Re:Never seen a knighthood I've been happier about
on
Terry Pratchett Knighted
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Objectively, he's also very good. His handling of multiple cultures is excellent, his political satire is brilliant, his ability to link human themes such as sexism, aging, outrage at injustice, poverty, fondness of pets, bureaucracy, and courage into plots that are fun for both children and sophisticated adults who appreciate more of the subtlety is amazing. His characters are very human, often very warm, and he successfully captures the attitudes of both heroes and villains.
'Jingo' should have been required reading for the Bush Administration before the recent mid-easter mess, just as 'Making Money' should have been required reading for the loan officers of the USA before the housing credit crunch. The man captures important themes about all sorts of aspects of life.
What 'depriving it of a victim'? Terry *has* Alzheimer's. It's a tremendous loss to the literary world, and to the world at large, that his mental faculties are slipping. I've also met him, he's sharper than Harlan Ellison and a lot more fun to chat with
He's pouring his resources into fighting it out of enlightened self-interest, but he's doing a pretty good job of it, much like Chris Reeve did for spinal injuries after breaking his neck. I'm sure it's why a lot of his most recent work has been collaborative, rather than personally authored from start to finish.
Good point. Their current sergeant-at-arms is in fact in serious trouble, due to letting the police search the office of a member of Parliament without a search warrant.
But a better title for Terry Pratchett might be 'Librarian', which I'm sure he would also enjoy.
It sounds like Southern California has confused you. Where I'm from, 'hockey moms' have to get through muddy roads to get to the spring training rinks, the kids are sweaty and filthy and sometimes bloody from their workouts, the moms are out at ridiculously early hours to get the kids to practice, and they often have 5 kids and a storage space full of heavy hockey armor, including goals, stuffed in the back and on the roof. I've seen at least one mom simply hose out her back seats and trunk after her chunk of the team clambered out of her vehicle, it was so messy in there.
SUV's are not "humongous" for their needs, they're shorter and easier to park than trucks, safer for 4 or more passengers than a pickup truck, and they handle a lot better on the nastier roads than the station wagons of my youth. I've got no grief with these women, and the dads, who do this sort of work for their kids: they probably have enough penis jack up that car without a handle, after that kind of work every week.
You're conflating 'secure' with 'classified' systems. Many sites run what they consider 'secure' systems, which simply do not have the level of physical security you're describing or I would expect in a 'classified' system.
I'm sorry if it confused you, but many sites that run what they consider 'secure' systems rely on virus scanners, data encyption, and employee behavior to prevent data theft. This certainly includes academic, medical, legal, and fiscal systems that I've encountered in the last decade on a professional basis. (I didn't run them all myself, but did work with them in some fascinating ways to integrate my employer's services with theirs.)
Security is a hard, scary problem, that needs review at each design phase of your systems. If you can live without USB memory sticks, great, but don't be surprised if a 'secure' system, for example, relies on external removable USB drives for removable off-site backups to replace very expensive tape drives and tape monkeys to swap out tapes. (I've made extensive professional use of this over the last 5 years.) And don't be surprised if some smart-aleck is breaking the USB lockouts to use equipment that they need to use, without bothering to report this upstream. It certainly happens in industry and academia, and while it's probably less common in military systems, that doesn't mean it won't happen.
That wasn't a military site, that was a laboratory site with intellectual property they were concerned about. There was a significant loss of productivity without the music for the personnel doing the work.
And don't be surprised at how people in the field, or even in the offices of the Pentagon, ignore upstream mandated security policies. I'm sure it's less of a problem in some ways in the military because chains of command are clearer, and enforcement easier, but don't assume that all Pentagon systems are strictly managed or "classified". There are a lot of contractors doing a lot of work, and while I've not personally inspected their sites, I'm reasonably confident that plenty of secretary and contractor and even admin machines are not secured to the extent you describe.
I also speak from personal experience. I've had to deal with plenty of people buying servers, desktops, and laptops machines in the last.... 4 years whose favorite old PS/2 devices required USB adapters to be connected, and whose use of good quality mice, modern keyboards, KVM's or reverse KVM's, and graphics tablets worked only or worked best with the built-in USB. Insisting that USB be disabled for security reasons is like forbidding floppy drives for security reasons. It creates a lot of work for the IT department that might be better spent elsewhere.
This is particularly a problem with servers, where installing a KVM of the incorrect type (whether USB or PS/2) creates serious problems accessing the console at boot time. And I was particularly amused to hear of a colleague's installation of new high-end desktops in a laboratory where some fool had insisted on blocking the USB ports only to find that the groups' 3D printers and graphics tablets were USB controlled, and to find that the group tended to use their Ipods to listen to music on their good headphones through their computers, which had been an accepted use for years.
So from my experience, it's not as common a security approach as you seem to think. And from the reports I've seen of field transfers of data, and from the reports of this USB problem at the Pentagon, I suspect the default enabling of USB ports and of USB mass storage is far more common than you may realize.
That's frankly nonsense about disabling USB ports. The military uses USB sticks extensively to transmit bulky data in the field relatively securely, without relying on vulnerable network connectivity or complex intervening VPN or unreliable transfer technologies. And far too many peripheral devices, from mice to graphics plotters to speakers, are now USB, so you can't simply plug that port or disable them in the BIOS.
More sophisticated tools to block digital storage on removable media are available, but their use seems particularly likely on those only lightly secured machines for office or semi-personal work, and the presence of malware or keystroke loggers would certainly cause a Pentagon security effort such as we saw referenced.
Since some people didn't read or carry 'alt' newsgroups. Not all of Usenet is porn and prodigious ranting, though alt groups with such content tend to be the most trafficked newsgroups, by far.
Because their business plan absolutely demanded 2 features.
* It must apply DRM on all recordings to only be playable for one week. There is exactly one graphical player for which that works reliably and is in fact a key point of the software's existence, and that player is Windows Media Player.
* It must only work within the UK. Again, the only player that does that is Windows Media Player.
There was also another feature which I suspect, but cannot personally prove was relevant:
* They must be able to claim that they invented it. That's the sort of insistence on personnel credit common to middle management and VP's with 'big visions', and the BBC may be as vulnerable to that as many other companies.
That's what Iplayer was written as, a concealed Bittorrent-like client. The need to support non-Windows platforms, and their own decisions to use Windows Media to provide the DRM they insisted on, forced them to break their usage model and provide something closer to normal video streams for Mac and other clients.
Got it. Then it sounds like it's time for you (or others who are interested) to update LyX, perhaps even forking it, to present an MS Word like interface. I think that's an unfortunate idea, because the MS Word interface encourages mindless font and layout manipulations, but I can see where it would be useful to stabilize document creation for environments where TeX is still useful, and because TeX formats are stable.
I don't suppose you'd accept, or consider writing a TeX backend for OpenOffice's editor?
The idea was massively flawed. It created a huge performance penalty for previously simple operations, such as a web proxy or the effective proxy of a simple browser web cache where a great deal of modern disk I/O occur, and destabilized the filesystems in ways likely to imperil data. There have been numerous attempts to create database structured filesytems, and they have _all_ suffered from these flaws and eventually been discarded for anything resembling normal software usage.
Frankly, the hooks necessary to make filesystem operations atomic (which is admittedly a laudable goal) are not consistent with large filesystem operations (such as transferring video clips) or database operations that live on top of the filesystem (such as IIS). And the usefulness is so rare that the overhead and additional problems of the atomic operations locking out other operations is so large that it has never worked well.
Filesystems, like most software, benefit from 'Keep It Simple, Stupid'. And because their operations are so low level, unnecessary features in the filesystem penalize the sytem even more heavily than elsewhere. The result, with WinFS, was years of wasted developer effort for an idea that actual engineers with filesystem experience (like me) warnted was a bad idea.
And this lack of care for your environment may cause trouble getting dates, or throwing good parties. A nice atmosphere to work or play in helps a lot of social endeavors. It can be massively overdone, to the point where the eye candy intrudes on safety, precious resources, or usability. That's what Vista did, and I'm afraid it's what a lot of Gnome and KDE eye candy does.
For example, what do hockey moms (who do a lot more useful car driving than almost any geek) drive? Oversized, overpowered cars that don't blink under the load, and don't mind getting mud all over the back seat from a bunch of muddy players coming back from spring practice.
You made the claim, sir, you get to back it up. You list a lot of presentations, none of which (by their titles) actually list improvements in Windows 7 over XP. Some titles, in fact, sound like they're an excuse to duplicate the errors of Vista, such as:
The next generation user experience for presenting commands in Win32 applications.
If that doesn't sound like an excuse to re-arrange and proprietize things to break backwards compatibility and help cut off XP users, I don't know what does.
It's quite true that LyX doesn't have MS Word's features sets. But I was suggesting a usable WYSIWYG for TeX, not a replacement for Word.
And LyX, and emacs, and vi, and Notepad and Wordpad, are not substitutes for MS Word. That's partly because they're stable and reliable and don't encourage wasting time manipulating fonts and layouts instead of actually writing your document. While they certainly lack features of MS Word, I submit that most MS Word documents would gain in legibility, printability, and content if the author used a much simpler tool that discouraged the manipulation of layout, and ideally kept everything in flat ASCII text.
If you think I'm kidding, clock the amount of time your average report writer takes to write in MS Word versus writing in flat text. Buy your favorite local secretary lunch in return for participating in the experiement.
The tool you're looking for is called 'LyX'. I've used it for years to edit various people's LaTeX documents, especially those from college professors who learned their craft in the early 1980's and aren't interested in updating their documents.
Not switching to Office 2007 is not due to hating new interfaces, it's due to hating bad interfaces. The dancing paperclip would have actually been an improvement to that "fulfill a VP's big vision" mess.
We're definitely not using 'innovate' the same way. There is plenty of small-scale innovation available for even quite standard products, to improve its performance, to reduce its cost, to improve reliability or ease maintenance or security, etc. The idea that 'innovation' only includes entirely new products sold to customers, or to major new product lines, is in fact demonstrably false. It's true that a large-scale innovation for a new product can take a big company to support, but it's the role of plenty of employees here on Slashdot to provide the modest changes and often innovations to improve their workplace and their products in-house. It's insulting not to count those as 'innovation', because those modest improvements and features are often what distinguish the best tools and products from the mediocre majority. They're also often the difference between profitability and bankruptcy. For examples of the small scale innovation approach, look at the evolution of the Linux kernel, gcc, Apache, and Firefox.
Doing only major releases cripples a lot of products and makes them difficult to use, or to market, because the fixes you need are held up behind 'new paradigms' that customers neither want nor need. That's what happened to Vista: the big changes were so big, and so unwieldy, and so undesired by customers and partners, that they swamped out the numerous small improvements and made them not worth investing in. So now we're essentially stuck at Windows XP until the next major release, and all those small improvements are not only delayed, they are likely to destabilize the next major release because they haven't been fully explored.
I thought there were major patent issues with MP3 tools, which may be software copyright available but run into major patent issues in the US. (Wikipedia has some references for this on the MP3 page.) It looks like Fluendo is dealing with this as well as they can legally, which is a _good_ thing.
PowerDVD is providing players for Linux? Also good! When I looked for such tools a few years ago, I could find nothing available legally. Note that most distributions are understandably unwilling to pay even a few dollars to include such components in their base package, and I can understand this. I loathe software patents and consider the DVD encoding and encryption nuttiness to be extremely abusive by the manufacturers. But while I may want to commit civil disobedience, I don't want to do so in my workplace or help my employers do so without their knowledge, so I'm glad to have legal such tools available.
An opportunity for overwhelming retaliation is, indeed, a form of protection for the company. How could the presence of such devastating risks to whistleblowers not be considered contractual protection for the company?
The FBI, SEC, etc. are also heavily dependent on whistleblowers. It's often painful if not impossible to get that first piece of information to justify an investigation, without a whistleblower to draw attention to the crime, or they'd have to be far more invasive than they are now.
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Objectively, he's also very good. His handling of multiple cultures is excellent, his political satire is brilliant, his ability to link human themes such as sexism, aging, outrage at injustice, poverty, fondness of pets, bureaucracy, and courage into plots that are fun for both children and sophisticated adults who appreciate more of the subtlety is amazing. His characters are very human, often very warm, and he successfully captures the attitudes of both heroes and villains.
'Jingo' should have been required reading for the Bush Administration before the recent mid-easter mess, just as 'Making Money' should have been required reading for the loan officers of the USA before the housing credit crunch. The man captures important themes about all sorts of aspects of life.
What 'depriving it of a victim'? Terry *has* Alzheimer's. It's a tremendous loss to the literary world, and to the world at large, that his mental faculties are slipping. I've also met him, he's sharper than Harlan Ellison and a lot more fun to chat with
He's pouring his resources into fighting it out of enlightened self-interest, but he's doing a pretty good job of it, much like Chris Reeve did for spinal injuries after breaking his neck. I'm sure it's why a lot of his most recent work has been collaborative, rather than personally authored from start to finish.
Good point. Their current sergeant-at-arms is in fact in serious trouble, due to letting the police search the office of a member of Parliament without a search warrant.
But a better title for Terry Pratchett might be 'Librarian', which I'm sure he would also enjoy.
It sounds like Southern California has confused you. Where I'm from, 'hockey moms' have to get through muddy roads to get to the spring training rinks, the kids are sweaty and filthy and sometimes bloody from their workouts, the moms are out at ridiculously early hours to get the kids to practice, and they often have 5 kids and a storage space full of heavy hockey armor, including goals, stuffed in the back and on the roof. I've seen at least one mom simply hose out her back seats and trunk after her chunk of the team clambered out of her vehicle, it was so messy in there.
SUV's are not "humongous" for their needs, they're shorter and easier to park than trucks, safer for 4 or more passengers than a pickup truck, and they handle a lot better on the nastier roads than the station wagons of my youth. I've got no grief with these women, and the dads, who do this sort of work for their kids: they probably have enough penis jack up that car without a handle, after that kind of work every week.
_Good_. Is that actually part of the Iplayer client on Windows to use Flash and avoid Windows Media? And if not, how are they doing the DRM?
You're conflating 'secure' with 'classified' systems. Many sites run what they consider 'secure' systems, which simply do not have the level of physical security you're describing or I would expect in a 'classified' system.
I'm sorry if it confused you, but many sites that run what they consider 'secure' systems rely on virus scanners, data encyption, and employee behavior to prevent data theft. This certainly includes academic, medical, legal, and fiscal systems that I've encountered in the last decade on a professional basis. (I didn't run them all myself, but did work with them in some fascinating ways to integrate my employer's services with theirs.)
Security is a hard, scary problem, that needs review at each design phase of your systems. If you can live without USB memory sticks, great, but don't be surprised if a 'secure' system, for example, relies on external removable USB drives for removable off-site backups to replace very expensive tape drives and tape monkeys to swap out tapes. (I've made extensive professional use of this over the last 5 years.) And don't be surprised if some smart-aleck is breaking the USB lockouts to use equipment that they need to use, without bothering to report this upstream. It certainly happens in industry and academia, and while it's probably less common in military systems, that doesn't mean it won't happen.
That wasn't a military site, that was a laboratory site with intellectual property they were concerned about. There was a significant loss of productivity without the music for the personnel doing the work.
And don't be surprised at how people in the field, or even in the offices of the Pentagon, ignore upstream mandated security policies. I'm sure it's less of a problem in some ways in the military because chains of command are clearer, and enforcement easier, but don't assume that all Pentagon systems are strictly managed or "classified". There are a lot of contractors doing a lot of work, and while I've not personally inspected their sites, I'm reasonably confident that plenty of secretary and contractor and even admin machines are not secured to the extent you describe.
I also speak from personal experience. I've had to deal with plenty of people buying servers, desktops, and laptops machines in the last.... 4 years whose favorite old PS/2 devices required USB adapters to be connected, and whose use of good quality mice, modern keyboards, KVM's or reverse KVM's, and graphics tablets worked only or worked best with the built-in USB. Insisting that USB be disabled for security reasons is like forbidding floppy drives for security reasons. It creates a lot of work for the IT department that might be better spent elsewhere.
This is particularly a problem with servers, where installing a KVM of the incorrect type (whether USB or PS/2) creates serious problems accessing the console at boot time. And I was particularly amused to hear of a colleague's installation of new high-end desktops in a laboratory where some fool had insisted on blocking the USB ports only to find that the groups' 3D printers and graphics tablets were USB controlled, and to find that the group tended to use their Ipods to listen to music on their good headphones through their computers, which had been an accepted use for years.
So from my experience, it's not as common a security approach as you seem to think. And from the reports I've seen of field transfers of data, and from the reports of this USB problem at the Pentagon, I suspect the default enabling of USB ports and of USB mass storage is far more common than you may realize.
That's frankly nonsense about disabling USB ports. The military uses USB sticks extensively to transmit bulky data in the field relatively securely, without relying on vulnerable network connectivity or complex intervening VPN or unreliable transfer technologies. And far too many peripheral devices, from mice to graphics plotters to speakers, are now USB, so you can't simply plug that port or disable them in the BIOS.
More sophisticated tools to block digital storage on removable media are available, but their use seems particularly likely on those only lightly secured machines for office or semi-personal work, and the presence of malware or keystroke loggers would certainly cause a Pentagon security effort such as we saw referenced.
Since some people didn't read or carry 'alt' newsgroups. Not all of Usenet is porn and prodigious ranting, though alt groups with such content tend to be the most trafficked newsgroups, by far.
Because their business plan absolutely demanded 2 features.
* It must apply DRM on all recordings to only be playable for one week. There is exactly one graphical player for which that works reliably and is in fact a key point of the software's existence, and that player is Windows Media Player.
* It must only work within the UK. Again, the only player that does that is Windows Media Player.
There was also another feature which I suspect, but cannot personally prove was relevant:
* They must be able to claim that they invented it. That's the sort of insistence on personnel credit common to middle management and VP's with 'big visions', and the BBC may be as vulnerable to that as many other companies.
That's what Iplayer was written as, a concealed Bittorrent-like client. The need to support non-Windows platforms, and their own decisions to use Windows Media to provide the DRM they insisted on, forced them to break their usage model and provide something closer to normal video streams for Mac and other clients.
Got it. Then it sounds like it's time for you (or others who are interested) to update LyX, perhaps even forking it, to present an MS Word like interface. I think that's an unfortunate idea, because the MS Word interface encourages mindless font and layout manipulations, but I can see where it would be useful to stabilize document creation for environments where TeX is still useful, and because TeX formats are stable.
I don't suppose you'd accept, or consider writing a TeX backend for OpenOffice's editor?
Thank you, that is a _much_ better reference.
The idea was massively flawed. It created a huge performance penalty for previously simple operations, such as a web proxy or the effective proxy of a simple browser web cache where a great deal of modern disk I/O occur, and destabilized the filesystems in ways likely to imperil data. There have been numerous attempts to create database structured filesytems, and they have _all_ suffered from these flaws and eventually been discarded for anything resembling normal software usage.
Frankly, the hooks necessary to make filesystem operations atomic (which is admittedly a laudable goal) are not consistent with large filesystem operations (such as transferring video clips) or database operations that live on top of the filesystem (such as IIS). And the usefulness is so rare that the overhead and additional problems of the atomic operations locking out other operations is so large that it has never worked well.
Filesystems, like most software, benefit from 'Keep It Simple, Stupid'. And because their operations are so low level, unnecessary features in the filesystem penalize the sytem even more heavily than elsewhere. The result, with WinFS, was years of wasted developer effort for an idea that actual engineers with filesystem experience (like me) warnted was a bad idea.
And this lack of care for your environment may cause trouble getting dates, or throwing good parties. A nice atmosphere to work or play in helps a lot of social endeavors. It can be massively overdone, to the point where the eye candy intrudes on safety, precious resources, or usability. That's what Vista did, and I'm afraid it's what a lot of Gnome and KDE eye candy does.
For example, what do hockey moms (who do a lot more useful car driving than almost any geek) drive? Oversized, overpowered cars that don't blink under the load, and don't mind getting mud all over the back seat from a bunch of muddy players coming back from spring practice.
You made the claim, sir, you get to back it up. You list a lot of presentations, none of which (by their titles) actually list improvements in Windows 7 over XP. Some titles, in fact, sound like they're an excuse to duplicate the errors of Vista, such as:
The next generation user experience for presenting commands in Win32 applications.
If that doesn't sound like an excuse to re-arrange and proprietize things to break backwards compatibility and help cut off XP users, I don't know what does.
It's quite true that LyX doesn't have MS Word's features sets. But I was suggesting a usable WYSIWYG for TeX, not a replacement for Word.
And LyX, and emacs, and vi, and Notepad and Wordpad, are not substitutes for MS Word. That's partly because they're stable and reliable and don't encourage wasting time manipulating fonts and layouts instead of actually writing your document. While they certainly lack features of MS Word, I submit that most MS Word documents would gain in legibility, printability, and content if the author used a much simpler tool that discouraged the manipulation of layout, and ideally kept everything in flat ASCII text.
If you think I'm kidding, clock the amount of time your average report writer takes to write in MS Word versus writing in flat text. Buy your favorite local secretary lunch in return for participating in the experiement.
The tool you're looking for is called 'LyX'. I've used it for years to edit various people's LaTeX documents, especially those from college professors who learned their craft in the early 1980's and aren't interested in updating their documents.
Not switching to Office 2007 is not due to hating new interfaces, it's due to hating bad interfaces. The dancing paperclip would have actually been an improvement to that "fulfill a VP's big vision" mess.
We're definitely not using 'innovate' the same way. There is plenty of small-scale innovation available for even quite standard products, to improve its performance, to reduce its cost, to improve reliability or ease maintenance or security, etc. The idea that 'innovation' only includes entirely new products sold to customers, or to major new product lines, is in fact demonstrably false. It's true that a large-scale innovation for a new product can take a big company to support, but it's the role of plenty of employees here on Slashdot to provide the modest changes and often innovations to improve their workplace and their products in-house. It's insulting not to count those as 'innovation', because those modest improvements and features are often what distinguish the best tools and products from the mediocre majority. They're also often the difference between profitability and bankruptcy. For examples of the small scale innovation approach, look at the evolution of the Linux kernel, gcc, Apache, and Firefox.
Doing only major releases cripples a lot of products and makes them difficult to use, or to market, because the fixes you need are held up behind 'new paradigms' that customers neither want nor need. That's what happened to Vista: the big changes were so big, and so unwieldy, and so undesired by customers and partners, that they swamped out the numerous small improvements and made them not worth investing in. So now we're essentially stuck at Windows XP until the next major release, and all those small improvements are not only delayed, they are likely to destabilize the next major release because they haven't been fully explored.
Linux is its only kernel. HURD was a false prophet. (I betatested HURD: it never worked.)
I thought there were major patent issues with MP3 tools, which may be software copyright available but run into major patent issues in the US. (Wikipedia has some references for this on the MP3 page.) It looks like Fluendo is dealing with this as well as they can legally, which is a _good_ thing.
PowerDVD is providing players for Linux? Also good! When I looked for such tools a few years ago, I could find nothing available legally. Note that most distributions are understandably unwilling to pay even a few dollars to include such components in their base package, and I can understand this. I loathe software patents and consider the DVD encoding and encryption nuttiness to be extremely abusive by the manufacturers. But while I may want to commit civil disobedience, I don't want to do so in my workplace or help my employers do so without their knowledge, so I'm glad to have legal such tools available.
An opportunity for overwhelming retaliation is, indeed, a form of protection for the company. How could the presence of such devastating risks to whistleblowers not be considered contractual protection for the company?
The FBI, SEC, etc. are also heavily dependent on whistleblowers. It's often painful if not impossible to get that first piece of information to justify an investigation, without a whistleblower to draw attention to the crime, or they'd have to be far more invasive than they are now.
Not all Linux users are Christians, you know. I know several devoutly pagan Linux advocates, and quite a few Jewish ones.