Often, the company actually calling you has been outsourced one or more levels so it's not enough to get on that particular telemarketing company's no-call list. You also have to get on the no call list of the company or companies they are representing. If you've ever tried this, then you know that you often have to talk to one of the shift managers or one of their managers.
Be sure to get the relevant names of the companies, date and time of the call and one or two other tidbits: some states offer $400-$500 fine for offending companies that call back.
The US already lost 60% of it's corn (maize) crop in the early 1970's, That lesson was learned,at least for a short while.
Cloning versus sexual reproduction initially favors the clones, then are eventually no longer suited to the environment, preditors, or disease. It's a given and any planing, economic, or otherwise must take this into consideration or lose big time.
You even see it in several animals like some species of fish and snails, perhaps others. But with the animals, especially, disease usually wipes out most of the clones.
Corporations may lose out, but the rise of interest among the general population in "heirloom" produce is an indication that geneticly diverse crops are not gone yet.
Unfortunately, a by product of genetically modified crops is often a very inbred gene pool because not enough generations have gone by to ensure wide genetic diversity.
With the corn, if it's made a priority, it's quite possible to maintain high yields and a varied gene pool. However, it's still corn. I'm sure other crops can be used for plastic using similar proceses. There's probably quite a few tons of cellulose in the stalks and chaff left over from a nation's yearly wheat, oat, rice or barley harvest.
The mushroom method (keep 'em in the dark and feed 'em shit) is a classic business strategy.
By meeting with the schools one on one, none of them know how bad a deal they're getting. That way each school can pay more than the normal purchase price, but go away thinking they got a special discount.
It also makes it easier to apply pressure to weak administrators (redundant) to knuckle under.
It's a kind of variation on divide-and-conquer. The schools need to stick to gether on this one, or at the least keep the process in the open so they know if they're being offered a special price or a special price.
You can see most of the original wirefeeds on usenet, Clarinet to be specific (clari.*) Most newspapers and newspaper-like entities use these feeds as the basis for their articles. Sometimes, they take 99% and only change the first or last lines. Other times, they put such a spin on the story that it barely resembles the original.
The big deal with the web is that they can adjust the spin after the article is not only published, but after it is cited / referenced.
Citing online resources is just like citing fixed media in that you're providing a pointer back to the original material, but with one difference: The information at the end of the pointer can change so be sure to add the date of access. Keep a screen shot if the info. you need is likely to disappear.
It was very difficult, even under Stalin, to retroactively edit fixed media. Mostly because of the large number and wide geaographic distribution of the physical items. With an online news source, there is usually only one physical server/server pool + backup to re-edit / crack / wipe / burn up. With a newspaper which has a small distribution, there are tens of thousands of copies to hunt down and burn.
When people started making custom terrain for Doom, some one I knew made a Doom model of several parts of the university he was at. After having tried it for only about 20 minutes, and then visiting the location in the model, it really increased awareness about the floor plans in regards to short cuts, avenues of approach, bottlenecks and ambuse positions. The same went for the others that tried it it.
<bs rate="+3">In regards to military applications for "first person shooters", it is a good occasional compliment to regular training, especially in urban areas. The alternative is closing down the building and running around, but carefully, so as not to break or scratch the walls or furniture, in a small part of the building + lot. Running field exercises is slow, expensive, and disruptive. In a simulation it's just fine to break windows and doors as needed and you have the entire building to work with.</bs>
As far as civilian applications go, I'd think that the travel industry would really keen on this. With such simulated environments, travel could really be more comfortable and more efficient by experiencing a simulation of your route in advance. The second time you have to find your way around an airport, trainstation, or city center is always much easier and faster compared to the first time.
There's really not any excuse to send an attachment theses days, except to propagate e-pathogens (virii, worms, trojans) or to mail bomb someone. Neither are legitimate uses of mail.
Great cross-platform file sharing systems exist for file sharing. Netware, DCE and OpenAFS are examples. These can easily handle any internal file sharing need, and some external needs. For sharing files outside, many easy solutions or work arounds can be made that don't require attachments. Some people even say that MS-Exchange could do this.
Regardless of how it is set up, once you have platform independent file sharing in place, all attachments can be filtered out. Then there's no doubt -- your shop could not be spreading Klez or other pathogens.
Note that keeping files on the server also simplifies concurrent editing and version control.
Staff there should probably gracefully find jobs elsewhere. If the management fails to do maintain a cash buffer for lean times, asks for pay concessions and then gives themselves a bonus, then the priorities are all wrong and it'll happen again.
Too bad, but a screw up like that should require the dismissal of a sizable bit of management -- without economic parachutes.
I'll be controversial and suggest that a fair number of companies could probably have squeaked by last year's down turn were it not for being bled dry by managment salaries and perks.
Staff, as mentioned in another post, themselves should always try to keep 4-6 months in the "oh shit" fund.
Currently Microsoft is trying to get ormaintain a death grip in three markets: applications, operating systems, and internet services. If Microsoft were to be disbanded, this would suddenly free these three markets and other companies both new and old would quickly fill any gaps. Look at the post IBM monopoly. Or look even the boom in film and
cameras once the secret of color film processing was available (wrested from Kodak by those clever Eastern block spies).
Now, look how polished SuSe, Mandrake, and RedHat have become in just the last two years. Look at how many business make big money using Apache. Look at how manybusinesses are doing well using Linux and
other kernels for embedded apps.
The article reports that the MS party line is to hold back on or prevent interoperability and connectivity. These are two keys to ecnomic growth in the IT-sector imparing them is to go against a free market. The MS execs are even down to using weasle words and phrases, much like big tobacco companies did when they were in the hot seat.
Trials are about facts. Reading this and other articles about the punishment phase of the trial and focusing only on statements of fact, striking all the "I {do | do not} believe"-type statements, leaves very little doubt about the benefit of a massive breakup. Odds are that breaking up or dissolving the company would actually create an economic boom.
The theft in Santiago makes a good point about physical security and single point of failure.
I stayed at a national record keeping agency a few years ago which got hit by thieves a few weeks before I arrived. In the areas they hit, they got every last CPU and piece of RAM and were out again before the alarm was respondend to.
Unlike the one in Santiago, this organization was very lucky that none of the hard drives were damaged or taken so there was no loss of working data, only expense and disruption of work. However, the building was sufficiently compartmentalized that they could only clean out a few administrative departments. They were already the model of security and efficiency for their primary charges. None of that is easily threatened by outsiders.
However, after that they got religion about backups for even working material.
Fires, roof leaks, or clumsy people near the servers could have a similiar effect.
I saw a hands free mouse a few years ago at a research fair for accessi/handicap technology. It was a sweat band like apparatus with three electrodes to collect signals from the brain and a wire going down to a largish box that did heavy signal processing. It was an impressive demo even if movement was a bit shaky. The demonstrator tended to over shoot the target quite often, especially when he tried to talk at the same time. With a little practice or concentration he could get quite smooth control.
According to the APA and AMA, viewing violence causes violence. It's now established and not controversial except when it comes to ratings.
See reports like "Big World, Small Screen", 1992, from the APA. Or books like "On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning
to Kill in War and Society", by David Grossman, published by Little, Brown and Co, 1995.
As PD points out, "people who are busy fucking don't accidentally pick up a gun and shoot their neighbors in the process!" The main problem with pr0n is the potential for social isolation and commodification of humans.
Schipol (Amsterdam) and Kastrup (Copenhagen) seem to have done this best that I've seen. Arlanda (Stockholm), Ventemoen/Gardemoen (Olso) have seen the importance and made special lines just to the airport. Often way faster than than taking a car, unless it's a cab or you're getting a lift. Get on the train from just about anywhere and you're set.
This type of connectivity with the airport could really have helped out places like Detroit and L.A.
The airport, casinos, and some of the major hotels would be obvious nodes for the rail network. For those fixated on increasing economic growth through 'security' measures, some of the airlines could offer check-in at some of the more prestigious hotels or conference centers. This would be an obvious attraction for tourists and would allow the airlines extra time to scan the bags and back up their 'profiling' with hard data.
In Chicago, many rails came years before many of the buildings. I think there the rail companies did it the other way around and sold air rights to put buildings over the tracks.
Monorail's a good option when you don't have the budget to bore tunnels or buy up surface real estate.
What's the geology like there? Maybe they could hire Norwegians to bore tunnels.;) (Subway / tube / underground sure, but how about "Casino Moria"?)
I'm not sure how Toshiba can make good on selling milling technology to both sides in the cold war.
Propellers are obsolete anyway now, but it's the thought that counts.
The AMA may be a more powerful (i.e. better funded) lobbying group than the the NRA. It has also maintained a lower profile and slightly better image than the NRA.
Either way, you've hit the nail on the head: are people ready to pay a real membership fee and "vote geek" to address important techological issuess? In light of the the 1 dollar == 1 vote reality of the current legislative process, it's probably time.
It's a very interesting article, but it came out in February. That aside it's good that some of these are getting mainstream press.
Protocols to mention besides OpenLDAP and OAI
are
Whois++
and Z39.50.
OAI actually is transported over HTTP. You could do the same with EAD or others.
Projects which implemented Z39.50 for the purposes of interoperability are ONE and ONE-2,
EUROPAGATE,
Desire and Desire II,
DECOMATE and DECOMATE II,
and
Renardus
just to touch the surface. Don't forget OHIOLINK...
Another other older, but interesting, metadata activity have been SGML MARC, and the corresponding XML MARC.
Those that are interested in more detailed reading can check out the Nordic Metadata Project, Nordic Metadata Project II, which studied the practical implications of cross browsing multiple databases and especially the use of Dublic Core. Even if you get agreement on the protocol and data standard, cross searching's not as easy as it sounds. One of the tools is the Dublin Core Metadata Temple (get it while you still can).
The BYTE article was exciting to see again and could have benefited further from pointing out the relative ease of use of Dublic Core.
OAI uses unqualified Dublic Core, SAFARI uses qualified Dublin Core to create an up to date index over academic research in Sweden. Shoot, since it already uses some META tags, you could even tweak htdig to use Dublic Core on your own site for those high precision searches.
With the interest in structured data (XML?) maybe well see some sites serving up not just HTML with Dublic Core, but maybe even Docbook or even TEI / TEI Lite. There are great tools for converting from Docbook to HTML, PDF, RTF, etc. and AbiWord and Kword already have partial support for docbook. If there were more, then we could see some real changes on searching the web. Coding for SGML is more difficult, so the obvious choice would be to start from Docbook XML.
BYTE's circuit cellar had an article in the mid 1980's where the columnist (Steve Ciarcia?) was locked out of his house with food in the oven. He had to get back in without a key before it set off the smoke detector which would auto dial the fire department. The various intrusion alarms would auto dial the police. He and a neighbor crawled in since his the external motion sensors had an exemption for dog-like objects.
These analysis programs are interesting research, but it'll be years before there's any thing even close to being have picking up enough threats and few enough false positives to be considered being in production.
Besides, by the time physical movement is visible, the target / victim has already been selected, monitored, and assessed by the attacker. Proactive measures are much more effective than reactive. Look at the PC virus industry for detailed case studies in prevention versus cure.
The question of why the patches are not applied might lead to some very interesting revelations. Not infrequently are microsofts patches difficult to install. Some have not even fixed the original problem. Some have introduced additional security problems. Not a few affect or break third party apps.
Regardless of the source of the patch, it is essential to test it before putting it into production. With OSS / Free Software. You can usually create a functional duplicate of the production machine on some spare hardware and test and tweak the patch thouroughly before setting it loose in a production environment.
This can't be done legally with expensive and restrictive licenses, unless you pay for and maintain a full set of duplicate licenses. Even with a fat budget, there's still the delay of days or weeks while bosses or purchasing departments sign off on things.
Extremadura is considering some of the real costs like training, but I'll take your point a little further.
The costs of diverse and incompatible documents (e.g. different versions of MS-Office) is still high even if you're in a shop where the management buys into single platform (e.g. All-Shall-Be-Microsoft) myth. Take MS-Word, the new versions usually have difficulty with the next most recent version until the patch / upgrade is installed. It often takes a bit of gymnastics to make the conversion successfully especially if you're an early adopter. Powerpoint is even worse. Quite often only one or two presentations will fit on a 3.5" floppy, so that means bringing two or three floppies to conferencs to make sure I can use the conference locale's version of PowerPoint.
Here comes the cost: Imagine nearly everyone in a 120 person organization learning that the hard way, either for their own work or by trying to help some one else. The actual salary is often only 50% of what the employer has to shell out per employee.
It gets more expensive with e-mail attachements.
It used to be whenever I got an MS-Office document as an attachment, it was a virus from a stranger. Everyone I actually knew, back then, used file sharing. Now that most shops don't have file sharing, these must be sorted by hand, at least in a MS-Windows environment.
And that's just the cost now. 3 or 4 years from now you have the added issue of trying to identify and read the old formats. So in reality the interoperability part the oft-cited cost benefit of running all MS products hasn't been there.
Two solutions: use more generic file formats (e.g. RTF and Docbook) and stable file sharing that support clients on multiple platforms (e.g. Netware or OpenAFS, to pick two). Operating costs and efficientcy costs are always going to be with any software. The trick is to minimize the work needed and to concentrate any extra effort on as few as possible.
The New Scientist article mentioned has this warning:
A similar [to the DMCA] piece of European legislation called the European Union Copyright Directive is being prepared.
While folks in the States are busy contacting congressmen about the potential government mandate to bail out failed MS products, those in the EU must deal with EUCD. Unfortunately, this new arrangement of states in Europe appears to have been more of a power and money grab than a democratization, so it's not.
Where is a list of how citizens should contact their EU representatives?
In addition to putting sensitive information into the hands of convicted criminals (aka MSFT), the weakness of MS- Passport's security makes it at soft target for "terrrorist activities".
Again, MS-Passport cannot be made secure even in theory. There are fatal errors in MS's implementation in additional to the fundamental problems with the basic idea.
David P. Kormann and Aviel D. Rubin,
"
Risks of the Passport Single
Signon Protocol [avirubin.com],"
Computer Networks, Elsevier Science Press,
volume 33, pages 51-58, 2000. (accessed 21 sep 2001)
http://avirubin.com/passport.html
Ebook and related technologies may not, to say it politely, be mature or ready for public usage. Whatever. Paper still is a superior display medium to LCD and CRT. I haven't used ebook format -- too many problems. I have cached and read books on notebook computers, but paper backs are easier, lighter, more portable, don't run out of power, etc..
The printed book or magazine is still a superior format to web pages, PDF, or ebook when it comes to novels.
How about a more practical approach to electronic books? Audio. Audio technologies are quite good and, as shown by the popularity of Napster and Napster-like entities and by the abundance of jukebox software, quite common.
Most libraries and many book stores already have audio recordings of books on cassette tape or occasionally on audio CD.
These are good for long commutes and road trips. Now that nearly everyone has Ogg/MP3 players, how about books in Ogg?
The bugs in the methodology can be worked out by reading public books. Nice voices can be had by hiring people from the local theater, radio staion or opera more cheaply than the big names like James Earl Jones or (the late) Sam Kinnison.
According to the eWeek article, the propietary MS replacement for digest authentication doesn't work with proxies.
the Microsoft-proprietary integrated Windows authentication, which
provides wire-level security similar to digest authentication. However,
this works only with Microsoft Web browsers and Web servers. It cannot be
used if Web clients send requests through a proxy server, which digest
authentication can handle.
This adds to the pressures for large enterprises to drop IE altogether. If the security and stability issues don't push them, then the functionality will. Large corporations and universities generally have enough technical staff to maintain their own modded software, like customizations for Mozilla. Or enough cash to get large site licenses, like for Opera. It's stupid stuff like that which will start to wean even diehard MS shops off of IE and, perhaps, MS-Windows, since IE is one of MS's hooks to try to get into the server room.
At the very least, more users are going to try
Mozilla and Opera. Compuserve would do well to consider Opera, too. The "Continue browsing where I left off" feature alone probably saved me a few hours a week back when I ran Win95/98 and WinNT.
BIBTEX and MARC are two format for managing bibliographic data. But if you're thinking of rolling your own reference manager, then you'll quickly find out that it's not just a flat file and then you'll also need to integrate it with your data source and with your editor/wordprocessor.
If you just want to import citations, the Z39.50 search and retrieval protocol is the way to import from yor library catalog and many online databases. Indexdata has number of multiplatform tools that you can use, such as YAZ (a z39.50 client) and PHPYAZ.
Three commercial packages import from Z39.50 sources nicely (Bookwhere, Procite and Endnote)
both Procite and Endnot work well at managing your footnotes during workprocessing, taking care of numbering and layout (e.g. APA or Chicago Manual of Style, etc.).
If you want something under GPL and more oriented to managing web sites and other Internet resources, then you may want to try hypatia. You'll have to ask special for it, but it's available. Here are the parts I've seen so far:
Web-based interface, both end users and maintainers.
Fully multi-lingual, including both interface and content. (It is very easy to add another language to the interfaces. Right now English and Spanish are complete, Norwegian and Finnish are being translated.)
Support for Unicode (Which means you're free to add interfaces in or
).
Useable on many different platforms, including Linux, Unix,
and Windows.
Individual installations can exchange records, allowing
federated content and service providers to work together
seamlessly. (Haven't tried it yet.)
Compatible with relevant standards, including MARC, Dublin Core, and the
Networked Reference standard currently under development by NISO.
Special features for digital collections, such as automatic
URL checking.
Authority control over names (e.g. People and Organizations).
Uses perl/MySQL/javascript
You can see the end user interface in production at the IPL in the serials, newspapers, or online texts collections. The collection managment interfaces are even nicer and very useful. I'm sure it can be tweaked for data on legacy media as well.
This is one of the severe downsides to group projects. You have two choices:
A) Make sure that everyone in the group participates and at least understands all the components of the project. Of course, this general means you'll get a crappy grade.
or
B) Divide the key tasks among the one or two skilled people and send the outhers out to buy coffee or to make the poster for the presentation.
You can't get much clearer than well commented text. However, text is more comfortable for some, GUIs for others.
GUIs do need to be well thought out and have the same functionality as the underlying tools they are shielding.
I've had to learn Linux administration the hard way -- no comp sci background -- but I find Apache one of the easier programs to configure and understand.
Though many linux programs are starting to get GUIs, I find the speed and flexibility of the text files unbeatable. You can't get much clearer than well commented text. However, text is more comfortable for some, GUIs for others.
If GUI based configuration tools can serve as a transitory step to allow users the option of learning more about the underlying tools, that would be a good thing. But even if that transition isn't made, both interfaces need to stay up to date with all functionality.
Slashdot Mirror
Be sure to get the relevant names of the companies, date and time of the call and one or two other tidbits: some states offer $400-$500 fine for offending companies that call back.
Cloning versus sexual reproduction initially favors the clones, then are eventually no longer suited to the environment, preditors, or disease. It's a given and any planing, economic, or otherwise must take this into consideration or lose big time. You even see it in several animals like some species of fish and snails, perhaps others. But with the animals, especially, disease usually wipes out most of the clones.
Corporations may lose out, but the rise of interest among the general population in "heirloom" produce is an indication that geneticly diverse crops are not gone yet. Unfortunately, a by product of genetically modified crops is often a very inbred gene pool because not enough generations have gone by to ensure wide genetic diversity.
With the corn, if it's made a priority, it's quite possible to maintain high yields and a varied gene pool. However, it's still corn. I'm sure other crops can be used for plastic using similar proceses. There's probably quite a few tons of cellulose in the stalks and chaff left over from a nation's yearly wheat, oat, rice or barley harvest.
The mushroom method (keep 'em in the dark and feed 'em shit) is a classic business strategy. By meeting with the schools one on one, none of them know how bad a deal they're getting. That way each school can pay more than the normal purchase price, but go away thinking they got a special discount.
It also makes it easier to apply pressure to weak administrators (redundant) to knuckle under. It's a kind of variation on divide-and-conquer. The schools need to stick to gether on this one, or at the least keep the process in the open so they know if they're being offered a special price or a special price.
Citing online resources is just like citing fixed media in that you're providing a pointer back to the original material, but with one difference: The information at the end of the pointer can change so be sure to add the date of access. Keep a screen shot if the info. you need is likely to disappear.
It was very difficult, even under Stalin, to retroactively edit fixed media. Mostly because of the large number and wide geaographic distribution of the physical items. With an online news source, there is usually only one physical server/server pool + backup to re-edit / crack / wipe / burn up. With a newspaper which has a small distribution, there are tens of thousands of copies to hunt down and burn.
<bs rate="+3">In regards to military applications for "first person shooters", it is a good occasional compliment to regular training, especially in urban areas. The alternative is closing down the building and running around, but carefully, so as not to break or scratch the walls or furniture, in a small part of the building + lot. Running field exercises is slow, expensive, and disruptive. In a simulation it's just fine to break windows and doors as needed and you have the entire building to work with.</bs>
As far as civilian applications go, I'd think that the travel industry would really keen on this. With such simulated environments, travel could really be more comfortable and more efficient by experiencing a simulation of your route in advance. The second time you have to find your way around an airport, trainstation, or city center is always much easier and faster compared to the first time.
Great cross-platform file sharing systems exist for file sharing. Netware, DCE and OpenAFS are examples. These can easily handle any internal file sharing need, and some external needs. For sharing files outside, many easy solutions or work arounds can be made that don't require attachments. Some people even say that MS-Exchange could do this.
Regardless of how it is set up, once you have platform independent file sharing in place, all attachments can be filtered out. Then there's no doubt -- your shop could not be spreading Klez or other pathogens.
Note that keeping files on the server also simplifies concurrent editing and version control.
Too bad, but a screw up like that should require the dismissal of a sizable bit of management -- without economic parachutes. I'll be controversial and suggest that a fair number of companies could probably have squeaked by last year's down turn were it not for being bled dry by managment salaries and perks.
Staff, as mentioned in another post, themselves should always try to keep 4-6 months in the "oh shit" fund.
The article reports that the MS party line is to hold back on or prevent interoperability and connectivity. These are two keys to ecnomic growth in the IT-sector imparing them is to go against a free market. The MS execs are even down to using weasle words and phrases, much like big tobacco companies did when they were in the hot seat.
Trials are about facts. Reading this and other articles about the punishment phase of the trial and focusing only on statements of fact, striking all the "I {do | do not} believe"-type statements, leaves very little doubt about the benefit of a massive breakup. Odds are that breaking up or dissolving the company would actually create an economic boom.
Unlike the one in Santiago, this organization was very lucky that none of the hard drives were damaged or taken so there was no loss of working data, only expense and disruption of work. However, the building was sufficiently compartmentalized that they could only clean out a few administrative departments. They were already the model of security and efficiency for their primary charges. None of that is easily threatened by outsiders. However, after that they got religion about backups for even working material.
Fires, roof leaks, or clumsy people near the servers could have a similiar effect.
I saw a hands free mouse a few years ago at a research fair for accessi/handicap technology. It was a sweat band like apparatus with three electrodes to collect signals from the brain and a wire going down to a largish box that did heavy signal processing. It was an impressive demo even if movement was a bit shaky. The demonstrator tended to over shoot the target quite often, especially when he tried to talk at the same time. With a little practice or concentration he could get quite smooth control.
As PD points out, "people who are busy fucking don't accidentally pick up a gun and shoot their neighbors in the process!" The main problem with pr0n is the potential for social isolation and commodification of humans.
The airport, casinos, and some of the major hotels would be obvious nodes for the rail network. For those fixated on increasing economic growth through 'security' measures, some of the airlines could offer check-in at some of the more prestigious hotels or conference centers. This would be an obvious attraction for tourists and would allow the airlines extra time to scan the bags and back up their 'profiling' with hard data.
In Chicago, many rails came years before many of the buildings. I think there the rail companies did it the other way around and sold air rights to put buildings over the tracks. Monorail's a good option when you don't have the budget to bore tunnels or buy up surface real estate.
What's the geology like there? Maybe they could hire Norwegians to bore tunnels. ;)
(Subway / tube / underground sure, but how about "Casino Moria"?)
I'm not sure how Toshiba can make good on selling milling technology to both sides in the cold war. Propellers are obsolete anyway now, but it's the thought that counts.
Either way, you've hit the nail on the head: are people ready to pay a real membership fee and "vote geek" to address important techological issuess? In light of the the 1 dollar == 1 vote reality of the current legislative process, it's probably time.
Protocols to mention besides OpenLDAP and OAI are Whois++ and Z39.50. OAI actually is transported over HTTP. You could do the same with EAD or others.
Projects which implemented Z39.50 for the purposes of interoperability are ONE and ONE-2, EUROPAGATE, Desire and Desire II, DECOMATE and DECOMATE II, and Renardus just to touch the surface. Don't forget OHIOLINK...
Another other older, but interesting, metadata activity have been SGML MARC, and the corresponding XML MARC.
Those that are interested in more detailed reading can check out the Nordic Metadata Project, Nordic Metadata Project II, which studied the practical implications of cross browsing multiple databases and especially the use of Dublic Core. Even if you get agreement on the protocol and data standard, cross searching's not as easy as it sounds. One of the tools is the Dublin Core Metadata Temple (get it while you still can).The BYTE article was exciting to see again and could have benefited further from pointing out the relative ease of use of Dublic Core. OAI uses unqualified Dublic Core, SAFARI uses qualified Dublin Core to create an up to date index over academic research in Sweden. Shoot, since it already uses some META tags, you could even tweak htdig to use Dublic Core on your own site for those high precision searches.
With the interest in structured data (XML?) maybe well see some sites serving up not just HTML with Dublic Core, but maybe even Docbook or even TEI / TEI Lite. There are great tools for converting from Docbook to HTML, PDF, RTF, etc. and AbiWord and Kword already have partial support for docbook. If there were more, then we could see some real changes on searching the web. Coding for SGML is more difficult, so the obvious choice would be to start from Docbook XML.
These analysis programs are interesting research, but it'll be years before there's any thing even close to being have picking up enough threats and few enough false positives to be considered being in production. Besides, by the time physical movement is visible, the target / victim has already been selected, monitored, and assessed by the attacker. Proactive measures are much more effective than reactive. Look at the PC virus industry for detailed case studies in prevention versus cure.
Regardless of the source of the patch, it is essential to test it before putting it into production. With OSS / Free Software. You can usually create a functional duplicate of the production machine on some spare hardware and test and tweak the patch thouroughly before setting it loose in a production environment.
This can't be done legally with expensive and restrictive licenses, unless you pay for and maintain a full set of duplicate licenses. Even with a fat budget, there's still the delay of days or weeks while bosses or purchasing departments sign off on things.
The costs of diverse and incompatible documents (e.g. different versions of MS-Office) is still high even if you're in a shop where the management buys into single platform (e.g. All-Shall-Be-Microsoft) myth. Take MS-Word, the new versions usually have difficulty with the next most recent version until the patch / upgrade is installed. It often takes a bit of gymnastics to make the conversion successfully especially if you're an early adopter. Powerpoint is even worse. Quite often only one or two presentations will fit on a 3.5" floppy, so that means bringing two or three floppies to conferencs to make sure I can use the conference locale's version of PowerPoint.
Here comes the cost: Imagine nearly everyone in a 120 person organization learning that the hard way, either for their own work or by trying to help some one else. The actual salary is often only 50% of what the employer has to shell out per employee.
It gets more expensive with e-mail attachements. It used to be whenever I got an MS-Office document as an attachment, it was a virus from a stranger. Everyone I actually knew, back then, used file sharing. Now that most shops don't have file sharing, these must be sorted by hand, at least in a MS-Windows environment.
And that's just the cost now. 3 or 4 years from now you have the added issue of trying to identify and read the old formats. So in reality the interoperability part the oft-cited cost benefit of running all MS products hasn't been there.
Two solutions: use more generic file formats (e.g. RTF and Docbook) and stable file sharing that support clients on multiple platforms (e.g. Netware or OpenAFS, to pick two). Operating costs and efficientcy costs are always going to be with any software. The trick is to minimize the work needed and to concentrate any extra effort on as few as possible.While folks in the States are busy contacting congressmen about the potential government mandate to bail out failed MS products, those in the EU must deal with EUCD. Unfortunately, this new arrangement of states in Europe appears to have been more of a power and money grab than a democratization, so it's not.
Where is a list of how citizens should contact their EU representatives?
Again, MS-Passport cannot be made secure even in theory. There are fatal errors in MS's implementation in additional to the fundamental problems with the basic idea.
How about a more practical approach to electronic books? Audio. Audio technologies are quite good and, as shown by the popularity of Napster and Napster-like entities and by the abundance of jukebox software, quite common. Most libraries and many book stores already have audio recordings of books on cassette tape or occasionally on audio CD. These are good for long commutes and road trips. Now that nearly everyone has Ogg/MP3 players, how about books in Ogg?
The bugs in the methodology can be worked out by reading public books. Nice voices can be had by hiring people from the local theater, radio staion or opera more cheaply than the big names like James Earl Jones or (the late) Sam Kinnison.
At the very least, more users are going to try Mozilla and Opera. Compuserve would do well to consider Opera, too. The "Continue browsing where I left off" feature alone probably saved me a few hours a week back when I ran Win95/98 and WinNT.
If you just want to import citations, the Z39.50 search and retrieval protocol is the way to import from yor library catalog and many online databases. Indexdata has number of multiplatform tools that you can use, such as YAZ (a z39.50 client) and PHPYAZ. Three commercial packages import from Z39.50 sources nicely (Bookwhere, Procite and Endnote) both Procite and Endnot work well at managing your footnotes during workprocessing, taking care of numbering and layout (e.g. APA or Chicago Manual of Style, etc.).
If you want something under GPL and more oriented to managing web sites and other Internet resources, then you may want to try hypatia. You'll have to ask special for it, but it's available. Here are the parts I've seen so far:
- Web-based interface, both end users and maintainers.
- Fully multi-lingual, including both interface and content. (It is very easy to add another language to the interfaces. Right now English and Spanish are complete, Norwegian and Finnish are being translated.)
Support for Unicode (Which means you're free to add interfaces in or
).
- Useable on many different platforms, including Linux, Unix,
and Windows.
- Individual installations can exchange records, allowing
federated content and service providers to work together
seamlessly. (Haven't tried it yet.)
- Compatible with relevant standards, including MARC, Dublin Core, and the
Networked Reference standard currently under development by NISO.
- Special features for digital collections, such as automatic
URL checking.
- Authority control over names (e.g. People and Organizations).
- Uses perl/MySQL/javascript
You can see the end user interface in production at the IPL in the serials, newspapers, or online texts collections. The collection managment interfaces are even nicer and very useful. I'm sure it can be tweaked for data on legacy media as well.A) Make sure that everyone in the group participates and at least understands all the components of the project. Of course, this general means you'll get a crappy grade.
or
B) Divide the key tasks among the one or two skilled people and send the outhers out to buy coffee or to make the poster for the presentation.
I've had to learn Linux administration the hard way -- no comp sci background -- but I find Apache one of the easier programs to configure and understand. Though many linux programs are starting to get GUIs, I find the speed and flexibility of the text files unbeatable. You can't get much clearer than well commented text. However, text is more comfortable for some, GUIs for others.
If GUI based configuration tools can serve as a transitory step to allow users the option of learning more about the underlying tools, that would be a good thing. But even if that transition isn't made, both interfaces need to stay up to date with all functionality.