Is there a way to create or replicate this bone marrow? Or will this immune donor be continually used for every AIDS patient in the world?
It's not quite as simple as that. As I understand it, there are different bone marrow types - just like you get different blood types - and for a transplant to be successful, you want to be transferring to someone with the same type. So for every HIV+ patient, you need to find a donor who is not only of the right type, but is also naturally immune.
Any judge these days who buys into the RIAA's bullshit as an absolute moron and should be impeached immediately for a lack of reasoning ability and common sense. These cases, all based on illegal investigations and no valid legal foundation, along with outright lies in the testimony of their sole "expert" at the ex parte John Doe joined subpoena phase should be stopped at that moment.
Ah, there you hit upon a problem in any modern society.
There are so many things that one needs to understand to effectively deal with a legal case these days that it is completely unreasonable to expect someone to understand them all. Hence you have specialists - the lawyers argue the law, the judges make decisions based on the law and the expert witnesses explain things which require an expert. Things like "Given that we've been shown A, B and C, what are these things evidence of? What do they tell us?"
The thing is, any old fred can get up in court and say "A tells you that the person was sharing files, B confirms it's the person standing there and not any random off the street, C confirms the files that they were sharing and the number of times they shared them". There are supposed to be checks and balances in place to make sure that the people who stand up as experts really do know what they're talking about, but history has shown that it is possible to find someone who one might reasonably consider to be an expert to stand up and say anything.
It is they who are the terrorists. I'm just an ordinary lawyer trying to help protect the rights of innocent people from a pack of extortionist bullies who don't care about what is legal or what is right.
And frankly, the world needs more people like you.
The RIAA's legal counsel does the general public's perception of lawyers no favours at all, and the fact that they seem to get away with their behaviour much of the time is even worse.
any OS that locks up solid so you have to ssh in remotely and kill your login session so you can log in
If you can log in via ssh and have enough process control to kill a session then your OS didn't "lock up solid".
True, but if you're describing how ready or otherwise the system is for a "typical user" (by which I mean someone who isn't familiar with Unix) to run on their own PC, there's not a lot of difference between "locked up solid login session" and "locked up solid OS".
(FWIW I think anyone who doesn't have a rough idea what they're doing needs their head examining if they really want to run Solaris, but it takes all sorts...)
A lot of these smaller shops there is just "the IT guy" that does everything. A lot of these places, when the IT guy goes on vacation, everyone just kind of holds their breath. Chances are pretty good the servers/network will chug along just fine for a couple of weeks unattended, but you never know what unforseen problem that might suddenly crop up and the one guy who runs everything isn't around to fix it.
I know. I am the IT guy.
You're quite right, but I'd argue that if the place isn't big enough to have at least two IT people, it should have none at all and instead outsource - if only because there's a very great risk of that guy making himself indispensable.
Better off does not = cheaper. Ive seen a lot of small offices, law firms, etc spend too much money for lousy service and poor response time from 3rd party support.
May not always be the case, but depending on what he does this may not be a good idea.
There's a simple reason for this.
The third party company will probably have a service level agreement with something like "n hour response, n*2 hour fix". It's in their interests to ensure that they only just have enough staff to be able to meet this. Any more will cost them more money while gaining very little.
Whereas many in-house IT departments are staffed on the basis of "how can we provide the best possible service (within reason) for the business" - and that generally means a rather more generous number of staff.
So even a relatively straightforward desktop support issue ("the hard disk in my PC's failed, I can't do anything") suddenly takes a whole working day to get fixed. Minimum. And that's assuming that they keep at least one spare PC and a person to swap them over onsite.
A whole working day in which the end user has basically sat around twiddling their thumbs.
Take a 2 week vacation and see if everything still works afterward. Your job is to keep everything working. If everything works without you, then you are not needed. If, however the boss balks at 2 weeks without IT support, you are vital.
If you can't even take off two weeks, that suggests to me that you're firefighting rather than putting in genuinely useful time.
Meanwhile we have massive infrastructural problems in IT because of a lack of people to carry out necessary on-the-ground projects. Dismantling these vast Government willy-waggling programmes and reallocating skilled staff to fixing the IT problems in local and national government all over the country would be a huge benefit - but it would mean dismantling departments, and it would mean overpaid business development managers getting the push and real IT implementers getting more visibility. And we don't want that, do we?
Sounds like something straight out of "Yes, Minister".
3M makes and sells a very pocketable battery powered projector already. It has been for sale for a couple of months. Has better specs too, and it's cheaper. I'm not sure why we have articles that ignore stuff like this. I know we can't be experts on everything, but man, the author couldn't do a quick google search for pico projectors? -Taylor
(Got to admire how a product which by their own admission "The first unit sent was nigh on impossible to use, because the cable had to be held in some impossible position to get a picture. The second unit involved a similar palaver but, with the aid of a tripod and a few books to support the cable, once a picture had been established it would remain, so long as you didnâ(TM)t touch it." still gets 50%)
I don't know exactly why the printers actually available(particularly the cheap ones) have resisted standardization so sharply;
Software is cheaper than hardware, and the hardware required to process Postscript is still quite a lot more powerful (and therefore expensive) than most manufacturers are prepared to put into their cheaper hardware. You also have to license it from Adobe, which costs money.
I don't know where these faulty games have been distributed, but I do know that in the UK, despite strong consumer protection laws, at least one or two well-known chains appear to have taken to training their staff in a company policy of "no refunds ever under any circumstances" and simply ignoring the law.
The idea being that most customers will give up sooner than take them to court or report them to Trading Standards.
Myself, I think a bit of undercover journalism to find out if this genuinely is company policy, followed by a very expensive appearance in court is in order.
It's really difficult to get a feel for this question without knowing why anyone would want a 'remote moving datacentre' that isn't well connected to anything else. Why can't the computers be sited somewhere less troublesome? Would virtualising the machines to get round the booting/power on/off issues help, or is there some reason that this can;t be done?
While I don't know what the OP's reasons are, I can think of a few. Most revolve around the idea of doing some sort of data processing in a remote location (eg. the antarctic or onboard a ship) which has to store a fair bit of data so needs something nearby to connect to. Quite plausible, particularly if the data processing is reading information from sensors.
I will bet $100 AUD (Or about 50 UK pounds) that there will be absolutely no jailtime served by anyone involved in the loss of this data, with the possible exception of the poor soul who found it.
After the number of high-profile security breaches, the number of well-meaning people who have been treated as suspects by the police and the willingness of the media to pay for such stories, it seems that the only sensible thing to do is very quietly hand it over to a journalist.
Most break ins are dumb criminals doing smash n grab jobs, the alarm is there to blast a 120dB siren in their face and hopefully freak them out enough that they run away.
As much as anything else, the alarm is there so they go next door instead;)
I don't think the police would care one way or the other. And I don't think you insurance would care either, other than a likely (small) discount for having a third-party monitoring system.
You ever had a major burglary? The insurance company can and will make fitting an alarm a condition of renewing your insurance next year. And don't imagine they'll accept "cheap DIY alarm from B&Q" because they won't.
Yes, this decade has been about TCDGADA (The customers do give a damn about:). First networking inflexibility, then security, then interface, then performance. Now if we can hold their feet to the fire about crippleware (five editions, only one with the all the features that matter), file formats, and equitable interoperability, Windows might become a product we work with instead of around.
It's called market segmentation. It's actually a good thing in this case because the only rational reason Microsoft would have for segmenting the market is that they're genuinely concerned that there is competition.
Quite simply, there's no real need to segment the market when you control 98% of it. But when your control is weakening, it's a valid strategy to try and sell to people who might otherwise be tempted to try out things like Linux (at the "Vista Home Basic" read: cheap) end or Mac OS X.
& applications that real people/businesses use are available for Ubuntu.
Open Office reads and writes Microsoft Office files. The real reason Open Source hasn't taken off is corporate FUD.
Oh dear. Another person who thinks that the only piece of software any business ever uses is Office.
There are hundreds of business applications which vary in size from "shitty little thing written in VB that only works on one PC" right the way up to "dirty great application which supports hundreds of users" that are very much Windows-only. They're seldom discussed on/., however, because they're generally specific to either a particular business (eg. insurance, auction houses) or a specific business function (eg. accounts, payroll, pensions). Half-decent alternatives to these tend to be thin on the ground and even if you find one, there's the issue of migration.
If you're lucky, they store their information in a reasonably easy to access database such as SQL server - though they sure as hell won't include a full description of the schema in the documentation. If you're unlucky, it's in a proprietary file format..
Businesses which have been around for many years with little change to their business-specific systems may, ironically, have the easiest time migrating desktops - there's a strong chance that the real work goes on through a terminal based system.
That the financial system is not any more secure than this. I always thought there were some serious security measures taken by banks before transferring funds, like doing small payments whose value has to be confirmed, and stuff like this.
Perhaps, but you've got to bear in mind that the banking industry is, more or less by definition, entirely driven by money.
There will always be a certain degree of fraud - the entire industry accepts that and doesn't even pretend that they'll ever eliminate it altogether. However, it's a huge industry. Even small procedural changes take a lot of work to implement - and therefore cost a lot of money.
If the amount of money lost to fraud that can be saved by a given procedural change is less than the amount it will cost to implement, it makes no sense to implement it.
A "reset my password" form would (are you ready?) email the wiki maintainer with a request to reset that user's password.
That, you'll be relieved to know, is gone.
While it's fast and has a simple file-based structure, it's also one of the worst web apps I've ever seen.
Fast? I must have missed something.
It's not a very mature app, however. It's been going a while and it's at version 4, but even minor version changes can mean API upheaval/breakage, version upgrading is always a game of whack-a-mole in terms of sorting out issues and it delegates features to third-party plugins which should have been made part of the core functionality several years ago.
We run TWiki at work. Not my choice, I hasten to add - it was already in place when I started as sysadmin and had a couple of gigs of data stored there.
I don't really like it.
Even minor upgrades are inevitably a big game of "let's see what's broken next", it's an absolute dog for anyone non-technical to use (there is finally a WYSIWYG editor that doesn't completely break everything in version 4.1) and the core developers tend to be painfully elitist. (as in: We don't care for [FEATURE], you shouldn't have non-techie people using it anyway so if a lack of [FEATURE] puts people off, all the better).
Features which are fairly basic in things like MediaWiki (eg. editing individual sections) require plugins, the plugin API changes drastically from one version to the next.
You can see previous edits but you can't just click a couple of buttons to revert to an earlier version - last time I checked, you had to view the source of the previous version and copy/paste it into a new revision.
Backend data isn't stored in a database; it's RCS. The only realistic way to migrate to any alternative is to write some sort of script but the number of little glitches you're likely to find in a TWiki site that's been running for many years and upgraded a few times is so huge that I hardly dare even try it.
I would dearly love to migrate the lot to a more mature alternative, but now there's so much built around TWiki that it's not really an option.
If you even need to ask, you've already demonstrated a trace of ethics.
Now, sometimes having such ethics will mean you have to make difficult choices. And nobody else can make those choices for you.
While ethics won't pay the mortgage, "Reason for leaving the previous job: I was asked to do something illegal and, when I queried this, was given the ultimatum to do it or get out. I got out." is probably a heck of a lot better than "The company had to sack me after it transpired I'd done something illegal" (emails to CYA notwithstanding).
Because, make no mistake, the fact that your company has done this will get out.
Slashdot Mirror
Is there a way to create or replicate this bone marrow? Or will this immune donor be continually used for every AIDS patient in the world?
It's not quite as simple as that. As I understand it, there are different bone marrow types - just like you get different blood types - and for a transplant to be successful, you want to be transferring to someone with the same type. So for every HIV+ patient, you need to find a donor who is not only of the right type, but is also naturally immune.
Any judge these days who buys into the RIAA's bullshit as an absolute moron and should be impeached immediately for a lack of reasoning ability and common sense. These cases, all based on illegal investigations and no valid legal foundation, along with outright lies in the testimony of their sole "expert" at the ex parte John Doe joined subpoena phase should be stopped at that moment.
Ah, there you hit upon a problem in any modern society.
There are so many things that one needs to understand to effectively deal with a legal case these days that it is completely unreasonable to expect someone to understand them all. Hence you have specialists - the lawyers argue the law, the judges make decisions based on the law and the expert witnesses explain things which require an expert. Things like "Given that we've been shown A, B and C, what are these things evidence of? What do they tell us?"
The thing is, any old fred can get up in court and say "A tells you that the person was sharing files, B confirms it's the person standing there and not any random off the street, C confirms the files that they were sharing and the number of times they shared them". There are supposed to be checks and balances in place to make sure that the people who stand up as experts really do know what they're talking about, but history has shown that it is possible to find someone who one might reasonably consider to be an expert to stand up and say anything.
It is they who are the terrorists. I'm just an ordinary lawyer trying to help protect the rights of innocent people from a pack of extortionist bullies who don't care about what is legal or what is right.
And frankly, the world needs more people like you.
The RIAA's legal counsel does the general public's perception of lawyers no favours at all, and the fact that they seem to get away with their behaviour much of the time is even worse.
any OS that locks up solid so you have to ssh in remotely and kill your login session so you can log in
If you can log in via ssh and have enough process control to kill a session then your OS didn't "lock up solid".
True, but if you're describing how ready or otherwise the system is for a "typical user" (by which I mean someone who isn't familiar with Unix) to run on their own PC, there's not a lot of difference between "locked up solid login session" and "locked up solid OS".
(FWIW I think anyone who doesn't have a rough idea what they're doing needs their head examining if they really want to run Solaris, but it takes all sorts...)
What the telco really means is that it wants no competition.
Isn't the entire idea behind a free market to that there should be competition?
And the entire idea behind a monopoly is that you can set the prices to be more-or-less what you like.
A lot of these smaller shops there is just "the IT guy" that does everything. A lot of these places, when the IT guy goes on vacation, everyone just kind of holds their breath. Chances are pretty good the servers/network will chug along just fine for a couple of weeks unattended, but you never know what unforseen problem that might suddenly crop up and the one guy who runs everything isn't around to fix it.
I know. I am the IT guy.
You're quite right, but I'd argue that if the place isn't big enough to have at least two IT people, it should have none at all and instead outsource - if only because there's a very great risk of that guy making himself indispensable.
Better off does not = cheaper. Ive seen a lot of small offices, law firms, etc spend too much money for lousy service and poor response time from 3rd party support.
May not always be the case, but depending on what he does this may not be a good idea.
There's a simple reason for this.
The third party company will probably have a service level agreement with something like "n hour response, n*2 hour fix". It's in their interests to ensure that they only just have enough staff to be able to meet this. Any more will cost them more money while gaining very little.
Whereas many in-house IT departments are staffed on the basis of "how can we provide the best possible service (within reason) for the business" - and that generally means a rather more generous number of staff.
So even a relatively straightforward desktop support issue ("the hard disk in my PC's failed, I can't do anything") suddenly takes a whole working day to get fixed. Minimum. And that's assuming that they keep at least one spare PC and a person to swap them over onsite.
A whole working day in which the end user has basically sat around twiddling their thumbs.
Take a 2 week vacation and see if everything still works afterward. Your job is to keep everything working. If everything works without you, then you are not needed. If, however the boss balks at 2 weeks without IT support, you are vital.
If you can't even take off two weeks, that suggests to me that you're firefighting rather than putting in genuinely useful time.
Meanwhile we have massive infrastructural problems in IT because of a lack of people to carry out necessary on-the-ground projects. Dismantling these vast Government willy-waggling programmes and reallocating skilled staff to fixing the IT problems in local and national government all over the country would be a huge benefit - but it would mean dismantling departments, and it would mean overpaid business development managers getting the push and real IT implementers getting more visibility. And we don't want that, do we?
Sounds like something straight out of "Yes, Minister".
3M makes and sells a very pocketable battery powered projector already. It has been for sale for a couple of months. Has better specs too, and it's cheaper. I'm not sure why we have articles that ignore stuff like this. I know we can't be experts on everything, but man, the author couldn't do a quick google search for pico projectors?
-Taylor
And according to The Register, it's borderline unusable.
(Got to admire how a product which by their own admission "The first unit sent was nigh on impossible to use, because the cable had to be held in some impossible position to get a picture. The second unit involved a similar palaver but, with the aid of a tripod and a few books to support the cable, once a picture had been established it would remain, so long as you didnâ(TM)t touch it." still gets 50%)
I don't know exactly why the printers actually available(particularly the cheap ones) have resisted standardization so sharply;
Software is cheaper than hardware, and the hardware required to process Postscript is still quite a lot more powerful (and therefore expensive) than most manufacturers are prepared to put into their cheaper hardware. You also have to license it from Adobe, which costs money.
I don't know where these faulty games have been distributed, but I do know that in the UK, despite strong consumer protection laws, at least one or two well-known chains appear to have taken to training their staff in a company policy of "no refunds ever under any circumstances" and simply ignoring the law.
The idea being that most customers will give up sooner than take them to court or report them to Trading Standards.
Myself, I think a bit of undercover journalism to find out if this genuinely is company policy, followed by a very expensive appearance in court is in order.
It's really difficult to get a feel for this question without knowing why anyone would want a 'remote moving datacentre' that isn't well connected to anything else. Why can't the computers be sited somewhere less troublesome? Would virtualising the machines to get round the booting/power on/off issues help, or is there some reason that this can;t be done?
While I don't know what the OP's reasons are, I can think of a few. Most revolve around the idea of doing some sort of data processing in a remote location (eg. the antarctic or onboard a ship) which has to store a fair bit of data so needs something nearby to connect to. Quite plausible, particularly if the data processing is reading information from sensors.
Giving i to a newspaper will shame the people who made the loss of data possible and then you can hope that some encryption will happen.
Except it hasn't yet.
I will bet $100 AUD (Or about 50 UK pounds) that there will be absolutely no jailtime served by anyone involved in the loss of this data, with the possible exception of the poor soul who found it.
After the number of high-profile security breaches, the number of well-meaning people who have been treated as suspects by the police and the willingness of the media to pay for such stories, it seems that the only sensible thing to do is very quietly hand it over to a journalist.
Most break ins are dumb criminals doing smash n grab jobs, the alarm is there to blast a 120dB siren in their face and hopefully freak them out enough that they run away.
As much as anything else, the alarm is there so they go next door instead ;)
I don't think the police would care one way or the other. And I don't think you insurance would care either, other than a likely (small) discount for having a third-party monitoring system.
You ever had a major burglary? The insurance company can and will make fitting an alarm a condition of renewing your insurance next year. And don't imagine they'll accept "cheap DIY alarm from B&Q" because they won't.
Yes, this decade has been about TCDGADA (The customers do give a damn about:). First networking inflexibility, then security, then interface, then performance. Now if we can hold their feet to the fire about crippleware (five editions, only one with the all the features that matter), file formats, and equitable interoperability, Windows might become a product we work with instead of around.
It's called market segmentation. It's actually a good thing in this case because the only rational reason Microsoft would have for segmenting the market is that they're genuinely concerned that there is competition.
Quite simply, there's no real need to segment the market when you control 98% of it. But when your control is weakening, it's a valid strategy to try and sell to people who might otherwise be tempted to try out things like Linux (at the "Vista Home Basic" read: cheap) end or Mac OS X.
& applications that real people/businesses use are available for Ubuntu.
Open Office reads and writes Microsoft Office files. The real reason Open Source hasn't taken off is corporate FUD.
Oh dear. Another person who thinks that the only piece of software any business ever uses is Office.
There are hundreds of business applications which vary in size from "shitty little thing written in VB that only works on one PC" right the way up to "dirty great application which supports hundreds of users" that are very much Windows-only. They're seldom discussed on /., however, because they're generally specific to either a particular business (eg. insurance, auction houses) or a specific business function (eg. accounts, payroll, pensions). Half-decent alternatives to these tend to be thin on the ground and even if you find one, there's the issue of migration.
If you're lucky, they store their information in a reasonably easy to access database such as SQL server - though they sure as hell won't include a full description of the schema in the documentation. If you're unlucky, it's in a proprietary file format..
Businesses which have been around for many years with little change to their business-specific systems may, ironically, have the easiest time migrating desktops - there's a strong chance that the real work goes on through a terminal based system.
And there won't ever be as long as people stick to stuff that comes from apt-get, don't do silly things with permissions, etc.
There wouldn't ever be any crapware on Windows if people stuck to reliable sources of software.
That the financial system is not any more secure than this. I always thought there were some serious security measures taken by banks before transferring funds, like doing small payments whose value has to be confirmed, and stuff like this.
Perhaps, but you've got to bear in mind that the banking industry is, more or less by definition, entirely driven by money.
There will always be a certain degree of fraud - the entire industry accepts that and doesn't even pretend that they'll ever eliminate it altogether. However, it's a huge industry. Even small procedural changes take a lot of work to implement - and therefore cost a lot of money.
If the amount of money lost to fraud that can be saved by a given procedural change is less than the amount it will cost to implement, it makes no sense to implement it.
If this is all true, I don't get it. What's the point of saying "Yeah thanks, but we don't want your help any more" (i.e. #$%^ off.)
I imagine the idea is to turn TWiki into a commercial product and sell it.
Can't think who'd want to pay for it though.
A "reset my password" form would (are you ready?) email the wiki maintainer with a request to reset that user's password.
That, you'll be relieved to know, is gone.
While it's fast and has a simple file-based structure, it's also one of the worst web apps I've ever seen.
Fast? I must have missed something.
It's not a very mature app, however. It's been going a while and it's at version 4, but even minor version changes can mean API upheaval/breakage, version upgrading is always a game of whack-a-mole in terms of sorting out issues and it delegates features to third-party plugins which should have been made part of the core functionality several years ago.
We run TWiki at work. Not my choice, I hasten to add - it was already in place when I started as sysadmin and had a couple of gigs of data stored there.
I don't really like it.
Even minor upgrades are inevitably a big game of "let's see what's broken next", it's an absolute dog for anyone non-technical to use (there is finally a WYSIWYG editor that doesn't completely break everything in version 4.1) and the core developers tend to be painfully elitist. (as in: We don't care for [FEATURE], you shouldn't have non-techie people using it anyway so if a lack of [FEATURE] puts people off, all the better).
Features which are fairly basic in things like MediaWiki (eg. editing individual sections) require plugins, the plugin API changes drastically from one version to the next.
You can see previous edits but you can't just click a couple of buttons to revert to an earlier version - last time I checked, you had to view the source of the previous version and copy/paste it into a new revision.
Backend data isn't stored in a database; it's RCS. The only realistic way to migrate to any alternative is to write some sort of script but the number of little glitches you're likely to find in a TWiki site that's been running for many years and upgraded a few times is so huge that I hardly dare even try it.
I would dearly love to migrate the lot to a more mature alternative, but now there's so much built around TWiki that it's not really an option.
If you even need to ask, you've already demonstrated a trace of ethics.
Now, sometimes having such ethics will mean you have to make difficult choices. And nobody else can make those choices for you.
While ethics won't pay the mortgage, "Reason for leaving the previous job: I was asked to do something illegal and, when I queried this, was given the ultimatum to do it or get out. I got out." is probably a heck of a lot better than "The company had to sack me after it transpired I'd done something illegal" (emails to CYA notwithstanding).
Because, make no mistake, the fact that your company has done this will get out.