We just recently got my Father in Law off of the craptacular satellite internet connection he had for several years, and onto a decent broadband that finally got offered in his rural Alabama community. He went from about 128kbps to 100Mbps, which is faster than I get in metro Atlanta.
I also game under Windows and OSX, but I'm trying to stay on Linux more and more for my gaming. Most of it is in Steam, with a couple under Wine as well. I'm used to occasional graphical or sound glitches, or really laggy input problems (I'm looking at you, L4D2).
Yeah but that movie sucked. I'd prefer to reference The Thing.
speaking as an IT provider to health care
on
IT and Health Care
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· Score: 1
I work as an outsourced IT contractor in the Atlanta area, and a large number of my clients are hospitals, clinics, doctors' offices, and so forth. The main reasons I see for them not wanting to adopt increased IT infrastructure to enhance record-keeping abilities are:
1) Budget. Health care has been one of the most resilient industries in the current recession, but no one can afford to not watch their spending these days. 2) Reliability. It doesn't work 100% of the time. It might, if you added enough redundancy, but then you're running into problem 1) again. 3) Politics. I don't know of a single hospital that doesn't have serious political infighting. This bleeds over into the budget issue again...who gets how much of the budget for what projects, who gets what access levels within the system, and so forth. IT tends to be looked on as an unwelcome but necessary expense, kind of like the power bill. If there isn't an obvious fire or immediate pressing need, getting funds for improving performance or reliability is very difficult. And if there *IS* an obvious fire or immediate pressing need, they're upset that you hadn't already prevented the problem with the budget you've had thus far. It's a catch 22.
I see these as being problems with getting all sorts of industries to incorporate better IT... the medical field is just a big obvious one right now with all the efforts to improve compliance with standards, and the efforts to control the rising costs. The answer I wish I could give to ALL of them is simply: "shit breaks. pay the cost of having it break less, or deal with it breaking. but it will always break. having a plan B is always going to be a good idea."
I agree:) My morse skills aren't much past the 5wpm I needed to get my extra a few years ago, but I'm pretty darn proud of my 5wpm. If it really hits the fan, morse works through a radio, through an intercom, through a car horn, through a flashlight, through just about anything...
There's plenty of theories about where the HAM moniker comes from. I've never really been terribly concerned with the true origins of the name. I still type it as HAM, though, because "Ham" and "ham" just look wrong to me.
You are correct, bouncing radio waves off the ionosphere is primarily for longer-range HF communications. However, when you're in a hurricane zone trying to communicate with NOAA, or at least with relay stations (many of whom are in FL or TX), being limited to 50-100 miles hurts. This was an issue during Hurricane Katrina, when sunspots were low, band conditions were terrible, and communications in and out were sporadic. I was manning the Georgia Tech radio room for a good bit during that time. The phone kept ringing off the hook with people trying to use us to get word about their loved ones in the disaster zone. Conditions were so limited, however, that most radio nets working the area were restricted to immediate lifesaving traffic only. Health and welfare traffic had to go through normal channels, like the red cross, which meant days or weeks of waiting.
Sunspots being low impacts radio communication within the US, not just across the globe.
I realize that HAM radio is a bit of an anachronism in the eyes of most slashdot readers, but it's still the most viable medium for emergency communications. Unfortunately, with sunspot activity being so low, HF communications become very limited. Whole bands of RF spectrum are almost unusable, because the E-layer of the ionosphere can no longer bounce higher frequencies of radio waves. 40m wavelength and lower tend to still be usable, 20m is come-and-go, and 17m and higher become sporadic or completely unusable.
I'm 31, I've been a HAM for 6 years. My cell phone often doesn't get coverage where I roam, and my power and internet and landline phone have been knocked out by storms and provider mistakes. Radio works when all else fails......but sometimes it works better than others!
I can finally put my CS degree to good use, answering the same questions students would ask the TAs in basic OS and systems-level programming courses!...except that the other comments have already answered the question. So, in true CS fashion, I will be lazy and refrain from duplicating effort;)
Laziness is a virtue! (And that's on-topic, because a lazy paging algorithm is a good paging algorithm).
It seems to me that taking the responsibility for the line away from the Telecoms is asking for more problems when something breaks. It's bad enough already when they have to be talked into rolling a truck to fix an issue on lines they maintain. With privately held fiber, I really don't see any advantage. The Telecom, or a private contractor, would still have to be called whenever the private fiber had issues. This seems like it would add middlemen and fingerpointing without really giving any benefit.
If we're to survive as a species, in the long run, we have to get off this rock. Permanently. And unless we perfect some form of cryo-sleep or faster than light travel (possibly even if we DO perfect those), we're going to need some means of recycling our own waste products into usable substances.
I've been in situations where the only water available for drinking also happened to be the local wild animals' mudhole. Animal urine and fecal matter were most certainly present, but there was no other water for miles in any direction. So it was scooped up, run through a rag to skim off any solids, run through an activated charcoal filter to purify it, pumped full of iodine to kill any microbes that might have survived the charcoal filtration, then turned into koolaid to mask the taste. Survival situations will do wonders for changing what you are and are not willing to drink. I was fortunate that I had all that equipment for purification. Those living in third world nations don't have the option of stocking up at the local REI.
And I imagine space travelers heading for outer worlds, asteroid belts, or other star systems will have their options pretty limited as well:)
by its very definition, if you reuse the key, it is no longer a one-time pad:)
OTP works great if you can distribute a great big bulk of OTPkeydata ahead of time, and use it incrementally in short chunks. The key distribution problem remains the same, it is simply the practice that has to change.
Actually, a one-time pad is an excellently secure symmetric cipher, the strength of which is dependent only upon the randomness of the pad (and the mechanism for distributing copies of the pad to the various parties who require it).
You have to distribute copies of a secure symmetric key anyway. Distributing copies of a OTP is no different.
Shoot, I even have a spare Ford 3.08 ratio differential. NASA can get it off me for what I paid for it, or I'll even give it to them if they let me do the installation;)
Sure you can crawl any information source and extrapolate anything you want out of it. I'd even be willing to believe the 95% accurate analysis, whatever. That's besides the point.
You can only extrapolate data you've read properly. The simplest of encryption and/or obfuscation schemes applied to this content would effectively protect against extrapolation. Sure, Big Brother can have software scrub the Net looking for suspicious content. But can they have software scrub the Net while applying decryption measures to everything found? While analyzing every image file for obfuscated content (or even something as simple as writing your terrorist plans on a piece of paper and scanning it in as an image)? While applying rot13 to every block of text found?
I would say no. The problem becomes computationally impossible at that point. There are theoretically infinite ways to hide, encrypt, or obfuscate data. To have a system check first for unhidden, unencrypted, un-obfuscated data, then also for each of those, is simply not doable unless one makes radical limitations to the format of the data itself.
I would say instead that this "Dark Web" will be invaluable in identifying characteristics of perfectly law-abiding forum posters, slashdotters, and so forth, and that the data gleaned will fetch a good price from directed marketeers, pharmaceutical companies, spammers, government bureaucracies, and other servants of the Dark Lord.
Slashdot Mirror
We just recently got my Father in Law off of the craptacular satellite internet connection he had for several years, and onto a decent broadband that finally got offered in his rural Alabama community. He went from about 128kbps to 100Mbps, which is faster than I get in metro Atlanta.
It's easy to make a small fortune from owning horses.
All you have to do is start with a big fortune.
Wouldn't Al Gore be the better person to talk to about changing internet Architecture?
I also game under Windows and OSX, but I'm trying to stay on Linux more and more for my gaming. Most of it is in Steam, with a couple under Wine as well. I'm used to occasional graphical or sound glitches, or really laggy input problems (I'm looking at you, L4D2).
Yeah but that movie sucked. I'd prefer to reference The Thing.
I work as an outsourced IT contractor in the Atlanta area, and a large number of my clients are hospitals, clinics, doctors' offices, and so forth. The main reasons I see for them not wanting to adopt increased IT infrastructure to enhance record-keeping abilities are:
1) Budget. Health care has been one of the most resilient industries in the current recession, but no one can afford to not watch their spending these days.
2) Reliability. It doesn't work 100% of the time. It might, if you added enough redundancy, but then you're running into problem 1) again.
3) Politics. I don't know of a single hospital that doesn't have serious political infighting. This bleeds over into the budget issue again...who gets how much of the budget for what projects, who gets what access levels within the system, and so forth. IT tends to be looked on as an unwelcome but necessary expense, kind of like the power bill. If there isn't an obvious fire or immediate pressing need, getting funds for improving performance or reliability is very difficult. And if there *IS* an obvious fire or immediate pressing need, they're upset that you hadn't already prevented the problem with the budget you've had thus far. It's a catch 22.
I see these as being problems with getting all sorts of industries to incorporate better IT... the medical field is just a big obvious one right now with all the efforts to improve compliance with standards, and the efforts to control the rising costs. The answer I wish I could give to ALL of them is simply: "shit breaks. pay the cost of having it break less, or deal with it breaking. but it will always break. having a plan B is always going to be a good idea."
what is this "extra cash" of which you speak?
I agree :) My morse skills aren't much past the 5wpm I needed to get my extra a few years ago, but I'm pretty darn proud of my 5wpm. If it really hits the fan, morse works through a radio, through an intercom, through a car horn, through a flashlight, through just about anything...
There's plenty of theories about where the HAM moniker comes from. I've never really been terribly concerned with the true origins of the name. I still type it as HAM, though, because "Ham" and "ham" just look wrong to me.
You are correct, bouncing radio waves off the ionosphere is primarily for longer-range HF communications. However, when you're in a hurricane zone trying to communicate with NOAA, or at least with relay stations (many of whom are in FL or TX), being limited to 50-100 miles hurts. This was an issue during Hurricane Katrina, when sunspots were low, band conditions were terrible, and communications in and out were sporadic. I was manning the Georgia Tech radio room for a good bit during that time. The phone kept ringing off the hook with people trying to use us to get word about their loved ones in the disaster zone. Conditions were so limited, however, that most radio nets working the area were restricted to immediate lifesaving traffic only. Health and welfare traffic had to go through normal channels, like the red cross, which meant days or weeks of waiting.
Sunspots being low impacts radio communication within the US, not just across the globe.
I realize that HAM radio is a bit of an anachronism in the eyes of most slashdot readers, but it's still the most viable medium for emergency communications. Unfortunately, with sunspot activity being so low, HF communications become very limited. Whole bands of RF spectrum are almost unusable, because the E-layer of the ionosphere can no longer bounce higher frequencies of radio waves. 40m wavelength and lower tend to still be usable, 20m is come-and-go, and 17m and higher become sporadic or completely unusable.
I'm 31, I've been a HAM for 6 years. My cell phone often doesn't get coverage where I roam, and my power and internet and landline phone have been knocked out by storms and provider mistakes. Radio works when all else fails... ...but sometimes it works better than others!
I guess that should be EetADyk, actually...
Sci-Fi to fans: "No, it's SyFy!"
Fans to Sci-Fi: "EetADik. You never should have canceled Farscape."
I can finally put my CS degree to good use, answering the same questions students would ask the TAs in basic OS and systems-level programming courses! ...except that the other comments have already answered the question. So, in true CS fashion, I will be lazy and refrain from duplicating effort ;)
Laziness is a virtue! (And that's on-topic, because a lazy paging algorithm is a good paging algorithm).
It seems to me that taking the responsibility for the line away from the Telecoms is asking for more problems when something breaks. It's bad enough already when they have to be talked into rolling a truck to fix an issue on lines they maintain. With privately held fiber, I really don't see any advantage. The Telecom, or a private contractor, would still have to be called whenever the private fiber had issues. This seems like it would add middlemen and fingerpointing without really giving any benefit.
You're right, we should all just curl up and wait to die I guess.
Technically, if the ground has any moisture, you can do that without the piss :)
If we're to survive as a species, in the long run, we have to get off this rock. Permanently. And unless we perfect some form of cryo-sleep or faster than light travel (possibly even if we DO perfect those), we're going to need some means of recycling our own waste products into usable substances.
I've been in situations where the only water available for drinking also happened to be the local wild animals' mudhole. Animal urine and fecal matter were most certainly present, but there was no other water for miles in any direction. So it was scooped up, run through a rag to skim off any solids, run through an activated charcoal filter to purify it, pumped full of iodine to kill any microbes that might have survived the charcoal filtration, then turned into koolaid to mask the taste. Survival situations will do wonders for changing what you are and are not willing to drink. I was fortunate that I had all that equipment for purification. Those living in third world nations don't have the option of stocking up at the local REI.
And I imagine space travelers heading for outer worlds, asteroid belts, or other star systems will have their options pretty limited as well :)
by its very definition, if you reuse the key, it is no longer a one-time pad :)
OTP works great if you can distribute a great big bulk of OTPkeydata ahead of time, and use it incrementally in short chunks. The key distribution problem remains the same, it is simply the practice that has to change.
Er, and I meant to add "and a good OTP algorithm is simple and can be written in a couple lines of code with an XOR operation in there somewhere."
Actually, a one-time pad is an excellently secure symmetric cipher, the strength of which is dependent only upon the randomness of the pad (and the mechanism for distributing copies of the pad to the various parties who require it).
You have to distribute copies of a secure symmetric key anyway. Distributing copies of a OTP is no different.
as an Atlanta-based IT worker, I will say that Atlanta companies are their own special kind of hell.
Dunno about everyone wanting to be Gandalf, but in WoW, roughly 70% of the alliance seems to be Night Elf hunters named some variant of "Legolas".
My favorite so far is "Superlegolas". Something about that one makes me giggle.
Shoot, I even have a spare Ford 3.08 ratio differential. NASA can get it off me for what I paid for it, or I'll even give it to them if they let me do the installation ;)
Sure you can crawl any information source and extrapolate anything you want out of it. I'd even be willing to believe the 95% accurate analysis, whatever. That's besides the point.
You can only extrapolate data you've read properly. The simplest of encryption and/or obfuscation schemes applied to this content would effectively protect against extrapolation. Sure, Big Brother can have software scrub the Net looking for suspicious content. But can they have software scrub the Net while applying decryption measures to everything found? While analyzing every image file for obfuscated content (or even something as simple as writing your terrorist plans on a piece of paper and scanning it in as an image)? While applying rot13 to every block of text found?
I would say no. The problem becomes computationally impossible at that point. There are theoretically infinite ways to hide, encrypt, or obfuscate data. To have a system check first for unhidden, unencrypted, un-obfuscated data, then also for each of those, is simply not doable unless one makes radical limitations to the format of the data itself.
I would say instead that this "Dark Web" will be invaluable in identifying characteristics of perfectly law-abiding forum posters, slashdotters, and so forth, and that the data gleaned will fetch a good price from directed marketeers, pharmaceutical companies, spammers, government bureaucracies, and other servants of the Dark Lord.