Someone tell me this is not some stupid business method patent, that there's a real INVENTION somewhere people need to do pay as you go. Not a piece of software, not an instruction list, I want to see some physical device that's not obvious without which pay as you go is impossible. Of course, there is not such thing.
Head is hung in shame. As much as I hate Cingular, I'm forced to admits, we are slaves.
You quibble about the wording of public information becoming inaccessible.
From the fine article:
Why do we care about formats? Electronic file formats sit at the core of concern about future access to today's public records. Simply put, the question is whether, when we look back a hundred years from now, we will be able to read the records of what we did today. It should be reasonably obvious for a lay person who reflects on the concept of public records that the government must keep them independent and free forever. It is an overriding imperative of the American democratic system that we cannot have our public documents locked up in some kind of proprietary format, perhaps unreadable in the future, or subject to a proprietary system license that restricts access.
Understand it now? Twenty years from now, there's a good chance no one will have a way to read Word DOC97. Public documents saved in that format, even if they are preserved, can be difficult, impossible or illegal to read without paying a third party a fat fee. They will have become inaccessible.
You stay stuck on little words, Massachusetts is moving to save what counts. There's already a pile of M$ shit that's hard to read and even harder to print out. Already Microsoft's poorly planned document formatting tools have shown their age and old documents have to be reworked before they can be printed. The longer they wait to move to free document standards, the bigger the pile of lost material grows.
So what? As long as it's not patented, how does that prevent a clean-room implementation for Linux?
A Non Disclosure Agreement in the EULA can own your code regardless of you having read it. Read the EULA carefully if you want to use this and do something useful. If it's not free software, I don't use it because I've got better things to do with my time than read a EULA.
Eighteen virtual desktops? Can I ask what on earth you need that many for?
Of course you can ask.
The 18 deskstops are actually three virtual desktops with six screens each. Enlightenment gives them each a pager and all share an icon box. The icon box works like a taskbar except it makes thumbnails instead of crappy little icons. The pager also makes thumbails, so you can see your whole desktop at a glance by looking at all the pagers.
When I get a new task, I open a new six panel desktop. I start in the middle top panel and drag things to other screens as needed. When I don't finish a task, I just leave it there and come back to it when I have the time or inspiration.
A typical task is a homework project. For instance, I'll edit and compile source code with kate and a konsole in one screen, make graphs with the result under that screen, do html or pdf write up in another and co-ordinate it all with a konqueror file browser in the middle top screen. That leaves me with three virtual screens for other tasks, like symbolic math with xmaxima, spell checking with kdict, or what have you. I usually have two or three homework projects going at once. Other tasks include customer billing, email, contact management and browsing.
The multiple desktop of Enlightenment is light years ahead of Microsoft's crappy single screen GUI taskbar approach. Grouped icons are a small step in the right direction for them and Nvidia has some multi desk software, but it's painfully slow and bloated. Having to boot daily eliminates place keeping and most of the advantages above. My laptop is a 233 MHz PII. Faster laptops, of course, work better but mine is usable. The M$ solution, where you buy more monitors and a PII or better, just makes me laugh.
I've read reports of XP home making "bridges" between networks without being asked. Sales men walking into a business would "bridge" the network with a neighbor's. Needless to say, the person who reported this was not happy they could suddenly see all of their neighbor's windoze network and vice versa. Thanks, Microsoft, indeed.
This just doesn't look like typical Microsoft, and IMO that's a good thing...Source code, a simple web site, and command line operation.....what more could I ask for?
You could ask for the ability to modify and redistribute the code. I'll believe Microsoft has changed when they embrace the GPL, quit paying people to badmouth everyone, stop pulling SCO stunts.
If this kind if thing is a concern, you're booting too often.
And "quick boot" won't help. The reason you are booting too often is because the OS you use is buggy and unstable, probably the one with an "insane" goal of 30 days uptime that currently has to be booted daily.
You also suffer from a single screen GUI, so you can't easily work on more than one thing at a time.
My laptop six year old laptop stays up longer than that. I take it down to get around buggy bios which sometimes won't work the vga out when I need to give a presentation. It goes to sleep when I close the lid and it wakes up when I open it, sometimes days later. My work is where I left it, on one of eighteen Enlightenment virtual desktops.
What's Intel got to match what I've already got? A copy of XP in the BIOS? No thanks, Intel, you can keep the next generation of boot pain to yourself.
but twitter... how does this relate to 'M$'? Surely you can find an angle this time as well? We don't want to be disappointed!
Don't worry, Microsoft has even managed to fuck things up where I now work. I really wish that it were not so and there was nothing to say.
Anything at the center using Microsoft sucks hard. It's mostly administrative garbage but there are one or two special machines that made the mistake of using a M$ operating system. Can you imagine having to reboot a cancer treatment machine? I've seen it, all 67 or so computers having to have their key turned because of a "network error" saving a plan.
Don't worry, the problem is being fixed. That machine's repair guy told me, without prompting, everything is going "Unix". When I asked him what flavor of "Unix", he told me Linux.
I'm sure cancer treatment isn't cheap (you may know this better than I), so covering the treatment costs on thousands of patients is quite costly. Does your facility do clinical trials? I'd be interested in what the doctors say about who pays for what when a clinical trial is involved.
The center has brand new machines and the staff colaborates with the local university and the machine makers. They are expensive and they are used on hundreds to thousands of people a year, but they are not that much more expensive than any "normal" treatment. I'm training to make sure they do what they say they do as far as delivering dose at depth.
Payments seem to go like most medicine does, with a few twists. It's a Byzantine mess of insurance and government required billing codes, like it is everywhere. Still, between insurance, government and good old charity the treatments are paid for. The institution is non profit and all of the excess goes into new equipment purchases.
The real intentions are closer to Every Road a Toll Road. Ten years ago, when I worked at the Louisiana Transportation Research Center, the trade magazines were full of this kind of thing.
After some thought, most reasonable people conclude that the current method of taxing gasoline works better. It's anonymous. It's cheap and easy because prices must be computed per gallon when you sell gasoline anyway. It taxes you for how much you drive and imposes no burden on those who don't use the roads.
Why do some government officials love the Big Brother way? The greedy ones realize you can squeeze much more out of people if you charge them differential rates they are unaware of. I'll bet most of you pay more for telco than you do for gasoline and roads, yet roads are more expensive to maintain than coper wires or fibers. The invasive ones realize they can track their perceived enemies. Both of these principles are in full swing in the UK, where the camera networks track people and charge those who drive downtown at the right time of day or speed. The camera networks were built to, yes you guessed it, "fight terrorism" and have manifestly failed at that. To get their wishes, they are willing to create a whole new infrastructure - the black boxes mentioned in the above link. The trade magazines were full of shine on about revenue maximization that hinted at tracking abilities.
The wired article points to some of the privacy concerns and shows that public officials are now aware of the issue and have to lie around it. The fact of the matter is that your cell phone can already be used to track you and that our sorry laws let that happen without much trouble or notice. Better laws would require the destruction of all data not required for billing, the destruction of that after payment and all the usual constitutional requirements to obtain so much as that. Individual tracking tools are too abusive to be allowed for people who are not convicted fellons.
Where do the grad students get the money to test the device on 1,000, 10,000, or 100,000 patients? Clinical testing is expensive. It requires real doctors on real salaries and if far beyond the scope of the labors of a grad student.
I don't really know what you are talking about. Doctors go to work every day. They see patients and evaluate the effectiveness of their treatments and meticulously document their opinions. Where does the additional cost of new treatments come from besides collecting those opinions? I have yet to run into them at the cancer treatment research facility where I work.
A cheap gadget like this will quickly be tested in every conceivable way by hungry graduate students at every University in existence like TLDs were.
An AC, unsatisfied or ignorant of TLD development and use, brays back:
Can you cite a case where this has actually happened before, or are just speaking out of your ass?
I work at a cancer treatment research center and get to see clinical trials of new machines every day. Those machines cost much more than this gadget and their availability is limited. I'm sure that people will be all over the cheap gadget to find out how good it is. Doctors and physicits will think of new uses, try them out and write papers about the results. The process does not have to cost tens of millions of dollars.
No, we'd have had crappy SCSI drives just like we do crappy IDE drives.
IDE is an inferior subset of SCSI. Any device would be nicer if it implemented the whole set.
Me, "DMA would not be so painful if Intel was not doggedly supporting Microsoft's legacy crap."
You: WTF are you talking about ? DMA is only painful on broken hardware like VIA chipsets. On decent hardware, it's been common and trivial to use for a decade or more.
Common with an SDK but not trial or decent. Superior platforms, such as Alpha, were crushed to eliminate a potential competitive threat to Microsoft. The technical details are easy. With those understood, you might connect the dots to understand the "business" decisions and how they screwed you and me. See "Direct Memory Access and Bus Mastering" here.
The relavant parts are:
"DMA is the hardware mechanism that allows peripheral components to transfer their I/O data directly to and from main memory without the need for the system processor to be involved in the transfer. Use of this mechanism can greatly increase throughput to and from a device, because a great deal of computational overhead is eliminated."
"Unfortunately, because of its hardware nature, DMA is very system dependent."
"IA-32 (x86)
MIPS
PowerPC
ARM
These platforms support the PCI DMA interface, but it is mostly a false front. There are no mapping registers in the bus interface, so scatterlists cannot be combined and virtual addresses cannot be used. There is no bounce buffer support, so mapping of high-memory addresses cannot be done. The mapping functions on the ARM architecture can sleep, which is not the case for the other platforms.
IA-64
The Itanium architecture also lacks mapping registers. This 64-bit architecture can easily generate addresses that PCI peripherals cannot use, though. The PCI interface on this platform thus implements bounce buffers, allowing any address to be (seemingly) used for DMA operations.
Alpha
MIPS64
SPARC
These architectures support an I/O memory management unit. As of 2.4.0, the MIPS64 port does not actually make use of this capability, so its PCI DMA implementation looks like that of the IA-32. The Alpha and SPARC ports, though, can do full-buffer mapping with proper scatter-gather support."
Unless you were sleeping, you noticed the death of Alpha at the hands of Intel and Microsoft. The final crushing blow came after the Compaq HP merger when tests which showed Alpha performed better than IA64 were suppressed and Alpha was terminated.
I consider that an anti-competitive screw. Alpha, MIPS or Spac could all be produced just as cheaply as any Intel junk. There would be a market if it were not for court proven Microsoft vendor manipulation. If you are happy using binary drivers tied to an OS with a 12 minute halflife on any network, you might not consider yourself screwed. As someone who has to put up spam and DoS from that OS, I consider myself doubly screwed.
if it only blasts 99.999999% of the bacteria, thus selecting for super-tough microbes.
PHB: Is it true that sunlight does that too?
Toad: Yes.
PHB: I want the sun turned off in five years!
Toad: Yes, Master.
Cheap devices are quickly tested and proved.
on
Bacteria-killing Pencil
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
A device such as this will require clinical testing to prove that it is both safe and effective. Those tests will take on the order of 2 to 5 years and cost on the order of $25 to $200 million for each proposed use.... The point is that without a patent, nobody will pay for testing, the device will sit on a shelf,
I doubt this will sit on the shelf long. A big dumb company might spend that much money testing out something that costs far more than this does. A cheap gadget like this will quickly be tested in every conceivable way by hungry graduate students at every University in existence like TLDs were. The results should start pouring out soon unless some jackass gets a pattent and demands fees which eliminate any price advantage the device has over mercury vapor lamps. In that case, we will have to wait another seventeen years and then some.
Until governments foot the bill for all medical R&D and clinical testing, patents are a crucial part of the medical device & pharma industry.
There's enough red tape as it is. Please don't make me go Federal for everything. Let them compile, analyze and publish statistics other people generate. Laws protecting patient privacy are fine. Making every institution apply for a Federal Grant just to buy a $50 device would be really stupid.
There may indeed be some non-obvious and inventive tricks in this device that deserve a patent. If so, we can hope the inventor licenses things out at a price that will insure widespread adoption and great riches for himself. If not, we can only hope that they don't get any patent and everyone can start testing.
They made the PC a commodity, accessible to all but the most poor.
I see a lot of that and it's a total crock of shit. Can you tell me how price fixing and other anti-competitive practices did this? That's all Microsoft has ever done. Microsoft has given you the upgrade train with all of it's intentional wastes in hardware, software and document retention. While obsoleting your computer every two or three years, they also make sure no one can sell you a new one that does not put money in their pocket.
Standardization, competition and improvements in production by hardware makers have lead to low priced hardware. Microsoft's work against standardization and competition has done nothing but make things expensive. Winmodems, for example, are cheap because a single chip is cheap but they are ultimately more expensive than they have to be because no two are the same and they all require expensive software to work and performance is poor. Imagine that industry had stuck with scsi and had slowly moved to firewire instead. We'd all have cheap but higher quality hardare then the absolute garbage IDE and USB junk we have now. DMA would not be so painful if Intel was not doggedly supporting Microsoft's legacy crap. Other chipmakers got abound Intel's DMA DOSyness but were slammed out of market share by vendor manipulations. The paradoxical result of Microsoft's anti-competitive bend is a kind of "standardization" around the worst kinds of hardware paractices. The designed result of their anti-standards bend is the destruction of excellent hardware which works with "competing" software.
Microsoft's current business model goes away when PC's reach the $250 level. At that point, there's not enough money to pay for their junk and manufacturers will have to seek lower cost alternatives. A low end computer from Dell or any of the other makers still costs around $800. That's about the same as it's been for the last 10 years of Microsoft monopoly. They can't keep their 80% profit margin with less to work with.
Do yourself a favor. Buy a real commodity computer - a used one and put free software on it.
There is nothing more convenient than drag&drop a file to your mate around the world -- just without starting another application and having everything configured the right way.
There's nothing less convenient than setting up a windoze box. Getting the dozens of programs that make it useful from dozens of sources and hoping and praying that they all are still there and still work together, ugh. Setting up your preferences for your crappy single screen GUI. I don't even want to start to talk about dial up through a winmodem, which never works long. All of these things have to be done frequently when your OS has a 12 minute half life on any network.
All so you can drag that ONE file? Give me a break, you can keep it.
Not everybody has a always-on internet line, so most probably they also don't have a webserver running, have their IP memorized (or use Dynamic DNS)... and setting up VPN is a pain in the ass, what will it be for just ONE file?
Actually more people do have that kind of connection now. You don't have to memorize an IP address if you make yourself a bookmark and all the servers work out of the box. What could be easier than that?
Oh yeah, getting the hell spammed out of you with popups and emoticons. I'm sold on that. Tomorrow, I'm going right out to buy XP for all six of the PCs in my house. It will only cost me six hundred bucks or so. Then I can start my Windoze eXPerience dragging and dropping files through my mighty winmodem. Thanks!
How many corporations have scaled back or even eliminated their R&D departments because they won't turn a profit next quarter?
Don't worry, you only think R&D has been eliminated. It's really moved offshore. GE, Microsoft, fucking everyone and that is the end of US technical dominance.
Burg = castle. Berg = mountain.
Eisberg ---> iceberg.
Stupid fuck.
The six foot cone sticking out of the AC's ass was just the tip of the iceberg. Thanks for the spell check, my multidialect friendly checker missed it. Oh yeah, you might want to chill out. Thinking all those nasty things will make you a nasty person.
GAIM + Jabber = excellent IM as anyone might expect. Free software tools do the job they are supposed to. Now let's examine the gripe again:
File transfers? I can swear that you're a lucky guy (girl) when it works. Usually it doesn't, resulting in embarrassing 'Sorry mate, I'm using Linux, you know and, well, could you mail me this picture instead?'.
Oh no, what's to do? I'll be ostracized for sure when I can't send you a picture or flash trash with my wimpy Unix like OS that powers most internet servers.... wait a minute.
When you need to share stuff, just IM them a link to your cable box with it's 200+ GB of whatever you put there running any of the free web servers. Distros like Mepis come with Apache and mySQL configured, just add content. For file transfer, use a tool designed for file transfer. Sure, it might be hard for your friend to return the favor, but that's because Windoze sucks.
Sharing is THE kind of thing Windoze just can't do. If your friends are cool and ditch their stupid Windoze software, you can offer them an account via ssh so they can put their content up and share via sftp graphically through KDE's excellent file and web browser Konqueror. It does not get better than that. If you try doing these things on Windoze, your going to get owned and wiped. Hell, as you noticed, you are going to get owned simply passing flash trash back and forth.
The upshot is that Free software already has tools for the job. Sure, it might be nice to have file transfers via IM, but it will never work with a Windoze client because M$ is going to break it on their end. Don't waste your effort on a legacy platform, move on and lead the rest of your friends away from all the obnoxion. The next time they come to you for help because Winblows is spitting chunks, give them something better.
Because, you know, there are no other chat rooms anywhere else on the Internet.
Sure, You Always Have Other Options (YAHOO). Unless you live in the United States or it's Dominion, which is everywhere with electricity.
What, you think you're favorite chat site has more push than Yahoo? This multiple hundred thousand dollar extortion is just the tip of the iceburg from the American Taliban. Yahoo is going to love being one of the three or four chat sites with Federal Aproval while the rest are shut down as if they were places pervs lurk. Don't forget to kill forums and email, mail, phone calls, cans with strings, hand signals, whispering in public and all that dangerous communications stuff used to seduce young girls and boys every day. And beer, can't have beer.
I've got a 4 year old daughter and I'm more afraid of the New York Attorney General (NYAG) than I am of pervs on her computer. My girl will have sense enough to ignore what she will obviously think of a "gross" comments. She and her friends will resent the intrusion on their conversation, just like they would in Meat Space, aka the real world. Of course, if Yahoo and the extortionists win, there will be no place for her to chat but Yahoo's obviously spammed out hell holes.
How about normal law enforcement instead? You know, punish the one in a million people who have done something harmful instead of the rest of us?
Yahoo will close down all chatrooms that promote sexual relations between minors and adults. So in other words, if there was a chat room called "pre-teen hook-ups with older men 50+" or whatever, Yahoo will shut it down. Again, minors are still allowed on Yahoo.
Well, well, that sounds nice, but how can you manage to practically enforce this and still allow people under 18? The name thing is stupid on it's own. How will Yahoo know the difference between "my 13th birthday party" and 70,000 perv room names? 70,000 NAMES! That kind of blackout is going to nail legitimate teen and adult rooms too much the same way public library email filters nailed the phrase "panty hose" in my wife's email to her sister. What difference will it make? The pervs will seek children regardless. What this means for Yahoo is more control and less competition.
"Yahoo is stupid, no skin off my nose" you might say and you would be dead wrong. No, Yahoo is huge. If they can be leaned on, anyone can. That means your IRC server too. This is bad news for everyone unless you think you can afford to filter everything.
If you really want to nail pervs, you need to wreck the bot net they hide in. All traffic not hopped through multiple encrypted anonymizers in multiple jurisdictions can be traced. That means get rid of windoze because that's what people use it for.
Riddle me this if you will. Media Center PCs (set-top boxes and the like) work fine. The Xbox works fine. SmartPhones work fine.
That depends on your definition of "fine". Those not so smart phones have a bad reputation and everyone got to see the new media center work. I can compare that to my Nokia cell phone, my Handspring Visor, anyone else's game console or any DVD player on the market. Nothing Microsoft will ever work. If it did they could not sell you an upgrade later and that would be their version of the suck.
More importantly, they've been caught selling their customers out, breaking competitor's software and doing all that kind of shit again and again. They have burnt EVERYONE who does business with them. Why would anyone trust them with anything?
Imagine two of those being horrible brainless reality TV re-runs peppered with commercials for products you wouldn't even think about buying, one a giant fat dirty BSoD
You've given them too much credit! I don't have to imagine, all I have to do is open up Internet Exploder. Advertisements take up 3/4 of the screen, leaving about 1/4 for your reality TV show. Pop ups will come at random to cover the one thing you want to look at, so "Power Users" will deploy Dual and Quad screen "solutions". As Outlook does with your email, M$ PhoneHome will lose your real calls in a sea of spam.
But it will be carnivore friendly! After M$ has sold all of your buying, banking, watching habits, social and genetic index data to the highest bidders, they will happily provide transcripts of your phone call and living room conversations to Copyright^H^H^H^H^H^HLaw Enforcement on demand. Those flunkies are good for something, it's just not privacy or entertainment.
Where did you want to go yesterday (1993)? Right, there you are! Single screen GUI, not quite WYSIWYG, not very fast, insecure and buggy as hell.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks, Mr. Meat, this author is very cool. Those are some informative papers.
Others authors are not, especially those who use Shared Source and other nonsense like that.
Head is hung in shame. As much as I hate Cingular, I'm forced to admits, we are slaves.
From the fine article:
Why do we care about formats? Electronic file formats sit at the core of concern about future access to today's public records. Simply put, the question is whether, when we look back a hundred years from now, we will be able to read the records of what we did today. It should be reasonably obvious for a lay person who reflects on the concept of public records that the government must keep them independent and free forever. It is an overriding imperative of the American democratic system that we cannot have our public documents locked up in some kind of proprietary format, perhaps unreadable in the future, or subject to a proprietary system license that restricts access.
Understand it now? Twenty years from now, there's a good chance no one will have a way to read Word DOC97. Public documents saved in that format, even if they are preserved, can be difficult, impossible or illegal to read without paying a third party a fat fee. They will have become inaccessible.
You stay stuck on little words, Massachusetts is moving to save what counts. There's already a pile of M$ shit that's hard to read and even harder to print out. Already Microsoft's poorly planned document formatting tools have shown their age and old documents have to be reworked before they can be printed. The longer they wait to move to free document standards, the bigger the pile of lost material grows.
A Non Disclosure Agreement in the EULA can own your code regardless of you having read it. Read the EULA carefully if you want to use this and do something useful. If it's not free software, I don't use it because I've got better things to do with my time than read a EULA.
Of course you can ask.
The 18 deskstops are actually three virtual desktops with six screens each. Enlightenment gives them each a pager and all share an icon box. The icon box works like a taskbar except it makes thumbnails instead of crappy little icons. The pager also makes thumbails, so you can see your whole desktop at a glance by looking at all the pagers.
When I get a new task, I open a new six panel desktop. I start in the middle top panel and drag things to other screens as needed. When I don't finish a task, I just leave it there and come back to it when I have the time or inspiration.
A typical task is a homework project. For instance, I'll edit and compile source code with kate and a konsole in one screen, make graphs with the result under that screen, do html or pdf write up in another and co-ordinate it all with a konqueror file browser in the middle top screen. That leaves me with three virtual screens for other tasks, like symbolic math with xmaxima, spell checking with kdict, or what have you. I usually have two or three homework projects going at once. Other tasks include customer billing, email, contact management and browsing.
The multiple desktop of Enlightenment is light years ahead of Microsoft's crappy single screen GUI taskbar approach. Grouped icons are a small step in the right direction for them and Nvidia has some multi desk software, but it's painfully slow and bloated. Having to boot daily eliminates place keeping and most of the advantages above. My laptop is a 233 MHz PII. Faster laptops, of course, work better but mine is usable. The M$ solution, where you buy more monitors and a PII or better, just makes me laugh.
This just doesn't look like typical Microsoft, and IMO that's a good thing...Source code, a simple web site, and command line operation.....what more could I ask for?
You could ask for the ability to modify and redistribute the code. I'll believe Microsoft has changed when they embrace the GPL, quit paying people to badmouth everyone, stop pulling SCO stunts.
And "quick boot" won't help. The reason you are booting too often is because the OS you use is buggy and unstable, probably the one with an "insane" goal of 30 days uptime that currently has to be booted daily.
You also suffer from a single screen GUI, so you can't easily work on more than one thing at a time.
My laptop six year old laptop stays up longer than that. I take it down to get around buggy bios which sometimes won't work the vga out when I need to give a presentation. It goes to sleep when I close the lid and it wakes up when I open it, sometimes days later. My work is where I left it, on one of eighteen Enlightenment virtual desktops.
What's Intel got to match what I've already got? A copy of XP in the BIOS? No thanks, Intel, you can keep the next generation of boot pain to yourself.
but twitter... how does this relate to 'M$'? Surely you can find an angle this time as well? We don't want to be disappointed!
Don't worry, Microsoft has even managed to fuck things up where I now work. I really wish that it were not so and there was nothing to say.
Anything at the center using Microsoft sucks hard. It's mostly administrative garbage but there are one or two special machines that made the mistake of using a M$ operating system. Can you imagine having to reboot a cancer treatment machine? I've seen it, all 67 or so computers having to have their key turned because of a "network error" saving a plan.
Don't worry, the problem is being fixed. That machine's repair guy told me, without prompting, everything is going "Unix". When I asked him what flavor of "Unix", he told me Linux.
Are you happy now?
The center has brand new machines and the staff colaborates with the local university and the machine makers. They are expensive and they are used on hundreds to thousands of people a year, but they are not that much more expensive than any "normal" treatment. I'm training to make sure they do what they say they do as far as delivering dose at depth.
Payments seem to go like most medicine does, with a few twists. It's a Byzantine mess of insurance and government required billing codes, like it is everywhere. Still, between insurance, government and good old charity the treatments are paid for. The institution is non profit and all of the excess goes into new equipment purchases.
True. Consider brain cancer. New cells are not always helpful.
After some thought, most reasonable people conclude that the current method of taxing gasoline works better. It's anonymous. It's cheap and easy because prices must be computed per gallon when you sell gasoline anyway. It taxes you for how much you drive and imposes no burden on those who don't use the roads.
Why do some government officials love the Big Brother way? The greedy ones realize you can squeeze much more out of people if you charge them differential rates they are unaware of. I'll bet most of you pay more for telco than you do for gasoline and roads, yet roads are more expensive to maintain than coper wires or fibers. The invasive ones realize they can track their perceived enemies. Both of these principles are in full swing in the UK, where the camera networks track people and charge those who drive downtown at the right time of day or speed. The camera networks were built to, yes you guessed it, "fight terrorism" and have manifestly failed at that. To get their wishes, they are willing to create a whole new infrastructure - the black boxes mentioned in the above link. The trade magazines were full of shine on about revenue maximization that hinted at tracking abilities.
The wired article points to some of the privacy concerns and shows that public officials are now aware of the issue and have to lie around it. The fact of the matter is that your cell phone can already be used to track you and that our sorry laws let that happen without much trouble or notice. Better laws would require the destruction of all data not required for billing, the destruction of that after payment and all the usual constitutional requirements to obtain so much as that. Individual tracking tools are too abusive to be allowed for people who are not convicted fellons.
I don't really know what you are talking about. Doctors go to work every day. They see patients and evaluate the effectiveness of their treatments and meticulously document their opinions. Where does the additional cost of new treatments come from besides collecting those opinions? I have yet to run into them at the cancer treatment research facility where I work.
A cheap gadget like this will quickly be tested in every conceivable way by hungry graduate students at every University in existence like TLDs were.
An AC, unsatisfied or ignorant of TLD development and use, brays back:
Can you cite a case where this has actually happened before, or are just speaking out of your ass?
I work at a cancer treatment research center and get to see clinical trials of new machines every day. Those machines cost much more than this gadget and their availability is limited. I'm sure that people will be all over the cheap gadget to find out how good it is. Doctors and physicits will think of new uses, try them out and write papers about the results. The process does not have to cost tens of millions of dollars.
IDE is an inferior subset of SCSI. Any device would be nicer if it implemented the whole set.
Me, "DMA would not be so painful if Intel was not doggedly supporting Microsoft's legacy crap."
You: WTF are you talking about ? DMA is only painful on broken hardware like VIA chipsets. On decent hardware, it's been common and trivial to use for a decade or more.
Common with an SDK but not trial or decent. Superior platforms, such as Alpha, were crushed to eliminate a potential competitive threat to Microsoft. The technical details are easy. With those understood, you might connect the dots to understand the "business" decisions and how they screwed you and me. See "Direct Memory Access and Bus Mastering" here.
The relavant parts are:
"DMA is the hardware mechanism that allows peripheral components to transfer their I/O data directly to and from main memory without the need for the system processor to be involved in the transfer. Use of this mechanism can greatly increase throughput to and from a device, because a great deal of computational overhead is eliminated."
"Unfortunately, because of its hardware nature, DMA is very system dependent."
"IA-32 (x86)
MIPS
PowerPC
ARM
These platforms support the PCI DMA interface, but it is mostly a false front. There are no mapping registers in the bus interface, so scatterlists cannot be combined and virtual addresses cannot be used. There is no bounce buffer support, so mapping of high-memory addresses cannot be done. The mapping functions on the ARM architecture can sleep, which is not the case for the other platforms.
IA-64
The Itanium architecture also lacks mapping registers. This 64-bit architecture can easily generate addresses that PCI peripherals cannot use, though. The PCI interface on this platform thus implements bounce buffers, allowing any address to be (seemingly) used for DMA operations.
Alpha
MIPS64
SPARC
These architectures support an I/O memory management unit. As of 2.4.0, the MIPS64 port does not actually make use of this capability, so its PCI DMA implementation looks like that of the IA-32. The Alpha and SPARC ports, though, can do full-buffer mapping with proper scatter-gather support."
Unless you were sleeping, you noticed the death of Alpha at the hands of Intel and Microsoft. The final crushing blow came after the Compaq HP merger when tests which showed Alpha performed better than IA64 were suppressed and Alpha was terminated.
I consider that an anti-competitive screw. Alpha, MIPS or Spac could all be produced just as cheaply as any Intel junk. There would be a market if it were not for court proven Microsoft vendor manipulation. If you are happy using binary drivers tied to an OS with a 12 minute halflife on any network, you might not consider yourself screwed. As someone who has to put up spam and DoS from that OS, I consider myself doubly screwed.
Me paraniod? Not enough.
PHB: Is it true that sunlight does that too?
Toad: Yes.
PHB: I want the sun turned off in five years!
Toad: Yes, Master.
I doubt this will sit on the shelf long. A big dumb company might spend that much money testing out something that costs far more than this does. A cheap gadget like this will quickly be tested in every conceivable way by hungry graduate students at every University in existence like TLDs were. The results should start pouring out soon unless some jackass gets a pattent and demands fees which eliminate any price advantage the device has over mercury vapor lamps. In that case, we will have to wait another seventeen years and then some.
Until governments foot the bill for all medical R&D and clinical testing, patents are a crucial part of the medical device & pharma industry.
There's enough red tape as it is. Please don't make me go Federal for everything. Let them compile, analyze and publish statistics other people generate. Laws protecting patient privacy are fine. Making every institution apply for a Federal Grant just to buy a $50 device would be really stupid.
There may indeed be some non-obvious and inventive tricks in this device that deserve a patent. If so, we can hope the inventor licenses things out at a price that will insure widespread adoption and great riches for himself. If not, we can only hope that they don't get any patent and everyone can start testing.
I see a lot of that and it's a total crock of shit. Can you tell me how price fixing and other anti-competitive practices did this? That's all Microsoft has ever done. Microsoft has given you the upgrade train with all of it's intentional wastes in hardware, software and document retention. While obsoleting your computer every two or three years, they also make sure no one can sell you a new one that does not put money in their pocket.
Standardization, competition and improvements in production by hardware makers have lead to low priced hardware. Microsoft's work against standardization and competition has done nothing but make things expensive. Winmodems, for example, are cheap because a single chip is cheap but they are ultimately more expensive than they have to be because no two are the same and they all require expensive software to work and performance is poor. Imagine that industry had stuck with scsi and had slowly moved to firewire instead. We'd all have cheap but higher quality hardare then the absolute garbage IDE and USB junk we have now. DMA would not be so painful if Intel was not doggedly supporting Microsoft's legacy crap. Other chipmakers got abound Intel's DMA DOSyness but were slammed out of market share by vendor manipulations. The paradoxical result of Microsoft's anti-competitive bend is a kind of "standardization" around the worst kinds of hardware paractices. The designed result of their anti-standards bend is the destruction of excellent hardware which works with "competing" software.
Microsoft's current business model goes away when PC's reach the $250 level. At that point, there's not enough money to pay for their junk and manufacturers will have to seek lower cost alternatives. A low end computer from Dell or any of the other makers still costs around $800. That's about the same as it's been for the last 10 years of Microsoft monopoly. They can't keep their 80% profit margin with less to work with.
Do yourself a favor. Buy a real commodity computer - a used one and put free software on it.
There's nothing less convenient than setting up a windoze box. Getting the dozens of programs that make it useful from dozens of sources and hoping and praying that they all are still there and still work together, ugh. Setting up your preferences for your crappy single screen GUI. I don't even want to start to talk about dial up through a winmodem, which never works long. All of these things have to be done frequently when your OS has a 12 minute half life on any network.
All so you can drag that ONE file? Give me a break, you can keep it.
Not everybody has a always-on internet line, so most probably they also don't have a webserver running, have their IP memorized (or use Dynamic DNS) ... and setting up VPN is a pain in the ass, what will it be for just ONE file?
Actually more people do have that kind of connection now. You don't have to memorize an IP address if you make yourself a bookmark and all the servers work out of the box. What could be easier than that?
Oh yeah, getting the hell spammed out of you with popups and emoticons. I'm sold on that. Tomorrow, I'm going right out to buy XP for all six of the PCs in my house. It will only cost me six hundred bucks or so. Then I can start my Windoze eXPerience dragging and dropping files through my mighty winmodem. Thanks!
Don't worry, you only think R&D has been eliminated. It's really moved offshore. GE, Microsoft, fucking everyone and that is the end of US technical dominance.
Those who do are those who know.
Burg = castle. Berg = mountain.
Eisberg ---> iceberg.
Stupid fuck.
The six foot cone sticking out of the AC's ass was just the tip of the iceberg. Thanks for the spell check, my multidialect friendly checker missed it. Oh yeah, you might want to chill out. Thinking all those nasty things will make you a nasty person.
File transfers? I can swear that you're a lucky guy (girl) when it works. Usually it doesn't, resulting in embarrassing 'Sorry mate, I'm using Linux, you know and, well, could you mail me this picture instead?'.
Oh no, what's to do? I'll be ostracized for sure when I can't send you a picture or flash trash with my wimpy Unix like OS that powers most internet servers .... wait a minute.
When you need to share stuff, just IM them a link to your cable box with it's 200+ GB of whatever you put there running any of the free web servers. Distros like Mepis come with Apache and mySQL configured, just add content. For file transfer, use a tool designed for file transfer. Sure, it might be hard for your friend to return the favor, but that's because Windoze sucks.
Sharing is THE kind of thing Windoze just can't do. If your friends are cool and ditch their stupid Windoze software, you can offer them an account via ssh so they can put their content up and share via sftp graphically through KDE's excellent file and web browser Konqueror. It does not get better than that. If you try doing these things on Windoze, your going to get owned and wiped. Hell, as you noticed, you are going to get owned simply passing flash trash back and forth.
The upshot is that Free software already has tools for the job. Sure, it might be nice to have file transfers via IM, but it will never work with a Windoze client because M$ is going to break it on their end. Don't waste your effort on a legacy platform, move on and lead the rest of your friends away from all the obnoxion. The next time they come to you for help because Winblows is spitting chunks, give them something better.
Sure, You Always Have Other Options (YAHOO). Unless you live in the United States or it's Dominion, which is everywhere with electricity.
What, you think you're favorite chat site has more push than Yahoo? This multiple hundred thousand dollar extortion is just the tip of the iceburg from the American Taliban. Yahoo is going to love being one of the three or four chat sites with Federal Aproval while the rest are shut down as if they were places pervs lurk. Don't forget to kill forums and email, mail, phone calls, cans with strings, hand signals, whispering in public and all that dangerous communications stuff used to seduce young girls and boys every day. And beer, can't have beer.
Next up: Protecting women from dangerous outdoor activities by mandatory dress code. Then the world will be safe from seduction at last.
I've got a 4 year old daughter and I'm more afraid of the New York Attorney General (NYAG) than I am of pervs on her computer. My girl will have sense enough to ignore what she will obviously think of a "gross" comments. She and her friends will resent the intrusion on their conversation, just like they would in Meat Space, aka the real world. Of course, if Yahoo and the extortionists win, there will be no place for her to chat but Yahoo's obviously spammed out hell holes.
How about normal law enforcement instead? You know, punish the one in a million people who have done something harmful instead of the rest of us?
Yahoo will close down all chatrooms that promote sexual relations between minors and adults. So in other words, if there was a chat room called "pre-teen hook-ups with older men 50+" or whatever, Yahoo will shut it down. Again, minors are still allowed on Yahoo.
Well, well, that sounds nice, but how can you manage to practically enforce this and still allow people under 18? The name thing is stupid on it's own. How will Yahoo know the difference between "my 13th birthday party" and 70,000 perv room names? 70,000 NAMES! That kind of blackout is going to nail legitimate teen and adult rooms too much the same way public library email filters nailed the phrase "panty hose" in my wife's email to her sister. What difference will it make? The pervs will seek children regardless. What this means for Yahoo is more control and less competition.
"Yahoo is stupid, no skin off my nose" you might say and you would be dead wrong. No, Yahoo is huge. If they can be leaned on, anyone can. That means your IRC server too. This is bad news for everyone unless you think you can afford to filter everything.
If you really want to nail pervs, you need to wreck the bot net they hide in. All traffic not hopped through multiple encrypted anonymizers in multiple jurisdictions can be traced. That means get rid of windoze because that's what people use it for.
That depends on your definition of "fine". Those not so smart phones have a bad reputation and everyone got to see the new media center work. I can compare that to my Nokia cell phone, my Handspring Visor, anyone else's game console or any DVD player on the market. Nothing Microsoft will ever work. If it did they could not sell you an upgrade later and that would be their version of the suck.
More importantly, they've been caught selling their customers out, breaking competitor's software and doing all that kind of shit again and again. They have burnt EVERYONE who does business with them. Why would anyone trust them with anything?
You've given them too much credit! I don't have to imagine, all I have to do is open up Internet Exploder. Advertisements take up 3/4 of the screen, leaving about 1/4 for your reality TV show. Pop ups will come at random to cover the one thing you want to look at, so "Power Users" will deploy Dual and Quad screen "solutions". As Outlook does with your email, M$ PhoneHome will lose your real calls in a sea of spam.
But it will be carnivore friendly! After M$ has sold all of your buying, banking, watching habits, social and genetic index data to the highest bidders, they will happily provide transcripts of your phone call and living room conversations to Copyright^H^H^H^H^H^HLaw Enforcement on demand. Those flunkies are good for something, it's just not privacy or entertainment.
Where did you want to go yesterday (1993)? Right, there you are! Single screen GUI, not quite WYSIWYG, not very fast, insecure and buggy as hell.