The article also states that UWB devices are unlikely to appear in consumer devices much before 2004, giving plenty of time for appropriate standards to be set to avoid such problems. It's not a big deal.
Two minor problems:
The kind of executive techno-geeks who use cutting edge devices are also the ones most likely to be taking a lot of commercial flights
It takes about 15 years to get a new standards for electronics created, passed, and installed throughout the commercial airline fleet. A new standard that required a lot of additional shielding and rewiring could take 30 years and cost hundreds of billions.
You mean Enron, WorldCom et al.? These aren't anything to do with executives ignorning the deadlines that their employees tell them about. These are totally different problems. Besides they represent only a small fraction of the companies in the US.
Enron and Worldcom merely added illegal behaviour to the practice of ignoring reality. Consider John Chambers for a moment - every sales nerd I knew at Cisco was reporting up the line at the end of 2000 that customers just weren't going to be buying very many routers in 2001. Chambers returned those forecasts to his sales team with instructions to "make the numbers". Totally out of touch with reality. Cost him about $2 billion personally so far, although I guess I feel a little worse for the 7,000 who got laid off when actual sales were To a certain extent, any good leader has to ignore objective reality and push on regardless - otherwise nothing new or significant would ever get accomplished. But the US economy does seem to create a lot of people (Ellen Hancock comes to mind) who work their way to the top, ignore reality, and fail big time. As long as they get out before Chapter 11 is filed, they usually have another CxO position within a month or so.
The nuclear power industry has done extensive studies on this subject. Tradition in the industry (partially the electric utility industry; partially coming from ex-Navy guys) was to work long shifts - 24 and 36 hour work days were not uncommon.
The conclusion of the studies was that people become increasingly ineffective after 10 hours per day, and very ineffective after 12 hours per day. BUT - they don't realize it. If they are "motivated" they think they are doing fine at hour 16 or hour 20. Objective testing shows that they aren't.
And similarly, anyone can work one or two 16 or even 24 hour days. But after a week of 16s, or ever 7 straight days of 12s, performance again drops significantly.
But hey, since your project won't hurt anyone else if it melts down, go ahead and work those hours!
Not even vaguely - this is a clear generalisation. I have no experience with AS/400. However, in my expierience, there is often a reluctance to move to new technologies, and the justification is often to cite them as "immature" and "unproven", whether this is or it not the fact
From roughly 1985 to 2000, the personal computer advocates and suppliers very successfully pushed the idea that "new is better" and "wizzier is better than dull". For better or for worse, that's the direction that many organizations took. An implicit assumption grew up in the IT industry (as opposed to Data Processing or Information Systems) that anything "old" (AS/400, S/370, etc.) was automatically obsolete and doomed. Some organizations were very successful with this way of thinking; many were not.
Now however, for good or for ill, I believe that kind of thinking is going away. Just as one doesn't change out the foundation of a house without very good reason, organizations are going to need to see some demonstrable business benefit from changing out a working, stable IS infrastructure item. The argument that "its a dinosaur" will no longer be an automatic win.
sPh
Re:Just another toy
on
Newton Won't Die
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
If a comic strip could "doom" something, then MS/Windows would be dead a long time ago. It seems that slashdot alone has a large amount of these linked from user comments.
Doonesbury may not be what it was in the 1970s, but it still has a slightly larger readership than Slashdot. By about 3 orders of magnitude!
The Newton was marketed as a "hip" device (as was the Palm) primarily for the "in" crowd. That one cartoon made the whole thing seem terminally absurd, and did in fact kill the entire product line.
The EULA states that MS has the right to install patches. it doesn't say anything about being able (legally) to transmit your personal data back to the mothership.
Can you imagine the cry that would be raised if someone discovered that MS was transmitting personal info or documents in Windows Update Requests? Do you remember Prodigy? Do you remember the Quicken scare? Compared to the number of installations of Win2k, those are tiny issues in comparison.
Yeah, can you imagine the hue and cry if Doubleclick started reselling your personal information in violation of the privacy agreements of every web site it was collected from as well as their own privacy agreement?
You don't remember that hue? Neither do I. Yeah, they agreed to pay a 500k "settlement". Big whoop. Your data was "repurposed" and you had no say. Too bad!
As long as you're being anal-retentive, you should be aware that unencrypted instant-messaging protocols are frowned upon, because medical staff can circumvent all your hard work and simply send patient data back & forth over the IM.
Indeed. Many Wall Street firms block IM protocols on both the Internet connection and internally due to privacy and recordkeeping regulations.
Seond, if you let your servers auto-update and apply patches from *ANY* vendor without doing your own testing and verification of those patches before hand, you're an idiot.
And a fool and his job are soon parted.
Does that apply also to people who misunderstand the nature of a problem, and apply a "fix" that doesn't address the root cause of the problem?
If so, I guess I would be a bit slower to call other people "morons & idiots". Because the fundamental problem is in the EULA, not in the service packs or download mechanism. One could take all the steps you have described and (potentially) still be in violation of the privacy statutes, since by agreeing to the EULA you have agreed to allow Microsoft access to your systems under circumstances controlled only by Microsoft.
If you want an answer, you're going to need to hire a lawyer. Asking Slashdot will certainly give you a wide variety of unfounded opinions, and baseless conclusions, but it won't actually be useful. At all.
In the long run, you are of course correct. This issue will need to be resolved by the hospital's CIO and Legal Dept.
However, when seeking assistance from a lawyer (or any similar professional) it is best to have a basic understanding of what is going on, and what you need, before you set up a meeting. You will get a lot more accomplished that way.
Similarily, lawyers aren't born knowing everything (even though they try to foster that impression!). If your hospital's legal dept. primarily handles malpractice and billing cases, and you bring an intellectual property / EULA problem to them, they are also going to have to do some research to get up to speed. Being able to provide background helps here too.
Running a Windows OS connected to the Internet without a firewall would constitute a violation of the "due cause" clause, with or without SP3.
Furthermore, disable auto-updating and do it manually and the problem is solved, moot, and done.
Have to disagree with your police work a bit there.
The problem is not the service pack or the auto-downloader, which can be disabled. The problem is with the EULA itself, where Microsoft reserves for itself the right to access your system at any time. Installing the service pack off-line still requires acceptance of the EULA.
They said in Deep Impact that the Orion ship was assembled in orbit (although it looked like a close enough orbit to create hell with EMP, at least).
Sorry, I should worded my reference more carefully. I meant that if the Earth actually faced a real asteroid impact scenario with enough time to respond, as illustrated in the fictional movie Deep Impact, the inhabitents of Earth might be willing to eat the fallout from an Orion launch to avoid total destruction.
While a nuclear explosion is rather devastating, it doesn't totally vaporize everything. H bomb tests at Bikini atoll included Navy ships so we could see how they weathered the explosion. I think there's a picture with one cruiser lifted hundreds of feet up in the air with one of these tests.
The original "Bikini" test that you refer to was a shot of a 20 kt fission weapon - essentially the same as the one used at Hiroshima. The first test of a fusion weapon, the "Mike" shot, ended up being a bit larger than predicted at 10 MT. It vaporized an entire island about 2 km in diameter to a depth of about 100 m! That's a lot of vaporized rock.
That's because it IS ludicrous, at least the "ascend into orbit" part. It has been a while since I read anything about Project Orion, but I'm pretty confident that this propulsion technique was intended for use only in space. The spacecraft would most likely have been assembled in orbit, or possibly launched from Earth by one mother of a big chemical rocket.
Interestingly, that turns out not to be the case.
First, the starting point of Orion was asking the question, "How do we get multi-ton payloads into space?". Chemical rockets, then and today, take tremendous amounts of resources to get a few hundred kg into space. Then and now, that doesn't really do much for anyone.
Second, you have to remember that the Orion project started during the era of above-ground nuclear testing. Yes, an Orion launch would have created some fallout and upper-atmosphere contamination. But compared to the 10 MT (US) and 60 MT (USSR) monsters that were being fired for test purposes, the pollution wouldn't have seemed so bad.
Of course, times have changed, and I doubt anything like this will be ever be used in the atmosphere except in dire circumstances (Footfall, Deep Impact).
Use a hemispherical plate, explode them at teh focus, enough of the energy pushes on the plate to make this worthwile. The key here is BIG OVERKILL not efficient.
Ted Taylor, the master of the elliptical, evasive non-release of classified information, hinted that it is possible to direct the energy release of an atomic explosion (hard as that may be to believe). So possibly some of the classified Orion knowledge concerns how to direct the energy in the desired direction.
These people are NOT having their rights infringed on. I can make a database of any group of people I want...hell, I can go through the phonebook, find out where the person lives and go take a picture of them AND IT'S PERFECTLY LEGAL. All this organization is doing is keeping track of people that have been caught in 'questionable activities' and making a list.
You might want to do a quick Google on "Chicago Police Department" and "COINTELPRO". It is true that it was never held that the CPD and City of Chicago were doing anything "illegal"; they just agreed never to do it again to avoid a settlement in the billion dollar range.
Again, I am not trying to sell you Lotus Notes, or convince you that its design is a good one. I am just pointing out some issues surrounding groupware.
But to address your question, and the brilliant observations of the iarchitect.com web site: please do keep in mind that Notes was developed before Windows 95, and long before Microsoft released the Common Interface guidelines, at a time when there was no agreement on how GUI interfaces should look or work. Every application at that time (including the various Microsoft apps) had its own look and feel. The designers of Notes built a platform-independent GUI from scratch without any guidelines to use and before most of what passes for "UI research" today was published (I am no big fan of the Microsoft CUI standards myself).
As for iarchitect.com, the first thing they rip on are the fat double-click buttons and tabbed desktop. Whereas when I was supporting Notes, the first thing that non-geekaziod users would ask me after they had used Notes for a while was how they could add the fat buttons and tabs to their other applications! So I am not quite so convinced that was a bad choice...
I also find it funny that the denizens of this site post violent diatribes concerning Microsoft's stifling monoculture and lack of innovation, but when faced with something a little different rip on how it "doesn't follow standards"!
The world can be divided into two kinds of people: those who think groupware is useful, and those who don't.
I guess this puts you into the "those who think groupware is useful" type, huh?
Actually, the world really can be divided into two kinds of people: those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who don't!;-)
Seriously, it is funny what people have imputed to me because I brought up a discussion of Notes. I went from using mail on 4.2 BSD, to IBM Profs, to cc:Mail, to Lotus Notes, to Exchange. I like some features of Notes and find some other laughable. Of all of those, cc:Mail was the cleanest and easiest to admin.
I will stick with my statement that Exchange is 45% of Notes features without the design, though.
While this is by no means an open source solution, Steltor (recently acquired by Oracle) has a product that takes care of these points in your post;
Oracle makes some great products, and when something must work, you cough up the $$$ and obtain them. But one of the major problems with Exchange is the cost of all the necessary licenses. I have a hard time believing an Oracle equivalent will cost less (see 9i AS), and I don't see much difference between putting the money in Bill's pocket or Larry's pocket - sorry.
The world can be divided into two kinds of people: those who think groupware is useful, and those who don't.
I know that mentioning Lotus Notes violates the Code of Slashdot Posting, but take a look at Notes sometime. The people who designed that system spent a long time thinking very hard about how to build a mobile, distributed, secure groupware system (note: you do not need to agree with the solution they built to acknowledge that they thought very deeply about the problem). Then - they spent a lot of time and money building what they had designed.
(Exchange is basically an imitation of the 45% of Notes' features that are most commonly used, without the thought, design, or security).
Who in the Free Software/Open Source world is going to spend that kind of time and effort? Particularly given that most Linuxians fall into the "don't like groupware" camp?
The proper way to dispose of a non-working or obsolete monitor or television is to take it to a computer recycling center, who can safely crush the CRT and dispose of the toxic plastic and electronics.
Where does one find such recycling centers, pray tell? I assume we are discussing ones which are audited to certify that they actually recycle the stuff, not just hide it for a while and then send it to a landfill in Mexico.
The reason I ask is that the US Navy has a regulation that their ships must be scrapped following strict environmental standards. They do about 10 a year at a cost 20 times higher than the standard fee for ship disposal. Everyone else sends their ships to India where they are scrapped using methods that are tremendously damaging to the environment ("PCB contaminated oil? Burn it off").
Berkshire Hathaway stock trades at about $32,000 US per share (Warren Buffet doesn't believe in stock splits!). At the time of the Euro conversion the lira was frozen at about 1000 to the USD. So if a company owned a few hundred shares of B-H stock there would not be enough room on the page to prints its value in lira in the same units as other assets held in USD, euro, etc. (Newspapers have the same problem - they can't print the B-H price in the regular stock listings and have to include a separate box for it.)
Although I supposed the "creative" solution would be "use a 2pt font!"
That's great. Of course, most programmers will spend 0.5% of their day working on things like that, 19.5% rewriting the same invoice printing routine for the 783rd time since the company purchased their first 1401, and 80% talking to the business analysts/spec writers, meeting with end users to tease out requirements that the users themselves haven't fully formulated, meeting with the CFO to explain why you can't print the price of Berkshire Hathaway stock in Italian lira on the financial statements, etc. Being able to solve tricky puzzles in an interview has very little bearing on being a functional team member.
If you were using win 3.1 or even win95 I could understand but I don't see why you would switch from a recent and generally (despite what linux zealots say) solid OS.
Because Microsoft has already EOL'd (End of Life) Windows 2000. And under Licensing 6.0, there is no longer an upgrade path for Open License (less than 250 workstations) sites. So to maintain support and patches (including those somewhat important security patches) you will be forced to upgrade to XP fairly soon (I would guess 12 months after XP Server {whatever it is being called this week} is finally released). Under the new licensing terms that will put a real squeeze on the wallet.
Here's a question - who do I sue if that bug in Konqueror causes me to lose money? Nobody! Microsoft is a corporation, they have to be sure whatever they fix doesn't create 14 other security holes or Joe Schmoe will sue their pants off and in turn piss off their shareholders.
Who do you sue if a bug in any software product by SuperMegaSoft causes you to lose money? I have been involved with software contracts large enough to bring even Microsoft to the negotiating table, and even though the software purchased under those contracts did have bugs that caused us to lose money, and even though we had pretty good lawyers, we didn't have a chance in the world of collecting a penny via lawsuits.
Slashdot Mirror
- The kind of executive techno-geeks who use cutting edge devices are also the ones most likely to be taking a lot of commercial flights
sPhIt takes about 15 years to get a new standards for electronics created, passed, and installed throughout the commercial airline fleet. A new standard that required a lot of additional shielding and rewiring could take 30 years and cost hundreds of billions.
sPh
sPh
The conclusion of the studies was that people become increasingly ineffective after 10 hours per day, and very ineffective after 12 hours per day. BUT - they don't realize it. If they are "motivated" they think they are doing fine at hour 16 or hour 20. Objective testing shows that they aren't.
And similarly, anyone can work one or two 16 or even 24 hour days. But after a week of 16s, or ever 7 straight days of 12s, performance again drops significantly.
But hey, since your project won't hurt anyone else if it melts down, go ahead and work those hours!
sPh
Now however, for good or for ill, I believe that kind of thinking is going away. Just as one doesn't change out the foundation of a house without very good reason, organizations are going to need to see some demonstrable business benefit from changing out a working, stable IS infrastructure item. The argument that "its a dinosaur" will no longer be an automatic win.
sPh
The Newton was marketed as a "hip" device (as was the Palm) primarily for the "in" crowd. That one cartoon made the whole thing seem terminally absurd, and did in fact kill the entire product line.
sPh
You don't remember that hue? Neither do I. Yeah, they agreed to pay a 500k "settlement". Big whoop. Your data was "repurposed" and you had no say. Too bad!
sPh
sPh
If so, I guess I would be a bit slower to call other people "morons & idiots". Because the fundamental problem is in the EULA, not in the service packs or download mechanism. One could take all the steps you have described and (potentially) still be in violation of the privacy statutes, since by agreeing to the EULA you have agreed to allow Microsoft access to your systems under circumstances controlled only by Microsoft.
sPh
However, when seeking assistance from a lawyer (or any similar professional) it is best to have a basic understanding of what is going on, and what you need, before you set up a meeting. You will get a lot more accomplished that way.
Similarily, lawyers aren't born knowing everything (even though they try to foster that impression!). If your hospital's legal dept. primarily handles malpractice and billing cases, and you bring an intellectual property / EULA problem to them, they are also going to have to do some research to get up to speed. Being able to provide background helps here too.
sPh
The problem is not the service pack or the auto-downloader, which can be disabled. The problem is with the EULA itself, where Microsoft reserves for itself the right to access your system at any time. Installing the service pack off-line still requires acceptance of the EULA.
sPh
sPh
sPh
First, the starting point of Orion was asking the question, "How do we get multi-ton payloads into space?". Chemical rockets, then and today, take tremendous amounts of resources to get a few hundred kg into space. Then and now, that doesn't really do much for anyone.
Second, you have to remember that the Orion project started during the era of above-ground nuclear testing. Yes, an Orion launch would have created some fallout and upper-atmosphere contamination. But compared to the 10 MT (US) and 60 MT (USSR) monsters that were being fired for test purposes, the pollution wouldn't have seemed so bad.
Of course, times have changed, and I doubt anything like this will be ever be used in the atmosphere except in dire circumstances (Footfall, Deep Impact).
sPh
sPh
sPh
But to address your question, and the brilliant observations of the iarchitect.com web site: please do keep in mind that Notes was developed before Windows 95, and long before Microsoft released the Common Interface guidelines, at a time when there was no agreement on how GUI interfaces should look or work. Every application at that time (including the various Microsoft apps) had its own look and feel. The designers of Notes built a platform-independent GUI from scratch without any guidelines to use and before most of what passes for "UI research" today was published (I am no big fan of the Microsoft CUI standards myself).
As for iarchitect.com, the first thing they rip on are the fat double-click buttons and tabbed desktop. Whereas when I was supporting Notes, the first thing that non-geekaziod users would ask me after they had used Notes for a while was how they could add the fat buttons and tabs to their other applications! So I am not quite so convinced that was a bad choice...
I also find it funny that the denizens of this site post violent diatribes concerning Microsoft's stifling monoculture and lack of innovation, but when faced with something a little different rip on how it "doesn't follow standards"!
sPh
Seriously, it is funny what people have imputed to me because I brought up a discussion of Notes. I went from using mail on 4.2 BSD, to IBM Profs, to cc:Mail, to Lotus Notes, to Exchange. I like some features of Notes and find some other laughable. Of all of those, cc:Mail was the cleanest and easiest to admin.
I will stick with my statement that Exchange is 45% of Notes features without the design, though.
sPh
sPh
I know that mentioning Lotus Notes violates the Code of Slashdot Posting, but take a look at Notes sometime. The people who designed that system spent a long time thinking very hard about how to build a mobile, distributed, secure groupware system (note: you do not need to agree with the solution they built to acknowledge that they thought very deeply about the problem). Then - they spent a lot of time and money building what they had designed.
(Exchange is basically an imitation of the 45% of Notes' features that are most commonly used, without the thought, design, or security).
Who in the Free Software/Open Source world is going to spend that kind of time and effort? Particularly given that most Linuxians fall into the "don't like groupware" camp?
sPh
The reason I ask is that the US Navy has a regulation that their ships must be scrapped following strict environmental standards. They do about 10 a year at a cost 20 times higher than the standard fee for ship disposal. Everyone else sends their ships to India where they are scrapped using methods that are tremendously damaging to the environment ("PCB contaminated oil? Burn it off").
sPh
Although I supposed the "creative" solution would be "use a 2pt font!"
sPh
sPh
sPh
sPh