Flash technology can allow you to store information indefinitely (over 100 years) without the need for a power source.
You didn't mention "price", in your desire for long term storage solutions, but there is hope for NV-RAM prices to come down in price (eventually) and replace Hard Disks in some computers...
With some commercial quality DVD's having been known to "delaminate" after 3-5 years, how long would one expect a home-burned DVD to last?
Longevity of CD-R's has been studied, and a preliminary government study of DVD-CD lifetimes indicates that you should keep multiple copies, check the media for errors annually and create new dups as bit rot occurs. This is also mentioned in this article on archival life for DVD's.
There doesn't seem to be a single method that is known to last 20 years. Of note, optimal storage conditions for optical media is 50-59 degrees F or 10-15C. That's a bit cooler than your average living space and certainly cooler than "human-optimal" office temperatures of around 77F (vs. the 68F "standard" adopted for heating during the first energy crisis).
The dirty little secret is: You don't need a degree in CS or anything like it to be able to do 99% of the jobs in the IT industry, and most large companies are brimming over with techies who hold degrees in completely different fields.
That's because "IT" isn't Computer Science.
It's not like this stuff is brain surgery. There's a perception that computer science is hard to learn because so few people are interested in learning it, but the truth is that most IT jobs are so pathetically simple that even a humanities graduate like me can learn them.
Computer Science is hard to learn. Most people working in "IT" don't do "computer science". People who were attracted to CS are increasingly finding themselves with fewer job opportunities to use their skill set.
It doesn't take a CS degree to manage a server farm, write web pages or create flash/dreamweaver projects. Excellent programming skills are no longer required nor desired. Today's processors are generally forgiving of slow algorithms and chunky code.
Bugs are expected as a natural part of software development now. This wasn't always the case, nor was it desirable/acceptable. Early on in my career, there were some managers that wanted to be able to measure number of bugs/lines of code written by a particular programmer as an evaluation criteria.
Today, with support contracts being major revenue streams, wasting time writing efficient code or doing thorough unit or stress testing is a waste of company time -- not only a waste, but it hurts profit in the "support division" where they make money off of bug fixes. Think of Microsoft's Support policies and how much it costs to get have them support one of their products. Remember how we laughed at the idea of MS offering security services for their own OS. They were far from the first.
There just aren't as many jobs that require a specialty degree in Computer Science. It's just that, for the most part, "users of IT" don't need to be Computer Science experts because CS people have (and still are) automating themselves out of a job. But that's the point of computers -- to automate tasks and make them simpler. But Computer Science? That's applicable to special applications like OS's, compilers, maybe embedded/RT apps or where one needs 99.9999% reliability vs. 99.9%.
Now, make software subject to the same consumer laws as other consumer products in regards to warantee's and liability -- then you'll see the industry come to a screeching halt from the lack of qualified people. But that's not likely to happen anytime soon.
Yeah -- Just like in Communist Cuba, where everyone is equal and has equal access to wealth and privilege [not!].
Theory is one thing, practice is another.
Everyone can make changes, but will those changes ever get supported in the mainstream? It's a common misconception in the less informed ranks of the Open Source community that "anyone" (like my Aunt May, or grandma in a nursing home) can take a copy of an open source project, modify it to do what they want and recompile it and have something useful.
Even if they could intelligently modify it, does "everyone" get the resources to fix bugs and add features to the new "fork"? Of course not. How many kernel developers can be "forked" (duplicated in full) to work on a new source fork for "everybody" who wants a slight mod here or there.
The linux-kernel is, in my own experience, one of the easier projects to build (on x86 on a Gnu-Linux based OS). It has few (none?) external source dependencies and the development tools are included in the major, if not all distros.
However, many OSS projects just "assume" you already have packages "X, Y & Z" installed or have the source for those projects installed in the same build tree, or the development headers & libs (at a, sometimes unspecified, specified "version") from other products installed to compile and link against. OSS-Linux-kernel based vendors are sometimes better about this -- like including build-time checks for specific packages being installed, but that "help" can be annoying if you aren't wanting to build the product in the same config as the vendor did.
You can't clone the entire development effort of the Linux kernel by simply having the ability to physically copy the source. It requires a huge knowledge base to maintain, fix bugs in to add new hardware support, not to mention "new" features (like improved VM's, Filesystems, etc...).
I don't believe this to be literally true -- UNLESS you always start IE within the first few minutes of a reboot. MS-XP monitors your boot and some segment of time after a reboot to determine your most likely startup drivers and programs. If you always load IE, immediately on reboot, it will end up being preloaded -- if you always load T-bird, it benefits some as well (as I've noticed in my own usage). The same would go for FF, but both T-bird and Firefox are large apps, and the space on disk MS reserves for startup programs (it reserves a large contiguous area on disk that it can read into memory at boot with one big read (ideally)) is of a fixed size. I doubt all of even T-bird, let alone T-bird+FF would fit after it has stored the OS, used drivers, the login/authentication code, the "Shell (GUI)", security & other tray add-ons.
IE benefits over FF simply because of "DLL" re-use. IE and Explorer use the same HTML rendering and display libraries -- so if explorer has been loaded and asked to display HTML content (folders with "common tasks", active desktop background, probably others), those librarys are already in memory.
Firefox suffers in this area because the project "re-invents the wheel" so their "wheel" can be used across several platforms. This is most easily seen with on the HTML display panels, where FF correctly renders some pages that IE won't, but also FF's smooth scroll function isn't as smooth as IE's native/built-in. As long as FF and T-bird don't use any local-OS libraries that may already be loaded in shared memory (as Konquorer might benefit on Linux from similar effects vs. FF on a KDE desktop), they will be at a disadvantage compared to those programs that share the same code.
Reading the original article, I couldn't help note the quote:
The pace of change is often stated in terms of Moore's Law, which says that the number of transistors packed into a square inch should double every 18 months. "Moore's Law is now on its 30th doubling.....
Does anyone know if Moore's Law has been upgraded to 64-bits, yet?:-)
The hyperthreading covert information leakage is unlikely to be a problem in Linux since Linux doesn't have true "threads". Each thread is represented by a process and the author states that multiple processes wouldn't be able to use the Processor L1 cache due to process switching overhead.
This exploit also uses a few "small" [sic] bits of handwaving:
1) Ability to syncronize the two separate processes. This was done for the author's example by using a debugger, "spy" to "know" when openssl was started and when it ended (p6).
2) quite another bit of handwaving with "On an otherwise quiescent system" (p6)
3) On a trusted OS, how did "trojans" and "spy" programs get loaded? On such systems, it is usually not the case that even compilers are availabe let alone the ability to load programs on demand.
On a trusted OS, a trojan might, at best, be loaded by a low-level browswer/download process. On a MLS, the user doing the downloading doesn't (or shouldn't) have administrative access to allow a trojan or a spy access to realtime functions like "process debugging", and "process scheduling" (perhaps including the "sched_yield" function.
It is quite likely that on a properly configured MLS system, web browsing would be done at a lowest level of priviledge, where only previously installed programs are allowed to run -- i.e. you can't download a trojan and have it be runnable. Anything downloadable to a writable partition has the "noexec" bit set. This is not user-changeable by a user with Mandatory Access Control's in place (often used with MLS to prevent privilege elevation).
4) It's unlikely that a MLS secure system with MAC (vs. Discretionary Access control, or DAC) would even be hooked up to the internet.
The whole bit describes an unlikely scenario in a MLS(usually MAC) system.
None of this means the author hasn't done his homework and there isn't a risk of covert channels using this means, but in the real world, super secure systems shouldn't be running code that hasn't been rigorously examined and proven to some "Effective Assurance Level" (EAL).
The whole bit of caching could be extended to the Linux block cache, but in such a scenario, to provide true Level Separation, different priviledge levels likely wouldn't use the same block devices -- and hopefully, Processesors could have a bit as to whether to divide the cache/processor or to allow cache sharing (which would benefit performance for most apps).
Also, I might ask -- how would two different threads of the same process get two different levels of security clearance -- that just seems like dangerous programming and such a program would likely not be approved for most MLS systems.
It is a good paper, and it raises good issues to be aware of, but in practice it doesn't seem easily implemented.
However -- that stated -- there have always been known information leakage problems on multi-user computers. Simply measure latency in key echo's, network pings and program performance. All of these can be used to leak bits of information.
Some symple preventive measures for now: 1) don't allow different threads in same process to have different security levels. 2) don't run untrusted programs on a "secure" system. 3) providing L2 cache separation _might_ be useful for some small number of government users trying to run an MLS on one machine, but it seems it'd be more assurance for them to use two separate processors in two separate machines physically separate machines running at different security levels.
Sorry if I've overlooked anything in my assessment. In no way did I mean to step on any toes.:-)
I seem to remember reports for US children where computers add to scholastic achievement (i.e. one, two, three, et al.)
I know the US is low in quality of schooling, lower than the UK and most of Europe. I wonder if this could be factored in and result in different results for different countries?
For example, I'm told that when French students graduate their equivalent of high school at 18, they have the American equivalent education of an AA degree that they call a baccalauréat.
Perhaps in the U.S. due to the already IQ-lowering effects of long hours spent in front of the TV, the computer is a "step-up", but for European schools, long hours in front of the TV have not been the "norm", so adding computers there might be detracting from study & homework hours.
One of the latter stories on computers helping scholastic performance listed in the first paragraph talked, in particular about how it helped children in low-income families -- again, possibly pulling children into the computer rather than time spent in front of TV or doing other non-scholastic activities.
The center of this study focused on "problem solving" and ability to focus, though, as measures of Intellectual Function. Email and computer multi-tasking might indeed hurt this type of function.
It really might depend on what "activity" the computer-spent time is replacing, and how good of schooling the children in the area would have been getting before computers were available.
In a society or school where children spend
It could be the computer, like many technologies before it, has an equalizing effect: having weakening effects on those who were stronger before their arrival but having help affects on those who were weaker before arrival.
I suppose the ability to randomly check email in the middle of a class might not be the greatest thing...but certainly, having a computer for use to store "facts" might improve "Intelligence" in those schools that required "rote" memorization of facts. I know I feel a bit cut off from part of my "brain", when I am disconnected -- can't just google up
an answer or bring up a dictionary or calculator or measurement converter.
It's a slow down to manually look things up, most certainly.
However, facts != intelligence. So schools that focused on problem solving and thinking for one's self, might suffer with the introduction of something (i.e. a computer) that provides easy answers.
I've set a few 3rd person computers meant for email and web browsing (one uses Open Office's Word processing heavily too).
Installing a printer was a simple matter. Went into HW section, Add printer, is it local or on the net?...net. Do I want it to scan or do I know the name/ip?... Gave it IP and it goes off and scans for the printer... Then "you have successfully installed your printer" I was told.
Think I had to type in the Admin(root) password at some point, as it currently takes root access to modify system files....but it really wasn't a bit pain.
It may not be as intuitive as Windows, but the Windows interface for printer control has been around for several years, However, it was a GUi I could talk a new user through w/o me telling them each character to type.
No big deal. I'm heard that SuSE has open-sourced YaST, maybe the fedora folks will grab -- or maybe they'll reject it on the NIH** principle.
Um...1 gigapixel = 31,623 x 31,623 pixels, low print quality of 300dpi, that's only about 8.8 x 8.8. That might give you a wall size display. Photo-realistic ranges from 1200-4800 dpi. At those resolutions a photo quality print would range from 2.2 x 2.2 feet to as small as as 6.5 x 6.5 inches.
Does anyone remember what the comparable dpi for, say, 35mm photos? Say I want to blow it up to the size of the original tapestry?
Mumpsman wrote: > There is quite a high demand for these kinds of things in the medical field > where physicians do indeed need to use a computer standing up. ^^^ -- this explains this: SuperRob wrote: > That said, the recognition software is NOT crappy, it's remarkably accurate > considering my terrible handwriting ======
The recognition software has to be good to read the average M.D.'s handwriting. Heck...might even work for me -- and as to why one would need it over a keyboard? You try drawing a picture with a mouse. There's many times I want to put a diagram into an email -- creating it in "Paint" was absolutely painful. Having it built-in to recognize drawing sounds cool.
Additionally -- sometimes writing by hand is good for writing quick notes where trying to type with a keyboard would be difficult due to space or computer placement. Portable keyboards are not exactly ergonomic.
Forgive me if I misunderstand -- but that sounds very much like SMP level programming. How is thread syncronization different than that found in SMP syncronization?
Isn't thread level going to be figuring out more about what can be done in parallel -- different algorithms to exploit the increase in parallelism in the same process?
This begs another question: is linux well suited to multi-threaded CPU's vs. the current thread emulation that has to be done on top of separate processes? Are Linux processes "light weight" enough for these new architectures?
Sadly, as a programmer, I'd be hard pressed to design a program that would run optimally when placed on single-threaded vs. multi-threaded CPU's.
If I knew I had multiple threads to play with, I might divise algorithms to split up work, but if run on a single CPU, the divide and merge code might introduce extra delay.
Might it also not vary depending on how the threads are implemented? I.e. - if they are true "light weight threads" (whatever that means), vs. separate processes?
I'm assuming that separate threads would all want CPU at the same time in the optimal case -- we are not talking about the case of one thread going to sleep while another operates and having them execute sequentially. The overhead of managing them with a process scheduler seems like it might outweigh parallelism benefits to "multi-thread" some code but have it run sequentially.
Until the overhead of thread-switching/task-switching can be quantified, it will be difficult to _explicitly_ write code for multithreading.
Worse -- if I am on a non-threading (or minimal threading) single cpu, just calling the main process scheduler might cause a disruption of what is in the cache and largely negate the benefits of multithreading.
If the bottle neck, now, is memory I/O on the Intel platform, how will multiple cores and threads help that much? It seems like they'll be waiting a greater percentage of their clock cycles for memory I/O.
I can do the same job, measured by two different managers and get rated excellent by one and failing by the other at the same company.
Personally, I _felt_ more productive between the two managers when I was in touch with the people I needed to be to get my job done, but somewhat insulated from unnecessary distractions.
However from a computer perspective, I was most efficient when I had a mobile "workstation" -- it was running Linux -- which is what I needed for development, and it ran Windows under VMLinux. It would have been better if the office functions were integrated, but using VMware was satisfactory -- at least it didn't require a reboot. I could also run test kernels, also under VMware to test unstable patches. The ability to throw away a "session" and reset it was very valuable.
When I was plugged in at home or work, I could off-load compilations to higher-powered workstations, but the ability to have a reliable computer I could take with me everywhere allowed me to do work on my schedule. It was all transparent with NFS (or SMBFS) and make -- sometimes my compiles ran on remote CPU's with my laptop acting as a disk server -- and thanks to linux's dynamic buffer usage, it could easily handle disk serving for my 2-cpu workstation at home or 3+ Xeon CPU's. So scaleability was important for the work I was doing. Windows has problems with interoperability and would have required expensive licensing for "servers", I haven't used a MAC, but have tended to shy away from that corner due to due to lack of interoperability in the workplace. The only thing that would have been better than a laptop would have been a multi-processor laptop -- both at work and at home, docking stations were a must -- plugged them in for large screen and ergo usage.
But I think what computer or OS is going to depend on what job you are doing and how you, as an individual, works best. I need to change tasks and focus, often, to work well. Others prefer to stay on one task at a time. As I get older, I find myself needing to focus on fewer tasks at a time so that may change.
I find the need to use a mouse disruptive to programming. No one has a good programming environment that uses a mouse to type in "if/then/else...etc" and moving my hands back and forth off the keyboard to mouse slows me down.
Another consideration -- what your "thinking system" is geared towards -- i.e. - visual, audio or tactile. Do you recognize shapes faster or words faster?
I think it would be hard to have one platform that would be the "best" for everyone. If we did, we probably wouldn't be having this discussion...
I think management style is a more important factor, for me, at least, than what computer I'm on -- if I have a flexible work schedule and multiple tasks to work on at the same time with agreed upon completion dates, I fare much better than with a micro-midget manager who only wants to hand out 1 task, and expects "you complete the 1 task you are assigned, and when you are done with that task you come back and ask for another task. You don't choose the order of tasks or take on other tasks without permission." I find it difficult to be productive under such circumstances.
Bingo. She gained employment to flee the harsh theocratic government that severely curtailed the rights of women. She arrived in America only to be exploited by the H1-B Visa system -- and yes, she was intelligent enough to recognize and know she was being exploited and "screwed", but it was better than life as a non-entity in Iran under the Ayatolla (sp?).
I greatly resent them and the government that enacts it. I resent Bush. I don't see them on a daily basis in my job environment. I only see constant reminders of their stupidity. Did I "hate" the workers? NO! Did I hate the H1-B System? YES! The 2nd example I gave who was oppressed was a dear friend of mine who I saw exploited by being trapped in a sponsoring company.
And to respond to a prior poster, they did not make "market" rates. Legally, they are supposed to be paid market rates, BUT, the companies would pay them the least amount they could get away with without bringing down an audit from the appropriate government entity.
If any of the workers complained and their company was audited and found to be paying notably lower than market rates, the company might find it's H1-B Visa sponsorship status terminated -- with the result that the workers would have to return (at the time) home immediately.
In the first example I gave about a fellow worker, they might never have been able to attract him, in a free market economy, as a, say "junior tech", but they might hire him and pay him market rate as a junior tech when his qualificattions might be more equivalent to a senior or principle engineer.
If an employer can hire a senior engineer to work for the pay of a junior tech, then what do you think the chances are of getting someone of the "real" abilities of a "junior" tech getting that job. The H1-B Visa worker has a distinct advantage and it is almost always a better deal than the country where they came from, so from their perspective it is a win, and it is a win for the employer, but not for the american citizens.
In the same vein, how can an american workforce with job safety regulations and work-comp benefits and considerable legal rights as an employee compete against a worker where the country treats the workers as disposable parts and pays them 10-20$/week (like Nike was accused of)?
American businesses cannot compete against businesses in countries where the citizens have few or no protections or rights.
Resultantly, the US has developed record high trade deficits that ultimately lower the value of the dollar abroad and ultimately cause a rise in prices here: a double squeeze: the US unemployment rises as foreign companies and H1-B visa workers replace US labor and inflation rises. In only 6 months, I've seen prices on pet products go up by 30-50%. Those numbers and the cost of home ownership are NOT included in the "consumer price index" that inflation numbers are derived from.
During years of hyper inflation in the Carter and Reagan years, home ownership was removed from the inflation index calculations as it was seen as "unduly" influencing inflation figures. So they removed it. That doesn't mean such inflation 'goes away'. Using home prices as a gauge in my area, inflation has gone up around 200% in the past 10 years. You don't see anything remotely indicating that in our government's propaganda on inflation figures.
It's easy to 'hide' H1-B visa workers in arbitrarily low-pay grade jobs, thus making them appear to be getting market rates, but without *freedom* to move between jobs and companies of their choice, they are partially enslaved and controlled by their sponsoring companies -- making them more attractive assets than someone who could just leave and leave for work at another employer.
I don't have a problem with immigrants that come here and compete on a level playing field with American workers. But I also have had friends and coworkers who were H1-B workers. Consistantly, they were not paid market rates for their talents and as a result, they were more experienced labor that was "forced" to work for a lower salary -- this is a resource that hurts Americans at the _same_ skill level who would have been earning more.
One coworker got an immediate promotion after attaining his green-card. He'd been at the company I was at for about 1.5 years, me, maybe 5. I'd been in management training, done project releases that were on time and well run and did project releases under unrealistic circumstances that left all members burnt out and with myself having no power to reward them w/time off or bonuses. But my manager was quite frank about my coworker's "promotion" into a higher pay grade than I -- even though he knew less about the work we were doing than I did. He felt/knew that my coworker was feeling restless as our company floundered and wasn't able to work on projects that tapped his abilities to their fullest extent. In his area of expertise, I knew less, but it wasn't the job or group he was in at SGI, he landed in the group because the group he had been in was dissolved and he was good at what he had been doing, so when layoffs came, he was relocated to a different group that wasn't as good a match for his skills. My manager also felt that because he wasn't able to use his talents in the best way, his salary was depressed compared to his peers and "merit" increases were limited to an average of 2.7% in the given review period. The only way to give him a large jump in salary to keep him from "jumping ship" to another company was to promote him. He was an H1-B worker from the UK.
Another friend of mine (who described herself as being from Persia so as to avoid negative connotations -- and this was almost 15 years ago) had required overtime hours (unpaid) at about 80-90% average pay for her job description (in SiliVal). She wanted to quit but could not because she would have to leave the country if she wasn't immediately swooped up by a new company. She was trapped for some long time until she found another position that was willing to take a risk and handle the extra paperwork of transfering her over -- and for a while may have been here "illegally" until H1-B visa rules were relaxed with respect to how long workers could stay in the country before having to leave after leaving their sponsoring country.
So it is the H1-B Visa process and the fact that those worker's are not free agents in the economy -- it is exploiting "trapped" labor and make American citizens or those with Green Cards less attractive as employees. So -- Yes, I do resent H1-B workers as representative of an exploitive system.
Tuning something for a test isn't illegal. Neither is non-disclosure of security bugs or bugs that could be escalated into security bugs in Software before selling to customers or the government.
But it is certainly "caveat emptor" in this day -- even things that are promised in large print (if you do x and y, then you get z). But then you will find that the completion of X and Y is not as simple as doing the tasks but you will find there are fine details about completion criteria for X and Y. Like some of the bigger rebates...have to mail in old CD's or UPC's from previous boxes to qualify for them even though you registered your previous version with them and they have you on file to make the "special upgrade offer" to you. They have the unique serial number from the previous edition, you can't sell it to someone else who would register it or the serial # would get caught. You can still dup'ed the disk if you really wanted to make a copy of the previous program for a friend (or the new one). It's just they make you keep all the boxes and manuals (which are usually online with the paper manuals and boxes gathering dust), and sending a CD through the mail isn't a 13^h^h37 cent stamp either...
It's capitalism, low-market control, whatever you can get away with that isn't explicity illegal is allowed (though most certainly, not what one might call ethical). But ethical? When it comes to a 'game' where the sole objective is to make money?
Where's the profit in having ethics? Are we really the progenitors of the federation or the real future will have us being the Ferengi.
Embarrassment. Couldn't get it to work in IE 6.0.2800-XP-SP2 (though I'm running on XP1). Must be something wrong with people's browsing habits. Oh, you browse with javascript enabled for all sites, by default? Well, um, *sigh*: trusting scripts from random sites? I don't think so: default ActiveX off, Java Off, Javascript Off, Cookies Off...etc...
Opening up my web browser to random scripts has never seemed like a great default no matter how "secure" the language is supposed to be. I worked in security -- I know what passes old C2/B1 or CC-CAPP/LSPP for commercial and federal "security" on OS's. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Besides -- my boss told me not to fix bugs (including security bugs): It was "not a bug" unless found by a customer or by the security evaluation vendor. "If they don't find it, we don't gotta fix it". Simple as that. As for fixing customer bugs: fixing unfound customer bugs was against his policy as "found bugs" could be fixed with money from support-paying customers. Otherwise, what incentive is there for the customer to have to buy or pay for support?
When support became a profit center, fixing non-customer (or non security-eval-team) reported bugs became a fiduciary liability to stockholders. Employees who wasted company time fixing such bugs were liable to have it show up negatively on their performance reviews.
It is just another "cost-cutting" measure in a free-market economy.:-)
> Subject: Re:Get Help Now, Maybe? > by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 16, @12:56PM
> Remember, 90% of everything is crap....
What part of "everything" does your post (and claim of 90%) fall into?
I've done a fair amount of research about various medical and other subject matters on the internet and find it to have more information that is accessible than any other source. That information can be corroborated by multiple sources, or not, and it can be correllated with standard medical websites or texts if needed -- but I forward research articles (crap?) from medical journals and some studies to my doctor regarding my health and let her "peer" review it for sanity.
My doctor can't possibly spend as much time researching each of her patients' exact condition, as I can spend on myself.
It is common wisdom that patients, often, have to become experts in their own diseases because they are the ones with the most time on their hands, have most accurate access to their symptoms, and are the most motivated to pay attention to their own problem.
That was (is) my system until I had the flu and the outage was at 3am. I didn't think I was too capable of dragging the gen outside in the rain and doing the extension cords... I just powered down the systems.
Some UPS manufacturers like APC spec a max load, but allow for adding additional "battery-only" units. What's not entirely clear to me has been whether or not I could use deep-cycle marine batteries (alot cheaper), plugged-in to one of their controllers....Just a thought though.
In all battery and generator backups, you will find cheap bargains but the output is "sloppy" -- not the sine-wave most devices expect. Some devices won't care, but more sensitive electronics that have average or sub-standard power supplies might.
Honda advertises their EU inverter line as being clean for electronics use -- clean in the sense of pure 50 or 60Hz sine wave output. Not a square, triangle or rhomboid shaped output.
> This bidding process is almost certainly a good thing for the > hospitals, but is it good for the nurses? ---
Is it? By encouraging nurses to work hours over their regular shift, they would likely be held responsible for encouraging nurses to work overtime which could expose the hospitals to liability for any accidents due to the nurses being tired during a shift going into 'no brain' mode...
There is likely some limit to hours worked/week. If the nurses are not exempt employees (like management and software engineers), I think they have to be paid overtime pay, no?
I seem to remember this "feature" being the case in SP0/SP1...I've never had their built-in firewall block off sharing. I thought it was deliberate on MS's part to give the user a puny firewall that wouldn't intefere with Microsoft's file sharing.
Then again, I also have my hosts on internal IP's on an otherwise unroutable P behind a linux proxy/firewall, so maybe MS's firewall software operates differently because I have a 192.168 addr..?
The MS FW was one of the first things I recognized as flawed when I got an XP laptop -- first thing I tried was an nmap against my host-- and bleh...none of the standard MS ports were hidden. Went to a 3rd party fw product after that...
I'm surpised this hasn't come out before now. It's not like it is a new bug, IME...
BBC's Sci-Tech section reports more on how it was launched off a mach 3+ jet that should be recoverable. It's built off the old X-15 concept of using a re-usable hypersonic jet to carry the shuttle most of the way up. If the launch vehicle (a twin-engine turbojet) is reusable, it should allow for easy re-use and a faster turnaround time.
Also mentioned is the shuttle design that makes it self-orienting on re-entry thus always having it re-enter on a "least friction" path.
Various design differences would appear to make the shuttle inherently safer than the 30 year old NASA design.
The article also mentions the cost on the project, $69 million, is less than most government studies and considerably less than the 1 billion dollar cost of the US Shuttle and the per-fligh cost of $500 million.
I have to agree...going back in time and somehow claiming he didn't do the work for his PhD is just plain "wrong" -- unless, they have some evidence that he cheated in obtaining his PhD. But to go back and and strip him of prior titles...is his high school going to revoke his diploma as well?
All a $29.95/month mom&pop store needs is to get hit with a/. crowd and your daily unique visitor count will get WAY screwed up.
I wonder what happens when you reach your limit -- does it just stop keeping track or will you be bumped to a higher tier. You maybe go home on a Friday and come-in on monday and see 200,000 unique visitors over the weekend...yuck!
Too bad there's not a "free" level for non-commercial, personal use.
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-l
Longevity of CD-R's has been studied, and a preliminary government study of DVD-CD lifetimes indicates that you should keep multiple copies, check the media for errors annually and create new dups as bit rot occurs. This is also mentioned in this article on archival life for DVD's.
There doesn't seem to be a single method that is known to last 20 years. Of note, optimal storage conditions for optical media is 50-59 degrees F or 10-15C. That's a bit cooler than your average living space and certainly cooler than "human-optimal" office temperatures of around 77F (vs. the 68F "standard" adopted for heating during the first energy crisis).
Computer Science is hard to learn. Most people working in "IT" don't do "computer science". People who were attracted to CS are increasingly finding themselves with fewer job opportunities to use their skill set.
It doesn't take a CS degree to manage a server farm, write web pages or create flash/dreamweaver projects. Excellent programming skills are no longer required nor desired. Today's processors are generally forgiving of slow algorithms and chunky code.
Bugs are expected as a natural part of software development now. This wasn't always the case, nor was it desirable/acceptable. Early on in my career, there were some managers that wanted to be able to measure number of bugs/lines of code written by a particular programmer as an evaluation criteria.
Today, with support contracts being major revenue streams, wasting time writing efficient code or doing thorough unit or stress testing is a waste of company time -- not only a waste, but it hurts profit in the "support division" where they make money off of bug fixes. Think of Microsoft's Support policies and how much it costs to get have them support one of their products. Remember how we laughed at the idea of MS offering security services for their own OS. They were far from the first.
There just aren't as many jobs that require a specialty degree in Computer Science. It's just that, for the most part, "users of IT" don't need to be Computer Science experts because CS people have (and still are) automating themselves out of a job. But that's the point of computers -- to automate tasks and make them simpler. But Computer Science? That's applicable to special applications like OS's, compilers, maybe embedded/RT apps or where one needs 99.9999% reliability vs. 99.9%.
Now, make software subject to the same consumer laws as other consumer products in regards to warantee's and liability -- then you'll see the industry come to a screeching halt from the lack of qualified people. But
that's not likely to happen anytime soon.
Yeah -- Just like in Communist Cuba, where everyone is equal and has equal access to wealth and privilege [not!].
Theory is one thing, practice is another.
Everyone can make changes, but will those changes ever get supported in the mainstream? It's a common misconception in the less informed ranks of the Open Source community that "anyone" (like my Aunt May, or grandma in a nursing home) can take a copy of an open source project, modify it to do what they want and recompile it and have something useful.
Even if they could intelligently modify it, does "everyone" get the resources to fix bugs and add features to the new "fork"? Of course not. How many kernel developers can be "forked" (duplicated in full) to work on a new source fork for "everybody" who wants a slight mod here or there.
The linux-kernel is, in my own experience, one of the easier projects to build (on x86 on a Gnu-Linux based OS). It has few (none?) external source dependencies and the development tools are included in the major, if not all distros.
However, many OSS projects just "assume" you already have packages "X, Y & Z" installed or have the source for those projects installed in the same build tree, or the development headers & libs (at a, sometimes unspecified, specified "version") from other products installed to compile and link against. OSS-Linux-kernel based vendors are sometimes better about this -- like including build-time checks for specific packages being installed, but that "help" can be annoying if you aren't wanting to build the product in the same config as the vendor did.
You can't clone the entire development effort of the Linux kernel by simply having the ability to physically copy the source. It requires a huge knowledge base to maintain, fix bugs in to add new hardware support, not to mention "new" features (like improved VM's, Filesystems, etc...).
-l
I don't believe this to be literally true -- UNLESS you always start IE within the first few minutes of a reboot. MS-XP monitors your boot and some segment of time after a reboot to determine your most likely startup drivers and programs. If you always load IE, immediately on reboot, it will end up being preloaded -- if you always load T-bird, it benefits some as well (as I've noticed in my own usage). The same would go for FF, but both T-bird and Firefox are large apps, and the space on disk MS reserves for startup programs (it reserves a large contiguous area on disk that it can read into memory at boot with one big read (ideally)) is of a fixed size. I doubt all of even T-bird, let alone T-bird+FF would fit after it has stored the OS, used drivers, the login/authentication code, the "Shell (GUI)", security & other tray add-ons.
IE benefits over FF simply because of "DLL" re-use. IE and Explorer use the same HTML rendering and display libraries -- so if explorer has been loaded and asked to display HTML content (folders with "common tasks", active desktop background, probably others), those librarys are already in memory.
Firefox suffers in this area because the project "re-invents the wheel" so their "wheel" can be used across several platforms. This is most easily seen with on the HTML display panels, where FF correctly renders some pages that IE won't, but also FF's smooth scroll function isn't as smooth as IE's native/built-in. As long as FF and T-bird don't use any local-OS libraries that may already be loaded in shared memory (as Konquorer might benefit on Linux from similar effects vs. FF on a KDE desktop), they will be at a disadvantage compared to those programs that share the same code.
-l
The hyperthreading covert information leakage is unlikely to be a problem in Linux since Linux doesn't have true "threads". Each thread is represented by a process and the author states that multiple processes wouldn't be able to use the Processor L1 cache due to process switching overhead.
:-)
This exploit also uses a few "small" [sic] bits of handwaving:
1) Ability to syncronize the two separate processes. This was done for the author's example by using a debugger, "spy" to "know" when openssl was started and when it ended (p6).
2) quite another bit of handwaving with "On an otherwise quiescent system" (p6)
3) On a trusted OS, how did "trojans" and "spy" programs get loaded? On such systems, it is usually not the case that even compilers are availabe let alone the ability to load programs on demand.
On a trusted OS, a trojan might, at best, be loaded by a low-level browswer/download process. On a MLS, the user doing the downloading doesn't (or shouldn't) have administrative access to allow a trojan or a spy access to realtime functions like "process debugging", and "process scheduling" (perhaps including the "sched_yield" function.
It is quite likely that on a properly configured MLS system, web browsing would be done at a lowest level of priviledge, where only previously installed programs are allowed to run -- i.e. you can't download a trojan and have it be runnable. Anything downloadable to a writable partition has the "noexec" bit set. This is not user-changeable by a user with Mandatory Access Control's in place (often used with MLS to prevent privilege elevation).
4) It's unlikely that a MLS secure system with MAC (vs. Discretionary Access control, or DAC) would even be hooked up to the internet.
The whole bit describes an unlikely scenario in a MLS(usually MAC) system.
None of this means the author hasn't done his homework and there isn't a risk
of covert channels using this means, but in the real world, super secure systems shouldn't be running code that hasn't been rigorously examined and proven to some "Effective Assurance Level" (EAL).
The whole bit of caching could be extended to the Linux block cache, but in such a scenario, to provide true Level Separation, different priviledge levels likely wouldn't use the same block devices -- and hopefully, Processesors could have a bit as to whether to divide the cache/processor or to allow cache sharing (which would benefit performance for most apps).
Also, I might ask -- how would two different threads of the same process get two different levels of security clearance -- that just seems like dangerous programming and such a program would likely not be approved for most MLS systems.
It is a good paper, and it raises good issues to be aware of, but in practice it doesn't seem easily implemented.
However -- that stated -- there have always been known information leakage problems on multi-user computers. Simply measure latency in key echo's, network pings and program performance. All of these can be used to leak bits of information.
As for getting 310 bits out of 512...who's using 512 byte RSA keys these days? Bruce Schneier, in 1995 listed 1280-2048 bits for an RSA key.
Some symple preventive measures for now: 1) don't allow different threads in same process to have different security levels. 2) don't run untrusted programs on a "secure" system. 3) providing L2 cache separation _might_ be useful for some small number of government users trying to run an MLS on one machine, but it seems it'd be more assurance for them to use two separate processors in two separate machines physically separate machines running at different security levels.
Sorry if I've overlooked anything in my assessment. In no way did I mean to step on any toes.
-l
I know the US is low in quality of schooling, lower than the UK and most of Europe. I wonder if this could be factored in and result in different results for different countries?
For example, I'm told that when French students graduate their equivalent of high school at 18, they have the American equivalent education of an AA degree that they call a baccalauréat.
Perhaps in the U.S. due to the already IQ-lowering effects of long hours spent in front of the TV, the computer is a "step-up", but for European schools, long hours in front of the TV have not been the "norm", so adding computers there might be detracting from study & homework hours.
One of the latter stories on computers helping scholastic performance listed in the first paragraph talked, in particular about how it helped children in low-income families -- again, possibly pulling children into the computer rather than time spent in front of TV or doing other non-scholastic activities.
The center of this study focused on "problem solving" and ability to focus, though, as measures of Intellectual Function. Email and computer multi-tasking might indeed hurt this type of function.
It really might depend on what "activity" the computer-spent time is replacing, and how good of schooling the children in the area would have been getting before computers were available.
In a society or school where children spend It could be the computer, like many technologies before it, has an equalizing effect: having weakening effects on those who were stronger before their arrival but having help affects on those who were weaker before arrival.
I suppose the ability to randomly check email in the middle of a class might not be the greatest thing...but certainly, having a computer for use to store "facts" might improve "Intelligence" in those schools that required "rote" memorization of facts. I know I feel a bit cut off from part of my "brain", when I am disconnected -- can't just google up an answer or bring up a dictionary or calculator or measurement converter. It's a slow down to manually look things up, most certainly.
However, facts != intelligence. So schools that focused on problem solving and thinking for one's self, might suffer with the introduction of something (i.e. a computer) that provides easy answers.
L
I've set a few 3rd person computers meant for email and web browsing (one uses Open Office's Word processing heavily too).
Installing a printer was a simple matter. Went into HW section, Add printer, is it local or on the net?...net. Do I want it to scan or do I know the name/ip?... Gave it IP and it goes off and scans for the printer... Then "you have successfully installed your printer" I was told.
Think I had to type in the Admin(root) password at some point, as it currently takes root access to modify system files....but it really wasn't a bit pain.
It may not be as intuitive as Windows, but the Windows interface for printer control has been around for several years, However, it was a GUi I could talk a new user through w/o me telling them each character to type.
No big deal. I'm heard that SuSE has open-sourced YaST, maybe the fedora folks will grab -- or maybe they'll reject it on the NIH** principle.
L
**-Not Invented Here
Um...1 gigapixel = 31,623 x 31,623 pixels, low print quality of 300dpi, that's only about 8.8 x 8.8. That might give you a wall size display. Photo-realistic ranges from 1200-4800 dpi. At those resolutions a photo quality print would range from 2.2 x 2.2 feet to as small as as 6.5 x 6.5 inches.
Does anyone remember what the comparable dpi for, say, 35mm photos? Say
I want to blow it up to the size of the original tapestry?
Mumpsman wrote:
> There is quite a high demand for these kinds of things in the medical field
> where physicians do indeed need to use a computer standing up.
^^^ -- this explains this:
SuperRob wrote:
> That said, the recognition software is NOT crappy, it's remarkably accurate
> considering my terrible handwriting
======
The recognition software has to be good to read the average M.D.'s handwriting. Heck...might even work for me -- and as to why one would need it over a keyboard? You try drawing a picture with a mouse. There's many times I want to put a diagram into an email -- creating it in "Paint" was absolutely painful. Having it built-in to recognize drawing sounds cool.
Additionally -- sometimes writing by hand is good for writing quick
notes where trying to type with a keyboard would be difficult due to space or computer placement. Portable keyboards are not exactly ergonomic.
-l
Hmmm....
Forgive me if I misunderstand -- but that sounds very much like SMP level programming. How is thread syncronization different than that found in
SMP syncronization?
Isn't thread level going to be figuring out more about what can be done
in parallel -- different algorithms to exploit the increase in parallelism
in the same process?
This begs another question: is linux well suited to multi-threaded CPU's vs. the current thread emulation that has to be done on top of separate processes?
Are Linux processes "light weight" enough for these new architectures?
Sadly, as a programmer, I'd be hard pressed to design a program that would
run optimally when placed on single-threaded vs. multi-threaded CPU's.
If I knew I had multiple threads to play with, I might divise algorithms
to split up work, but if run on a single CPU, the divide and merge
code might introduce extra delay.
Might it also not vary depending on how the threads are implemented? I.e. -
if they are true "light weight threads" (whatever that means), vs. separate processes?
I'm assuming that separate threads would all want CPU at the same time
in the optimal case -- we are not talking about the case of one thread
going to sleep while another operates and having them execute sequentially.
The overhead of managing them with a process scheduler seems like it might
outweigh parallelism benefits to "multi-thread" some code but have it
run sequentially.
Until the overhead of thread-switching/task-switching can be quantified, it will be difficult to _explicitly_ write code for multithreading.
Worse -- if I am on a non-threading (or minimal threading) single cpu,
just calling the main process scheduler might cause a disruption of what
is in the cache and largely negate the benefits of multithreading.
If the bottle neck, now, is memory I/O on the Intel platform, how will multiple
cores and threads help that much? It seems like they'll be waiting a greater percentage of their clock cycles for memory I/O.
-l
Productivity is very subjective.
I can do the same job, measured by two different managers and get rated excellent by one and failing by the other at the same company.
Personally, I _felt_ more productive between the two managers when I was in touch with the people I needed to be to get my job done, but somewhat insulated from unnecessary distractions.
However from a computer perspective, I was most efficient when I had a mobile "workstation" -- it was running Linux -- which is what I needed for development, and it ran Windows under VMLinux. It would have been better if the office functions were integrated, but using VMware was satisfactory -- at least it didn't require a reboot. I could also run test kernels, also under VMware to test unstable patches. The ability to throw away a "session" and reset it was very valuable.
When I was plugged in at home or work, I could off-load compilations to higher-powered workstations, but the ability to have a reliable computer I could take with me everywhere allowed me to do work on my schedule. It was all transparent with NFS (or SMBFS) and make -- sometimes my compiles ran on remote CPU's with my laptop acting as a disk server -- and thanks to linux's dynamic buffer usage, it could easily handle disk serving for my 2-cpu workstation at home or 3+ Xeon CPU's. So scaleability was important for the work I was doing. Windows has problems with interoperability and would have required expensive licensing for "servers", I haven't used a MAC, but have tended to shy away from that corner due to due to lack of interoperability in the workplace. The only thing that would have been better than a laptop would have been a multi-processor laptop -- both at work and at home, docking stations were a must -- plugged them in for large screen and ergo usage.
But I think what computer or OS is going to depend on what job you are doing and how you, as an individual, works best. I need to change tasks and focus, often, to work well. Others prefer to stay on one task at a time. As I get older, I find myself needing to focus on fewer tasks at a time so that may change.
I find the need to use a mouse disruptive to programming. No one has a good programming environment that uses a mouse to type in "if/then/else...etc" and moving my hands back and forth off the keyboard to mouse slows me down.
Another consideration -- what your "thinking system" is geared towards -- i.e. - visual, audio or tactile. Do you recognize shapes faster or words
faster?
I think it would be hard to have one platform that would be the "best" for everyone. If we did, we probably wouldn't be having this discussion...
I think management style is a more important factor, for me, at least, than what computer I'm on -- if I have a flexible work schedule and multiple tasks to work on at the same time with agreed upon completion dates, I fare much better than with a micro-midget manager who only wants to hand out 1 task, and expects "you complete the 1 task you are assigned, and when you are done with that task you come back and ask for another task. You don't choose the order of tasks or take on other tasks without permission." I find it difficult to be productive under such circumstances.
-l
Bingo. She gained employment to flee the harsh theocratic government that severely curtailed the rights of women. She arrived in America only to be exploited by the H1-B Visa system -- and yes, she was intelligent enough to recognize and know she was being exploited and "screwed", but it was better than life as a non-entity in Iran under the Ayatolla (sp?).
I greatly resent them and the government that enacts it. I resent Bush. I don't see them on a daily basis in my job environment. I only see constant reminders of their stupidity. Did I "hate" the workers? NO! Did I hate the H1-B System? YES! The 2nd example I gave who was oppressed was a dear friend of mine who I saw exploited by being trapped in a sponsoring company.
And to respond to a prior poster, they did not make "market" rates. Legally, they are supposed to be paid market rates, BUT, the companies would pay them the least amount they could get away with without bringing down an audit from the appropriate government entity.
If any of the workers complained and their company was audited and found to be paying notably lower than market rates, the company might find it's H1-B Visa sponsorship status terminated -- with the result that the workers would have to return (at the time) home immediately.
In the first example I gave about a fellow worker, they might never have been able to attract him, in a free market economy, as a, say "junior tech", but they might hire him and pay him market rate as a junior tech when his qualificattions might be more equivalent to a senior or principle engineer.
If an employer can hire a senior engineer to work for the pay of a junior tech, then what do you think the chances are of getting someone of the "real" abilities of a "junior" tech getting that job. The H1-B Visa worker has a distinct advantage and it is almost always a better deal than the country where they came from, so from their perspective it is a win, and it is a win for the employer, but not for the american citizens.
In the same vein, how can an american workforce with job safety regulations and work-comp benefits and considerable legal rights as an employee compete against a worker where the country treats the workers as disposable parts and pays them 10-20$/week (like Nike was accused of)?
American businesses cannot compete against businesses in countries where the citizens have few or no protections or rights.
Resultantly, the US has developed record high trade deficits that ultimately lower the value of the dollar abroad and ultimately cause a rise in prices here: a double squeeze: the US unemployment rises as foreign companies and H1-B visa workers replace US labor and inflation rises. In only 6 months, I've seen prices on pet products go up by 30-50%. Those numbers and the cost of home ownership are NOT included in the "consumer price index" that inflation numbers are derived from.
During years of hyper inflation in the Carter and Reagan years, home ownership was removed from the inflation index calculations as it was seen as "unduly" influencing inflation figures. So they removed it. That doesn't mean such inflation 'goes away'. Using home prices as a gauge in my area, inflation has gone up around 200% in the past 10 years. You don't see anything remotely indicating that in our government's propaganda on inflation figures.
It's easy to 'hide' H1-B visa workers in arbitrarily low-pay grade jobs, thus making them appear to be getting market rates, but without *freedom* to move between jobs and companies of their choice, they are partially enslaved and controlled by their sponsoring companies -- making them more attractive assets than someone who could just leave and leave for work at another employer.
I don't have a problem with immigrants that come here and compete on a level playing field with American workers. But I also have had friends and coworkers who were H1-B workers. Consistantly, they were not paid market rates for their talents and as a result, they were more experienced labor that was "forced" to work for a lower salary -- this is a resource that hurts Americans at the _same_ skill level who would have been earning more.
One coworker got an immediate promotion after attaining his green-card. He'd been at the company I was at for about 1.5 years, me, maybe 5. I'd been in management training, done project releases that were on time and well run and did project releases under unrealistic circumstances that left all members burnt out and with myself having no power to reward them w/time off or bonuses. But my manager was quite frank about my coworker's "promotion" into a higher pay grade than I -- even though he knew less about the work we were doing than I did. He felt/knew that my coworker was feeling restless as our company floundered and wasn't able to work on projects that tapped his abilities to their fullest extent. In his area of expertise, I knew less, but it wasn't the job or group he was in at SGI, he landed in the group because the group he had been in was dissolved and he was good at what he had been doing, so when layoffs came, he was relocated to a different group that wasn't as good a match for his skills. My manager also felt that because he wasn't able to use his talents in the best way, his salary was depressed compared to his peers and "merit" increases were limited to an average of 2.7% in the given review period. The only way to give him a large jump in salary to keep him from "jumping ship" to another company was to promote him. He was an H1-B worker from the UK.
Another friend of mine (who described herself as being from Persia so as to avoid negative connotations -- and this was almost 15 years ago) had required overtime hours (unpaid) at about 80-90% average pay for her job description (in SiliVal). She wanted to quit but could not because she would have to leave the country if she wasn't immediately swooped up by a new company. She was trapped for some long time until she found another position that was willing to take a risk and handle the extra paperwork of transfering her over -- and for a while may have been here "illegally" until H1-B visa rules were relaxed with respect to how long workers could stay in the country before having to leave after leaving their sponsoring country.
So it is the H1-B Visa process and the fact that those worker's are not free agents in the economy -- it is exploiting "trapped" labor and make American citizens or those with Green Cards less attractive as employees. So -- Yes, I do resent H1-B workers as representative of an exploitive system.
-eol-
When it violates a law.
Tuning something for a test isn't illegal. Neither is non-disclosure of security bugs or bugs that could be escalated into security bugs in Software before selling to customers or the government.
But it is certainly "caveat emptor" in this day -- even things that are promised in large print (if you do x and y, then you get z). But then you will find that the completion of X and Y is not as simple as doing the tasks but you will find there are fine details about completion criteria for X and Y. Like some of the bigger rebates...have to mail in old CD's or UPC's from previous boxes to qualify for them even though you registered your previous version with them and they have you on file to make the "special upgrade offer" to you. They have the unique serial number from the previous edition, you can't sell it to someone else who would register it or the serial # would get caught. You can still dup'ed the disk if you really wanted to make a copy of the previous program for a friend (or the new one). It's just they make you keep all the boxes and manuals (which are usually online with the paper manuals and boxes gathering dust), and sending a CD through the mail isn't
a 13^h^h37 cent stamp either...
It's capitalism, low-market control, whatever you can get away with that isn't explicity illegal is allowed (though most certainly, not what one might
call ethical). But ethical? When it comes to a 'game' where the sole objective is to make money?
Where's the profit in having ethics? Are we really the progenitors of the federation or the real future will have us being the Ferengi.
*psycho future!*
-l
Embarrassment. Couldn't get it to work in IE 6.0.2800-XP-SP2 (though I'm running on XP1). Must be something wrong with people's browsing habits. Oh, you browse with javascript enabled for all sites, by default? Well, um, *sigh*: trusting scripts from random sites? I don't think so: default ActiveX off, Java Off, Javascript Off, Cookies Off...etc...
:-)
Opening up my web browser to random scripts has never seemed like a great default no matter how "secure" the language is supposed to be. I worked in security -- I know what passes old C2/B1 or CC-CAPP/LSPP for commercial and federal "security" on OS's. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Besides -- my boss told me not to fix bugs (including security bugs): It was "not a bug" unless found by a customer or by the security evaluation vendor. "If they don't find it, we don't gotta fix it". Simple as that. As for fixing customer bugs: fixing unfound customer bugs was against his policy as "found bugs" could be fixed with money from support-paying customers. Otherwise, what incentive is there for the customer to have to buy or pay for support?
When support became a profit center, fixing non-customer (or non security-eval-team) reported bugs became a fiduciary liability to stockholders. Employees who wasted company time fixing such bugs were liable to have it show up negatively on their performance reviews.
It is just another "cost-cutting" measure in a free-market economy.
-l
> Subject: Re:Get Help Now, Maybe?
> by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 16, @12:56PM
> Remember, 90% of everything is crap.
What part of "everything" does your post (and claim of 90%) fall into?
I've done a fair amount of research about various medical and other subject matters on the internet and find it to have more information that is accessible than any other source. That information can be corroborated by multiple sources, or not, and it can be correllated with standard medical websites or texts if needed -- but I forward research articles (crap?) from medical journals and some studies to my doctor regarding my health and let her "peer" review it for sanity.
My doctor can't possibly spend as much time researching each of her patients' exact condition, as I can spend on myself.
It is common wisdom that patients, often, have to become experts in their own diseases because they are the ones with the most time on their hands, have most accurate access to their symptoms, and are the most motivated to pay attention to their own problem.
-l
That was (is) my system until I had the flu and the outage was at 3am. I didn't think I was too capable of dragging the gen outside in the rain and doing the extension cords... I just powered down the systems.
Some UPS manufacturers like APC spec a max load, but allow for adding additional "battery-only" units. What's not entirely clear to me has been whether or not I could use deep-cycle marine batteries (alot cheaper), plugged-in to one of their controllers....Just a thought though.
In all battery and generator backups, you will find cheap bargains but the output is "sloppy" -- not the sine-wave most devices expect. Some devices won't care, but more sensitive electronics that have average or sub-standard power supplies might.
Honda advertises their EU inverter line as being clean for electronics use -- clean in the sense of pure 50 or 60Hz sine wave output. Not a square, triangle or rhomboid shaped output.
> This bidding process is almost certainly a good thing for the
> hospitals, but is it good for the nurses?
---
Is it? By encouraging nurses to work hours over their regular shift, they would likely be held responsible for encouraging nurses to work overtime which could expose the hospitals to liability for any accidents due to the nurses being tired during a shift going into 'no brain' mode...
There is likely some limit to hours worked/week. If the nurses are not exempt employees (like management and software engineers), I think they have to be paid overtime pay, no?
-l
I seem to remember this "feature" being the case in SP0/SP1...I've never had their built-in firewall block off sharing. I thought it was deliberate on MS's part to give the user a puny firewall that wouldn't intefere with Microsoft's file sharing.
Then again, I also have my hosts on internal IP's on an otherwise unroutable P behind a linux proxy/firewall, so maybe MS's firewall software operates differently because I have a 192.168 addr..?
The MS FW was one of the first things I recognized as flawed when I got an XP laptop -- first thing I tried was an nmap against my host-- and bleh...none of the standard MS ports were hidden. Went to a 3rd party fw product after that...
I'm surpised this hasn't come out before now. It's not like it is a new bug, IME...
-l
Also mentioned is the shuttle design that makes it self-orienting on re-entry thus always having it re-enter on a "least friction" path.
Various design differences would appear to make the shuttle inherently safer than the 30 year old NASA design.
The article also mentions the cost on the project, $69 million, is less than most government studies and considerably less than the 1 billion dollar cost of the US Shuttle and the per-fligh cost of $500 million.
-l
I have to agree...going back in time and somehow claiming he didn't do the work for his PhD is just plain "wrong" -- unless, they have some evidence that he cheated in obtaining his PhD. But to go back and and strip him of prior titles...is his high school going to revoke his diploma as well?
-l
The pricing scheme is open to rampant abuse.
/. crowd and your daily unique visitor count will get WAY screwed up.
All a $29.95/month mom&pop store needs is to get hit with a
I wonder what happens when you reach your limit -- does it just stop keeping track or will you be bumped to a higher tier. You maybe go home on a Friday and come-in on monday and see 200,000 unique visitors over the weekend...yuck!
Too bad there's not a "free" level for non-commercial, personal use.
-l