Oh, I can just see it now, hanging there on a swinging-door display, alongside all the other parts: RS part number 14-2847, in a little blue blister pack labeled 7404 TTL Hex Quantum Gate. On the back of the cardboard is printed a pinout and a Feynman diagram. I can almost smell the 60/40 now...
Radio Shack: You've got questions, we've got blank stares.
You're suggesting something that has no benefit to anyone at all, whereas Smart Tags (while you may find them intrusive) actually have a pretty good use.
Suggesting? No, I'm not suggesting... I wouldn't ever want a browser to do this. But as long as MS is modifying content by adding links to point people to MS-affiliated sites, then why wouldn't they also modify content by deleting links that point people to MS-competing sites? Different side of the same coin. If they're allowed to get away with the one, what'll stop them from doing the other?
...and maybe someone else has posted this thought, because it's a logical extension (or inversion?) of the "smart tags" idea. What if Microsoft turned this idea around, and also invented "untags", that would take hyperlinks pointing to competitor's web sites and "unlink" them? For example, their browser could turn
<a href="http://redhat.com">Redhat</a>
into plain old
Redhat
Would even Microsoft be arrogant and audacious enough to try to get away with this? I hope we don't find out. This Orwellian notion of on-the-fly content modification - "for the benefit of the user" - just scares the stuffing out of me!
This topic comes up many times on comp.risks: there's no point in having a backup (server, archive, database, router, etc.) unless you TEST your backup procedure to make sure it works. Pull the plug on the server - does the backup kick in? Kick over the router - does it fail over to the backup? Those who ignore the RISKS digest are doomed to repeat it!
Just plain nuts. Imperial Bedroom is not only Elvis Costello's finest album, it's his last fine album period. Everything produced after that is crap, utter crap. Don't talk to me about King of America. Don't talk to me about Spike. The guys been recording with Burt Bacharach for Chrissakes! What's next, dinner music and ad medlies with Barry Manilow? Whatever happened to our angry young man? For all I know, Elvis Costello died in late 1982 and they shaved a monkey and sent him into the studio with dear old Bart. Give me a fucking break!
Yup. To elucidate further, the serial killer "Buffalo Bill" used IR goggles to see in the dark, so the reviewer must think he needed an IR flashlight.
At one point in the movie (though he's not using the IR goggles at this point), he has a victim he's holding prisoner in his house. She's being held in what appears to be a dry well dug in the cellar. He's starving her so her skin will loosen, and he wants her to put lotion on her skin to keep it from drying out. He lowers a basket into the well with a rope, and tells the girl to apply the lotion. But instead of speaking to her directly, he speaks in the 3rd person and refers to her as "it":
It puts the lotion on its skin, then it puts the lotion back in the basket.
This is what the reviewer was referring to, though it was pretty obscure and I didn't get it until reading the previous post.
Is this the same superhero-wannabe dude who is always ragging Superman... and once arrested a Buick? At least in the few issues I read years and years ago.
Plans are already well underway to move Slashdot to the new code base soon enough.
Two words: Beta site?
--Jim
Re:I hope they don't make fridge magnets
on
Magnet Patent Suits
·
· Score: 5
Those little magnets are just awesome. I've been salvaging magnets from failed and obsolete disk drives for years, and have a nice collection of these insanely strong critters. My best acquisition was a set of four that came out of a nine-platter SCSI drive.
I love handing a pair of these little magnets to an unsuspecting guest, and ask them to separate them for me. One guy actually told me they were glued together, until I showed him how to slide the magnets apart to separate them.
Another good trick to do with an old (but functional) drive, before you take its guts out: take the cover off, hook the drive up, and run fsck on its contents while you mess with its guts. Touch the center of the platter stack to slow them down. Use a marker to write on the spinning platters. Put your finger on the center of rotation of the arms the R/W heads are mounted on. See how much abuse the drive will take and still function (I was kind of surprised).
I also like to salvage the disk-platter assemblies and set them out as objets d'art. They're really quite pretty!
My experience has been that you can see meteors pretty much any time of year... given a few conditions:
Clear skies. (Duh.)
Dark skies. Get well away city lights. View during a new moon, before moonrise, or after moonset.
Patience. Take a blanket and a pillow with you. Throw them on the ground and get comfortable. Give your eyes a good twenty minutes to get fully accustomed to the dark. Keep watching the sky. "Widen" your vision: be sensitive to your peripheral vision.
There are many minor showers that occur throughout the year. My experience has been that if it's dark and clear, and you're patient you can see shooting stars pretty much any time.
My grandparents once lived in rural Alabama. After family visits to their farm, while the womenfolk said their goodbyes, I would go outside with my Dad and Grandad, and we'd just watch the skies. On almost every occasion, we'd be seeing meteors within ten minutes of watching, and the longer we watched, the faster they'd come.
Don't wait for a meteor shower. Get out now and watch.
I think we are all missing the point. Copyright is not the issue here, but rather good taste. If such a sick parody is allowed to be made, what's next? It's not censorship to order the joke be stopped, it's responsible web hosting. I'm glad that someone is finally fighting for the children.
HAhahahahaha! Stop it! You're making my sides hurt!
But seriously, if you follow r.h.f, and I've been reading it for about ten years now, then you know that Brad has never shied away from "sick" humor -- or any other kind, for that matter. His only criteria for posts to r.h.f is that they should be funny. He's got a great sense of humor, and I'm glad to see him respond to MasterCard in such an appropriately funny manner. (And, BTW, it was Trademark infringement, not Copyright.)
Rec.humor.funny is one of the longstanding gems of the 'net. Long may it run!
Has anybody ever seen a bug-free piece of software of any complexity greater than "Hello World"?"
I can't believe nobody's posted about Knuth yet. Donald E. Knuth is famous for writing high-quality software, and even proving some of it (all of it?) correct. He offers rewards to people who find bugs in his code. The reward for TeX and METAFONT is described here: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/abcde.ht ml, under the heading "Rewards".
I don't know much about Quicktime and Flash, but I don't think either is the complete package that Hypercard was.
Hypercard had three basic features: graphics, database, and programming. None of them were very advanced. Oh, I suppose the graphics in Hypercard were state-of-the-art when it was introduced into a monochrome bitmapped world. But its database capabilities were merely very basic, and its programming was only a bit more than basic (don't get me wrong - it wasn't intended to be anything fancy; it was supposed to be easy to use).
Today there are many products that beat the pants off Hypercard in one or two of these three areas. Flash clearly beats it graphically, and I'll take your word for it that Quicktime does too. I don't know much about Flash's scripting language, but let's say that it's as good as Hypertalk. However, I don't think Quicktime has programming capability, and I don't think either of these products has database capability like Hypercard did. I know even less about Visual Basic, but I doubt it has a built-in database either.
Perhaps you can hook up a database to these products. I know you can to Visual Basic. Maybe it's even easy to do. So maybe with some modern products you can come up with the same three feature sets as were in Hypercard, and they would be much more powerful.
That would still be missing the point.
In Hypercard, the three features were designed and built together. There was nothing external to hook up - no database, no ODBC drivers, no graphics package to add. You got it all right out of the box.
The best part was that they were exceptionally well integrated. Everything fit nicely into everything else. The object hierarchy that glued them all together is still one of the best and most likeable designs I've ever seen. For example, I still very much admire the way that Hypercard handled events -- passing them from specific to general: button to card to background to stack and finally to Hypercard itself. The design of Hypercard showed that Apple hadn't just stuck together a bunch of features -- they thought about what they wanted to do and came up with a holistic, comprehensive design.
The "card" paradigm was just a metaphor to let people work with databases without having to think in database terms. Build a background card and you're building a database schema. Add a card and you're adding a database record. Except, of course, that Hypercard never mention databases nor records. The closest they got to database terminology, if I remember correctly, was the "field".
My only complaint about Hypercard was that sometimes things were too simple. In trying to design a system that was "easy" for the average user to work with and even program, they built in some limitations that became obvious when pushed to their limits. Its database capabilities were crude, at best. And I seem to remember that string manipulation was often a problem. What I wouldn't have given just for some perl-like regular expressions! Probably, though, there's an XTND resource out there somewhere to do just that -- at least they made Hypercard extensible.
So, while I agree with you that there are many, many products that beat Hypercard in one or two if its feature areas, I don't know of any product that beats it at all three. And even if there is such a product, I doubt if the three features are as well-integrated as they were in Hypercard.
There's not a whole lot that I really miss about my old Macs, but Hypercard is definitely one of them. For simple databases like my card catalog, it not only did the job well, but it was a joy to use.
Much as I despise these right-wing wackos, I love my First Amendment even more. So I'm pleased that the court would defend it.
Something more that interests me is what happens when you consider this ruling in light of another one covered here on/. not too long ago in this story:
The gist of the story is that the high school students published satire aimed at his high school principal on his own time, and on a web site entirely independent of the school. When the school district tried to punish the student, he sued and won. The court ruled that the school had no jurisdiction over the student's speech rights as practiced on his own time and his own equipment. And rightly so. You high school kids still have some speech rights in the eyes of the courts.
Now consider today's case, in which the court said that the anti-abortion speech is protected, including the "hit lists", so long as the speech doesn't directly threaten to commit violent acts. Wow. Juxtapose this case against the high school case from some weeks ago and tell me what you see.
How long is it going to be until we hear about some high school kid publishing a hit list on his personal web site? I thinking here of a list a teachers, administrators, bullies, and the like... of course, this kind of thing is probably happening already, but now it's protected. Are more kids going to start doing this kind of thing? How will the school districts react? Will they continue to suspend and expel... or will they just call the police?
It's a fascinating situation. It's great that speech rights on the Internet are seeing some protection, especially for students, but I'm wondering how these new protections are going to be interpreted by today's high school kids, and what the repercussions are going to be when they start pushing the envelope with them.
I'm sure this is just coincidence, but when I clicked on the poll on the left margin ("Do you support copy-proctected CDs?") to vote "NO", their site took me to a blank page. When I tried to go back to the article, still nothing... blank page. Shortly after that, Netscape crashed. By now they have no doubt logged my IP address and sent a complaint to my ISP that I'm a potential pirate, and asking that my account be revoked.
On the other hand, maybe I've been watching too much X-Files. And it's early... yeah, that's the ticket... early... brain not function... must... get... caffiene...
Many of the Braves games were available on the "Superstation" WTBS, which I get as part of my cable service, but TBS doesn't carry as many of the games as does the radio broadcast (which has nearly 100% of a season's games). Furthermore, I didn't have to be near a TV to listen, which means I could listen at work to the day games. Best of all, during playoffs, I could listen to the Brave's play-by-play instead of having to listen to those network blabbermouths.
But last year things began to change. Atlanta's baseball games were no longer broadcast on the Internet out of the web site of WSB, the home station of the radio program. Instead, I had to listen by going through broadcast.com. I really hated this because they only carried the broadcast of the home team, so when Atlanta played on the road, I had to listen to the "other guy's" announcers, even though I would much rather hear Skip Carey and Company.
Now, it sounds like things are going to get still worse if I have to pay both MLB for the broadcast and Real for the Gold Pass player. I'd just as soon go back to watching what games I can on the TV.
But it doesn't have to be this way. Why not treat the Internet broadcast as just another affiliate station? Insert advertisements targeted to an Internet audience. The technology already exists to do this -- it's in every radio station in their system. It's the way affiliate stations insert their own local advertisements into the broadcast. Or go one step further, and treat the Internet as a kind of super-affiliate that replaces all the advertisements (not just those designated "local").
Get paying customers -- it shouldn't be that hard. You've got a regional broadcast going to a worldwide audience. You should be able to sell ads to the local tourist and convention industry: concert promoters, sporting event promoters, travel agencies, the local Visitors/Tourist Bureau, and the like. Likewise you can sell to the local chamber of commerce, which is always trying to attract business to town. Sell ads to local headhunters -- they're always trying to attract talent to town.
If that doesn't sell enough ads, go to mass-market advertisers who have national campaigns: Budweiser, Chevy, Nike, etc., etc., etc. Surely you can sell enough ad time to more than make up for the cost of running the server.
Unless, of course, MLB and Real are offering a buttload more. Well, here's hoping their plan fails, and in a few years the local sports clubs and broadcast stations can revert to a revenue model that both makes sense, and is fan-friendly. Cause this one is neither.
For a few happy years there, the 'net was the best the to happen to sports fans, when many teams, both college and pro, began to broadcast their games for free on the Internet. No longer did you have to be in a team's broadcast area to follow a that team. From my home in Texas, I listened to broadcasts of Atlanta Braves baseball and Auburn (my alma mater) football. I could even listen in on interesting games in other regions, like I did when McGwire and Sosa were chasing Maris two or three seasons ago.
Poor, poor misunderstood Microsoft. Just a bunch of working-class slobs trying to make a buck, and maybe getting a little overeager at times.
Feh. I don't believe it. Here's what happened:
1. They throw something out there. It's a fake, but they don't tell anyone.
2. Someone spots the trickery and cries foul.
3. Microsoft feigns innocence: "OH, we didn't say it was a manufactured demo? Sorry, must have slipped our minds."
And, BTW, I'm not talking about the Xbox here - I'm thinking of what happened with that "demo" videotape during their antitrust trial. Anyone remember that? Anyone see a pattern here? Anyone still trust Microsoft?
I've been waiting for the day when we'll carry around little solid colored tiles of information like on Star Trek TOS. Now if I could only get one of those three-faced monitors!
What a stupid, pedantic nitpick! The activities performed by the engineers would be recognized by most non-anal-rententive people as "reverse engineering".
...with cool fun electric toys. Look at the first "Can crusher" image... there in the background is a classic "Jacob's Ladder" device. So that's what they do with their neon-sign transformer when it's not charging high-energy capacitors!
Security is hard enough for the professionals to get right, let alone a bunch of doctors designing their own system. Hire a security professional to design your security for you, but don't trust him. (Frankly, digital security pros are like car mechanics - just because they get paid for it doesn't mean they truly know what they're doing. Some might be experts who can fix it right, but others are just hacks who'll get it running but it'll break down again 100 miles down the road.)
So do your homework. Buy and read Schneier's Secrets and Lies and any other book like it you can get your hands on. Read the Privacy Digest and the Risks Digest. Don't read just the current issues - read the archives going back at least ten years. Don't read just the medical stuff - read it all, including stuff about the plane crashes, ATMs, 911 systems, banking systems, e-commerce systems, etc., etc. Reading those archives should scare you silly about the system you're trying to design. Armed with these fears, make sure you ask your security consultant lots of hard, pointed questions. Grill him. Make him sweat a little. If he has all the answers, he's bullshitting you.
Remember Scheier's motto "Security is a process not a product." Just because you buy a "secure" web server and a "secure" operating system and "secure" application software doesn't mean a thing. Your whole system needs to be designed from the beginning with security in mind, end to end. Furthermore, everyone who uses the system has to know and respect the security procedures. Does your receptionist know she can't hand out passwords over the phone, for example? Your people are going to be your weakest link if they don't know and respect your security system.
Some other random thoughts about security:
Do you know not to store passwords verbatim in the system, and not to have default passwords like the user's last name or SSN?
The machine that houses your online system should NOT be the primary system you use to store your permanent records. If someone breaks into your online system, they can compromise your database permanently! Your primary system should never ever be connected to the Internet, nor should it be connected to the online system while it is connected to the Internet.
Your system should be opt-in only. If a patient hasn't signed up for online access, his/her information should NEVER enter the online machine. It should be on the primary machine ONLY.
To illustrate the above: assume you store ALL your patient records on the online system, but you only enable passwords for those patients who opt into the online system. You're safe, right? Records can be accessed online ONLY for those patients wha have opted in, because the others have their passwords disabled... right? Right, until the day that sameone breaks into your online machine, then ALL the records are vulnerable. Or suppose your programmer makes a mistake so that a patient's web page accidently displays records for other patients? If ALL your records are on the online machine, mistakes like the above can compromise them ALL. The online records should be copies, should be online ONLY for opt-in patients, and should probably, just to be safe, be read-only copies.
Your online system should be non-critical. You should be able to run your office, diagnose and treat patients, etc., without it. Assume it's going to be broken into. Assume you're going to need to work without it, and BE ABLE TO DO SO.
Have backups of your critical primary records. Have hardcopy. Practice your backup procedures, so you know that they work. (My favorite kind of episode in the RISKS Digest is the instutition that has backup procedures, only to discover that they don't work when needed. Because they've never practiced them, never had a dry run.)
Make sure your office personnel are resistant to "social engineering" techniques. If a hacker can sweet-talk your office administrator, secretary, and receptionist into giving out a password, it doesn't matter how good the rest of your security is.
Bottom line: Security is a hard problem. That's why there are so many stories about people who get it wrong (again, read the RISKS digest). My advice would be to forget the online access to records. If you HAVE to go online, limit yourself to taking appointments, so you don't have to worry about securing sensitive information. (Even if you do take appointments online, do it from a separate, non-critical system.)
Slashdot Mirror
Eventually, they'll hit RadioShack
Oh, I can just see it now, hanging there on a swinging-door display, alongside all the other parts: RS part number 14-2847, in a little blue blister pack labeled 7404 TTL Hex Quantum Gate. On the back of the cardboard is printed a pinout and a Feynman diagram. I can almost smell the 60/40 now...
Radio Shack: You've got questions, we've got blank stares.
--Jim
You're suggesting something that has no benefit to anyone at all, whereas Smart Tags (while you may find them intrusive) actually have a pretty good use.
Suggesting? No, I'm not suggesting... I wouldn't ever want a browser to do this. But as long as MS is modifying content by adding links to point people to MS-affiliated sites, then why wouldn't they also modify content by deleting links that point people to MS-competing sites? Different side of the same coin. If they're allowed to get away with the one, what'll stop them from doing the other?
--Jim
...and maybe someone else has posted this thought, because it's a logical extension (or inversion?) of the "smart tags" idea. What if Microsoft turned this idea around, and also invented "untags", that would take hyperlinks pointing to competitor's web sites and "unlink" them? For example, their browser could turn
<a href="http://redhat.com">Redhat</a>
into plain old
Redhat
Would even Microsoft be arrogant and audacious enough to try to get away with this? I hope we don't find out. This Orwellian notion of on-the-fly content modification - "for the benefit of the user" - just scares the stuffing out of me!
Where do you want to stay today?
--Jim
This topic comes up many times on comp.risks: there's no point in having a backup (server, archive, database, router, etc.) unless you TEST your backup procedure to make sure it works. Pull the plug on the server - does the backup kick in? Kick over the router - does it fail over to the backup? Those who ignore the RISKS digest are doomed to repeat it!
--Jim
Just plain nuts. Imperial Bedroom is not only Elvis Costello's finest album, it's his last fine album period. Everything produced after that is crap, utter crap. Don't talk to me about King of America. Don't talk to me about Spike. The guys been recording with Burt Bacharach for Chrissakes! What's next, dinner music and ad medlies with Barry Manilow? Whatever happened to our angry young man? For all I know, Elvis Costello died in late 1982 and they shaved a monkey and sent him into the studio with dear old Bart. Give me a fucking break!
IbMePdErRoIoAmL
--Jim
Yup. To elucidate further, the serial killer "Buffalo Bill" used IR goggles to see in the dark, so the reviewer must think he needed an IR flashlight.
At one point in the movie (though he's not using the IR goggles at this point), he has a victim he's holding prisoner in his house. She's being held in what appears to be a dry well dug in the cellar. He's starving her so her skin will loosen, and he wants her to put lotion on her skin to keep it from drying out. He lowers a basket into the well with a rope, and tells the girl to apply the lotion. But instead of speaking to her directly, he speaks in the 3rd person and refers to her as "it":
This is what the reviewer was referring to, though it was pretty obscure and I didn't get it until reading the previous post.
--Jim
Is this the same superhero-wannabe dude who is always ragging Superman... and once arrested a Buick? At least in the few issues I read years and years ago.
--Jim
An Edward Gorey renderer:
i nks.html
. html
http://students.washington.edu/cread/gorey/goreyl
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Square/3441/object1
--Jim
Plans are already well underway to move Slashdot to the new code base soon enough.
Two words: Beta site?
--Jim
Those little magnets are just awesome. I've been salvaging magnets from failed and obsolete disk drives for years, and have a nice collection of these insanely strong critters. My best acquisition was a set of four that came out of a nine-platter SCSI drive.
I love handing a pair of these little magnets to an unsuspecting guest, and ask them to separate them for me. One guy actually told me they were glued together, until I showed him how to slide the magnets apart to separate them.
Another good trick to do with an old (but functional) drive, before you take its guts out: take the cover off, hook the drive up, and run fsck on its contents while you mess with its guts. Touch the center of the platter stack to slow them down. Use a marker to write on the spinning platters. Put your finger on the center of rotation of the arms the R/W heads are mounted on. See how much abuse the drive will take and still function (I was kind of surprised).
I also like to salvage the disk-platter assemblies and set them out as objets d'art. They're really quite pretty!
--Jim
My experience has been that you can see meteors pretty much any time of year... given a few conditions:
Clear skies. (Duh.)
Dark skies. Get well away city lights. View during a new moon, before moonrise, or after moonset.
Patience. Take a blanket and a pillow with you. Throw them on the ground and get comfortable. Give your eyes a good twenty minutes to get fully accustomed to the dark. Keep watching the sky. "Widen" your vision: be sensitive to your peripheral vision.
There are many minor showers that occur throughout the year. My experience has been that if it's dark and clear, and you're patient you can see shooting stars pretty much any time.
My grandparents once lived in rural Alabama. After family visits to their farm, while the womenfolk said their goodbyes, I would go outside with my Dad and Grandad, and we'd just watch the skies. On almost every occasion, we'd be seeing meteors within ten minutes of watching, and the longer we watched, the faster they'd come.
Don't wait for a meteor shower. Get out now and watch.
--Jim
I think we are all missing the point. Copyright is not the issue here, but rather good taste. If such a sick parody is allowed to be made, what's next? It's not censorship to order the joke be stopped, it's responsible web hosting. I'm glad that someone is finally fighting for the children.
HAhahahahaha! Stop it! You're making my sides hurt!
But seriously, if you follow r.h.f, and I've been reading it for about ten years now, then you know that Brad has never shied away from "sick" humor -- or any other kind, for that matter. His only criteria for posts to r.h.f is that they should be funny. He's got a great sense of humor, and I'm glad to see him respond to MasterCard in such an appropriately funny manner. (And, BTW, it was Trademark infringement, not Copyright.)
Rec.humor.funny is one of the longstanding gems of the 'net. Long may it run!
--Jim
My Win98 machine isn't as buggy as that airplane.
And you stayed on it? Of the four passengers to board that plane, we know which one isn't the smart one!
--Jim
I can't believe nobody's posted about Knuth yet. Donald E. Knuth is famous for writing high-quality software, and even proving some of it (all of it?) correct. He offers rewards to people who find bugs in his code. The reward for TeX and METAFONT is described here: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/abcde.ht ml, under the heading "Rewards".
--Jim
I don't know much about Quicktime and Flash, but I don't think either is the complete package that Hypercard was.
Hypercard had three basic features: graphics, database, and programming. None of them were very advanced. Oh, I suppose the graphics in Hypercard were state-of-the-art when it was introduced into a monochrome bitmapped world. But its database capabilities were merely very basic, and its programming was only a bit more than basic (don't get me wrong - it wasn't intended to be anything fancy; it was supposed to be easy to use).
Today there are many products that beat the pants off Hypercard in one or two of these three areas. Flash clearly beats it graphically, and I'll take your word for it that Quicktime does too. I don't know much about Flash's scripting language, but let's say that it's as good as Hypertalk. However, I don't think Quicktime has programming capability, and I don't think either of these products has database capability like Hypercard did. I know even less about Visual Basic, but I doubt it has a built-in database either.
Perhaps you can hook up a database to these products. I know you can to Visual Basic. Maybe it's even easy to do. So maybe with some modern products you can come up with the same three feature sets as were in Hypercard, and they would be much more powerful.
That would still be missing the point.
In Hypercard, the three features were designed and built together. There was nothing external to hook up - no database, no ODBC drivers, no graphics package to add. You got it all right out of the box.
The best part was that they were exceptionally well integrated. Everything fit nicely into everything else. The object hierarchy that glued them all together is still one of the best and most likeable designs I've ever seen. For example, I still very much admire the way that Hypercard handled events -- passing them from specific to general: button to card to background to stack and finally to Hypercard itself. The design of Hypercard showed that Apple hadn't just stuck together a bunch of features -- they thought about what they wanted to do and came up with a holistic, comprehensive design.
The "card" paradigm was just a metaphor to let people work with databases without having to think in database terms. Build a background card and you're building a database schema. Add a card and you're adding a database record. Except, of course, that Hypercard never mention databases nor records. The closest they got to database terminology, if I remember correctly, was the "field".
My only complaint about Hypercard was that sometimes things were too simple. In trying to design a system that was "easy" for the average user to work with and even program, they built in some limitations that became obvious when pushed to their limits. Its database capabilities were crude, at best. And I seem to remember that string manipulation was often a problem. What I wouldn't have given just for some perl-like regular expressions! Probably, though, there's an XTND resource out there somewhere to do just that -- at least they made Hypercard extensible.
So, while I agree with you that there are many, many products that beat Hypercard in one or two if its feature areas, I don't know of any product that beats it at all three. And even if there is such a product, I doubt if the three features are as well-integrated as they were in Hypercard.
There's not a whole lot that I really miss about my old Macs, but Hypercard is definitely one of them. For simple databases like my card catalog, it not only did the job well, but it was a joy to use.
--Jim
Much as I despise these right-wing wackos, I love my First Amendment even more. So I'm pleased that the court would defend it.
/. not too long ago in this story:
? tag=nbs
Something more that interests me is what happens when you consider this ruling in light of another one covered here on
http://slashdot.org/yro/01/02/26/1622248_F.shtml
And the CNET article referenced from the Slashdot discussion:
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-4930756.html
The gist of the story is that the high school students published satire aimed at his high school principal on his own time, and on a web site entirely independent of the school. When the school district tried to punish the student, he sued and won. The court ruled that the school had no jurisdiction over the student's speech rights as practiced on his own time and his own equipment. And rightly so. You high school kids still have some speech rights in the eyes of the courts.
Now consider today's case, in which the court said that the anti-abortion speech is protected, including the "hit lists", so long as the speech doesn't directly threaten to commit violent acts. Wow. Juxtapose this case against the high school case from some weeks ago and tell me what you see.
How long is it going to be until we hear about some high school kid publishing a hit list on his personal web site? I thinking here of a list a teachers, administrators, bullies, and the like... of course, this kind of thing is probably happening already, but now it's protected. Are more kids going to start doing this kind of thing? How will the school districts react? Will they continue to suspend and expel... or will they just call the police?
It's a fascinating situation. It's great that speech rights on the Internet are seeing some protection, especially for students, but I'm wondering how these new protections are going to be interpreted by today's high school kids, and what the repercussions are going to be when they start pushing the envelope with them.
--Jim
ROFL!!!
I'm sure this is just coincidence, but when I clicked on the poll on the left margin ("Do you support copy-proctected CDs?") to vote "NO", their site took me to a blank page. When I tried to go back to the article, still nothing... blank page. Shortly after that, Netscape crashed. By now they have no doubt logged my IP address and sent a complaint to my ISP that I'm a potential pirate, and asking that my account be revoked.
On the other hand, maybe I've been watching too much X-Files. And it's early... yeah, that's the ticket... early... brain not function... must... get... caffiene...
[Whoops - hit "submit" instead of "preview"]
Many of the Braves games were available on the "Superstation" WTBS, which I get as part of my cable service, but TBS doesn't carry as many of the games as does the radio broadcast (which has nearly 100% of a season's games). Furthermore, I didn't have to be near a TV to listen, which means I could listen at work to the day games. Best of all, during playoffs, I could listen to the Brave's play-by-play instead of having to listen to those network blabbermouths.
But last year things began to change. Atlanta's baseball games were no longer broadcast on the Internet out of the web site of WSB, the home station of the radio program. Instead, I had to listen by going through broadcast.com. I really hated this because they only carried the broadcast of the home team, so when Atlanta played on the road, I had to listen to the "other guy's" announcers, even though I would much rather hear Skip Carey and Company.
Now, it sounds like things are going to get still worse if I have to pay both MLB for the broadcast and Real for the Gold Pass player. I'd just as soon go back to watching what games I can on the TV.
But it doesn't have to be this way. Why not treat the Internet broadcast as just another affiliate station? Insert advertisements targeted to an Internet audience. The technology already exists to do this -- it's in every radio station in their system. It's the way affiliate stations insert their own local advertisements into the broadcast. Or go one step further, and treat the Internet as a kind of super-affiliate that replaces all the advertisements (not just those designated "local").
Get paying customers -- it shouldn't be that hard. You've got a regional broadcast going to a worldwide audience. You should be able to sell ads to the local tourist and convention industry: concert promoters, sporting event promoters, travel agencies, the local Visitors/Tourist Bureau, and the like. Likewise you can sell to the local chamber of commerce, which is always trying to attract business to town. Sell ads to local headhunters -- they're always trying to attract talent to town.
If that doesn't sell enough ads, go to mass-market advertisers who have national campaigns: Budweiser, Chevy, Nike, etc., etc., etc. Surely you can sell enough ad time to more than make up for the cost of running the server.
Unless, of course, MLB and Real are offering a buttload more. Well, here's hoping their plan fails, and in a few years the local sports clubs and broadcast stations can revert to a revenue model that both makes sense, and is fan-friendly. Cause this one is neither.
--Jim
For a few happy years there, the 'net was the best the to happen to sports fans, when many teams, both college and pro, began to broadcast their games for free on the Internet. No longer did you have to be in a team's broadcast area to follow a that team. From my home in Texas, I listened to broadcasts of Atlanta Braves baseball and Auburn (my alma mater) football. I could even listen in on interesting games in other regions, like I did when McGwire and Sosa were chasing Maris two or three seasons ago.
Poor, poor misunderstood Microsoft. Just a bunch of working-class slobs trying to make a buck, and maybe getting a little overeager at times.
Feh. I don't believe it. Here's what happened:
1. They throw something out there. It's a fake, but they don't tell anyone.
2. Someone spots the trickery and cries foul.
3. Microsoft feigns innocence: "OH, we didn't say it was a manufactured demo? Sorry, must have slipped our minds."
And, BTW, I'm not talking about the Xbox here - I'm thinking of what happened with that "demo" videotape during their antitrust trial. Anyone remember that? Anyone see a pattern here? Anyone still trust Microsoft?
--Jim
"Pretty cool, Jim"
I've been waiting for the day when we'll carry around little solid colored tiles of information like on Star Trek TOS. Now if I could only get one of those three-faced monitors!
--Jim
What a stupid, pedantic nitpick! The activities performed by the engineers would be recognized by most non-anal-rententive people as "reverse engineering".
--Jim
...with cool fun electric toys. Look at the first "Can crusher" image... there in the background is a classic "Jacob's Ladder" device. So that's what they do with their neon-sign transformer when it's not charging high-energy capacitors!
--Jim
Security is hard enough for the professionals to get right, let alone a bunch of doctors designing their own system. Hire a security professional to design your security for you, but don't trust him. (Frankly, digital security pros are like car mechanics - just because they get paid for it doesn't mean they truly know what they're doing. Some might be experts who can fix it right, but others are just hacks who'll get it running but it'll break down again 100 miles down the road.)
So do your homework. Buy and read Schneier's Secrets and Lies and any other book like it you can get your hands on. Read the Privacy Digest and the Risks Digest. Don't read just the current issues - read the archives going back at least ten years. Don't read just the medical stuff - read it all, including stuff about the plane crashes, ATMs, 911 systems, banking systems, e-commerce systems, etc., etc. Reading those archives should scare you silly about the system you're trying to design. Armed with these fears, make sure you ask your security consultant lots of hard, pointed questions. Grill him. Make him sweat a little. If he has all the answers, he's bullshitting you.
Remember Scheier's motto "Security is a process not a product." Just because you buy a "secure" web server and a "secure" operating system and "secure" application software doesn't mean a thing. Your whole system needs to be designed from the beginning with security in mind, end to end. Furthermore, everyone who uses the system has to know and respect the security procedures. Does your receptionist know she can't hand out passwords over the phone, for example? Your people are going to be your weakest link if they don't know and respect your security system.
Some other random thoughts about security:
Do you know not to store passwords verbatim in the system, and not to have default passwords like the user's last name or SSN?
The machine that houses your online system should NOT be the primary system you use to store your permanent records. If someone breaks into your online system, they can compromise your database permanently! Your primary system should never ever be connected to the Internet, nor should it be connected to the online system while it is connected to the Internet.
Your system should be opt-in only. If a patient hasn't signed up for online access, his/her information should NEVER enter the online machine. It should be on the primary machine ONLY.
To illustrate the above: assume you store ALL your patient records on the online system, but you only enable passwords for those patients who opt into the online system. You're safe, right? Records can be accessed online ONLY for those patients wha have opted in, because the others have their passwords disabled... right? Right, until the day that sameone breaks into your online machine, then ALL the records are vulnerable. Or suppose your programmer makes a mistake so that a patient's web page accidently displays records for other patients? If ALL your records are on the online machine, mistakes like the above can compromise them ALL. The online records should be copies, should be online ONLY for opt-in patients, and should probably, just to be safe, be read-only copies.
Your online system should be non-critical. You should be able to run your office, diagnose and treat patients, etc., without it. Assume it's going to be broken into. Assume you're going to need to work without it, and BE ABLE TO DO SO.
Have backups of your critical primary records. Have hardcopy. Practice your backup procedures, so you know that they work. (My favorite kind of episode in the RISKS Digest is the instutition that has backup procedures, only to discover that they don't work when needed. Because they've never practiced them, never had a dry run.)
Make sure your office personnel are resistant to "social engineering" techniques. If a hacker can sweet-talk your office administrator, secretary, and receptionist into giving out a password, it doesn't matter how good the rest of your security is.
Bottom line: Security is a hard problem. That's why there are so many stories about people who get it wrong (again, read the RISKS digest). My advice would be to forget the online access to records. If you HAVE to go online, limit yourself to taking appointments, so you don't have to worry about securing sensitive information. (Even if you do take appointments online, do it from a separate, non-critical system.)
--Jim