Monday, February 24, 2003

Source: [Sexy Mothers Do Exist] Shoplifters Beware               At every birthday and each Christmas I make the same promise.  If I ever catch someone shoplifting, before I turn them over to the cops, I’ll beat the crap out of them.  For those who have not had the need to open a toy for a child within the past five or so years, be glad.  Be very, very glad.             They have twisty ties, taped tabs, plastic hooks and stitching holding those toys FIRMLY in the box.  And I mean, nothing short of an explosion would separate these toys from their boxes.  Removing the toys from the boxes is difficult enough, but add to that an excited four year old who wants to play with it – NOW – and you have the recipe for high parental frustration.             I can remember being able to remove toys lickety split without much parental aid when I was a kid.  Admittedly this ease made conditions ripe for those hell bent on having that which does not belong to them.  Forcing stores and manufacturers to combat the problem in the best, most economical way possible.             Which allows me to place all of my frustration, sliced fingers and headaches from removing the toys on the head of shoplifters.  Prosecuting to the fullest extent of the law just isn’t enough.  Put them in a room with some parents, or better yet, force them to open the packages for the parents with no compensation.             Side Note:  Gift of the year – Barbie Karaoke Machine.  She sings with that thing anywhere and everywhere that we would allow her.  Favorite song to sing – God Bless the USA by Lee Greenwood. 12:10:28 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Source: [Ming the Mechanic]  The Great Pirates Some hundreds of years ago the technology of ship building advanced so that it became practical to travel the oceans for extended periods of time. Thus whole new territories were opened to exploration and possible domination. It became clear that it was impractical to assume that the law and order of the land could be applied to the sea. Thus the oceans became a zone of lawlessness and a battleground for whomever chose to enter the arena. It also became clear that those who fared best were those who mastered all the elements of survival at sea and who did their business under the veil of secrecy. It is those who mastered this game that we can call The Great Pirates. A Great Pirate succeeded because of his comprehensive command of a whole set of different disciplines. He had a high proficiency in dealing with celestial navigation, the sea, the storms, the ship, the men, economics, biology, geography, history, and science. The better the Great Pirate could understand and anticipate the whole scene, the better he would do. Great Pirates would travel, bargain, plunder, plan, negotiate, battle, and much more. He would use the science of ship building to amass a fleet, he would use his people skills to manage his crew and to negotiate with representatives of far away lands. He would do his activities out of sight of people on land and of his competitors. A Great Pirate would naturally want to maintain his position, and he had to sleep once in a while. He therefore at first surrounded himself with dull-witted but loyal men of muscle. Only he himself planned and coordinated his operations, and his men simply did what they were told. However, when the Great Pirate expanded his operations it became clear that he needed something more than that. The Great Pirate invented the brilliant scheme of specialization. It is both the way to expand his empire with skilled assistance and at the same time the assurance that only HE will ever know the full picture of what is going on. The Great Pirates started to encourage and employ people of great skill in specialized areas. There might be, for example, a greatly skilled and experienced Navigator. And there might be a master Weapon Builder, an accomplished Master Historian, a Politician, a Ship's Captain, a General, and so forth. Each of those people were cultivated to a high level of skill. But also, it was made clear to each one that they had better stay within their specific field, or they would lose their head. The Great Pirate himself would be the ONLY person who knew the whole picture. He would know the plan, he would know where ships would go and why, he would know what they would find, who they would meet, he would know what to trade and what to steal, he would know who to trust and who not to. None of his people would ever be allowed near the full picture, and none of them could therefore possibly replace him. And thus his position was safe from any coup by those close to him. He always kept the true full picture in utmost secrecy and kept the skills and knowledge of all his people perpetually compartmentalized. Through the ingenious scheme of specialization and compartmentalization of knowledge, the Great Pirates were able to expand their business immensely. They were able to expand their influence into different lands through carefully chosen and educated front people. They would chose local strong men in different territories, supply them with what they needed to assume power, educate them to present a proper public facade, but never giving them the knowledge of all the pieces in the game. The local strong man might be maneuvered into a position of King, assumed by his people to be the utmost authority, but in essence simply being another of the specialized agents of the hidden Great Pirates. The Great Pirate would naturally also cultivate agents in the fields of religion, education, science, military, banking, and so forth, and would naturally be able to play them out against each other if any one of them ever got ambitious beyond his assigned role. The Great Pirate knew the world was round when everybody else were kept in the belief that it was flat. He knew about grand logistical schemes, he knew about international exchange media and trade balancing, and much more. He was the only one who saw the whole picture of the planet and its resources, and was therefore able to play his game totally unnoticed by the vast majority of the population of the planet. All through the magic of specialization ... --- The above is my shortened rendition of what Bucky Fuller described in his book "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth", in the chapter "Origins of Specialization" 10:43:07 AM    trackback []     Articulate []

Source:  [The FuzzyBlog!] Is the Office 2003 File Format Going to Change ???. Is the Office 2003 File Format Going to Change ??? Note: This article is based on analysis inference and nothing concrete from Microsoft.  Still it makes a lot of sense. News.com has a very, very interesting article on Microsoft expanding their rights management tool, RMS.  And what it makes me think is that we could well see the file format for Microsoft Office 2003, the next version of Office, change dramatically.  What they are doing is allowing a document to have an access control list (ACL) associated with it so that only users identified in that ACL will be allowed to read the document.  Specifically when I read this: "What we've done here is put persistent protection in the document itself," Nash said. "Even if the file is no longer part of the file system or the infrastructure of the company, the protection is still there as part of the file." What I have to think is that the underlying file format for an office document is going to change because of this.  How else will this new feature be supported?  And this will be both a financial godsend for Microsoft and an absolute disaster for their customers.  I've lived through this before and here's what happens. Microsoft releases new version of Office with new file format.  We saw this in Office 97 which had a different Microsoft Word format than Office 95. Every new computer comes bundled with the new version of Office and manufacturers (like Dell) that bundle Office don't even offer the old version of Office. Joe Worker or worse Job Boss gets his new computer from IT and creates a new document.  He emails it out to 10 people who need it.  Unknowingly he uses a feature which requires the new file format. The people that get it can't read it and go scream at IT.  IT screams at its management.  And the company ends up being dragged unwillingly to Office 2003, updating hundreds if not thousands of desktops in the process. Think that's an imaginary scenario?  Nope.  I was at a software company from 1996 to 1999 and that exact scenario played itself out and cost us tens of thousands in license fees.  And for what?  The bulk of us didn't use 95% of the features in Office anyway. Oh and this statement also pretty much confirms this: The same restriction in one sense applies to other Windows users. "If you shared the document with another Windows user and that Windows user hadn't installed (RMS), that other Windows user couldn't open the document as well," Nash said. Now this statement could be interpreted that RMS is an add-on and will work with any version of Office.  Still I've been a Windows programmer and I've read file format documentation for most of the Office document types and I don't think the ability to do this exists within a current .DOC / .XLS / .PPT / etc file.  Oh and don't think that you'll be able to work on a laptop offline -- at least initially: But one important protection mechanism could cause headaches for companies that don't implement RMS carefully. A user's computer must be able to access the Windows Server 2003 running RMS on first opening a document to authenticate the rights and decrypt the document. Otherwise, the document cannot be opened. In the future, Microsoft plans to offer an "offline" rights authentication mechanism, but not with this version of RMS. Sigh.  Can you imagine the amount of technical support work that this is going to cause?  And can you hear the screams when a manager is offline planning on reviewing a document that was emailed to him just before a trip?  Or when the sales staff gets a new PowerPoint just before leaving for a demo?  And you can argue that these features have to be intentionally turned on and I'd agree with that.  But people make mistakes and you can guarantee that people will use this incorrectly with the end result being losting access to data when you really need it. My guess?  You'll see a new file format for Office 2003 and that will force upgrades and revenue dramatically.  Good for Microsoft and bad for users. 10:33:12 AM    trackback []     Articulate []