The sad part is that this is true even for the couple of books I have on Blender modeling. The fact that it's almost impossible to navigate the application without the two-page shortcut chart (which in and of itself, shows how much the shortcuts only make about 90% sense) is a frustration.
That said, once you get a feel for the use of TAB, the middle button on the mouse, the A and S and B keys, the W key and the Z key and the U key and the D key and the number keys on the top of the keyboard and the number keys on the numerical keypad and the two-key sequence combos, you'll really be able to make a great model of that vintage hoverCar that is sitting in Grandma's basement...
There is a reasonably acceptable dimensions plugin that lets you generate a 3d object in a new layer that gives you the distance (in configurable units) from point x to point y (so you can measure internal and external dimensions, etc). Not quite as powerful as the dimensioning tools in even a middling CAD program, but given how horrible it was for me to work with TurboCad on the Mac (p.o.s. software, if I ever saw it), i thought that the dimension plugin for Blender did what I needed without all that much fuss. Would be nice if it could do angles, that's about it...
PalmOS developers tend to be amongst the most loyal out there -- not quite fanatical about the platform, but very pragmatically into it. I guess something has to come out of the fact that applications written for Palm IIIx devices are still running, even on the latest devices, without any rework. Which, come to think of it, is strange -- you have an OS where native applications have to be written in C (with a plathora of inconsistent although good C++ frameworks), with a somewhat quirky event handling model.
I think that Palm's early-days decisions of releasing the source code to all their native apps as examples of well-coded applications, and of having really good testing tools (Gremlins are brilliant! I wish we had them in the Java ME world for non-palm mobile phones) played a huge role in creating folks who, well, still like writing for the PalmOS despite the massive changes everywhere else in the PDA world...
You need good communications infrastructures to help build basic, self-sustaining functional societies.
Villa El Salvador started out as a squatter settlement (est. 1971) of destitute and landless peasants 10km outside of Lima Peru, who took a barren plot of desert (and this is not Nevada desert, this is sand and nothing else desert) and built it into an economic engine for that whole southern cone of Lima. They did this on their own, often refusing government patronage systems. Key to this success? Their building a communications center that evolved into a radio station in the 1970s and a UHF TV station in the early 1980s helped them build not only a sense of community but also strong governance and solid economic institutions. People in the 1970s said "what do they need radios for?". In the 1980s they said "what do those poor people need TVs for, shouldn't they be spending their money on food?". That misses the point.
Favelas in Rio de Janeiro set up websites to provide a report on their own lives and conditions, outside of mainstream media, which not only helps them in terms of knowing what's going on but helps build that sense of self, of place, of identity that is basic and fundamental to building the governing structures that let a group of people provide for themselves.
Saying that the spread of technology to developing regions is a westernist, globalist imposition of a some kind of "perverse" model is historically blind -- technological development is not an exclusively western phenomenon. It's just that we tend to think only of the late 20th century when we think of technology, not of the looms built in the pre-columbian years by inhabitants of this hemisphere to facilitate the creation of textiles that were traded for food/sustenance.
I think all this boils down to many of us in the West not really understanding poor people -- the assumption that poverty always takes the shape of the extreme (the starving, fly-addled swollen-bellied kids of We Are The World) rather than the more common form of poverty, which involves people who work, who try to make it happen but who don't have the resources or institutions around them to help that work pay off.
So why could they possibly need computers? Because, you numbskull, it is exactly one of the ways of addressing the problem of democratic instability, unstable food supplies, unstable housing, and poor educational systems. These mobile, networked computers can help redistribute access to information and reduce the control over such things as distribution of resources from authoritarian regimes that thrive on chaos, can put intelligence at the ends of the social network rather than at the center, and generally enable people to have access to information, tools, communities that can help them get the necessary lift and resource to stand up and Make Things Happen.
I manage Developer Platforms and Support for Sprint so I think I may have something to add here.
(Apologies for the length, but there are a lot of very valid points raised in this thread that I'd like to address.)
Preamble: My personal philosophy or Where I'm coming from or My Role At Sprint
I've posted on the general topic of openness to developers before. I've been a software developer, both as a dabbler and as an employee for both startups and established companies. I've been involved in wireless developer programs for years now, and approach my job at Sprint from the perspective of the ousider more often than from that of the insider. I know that a development platform without both good developer support and a critical mass of passionate developers is likely to end up in the cool but unused the esoteric and unusual or the abandoned bins of history.
That's a philosophy that those of us in Sprint's Developer Program share and spend a lot of time preaching within the company--without a developer community, we'd be nowhere, and without continuing to invest in making it easy to adopt our phones and network, we'll lose what we've gained.
Sprint's Approach to Developers: Dabblers, Hobbyists and Professionals
That said, the "open to everyone, information must be free, hobbyists rule" philosophy isn't necessarily one that is immediately embraced within a large wireless carrier with multiple people with different opinions that they can defend. By and large, as I've said before, wireless carriers are in a different world than that of straight operating system vendors:
We don't build the operating systems or platforms: instead, we work with device manufacturers and platform providers to find cost-effective ways of delivering a broad set of device and network capabilities within the constraints of time and money required to implement.
We fully own our networks and must ensure that they, and the customers using them, are protected and that we meet our service obligations to our customers. This is not the collective-sharing-we-each-pay-for-our-onramp-and- give-each-other-access-through-our-network model of the early Internet.
Customers see our primary role and business as voice service, and while we continue to invest in expanding data services, my humble not-necessarily-that-of-Sprint-or-its-affiliates view of the world is that customers will continue to see our primary role as voice for many years to come. This also means that as a rule, wireless carriers will tend to defer to voice requirements on their networks (and they are the carriers' networks, make no mistake about it) pretty much all the time.
The reason why most carriers encourage developers to adopt the platform is not so they can push additional bits through the network; it's so that they can offer additional services that customers will be willing to pay for and that developers can make money from delivering.
What this means is that wireless carriers will pretty much always defer to developers that are likely to build real, marketable software, because ultimately those are the ones that will be able to offer those additional services.
For some carriers, the calculations above have had the end result of limiting the availability of tools and such only to "vetted" developers (using whatever criteria they deem appropriate). Other carriers have opted for more openness. While I'd love to be able to say that Sprint is better than most in this regard and that we open everything, we're not an exception to market forces or social dynamics--some tools or functions end up being limited to only some developers for various reasons. Part of what our Developer Program does is work to system
I work in Developer Relations for a big wireless carrier, so this is close to my heart. While I've been a Mac user since 1985 ('nuff said), I do have a lot of respect of Microsoft when it comes to Developer Relations... they do know what they're doing in that area.I can understand the source of the Microsoft's VP's statement, although if his wording was close to what was paraphrased in the article, it was a poor choice of words.
If Microsoft is hoping to get real devices out there that include their DRM component, then what they're doing is putting up a barrier to entry to ensure that only those who are truly committed to building a mass-market product get the attention of internal staff so that MS can make money indirectly through devices that use and license the DRM component.
Whether or not that's a sound business practice is their decision to make. But it's not a unique model. If you want to release a game on PlayStation, Gamecube or XBox, you license the development kits from Sony, Nintendo or XBox. They do this because they're in a mass market and need to ensure that the companies they work with and who use their name are equipped for what happens when something succeeds massively or has major problems. Microsoft's approach for their DRM is no different--the only difference is that a VP went out and actually set realistic expectations for what it takes to be a developer for those platforms in a forum that pissed boingBoing off--enough of a commitment and a financial stake in the game to make sure that something useful comes out of all the work people put into it.
It's true that hobbyists are often the source of completely original, unexpected innovations, and any company that is serious about innovation encourages that. Developer programs that embrace this open themselves up to very new ideas. But let's make a clear distinction between encouraging hobbyists and the business drive behind encouraging real applications, services or devices that make money for a developer and the company that makes money from the platform.
Please don't get me wrong: I stay at my job managing a developer program because I love answering developer questions. I love helping someone out and seeing them succeed, particularly if they have a great idea and the nads to see it through. I also believe that developers should have as many tools freely available as they can have. Where I work, I always try to argue for making information, APIs and toolkits open and accessible to every developer. I often get into some very heated discussions with people who argue that we should only make this API or that piece of documentation available to existing partners because they don't want to deal with hobbyists--in fact, I'm actively lobbying for something like that as I type. I tell internal resistors that by staying closed off they're never going to hear of the new stuff, they'll only hear from the same people over and over again and they'll still have to deal with hobbyists. I also help hobbyists and independent developers figure out ways of selling their product without having to build a business relationship with MegaCorp and dealing with what can be a bureaucratic process.
Being on the support side of things, I also contend with the reality of this internal advocacy--I often have to guide hobbyists and amateurs who are dabbling and who can consume hours of my day while clearly showing me that they're very unlikely to actually come up with something that could be a marketable product even if they go it alone.
Hobbyists-cum-entrepreneurs often have very unrealistic expectations regarding what they need to do to succeed. Some hobbyists tend to consume an inordinate amount of time from a company's developer relations and business development staff and don't turn out something that can actually become a product--and honestly, my business is to get developers from idea to market. These things include adequate support staff, sales teams, marketing funds, technical acumen and enough wherewithal to deal with contract n
I usually try to figure out ways of either circumventing them, mocking them, or getting them to want to do it because not doing it hurts them personally. Three examples:
1) Circumvention: Recently, I needed a DNS change to point an existing subdomain to a different IP address. Our not-very-useful IT project manager told me they needed to come up with an LOE for changing the DNS entry. Three days later, they told me they hadn't had time to calculate the LOE and would not be able to complete the change by the following week's deadline.
I went to the head of our corporate marketing and branding group, asked for her help. Even though this is a very large corporation with more than 30k employees and a very significant IT organization, within 10 minutes, one of the staff members on the marketing and branding team physically made the DNS change herself.
2) Mockery: I needed our web team to add a link to the bottom of our company's homepage linking to my program's home page. Three weeks later, the guy who was going to do the change saw me in the hallway and asked me if I had lined up testing resources from our testing outsource company to make sure that the link worked.
I responded, very loudly and within earshot of the web developers: "open bracket a href equals quote h tee tee pee colon slash slash my dot domain dot com close quote close bracket My Site Name open bracket slash a close bracket and then click on the damn thing"
2) Fool them into wanting to do it for their own purposes: We decomissioned a website a few months ago, and it is no longer publicly available. However, we've kept it around while we make sure we got all the old documents. However, we are still getting monthly reports extracted from the back-end database. I contacted our IT reporting team and asked them to stop delivery of these reports since they're no longer needed. They sent me a form I needed to fill out justifying why I needed these to stop and aking for VP signatures and notarized copies of the marriage certificates for every gerbil I've ever owned.
I told them they had to be kidding, then I set up a rule in Outlook that automatically bounces back the reporting emails to them and deletes them from my inbox. I don't have to worry about it and once they start getting these every month they'll try to figure out what's wrong and fix it. Once we fully bring down the system, I imagine that the report engine will start throwing all sorts of error messages and they'll see fit to do it on their own if the auto emails don't do the trick.
It's sad that IT, something that shoudl enhance productivity, has become a huge obstacle for us to do business.
Quoting the Free Republic as to suggest that the linkage between global warming and increased extreme weather is still in dispute is like quoting Pat Robertson on religious tolerance.
Find a reputable, accepted scientific source that considers the link between the massive weather shifts we've seen over the last 20 years and global warming merely spurious, and perhaps we can have a serious debate. Until that, please stop trying to pretend that politics are science.
Well, it's hard to see how TV in the US can serve a purpose other than entertainment, but here are some essential purposes
- local news - educational programming through public television - open university channels - over-the-air community information channels, mostly in UHF bands
In countries that demand it, TV stations are required to provide equal and free time for political candidates--this reduces the importance of raising massive contributions from wealthy donors in order to mount a viable campaign for office.
In countries that demand it, TV stations are required to dedicate a portion of their schedule for educational and civic programming. TV stations are required to yield their schedule when there are announcements of importance to be delivered by elected leaders. They're required to provide equal levels of access to content producers--a-la public access TV.
Unfortunately, in the US we've been complacently accepting a situation where many of these arguably basic services are available only if you're willing to pay a cable company to provide them, even at a basic level of service.
Well yes, the fact is that PBS has has to step up corporate underwriting to the point that underwriting announcements sound like commercials. This points even more strongly to the fact that until we treat the airwaves as a public good, and until we as citizens make it clear that commercial-free and non-commercial broadcasting is essential, we'll still have things like what recently happened with congress slashing the budget for Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB)--which doles out federal fudns to PBS and NPR by 1/4, with complete phase-out of government funding for public broadcasting in 4 years.
If we allow a certain small minority insist that non-commercial broadcasting is perfectly fine because corporations are happily underwriting, we will get to the point where we'll only have Monsanto underwriting ads and fund raising campaigns.
While the British model isn't ideal (the TV tax is kind of odd), at least they've embraced the idea that something like the BBC is a public good that serves a public need for which everyone should pay through taxes.
Here's what I'm guessing: The broadcasters are betting that by 2009, just about everyone will have cheap satellite or cable TV, and (as someone pointed out to me in a previous story on this subject), the people that don't are probably limited enough in purchasing power that it'd be worth the risk to ad revenue to go ahead with it anyway.
That's precisely the issue--that a technology architecture and phase-out process was taken that can have, as a net result, excluding those who cannot purchase new equipment because they are on limited incomes or can not afford or cannot receive services such as cable or satellite.
I think we need to remember that that the public airwaves are a public good that has merely been loaned out to broadcasters, and that they need to treat it as more than a vehicle to peddle their wares. They can and should serve a public need--i.e. emergency broadcasting, public television, network television, etc, and transition plans to DTV should have a clear path for making sure that large groups of people aren't systematically blocked out from what is, nowadays, an essential medium.
Well, that's why I think it's very meaningful that this research came not from big Pharma but from a University in Japan...
More probability that people would have different motives for conducting the research. When you have a mechanism that is published in an academic journal, it may make it more difficult to obtain a patent on the mechanism itself, i'd suspect, rather than on the delivery vehicle.
http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_1423753,0 05 0.htm%5D ">Indo-Asian News Service Tokyo, July 7, 2005
"A new drug that blocks HIV virus from entering human cells and causes almost no side effects has been developed by Japanese researchers. The drug, code named AK602, was tried on 40 AIDS patients in the US and almost no side effect was found.
"When patients took 0.02 ounces of AK602 twice a day for 10 days the HIV dropped to an average of one per cent, according to a research team led by Hiroaki Mitsuya of Kumamoto University.
"Current AIDS medications often lose their effectiveness after a few days due to the virus' resistance, but the AK602 reacts to human cells instead of attacking the virus, said Mitsuya. [...]"
Under current HAART treatment, it takes months for HIV viral load to go down that quickly, and side effects under current meds are not negligible (high cholesterol, weird fat distribution, major depression, intense diarrhoea...)
I already get to experience the joy of roadcast. There I go, minding my own business, listening to 87.9 FM -- WPOD, which somehow knows to play only songs I own and songs I like, and then all of a sudden my Mighty Wind and Bon Jovi singing in spanish gets interrupted by the staticky sound of Limp Biskit... I look to the car on my left and see that the dude in the souped up Honday is bobbing his head to the music in my car, and i realize-- his XM Radio FM transceiver relay can beat up my dinky little iTrip.
Problem with line-item veto is that it could really screw up a carefully crafted and balanced act (not that those are very common). It's like removing paragraphs from a novel as you read it--you may not think they're important, but when you get further into it, you may all of a sudden wonder why the plot doesn't work.
Better option: single-issue legislation. Some countries do this and don't have the problem of pork and nonsense that we do in the US.
Um... they're US Federal government savings bonds. Same things taht the US sells to fund it massive deficits and debt spending.
If you have any reason to believe that the US government is going to default on its debt, what are you still doing out on the surface? I'd imagine you should be preparing to duck into your bunker.
He sponsored a very significant National Supercomputing Act in the 1980s, had a clear role in aiding the transition from NSFNet to an open Internet, and through his National Information Infrastructure agenda for action as Vice-President clearly set the terms of the debate as a challenge between the phone and cable companies that just wanted to have narrow pipes out of the home to deliver push-button pizza and QVC on steriods and those who wanted something open and much broader, like the Internet that up until that point was the domain of those who had access to scientific research institutions.
Slashdot Mirror
The sad part is that this is true even for the couple of books I have on Blender modeling. The fact that it's almost impossible to navigate the application without the two-page shortcut chart (which in and of itself, shows how much the shortcuts only make about 90% sense) is a frustration.
That said, once you get a feel for the use of TAB, the middle button on the mouse, the A and S and B keys, the W key and the Z key and the U key and the D key and the number keys on the top of the keyboard and the number keys on the numerical keypad and the two-key sequence combos, you'll really be able to make a great model of that vintage hoverCar that is sitting in Grandma's basement...
There is a reasonably acceptable dimensions plugin that lets you generate a 3d object in a new layer that gives you the distance (in configurable units) from point x to point y (so you can measure internal and external dimensions, etc). Not quite as powerful as the dimensioning tools in even a middling CAD program, but given how horrible it was for me to work with TurboCad on the Mac (p.o.s. software, if I ever saw it), i thought that the dimension plugin for Blender did what I needed without all that much fuss. Would be nice if it could do angles, that's about it...
why oh why are there no moderation points for bad puns?
Well, they did license the a Hotsync Server from Riverbed and had some good uptake there, but well, Riverbed got bought by a company that now specializes in shoe retail brands.
... pretty impressive for software that hasn't been supported in 3+ years...
There are still apps out there that run on that platform
PalmOS developers tend to be amongst the most loyal out there -- not quite fanatical about the platform, but very pragmatically into it. I guess something has to come out of the fact that applications written for Palm IIIx devices are still running, even on the latest devices, without any rework. Which, come to think of it, is strange -- you have an OS where native applications have to be written in C (with a plathora of inconsistent although good C++ frameworks), with a somewhat quirky event handling model.
I think that Palm's early-days decisions of releasing the source code to all their native apps as examples of well-coded applications, and of having really good testing tools (Gremlins are brilliant! I wish we had them in the Java ME world for non-palm mobile phones) played a huge role in creating folks who, well, still like writing for the PalmOS despite the massive changes everywhere else in the PDA world...
You need good communications infrastructures to help build basic, self-sustaining functional societies.
Villa El Salvador started out as a squatter settlement (est. 1971) of destitute and landless peasants 10km outside of Lima Peru, who took a barren plot of desert (and this is not Nevada desert, this is sand and nothing else desert) and built it into an economic engine for that whole southern cone of Lima. They did this on their own, often refusing government patronage systems. Key to this success? Their building a communications center that evolved into a radio station in the 1970s and a UHF TV station in the early 1980s helped them build not only a sense of community but also strong governance and solid economic institutions. People in the 1970s said "what do they need radios for?". In the 1980s they said "what do those poor people need TVs for, shouldn't they be spending their money on food?". That misses the point.
Favelas in Rio de Janeiro set up websites to provide a report on their own lives and conditions, outside of mainstream media, which not only helps them in terms of knowing what's going on but helps build that sense of self, of place, of identity that is basic and fundamental to building the governing structures that let a group of people provide for themselves.
Saying that the spread of technology to developing regions is a westernist, globalist imposition of a some kind of "perverse" model is historically blind -- technological development is not an exclusively western phenomenon. It's just that we tend to think only of the late 20th century when we think of technology, not of the looms built in the pre-columbian years by inhabitants of this hemisphere to facilitate the creation of textiles that were traded for food/sustenance.
I think all this boils down to many of us in the West not really understanding poor people -- the assumption that poverty always takes the shape of the extreme (the starving, fly-addled swollen-bellied kids of We Are The World) rather than the more common form of poverty, which involves people who work, who try to make it happen but who don't have the resources or institutions around them to help that work pay off.
So why could they possibly need computers? Because, you numbskull, it is exactly one of the ways of addressing the problem of democratic instability, unstable food supplies, unstable housing, and poor educational systems. These mobile, networked computers can help redistribute access to information and reduce the control over such things as distribution of resources from authoritarian regimes that thrive on chaos, can put intelligence at the ends of the social network rather than at the center, and generally enable people to have access to information, tools, communities that can help them get the necessary lift and resource to stand up and Make Things Happen.
I manage Developer Platforms and Support for Sprint so I think I may have something to add here. (Apologies for the length, but there are a lot of very valid points raised in this thread that I'd like to address.)
Preamble: My personal philosophy or Where I'm coming from or My Role At Sprint
I've posted on the general topic of openness to developers before. I've been a software developer, both as a dabbler and as an employee for both startups and established companies. I've been involved in wireless developer programs for years now, and approach my job at Sprint from the perspective of the ousider more often than from that of the insider. I know that a development platform without both good developer support and a critical mass of passionate developers is likely to end up in the cool but unused the esoteric and unusual or the abandoned bins of history.
That's a philosophy that those of us in Sprint's Developer Program share and spend a lot of time preaching within the company--without a developer community, we'd be nowhere, and without continuing to invest in making it easy to adopt our phones and network, we'll lose what we've gained.
Sprint's Approach to Developers: Dabblers, Hobbyists and Professionals
That said, the "open to everyone, information must be free, hobbyists rule" philosophy isn't necessarily one that is immediately embraced within a large wireless carrier with multiple people with different opinions that they can defend. By and large, as I've said before, wireless carriers are in a different world than that of straight operating system vendors:
What this means is that wireless carriers will pretty much always defer to developers that are likely to build real, marketable software, because ultimately those are the ones that will be able to offer those additional services.
For some carriers, the calculations above have had the end result of limiting the availability of tools and such only to "vetted" developers (using whatever criteria they deem appropriate). Other carriers have opted for more openness. While I'd love to be able to say that Sprint is better than most in this regard and that we open everything, we're not an exception to market forces or social dynamics--some tools or functions end up being limited to only some developers for various reasons. Part of what our Developer Program does is work to system
You raise a very fair point.
Sadly, though, the web link thing happened before SarbOx was even on the radar screen....
I work in Developer Relations for a big wireless carrier, so this is close to my heart. While I've been a Mac user since 1985 ('nuff said), I do have a lot of respect of Microsoft when it comes to Developer Relations... they do know what they're doing in that area.I can understand the source of the Microsoft's VP's statement, although if his wording was close to what was paraphrased in the article, it was a poor choice of words.
If Microsoft is hoping to get real devices out there that include their DRM component, then what they're doing is putting up a barrier to entry to ensure that only those who are truly committed to building a mass-market product get the attention of internal staff so that MS can make money indirectly through devices that use and license the DRM component.
Whether or not that's a sound business practice is their decision to make. But it's not a unique model. If you want to release a game on PlayStation, Gamecube or XBox, you license the development kits from Sony, Nintendo or XBox. They do this because they're in a mass market and need to ensure that the companies they work with and who use their name are equipped for what happens when something succeeds massively or has major problems. Microsoft's approach for their DRM is no different--the only difference is that a VP went out and actually set realistic expectations for what it takes to be a developer for those platforms in a forum that pissed boingBoing off--enough of a commitment and a financial stake in the game to make sure that something useful comes out of all the work people put into it.
It's true that hobbyists are often the source of completely original, unexpected innovations, and any company that is serious about innovation encourages that. Developer programs that embrace this open themselves up to very new ideas. But let's make a clear distinction between encouraging hobbyists and the business drive behind encouraging real applications, services or devices that make money for a developer and the company that makes money from the platform.
Please don't get me wrong: I stay at my job managing a developer program because I love answering developer questions. I love helping someone out and seeing them succeed, particularly if they have a great idea and the nads to see it through. I also believe that developers should have as many tools freely available as they can have. Where I work, I always try to argue for making information, APIs and toolkits open and accessible to every developer. I often get into some very heated discussions with people who argue that we should only make this API or that piece of documentation available to existing partners because they don't want to deal with hobbyists--in fact, I'm actively lobbying for something like that as I type. I tell internal resistors that by staying closed off they're never going to hear of the new stuff, they'll only hear from the same people over and over again and they'll still have to deal with hobbyists. I also help hobbyists and independent developers figure out ways of selling their product without having to build a business relationship with MegaCorp and dealing with what can be a bureaucratic process.
Being on the support side of things, I also contend with the reality of this internal advocacy--I often have to guide hobbyists and amateurs who are dabbling and who can consume hours of my day while clearly showing me that they're very unlikely to actually come up with something that could be a marketable product even if they go it alone.
Hobbyists-cum-entrepreneurs often have very unrealistic expectations regarding what they need to do to succeed. Some hobbyists tend to consume an inordinate amount of time from a company's developer relations and business development staff and don't turn out something that can actually become a product--and honestly, my business is to get developers from idea to market. These things include adequate support staff, sales teams, marketing funds, technical acumen and enough wherewithal to deal with contract n
I usually try to figure out ways of either circumventing them, mocking them, or getting them to want to do it because not doing it hurts them personally. Three examples:
1) Circumvention: Recently, I needed a DNS change to point an existing subdomain to a different IP address. Our not-very-useful IT project manager told me they needed to come up with an LOE for changing the DNS entry. Three days later, they told me they hadn't had time to calculate the LOE and would not be able to complete the change by the following week's deadline.
I went to the head of our corporate marketing and branding group, asked for her help. Even though this is a very large corporation with more than 30k employees and a very significant IT organization, within 10 minutes, one of the staff members on the marketing and branding team physically made the DNS change herself.
2) Mockery: I needed our web team to add a link to the bottom of our company's homepage linking to my program's home page. Three weeks later, the guy who was going to do the change saw me in the hallway and asked me if I had lined up testing resources from our testing outsource company to make sure that the link worked.
I responded, very loudly and within earshot of the web developers: "open bracket a href equals quote h tee tee pee colon slash slash my dot domain dot com close quote close bracket My Site Name open bracket slash a close bracket and then click on the damn thing"
2) Fool them into wanting to do it for their own purposes: We decomissioned a website a few months ago, and it is no longer publicly available. However, we've kept it around while we make sure we got all the old documents. However, we are still getting monthly reports extracted from the back-end database. I contacted our IT reporting team and asked them to stop delivery of these reports since they're no longer needed. They sent me a form I needed to fill out justifying why I needed these to stop and aking for VP signatures and notarized copies of the marriage certificates for every gerbil I've ever owned.
I told them they had to be kidding, then I set up a rule in Outlook that automatically bounces back the reporting emails to them and deletes them from my inbox. I don't have to worry about it and once they start getting these every month they'll try to figure out what's wrong and fix it. Once we fully bring down the system, I imagine that the report engine will start throwing all sorts of error messages and they'll see fit to do it on their own if the auto emails don't do the trick.
It's sad that IT, something that shoudl enhance productivity, has become a huge obstacle for us to do business.
An open letter to the Kansas School board arguing that the creation story provided by the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster also needs to be recognized...
Quoting the Free Republic as to suggest that the linkage between global warming and increased extreme weather is still in dispute is like quoting Pat Robertson on religious tolerance.
Find a reputable, accepted scientific source that considers the link between the massive weather shifts we've seen over the last 20 years and global warming merely spurious, and perhaps we can have a serious debate. Until that, please stop trying to pretend that politics are science.
The perfect tool to induce total loss of bowel control...
Almost 19% of US TV sets receive only Over-the-air broadcast.
I wouldn't say that 1/5th of the US population that have TV sets is "not many".
Well, it's hard to see how TV in the US can serve a purpose other than entertainment, but here are some essential purposes
- local news
- educational programming through public television
- open university channels
- over-the-air community information channels, mostly in UHF bands
In countries that demand it, TV stations are required to provide equal and free time for political candidates--this reduces the importance of raising massive contributions from wealthy donors in order to mount a viable campaign for office.
In countries that demand it, TV stations are required to dedicate a portion of their schedule for educational and civic programming. TV stations are required to yield their schedule when there are announcements of importance to be delivered by elected leaders. They're required to provide equal levels of access to content producers--a-la public access TV.
Unfortunately, in the US we've been complacently accepting a situation where many of these arguably basic services are available only if you're willing to pay a cable company to provide them, even at a basic level of service.
Well yes, the fact is that PBS has has to step up corporate underwriting to the point that underwriting announcements sound like commercials. This points even more strongly to the fact that until we treat the airwaves as a public good, and until we as citizens make it clear that commercial-free and non-commercial broadcasting is essential, we'll still have things like what recently happened with congress slashing the budget for Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB)--which doles out federal fudns to PBS and NPR by 1/4, with complete phase-out of government funding for public broadcasting in 4 years.
If we allow a certain small minority insist that non-commercial broadcasting is perfectly fine because corporations are happily underwriting, we will get to the point where we'll only have Monsanto underwriting ads and fund raising campaigns.
While the British model isn't ideal (the TV tax is kind of odd), at least they've embraced the idea that something like the BBC is a public good that serves a public need for which everyone should pay through taxes.
Here's what I'm guessing: The broadcasters are betting that by 2009, just about everyone will have cheap satellite or cable TV, and (as someone pointed out to me in a previous story on this subject), the people that don't are probably limited enough in purchasing power that it'd be worth the risk to ad revenue to go ahead with it anyway.
That's precisely the issue--that a technology architecture and phase-out process was taken that can have, as a net result, excluding those who cannot purchase new equipment because they are on limited incomes or can not afford or cannot receive services such as cable or satellite.
I think we need to remember that that the public airwaves are a public good that has merely been loaned out to broadcasters, and that they need to treat it as more than a vehicle to peddle their wares. They can and should serve a public need--i.e. emergency broadcasting, public television, network television, etc, and transition plans to DTV should have a clear path for making sure that large groups of people aren't systematically blocked out from what is, nowadays, an essential medium.
Well, that's why I think it's very meaningful that this research came not from big Pharma but from a University in Japan...
More probability that people would have different motives for conducting the research. When you have a mechanism that is published in an academic journal, it may make it more difficult to obtain a patent on the mechanism itself, i'd suspect, rather than on the delivery vehicle.
Um... no. see below:
0 05 0.htm%5D
New drug blocks HIV from entering human cells
http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_1423753,
">Indo-Asian News Service
Tokyo, July 7, 2005
"A new drug that blocks HIV virus from entering human cells and causes almost no side effects has been developed by Japanese researchers.
The drug, code named AK602, was tried on 40 AIDS patients in the US and almost no side effect was found.
"When patients took 0.02 ounces of AK602 twice a day for 10 days the HIV dropped to an average of one per cent, according to a research team led by Hiroaki Mitsuya of Kumamoto University.
"Current AIDS medications often lose their effectiveness after a few days due to the virus' resistance, but the AK602 reacts to human cells instead of attacking the virus, said Mitsuya. [...]"
Under current HAART treatment, it takes months for HIV viral load to go down that quickly, and side effects under current meds are not negligible (high cholesterol, weird fat distribution, major depression, intense diarrhoea...)
I already get to experience the joy of roadcast.
There I go, minding my own business, listening to 87.9 FM -- WPOD, which somehow knows to play only songs I own and songs I like, and then all of a sudden my Mighty Wind and Bon Jovi singing in spanish gets interrupted by the staticky sound of Limp Biskit... I look to the car on my left and see that the dude in the souped up Honday is bobbing his head to the music in my car, and i realize-- his XM Radio FM transceiver relay can beat up my dinky little iTrip.
This new Roomba DOES look surprisingly like the Woomba.
Who'd have thought that reality imitates satire?
Problem with line-item veto is that it could really screw up a carefully crafted and balanced act (not that those are very common). It's like removing paragraphs from a novel as you read it--you may not think they're important, but when you get further into it, you may all of a sudden wonder why the plot doesn't work.
Better option: single-issue legislation. Some countries do this and don't have the problem of pork and nonsense that we do in the US.
Um... they're US Federal government savings bonds. Same things taht the US sells to fund it massive deficits and debt spending.
If you have any reason to believe that the US government is going to default on its debt, what are you still doing out on the surface? I'd imagine you should be preparing to duck into your bunker.
You've been watching too much Fox News, buddy...
He sponsored a very significant National Supercomputing Act in the 1980s, had a clear role in aiding the transition from NSFNet to an open Internet, and through his National Information Infrastructure agenda for action as Vice-President clearly set the terms of the debate as a challenge between the phone and cable companies that just wanted to have narrow pipes out of the home to deliver push-button pizza and QVC on steriods and those who wanted something open and much broader, like the Internet that up until that point was the domain of those who had access to scientific research institutions.