No, I went to Hertford once for a gig at "The Marquee Club" (they wish), and that was scary enough - makes Newcastle(-Upon-Tyne) on a Saturday night look like Bloomsbury.
Never knew so many XR3's were still on the road... but also made me wish I was back in my adolescent days (in a lecherous and self-deceiving way of course).
It can't be! Posh and Becks live near there, and even more impressively so do *I*:-)
Well I guessed that Essex would be their spiritual home... didn't know they actually had a place there (I take it that it's a 23 bedroom holiday home or the like).
So, very OT, but if you're a local, can you tell me why the M11 between Harlow and Stansted is so full of arsehole drivers - if it was a pure "Essex driver" thing I'd expect it all the way up the M11 (I commute daily from Watford to Cambridge by the M25 and M11) - and whilst some parts of the trip get a bit tense and aggressive, nowhere do you get such the idiots like between those two junctions - surely not everyone running late for a plane joins the motorway at the same place !
If you don't like Starbucks, you could also try... a library. Or my personal favorite, the lobby of a hotel that has free wireless.
Or the lobby of a bank is usually good for a quick bit of work (no meetings mind you) or taking mobile hone calls somewhere quiet and dry.
They provide tables and chairs, pens and paper and they're quiet - just walk in sit down, grab a few forms and pull out your cheque book, then you "get distracted" by the phone or your PC or whatever... if my phone rings in a busy street I always look round for a bank first...
Used to be flying was expensive, but parking at the airport was cheap and you got some cheap shopping to soften the blow (in Europe in particular).
Now the flights cost virtually nothing, but suddenly it costs me more to park my car for a couple of days than it does to fly to Geneva and back. If these were inner city car parks with expensive land, I'd understand, but Stansted Airport in the UK is in the middle of nowhere.
So the airport is now making money not from the airlines (it's traditional customers) but is instead selling itself to the passengers, and looking to remove as much incidental cash as it can from their wallets as they pass thru on their "cheap flights".
Not that I'm blaming them, it's just the observation that they're sort of redefining their core business as they follow the money.
Especially in the financial centres of big cities it seems that Starbucks et al are not really a "coffee company", but are in fact selling very on-demand temporary office space ("Regus Lite") with free coffee as an incentive and informal time-billing system.
Anyone who's worked for a large investment bank and has tried to book an office for a quick meeting will know this is true (especially if the meeting rooms operate as a "profit centre" and so you have be recharged the costs). It's amazing how much you can find out about the state of the IT dept of a large company just by hanging out in the nearest coffee shop - are they hiring or firing, are the staff excited or bitching, what new projects are they working on.... industrial espionage was rarely so cheap.
Similarly, airports are now in the business of selling multi-day car parking and short term entertainment for an hour or two.
Seems they're looking to reinvent COBOL, and we all know what a great success that was. Anyone remember The Last One ??
They'd do better actually talking to lingusts and looking to apply the principles of natural languages to programming, rather than the syntax.
Of course, some people have discussed this already, but you say things like Local ambiguity is okay or Topicalization or Pronominalization to a lot of developers and they can't see past their prejudice of "I know one language and I'm too scared to look at another".
If you dare let go of your prejudices and re-consider some of the fundamentals you might just be surprised.
"We've written a client-server database system" was a MS Access application with the MDB file on a network drive - and they couldn't understand why running the app over the WAN didn't work very well.
"I've done lots of network programming" (meant that the compiler was installed on his PC's hard disk but the source code files were on a shared drive, so everytime he compiled he thought he was doing network programming)
"When you write data to a socket, TCP/IP guarantees the data will be delivered" (hmmm, and they were going to write a global trading system that's now done over $20 trillion of trades).
"We've written the most sophisticated database in existence and so you can't see the source because you'd steal our secrets" (turns out they didn't know what indices were, the whole thing had no indices on any table, and the code was crap, oh, and it was Access 2)
"Our encryption is unbreakable" (data was encoded using the string OVER_THE_TOP_ENCRYPTION which was present as plaintext in the EXE - was later changed to CUSTARDCREAMS, still present as plaintext)
"The performance test of this software running on a 4-CPU Sun machine on a 100BaseT network was invalidated because we detected a rogue packet on the network (was actually a single UDP broadcast packet of about 800 bytes every 15 minutes) and that was chewing up all the cpu time as the network stack thrashed trying to decide what to do with the data because no program was listening to that port" (that from the networking expert of the consultancy department of a global carrier)
"The smartest programmer in the world who we were going to lend you to replace 50 of your crap guys - he won't be coming over because he refuses to fly over water and we've just explained that New York is an ocean away from London" (seems he didn't know that)
"I'm such a great programmer that the code I've written here is unreadable by anyone except me - in fact if you looked at it you'd probably think it's shit code, but in fact it's just that I'm so smart" (erm, well, it was shit, and it didn't work)
Oh there are loads more, but just typing those in has made me depressed.
What you're seeing is just people that have registered nameserver entries with "google" in them and have absolutely no effect on Google's DNS.
Ah, sorry yes. As a non network admin person my understanding of the finer points of what "whois" is actually reporting and the like are somewhat glib, and fall apart when I think about it - the theory of TCP/IP and DNS and the reality of the implications of what's evolved turn out to be quite different... thanks for the correction.
Doing a whois on google produces this... looks like a DNS attack to me
C:\>whois google.com
Whois Server Version 1.3
Domain names in the.com and.net domains can now be registered with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net for detailed information.
Server Name: GOOGLE.COM.SUCKS.FIND.CRACKZ.WITH.SEARCH.GULLI.COM
IP Address: 80.190.192.24
Registrar: GANDI
Whois Server: whois.gandi.net
Referral URL: http://www.gandi.net
Server Name: GOOGLE.COM.HAS.LESS.FREE.PORN.IN.ITS.SEARCH.ENGINE.THAN.SECZY.CO M
IP Address: 209.187.114.130
Registrar: INNERWISE, INC. D/B/A ITSYOURDOMAIN.COM
Whois Server: whois.itsyourdomain.com
Referral URL: http://www.itsyourdomain.com
Domain Name: GOOGLE.COM
Registrar: ALLDOMAINS.COM INC.
Whois Server: whois.alldomains.com
Referral URL: http://www.alldomains.com
Name Server: NS2.GOOGLE.COM
Name Server: NS1.GOOGLE.COM
Name Server: NS3.GOOGLE.COM
Name Server: NS4.GOOGLE.COM
Status: REGISTRAR-LOCK
Updated Date: 03-oct-2002
Creation Date: 15-sep-1997
Expiration Date: 14-sep-2011
>>> Last update of whois database: Mon, 26 Jul 2004 08:37:55 EDT <<<
I certainly agree with you that an application should be written to be flexible in the databases it can talk to. But typically portability is used to say the application can run on Unix, Windows, Linux etc. Or replace the computer with 3090 or Sun or Intel.
Might not be for you - but it helps for me. The change from 16 to 32 bits flushed out a load of bugs in code, I have no reason to expect 32 to 64 won't do the same, so I pre-empt it where I can.
Standard system calls have subtle differences on different platforms, so testing the code on different OS's flush out bugs, I have no reason to expect the latest version of Windows or Solaris won't do the same, so I pre-empt it.
If I'm writing systems with windows front ends, and a mix of windows and unix at the back ends, some code is going to end up moving between sections - and I know it's not going to be the GUI code, but the rest of my code should be portable enough that I can move it between Sun and Intel, so it does happen. Maybe not much in the world of shrink-wrap and shareware software, but in large organisations and across organisations it happens a lot.
Now maybe you can claim this isn't "writing portable code", but the problem is that is some idiot like McCarthy (surely the least talented of the MS dev writers - Steve Maguire's books were much better) comes out with some pithy simplification like "portability is for canoes" and look at what happens - we get software that is broken by Service Packs, compiler patches, or a business logic bit of code that won't run on the server rather than the client without major re-engineering and code duplication.
As a consultant and developer for the lastest 2 decades the comment does surprise. Not because of the content but because he has the guts to say portability does not matter.
As a consultant and developer for the last 2 decades I say it sounds like a dumb statement.
Sometime during any non-trivial project something in the environment will change: you'll be asked to change database from Oracle to Sybase, switch to a different compiler or at least upgrade a major revision to fix bugs, or the product will be expected to work on the new O/S the vendor just released... (anyone remember the WoW Win16 subsystem on WinNT)
If you design and write for portability from the start, you'll survive these changes, if not, they'll knock your schedule way off track.
Even when developing pure Windows software, I still make a point of running code through as many compilers on as many platforms (for the non-GUI stuff, of course, but the GUI code is less than 10% of any real commercial product) as I can, simply because if I know it compiles and passes basic unit tests with Borland 5, VC++ 6, VC++ 7, GCC 2.95, GCC 3.x, and 3 or 4 different versions of STL-Port on NT, Win2k, XP, Linux, and Solaris then I'm pretty damn sure that my launch date is unlikely to go out the window when the latest Service Pack is released or IE is patched or a customer asks about a beta release for Win64...
You know, I would have thought that a guy who's most recent blog reads "Site went down sometime last night:-/ Bind has been eating up the CPU for some reason. Need to figure it out. Had to reboot the machine." wouldn't actually be that keen on Voice over DNS etc.
I'm only kidding you, of course...;^p
Re:Political showpieces and $$ for supporters
on
Big Screen for NYPD
·
· Score: 1
most crime occurs spontaneously in the form of 1 or two persons performing criminal actions. [...] GIS in proactive police work is in the same state as "profiling"
That doesn't stop patterns from appearing where the same opportunity occurs multiple times (muggings in dark alleys, bag snatchings in high streets, iPod thefts near universitys etc.), the study of the locations of the 300 odd gun related homicides in Washington revealed some interesting patterns not in terms of the absolute location where they occurred, but where they occurred with respect to the home and work locations of the individuals... even if they all involved different people, a pattern can still prove useful to reduce the future incidents.
But yep, I largely agree with you... true analysis is normally done after the event. GIS work is mostly used to analyse crimes after the event, and this doesn't need big war rooms. And having spoken with the real psychologists who work with police, they say their work is nothing like the TV and movies, but is largely studying suspects, helping with interview strategies for difficult individuals... profiling is, like you say, not much used for prediction, but more for analysing a crime scene and individuals (does the scene look like it was prepared for a murder, were the tools already prepared there, or does it look like the murder just happened there).
Thank you for the comment about being a polite AC. I now see the problem with being an AC: anyone else can post under AC too!-)) My apologies: I'll get an account.
Let me know when you do, you sound interesting enough a developer to add to the friends and foes things. That's one of the other benefits of being signed in...
Re:Political showpieces and $$ for supporters
on
Big Screen for NYPD
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Perhaps I was too broad in my original post - it's not the visualization systems per se that are not useful in police work - we used many during my stint with police IT - but the use of large, real-time visualization of ongoing events in centers with hundreds of staff.
I'd agree largely with that - my background was GIS too (census data on chloropleth maps - I wrote Supermap back in the 80's that replaced mainframes with a PC and a CD-ROM drive) and while our law enforcement products will hook in to GIS systems, geographic data is often too complex to let you see true trends (is that a cluster of car thefts in a car park, or is it something to do with the pub down the road, and are those 5 street robberies that appear to be in different locations in fact linked by the fact that they all occur in blind alleys etc.). The Washington room was handy because apparently the mayor loved to ask questions like "well, it would be nice to see the muggings in that area broken down by the day of week and time of day", and whereas they used to have to go off and prepare that for the next week, they can now do it instantly and show the results there and then to an audience of a dozen or so people who can make decisions about what to do now (ie actionable intelligence). And the room in DC was built for maybe 10 or 20 "special incident joint command days" a year, so the police department figured they might as well get some use out of it the other 350 or so days -- they'd say they weren't wasting money but were making use of an idle resource.
To your other points, analysts in Law Enforcement are very different to ordinary officers, and it's true that a lot of their work is analysing events, networks and relationships after an incident, but there is a distinct move towards pro-active analysis too (especially in Homeland Security, COMPSTAT, and a number of UK initiatives).
The main software we sell is link analysis and association and time visualisation tools for analysing commodity flows in fraud, criminal networks etc - very much the analysis after the event and not, as you point out, real-time intervention. It was used for serial killers, the Washington snipers, the LoveBig virus, the Concorde crash, the Soham murders, the Australian BackPackers killer... but to analyse, identify, catch and convict the felons (of course it's very hard to show how you stopped a crime happening, but catching and convicting people earlier is one way).
Oxford Street in London is covered with CCTV and the control room that monitors that can spot pickpockets and the like and radio directly to officers on the street, but I understand that control room is about half a dozen officers and 20 or so normal TV screens.... and of course the big brother aspect of that is making plenty of people nervous already.
But I do take your point (you're very polite for an AC) -- the lure of technology is often hard for police departments to resist, when sometimes simpler, less sexy, pragmatic use of money could render better results but less headlines.
Cheers
Re:Political showpieces and $$ for supporters
on
Big Screen for NYPD
·
· Score: 1
I worked years for the IT division of a major city's police department and I can assure you that nothing is a bigger waste of money than such things as visualization systems, etc.
Some of them maybe, but not all - I just listened to one of the chief analysts from Washington talk about their incident room (it was meant for major incidents only, but then they decided why not use it all the other days too) and how this was a key part of reducing their homicide rate by significant amounts (disclaimer: they're using our software).
Day to day police does work with incidents, it's true, but crime pattern analysis can be a good way to show those politicians and bureaucrats why and where extra money needs spending.
The big screens at Washington are used so that they can have dozens of people in the room and not just view a static powerpoint-style presentation, but they can drill-down the data on the fly according to what the major, the chief of police, or anyone else wants to see there and then.
Anyone doubting the use of visualisation of this sort of information might want to check out reports like this or this
Oh I can do worse than not liking HHGTTG... in fact I quite liked Hitchhikers, but that Dirk Gently stuff was just unbearably childish junk... oh and William Gibson is pre-juvenile strutting machismo wet dreams too - Virtual Light was quite possibly the worst "fiction" I've ever read... "the baddies can't be beaten, they are invincible, nothing will work, we're all going to die --- oh look I just invented a 'kill all the bad guys' toy -- yay for me [finis]", I only kept reading out of disbelief that anyone would publish such trivia.
Ho hum... I guess this will be modded OT now... lets bring it back on topic - why has no-one made a flip phone that makes that Star Trek communicator "chirrup" sound when you flip it open, and a similar ring tone, with a black body and a gold coloured flip - you just know that all those fans would flock to buy one - hell, even I would...
then through something uniquely *human* (courage, freindship, cunning) they win the day despite beging owned in any rational assesment of the situation.
What pissed me off when I watched ST as a kid was that it's not something human, just something adult... every alien race suffers from being emotionally immature and acting like a 7-year-old up past his bedtime on a sugar high... and Kirk always struggles:
Kirk:... if... I... could... just... get through... to them... to.. SHARE.. their toys... Spock
Spock: But Captin, to share their toys would run the risk that somebody else might damage them, it is surely irrational
Bones: Why don't we just get pissed and find some whores you retards
Kirk: But I... AM... the very MODEL... of... a modern spaceship caption... I... HAVE... no powers of introspection... or... self-analysis... but... my inherent... MATURITY... will always... win.
To do it once or twice as a crappy morality story is OK, but to keep on pushing it for 30 years (TNG, DS9, all the movies etc etc.) is just a bit too much...
The super bad acting etc. is, as you say, just the icing on the cake - Patrick Stewart should be ashamed until the day he dies...
Nothing wrong with awk and sed and bash, but the origin of perl was Larry kept on writing sh+awk+sed scripts and forgetting where he needed a "$", where a ";", which index started at 0 or at 1.. etc. and wishing he had all 3 with a unified syntax, so don't be surprised that most stuff (not all, just most) can be expressed in very similar ways.
Try "perldoc perltrap" for hints - awk programmers should look at command line options -a, -n, sed users look at -p.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I went to Hertford once for a gig at "The Marquee Club" (they wish), and that was scary enough - makes Newcastle(-Upon-Tyne) on a Saturday night look like Bloomsbury.
Never knew so many XR3's were still on the road... but also made me wish I was back in my adolescent days (in a lecherous and self-deceiving way of course).
It can't be! Posh and Becks live near there, and even more impressively so do *I* :-)
Well I guessed that Essex would be their spiritual home... didn't know they actually had a place there (I take it that it's a 23 bedroom holiday home or the like).
So, very OT, but if you're a local, can you tell me why the M11 between Harlow and Stansted is so full of arsehole drivers - if it was a pure "Essex driver" thing I'd expect it all the way up the M11 (I commute daily from Watford to Cambridge by the M25 and M11) - and whilst some parts of the trip get a bit tense and aggressive, nowhere do you get such the idiots like between those two junctions - surely not everyone running late for a plane joins the motorway at the same place !
Ho hum...
If you don't like Starbucks, you could also try... a library. Or my personal favorite, the lobby of a hotel that has free wireless.
Or the lobby of a bank is usually good for a quick bit of work (no meetings mind you) or taking mobile hone calls somewhere quiet and dry.
They provide tables and chairs, pens and paper and they're quiet - just walk in sit down, grab a few forms and pull out your cheque book, then you "get distracted" by the phone or your PC or whatever... if my phone rings in a busy street I always look round for a bank first...
Airports? Can you tell me more?
Used to be flying was expensive, but parking at the airport was cheap and you got some cheap shopping to soften the blow (in Europe in particular).
Now the flights cost virtually nothing, but suddenly it costs me more to park my car for a couple of days than it does to fly to Geneva and back. If these were inner city car parks with expensive land, I'd understand, but Stansted Airport in the UK is in the middle of nowhere.
So the airport is now making money not from the airlines (it's traditional customers) but is instead selling itself to the passengers, and looking to remove as much incidental cash as it can from their wallets as they pass thru on their "cheap flights".
Not that I'm blaming them, it's just the observation that they're sort of redefining their core business as they follow the money.
Especially in the financial centres of big cities it seems that Starbucks et al are not really a "coffee company", but are in fact selling very on-demand temporary office space ("Regus Lite") with free coffee as an incentive and informal time-billing system.
Anyone who's worked for a large investment bank and has tried to book an office for a quick meeting will know this is true (especially if the meeting rooms operate as a "profit centre" and so you have be recharged the costs). It's amazing how much you can find out about the state of the IT dept of a large company just by hanging out in the nearest coffee shop - are they hiring or firing, are the staff excited or bitching, what new projects are they working on.... industrial espionage was rarely so cheap.
Similarly, airports are now in the business of selling multi-day car parking and short term entertainment for an hour or two.
Seems they're looking to reinvent COBOL, and we all know what a great success that was. Anyone remember The Last One ??
They'd do better actually talking to lingusts and looking to apply the principles of natural languages to programming, rather than the syntax.
Of course, some people have discussed this already, but you say things like Local ambiguity is okay or Topicalization or Pronominalization to a lot of developers and they can't see past their prejudice of "I know one language and I'm too scared to look at another".
If you dare let go of your prejudices and re-consider some of the fundamentals you might just be surprised.
I'm willing to bet that he doesn't have a hardware drive copier that supports SATA
;^)
Really ?? How much are you willing to bet on that ??
Hmmm, I wonder if Google will predict roulette numbers for me too
"We've written a client-server database system" was a MS Access application with the MDB file on a network drive - and they couldn't understand why running the app over the WAN didn't work very well.
"I've done lots of network programming" (meant that the compiler was installed on his PC's hard disk but the source code files were on a shared drive, so everytime he compiled he thought he was doing network programming)
"When you write data to a socket, TCP/IP guarantees the data will be delivered" (hmmm, and they were going to write a global trading system that's now done over $20 trillion of trades).
"We've written the most sophisticated database in existence and so you can't see the source because you'd steal our secrets" (turns out they didn't know what indices were, the whole thing had no indices on any table, and the code was crap, oh, and it was Access 2)
"Our encryption is unbreakable" (data was encoded using the string OVER_THE_TOP_ENCRYPTION which was present as plaintext in the EXE - was later changed to CUSTARDCREAMS, still present as plaintext)
"The performance test of this software running on a 4-CPU Sun machine on a 100BaseT network was invalidated because we detected a rogue packet on the network (was actually a single UDP broadcast packet of about 800 bytes every 15 minutes) and that was chewing up all the cpu time as the network stack thrashed trying to decide what to do with the data because no program was listening to that port" (that from the networking expert of the consultancy department of a global carrier)
"The smartest programmer in the world who we were going to lend you to replace 50 of your crap guys - he won't be coming over because he refuses to fly over water and we've just explained that New York is an ocean away from London" (seems he didn't know that)
"I'm such a great programmer that the code I've written here is unreadable by anyone except me - in fact if you looked at it you'd probably think it's shit code, but in fact it's just that I'm so smart" (erm, well, it was shit, and it didn't work)
Oh there are loads more, but just typing those in has made me depressed.
What you're seeing is just people that have registered nameserver entries with "google" in them and have absolutely no effect on Google's DNS.
Ah, sorry yes. As a non network admin person my understanding of the finer points of what "whois" is actually reporting and the like are somewhat glib, and fall apart when I think about it - the theory of TCP/IP and DNS and the reality of the implications of what's evolved turn out to be quite different... thanks for the correction.
And Yahoo is unable to return search results either - they're powered by google too (did this to check it wasn't just my connection) ...
DDoS attack anyone ?
I'm getting a google error page ony any activities right now
Server Error
The service you requested is not available at this time.
Service error -27.
Never seen google go down before, anyone remember what one of those other search engines was called ??
I certainly agree with you that an application should be written to be flexible in the databases it can talk to. But typically portability is used to say the application can run on Unix, Windows, Linux etc. Or replace the computer with 3090 or Sun or Intel.
;^)
Might not be for you - but it helps for me.
The change from 16 to 32 bits flushed out a load of bugs in code, I have no reason to expect 32 to 64 won't do the same, so I pre-empt it where I can.
Standard system calls have subtle differences on different platforms, so testing the code on different OS's flush out bugs, I have no reason to expect the latest version of Windows or Solaris won't do the same, so I pre-empt it.
If I'm writing systems with windows front ends, and a mix of windows and unix at the back ends, some code is going to end up moving between sections - and I know it's not going to be the GUI code, but the rest of my code should be portable enough that I can move it between Sun and Intel, so it does happen. Maybe not much in the world of shrink-wrap and shareware software, but in large organisations and across organisations it happens a lot.
Now maybe you can claim this isn't "writing portable code", but the problem is that is some idiot like McCarthy (surely the least talented of the MS dev writers - Steve Maguire's books were much better) comes out with some pithy simplification like "portability is for canoes" and look at what happens - we get software that is broken by Service Packs, compiler patches, or a business logic bit of code that won't run on the server rather than the client without major re-engineering and code duplication.
All Generalisations are by Fools for Idiots.
Including this one
As a consultant and developer for the lastest 2 decades the comment does surprise. Not because of the content but because he has the guts to say portability does not matter.
As a consultant and developer for the last 2 decades I say it sounds like a dumb statement.
Sometime during any non-trivial project something in the environment will change: you'll be asked to change database from Oracle to Sybase, switch to a different compiler or at least upgrade a major revision to fix bugs, or the product will be expected to work on the new O/S the vendor just released... (anyone remember the WoW Win16 subsystem on WinNT)
If you design and write for portability from the start, you'll survive these changes, if not, they'll knock your schedule way off track.
Even when developing pure Windows software, I still make a point of running code through as many compilers on as many platforms (for the non-GUI stuff, of course, but the GUI code is less than 10% of any real commercial product) as I can, simply because if I know it compiles and passes basic unit tests with Borland 5, VC++ 6, VC++ 7, GCC 2.95, GCC 3.x, and 3 or 4 different versions of STL-Port on NT, Win2k, XP, Linux, and Solaris then I'm pretty damn sure that my launch date is unlikely to go out the window when the latest Service Pack is released or IE is patched or a customer asks about a beta release for Win64...
You know, I would have thought that a guy who's most recent blog reads "Site went down sometime last night :-/ Bind has been eating up the CPU for some reason. Need to figure it out. Had to reboot the machine." wouldn't actually be that keen on Voice over DNS etc.
;^p
I'm only kidding you, of course...
most crime occurs spontaneously in the form of 1 or two persons performing criminal actions. [...] GIS in proactive police work is in the same state as "profiling"
That doesn't stop patterns from appearing where the same opportunity occurs multiple times (muggings in dark alleys, bag snatchings in high streets, iPod thefts near universitys etc.), the study of the locations of the 300 odd gun related homicides in Washington revealed some interesting patterns not in terms of the absolute location where they occurred, but where they occurred with respect to the home and work locations of the individuals... even if they all involved different people, a pattern can still prove useful to reduce the future incidents.
But yep, I largely agree with you... true analysis is normally done after the event. GIS work is mostly used to analyse crimes after the event, and this doesn't need big war rooms. And having spoken with the real psychologists who work with police, they say their work is nothing like the TV and movies, but is largely studying suspects, helping with interview strategies for difficult individuals... profiling is, like you say, not much used for prediction, but more for analysing a crime scene and individuals (does the scene look like it was prepared for a murder, were the tools already prepared there, or does it look like the murder just happened there).
Thank you for the comment about being a polite AC. I now see the problem with being an AC: anyone else can post under AC too!-)) My apologies: I'll get an account.
Let me know when you do, you sound interesting enough a developer to add to the friends and foes things. That's one of the other benefits of being signed in...
Perhaps I was too broad in my original post - it's not the visualization systems per se that are not useful in police work - we used many during my stint with police IT - but the use of large, real-time visualization of ongoing events in centers with hundreds of staff.
I'd agree largely with that - my background was GIS too (census data on chloropleth maps - I wrote Supermap back in the 80's that replaced mainframes with a PC and a CD-ROM drive) and while our law enforcement products will hook in to GIS systems, geographic data is often too complex to let you see true trends (is that a cluster of car thefts in a car park, or is it something to do with the pub down the road, and are those 5 street robberies that appear to be in different locations in fact linked by the fact that they all occur in blind alleys etc.). The Washington room was handy because apparently the mayor loved to ask questions like "well, it would be nice to see the muggings in that area broken down by the day of week and time of day", and whereas they used to have to go off and prepare that for the next week, they can now do it instantly and show the results there and then to an audience of a dozen or so people who can make decisions about what to do now (ie actionable intelligence). And the room in DC was built for maybe 10 or 20 "special incident joint command days" a year, so the police department figured they might as well get some use out of it the other 350 or so days -- they'd say they weren't wasting money but were making use of an idle resource.
To your other points, analysts in Law Enforcement are very different to ordinary officers, and it's true that a lot of their work is analysing events, networks and relationships after an incident, but there is a distinct move towards pro-active analysis too (especially in Homeland Security, COMPSTAT, and a number of UK initiatives).
The main software we sell is link analysis and association and time visualisation tools for analysing commodity flows in fraud, criminal networks etc - very much the analysis after the event and not, as you point out, real-time intervention. It was used for serial killers, the Washington snipers, the LoveBig virus, the Concorde crash, the Soham murders, the Australian BackPackers killer... but to analyse, identify, catch and convict the felons (of course it's very hard to show how you stopped a crime happening, but catching and convicting people earlier is one way).
Oxford Street in London is covered with CCTV and the control room that monitors that can spot pickpockets and the like and radio directly to officers on the street, but I understand that control room is about half a dozen officers and 20 or so normal TV screens.... and of course the big brother aspect of that is making plenty of people nervous already.
But I do take your point (you're very polite for an AC) -- the lure of technology is often hard for police departments to resist, when sometimes simpler, less sexy, pragmatic use of money could render better results but less headlines.
Cheers
I worked years for the IT division of a major city's police department and I can assure you that nothing is a bigger waste of money than such things as visualization systems, etc.
Some of them maybe, but not all - I just listened to one of the chief analysts from Washington talk about their incident room (it was meant for major incidents only, but then they decided why not use it all the other days too) and how this was a key part of reducing their homicide rate by significant amounts (disclaimer: they're using our software).
Day to day police does work with incidents, it's true, but crime pattern analysis can be a good way to show those politicians and bureaucrats why and where extra money needs spending.
The big screens at Washington are used so that they can have dozens of people in the room and not just view a static powerpoint-style presentation, but they can drill-down the data on the fly according to what the major, the chief of police, or anyone else wants to see there and then.
Anyone doubting the use of visualisation of this sort of information might want to check out reports like this or this
Oh I can do worse than not liking HHGTTG... in fact I quite liked Hitchhikers, but that Dirk Gently stuff was just unbearably childish junk... oh and William Gibson is pre-juvenile strutting machismo wet dreams too - Virtual Light was quite possibly the worst "fiction" I've ever read ... "the baddies can't be beaten, they are invincible, nothing will work, we're all going to die --- oh look I just invented a 'kill all the bad guys' toy -- yay for me [finis]", I only kept reading out of disbelief that anyone would publish such trivia.
Ho hum... I guess this will be modded OT now... lets bring it back on topic - why has no-one made a flip phone that makes that Star Trek communicator "chirrup" sound when you flip it open, and a similar ring tone, with a black body and a gold coloured flip - you just know that all those fans would flock to buy one - hell, even I would...
then through something uniquely *human* (courage, freindship, cunning) they win the day despite beging owned in any rational assesment of the situation.
... if ... I ... could ... just ... get through ... to them ... to .. SHARE .. their toys ... Spock
... AM ... the very MODEL ... of ... a modern spaceship caption... I ... HAVE... no powers of introspection ... or ... self-analysis ... but ... my inherent ... MATURITY ... will always... win.
What pissed me off when I watched ST as a kid was that it's not something human, just something adult... every alien race suffers from being emotionally immature and acting like a 7-year-old up past his bedtime on a sugar high... and Kirk always struggles:
Kirk:
Spock: But Captin, to share their toys would run the risk that somebody else might damage them, it is surely irrational
Bones: Why don't we just get pissed and find some whores you retards
Kirk: But I
To do it once or twice as a crappy morality story is OK, but to keep on pushing it for 30 years (TNG, DS9, all the movies etc etc.) is just a bit too much...
The super bad acting etc. is, as you say, just the icing on the cake - Patrick Stewart should be ashamed until the day he dies...
Oh dear, was that my karma evaporating ??
The rest is just decoration and glitter (and that includes Office, Acrobat [spit] etc.), or I can write it myself given the above.
Does copying over my bookmarks, docs, command line utils etc count ??
kde developer : KDE is obviously much superior, so I propose all applications should begin with K.
;^)
gnome developer : I had a similar idea, but with the letter G...
Yeah, maybe they should meet half way and start everything with.... oh... "i"... bugger...
DNS is for naming domains and machines, not just websites.
... try email for starters.
There is more to the network than just port 80
I always use DomainSurfer which does sub-string matching if not proper wildcards...
cat blahlblahblha.txt | awk '{ print $8 $2;}'
cat blahlblahblha.txt | perl -ane 'print $F[7], $F[1], "\n"'
or
perl -ane 'print $F[7], $F[1], "\n"' blahlblahblha.txt
Nothing wrong with awk and sed and bash, but the origin of perl was Larry kept on writing sh+awk+sed scripts and forgetting where he needed a "$", where a ";", which index started at 0 or at 1.. etc. and wishing he had all 3 with a unified syntax, so don't be surprised that most stuff (not all, just most) can be expressed in very similar ways.
Try "perldoc perltrap" for hints - awk programmers should look at command line options -a, -n, sed users look at -p.