I thought the same thing once (proof). The moderation and metamoderation systems seems to work - I'd just let us in the bucket of submissions and then there's no need for editors.
I work in healthcare too. I believe HIPAA doesn't specify that you completely erase drives, just that you take "reasonable measures to ensure patient privacy" (HIPAA is wonderfully free of technical specifications in its 2400 pages of documentation). If you're doing any basic wipe of drives that prevent someone just installing a drive and seeing the data you're probably OK.
But, you might consider why there is _any_ patient data on hard drives. If "Microsoft Office" is a primary application for patient stuff, you're going to have to deal with this forever. You might want to start migrating to server centric applications and thin client approaches to make sure the data stays someplace where it can be audited.
In the end, there's lots more HIPAA exposure through CD-ROM burners, USB ports, print outs, and elevator gossip than an IT department that's bothering to wipe drives.
I believe a lot in what your saying, the effort to build and keep them running correctly is amazing. Those of us old enough probably remember knowing what day of the month the maintenance guy came around and you knew the flippers would work again and all the rubber would be fixed.
I do think there has been a tremendous amount of consolidation of parts or development of "tool kits" over the years. The old machines (I started playing as a kid in the 70s) were definately all analog, tons of relays, and tons of custom mechanisms to create various scoring/bonus opportunities. With the coming of the video games (which were also originally very custom, with specific circuit boards for each game), common components came into being, I believe. The newer games I've looked in seem to have a common logic component and an OS type environment for defining the scoring and the (generally) video display on the backglass. The playing surface, art work, and layout is all specific to the game, but I think the logic and primary controller is probably a common unit across games and maybe across manufacturers at this point.
There is tremendous design and probably trial and error to the creation of a game, but I think there are a lot of common components now and the building of a game is probably like other things: design and engineering by the experienced specialists, art work by the artists, and construction is probably a furniture building like process.
The older machines though -- ahh there is magic under them. We had an old "Centigrade 37" machine in my frat house that a couple guys got together and fixed (some EE students -- a cool project for them), and it was quite a playable thing and all electro-mechanical (with a babe stuck in a test tube theme, if I remember correctly). This was probably a late 60s early 70s Williams machine I think.
Later, we got a hold of a machine through a vending company - a Bally "Silverball Mania" machine. This was a next generation machine with electronic scoring and electronic sounds. Wonderful play - could keep you up all night. Had a neat building background sound that really built tension as you kept the ball in play.
When I do come across a machine these days they all seem to have a movie/TV tie-in of some kind. Maybe the royalties drives up the cost a bit, also. Pinball is like darts -- an old thing to a lot of people and not worth the time to master the skill.
The market for this stuff mostly has disappeared because "hang outs" have mostly disappeared. Dave and Buster's/Dreamworks aside, who hangs out to play a game when your basic home computer does such a great job on the video games. I'd love to find a machine for the home, but its going to take some bizarre retro-fad thing to happen for lots of machines to be sold that way. These machines new cost more than a piano, and no one buys pianos anymore because the household budget going to the "need for school" of home computers.
*off-topic, private (poster's Email not available)*
I guess my message came across as a little negative - more of a comment about how different this question seemed to be from other questions, and maybe I just read your question wrong.
I work in healthcare IT in USA, and I'm involved in some public domain projects. While I don't understand the specific needs for AIDS/TB, I do understand how the costs can be prohibitive for commercial projects. Write me at the above Email if you wish.
I do a lot of work in South Africa and other parts of Africa with health care information systems. There is a pressing need for open source information systems for AIDS treatment and also health system management. The existing proprietary solutions are expensive, not suitable, not customizable, and don't build local capacity.
Not to point out the obvious, but Googling "Open Source Health Care" finds plenty of information to get started. I wonder what questions this one bumped off the list?
I think the lack of posting shows general agreement from the community.
This is the annual day of beating an idea to death done by media types. Fortunately, no news happens on April 1 so they are free to show us how clever they are all day.
I would think that most of the servers have long since moved out of New York to hosting facilities with cheaper real estate costs.
These commuter taxes long term must kill a company's ability to stay in the location, since they can't attract nearby talent from across a city line. As an employee, I wouldn't want to work where I'd be taxed extra, and as an employer, I'd need to establish some presence outside the city to get a hold of talent. Long term - city loses as the suburbs become the center of commerce and the city become a shell of what it could be.
It's a silly article. It's not about the future of Apple, but about the future of "Pentagram" design projects. They're latching on to Apple through an old relationship to show their design take on somewhat obvious extensions of existing products.
It would be obviously more interesting to see an article from Apple sources on future products...
Hershey was the first one in the game in a big way, and I think they became big by figuring out how to become big - not by being the best. Ironically, some of the better low cost American chocolate is right down the street: http://www.wilburbuds.com/docs/visit.html
I was thinking "girl friends of the guys putting it together" the whole time. Stolen soundtrack and the effects definately had the right vibe. But those two girls (especially the "evil" one) -- yikes.
Kind of neat to see how professional a job this was. Especially the clips where you can see AT-ATs walking behind the real actors. The lightsabers looked right too. I guess the availability of tools for filmmakers on a budget has progressed amazingly. I keep thinking "Flight 405", but looks much better than that.
Very interesting that just a few days ago Bill Gates blasted the education community as being obsolete. Now, Microsoft powered nanny cams to allow parents to go off and persue their interests. Doesn't seem like a very consistant message.
Unless, of course, the school reform he seeks includes tons of Microsoft products in the classrooms. Perhaps there is a Microsoft Teacher product in the works as well.
I forget where this comes from, but "the world is full of irony for the stupid".
Don't we work in an industry that for a _long_ time has hired people that broke into systems as security consultants? Isn't there a common theory of "who knows more about -a thing- than someone that has -ripped apart a thing-"?
I'm not proposing that this person is the right one for the job, but I don't think this is a huge story or "pervasive irony". It might just be:
1) Creative hiring, to get someone that knows how to circumvent common systems. 2) Incorrect hiring, someone didn't check references. 3) Bad hiring, no one else applied for the job.
I think the term "VAX" might have been originally used (in this thread) generically. I still use the term VAX for our boxes, even though they are Alpha chip based.
As to the pace of replacement of these machines -- DEC (and others) used to make hardware with relatively conservative engineering and they lasted a long time with little attention. We still have clients running 20 year old Data General 16 bit Eclipses. As Microsoft took over the world we all got used to disposable Intel based servers with 3 year depriciation schedules.
You also aren't as wedded to the operating system anymore. Code used to be written to a compiler for that operating system. Now we can be pretty insulated from the operating system thanks to Apache, Oracle, Java, etc. Frees you up to purchase the best deal regardless of OS. No one needs to purchase a nice shiny VMS box since they can run just fine on Linux, etc.
There's little reason to not move away from Alpha now. HP has priced this stuff out of it being a rational option, and doesn't seem to be supporting some emerging standards on VMS moving forward (iSCSI is what's making me kill our VMS boxes).
Even if this goes through some level(s) of PR spin, I would think an Intel employee would be pleased to have this kind of internal dialog with their CEO. There's plenty of CEO's that only have dialog to their employees through annual reports, and there seems to be a health amount of dialog here (unless the whole thing is faked:-) )
Of course, its no wonder that CEOs don't communicate in a written form, since there always one disgruntled person willing to forward clearly internal things to the outside world.
It's kind of funny to see all the employee comments about wanting to make "cool" products like iPods and Macs. I don't think chips will ever be a "cool" part of the consumer creations except for Slashdot readers. Intel just doesn't control that part of products, and the manufacturers on that side are only interested in churning out ATX compatible motherboards at low cost. For someone to start making "cool" products based on Intel chips, Intel is going to have to find someone willing to do some original motherboard design. Or convince Apple to based some products on their chips.
Hmmmm... no. Not aware of that. I started using Orbitz because their $6 fee was less than the $35 fee the travel agency charges. I always thought the connection to the Sabre system gave them an edge, and used SideStep to keep them honest.
I have bought a few tickets this year directly from United, where there is no commission and usually an extra 1000 miles thrown into your account. If Orbitz wants to jack up their price they'll have to provide some service. The airlines are clearly trying to squeeze agencies out of the picture (maybe that's the reason for the spin-off?). After spending a night at O'Hare I definately know that Orbitz isn't providing the service of an agency at this point.
Is Orbitz really going to sue? Or, are they just going to cancel your account with them? I've read TFA but can't really find the rule or the penalty (I'm a human, not a laywer).
I use Orbitz all the time, and don't think this is going to change my opinion of them. There's not much to link to them past the home page for results, because they're constantly changing, unless you're just trying to help someone that doeen't know how to get the search going. I cut and paste the "matrix" in Email when a group of us are going somewhere or when I'm trying to figure out a budget for a trip, but this is private stuff.
I think all they're trying to do is limit the ability of people to glom on to their site for aggregating prices (I'm thinking sidestep.com, which combines airlines that don't participate in the Sabre system behind Orbitz, like Southwest). They'd probably sue things like this.
I have no insight outside of having been a customer of theirs for 20 years.
My speculation has always been that the foundation of Microsoft is sand. There's such a strong need to be backward compatible with new products that they're not able to make the "System 9 to OS X" kind of leap that others do. Part of this might be that its got to be career suicide to point out any mistakes that Bill might make, and his hand is (supposedly) on all the technical decisions.
Another part is that the whole split of software to hardware makes it difficult to create good design, since you have to cater to the least common denominator and you have technology being advanced by hardware guys outside your direct control. Apple obviously has a huge advantage in this area and it accounts for the tremendously advanced style of their machines compared to the Windows based bland things produced by everyone else.
The employee angle is the one I can't figure out. They obviously are hiring all the smart people they can, as they have the cash to throw at people (how does an MIT grad take that MS position without thinking they're selling their soul? Maybe people don't care about that anymore). But if they have so many smart people how come they seem to be wasting so much time producing uninteresting, uncreative, buggy stuff? I know there's a lot of dumb people creating problems on their machines everyday (customers), but how come they can't figure out how to isolate and protect critical parts of their products from that? Why do they think that every product should have a million icons and functions that confuse or don't work?
How come PowerPoint hasn't changed substantially since 1997? Seems to be a real "Physics Olympics" kind of question to figure out how many mind-numbing PowerPoint slides of bullet points are created every day. Or the IE rendering weaknesses. Or MS Project inability to product usable output? Etc. etc. etc.
Turned into kind of a rant, I know, but these aren't shareware products, these are $400, $500, $600 products bought in the millions of copies. It's either the arrogance of the employees that squeezes all the real creativity out of them (or they don't care), or it really is a technically impossible task to create high quality software that runs universally on other people's hardware.
(In the interest of disclosure, I bought my first Apple product three weeks ago. I no longer understand how people rationally decide to purchase a Microsoft product for personal use).
"Unfortunately the rendering codebase means this is a little more difficult to implement than you might expect but we aren't afraid to take on the difficult issues:-)"
what are they saying, that IE is poorly designed?
Yes, and they are willing to introduce some new security holes and performance issues as they throw the might of their Internet Explorer Rendering Engine division (425 employees, all with a PhD in CS) at the problem.
...it's probably more expensive to publish a book in 3 ring binder form than traditional paperback production.
I believe paperpack books only cost a few bucks per unit (US$) to produce in volume. 3 ring binder plus all that manual insertion probably is more, and would take up more space for shipping.
My guess is that it's basic economics, and we're getting what's cheapest to produce.
I find it hard to believe the SNL skit had a major impact on Star Trek. Shatner was obviously toward the end of the movie line at that point -- those movies were losing steam and TNG was in full production. SNL is rarely a major impact on culture outside of a few catch phrases -- whenever anything becomes popular the actor then moves on to non-SNL things. It was, in reality, a funny little bit about the compulsive fan-conference attending show nerds, especially for a show that ended in 1970.
The Trek resurgence around 1978-1980 allowed them to get capital to do TNG and some movies with special effects more in line with what they invisioned. But, they ran out of script ideas along the way -- the lack of creativity in rehashing old episodes on Enterprise is what is unrecoverable.
Science Fiction on TV is dead. Marvel comics rule. Stan Lee is the Gene Roddenbery of the turn of the century.
And, "Night Court" did the skit funnier with a public disturbance between "old star trek" and "new star trek" fans at a convention.
The probably need to slim it down more than slightly. That iMac is thicker than it seems, especially when compared to a lap top. It's got a lot of fans and heat sinks in it too.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe...
I work in healthcare too. I believe HIPAA doesn't specify that you completely erase drives, just that you take "reasonable measures to ensure patient privacy" (HIPAA is wonderfully free of technical specifications in its 2400 pages of documentation). If you're doing any basic wipe of drives that prevent someone just installing a drive and seeing the data you're probably OK.
But, you might consider why there is _any_ patient data on hard drives. If "Microsoft Office" is a primary application for patient stuff, you're going to have to deal with this forever. You might want to start migrating to server centric applications and thin client approaches to make sure the data stays someplace where it can be audited.
In the end, there's lots more HIPAA exposure through CD-ROM burners, USB ports, print outs, and elevator gossip than an IT department that's bothering to wipe drives.
I believe a lot in what your saying, the effort to build and keep them running correctly is amazing. Those of us old enough probably remember knowing what day of the month the maintenance guy came around and you knew the flippers would work again and all the rubber would be fixed.
I do think there has been a tremendous amount of consolidation of parts or development of "tool kits" over the years. The old machines (I started playing as a kid in the 70s) were definately all analog, tons of relays, and tons of custom mechanisms to create various scoring/bonus opportunities. With the coming of the video games (which were also originally very custom, with specific circuit boards for each game), common components came into being, I believe. The newer games I've looked in seem to have a common logic component and an OS type environment for defining the scoring and the (generally) video display on the backglass. The playing surface, art work, and layout is all specific to the game, but I think the logic and primary controller is probably a common unit across games and maybe across manufacturers at this point.
There is tremendous design and probably trial and error to the creation of a game, but I think there are a lot of common components now and the building of a game is probably like other things: design and engineering by the experienced specialists, art work by the artists, and construction is probably a furniture building like process.
The older machines though -- ahh there is magic under them. We had an old "Centigrade 37" machine in my frat house that a couple guys got together and fixed (some EE students -- a cool project for them), and it was quite a playable thing and all electro-mechanical (with a babe stuck in a test tube theme, if I remember correctly). This was probably a late 60s early 70s Williams machine I think.
Later, we got a hold of a machine through a vending company - a Bally "Silverball Mania" machine. This was a next generation machine with electronic scoring and electronic sounds. Wonderful play - could keep you up all night. Had a neat building background sound that really built tension as you kept the ball in play.
When I do come across a machine these days they all seem to have a movie/TV tie-in of some kind. Maybe the royalties drives up the cost a bit, also. Pinball is like darts -- an old thing to a lot of people and not worth the time to master the skill.
The market for this stuff mostly has disappeared because "hang outs" have mostly disappeared. Dave and Buster's/Dreamworks aside, who hangs out to play a game when your basic home computer does such a great job on the video games. I'd love to find a machine for the home, but its going to take some bizarre retro-fad thing to happen for lots of machines to be sold that way. These machines new cost more than a piano, and no one buys pianos anymore because the household budget going to the "need for school" of home computers.
*off-topic, private (poster's Email not available)*
I guess my message came across as a little negative - more of a comment about how different this question seemed to be from other questions, and maybe I just read your question wrong.
I work in healthcare IT in USA, and I'm involved in some public domain projects. While I don't understand the specific needs for AIDS/TB, I do understand how the costs can be prohibitive for commercial projects. Write me at the above Email if you wish.
Not to point out the obvious, but Googling "Open Source Health Care" finds plenty of information to get started. I wonder what questions this one bumped off the list?
I think the lack of posting shows general agreement from the community.
This is the annual day of beating an idea to death done by media types. Fortunately, no news happens on April 1 so they are free to show us how clever they are all day.
I would think that most of the servers have long since moved out of New York to hosting facilities with cheaper real estate costs.
These commuter taxes long term must kill a company's ability to stay in the location, since they can't attract nearby talent from across a city line. As an employee, I wouldn't want to work where I'd be taxed extra, and as an employer, I'd need to establish some presence outside the city to get a hold of talent. Long term - city loses as the suburbs become the center of commerce and the city become a shell of what it could be.
It's a silly article. It's not about the future of Apple, but about the future of "Pentagram" design projects. They're latching on to Apple through an old relationship to show their design take on somewhat obvious extensions of existing products.
It would be obviously more interesting to see an article from Apple sources on future products...
You'd be surprised: http://www.shady-maple.com/index.htm
Hershey was the first one in the game in a big way, and I think they became big by figuring out how to become big - not by being the best. Ironically, some of the better low cost American chocolate is right down the street: http://www.wilburbuds.com/docs/visit.html
I was thinking "girl friends of the guys putting it together" the whole time. Stolen soundtrack and the effects definately had the right vibe. But those two girls (especially the "evil" one) -- yikes.
Kind of neat to see how professional a job this was. Especially the clips where you can see AT-ATs walking behind the real actors. The lightsabers looked right too. I guess the availability of tools for filmmakers on a budget has progressed amazingly. I keep thinking "Flight 405", but looks much better than that.
I think this was a "Dilbert":
Wally: I placed streams of ones and zeros on my hard drive. The fact that you created images of porn out of them is your problem, not mine.
(paraphrased)
Plug it into the Firewire jack on the side.
Very interesting that just a few days ago Bill Gates blasted the education community as being obsolete. Now, Microsoft powered nanny cams to allow parents to go off and persue their interests. Doesn't seem like a very consistant message.
Unless, of course, the school reform he seeks includes tons of Microsoft products in the classrooms. Perhaps there is a Microsoft Teacher product in the works as well.
I forget where this comes from, but "the world is full of irony for the stupid".
Don't we work in an industry that for a _long_ time has hired people that broke into systems as security consultants? Isn't there a common theory of "who knows more about -a thing- than someone that has -ripped apart a thing-"?
I'm not proposing that this person is the right one for the job, but I don't think this is a huge story or "pervasive irony". It might just be:
1) Creative hiring, to get someone that knows how to circumvent common systems.
2) Incorrect hiring, someone didn't check references.
3) Bad hiring, no one else applied for the job.
I think the term "VAX" might have been originally used (in this thread) generically. I still use the term VAX for our boxes, even though they are Alpha chip based.
As to the pace of replacement of these machines -- DEC (and others) used to make hardware with relatively conservative engineering and they lasted a long time with little attention. We still have clients running 20 year old Data General 16 bit Eclipses. As Microsoft took over the world we all got used to disposable Intel based servers with 3 year depriciation schedules.
You also aren't as wedded to the operating system anymore. Code used to be written to a compiler for that operating system. Now we can be pretty insulated from the operating system thanks to Apache, Oracle, Java, etc. Frees you up to purchase the best deal regardless of OS. No one needs to purchase a nice shiny VMS box since they can run just fine on Linux, etc.
There's little reason to not move away from Alpha now. HP has priced this stuff out of it being a rational option, and doesn't seem to be supporting some emerging standards on VMS moving forward (iSCSI is what's making me kill our VMS boxes).
Even if this goes through some level(s) of PR spin, I would think an Intel employee would be pleased to have this kind of internal dialog with their CEO. There's plenty of CEO's that only have dialog to their employees through annual reports, and there seems to be a health amount of dialog here (unless the whole thing is faked :-) )
Of course, its no wonder that CEOs don't communicate in a written form, since there always one disgruntled person willing to forward clearly internal things to the outside world.
It's kind of funny to see all the employee comments about wanting to make "cool" products like iPods and Macs. I don't think chips will ever be a "cool" part of the consumer creations except for Slashdot readers. Intel just doesn't control that part of products, and the manufacturers on that side are only interested in churning out ATX compatible motherboards at low cost. For someone to start making "cool" products based on Intel chips, Intel is going to have to find someone willing to do some original motherboard design. Or convince Apple to based some products on their chips.
Hmmmm... no. Not aware of that. I started using Orbitz because their $6 fee was less than the $35 fee the travel agency charges. I always thought the connection to the Sabre system gave them an edge, and used SideStep to keep them honest.
I have bought a few tickets this year directly from United, where there is no commission and usually an extra 1000 miles thrown into your account. If Orbitz wants to jack up their price they'll have to provide some service. The airlines are clearly trying to squeeze agencies out of the picture (maybe that's the reason for the spin-off?). After spending a night at O'Hare I definately know that Orbitz isn't providing the service of an agency at this point.
Is Orbitz really going to sue? Or, are they just going to cancel your account with them? I've read TFA but can't really find the rule or the penalty (I'm a human, not a laywer).
I use Orbitz all the time, and don't think this is going to change my opinion of them. There's not much to link to them past the home page for results, because they're constantly changing, unless you're just trying to help someone that doeen't know how to get the search going. I cut and paste the "matrix" in Email when a group of us are going somewhere or when I'm trying to figure out a budget for a trip, but this is private stuff.
I think all they're trying to do is limit the ability of people to glom on to their site for aggregating prices (I'm thinking sidestep.com, which combines airlines that don't participate in the Sabre system behind Orbitz, like Southwest). They'd probably sue things like this.
I have no insight outside of having been a customer of theirs for 20 years.
My speculation has always been that the foundation of Microsoft is sand. There's such a strong need to be backward compatible with new products that they're not able to make the "System 9 to OS X" kind of leap that others do. Part of this might be that its got to be career suicide to point out any mistakes that Bill might make, and his hand is (supposedly) on all the technical decisions.
Another part is that the whole split of software to hardware makes it difficult to create good design, since you have to cater to the least common denominator and you have technology being advanced by hardware guys outside your direct control. Apple obviously has a huge advantage in this area and it accounts for the tremendously advanced style of their machines compared to the Windows based bland things produced by everyone else.
The employee angle is the one I can't figure out. They obviously are hiring all the smart people they can, as they have the cash to throw at people (how does an MIT grad take that MS position without thinking they're selling their soul? Maybe people don't care about that anymore). But if they have so many smart people how come they seem to be wasting so much time producing uninteresting, uncreative, buggy stuff? I know there's a lot of dumb people creating problems on their machines everyday (customers), but how come they can't figure out how to isolate and protect critical parts of their products from that? Why do they think that every product should have a million icons and functions that confuse or don't work?
How come PowerPoint hasn't changed substantially since 1997? Seems to be a real "Physics Olympics" kind of question to figure out how many mind-numbing PowerPoint slides of bullet points are created every day. Or the IE rendering weaknesses. Or MS Project inability to product usable output? Etc. etc. etc.
Turned into kind of a rant, I know, but these aren't shareware products, these are $400, $500, $600 products bought in the millions of copies. It's either the arrogance of the employees that squeezes all the real creativity out of them (or they don't care), or it really is a technically impossible task to create high quality software that runs universally on other people's hardware.
(In the interest of disclosure, I bought my first Apple product three weeks ago. I no longer understand how people rationally decide to purchase a Microsoft product for personal use).
"Unfortunately the rendering codebase means this is a little more difficult to implement than you might expect but we aren't afraid to take on the difficult issues :-)"
what are they saying, that IE is poorly designed?
Yes, and they are willing to introduce some new security holes and performance issues as they throw the might of their Internet Explorer Rendering Engine division (425 employees, all with a PhD in CS) at the problem.
...it's probably more expensive to publish a book in 3 ring binder form than traditional paperback production.
I believe paperpack books only cost a few bucks per unit (US$) to produce in volume. 3 ring binder plus all that manual insertion probably is more, and would take up more space for shipping.
My guess is that it's basic economics, and we're getting what's cheapest to produce.
I find it hard to believe the SNL skit had a major impact on Star Trek. Shatner was obviously toward the end of the movie line at that point -- those movies were losing steam and TNG was in full production. SNL is rarely a major impact on culture outside of a few catch phrases -- whenever anything becomes popular the actor then moves on to non-SNL things. It was, in reality, a funny little bit about the compulsive fan-conference attending show nerds, especially for a show that ended in 1970.
The Trek resurgence around 1978-1980 allowed them to get capital to do TNG and some movies with special effects more in line with what they invisioned. But, they ran out of script ideas along the way -- the lack of creativity in rehashing old episodes on Enterprise is what is unrecoverable.
Science Fiction on TV is dead. Marvel comics rule. Stan Lee is the Gene Roddenbery of the turn of the century.
And, "Night Court" did the skit funnier with a public disturbance between "old star trek" and "new star trek" fans at a convention.
The probably need to slim it down more than slightly. That iMac is thicker than it seems, especially when compared to a lap top. It's got a lot of fans and heat sinks in it too.
That being said - very slick design.