I also think there is the angle of who are key financiers of this technology; NVidia and Sony, two companies with a clear interest in home entertainment. At least that's the link I see. I've gotten used to the slightly hyped headlines on slashdot, but I'm not sure this one is really all that incorrectly provocative.
I worked for a small academic department within a large teaching hospital. We had been running Solaris using NFS for file sharing between Win 3.1 clients (With PCNFS client software). At the time, we were migrating to Win95 and it didn't have built in NFS support, and I couldnt get that iteration of Samba to work on our solaris box. I wanted to save money from buying client software for the new Win95 boxes.
Long story short, I had two 486's running RedHat (5.0 I think) with the Solaris NFS shares exported to the RedHat boxes, then those shares exported as SMB shares to the Win boxes. This was my first experience with Redhat, and I had no real background in IS. Our boxes sat behind the hospital firewall, and I didnt think there was a problem with internal hacking. So i basically had the box wide open to internal threats.
I was leaving my job and we were in the process of hiring a new part time IS person for the department. Posted an ad through a local linux users group, and interviewed a potential, qualified candidate. Unfortunately, the candidate was from Canada and not a US citizen. This posed a problem cause my job was funded through the UAW (United AutoWorkers union) and the position had to go to a US citizen. We told this to the candidate and he was not hired.
About 3 weeks later, the hospital was hit with a substatial DOS attack necessitating the entire hospital network being shutdown. When it was traced, it was coming from inside the hospital, and yes, from one of my RedHat boxes. It turned out the hospital IS dept. had left some backdoors in through the firewall. The hacker had used that hole to get access to the hospital network, then finally once in, my unprotected Redhat boxes were prime pickings.
We certainly never could prove anything, but I certainly had my suspicions about the culprit. Fortunately, at a team meeting of dept. heads and and IS people, as they tried to blame our dept, it came out that these backdoors had been purposefully left in the firewall, and IS had held shared responsibility.
It was not pleasant as there were substantial numbers of staff (doctors included) trying to access the hospital network from home who couldn't get in for an entire weekend as the hospital network had to be taken offline.
(a) the public in general isn't too fascinated in astronomy to begin with
-and-
(b) the public has come to expect those beautiful Hubble space images, when looking at images from space.
The stuff coming back from Pluto and the belt are gonna be quite boring to anyone but the most astute planetary observer (amateur and professional).
Not that there isnt scientific merit, but I just don't see the public being interested. When the first images of Saturn and Jupiter came back way back when, no one had ever seen images from space like that, and those planets are amazing to look at, even in tiny backyard telescopes. Plus science didn't allow for much analsysis beyond what was visual. Now, scientists know far more about Pluto than they new about those other planets when visual images were so important.
I was just reading an article in the Chicago Tribune some weeks ago about the concern some Nascar drivers/officials/team owners have that Toyota (and Honda and one other manufacturer I believe) are getting into Nascar. Not because it had anything to do with the patriotic/american spirit of the sport (although as someone pointed out, these manufacturers have plants in the US), but because of the cost these manufacturers are going to bring to the sport.
From what I understand, the amount of money some foreign automakers spend on racing programs (CART, IRL, F1, etc...) blows the Nascar racing programs out of the water. And some are concerned that the financial backing from the big four might not be there for them (pontiac, dodge, ford, chevy) to compete.
I wish I could say the story is online, but I get the real paper, and I think you have to subscribe to actually read the article. But it was an interesting read anyway, and I could see why people would be concerned.
Odyssey, a show on NPR, just had a discussion about some of these same issues and the realaudio link can found here:
http://www.wbez.org/frames.asp?readerURL=../sche du le/hd_sched_light.htm&BodyURL=/schedule/odyssey/od yssey_v2.htm
It was quite good, and I think the consensus of their panel (an MIT chemical biologist, a University of Chicago geneticist, and another panel member, I forget from where) was that we are a long way off from reducing human behavior to genes alone.
As an example of how stupid memo's can be at the enterprise level, I work at a VA (Veteran's Adminstration) hospital. It doesn't get much bigger and more beaurocratic than the VA. About 2 months ago a memo went out (through the entire system) stating that we (as providers) were no longer supposed to encourage veteran's who were not part of the VA system to use our health care services. In other words, Veteran's who were not already being seen by the VA health care system should not be encouraged to seek care at a VA hospital.
This after a similar memo and major initiative a couple years back to get new patients coming in (don't ask, its all about reimbursement and budget). Needless to say, there was a major backlash from Veteran's groups and politicians and the memo and policy was rescined about a week later. It was tantamount to saying that we were no longer going to provide care to Veterans who weren't already part of our system.
So yes, conspiracy theories aside, very stupid memos do come out for mass distribution. From the ivory tower, sometimes people have a very limited and distorted view of the rest of their fiefdom and the world at large.
Here at the hospital i work at, we've been using remote p.c. appliances for some time. The great advantage here is that (on our spinal cord unit), nursing and physician staff can walk into a patient's room, check the patient's chart, vitals, lab results, medications, imaging, etc... right there in the patient's room. We can also write orders, fill prescriptions (with the help of a bar coder reader attached to the unit) with a much lower error rate. Given the volume of information to which you want and need access, PDA's just don't cut it. And yes, you can put a laptop on a cart and wheel the cart around, but tablets make things much more efficient.
I know this is a niche industry, but in medicine, units like this really help productivity and quality of care.
I thought it died, not because of the price of the O/S, but because of the system required to take advantage of the O/S. I remember, back in '93 i think, a roommate of my girlfriend had OS2 on her machine. It really needed 32mb of ram to take advantage of its multitasking. At that time, RAM was about $50.00 (US) per mb, meaning that 32MB added another $1500.00 to the p.c. effectively doubling the cost of a computer. I was interested in OS2, but no way could i afford the hardware. As time went on, you get more committed/comfortable with MS (with an investment in sofware) so switching was no longer really an option, even after the price of hardware came down.
I am all for new technology and certainly understand the huge gains in technology we see that were/are the direct result of space exploration research and military research.
With that said, Robert Parks in "VooDoo Science" has a very good chapter on why the ISS was doomed to be a failure, and how there could have been so much more future gain in technology had the R&D money been spent elsewhere (unmanned space exploration for example).
It's a very interesting chapter in a good book, and certainly gave me a different perspective on a project I initially thought was quite important.
I'm not a big fan of IE or MS, but I use both regularly. While its true that there hasn't been a major release of IE in quite some time, there are quite frequent security patches that one can update quite easily through their TOOLS--->WINDOWS UPDATE option.
You have to read exactly what the recommended updates are, and be sure to select only what you want (for example, it defaults to upgrading to IE 6.0 if you're running 5.#), but it does work quite well.
And while I certainly don't need to see Slashdot post an announcement everytime a security fix is out there for MS/IE, I think it would be in people's best interest if they knew about these things and took care of problems on a more regular basis.
Where the hell is the picture of the babe in the black cocktail dress, the scantilly clad bikini vixen? We all know this is what you get to see when you use an X10. And don't try to defend this, hiding behind some lame logic saying those kinds of women don't attend nitro R/C racing. I know they must, i know they must.
A book that covers the individual hacker
on
Hacker Culture
·
· Score: 2, Informative
and their relationship to the hacker culture and mainstream culture is:
"Underground"
Which is available, in its entirety here:
http://www.underground-book.com/download.php3
What I really liked about this book was the indepth story telling about several hackers, their relationships with other hackers (globally I might add), their relationships with family and other "non-hackers," and their general makeup as people.
After reading this, I felt I had a much better appreciation of the importance that the hacker culture can have for some people. The hacker underground was clearly a place where these kids felt most comfortable, and in some cases provided an important level of social support that they didn't otherwise have access to.
I work on a spinal cord injury unit at a VA hospital. We work with people of all levels of disability, including advanced ALS patients.
Can she move her tounge? There are simple switching devices that can be placed in a person's mouth that can be tripped with a tounge movement.
Can she breathe (i.e. not on a ventilator). There are all kind of "sip-and-puff" devices out there that can generate several signals based on whether or not the person is sipping or blowing.
You said she can see, and has some eye movement. We have patients who are trained using eye gaze computers.
A search on google for adaptive devices, adaptive technology, a call to a local rehab hospital should all be able to provide you with information with regard to devices already available. Even if this person can't afford these things, it may give you ideas as to what you can build for her. I'm sorry I can't provide specific info, as our rehab staff/prosthetics department takes care of actual building and ordering.
When you work with people with a serious impairment, in a rehab setting, its truly remarkable what can be built/developed to take advantage of even the slightest behavior a person can elicit.
I certainly can't argue with the relationship between NVidia and Open Source, but I also can't fault the company for consistently delivering quality hardware and software to *their* market, which is people running MS who want high quality graphics. As long as they continue to do this, I'll continue to support their products.
Anyone who's played games in the last two years knows that an NVidia chip is the way to go. They update their drivers on an almost weekly basis, and make all their beta's available for download as well. The On-line support is excellent, and just about every driver update seems to add a boost in performance. Add to this that their drivers are backwards compatible to at least the TNT2 chips, and I say I don't really care if they want to tout their own language, and make it propriatary to their chips.
This is a company that actually survived the dotcom burst, and is continuing to thrive because they make a damn good product.
I'm not sure how old "Randomized Response" surveys are, but I think it goes back to at least 1965 [Warner, 1965, Journal of the American Statistical Association, 60, 63-69].
There is a nice summary of several randomized response methods in:
Fox, J., & Tracy, P. (1986). Randomized Response; A Method for Sensitive Surveys. Sage University Papers
While I'm not sure these particular techniques are applicable to the types of things IBM is doing, they can be very helpful in research when you are trying to establish a baseline/prevalence of behavior that has some stigma attached to it (i.e. drug use, child sexual assault, rape, etc...)
The Incredible Machine, More of The Icredible Machine, and Sid and Al's Crazy Toons (I may be wrong on this exact title) were all about constructing Rube Goldberg machines that were pretty neat, had multiple solutions, and allowed you to mess with gravity, friction, and the like to understand fundamental priniciples of physics while still having a good time sitting at a computer.
Um,
IIRC, it was actually Richard Roeper who thought that the story "had no ending" and was consequently a major dissappointment.
Ebert spent his time telling Roeper what a ridiculous criticism that was given that Ebert is a big fan of the series.
Here is the original Chicago Sun Times review, and I don't really see mention of a complaint about no end.
http://www.suntimes.com/ebert/ebert_reviews/2001/1 2/121901.html
Slashdot Mirror
I also think there is the angle of who are key financiers of this technology; NVidia and Sony, two companies with a clear interest in home entertainment. At least that's the link I see. I've gotten used to the slightly hyped headlines on slashdot, but I'm not sure this one is really all that incorrectly provocative.
jeff
I worked for a small academic department within a large teaching hospital. We had been running Solaris using NFS for file sharing between Win 3.1 clients (With PCNFS client software). At the time, we were migrating to Win95 and it didn't have built in NFS support, and I couldnt get that iteration of Samba to work on our solaris box. I wanted to save money from buying client software for the new Win95 boxes.
Long story short, I had two 486's running RedHat (5.0 I think) with the Solaris NFS shares exported to the RedHat boxes, then those shares exported as SMB shares to the Win boxes. This was my first experience with Redhat, and I had no real background in IS. Our boxes sat behind the hospital firewall, and I didnt think there was a problem with internal hacking. So i basically had the box wide open to internal threats.
I was leaving my job and we were in the process of hiring a new part time IS person for the department. Posted an ad through a local linux users group, and interviewed a potential, qualified candidate. Unfortunately, the candidate was from Canada and not a US citizen. This posed a problem cause my job was funded through the UAW (United AutoWorkers union) and the position had to go to a US citizen. We told this to the candidate and he was not hired.
About 3 weeks later, the hospital was hit with a substatial DOS attack necessitating the entire hospital network being shutdown. When it was traced, it was coming from inside the hospital, and yes, from one of my RedHat boxes. It turned out the hospital IS dept. had left some backdoors in through the firewall. The hacker had used that hole to get access to the hospital network, then finally once in, my unprotected Redhat boxes were prime pickings.
We certainly never could prove anything, but I certainly had my suspicions about the culprit. Fortunately, at a team meeting of dept. heads and and IS people, as they tried to blame our dept, it came out that these backdoors had been purposefully left in the firewall, and IS had held shared responsibility.
It was not pleasant as there were substantial numbers of staff (doctors included) trying to access the hospital network from home who couldn't get in for an entire weekend as the hospital network had to be taken offline.
simply because:
.02
(a) the public in general isn't too fascinated in astronomy to begin with
-and-
(b) the public has come to expect those beautiful Hubble space images, when looking at images from space.
The stuff coming back from Pluto and the belt are gonna be quite boring to anyone but the most astute planetary observer (amateur and professional).
Not that there isnt scientific merit, but I just don't see the public being interested. When the first images of Saturn and Jupiter came back way back when, no one had ever seen images from space like that, and those planets are amazing to look at, even in tiny backyard telescopes. Plus science didn't allow for much analsysis beyond what was visual. Now, scientists know far more about Pluto than they new about those other planets when visual images were so important.
Its just a different time.
just my
jeff
I was just reading an article in the Chicago Tribune some weeks ago about the concern some Nascar drivers/officials/team owners have that Toyota (and Honda and one other manufacturer I believe) are getting into Nascar. Not because it had anything to do with the patriotic/american spirit of the sport (although as someone pointed out, these manufacturers have plants in the US), but because of the cost these manufacturers are going to bring to the sport.
From what I understand, the amount of money some foreign automakers spend on racing programs (CART, IRL, F1, etc...) blows the Nascar racing programs out of the water. And some are concerned that the financial backing from the big four might not be there for them (pontiac, dodge, ford, chevy) to compete.
I wish I could say the story is online, but I get the real paper, and I think you have to subscribe to actually read the article. But it was an interesting read anyway, and I could see why people would be concerned.
Odyssey, a show on NPR, just had a discussion about some of these same issues and the realaudio link can found here:
e du le/hd_sched_light.htm&BodyURL=/schedule/odyssey/od yssey_v2.htm
http://www.wbez.org/frames.asp?readerURL=../sch
It was quite good, and I think the consensus of their panel (an MIT chemical biologist, a University of Chicago geneticist, and another panel member, I forget from where) was that we are a long way off from reducing human behavior to genes alone.
jeff
As an example of how stupid memo's can be at the enterprise level, I work at a VA (Veteran's Adminstration) hospital. It doesn't get much bigger and more beaurocratic than the VA. About 2 months ago a memo went out (through the entire system) stating that we (as providers) were no longer supposed to encourage veteran's who were not part of the VA system to use our health care services. In other words, Veteran's who were not already being seen by the VA health care system should not be encouraged to seek care at a VA hospital.
This after a similar memo and major initiative a couple years back to get new patients coming in (don't ask, its all about reimbursement and budget). Needless to say, there was a major backlash from Veteran's groups and politicians and the memo and policy was rescined about a week later. It was tantamount to saying that we were no longer going to provide care to Veterans who weren't already part of our system.
So yes, conspiracy theories aside, very stupid memos do come out for mass distribution. From the ivory tower, sometimes people have a very limited and distorted view of the rest of their fiefdom and the world at large.
jeff
Alright, and let's just say that someone has been playing a little too much "Roller Coaster Tycoon." :-)
Here at the hospital i work at, we've been using remote p.c. appliances for some time. The great advantage here is that (on our spinal cord unit), nursing and physician staff can walk into a patient's room, check the patient's chart, vitals, lab results, medications, imaging, etc... right there in the patient's room. We can also write orders, fill prescriptions (with the help of a bar coder reader attached to the unit) with a much lower error rate. Given the volume of information to which you want and need access, PDA's just don't cut it. And yes, you can put a laptop on a cart and wheel the cart around, but tablets make things much more efficient. I know this is a niche industry, but in medicine, units like this really help productivity and quality of care.
I thought it died, not because of the price of the O/S, but because of the system required to take advantage of the O/S. I remember, back in '93 i think, a roommate of my girlfriend had OS2 on her machine. It really needed 32mb of ram to take advantage of its multitasking. At that time, RAM was about $50.00 (US) per mb, meaning that 32MB added another $1500.00 to the p.c. effectively doubling the cost of a computer. I was interested in OS2, but no way could i afford the hardware. As time went on, you get more committed/comfortable with MS (with an investment in sofware) so switching was no longer really an option, even after the price of hardware came down.
Have you ever eaten at a Red Lobster?
I am all for new technology and certainly understand the huge gains in technology we see that were/are the direct result of space exploration research and military research. With that said, Robert Parks in "VooDoo Science" has a very good chapter on why the ISS was doomed to be a failure, and how there could have been so much more future gain in technology had the R&D money been spent elsewhere (unmanned space exploration for example). It's a very interesting chapter in a good book, and certainly gave me a different perspective on a project I initially thought was quite important.
I'm not a big fan of IE or MS, but I use both regularly. While its true that there hasn't been a major release of IE in quite some time, there are quite frequent security patches that one can update quite easily through their TOOLS--->WINDOWS UPDATE option.
You have to read exactly what the recommended updates are, and be sure to select only what you want (for example, it defaults to upgrading to IE 6.0 if you're running 5.#), but it does work quite well.
And while I certainly don't need to see Slashdot post an announcement everytime a security fix is out there for MS/IE, I think it would be in people's best interest if they knew about these things and took care of problems on a more regular basis.
"Attempts To Stop Music Sharing Pointless" In a word Yes enough said.
Where the hell is the picture of the babe in the black cocktail dress, the scantilly clad bikini vixen? We all know this is what you get to see when you use an X10. And don't try to defend this, hiding behind some lame logic saying those kinds of women don't attend nitro R/C racing. I know they must, i know they must.
and their relationship to the hacker culture and mainstream culture is:
"Underground"
Which is available, in its entirety here:
http://www.underground-book.com/download.php3
What I really liked about this book was the indepth story telling about several hackers, their relationships with other hackers (globally I might add), their relationships with family and other "non-hackers," and their general makeup as people.
After reading this, I felt I had a much better appreciation of the importance that the hacker culture can have for some people. The hacker underground was clearly a place where these kids felt most comfortable, and in some cases provided an important level of social support that they didn't otherwise have access to.
"Shall we play a game"
I work on a spinal cord injury unit at a VA hospital. We work with people of all levels of disability, including advanced ALS patients.
Can she move her tounge? There are simple switching devices that can be placed in a person's mouth that can be tripped with a tounge movement.
Can she breathe (i.e. not on a ventilator). There are all kind of "sip-and-puff" devices out there that can generate several signals based on whether or not the person is sipping or blowing.
You said she can see, and has some eye movement. We have patients who are trained using eye gaze computers.
A search on google for adaptive devices, adaptive technology, a call to a local rehab hospital should all be able to provide you with information with regard to devices already available. Even if this person can't afford these things, it may give you ideas as to what you can build for her. I'm sorry I can't provide specific info, as our rehab staff/prosthetics department takes care of actual building and ordering.
When you work with people with a serious impairment, in a rehab setting, its truly remarkable what can be built/developed to take advantage of even the slightest behavior a person can elicit.
hth,
jeff
I certainly can't argue with the relationship between NVidia and Open Source, but I also can't fault the company for consistently delivering quality hardware and software to *their* market, which is people running MS who want high quality graphics. As long as they continue to do this, I'll continue to support their products.
Anyone who's played games in the last two years knows that an NVidia chip is the way to go. They update their drivers on an almost weekly basis, and make all their beta's available for download as well. The On-line support is excellent, and just about every driver update seems to add a boost in performance. Add to this that their drivers are backwards compatible to at least the TNT2 chips, and I say I don't really care if they want to tout their own language, and make it propriatary to their chips. This is a company that actually survived the dotcom burst, and is continuing to thrive because they make a damn good product.
I'm not sure how old "Randomized Response" surveys are, but I think it goes back to at least 1965 [Warner, 1965, Journal of the American Statistical Association, 60, 63-69].
There is a nice summary of several randomized response methods in:
Fox, J., & Tracy, P. (1986). Randomized Response; A Method for Sensitive Surveys. Sage University Papers
While I'm not sure these particular techniques are applicable to the types of things IBM is doing, they can be very helpful in research when you are trying to establish a baseline/prevalence of behavior that has some stigma attached to it (i.e. drug use, child sexual assault, rape, etc...)
The Incredible Machine, More of The Icredible Machine, and Sid and Al's Crazy Toons (I may be wrong on this exact title) were all about constructing Rube Goldberg machines that were pretty neat, had multiple solutions, and allowed you to mess with gravity, friction, and the like to understand fundamental priniciples of physics while still having a good time sitting at a computer.
Um, IIRC, it was actually Richard Roeper who thought that the story "had no ending" and was consequently a major dissappointment. Ebert spent his time telling Roeper what a ridiculous criticism that was given that Ebert is a big fan of the series. Here is the original Chicago Sun Times review, and I don't really see mention of a complaint about no end. http://www.suntimes.com/ebert/ebert_reviews/2001/1 2/121901.html