If you're C-level, you've got all of the corporate governance bullshit.
The real problem is that in most companies, the entire IT organization is seen as a corporate support cost center, like janitorial services.
Among MBAs, it is an old joke that CIO stands for "Career Is Over." If you're head of products, marketing or sales, you're seen as doing something "core" to the business and its value to customers. If you're CIO, you're seen as managing the IT department and technical product and service vendors -- supporting product development, marketing and sales.
Of course, in many large companies today, IT is the core value and a key driver of value to customers (e.g. FedEx). I might expect to see more CIO to CEO promotions.
I had the Timex Sinclair 1000, which was the North American Version of the ZX-81. 2K RAM, 3.25MHz. I would program text adventure games as a crazy long series of if-then-goto statements. At the end of the day, my father would make me turn it off. No permanent storage -- poof, gone. It was awesome.
Vonnegut tried to write Slaugherhouse-Five as "a novel somewhat in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner of tales of the planet Tralfamadore." In Tralfamadorian books, there is no story arc -- just a colleciton of clumps of symbols. "Each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message describing a situation, a scene. Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn't any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image which is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects."
Vonnegut tried to mimic this style by taking a traditional story arc and shuffling the pieces, but maybe this (or the new types of loosely connected symbols on the web) gets closer to the ideal by removing the story arc entirely.
It certainly seems like you get a sense of character from this book, even without any type of narrative.
"I expect that Alan Cox doesn't understand the issues deeply enough."
I hope someday I am cocky enough to make that statement.
"You can put two secure pieces of code and get insecurity."
Of course you can. But you can also put two secure pieces of code and prove that the combination is secure. The fact that the two pieces that you're combining are provably secure means that there is less work for you to do. Nobody is talking about writing the "Linux is secure" proof. If you start with the building blocks of secure systems and make them provably secure, you can absolutely combine them to come up with "provably secure systems."
"... a provably secure operating system is impossible."
You are wrong. Perhaps a provably secure Linux is impossible. But Alan Cox didn't say "operating system." He said, "system." Always pause (at least briefly) before suggesting that you have a better understanding of operating systems than Alan Cox.
I'm not claiming that the midichlorians idea constitutes a continuity error. I'm saying that Lucas's choice to make Jedi~=Master Race instead of Jedi~=Samurai is an awful, awful shame.
Just as you suggested, Jedi skill should be like athletic skill -- there's some natural ability, but it's also training, discipline, etc. But the Jedi recruit only infants, based on the blood test. (Young Annikan was almost too old as a boy, remember?) If you're not drafted as an infant, you can't be a Jedi. The Force may not be an exclusive, genetically-inherited power, but the ability to become a Jedi certainly is. And that was a massive foul up on Lucas's part -- one that makes me honestly wish that Episode I was never made.
Jedi is not a practice or a religion that anyone might master. It is more like a race.
Episode I revealed that the Jedi are recruited based on the midi-chlorian count of their bloodstream. Based on this, they are "recruited" as infants.
This, along with the fact that the Jedi are now a giant beauracracy with committee meetings, make the whole thing feel like Soviet olympics committees enslaving children to become gymnasts.
I really wouldn't care if Lucas had just made a few bad movies. But he gave us something that became part of our lives, and then he let his crew of marketers and focus group facilitators pull the rug out from under us. My final review of the prequels: "What a shame."
Very well put. It is not at all obvious, for example, that "choosing your job carefully" results in a better decision than choosing a job based on "gut instinct" (even if your gut is well-lubricated). There are plenty of decisions where behavioral science tells us that snap decisions are better than decisions from prolonged conscious consideration.
I actually find that specific result (that "choosing your job carefully" is best) to be interesting. Not only is it not obvious -- I actually want to read the scientific paper to see if I agree with the study. It certainly doesn't fit with my experience.
If they're using Red Hat Linux, anyone have any idea what player they're using? I doubt they wrote their own from scratch for this thing, and because Sony isn't a Linux house, I'd guess that they are licensing 3rd party or using open source. (I'd love it if it used ffmpeg so I could get my hands on that cool video scheduling interface, and in any case, I'd like to know what Sony chose for their "high bit rate" mpeg2.)
Can someone with access to one of these things take a look at the video libraries and tell us where they come from?
Canonical wants this: "As the framework [for using code from across the community] sets, hopefully we are at the centre of [open source]."
In other words, they want to host it and control it -- they see that as a way of carving differentiation for Canonical.
But they're not releasing the source code for the project (at least not yet). You can share code, etc., using launchpad, but you can't (for example) use malone in your own project as an alternative to bugzilla.
I believe that these guys wouldn't pull a Bitkeeper move, but I'm not using Launchpad till i've got source.
The availability of this tool does wonders for Java. I'd like to know the reasons behind NASA's decision to use Java for this kind of development in the first place, but having this tool available as a testing resource could be enough reason alone to choose Java for a wide variety of new projects.
Photoshop is great, and a category-gorilla, but there are tons of competitors.
Dreamweaver? Lots of competiton.
Flash? It was cool, but from what I can tell, Ajax-based rich web clients are eclipsing both Flash and Java (applet) as the technology of choice. Even when Flash is used, it is just for front-end widgets -- all of Macromedia's investment in server-side technologies (a la Cold Fusion) are losers now.
Adobe sees Microsoft coming in a big way. Expect more acquisitions -- this is nothing but an attempt to form a bigger, harder-to-kill installed-base/revenue base so that the combined entity will have more pieces that Microsoft will have to chip away before total annihilation occurs.
Well, it is a novel method of neural stimulation, with the wrinkle that it doesn't freaking work. Everyone here is correct: the patent, in order to be valid, must contain a sufficiently detailed description of the invention such that someone skilled in the field could reproduce it. Nobody can build this thing today.
This patent is a stinking turd. Sony isn't dumb enough to think that this thing would withstand even the most cursory review of a court. This is a marketing patent, pure and simple.
Here is the offending section. The bracketed sections have been struck from the original bill. Note how the words "For sale" have been struck, making this bill offensive (ie, no free WiFi.)
Sec. 54.202. PROHIBITED MUNICIPAL SERVICES.
[(a)] A
municipality or municipally
owned utility may not, directly or indirectly, on its own or with
another entity, offer [for sale] to the public:
(1) a service for which a certificate [of convenience
and necessity, a certificate of operating authority, or a service
provider certificate of operating authority] is required; [or]
(2) a service as a network provider; or
(3) [(2) a nonswitched] any telecommunications or
information service, without regard to the technology platform used
to [connect a customer's premises with:] provide the service.
Damn. I've always wanted to copy and paste between computers. This could be a dream come true for people that have to work on a large number of computers for a short amount of time...
Unfortunately, it wouldn't work if you couldn't reach both computers so you could touch them both at the same time. Luckily, you also have the RedNard data storage and transfer solution: up to 4 GB of storage! (Assuming you have two....)
Here's another one: note how they split the string in the "write" call up so that the browser can't detect the javascript just by examining the original script:
Gross: "Yeah that's going to be a problem. It's gonna be a problem for them. Apple's attempt to silence a small publication's news reporting presents a troubling affront to the protections of the First Amendment. It's outrageous, egregious, preposterous."
Exactly! Communications satellites have on-board computers and thousands of transponders. Preparing electronics for the rigors of space is now a well-understood practice. There is no reason that a router should be any different from any of the other equipment, should there?
I suppose it is interesting that you could have packets routed between war planes without needing ground-based network services. Not sure why it's necessary, but interesting.
http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/. I don't know how anyone lives without this. I get the typical hundreds of spam every day. 99% end up in my "Spam" folder. I stopped looking in the spam folder for false positives after doing that for 3 months didn't turn up a single one. My "Junk Suspects" folder usually turns up 10 or so a day, one of which might be a non-spam email. I can almost always clear my Junk Suspect folder in bulk by highlighting the whole mess of them and clicking "Delete As Spam", thus further training my spam filter to delete those kinds of things in the future.
Of the hundreds of spam I receive every day, now only 1 or 2 a day might squeeze past the filter into my inbox. It is absolutely essential.
I have a linux box right next to a windows box on my desk. I use windows for email solely because of Spambayes' excellent integration with Outlook.
I am by no means an expert, but you can get get POTS connectiveity for independent lines in less than T1 chunks, I believe these are the FXS cards which should be available in 1/2/4 line flavors.
Sure, but you still have to pay your telco for 1/2/4 lines in that situation, right?
Thanks for the response... so for your t-1 line, you'd have to make a deal with your telco to route a bank of phone numbers to your pbx system via the t-1. Is there any other way to get this done? Can you operate your own PBX to POTS gateway? I'm already sensing that this is probably a stupid question.
I RTFA and I think I understand all of the components -- there's one thing I'm not sure I get:
Once you've got this system set up, where is the connection to POTS? How do you make calls to / receive calls from the normal old circuit-switched phone network?
If the answer is that you pay for this service from your telco (or other VOIP gateway provider), then you aren't really starting your own telco, are you?
CB radio has the same flaw that many information sharing / knowledge base problems have: it requires participation to work. If you're on a major interstate highway, you'll know where every cop, slowdown, accident, truck stop, hot chick in a convertible, etc, are for the next 100 miles ahead of you, if you can handle the foul language. That's because it is an active exchange for information. Northbound truckers pay attention and note mile markers (some even write it down) for highway information, and they trade it with southbound truckers for equivalent information.
One problem with any such network is the "free rider" problem: people like me who just listen to the channel and "suck" information without sharing. Sound familiar?
Perhaps this system might work by "requiring" participation -- by monitoring system information from multiple vehicles and combining it with a news source, the network might be able to "infer" the information that it seeks to provide. To see the information, you have to turn on your information provider. Kind of like requiring that you share your downloads in a p2p system.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're C-level, you've got all of the corporate governance bullshit.
The real problem is that in most companies, the entire IT organization is seen as a corporate support cost center, like janitorial services.
Among MBAs, it is an old joke that CIO stands for "Career Is Over." If you're head of products, marketing or sales, you're seen as doing something "core" to the business and its value to customers. If you're CIO, you're seen as managing the IT department and technical product and service vendors -- supporting product development, marketing and sales.
Of course, in many large companies today, IT is the core value and a key driver of value to customers (e.g. FedEx). I might expect to see more CIO to CEO promotions.
I had the Timex Sinclair 1000, which was the North American Version of the ZX-81. 2K RAM, 3.25MHz. I would program text adventure games as a crazy long series of if-then-goto statements. At the end of the day, my father would make me turn it off. No permanent storage -- poof, gone. It was awesome.
Vonnegut tried to write Slaugherhouse-Five as "a novel somewhat in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner of tales of the planet Tralfamadore." In Tralfamadorian books, there is no story arc -- just a colleciton of clumps of symbols. "Each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message describing a situation, a scene. Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn't any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image which is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects."
Vonnegut tried to mimic this style by taking a traditional story arc and shuffling the pieces, but maybe this (or the new types of loosely connected symbols on the web) gets closer to the ideal by removing the story arc entirely.
It certainly seems like you get a sense of character from this book, even without any type of narrative.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_note
If Cartman can do it, surely the military can.
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/0 3/31/231227
"I expect that Alan Cox doesn't understand the issues deeply enough."
I hope someday I am cocky enough to make that statement.
"You can put two secure pieces of code and get insecurity."
Of course you can. But you can also put two secure pieces of code and prove that the combination is secure. The fact that the two pieces that you're combining are provably secure means that there is less work for you to do. Nobody is talking about writing the "Linux is secure" proof. If you start with the building blocks of secure systems and make them provably secure, you can absolutely combine them to come up with "provably secure systems."
"... a provably secure operating system is impossible."
You are wrong. Perhaps a provably secure Linux is impossible. But Alan Cox didn't say "operating system." He said, "system." Always pause (at least briefly) before suggesting that you have a better understanding of operating systems than Alan Cox.
I'm not claiming that the midichlorians idea constitutes a continuity error. I'm saying that Lucas's choice to make Jedi~=Master Race instead of Jedi~=Samurai is an awful, awful shame.
Just as you suggested, Jedi skill should be like athletic skill -- there's some natural ability, but it's also training, discipline, etc. But the Jedi recruit only infants, based on the blood test. (Young Annikan was almost too old as a boy, remember?) If you're not drafted as an infant, you can't be a Jedi. The Force may not be an exclusive, genetically-inherited power, but the ability to become a Jedi certainly is. And that was a massive foul up on Lucas's part -- one that makes me honestly wish that Episode I was never made.
The biggest, most fundamental difference:
Jedi is not a practice or a religion that anyone might master. It is more like a race.
Episode I revealed that the Jedi are recruited based on the midi-chlorian count of their bloodstream. Based on this, they are "recruited" as infants.
This, along with the fact that the Jedi are now a giant beauracracy with committee meetings, make the whole thing feel like Soviet olympics committees enslaving children to become gymnasts.
I really wouldn't care if Lucas had just made a few bad movies. But he gave us something that became part of our lives, and then he let his crew of marketers and focus group facilitators pull the rug out from under us. My final review of the prequels: "What a shame."
Very well put. It is not at all obvious, for example, that "choosing your job carefully" results in a better decision than choosing a job based on "gut instinct" (even if your gut is well-lubricated). There are plenty of decisions where behavioral science tells us that snap decisions are better than decisions from prolonged conscious consideration.
I actually find that specific result (that "choosing your job carefully" is best) to be interesting. Not only is it not obvious -- I actually want to read the scientific paper to see if I agree with the study. It certainly doesn't fit with my experience.
If they're using Red Hat Linux, anyone have any idea what player they're using? I doubt they wrote their own from scratch for this thing, and because Sony isn't a Linux house, I'd guess that they are licensing 3rd party or using open source. (I'd love it if it used ffmpeg so I could get my hands on that cool video scheduling interface, and in any case, I'd like to know what Sony chose for their "high bit rate" mpeg2.)
Can someone with access to one of these things take a look at the video libraries and tell us where they come from?
Canonical wants this: "As the framework [for using code from across the community] sets, hopefully we are at the centre of [open source]."
In other words, they want to host it and control it -- they see that as a way of carving differentiation for Canonical.
But they're not releasing the source code for the project (at least not yet). You can share code, etc., using launchpad, but you can't (for example) use malone in your own project as an alternative to bugzilla.
I believe that these guys wouldn't pull a Bitkeeper move, but I'm not using Launchpad till i've got source.
The availability of this tool does wonders for Java. I'd like to know the reasons behind NASA's decision to use Java for this kind of development in the first place, but having this tool available as a testing resource could be enough reason alone to choose Java for a wide variety of new projects.
Kudos, NASA!!
No real competitors?
Photoshop is great, and a category-gorilla, but there are tons of competitors.
Dreamweaver? Lots of competiton.
Flash? It was cool, but from what I can tell, Ajax-based rich web clients are eclipsing both Flash and Java (applet) as the technology of choice. Even when Flash is used, it is just for front-end widgets -- all of Macromedia's investment in server-side technologies (a la Cold Fusion) are losers now.
Adobe sees Microsoft coming in a big way. Expect more acquisitions -- this is nothing but an attempt to form a bigger, harder-to-kill installed-base/revenue base so that the combined entity will have more pieces that Microsoft will have to chip away before total annihilation occurs.
Well, it is a novel method of neural stimulation, with the wrinkle that it doesn't freaking work. Everyone here is correct: the patent, in order to be valid, must contain a sufficiently detailed description of the invention such that someone skilled in the field could reproduce it. Nobody can build this thing today.
This patent is a stinking turd. Sony isn't dumb enough to think that this thing would withstand even the most cursory review of a court. This is a marketing patent, pure and simple.
Well, the anagram solution is:
4 Decode/Default.aspx)
Zm9vbHMgc2hvcCBhdCB0aGlua2dlZWs=
(I Base-64 encoded it, so I wouldn't spoil it for anyone else working on it. You can decode it here: http://www.opinionatedgeek.com/dotnet/tools/Base6
Here is the bill:
http://www.capitol.state.tx.us/tlo/79R/billtext/H
Here is the offending section. The bracketed sections have been struck from the original bill. Note how the words "For sale" have been struck, making this bill offensive (ie, no free WiFi.)
Damn. I've always wanted to copy and paste between computers. This could be a dream come true for people that have to work on a large number of computers for a short amount of time...
Unfortunately, it wouldn't work if you couldn't reach both computers so you could touch them both at the same time. Luckily, you also have the RedNard data storage and transfer solution: up to 4 GB of storage! (Assuming you have two....)
Gross: "So, you published trade secrets."
dePlume: "Yes. Is that going to be a problem?"
Gross: "Yeah that's going to be a problem. It's gonna be a problem for them. Apple's attempt to silence a small publication's news reporting presents a troubling affront to the protections of the First Amendment. It's outrageous, egregious, preposterous."
dePlume: "It's definitely preposterous."
Exactly! Communications satellites have on-board computers and thousands of transponders. Preparing electronics for the rigors of space is now a well-understood practice. There is no reason that a router should be any different from any of the other equipment, should there?
I suppose it is interesting that you could have packets routed between war planes without needing ground-based network services. Not sure why it's necessary, but interesting.
http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/. I don't know how anyone lives without this. I get the typical hundreds of spam every day. 99% end up in my "Spam" folder. I stopped looking in the spam folder for false positives after doing that for 3 months didn't turn up a single one. My "Junk Suspects" folder usually turns up 10 or so a day, one of which might be a non-spam email. I can almost always clear my Junk Suspect folder in bulk by highlighting the whole mess of them and clicking "Delete As Spam", thus further training my spam filter to delete those kinds of things in the future.
Of the hundreds of spam I receive every day, now only 1 or 2 a day might squeeze past the filter into my inbox. It is absolutely essential.
I have a linux box right next to a windows box on my desk. I use windows for email solely because of Spambayes' excellent integration with Outlook.
I am by no means an expert, but you can get get POTS connectiveity for independent lines in less than T1 chunks, I believe these are the FXS cards which should be available in 1/2/4 line flavors.
Sure, but you still have to pay your telco for 1/2/4 lines in that situation, right?
Thanks for the response... so for your t-1 line, you'd have to make a deal with your telco to route a bank of phone numbers to your pbx system via the t-1. Is there any other way to get this done? Can you operate your own PBX to POTS gateway? I'm already sensing that this is probably a stupid question.
I RTFA and I think I understand all of the components -- there's one thing I'm not sure I get:
Once you've got this system set up, where is the connection to POTS? How do you make calls to / receive calls from the normal old circuit-switched phone network?
If the answer is that you pay for this service from your telco (or other VOIP gateway provider), then you aren't really starting your own telco, are you?
CB radio has the same flaw that many information sharing / knowledge base problems have: it requires participation to work. If you're on a major interstate highway, you'll know where every cop, slowdown, accident, truck stop, hot chick in a convertible, etc, are for the next 100 miles ahead of you, if you can handle the foul language. That's because it is an active exchange for information. Northbound truckers pay attention and note mile markers (some even write it down) for highway information, and they trade it with southbound truckers for equivalent information.
One problem with any such network is the "free rider" problem: people like me who just listen to the channel and "suck" information without sharing. Sound familiar?
Perhaps this system might work by "requiring" participation -- by monitoring system information from multiple vehicles and combining it with a news source, the network might be able to "infer" the information that it seeks to provide. To see the information, you have to turn on your information provider. Kind of like requiring that you share your downloads in a p2p system.