Without diminishing the other comments, it crossed my mind that the issue here is probably not whether Excel was used in the research. It's one of getting backup (supplementary) data into publishable form. That'd occur after the authors(s) had written their paper using their normal toolset for their work and gotten the paper through review. At this point, they are supposed to package up their data in some format dictated by the journal they are publishing in. Apparently.xls is an acceptable format -- which is not irrational. The format is documented and widely supported.
Anyway, the authors are just cleaning up and getting on with their lives -- cleaning the glassware (if any), paying any bills, archiving their data and scripts, returning borrowed equipment, etc. They are going to convert their data to.xls using whatever quick and dirty tool they can find. I doubt they are going to type tens of thousands of genome codes in manually. They'll use some tool they got from a buddy or write something themselves in Perl or Python or whatever scripting language they know. And they'll check the output to make sure that Excel loads it and that it's about the right length and that the first page or so and the last page look reasonable. And off it goes.
I don't think most folks outside of IT (and probably most in IT) are all that aware of Excel's flaky and sometimes bizarre data conversions. And, assuming that there's an unambiguous one to one translation between gene codes and excel mangled gene codes, this probably isn't a big deal. Anyone using the archived data will scratch their heads, maybe ask around, figure out what's happened, fix the data, and get on with THEIR research.
Fracking water is water with suspended sand and small amounts of citric acid, propylene glycol, and a few other things. Probably no more toxic than diet Coke. Probably tastes like dilute, sandy, gatorade. Formulas vary, but most probably wouldn't be especially unhealthy. Would I drink it? Not unless I was really thirsty. I loathe gatorade and I'm not wild about sand in my beverages either.
"40 states are using a voting technology that's at least 10 years old"
I assume that would include paper ballots that are, unlike electronic voting machines, independently auditable should there be questions about the integrity of the voting process. Why, exactly, is that something that needs to be fixed with a probably flawed modern technology?
I'm not a gamer, so I was able to ditch Windows many years ago. But my impression is that if you have network cable attached to your Windows PC, MS is likely to sneak in in the middle of the night and upgrade your older build to a newer, shinier, more secure, version whose only problem will be that it won't work. (Nothing more secure than a computer that won't run, right?).
I believe that the objection is probably that any mass dump of correspondence is likely to include stuff that damages folks and serves no useful public purpose. We (the public) don't really need to know that some minor functionary is stepping out on their spouse, has cancer. or thinks their cousin might have a gambling problem.
More likely, the Russians desire to get even with the administration for orchestrating the 2014 overthrow of a pro-Russian government in the Ukraine. That has caused the Russians no end of trouble. Did the US actually do that? Hard to tell as everyone looks to be lying non-stop. But very likely it did.
"I can only assume Oracle shops will install this latest batch of updates and get back to business as usual without batting an eye or even contemplating pushing back at all against this batshit insanity"
What would you propose Oracle shops do instead? It's not like anyone, anywhere, has the slightest idea how to code defect free software or fix 70 million lines or so of existing defective code.
I don't remember the details completely, but shortly after Google bought Blogger.com, they disabled ftp upload to blogger. That seemed to me at the time to be a clear attempt to encourage you to store your website on their servers... and only on their servers... without backup on your machine(s).
IIRC, if your website has only a few files and if you don't use Google's website creation tools, you can upload all your files one at a time via some clunky manual interface and keep a local backup. But for most people, with a website of any size, you pretty much have to just trust Google. I didn't trust Google to always act in my best interests then (and don't trust them now). I moved my website to someplace where I could simply upload from my master copy using a simple script. But I'm a techie. This unfortunate gentleman is an artist. How is he supposed to figure out he's dealing with typical system administration (i.e. whackjobs)?
I suppose you could probably update your site the Google way and periodically download copies with wget/curl to keep a backup. But I wouldn't be at all surprised that in the clusterf**k that is today's internet, that is difficult, impossible, or doesn't get all your files.
However, unplugging your internet connection would provide a lot of relative security compared to your neighbors. You surely know that.... and yet you're here using an internet message board that you know damn well is designed and implemented by folks whose mental state and technical competence seems at the very least a bit iffy.... As am I
Ripping up a well built road is hard work. There's a crew about 200 meters up the street from me now demonstrating that very thing. Six guys, a huge power shovel, several trucks, a bulldozer. Depending on how the solar road is constructed, ripping it up for parts might not be worth the effort/risk.
"I have a hard time seeing how it is worth the effort to sell an old drive. "
Mostly, you're right. But if you work in an IT department and have 700 of the blasted things stacked in the corner after an upgrade, it may be worth the effort to gather em up and sell them -- especially if you can use volunteer labor to clear them. Also, if you want to donate your old PC to a charity or sell it at a garage sale, you might want to clear the drive and install a fresh copy of the OS.
"Actually I have been wondering for a long time why trains don't do exactly what these trucks are doing. Many (most?) trains now (at least around here in the US) are deisel-electric with a deisel engine running an on-board generator to make electricity for the wheels."
I could be wrong, but I believe that Amtrak, LIRR, MetroRail do that for traffic in and out of NYC using diesel where electricity isn't available and switching to electric under Manhattan. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"having to give a reason is so backwards! they should have a good reason TO put it online."
Reasonably secure offfsite storage that is (presumably) easy to integrate with the school's existing IT. It'll be embarassing if an electrical fire in the school office incinerates all the school records and it turns out there is no paper or digital backup.
The problem of course is that many (most?) IT professionals have substantial doubts that the "secure" part of "secure offsite storage" is doable with 2016 cloud technology.
Just to complicate things, not only is it up to the person writing a document to ensure the information is properly marked -- a process that is bound to be error prone, I believe that the Sec of State is one of the very numerous people who can legally change the classification of a piece of information. Not only is "I didn't think THAT was classified" often a legitimate defense, "I didn't think that SHOULD be classified" may well be a legitimate defense for the SecofState.
What is this obsession with spying on users? Seems to me that the potential benefits to MS, Google, et. al. are pretty limited and the risks of eventually getting hit with one or more serious class action suit(s) are substantial -- especially when (not if, when) their data bases are breached and vast amounts of personal information on users are exposed to the world. Am I missing something, or are the folks guiding these companies steering them toward potential big trouble?
Yeah, I'm mildly surprised. Tesla doesn't MAKE ball joints. It BUYS them from someone and they probably are not custom engineered for the unique needs of Tesla's vehicle. Tesla does design the suspension, but this sounds like a defective part rather than an overstressed part. Overall, Ball joint failure in modern cars is uncommon. Which is a very good thing as it often causes complete steering failure and can kill you if the ball joint fails at speed or at the wrong time and place.
BTW, I'm not a big fan of Tesla or Elon Musk. I think electric cars (as opposed to hybrids) are a poor choice for cold climates or long distance driving, and I think Musk is a con artist who will tell us anything he thinks we're dumb enough to believe if it is to his advantage. But his companies do seem to do decent engineering.
As for the agreement. The no admission of fault part seems reasonable. The confidentiality clause seems to me to be unconscionable and if this crap is enforcable, laws need to be changed to make it unenforcable.
So when the glorious IoT arrives, if I reach out from half way around the world and persuade your wi-fi enabled toothbrush to kill you, I have no responsibility?
"... that policy changed to install-nothing by default, and we just have someone review the security updates each patch day and make a list of any that it seems (a) we might actually need and (b) don't come bundled with anything else we don't want."
1. Isn't that kind of expensive? 2. if you can't trust your supplier not to try to trick you why are you using that supplier?
Am I the only one that finds this situation to be surreal?
In fairness, Windows 95 was a decent, inexpensive, usable, OS that ran multiple applications pretty well on very limited equipment (... well... OK... you did have to install about 25 service packs to get it to work well). All downhill from there regrettably.
There is an interesting thread on Microsoft and the "click the red X to install Windows 10" dialog at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2... What stands out in the 200 some odd comments is the Microsoft seems to have motivated one articulate segment of its user base... motivated them to switch to Unix.
Next step is to prevent any sort of backup unless and until your subscription is up to date. You can continue to run (for a while). You just can't archive data until you pay.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, I didn't make my point well. If people smart enough to decode genomes are too dumb to use Excel "properly", what hope do ordinary users have?
Without diminishing the other comments, it crossed my mind that the issue here is probably not whether Excel was used in the research. It's one of getting backup (supplementary) data into publishable form. That'd occur after the authors(s) had written their paper using their normal toolset for their work and gotten the paper through review. At this point, they are supposed to package up their data in some format dictated by the journal they are publishing in. Apparently .xls is an acceptable format -- which is not irrational. The format is documented and widely supported.
Anyway, the authors are just cleaning up and getting on with their lives -- cleaning the glassware (if any), paying any bills, archiving their data and scripts, returning borrowed equipment, etc. They are going to convert their data to .xls using whatever quick and dirty tool they can find. I doubt they are going to type tens of thousands of genome codes in manually. They'll use some tool they got from a buddy or write something themselves in Perl or Python or whatever scripting language they know. And they'll check the output to make sure that Excel loads it and that it's about the right length and that the first page or so and the last page look reasonable. And off it goes.
I don't think most folks outside of IT (and probably most in IT) are all that aware of Excel's flaky and sometimes bizarre data conversions. And, assuming that there's an unambiguous one to one translation between gene codes and excel mangled gene codes, this probably isn't a big deal. Anyone using the archived data will scratch their heads, maybe ask around, figure out what's happened, fix the data, and get on with THEIR research.
"...scientists are too fucking stupid to use Excel properly."
So, who, other than you of course, is Excel's target audience?
I can tell you, it's not me.
I'm only willing to fight with Excel/Open Office when I wand to do plots. And that's only because gnuplot is even more obtuse than the spreadsheets.
Fracking water is water with suspended sand and small amounts of citric acid, propylene glycol, and a few other things. Probably no more toxic than diet Coke. Probably tastes like dilute, sandy, gatorade. Formulas vary, but most probably wouldn't be especially unhealthy. Would I drink it? Not unless I was really thirsty. I loathe gatorade and I'm not wild about sand in my beverages either.
"40 states are using a voting technology that's at least 10 years old"
I assume that would include paper ballots that are, unlike electronic voting machines, independently auditable should there be questions about the integrity of the voting process. Why, exactly, is that something that needs to be fixed with a probably flawed modern technology?
"So run an older build?"
I'm not a gamer, so I was able to ditch Windows many years ago. But my impression is that if you have network cable attached to your Windows PC, MS is likely to sneak in in the middle of the night and upgrade your older build to a newer, shinier, more secure, version whose only problem will be that it won't work. (Nothing more secure than a computer that won't run, right?).
Not so?
"I mean they're OUR machines, we should be able to do whatever we want with them."
Your machine? Not any more.
I believe that the objection is probably that any mass dump of correspondence is likely to include stuff that damages folks and serves no useful public purpose. We (the public) don't really need to know that some minor functionary is stepping out on their spouse, has cancer. or thinks their cousin might have a gambling problem.
More likely, the Russians desire to get even with the administration for orchestrating the 2014 overthrow of a pro-Russian government in the Ukraine. That has caused the Russians no end of trouble. Did the US actually do that? Hard to tell as everyone looks to be lying non-stop. But very likely it did.
"I can only assume Oracle shops will install this latest batch of updates and get back to business as usual without batting an eye or even contemplating pushing back at all against this batshit insanity"
What would you propose Oracle shops do instead? It's not like anyone, anywhere, has the slightest idea how to code defect free software or fix 70 million lines or so of existing defective code.
I don't remember the details completely, but shortly after Google bought Blogger.com, they disabled ftp upload to blogger. That seemed to me at the time to be a clear attempt to encourage you to store your website on their servers ... and only on their servers ... without backup on your machine(s).
IIRC, if your website has only a few files and if you don't use Google's website creation tools, you can upload all your files one at a time via some clunky manual interface and keep a local backup. But for most people, with a website of any size, you pretty much have to just trust Google. I didn't trust Google to always act in my best interests then (and don't trust them now). I moved my website to someplace where I could simply upload from my master copy using a simple script. But I'm a techie. This unfortunate gentleman is an artist. How is he supposed to figure out he's dealing with typical system administration (i.e. whackjobs)?
I suppose you could probably update your site the Google way and periodically download copies with wget/curl to keep a backup. But I wouldn't be at all surprised that in the clusterf**k that is today's internet, that is difficult, impossible, or doesn't get all your files.
"what hope is there to be fully secure?"
None whatsoever.
However, unplugging your internet connection would provide a lot of relative security compared to your neighbors. You surely know that. ... and yet you're here using an internet message board that you know damn well is designed and implemented by folks whose mental state and technical competence seems at the very least a bit iffy. ... As am I
Ripping up a well built road is hard work. There's a crew about 200 meters up the street from me now demonstrating that very thing. Six guys, a huge power shovel, several trucks, a bulldozer. Depending on how the solar road is constructed, ripping it up for parts might not be worth the effort/risk.
"I have a hard time seeing how it is worth the effort to sell an old drive. "
Mostly, you're right. But if you work in an IT department and have 700 of the blasted things stacked in the corner after an upgrade, it may be worth the effort to gather em up and sell them -- especially if you can use volunteer labor to clear them. Also, if you want to donate your old PC to a charity or sell it at a garage sale, you might want to clear the drive and install a fresh copy of the OS.
"Actually I have been wondering for a long time why trains don't do exactly what these trucks are doing. Many (most?) trains now (at least around here in the US) are deisel-electric with a deisel engine running an on-board generator to make electricity for the wheels."
I could be wrong, but I believe that Amtrak, LIRR, MetroRail do that for traffic in and out of NYC using diesel where electricity isn't available and switching to electric under Manhattan. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"having to give a reason is so backwards! they should have a good reason TO put it online."
Reasonably secure offfsite storage that is (presumably) easy to integrate with the school's existing IT. It'll be embarassing if an electrical fire in the school office incinerates all the school records and it turns out there is no paper or digital backup.
The problem of course is that many (most?) IT professionals have substantial doubts that the "secure" part of "secure offsite storage" is doable with 2016 cloud technology.
Just to complicate things, not only is it up to the person writing a document to ensure the information is properly marked -- a process that is bound to be error prone, I believe that the Sec of State is one of the very numerous people who can legally change the classification of a piece of information. Not only is "I didn't think THAT was classified" often a legitimate defense, "I didn't think that SHOULD be classified" may well be a legitimate defense for the SecofState.
What is this obsession with spying on users? Seems to me that the potential benefits to MS, Google, et. al. are pretty limited and the risks of eventually getting hit with one or more serious class action suit(s) are substantial -- especially when (not if, when) their data bases are breached and vast amounts of personal information on users are exposed to the world. Am I missing something, or are the folks guiding these companies steering them toward potential big trouble?
Yeah, I'm mildly surprised. Tesla doesn't MAKE ball joints. It BUYS them from someone and they probably are not custom engineered for the unique needs of Tesla's vehicle. Tesla does design the suspension, but this sounds like a defective part rather than an overstressed part. Overall, Ball joint failure in modern cars is uncommon. Which is a very good thing as it often causes complete steering failure and can kill you if the ball joint fails at speed or at the wrong time and place.
BTW, I'm not a big fan of Tesla or Elon Musk. I think electric cars (as opposed to hybrids) are a poor choice for cold climates or long distance driving, and I think Musk is a con artist who will tell us anything he thinks we're dumb enough to believe if it is to his advantage. But his companies do seem to do decent engineering.
As for the agreement. The no admission of fault part seems reasonable. The confidentiality clause seems to me to be unconscionable and if this crap is enforcable, laws need to be changed to make it unenforcable.
So when the glorious IoT arrives, if I reach out from half way around the world and persuade your wi-fi enabled toothbrush to kill you, I have no responsibility?
"... that policy changed to install-nothing by default, and we just have someone review the security updates each patch day and make a list of any that it seems (a) we might actually need and (b) don't come bundled with anything else we don't want."
1. Isn't that kind of expensive?
2. if you can't trust your supplier not to try to trick you why are you using that supplier?
Am I the only one that finds this situation to be surreal?
In fairness, Windows 95 was a decent, inexpensive, usable, OS that ran multiple applications pretty well on very limited equipment (... well ... OK ... you did have to install about 25 service packs to get it to work well). All downhill from there regrettably.
There is an interesting thread on Microsoft and the "click the red X to install Windows 10" dialog at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2... What stands out in the 200 some odd comments is the Microsoft seems to have motivated one articulate segment of its user base ... motivated them to switch to Unix.
Next step is to prevent any sort of backup unless and until your subscription is up to date. You can continue to run (for a while). You just can't archive data until you pay.
Forget what?