Does the book, or any other reference explain why we need such an obtuse mechanism for parsing strings in the first place? Most of the things I read about people doing with regular expressions could be done with much more intuitive string handling methods that have been around since at least the 70s. There may be things that can be done with regex that couldn't be done with (for example) the "parse" statement in Rexx, but it would be a very small percentage of the examples I've seen.
The Clinton administrations "lost" e-mail too, but 99 percent of the posters above seem to have no knowledge of this. I grow tired of pointing it out, particularly as I think it is intentionally ignored by those who have pet conspiracy theories.
The real culprit here is that "e-mail" as practiced today is a far cry from what went on in the 80s when the amount of total e-mail traffic was at a much much more manageable level. There is no artificial intelligence system which can distinguish a message concerning our Iraq policy from a message to mom about the son's high school soccer team, much less all the spam that must arrive at the White House. Managing this problem has been bungled at the White House, but it has also been bungled at many large organizations, where in many cases the solution is to have everyone delete messages more than 30 days old (not because that is a good idea, but because it is the only way to cope) and instead to save DOCUMENTS (Word files etc.) as the official records of what is going on. Central repositories of such documents with change histories (the way Google docs currently works and the way old mainframe systems used to work for the most part) are, and always have been the way to go and I feel quite confident that eventually thats the way it will go, leaving MS Exchange servers as the exclusive domain of soccer moms.
Also missing from the above conspiracy theories is the fact that anyone doing a hangable offense is almost certainly to have used other than official means to communicate with one another. The term "crack berries" was coined during those days and there are certainly other off-record means to communicate. Archived e-mails, C-Span, and schemes, such as pioneered in Florida's "Government in the Sunshine" that seek to make all government communications transparent to its "users" are a good thing. But dishonest people (of either party, regardless of position on political spectrum) who are either seeking profit for themselves, or who believe in "end justifies the means" approaches to government will find ways around these transparencies that don't involve subsequent massive data purges.
There is nothing new about the level of technical incompetence here, and any lawsuit that turns over a rock of procedures within the Federal (or, likely, most states) government will expose similar disasters in the making.
I'll keep saying: If you are tired of big-government fuck-ups, stop voting for big government.
One of the things that got my attention about this story (yesterday when it was actually still news) was the mention of "government officials". Even though the story had it right that it was contractors that did the peeking, they continued to refer to them as "government officials".
As a former government contractor I can say with a fair amount of confidence that we are safe from "government officials" looking up our records in Federal databases. Most of them are doing good to get through their morning e-mail without a call to the help desk. The really technical ones can manage simple spreadsheets (although in my experience this involved a fair amount of hand-holding too).
I'm not sure if the problem here is that the average citizen doesn't know the difference between a contractor and a "government official" or if the reporters involved just weren't sure which one it was. Chances are that if you call the IRS, Social Security Administration, or State Department you are going to be talking to a contractor, not a "government official" or even (if we want to consider a third category) a government employee. They don't do database updates, they don't do secretarial work, they don't write computer programs, they certainly don't make their own travel arrangements (Clinton/Gore's government re-invention program relieved them of this onerous responsibility) and they can sit right next to a ringing telephone for hours without being bothered by it.
So, now, the question remains for those who are in favor of the government doing more and more things for us, all of such things involving the collection of various bits of data about ourselves: Who would you rather have access to that data... (a) a contractor, who as we've seen might use idle time to sneak a peek at their neighbors info, or (b) a government employee (or official) who might also do such things, but in addition might accidentally delete or mangle your records because they don't have a clue how the data is organized.
By the way my answer is (c) none of the above. There is no technology fix for this. If you don't want your data looked at, then don't have it out there. That means you have to take a certain amount of responsibility for your own lives. Tough huh?
I agree with the point you are trying to make regarding the two terms, but as a practical matter are there any governments with a significant amount of freedom for individuals that are not also democracies?
It certainly makes more sense to confound freedom and democracy than it does to confound liberty and liberal, certainly in modern use. I'm very much in favor of liberty, which is why I've never considered myself a liberal (in the modern sense). Federal government insertion into every aspect of our lives can't coexist with liberty and it doesn't matter which party is pushing it or what good excuse they have for it.
There are somewhere on the order of thousands of people with access to the data in question here, and some of them (DBAs for example) can probably access it without leaving a trace (since they are the ones coding the tracing mechanisms).
You can't have a universal passport system, or a universal drivers license, voter ID card, Social Security database or the ultimate health care system people seem to fantasize about without enormous potential for abuse and if anyone should realize this it should be the readers of/. (some of them anyway).
You mean you have worked with managers who know how to do their own animated Powerpoint presentations?
You've worked with a better class than I have then.
The ones I know only know how to do a single operation on a Powerpoint file, and that is to accidentally erase it while on the plane in route to the presentation.
I just assumed that the Internet was invented to handle such emergencies.
"People were shifting between companies all the time back then. Microsoft weren't some alien group, they were people with exactly the same goals and level of experience as the competition. They just had the superior business model for the day. Back then things were nasty, but they were nasty all round, it's just fashionable to only remember microsofts bad deeds."
Business model has nothing to do with it. Talking key decision makers within the Federal government to standardize on Windows and Office has everything to do with it. Nobody I worked with at the time was gung-ho to switch to Windows or Office, we did so because our customers (the Feds) mandated that all future submissions had to be in Word or Excel format.
Microsoft as much as anything is a US Government created monopoly, and the Feds (using taxpayer money) funded a whole new round of spending on PCs and related software for which the existing infrastructure was ill prepared (and still hasn't recovered; witness continuing loss of e-mail and other documents due to conflicting or non-existent internal document standards).
Hopefully wide adoption of something like ODF (and not OOXML) by Europe and other countries will cause US decision makers to finally get a clue (I'm only cautiously optimistic though as they are a fairly clueless bunch). I remain concerned that some people mistakenly see support of Microsoft as the patriotic thing to do when in fact it has hastened the dumbing down of most of the people exposed to it. I know, you won't believe me anyway.
I sure hope so, as I've never heard of the Origami plug-in, and I hope they don't make such a thing for Linux.
But seriously... why do I have to run an application on my PC to upload a photo? I take these nice bazillion pixel photos and Facebook after doing endless minutes of something, turns them into postage stamps. Why don't Facebook users just upload their pics to a real photo site and then throw a sheep at all their friends with the URL branded on it. Their whole infrastructure is disgustingly lame.
..kindly RTFA: it consists of actual imagery, not a model of the imagery like Celestia... (karma whoring: off)
Yes, but why is this being presented as as advantage over 3D modeling?
To answer my own question: A program like Celestia allows you to see hundreds of thousands of stars (or however many are in the database you are using). It allows you to "fly" to those stars, turn around and look back at our star from them, or see star configurations that are familiar to us on earth from other perspectives. What a program like Celestia doesn't do is allow you to see other galaxies, or at least it doesn't allow you to interact with them in the same way you would a star in our galaxy. (I haven't used Celestia for a while and I can't remember if they present galaxies as distant points that you can never quite get to.)
I see advantages to both, but in comparing the oh-wow aspects of the two I think Celestia is a far greater accomplishment, especially considering it has been around for what 7 years or more, and runs on Windows, Linux OS X and without special software.
This "new" thing from Microsoft on the other hand looks like one more (and I suspect there will be many to follow) inducement for people to adopt Silverlight. Anyone who can't see that needs more than a computerized telescope to help them with their vision.
That term may in fact be hyperbolic, depending on what they actually use it for. On the other hand I've worked with government IT people who didn't know their ass from a hole in the ground, and with government IT consultants who did know their ass from a hole in the ground (but still didn't know anything about IT).
They (the two groups above) do dumb-ass things like store archival documents in Word format, and then when they discover that new versions of Word won't read them, load old versions of Word, print the documents, scan them back in using "Acrobat" scanners that convert the documents to pictures and poorly OCRed text.
These people need to be protected from shooting themselves, and taxpayers in the foot when ten years down the road they find again that they have lost all backups and have only the data in these kiosks to go from (not saying this is the plan, just saying that given the players, stranger things have happened).
Microsoft is ferociously promoting Silverlight as an alternative to just about everything, but somehow with all their billions, they haven't had a chance yet to port it to other OSs. I find this very suspect. As a new product, minus all the baggage that comes with Windows and Office, this would be a perfect opportunity for full and open specs, plus at least prototype implementations in all the major OSs, Open Source, and all. So far though, it looks like just another wedge product to get people into the mindset that you just HAVE to run Windows to operate in the modern world.
Which makes me realize that with todays technology, if we ever land a man on a planet large enough to sustain an earth-like atmosphere, the chances of ever having them return is nil.
Can't you just put them in the microwave and achieve the same results quicker?
So, at what point I wonder does Microsoft announce another version of the XBox? Or are they all already too broken from overheating for anyone to care?
Basically until we can agree on clearly defined terms that mean the same globally it's meaningless to even try to compare. The best you can do is agree/disagree on certain points and form your own unique political stance - then vote for the best candidate at the next available election.
Well, I don't think that is likely to happen any time soon. The confounding of the terminology isn't an unfortunate accident, it is in fact a tool used by both sides (but I'd claim more frequently by the "left") to muddle the debate in order to corral voters who don't have the time, inclination, or education to wade through it all. In the end the politicos resort to "trust us, because you're not smart enough to work all this out on your own".
We noted that 1984 came and went without the existence of a worldwide "Big Brother", even though there have been some countries that have come close to such a thing. But you don't have to be paying too much attention to see a steady drift toward less and less control by the individual over their own destiny. This is a reversal of the long lasting historical trend towards more personal freedom, and it was during that previous time that the classical definition of "liberal" and "conservative" were coined.
Todays political parties only pretend to be following that terminology though, and I suspect it is no different in America than in many other countries: One party wants freedom from excess taxes and growth in domestic spending, but somehow, can't quite bring itself to let the rest of the world go its own way. We either have to bomb them, or in some other way convince them to cooperate with us, both options seem to be equally expensive. The other party invents one new government program after another to make life better for individuals, in the process creating an unbreakable dependency on more such programs. Both parties, even when having full control of the government are somehow thwarted in achieving even their primary stated goals, even though government as inexorably grown with their efforts.
You have only to look at the events of yesterday to realize that relative financial security does not lead to universal happiness, nor does a relatively lax legal system result in universal respect for law an order. In the end, society has to choose just how important true freedom (freedom to act as opposed to freedom from worry) is in the equation, and unfortunately, now that our world is fully inhabited there is no way for the individual to make that determination for themselves alone.
Seems to me it is the star that is 21,000 light years away that would have the planets, not the one that is 5000 light years away. The lensing effect is provided by the intermediate star. Unless I'm mistaken they need a new (or any) science editor at The Times.
How many of "us, the normal people" will ever be single-issue voters with a focus on spam?
Probably few to none. It is, unfortunately the lock that both parties have on single-issue-voters that makes progress on many many issues unlikely. If the parties can get all the votes they need on issues such as abortion, gun control, immigration and special rights for various groups, what incentive will they ever have for focusing on the economy as a whole, improving our infrastructure (or getting out of the way so is can be improved). There are make-or-break issues that are rarely touched upon in debates etc., simply because so much time is spent on the issues for which vast numbers of lawyers and lobbyists make their living. With most people I talk to, once you get beyond one or two hot-button issues they plead total or almost total ignorance.
But from the perspective of Yahoo! users the more important question is whether a MS takeover will turn Yahoo! into tepid porridge? And will the long, slow decline of Microsoft now drag Yahoo! down too?
I certainly hope (and think) so!
I was a loyal and early user of both Yahoo and Microsoft products. There is nothing like a loyal user scorned.
Microsoft's version to version bloat, buggyness, and most of all, attempts to lock one product inextricably to another, plus their habit of acquiring other companies who's products I used, only to simply discontinue them or render them unrecognizable -- all of this, finally, drove me away in disgust. I gave up my career in order to avoid having to deal with MS crap.
What puzzles me is how you (and others) cannot see that Yahoo is made in the same mold as Microsoft already.
I've been (unfortunately) involved in some Yahoo Groups for a long while and countless times have had to explain the tortured process for an outsider to sign up for Yahoo Groups, involving them not only giving up (or faking) a lot of personal information, but also agreeing to take a Yahoo e-mail address as part of the process. How many of the claimed bazzillion Yahoo e-mail addresses are (as I suspect) mostly unused? I'd guess a lot. I had one guy tell me he never could remember his Yahoo sign-on, so every time he wanted to check the messages in the group he would just sign up for Yahoo all over again. They stuff is so crappy it makes me sick to even think about it.
Do you use Flickr without paying the premium fee? I can't imagine why anyone would. They keep everything you upload, but hide all but the last 200 picture from you. This is the most retarded scheme I've ever heard of. They must have the largest collection of unaccessible information on Earth! To help them out I just continue to upload files. I keep the pictures I actually want to view on Google. Flickr has had a lot of service outages, and for me is often painfully slow. Is it any wonder?
How can you stand all the stupid animated graphics that Yahoo throws at you? Half my screen real-estate and 90 percent of my bandwidth is used up with this silly junk when I go to a Yahoo page.
I know only one or two people who use Yahoo as their primary e-mail account, and maybe not coincidentally these are the people who don't seem to have their e-mail act totally together, don't respond to important messages, can't keep their CCs and BCCs straight, and since they are universally Windows users, are often having serious computer problems anyway ("Sorry, I haven't been able to check my e-mail in three weeks, my computer keeps locking up, got any ideas?").
These two companies are a match made in heaven. I wish them the greatest of happiness, and I hope they alienate a few billion more users along the way so that the rest of us can stop playing the role of free tech support for them.
Sorry, please don't lump the rest of us in with your level of incompetence in '2003. I've known the difference between routine backups and archival tapes for as long as I've been in the biz, and the original poster is correct - all of these emails were required by law to be archived.
Thanks for speaking up for us older and (I really believe) more responsible data processing professionals of the past.
Don't any of the posters above even read the Dilbert cartoons? I guess not. It concerts a clueless mid-level executive, numerous clueless underlings in a large organization of mostly clueless people, where there are approximately two people (not counting the janitor and some supernatural animal characters) who actually know what is going on.
First, let me say that when people speak of anything regarding data processing at almost any government organization (with some exceptions, but the White House isn't one of them) you are talking about a private contractor which usually means a large company with many subsidiaries, sub contractors and sub sub contractors (some of which is not technically allowed, but I know it happens anyway). Each of these organizations has business managers, task leads, specialists in various areas and a virtual army of people at the bottom who actually do things like manage archive tapes. Can you guess how technically competent some of the people in the middle of that chain are? Can you guess how technically competent some of the people who work the back-up shift are? (And of course nobody in their right mind things that most of the people with business school degrees have a clue about how to run a modern server network.) Do you suspect that they are all Republicans? Do you suspect that they are all so unethical that they would not question (or even subvert) an attempt to do something that was clearly unethical and possibly illegal?
Maybe one reason that so many people are so passive about the continued growth of government is that they don't realize just how enormous and unwieldy it is already. Sorry, but some of you just don't have a clue either.
I happened to have worked for the contractor (in a very general sense as alluded to above) responsible for e-mail at the White House during the Clinton administration. E-mail at that time was lost under almost identical circumstances. The media doesn't seem to be able to do any real research in these area, they just regurgitate press releases (if and when it fits their political agenda). News of the gaff which was purely technical in nature was all over the organization (because I didn't work at the White House or on that contract or even for that part of the organization and I heard about it). It just so happened though that it was handy for Clinton that those records were lost during the run-up to his impeachment. I don't know if the records were eventually found, because the media didn't seem to take an interest in the matter as they are doing now. What I do know, for sure, is that then, and now, the politics of the matter and the technology of the matter are completely isolated from one another.
Finally, it seems from reading most of the news stories, and many of the/. comments that the difference between backup and archive are muddled in the minds of many. A sad commentary on the state of the art in the US. That there was no archive, or that the archive was in some way mishandled is surely worth looking into, and by all means criminally prosecute or at least fire those who were responsible at all levels. If every time someone in government (whether a government employee or contractor) screwed up they would simply be terminated immediately (without generous lifetime pension benefits) you would be surprised how fast things would improve in America. I'm all for it.
Keep making it a mater of pure politics though, and things will continue to drift in the wrong direction as they have been for most of the last century
Sounds about right. This so-called 'worm' is nothing more than a useless file - THAT YOU HAVE TO CHOOSE TO INSTALL - with a bad uninstaller script. It's about as much a worm as typing 'sudo rm -rf/' into the terminal because some stranger on the internet said it's a good idea (for the uninformed, it's a great idea, and definitely try it and give it your root password when prompted)*.
You're right though. Most Office users are writing away at their documents, computing their departments next year budget and so on, after just 5 minutes of playing with Word and Excel.
Unfortunately, for the rest of us, this methodology shines through in the results.
Also unfortunately, most of these people never bother to get any better at what they are doing and further go on to preparing Powerpoint sideshows that we have to pretend to pay attention to.
Maybe that's the problem. Here in the US the decision would be made by someone who would go with a more commercial solution in order to get the free glass paperweight/calendar/digital clock from their sales rep. Intel, MS and others would tout these "wins" as proof that their systems are better.
We've seen it all before (although many have yet to learn from it).
Notice how many people put albums of photos on Facebook, compared to Myspace - it's a good indicator of whether they will stay with the service.
Are you confusing Facebook with Flickr or Picasa? Facebook runs a Java program that spends ten minutes converting my beautiful hi-res photos to postage stamps. The results are pathetic! 50meg in 2meg out.
If you pay attention you will notice that Facebook doesn't do any heavy lifting on their servers. They leave that to the ap writers, and even so, the service was grinding to a halt in December. They'll have to reinvent their infrastructure to scale and by then the world will be bored with their walled garden.
I think Facebook joining this group is too little too late. Let's see them actually make some content exportable (not that I want my postage stamp pictures back or anything).
On the other hand, nothing is new about Google joining this group. Everything is Google is exportable right now. they are already walking the walk, while Facebook is just talking the talk (and running in the other direction).
If you aren't showing any data to anyone then you belong to a social networking site for no reason.
Actually I suspect a lot of people just try it out of curiosity. I did. That's how I found out about Gmail several years ago and I've been using it ever since.
With Facebook though, I tried it, and partially because of security concerns quickly concluded the whole concept (and implementation) sucked. Fortunately I hadn't provided much information during the sign-up, and most of what I did provide was fake. Exception being my real name.
In order to keep monitoring what they are up to (in case they ever stop sucking) I created a new ID with a fake name to go along with the other fake information. In spite of Facebook's hi-sounding philosophical statements on the subject, there are a lot of fake users out there.
I've learned through incidences such as this that their stated mission and what they are actually doing are two different things. If they were still only open to college kids with proven school e-mail addresses etc. it would be a different matter. Once they started trying to get the MySpace user counts their original philosophy (if it truly existed) went out the window.
Your "no reason" proposition is wrong in another respect though. I have a similar fake ID on Orkut. Both Orkut and Facebook allow you to join various "groups" with special interests. These things are as useful as the old Internet Newsgroups used to be (and still are in a few cases). If you can find a sufficiently active and well moderated special interest group in one of these services it may well be worth your time.
Facebook and the like might be useful services as long as they don't get in such a hurry to earn those ridiculous 15B valuations. They may even be valuable now for all the college kids to keep track of one another. Finally, it will be very useful in the future to employers who figure out how to check up on what the latest interviewees were like in their "private" moments.
Slashdot Mirror
Does the book, or any other reference explain why we need such an obtuse mechanism for parsing strings in the first place? Most of the things I read about people doing with regular expressions could be done with much more intuitive string handling methods that have been around since at least the 70s. There may be things that can be done with regex that couldn't be done with (for example) the "parse" statement in Rexx, but it would be a very small percentage of the examples I've seen.
The Clinton administrations "lost" e-mail too, but 99 percent of the posters above seem to have no knowledge of this. I grow tired of pointing it out, particularly as I think it is intentionally ignored by those who have pet conspiracy theories.
The real culprit here is that "e-mail" as practiced today is a far cry from what went on in the 80s when the amount of total e-mail traffic was at a much much more manageable level. There is no artificial intelligence system which can distinguish a message concerning our Iraq policy from a message to mom about the son's high school soccer team, much less all the spam that must arrive at the White House. Managing this problem has been bungled at the White House, but it has also been bungled at many large organizations, where in many cases the solution is to have everyone delete messages more than 30 days old (not because that is a good idea, but because it is the only way to cope) and instead to save DOCUMENTS (Word files etc.) as the official records of what is going on. Central repositories of such documents with change histories (the way Google docs currently works and the way old mainframe systems used to work for the most part) are, and always have been the way to go and I feel quite confident that eventually thats the way it will go, leaving MS Exchange servers as the exclusive domain of soccer moms.
Also missing from the above conspiracy theories is the fact that anyone doing a hangable offense is almost certainly to have used other than official means to communicate with one another. The term "crack berries" was coined during those days and there are certainly other off-record means to communicate. Archived e-mails, C-Span, and schemes, such as pioneered in Florida's "Government in the Sunshine" that seek to make all government communications transparent to its "users" are a good thing. But dishonest people (of either party, regardless of position on political spectrum) who are either seeking profit for themselves, or who believe in "end justifies the means" approaches to government will find ways around these transparencies that don't involve subsequent massive data purges.
There is nothing new about the level of technical incompetence here, and any lawsuit that turns over a rock of procedures within the Federal (or, likely, most states) government will expose similar disasters in the making.
I'll keep saying: If you are tired of big-government fuck-ups, stop voting for big government.
One of the things that got my attention about this story (yesterday when it was actually still news) was the mention of "government officials". Even though the story had it right that it was contractors that did the peeking, they continued to refer to them as "government officials".
As a former government contractor I can say with a fair amount of confidence that we are safe from "government officials" looking up our records in Federal databases. Most of them are doing good to get through their morning e-mail without a call to the help desk. The really technical ones can manage simple spreadsheets (although in my experience this involved a fair amount of hand-holding too).
I'm not sure if the problem here is that the average citizen doesn't know the difference between a contractor and a "government official" or if the reporters involved just weren't sure which one it was. Chances are that if you call the IRS, Social Security Administration, or State Department you are going to be talking to a contractor, not a "government official" or even (if we want to consider a third category) a government employee. They don't do database updates, they don't do secretarial work, they don't write computer programs, they certainly don't make their own travel arrangements (Clinton/Gore's government re-invention program relieved them of this onerous responsibility) and they can sit right next to a ringing telephone for hours without being bothered by it.
So, now, the question remains for those who are in favor of the government doing more and more things for us, all of such things involving the collection of various bits of data about ourselves: Who would you rather have access to that data... (a) a contractor, who as we've seen might use idle time to sneak a peek at their neighbors info, or (b) a government employee (or official) who might also do such things, but in addition might accidentally delete or mangle your records because they don't have a clue how the data is organized.
By the way my answer is (c) none of the above. There is no technology fix for this. If you don't want your data looked at, then don't have it out there. That means you have to take a certain amount of responsibility for your own lives. Tough huh?
I agree with the point you are trying to make regarding the two terms, but as a practical matter are there any governments with a significant amount of freedom for individuals that are not also democracies?
/. (some of them anyway).
It certainly makes more sense to confound freedom and democracy than it does to confound liberty and liberal, certainly in modern use. I'm very much in favor of liberty, which is why I've never considered myself a liberal (in the modern sense). Federal government insertion into every aspect of our lives can't coexist with liberty and it doesn't matter which party is pushing it or what good excuse they have for it.
There are somewhere on the order of thousands of people with access to the data in question here, and some of them (DBAs for example) can probably access it without leaving a trace (since they are the ones coding the tracing mechanisms).
You can't have a universal passport system, or a universal drivers license, voter ID card, Social Security database or the ultimate health care system people seem to fantasize about without enormous potential for abuse and if anyone should realize this it should be the readers of
You mean you have worked with managers who know how to do their own animated Powerpoint presentations?
You've worked with a better class than I have then.
The ones I know only know how to do a single operation on a Powerpoint file, and that is to accidentally erase it while on the plane in route to the presentation.
I just assumed that the Internet was invented to handle such emergencies.
"People were shifting between companies all the time back then. Microsoft weren't some alien group, they were people with exactly the same goals and level of experience as the competition. They just had the superior business model for the day. Back then things were nasty, but they were nasty all round, it's just fashionable to only remember microsofts bad deeds."
Business model has nothing to do with it. Talking key decision makers within the Federal government to standardize on Windows and Office has everything to do with it. Nobody I worked with at the time was gung-ho to switch to Windows or Office, we did so because our customers (the Feds) mandated that all future submissions had to be in Word or Excel format.
Microsoft as much as anything is a US Government created monopoly, and the Feds (using taxpayer money) funded a whole new round of spending on PCs and related software for which the existing infrastructure was ill prepared (and still hasn't recovered; witness continuing loss of e-mail and other documents due to conflicting or non-existent internal document standards).
Hopefully wide adoption of something like ODF (and not OOXML) by Europe and other countries will cause US decision makers to finally get a clue (I'm only cautiously optimistic though as they are a fairly clueless bunch). I remain concerned that some people mistakenly see support of Microsoft as the patriotic thing to do when in fact it has hastened the dumbing down of most of the people exposed to it. I know, you won't believe me anyway.
I sure hope so, as I've never heard of the Origami plug-in, and I hope they don't make such a thing for Linux.
But seriously... why do I have to run an application on my PC to upload a photo? I take these nice bazillion pixel photos and Facebook after doing endless minutes of something, turns them into postage stamps. Why don't Facebook users just upload their pics to a real photo site and then throw a sheep at all their friends with the URL branded on it. Their whole infrastructure is disgustingly lame.
House of cards.
Yes, but why is this being presented as as advantage over 3D modeling?
To answer my own question: A program like Celestia allows you to see hundreds of thousands of stars (or however many are in the database you are using). It allows you to "fly" to those stars, turn around and look back at our star from them, or see star configurations that are familiar to us on earth from other perspectives. What a program like Celestia doesn't do is allow you to see other galaxies, or at least it doesn't allow you to interact with them in the same way you would a star in our galaxy. (I haven't used Celestia for a while and I can't remember if they present galaxies as distant points that you can never quite get to.)
I see advantages to both, but in comparing the oh-wow aspects of the two I think Celestia is a far greater accomplishment, especially considering it has been around for what 7 years or more, and runs on Windows, Linux OS X and without special software.
This "new" thing from Microsoft on the other hand looks like one more (and I suspect there will be many to follow) inducement for people to adopt Silverlight. Anyone who can't see that needs more than a computerized telescope to help them with their vision.
Pls post as podcast, u use 2 big words.
That term may in fact be hyperbolic, depending on what they actually use it for. On the other hand I've worked with government IT people who didn't know their ass from a hole in the ground, and with government IT consultants who did know their ass from a hole in the ground (but still didn't know anything about IT).
They (the two groups above) do dumb-ass things like store archival documents in Word format, and then when they discover that new versions of Word won't read them, load old versions of Word, print the documents, scan them back in using "Acrobat" scanners that convert the documents to pictures and poorly OCRed text.
These people need to be protected from shooting themselves, and taxpayers in the foot when ten years down the road they find again that they have lost all backups and have only the data in these kiosks to go from (not saying this is the plan, just saying that given the players, stranger things have happened).
Microsoft is ferociously promoting Silverlight as an alternative to just about everything, but somehow with all their billions, they haven't had a chance yet to port it to other OSs. I find this very suspect. As a new product, minus all the baggage that comes with Windows and Office, this would be a perfect opportunity for full and open specs, plus at least prototype implementations in all the major OSs, Open Source, and all. So far though, it looks like just another wedge product to get people into the mindset that you just HAVE to run Windows to operate in the modern world.
Don't buy that concept.
Not to mention a parachute won't do you any good.
Which makes me realize that with todays technology, if we ever land a man on a planet large enough to sustain an earth-like atmosphere, the chances of ever having them return is nil.
Can't you just put them in the microwave and achieve the same results quicker?
So, at what point I wonder does Microsoft announce another version of the XBox? Or are they all already too broken from overheating for anyone to care?
My hygienist told me that too. I didn't inform her that I never watch TV.
Well, I don't think that is likely to happen any time soon. The confounding of the terminology isn't an unfortunate accident, it is in fact a tool used by both sides (but I'd claim more frequently by the "left") to muddle the debate in order to corral voters who don't have the time, inclination, or education to wade through it all. In the end the politicos resort to "trust us, because you're not smart enough to work all this out on your own".
We noted that 1984 came and went without the existence of a worldwide "Big Brother", even though there have been some countries that have come close to such a thing. But you don't have to be paying too much attention to see a steady drift toward less and less control by the individual over their own destiny. This is a reversal of the long lasting historical trend towards more personal freedom, and it was during that previous time that the classical definition of "liberal" and "conservative" were coined.
Todays political parties only pretend to be following that terminology though, and I suspect it is no different in America than in many other countries: One party wants freedom from excess taxes and growth in domestic spending, but somehow, can't quite bring itself to let the rest of the world go its own way. We either have to bomb them, or in some other way convince them to cooperate with us, both options seem to be equally expensive. The other party invents one new government program after another to make life better for individuals, in the process creating an unbreakable dependency on more such programs. Both parties, even when having full control of the government are somehow thwarted in achieving even their primary stated goals, even though government as inexorably grown with their efforts.
You have only to look at the events of yesterday to realize that relative financial security does not lead to universal happiness, nor does a relatively lax legal system result in universal respect for law an order. In the end, society has to choose just how important true freedom (freedom to act as opposed to freedom from worry) is in the equation, and unfortunately, now that our world is fully inhabited there is no way for the individual to make that determination for themselves alone.
Seems to me it is the star that is 21,000 light years away that would have the planets, not the one that is 5000 light years away. The lensing effect is provided by the intermediate star. Unless I'm mistaken they need a new (or any) science editor at The Times.
("Just make it black/white text! That's the best for readability, navigation, and accessibility")
Are you nuts?!
Green text on black background is the only way to go!
Probably few to none. It is, unfortunately the lock that both parties have on single-issue-voters that makes progress on many many issues unlikely. If the parties can get all the votes they need on issues such as abortion, gun control, immigration and special rights for various groups, what incentive will they ever have for focusing on the economy as a whole, improving our infrastructure (or getting out of the way so is can be improved). There are make-or-break issues that are rarely touched upon in debates etc., simply because so much time is spent on the issues for which vast numbers of lawyers and lobbyists make their living. With most people I talk to, once you get beyond one or two hot-button issues they plead total or almost total ignorance.
I certainly hope (and think) so!
I was a loyal and early user of both Yahoo and Microsoft products. There is nothing like a loyal user scorned.
Microsoft's version to version bloat, buggyness, and most of all, attempts to lock one product inextricably to another, plus their habit of acquiring other companies who's products I used, only to simply discontinue them or render them unrecognizable -- all of this, finally, drove me away in disgust. I gave up my career in order to avoid having to deal with MS crap.
What puzzles me is how you (and others) cannot see that Yahoo is made in the same mold as Microsoft already.
I've been (unfortunately) involved in some Yahoo Groups for a long while and countless times have had to explain the tortured process for an outsider to sign up for Yahoo Groups, involving them not only giving up (or faking) a lot of personal information, but also agreeing to take a Yahoo e-mail address as part of the process. How many of the claimed bazzillion Yahoo e-mail addresses are (as I suspect) mostly unused? I'd guess a lot. I had one guy tell me he never could remember his Yahoo sign-on, so every time he wanted to check the messages in the group he would just sign up for Yahoo all over again. They stuff is so crappy it makes me sick to even think about it.
Do you use Flickr without paying the premium fee? I can't imagine why anyone would. They keep everything you upload, but hide all but the last 200 picture from you. This is the most retarded scheme I've ever heard of. They must have the largest collection of unaccessible information on Earth! To help them out I just continue to upload files. I keep the pictures I actually want to view on Google. Flickr has had a lot of service outages, and for me is often painfully slow. Is it any wonder?
How can you stand all the stupid animated graphics that Yahoo throws at you? Half my screen real-estate and 90 percent of my bandwidth is used up with this silly junk when I go to a Yahoo page.
I know only one or two people who use Yahoo as their primary e-mail account, and maybe not coincidentally these are the people who don't seem to have their e-mail act totally together, don't respond to important messages, can't keep their CCs and BCCs straight, and since they are universally Windows users, are often having serious computer problems anyway ("Sorry, I haven't been able to check my e-mail in three weeks, my computer keeps locking up, got any ideas?").
These two companies are a match made in heaven. I wish them the greatest of happiness, and I hope they alienate a few billion more users along the way so that the rest of us can stop playing the role of free tech support for them.
Thanks for speaking up for us older and (I really believe) more responsible data processing professionals of the past.
/. comments that the difference between backup and archive are muddled in the minds of many. A sad commentary on the state of the art in the US. That there was no archive, or that the archive was in some way mishandled is surely worth looking into, and by all means criminally prosecute or at least fire those who were responsible at all levels. If every time someone in government (whether a government employee or contractor) screwed up they would simply be terminated immediately (without generous lifetime pension benefits) you would be surprised how fast things would improve in America. I'm all for it.
Don't any of the posters above even read the Dilbert cartoons? I guess not. It concerts a clueless mid-level executive, numerous clueless underlings in a large organization of mostly clueless people, where there are approximately two people (not counting the janitor and some supernatural animal characters) who actually know what is going on.
First, let me say that when people speak of anything regarding data processing at almost any government organization (with some exceptions, but the White House isn't one of them) you are talking about a private contractor which usually means a large company with many subsidiaries, sub contractors and sub sub contractors (some of which is not technically allowed, but I know it happens anyway). Each of these organizations has business managers, task leads, specialists in various areas and a virtual army of people at the bottom who actually do things like manage archive tapes. Can you guess how technically competent some of the people in the middle of that chain are? Can you guess how technically competent some of the people who work the back-up shift are? (And of course nobody in their right mind things that most of the people with business school degrees have a clue about how to run a modern server network.) Do you suspect that they are all Republicans? Do you suspect that they are all so unethical that they would not question (or even subvert) an attempt to do something that was clearly unethical and possibly illegal?
Maybe one reason that so many people are so passive about the continued growth of government is that they don't realize just how enormous and unwieldy it is already. Sorry, but some of you just don't have a clue either.
I happened to have worked for the contractor (in a very general sense as alluded to above) responsible for e-mail at the White House during the Clinton administration. E-mail at that time was lost under almost identical circumstances. The media doesn't seem to be able to do any real research in these area, they just regurgitate press releases (if and when it fits their political agenda). News of the gaff which was purely technical in nature was all over the organization (because I didn't work at the White House or on that contract or even for that part of the organization and I heard about it). It just so happened though that it was handy for Clinton that those records were lost during the run-up to his impeachment. I don't know if the records were eventually found, because the media didn't seem to take an interest in the matter as they are doing now. What I do know, for sure, is that then, and now, the politics of the matter and the technology of the matter are completely isolated from one another.
Finally, it seems from reading most of the news stories, and many of the
Keep making it a mater of pure politics though, and things will continue to drift in the wrong direction as they have been for most of the last century
Damn you!!
Cute sig.
You're right though. Most Office users are writing away at their documents, computing their departments next year budget and so on, after just 5 minutes of playing with Word and Excel.
Unfortunately, for the rest of us, this methodology shines through in the results.
Also unfortunately, most of these people never bother to get any better at what they are doing and further go on to preparing Powerpoint sideshows that we have to pretend to pay attention to.
Maybe that's the problem. Here in the US the decision would be made by someone who would go with a more commercial solution in order to get the free glass paperweight/calendar/digital clock from their sales rep. Intel, MS and others would tout these "wins" as proof that their systems are better.
We've seen it all before (although many have yet to learn from it).
Don't anybody light a match!
Are you confusing Facebook with Flickr or Picasa? Facebook runs a Java program that spends ten minutes converting my beautiful hi-res photos to postage stamps. The results are pathetic! 50meg in 2meg out.
If you pay attention you will notice that Facebook doesn't do any heavy lifting on their servers. They leave that to the ap writers, and even so, the service was grinding to a halt in December. They'll have to reinvent their infrastructure to scale and by then the world will be bored with their walled garden.
I think Facebook joining this group is too little too late. Let's see them actually make some content exportable (not that I want my postage stamp pictures back or anything).
On the other hand, nothing is new about Google joining this group. Everything is Google is exportable right now. they are already walking the walk, while Facebook is just talking the talk (and running in the other direction).
Actually I suspect a lot of people just try it out of curiosity. I did. That's how I found out about Gmail several years ago and I've been using it ever since.
With Facebook though, I tried it, and partially because of security concerns quickly concluded the whole concept (and implementation) sucked. Fortunately I hadn't provided much information during the sign-up, and most of what I did provide was fake. Exception being my real name.
In order to keep monitoring what they are up to (in case they ever stop sucking) I created a new ID with a fake name to go along with the other fake information. In spite of Facebook's hi-sounding philosophical statements on the subject, there are a lot of fake users out there.
I've learned through incidences such as this that their stated mission and what they are actually doing are two different things. If they were still only open to college kids with proven school e-mail addresses etc. it would be a different matter. Once they started trying to get the MySpace user counts their original philosophy (if it truly existed) went out the window.
Your "no reason" proposition is wrong in another respect though. I have a similar fake ID on Orkut. Both Orkut and Facebook allow you to join various "groups" with special interests. These things are as useful as the old Internet Newsgroups used to be (and still are in a few cases). If you can find a sufficiently active and well moderated special interest group in one of these services it may well be worth your time.
Facebook and the like might be useful services as long as they don't get in such a hurry to earn those ridiculous 15B valuations. They may even be valuable now for all the college kids to keep track of one another. Finally, it will be very useful in the future to employers who figure out how to check up on what the latest interviewees were like in their "private" moments.
Enjoy it while you can kids!