"Value" is not defined as importance of the commodity. Value is defined as a company's worth based on assets, liabilities, and anticipated future cash flow; revenue, profits, and costs.
You can be selling the most important product in the world and make no profit, then your company's valuation will be low;
your intrinsic monopoly could be worth something, if you have that (E.g. ownership of land containing a certain $$ amount of commodity capable of being extracted at cost $Y and rate of Z units per quarter).
If Exxon-Mobil stops pumping out oil and refining gas, diesel and jet fuel, what's the worst that will happen?
$10/Gallon gas.
A mass exodus occurs towards alternative energy sources.
A federal inquiry is launched, and some Exxon execs go to jail for market manipulation; a shareholder lawsuit ensues, and the company is placed under different management who resume operations, unfortunately, legal delays and all, that happens years later...
If Apple stops pumping iPods, iPhones and iPads tomorrow, what's the worst that will happen?
Satan goes ice-skating in hell.
The Apple bubble bursts, and the stock price is adjusted to reflect a less-lofty valuation, such as 20x forward earnings.
Richard Stallman and Balmer become good friends, and the FSF starts marketing the reduced-price-as-in-cheap-beer Windows Express as an alternative to Linux.
Windows 7 (or windows 8) and Android take the market.
The Zune makes a sudden, miraculously unusual comeback.
The HOSTS file is not for blocking things; it is for optionally providing an alternative way of looking up some local names besides using DNS,
in an enterprise network with what is today called a local intranet. It has fallen into disuse, mostly exists for legacy reasons; maintaining HOSTS files
across machines in a network is inefficient; maintaining a local DNS service is normally the more appropriate strategy, and blacklisting can be implemented on the Enterprise's DNS service.
A perfectly appropriate firewalling mechanism exists in Windows called Windows Firewall with Advanced Security;
which allows you to set an outbound firewall rule to block opening all connections to a specified server.
This is safer than HOSTS file, because it simply blocks the address, without tampering DNS lookup results, and enabling a site to be repointed to
a phishing site..
HOSTS file is commonly abused or misused for nefarious purposes; its use for any purpose is strongly discouraged, and has been unsupported for a long time.
It would be no surprise to see the DNS resolver of a future version of Windows drop HOSTS file functionality entirely, and move towards Group policy configuration, or Administrator registry configuration for any 'manual local names'.
HOSTS file use as a mechanism for blocking or 'firewalling' things is also unsupported.
The HOSTS file is not a firewall, and the HOSTS it not a DNS access control mechanism.
It's still perfectly legitimate for a DNS resolver to attempt lookup via the DNS as a failover strategy, if the entry in the HOSTS file seems bad or non-responsive.
Browsers may do this; browsers may even bypass the HOSTS file entirely, because it is commonly abused by malware.
Malware and Adware commonly mess with this file to hijack users' browser by creating false host entries for common websites to point them to malware author-controlled domains.
Disabling the ability to silently do this on consumer-targeted OSes improves security.
This security feature/change is appropriate for end-user systems that are not part of a large enterprise intranet with unusual requirements necessitating local resolver entries.
If the site is intended to be blocked or "legitimately" hijacked/misdirected;
enterprises have more appropriate, more scalable means of implementing this; such as DNS server based blacklisting,
and configurations on edge firewalls.
[snip] For the Universities I've done IT for, typically the technology committee has either the Provost themselves or the assistant to the provost sit in on policy meetings which are finalized by the head of IT
As a University IT worker, it would be the head of IT, or someone with authority over the IT department,
who could demand that you exclude their host from the filter, or fire you, and replace you with someone who takes orders properly.....
What a ridiculous rule. Back when I went to school you weren't allowed to use a cell phone *during* class, but were free to have one with you
Well, one of the reasons they're commonly not allowed is -- many local governments have banned cell phones on school premises,
because if a perception that students were using them to make drug deals.
What is the point of banning cell phones in situations where they are not disruptive?
They can be used to cheat. Sometimes students use them to text. There are arguments/disagreements about
what counts as "disruptive" and what counts as "OK" use.
Banning them from the classroom settles the matter -- if a student is caught with one, and puts it away real quick,
it cannot later be argued that their use was nondisruptive, therefore the confiscator was in the wrong.
The ban against possession ensures that the staff who catch the student using one can act appropriately without
worry of unjustified complaints from the parents.
I don't think they're in general searching students specifically for phones; although schools will on occasion search random students' packs
or lockers for contraband such as controlled substances, cigarettes, alcohol, or weapons, the student has no right to possess,
and cell phones would be included in that.
Really? - What if a parent needs to contact a student?
It's similar to the situation where a spouse needs to contact their wife/husband who is in a meeting with a client.
They have two options.
(1) It's not really an emergency worth disrupting lessons or the class meeting -- the parent has to wait until the student gets out of class.
(2) It's an emergency, and they send someone to get the student out of class, to discuss.
Confiscation is an epic Bad Idea (tm) which makes the school liable both for damages relating to missed calls and for the cost of a new phone.
Nope. The school has the discretion to remove items from their students' possession when possession of the item is a safety issue or when possession of the item violates school policy, the law, or in the opinion of the administration, the item needs to be taken from the student, and this is not theft, as long as the school does not take the possession for their own.
This would be because while the student is on the premises, they are under the care of the school.
The school has rights and duties, while the child is under their care, and can compel the child to surrender any article under the child's possession.
If the item presents a safety hazard, the school is then free to dispose of the item if necessary; otherwise, they would need to document who the item
belongs to, and follow the policy the parents had agreed to, which probably involves contacting the parent, to inform them of what they are holding, and
that the student must not bring this to school in the future.
Should the item come back to school and be taken again, the school would follow their ordinary disciplinary policies again, which might include suspension of the student, permanent removal, or legal action against the parents.
But most likely the parents will get tired of having to repeatedly come back to the school to pick up the cell phone,
and the school might have a policy of a periodic search of students' persons who had committed a certain number of offenses.
which is an obvious invasion of privacy.
The matter of privacy is within the school's discretion according to their policies. As long as the school has physical custody of the student, the school has full authority over all privacy matters, specifically because the child is in the school's care, the staff of the school have parental rights (and duties), until the parent
sends someone to come and get the kid. The parent should not bring up private details when talking on the phone with their child while the child is under
someone else's care; the same goes when talking on a cell phone by the way in general, or sending a text message to someone in a public place, you cannot safely rely on the conversation being private.
disruptive to both class and administration, and often involves the student talking while standing right next to an administration employee,
In case of emergency, it is worth taking a one-time disruption of the class to summon the one student out of the room.
This will be much less of a disruption and much less frequent and severe than the disruptions and other issues that are caused by students with cell phones in classrooms who frequently abuse the phone whenever they can get away with it.
The correct way to do it is to allow cell phones set to a silent ring, and ban from making outgoing calls and texts during school hours
No. That's not a solution, because it doesn't address important issue s-- the cell phones, esp. sophisticated ones present too much a distraction in class,
they can be used to "pass notes" (SMS); cheat; make contacts that are unwanted and unauthorized (by the parents), and possibly
illicit (criminal); access Facebook, and other sites that have nothing to do with class. They can also bring unsafe content in the classroom,
or invade other students' privacy by capturing pictures or video.
Functions cell phones have are too much of a temptation and a distraction to both the student with the phone, and others in class.
Couldn't they just find out the numerical address (at home) and type that in (for various sites)?
It won't work for many sites that are hosted on name-based vhost servers; when the browser doesn't supply a valid
hostname for the site to display in the Host: header, an error page, or something other than the desired site, is shown.
You can enforce using opendns by forcing all traffic on your LAN to go through a proxy server.
Implement DNS lookups on the proxy server, and deny accessing sites by IP address.
A far bigger challenge is the expanding use of SSL by default. It solves a lot of problems for the individuals but it makes life more difficult for the enterprise admin who is supposed to filter these things.
There are products that deploy as agents that are installed on the client computers via group policy or other methods, and handle the blocking locally;
as long as this is school-owned equipment, and you can dictate local software policies, what browser may be installed, how it may be configured,
what other software can run, etc, and ensure noone being filtered can achieve admin access, there are solid options for filtering even SSL enabled sites.
So what happens when the central clearinghouse, or access to communications, goes down? The more complicated you make the interface for medical devices, the more potential points of failure you introduce when it comes to an emergency for any particular patient.
You issue a time-based certificate from the central clearinghouse, good for authenticating for READ-WRITE access to devices that trust the certificate for 21 days,
and on day 7, you immediately start applying for certificate renewal.
Also, you provide a manual override / temporary "security disable switch" that disables authentication for a specified period of time and
absolutely requires something that can only be done with intimate physical access, but is not required to grant READ-ONLY data access.
I always show it to them, give them the clinical interpretation of the data, and let them keep it if they want.
The problem with printouts is they are not machine-readable. For records keeping and trends analysis purposes, that is a pretty unsavory proposition,
versus a suitable digital file format for gathering the raw datapoints instead of displaying some visualization of them.
There are real potential harms to widely propogating machines that could decrypt the data; the exact same machines allow us to reprogram the device, including settings that could harm or kill the patient. The encryption IS the security on implantable, reprogrammable medical devices; password, 2 step authorization or the like is not possible
UNLESS every implant in use has a unique non-shared encryption key, that cannot possibly be obtained except with proper authorization,
then the encryption is not really "security" in the first place.
If there is one shared key and no unique password; then the key material is available.... for the right price, and with the right reverse-engineering skills applied.
I don't suppose it occurs to you to have the device send a serial number, and for there to be a central clearinghouse capable of authorizing any device to be reprogrammed, by lookup up the password, and giving it to the emergency responder, but to keep the device READ-ONLY otherwise?
I thought you said you didn't have access to this info? What this guy wants is exactly like an ODBII port for his heart.
Except well, you know... ODBII devices aren't necessarily passive, there's a possibility that some could make invasive
changes, that could effect the operation of the vehicle, which could have an adverse impact on the vehicle's warranty.
Allowing a third-party to interface with the medical device could be inherently dangerous, if this involves/requires two-way communications.
It's understandable that the manufacturer wouldn't allow this.
What they should be required to do is to provide the patient with access to any data that is stored by the device,
at the time when the persistent data is gathered from it, the record should be preserved and made available just as all their
other medical records are.
If the device doesn't actually store any data, then you don't actually have a record.
But it's also reasonable for a patient to want to pick the device that does keep a record,
given alternate choices from different manufacturers, model numbers, etc, etc.
Odd, I was thinking about the same thing. Except that it's the receptionist who needs that speech, not the poster.
Exactly. It's an iconic example of BAD customer service.
Yes... "go bother someone else, ask the records department" may meet the legal requirements.
In reality, the secretary with that kind of an attitude towards customers should be fired.
Do you really though? If you ask your hospital for a copy of your record, do they give it to you or do they redact it first?
In the US, they redact it to protect your PHI, if they are sending records to third parties for certain purposes
You have a right under the law to your complete medical records.
Redaction, in case where you order all your medical records to be released to yourself,
would be a violation of your patient privacy rights, and you could file a regulatory complaint against the hospital in that case.
Right... the best way to contribute for such an application is to contribute information about what they lack.
Or build your restaurant, and then donate, once you are financially successful.
I say wait until you are financially successful, so you will have more $$$ you can donate to OSS projects.
Whereas right now every $$$ of investment should be spent and every minute of your time should be planned
to be spent as efficiently as possible to start the restaurant and make it profitable, not for the purpose of helping
others benefit immediately through greater use of OSS software.
Tackle the harder problem. If you say you want to start a successful restaurant using open source software,
instead of doing what's obvious or simplest, now you have two problems, which is a MUCH harder/more unpleasant situation
With regards to business... "Keep it simple, stupid, and think it through."
There are well-known solutions that work well, and other restaurants know about,
follow best proven practices.
and also a webserver so people can read your menu and maybe even place takeout/delivery orders online.
If you take online orders, it would be a better move to get the web site hosted professionally in a HA datacenter, where
reliability can be assured to a higher degree, for this business-critical application,
with a telephone, serial, or pager-based backup for order data transfer in case your internet connection goes down,
so you don't lose orders, and remember losing orders = losing $$$.
Priority and IT time should be getting a good, stable, efficient, reliable POS system in place,
that has the reporting req'd for the business to function, with good vendor-supported integrations
into the accounting system, and fair due dilligence there.
As for accounting.... use what the Accountants are comfortable with; don't try to shoehorn
your organization into an open source solution, if it's not appropriate, when the good open source solutions are hard to find
or have poor online integrations or restaurant/ line-of-business-specific addons/plugins due to proprietary QB-specific services, banking protocols, and document formats.
An accounting package might not even be the cost-effective answer there;
the answer may even be BPaaS, outsourced Accounting as a Service,
or a SaaS accounting application.
The main thing is ensuring the management can focus on making the restaurant successful and profitable;
they need reports and accounting for decision making and to do that effectively, but otherwise,
accounting is a royal pain.
Corporations also have IT departments, who will demand Microsoft support provide them a bypass,
OR it will be a condition that has to be met, before they will purchase Windows 8.
Mark my words.... Microsoft will provide Enterprises a bypass of some kind, if not at release, then via a patch,
special tool, registry hack, or script that can be deployed for domain-joined computers via group policy.
The data may not be informative as it seems; I would say it is even deceptive, to equate people who registered as Democrats some time in the distant past as Obama supporters.
Just because someone's registered as a member of democrat party, does not necessarily mean they support Obama.
Someone who's a member of republican party may support Obama as well.
Independent affiliation doesn't mean you oppose both.
Party affiliation doesn't say which rep you vote for, and doesn't say who you support.
People check boxes when they originally registered to vote, and don't update the data every year, or when their views change,
most people are not activists, and may be registered as a particular party for a reason not reflecting their views and the votes they'll cast; also,
people oppose candidates they disapprove of regardless of party membership.
I think the real reason the author of the article didn't tell us about is... as an IT pro, less work per agent (though more agents required
for the same number of support requests, therefore more $$ costs to the business).
Talking on the phone, only one customer can really be supported at a time, the rep really has to give them undivided attention.
And in many situations, the user will be slower than support, so support will be "waiting" on the user, or having them on hold,
either way, the IT pro is working on one and only one request, and taking longer to do the same job, therefore less work.
With E-mail or Chat-based support, the IT pro can be expected to be 'pipeline' their requests; simultaneously deal with multiple users,
and efficiently utilize every moment to get work done on their assigned tickets.
Because they're not "bound" to the non-parallelizable task of talking on the phone, which requires an exclusive attention lock.
So some IT pros may find it less fun, even if it's more beneficial for the business organization in terms of getting more work done with fewer agents,
and advantageous to the customers not having to waste time waiting for their turn to talk to an agent, and getting a faster turnaround on simple requests.
Slashdot Mirror
"Value" is not defined as importance of the commodity. Value is defined as a company's worth based on assets, liabilities, and anticipated future cash flow; revenue, profits, and costs. You can be selling the most important product in the world and make no profit, then your company's valuation will be low; your intrinsic monopoly could be worth something, if you have that (E.g. ownership of land containing a certain $$ amount of commodity capable of being extracted at cost $Y and rate of Z units per quarter).
If Exxon-Mobil stops pumping out oil and refining gas, diesel and jet fuel, what's the worst that will happen?
$10/Gallon gas.
A mass exodus occurs towards alternative energy sources.
A federal inquiry is launched, and some Exxon execs go to jail for market manipulation; a shareholder lawsuit ensues, and the company is placed under different management who resume operations, unfortunately, legal delays and all, that happens years later...
If Apple stops pumping iPods, iPhones and iPads tomorrow, what's the worst that will happen?
Satan goes ice-skating in hell.
The Apple bubble bursts, and the stock price is adjusted to reflect a less-lofty valuation, such as 20x forward earnings.
Richard Stallman and Balmer become good friends, and the FSF starts marketing the reduced-price-as-in-cheap-beer Windows Express as an alternative to Linux.
Windows 7 (or windows 8) and Android take the market.
The Zune makes a sudden, miraculously unusual comeback.
The HOSTS file is not for blocking things; it is for optionally providing an alternative way of looking up some local names besides using DNS, in an enterprise network with what is today called a local intranet. It has fallen into disuse, mostly exists for legacy reasons; maintaining HOSTS files across machines in a network is inefficient; maintaining a local DNS service is normally the more appropriate strategy, and blacklisting can be implemented on the Enterprise's DNS service.
A perfectly appropriate firewalling mechanism exists in Windows called Windows Firewall with Advanced Security; which allows you to set an outbound firewall rule to block opening all connections to a specified server. This is safer than HOSTS file, because it simply blocks the address, without tampering DNS lookup results, and enabling a site to be repointed to a phishing site..
HOSTS file is commonly abused or misused for nefarious purposes; its use for any purpose is strongly discouraged, and has been unsupported for a long time. It would be no surprise to see the DNS resolver of a future version of Windows drop HOSTS file functionality entirely, and move towards Group policy configuration, or Administrator registry configuration for any 'manual local names'.
HOSTS file use as a mechanism for blocking or 'firewalling' things is also unsupported. The HOSTS file is not a firewall, and the HOSTS it not a DNS access control mechanism. It's still perfectly legitimate for a DNS resolver to attempt lookup via the DNS as a failover strategy, if the entry in the HOSTS file seems bad or non-responsive. Browsers may do this; browsers may even bypass the HOSTS file entirely, because it is commonly abused by malware.
Malware and Adware commonly mess with this file to hijack users' browser by creating false host entries for common websites to point them to malware author-controlled domains.
Disabling the ability to silently do this on consumer-targeted OSes improves security. This security feature/change is appropriate for end-user systems that are not part of a large enterprise intranet with unusual requirements necessitating local resolver entries.
If the site is intended to be blocked or "legitimately" hijacked/misdirected; enterprises have more appropriate, more scalable means of implementing this; such as DNS server based blacklisting, and configurations on edge firewalls.
[snip] For the Universities I've done IT for, typically the technology committee has either the Provost themselves or the assistant to the provost sit in on policy meetings which are finalized by the head of IT
As a University IT worker, it would be the head of IT, or someone with authority over the IT department, who could demand that you exclude their host from the filter, or fire you, and replace you with someone who takes orders properly.....
What a ridiculous rule. Back when I went to school you weren't allowed to use a cell phone *during* class, but were free to have one with you
Well, one of the reasons they're commonly not allowed is -- many local governments have banned cell phones on school premises, because if a perception that students were using them to make drug deals.
What is the point of banning cell phones in situations where they are not disruptive?
They can be used to cheat. Sometimes students use them to text. There are arguments/disagreements about what counts as "disruptive" and what counts as "OK" use.
Banning them from the classroom settles the matter -- if a student is caught with one, and puts it away real quick, it cannot later be argued that their use was nondisruptive, therefore the confiscator was in the wrong.
The ban against possession ensures that the staff who catch the student using one can act appropriately without worry of unjustified complaints from the parents.
I don't think they're in general searching students specifically for phones; although schools will on occasion search random students' packs or lockers for contraband such as controlled substances, cigarettes, alcohol, or weapons, the student has no right to possess, and cell phones would be included in that.
Really? - What if a parent needs to contact a student?
It's similar to the situation where a spouse needs to contact their wife/husband who is in a meeting with a client.
They have two options. (1) It's not really an emergency worth disrupting lessons or the class meeting -- the parent has to wait until the student gets out of class.
(2) It's an emergency, and they send someone to get the student out of class, to discuss.
Confiscation is an epic Bad Idea (tm) which makes the school liable both for damages relating to missed calls and for the cost of a new phone.
Nope. The school has the discretion to remove items from their students' possession when possession of the item is a safety issue or when possession of the item violates school policy, the law, or in the opinion of the administration, the item needs to be taken from the student, and this is not theft, as long as the school does not take the possession for their own.
This would be because while the student is on the premises, they are under the care of the school. The school has rights and duties, while the child is under their care, and can compel the child to surrender any article under the child's possession.
If the item presents a safety hazard, the school is then free to dispose of the item if necessary; otherwise, they would need to document who the item belongs to, and follow the policy the parents had agreed to, which probably involves contacting the parent, to inform them of what they are holding, and that the student must not bring this to school in the future.
Should the item come back to school and be taken again, the school would follow their ordinary disciplinary policies again, which might include suspension of the student, permanent removal, or legal action against the parents. But most likely the parents will get tired of having to repeatedly come back to the school to pick up the cell phone, and the school might have a policy of a periodic search of students' persons who had committed a certain number of offenses.
which is an obvious invasion of privacy.
The matter of privacy is within the school's discretion according to their policies. As long as the school has physical custody of the student, the school has full authority over all privacy matters, specifically because the child is in the school's care, the staff of the school have parental rights (and duties), until the parent sends someone to come and get the kid. The parent should not bring up private details when talking on the phone with their child while the child is under someone else's care; the same goes when talking on a cell phone by the way in general, or sending a text message to someone in a public place, you cannot safely rely on the conversation being private.
disruptive to both class and administration, and often involves the student talking while standing right next to an administration employee,
In case of emergency, it is worth taking a one-time disruption of the class to summon the one student out of the room. This will be much less of a disruption and much less frequent and severe than the disruptions and other issues that are caused by students with cell phones in classrooms who frequently abuse the phone whenever they can get away with it.
The correct way to do it is to allow cell phones set to a silent ring, and ban from making outgoing calls and texts during school hours
No. That's not a solution, because it doesn't address important issue s-- the cell phones, esp. sophisticated ones present too much a distraction in class, they can be used to "pass notes" (SMS); cheat; make contacts that are unwanted and unauthorized (by the parents), and possibly illicit (criminal); access Facebook, and other sites that have nothing to do with class. They can also bring unsafe content in the classroom, or invade other students' privacy by capturing pictures or video. Functions cell phones have are too much of a temptation and a distraction to both the student with the phone, and others in class.
Effective Internet filtering cannot be done at this time.
You mean 100% effective filtered internet access cannot be done.
There are highly effective internet filtering mechanisms.
1. Surround the school with a faraday cage.
2. Swap out all Windows PCs for dumb terminals
3. Setup a central computer with all dumb terminals attached.
4. Enable only safe internet applications.
5. Porn and Facebook cannot be viewed, because hardware is incapable of displaying it. Therefore: filtering was effective.
Couldn't they just find out the numerical address (at home) and type that in (for various sites)?
It won't work for many sites that are hosted on name-based vhost servers; when the browser doesn't supply a valid hostname for the site to display in the Host: header, an error page, or something other than the desired site, is shown.
You can enforce using opendns by forcing all traffic on your LAN to go through a proxy server. Implement DNS lookups on the proxy server, and deny accessing sites by IP address.
A far bigger challenge is the expanding use of SSL by default. It solves a lot of problems for the individuals but it makes life more difficult for the enterprise admin who is supposed to filter these things.
There are products that deploy as agents that are installed on the client computers via group policy or other methods, and handle the blocking locally; as long as this is school-owned equipment, and you can dictate local software policies, what browser may be installed, how it may be configured, what other software can run, etc, and ensure noone being filtered can achieve admin access, there are solid options for filtering even SSL enabled sites.
I'd only whitelist the dean for appropriate sites. No blanket access for anyone.
That works, until the Dean encounters the blocked message on a legitimate site, and demands you unblock all sites for him.
You either comply, or get replaced with someone who has the proper respect for management
It's pointless anyways, kids have Facebook on their phones these days.
Cell phones aren't allowed on school premises, and will be confiscated if a student is caught in possession of one.
you'd likely start with things mostly turned off, and then let on what you needed as required by the instructors
That really doesn't work very well when kids are to use the internet to research a subject, as assignment, or to learn more about the subject.
They generally need the use of search engines and unanticipated websites to do it properly.
The educational content students need to access is not concentrated on 3 or 4 websites that the instructors already know about.
So what happens when the central clearinghouse, or access to communications, goes down? The more complicated you make the interface for medical devices, the more potential points of failure you introduce when it comes to an emergency for any particular patient.
You issue a time-based certificate from the central clearinghouse, good for authenticating for READ-WRITE access to devices that trust the certificate for 21 days, and on day 7, you immediately start applying for certificate renewal.
Also, you provide a manual override / temporary "security disable switch" that disables authentication for a specified period of time and absolutely requires something that can only be done with intimate physical access, but is not required to grant READ-ONLY data access.
I always show it to them, give them the clinical interpretation of the data, and let them keep it if they want.
The problem with printouts is they are not machine-readable. For records keeping and trends analysis purposes, that is a pretty unsavory proposition, versus a suitable digital file format for gathering the raw datapoints instead of displaying some visualization of them.
There are real potential harms to widely propogating machines that could decrypt the data; the exact same machines allow us to reprogram the device, including settings that could harm or kill the patient. The encryption IS the security on implantable, reprogrammable medical devices; password, 2 step authorization or the like is not possible
UNLESS every implant in use has a unique non-shared encryption key, that cannot possibly be obtained except with proper authorization, then the encryption is not really "security" in the first place.
If there is one shared key and no unique password; then the key material is available.... for the right price, and with the right reverse-engineering skills applied.
I don't suppose it occurs to you to have the device send a serial number, and for there to be a central clearinghouse capable of authorizing any device to be reprogrammed, by lookup up the password, and giving it to the emergency responder, but to keep the device READ-ONLY otherwise?
I thought you said you didn't have access to this info? What this guy wants is exactly like an ODBII port for his heart.
Except well, you know... ODBII devices aren't necessarily passive, there's a possibility that some could make invasive changes, that could effect the operation of the vehicle, which could have an adverse impact on the vehicle's warranty.
Allowing a third-party to interface with the medical device could be inherently dangerous, if this involves/requires two-way communications.
It's understandable that the manufacturer wouldn't allow this.
What they should be required to do is to provide the patient with access to any data that is stored by the device, at the time when the persistent data is gathered from it, the record should be preserved and made available just as all their other medical records are.
If the device doesn't actually store any data, then you don't actually have a record. But it's also reasonable for a patient to want to pick the device that does keep a record, given alternate choices from different manufacturers, model numbers, etc, etc.
Odd, I was thinking about the same thing. Except that it's the receptionist who needs that speech, not the poster.
Exactly. It's an iconic example of BAD customer service.
Yes... "go bother someone else, ask the records department" may meet the legal requirements. In reality, the secretary with that kind of an attitude towards customers should be fired.
Do you really though? If you ask your hospital for a copy of your record, do they give it to you or do they redact it first?
In the US, they redact it to protect your PHI, if they are sending records to third parties for certain purposes
You have a right under the law to your complete medical records.
Redaction, in case where you order all your medical records to be released to yourself, would be a violation of your patient privacy rights, and you could file a regulatory complaint against the hospital in that case.
Right... the best way to contribute for such an application is to contribute information about what they lack. Or build your restaurant, and then donate, once you are financially successful. I say wait until you are financially successful, so you will have more $$$ you can donate to OSS projects.
Whereas right now every $$$ of investment should be spent and every minute of your time should be planned to be spent as efficiently as possible to start the restaurant and make it profitable, not for the purpose of helping others benefit immediately through greater use of OSS software.
Tackle the harder problem. If you say you want to start a successful restaurant using open source software, instead of doing what's obvious or simplest, now you have two problems, which is a MUCH harder/more unpleasant situation
With regards to business... "Keep it simple, stupid, and think it through."
There are well-known solutions that work well, and other restaurants know about, follow best proven practices.
and also a webserver so people can read your menu and maybe even place takeout/delivery orders online.
If you take online orders, it would be a better move to get the web site hosted professionally in a HA datacenter, where reliability can be assured to a higher degree, for this business-critical application, with a telephone, serial, or pager-based backup for order data transfer in case your internet connection goes down, so you don't lose orders, and remember losing orders = losing $$$.
Priority and IT time should be getting a good, stable, efficient, reliable POS system in place, that has the reporting req'd for the business to function, with good vendor-supported integrations into the accounting system, and fair due dilligence there.
As for accounting.... use what the Accountants are comfortable with; don't try to shoehorn your organization into an open source solution, if it's not appropriate, when the good open source solutions are hard to find or have poor online integrations or restaurant/ line-of-business-specific addons/plugins due to proprietary QB-specific services, banking protocols, and document formats.
An accounting package might not even be the cost-effective answer there; the answer may even be BPaaS, outsourced Accounting as a Service, or a SaaS accounting application.
The main thing is ensuring the management can focus on making the restaurant successful and profitable; they need reports and accounting for decision making and to do that effectively, but otherwise, accounting is a royal pain.
and/or Mac and/or Linux migrations will be viable options.
In other words, 2013 will be the year of the Linux (or MacOS) desktop?
Oh, wait. That's not what happened at all.
It kind of did. Windows 7 is really Vista Service Pack 3. Which Enterprises are moving to. Windows XP has two years of support left.
If you hate the UI changes in Windows Vista, which Windows 7 kept, and you don't like Metro, then you are kind of screwed.
Corporations also have IT departments, who will demand Microsoft support provide them a bypass, OR it will be a condition that has to be met, before they will purchase Windows 8.
Mark my words.... Microsoft will provide Enterprises a bypass of some kind, if not at release, then via a patch, special tool, registry hack, or script that can be deployed for domain-joined computers via group policy.
That only works for a limited period of time. Eventually, they stop selling Windows 7, and eventually they drop support for it.
The data may not be informative as it seems; I would say it is even deceptive, to equate people who registered as Democrats some time in the distant past as Obama supporters.
Just because someone's registered as a member of democrat party, does not necessarily mean they support Obama.
Someone who's a member of republican party may support Obama as well.
Independent affiliation doesn't mean you oppose both.
Party affiliation doesn't say which rep you vote for, and doesn't say who you support.
People check boxes when they originally registered to vote, and don't update the data every year, or when their views change, most people are not activists, and may be registered as a particular party for a reason not reflecting their views and the votes they'll cast; also, people oppose candidates they disapprove of regardless of party membership.
I think the real reason the author of the article didn't tell us about is... as an IT pro, less work per agent (though more agents required for the same number of support requests, therefore more $$ costs to the business).
Talking on the phone, only one customer can really be supported at a time, the rep really has to give them undivided attention. And in many situations, the user will be slower than support, so support will be "waiting" on the user, or having them on hold, either way, the IT pro is working on one and only one request, and taking longer to do the same job, therefore less work.
With E-mail or Chat-based support, the IT pro can be expected to be 'pipeline' their requests; simultaneously deal with multiple users, and efficiently utilize every moment to get work done on their assigned tickets.
Because they're not "bound" to the non-parallelizable task of talking on the phone, which requires an exclusive attention lock.
So some IT pros may find it less fun, even if it's more beneficial for the business organization in terms of getting more work done with fewer agents, and advantageous to the customers not having to waste time waiting for their turn to talk to an agent, and getting a faster turnaround on simple requests.