Archive installs preserve third-party applications in the/Applications folder. No need to back them up.
The contents of the old system get put into a "Previous Systems" folder, and if you installed fonts in/Library, you'll want to dig them out.
Re:If Ars Technica is so concerned about usability
on
A Better Finder?
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· Score: 1
It's easier to read because paper's natural state is white. Subtracting light/color gives you the text, images, whatever. A CRT's natural state is black, so you *add* light to get text, images, etc. Using white background with black text on a screen is equivalent to printing a page solid black and leaving blank spots for the text. aka - not natural. I don't care if most of the web has adopted black on white for the mainstream design - it hurts my eyes. A medium's natural state is the easiest to read.
By that logic, an LCD's "natural" state is white, the color of the backlight, with the pixels filtered by liquid-crystal cells. And the same black-on-white page should be much more readable on an LCD than on the CRT or plasma-discharge display right next to it.
I am prepared to doubt the living shit out of this.
Maybe you're just used to crappy CRTs? Try turning down the brightness control.
In some ways a basic text editor is easier to work with, of course the nice color coding makes reading your code easier but really your code, when properly formatted (indenting and so forth), should be easy to read in a text editor.
Well, yeah, and debuggers are nice, too, but your code, when properly written, should be bug-free. Take it far enough, and compilers are a luxury, because one's code should be directly-executable.
The whole point in having good professional tools lies in the chasm between "should" and "is." The code that leaves my fingers is easy-to-read as to my intent, but not necessarily as to what it actually does. I've had bugs that were harder to find because the indentation and comments said one thing, and the code did something else.
A good code editor indents, balances braces, and colorizes as a way of feeding back the meaning of the code as the programmer writes it. If the meaning as the editor sees it isn't what I thought it was, that's at least a compile cycle saved, and maybe a debugging session avoided.
William Safire actually addressed this once (SALT treaty, FOIA Act, etc.). The actual rule of English, as evidenced by almost universal usage, is that it is acceptable, though certainly optional, to repeat the final noun of an abbreviation or acronym.
It's just one of those things that's too deep in the neurolinguistic wiring to fight.
Pandering the absolute lowest common denominator has never been the goal with *NIX applications in the past, and there has been no reason to pander, either....
Taking an application that was intended to be run on an operating system that is designed for advanced users, and running it on an operating system that is designed for less advanced users -- and calling said software crap because it relies upon conventions that advanced users are used to, is just silly.
The observation is made that X11 software behaves, almost uniformly, in a way that is hostile to people who think the work they do is more important than paying Guru Tax. The answer above says that this is the case, not because X programmers (almost uniformly) don't give a rat's ass about people who are unthrilled by computers, but because UNIX, the programmers, their programs, and the person I've quoted are all "more advanced" than almost anybody else. Features aren't bagged-on in hidden places out of inept human engineering, but because they are too cool not to hide.
This reveals a pervasive, and damaging misconception about human-interface design. UNIX is not the way it is because its users are "more advanced."
UNIX is the way it is because its users are wealthy, strong, and handsome, and everybody loves them.
Targeted at the 'third world' at $214 a pop? Who exactly is going to buy them for these people? I can't help but think that if residents of the underdeveloped nations could get their hands on $200, they'd MUCH rather purchase a cow, grain, a plow or many of life's other necessities so they could survive another day.
And this is why "the poor," (also known as "these people") once Western Liberal Experts get their hands on them, remain "the poor," and why Western Liberal Experts find they have such limitless opportunities to Do Good.
To the Western Liberal Expert, "the poor" is not an aggregation of men, women, boys, and girls of varying tastes, abilities, and interests. "The poor" is not composed of humans at all. It is a substance, a homogeneous paste-like goo such as might come out of a tube of toothpaste.
Experts such as quoted here would measure out, say, 70 kg of "the poor," and tell us that a 70 kg barrel of poverty requires three-quarters (0.75) cow or culturally-suitable livestock in undivided share; half a kilo (0.5 kg) grain per week grain fresh-issue, and one-quarter (0.25) share in stock-drawn plow of suitable manufacture and dimension. Every barrel of Poor Person is identical, so every barrel has the same needs.
Dufus.
It turns out that one of the development programs that actually works is microcredit: You do not barge into a place with an eye to rationing everybody into lockstep subsistence agriculture. You offer loans of, like $10 or $100.
In the early '90s, women in parts of the Third World found a good measure of independence and prosperity by raising money of their own, borrowing the rest, and getting a cellular phone: They then go into business renting out the use of the phone. Peanuts to you, but the community (as well as the borrower) has a gain in wealth, and in the habits of making wealth, above what could be had from sinking the money into More Subsistence Rationing.
So, yes. I could see somebody sinking a life's savings, or a family's life savings, into something that could put half a village over the hump into an above-subsistence economy, if they had a real cheap computer to do it with. Sneer all you want, white boy.
As Randall Packer and Ken Jordan point out in Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality, the surprisingly readable, history-minded and idealistic volume of essays published this week, multimedia by its very nature is "open, democratic, nonhierarchical, fluid, varied, inclusive -- a slippery domain that evades the critic's grasp just on the verge of definition."
I have a problem with "pointing out" facts that are content-free. The words "open, democratic, nonhierarchical,... inclusive" seem to be there, not for the meaning of the words, but as happysounds. They are Worship Words in bush-league academia; these academians like multimedia; therefore multimedia is Worship-Word-compliant.
By Wagner, we're talking about Richard Wagner, right? The 19th-century German composer of opera? Okay then, isn't it fair to stop somewhere between Wagner and VR, at Leni Riefenstahl? Triumph of the Will is a great film, and probably the best example of the multimedia of its day. In what way is it open, democratic, nonhierarchical, or inclusive?
The answer, of course, is that if that multimedia presentation was any of those things, Riefenstahl slipped. Triumph of the Will was a great, important, effective work. But -- obviously -- greatness, importance, and effectiveness are not the same as goodness, or service to good ends.
It is a fetish of modern academe -- in which scholars assure each other of their inclusivism as nervously as, in Red Scares past, they assured each other of their anti-Communism -- that only politically-approved things have virtues, and therefore anything one finds virtue in, must first be praised in political terms.
"Open Source Is Bad", huh? Well, reading that I would guess that the author is implying that Microsoft doesn't like open source. No, that's not true. Microsoft likes open source, very very much - after all, huge portions of their networking system come from open source. Microsoft does not like the GPL. Please take note:
open source != GPL
... by no means is it the only type.
That's true as far as it goes. You understand that; I understand that.
The point the rest of us are making is that Microsoft seems to hope its audience at the NYU b-school (and PHBs overseeing IT decisions) won't understand that.
The speech, closely parsed, will only say (GPL == bad). Microsoft became what it is today on the strength of its insight that most of its purchasers are not skilled at close parsing. They will hear (open source == GPL) && (GPL == bad). Vice-presidents and CIOs will read about this speech in InfoWorld, and will soon be telling their tech staff, as Gospel truth: Run Apache, sign your business over to Stallman the Communist.
You imply that such an suggestion on Microsoft's part would be breathtakingly misleading and hypocritical.
Mr. Dickinson's argument seems to be: If you didn't catch it when it was being maneuvered in back rooms, I don't care if it's right or not, tough shit, you should have been richer.
We could have a system in which Mr. Dickinson could decide whether Congress was right in passing a law, and if they were not, he could do what he damn well pleased (which we might hope would please us, too). We would not call that a patent system. We would call it a junta fronted by a figurehead legislature.
The worst thing I heard in that interview (if I understand it correctly) was that the new law extinguishes prior-art defenses that had been heard administratively. That's got to be a denial of due process, and a violation of the separate powers of the judiciary. I believe Mr. Dickinson thinks this sucks as much as Mr. O'Reilly and I do.
I also believe he thinks we aren't paying him to protect us from the flaws of representative democracy. His job places him in charge of a bad law. That he refuses to ride in on a white horse to override it does not make him the bad guy.
Yes, these IT methodologies are important because they enforce the measurement of quality. Without measurement there is no science.
...
The IT methodologies put the science back into "CS".
The ability to say something like that, with evident confidence that it ends the discussion, is what makes the rest of us suspect fraud. It may be that there is no science without measurement -- but the delusion is that once we start measuring, everything we do becomes science.
The hallmark of the management fad is faith in a Secret Handshake, something you can do without thinking very hard, and once you've gone through the process, you done something that isn't quite "management" or "leadership," but is isomorphic to them, and therefore just as good. MBAs managing technical projects, like gym teachers teaching physics, want desperately to believe that stone ignorance of the activity they lead is no handicap, because they have Process Skills. And now both the MBAs and the gym teachers have discovered they can succeed -- so long as they get to define "succeed."
For what, after all, is this "quality" thing that is being measured? It turns out that "quality" is defined as whatever today's Quality Régime chooses to measure. "You mean," I asked the Quality Manager, "unless we follow these guidelines, our product won't be any good?"
The Quality Manager knew better than to take actual responsibility for contributing to the success of the project. "No, no: 'Quality' is a technical term, meaning 'compliance with procedures written before or after the fact.' It has nothing to do with whether the product is any good."
"So why should I write procedures and compliance reports for you, when doing so forces me to do a slap-dash rush job on the product?"
"You have to do the reports," said the Quality Manager, "What's the matter? Don't you want our product to be any good?"
In short: On matters for which Quality experts want as little accountability as possible, "Quality" refers only to a small, technical, ministerial process. On matters for which Quality experts wish to maximize everyone else's accountability to them, "Quality" retains its usual, broad, and moral meaning.
Now, all that said: The impulse to write down everything that was done in the course of a project is a Good Thing. A worthwhile project will outlive the interest of any working set of participants, and, being worth while, the project deserves a memory of its own. It's why I write design notes and comment my code, or at least feel terrible when I don't.
I don't object to running projects as if all participants knew what they were about. I resent the tendency of Quality consultants to huckster deliberately content-free procedures as a pacifier for managers who are frightened at not understanding what they are about.
The point about the Star being a tabloid is well-taken. Certainly it explains the bizarre slant given the story.
The regulation in question was the enforcement for the biological-isolation régime observed after Apollo 11, 12, and (I think) 14. Astronauts returning from the moon had to wear respirators and (at first) suits; the command module had to be sealed, and anything exposed in the course of getting the astronauts out of it disinfected; the crew had to spend a couple of weeks in a negative-pressure lab; workers exposed to moon rocks were also put in the lab.
It was done, not because anyone thought it likely that there were Moon Germs, but because if there were, it'd look stupid not to have taken precautions.
As with any quarantine, this had the force of law, and the power to enforce it resided, not in the Public Health Service or USAMRIID, but NASA, in the person of its administrator. That's all the reg said.
Sun sells to the Slashdot market; Apple, largely, doesn't. In the Slashdot market, the computer is the job, and the customer gets the highest benefit from the most direct possible access to the workings of the machine as a machine.
In Apple's market, the computer is not the job. It is a tool that must support the mental model the customer has of his own job. The customer gets the highest benefit when the computer presents nothing dissonant with (or even irrelevant to) that mental model.
Apple is a systems-integration house that turns out machines that are ruthlessly designed to get the computer out of the way of the customer's work. They do this by integrating the design of the Macintosh from motherboard through OS to GUI design. There is a large market of decent, intelligent people who need such machines. If you don't want to say Apple serves that market well, at least admit they serve it better than anyone else.
The cost of a Macintosh, its usefulness, and its excuse for existing, come from its tight integration. Apple is uninterested in Linux because Linux boxes don't need an Apple Computer, Inc. to build them. Put Linux on a Mac, and you've thrown away most of the value Apple adds (and charges for).
My rule of thumb is that a new Macintosh is wasted running Linux, and any Pentium is wasted running anything else. I'm writing this from a Mac running LinuxPPC, but it's an amortized Mac on a second career.
The math would be better if it corresponded more closely to the evidence.
Yeah, the 400MHz G4 exists (1) to be deliverable close to announcement, and (2) to provide a low price point for Apple's desktop line. Apple is not to be despised for wanting to have a desktop computer it can sell for under $1600, but I'm not much interested in it.
Processor/motherboard mismatches are hardly an unsolved problem. Look in the specs under "Level 2 cache."
The Photoshop tasks they demonstrated at Seybold looked to me to be a demo-ish, but representative, mix of real-world tasks. I believe the video is still out there if you'd care to criticize it knowledgeably. The 500 MHz G4 finished in half the time of the 600 MHz PIII. Tell me what kind of "tweak" makes factor-of-two differences between "equivalent" systems?
SETI@home looked to be running about twice as fast on the G4/500 as on the PIII/600. Same tweak?
The G4 beats Intel's own published benchmark for the PIII (I assume equivalently-clocked) by a factor of not-quite-3. Damn, that must be some fine tweak, if it escaped the Frankenstein lab that is the Intel benchmarketing department! Maybe the gcc team will discover that tweak, so x86 Linux will run three times as fast, too.
All this, combined with the airy definition of general-purpose as "anything at which the G4 beats my Pentium by less than 20%," sound like whistling in the dark to me.
The following are not synonyms for "dying;" please make a note of them:
Not an Intel product
Competing with announced, but far-off, Intel product
Starved of Intel support to generate FUD for an announced, but far-off, Intel product
Used by Apple
Owned by Apple
Owned by anybody (except maybe Intel)
Apple sux
Corporations suk (except maybe Intel)
FireWire exists, works, and appears to be the leading candidate for a purpose-designed high-speed peripheral bus that is not a kludge (or worse, a promised kludge) on somebody's cash-cow chip set. This seems to me to be a Good Thing.
I hope the jockeying between Apple and the licensees stops: It's bad for the Good Thing, and good for the FUDders. I don't know whether stopping means Apple admits that $1/port is a bad deal, or the licensees admit it's a good deal. I don't think anyone else can claim to know, either.
I agree with jht; my experience of InfoWorld's default mindset is that nothing can survive outside the shadow of "safe," "responsible" companies like Microsoft and Intel. That's their market: When they shifted to their current format in the mid-80's, their lead editorial explicitly said they wanted to be an indispensible resource to the IT professional who didn't want to get fired.
I have no argument with people whose first priority is to avoid risks. But that sort of mindset does not produce the kinds of judgments most Slashdotters would necessarily respect.
[I]f Unisys can get a court order to get you to reveal what software you've used to compress the images, then it's time for a revolution...
I have news for you: They can. The plaintiff in a civil suit is entitled to the defendant's evidence, or the plaintiff wins. The question isn't even close.
Find someone with a machine outside the US. Create PNG's, and get them to convert the images to [? GIF ?] with unlicensed software in a country where the patent isn't valid, and make sure you document the process... Then refuse to give out details to Unisys if asked, and piss them off, get them to sue you for infringement without any proof, find a good lawyer who does pro bono work, and slap them with a counter suit for frivolous lawsuit.
In fact, most law-school graduates, and a fair majority of judges, are bright enough to recognize that procuring a violation of your duties under the patent law is the same as violating them yourself. The tricks that work to avoid exporting crypto software don't work here.
"A good lawyer who does pro bono work." Imagine the scene: You go into a law office, and explain you want them to pay out hundreds of thousands of dollars in salaries, rents, and expenses, in order to defend a lawsuit you deliberately incurred because you assumed they'd bail you out for free. Instead of doing less-expensive work in defense of the rights of a genuinely poor person. And your chances of success are...?
Also, the ugly fact of American law is that it is in the hands of lawyers, judges, and legislators who sincerely believe there is no such thing as a frivolous lawsuit. To them, filing suit is a sacrament of a free people, like voting or going to high school. The system does not even admit that being sued costs defendants anything, lest plaintiffs and their lawyers be held accountable for abuses. A filing would have to be the obvious product of paranoid schizophrenia before your lawyer would expect to get sanctions for it. Effectively, there is no ethical limit on filing a lawsuit in America.
This does suggest that as Open Source assets become rich enough to invite legal predation (see the SW patent proliferation topic of 8/28), the community ought to set aside part of its IPO gold rush to defend itself.
WRONG! Unless the girl intends to live no longer than eight years. Consecutive 0 mod 6 years have the same days (post-March 1) only if a leap year does not intervene.
That means I WIN.
Admit it: I've run rings around you logically.
But I am showing a fetching amount of décolletage as I post this.
"Productivity" is simply "how much you produce, per unit time, for which you can obtain goods and services." (Or, "so you can accomplish your goal," whatever.) Being a per-unit-time thing, it says absolutely nothing about how much time you spend, nor how hard you worked while spending it.
The hacker who develops a tool to automate part of her work makes herself more productive, so she can go home sooner, or so she can get on to the next hack. Anyone who cares about what she's doing wants to be more productive at it. Accusing her of therefore being a brainwashed tool of The Man is silly.
Yet people today are working as hard (or harder, depending on what you read) than people did in pre-industrial times.
Huh? Are you familiar with the term (in common usage into the early 20th century) "from can-see to can't-see?" It refers to the work schedule for preindustrial agriculture: predawn to postdusk.
Yeah, we live a little longer (arguably -- opinions differ) and we have better teeth (no question)
Well, no. There were always people who lived to be a hundred, but most were dead before 40, and most of those died before 7, or at birth, taking their mothers with them. Visit any pre-1850 cemetery: A lot of men are buried next to their successive wives and their infant childen -- and those were the people who could afford headstones.
People had worse teeth in Terry Gilliam's Jabberwocky, but in real life they didn't soak their mouths in nearly as much sugar and acid as we do. Moderns can do more for their teeth when they go bad, but they go bad much more.
Modern life is hard and stressful in unique ways, but reactionary longings for a golden age gone by are a waste of time.
Personally, I think this is off-topic, but the top of this thread got moderated up.
OK, so Microsoft designed, brought to market, and apparently got paying customers for, a "security" product that is secure only against people who use the security product?
Either
my characterization of what happened is way too glib to be true, or
we have found the Canonical Example of Redmond's inability to imagine a world outside the Microsoft Box[tm].
... and while we're on Katzmemes, let's not forget his obsession with under-30 as a placeholder for cool. Mr. Katz implies that "getting" The Blair Witch Project comes from fine sensibilities found in "anybody under 30," but not, it seems, thereafter.
I made it into my forties by hacking, living the non-corporate life, and having tastes that embrace new things. To be sure, that's not true of most boomers, but it won't be true of most of Generations X and Y, either.
Some tastes are identifiable to the 18-to-30 demographic. It's interesting to discuss why that's so. Katz, it seems, likes to explain it by appealing to the adolescent plaint that the Grownups Will Never Understand Me. I think that's as cynical an appeal to a target market as any you'll find in Corporate America.
Slashdot Mirror
Archive installs preserve third-party applications in the /Applications folder. No need to back them up.
The contents of the old system get put into a "Previous Systems" folder, and if you installed fonts in /Library, you'll want to dig them out.
By that logic, an LCD's "natural" state is white, the color of the backlight, with the pixels filtered by liquid-crystal cells. And the same black-on-white page should be much more readable on an LCD than on the CRT or plasma-discharge display right next to it.
I am prepared to doubt the living shit out of this.
Maybe you're just used to crappy CRTs? Try turning down the brightness control.
Well, yeah, and debuggers are nice, too, but your code, when properly written, should be bug-free. Take it far enough, and compilers are a luxury, because one's code should be directly-executable.
The whole point in having good professional tools lies in the chasm between "should" and "is." The code that leaves my fingers is easy-to-read as to my intent, but not necessarily as to what it actually does. I've had bugs that were harder to find because the indentation and comments said one thing, and the code did something else.
A good code editor indents, balances braces, and colorizes as a way of feeding back the meaning of the code as the programmer writes it. If the meaning as the editor sees it isn't what I thought it was, that's at least a compile cycle saved, and maybe a debugging session avoided.
William Safire actually addressed this once (SALT treaty, FOIA Act, etc.). The actual rule of English, as evidenced by almost universal usage, is that it is acceptable, though certainly optional, to repeat the final noun of an abbreviation or acronym.
It's just one of those things that's too deep in the neurolinguistic wiring to fight.
The observation is made that X11 software behaves, almost uniformly, in a way that is hostile to people who think the work they do is more important than paying Guru Tax. The answer above says that this is the case, not because X programmers (almost uniformly) don't give a rat's ass about people who are unthrilled by computers, but because UNIX, the programmers, their programs, and the person I've quoted are all "more advanced" than almost anybody else. Features aren't bagged-on in hidden places out of inept human engineering, but because they are too cool not to hide.
This reveals a pervasive, and damaging misconception about human-interface design. UNIX is not the way it is because its users are "more advanced."
UNIX is the way it is because its users are wealthy, strong, and handsome, and everybody loves them.
I wish people would get this straight.
And this is why "the poor," (also known as "these people") once Western Liberal Experts get their hands on them, remain "the poor," and why Western Liberal Experts find they have such limitless opportunities to Do Good.
To the Western Liberal Expert, "the poor" is not an aggregation of men, women, boys, and girls of varying tastes, abilities, and interests. "The poor" is not composed of humans at all. It is a substance, a homogeneous paste-like goo such as might come out of a tube of toothpaste.
Experts such as quoted here would measure out, say, 70 kg of "the poor," and tell us that a 70 kg barrel of poverty requires three-quarters (0.75) cow or culturally-suitable livestock in undivided share; half a kilo (0.5 kg) grain per week grain fresh-issue, and one-quarter (0.25) share in stock-drawn plow of suitable manufacture and dimension. Every barrel of Poor Person is identical, so every barrel has the same needs.
Dufus.
It turns out that one of the development programs that actually works is microcredit: You do not barge into a place with an eye to rationing everybody into lockstep subsistence agriculture. You offer loans of, like $10 or $100.
In the early '90s, women in parts of the Third World found a good measure of independence and prosperity by raising money of their own, borrowing the rest, and getting a cellular phone: They then go into business renting out the use of the phone. Peanuts to you, but the community (as well as the borrower) has a gain in wealth, and in the habits of making wealth, above what could be had from sinking the money into More Subsistence Rationing.
So, yes. I could see somebody sinking a life's savings, or a family's life savings, into something that could put half a village over the hump into an above-subsistence economy, if they had a real cheap computer to do it with. Sneer all you want, white boy.
I have a problem with "pointing out" facts that are content-free. The words "open, democratic, nonhierarchical, ... inclusive" seem to be there, not for the meaning of the words, but as happysounds. They are Worship Words in bush-league academia; these academians like multimedia; therefore multimedia is Worship-Word-compliant.
By Wagner, we're talking about Richard Wagner, right? The 19th-century German composer of opera? Okay then, isn't it fair to stop somewhere between Wagner and VR, at Leni Riefenstahl? Triumph of the Will is a great film, and probably the best example of the multimedia of its day. In what way is it open, democratic, nonhierarchical, or inclusive?
The answer, of course, is that if that multimedia presentation was any of those things, Riefenstahl slipped. Triumph of the Will was a great, important, effective work. But -- obviously -- greatness, importance, and effectiveness are not the same as goodness, or service to good ends.
It is a fetish of modern academe -- in which scholars assure each other of their inclusivism as nervously as, in Red Scares past, they assured each other of their anti-Communism -- that only politically-approved things have virtues, and therefore anything one finds virtue in, must first be praised in political terms.
That's true as far as it goes. You understand that; I understand that.
The point the rest of us are making is that Microsoft seems to hope its audience at the NYU b-school (and PHBs overseeing IT decisions) won't understand that.
The speech, closely parsed, will only say (GPL == bad). Microsoft became what it is today on the strength of its insight that most of its purchasers are not skilled at close parsing. They will hear (open source == GPL) && (GPL == bad). Vice-presidents and CIOs will read about this speech in InfoWorld, and will soon be telling their tech staff, as Gospel truth: Run Apache, sign your business over to Stallman the Communist.
You imply that such an suggestion on Microsoft's part would be breathtakingly misleading and hypocritical.
Yes. And your point would be... ?
I predict this technology won't really take off until we develop Compassionate 64-bit Superconducting DNA Extreme.
But why would Canada need to send the regiment up into space if it wants them to show up out of nowhere? It already has Saskatchewan.
Mr. Dickinson's argument seems to be:
If you didn't catch it when it was being maneuvered in back rooms, I don't care if it's right or not, tough shit, you should have been richer.
We could have a system in which Mr. Dickinson could decide whether Congress was right in passing a law, and if they were not, he could do what he damn well pleased (which we might hope would please us, too). We would not call that a patent system. We would call it a junta fronted by a figurehead legislature.
The worst thing I heard in that interview (if I understand it correctly) was that the new law extinguishes prior-art defenses that had been heard administratively. That's got to be a denial of due process, and a violation of the separate powers of the judiciary. I believe Mr. Dickinson thinks this sucks as much as Mr. O'Reilly and I do.
I also believe he thinks we aren't paying him to protect us from the flaws of representative democracy. His job places him in charge of a bad law. That he refuses to ride in on a white horse to override it does not make him the bad guy.
The ability to say something like that, with evident confidence that it ends the discussion, is what makes the rest of us suspect fraud. It may be that there is no science without measurement -- but the delusion is that once we start measuring, everything we do becomes science.
The hallmark of the management fad is faith in a Secret Handshake, something you can do without thinking very hard, and once you've gone through the process, you done something that isn't quite "management" or "leadership," but is isomorphic to them, and therefore just as good. MBAs managing technical projects, like gym teachers teaching physics, want desperately to believe that stone ignorance of the activity they lead is no handicap, because they have Process Skills. And now both the MBAs and the gym teachers have discovered they can succeed -- so long as they get to define "succeed."
For what, after all, is this "quality" thing that is being measured? It turns out that "quality" is defined as whatever today's Quality Régime chooses to measure. "You mean," I asked the Quality Manager, "unless we follow these guidelines, our product won't be any good?"
The Quality Manager knew better than to take actual responsibility for contributing to the success of the project. "No, no: 'Quality' is a technical term, meaning 'compliance with procedures written before or after the fact.' It has nothing to do with whether the product is any good."
"So why should I write procedures and compliance reports for you, when doing so forces me to do a slap-dash rush job on the product?"
"You have to do the reports," said the Quality Manager, "What's the matter? Don't you want our product to be any good?"
In short: On matters for which Quality experts want as little accountability as possible, "Quality" refers only to a small, technical, ministerial process. On matters for which Quality experts wish to maximize everyone else's accountability to them, "Quality" retains its usual, broad, and moral meaning.
Now, all that said: The impulse to write down everything that was done in the course of a project is a Good Thing. A worthwhile project will outlive the interest of any working set of participants, and, being worth while, the project deserves a memory of its own. It's why I write design notes and comment my code, or at least feel terrible when I don't.
I don't object to running projects as if all participants knew what they were about. I resent the tendency of Quality consultants to huckster deliberately content-free procedures as a pacifier for managers who are frightened at not understanding what they are about.
The point about the Star being a tabloid is well-taken. Certainly it explains the bizarre slant given the story.
The regulation in question was the enforcement for the biological-isolation régime observed after Apollo 11, 12, and (I think) 14. Astronauts returning from the moon had to wear respirators and (at first) suits; the command module had to be sealed, and anything exposed in the course of getting the astronauts out of it disinfected; the crew had to spend a couple of weeks in a negative-pressure lab; workers exposed to moon rocks were also put in the lab.
It was done, not because anyone thought it likely that there were Moon Germs, but because if there were, it'd look stupid not to have taken precautions.
As with any quarantine, this had the force of law, and the power to enforce it resided, not in the Public Health Service or USAMRIID, but NASA, in the person of its administrator. That's all the reg said.
Sun sells to the Slashdot market; Apple, largely, doesn't. In the Slashdot market, the computer is the job, and the customer gets the highest benefit from the most direct possible access to the workings of the machine as a machine.
In Apple's market, the computer is not the job. It is a tool that must support the mental model the customer has of his own job. The customer gets the highest benefit when the computer presents nothing dissonant with (or even irrelevant to) that mental model.
Apple is a systems-integration house that turns out machines that are ruthlessly designed to get the computer out of the way of the customer's work. They do this by integrating the design of the Macintosh from motherboard through OS to GUI design. There is a large market of decent, intelligent people who need such machines. If you don't want to say Apple serves that market well, at least admit they serve it better than anyone else.
The cost of a Macintosh, its usefulness, and its excuse for existing, come from its tight integration. Apple is uninterested in Linux because Linux boxes don't need an Apple Computer, Inc. to build them. Put Linux on a Mac, and you've thrown away most of the value Apple adds (and charges for).
My rule of thumb is that a new Macintosh is wasted running Linux, and any Pentium is wasted running anything else. I'm writing this from a Mac running LinuxPPC, but it's an amortized Mac on a second career.
The math would be better if it corresponded more closely to the evidence.
The following are not synonyms for "dying;" please make a note of them:
FireWire exists, works, and appears to be the leading candidate for a purpose-designed high-speed peripheral bus that is not a kludge (or worse, a promised kludge) on somebody's cash-cow chip set. This seems to me to be a Good Thing.
I hope the jockeying between Apple and the licensees stops: It's bad for the Good Thing, and good for the FUDders. I don't know whether stopping means Apple admits that $1/port is a bad deal, or the licensees admit it's a good deal. I don't think anyone else can claim to know, either.
I agree with jht; my experience of InfoWorld's default mindset is that nothing can survive outside the shadow of "safe," "responsible" companies like Microsoft and Intel. That's their market: When they shifted to their current format in the mid-80's, their lead editorial explicitly said they wanted to be an indispensible resource to the IT professional who didn't want to get fired.
I have no argument with people whose first priority is to avoid risks. But that sort of mindset does not produce the kinds of judgments most Slashdotters would necessarily respect.
I have news for you: They can. The plaintiff in a civil suit is entitled to the defendant's evidence, or the plaintiff wins. The question isn't even close.
In fact, most law-school graduates, and a fair majority of judges, are bright enough to recognize that procuring a violation of your duties under the patent law is the same as violating them yourself. The tricks that work to avoid exporting crypto software don't work here.
"A good lawyer who does pro bono work." Imagine the scene: You go into a law office, and explain you want them to pay out hundreds of thousands of dollars in salaries, rents, and expenses, in order to defend a lawsuit you deliberately incurred because you assumed they'd bail you out for free. Instead of doing less-expensive work in defense of the rights of a genuinely poor person. And your chances of success are...?
Also, the ugly fact of American law is that it is in the hands of lawyers, judges, and legislators who sincerely believe there is no such thing as a frivolous lawsuit. To them, filing suit is a sacrament of a free people, like voting or going to high school. The system does not even admit that being sued costs defendants anything, lest plaintiffs and their lawyers be held accountable for abuses. A filing would have to be the obvious product of paranoid schizophrenia before your lawyer would expect to get sanctions for it. Effectively, there is no ethical limit on filing a lawsuit in America.
This does suggest that as Open Source assets become rich enough to invite legal predation (see the SW patent proliferation topic of 8/28), the community ought to set aside part of its IPO gold rush to defend itself.
WRONG! Unless the girl intends to live no longer than eight years. Consecutive 0 mod 6 years have the same days (post-March 1) only if a leap year does not intervene.
That means I WIN.
Admit it: I've run rings around you logically.
But I am showing a fetching amount of décolletage as I post this.
"Productivity" is simply "how much you produce, per unit time, for which you can obtain goods and services." (Or, "so you can accomplish your goal," whatever.) Being a per-unit-time thing, it says absolutely nothing about how much time you spend, nor how hard you worked while spending it.
The hacker who develops a tool to automate part of her work makes herself more productive, so she can go home sooner, or so she can get on to the next hack. Anyone who cares about what she's doing wants to be more productive at it. Accusing her of therefore being a brainwashed tool of The Man is silly.
Huh? Are you familiar with the term (in common usage into the early 20th century) "from can-see to can't-see?" It refers to the work schedule for preindustrial agriculture: predawn to postdusk.
Well, no. There were always people who lived to be a hundred, but most were dead before 40, and most of those died before 7, or at birth, taking their mothers with them. Visit any pre-1850 cemetery: A lot of men are buried next to their successive wives and their infant childen -- and those were the people who could afford headstones.
People had worse teeth in Terry Gilliam's Jabberwocky, but in real life they didn't soak their mouths in nearly as much sugar and acid as we do. Moderns can do more for their teeth when they go bad, but they go bad much more.
Modern life is hard and stressful in unique ways, but reactionary longings for a golden age gone by are a waste of time.
Personally, I think this is off-topic, but the top of this thread got moderated up.
OK, so Microsoft designed, brought to market, and apparently got paying customers for, a "security" product that is secure only against people who use the security product?
Either
... and while we're on Katzmemes, let's not forget his obsession with under-30 as a placeholder for cool. Mr. Katz implies that "getting" The Blair Witch Project comes from fine sensibilities found in "anybody under 30," but not, it seems, thereafter.
I made it into my forties by hacking, living the non-corporate life, and having tastes that embrace new things. To be sure, that's not true of most boomers, but it won't be true of most of Generations X and Y, either.
Some tastes are identifiable to the 18-to-30 demographic. It's interesting to discuss why that's so. Katz, it seems, likes to explain it by appealing to the adolescent plaint that the Grownups Will Never Understand Me. I think that's as cynical an appeal to a target market as any you'll find in Corporate America.