I help manage a lot of medical information. Clearly, some of the stuff that people can be treated for is downright embarrassing. The catch is, if we start purging data that might fall into some vague "I don't want my mom to know" category, we won't be able to treat the person to the best of our ability now. One's health is often the sum of one's medical history. A tiny problem that showed up ten years ago might be related to the serious problem today.
The whole point of medical systems is to supplement forgetful humans and improve communication when dozens of caregivers are involved with a patient's health. I can't imagine ever wanting to go back to the days of paper charts.
Fallout and Civ (I haven't played STALKER) had some great cinematics, but they were used very sparingly. For example, seeing the faux-news intro to Fallout was amazing, setting the feel for the entire game. With Civ, you saw your Wonders built and in the end the rocket launch, which was a tasty reward for your efforts.
What should be avoided is lots of cutscenes that take control away from the player. And yes, I learned that the hard way after being a bit too cutscene-happy with my own game development.
As far as I can tell, the only reason this is news is that it's Google. I manage several very large database, some in the hundreds of GB. Probably the most interesting of the big ones involves auditing people who are accessing a medical records system. The tricky part isn't managing every command passed by tens of thousands of users, but rather trying to find ways to pull out the needle of bad behavior from the endless normal activities. Was doctor A supposed to look at patient B's record? Is user A somehow related to patient B?
The only thing of technical note in the article is the ordinary problem with database jobs taking a long time. On a related note, I've kept waffling on whether or not to break off the above audit database to its own server. The processing time for some of the import jobs is over an hour. Strangely enough, advances in hardware have been such that it still resides on our main database/web server without any problem. Maybe Google just needed to throw hardware at the problem.
It's interesting. My son, who's eight, never lies. In fact, if I ask him if he's done something and I say I don't believe him, he gets incredibly upset. My daughter, who's three, will freely lie if it gets her out of anything. "Did you wash your hands? Did mom say it's okay?" To some degree, it's a measure of maturity. Eventually people figure out that the elusive concept of "trust" is more valuable than the short-term gains made by lying. Not everyone figures this out, and many people lie about small things ("Yes, honey, that dress looks great."). Still, I'd like to think that most kids are mostly honest.
What's frustrating to me is when school officials "play detective" when they're so clearly untrained to do so. I've had to play detective at work, tracking down people doing bad things electronically. While it was interesting, I had absolutely no interest on doing anything other than gathering information to present to someone else. Jumping up and down and yelling "We got him!" sounds like poor deductive reasoning.
We had a good article in our local paper about the bee issue. It turns out they're just fine here (meaning there's the usual number of hive deaths).
In fact, some farmers say they are puzzled about the dire news stories appearing in local, state and national media in the past several weeks.
"It's not new this year," Williams said. "If you know what I mean."
Many beekeepers are skeptical of the reports or at least how they're adding up. For 100 years, beekeepers have logged periodic reports of sudden and inexplicable bee die-offs.
People refer the latest die-off by its initials "CCD," but one Georgia beekeeper instead calls it the "SSDD" crisis for "Same Stuff, Different Day."
There have been a few good theories as to why they're dying off in certain places:
Most empty hives have been discovered at large, commercial migrating bee farms - and that has led some beekeepers to theorize that it's the stress of being trucked cross-country that's killing the bees.
"The (bee's) instinct is to go out and collect pollen and nectar, and that's what they do. When they can't get out of the hive, it puts them under stress. They need to go to the bathroom on a regular basis, but they won't go in their hive," said Ken Ograin, an Elmira beekeeper.
Some people blame the high-fructose corn syrup that beekeepers feed the bees in the large-scale operations.
"People think that's not the best thing to feed them. There's a lot of argument about that," Scher said. At this point, bringing cell phones into the mix is just plain silly.
I recently got involved into a legal issue where the question posed to me was "What was on our Internet site on a particular day several years ago?" We went through our file backups, but it turns out the data was pulled from a database. Then it was looking at database backups, which we don't keep that far back except for certain patient-related databases.
To top it off, we've started implementing a policy where old stuff is no longer backed up, simply because of the huge costs involved in legal discovery. It's very easy to spend millions of dollars when a judge demands "Get every electronic document that talks about X".
That being said, I'm sure people can find all sorts of clever ways to recover e-mails. Personal computers are a good first step. It would be interesting if the NSA was intercepting e-mails. Sometimes when e-mails are "deleted", the hard drives still contain pieces of the data. Finally, if people are sending and receiving e-mail outside of the RNC's systems, you can look into those e-mail accounts.
I've investigated people doing inappropriate things and the best thing to do was to get your hands on their personal computers. There are amazing numbers of things you can find out about a person. Of course, I'm not sure the RNC would cheerfully hand over their computers to a Democratically controlled congress.
Admittedly this is a bit of self-promotion, but the first module of the Dark Waters campaign should be posted on the Vault tomorrow. It has lots of custom content, voice acting, scripting system, and hopefully a fun little storyline. For people impatient for the expansion, this might tide them over.
The evidence is pretty good - no assumptions needed.
What I'm guessing will happen is there will be a patch to remedy the situation. It's unlikely we'll see legal action, but I suspect we'll see some apologies and maybe some firings.
Odds are, you're right about the frequency, especially initially. Keep in mind, though, that these "rocket guys" won't just drive in, do their thing, and leave. You'll have full-time employees, stuff to be stored, things manufactured on site, and all the infrastructure to make it happen. Have you looked at the Kennedy space center's org chart? That's a lot of people and there hasn't been a launch for quite awhile.
Be a little careful about "poison is the cost of progress". Nearly everyone thinks vaccines are a good thing, even though a very small percentage of people have a reaction. Certain technologies, such as sanitation, have significant environmental costs, even though as a whole they save millions of lives.
Not only bad, it may not be smart. Counterstrike was a fan-created mod which revolutionized the industry. Neverwinter Nights was great because so many people made modules for it. I think we'll see developers looking for ways to leverage user-created content. YouTube wouldn't be worth billions if no one uploaded anything to it.
I think part of the reason the $200 laptop costs $200 is that they're selling them in bulk to governments. It's then up to the government to distribute it appropriately. If you're doing it yourself, you've got to pay for the distribution infrastructure yourself, which gets tacked on to the cost of the $200 laptop. Now, these days with Amazon and Dell, you can do pretty good at minimizing these costs, but it'll still make it more expensive.
If that ends up bringing the cost of the laptop into the $300-$400 range, you're suddenly competing with the likes of Dell and other low-cost laptop manufacturers.
The worst part was getting a new PIN that didn't have the easy-to-remember "69" in the digits. Now I'm stuck with one that has no sexual connotations at all. Sniff.
What will be interesting is when this list comes into contact with established anti-discrimination laws. Looking at the list, they're all rather "foreign sounding". I'm guessing some folks think to themselves "Abdul? Well, there's another Abdul on the list, so I better not loan money to this guy."
On a brighter note, it looks like Slobodan Milosevic won't be getting a car loan here in the states any time soon:
MILOSEVIC, Slobodan; DOB 20 Aug 1941; POB
Pozarevac, Serbia and Montenegro; ex-FRY
President; ICTY indictee in custody (individual)
[BALKANS]
About ten years ago, I sold my soul to Microsoft and haven't regretted it yet. I work for a healthcare organization that's a Microsoft shop. I started as a database developer, switched to SQL Server administration, and have been a web developer ever since.
I personally prefer development over administration. Being a database administrator was a lot like being a firefighter. There were long periods of boredom where everything was running smoothly, coupled with late night crisis modes with huge pressure to get critical systems running again.
As a web developer, I get to do database work as well as creating web applications. I create a lot of things to make people's lives easier, some of whom are patients to our hospitals. It's interesting work and I get fairly generous praise heaped on me by coworkers and customers. The really crazy thing is that they pay me quite well to keep doing it.
It used to be that where I work, everyone in our department was exempt. The catch is that for a few folks, they were treated like hourly employees (strict work times for the help desk staff, for example). Eventually someone complained and certain jobs were reclassified as hourly.
In general, I don't think it made much of a difference to people's salaries. Certain Help Desk staff had their schedules adjusted to prevent overtime. Hourly people had to record their times. What's strange is that there was a loss of prestige of sorts. Hourly employees weren't considered as "professional" as exempt employees. It wasn't major, and I don't think anyone mentions it now, but it was a cause of grumbling at the time.
I played GTA pretty seriously for awhile. The sense of freedom was amazing.
When I first played (and when my wife first played), we tried to obey the traffic laws and stay in the proper lane. After realizing how pointless that was, we were driving on sidewalks, ignoring pedestrians, and laughing with glee when running red lights.
Your brain is very good at unlearning old skills and relearning new ones. The catch is that when doing very similar things, it's easy for one set of skills to bleed into another. Switching from throwing a whiffle ball to a softball requires a period of adjustment. Driving like an insane maniac to a law abiding citizen requires a degree of concentration.
The vast majority of people will likely use caution, focus, and not have any problem at all. Some folks, however, may have difficulty making the switch. Ban all driving games? That seems a bit silly. Banning cell phones or music in cars would likely have a more concrete effect.
Why autonomous? Instead of trying to making complex AI-enabled cleaners, just hook up a grad student via remote control to each one. It's not like you'd need to hire undocumented workers from Mexico to clean house on the moon. You'd have PhD's clamoring for the honor.
If I remember my college psych classes properly, subliminal messages to buy a product may work to some degree, but obvious ads to buy a product work far better. There's lots of studies on the effectiveness of advertising, and not very many on the effectiveness of subliminal messages.
I think Greenwald is the author I was thinking of, but some of these other articles may be useful.
We just have age verified via a webcam, typically by viewing the secondary sex characteristics that come with puberty. Other visitors to the site can rate the newbie as "MILF", "jailbait", or "hot coed". Obviously the jailbait applicants can't actually "register", but will instead have their images archived off as counterexamples to future applicants.
Slashdot Mirror
I help manage a lot of medical information. Clearly, some of the stuff that people can be treated for is downright embarrassing. The catch is, if we start purging data that might fall into some vague "I don't want my mom to know" category, we won't be able to treat the person to the best of our ability now. One's health is often the sum of one's medical history. A tiny problem that showed up ten years ago might be related to the serious problem today.
The whole point of medical systems is to supplement forgetful humans and improve communication when dozens of caregivers are involved with a patient's health. I can't imagine ever wanting to go back to the days of paper charts.
Fallout and Civ (I haven't played STALKER) had some great cinematics, but they were used very sparingly. For example, seeing the faux-news intro to Fallout was amazing, setting the feel for the entire game. With Civ, you saw your Wonders built and in the end the rocket launch, which was a tasty reward for your efforts.
What should be avoided is lots of cutscenes that take control away from the player. And yes, I learned that the hard way after being a bit too cutscene-happy with my own game development.
As far as I can tell, the only reason this is news is that it's Google. I manage several very large database, some in the hundreds of GB. Probably the most interesting of the big ones involves auditing people who are accessing a medical records system. The tricky part isn't managing every command passed by tens of thousands of users, but rather trying to find ways to pull out the needle of bad behavior from the endless normal activities. Was doctor A supposed to look at patient B's record? Is user A somehow related to patient B?
The only thing of technical note in the article is the ordinary problem with database jobs taking a long time. On a related note, I've kept waffling on whether or not to break off the above audit database to its own server. The processing time for some of the import jobs is over an hour. Strangely enough, advances in hardware have been such that it still resides on our main database/web server without any problem. Maybe Google just needed to throw hardware at the problem.
It's interesting. My son, who's eight, never lies. In fact, if I ask him if he's done something and I say I don't believe him, he gets incredibly upset. My daughter, who's three, will freely lie if it gets her out of anything. "Did you wash your hands? Did mom say it's okay?" To some degree, it's a measure of maturity. Eventually people figure out that the elusive concept of "trust" is more valuable than the short-term gains made by lying. Not everyone figures this out, and many people lie about small things ("Yes, honey, that dress looks great."). Still, I'd like to think that most kids are mostly honest.
What's frustrating to me is when school officials "play detective" when they're so clearly untrained to do so. I've had to play detective at work, tracking down people doing bad things electronically. While it was interesting, I had absolutely no interest on doing anything other than gathering information to present to someone else. Jumping up and down and yelling "We got him!" sounds like poor deductive reasoning.
"It's not new this year," Williams said. "If you know what I mean."
Many beekeepers are skeptical of the reports or at least how they're adding up. For 100 years, beekeepers have logged periodic reports of sudden and inexplicable bee die-offs. People refer the latest die-off by its initials "CCD," but one Georgia beekeeper instead calls it the "SSDD" crisis for "Same Stuff, Different Day."
There have been a few good theories as to why they're dying off in certain places: Most empty hives have been discovered at large, commercial migrating bee farms - and that has led some beekeepers to theorize that it's the stress of being trucked cross-country that's killing the bees.
"The (bee's) instinct is to go out and collect pollen and nectar, and that's what they do. When they can't get out of the hive, it puts them under stress. They need to go to the bathroom on a regular basis, but they won't go in their hive," said Ken Ograin, an Elmira beekeeper. Some people blame the high-fructose corn syrup that beekeepers feed the bees in the large-scale operations.
"People think that's not the best thing to feed them. There's a lot of argument about that," Scher said. At this point, bringing cell phones into the mix is just plain silly.
I recently got involved into a legal issue where the question posed to me was "What was on our Internet site on a particular day several years ago?" We went through our file backups, but it turns out the data was pulled from a database. Then it was looking at database backups, which we don't keep that far back except for certain patient-related databases.
To top it off, we've started implementing a policy where old stuff is no longer backed up, simply because of the huge costs involved in legal discovery. It's very easy to spend millions of dollars when a judge demands "Get every electronic document that talks about X".
That being said, I'm sure people can find all sorts of clever ways to recover e-mails. Personal computers are a good first step. It would be interesting if the NSA was intercepting e-mails. Sometimes when e-mails are "deleted", the hard drives still contain pieces of the data. Finally, if people are sending and receiving e-mail outside of the RNC's systems, you can look into those e-mail accounts.
I've investigated people doing inappropriate things and the best thing to do was to get your hands on their personal computers. There are amazing numbers of things you can find out about a person. Of course, I'm not sure the RNC would cheerfully hand over their computers to a Democratically controlled congress.
Admittedly this is a bit of self-promotion, but the first module of the Dark Waters campaign should be posted on the Vault tomorrow. It has lots of custom content, voice acting, scripting system, and hopefully a fun little storyline. For people impatient for the expansion, this might tide them over.
The evidence is pretty good - no assumptions needed.
What I'm guessing will happen is there will be a patch to remedy the situation. It's unlikely we'll see legal action, but I suspect we'll see some apologies and maybe some firings.
Wait for Firefox 3.0. Soon you'll be able to use your web apps, even if you're connected at 0 Mbps.
Odds are, you're right about the frequency, especially initially. Keep in mind, though, that these "rocket guys" won't just drive in, do their thing, and leave. You'll have full-time employees, stuff to be stored, things manufactured on site, and all the infrastructure to make it happen. Have you looked at the Kennedy space center's org chart? That's a lot of people and there hasn't been a launch for quite awhile.
After a bit of Googlin':
:)
Two Screens Are Better Than One
The best part is that it was done by Slashdot's nemesis.
Be a little careful about "poison is the cost of progress". Nearly everyone thinks vaccines are a good thing, even though a very small percentage of people have a reaction. Certain technologies, such as sanitation, have significant environmental costs, even though as a whole they save millions of lives.
Not only bad, it may not be smart. Counterstrike was a fan-created mod which revolutionized the industry. Neverwinter Nights was great because so many people made modules for it. I think we'll see developers looking for ways to leverage user-created content. YouTube wouldn't be worth billions if no one uploaded anything to it.
I think part of the reason the $200 laptop costs $200 is that they're selling them in bulk to governments. It's then up to the government to distribute it appropriately. If you're doing it yourself, you've got to pay for the distribution infrastructure yourself, which gets tacked on to the cost of the $200 laptop. Now, these days with Amazon and Dell, you can do pretty good at minimizing these costs, but it'll still make it more expensive.
If that ends up bringing the cost of the laptop into the $300-$400 range, you're suddenly competing with the likes of Dell and other low-cost laptop manufacturers.
The worst part was getting a new PIN that didn't have the easy-to-remember "69" in the digits. Now I'm stuck with one that has no sexual connotations at all. Sniff.
On a brighter note, it looks like Slobodan Milosevic won't be getting a car loan here in the states any time soon: MILOSEVIC, Slobodan; DOB 20 Aug 1941; POB Pozarevac, Serbia and Montenegro; ex-FRY President; ICTY indictee in custody (individual) [BALKANS]
About ten years ago, I sold my soul to Microsoft and haven't regretted it yet. I work for a healthcare organization that's a Microsoft shop. I started as a database developer, switched to SQL Server administration, and have been a web developer ever since.
I personally prefer development over administration. Being a database administrator was a lot like being a firefighter. There were long periods of boredom where everything was running smoothly, coupled with late night crisis modes with huge pressure to get critical systems running again.
As a web developer, I get to do database work as well as creating web applications. I create a lot of things to make people's lives easier, some of whom are patients to our hospitals. It's interesting work and I get fairly generous praise heaped on me by coworkers and customers. The really crazy thing is that they pay me quite well to keep doing it.
It used to be that where I work, everyone in our department was exempt. The catch is that for a few folks, they were treated like hourly employees (strict work times for the help desk staff, for example). Eventually someone complained and certain jobs were reclassified as hourly.
In general, I don't think it made much of a difference to people's salaries. Certain Help Desk staff had their schedules adjusted to prevent overtime. Hourly people had to record their times. What's strange is that there was a loss of prestige of sorts. Hourly employees weren't considered as "professional" as exempt employees. It wasn't major, and I don't think anyone mentions it now, but it was a cause of grumbling at the time.
Here's the relatively ad-free all-in-one-page print version.
I played GTA pretty seriously for awhile. The sense of freedom was amazing.
When I first played (and when my wife first played), we tried to obey the traffic laws and stay in the proper lane. After realizing how pointless that was, we were driving on sidewalks, ignoring pedestrians, and laughing with glee when running red lights.
Your brain is very good at unlearning old skills and relearning new ones. The catch is that when doing very similar things, it's easy for one set of skills to bleed into another. Switching from throwing a whiffle ball to a softball requires a period of adjustment. Driving like an insane maniac to a law abiding citizen requires a degree of concentration.
The vast majority of people will likely use caution, focus, and not have any problem at all. Some folks, however, may have difficulty making the switch. Ban all driving games? That seems a bit silly. Banning cell phones or music in cars would likely have a more concrete effect.
Why autonomous? Instead of trying to making complex AI-enabled cleaners, just hook up a grad student via remote control to each one. It's not like you'd need to hire undocumented workers from Mexico to clean house on the moon. You'd have PhD's clamoring for the honor.
Obviously they didn't read this book
It does remind me of string theory a bit, though. Heavy on cool math. Light on any practical application.
No jokes about solar powered sharks with frikin' lasers in orbit.
If I remember my college psych classes properly, subliminal messages to buy a product may work to some degree, but obvious ads to buy a product work far better. There's lots of studies on the effectiveness of advertising, and not very many on the effectiveness of subliminal messages.
I think Greenwald is the author I was thinking of, but some of these other articles may be useful.
We just have age verified via a webcam, typically by viewing the secondary sex characteristics that come with puberty. Other visitors to the site can rate the newbie as "MILF", "jailbait", or "hot coed". Obviously the jailbait applicants can't actually "register", but will instead have their images archived off as counterexamples to future applicants.