And all this time, I have been just installing the software and renaming the icons Word, Excel, and so on. I didn't realize I was supposed to tell them the name of the programs as well as they weren't using the Microsoft versions.
I live around 1500kms from my parents... when they bought their computer I told them in no uncertain terms that I could not, and would not, be their tech support.
I've found it has actually caused them to learn enough to use the computer as they see fit, and I don't care what they use for software.
Part of this was due to the fact that Sun/Oracle wanted to charge money for certain features
Oracle? Charge money? Say it aint so!!
Either way, when LibreOffice split off from OpenOffice.org it was already the better fork.
That's good to know... as I said in my other post, for some reason I was thinking they had to remove a bunch of functionality written in Java that Oracle still owned and wouldn't let people keep using... obviously, I was wrong. I'd been under the impression that LibreOffice had less functionality.
Oracle is starting to get concerned about what this says about Oracle's ability to lead in other Free Software communities
See, "Oracle" and "Free Software" areessentially antithetical concepts... within weeks of the take over, I remember people saying that they could no longer download the drivers and other free bits of Solaris stuff that used to be readily accessible. Unless you had the very expensive Oarcle support contract, you were SOL. And, in some cases, these were old machines past their formal EOL that were still limping along.
Anything which was free before Oracle is going to be better off forked from Oracle.
Oracle -- One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison. I was actually told that joke by an Oracle employee.
Why would I expect a merger? It feels like they only forked a couple of months ago.
I'm trying to recall... didn't they strip out a bunch of functionality due to ownership issues?
They might put that back in if they actually did strip it in the first place... I think not having a bunch of different free/open/libre/emancipated/shiny/awesome-Office suites might make for less confusion over all. It certainly might ensure that people actually get a viable alternative to Microsoft Office.
Because, really... "honestly mom, you should change to Libre Office, that Open Office from 2 years ago is so passe"... I just don't see that helping the cause of coming up with a free alternative. I'm not really willing to go there for myself even.
On a different note, I wish he had come up with a better acronym. "The World Wide Web is the only thing I know of whose shortened form takes three times longer to say than what it's short for" (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web [wikipedia.org])
Then you're doing it wrong. =)
"dub dub dub" is how I've said it since about '96... "dubya dubya dubya" occasionally... "double-u double-u double-u", yeah, that's cumbersome and nobody wants to do that.
(but come on, no need to be taken in by the Sony bashing contest)
As much as I hate Sony, I don't even directly blame them for all of the HD shenanigans that have taken place. They're not blameless, but others have been involved.
We've gone 480p, 720p, 1080p, and I think I've seen mention of even higher "coming soon".
We've changed connectors (though most of them had adapters), we've added DRM... we've been through two formats intended to be the successor to DVDs (which was only a few years old to begin with). Now we've got 3D, and increased FPS for movies...
Blah blah blah... I just find myself not caring any more. It's all a money grab as companies try to make new crap to sell us.
I don't feel compelled to upgrade, and when I do, it will likely be a trailing edge TV. I certainly won't consider any format that hasn't been on the market for less than two years and with a fair degree of uptake.
In my opinion, HD is one of those "transitional" specs that is always changing. The more they bring out new variations, the more I just stay away from it.
I hate it when I see the phrase "inventor of the web", etc.
Well, in terms of coining the phrase "World Wide Web", and actually creating http, he certainly had an impact.
Prior to him doing this, we had gopher, and ftp, and telnet, and usenet and what have you... I suspect if you measure the total amount of traffic sent over this "rather sucky" protocol, it likely dwarfs most of the rest of the traffic on the internet by several orders of magnitude. It's hard to ignore how ubiquitous http is.
NCSA Mosaic changed the way everyone saw the internet almost within a year or two -- it went from being the "Internet" to being the WWW very quickly, and suddenly everybody knew what it was. I remember trying to describe the "internet" to people one month, and then having me tell me about the "web" the next (well, not literally, but damned close).
He also founded the W3C. He's much more the inventor of the world-wide web and a widespread hyper-linking technology that anybody else can claim to be. By one hell of a long distance.
What makes TBL think that most of the people using Twitter or Facebook are interested in reasoned debate? If that's what people were interested in, Twitter would already look like that.
Twitter and Facebook are about sharing your "opinions" and updates with people who largely already agree with you... you think the people following Rush Limbaugh on Twitter have differing points of view from him? Or that a bunch of angsty 16 year-old kids are looking for 'reasoned debate' or anything more than "going to the mall to buy shoes"?
Hell, even Slashdot has become a place where you can make a reasonable argument, in a reasonable tone, and if someone doesn't agree with your conclusions they'll mark you as a troll -- and where most topics quickly devolve into what more or less is an internet screaming match over which of Mac|Windows|Linux users are the biggest doodie heads.
Look at how public discourse happens in Western Democracies -- do you see a whole lot of reasoned debate there? Or screeching opinions and demonizing of dissenting views? Society isn't interested in it, and they're increasingly incapable of it.
Hole in one. Past a certain point, most people just won't care. This is why most people listen to music on cheap, crappy speakers; the gains in paying an extra $X aren't worth it to them. Plus, people are naturally conservative by nature and won't change anything unless they're forced to or see enough of a benefit in doing so.
One further reason (beyond not caring about incremental quality differences) is that "High Definition" has been a moving target. I've stood on the sidelines watching HD and the like since I started buying home theater components somewhere around '98.
HDTV is in its third incarnation, at least. Plus all of the cabling issues like HDMI rendering old TVs irrelevant/obsolete. Now they've got 3D TV which I have no interest in. It's been a moving target, and by the time you've bought into one technology, they move onto the next new thing.
Combine this with the competing standards for HD-DVD and Blu Ray, and now talk of different things... it's like throwing good money after bad. When I buy movies, I buy them on DVD for the most part. A movie that I'm really interested in will be bought with a combo pack that gets me Blu Ray, DVD, and a digital copy I can download to I can have -- the digital copy is actually worth more to me than the Blu Ray.
"Normal" NTSC TVs lasted for decades, completely unchanged. We're not on something like the 4th generation of TVs since about 1998, and when Blu Ray and HD-DVD were fighting for market dominance, it was clear that the writing was on the wall for both of them. Blu Ray was dying the day it was released, because it was never going to get the huge amount of acceptance that DVD did.
I simply refuse to replace my TV, amplifier, DVD player every year or two because some company (usually Sony) decides they've come out with new and improved. And, until HD (or whatever it morphs into) becomes stable, people will continue to determine that they don't really need it, and they won't buy it.
I know someone who bought a $5K TV in the late 90's, by around 2005 or so, it didn't work with the newest things at the resolutions he was promised. His last TV was a $500 42" LCD, and like a lot of people, he's simply gotten off the treadmill of 'leading edge' TVs.
Somehow marketing companies have come to believe we're willing to get all new tech on a fairly regular basis. We're not.
Strangely, though. X-Men, was not an origin story of the X-Men. It gave an origin of Rogue and an origin of Wolverine as "kinda mysterious", but the rest of the X-Men were an established team, with an established villain.
Fair comment... I guess they couldn't possibly hope to do the backstory of all of the X-Men, but they did need to be able to introduce them to us and they had to find a way to do that. However, short of Blade, X-Men was one of the first comic-based movies to really do well in the theaters, and has ushered in a whole decade of pretty good films and even caused Marvel to do their own studio -- as I recall, when the DVD came out for X-Men, its sales actually beat whatever was in the box office that weekend, which was a first.
I'm mostly opposed to a new Spider-man not because I don't want to see the origin again, but because J. K. Simmons did such an awesome J Jonah Jameson and I want to see more of him. Kirsten Dunst is nice to look at too.
I'm kind of inclined to agree... I think I'd rather a 4th Spider man with the cast who had done the first three. I checked on IMDB, and as far as I can tell, there simply isn't a Mary Jane character.
I must say, I'm definitely a little leery about the upcoming Spider Man reboot. I'm just not sure what to expect, and I'm not sure that a do-over and a new telling of the back story is going to entice me enough to go see it in the theater.
If nothing else, it's good to see both Marvel and DC being much more involved in the creation of movies based on their properties... it prevents some Hollywood hack from bastardizing good material.
Small correction. When Google first came out, there were no link farms because Google was the first search engine to rank results based on the quantity and quality of links going to sites. That was their great innovation.
Well, given that when Google came out many searches on Yahoo were completely shit because people were putting 100K worth of crap in meta tags so that anything going for search keywords would hit it.
Those sites might have had some links, and they may or may not have had anything to do with what you searched for. It was all about trying to sell doubleclick ads or install malware. In that sense, I don't see them as being any different from the crap web sites which exist purely to drive link traffic. I don't really see much distinction between what you call a link farm now, and the crap faux traffic sites from the late 90's.
It was all shit designed to drive eyeballs to stuff that wasn't actually relevant, but would be beneficial to the guys who ran it. It doesn't really have anything to do with what you searched on, or only tangentially... but it's only showing up in your search because someone went to great lengths to make sure the search results were poisoned.
Part of the reason we need/end up with origin stories is the film creators are trying to cater to a wider market.
If people didn't know who the X-Men were or how they came to be, they might not be interested in the movie. Targeting geeks who are already 'in the know' and not telling everyone else what is happening doesn't fill cinemas.
I guess the same goes for a Spider Man origins story, though in this case it's more of a "reboot" of the series to start from scratch, sell more tickets, and try to pay big name stars even less money. Which, one might argue is a little cynical and money-grasping.
Besides, it's not like the series reboot and fresh origin story hasn't been a staple of comics for quite some time -- it seems to me we've been through a fair number of incarnations of Spider Man and Iron Man (and Super Man and Bat Man) throughout the years.
As long as it's a good (enough) story, and has the requisite effects, fight scenes, car wrecks, and chicks in spandex... well, they'll probably do fine. Den of Geek comes from a certain perspective of people who would want some more "hard core comic geek" movies -- but studio execs want to maximize the number of ticket buyers.
My sister in law or wife won't want to see some super hero movie that just jumps into the middle without an origin story.
Re:This is not the logic you are looking for
on
Is Sugar Toxic?
·
· Score: 1
Would you like your "whoosh" now, or would you like to save it for later?
Congratulations, you have identified that I constructed a logical fallacy in response to another, and used it ironically.
You're a freakin' genius. Except that you missed the point and the irony.
I think Google have made a massive error here - by saying they can gauge the quality of a website (and its usefulness) algorithmically is arrogant and short-sighted.
WTF? Google has always 'algorithmically gauged the quality and usefulness' of a website. That's what they do. That's what they've always done, and that's what search engines are for.
When they first came out, they were the best search engine because they explicitly pruned out the cruft and the link farms that had polluted all of the other search engines and made them useless. When I found Google, Yahoo and every other search engine got pretty much dropped, because Google actually returned content.
Google has become a multi-billion dollar concern by showing the 'arrogance' of thinking they can get rid of the shit and highlight the useful stuff.
If you truly have original research, and people actually cite you, then hopefully Google's new changes will actually help you and hinder the link farms and scrapers.
But, thinking it "arrogant and short-sighted" for Google to continue to do what they've always done is, well, arrogant and short-sighted. Google has been doing exactly this for over a decade, and continuously trying to make it better. To say that now they shouldn't be doing it because it might lower your page hits is hypocritical.
Personally, I'm all in favor of anything which gets rid of some of the useless damned meta-link sites that don't have anything of value, but exist purely to drive traffic from Google. I don't think such sites should be rewarded. In fact, I think they should be dropped from the search results altogether, which is hopefully what Google is doing here... dropping eHow is a good start.
the kind of cruft that accumulates in XML files (and, by extension, application-specific XML parsers) is analogous to biological evolution, and therefore XML is a phenomenon outside of human control
Ummmm... what?
How is a structured document type, and ideally one which uses DTDs and the like "analogous to biological evolution" and "outside of human control"????
I don't know what kind of mutant XML you've worked with, but the XML I've worked with changes under pretty well-defined rules, which are applied consistently by a program, and which are consistently parse-able by a standard parser.
It's far from some mutating, randomly evolving thing which grows in ways we can't know or predict or that suddenly comes up with some new aspects that nobody could ever have predicted.
Seriously, what kind of XML are you working with? I can't reconcile what you say with any of my experiences with it... you might as well say that computer source code is some alien phenomenon which mutates more like biology and is outside of human control.
I'm not trying to flame you, I'm just completely confused by your assertion. In my experience, XML tends to be normalizable, repeatable, and predictable... in fact, it's largely supposed to be.
Re:This is not the logic you are looking for
on
Is Sugar Toxic?
·
· Score: 2
In fact, I suspect the drinking of pulp-free orange juice over a span of 80-90 years is responsible for the near 100% mortality over that time span.
Nah, lots of people have died who don't drink orange juice.
If it was the oranges, anybody who didn't drink it would still be alive. =)
Pretty much any department head of any hospital I've ever worked with, that's who. Yes, questions would be asked, HIPAA would be considered, the department head would be educated about the VPN, and then would be told "OK, it's your responsibility".
Really? Is that even legal to say "if anything happens it's all his fault and responsibility"?
It seems like there's certain kinds of blame/legal responsibility you can't assign... sounds more like a case of merely giving in and hoping nothing goes horribly wrong. If there was a breech, has anybody actually tried to say "well, it's not my fault, I told him"?
And, if he's using a VPN, that's one thing... opening a firewall port to the outside world is a whole different thing.
I've worked in some government environments where someone could get arrested for putting a non-certified server out onto the general web, especially if it could get to anything else on the network -- depending of course on the kinds of data the network is capable of accessing.
I'd be awfully leery of being told that "laws and policies be damned, we're letting this guy hang his server out the firewall and still access the internal network". This sounds like an awfully casual way to handle something that is covered under a fair few laws.
Exactly which part of a "night and weekend on-call schedule" do you think will contain private health information?
What part of "opening up a firewall port so this department can run a server they aren't willing to let IT have access to but is still on the network" doesn't strike you as completely bypassing security protocols?
Are we to assume this guys is 100% competent and hasn't inadvertently done something monumentally stupid? If this machine is compromised from outside, and used to access private health information... who do you think will be held responsible? The IT department, that's who.
Asking for a hole in the firewall, and a machine which you more or less say "trust me" about is kind of bordering on the insane. If they can't verify and monitor that you've not created a new potential security risk, the prudent thing is to tell you "no".
I can completely see how HIPAA issues would have to be considered before you start punching holes in your firewall on the say so of a department head.
How many of us could walk down the hall to IT and get a port opened up through our firewall so a server we'd ginned up in our department could be accessed from outside? I can say that in almost every organization I've worked in, you would be laughed out of the room unless you could provide a pretty good business case, and demonstrate that you've been through a proper security audit.
There's usually a pretty high-standard to get firewall ports opened up... and in a lot of places, such a server would need to be in the DMZ with absolutely no access back into the secured parts of the network. Hell, I've sat in meetings with 15 different people to try to explain, justify, and document such a change. There are reasons for such things.
I'm pretty sure I read a much more thorough article involving GPL related disputes but, as you say, it might not be sufficient depending on the case, the jurisdiction and the lawyers.
Unfortunately, that seems to be the crux of the problem. Lots of people write what essentially amount to opinion pieces... but depending on the case, the lawyers, and the judge I fear there might be far too many grey areas in which the GPL might be only partly (or not at all) enforced.
It would be nice to think that you could pretty much say "we've proven they're not adhering to the GPL, the GPL is backed with copyright law, therefore they need to be censured" -- I'm just not sure you might not find yourself fighting Microsoft or some other large company for years, only for them to say "OK, we'll release 4 year old code, and we'll give you $200 for your legal defense fund, but we admit no wrong doing".
At which point, you're no further ahead than you are now.:(
Should I give IT access to a server for a service I need that they were incapable of providing?
You know, just because one department screeches loudly that they critically need something which isn't a priority to IT, doesn't make them incapable of providing it.
Like any department, IT has a budget, priorities, and things they've already committed to doing.
This is describing the equivalent of a temper tantrum that says "Waaah, we've decided we want to implement our own calendaring system and you're not dropping everything to do it for it".
Of the thousands of people likely at any hospital, with a bunch of departments and various things... why should this one guy who felt the need to hack together his own server suddenly be the highest priority thing?
Make a business case it, convince people that it should be done and possibly agree to pony up to pay for the funding of it, and get it done through proper channels. Organizations that allow one screeching department to hijack their IT planning do themselves a great disservice.
I emailed IT to ask to allow port 8443 through the hospital firewall to this server. The tech (after asking what port 8443 was for), said he would unblock the port after I provide him with a login account on the machine (though 'I don't need root access'). I was taken aback, and after considering it, I am still leaning toward opposing this request, possibly taking this up the chain.
This sounds stupid... you understand you need to ask IT for permissions to open up a port, but you don't want to allow them access to your machine. Well, why should they allow you access to their network? The poster doesn't elaborate on why he feels IT shouldn't be able to access the machine -- especially since they accept they don't need root.
If you don't trust them with access to the information, you already have bigger problems in that your IT department can probably access all sorts of private information.
Just because you're head of a clinical division, why do you have any expectation of being able to put un-verified machines onto the hospital network? IT has a responsibility to the hospital as a whole, and not just your department. Certainly not if you're talking about punching holes through the firewall.
At a very minimum, they need to be sure that you're not opening up some great big hole in the overall security. Why should you be allowed to connect a machine to their network without some involvement from them?
People going around insisting on installing machines without oversight and adhering to the rules are generally people you need to be very leery of in any organization -- because they insist the rules don't apply to them, and they try very hard to circumvent policies which are in place for a damned good reason.
I see your choices as waiting until they provide you with a solution, or working with them to allow you to install your own solution. Insisting they open up the firewall and then insist they shouldn't be able to access the machine... well, that's just rather short sighted.
Actually, 'socialist software development' would be where you let someone else develop the software, then steal it and put your name on it.
Actually, that's more like outright theft or Stalinism -- we're taking it from whether you like it or not.
The GPL is socialist more like the way a co-op works... participation is voluntary, and is intended to benefit everybody. If you don't want to participate in the co-op, you are free to go elsewhere.
Since you still retain the freedom to not use the GPL'd software in any way, shape, or form... you're free to opt out of the "socialism" part. That doesn't mean you should be able to derive the benefit without playing by the same rules. As a matter of fact, you're explicitly prohibited from that.
Essentially, the GPL is a "social contact" where everybody agrees to play by the same set of rules, meant to provide a level of benefit to everybody. You're all in, or you're all out. But, if you're not helping everyone else out according to the rules, you have no right to expect a share in their labors.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I thought malmanteau was pretty goofy. :-P
It might be a little dusty, and colors have faded a little bit though.
Of course, those old fashioned steam-powered four-digit IDs keep working for quite a while as long as you maintain them properly.
Not like these new-fangled 7-digit IDs, which seem to be pretty defective from the get go. :-P
I live around 1500kms from my parents ... when they bought their computer I told them in no uncertain terms that I could not, and would not, be their tech support.
I've found it has actually caused them to learn enough to use the computer as they see fit, and I don't care what they use for software.
I'm much happier that way. :-P
Oracle? Charge money? Say it aint so!!
That's good to know ... as I said in my other post, for some reason I was thinking they had to remove a bunch of functionality written in Java that Oracle still owned and wouldn't let people keep using ... obviously, I was wrong. I'd been under the impression that LibreOffice had less functionality.
See, "Oracle" and "Free Software" areessentially antithetical concepts ... within weeks of the take over, I remember people saying that they could no longer download the drivers and other free bits of Solaris stuff that used to be readily accessible. Unless you had the very expensive Oarcle support contract, you were SOL. And, in some cases, these were old machines past their formal EOL that were still limping along.
Anything which was free before Oracle is going to be better off forked from Oracle.
Oracle -- One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison. I was actually told that joke by an Oracle employee.
I'm trying to recall ... didn't they strip out a bunch of functionality due to ownership issues?
They might put that back in if they actually did strip it in the first place ... I think not having a bunch of different free/open/libre/emancipated/shiny/awesome-Office suites might make for less confusion over all. It certainly might ensure that people actually get a viable alternative to Microsoft Office.
Because, really ... "honestly mom, you should change to Libre Office, that Open Office from 2 years ago is so passe" ... I just don't see that helping the cause of coming up with a free alternative. I'm not really willing to go there for myself even.
Then you're doing it wrong. =)
"dub dub dub" is how I've said it since about '96 ... "dubya dubya dubya" occasionally ... "double-u double-u double-u", yeah, that's cumbersome and nobody wants to do that.
I knew someone who said "wuh-wuh-wuh" too.
As much as I hate Sony, I don't even directly blame them for all of the HD shenanigans that have taken place. They're not blameless, but others have been involved.
We've gone 480p, 720p, 1080p, and I think I've seen mention of even higher "coming soon".
We've changed connectors (though most of them had adapters), we've added DRM ... we've been through two formats intended to be the successor to DVDs (which was only a few years old to begin with). Now we've got 3D, and increased FPS for movies ...
Blah blah blah ... I just find myself not caring any more. It's all a money grab as companies try to make new crap to sell us.
I don't feel compelled to upgrade, and when I do, it will likely be a trailing edge TV. I certainly won't consider any format that hasn't been on the market for less than two years and with a fair degree of uptake.
In my opinion, HD is one of those "transitional" specs that is always changing. The more they bring out new variations, the more I just stay away from it.
Well, in terms of coining the phrase "World Wide Web", and actually creating http, he certainly had an impact.
Prior to him doing this, we had gopher, and ftp, and telnet, and usenet and what have you ... I suspect if you measure the total amount of traffic sent over this "rather sucky" protocol, it likely dwarfs most of the rest of the traffic on the internet by several orders of magnitude. It's hard to ignore how ubiquitous http is.
NCSA Mosaic changed the way everyone saw the internet almost within a year or two -- it went from being the "Internet" to being the WWW very quickly, and suddenly everybody knew what it was. I remember trying to describe the "internet" to people one month, and then having me tell me about the "web" the next (well, not literally, but damned close).
He also founded the W3C. He's much more the inventor of the world-wide web and a widespread hyper-linking technology that anybody else can claim to be. By one hell of a long distance.
What makes TBL think that most of the people using Twitter or Facebook are interested in reasoned debate? If that's what people were interested in, Twitter would already look like that.
Twitter and Facebook are about sharing your "opinions" and updates with people who largely already agree with you ... you think the people following Rush Limbaugh on Twitter have differing points of view from him? Or that a bunch of angsty 16 year-old kids are looking for 'reasoned debate' or anything more than "going to the mall to buy shoes"?
Hell, even Slashdot has become a place where you can make a reasonable argument, in a reasonable tone, and if someone doesn't agree with your conclusions they'll mark you as a troll -- and where most topics quickly devolve into what more or less is an internet screaming match over which of Mac|Windows|Linux users are the biggest doodie heads.
Look at how public discourse happens in Western Democracies -- do you see a whole lot of reasoned debate there? Or screeching opinions and demonizing of dissenting views? Society isn't interested in it, and they're increasingly incapable of it.
WHAT? I can't hear you. ;-)
One further reason (beyond not caring about incremental quality differences) is that "High Definition" has been a moving target. I've stood on the sidelines watching HD and the like since I started buying home theater components somewhere around '98.
HDTV is in its third incarnation, at least. Plus all of the cabling issues like HDMI rendering old TVs irrelevant/obsolete. Now they've got 3D TV which I have no interest in. It's been a moving target, and by the time you've bought into one technology, they move onto the next new thing.
Combine this with the competing standards for HD-DVD and Blu Ray, and now talk of different things ... it's like throwing good money after bad. When I buy movies, I buy them on DVD for the most part. A movie that I'm really interested in will be bought with a combo pack that gets me Blu Ray, DVD, and a digital copy I can download to I can have -- the digital copy is actually worth more to me than the Blu Ray.
"Normal" NTSC TVs lasted for decades, completely unchanged. We're not on something like the 4th generation of TVs since about 1998, and when Blu Ray and HD-DVD were fighting for market dominance, it was clear that the writing was on the wall for both of them. Blu Ray was dying the day it was released, because it was never going to get the huge amount of acceptance that DVD did.
I simply refuse to replace my TV, amplifier, DVD player every year or two because some company (usually Sony) decides they've come out with new and improved. And, until HD (or whatever it morphs into) becomes stable, people will continue to determine that they don't really need it, and they won't buy it.
I know someone who bought a $5K TV in the late 90's, by around 2005 or so, it didn't work with the newest things at the resolutions he was promised. His last TV was a $500 42" LCD, and like a lot of people, he's simply gotten off the treadmill of 'leading edge' TVs.
Somehow marketing companies have come to believe we're willing to get all new tech on a fairly regular basis. We're not.
Fair comment ... I guess they couldn't possibly hope to do the backstory of all of the X-Men, but they did need to be able to introduce them to us and they had to find a way to do that. However, short of Blade, X-Men was one of the first comic-based movies to really do well in the theaters, and has ushered in a whole decade of pretty good films and even caused Marvel to do their own studio -- as I recall, when the DVD came out for X-Men, its sales actually beat whatever was in the box office that weekend, which was a first.
I'm kind of inclined to agree ... I think I'd rather a 4th Spider man with the cast who had done the first three. I checked on IMDB, and as far as I can tell, there simply isn't a Mary Jane character.
I must say, I'm definitely a little leery about the upcoming Spider Man reboot. I'm just not sure what to expect, and I'm not sure that a do-over and a new telling of the back story is going to entice me enough to go see it in the theater.
If nothing else, it's good to see both Marvel and DC being much more involved in the creation of movies based on their properties ... it prevents some Hollywood hack from bastardizing good material.
Well, given that when Google came out many searches on Yahoo were completely shit because people were putting 100K worth of crap in meta tags so that anything going for search keywords would hit it.
Those sites might have had some links, and they may or may not have had anything to do with what you searched for. It was all about trying to sell doubleclick ads or install malware. In that sense, I don't see them as being any different from the crap web sites which exist purely to drive link traffic. I don't really see much distinction between what you call a link farm now, and the crap faux traffic sites from the late 90's.
It was all shit designed to drive eyeballs to stuff that wasn't actually relevant, but would be beneficial to the guys who ran it. It doesn't really have anything to do with what you searched on, or only tangentially ... but it's only showing up in your search because someone went to great lengths to make sure the search results were poisoned.
Same shit, different decade.
Part of the reason we need/end up with origin stories is the film creators are trying to cater to a wider market.
If people didn't know who the X-Men were or how they came to be, they might not be interested in the movie. Targeting geeks who are already 'in the know' and not telling everyone else what is happening doesn't fill cinemas.
I guess the same goes for a Spider Man origins story, though in this case it's more of a "reboot" of the series to start from scratch, sell more tickets, and try to pay big name stars even less money. Which, one might argue is a little cynical and money-grasping.
Besides, it's not like the series reboot and fresh origin story hasn't been a staple of comics for quite some time -- it seems to me we've been through a fair number of incarnations of Spider Man and Iron Man (and Super Man and Bat Man) throughout the years.
As long as it's a good (enough) story, and has the requisite effects, fight scenes, car wrecks, and chicks in spandex ... well, they'll probably do fine. Den of Geek comes from a certain perspective of people who would want some more "hard core comic geek" movies -- but studio execs want to maximize the number of ticket buyers.
My sister in law or wife won't want to see some super hero movie that just jumps into the middle without an origin story.
Would you like your "whoosh" now, or would you like to save it for later?
Congratulations, you have identified that I constructed a logical fallacy in response to another, and used it ironically.
You're a freakin' genius. Except that you missed the point and the irony.
WTF? Google has always 'algorithmically gauged the quality and usefulness' of a website. That's what they do. That's what they've always done, and that's what search engines are for.
When they first came out, they were the best search engine because they explicitly pruned out the cruft and the link farms that had polluted all of the other search engines and made them useless. When I found Google, Yahoo and every other search engine got pretty much dropped, because Google actually returned content.
Google has become a multi-billion dollar concern by showing the 'arrogance' of thinking they can get rid of the shit and highlight the useful stuff.
If you truly have original research, and people actually cite you, then hopefully Google's new changes will actually help you and hinder the link farms and scrapers.
But, thinking it "arrogant and short-sighted" for Google to continue to do what they've always done is, well, arrogant and short-sighted. Google has been doing exactly this for over a decade, and continuously trying to make it better. To say that now they shouldn't be doing it because it might lower your page hits is hypocritical.
Personally, I'm all in favor of anything which gets rid of some of the useless damned meta-link sites that don't have anything of value, but exist purely to drive traffic from Google. I don't think such sites should be rewarded. In fact, I think they should be dropped from the search results altogether, which is hopefully what Google is doing here ... dropping eHow is a good start.
Ummmm ... what?
How is a structured document type, and ideally one which uses DTDs and the like "analogous to biological evolution" and "outside of human control"????
I don't know what kind of mutant XML you've worked with, but the XML I've worked with changes under pretty well-defined rules, which are applied consistently by a program, and which are consistently parse-able by a standard parser.
It's far from some mutating, randomly evolving thing which grows in ways we can't know or predict or that suddenly comes up with some new aspects that nobody could ever have predicted.
Seriously, what kind of XML are you working with? I can't reconcile what you say with any of my experiences with it ... you might as well say that computer source code is some alien phenomenon which mutates more like biology and is outside of human control.
I'm not trying to flame you, I'm just completely confused by your assertion. In my experience, XML tends to be normalizable, repeatable, and predictable ... in fact, it's largely supposed to be.
Nah, lots of people have died who don't drink orange juice.
If it was the oranges, anybody who didn't drink it would still be alive. =)
Really? Is that even legal to say "if anything happens it's all his fault and responsibility"?
It seems like there's certain kinds of blame/legal responsibility you can't assign ... sounds more like a case of merely giving in and hoping nothing goes horribly wrong. If there was a breech, has anybody actually tried to say "well, it's not my fault, I told him"?
And, if he's using a VPN, that's one thing ... opening a firewall port to the outside world is a whole different thing.
I've worked in some government environments where someone could get arrested for putting a non-certified server out onto the general web, especially if it could get to anything else on the network -- depending of course on the kinds of data the network is capable of accessing.
I'd be awfully leery of being told that "laws and policies be damned, we're letting this guy hang his server out the firewall and still access the internal network". This sounds like an awfully casual way to handle something that is covered under a fair few laws.
What part of "opening up a firewall port so this department can run a server they aren't willing to let IT have access to but is still on the network" doesn't strike you as completely bypassing security protocols?
Are we to assume this guys is 100% competent and hasn't inadvertently done something monumentally stupid? If this machine is compromised from outside, and used to access private health information ... who do you think will be held responsible? The IT department, that's who.
Asking for a hole in the firewall, and a machine which you more or less say "trust me" about is kind of bordering on the insane. If they can't verify and monitor that you've not created a new potential security risk, the prudent thing is to tell you "no".
I can completely see how HIPAA issues would have to be considered before you start punching holes in your firewall on the say so of a department head.
How many of us could walk down the hall to IT and get a port opened up through our firewall so a server we'd ginned up in our department could be accessed from outside? I can say that in almost every organization I've worked in, you would be laughed out of the room unless you could provide a pretty good business case, and demonstrate that you've been through a proper security audit.
There's usually a pretty high-standard to get firewall ports opened up ... and in a lot of places, such a server would need to be in the DMZ with absolutely no access back into the secured parts of the network. Hell, I've sat in meetings with 15 different people to try to explain, justify, and document such a change. There are reasons for such things.
Unfortunately, that seems to be the crux of the problem. Lots of people write what essentially amount to opinion pieces ... but depending on the case, the lawyers, and the judge I fear there might be far too many grey areas in which the GPL might be only partly (or not at all) enforced.
It would be nice to think that you could pretty much say "we've proven they're not adhering to the GPL, the GPL is backed with copyright law, therefore they need to be censured" -- I'm just not sure you might not find yourself fighting Microsoft or some other large company for years, only for them to say "OK, we'll release 4 year old code, and we'll give you $200 for your legal defense fund, but we admit no wrong doing".
At which point, you're no further ahead than you are now. :(
You know, just because one department screeches loudly that they critically need something which isn't a priority to IT, doesn't make them incapable of providing it.
Like any department, IT has a budget, priorities, and things they've already committed to doing.
This is describing the equivalent of a temper tantrum that says "Waaah, we've decided we want to implement our own calendaring system and you're not dropping everything to do it for it".
Of the thousands of people likely at any hospital, with a bunch of departments and various things ... why should this one guy who felt the need to hack together his own server suddenly be the highest priority thing?
Make a business case it, convince people that it should be done and possibly agree to pony up to pay for the funding of it, and get it done through proper channels. Organizations that allow one screeching department to hijack their IT planning do themselves a great disservice.
This sounds stupid ... you understand you need to ask IT for permissions to open up a port, but you don't want to allow them access to your machine. Well, why should they allow you access to their network? The poster doesn't elaborate on why he feels IT shouldn't be able to access the machine -- especially since they accept they don't need root.
If you don't trust them with access to the information, you already have bigger problems in that your IT department can probably access all sorts of private information.
Just because you're head of a clinical division, why do you have any expectation of being able to put un-verified machines onto the hospital network? IT has a responsibility to the hospital as a whole, and not just your department. Certainly not if you're talking about punching holes through the firewall.
At a very minimum, they need to be sure that you're not opening up some great big hole in the overall security. Why should you be allowed to connect a machine to their network without some involvement from them?
People going around insisting on installing machines without oversight and adhering to the rules are generally people you need to be very leery of in any organization -- because they insist the rules don't apply to them, and they try very hard to circumvent policies which are in place for a damned good reason.
I see your choices as waiting until they provide you with a solution, or working with them to allow you to install your own solution. Insisting they open up the firewall and then insist they shouldn't be able to access the machine ... well, that's just rather short sighted.
Actually, that's more like outright theft or Stalinism -- we're taking it from whether you like it or not.
The GPL is socialist more like the way a co-op works ... participation is voluntary, and is intended to benefit everybody. If you don't want to participate in the co-op, you are free to go elsewhere.
Since you still retain the freedom to not use the GPL'd software in any way, shape, or form ... you're free to opt out of the "socialism" part. That doesn't mean you should be able to derive the benefit without playing by the same rules. As a matter of fact, you're explicitly prohibited from that.
Essentially, the GPL is a "social contact" where everybody agrees to play by the same set of rules, meant to provide a level of benefit to everybody. You're all in, or you're all out. But, if you're not helping everyone else out according to the rules, you have no right to expect a share in their labors.
Highly unlikely ... I'm pretty sure very little of what's inside of a Cadbury Egg is naturally occurring compounds. ;-)