Of course, you can always try charging a reasonable price and trusting people to be honest. Just think of all the money you'll save not having to implement DRM.
The first sentence is quite telling as well. There will always be a small minority that refuse to pay for things, though most people are more than happy to shell out a few bucks for something useful.
I picked up Knights of the Old Republic the other day. It's a great game, but I found that the copy protection wouldn't let me play at first. It took a "no cd" patch before I could play my perfectly legal game. Sigh.
That was their plan until the compiler they were using ended up not having a Linux version (which was planned). Some things are beyond their control. I'm mostly impressed they did it in the first place, even though it was done at a loss.
About six years when I started working in our IT department, we had an off-the-shelf product called Applix which managed our help desk calls. From that very simple starting point, a group of us started slowly growing and modifying the code base until the product as it began no longer really exists.
Customers call our help desk for broken items (or use a web page to record the call), then it's paged out to the appropriate rep. The reps go to a browser and works the call.
We've got a "project" request system that is also web-based, allowing customers to submit projects, managers to view them, reps to document their work, and a time tracking system to track time against the projects.
There are other related web-based systems, such as an interface to the HR system that lets us know when new users have been hired, fired, or transferred. There's an automated system for setting up users (tying into Applix, NT, Exchange, and some other miscellaneous things).
We also have a generic web-based form builder that anyone can use to create simple request forms. Some teams have very specific pieces of information they want to see their customers give them, so they direct them to the web form.
Strangely, everyone seems to take it for granted that this is all in place. I have no idea how we'd function with all this infrastructure to help us do our jobs. Go back to e-mail and sticky notes, I suppose.
Research showing the life extending benefits of a low calorie diet has been known for a long while. What wasn't known was exactly why it works. One leading theory is that eating food (which contains oxidants) led to the gradual breakdown of cells and other important biological structures. This study seems to suggest otherwise.
If the reduction in the aging process was simply caused by a reduction in oxidation of cells, that means you wouldn't expect to see the same benefit for someone who suddenly went on a restricted calorie diet. That changes the focus to suggest that restricting the diet triggers biological pathways within the organism that has this protective effect.
It may be something very simple, or it may be far more complex. Reduced diet organisms tend to not reproduce and generally slow down. It could be that simply being able to reproduce can lead to forms of mortality that shortens lifespan (e.g. it causes cancer, takes energy away from cell repair, or something else). If it's something that basic, I could see a drug therapy that everyone starts taking after a certain age that switches people's metabolism into "restricted calorie" mode, even if they're eating normally.
Of course, these things are rarely that simple. Even if it was possible to create such a drug, it may simply make people feel too bad (starving isn't usually fun). The few individuals who have decided to go on a restricted calorie diet tend to have pretty poor quality of life, not being able to do really active things or enjoy a meal.
Finally, the research I've seen that relates to long-lived men tend to have one thing in common. They are all in excellent physical shape, regularly exercising an excessive amount. Women evidently have more flexability and don't have to be quite so active, but men seem to need a large amount of physical exercise. It could be that there are two different paths to longevity, one involving eating little and staying still, and the other eating a healthy diet and exercising regularly. Me, I'm going with the second approach. Food tastes too good to me.
(and yes, I do have a master's degree in biology, though it is collecting dust these days)
One of the issues we face is that every single security patch needs to be tested against a huge array of applications installed on our desktop systems. While it's a simple rule to always update Windows to the latest patch, it can be troublesome when mission critical applications fail as a result. And when you're in the healthcare business, failure is not an option.
I work for a healthcare organization and it was indeed pretty bad. Our desktop folks had gotten behind on their testing of security patches, so many of our systems were unpatched. All it took was one connected clinic to start it off and pretty soon routers started shutting down due to the huge network traffic as the worm spread.
It was pretty freaky. My coworker was patching systems in the Emergency Department as patients started getting some long wait times. Downtime measures tend to be slow in comparison to what people are used to.
Though the results are promising, it's important to be careful extrapolating out to larger populations. 90% of 40 people is "significant", but it still a small sample size. Small effects can skew the results pretty badly.
It's nice to see AIDS vaccines working out, though. It's our best hope in the fight against the disease.
That means you accept students SSN as a valid proof of identity? I work for a healthcare organization and we come across this issue all the time.
SSN is a wonderful identifier. The problem isn't that someone knows my SSN, the problem is that far too many organizations use it as a password. That, IMHO, is a very bad thing.
As for radio tags, I think of them as cookies in the physical world. If they were encrypted properly, you could even block other people from knowing what the tag really says. All you'd know is that there were x items with tags on it, but only the person with the private key could see what it was.
Not that I think it's necessarily a good idea, except possibly if they were required to be removed before leaving the store.
Who's in charge of this Internet thingie anyway?
on
Linking Dangerously
·
· Score: 1
I've been following this Salon story as well, which seems similar.
Essentially, the web site involved had links to another site. That site had links to a porn site. Since this all involves bishops in the Episcopal Church, people have been getting quite excited about it.
It's getting so that someone has to police not only your own web site, but all of those that you link to. I'm one of the web admins for a healthcare site, so I suppose I have to check through a few thousand web links to make sure there's not a link to a penis enlargement treatment that kills someone.
With somewhere around a quarter of the US population engaging in filesharing, I suspect that corporate-run prisons will be a growth sector over the coming years.
Soon they will no longer just come in red and blue pills, but a variety of fruity flavors!
But seriously, it's amazing how carefully people market products these days. They've got the video game tie-in (which sold well despite poor reviews and saved the publisher), the online game in the works, comics, and the obligitory action figures.
To a large degree, I think there's a lot of truth here. When I was doing my student teaching, they called me Mr. Explosion (due to an unfortunate science demonstration). I suspect they remembered far more about the strange demonstrations than what was read in the textbook.
Keep in mind that different kids learn in different ways. Textbooks should just be one of the several methods in which information is passed along. Open discussion, reading, projects, and even the ubitiquous video all have their places.
Okay, this is an odd story, but true. Because of this, I will always have a soft spot in my heart for Battlestar Galactica.
When I was a kid, there was a special episode of Battlestar Galactica. I think it was the one where they got to Earth finally, but regardless it was on an hour before it normally came on. My family was out for dinner and I kept pestering them to leave early just so we could watch the show. They finally gave into my whining and we headed home.
Once we arrived, we found the dog running around in the front yard, having somehow jumped out the window. There was on odd flickering through our livingroom windows and we all rushed in. In front of the fireplace, a spark had caught the rug on fire and a small blaze had started.
My parents ran into the kitchen to fill up pots and pans to douse the fire. We kids ran into the t.v. room, ducked under the smoke, and watched our movie.
The true irony is that a few years later, we had a much more serious house fire in the middle of the night. We were moving in a week and my mother had packed away all the fire alarms. We ended up safe, but it was far more exciting than I'd wish for again. Now my wife wonders why I'm so weird about having many fire extinguishers and fire alarms.
We've had one of these for awhile . . .
on
Robot Pharmacists
·
· Score: 1
I work for a healthcare organization and we've had one of these for awhile. I see it as a good thing in general, as removing hand-offs between the physician and the drug can reduce errors in miscommunication. The real benefit is when the robot is tied to the medical system, allowing physician order entry, checking for drug interactions, and pop-up notices about new information on certain drugs.
The robot is pretty cool looking too. It's got its own large glass case around it that you can press your nose against as you watch its cute arms whipping around doing its thing.
I'm a web/database developer in a large healthcare organization, and the phrase "HIPPA compliance" has been thrown around quite a bit lately. Some of this makes quite a bit of sense, like not sending patient information over the Internet via e-mail. Others are much more fuzzy, and seem to do more harm than good.
For example, only the people who "need to know" should have access to the data. The catch is that I'm somehow supposed to magically determine who needs to know what. Do I get to tell my directors that they can't see something? How much do I really get to question someone else who knows their job better than I?
Plus there's the catch-22 situations. There's data on which physicians can perform what procedures. I personally think that everyone in our organization should see it, as I don't want any physician performing procedures they're not supposed to. The catch is that not everyone "needs to know", so that increases the chance that the information won't be seen.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, you can always try charging a reasonable price and trusting people to be honest. Just think of all the money you'll save not having to implement DRM.
The first sentence is quite telling as well. There will always be a small minority that refuse to pay for things, though most people are more than happy to shell out a few bucks for something useful.
I picked up Knights of the Old Republic the other day. It's a great game, but I found that the copy protection wouldn't let me play at first. It took a "no cd" patch before I could play my perfectly legal game. Sigh.
That was their plan until the compiler they were using ended up not having a Linux version (which was planned). Some things are beyond their control. I'm mostly impressed they did it in the first place, even though it was done at a loss.
I wasn't speeding, I was using CFD!
About six years when I started working in our IT department, we had an off-the-shelf product called Applix which managed our help desk calls. From that very simple starting point, a group of us started slowly growing and modifying the code base until the product as it began no longer really exists.
Customers call our help desk for broken items (or use a web page to record the call), then it's paged out to the appropriate rep. The reps go to a browser and works the call.
We've got a "project" request system that is also web-based, allowing customers to submit projects, managers to view them, reps to document their work, and a time tracking system to track time against the projects.
There are other related web-based systems, such as an interface to the HR system that lets us know when new users have been hired, fired, or transferred. There's an automated system for setting up users (tying into Applix, NT, Exchange, and some other miscellaneous things).
We also have a generic web-based form builder that anyone can use to create simple request forms. Some teams have very specific pieces of information they want to see their customers give them, so they direct them to the web form.
Strangely, everyone seems to take it for granted that this is all in place. I have no idea how we'd function with all this infrastructure to help us do our jobs. Go back to e-mail and sticky notes, I suppose.
Research showing the life extending benefits of a low calorie diet has been known for a long while. What wasn't known was exactly why it works. One leading theory is that eating food (which contains oxidants) led to the gradual breakdown of cells and other important biological structures. This study seems to suggest otherwise.
If the reduction in the aging process was simply caused by a reduction in oxidation of cells, that means you wouldn't expect to see the same benefit for someone who suddenly went on a restricted calorie diet. That changes the focus to suggest that restricting the diet triggers biological pathways within the organism that has this protective effect.
It may be something very simple, or it may be far more complex. Reduced diet organisms tend to not reproduce and generally slow down. It could be that simply being able to reproduce can lead to forms of mortality that shortens lifespan (e.g. it causes cancer, takes energy away from cell repair, or something else). If it's something that basic, I could see a drug therapy that everyone starts taking after a certain age that switches people's metabolism into "restricted calorie" mode, even if they're eating normally.
Of course, these things are rarely that simple. Even if it was possible to create such a drug, it may simply make people feel too bad (starving isn't usually fun). The few individuals who have decided to go on a restricted calorie diet tend to have pretty poor quality of life, not being able to do really active things or enjoy a meal.
Finally, the research I've seen that relates to long-lived men tend to have one thing in common. They are all in excellent physical shape, regularly exercising an excessive amount. Women evidently have more flexability and don't have to be quite so active, but men seem to need a large amount of physical exercise. It could be that there are two different paths to longevity, one involving eating little and staying still, and the other eating a healthy diet and exercising regularly. Me, I'm going with the second approach. Food tastes too good to me.
(and yes, I do have a master's degree in biology, though it is collecting dust these days)
Fewer people know Neils Bohrs' response, which I think is more insightful:
"Don't tell God what to do."
Remember, it's not paranoia if they really are all out to get them.
And we are.
One of the issues we face is that every single security patch needs to be tested against a huge array of applications installed on our desktop systems. While it's a simple rule to always update Windows to the latest patch, it can be troublesome when mission critical applications fail as a result. And when you're in the healthcare business, failure is not an option.
I work for a healthcare organization and it was indeed pretty bad. Our desktop folks had gotten behind on their testing of security patches, so many of our systems were unpatched. All it took was one connected clinic to start it off and pretty soon routers started shutting down due to the huge network traffic as the worm spread.
It was pretty freaky. My coworker was patching systems in the Emergency Department as patients started getting some long wait times. Downtime measures tend to be slow in comparison to what people are used to.
Though the results are promising, it's important to be careful extrapolating out to larger populations. 90% of 40 people is "significant", but it still a small sample size. Small effects can skew the results pretty badly.
It's nice to see AIDS vaccines working out, though. It's our best hope in the fight against the disease.
That means you accept students SSN as a valid proof of identity? I work for a healthcare organization and we come across this issue all the time.
SSN is a wonderful identifier. The problem isn't that someone knows my SSN, the problem is that far too many organizations use it as a password. That, IMHO, is a very bad thing.
As for radio tags, I think of them as cookies in the physical world. If they were encrypted properly, you could even block other people from knowing what the tag really says. All you'd know is that there were x items with tags on it, but only the person with the private key could see what it was.
Not that I think it's necessarily a good idea, except possibly if they were required to be removed before leaving the store.
I've been following this Salon story as well, which seems similar.
Essentially, the web site involved had links to another site. That site had links to a porn site. Since this all involves bishops in the Episcopal Church, people have been getting quite excited about it.
It's getting so that someone has to police not only your own web site, but all of those that you link to. I'm one of the web admins for a healthcare site, so I suppose I have to check through a few thousand web links to make sure there's not a link to a penis enlargement treatment that kills someone.
With somewhere around a quarter of the US population engaging in filesharing, I suspect that corporate-run prisons will be a growth sector over the coming years.
Soon they will no longer just come in red and blue pills, but a variety of fruity flavors! But seriously, it's amazing how carefully people market products these days. They've got the video game tie-in (which sold well despite poor reviews and saved the publisher), the online game in the works, comics, and the obligitory action figures.
It appears we're quickly approaching tech level 8. Now if they could only get that grav sled finished . . .
To a large degree, I think there's a lot of truth here. When I was doing my student teaching, they called me Mr. Explosion (due to an unfortunate science demonstration). I suspect they remembered far more about the strange demonstrations than what was read in the textbook.
Keep in mind that different kids learn in different ways. Textbooks should just be one of the several methods in which information is passed along. Open discussion, reading, projects, and even the ubitiquous video all have their places.
Okay, this is an odd story, but true. Because of this, I will always have a soft spot in my heart for Battlestar Galactica.
When I was a kid, there was a special episode of Battlestar Galactica. I think it was the one where they got to Earth finally, but regardless it was on an hour before it normally came on. My family was out for dinner and I kept pestering them to leave early just so we could watch the show. They finally gave into my whining and we headed home.
Once we arrived, we found the dog running around in the front yard, having somehow jumped out the window. There was on odd flickering through our livingroom windows and we all rushed in. In front of the fireplace, a spark had caught the rug on fire and a small blaze had started.
My parents ran into the kitchen to fill up pots and pans to douse the fire. We kids ran into the t.v. room, ducked under the smoke, and watched our movie.
The true irony is that a few years later, we had a much more serious house fire in the middle of the night. We were moving in a week and my mother had packed away all the fire alarms. We ended up safe, but it was far more exciting than I'd wish for again. Now my wife wonders why I'm so weird about having many fire extinguishers and fire alarms.
I work for a healthcare organization and we've had one of these for awhile. I see it as a good thing in general, as removing hand-offs between the physician and the drug can reduce errors in miscommunication. The real benefit is when the robot is tied to the medical system, allowing physician order entry, checking for drug interactions, and pop-up notices about new information on certain drugs.
The robot is pretty cool looking too. It's got its own large glass case around it that you can press your nose against as you watch its cute arms whipping around doing its thing.
I'm a web/database developer in a large healthcare organization, and the phrase "HIPPA compliance" has been thrown around quite a bit lately. Some of this makes quite a bit of sense, like not sending patient information over the Internet via e-mail. Others are much more fuzzy, and seem to do more harm than good.
For example, only the people who "need to know" should have access to the data. The catch is that I'm somehow supposed to magically determine who needs to know what. Do I get to tell my directors that they can't see something? How much do I really get to question someone else who knows their job better than I?
Plus there's the catch-22 situations. There's data on which physicians can perform what procedures. I personally think that everyone in our organization should see it, as I don't want any physician performing procedures they're not supposed to. The catch is that not everyone "needs to know", so that increases the chance that the information won't be seen.