Hey dickwad, sorry but in George Bush's Amerika it took me six years to get promoted to assistant manager at Domino's so I could start saving up for my own place! Besides I get cable and DSL for free, Mom does my laundry without me asking her to and I feed their cat while they go on vacation, which they do a lot these days. I have a totally cool gaming set-up--two XBox's, all three generations of PSP's (all on a bitching gaming LAN together). The guys at the game store call me when new stuff comes in (I send them free pizza now that I'm in charge of the DeLindo Hills store on Tuesdays) so I have a library of games almost as large as theirs (I don't buy the lame stuff).
My girlfriend's totally cool with it, she hates her place, her parents are always on her ass to get her own place. Mine are cool. In fact, they pretty much don't talk to me at all. She stays over and stuff, Mom does her laundry too.
I'm gonna get my place soon, I just don't want to be ripped off by these stupid apartment complexes. I'm not going to pay all this deposit and move-in crap. People that are so into "independence" so they can feed the corporate greed machine are just lame and stupid. I'm patient enough to not let all those facists real estate greedheads rip me off. Besides, nobody's really independent, they rely on their boss and stuff. Screw all that, I'm being my own person. You guys are just jealous.
"In the beginning, do you think it was easy to get the first Linux kernel version, find something to bootstrap it off of and somehow create a functioning system?"
Did I imply that I did?
"Should we have held Linus accountable for this?"
He is being held accountable. He demands accountability for the kernel.
"Would we have been a lot better off if the police hauled Linus off for being an "unlicenced software developer"?"
There's a semantic misunderstanding here. I mean licensing along the lines that we license people in my field, nursing. You can have an unlicensed nurse care for you, they may provide excellent care, far superior to other licensed nurses, but if they hurt you there is no recourse. There's no one to complain to, because no one is making a claim for their competence.
"Would we have been better of if Linus stopped at version 0.01 so he could design an installer, a window system, and write accessible documentation?"
Actually, I'd prefer that he'd stopped at that point and worked on something like clippy. I would have waited for SMP support if we could have had an annoying, dancing penguin.
I don't know why you're attacking me for wanting something better. I'm not stomping off to Redmond, I still scour the LDP and lists when I have a problem. I just think ESR has a point, which is rare, usually I think he needs medication.
This will happen, Linux can't remain as it has been if it is going to move to the desktop. I just have this notion that we might benefit from talking about how to make it happen rather than resisting it out mere conservatism for conservatism's sake.
What I meant was I have had no formal instruction in anything technology related. I wasn't in CS in school or anything like that. I didn't go to any install-fests, I didn't have anyone helping me out.
"rdewald, I have to strongly disagree with you on this one. I'm a member of two separate LUG mailing lists, and I find that people are more than helpful in answering all questions, even simple ones."
Try NYLUG, PhillyLUG or the Austin LUG, the three in which I have been involved. I'm happy to hear you have had a better experience than I have.
"But more specifically, let me ask you this: when was the last time, after spending hours to finally figure something out, you went back and wrote up a quick description that can be added back to the documentation?"
It was about a year ago. I still have not heard back from the project maintainers.
While we're on the topic, I had a suggestion for Taco for improving slashdot. He directed me to the sourceforge project, I submitted the idea, they liked it, coded it up, and now you can give gift subscriptions anonymously on slashdot.
You might think I am part of the problem, but I'm not.
First of all, as a self-taught Linux user I am delighted that someone as talented as ESR can have a hair-pulling session doing something like setting up CUPS. I have had many an evening like this. Excruciatingly close to getting something done, something that should be simple, and instead spending hours feeling stupid and incompetent. He's right, and he's right about the fact that this is why there are countless unused Linux install discs littering desk drawers under Windows machines, tried and abandoned by people who hate Micorosft, hate Windows, who would LOVE to support an alternative, but can't make it work.
The user is the loser. There's a clubby, exclusive, snotty attitude among user's groups. The online resources are hopelessly disorganized or relentlessly dinged with ads. The vision that Stallman has of software as knowledge, rather than product, is lost among the throng of sociopaths that spout RTFM at users that ask the same questions over and over.
Well, you know why people have the same questions over and over? Because the software is obscure and the documentation is unhelpful. GNU is based on people solving their own problems and then giving other people an opportunity to use thier solutions. Documentation, at best, is an afterthought. Once you have solved a problem, there's no need to go back and explain it to yourself, any documentation that does exist arises purely from the virture of developers, not because they need it themselves.
The fact that the most useful thing you can have with this enormously powerful gem of human progress (the computer) when trying to use Linux is a printed-out HOW-TO, probably downloaded and printed from a Windows box, is more than ironic, it is shameful. The tools for providing context-sensitive help are there, they just are unused. The developers don't care about the user, they've solved thier problem by this time.
If OSS developers needed robust documentation in order to distribute their product, they would either develop it or not distribute their code. But they don't. There's no reward for the developer.
This brings me around again to the notion of licensing software developers and then making them accountable for the usability of the product. Not as an avenue for exclusion, but to build a community of developers devoted to the user, a Mr. Goodwrench sort of certification standards, that tests it's releases against naive and novice users. How you make this work I have no idea.
Red Hat should be doing this already, but they've clearly left the home user at the altar.
The author of the study sought to disprove the notion that heavy internet usage had a deliterious effect on people experiencing depression.
That's a long way from claiming that Internet usage is not harmful, or beyond that, that it may have an effect on depression.
This is the psycho-industrial complex in full bloom. Truth is, "internet usage" is such a scientifically meaningless term as to evade any meaningful scientific metric. It is analogous to studying groups of people "using sidewalks."
"Internet usage" can mean anything from viewing pornography to online communities like Slashdot, with lots of stops in between. Each of these stops will have radically different effects on the user, particularly along an axis like "social isolation." Personally, there are times when I use the Internet to interact with people, there are other times that I use it to get the hell away from people. It's a meaningless indicator.
There is a mention at the close of the story that indicates the author is going on to study epidemiology. Good, she needs it.
There was a time when air conditioning was not universal. Places of business advertised and promoted the fact that their place of business was air conditioned and they managed the burden of the increased cost of air conditioning in order to attract customers.
WiFi will follow the same trajectory. Wise businesses like restaurants and coffee shops will just provide it like air conditioning and leverage the log-on portal for advertising. I think it will be likely that they will filter on mac addressess and quota traffic over ports like tcp25 to prevent abuse, but eventually they will provide it for free. It will become the new air conditioning--the mark of a savvy service business.
Until then, people will try to charge for it. The main problem with that is the variety of needs that customers will have. Some need it a lot, some need it once a year. Some just prefer to have it, some can't live without it. How do you price-model that?
You don't.
It's the new utility. Figure it into your overhead.
"We can settle out of tort for $1,000,000USD to be transferred to my Nigerian bank account so my children can immediately extract it.'
Mr. Kenny Humbigawee of Lagos has agreed to act as my intermediary. I will send you plane tickets to meet him in Lagos upon receipt of your credit card numbers and expiration dates. This formaility is necessary for identification purposes only to facilitate the transfer of funds. Your portion of the transfer will be 304%.
Thank you for your assistance and business expertise with this important settlement matter.
I have been scanning my technical documentation and I have found several similarly offensive and discriminatory terms. I propose the following modifications:
Server/client - please use transactor/transactee.
Ones/zeroes - please use numerically-advantaged/disadvantaged
directory/folder - please use facilitator/facilitatee
physical/virtual - please use reality-enhanced/disenhanced.
I witnessed an executive officer, when asked to move the cursor on the screen with the mouse, pick up the mouse and place it in the glass surface of the computer monitor to (very awkwardly) move the cursor. While doing this he remarked that he thought there might be something wrong with his mouse because "it doesn't always catch it like it used to."
I did not laugh. I was waiting to pitch a rather complicated proposal concerning the reorganization of some database tables to this same person (my first meeting with them). I was unpersuasive.
The problem with antibiotic abuse in health care workers is particularly troubling, as you describe. I'm like you, I don't take them unless my clinical situation indicates it--meaning I have the right drug for the right bug and I'm getting worse instead of better.
Don't even get me started on anti-bacterial soaps.... Not only does their misuse compound the problems we've discussed above, but these soaps only kill off the same flora that our antibiotics (particularly the cheap and safe ones) do, leaving the drug-resistant flora relatively unaffected. As they get washed into our communal water-treatment facilities, the drug-resistant strains are then left with reduced competiton for the limited, consumable resources (like food) that they need to live and multiply.
Because of the use of the "New and Improved Anti-bacterial ____," we encourage the survival and colonization of the very bugs that cause the illnesses for which we don't have good and/or cheap antibiotics. I particularly regret seeing antibacterials used routinely at home around infants, which is the use for which they are most aggressively marketed....
But, I've wandered sufficiently off topic for now.
"Possibly, but what the hell are medical staff doing with cell phones on them in the first place while they're on the job, working with patients? "Hi, sorry, I'm smack in the middle of cracking open someone's ribcage, can I call you back?""
There are a lot of different answers to this question because the term "medical staff" covers a lot of different people with different functions.
Surgeons take calls during procedures. They always have, long before there were even cordless phones, much less cell phones. Medical treatment is sometimes dependent upon the rapid dispersal of information and an equally rapid decision being made in response to said information. I've talked to more than a few chest surgeons on the phone while they had their hands in someone else's chest. This was accomplished (aseptically) by speaker phone.
With the advent of cell phones, many health care providers who care for patients dependent upon rapid decision-making carry cell phones with them 24/7/365. This easy access to decision-making resources has saved lives and reduced suffering, but these people represent a tiny, tiny fraction of the health care workers carrying cell phones today.
Having said that, health care workers are people first, and there exists roughly the same proportion of stupid, thoughtless people in the industry as exist in the world at large. So, many health care workers use phones thoughtlessly. Should they stop? Sure.
Wedding rings are virtual cesspools of virulent bacteria, particularly if they are engraved and/or contain a complex setting. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to get people to take off their wedding rings while working in ICU's even though we have reams of good, hard science demonstrating that rings are a very efficient way to infect patients with all kinds of deadly bugs? Forget cell phones, it's just another surface, just another pathogen vehicle. It's just a particularly powerful vehicle because people touch it with their hands.
I despise cell phones only slightly more than I despise strollers. They are both a menace to civility in public space. But, there's nothing new here. My point is the cell phone problem discussed in this story, and all other similar hand-contamination vectors (past, present and future) can be stopped dead with 15 seconds of hand-washing. Just using running water , i.e., without soap, is almost as effective. It's not hard, it's just inconvenient.
I neglected to mention that they also had discussed a plan to repair the wing on orbit in the CAIB report. They had material on board with which a spacewalking crew member could have patched the hole and restored the leading edge wing geometry so that it would fly. There was a chance that any burn-through that would have occurred through this patch might not have been catastrophic.
It could have been done, but the NASA team doing this analysis for the CAIB couldn't demonstrate that it would have worked (survived re-entry), so they concluded in the CAIB report that sending Atlantis would have been the better of the two options, even though it would have put another orbiter and five more crew members at risk.
They could have gotten Atlantis up in time to rescue the crew. With alterations to work schedules, activity levels and such the Columbia crew could have survived until Feb 15th, and Atlantis, assuming a problem-free launch protocol, could have gotten up there by February 10th. They covered this in the CAIB report, section 6.4, pages 173-174.
It would not have been without risk, and they could have lost TWO orbiters and TWELVE crew members if Atlantis failed on re-entry, but had they gotten the images everyone admits that they probably would have been able to tell that Columbia was doomed by January 18th.
The limiting consumable was not fuel, it was the lithium hydroxide they use to scrub CO2 from the air. They had enough to go until about February 15-16th, they had enough oxygen for perhaps another day after that.
I have spent the last few days reading the entire CAIB report and I have to agree that Mr. Petroski is right on target with his observations.
Simply put, the problem was that the engineers concerned with the safe re-entry of the orbiter after the foam strike were put in the position of having to prove a negative. Management wouldn't pay attention to them until they could prove that the strike was *not* safe.
They couldn't prove or disprove the notion that the foam strike had caused critical damage until they got the images, but they couldn't get the images without first proving they needed them to assure the safety of the re-entry.
There had been a number of previous foam strikes, many of them involving this same piece of foam (the left bipod ramp), and all of those shuttles had landed okay, so management believed that this foam strike was similarly okay just because they had gotten away with it so far.
No science. No analysis. Just an assumption that if they had gotten away with ignoring this problem so far, they could continue to ignore it. The schedule was king, not safety.
Engineers know well that "getting away with it" is not evidence of reliability. Managers, at least in my experience, tend to be proportionately successful in their careers to the extent that they can spin "getting away with it" into a career advancement tool.
This is really why the orbiter was lost. This is really why the astronauts died.
So, the bottom line here is if you want government benefits you have to give up some privacy in order to get them. Why don't we just ear-tag the homeless with RFID's and track their migration like an endangered species?
There are a significant portion of the hard-core homeless that will simply stay off-grid, that's why they're homeless in the first place, they decline to participate. Now, these people won't be able to stay anonymous and get fed or get medical care from the government. My suspicion is that the govt. knows this well and is anticipating a reduction in cost while being able to issue press releases about the decline in the numbers of homeless as they stop coming to the clinics and kitchens.
This is analogous to the reports in the declining unemployment rate reflected in lower numbers of people collecting unemployment insurance. It doesn't count the people that have given up, or have turned to the black/gray market for a living.
I just got a bounce message (with the e-mail below attached) from an automated domain mail admin because it believed I was the sender of a so.big payload (to a user who has a full e-mailbox).
I don't use windows, so it's not coming from any of my boxes.
Here's the header and body text:
-----
Received: from HP ([141.154.241.155]) by mta02.mail.mel.aone.net.au
with ESMTP
id [20030819180952.SWCW5855.mta02.mail.mel.aone.net.a u@HP>
for [removed for/. post]; Wed, 20 Aug 2003 04:09:52 +1000 From: [removed for/.-- it was my valid email address] To: [likewise removed] Subject: Re: That movie Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2003 14:10:02 --0400 X-MailScanner: Found to be clean Importance: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2600.0000 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Priority: 3 (Normal) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
boundary="_NextPart_000_00FA8C46" Message-Id:
I am a hobbyist user so I don't know the mechanics of how this works, but I can relate my similar frustration with this problem and what I've done about it since I banished all Microsoft software from my home a couple of years ago. My success may have more to do with the particular applications I use (Mozilla, kmail, kate).
What I have come to do is use a child directory from home I call ~/snip with Kate, the text editor, and paste everything into a file I save in the snip directory. Most of the time, things will either paste to Kate, or you can write to a file directly (as with kmail) and then pull it up for selection in Kate.
I have been most unhappy about having to do this (I still use windows at work) until I began to grep the directory randomly for certain keywords. It's almost like poetry....a slice of one's history of intellectual efforts at the console.
But, I still do like the centralized clipboard in windows, and the fact that it is only one buffer makes things quick, if repetitive. I can see the evil bits in this, though. Having a buffer that can literally paste directly into any process from any process is a potential integrity/security problem, so it's all a trade off.
Yeah, after I posted the comment I realized it would all be in the system logs.
I wonder what would happen if you required a custom compile of your kernel and bought the license. Are they on the hook for doing the recompile? If so, I wish I had the money to throw away, you could drive them nuts with hardware changes.
Now that we're all waiting for our day in small claims court to get a refund from hardware vendors for the Windows license. maybe we will be back in court at a later date asking for a refund on our SCO binary licenses.
I wonder, if you are using multiple kernels, say, one from 2.2 and one from 2.4, and you can boot with either, how could anyone (sans console access) really determine that you are using the 2.4 kernel?
It seems that the people who designed this study were trying to replicate the experience of the user who just opened their new computer box and is setting it up. So, these people have a slightly easier time with XP. Great. This has always been Windows' strength--booting a computer for a single standalone user.
It's a tribute to Suse that they came this close.
But computers are used for a lot more than this and the differences between the OS's become more robust as the user matures as a user.
Granted, many users never "mature" in the way that I mean here. That is, they never use their computers for anything other than as an Internet terminal, for Quicken, for TurboTax once every April 14th and for the Christmas card letter. Microsoft will have these users in their pocket for the forseeable future. They won that battle. Let them have the spoils.
But there are other users groups that need different things from their machine. In the corporate environment, user enjoyment is less of a concern, availability and TCO emerge as the most prominent issues. Windows will be in real trouble in this environment in the next five years. I work in an organization 100% committed to Windows with about 500 workstations and 20 servers.
Keeping it all up is killing us. The IT Department never has time to get anything done other than pushing patches and reinstalling dead workstations. The results are speaking for themselves. The Germans are the bleeding edge of a larger corporate reaction to the mess that is corporate Windows network administration.
My O'Reilly calendar has a nice line that illustrates my point this month: "Linux? You could have a less powerful system, but it would cost more."
Money talks, advertising walks. Sit back and watch it happen.
Well, I have to say that this means that SCO's strategy of exploiting the weaknesses in Intellectual Property law rather than concentrating on making a good product is working in the short term. I'll bet Ballmer is doing the monkey dance. Since Microsoft has demonstrated that being universally despised by the expert community is of litle obvious consequence to the bottom line, SCO can now appoint themselves the defender of the Loophole Exploitation Realm left recently vacant by the Enron, WorldCom and Tyco.
What they should do next is commission Martha Stewart Omnimedia to design a nice pastel case, contract with Chinese prison laborers for manufacturing and ship their "licensed" Lindows clone to Walmarts everywhere. If you're going to commit to a concept, you might as well go all the way.
Slashdot Mirror
Mod parent down! Flamebait!
Hey dickwad, sorry but in George Bush's Amerika it took me six years to get promoted to assistant manager at Domino's so I could start saving up for my own place! Besides I get cable and DSL for free, Mom does my laundry without me asking her to and I feed their cat while they go on vacation, which they do a lot these days. I have a totally cool gaming set-up--two XBox's, all three generations of PSP's (all on a bitching gaming LAN together). The guys at the game store call me when new stuff comes in (I send them free pizza now that I'm in charge of the DeLindo Hills store on Tuesdays) so I have a library of games almost as large as theirs (I don't buy the lame stuff).
My girlfriend's totally cool with it, she hates her place, her parents are always on her ass to get her own place. Mine are cool. In fact, they pretty much don't talk to me at all. She stays over and stuff, Mom does her laundry too.
I'm gonna get my place soon, I just don't want to be ripped off by these stupid apartment complexes. I'm not going to pay all this deposit and move-in crap. People that are so into "independence" so they can feed the corporate greed machine are just lame and stupid. I'm patient enough to not let all those facists real estate greedheads rip me off. Besides, nobody's really independent, they rely on their boss and stuff. Screw all that, I'm being my own person. You guys are just jealous.
"In the beginning, do you think it was easy to get the first Linux kernel version, find something to bootstrap it off of and somehow create a functioning system?"
Did I imply that I did?
"Should we have held Linus accountable for this?"
He is being held accountable. He demands accountability for the kernel.
"Would we have been a lot better off if the police hauled Linus off for being an "unlicenced software developer"?"
There's a semantic misunderstanding here. I mean licensing along the lines that we license people in my field, nursing. You can have an unlicensed nurse care for you, they may provide excellent care, far superior to other licensed nurses, but if they hurt you there is no recourse. There's no one to complain to, because no one is making a claim for their competence.
"Would we have been better of if Linus stopped at version 0.01 so he could design an installer, a window system, and write accessible documentation?"
Actually, I'd prefer that he'd stopped at that point and worked on something like clippy. I would have waited for SMP support if we could have had an annoying, dancing penguin.
I don't know why you're attacking me for wanting something better. I'm not stomping off to Redmond, I still scour the LDP and lists when I have a problem. I just think ESR has a point, which is rare, usually I think he needs medication.
This will happen, Linux can't remain as it has been if it is going to move to the desktop. I just have this notion that we might benefit from talking about how to make it happen rather than resisting it out mere conservatism for conservatism's sake.
What I meant was I have had no formal instruction in anything technology related. I wasn't in CS in school or anything like that. I didn't go to any install-fests, I didn't have anyone helping me out.
"rdewald, I have to strongly disagree with you on this one. I'm a member of two separate LUG mailing lists, and I find that people are more than helpful in answering all questions, even simple ones."
Try NYLUG, PhillyLUG or the Austin LUG, the three in which I have been involved. I'm happy to hear you have had a better experience than I have.
"But more specifically, let me ask you this: when was the last time, after spending hours to finally figure something out, you went back and wrote up a quick description that can be added back to the documentation?"
It was about a year ago. I still have not heard back from the project maintainers.
While we're on the topic, I had a suggestion for Taco for improving slashdot. He directed me to the sourceforge project, I submitted the idea, they liked it, coded it up, and now you can give gift subscriptions anonymously on slashdot.
You might think I am part of the problem, but I'm not.
First of all, as a self-taught Linux user I am delighted that someone as talented as ESR can have a hair-pulling session doing something like setting up CUPS. I have had many an evening like this. Excruciatingly close to getting something done, something that should be simple, and instead spending hours feeling stupid and incompetent. He's right, and he's right about the fact that this is why there are countless unused Linux install discs littering desk drawers under Windows machines, tried and abandoned by people who hate Micorosft, hate Windows, who would LOVE to support an alternative, but can't make it work.
The user is the loser. There's a clubby, exclusive, snotty attitude among user's groups. The online resources are hopelessly disorganized or relentlessly dinged with ads. The vision that Stallman has of software as knowledge, rather than product, is lost among the throng of sociopaths that spout RTFM at users that ask the same questions over and over.
Well, you know why people have the same questions over and over? Because the software is obscure and the documentation is unhelpful. GNU is based on people solving their own problems and then giving other people an opportunity to use thier solutions. Documentation, at best, is an afterthought. Once you have solved a problem, there's no need to go back and explain it to yourself, any documentation that does exist arises purely from the virture of developers, not because they need it themselves.
The fact that the most useful thing you can have with this enormously powerful gem of human progress (the computer) when trying to use Linux is a printed-out HOW-TO, probably downloaded and printed from a Windows box, is more than ironic, it is shameful. The tools for providing context-sensitive help are there, they just are unused. The developers don't care about the user, they've solved thier problem by this time.
If OSS developers needed robust documentation in order to distribute their product, they would either develop it or not distribute their code. But they don't. There's no reward for the developer.
This brings me around again to the notion of licensing software developers and then making them accountable for the usability of the product. Not as an avenue for exclusion, but to build a community of developers devoted to the user, a Mr. Goodwrench sort of certification standards, that tests it's releases against naive and novice users. How you make this work I have no idea.
Red Hat should be doing this already, but they've clearly left the home user at the altar.
The author of the study sought to disprove the notion that heavy internet usage had a deliterious effect on people experiencing depression.
That's a long way from claiming that Internet usage is not harmful, or beyond that, that it may have an effect on depression.
This is the psycho-industrial complex in full bloom. Truth is, "internet usage" is such a scientifically meaningless term as to evade any meaningful scientific metric. It is analogous to studying groups of people "using sidewalks."
"Internet usage" can mean anything from viewing pornography to online communities like Slashdot, with lots of stops in between. Each of these stops will have radically different effects on the user, particularly along an axis like "social isolation." Personally, there are times when I use the Internet to interact with people, there are other times that I use it to get the hell away from people. It's a meaningless indicator.
There is a mention at the close of the story that indicates the author is going on to study epidemiology. Good, she needs it.
There was a time when air conditioning was not universal. Places of business advertised and promoted the fact that their place of business was air conditioned and they managed the burden of the increased cost of air conditioning in order to attract customers.
WiFi will follow the same trajectory. Wise businesses like restaurants and coffee shops will just provide it like air conditioning and leverage the log-on portal for advertising. I think it will be likely that they will filter on mac addressess and quota traffic over ports like tcp25 to prevent abuse, but eventually they will provide it for free. It will become the new air conditioning--the mark of a savvy service business.
Until then, people will try to charge for it. The main problem with that is the variety of needs that customers will have. Some need it a lot, some need it once a year. Some just prefer to have it, some can't live without it. How do you price-model that?
You don't.
It's the new utility. Figure it into your overhead.
"We can settle out of tort for $1,000,000USD to be transferred to my Nigerian bank account so my children can immediately extract it.'
Mr. Kenny Humbigawee of Lagos has agreed to act as my intermediary. I will send you plane tickets to meet him in Lagos upon receipt of your credit card numbers and expiration dates. This formaility is necessary for identification purposes only to facilitate the transfer of funds. Your portion of the transfer will be 304%.
Thank you for your assistance and business expertise with this important settlement matter.
Your humble secondary,
Mr. A. Okalipa Humpakin
I, for one, welcome our new facilitators.
I witnessed an executive officer, when asked to move the cursor on the screen with the mouse, pick up the mouse and place it in the glass surface of the computer monitor to (very awkwardly) move the cursor. While doing this he remarked that he thought there might be something wrong with his mouse because "it doesn't always catch it like it used to."
I did not laugh. I was waiting to pitch a rather complicated proposal concerning the reorganization of some database tables to this same person (my first meeting with them). I was unpersuasive.
The problem with antibiotic abuse in health care workers is particularly troubling, as you describe. I'm like you, I don't take them unless my clinical situation indicates it--meaning I have the right drug for the right bug and I'm getting worse instead of better.
Don't even get me started on anti-bacterial soaps.... Not only does their misuse compound the problems we've discussed above, but these soaps only kill off the same flora that our antibiotics (particularly the cheap and safe ones) do, leaving the drug-resistant flora relatively unaffected. As they get washed into our communal water-treatment facilities, the drug-resistant strains are then left with reduced competiton for the limited, consumable resources (like food) that they need to live and multiply.
Because of the use of the "New and Improved Anti-bacterial ____," we encourage the survival and colonization of the very bugs that cause the illnesses for which we don't have good and/or cheap antibiotics. I particularly regret seeing antibacterials used routinely at home around infants, which is the use for which they are most aggressively marketed....
But, I've wandered sufficiently off topic for now.
There are a lot of different answers to this question because the term "medical staff" covers a lot of different people with different functions.
Surgeons take calls during procedures. They always have, long before there were even cordless phones, much less cell phones. Medical treatment is sometimes dependent upon the rapid dispersal of information and an equally rapid decision being made in response to said information. I've talked to more than a few chest surgeons on the phone while they had their hands in someone else's chest. This was accomplished (aseptically) by speaker phone.
With the advent of cell phones, many health care providers who care for patients dependent upon rapid decision-making carry cell phones with them 24/7/365. This easy access to decision-making resources has saved lives and reduced suffering, but these people represent a tiny, tiny fraction of the health care workers carrying cell phones today.
Having said that, health care workers are people first, and there exists roughly the same proportion of stupid, thoughtless people in the industry as exist in the world at large. So, many health care workers use phones thoughtlessly. Should they stop? Sure.
Wedding rings are virtual cesspools of virulent bacteria, particularly if they are engraved and/or contain a complex setting. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to get people to take off their wedding rings while working in ICU's even though we have reams of good, hard science demonstrating that rings are a very efficient way to infect patients with all kinds of deadly bugs? Forget cell phones, it's just another surface, just another pathogen vehicle. It's just a particularly powerful vehicle because people touch it with their hands.
I despise cell phones only slightly more than I despise strollers. They are both a menace to civility in public space. But, there's nothing new here. My point is the cell phone problem discussed in this story, and all other similar hand-contamination vectors (past, present and future) can be stopped dead with 15 seconds of hand-washing. Just using running water , i.e., without soap, is almost as effective. It's not hard, it's just inconvenient.
I am a nurse. Cell phones aren't the problem, people are the problem.
Want to stop the spread of the pathogens on your cell phone or _______ ? It's easy.
1. Wash your fscking hands before and after you examine any patient.
2. Don't use the device during an examination.
Problem solved.
You don't have to kill the little germies on the phone, just wash them off your hands, for %#^$&! sake.
"You can't prove a negative" is an axiom. It doesn't require proof.
I neglected to mention that they also had discussed a plan to repair the wing on orbit in the CAIB report. They had material on board with which a spacewalking crew member could have patched the hole and restored the leading edge wing geometry so that it would fly. There was a chance that any burn-through that would have occurred through this patch might not have been catastrophic.
It could have been done, but the NASA team doing this analysis for the CAIB couldn't demonstrate that it would have worked (survived re-entry), so they concluded in the CAIB report that sending Atlantis would have been the better of the two options, even though it would have put another orbiter and five more crew members at risk.
That's a good question and it has been answered.
They could have gotten Atlantis up in time to rescue the crew. With alterations to work schedules, activity levels and such the Columbia crew could have survived until Feb 15th, and Atlantis, assuming a problem-free launch protocol, could have gotten up there by February 10th. They covered this in the CAIB report, section 6.4, pages 173-174.
It would not have been without risk, and they could have lost TWO orbiters and TWELVE crew members if Atlantis failed on re-entry, but had they gotten the images everyone admits that they probably would have been able to tell that Columbia was doomed by January 18th.
The limiting consumable was not fuel, it was the lithium hydroxide they use to scrub CO2 from the air. They had enough to go until about February 15-16th, they had enough oxygen for perhaps another day after that.
IOW, they learned nothing from Challenger.
This is explictly the position of the CAIB in their report, mentioned in several different places.
I have spent the last few days reading the entire CAIB report and I have to agree that Mr. Petroski is right on target with his observations.
Simply put, the problem was that the engineers concerned with the safe re-entry of the orbiter after the foam strike were put in the position of having to prove a negative. Management wouldn't pay attention to them until they could prove that the strike was *not* safe.
They couldn't prove or disprove the notion that the foam strike had caused critical damage until they got the images, but they couldn't get the images without first proving they needed them to assure the safety of the re-entry.
There had been a number of previous foam strikes, many of them involving this same piece of foam (the left bipod ramp), and all of those shuttles had landed okay, so management believed that this foam strike was similarly okay just because they had gotten away with it so far.
No science. No analysis. Just an assumption that if they had gotten away with ignoring this problem so far, they could continue to ignore it. The schedule was king, not safety.
Engineers know well that "getting away with it" is not evidence of reliability. Managers, at least in my experience, tend to be proportionately successful in their careers to the extent that they can spin "getting away with it" into a career advancement tool.
This is really why the orbiter was lost. This is really why the astronauts died.
Denial is deadly.
So, the bottom line here is if you want government benefits you have to give up some privacy in order to get them. Why don't we just ear-tag the homeless with RFID's and track their migration like an endangered species?
There are a significant portion of the hard-core homeless that will simply stay off-grid, that's why they're homeless in the first place, they decline to participate. Now, these people won't be able to stay anonymous and get fed or get medical care from the government. My suspicion is that the govt. knows this well and is anticipating a reduction in cost while being able to issue press releases about the decline in the numbers of homeless as they stop coming to the clinics and kitchens.
This is analogous to the reports in the declining unemployment rate reflected in lower numbers of people collecting unemployment insurance. It doesn't count the people that have given up, or have turned to the black/gray market for a living.
I just got a bounce message (with the e-mail below attached) from an automated domain mail admin because it believed I was the sender of a so.big payload (to a user who has a full e-mailbox).
a u@HP> /. post]; Wed, 20 Aug 2003 04:09:52 +1000 /.-- it was my valid email address]
n g: base64
I don't use windows, so it's not coming from any of my boxes.
Here's the header and body text:
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Received: from HP ([141.154.241.155]) by mta02.mail.mel.aone.net.au
with ESMTP
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for [removed for
From: [removed for
To: [likewise removed]
Subject: Re: That movie
Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2003 14:10:02 --0400
X-MailScanner: Found to be clean
Importance: Normal
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2600.0000
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
X-Priority: 3 (Normal)
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
boundary="_NextPart_000_00FA8C46"
Message-Id:
This is a multipart message in MIME format
--_NextPart_000_00FA8C46
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Please see the attached file for details.
--_NextPart_000_00FA8C46
Content-Type: application/octet-stream;
name="your_document.pif"
Content-Transfer-Encodi
Content-Disposition: attachment;
filename="your_document.pif"
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The your_document.pif was a binary of about 100k.
Rant on, brother!
I am a hobbyist user so I don't know the mechanics of how this works, but I can relate my similar frustration with this problem and what I've done about it since I banished all Microsoft software from my home a couple of years ago. My success may have more to do with the particular applications I use (Mozilla, kmail, kate).
What I have come to do is use a child directory from home I call ~/snip with Kate, the text editor, and paste everything into a file I save in the snip directory. Most of the time, things will either paste to Kate, or you can write to a file directly (as with kmail) and then pull it up for selection in Kate.
I have been most unhappy about having to do this (I still use windows at work) until I began to grep the directory randomly for certain keywords. It's almost like poetry....a slice of one's history of intellectual efforts at the console.
But, I still do like the centralized clipboard in windows, and the fact that it is only one buffer makes things quick, if repetitive. I can see the evil bits in this, though. Having a buffer that can literally paste directly into any process from any process is a potential integrity/security problem, so it's all a trade off.
Yeah, after I posted the comment I realized it would all be in the system logs.
I wonder what would happen if you required a custom compile of your kernel and bought the license. Are they on the hook for doing the recompile? If so, I wish I had the money to throw away, you could drive them nuts with hardware changes.
Now that we're all waiting for our day in small claims court to get a refund from hardware vendors for the Windows license. maybe we will be back in court at a later date asking for a refund on our SCO binary licenses.
I wonder, if you are using multiple kernels, say, one from 2.2 and one from 2.4, and you can boot with either, how could anyone (sans console access) really determine that you are using the 2.4 kernel?
It seems that the people who designed this study were trying to replicate the experience of the user who just opened their new computer box and is setting it up. So, these people have a slightly easier time with XP. Great. This has always been Windows' strength--booting a computer for a single standalone user.
It's a tribute to Suse that they came this close.
But computers are used for a lot more than this and the differences between the OS's become more robust as the user matures as a user.
Granted, many users never "mature" in the way that I mean here. That is, they never use their computers for anything other than as an Internet terminal, for Quicken, for TurboTax once every April 14th and for the Christmas card letter. Microsoft will have these users in their pocket for the forseeable future. They won that battle. Let them have the spoils.
But there are other users groups that need different things from their machine. In the corporate environment, user enjoyment is less of a concern, availability and TCO emerge as the most prominent issues. Windows will be in real trouble in this environment in the next five years. I work in an organization 100% committed to Windows with about 500 workstations and 20 servers.
Keeping it all up is killing us. The IT Department never has time to get anything done other than pushing patches and reinstalling dead workstations. The results are speaking for themselves. The Germans are the bleeding edge of a larger corporate reaction to the mess that is corporate Windows network administration.
My O'Reilly calendar has a nice line that illustrates my point this month: "Linux? You could have a less powerful system, but it would cost more."
Money talks, advertising walks. Sit back and watch it happen.
Well, I have to say that this means that SCO's strategy of exploiting the weaknesses in Intellectual Property law rather than concentrating on making a good product is working in the short term. I'll bet Ballmer is doing the monkey dance. Since Microsoft has demonstrated that being universally despised by the expert community is of litle obvious consequence to the bottom line, SCO can now appoint themselves the defender of the Loophole Exploitation Realm left recently vacant by the Enron, WorldCom and Tyco.
What they should do next is commission Martha Stewart Omnimedia to design a nice pastel case, contract with Chinese prison laborers for manufacturing and ship their "licensed" Lindows clone to Walmarts everywhere. If you're going to commit to a concept, you might as well go all the way.