I think it can be put in simpler terms: When H1B visas were requested and utilized there were many more Americans with jobs. While the workforce market allowed for foreign workers then, it does not necessarily do so now. Foreign and temporary workers should make up the bulk, if not total, of workers laid off now. Don't give me crap about how they spend money here in the USA too. It's about keeping a job, feeding families. Sorry, American families should come first in these hard times. Yeah, I know we just did the bialout shuffle dance, but any company that retains foreign workers while citizens are put out on the street will lose my business, and I will work to ensure they lose business from other citizens.
Sadly, I think you are right. Since I loathe iWTFever, I suppose I'll not be using any touchscreen devices anytime soon. Shame. This will be much like getting a patent on a brake pedal, IMO.
Sometimes a patent is not such a good thing for the public. I hope that this doesn't turn out to be one of those times.
Just two words
on
Daemon
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Imagine the game play when the computer you're playing against behaves as though it were a human? Getting to level 9000 and killing the megabeast is no longer a game of skills with the game controller and dexterity. If the game could change every game to challenge you as a human might, the game might be different every time for every player.
With network connectivity, the game could draw on data from thousands of other players to add changes to the game you are playing.
Such technology could lend itself to becoming a very useful 'clippy' assistant embedded in your OS.
Not sure what kind of hardware you'd need, but it would be possible.
It's just a thought, but if schools can start teaching geeks/nerds how to be social, teaching others how to manage their pc is probably not far off in the future.
You might be getting old, but reporting malicious attacks like the weather is a good thing. Some will get tired of it, but the good thing is that perhaps the average joe public user will become aware of how vulnerable their on-line experience and computer are. Fighting DDoS attacks has been done successfully, but it takes a lot of work, and a lot of hardware. There are a couple of stories on the Internet about such.
The most recent botnet reports show that 100s of millions of PCs are infected with via a MS vulnerability that was fixed with a patch last year.
We need to see the awareness level increased, and some serious attention to detail on the patch/upgrade cycles.
Where I work, Linux is taking a big chunk away from both MS and Sun for price alone. We (developers) have shown that we can use Linux and two different DB engines to replicate or outperform the existing Sun/Oracle environment. With some of the Sun hardware at EOL, upgrade is forced, and cost is a big issue. MS/Sun/Oracle lost out.
On the desktop? I have 6 systems at home running Ubuntu, one for testing that currently has Mint/CentOS dual installation, and of course I've got dual installs with others (Puppy/DSL/Fedora)
I know that other people have other constraints, but I truly don't get the logic behind it. Sooner or later, you'll find yourself at the forced upgrade state, and I don't see how you can argue for anything but Linux at that point, if not sooner. Note: that doesn't count legacy Windows only apps that won't run on Wine, or hardware requirements that preclude Linux such as some RT systems requirements. I'm still steadily converting Windows users to Ubuntu with little effort... once they understand that Linux (and everything else) doesn't run on Windows.
Linux may not be the reason, but the threat of Linux is part of the reason.
....You can't be a player in the WTO if you are branded as a thief. The other kids won't want to play with you!
I think this statement sums up the WTO fantastically well. It's a club for schoolkids, pretending to be important. They are all thieves, but you don't want ALL of the rest of them calling you a thief. As long as it's only one or two of them, you're ok.
Johnny trades me marbles at a good deal because I have a good supply of bubble gum that he likes. Sure, I trade it to other kids too, but I need the marbles so Johnny and I trade on the side. I think the playground is a great analogy for the WTO.
When I first read the headline, I thought holy fsck, four minutes? How do they know it will last that long? Damn they're playing with black holes! Glad my kid doesn't have a Radio Shack physics experiment kit! And I feel better about not trying to get him a chemistry set. I still worry about the dart board in the garage when I see the dangerous way he plays Wii....
Yes. At some point in the future, I'm fine with the universe unfolding like so:
Mother: Tottle, do NOT do that! Child: But mom, they are just small ones. Mother: You remember what happened to the humans, don't you? Child: They danced funny? Mother: Besides that...... (hand on hip) Child: (face frowning slowly) Yes mother, they blew up the southeast quarter of the galaxy experimenting with black holes. Mother: that's right Tottle. It's all fun and games till chunks of the galaxy go missing. Your father will NOT be impressed if he can't find our house after he gets off work tonight. Child: yes mother Mother: now put your physics set away and make your bed. Child: yes mother
Yes, I'd be happy to be a footnote in the history of the universe as an example of what you really shouldn't do with your Acme Physics set that you got for your birthday.
Clearly, in this day and age, the easiest way to summon a succubus is to share some music files. It may take the demon a little while to find you, but that is understandable since the head demon is spending most of his time currently trying to stay OUT of court rooms.
Seriously, these legal tactics get used now and then. What is needed is some public information, you know, a coordinated Streisand effect making story. Something that will cause the RIAA to feel a need to explain what would have been answered in the deposition. Anyone got any ideas?
Actually, IMO we are in need of another category of malicious software. Social engineering allows code writers to get their code run by the user in a way that is neither stealthy or without their knowledge. It runs as a user program, and did not necessarily 'infect' the machine, yet is a virus by the definition that it has modified an executable. So we need either a new term, or be satisfied that the generic use of the term 'virus' fits such code.
An example would be a screen saver that does it's work when the computer is idle and the screen saver itself has been run on the user's command to do so. That group of software that claims to be scanning software which does more than look for malicious code is also in this category. It's becoming quite confusing, and at any turn unvalidated code can be malicious. Many end users are unable to know the difference without much more training. Social engineering makes it fairly simple to get users to run malicious code.
We've seen people repackage OOo software and sell it. It won't be long before we discover such tactics used to deliver malicious code. Would that be a virus or a worm?
You see, my favorite scenario for malicious code is quite simple... spreads like a virus, then sits and waits patiently for the moment that it finds itself on a machine whose user is 'bill gates' (as an example) then every time the screen saver is activated, it searches the drive for the oldest.xls or.doc files and deletes two of them that are at least 45 days since last access. Every 17th time (or follow a Fibonacci number sequence) the screen saver is activated, it searches for Symantec installations and deletes the current virus definition file. Every 6th boot, it loads a key logger which looks for a select set of certain bank URLs. Every time you plug in a USB drive, it copies itself to the USB device if the screen saver is activated. You see, there are many ways to create hard to find problems. It won't be long before we are seeing them.
They certainly use virus news to justify their existence and the cost of their products. The fact that they exist is tantamount to admitting that no OS can be fully secured.
The harder anti-virus vendors bleat on about how good their product is, the more bragging rights a virus writer will get for walking around the security... among their own crowd. It's more or less a case of putting up a wall and telling the world, there, you can't get past this wall now.
The real trouble with anti-virus vendors is that they tend to convince people that once their product is installed, the end user's pc is safe. It is NOT, and won't ever be. Some of the best virus programs in the world are still out in the wild, running as they were intended to run, collecting and passing information as they are supposed to. Since they are not destructive to normal computer activity, they go undetected. Don't say that such does not exist... I know you have not done forensics on all existent computers. Every now and then we hear about some corporate espionage or attacks from state military groups etc. All of this is just hinting at the real problems: The virus programs we don't know about.
Think about it. If a virus program did some key logging for bank URLs then spread itself a bit, then self destructed... hmmmmm They are seeing more sophisticated virus programs now, and fortunately beginning to look for them. Sadly, you'll have some pretty incredibly long scan times to find some types of malicious software: none of this 45 minute scan by Symantec etc.
Soon, you'll need a multicore CPU just to handle real time scanning. It's a giant whack-a-mole game. Always will be.
Right now, thanks in large part to Congress, there are more reasons than quality. Doing a small project at home, I found a need for a jig saw. A trip to one of the local pawn shops netted me a nearly new Skil jigsaw that currently retails for about $90 USD. My cost? $30 USD. I cleaned the dust off, looks new. If you have the time, great source of other tools too. Quality merchandise lasts long enough to end up in Pawn shops. Found complete set of deep set impact wrench sockets - $14 USD. Can't beat that.
If Congress keeps up what they have been doing, it will soon be one of the few places I can afford to shop.
This Whitehouse Administration is seeking a x86-64 64 bit computer operating system (OS) that is free of cumbersome and expensive licensing issues, can be secured and is not vulnerable to Windows security flaws, and which the Whitehouse Administration IT department can view, modify, and re-issue the source code in compiled form.....
My understanding is that the maintenance staff at the Whitehouse are currently working 24/7 to secure any chairs that can be picked up by a single person.....
In other news, the New president has asked for help installing Seti@home in the Oval Office, and has personally initiated communication with Adobe because he can't view the Zebruder Youtube videos on his laptop.
gah! I forgot to add to my original post that saving money and resources is a damned good reason for having energy efficient appliances. It's just that CO2 is not! It's a trendy buzzword whose common perceived meaning has no viable or believable relationship to a good reason for buying energy efficient devices. I agree with you almost completely. I would posit that people who don't like us very much ALREADY control our economy.
The burger you ate while typing that summary was made from a cow that emitted more damage causing methane than CO2 that my energy star monitors will be responsible for over the next 12 years.
Second, while CO2 is contributing to the hot house gas portion of contributing factors to global warming, it is not the worst or most worrisome contributor, and that is only among hot house gas causes. There are many other contributors that should worry you far more.
On top of that, you say CO2 like the Earth will get so hot in the next few years that we are in danger of bursting into flames any minute, when in fact, there is credible evidence to show that now only is global warming a cruel hoax on politicians and citizens of the world, but there is currently NO WARMING TREND happening.
So, which is it, should we assume you have been duped by the MSM, or are you really believing the hype, drinking the koolaid, and kissing the asses of the ill-informed?
Yeah, that is sort of like flamebait, but damn, enough with the global warming crap already. It's like soooo last year!
Understanding empire building does not require that you build one or keep it going. To dismantle an empire, you must understand how it was built. I didn't say that very well in my original post. I figured it would get modded as flamebait, but better to have said it up front than simply claim I thought it 2 years from now.
Since this is the day for it, let me try to put a bit more truth into what you say:
Whether you voted for the guy or not, one cannot deny the magnitude of the ramifications of Barack Obama's election to the U.S. Presidency.
This past election has seen a level of participation from a large cross-section of our nation, showing America's disdain for both the Bush administration and the Republicans who supported him, both home and abroad. While the tea leaves aren't revealing much about what the future holds, Obama's statments and actions so far show us that we have chosen to go down a different path than we have been going for the past eight years, but one that ultimately leads to the same destination as Obama's clubs and associations are similar or near enough to identical to those of Clinton and Bush.
It will be interesting in Obama's freshman year to see how he'll deal with the mess left by W, and if the Republic will survive. I think more than anything, Barack will have trouble living up to the image of a 'Cristo Negro de Esquipulas', as many wrongly look at him as a messiah of sorts for the nation. That aside, we have a unique moment in history in which we will be asked what it was like when the first African American president was inaugurated, to which we'll reply that it was both exciting and uncertain. Exciting because it seems that we have grown from our bigoted and biased past, but uncertain, not because he's black, but because of the economic and foreign calamities and troubles that have been layed before us.
I like to think of Barak as a little weevil. He was certainly the lesser of two evils. That said, there is little expectation among many of us for Obama to do much of anything beyond mere appeasement to attempt to keep the momentum going. He only promises change, not change we need as defined by people that DO understand the economy, the constitution, and empire building.
How are you supposed to handle the data if you do not understand it? Sure, there can be too much to see/think about at one time, but if you don't understand it, how can you visualize it usefully?
I am asking because I have a problem: Where I work, I understand the data and I make efforts to visualize it for others. The trouble starts when they don't understand the data and it's sources and limitations, so what they see in my visualization is all they know of it, and they make assumptions about it. I've even had people worry that the network is down because there were holes in the collected data which then showed up in the visualizations.
If anyone has some good URLs for such thinking, I'd be grateful.
I simply do not understand how you can visualize data for people if you yourself do not understand it.
If the management above is unable to see which of the two in the example is worth keeping, perhaps it's not the best place to work anyway, as it looks like politics makes up more of the workload than engineering. I'm reasonably sure that engineers are engineers because they DO NOT want to be politicians.
Of course, there is always the fix the coolant leakage rate solution, mix that with the faked IP and filesharing solution and things get entertaining while you are passing out your resume.
I dismantle mine and make those cool clocks out of them for xmas gifts. A couple have it where the platters are mounted on a spindle also over a mirror, and move counter-clockwise. So far, only two epileptics have succumbed to the effects.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it can be put in simpler terms: When H1B visas were requested and utilized there were many more Americans with jobs. While the workforce market allowed for foreign workers then, it does not necessarily do so now. Foreign and temporary workers should make up the bulk, if not total, of workers laid off now. Don't give me crap about how they spend money here in the USA too. It's about keeping a job, feeding families. Sorry, American families should come first in these hard times. Yeah, I know we just did the bialout shuffle dance, but any company that retains foreign workers while citizens are put out on the street will lose my business, and I will work to ensure they lose business from other citizens.
Sadly, I think you are right. Since I loathe iWTFever, I suppose I'll not be using any touchscreen devices anytime soon. Shame. This will be much like getting a patent on a brake pedal, IMO.
Sometimes a patent is not such a good thing for the public. I hope that this doesn't turn out to be one of those times.
Andromeda Strain oh... two more words, "insomnia cure"
uhm, basically, yes!
Imagine the game play when the computer you're playing against behaves as though it were a human? Getting to level 9000 and killing the megabeast is no longer a game of skills with the game controller and dexterity. If the game could change every game to challenge you as a human might, the game might be different every time for every player.
With network connectivity, the game could draw on data from thousands of other players to add changes to the game you are playing.
Such technology could lend itself to becoming a very useful 'clippy' assistant embedded in your OS.
Not sure what kind of hardware you'd need, but it would be possible.
It's just a thought, but if schools can start teaching geeks/nerds how to be social, teaching others how to manage their pc is probably not far off in the future.
You might be getting old, but reporting malicious attacks like the weather is a good thing. Some will get tired of it, but the good thing is that perhaps the average joe public user will become aware of how vulnerable their on-line experience and computer are. Fighting DDoS attacks has been done successfully, but it takes a lot of work, and a lot of hardware. There are a couple of stories on the Internet about such.
The most recent botnet reports show that 100s of millions of PCs are infected with via a MS vulnerability that was fixed with a patch last year.
We need to see the awareness level increased, and some serious attention to detail on the patch/upgrade cycles.
Where I work, Linux is taking a big chunk away from both MS and Sun for price alone. We (developers) have shown that we can use Linux and two different DB engines to replicate or outperform the existing Sun/Oracle environment. With some of the Sun hardware at EOL, upgrade is forced, and cost is a big issue. MS/Sun/Oracle lost out.
On the desktop? I have 6 systems at home running Ubuntu, one for testing that currently has Mint/CentOS dual installation, and of course I've got dual installs with others (Puppy/DSL/Fedora)
I know that other people have other constraints, but I truly don't get the logic behind it. Sooner or later, you'll find yourself at the forced upgrade state, and I don't see how you can argue for anything but Linux at that point, if not sooner. Note: that doesn't count legacy Windows only apps that won't run on Wine, or hardware requirements that preclude Linux such as some RT systems requirements. I'm still steadily converting Windows users to Ubuntu with little effort... once they understand that Linux (and everything else) doesn't run on Windows.
Linux may not be the reason, but the threat of Linux is part of the reason.
Kind of like a bearded Nazarene guy standing up to his knees in water, asking rather nervously if anyone on shore is a swimming instructor?
....You can't be a player in the WTO if you are branded as a thief. The other kids won't want to play with you!
I think this statement sums up the WTO fantastically well. It's a club for schoolkids, pretending to be important. They are all thieves, but you don't want ALL of the rest of them calling you a thief. As long as it's only one or two of them, you're ok.
Johnny trades me marbles at a good deal because I have a good supply of bubble gum that he likes. Sure, I trade it to other kids too, but I need the marbles so Johnny and I trade on the side. I think the playground is a great analogy for the WTO.
When I first read the headline, I thought holy fsck, four minutes? How do they know it will last that long? Damn they're playing with black holes! Glad my kid doesn't have a Radio Shack physics experiment kit! And I feel better about not trying to get him a chemistry set. I still worry about the dart board in the garage when I see the dangerous way he plays Wii....
Yes. At some point in the future, I'm fine with the universe unfolding like so:
Mother: Tottle, do NOT do that!
Child: But mom, they are just small ones.
Mother: You remember what happened to the humans, don't you?
Child: They danced funny?
Mother: Besides that...... (hand on hip)
Child: (face frowning slowly) Yes mother, they blew up the southeast quarter of the galaxy experimenting with black holes.
Mother: that's right Tottle. It's all fun and games till chunks of the galaxy go missing. Your father will NOT be impressed if he can't find our house after he gets off work tonight.
Child: yes mother
Mother: now put your physics set away and make your bed.
Child: yes mother
Yes, I'd be happy to be a footnote in the history of the universe as an example of what you really shouldn't do with your Acme Physics set that you got for your birthday.
Clearly, in this day and age, the easiest way to summon a succubus is to share some music files. It may take the demon a little while to find you, but that is understandable since the head demon is spending most of his time currently trying to stay OUT of court rooms.
Seriously, these legal tactics get used now and then. What is needed is some public information, you know, a coordinated Streisand effect making story. Something that will cause the RIAA to feel a need to explain what would have been answered in the deposition. Anyone got any ideas?
Actually, IMO we are in need of another category of malicious software. Social engineering allows code writers to get their code run by the user in a way that is neither stealthy or without their knowledge. It runs as a user program, and did not necessarily 'infect' the machine, yet is a virus by the definition that it has modified an executable. So we need either a new term, or be satisfied that the generic use of the term 'virus' fits such code.
An example would be a screen saver that does it's work when the computer is idle and the screen saver itself has been run on the user's command to do so. That group of software that claims to be scanning software which does more than look for malicious code is also in this category. It's becoming quite confusing, and at any turn unvalidated code can be malicious. Many end users are unable to know the difference without much more training. Social engineering makes it fairly simple to get users to run malicious code.
We've seen people repackage OOo software and sell it. It won't be long before we discover such tactics used to deliver malicious code. Would that be a virus or a worm?
You see, my favorite scenario for malicious code is quite simple... spreads like a virus, then sits and waits patiently for the moment that it finds itself on a machine whose user is 'bill gates' (as an example) then every time the screen saver is activated, it searches the drive for the oldest .xls or .doc files and deletes two of them that are at least 45 days since last access. Every 17th time (or follow a Fibonacci number sequence) the screen saver is activated, it searches for Symantec installations and deletes the current virus definition file. Every 6th boot, it loads a key logger which looks for a select set of certain bank URLs. Every time you plug in a USB drive, it copies itself to the USB device if the screen saver is activated. You see, there are many ways to create hard to find problems. It won't be long before we are seeing them.
They certainly use virus news to justify their existence and the cost of their products. The fact that they exist is tantamount to admitting that no OS can be fully secured.
The harder anti-virus vendors bleat on about how good their product is, the more bragging rights a virus writer will get for walking around the security... among their own crowd. It's more or less a case of putting up a wall and telling the world, there, you can't get past this wall now.
The real trouble with anti-virus vendors is that they tend to convince people that once their product is installed, the end user's pc is safe. It is NOT, and won't ever be. Some of the best virus programs in the world are still out in the wild, running as they were intended to run, collecting and passing information as they are supposed to. Since they are not destructive to normal computer activity, they go undetected. Don't say that such does not exist... I know you have not done forensics on all existent computers. Every now and then we hear about some corporate espionage or attacks from state military groups etc. All of this is just hinting at the real problems: The virus programs we don't know about.
Think about it. If a virus program did some key logging for bank URLs then spread itself a bit, then self destructed... hmmmmm They are seeing more sophisticated virus programs now, and fortunately beginning to look for them. Sadly, you'll have some pretty incredibly long scan times to find some types of malicious software: none of this 45 minute scan by Symantec etc.
Soon, you'll need a multicore CPU just to handle real time scanning. It's a giant whack-a-mole game. Always will be.
Right now, thanks in large part to Congress, there are more reasons than quality. Doing a small project at home, I found a need for a jig saw. A trip to one of the local pawn shops netted me a nearly new Skil jigsaw that currently retails for about $90 USD. My cost? $30 USD. I cleaned the dust off, looks new. If you have the time, great source of other tools too. Quality merchandise lasts long enough to end up in Pawn shops. Found complete set of deep set impact wrench sockets - $14 USD. Can't beat that.
If Congress keeps up what they have been doing, it will soon be one of the few places I can afford to shop.
Or maybe they just did it for the RuRz?
There, fixed that for you.
The summary goes something like this:
This Whitehouse Administration is seeking a x86-64 64 bit computer operating system (OS) that is free of cumbersome and expensive licensing issues, can be secured and is not vulnerable to Windows security flaws, and which the Whitehouse Administration IT department can view, modify, and re-issue the source code in compiled form. ....
My understanding is that the maintenance staff at the Whitehouse are currently working 24/7 to secure any chairs that can be picked up by a single person. ....
In other news, the New president has asked for help installing Seti@home in the Oval Office, and has personally initiated communication with Adobe because he can't view the Zebruder Youtube videos on his laptop.
gah! I forgot to add to my original post that saving money and resources is a damned good reason for having energy efficient appliances. It's just that CO2 is not! It's a trendy buzzword whose common perceived meaning has no viable or believable relationship to a good reason for buying energy efficient devices. I agree with you almost completely. I would posit that people who don't like us very much ALREADY control our economy.
The burger you ate while typing that summary was made from a cow that emitted more damage causing methane than CO2 that my energy star monitors will be responsible for over the next 12 years.
Second, while CO2 is contributing to the hot house gas portion of contributing factors to global warming, it is not the worst or most worrisome contributor, and that is only among hot house gas causes. There are many other contributors that should worry you far more.
On top of that, you say CO2 like the Earth will get so hot in the next few years that we are in danger of bursting into flames any minute, when in fact, there is credible evidence to show that now only is global warming a cruel hoax on politicians and citizens of the world, but there is currently NO WARMING TREND happening.
So, which is it, should we assume you have been duped by the MSM, or are you really believing the hype, drinking the koolaid, and kissing the asses of the ill-informed?
Yeah, that is sort of like flamebait, but damn, enough with the global warming crap already. It's like soooo last year!
I would never think that Intel would leave data center power research to Sun? You'd think they would do their own research?
Understanding empire building does not require that you build one or keep it going. To dismantle an empire, you must understand how it was built. I didn't say that very well in my original post. I figured it would get modded as flamebait, but better to have said it up front than simply claim I thought it 2 years from now.
Since this is the day for it, let me try to put a bit more truth into what you say:
Whether you voted for the guy or not, one cannot deny the magnitude of the ramifications of Barack Obama's election to the U.S. Presidency.
This past election has seen a level of participation from a large cross-section of our nation, showing America's disdain for both the Bush administration and the Republicans who supported him, both home and abroad. While the tea leaves aren't revealing much about what the future holds, Obama's statments and actions so far show us that we have chosen to go down a different path than we have been going for the past eight years, but one that ultimately leads to the same destination as Obama's clubs and associations are similar or near enough to identical to those of Clinton and Bush.
It will be interesting in Obama's freshman year to see how he'll deal with the mess left by W, and if the Republic will survive. I think more than anything, Barack will have trouble living up to the image of a 'Cristo Negro de Esquipulas', as many wrongly look at him as a messiah of sorts for the nation. That aside, we have a unique moment in history in which we will be asked what it was like when the first African American president was inaugurated, to which we'll reply that it was both exciting and uncertain. Exciting because it seems that we have grown from our bigoted and biased past, but uncertain, not because he's black, but because of the economic and foreign calamities and troubles that have been layed before us.
I like to think of Barak as a little weevil. He was certainly the lesser of two evils. That said, there is little expectation among many of us for Obama to do much of anything beyond mere appeasement to attempt to keep the momentum going. He only promises change, not change we need as defined by people that DO understand the economy, the constitution, and empire building.
How are you supposed to handle the data if you do not understand it? Sure, there can be too much to see/think about at one time, but if you don't understand it, how can you visualize it usefully?
I am asking because I have a problem: Where I work, I understand the data and I make efforts to visualize it for others. The trouble starts when they don't understand the data and it's sources and limitations, so what they see in my visualization is all they know of it, and they make assumptions about it. I've even had people worry that the network is down because there were holes in the collected data which then showed up in the visualizations.
If anyone has some good URLs for such thinking, I'd be grateful.
I simply do not understand how you can visualize data for people if you yourself do not understand it.
If the management above is unable to see which of the two in the example is worth keeping, perhaps it's not the best place to work anyway, as it looks like politics makes up more of the workload than engineering. I'm reasonably sure that engineers are engineers because they DO NOT want to be politicians.
Of course, there is always the fix the coolant leakage rate solution, mix that with the faked IP and filesharing solution and things get entertaining while you are passing out your resume.
I dismantle mine and make those cool clocks out of them for xmas gifts. A couple have it where the platters are mounted on a spindle also over a mirror, and move counter-clockwise. So far, only two epileptics have succumbed to the effects.