That's not entirely true. In Virginia, the distinction between "Invitation for Bid" and "Request for Proposal" is important. For IFB, you the spec is hard and fast, and the contract is strictly awarded to the lowest bid. For RFP, this is not the case: you can make multiple awards, there is a negotiation phase, you do not have to award to the lowest bid, etc. It is actually rather intelligent, as far as public purchasing vehicles go. The issue is usually that people still tend to become overly bureaucratic even with RFPs, and, well, public employment does not necessarily select for the brightest sparks. Still, in general, if the RFP doesn't spec it, you tend to not offer it.
The usual Big Government Contract gig (actually any "Big Contract gig" -- government is hardly monopolistic of Big Business) is to offer a service that you know is less than the customer needs but satisfies the stated spec, with the full knowledge that it will be easier to increase the contract than rebid it down the road. You might make some hand-wave of "we can do these things too if you want" just to make the potential customer feel good, but that's how it works. Make just enough money on the stated contract to cover the costs, but expect to *really* make the money on the overruns, add-ons, etc, that come later. Standard practice, and NG is one of the best at the game.
To a great degree, the public sector folks are either ignorant or complicitous. After all, the primary reason government entities outsource is to give business to (taxpaying) companies. It's strictly political. Competence of service and value are very much secondary (in fact, seldom is it cheaper). The larger agencies (and higher ed, for example) usually can have at least as much competence as the Big Contractor. However, in many cases the smaller agencies really are better served by Big Contractor, because they can seldom attract enough really good people.
Sorry, that's just the reality. It is both better and worse than most people realize.
So don't implement MS formats. That's where the standards come in in the first place. There are some "gotta do"s like SMB, but wherever possible just ignore their obscure proprietary formats.
Please stop abuseing the phrase "security through obscurity." The catch phrase was meant to apply to one and only one case: The practive of obscuring encryption algorithms. Bruce Schneier's thesis was that an encryption system that relied on a secret or hidden algorithm was not secure.
You are incorrect. "Security through obscurity" long pre-dates Schneier. It originally referred to systems, e.g. mainframes, that were so cumbersome to use that their use was considered obscure. It had nothing to do with encryption; it applied to situations where there was no encryption, and you just had to know where and how to look to get access to data. It is still used, for example, by having data on a publicly available web server but not having the data in any browsable index. Obviously this is not a very strong method of securing data, but in certain contexts it may be entirely suitable. In some sense, any common shared secret system could be viewed as "security through obscurity" (e.g. WEP), but usually we mean something weaker still. Schneier simply applied this principal to the case of encryption algorithms.
anyone who has looked at a sniffer trace of AIM could tell you why this is: it's the ads. I analyze netflow traffic for about 25000 users on a college campus, and the number one site for port 80 is... you guessed it... oscar.aol.com (or some such). watch aim run for a while; it's just spewing ad after ad after ad.
the/. community, might recognize that im and p2p mean more than aim, but for millions of internet users (even if they aren't aol customers), they don't even know there are alternatives. [granted the other p2p's with the same model of ad splashing are prevalent, but nothing holds a candle to aim's market share]
I dry myself out once a year or so, and I've found a methodology that works well for me. I drink strong coffee and lots of it in general. When it is time for the annual clean-out, I just wait until I start to feel the first headache (usually takes about four to six hours), then have about 1/2 cup of my normal brew. That's enough to take the edge off the headache for a few hours. I iterate this procedure over a few days, maybe a week, and each time it is longer until the headache comes on. When I get the point where I can go over a day or so, I consider myself cured (and then prompt readdict myself).
You are incorrect; try reading it this time. The Infiniband network vendor (Melanox) executive was quoted saying that this kind of success is due to (among other things) Linux. He wasn't saying that this cluster runs Linux. The Melanox Infiniband drivers (and some of the other software) were first developed on Linux and benefit from the open source development model. This was to also point out that the large number of Linux-based systems can use this vendor's products (i.e. that it isn't Mac-specific).
Re:Jabber is an offense against christians!
on
Jabber Makes It Good
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Anonymous coward = most ignorant of all
Re:Jabber is an offense against christians!
on
Jabber Makes It Good
·
· Score: 1
Would that it were so... sigh... unfortunately, I don't think so. All I can hope is that this pseudo-christian is only assuming this persona for shock value on/.... sadder than fiction.
It is commonly held that a necessary condition for a technical paper to be seriously considered as a work of scholarly merit is that the author has prepared it with a member of the TeX family. Accordingly, when these same respectable people want to take a LaTeX document and publish it on the web, they often turn to LaTeX2HTML.
LaTeX and HTML are very similar: they are both logical markup languages; they both use plain text as their underlying format; etc. HTML has the obvious link capability; LaTeX has the TeX-ability of doing physical layout on the page. Links can be an extension of TeX via \special tags (I believe L2H allows this).
Neither LaTeX nor TeX are page definition methods, as was incorrectly mentioned by someone else -- that is PostScript's (and pdf's) job -- though TeX is closer to this.
Guess what? You have to "compile" HTML too! It's just that your browser does this on the fly for you. Now, with pdflatex (a great tool... now if they could just get psfigs in there:-( ) we are one step closer to the same in the TeX world. The concept of writing a text file that gets interpreted in some manner, whether by a browser or a compiler or an interpreter, should not be a serious conceptual problem.
And is readily configurable (place HERE vs at top of next page vs on a separate figures page). It does a damn good job with the crap that most people feed it (notably figs sized so that nothing can really be put on the same page in a reasonable manner). Still, this argument is irrelevant to the question of whether LaTeX is a suitable markup language for HTML-type documents, as there is no page-oriented-ness in the latter; your complaint is an abberation of the physical page and not relevant to this discussion. Indeed, when you take one of those problematical LaTeX figs and LaTeX2HTML-ize it, the latter is often much nicer.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not entirely true. In Virginia, the distinction between "Invitation for Bid" and "Request for Proposal" is important. For IFB, you the spec is hard and fast, and the contract is strictly awarded to the lowest bid. For RFP, this is not the case: you can make multiple awards, there is a negotiation phase, you do not have to award to the lowest bid, etc. It is actually rather intelligent, as far as public purchasing vehicles go. The issue is usually that people still tend to become overly bureaucratic even with RFPs, and, well, public employment does not necessarily select for the brightest sparks. Still, in general, if the RFP doesn't spec it, you tend to not offer it.
The usual Big Government Contract gig (actually any "Big Contract gig" -- government is hardly monopolistic of Big Business) is to offer a service that you know is less than the customer needs but satisfies the stated spec, with the full knowledge that it will be easier to increase the contract than rebid it down the road. You might make some hand-wave of "we can do these things too if you want" just to make the potential customer feel good, but that's how it works. Make just enough money on the stated contract to cover the costs, but expect to *really* make the money on the overruns, add-ons, etc, that come later. Standard practice, and NG is one of the best at the game.
To a great degree, the public sector folks are either ignorant or complicitous. After all, the primary reason government entities outsource is to give business to (taxpaying) companies. It's strictly political. Competence of service and value are very much secondary (in fact, seldom is it cheaper). The larger agencies (and higher ed, for example) usually can have at least as much competence as the Big Contractor. However, in many cases the smaller agencies really are better served by Big Contractor, because they can seldom attract enough really good people.
Sorry, that's just the reality. It is both better and worse than most people realize.
So don't implement MS formats. That's where the standards come in in the first place. There are some "gotta do"s like SMB, but wherever possible just ignore their obscure proprietary formats.
And yet, you still don't know the difference between a bearing and a rod? I guess google can only do so much good.
You are incorrect. "Security through obscurity" long pre-dates Schneier. It originally referred to systems, e.g. mainframes, that were so cumbersome to use that their use was considered obscure. It had nothing to do with encryption; it applied to situations where there was no encryption, and you just had to know where and how to look to get access to data. It is still used, for example, by having data on a publicly available web server but not having the data in any browsable index. Obviously this is not a very strong method of securing data, but in certain contexts it may be entirely suitable. In some sense, any common shared secret system could be viewed as "security through obscurity" (e.g. WEP), but usually we mean something weaker still. Schneier simply applied this principal to the case of encryption algorithms.
anyone who has looked at a sniffer trace of AIM could tell you why this is: it's the ads. I analyze netflow traffic for about 25000 users on a college campus, and the number one site for port 80 is ... you guessed it ... oscar.aol.com (or some such). watch aim run for a while; it's just spewing ad after ad after ad.
/. community, might recognize that im and p2p mean more than aim, but for millions of internet users (even if they aren't aol customers), they don't even know there are alternatives. [granted the other p2p's with the same model of ad splashing are prevalent, but nothing holds a candle to aim's market share]
the
I dry myself out once a year or so, and I've found a methodology that works well for me. I drink strong coffee and lots of it in general. When it is time for the annual clean-out, I just wait until I start to feel the first headache (usually takes about four to six hours), then have about 1/2 cup of my normal brew. That's enough to take the edge off the headache for a few hours. I iterate this procedure over a few days, maybe a week, and each time it is longer until the headache comes on. When I get the point where I can go over a day or so, I consider myself cured (and then prompt readdict myself).
:-)
Presumably the readdition is optional.
--ckg
You are incorrect; try reading it this time. The Infiniband network vendor (Melanox) executive was quoted saying that this kind of success is due to (among other things) Linux. He wasn't saying that this cluster runs Linux. The Melanox Infiniband drivers (and some of the other software) were first developed on Linux and benefit from the open source development model. This was to also point out that the large number of Linux-based systems can use this vendor's products (i.e. that it isn't Mac-specific).
Anonymous coward = most ignorant of all
Would that it were so... sigh ... unfortunately, I don't think so. All I can hope is that this pseudo-christian is only assuming this persona for shock value on /. ... sadder than fiction.
Perl? I thought they asked for smart references.
FreeBSD is dead! I heard it on /. so it must be true.
Sorry Tatu ... you just became the next "Aspirin" ... go cry on Bayer's shoulder.
It is commonly held that a necessary condition for a technical paper to be seriously considered as a work of scholarly merit is that the author has prepared it with a member of the TeX family. Accordingly, when these same respectable people want to take a LaTeX document and publish it on the web, they often turn to LaTeX2HTML.
LaTeX and HTML are very similar: they are both logical markup languages; they both use plain text as their underlying format; etc. HTML has the obvious link capability; LaTeX has the TeX-ability of doing physical layout on the page. Links can be an extension of TeX via \special tags (I believe L2H allows this).
Neither LaTeX nor TeX are page definition methods, as was incorrectly mentioned by someone else -- that is PostScript's (and pdf's) job -- though TeX is closer to this.
Guess what? You have to "compile" HTML too! It's just that your browser does this on the fly for you. Now, with pdflatex (a great tool ... now if they could just get psfigs in there :-( ) we are one step closer to the same in the TeX world. The concept of writing a text file that gets interpreted in some manner, whether by a browser or a compiler or an interpreter, should not be a serious conceptual problem.
And is readily configurable (place HERE vs at top of next page vs on a separate figures page). It does a damn good job with the crap that most people feed it (notably figs sized so that nothing can really be put on the same page in a reasonable manner). Still, this argument is irrelevant to the question of whether LaTeX is a suitable markup language for HTML-type documents, as there is no page-oriented-ness in the latter; your complaint is an abberation of the physical page and not relevant to this discussion. Indeed, when you take one of those problematical LaTeX figs and LaTeX2HTML-ize it, the latter is often much nicer.