Do the devices need that high-speed component? Does a USB mouse need to be able to transmit data in excess of 400mbit/sec? No?
Well, actually, probably yes.
If your mouse works at 480 mbit/sec then it wont slow down anything else on the hub. If it runs in a legacy mode such as 1.5 mbit/sec, everything else timeslices with it and runs much slower.
What about those 5%? What did they dislike about Linux, why did they switch (back?) to Windows? - We need to get in touch with folks who switched from Linux to Windows and ask them these questions.
Ok, so we have established that there is a switch back rate. Its not that surprising. People try linux, then go back to microsoft for a variety of reasons, such as they discovered they were locked into windows and couldn't change over at that point.
To really make sense of the statistics, you also need to compare that to the rate of those who are using windows who now use linux.
Knowing only one statistic doesn't let you work out anything much.
Well, 50% of the population has a below average amount of common sense and decision making ability. Happy now? ^.^
50% of any population will be below the median value, but the same can be said of the average only when the distribution has a symmetrical distribution around the mean. This occurs in a normal distribution (amongst many other distributions, but not all).
(Hopefully this isn't to oblique a point to avoid the -1, Offtopic moderation.)
Add to this wearable computer technology, RFID tags everywhere, smart consumables, etc., and it is very possible that in 30 years it won't be possible to just tell people to turn their devices off.
And you think you can turn your digital watch off during a plane flight today?
ay I need more tinfoil on my hat, but I don't doubt for a moment that terrorists somewhere are looking at a way to have a "martyr" on a plane disrupt the controls from the cabin using electronics.
If you want scary, how about a terrorist on a hill top with a satellite dish? You could pump alot more power into a plane from a land based transmitter with a focused beam. You would be near to undetectable. You could fire it off through the back window of a van. You wouldn't even be able to triangulate on the beam if its a focused one. Its alot more discreet than firing a rocket launcher from near the tarmac. Even if you found the "weapon", you would be hard put to prove it caused the accident. Most police wouldn't even know what they were looking at if they found something like this.
This scares me alot more than somebody on a plane with a gameboy that uses 2 AAA batteries.
My 2c worth: Fix the planes - turning off the mobiles just hides the problem. The only defence against this is to harden the plane's electronics so that it can withstand this sort of thing.
One possible reason why it should not be legal to hack the XBox and run non-MS games or Linux on it is that it would effectively preclude Microsoft from adopting a modified razor blade strategy (pdf) (html) -- i.e., in this case, selling the XBox at a loss and making its profit on the sale of MS XBox games. This strategy is thwarted if Microsoft sells the XBox at a loss, only to have people use it to run Sony games or Linux.
In some countries (eg., Australia) exporting product for less than it cost to produce may be illegal in itself. Its called dumping, and when farmers from the EU do that, the US is the first to protect their own markets. Microsoft selling modified PC's at less than production cost isn't much different.
The current Knoppix CD unpacks to 2.1GB when not chloop'd! Considering the CD has both KDE, Gnome, several minor WdM's as well as most of the common server software...perl, php, mysql, apache, samba... and desktop software...Koffice, "Gnu" office, openoffice.org...it's not a "tiny" distro. That said, it's heavily biased to KDE because of space issues that Gnome apps get cut first.
Actually, it doesn't contain Gnome. Thats the point of this whole slashdot submission.
With DVD-Rs now out, it is just a matter of time before they pretty much replace the old 700 MB CD-Rs. It will be interesting to see how this project develops once it has more space to play around with.
Yeah - they will be able to include the source code.
Michael.
(No doubt the moderators will not appreciate the humour of this comment).
Righto... things like this drive me nuts. There presently already is a cheep and efficent means of taxing cars based on distance they drive. By taxing the fuel it self you have an accurate means of charging for a vehicel's use on the road. Heavier vehicels such as SUVs pay more then a honda driver due to the fact that these vehicels use more fuel per mile.
One of the big attractions of tolls is that they allow governments to move road costs off balance sheets.
If you build a road and pay for it with fuel tax, you usually have to generate debt. That this can be paid for with fuel excise is of no consequence, its still a government debt.
If you get a company to build a toll road and give them the right to toll for it (in legislation as a rule) then you have no debt. Society, of course does pay for it, plus profit for the private company at about 4 times the cost of just building the road and increasing petrol tax.
If you have less government debt, Standard and Poor & Moody's will give you a better credit rating, and you can borrow at a cheaper rate, financing your current account deficits, etc.
I'm not saying this is good (in fact, I think it sucks as roads cost money no matter what, and more if they are toll road than if not), but it is a strong factor for many governments at state/federal levels in countries around the world.
Wouldn't that be a good PR move? Not if the journalist hasn't tried it, and certainly not if they have to install it themselves, and write an article bitching about how hard it is to partition disks. Which is where the idea of a specialized distribution comes in. You've identified one feature that any such distribution would have to have- easy installation.
Ok, a moment of zealotry here, but... Knoppix does most of this for you. And, it does one thing you can never get off microsoft - an OS that doesn't depend on a hard drive. I have used knoppix to save data from a capable but not technically skilled friends laptop, before reinstalling windows.
He may not have switched over to linux yet, but he now knows what it is, and that it saved his work. He kept a copy of the distro "just in case" his windows boot up went down in flames again. And I was astounded to watch him take over and continue the salvage procedure - A non-destructive repartition and copying of files from the old primary partition before the inevitable destructive microsoft reinstall.
In summary, we don't need a special distro to sway people over, just continued evolution of the current trends. Knoppix has spawned several other distro's and I expect that its level of hardware detection will become a part of the standard distro of the future.
The last episode features the entire crew but Avon dying in a brief shootout - much more realistic than 'small group of mercenaries overcomes entire galactic government'.
Actually if you read afterlife, the book sequel to the TV series, you realise that two of the crew survive the final shootout.
For the record, I don't believe that we need drivers from the manufacturers. Any driver will be tied to its architecture and limited. Even an open source driver, while useful, may be limited, especially if its not well documented.
What we really need is open API's for the hardware, so that anyone can write their own driver instead of having to reverse engineer it by guessing what the hardware interface does.
Have you tried Knoppix, by any chance? That's the only distro where everything worked out of the box for me.
I have to agree with this one.
Its also the only distro I know of which (by design) doesn't save any hardware info, it just autoconfigures everything each boot up.
This is the most impressive linux disto I have ever seen - because it just works. This is the holy grail of the distros, and I can only hope that this is the base upon which most other distro's build in future. (Excluding the hard core fanatics that get pleasure out of Gentoo or even debian, ironicaly enough).
I think your problem is that Linux doesn't really have a COM analogue (or rather it has several, which is the problem from the point of view of application support) so you can't just embed a copy of QuickTime player into your presentation (well, you couldn't anyway, since QT doesn't run on Linux). If you run OO on Windows, then you don't have this problem.
My specific problem is that I have to make alot of peoples talks work. I not only give talks, but I also organise conferences for alot of others to give talks. Many of the talks that I get given don't actually work at all on the target computer, even under windows. Because they are in quicktime format. Or maybe its some mpeg codec I've never hit before. And usually about half of all speakers at conferences dont give you the talk until about 20-30 minutes before they are due to talk, which isn't alot of time if you have to reencode the video to another format.
Now I don't much like using windows/powerpoint. It crashes so often that when I do this sort of work, I run two computers in tandem with a switchbox so that I can flick over to the other if one crashes. Over a period of days, you can bet that someones talk will die midflight, for no obvious reason. If I could find a system that could take talks from a variety of sources and play them back without crashing, I would. That system does not exist (to my knowledge) today. Linux is incredibly stable, but it really isn't going to cope with a mac-formatted zip disk full of quicktime loops.
I'm not complaining about open office. I look at how far and fast it is moving, and I think --- soon. But not yet.
I do find it hard however, when so many people post saying that OO is the solution to everything. It isn't. If it was, there wouldn't be the next beta version available - we would already be using the final version now. Its good, but it isn't there for everyone. If you can make the move now, I would say to do so. Because then you won't get locked into the proprietary hell that microsoft offers. I have to deal with alot of other peoples proprietary hell's (with regard to certain conferences, in particular), and because of that I can't really run an open source solution. I believe that open office could actually succeed here, and I hope that it does so, and soon. It hasn't made it there yet, however.
Excuse me, if you want to open Words, Excel, etc, you can use Open Office. It works fine for me.
Then you haven't tried to put motion video into your talks. I do alot of talks, and they have alot of video's in them - 1 second repeating loops to be precise, for technical reasons. But the problem applies for any video. (I have actually though of reencoding some of this stuff as an animated gif, which would be a really ugly solution....)
Open office doesn't do video, or other fancy includes. It doesn't do the macros for excel right.
That doesn't make it bad, but it does make it less than 100% compatible.
I'm not here to troll on this one, but if open office could do my talks, I would be doing them all on a linux laptop now. But it doesn't, and any amount of people on./ saying open office does everything isn't going to make it so. Sure, it works for you. It is getting close to better than word for doing wordprocessing. It isn't that close on excel, nor powerpoint. We won't even talk about porting over access databases....
As soon as OO does this stuff reliably, I'm switching over. Until then, I _HAVE_ to use microsoft for this part of my work, and windows stays on my laptops, even with a room full of linux servers & workstations at home.
I submitted this story 2 days back. 2003-06-08 15:11:43 Microsoft wooing TigerDirect with cheaper software (articles,microsoft)-(rejected)
Here's the article I submitted.
There isn't much point griping about it. I've never managed a successful submission either, and a few of mine have appeared afterwards from someone else.
The editors are strange (to say the least) in what they choose to publish - you may get someone who isn't interested in your info, while another thinks its a great thing.
I don't know much about the editors at/. but clearly there must be alot of them (mostly in the US) to put out stories. Articles come out 24/7, so there must be alot of people on the job, all with differing opinions as to what is a good article.
We all get hit by this, only to see the same story get up on a few occasions.
P.S. Anyone know how much karma you would get for a successful submission? Its all obscure now with the silly rating system.
As I read this little blurb, I was thinking to myself that this probably won't help me any, since I have a pirated copy of XP (as do a nontrivial number of other users, I would imagine).
Yes, my more recent microsoft installs are pirated. Not because I dont own the software (I do have licenced versions that I don't install) but because I won't install software that I can't reinstall. If you have to authenticate with microsoft, then you can't truly reinstall it.
I live in fear that microsoft won't reauthenticate a legit copy because: 1. They decide to stop supporting that version. 2. Someone stole my authentication code and used it also 3. I can't connect to them on the internet and its 2am in the morning. 4. Microsoft has gone broke and it no longer owns microsoft.com
(No, i'm not joking. One day they won't be around) Orphaned software is bad, but uninstallable orphaned software is worse.
Now the purists would say I don't deserve the updates because I'm not using licenced software, although its hard for microsoft to show how they have lost money over this arrangement (I actually own way more licences for microsoft software than I use - especially since I moved to linux). But I'm one of their paying customers, without doubt.
So maybe they should be putting out patches for their unlicenced stuff too?
Well, if you can afford the equipment necessary to counterfeit Australian notes well, you can probably hire an artist to recreate the note for you.. which is basically how the REAL counterfeits work. Though yeah, a lot of small scale counterfeiters will print out a few twenties then go have a night on the town. That's basically who these anti-counterfeit measures are designed to stop. The big guys will always be able to fake anything. All it takes is money, and christ, they're printing the stuff anyway, so who cares?
Actually, we have never moved to the next phase in anticounterfitting in Australia (Mainly because the current system has virtually eliminated fraud - the stuff that gets done is mostly clearly different from the real thing and very ameturish).
The next stage is self validating notes which incorporate specific filters in the clear parts of the note - so you look through the clear part of the note to see a mark on the opaque bit that you cant see without it. While this has not had to be done as yet, the Australian technology has this built in as an option.
The technology has been licenced to 19 other countries, mainly because its the best one available. (Does my patriotic pride show just a little?)
t's like thrombolytics for strokes... I've personally seen that kill a few people, and despite the quality of the NINDS trial, some docs are very, very cautious about using it (can't really say that I blame them... lytics are dangerous drugs, best to use them with extreme care). Personally, if there's ANY contraindications to be had, relative or absolute, I urge the patient and family to consider other options.
I guess I'm lucky down here in Oz. Most people in this state get primary angioplasty rather than thrombolytics - for the reasons you outline.
Last time I checked the literature on Amiodarone, it was improving survival to ICU admission, but not to hospital discharge. There's two questions here - does it improve survival, and does it improve it enough to make it worthwhile. The answers appear to be yes and maybe.
Ever since we've had recording devices, people have been able to BUY (not rent) a version of whatever it was that they had, and use it however they want. Things have only changed in the last decade - and they changed without telling anyone. The industries are trying to sneak the changes in without anyone really noticing until it's a part of the culture.
The way to think of it is simple to my mind. Don't worry about the cost of replacing your old music collection. Think of it over a lifetime. Do you spend $20 per month every month on music? If not, then the microsoft model will cost you more. If you actually spend more than this per week then the microsoft model may make sense. Unless they increase the prices in the future, of course, or you lose interest in new music as you grow older. Fewer older people buy new music, and older artists stop releasing after a while, so they buy less of that, too. I can see where microsoft is coming from - revenue generation. They are aiming to make more of it than apple, for most people. And if they don't, they will increase the subscription rate until they do.
In his defense: we had amiodarone for recurrent VF in 1997; we were the first agency in the country to have it.
I hate to say it, but the US is along way behind on that one. Amiodarone was being used years before that in Australia and the UK. I always found it strange (because the US is usually the first to get most drugs, equipment, etc) but to my mind, using amiodarone for recurrent VF is a standard treatment (I was using it in 92, and I wasn't exactly a pioneer).
If you regularly ignore its conclusions, then it's better not even having the feature.
Thats why many departments turn off the automatic interpretation. Its just not that easy to do it correctly in a wide variety of real life situations. Its of the same order of complexity as most other image recognition problems.
So the interpretation is pretty easy to most humans with a bit of training, and frustratingly hard to code an algorithm for in the real world.
Slashdot Mirror
Do the devices need that high-speed component? Does a USB mouse need to be able to transmit data in excess of 400mbit/sec? No?
Well, actually, probably yes.
If your mouse works at 480 mbit/sec then it wont slow down anything else on the hub. If it runs in a legacy mode such as 1.5 mbit/sec, everything else timeslices with it and runs much slower.
Michael
What about those 5%? What did they dislike about Linux, why did they switch (back?) to Windows? - We need to get in touch with folks who switched from Linux to Windows and ask them these questions.
Ok, so we have established that there is a switch back rate. Its not that surprising. People try linux, then go back to microsoft for a variety of reasons, such as they discovered they were locked into windows and couldn't change over at that point.
To really make sense of the statistics, you also need to compare that to the rate of those who are using windows who now use linux.
Knowing only one statistic doesn't let you work out anything much.
Michael
What are we, a perfect bell curve?
Well, 50% of the population has a below average amount of common sense and decision making ability. Happy now? ^.^
50% of any population will be below the median value, but the same can be said of the average only when the distribution has a symmetrical distribution around the mean. This occurs in a normal distribution (amongst many other distributions, but not all).
(Hopefully this isn't to oblique a point to avoid the -1, Offtopic moderation.)
Hope that this clarifies the discussion.
Michael
some points about how difficult it is to harm an airplane with EMP weapons.
If that is true, why worry about a few mobile phones?
Michael
You're in a country that weakly encrypts all your private data and then just makes it illegal to break the encryption.
Actually I might not be.
Michael
Add to this wearable computer technology, RFID tags everywhere, smart consumables, etc., and it is very possible that in 30 years it won't be possible to just tell people to turn their devices off.
And you think you can turn your digital watch off during a plane flight today?
Michael
ay I need more tinfoil on my hat, but I don't doubt for a moment that terrorists somewhere are looking at a way to have a "martyr" on a plane disrupt the controls from the cabin using electronics.
If you want scary, how about a terrorist on a hill top with a satellite dish? You could pump alot more power into a plane from a land based transmitter with a focused beam. You would be near to undetectable. You could fire it off through the back window of a van. You wouldn't even be able to triangulate on the beam if its a focused one. Its alot more discreet than firing a rocket launcher from near the tarmac. Even if you found the "weapon", you would be hard put to prove it caused the accident. Most police wouldn't even know what they were looking at if they found something like this.
This scares me alot more than somebody on a plane with a gameboy that uses 2 AAA batteries.
My 2c worth: Fix the planes - turning off the mobiles just hides the problem. The only defence against this is to harden the plane's electronics so that it can withstand this sort of thing.
Michael
One possible reason why it should not be legal to hack the XBox and run non-MS games or Linux on it is that it would effectively preclude Microsoft from adopting a modified razor blade strategy (pdf) (html) -- i.e., in this case, selling the XBox at a loss and making its profit on the sale of MS XBox games. This strategy is thwarted if Microsoft sells the XBox at a loss, only to have people use it to run Sony games or Linux.
In some countries (eg., Australia) exporting product for less than it cost to produce may be illegal in itself. Its called dumping, and when farmers from the EU do that, the US is the first to protect their own markets. Microsoft selling modified PC's at less than production cost isn't much different.
Michael
The current Knoppix CD unpacks to 2.1GB when not chloop'd! Considering the CD has both KDE, Gnome, several minor WdM's as well as most of the common server software...perl, php, mysql, apache, samba... and desktop software...Koffice, "Gnu" office, openoffice.org...it's not a "tiny" distro. That said, it's heavily biased to KDE because of space issues that Gnome apps get cut first.
Actually, it doesn't contain Gnome. Thats the point of this whole slashdot submission.
Michael
With DVD-Rs now out, it is just a matter of time before they pretty much replace the old 700 MB CD-Rs. It will be interesting to see how this project develops once it has more space to play around with.
Yeah - they will be able to include the source code.
Michael.
(No doubt the moderators will not appreciate the humour of this comment).
Righto... things like this drive me nuts. There presently already is a cheep and efficent means of taxing cars based on distance they drive. By taxing the fuel it self you have an accurate means of charging for a vehicel's use on the road. Heavier vehicels such as SUVs pay more then a honda driver due to the fact that these vehicels use more fuel per mile.
One of the big attractions of tolls is that they allow governments to move road costs off balance sheets.
If you build a road and pay for it with fuel tax, you usually have to generate debt. That this can be paid for with fuel excise is of no consequence, its still a government debt.
If you get a company to build a toll road and give them the right to toll for it (in legislation as a rule) then you have no debt. Society, of course does pay for it, plus profit for the private company at about 4 times the cost of just building the road and increasing petrol tax.
If you have less government debt, Standard and Poor & Moody's will give you a better credit rating, and you can borrow at a cheaper rate, financing your current account deficits, etc.
I'm not saying this is good (in fact, I think it sucks as roads cost money no matter what, and more if they are toll road than if not), but it is a strong factor for many governments at state/federal levels in countries around the world.
Michael
Wouldn't that be a good PR move?
... Knoppix does most of this for you. And, it does one thing you can never get off microsoft - an OS that doesn't depend on a hard drive. I have used knoppix to save data from a capable but not technically skilled friends laptop, before reinstalling windows.
Not if the journalist hasn't tried it, and certainly not if they have to install it themselves, and write an article bitching about how hard it is to partition disks.
Which is where the idea of a specialized distribution comes in. You've identified one feature that any such distribution would have to have- easy installation.
Ok, a moment of zealotry here, but
He may not have switched over to linux yet, but he now knows what it is, and that it saved his work.
He kept a copy of the distro "just in case" his windows boot up went down in flames again. And I was astounded to watch him take over and continue the salvage procedure - A non-destructive repartition and copying of files from the old primary partition before the inevitable destructive microsoft reinstall.
In summary, we don't need a special distro to sway people over, just continued evolution of the current trends. Knoppix has spawned several other distro's and I expect that its level of hardware detection will become a part of the standard distro of the future.
My 2c of speculation and comment,
Michael
The last episode features the entire crew but Avon dying in a brief shootout - much more realistic than 'small group of mercenaries overcomes entire galactic government'.
Actually if you read afterlife, the book sequel to the TV series, you realise that two of the crew survive the final shootout.
Michael
You could recover your data using Knoppix, which would let you boot into a system and read the file system. Unless you encrypted that.
Michael
For the record, I don't believe that we need drivers from the manufacturers. Any driver will be tied to its architecture and limited. Even an open source driver, while useful, may be limited, especially if its not well documented.
What we really need is open API's for the hardware, so that anyone can write their own driver instead of having to reverse engineer it by guessing what the hardware interface does.
Just my 2c worth.
Michael
Have you tried Knoppix, by any chance? That's the only distro where everything worked out of the box for me.
I have to agree with this one.
Its also the only distro I know of which (by design) doesn't save any hardware info, it just autoconfigures everything each boot up.
This is the most impressive linux disto I have ever seen - because it just works. This is the holy grail of the distros, and I can only hope that this is the base upon which most other distro's build in future. (Excluding the hard core fanatics that get pleasure out of Gentoo or even debian, ironicaly enough).
Michael
I think your problem is that Linux doesn't really have a COM analogue (or rather it has several, which is the problem from the point of view of application support) so you can't just embed a copy of QuickTime player into your presentation (well, you couldn't anyway, since QT doesn't run on Linux). If you run OO on Windows, then you don't have this problem.
My specific problem is that I have to make alot of peoples talks work. I not only give talks, but I also organise conferences for alot of others to give talks. Many of the talks that I get given don't actually work at all on the target computer, even under windows. Because they are in quicktime format. Or maybe its some mpeg codec I've never hit before. And usually about half of all speakers at conferences dont give you the talk until about 20-30 minutes before they are due to talk, which isn't alot of time if you have to reencode the video to another format.
Now I don't much like using windows/powerpoint. It crashes so often that when I do this sort of work, I run two computers in tandem with a switchbox so that I can flick over to the other if one crashes. Over a period of days, you can bet that someones talk will die midflight, for no obvious reason. If I could find a system that could take talks from a variety of sources and play them back without crashing, I would. That system does not exist (to my knowledge) today. Linux is incredibly stable, but it really isn't going to cope with a mac-formatted zip disk full of quicktime loops.
I'm not complaining about open office. I look at how far and fast it is moving, and I think --- soon. But not yet.
I do find it hard however, when so many people post saying that OO is the solution to everything. It isn't. If it was, there wouldn't be the next beta version available - we would already be using the final version now. Its good, but it isn't there for everyone. If you can make the move now, I would say to do so. Because then you won't get locked into the proprietary hell that microsoft offers. I have to deal with alot of other peoples proprietary hell's (with regard to certain conferences, in particular), and because of that I can't really run an open source solution. I believe that open office could actually succeed here, and I hope that it does so, and soon. It hasn't made it there yet, however.
Just my $0.20 worth (ie., 10x my usual rant)
Michael
Excuse me, if you want to open Words, Excel, etc, you can use Open Office. It works fine for me.
....)
./ saying open office does everything isn't going to make it so. Sure, it works for you. It is getting close to better than word for doing wordprocessing. It isn't that close on excel, nor powerpoint. We won't even talk about porting over access databases ....
Then you haven't tried to put motion video into your talks. I do alot of talks, and they have alot of video's in them - 1 second repeating loops to be precise, for technical reasons. But the problem applies for any video. (I have actually though of reencoding some of this stuff as an animated gif, which would be a really ugly solution
Open office doesn't do video, or other fancy includes. It doesn't do the macros for excel right.
That doesn't make it bad, but it does make it less than 100% compatible.
I'm not here to troll on this one, but if open office could do my talks, I would be doing them all on a linux laptop now. But it doesn't, and any amount of people on
As soon as OO does this stuff reliably, I'm switching over. Until then, I _HAVE_ to use microsoft for this part of my work, and windows stays on my laptops, even with a room full of linux servers & workstations at home.
Michael
I submitted this story 2 days back. 2003-06-08 15:11:43 Microsoft wooing TigerDirect with cheaper software (articles,microsoft)-(rejected)
/. but clearly there must be alot of them (mostly in the US) to put out stories. Articles come out 24/7, so there must be alot of people on the job, all with differing opinions as to what is a good article.
Here's the article I submitted.
There isn't much point griping about it. I've never managed a successful submission either, and a few of mine have appeared afterwards from someone else.
The editors are strange (to say the least) in what they choose to publish - you may get someone who isn't interested in your info, while another thinks its a great thing.
I don't know much about the editors at
We all get hit by this, only to see the same story get up on a few occasions.
P.S. Anyone know how much karma you would get for a successful submission? Its all obscure now with the silly rating system.
Michael
As I read this little blurb, I was thinking to myself that this probably won't help me any, since I have a pirated copy of XP (as do a nontrivial number of other users, I would imagine).
Yes, my more recent microsoft installs are pirated. Not because I dont own the software (I do have licenced versions that I don't install) but because I won't install software that I can't reinstall. If you have to authenticate with microsoft, then you can't truly reinstall it.
I live in fear that microsoft won't reauthenticate a legit copy because:
1. They decide to stop supporting that version.
2. Someone stole my authentication code and used it also
3. I can't connect to them on the internet and its 2am in the morning.
4. Microsoft has gone broke and it no longer owns microsoft.com
(No, i'm not joking. One day they won't be around) Orphaned software is bad, but uninstallable orphaned software is worse.
Now the purists would say I don't deserve the updates because I'm not using licenced software, although its hard for microsoft to show how they have lost money over this arrangement (I actually own way more licences for microsoft software than I use - especially since I moved to linux). But I'm one of their paying customers, without doubt.
So maybe they should be putting out patches for their unlicenced stuff too?
My 2c
Michael
Well, if you can afford the equipment necessary to counterfeit Australian notes well, you can probably hire an artist to recreate the note for you.. which is basically how the REAL counterfeits work. Though yeah, a lot of small scale counterfeiters will print out a few twenties then go have a night on the town. That's basically who these anti-counterfeit measures are designed to stop. The big guys will always be able to fake anything. All it takes is money, and christ, they're printing the stuff anyway, so who cares?
Actually, we have never moved to the next phase in anticounterfitting in Australia (Mainly because the current system has virtually eliminated fraud - the stuff that gets done is mostly clearly different from the real thing and very ameturish).
The next stage is self validating notes which incorporate specific filters in the clear parts of the note - so you look through the clear part of the note to see a mark on the opaque bit that you cant see without it. While this has not had to be done as yet, the Australian technology has this built in as an option.
The technology has been licenced to 19 other countries, mainly because its the best one available. (Does my patriotic pride show just a little?)
Michael
t's like thrombolytics for strokes... I've personally seen that kill a few people, and despite the quality of the NINDS trial, some docs are very, very cautious about using it (can't really say that I blame them... lytics are dangerous drugs, best to use them with extreme care). Personally, if there's ANY contraindications to be had, relative or absolute, I urge the patient and family to consider other options.
I guess I'm lucky down here in Oz. Most people in this state get primary angioplasty rather than thrombolytics - for the reasons you outline.
Last time I checked the literature on Amiodarone, it was improving survival to ICU admission, but not to hospital discharge.
There's two questions here - does it improve survival, and does it improve it enough to make it worthwhile. The answers appear to be yes and maybe.
Michael
Ever since we've had recording devices, people have been able to BUY (not rent) a version of whatever it was that they had, and use it however they want. Things have only changed in the last decade - and they changed without telling anyone. The industries are trying to sneak the changes in without anyone really noticing until it's a part of the culture.
The way to think of it is simple to my mind. Don't worry about the cost of replacing your old music collection. Think of it over a lifetime. Do you spend $20 per month every month on music? If not, then the microsoft model will cost you more. If you actually spend more than this per week then the microsoft model may make sense. Unless they increase the prices in the future, of course, or you lose interest in new music as you grow older. Fewer older people buy new music, and older artists stop releasing after a while, so they buy less of that, too. I can see where microsoft is coming from - revenue generation. They are aiming to make more of it than apple, for most people. And if they don't, they will increase the subscription rate until they do.
Michael
In his defense: we had amiodarone for recurrent VF in 1997; we were the first agency in the country to have it.
I hate to say it, but the US is along way behind on that one. Amiodarone was being used years before that in Australia and the UK. I always found it strange (because the US is usually the first to get most drugs, equipment, etc) but to my mind, using amiodarone for recurrent VF is a standard treatment (I was using it in 92, and I wasn't exactly a pioneer).
Michael
If you regularly ignore its conclusions, then it's better not even having the feature.
Thats why many departments turn off the automatic interpretation. Its just not that easy to do it correctly in a wide variety of real life situations. Its of the same order of complexity as most other image recognition problems.
So the interpretation is pretty easy to most humans with a bit of training, and frustratingly hard to code an algorithm for in the real world.
Michael