First off, I totally agree with Samschnooks that as a development team, that 5% is your responsibility, and what you're really getting paid for. But given your concerns about maintainability, and what I'm reading as your concern that custom code that you create may end up being addressed by the framework, I do have some advice.
See what of your own code can be crafted into a plugin to extend the framework. Rails plugins are quite easy to create and insanely easy to use.
Be diligent about abstracting the functionality that you need, keeping domain-specific business logic out of the plugin and in the application instead. You'll find that plugins are easy to write test cases for and will keep your custom logic very modular.
If someone else ends up releasing a plugin that addresses your needs, you can simply swap it out; the same applies if the framework gets extended to include what you need.
If maintenance is a real issue for you, release the plugin yourself as open source and recruit some assistance from the community. Chances are, you're not the only one in the world who needs the functionality.
Timeshifting is, AFAIK, a term invented to cover the legal use of a VCR to record a television show for later viewing. The entertainment industry responded with just as much fervor to the widespread availability of the VCR as they did to file sharing and digital music, claiming violation of their rights as owners of the material; in the courts, however, it was determined that recording a television show was not piracy, but rather shifting the time of the material's viewing, and was thus a valid, fair, and legal use of the material.
Brakes are to a car what DVD playback is to a computer? Hmm, I don't think so.
I do think that it's significant that with a brand new OS coming out the door, revolutionizing everything again, that all the pundits can talk about is DVD playback.
Yes, the Audrey has to be tethered. No, you're not out of luck if you have DSL or Cable. I have an old Power Computing clone with 2 ethernet cards that acts as a software router and DHCP server. One hub is in the office, providing desktop connectivity. A line goes upstairs to another hub in the kitchen, where the Audrey lives (and where I can work from my laptop).
The Audrey does have its problems, but it's far from useless.
Yahoo! was taken over (37% of stock, the leading share) in 1996 by Softbank Corporation, which is a huge Japanese megacorp. Softbank also acquired Ziff Davis in 1996 and has strong ties to both Microsoft and the News Corporation (Rupert Murdoch). Some of their other holdings include Novell Japan Ltd., Japan Cisco Systems KK, and Kingston Technology Company.
What's worse, I can see the USPS setting up these e-mail accounts whether they've been requested or not; probably tied to some sort of central database of postal customers.
Remember the mess that was created when Network Solutions set up their 'free e-mail accounts' for all of their customers? Complete with formulaic passwords? (See the old story on/.)
I wonder, is a an attempt to force mac users to stay with mac OS? How motivated are you to install an OS (linux) whos GUI reccomends 3 buttons when you only have 1 button avalible?
Patently absurd. If you're willing to stick a new OS on your Mac, you should be capable of picking up a third party mouse from another vendor.
I personally use a MacAlly 2-button mouse with my G4. It's sweet-- I can set default behaviour for button number two, and also program different behaviours on a per-application basis.
It's clear that cryptography is becoming increasingly important, not just in the military-industrial world but in the very personal realms of privacy and political freedom. At the same time, it's become obvious that we cannot implicitly trust corporations to provide us with secure cryptographic products (Take the recent story of NSA backdoors in Lotus, Netscape, and Microsoft products e-mail products, for example).
Unfortunately, the rising tide of interest in cryptography comes in the midst of an absence of reliable commercial tools and a shortage of crypto materials comprehensible to non-mathematicians.
I devoured Applied Cryptography with great fervor, started scouring bookshelves physical and virtual for additional reading, and have even started poring over mathematical textbooks in an attempt to wrap my head around practical crypto. But my obsessive compulsion and dreams of building my own crypto software aside, I actually have little hope of acheiving more than an amateur's or hobbyist's understanding of cryptography.
Is it actually worth the effort? Are there any cryptographic resources available for the enlightenment of nonmath geeks? Must we leave cryptography to the professionals and hope that they're not on the NSA payroll?
The Supreme Court recently ruled that campaign contributions are protected speech. Now they rule that protected speech is not speech at all, but rather a campaign contribution...
So money = speech, speech = money, but speech != speech? Hmm.
Well, at least the vision of the Founding Fathers is coming true. They only ever intended land-holding (i.e. wealthy) males to have any say in the governance of the country in the first place.
"SOFTBANK and Ziff-Davis Publishing Company (hereafter referred to as ZD) in November of 1995 invested U.S.$2 million in Yahoo! Corp. U.S.A. (hereafter referred to as Yahoo!), which provides Internet access, and obtained about 5% of Yahoo!'s stock. In an attempt at full-scale developement of Internet business, SOFTBANK joined with Yahoo! to incooporate Yahoo Japan Corp."
If your child's first ideas of human sexuality come from pornographic materials, you've already dropped the ball. You can't wait until your child is 12 or 13 and then suddenly start acting like a parent.
A young child, when presented with pornographic images, will probably be totally disinterested or "grossed out". At the age of sexual awakening, he or she may be intrigued by the imagery. You'd better make damn sure that you've given them a framework for interpreting that imagery.
I think that the root of this and related issues is that modern people are increasingly outsourcing more and more of their responsibilities. We outsource the production and preparation of food, we pay other people to be charitable in our place, we rely on the government to tend to the well-being of our communities, we rely on the school system to educate our children, we rely on television to babysit those kids when they're not in school... and of course, some want to go so far as to let the governments take responsibility for the moral education of our children as well.
I disagree with your assumption that the technical elite ("people who know what they're doing, i.e. some of us") by definition have a set of moral principles in opposition to the kind of creepy preemptive "counterterrorism" that the Feds are engaging in. As humans, we have a long history of putting our best minds to work on the most nefarious and wicked projects.
Hell, I wouldn't be suprised if some of the best and brightest were attracted to such programs because of the sense of power that must come with the job.
I've been living with CTS for a few years now. It got to the point where I had numbness in my fingers and shooting pains up to my elbows. I found doctors to be useless.
Acupuncture, however, was a big help. It's almost painless, makes for good anectdotes, and seems to actually work.
Aside from that: Get an ergonomic keyboard for all of your machines. Get a gel-filled mouse wrist rest that you can drop in the freezer before use. Buy some wrist braces and wear them to bed.
Is all this a hassle? Well, it's less a hassle than losing the use of your hands.
The Wired article goes on to say, "If they have few complaints about this, then expect them to include the full first page of results in the future. If there are massive user complaints then it's possible they may cancel it."
Slashdot Mirror
First off, I totally agree with Samschnooks that as a development team, that 5% is your responsibility, and what you're really getting paid for. But given your concerns about maintainability, and what I'm reading as your concern that custom code that you create may end up being addressed by the framework, I do have some advice.
See what of your own code can be crafted into a plugin to extend the framework. Rails plugins are quite easy to create and insanely easy to use.
Be diligent about abstracting the functionality that you need, keeping domain-specific business logic out of the plugin and in the application instead. You'll find that plugins are easy to write test cases for and will keep your custom logic very modular.
If someone else ends up releasing a plugin that addresses your needs, you can simply swap it out; the same applies if the framework gets extended to include what you need.
If maintenance is a real issue for you, release the plugin yourself as open source and recruit some assistance from the community. Chances are, you're not the only one in the world who needs the functionality.
Timeshifting is, AFAIK, a term invented to cover the legal use of a VCR to record a television show for later viewing. The entertainment industry responded with just as much fervor to the widespread availability of the VCR as they did to file sharing and digital music, claiming violation of their rights as owners of the material; in the courts, however, it was determined that recording a television show was not piracy, but rather shifting the time of the material's viewing, and was thus a valid, fair, and legal use of the material.
I just got this e-mail from e-Bay...
So much for that experiment.
Brakes are to a car what DVD playback is to a computer? Hmm, I don't think so.
I do think that it's significant that with a brand new OS coming out the door, revolutionizing everything again, that all the pundits can talk about is DVD playback.
Yes, the Audrey has to be tethered. No, you're not out of luck if you have DSL or Cable. I have an old Power Computing clone with 2 ethernet cards that acts as a software router and DHCP server. One hub is in the office, providing desktop connectivity. A line goes upstairs to another hub in the kitchen, where the Audrey lives (and where I can work from my laptop). The Audrey does have its problems, but it's far from useless.
Yahoo! was taken over (37% of stock, the leading share) in 1996 by Softbank Corporation, which is a huge Japanese megacorp. Softbank also acquired Ziff Davis in 1996 and has strong ties to both Microsoft and the News Corporation (Rupert Murdoch). Some of their other holdings include Novell Japan Ltd., Japan Cisco Systems KK, and Kingston Technology Company.
I must agree with Laetus' prediction.
What's worse, I can see the USPS setting up these e-mail accounts whether they've been requested or not; probably tied to some sort of central database of postal customers.
Remember the mess that was created when Network Solutions set up their 'free e-mail accounts' for all of their customers? Complete with formulaic passwords? (See the old story on /.)
I wonder, is a an attempt to force mac users to stay with mac OS? How motivated are you to install an OS (linux) whos GUI reccomends 3 buttons when you only have 1 button avalible?
Patently absurd. If you're willing to stick a new OS on your Mac, you should be capable of picking up a third party mouse from another vendor.
I personally use a MacAlly 2-button mouse with my G4. It's sweet-- I can set default behaviour for button number two, and also program different behaviours on a per-application basis.
It's clear that cryptography is becoming increasingly important, not just in the military-industrial world but in the very personal realms of privacy and political freedom. At the same time, it's become obvious that we cannot implicitly trust corporations to provide us with secure cryptographic products (Take the recent story of NSA backdoors in Lotus, Netscape, and Microsoft products e-mail products, for example).
Unfortunately, the rising tide of interest in cryptography comes in the midst of an absence of reliable commercial tools and a shortage of crypto materials comprehensible to non-mathematicians.
I devoured Applied Cryptography with great fervor, started scouring bookshelves physical and virtual for additional reading, and have even started poring over mathematical textbooks in an attempt to wrap my head around practical crypto. But my obsessive compulsion and dreams of building my own crypto software aside, I actually have little hope of acheiving more than an amateur's or hobbyist's understanding of cryptography.
Is it actually worth the effort? Are there any cryptographic resources available for the enlightenment of nonmath geeks? Must we leave cryptography to the professionals and hope that they're not on the NSA payroll?
The Supreme Court recently ruled that campaign contributions are protected speech. Now they rule that protected speech is not speech at all, but rather a campaign contribution...
So money = speech, speech = money, but speech != speech? Hmm.
Well, at least the vision of the Founding Fathers is coming true. They only ever intended land-holding (i.e. wealthy) males to have any say in the governance of the country in the first place.
In 1996:
"SOFTBANK and Ziff-Davis Publishing Company (hereafter referred to as ZD) in November of 1995 invested U.S.$2 million in Yahoo! Corp. U.S.A. (hereafter referred to as Yahoo!), which provides Internet access, and obtained about 5% of Yahoo!'s stock. In an attempt at full-scale developement of Internet business, SOFTBANK joined with Yahoo! to incooporate Yahoo Japan Corp."
This is all culled from the Softbank web site, at http://www.softbank.co.jp/. Read on and be frightened:
For more, see these news releases:
There may be objective news sources (I don't know), but ZD is not one of them.
--Bantik
If your child's first ideas of human sexuality come from pornographic materials, you've already dropped the ball. You can't wait until your child is 12 or 13 and then suddenly start acting like a parent.
A young child, when presented with pornographic images, will probably be totally disinterested or "grossed out". At the age of sexual awakening, he or she may be intrigued by the imagery. You'd better make damn sure that you've given them a framework for interpreting that imagery.
I think that the root of this and related issues is that modern people are increasingly outsourcing more and more of their responsibilities. We outsource the production and preparation of food, we pay other people to be charitable in our place, we rely on the government to tend to the well-being of our communities, we rely on the school system to educate our children, we rely on television to babysit those kids when they're not in school... and of course, some want to go so far as to let the governments take responsibility for the moral education of our children as well.
Anybody see a pattern developing here?
(And yes, I do have a child of my own.)
I disagree with your assumption that the technical elite ("people who know what they're doing, i.e. some of us") by definition have a set of moral principles in opposition to the kind of creepy preemptive "counterterrorism" that the Feds are engaging in. As humans, we have a long history of putting our best minds to work on the most nefarious and wicked projects.
Hell, I wouldn't be suprised if some of the best and brightest were attracted to such programs because of the sense of power that must come with the job.
For a little more on carpal tunnel: Ask St. Joseph's
Find an acupuncturist near you: http://acupuncture.com/Referrals/ref2.htm
I've been living with CTS for a few years now. It got to the point where I had numbness in my fingers and shooting pains up to my elbows. I found doctors to be useless.
Acupuncture, however, was a big help. It's almost painless, makes for good anectdotes, and seems to actually work.
Aside from that: Get an ergonomic keyboard for all of your machines. Get a gel-filled mouse wrist rest that you can drop in the freezer before use. Buy some wrist braces and wear them to bed.
Is all this a hassle? Well, it's less a hassle than losing the use of your hands.
This is just where it starts. If no one reacts, how long do you think it'll be before they're selling the top ten results? 100? All?
The Wired article goes on to say, "If they have few complaints about this, then expect them to include the full first page of results in the future. If there are massive user complaints then it's possible they may cancel it."
Comments to search-support@altavista.com. It's /. time.