Well just maybe, since personal abuse != free speech/satire
. Since when is speech personal abuse? We all have to defend ourselves from lots of things from time to time. If some knuckledragger in the audience was heckling her for being a lesbian, wouldn't that have been trivial to use against him? "What'sa matter, buddy? Your dick too short?"
Everybody ought to have a backbone. It's good for you. BTW, I'm Canuck.
*Somebody* accused tinkerers of not knowing what professionals are supposed to know. Me, I've worked with a lot of "professionals" who I would not describe so.
Obviously, I'm one of the self-taught "tinkerers" who feels a bit slandered.
Hilarious. This story has polarized Slashdot into the "I actually work in IT in a systems administration capacity" camp and the "I tinker with computers as a hobby" camp.
The OP is asking how to broadcast patient data, apparently with little or no consideration for HIPAA regs., yet some of us self-taught tinkerers appear to know more about HIPAA than, "I actually work in IT in a systems administration capacity" people.
What is it with the vapid, knee-jerk bashing of baby boomers?
Thanks (born '54).
Second, if you ever come up with a superior alternative to capitalism, you let us know.
Well, it is practised rather badly, so badly that this libertarian-Objectivist (it's complicated) hesitates to call it capitalism. I'd call it closer to Fascism; regulatory capture plus corporatism. The politicians and lobbyists are in it up to their elbows, and the movers and shakers in the shadows appear to prefer de-population to solve humanity's ills.
It's pretty damned annoying to see the slandering of Ayn Rand* (et al) here when they screamed loudest about getting those jerks out of the system so it could have a chance to work. "Laissez nous faire!"
[*] Yeah, her personal life was a little nuts. Isn't everyone's?
Thing is the GNU foundation doesn't make large contributions to various political campaigns...
Why is it that this is common knowledge on/., yet this seems never to end up on the nightly news shows?
Oh, I forgot, I don't watch those (very often).
Is the US' really broken and bought by and in the pockets of special interests, or is that just/.'s perception? From this Canuck's point of view, ever since I heard of Senator Byrd, I'm inclined to believe this. I never imagined this could happen when I was a kid.
Requires Windows (tm) 7 (tm) Professional (tm) using an Intel (tm) chipset supporting a Trusted Platform Module (tm) with keys in escrow by the issuing authority.
the 1.4km/yr is the rate at which the soil is becoming to salty to use for growing.
I thought that was due to deforestation. The coastlines used to be covered with banyan (?) trees which filtered out the salt. Those have now been eliminated.
This was mentioned as to why a tsunami so devastated Myanmar/Burma a few years ago.
Currently we're seeing an unparalled scare campaign by the UN and some environmental organizations based on the same data that three decades ago showed an iceage approaching...
Can someone provide some links regarding those organizations?
Oh c'mon, buddy, especially on/., that's your job. Report back what you find, or what you found not to exist.
I would be interested in Slashdotters recommendations for software, practices, services and anything else that can help build strong virtual teams.
My only suggestion is to learn to communicate with them the way they prefer it to happen. I've recently been paired up with a bunch of cell-phone addicts, whereas I'm an email junkie. Just getting these guys to check email once before phoning me first thing in the morning has been maddening.
There are lots of cases where the only currently existing way to get data produced is in a patent encumbered or indecipherably complex format. There's no reworking or resubmitting; there's just one vendor-specific program that does the magic, its storage format, and an export feature that only captures one viewpoint of the data.
I don't know what sort of IT people you have to put up with, but from my perspective this is not the rocket science you appear to believe it is. Any of my friends would be able to sit down and analyze those bizarre file formats and come up with *some* sort of process to handle them. Some will be finicky and demand hands-on treatment. However, you ought to be able to automate the majority of them.
At the very least, insist this cryptic data is submitted in as many forms as possible; raw binary, export, backup data files, screenshots, email attachments, fax,... All I'm doing here is advocating for doing it smarter. IT is a young field, but we have learned few basic laws. Redundancy's an important one.
I'm also suggesting that you're missing the value of divide and conquer. Leave the IT to the geeks. Leave the researchers to research. Don't try to teach a pig to sing; they're not good at it, and it annoys the pig.
In general, I think you're out of touch with the culture at universities.
Absolutely. I've never been to one (I'm primarily a self-taught hacker:-).
Computers can make life easier for everyone involved, but only if the sharp end's focussed upon. I enjoy implementing solutions that make problems disappear forever. Not all of your labs or projects should have to fight with every problem, ffs! Automate what you can institution-wide, and deal with the rest when you run into them. Iterate.
Not to belittle your burden, but this's what I've been doing for two decades. Some problems are intractable exceptions, however most *can* be handled if you know how. I still say you need a better geek.:-)
To make your batch idea work, you'd have to do the conversions as part of a nightly backup process, requiring no intervention on the part of the user to produce the record. You then have to hope to the gods that you get informed whenever a professor adds a new obscure format to his or her roster, and then personally know enough field-specific information to interpret the format involved.
This is an old problem, one that we've been dealing with forever! At a shell prompt on any *nix box, type "apropos 2". On my Linux box, that spits out stuff like:
We've been building and using specialised data conversion tools since forever! Anyone with any shel/perl/python/... scripting foo can build a tool that'll loop over the contents of $INCOMING, detect what sort of file it is, pass it through the correct filter, or bail and scream "Exception!", and go on to the next.
As for your "new obscure format", shouldn't you have policies in place to handle this? If $NEWFILEFORMAT is non-portable, submission refused, rework and resubmit, damnit!
There's really no such thing as anonymized data when it comes to large aggregate databases.
Well, I have to admit that's true. Once you start aggregating,...
Still, anonymize, anonymize, anonymize, anonymize, anonymize,... Give it to the Secret Service, or NCIS. "We just want your data, we don't care who you are. Honest, it's all just going into this big pot. We're shooting lawyers on sight."
The average small university would need one per biology/biochemistry/life sciences department...
No. It would need a process implemented by a specialist.
That person ought to be employed by your computing centre. You shouldn't even need to budget for them. This's like having someone on hand to do backups, or configure the firewall. You need data conversion on a regular basis. It's an essential service your entire institution needs, institution-wide. What's wrong with your IT dept?
The average small university would need one per biology/biochemistry/life sciences department...
No. It would need a process implemented by a specialist. I'd do an inventory of all the data, all the file formats that need to be dealt with, then I'd start building tools/filters that handle those types of data. Once built, those tools can be used institution-wide. Soon, you would be batch processing data in the background automatically. Your postdocs would see the output in their email every morning.
... it's much more practical to lobby vendors to open their stuff up...
I very much doubt that! Since when has that sort of thing been in their interest?
I'm sorry you've come to the conclusion that we're in hopeless disagreement with each other. I assure you, you're jumping to conclusions. I've always railed against the proliferation of proprietary, opaque file formats & etc. (remember, I used LaTeX against orders, ffs).
You're ignoring my point completely in order to make a stand for your own job security
I'll cop to the job security charge, but in my defense, you're the one with the vast, complex problem to solve. I'm someone who (theoretically:-) can solve it.
The entire problem can be eliminated by making the data more consistent in the first place.
I'm one of the loudest advocates for this.
What you fail to understand is this is as it is! This is IT. *We* didn't create this clusterfuck, but this is our reality! It is among the youngest sciences out there. We're going to have to go through a lot of !@#$ before it's as solid as other professions. COBOL programmers are still valuable, ffs. There's going to be a lot of deadwood to wade through on the way, and more's created as we speak. I've been fighting this crap since '75 or so. With respect, suck it up. This is IT. Idiots out there created a mess. For our own reasons, we choose to work within that mess. These are our dragons.
Your fantasy world that geeks + money = results ignores the amount of pain and suffering that these bad designs are creating in the first place.
You appear to be blaming this on me. Why? I'm well aware there's a vast amount of dumbth in IT. Not every geek is worth the air they breath. I know of Sun Certified engineers who can't use ls to list a directory. Such is life.
Your argument is essentially that of the Luddite.
If that's really the impression you got, then I've obviously failed to express myself cogently. My apology.
All I'm asking is, is it really worth six months of a postdoc's time to bang their head on this to figure it out, or might a competent specialist manage to get that data for you in a week? When do you want it? How cheap are you? What's the postdoc really want to do? Bang their head on data conversion for six months, or do something with the data?
Wouldn't it be smarter to budget for data conversion specialists in the first place?
Contrary to popular belief scientists don't just sit down and code programs on their off time for fun...
I am a counter-example to your assertion.
Not to mention, there's a few geeks out here who love to dabble in sciency stuff. Show me an interesting problem, and you won't find it easy to get me off it. I live for the "three pipe problem."
It isn't, but they're still jerks for doing it in the first place.
Which is why I wrote my dox in LaTeX. I knew they'd reject it. I didn't care.
... labs with two or three PhDs and a handful of masters students. Not a major resource of deep computer expertise, or large enough to have a DBA.
See, this's the part that pees me off. This is complicated !@#$ for average mortals, and you sciency types, hell everyone in and out of research, have to learn to budget for this specialized computing expertise. My last big client couldn't wait to ship my position off to three guys in Brazil. If that's how much local expertise is appreciated, who'd want to be in this business?
We can do this, but you've got to fund us as much as your sponsors are funding you.
If you've got exotic data to deal with, do you hand it to an intern, or to someone who already knows how to handle it? That's your choice. How soon do you want it?
Slashdot Mirror
.
Since when is speech personal abuse? We all have to defend ourselves from lots of things from time to time. If some knuckledragger in the audience was heckling her for being a lesbian, wouldn't that have been trivial to use against him? "What'sa matter, buddy? Your dick too short?"
Everybody ought to have a backbone. It's good for you. BTW, I'm Canuck.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2088940&cid=35860896. Are you sure I'm not supposed to be replying to you?
*Somebody* accused tinkerers of not knowing what professionals are supposed to know. Me, I've worked with a lot of "professionals" who I would not describe so.
Obviously, I'm one of the self-taught "tinkerers" who feels a bit slandered.
The OP is asking how to broadcast patient data, apparently with little or no consideration for HIPAA regs., yet some of us self-taught tinkerers appear to know more about HIPAA than, "I actually work in IT in a systems administration capacity" people.
Are you a manager?
Thanks (born '54).
Well, it is practised rather badly, so badly that this libertarian-Objectivist (it's complicated) hesitates to call it capitalism. I'd call it closer to Fascism; regulatory capture plus corporatism. The politicians and lobbyists are in it up to their elbows, and the movers and shakers in the shadows appear to prefer de-population to solve humanity's ills.
It's pretty damned annoying to see the slandering of Ayn Rand* (et al) here when they screamed loudest about getting those jerks out of the system so it could have a chance to work. "Laissez nous faire!"
[*] Yeah, her personal life was a little nuts. Isn't everyone's?
No need to worry. We're not clicking on the ads. We do wonder why marketing types keep buying this !@#$ believing that we are.
So, according to your Constitution, you ought to be reaching for your ammunition. Or does that make me a 'terrist'?
This needs to be fixed. I say, what started in Tunisia, needs to spread across the world. Reboot civilization. 'Trow de bums out!'
Why is it that this is common knowledge on /., yet this seems never to end up on the nightly news shows?
Oh, I forgot, I don't watch those (very often).
Is the US' really broken and bought by and in the pockets of special interests, or is that just /.'s perception? From this Canuck's point of view, ever since I heard of Senator Byrd, I'm inclined to believe this. I never imagined this could happen when I was a kid.
I thought we'd decided not to reinvent wheels: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x48EE77B1AC94E4B7
I thought that was due to deforestation. The coastlines used to be covered with banyan (?) trees which filtered out the salt. Those have now been eliminated.
This was mentioned as to why a tsunami so devastated Myanmar/Burma a few years ago.
What I'd like to know is, why's nobody mentioned https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Maurice_Strong yet. Even Jesse Ventura devoted a whle program to him.
Oh c'mon, buddy, especially on /., that's your job. Report back what you find, or what you found not to exist.
My only suggestion is to learn to communicate with them the way they prefer it to happen. I've recently been paired up with a bunch of cell-phone addicts, whereas I'm an email junkie. Just getting these guys to check email once before phoning me first thing in the morning has been maddening.
Really? Go take a look at Michael Geist's reportage, or TechDirt.com.
The discussion shouldn't be about piracy. It should be about freedom. Computers copy data. That's what they do. Live with it.
If I paid for something, it's mine to use as I wish, no questions asked, the producer has been compensated. That's the end of the relationship.
I believe you're missing half of the equation. They're coming through bigtime for those who lobbied and paid them to do this.
Promises to voters? Oh, that's so quaint.
I don't know what sort of IT people you have to put up with, but from my perspective this is not the rocket science you appear to believe it is. Any of my friends would be able to sit down and analyze those bizarre file formats and come up with *some* sort of process to handle them. Some will be finicky and demand hands-on treatment. However, you ought to be able to automate the majority of them.
At the very least, insist this cryptic data is submitted in as many forms as possible; raw binary, export, backup data files, screenshots, email attachments, fax, ... All I'm doing here is advocating for doing it smarter. IT is a young field, but we have learned few basic laws. Redundancy's an important one.
I'm also suggesting that you're missing the value of divide and conquer. Leave the IT to the geeks. Leave the researchers to research. Don't try to teach a pig to sing; they're not good at it, and it annoys the pig.
Absolutely. I've never been to one (I'm primarily a self-taught hacker:-).
Computers can make life easier for everyone involved, but only if the sharp end's focussed upon. I enjoy implementing solutions that make problems disappear forever. Not all of your labs or projects should have to fight with every problem, ffs! Automate what you can institution-wide, and deal with the rest when you run into them. Iterate.
Not to belittle your burden, but this's what I've been doing for two decades. Some problems are intractable exceptions, however most *can* be handled if you know how. I still say you need a better geek. :-)
This is an old problem, one that we've been dealing with forever! At a shell prompt on any *nix box, type "apropos 2". On my Linux box, that spits out stuff like:
We've been building and using specialised data conversion tools since forever! Anyone with any shel/perl/python/... scripting foo can build a tool that'll loop over the contents of $INCOMING, detect what sort of file it is, pass it through the correct filter, or bail and scream "Exception!", and go on to the next.
As for your "new obscure format", shouldn't you have policies in place to handle this? If $NEWFILEFORMAT is non-portable, submission refused, rework and resubmit, damnit!
Well, I have to admit that's true. Once you start aggregating, ...
Still, anonymize, anonymize, anonymize, anonymize, anonymize, ... Give it to the Secret Service, or NCIS. "We just want your data, we don't care who you are. Honest, it's all just going into this big pot. We're shooting lawyers on sight."
That person ought to be employed by your computing centre. You shouldn't even need to budget for them. This's like having someone on hand to do backups, or configure the firewall. You need data conversion on a regular basis. It's an essential service your entire institution needs, institution-wide. What's wrong with your IT dept?
Out-sourced to Brazil?
No. It would need a process implemented by a specialist. I'd do an inventory of all the data, all the file formats that need to be dealt with, then I'd start building tools/filters that handle those types of data. Once built, those tools can be used institution-wide. Soon, you would be batch processing data in the background automatically. Your postdocs would see the output in their email every morning.
I very much doubt that! Since when has that sort of thing been in their interest?
I'm sorry you've come to the conclusion that we're in hopeless disagreement with each other. I assure you, you're jumping to conclusions. I've always railed against the proliferation of proprietary, opaque file formats & etc. (remember, I used LaTeX against orders, ffs).
I'll cop to the job security charge, but in my defense, you're the one with the vast, complex problem to solve. I'm someone who (theoretically :-) can solve it.
I'm one of the loudest advocates for this.
What you fail to understand is this is as it is! This is IT. *We* didn't create this clusterfuck, but this is our reality! It is among the youngest sciences out there. We're going to have to go through a lot of !@#$ before it's as solid as other professions. COBOL programmers are still valuable, ffs. There's going to be a lot of deadwood to wade through on the way, and more's created as we speak. I've been fighting this crap since '75 or so. With respect, suck it up. This is IT. Idiots out there created a mess. For our own reasons, we choose to work within that mess. These are our dragons.
dbi_list_schema.pl
Cry me a river.
You appear to be blaming this on me. Why? I'm well aware there's a vast amount of dumbth in IT. Not every geek is worth the air they breath. I know of Sun Certified engineers who can't use ls to list a directory. Such is life.
If that's really the impression you got, then I've obviously failed to express myself cogently. My apology.
All I'm asking is, is it really worth six months of a postdoc's time to bang their head on this to figure it out, or might a competent specialist manage to get that data for you in a week? When do you want it? How cheap are you? What's the postdoc really want to do? Bang their head on data conversion for six months, or do something with the data?
Wouldn't it be smarter to budget for data conversion specialists in the first place?
Not to mention, there's a few geeks out here who love to dabble in sciency stuff. Show me an interesting problem, and you won't find it easy to get me off it. I live for the "three pipe problem."
Which is why I wrote my dox in LaTeX. I knew they'd reject it. I didn't care.
See, this's the part that pees me off. This is complicated !@#$ for average mortals, and you sciency types, hell everyone in and out of research, have to learn to budget for this specialized computing expertise. My last big client couldn't wait to ship my position off to three guys in Brazil. If that's how much local expertise is appreciated, who'd want to be in this business?
We can do this, but you've got to fund us as much as your sponsors are funding you.
If you've got exotic data to deal with, do you hand it to an intern, or to someone who already knows how to handle it? That's your choice. How soon do you want it?
No. It's anonymized.
You're arguing against early warning systems.
That's when I whooped out laughing. Damn, this's well written and composed! Thanks.
I do know the values of all those special chars you mention above, but damn, you do put a brilliant spin on them.
No, you'll not get my geek card, except from my cold, dead hands ...! :-|
I'm still giggling. Fun meeting you. Carry on, thanks.