For the last 25 years you have been voting for a Police State. And now that's exactly what you have. Congratulations, Democracy really works. Now shut up, bend over and take it like a man.
The Amish are typically looked down upon as ludites or anti-intellectuals, especially with regards to technology.
The reality is more complicated. Basically, that they simply have different values than most urban Americans.
They refuse to allow technology to intrude into the parts of their life which they value the most: Eg: personal relationships.
Many Amish sects actually allow the use of telephones, but not in the home. Several homes will sometimes share a telephone housed outside in a small kiosk the same way that several houses may have a common location for their mail boxes.
The tendency, when faced with new technologies, is for the Amish to wait a good long time to see the effects of the technology on the larger society, and then make a decision as to whether to allow it into their towns.
That may be viewed as being very conservative, but its certainly not crazy or stupid.
Wouldn't you need to duplicate the entire electro-chemical state of every synapse in the brain?
And wouldn't you have to do that at the quantum level?
And didn't ol' Heisenberg say something about not being able to do that?
I think the author has demonstrated that it really is possible to watch too much Star Trek.
-S
P.S. I guess it might be possible to "record" the perceptions of an individual by intercepting nerve impulses on their way to the brain, but that doesn't get you much in the way of imortality.
Seriously, requiring that you authenticate yourself to the media before purchasing or playing it would completely end mail-order DVD sales and Mail-order DVD rentals.
That sounds like a pretty big chunk-o-change to throw out the window. Not even the MPAA is that stupid.
The Presidio borders the San Franciso Marina district, where a condo will set you back a million bucks. And a Studio Aparment rents for $1300-$1600 per/mo.
Where, pray tell, have you been living in that area that's affordable up to now?
One aspect of Video phones and other video-chat technologies is that both parties can never look into each others "eyes" simultaneously.
Your eyes never meet, as they do in a physical one-on-one conversation because the camera and video display are at least a few inches apart.
I wonder if dual photography could be used to create the illusion of having the "camera" in the middle of the display device so you could actually "lock eyes" during a conversation.
I guess you'd need a pretty bright display device...
...but I think I'll have to dust off my old "Official SkyLab Target" T-Shirt.
Seeing as the Government usually can't hit the broad side of a planet, its a pretty fair bet that making myself a target ( again ) will prevent any possibility of me getting hit by Hubble when it crashes.
Cue SNL video of John Belushi smashing his SkyLab model into a Globe of the Earth
Things can get complicated on the Intranet as well.
Kaiser Permanente is so old and so large and so balkanized that sharing data Internally between systems is a major headache.
They have legacy systems, built in house, that are older than some of their employees.
They are currently spending Billions on an Electronic Health Record system and a recurring problem is getting the new stuff to talk to the old stuff.
And its certainly Not for lack of spending.
Obviously, this isn't a unique problem. But if a single organization has trouble managing such a complex system, how hard is it going to be to get a network of similarly sized organizations to interoprate?
Kaiser Permanente, for those who don't know, is really the first HMO. They serve all of California, Hawaii, Colorado, Georgia and a smattering of other regions around the country.
I've been with the company for about 3 years, doing both Software development and system support. During that time, most of my development has been in Java. I have yet to see any.NET development.
There may, in fact, be.NET development at Kaiser, but I haven't been able to find many references on the corporate intranet.
I would summarize Kaiser's software development as follows:
Patient Records are stored in IBM DB2 running on IBM OS390 mainframes./li>
Minor or less-critical datastores often use Oracle.
Some legacy systems use Cache (Mumps) running on AIX
Major applications run on either a Mainframe or IBM AIX boxes, or a combination of the two.
Java is the language used for developing their Integration Broker, the crosspoint which links many of their newer medical systems.
Fat client-side applications are written in C++, or to a lesser extent, Java
Web applications are written in Java and hosted on IBM WebSphere
Perl plays a supporting role in UNIX environments, as it always seems to.
I have yet to see Microsoft used for any critical back-end component which could significanly impact patient care. Client software, yes. Back-end software, no.
In the last few years, Kaiser has had an apiphany regarding in-house software development and now leans towards vended systems. But there is still a significant amount of in-house software development done to integrate these vended systems.
The only conceptually similar system I know about is the, now defunct, rubberhose.
Rubberhose was a plausibly-deniable disk encryption system which allowed you to create 2 distinct encrypted file systems which occupied the same disk space.
One would be the decoy and have harmless boring info, the other would be the "real" file system.
If you were compelled to give up the passphrase to the filesystem, you could give up the decoy passphrase.
The implementation was tricky, because neither file system could "know" about the other, otherwise, an enemy would know you were hiding the "real" file system and could imprison or torture you into giving up the passphrase.
Since the stakes were high, Rubberhose had features to thwart forensic disk-surface analysis. A percentage of disk blocks from both file systems would be randomly repositioned on the drive, to ensure that the more heavily used "real" file system didn't stand out in any statistical way.
BackWeb sold a background network data transfer technology that was respectful of BOTH your modem/DSL connection and your WAN connection (if you had a private WAN )
It really worked. You could transfer hundreds of megabytes over slow, unreliable connections - so long as you didn't really mind how long it took to transfer. Hours... Days... Weeks...
The protocol was highly optimized. Everything was encrypted. They used differential downloading technology (similar to that used in revision control systems) to only transfer the changes made between different versions of the same file.
Nevertheless, they failed.
They failed to make a simple, concise and compelling argument as to why a business should pay good money for this technology.
And they failed to make the software easy to install, configure, deploy and maintain.
So, today they have little to show for their efforts other than a handful of patents.
Oddly enough, the US government and the MPAA may achive what BackWeb Marketing never could: providing a compelling argument for a secure, private file-sharing technology and the motivation to make it usable and deployable.
BTW, your "trickle-sync" idea is similar in some respects to one of BackWeb's patented Technologies.
The Sunday Morning Fog is still hovering over my brain, but I seem to recall that the law makes a distinction between Parody and Satire.
Parody (in which an artist is commenting on the work itself ) is protected as Fair Use, while Satire ( where an artist is merely using the work as a tool to comment on something else entirely) is not.
So, as always, the devil is in the details. And whether this Mashup is considered Parody or Satire would depend entirely on the content of the derived work.
Um, I don't mean to be snarky, but my experience has been that GNUNet is even less friendly and less popular than either Entropy or Freenet.
It still has the feel of a research project and the fact that it defines itself as a framework rather than an application means that 99.9% of their potential audience won't be able to figure it out or use it. (Could your Mother download, compile and install gnunet-gtk?)
With that said, the project is really interesting.
But in its current state, its not ready for prime-time... or even late-night viewing.... Maybe CSPAN.
Slashdot Mirror
... Lets see how you handle it.
-S
Sorry, somebody had to say it.
-S
America,
For the last 25 years you have been voting for a Police State. And now that's exactly what you have. Congratulations, Democracy really works.
Now shut up, bend over and take it like a man.
-S
The Amish are typically looked down upon as ludites or anti-intellectuals, especially with regards to technology.
The reality is more complicated. Basically, that they simply have different values than most urban Americans.
They refuse to allow technology to intrude into the parts of their life which they value the most: Eg: personal relationships.
Many Amish sects actually allow the use of telephones, but not in the home. Several homes will sometimes share a telephone housed outside in a small kiosk the same way that several houses may have a common location for their mail boxes.
The tendency, when faced with new technologies, is for the Amish to wait a good long time to see the effects of the technology on the larger society, and then make a decision as to whether to allow it into their towns.
That may be viewed as being very conservative, but its certainly not crazy or stupid.
KQED FM's Forum program had Marcia Sterling, senior vice president, general counsel and secretary of Autodesk on their program recently.
The discussion covered Intellectual Property in information technology.
I'd be willing to bet, based on Marcia's responses during the discussion, that Autodesk is definately NOT embracing open source.
Also represented on the program was the EFF and Stanford Law School.
Link to Nov 21 Forum broadcast
-S
I KNOW I'm just setting myself up for an ulcer:
http://www.screendaily.com/story.asp?storyid=23110 &r=true
Groklaw is in fine form today...
Darl's Open Letter, "Long Live UNIX," and other PR Blizzardry from SCOForum
>
> Isn't that where all the gays live?
>
Yep, that's why San Francisco is so cool.
-S
And wouldn't you have to do that at the quantum level?
And didn't ol' Heisenberg say something about not being able to do that?
I think the author has demonstrated that it really is possible to watch too much Star Trek.
-S
P.S. I guess it might be possible to "record" the perceptions of an individual by intercepting nerve impulses on their way to the brain, but that doesn't get you much in the way of imortality.
That sounds like a pretty big chunk-o-change to throw out the window. Not even the MPAA is that stupid.
maybe.
-S
More like... there went your Rent.
The Presidio borders the San Franciso Marina district, where a condo will set you back a million bucks. And a Studio Aparment rents for $1300-$1600 per/mo.
Where, pray tell, have you been living in that area that's affordable up to now?
No, Really. I need to find a new place.
One aspect of Video phones and other video-chat technologies is that both parties can never look into each others "eyes" simultaneously.
Your eyes never meet, as they do in a physical one-on-one conversation because the camera and video display are at least a few inches apart.
I wonder if dual photography could be used to create the illusion of having the "camera" in the middle of the display device so you could actually "lock eyes" during a conversation.
I guess you'd need a pretty bright display device...
What does a spreading Worm Simulator look like?
Thanks to the Slashdot effect, I think we're gonna find out.
-S
With the median price of a home in Silicon Valley being over half a million dollars, starting your business in a Garage seems a little extravagant.
Perhaps in a few years, we'll be hearing about great companies being started in a dumpster...
Cue: rant about Silicon Valley not being the whole IT-World
Insert: remark designed to disarm rants about Silicon Valley not being the whole IT-World
-Sean
Seeing as the Government usually can't hit the broad side of a planet, its a pretty fair bet that making myself a target ( again ) will prevent any possibility of me getting hit by Hubble when it crashes.
Cue SNL video of John Belushi smashing his SkyLab model into a Globe of the Earth
Kaiser Permanente is so old and so large and so balkanized that sharing data Internally between systems is a major headache.
They have legacy systems, built in house, that are older than some of their employees.
They are currently spending Billions on an Electronic Health Record system and a recurring problem is getting the new stuff to talk to the old stuff.
And its certainly Not for lack of spending.
Obviously, this isn't a unique problem. But if a single organization has trouble managing such a complex system, how hard is it going to be to get a network of similarly sized organizations to interoprate?
The people behind that anouncement are probably just trying to appease a bunch of idiots in Hollywood.
This may be true, but in the meantime a lot of time, energy and money is going to be wasted that could be going into something innovative.
One of the definitions of insanity is exhibiting the same behavior again and again but expecting a different outcome each time.
Sound familiar?
-Sean
I wonder if this first generation of consumer OLED displays will last as long as a CRT.
I hope they last longer than a Plasma display, since color fading is one of that technologies drawbacks.
-Sean
I've been with the company for about 3 years, doing both Software development and system support. During that time, most of my development has been in Java. I have yet to see any .NET development.
There may, in fact, be .NET development at Kaiser, but I haven't been able to find many references on the corporate intranet.
I would summarize Kaiser's software development as follows:
In the last few years, Kaiser has had an apiphany regarding in-house software development and now leans towards vended systems. But there is still a significant amount of in-house software development done to integrate these vended systems.
Hope that's useful.
-S
Rubberhose was a plausibly-deniable disk encryption system which allowed you to create 2 distinct encrypted file systems which occupied the same disk space.
One would be the decoy and have harmless boring info, the other would be the "real" file system.
If you were compelled to give up the passphrase to the filesystem, you could give up the decoy passphrase.
The implementation was tricky, because neither file system could "know" about the other, otherwise, an enemy would know you were hiding the "real" file system and could imprison or torture you into giving up the passphrase.
Since the stakes were high, Rubberhose had features to thwart forensic disk-surface analysis. A percentage of disk blocks from both file systems would be randomly repositioned on the drive, to ensure that the more heavily used "real" file system didn't stand out in any statistical way.
I'd love to see something similar revived.
-Sean
...this update seeks to destory?
-Sean
It really worked. You could transfer hundreds of megabytes over slow, unreliable connections - so long as you didn't really mind how long it took to transfer. Hours... Days... Weeks...
The protocol was highly optimized. Everything was encrypted. They used differential downloading technology (similar to that used in revision control systems) to only transfer the changes made between different versions of the same file.
Nevertheless, they failed.
They failed to make a simple, concise and compelling argument as to why a business should pay good money for this technology.
And they failed to make the software easy to install, configure, deploy and maintain.
So, today they have little to show for their efforts other than a handful of patents.
Oddly enough, the US government and the MPAA may achive what BackWeb Marketing never could: providing a compelling argument for a secure, private file-sharing technology and the motivation to make it usable and deployable.
BTW, your "trickle-sync" idea is similar in some respects to one of BackWeb's patented Technologies.
Caveat scriptor.
The Sunday Morning Fog is still hovering over my brain, but I seem to recall that the law makes a distinction between Parody and Satire.
Parody (in which an artist is commenting on the work itself ) is protected as Fair Use, while Satire ( where an artist is merely using the work as a tool to comment on something else entirely) is not.
So, as always, the devil is in the details. And whether this Mashup is considered Parody or Satire would depend entirely on the content of the derived work.
-Sean
Am I the only one that finds this insanely OLD NEWS?
-S
Um, I don't mean to be snarky, but my experience has been that GNUNet is even less friendly and less popular than either Entropy or Freenet.
It still has the feel of a research project and the fact that it defines itself as a framework rather than an application means that 99.9% of their potential audience won't be able to figure it out or use it. (Could your Mother download, compile and install gnunet-gtk?)
With that said, the project is really interesting.
But in its current state, its not ready for prime-time... or even late-night viewing.... Maybe CSPAN.