I do trust the very sophisticated checks and cross-checks that are built into the banking industry that would prevent any systematic corruption of ATM machines. So I'm comfortable using them, and I do so a few times each month.
Voting machines are just a pretty face. There are none of the kinds of checks and cross-checks behind them that make the banking industry work. Companies like Premier (aka Diebold) have shown deliberate resistance to incorporating any of those kinds of mechanisms into their pretty face machines. You've even got a CEO of one of these companies promising in public that he would deliver a favorable vote to one candidate from one of the states using his machines.
I'm having trouble remembering the last time I saw a lead Microsoft developer:
* Give a presentation featuring a "Fuck You" slide,
* Get indicted for killing his wife,
* Call his rivals idiots,
At Microsoft, it is the CEO who says "fuck you".
At Microsoft, it is the CEO who threatens to murder people. Possibly his claim that he has done so before is true... there was an odd death by ingestion of antifreeze which has not been satisfactorily investigated.
At Microsoft, only the CEO and his designated marketdroids are allowed to use such language in public.
So. Yeah. At the lead developer level, Microsoft might be reasonably civilized. That behavior does not extend up the ladder. So Microsoft might possibly be cured of its problems without affecting its software expertise with a simple headectomy.
Parent post makes some good points, and brought this discussion into focus for me.
Corporate investments in Outlook and Exchange Server are now coming to the fore as the best reasons for big customers to stay with Microsoft products. That is not due to a change in Microsoft strategy. It is because the MS Office team has shot itself in the foot with the OOXML debacle. And the Vista team has struck out with its dismal failure to address business needs. The Outlook/Exchange Server is Microsoft's last remaining heavy hitter in this game. Since the only current reason for the big customers to stay in the Microsoft cattle chutes are its clear and obvious lead in collaborative software like Exchange Server and Outlook, then that needs to be marketed right now, despite the risks.
And there are risks. Google has started offering a collaborative suite at the low, low price of $50 per seat per year. Coupled with the other obvious advantages of not having to pay your own IT staff double time to come in on Sunday to bring the Exchange Server back on line after its umpteenth crash of the year, and not having to worry about whether the backup tapes are riding around town in some intern's stationwagon, Google's offer has a certain allure. Meanwhile, FOSS efforts at developing collaborative tools are continuing to get closer to target. And of course IBM has a product that has been working well enough for some businesses for years, and would definitely survive a migration to Linux if Kubuntu turns out to be the way to upgrade all the WinXP boxes...
Microsoft and Gates are in a tricky place. In trying to divert attention from office suites and operating systems to collaborative software, Bill is playing to one of the few remaining Microsoft strengths. But even that strength is under credible assaults. If corporations follow his lead here, and turn their attention toward Outlook, Exchange, and so on, they just might look a little beyond Bill's spotlight and see things they like from Google, IBM, or maybe some nascent FOSS project.
OTOH, his behavior is consistent with having first decided to close the source, and then coming up with this as an acceptable excuse to lay out before his user base.
Perhaps the people at his day job, at Microsoft, have offered to buy his copyright. There would be a need to close the source in a way that would not offend potential purchasers of any Microsoft product that would be marketed as a follow-on to the users of his original work.
Either the author of TFA is incredibly naive about the software community, or he is attempting to do something clever in the way of marketdroid spin. I doubt very much that he could have gained sufficient experience to write a major piece of software without losing his naivety along the way. OTOH, he works in an environment that values cleverness in exploiting markets and marks above honesty, ethics, or legalities.
The original definition of a firewall was a sacrificial physical computer sitting between the outside world and the corporate jewels.
The antimalware industry would like to convince its market that software which configures a user machine in a proper and safe manner is indeed a "firewall". This is marketeer hype. Many IT professionals use the word "firewall" in its original sense, before the McAfeeNorton&Trend language distortion. To those IT professionals, a GUI software assistant that closes unneeded ports and monitors for indications of malformed packets is called "GUIcrap".
Well, it should be called that.
Caveat: I have been a customer of Trend Micro for around 10 years and I am very happy to have their GUIcrap on my computers. The only thing I'm not happy about is them calling it a "firewall", because it ain't that.
A Vista is what you get to look at after you spend a lot of time and effort climbing a steep mountain. It doesn't let you go out into the pretty landscape that you see before you— to do that you need to come down off the mountain and mingle with the crowds on the roads. But it sure is pretty, and if you can afford the time and the effort, the memories will be worth the side trip.
And if you are a company rolling in billions of dollars of profit, you might think that you can afford to take all your employees along for the ride.
But if you are a regular company that has to worry about things like making the right business decisions today so you can meet next year's payroll expenses, then taking your employees on a sightseeing trip into the mountains probably isn't such a good idea. If you don't have $billions to burn on pursuing the vision thing, then maybe you just shouldn't go there.
Looks like Dvorak managed to sucker at least one slashdot reader with his drivel.
OLPC is a contribution of know-how by people who have know-how, many of whom are also donating cash to traditional charities. OLPC does not exclude other charities; it supplements them. It does nothing for those in the deepest poverty: it is not intended to. It will help those who could otherwise expect to earn $100/mo at most during their productive years to find ways to earn, and contribute in turn, much more than that. Like maybe $12,000 per year. Or maybe even more! It really is amazing how much better life can be with a high school education.
OLPC will not cure AIDS or end world hunger. There are organizations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that are well positioned to take on those challenges.
Oh wait... B&MGF only donates 5% of its previous year's assets to charity (while its return on investments runs between 8% and 15% depending on how good things were). So I guess we need to wait until Bill shuffles off this mortal coil before his $billions$ will really have much impact on things... at the moment, the main thing B&MGF is doing is making itself bigger and bigger in a tax avoidance way.
Oh, wait again! B&MGF could use the tremendous power of its investment arm to shape the world into a better place! Oh, but they've decided not to do that, it would be too confusing. In fact to keep things simple, those who are in charge of giving away that 5% per year are completely firewalled from those in charge of assuring that the yearly return on investment will be around 10% on the average. No need for the do-gooders who fund chidren's clinics in Nigeria to be bothered by knowing that B&MGF owns 40% of the refineries that spew the pollution that causes the killing "cough".
</rant>
If it affects mean wave height, it will affect the self-cleaning mechanisms of tide pools and the edges of estuaries. That in turn will affect the levels of micronutrients these critical marginal ecosystems feed to the larger ocean ecosystems just off their shores.
Us lay people really don't know what goes on with this. The last book that gave the body politic any insight into these processes was The Sea Around Us, published in 1951 by Rachel Carson, a marine biologist. Fifty-six years later, it is still in print, and worth reading.
But when the same author published The Silent Spring in 1962, she simultaneously launched the ecology movement and destroyed her career as a popular science writer (she was tarred with hot, broad brushes from Monsanto, Dow Chemical, and the entire "better living through chemistry"— "DDT in your mama's breast milk is a Good Thing" industry). Serious students of marine biology, ecology, and related disciplines are told of the hell she was put through, that continued until her death from cancer when she was 57 years old. The message given to everyone who has trained in this field is don't say anything in public that could disturb the giants of industry, because they can and will crush you. The books that you would expect to have been published as follow-ons to Carson's works— books by marine biologists and other experts to make their findings available to lay persons within a global context— have not been written.
The world is changing. Try to keep up. that was not an ad hominem attack. I had already won the argument by demonstrating that the facts did not support the assertions OP built his logic upon.
My words were merely a gratuitous insult. And that is an affront to civility, not a matter of logic.
Kids today. You can't even insult them without them getting it all wrong.
The OLPC with its native mesh networking and internet connectivity will put libraries in the hands of many students for less than it would cost to buy, ship, and store the hardcopy books they would otherwise need for a good K-12 education. Looked at only as a method of distributing traditional written materials, the OLPC is a fantastically good idea.
Additionally, OLPC provides any high school student with access to the expanding world of OpenCourseWare (OCW). The complete curricular materials for about 1,800 MIT undergraduate courses are now available as OCW. Carnegie-Mellon, John Hopkins, and an increasing number of other post high school facilities are adding to the OCW libraries, as well.
The OLPC is not only ruggedized, it has been designed so that field maintenance can be done by persons with no special training or tools. Some will break, obviously. They can be cannabilized to keep others functioning.
OK so why is this good but the Microsoft format is bad?
Let me count the ways that PDF succeeds:
Over two dozen pdf readers and editors available
Full support on numerous different platforms
Full support from multiple vendors
Complete documentation
Reasonably concise documentation
Clear documentation
Free of proprietary constraints
And probably a number of other reasons, but this short list should suffice.
If OOXML met these criteria, it would stand a fair chance of becoming an accepted standard, too. But Microsoft does not seem to think that meeting these criteria are in its best interests, presumably because that would mean that people could use OOXML without buying licenses to Microsoft products. Microsoft isn't thinking clearly at this time; it is confusing some of the fantasy aspects of its "vision" with the evolving realities of the market it is trying to sell product to.
We are back to the original problem, which is that the underlying technology for web pages is that of a scrolling page. Yes, you can break that, and sometimes for good effect, but do please recognize that when you force a web page to act like a sheet of paper or a tv screen, you are breaking with the protocols on which it is built.
The remainder of parent post is based on the same premise that the web doesn't work right because it doesn't do what the graphics designer / software architect wants it to do. Well, when you want the saxophones to sound like violins, there are going to be problems orchestrating a solution.
The web accommodates a lot of abuse. Those who purposefully abuse it should be thankful that they can get away with their sax and violins.
An increasing number of businesses cannot afford to hire IT personnel who have the skills to keep up with the growing risks of data corruption and security problems. I work for a college that teaches a number of IT related courses from Introduction to Spreadsheets to advanced CS stuff, and quite frankly our IT department is stymied by the security issues that USB drives raise. Even if we get that resolved soon, next year will bring some other challenge that we will initially deal with in the same time-honored way: stonewall inquiries by saying that there is no problem here since we are up to date in all our patches; use all the techniques of security through obscurity, including refusals to investigate the logs to see if we've been hit; and pray that Microsoft will give us a patch before someone discovers our ass is bare.
Contracting with Google or some other business that specializes in data management is an immediate good solution for many at risk businesses: the risks of Google screwing them over are a lot less than the risks they are currently facing. Whether it would work for my college is debatable: it would mean that some persons in IT would have to deflate their egos and admit that their personal wizardry is limited. Sometimes colleges have to wait for key retirements before they can advance.
In the long term, hiring Google or a competitor to do a company's databanking will be seen as similar to hiring an accounting firm to handle the payroll. For many businesses, it will be a strategy that makes a lot more sense than attempting an in-house solution.
I would like to see more discussion from IT professionals about what clauses should be in a contract with Google for managing proprietary information. What mechanisms (contract clauses) need to be in place to assure that the data is under good protection: in terms of
privacy,
protection from corruption, and
ease of access by authorized persons?
Are there any other categories that should be on this short list? Should the contract specify remedies for certain breaches? How would the client assure that his databank was meeting its contractual obligations? Is there a role here for a third party that has audit and investigative powers?
The banking and accounting industries are regulated by government bodies, and the regulations have been developed from wisdom acquired in over a hundred years of experience. Mostly through reactions to negative experiences: bureaucracies are basically reactionary mechanisms.
Can IT professionals be a bit more forward-looking than bureaucratic regulators, and anticipate problems and develop contract language that would avoid or mitigate them? If so, then maybe the nascent databanking industry can develop without the need for an external regulatory bureaucracy.
Why would anyone want to vertically center an element on a page that is designed to scroll under the control of the user?
What about text readers and other alternative displays: how are these supposed to render a vertically centered chunk of text? And then there are spiders, index builders, and other automatons, none of whom is going to be able to assign semantic values to manipulations of whitespace. But all of these are becoming increasingly important as middlemen between the author and his intended audience. Which is a Good Thing: without Google, Yahoo, et cetera, the web wouldn't be nearly as valuable as it has become.
The web just isn't some newfangled improvement on paper. It is an entirely different medium.
The mechanics of CSS and HTML are not that hard to learn. A high school graduate could gain rudimentary literacy with these in a couple of weekends of study, and most people who hand code with these are proficient in under three months.
Now learning to make good web pages with CSS and HTML is a different story. Developing a good web page is tough. But blaming that on the shortcomings of CSS and HTML is like blaming an inability to write a decent sonnet on the shortcomings of the English language.
Just get over your bad self and learn the medium, and the mechanics of CSS and HTML if you don't know them, and then do what every other artisan has to do, which is to wrestle the damn concepts out of your brain and into your fingers. That's the tough part— for the potter, the blacksmith, or the web designer.
Want to know the surest way to become a miserable web designer? Can you imagine a blacksmith who works out his designs for his wrought iron gates in potters' clay, and then attempts to accurately reproduce that at his forge? So how many "web designers" work up their designs in PhotoShop, and then try to make a web page that looks just the same?
Learn the medium, learn its strengths and weaknesses, and work up the designs from that solid technical base. It will make the spiders happy and bring beaucoup traffic to those web pages.
Off with you then, and let the engineers, analysts, and programmers do what they need to do to make things better. This stuff of protocols, consistent fail-over behaviors, and so on is all very much closer to the ground than the stratospheric heights where you belong.
Be comforted in knowing that those on your team who can handcode HTML and CSS will soon benefit from the work that is going on today. But how long this will take to bubble up to the stratosphere is difficult to say, for it will depend on how quickly the maintainers of the WYSIWYG wonders like DreamWeaver and FrontPage will start to put some minimal intelligence into their products. I'm not going to hold my breath. I realized about a dozen years ago that the WYSIWYG wonders have an inexhaustible supply of customers who don't know how to look at source, and don't care. There is no incentive to do these packages right.
Uh, one last thing. This particular discussion is totally about the technology, and not at all about the content. I don't understand how it could seem otherwise. Perhaps looking down through a thermal inversion causes a mirage?? I'm no software architect, I don't live among the clouds, so I'm really guessing on this one.
I am a programmer/analyst with over a decade of experience with development and maintenance of big text web sites: online hospital procedure manuals of several thousand pages in constant revision, etc. From the ground level, the ideas for HTML 5 look pretty solid.
CSS is junk and should be replaced with something that is actually useful to graphic designers.
This identifies a major source of the problems surrounding growing the web: we've got self-identified graphic designers who think that they know how to build the protocols. It is a situation similar to painter telling chemists how they should formulate the pigments.
Certainly input from graphics designers is appropriate, but beyond a certain point, it is just adding unnecessarily to the noise level.
CSS and HTML, when done by hand can be a wonderful thing: css Zen Garden shows what was possible several years ago, and it has only gotten better since then. Granted that WYSIWYG web page editors like DreamWeaver and FrontPage churn out crappy tag soups, but that is a problem with those software packages, not with the underlying protocols.
Geeze, be easy on the guy. His innate inability to comprehend TFA is going to cause him to stop reading altogether. So have a little compassion for those who are not as well endowed as you.
</sarcasm>
To ingest the powerful spirits living in the chips and become one with them.
Well, that's silly.
The True, Right, and Only Way to bring the spirits you seek into your corporeal body is to zap the chips on the board, and inhale the magic smoke.
(For those too young to have the memories, it was demonstrated in the days of Apple ][ and Trash-80 that the magic was in the smoke, for Lo, it was clear to everyone that once you let the magic smoke out of the chip, the computer no longer worked.)
I'm thinking of using it to counterbalance what I feel is an overemphasis on Myers-Briggs categorizations that are being used in some of the classes I work with. (I supply "back office" support to an adult education program that changes individuals from welfare recipients to taxpayers).
I also like most of what I see in the slashdot comments. Though it does seem to me that several have missed the point: it isn't about spending quality time with the kids; it is about setting up a situations where they might learn how to learn.
what he [Bill Gates] is doing through his foundation is saving more lives than can be counted
When the Bill And Melinda Gates Foundation starts making yearly charitable contributions in excess of the minimum amount needed to preserve the tax exemptions accorded to charities, let me know. I have looked over the financial statements. B&MGF is no more charitable than it needs to be. Its primary goal is pretty obvious: retain control of as much money as possible and use the power of its portfolio to make more and more money.
As to saving lives, B&MGF is deliberately set up so that those in charge of determining where the largess will go have no influence at all on determining how the investments are made. So you end up with curious situations where B&MGF is providing assistance to pediatric clinics that are downwind from industrial sources of pollution that B&MGF have major investments in, and which are causing severe childhood respiratory diseases. An early article documenting this is from the LA Times on 7 Jan 2007: Dark cloud over good works of Gates Foundation. Others have picked up the story and done their own investigations; there is now quite a pile of literature documenting what in terms of cold hard cash is the biggest hipocrisy the world has ever seen.
This man is not a good man. He is not an honest man. He is only a very clever man, with some very clever disguises to mask his incredible greed.
Gotcha, But wouldn't after a period of time, would we be both be beyond a point where it wouldn't/shouldn't matter?
Yes, you are right, in the sense that the process of assimilation always takes time. However the invasive European cultures have only been on Turtle Island for about half a millennium and it will take longer than that for those foreign cultures to be adjusted to fit this land. In the meantime, those who grow up in cultures that are so well suited to this land that we cannot say whether they've been here 10 millennia or 40 millennia are correct in being suspicious about the newcomer's ideas and ways. Until the totems of this land have molded the newcomer's language and world view into something more in tune with the way things need to be on these continents, those who learn European languages as they grow up are learning a world view that is detrimental to the sacred land, to the native peoples and their ways, and, well, that's sufficient to make my point.
Study the writings of those who have been attempting to develop English expressions for key concepts of the Native American world view, and you may find that you are more accepted by those who have grown up thinking in terms of being in balance with the world, living a life that is a constant walk in beauty, and so forth.
Of course to some extent this will conflict with the "American Dream" of getting ahead by successfully beating others, and winning the game by having the most toys of anybody when you die.
So make your choice about how you want to live, because you look like you are on a lake with one foot in each of two canoes. You need to go fully in one or the other, because your wishes are not going to turn those two canoes into one big enough to hold everybody. Until you recognize that and make your choice, you aren't going anywhere and frankly you look kind of silly standing in two canoes out on the great big lake...
And don't bitch when some people show you they don't much like the choice you have made (because no matter which way you go, some people won't like it). Well, okay, bitch about it if you want to. But the bitching also makes you look silly, and sort of incompetent, as if you are reaching for reality, but not quite grasping hold of it.
So why is it that we can't seem to get anything done with that level of efficiency again?
Short answer: we goofed. Longer answer: we not only goofed, but we munged it after the initial goof (MUNG being used here as the recursive acronym for Mung Until No Good).
The USA thought it could build a reusable space vehicle that would be mounted on a reusable first stage, and that a small fleet of these would be able to deliver enough tonnage to LEO quickly enough that further lunar missions could be launched from there, as well as doing just all sorts of other neat stuff, like maybe brokering Pax Americana. The technical difficulties were seriously underestimated, while the technical proficiency that could be brought to bear on the problems was seriously overestimated. For instance, the original vision for the Space Shuttle included a manned, winged first stage vehicle, and a "space tug" that could retrieve unmanned cargo vessels, and possibly tend to satellites in near neighbor orbits. You don't hear about those parts of the original plan now.
By the time the plans were scaled down to what was technically, fiscally, and politically possible, the USA was fully committed through contracts and bureaucratic ladder-climbing to continue with the Shuttle, even though it was known that it would be more efficient to go back to throw-away rockets and Apollo-like personnel capsules. In this kind of situation, you have to wait until bureaucrats whose careers were advanced by decisions to go ahead with the program to either retire or get promoted so high up the ladder that their youthful indiscretions with the Shuttle boosters would no longer be noticed.
IMO, the USA is 5 to 10 years away from starting to make any serious changes in its space capabilities. It will take that long to clear out the remaining bureaucratic deadwood. Then we are likely to go from having no effective manned space exploration vehicles (our current situation) to having a lunar base in 2 to 4 years. Like in so many other things, mastering the technology isn't really the problem; the problem is usually managing the bureaucracy.
--
Administratium: it really isn't just for joking about anymore...
Slashdot Mirror
Ah. The "what's mine is mine, and what's yours is negotiable" approach to life. Yeah.
I don't trust ATM machines.
I do trust the very sophisticated checks and cross-checks that are built into the banking industry that would prevent any systematic corruption of ATM machines. So I'm comfortable using them, and I do so a few times each month.
Voting machines are just a pretty face. There are none of the kinds of checks and cross-checks behind them that make the banking industry work. Companies like Premier (aka Diebold) have shown deliberate resistance to incorporating any of those kinds of mechanisms into their pretty face machines. You've even got a CEO of one of these companies promising in public that he would deliver a favorable vote to one candidate from one of the states using his machines.
* Give a presentation featuring a "Fuck You" slide,
* Get indicted for killing his wife,
* Call his rivals idiots,
So. Yeah. At the lead developer level, Microsoft might be reasonably civilized. That behavior does not extend up the ladder. So Microsoft might possibly be cured of its problems without affecting its software expertise with a simple headectomy.
Parent post makes some good points, and brought this discussion into focus for me.
Corporate investments in Outlook and Exchange Server are now coming to the fore as the best reasons for big customers to stay with Microsoft products. That is not due to a change in Microsoft strategy. It is because the MS Office team has shot itself in the foot with the OOXML debacle. And the Vista team has struck out with its dismal failure to address business needs. The Outlook/Exchange Server is Microsoft's last remaining heavy hitter in this game. Since the only current reason for the big customers to stay in the Microsoft cattle chutes are its clear and obvious lead in collaborative software like Exchange Server and Outlook, then that needs to be marketed right now, despite the risks.
And there are risks. Google has started offering a collaborative suite at the low, low price of $50 per seat per year. Coupled with the other obvious advantages of not having to pay your own IT staff double time to come in on Sunday to bring the Exchange Server back on line after its umpteenth crash of the year, and not having to worry about whether the backup tapes are riding around town in some intern's stationwagon, Google's offer has a certain allure. Meanwhile, FOSS efforts at developing collaborative tools are continuing to get closer to target. And of course IBM has a product that has been working well enough for some businesses for years, and would definitely survive a migration to Linux if Kubuntu turns out to be the way to upgrade all the WinXP boxes...
Microsoft and Gates are in a tricky place. In trying to divert attention from office suites and operating systems to collaborative software, Bill is playing to one of the few remaining Microsoft strengths. But even that strength is under credible assaults. If corporations follow his lead here, and turn their attention toward Outlook, Exchange, and so on, they just might look a little beyond Bill's spotlight and see things they like from Google, IBM, or maybe some nascent FOSS project.
OTOH, his behavior is consistent with having first decided to close the source, and then coming up with this as an acceptable excuse to lay out before his user base.
Perhaps the people at his day job, at Microsoft, have offered to buy his copyright. There would be a need to close the source in a way that would not offend potential purchasers of any Microsoft product that would be marketed as a follow-on to the users of his original work.
Either the author of TFA is incredibly naive about the software community, or he is attempting to do something clever in the way of marketdroid spin. I doubt very much that he could have gained sufficient experience to write a major piece of software without losing his naivety along the way. OTOH, he works in an environment that values cleverness in exploiting markets and marks above honesty, ethics, or legalities.
Just saying.
The original definition of a firewall was a sacrificial physical computer sitting between the outside world and the corporate jewels.
The antimalware industry would like to convince its market that software which configures a user machine in a proper and safe manner is indeed a "firewall". This is marketeer hype. Many IT professionals use the word "firewall" in its original sense, before the McAfeeNorton&Trend language distortion. To those IT professionals, a GUI software assistant that closes unneeded ports and monitors for indications of malformed packets is called "GUIcrap".
Well, it should be called that.
Caveat: I have been a customer of Trend Micro for around 10 years and I am very happy to have their GUIcrap on my computers. The only thing I'm not happy about is them calling it a "firewall", because it ain't that.
I've been thinking about what a "vista" is.
A Vista is what you get to look at after you spend a lot of time and effort climbing a steep mountain. It doesn't let you go out into the pretty landscape that you see before you— to do that you need to come down off the mountain and mingle with the crowds on the roads. But it sure is pretty, and if you can afford the time and the effort, the memories will be worth the side trip.
And if you are a company rolling in billions of dollars of profit, you might think that you can afford to take all your employees along for the ride.
But if you are a regular company that has to worry about things like making the right business decisions today so you can meet next year's payroll expenses, then taking your employees on a sightseeing trip into the mountains probably isn't such a good idea. If you don't have $billions to burn on pursuing the vision thing, then maybe you just shouldn't go there.
Hey, Steve, is that you?
Oh, take it easy with the chairs, man! We're going to have watch expenses now, you know.
Looks like Dvorak managed to sucker at least one slashdot reader with his drivel.
OLPC is a contribution of know-how by people who have know-how, many of whom are also donating cash to traditional charities. OLPC does not exclude other charities; it supplements them. It does nothing for those in the deepest poverty: it is not intended to. It will help those who could otherwise expect to earn $100/mo at most during their productive years to find ways to earn, and contribute in turn, much more than that. Like maybe $12,000 per year. Or maybe even more! It really is amazing how much better life can be with a high school education.
OLPC will not cure AIDS or end world hunger. There are organizations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that are well positioned to take on those challenges.
Oh wait... B&MGF only donates 5% of its previous year's assets to charity (while its return on investments runs between 8% and 15% depending on how good things were). So I guess we need to wait until Bill shuffles off this mortal coil before his $billions$ will really have much impact on things... at the moment, the main thing B&MGF is doing is making itself bigger and bigger in a tax avoidance way.
Oh, wait again! B&MGF could use the tremendous power of its investment arm to shape the world into a better place! Oh, but they've decided not to do that, it would be too confusing. In fact to keep things simple, those who are in charge of giving away that 5% per year are completely firewalled from those in charge of assuring that the yearly return on investment will be around 10% on the average. No need for the do-gooders who fund chidren's clinics in Nigeria to be bothered by knowing that B&MGF owns 40% of the refineries that spew the pollution that causes the killing "cough".
</rant>
If it affects mean wave height, it will affect the self-cleaning mechanisms of tide pools and the edges of estuaries. That in turn will affect the levels of micronutrients these critical marginal ecosystems feed to the larger ocean ecosystems just off their shores.
Us lay people really don't know what goes on with this. The last book that gave the body politic any insight into these processes was The Sea Around Us, published in 1951 by Rachel Carson, a marine biologist. Fifty-six years later, it is still in print, and worth reading.
But when the same author published The Silent Spring in 1962, she simultaneously launched the ecology movement and destroyed her career as a popular science writer (she was tarred with hot, broad brushes from Monsanto, Dow Chemical, and the entire "better living through chemistry"— "DDT in your mama's breast milk is a Good Thing" industry). Serious students of marine biology, ecology, and related disciplines are told of the hell she was put through, that continued until her death from cancer when she was 57 years old. The message given to everyone who has trained in this field is don't say anything in public that could disturb the giants of industry, because they can and will crush you. The books that you would expect to have been published as follow-ons to Carson's works— books by marine biologists and other experts to make their findings available to lay persons within a global context— have not been written.
When I wrote
The world is changing. Try to keep up. that was not an ad hominem attack. I had already won the argument by demonstrating that the facts did not support the assertions OP built his logic upon.My words were merely a gratuitous insult. And that is an affront to civility, not a matter of logic.
Kids today. You can't even insult them without them getting it all wrong.
Hey! Get off my lawn!
The OLPC with its native mesh networking and internet connectivity will put libraries in the hands of many students for less than it would cost to buy, ship, and store the hardcopy books they would otherwise need for a good K-12 education. Looked at only as a method of distributing traditional written materials, the OLPC is a fantastically good idea.
Additionally, OLPC provides any high school student with access to the expanding world of OpenCourseWare (OCW). The complete curricular materials for about 1,800 MIT undergraduate courses are now available as OCW. Carnegie-Mellon, John Hopkins, and an increasing number of other post high school facilities are adding to the OCW libraries, as well.
The OLPC is not only ruggedized, it has been designed so that field maintenance can be done by persons with no special training or tools. Some will break, obviously. They can be cannabilized to keep others functioning.
The world is changing. Try to keep up.
A Good Thing the which of that might be.
There. Fixed for you did I.
The Forth with you, maybe. The Farce with you, for sure.
Let me count the ways that PDF succeeds:
If OOXML met these criteria, it would stand a fair chance of becoming an accepted standard, too. But Microsoft does not seem to think that meeting these criteria are in its best interests, presumably because that would mean that people could use OOXML without buying licenses to Microsoft products. Microsoft isn't thinking clearly at this time; it is confusing some of the fantasy aspects of its "vision" with the evolving realities of the market it is trying to sell product to.
We are back to the original problem, which is that the underlying technology for web pages is that of a scrolling page. Yes, you can break that, and sometimes for good effect, but do please recognize that when you force a web page to act like a sheet of paper or a tv screen, you are breaking with the protocols on which it is built.
The remainder of parent post is based on the same premise that the web doesn't work right because it doesn't do what the graphics designer / software architect wants it to do. Well, when you want the saxophones to sound like violins, there are going to be problems orchestrating a solution.
The web accommodates a lot of abuse. Those who purposefully abuse it should be thankful that they can get away with their sax and violins.
Mod parent up.
An increasing number of businesses cannot afford to hire IT personnel who have the skills to keep up with the growing risks of data corruption and security problems. I work for a college that teaches a number of IT related courses from Introduction to Spreadsheets to advanced CS stuff, and quite frankly our IT department is stymied by the security issues that USB drives raise. Even if we get that resolved soon, next year will bring some other challenge that we will initially deal with in the same time-honored way: stonewall inquiries by saying that there is no problem here since we are up to date in all our patches; use all the techniques of security through obscurity, including refusals to investigate the logs to see if we've been hit; and pray that Microsoft will give us a patch before someone discovers our ass is bare.
Contracting with Google or some other business that specializes in data management is an immediate good solution for many at risk businesses: the risks of Google screwing them over are a lot less than the risks they are currently facing. Whether it would work for my college is debatable: it would mean that some persons in IT would have to deflate their egos and admit that their personal wizardry is limited. Sometimes colleges have to wait for key retirements before they can advance.
In the long term, hiring Google or a competitor to do a company's databanking will be seen as similar to hiring an accounting firm to handle the payroll. For many businesses, it will be a strategy that makes a lot more sense than attempting an in-house solution.
I would like to see more discussion from IT professionals about what clauses should be in a contract with Google for managing proprietary information. What mechanisms (contract clauses) need to be in place to assure that the data is under good protection: in terms of
Are there any other categories that should be on this short list? Should the contract specify remedies for certain breaches? How would the client assure that his databank was meeting its contractual obligations? Is there a role here for a third party that has audit and investigative powers?
The banking and accounting industries are regulated by government bodies, and the regulations have been developed from wisdom acquired in over a hundred years of experience. Mostly through reactions to negative experiences: bureaucracies are basically reactionary mechanisms.
Can IT professionals be a bit more forward-looking than bureaucratic regulators, and anticipate problems and develop contract language that would avoid or mitigate them? If so, then maybe the nascent databanking industry can develop without the need for an external regulatory bureaucracy.
Why would anyone want to vertically center an element on a page that is designed to scroll under the control of the user?
What about text readers and other alternative displays: how are these supposed to render a vertically centered chunk of text? And then there are spiders, index builders, and other automatons, none of whom is going to be able to assign semantic values to manipulations of whitespace. But all of these are becoming increasingly important as middlemen between the author and his intended audience. Which is a Good Thing: without Google, Yahoo, et cetera, the web wouldn't be nearly as valuable as it has become.
The web just isn't some newfangled improvement on paper. It is an entirely different medium.
The mechanics of CSS and HTML are not that hard to learn. A high school graduate could gain rudimentary literacy with these in a couple of weekends of study, and most people who hand code with these are proficient in under three months.
Now learning to make good web pages with CSS and HTML is a different story. Developing a good web page is tough. But blaming that on the shortcomings of CSS and HTML is like blaming an inability to write a decent sonnet on the shortcomings of the English language.
Just get over your bad self and learn the medium, and the mechanics of CSS and HTML if you don't know them, and then do what every other artisan has to do, which is to wrestle the damn concepts out of your brain and into your fingers. That's the tough part— for the potter, the blacksmith, or the web designer.
Want to know the surest way to become a miserable web designer? Can you imagine a blacksmith who works out his designs for his wrought iron gates in potters' clay, and then attempts to accurately reproduce that at his forge? So how many "web designers" work up their designs in PhotoShop, and then try to make a web page that looks just the same?
Learn the medium, learn its strengths and weaknesses, and work up the designs from that solid technical base. It will make the spiders happy and bring beaucoup traffic to those web pages.
Oh.
I see.
Off with you then, and let the engineers, analysts, and programmers do what they need to do to make things better. This stuff of protocols, consistent fail-over behaviors, and so on is all very much closer to the ground than the stratospheric heights where you belong.
Be comforted in knowing that those on your team who can handcode HTML and CSS will soon benefit from the work that is going on today. But how long this will take to bubble up to the stratosphere is difficult to say, for it will depend on how quickly the maintainers of the WYSIWYG wonders like DreamWeaver and FrontPage will start to put some minimal intelligence into their products. I'm not going to hold my breath. I realized about a dozen years ago that the WYSIWYG wonders have an inexhaustible supply of customers who don't know how to look at source, and don't care. There is no incentive to do these packages right.
Uh, one last thing. This particular discussion is totally about the technology, and not at all about the content. I don't understand how it could seem otherwise. Perhaps looking down through a thermal inversion causes a mirage?? I'm no software architect, I don't live among the clouds, so I'm really guessing on this one.
I am a programmer/analyst with over a decade of experience with development and maintenance of big text web sites: online hospital procedure manuals of several thousand pages in constant revision, etc. From the ground level, the ideas for HTML 5 look pretty solid.
This identifies a major source of the problems surrounding growing the web: we've got self-identified graphic designers who think that they know how to build the protocols. It is a situation similar to painter telling chemists how they should formulate the pigments.
Certainly input from graphics designers is appropriate, but beyond a certain point, it is just adding unnecessarily to the noise level.
CSS and HTML, when done by hand can be a wonderful thing: css Zen Garden shows what was possible several years ago, and it has only gotten better since then. Granted that WYSIWYG web page editors like DreamWeaver and FrontPage churn out crappy tag soups, but that is a problem with those software packages, not with the underlying protocols.
Geeze, be easy on the guy. His innate inability to comprehend TFA is going to cause him to stop reading altogether. So have a little compassion for those who are not as well endowed as you. </sarcasm>
Well, that's silly.
The True, Right, and Only Way to bring the spirits you seek into your corporeal body is to zap the chips on the board, and inhale the magic smoke.
(For those too young to have the memories, it was demonstrated in the days of Apple ][ and Trash-80 that the magic was in the smoke, for Lo, it was clear to everyone that once you let the magic smoke out of the chip, the computer no longer worked.)
I liked the article.
I'm thinking of using it to counterbalance what I feel is an overemphasis on Myers-Briggs categorizations that are being used in some of the classes I work with. (I supply "back office" support to an adult education program that changes individuals from welfare recipients to taxpayers).
I also like most of what I see in the slashdot comments. Though it does seem to me that several have missed the point: it isn't about spending quality time with the kids; it is about setting up a situations where they might learn how to learn.
When the Bill And Melinda Gates Foundation starts making yearly charitable contributions in excess of the minimum amount needed to preserve the tax exemptions accorded to charities, let me know. I have looked over the financial statements. B&MGF is no more charitable than it needs to be. Its primary goal is pretty obvious: retain control of as much money as possible and use the power of its portfolio to make more and more money.
As to saving lives, B&MGF is deliberately set up so that those in charge of determining where the largess will go have no influence at all on determining how the investments are made. So you end up with curious situations where B&MGF is providing assistance to pediatric clinics that are downwind from industrial sources of pollution that B&MGF have major investments in, and which are causing severe childhood respiratory diseases. An early article documenting this is from the LA Times on 7 Jan 2007: Dark cloud over good works of Gates Foundation. Others have picked up the story and done their own investigations; there is now quite a pile of literature documenting what in terms of cold hard cash is the biggest hipocrisy the world has ever seen.
This man is not a good man. He is not an honest man. He is only a very clever man, with some very clever disguises to mask his incredible greed.
Yes, you are right, in the sense that the process of assimilation always takes time. However the invasive European cultures have only been on Turtle Island for about half a millennium and it will take longer than that for those foreign cultures to be adjusted to fit this land. In the meantime, those who grow up in cultures that are so well suited to this land that we cannot say whether they've been here 10 millennia or 40 millennia are correct in being suspicious about the newcomer's ideas and ways. Until the totems of this land have molded the newcomer's language and world view into something more in tune with the way things need to be on these continents, those who learn European languages as they grow up are learning a world view that is detrimental to the sacred land, to the native peoples and their ways, and, well, that's sufficient to make my point.
Study the writings of those who have been attempting to develop English expressions for key concepts of the Native American world view, and you may find that you are more accepted by those who have grown up thinking in terms of being in balance with the world, living a life that is a constant walk in beauty, and so forth.
Of course to some extent this will conflict with the "American Dream" of getting ahead by successfully beating others, and winning the game by having the most toys of anybody when you die.
So make your choice about how you want to live, because you look like you are on a lake with one foot in each of two canoes. You need to go fully in one or the other, because your wishes are not going to turn those two canoes into one big enough to hold everybody. Until you recognize that and make your choice, you aren't going anywhere and frankly you look kind of silly standing in two canoes out on the great big lake...
And don't bitch when some people show you they don't much like the choice you have made (because no matter which way you go, some people won't like it). Well, okay, bitch about it if you want to. But the bitching also makes you look silly, and sort of incompetent, as if you are reaching for reality, but not quite grasping hold of it.
Short answer: we goofed. Longer answer: we not only goofed, but we munged it after the initial goof (MUNG being used here as the recursive acronym for Mung Until No Good).
The USA thought it could build a reusable space vehicle that would be mounted on a reusable first stage, and that a small fleet of these would be able to deliver enough tonnage to LEO quickly enough that further lunar missions could be launched from there, as well as doing just all sorts of other neat stuff, like maybe brokering Pax Americana. The technical difficulties were seriously underestimated, while the technical proficiency that could be brought to bear on the problems was seriously overestimated. For instance, the original vision for the Space Shuttle included a manned, winged first stage vehicle, and a "space tug" that could retrieve unmanned cargo vessels, and possibly tend to satellites in near neighbor orbits. You don't hear about those parts of the original plan now.
By the time the plans were scaled down to what was technically, fiscally, and politically possible, the USA was fully committed through contracts and bureaucratic ladder-climbing to continue with the Shuttle, even though it was known that it would be more efficient to go back to throw-away rockets and Apollo-like personnel capsules. In this kind of situation, you have to wait until bureaucrats whose careers were advanced by decisions to go ahead with the program to either retire or get promoted so high up the ladder that their youthful indiscretions with the Shuttle boosters would no longer be noticed.
IMO, the USA is 5 to 10 years away from starting to make any serious changes in its space capabilities. It will take that long to clear out the remaining bureaucratic deadwood. Then we are likely to go from having no effective manned space exploration vehicles (our current situation) to having a lunar base in 2 to 4 years. Like in so many other things, mastering the technology isn't really the problem; the problem is usually managing the bureaucracy.
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Administratium: it really isn't just for joking about anymore...