As C.S. Lewis wrote, people who take the Bible literally "might as well think that when Christ
told us to be like doves, He meant that we were to lay eggs." Tweet tweet!
"I don't find the US to be a very christian country even by sunday christian standards."
As a Christian slashdotter (though generally considered a liberal Christian), I totally agree. I'm tired of hearing that the U.S. is a Christian nation, because it is not.
E.g. we could have overthrown Iraq easily by now if we had dropped $3 billion in food and medical supplies into the country instead of bombs and guns... but I forgot, the war is not really about the people. And where was/is the U.S. in the Congo, Sudan, or Rwanda?
One GOOD example of healthcare + government + IT
on
Biggest IT Disaster Ever?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Although many people are not aware of it, the Veterans Health Administration (otherwise known as the Veterans Affairs/VA hospital network) in the United States has progressed from a backwards, poorly-kept system in the 1980s to the best, most advanced medical organization in the nation. Read more here, here, or this reprint from Time Magazine.
It's proof that government + healthcare + technology does not always equal disaster.
"It's enough to make you slit your wrists with the shards of a smashed Christmas tree bauble."
Clearly Chris Stevens has far bigger problems than suffering production delays from Microsoft or Sony. Who really ASKS for Vista as a Christmas present? (or any kind of holiday present, actually) How bizarre. It's an insult to suicidal people everywhere.
In colonial America, you never had hung or stalled juries in the court system. This was because the jury members were locked in a room without food or water until they came to a decision.
I have been pushing for this to occur during internal committee meetings, but we haven't had consensus about it yet.
I guess nobody noticed the "gigabytes of data" that was being pumped through the company's Internet pipe? Also, how do you know the server was actually in Eastern Europe?
"But they [Adobe] are most definitely going head to head with microsoft."
I agree they're going head to head with MS on web development tools. But the article was about the actual web apps, not the development tools. Adobe is not going to get into that market.
Microsoft is a very reactive company; when the landscape changes, they will eventually adapt, though it may take years. Google, however, is setting the pace in many ways, and has a boggling number of development efforts in the works that are still ahead of most other companies. So I disagree these two companies are somehow in the same predicament.
Anyway, from the article: "The days of purely desktop-based applications are clearly numbered, but so are the days of exclusively web-based apps. Both Microsoft and Google are racing toward a happy medium. However, they aren't the only players in town, not by a long shot. Both Mozilla and Adobe are well positioned to take advantage of desktop and web convergence. Companies offering solutions that connect desktop and web apps together will get their chance too. Calendaring and project management are two obvious choices, but every productivity app deserves to be re-examined."
The author also says "in the spirit of open source I'm happy to dispense my advice freely...." Continuing that spirit, I'm happy to modify your advice so it actually works. Adobe will never go up against Microsoft, Google or others in developing their own "web convergence" applications (word processors, calendars, whatever). Adobe is in the business of enabling communication. If that means in print, they've got it (InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, etc.). If it means in portable documents, they've got it (PDF, now FlashPaper too). If it means web development, they've got it (Flash, Dreamweaver, GoLive, Flex, Cold Fusion, etc.). Adobe makes tools for designers and builders; they don't make the end product. The author of the article has missed this point.
This is an interesting site, but it feels like a student thesis project from, say, Parsons' Design & Technology department. It's interesting, somewhat humorous, makes you think a little about your habits, and may even -- someday, perhaps, with enough work -- lead to something practical.
I'm riding a train right now, and the guy across from me has a wireless mouse. When he's not using it (e.g. he's typing), the mouse keeps sliding around the tray surface when the train turns or bumps. A clickless interface would really suck for him right now; the mouse would keep triggering button events he doesn't want. Nice.
The benefit of the mouse click is that it fits into the aim/shoot paradigm: one chain of thought to specify a target, another to act on the target. There are plenty of times when I don't care where the mouse is, and it may be left anywhere, because it won't do anything unless I act upon it. With a clickless interface, suddenly I have to pay attention to the mouse all the time; there is no room for wandering, or not caring. (Obviously you need a new "ignore mouse" button on the side of the mouse, so that the clickless interface knows to ignore the mouse! hee hee)
Respectfully, there are quite a few things worth noting in the article that are still useful in low-bandwidth situations, such as:
Load fewer external objects.
Allow static images, stylesheets, and javascript to be cached by the browser... Set an Expires header on everything you can, with a date days or even months into the future.
If you have a lot of uncached or uncachable objects per page and big, domain-wide cookies, consider using a separate domain to host static content, and be sure to never set any cookies in it.
Encryption is cool, but a bit scan will reveal that there is, indeed, encrypted data on it. This might look suspicious to certain people. What we really need is a drive that saves all my secrets to it but, upon bit scan, will make it look like I'm actually storing recipes on it, or perhaps quotes from famous books.
Investigator: "What did the hard drive forensics turn up? We KNOW he has one of those funky encryption hard drives!"
Officer: "Umm... well, oddly enough, he seems to be a big fan of Danielle Steele and homemade lemon tarts."
Investigator: "This isn't helpful -- we already knew that from going through his garbage."
There are a lot of posts here asking "why is this important" and saying that pages already load fast enough on their broadband Internet connection. That may be true for you, but I'm frequently in a position where I am designing a site that needs to load over a slow satellite connection in rural Africa, say, or into a remote village in Nepal. They have a fairly recent computer, OS and browser on the recieving end, but their Internet connection is dog slow; anything I can do to speed it up will be greatly appreciated. It's back to 1980s dial-up speeds.
This isn't everyone's problem, I admit, but it's an issue for a lot of people in the world.
Microsoft announces they're postponing everything for two weeks because of ONE SINGLE BUG. Of course there are more bugs. Of course some of them are probably just as vicious. But MS is is focusing on one single one, as if to try to convince the market that they're really on top of these things. "Look, we found this big bug! Everything will be fine after we squash this one!" Very reassuring to some folks.
Alternatively, there is some other reason for the delay ("The eye candy is JUST NOT SWEET ENOUGH!"), but they've decided to push a "look we're being a responsible company" message out by picking a major bug from their development list.
There's no telling how many OTHER bugs are still there, waiting to totally crash your system and force you to reinstall. We can make guesses (200? 500? 1000?) but nobody really knows.
The original court decision was handed down last April; this is the punishment. Additionally, when the case went to court in 2005, the courts handed Clarity1 an an injunction against sending more spam. So it sounds like Mansfield first violated the law, then violated a court injunction.
I wonder if he can pay the fine in e-mail promotion services?
Hmm, the package screen shot says that it can take one player or two... what does the second player get to do? Do you play the Indian princess? Or the cactus? Or are there two General Custers and you get to, uh, play each other?
"However, they (Apple) still have to realize that when I buy it, I OWN it, and I have the right by law to transfer ownership of what I purchased to someone else if I damn well desire to, just as I can sell or give away a used CD I no longer want."
And, from a technology standpoint, that's exactly what you could do: burn your iTunes purchases to CD and hand them to a friend.
However, the original questioner hasn't specified location at all. Both Google and Microsoft have offices all over the U.S. and beyond. I know a couple of Google programmers here in Manhattan, and they love it... but if you dislike NYC then go someplace else.
My former boss said back in 1997, "Whenever you put up a web page, you've just joined the PR department." A reasonable corollary might be, "Whenever you put up a web page, you've just created a PR department for yourself." Think about it.
As an art major in college roughly ten years ago, we ran into some problems when the I.T. department installed Novell's Border Manager software to filter naughty HTTP traffic. Whenever you went to look at, say, Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights, you would instead be presented with an obtuse Border Manager error page stating that you were restricted from viewing that web page.
Now, art history classes typically involve sitting in a dark lecture room and viewing hundreds of slides of artwork while a professor (or TA) talks about them in excrutiating detail. As you might expect, a lot of this artwork involved nudity in some way. So the obvious answer to this situation was to take a screen shot of the Border Manager error page, turn it into some slides, and slip them into the slide reel when the professor wasn't looking: "The next image [click] is Botticelli's famous Birth of Venus, which... what the hell?"
I suggest you try this yourself if your art history professor still uses slides. It will be funny at least once.
Slashdot Mirror
As C.S. Lewis wrote, people who take the Bible literally "might as well think that when Christ told us to be like doves, He meant that we were to lay eggs." Tweet tweet!
"I don't find the US to be a very christian country even by sunday christian standards."
As a Christian slashdotter (though generally considered a liberal Christian), I totally agree. I'm tired of hearing that the U.S. is a Christian nation, because it is not.
E.g. we could have overthrown Iraq easily by now if we had dropped $3 billion in food and medical supplies into the country instead of bombs and guns... but I forgot, the war is not really about the people. And where was/is the U.S. in the Congo, Sudan, or Rwanda?
Although many people are not aware of it, the Veterans Health Administration (otherwise known as the Veterans Affairs/VA hospital network) in the United States has progressed from a backwards, poorly-kept system in the 1980s to the best, most advanced medical organization in the nation. Read more here, here, or this reprint from Time Magazine.
It's proof that government + healthcare + technology does not always equal disaster.
"It's enough to make you slit your wrists with the shards of a smashed Christmas tree bauble."
Clearly Chris Stevens has far bigger problems than suffering production delays from Microsoft or Sony. Who really ASKS for Vista as a Christmas present? (or any kind of holiday present, actually) How bizarre. It's an insult to suicidal people everywhere.
THEY'RE ALL POLITICIANS!!!
In colonial America, you never had hung or stalled juries in the court system. This was because the jury members were locked in a room without food or water until they came to a decision.
I have been pushing for this to occur during internal committee meetings, but we haven't had consensus about it yet.
I guess nobody noticed the "gigabytes of data" that was being pumped through the company's Internet pipe? Also, how do you know the server was actually in Eastern Europe?
So nerds don't care about right and wrong? It's only ones and zeros? What kind of hat should he wear if he wanted to be concerned?
"But they [Adobe] are most definitely going head to head with microsoft."
I agree they're going head to head with MS on web development tools. But the article was about the actual web apps, not the development tools. Adobe is not going to get into that market.
I get all my work done on Slashdot. I'm pretty sure that's what they pay me for.
Microsoft is a very reactive company; when the landscape changes, they will eventually adapt, though it may take years. Google, however, is setting the pace in many ways, and has a boggling number of development efforts in the works that are still ahead of most other companies. So I disagree these two companies are somehow in the same predicament.
Anyway, from the article: "The days of purely desktop-based applications are clearly numbered, but so are the days of exclusively web-based apps. Both Microsoft and Google are racing toward a happy medium. However, they aren't the only players in town, not by a long shot. Both Mozilla and Adobe are well positioned to take advantage of desktop and web convergence. Companies offering solutions that connect desktop and web apps together will get their chance too. Calendaring and project management are two obvious choices, but every productivity app deserves to be re-examined."
The author also says "in the spirit of open source I'm happy to dispense my advice freely...." Continuing that spirit, I'm happy to modify your advice so it actually works. Adobe will never go up against Microsoft, Google or others in developing their own "web convergence" applications (word processors, calendars, whatever). Adobe is in the business of enabling communication. If that means in print, they've got it (InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, etc.). If it means in portable documents, they've got it (PDF, now FlashPaper too). If it means web development, they've got it (Flash, Dreamweaver, GoLive, Flex, Cold Fusion, etc.). Adobe makes tools for designers and builders; they don't make the end product. The author of the article has missed this point.
So is this the difference between a clickless site where you just point, and a pointless site where you just click?
This is an interesting site, but it feels like a student thesis project from, say, Parsons' Design & Technology department. It's interesting, somewhat humorous, makes you think a little about your habits, and may even -- someday, perhaps, with enough work -- lead to something practical.
I'm riding a train right now, and the guy across from me has a wireless mouse. When he's not using it (e.g. he's typing), the mouse keeps sliding around the tray surface when the train turns or bumps. A clickless interface would really suck for him right now; the mouse would keep triggering button events he doesn't want. Nice.
The benefit of the mouse click is that it fits into the aim/shoot paradigm: one chain of thought to specify a target, another to act on the target. There are plenty of times when I don't care where the mouse is, and it may be left anywhere, because it won't do anything unless I act upon it. With a clickless interface, suddenly I have to pay attention to the mouse all the time; there is no room for wandering, or not caring. (Obviously you need a new "ignore mouse" button on the side of the mouse, so that the clickless interface knows to ignore the mouse! hee hee)
Respectfully, there are quite a few things worth noting in the article that are still useful in low-bandwidth situations, such as:
...and others.
Encryption is cool, but a bit scan will reveal that there is, indeed, encrypted data on it. This might look suspicious to certain people. What we really need is a drive that saves all my secrets to it but, upon bit scan, will make it look like I'm actually storing recipes on it, or perhaps quotes from famous books.
Investigator: "What did the hard drive forensics turn up? We KNOW he has one of those funky encryption hard drives!"
Officer: "Umm... well, oddly enough, he seems to be a big fan of Danielle Steele and homemade lemon tarts."
Investigator: "This isn't helpful -- we already knew that from going through his garbage."
There are a lot of posts here asking "why is this important" and saying that pages already load fast enough on their broadband Internet connection. That may be true for you, but I'm frequently in a position where I am designing a site that needs to load over a slow satellite connection in rural Africa, say, or into a remote village in Nepal. They have a fairly recent computer, OS and browser on the recieving end, but their Internet connection is dog slow; anything I can do to speed it up will be greatly appreciated. It's back to 1980s dial-up speeds.
This isn't everyone's problem, I admit, but it's an issue for a lot of people in the world.
That should be, "put big <IRONY> tags"... *sigh*
Next time, I'll put big tags around the post.
Microsoft announces they're postponing everything for two weeks because of ONE SINGLE BUG. Of course there are more bugs. Of course some of them are probably just as vicious. But MS is is focusing on one single one, as if to try to convince the market that they're really on top of these things. "Look, we found this big bug! Everything will be fine after we squash this one!" Very reassuring to some folks.
Alternatively, there is some other reason for the delay ("The eye candy is JUST NOT SWEET ENOUGH!"), but they've decided to push a "look we're being a responsible company" message out by picking a major bug from their development list.
There's no telling how many OTHER bugs are still there, waiting to totally crash your system and force you to reinstall. We can make guesses (200? 500? 1000?) but nobody really knows.
The original court decision was handed down last April; this is the punishment. Additionally, when the case went to court in 2005, the courts handed Clarity1 an an injunction against sending more spam. So it sounds like Mansfield first violated the law, then violated a court injunction.
I wonder if he can pay the fine in e-mail promotion services?
Hmm, the package screen shot says that it can take one player or two... what does the second player get to do? Do you play the Indian princess? Or the cactus? Or are there two General Custers and you get to, uh, play each other?
"However, they (Apple) still have to realize that when I buy it, I OWN it, and I have the right by law to transfer ownership of what I purchased to someone else if I damn well desire to, just as I can sell or give away a used CD I no longer want."
And, from a technology standpoint, that's exactly what you could do: burn your iTunes purchases to CD and hand them to a friend.
I totally agree that the location is an issue.
However, the original questioner hasn't specified location at all. Both Google and Microsoft have offices all over the U.S. and beyond. I know a couple of Google programmers here in Manhattan, and they love it... but if you dislike NYC then go someplace else.
My former boss said back in 1997, "Whenever you put up a web page, you've just joined the PR department." A reasonable corollary might be, "Whenever you put up a web page, you've just created a PR department for yourself." Think about it.
As an art major in college roughly ten years ago, we ran into some problems when the I.T. department installed Novell's Border Manager software to filter naughty HTTP traffic. Whenever you went to look at, say, Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights, you would instead be presented with an obtuse Border Manager error page stating that you were restricted from viewing that web page.
Now, art history classes typically involve sitting in a dark lecture room and viewing hundreds of slides of artwork while a professor (or TA) talks about them in excrutiating detail. As you might expect, a lot of this artwork involved nudity in some way. So the obvious answer to this situation was to take a screen shot of the Border Manager error page, turn it into some slides, and slip them into the slide reel when the professor wasn't looking: "The next image [click] is Botticelli's famous Birth of Venus, which... what the hell?"
I suggest you try this yourself if your art history professor still uses slides. It will be funny at least once.