The last yellow pages to land on our mailbox was in a plastic bag. We made a game out of leaving it there until it fell off the top of the mailbox where it was left. It lasted about nine months until a guest brought it in as a favour.
While I realize the article was more about the white pages, in the era of unlisted cell phone numbers, that's even less useful than the yellow pages. Another old cliché of modern life goes away, with ten others to replace it. Remember during the early era of the Internet's commercial phase (which is to say when it was finally open to anyone willing to pay an ISP), and the "yellow pages" metaphor was adopted to give older and less technically-savvy people a product whose name made the internet seem a little less intimidating?
The "Internet Yellow Pages" phenomenon lasted a few years, with about a dozen companies making them, all of them obsolete before they were even sent to the printer. There's a fantastic used book store in Detroit (John King's Books), and I ran across a small shelf of them sometime last year and enjoyed thumbing through one as a monument to uselessness. This was in the era when Yahoo's search was human-deliberated - each site in its database put into a specific taxonomy by actual human beings - making it effectively the online version of the "Internet Yellow Pages". Yahoo is another cliché that has long outlived its usefulness, perhaps with the exception of Yahoo Finance, which is still handy for a few things.
There was a chance you were someone I knew as a different nick (usually on IRC), who also used Wonko the Sane on rare occasions. My mistake, disregard.
"They are not looking for passwords and such; scrapers are looking at blogs and forums searching for material relevant to their corporate clients."
Web scraping for passwords? Why would anyone have thought this in the first place? It's a bad comparison. If your passwords are already on a website to be scraped, your problem isn't data scrapers.
It's a chaotic mess. If a data visualization technique doesn't bring clarity to a subject, but instead just results in a Jackson Pollock jumble, what exactly is it?
Is it art? If this is its primary goal, I have no argument.
If it, however, is meant to clarify the history and relationships of principals involved with the creation and maintenance of a program's codebase, it's a complete failure. There is no clarity here, less so than even a simple table would provide.
I'm an atheist. I also thought that the headline and summary were grossly unfair to Consolmagno.
The quote starts out in the Guardian article as: Would he baptise an alien? "Only if they asked."
The Guardian trumps it up to: "Pope's astronomer says he would baptise an alien if it asked him" as if this were something that Consolmagno were actively interested in.
By the time it gets to Slashdot, it's: " Pope's Astronomer Would Love To Baptize an Alien" as if it were his primary interest.
Very shady, Slashdot. What the man said about intelligent design and the "God of the Gaps" hypothesis are important. What he said about aliens was an aside that reveals more about the author of the Guardian article than Consolmagno himself.
I had a tab opened from yesterday when I was reading it. Just because he deleted the article doesn't mean you have to miss out on the fun:
-----
Super SATA Cables on Sale Soon Posted by Malcolm Steward on 8/17/10 Categorized as Audio
The Super SATA cables I recently tested proved to be real shockers. Every logical thought was telling me that the wires that transmit the raw digital data between a hard disk and the motherboard in a NAS simply could not influence the sound that emerged from the player – after the music has already subsequently passed through metres of CAT5.
But they do.
I listened to the cables in my NAS feeding my Naim HDX/DAC/XPS and clearly identified easily perceptible improvements through my highly revealing active Naim DBL system. Quite what it is that wrought these improvements I do not know. My only guess is that the Super SATAs reject interference significantly better than the standard cables and in so doing lower the noise floor revealing greater low-level musical detail and presentational improvements in the soundstage and the ‘air’ around instruments.
The most marked and worthwhile difference, I felt, was in the increased naturalness in both the sound of instruments and voices, which seemed more organic, human and less ‘electronic’, and in the music’s rhythmical progression, which was also more natural and had the realistic ebb and flow that musicians exhibit when playing live. In short, recordings sounded more like musical performances then recordings.
As you can see the cables do not look anything special even though they are far more robust than the standard issue flat cables, and they are are irradiated, I am told, to vapourise any moisture that has found its way into the molecular structure of the conductors.
The photo here shows the original, Generation 1 cable but there is now a more advanced, wider bandwidth Generation 2 version that is soon going to be available from the same American manufacturer. They will, of course, be more expensive than ‘ordinary’ SATA cables – the red and grey insulated flat cables that come free with hard disks or sell for around £2.99. But their superior performance easily justifies the extra expense.
When I have a definite price on the new cables and the URL from which they will be able to be purchased, I will post the information here. I cannot wait: I only have one of the generation 1 cables and wanted a dozen more for other hard disks and SATA peripherals. Now there is a supposedly ‘better’ version I cannot wait to evaluate it and if it is, as I am told, substantially superior, get my order in for a dozen of those.
I have disabled Comments on this post so that respectable visitors do not have to read the remarks made by a small number of extremely ignorant, rude, malicious and disingenuous individuals who cannot tolerate people expressing opinions that do not concur with their own.
-----
Included photo:
http://www.malcolmsteward.co.uk/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Critical-SATA.jpg Critical SATA
If this test does mature into a (much) more reliable diagnostic tool, and can be made accurate enough to be useful, early diagnosis will significantly increase the number of children diagnosed with autism.
I'm sure the anti-vaccine, anti-science contingent will completely misunderstand the issue and blame the increase in autism diagnoses on the H1N1 vaccine, or whatever tomorrow's boogeyman is.
I think the case can be made that people who accept sensationalist statistics without sufficient media literacy to understand the various biases involved in poorly conducted studies may, in fact, be only using 10% of their brain.
...early. In the early 90s, "surf" was pretty common, as was the whole idea of "going online", both of which sound silly today. Add to that, "everything-nothing sites", which would now be called "blogs". Or, god forbid "cyberspace" or cyber-anything.
Will "google" as a verb stand the test of time? Maybe. But it's too early to assume it will. I did like the "Google with Bing" parody, fantastic stuff. http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1915736
I don't necessarily disagree. But if the choice is between animated, flowing wheat fields in the farming squares, or a bigger game, I want the bigger game.
This is another case of not having to choose; let me play the big game, and if that becomes a five, ten minute turn compute-fest, let me turn off features I value less, such as terrain animation, in order to make that more practical.
Civ 2 and Alpha Centauri are my favorite Civ games, because ever since Civ III, the developers have been pushing a smaller and smaller game at me.
Now, I realize there's a lot of push to make the multiplayer game a reasonable experience that doesn't take more than one session to complete, but I'm not interested in multiplayer in the Civ series.
I want an epic-sized map that takes a long, long time to complete. That "huge" is 160x160 is a joke. I want to be able to play a map 5,000x3,000 squares long, and if that means that civilizations come in contact in the battleship era, I'm fine with that.
It doesn't mean everyone has to play this way. It doesn't mean I have to play this way every time. I just want the option to do so, without arbitrary map and city size limitations being imposed on me whose primary function is to make the multiplayer game a more streamlined experience. One should not exclude the other.
That false hope is the foundation of our political system: getting working class people to continually vote in the interests of the wealthy by distracting them with hot-button social issues.
The IT community at large has already decided that it doesn't need unions, because unions are for poor slobs who get their hands dirty at work. One day, they'll realize the folly of this attitude, and hopefully it'll be before all the good jobs in IT are outsourced.
It's the theodicy of price, quality, and speed (pick two). Outsourcing creative work to the lowest possible wage location is often great for price and quality, but I'm waiting for this history you cite to show me an example of outsourcing to weak labour markets developing creative talent that's better than what it replaced.
In my rhetorical example (which isn't really rhetorical, as I've known two people to whom it's happened to), people don't find out their design is offered to multiple sites unless they look at their competitors' offers on 99designs.com, go to their websites after they've already picked a winner, or someone tells them.
People who think 99designs.com is a good way to save a few bucks for important work that represents their company generally aren't aware of the drawbacks. They just want a website or logo that looks good. And it does look good (good enough for their non-designer eye), just as good as the rest of the people who are farmed the same template. Hardly a way to make a distinct impression.
You joke, but most businesses rely on their ability to project sober professionalism and seriousness. People who don't understand that Comic Sans (I know, I just font-Godwinned myself here) deteriorates that image of professionalism rather than merely communicating "informal" or "fun" (often when neither is even appropriate in the first place) shouldn't be designing anything that represents their company. And if they're in charge of paying someone else to design it, they should take advantage of that designer's skillset.
I don't tell my auto mechanic how to do his job, because I don't know how to replace wheel bearings, nor do I want to.
No need to wait. The article doesn't mention this, but 99designs is already saturated by Indians and Chinese who will happily undercut you. It's just a nice name for more outsourcing.
You put a job up, you pick the "winner", and it gets fulfilled.
Then you see the same design has been shopped around to every other site, including your direct competitors.
Then you see that this "design in a box" approach actually handily ignored many of your stated requirements in your original request.
All this to save a few bucks on design by farming it out to people who do this for literally a few bucks a job. You get what you pay for: a $50 design that looks cookie cutter (because it is), and is designed by "e-lancers" from India and China who didn't understand all of your requirements and in most cases, didn't have time to care, because they'll only see $10 of it.
There's some paranoia at play, too.
on
Employee Monitoring
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I worked IT at a mortgage company run by someone without much in the way of morals. He wanted a print-tracking solution to monitor who was printing and what they were printing. As it happens, I later worked for a company which provided this exact solution, but ultimately it didn't matter because what he wanted was something he didn't want to spend any actual money on, and at the time any solutions were resource-intensive for a file and print server running on a then-midline Pentium 166 MHz, so it would have required spending money on hardware upgrades, too.
He wanted this solution to protect his leads, which he was convinced were walking out the door from employees taking them and selling them to his competitors; ultimately, it was one of those cases of suspecting other people were doing exactly what he would have done in their situation. I suspect there's a fair amount of this attitude, and it's probably more common in smaller businesses than Fortune 500 companies, who are generally more interested in liability.
While driving, an amusing point and counterpoint occurred to me many years ago:
[young person] It terrifies me to think that I’m sharing the road with people who grew up before the era of videogame sensory overload.
[old person] It terrifies me to think that I’m sharing the road with people who learned to drive in an environment where they’re used to having three lives.
No different than "cyber" or (and it took longer for this to go away), "surf". And good riddance to both. I don't hate twitter, but I think it's a pointless waste of time. I do hate "tweet". It's precious and annoying.
You know, I was just saying yesterday that I'm so glad we don't get inundated anymore with news articles that present Second Life as if it's some great business tool, and that it's somehow "Important". That meme passed, and now it's all about how Twitter is somehow "Important".
This seems like regression; been there, done that.
Slashdot Mirror
The last yellow pages to land on our mailbox was in a plastic bag. We made a game out of leaving it there until it fell off the top of the mailbox where it was left. It lasted about nine months until a guest brought it in as a favour.
While I realize the article was more about the white pages, in the era of unlisted cell phone numbers, that's even less useful than the yellow pages. Another old cliché of modern life goes away, with ten others to replace it. Remember during the early era of the Internet's commercial phase (which is to say when it was finally open to anyone willing to pay an ISP), and the "yellow pages" metaphor was adopted to give older and less technically-savvy people a product whose name made the internet seem a little less intimidating?
The "Internet Yellow Pages" phenomenon lasted a few years, with about a dozen companies making them, all of them obsolete before they were even sent to the printer. There's a fantastic used book store in Detroit (John King's Books), and I ran across a small shelf of them sometime last year and enjoyed thumbing through one as a monument to uselessness. This was in the era when Yahoo's search was human-deliberated - each site in its database put into a specific taxonomy by actual human beings - making it effectively the online version of the "Internet Yellow Pages". Yahoo is another cliché that has long outlived its usefulness, perhaps with the exception of Yahoo Finance, which is still handy for a few things.
There was a chance you were someone I knew as a different nick (usually on IRC), who also used Wonko the Sane on rare occasions. My mistake, disregard.
DeV?
"They are not looking for passwords and such; scrapers are looking at blogs and forums searching for material relevant to their corporate clients."
Web scraping for passwords? Why would anyone have thought this in the first place? It's a bad comparison. If your passwords are already on a website to be scraped, your problem isn't data scrapers.
It's a chaotic mess. If a data visualization technique doesn't bring clarity to a subject, but instead just results in a Jackson Pollock jumble, what exactly is it?
Is it art? If this is its primary goal, I have no argument.
If it, however, is meant to clarify the history and relationships of principals involved with the creation and maintenance of a program's codebase, it's a complete failure. There is no clarity here, less so than even a simple table would provide.
I'm an atheist. I also thought that the headline and summary were grossly unfair to Consolmagno.
The quote starts out in the Guardian article as:
Would he baptise an alien? "Only if they asked."
The Guardian trumps it up to:
"Pope's astronomer says he would baptise an alien if it asked him" as if this were something that Consolmagno were actively interested in.
By the time it gets to Slashdot, it's:
" Pope's Astronomer Would Love To Baptize an Alien" as if it were his primary interest.
Very shady, Slashdot. What the man said about intelligent design and the "God of the Gaps" hypothesis are important. What he said about aliens was an aside that reveals more about the author of the Guardian article than Consolmagno himself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nixie_Wozniak.jpg
Practical? No.
Badass? Profoundly.
I had a tab opened from yesterday when I was reading it. Just because he deleted the article doesn't mean you have to miss out on the fun:
-----
Super SATA Cables on Sale Soon
Posted by Malcolm Steward on 8/17/10 Categorized as Audio
The Super SATA cables I recently tested proved to be real shockers. Every logical thought was telling me that the wires that transmit the raw digital data between a hard disk and the motherboard in a NAS simply could not influence the sound that emerged from the player – after the music has already subsequently passed through metres of CAT5.
But they do.
I listened to the cables in my NAS feeding my Naim HDX/DAC/XPS and clearly identified easily perceptible improvements through my highly revealing active Naim DBL system. Quite what it is that wrought these improvements I do not know. My only guess is that the Super SATAs reject interference significantly better than the standard cables and in so doing lower the noise floor revealing greater low-level musical detail and presentational improvements in the soundstage and the ‘air’ around instruments.
The most marked and worthwhile difference, I felt, was in the increased naturalness in both the sound of instruments and voices, which seemed more organic, human and less ‘electronic’, and in the music’s rhythmical progression, which was also more natural and had the realistic ebb and flow that musicians exhibit when playing live. In short, recordings sounded more like musical performances then recordings.
As you can see the cables do not look anything special even though they are far more robust than the standard issue flat cables, and they are are irradiated, I am told, to vapourise any moisture that has found its way into the molecular structure of the conductors.
The photo here shows the original, Generation 1 cable but there is now a more advanced, wider bandwidth Generation 2 version that is soon going to be available from the same American manufacturer. They will, of course, be more expensive than ‘ordinary’ SATA cables – the red and grey insulated flat cables that come free with hard disks or sell for around £2.99. But their superior performance easily justifies the extra expense.
When I have a definite price on the new cables and the URL from which they will be able to be purchased, I will post the information here. I cannot wait: I only have one of the generation 1 cables and wanted a dozen more for other hard disks and SATA peripherals. Now there is a supposedly ‘better’ version I cannot wait to evaluate it and if it is, as I am told, substantially superior, get my order in for a dozen of those.
I have disabled Comments on this post so that respectable visitors do not have to read the remarks made by a small number of extremely ignorant, rude, malicious and disingenuous individuals who cannot tolerate people expressing opinions that do not concur with their own.
-----
Included photo:
http://www.malcolmsteward.co.uk/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Critical-SATA.jpg
Critical SATA
...movement.
If this test does mature into a (much) more reliable diagnostic tool, and can be made accurate enough to be useful, early diagnosis will significantly increase the number of children diagnosed with autism.
I'm sure the anti-vaccine, anti-science contingent will completely misunderstand the issue and blame the increase in autism diagnoses on the H1N1 vaccine, or whatever tomorrow's boogeyman is.
I think the case can be made that people who accept sensationalist statistics without sufficient media literacy to understand the various biases involved in poorly conducted studies may, in fact, be only using 10% of their brain.
...early. In the early 90s, "surf" was pretty common, as was the whole idea of "going online", both of which sound silly today. Add to that, "everything-nothing sites", which would now be called "blogs". Or, god forbid "cyberspace" or cyber-anything.
Will "google" as a verb stand the test of time? Maybe. But it's too early to assume it will. I did like the "Google with Bing" parody, fantastic stuff.
http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1915736
I don't necessarily disagree. But if the choice is between animated, flowing wheat fields in the farming squares, or a bigger game, I want the bigger game.
This is another case of not having to choose; let me play the big game, and if that becomes a five, ten minute turn compute-fest, let me turn off features I value less, such as terrain animation, in order to make that more practical.
Civ 2 and Alpha Centauri are my favorite Civ games, because ever since Civ III, the developers have been pushing a smaller and smaller game at me.
Now, I realize there's a lot of push to make the multiplayer game a reasonable experience that doesn't take more than one session to complete, but I'm not interested in multiplayer in the Civ series.
I want an epic-sized map that takes a long, long time to complete. That "huge" is 160x160 is a joke. I want to be able to play a map 5,000x3,000 squares long, and if that means that civilizations come in contact in the battleship era, I'm fine with that.
It doesn't mean everyone has to play this way. It doesn't mean I have to play this way every time. I just want the option to do so, without arbitrary map and city size limitations being imposed on me whose primary function is to make the multiplayer game a more streamlined experience. One should not exclude the other.
That false hope is the foundation of our political system: getting working class people to continually vote in the interests of the wealthy by distracting them with hot-button social issues.
The IT community at large has already decided that it doesn't need unions, because unions are for poor slobs who get their hands dirty at work. One day, they'll realize the folly of this attitude, and hopefully it'll be before all the good jobs in IT are outsourced.
It's the theodicy of price, quality, and speed (pick two). Outsourcing creative work to the lowest possible wage location is often great for price and quality, but I'm waiting for this history you cite to show me an example of outsourcing to weak labour markets developing creative talent that's better than what it replaced.
Who would designers be proving themselves to? People who shop for work on 99designs.com?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
In my rhetorical example (which isn't really rhetorical, as I've known two people to whom it's happened to), people don't find out their design is offered to multiple sites unless they look at their competitors' offers on 99designs.com, go to their websites after they've already picked a winner, or someone tells them.
People who think 99designs.com is a good way to save a few bucks for important work that represents their company generally aren't aware of the drawbacks. They just want a website or logo that looks good. And it does look good (good enough for their non-designer eye), just as good as the rest of the people who are farmed the same template. Hardly a way to make a distinct impression.
You joke, but most businesses rely on their ability to project sober professionalism and seriousness. People who don't understand that Comic Sans (I know, I just font-Godwinned myself here) deteriorates that image of professionalism rather than merely communicating "informal" or "fun" (often when neither is even appropriate in the first place) shouldn't be designing anything that represents their company. And if they're in charge of paying someone else to design it, they should take advantage of that designer's skillset.
I don't tell my auto mechanic how to do his job, because I don't know how to replace wheel bearings, nor do I want to.
No need to wait. The article doesn't mention this, but 99designs is already saturated by Indians and Chinese who will happily undercut you. It's just a nice name for more outsourcing.
You put a job up, you pick the "winner", and it gets fulfilled.
Then you see the same design has been shopped around to every other site, including your direct competitors.
Then you see that this "design in a box" approach actually handily ignored many of your stated requirements in your original request.
All this to save a few bucks on design by farming it out to people who do this for literally a few bucks a job. You get what you pay for: a $50 design that looks cookie cutter (because it is), and is designed by "e-lancers" from India and China who didn't understand all of your requirements and in most cases, didn't have time to care, because they'll only see $10 of it.
I worked IT at a mortgage company run by someone without much in the way of morals. He wanted a print-tracking solution to monitor who was printing and what they were printing. As it happens, I later worked for a company which provided this exact solution, but ultimately it didn't matter because what he wanted was something he didn't want to spend any actual money on, and at the time any solutions were resource-intensive for a file and print server running on a then-midline Pentium 166 MHz, so it would have required spending money on hardware upgrades, too.
He wanted this solution to protect his leads, which he was convinced were walking out the door from employees taking them and selling them to his competitors; ultimately, it was one of those cases of suspecting other people were doing exactly what he would have done in their situation. I suspect there's a fair amount of this attitude, and it's probably more common in smaller businesses than Fortune 500 companies, who are generally more interested in liability.
While driving, an amusing point and counterpoint occurred to me many years ago:
[young person] It terrifies me to think that I’m sharing the road with people who grew up before the era of videogame sensory overload.
[old person] It terrifies me to think that I’m sharing the road with people who learned to drive in an environment where they’re used to having three lives.
No different than "cyber" or (and it took longer for this to go away), "surf". And good riddance to both. I don't hate twitter, but I think it's a pointless waste of time. I do hate "tweet". It's precious and annoying.
You know, I was just saying yesterday that I'm so glad we don't get inundated anymore with news articles that present Second Life as if it's some great business tool, and that it's somehow "Important". That meme passed, and now it's all about how Twitter is somehow "Important".
This seems like regression; been there, done that.
It always irritates me when someone refers to "goatse.cx" as "goatse". It's like they missed the whole point of the joke.