Sorry, but if a last name of "Null" breaks your code, you're a shit coder.
The same for name fields- a 50 character limit should be the minimum. Database space is cheap, what exactly do people think they're saving by restricting a name field to 20 characters or so?
True, but in my experience, those customer facing interfaces are dependent on God knows how many downstream systems. All it takes in one to have a bad coder or some other restriction to force everything upstream to adhere to it also. Get several that have different such issues and things get silly. At my work, passwords require a symbol, however all the systems that use that password have different restrictions, so that there are only four symbols that are possible to use that will work in all the systems. Thus we have to enforce those restrictions when the user creates their passwords.
Actually, since reclassifying Pluto as a "dwarf planet", they've also started calling Ceres a dwarf planet also. If Pluto gets re-added to the list, they'll probably also re-add Ceres (as it was considered a planet for a number of years after discovery) making Pluto number 10 and this one number 11. Otherwise, this will be the ninth non-dwarf planet.
apple needs consumers to continuously discard their old and buy its newest overpriced products with their much hyped latest features in order to make profit.
Then they really should update their computer line. Right now my 2008 Mac Pro still works fine and looking at benchmarks, the new macs really aren't better enough to justify upgrading. The latest Mac Mini and Mac Pros are getting near 2 and 3 years old without an upgrade to the model. I've been a Mac fan since 1984 when one of my high school teachers brought his Macintosh computer to class to show us. I'd love to buy a new Mac and their target market, but they're choices leave me wondering if they even care about computers any more.
I'm sorry, are you suggesting that there is an infinite amount of oil, or that the production (biogenesis) of oil is greater than or equal to demand? Because otherwise, isn't "peak oil" a mathematical certainty? Or am I missing something?
Yes, despite that every time it looks like we've reached it, production is sometime in the future upped to a new max, "peak oil" will eventually happen. What we are really discussing here is the effect that will have on society. The worst case theory is that demand will grow exponentially and supply will drop and this will cause major disruptions. We really haven't seen this in past possible cases of peak oil but possible have seen price rises. The more likely situation is we hit peak oil, prises will rise, demand will not due to those prices, alternatives become viable and the shortage and eventual end of oil will be soft landed by other solutions such as electric cars, bio plastics, etc. It probably will change society as oil is a really cheap source of energy that will eventually run out, but the main discussion is how disruptive the switch to alternatives and resultant costs will be to society. Some people are claiming society will collapse, while others think that it will be lost in normal market "noise".
Luxury room sizes - about the same as the size of a normal hotel room in central Paris or London.
I was about to say that that is about the size of the hotel room I had in London, except I paid extra for one with a private toilet and shower, so that would have added another 15 square feet.
I was most recently at a very large hospital, and they were entering my information into a computer running Windows XP. They had upgraded other facilities, so it's not penny-pinching in general, I guess just IT is low o the priority?
IT a low priority, not really. They all pay plenty for their EMR and other systems. Desktop support? That does often end up being the red headed step child of IT. For the past twenty years, healthcare has been deploying more and more computers, practically as fast as they can, and only replacing them when they fail or can't do the job anymore. In the last ten years, they really haven't failed that much and still do their job fine. The XP to Win7 has probably been the first enterprise wide upgrade that was demanded for working machines. Now, their desktop support groups need to start replacing good computers with newer computers while still deploying more computers as they have been doing as all their other work hasn't gone away.
Still, what is more likely is that some vendor system is holding the department back. All these computers have been deployed because all the different departments are going from paper to electronic and communicating with all the other systems. So your clinical devices need to talk to the departmental information systems, which have to talk to the EMR which has to talk to the HIS which has to talk to the billing system. Since most hospitals are doing pretty much the same things, they all use some of the few leaders who make those systems at a variety of levels of complexity. Is one of those systems requires Win XP, probably because it needs an older version of IE, nobody can upgrade. That needed upgrade may be a large project that will take this years capital budget and take two years because vendors rarely add features to current version rather than just roll them up into newer versions so they can use that to sell to other hospitals. So, once you decide to upgrade, you're talking about new hardware, often requiring new server space, new interfaces, new training, etc. Once that is done, then they can go to the next critical upgrade project. Heaven help you if a project falls behind or some unplanned upgrade needs to happen. Add in that this constant upgrade treadmill is still relatively new to hospitals on an enterprise level and many of the upper management were running the hospitals back when departments handled their own IT or there was no IT to be handled. So, the current ten year upgrade plan wasn't really planned for ten years ago.
So what would be the effect of completely abolishing advertising? (Just as a thought experiment: we can think about how to do it another day).
As somebody that hasn't watched broadcast TV in 20+ years, seen the decline of magazines and newspapers, and stopped reading even the local weekly newspapers, I can tell you some of the effects. First, I found myself completely out of touch with pop culture. People would talk about things or I'd see some of the advertisements I didn't miss, and there would be bands, celebrities, etc that I've never heard of but had been big for years. I didn't really care for them but some of my friends did, usually the ones of the generation after me. No real loss to me, but the shear ignorance causes others to doubt anything else you say. We see this a lot on/. as people dismiss anything they dislike as worthless. Then I found out that I was completely missing movies that had made it to the theater and left without me ever hearing about them. Then concerts and shows in my city that I actually would have liked to have gone to, but I never knew about them. Also, although I'm in the tech industry as glorified desktop support, my knowledge of computers was practically nil as I wasn't looking for a new computer and wasn't seeing what was new in magazines. Even/., Ars, Mac rumors and others give some general knowledge, but mostly high level view stuff, not what is common trends in technical details of systems which I usually gleaned from reading ads. I've found myself actually picking up the local weekly papers when I can remember it just to check the ads for concerts I want to see, because as I and my friends have aged, they've stopped talking about and going to them, thus I've stopped finding out about them.
Screw kerosene and energy. We'll need oil to produce all the plastics we currently make. Modern medicine alone owes a great deal to having an endless supply of cheap, virgin, sterile, packaged plastic devices. Long after we're all driving electric cars, we'll still be pumping oil for manufacturing reasons.
Actually, I'm reminded of a recent incident in which I believe I was censored by Bernie's fanatics for saying that Hillary wasn't such a bad option compared to Trump and his associates.
I would agree with you. As far as the candidates go, Hillary is a pretty benign establishment Republican.
Well, if you're going to mine raw materials in space and ship them to Earth, they would need to be high value items rather than bulk commodities. Things like Platinum, Osmium, etc. Iron would likely never make sense.
More likely, we'll be mining asteroids for iron, nickel, etc. for use in space and eventually be left over with a blog of gold and platinum which will probably be worth more to drop in on earth with a cheap heat shield that use in space for industrial purposes.
Defeated by networked radar systems, same as stealth, since they would be hunting the radar source, which will be miles away and off the flight path.
Yes, but what it really comes down to, or goes to next, is that if we spend money on the drones, will they spend money on the networked radar system and its deployment. Then we build a counter measure, etc. Like most war, it will come down to money and industrial manufacturing with a significant lead in the beginning to those that have already sunk costs into the effort, while sunk costs hurt other elements of the economy.
That's entirely true, in that it was the viewpoint of people back then - but they'd be wrong. Japan has always been about high quality work, rather than mass production.
No. Certainly not before Iwakura Mission to United States and Europe. They sent people around the world to see how Westerners did things and then report back so they could change how the Japanese did things. There is a book of the trip and besides recounting some very obvious stereotypes of Americans and their habits in the 1870's that would be recognized today*, one of the subjects was a long argument that Japan should make their items with skill and built to last as the Americans and Germans did. The author, who was part of the Japanese envoy, advised giving up the Japanese trait of making things shody and expected to be replaced in a few years for things like the buildings and bridges he saw in Europe that were still in use hundreds of years later.
*They went to a horse race in San Francisco, and I swear if you just did a find and replace of "Horses" for "Cars", it would seem like he was talking about Nascar and how much of a car culture the modern US has.
If someone walks into ER with a screwdriver stuck through his head there isn't usually time to post it on stackexchange. You have to decide right away - ice pack or aspirin.
By time you're having to worry about the ER, you're already an R3 and have already spent several years in residency. Even then, you're there to get new experience and and attending will be there to double check your work before the patient leaves. As an R4 you might spend over night and just have people on call, but really, your example of med school and patients dying doesn't relate because it will be years after med school through more training that you can be kicked out for doing badly (or not showing up for training) before you see a patient and even then, more years working in the real world till they'll ever let you see a patient and somebody doesn't meticulously follow up on your result.
If you're looking at selling them, you are pretty much looking at pennies per comic, or a certain price per standard comic box. 99% of them probably aren't even worth those pennies per comic but the people who buy collections are looking for the other 1% that are worth money. Collection from the mid-90's is sort of rough as it was when collecting was big and everybody was buying to speculate on the next big thing so there's lots out there. With the movies that have come out, prices have been upped for some things that were otherwise nearly forgotten, but still it's pretty much a buyers market for comics except for those issues everybody wants. That's before the CGC service and cases, so those special cases are probably not graded in a way that the current market will respect. So, you'd either need to sell them all at once, or have somebody come tell you which ones are worth money (or you could do that online would take a long time) to sell the few that were worth money and if you did it yourself it would be either Ebay or to a store for cheap.
Facebook doesn't enforce it's real name policy particularly well though, it's mostly only used to beat spam accounts and so forth over the head. A number of my friends on Facebook have never used anything other than blatantly false aliases (blatant because they couldn't possibly be people's real names, or are obviously the names of well fictional characters).
In contrast, Google was trying to get people to prove their names by sending in real ID from day one no matter how harmless you were and if there's one thing people aren't going to do, it's send Google even more sensitive personal data like passport and driving license details.
IME, you have things exactly reversed. Facebook has all sorts of hate for pseudonyms on their establishment. Canceling accounts and making them email in pictures of real ID to get them reactivated. Friends of mine that had fake names, nicknames, or professional names would all get canceled and eventually gave up or showed real ID to associate. There was a particular hatred of drag queens, following protest, FB backdown, but then not really. Part of that was wanting people with stage names to not have personal pages but professional pages which operate under different rules and can't be used reliably for anything really without paying FB advertising money. Meanwhile, Google+, has me listed as a nickname that matches my email and I've never had any issues.
Who is telling you that? I know some people on the Chinese side of the border and they have a very different story. Who would go back to starvation and public execution for trying to escape in the first place? Some executions even happen within sight of the Chinese border.
Various news articles on the subject. I think the one I remember was on BBC on how hard it was for NKs to adjust to SK culture. It just mentioned that some did return. This article addresses the subject although they put a very low number to those that have returned. Single digits on the number SK says have gone back to NK, double digits on what NK says, and barely triple digits on the high end. Of course, this is also put into uncertainly because it is feared that NK is sending spies in with refugees and I could see such returning just as a propaganda ploy. Many of the articles will talk of how refugees are sending money back to NK from SK because of families and there are fears that the NK government is seeking to control such people either for the money or propaganda by doing so.
BTW, has anybody noticed that Kim Jong Un always seems to be the one-and-only fat guy in any picture you ever see of North Koreans? Not even the elite folks that flank him are fat (except for the brims of their hats, of course.) Maybe he has a rule about that or something: "I am only fat guy in North Krorea!" Just wondering...
It is a point of national pride that their leader is fat and that the people can keep him that way. It shows how much they care for him. Not kidding. That's what they teach and believe in NK. Unlike the countries behind the iron curtain back in the day, NK is less the oppressed people yearning to be free rather than a nation of Stalinist true believers who will cry out their leaders names as they starve. Things have gotten less so in the last decade or so with a porous Chinese border and the smuggling in of SK soaps that the NKs watch. Still, even though many NK manage these days to escape to SK, even with special classes, they find it hard to adapt and some even return home because they can't deal with living in the south. Keep in mind that their entire idea of what NKians believe about the south is from those soap operas, and when they get there and find out they aren't realistic representations of life, it shatters their world that much more.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, but if a last name of "Null" breaks your code, you're a shit coder.
The same for name fields- a 50 character limit should be the minimum. Database space is cheap, what exactly do people think they're saving by restricting a name field to 20 characters or so?
True, but in my experience, those customer facing interfaces are dependent on God knows how many downstream systems. All it takes in one to have a bad coder or some other restriction to force everything upstream to adhere to it also. Get several that have different such issues and things get silly. At my work, passwords require a symbol, however all the systems that use that password have different restrictions, so that there are only four symbols that are possible to use that will work in all the systems. Thus we have to enforce those restrictions when the user creates their passwords.
Ulysses S Grant
Yup. Should be Planet Ten.
Actually, since reclassifying Pluto as a "dwarf planet", they've also started calling Ceres a dwarf planet also. If Pluto gets re-added to the list, they'll probably also re-add Ceres (as it was considered a planet for a number of years after discovery) making Pluto number 10 and this one number 11. Otherwise, this will be the ninth non-dwarf planet.
apple needs consumers to continuously discard their old and buy its newest overpriced products with their much hyped latest features in order to make profit.
Then they really should update their computer line. Right now my 2008 Mac Pro still works fine and looking at benchmarks, the new macs really aren't better enough to justify upgrading. The latest Mac Mini and Mac Pros are getting near 2 and 3 years old without an upgrade to the model. I've been a Mac fan since 1984 when one of my high school teachers brought his Macintosh computer to class to show us. I'd love to buy a new Mac and their target market, but they're choices leave me wondering if they even care about computers any more.
I'm sorry, are you suggesting that there is an infinite amount of oil, or that the production (biogenesis) of oil is greater than or equal to demand? Because otherwise, isn't "peak oil" a mathematical certainty? Or am I missing something?
Yes, despite that every time it looks like we've reached it, production is sometime in the future upped to a new max, "peak oil" will eventually happen. What we are really discussing here is the effect that will have on society. The worst case theory is that demand will grow exponentially and supply will drop and this will cause major disruptions. We really haven't seen this in past possible cases of peak oil but possible have seen price rises. The more likely situation is we hit peak oil, prises will rise, demand will not due to those prices, alternatives become viable and the shortage and eventual end of oil will be soft landed by other solutions such as electric cars, bio plastics, etc. It probably will change society as oil is a really cheap source of energy that will eventually run out, but the main discussion is how disruptive the switch to alternatives and resultant costs will be to society. Some people are claiming society will collapse, while others think that it will be lost in normal market "noise".
Luxury room sizes - about the same as the size of a normal hotel room in central Paris or London.
I was about to say that that is about the size of the hotel room I had in London, except I paid extra for one with a private toilet and shower, so that would have added another 15 square feet.
There was drastically less terrorism. I can't really think of any significant Europe terrorist attacks between WW2 and the late 90s.
Obviously never heard of the Red Army Faction. This is your chance to start having Bader-Meinhof moments.
Forget about left/right wing politics for a while.
How about Law/Chaos?
I was most recently at a very large hospital, and they were entering my information into a computer running Windows XP. They had upgraded other facilities, so it's not penny-pinching in general, I guess just IT is low o the priority?
IT a low priority, not really. They all pay plenty for their EMR and other systems. Desktop support? That does often end up being the red headed step child of IT. For the past twenty years, healthcare has been deploying more and more computers, practically as fast as they can, and only replacing them when they fail or can't do the job anymore. In the last ten years, they really haven't failed that much and still do their job fine. The XP to Win7 has probably been the first enterprise wide upgrade that was demanded for working machines. Now, their desktop support groups need to start replacing good computers with newer computers while still deploying more computers as they have been doing as all their other work hasn't gone away.
Still, what is more likely is that some vendor system is holding the department back. All these computers have been deployed because all the different departments are going from paper to electronic and communicating with all the other systems. So your clinical devices need to talk to the departmental information systems, which have to talk to the EMR which has to talk to the HIS which has to talk to the billing system. Since most hospitals are doing pretty much the same things, they all use some of the few leaders who make those systems at a variety of levels of complexity. Is one of those systems requires Win XP, probably because it needs an older version of IE, nobody can upgrade. That needed upgrade may be a large project that will take this years capital budget and take two years because vendors rarely add features to current version rather than just roll them up into newer versions so they can use that to sell to other hospitals. So, once you decide to upgrade, you're talking about new hardware, often requiring new server space, new interfaces, new training, etc. Once that is done, then they can go to the next critical upgrade project. Heaven help you if a project falls behind or some unplanned upgrade needs to happen. Add in that this constant upgrade treadmill is still relatively new to hospitals on an enterprise level and many of the upper management were running the hospitals back when departments handled their own IT or there was no IT to be handled. So, the current ten year upgrade plan wasn't really planned for ten years ago.
So what would be the effect of completely abolishing advertising? (Just as a thought experiment: we can think about how to do it another day).
As somebody that hasn't watched broadcast TV in 20+ years, seen the decline of magazines and newspapers, and stopped reading even the local weekly newspapers, I can tell you some of the effects. First, I found myself completely out of touch with pop culture. People would talk about things or I'd see some of the advertisements I didn't miss, and there would be bands, celebrities, etc that I've never heard of but had been big for years. I didn't really care for them but some of my friends did, usually the ones of the generation after me. No real loss to me, but the shear ignorance causes others to doubt anything else you say. We see this a lot on /. as people dismiss anything they dislike as worthless. Then I found out that I was completely missing movies that had made it to the theater and left without me ever hearing about them. Then concerts and shows in my city that I actually would have liked to have gone to, but I never knew about them. Also, although I'm in the tech industry as glorified desktop support, my knowledge of computers was practically nil as I wasn't looking for a new computer and wasn't seeing what was new in magazines. Even /., Ars, Mac rumors and others give some general knowledge, but mostly high level view stuff, not what is common trends in technical details of systems which I usually gleaned from reading ads. I've found myself actually picking up the local weekly papers when I can remember it just to check the ads for concerts I want to see, because as I and my friends have aged, they've stopped talking about and going to them, thus I've stopped finding out about them.
Screw kerosene and energy. We'll need oil to produce all the plastics we currently make. Modern medicine alone owes a great deal to having an endless supply of cheap, virgin, sterile, packaged plastic devices. Long after we're all driving electric cars, we'll still be pumping oil for manufacturing reasons.
Pi Day should be 22/7.
That is Pi Approximation Day.
Actually, I'm reminded of a recent incident in which I believe I was censored by Bernie's fanatics for saying that Hillary wasn't such a bad option compared to Trump and his associates.
I would agree with you. As far as the candidates go, Hillary is a pretty benign establishment Republican.
Well, if you're going to mine raw materials in space and ship them to Earth, they would need to be high value items rather than bulk commodities. Things like Platinum, Osmium, etc. Iron would likely never make sense.
More likely, we'll be mining asteroids for iron, nickel, etc. for use in space and eventually be left over with a blog of gold and platinum which will probably be worth more to drop in on earth with a cheap heat shield that use in space for industrial purposes.
Or just talk out your ass on a regular basis?
This is Slashdot. You must be new around here.
There needs to be a "+1, good use of /. trope" mod.
Sounds great! I would like to subscribe to your cooking blog.
Savoring the Past
How long before they stick a couple of embedded CPU's or GPU's along with those SSD's?
Hah! Computer on a disk. It will take "upgrading my computer's hard drive" to a whole new level.
Defeated by networked radar systems, same as stealth, since they would be hunting the radar source, which will be miles away and off the flight path.
Yes, but what it really comes down to, or goes to next, is that if we spend money on the drones, will they spend money on the networked radar system and its deployment. Then we build a counter measure, etc. Like most war, it will come down to money and industrial manufacturing with a significant lead in the beginning to those that have already sunk costs into the effort, while sunk costs hurt other elements of the economy.
That's entirely true, in that it was the viewpoint of people back then - but they'd be wrong. Japan has always been about high quality work, rather than mass production.
No. Certainly not before Iwakura Mission to United States and Europe. They sent people around the world to see how Westerners did things and then report back so they could change how the Japanese did things. There is a book of the trip and besides recounting some very obvious stereotypes of Americans and their habits in the 1870's that would be recognized today*, one of the subjects was a long argument that Japan should make their items with skill and built to last as the Americans and Germans did. The author, who was part of the Japanese envoy, advised giving up the Japanese trait of making things shody and expected to be replaced in a few years for things like the buildings and bridges he saw in Europe that were still in use hundreds of years later.
*They went to a horse race in San Francisco, and I swear if you just did a find and replace of "Horses" for "Cars", it would seem like he was talking about Nascar and how much of a car culture the modern US has.
If someone walks into ER with a screwdriver stuck through his head there isn't usually time to post it on stackexchange. You have to decide right away - ice pack or aspirin.
By time you're having to worry about the ER, you're already an R3 and have already spent several years in residency. Even then, you're there to get new experience and and attending will be there to double check your work before the patient leaves. As an R4 you might spend over night and just have people on call, but really, your example of med school and patients dying doesn't relate because it will be years after med school through more training that you can be kicked out for doing badly (or not showing up for training) before you see a patient and even then, more years working in the real world till they'll ever let you see a patient and somebody doesn't meticulously follow up on your result.
If you're looking at selling them, you are pretty much looking at pennies per comic, or a certain price per standard comic box. 99% of them probably aren't even worth those pennies per comic but the people who buy collections are looking for the other 1% that are worth money. Collection from the mid-90's is sort of rough as it was when collecting was big and everybody was buying to speculate on the next big thing so there's lots out there. With the movies that have come out, prices have been upped for some things that were otherwise nearly forgotten, but still it's pretty much a buyers market for comics except for those issues everybody wants. That's before the CGC service and cases, so those special cases are probably not graded in a way that the current market will respect. So, you'd either need to sell them all at once, or have somebody come tell you which ones are worth money (or you could do that online would take a long time) to sell the few that were worth money and if you did it yourself it would be either Ebay or to a store for cheap.
Facebook doesn't enforce it's real name policy particularly well though, it's mostly only used to beat spam accounts and so forth over the head. A number of my friends on Facebook have never used anything other than blatantly false aliases (blatant because they couldn't possibly be people's real names, or are obviously the names of well fictional characters).
In contrast, Google was trying to get people to prove their names by sending in real ID from day one no matter how harmless you were and if there's one thing people aren't going to do, it's send Google even more sensitive personal data like passport and driving license details.
IME, you have things exactly reversed. Facebook has all sorts of hate for pseudonyms on their establishment. Canceling accounts and making them email in pictures of real ID to get them reactivated. Friends of mine that had fake names, nicknames, or professional names would all get canceled and eventually gave up or showed real ID to associate. There was a particular hatred of drag queens, following protest, FB backdown, but then not really. Part of that was wanting people with stage names to not have personal pages but professional pages which operate under different rules and can't be used reliably for anything really without paying FB advertising money. Meanwhile, Google+, has me listed as a nickname that matches my email and I've never had any issues.
Forbes link removed
Thank you.
Who is telling you that? I know some people on the Chinese side of the border and they have a very different story. Who would go back to starvation and public execution for trying to escape in the first place? Some executions even happen within sight of the Chinese border.
Various news articles on the subject. I think the one I remember was on BBC on how hard it was for NKs to adjust to SK culture. It just mentioned that some did return. This article addresses the subject although they put a very low number to those that have returned. Single digits on the number SK says have gone back to NK, double digits on what NK says, and barely triple digits on the high end. Of course, this is also put into uncertainly because it is feared that NK is sending spies in with refugees and I could see such returning just as a propaganda ploy. Many of the articles will talk of how refugees are sending money back to NK from SK because of families and there are fears that the NK government is seeking to control such people either for the money or propaganda by doing so.
BTW, has anybody noticed that Kim Jong Un always seems to be the one-and-only fat guy in any picture you ever see of North Koreans? Not even the elite folks that flank him are fat (except for the brims of their hats, of course.) Maybe he has a rule about that or something: "I am only fat guy in North Krorea!" Just wondering...
It is a point of national pride that their leader is fat and that the people can keep him that way. It shows how much they care for him. Not kidding. That's what they teach and believe in NK. Unlike the countries behind the iron curtain back in the day, NK is less the oppressed people yearning to be free rather than a nation of Stalinist true believers who will cry out their leaders names as they starve. Things have gotten less so in the last decade or so with a porous Chinese border and the smuggling in of SK soaps that the NKs watch. Still, even though many NK manage these days to escape to SK, even with special classes, they find it hard to adapt and some even return home because they can't deal with living in the south. Keep in mind that their entire idea of what NKians believe about the south is from those soap operas, and when they get there and find out they aren't realistic representations of life, it shatters their world that much more.