Yes, this once proud insitution is showing signs of decay. They are moving to a new building - which sounds good, except that they will no longer have coffee. This is a true shame, because without coffee, people don't code. Without code, you don't have a CS department, and without a CS department, well......
Someone should start an online petition to make sure that not only does the coffee stay in Cambridge computing, but that the web-cam stays up to so that those of us around the world can have supreme confidence in the coding abilities of those stationed at Cambridge.
What if you log on with copyrighted material in your personal database, and you send your song list to the server, but you aren't allowing any uploads?
They made a movie about it with Sandra Bollock. Industry just got smart after that and made it to where you couldn't see the pi, even if you held down control shift.;)
God, that was a bad movie. Thankfully, I don't remember the title.
Bruce Perens practical joke on Eric Raymond?
on
ESR On XML-RPC
·
· Score: 5
Saw this over on LinuxToday.
Zoom over to Google and put in Eric Raymond (or just check this link out). Notice the paid hotlink...
I'd also like to comment about the other postings in this thread. There seems to be about 90% of the 2+ posters talking about how he didn't defend his trademark initially, so screw him. OpenSSH should stay. May I ask these posters what the reaction would've been had he done so initially? Exactly. Same negative reaction.
There are also a few who have noted that this isn't a letter from lawyers. It is written by a person who understands and even has contributed to the very open source community he is appealing to. I suggest that these facts are taken into consideration.
My observations are these:
1) This guy isn't a lawyer.
2) This guy helped create openSSH.
3) This guy didn't care about the use of the name OpenSSH until his customers started getting confused.
4) Free projects change their name fairly regularly without losing a users.
5) He wrote a reasonable and non-lawyer request to a group asking not for them to cease and desist design and implementation of their program, but for a name change.
It seems like a reasonable thing to do to change the name.
This unit can't even hold 1/10th of my mp3 music collection. 6GB isn't that big, but it is a nice size for a portable collection. (I don't listen to much classical or jazz when driving the car, for example). The fact that these things look like they can be hacked to hold other laptop HDs makes them more promising in my eyes.
I have 80GB. and increasing as we speak. All my files are encoded at 256k for archival purposes. I use Lame -b 256 -ms -h -p and then I don't need to worry about crappy sounding mp3s. Plus, hard drives are so cheap, you might as well encode as best as you can once and not worry about it.
What I want to know is if any of these portable mp3 players play 256k mp3s, since I don't want to downsample my already-encoded mp3s due to further loss in quality.
Does anyone else find it odd
on
DSL Woes
·
· Score: 1
That we're using metric prefixes for english measurements?
I live in Mobile, AL and I have Comcast@home running through Linux. Customer support sucks if you need it, but they are tolerant of linux. In fact, their 888 number (which took me about 20 minutes to find and is 888-793-0800) has 3 selections on their menu.
1) Windows
2) Macintosh
3) Other Operating System
Not that pushing 3 was any help.
In general, I have been pleased with my connection. I was regularly getting 500+kb/s down and 128kb/s up. Kicked ass.
However, today the service is 80/16 - and I can't get anyone to explain why. I called customer service and they were clueless. I've run across a few more @home users in the southeast U.S. who have reported the same thing. Anyone know what is up? Tech support is 888-793-0800. They wouldn't support their line because I was running Linux. Pretty much, they told me to fsck off and hung up.
I currently own the patents on several viruses that use proprietary technology to spread themselves across the internet. Reverse engineering these viruses is explicitly prohibited under the DMCA and I shall now proceed to sue the socks over anyone who reverse engineers my virii and figures out how to bypass or disable them.
I have seen many posts here questioning whether an EMR will improve patient care. The simple answer is this.
If it is well designed and easy to use, then most definitely yes.
If it is poorly designed and hard to use, then most definitely no.
Almost 1/2 of what a physician does these days is paperwork. You must document every detail of the patient encounter. You must then look up the code for your diagnoses. (Did you know there is a code for being hit with space debris? Yep. There is.) These code books are huge. The more of a generalist you are (Family Practice, Internal Medicine, Pediatrics, Emergency Medicine), the wider the set of possible codes you will use regularly will be. Computers are great at finding this stuff and coding it for you.
Prescriptions. Man, there are so many freaking drugs, and so many drug interactions, it boggles the mind. What better way to keep track of things like doses, dosage forms, and drug interactions than a computer?
Computerized medical information would also be helpful in an EMR. Your doctor doesn't know everything. It's humanly impossible. Medical Information doubles every 8 years, *and* in that 8 years, 1/2 of what you knew 8 years ago was proven wrong. That is the kind of database that your physician deals with every day. To put that stat in prospective, On the day you start medical school to the day you finish residency (averages 8 years), there is now twice as much stuff, and half of what you knew is now wrong. And you're just getting started.
And to those of you bitching about the money a doc makes, let me remind you it isn't the truckloads you imagine. Medicine in the U.S. takes approximately 12 years of higher education. 4 years university, 4 years medical school, 4 years residency. The first 4, you might have a job at Arby's or something. Not a lot of income there. The second 4, you probably don't have any paycheck, and you're adding at least $20k in debt per year on top of whatever you were in for undergrad. The third 4, you're getting paid - but only about 35-45k per year. That sounds like a good chunk of change, until you compare it to the hourly wage, and then realize that you're only making about 3 dollars an hour. Once you finally get into the real world, if you're in a general specialty, you're looking at a paycheck of about 150k - which if you're lucky is slightly more than the amount of debt you are facing. Oh, and you're 30 years old now.
People aren't physicians because they want to make truckloads of money. It's better to pursue a business career for that. Physicians want to make some money for their SERVICE, for that is what Health Care is - a service industry. You pay us to give you the best health care advice possible. It's up to you how much you are willing to pay for that, and how you use that information.
I'm currently a 4th year medical student that is doing an independent project on Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) and what I have seen so far scares me.
Medicine as a whole has an absolutely horrid track record embracing business technologies. Inventory Control is a good example. You and I both know that I could walk into your hospital and walk out with a Cath Tray, and no one would be the wiser. Keeping this in mind, you aren't going to have much local help setting up and/or maintaining your setup.
Second, make it secure. Very secure. As in don't even connect it to the internet. You should be under the assumption that if it is on the internet, someone has already seen it.
If you want to keep your EMR from being hacked, don't have them on machines that can access the internet. Don't have machines that can access the internet access the EMR. It's that simple.
Once someone (insurance company, employee's corporation) hacks your system and gets data about your patient, you have violated their privacy, and there is absolutely no way that you can ever restore it. And believe me, Insurance Companies have a large incentive to find out who the financial bad apples are and remove them from the system.
Don't connect it to the internet. Don't allow internet accessible machines to access your medical records. Understand that these are two separate things.
EMRs have already been hacked at institutions that will have a much larger budget than you.
Feel free to email me - miracle at procyon dot com if you want to discuss the matter further. I'vee travelled the country this year interviewing for residencies, and I assure you this problem is nation wide.
I would argue that you should have the right to examine thouroughly anything that enters your property and/or your body. You can't have a more basic right than to examine what you are subjected to.
That being said, I don't disagree with what Hughes did. It was very creative, very ingenious, and technologically genious. Had they pursued a legal case over this, I believe they would be in the moral wrong, but the legal right.
Someone will bypass this. It's a new challenge. The DirecTV hack bug has been relit.
At one time in America, it was legal for you to hack and decode any signal that was sent onto your property. I can't remember the name of the act that allowed this, but if an electronic signal was sent onto your property, and you could decode it, listening/watching it was your right.
This is why the old C-band dishes never had prosecutions for descrambling, or why you could listen in to Cellular Telephone conversations. And this would apply to DirecTV too, except it didn't exist when this law did.
Sometime in the mid 90's, a new Radio Telecommunications Act was passed which banned the eavesdropping on cellular telephones and any other signal entering your property that needed to be decoded. Thus, now the old C-Band hackers had become pirates, and the new DirecTV decoding was illegal.
The question is this - do you have the right to translate signals that are travelling onto your property - signals which you did not request?
Every presidential election year, Discover magazine puts out an article about election math. This years was really good - it discussed the different types of election systems that could be used instead of a popular vote.
Unfortunately, I don't have the issue handy, but I think it is still on the newsstands. It's worth a read for anyone interested in other possible voting methods.
Personally, I find Mandrake's floppy install *better* than Debians. Why?
1) Debian requires 5 floppies - and it's difficult finding 5 without errors. Mandrake's only requires 1.
2) Mandrake's install off the floppy gives you their great graphical installer. Debian's installer is bit confusing if you don't know what you're doing.
I know that Debian is working on the install process of their distro - but if you like the floppy/internet install of Debian, you really should give the Mandrake floppy/internet install a whirl.
Respectfully, I believe you've been blinded by your $200 licensing fee. The Lame versions sound much better than Frau at 128 and beyond. It is possible that your version of Frau isn't equivalent to the one displayed but I find it hard to believe that Frau has improved to a point where their 256k version can compete with the 128k version of lame.
The tools used to create these are readily available, and I'd love for you to run these tests and post the information on the web. Hell, I'd like an e-mail
They were worried someone would write a virus to introduce all the valid microsoft.com emails into all the outlook addressbooks before their auto-spam took place.
I would definitely recommend Mandrake to anyone new to Linux. Sure, it isn't the most stable distribution, but compared to Windows, it's a rock. The installation is beautiful - and newbies feel comfortable with it. I've tried several distros (RedHat/Mandrake/Storm/Debian) and Mandrakes is the easiest to use by far. It's not the quickest, but it will get it up and going.
My beef with it is the update system. It's confusing - and they often include things that can crump a system - like the kernel updates (rpms) that could munge a ReiserFS system. These kinds of things are not good - especially when the end user is a novice and expects these updates to work. Of course, updating a kernel by an rpm isn't the wisest thing to do, but newbies don't necessarilly know that.
What I would *love* to see a distro do is use Mandrake's installer with Debian's package management. I just installed Debian - and while the install wasn't terribly complicated - there were several annoyances that a newbie wouldn't be able to overcome - things like pnp configuration (automagic under mandrake) - X configuration (not as slick as Mandrakes - and I've had to modify some config files by hand) - and sound configuration. These are all relatively small obsticals for someone familiar with linux, but they are show-killers for newbies.
But - apt-get. Oh man, what a program! This is the killer app of Debian. Something isn't working? You see the error message - packageX is missing. Please install before running ProgramY. With apt-get and the.debs - you just can't go wrong. No downloading RPMs to find you need *another* rpm. Debian's package management is definitely the easiest to master for the newbie.
Hopefully, someone will mix the LM installer with the Debian package management - and _THAT_ will be the killer distro...
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, this once proud insitution is showing signs of decay. They are moving to a new building - which sounds good, except that they will no longer have coffee. This is a true shame, because without coffee, people don't code. Without code, you don't have a CS department, and without a CS department, well......
Someone should start an online petition to make sure that not only does the coffee stay in Cambridge computing, but that the web-cam stays up to so that those of us around the world can have supreme confidence in the coding abilities of those stationed at Cambridge.
Banner Ads?
It had precisely zero.
What if you log on with copyrighted material in your personal database, and you send your song list to the server, but you aren't allowing any uploads?
Are you doing anything wrong?
Will you be banned from Napster?
Has anyone been able to connect to their servers in the last few days? I sure haven't. I'm now on Swaptor.
They made a movie about it with Sandra Bollock. Industry just got smart after that and made it to where you couldn't see the pi, even if you held down control shift. ;)
God, that was a bad movie. Thankfully, I don't remember the title.
Saw this over on LinuxToday.
Zoom over to Google and put in Eric Raymond (or just check this link out). Notice the paid hotlink...
Great name.
I'd also like to comment about the other postings in this thread. There seems to be about 90% of the 2+ posters talking about how he didn't defend his trademark initially, so screw him. OpenSSH should stay. May I ask these posters what the reaction would've been had he done so initially? Exactly. Same negative reaction.
There are also a few who have noted that this isn't a letter from lawyers. It is written by a person who understands and even has contributed to the very open source community he is appealing to. I suggest that these facts are taken into consideration.
My observations are these:
1) This guy isn't a lawyer.
2) This guy helped create openSSH.
3) This guy didn't care about the use of the name OpenSSH until his customers started getting confused.
4) Free projects change their name fairly regularly without losing a users.
5) He wrote a reasonable and non-lawyer request to a group asking not for them to cease and desist design and implementation of their program, but for a name change.
It seems like a reasonable thing to do to change the name.
This unit can't even hold 1/10th of my mp3 music collection. 6GB isn't that big, but it is a nice size for a portable collection. (I don't listen to much classical or jazz when driving the car, for example). The fact that these things look like they can be hacked to hold other laptop HDs makes them more promising in my eyes.
I have 80GB. and increasing as we speak. All my files are encoded at 256k for archival purposes. I use Lame -b 256 -ms -h -p and then I don't need to worry about crappy sounding mp3s. Plus, hard drives are so cheap, you might as well encode as best as you can once and not worry about it.
What I want to know is if any of these portable mp3 players play 256k mp3s, since I don't want to downsample my already-encoded mp3s due to further loss in quality.
That we're using metric prefixes for english measurements?
kft?
Gah.
I live in Mobile, AL and I have Comcast@home running through Linux. Customer support sucks if you need it, but they are tolerant of linux. In fact, their 888 number (which took me about 20 minutes to find and is 888-793-0800) has 3 selections on their menu.
1) Windows
2) Macintosh
3) Other Operating System
Not that pushing 3 was any help.
In general, I have been pleased with my connection. I was regularly getting 500+kb/s down and 128kb/s up. Kicked ass.
However, today the service is 80/16 - and I can't get anyone to explain why. I called customer service and they were clueless. I've run across a few more @home users in the southeast U.S. who have reported the same thing. Anyone know what is up? Tech support is 888-793-0800. They wouldn't support their line because I was running Linux. Pretty much, they told me to fsck off and hung up.
I currently own the patents on several viruses that use proprietary technology to spread themselves across the internet. Reverse engineering these viruses is explicitly prohibited under the DMCA and I shall now proceed to sue the socks over anyone who reverse engineers my virii and figures out how to bypass or disable them.
I have seen many posts here questioning whether an EMR will improve patient care. The simple answer is this.
If it is well designed and easy to use, then most definitely yes.
If it is poorly designed and hard to use, then most definitely no.
Almost 1/2 of what a physician does these days is paperwork. You must document every detail of the patient encounter. You must then look up the code for your diagnoses. (Did you know there is a code for being hit with space debris? Yep. There is.) These code books are huge. The more of a generalist you are (Family Practice, Internal Medicine, Pediatrics, Emergency Medicine), the wider the set of possible codes you will use regularly will be. Computers are great at finding this stuff and coding it for you.
Prescriptions. Man, there are so many freaking drugs, and so many drug interactions, it boggles the mind. What better way to keep track of things like doses, dosage forms, and drug interactions than a computer?
Computerized medical information would also be helpful in an EMR. Your doctor doesn't know everything. It's humanly impossible. Medical Information doubles every 8 years, *and* in that 8 years, 1/2 of what you knew 8 years ago was proven wrong. That is the kind of database that your physician deals with every day. To put that stat in prospective, On the day you start medical school to the day you finish residency (averages 8 years), there is now twice as much stuff, and half of what you knew is now wrong. And you're just getting started.
And to those of you bitching about the money a doc makes, let me remind you it isn't the truckloads you imagine. Medicine in the U.S. takes approximately 12 years of higher education. 4 years university, 4 years medical school, 4 years residency. The first 4, you might have a job at Arby's or something. Not a lot of income there. The second 4, you probably don't have any paycheck, and you're adding at least $20k in debt per year on top of whatever you were in for undergrad. The third 4, you're getting paid - but only about 35-45k per year. That sounds like a good chunk of change, until you compare it to the hourly wage, and then realize that you're only making about 3 dollars an hour. Once you finally get into the real world, if you're in a general specialty, you're looking at a paycheck of about 150k - which if you're lucky is slightly more than the amount of debt you are facing. Oh, and you're 30 years old now.
People aren't physicians because they want to make truckloads of money. It's better to pursue a business career for that. Physicians want to make some money for their SERVICE, for that is what Health Care is - a service industry. You pay us to give you the best health care advice possible. It's up to you how much you are willing to pay for that, and how you use that information.
Security Security Security.
I'm currently a 4th year medical student that is doing an independent project on Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) and what I have seen so far scares me.
Medicine as a whole has an absolutely horrid track record embracing business technologies. Inventory Control is a good example. You and I both know that I could walk into your hospital and walk out with a Cath Tray, and no one would be the wiser. Keeping this in mind, you aren't going to have much local help setting up and/or maintaining your setup.
Second, make it secure. Very secure. As in don't even connect it to the internet. You should be under the assumption that if it is on the internet, someone has already seen it.
If you want to keep your EMR from being hacked, don't have them on machines that can access the internet. Don't have machines that can access the internet access the EMR. It's that simple.
Once someone (insurance company, employee's corporation) hacks your system and gets data about your patient, you have violated their privacy, and there is absolutely no way that you can ever restore it. And believe me, Insurance Companies have a large incentive to find out who the financial bad apples are and remove them from the system.
Don't connect it to the internet. Don't allow internet accessible machines to access your medical records. Understand that these are two separate things.
EMRs have already been hacked at institutions that will have a much larger budget than you.
Feel free to email me - miracle at procyon dot com if you want to discuss the matter further. I'vee travelled the country this year interviewing for residencies, and I assure you this problem is nation wide.
I would argue that you should have the right to examine thouroughly anything that enters your property and/or your body. You can't have a more basic right than to examine what you are subjected to.
That being said, I don't disagree with what Hughes did. It was very creative, very ingenious, and technologically genious. Had they pursued a legal case over this, I believe they would be in the moral wrong, but the legal right.
Someone will bypass this. It's a new challenge. The DirecTV hack bug has been relit.
At one time in America, it was legal for you to hack and decode any signal that was sent onto your property. I can't remember the name of the act that allowed this, but if an electronic signal was sent onto your property, and you could decode it, listening/watching it was your right.
This is why the old C-band dishes never had prosecutions for descrambling, or why you could listen in to Cellular Telephone conversations. And this would apply to DirecTV too, except it didn't exist when this law did.
Sometime in the mid 90's, a new Radio Telecommunications Act was passed which banned the eavesdropping on cellular telephones and any other signal entering your property that needed to be decoded. Thus, now the old C-Band hackers had become pirates, and the new DirecTV decoding was illegal.
The question is this - do you have the right to translate signals that are travelling onto your property - signals which you did not request?
The old law said yes. The new one says no.
Would that be the number of PS2's they've produced so far?
Goes to Web Sites like ZD Net for selling their souls and 1/2 of their bandwidth and cpu cycles to advertisers.
Who the hell breaks a 1000 word story up into 9 freaking pages!?!!!
Gah.
Now, there have been some memorial Comic Book Flops.
Punisher, Captain America, and Spawn.
Personally, I thought Spawn wasn't that bad, but I'd alread seen Punisher and Captain America, so I was braced for much much worse.
Every presidential election year, Discover magazine puts out an article about election math. This years was really good - it discussed the different types of election systems that could be used instead of a popular vote.
Unfortunately, I don't have the issue handy, but I think it is still on the newsstands. It's worth a read for anyone interested in other possible voting methods.
Personally, I find Mandrake's floppy install *better* than Debians. Why?
1) Debian requires 5 floppies - and it's difficult finding 5 without errors. Mandrake's only requires 1.
2) Mandrake's install off the floppy gives you their great graphical installer. Debian's installer is bit confusing if you don't know what you're doing.
I know that Debian is working on the install process of their distro - but if you like the floppy/internet install of Debian, you really should give the Mandrake floppy/internet install a whirl.
Respectfully, I believe you've been blinded by your $200 licensing fee. The Lame versions sound much better than Frau at 128 and beyond. It is possible that your version of Frau isn't equivalent to the one displayed but I find it hard to believe that Frau has improved to a point where their 256k version can compete with the 128k version of lame.
The tools used to create these are readily available, and I'd love for you to run these tests and post the information on the web. Hell, I'd like an e-mail
miracle@nospammage.procyon.com
Why use the proprietary Frau encoder when Lame has been proven to be not only faster, but of better
quality?
And regardless of where mp3 ends up legally, Ogg Vorbis will replace it if licensing becomes a huge issue.
They were worried someone would write a virus to introduce all the valid microsoft.com emails into all the outlook addressbooks before their auto-spam took place.
Man, me and the Milky Way are so simalar.
Just this week, Doctors found a black hole at the center of my ass.
I would definitely recommend Mandrake to anyone new to Linux. Sure, it isn't the most stable distribution, but compared to Windows, it's a rock. The installation is beautiful - and newbies feel comfortable with it. I've tried several distros (RedHat/Mandrake/Storm/Debian) and Mandrakes is the easiest to use by far. It's not the quickest, but it will get it up and going.
.debs - you just can't go wrong. No downloading RPMs to find you need *another* rpm. Debian's package management is definitely the easiest to master for the newbie.
My beef with it is the update system. It's confusing - and they often include things that can crump a system - like the kernel updates (rpms) that could munge a ReiserFS system. These kinds of things are not good - especially when the end user is a novice and expects these updates to work. Of course, updating a kernel by an rpm isn't the wisest thing to do, but newbies don't necessarilly know that.
What I would *love* to see a distro do is use Mandrake's installer with Debian's package management. I just installed Debian - and while the install wasn't terribly complicated - there were several annoyances that a newbie wouldn't be able to overcome - things like pnp configuration (automagic under mandrake) - X configuration (not as slick as Mandrakes - and I've had to modify some config files by hand) - and sound configuration. These are all relatively small obsticals for someone familiar with linux, but they are show-killers for newbies.
But - apt-get. Oh man, what a program! This is the killer app of Debian. Something isn't working? You see the error message - packageX is missing. Please install before running ProgramY. With apt-get and the
Hopefully, someone will mix the LM installer with the Debian package management - and _THAT_ will be the killer distro...