But what do you use for a second video card? There's no way I can get my boss to buy a dual head card and no new cards are PCI, so I'm stick with the single AGP card. I have a spare ATI Rage PCI floating around.
I have wondered about the same thing for Flight Simulator. Are there any systems with multiple AGP ports? Five monitors driven by three cards would make for an excellent virtual cockpit.
For those of you with multiple monitors, how do you set them up? One straight ahead and the 2nd at a 45 deg angle? Or both to the left and right at 20 deg or so?
My question relates to neck strain: while I would like to try two monitors, I am concerned that the constant looking to the left or right for the second monitor (or both in the low-angle setup) would increase strain on the neck muscles and/or neck and shoulder joints.
Perhaps I have been reading the New York Review of Books too long, but when I read a "review" I like to see some quotes from the actual book, some arguments for and against, some footnoted references to counter-arguments (it is fine if the reviewer considers the counter-arguments weak, as long as they are noted). In other words, something more than a prose advertisment.
That rumour has been floating around since 1992 - when it might have made some strategic sense. I don't see the value in it for either party at this point.
Which could have resulted in the same situation as the first one... If they had known about the extent of the tile damage, and thought it bad enough to risk a balls-to-the-wall processing of the next available shuttle (Atlantis), it would have been a horribly bad idea to blindly launch another shuttle without knowing what had happened to the previous one or taking steps to prevent it.
Two slight differences: (a) the crew on the rescue mission would have been volunteers who knew exactly what additional risk they were taking (b) the taxpaying public would have known exactly what risk was being taken with its money.
econdly the law is a violation of teh 1st amendment. The surpeme court ruled on a colorado state law that prevented door to door canvassing. The law was almost exactly the same and the court said it violated the 1st amendment
The door of your house is on the outside and faces the public street. And traditionally (by which I mean "for thousands of years") the front walk with an open gate has been considered a temporary invitation to tresspass long enough to state your business.
The telephone is inside the house. That makes the uninvited call a totally different situation from the uninvited doorbell ring.
sPh
Re:It's a ridiculously contrived plot device,
on
Quicksilver
·
· Score: 1
Sorry - I should have used the SARCASM tag. Back when I was travelling a lot I used to run into one of my old friends from Middle American High School at London Heathrow about once a year. Since people travel around a lot more now than they did even 50 years ago, such meetings sould be fairly likely.
In the case of the novel, this is particularly true since (as you state) there were non-random factors driving the two characters toward the same geographical and social areas.
sPh
Re:It's a ridiculously contrived plot device,
on
Quicksilver
·
· Score: 2, Funny
I couldn't agree more. The idea of two generations of the same families coincidentally bumping into each other after 50 years totally ruined Cryptonomicon. Don't get me wrong - I'm a big fan of surreal plot elements. That is, if they are in surreal novels.
I agree. Of the 6 billion or so people alive on the Earth today, representing 1.25 billion families, how often could something like that happen? Totally improbable given the small numbers involved.
sPh
Re:Mo Money! Mo Money! Mo Money!
on
Windows ATMs by 2005
·
· Score: 5, Informative
You're forgetting that there are actaully some smart people in the banking industry that will realize that having your ATM's running windows hooked up to the internet is a bad idea. The people that make these kinds of decisions are not fools.
I would have said the same thing about the electric utility and railroad industries, as both have over 120 years of experience handling dangerous large-scale technology. And yet CSX operations were seriously affected by the MSBlaster worm, and there are some indications that the latest East Coast blackout may have been triggered by attacks on COTS-based systems (the CSX incident is confirmed; the First Energy incident is {so far} rumour).
I have seen the pressure to go COTS first-hand myself in an application where it really wasn't a good engineering decision. But the price and functionality of the COTS system exerted tremendous pressure on the selection process.
And again, Enron was a financial services company, as were the New York investement houses that served it, but that didn't make them immune from doing stupid things.
sPh
Re:Mo Money! Mo Money! Mo Money!
on
Windows ATMs by 2005
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
f you completely disregard that most ATMs don't have built-in TCP/IP stacks-- even the ones that communicate via CDPD, or cellular to internet use a transmitter that works through a serial port and sends an encrypted stream of data to the processor-- Most ATMs are designed to go balls-up at the first sign of trouble and shut themselves down after sending detailed error messages to their owners via leased line
The problem being that once a commercial technology ("commercial off-the-shelf" or COTS in milspeak) starts to leak into a closed architecture application, it becomes almost impossible for manufactuers to resist the pressure to use all the features of the commercial technology to reduce cost.
If Vendor A makes an ATM that uses propriatary closed architecture and its units cost $125,000, while Vendor B uses Windows but its units cost $110,000, guess who is going to win the bids? So Vendor A goes to Windows + TCP/IP and gets down to $100,000/unit. Vendor B then responds with Windows + TCP/IP + "Internet connection to eliminate costly leased line charges". Guess who will win that bid? And there we are - the security of a closed system gone in three rounds of bidding.
Now perhaps that example is bad, because there might be regulations in the financial industry to prevent it. And such regulations might even be enforced. But then again, if Enron or Dick Cheney had bought a large ATM network...
I used to clean out gas turbine engines by dumping ground walnut shells in the air intake. Loads of fun, and it smelled like Good Humor Toasted Almond Bar in the vicinity for quite a while afterward.
But I now know several people with fatal allergies to tree nuts. So I wonder - what is the effect on any allergic people nearby of vaporizing nut shells and injecting the vapor into the atmosphere?
A few replies referencing SAP - I don't disagree. But I was describing midrange apps for midsized orgs. A typical conversion to Visual Manufacturing runs around $400,000 including software, hardware, and consulting. I don't think you can even get an SAP AG salesman on-site for $400k!
Want to show some people some pictures? Put them all in a Word doc, that way you can email one huge.doc file. I once complained to a guy because he was attaching screenshots to a bug report like this. I explained "do you realize that for someone to see these, they would have to use MSWord. They are just images". His response? "Everyone here has Word installed, that isn't a problem."
I don't like to do it that way myself, and my personal preference might be that that practice had never started. But help me understand why this is "horrible"? The end user wants to get his work done as efficiently as possible - not make the most efficient use of computing resources. If [paste into Word] is quick and efficient for end users in your org (and it is for most I am aware of) who are you to tell them their practice is wrong?
The author missing one minor point. The core of business information management for small and medium sized business is Win32-based client/server applications. These are the products that you see advertised and discussed in Manufacturing Systems and CFO Magazine. In the middle to late 1980s they were available on several platforms and usually had a Mac version, but by the mid 1990s they had migrated almost exclusively to the client/server model on the Win32 platform.
These midrange apps are the bread-and-butter of corporate computing. They do not run on the Mac and do not run under Linux. Some are starting to move toward a web browser based model, but not all and not necessarily quickly.
Until Linux equivalents exist for these midrange apps, the Linux desktop will not be used in midsized organizations.
[...]With the exception of security management, essentially all of the practical skills associated with those functions will be invalidated. DHCP, WINS, SMB networking, Processor Affinity Management, Domain Administration, Registry hacking, and so on, are all technologies and ideas out of place in a well run Unix environment, though some pollution has crept in.
[...]can be, and therefore will be, perpetuated in the new environment despite having no natural role there.
I am not a fan of Active Directory. But if the author thinks that corporate directory services (preferabley Novell eDirectory, but Active Directory if you must) have no role in large-scale corporate networking, I have to question the rest of his conclusions a bit.
I hope she scans them after they're dead / stunned. I just had the vaguely disturbing mental image of her running around the garden, scanner in hand, cackling insanely as she attempts to snap the scanner shut on the flying insects.
Not far from the truth, not far...
Seriously, they are dead before scanning for two reasons (a) the process works best when they are semi-dry (b) with little kids in the house, you don't go around killing cute butterflys for no good reason. Not if you want to sit at your own dinner table without being shamed into silence anyway!
My spouse has made some really nice Christmas ornaments this way by scanning dragonflys and butterflies, printing the result on very heavy paper, cutting out the outline of the insect, and mounting it to cardboard cut in the same shape. It is amazing the detail you can see in the wings and body with just the magnification of a scanner.
I hate it when she leaves it to me to wash the scanner glass though!
It has to be HIPAA compliant to hold PHI. It's a medical record app, so obviously it would have that in it. To be HIPAA compliant you have to only use vendor supported software. With that vendor you need to sign a BAA.
Therefor, I don't think you could just download it and use it without vendor support and it stay compliant. You would have to get support from someone who could sign a BAA, which probably shouldn't be an employee. Or, your IT staff might be able to become the "support", depending on the software and if they understood the sourcecode enough to fix it on their own..
Sounds as if there are some people in this discussion who actually understand HIPPA, so perhaps they could address a question I have had for the last year or so. I have a surfact knowledge of HIPPA, and have heard a lot of comments from IT people along these lines. And when I have made use of major medical facilities in large urban areas it seems from what I can see as an outsider that they are making some effort to comply with the spirit of these regulations.
But when I receive medical care in small towns, or small cities for that matter, this is not the case. They have me sign all sorts of "HIPPA Compliance" forms, but I can clearly see from the way they process charts, records, etc. that they are in no way shape or form complying with the spirit or even the form of HIPPA as I understand it.
So what gives? Is HIPPA just another make-work program honored by the honest or in the breech? Or are these smaller medical providers going to be in big trouble soon?
Bruce talks a great deal about security tradeoffs. Despite the fact that he's a big security guy, he states that he doesn't lock his back door, because I know the risk of burglary is slight. A security expert who cannot be bothered to turn a knob on his door... eh, what?
I came home one day from a long business trip. Spouse and kids were out of town. Noticed that the spouse had locked the inside basement door as usual while I was away. Heard a funny noise from the basement, thought "I must get down and look at that furnace". Took a shower, sat down in the kitchen to have a snack.
Then I heard a loud funny noise from the basement. Unlocked the door and went down. Found the mason, with whom we had signed a contract 4 or 5 weeks previous, at work on the wall. Looked up at the door and said "how did you get in?". His response: "I tried your neighbor but they weren't home. So I disassembled the corner of your foundation so I could get in and get to work".
Well, that was small town and people did things that way. But still: locks mostly keep honest people honest.
sPh
Um, have you ever actually read the novels?
on
Bay of Souls
·
· Score: 3, Informative
"Imagine if William Gibson wrote a James Bond adventure in which a sexual tigress seduces Bond into a Caribbean political crisis, requiring a nighttime scuba-dive into a sunken treasure-wreck, and then a voodoo ceremony that reads like a nightmare acid trip.
Have you ever read Ian Fleming's original James Bond novels? That is a fairly good summary of the plot of most of them.
I know a lot of Slashbots seem to think that all geekdom is required to mindlessly support Mozilla, and that it has always been that way. But I remember a time in days of yore when Mozilla was the project everybody loved to hate. It was _the_ example of Open Source gone awry - here's how not to open up your product, here's how not to manage an open source project, etc.
Which as far as I can see was (and still is) a correct assessment. Although I used Mozilla daily myself, it doesn't even appear on the stats for our consumer-goods oriented site. Mozilla just doesn't exist as far as 99.95% of the Internet-using world is concerned. I have to rank that as "failure".
Let's start a pool on how long Dell takes to respond to this. I've got fifteen minutes from post-time.
If the article had appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Dell might reply. Why on earth would they reply to a no-name website and a Slashdot article? This won't affect their sales in any way, shape, or form.
Well, the article is now Slashdotted so I can't get the exact quote. But in there somewhere he says the manager of customer service would not accept his complaint and would not give him a mailing address.
In this situation, one needs to write a letter stating one's problem or complaint in clear, calm, non-abusive language. Look up the corporation's VP of Customer Service, Chairman of the Board of Directors, and Chief Legal Counsel (all names should be available through finance.yahoo.com). Send the letter to each of them at the address where the company accepts legal correspondence (also available from public sources). That course of action is far more likely to get results in difficult or complex circumstances than endlessly e-mailing or calling worker bees.
Remember, the worker bees aren't fibbing: they really can't do anything outside corporate policy if they want to keep their jobs
Hopefully there can be some valuable lessons learned from this tragedy. Hopefully something like this will never happen again.
While no one is in favor of needlessly throwing away life, do consider that the bones of a good percentage of the settlers who tried the Oregon Trail can still be seen along the sides of that trail today. For the ones who made it, Oregon was a good life. But quite a few did not make it, and that is the nature of exploring/pioneering.
Also consider that that same week 90 people were roasted/squashed to death while attempting the life-altering experience of seeing "Great White" live on stage. Seems to me that space exploration is worth a bit more risk than that event.
I also have sent off a message or two to various people, trying to ensure that all the various data items that come up, each of which refutes SCO claims in some manner, get brought together when the court case starts.
The problem is that for the court to take notice of such material, it has to be packaged up in the proper format with references to supporting statutes and cases, then submitted at the proper time and place as a "friend of the court" brief.
As we saw with the Microsoft anti-trust case, no matter how good or sound the argument may be, if it is not packaged up in standard format the legal system will just spit it back out.
So I would say a first priority would be fundraising for the legal fund that RedHat has established; perhaps that fund could then process and format the arguments developed by the community.
Slashdot Mirror
sPh
My question relates to neck strain: while I would like to try two monitors, I am concerned that the constant looking to the left or right for the second monitor (or both in the low-angle setup) would increase strain on the neck muscles and/or neck and shoulder joints.
sPh
sPh
sPh
sPh
The telephone is inside the house. That makes the uninvited call a totally different situation from the uninvited doorbell ring.
sPh
In the case of the novel, this is particularly true since (as you state) there were non-random factors driving the two characters toward the same geographical and social areas.
sPh
sPh
I have seen the pressure to go COTS first-hand myself in an application where it really wasn't a good engineering decision. But the price and functionality of the COTS system exerted tremendous pressure on the selection process.
And again, Enron was a financial services company, as were the New York investement houses that served it, but that didn't make them immune from doing stupid things.
sPh
If Vendor A makes an ATM that uses propriatary closed architecture and its units cost $125,000, while Vendor B uses Windows but its units cost $110,000, guess who is going to win the bids? So Vendor A goes to Windows + TCP/IP and gets down to $100,000/unit. Vendor B then responds with Windows + TCP/IP + "Internet connection to eliminate costly leased line charges". Guess who will win that bid? And there we are - the security of a closed system gone in three rounds of bidding.
Now perhaps that example is bad, because there might be regulations in the financial industry to prevent it. And such regulations might even be enforced. But then again, if Enron or Dick Cheney had bought a large ATM network...
sPh
But I now know several people with fatal allergies to tree nuts. So I wonder - what is the effect on any allergic people nearby of vaporizing nut shells and injecting the vapor into the atmosphere?
sPh
sPh
sPh
These midrange apps are the bread-and-butter of corporate computing. They do not run on the Mac and do not run under Linux. Some are starting to move toward a web browser based model, but not all and not necessarily quickly.
Until Linux equivalents exist for these midrange apps, the Linux desktop will not be used in midsized organizations.
sPh
sPh
Seriously, they are dead before scanning for two reasons (a) the process works best when they are semi-dry (b) with little kids in the house, you don't go around killing cute butterflys for no good reason. Not if you want to sit at your own dinner table without being shamed into silence anyway!
sPh
I hate it when she leaves it to me to wash the scanner glass though!
sPh
But when I receive medical care in small towns, or small cities for that matter, this is not the case. They have me sign all sorts of "HIPPA Compliance" forms, but I can clearly see from the way they process charts, records, etc. that they are in no way shape or form complying with the spirit or even the form of HIPPA as I understand it.
So what gives? Is HIPPA just another make-work program honored by the honest or in the breech? Or are these smaller medical providers going to be in big trouble soon?
sPh
Then I heard a loud funny noise from the basement. Unlocked the door and went down. Found the mason, with whom we had signed a contract 4 or 5 weeks previous, at work on the wall. Looked up at the door and said "how did you get in?". His response: "I tried your neighbor but they weren't home. So I disassembled the corner of your foundation so I could get in and get to work".
Well, that was small town and people did things that way. But still: locks mostly keep honest people honest.
sPh
sPh
sPh
sPh
In this situation, one needs to write a letter stating one's problem or complaint in clear, calm, non-abusive language. Look up the corporation's VP of Customer Service, Chairman of the Board of Directors, and Chief Legal Counsel (all names should be available through finance.yahoo.com). Send the letter to each of them at the address where the company accepts legal correspondence (also available from public sources). That course of action is far more likely to get results in difficult or complex circumstances than endlessly e-mailing or calling worker bees.
Remember, the worker bees aren't fibbing: they really can't do anything outside corporate policy if they want to keep their jobs
sPh
Also consider that that same week 90 people were roasted/squashed to death while attempting the life-altering experience of seeing "Great White" live on stage. Seems to me that space exploration is worth a bit more risk than that event.
sPh
As we saw with the Microsoft anti-trust case, no matter how good or sound the argument may be, if it is not packaged up in standard format the legal system will just spit it back out.
So I would say a first priority would be fundraising for the legal fund that RedHat has established; perhaps that fund could then process and format the arguments developed by the community.
sPh