Since they have already said that repair missions to the hubble scope are off the agenda, sooner or later its going to die. There are replacements on the way anyhow.
Personally I think they should boost it into higher orbit so it stays safe for future space archeologists. The same bods who will eventually be interested in retreiving the Viking missions, and who knows, if we get fast enough ships, the voyagers.
Likely they did it because they knew if they didn't, then microsofts format would possibly beat them to the punch. After all many other things were de-facto standards before microsoft got interested and destroyed them.
I like pdf, and see no reason to use another format for tasks I'd use a pdf for, personally.
not on any computers I own, my promised free opensolaris dvd has never arrived.
Ubuntu managed to send me the one I ordered. Heck, even microsoft managed to post an SP2 cd to me, but Sun? It would appear my order has dissapeared into the ether.
Nah, I'd say it was my fault. It was over 20 years ago, what would be the point in lying?
As I got close to finishing management saw the amount of money that could be made by going commercial with the system, but instead of talking to me about it, they took the software and tried to get a deal with a software company to further develop it, leaving me out of the loop.
Since I was the designer of the system, and had the required domain knowledge, I was possibly a good choice to lead or at least take part in the commercial development, but they handled the situation so badly (hiding the talks with the software house from me and lying when I asked about deployment plans), that I discovered the talks through a thrid party and quit immediatelly in disgust.
Why did they try to hide it from me? I have no idea, really I don't. After all they effectivelly owned the software. Being treated like that though was too much for me, I care not for lies, so I left. Shortly afterwards the project collapsed.
It was a shame really, but there we are, these things happen.
The patients in the system I designed (described in the reply to "a potential disaster?" above) were unable to give consent for such a system. Thus the responsibility was assigned to key workers who took the role of advocate for those individuals.
This is also the means that should be used for patients who may, at the time of need for such information, be unable to provide informed consent.
In the case of the general population of a given country, there is no way that everyone could give explicit consent in advance. Not many people know when they will become ill, so cannot be assumed as providing informed consent as individuals.
The solution therefore is for a body to be established whose responsibility it is to act as advocate in advance for these unknown individuals. Such a body would require strong ethical guidelines so as to assure the correct treatment of information. Not being in the medical field any more I am unaware if such bodies exist, though the need should be apparent to any government defining the requirement for such a system.
It should be noted that, by the laws in the UK and the US at least (unsure regarding other countries), informed consent regarding medical treatment is not required if no source of consent is available in those critical periods when consent is normally sought, although it is sought as a first resort should the time for retreival of consent exist. A practitioner may retreive any and all medical information regarding an identified but unresponsive individual that is available, and make medical decisions on behalf of the unresponsive individual without such information should it not be available, or too late in arriving.
The issue then is the level of ease by which such information is available, since rapid delivery is more likely to ensure the corect medical response. In the medical world time is paramount, so information that may mean the difference between life and death, or even the allowing of the death of a patient in accordance to patient instruction as previously recorded, should ideally be available by some method which minimises he delay between request and delivery.
I designed a similer system for the NHS in oxfordshire, england, way back in the 1980's. Such was the lack of understanding about IT at the time that the project floundered and failed, in spite of the year I spent coding the darn thing.
Mine was not for general patients though, it was for people with learning disabilities, so their care needs could be available should they be hospitalised whilst on holiday or on some other excursion from home.
In my system, records were temporarily made available to the region that the client was visiting, but only able to be accessed if a nominated individual requested them. By therefore involving a human in the process I sought to reduce the chances of sensitive medical data being released to the wrong people. This was pre interweb, so the method of making available was arcane, but effective.
Sadly the project failed because of monumentally crap management. In that way at least the project was ahead of it's time....
Not when the reason is 'National Security' because of 'Threats to the Nation'. That's the start of different classes of freedom, and that's the same as no freedom at all.
Anyway, I have a normal passport that I've used for the last thiry odd years, and I am not required to use it unless I want to to travel.
Were non terror related reason the cause, perhaps people might be less against it. The problem with this is it by definition dictates that anyone without an ID is immediatelly suspect, and would potentially be subject to arrest or questioning. That's the way these things have *always* gone in the past. That the Bush administration deny this will occur is beside the point, that is what these things are for, to monitor the movements and identity of the entire population, you can't gloss over the fact that this implies there are serious consequences for refusal to obey if it's required. Can they, in all truth, state that there will *never* be a US government that will abuse it?
Not for nothing does the phrase 'the road to hell is paved with good intentions' exist.
Also, a large number of US citizens are there because their ancestors fled nations that mandated total control of the public, or segments of the population. That kind of history doesn't get forgotten easily. I'm in the UK, but my family are here because of just such an exodus. I personally intend to refuse to take part in any ID scheme here as well.
Ok, so this may be over-reacting, but the fact is, this is a step too far for many people. National ID of this kind has scary implications, no matter the 'sensibleness' of the implementation.
The real clincher (I think) will be the first to get to affordable home archiving use. The first writer/media combo that is cheap enough to warrent the purchase for mid-income range families will be the one most likely to be widely taken up.
I'll be waiting about another three years from now though, just to be absolutelly sure.
Bomber Harris thought much along the same lines, which is why he started his city bombing campaign to kill civilians and infrastructure (but mainly civilians, lets be honest here). After all, why kill the army when you can wreck the very thing they're fighting for?
Vicous and terrible though it was, it did have the required effect, which was to terrorise to the point that people wished the war was over. There was not one jot of resistance to the allies once the war was declared finished. Would that have been the case if we hadn't done what we did?
I'll never agree with the decision, but I can understand the motivation.
The truly horrific thing was that the whole bombing of english and german cities thing started because one german bomber got lost and hit london by mistake. I wonder if there could be an alalogue with robots? Perhaps one killing a building full of innocent people?
Communist states have often used dramatic terms to get their meaning across.
'Purify' 'Glorious' 'Courageous'
And other terms meant to indicate that somehow the idea described is 'whiter then white' and all that man can aspire to. It's all part of the ethos. If people thought that the idea's of the government weren't perfect, then why they might start thinking up their own idea's, and that will never do. Of course us capitalist democracies do get the same stuff sometimes, but we can say 'screw you' to the people saying it.
Whatever, it's obvious this guy has never seen 4chan, or he would have already given up....
I've done this for years, but I will admit the idea of a 'pick up and fix for me' warranty does have its appeal sometimes.
Mind you, if I got a machine from Dell it would have windows on it, I like my linux machines to be headless monsters capable of running my experiments, or simple coding boxes with a basic Gcard.
windows machines == gaming boxen for me, not a place for serious work.
The very fact that city design means that people are virtually forced into cars assures weight gain.
In the past I have considered moving to the US. That I cannot drive (medically barred from same) means it would likely be very hard to find a place to live where I wasn't stuck in one place all the time, which put me off.
no problem regarding the bucolicism (is that a word?)
I'm, somewhat biased, since I am fascinated by the development of trade over the ages, and evolution of mathematics and writing. Politics and empire building/maintenance doesn't interest me much.
It's a many faceted subject.
However I am aware of the extreme costs involved in any such project if it is to really be able to be understood by peoples far in the future. Who knows, even subsequent evolutions of intelligent life. This was the problem facing the people given the job of indicating a nuclear waste store in the desert, and it took them a long time just to find some likely symbols. Finding a similer method to encode the knowledge of our entire world (significant bits of at any rate) is horrifically complex, so far as I can tell.
They could always encode it mathematically, that at least won't change. Provioding context for the information though, urk.
Given that no government organisation anywhere has dealt with this issue to date, aside from warning covers on nuclear dumps, I think it is entirely reasonable for companies to do it.
There is plenty of precedent for business to be the ones being responsible for records of a previous age. Shipwrecks found to contain ancient trade goods were owned and operated by businesmen, writing was first developed to aid trade, and the earliest evidence we have for writing is of storage records from warehouses.
Governments often left huge impressive edifices, encribed with murals/hieroglyphic and so on, but its the thousands of years of trade records, either written, carved, or buried in silt at the bottom of the mediterranian in the form of former trade ships that give us most of what we know about the detail of life in the ancient world.
I really doubt this will involve proprietary information. It can only, by its very definition, use easily deciferable methods.
Besides, it matters not who does this, only that it is done. Do you think that in thousands of years time anyone will give a crap who the company that started it was? Or that the company will even exist?
Using formats easily understood by unknown technology is a non trivial task, and will require a vast amount of work. While microsoft may start the effort, its doubtful the will complete it without assistance from other companies, if only because those companies may employ someone with important insight into the problem.
I think it's a fascinating development, probably also an inevitable one.
I suspect it will be in for a very hard sell. The main problem is the perception that it wasn't built for the consumer, but for the media producers. This is another one for the bargain bucket if you ask me.
I'm sure the designers were able to convince themselves that users want Zune style restrictions in their media experience, but history shows that people will gravitate towards the simplest device that meets their needs, and the Zune isn't it.
The sad thing is there is probably some kickass hardware in the thing, but it's been tasked, as I said, to suit media producers first, which is the wrong way round.
Wireless on a whole campus? Wow. Is that standard in the US? At my uni we have wireless within the CS dept only, and that only within a small part of the building. It's monumentally shit.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds good to me....
true, but there's not much will for that mission, one has already been cancelled, and I doubt this one will go ahead either
Since they have already said that repair missions to the hubble scope are off the agenda, sooner or later its going to die. There are replacements on the way anyhow.
Personally I think they should boost it into higher orbit so it stays safe for future space archeologists. The same bods who will eventually be interested in retreiving the Viking missions, and who knows, if we get fast enough ships, the voyagers.
Likely they did it because they knew if they didn't, then microsofts format would possibly beat them to the punch. After all many other things were de-facto standards before microsoft got interested and destroyed them.
I like pdf, and see no reason to use another format for tasks I'd use a pdf for, personally.
not on any computers I own, my promised free opensolaris dvd has never arrived.
Ubuntu managed to send me the one I ordered. Heck, even microsoft managed to post an SP2 cd to me, but Sun? It would appear my order has dissapeared into the ether.
At least they didn't say they paid for a survey...
Nah, I'd say it was my fault. It was over 20 years ago, what would be the point in lying?
As I got close to finishing management saw the amount of money that could be made by going commercial with the system, but instead of talking to me about it, they took the software and tried to get a deal with a software company to further develop it, leaving me out of the loop.
Since I was the designer of the system, and had the required domain knowledge, I was possibly a good choice to lead or at least take part in the commercial development, but they handled the situation so badly (hiding the talks with the software house from me and lying when I asked about deployment plans), that I discovered the talks through a thrid party and quit immediatelly in disgust.
Why did they try to hide it from me? I have no idea, really I don't. After all they effectivelly owned the software. Being treated like that though was too much for me, I care not for lies, so I left. Shortly afterwards the project collapsed.
It was a shame really, but there we are, these things happen.
The patients in the system I designed (described in the reply to "a potential disaster?" above) were unable to give consent for such a system. Thus the responsibility was assigned to key workers who took the role of advocate for those individuals.
This is also the means that should be used for patients who may, at the time of need for such information, be unable to provide informed consent.
In the case of the general population of a given country, there is no way that everyone could give explicit consent in advance. Not many people know when they will become ill, so cannot be assumed as providing informed consent as individuals.
The solution therefore is for a body to be established whose responsibility it is to act as advocate in advance for these unknown individuals. Such a body would require strong ethical guidelines so as to assure the correct treatment of information. Not being in the medical field any more I am unaware if such bodies exist, though the need should be apparent to any government defining the requirement for such a system.
It should be noted that, by the laws in the UK and the US at least (unsure regarding other countries), informed consent regarding medical treatment is not required if no source of consent is available in those critical periods when consent is normally sought, although it is sought as a first resort should the time for retreival of consent exist.
A practitioner may retreive any and all medical information regarding an identified but unresponsive individual that is available, and make medical decisions on behalf of the unresponsive individual without such information should it not be available, or too late in arriving.
The issue then is the level of ease by which such information is available, since rapid delivery is more likely to ensure the corect medical response. In the medical world time is paramount, so information that may mean the difference between life and death, or even the allowing of the death of a patient in accordance to patient instruction as previously recorded, should ideally be available by some method which minimises he delay between request and delivery.
I designed a similer system for the NHS in oxfordshire, england, way back in the 1980's. Such was the lack of understanding about IT at the time that the project floundered and failed, in spite of the year I spent coding the darn thing.
Mine was not for general patients though, it was for people with learning disabilities, so their care needs could be available should they be hospitalised whilst on holiday or on some other excursion from home.
In my system, records were temporarily made available to the region that the client was visiting, but only able to be accessed if a nominated individual requested them. By therefore involving a human in the process I sought to reduce the chances of sensitive medical data being released to the wrong people. This was pre interweb, so the method of making available was arcane, but effective.
Sadly the project failed because of monumentally crap management. In that way at least the project was ahead of it's time....
Not when the reason is 'National Security' because of 'Threats to the Nation'. That's the start of different classes of freedom, and that's the same as no freedom at all.
Anyway, I have a normal passport that I've used for the last thiry odd years, and I am not required to use it unless I want to to travel.
Were non terror related reason the cause, perhaps people might be less against it. The problem with this is it by definition dictates that anyone without an ID is immediatelly suspect, and would potentially be subject to arrest or questioning. That's the way these things have *always* gone in the past. That the Bush administration deny this will occur is beside the point, that is what these things are for, to monitor the movements and identity of the entire population, you can't gloss over the fact that this implies there are serious consequences for refusal to obey if it's required. Can they, in all truth, state that there will *never* be a US government that will abuse it?
Not for nothing does the phrase 'the road to hell is paved with good intentions' exist.
Also, a large number of US citizens are there because their ancestors fled nations that mandated total control of the public, or segments of the population. That kind of history doesn't get forgotten easily. I'm in the UK, but my family are here because of just such an exodus. I personally intend to refuse to take part in any ID scheme here as well.
Ok, so this may be over-reacting, but the fact is, this is a step too far for many people. National ID of this kind has scary implications, no matter the 'sensibleness' of the implementation.
The real clincher (I think) will be the first to get to affordable home archiving use. The first writer/media combo that is cheap enough to warrent the purchase for mid-income range families will be the one most likely to be widely taken up.
I'll be waiting about another three years from now though, just to be absolutelly sure.
Bomber Harris thought much along the same lines, which is why he started his city bombing campaign to kill civilians and infrastructure (but mainly civilians, lets be honest here). After all, why kill the army when you can wreck the very thing they're fighting for?
Vicous and terrible though it was, it did have the required effect, which was to terrorise to the point that people wished the war was over. There was not one jot of resistance to the allies once the war was declared finished. Would that have been the case if we hadn't done what we did?
I'll never agree with the decision, but I can understand the motivation.
The truly horrific thing was that the whole bombing of english and german cities thing started because one german bomber got lost and hit london by mistake. I wonder if there could be an alalogue with robots? Perhaps one killing a building full of innocent people?
Communist states have often used dramatic terms to get their meaning across.
'Purify'
'Glorious'
'Courageous'
And other terms meant to indicate that somehow the idea described is 'whiter then white' and all that man can aspire to. It's all part of the ethos. If people thought that the idea's of the government weren't perfect, then why they might start thinking up their own idea's, and that will never do.
Of course us capitalist democracies do get the same stuff sometimes, but we can say 'screw you' to the people saying it.
Whatever, it's obvious this guy has never seen 4chan, or he would have already given up....
{sounds of mob picking up stones}....
I've done this for years, but I will admit the idea of a 'pick up and fix for me' warranty does have its appeal sometimes.
Mind you, if I got a machine from Dell it would have windows on it, I like my linux machines to be headless monsters capable of running my experiments, or simple coding boxes with a basic Gcard.
windows machines == gaming boxen for me, not a place for serious work.
The very fact that city design means that people are virtually forced into cars assures weight gain.
In the past I have considered moving to the US. That I cannot drive (medically barred from same) means it would likely be very hard to find a place to live where I wasn't stuck in one place all the time, which put me off.
no problem regarding the bucolicism (is that a word?)
I'm, somewhat biased, since I am fascinated by the development of trade over the ages, and evolution of mathematics and writing. Politics and empire building/maintenance doesn't interest me much.
It's a many faceted subject.
However I am aware of the extreme costs involved in any such project if it is to really be able to be understood by peoples far in the future. Who knows, even subsequent evolutions of intelligent life. This was the problem facing the people given the job of indicating a nuclear waste store in the desert, and it took them a long time just to find some likely symbols. Finding a similer method to encode the knowledge of our entire world (significant bits of at any rate) is horrifically complex, so far as I can tell.
They could always encode it mathematically, that at least won't change. Provioding context for the information though, urk.
Given that no government organisation anywhere has dealt with this issue to date, aside from warning covers on nuclear dumps, I think it is entirely reasonable for companies to do it.
There is plenty of precedent for business to be the ones being responsible for records of a previous age. Shipwrecks found to contain ancient trade goods were owned and operated by businesmen, writing was first developed to aid trade, and the earliest evidence we have for writing is of storage records from warehouses.
Governments often left huge impressive edifices, encribed with murals/hieroglyphic and so on, but its the thousands of years of trade records, either written, carved, or buried in silt at the bottom of the mediterranian in the form of former trade ships that give us most of what we know about the detail of life in the ancient world.
So rip the music to cd, convert that to mp3 and do exactly what you want with the music you bought....
iTunes allows that without difficulty.
I really doubt this will involve proprietary information. It can only, by its very definition, use easily deciferable methods.
Besides, it matters not who does this, only that it is done. Do you think that in thousands of years time anyone will give a crap who the company that started it was? Or that the company will even exist?
Using formats easily understood by unknown technology is a non trivial task, and will require a vast amount of work. While microsoft may start the effort, its doubtful the will complete it without assistance from other companies, if only because those companies may employ someone with important insight into the problem.
I think it's a fascinating development, probably also an inevitable one.
the mere fact that they're having to mention just one catagory of the total player sales in the US to find a decent number is rather telling.
I suspect it will be in for a very hard sell.
The main problem is the perception that it wasn't built for the consumer, but for the media producers. This is another one for the bargain bucket if you ask me.
I'm sure the designers were able to convince themselves that users want Zune style restrictions in their media experience, but history shows that people will gravitate towards the simplest device that meets their needs, and the Zune isn't it.
The sad thing is there is probably some kickass hardware in the thing, but it's been tasked, as I said, to suit media producers first, which is the wrong way round.
Wireless on a whole campus? Wow. Is that standard in the US?
At my uni we have wireless within the CS dept only, and that only within a small part of the building. It's monumentally shit.
I know it's friday and all, but whatever you're taking you need to slow down :-)