allowing google or other search engines to index their sites.
Sites could get more clicks from me if their local search engines were more intelligent, like Google's.
Often Google will point me into a deep link inside some site (eg, mailing list archives), where if I go to the top level of most updated material I can run a local search and perhaps come up with more relevant information.
As nice as their search algorithms are, Google can only do so much so fast.
Between Microsoft and the tobacco company settlements, residents of states ought to evaluate the effectiveness of their government appointed watchdogs by dividing the settlement size by the number of residents in the state.
Impoverished states like New Mexico caved early as Microsoft offered settlement terms that include attorney's fees.
dissatisfied customers who couldn't cope with... and scripted responses.
That problem isn't particular to India or any other outsourced venue.
Just about every knowledgeable person I've met has, at one time or another, complained of Support Desks that beancounters have cost-economized into paragons of efficiency filled with low-paying positions by having techs read through a flowchart.
But Ma and Pa Kettle will blithely visit all the DRM-requiring sites without a clue `cuz "DRM came with My PC - I just had to fill out a Wizard when I turned it on!"
And people thought Doubleclick was insidious and intrusive...
It's great accomplishment that 65 nm chips are sampling but projecting out into the future has always struck me as silly. "will produce in 2005" is rather like:
Clarence Thomas' votes certainly have a broad and long lasting impact in the United States. His actions don't seem comparable in severity to the impact of Robert Mugabe, who is destroying Zimbabwe piece by piece.
However, some might argue that the SCOTUS ruling in the 2000 U.S. Presidential election indirectly led to the war in Iraq by chain of events.
Adobe's delayed release of Acrobat for Linux compared with Windows and Mac, their discontinuing the Framemaker on Linux beta program suggest to me that they don't mind losing various markets in their effort to consolidate their product lines.
Why Adobe doesn't support SVG more? It's simply an XML-ification of the capabilities they already own in PDF. Innovators dilemma. It competes too much with an existing product for them to promote it with any enthusiasm.
The key feature they were interested in is not there.
And that is the key feature motivating such a decision, a realization that, in the long-term, you're in a much better position to get the feature you want if you have complete access to the source code.
You want right-left and left-right language processing? Maybe you want to write up-down, right-left and follow a square spiral around the page? If you have the motivation and expertise you can change the code to do what you want. The Israeli government could lay down a fraction of what they pay for their MS licensesa and get several programmers to make OOo to exactly what they need. (Meanwhile, the rest of us using the same code base will probably benefit from general improvements to the code.)
You don't have to pay MS for any color as long as it's black.
The point of the parent post was that Word has long had most of the functionality that most people use.
Outlook is a different application than Word, even though it might be bundled together with Word in some overall purchase of Office.
As much as I hate MS, in Outlook they did design a lot of convenient, easy-to-use features which make it quite useful and something people might want to buy. Despite the occassional problem with viri, people basically like using Outlook and appreciate what it does for them.
It would be nice if people could pay less and just get the nice new applications like Outlook and Visio that they want instead of rustproofing add-ons like Word and Windows itself with new features they don't use.
"One of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the great struggle for independence."
Often, I leave books and papers open on my desk, multiple applications and tabs going to different URL's, etc.
My excuse has always been that when I return to my work, everything is there to remind me of exactly where I was and minimizes the time it will take for me to "swap in".
Stale stuff needs to be pushed out of perception to keep you sane, though.
Periodically go through stuff and assign it value based on a real assessment of how often you have accessed it in the past and will access it in the future. Be ruthless about it, don't be sentimental. I mean, really, I won't ever get around to reading all the RFC's pertaining to secure shell, no matter how much I think it would be really great to do that and no matter if I keep a paper copy in my backpack 24/7. It's not gonna happen.
Push out the infrequently accessed stuff as far away as you can.
Given this recent revelation, I'm sure everyone is ready to trust the FBI with greater power and lesser accountability:)
It's really a shame though. I know a lot of the people working there are quite professional and care about doing a good job and protecting the Constitution of the United States, the ideals that make America a good place.
But after the legacy of Hoover misusing the agency many decades ago, evidently missing the boat on predicting the 9/11 catastrophe, the last thing they need is this kind of power handed to them by higher ups. Those superiors are political appointees with a vision for enforcement that shares more with authoritarian states than with the principles America was founded upon.
If I was a mid-level bureaucrat in the FBI, I'd make efforts to establish accountability policies, citizen review boards, etc. even if the current administration doesn't think they're necessary.
If they don't this, then they can be assured of getting tarred and feather during Congressional hearings 5-10 years from now, much like what happened to the CIA in the late 1970's.
Surely teams of 5 friendly people should come up with more patentable inventions if they ALWAYS outperform the grumpy loners.
The patent process is a certifiable tool for transitioning 5 friendly people into 5 grumpy loners.
Then, too, there are magic antidotes to teams, single people who, when added to the group, can diminish productivity by over 50%, creating immiscibility whereever they happen to be...
if you're currently using cited references, you should be able to build such a system
Seems like an open source local cache, a squid-like system might be useful for preserving the integrity of referenced works.
The big objection has always been that the referred-to work doesn't necessarily get all the hits it deserves during its lifeftime.
So, if I publish
http://me.net/mine.html
and it contains references to
http://you.org/yours.html
then
my web references ought to be layered through an inpreter so they can be intelligently referred (just like how freshmeat rewrites Download URL's to go through freshmeat.net first.
This kind of mechanism just has to exist already..
so that you.org gets the hits it's advertisers want, but my work gets the possibility to provide a local cache if your site goes down for whatever reason.
Really, is there a reason to archive everything in the world?
No, only the good stuff needs to be saved. So what's good and who should save it?
IMHO, anything that gets officially referenced by another work should be saved.
That burden should not fall upon the original creator of the referenced work; it should fall upon the creator of the refering work.
Despite all the hue and cry about lost revenue opportunities from controlled distribution of copyrighted information, knowledge preservation and the overall benefit to society would improve if works were able to save a local cache of referenced works.
This would also help with the problem of morphing or revisionist works. Some works can be improved by editing (something around here comes to mind), but it would be inappropriate to change old web pages that show an earlier mistake in thinking, to show that somehow someone was particularly prescient, or to erase knowledge for a political agenda (a la Stalin).
Just a couple of days ago I was able to retrieve an old recipe from the Google cache that had been summarily removed from a web site due to some time retention policy. An attempt to encourage repeat visits to the website because stuff disappears was circumvented. I would have been particularly annoyed with that website were it not for the delayed action of the Google cache. Google may have enable circumvention of their policy, but they would have garned a lot more ill will from me if their policy were effective.
Guess what? References in scientific papers I write are not just available in libraries capable of paying $1K/year subscription rates, but as photocopies in my file cabinet. That is, I have a local cache of referenced works already.
If a colleague's library did not have the specified volume and journal article, I would let him have a copy for the asking. It's a copyright violation, I know, but I'm not convinced that strict adherence to copyright laws in this case provides the best overall benefit to society.
Now how does digitial signing on a non-connected machine help you know the source wasn't tampered with?
You're right - it doesn't.
It's difficult though.
The whole idea of code development is to tamper with code, so there's no getting around that fact that you extend your web of trust to the folks with write access to the repository.
Not only trusting that developers don't do anything malicious to a code base (that grows so rapidly that a master signer can't possibly check it all for backdoors), but also that each of the trusted committers is not lax about their own system's security and inadvertently let someone else masquerade a commit to the master repository.
I do have to smile about any distribution where the md5 sums are sitting side by side with the source distribution...
trojan-0.9.3.tar.gz
trojan-0.9.3.tar.gz.md5
Yep, looks like everything's in order here!
Slightly better would be md5sums from a different website (hopefully they've been encrypted and signed before going up, though).
The key to their longevity appears to be always growing, but ever so slowly.
I could see where age guessing of a slowly-changing organism would be difficult and that they would corroborate their results with nuclear information because biochemical indicators are so flat.
This is also consistent with Duncan MacLeod and the other Immortals being under 40.
Note: "I am American, and thus entitled to living better than 90% of the world's population." is not a convincing argument.
Right.
Unless you're doing something that only you can do, expect your wage to fall to a level that is attractive only to the poorest people in the world.
Exactly.
Moral: learn to do something remarkable, or accept that you don't deserve more than three meals a day and a warm place to sleep.
I agree with each piece and I'm willing to learn to do something about it.
Having surveyed the American economic landscape, I've determined that I would very much like to become a trust fund baby and inherit wealth.
If not that, then I'd certainly like to be able to be raised in an upper-middle class family with two married parents and not be a minority, because all the evidence points to lesser odds for my success in those instances. My odds of getting into a good university to get the special training I need to distinguish myself from the rest of the teeming masses is a strong function of this kind of good upbringing, so I'd certainly like to get it.
it's not always necessary to go balls-to-the-wall when setting up IT infrastructure.
I've seen successful businesses operating on 15 and 20 year old IT. It works, it's been paid for, and the new stuff that's expensive won't improve upon the 1980's technology by enough to justify the expense.
A lot of IT infrastructure is Good Enough.
Business owners are wiser to continue using what works (it's not broken).
The success of Southwest Airlines using old Boeing 737 jetliners and maintaining them forever should be of some interest to people in IT.
Speed is not the same thing as Stability. TPC-H is a test of speed.
So, not being a db person, I'm curious if there are stability benchmarks?
Kind of like high TPC * high uptime?
Just like network vendors can quote error rates like 1 in 10e15 etc., I would imagine that db transactions could be stable like 1 in 10e13, etc. (except for the insurance claim forms I submit that get processed with error rates like 1 in 10e0).
Slashdot Mirror
there won't be a problem for those people who are diligent in patching.
You're right, of course.
And I'm sure a big selling point for migrating away from Microsoft will be that alternatives may require less diligence on their part.
But never underestimate just how little diligence the customer is willing to spend. Any diligence requirement annoys them.
And, a positive way for street cops to tell who is in the area, or who saw a crime.
"Well, yes, I suppose I was traveling on the freeway last Friday afternoon right after the beer delivery truck crashed."
"Uhhh, well, I think I did slow down and stopped momentarily see if anyone needed help."
"No, of course not. I didn't take any of the beer."
Ummmm...Wrong! Theft and copyright infringement ARE different, otherwise there would be no need for the term copyright infringement,
The term "copyright infringement" carries all the weight of "jaywalking".
Therefore, the term has been eliminated.
Alternative terminology has been upgraded several times:
- Copyright infringer = Pirate (1995)
- Copyright infringer = Thief (1999)
- Copyright infringer = Terrorist/Paedophile/Hacker (2001)
My prediction: in 2004 the RIAA will donate one of their own to the cause. Copyright infringers will be known as "Michael Jacksons".allowing google or other search engines to index their sites.
Sites could get more clicks from me if their local search engines were more intelligent, like Google's.
Often Google will point me into a deep link inside some site (eg, mailing list archives), where if I go to the top level of most updated material I can run a local search and perhaps come up with more relevant information.
As nice as their search algorithms are, Google can only do so much so fast.
Between Microsoft and the tobacco company settlements, residents of states ought to evaluate the effectiveness of their government appointed watchdogs by dividing the settlement size by the number of residents in the state.
Impoverished states like New Mexico caved early as Microsoft offered settlement terms that include attorney's fees.
dissatisfied customers who couldn't cope with
That problem isn't particular to India or any other outsourced venue.
Just about every knowledgeable person I've met has, at one time or another, complained of Support Desks that beancounters have cost-economized into paragons of efficiency filled with low-paying positions by having techs read through a flowchart.
You know:
I'll do that and visit the sites I can, etc.
But Ma and Pa Kettle will blithely visit all the DRM-requiring sites without a clue `cuz "DRM came with My PC - I just had to fill out a Wizard when I turned it on!"
And people thought Doubleclick was insidious and intrusive...
It's great accomplishment that 65 nm chips are sampling but projecting out into the future has always struck me as silly. "will produce in 2005" is rather like:
Can he declare war?
Clarence Thomas' votes certainly have a broad and long lasting impact in the United States. His actions don't seem comparable in severity to the impact of Robert Mugabe, who is destroying Zimbabwe piece by piece.
However, some might argue that the SCOTUS ruling in the 2000 U.S. Presidential election indirectly led to the war in Iraq by chain of events.
Even though the final ruling was 7-2, there seemed to be a 5-4 split earlier in the decision making process.
Had Thomas been in the opposite camp, event may have turned out quite differently.
Adobe's delayed release of Acrobat for Linux compared with Windows and Mac, their discontinuing the Framemaker on Linux beta program suggest to me that they don't mind losing various markets in their effort to consolidate their product lines.
Why Adobe doesn't support SVG more? It's simply an XML-ification of the capabilities they already own in PDF. Innovators dilemma. It competes too much with an existing product for them to promote it with any enthusiasm.
The key feature they were interested in is not there.
And that is the key feature motivating such a decision, a realization that, in the long-term, you're in a much better position to get the feature you want if you have complete access to the source code.
You want right-left and left-right language processing? Maybe you want to write up-down, right-left and follow a square spiral around the page? If you have the motivation and expertise you can change the code to do what you want. The Israeli government could lay down a fraction of what they pay for their MS licensesa and get several programmers to make OOo to exactly what they need. (Meanwhile, the rest of us using the same code base will probably benefit from general improvements to the code.)
You don't have to pay MS for any color as long as it's black.
Since office 97
Outlook
The point of the parent post was that Word has long had most of the functionality that most people use.
Outlook is a different application than Word, even though it might be bundled together with Word in some overall purchase of Office.
As much as I hate MS, in Outlook they did design a lot of convenient, easy-to-use features which make it quite useful and something people might want to buy. Despite the occassional problem with viri, people basically like using Outlook and appreciate what it does for them.
It would be nice if people could pay less and just get the nice new applications like Outlook and Visio that they want instead of rustproofing add-ons like Word and Windows itself with new features they don't use.
I've battled clutter for years.
Often, I leave books and papers open on my desk, multiple applications and tabs going to different URL's, etc.
My excuse has always been that when I return to my work, everything is there to remind me of exactly where I was and minimizes the time it will take for me to "swap in".
Stale stuff needs to be pushed out of perception to keep you sane, though.
Periodically go through stuff and assign it value based on a real assessment of how often you have accessed it in the past and will access it in the future. Be ruthless about it, don't be sentimental. I mean, really, I won't ever get around to reading all the RFC's pertaining to secure shell, no matter how much I think it would be really great to do that and no matter if I keep a paper copy in my backpack 24/7. It's not gonna happen.
Push out the infrequently accessed stuff as far away as you can.
Given this recent revelation, I'm sure everyone is ready to trust the FBI with greater power and lesser accountability:)
It's really a shame though. I know a lot of the people working there are quite professional and care about doing a good job and protecting the Constitution of the United States, the ideals that make America a good place.
But after the legacy of Hoover misusing the agency many decades ago, evidently missing the boat on predicting the 9/11 catastrophe, the last thing they need is this kind of power handed to them by higher ups. Those superiors are political appointees with a vision for enforcement that shares more with authoritarian states than with the principles America was founded upon.
If I was a mid-level bureaucrat in the FBI, I'd make efforts to establish accountability policies, citizen review boards, etc. even if the current administration doesn't think they're necessary.
If they don't this, then they can be assured of getting tarred and feather during Congressional hearings 5-10 years from now, much like what happened to the CIA in the late 1970's.
Surely teams of 5 friendly people should come up with more patentable inventions if they ALWAYS outperform the grumpy loners.
The patent process is a certifiable tool for transitioning 5 friendly people into 5 grumpy loners.
Then, too, there are magic antidotes to teams, single people who, when added to the group, can diminish productivity by over 50%, creating immiscibility whereever they happen to be...
if you're currently using cited references, you should be able to build such a system
Seems like an open source local cache, a squid-like system might be useful for preserving the integrity of referenced works.
The big objection has always been that the referred-to work doesn't necessarily get all the hits it deserves during its lifeftime.
So, if I publish
and it contains references to then my web references ought to be layered through an inpreter so they can be intelligently referred (just like how freshmeat rewrites Download URL's to go through freshmeat.net first.This kind of mechanism just has to exist already..
so that you.org gets the hits it's advertisers want, but my work gets the possibility to provide a local cache if your site goes down for whatever reason.Really, is there a reason to archive everything in the world?
No, only the good stuff needs to be saved. So what's good and who should save it?
IMHO, anything that gets officially referenced by another work should be saved.
That burden should not fall upon the original creator of the referenced work; it should fall upon the creator of the refering work.
Despite all the hue and cry about lost revenue opportunities from controlled distribution of copyrighted information, knowledge preservation and the overall benefit to society would improve if works were able to save a local cache of referenced works.
This would also help with the problem of morphing or revisionist works. Some works can be improved by editing (something around here comes to mind), but it would be inappropriate to change old web pages that show an earlier mistake in thinking, to show that somehow someone was particularly prescient, or to erase knowledge for a political agenda (a la Stalin).
Just a couple of days ago I was able to retrieve an old recipe from the Google cache that had been summarily removed from a web site due to some time retention policy. An attempt to encourage repeat visits to the website because stuff disappears was circumvented. I would have been particularly annoyed with that website were it not for the delayed action of the Google cache. Google may have enable circumvention of their policy, but they would have garned a lot more ill will from me if their policy were effective.
Guess what? References in scientific papers I write are not just available in libraries capable of paying $1K/year subscription rates, but as photocopies in my file cabinet. That is, I have a local cache of referenced works already.
If a colleague's library did not have the specified volume and journal article, I would let him have a copy for the asking. It's a copyright violation, I know, but I'm not convinced that strict adherence to copyright laws in this case provides the best overall benefit to society.
Now how does digitial signing on a non-connected machine help you know the source wasn't tampered with?
You're right - it doesn't.
It's difficult though.
The whole idea of code development is to tamper with code, so there's no getting around that fact that you extend your web of trust to the folks with write access to the repository.
Not only trusting that developers don't do anything malicious to a code base (that grows so rapidly that a master signer can't possibly check it all for backdoors), but also that each of the trusted committers is not lax about their own system's security and inadvertently let someone else masquerade a commit to the master repository.
I do have to smile about any distribution where the md5 sums are sitting side by side with the source distribution...
Yep, looks like everything's in order here!Slightly better would be md5sums from a different website (hopefully they've been encrypted and signed before going up, though).
The key to their longevity appears to be always growing, but ever so slowly.
I could see where age guessing of a slowly-changing organism would be difficult and that they would corroborate their results with nuclear information because biochemical indicators are so flat.
This is also consistent with Duncan MacLeod and the other Immortals being under 40.
the biggest market is still the us
Is it?
Where do microprocessors go? I would have guess the EU to be a larger market than the US, and East Asia to be comparable, too.
Now justify your standard of living.
Yep.
Note: "I am American, and thus entitled to living better than 90% of the world's population." is not a convincing argument.Right.
Unless you're doing something that only you can do, expect your wage to fall to a level that is attractive only to the poorest people in the world.Exactly.
Moral: learn to do something remarkable, or accept that you don't deserve more than three meals a day and a warm place to sleep.
I agree with each piece and I'm willing to learn to do something about it.
Having surveyed the American economic landscape, I've determined that I would very much like to become a trust fund baby and inherit wealth.
If not that, then I'd certainly like to be able to be raised in an upper-middle class family with two married parents and not be a minority, because all the evidence points to lesser odds for my success in those instances. My odds of getting into a good university to get the special training I need to distinguish myself from the rest of the teeming masses is a strong function of this kind of good upbringing, so I'd certainly like to get it.
A lot of the recommendations seem like good advic e in the event of a BSA audit, too.
it's not always necessary to go balls-to-the-wall when setting up IT infrastructure.
I've seen successful businesses operating on 15 and 20 year old IT. It works, it's been paid for, and the new stuff that's expensive won't improve upon the 1980's technology by enough to justify the expense.
A lot of IT infrastructure is Good Enough.
Business owners are wiser to continue using what works (it's not broken).
The success of Southwest Airlines using old Boeing 737 jetliners and maintaining them forever should be of some interest to people in IT.
Speed is not the same thing as Stability. TPC-H is a test of speed.
So, not being a db person, I'm curious if there are stability benchmarks?
Kind of like high TPC * high uptime?
Just like network vendors can quote error rates like 1 in 10e15 etc., I would imagine that db transactions could be stable like 1 in 10e13, etc. (except for the insurance claim forms I submit that get processed with error rates like 1 in 10e0).