We were having performance issues with our Intranet home page. The page was data-driven and requests took too long to execute. People would get impatient, hit refresh, add more items to the queue, and eventually things would melt into a puddle.
I rewrote as much as possible using static javascript includes and cookies, greatly improving performance. There were still a couple things personalized to the individual. Those I threw into a hidden frame which filled in a couple drop-down boxes and populated a line that said "Hello username." (not my idea).
If the database was down or busy, those things wouldn't be available, but 90% of the time the users wanted to click one of the static links.
The assumption is that land where you can't grow grain is useless and thus the extra plant material is "free". I can think of lots of things to do with all the land that's currently being used for grazing animals. I wouldn't consider the Amazon forest as useless, for example. It's currently being cut down for cattle grazing, though.
Also remember that we're talking about spacecraft. There's not much grazing land up there.
One of the other reasons I'm a vegetarian is that meat is a lousy way to convert sunlight into a form that people can eat. From plants to animals to people, the steps involve a significant loss of energy. The Earth has limited resources, especially useful land, and six billion people wanting their daily hamburger scares me.
It's hard finding facts on how many pounds of grain translate into pounds of meat. The beef.org site lists 2.6 pounds while other places list dozens. Just to pick a number, let's say 90% of the calories from plant material is lost in making non-edible cow parts, reproduction, etc. That's still a considerable loss of energy.
Now it may be that this new process is more efficient, but I doubt it. The mechanical energy spent on "exercising" the muscles alone seems rather unnecessary.
I suspect that a carefully chosen vegetarian diet would save far more energy than trying to grow sheets of meat. On a spacecraft, wasting lots of energy isn't something you can casually do.
Insurance companies and businesses have long flip flopped on the concept of "pre-existing conditions". Those are cases where a person is hired who has medical conditions that are potentially expensive to treat (e.g. diabetes, cancer, AIDS, etc.).
It used to be that insurers tried hard not to pay for conditions that existed before the person came onto the plan. As you might expect, it was hugely unpopular (insurance companies really do listen to people) as well as expensive to administer (it's expensive to decide what's pre-existing and what isn't).
I see this as the same way. When you hire a bunch of people, they'll have a range of health issues, some obvious and some hidden. Sure it's possible to try and figure out who might get what conditions, but it's not worth it. When dealing with millions of people being insured, it's typically easier to simply manage the overall risk and adjust prices accordingly. Micromanaging at that level is expensive and wasteful.
True, though in my case the extra room was essentially "free". My office is in the basement, next to the bathroom. Back in the 70's the previous owners decided to put in a trendy sauna in the bathroom which after several years we never used. I converted it to a closet first, and then cut holes in the wall, and use it now as a "rack room" for my web server and main computer. Ironically enough, with both PCs going, it sometimes gets to sauna-like temperatures in there.
My first attempt was to build a stylish case with large fans, quiet hard drives, and a massive heat sink for the CPU. It worked fairly well, though the CD drive was incredibly loud in comparison.
My second attempt was far more successful. The CPU is in another room, with a hole in the wall for cables. This is a far better approach as the only noise I hear is the quiet hum of the monitor.
There's one down side, of course. I have to walk through a couple doorways to put in a CD, though that's a fairly rare occurrence these days. If I was really hardcore I'd have a USB CD-ROM drive next to the monitor to solve that problem. Still, it's probably good to get me out of my chair from time to time.
As a web developer, I'm currently focusing my AJAX development on our Intranet. It's safer in the sense that we have more control over the browser and it's less likely that people with odd browsers will complain. That's where most of the interest is at the moment. For example, a form builder that lets people drag and drop controls, update properties, and so on.
There's a reason why Google maps is so popular while Google Earth (a client/server app) isn't as much. Anyone with a modern browser can use Google maps, while Google Earth requires an install, the right OS, and more.
I've been using a local ISP for several years now. While they've done some odd things (blocking ports without notice), it was great to have a human being to talk to with simply a phone call. I also have a static IP address so that I can run my own web server. The speed has been great, especially the latest no-cost upgrade to 1.5 Mb. True, cable is faster, but I've loved the flexibility of DSL.
Sadly, if Qwest is no longer forced to cooperate with ISPs, my account will simply be closed and I'll be forced to pay through the nose for the features I want (primarily a static IP address), and that's assuming they even do it.
If I want to keep a static IP address, I'm stuck with DSL. The alternatives are all lousy. Any suggestions?
And don't forget the number of employees currently producing shuttle parts. That the new approach keeps everyone in their current jobs makes a number of politicians very happy.
I agree that redesigning everything from scratch is painful and expensive. I also suspect that the decision wasn't completely technical.
Yes I'm an MSDN subscriber through work. No, I won't be downloading the betas. I personally don't have the time to fiddle around with such things any more. It's far easier to wait for others to find the gotchas. When the final version is released, it'll still be months until we deploy it at work.
Feel free to call me lazy. I just know I have interfaces to write and queries to improve. Those things can't wait.
Ah - best of luck to you. Evil Nooble's romance, which starts in Dreamcatcher, was my favorite to write for. Why is it that evil love is far more amusing than love that is noble and pure?
I think it was Dreamcatcher when I really started using custom content. There were some really fun things to make, especially for Dreamcatcher 3, which is still my favorite of them all.
Most of my effort these days is for the future, but I still may release some teaser content for NWN down the road. Most likely it'll be the Pirate Cards game, a variation of the Demon Cards game that shows off new content and gives people a taste of the piratey goodness.
Perhaps it was a poor choice of words. I'm thinking that most of the next-gen consoles are being designed with network games in mind. Already we have the upcoming Final Fantasy game, APB, Huxley, the Marvel themed MMORPG for the 360, and so on.
Up until now, the console-based MMORPGs haven't achieved as widespread an audience as the PC ones.
I've been creating modules for Neverwinter Nights for the last few years and have had far more exposure than I would have thought possible to the world of game design. I've had teams of people working for me, dealt with NDAs and contracts, stayed up way too late debugging, and gone from extremes of giddiness to despair.
It sounds silly, but making games is a ton of work. Most of it isn't pleasant and it requires someone who enjoys creating things for the sake of the creation. The pay is lousy and you'll get hate mail no matter what creative decisions you make. Things will break and people will complain and ask for help. I find myself playing tech support to the world, explaining how you can't overclock your computer on a hot Summer day in Spain, or how you need to extract all the files from a.zip file, not just the one that looks neat.
Still, I've kept it as a hobby for a long while now and don't plan on stopping any time soon. On the plus side, I've gotten some extremely uplifting e-mails from cancer patients, Israeli soldiers, and Peace Corps volunteers talking about how happy my games made them when all seemed bleak. As cliche as it sounds, it's that sort of thing that keeps me motivated.
If you look at games like World of Warcraft, they've now hit the 3.5 million subscribers mark. That's steady income for Blizzard for years to come. True, it's the exception to the rule, but even the GTA's which sold millions aren't going to see that sort of long-term revenue stream.
That's not to say that many console games have more widespread distribution than PC games, only that it's not fair to compare them directly. PC games make their money in different ways - expansion packs, digital downloads (e.g. Neverwinter Nights & HL2), and the holy grail of MMORPGs.
Of course, consoles are about to pounce on the same ideas. It's just that PCs went there first and it's likely that PCs will continue to innovate, being a much more flexible platform than consoles are.
There are certainly some people out there who are impressed by cool graphic tricks.
After writing web applications for ten years, though, I find that more and more people simply want to get the job done. Perhaps it's that I work in Healthcare and my customers are busy people caring for patients.
The other thing that makes me nervous about bells and whistles is that they add complexity to things. Complicated things break. Browser makers have changed how they implement CSS and DHTML before and there's a good chance they'll change it in the future. Basic support for checkboxes will last another fifty years.
Okay. I've finished my first play-through. It took about twenty minutes. Some of it is fairly clunky. Some of it is extremely compelling.
I restarted after my first posting and noticed some differences right away. The first time the phone rang. The second time it didn't. I ended up kissing Grace when we met and she seemed more positive afterwards (I have that effect on women).
Emotionally the game is great. You get a ringside view of the emotional train wreck of these two people's marriage. You can guide their conversation, take sides, and watch them reveal painful secrets.
Being a fast typist helps as you regularly need to type out long strings of text. Moving around is awkward with the mouse and arrows, but fortunately you don't need to move around much. Your decisions are remembered and the actors will comment on the previous things you've done. The 800 MB download makes perfect sense now as there must be hours of sound files to cover every contingency.
This seems like the sort of game that would strongly appeal to women. It's very free-form and is exclusively about social interactions. The only catch is that I'd imagine it's extremely labor intensive to create something like this. The writing, voice acting, and tracking all the branch points seems a daunting task.
Still, I can see how people herald this as the future of gaming. It would be amazing if you could hit this level of character interaction in ordinary games.
Well, no one here appears to have downloaded and installed Facade. Thanks to Evil Avatar, I picked this one up over night and just installed it.
First off, make sure you have a 1.6 Ghz machine. It's not just a recommendation - the install won't work if you don't meet that requirement. And the install is very long as you might expect.
This is a very audio game. If you're deaf, I'm not sure it's even possible to play. The first really odd thing is that the characters call me verbally by my real name. It's "Adam", which isn't too uncommon, but strange nonetheless. I suspect they have a hundred or so common names they've recorded.
The controls are weird - a combination of keyboard arrows, typing, and the mouse. There's also some limited manipulation of objects (e.g. picking up the phone and throwing it around). You can also hug and comfort the two people with a click of the mouse.
The main interface, however, is the keyboard. You'll do a lot of typing, trying to guess what the magic keys and phrases are.
I haven't finished it. Heck, I feel I've barely scratched the surface. Even though it's in a single room, the illusion of open interaction with two humans is pretty good. Well, enough Slashdotting. Time to play a bit more.
First off, I think it's a horrible idea to use SSN as proof of identity. Why reset someone's password with something you can buy on the Internet for $50?
What SSN is good for is a unique number that the person knows that is also common other places. So if I'm 123-45-6789 in one medical database, odds are I'm the same number in another one. When I need to check to see if Person X is really Person Y with a deadly drug allergy in a related database, it's good to have a number that everyone's pretty sure about.
We certainly assign medical record numbers to people, and use that where possible, but the catch is that every clinic and medical system have their own unique medical record numbers. Even if I have access to the data, it's essentially worthless as I can't trust that John Smith in one database is the same John Smith in another.
So while I have concerns about freely sharing financial information between companies, I have different feelings about medical organizations. If my clinic prescribes drugs to me, I sure want my hospital to know what those drugs are. If that information doesn't get passed around, serious medical errors can occur.
I work in the healthcare industry where we're extremely sensitive about SSN, patient information, and so on.
Banning SSN and other identifiers sounds good on paper, until people think through some of the implications. Right now we have dozens of separate systems that are not linked. Patients in one system may or not be a patient in another. If a doctor prescribes a drug in one system, the other system may not know this.
Because of these disconnects, the problem of not being able to clearly identify people because extremely troublesome. People can die if we can't figure out who they are in all these separate systems. The nice thing about SSN is that people typically know what their SSN is and it rarely changes.
True, we could fall back to guessing on matches by name, address, and DOB, but none of these are very reliable. We could issue our own numbers, but they wouldn't remember it and affiliated medical systems wouldn't have that number in it anyway.
I don't have any solutions on this one. It seems as if the desire for privacy is going up against the desire to have quality healthcare. It'll be interesting to watch this over the next few years.
I keep reading that PC gaming will die sooner rather than later. What this article says to me is that even a dedicated console will be roughly as powerful as high-end PCs in a year or so. In two years, most average PCs will have the same power as a next-gen console.
Now, the matter is far more complicated than simple CPU/GPU power. What it says to me is that there's plenty of room for PCs to continue to drive innovation in the world of gaming.
Right. The catch is that "any one time" is probably a lie. If I invented a device that sucked out every antiproton in the magnetic field, it would still take awhile for cosmic rays to create new antiprotons. The article didn't mention how long this process takes (and it may be unknown).
Oh, an in my earlier posting I mentioned "Jovian moons". It's really the magnetic fields of the big gas giants, not the moons (though they might be a convenient place to park a satellite).
This is quite an interesting proposal. Of course, 10 micrograms of antiprotons is still a tiny amount. I ran across this web site that talks about antimatter as a propulsion mechanism. That would probably get a robotic probe someplace pretty quick. Still, how quickly does this resource replenish itself? Every year? Every century? Hopefully it won't be like our oil reserves.
Of course, as the article points out, you could always send robotic miners to the Jovian moons. Antimatter is probably the most valuable substance by weight in the solar system.
For those who don't want to open up the PDF, here's the abstract for the antimatter recovery scheme:
Small quantities of antimatter (nanograms to micograms) have enormous potential in a variety of space, medical, and sensing applications. However, due to the high intrinsic cost of production, such applications have not yet been realized. Antiprotons are currently produced during high energy collisions in large particle accelerators. Based on current capabilities, the electricity cost alone for the process is estimated to be $160 trillion per gram collected. In comparison, high energy cosmic rays bombard the Earth's upper atmosphere and produce the antiprotons naturally through pair production. A fraction of these are subsequently concentrated within the Van Allen radiation belts of the Earth similar to their standard matter counterparts. Satellite and high altitude balloon measurements have confirmed the fractional existences of antimatter in the normal background of ionizing radiation. As particles are lost through diffusion processes, new ones are generated to maintain a quasi-static supply trapped in the near dipole field of the Earth. Based on preliminary calculations, it is estimated that 10 micrograms of antiprotons and 10 milligrams of positrons are locally contained within the Earth's magnetosphere at any given time. The Jovian planets with their strong magnetic fields are expected to contain significantly more within their radiation belts. Draper Laboratory and its collaborators propose to use a magnetic scoop to extract large quantities of these trapped antiparticles. The principles of a Bussard magnetic scoop, first proposed for relativistic propulsion, will be adapted for use on a satellite in a planetary orbit. Particles bouncing between mirror points near the planet's poles will pass through and be concentrated by the superimposed magnetic field. Separation and cooling techniques from particle accelerators will be adapted for extracting and separating the desired particles from the radiation flux near the satellite.
If things went to court, it should be fairly easy to obtain a copy of the forged electronic document and look for added junk.
A novice might miss it, but a trained eye could easily see the garbage.
What worries me more is executeables where you're depending on the hash to match. If the file sizes are approximately the same, it would be very easy to trick someone into running something that is actually something else.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep. Very true.
We were having performance issues with our Intranet home page. The page was data-driven and requests took too long to execute. People would get impatient, hit refresh, add more items to the queue, and eventually things would melt into a puddle.
I rewrote as much as possible using static javascript includes and cookies, greatly improving performance. There were still a couple things personalized to the individual. Those I threw into a hidden frame which filled in a couple drop-down boxes and populated a line that said "Hello username." (not my idea).
If the database was down or busy, those things wouldn't be available, but 90% of the time the users wanted to click one of the static links.
The assumption is that land where you can't grow grain is useless and thus the extra plant material is "free". I can think of lots of things to do with all the land that's currently being used for grazing animals. I wouldn't consider the Amazon forest as useless, for example. It's currently being cut down for cattle grazing, though.
Also remember that we're talking about spacecraft. There's not much grazing land up there.
One of the other reasons I'm a vegetarian is that meat is a lousy way to convert sunlight into a form that people can eat. From plants to animals to people, the steps involve a significant loss of energy. The Earth has limited resources, especially useful land, and six billion people wanting their daily hamburger scares me.
It's hard finding facts on how many pounds of grain translate into pounds of meat. The beef.org site lists 2.6 pounds while other places list dozens. Just to pick a number, let's say 90% of the calories from plant material is lost in making non-edible cow parts, reproduction, etc. That's still a considerable loss of energy.
Now it may be that this new process is more efficient, but I doubt it. The mechanical energy spent on "exercising" the muscles alone seems rather unnecessary.
I suspect that a carefully chosen vegetarian diet would save far more energy than trying to grow sheets of meat. On a spacecraft, wasting lots of energy isn't something you can casually do.
Insurance companies and businesses have long flip flopped on the concept of "pre-existing conditions". Those are cases where a person is hired who has medical conditions that are potentially expensive to treat (e.g. diabetes, cancer, AIDS, etc.).
It used to be that insurers tried hard not to pay for conditions that existed before the person came onto the plan. As you might expect, it was hugely unpopular (insurance companies really do listen to people) as well as expensive to administer (it's expensive to decide what's pre-existing and what isn't).
I see this as the same way. When you hire a bunch of people, they'll have a range of health issues, some obvious and some hidden. Sure it's possible to try and figure out who might get what conditions, but it's not worth it. When dealing with millions of people being insured, it's typically easier to simply manage the overall risk and adjust prices accordingly. Micromanaging at that level is expensive and wasteful.
True, though in my case the extra room was essentially "free". My office is in the basement, next to the bathroom. Back in the 70's the previous owners decided to put in a trendy sauna in the bathroom which after several years we never used. I converted it to a closet first, and then cut holes in the wall, and use it now as a "rack room" for my web server and main computer. Ironically enough, with both PCs going, it sometimes gets to sauna-like temperatures in there.
My first attempt was to build a stylish case with large fans, quiet hard drives, and a massive heat sink for the CPU. It worked fairly well, though the CD drive was incredibly loud in comparison.
My second attempt was far more successful. The CPU is in another room, with a hole in the wall for cables. This is a far better approach as the only noise I hear is the quiet hum of the monitor.
There's one down side, of course. I have to walk through a couple doorways to put in a CD, though that's a fairly rare occurrence these days. If I was really hardcore I'd have a USB CD-ROM drive next to the monitor to solve that problem. Still, it's probably good to get me out of my chair from time to time.
Okay, I'll feed the troll.
As a web developer, I'm currently focusing my AJAX development on our Intranet. It's safer in the sense that we have more control over the browser and it's less likely that people with odd browsers will complain. That's where most of the interest is at the moment. For example, a form builder that lets people drag and drop controls, update properties, and so on.
There's a reason why Google maps is so popular while Google Earth (a client/server app) isn't as much. Anyone with a modern browser can use Google maps, while Google Earth requires an install, the right OS, and more.
but I don't want to have to answer "Dad, what's that robot doing to that orange?"
"Well, son, when a juicer and a fruit love each other very much . . . "
I've been using a local ISP for several years now. While they've done some odd things (blocking ports without notice), it was great to have a human being to talk to with simply a phone call. I also have a static IP address so that I can run my own web server. The speed has been great, especially the latest no-cost upgrade to 1.5 Mb. True, cable is faster, but I've loved the flexibility of DSL.
Sadly, if Qwest is no longer forced to cooperate with ISPs, my account will simply be closed and I'll be forced to pay through the nose for the features I want (primarily a static IP address), and that's assuming they even do it.
If I want to keep a static IP address, I'm stuck with DSL. The alternatives are all lousy. Any suggestions?
And don't forget the number of employees currently producing shuttle parts. That the new approach keeps everyone in their current jobs makes a number of politicians very happy.
I agree that redesigning everything from scratch is painful and expensive. I also suspect that the decision wasn't completely technical.
Yes I'm an MSDN subscriber through work. No, I won't be downloading the betas. I personally don't have the time to fiddle around with such things any more. It's far easier to wait for others to find the gotchas. When the final version is released, it'll still be months until we deploy it at work.
Feel free to call me lazy. I just know I have interfaces to write and queries to improve. Those things can't wait.
Ah - best of luck to you. Evil Nooble's romance, which starts in Dreamcatcher, was my favorite to write for. Why is it that evil love is far more amusing than love that is noble and pure?
I think it was Dreamcatcher when I really started using custom content. There were some really fun things to make, especially for Dreamcatcher 3, which is still my favorite of them all.
Most of my effort these days is for the future, but I still may release some teaser content for NWN down the road. Most likely it'll be the Pirate Cards game, a variation of the Demon Cards game that shows off new content and gives people a taste of the piratey goodness.
Perhaps it was a poor choice of words. I'm thinking that most of the next-gen consoles are being designed with network games in mind. Already we have the upcoming Final Fantasy game, APB, Huxley, the Marvel themed MMORPG for the 360, and so on.
Up until now, the console-based MMORPGs haven't achieved as widespread an audience as the PC ones.
I'm the author of the Shadowlords, Dreamcatcher, and Demon campaigns. They're all in the Hall of Fame over on Neverwinter Vault. These days I'm working on a pirate adventure, mostly likely for Neverwinter Nights 2.
but I play one on the web.
.zip file, not just the one that looks neat.
I've been creating modules for Neverwinter Nights for the last few years and have had far more exposure than I would have thought possible to the world of game design. I've had teams of people working for me, dealt with NDAs and contracts, stayed up way too late debugging, and gone from extremes of giddiness to despair.
It sounds silly, but making games is a ton of work. Most of it isn't pleasant and it requires someone who enjoys creating things for the sake of the creation. The pay is lousy and you'll get hate mail no matter what creative decisions you make. Things will break and people will complain and ask for help. I find myself playing tech support to the world, explaining how you can't overclock your computer on a hot Summer day in Spain, or how you need to extract all the files from a
Still, I've kept it as a hobby for a long while now and don't plan on stopping any time soon. On the plus side, I've gotten some extremely uplifting e-mails from cancer patients, Israeli soldiers, and Peace Corps volunteers talking about how happy my games made them when all seemed bleak. As cliche as it sounds, it's that sort of thing that keeps me motivated.
If you look at games like World of Warcraft, they've now hit the 3.5 million subscribers mark. That's steady income for Blizzard for years to come. True, it's the exception to the rule, but even the GTA's which sold millions aren't going to see that sort of long-term revenue stream.
That's not to say that many console games have more widespread distribution than PC games, only that it's not fair to compare them directly. PC games make their money in different ways - expansion packs, digital downloads (e.g. Neverwinter Nights & HL2), and the holy grail of MMORPGs.
Of course, consoles are about to pounce on the same ideas. It's just that PCs went there first and it's likely that PCs will continue to innovate, being a much more flexible platform than consoles are.
There are certainly some people out there who are impressed by cool graphic tricks.
After writing web applications for ten years, though, I find that more and more people simply want to get the job done. Perhaps it's that I work in Healthcare and my customers are busy people caring for patients.
The other thing that makes me nervous about bells and whistles is that they add complexity to things. Complicated things break. Browser makers have changed how they implement CSS and DHTML before and there's a good chance they'll change it in the future. Basic support for checkboxes will last another fifty years.
Okay. I've finished my first play-through. It took about twenty minutes. Some of it is fairly clunky. Some of it is extremely compelling.
I restarted after my first posting and noticed some differences right away. The first time the phone rang. The second time it didn't. I ended up kissing Grace when we met and she seemed more positive afterwards (I have that effect on women).
Emotionally the game is great. You get a ringside view of the emotional train wreck of these two people's marriage. You can guide their conversation, take sides, and watch them reveal painful secrets.
Being a fast typist helps as you regularly need to type out long strings of text. Moving around is awkward with the mouse and arrows, but fortunately you don't need to move around much. Your decisions are remembered and the actors will comment on the previous things you've done. The 800 MB download makes perfect sense now as there must be hours of sound files to cover every contingency.
This seems like the sort of game that would strongly appeal to women. It's very free-form and is exclusively about social interactions. The only catch is that I'd imagine it's extremely labor intensive to create something like this. The writing, voice acting, and tracking all the branch points seems a daunting task.
Still, I can see how people herald this as the future of gaming. It would be amazing if you could hit this level of character interaction in ordinary games.
Well, no one here appears to have downloaded and installed Facade. Thanks to Evil Avatar, I picked this one up over night and just installed it.
First off, make sure you have a 1.6 Ghz machine. It's not just a recommendation - the install won't work if you don't meet that requirement. And the install is very long as you might expect.
This is a very audio game. If you're deaf, I'm not sure it's even possible to play. The first really odd thing is that the characters call me verbally by my real name. It's "Adam", which isn't too uncommon, but strange nonetheless. I suspect they have a hundred or so common names they've recorded.
The controls are weird - a combination of keyboard arrows, typing, and the mouse. There's also some limited manipulation of objects (e.g. picking up the phone and throwing it around). You can also hug and comfort the two people with a click of the mouse.
The main interface, however, is the keyboard. You'll do a lot of typing, trying to guess what the magic keys and phrases are.
I haven't finished it. Heck, I feel I've barely scratched the surface. Even though it's in a single room, the illusion of open interaction with two humans is pretty good. Well, enough Slashdotting. Time to play a bit more.
First off, I think it's a horrible idea to use SSN as proof of identity. Why reset someone's password with something you can buy on the Internet for $50?
What SSN is good for is a unique number that the person knows that is also common other places. So if I'm 123-45-6789 in one medical database, odds are I'm the same number in another one. When I need to check to see if Person X is really Person Y with a deadly drug allergy in a related database, it's good to have a number that everyone's pretty sure about.
We certainly assign medical record numbers to people, and use that where possible, but the catch is that every clinic and medical system have their own unique medical record numbers. Even if I have access to the data, it's essentially worthless as I can't trust that John Smith in one database is the same John Smith in another.
So while I have concerns about freely sharing financial information between companies, I have different feelings about medical organizations. If my clinic prescribes drugs to me, I sure want my hospital to know what those drugs are. If that information doesn't get passed around, serious medical errors can occur.
I work in the healthcare industry where we're extremely sensitive about SSN, patient information, and so on.
Banning SSN and other identifiers sounds good on paper, until people think through some of the implications. Right now we have dozens of separate systems that are not linked. Patients in one system may or not be a patient in another. If a doctor prescribes a drug in one system, the other system may not know this.
Because of these disconnects, the problem of not being able to clearly identify people because extremely troublesome. People can die if we can't figure out who they are in all these separate systems. The nice thing about SSN is that people typically know what their SSN is and it rarely changes.
True, we could fall back to guessing on matches by name, address, and DOB, but none of these are very reliable. We could issue our own numbers, but they wouldn't remember it and affiliated medical systems wouldn't have that number in it anyway.
I don't have any solutions on this one. It seems as if the desire for privacy is going up against the desire to have quality healthcare. It'll be interesting to watch this over the next few years.
I keep reading that PC gaming will die sooner rather than later. What this article says to me is that even a dedicated console will be roughly as powerful as high-end PCs in a year or so. In two years, most average PCs will have the same power as a next-gen console.
Now, the matter is far more complicated than simple CPU/GPU power. What it says to me is that there's plenty of room for PCs to continue to drive innovation in the world of gaming.
Right. The catch is that "any one time" is probably a lie. If I invented a device that sucked out every antiproton in the magnetic field, it would still take awhile for cosmic rays to create new antiprotons. The article didn't mention how long this process takes (and it may be unknown).
Oh, an in my earlier posting I mentioned "Jovian moons". It's really the magnetic fields of the big gas giants, not the moons (though they might be a convenient place to park a satellite).
Of course, as the article points out, you could always send robotic miners to the Jovian moons. Antimatter is probably the most valuable substance by weight in the solar system.
For those who don't want to open up the PDF, here's the abstract for the antimatter recovery scheme:
If things went to court, it should be fairly easy to obtain a copy of the forged electronic document and look for added junk.
A novice might miss it, but a trained eye could easily see the garbage.
What worries me more is executeables where you're depending on the hash to match. If the file sizes are approximately the same, it would be very easy to trick someone into running something that is actually something else.