I always think it's disingenuous for people to say our bills are X pages long. If you open up the PDF, then copy and paste the text only (no formatting) into your favorite document editor at the default font size, and remove the extra line breaks, you'll see that for every "normal" 1 page you can get 3-4 pages of a bill from Congress. Try it.
So, realistically the bill is still novel-like long, and yeah it'd be great if the bills were shorter but they do have to deal with complex issues. But it's not actually 2000 pages of dense text, like the Republicans try to make it out to be (by bringing reams of paper to press conferences and saying, "Look at how big this thing is! It's enormous! We haven't read it because we're going to vote no anyway, but hoo-eey, this is a big bill don't you think?"
Agreed, and with that out of the way, other welfare-like benefits should all be restructured that way. There should never be a situation in which someone has to ask themselves, "Can I really afford to work a few extra hours or will it take away my benefits and end up costing me more?"
That said, according to TFS, TFA, in the US any fall over 6 feet would be equivalent to a category A, no matter what. Presumably, in a system designed by medical professionals. So the real question is, who downgraded the response in the UK and did they consult the original authors of the guidelines? Did they work in concert with medical professionals to determine the Americans made a mistake in elevating the risk level of a fall over six feet?
Whenever you make a change to a system like this, there are a lot of questions that need to be answered. Sadly, I suspect the answer is that some administrator decided falls over 6 feet were so frequent and costing so much that they downgraded the response because of the number of false alarms or whatever.
As I said below, dispatchers are not trained to be EMTs. When medical professionals draw up these guidelines, they may have "hidden knowledge" or obscure reasons for deciding a certain type of fall, or a certain type of impact as being especially dangerous and the reasons may be far more complex than the dispatcher can appreciate. I list one example below, where if someone calls in and says they fell more than six feet but feel fine due to some head injury impairing their judgement, it is not the dispatcher's place to downgrade that.
Training every dispatcher to have the same ability to recognize life-threatening situations as a trained medical professional based on intuition alone, rather than a procedure or checklist, is far more costly and likely far more prone to error.
Strict checklists and procedures, though often criticized for the same arguments you gave, are proven to be more effective than simply training individuals. I realize that sometimes it feels like the humanity is being taken out of some of these professions, but the truth is that if done correctly, checklists remove the majority of human error.
I for one would not like to get stuck with the dispatcher who took it as a "suggestion" that my fall was a serious, life-threatening situation, but that because of my delusional remarks on the phone where I claimed that I didn't feel bad at all, decided to downgrade the priority of my call. If medical professionals consider all falls over six feet to be potentially life threatening despite any positive signs, then the dispatcher is completely out of their league downgrading it because I said "No really I feel fine, just a little light-headed is all."
Let the medical professionals set the bars wherever, but the dispatchers are frequently not as well trained as the EMTs that will be on the scene or the doctors at the medical facility. They are far more prone to make judgement errors based on misconceptions they have about medical problems.
There is an inherent risk to allowing operators of software to override the systems rules.
I like to call it the "Red Exclamation Point Problem" or the "High Priority Problem." To a not insignificant portion of the population, opportunity to elevate, upgrade, bold, underline, highlight, or change the font red is taken at nearly every opportunity. This defeats the priority system that was set out with the intention of reducing costs, and in this case, saving more lives by better prioritizing the use of a finite resource in emergencies.
While I agree there are a number of industries and professions in which not allowing user intervention is mistaken, and while I agree that the administration who altered the system in place poorly are at least somewhat to blame for the needless deaths, I don't think dispatchers should have the ability to arbitrarily override the priority system either. It looks like the software handled everything it was told to do correctly, but the administrators made a mistake in designing and testing alterations to it and perhaps did not even consult medical professionals. As a result, people died.
And lastly, the problem isn't that most falls should probably be category B. That's already taken care of, but falls over six feet being category A must have made sense to someone, and apparently it cost lives changing it.
Ah, yeah that's purely for what it says it is: testing the browsers and OSes listed in that document. If you're really interested in testing Microsoft stuff for business reasons, testing or just keeping on top of things, they do have a subscription service that, for $250 a year you can get access to literally every Windows version, every Office version, every SQL Server version, etc. Comes with keys and everything.
It's called a Technet Subscription I believe, and if you have a lot of computers in your house it allows you to license any computer you own. The only caveat is that it's licensed "not for business use."
You bring up a lot of salient points about the issue with lock-in and questionable business practices. There are certainly a lot of ways that Microsoft and, of course, most businesses could improve and even benefit from better interoperability.
That said, they aren't saying compatibility and security are not possible, "they", as in Microsoft, are merely saying they will not port IE9 to XP. IE9, so far, has no greater security improvements over IE8. In fact, one of the selling points of IE7 and IE8 on Vista and Windows 7 were that improvements in the security model allows process integrity levels as well as the typical ACLs. This security feature, like many others added in Vista and 7 are not present in XP because XP did not have those features and it would be more than just a bolt-on piece of code to handle it.
I think it's also very contradictory for you to begrudge Microsoft for trying to get people off XP and into better, more secure platforms. Like I said before, you do bring up many good points, and I am personally not an IE user (used to use Opera, then when the ad bar came out I switched to Firefox, then Chrome when it came out) though it is my sincere hope that you are wrong about the motivations of the IE team.
And again, stop suggesting Microsoft is saying it is wholly impossible. The fact is, back-porting substantial amounts of Vista and 7 code is likely to introduce far more problems, more security issues and will cause them far more pain down the road if it ever backfires than simply drawing a line in the sand and saying "Look, you knew we were going to stop supporting XP eventually and we told you ten years ago." Should I get pissed off at Microsoft for not backporting all of Windows Vista because XP doesn't support all the new security features?
First, impossible can mean a lot of things. Impossible could mean that it would hurt their bottom line so severely to divert resources to an XP rewrite that it would hurt existing products and anger shareholders. That's impossible. Having a public option in the health care bill is impossible because of the political reality in the situation. Impossible is typically used as hyperbole to express that which would be a Pyrrhic victory. For the IE9 team, asking the Windows team to rewrite major pieces of XP is probably impossible.
Second, it's Joel Hruska of hothardware.com that's saying this is impossible, nowhere does he quote Microsoft. I think Microsoft will more readily admit that IE9 will not be ported to Windows XP because:
* Windows XP is no longer in mainstream support and only security related patches will be provided from now on. This lifecycle was known to businesses investing in XP ten years ago. * It may not be possible to port Vista and Windows 7 features to XP without potentially breaking compatibility, which would go against their support lifecycle, anger business customers and other things. There are certain things that Windows does for compatibility that are far-reaching, and lifting Windows XP up to Windows 7's functional level in some areas may cause compatibility issues, mismatches. * IE9 should not be further bloated by targeting an OS that the Windows team will not even support.
Sharepoint doesn't require Microsoft Office, it only requires Windows Server.
If you have a relatively unused server running Windows 2008/2008 R2, install Sharepoint Foundation 2010 Beta and give it a try. It's OK, and it doesn't require IE to access the site.
The major rewrite of XP's code that would be necessary to port all of the featured added in Vista and Windows 7 would make it an unsupportable mess. They'd have to extend the support lifecycle again because now they have to patch those features on a third OS and they'd be lambasted for it if there were ever any issues with duct-taping Windows Vista and Windows 7 kernel code into the Windows XP kernel.
Think about it this way, let's say you're a Red Hat customer and you standardized on Red Hat 7 using the 2.4 kernel. But there's some new whiz bang feature you have to have in the 2.6 kernel! Shucks! You emailed the author and asked them if that feature would ever work in 2.4 and they gave you a list of major kernel components that have changed. So then you call Red Hat and ask them, "Hey, we really really like Red Hat 7 and the 2.4 kernel we standardized on. We realize we probably should have stayed up to date, because we basically locked ourselves in, but we were wondering if you'd support our install if we hacked in bits from 2.6 to use this new feature."
Their answer would be "Are you serious? No. No we're not going to support or help you hack in major changes from the newer kernel into your old one and then support you."
Why would they? Even though you're a paying customer, they are never going to see a return on investment for hacking that in for you and supporting you with patches.
Modifying the DOM rapidly incurs a lot of redraws and reflow. Accelerating this with the GPU will make web applications faster and probably give some Javascript tests a boost.
That said, they do have a new Javascript engine in IE9 that is completely unrelated to the hardware acceleration feature. I don't think that's the problem with porting to XP though.
Re:It is bad, wrong way to go about it
on
Health Care Reform
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The government foots the bill for people who can't pay already because we, society, have deemed it completely immoral to deny someone vital care merely because they can't afford it. To top it off, Republicans since Reagan have considered it their goal to prove that social programs can't work, and so they intentionally hamstring them. See: Medicare's inability to properly negotiate drug prices, or the fact that the federal government can't step into impoverished communities and directly provide health care and help people live healthier (and ultimately cost the government less money.)
Right now the insurance companies have a pretty sweet deal. Healthy people they cover, and they tend to not cost much. With few restrictions on denying or rescinding coverage under current law, anyone that becomes truly expensive (and could hurt their bottom line) is shunted off into the public system. The public system is hamstrung by Republicans who don't want it to truly succeed, and as a result the very ill go into a downward spiral of debt and shame from being a burden on society, wherein they may even have to decide whether their dignity is more valuable than being well. Eventually many quit their jobs to finally be able to take advantage of medicaid or SSDI or whatever, and now they can't make any payments on anything else because they have no real income. So now they're broke, truly a burden on society, and on the fast track to homelessness and poverty for the rest of their now drastically shortened (due to spotty and infrequent health care since losing coverage) and probably less than happy life.
What I'm saying has been backed up by countless studies showing the hundreds of thousands of people every year who go bankrupt not due to a bad bet, not due to a failed entrepreneurial venture, not due to gambling or risky behavior... but because they got sick and either didn't have coverage or hit their cap or had it taken from them. These people are then forced to be covered in the most expensive way possible because that is the only way the Republicans have allowed public health care to work. It's pathetic, it's disgusting, it's sick and it turns my stomach knowing that according to the Republican leadership in Congress, the system is working by design.
No, I think the suggestion is that the City of Munich, his IT department head both had the mistaken notion that an open source solution was better because it was open source. Not because it was cheaper than keeping the existing solution after exhaustive cost benefit analysis, not because it would provide better features or improve productivity... They wanted to switch to open source because it was open source.
This ideology is just as bad as an IT head or a politician going against open source because it's scary and new, and moving toward a completely proprietary or closed source system.
The display should only account for 16-30ms (30 to 60fps) of delay. They're recording 133ms or four frames at 30fps of delay, or eight frames at 60fps.
Why? Have you actually played with Windows 7 (Beta, RC, RTM?)
The Beta was rock solid, the RC was, I don't know, it made the UI more uniform, and I hardly noticed many differences between the RC and release. And I haven't had any trouble at all with RTM.
It's the compression algorithms that often get used in demos that cause the problem. Compression is great obfuscation on the actual payload, but the problem is that the compression algorithm is an easy to target signature.
Slashdot Mirror
Or naturalize.
I always think it's disingenuous for people to say our bills are X pages long. If you open up the PDF, then copy and paste the text only (no formatting) into your favorite document editor at the default font size, and remove the extra line breaks, you'll see that for every "normal" 1 page you can get 3-4 pages of a bill from Congress. Try it.
So, realistically the bill is still novel-like long, and yeah it'd be great if the bills were shorter but they do have to deal with complex issues. But it's not actually 2000 pages of dense text, like the Republicans try to make it out to be (by bringing reams of paper to press conferences and saying, "Look at how big this thing is! It's enormous! We haven't read it because we're going to vote no anyway, but hoo-eey, this is a big bill don't you think?"
Agreed, and with that out of the way, other welfare-like benefits should all be restructured that way. There should never be a situation in which someone has to ask themselves, "Can I really afford to work a few extra hours or will it take away my benefits and end up costing me more?"
I discussed that elsewhere and I agree.
That said, according to TFS, TFA, in the US any fall over 6 feet would be equivalent to a category A, no matter what. Presumably, in a system designed by medical professionals. So the real question is, who downgraded the response in the UK and did they consult the original authors of the guidelines? Did they work in concert with medical professionals to determine the Americans made a mistake in elevating the risk level of a fall over six feet?
Whenever you make a change to a system like this, there are a lot of questions that need to be answered. Sadly, I suspect the answer is that some administrator decided falls over 6 feet were so frequent and costing so much that they downgraded the response because of the number of false alarms or whatever.
As I said below, dispatchers are not trained to be EMTs. When medical professionals draw up these guidelines, they may have "hidden knowledge" or obscure reasons for deciding a certain type of fall, or a certain type of impact as being especially dangerous and the reasons may be far more complex than the dispatcher can appreciate. I list one example below, where if someone calls in and says they fell more than six feet but feel fine due to some head injury impairing their judgement, it is not the dispatcher's place to downgrade that.
Training every dispatcher to have the same ability to recognize life-threatening situations as a trained medical professional based on intuition alone, rather than a procedure or checklist, is far more costly and likely far more prone to error.
Strict checklists and procedures, though often criticized for the same arguments you gave, are proven to be more effective than simply training individuals. I realize that sometimes it feels like the humanity is being taken out of some of these professions, but the truth is that if done correctly, checklists remove the majority of human error.
I for one would not like to get stuck with the dispatcher who took it as a "suggestion" that my fall was a serious, life-threatening situation, but that because of my delusional remarks on the phone where I claimed that I didn't feel bad at all, decided to downgrade the priority of my call. If medical professionals consider all falls over six feet to be potentially life threatening despite any positive signs, then the dispatcher is completely out of their league downgrading it because I said "No really I feel fine, just a little light-headed is all."
Let the medical professionals set the bars wherever, but the dispatchers are frequently not as well trained as the EMTs that will be on the scene or the doctors at the medical facility. They are far more prone to make judgement errors based on misconceptions they have about medical problems.
There is an inherent risk to allowing operators of software to override the systems rules.
I like to call it the "Red Exclamation Point Problem" or the "High Priority Problem." To a not insignificant portion of the population, opportunity to elevate, upgrade, bold, underline, highlight, or change the font red is taken at nearly every opportunity. This defeats the priority system that was set out with the intention of reducing costs, and in this case, saving more lives by better prioritizing the use of a finite resource in emergencies.
While I agree there are a number of industries and professions in which not allowing user intervention is mistaken, and while I agree that the administration who altered the system in place poorly are at least somewhat to blame for the needless deaths, I don't think dispatchers should have the ability to arbitrarily override the priority system either. It looks like the software handled everything it was told to do correctly, but the administrators made a mistake in designing and testing alterations to it and perhaps did not even consult medical professionals. As a result, people died.
And lastly, the problem isn't that most falls should probably be category B. That's already taken care of, but falls over six feet being category A must have made sense to someone, and apparently it cost lives changing it.
Your insurance company however, can still do ridiculous things to you if you were taken to a provider they don't cover, etc.
Ah, yeah that's purely for what it says it is: testing the browsers and OSes listed in that document. If you're really interested in testing Microsoft stuff for business reasons, testing or just keeping on top of things, they do have a subscription service that, for $250 a year you can get access to literally every Windows version, every Office version, every SQL Server version, etc. Comes with keys and everything.
It's called a Technet Subscription I believe, and if you have a lot of computers in your house it allows you to license any computer you own. The only caveat is that it's licensed "not for business use."
You bring up a lot of salient points about the issue with lock-in and questionable business practices. There are certainly a lot of ways that Microsoft and, of course, most businesses could improve and even benefit from better interoperability.
That said, they aren't saying compatibility and security are not possible, "they", as in Microsoft, are merely saying they will not port IE9 to XP. IE9, so far, has no greater security improvements over IE8. In fact, one of the selling points of IE7 and IE8 on Vista and Windows 7 were that improvements in the security model allows process integrity levels as well as the typical ACLs. This security feature, like many others added in Vista and 7 are not present in XP because XP did not have those features and it would be more than just a bolt-on piece of code to handle it.
I think it's also very contradictory for you to begrudge Microsoft for trying to get people off XP and into better, more secure platforms. Like I said before, you do bring up many good points, and I am personally not an IE user (used to use Opera, then when the ad bar came out I switched to Firefox, then Chrome when it came out) though it is my sincere hope that you are wrong about the motivations of the IE team.
And again, stop suggesting Microsoft is saying it is wholly impossible. The fact is, back-porting substantial amounts of Vista and 7 code is likely to introduce far more problems, more security issues and will cause them far more pain down the road if it ever backfires than simply drawing a line in the sand and saying "Look, you knew we were going to stop supporting XP eventually and we told you ten years ago." Should I get pissed off at Microsoft for not backporting all of Windows Vista because XP doesn't support all the new security features?
First, impossible can mean a lot of things. Impossible could mean that it would hurt their bottom line so severely to divert resources to an XP rewrite that it would hurt existing products and anger shareholders. That's impossible. Having a public option in the health care bill is impossible because of the political reality in the situation. Impossible is typically used as hyperbole to express that which would be a Pyrrhic victory. For the IE9 team, asking the Windows team to rewrite major pieces of XP is probably impossible.
Second, it's Joel Hruska of hothardware.com that's saying this is impossible, nowhere does he quote Microsoft. I think Microsoft will more readily admit that IE9 will not be ported to Windows XP because:
* Windows XP is no longer in mainstream support and only security related patches will be provided from now on. This lifecycle was known to businesses investing in XP ten years ago.
* It may not be possible to port Vista and Windows 7 features to XP without potentially breaking compatibility, which would go against their support lifecycle, anger business customers and other things. There are certain things that Windows does for compatibility that are far-reaching, and lifting Windows XP up to Windows 7's functional level in some areas may cause compatibility issues, mismatches.
* IE9 should not be further bloated by targeting an OS that the Windows team will not even support.
Sharepoint doesn't require Microsoft Office, it only requires Windows Server.
If you have a relatively unused server running Windows 2008/2008 R2, install Sharepoint Foundation 2010 Beta and give it a try. It's OK, and it doesn't require IE to access the site.
http://www.codeguru.com/cpp/misc/misc/graphics/article.php/c16139
Mind running or compiling this demo and letting me know how it runs? I'm genuinely interested.
The major rewrite of XP's code that would be necessary to port all of the featured added in Vista and Windows 7 would make it an unsupportable mess. They'd have to extend the support lifecycle again because now they have to patch those features on a third OS and they'd be lambasted for it if there were ever any issues with duct-taping Windows Vista and Windows 7 kernel code into the Windows XP kernel.
Think about it this way, let's say you're a Red Hat customer and you standardized on Red Hat 7 using the 2.4 kernel. But there's some new whiz bang feature you have to have in the 2.6 kernel! Shucks! You emailed the author and asked them if that feature would ever work in 2.4 and they gave you a list of major kernel components that have changed. So then you call Red Hat and ask them, "Hey, we really really like Red Hat 7 and the 2.4 kernel we standardized on. We realize we probably should have stayed up to date, because we basically locked ourselves in, but we were wondering if you'd support our install if we hacked in bits from 2.6 to use this new feature."
Their answer would be "Are you serious? No. No we're not going to support or help you hack in major changes from the newer kernel into your old one and then support you."
Why would they? Even though you're a paying customer, they are never going to see a return on investment for hacking that in for you and supporting you with patches.
Modifying the DOM rapidly incurs a lot of redraws and reflow. Accelerating this with the GPU will make web applications faster and probably give some Javascript tests a boost.
That said, they do have a new Javascript engine in IE9 that is completely unrelated to the hardware acceleration feature. I don't think that's the problem with porting to XP though.
Where'd you download it from?
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/default.aspx
Try getting the Windows 7 trial there.
The government foots the bill for people who can't pay already because we, society, have deemed it completely immoral to deny someone vital care merely because they can't afford it. To top it off, Republicans since Reagan have considered it their goal to prove that social programs can't work, and so they intentionally hamstring them. See: Medicare's inability to properly negotiate drug prices, or the fact that the federal government can't step into impoverished communities and directly provide health care and help people live healthier (and ultimately cost the government less money.)
Right now the insurance companies have a pretty sweet deal. Healthy people they cover, and they tend to not cost much. With few restrictions on denying or rescinding coverage under current law, anyone that becomes truly expensive (and could hurt their bottom line) is shunted off into the public system. The public system is hamstrung by Republicans who don't want it to truly succeed, and as a result the very ill go into a downward spiral of debt and shame from being a burden on society, wherein they may even have to decide whether their dignity is more valuable than being well. Eventually many quit their jobs to finally be able to take advantage of medicaid or SSDI or whatever, and now they can't make any payments on anything else because they have no real income. So now they're broke, truly a burden on society, and on the fast track to homelessness and poverty for the rest of their now drastically shortened (due to spotty and infrequent health care since losing coverage) and probably less than happy life.
What I'm saying has been backed up by countless studies showing the hundreds of thousands of people every year who go bankrupt not due to a bad bet, not due to a failed entrepreneurial venture, not due to gambling or risky behavior... but because they got sick and either didn't have coverage or hit their cap or had it taken from them. These people are then forced to be covered in the most expensive way possible because that is the only way the Republicans have allowed public health care to work. It's pathetic, it's disgusting, it's sick and it turns my stomach knowing that according to the Republican leadership in Congress, the system is working by design.
Yeah, and I wouldn't count on turning to the FBI for their Witness Protection Program or something similar for jurors.
That's the Air Force.
Forgot to close </em> tag. Oops.
No, I think the suggestion is that the City of Munich, his IT department head both had the mistaken notion that an open source solution was better because it was open source. Not because it was cheaper than keeping the existing solution after exhaustive cost benefit analysis, not because it would provide better features or improve productivity... They wanted to switch to open source because it was open source.
This ideology is just as bad as an IT head or a politician going against open source because it's scary and new, and moving toward a completely proprietary or closed source system.
It's feature or bug competitive? I've never gotten that impression from MySQL. PostgreSQL has always come across as more featureful and "safe" to run.
The display should only account for 16-30ms (30 to 60fps) of delay. They're recording 133ms or four frames at 30fps of delay, or eight frames at 60fps.
Why? Have you actually played with Windows 7 (Beta, RC, RTM?)
The Beta was rock solid, the RC was, I don't know, it made the UI more uniform, and I hardly noticed many differences between the RC and release. And I haven't had any trouble at all with RTM.
It's the compression algorithms that often get used in demos that cause the problem. Compression is great obfuscation on the actual payload, but the problem is that the compression algorithm is an easy to target signature.