Some of the research says that there is executing code in the embedded controllers of the centrifuges, not just in the computers that control them at a high level. I'm not sure that they can be certain that the infected centrifuges themselves won't cause a reinfection of other systems. They may need to kill the patient to cure the disease.
There's nothing wrong with that. But you have to be realistic. Giving $2000 to a food shelter buys that shelter $2000 worth of food, or 1 to 1 return. Buying a $2000 plane ticket to somewhere in africa, to show up and do the equivalent of $100 worth of labor at local rates gives a 1 to 20 return. That's ok if you're considering $1900 of it to be a vacation, with a $100 donation. The $100 will still help...
And money. If your true goal is to help people and not seek out a personal experience, frankly, the best thing a tech person like us can do is stay home, and work, and donate the money you make. A techie earns anywhere from $20 to $50 an hour in the US. Add to that the cost of an airline ticket and other expenses, then consider how much grain, how many solar-powered lightbulbs, vaccines, hand tools, pencils and paper, etc could be bought with your donation by a group that already has the network and infrastructure to provide those things. You donating 1 hour of income at tech rates can provide enough wages to hire an unskilled worker for a few days, which has not only the effect of the work he does, but the side effect of giving someone a job.
Additionally, you need to consider how much support you will require when you get where you are going? Are you expecting some non-profit to feed and shelter you? You need to make a donation equal or greater to their expense to offset this. I remember a Red Cross worker specifically asking people not to show up unannounced in Haiti after the earthquake to "set up tents". You end up being just one more mouth to feed.
This is a deeply unsatisfying answer, I know, but it's the truth.
But it's sad that the good they do is unnoticed by the masses.
This makes it that much more important that you notice it on an individual-by-individual basis. Tell someone they did a good job. Thank someone. Smile and nod. It makes a difference. There's a story (parable?) that I like a lot:
Two men are walking along a shoreline after the tide goes out. Hundreds of starfish and other creatures have been beached, out of the water. The first man picks up one starfish and throws it back into the water. The second man asks him "Look at all of these fish. They're all going to die. What difference does throwing one back make?". The first man says, "It made a huge difference to that one."
I had one. Mine was one of the early epson branded ones. I put it in a padded case and carried it back and forth from my dorm room to the Computer Lab at my university. I got permission from my boss (I was a lab-tech) to install the drivers on the PC. It was great because we had High Speed access in the lab (T1...) but only 28.8 dialup to the dorms, and they were always busy. I had my fair share of click-of-deaths, but it made it possible for me to move files that were 10s of megabytes back to my dorm pc, instead of pkzipping across a score of floppies.
Making something cheaper and less reliable is not revolutionary.
It can be if it gets that something into a market where it was previously unattainable, depending on how much cheaper and how much less reliable. The Syquest drives were prohibitively expensive for college students and light enthusiasts.
We've got a couple of their new scopes, and they have no problem reading my Fat32 USB devices. They also interface nicely to keyboards, and OTG printers.
The funny thing is, in a lot of elecrical engineering labs the floppy is still alive and well. A lot of expensive measurement equipment, such as Techtronix oscilloscopes and logic analyzers had a floppy inside for storing.bmp files of the captured wave forms, and tables of raw captured data. These devices remain useful for many, many years, as the measurement capabilities change/improve much more slowly than the digital interfaces to them. There's a USB floppy disk drive duct-taped to one of our lab benches downstairs for just this reason.
even more abysmal technology... zip drive, which off course flopped badly for its disks being so easy corruptable.
Wtf? Zip was revolutionary at the time. A typical 486 had a 200 to 400 Meg hard drive. A lot of the computers couldn't even address more space than that without a software hack to simulate LBA. A single $20 zip disk represented 1/4 to 1/1 of a typical PC hard drive. The Zip drive was the first reasonable device on which a user could easily back up their entire computer. Yeah, they had reliablity problems, but the cost per megabyte and ease with which they could be moved from PC to PC (parallel port version) was totally unmatched at the time. They sold millons of them for a reason.
I for one simply stopped using floppies in 486 era as soon as i bought my first cd recorder. never bought one floppy drive after that
Your timeline is off, or you were fabulously weathy. The 486 golden era was around 93' to 95. (the pentium 60 came out around '94). At that time, many computers shipped without CD drives of any sort. A really hot-shot machine had a 4x reader and no writer. Even around '97 a CDR (not RW) cost many hundreds of dollars, ran at 1x or 2x speeds, required a 3rd party program because there was no OS integration (and they were all horrible), and produced as many coasters as finalized disks, at nearly $1 per disk.
And even the Ask/. section copies the same "What's the best way to store my digital photos for the next 2000 years?" question every 2 months since it was first posted in like 2002.
You can also make an analogy to an all-you-can-eat buffet. Cable is all you can eat. But you order your TV of a menu, and pay for it per item. Just as an all-you-can-eat buffet has a tendancy to make you fat and unhealthy, cable tv has a tendancy to make you fat and mentally lazy. If you're sitting there flipping channels for an hour looking for something to watch, you really need to find something better to do. Some of you are going to think I'm being an arrogant, judgemental asshole for saying it, but it's true. I've made the transition myself, and love it. Go outside and plant some flowers. Learn how to do something you've always found interesting. Volunteer in order to help someone else. Focus more effort on dating / trying to get laid. Do anything...anything!...where you're producing or growing rather than just consuming. Do this for a year or two and you'll be amazed how much happier you are.
If you can't afford a 5$/mo increase you probably shouldn't have a Netflix account in the first place.
I disagree with this. Of the utilities I would drop for economic reasons, cable would be first, before my high-speed internet. Netflix makes that internet a lot more valuable in terms of entertainment content. I can get a huge amount of quality programming from netflix for a month for less than going to a first run movie with my wife.
People with money tend to bitch and moan a lot when they hear about poor people with cable TV or an XBOX, but the fact is those things become very valuable and provide a good return on investment if you don't have cash to do other things, money to get transportation to get to places like libraries, parks, etc. A $25 pawn-shop PS2 and a pile of 5 year old games goes a long way in terms of entertainment, when you have no other options.
I think that's the other elephant in the room for them. Saturday delivery is going away soon. And we'll be seeing 2 day a week delivery sometime in the next decade, so the USPS can use half as many carriers and trucks to hit the same number addresses on weekdays. That effectively kills their mail-order business.
At some point it probably doesn't matter that much. Netflix is likely to keep enough people to be able to keep the lights on. And the price they pay for content will likely be proportional to their number of users, as will their bandwitdh costs, so their single biggest costs will scale up or down with their user base, keeping the margin per user relatively flat. If they can increase their margin by 200% at a cost of 30% of their users, that's a win.
Personally, I think it's a smart move. Netflix has had by far the greatest success monitizing the content delivery business (excluding the wire-to-your-house providers like comcast or AT&T). Google and Hulu still have to figure out the business plan (Youtube is popular as shit, but hard to make money on). This gives netflix a chance now to try and raise margins, in order to try and gain enough capital clout to fight with their likely ultimate rivals for exclusive content, Comcast, AT&T, etc.
The need to shoot for the moon now and try to get to the point where they can square off against the 800 pound gorillas, or they'll end up like Tivo.
Not that hard. Take a look at Haiti and The Dominican Republic. One is a total basket case, the other isn't. A strong wall and customs service on the DR side keeps them separate.
Exactly. The argument for this is the same as the argument for getting rid of Leaded gasoline. Knowing what we know now, and given the available technology, it really is a crime against humanity to put lead in gasoline.
Slashdot Mirror
Iran were only less skilled at censorship and keeping the lid on. Your country was better at it.
WTF? There's this site called Wikileaks... you may have heard of it...
I'm picturing some Israeli air-force tech with a Sharpie writing "StuxNet 2.0" on a hardened spike as it gets loaded onto an aircraft...
I'll take that over a nuke going off in the harbor outside NYC.
Who sells guns to drug dealers who can't pass a background check? Straw purchasers. People who look legit, then resell them.
Some of the research says that there is executing code in the embedded controllers of the centrifuges, not just in the computers that control them at a high level. I'm not sure that they can be certain that the infected centrifuges themselves won't cause a reinfection of other systems. They may need to kill the patient to cure the disease.
There's nothing wrong with that. But you have to be realistic. Giving $2000 to a food shelter buys that shelter $2000 worth of food, or 1 to 1 return. Buying a $2000 plane ticket to somewhere in africa, to show up and do the equivalent of $100 worth of labor at local rates gives a 1 to 20 return. That's ok if you're considering $1900 of it to be a vacation, with a $100 donation. The $100 will still help...
And money. If your true goal is to help people and not seek out a personal experience, frankly, the best thing a tech person like us can do is stay home, and work, and donate the money you make. A techie earns anywhere from $20 to $50 an hour in the US. Add to that the cost of an airline ticket and other expenses, then consider how much grain, how many solar-powered lightbulbs, vaccines, hand tools, pencils and paper, etc could be bought with your donation by a group that already has the network and infrastructure to provide those things. You donating 1 hour of income at tech rates can provide enough wages to hire an unskilled worker for a few days, which has not only the effect of the work he does, but the side effect of giving someone a job.
Additionally, you need to consider how much support you will require when you get where you are going? Are you expecting some non-profit to feed and shelter you? You need to make a donation equal or greater to their expense to offset this. I remember a Red Cross worker specifically asking people not to show up unannounced in Haiti after the earthquake to "set up tents". You end up being just one more mouth to feed.
This is a deeply unsatisfying answer, I know, but it's the truth.
But it's sad that the good they do is unnoticed by the masses.
This makes it that much more important that you notice it on an individual-by-individual basis. Tell someone they did a good job. Thank someone. Smile and nod. It makes a difference. There's a story (parable?) that I like a lot:
Two men are walking along a shoreline after the tide goes out. Hundreds of starfish and other creatures have been beached, out of the water. The first man picks up one starfish and throws it back into the water. The second man asks him "Look at all of these fish. They're all going to die. What difference does throwing one back make?". The first man says, "It made a huge difference to that one."
It surprised me that he didn't ask the most obvious question: "How did the war turn out?"
I had one. Mine was one of the early epson branded ones. I put it in a padded case and carried it back and forth from my dorm room to the Computer Lab at my university. I got permission from my boss (I was a lab-tech) to install the drivers on the PC. It was great because we had High Speed access in the lab (T1...) but only 28.8 dialup to the dorms, and they were always busy. I had my fair share of click-of-deaths, but it made it possible for me to move files that were 10s of megabytes back to my dorm pc, instead of pkzipping across a score of floppies.
Making something cheaper and less reliable is not revolutionary.
It can be if it gets that something into a market where it was previously unattainable, depending on how much cheaper and how much less reliable. The Syquest drives were prohibitively expensive for college students and light enthusiasts.
Who's doing these upgrades? Pilots? Aircraft Technicians?
if (((timeToLoadALotOfFloppiesInHours - timeToLoadCDsInHours) * 26 * TechnicianDollarsPerHour) > 12,000)
{
// Yearly cost exceeds upgrade cost
UpgradeJetsToCDDrives()
}
We've got a couple of their new scopes, and they have no problem reading my Fat32 USB devices. They also interface nicely to keyboards, and OTG printers.
Yes. There's lots of them on eBay. This one has both 3.5 and 5.25 drives: http://cgi.ebay.com/Zenith-Data-Systems-ZBV-3829-KR-Computer-CPU-Z-386-33E-/320718188218?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item4aac4b2eba
The funny thing is, in a lot of elecrical engineering labs the floppy is still alive and well. A lot of expensive measurement equipment, such as Techtronix oscilloscopes and logic analyzers had a floppy inside for storing .bmp files of the captured wave forms, and tables of raw captured data. These devices remain useful for many, many years, as the measurement capabilities change/improve much more slowly than the digital interfaces to them. There's a USB floppy disk drive duct-taped to one of our lab benches downstairs for just this reason.
even more abysmal technology... zip drive, which off course flopped badly for its disks being so easy corruptable.
Wtf? Zip was revolutionary at the time. A typical 486 had a 200 to 400 Meg hard drive. A lot of the computers couldn't even address more space than that without a software hack to simulate LBA. A single $20 zip disk represented 1/4 to 1/1 of a typical PC hard drive. The Zip drive was the first reasonable device on which a user could easily back up their entire computer. Yeah, they had reliablity problems, but the cost per megabyte and ease with which they could be moved from PC to PC (parallel port version) was totally unmatched at the time. They sold millons of them for a reason.
I for one simply stopped using floppies in 486 era as soon as i bought my first cd recorder. never bought one floppy drive after that
Your timeline is off, or you were fabulously weathy. The 486 golden era was around 93' to 95. (the pentium 60 came out around '94). At that time, many computers shipped without CD drives of any sort. A really hot-shot machine had a 4x reader and no writer. Even around '97 a CDR (not RW) cost many hundreds of dollars, ran at 1x or 2x speeds, required a 3rd party program because there was no OS integration (and they were all horrible), and produced as many coasters as finalized disks, at nearly $1 per disk.
And even the Ask /. section copies the same "What's the best way to store my digital photos for the next 2000 years?" question every 2 months since it was first posted in like 2002.
You can also make an analogy to an all-you-can-eat buffet. Cable is all you can eat. But you order your TV of a menu, and pay for it per item. Just as an all-you-can-eat buffet has a tendancy to make you fat and unhealthy, cable tv has a tendancy to make you fat and mentally lazy. If you're sitting there flipping channels for an hour looking for something to watch, you really need to find something better to do. Some of you are going to think I'm being an arrogant, judgemental asshole for saying it, but it's true. I've made the transition myself, and love it. Go outside and plant some flowers. Learn how to do something you've always found interesting. Volunteer in order to help someone else. Focus more effort on dating / trying to get laid. Do anything...anything!...where you're producing or growing rather than just consuming. Do this for a year or two and you'll be amazed how much happier you are.
If you can't afford a 5$/mo increase you probably shouldn't have a Netflix account in the first place.
I disagree with this. Of the utilities I would drop for economic reasons, cable would be first, before my high-speed internet. Netflix makes that internet a lot more valuable in terms of entertainment content. I can get a huge amount of quality programming from netflix for a month for less than going to a first run movie with my wife.
People with money tend to bitch and moan a lot when they hear about poor people with cable TV or an XBOX, but the fact is those things become very valuable and provide a good return on investment if you don't have cash to do other things, money to get transportation to get to places like libraries, parks, etc. A $25 pawn-shop PS2 and a pile of 5 year old games goes a long way in terms of entertainment, when you have no other options.
That depends on where you live.
I think that's the other elephant in the room for them. Saturday delivery is going away soon. And we'll be seeing 2 day a week delivery sometime in the next decade, so the USPS can use half as many carriers and trucks to hit the same number addresses on weekdays. That effectively kills their mail-order business.
At some point it probably doesn't matter that much. Netflix is likely to keep enough people to be able to keep the lights on. And the price they pay for content will likely be proportional to their number of users, as will their bandwitdh costs, so their single biggest costs will scale up or down with their user base, keeping the margin per user relatively flat. If they can increase their margin by 200% at a cost of 30% of their users, that's a win.
Personally, I think it's a smart move. Netflix has had by far the greatest success monitizing the content delivery business (excluding the wire-to-your-house providers like comcast or AT&T). Google and Hulu still have to figure out the business plan (Youtube is popular as shit, but hard to make money on). This gives netflix a chance now to try and raise margins, in order to try and gain enough capital clout to fight with their likely ultimate rivals for exclusive content, Comcast, AT&T, etc.
The need to shoot for the moon now and try to get to the point where they can square off against the 800 pound gorillas, or they'll end up like Tivo.
it's hard to be independent of your own island.
Not that hard. Take a look at Haiti and The Dominican Republic. One is a total basket case, the other isn't. A strong wall and customs service on the DR side keeps them separate.
Exactly. The argument for this is the same as the argument for getting rid of Leaded gasoline. Knowing what we know now, and given the available technology, it really is a crime against humanity to put lead in gasoline.
Your friend texted me too. It was your closet...