I've reviewed the other replies on this branch of the thread (those above my "2" threshhold), and parent post still seems like the best place to hang my thoughts.
I do appreciate the limitations the General faced in developing answers on this very public forum. I am sure he and his staff had to sweat through several revisions on some of these. So his words carry a lot of weight in my mind. Both for what little he has said, and also for what has not been said.
My impressions:
The Cyber Command does not yet have a secure mandate. Either the mandate is
not yet well defined, or
has controversial clauses that are still being hammered out.
The Air Force is not yet prepared to say what the role of Cyber Command will be, or how that role will integrate with civil government agencies and NGOs that are already involved in "cyber space" security. This may be a consequence of the first point.
The specific responsibilities, duties, and skill sets of personnel who will be involved with this effort are not yet identified.
This is very much a fledgling operation, dissimilar to any other operation the Air Force has taken in my memory. When I was a teen, I was an avid reader of stories about the early days of flight. This Cyber Command reminds me of anecdotes about the beginnings of the Army Air Corps, and the way it tried to function in a situation where everyone knew that the USA needed such a thing, but no one knew just what the AAC should do, and there was a constant squabble between different agencies about overlapping jurisdictions. The chapter in _God is my copilot_ entitled "When the Army flew the mail" had stories about taking off in planes without knowing how to retract their landing gear, and figuring out non-embarrassing ways to determine if you had landed in Kalamazoo or Timbuktu. Those stories made a big impression on me; after more than 4 decades, I still remember them as cautionary tales.
My guess: whatever the USAF Cyber Command turns out to become by 2010, it will be replaced by an entity entirely independent of the USAF or any other existing Service by 2020. That entity will have a clearly defined mandate and jurisdiction. But Cyber Command will exist its whole time without such an umbrella, and it will be a stormy time.
I wish them luck. If we don't yet need something like this, we probably soon will. But danged if I've got any idea of just what Cyber Command needs to be doing, or how they should do it. And it seems pretty clear that everyone involved in putting this together has no better idea about these things than I do. Otherwise, the Good General would have been more specific in his answers to several of the questions.
no one comments yet on a General's usage of "YGTBKM! LOL!"?
YGTBKM: I had to google that one; I've never encountered it before. And I've got pretty fair geek credentials:
Read slashdot more than twice a day, for more than 7 years
Could dust off my notes and argue the benefits of DR-DOS vs MSDOS
Used to program in Applesoft and 6502 Assembler (and use the Lamb method to stuff ML routines into the keyboard buffer where they could be CALLed to do wondrous things, like self-modifying BASIC
Have actually prepared and handled Hollerith card decks
Hand write HTML with CSS, currently conversant in Perl, Javascript, PHP, forgotten more Pascal and Delphi than most geeks have ever bothered to learn, etc
So, does YGTBKM come from the Facebook or the gaming communities? Or AOL or whatever? Does anybody know?
I've got a more serious comment to offer in another reply to parent post: this one is mostly just for fun.
Science journalism would perhaps be the one area where you would expect the author to concisely go out of their way to be unbiased.
WTF?
A good journalist has a strong understanding of the biases of his intended audience, and writes with those in mind. He may suppress his own biases to do this.
If he is writing for a scientific journal, then yes, he will probably strive to present an unbiased POV. But if he is writing for the popular press, he will strive to express his findings in ways that are understandable within the context of his readership. Which usually means accepting many of their biases as constraints on his wording.
Yet in TFA's case, there were also these statements:
The stress-cardiovascular disease link is well-documented in scientific literature, and the affection and pleasure pets give humans is a known stress-buster.
"We certainly expected an effect, because we thought that there was a biologically plausible mechanism at work. But the magnitude of the effect was hard to predict."
She pointed to multiple studies that have found that animal companions "have a calming effect in regard to mental stressors."
So after RTFA, there is ample cause to believe that the statistics were analyzed within the context of a hypothesis that the reporter did not explicitly state.
Finding a strong correlation that must exist if the hypothesis is true generally increases confidence in the hypothesis.
Why wasn't the hypothesis reported in the story? More than likely, because it was framed as a null hypothesis, and those can be hard to dummy down to the general public's limited understanding of the scientific method— at least within the framework of articles like TFA. These are written to report newsworthy events, not to teach high school science.
Well, yes, this general idea sounds pretty good. Now that we've got ways of generating lots of raw content, and found that doing so has actually led us down an interesting path, it is time to take another step and look at ways to make the content better.
But calling that "Web 3.0"??
I don't think so. This is much more like going to Web 2.0.1 Which is certainly important but definitely just another incremental step in the evolution of the intarweb.
Emgee's future chronology for making the tubes better:
Web 1.x: the web as it was back in the day when MSIEv6 was unchallenged;
no effective "D" in "DHTML"
Web 2.0: those parts of today's web with interactive content;
partial page fetching;
formations of communities of content maintainers
Web 2.1: reasonable editorial control of Web user-generated content;
where we will be at the end of the next step
Web 2.2: effective mechanisms of quality assurance;
ability to start relying on accuracy of content
Web 3.0: effective navigation without physical input devices
maybe through "wish switch" mechanisms or virtual keyboards, etc
Web 4.0: effective output without display screens
maybe through direct stimulation of visual cortex
[Thanks for another fun Saturday morning mental exercise. So much better than the cartoons!]
Because a standard is a human production that has no physical reality, it is possible to fully comply with its every detail (assuming that it is a well-written standard). And therein lies one hell of an operating assumption, WRT practically any standard generated by the W3C in the last decade. (CSS, DOM, XHTML, SVG... HTML 4.01 may well be the last thing they wrote that wasn't a complete [bleep]ing joke.)
And your point is....?
And why do exclude HTML 4.01 or the earlier work? Seems to me the split between HTML 4.x and XHTML 1.x has proven to be a pretty funny joke. And we were all laughing so hard at HTML v3.0 that no one actually got around to figuring out how to implement it. And the continuing giggles from that joke were so side-splitting that HTML v3.1 was dropped before we even got it to the punch line.
Nobody ever said a standard had to be serious. Look at the clowns of Redmond: they make money hand over fist, and they've yet to treat any standard seriously.
Would you agree that a physical theory being "correct" is equivalent to a physical theory being "standards compliant" where the standard is reality?
No, I don't agree with that stipulation.
Reality is in its essence unknowable. Theories are models of reality that are simpler, and are based on a multitude of assumptions. And many of those assumptions go unstated. For instance, I am aware of no theory of gravity that takes into account the color of the objects being described, yet there is no scientific basis on which we can exclude color (or smell, or taste) from gravitational considerations. We do so because at this moment in history it seems silly to include it, but that is a literary arts judgment, not a scientific judgment. If you want to get your pet theory on Electric Pulse Gravity published, you'd do well to heed the literary aspects, but don't mistake them for the science.
A standard, however, is the formal statement of a group's conceptualization about a process, such as how a distance shall be measured, or how a web page shall be rendered. A standard has nothing to do with reality. It is all in your head (and the heads of everyone else who familiarizes themself with the standard). Because a standard is a human production that has no physical reality, it is possible to fully comply with its every detail (assuming that it is a well-written standard). Perhaps more to the point, it is possible for someone to completely learn a standard, including any of its weaknesses like internal contradictions or ambiguities. However it is impossible for anyone to completely learn reality, or learn all there is to know about any theory of reality.
In this sense, Euclidean geometry is a standard. You can do a lot of neat things with it, and you can spend lots of time exploring places where it is still ambiguous (things not yet proven). But you can't violate its established rules and still claim it is Euclidean geometry. You can replace those rules with other rules, but then you have a non-Euclidean geometry, like spherical geometry as one instance.
It is possible for a web browser to be standards compliant in the absolute sense. It is also reasonable to describe the relative compliance of non-compliant browsers. And since in nearly every case the context will make it clear as to whether the meaning is absolute or relative, there is no rarely any need to specify that. Unless, of course, one is pushing a hidden agenda, where the intent of talking about the subject is to create as much heat and smoke as possible while putting out no light.
There's probably a really succinct way of saying all the above, but I left my Zen Pocket Companion at work.
Seems to me this talk about using inductive chargers is shooting way above the target.
We've got the means right now to charge electric cars on the go. We know how to string catenaries and how to build pantographs that can can be raised to grab the juice, even at high speeds, or lowered when going off grid. All we need to do is transfer the technology we've developed for electrified light rail to toll lanes on the freeways and main streets.
Got charge enough on board and don't want to fuss with the cats and whiskers when your just doing a quick run to the store? Keep your pant down, and/or stay out of the toll lane. Heading into the country for a day off, and want a full charge on board when you leave the grid? Plan your route out of town so that you've got your pant up to the cats for as long as possible. On a tight student budget? Take advantage of the off-peak hourly rates, and only put your pant up on the 3:00 a.m. pizza runs.
Gee, this technology even comes with built-in set of fancy jargon. Much more fun to talk about pants up and pants down than about inductive charging.
Billing shouldn't be a problem. The onboard computer could track usage and communicate with GoGreen Electric Company through wifi.
This story was one of the first things I looked at this morning, and I misread the title as "IBM optical chip zips huge flies" which sounded kind of weird in a cyborg sort of way.
And now parent post talks of zipping huge flies, which sounds kind of weird with a hint of goatse.
<!-- note to self: Don't read slashdot before coffee -->
Look into whether you can side step the whole design thing by
Making the interface skin-able by the users
Creating a permanent wiki where users could download and upload skins, discuss the merits of each, and rank them according to whatever criteria are important to them.
Your initial job would be to build a rudimentary interface and a toolkit that would allow each user of the software to skin it the way they think would work best. Long term maintenance would include adding extensions to the toolkit that would be driven by user requests.
You would want to recruit a few users to help with debugging the initial toolkit and setting up the default interface.
Handle this right, and the traditional users' resistance to change could be morphed into an enthusiastic buy-in on the project before it is even out the door. An annual award, like a couple of extra days off, to the user who is voted Most Valuable Contributor by his peers could be an inexpensive way to get things started and keep things going.
If you take this idea to your boss, I'd be interested in hearing his response.
I think the ribbon has been unfairly criticised since it became public. It eliminates the redundancy of having both menus and toolbars with the same commands in them, and makes better use of the space on the screen.
This is the first sensible rationale for ribbons that I've yet seen. Yes, really. The. Very. First. Not that I've been looking for such rationales.
But I don't think it is a particularly strong rationale. There are good arguments for redundancy of controls. Especially in apps like Firefox, oOO, and even Office 2003, where the user has the ability to customize the toolbars to whatever makes the most sense for him, but the menus continue as a known constant, which is damn useful when giving instructions to someone else, or when following tutorials into unknown territory.
The phrase
Dos Ain't Done 'Til Lotus Don't Run is apocryphal, but the strategy that it describes was practiced by Microsoft in the late days of DOS, when Word was second fiddle to WordPerfect and Excel was an also-ran, trailing Lotus' 1-2-3 and Borland's Quattro.
Back in the day, those of us who were using various Business Basics to write custom code relied heavily on a thick reference book called Undocumented DOS, which described the hidden interface to DOS internals that were being used by Microsoft applications, but were not supposed to be used by third party developers because, well, because they weren't officially documented. They were, however, generally faster or in some other way better than the documented routines. The feeling was that if Word and Excel used these, they had to be pretty damn stable.
Microsoft continued this practice with the Windows 3.x APIs. I was doing other things by the end of that era, so I have no personal knowledge of anything after Windows For Workgroups.
While
Dos Ain't Done 'Til Lotus Don't Run may never have been actually chanted in the halls of Redmond, it is a very good at suggesting the oh so clever mixture of development and marketing strategy that Microsoft has built its edifice on.
The mahjong security model? That could be fun[see note below].
There's also the Sesame Street variant: "One of these pictures is not like the others / one of these pictures does not belong".
Either one should raise the bar sufficiently to keep the bots out for some positive integer multiple of eighteen months. If the visual riddles were kept interesting, there would be good user acceptance. At least in initial gatekeeping functions, like applications for passwords.
Note: while I'm going for funny points, this is actually a serious proposal. Mah jong with identical matches clearly wouldn't work, but mah jong where the matching pairs were different images from the same implied category would be a barrier to non-human intelligence for quite a while. Examples of matching pairs in such an approach: the roman numeral VII and the arabic numeral 3, a rose and a daffodil, a pipe wrench and a hammer.
You are right that "competence" and "incompetence" have specific meanings in the legal world and in the professions.
When Jacobsen put himself forward as an "expert witness" (which also has a specific meaning), he asserted that he is a professional in the matter before the court. One of the measures of the value of his testimony is whether he is professionally competent or incompetent in this arena.
When Pouwelse describes Jacobsen as "borderline incompetent" he is saying that in this instance for sure, Jacobsen failed to meet the minimum standards of competent practice. I think by "borderline" Pouwelse means that he has not reviewed a large enough body of Jacobsen's work to judge whether Jacobsen is consistently incompetent as an expert witness.
Consider an organ transplant surgeon whose patients consistently do well: he is a competent surgeon and would be a good expert witness with regard to organ transplant procedures. He owns a couple of vintage 1957 Ford Thunderbirds and he does his own maintenance on them. But despite his huge ego (I did say he was a surgeon), he would be incompetent as an expert witness on the design flaws of the Ford Edsel.
On the other hand, a simple, flat, renewal fee would have the same effect. Or perhaps a sliding scale, so that the longer you hold a copyright the more expensive it becomes. Copyrights that weren't producing revenues would be released
This would destroy the GPL and probably all other copyright licenses that support FOSS.
The article is looking at things totally from the wrong point of view - it's as if they believe that Microsoft's problem is that it has a huge pile of cash & don't know what to do with it.
It's not. Microsoft's problem is Google.
Above from parent post is the wrong point of view. The primary purpose of any corporation is to earn money for its owners, the stockholders. It is not to pursue a quasi-religious vision of the digital future.
TFA suggests that Microsoft would be better off investing its $billions of loose change in a healthy business, rather than in a competitor that is also sick. This would certainly the prudent thing to do. Microsoft should have done this a decade ago. Keeping all those retained profits in highly liquid state rather than going after the big ROI of long range investments is the kind of stupid stunt one expects from garage shop entrepreuners, not from a multinational corporation.
Microsoft needs a Lee Iaccoca in high level management: someone who knows how to turn a massive company around. If it continues on its present courses of action, it is going to get increasingly mired in legal problems of its own making. It will increasingly lose market to companies that know how to keep their eye on the bouncing ball (rather than focusing on the vision of where the ball just might be going). And its brain drain to Google, IBM, and yea even unto Yahoo will continue.
Some of slashdot's audience are shackled to their seats with fettered heads that can only see the dim glorious vision on the screen up front. To these persons I say: Let that little girl in the shorts and tee shirt come running down the aisle of your mind, and put her sledgehammer where it will do the most good. For your own sake.
On the WinXP side, I've been using local web hosting with XAMPP for development for around a year. Works well from a USB drive.
Lately I've also been looking at personal wikis as a kind of outliner on steroids tool. At least one launches its own micro web server and uses your choice of browser as the interface, with the scripting done server-side (but on your machine). It can run from a USB drive. I've forgotten the name of this guy, because I've been focusing on another one:
TiddlyWiki uses client-side Javascript for the scripting and runs well under Firefox, and with the usual irritations under MSIE. Reports are that it works well under Safari, Opera, etc, too. It has proven itself in small applications (size of the file:///.../myTiddlies.html up to about 2MB without hassle; haven't gotten any larger than that yet). As mentioned, storage is as a local file, with no server involvement. It's amazing how capable Javascript can be in a standards compliant browser.
I'm just starting my second cup of coffee for the day, so I'm not yet ready to dig up links to any of this. But googling on "personal wiki" will bring up plenty of reading.
I suppose I need to make it abundantly clear that this is on topic. This is all about using software designed for intarweb tubes on your local machine, which is right smack in the middle of the topic category.
As an independent investor, I would be basing my investment decisions on what the stock was doing and where I thought it would go.
But if I were a director of a Union pension fund, I would probably do whatever the guy who wanted to give us an incredible discount on Vista and Office 2007 licenses asked me to do. If the value of the donations were greater than the costs of filing a lawsuit, well, I know what is good for my self-interest. Besides, it would make the stuffed shirts in Legal have to earn their pay for at least a little while.
Looking at YHOO on Google, I see that Yahoo is currently at a 3 month high, having increased in value by 47% since its January low (now trading above $28). MSFT is at the lowest point in 3 months, having dropped in value by 19% from its December high (now trading around $27.50).
Long term investors in YHOO will remember the hit that stock took after Yahoo acquired GeoCities. Absorbing GeoCities was relatively easy since the corporate cultures were similar— I don't recall hearing of any great brain drain from that cause. Microsoft and Yahoo have very different corporate cultures, and there is strong likelihood that the core assets of Yahoo would evaporate by finding other jobs if this acquisition succeeded.
Coupled with a growing number of analysts having major questions about the financial wisdom of Microsoft's offer to buy, this whole thing looks more like FUD than substance. I'm seeing grubby little monkeyboy fingerprints all over it.
designed with backup generators and large fuel storage for same
might be purchasable with those already in place
designed for keeping electronics cool
multiple hardened cable conduits to remote access points like
widely distributed radar antennae
redundant comm links to external control centers
relatively cheap, since there is not much demand for office space several hundred feet underground.
Missile silos would also offer some unique experiences in bungee jumping. Or, you could plan on not having to take out the garbage for several decades.
How can it not be wrong for an operating system to have even a dozen possible system configurations that are significantly different at the basic levels that are the context of this discussion? Let alone the far greater number that parent post suggests?
An operating system should have minimal coupling between itself and the peripheral hardware, and itself and the application software. Parent post is suggesting that MS Vista has been built to specifications that would not have been acceptable in 1967.
This problem can be described as a breakdown of partitions between the OS and other parts of the system. MS is guilty of mucking about with such stuff before: bringing parts of IE into the OS opened huge security holes and dealing with the sequellae has cost billions in anti-malware, downtime, losses from identity theft, etc. So perhaps they are going further down this road. Some of the odd things I've heard about system wide impacts of DRM techniques does suggest that they've thrown away basic concepts of software engineering.
This is to be expected when too much of the talent moves on to more interesting places to work, like Google, Yahoo, or IBM. It becomes increasingly difficult to do acceptable work when the number of staff who understand the core parts of the problems approaches zero.
These articles are still timely:
About Microsoft brain drain from 22 months ago, Similar, from 19 months ago, or
yet another, from 10 months ago. Or google "Microsoft brain drain" and browse through the 134,000 results: you'll see a long histor of MS being accused of kneecapping competitors by targetted headhunting of key staff, but that toward the end of the Vista development cycle, there have been a growing number of questions about whether the exodus of talent from Redmond would leave MS with enough brains to deliver on their promises.
One of Microsoft's more annoying practices, to those of us not working for the Evil Empire, has been their use of astroturfing. Would you as an ex-Microsoftie care to speak about that? I've always been curious about the incentives astroturfers were given.
Were there tangible incentives, or was it all done with a pat on the head and a rousing "Attaboy!"?
How extensive is the practice these days? Rather, how extensive was it when you were last in Microsoft's employ?
Slashdot Mirror
I've reviewed the other replies on this branch of the thread (those above my "2" threshhold), and parent post still seems like the best place to hang my thoughts.
I do appreciate the limitations the General faced in developing answers on this very public forum. I am sure he and his staff had to sweat through several revisions on some of these. So his words carry a lot of weight in my mind. Both for what little he has said, and also for what has not been said.
My impressions:
This is very much a fledgling operation, dissimilar to any other operation the Air Force has taken in my memory. When I was a teen, I was an avid reader of stories about the early days of flight. This Cyber Command reminds me of anecdotes about the beginnings of the Army Air Corps, and the way it tried to function in a situation where everyone knew that the USA needed such a thing, but no one knew just what the AAC should do, and there was a constant squabble between different agencies about overlapping jurisdictions. The chapter in _God is my copilot_ entitled "When the Army flew the mail" had stories about taking off in planes without knowing how to retract their landing gear, and figuring out non-embarrassing ways to determine if you had landed in Kalamazoo or Timbuktu. Those stories made a big impression on me; after more than 4 decades, I still remember them as cautionary tales.
My guess: whatever the USAF Cyber Command turns out to become by 2010, it will be replaced by an entity entirely independent of the USAF or any other existing Service by 2020. That entity will have a clearly defined mandate and jurisdiction. But Cyber Command will exist its whole time without such an umbrella, and it will be a stormy time.
I wish them luck. If we don't yet need something like this, we probably soon will. But danged if I've got any idea of just what Cyber Command needs to be doing, or how they should do it. And it seems pretty clear that everyone involved in putting this together has no better idea about these things than I do. Otherwise, the Good General would have been more specific in his answers to several of the questions.
...OMG PONIES!Dang it, you snuck that one in when I wasn't ready for it. Now I've got to clean the coffee and snot off my screen.
VERY well said, Sir!
YGTBKM: I had to google that one; I've never encountered it before. And I've got pretty fair geek credentials:
So, does YGTBKM come from the Facebook or the gaming communities? Or AOL or whatever? Does anybody know?
I've got a more serious comment to offer in another reply to parent post: this one is mostly just for fun.
WTF?
A good journalist has a strong understanding of the biases of his intended audience, and writes with those in mind. He may suppress his own biases to do this.
If he is writing for a scientific journal, then yes, he will probably strive to present an unbiased POV. But if he is writing for the popular press, he will strive to express his findings in ways that are understandable within the context of his readership. Which usually means accepting many of their biases as constraints on his wording.
Correlation does not mean causation.
Right.
Yet in TFA's case, there were also these statements:
So after RTFA, there is ample cause to believe that the statistics were analyzed within the context of a hypothesis that the reporter did not explicitly state.
Finding a strong correlation that must exist if the hypothesis is true generally increases confidence in the hypothesis.
Why wasn't the hypothesis reported in the story? More than likely, because it was framed as a null hypothesis, and those can be hard to dummy down to the general public's limited understanding of the scientific method— at least within the framework of articles like TFA. These are written to report newsworthy events, not to teach high school science.
Well, yes, this general idea sounds pretty good. Now that we've got ways of generating lots of raw content, and found that doing so has actually led us down an interesting path, it is time to take another step and look at ways to make the content better.
But calling that "Web 3.0"??
I don't think so. This is much more like going to Web 2.0.1 Which is certainly important but definitely just another incremental step in the evolution of the intarweb.
Emgee's future chronology for making the tubes better:
no effective "D" in "DHTML"
partial page fetching;
formations of communities of content maintainers
where we will be at the end of the next step
ability to start relying on accuracy of content
maybe through "wish switch" mechanisms or virtual keyboards, etc
maybe through direct stimulation of visual cortex
[Thanks for another fun Saturday morning mental exercise. So much better than the cartoons!]
And your point is....?
And why do exclude HTML 4.01 or the earlier work? Seems to me the split between HTML 4.x and XHTML 1.x has proven to be a pretty funny joke. And we were all laughing so hard at HTML v3.0 that no one actually got around to figuring out how to implement it. And the continuing giggles from that joke were so side-splitting that HTML v3.1 was dropped before we even got it to the punch line.
Nobody ever said a standard had to be serious. Look at the clowns of Redmond: they make money hand over fist, and they've yet to treat any standard seriously.
No, I don't agree with that stipulation.
Reality is in its essence unknowable. Theories are models of reality that are simpler, and are based on a multitude of assumptions. And many of those assumptions go unstated. For instance, I am aware of no theory of gravity that takes into account the color of the objects being described, yet there is no scientific basis on which we can exclude color (or smell, or taste) from gravitational considerations. We do so because at this moment in history it seems silly to include it, but that is a literary arts judgment, not a scientific judgment. If you want to get your pet theory on Electric Pulse Gravity published, you'd do well to heed the literary aspects, but don't mistake them for the science.
A standard, however, is the formal statement of a group's conceptualization about a process, such as how a distance shall be measured, or how a web page shall be rendered. A standard has nothing to do with reality. It is all in your head (and the heads of everyone else who familiarizes themself with the standard). Because a standard is a human production that has no physical reality, it is possible to fully comply with its every detail (assuming that it is a well-written standard). Perhaps more to the point, it is possible for someone to completely learn a standard, including any of its weaknesses like internal contradictions or ambiguities. However it is impossible for anyone to completely learn reality, or learn all there is to know about any theory of reality.
In this sense, Euclidean geometry is a standard. You can do a lot of neat things with it, and you can spend lots of time exploring places where it is still ambiguous (things not yet proven). But you can't violate its established rules and still claim it is Euclidean geometry. You can replace those rules with other rules, but then you have a non-Euclidean geometry, like spherical geometry as one instance.
It is possible for a web browser to be standards compliant in the absolute sense. It is also reasonable to describe the relative compliance of non-compliant browsers. And since in nearly every case the context will make it clear as to whether the meaning is absolute or relative, there is no rarely any need to specify that. Unless, of course, one is pushing a hidden agenda, where the intent of talking about the subject is to create as much heat and smoke as possible while putting out no light.
There's probably a really succinct way of saying all the above, but I left my Zen Pocket Companion at work.
Seems to me this talk about using inductive chargers is shooting way above the target.
We've got the means right now to charge electric cars on the go. We know how to string catenaries and how to build pantographs that can can be raised to grab the juice, even at high speeds, or lowered when going off grid. All we need to do is transfer the technology we've developed for electrified light rail to toll lanes on the freeways and main streets.
Got charge enough on board and don't want to fuss with the cats and whiskers when your just doing a quick run to the store? Keep your pant down, and/or stay out of the toll lane. Heading into the country for a day off, and want a full charge on board when you leave the grid? Plan your route out of town so that you've got your pant up to the cats for as long as possible. On a tight student budget? Take advantage of the off-peak hourly rates, and only put your pant up on the 3:00 a.m. pizza runs.
Gee, this technology even comes with built-in set of fancy jargon. Much more fun to talk about pants up and pants down than about inductive charging.
Billing shouldn't be a problem. The onboard computer could track usage and communicate with GoGreen Electric Company through wifi.
This story was one of the first things I looked at this morning, and I misread the title as "IBM optical chip zips huge flies" which sounded kind of weird in a cyborg sort of way.
And now parent post talks of zipping huge flies, which sounds kind of weird with a hint of goatse.
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note to self:
Don't read slashdot before coffee
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Look into whether you can side step the whole design thing by
Your initial job would be to build a rudimentary interface and a toolkit that would allow each user of the software to skin it the way they think would work best. Long term maintenance would include adding extensions to the toolkit that would be driven by user requests.
You would want to recruit a few users to help with debugging the initial toolkit and setting up the default interface.
Handle this right, and the traditional users' resistance to change could be morphed into an enthusiastic buy-in on the project before it is even out the door. An annual award, like a couple of extra days off, to the user who is voted Most Valuable Contributor by his peers could be an inexpensive way to get things started and keep things going.
If you take this idea to your boss, I'd be interested in hearing his response.
This is the first sensible rationale for ribbons that I've yet seen. Yes, really. The. Very. First. Not that I've been looking for such rationales.
But I don't think it is a particularly strong rationale. There are good arguments for redundancy of controls. Especially in apps like Firefox, oOO, and even Office 2003, where the user has the ability to customize the toolbars to whatever makes the most sense for him, but the menus continue as a known constant, which is damn useful when giving instructions to someone else, or when following tutorials into unknown territory.
Back in the day, those of us who were using various Business Basics to write custom code relied heavily on a thick reference book called Undocumented DOS, which described the hidden interface to DOS internals that were being used by Microsoft applications, but were not supposed to be used by third party developers because, well, because they weren't officially documented. They were, however, generally faster or in some other way better than the documented routines. The feeling was that if Word and Excel used these, they had to be pretty damn stable.
Microsoft continued this practice with the Windows 3.x APIs. I was doing other things by the end of that era, so I have no personal knowledge of anything after Windows For Workgroups.
While
Dos Ain't Done 'Til Lotus Don't Run may never have been actually chanted in the halls of Redmond, it is a very good at suggesting the oh so clever mixture of development and marketing strategy that Microsoft has built its edifice on.The mahjong security model? That could be fun[see note below].
There's also the Sesame Street variant: "One of these pictures is not like the others / one of these pictures does not belong".
Either one should raise the bar sufficiently to keep the bots out for some positive integer multiple of eighteen months. If the visual riddles were kept interesting, there would be good user acceptance. At least in initial gatekeeping functions, like applications for passwords.
Note: while I'm going for funny points, this is actually a serious proposal. Mah jong with identical matches clearly wouldn't work, but mah jong where the matching pairs were different images from the same implied category would be a barrier to non-human intelligence for quite a while. Examples of matching pairs in such an approach: the roman numeral VII and the arabic numeral 3, a rose and a daffodil, a pipe wrench and a hammer.
Or for porn sites... use your imagination.
I agree that GP post shows borderline incompetence in the use of </i>.
It should noted that parent post shows borderline incompetence in distinguishing between content and the bells and whistles of presentation.
You are right that "competence" and "incompetence" have specific meanings in the legal world and in the professions.
When Jacobsen put himself forward as an "expert witness" (which also has a specific meaning), he asserted that he is a professional in the matter before the court. One of the measures of the value of his testimony is whether he is professionally competent or incompetent in this arena.
When Pouwelse describes Jacobsen as "borderline incompetent" he is saying that in this instance for sure, Jacobsen failed to meet the minimum standards of competent practice. I think by "borderline" Pouwelse means that he has not reviewed a large enough body of Jacobsen's work to judge whether Jacobsen is consistently incompetent as an expert witness.
Consider an organ transplant surgeon whose patients consistently do well: he is a competent surgeon and would be a good expert witness with regard to organ transplant procedures. He owns a couple of vintage 1957 Ford Thunderbirds and he does his own maintenance on them. But despite his huge ego (I did say he was a surgeon), he would be incompetent as an expert witness on the design flaws of the Ford Edsel.
This would destroy the GPL and probably all other copyright licenses that support FOSS.
I do not think that would be A Good Thing To Do.
The article is looking at things totally from the wrong point of view - it's as if they believe that Microsoft's problem is that it has a huge pile of cash & don't know what to do with it.
It's not. Microsoft's problem is Google.
Above from parent post is the wrong point of view. The primary purpose of any corporation is to earn money for its owners, the stockholders. It is not to pursue a quasi-religious vision of the digital future.
TFA suggests that Microsoft would be better off investing its $billions of loose change in a healthy business, rather than in a competitor that is also sick. This would certainly the prudent thing to do. Microsoft should have done this a decade ago. Keeping all those retained profits in highly liquid state rather than going after the big ROI of long range investments is the kind of stupid stunt one expects from garage shop entrepreuners, not from a multinational corporation.
Microsoft needs a Lee Iaccoca in high level management: someone who knows how to turn a massive company around. If it continues on its present courses of action, it is going to get increasingly mired in legal problems of its own making. It will increasingly lose market to companies that know how to keep their eye on the bouncing ball (rather than focusing on the vision of where the ball just might be going). And its brain drain to Google, IBM, and yea even unto Yahoo will continue.
Some of slashdot's audience are shackled to their seats with fettered heads that can only see the dim glorious vision on the screen up front. To these persons I say: Let that little girl in the shorts and tee shirt come running down the aisle of your mind, and put her sledgehammer where it will do the most good. For your own sake.
On the WinXP side, I've been using local web hosting with XAMPP for development for around a year. Works well from a USB drive.
Lately I've also been looking at personal wikis as a kind of outliner on steroids tool. At least one launches its own micro web server and uses your choice of browser as the interface, with the scripting done server-side (but on your machine). It can run from a USB drive. I've forgotten the name of this guy, because I've been focusing on another one:
TiddlyWiki uses client-side Javascript for the scripting and runs well under Firefox, and with the usual irritations under MSIE. Reports are that it works well under Safari, Opera, etc, too. It has proven itself in small applications (size of the file:///.../myTiddlies.html up to about 2MB without hassle; haven't gotten any larger than that yet). As mentioned, storage is as a local file, with no server involvement. It's amazing how capable Javascript can be in a standards compliant browser.
I'm just starting my second cup of coffee for the day, so I'm not yet ready to dig up links to any of this. But googling on "personal wiki" will bring up plenty of reading.
I suppose I need to make it abundantly clear that this is on topic. This is all about using software designed for intarweb tubes on your local machine, which is right smack in the middle of the topic category.
As an independent investor, I would be basing my investment decisions on what the stock was doing and where I thought it would go.
But if I were a director of a Union pension fund, I would probably do whatever the guy who wanted to give us an incredible discount on Vista and Office 2007 licenses asked me to do. If the value of the donations were greater than the costs of filing a lawsuit, well, I know what is good for my self-interest. Besides, it would make the stuffed shirts in Legal have to earn their pay for at least a little while.
Looking at YHOO on Google, I see that Yahoo is currently at a 3 month high, having increased in value by 47% since its January low (now trading above $28). MSFT is at the lowest point in 3 months, having dropped in value by 19% from its December high (now trading around $27.50).
Long term investors in YHOO will remember the hit that stock took after Yahoo acquired GeoCities. Absorbing GeoCities was relatively easy since the corporate cultures were similar— I don't recall hearing of any great brain drain from that cause. Microsoft and Yahoo have very different corporate cultures, and there is strong likelihood that the core assets of Yahoo would evaporate by finding other jobs if this acquisition succeeded.
Coupled with a growing number of analysts having major questions about the financial wisdom of Microsoft's offer to buy, this whole thing looks more like FUD than substance. I'm seeing grubby little monkeyboy fingerprints all over it.
Other advantages of a bunker are
Missile silos would also offer some unique experiences in bungee jumping. Or, you could plan on not having to take out the garbage for several decades.
The transgrade to Ubuntu is the optimal solution.
How can it not be wrong for an operating system to have even a dozen possible system configurations that are significantly different at the basic levels that are the context of this discussion? Let alone the far greater number that parent post suggests?
An operating system should have minimal coupling between itself and the peripheral hardware, and itself and the application software. Parent post is suggesting that MS Vista has been built to specifications that would not have been acceptable in 1967.
This problem can be described as a breakdown of partitions between the OS and other parts of the system. MS is guilty of mucking about with such stuff before: bringing parts of IE into the OS opened huge security holes and dealing with the sequellae has cost billions in anti-malware, downtime, losses from identity theft, etc. So perhaps they are going further down this road. Some of the odd things I've heard about system wide impacts of DRM techniques does suggest that they've thrown away basic concepts of software engineering.
This is to be expected when too much of the talent moves on to more interesting places to work, like Google, Yahoo, or IBM. It becomes increasingly difficult to do acceptable work when the number of staff who understand the core parts of the problems approaches zero.
These articles are still timely: About Microsoft brain drain from 22 months ago, Similar, from 19 months ago, or yet another, from 10 months ago. Or google "Microsoft brain drain" and browse through the 134,000 results: you'll see a long histor of MS being accused of kneecapping competitors by targetted headhunting of key staff, but that toward the end of the Vista development cycle, there have been a growing number of questions about whether the exodus of talent from Redmond would leave MS with enough brains to deliver on their promises.
One of Microsoft's more annoying practices, to those of us not working for the Evil Empire, has been their use of astroturfing. Would you as an ex-Microsoftie care to speak about that? I've always been curious about the incentives astroturfers were given.
Were there tangible incentives, or was it all done with a pat on the head and a rousing "Attaboy!"?
How extensive is the practice these days? Rather, how extensive was it when you were last in Microsoft's employ?