The museum had a policy of no photographs. This is hardly uncommon: not only do many people find it annoying to stumble over photographers and deal with flashes while they're trying to look at art, but repeated exposure to light flashes can damage art.
This is completely wrong--the museum lifted its ban prior to Hawk's visit (still no flash though). I've been following Hawk's blog for a while now, and he had made a point of becoming a member of the museum after they had liberalized their photography policy.
As best as I can tell, they kicked him out because they thought he was taking pictures of a female member of the staff from the second floor of the atrium. However, this is pretty ridiculous since he seems to have been using a 14mm lens. For you non-photographers out there, using a super wide angle lens like this means you pretty much have to be right on top of a person in order for them to not look like an ant. Hawk has a picture of Simon Blint, the guy who kicked him out of the museum, taken from the second floor of the atrium in the museum that's clearly taken with a super wide angle lens. Allegedly Hawk offered to show Blint his photos but Blint refused to look.
There is nothing remarkable about the iPod, there are many better alternatives like Creative players which don't have any DRM, can play Divx and XDvix and have many more options. The iPod is basically overhyped and locks you into propriatory crap.
If the iPod "locks you into propriatory crap," home come my iPod is full of non-proprietary, non-DRM mp3s that I either bought legally or burned from my own CD-ROMs? Overhyped I'll buy, but I'm not locked into anything.
"It's also worth noting that Aperture's sole purpose is rapid acquisition and cataloging. Do not concatenate acquisition/cataloging with editing."
Did you mean "primary purpose?" Because I could buy that. However, since you can use Aperture to adjust exposure, contrast, saturation and make other adjustments like sharpening and dodging and burning, you can certainly use Aperture to edit your photos.
Its editing capabilities are limited compared to Photoshop or the GIMP, but then again it is (as you said) intended as more of a cataloguing/workflow tool.
I suspect somebody somewhere is getting paid based on the number of cases settled, etc.
Re:David "Bobo" Brooks is an idiot
on
The Rise of Geekdom
·
· Score: 2, Informative
"He's a self-described liberal...."
No. He's a conservative, albeit a moderate who feels "estranged" from the conservative movement (you'll have to search for the quote). According to the Wikipedia article on him, he "started out" as a liberal, but claims to have had a conversion moment during a debate with Milton Friedman. He worked for the conservative National Review. He was an editor for the conservative Wall Street Journal op-ed page. He was an editor for the conservative Weekly Standard.
He's still an idiot and a cheerleader for the war, but he's not a liberal.
I don't think "believe in" is the way to think about this. Either they've got something which can be duplicated somewhere else, or they don't. Even if the people performing these experiments are simply trying to separate gullible investors from their money, the truth will come out eventually.
If there is something there, great. It'll probably lead to some interesting physics, and in twenty years it may or may not power my flying car. If not, well, I'm definitely not gettting a flying car.
I strongly suspect that migrating from TEC to Omnibus is not going to be the kind of thing you can do over a weekend. Customers are probably going to be running TEC for years even if they can migrate for "free" (i.e., no additional licensing fees). Besides, it's probably on somebody's marketing checklist.
Glad to hear it's improving--I'm sure I'll be running into it in the field. I have to admit that in my opinion pretty much every product in this category sucks. Typically these products do a few things well, and a lot of things poorly. Usually you wind up with a fair amount of glue code to get things to do what you need (and I've written plenty of my own monitoring apps).
Eh, Microsoft is not going to be dominating this market any time soon. I say this as someone who had the misfortune to use MOM (fortunately not that much). My previous employer bought MOM to support Windows servers, and we wound up getting rid of it a couple of years ago for a product that also covered Linux, AIX and Solaris.
I'm not surprised Microsoft is going after this market, but I don't think support for Linux and other *nix is going to mean a lot unless the product itself becomes a lot better.
I've been getting these damn DNS redirects for some domains that do exist. Let's say that I want to open a well-known site, such as www.slashdot.org. If the DNS response times out, then I get one of those domain parking sites.
I know I'm not mistyping the domain name, because if I wait a bit and reload the browser window, then it comes up fine.
Frankly, this happens way more than it should. The default config Rogers left my router with apparently has the router acting as a forwarding name server. In turn it apparently has only one nameserver. OpenDNS has started sounding a lot better.
Even if the ship doesn't sink, the golf buddies will often see themselves getting thrown overboard if they're not, uh, trimming the sails (or whatever you do on a ship, leave me alone, I'm a landlubber).
It'll get them the job, it'll give them a (admittedly sometimes very long) honeymoon period, but if the boss thinks his friends are threatening his own job, they're gone.
It just takes longer than the rest of us think it should.
I hate to break it to you, but the two things are not mutually incompatible. Yes, most of us are worse drivers than we think (and certainly don't think I'm an exception). But at the same time some towns clearly do use traffic enforcement as a revenue generator.
For intance, the village of New Rome is a classic case of a speed trap. At one point, the village of 60 had 14 part-time police officers and was grossing $400,000 annually from traffic stops.
Obviously that's an extreme example. At the same time, don't be daft. Anything that can generate revenue can be abused.
Creation scientists get rejected because they're not doing science. You've basically got three classes of science done by creationists:
1. Philosophical noodlings "proving" that evolution is impossible. For instance, see the work of Michael Behe or William Dembski. These guys don't have anything in the way of experimental results.
2. Bad science. The people trying to prove that the earth is only six thousand years old are the best examples of this.
3. Science that isn't relevant. You'll see a lot of people on those lists of scientists who support creationism who do research in some unrelated area.
Intelligent Design advocate Michael Behe himself admitted in his Dover testimony that "there are no peer reviewed articles by anyone advocating for intelligent design supported by pertinent experiments or calculations which provide detailed rigorous accounts of how intelligent design of any biological system occurred." Behe, despite being both a scientist and a leading Intelligent Design advocate, doesn't seem to do any experimental work related to Intelligent Design.
"Before we can arrive at any *hard proof* of evolution, we will first need to know what it takes to create a self-replicating organism in the first place."
Evolution (and the evidence for it) does not depend (logically or otherwise) on the origin of life. It doesn't really matter if the first self-replicating organism developed in a pool on the beach or in a deep-sea thermal vent, if it came from a meteorite from somewhere else, or if God poofed it into existence.
To suggest that evolution depends on this in any way is just moving the goal posts around.
There are clearly multiple uses for this kind of thing. When I was doing network management a few years ago for a small-medium hosting provider, we were pitched what was basically a deep packet inspection package (name long forgotten). We debated the merits of selling it as a service to our customers (i.e., using it for additional monitoring/troubleshooting of their networks and their web apps). We decided against it for a variety of reasons.
I don't think we ever considered implementing it to watch all traffic, though. We would have lost customers.
Somewhere below or above I mentioned a customer of ours who did implement something similar for the purpose of monitoring/troubleshooting their own web app (e.g., so they could reconstruct customer sessions).
Sure, they don't use it for targeted advertising. Do you think that's because of ethical concerns, or because of technical limitations? Do you imagine that they'll always resist the urge to send their customers targeted advertising?
As an aside, I'm well aware that there are benign uses for this sort of technology. For instance, we had a customer that installed some kind of deep packet monitoring app to monitor and troubleshoot customer application issues on their web site (which were costing them a bundle). I can't think of any additional privacy issues there, since they already knew where their customers were browsing on their site, etc. (Although perhaps I'm being naive.)
"For God's sake, my friends that are in highway patrol just decided yesterday they will stop any car with Clinton bumper stickers and find a way to give the people driving a ticket or send them to jail."
Thanks for pointing out that it's the "Nazi-Clintonian party" and "their Storm-Trooper followers" that are the problem!
How did this get modded -1? AC, yes, but it's a pretty reasonable point. I guess it's just unpopular.
Don't forget about the Tamil Tigers. They're credited with "inventing" the suicide bomber, meaning that they're the ones who came up with the idea of the suicide bomber vest. Oh, and they're a secular organization. They've been known to force Muslims out of the areas they control. They haven't made the headlines Al Qaeda has because they're not attacking American interests and because of the 2001 cease fire (which seems to have lapsed, though).
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For a museum, you're better off with a fast lens and/or image stabilization.
The museum had a policy of no photographs. This is hardly uncommon: not only do many people find it annoying to stumble over photographers and deal with flashes while they're trying to look at art, but repeated exposure to light flashes can damage art.
This is completely wrong--the museum lifted its ban prior to Hawk's visit (still no flash though). I've been following Hawk's blog for a while now, and he had made a point of becoming a member of the museum after they had liberalized their photography policy. As best as I can tell, they kicked him out because they thought he was taking pictures of a female member of the staff from the second floor of the atrium. However, this is pretty ridiculous since he seems to have been using a 14mm lens. For you non-photographers out there, using a super wide angle lens like this means you pretty much have to be right on top of a person in order for them to not look like an ant. Hawk has a picture of Simon Blint, the guy who kicked him out of the museum, taken from the second floor of the atrium in the museum that's clearly taken with a super wide angle lens. Allegedly Hawk offered to show Blint his photos but Blint refused to look.
You've read PKD and you're wondering why his stories get butchered when they're made into movies? I'm surprised that Hollywood does as well as it has.
There is nothing remarkable about the iPod, there are many better alternatives like Creative players which don't have any DRM, can play Divx and XDvix and have many more options. The iPod is basically overhyped and locks you into propriatory crap.
If the iPod "locks you into propriatory crap," home come my iPod is full of non-proprietary, non-DRM mp3s that I either bought legally or burned from my own CD-ROMs? Overhyped I'll buy, but I'm not locked into anything.
You could feed them a little. Just a few replies here and there, and at a minimum it'll take them longer to get the idea.
My country doesn't have the attractive women, frankly. I'm Canadian.
There, fixed that for you.
I just moved to downtown Toronto. I can assure you that you're wrong. Although perhaps we're stockpiling them.
"It's also worth noting that Aperture's sole purpose is rapid acquisition and cataloging. Do not concatenate acquisition/cataloging with editing."
Did you mean "primary purpose?" Because I could buy that. However, since you can use Aperture to adjust exposure, contrast, saturation and make other adjustments like sharpening and dodging and burning, you can certainly use Aperture to edit your photos.
Its editing capabilities are limited compared to Photoshop or the GIMP, but then again it is (as you said) intended as more of a cataloguing/workflow tool.
I suspect somebody somewhere is getting paid based on the number of cases settled, etc.
No. He's a conservative, albeit a moderate who feels "estranged" from the conservative movement (you'll have to search for the quote). According to the Wikipedia article on him, he "started out" as a liberal, but claims to have had a conversion moment during a debate with Milton Friedman. He worked for the conservative National Review. He was an editor for the conservative Wall Street Journal op-ed page. He was an editor for the conservative Weekly Standard.
He's still an idiot and a cheerleader for the war, but he's not a liberal.
I don't think "believe in" is the way to think about this. Either they've got something which can be duplicated somewhere else, or they don't. Even if the people performing these experiments are simply trying to separate gullible investors from their money, the truth will come out eventually.
If there is something there, great. It'll probably lead to some interesting physics, and in twenty years it may or may not power my flying car. If not, well, I'm definitely not gettting a flying car.
I strongly suspect that migrating from TEC to Omnibus is not going to be the kind of thing you can do over a weekend. Customers are probably going to be running TEC for years even if they can migrate for "free" (i.e., no additional licensing fees). Besides, it's probably on somebody's marketing checklist.
Glad to hear it's improving--I'm sure I'll be running into it in the field. I have to admit that in my opinion pretty much every product in this category sucks. Typically these products do a few things well, and a lot of things poorly. Usually you wind up with a fair amount of glue code to get things to do what you need (and I've written plenty of my own monitoring apps).
Eh, Microsoft is not going to be dominating this market any time soon. I say this as someone who had the misfortune to use MOM (fortunately not that much). My previous employer bought MOM to support Windows servers, and we wound up getting rid of it a couple of years ago for a product that also covered Linux, AIX and Solaris.
I'm not surprised Microsoft is going after this market, but I don't think support for Linux and other *nix is going to mean a lot unless the product itself becomes a lot better.
Okay, OpenDNS does not sound better...
I've been getting these damn DNS redirects for some domains that do exist. Let's say that I want to open a well-known site, such as www.slashdot.org. If the DNS response times out, then I get one of those domain parking sites.
I know I'm not mistyping the domain name, because if I wait a bit and reload the browser window, then it comes up fine.
Frankly, this happens way more than it should. The default config Rogers left my router with apparently has the router acting as a forwarding name server. In turn it apparently has only one nameserver. OpenDNS has started sounding a lot better.
Even if the ship doesn't sink, the golf buddies will often see themselves getting thrown overboard if they're not, uh, trimming the sails (or whatever you do on a ship, leave me alone, I'm a landlubber).
It'll get them the job, it'll give them a (admittedly sometimes very long) honeymoon period, but if the boss thinks his friends are threatening his own job, they're gone.
It just takes longer than the rest of us think it should.
For intance, the village of New Rome is a classic case of a speed trap. At one point, the village of 60 had 14 part-time police officers and was grossing $400,000 annually from traffic stops.
Obviously that's an extreme example. At the same time, don't be daft. Anything that can generate revenue can be abused.
Creation scientists get rejected because they're not doing science. You've basically got three classes of science done by creationists:
1. Philosophical noodlings "proving" that evolution is impossible. For instance, see the work of Michael Behe or William Dembski. These guys don't have anything in the way of experimental results.
2. Bad science. The people trying to prove that the earth is only six thousand years old are the best examples of this.
3. Science that isn't relevant. You'll see a lot of people on those lists of scientists who support creationism who do research in some unrelated area.
Intelligent Design advocate Michael Behe himself admitted in his Dover testimony that "there are no peer reviewed articles by anyone advocating for intelligent design supported by pertinent experiments or calculations which provide detailed rigorous accounts of how intelligent design of any biological system occurred." Behe, despite being both a scientist and a leading Intelligent Design advocate, doesn't seem to do any experimental work related to Intelligent Design.
"Before we can arrive at any *hard proof* of evolution, we will first need to know what it takes to create a self-replicating organism in the first place."
Evolution (and the evidence for it) does not depend (logically or otherwise) on the origin of life. It doesn't really matter if the first self-replicating organism developed in a pool on the beach or in a deep-sea thermal vent, if it came from a meteorite from somewhere else, or if God poofed it into existence.
To suggest that evolution depends on this in any way is just moving the goal posts around.
There are clearly multiple uses for this kind of thing. When I was doing network management a few years ago for a small-medium hosting provider, we were pitched what was basically a deep packet inspection package (name long forgotten). We debated the merits of selling it as a service to our customers (i.e., using it for additional monitoring/troubleshooting of their networks and their web apps). We decided against it for a variety of reasons.
I don't think we ever considered implementing it to watch all traffic, though. We would have lost customers.
Somewhere below or above I mentioned a customer of ours who did implement something similar for the purpose of monitoring/troubleshooting their own web app (e.g., so they could reconstruct customer sessions).
Sure, they don't use it for targeted advertising. Do you think that's because of ethical concerns, or because of technical limitations? Do you imagine that they'll always resist the urge to send their customers targeted advertising?
As an aside, I'm well aware that there are benign uses for this sort of technology. For instance, we had a customer that installed some kind of deep packet monitoring app to monitor and troubleshoot customer application issues on their web site (which were costing them a bundle). I can't think of any additional privacy issues there, since they already knew where their customers were browsing on their site, etc. (Although perhaps I'm being naive.)
"so hit them in the wallet, where they'll feel it as that's where their hearts and souls are."
So telco managers in Canada have souls? I didn't realize the difference between our two countries was so great.
"For God's sake, my friends that are in highway patrol just decided yesterday they will stop any car with Clinton bumper stickers and find a way to give the people driving a ticket or send them to jail."
Thanks for pointing out that it's the "Nazi-Clintonian party" and "their Storm-Trooper followers" that are the problem!
I think you left out a reason:
3. People fear migrations.
Lord knows I do, and I have first hand experience on why.
Don't forget about the Tamil Tigers. They're credited with "inventing" the suicide bomber, meaning that they're the ones who came up with the idea of the suicide bomber vest. Oh, and they're a secular organization. They've been known to force Muslims out of the areas they control. They haven't made the headlines Al Qaeda has because they're not attacking American interests and because of the 2001 cease fire (which seems to have lapsed, though).