Of course SCO doesn't have control over anyone, well maybe they have control over the workload of a few dozen lawyers, but that's about it.
Just because they state that other UNIXes are derivaties of System V doesn't mean that they are in a position to profit from it. Sure, the way they present it makes it look like they could profit, but that's just corporate spin to make the best out a bad situation.
SCO's just hoping that nobody notices that all of the UNIXes are permitted derivatives of System IV / V code. As long as they concentrate on the "derivative" part, and don't bring attention to the "permitted" part, they might be able to fool a few more people for a little longer.
The permission to make HP-UX and Solaris was final decades ago. All money that was ever going to change hands, changed hands back then. SCO's just trying to twist reality into looking like they might have another multi-million dollar jackpot lawsuit in the pipeline. Unfortunately, they'll have to disregard their own (assuming they have any connection to System V code) agreements to persue this fictional windfall.
Technically both HP-UX and Solaris are derivatives of code that SCO somewhat controls. The thing to remember is that they are LICENSED derivatives, which have paid thier royalties and have permission to call themselves UNIXes.
They're probably enhanced versions of System V, but they might have done even better than that. System V has been around the block a few times, and there's a lot of room for enhancement. That means that assuming SCO has some claim of ownership of the System V code, all other UNIXes are derivates. Unfortunately, all other UNIXes are licensed derivatives, and those agreements usually were written to be non-revokable.
Remember when SCO declared that they had revoked IBM's license for AIX? Well, IBM pulled the contract and it stated clearly "non-revokable". SCO is going to die, but it will continue to be a long slow death.
DRM has always been copy protection. It's just a nicer set of syllables that don't adgitate nerves as badly as copy protection enforcement.
That's why it's in so many things. Download a song, you could make a copy of it, so you need DRM. Transfer songs from an IPOD to a computer, need DRM. Transfer songs from a computer to a CD, DRM. Copy a file, need DRM in the OS.
It's an interesting idea, that a copy of a song exists as a single entity which should not reproduce. Unfortunately, many aspects of computers require reproduction of data. This sets the two initiatives at odds. I personally don't think it is possible without hardware support (like memory fencing wasn't), but I'm not about to buy hardware that permits me fewer possible options while using my computer. After all, if I'm writing an email to my folks, I don't want to suffer the bother of copyrighting the email, then creating a license for distribution to my folks. A "DRM for everything" solution might require this. A "DRM for some things" solution will just see an eventual migration of the DRM'd material into the non-DRM side of the machine.
Boats are cheaper. Take it out about 10 miles, and you should be in international waters. Sure, there's a risk involved, and pirates are not a thing of the past, but it's been effective as a gabling workaround wherever there's been a port for many, many years.
For ever string function, there's an equivalent that will only perform the operation on the first n bytes. If you're working with a C library that's old and doesn't have such a convienece, you can always wrap it with a call that does.
The real problems come into play when you're using a 3rd party library. You can always police your code, but it's hard to police / fix other's code. Open source libraries are great for this in general, but there's not always an open source solution for connecting to proprietary buses, services, etc.
In the end, solutions that require policing are only as good as policing. Policing is designed to only be effective after some atrocity has been committed, and so policing will likely only be effective after the exploit. A much better solution would prevent use of unbounded string functions by not having them defined. Perhaps there's some compiler magic that could be employed, but I doubt such techniques will gain much traction. It's like asking a guild of master carpenters to switch building materials. Once you know the materials and weaknesses, usually it's better to design around the weaknesses than to change materials.
As a pratical real-world example near me, our school system just replace over a million bricks in a nearby school. The reason was that the new-fangled iodized metal bolts were used (way back when) to bind the bricks to the sub wall. Iodized was new and "hot" and it didn't rust, so the wall should have lasted forever. However, it corrordes when exposed to salt water, and the school was close enough to the sea to be exposed to salt water vapor. The problem was discovered when a worker leaned against a brick wall and it toppeled over.
In the end, education will bring the current coders around, but don't expect the problem to go away. There will be many years of people reading antiquated "how to program" books that teach older, less safe, practices. There will be people reentering the marketplace that will have missed the newer techniques. There will be users installing from the copy of winZip (or whatever) that they downloaded in 2000.
Only with time, and a whole lot of paitence, will this problem die. It won't be fixed, it will decline until it's barely noticable.
I could support your position, in a perfect world.
Advertising in Wikipedia could provide a lot of dollars, and with those dollars comes a few concerns:
1. What safeguards are there going to be when considering how the content clashes with the interests of the advertisers? Many small newspapers cannot finiancially afford to run articles that conflict with their ad base. So if your biggest advertiser is a jewler, you'd be stupid to run an article about DeBeers backed fighting in Africa.
2. What safeguards are there in controlling spending? Most organizations, corporations, governments, and such tend to be regulated by the amount of money they can dispose. If you add a large amount of money into the system, the system's spending grows to accommodate the new money, but usually the service doesn't alter dramatically. I cannot imagine any new feature that I want in Wikipedia, so why throw money at it to make the existing features cost more.
Once an organization depends on a revenue stream, those providing the revenue stream can wield a lot of power. It's not done malicously, but eventually those with the cash will wish that their ads were more visible. They'll wish that their products were not "slandered" in wikipedia even when the product merits unfavoring words. Think of Mattel wanting to soften articles about dangerous toys they've released. Remove a reference, change the wording from "37 killed" to "a few children were injured, and one even died". You haven't outright lied, you're just misleading your audience.
Wikipedia already has had to combat product promotion and ad placement. How will they handle it when they are receiving money from these companies?
I mean, when do you ever hear of a tape-recored language? The processing, storage, and transmission of a language is somewhat independent of the language's grammar.
Sorry, but this is written in an email language. You'll have to render it to a pixel language to display on a CRT, and then illuminate it as a light emitting visual language for eye processing.
There's been no scientific proof that God doesn't exist, nor can science prove such a thing.
Just because certain churches have an axe to grind doesn't mean that Religon and Science are opposed. For some reason, Churches insist on a static universe where things cannot change, and when they make statements that turn out to be incorrect like, "The Earth is at the center of the universe." or "The Sun revolves around the Earth." their policy of a static universe doesn't provide them an avenue of correction.
So, they do what any self-perserving organization does, which is try to discredit the messenger (or better yet, kill him), and they use strong appeals to authority to ignore the real world and preserve the status quo. God didn't come up with the church sponsored ideas of how the world works, so churches don't have to weaken their foundations to accept that the universe changes. It's a self-inflicted wound when churces insist that the world only works one way, because sooner or later, ideas about the Universe will be refined, reorganized, and reworked.
It's not about being apathetic with discovery. Polygraphs are known to discover a lot of information. It has also been proven that none of that information has anything to do with lying. If you answer truthfully, but you ex walks into the room, the needles will jump, and the activity will be read to imply that you lied. For a real lie detector test, the environment shouldn't matter. If the environment matters so much, it's just a test to see if you get nervous, or if you can lie calmly.
I want to see a lie detector test that works while someone is skateboarding. If it detects truth even when people are nervous, then it's a much better design that the mis-labeled "nervousness detector test" which people keep trying to call a "lie detector test".
To a real scientist, "no apparent developmental abnormalities" means that they're hedging their bets. They haven't seen any developmental abnormalities, but as scientists, they know that it is impossible to observe every detail in their lifetime, so they're just saying that they haven't discovered one yet.
A scientist doesn't have a strong interest in not finding things, finding things is what makes a scientist's career successful.
Business sponsored research isn't science. Business sponsored research usually employs people called scientists who then don't use (or misrepresent) the scientific procedure, producing results which were probably dictated before the experiment was started.
A popular misconception is that if a scientist says it, it's science. Science is about the procedure, not the person. If a scientist says he can save 15 minutes to picking up his dry cleaning, it's not science. But if an experiment is performed which accurately measures dry cleaning pickup times, and by changing how dry cleaning is picked up the times decrease by 15 minutes, then that's science.
Remember, appeal to authority only works in authoritarian systems. In law, (authoritarian system) the judge is an authoratative figure, what he says and does has a real impact on the case. In science, a scientist isn't an authoritarian figure. Sure, a scientist may become famous, but that's celebrity. A famous scientist can still be wrong, but the procedure eventually aligns the "model of how things work" with the "world in which things happen".
So trust your science, but don't get it from Newsweek, FOX, CNN, etc. Any findings without a description of the procedure and the control is a fluff piece that might totally misrepresent the discovered facts, the observations, the deductions based from the observations, and the findings of the experiment. The reason U.S. Citizens have such a cynical view of scientists is partially due to sloppy "BIG HEADLINES" reporting that takes the least consequential detail out of context for the biggest impact.
It's not the damage to the "virtual" victim that's considered the side effect, the Milgram experiment never damaged the "victim" virtual or otherwise.
It's the damage to the administrator of the virtual torture that's considered unethical. As long as that person has any common sense, they'll eventually discover that they are torturing the subject, and if they persist, they will be led to beileve that they have killed the subject. This should bring the administrator in conflict with their sense of morals, and the experiment is designed to break the virtues of compassion and human decency in a high-pressure situation.
We have all felt the pains of high pressure sales tactics, imagine the mistakes you could make if you were initially told that the test was harmless, then put under high pressure to continue it, eventually leading to the death (real in your point-of-view) of the subject? That's the Milgram experiment in a nut shell, and it relies on abusing the trust the administrator has in the researcher. The researcher deliberately lies to the administrator to achieve the desired results.
The fact that you're later debriefed won't console you because the experimenter lied to you, so they could lie to you about "it's all fake, after all". It also prevents resolution of the pain, because complaining about the stresses incurred while virtually torturing someone will either ostracize you from peers or be dismissed as non-real stress. If you actually tortured someone you could atone (if you wish to) for your actions by helping those you hurt, seeking forgiveness within your faith, or by deeds. But nobody understands redressing virtual wrongs; there's no avenue for repentance.
As a good Christian (in the best meaning of the phrase) can you condone the treatment of the real subjects, the ones administring the virtual shocks?
There's also other scientific grounds for dismissal. If the researcher deliberately manipulates the administrator to achieve the desired results, then is it science? In other "hard" science fields, manipulation of the experiment with a desire to achieve certain results would be a serious infraction of the scientific process, but in the near-voodoo corners of Psychology, it's considered a technique.
The news is that they've reproduced it. This one isn't nearly as reproducable as it claims to be, and the effect doesn't support what every Psychology student is told; that "You would do the same thing in the same situation." which (fortunately) isn't true according to the less fantastic failures to reproduce the same outcome.
Assume you automate it based off of the output from someone's build command.
How do you know if a file is missing? Consider the list a "checklist" for audit purposes. This might not make so much sense if you're packaging your own sources, but when you package someone else's, if such a protection wasn't in place, you wouldn't know until you had already released a badly built package (assuming you automate the packaging process, like most people do).
We should also make cars out of sponge to reduce the impact consequences, but for some reason that's not what we've determined makes reliable, useable cars.
Like most simple solutions, the cure is considered to be worse than the ill. You might as well suggest eating children to solve the problem of the potato famine.
It's not that everything needs to be complicated, but that you have to pick the lowest level of complexity to completely solve the problem. Distribution building, compiling, packaging, configuration, and software maintenance (not just installation, but removal, upgrade, patching, etc.), are a lot of unsexy tasks that are critical but only noticed when they go horribly wrong. They also become rather complicated problems with each added dimension of complexity.
Yes, I have a Dell 510 too. It was "dontated" for repair, but not worth the repair effort. It's been shipped back to HP and returned twice now. I would never attempt to run Linux on it, it's having a hard enough time running windows properly. For those who don't know, it's a $600 laptop that I've seen marked down to $400 on occasion, and about 20% of them don't seem to work properly from day one. Mine has display issues, the screen seems to light up, but like Ford's model T, "You can have any pixed color you want, as long as it's black."
But don't let that get in the way of a good rant. By all means, please install Windows on your glorified boat anchor and stop wasting our time with "sucks" comments. Then you can yell at MS about how much Windows sucks.
It's close enough to the topic for my tastes.
However, I am confused. Pray tell, how do you update software that's not installed? Even with the new found power of computers, they can't update nothing.
Perhaps you have more software installed than you know.
Typically Micosoft's shared source means that they can share the source code with you, but you can't modify it and redistribute or share it with anyone else. Most of the time it won't compile properly or will fail to operate after compilation due to not knowing what compiler flags to set and / or not having a compiler that will understand and handle any non-standard syntax that's been "injected" into the language.
I don't know if that's the case here, but I wouldn't get my hopes up too much.
Don't try to explain it with 4 or 5 dimensions, because that's far too challenging to imagine, much less to use as a base of an analogy.
Compare it to a cube. People know what cubes are. Say that you're trying to measure a cube, so you take the measurements of every edge of the cube, 12 measurements in all. Then you realize that really there are 3 sets of measurements, containing 4 identical measurements along the height, width, and depth of the cube. Suddenly something that seemed like a 12 dimension object really only seems to have 3 dimensions now. That's roughly how String theory "loses" dimensions over time. The first time I heard of the theory, it needed over a hundred dimensions to work, then around 80, 60, etc. Now I'm wondering if it's under the 12 that my memory told me it either hit, or might hit.
Finally, you could notice that you don't really have 3 measurements, you have one set of three identical measurements (because it's a cube the height, width, and length are all identical) So you only really have one dimension now. Of course, you dimension only applies to the "cube" universe, where everything must be a cube. However, that's the danger of models, they can become disconnected from the constraints of the real world they are modeling.
A perfect example of such a disconnect is the idea of a circular orbit around a moving planet. All planets move, and it's impossible to maintain a stationary circular orbit because the planet will move closer to one side of the circle, increasing the gravitational pull on that side, twisiting the circle into an elliptical shape.
Naturally, I wasn't really thinking about data presentation when I wrote my glib statements. I was talking about layout, and I'm glad we can at least come to some agreement on that use of tables.
But to properly consider your question, I'll counter that tabular data implies that you know more about the format of the data than about the meaning of the data.
So, sure, for tabular data, a table makes sense. However, you'll never get much reuse out of your data, because you'll have to write a non-trivial (but not that hard either) parser it to get it back into a form where the "cells" have some meaning. HTML falls short in this category, but namespaces probably provide a way to have your cake and eat it too. I haven't tried because I find that there's very little information that I need to present as a table these days.
As far as "unholy" CSS hacks, well, that's what CSS is for. Theres nothing unholy (or holy for that matter) about using a stylesheet to present data with style. Certainly, there's room for improvement in rendering tables with CSS, but as your suggestion was to use Excel, I doubt you're really looking to better things.
Come to think of it, there's nothing unholy about using tables as a presentation language, except that we've already established that using tables as a presentation language typically pollutes your markup language with a lot of elements that are only related to presentation style. The rub is that even for tabular data, tables are only a layout style, so it's philosopically the same as CSS. I only wonder why it's more important to describe the layout the information than to describe the information in a reusable way.
Now the tree to table mapping that commonly occurs when sweating the "tableness" of both XML and HTML data forces a cell to bind to either a row more tightly than a column, or a column more tightly than a row. This side effect using a tree to represent a grid forces tables to always favor a column or row search / selection method, and has subtle implications on the performance of real world systems, even if provided with an interface that makes both selection methods seem identical.
Trust me, these issues aren't isolated to tables in web pages. Even in 2 dimensional arrays, you'll get better performance on average if you read the data linearly down its memory addresses, which might be "reading by row" or "reading by column" depending on specifics of compiler choice, language, and whether you're using a cooked example to back your point!:) Note that I say "on average" because there are always trivial tables that will provide identical performance (table of no cells, table of one cell) but when things get big or badly located (table crosses memory page boundary) the speed improvements become noticable.
There's algorithmic fixes to make row and column retrieval equally constant time operations, but they are not nearly as fast as knowing how the data is ordered in a low level and working with it in that direction.
That's the reason that they still put up new websites using HTML 3.2. That's the reason that they still link to print density pictures. That's the reason that they still depend on frames for navigation. That's the reason that they still use font tags. That's the reason that they still use tables.
Sometimes I believe that the only way to see things improve is to wait until all of the dollar-bin how-to HTML books from 1999 decompose. It may have been the best technology available last decade, but "best technology" doesn't remain stable over the years.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course SCO doesn't have control over anyone, well maybe they have control over the workload of a few dozen lawyers, but that's about it.
Just because they state that other UNIXes are derivaties of System V doesn't mean that they are in a position to profit from it. Sure, the way they present it makes it look like they could profit, but that's just corporate spin to make the best out a bad situation.
SCO's just hoping that nobody notices that all of the UNIXes are permitted derivatives of System IV / V code. As long as they concentrate on the "derivative" part, and don't bring attention to the "permitted" part, they might be able to fool a few more people for a little longer.
The permission to make HP-UX and Solaris was final decades ago. All money that was ever going to change hands, changed hands back then. SCO's just trying to twist reality into looking like they might have another multi-million dollar jackpot lawsuit in the pipeline. Unfortunately, they'll have to disregard their own (assuming they have any connection to System V code) agreements to persue this fictional windfall.
Technically both HP-UX and Solaris are derivatives of code that SCO somewhat controls. The thing to remember is that they are LICENSED derivatives, which have paid thier royalties and have permission to call themselves UNIXes.
They're probably enhanced versions of System V, but they might have done even better than that. System V has been around the block a few times, and there's a lot of room for enhancement. That means that assuming SCO has some claim of ownership of the System V code, all other UNIXes are derivates. Unfortunately, all other UNIXes are licensed derivatives, and those agreements usually were written to be non-revokable.
Remember when SCO declared that they had revoked IBM's license for AIX? Well, IBM pulled the contract and it stated clearly "non-revokable". SCO is going to die, but it will continue to be a long slow death.
You bet! It's HP-UXA!
(Stars and Stripes Forver playing in the background...)
They probably wouldn't recogonize your genius.
You mean they will be more attractive to female engineers and programmers.
DRM has always been copy protection. It's just a nicer set of syllables that don't adgitate nerves as badly as copy protection enforcement.
That's why it's in so many things. Download a song, you could make a copy of it, so you need DRM. Transfer songs from an IPOD to a computer, need DRM. Transfer songs from a computer to a CD, DRM. Copy a file, need DRM in the OS.
It's an interesting idea, that a copy of a song exists as a single entity which should not reproduce. Unfortunately, many aspects of computers require reproduction of data. This sets the two initiatives at odds. I personally don't think it is possible without hardware support (like memory fencing wasn't), but I'm not about to buy hardware that permits me fewer possible options while using my computer. After all, if I'm writing an email to my folks, I don't want to suffer the bother of copyrighting the email, then creating a license for distribution to my folks. A "DRM for everything" solution might require this. A "DRM for some things" solution will just see an eventual migration of the DRM'd material into the non-DRM side of the machine.
You forgot to add the obligatory, ... or the cute little kitten 'Gets it!'
Boats are cheaper. Take it out about 10 miles, and you should be in international waters. Sure, there's a risk involved, and pirates are not a thing of the past, but it's been effective as a gabling workaround wherever there's been a port for many, many years.
For ever string function, there's an equivalent that will only perform the operation on the first n bytes. If you're working with a C library that's old and doesn't have such a convienece, you can always wrap it with a call that does.
The real problems come into play when you're using a 3rd party library. You can always police your code, but it's hard to police / fix other's code. Open source libraries are great for this in general, but there's not always an open source solution for connecting to proprietary buses, services, etc.
In the end, solutions that require policing are only as good as policing. Policing is designed to only be effective after some atrocity has been committed, and so policing will likely only be effective after the exploit. A much better solution would prevent use of unbounded string functions by not having them defined. Perhaps there's some compiler magic that could be employed, but I doubt such techniques will gain much traction. It's like asking a guild of master carpenters to switch building materials. Once you know the materials and weaknesses, usually it's better to design around the weaknesses than to change materials.
As a pratical real-world example near me, our school system just replace over a million bricks in a nearby school. The reason was that the new-fangled iodized metal bolts were used (way back when) to bind the bricks to the sub wall. Iodized was new and "hot" and it didn't rust, so the wall should have lasted forever. However, it corrordes when exposed to salt water, and the school was close enough to the sea to be exposed to salt water vapor. The problem was discovered when a worker leaned against a brick wall and it toppeled over.
In the end, education will bring the current coders around, but don't expect the problem to go away. There will be many years of people reading antiquated "how to program" books that teach older, less safe, practices. There will be people reentering the marketplace that will have missed the newer techniques. There will be users installing from the copy of winZip (or whatever) that they downloaded in 2000.
Only with time, and a whole lot of paitence, will this problem die. It won't be fixed, it will decline until it's barely noticable.
I could support your position, in a perfect world.
Advertising in Wikipedia could provide a lot of dollars, and with those dollars comes a few concerns:
1. What safeguards are there going to be when considering how the content clashes with the interests of the advertisers? Many small newspapers cannot finiancially afford to run articles that conflict with their ad base. So if your biggest advertiser is a jewler, you'd be stupid to run an article about DeBeers backed fighting in Africa.
2. What safeguards are there in controlling spending? Most organizations, corporations, governments, and such tend to be regulated by the amount of money they can dispose. If you add a large amount of money into the system, the system's spending grows to accommodate the new money, but usually the service doesn't alter dramatically. I cannot imagine any new feature that I want in Wikipedia, so why throw money at it to make the existing features cost more.
Once an organization depends on a revenue stream, those providing the revenue stream can wield a lot of power. It's not done malicously, but eventually those with the cash will wish that their ads were more visible. They'll wish that their products were not "slandered" in wikipedia even when the product merits unfavoring words. Think of Mattel wanting to soften articles about dangerous toys they've released. Remove a reference, change the wording from "37 killed" to "a few children were injured, and one even died". You haven't outright lied, you're just misleading your audience.
Wikipedia already has had to combat product promotion and ad placement. How will they handle it when they are receiving money from these companies?
I mean, when do you ever hear of a tape-recored language? The processing, storage, and transmission of a language is somewhat independent of the language's grammar.
Sorry, but this is written in an email language. You'll have to render it to a pixel language to display on a CRT, and then illuminate it as a light emitting visual language for eye processing.
There's been no scientific proof that God doesn't exist, nor can science prove such a thing.
Just because certain churches have an axe to grind doesn't mean that Religon and Science are opposed. For some reason, Churches insist on a static universe where things cannot change, and when they make statements that turn out to be incorrect like, "The Earth is at the center of the universe." or "The Sun revolves around the Earth." their policy of a static universe doesn't provide them an avenue of correction.
So, they do what any self-perserving organization does, which is try to discredit the messenger (or better yet, kill him), and they use strong appeals to authority to ignore the real world and preserve the status quo. God didn't come up with the church sponsored ideas of how the world works, so churches don't have to weaken their foundations to accept that the universe changes. It's a self-inflicted wound when churces insist that the world only works one way, because sooner or later, ideas about the Universe will be refined, reorganized, and reworked.
It's not about being apathetic with discovery. Polygraphs are known to discover a lot of information. It has also been proven that none of that information has anything to do with lying. If you answer truthfully, but you ex walks into the room, the needles will jump, and the activity will be read to imply that you lied. For a real lie detector test, the environment shouldn't matter. If the environment matters so much, it's just a test to see if you get nervous, or if you can lie calmly.
I want to see a lie detector test that works while someone is skateboarding. If it detects truth even when people are nervous, then it's a much better design that the mis-labeled "nervousness detector test" which people keep trying to call a "lie detector test".
To a real scientist, "no apparent developmental abnormalities" means that they're hedging their bets. They haven't seen any developmental abnormalities, but as scientists, they know that it is impossible to observe every detail in their lifetime, so they're just saying that they haven't discovered one yet.
A scientist doesn't have a strong interest in not finding things, finding things is what makes a scientist's career successful.
Business sponsored research isn't science. Business sponsored research usually employs people called scientists who then don't use (or misrepresent) the scientific procedure, producing results which were probably dictated before the experiment was started.
A popular misconception is that if a scientist says it, it's science. Science is about the procedure, not the person. If a scientist says he can save 15 minutes to picking up his dry cleaning, it's not science. But if an experiment is performed which accurately measures dry cleaning pickup times, and by changing how dry cleaning is picked up the times decrease by 15 minutes, then that's science.
Remember, appeal to authority only works in authoritarian systems. In law, (authoritarian system) the judge is an authoratative figure, what he says and does has a real impact on the case. In science, a scientist isn't an authoritarian figure. Sure, a scientist may become famous, but that's celebrity. A famous scientist can still be wrong, but the procedure eventually aligns the "model of how things work" with the "world in which things happen".
So trust your science, but don't get it from Newsweek, FOX, CNN, etc. Any findings without a description of the procedure and the control is a fluff piece that might totally misrepresent the discovered facts, the observations, the deductions based from the observations, and the findings of the experiment. The reason U.S. Citizens have such a cynical view of scientists is partially due to sloppy "BIG HEADLINES" reporting that takes the least consequential detail out of context for the biggest impact.
It's not the damage to the "virtual" victim that's considered the side effect, the Milgram experiment never damaged the "victim" virtual or otherwise.
It's the damage to the administrator of the virtual torture that's considered unethical. As long as that person has any common sense, they'll eventually discover that they are torturing the subject, and if they persist, they will be led to beileve that they have killed the subject. This should bring the administrator in conflict with their sense of morals, and the experiment is designed to break the virtues of compassion and human decency in a high-pressure situation.
We have all felt the pains of high pressure sales tactics, imagine the mistakes you could make if you were initially told that the test was harmless, then put under high pressure to continue it, eventually leading to the death (real in your point-of-view) of the subject? That's the Milgram experiment in a nut shell, and it relies on abusing the trust the administrator has in the researcher. The researcher deliberately lies to the administrator to achieve the desired results.
The fact that you're later debriefed won't console you because the experimenter lied to you, so they could lie to you about "it's all fake, after all". It also prevents resolution of the pain, because complaining about the stresses incurred while virtually torturing someone will either ostracize you from peers or be dismissed as non-real stress. If you actually tortured someone you could atone (if you wish to) for your actions by helping those you hurt, seeking forgiveness within your faith, or by deeds. But nobody understands redressing virtual wrongs; there's no avenue for repentance.
As a good Christian (in the best meaning of the phrase) can you condone the treatment of the real subjects, the ones administring the virtual shocks?
There's also other scientific grounds for dismissal. If the researcher deliberately manipulates the administrator to achieve the desired results, then is it science? In other "hard" science fields, manipulation of the experiment with a desire to achieve certain results would be a serious infraction of the scientific process, but in the near-voodoo corners of Psychology, it's considered a technique.
The news is that they've reproduced it. This one isn't nearly as reproducable as it claims to be, and the effect doesn't support what every Psychology student is told; that "You would do the same thing in the same situation." which (fortunately) isn't true according to the less fantastic failures to reproduce the same outcome.
Diebold would beg to differ.
Dude man, you're digital!
Of course they were going to make YOU man of the year!
Assume you automate it based off of the output from someone's build command.
How do you know if a file is missing? Consider the list a "checklist" for audit purposes. This might not make so much sense if you're packaging your own sources, but when you package someone else's, if such a protection wasn't in place, you wouldn't know until you had already released a badly built package (assuming you automate the packaging process, like most people do).
We should also make cars out of sponge to reduce the impact consequences, but for some reason that's not what we've determined makes reliable, useable cars.
Like most simple solutions, the cure is considered to be worse than the ill. You might as well suggest eating children to solve the problem of the potato famine.
It's not that everything needs to be complicated, but that you have to pick the lowest level of complexity to completely solve the problem. Distribution building, compiling, packaging, configuration, and software maintenance (not just installation, but removal, upgrade, patching, etc.), are a lot of unsexy tasks that are critical but only noticed when they go horribly wrong. They also become rather complicated problems with each added dimension of complexity.
Yes, I have a Dell 510 too. It was "dontated" for repair, but not worth the repair effort. It's been shipped back to HP and returned twice now. I would never attempt to run Linux on it, it's having a hard enough time running windows properly. For those who don't know, it's a $600 laptop that I've seen marked down to $400 on occasion, and about 20% of them don't seem to work properly from day one. Mine has display issues, the screen seems to light up, but like Ford's model T, "You can have any pixed color you want, as long as it's black."
But don't let that get in the way of a good rant. By all means, please install Windows on your glorified boat anchor and stop wasting our time with "sucks" comments. Then you can yell at MS about how much Windows sucks.
It's close enough to the topic for my tastes. However, I am confused. Pray tell, how do you update software that's not installed? Even with the new found power of computers, they can't update nothing. Perhaps you have more software installed than you know.
Typically Micosoft's shared source means that they can share the source code with you, but you can't modify it and redistribute or share it with anyone else. Most of the time it won't compile properly or will fail to operate after compilation due to not knowing what compiler flags to set and / or not having a compiler that will understand and handle any non-standard syntax that's been "injected" into the language.
I don't know if that's the case here, but I wouldn't get my hopes up too much.
Don't try to explain it with 4 or 5 dimensions, because that's far too challenging to imagine, much less to use as a base of an analogy.
Compare it to a cube. People know what cubes are. Say that you're trying to measure a cube, so you take the measurements of every edge of the cube, 12 measurements in all. Then you realize that really there are 3 sets of measurements, containing 4 identical measurements along the height, width, and depth of the cube. Suddenly something that seemed like a 12 dimension object really only seems to have 3 dimensions now. That's roughly how String theory "loses" dimensions over time. The first time I heard of the theory, it needed over a hundred dimensions to work, then around 80, 60, etc. Now I'm wondering if it's under the 12 that my memory told me it either hit, or might hit.
Finally, you could notice that you don't really have 3 measurements, you have one set of three identical measurements (because it's a cube the height, width, and length are all identical) So you only really have one dimension now. Of course, you dimension only applies to the "cube" universe, where everything must be a cube. However, that's the danger of models, they can become disconnected from the constraints of the real world they are modeling.
A perfect example of such a disconnect is the idea of a circular orbit around a moving planet. All planets move, and it's impossible to maintain a stationary circular orbit because the planet will move closer to one side of the circle, increasing the gravitational pull on that side, twisiting the circle into an elliptical shape.
Naturally, I wasn't really thinking about data presentation when I wrote my glib statements. I was talking about layout, and I'm glad we can at least come to some agreement on that use of tables.
:) Note that I say "on average" because there are always trivial tables that will provide identical performance (table of no cells, table of one cell) but when things get big or badly located (table crosses memory page boundary) the speed improvements become noticable.
But to properly consider your question, I'll counter that tabular data implies that you know more about the format of the data than about the meaning of the data.
So, sure, for tabular data, a table makes sense. However, you'll never get much reuse out of your data, because you'll have to write a non-trivial (but not that hard either) parser it to get it back into a form where the "cells" have some meaning. HTML falls short in this category, but namespaces probably provide a way to have your cake and eat it too. I haven't tried because I find that there's very little information that I need to present as a table these days.
As far as "unholy" CSS hacks, well, that's what CSS is for. Theres nothing unholy (or holy for that matter) about using a stylesheet to present data with style. Certainly, there's room for improvement in rendering tables with CSS, but as your suggestion was to use Excel, I doubt you're really looking to better things.
Come to think of it, there's nothing unholy about using tables as a presentation language, except that we've already established that using tables as a presentation language typically pollutes your markup language with a lot of elements that are only related to presentation style. The rub is that even for tabular data, tables are only a layout style, so it's philosopically the same as CSS. I only wonder why it's more important to describe the layout the information than to describe the information in a reusable way.
Now the tree to table mapping that commonly occurs when sweating the "tableness" of both XML and HTML data forces a cell to bind to either a row more tightly than a column, or a column more tightly than a row. This side effect using a tree to represent a grid forces tables to always favor a column or row search / selection method, and has subtle implications on the performance of real world systems, even if provided with an interface that makes both selection methods seem identical.
Trust me, these issues aren't isolated to tables in web pages. Even in 2 dimensional arrays, you'll get better performance on average if you read the data linearly down its memory addresses, which might be "reading by row" or "reading by column" depending on specifics of compiler choice, language, and whether you're using a cooked example to back your point!
There's algorithmic fixes to make row and column retrieval equally constant time operations, but they are not nearly as fast as knowing how the data is ordered in a low level and working with it in that direction.
Trash Theory.
That's the reason that they still put up new websites using HTML 3.2.
That's the reason that they still link to print density pictures.
That's the reason that they still depend on frames for navigation.
That's the reason that they still use font tags.
That's the reason that they still use tables.
Sometimes I believe that the only way to see things improve is to wait until all of the dollar-bin how-to HTML books from 1999 decompose. It may have been the best technology available last decade, but "best technology" doesn't remain stable over the years.