Yeah, but think about the classic Japanese two-handed business card handover. What we really need is conductive business cards.
But, oh, I guess that by then they've *got* the information. Never mind.
Maybe you're just supposed to bow *really close* at just the same time and same degree (warning, status eval. violation) and the few strands of hair that contact act as the conductors.
Nope, never work.
O.K. Let's face it. This is clearly meant for use in the subway. A whole new defense for sexual harassment. "I wasn't fondling your breast, I was just checking to see if you were logged in."
Thank you. You have an excellent point. Now that you mention it, the shuttle abort zones are half way around the globe, aren't they?
So, I say again, when is a private launch company going to go out and build a facility in Guyana? I know that their government was up for it. Though then again, the facility going up in Tonga does kinda serve. It's just very far away.
Rustin
Yeah, it's uninhabited, but that's what R.H. Goddard said when he set up his first test site. And his second. And his third. That's what they said when they built the landing area for the New York Marine Air Terminal (now within La Guardia Airport, surrounded by apartment buildings) That's what they said when they built JPL in what, *Pasadena*?.
In other words, okay, so it's empty. How do they insure that it *stays* empty?
Personally I thought the Beal Aerospace idea of building in Guyana was great. The whole damn country has fewer people in it then, say, Dallas, and the entire economy is the size of the average American large town's. If you have a problem, just buy half the province, cash up front, and employ the rest.
Actually I used to know a guy who did 30+years of research on bike cadence (and unfortunately all of his files are sitting behind me at this very moment) and he concluded that Biopace gearing failed primarily because of a misunderstanding of the exertion patterns of most riders and so claimed that if you just mounted them 90 degrees off from the recommended pedal alignment they worked just fine.
Which takes us right back to the main discussion. Yep, TANSTAAFL, so this guy will have to just put in the time to get things right and probably suffer through quite a lot of "wasted" time on the way to building something good. But please document what *went wrong*. That way at least the next poor schmuck won't have to make *all* of the same mistakes the next time around.
So determine the metrics of "success", then
(1) measure twice
(2) cut once
(3) test
(4) analyze re metrics and document results, if not ready (5), if ready (7)
(5) redesign
(6) return to step (1)
(7) move on to next problem and start the whole bloody thing over again.
And maybe even eventually
(n) profit ! ! ! !
Actually I think/. is a great place to get advice on how. The real problem is getting advice on what.
Might I suggest two general approaches?
First of all, talk to actual customers in fields where they spend money on this sort of thing. Use a group like the American Institute of Architects or the American Society of Mechanical Engineers to reach the people who actually *do* flythroughs and renderings and see what they want from such a product. You may also find that talking to folk at a second-string engineering school (Stevens or RPI rather than MIT or CMU) you'll be able to get plenty of eager beta testers as unlike the more famous places, they don't get as many offers but they've got plenty of brains.
A variation on that would be to check out reviews of products in magazines like Architectural Record, and further, write to the relevant editors (not phone, you want to make it clear that you weren't just bored and calling on a lazy whim) and see what they've got to say. This page will give you a solid start on relevant organizations and variables.
Secondly, the current situation of having to use five different programs to finish the job is a little silly. I continue to be amazed by the frequency with which I hear somebody say that they do the sketching on paper or with something like Illustrator, then do the technical work in something like AutoCAD, drop in some people from Poser, then export to something like Maya, fix the resulting problems and render there, and then do final changes in Photoshop. Meanwhile stereolithography outputting is moved to something like Lightyear or Buildstation.
Might I suggest a rigorous NURBS implementation with an intuitive basic functionality such that an item can be rough generated with a PowerGlove/Glasstron UI and make it all the way through the process right to render, animation, and outputting of models. I know that it's a lot to ask but, hey, you *said* that you were ambitious. In fact, I suspect that if you can do a system such that you sell a $50 crippleware version through places like Download.com and the serious version elsewhere, you'ld be able to build your user set quickly and also get to market faster.
A side note is that the ability to generate objects for systems like Adobe Atmospherewould finalize the build once-use many times paradigm that I'm talking about. After all, how much overlap is there between these communities? I'ld say considerable, and if gamers can then use the objects they created for one part of their lives in another, they'll be happy campers.
Best of luck to you,
Rustin (former techie for Sweets, Arch. Record, Design-Build, This Old House, Index, Woodworker, etc.)
Thank you. You are the first person to address the question. If I had the mod points I've try to get you up to five. Bravo.
Also, having read your response and as somebody who has literally considered getting the six-color Apple logo tatooed on my shoulder, if I were in fact a Hughes shareholder I would *not* want them pursuing that market. mac folk will just have to continue spoofing/using Dave/whatever. I also think that it's a bit funny that your response so effectively refutes the BSD "we brought sanity and order to TCP/IP" muck.
Thanks again.
Re:more level-headed view of "hackers"
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Hacker Culture
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Nope, I suggest that you look again. While Kidder was only personally present for the Data General activities, he spends quite a bit of time on the history of VAXen and the surrounding computing environment.
Sure. I'll wear my Jerry Garcia tie, while using my BSD-derived Mac (are the Steves still hippies?) to read about Steve Case (an ex-hippie, ex-Apple guy) bitch about Geffen (even worse, a *gay* hippie) statements backing the Bono (hippie in denial)/Feinstein (still a hippie) Act while only the EFF (hippie central), Janis Ian (hippie all along), and others like them can back me up.
I hate to tell you this (no, I don't) but he culture wars are over. You lost. We won. Get over it.
please mod this to zero. I just couldn't control myself.
more level-headed view of "hackers"
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Hacker Culture
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· Score: 1
It's not comprehensive, but you might want to check out Tracy Kidder's Soul of a New Machine (I'm too lazy at the moment to link to a bookseller) about the creation of Data General and the much-revered VAX line of computers.
BTW, it is my suspicion that years from now, when all the dust settles, folk will conclude that a lot of key development of computers actually took place in industries like trucking (traveling salesman problem anyone?) far from the spotlight, where the techies were just expected to get the job done and not pressed for details.
After all, what was the first major industry to universally computerize?
Can you guess?
That's right, retail stores. Yup. Sam Walton always said that the biggest thing that gave him his edge was his heavy usage of computers for things like logistics and anticipation of demand.
Now given that the other major contenders are accounting/insurance and personnel departments I suspect that for every Steve and Steve working at Atari was a just as influential person who did their seminal work in a polyester shirt in some big conservative company. But since that's not good televison, it ain't gettin' covered any time soon. After all it would be much harder to cast a heartthrob like Noah Wyle in such a role. The best you'ld do is Jack Black or Curtis "Booger"Armstrong.
Off to dig out my original, pre-recall, "Real Genius" poster,
Rustin
And, if someone wants to hire a Leo DeCaprio and Kate Winslet lookalike, and fill in the love scenes with some hard-core, let 'em.
Actually, what if somebody hired DeCaprio and Billy Zane lookalikes and added some hard core "man on man action"? Much more legally interesting and I betcha it'ld sell better too.
Heh, heh. Undermining American values again. Yep, I love it.
A car is not a copyrighted work. Your analogy is poor and misleading.
Au contraire, my dear.
Car companies spend tens of millions of dollars (by some definitions hundreds) to promote the identity of their marque, so that when you hear "Cadillac" or "BMW" you instantly have a certain clear and distinctive "vision" in your head (I'll bet it just happened too, when you read those brands).
And yes, in different ways they are protecting that "vison" with copyrights (trade dress, mottos, etc.), design patents, trademarks, utility patents (think cup holders), and every other form of protection that our government has created as a part of their mandate to "promote the useful arts".
Better luck next time.
Copyright was designed to give people an incentive to produce things, not this specifically.
Yes and no.
Actually, edited works of the sort that this creates were the norm when the framers were alive. The whole idea of a "pure" portrayal of an author's idea being the only appropriate one is very recent. That's why things like "early music" on original instruments are just now taking off.
The Shakespeare to which an educated 1700's person was exposed was heavily edited, as was most classic Greek work, let alone something like political speech, that notoriously reappeared in edited form constantly.
After all, what do we call this stuff? "Bowdlerized". As in Thomas Bowdler who lived from 1754 to 1825.
So you can argue legality or ethics and have ground to stand on, but don't even try to argue "original intent". Our founding fathers knew this phenomenon well and had every chance to write it into the copyright laws had they so chosen.
But oil lamps don't really conjure up that whole Tron thing quite so well, do they?
Used conventionally, no. But try a two foot channel (metal gutter will do fine) blocked from direct view and filled with flaming alcohol. Reflect that puppy off something appropriate (a sheet of masonite painted sky blue or with a sheet of reflective mylar glued to it) and you can get some pretty spacey effects on a beer budget. Also, doing this is so cheap that most people are far more likely to experiment with it then they are with the specially mail-ordered, took-six-weeks-to-get-it light strip that they can't afford to/aren't willing to replace.
Of course another cool cheap trick is to put a row of cheap power strips on your ceiling, paint them to match what they're sitting on, and plug in tons of those cheap little electroluminescent night lights. That will give you rows of blue and green lights along your walls and/or ceiling. Careful and subdued use of Glow In the Dark paint and those little GITD dots sold for astronomy kits can help complete the look. (Don't go overboard; less is more. It's much easier to add then to take away.) Keep in mind that anything bought in bulk counts as expensive, so check out your local 99 cent/discount store for supplies as the cheesy $2.50 power strip that you would normally scoff at may be perfect for this.
I'm telling you, as somebody who stripped his bathroom down to the plaster, smeared on thin smears of plaster (mixed with those funky 3M reflective balls and man, was that a waste of money), and then covered it all with stain and then eight coats of varnish, all to look better when seen in a combination of electroluminescent and oil lamp lighting, each situation and each person's taste is different. And since this stuff is so cool precisely because it creates a low-level response, one should really experiment as much as possible.
BTW, if, like me, you're *truly* insane, then you can get some great silvery "high tech" effects by mixing small amounts of silver bronzing powder (ideally in two or more similar shades) into varnish and applying it to a surface here and there. Words of caution: you will want to use a wide brush (ideally over 1.5 inches) that has had almost all the bristle cut off. This gives you a short, even stroke. Chinese sumi-ei brushes work great.
You can get all the supplies for this here or at your neighborhood art supply store. Check prices as they can vary by as much as 500% for the same item.
Last point. If you look at a movie like TRON you'll find that much of the power of the effect is it's comprehensiveness. There must be an absolute minimum of exceptions to the color scheme. If you can match it to the dominant color (charcoal grey may be more practical and just as effective as black) then do so. Light switch plates. alarm clocks, everything. If you're afraid that you might change your mind tomorrow then do the job in tempera paints. They're very cheap, quick to apply, and let's face it, on most plastic they'll start to flake off pretty fast anyway, making them a low-risk test indeed. The other extreme is nail polish. And let me assure you, nail polish is a pain in the butt to apply. It dries very fast, keeping every little ridge you left in it and some you may not have (don't paint on too much at a time). But . . . it comes in every Tron-ish color there is, expecially if you check out the girly stores where they have brands like Smashmouth and Pure Ice (I got a great sixties look on my Mac's speakers with some silver, gloss over matte) Also check out Old Navy as a late night "I'm gonna do this *now* dammit!" source. (Ain't excessive caffeine grand?)
So, what is the short form?
Do cheap stuff first in several media so that you can figure out what you like. (Parties are a great excuse.)
Light strips are good, flat panel night lights are better.
Indirect lighting, attention to color scheme, and funky materials like mylar blankets, plain glow in the dark stickers, and nail polish are all good ways to finish things off.
Have a great time and be sure to post your results somewhere when you're done.
Rustin
Well, I've taken the training for QPS (hey, somebody wants to pay to fly me to Denver for a week of futzing around, who am I to say no?), I've done admin work in Cumulus, and worked with MediaSphere. So, based on that, I'ld say, yet again, ask to see screenshots of the admin tools, sample printouts, a list of prebuilt reports, and a list of functions and how they're accessed. Then, once you've done that, get a demo and you'll be able to see for yourself how easy or hard the system is to run.
Chances are that what they're calling "programming" (yeah, right!) is building the config file, which is admittedly a bitch. Personally, I always did that by wandering off to the park with the fifty or sixty pages of printout and editing it there. In other words, doing/majorly revising a config does require raw text, but in a good system it should be more like creating the accounting section of a large annual report than like, say, writing in C.
So if they're so easy (comparatively) to run, why do people get away with charging thousands of dollars? It's two things. To some extent they're just charging what the market will bear and to some extent it's simply that if a corporation plans to put somebody in charge of their crown jewels (and make no mistake, that's what content admin is) then they're perfectly content(heh), and appropriately so, to spend the extra two or three days of training to go over things the one last time that might prevent a mishap.
Personally, I once had a problem with the backup/archive application in a CMS and accidently (screen redraw problem, combined with faulty error message) put in the command to erase and zero out most of three issues of a major national magazine. Layouts, stories, photos, ad tracking logs. The works. Oops! Too bad. You didn't *really* want a Christmas issue, did you? I'm sure that General Motors won't mind letting you keep the fifty thousand dollars they paid for their ad.
The only thing that saved my butt was an absolutely obsessive awareness of how the system worked, right down to things like bugs in screen redraw, as a result of which I had built in a workaround just in case this very thing happened. I was able to cancel the command before it could fully execute (it was still running through its preparatory pre-erase automatic functions) and the editorial staff never even knew. Was this worth the extra couple thousand dollars it cost a multi-billion dollar company to get me trained to that level of knowledge? Yah, I'ld say so.
This brings up another problem. Let's say you want to offer training in a major CMS, let's say Vignette. It's the same problem airlines have when looking for experienced pilots. The gear costs a ton, there are fewer active seats to work the app in the entire world then there are PCs in one medium sized town, you can only really learn how it works with months of time managing the work of at least thirty or forty creatives/editors, and so forth.
The bottom line: how many qualified people are on the entire planet who aren't tied up in full time gigs? I know that just including my primary system (QPS) and my primary industry (large print pubs) drops me into a group of fewer than two thousand qualified admins WORLDWIDE. Reduce that down to those who are good teachers *and* aren't busy and it's slim pickins. Add to that the fact that there aren't enough customers to justify even two classes per city a month and of course it's expensive and difficult to get trainers.
Of course this is an important argument for scalable systems, where the skills learned in a three person shop apply to a seven hundred person shop. Yet another reason I'm sitting this out.
So, back to the original topic. In my experience a good CMS should be no harder to work with than a large, say, cc:mail installation. Like Go, you'll be quite busy enough working the implications of all that stuff moving around and all those users/statuses/groups to manage as it is.
Which takes us to yet another proof to me that the open source CMSes are still clueless. Look at any big production environment and you'll see at least ten different statuses that a document may be in. You've got (at least):
needs to be done but not yet assigned (as in "we'll need a turkey logo for the Thanksgiving page, see if you can give it some Flash functions")
assigned but not yet started ("Okay, Paolo, this is yours, here are the notes and template")
rough
first edit
second edit (some places have as many as six edit stages but we'll leave it at two)
ready for proof (known in my world as "blues" because they used to be run to press on special blue paper/ink)
final (no more changes allowed but not yet run)
live
archive
hold ("pull that story from this issue, we don't have the space/the interview fell through; we'll run it in another issue")
next/later specified edit cycle (the end of the year overview that's already in the works even though it's only March)
not for publication (trust me, if you don't create it, the edit staff will find a way to fake it. This is where you keep random stuff like mockups, joke documents, etc.)
Trash (yes, this is a status because a.)like the Windoze/Mac trash can sometimes you want to be able to change your mind and b.) some user classes who can be trusted to change a document status can't be trusted to permanently delete documents)
And keep in mind that a good CMS should change document characteristics (who can check it out, what aspects are still editable, who it gets default routed to) automagically when the status changes.
I could list another ten statuses and another four or five kinds of functionality without breathing hard but you get the idea. So, how is most of this stuff out there built? Rough, Final, Live, maybe one other, and usually none of them editable. Like I said, amateur hour.
Anyway, I'm late for a barbeque. See y'all later,
Rustin
Actually I *had* already figured most of that stuff out. My point wasn't an ignorance of specs on my part; it was that any place that made it such a pain in the ass to figure out easy stuff like platform can't be trusted to handle the tough stuff.
CRM/content admin shouldn't require a dedicated programmer. Especially for any project clamoring for people to use their software instead of commercial offerings. Because like it or not, Vignette, Cumulus, Mediasphere, and QPS and so forth, whatever they may cost to buy, will all continue to be cheaper in the commercial world if the open source alternatives require coding to do jobs that commercial products better enable with the click of a button.
On top of that, in my experience open source tools even have inferior reporting functions, making them harder to use that the geekiest thing that actually *is* an appropriate part of an asset manager's job. Give me a choice between a tool that has real built in diagnostics and something where the "support" guy just tells you to put the log file in excel and build something from there and guess what I'll choose?
Face it folks, most of us don't get up in the morning looking for excuses to write new software. We use software to do SOMETHING ELSE and have no more desire to spend our time programming then the average driver wants a car that needs you to machine new parts before it will start in the morning.
Some days the open source community reminds me of the character in Ripping Yarns who thinks it's fun when somebody drags her way in, freezing and damn-near crippled, from being stranded in winter rain out on the moors (almost dying) because it's a chance to test his new wheel alignment. At the end of the day, believe it or not, this stuff is supposed to exist to be useful tools, not chances for endless fiddling while the poor sap depending on it to work goes bankrupt/loses their project/has their work deleted by mistake.
Okay, were do I start?
I've wandered about the site a bit (I'll go back later) and immediately I'm seeing some mighty familiar stuff. As in signs of just the sort of approach that I was complaining about above.
No FAQ, just a bunch of min-FAQs on subsets of subsets of functions. I'm not too interested in any project that doesn't consider it worth their time to explain what they're doing. I have a reasonable right to expect one document that says and explains:
this is what our product does (jargon lists don't count, actual sentences written in normal english required)
this is how it does it
these are the operating system/hardware requirements (cost estimates help a lot)
this is the estimated time to get up and running, i.e. what sorts of training/familiarity are needed to administer, use, set up this system
these our intended target market segments, both current and long-term
these are similar systems and a sentence or two on how we differ from them
here is a basic list of functions/features
Next, as I've gone through the FAQs, such as they are, I'm seeing lines and lines of coding required to address basic issues. Take a look at the UI of the system I linked to in the parent post to see this sort of thing done right. If I have to write half a page of code just to define a user set them I'm so gone.
Screenshots of the thing in action? Couldn't find any. Examples of people using it and how? Nope, didn't see that either.
Well, lessee, rights management? They say they have some. Guess that I'm supposed to guess about what. File types? No se. Routing approach? Haven't a clue. Admin functions? Nope. Archiving? Nope again.
Hmmmm... other then that? Other than the many other things I'm seeing like badly documented links that could be downloads, pages, or functions, click here and guess? Looks to me like I'm expected to download the app (while hoping that my setup will support it), find a way to get it running (who *knows* how long that will take. Hours? Days? Can't say) train myself in how to use it, get it running with some of my datasets, and then decide if it's useful or not.
I'm sorry, I *have* a life. I didn't put up with this when I was paid a salary to be a full-time sysadmin. I'm certainly not putting up with it now that I run my own business.
And if you think that "Oh, we're not at version one yet; we don't have time for that sort of thing", well, tiny little companies like LemkeSoft have been managing it just fine, pre-release, for over twenty years. Back when I bought my software on five and quarter inch disks for an Osborne there were already plenty of little one-person software companies that had far more respect for the people who actually *use* their software then ANY of the open source CRM projects feel they should have to condescend to accomplish.
What do I think? Thank you for a perfect example of exactly the sort of programmer-driven amateur hour I was talking about.
Rustin
I'ld recommend that you go with LEDs instead. Lots more flexibility. Far more options.
Let me give you a few of the links from the upcoming LED section of my site. (Yep, that was a plug.)
American Science and Surplus Inner Mountain Outfitters Gilway Superbright LEDs
Overall you'll find that they'll work with any decent source of 3.5 to 6 volt (depending on the LED) current, which includes the cheesy little plug-in transformers that you can buy at Radio Shack. But they'll work better off battery power or some other means that is truly DC. I ran a tiny custom jobbie in my bathroom as a functional light source for weeks, all running off standard nine-volt batteries. I just turned it on and left it on to see how long it would last. These, BTW, were rebuilt versions of the LED-based clip-on lights that they sell for bike riders.
Of course if you've got a cheap supply of watch batteries or have a recharger for them then you could just hang photons about the place.
Lastly, if you're just going for cool low-level lighting, good old FLAME can be plenty of fun. In other words, don't dismiss the possibilities of oil lamps and such until you've tried them. Properly set up, especially if they're indirect, they give a just variable enough glow to be quite satisfying. I've also had fun with building custom lamps based on isopropyl alcohol. You know, the stuff sold for 99 cents a bottle to put on small cuts. A big (say, two inches around) alcohol flame in a deep container with a well setup oxygen supply will last for hours. Since the flame isn't very hot, is non-toxic, and blows out readily it's easy to experiment using things like soup bowls while you figure out what you want to do. Yo could cheat and go somewhere like Illuminations (I'm not providing a link, there are too many mall businesses as it is) and buy wicks, but you shouldn't need to bother.
And with all of this the fire department has only come by here once (damn those witnesses!).
Rustin
What happened? They cut their salaries *way* down, the pool of available techies disappeared as the PC support/customization industry expanded beyond Silicon Valley and we all got better jobs, and the number of customers who cared about and understood things like impedence and rise times dropped waaaaaaaaaaaaaay down. For crying out loud! These days people think that making something with LEGO Mindstorms constitutes building it from "scratch".
In MY day, mumble, grumble. . . ten miles of snow, every day! uphill! BOTH WAYS! . . . wound our own transformer coils with our TEETH . . . cast our own ferrite cores out of melted down cobbler's nails. . . bitch, moan, complain
I massively disagree. This article is the stuff of frustration. And I agree with them. As an old corporate guy I've been watching the various open source content management systems for years and to me they *all* look like muck. Specifically, they look like the work of a bunch of programmers who have never for a moment on their lives run or even worked in an actual content creation environment. They program in the features that are "cool" to implement instead of what an actual publisher could use.
So they're finally talking about how poorly an aspect of this whole movement functions in the real "I need to make a living with this" world and surprise, surprise, it sucks so bad that the room is filled with (heh, heh) jabber, in which they can't even agree on what they're arguing about or what goal they're seeking.
This all looks promising to me but frankly I wrote this whole category off years ago. As far as I'm concerned the dedicated content management systems that are available or well on the way now are VisiCalc in a world where most of us need Excel. I. e., this is all very nice but I'll wait until they've putzed around for a few more years, have worked out the most egregious mistakes, and start over from scratch.
BTW, if any of you ever want to check out a *real* content management system, you know, one that complex pubs (like the New York Times, Time Magazine, JCrew, etc.) actually *use*, then study the feature list, UI, etc. of QPS. Now almost a decade old and in the hands of a succession of commerce-impaired clueless corporations, it's still more usable, easier to administer, and more powerful than anything I've seen. Now if only *that* would get open sourced (a la PostGres) we'ld be getting somewhere.
Until then I'm placing my bets on well-customized SQL-compliant systems based on rigorous adherence to rich XML schemas.
Happy days,
Rustin
Well, yes, and sorta no. As a guy with asthma living in upper Manhattan I've taken the time to talk to quite a few doctors about this and they all agree (most emphatically the pediatricians) that it mostly comes down to *three* interrelated issues.
First of all there's stuff like roach droppings and rat dander (and the lice and other parasites that come with them) that are themselves reaction-inducing.
Then there's the seriously disproportionate amounts of toxins in poverty-stricken areas. This comes about because undesirable facilities like bus depots, factories, sewage treatment plants, etc. tend to both get sited there and be less subject to inspection since poor people are less capable (on average) at raising a ruckus and getting things like OSHA regs enforced.
And perhaps most importantly, residents of such areas tend to be eating worse food, smoking more (and subject to more second hand-smoke), sleeping worse hours, encountering more stress both conscious (muggings, a cousin sleeping on the sofa for three months, etc.) and unconscious (more street noise, more variable environment, etc.). This trashes their immune response, which makes them more vulnerable to immune disorders from asthma to AIDS.
So, what does this all add up to?
Looks to me like it shows the how a key issue frequently involves a tangle of money, science, and politics. This tangle can best be effectively addressed by a sizable group of scientists and other experts whose:
a.) data collection and review methods must be transparent (can you hear me, Mr. "you don't need to know who I met with" Cheney?)
b.) terms should ideally be staggered and long term to provide continuity and institutional memory
c.) continuing service must be resistant to political pressure as they inevitably will have to make judgements that will cost *somebody* a lot of money
d.) whose status and final reports must be made freely available and readable on a predictable schedule for which the member will be held accountable.
and e.) viewpoints should be chosen for diversity to decrease the risk of groupthink and excess reverence for authority (think of Feynman's role in the Challenger investigation).
Boy, sounds to me (but what would I know?) like the exact opposite of the decisions to date of the Bush administration.
BTW, if this sounds like a lot of irrelevant political jargon to you, just think about what/.ers keep demanding of open-source projects. It's pretty much the same stuff. For A and D think of the bitching when a major project stops giving status reports. For B think of the furor when someone like Perens moves. And so on and so on. So if the/. community demands these things (and it does and should) for things like video card drivers then I think that it's pretty justified that gene-testing be held to the same standard.
Rustin
It just goes downhill from here, folks.
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Whoops! Contradicting yourself there ol' son.
EITHER the truth is just not clear OR scientists can reasonably be chosen based on your already knowing what conclusion they'll reach.
Can't have both.
Let's face it folks, this administration is fundamentally oposed to public review of *any* issue.
Bottom line, we leave them there long enough and they'll start going after/.
Don't believe me? Look at what happened to the SPIE (Society of PhotoInstrumentation Engineers) under Reagan. They started being threatened with arrest on treason charges if they released research that contradicted SDI (The "Star Wars" program).
As somebody who worked on a few SDI proposals and was doing fiber optics work at the time (mostly for defense applications) I don't intend to be quiet this time.
So, are you ready to "hang separately"?
Rustin H. Wright
Founder, Reed and Wright
F.O. patent 4,808,204 (drawings done on a Mac Plus!)
Slashdot Mirror
Mmm. Now I'll have to get my own stockpile. Heh, heh, heh.
Yeah, but think about the classic Japanese two-handed business card handover. What we really need is conductive business cards.
But, oh, I guess that by then they've *got* the information. Never mind.
Maybe you're just supposed to bow *really close* at just the same time and same degree (warning, status eval. violation) and the few strands of hair that contact act as the conductors.
Nope, never work.
O.K. Let's face it. This is clearly meant for use in the subway. A whole new defense for sexual harassment. "I wasn't fondling your breast, I was just checking to see if you were logged in."
Thank you. You have an excellent point. Now that you mention it, the shuttle abort zones are half way around the globe, aren't they?
So, I say again, when is a private launch company going to go out and build a facility in Guyana? I know that their government was up for it. Though then again, the facility going up in Tonga does kinda serve. It's just very far away.
Rustin
Yeah, it's uninhabited, but that's what R.H. Goddard said when he set up his first test site. And his second. And his third. That's what they said when they built the landing area for the New York Marine Air Terminal (now within La Guardia Airport, surrounded by apartment buildings) That's what they said when they built JPL in what, *Pasadena*?.
In other words, okay, so it's empty. How do they insure that it *stays* empty?
Personally I thought the Beal Aerospace idea of building in Guyana was great. The whole damn country has fewer people in it then, say, Dallas, and the entire economy is the size of the average American large town's. If you have a problem, just buy half the province, cash up front, and employ the rest.
Actually I used to know a guy who did 30+years of research on bike cadence (and unfortunately all of his files are sitting behind me at this very moment) and he concluded that Biopace gearing failed primarily because of a misunderstanding of the exertion patterns of most riders and so claimed that if you just mounted them 90 degrees off from the recommended pedal alignment they worked just fine.
Which takes us right back to the main discussion. Yep, TANSTAAFL, so this guy will have to just put in the time to get things right and probably suffer through quite a lot of "wasted" time on the way to building something good. But please document what *went wrong*. That way at least the next poor schmuck won't have to make *all* of the same mistakes the next time around.
So determine the metrics of "success", then (1) measure twice
(2) cut once
(3) test
(4) analyze re metrics and document results, if not ready (5), if ready (7)
(5) redesign
(6) return to step (1)
(7) move on to next problem and start the whole bloody thing over again.
And maybe even eventually
(n) profit ! ! ! !
Actually I think /. is a great place to get advice on how. The real problem is getting advice on what.
Might I suggest two general approaches?
First of all, talk to actual customers in fields where they spend money on this sort of thing. Use a group like the American Institute of Architects or the American Society of Mechanical Engineers to reach the people who actually *do* flythroughs and renderings and see what they want from such a product. You may also find that talking to folk at a second-string engineering school (Stevens or RPI rather than MIT or CMU) you'll be able to get plenty of eager beta testers as unlike the more famous places, they don't get as many offers but they've got plenty of brains.
A variation on that would be to check out reviews of products in magazines like Architectural Record, and further, write to the relevant editors (not phone, you want to make it clear that you weren't just bored and calling on a lazy whim) and see what they've got to say.
This page will give you a solid start on relevant organizations and variables.
Secondly, the current situation of having to use five different programs to finish the job is a little silly. I continue to be amazed by the frequency with which I hear somebody say that they do the sketching on paper or with something like Illustrator, then do the technical work in something like AutoCAD, drop in some people from Poser, then export to something like Maya, fix the resulting problems and render there, and then do final changes in Photoshop. Meanwhile stereolithography outputting is moved to something like Lightyear or Buildstation.
Might I suggest a rigorous NURBS implementation with an intuitive basic functionality such that an item can be rough generated with a PowerGlove/Glasstron UI and make it all the way through the process right to render, animation, and outputting of models. I know that it's a lot to ask but, hey, you *said* that you were ambitious. In fact, I suspect that if you can do a system such that you sell a $50 crippleware version through places like Download.com and the serious version elsewhere, you'ld be able to build your user set quickly and also get to market faster.
A side note is that the ability to generate objects for systems like Adobe Atmospherewould finalize the build once-use many times paradigm that I'm talking about. After all, how much overlap is there between these communities? I'ld say considerable, and if gamers can then use the objects they created for one part of their lives in another, they'll be happy campers.
Best of luck to you,
Rustin (former techie for Sweets, Arch. Record, Design-Build, This Old House, Index, Woodworker, etc.)
Thank you. You are the first person to address the question. If I had the mod points I've try to get you up to five. Bravo.
Also, having read your response and as somebody who has literally considered getting the six-color Apple logo tatooed on my shoulder, if I were in fact a Hughes shareholder I would *not* want them pursuing that market. mac folk will just have to continue spoofing/using Dave/whatever.
I also think that it's a bit funny that your response so effectively refutes the BSD "we brought sanity and order to TCP/IP" muck.
Thanks again.
Nope, I suggest that you look again. While Kidder was only personally present for the Data General activities, he spends quite a bit of time on the history of VAXen and the surrounding computing environment.
Sure. I'll wear my Jerry Garcia tie, while using my BSD-derived Mac (are the Steves still hippies?) to read about Steve Case (an ex-hippie, ex-Apple guy) bitch about Geffen (even worse, a *gay* hippie) statements backing the Bono (hippie in denial)/Feinstein (still a hippie) Act while only the EFF (hippie central), Janis Ian (hippie all along), and others like them can back me up.
I hate to tell you this (no, I don't) but he culture wars are over. You lost. We won. Get over it.
please mod this to zero. I just couldn't control myself.
It's not comprehensive, but you might want to check out Tracy Kidder's Soul of a New Machine (I'm too lazy at the moment to link to a bookseller) about the creation of Data General and the much-revered VAX line of computers.
BTW, it is my suspicion that years from now, when all the dust settles, folk will conclude that a lot of key development of computers actually took place in industries like trucking (traveling salesman problem anyone?) far from the spotlight, where the techies were just expected to get the job done and not pressed for details.
After all, what was the first major industry to universally computerize?
Can you guess?
That's right, retail stores. Yup. Sam Walton always said that the biggest thing that gave him his edge was his heavy usage of computers for things like logistics and anticipation of demand.
Now given that the other major contenders are accounting/insurance and personnel departments I suspect that for every Steve and Steve working at Atari was a just as influential person who did their seminal work in a polyester shirt in some big conservative company. But since that's not good televison, it ain't gettin' covered any time soon. After all it would be much harder to cast a heartthrob like Noah Wyle in such a role. The best you'ld do is Jack Black or Curtis "Booger"Armstrong.
Off to dig out my original, pre-recall, "Real Genius" poster,
Rustin
"Oh, him? He's harmless. Part of the free speech movement at Berkeley in the sixties. I think he did a little too much LDS."
- James Tiberius K.
Three little words (correctly spelled).
Get.
A.
Life.
And, if someone wants to hire a Leo DeCaprio and Kate Winslet lookalike, and fill in the love scenes with some hard-core, let 'em.
Actually, what if somebody hired DeCaprio and Billy Zane lookalikes and added some hard core "man on man action"? Much more legally interesting and I betcha it'ld sell better too.
Heh, heh. Undermining American values again. Yep, I love it.
A car is not a copyrighted work. Your analogy is poor and misleading.
Au contraire, my dear.
Car companies spend tens of millions of dollars (by some definitions hundreds) to promote the identity of their marque, so that when you hear "Cadillac" or "BMW" you instantly have a certain clear and distinctive "vision" in your head (I'll bet it just happened too, when you read those brands).
And yes, in different ways they are protecting that "vison" with copyrights (trade dress, mottos, etc.), design patents, trademarks, utility patents (think cup holders), and every other form of protection that our government has created as a part of their mandate to "promote the useful arts".
Better luck next time.
Copyright was designed to give people an incentive to produce things, not this specifically.
Yes and no.
Actually, edited works of the sort that this creates were the norm when the framers were alive. The whole idea of a "pure" portrayal of an author's idea being the only appropriate one is very recent. That's why things like "early music" on original instruments are just now taking off.
The Shakespeare to which an educated 1700's person was exposed was heavily edited, as was most classic Greek work, let alone something like political speech, that notoriously reappeared in edited form constantly.
After all, what do we call this stuff? "Bowdlerized". As in Thomas Bowdler who lived from 1754 to 1825.
So you can argue legality or ethics and have ground to stand on, but don't even try to argue "original intent". Our founding fathers knew this phenomenon well and had every chance to write it into the copyright laws had they so chosen.
But oil lamps don't really conjure up that whole Tron thing quite so well, do they?
Used conventionally, no. But try a two foot channel (metal gutter will do fine) blocked from direct view and filled with flaming alcohol. Reflect that puppy off something appropriate (a sheet of masonite painted sky blue or with a sheet of reflective mylar glued to it) and you can get some pretty spacey effects on a beer budget. Also, doing this is so cheap that most people are far more likely to experiment with it then they are with the specially mail-ordered, took-six-weeks-to-get-it light strip that they can't afford to/aren't willing to replace.
Of course another cool cheap trick is to put a row of cheap power strips on your ceiling, paint them to match what they're sitting on, and plug in tons of those cheap little electroluminescent night lights. That will give you rows of blue and green lights along your walls and/or ceiling. Careful and subdued use of Glow In the Dark paint and those little GITD dots sold for astronomy kits can help complete the look. (Don't go overboard; less is more. It's much easier to add then to take away.)
Keep in mind that anything bought in bulk counts as expensive, so check out your local 99 cent/discount store for supplies as the cheesy $2.50 power strip that you would normally scoff at may be perfect for this.
I'm telling you, as somebody who stripped his bathroom down to the plaster, smeared on thin smears of plaster (mixed with those funky 3M reflective balls and man, was that a waste of money), and then covered it all with stain and then eight coats of varnish, all to look better when seen in a combination of electroluminescent and oil lamp lighting, each situation and each person's taste is different. And since this stuff is so cool precisely because it creates a low-level response, one should really experiment as much as possible.
BTW, if, like me, you're *truly* insane, then you can get some great silvery "high tech" effects by mixing small amounts of silver bronzing powder (ideally in two or more similar shades) into varnish and applying it to a surface here and there. Words of caution: you will want to use a wide brush (ideally over 1.5 inches) that has had almost all the bristle cut off. This gives you a short, even stroke. Chinese sumi-ei brushes work great.
You can get all the supplies for this here or at your neighborhood art supply store. Check prices as they can vary by as much as 500% for the same item.
Last point. If you look at a movie like TRON you'll find that much of the power of the effect is it's comprehensiveness. There must be an absolute minimum of exceptions to the color scheme. If you can match it to the dominant color (charcoal grey may be more practical and just as effective as black) then do so. Light switch plates. alarm clocks, everything. If you're afraid that you might change your mind tomorrow then do the job in tempera paints. They're very cheap, quick to apply, and let's face it, on most plastic they'll start to flake off pretty fast anyway, making them a low-risk test indeed. The other extreme is nail polish. And let me assure you, nail polish is a pain in the butt to apply. It dries very fast, keeping every little ridge you left in it and some you may not have (don't paint on too much at a time). But . . . it comes in every Tron-ish color there is, expecially if you check out the girly stores where they have brands like Smashmouth and Pure Ice (I got a great sixties look on my Mac's speakers with some silver, gloss over matte) Also check out Old Navy as a late night "I'm gonna do this *now* dammit!" source. (Ain't excessive caffeine grand?)
So, what is the short form?
Do cheap stuff first in several media so that you can figure out what you like. (Parties are a great excuse.)
Light strips are good, flat panel night lights are better.
Indirect lighting, attention to color scheme, and funky materials like mylar blankets, plain glow in the dark stickers, and nail polish are all good ways to finish things off.
Have a great time and be sure to post your results somewhere when you're done.
Rustin
Chances are that what they're calling "programming" (yeah, right!) is building the config file, which is admittedly a bitch. Personally, I always did that by wandering off to the park with the fifty or sixty pages of printout and editing it there. In other words, doing/majorly revising a config does require raw text, but in a good system it should be more like creating the accounting section of a large annual report than like, say, writing in C.
So if they're so easy (comparatively) to run, why do people get away with charging thousands of dollars? It's two things. To some extent they're just charging what the market will bear and to some extent it's simply that if a corporation plans to put somebody in charge of their crown jewels (and make no mistake, that's what content admin is) then they're perfectly content(heh), and appropriately so, to spend the extra two or three days of training to go over things the one last time that might prevent a mishap.
Personally, I once had a problem with the backup/archive application in a CMS and accidently (screen redraw problem, combined with faulty error message) put in the command to erase and zero out most of three issues of a major national magazine. Layouts, stories, photos, ad tracking logs. The works. Oops! Too bad. You didn't *really* want a Christmas issue, did you? I'm sure that General Motors won't mind letting you keep the fifty thousand dollars they paid for their ad.
The only thing that saved my butt was an absolutely obsessive awareness of how the system worked, right down to things like bugs in screen redraw, as a result of which I had built in a workaround just in case this very thing happened. I was able to cancel the command before it could fully execute (it was still running through its preparatory pre-erase automatic functions) and the editorial staff never even knew. Was this worth the extra couple thousand dollars it cost a multi-billion dollar company to get me trained to that level of knowledge? Yah, I'ld say so.
This brings up another problem. Let's say you want to offer training in a major CMS, let's say Vignette. It's the same problem airlines have when looking for experienced pilots. The gear costs a ton, there are fewer active seats to work the app in the entire world then there are PCs in one medium sized town, you can only really learn how it works with months of time managing the work of at least thirty or forty creatives/editors, and so forth.
The bottom line: how many qualified people are on the entire planet who aren't tied up in full time gigs? I know that just including my primary system (QPS) and my primary industry (large print pubs) drops me into a group of fewer than two thousand qualified admins WORLDWIDE. Reduce that down to those who are good teachers *and* aren't busy and it's slim pickins. Add to that the fact that there aren't enough customers to justify even two classes per city a month and of course it's expensive and difficult to get trainers.
Of course this is an important argument for scalable systems, where the skills learned in a three person shop apply to a seven hundred person shop. Yet another reason I'm sitting this out.
So, back to the original topic. In my experience a good CMS should be no harder to work with than a large, say, cc:mail installation. Like Go, you'll be quite busy enough working the implications of all that stuff moving around and all those users/statuses/groups to manage as it is.
Which takes us to yet another proof to me that the open source CMSes are still clueless. Look at any big production environment and you'll see at least ten different statuses that a document may be in. You've got (at least):
needs to be done but not yet assigned (as in "we'll need a turkey logo for the Thanksgiving page, see if you can give it some Flash functions")
assigned but not yet started ("Okay, Paolo, this is yours, here are the notes and template")
rough
first edit
second edit (some places have as many as six edit stages but we'll leave it at two)
ready for proof (known in my world as "blues" because they used to be run to press on special blue paper/ink)
final (no more changes allowed but not yet run)
live
archive
hold ("pull that story from this issue, we don't have the space/the interview fell through; we'll run it in another issue")
next/later specified edit cycle (the end of the year overview that's already in the works even though it's only March)
not for publication (trust me, if you don't create it, the edit staff will find a way to fake it. This is where you keep random stuff like mockups, joke documents, etc.)
Trash (yes, this is a status because a.)like the Windoze/Mac trash can sometimes you want to be able to change your mind and b.) some user classes who can be trusted to change a document status can't be trusted to permanently delete documents)
And keep in mind that a good CMS should change document characteristics (who can check it out, what aspects are still editable, who it gets default routed to) automagically when the status changes.
I could list another ten statuses and another four or five kinds of functionality without breathing hard but you get the idea. So, how is most of this stuff out there built? Rough, Final, Live, maybe one other, and usually none of them editable. Like I said, amateur hour.
Anyway, I'm late for a barbeque. See y'all later,
Rustin
Actually I *had* already figured most of that stuff out. My point wasn't an ignorance of specs on my part; it was that any place that made it such a pain in the ass to figure out easy stuff like platform can't be trusted to handle the tough stuff.
CRM/content admin shouldn't require a dedicated programmer. Especially for any project clamoring for people to use their software instead of commercial offerings. Because like it or not, Vignette, Cumulus, Mediasphere, and QPS and so forth, whatever they may cost to buy, will all continue to be cheaper in the commercial world if the open source alternatives require coding to do jobs that commercial products better enable with the click of a button.
On top of that, in my experience open source tools even have inferior reporting functions, making them harder to use that the geekiest thing that actually *is* an appropriate part of an asset manager's job. Give me a choice between a tool that has real built in diagnostics and something where the "support" guy just tells you to put the log file in excel and build something from there and guess what I'll choose?
Face it folks, most of us don't get up in the morning looking for excuses to write new software. We use software to do SOMETHING ELSE and have no more desire to spend our time programming then the average driver wants a car that needs you to machine new parts before it will start in the morning.
Some days the open source community reminds me of the character in Ripping Yarns who thinks it's fun when somebody drags her way in, freezing and damn-near crippled, from being stranded in winter rain out on the moors (almost dying) because it's a chance to test his new wheel alignment.
At the end of the day, believe it or not, this stuff is supposed to exist to be useful tools, not chances for endless fiddling while the poor sap depending on it to work goes bankrupt/loses their project/has their work deleted by mistake.
I've wandered about the site a bit (I'll go back later) and immediately I'm seeing some mighty familiar stuff. As in signs of just the sort of approach that I was complaining about above.
No FAQ, just a bunch of min-FAQs on subsets of subsets of functions. I'm not too interested in any project that doesn't consider it worth their time to explain what they're doing. I have a reasonable right to expect one document that says and explains:
this is what our product does (jargon lists don't count, actual sentences written in normal english required)
this is how it does it
these are the operating system/hardware requirements (cost estimates help a lot)
this is the estimated time to get up and running, i.e. what sorts of training/familiarity are needed to administer, use, set up this system
these our intended target market segments, both current and long-term
these are similar systems and a sentence or two on how we differ from them
here is a basic list of functions/features
Next, as I've gone through the FAQs, such as they are, I'm seeing lines and lines of coding required to address basic issues. Take a look at the UI of the system I linked to in the parent post to see this sort of thing done right. If I have to write half a page of code just to define a user set them I'm so gone.
Screenshots of the thing in action? Couldn't find any. Examples of people using it and how? Nope, didn't see that either.
Well, lessee, rights management? They say they have some. Guess that I'm supposed to guess about what. File types? No se. Routing approach? Haven't a clue. Admin functions? Nope. Archiving? Nope again.
Hmmmm... other then that? Other than the many other things I'm seeing like badly documented links that could be downloads, pages, or functions, click here and guess? Looks to me like I'm expected to download the app (while hoping that my setup will support it), find a way to get it running (who *knows* how long that will take. Hours? Days? Can't say) train myself in how to use it, get it running with some of my datasets, and then decide if it's useful or not.
I'm sorry, I *have* a life. I didn't put up with this when I was paid a salary to be a full-time sysadmin. I'm certainly not putting up with it now that I run my own business.
And if you think that "Oh, we're not at version one yet; we don't have time for that sort of thing", well, tiny little companies like LemkeSoft have been managing it just fine, pre-release, for over twenty years. Back when I bought my software on five and quarter inch disks for an Osborne there were already plenty of little one-person software companies that had far more respect for the people who actually *use* their software then ANY of the open source CRM projects feel they should have to condescend to accomplish.
What do I think? Thank you for a perfect example of exactly the sort of programmer-driven amateur hour I was talking about.
Rustin
I'ld recommend that you go with LEDs instead. Lots more flexibility. Far more options.
Let me give you a few of the links from the upcoming LED section of my site. (Yep, that was a plug.)
American Science and Surplus
Inner Mountain Outfitters
Gilway
Superbright LEDs
Overall you'll find that they'll work with any decent source of 3.5 to 6 volt (depending on the LED) current, which includes the cheesy little plug-in transformers that you can buy at Radio Shack. But they'll work better off battery power or some other means that is truly DC. I ran a tiny custom jobbie in my bathroom as a functional light source for weeks, all running off standard nine-volt batteries. I just turned it on and left it on to see how long it would last. These, BTW, were rebuilt versions of the LED-based clip-on lights that they sell for bike riders.
Of course if you've got a cheap supply of watch batteries or have a recharger for them then you could just hang photons about the place.
Lastly, if you're just going for cool low-level lighting, good old FLAME can be plenty of fun. In other words, don't dismiss the possibilities of oil lamps and such until you've tried them. Properly set up, especially if they're indirect, they give a just variable enough glow to be quite satisfying. I've also had fun with building custom lamps based on isopropyl alcohol. You know, the stuff sold for 99 cents a bottle to put on small cuts. A big (say, two inches around) alcohol flame in a deep container with a well setup oxygen supply will last for hours. Since the flame isn't very hot, is non-toxic, and blows out readily it's easy to experiment using things like soup bowls while you figure out what you want to do. Yo could cheat and go somewhere like Illuminations (I'm not providing a link, there are too many mall businesses as it is) and buy wicks, but you shouldn't need to bother.
And with all of this the fire department has only come by here once (damn those witnesses!).
Rustin
Debabelizer is the way to go. Check it out.
Now if only I could get my file cabinets organized that easily. * Sigh *
Rustin
What happened? They cut their salaries *way* down, the pool of available techies disappeared as the PC support/customization industry expanded beyond Silicon Valley and we all got better jobs, and the number of customers who cared about and understood things like impedence and rise times dropped waaaaaaaaaaaaaay down. For crying out loud! These days people think that making something with LEGO Mindstorms constitutes building it from "scratch".
In MY day, mumble, grumble. . . ten miles of snow, every day! uphill! BOTH WAYS! . . . wound our own transformer coils with our TEETH . . . cast our own ferrite cores out of melted down cobbler's nails. . . bitch, moan, complain
I massively disagree. This article is the stuff of frustration. And I agree with them. As an old corporate guy I've been watching the various open source content management systems for years and to me they *all* look like muck.
Specifically, they look like the work of a bunch of programmers who have never for a moment on their lives run or even worked in an actual content creation environment. They program in the features that are "cool" to implement instead of what an actual publisher could use.
So they're finally talking about how poorly an aspect of this whole movement functions in the real "I need to make a living with this" world and surprise, surprise, it sucks so bad that the room is filled with (heh, heh) jabber, in which they can't even agree on what they're arguing about or what goal they're seeking.
This all looks promising to me but frankly I wrote this whole category off years ago. As far as I'm concerned the dedicated content management systems that are available or well on the way now are VisiCalc in a world where most of us need Excel. I. e., this is all very nice but I'll wait until they've putzed around for a few more years, have worked out the most egregious mistakes, and start over from scratch.
BTW, if any of you ever want to check out a *real* content management system, you know, one that complex pubs (like the New York Times, Time Magazine, JCrew, etc.) actually *use*, then study the feature list, UI, etc. of QPS. Now almost a decade old and in the hands of a succession of commerce-impaired clueless corporations, it's still more usable, easier to administer, and more powerful than anything I've seen. Now if only *that* would get open sourced (a la PostGres) we'ld be getting somewhere.
Until then I'm placing my bets on well-customized SQL-compliant systems based on rigorous adherence to rich XML schemas.
Happy days,
Rustin
Well, yes, and sorta no. As a guy with asthma living in upper Manhattan I've taken the time to talk to quite a few doctors about this and they all agree (most emphatically the pediatricians) that it mostly comes down to *three* interrelated issues.
/.ers keep demanding of open-source projects. It's pretty much the same stuff. For A and D think of the bitching when a major project stops giving status reports. For B think of the furor when someone like Perens moves. And so on and so on. So if the /. community demands these things (and it does and should) for things like video card drivers then I think that it's pretty justified that gene-testing be held to the same standard.
First of all there's stuff like roach droppings and rat dander (and the lice and other parasites that come with them) that are themselves reaction-inducing.
Then there's the seriously disproportionate amounts of toxins in poverty-stricken areas. This comes about because undesirable facilities like bus depots, factories, sewage treatment plants, etc. tend to both get sited there and be less subject to inspection since poor people are less capable (on average) at raising a ruckus and getting things like OSHA regs enforced.
And perhaps most importantly, residents of such areas tend to be eating worse food, smoking more (and subject to more second hand-smoke), sleeping worse hours, encountering more stress both conscious (muggings, a cousin sleeping on the sofa for three months, etc.) and unconscious (more street noise, more variable environment, etc.). This trashes their immune response, which makes them more vulnerable to immune disorders from asthma to AIDS.
So, what does this all add up to?
Looks to me like it shows the how a key issue frequently involves a tangle of money, science, and politics. This tangle can best be effectively addressed by a sizable group of scientists and other experts whose:
a.) data collection and review methods must be transparent (can you hear me, Mr. "you don't need to know who I met with" Cheney?)
b.) terms should ideally be staggered and long term to provide continuity and institutional memory
c.) continuing service must be resistant to political pressure as they inevitably will have to make judgements that will cost *somebody* a lot of money
d.) whose status and final reports must be made freely available and readable on a predictable schedule for which the member will be held accountable.
and e.) viewpoints should be chosen for diversity to decrease the risk of groupthink and excess reverence for authority (think of Feynman's role in the Challenger investigation).
Boy, sounds to me (but what would I know?) like the exact opposite of the decisions to date of the Bush administration.
BTW, if this sounds like a lot of irrelevant political jargon to you, just think about what
Rustin
Whoops! Contradicting yourself there ol' son. /.
EITHER the truth is just not clear OR scientists can reasonably be chosen based on your already knowing what conclusion they'll reach.
Can't have both.
Let's face it folks, this administration is fundamentally oposed to public review of *any* issue.
Bottom line, we leave them there long enough and they'll start going after
Don't believe me? Look at what happened to the SPIE (Society of PhotoInstrumentation Engineers) under Reagan. They started being threatened with arrest on treason charges if they released research that contradicted SDI (The "Star Wars" program).
As somebody who worked on a few SDI proposals and was doing fiber optics work at the time (mostly for defense applications) I don't intend to be quiet this time.
So, are you ready to "hang separately"?
Rustin H. Wright
Founder, Reed and Wright
F.O. patent 4,808,204 (drawings done on a Mac Plus!)