place. But I've found that most professional designers, as well as most professional managers, don't agree with me.
(And my Mac's silly 2-finger resizing just spontaneously shrunk my font to maybe 8 points. But I can still read it. And it should be readable on your screen, regardless of its size.;-)
I've worked on a number of projects where we were explicitly ordered not to "waste our time" with anything that would help the disabled to use our web sites. There wasn't much we could do other than sneak in things that we thought the management wouldn't notice.
Maybe it's time that people with more clout than us mere developers let the managers know that something a bit more, uh, civilised is expected of them.
We can't do it on our own, even if we want to.
(Actually, I'm currently doing some pro bono work for some nonprofits that involves making their web sites more accessible. A curious part of this is that they've mostly been persuaded by the growing number of people carrying a "smart phone", and it's getting through their heads that web pages forced to width=1200 or requiring javascript are limiting their audience. While we're at it, maybe we can sneak in even more stuff that helps the visually impaired, etc.)
Sure, but also take a look at the top researchers in American schools. They are Chinese, Indian, and Russian. Whats troubling is the lack of American kids doing the research these days....
This is nothing new. While education has long been one of America's main "export industries", we've long had a significant part of the population that is profoundly anti-education, and is often proud of its ignorance. We've long depended on immigrants and their children to do the "intellectual" work that the economy requires, since mostly of the long-established population actively suppresses its children's interest in "book learning".
I'm fairly familiar with this, as I grew up in just such a family. I was the first of any of my known relatives to go to college, and my parents refused to cooperate with this, to the point of refusing to fill out the parents-income forms required by most scholarships. This put a serious limit on which schools I could get into.
An illustrative anecdote from my teen years: I noticed that the barrel that was below a roof drain contained a good population of "wiggler" mosquito larvae, so I mentioned this to my parents, suggesting that we empty it. They had no idea what those little critters were, and didn't believe they were young mosquitos, since they lived in water and couldn't fly. They wanted to know where I'd heard such garbage. When they found out that it was from things I'd read, they got quite angry at my attempt to impose such "book learning" on the family. They firmly ordered me to ignore the wigglers.
Now, I understood that this was a potential health hazard, and I was tempted to report it to the local authorities. But I also understood that this would get me into a lot of trouble at home, so I kept my mouth shut. And the neighborhood had a household that was effectively protecting and producing mosquitos.
This is nothing at all odd in the US. A large part of the population is just as willfully ignorant as my family was. And they frequently threaten people who try to do something about it, as my family did in this case. When I've mentioned this to friends, I've seen a lot of them nod, and say that much of their family is just as bad.
So it's not at all surprising to read comments about college departments that are mostly non-citizens. This has been true in most scientific and technical fields in all the US institutions that I know anything about, for at least several decades. I don't see many signs that it's changing.
What seems to be different is that this attitude is changing in a few other parts of the world. As long as the rest of the world was as ignorant as the US, and ruled by a crowd that kept their subjects ignorant, the US could maintain its technical lead by simply encouraging the academic crowd to do its thing in its semi-walled garden. Now that some of the leaders in countries like China and India understand the importance of a technically-educated subpopulation to their economy, it shouldn't be surprising that they've started to encroach on the US's position.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, maybe I shouldn't be critical of such positive mods, but I'm a bit worried that my post has a "5 insightful" mod, with most of the mods being "insightful". This could be taken as a sign of the low quality of a lot of the moderation here. After all, I didn't write anything the least bit original. I was just saying what any number of security people have been saying for longer than I've been involved in computer software. Everything I wrote is common in the technical literature about network security. So there's really nothing "insightful" at all about it on my part. Maybe "informative", since that reasonably applies to writing about specialized knowledge in a forum where people may not be familiar with the specialty. But it takes no insight at all to merely quote what the technical experts have been saying for decades.
I wonder if there's something we can do to improve this sort of mis-moderation? After all, poorly-done positive mods are every bit as misleading as poorly-done negative mods. Both produce poor results that don't help the reader. Anyone got any good suggestions?
Oh, yeah: ;-)
Dickie George says the way to fight the cyber cold war is by building security into technology, making it transparent to the end user, continually monitoring networks and updating their security software.
From the earliest days of the ARPAnet that led to the Internet, people have pointed out that it's pointless to build security into the network layer(s). Putting it there is a single point of failure that can be defeated by a single bribe to the right person. And the end users won't know that the network-level security has been compromised. If your security is supplied by a vendor along your message's route, that vendor has access to your message's contents, to do with as they please.
For this reason, it has been long understood that the only real security is in end-to-end encryption. Security at any lower level is merely a waste of cpu cycles and bandwidth. It can't be trusted by the users, who must supply their own security. So the network layer should work on supplying fast, reliable packet transport. Security belongs a higher level, out of control of the companies that deliver the packets.
Note that the most-used widely-available security package, SSL, works solely at the sender and receiver ends of a connection, and relies on the network for nothing but packet transport. And it supplies a list of encryption schemes, so if you learn or suspect that someone along the route has managed to crack your encryption, you can quickly change the scheme without the cooperation of any vendor supplying the links.
It is slowly getting through to a lot of people that the commercial Internet vendors have become a common source of data leaks, for well-understood commercial reasons. So relying on them to supply network-level security is an especially stupid idea. They will simply decode your data, and sell the contents to interested parties without your knowledge. Your only defense against this is to use encryption that they can't decode.
As if not using a stain/dye is a new concept in the microscopy arena.
Whaddaya wanna bet that someone will soon patent the concept?
I think you've got it! And you might be the only one. After all, my snide, tongue-in-cheek comment now has a "5, insightful" moderation, and all the mods were "insightful". So none of them got it.
I did like the AC who wrote "pedantics" for "pedants", though. I wonder if that was intentional. Sorta how I always like to mispell the word "misspell" in spelling-flame discussions. ;-)
China has raised it standard of living in recent decades but they still suffer from a severe lack of basic freedoms, corruption, and choking pollution.
Hmmm ... China's severe lack of basic freedoms is pretty well documented. But I don't recall reading about a similar severe shortage of corruption, or of choking pollution. Where might these shortages be documented?
... whole living cells are fast-frozen and studied in their natural environment.
Um, unless we're talking about species native to Antarctica, I wouldn't think that frozen would be their "natural environment".
Freezing is known (and not just by the State of California ;-) to do damage to many cell structures. For example, they no longer qualify as "living".
Somehow, I think this could have been better expressed with different words.
So I won't be able to give $20 to a friend without: 1) being tracked; ...
Yup; and this is exactly why it won't be implemented, not in Estonia, not in the US, not in any other country.
A more illustrative example would be: You want to give $20,000 to your favorite local politician, in exchange for "consideration" during part of the law-making process. This only works well if your "gift" can't be tracked and be made known to the voters (and to legal authorities).
The recent election in the US is a good example. Political gift-giving used to be mostly public information. But recently, our Supreme Court changed the rules, making it legal for anyone to give money to politicians and keep the source of the money a secret. So before this election, political contributions went up roughly an order of magnitude over what they had been in previous elections. Mostly to the Republicans, but the Democrats got a large increase, too.
This would be very difficult with an all-electronic money system. The political system relies on the non-tracability of most of the "gifts". So we can trust that the politicians who got elected won't pass laws that eliminate the money that put them in power.
All the recent news of financial systems being "hacked" and their information made available to the wrong people is all the proof our politicians need that electronic money can't be trusted to keep a secret. So they won't allow it to happen while they're in office.
Well, I used to think that this "attitude" is out of date. But I keep talking to people who express it fairly clearly, often by simply not hearing any comments or questions about non-IBM/MS products. I've even seen this in places where gadgets with Apple logos were visible on a lot of desks.
It can be impressive to walk around yet another company and see all the desktop computers with IBM logos. In the software development places that I mostly work, you hardly ever see that, but out in what passes for the "Real World", it's common.
So I grudgingly admit that the old "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" seems to be alive and well in much of the "business" environment, bizarre as that may seem to an outsider. It's only a bit more complicated by the presence of Dell, who will of course sell you a computer with an IBM logo next to the MS-Window and Intel-Inside logos, if that's what your management wants.
I wonder what the markup on those logo stickers is?
1985 called, it wants its worldview back.
It's quite welcome to drop by any time and pick it up.
... would be that historically, the "business" community has rarely adopted anything computer-like until it comes out with the IBM logo on it. Back in the 1980s, lots of little companies were marketing desktop computers, but they were considered toys by the business community, until IBM came out with theirs.
Now, I can hear people saying "What about Microsoft, huh?" This is an example that supports the thesis, since Microsoft's first successes were with the machines labelled as "IBM Personal Computers". Furthermore, if you go to ibm.com and look for available small computers, you'll see that all of them are advertised as running "Microsoft Windows 7 Professional Edition"(or sometimes "Vista" or "XP"). This supports the general business-world belief that Microsoft is the software-development division of IBM.
Yes, I've asked business people about this, and I've gotten funny looks, because "everyone knows" that Microsoft is part of IBM. If you try going into an explanation of why this isn't technically true, you merely find yourself dismissed as a geek trying to confuse them with Too Much Information. They don't need to know the details of the arrangement; they just know that "computer" and "IBM machine" are and always have been synonyms, and the small ones run Microsoft software, so Microsoft is IBM's small-computer software developer. That's all they need to know; the rest is left to the hired help to discuss. And they don't order "tablet" computers because they haven't seen one sold by IBM yet.
(Hey, is there one? I don't see it at ibm.com, but that doesn't mean that they don't have one. Sorta like how yes, you can get an IBM PC running linux -- if you can find it to order it. But try digging around at ibm.com to find it. It'll probably take you hours, and you should bookmark the page when you find it, otherwise it'll take you more hours to find it again the next time. Or it'll have moved and your bookmark doesn't work any more. But you can find MS Windows Pro all over the site. I's hard to find tablets there, so IBM probably doesn't sell them -- or doesn't want to. ;-)
Anyway, it's likely that Apple has never much marketed to the business community, because like everyone else selling non-IBM-branded stuff, they know that they can't sell enough there for it to be profitable. But they can sell to individual purchasers, who might take their Apple toys along to work with them, and that's fine.
There's an old saying that nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM. Similarly, nobody ever stays in business by trying to sell non-IBM stuff in IBM's market. That's a recipe for disaster and bankruptcy. The folks at Apple are smart enough to understand this, and don't try to sell in an arena where IBM/Microsoft will squash them.
Of course, there may be a third and fourth theory for why Apple stays out of the business arena. Anyone want to explain the others? ;-)
The main point of the patent's claims seems to be the selection of protocols based on a set of criteria. I'd wonder how many zillions of examples of "prior art" we can dig up for something that is basically keeping a list of alternative protocols/routes, and selecting one of them.
Thus, part of the "handshake" used in the venerable uucp system was a pair of messages, in which one end effectively says "I have the following protocol packages: X, Q, V1, V2, V3, R7, and C", the other end looks at the list, and send back a message saying "Let's use protocol package R7". The simplest implementation would simply pick the first name in the list that both have, but other versions would pick the fastest or cheapest or most reliable protocol.
The value of this is that it made for easy introduction of new protocols, typically when new hardware became available. Thus, when Ethernet came out, a bunch of people developed on a uucp package for it, and new releases of uucp would contain the Ethernet protocol. Whenever two ends found that they had an Ethernet route to each other, they could use it, but they could still talk to releases without Ethernet as they always had, using an older protocol. Eventually, uucp also had a TCP package, and it was fun watching uucp transfer data via TCP at speeds much faster than FTP or SMTP could. (I think this is probably no longer true, though.)
In any case, the idea of a comm-link setup routine choosing among a list of protocols (or drivers or hardware or however you like to think of it) is a lot older than the events in this story. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find such approaches that date back to the 1950s. After all, it really is something that should be obvious to any competent engineer who has even the simplest computer available to set up the connections.
"Pics or it didn't happen".
(Someone had to say it, and we're almost 500 comments in without anyone doing their duty.)
Actually, I wonder how many of these images will soon be downloadable. Not that I expect it to compete with any real porn site, of course.
Well, of course, the suggestion that science is an example of neoteny in humans is mostly a bit of tongue-in-cheek geek humor. But I have read a few fun semi-serious discussions of the idea, which has both problems and merits.
In any case, you obviously grew up with a different bunch of kids than I did. I remember a childhood of constantly exploring and challenging adult misconceptions. My parents also moved several times, and I remember being the one of the kids who quickly knew the most about our new surroundings and neighbors.
I remember an echo of this in high school, where I took courses in several foreign languages. The teachers all commented that I was one of the few who rapidly adopted "non-English" word orders and idioms. I thought it was fun to find new ways of expressing ideas that were structured differently than English. Most of the others didn't seem to find this as much fun.
I suppose the main observation about it all is "people are different from each other". Some kids do accommodate quickly to the beliefs of those around them and show little need to critically examine what they're told. Others are at the other end of the scale, and are the ones who end up as scientists, journalists, and other professions where a critical, exploring outlook is an advantage. (For some of them anyway; we're all familiar with the scientists and journalists who parrot the party line. ;-)
At the same time (please, forgive me, here), your homepage is straight out of 1998.
Yeah, that's about right. ;-) I do occasionally think of doing a total redesign, but frankly, not many people look at it other than me, and I like something that's just a bunch of cryptically labelled links that I can quickly find and click. There's nothing at all commercial about that page, and never will be.
Are you aware of ways to meet both goals, to provide dynamic behavior AND have a site be accessible? Do you know of any javascript frameworks which would allow this? It seems that wiping out our recent years of progress with javascript would be just that -- rolling back the years. And few clients want that.
There are growing problems with JS, since the big sales now are in small, mobile devices, and those that have JS usually have a stripped-down version that often does a really crappy job of complex web sites. I can spot them easily on my G1 phone or my wife's iPhone.
I suspect that, if you want dynamic behavior and complex content, you should be seriously looking at HTML5. It could supplant most of your use of JS. Of course, HTML5 isn't quite stable yet, but it's good enough that you can use it for a lot of stuff. (As long as you work seriously on fallbacks for IE5.)
I might also note that, like most people familiar with JS, I usually do most browsing with NoScript enabled. I have a couple of demos on my site of some of the nasty things that can be done to you with JS. I don't want those things done to me, so I block JS almost everywhere, and turn it on if I judge a site trustworthy. (And yes, I've been fooled a few times.) Of course, the general public hasn't heard of such things, so they continue to leave JS enabled. But they're buying lots of smartphones and carrying them in their pockets or purses. And the smartphone these days are web-enabled computers. If your business isn't testing with them now, you're losing customers.
So you are wasting the money of your employer against their specific directions? Good thing you are not working for me.
Well, maybe, maybe not. If your overly-strict page formats are interfering with readability on small screens, you could well be losing customers who get frustrated with your awful (from their viewpoint) web site. In that case, you might profit by hiring me to make your site more user-friendly. ;-)
I guess it depends on what you want. In several cases, the expected "design" was so bad that other people in the same company were complaining, and asking if we could improve it. I usually replied by 1) agreeing with them, 2) showing them the specs I had that required such bad design, and 3) asking them how I might go about sneaking in improvements without being fired.
Of course, I usually had some ideas already, but it never hurts to get buy-in from the other players.
Part of the problem is that people without much hands-on web experience (which typically includes much of top management) aren't usually aware of the problems until much later, after it has all gone live. Then they get all upset, and start threatening to fire the people who produced something with so many problems. It usually doesn't help to say "We were just following orders"; that doesn't usually endear you to the people who ordered that it be done wrong.
You may not be aware of it, but there's a good chance that many of your employees have done things to help your (potential) customers, without your permission. Before threatening to fire them, you might consider whether you have profited from their subversion.
After all, if you hire someone with expertise in some process, you shouldn't be surprised if they have a different understanding of the problems than you do. That's what you hire them for, right? If not, maybe you should be hiring novices without the expertise.
After all, HTML is easy, and anyone can build a web page. You don't need experts to do such an easy job. ;-)
neoteny: The retention of juvenile characteristics in the adult; The sexual maturity of an organism still in its larval stage. [One of several online definitions.]
Some biologists have suggested, not entirely jokingly, that science is a neotenic (or neotenous) evolutionary development in humans. Mature primates generally lose the curiosity that's so visible in juveniles; the adults know everything they need to know about their world, and have no need to learn more. Humans arose as the dominant large species on the planet in part due to our retention of juvenile curiosity in adults.
So you're saying that scientists are a menace to society, right?
(Granted, the story may be a silly example, but it's basically harmless to be curious about unusual features of your environment, and sometimes it turns out to be valuable.)
. the submitter acknowledges the possibility of being wrong, and still has a childlike fascination for the things we all know too much about to be inspired by. ...
Yeah. And I wonder about the vociferous put-downs that people are posting. After all, there are hundreds of known impact craters scattered around the planet. The US has had several cases of meteors hitting houses in the past few decades (two of them in Connecticut). Some years back, there was a groups of small craters (in the 1-2m size range) in a farming area in China, probably caused by the pieces of a larger rock that broke up in the atmosphere. Just a year or two ago, there was the impact in eastern Africa that was located from calculations based on several photos of the object in the atmosphere.
It's estimate that 1-3m diameter meteors enter the atmosphere at a rate of around 1 per day. Most break up in the air and become a dust fall, but a few hit the ground.
In general, a meteor impact is a reasonably hypothesis if you even have a roughly circular crater, which the aerial photo does have. Granted, it's only roughly circular, but it does have a hill in the center. So an old, weathered crater is a reasonable thing to consider. Or a karst sink, if the area has a lot of calcium rocks.
OTOH, it's not too surprising if "the authorities" don't find it interesting. They probably know of lots of sinkholes and craters in their general vicinity. A new one might not strike them as very interesting, unless there's something really unusual about it.
The best suggestion might be that the fellow get together a few interested friends, read up a bit on amateur archaeological and paleontological digging, and set to work in the depression. If there are any experts on such digging at nearby schools (or mining companies ;-), ask them for advice. With a bit of careful digging, they may add a bit to our knowledge of local history. The metals may just be from mining, or the rubble from a recent battlegound or campground or whatever. But even that could add to the store of local historical knowledge.
Instead of trying to discourage them, maybe we could encourage a bit of digging and analysis.
And maybe they will turn up evidence of the first real crash site of an alien spacecraft. ;-)
Yes. But, as I said, I've often been explicitly ordered by the people who hired me to produce web pages that only work at one specific width. It doesn't take a lot of research to figure out that this is fairly common.
In some cases, I was able to go back later during the work and remove all the width= and size= attributes from the HTML, and they never noticed. But I've also seen management set up test procedures that explicitly tested for pages that worked in windows that were the "wrong size", and reported this as a failure.
Most of the sites that work this way were built with malice aforethought. The designers (or their bosses) were intentionally excluding viewers with small screens, or with big screens set in a "visually impaired" configuration.
What a typically anthropocentric way of looking at the universe.
Ah, but the anthropocentric frame of reference is as good as any other.
And it's handy, so we might as well use it, until another frame of reference comes along that we like better.
... seeing as from earth that black hole is 30 years old thats the age I'll accept, anything else is pointless pedantry.
Ah, but to a lot of us, pointless pedantry can be a lot of fun.
(I figured that was a better way to express it than "Whoosh!" ;-)
Yeah, well, I also keep pointing out to people that the original design of HTML was intended to make it easy to build documents that would be readable on a very wide range of screen sizes and shapes. This was done by "marking up" the document with hints to the rendering software about the structure of the document, so that the software could format it sensibly on whatever screen you had, or even with no screen for the visually impaired or for people (e.g., drivers and airplane pilots) whose eyes are busy elsewhere.
But the "designers" sorta took over, and worked from the attitude that they were producing a work of art that should only be produced in exactly the same format that they designed. They specified the exact size, shape, and screen position for everything, and did their best to make sure that it wouldn't work well any other way.
With luck (and a bit of encouragement), maybe we can develop a new breed of designer whose aesthetic is based on clarity and comprehensibility for all, not just those with the best eyes and the biggest screens. And maybe we can get the browser makers to add a switch that disables all size= and width= attributes, to help defeat the designers' efforts.
Actually, people are always complaining about the way my screens are covered with lots of small windows, each using the smallest fonts that I can read. This window currently uses a 10-point font, which most people looking over my shoulder can't read because they're farther away than I am and/or don't have eyes as good as mine. But that doesn't matter. I have some visually-impaired friends. And sometimes my only Net access is via my G1 phone or my wife's iPhone. So I'm learning to design for them. Now if I could just figure out how to persuade people to pay me to work on such "design". I think it'd make the world a better place. But I've found that most professional designers, as well as most professional managers, don't agree with me.
(And my Mac's silly 2-finger resizing just spontaneously shrunk my font to maybe 8 points. But I can still read it. And it should be readable on your screen, regardless of its size. ;-)
I've worked on a number of projects where we were explicitly ordered not to "waste our time" with anything that would help the disabled to use our web sites. There wasn't much we could do other than sneak in things that we thought the management wouldn't notice.
Maybe it's time that people with more clout than us mere developers let the managers know that something a bit more, uh, civilised is expected of them.
We can't do it on our own, even if we want to.
(Actually, I'm currently doing some pro bono work for some nonprofits that involves making their web sites more accessible. A curious part of this is that they've mostly been persuaded by the growing number of people carrying a "smart phone", and it's getting through their heads that web pages forced to width=1200 or requiring javascript are limiting their audience. While we're at it, maybe we can sneak in even more stuff that helps the visually impaired, etc.)
Hey, I'm not the only one here who's seen Little Shop of Horrors. ;-)
And I see that you got the "funny", so now you're a funny, insightful troll. The rest of us are in awe ...
Sure, but also take a look at the top researchers in American schools. They are Chinese, Indian, and Russian. Whats troubling is the lack of American kids doing the research these days. ...
This is nothing new. While education has long been one of America's main "export industries", we've long had a significant part of the population that is profoundly anti-education, and is often proud of its ignorance. We've long depended on immigrants and their children to do the "intellectual" work that the economy requires, since mostly of the long-established population actively suppresses its children's interest in "book learning".
I'm fairly familiar with this, as I grew up in just such a family. I was the first of any of my known relatives to go to college, and my parents refused to cooperate with this, to the point of refusing to fill out the parents-income forms required by most scholarships. This put a serious limit on which schools I could get into.
An illustrative anecdote from my teen years: I noticed that the barrel that was below a roof drain contained a good population of "wiggler" mosquito larvae, so I mentioned this to my parents, suggesting that we empty it. They had no idea what those little critters were, and didn't believe they were young mosquitos, since they lived in water and couldn't fly. They wanted to know where I'd heard such garbage. When they found out that it was from things I'd read, they got quite angry at my attempt to impose such "book learning" on the family. They firmly ordered me to ignore the wigglers.
Now, I understood that this was a potential health hazard, and I was tempted to report it to the local authorities. But I also understood that this would get me into a lot of trouble at home, so I kept my mouth shut. And the neighborhood had a household that was effectively protecting and producing mosquitos.
This is nothing at all odd in the US. A large part of the population is just as willfully ignorant as my family was. And they frequently threaten people who try to do something about it, as my family did in this case. When I've mentioned this to friends, I've seen a lot of them nod, and say that much of their family is just as bad.
So it's not at all surprising to read comments about college departments that are mostly non-citizens. This has been true in most scientific and technical fields in all the US institutions that I know anything about, for at least several decades. I don't see many signs that it's changing.
What seems to be different is that this attitude is changing in a few other parts of the world. As long as the rest of the world was as ignorant as the US, and ruled by a crowd that kept their subjects ignorant, the US could maintain its technical lead by simply encouraging the academic crowd to do its thing in its semi-walled garden. Now that some of the leaders in countries like China and India understand the importance of a technically-educated subpopulation to their economy, it shouldn't be surprising that they've started to encroach on the US's position.