Thanks for pointing out the economic issue with long-term data storage. What data is actually worth keeping that long? I'm sure there's a few examples besides the obvious benefit for future historians, but in a lot of cases we're keeping too much data, and we should be thankful that it deteriorates.
Re:Just shows what we already knew
on
How DRM Won
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
The thing with the rising popularity of streaming is not DRM. The real problem is (as usual) the way they'll ruin it with advertisements, and then DRM will come into play, making sure you cannot edit out or skip ads. And thanks to technology, it's now super easy to inject all manner of interstitials and pop-ups and pop-overs and watermarks and other crap on top of the content.
That is why I hate streaming, and it's why I will cling to media that I *own* for as long as I can. Until they start ruining that with ads too (like Disney and their infamous unskippable trailers).
RedHat and such only protect against lawsuits targeting (users of) FOSS products. They do not offer much protection against your manager's wrath when he finds out you choose "cowboy software" over "reputable products", which is sadly still how many managers see things.
The reverse is not true: when others are seeking redress, using open source may make you more vulnerable. For example: software may infringe on someone else's IP, and a lawsuit ensues. With proprietary software, the vendor will be sued. If they are forced to recall their product, you may even sue them successfully for damages because you can no longer use their software. But if you use open source, the IP holder may very well be coming after your ass, and win. Happened to a client of mine. That's the main argument I hear from legal departments in companies contemplating the use of FOSS products: not the FOSS licenses are the issue, but the fact that IP holders can (and successfully have) sued users (rather than the authors) of FOSS for infringement.
In some cases you can stick a vendor (or FOSS "reseller") like RedHat in the middle, which provides some protection against this.
It also wins on ass-covering, which is a real benefit in business nad government. If there are issues with a well known piece of proprietary software, you can always blame the software vendor or even the implementer. If a FOSS-based project fails, you take the fall for taking a chance on "some free crap developed by a bunch of hippies", even if the project is implemented by a 3rd party. It's the old adage: no-one has ever been fired for choosing IBM. Proprietary software is a safe choice.
Not health care expenses, but overall costs. Dead smokers will not draw a pension, for example. And keep in mind that dying in general has become more expensive; we're extending people's lifetimes with treatments and the older people get, the more ailments they will have, even having lived a healthy life. The difference in total health care costs between smokers and non smokers has declined.
They sure as hell would like to. There's already talk of charging smokers and overweight people an additional premium. Not being a smoker and being just a tad overweight, I say HELL NO unless the people with an unhealthy lifestyle also get a larger cut on their state and private pension premiums. The BBC doc. "the cost of dying" ought to be mandatory viewing for anyone contemplating such penalties, as it has shown that the super healthy people are the most expensive overall, and only slightly below in health care costs as they will often suffer from similarly expensive ailments, just a bit later in life.
Event better: "Researcher copies and publishes every document in the house as proof that the door was unlocked". Nothing was removed. I'd say that downloading the data and sharing it in some way with the press was necessary to demonstrate the weakness of AT&T's system, with the caveat that the press should use the data only to verify the claims, not publish them to the general public. His subsequent handling of the affair does merit some punishment though.
What was he actually being punished for; the hack, or the publication of private data?
The socialised systems in Europe (or several countries here at least) suffer from the same problem as ObamaCare, and your current health care system: a powerful oligarchy of insurance companies. These companies have no incentive to drive down health care costs, on the contrary. They'd much rather pay twice as much and double our premiums at the same time. On top of that these companies (at least in NL) are building their own health care bureaucracies to do stuff that has little to do with insurance but looks nice, like helping customers live more healthy lives... useful stuff to be sure, but paid for by our premiums and very, very, very expensive.
One of our ministers had the right idea (he's a socialist but a clever fellow nonetheless, and smarter than many of his colleagues). Insurance is this: you collect premiums, and if someone stubs a toe, you pay their medical bill. If (like in NL) everyone is insured for basic healthcare at the same rates and under the same terms... why then do we still need insurance companies? What are they going to compete on? Simpler to let the gov't self insure and cut out these horribly expensive middlemen who add no value, leave the insurers to offer us packages for additional coverage.
It's not a lack of demand for transportation to drive development of space technology, we need a good reason to colonize the moon or Mars in the first place. A good economic reason; science or an abstract notion like survival of the species isn't going to cut it given the staggering cost of such an undertaking. Europe's colonization of Americas wasn't exactly cheap or safe, but it brought tangible returns for both the colonists and the investors. Mars? What are we even going to do there?
What about real estate? Perhaps habitable worlds (in the goldilocks zone, spinning core, geologically stable, etc) are rare, and if an alien species would find our gravity and air tolerable, then this world could be of incredible value to them. Even if we haven't exactly left it in pristine condition.
As for threats, we really can't assume that a spacefaring race would be so far ahead of us as to find us no threat to them. Perhaps it took their civilisation a few millenia to go from the beginnings of industrialisation to the space/information age, in which case they might well fear a species that did this in a century or two. Or they know that we, a rather warlike species, are likely to soon discover the trick to interstellar travel. They might not want us around for all manner of reasons.
BU appears to be suing for dollar amounts absurdly in excess of the marginal utility of its invention.
Isn't that the norm? You ask for a few beeellion dollars, the offending end product to be crushed to powder and shot into the sun, and the firstborn of the company's executives to be sacrificed to Ba'al. Then you settle out of court for something more reasonable.
ITIL, and redundant processes in general, are part (or the result) of one my fears: the dumbing down of my job to the point where there's no need for or chance to excel (as in doing a good job and making a presonal difference, I don't mean spreadsheets!). Large organisations need process and structure; they do not need ITIL.
ITIL is still very much around though. Many large companies are reorganising IT and other knowledge work, creating increasingly specialisatized and compartimentalized jobs and teams that appear to be easy to plan, manage, measure and outsource (but aren't in practice). Much of IT is being turned into an assembly line, which might be ok for making cars (although even that industry has thought better of dumbing things down too much, a long time ago), but in my experience works very poorly for knowledge work. It's an attempt to reduce some of the inherent uncertaintly in our line of work, and the effort of managing a diverse set of highly skilled people, by dumbing down the work and replacing intelligent decisions and judgment calls with process and SLAs. Someone coined the term "predictable mediocrity" for this. The result sucks but you know what you're getting, and most managers (the MBA types) actually prefer this.
This way of working adds red tape and communication overhead, as you'll be dealing with more and more specialized teams, and reduces project buy-in: no one gives a damn about any single particular project anymore. I've recently been involved in a project where the ratio of process to doing actual work was around 20:1, I kid you not. And I do include producing useful documentation, agreeing on a support model, and hammering out specifications in the definition of "actual work" here. My fear is that this is the future of IT.
Solar might be a great match for EVs. Instead of charging overnight from the grid, you'd charge during the day using solar power. The problem is infrastructure: many of us commute to work, and while it's easy to have solar panels and a charging point installed at home, few of us have much influence on getting such amenities installed in the office parking lot.
I have to agree: it runs well. Booting is exceptionally fast; in Windows 8 I'll be running on the desktop while my older (but more powerful) machine is still loading the Windows 7 login screen. I dislike Metro though; I suppose I could make it into something usable, if I spend the effort to nicely organize my favorite apps on the Metro canvas, but why should I? The old Windows start menu does that for me in a very usable way with zero effort (other than installing the tool to bring back that start menu). Besides that, I like to use the desktop like my real desktop, to organize and sort files I am working on. The Metro canvas is useless for that.
A real problem with Metro is that so many basic actions are hidden or counter-intuitive. You're doing something wrong if people have to search for help on how to close an app or manage windows on your OS. And before they can even try and search for that info, they have to use another computer to search for help on getting the damn address bar to appear in IE! People's hatred for Metro doesn't just come from having to learn a new UI, a lot of it is due to (piss-)poor design.
"We do not stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing" (Shaw)
Take up a hobby, keep your curiosity peaked, explore, appreciate the beauty found in small things, laugh often and dare to cry. Create something just for the hell of it, anything, and don't be afraid to fail. Most of all do not be afraid to be "wasting your time". That too may sound like a bunch of trite nonsense, but being carefree in your leisure time will help you cope with the stressful day-to-day, as I found. We cannot remain children, but hanging on to some part of our childhood is a healthy thing.
You laugh, but the director of the Dutch secret service recently admitted to gathering intel on a large scale "so they'll have something valuable to trade with their counterparts abroad". Apparently you need to give up the goods on your own citizens in order to play the spy game on an international level.
"Even" at 0.5C? You'll need to travel closer to light speed and be able to accelerate at a pretty spanky rate to average that speed. Getting a manned ship to 0.1C with a reasonable acceleration might be hard but doable with next-century tech, but anything more is rather far fetched unless there is some fundamental breakthrough in energy generation, propulsion or physics in general (warp drives or wormholes). Hey, I'm hoping to see this happen just as much as the next guy, but it's not looking good.
Political rallies... Solzhenitsyn wrote about a rally were people were applauding Stalin, and no one dared to be the first to stop! Of course someone had to be the first; apparently the story had no happy ending for him.
Slashdot Mirror
Flying aircraft carriers? It's been done
Thanks for pointing out the economic issue with long-term data storage. What data is actually worth keeping that long? I'm sure there's a few examples besides the obvious benefit for future historians, but in a lot of cases we're keeping too much data, and we should be thankful that it deteriorates.
The thing with the rising popularity of streaming is not DRM. The real problem is (as usual) the way they'll ruin it with advertisements, and then DRM will come into play, making sure you cannot edit out or skip ads. And thanks to technology, it's now super easy to inject all manner of interstitials and pop-ups and pop-overs and watermarks and other crap on top of the content.
That is why I hate streaming, and it's why I will cling to media that I *own* for as long as I can. Until they start ruining that with ads too (like Disney and their infamous unskippable trailers).
RedHat and such only protect against lawsuits targeting (users of) FOSS products. They do not offer much protection against your manager's wrath when he finds out you choose "cowboy software" over "reputable products", which is sadly still how many managers see things.
The reverse is not true: when others are seeking redress, using open source may make you more vulnerable. For example: software may infringe on someone else's IP, and a lawsuit ensues. With proprietary software, the vendor will be sued. If they are forced to recall their product, you may even sue them successfully for damages because you can no longer use their software. But if you use open source, the IP holder may very well be coming after your ass, and win. Happened to a client of mine. That's the main argument I hear from legal departments in companies contemplating the use of FOSS products: not the FOSS licenses are the issue, but the fact that IP holders can (and successfully have) sued users (rather than the authors) of FOSS for infringement.
In some cases you can stick a vendor (or FOSS "reseller") like RedHat in the middle, which provides some protection against this.
My comment was not about suing, but about making excuses to your manager.
It also wins on ass-covering, which is a real benefit in business nad government. If there are issues with a well known piece of proprietary software, you can always blame the software vendor or even the implementer. If a FOSS-based project fails, you take the fall for taking a chance on "some free crap developed by a bunch of hippies", even if the project is implemented by a 3rd party. It's the old adage: no-one has ever been fired for choosing IBM. Proprietary software is a safe choice.
Not health care expenses, but overall costs. Dead smokers will not draw a pension, for example. And keep in mind that dying in general has become more expensive; we're extending people's lifetimes with treatments and the older people get, the more ailments they will have, even having lived a healthy life. The difference in total health care costs between smokers and non smokers has declined.
They sure as hell would like to. There's already talk of charging smokers and overweight people an additional premium. Not being a smoker and being just a tad overweight, I say HELL NO unless the people with an unhealthy lifestyle also get a larger cut on their state and private pension premiums. The BBC doc. "the cost of dying" ought to be mandatory viewing for anyone contemplating such penalties, as it has shown that the super healthy people are the most expensive overall, and only slightly below in health care costs as they will often suffer from similarly expensive ailments, just a bit later in life.
Tomorrow?
Event better: "Researcher copies and publishes every document in the house as proof that the door was unlocked". Nothing was removed. I'd say that downloading the data and sharing it in some way with the press was necessary to demonstrate the weakness of AT&T's system, with the caveat that the press should use the data only to verify the claims, not publish them to the general public. His subsequent handling of the affair does merit some punishment though.
What was he actually being punished for; the hack, or the publication of private data?
The socialised systems in Europe (or several countries here at least) suffer from the same problem as ObamaCare, and your current health care system: a powerful oligarchy of insurance companies. These companies have no incentive to drive down health care costs, on the contrary. They'd much rather pay twice as much and double our premiums at the same time. On top of that these companies (at least in NL) are building their own health care bureaucracies to do stuff that has little to do with insurance but looks nice, like helping customers live more healthy lives... useful stuff to be sure, but paid for by our premiums and very, very, very expensive.
One of our ministers had the right idea (he's a socialist but a clever fellow nonetheless, and smarter than many of his colleagues). Insurance is this: you collect premiums, and if someone stubs a toe, you pay their medical bill. If (like in NL) everyone is insured for basic healthcare at the same rates and under the same terms... why then do we still need insurance companies? What are they going to compete on? Simpler to let the gov't self insure and cut out these horribly expensive middlemen who add no value, leave the insurers to offer us packages for additional coverage.
It's not a lack of demand for transportation to drive development of space technology, we need a good reason to colonize the moon or Mars in the first place. A good economic reason; science or an abstract notion like survival of the species isn't going to cut it given the staggering cost of such an undertaking. Europe's colonization of Americas wasn't exactly cheap or safe, but it brought tangible returns for both the colonists and the investors. Mars? What are we even going to do there?
What about real estate? Perhaps habitable worlds (in the goldilocks zone, spinning core, geologically stable, etc) are rare, and if an alien species would find our gravity and air tolerable, then this world could be of incredible value to them. Even if we haven't exactly left it in pristine condition.
As for threats, we really can't assume that a spacefaring race would be so far ahead of us as to find us no threat to them. Perhaps it took their civilisation a few millenia to go from the beginnings of industrialisation to the space/information age, in which case they might well fear a species that did this in a century or two. Or they know that we, a rather warlike species, are likely to soon discover the trick to interstellar travel. They might not want us around for all manner of reasons.
Isn't that the norm? You ask for a few beeellion dollars, the offending end product to be crushed to powder and shot into the sun, and the firstborn of the company's executives to be sacrificed to Ba'al. Then you settle out of court for something more reasonable.
ITIL, and redundant processes in general, are part (or the result) of one my fears: the dumbing down of my job to the point where there's no need for or chance to excel (as in doing a good job and making a presonal difference, I don't mean spreadsheets!). Large organisations need process and structure; they do not need ITIL.
ITIL is still very much around though. Many large companies are reorganising IT and other knowledge work, creating increasingly specialisatized and compartimentalized jobs and teams that appear to be easy to plan, manage, measure and outsource (but aren't in practice). Much of IT is being turned into an assembly line, which might be ok for making cars (although even that industry has thought better of dumbing things down too much, a long time ago), but in my experience works very poorly for knowledge work. It's an attempt to reduce some of the inherent uncertaintly in our line of work, and the effort of managing a diverse set of highly skilled people, by dumbing down the work and replacing intelligent decisions and judgment calls with process and SLAs. Someone coined the term "predictable mediocrity" for this. The result sucks but you know what you're getting, and most managers (the MBA types) actually prefer this.
This way of working adds red tape and communication overhead, as you'll be dealing with more and more specialized teams, and reduces project buy-in: no one gives a damn about any single particular project anymore. I've recently been involved in a project where the ratio of process to doing actual work was around 20:1, I kid you not. And I do include producing useful documentation, agreeing on a support model, and hammering out specifications in the definition of "actual work" here. My fear is that this is the future of IT.
Solar might be a great match for EVs. Instead of charging overnight from the grid, you'd charge during the day using solar power. The problem is infrastructure: many of us commute to work, and while it's easy to have solar panels and a charging point installed at home, few of us have much influence on getting such amenities installed in the office parking lot.
I have to agree: it runs well. Booting is exceptionally fast; in Windows 8 I'll be running on the desktop while my older (but more powerful) machine is still loading the Windows 7 login screen. I dislike Metro though; I suppose I could make it into something usable, if I spend the effort to nicely organize my favorite apps on the Metro canvas, but why should I? The old Windows start menu does that for me in a very usable way with zero effort (other than installing the tool to bring back that start menu). Besides that, I like to use the desktop like my real desktop, to organize and sort files I am working on. The Metro canvas is useless for that.
A real problem with Metro is that so many basic actions are hidden or counter-intuitive. You're doing something wrong if people have to search for help on how to close an app or manage windows on your OS. And before they can even try and search for that info, they have to use another computer to search for help on getting the damn address bar to appear in IE! People's hatred for Metro doesn't just come from having to learn a new UI, a lot of it is due to (piss-)poor design.
Titanium and cute? That just doesn't work...
"We do not stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing" (Shaw)
Take up a hobby, keep your curiosity peaked, explore, appreciate the beauty found in small things, laugh often and dare to cry. Create something just for the hell of it, anything, and don't be afraid to fail. Most of all do not be afraid to be "wasting your time". That too may sound like a bunch of trite nonsense, but being carefree in your leisure time will help you cope with the stressful day-to-day, as I found. We cannot remain children, but hanging on to some part of our childhood is a healthy thing.
You laugh, but the director of the Dutch secret service recently admitted to gathering intel on a large scale "so they'll have something valuable to trade with their counterparts abroad". Apparently you need to give up the goods on your own citizens in order to play the spy game on an international level.
Sounds like after dinner mints that go well with Victory Coffee.
"Even" at 0.5C? You'll need to travel closer to light speed and be able to accelerate at a pretty spanky rate to average that speed. Getting a manned ship to 0.1C with a reasonable acceleration might be hard but doable with next-century tech, but anything more is rather far fetched unless there is some fundamental breakthrough in energy generation, propulsion or physics in general (warp drives or wormholes). Hey, I'm hoping to see this happen just as much as the next guy, but it's not looking good.
That's why so many people got good shots of the meteorites
Not to mention good footage of heart-stopping and/or hilarious shenanigans in Russian traffic. Have a look on YouTube.
These cams are rather inexpensive these days; no need to be messing around with web cams and servers in your car.
Political rallies... Solzhenitsyn wrote about a rally were people were applauding Stalin, and no one dared to be the first to stop! Of course someone had to be the first; apparently the story had no happy ending for him.