In New Zealand, an IVF cycle is NZ$5K -- which is more like US$3K.
Did your state legislature ship your job overseas with the high
cost of medical benefits? Well, now you can ship your fertility
specialist's job overseas by having your IVF in New Zealand!
Now it's thought that the cooler oceanic slabs sink into the subduction
zone by their own weight...
The buoyancy contrast as driving force you describe -- between
cold (dense) slab and warm (less dense) mantle -- is by
definition thermal convection.
The fact that some Earth Scientists actually argue over "whether it's slab pull,
ridge push, or thermal convection," is just proof that
they went into Earth Science because they failed their undergraduate
classical mechanics and hydrostatics courses.
Maybe that helps aids the tectonic flows around here?
Seems to me that the techtonic flows cause, rather than are caused by gravitational differences. Less mass in one area == less gravity, and so forth.
Tectonic movement is caused by density variations associated with
the earth's being heated from within (decay of radioactive elements) and cooled from without.
This drives convection currents (think chicken soup). What we see on the surface is the
horizontal component of those convective movements. The gravity anomalies associated
with these density variations are on the 100km-1000km length scale.
OTOH you can get gravity anomalies due to plain old topography, changes in chemical
composition of the crust (e.g. an iron ore body, or uranium deposit) which are associated
with both mass and density variations, but have nothing to do with either tectonics. The
gravity anomalies associated with these effects are generally of a much shorter wavelength
than the anomalies associated with convective (tectonic) forces.
Ah, that's why you took that big thick highlighter pen and put a diagonal stripe along the edge of your card deck! So you can sort them more easily in case of this particular mishap!
Bravo! Women don't want to work on that kind of nonsense either -- so
the people that decide on what games to be made for women (and don't have
a clue) have to take part of the blame, too.
I understand that the popcap games
particularly BookWorm are doing extremely well with women, particularly
women over 35. These are extremely addictive, cheap as they come,
simple, do not require special hardware, and give your brain a bit of a workout.
PopCap's Mummy Maze and Psychobabble have the same properties.
This reminds me of the Monty Pyton sketch "When I was in college, we used to live
in a shoebox in the middle of the road..." "LUXURY! We DREAMED of a shoebox!" etc.
Or the Dilbert cartoon where Dilbert says that when he started out, they
had to write all their code in ones and zeros -- and Wally answers that when
he started out, all they had was zeros.
But the story about letting the C compiler do the basic conversion to assembler
for you is a good one! Think fast, young padiwan, indeed!
If you're doing anything at all with computer algebra
(rather common in applied math and engineering science anyway)
you'll find you can get maple or
mathematica to output your equations
at any stage of processing in TeX. They even have little
TeX-rendering front ends now.
This is really really
nifty, because it means that you can play with the
algebraic form of an equation (or a whole table of
related equations) and see what form of the same
equation typesets the most clearly and readably --
with a far lower probability of making typographic
errors!
I did a lot of the equations for my thesis like this,
in the late 80's -- using cut-and-paste between different
virtual terminals under X windows to get the TeX output
from command-line maple and mathematica
into my vi session where I was writing my thesis--in
plain TeX.
Great reproducibility and easier to keep stuff organised
too.
It means you can save the maple or mathematica workbook
in the same directory as that section of your thesis
(and the bibtex file associated with it, and the
fortran/C source you also had maple/mathematic spit
out to test numerical approaches to solving the same
problem).
Someone mentioned FrameMaker -- that was originally
just a SunWindows WYSIWYG front-end to TeX. A long
long time ago. It was too expensive, and there were several
open source alternatives to preview your DVI output, some
of which survive to this day.
If you play music with other people lilypond makes
the most beautifully typeset music I've ever seen -- in LaTeX
--and
automates the transcription process for you as well.
From the command line. Which means you can set it up
as a web service for your muso buddies, who might be
blowing a B-flat instrument, while you keep the master
transcription in C for the piano. While there are lots
of pointy-clicky windows apps that will do this, the
typesetting quality is not nearly as good, and because
they require someone pointing and clicking, it's much
harder to use them as processing back ends to some other
thing you might want to do. e.g. a transcription service
that you and your friends need in order to play stuff
together. But a way to get rehearsal copies to them
quickly without a lot of fiddling around in Windows.
For example, you left out the step where, after walking across campus
in the freezing cold, you have to wait on line with 200 other freshmen
(half of whom have the flu--several different varieties brought back
from Thanksgiving holiday)
in a stuffy, moldy, underventillated,
overheated basement room to submit your cards to the card reader.
And the
other step where the person three ahead of you in the queue had one
slightly bent card, that (because this is a modern high-speed card
reader) sent several hundred cards shooting halfway across the machine
room.
Oh and the other step where you stand on line again
waiting for your output to come out of the batch queue printer. (Remember
green-and-white striped pinfeed fanfold paper with that highly
professional looking ALL CAPITALS dot matrix font? Fetching!)
And of course there's the optional step where you fall asleep
over your printout at 4 in the morning and wake up to find that
both your jacket and the wallet that was in the pocket have been
stolen, along with one of your more costly science textbooks.
And if you don't like punch cards, well, there's always
paper tape....what narked me off about the punch card debug
cycle (besides having to use it for every assignment)
was that back in high school, we had interactive terminals,
WYLBUR scripting language, and access to several real-world compilers
and interpreted languages
on a local company's spare UNIVAC cycles. Debugging at 300baud
is vastly better than debugging via carrying decks of cards across
campus! Well, the use of the UNIVAC was free
and easy, learned a lot fast -- but there in university, an
IVY LEAGUE institution no less, paying top tuition
dollar, we got a vastly worse system to work with.
Real World
Lesson: the more money an institution has, the more tight-fisted
they are, and the less they care about the people at the bottom.
Other Real World Lesson: Prestige is worthless when you're hungry. You Can't Eat Prestige.
ps did you get away with turning in your .s files straight out of the
c compiler? GOOD ONE!
One school here in NZ has their mail server set up to reject all mail
from.com domains. Decent spam filter, but it makes it difficult to
communicate with the principal about converting it to linux and putting
more effective and accurate spam filters on it!
One request I've seen is for a configuration of squid (or some other
cache/proxy server) that can (a) cache
a large number of pages on a certain topic (gathered by hand if
necessary) and then limit the access of the students to only those
pages.
Another popular item for schools is an
ltsp setup . But you *have* to let them know that despite the word
"terminal" in the title, these are not dumb terminals per se, but rather
a thin client arrangement, more along the lines of the old diskless sun
workstations! You don't want them going out and getting a bunch of old
VT100's and thinking they'll be able to bring up a graphical display on
them! (well, maybe if you put them in tek4014 emulation mode, but it's
it's not exactly what they expect!)
At the NZ Open Source Society we're
focussing on schools as a highly appropriate place to place open
source deployments, on charity. Think about it. If you donate
your time at market rates, you can claim it back on your taxes
at a rate that's still a living wage.
This is an excellent way to reduce your tax burden from a windfall
in previous years, keep busy and expand your skills in a lean year,
and do something good for the community--all at the same time.
A friend of mine's kid uses linux exclusively at home, and when
the kids on the schoolbus found out, they backed away from her
in shock and informed her that linux "was illegal" and she could
be arrested "for being a hacker using that." An idea brought to
a school near you by
the MS FUD Factory.
This is the level of misunderstanding of open source
in the schools, so it's an important mission to at least dispell
some of the FUD surrounding it.
Yah. True. And if you read The Tower Report on Iran Contra, you'd know that it was the
IBM mainframe that caught them out in the end, not investigative journalists.
Basically they were hoisted by their own petard (but apparently not dropped hard enough
afterwards). They had an early email system
that (wow!) kept backups of everything, including things that they'd thought they'd
deleted. So what was so incriminating? The email discussion between JP and other
White House Staff
concerning how various lies might go over with the public regarding the Iran Contra
scandal as it unfolded -- how the story might be changed, how they might spin various half-
truths.
The devil is in the details: you can't read the Tower Report without reading
the footnotes, because this is where the real story is: how they were
undone by their own words, when they thought everything they wrote could be deleted and or
otherwise kept secret.
TIA profiling comes a little bit too close to Minority Report's FutureCrime and
1984's ThoughtCrime for comfort.
A better example is Ma Bell - the growth of services and plummeting of costs since the AT&T breakup has been astounding. When Ma Bell had the market cornered, there was no pressure to innovate.
Frankly, I think we need stronger anti-trust action..
I agree with your first premise--that growth of services and
plummeting of costs has taken place since the AT&T breakup--and your conclusion--that we need stronger anti-trust action.
However, I disagree with your second premise that Ma Bell had no pressure to innovate
when they had the market cornered.
Bell Labs in the 60's, 70's and 80's was (IMHO) a national
treasure of research and development. True, their pressure to innovate did not come from
commercial competition driven by next quarter's bottom line. It came rather
from a more academic competition for research funds, both internal and external.
All those EE PhD's who did not go get academic jobs were out there proving that their
R&D was better than what could be done at a university. It was actually more desirable,
from a researcher's standpoint, to go be a Member of the Technical Staff at Bell Labs
than to be, say, a full professor in the same subject at a small teaching college.
Why? First, you got all the good toys, and contact with all the people developing
all the latest greatest stuff--particularly access to internal technical memoranda.
The best developments were kept in-house, and yet you could publish, and
get bonus points for developing a rock-solid working prototype rather than being
punished for the time you spent exploring the reliability issues rather than zooming
on the next "sexy" fashionable idea! Bell Labs was considered "the best of both worlds"
in that sense!
The setup was geared
to R&D, a higher level of R&D than you could do at a University, in part because of
access to your colleagues proprietary unpublished R&D, and second because you could
do projects that did not have to result in a stream of "LPU's" -- Least Publishable
Units -- and grant money next year .
At Bell Labs, by contrast,
you could actually do a project with
a tangible result projected for 5 years down the line, rather than having to
limit yourself to doing something you knew would work in 1 or 2 (typically
incremental
mods on your PhD thesis, which is all most academic researchers ever do). And yet, the setup
was incredibly academic, in that you had postdocs going back and forth transparently
between the best research universities in the world, and Bell Labs. The result
was a highly creative and productive R&D environment.
One of the reasons Ma Bell's services were so costly at that time was because they
were supporting this R&D infrastructure.
Now my impression is colored by knowing a dozen or so people who were members
of the technical staff and/or postdocs in "the glory days" of Bell Labs. There
might be some people that considered it the WORST of both worlds. If so, I never
met 'em.
In national power grids and telephone networks, a regulated monopoly
makes some sense, as you really do need different parts of the system to work
well together. Even where there are standards and protocols established by
disinterested parties, every implementation will be slightly different wherever
an ambiguity or lack of specificity is present in the protocol or standard. Witnesseth
Oracle's interpretation of SQL standards, to bring us back to the original topic.
The reason I would personally lament the purchase of PeopleSoft by Oracle is
that Oracle would use it to progressively stamp out OS/400 and most likely the
PPC64 architecture altogether by interfering with the existing technical
synergy among JDE, SAP, PeopleSoft, DB2 and a whole host of third party
tools which run really stably and reliably on the iSeries platform.
This is what makes Oracle's bid to purchase PeopleSoft anti-competetive
in a very specific, measurable and identifiab
It's an equilateral triangle, 8 inches per side, composed of thin sticks of balsa wood. There's a ring of copper wire from RadioShack strung around the top and a strip of Reynolds Wrap held down with Krazy Glue around the bottom.
When I throw the switch, 20,000 volts will course through this bundle of sticks and foil - and it will levitate.
Slashdot wasn't built on a massive budget. Amazon doesn't have a history of "bleeding" data from one user to another. Google and Yahoo are certainly capable of handling tremendous loads.
I think that it's actually unfair to compare this EDS project to these,
because none of the cases you cite had to deal with what is essentially
integrating data from literally thousands
of legacy databases -- one for every participating university,
as well as the government's internal databases. The databases behind the examples
you cite were designed and built well after the current standards of
best practice in relational database design and deployment were established,
they were built by one company for one purpose, and the data were all entered
through a generally manageable system. LOTS of data, yes, but it's not the
transactional volumes or data size we're concerned about here, it's the
quality and accuracy of the data. Which follows the dictum,
garbage in, garbage out .
By legacy I mean databases that have no established means to
maintain referential integrity,
zero data accuracy or consistency checks at the point of data entry,
have fields being used to represent data completely different from the original
purpose, might be using an engine that simply can't handle SQL properly because
they're not actually relational databases -- try PICK or UNIDATA.
I swear there are still UNIDATA systems out there, and they are a
bloody nightmare to get reasonable data out of, even if it's a one-off
migration to a real database engine like Oracle or DB2.
And you
wouldn't believe the utter stupidity of some of the people running these
databases. I had one IT manager actually tell me that they should stick with
Unidata because "there were more people available in the workforce
who understood Unidata than who could work with Oracle." I kid you not.
And it wasn't existing internal programmers he was talking about -- this was
his case for whether they should use unidata for a NEW system for
which they intended to hire new people! Unidata isn't even supported
by the company that owns it anymore! It's an orphan product! So what am
I supposed to think, gee, I really need to get me some unidata skillz?
NOT!
When you think of the word "legacy" do not think "stable, works" -- think
of those "legacy" students at your Ivy League school: the children
of the rich, thick as pigshit, who never would have gotten into
Harvard without daddy's name. And in this project, you're dealing with
thousands of different legacy databases. Each one uniquely stupid
and broken in its own mid-70's to early-80's way. Believe you me, University
student administration databases are far more broken than government
databases. Probably because they have all those "legacy" students who barely
graduated and couldn't get a job in the real world -- so the university gave
them the IT manager job that nobody else wanted, because nobody who could
actually do the job would have anything to do with University IT.
This EDS project is just conforming to the established standard in the field.
But this isn't actually the worst I've ever seen. THAT one was
a little FoxPro database on one PC that was being used to handle an order
entry process for over a hundred sales offices around the world, for custom
made products (i.e. each order requiring different measurements, fittings,
materials used and
pricing). Yes, this was post-y2K (which FoxPro can't handle, so guess what!
Numerous custom patches and work-arounds! yeah!). Yes, this was in the
post-internet world. So how did the hundreds of sales offices around the
world contact the order-entry database? By
dialling into the PC's modem--long distance . It was the funniest
stupidest, brokenest system I have ever seen. It could have been worse--
they could have been using UNIDATA instead of
Actually, I have banking software that only works in windows (well it's more secure, what would you expect a bank to use?), it crashes 1 out 5 times I use it at a rough guess. But then that would probably be a hardware problem wouldn't it?
Um...I hate to tell you, but...if it's just the application that's crashing,
it (a) may well be trojaned, and (b) could very well be leaving easily compromised
banking information in open files and readable memory, even if it's i/o to other
processes is all encrypted. I've seen some awfully insecure banking applications.
It is not necessarily more secure just because it came from a bank! Think about it! If you
were a crooked programmer, now what kind of an organisation would you go to work for? A
BANK! Why? Like John Dillinger said, "Because that's where the money is!"
Funny I don't have any hardware problems with the other dozen identical machines in the department that run another OS.
YAH! All the more reason to encourage the redevelopment or, if necessary, reverse engineering of
that banking application to LIN^h^h^hBSD^h^h^hSOLAR^h^h^h^h^hthat er um "other OS."
I'm sure in those circumstances your company could have obtained a court order from a court of competent jurisdiction for the information.
I'm sure they did. In fact, I know they did. Jpwever. the information that gave them probable cause
to get the court order...now where would that have come from..?
One electronics company I know fairly well caught an employee
selling units over e-bay that he'd pulled off the assembly line (he was in QA).
Not the brightest move. He was led out of the plant
in handcuffs by the police. The point is, though, there
are sometimes legitimate reasons for not protecting
everybody's identity.
Web site content is copyrighted. Therefore, you have a right to make your own personal copy, and backup copies, but it is not legal to redistribute those copies without the site owner's permission. I cannot imagine that the Wayback machine or the Google cache is legal. They are blatantly disregarding the site owners' copyright.
That would imply that every ISP running a public
squid cache is breaking the law, and Akamai's entire
business model
is based on illegal content-smuggling. I really don't think so!
Re:Obviously fiction/fantasy
on
The Bug
·
· Score: 1
Well, some attractive girls prefer geeks. It's the attention
to detail, the ability to think clearly, the expression of
individuality, the drive/motivation, the expression of the
creative urge to create something from nothing, an even
god-like authority
to breathe life into a once-dead piece of metal. While
attractive
girls who have these qualities themselves and can do these things
themselves certainly don't look on in
breathless admiration, we also could not settle for someone who
did not themselves
possess these qualities, and could
not do these things themselves.
Such a girl would probably
have dropped him, if he couldn't track down the
source of what is clearly a memory bug -- probably
corruption or a leak. Particularly if he
couldn't accept her help or advice.
While this might seem like a cold-hearted "YOU are the Weakest Link!
Good Bye!" it's slightly more complicated than that. What
attracts the girl with the geek preference is mastery of the
medium. Once that's gone, the attraction is likely to wane unless
something far more substantial has grown up in the meantime.
Well, I can assure you that Chris Barton is a real person -- a journalist for the New Zealand
Herald technical and business pages,
(not a "technical writer" as written here) i.e. He is a real person who needs to get real work done
irrespective of what operating system he's running. He's a journo, not a techo by trade. That's
what's news. More and more, musicians, artists, novelists and soccer moms are flocking to Linux in NZ
because of what Chris Barton writes in the newspaper. Particularly his promoting our
INSTALLFEST which is what the original article
was about.
Now Chris has also
written numerous good articles about WETA DIGITAL , the
people who brought the Lord of the Rings trilogy to the big screen, running linux clusters
(at least two generations of them), as well as numerous other commerical linux
deployments throughout New Zealand and the rest of Australasia. I was actually quite surprised that
he wasn't running Linux on his desktop already, but, then, a lot of us are literally forced
to use Windows at work by brain-dead MSCE-infected ITdiots who advise Upper Management. The more of
a groundswell towards Linux adoption they see, the better.
Again, if North American and European retailers aren't up with the programme, their loss
Australia and New Zealand are regarded as test markets for
the introduction of new computing and electronics gizmos for the rest
of the world because it's a culturally similar market, yet smaller
and more receptive to new technology, particularly when it can
be used to communicate with the rest of the world.
What you see succeed down here will soon take root in North America and Europe.
Sorry, but as long as there are no separate shelves with Linux software in shops like CompUSA or Virgin Megastore, Linux will not be for "ordinary people".
Well, the computer store I go to -- Dr Floppy -- has Linux games stocked on
shelves separate from
the Windows games...and about the same number of each. It's a retail store in the heart of downtown Auckland.
If the US and UK retailers haven't figured out how to stock and market Linux games yet, well, that's their loss.
People can transfer the skills they already have from Windows to Linux -- which is what the INSTALLFEST is all about, really: helping "ordinary people" leverage a very transferrable skillset.
The important thing to remember is that while they may feel at first that they're "having to learn everything
all over again," with just a little encouragement, they soon realize that all the things they learned how
to do in Windows and/or Mac gave them a lot more general knowledge than what they had when they truly
knew nothing about computers. The truly awesome thing is when they realize that they actually know
a lot more about computers in general than they're giving themselves credit for--because it's their second
or third operating system, they find themselves picking it up far more quickly than the others, and they see
more similarities than differences. Your "ordinary people" are not so ordinary any more! Well, not in NZ anyway.
Back to your point about games.
Most of your linux games are open-source anyway, which means that not only can you get them for free
(as in beer) over the internet, but also so can all of your friends. Far more social than forcing everyone
into the false dilemma of "Purchase or Pirate." On Windows, you have to either crack the game to play it
multiplayer, or convince your friends to buy it. On Linux all that intellectual energy can go into
adding new features, or even just making new skins -- because you don't have to crack it!
Please check out our Installfest
site. This is intended to install linux, yes, and get people started, yes.
But most of all it will put the people getting started in touch
with local people who can and will
provide them with additional information in the future. It's about promoting
linux in the community, and forming a community around it.
I have to say that "ordinary people" are getting more and more
sophisticated. People are learning about their own computers
at a much deeper level than ever before -- configuring a machine
to, say, share a printer over a network is common knowledge
these days, part of what is considered basic computer literacy ,
and guess what? This knowledge and these skills are transferrable.
Going from one
pointy-clicky interface on a Windows PC and setting it up for email,
file and print sharing, to another pointy-clicky
interface on, say, SuSE, to do the same things is a lot easier than
when way back when, when
we had to explain to people what a network could do for them
in the first place.
Windows helped crack open the window to learning to use a computer, and
Linux turns it into a door--a great big double door to a very large house,
with a tiled and heated indoor pool, a marble sunken jacuzzi and a conservatory.
They just don't want to go back to their overpriced little
council flat of a Windows operating system after seeing what they can
do with Linux running on the same machine.
There was a time when MS "wasn't for ordinary peoples' desktops", either.
That was the domain of Apple, remember?
LINUX. Because in a world without fences, who needs Gates?
One interesting thing about AHWOSG is the pace -- it starts out slooow, where
every incident is described in great detail. It steadily accelerates throughout until
the ending which is like "and then everybody grew upandgotahaircutandarealjobhappeverafterTHEEND."
At first I thought it was a little disappointing that such great writing could
wind down so trivially. I would have expected it to be more evenly paced, with
some brilliant dramatic event unfolding and coming to a climax somewhere about
halfway between the middle and the end of the book.
But ( ironically? NOT! Ha!) life is like that: when you're
a kid, every day seems like an eternity, and everything is terribly meaningful.
As you get older it just...accelerates,
and everything just seems less important--except the things that really are ,
which you never "get" except in retrospect.
To get back to the original article and the original topic, I liked the way
it made the distinction
amongst rhetorical irony, philosophical irony and situational irony.
For IBM, even more of a corporate bully in its day than M$, to be championing
open source software, and even going to the wall for OSS against SCO,
is situational irony. It's the opposite of what
we've learned to expect from them.
Next week, class, we will discuss
Syllogisms (anyone who had to live through the Reagan/Thatcher era will
recognise these devices!).
Slashdot Mirror
One cycle of IVF costs an average of $12,400.00.
US$12.5K in the USA you mean.
In New Zealand, an IVF cycle is NZ$5K -- which is more like US$3K.
Did your state legislature ship your job overseas with the high cost of medical benefits? Well, now you can ship your fertility specialist's job overseas by having your IVF in New Zealand!
Now it's thought that the cooler oceanic slabs sink into the subduction zone by their own weight...
The buoyancy contrast as driving force you describe -- between cold (dense) slab and warm (less dense) mantle -- is by definition thermal convection.
The fact that some Earth Scientists actually argue over "whether it's slab pull, ridge push, or thermal convection," is just proof that they went into Earth Science because they failed their undergraduate classical mechanics and hydrostatics courses.
Maybe that helps aids the tectonic flows around here? Seems to me that the techtonic flows cause, rather than are caused by gravitational differences. Less mass in one area == less gravity, and so forth.
Tectonic movement is caused by density variations associated with the earth's being heated from within (decay of radioactive elements) and cooled from without. This drives convection currents (think chicken soup). What we see on the surface is the horizontal component of those convective movements. The gravity anomalies associated with these density variations are on the 100km-1000km length scale.
OTOH you can get gravity anomalies due to plain old topography, changes in chemical composition of the crust (e.g. an iron ore body, or uranium deposit) which are associated with both mass and density variations, but have nothing to do with either tectonics. The gravity anomalies associated with these effects are generally of a much shorter wavelength than the anomalies associated with convective (tectonic) forces.
Ah, that's why you took that big thick highlighter pen and put a diagonal stripe along the edge of your card deck! So you can sort them more easily in case of this particular mishap!
Bravo! Women don't want to work on that kind of nonsense either -- so the people that decide on what games to be made for women (and don't have a clue) have to take part of the blame, too.
I understand that the popcap games particularly BookWorm are doing extremely well with women, particularly women over 35. These are extremely addictive, cheap as they come, simple, do not require special hardware, and give your brain a bit of a workout.
PopCap's Mummy Maze and Psychobabble have the same properties.
This reminds me of the Monty Pyton sketch "When I was in college, we used to live in a shoebox in the middle of the road..." "LUXURY! We DREAMED of a shoebox!" etc.
Or the Dilbert cartoon where Dilbert says that when he started out, they had to write all their code in ones and zeros -- and Wally answers that when he started out, all they had was zeros.
But the story about letting the C compiler do the basic conversion to assembler for you is a good one! Think fast, young padiwan, indeed!
This is yet another reason that LaTeX is Good.
If you're doing anything at all with computer algebra (rather common in applied math and engineering science anyway) you'll find you can get maple or mathematica to output your equations at any stage of processing in TeX. They even have little TeX-rendering front ends now.
This is really really nifty, because it means that you can play with the algebraic form of an equation (or a whole table of related equations) and see what form of the same equation typesets the most clearly and readably -- with a far lower probability of making typographic errors!
I did a lot of the equations for my thesis like this, in the late 80's -- using cut-and-paste between different virtual terminals under X windows to get the TeX output from command-line maple and mathematica into my vi session where I was writing my thesis--in plain TeX.
Great reproducibility and easier to keep stuff organised too. It means you can save the maple or mathematica workbook in the same directory as that section of your thesis (and the bibtex file associated with it, and the fortran/C source you also had maple/mathematic spit out to test numerical approaches to solving the same problem).
Someone mentioned FrameMaker -- that was originally just a SunWindows WYSIWYG front-end to TeX. A long long time ago. It was too expensive, and there were several open source alternatives to preview your DVI output, some of which survive to this day.
If you play music with other people lilypond makes the most beautifully typeset music I've ever seen -- in LaTeX --and automates the transcription process for you as well. From the command line. Which means you can set it up as a web service for your muso buddies, who might be blowing a B-flat instrument, while you keep the master transcription in C for the piano. While there are lots of pointy-clicky windows apps that will do this, the typesetting quality is not nearly as good, and because they require someone pointing and clicking, it's much harder to use them as processing back ends to some other thing you might want to do. e.g. a transcription service that you and your friends need in order to play stuff together. But a way to get rehearsal copies to them quickly without a lot of fiddling around in Windows.
Mod parent up!!! It was actually worse than that!
For example, you left out the step where, after walking across campus in the freezing cold, you have to wait on line with 200 other freshmen (half of whom have the flu--several different varieties brought back from Thanksgiving holiday) in a stuffy, moldy, underventillated, overheated basement room to submit your cards to the card reader.
And the other step where the person three ahead of you in the queue had one slightly bent card, that (because this is a modern high-speed card reader) sent several hundred cards shooting halfway across the machine room.
Oh and the other step where you stand on line again waiting for your output to come out of the batch queue printer. (Remember green-and-white striped pinfeed fanfold paper with that highly professional looking ALL CAPITALS dot matrix font? Fetching!)
And of course there's the optional step where you fall asleep over your printout at 4 in the morning and wake up to find that both your jacket and the wallet that was in the pocket have been stolen, along with one of your more costly science textbooks.
And if you don't like punch cards, well, there's always paper tape....what narked me off about the punch card debug cycle (besides having to use it for every assignment) was that back in high school, we had interactive terminals, WYLBUR scripting language, and access to several real-world compilers and interpreted languages on a local company's spare UNIVAC cycles. Debugging at 300baud is vastly better than debugging via carrying decks of cards across campus! Well, the use of the UNIVAC was free and easy, learned a lot fast -- but there in university, an IVY LEAGUE institution no less, paying top tuition dollar, we got a vastly worse system to work with.
Real World Lesson: the more money an institution has, the more tight-fisted they are, and the less they care about the people at the bottom. Other Real World Lesson: Prestige is worthless when you're hungry. You Can't Eat Prestige.
ps did you get away with turning in your .s files straight out of the
c compiler? GOOD ONE!
NZ Open Source Society is here
One school here in NZ has their mail server set up to reject all mail from .com domains. Decent spam filter, but it makes it difficult to
communicate with the principal about converting it to linux and putting
more effective and accurate spam filters on it!
One request I've seen is for a configuration of squid (or some other cache/proxy server) that can (a) cache a large number of pages on a certain topic (gathered by hand if necessary) and then limit the access of the students to only those pages.
Another popular item for schools is an ltsp setup . But you *have* to let them know that despite the word "terminal" in the title, these are not dumb terminals per se, but rather a thin client arrangement, more along the lines of the old diskless sun workstations! You don't want them going out and getting a bunch of old VT100's and thinking they'll be able to bring up a graphical display on them! (well, maybe if you put them in tek4014 emulation mode, but it's it's not exactly what they expect!)
At the NZ Open Source Society we're focussing on schools as a highly appropriate place to place open source deployments, on charity. Think about it. If you donate your time at market rates, you can claim it back on your taxes at a rate that's still a living wage. This is an excellent way to reduce your tax burden from a windfall in previous years, keep busy and expand your skills in a lean year, and do something good for the community--all at the same time.
A friend of mine's kid uses linux exclusively at home, and when the kids on the schoolbus found out, they backed away from her in shock and informed her that linux "was illegal" and she could be arrested "for being a hacker using that." An idea brought to a school near you by the MS FUD Factory.
This is the level of misunderstanding of open source in the schools, so it's an important mission to at least dispell some of the FUD surrounding it.
What is the ideal education and entry-level career path to become upper-level IT management such as a CIO or CTO?"
Yah. True. And if you read The Tower Report on Iran Contra, you'd know that it was the IBM mainframe that caught them out in the end, not investigative journalists.
Basically they were hoisted by their own petard (but apparently not dropped hard enough afterwards). They had an early email system that (wow!) kept backups of everything, including things that they'd thought they'd deleted. So what was so incriminating? The email discussion between JP and other White House Staff concerning how various lies might go over with the public regarding the Iran Contra scandal as it unfolded -- how the story might be changed, how they might spin various half- truths.
The devil is in the details: you can't read the Tower Report without reading the footnotes, because this is where the real story is: how they were undone by their own words, when they thought everything they wrote could be deleted and or otherwise kept secret.
TIA profiling comes a little bit too close to Minority Report's FutureCrime and 1984's ThoughtCrime for comfort.
A better example is Ma Bell - the growth of services and plummeting of costs since the AT&T breakup has been astounding. When Ma Bell had the market cornered, there was no pressure to innovate. Frankly, I think we need stronger anti-trust action..
I agree with your first premise--that growth of services and plummeting of costs has taken place since the AT&T breakup--and your conclusion--that we need stronger anti-trust action.
However, I disagree with your second premise that Ma Bell had no pressure to innovate when they had the market cornered.
Bell Labs in the 60's, 70's and 80's was (IMHO) a national treasure of research and development. True, their pressure to innovate did not come from commercial competition driven by next quarter's bottom line. It came rather from a more academic competition for research funds, both internal and external. All those EE PhD's who did not go get academic jobs were out there proving that their R&D was better than what could be done at a university. It was actually more desirable, from a researcher's standpoint, to go be a Member of the Technical Staff at Bell Labs than to be, say, a full professor in the same subject at a small teaching college. Why? First, you got all the good toys, and contact with all the people developing all the latest greatest stuff--particularly access to internal technical memoranda. The best developments were kept in-house, and yet you could publish, and get bonus points for developing a rock-solid working prototype rather than being punished for the time you spent exploring the reliability issues rather than zooming on the next "sexy" fashionable idea! Bell Labs was considered "the best of both worlds" in that sense!
The setup was geared to R&D, a higher level of R&D than you could do at a University, in part because of access to your colleagues proprietary unpublished R&D, and second because you could do projects that did not have to result in a stream of "LPU's" -- Least Publishable Units -- and grant money next year .
At Bell Labs, by contrast, you could actually do a project with a tangible result projected for 5 years down the line, rather than having to limit yourself to doing something you knew would work in 1 or 2 (typically incremental mods on your PhD thesis, which is all most academic researchers ever do). And yet, the setup was incredibly academic, in that you had postdocs going back and forth transparently between the best research universities in the world, and Bell Labs. The result was a highly creative and productive R&D environment.
One of the reasons Ma Bell's services were so costly at that time was because they were supporting this R&D infrastructure.
Now my impression is colored by knowing a dozen or so people who were members of the technical staff and/or postdocs in "the glory days" of Bell Labs. There might be some people that considered it the WORST of both worlds. If so, I never met 'em.
In national power grids and telephone networks, a regulated monopoly makes some sense, as you really do need different parts of the system to work well together. Even where there are standards and protocols established by disinterested parties, every implementation will be slightly different wherever an ambiguity or lack of specificity is present in the protocol or standard. Witnesseth Oracle's interpretation of SQL standards, to bring us back to the original topic.
The reason I would personally lament the purchase of PeopleSoft by Oracle is that Oracle would use it to progressively stamp out OS/400 and most likely the PPC64 architecture altogether by interfering with the existing technical synergy among JDE, SAP, PeopleSoft, DB2 and a whole host of third party tools which run really stably and reliably on the iSeries platform. This is what makes Oracle's bid to purchase PeopleSoft anti-competetive in a very specific, measurable and identifiab
It's an equilateral triangle, 8 inches per side, composed of thin sticks of balsa wood. There's a ring of copper wire from RadioShack strung around the top and a strip of Reynolds Wrap held down with Krazy Glue around the bottom. When I throw the switch, 20,000 volts will course through this bundle of sticks and foil - and it will levitate.
Didn't he mean DEFLAGRATE ?
Slashdot wasn't built on a massive budget. Amazon doesn't have a history of "bleeding" data from one user to another. Google and Yahoo are certainly capable of handling tremendous loads.
I think that it's actually unfair to compare this EDS project to these, because none of the cases you cite had to deal with what is essentially integrating data from literally thousands of legacy databases -- one for every participating university, as well as the government's internal databases. The databases behind the examples you cite were designed and built well after the current standards of best practice in relational database design and deployment were established, they were built by one company for one purpose, and the data were all entered through a generally manageable system. LOTS of data, yes, but it's not the transactional volumes or data size we're concerned about here, it's the quality and accuracy of the data. Which follows the dictum, garbage in, garbage out .
By legacy I mean databases that have no established means to maintain referential integrity, zero data accuracy or consistency checks at the point of data entry, have fields being used to represent data completely different from the original purpose, might be using an engine that simply can't handle SQL properly because they're not actually relational databases -- try PICK or UNIDATA. I swear there are still UNIDATA systems out there, and they are a bloody nightmare to get reasonable data out of, even if it's a one-off migration to a real database engine like Oracle or DB2.
And you wouldn't believe the utter stupidity of some of the people running these databases. I had one IT manager actually tell me that they should stick with Unidata because "there were more people available in the workforce who understood Unidata than who could work with Oracle." I kid you not. And it wasn't existing internal programmers he was talking about -- this was his case for whether they should use unidata for a NEW system for which they intended to hire new people! Unidata isn't even supported by the company that owns it anymore! It's an orphan product! So what am I supposed to think, gee, I really need to get me some unidata skillz? NOT!
When you think of the word "legacy" do not think "stable, works" -- think of those "legacy" students at your Ivy League school: the children of the rich, thick as pigshit, who never would have gotten into Harvard without daddy's name. And in this project, you're dealing with thousands of different legacy databases. Each one uniquely stupid and broken in its own mid-70's to early-80's way. Believe you me, University student administration databases are far more broken than government databases. Probably because they have all those "legacy" students who barely graduated and couldn't get a job in the real world -- so the university gave them the IT manager job that nobody else wanted, because nobody who could actually do the job would have anything to do with University IT.
This EDS project is just conforming to the established standard in the field.
But this isn't actually the worst I've ever seen. THAT one was a little FoxPro database on one PC that was being used to handle an order entry process for over a hundred sales offices around the world, for custom made products (i.e. each order requiring different measurements, fittings, materials used and pricing). Yes, this was post-y2K (which FoxPro can't handle, so guess what! Numerous custom patches and work-arounds! yeah!). Yes, this was in the post-internet world. So how did the hundreds of sales offices around the world contact the order-entry database? By dialling into the PC's modem--long distance . It was the funniest stupidest, brokenest system I have ever seen. It could have been worse-- they could have been using UNIDATA instead of
Actually, I have banking software that only works in windows (well it's more secure, what would you expect a bank to use?), it crashes 1 out 5 times I use it at a rough guess. But then that would probably be a hardware problem wouldn't it?
Um...I hate to tell you, but...if it's just the application that's crashing, it (a) may well be trojaned, and (b) could very well be leaving easily compromised banking information in open files and readable memory, even if it's i/o to other processes is all encrypted. I've seen some awfully insecure banking applications.
It is not necessarily more secure just because it came from a bank! Think about it! If you were a crooked programmer, now what kind of an organisation would you go to work for? A BANK! Why? Like John Dillinger said, "Because that's where the money is!"
Funny I don't have any hardware problems with the other dozen identical machines in the department that run another OS.
YAH! All the more reason to encourage the redevelopment or, if necessary, reverse engineering of that banking application to LIN^h^h^hBSD^h^h^hSOLAR^h^h^h^h^hthat er um "other OS."
AAHH-OOO! Penguins of Laingholm.
I'm sure in those circumstances your company could have obtained a court order from a court of competent jurisdiction for the information.
I'm sure they did. In fact, I know they did. Jpwever. the information that gave them probable cause to get the court order...now where would that have come from..?
One electronics company I know fairly well caught an employee selling units over e-bay that he'd pulled off the assembly line (he was in QA). Not the brightest move. He was led out of the plant in handcuffs by the police. The point is, though, there are sometimes legitimate reasons for not protecting everybody's identity.
Web site content is copyrighted. Therefore, you have a right to make your own personal copy, and backup copies, but it is not legal to redistribute those copies without the site owner's permission. I cannot imagine that the Wayback machine or the Google cache is legal. They are blatantly disregarding the site owners' copyright.
That would imply that every ISP running a public squid cache is breaking the law, and Akamai's entire business model is based on illegal content-smuggling. I really don't think so!
Well, some attractive girls prefer geeks. It's the attention to detail, the ability to think clearly, the expression of individuality, the drive/motivation, the expression of the creative urge to create something from nothing, an even god-like authority to breathe life into a once-dead piece of metal. While attractive girls who have these qualities themselves and can do these things themselves certainly don't look on in breathless admiration, we also could not settle for someone who did not themselves possess these qualities, and could not do these things themselves.
Such a girl would probably have dropped him, if he couldn't track down the source of what is clearly a memory bug -- probably corruption or a leak. Particularly if he couldn't accept her help or advice.
While this might seem like a cold-hearted "YOU are the Weakest Link! Good Bye!" it's slightly more complicated than that. What attracts the girl with the geek preference is mastery of the medium. Once that's gone, the attraction is likely to wane unless something far more substantial has grown up in the meantime.
Well, I can assure you that Chris Barton is a real person -- a journalist for the New Zealand Herald technical and business pages, (not a "technical writer" as written here) i.e. He is a real person who needs to get real work done irrespective of what operating system he's running. He's a journo, not a techo by trade. That's what's news. More and more, musicians, artists, novelists and soccer moms are flocking to Linux in NZ because of what Chris Barton writes in the newspaper. Particularly his promoting our INSTALLFEST which is what the original article was about.
Now Chris has also written numerous good articles about WETA DIGITAL , the people who brought the Lord of the Rings trilogy to the big screen, running linux clusters (at least two generations of them), as well as numerous other commerical linux deployments throughout New Zealand and the rest of Australasia. I was actually quite surprised that he wasn't running Linux on his desktop already, but, then, a lot of us are literally forced to use Windows at work by brain-dead MSCE-infected ITdiots who advise Upper Management. The more of a groundswell towards Linux adoption they see, the better.
Australasia's largest consumer electronics shop, Dick Smith's provides pre-built systems off the shelf, with LINUX and OO already installed .
Again, if North American and European retailers aren't up with the programme, their loss
Australia and New Zealand are regarded as test markets for the introduction of new computing and electronics gizmos for the rest of the world because it's a culturally similar market, yet smaller and more receptive to new technology, particularly when it can be used to communicate with the rest of the world.
What you see succeed down here will soon take root in North America and Europe.
Sorry, but as long as there are no separate shelves with Linux software in shops like CompUSA or Virgin Megastore, Linux will not be for "ordinary people".
Well, the computer store I go to -- Dr Floppy -- has Linux games stocked on shelves separate from the Windows games...and about the same number of each. It's a retail store in the heart of downtown Auckland.
If the US and UK retailers haven't figured out how to stock and market Linux games yet, well, that's their loss.
People can transfer the skills they already have from Windows to Linux -- which is what the INSTALLFEST is all about, really: helping "ordinary people" leverage a very transferrable skillset.
The important thing to remember is that while they may feel at first that they're "having to learn everything all over again," with just a little encouragement, they soon realize that all the things they learned how to do in Windows and/or Mac gave them a lot more general knowledge than what they had when they truly knew nothing about computers. The truly awesome thing is when they realize that they actually know a lot more about computers in general than they're giving themselves credit for--because it's their second or third operating system, they find themselves picking it up far more quickly than the others, and they see more similarities than differences. Your "ordinary people" are not so ordinary any more! Well, not in NZ anyway.
Back to your point about games. Most of your linux games are open-source anyway, which means that not only can you get them for free (as in beer) over the internet, but also so can all of your friends. Far more social than forcing everyone into the false dilemma of "Purchase or Pirate." On Windows, you have to either crack the game to play it multiplayer, or convince your friends to buy it. On Linux all that intellectual energy can go into adding new features, or even just making new skins -- because you don't have to crack it!
Please check out our Installfest site. This is intended to install linux, yes, and get people started, yes. But most of all it will put the people getting started in touch with local people who can and will provide them with additional information in the future. It's about promoting linux in the community, and forming a community around it.
I have to say that "ordinary people" are getting more and more sophisticated. People are learning about their own computers at a much deeper level than ever before -- configuring a machine to, say, share a printer over a network is common knowledge these days, part of what is considered basic computer literacy , and guess what? This knowledge and these skills are transferrable.
Going from one pointy-clicky interface on a Windows PC and setting it up for email, file and print sharing, to another pointy-clicky interface on, say, SuSE, to do the same things is a lot easier than when way back when, when we had to explain to people what a network could do for them in the first place. Windows helped crack open the window to learning to use a computer, and Linux turns it into a door--a great big double door to a very large house, with a tiled and heated indoor pool, a marble sunken jacuzzi and a conservatory. They just don't want to go back to their overpriced little council flat of a Windows operating system after seeing what they can do with Linux running on the same machine.
There was a time when MS "wasn't for ordinary peoples' desktops", either. That was the domain of Apple, remember?
LINUX. Because in a world without fences, who needs Gates?
[glows slightly] 'tis! an amazing book.
One interesting thing about AHWOSG is the pace -- it starts out slooow, where every incident is described in great detail. It steadily accelerates throughout until the ending which is like "and then everybody grew upandgotahaircutandarealjobhappeverafterTHEEND."
At first I thought it was a little disappointing that such great writing could wind down so trivially. I would have expected it to be more evenly paced, with some brilliant dramatic event unfolding and coming to a climax somewhere about halfway between the middle and the end of the book.
But ( ironically? NOT! Ha!) life is like that: when you're a kid, every day seems like an eternity, and everything is terribly meaningful. As you get older it just...accelerates, and everything just seems less important--except the things that really are , which you never "get" except in retrospect.
To get back to the original article and the original topic, I liked the way it made the distinction amongst rhetorical irony, philosophical irony and situational irony.
For IBM, even more of a corporate bully in its day than M$, to be championing open source software, and even going to the wall for OSS against SCO, is situational irony. It's the opposite of what we've learned to expect from them.
Next week, class, we will discuss Syllogisms (anyone who had to live through the Reagan/Thatcher era will recognise these devices!).