I love Adaptive Path; this is going a good direction. They are opening the requirements and design aspects of a next generation browser to open collaboration. Most software, in my opinion, ESPECIALLY the web, suffers its deficiencies not at the level of code, but at the level of requirements omissions and design flaws. Great requirements analysis and design lead to much better solutions.
Poor or non-existent requirements documentation and design leads to poor solutions regardless of the elegance of the coding. Some people who do not understand how to write software have a fantastic mind for identifying hidden requirements and end-user or even backend API needs.
Anyway, I realize that changing the american system is hard and it'd take several years, but can't understand why, even technical people, are resisting to that.
I can't understand why some technical people have extreme short term memory loss! I just posted a possible thought about that, and you obviously just read it, and replied to it!
I'm not saying I am really married to that line of thinking, but it is a possible way to approach the problem.
My 10 year old asked me my opinion about whether we should keep the English System, or go to the metric system, and I realized I didn't really have an opinion about this. Upon reflection, I decided that I think the English system is the way to go, for these reasons.
Let's suppose that when measuring temperature, the normal range of air temperature in Degrees Fahrenheit at normal human occupied geographies is between 0 and 100. Just go with me. In Celsius that would be -18 to 37 degrees. There are roughly 55 degrees celsius in that range, a little over half the increments in fahrenheit. So, the normal range of temparature that humans deal with on a day to day basis is better mapped with more increments and more positive regular numbers by Fahrenheit.
This is true across the board. What is the metric equivalent of a gallon? There isn't one! Who honestly ever talks about decaliters or centilters or whatever? The arbitrary division of basic units by 10 doesn't map well to human experience. The units in the English system arose organically over time to measure things that human beings actually do. It is a bit of a mess, but it makes sense to us because there are units for things that we actually need units for. If you go into Canada, they measure distance in Km, but land is still sold by the acre. Why? It makes more sense to measure land that way than by the square meter or square Km.
The metric system was created by some scientists in the absence of thinking about how well it mapped to most of human experience. It is a wonderful experiment but I think the resistance to it is more than simple inertia; there is a reason that in some places like the US it is very much persisting.
Good point, thanks for the discussion. No need to get vitriolic, I think you have some great ideas, and I appreciate it. I don't want to go away (although the thread is getting old now) because this is actually interesting and you have some very intelligent things to say; much of what you are saying is very persuasive.
Now we're getting into some very deep waters, the foundation of law. Is conformity to social norms really a good basis for law? I'm not touching that here!
I am also not sure why the ideal world wouldn't include that the authors and inventors profit from their labors. Or are we talking about a fantasy utopia where no one needs money and every child has their own flying pony?
I think our basic disagreement lies here: if there was no guarantee in the law that an author could profit from his work, I don't think that would be an environment in which the maximum number of works would be created. I do actually believe in capitalism. We know the effect on the arts that communism had - not good. However, I very much agree, as you will note in my first post, that the application of IP law has gotten completely out of hand, and that the kind of control and balance that you have articulated so well is very much needed.
So, I'm really pressing you, should we throw out the murder laws because we can't enforce them properly? Is the constitution wrong about this? You are arguing with the United States constitution. It has proven to be a pretty solid document otherwise; do we need an amendment to the constitution to do away with copyright? What exactly are you trying to say?
Well, I have heard this before, and I am calling BS. What exactly IS that incentive, if you can create something, and then everyone in the world can copy and sell it and give you nothing? Why do we even NEED GPL? Why is there a BSD license at all? The advantage is different than financial advantage, but it is an advantage that the license owners wish to see enforced. Just do the work and send it out to the world, right? Nobody ever needs credit for anything, right?
Besides, copyright doesn't incentivise, the possibility of some form of profit or advantage is what incentivises. IP is a tool toward that end.
Saying that the incentive is artificial is like saying that laws against murder aren't working, so let's throw them out. We need those laws, even if they can't be perfectly enforced, they have their beneficial effect.
Intellectual property indeed DOES need to be defended, but this article is a weak defense. The basis for IP is in fact based in Article 1 of the constitution:
"To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries"
This is lumped in with trivialities like granting the government the power to coin money and maintain an army. Why? Because if we take IP away, then it removes the power for people to control and profit from the fruits of their labors. If we go too far down this road it will remove the incentive for innovation, even open source innovation. We all know this guy got it totally wrong:
"And frankly, without them, most open-source projects would rapidly wither away: without an intellectual property behemoth like Microsoft to fight, what would be the point?"
The REAL need for copyright for open source is that we need to actually be able to enforce the GPL license or whatever license a project is operating under. If there is no copyright then anyone can steal and use and close up anything they want.
The point of copyright after all, is not to prevent copying. It is to promote copying! It is simply there so the IP holder can profit from the work the way he wants, every time it IS copied. Even if that benefit is non-financial, the interest of the holding entity badly needs to be enforced.
On the other hand, we have a serious problem with overapplication of the copyright laws, as outlined in Lawrence Lessig's book The Future of Ideas. We are coming to a point when IP is held so closely on so many things that really aren't inventions or authored works that we can barely breathe or think. The solution, however, is NOT to do away with copyright. The solution is to rethink where we have taken it and reapply it for the benefit of the general society.
Which is obviously beyond the scope of a slashdot post!
I have not read it, so please correct me if this is wrong, but a quick Google gives the impression that it doesn't so much give a reasoned criticism of modern evolutionary biology as it does evangelise biblical creationism under another name
Well it isn't like that at all, and in fact he does look at a lot of the chromosomal comparison research and all of that. He does NOT say anything about evangelical religion and refutes young earth creationism, as do I.
So, as usual, we get an ad hominem fallacy and a non-answer to the problem of irreducible complexity, which is THE killer argument against evolution. I have never heard this properly answered. In this book and others there are several extremely detailed examples of molecular biological processes which could never have arisen by a gradual process. Why has no one come forward with a direct reasonable answer to this?
This is exactly the kind of bullshit response I always hear to this. I'm actually glad this was posted, it is a PERFECT example of how people are totally hiding their heads in the sand on this issue. Why don't you actually give a substantive reasonable answer to the problem of irreducible complexity? I've never heard one, and I'm not sure it exists. If it did, I might listen. BTW this argument has absolutely NOTHING to do with religion. It is a scientific criticism of a prevailing theory.
I read a book called Darwin's Black Box, which I found extremely compelling. He posts some very devastating evidence against gradualistic evolution, which I have never heard really answered. Most of the answers are basically, "Yeah, but most scientists disagree with that." I don't care what most scientists disagree with. I care about what is true. I have read several Dawkins books, I have The Origin of Species, and I find Darwin's Black Box more compelling.
Now, I don't mind people disagreeing with me. I have friends who disagree strongly with me. We are friends and they don't call me ignorant, stupid, uneducated, or fundamentalist. What I DO have an issue with is being called ignorant, stupid, or whatever because I challenge the status quo. There was a point in time when it was firmly established by all educated people that the earth was the center of the universe. Not that it was flat, but the center. There was a lot of astronomical evidence that really predicted the motions of the stars that supported this. It was several hundred years before Copernicus' evidence held sway.
I would strongly recommend a book by Thomas Kuhn called The Copernican Revolution, or another called The Structure of Scientific Revolution. It simply does not do to dismiss ideas you do not want to believe out of fear for being called ignorant or a fundamentalist. We are interested in discovering the actual truth, right? We don't want to go on supporting a myth because of the fear of the opinions of others, right?
For the record, I am educated, not a fundamentalist, I agree that the earth is probably several billion years old, etc. I simply do not believe that the evidence for evolution is well supported at all. I don't know what actually happened; do we need a myth to explain it? Perhaps the fact that it is a mystery is the most profound truth of all.
Maybe there actually is a God. Maybe there is a supernatural realm. Maybe the universe and life on earth didn't simply happen by chance.
Even more, maybe everyone who believes such things isn't a complete idiot.
Doesn't it take just as much belief to think that everything simply happened by the coincidence of time and chance as it does to believe that a superintelligent spiritual being did it all?
The idea, as I understand it, is that you can transfer data formatted as XML within a certain grammar, such as RSS or some others defined within technology and industry niches, or make up your own. Then you don't need to base your own systems on this grammar, because they have provided transformation tools like XSL to transform a known grammar to the grammar your system requires. XML provides the taxonomy, which can be defined however the data source decides. I believe they are hoping for, and beginning to see, islands of agreed upon grammars arise which can be used in many places with different grammar expectations using transformation. The main problem with this is that XSL is extremely arcane, which is a barrier IMHO to widespread acceptance.
Now that an environmentalist, the icon of all science, culture, sexuality, and politics, has OK'd it, NOW can I have my nuclear powered car, my nuclear powered house, my nuclear powered laptop, and maybe even my own nuclear powered spaceship? I'm sick of pausing every 300 to 400 miles to restock with smelly chemicals processed from deep earth ooze.
That's a good point really, a big focus for our company going forward is gratitude and respect, which I think you are rightly pointing out my attitude about this may be lacking. However, what I'm saying I'm frustrated about is that they've been keeping that kind of data in excel for a long time, in no standard format. If they could have just kept a filemaker or access database, it shares better and enforces some degree of data integrity, if not normalization. I really do wish these desktop databases of any flavor would get a little more popular, in most cases that is what people would be better served by. Not that excel doesn't have its place, it does. But it is not a desktop database.
As a database developer, I have come across organizations countless times that are using excel as a database. They keep some list, with lots of visual formatting, which they send around in emails, which they then end up with dozens of different versions of. Someone gets the bright idea to put the file on a file server so lots of people can open it at once, but that doesn't seem to work right! THEN when it truly gets out of hand, I get a call. Can you help us? Can I just shoot myself, it will be quicker and less painful. I have seen people keeping inventory, invoices, correspondence logs, etc. in excel. Why not put it in a database? It obviously needs to be shared. Data should be kept as close as possible in ONE place, and when edited it should propagate immediately to all users. This is why databases are useful. After having been confronted with these kinds of messes over and over, I have developed a (perhaps unfounded) hatred of excel. It really does have its place, and in its place it is a wonderful tool. Very few people seem to understand what that place is. The power that it really possesses rarely seems to get used either.
It looked like, from the title, that Intel was launching, not just a new chip for notebook machines, but actual notebook machines. That would certainly have Dell and HP shaking in their boots!
If it takes off at all I think what this is going to do is usher in a new form of video that is suited to small hand-held devices. No one is going to want to sit and watch a 40 minute TV show on one of these, your arm would fall off and your eyes would permanently cross. It's too small, its just wrong. However, for short music videos, that go with a song, and short independent video podcasts, this is going to be a somewhat new medium. Creative people adapt to the canvas that is available; TV shows are not what this is going to be about. Even with normal DSL it takes too long to download, it destroys the impulse buying part of the equation. Who in their right mind wants to spend 20 minutes downloading an episode of DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES?! However, songs with good or clever videos to go along with would probably sell better. However, I want one so I can listen to Glenn Gould play Bach on the piano. Who cares about the video?
1. You carry around credit cards don't you? What about car and door keys? How cumbersome can this be?
2. Would you rather they took biometric information? It is digital info that someone could HACK and reuse, that is referrenced irretrievably to YOU. I would rather carry the something around.
As Woody Allen said in Sleeper, my brain is my second favorite organ. Ever since I read about this research and saw a few before and after pictures: protectingourhealth.org
I have used the headset pretty much exclusively. I also try to hold it away from my first favorite organ as well; I haven't noticed any research about this but I'm sure I don't want to see THOSE pictures.
I'm at the annual FM developer's conference right now, and they just released FM Server advanced, which is ANSI SQL compliant with ODBC/JDBC, directly ports XML in and out and parses XML using the XALAN engine, and does lots of other groovy stuff. A single field can hold 2 GB of text, the container field type holds any binary data now, and the new relational model allows you to hold "joins" as stateful objects which display live data via the relationship. There are a beautiful set of classes in PHP to build web pages via XML interchange at iviking.org. These are open source.
OTOH, I have also spent some time with the servoy guys www.servoy.com which is an amazingly worthy SQL front end gui building tool; I am absolutely blown away by this product.
So take your pick, FM is great, servoy is great, PHP as a web app front end to PostgreSQL would be great, it depends on time, budget, concurrent users, dataset sizes, etc.
I worked for a small development firm that had a lot of nepotism, and family money invested in it. I will never ever go there because of that experience. You end up with people that at first were very enthusiastic, but had slightly mismatched skill sets. Then when they got disinterested or simply were lazy, they were family, you really couldn't get rid of them or even say much to them without a big family conflagration. It killed the company.
I started a new company that is going much better, and the only one I will tolerate participating is my own wife, and at that she helps with the books, she understands that the board (of which she is not on by design because of this whole problem) has final say on expenditures and direction.
Also, as someone else has said, you should look into incorporating, there are a lot of tax advantages and it limits your liability in case someone becomes litigious. You think no one will get litigious but it is like health insurance, you never think you are going to need it until you need it.
I've done several web projects recently, including my own web site, completely with web standards compliant CSS that works beautifully on IE6 and others. No tables, etc., just lists, divs, css object js and a stylesheet. It works great; you just have to test it on both (meaning, IE, and everything else).
Here's the link if someone is curious to look at the resulting source code:
www.newcenturydata.com
Re:Privacy advocates are going overboard...
on
NYT on RFID
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· Score: 1
Well that's a good point, thanks. It is always far more useful to hear from someone with actual experience.
I think this is all a very good point to dialog over, because these issues are going to press on us more and more.
Re:Privacy advocates are going overboard...
on
NYT on RFID
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· Score: 1
This is a perfect example of how this is all Luddite nonsense. Who is really doing this with barcode scanners? A few people. Why so few? Because it is not a real threat. There are solutions for RFID problems just as there are with barcode scanners.
Knee-jerk Alarmists
on
NYT on RFID
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· Score: 1, Troll
There are some objections and a lot of legitimate strengths to RFID technology. I am surprised to see so many on slashdot being such knee-jerk Luddites. This is promising technology and there are clearly ways to limit the risks it poses.
Here are what seem to be the risks:
1. Businesses keep a database of my purchases and spending habits. What do I care? Maybe they will keep stocking and producing more of what I want to buy. Maybe they will use this to market stuff to me that I am actually interested in. What is the problem with that? The grocery stores already do it with the cards they issue and I am happy to have them do it.
2. Bad guys will drive by and scan my house to see what there is worth stealing. This is not a credible threat, as someone else has pointed out, these are passive tags that can't be read easily at a distance.
3. Nefarious gov't figures will be able to track my movements and will imprison me or kill me. Am I overstating this fear for dramatic effect? Well, what exactly is the fear? If this can be determined to be a true threat to our rights against unwarranted search and seizure, all we have to do is pass a law to have the units blanked out upon the point of sale. It also would seem to be technologically unfeasible.
There are probably many many ways to get around these weaknesses which in my mind are not really that great a threat anyway. The laws against unwarranted search are going to end up being a challenge to the worst of them anyway. The creation of these technologies does not suddenly cause the veracity of deeply entrenched law to just evaporate like a mist.
What are the benefits?
1. I am a database developer, and this is going to create a LOT or work for me for years to come. What's wrong with that?
2. This will greatly increase the efficiency of inventory and logistics systems, cutting down on the need for tedious soul-killing work counting widgets and keeping track of stuff.
3. There are a lot of really fabulous futuristic applications for this that I can't wait to see implemented. The article mentioned auto-inventory of medicine to see what is expired.
4. Far more accurate and efficient inventory means less cost to bring stuff to market which means better stuff for lower prices, or better profits for businesses whcih means more $ available to hire ME to beef up their information infrastructure.
5. These benefits are only the tip of the iceberg.
Slashdot Mirror
I love Adaptive Path; this is going a good direction. They are opening the requirements and design aspects of a next generation browser to open collaboration. Most software, in my opinion, ESPECIALLY the web, suffers its deficiencies not at the level of code, but at the level of requirements omissions and design flaws. Great requirements analysis and design lead to much better solutions.
Poor or non-existent requirements documentation and design leads to poor solutions regardless of the elegance of the coding. Some people who do not understand how to write software have a fantastic mind for identifying hidden requirements and end-user or even backend API needs.
Anyway, I realize that changing the american system is hard and it'd take several years, but can't understand why, even technical people, are resisting to that.
I can't understand why some technical people have extreme short term memory loss! I just posted a possible thought about that, and you obviously just read it, and replied to it! I'm not saying I am really married to that line of thinking, but it is a possible way to approach the problem.
My 10 year old asked me my opinion about whether we should keep the English System, or go to the metric system, and I realized I didn't really have an opinion about this. Upon reflection, I decided that I think the English system is the way to go, for these reasons. Let's suppose that when measuring temperature, the normal range of air temperature in Degrees Fahrenheit at normal human occupied geographies is between 0 and 100. Just go with me. In Celsius that would be -18 to 37 degrees. There are roughly 55 degrees celsius in that range, a little over half the increments in fahrenheit. So, the normal range of temparature that humans deal with on a day to day basis is better mapped with more increments and more positive regular numbers by Fahrenheit. This is true across the board. What is the metric equivalent of a gallon? There isn't one! Who honestly ever talks about decaliters or centilters or whatever? The arbitrary division of basic units by 10 doesn't map well to human experience. The units in the English system arose organically over time to measure things that human beings actually do. It is a bit of a mess, but it makes sense to us because there are units for things that we actually need units for. If you go into Canada, they measure distance in Km, but land is still sold by the acre. Why? It makes more sense to measure land that way than by the square meter or square Km. The metric system was created by some scientists in the absence of thinking about how well it mapped to most of human experience. It is a wonderful experiment but I think the resistance to it is more than simple inertia; there is a reason that in some places like the US it is very much persisting.
Good point, thanks for the discussion. No need to get vitriolic, I think you have some great ideas, and I appreciate it. I don't want to go away (although the thread is getting old now) because this is actually interesting and you have some very intelligent things to say; much of what you are saying is very persuasive.
Now we're getting into some very deep waters, the foundation of law. Is conformity to social norms really a good basis for law? I'm not touching that here!
I am also not sure why the ideal world wouldn't include that the authors and inventors profit from their labors. Or are we talking about a fantasy utopia where no one needs money and every child has their own flying pony?
I think our basic disagreement lies here: if there was no guarantee in the law that an author could profit from his work, I don't think that would be an environment in which the maximum number of works would be created. I do actually believe in capitalism. We know the effect on the arts that communism had - not good. However, I very much agree, as you will note in my first post, that the application of IP law has gotten completely out of hand, and that the kind of control and balance that you have articulated so well is very much needed.
So, I'm really pressing you, should we throw out the murder laws because we can't enforce them properly? Is the constitution wrong about this? You are arguing with the United States constitution. It has proven to be a pretty solid document otherwise; do we need an amendment to the constitution to do away with copyright? What exactly are you trying to say?
Well, I have heard this before, and I am calling BS. What exactly IS that incentive, if you can create something, and then everyone in the world can copy and sell it and give you nothing? Why do we even NEED GPL? Why is there a BSD license at all? The advantage is different than financial advantage, but it is an advantage that the license owners wish to see enforced. Just do the work and send it out to the world, right? Nobody ever needs credit for anything, right?
Besides, copyright doesn't incentivise, the possibility of some form of profit or advantage is what incentivises. IP is a tool toward that end.
Saying that the incentive is artificial is like saying that laws against murder aren't working, so let's throw them out. We need those laws, even if they can't be perfectly enforced, they have their beneficial effect.
Intellectual property indeed DOES need to be defended, but this article is a weak defense. The basis for IP is in fact based in Article 1 of the constitution:
"To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries"
This is lumped in with trivialities like granting the government the power to coin money and maintain an army. Why? Because if we take IP away, then it removes the power for people to control and profit from the fruits of their labors. If we go too far down this road it will remove the incentive for innovation, even open source innovation. We all know this guy got it totally wrong:
"And frankly, without them, most open-source projects would rapidly wither away: without an intellectual property behemoth like Microsoft to fight, what would be the point?"
The REAL need for copyright for open source is that we need to actually be able to enforce the GPL license or whatever license a project is operating under. If there is no copyright then anyone can steal and use and close up anything they want.
The point of copyright after all, is not to prevent copying. It is to promote copying! It is simply there so the IP holder can profit from the work the way he wants, every time it IS copied. Even if that benefit is non-financial, the interest of the holding entity badly needs to be enforced.
On the other hand, we have a serious problem with overapplication of the copyright laws, as outlined in Lawrence Lessig's book The Future of Ideas. We are coming to a point when IP is held so closely on so many things that really aren't inventions or authored works that we can barely breathe or think. The solution, however, is NOT to do away with copyright. The solution is to rethink where we have taken it and reapply it for the benefit of the general society.
Which is obviously beyond the scope of a slashdot post!
I have not read it, so please correct me if this is wrong, but a quick Google gives the impression that it doesn't so much give a reasoned criticism of modern evolutionary biology as it does evangelise biblical creationism under another name
Well it isn't like that at all, and in fact he does look at a lot of the chromosomal comparison research and all of that. He does NOT say anything about evangelical religion and refutes young earth creationism, as do I.
So, as usual, we get an ad hominem fallacy and a non-answer to the problem of irreducible complexity, which is THE killer argument against evolution. I have never heard this properly answered. In this book and others there are several extremely detailed examples of molecular biological processes which could never have arisen by a gradual process. Why has no one come forward with a direct reasonable answer to this?
This is exactly the kind of bullshit response I always hear to this. I'm actually glad this was posted, it is a PERFECT example of how people are totally hiding their heads in the sand on this issue. Why don't you actually give a substantive reasonable answer to the problem of irreducible complexity? I've never heard one, and I'm not sure it exists. If it did, I might listen. BTW this argument has absolutely NOTHING to do with religion. It is a scientific criticism of a prevailing theory.
I read a book called Darwin's Black Box, which I found extremely compelling. He posts some very devastating evidence against gradualistic evolution, which I have never heard really answered. Most of the answers are basically, "Yeah, but most scientists disagree with that." I don't care what most scientists disagree with. I care about what is true. I have read several Dawkins books, I have The Origin of Species, and I find Darwin's Black Box more compelling.
Now, I don't mind people disagreeing with me. I have friends who disagree strongly with me. We are friends and they don't call me ignorant, stupid, uneducated, or fundamentalist. What I DO have an issue with is being called ignorant, stupid, or whatever because I challenge the status quo. There was a point in time when it was firmly established by all educated people that the earth was the center of the universe. Not that it was flat, but the center. There was a lot of astronomical evidence that really predicted the motions of the stars that supported this. It was several hundred years before Copernicus' evidence held sway.
I would strongly recommend a book by Thomas Kuhn called The Copernican Revolution, or another called The Structure of Scientific Revolution. It simply does not do to dismiss ideas you do not want to believe out of fear for being called ignorant or a fundamentalist. We are interested in discovering the actual truth, right? We don't want to go on supporting a myth because of the fear of the opinions of others, right?
For the record, I am educated, not a fundamentalist, I agree that the earth is probably several billion years old, etc. I simply do not believe that the evidence for evolution is well supported at all. I don't know what actually happened; do we need a myth to explain it? Perhaps the fact that it is a mystery is the most profound truth of all.
Maybe there actually is a God. Maybe there is a supernatural realm. Maybe the universe and life on earth didn't simply happen by chance.
Even more, maybe everyone who believes such things isn't a complete idiot.
Doesn't it take just as much belief to think that everything simply happened by the coincidence of time and chance as it does to believe that a superintelligent spiritual being did it all?
The idea, as I understand it, is that you can transfer data formatted as XML within a certain grammar, such as RSS or some others defined within technology and industry niches, or make up your own. Then you don't need to base your own systems on this grammar, because they have provided transformation tools like XSL to transform a known grammar to the grammar your system requires. XML provides the taxonomy, which can be defined however the data source decides. I believe they are hoping for, and beginning to see, islands of agreed upon grammars arise which can be used in many places with different grammar expectations using transformation. The main problem with this is that XSL is extremely arcane, which is a barrier IMHO to widespread acceptance.
Now that an environmentalist, the icon of all science, culture, sexuality, and politics, has OK'd it, NOW can I have my nuclear powered car, my nuclear powered house, my nuclear powered laptop, and maybe even my own nuclear powered spaceship? I'm sick of pausing every 300 to 400 miles to restock with smelly chemicals processed from deep earth ooze.
This was on makezine.com:
www.proxflyer.com/pi_meny.htm
However, I think the point isn't the size, it is that it emulates insect vision to sense its environment and avoid obstacles.
That's a good point really, a big focus for our company going forward is gratitude and respect, which I think you are rightly pointing out my attitude about this may be lacking. However, what I'm saying I'm frustrated about is that they've been keeping that kind of data in excel for a long time, in no standard format. If they could have just kept a filemaker or access database, it shares better and enforces some degree of data integrity, if not normalization. I really do wish these desktop databases of any flavor would get a little more popular, in most cases that is what people would be better served by. Not that excel doesn't have its place, it does. But it is not a desktop database.
As a database developer, I have come across organizations countless times that are using excel as a database. They keep some list, with lots of visual formatting, which they send around in emails, which they then end up with dozens of different versions of. Someone gets the bright idea to put the file on a file server so lots of people can open it at once, but that doesn't seem to work right! THEN when it truly gets out of hand, I get a call. Can you help us? Can I just shoot myself, it will be quicker and less painful. I have seen people keeping inventory, invoices, correspondence logs, etc. in excel. Why not put it in a database? It obviously needs to be shared. Data should be kept as close as possible in ONE place, and when edited it should propagate immediately to all users. This is why databases are useful. After having been confronted with these kinds of messes over and over, I have developed a (perhaps unfounded) hatred of excel. It really does have its place, and in its place it is a wonderful tool. Very few people seem to understand what that place is. The power that it really possesses rarely seems to get used either.
It looked like, from the title, that Intel was launching, not just a new chip for notebook machines, but actual notebook machines. That would certainly have Dell and HP shaking in their boots!
If it takes off at all I think what this is going to do is usher in a new form of video that is suited to small hand-held devices. No one is going to want to sit and watch a 40 minute TV show on one of these, your arm would fall off and your eyes would permanently cross. It's too small, its just wrong. However, for short music videos, that go with a song, and short independent video podcasts, this is going to be a somewhat new medium. Creative people adapt to the canvas that is available; TV shows are not what this is going to be about. Even with normal DSL it takes too long to download, it destroys the impulse buying part of the equation. Who in their right mind wants to spend 20 minutes downloading an episode of DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES?! However, songs with good or clever videos to go along with would probably sell better. However, I want one so I can listen to Glenn Gould play Bach on the piano. Who cares about the video?
Get a free video ipod
1. You carry around credit cards don't you? What about car and door keys? How cumbersome can this be?
2. Would you rather they took biometric information? It is digital info that someone could HACK and reuse, that is referrenced irretrievably to YOU. I would rather carry the something around.
Get a free video ipod
As Woody Allen said in Sleeper, my brain is my second favorite organ. Ever since I read about this research and saw a few before and after pictures:
protectingourhealth.org
I have used the headset pretty much exclusively. I also try to hold it away from my first favorite organ as well; I haven't noticed any research about this but I'm sure I don't want to see THOSE pictures.
I'm at the annual FM developer's conference right now, and they just released FM Server advanced, which is ANSI SQL compliant with ODBC/JDBC, directly ports XML in and out and parses XML using the XALAN engine, and does lots of other groovy stuff. A single field can hold 2 GB of text, the container field type holds any binary data now, and the new relational model allows you to hold "joins" as stateful objects which display live data via the relationship.
There are a beautiful set of classes in PHP to build web pages via XML interchange at iviking.org. These are open source.
OTOH, I have also spent some time with the servoy guys www.servoy.com which is an amazingly worthy SQL front end gui building tool; I am absolutely blown away by this product. So take your pick, FM is great, servoy is great, PHP as a web app front end to PostgreSQL would be great, it depends on time, budget, concurrent users, dataset sizes, etc.
I worked for a small development firm that had a lot of nepotism, and family money invested in it. I will never ever go there because of that experience. You end up with people that at first were very enthusiastic, but had slightly mismatched skill sets. Then when they got disinterested or simply were lazy, they were family, you really couldn't get rid of them or even say much to them without a big family conflagration. It killed the company.
I started a new company that is going much better, and the only one I will tolerate participating is my own wife, and at that she helps with the books, she understands that the board (of which she is not on by design because of this whole problem) has final say on expenditures and direction.
Also, as someone else has said, you should look into incorporating, there are a lot of tax advantages and it limits your liability in case someone becomes litigious. You think no one will get litigious but it is like health insurance, you never think you are going to need it until you need it.
I've done several web projects recently, including my own web site, completely with web standards compliant CSS that works beautifully on IE6 and others. No tables, etc., just lists, divs, css object js and a stylesheet. It works great; you just have to test it on both (meaning, IE, and everything else). Here's the link if someone is curious to look at the resulting source code: www.newcenturydata.com
Well that's a good point, thanks. It is always far more useful to hear from someone with actual experience.
I think this is all a very good point to dialog over, because these issues are going to press on us more and more.
This is a perfect example of how this is all Luddite nonsense. Who is really doing this with barcode scanners? A few people. Why so few? Because it is not a real threat. There are solutions for RFID problems just as there are with barcode scanners.
There are some objections and a lot of legitimate strengths to RFID technology. I am surprised to see so many on slashdot being such knee-jerk Luddites. This is promising technology and there are clearly ways to limit the risks it poses.
Here are what seem to be the risks:
1. Businesses keep a database of my purchases and spending habits. What do I care? Maybe they will keep stocking and producing more of what I want to buy. Maybe they will use this to market stuff to me that I am actually interested in. What is the problem with that? The grocery stores already do it with the cards they issue and I am happy to have them do it.
2. Bad guys will drive by and scan my house to see what there is worth stealing. This is not a credible threat, as someone else has pointed out, these are passive tags that can't be read easily at a distance.
3. Nefarious gov't figures will be able to track my movements and will imprison me or kill me. Am I overstating this fear for dramatic effect? Well, what exactly is the fear? If this can be determined to be a true threat to our rights against unwarranted search and seizure, all we have to do is pass a law to have the units blanked out upon the point of sale. It also would seem to be technologically unfeasible.
There are probably many many ways to get around these weaknesses which in my mind are not really that great a threat anyway. The laws against unwarranted search are going to end up being a challenge to the worst of them anyway. The creation of these technologies does not suddenly cause the veracity of deeply entrenched law to just evaporate like a mist.
What are the benefits?
1. I am a database developer, and this is going to create a LOT or work for me for years to come. What's wrong with that?
2. This will greatly increase the efficiency of inventory and logistics systems, cutting down on the need for tedious soul-killing work counting widgets and keeping track of stuff.
3. There are a lot of really fabulous futuristic applications for this that I can't wait to see implemented. The article mentioned auto-inventory of medicine to see what is expired.
4. Far more accurate and efficient inventory means less cost to bring stuff to market which means better stuff for lower prices, or better profits for businesses whcih means more $ available to hire ME to beef up their information infrastructure.
5. These benefits are only the tip of the iceberg.