The US requires a written test and a driving test.
Actually, the requirements vary by state. While written & practical tests are typical, there may be exceptions. My first license was in Massachusetts, where I was required to do both tests (and on the written test -- actually, it was a computerized multiple choice exam, but whatever -- you had to get at least 70%). My second license was in Alabama, where I only had to take a written exam and surrender my Massachusetts license (my understanding is that if you're applying for your first license, you have to take a driving test there, but with an out of state license, you can skip it). When I moved back to Massachusetts, I don't remember having to take a followup test at all, and when I renewed my license recently there was definitely no new test.
the storylines are almost entirely incompatible with the rest of theStar Trek universe (Klingons that look like TNG/DS9/Voyager rather than TOS, etc).
My awareness of ST mythology is about a decade out of date, but are you suggesting that this change in appearance for Klingons is part of the story now? Was there some kind of cataclysmic Chernobyl event that caused the whole Klingon species to mutate from some kind of vaguely Fu Manchu types into the grotesque Motorhead roadies that they were to become in the movies & later television series?
If so, then this event, whatever it was, must have happened some time in the small handful of years between the end of the first series and the transfer of that crew, slightly older now, to a new ship. How much time was supposed to have elapsed there -- a decade or so, if that?
I think Spock would have some droll comment about logic or the lack thereof here, but I'll just switch genres and exclaim "holy punctuated equilibrium, Batman!"
Seriously though, if there's some kind of canonical explanation for this, I'd be happy to read it -- I thought it was just an inconsistency that had been swept under the rug and happily ignored, which makes explaining the current ST series easier to swallow. But then, like I say, I haven't watched any of these shows in about a decade now...
On a similar note, when I was in college, my department conducted a survey something like this, except that they were asking us students what we thought about the faculty & their attitudes towards their students. These surveys were meant to be anonymous, and supposedly were compiled by people who didn't know any of us (or our handwriting, etc).
The one big comment that really stuck in my mind was that I'd caught one of my professors making what sounded to me like racist comments towards some of my classmates, but it was all put in a chummy, jokey kind of way that made it hard for me to read his intent in making the remarks.
When it came time to fill out the survey, I gave him the benefit of the doubt, stating generally that a certain faculty member had made what seemed like inappropriate remarks towards students from certain parts of the world -- but I didn't get any more specific than that.
I never found out exactly what the school did with the survey results, but it didn't seem like anyone was reprimanded or fired because of it. I got to know that professor better over time, and his behavior in later classes with him firmly changed my early impression -- he was a nice guy, and one of the only faculty that would, for example, make a sincere effort to correctly & respectfully pronounce the names of students from Asia, India, and the Middle East. A lot of faculty didn't bother with little things like that.
Either he changed (possibly because of the survey), or I was just wrong in my early impression, but in any case I was always glad that I never explicitly singled him out on that survey. Would it have put a good guy out of a job? Who knows. I'm just glad I didn't have to find out...
Incorrect. Search advertising such those offered by Google (AdWords), Overture and numerous other players are better in terms of click-throughs, conversion rates, or any other relevant measure of advertising effectiveness. The same goes for online yellow pages advertising.
This isn't quite correct either. The problem with the search engine / yellow pages styled directed ads are mainly only relevant for, well, search engines and phone directories. Most of the web isn't either of these things.
The New York Times -- and every other newspaper website in the world -- needs to be able to run a large volume of generic ads on their home page, their section front pages, and with articles. They can partially target some of their ads based on demographic profiling, but this doesn't go as far as what you're describing, and nobody has any illusions about that.
The thing is, there's nothing for it: the New York Times must run ads just to break even, nevermind make a profit, and for a newspaper site, this kind of directed, personally relevant advertising does not apply to the most visible parts of the site.
Therefore, alternatives are needed. Unfortunately, popups/popunders are the most successful format to date, but nobody running these sites has any illusions that popups are popular with the public. But, they pay the bills, and as long as they do, they're going to keep getting used. The second that changes, they'd be perfectly happy to drop the ad format forever.
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Last time I talked to people about this, the most promising step forward had to do with taxonomies: finding ways to categorize the content of news articles automagically. For example, the publishing system detects that an article about, say, the EU investigating allegations that the US goverment has been conducting corporate espionage of Airbus for Boeing, would be relevant to the taxonomies for "airlines", "globalization", "European Union", etc. And because taxonomies are hierarchical, "airline" is a subset of "business", while "European Union" might be a subset of "international organizations", which in turn might fall under "politics".
With such a system in place, the sales department can go to prospective advertisers, allowing them to target their ads to all site content related to keywords they want to buy, even if those articles show up in non-obvious parts of the site -- for example, the Chicago Tribune might run Boeing stories as local news, while the Boston Globe would just leave it in their business section. This would allow something reasonably close to the targeted searches that Google provides, but would still have to make compromises that Google doesn't have to do, mainly because Google doesn't put ads on their home page and doesn't have section fronts with ad positions to be filled.
There were two main problems to be dealt with. The first, and biggest, was just that setting up such a system is a lot of work, and the more it can be automated, the better. The other, and going at cross purposes to the first one, is that this can't ever be fully automatic: auto classifying software will always make mistakes (just as spam filters will always have false positives & false negatives), and there are always cases where, even if the system makes the right classifications, you still want to override it. For example, maybe Delta Airlines and other travel companies would want to target ads about airlines & Europe, even including the corporate espionage example above. On the other hand, if a plane crashes or is hijacked anywhere in the world, these advertisers often want their ad campaigns suspended, or at least disassociated with the air travel articles that they'd normally be targeting. For a big site, this can be a huge amount of work, and when it comes up, it has to be handled very quickly.
From what I've seen -- the essays in "Salmon of Doubt", Neil Gaiman's biography, the interviews on the HHGTTG tv series DVD -- it seems like Adams wasn't at all interested in what the question actually turned out to be.
The really funny part isn't so much that 6*9 != 42, but that this great ancient race built a machine to solve all their philosophical questions and the best thing it could come up with was a random number -- and so, raising even more deep philosophical questions & solving exactly nothing.
Everything he wrote after that first revelation -- regardless of whether we're dealing with the radio, television, book, etc version of the story -- was mainly just made up crap to keep the story moving along, and he really didn't seem to interested to get to the answer in a big hurry. I seem to remember, but haven't actually tried to verify this, that he actually presented slightly different variations on the answer -- err, "question" -- at different points much later in the story. Like everything else with the Hitchhiker's story, keeping explanations consistent or logical was definitely not important, and if Marvin found one version of The Question written on the side of a mountain, and Arthur found a completely different & contradictory answer in a bag of Scrabble chips, that's just fine.
Damn I miss Douglas Adams -- it was nice knowing that the world had someone like that somewhere out there...
If you read the essays in "Salmon of Doubt", one of the gives kind of an apology for "Mostly Harmless" -- basically, DNA writes that he was going through a rough year, it sounds like some friends &/or family had passed away, and basically he just wasn't in the mood to be writing a comedy book at the time. In hindsight, he seemed to think it would have been better to shelve it for a while, and try another draft later, but of course it didn't work out that way. Still, he was disappointed to have left the Hitchhiker's series on such a down note, and seemed interested in finding a way to correct that by adding one more volume. He seemed optimistic about the story he was gradually working on under the name "Salmon of Doubt", which had started out as a Dirk Gentley book, but he seemed to feel that the story would work better if rewritten as a Hitchhiker book. Alas, there wasn't time for that, and the unfinished draft he left behind, as published today in "Salmon of Doubt", is a clearly unpolished Dirk Gentley story.
I took a journalism class in school, for which one of the main photographers for the local daily paper gave us a talk about typical newspaper photojournalism.
My favorite anecdote, by far, was that newspaper sports photographers pretty much always shot all their photos during the first five or ten minutes of the game, then ran over to Wal-Mart to have the film developed. They wouldn't have prints made though, just negatives -- the paper's publishing system could scan in the raw negatives & correct the colors before going to print.
In any case, the important part was just to come back with some quick, dramatic results, and to do so in time to get something to the printing presses in time for the next day's run. It didn't matter if it was a photo of the big game winning goal / run / touchdown / etc, because it's not like people that watched the game the night before are going to compare that footage to the photo in the next day's sports section. In other words, sports photojournalism is always a lie, and always has been.
Interestingly, in spite of the risk of tampering with the images, digital photography may have actually corrected this problem, because not having to waste time developing the photos gives photographers another hour or so to get shots of the event. If the reporter can upload photos remotely, that buys them even more time: they can just dial up the newspaper from their laptop's cell phone modem and basically work right until the paper goes to the presses.
Well, this is WBZ radio we're talking about, so the way the guy looks isn't relevant to his job, but that's an aside. He made marks that, while not dishonest, did misrepresent the truth, and in various ways has done so for two years now.
By way of comparison, ABC news got in similar trouble a couple of years ago when it was revealed that one of their White House reporters was filing reports not from the White House lawn, as these news broadcasts typically do, but while standing in front of a studio newsroom's blue screen, in front of which a photo of the White House was digitally painted. This was seen as a breach of journalistic integrity, for reasons I can understand if not entirely accept -- after all, television newscasters often report from studios with an obviously phony city skyline is used for a backdrop, and the integrity of this is never questioned. The White House lawn situation, on the other hand, was seen as crossing a line, by suggesting that the reporter was on the scene, and perhaps had just stepped outside for a quick photo shoot with the freshest first hand information, while the news desks with their fake backdrops are obviously studios.
With radio, it's a different & interesting case though. By way of comparison, Boston's other main news radio station, WBUR, has sent their call-in news talk show The Connection to Baghdad for two weeks, where host Dick Gordon interviewed locals about the Iraq war and it's aftermath. It probably would have been possible, and cheaper & safer, to do these shows from WBUR's Boston University studios, and for all most listeners would know, maybe they did stay at home. I don't think these shows were actually faked, but the point is, with radio you have to take their word for it.
Then again, as ABC's White House lawn scandal showed, you have to take their word for it with television too, and they're not always honest. Yay, digital revolution...:-/
Anyway, with the "Connection Goes To Baghdad" series, I see that as a cool story of how tele-commuting is making journalism better. This WBZ story, on the other hand, isn't showing how technology is elevating journalism -- it's allowing them to hide what's really going on with their staff. Now while I don't think there's anything that bad with what Gary LaPierre is doing, the fact that WBZ felt it was unnecessary to present this information to the public isn't encouraging.
It's fairly well known that one of WBZ's other personalities, David Brudnoy, has had to report from home at various points over the years due to poor health -- the guy has been HIV+ for years, and now he's also dealing with cancer. Brudnoy is very popular, and I don't think anyone begrudges him from working from home. But then, he's honest about it, and that's the key difference. Likewise, one of the FM talk radio hosts, Jay Severin, does his Boston show from New York -- but again, his station is honest about it, so there's no big deal. Again, this isn't how the LaPierre situation has been handled.
So, you're right that the capability to telecommute is an interesting and useful thing for broadcast journalism, but being up front about it is ethically critical -- especially considering that the public knows how easy it is to misrepresent the truth with modern technology, so we depend on broadcasters to be up front about what they're doing. In cases where a station admits what they're doing, the public will probably accept this without blinking an eye. On the other hand, if a station gets caught out with a deception, as here, then it becomes an issue for that station's credibility. I'm sure that WBZ will overcome this -- they have an excellent reputation, and this isn't enough to change that -- I hope that they and other broadcasters will be more forthcoming in the future.
M$ Word: In most cases, it's an elephant that is used to squat a mosquito: you don't need such a monster program to type in a small report/question of a couple of pages or an abstract of the project.
Then again, you could also argue that you don't need a monster program like Emacs to type in a small program/email of a couple of pages, either. [1] And yet some people happily use Emacs all day long, just as some people -- a completely non-intersecting group of people, I suspect -- use Word all day long.
I have a hard time faulting anyone for using the tool they've become proficient with, even if sending a 200 word message as a.DOC attachment balloons the content from a couple of kilobytes to several times that, while generally contributing nothing useful. But whatever, there are ways to deal with that.
The bigger problem isn't that Word is bad, but that promoting lock-in is bad. Now that the.DOC format has been roughly reverse engineered, there are a variety of programs that can open it, but it would generally still be better to use.RTF or.PDF for most of these situations. The important thing isn't to have free software applications for working with these formats -- though, obviously, that matters a lot -- but that the formats exchanged are open and portable, so that nobody can get locked into a dead end, either because a vendor discontinued a product or went out of business, or because a free software project has been abandoned and no one has done anything to the source in years.
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Anyway, in the end, it's not always up to the teachers -- sometimes it's a matter of department or school policy, and circumventing it isn't worth the trouble to them.
I had a project in college where we worked for two semesters on a web crawler, and at the end had to make a big presentation to the public about our work. The requirement was that we had to prepare & submit a PowerPoint slideshow, but I felt then & still do that this was entirely the wrong approach, especially for a web based project, so we did a version of the demonstration as a series of HTML slides on our project's web server, showed our faculty advisors that this looked just as good as the PowerPoint slideshow -- and, as a bonus, allowed us to link directly to our project's web front end directly from the presentation -- and after we were done, the slideshow exactly as given would work in anyone's web browser. We were breaking the project rules, but we demonstrated in advance that there were clear advantages to not going with the proprietary format, and so we were allowed to go it our way.
I think this is a reasonable approach. Rather than just throwing a temper tantrum about having to use The Man's tools, demonstrate that an alternative can be just as good, if not better, and make your intentions clear early enough to win over the faculty (or your boss, or whatever). If you don't convince them, you still have time to turn around and switch to The Man's format, but at least you tried, made your case, and let them know that the alternative could have worked; it'll be a moral victory, if nothing else, and maybe next time around you'll get to do it your way.
Ya know, now that you mention it, it occurs to me that three of Florida's most pleasant major exports are [a] supermarket tabloids, [b] email spam, and [c] telemarketing calls.
I wonder how much having a 666-nnnn telephone number helped keep down the flood of telemarkers calling my house before the state & federal do not call lists. I can just picture the Bible Belt call center staff now -- they have to make however many dozens of calls per hour, they've got a huge list of numbers to work with, and then they get to the batch with the creepy yankees with their devil phone numbers.... "maybe I'll just skip down the list a bit...".
I'm sure it happened at least some of the time -- as you say, fundamentalism and superstititious numerology seem to go hand and hand, and even in heathen New England I meet people surprised that I wasn't spooked to accept a 666 prefix from the phone company...:-)
I knew something didn't look right, but didn't bother to sit down and do the math properly. And now this is on my permanent record. Oh well -- thank you for the correction, and in future I'll double check my math before spouting off in public like this...
Hopefully my point stands otherwise, even if I screwed up the details of the demonstration: with more points of failure, the probability of failure rises quickly, and a design that aims to compartmentalize parts of the system will tend to be more robust & fault-tolerant. The math seems valid, even if my particular demonstration of that math was, well, stupid:-)
I think he gets it, but his point is that there are still as many points of potential failure. Two of these drives, for example, are effectively eight drives, and if any given IDE drive has, say, a 5% chance of failing per month (obviously, I'm making this up to illustrate the math involved, rather than trying to show real life failure rates), then two drives would have a 10% chance of failure. This isn't actually two drives though: it's eight drives, meaning you have a 40% chance of at least one sub-drive failing.
Wouldn't it be more robust to be able to treat each of these devices as a single, four disc, 250gb RAID array? If you want to store 1tb of data, then 4 of these, configured as RAIDS rather than monolithic nodes, seem like they would be more reliable.
I mean, I see what you're saying, but the earlier point is still valid. Your suggestion treats two of these as a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Discs, but I'd argue that a $1200 Disc wouldn't fit well with most people's idea of "inexpensive". On the other hand, a quartet of 250gb "more traditional" RAIDs would consist of sub-drives of about $180 each -- even if you have to replace all four discs in one of the RAID nodes here, that's still cheaper than the $1200 unit.
Like I say, I see your point, but I think that to do what you're suggesting would be both more expensive and less reliable than other approaches. I'd be willing to consider well-reasoned counter-arguments, though:-)
So... does this count as a dupe, or does the fact that now there's an official announcement from MySQL AB with today's date on it make this one more concrete somehow?
Lotus Notes hasn't been dumped, and it isn't available on Linux except as an internal skunk works project running on WINE (and it doesn't run any too good, either).
So... it runs just like the Windows version then, or the OSX version. At least they have parity...:-)
As crappy as Notes is -- and really, it's just crappy software, a bad implementation of some good & not so good ideas that most people just see, for better or worse, as a really annoying version of Outlook -- there have been versions of it that ran on X11 in the past, and there's no reason to assume that this couldn't happen again in the future.
Moving the whole company over to Linux might be just the incentive IBM needs to get the old X11 port brought up to the level of the Windows & Mac versions...
You could argue that maybe this should be the default.
You can't argue that it's hard to change though.
If you want to complain about crappy handling of MIME types, how about the IE "feature" where, unless the URL ends in the string.xml, the document cannot be handled as XML -- even if the transmitted MIME type is text/xml or equivalent. Hence you have web applications written in such a way that the HTTP/GET url has to be something silly like http://site.net/xmlrpc.pl?arg1=foo&arg2=bar&dummy_ arg=null.xml. (Okay, contrived example -- xml-rpc apps should use POST instead of GET, but this illustrates the behavior anyway.)
I'm not sure that it's Apache that has the problem here, compared to Microsoft's IIS and their dominant-but-mangled web browser, and their cavalier disregard for the data that Apache & Apache-served apps are willing to deliver.
Re:Yes, but measuring webserver market share is ha
on
2003: Year of Apache
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So I hope that Apache gets some viable competition.
For that matter, it would be nice if Apache1.x got some viable competition from Apache2.x. I can't find a breakdown by version on Netcraft's site, but the general concensus for the past couple of years has been that Apache 2 "isn't ready yet" -- even if, for most purposes, it can work just fine, and is far more flexible & efficient than Apache 1.3.x versions have been.
Does anyone have any stats on Apache 1 / Apache 2 usage levels? If Netcraft is keeping track of this, 20 minutes of poking around their reports site hasn't yet turned it up for me. The closest report I can come up with is this overview of secure sites, which puts Apache 2.x at roughly 3.25%, and Apache 1.x at around 61%. [They break down by exact x.x.x version number, so I'm just putting a thumbnail estimate based on eyeballing the table of percentages.]
Obviously, Apache 1 & 2 are in the same family, but they have a lot of differences as well; the new version is a complete rewrite of the codebase, from what I understand. Increased adoption of Apache2 would be a nice diversification of the web server "ecosystem", but it looks like real acceptance of Apache 2 may still be years off.
My understanding is that Oracle's web server is just a custom-configured version of Apache, so arguably you could even add their offering to the open source column in your comparison.
Obviously the backend & app server are proprietary with Oracle, but then comparing app servers is a different matter anyway -- or should be, provided that the software in question has well delineated boundaries (i.e. web servers deliver compliant HTTP data down the wire; app servers generate content for delivery via a web server, email server, etc). I realize that the line is probably hazier than I wish it were, but it sill exists.
I don't know anything about WebLogic -- isn't that IBM's Java app server? Does it use an Apache (etc) core the way Oracle does?
I thought that, aside from Pudge, the whole scheme was to be as anti-journalistic integrity as possible. Clearly, thinking about their jobs would run counter to that...
</troll>:-)
So, since I'm already whining about journalistic integrity, would it have killed them to come out and say what Speakeasy is / was? As is too often the case, this writeup leaves me none the wiser as to what they're talking about, or why anyone should care...
I've been using my HP 48SX since '93 or so. Back then it cost something like $300. Its an amazing calculator, a lot like having Matlab and a symbolic solver in the palm of your hand, but as the years go by I kept thinking that one day its going to break and I won't be able to find another RPN calc that can do what it does.
If you have a modern-ish Palm PDA -- one that runs PalmOS 5 or newer -- you may want to give Power48 a try:
Power48 is a PalmOS based emulator for the Hewlett-Packard 48SX, 48GX and 49G series of calculators. It provides a fairly complete emulation of the Saturn CPU upon which these calculators are based and is able to run a majority of the programs available for them. It emulates one instance each of the 48SX, 48GX and 49G, and maintains complete and separate state information for each allowing the user to quickly switch between them.
Power48 is GPLed, and distributed with the HP calculator ROM files. I seem to remember reading somewhere that the ROMs are freely redistributable, but the site just says you have to have permission to use them and that they remain the property of HP. I'm not sure what the status of that is, but in any case the emulator is fully in the clear, and runs nicely on modern Palm & Sony (et al?) PalmOS devices running at least PalmOS4 (preferably, PalmOS5 -- not sure what the status of the new PalmOS6 is, but then I'm not sure anything on the market even runs PalmOS6 yet...).
In any case, some people like the nice clicky-clicky feel of an old school calculator, and that's understandable. If you don't mind tapping a glass screen though it's nice being able to have the functionality of one (or three!) of the old HP calculators in the same device that can also be your mp3 player, Tetris console, digital camera (on some models), and oh yeah Palm Pilot, too.
Not only that, but I suspect that a modern Palm PDA is also going to be faster than an old HP calculator would have been. It's a nice alternative to having to buy a new calculator...
I hope Adobe has a special version for the Treasury Department that doesn't have this restriction!
My hunch is that this feature was produced at the behest of someone like the US Treasury Department or the Secret Service. However, it looks like this isn't just a US thing -- some of the anti-counterfeiting properties in the new US $20 bill have apparently been used in Euros, Deutsche Marks, and British Pounds for years now, according to Markus Kuhn. The people designing these currencies must have been collaborating on this stuff for a while now, and brought in the graphics & printer companies at some later stage.
It wouldn't surprise me though if, given that the mass market anti-counterfeiting functionality was put in by these vendors for the government[s], the vendors would have also provided either [a] a special non-encumbered version for internal & governmental use, or [b] a backdoor for the government to use. The latter makes the software vulnerable to cracking, but it wouldn't be the first time something like this was designed & released into the wild.
The interesting question to me is how long this has been planned, how long the currencies have had these fingerprints, how long these restrictions have been embedded in hardware & software, etc. I mean, the current version of Photoshop has been out for months now, and people have just discovered this behavior. Were more subtle versions of this active in older versions of Photoshop? Who at Adobe or the Treasury knows about these things? Is the next great counterfeiting ring going to be a cabal of disgruntled Adobe & HP employees, just as the great movie piracy ring is almost definitely a cabal of disgruntled movie studio companies?
Taking this out to supercomputer levels, the #1 supercomputer is three and a half times faster than Big Mac but cost 60x as much money!!! Amazing.
The catch though is that the VT Big Mac machine is essentially just a Beowulf cluster, albeit one put together with faster nodes & better networking than has ever been used to date.
The thing is though that Beowulf clusters are only suitable for attacking certain kinds of problems, but for others they don't perform well at all. Basically, the problem has to be "embarassingly parallel": the individual components of the problem being attacked have to lend themselves to decomposition in such a way that each node in the cluster can get a lot of work done while working as independently as possible.
SETI is an example of such a problem: the radio telescope slurps down a mountain of data, and working on the assumption that one spoonful out of a trillion spoonfuls of data has some kind of understandable meaning, the project gives each SETI client a slice of the data to analyze (and, to ensure consistency, the same slice of data is sent out to a handful of clients to double-check the results).
For other problems, the elements in the system aren't independent like this: a change at one point in the computational system has cascading repurcussions on neighbors both near & far -- think of the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings in Madagascar and causing a hurricane in Florida a week later. For problems like this, Beowulf systems have traditionally not done well, because the excess chatter ends up swamping the network and everything grinds to a halt.
With the high speed network VT is using, their machine isn't likely to be as susceptible to these issues as earlier cluster supercomputers, but the problem isn't going to go away entirely -- it's just a side effect of the design that can't be avoided.
On paper, it looks like all VT would need to do to get their (roughly) 10 teraflop / $5 million machine beyond the 35 teraflop / $200 million Earth Simulator would be to spend another $15 million to get their machine up to 40 teraflops / $20 million. It's probably not that simple. Just as it's bogus to compare, say, a 2ghz G5 to a 2ghz P4 -- the RISC Gx chips are generally considered to be more efficient than the CISC Pentiums -- a custom built, integrated supercomputer is built in a way that makes it more efficient than cluster based designs can be.
Granted, for a lot of organizations, the bargain rate cluster machine is so much cheaper that they would be willing to sacrifice some performance & just overshoot their needed specs: maybe a task for a $200million/35tflop traditional machine would work as well on a $50million/100tflop cluster. But in general, the people building these things need to study the kinds of problems they're trying to solve, and figure out whether the work they want to do would tolerate a cluster design. It won't be adequate for everyone, even if they are cheaper...
Not that I'm sticking up for the quirks in Slashcode, but haven't you ever seen the common three letter currency codes? Most of them aren't hard to guess -- GBP, USD, CND, AUD, EUR, JPY, CNY etc -- and they're very handy for typographic situations where you don't have access to "funny" characters like the British Pound symbol, the Euro symbol, or the Yen symbol, and you also don't feel like typing out the whole currency name, including discriminators such as "American" vs. "Canadian" vs. "Austrialian" Dollar.
This set of three letter currency abbreviations is so useful, in fact, that the list of codes is an ISO standard.
Granted, having access to the actual symbols is better, but these abbreviations are widely used, familiar to many, easy to interpret...and portable to any typographic system that can represent the Latin alphabet. It's a workaround, but it works.
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...not that this has anything to do with El Nino, wildfires, or global warming, But then neither did the parent post, but it was still a fair observation...:-)
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Actually, the requirements vary by state. While written & practical tests are typical, there may be exceptions. My first license was in Massachusetts, where I was required to do both tests (and on the written test -- actually, it was a computerized multiple choice exam, but whatever -- you had to get at least 70%). My second license was in Alabama, where I only had to take a written exam and surrender my Massachusetts license (my understanding is that if you're applying for your first license, you have to take a driving test there, but with an out of state license, you can skip it). When I moved back to Massachusetts, I don't remember having to take a followup test at all, and when I renewed my license recently there was definitely no new test.
My awareness of ST mythology is about a decade out of date, but are you suggesting that this change in appearance for Klingons is part of the story now? Was there some kind of cataclysmic Chernobyl event that caused the whole Klingon species to mutate from some kind of vaguely Fu Manchu types into the grotesque Motorhead roadies that they were to become in the movies & later television series?
If so, then this event, whatever it was, must have happened some time in the small handful of years between the end of the first series and the transfer of that crew, slightly older now, to a new ship. How much time was supposed to have elapsed there -- a decade or so, if that?
I think Spock would have some droll comment about logic or the lack thereof here, but I'll just switch genres and exclaim "holy punctuated equilibrium, Batman!"
Seriously though, if there's some kind of canonical explanation for this, I'd be happy to read it -- I thought it was just an inconsistency that had been swept under the rug and happily ignored, which makes explaining the current ST series easier to swallow. But then, like I say, I haven't watched any of these shows in about a decade now...
On a similar note, when I was in college, my department conducted a survey something like this, except that they were asking us students what we thought about the faculty & their attitudes towards their students. These surveys were meant to be anonymous, and supposedly were compiled by people who didn't know any of us (or our handwriting, etc).
The one big comment that really stuck in my mind was that I'd caught one of my professors making what sounded to me like racist comments towards some of my classmates, but it was all put in a chummy, jokey kind of way that made it hard for me to read his intent in making the remarks.
When it came time to fill out the survey, I gave him the benefit of the doubt, stating generally that a certain faculty member had made what seemed like inappropriate remarks towards students from certain parts of the world -- but I didn't get any more specific than that.
I never found out exactly what the school did with the survey results, but it didn't seem like anyone was reprimanded or fired because of it. I got to know that professor better over time, and his behavior in later classes with him firmly changed my early impression -- he was a nice guy, and one of the only faculty that would, for example, make a sincere effort to correctly & respectfully pronounce the names of students from Asia, India, and the Middle East. A lot of faculty didn't bother with little things like that.
Either he changed (possibly because of the survey), or I was just wrong in my early impression, but in any case I was always glad that I never explicitly singled him out on that survey. Would it have put a good guy out of a job? Who knows. I'm just glad I didn't have to find out...
This isn't quite correct either. The problem with the search engine / yellow pages styled directed ads are mainly only relevant for, well, search engines and phone directories. Most of the web isn't either of these things.
The New York Times -- and every other newspaper website in the world -- needs to be able to run a large volume of generic ads on their home page, their section front pages, and with articles. They can partially target some of their ads based on demographic profiling, but this doesn't go as far as what you're describing, and nobody has any illusions about that.
The thing is, there's nothing for it: the New York Times must run ads just to break even, nevermind make a profit, and for a newspaper site, this kind of directed, personally relevant advertising does not apply to the most visible parts of the site.
Therefore, alternatives are needed. Unfortunately, popups/popunders are the most successful format to date, but nobody running these sites has any illusions that popups are popular with the public. But, they pay the bills, and as long as they do, they're going to keep getting used. The second that changes, they'd be perfectly happy to drop the ad format forever.
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Last time I talked to people about this, the most promising step forward had to do with taxonomies: finding ways to categorize the content of news articles automagically. For example, the publishing system detects that an article about, say, the EU investigating allegations that the US goverment has been conducting corporate espionage of Airbus for Boeing, would be relevant to the taxonomies for "airlines", "globalization", "European Union", etc. And because taxonomies are hierarchical, "airline" is a subset of "business", while "European Union" might be a subset of "international organizations", which in turn might fall under "politics".
With such a system in place, the sales department can go to prospective advertisers, allowing them to target their ads to all site content related to keywords they want to buy, even if those articles show up in non-obvious parts of the site -- for example, the Chicago Tribune might run Boeing stories as local news, while the Boston Globe would just leave it in their business section. This would allow something reasonably close to the targeted searches that Google provides, but would still have to make compromises that Google doesn't have to do, mainly because Google doesn't put ads on their home page and doesn't have section fronts with ad positions to be filled.
There were two main problems to be dealt with. The first, and biggest, was just that setting up such a system is a lot of work, and the more it can be automated, the better. The other, and going at cross purposes to the first one, is that this can't ever be fully automatic: auto classifying software will always make mistakes (just as spam filters will always have false positives & false negatives), and there are always cases where, even if the system makes the right classifications, you still want to override it. For example, maybe Delta Airlines and other travel companies would want to target ads about airlines & Europe, even including the corporate espionage example above. On the other hand, if a plane crashes or is hijacked anywhere in the world, these advertisers often want their ad campaigns suspended, or at least disassociated with the air travel articles that they'd normally be targeting. For a big site, this can be a huge amount of work, and when it comes up, it has to be handled very quickly.
Therefore, this kind of taxonomic
From what I've seen -- the essays in "Salmon of Doubt", Neil Gaiman's biography, the interviews on the HHGTTG tv series DVD -- it seems like Adams wasn't at all interested in what the question actually turned out to be.
The really funny part isn't so much that 6*9 != 42, but that this great ancient race built a machine to solve all their philosophical questions and the best thing it could come up with was a random number -- and so, raising even more deep philosophical questions & solving exactly nothing.
Everything he wrote after that first revelation -- regardless of whether we're dealing with the radio, television, book, etc version of the story -- was mainly just made up crap to keep the story moving along, and he really didn't seem to interested to get to the answer in a big hurry. I seem to remember, but haven't actually tried to verify this, that he actually presented slightly different variations on the answer -- err, "question" -- at different points much later in the story. Like everything else with the Hitchhiker's story, keeping explanations consistent or logical was definitely not important, and if Marvin found one version of The Question written on the side of a mountain, and Arthur found a completely different & contradictory answer in a bag of Scrabble chips, that's just fine.
Damn I miss Douglas Adams -- it was nice knowing that the world had someone like that somewhere out there...
If you read the essays in "Salmon of Doubt", one of the gives kind of an apology for "Mostly Harmless" -- basically, DNA writes that he was going through a rough year, it sounds like some friends &/or family had passed away, and basically he just wasn't in the mood to be writing a comedy book at the time. In hindsight, he seemed to think it would have been better to shelve it for a while, and try another draft later, but of course it didn't work out that way. Still, he was disappointed to have left the Hitchhiker's series on such a down note, and seemed interested in finding a way to correct that by adding one more volume. He seemed optimistic about the story he was gradually working on under the name "Salmon of Doubt", which had started out as a Dirk Gentley book, but he seemed to feel that the story would work better if rewritten as a Hitchhiker book. Alas, there wasn't time for that, and the unfinished draft he left behind, as published today in "Salmon of Doubt", is a clearly unpolished Dirk Gentley story.
If only he had lived...
I took a journalism class in school, for which one of the main photographers for the local daily paper gave us a talk about typical newspaper photojournalism.
My favorite anecdote, by far, was that newspaper sports photographers pretty much always shot all their photos during the first five or ten minutes of the game, then ran over to Wal-Mart to have the film developed. They wouldn't have prints made though, just negatives -- the paper's publishing system could scan in the raw negatives & correct the colors before going to print.
In any case, the important part was just to come back with some quick, dramatic results, and to do so in time to get something to the printing presses in time for the next day's run. It didn't matter if it was a photo of the big game winning goal / run / touchdown / etc, because it's not like people that watched the game the night before are going to compare that footage to the photo in the next day's sports section. In other words, sports photojournalism is always a lie, and always has been.
Interestingly, in spite of the risk of tampering with the images, digital photography may have actually corrected this problem, because not having to waste time developing the photos gives photographers another hour or so to get shots of the event. If the reporter can upload photos remotely, that buys them even more time: they can just dial up the newspaper from their laptop's cell phone modem and basically work right until the paper goes to the presses.
Well, this is WBZ radio we're talking about, so the way the guy looks isn't relevant to his job, but that's an aside. He made marks that, while not dishonest, did misrepresent the truth, and in various ways has done so for two years now.
By way of comparison, ABC news got in similar trouble a couple of years ago when it was revealed that one of their White House reporters was filing reports not from the White House lawn, as these news broadcasts typically do, but while standing in front of a studio newsroom's blue screen, in front of which a photo of the White House was digitally painted. This was seen as a breach of journalistic integrity, for reasons I can understand if not entirely accept -- after all, television newscasters often report from studios with an obviously phony city skyline is used for a backdrop, and the integrity of this is never questioned. The White House lawn situation, on the other hand, was seen as crossing a line, by suggesting that the reporter was on the scene, and perhaps had just stepped outside for a quick photo shoot with the freshest first hand information, while the news desks with their fake backdrops are obviously studios.
With radio, it's a different & interesting case though. By way of comparison, Boston's other main news radio station, WBUR, has sent their call-in news talk show The Connection to Baghdad for two weeks, where host Dick Gordon interviewed locals about the Iraq war and it's aftermath. It probably would have been possible, and cheaper & safer, to do these shows from WBUR's Boston University studios, and for all most listeners would know, maybe they did stay at home. I don't think these shows were actually faked, but the point is, with radio you have to take their word for it.
Then again, as ABC's White House lawn scandal showed, you have to take their word for it with television too, and they're not always honest. Yay, digital revolution... :-/
Anyway, with the "Connection Goes To Baghdad" series, I see that as a cool story of how tele-commuting is making journalism better. This WBZ story, on the other hand, isn't showing how technology is elevating journalism -- it's allowing them to hide what's really going on with their staff. Now while I don't think there's anything that bad with what Gary LaPierre is doing, the fact that WBZ felt it was unnecessary to present this information to the public isn't encouraging.
It's fairly well known that one of WBZ's other personalities, David Brudnoy, has had to report from home at various points over the years due to poor health -- the guy has been HIV+ for years, and now he's also dealing with cancer. Brudnoy is very popular, and I don't think anyone begrudges him from working from home. But then, he's honest about it, and that's the key difference. Likewise, one of the FM talk radio hosts, Jay Severin, does his Boston show from New York -- but again, his station is honest about it, so there's no big deal. Again, this isn't how the LaPierre situation has been handled.
So, you're right that the capability to telecommute is an interesting and useful thing for broadcast journalism, but being up front about it is ethically critical -- especially considering that the public knows how easy it is to misrepresent the truth with modern technology, so we depend on broadcasters to be up front about what they're doing. In cases where a station admits what they're doing, the public will probably accept this without blinking an eye. On the other hand, if a station gets caught out with a deception, as here, then it becomes an issue for that station's credibility. I'm sure that WBZ will overcome this -- they have an excellent reputation, and this isn't enough to change that -- I hope that they and other broadcasters will be more forthcoming in the future.
Then again, you could also argue that you don't need a monster program like Emacs to type in a small program/email of a couple of pages, either. [1] And yet some people happily use Emacs all day long, just as some people -- a completely non-intersecting group of people, I suspect -- use Word all day long.
I have a hard time faulting anyone for using the tool they've become proficient with, even if sending a 200 word message as a .DOC attachment balloons the content from a couple of kilobytes to several times that, while generally contributing nothing useful. But whatever, there are ways to deal with that.
The bigger problem isn't that Word is bad, but that promoting lock-in is bad. Now that the .DOC format has been roughly reverse engineered, there are a variety of programs that can open it, but it would generally still be better to use .RTF or .PDF for most of these situations. The important thing isn't to have free software applications for working with these formats -- though, obviously, that matters a lot -- but that the formats exchanged are open and portable, so that nobody can get locked into a dead end, either because a vendor discontinued a product or went out of business, or because a free software project has been abandoned and no one has done anything to the source in years.
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Anyway, in the end, it's not always up to the teachers -- sometimes it's a matter of department or school policy, and circumventing it isn't worth the trouble to them.
I had a project in college where we worked for two semesters on a web crawler, and at the end had to make a big presentation to the public about our work. The requirement was that we had to prepare & submit a PowerPoint slideshow, but I felt then & still do that this was entirely the wrong approach, especially for a web based project, so we did a version of the demonstration as a series of HTML slides on our project's web server, showed our faculty advisors that this looked just as good as the PowerPoint slideshow -- and, as a bonus, allowed us to link directly to our project's web front end directly from the presentation -- and after we were done, the slideshow exactly as given would work in anyone's web browser. We were breaking the project rules, but we demonstrated in advance that there were clear advantages to not going with the proprietary format, and so we were allowed to go it our way.
I think this is a reasonable approach. Rather than just throwing a temper tantrum about having to use The Man's tools, demonstrate that an alternative can be just as good, if not better, and make your intentions clear early enough to win over the faculty (or your boss, or whatever). If you don't convince them, you still have time to turn around and switch to The Man's format, but at least you tried, made your case, and let them know that the alternative could have worked; it'll be a moral victory, if nothing else, and maybe next time around you'll get to do it your way.
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[1] "Emacs: For a Brave GNU Word"
Ya know, now that you mention it, it occurs to me that three of Florida's most pleasant major exports are [a] supermarket tabloids, [b] email spam, and [c] telemarketing calls.
I wonder how much having a 666-nnnn telephone number helped keep down the flood of telemarkers calling my house before the state & federal do not call lists. I can just picture the Bible Belt call center staff now -- they have to make however many dozens of calls per hour, they've got a huge list of numbers to work with, and then they get to the batch with the creepy yankees with their devil phone numbers.... "maybe I'll just skip down the list a bit...".
I'm sure it happened at least some of the time -- as you say, fundamentalism and superstititious numerology seem to go hand and hand, and even in heathen New England I meet people surprised that I wasn't spooked to accept a 666 prefix from the phone company... :-)
I knew something didn't look right, but didn't bother to sit down and do the math properly. And now this is on my permanent record. Oh well -- thank you for the correction, and in future I'll double check my math before spouting off in public like this...
Hopefully my point stands otherwise, even if I screwed up the details of the demonstration: with more points of failure, the probability of failure rises quickly, and a design that aims to compartmentalize parts of the system will tend to be more robust & fault-tolerant. The math seems valid, even if my particular demonstration of that math was, well, stupid :-)
As has been said (by Andy Tanenbaum?):
Or as the modern formulation of the quote might go, an SUV full of hard drives guzzling down the highway. :-)
I think he gets it, but his point is that there are still as many points of potential failure. Two of these drives, for example, are effectively eight drives, and if any given IDE drive has, say, a 5% chance of failing per month (obviously, I'm making this up to illustrate the math involved, rather than trying to show real life failure rates), then two drives would have a 10% chance of failure. This isn't actually two drives though: it's eight drives, meaning you have a 40% chance of at least one sub-drive failing.
Wouldn't it be more robust to be able to treat each of these devices as a single, four disc, 250gb RAID array? If you want to store 1tb of data, then 4 of these, configured as RAIDS rather than monolithic nodes, seem like they would be more reliable.
I mean, I see what you're saying, but the earlier point is still valid. Your suggestion treats two of these as a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Discs, but I'd argue that a $1200 Disc wouldn't fit well with most people's idea of "inexpensive". On the other hand, a quartet of 250gb "more traditional" RAIDs would consist of sub-drives of about $180 each -- even if you have to replace all four discs in one of the RAID nodes here, that's still cheaper than the $1200 unit.
Like I say, I see your point, but I think that to do what you're suggesting would be both more expensive and less reliable than other approaches. I'd be willing to consider well-reasoned counter-arguments, though :-)
Well. Whad'ya know?
So... does this count as a dupe, or does the fact that now there's an official announcement from MySQL AB with today's date on it make this one more concrete somehow?
So... it runs just like the Windows version then, or the OSX version. At least they have parity... :-)
As crappy as Notes is -- and really, it's just crappy software, a bad implementation of some good & not so good ideas that most people just see, for better or worse, as a really annoying version of Outlook -- there have been versions of it that ran on X11 in the past, and there's no reason to assume that this couldn't happen again in the future.
Moving the whole company over to Linux might be just the incentive IBM needs to get the old X11 port brought up to the level of the Windows & Mac versions...
Of course, this is a one line change to httpd.conf. Two, if you count commenting out the default that you find so objectionable:
You could argue that maybe this should be the default.
You can't argue that it's hard to change though.
If you want to complain about crappy handling of MIME types, how about the IE "feature" where, unless the URL ends in the string .xml, the document cannot be handled as XML -- even if the transmitted MIME type is text/xml or equivalent. Hence you have web applications written in such a way that the HTTP/GET url has to be something silly like http://site.net/xmlrpc.pl?arg1=foo&arg2=bar&dummy_ arg=null.xml. (Okay, contrived example -- xml-rpc apps should use POST instead of GET, but this illustrates the behavior anyway.)
I'm not sure that it's Apache that has the problem here, compared to Microsoft's IIS and their dominant-but-mangled web browser, and their cavalier disregard for the data that Apache & Apache-served apps are willing to deliver.
For that matter, it would be nice if Apache1.x got some viable competition from Apache2.x. I can't find a breakdown by version on Netcraft's site, but the general concensus for the past couple of years has been that Apache 2 "isn't ready yet" -- even if, for most purposes, it can work just fine, and is far more flexible & efficient than Apache 1.3.x versions have been.
Does anyone have any stats on Apache 1 / Apache 2 usage levels? If Netcraft is keeping track of this, 20 minutes of poking around their reports site hasn't yet turned it up for me. The closest report I can come up with is this overview of secure sites, which puts Apache 2.x at roughly 3.25%, and Apache 1.x at around 61%. [They break down by exact x.x.x version number, so I'm just putting a thumbnail estimate based on eyeballing the table of percentages.]
Obviously, Apache 1 & 2 are in the same family, but they have a lot of differences as well; the new version is a complete rewrite of the codebase, from what I understand. Increased adoption of Apache2 would be a nice diversification of the web server "ecosystem", but it looks like real acceptance of Apache 2 may still be years off.
My understanding is that Oracle's web server is just a custom-configured version of Apache, so arguably you could even add their offering to the open source column in your comparison.
Obviously the backend & app server are proprietary with Oracle, but then comparing app servers is a different matter anyway -- or should be, provided that the software in question has well delineated boundaries (i.e. web servers deliver compliant HTTP data down the wire; app servers generate content for delivery via a web server, email server, etc). I realize that the line is probably hazier than I wish it were, but it sill exists.
I don't know anything about WebLogic -- isn't that IBM's Java app server? Does it use an Apache (etc) core the way Oracle does?
Since when do /. editors think?
I thought that, aside from Pudge, the whole scheme was to be as anti-journalistic integrity as possible. Clearly, thinking about their jobs would run counter to that...
</troll> :-)
So, since I'm already whining about journalistic integrity, would it have killed them to come out and say what Speakeasy is / was? As is too often the case, this writeup leaves me none the wiser as to what they're talking about, or why anyone should care...
If you have a modern-ish Palm PDA -- one that runs PalmOS 5 or newer -- you may want to give Power48 a try:
Power48 is GPLed, and distributed with the HP calculator ROM files. I seem to remember reading somewhere that the ROMs are freely redistributable, but the site just says you have to have permission to use them and that they remain the property of HP. I'm not sure what the status of that is, but in any case the emulator is fully in the clear, and runs nicely on modern Palm & Sony (et al?) PalmOS devices running at least PalmOS4 (preferably, PalmOS5 -- not sure what the status of the new PalmOS6 is, but then I'm not sure anything on the market even runs PalmOS6 yet...).
In any case, some people like the nice clicky-clicky feel of an old school calculator, and that's understandable. If you don't mind tapping a glass screen though it's nice being able to have the functionality of one (or three!) of the old HP calculators in the same device that can also be your mp3 player, Tetris console, digital camera (on some models), and oh yeah Palm Pilot, too.
Not only that, but I suspect that a modern Palm PDA is also going to be faster than an old HP calculator would have been. It's a nice alternative to having to buy a new calculator...
My hunch is that this feature was produced at the behest of someone like the US Treasury Department or the Secret Service. However, it looks like this isn't just a US thing -- some of the anti-counterfeiting properties in the new US $20 bill have apparently been used in Euros, Deutsche Marks, and British Pounds for years now, according to Markus Kuhn. The people designing these currencies must have been collaborating on this stuff for a while now, and brought in the graphics & printer companies at some later stage.
It wouldn't surprise me though if, given that the mass market anti-counterfeiting functionality was put in by these vendors for the government[s], the vendors would have also provided either [a] a special non-encumbered version for internal & governmental use, or [b] a backdoor for the government to use. The latter makes the software vulnerable to cracking, but it wouldn't be the first time something like this was designed & released into the wild.
The interesting question to me is how long this has been planned, how long the currencies have had these fingerprints, how long these restrictions have been embedded in hardware & software, etc. I mean, the current version of Photoshop has been out for months now, and people have just discovered this behavior. Were more subtle versions of this active in older versions of Photoshop? Who at Adobe or the Treasury knows about these things? Is the next great counterfeiting ring going to be a cabal of disgruntled Adobe & HP employees, just as the great movie piracy ring is almost definitely a cabal of disgruntled movie studio companies?
Too late, it's already ported, and fact deeply integrated.
Maybe they can port COM to Windows next? :-)
The catch though is that the VT Big Mac machine is essentially just a Beowulf cluster, albeit one put together with faster nodes & better networking than has ever been used to date.
The thing is though that Beowulf clusters are only suitable for attacking certain kinds of problems, but for others they don't perform well at all. Basically, the problem has to be "embarassingly parallel": the individual components of the problem being attacked have to lend themselves to decomposition in such a way that each node in the cluster can get a lot of work done while working as independently as possible.
SETI is an example of such a problem: the radio telescope slurps down a mountain of data, and working on the assumption that one spoonful out of a trillion spoonfuls of data has some kind of understandable meaning, the project gives each SETI client a slice of the data to analyze (and, to ensure consistency, the same slice of data is sent out to a handful of clients to double-check the results).
For other problems, the elements in the system aren't independent like this: a change at one point in the computational system has cascading repurcussions on neighbors both near & far -- think of the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings in Madagascar and causing a hurricane in Florida a week later. For problems like this, Beowulf systems have traditionally not done well, because the excess chatter ends up swamping the network and everything grinds to a halt.
With the high speed network VT is using, their machine isn't likely to be as susceptible to these issues as earlier cluster supercomputers, but the problem isn't going to go away entirely -- it's just a side effect of the design that can't be avoided.
On paper, it looks like all VT would need to do to get their (roughly) 10 teraflop / $5 million machine beyond the 35 teraflop / $200 million Earth Simulator would be to spend another $15 million to get their machine up to 40 teraflops / $20 million. It's probably not that simple. Just as it's bogus to compare, say, a 2ghz G5 to a 2ghz P4 -- the RISC Gx chips are generally considered to be more efficient than the CISC Pentiums -- a custom built, integrated supercomputer is built in a way that makes it more efficient than cluster based designs can be.
Granted, for a lot of organizations, the bargain rate cluster machine is so much cheaper that they would be willing to sacrifice some performance & just overshoot their needed specs: maybe a task for a $200million/35tflop traditional machine would work as well on a $50million/100tflop cluster. But in general, the people building these things need to study the kinds of problems they're trying to solve, and figure out whether the work they want to do would tolerate a cluster design. It won't be adequate for everyone, even if they are cheaper...
Not that I'm sticking up for the quirks in Slashcode, but haven't you ever seen the common three letter currency codes? Most of them aren't hard to guess -- GBP, USD, CND, AUD, EUR, JPY, CNY etc -- and they're very handy for typographic situations where you don't have access to "funny" characters like the British Pound symbol, the Euro symbol, or the Yen symbol, and you also don't feel like typing out the whole currency name, including discriminators such as "American" vs. "Canadian" vs. "Austrialian" Dollar.
This set of three letter currency abbreviations is so useful, in fact, that the list of codes is an ISO standard.
Granted, having access to the actual symbols is better, but these abbreviations are widely used, familiar to many, easy to interpret ...and portable to any typographic system that can represent the Latin alphabet. It's a workaround, but it works.
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...not that this has anything to do with El Nino, wildfires, or global warming, But then neither did the parent post, but it was still a fair observation... :-)