That'll depend on what the machine's owner decides to use to record on - it's not just "VHS is what ultrasound machines use." Our (1997-vintage) ultrasound machine simply has RCA composite video, BNC composite video and S-video out connectors on the back, and you connect those to whatever recording device you like. We've got a VCD recorder on the outputs of our particular machine.
because if there is a larger group of (walking free) self delusional pathological liars than diabetics, I'm not aware of it. It's not that I hate diabetics I just hate the devil inside them.
Sorry, but I have to jump in the side of your sister here. It's about the 50th time your doctor states that your blood glucose control is, "only fair, and needs to be better," that you decide that lying about your levels is less stressful all around.
True, by doing so we hurt no-one but ourselves, but the disease is so bloody obtrusive anyways that it's worth it to keep people off your back.
I can already see how much pain you'll be going through tonight. The first stab will most likely be when you ask, "Have you got everything backed up?". From there it all just goes downhill...
I might have a beer or two to try and drown your sorrows, by proxy:>
Not sure if all your examples are good ones. And therein lies a bit of a problem...
Playstation - switch on, shove disk in, play game. - Also: hook up via appropriate AV/aerial connection, set up TV/amplifier to display/play correct audio & video signal, ensure memory card has storage space, learn yet another assignment of buttons on to controller to actions in game
Car - common interface taught and tested by law. Big wheel, stick, bunch of pedals. Even so, a lot of people take a long time to learn to drive. - Your last line hits the truth. On top of the things you list, also: deal with intricacies of around a thousand road laws, deal with issues of being surrounded and having to coexist with 100 other vehicles within visual range, understand physicss quirks & behaviour of 1,000+ kg object travelling with some serious momentum, and a hundred other items as well. Driving a car takes a *lot* of learning.
Microwave - Simple timer and "Low/High" button. - Also: know details of what can and can't be cooked in it, understand cooking methods themselves, discover mysteries of cooking using a method that directly heats water molecules in food to the exception of others, and then only for those molecules a few cm into the edges of the food.
With "Computer," you've just outlined all the other salient points you've left out in your simple examples. These things - most things in the lives we live today - aren't simple. They may be reducable in some controlled circumstances, but to learn to use them properly (as opposed to bunny-hopping down the street, or creating accidental lightning storms from metallic coffee cups) takes a lot of almost hidden, long-term, and generally unforseen effort.
As to TV - once the thing is on, how much processing goes on in your mother's brain to figure out what shows she wants to watch, when they're on, whether she wants to tape them or not, if so is there a blank tape around, does anyone else want to use the TV/video at the time, etc., etc.? You might argue, "But you're just adding complication!" - true, but that _is_ my argument - all these things end up complicated, by virtue of the fact they don't exist separately from the world they're in. It's interrelationship soup out there.
Yeah, that's something that worried me a bit too when I read the details on their site.
Perhaps a better donation/gift would be a nice, reasonably fast (10 or 12x) cd-r drive, plus, as each distro releases it's newest and latest over the months, a CD-R 'master' of each new distro? This'd mean they could rapidly burn off large numbers of the most recent, bug-free distros, using blanks donated by other people. Your gift is the bandwidth taken to d/l the latest ISOs.
Hm... do you perchance have a beeper, likes the ones on trucks for when they reverse? Does it come on when your sense of humour and your intellect drops out for awhile? It should.
Yah, all well and good, but it won't do anything for the real killer in this case - the transmitted vibration that conducts through the solid parts of the room, via the walls, floor, and desks to the computer & drives themselves. No amount of air-flapping on the part of 180 degree out of phase sound waves is going to stop that energy...
"There is no requirement to know anything above the basics of computing, and floppy disks *are* the unfortunate standard. Taking such a hard stance on students is unfair. They are paying too much money as it is =P"
Well... I'm a postgrad student at a Uni myself, and I get paid a bit extra on the side (over my scholarship) to keep the computers in our building (about 50 users, half staff generally with phd's and above, the rest postgrads like myself) working properly.
That said, in our environment, I'd say that one of the basic tenets of modern computing is that no storage device _is_ infallible. Every person I have to tell the basics of computing practice gets told, "Never, never, ever have only one copy a file. No matter what media it's on." Heck, everything associated with data storage dies eventually - so I'd argue that "make a backup, no matter what" _IS_ a basic piece of computer knowledge. If students need/want to use a computer to do their work, instead of a typewriter or pen & paper, then it's their responsibility to learn how to use the equipment, just like they need to learn to drive before 'using' a car.
As for the last sentence, being a student myself, I agree entirely:>
One thing that's very obvious from reading all the previous comments is that the # of support staff : # of users ratio depends a _lot_ on the technical needs and work type of those users.
When I read messages saying, "we've got a ratio of 1:100" or even 1:500, I just can't believe it. But that's just because of my bias.
I'm the "official server admin" at a place called the Brain Sciences Institute, part of a university in Melbourne, Australia. We have about 18 staff (mostly academic types with doctorates, supervising postgrad students) and around 40 or so students (full time; there are a few part-timers around as well). We have a 4-man tech support team at the moment, and we never have a moments rest. Why?
Our users - all of them having at least a bachelor's desgree (thank heavens) are fairly intelligent. Odds are also that they've used computers all through their courses, so using computers isn't completely alien to them. Also, they're postgrads - so they _want_ to learn (perhaps not computers, rather neuroscience - but the attitude still sticks thankfully!). They generally have a rather high 'general computer IQ', and so we don't get the usual load of "my desktop looks funny!" [because you played with the settings, stupid] type questions.
So why are we so busy? Because our head tech guy (and previously only tech guy) is busy building EEG amplifiers (which are bloody good ones, if I do say so) and playing with microcontrollers, as well as making purchase decisions and doing occasional tech support. Thankfully we're a fairly informal team, being in a university environment and being heavy academic types generally:> I'm the server admin, true, and the "server room" consists of about 10 PCs and a bunch of routers. It's just enough - just - for our work. We currently have about 600 gig or so of online hard drive storage, which is usually chock full of experimental data (this month's helpful new tool to be installed: quotas! Cost: unix machines, $0. NT boxes, $1,300 Australian per machine. LOL.).
All the users are NT4. I've been scoring mucho victories lately installing Linux boxes as servers instead of NT4 server machines... gotta love samba. We have 4 unix boxes and the rest are NT4 server. We also have the EEG recording rooms to take care of, and a bunch of wierd stuff (MRI imaging, etc.) that's carried out outside the institute to deal with when the data gets back here. Thankfully our director was working with PDP-4s when he started his biophysics degree, so he's very, very flexible with regards buying stuff, OSes to install, etc.
Most of our user problems are the usual run of "is forge/anvil/soul/some other data storage server down?", "I can't get xxxxx boring win32 app to run on my box", and so on. But we also get a goodly number of interesting ones related to our technical field. Everyone uses computers almost exclusively to do their phds here - everything from writing up the ethics committee approval, to doing the EEG recordings, to analysis and finally thesis writeup. It's very neat actually:> The rest of our problems are related to our custom-made EEG recording equipment. It's very complicated (being in-house stuff, ease of use was never a particularly important point) and altering it to fit in with new projects that are going to push it's capabilities takes up the rest of our time.
So, we need 3 full-time and one part-time tech support type to support 50 people. And we're never bored. 1:100? Just a pipe dream...
OK guys... before I start, since I'm gonna do a bit of explaining, I should give some credentials . I'm a 2nd year PhD student, studying cognitive neuroscience. I've also spent a year in Akita, Japan, doing neuroscience experiments at a research hospital there. IT was, as it happens, the best year I've ever had in my life.:>
The hospital I was at - Akita Noukekkan Kenritsu Kenkyuu Sentaa (Research Centre for Brain and Blood Vessels) is one of the three research sites involved in the Human Brain Project. The other sites are in Massachusetts and Copenhagen, Denmark. I helped set up the stimulus generating computer (an old Macintosh Quadra 850) for the HBP project, but I left the country after the first two experiments had been done.
>These people are making "cool 3d views of a brain" and telling you absolutely frigging nothing about what they're going to do. What the >hell can you do with information like that?
OK, if you read the article closely (and do a bit of background research), they're performing *cortical inflation*, and not just funky 3d mapping. Cortical inflation is sort of like sticking a bicyle pump into your brain, and pumping up your cortex - eventually you push out all the deep fissures and gyri that make up the convoluted surface, and the detail that's in those areas of brain that are normally hidden from view is displayed on a nice sphere.
How is this helpful? Well, the organization of brain areas makes a lot more sense when you inflate the cortex. It's a very recent fad in neuroscience - people are seeing, for the first time, why certain areas seem to be near each other. And the cortically inflated image of the brain is much easier to figure out.
>We still don't know how to a) communicate with the brain (subconscious) directly, or b) understand why it is we only use 5% of its >capacity.
An AC further down posted the fallacy of the 5% deal. And believe it or not, communicating the the subconscious brain directly is not the be-all-and-end-all of brain science. There are other things that are just as important to know. Hell, we don't even know *what* the subconscious is exactly, let alone where.
>We know the general area that controls movement, and if they shock it it makes the shaking less violent. But we don't know EXACTLY >what those brain cells control, or where we should shock them on a cell-by-cell basis. We just shock it and it fixes it. Thats about as >scientific as it gets, no? >This project the article centers on will provide a nice road map. But what good is a road map if you don't know where you're going?
A very valid point. The time when we know exactly what each individual cell in the brain does is a very, very, very long way off. Why? Because _everybody's brain is dofferent_. A cell in a particular location of my brain that deals with directed attention, for example, is _not_ going to be int he same place in your brain. So it's a bloody hard job to figure out what goes where.
I'll counter your last comment with a similar analogy. A road map doesn't just tell you how to get to one place - ite tells you _all_ the places you can go. A map - specific to one person though it may be - is a very useful tool. It shows you areas in which you might want to explore more, and more deeply. It's definitely not a waste of time and money.
Well... I don't know about these unqualified "such-and-such is much easier/harder than something-else to install" comments. They seem a bit overzealous to me - on some boxes, RH will have a better time. On others, Caldera. And if you've got a really wierd machine, maybe Slackware:> But seriously... installation ease is really in the eye of the beholder: I've installed rh 5.0, 5.1 and 5.2 on a range of machines - an old amd k5-133, a Japanese IBM pc300pl (a triple boot in the end!), a thrown-together-from-old-junk (incl. a 1992, 1.7 gig full height 5.25" Fujitsu SCSI drive which works like a charm) playaround machine, and a dual-processor p2 400 with 512 megs of ram and 72 gigs of scsi disk as a linear volume raid. Every one has worked flawlessly, even the SMP machine (when I finally figured out how to recompile the kernel without breaking two thousand modules in the process). It's really just the luck of the draw:>
Slashdot Mirror
That'll depend on what the machine's owner decides to use to record on - it's not just "VHS is what ultrasound machines use."
Our (1997-vintage) ultrasound machine simply has RCA composite video, BNC composite video and S-video out connectors on the back, and you connect those to whatever recording device you like. We've got a VCD recorder on the outputs of our particular machine.
France had abyssimal air power compared to the Germans.
I can't help but see strange images in my head of French DW.520s zooming up into the sky from big holes in the ground.
Must've been bloody scary!
because if there is a larger group of (walking free) self delusional pathological liars than diabetics, I'm not aware of it. It's not that I hate diabetics I just hate the devil inside them.
Sorry, but I have to jump in the side of your sister here. It's about the 50th time your doctor states that your blood glucose control is, "only fair, and needs to be better," that you decide that lying about your levels is less stressful all around.
True, by doing so we hurt no-one but ourselves, but the disease is so bloody obtrusive anyways that it's worth it to keep people off your back.
(Until the complications set in, of course...)
I can already see how much pain you'll be going through tonight. The first stab will most likely be when you ask, "Have you got everything backed up?". From there it all just goes downhill...
:>
I might have a beer or two to try and drown your sorrows, by proxy
Terminate was my favourite terminal program of all time. Far better than everyone else who seemed to be using... Telemate, I think it was?
My memory fails me... anyone?
Not sure if all your examples are good ones. And therein lies a bit of a problem...
Playstation - switch on, shove disk in, play game.
- Also: hook up via appropriate AV/aerial connection, set up TV/amplifier to display/play correct audio & video signal, ensure memory card has storage space, learn yet another assignment of buttons on to controller to actions in game
Car - common interface taught and tested by law. Big wheel, stick, bunch of pedals. Even so, a lot of people take a long time to learn to drive.
- Your last line hits the truth. On top of the things you list, also: deal with intricacies of around a thousand road laws, deal with issues of being surrounded and having to coexist with 100 other vehicles within visual range, understand physicss quirks & behaviour of 1,000+ kg object travelling with some serious momentum, and a hundred other items as well. Driving a car takes a *lot* of learning.
Microwave - Simple timer and "Low/High" button.
- Also: know details of what can and can't be cooked in it, understand cooking methods themselves, discover mysteries of cooking using a method that directly heats water molecules in food to the exception of others, and then only for those molecules a few cm into the edges of the food.
With "Computer," you've just outlined all the other salient points you've left out in your simple examples. These things - most things in the lives we live today - aren't simple. They may be reducable in some controlled circumstances, but to learn to use them properly (as opposed to bunny-hopping down the street, or creating accidental lightning storms from metallic coffee cups) takes a lot of almost hidden, long-term, and generally unforseen effort.
As to TV - once the thing is on, how much processing goes on in your mother's brain to figure out what shows she wants to watch, when they're on, whether she wants to tape them or not, if so is there a blank tape around, does anyone else want to use the TV/video at the time, etc., etc.? You might argue, "But you're just adding complication!" - true, but that _is_ my argument - all these things end up complicated, by virtue of the fact they don't exist separately from the world they're in. It's interrelationship soup out there.
No, an exploit is a means; a DOS is an end.
Yeah, that's something that worried me a bit too when I read the details on their site.
Perhaps a better donation/gift would be a nice, reasonably fast (10 or 12x) cd-r drive, plus, as each distro releases it's newest and latest over the months, a CD-R 'master' of each new distro? This'd mean they could rapidly burn off large numbers of the most recent, bug-free distros, using blanks donated by other people. Your gift is the bandwidth taken to d/l the latest ISOs.
Just an idea...
Hm... do you perchance have a beeper, likes the ones on trucks for when they reverse? Does it come on when your sense of humour and your intellect drops out for awhile? It should.
Yah, all well and good, but it won't do anything for the real killer in this case - the transmitted vibration that conducts through the solid parts of the room, via the walls, floor, and desks to the computer & drives themselves. No amount of air-flapping on the part of 180 degree out of phase sound waves is going to stop that energy...
"There is no requirement to know anything above the basics of computing, and floppy disks *are* the unfortunate standard. Taking such a hard stance on students is unfair. They are paying too much money as it is =P"
:>
Well... I'm a postgrad student at a Uni myself, and I get paid a bit extra on the side (over my scholarship) to keep the computers in our building (about 50 users, half staff generally with phd's and above, the rest postgrads like myself) working properly.
That said, in our environment, I'd say that one of the basic tenets of modern computing is that no storage device _is_ infallible. Every person I have to tell the basics of computing practice gets told, "Never, never, ever have only one copy a file. No matter what media it's on." Heck, everything associated with data storage dies eventually - so I'd argue that "make a backup, no matter what" _IS_ a basic piece of computer knowledge. If students need/want to use a computer to do their work, instead of a typewriter or pen & paper, then it's their responsibility to learn how to use the equipment, just like they need to learn to drive before 'using' a car.
As for the last sentence, being a student myself, I agree entirely
Wazza
One thing that's very obvious from reading all the previous comments is that the # of support staff : # of users ratio depends a _lot_ on the technical needs and work type of those users.
:> I'm the server admin, true, and the "server room" consists of about 10 PCs and a bunch of routers. It's just enough - just - for our work. We currently have about 600 gig or so of online hard drive storage, which is usually chock full of experimental data (this month's helpful new tool to be installed: quotas! Cost: unix machines, $0. NT boxes, $1,300 Australian per machine. LOL.).
:> The rest of our problems are related to our custom-made EEG recording equipment. It's very complicated (being in-house stuff, ease of use was never a particularly important point) and altering it to fit in with new projects that are going to push it's capabilities takes up the rest of our time.
When I read messages saying, "we've got a ratio of 1:100" or even 1:500, I just can't believe it. But that's just because of my bias.
I'm the "official server admin" at a place called the Brain Sciences Institute, part of a university in Melbourne, Australia. We have about 18 staff (mostly academic types with doctorates, supervising postgrad students) and around 40 or so students (full time; there are a few part-timers around as well). We have a 4-man tech support team at the moment, and we never have a moments rest. Why?
Our users - all of them having at least a bachelor's desgree (thank heavens) are fairly intelligent. Odds are also that they've used computers all through their courses, so using computers isn't completely alien to them. Also, they're postgrads - so they _want_ to learn (perhaps not computers, rather neuroscience - but the attitude still sticks thankfully!). They generally have a rather high 'general computer IQ', and so we don't get the usual load of "my desktop looks funny!" [because you played with the settings, stupid] type questions.
So why are we so busy? Because our head tech guy (and previously only tech guy) is busy building EEG amplifiers (which are bloody good ones, if I do say so) and playing with microcontrollers, as well as making purchase decisions and doing occasional tech support. Thankfully we're a fairly informal team, being in a university environment and being heavy academic types generally
All the users are NT4. I've been scoring mucho victories lately installing Linux boxes as servers instead of NT4 server machines... gotta love samba. We have 4 unix boxes and the rest are NT4 server. We also have the EEG recording rooms to take care of, and a bunch of wierd stuff (MRI imaging, etc.) that's carried out outside the institute to deal with when the data gets back here. Thankfully our director was working with PDP-4s when he started his biophysics degree, so he's very, very flexible with regards buying stuff, OSes to install, etc.
Most of our user problems are the usual run of "is forge/anvil/soul/some other data storage server down?", "I can't get xxxxx boring win32 app to run on my box", and so on. But we also get a goodly number of interesting ones related to our technical field. Everyone uses computers almost exclusively to do their phds here - everything from writing up the ethics committee approval, to doing the EEG recordings, to analysis and finally thesis writeup. It's very neat actually
So, we need 3 full-time and one part-time tech support type to support 50 people. And we're never bored. 1:100? Just a pipe dream...
OK guys... before I start, since I'm gonna do a bit of explaining, I should give some credentials . I'm a 2nd year PhD student, studying cognitive neuroscience. I've also spent a year in Akita, Japan, doing neuroscience experiments at a research hospital there. IT was, as it happens, the best year I've ever had in my life. :>
The hospital I was at - Akita Noukekkan Kenritsu Kenkyuu Sentaa (Research Centre for Brain and Blood Vessels) is one of the three research sites involved in the Human Brain Project. The other sites are in Massachusetts and Copenhagen, Denmark. I helped set up the stimulus generating computer (an old Macintosh Quadra 850) for the HBP project, but I left the country after the first two experiments had been done.
>These people are making "cool 3d views of a brain" and telling you absolutely frigging nothing about what they're going to do. What the >hell can you do with information like that?
OK, if you read the article closely (and do a bit of background research), they're performing *cortical inflation*, and not just funky 3d mapping. Cortical inflation is sort of like sticking a bicyle pump into your brain, and pumping up your cortex - eventually you push out all the deep fissures and gyri that make up the convoluted surface, and the detail that's in those areas of brain that are normally hidden from view is displayed on a nice sphere.
How is this helpful? Well, the organization of brain areas makes a lot more sense when you inflate the cortex. It's a very recent fad in neuroscience - people are seeing, for the first time, why certain areas seem to be near each other. And the cortically inflated image of the brain is much easier to figure out.
>We still don't know how to a) communicate with the brain (subconscious) directly, or b) understand why it is we only use 5% of its >capacity.
An AC further down posted the fallacy of the 5% deal. And believe it or not, communicating the the subconscious brain directly is not the be-all-and-end-all of brain science. There are other things that are just as important to know. Hell, we don't even know *what* the subconscious is exactly, let alone where.
>We know the general area that controls movement, and if they shock it it makes the shaking less violent. But we don't know EXACTLY
>what those brain cells control, or where we should shock them on a cell-by-cell basis. We just shock it and it fixes it. Thats about as >scientific as it gets, no?
>This project the article centers on will provide a nice road map. But what good is a road map if you don't know where you're going?
A very valid point. The time when we know exactly what each individual cell in the brain does is a very, very, very long way off. Why? Because _everybody's brain is dofferent_. A cell in a particular location of my brain that deals with directed attention, for example, is _not_ going to be int he same place in your brain. So it's a bloody hard job to figure out what goes where.
I'll counter your last comment with a similar analogy. A road map doesn't just tell you how to get to one place - ite tells you _all_ the places you can go. A map - specific to one person though it may be - is a very useful tool. It shows you areas in which you might want to explore more, and more deeply. It's definitely not a waste of time and money.
Actually, you should re-read the original question:
:>
"... AMD's Athlon? P3 Xeon? or Dual Processors? If anyone could recommend system specs, keeping it cost effective at the same time, it would help."
So since he wants whole system specs (and asks about SMP explicitly), arguments like OS and SMP, etc. _are_ what he wants to hear about
Well... I don't know about these unqualified "such-and-such is much easier/harder than something-else to install" comments. They seem a bit overzealous to me - on some boxes, RH will have a better time. On others, Caldera. And if you've got a really wierd machine, maybe Slackware :> :>
But seriously... installation ease is really in the eye of the beholder: I've installed rh 5.0, 5.1 and 5.2 on a range of machines - an old amd k5-133, a Japanese IBM pc300pl (a triple boot in the end!), a thrown-together-from-old-junk (incl. a 1992, 1.7 gig full height 5.25" Fujitsu SCSI drive which works like a charm) playaround machine, and a dual-processor p2 400 with 512 megs of ram and 72 gigs of scsi disk as a linear volume raid. Every one has worked flawlessly, even the SMP machine (when I finally figured out how to recompile the kernel without breaking two thousand modules in the process).
It's really just the luck of the draw