I called the agency about some of the categories, especially that one. It turns out they do a lot of grants to agencies like the Red Cross as well (corporate foundation) and they just recycled some of the form. They basically told me to ignore the whole section, after I spent a long time and many phone calls tracking down the numbers.
I spoke with the grant administrator about this one and told them they really needed to redo it. (After getting the grant:^)
You'd be amazed at the number of agencies that do data collection on a typical university. We have a full-time person here at a 750-person college just to do "university research". In other words, research on our university. Dropout rates, percentage of students that graduate in 4 years, current majors, etc etc etc. We've got to be able to produce all of it for a variety of groups, the most important for us being SACS, our accreditation agency.
Our education department just underwent their accreditation review last month. (Seperate and in addition to the SACS review) They had to be able to cough up every single piece of paperwork on every student teacher for the past ten years.
I once wrote a grant that asked, among other questions, the percentage of our students that were international, veterans, gay/lesbian and even disaster victims. I threw up my hands at the last one- I've got not an arsing clue what that even means.
Can't say I've been very impressed with Red Hat's Up2date.
I actually got it to work the other day on one of my machines- it usually hangs on the "resolving dependecies" step, requiring a force quit. It's been months since I updated either of my Linux machines, but I keep hoping, and I got "lucky". Happy that I could actually update, I did the whole hog, and xemacs now dumps core complaining that font resources aren't available. An auto-mounted share is totally corrupted as well- trying to go to / hangs any shell waiting for/backup to actually respond. No idea what else is broken.
It made quite a row when they endorsed John Kerry for President, considering their staunchly fiscally conservative point of view.
I think you actually mean "It made perfect sense that they endorsed John Kerry for President, considering their staunchly fiscally conservative point of view." Bush is a walking fiscal nightmare- no intelligent businessman should support someone whos entire economic policy amounts to "Charge it!"
The Economist's endorsement of Kerry was the most damning commentary on Bush's presidency I've seen. The election cover was sheer brilliance: "The Incompetent or the Incoherent". I love the magazine- it's the last bastion of intelligent conservatism out there.
But then again, don't mind me, I'm just bitter. I didn't leave the Republican party- it left me.
Word count. What a moronic example. Let's imagine I'm a typical Word user vs. a typical Unix user
Word: I don't know how to word count. I can either trawl the menus (Hmm, "Tools" looks possible- gee, option 4 is Word Count- maybe that works) or click Help and type word count and get the #1 option: How to count words. Farking trivial for poo-flinging chimp, perhaps less so for a typical user but having worked help desk, I've never gotten a call about this. I get a nice list of pages, words, characters, paragraphs, etc.
Unix. Well, gurus know wc. If not, how do I find out about it? Perhaps I actually know the "man -k" command. Let's try "man -k word count"- hmm, ~8 pages scroll by. I'm a really smart unix user: "man -k word count |more". Let's look at the entries
#1- BN_add_word (3ssl) - arithmetic functions on BIGNUMS with integers. Hmm- fuck no.
(Omitting much BN badness)
#8- EVP_BytesToKey (3ssl) - password based encryption routine. What the hell? I just want to count words, damnit.
4 screens later, I actually find wc- maybe that will work.
"wc myfile.txt". (And it had better be ASCII text- don't try feeding wc a file in Japanese. Or an HTML file for that matter: Word correctly counts the actual text without the tags, wc won't)
"1624 2282 53168 myfile.txt" Ok, which number do I care about? "man wc" Hmm- probably the second. But hey- it's scriptable. That means it's better, right?
Witness the amazing power of the command line: I can dick around for five minutes trying to figure out what command to use and end up with one vastly inferior for almost all tasks compared to the GUI version.
I love command lines, I really do. (I have to- I admin a couple of Unix boxes) But people vastly underestimate how powerful GUI tools have gotten and how long it takes to learn the arcane syntax of a typical Unix shell.
We have languages such as C++, Python, Java etc now (compared to FORTRAN and COBOL they mentioned in the book) and still programming is sort of a geek thing.
And I'll argue those languages are much more complex than FORTRAN and COBOL. I'm looking at my old F77 book. Any decent programmer could learn the entire language before breakfast. Compare that to C++. Tack on the near-infinite number of libraries you need to do interesting things in Java and C++ (I'm not familiar with Python) and I'm not surprised that programming is still a geek thing.
Consider languages like Flash. You can do very sophisticated things in it without ever typing a line of code. How many web sites out there have goofy Flash movies? Give people easy languages and a lot more will program.
The truth is that no matter how many buffer overflows there may be in Linux, BSD etc, we are not likely to ever have problems with email worms - unless some idiot puts the necessary functionality in place.
Sadly, the necessary functionality is in place for some of it- the idiot user. There're several email worms on Windows that ship the paylod in an encrypted zip, with instructions telling the user: "Unpack this, enter the password XXYYZZ, then run virus.exe." They spread quite well.
The only reason you haven't seen these for Linux is that most current Linux users would toss any message that said "Extract this attachment, type 'chmod 777 virus' then './virus'. Oh yeah, if you have root access do an 'su root' first." But let Linux have 90% of the marketplace and you'll have hordes of users who will do exactly that.
The retina has one of the highest metabolic requirements/mass in the body and all that metabolic machinery requires some mechanism to supply nutrients and remove wastes. This is the function of the RPE and vascular choroid. So, you make the retina essentially transparent and flip the bits with the highest metabolic requirements over to face the tissues that would be very difficult to make transparent and you have a reasonable solution.
Yet the octopus has an eye equally as advanced as ours, and it's wired "correctly".
Serious question: is there some reason why the octopus can do it and we can't?
They are successful for one reason-they market what consumers want. This is what makes them different from the Redmond Giant.
Despite what you hear on/., most people do want Windows. Windows works well enough, it's already installed on the hardware they just bought at BestBuy, it's compatible with every piece of addon hardware on earth, it's reasonably easy to use and it runs the software (read, games) that people want. Consider the two main options
MacOSX. Better than Windows? IMHO, yes. But only one vendor, much more limited hardware and software selection, and unless you're in a major city you're going to be buying everything by mail order.
Linux. Better than Windows? I like it, but there's not a chance in hell I'm going to have my parents run it. Virtually no mainstream software and you're probably going to have to install it yourself.
Guess what-many people have the same contempt for WalMart that you have for Microsoft. WalMart products are crap- poorly made junk stamped out in 3rd world hellhole sweatshops. The average american consumer doesn't care- it's good enough. Ditto Windows.
I was thinking about this. Assuming that SpaceX can really get the FalconV off the ground for $12 million per launch, they can lift over 4 tons into a 200km orbit with plenty of room for a Gemini-sized capsule. Be real, real dumb and I bet you could do a simple capsule for a bit over 20-30 million- ablative heat shield, parachute recovery, etc. There's nothing there that hasn't been done multiple times before with a near perfect success rate.
Then again, I'm just talking out my ass. But I wouldn't put it past Rutan.
I'm a little concerned about the loss of large collections of priceless art due a bombing of a museum. This might be the destruction of the building with a bomb, missle, or aircraft. Or even the loss of the museum when the city around is destroyed by an atomic weapon.
It seems that there should be plans to get, say, a hundred paintings maybe several hundred feet underground within ten minutes should authorities determine that a nuclear event is imminent. Especially for the collections like the National Gallery in Washington DC, the National Gallery in London, the Louvre in Paris, the Uffizi in Florence.
Interestingly, I work at Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg VA, and just got back ten minutes ago from a tour of the Maier Museum with a student discussion group I lead.
The Maier is the 1950's version of exactly what you describe. It was built in 1951 as a bomb shelter for the National Gallery in case of nuclear attack on Washington. There was a fleet of trucks always at the ready outside the gallery to grab the most "valuable" artworks and run them down to the Maier. The building is basically a blockhouse, although it has been spiffed up a lot since.
With advances in technology, it became clear in the 1970s that this just wasn't going to work. (Not to mention Lynchburg has a large number of nuclear industries here like Framatone, so we're a huge target anyway.) They quietly abandoned the whole thing about then and formally gave it up in 2001, but there's still a clause in the contract that we'll take art from the Gallery if there's a major concern. Given the inherent problems of moving very fragile art quickly, I suspect that nobody is really interested in doing something like this.
BTW: The Maier now focuses on American art from RMWC's collection. It's a damn good museum, especially given the size of the college.
Here, we trickle old lab machines to the professors. Old professor machines go to the staff. Old staff machines go to special use or the junkheap. I think we finally retired all of the PII-300s this past year- there might be a few still in labs doing data collection, but that's it.
Great selling point to incoming students- you get better stuff than the profs.
The SciAm guy's idea for removing paper ballots in favor of an audio stream? This makes no sense to me at all- the entire point is that the paper ballot isn't on the computer.
I go vote, I hear the "You voted for John Kerry for President" audio. He's claiming that saving this audio stream is valuable. But I can save and alter any computer data I want- a bit of work (or malicious backdoor code) and the audio stream is nothing but "You voted for Cthulu for President"
Cthulu/Yog-Sothoth in 2004. When you're tired of the lesser of two evils!
Private: When you call to find out why you got released at 50 miles altitude rather than geosync, you're treated to 20 minutes of "Press 1 if need help finding the space elevator, press 2 if you need..." interspersed with a "Best of ABBA" tape. Upon listening to your problem, the help desk staff will ask you to make sure your guidance computer is plugged in. Shortly after this you crash and die horribly. The drone on the other end of the line continues by asking "Is the flight yoke attached?"
Government When you call to find out why you got released at 50 miles altitude rather than geosync from the Halliburton(tm) Space Elevator, your call has a bunch of mysterious clicks in the background before being cut off entirely. After you die horribly in the crash, it's announced that you were a terrorist who crashed the elevator deliberatly. The president goes on to bomb Syria, even though you'd never even been there.
I'm a chemist by background, not a virologist, so I can't judge which step is the real problem. I suspect it's the last step. You can't inject a (potentially) lethal virus into humans just to see if they sicken and die, and HIV won't infect anything else. (Chimps can get similar viruses, but IIRC HIV will infect them at a low level but not do much else.)
However, take everything from that site with an oceanload of salt. Duseberg is utterly convinced that HIV doesn't cause AIDS despite a mountain of evidence that it does. (See http://www.skeptica.dk/arkiv_us/027_hemmingsen3.ht m) He's gone beyond healthy skepticism well into the realm of what I think of as evil: he's lobbying countries such as South Africa which have major AIDS problems to ignore almost everything we know about stopping the spread of the disease. (http://www.cnn.com/2000/US/04/21/aids4_21.a.tm/)
After 20 years and I'm guessing millions if not billions of dollars in research have not even provided any kind of explanation of AIDS nor has the virus even been isolated.
Hunh? The HIV virus has been known since the 1980s. It's fully sequenced and numerous drugs have been designed based on the life cycle of the virus. I did a tiny amount of work on the protease inhibitor Crixivan back when I worked at Merck in the late 1980s. Merck had a crash program to crystallize HIV-1 protease to get the structure, followed by many attempts using computational chemistry to get an effective inhibitor. (I was a lab drone testing bioavailability of the wonder drug proposals they created.)
Just for fun, here's a photo of the virus: http://www.avert.org/pictures/hivvirus6.htm.
It's named for Leland Stanford *Jr*, his son who died (of TB?) at a young age.
Look at the seal sometime: it's Leland Stanford Junior University. As a Stanford grad school alum, I always get a kick out of that- I got my doctorate from a junior college!
Reprising a comment I made yesterday, at least IE can render/. correctly. Mozilla has serious problems- probably 50% of the page loads I get on/. have the margins messed up, the text black on black, or just a blank screen.
Yeah, yeah, you don't see this problem, it's my configuration, etc. I've seen it in every version since 0.5, on multiple machines, on multiple OSs. It's the only site Firefox can't render correctly. There have been times I've just used IE on/. since I don't want the hassle
I have to admit I find it ironic that the premier "Open Source rules, MS drools!" site works perfectly in IE and needs 2-3 refreshes to even manage to render poorly in Firefox. Black on black text and margin errors and blank screens, oh my.
There's nothing like being unable to read the latest IE bashing thread because Firefox can't render the/. page.
If there's a problem with their webpage(there is, an outdated sniffer script) so it doesn't render properly in Opera, I don't call the helpdesk, I email the web admin with the information about the script being broken, and where they can find an updated version of that script(by the script developer) ONCE, then I just have proxomitron rewrite(or spoof IE in this instance) the page on the fly from then on.
Hmm. As I've mentioned before, I run our (Open source) course management system for the campus. I have *never* received a bug report like that- I've virtually never received a coherent report at all. I did get one the other day where the faculty member copied the error and told me what browser she was running- bliss! I've gotten another this semester that was enough to pinpoint the error. That's been pretty much it for a few months- the rest are at the level of "The portal's broken. (It's not a portal...) When I went there I got a wierd error message on my internet. Fix it!" (Although I'm not including the typical spelling errors.)
Even better are the mysterious errors I hear about that prevent students from downloading reading assignments and uploading papers the day they are due. There seem to be an awful lot of those. I never seem to hear about them except from the faculty when students didn't turn something in. Guess who gets blamed? (Actually, most faculty are pretty wise to this- it's a small subset I hear from.)
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I got a serious chuckle out of it, then sadly read the followups...
I spoke with the grant administrator about this one and told them they really needed to redo it. (After getting the grant :^)
You'd be amazed at the number of agencies that do data collection on a typical university. We have a full-time person here at a 750-person college just to do "university research". In other words, research on our university. Dropout rates, percentage of students that graduate in 4 years, current majors, etc etc etc. We've got to be able to produce all of it for a variety of groups, the most important for us being SACS, our accreditation agency.
Our education department just underwent their accreditation review last month. (Seperate and in addition to the SACS review) They had to be able to cough up every single piece of paperwork on every student teacher for the past ten years.
I once wrote a grant that asked, among other questions, the percentage of our students that were international, veterans, gay/lesbian and even disaster victims. I threw up my hands at the last one- I've got not an arsing clue what that even means.
I actually got it to work the other day on one of my machines- it usually hangs on the "resolving dependecies" step, requiring a force quit. It's been months since I updated either of my Linux machines, but I keep hoping, and I got "lucky". Happy that I could actually update, I did the whole hog, and xemacs now dumps core complaining that font resources aren't available. An auto-mounted share is totally corrupted as well- trying to go to / hangs any shell waiting for /backup to actually respond. No idea what else is broken.
It made quite a row when they endorsed John Kerry for President, considering their staunchly fiscally conservative point of view.
I think you actually mean "It made perfect sense that they endorsed John Kerry for President, considering their staunchly fiscally conservative point of view." Bush is a walking fiscal nightmare- no intelligent businessman should support someone whos entire economic policy amounts to "Charge it!"
The Economist's endorsement of Kerry was the most damning commentary on Bush's presidency I've seen. The election cover was sheer brilliance: "The Incompetent or the Incoherent". I love the magazine- it's the last bastion of intelligent conservatism out there.
But then again, don't mind me, I'm just bitter. I didn't leave the Republican party- it left me.
"apropos count words |wc -l"
73
wc is the 2nd to last on that list of 73, so it actually does show up on the screen if you omit the wc. Awesome! Really user friendly, that.
Word: I don't know how to word count. I can either trawl the menus (Hmm, "Tools" looks possible- gee, option 4 is Word Count- maybe that works) or click Help and type word count and get the #1 option: How to count words. Farking trivial for poo-flinging chimp, perhaps less so for a typical user but having worked help desk, I've never gotten a call about this. I get a nice list of pages, words, characters, paragraphs, etc.
Unix. Well, gurus know wc. If not, how do I find out about it? Perhaps I actually know the "man -k" command. Let's try "man -k word count"- hmm, ~8 pages scroll by. I'm a really smart unix user: "man -k word count |more". Let's look at the entries
#1- BN_add_word (3ssl) - arithmetic functions on BIGNUMS with integers. Hmm- fuck no. (Omitting much BN badness)
#8- EVP_BytesToKey (3ssl) - password based encryption routine. What the hell? I just want to count words, damnit.
4 screens later, I actually find wc- maybe that will work.
"wc myfile.txt". (And it had better be ASCII text- don't try feeding wc a file in Japanese. Or an HTML file for that matter: Word correctly counts the actual text without the tags, wc won't) "1624 2282 53168 myfile.txt" Ok, which number do I care about? "man wc" Hmm- probably the second. But hey- it's scriptable. That means it's better, right?
Witness the amazing power of the command line: I can dick around for five minutes trying to figure out what command to use and end up with one vastly inferior for almost all tasks compared to the GUI version.
I love command lines, I really do. (I have to- I admin a couple of Unix boxes) But people vastly underestimate how powerful GUI tools have gotten and how long it takes to learn the arcane syntax of a typical Unix shell.
We have languages such as C++, Python, Java etc now (compared to FORTRAN and COBOL they mentioned in the book) and still programming is sort of a geek thing.
And I'll argue those languages are much more complex than FORTRAN and COBOL. I'm looking at my old F77 book. Any decent programmer could learn the entire language before breakfast. Compare that to C++. Tack on the near-infinite number of libraries you need to do interesting things in Java and C++ (I'm not familiar with Python) and I'm not surprised that programming is still a geek thing.
Consider languages like Flash. You can do very sophisticated things in it without ever typing a line of code. How many web sites out there have goofy Flash movies? Give people easy languages and a lot more will program.
The truth is that no matter how many buffer overflows there may be in Linux, BSD etc, we are not likely to ever have problems with email worms - unless some idiot puts the necessary functionality in place.
Sadly, the necessary functionality is in place for some of it- the idiot user. There're several email worms on Windows that ship the paylod in an encrypted zip, with instructions telling the user: "Unpack this, enter the password XXYYZZ, then run virus.exe." They spread quite well.
The only reason you haven't seen these for Linux is that most current Linux users would toss any message that said "Extract this attachment, type 'chmod 777 virus' then './virus'. Oh yeah, if you have root access do an 'su root' first." But let Linux have 90% of the marketplace and you'll have hordes of users who will do exactly that.
While I know you're joking, some of the folks at JPL might take issue about getting grief for screwing up missions.
Yet the octopus has an eye equally as advanced as ours, and it's wired "correctly".
Serious question: is there some reason why the octopus can do it and we can't?
They are successful for one reason-they market what consumers want. This is what makes them different from the Redmond Giant.
Despite what you hear on /., most people do want Windows. Windows works well enough, it's already installed on the hardware they just bought at BestBuy, it's compatible with every piece of addon hardware on earth, it's reasonably easy to use and it runs the software (read, games) that people want. Consider the two main options
Guess what-many people have the same contempt for WalMart that you have for Microsoft. WalMart products are crap- poorly made junk stamped out in 3rd world hellhole sweatshops. The average american consumer doesn't care- it's good enough. Ditto Windows.
Then again, I'm just talking out my ass. But I wouldn't put it past Rutan.
I'm a little concerned about the loss of large collections of priceless art due a bombing of a museum. This might be the destruction of the building with a bomb, missle, or aircraft. Or even the loss of the museum when the city around is destroyed by an atomic weapon. It seems that there should be plans to get, say, a hundred paintings maybe several hundred feet underground within ten minutes should authorities determine that a nuclear event is imminent. Especially for the collections like the National Gallery in Washington DC, the National Gallery in London, the Louvre in Paris, the Uffizi in Florence.
Interestingly, I work at Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg VA, and just got back ten minutes ago from a tour of the Maier Museum with a student discussion group I lead.
The Maier is the 1950's version of exactly what you describe. It was built in 1951 as a bomb shelter for the National Gallery in case of nuclear attack on Washington. There was a fleet of trucks always at the ready outside the gallery to grab the most "valuable" artworks and run them down to the Maier. The building is basically a blockhouse, although it has been spiffed up a lot since.
With advances in technology, it became clear in the 1970s that this just wasn't going to work. (Not to mention Lynchburg has a large number of nuclear industries here like Framatone, so we're a huge target anyway.) They quietly abandoned the whole thing about then and formally gave it up in 2001, but there's still a clause in the contract that we'll take art from the Gallery if there's a major concern. Given the inherent problems of moving very fragile art quickly, I suspect that nobody is really interested in doing something like this.
BTW: The Maier now focuses on American art from RMWC's collection. It's a damn good museum, especially given the size of the college.
Great selling point to incoming students- you get better stuff than the profs.
I go vote, I hear the "You voted for John Kerry for President" audio. He's claiming that saving this audio stream is valuable. But I can save and alter any computer data I want- a bit of work (or malicious backdoor code) and the audio stream is nothing but "You voted for Cthulu for President"
Cthulu/Yog-Sothoth in 2004. When you're tired of the lesser of two evils!
Government When you call to find out why you got released at 50 miles altitude rather than geosync from the Halliburton(tm) Space Elevator, your call has a bunch of mysterious clicks in the background before being cut off entirely. After you die horribly in the crash, it's announced that you were a terrorist who crashed the elevator deliberatly. The president goes on to bomb Syria, even though you'd never even been there.
However, take everything from that site with an oceanload of salt. Duseberg is utterly convinced that HIV doesn't cause AIDS despite a mountain of evidence that it does. (See http://www.skeptica.dk/arkiv_us/027_hemmingsen3.ht m) He's gone beyond healthy skepticism well into the realm of what I think of as evil: he's lobbying countries such as South Africa which have major AIDS problems to ignore almost everything we know about stopping the spread of the disease. (http://www.cnn.com/2000/US/04/21/aids4_21.a.tm/)
After 20 years and I'm guessing millions if not billions of dollars in research have not even provided any kind of explanation of AIDS nor has the virus even been isolated.
Hunh? The HIV virus has been known since the 1980s. It's fully sequenced and numerous drugs have been designed based on the life cycle of the virus. I did a tiny amount of work on the protease inhibitor Crixivan back when I worked at Merck in the late 1980s. Merck had a crash program to crystallize HIV-1 protease to get the structure, followed by many attempts using computational chemistry to get an effective inhibitor. (I was a lab drone testing bioavailability of the wonder drug proposals they created.)
Just for fun, here's a photo of the virus: http://www.avert.org/pictures/hivvirus6.htm.
Look at the seal sometime: it's Leland Stanford Junior University. As a Stanford grad school alum, I always get a kick out of that- I got my doctorate from a junior college!
Yeah, yeah, you don't see this problem, it's my configuration, etc. I've seen it in every version since 0.5, on multiple machines, on multiple OSs. It's the only site Firefox can't render correctly. There have been times I've just used IE on /. since I don't want the hassle
Until then, just resize the font on the page when it renders badly... and boom! fixed!
Umm, no. This fixes some of the more obvious errors, but not the complete blank screens and black-on-black text persist through all sorts of changes.
Someone needs to give Taco a boot to the head every day until he fixes this.
There's nothing like being unable to read the latest IE bashing thread because Firefox can't render the /. page.
If there's a problem with their webpage(there is, an outdated sniffer script) so it doesn't render properly in Opera, I don't call the helpdesk, I email the web admin with the information about the script being broken, and where they can find an updated version of that script(by the script developer) ONCE, then I just have proxomitron rewrite(or spoof IE in this instance) the page on the fly from then on.
Hmm. As I've mentioned before, I run our (Open source) course management system for the campus. I have *never* received a bug report like that- I've virtually never received a coherent report at all. I did get one the other day where the faculty member copied the error and told me what browser she was running- bliss! I've gotten another this semester that was enough to pinpoint the error. That's been pretty much it for a few months- the rest are at the level of "The portal's broken. (It's not a portal...) When I went there I got a wierd error message on my internet. Fix it!" (Although I'm not including the typical spelling errors.)
Even better are the mysterious errors I hear about that prevent students from downloading reading assignments and uploading papers the day they are due. There seem to be an awful lot of those. I never seem to hear about them except from the faculty when students didn't turn something in. Guess who gets blamed? (Actually, most faculty are pretty wise to this- it's a small subset I hear from.)