I'm still wondering. I have no idea how many hours from GMT EDT would be. I am not even sure that there are not multiple zones that use the EDT acronym. Like Eastern Dagestan Time, or something.
If instead it's just a need to transfer data from their office to home, or between hospitals, why not use something more appropriate, such as a burned CD, or much better, through an networked inter-hospital database over an encrypted connection.
I don't know about this guy, but my cousin is a doctor at a major Swedish hospital. This hospital is rolling out thin clients, removing all PC:s with hard drives and CD drives. They do this for reasons of security and ease of administration. So far so good. According to my cousin, they do all the ordinary mistakes: They impose a uniform usage profile on all users, from janitors to surgeons. They get the same programs (all centrally administered), and they get measely 200 MB storage on a central server. That's about one powerpoint presentation for a doctor. As a result, they have all swapped their stetoscopes for USB drives (which they can attach to the thin clients). It didn't really get much more secure (flash drives could be somewhat more secure than magnetic media, but on the flip side, they are actually running around with these things all over the place now), but at least the sysadms don't have to bother.
While you're at it, have it last year-round. Not like it hasn't been done before:
The last time the United States and Canada observed different winter time systems was during the 1974-75 oil crisis. The U.S. did not turn its clocks back at all that fall in an attempt to conserve energy.
And that is not a first either. Ever wondered why France is in a different timezone? They didn't change back after the war.
Then EU kicked in and harmonized the rules for changing to and from DST
Interestingly enough, the current EU directive on daylight saving time is the ninth such directive to be issued. The eigth directive specified the date and hour to switch to and from DST, but forgot to mention the time zone. Hence Britain was out-of-synch with the rest of the union for one hour (or in-synch, depending on your point of view).
One wonders how the heck it could take nine tries to get it right...
I bet the next generation of African mechanics already spend their days under the bonnet of any car they can get access to. These are the people who will own small mechanics business in tomorrow's Africa. Tough luck if your car is a Microsoft car with the bonnet welded shut.
Not so uncommonly, when a Western European car owner he thinks his car is going to be scrapped it is shipped and resold in Africa. Going to Africa will redefine your notion of when a car is through.
All that is bound to change with modern cars which are not easily serviceable by their owners, where the bonnet is essentially welded shut, as you say. (But on the other hand, the World's current supply of user serviceable cars is perhaps enough to keep Africa rolling for the next decade, I don't know)
Nestle's CEO states that "Africa does not need bread and water, but Butterfinger and Nescafe".
You'd be surprised that in a region, West Africa, which produces a hell of lot of coffe and has a coffe culture which is on par with Italian coffe, "coffe" surprisingly often means Nescafé.
In a region where money is scarce and time and coffe beans are plenty, people drink Nescafé. It makes your head spin.
The real question is support. Will the manufacturer still be around in 3,000 years when you need to replace the little rubber feet? Are vendors and repair centers going to stock replacement parts? How much does an extended warranty cost?
This is so ontopic! This is the one overshadowing design criterion. It should be possible to repair with whatever technology is available in 10000 years. And you can't rely on manuals, since you don't even know what languages there will be 10000 years down the road.
French because it was the international language of diplomacy
You obviously didn't read up on your British history. There is no other country with which Britain has been so much at war with, and distrusts so much at times of peace as France.
Also French is the international language at the roulette tables.
Knowing French is thus the sine qua non of British intelligence.
(French is also a language spoken in most of West Africa, which is not entirely stable, and uncomfortably close to Europe.)
I don't think I am revealing any military secrets by pointing out that paper maps often are subject to military censorship. Not that I think the defense establishment reviews every map there is, but that there are stuff that is normally left out of maps. My experience is that Swedish countryside maps are on purpose inaccurate, leaving roads out, or putting in roads that have never existed (minor roads that is, the E4 is probably correct...).
The idea is of course that russian invasion forces wouldn't be able to advance as quickly if the maps doesn't match the terrain. Unfortunately this has side effects for our side as well...:)
Obviously, a lot of premises have changed since I did my army service.
I'd love to work at companies who need skills I haven't got.
But, uhmm.. how'd you get past those HR guys?
They keep telling me I need the skills!
Some consulting companies require that you have experience of the exact make and model of the stuff that they are consulting on (specified like so: 18 months experience of BEA WebLogic 8.1 SP2). Companies like that are probably boring to work at, and will have problems hiring very soon if not already.
Otherwise you only need to make plausible that you have basic software engineering skills, and are a quick learner. The "make plausible" part is a personality thing, probably.
For one job I applied recently I had to make a work test, making a small web shop thingy, choosing technology freely. I decided it was a good opportunity to pick up Hibernate, so I bought the book and flipped through it in a few hours (admittedly missing some important concepts that would have saved me some time later, but still). That I did that was an advantage at the interview later.
You never get the opportunity for growth at work. You'll only ever get training if it's free or has something directly to do with a task at hand and not the possibility of training you for your next job outside the company. Your boss is always mindful of people who could fill his shoes.
Personal growth is achieved by taking in a "Learn X in 21 Days" book and reading it in the slow times. Or surfing www.X-programming.com then getting a job at a new company.
I get personal growth at work. I specifically choose to work at companies that need skills that I haven't got (or at least not yet perfected), but find interesting. And I am quite open about it at interviews, so the employer knows that I am not an expert in their field from day one, but that I like to learn. And many employers appreciate that attitude.
Ok, so I don't learn things the university way anymore. I can perhaps only spare a day or so to study up on a new technology, the rest has to come little by little while working. Also I find I prefer stuff that is quick to learn (but takes a life time to master, as they say), if I get a choice. Since this is a current trend, I am in luck.
In my previous job, I didn't get any personal growth, so I had to overcompensate by doing hobby projects in my free time. Hobby projects are fun, but as I didn't get any kicks in the day time they more or less took over my life. That was a clear indication for me I had to get going.
3) The coffee delivery man stops refilling your coffee machines - Amenities getting cut in a budget crisis are one of the signs that further budget cuts are on the way.
Amen. When a previous employer announced that there would be no more coffee bread on fridays (to save a tiny bit of money and to underline the seriousness of the condition the company was in) my first reaction was to walk over to the payrolls office to cash in the overtime debt. Turns out that most people reacted the same and as a result the company lost half a million dollars in liquidity in twenty minutes. Should've thought about that!
A high number of Macromedia employees from the audit department have been found in a dumpster near Langley, VA. Unnamed sources in CIA say that they were forced to let them audit CIA computers due to the Macromedia Flash player EULA.
In the USA for example, a country of 500 million people, the odds of being killed by a terrorist attack is infantesimal. Yet here we are, giving up our basic civil liberties in droves.
There are two reasons that the risk of dying from terrorism is small:
1/ There are already security measures being taken, and they were taken before the problem got large, or out of hand. If your bags weren't screened before you boarded the plane, they would be falling from the skies in dozens (the planes, not the bags...well, the bags would kind of follow).
2/ The risk of being killed by traffic accidents is quite high, so it masks the risk of terrorism death.
Now, would you prefer to wait for the risk of dying of something was large before doing something about it?
An infrastructure for supplying the troops with clean underwear, silver magic or not, is second in importance only to supply of food and ammunition (well, communications and...well, it is quite important).
If you don't change underwear regularly you are bound to get very nasty rashes in just a few days (which will put you out of any useless service). If you leave it to the individual serviceman to supply his own trunks, then there is a high risk some won't change them often enough.
I would guess that underwear lasts longer in desert climate than in more temperate climates due to that the sweat evaporates faster and leaves less time for the germs to grow, but all the same anti-germ underwear seems like a good idea. You increase the underwear changing interval which means you can cut back on the supplies organization (and the individual soldiers don't have to carry as many pairs of underwear).
The trouble would be collecting the methane, of course, since the emission is *very* diffuse. But other than that, there is already at least one company that does business from flaring methane that would otherwise be released in the atmosphere. (That's flaring like in burning without trying to recuperate the heat) The idea is that they can sell the greenhouse gas emission credits.
It is perverse, but it is just the way the system is meant to work.
It is not clear from the article what they actually did with MD5. It could be something like that the camera maintains a log of hashes of the pictures taken. As many have already pointed out, this by itself doesn't lend much extra protection against willful manipulation of the picture if that said manipulation is done by the people who are in physical possession of the log.
If you have reason to suspect that the camera operators are manipulating the pictures (maybe they get a percentage on the fines, whatever), then you have to introduce a trusted third party that can vouch for the authenticity of the pictures (or at least that they were not altered after some point in time).
On the other hand, if you have no reason to believe that whoever controls the cameras willfully manipulates them, then you only need protection against accidental alterations, and the said hash log will be just fine.
The motorist's defence lawyer, Denis Mirabilis, argued successfully that an algorithm known as MD5, which is used to store the time, date, place, numberplate and speed of cars caught on camera, was a discredited piece of technology.
This is of course a misunderstanding. Denis Mirabilis is a latin term used in courts roughly meaning "claiming something that is plain to see to be untrue or at least not evident".
Just to clarify, it's "daylight saving" time...No "s".
This is a common misconception. You deposit one hour in the spring, and in the fall you withdraw. The interest is unfortunately low, but non-zero, as the hour you withdraw will be a teeny-weeny bit longer due to the slowdown of the earth's rotation.
HP RPL calculators. Yes, they still make them, but it not exactly as if they evolved with time. Well, perhaps I don't miss them, since I haven't had much use for them since I left university, but still.
HP calculators are (used to be) fine pieces of engineering. A few months ago I needed to calculate something and since there really isn't anything that compares to the HP RPL calculator interface I digged out my HP48 from a deskdrawer. I turned it on. The batteries had not drained! It must have been roughly ten years since I used it last. There was stuff lying around on the stack since I last used it.
Mixed into this equation is the role of water vapour. When the earth is fozen over - there is effetively no water vapour in the atmosphere. If one looks at the ABSOLUTE HUMIDITY CURVES one can see that below zero there is effectively no water vapour in the atmosphere. This is why it is so cold at the top of mountains.
You might be right, but I'm not following here. Absolute humidity is quite low in the Sahara too. You don't think that there is a connection to the fact air, and dry air specifically, has low specific heat, and since there is more air, and less land at the top of the mountains, it is colder? Could wind, carrying away whatever heat there was, play a role? Is it possible that the condensation of water vapour into rain cools the air?
Slashdot Mirror
pass scheduled for 11:25 p.m. EDT.
I'm still wondering. I have no idea how many hours from GMT EDT would be. I am not even sure that there are not multiple zones that use the EDT acronym. Like Eastern Dagestan Time, or something.
If instead it's just a need to transfer data from their office to home, or between hospitals, why not use something more appropriate, such as a burned CD, or much better, through an networked inter-hospital database over an encrypted connection.
I don't know about this guy, but my cousin is a doctor at a major Swedish hospital. This hospital is rolling out thin clients, removing all PC:s with hard drives and CD drives. They do this for reasons of security and ease of administration. So far so good. According to my cousin, they do all the ordinary mistakes: They impose a uniform usage profile on all users, from janitors to surgeons. They get the same programs (all centrally administered), and they get measely 200 MB storage on a central server. That's about one powerpoint presentation for a doctor. As a result, they have all swapped their stetoscopes for USB drives (which they can attach to the thin clients). It didn't really get much more secure (flash drives could be somewhat more secure than magnetic media, but on the flip side, they are actually running around with these things all over the place now), but at least the sysadms don't have to bother.
While you're at it, have it last year-round. Not like it hasn't been done before:
The last time the United States and Canada observed different winter time systems was during the 1974-75 oil crisis. The U.S. did not turn its clocks back at all that fall in an attempt to conserve energy.
And that is not a first either. Ever wondered why France is in a different timezone? They didn't change back after the war.
Then EU kicked in and harmonized the rules for changing to and from DST
Interestingly enough, the current EU directive on daylight saving time is the ninth such directive to be issued. The eigth directive specified the date and hour to switch to and from DST, but forgot to mention the time zone. Hence Britain was out-of-synch with the rest of the union for one hour (or in-synch, depending on your point of view).
One wonders how the heck it could take nine tries to get it right...
I bet the next generation of African mechanics already spend their days under the bonnet of any car they can get access to. These are the people who will own small mechanics business in tomorrow's Africa. Tough luck if your car is a Microsoft car with the bonnet welded shut.
Not so uncommonly, when a Western European car owner he thinks his car is going to be scrapped it is shipped and resold in Africa. Going to Africa will redefine your notion of when a car is through.
All that is bound to change with modern cars which are not easily serviceable by their owners, where the bonnet is essentially welded shut, as you say. (But on the other hand, the World's current supply of user serviceable cars is perhaps enough to keep Africa rolling for the next decade, I don't know)
Nestle's CEO states that "Africa does not need bread and water, but Butterfinger and Nescafe".
You'd be surprised that in a region, West Africa, which produces a hell of lot of coffe and has a coffe culture which is on par with Italian coffe, "coffe" surprisingly often means Nescafé.
In a region where money is scarce and time and coffe beans are plenty, people drink Nescafé. It makes your head spin.
but this is far from a new project
Indeed. Recent archaelogical research indicates prototypes were already around during Pharao Amenhoppsan III:s reign, some 3000 years ago.
The real question is support. Will the manufacturer still be around in 3,000 years when you need to replace the little rubber feet? Are vendors and repair centers going to stock replacement parts? How much does an extended warranty cost?
This is so ontopic! This is the one overshadowing design criterion. It should be possible to repair with whatever technology is available in 10000 years. And you can't rely on manuals, since you don't even know what languages there will be 10000 years down the road.
French because it was the international language of diplomacy
You obviously didn't read up on your British history. There is no other country with which Britain has been so much at war with, and distrusts so much at times of peace as France.
Also French is the international language at the roulette tables.
Knowing French is thus the sine qua non of British intelligence.
(French is also a language spoken in most of West Africa, which is not entirely stable, and uncomfortably close to Europe.)
I don't think I am revealing any military secrets by pointing out that paper maps often are subject to military censorship. Not that I think the defense establishment reviews every map there is, but that there are stuff that is normally left out of maps. My experience is that Swedish countryside maps are on purpose inaccurate, leaving roads out, or putting in roads that have never existed (minor roads that is, the E4 is probably correct...).
:)
The idea is of course that russian invasion forces wouldn't be able to advance as quickly if the maps doesn't match the terrain. Unfortunately this has side effects for our side as well...
Obviously, a lot of premises have changed since I did my army service.
I'd love to work at companies who need skills I haven't got.
But, uhmm.. how'd you get past those HR guys?
They keep telling me I need the skills!
Some consulting companies require that you have experience of the exact make and model of the stuff that they are consulting on (specified like so: 18 months experience of BEA WebLogic 8.1 SP2). Companies like that are probably boring to work at, and will have problems hiring very soon if not already.
Otherwise you only need to make plausible that you have basic software engineering skills, and are a quick learner. The "make plausible" part is a personality thing, probably.
For one job I applied recently I had to make a work test, making a small web shop thingy, choosing technology freely. I decided it was a good opportunity to pick up Hibernate, so I bought the book and flipped through it in a few hours (admittedly missing some important concepts that would have saved me some time later, but still). That I did that was an advantage at the interview later.
"3. Personal Growth:"
;-)
This really is your first job isn't it?!
You never get the opportunity for growth at work. You'll only ever get training if it's free or has something directly to do with a task at hand and not the possibility of training you for your next job outside the company. Your boss is always mindful of people who could fill his shoes.
Personal growth is achieved by taking in a "Learn X in 21 Days" book and reading it in the slow times. Or surfing www.X-programming.com then getting a job at a new company.
I get personal growth at work. I specifically choose to work at companies that need skills that I haven't got (or at least not yet perfected), but find interesting. And I am quite open about it at interviews, so the employer knows that I am not an expert in their field from day one, but that I like to learn. And many employers appreciate that attitude.
Ok, so I don't learn things the university way anymore. I can perhaps only spare a day or so to study up on a new technology, the rest has to come little by little while working. Also I find I prefer stuff that is quick to learn (but takes a life time to master, as they say), if I get a choice. Since this is a current trend, I am in luck.
In my previous job, I didn't get any personal growth, so I had to overcompensate by doing hobby projects in my free time. Hobby projects are fun, but as I didn't get any kicks in the day time they more or less took over my life. That was a clear indication for me I had to get going.
3) The coffee delivery man stops refilling your coffee machines
- Amenities getting cut in a budget crisis are one of the signs that further budget cuts are on the way.
Amen. When a previous employer announced that there would be no more coffee bread on fridays (to save a tiny bit of money and to underline the seriousness of the condition the company was in) my first reaction was to walk over to the payrolls office to cash in the overtime debt. Turns out that most people reacted the same and as a result the company lost half a million dollars in liquidity in twenty minutes. Should've thought about that!
Using my superior pattern recognition skills I've deduced that a iPod Pico will be forthcomming.
That's exactly why Apple will skip the Pico and head directly to the Femto.
To add to that. They actually grow tree farms for the purpose of making paper. Because of paper we have more trees.
And less biological diversity, unfortunately.
A high number of Macromedia employees from the audit department have been found in a dumpster near Langley, VA. Unnamed sources in CIA say that they were forced to let them audit CIA computers due to the Macromedia Flash player EULA.
In the USA for example, a country of 500 million people, the odds of being killed by a terrorist attack is infantesimal. Yet here we are, giving up our basic civil liberties in droves.
There are two reasons that the risk of dying from terrorism is small:
1/ There are already security measures being taken, and they were taken before the problem got large, or out of hand. If your bags weren't screened before you boarded the plane, they would be falling from the skies in dozens (the planes, not the bags...well, the bags would kind of follow).
2/ The risk of being killed by traffic accidents is quite high, so it masks the risk of terrorism death.
Now, would you prefer to wait for the risk of dying of something was large before doing something about it?
An infrastructure for supplying the troops with clean underwear, silver magic or not, is second in importance only to supply of food and ammunition (well, communications and...well, it is quite important).
If you don't change underwear regularly you are bound to get very nasty rashes in just a few days (which will put you out of any useless service). If you leave it to the individual serviceman to supply his own trunks, then there is a high risk some won't change them often enough.
I would guess that underwear lasts longer in desert climate than in more temperate climates due to that the sweat evaporates faster and leaves less time for the germs to grow, but all the same anti-germ underwear seems like a good idea. You increase the underwear changing interval which means you can cut back on the supplies organization (and the individual soldiers don't have to carry as many pairs of underwear).
The trouble would be collecting the methane, of course, since the emission is *very* diffuse. But other than that, there is already at least one company that does business from flaring methane that would otherwise be released in the atmosphere. (That's flaring like in burning without trying to recuperate the heat) The idea is that they can sell the greenhouse gas emission credits.
It is perverse, but it is just the way the system is meant to work.
It is not clear from the article what they actually did with MD5. It could be something like that the camera maintains a log of hashes of the pictures taken. As many have already pointed out, this by itself doesn't lend much extra protection against willful manipulation of the picture if that said manipulation is done by the people who are in physical possession of the log.
If you have reason to suspect that the camera operators are manipulating the pictures (maybe they get a percentage on the fines, whatever), then you have to introduce a trusted third party that can vouch for the authenticity of the pictures (or at least that they were not altered after some point in time).
On the other hand, if you have no reason to believe that whoever controls the cameras willfully manipulates them, then you only need protection against accidental alterations, and the said hash log will be just fine.
The motorist's defence lawyer, Denis Mirabilis, argued successfully that an algorithm known as MD5, which is used to store the time, date, place, numberplate and speed of cars caught on camera, was a discredited piece of technology.
This is of course a misunderstanding. Denis Mirabilis is a latin term used in courts roughly meaning "claiming something that is plain to see to be untrue or at least not evident".
At what point will technology become so cheap and simple to use, that it will make terrorism that much more effective and efficient.
I think it is not controversial to state that the cost of cell phones is not the limiting factor of terrorism.
Just to clarify, it's "daylight saving" time...No "s".
This is a common misconception. You deposit one hour in the spring, and in the fall you withdraw. The interest is unfortunately low, but non-zero, as the hour you withdraw will be a teeny-weeny bit longer due to the slowdown of the earth's rotation.
HP RPL calculators. Yes, they still make them, but it not exactly as if they evolved with time. Well, perhaps I don't miss them, since I haven't had much use for them since I left university, but still.
HP calculators are (used to be) fine pieces of engineering. A few months ago I needed to calculate something and since there really isn't anything that compares to the HP RPL calculator interface I digged out my HP48 from a deskdrawer. I turned it on. The batteries had not drained! It must have been roughly ten years since I used it last. There was stuff lying around on the stack since I last used it.
Mixed into this equation is the role of water vapour. When the earth is fozen over - there is effetively no water vapour in the atmosphere. If one looks at the ABSOLUTE HUMIDITY CURVES one can see that below zero there is effectively no water vapour in the atmosphere. This is why it is so cold at the top of mountains.
You might be right, but I'm not following here. Absolute humidity is quite low in the Sahara too. You don't think that there is a connection to the fact air, and dry air specifically, has low specific heat, and since there is more air, and less land at the top of the mountains, it is colder? Could wind, carrying away whatever heat there was, play a role? Is it possible that the condensation of water vapour into rain cools the air?