In 1961, when shit wasn't invented yet and people fought bears for vital food, President Kennedy had the balls to give NASA less than nine years to get to the moon.
And today Congress would have told such an uppity President where to stick those balls and not passed his budget. And vast numbers of hyper-cynical citizens would have called Kennedy's challenge empty political posturing to woo the ignorant come next election. And every politician from the opposing party would have cut off one of their balls to keep the plan from working lest someone other than they look good.
The race to the moon was all about proving that the USA was better than those stinking commie Russians. Without that, we'd still be bickering amongst ourselves.
20 years ago, someone at Lego thought that they should be a huge powerhouse company, with their hands in everything. Why not just be a medium sized company, making a few million dollars of profit every year with your core business?
Apparently you have not attended business school and/or hold an MBA. The standard doctrine of the business suit bean counter set is: "If you're not growing, you're dying." The idea of a stable profitable company that is not expanding into new markets, new products, selling more, more, MORE! is an anathema to them.
Here's to hoping LEGO will go back to focusing on making plastic bricks that can be used to build lots of different things.
Because Linux and the apps written by open source developers are targetted at other geeks, NOT the soccer moms who can barely spell computer let alone install kernal extensions.
Easy, consistent, UI is as hard to nail down as any complex computing chore. Open source seems to love the latter but rarely bother with the former.
- Jasen.
Re:Too bad the versus have zilch to do w/ the arti
on
Global Dimming
·
· Score: 1
Yes, I know only one of the verses has to do with the article, I just copied in some context. I guess I could have highlighted the relevant portion better.
Perhaps my point was/is that while 100 years ago if you asked someone what could cause the listed judgements a person would likely answer "a miracle" or only some super-natural intervention. Now we might say "pollutants in the atmosphere caused by industrial emissions could reduce the sun's brightness by 1/3 from the levels a few thousand years ago." i.e. With greater knowledge, it becomes easier to explain away the divine (in some cases).
If/When the events listed in Revelation come true, people will just explain them away with purely physical, mechanistic causes. Any Christians left pointing to the Bible saying "told you so" will be deemed too annoying to tolerate and promptly locked up, beaten and/or executed.
Or, the judgements could be very dramatic and unmistakably the hand of God; people will just be too proud to acknowledge Him.
- Jasen.
P.S. Yeah. I realize/. is the wrong place to be analyzing current scientific findings from a Biblical-literalist point of view.
Obligatory Bible reference
on
Global Dimming
·
· Score: 0, Troll
Revelation 8:7-13 7 The first angel blew his trumpet, and there followed hail and fire, mixed with blood, which fell on the earth; and a third of the earth was burnt up, and a third of the trees were burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up. 8 The second angel blew his trumpet, and something like a great mountain, burning with fire, was thrown into the sea; 9 and a third of the sea became blood, a third of the living creatures in the sea died, and a third of the ships were destroyed. 10 The third angel blew his trumpet, and a great star fell from heaven, blazing like a torch, and it fell on a third of the rivers and on the fountains of water. 11 The name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters became wormwood, and many men died of the water, because it was made bitter. 12 The fourth angel blew his trumpet, and a third of the sun was struck, and a third of the moon, and a third of the stars, so that a third of their light was darkened; a third of the day was kept from shining, and likewise a third of the night. 13 Then I looked, and I heard an eagle crying with a loud voice, as it flew in midheaven, "Woe, woe, woe to those who dwell on the earth, at the blasts of the other trumpets which the three angels are about to blow!"
The more we learn about our environment, the more possible (probable?) the judgements listed in the Bible become.
- Jasen.
Re:The unintended benefits of pollution
on
Global Dimming
·
· Score: 1
Whether we like it or not, humanity is changing the climate -- as attractive as it seems, preservation is impossible. At this point, it might be better to think about climate engineering
The problem is the climate system is too complex for us to predict what effect various actions will have - especially if you start extrapolating out 100-200 years. As this article shows, the climatology folks dismissed this "global dimming" phenomenon for quite some time because it didn't fit into their assumptions and expectations about what should be going on.
There are some big obvious things we can say with some certainy are bad - acid rain, choking clouds of pollutants, anything that kills off lots of lifeforms in a short period of time. But many other things we just can't know the goodness or badness of - CO in the atmosphere - because not only is the system really big, but it is also changing - the sun has more and less activity, volcanic activity affects the atmosphere, a meteor could crash into us at any moment, etc.
Does this mean we should give up our modern industrial society and go back to living in huts? Or that we should throw caution to the wind and pump out all the pollution we can? No.
- Jasen.
P.S. IMHO, we have the same issues with all the genetic tinkering we're doing.
A prototype in software engineering is just that -- a bare bones quickly knocked-out attempt at checking if some assumptions hold up or not. A prototype is something you write in 5 minutes with no thought given to its future reliablility maintainability. After the prototypes, only then do we seriously design the software. We do not give prototypes to customers and say "they you are, it's finished".
Unfortunately, to many (some?) managers anything that works is sellable/shippable. Only when the bug reports & crash complaints start flowing in do the engineers have the opportunity to go back and clean up the messy prototype code.
Maybe I've just worked at some bad places, but the pressure to get to market usually outweighs the desire to get things right the first time - that's what maintenance contracts are for!
Adobe, Corel, and some others have DRAWING software that supports SVG but the only IDE along the lines of FlashMX for interactive content that I know of is XStudio by EvolGrafix (http://evolgrafix.com). But they are a small company in Germany. (Adobe or Corel ought to buy these guys or at least partner with them and distribute their software in the USA.) And the last time I played with XStudio it was pretty buggy.
Corel has recently released some interesting server-side XML generation software (http://www.smartgraphics.com/default.shtml).
But on to the issue at hand: Once Microsoft has this proprietary WVG under the covers of Longhorn, we can expect Front Page, Office, and any drawing software put out by MS to support it and IE to render it. VisualStudio will provide easy ways to generate sophisticated WVG web apps.
Then Flash will stop being installed by default in IE. WVG will start appearing all over the WWW and the 90+% of the hoi polloi who don't even know how to start a Windows Command Prompt, let alone compile a Linux kernal, will be oblivious to the fact that Microsoft has grown even larger by embracing and extending.
Perhaps the best we can hope for is that Microsoft will publish their WVG standard and let others write software to generate the stuff.
In the long run, maybe this is a good thing? MS will push the WWW to vector graphics in a way that SVG has not been able to due to the lack of a powerful sugar-daddy. Maybe WVG will be incorporated into a later SVG spec?
Sheesh. Two posts today with "to" where "too" should be. You gotta shortage of "o" keys on your keyboard? Maybe you're saving your "o"s to send someone a big hug?
Many of us that read this hear slashdotty thing are computer programmer types. Forget a ";" or typo a variable name and *poof* the program she no go. ACCURACY COUNTS!!!
McDonalds, Wendy's, BK, et al sell way more food than Shula's Steak House, or any other high quality restaurant. Way more people own Packard Bell's and Gateway's than highly optimized, water-cooled, custom configured CPUs. And, far more people walk into CC or Best Buy and buy a Sony, Kenwood, or (shudder) Apex home-theater-in-a-box than buy separate pre-amps, amplifiers, speakers, and high-grade cables.
The masses don't care about the best, they only want good enough. And even if there are pockets of your life where you care about quality, in other areas you'll be plenty satisfied with "just barely gets the job done".
Maybe you have to be an old fogey (over 30?) to recognize this. And to develop areas in your life where quality really matters to you. Maybe modern consumerism is so concerned about BUYING MORE STUFF and SELLING MORE STUFF that buying and selling GOOD stuff has largely fallen by the wayside.
To pull this slightly back on topic: Much of today's music sucks not just because it is played on cheapy sound systems, but because it is made (compressed, equalized, and other processing applied) to be played on cheap equipment. And most people just don't care - which really annoys the few of us who do.
They DO do a lot of measuring of systems in their full blown reviews. In fact, they typically have one person take the gear home and listen to it - the subjective side. And another person hook it up on a test bench and see what the meters say - the objective side.
As a lay person, I don't know all the math and physics involved in producing "audiophile" sound. I also don't fully understand how my telephone or television work. That doesn't stop me from talking on the phone or being able to tell that the screen is "fuzzy". As a consumer, I trust "experts" with all that detailed knowledge to evaluate gear and explain the results in language I can understand. After paying attention for a little while one can start to correlate the flowery language with the measurements to the point where just listening to something, or reading the flowery language from a known reviewer gives a rough idea of how a piece of equipment most likely measures - and vice versa.
Sure, I probably end up buying some snake oil that way. But hopefully I'm perceptive enough to wise up after the first few bottles and stop buying the oil a particular saleman is selling. If not, hopefully I'm happy drinking what they're selling.
Listening to music is a hobby/pastime for me, not a career. I expect people who do make it their career to be able to advise me quickly and plainly whether a piece of gear is worth buying. To do that, they have to use "dumbed down" language.
Exactly right. Many people that whine about Macs and other OEM machines being too expensive enjoy the process of putting machines together as much as actually DOING anything with those machines. Analogous to car hobbyists who spend lots of time in the garage messing with carbs, valves, suspension, etc. all supposedly in the name of having a higher performance vehicle - which they will then use to cruise around town impressing other motorheads and using all that high-performance gear to race from stop light to stop light.
People who need a van, taxicab, or truck to actually DO something want to spend as little time messing with the vehicle as possible. Analogous to movie editors, book publishers, etc.
For some reason, many people seem unable to separate those who enjoy messing with the computer for its own sake from those who never want to mess with the computer but need a computer to get their work done. Both are valid markets. Apple is aimed at the latter group.
Looking at Farnsworth's plans for the first time, Craig and his father both had the same thought: Now there's a science project.
This kid didn't do this all on his own. His father helped and supported him. To me, the big message here is: "Hey parents, pay attention to your kids and encourage them to do hard things. They can and will." Work with and help your kids excel at something, anything. Don't expect the public school system and day care to turn your kids into geniuses.
There is a much longer rant wanting to be released, but I think you get the message.
While the comparison between the G5 and G4 processors is interesting, how about testing the other parts of the system that have been radically improved? Namely, the new 800MHz bus vs the old 133MHz bus. How about I/O throughput with the new serial ATA? The CPUs may go back and forth in some tasks, but the rest of the G5 systems ought to smoke the G4s. Let's see those tests.
Oh, see we in America have this thing called "freedom". It lets the government give powers to non-government entities like the BSA, RIAA, MPAA, etc.
As the EU picks up speed, you should be experiencing such "freedom" soon, too.
- Jasen.
whereas Flash already has a robust graphical "IDE" which is understood by many thousands of web developers
Bingo. This, IMHO, is what SVG desperately needs. A good IDE to develop SVG apps. Adobe and Corel provide SVG export for static images, but there's nothing like Dreamweaver or MX Studio for SVG - from a big vendor. (There is XStudio. But they're a small vendor in Europe. Maybe one of the bigger boys will buy them up?)
If Corel came out with a nice IDE using dSVG, nobody would care whether it was a standard or not. They'd just use the IDE to create cool interactive content.
Violation of DMCA? Is providing a direct link like this bypassing some sort of copyright protection - i.e. the big legalese agreement. By posting the direct link, you are bypassing the binding EULA. That seems somehow illegal.
Hmmmm... But Corel is in Canada, so the USA's DMCA doesn't apply. Doesn't Canada have a similarly draconian law? Is it illegal in the USA to do things that are illegal in other countries while in the USA, e.g. forging another country's currency, or bypassing EULAs?
Awww... Screw it. I'll just DL the spec and wait for the FBI to knock on my door. If they don't show, it must be ok.
This would lead to the country being run by career bureaucrats. The newly elected people would be controlled by the support staff. And, a lot of those chosen by the lottery very likely wouldn't have the brain-power to understand what was going on.
IMHO, politics in the USA is focused way too much at the federal level. If the local newspapers, TV news and such would cover LOCAL politics more, and local politicians had far more influence over our lives, the average citizen would feel their vote counted a whole lot more. As it is now, you constantly here how the feds are doling out money for this and that, and local & state governments line up to get their hand out. I don't think the framers of our nation intended for the Fed to be anywhere near as powerful as it is.
Dvorak user here, too. I switched to it mostly because I couldn't break myself from the habit of looking at the keys with the QWERTY layout. I susupect I make a few more typos, but I'm looking at what I'm typing (mostly, I can stare off into space while typing a little nowadays) and can quickly correct.
Plus, it's a good security measure to keep coworkers from messing with my machine!
And, using Dvorak layout seems to earn a pretty high geek factor amongst the masses.
Ok, I'll bite. In this case, the system is neither secure nor obscure. Thus the "worst kind" of security through obscurity.
I don't know the specifics, but it sounds like foiling this Blackboard thingy is not too hard (not secure), and, I'll take a WAG that at least several thousand students are relying on it (not obscure).
I agree if security or obscurity are high, there's little problem. As either of those values go down, the other one becomes more important.
Slashdot Mirror
And today Congress would have told such an uppity President where to stick those balls and not passed his budget. And vast numbers of hyper-cynical citizens would have called Kennedy's challenge empty political posturing to woo the ignorant come next election. And every politician from the opposing party would have cut off one of their balls to keep the plan from working lest someone other than they look good.
The race to the moon was all about proving that the USA was better than those stinking commie Russians. Without that, we'd still be bickering amongst ourselves.
- Jasen.
Apparently you have not attended business school and/or hold an MBA. The standard doctrine of the business suit bean counter set is: "If you're not growing, you're dying." The idea of a stable profitable company that is not expanding into new markets, new products, selling more, more, MORE! is an anathema to them.
Here's to hoping LEGO will go back to focusing on making plastic bricks that can be used to build lots of different things.
- Jasen.Because Linux and the apps written by open source developers are targetted at other geeks, NOT the soccer moms who can barely spell computer let alone install kernal extensions.
Easy, consistent, UI is as hard to nail down as any complex computing chore. Open source seems to love the latter but rarely bother with the former.
- Jasen.
Yes, I know only one of the verses has to do with the article, I just copied in some context. I guess I could have highlighted the relevant portion better.
/. is the wrong place to be analyzing current scientific findings from a Biblical-literalist point of view.
Perhaps my point was/is that while 100 years ago if you asked someone what could cause the listed judgements a person would likely answer "a miracle" or only some super-natural intervention. Now we might say "pollutants in the atmosphere caused by industrial emissions could reduce the sun's brightness by 1/3 from the levels a few thousand years ago." i.e. With greater knowledge, it becomes easier to explain away the divine (in some cases).
If/When the events listed in Revelation come true, people will just explain them away with purely physical, mechanistic causes. Any Christians left pointing to the Bible saying "told you so" will be deemed too annoying to tolerate and promptly locked up, beaten and/or executed.
Or, the judgements could be very dramatic and unmistakably the hand of God; people will just be too proud to acknowledge Him.
- Jasen.
P.S. Yeah. I realize
7 The first angel blew his trumpet, and there followed hail and fire, mixed with blood, which fell on the earth; and a third of the earth was burnt up, and a third of the trees were burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up. 8 The second angel blew his trumpet, and something like a great mountain, burning with fire, was thrown into the sea; 9 and a third of the sea became blood, a third of the living creatures in the sea died, and a third of the ships were destroyed. 10 The third angel blew his trumpet, and a great star fell from heaven, blazing like a torch, and it fell on a third of the rivers and on the fountains of water. 11 The name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters became wormwood, and many men died of the water, because it was made bitter. 12 The fourth angel blew his trumpet, and a third of the sun was struck, and a third of the moon, and a third of the stars, so that a third of their light was darkened; a third of the day was kept from shining, and likewise a third of the night. 13 Then I looked, and I heard an eagle crying with a loud voice, as it flew in midheaven, "Woe, woe, woe to those who dwell on the earth, at the blasts of the other trumpets which the three angels are about to blow!"
The more we learn about our environment, the more possible (probable?) the judgements listed in the Bible become.
- Jasen.
The problem is the climate system is too complex for us to predict what effect various actions will have - especially if you start extrapolating out 100-200 years. As this article shows, the climatology folks dismissed this "global dimming" phenomenon for quite some time because it didn't fit into their assumptions and expectations about what should be going on.
There are some big obvious things we can say with some certainy are bad - acid rain, choking clouds of pollutants, anything that kills off lots of lifeforms in a short period of time. But many other things we just can't know the goodness or badness of - CO in the atmosphere - because not only is the system really big, but it is also changing - the sun has more and less activity, volcanic activity affects the atmosphere, a meteor could crash into us at any moment, etc.
Does this mean we should give up our modern industrial society and go back to living in huts? Or that we should throw caution to the wind and pump out all the pollution we can? No.
- Jasen.
P.S. IMHO, we have the same issues with all the genetic tinkering we're doing.
Unfortunately, to many (some?) managers anything that works is sellable/shippable. Only when the bug reports & crash complaints start flowing in do the engineers have the opportunity to go back and clean up the messy prototype code.
Maybe I've just worked at some bad places, but the pressure to get to market usually outweighs the desire to get things right the first time - that's what maintenance contracts are for!
- Jasen.
- Jasen.
Adobe, Corel, and some others have DRAWING software that supports SVG but the only IDE along the lines of FlashMX for interactive content that I know of is XStudio by EvolGrafix (http://evolgrafix.com). But they are a small company in Germany. (Adobe or Corel ought to buy these guys or at least partner with them and distribute their software in the USA.) And the last time I played with XStudio it was pretty buggy.
Corel has recently released some interesting server-side XML generation software (http://www.smartgraphics.com/default.shtml).
But on to the issue at hand:
Once Microsoft has this proprietary WVG under the covers of Longhorn, we can expect Front Page, Office, and any drawing software put out by MS to support it and IE to render it. VisualStudio will provide easy ways to generate sophisticated WVG web apps.
Then Flash will stop being installed by default in IE. WVG will start appearing all over the WWW and the 90+% of the hoi polloi who don't even know how to start a Windows Command Prompt, let alone compile a Linux kernal, will be oblivious to the fact that Microsoft has grown even larger by embracing and extending.
Perhaps the best we can hope for is that Microsoft will publish their WVG standard and let others write software to generate the stuff.
In the long run, maybe this is a good thing? MS will push the WWW to vector graphics in a way that SVG has not been able to due to the lack of a powerful sugar-daddy. Maybe WVG will be incorporated into a later SVG spec?
- Jasen.
Soon to be seen at Mac World San Francisco:
Big Mac does Photoshop benchmark in 0.0001 seconds. G5 retains "fastest PC on the planet" title.
Seriously, Apple ought to milk this Big Mac supercomputer for all the good PR they can.
- Jasen.
Sheesh. Two posts today with "to" where "too" should be. You gotta shortage of "o" keys on your keyboard? Maybe you're saving your "o"s to send someone a big hug?
Many of us that read this hear slashdotty thing are computer programmer types. Forget a ";" or typo a variable name and *poof* the program she no go. ACCURACY COUNTS!!!
- Jasen.
McDonalds, Wendy's, BK, et al sell way more food than Shula's Steak House, or any other high quality restaurant. Way more people own Packard Bell's and Gateway's than highly optimized, water-cooled, custom configured CPUs. And, far more people walk into CC or Best Buy and buy a Sony, Kenwood, or (shudder) Apex home-theater-in-a-box than buy separate pre-amps, amplifiers, speakers, and high-grade cables.
The masses don't care about the best, they only want good enough. And even if there are pockets of your life where you care about quality, in other areas you'll be plenty satisfied with "just barely gets the job done".
Maybe you have to be an old fogey (over 30?) to recognize this. And to develop areas in your life where quality really matters to you. Maybe modern consumerism is so concerned about BUYING MORE STUFF and SELLING MORE STUFF that buying and selling GOOD stuff has largely fallen by the wayside.
To pull this slightly back on topic: Much of today's music sucks not just because it is played on cheapy sound systems, but because it is made (compressed, equalized, and other processing applied) to be played on cheap equipment. And most people just don't care - which really annoys the few of us who do.
- Jasen.
FWIW, I used to subscribe to Stereophile.
They DO do a lot of measuring of systems in their full blown reviews. In fact, they typically have one person take the gear home and listen to it - the subjective side. And another person hook it up on a test bench and see what the meters say - the objective side.
As a lay person, I don't know all the math and physics involved in producing "audiophile" sound. I also don't fully understand how my telephone or television work. That doesn't stop me from talking on the phone or being able to tell that the screen is "fuzzy". As a consumer, I trust "experts" with all that detailed knowledge to evaluate gear and explain the results in language I can understand. After paying attention for a little while one can start to correlate the flowery language with the measurements to the point where just listening to something, or reading the flowery language from a known reviewer gives a rough idea of how a piece of equipment most likely measures - and vice versa.
Sure, I probably end up buying some snake oil that way. But hopefully I'm perceptive enough to wise up after the first few bottles and stop buying the oil a particular saleman is selling. If not, hopefully I'm happy drinking what they're selling.
Listening to music is a hobby/pastime for me, not a career. I expect people who do make it their career to be able to advise me quickly and plainly whether a piece of gear is worth buying. To do that, they have to use "dumbed down" language.
- Jasen.
Exactly right. Many people that whine about Macs and other OEM machines being too expensive enjoy the process of putting machines together as much as actually DOING anything with those machines. Analogous to car hobbyists who spend lots of time in the garage messing with carbs, valves, suspension, etc. all supposedly in the name of having a higher performance vehicle - which they will then use to cruise around town impressing other motorheads and using all that high-performance gear to race from stop light to stop light.
People who need a van, taxicab, or truck to actually DO something want to spend as little time messing with the vehicle as possible. Analogous to movie editors, book publishers, etc.
For some reason, many people seem unable to separate those who enjoy messing with the computer for its own sake from those who never want to mess with the computer but need a computer to get their work done. Both are valid markets. Apple is aimed at the latter group.
- Jasen.
Looking at Farnsworth's plans for the first time, Craig and his father both had the same thought: Now there's a science project.
This kid didn't do this all on his own. His father helped and supported him. To me, the big message here is: "Hey parents, pay attention to your kids and encourage them to do hard things. They can and will." Work with and help your kids excel at something, anything. Don't expect the public school system and day care to turn your kids into geniuses.
There is a much longer rant wanting to be released, but I think you get the message.
- Jasen.
While the comparison between the G5 and G4 processors is interesting, how about testing the other parts of the system that have been radically improved? Namely, the new 800MHz bus vs the old 133MHz bus. How about I/O throughput with the new serial ATA? The CPUs may go back and forth in some tasks, but the rest of the G5 systems ought to smoke the G4s. Let's see those tests.
- Jasen.
Oh, see we in America have this thing called "freedom". It lets the government give powers to non-government entities like the BSA, RIAA, MPAA, etc. As the EU picks up speed, you should be experiencing such "freedom" soon, too. - Jasen.
Really. Who filters the stories? Why on earth is this "News for nerds. Stuff that matters."?
/. help me?"
/. going to offer a subscription service to filter out all the lame fluff stories?
"Hi, I'm too cheap (or stupid) to do the obvious and hire an electrician. Can
Give me a break.
Is
- Jasen.
Actually, the bras linkage is pretty well documented.
e rw w.health2us.com/bra.htm/ bra_breast_cancer.htm/ obidos/ASIN/0895296640/ seekye1comonline/002-2368796-0932831
http://www.google.com/search?q=bras+breast+canc
http://www.all-natural.com/bras.html
http://w
http://www.guymalone.com
http://www.amazon.com/exec
- Jasen.
I was hoping the link would be to another show.
- Jasen.
Bingo. This, IMHO, is what SVG desperately needs. A good IDE to develop SVG apps. Adobe and Corel provide SVG export for static images, but there's nothing like Dreamweaver or MX Studio for SVG - from a big vendor. (There is XStudio. But they're a small vendor in Europe. Maybe one of the bigger boys will buy them up?)
If Corel came out with a nice IDE using dSVG, nobody would care whether it was a standard or not. They'd just use the IDE to create cool interactive content.
- Jasen.
Violation of DMCA? Is providing a direct link like this bypassing some sort of copyright protection - i.e. the big legalese agreement. By posting the direct link, you are bypassing the binding EULA. That seems somehow illegal.
Hmmmm... But Corel is in Canada, so the USA's DMCA doesn't apply. Doesn't Canada have a similarly draconian law? Is it illegal in the USA to do things that are illegal in other countries while in the USA, e.g. forging another country's currency, or bypassing EULAs?
Awww... Screw it. I'll just DL the spec and wait for the FBI to knock on my door. If they don't show, it must be ok.
- Jasen.
This would lead to the country being run by career bureaucrats. The newly elected people would be controlled by the support staff. And, a lot of those chosen by the lottery very likely wouldn't have the brain-power to understand what was going on.
IMHO, politics in the USA is focused way too much at the federal level. If the local newspapers, TV news and such would cover LOCAL politics more, and local politicians had far more influence over our lives, the average citizen would feel their vote counted a whole lot more. As it is now, you constantly here how the feds are doling out money for this and that, and local & state governments line up to get their hand out. I don't think the framers of our nation intended for the Fed to be anywhere near as powerful as it is.
I'll stop rambling now.
- Jasen.
Dvorak user here, too. I switched to it mostly because I couldn't break myself from the habit of looking at the keys with the QWERTY layout. I susupect I make a few more typos, but I'm looking at what I'm typing (mostly, I can stare off into space while typing a little nowadays) and can quickly correct.
Plus, it's a good security measure to keep coworkers from messing with my machine!
And, using Dvorak layout seems to earn a pretty high geek factor amongst the masses.
- Jasen.
Ok, I'll bite. In this case, the system is neither secure nor obscure. Thus the "worst kind" of security through obscurity.
I don't know the specifics, but it sounds like foiling this Blackboard thingy is not too hard (not secure), and, I'll take a WAG that at least several thousand students are relying on it (not obscure).
I agree if security or obscurity are high, there's little problem. As either of those values go down, the other one becomes more important.
- Jasen.