Hey, maybe what Apple's going to do is sell a flash player with a card slot, then sell preloaded flash cards. THAT would be a great idea for the industry. Slap in U2's new album, then slap in "1,000 metal hits," "1,000 easy listening tunes," etc.
Just imagine the market for custom card mixes. Damn!
That would totally change the music industry.
I'm sure the Apple guys thought of it already. No patent for me:(
It's my understanding that genetic-based timelines (mDNA, etc) are set and calibrated to archaeologist-created timelines. Using genetic timelines to disprove c-14 dating may be spurious.
Did you know that Wal-Mart anally implants a tracking device into each employee?
It's to measure the stool production of each employee. You see, Wal-Mart realized that you can only eat so much during your breaks. Excessive stool production implies that your breaks are too long. Any employee with excessive stool production is flagged and actively monitored by store management.
It also is linked into the in-store McDonalds'. If an employee is producing too little stool, the employee is forwarded to the McDonalds for a quick snack, increasing the blood sugar of the employee and boosting productivity./conspiracy
Why should we be afraid of Wal-Mart? They're using their data to be more responsive to their customer. They want to make sure that if you want something, it's in-stock and ready to go.
What could they do with their data, really, that would hurt anyone? It wouldn't be like "Bob Smith is buying condoms again." It would be more like "there's a condom spike in area code 78750 every Thursday, let's ship more out."
People who are afraid of data aggregation are jumping at shadows. Nobody cares what you in particular are buying. An individual as a data point is useless, unless you're an exemplar or something like that (which would be unusual).
Let's face it, individuals just aren't that interesting. More importandly from Wal-Mart's point of view, there's no return on looking at individuals.
You know, when you look back Ashcroft wasn't so bad. He turned the FBI around and changed its mission radically. While the FBI has had a lot of false positives, it hasn't had many false negatives.
Compare that to the last AG, Janet Reno. The only thing I remember her doing was frying a whole bunch of fellow citizens down in Texas...and refusiing to prosecute/investigate a bunch of Clintonistas.
One problem with these types of events is that nobody can say whether something happened or not. All you can say is that "the numbers don't fit a mental model of normalcy." The problem is that model may be wrong, or that something unusual happened.
If something unusual happened, well, statistically you can try and figure out how unusual the event was, but could you actually figure out if it was a "normal but unusual" event or a "fraud-related unusual" event?
Just because an event is extremely unlikely doesn't mean that it can't happen. People win the lottery every day, even though those events are highly unusual.
Can someone with some knowledge of statistics chime in?
BTW, palm beach found and corrected the 88k discrepancy.
Attacks on MacOS X will be driven by user interaction.
The biggest problem for malware writers in MacOS X is that it's hard to remotely attack the box.
Mac OS 9 and its ilk were pretty much impossible to compromise remotely, because, well, they were designed as single-user OSs with no network services (no network daemons) installed by default.
Mac OS X isn't quite like that, but it's close. The downside is all those bsd-level things probably have holes of one sort or another. Has anyone actually checked the robustness of Apple's X-11 implementation?.
OTOH, it's must easier to get the user to click and download something. The "prompt for your admin password" thing is great, but everyone does it without thinking these days, giving any installer root access.
Once that happens, you can install anything, anywhere, and given the structure of MacOS X you can hide your stuff in places a normal user won't be able to find. The "Opener" guys (see www.macintouch.com) should have edited the rc scripts, not stuck their stuff in/Library/StartupItems.
Luckily, the web/email based attacks haven't worked so far (unlike on Windows), so you really do need to get someone to run an app. These days that isn't as hard as it used to be.
Apple could protect against that by doing a system restore/diff after every installer run. It would be useful after-the-fact, and most users may not understand any of it, but it would be nice to have. Or (assuming the metadata stuff works in tiger) you could stash metadata info on the installed files somewhere, then search across your filesystem for matching stuff?
Ideally (and this is what MS tried) each publisher would sign all their files, and that sig would be part of the file metadata. So you could list, see, and search across it. Malware would bypass that, though, but you never know.
You know, people have been spinning theories about the solar system for hundreds of years. It seems that every time solar theories meet with reality, they are proven to be less-than-accurate.
What does this mean for all the rest of the theories that don't have a lot of empirical data?
It could be that the whole underpinnings of planetary geology are bunk. Lord knows the prevailng theories haven't worked out so far.
Next, imagine all the rest of the scientific canon that's never had a brush with reality, and never will.
And people wonder why other people equate science to religion...
Kerry admitted during the second debate that his "plan" wouldn't really do anything. The problem isn't tax loopholes, the problem is that offshore workers are so freaking cheap. An offshore worker gets paid a week what people in the US get every hour, sometimes less. And that's big money in the offshore country.
That's a pure cost savings right there.
Plus, the tax issues mentioned wouldn't apply, because most offshoring is arms-length, There aren't income tax issues there, because the offshore company probably isn't a subsidiary of the mother company.
All Kerry can really do is make it socially unacceptable to offshore. But at a 30-to-1 cost advantage, well, the savings goes into the EPS number. It's hard to argue with a 40-60% savings.
You know, now that Google is encroaching on Microsoft's desktop turf, expect more of these kinds of articles.
Google, security risk of the new millenum.
"Gee, I have no idea where that email went." "Oh, here it is. Doh!"
Google's desktop search and archiving would be a disaster for Microsoft, given their poor record on document retention. It might also be a revolution in e-mail based discovery proceedings. Imagine how hard it is to plow through the thousands of hourly (or daily) emails a firm receives every day. Stick google on it, and you can find anything.
I'd think that you'd want as much medical information in the hands of your doctors as possible.
For example, if you're allergic to something like penicillin they could read that from your implant instead of attempting to somehow elicit it out of your unconcious body.
Likewise, if you have AIDS but didn't tell anyone the hospital would probably treat you differently, given that you might have a whole slew of daily meds in your system that might interact with whatever they were planning to do with you.
Of course, the downside is that it might tell them that you've been to the ER fifteen times complaining about the same thing, but all that would be in your paper file anyway.
Could law enforcement abuse it? Probably. But those guys don't have a lot of free time, and what free time they have won't be used scannning random individuals.
when something goes wrong, the internal dialogue will go something like this::
Management: why didn't the AI inform us of the problem? Contractors: oh, looks like we forgot to turn it on before launch. Sorry about that. Management: doh! Here's more money, don't do that again. Contractors: OK. We'll do something else wrong next time.
In the US, most on-board diagnostic computers only store emissions-related faults. If the fault isn't emission-related, it won't be there (unless you've got a true black-box car).
And, of course, if it's a fault in the computer system, well, the chances of it showing up in a diagnostic are low.
Migrating your desktops isn't going to be easy. Moving from Windows to Linux or MacOS has a lot of different costs involved. Some of them are:
* how are you going to manage 70k desktops? Does your current management software support the target platform? How will your IT department deal with the shift?
* hardware replacement. How much is it going to be to replace the hardware? If they're on-lease, it's not a big deal.
* application requirements. How bound are your applications to the current OS? Will the hardware support it?
* training. This is going to cost a whole lot. But they have to train anyway if they're moving from Windows blah to Windows XP, so that's not really an extra cost.
If AT&T is at the end of a lease cycle, then this may make a lot of sense. Most likely their current hardware isn't capable of running XP effectively. They need to retrain for XP. And if they're all web-based, well, then they aren't bound to the OS at all. If they're outlook/exchange based, then they can migrate to Entourage and MS Office Mac.
Managing these desktops may be a problem, because none of the enterprise management tools really deals with MacOS X yet. They deal with Linux some, but more on the server side.
Hey, don't worry, be happy. The Spanish-American war was started with much less information, and for a lot less justification.
But, it led to the liberation of Cuba, the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico, and the annexation of Hawaii. It also led to the invention of the Colt.45, which apparently was created to stop psychotic Filipino tribesmen who refused to fall down when plugged with.38s.
If you want to blame someone, blame the Democrats. They're a terrible opposition party. I'm sure they calculated that, when it was all over, they'd rather criticize Bush for attacking Iraq than be put on the spot for opposing the war if Iraq actually did something exciting.
Yeah, read that one twice.
Is America safer now? Heck yes. Iraq has been removed from the global stage, and is now not even a regional player.
Are there risks? Yes, definitely. No risk, no reward.
What the US needs is a good Iraqi PR firm. Nobody wants to see photos of people going to work, since that's not dramatic enough for news. But the media will eat it if you feed it to them.
What's happening in Afghanistan? No hostilities, no media, no crisis. I'm sure the situation there is almost identical to Iraq, but without drama there's no news.
Southern Command's big problem isn't Iraqi insurgents. It's problem is it has no idea how to manage news organizations. Throw some human interest, post-war stories there. Humanize the situation. The embedded reporters are bitter, cynical flakes who would find something to complain about if they had free suites at the Four Seasons. Rotate them out and get the Saachi to do your PR/human interest stuff.
Grant the reporters you like access, and they'll lick your boots until their tour is up.
Well, sounds like they got their infra working
on
Inside Wal-Mart IT
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
It was maybe 2 years ago when I heard that Wal-Mart had massive system monitoring problems. They installed HP Vantage Point, then found out that it was a total piece of crap. It couldn't watch anything, much less their boxes it was installed on. I suppose they finally got all that stuff to work.
Before that, I remember hearing that Wal-Mart used to make every store identical - down to the IP addresses of the boxes. It was a great idea, until it broke all the software that used IP addresses to track state. Imagine: push software to a box, then go to the next store. But wait, the software's already been sent, so no push. Doh!
Overall, their business application people seemed really good, but their infrastructure people were less-than-stellar. It's an interesting environment nevertheless.
Oh, and they were really cheap, too. You'd think they'd understand the value of infrastructure, you know?
Remember, releasing this information provides at least two things:
1. it's a trial balloon, to see what people om the outside think,
2. it's a way to give other (potential enemy) strategists one more thing to think about.
If someone is relying on eyes in the sky, well, it's good to point out those eyes may go blind. It's unlikely that anyone anytime soon is going to use them, but you never know. I'd be surprised if the Feds aren't looking at every query that comes through the commercial sat servcices (great intel) as well as the origin/destination of every telstar call.
With SIP, it becomes even easier, because all that stuff is in text:)
It's amusing that the growth in commerical satellites have probably stopped (or will stop) competition in the intel satellite business. Why build your own if you can rent one?
Look, our current system is as simple as it can get, and people in Florida still had problems with it. Anything more complicated and people's heads will explode in the voting booth.
Also the reason that there are two parties is, well, because no other perspective has garnered enough voters to perpetuate itself. Back in the day there were multiple parties, but most of those points of view are long gone.
As time goes on and people see what works and what doesn't, the field narrows. What's left are single-issue parties, which don't have enough momentum to survive, and local parties with strong organizations like the greens.
Greens survive locally because the issues they face locally aren't likely to conflict with their beliefs. On a wider stage, they tend to be unwilling to compromise, and tend to be marginalized pretty easily by the dominant parties.
Single-issue parties tend to get their issues co-opted. What can you do?
Slashdot Mirror
Funny, there was just something about it on macosxhints.com. This hint lets you have speed control and bookmarks with non-audible content:
0 41 114214939859
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20
Hey, maybe what Apple's going to do is sell a flash player with a card slot, then sell preloaded flash cards. THAT would be a great idea for the industry. Slap in U2's new album, then slap in "1,000 metal hits," "1,000 easy listening tunes," etc.
:(
Just imagine the market for custom card mixes. Damn!
That would totally change the music industry.
I'm sure the Apple guys thought of it already. No patent for me
"Currently, Creative has 600 research and development staff working on its MP3 players, and plans to hire another 300 engineers."
This is why the Creative products will never be as good. 600 people in R&D for their player? What are all those people doing, reading fark?
You'd think they'd hire 5 people with imagination to replace the 450 people who aren't doing anything except meeting with each other.
It's my understanding that genetic-based timelines (mDNA, etc) are set and calibrated to archaeologist-created timelines. Using genetic timelines to disprove c-14 dating may be spurious.
Funny, I remember someone doing a blind test with a tube amp and a solid state amp with a bit of distortion.
When they didn't know which was which, the group of audiophiles ranked them equally.
When they knew which one was the tube, they rated the tube higher...even if it was the solid state amp.
I wish I remembered where I read it. It was back in the early 90s, pre-web.
Did you know that Wal-Mart anally implants a tracking device into each employee?
/conspiracy
It's to measure the stool production of each employee. You see, Wal-Mart realized that you can only eat so much during your breaks. Excessive stool production implies that your breaks are too long. Any employee with excessive stool production is flagged and actively monitored by store management.
It also is linked into the in-store McDonalds'. If an employee is producing too little stool, the employee is forwarded to the McDonalds for a quick snack, increasing the blood sugar of the employee and boosting productivity.
Why should we be afraid of Wal-Mart? They're using their data to be more responsive to their customer. They want to make sure that if you want something, it's in-stock and ready to go.
What could they do with their data, really, that would hurt anyone? It wouldn't be like "Bob Smith is buying condoms again." It would be more like "there's a condom spike in area code 78750 every Thursday, let's ship more out."
People who are afraid of data aggregation are jumping at shadows. Nobody cares what you in particular are buying. An individual as a data point is useless, unless you're an exemplar or something like that (which would be unusual).
Let's face it, individuals just aren't that interesting. More importandly from Wal-Mart's point of view, there's no return on looking at individuals.
You know, when you look back Ashcroft wasn't so bad. He turned the FBI around and changed its mission radically. While the FBI has had a lot of false positives, it hasn't had many false negatives.
Compare that to the last AG, Janet Reno. The only thing I remember her doing was frying a whole bunch of fellow citizens down in Texas...and refusiing to prosecute/investigate a bunch of Clintonistas.
"AOL est omnis divisa in partes quattuor" /sorry julius
One problem with these types of events is that nobody can say whether something happened or not. All you can say is that "the numbers don't fit a mental model of normalcy." The problem is that model may be wrong, or that something unusual happened.
If something unusual happened, well, statistically you can try and figure out how unusual the event was, but could you actually figure out if it was a "normal but unusual" event or a "fraud-related unusual" event?
Just because an event is extremely unlikely doesn't mean that it can't happen. People win the lottery every day, even though those events are highly unusual.
Can someone with some knowledge of statistics chime in?
BTW, palm beach found and corrected the 88k discrepancy.
Greenland?
o ri olis.html
c J: www.ens-newswire.com/ens/feb2004/2004-02-13g.asp+g reenland+chemical+plants&hl=en
Do you have actual documentation that pollution source is US-based, or is this just a Dane venting?
While the prevailing winds do seem to flow towards Greenland:
http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr161/lect/earth/c
Pollution comes from everywhere, like Asia:
http://216.239.57.104/search?q=cache:aSDhgSpkSH
According to the above article, Greenland seems to be a depository of pollution for Europe, North America, and Asia due to its location. Oh well.
It's fashionable to blame the US, but you should read the facts too.
It's funny that "origin" in this case is "where they're coming from" when the real question is "why and how are cosmic rays created?"
There's a lot of energy being beamed about, and well, you'd think that it would stop eventually, but it keeps on coming.
Attacks on MacOS X will be driven by user interaction.
.
/Library/StartupItems.
The biggest problem for malware writers in MacOS X is that it's hard to remotely attack the box.
Mac OS 9 and its ilk were pretty much impossible to compromise remotely, because, well, they were designed as single-user OSs with no network services (no network daemons) installed by default.
Mac OS X isn't quite like that, but it's close. The downside is all those bsd-level things probably have holes of one sort or another. Has anyone actually checked the robustness of Apple's X-11 implementation?
OTOH, it's must easier to get the user to click and download something. The "prompt for your admin password" thing is great, but everyone does it without thinking these days, giving any installer root access.
Once that happens, you can install anything, anywhere, and given the structure of MacOS X you can hide your stuff in places a normal user won't be able to find. The "Opener" guys (see www.macintouch.com) should have edited the rc scripts, not stuck their stuff in
Luckily, the web/email based attacks haven't worked so far (unlike on Windows), so you really do need to get someone to run an app. These days that isn't as hard as it used to be.
Apple could protect against that by doing a system restore/diff after every installer run. It would be useful after-the-fact, and most users may not understand any of it, but it would be nice to have. Or (assuming the metadata stuff works in tiger) you could stash metadata info on the installed files somewhere, then search across your filesystem for matching stuff?
Ideally (and this is what MS tried) each publisher would sign all their files, and that sig would be part of the file metadata. So you could list, see, and search across it. Malware would bypass that, though, but you never know.
You know, people have been spinning theories about the solar system for hundreds of years. It seems that every time solar theories meet with reality, they are proven to be less-than-accurate.
What does this mean for all the rest of the theories that don't have a lot of empirical data?
It could be that the whole underpinnings of planetary geology are bunk. Lord knows the prevailng theories haven't worked out so far.
Next, imagine all the rest of the scientific canon that's never had a brush with reality, and never will.
And people wonder why other people equate science to religion...
Kerry admitted during the second debate that his "plan" wouldn't really do anything. The problem isn't tax loopholes, the problem is that offshore workers are so freaking cheap. An offshore worker gets paid a week what people in the US get every hour, sometimes less. And that's big money in the offshore country.
That's a pure cost savings right there.
Plus, the tax issues mentioned wouldn't apply, because most offshoring is arms-length, There aren't income tax issues there, because the offshore company probably isn't a subsidiary of the mother company.
All Kerry can really do is make it socially unacceptable to offshore. But at a 30-to-1 cost advantage, well, the savings goes into the EPS number. It's hard to argue with a 40-60% savings.
You know, now that Google is encroaching on Microsoft's desktop turf, expect more of these kinds of articles.
Google, security risk of the new millenum.
"Gee, I have no idea where that email went."
"Oh, here it is. Doh!"
Google's desktop search and archiving would be a disaster for Microsoft, given their poor record on document retention. It might also be a revolution in e-mail based discovery proceedings. Imagine how hard it is to plow through the thousands of hourly (or daily) emails a firm receives every day. Stick google on it, and you can find anything.
It's a lawyer's dream and nightmare, all in one.
I'd think that you'd want as much medical information in the hands of your doctors as possible.
For example, if you're allergic to something like penicillin they could read that from your implant instead of attempting to somehow elicit it out of your unconcious body.
Likewise, if you have AIDS but didn't tell anyone the hospital would probably treat you differently, given that you might have a whole slew of daily meds in your system that might interact with whatever they were planning to do with you.
Of course, the downside is that it might tell them that you've been to the ER fifteen times complaining about the same thing, but all that would be in your paper file anyway.
Could law enforcement abuse it? Probably. But those guys don't have a lot of free time, and what free time they have won't be used scannning random individuals.
when something goes wrong, the internal dialogue will go something like this::
Management: why didn't the AI inform us of the problem?
Contractors: oh, looks like we forgot to turn it on before launch. Sorry about that.
Management: doh! Here's more money, don't do that again.
Contractors: OK. We'll do something else wrong next time.
This is the equivalent of the AAC/FairPlay stuff in iTunes. In short, it's DRM that geeks can bypass, but is mostly effective on normal users.
If this is the price people pay to get books online, well, it's no price at all.
In the US, most on-board diagnostic computers only store emissions-related faults. If the fault isn't emission-related, it won't be there (unless you've got a true black-box car).
And, of course, if it's a fault in the computer system, well, the chances of it showing up in a diagnostic are low.
Migrating your desktops isn't going to be easy. Moving from Windows to Linux or MacOS has a lot of different costs involved. Some of them are:
* how are you going to manage 70k desktops? Does your current management software support the target platform? How will your IT department deal with the shift?
* hardware replacement. How much is it going to be to replace the hardware? If they're on-lease, it's not a big deal.
* application requirements. How bound are your applications to the current OS? Will the hardware support it?
* training. This is going to cost a whole lot. But they have to train anyway if they're moving from Windows blah to Windows XP, so that's not really an extra cost.
If AT&T is at the end of a lease cycle, then this may make a lot of sense. Most likely their current hardware isn't capable of running XP effectively. They need to retrain for XP. And if they're all web-based, well, then they aren't bound to the OS at all. If they're outlook/exchange based, then they can migrate to Entourage and MS Office Mac.
Managing these desktops may be a problem, because none of the enterprise management tools really deals with MacOS X yet. They deal with Linux some, but more on the server side.
But hey, more power to them!
Hey, don't worry, be happy. The Spanish-American war was started with much less information, and for a lot less justification.
.45, which apparently was created to stop psychotic Filipino tribesmen who refused to fall down when plugged with .38s.
But, it led to the liberation of Cuba, the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico, and the annexation of Hawaii. It also led to the invention of the Colt
If you want to blame someone, blame the Democrats. They're a terrible opposition party. I'm sure they calculated that, when it was all over, they'd rather criticize Bush for attacking Iraq than be put on the spot for opposing the war if Iraq actually did something exciting.
Yeah, read that one twice.
Is America safer now? Heck yes. Iraq has been removed from the global stage, and is now not even a regional player.
Are there risks? Yes, definitely. No risk, no reward.
What the US needs is a good Iraqi PR firm. Nobody wants to see photos of people going to work, since that's not dramatic enough for news. But the media will eat it if you feed it to them.
What's happening in Afghanistan? No hostilities, no media, no crisis. I'm sure the situation there is almost identical to Iraq, but without drama there's no news.
Southern Command's big problem isn't Iraqi insurgents. It's problem is it has no idea how to manage news organizations. Throw some human interest, post-war stories there. Humanize the situation. The embedded reporters are bitter, cynical flakes who would find something to complain about if they had free suites at the Four Seasons. Rotate them out and get the Saachi to do your PR/human interest stuff.
Grant the reporters you like access, and they'll lick your boots until their tour is up.
It was maybe 2 years ago when I heard that Wal-Mart had massive system monitoring problems. They installed HP Vantage Point, then found out that it was a total piece of crap. It couldn't watch anything, much less their boxes it was installed on. I suppose they finally got all that stuff to work.
Before that, I remember hearing that Wal-Mart used to make every store identical - down to the IP addresses of the boxes. It was a great idea, until it broke all the software that used IP addresses to track state. Imagine: push software to a box, then go to the next store. But wait, the software's already been sent, so no push. Doh!
Overall, their business application people seemed really good, but their infrastructure people were less-than-stellar. It's an interesting environment nevertheless.
Oh, and they were really cheap, too. You'd think they'd understand the value of infrastructure, you know?
Remember, releasing this information provides at least two things:
:)
1. it's a trial balloon, to see what people om the outside think,
2. it's a way to give other (potential enemy) strategists one more thing to think about.
If someone is relying on eyes in the sky, well, it's good to point out those eyes may go blind. It's unlikely that anyone anytime soon is going to use them, but you never know. I'd be surprised if the Feds aren't looking at every query that comes through the commercial sat servcices (great intel) as well as the origin/destination of every telstar call.
With SIP, it becomes even easier, because all that stuff is in text
It's amusing that the growth in commerical satellites have probably stopped (or will stop) competition in the intel satellite business. Why build your own if you can rent one?
Look, our current system is as simple as it can get, and people in Florida still had problems with it. Anything more complicated and people's heads will explode in the voting booth.
Also the reason that there are two parties is, well, because no other perspective has garnered enough voters to perpetuate itself. Back in the day there were multiple parties, but most of those points of view are long gone.
As time goes on and people see what works and what doesn't, the field narrows. What's left are single-issue parties, which don't have enough momentum to survive, and local parties with strong organizations like the greens.
Greens survive locally because the issues they face locally aren't likely to conflict with their beliefs. On a wider stage, they tend to be unwilling to compromise, and tend to be marginalized pretty easily by the dominant parties.
Single-issue parties tend to get their issues co-opted. What can you do?