I agree with you on the dirt bit. Our lab is quite clean, but little bits of detritus do seem to catch in between the trackball and the base from time to time. They appear to have a new optical model here . I have yet to use one or see it in action.
My favorite input device is my Kensington Turbo Mouse. It's a trackball, but I have been using them for years going back to the original 1.0. They are great in reducing RSI and allow precise control which is important for digital imagery work and image forensics.
RTFA. The second sentences states, and I quote: "During August, 67 per cent of all successful and verifiable digital attacks against on-line servers targeted Linux, followed by Microsoft Windows at 23.2 per cent." OS X is probalby somewhere in the missing 9%
You have never taken a statistics class have you? The statistic reported in the article says "67 per cent of all successful and verifiable digital attacks against on-line servers targeted Linux, followed by Microsoft Windows at 23.2 per cent.". This is not the same question as what percentage of attacks are successful. They are two populations of data.
So, I wonder....the interesting statistic to me would be what percentage of attacks against each platform are successful? This statistic is not explicitly stated. Also did they include OS X as part of the study?
To save time I will respond to most of your points with the simple reply: "I have actually heard very good things about Web Objects." I have not yet used it myself, but many folks whose opinions I respect have very sucsessfully implemented WO solutions.
To specifically respond to your point: It doesn't scale. At all.
I will state simply that the DOD is using Web Objects to manage all of the medical history and data of their employees including Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines, Semper Fi as well as many other branches of that department. That to me suggests it scales rather well, into the many hundreds of thousands if not millions of comprehensive records.
These typically monocular scopes usually offer 3 objectives of around 10x, 40x and 90-100x, giving a total possibly magnification of around 1000x with oil immersion.
The problem with this is that you are restricted to very small fields unless you have very expensive objectives. (many hundreds to thousands of dollars for the objective alone) Even then, your field is restricted and this is why we have been employing photo mosaicing of digitally captured images to get around this problem for our research with images that are at 400-1000X magnification. The cool thing about using a scanner (for lower mag requirements) is that you do not have to perform the photomosaicing.
People have been using scanners in this way for image forensics for years. We also used this method to get around image mosaicing large microscopy fields several years ago in an undergraduate biology class I took. (amazing what students come up with to avoid work) Now of course image mosaicing software is available to get around this problem, but it's good to see science stuff like this get out to the main stream. Perhaps this will also make it into a few junior high and high school classes as a cool exercise.
I can't imagine that many artists the RIAA represents are happy with some of the RIAA's behavior. I am sure they are having some of the same reactions that many folks have with Clippy......"Stop trying to help me!!!"
I should also have stated that I believe there is a significant need for medical records management software in the open source community and if you were to perform a little market research on medical records software, you would find the field is a mess of competing programs and standards, and you would not believe how much money is made by businesses that have half assed solutions to the problem. The cost to individual medical practices and hospitals is considerable and many companies do not have any real clue of how to properly implement this code. Things are complicated by numerous proprietary databases and lots of new HIPAA legislation that makes interconnectivity a real nightmare.
I've often thought that a good open source team of about thirty individuals including a half dozen subject matter experts, a couple good technical writers and half a dozen programmers could kick some serious butt in this market, establish an inter-operative database standard, either run it platform independent, or take advantage of some pretty powerful, yet inexpensive software like Web Objects and dominate the market within two years. Of course this third party you are talking about is probably interested in such a proposal, thus the offer. It's pretty amazing actually how many folks are wading around aimlessly in this market. Big players like GE, Siemens, IBM etc... are without any direction or focus on this problem and the market payoff could be relatively big if you properly market this to select members of government who are absolutely desperate to reduce the cost of medicine.
My guess would be that writing this grant would be like writing any other grant. The idea is to propose an idea, outline your thesis (in this case, why you are making a case for this software and why open source), talk about the background of this project, why it is important what the implications are if this were to succeed and how you plan on going about completing this project. Outline the costs and give a timeline, clearly state your goals and wrap it up.
That's not true in the United States, yet American scientists who refuse military work are exceedingly rare today.
Look, there are all sorts of issues involved with performing military and defense research, particularly if it is classifed. I've had more than one resume come across my desk where the Ph.D. has a blank space for a couple of years or more on their CV. If you perform classified work, it tends to lock one into industry as these are periods where you often cannot publish in the peer reviewed journals.
God help you if you are interested in an academic career and say.....invest yourself in doing sleep research and find out how to induce sleep remotely via say trans-cranial stimulation. Stuff like this, particularly projects that apply to non-lethal weapon systems are hot right now.
Social engineering is right. The BBC is also reporting that the RIAA is suing a 71 year old man. Apparently his grandchildren were coming over to his house and downloading music.
Just about all the users loved the system, too (imagine! Secretaries, using UNIX!:) )
Ahhhh, now I know you are talking CIA. This actually surprised me back in 1991 or 1992 to see NeXT slabs on secretaries desks, but I thought it was very cool (I liked the Cubes). Aside from the rather interesting angle that certain current Apple fellows (former NeXT employees) had with cryptography, the security, built in scriptability, built in optical storage and other obvious choices for a critical, yet secure installation, NeXT had those cool black cases.:-) The running joke among the spook crowd was that that the black cases were the sole reason for the contract.
To answer your question, no, I have a Ph.D. in retinal neurophysiology with many years of statistics, chemistry, biological science, bioengineering, anatomy and the first two years of medical school under my belt.:-) However, that said, I agree with you and the other poster. That is why I said that hybrid technologies with pen and keyboard would be good. The tablet stuff from the Microsoft camp is not where it needs to be right now for this to happen and much of it still does not compare to the old Newtons. With the newtons, you could enter equations and such along with text.
So, get an iBook. They are cheap and when you wake them from sleep, they are on almost instantly. No waiting.
They also require juice considering they don't run on air and a random day at college lasts 8 hours for me.
My 800 Mhz iBook ran for about 5 hours of constant use which is more than plenty for a day at school considering that you are not constantly using the laptop during your school day. If you were, you had access to a power outlet. Currently, I use an 12in Powerbook that has less battery life, but since I am not in classes anymore, I prefer it and the extra features.
Also, laptops aren't very versatile for writing down stuff in a hurry.
I can type much faster that I can write as can many, many others who generally prefer taking notes with a keyboard.
The programs given are very limited and using them can feel very unnatural at times.
I find a simple text edit program the easiest and fastest way to input notes.
That whole issue might be solved by those tablet PCs with the pen thingy, which is far more suitable for jotting down notes and what not.
I agree with you here. I have owned an Apple Newton 120 (they still rock!) and I have used some of the new Microsoft tablets, and by far, the Newton had better usability, although they are showing their age now by lacking modern I/O and networking. The Newton however was not quite ideal for notetaking. If you plugged in the additional keyboard they were O.K., but it needed a little more integration with the pen and keyboard. The current Wintel tablets are simply tablet versions of dekstop metaphors and simply, don't work very well. More R&D needed to go into interface design. I don't know if Apple will ever produce another tablet/subtablet type device, but it would certainly be welcome in many circles.
"Let's screw the platform that made the Myst franchise what it is today!"
Indeed, when Myst was originally created by Cyan back in 1992/1993, it was an all Macintosh operation. They used all of the video and audio built into Macs leveraging Quicktime (on Quadras I seem to remember) for the production and play of the game. All audio and video was a Macintosh operation. When it was ported to Windows, I had a friend complaining it simply did not look as good as it did on my IIci or my Quadra 840av. The really cool thing was, this was created using Hypercard and Hypertalk scripts! and is probably one of the all time greatest Hypercard programs.
That sounds like nothing more than the usual tit-for-tat barbs that Taiwan and China have been throwing across the strait for decades. In fact, I suspect that's what this whole Trojan Horse issue is -- all bluster, no substance.
However, we should not be complacent about China. I am certainly not one for warmongering but given the U.S. financial involvement in Taiwan (odds are the computer you are typing on was made there), if China ever does do anything more than little experimental probes then we will inexorably be drawn in to a conflict. China has long been a serious threat to world security, but desperately wants to be seen as a principal power in the world. (who knows, perhaps they are even pulling strings in N. Korea to make China look like the good guys that can keep things in check on the peninsula).
So, guided missile exercises in the Sea of Japan or in the Taiwanese straights are seen as a little provocative, but what about a little cyber warfare. Or would that be Warefare:-). If this is the case, it would be unprecedented.
Hey, it's not just the power grid and atm's. There are command and control systems used by the department of defense that folks have migrated to Windows. Our Dept of Homeland security has standardized on Windows. Certain FAA traffic control systems are running on Windows. The Army's Landwarrior program is using Windows. Traffic control for trains and shipping are running on Windows. etc...etc...etc...
This should scare the hell out of a lot of people.
Nationwide universities are opening their doors to new students but closing off their network services. The Blaster worm has caused universities to take drastic actions to protect their campus networks. Universities have gone as far as shutting down their entire resnet network and bringing it back up dorm-by-dorm after each computer has been certified worm-free.
Geez, this gives that old joke about the guy yelling from the back of the auditorium, "Get a Mac!" new life.
He he. Headlines from the future: Harold P. Winkerbody comes out of nowhere to be the first 17 year old governor of California. He succeeds in changing the state name to Kalifornia, legalizes skateboarding in all public places, legalizes consumption of beer by minors and then is impeached after it is discovered he hacked into the system to rig the votes when he was elected.
Yes! So it wasn't the downloading that caused poor sales afterall. It was the crappy music + high prices + strongarming.
Crappy music indeed. It seems that the industry after pushing grunge really hard was looking for the next new thing and jumped on the rap bit and engineered music garbage pushing it really hard in all mediums and exposures. I watched part of the MTV music video awards and never felt so out of touch with the music industry which any marketer will tell you is death. Lots of the new popular music completely misses the target for me and I am sure much of the music buying public. For me, I have been focusing on expanding my collection of older bluegrass, jazz and finding all that punk stuff that never made it to CD. Most of those purchases are not from the current RIAA libraries and I am sure many others are doing the same type of thing or ignoring music entirely leading to the current numbers.
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I agree with you on the dirt bit. Our lab is quite clean, but little bits of detritus do seem to catch in between the trackball and the base from time to time. They appear to have a new optical model here . I have yet to use one or see it in action.
What's your favorite current or past mouse?"
My favorite input device is my Kensington Turbo Mouse. It's a trackball, but I have been using them for years going back to the original 1.0. They are great in reducing RSI and allow precise control which is important for digital imagery work and image forensics.
RTFA. The second sentences states, and I quote: "During August, 67 per cent of all successful and verifiable digital attacks against on-line servers targeted Linux, followed by Microsoft Windows at 23.2 per cent." OS X is probalby somewhere in the missing 9%
You have never taken a statistics class have you? The statistic reported in the article says "67 per cent of all successful and verifiable digital attacks against on-line servers targeted Linux, followed by Microsoft Windows at 23.2 per cent.". This is not the same question as what percentage of attacks are successful. They are two populations of data.
So, I wonder....the interesting statistic to me would be what percentage of attacks against each platform are successful? This statistic is not explicitly stated. Also did they include OS X as part of the study?
*BSD is dead. This is just more proof of what we've all already known.
Ummmm. FreeBSD? OS X? Come on now, with OS X, we have a flavor of FreeBSD that is now the largest shipping *nix in the world.
To save time I will respond to most of your points with the simple reply: "I have actually heard very good things about Web Objects." I have not yet used it myself, but many folks whose opinions I respect have very sucsessfully implemented WO solutions.
To specifically respond to your point: It doesn't scale. At all.
I will state simply that the DOD is using Web Objects to manage all of the medical history and data of their employees including Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines, Semper Fi as well as many other branches of that department. That to me suggests it scales rather well, into the many hundreds of thousands if not millions of comprehensive records.
These typically monocular scopes usually offer 3 objectives of around 10x, 40x and 90-100x, giving a total possibly magnification of around 1000x with oil immersion.
The problem with this is that you are restricted to very small fields unless you have very expensive objectives. (many hundreds to thousands of dollars for the objective alone) Even then, your field is restricted and this is why we have been employing photo mosaicing of digitally captured images to get around this problem for our research with images that are at 400-1000X magnification. The cool thing about using a scanner (for lower mag requirements) is that you do not have to perform the photomosaicing.
I didn't clean my nose for a while in preparation for this advancement of knowledge and the results are worth it.
:-)
Yeah, well......that's disgusting.
People have been using scanners in this way for image forensics for years. We also used this method to get around image mosaicing large microscopy fields several years ago in an undergraduate biology class I took. (amazing what students come up with to avoid work) Now of course image mosaicing software is available to get around this problem, but it's good to see science stuff like this get out to the main stream. Perhaps this will also make it into a few junior high and high school classes as a cool exercise.
I can't imagine that many artists the RIAA represents are happy with some of the RIAA's behavior. I am sure they are having some of the same reactions that many folks have with Clippy......"Stop trying to help me!!!"
I should also have stated that I believe there is a significant need for medical records management software in the open source community and if you were to perform a little market research on medical records software, you would find the field is a mess of competing programs and standards, and you would not believe how much money is made by businesses that have half assed solutions to the problem. The cost to individual medical practices and hospitals is considerable and many companies do not have any real clue of how to properly implement this code. Things are complicated by numerous proprietary databases and lots of new HIPAA legislation that makes interconnectivity a real nightmare.
I've often thought that a good open source team of about thirty individuals including a half dozen subject matter experts, a couple good technical writers and half a dozen programmers could kick some serious butt in this market, establish an inter-operative database standard, either run it platform independent, or take advantage of some pretty powerful, yet inexpensive software like Web Objects and dominate the market within two years. Of course this third party you are talking about is probably interested in such a proposal, thus the offer. It's pretty amazing actually how many folks are wading around aimlessly in this market. Big players like GE, Siemens, IBM etc... are without any direction or focus on this problem and the market payoff could be relatively big if you properly market this to select members of government who are absolutely desperate to reduce the cost of medicine.
My guess would be that writing this grant would be like writing any other grant. The idea is to propose an idea, outline your thesis (in this case, why you are making a case for this software and why open source), talk about the background of this project, why it is important what the implications are if this were to succeed and how you plan on going about completing this project. Outline the costs and give a timeline, clearly state your goals and wrap it up.
That's not true in the United States, yet American scientists who refuse military work are exceedingly rare today.
Look, there are all sorts of issues involved with performing military and defense research, particularly if it is classifed. I've had more than one resume come across my desk where the Ph.D. has a blank space for a couple of years or more on their CV. If you perform classified work, it tends to lock one into industry as these are periods where you often cannot publish in the peer reviewed journals.
God help you if you are interested in an academic career and say.....invest yourself in doing sleep research and find out how to induce sleep remotely via say trans-cranial stimulation. Stuff like this, particularly projects that apply to non-lethal weapon systems are hot right now.
"Moth found trapped between points at Relay # 70, Panel F, of the Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator
:-)
Cool. I always wondered about the etymology of "computer bug", and now I know the etymology is truly related to entymology.
Ack! Thpppt!
Will we see Billy and the Boingers!!!! make a comeback tour on the new strip? Opus bangin away on the tuba was most punk. Very cool.
Social engineering is right. The BBC is also reporting that the RIAA is suing a 71 year old man. Apparently his grandchildren were coming over to his house and downloading music.
Just about all the users loved the system, too (imagine! Secretaries, using UNIX! :) )
:-) The running joke among the spook crowd was that that the black cases were the sole reason for the contract.
Ahhhh, now I know you are talking CIA. This actually surprised me back in 1991 or 1992 to see NeXT slabs on secretaries desks, but I thought it was very cool (I liked the Cubes). Aside from the rather interesting angle that certain current Apple fellows (former NeXT employees) had with cryptography, the security, built in scriptability, built in optical storage and other obvious choices for a critical, yet secure installation, NeXT had those cool black cases.
Re:do you only take humanities classes?
:-) However, that said, I agree with you and the other poster. That is why I said that hybrid technologies with pen and keyboard would be good. The tablet stuff from the Microsoft camp is not where it needs to be right now for this to happen and much of it still does not compare to the old Newtons. With the newtons, you could enter equations and such along with text.
To answer your question, no, I have a Ph.D. in retinal neurophysiology with many years of statistics, chemistry, biological science, bioengineering, anatomy and the first two years of medical school under my belt.
They require boot time, which is wasted time
So, get an iBook. They are cheap and when you wake them from sleep, they are on almost instantly. No waiting.
They also require juice considering they don't run on air and a random day at college lasts 8 hours for me.
My 800 Mhz iBook ran for about 5 hours of constant use which is more than plenty for a day at school considering that you are not constantly using the laptop during your school day. If you were, you had access to a power outlet. Currently, I use an 12in Powerbook that has less battery life, but since I am not in classes anymore, I prefer it and the extra features.
Also, laptops aren't very versatile for writing down stuff in a hurry.
I can type much faster that I can write as can many, many others who generally prefer taking notes with a keyboard.
The programs given are very limited and using them can feel very unnatural at times.
I find a simple text edit program the easiest and fastest way to input notes.
That whole issue might be solved by those tablet PCs with the pen thingy, which is far more suitable for jotting down notes and what not.
I agree with you here. I have owned an Apple Newton 120 (they still rock!) and I have used some of the new Microsoft tablets, and by far, the Newton had better usability, although they are showing their age now by lacking modern I/O and networking. The Newton however was not quite ideal for notetaking. If you plugged in the additional keyboard they were O.K., but it needed a little more integration with the pen and keyboard. The current Wintel tablets are simply tablet versions of dekstop metaphors and simply, don't work very well. More R&D needed to go into interface design. I don't know if Apple will ever produce another tablet/subtablet type device, but it would certainly be welcome in many circles.
"Let's screw the platform that made the Myst franchise what it is today!"
Indeed, when Myst was originally created by Cyan back in 1992/1993, it was an all Macintosh operation. They used all of the video and audio built into Macs leveraging Quicktime (on Quadras I seem to remember) for the production and play of the game. All audio and video was a Macintosh operation. When it was ported to Windows, I had a friend complaining it simply did not look as good as it did on my IIci or my Quadra 840av. The really cool thing was, this was created using Hypercard and Hypertalk scripts! and is probably one of the all time greatest Hypercard programs.
That sounds like nothing more than the usual tit-for-tat barbs that Taiwan and China have been throwing across the strait for decades. In fact, I suspect that's what this whole Trojan Horse issue is -- all bluster, no substance.
:-). If this is the case, it would be unprecedented.
However, we should not be complacent about China. I am certainly not one for warmongering but given the U.S. financial involvement in Taiwan (odds are the computer you are typing on was made there), if China ever does do anything more than little experimental probes then we will inexorably be drawn in to a conflict. China has long been a serious threat to world security, but desperately wants to be seen as a principal power in the world. (who knows, perhaps they are even pulling strings in N. Korea to make China look like the good guys that can keep things in check on the peninsula).
So, guided missile exercises in the Sea of Japan or in the Taiwanese straights are seen as a little provocative, but what about a little cyber warfare. Or would that be Warefare
... it frankly scares the hell out of me.
Hey, it's not just the power grid and atm's. There are command and control systems used by the department of defense that folks have migrated to Windows. Our Dept of Homeland security has standardized on Windows. Certain FAA traffic control systems are running on Windows. The Army's Landwarrior program is using Windows. Traffic control for trains and shipping are running on Windows. etc...etc...etc...
This should scare the hell out of a lot of people.
Nationwide universities are opening their doors to new students but closing off their network services. The Blaster worm has caused universities to take drastic actions to protect their campus networks. Universities have gone as far as shutting down their entire resnet network and bringing it back up dorm-by-dorm after each computer has been certified worm-free.
Geez, this gives that old joke about the guy yelling from the back of the auditorium, "Get a Mac!" new life.
He he. Headlines from the future: Harold P. Winkerbody comes out of nowhere to be the first 17 year old governor of California. He succeeds in changing the state name to Kalifornia, legalizes skateboarding in all public places, legalizes consumption of beer by minors and then is impeached after it is discovered he hacked into the system to rig the votes when he was elected.
Yes! So it wasn't the downloading that caused poor sales afterall. It was the
crappy music + high prices + strongarming.
Crappy music indeed. It seems that the industry after pushing grunge really hard was looking for the next new thing and jumped on the rap bit and engineered music garbage pushing it really hard in all mediums and exposures. I watched part of the MTV music video awards and never felt so out of touch with the music industry which any marketer will tell you is death. Lots of the new popular music completely misses the target for me and I am sure much of the music buying public. For me, I have been focusing on expanding my collection of older bluegrass, jazz and finding all that punk stuff that never made it to CD. Most of those purchases are not from the current RIAA libraries and I am sure many others are doing the same type of thing or ignoring music entirely leading to the current numbers.