I think the article missed out on earlier attempts. Some of the comics listed at mid-90s would never have been considered or published if it wasn't for a set of earlier pioneers. Elfquest, self-published by Wendi and Richard Pini (WaRP) starting in 1977 and still selling today, being one of those.
There were many other "independent comics" around that time frame, most of which did not survive. They all had one aspect in common, the artists and writers felt that main stream comics were too "dumbed down." They wanted to use the medium in a more literary and artistic manner. Their successes proved that there was a market for such publications, without which I would not be sure the later titles listed would have been started.
I also suspect that the trend has been around longer than that. How many books have been sold in part for their illustrations? Pretty much every children book, plus more. As an example, Frank Baum's OZ books were helped in sale by John R. Neill's illustrations. (OK, not high culture, but it makes the point.) And what about "coffee table books?" The "A Day in the Life" series, the one were photographers all over America, and else where, all took photos on a specific day and the best were compiled into the final book, I doubt that series doesn't qualify as "culture" or "literature."
Man, I didn't know this was one of my hot buttons.....
If you accidentally damage or break one of your Disney DVDs, you can get a replacement disc for a nominal charge of $10. Please call (800) 723-4763 for details.
Any stress I have in my job was not directly caused by technology. But, it is caused because every assumes that technology makes things faster.
As an example, the assumption: we can support a new process before the business has fully defined it because software isn't like buildings, it can be changed in no time.
Name changing is a constant game. The Boards need something to do when they aren't merging/acquiring or changing the reporting structure of the company. They have to earn their somewhat inflated pay.
My favorite stupid name change is the one proposed by the board of PWC Consulting prior to being bought out by IBM: Monday. I think IBM bought them out just to keep their employees from dying of embarrassment!
Well, maybe the investors are looking for a tax write off? I know of one case where a Bank manager, actually he started the bank and managed it, was fired because the bank was making money!
[it's] the responsibility of every citizen to test the truth of information on the Web, and draw attention to incorrect information....
Ok, so how do you draw attention to it, but posting or linking to the site and saying, "This is wrong." Meanwhile the search engines pick up that the site has been linked to and increases the site's "score" for future searches.
This isn't idle speculation, I have seen a search engine come up with a high score site which has actually been incorrect. (I wish I could remember the specific search I was doing at the time, but I can't. Sorry.)
You need to be able to smell the other person's farts
Now there's an argument which will have people lining up to try XP.... Sometimes people should just think about what they're about to say before saying it.
First, and probably the main reason, is that pure mathematicians do not think computers are mathematics. This is probably doubly so in the number theory area; where the people sometimes act like algebra isn't real mathematics....
Second, most computer programming languages cannot be "proven" themselves. This means, from a purely theoretical standpoint, that even if they produce the results desired, there is no way to "prove" that they really did what they were supposed to do. Or put another way, how can these author's prove that the "proof" isn't really the result of a programming error. Obviously, in the normal world, no one cares about this; if the program displays the correct graph, who cares whether it is really proven or not. But in the world of mathematical proofs, that sort of "slip-shod" work is really frowned upon. On the other hand, there are computer languages which are formally provable, so this may not matter depending on what the proof program was written in.
Finally, it looks much cooler to have a bunch of greek characters up on a white board then a computer monitor saying "Yup, it works."
So I say, Joss has killed major loved characters before (jonathon, tara, gyspy teacher). I say, Joss, kill the entire cast and keep them dead, just to show you have the balls to do it.
Been done. Space: Above and Beyond and The Others both did this when they were canceled. Of course, they didn't last a season; and they were obviously "I hate the networks" reactionary kills.
If JW decides to kill everyone off, at least I know he'll do it well!
For years, like its whole life as a company, Oracle has been known to sell non-existent features and walk away with your money and no or little support. In the last 80's or early 90's this was a major PR and sales problem for Oracle. For the life of me I can't see a whole lot of change in their sales approach; so I just figured out they've managed to hit the saturation wall. There was so much flack about Oracle sales people, riviled worse than used car sales people (who at least could feel good that there is someone lower than they are according to one old, old joke), that it just isn't news anymore.
So, maybe MS's long term plan is to mess up sooo much on security, that it no longer news at all. Then after 5 or so years, everyone will have forgotten that they have a bad security record, because "everyone knows MS has bad security!"
Part of the article is also pointing out that Oracle has just pulled some MS style delays, and maybe worse because of the need to pay for a service agreement, yet the only report was that Oracle fixed the holes. No mention of how long they were there, etc.
Put into perspective, if MS Windows may be the largest base of PC OSes out there and deserves to be dissed like crazy; then Oracle is the largest based of DB "OSes" out there and also deserves to be dissed like crazy.
The reality is that security holes must be reported fairly, evenly with all the facts. OSS fans don't need to be afraid of that; the turn around times on the patches and the definite lack of finger pointing will make them look good every time. But by throwing near, but not quite, terrorist level rhetoric for any security problems only causes a panic, draconian, overkill rules.... (Insert Ghostbusters quote here)
It's been a while since my Senior Independent project, but it was on products like these. I did a lot of the symbolic maths on the packages to describe and document what they were doing. As part of that, I had to look into how they handled floating point errors. I don't remember the package I was specifically working with; and my copy of the SIP is at home.
With that as an introduction, for the "pure computational" packages,the problem you point out is real. Floating point errors when ignored will slowly move further and further into the significant digits of the FP calculations. For a package to be even reasonable, it must be able to describe in mathematical expressions and textual dialog how it will manage FP errors to keep them in the least significant digits of the number. If you review a package, look and ask specifically how the package does that.
Some may ask why is this important, don't modern languages handle all this according to the FP Specs? Well, basically the specs are not good enough for large computation tasks. When you start multiplying several matrices together, you end up doing so many FP operations, that without carefully written and mathematically backed code the errors will pratically zoom "to the right." This is compounded by the fact that not all chips comply with the specs in exactly the same way, most of these packages will have a lot of conditional code to handle each chip set's specific particularities. Something else to look for: if a package claims one size fits all, and doesn't talk about OS and HW specific compiles, take extra care checking the FP issues out. They may be taking a worst possible processing approach, which will work but at the expense of speed, or they may be taking a more "mean" processing approach, which may end up with different results on different OS and HW combinations.
Now, after all that, the reality is that most of these packages, at least if they have been around a while, have the mathematical grounding and programming "backgrounds" to handle FP operations pretty darn well. After all, this was a fairly well known and documented issue back in 1983 when I wrote my SIP.
The "symbolic" packages seem to side step this by first taking the equations and modifying them in "symbol" form before performing their calculations. Thus, the differential of X^2 is changed to 2x by the program before any FP operations happen. But this does not mean that FP operations do not occur. If your equations still deal with matrices, then a lot of FP operations will have to be done to come up with a numeric answer, no matter what.
I still got calls for the person who last had my phone number for years after it was switched to me. Now I can get personal emails for the prior "owner" of my phone number and not even have the chance to tell them I'm not Kim before they go on about what happened to them last night.
Leaving that and telemarketers having everyone's email address immediately and automatically aside, I am confused as to the utility of this. I would much rather have permanent transferable alphabetic EMail address, which I do have on pobox.com, than my telephone number.
Heck it is already being done on TV and Films; even in books, although I don't know if the author really gets a kick back in that case. I' really surprised it has taken this long.
At least it may be less annoying than pop-up adds!
At the college I went to, there was one advance physics class where the teacher said: "Most tests check that you understand the base 75% of the information. I don't. I assume you know that and test you on the other 25%." It was not uncommon to get 50% on his tests and still have a B average.
Why? There may be some quirks in the assembly that cannot be directly supported by QT or Gtk, but why can't a smart coder work around these? To be frank, I would rather the developers work on getting the System.Windows.Forms assembly functionality working on Linux using either toolkit than for people to invent new assemblies from scratch. Compatibility first, then efficiency; we need to move developers from Windows to Linux first, then we can move them to more efficient Linux implementations. But to expect a Windows developer to move to Linux by having to support two branches of his code is not realistic.
I think there are more albums worth listening to than you realize. There are several artists and albums that I will listen to as an album and never are individual tracks. Jethro Tull's Thick as a Brick and Passion Play are extreme examples being songs which are albums. But Peter Gabriel's US is an album which carries a theme, developing from start to finish. Then there are some albums which are not necessarily works as a whole but still are completely full of songs worth listening to: nearly all of The Dave Matthew's Band's albums are that way.
I agree that the majority of flash-in-the-pan, me-too groups cannot do this, but there are enough around for me to dispute that. Rather than say people listen to songs, and call that the argument to kill the concept of an album as a work, I'd rather say we need to teach the new artists that albums should be thought of as a work itself, made up of songs, rather than just song repositories.
I'm not sure if it is still available, but one of my college friends worked at an ADA compiler company which had a product which compiled ADA to the JVM.
Tom Holt: I would suggest starting with Expecting Someone Taller. That was the first Holt I read and certainly one of my favorites.
If you like humorous books, then you can't go wrong with Terry Pratchett. But skip the first couple and start with Equal Rites or Wyrd Sisters. The earlier ones are fine, but he doesn't hit his real stride until those.
And don't pass up on the Harry Potter series just because its a child's book.
Thank goodness for Amazon UK without that, I would never have managed to get all 15-20 Tom Holts that I do own.
Just because having your own firewall is the "best" solution, doesn't mean that it has to be in your own home. The ISP could, and probably does, provide a firewall at their end. The ISP could require a software firewall to provide intra-ISP coverage.
Let's also not forget that many OS vendors, including MS and Linux ones, provide an automated upgrade process, or could. This means that the OS providers can help the "blue haired granny" keep their system's security up to date automatically. Of course, the manufacturer would need to accept the burden of providing effective patches in a timely fashion, and the monetary responsibility to do so.
The solution becomes more complex when you realize that all software will need to have this "security update" built into them. Here is where I think the OSS world has a huge advantage. They could, if they were willing to truly get behind this, provide a single package update location for all OSS packages. I know there are a handful of them now, but there really should only be one location.
Oh, and this may actually get the software world to the point that digitally signing and verifying code is common place. I don't believe in Palladium or any other DRM use of this, but I would really appreciate it if everyone signed their binaries and code so I can be assured that it hasn't been changed. Today we do that by only accepting code by going to the developer's website. This isn't a problem, of course, but it hinders the one-location-for-all update process.
So the process could happen, even for the non-computer literate. As the prior post suggests, though, there really isn't any business reason required to do this. It really won't be cheap, in either money terms or just development time.
...but I would much prefer the government try to solve the problem.
The solution I've been trying to get people to think about is a 24 hour voting "day." All the booths would open at the same time and stay open for 24 hours. In addition, exit interviews could be taken, but not reported until the polls close.
That way the entire US would have the chance to vote at the same time and without external influence.
I feel sorry for those commmunities on the west coast, or in the Pacific, who do not have real elections because one party's presidential candidate is declared the loser. People may disagree with this, but I am sure that there are people who would have otherwise voted who end up staying at home because "What's the use."
I'm tired of hearing the "connect the dots" argument for two reasons.
If it really were that easy, they wouldn't need the TIA effort at all, the information currently collected would be enough.
I remember reading some where, I wish I could remember, that the FAA was supposed to contact the military when any flight deviates from its course without notification. If that was done, there would have been jets around the planes well before they could have crashed into the buildings. Sometimes executed response plans are enough to help ensure safety.
Slashdot Mirror
When I read this, one of the first rules of project management popped into my head:
I think the article missed out on earlier attempts. Some of the comics listed at mid-90s would never have been considered or published if it wasn't for a set of earlier pioneers. Elfquest, self-published by Wendi and Richard Pini (WaRP) starting in 1977 and still selling today, being one of those.
There were many other "independent comics" around that time frame, most of which did not survive. They all had one aspect in common, the artists and writers felt that main stream comics were too "dumbed down." They wanted to use the medium in a more literary and artistic manner. Their successes proved that there was a market for such publications, without which I would not be sure the later titles listed would have been started.
I also suspect that the trend has been around longer than that. How many books have been sold in part for their illustrations? Pretty much every children book, plus more. As an example, Frank Baum's OZ books were helped in sale by John R. Neill's illustrations. (OK, not high culture, but it makes the point.) And what about "coffee table books?" The "A Day in the Life" series, the one were photographers all over America, and else where, all took photos on a specific day and the best were compiled into the final book, I doubt that series doesn't qualify as "culture" or "literature."
Man, I didn't know this was one of my hot buttons.....
From the Disney website:
Not free, but better than nothing!
Any stress I have in my job was not directly caused by technology. But, it is caused because every assumes that technology makes things faster.
As an example, the assumption: we can support a new process before the business has fully defined it because software isn't like buildings, it can be changed in no time.
XML is not a data format. It is a way of formatting data. There is a difference!
The following are both legal XML and include the same information but are nowhere near the same data format:
Name changing is a constant game. The Boards need something to do when they aren't merging/acquiring or changing the reporting structure of the company. They have to earn their somewhat inflated pay.
My favorite stupid name change is the one proposed by the board of PWC Consulting prior to being bought out by IBM: Monday. I think IBM bought them out just to keep their employees from dying of embarrassment!
I'm not sure I could get my wife to agree to a hybred anyway, but I have one big question that I've never heard the answer to.
How does it perform in snow?
Being in the snow belt, it would make little sense to buy a car which can only be used 8 months out of the year.
Well, maybe the investors are looking for a tax write off? I know of one case where a Bank manager, actually he started the bank and managed it, was fired because the bank was making money!
Ok, so how do you draw attention to it, but posting or linking to the site and saying, "This is wrong." Meanwhile the search engines pick up that the site has been linked to and increases the site's "score" for future searches.
This isn't idle speculation, I have seen a search engine come up with a high score site which has actually been incorrect. (I wish I could remember the specific search I was doing at the time, but I can't. Sorry.)
Now there's an argument which will have people lining up to try XP.... Sometimes people should just think about what they're about to say before saying it.
First, and probably the main reason, is that pure mathematicians do not think computers are mathematics. This is probably doubly so in the number theory area; where the people sometimes act like algebra isn't real mathematics....
Second, most computer programming languages cannot be "proven" themselves. This means, from a purely theoretical standpoint, that even if they produce the results desired, there is no way to "prove" that they really did what they were supposed to do. Or put another way, how can these author's prove that the "proof" isn't really the result of a programming error. Obviously, in the normal world, no one cares about this; if the program displays the correct graph, who cares whether it is really proven or not. But in the world of mathematical proofs, that sort of "slip-shod" work is really frowned upon. On the other hand, there are computer languages which are formally provable, so this may not matter depending on what the proof program was written in.
Finally, it looks much cooler to have a bunch of greek characters up on a white board then a computer monitor saying "Yup, it works."
So I say, Joss has killed major loved characters before (jonathon, tara, gyspy teacher). I say, Joss, kill the entire cast and keep them dead, just to show you have the balls to do it.
Been done. Space: Above and Beyond and The Others both did this when they were canceled. Of course, they didn't last a season; and they were obviously "I hate the networks" reactionary kills.
If JW decides to kill everyone off, at least I know he'll do it well!
I just thought of this:
For years, like its whole life as a company, Oracle has been known to sell non-existent features and walk away with your money and no or little support. In the last 80's or early 90's this was a major PR and sales problem for Oracle. For the life of me I can't see a whole lot of change in their sales approach; so I just figured out they've managed to hit the saturation wall. There was so much flack about Oracle sales people, riviled worse than used car sales people (who at least could feel good that there is someone lower than they are according to one old, old joke), that it just isn't news anymore.
So, maybe MS's long term plan is to mess up sooo much on security, that it no longer news at all. Then after 5 or so years, everyone will have forgotten that they have a bad security record, because "everyone knows MS has bad security!"
Part of the article is also pointing out that Oracle has just pulled some MS style delays, and maybe worse because of the need to pay for a service agreement, yet the only report was that Oracle fixed the holes. No mention of how long they were there, etc.
Put into perspective, if MS Windows may be the largest base of PC OSes out there and deserves to be dissed like crazy; then Oracle is the largest based of DB "OSes" out there and also deserves to be dissed like crazy.
The reality is that security holes must be reported fairly, evenly with all the facts. OSS fans don't need to be afraid of that; the turn around times on the patches and the definite lack of finger pointing will make them look good every time. But by throwing near, but not quite, terrorist level rhetoric for any security problems only causes a panic, draconian, overkill rules .... (Insert Ghostbusters quote here)
It's been a while since my Senior Independent project, but it was on products like these. I did a lot of the symbolic maths on the packages to describe and document what they were doing. As part of that, I had to look into how they handled floating point errors. I don't remember the package I was specifically working with; and my copy of the SIP is at home.
With that as an introduction, for the "pure computational" packages,the problem you point out is real. Floating point errors when ignored will slowly move further and further into the significant digits of the FP calculations. For a package to be even reasonable, it must be able to describe in mathematical expressions and textual dialog how it will manage FP errors to keep them in the least significant digits of the number. If you review a package, look and ask specifically how the package does that.
Some may ask why is this important, don't modern languages handle all this according to the FP Specs? Well, basically the specs are not good enough for large computation tasks. When you start multiplying several matrices together, you end up doing so many FP operations, that without carefully written and mathematically backed code the errors will pratically zoom "to the right." This is compounded by the fact that not all chips comply with the specs in exactly the same way, most of these packages will have a lot of conditional code to handle each chip set's specific particularities. Something else to look for: if a package claims one size fits all, and doesn't talk about OS and HW specific compiles, take extra care checking the FP issues out. They may be taking a worst possible processing approach, which will work but at the expense of speed, or they may be taking a more "mean" processing approach, which may end up with different results on different OS and HW combinations.
Now, after all that, the reality is that most of these packages, at least if they have been around a while, have the mathematical grounding and programming "backgrounds" to handle FP operations pretty darn well. After all, this was a fairly well known and documented issue back in 1983 when I wrote my SIP.
The "symbolic" packages seem to side step this by first taking the equations and modifying them in "symbol" form before performing their calculations. Thus, the differential of X^2 is changed to 2x by the program before any FP operations happen. But this does not mean that FP operations do not occur. If your equations still deal with matrices, then a lot of FP operations will have to be done to come up with a numeric answer, no matter what.
I still got calls for the person who last had my phone number for years after it was switched to me. Now I can get personal emails for the prior "owner" of my phone number and not even have the chance to tell them I'm not Kim before they go on about what happened to them last night.
Leaving that and telemarketers having everyone's email address immediately and automatically aside, I am confused as to the utility of this. I would much rather have permanent transferable alphabetic EMail address, which I do have on pobox.com, than my telephone number.
Heck it is already being done on TV and Films; even in books, although I don't know if the author really gets a kick back in that case. I' really surprised it has taken this long.
At least it may be less annoying than pop-up adds!
At the college I went to, there was one advance physics class where the teacher said: "Most tests check that you understand the base 75% of the information. I don't. I assume you know that and test you on the other 25%." It was not uncommon to get 50% on his tests and still have a B average.
System.Windows.Forms and they will need Wine....
Why? There may be some quirks in the assembly that cannot be directly supported by QT or Gtk, but why can't a smart coder work around these? To be frank, I would rather the developers work on getting the System.Windows.Forms assembly functionality working on Linux using either toolkit than for people to invent new assemblies from scratch. Compatibility first, then efficiency; we need to move developers from Windows to Linux first, then we can move them to more efficient Linux implementations. But to expect a Windows developer to move to Linux by having to support two branches of his code is not realistic.
I think there are more albums worth listening to than you realize. There are several artists and albums that I will listen to as an album and never are individual tracks. Jethro Tull's Thick as a Brick and Passion Play are extreme examples being songs which are albums. But Peter Gabriel's US is an album which carries a theme, developing from start to finish. Then there are some albums which are not necessarily works as a whole but still are completely full of songs worth listening to: nearly all of The Dave Matthew's Band's albums are that way.
I agree that the majority of flash-in-the-pan, me-too groups cannot do this, but there are enough around for me to dispute that. Rather than say people listen to songs, and call that the argument to kill the concept of an album as a work, I'd rather say we need to teach the new artists that albums should be thought of as a work itself, made up of songs, rather than just song repositories.
I'm not sure if it is still available, but one of my college friends worked at an ADA compiler company which had a product which compiled ADA to the JVM.
Tom Holt: I would suggest starting with Expecting Someone Taller. That was the first Holt I read and certainly one of my favorites.
If you like humorous books, then you can't go wrong with Terry Pratchett. But skip the first couple and start with Equal Rites or Wyrd Sisters. The earlier ones are fine, but he doesn't hit his real stride until those.
And don't pass up on the Harry Potter series just because its a child's book.
Thank goodness for Amazon UK without that, I would never have managed to get all 15-20 Tom Holts that I do own.
Ah, but an ISP could.
Just because having your own firewall is the "best" solution, doesn't mean that it has to be in your own home. The ISP could, and probably does, provide a firewall at their end. The ISP could require a software firewall to provide intra-ISP coverage.
Let's also not forget that many OS vendors, including MS and Linux ones, provide an automated upgrade process, or could. This means that the OS providers can help the "blue haired granny" keep their system's security up to date automatically. Of course, the manufacturer would need to accept the burden of providing effective patches in a timely fashion, and the monetary responsibility to do so.
The solution becomes more complex when you realize that all software will need to have this "security update" built into them. Here is where I think the OSS world has a huge advantage. They could, if they were willing to truly get behind this, provide a single package update location for all OSS packages. I know there are a handful of them now, but there really should only be one location.
Oh, and this may actually get the software world to the point that digitally signing and verifying code is common place. I don't believe in Palladium or any other DRM use of this, but I would really appreciate it if everyone signed their binaries and code so I can be assured that it hasn't been changed. Today we do that by only accepting code by going to the developer's website. This isn't a problem, of course, but it hinders the one-location-for-all update process.
So the process could happen, even for the non-computer literate. As the prior post suggests, though, there really isn't any business reason required to do this. It really won't be cheap, in either money terms or just development time.
...but I would much prefer the government try to solve the problem.
The solution I've been trying to get people to think about is a 24 hour voting "day." All the booths would open at the same time and stay open for 24 hours. In addition, exit interviews could be taken, but not reported until the polls close.
That way the entire US would have the chance to vote at the same time and without external influence.
I feel sorry for those commmunities on the west coast, or in the Pacific, who do not have real elections because one party's presidential candidate is declared the loser. People may disagree with this, but I am sure that there are people who would have otherwise voted who end up staying at home because "What's the use."
I'm tired of hearing the "connect the dots" argument for two reasons.