I have to agree with you. I dont even have a GPS, but I would have one if I hadnt spent way too much on this damn "smart" phone with builtin GPS. Which has the crappiest GPS antenna known to man and probably some other hardware problems as well - it usually works, eventually, but it's more of an irritant than an asset. I'd have been a lot happier with a simple phone that works, and a separate GPS device that also worked, instead of having both crammed into one device that often doesnt work.
The OS is just the basic software you need to use a computer. On a general purpose computer 'use' normally means to load an application. On a calculator, it just needs to handle input and output, so an argument could easily be made that it consists entirely of hardware and OS.
Yes, I have had similar experiences. The History Channel is actually really awful. It's pure entertainment and they espouse all kinds of nonsense and give it an air of respectability.
Granted. Now here is the problem. Even if it's doable, that doesnt mean it's good business. If you set up a situation where it's possible to do a good job, but it's better business not to do so, guess which will happen? Sure a percentage will do a good job. The others will do it cheap, show higher profit margins, draw all the investment capital, and eventually crowd out the less profitable competition.
There is an unavoidable tradeoff between making it easy to do legitimate things and making it hard to do illegitimate things. They have made bank making both very easy to do, and that's somewhat appropriate on the typical pc. It's just wildly inappropriate on medical equipment.
While *nix style open systems have definite advantages, I am not sure that is what I would pick for a medical device that could kill someone if it malfunctioned either.
Any hospital IT department that leaves their medical equipment open and exposed to malware or any internet (or even LAN) based attack / infection has already failed.
Or if you have to cut your systems off from the network to feel secure, you've already failed.
The fact is in theory you should be able to secure one end and not care about the other, but in practice any security worthy of the name involves at least taking reasonable precautions at both ends.
Consumer PCs are designed to be cheap and fast, not reliable or secure. They just arent a fit for the job for any sort of device on which a patients life is going to depend, and that wont change if you eliminate all networking and run a great embedded OS on it, although that would improve the situation somewhat. You really need custom hardware. Now over my lifetime I have seen custom hardware eliminated from application after application, replaced by commodity hardware, for economic reasons, but it's a fact that you give up reliability. In SOME cases you can get the reliability back RAID style, but in others you just cant. Medical equipment seems like a good place to expect to see examples of this.
Building the machine purposely, from the ground up, and implementing the software needed the same way, and doing it to a high standard, isnt cheap. It wont be done in a regulated market where the regulators are ok with unpatchable windows ce install. If one manufacturer did this and put out a great device... they would never make their money back on it.
If the equipment maker isn't building a system that is safe within the context of the regulations, then they are incompetent.
I appreciate what you are saying, but consider it from another POV. If the market is regulated like this, it actually minimises liability for this sort of technical incompetence. It's very hard to sue someone that can demonstrate they were under regulatory oversight and complied in all ways with it. Understanding that, from a business point of view, if I can make the product cheaper by using commodity white boxes and windows, without hiring anyone that actually knows what they are doing, and the regulators will bless the result - then from a business perspective I would be incompetent to do anything else.
When the practical effect of the regulatory regime is to make sure that business competence will entail technical incompetence I would lay the resulting product 100%, not 50%, on the regulatory regime.
So what you are telling us is that this is a regulatory problem. It's the regulators who are, at least in effect, demanding that medical devices be built using old insecure operating systems and then not be tampered with, and since they have the power of the state behind them everyone else is helpless in the face of their incompetence.
Why windows? Because any monkey can throw it on and stitch together something that works.
Not something that works properly, of course, but that would cost extra. As long as the buyers are totally clueless about the tech and believe whatever marketing tells them, then the company that puts the money into marketing and gets a monkey to slap xp on a white box and call it a custom control console beats the one that hires real techs and does a good job everytime.
The difference has nothing to do with compiled versus interpreted, that is a common misconception because early scripting languages were more often than not interpreted, but it's never been a hard and fast rule. Scripting is stringing together pre-existing tools with i/o and control logic. You can probably script in any language if you want to but some languages are written specifically for it. It's not a bad thing, it's very often the quickest most efficient way to deal with things.
Hex and octal are easily converted by hand into binary and back, so I dont see too much difference there. It was the macro in the macro assemblers that first justified the 'high level' moniker.
The same argument could be used against C++, or C, and not just scripting languages like you claim. I know that most C programmers think they are doing low level programming, but they aren't.
I'm a little confused by your plus 5 mod, I usually get flambaited into oblivion when I say so, but I was taught that C, along with Pascal, pretty much embodied 'high level programming language' and anything more abstract isnt programming, it is scripting. Assembler is still quite abstract. Low level programming means hexadecimal.
Your video (at least the start, havent watched it all yet) is talking about the chicago incident, his was about the later Dr Who hijacking, so you could both be right.
Subs have active and passive sonar too. Active pings are a two-edged sword, you can get an exact fix on the target, but you definitely give the target an absolute fix on you... it's important not to be the first one to do that without being sure you have the target(s) pretty well mapped through other means already, so it tends to be a battle of the passive systems, the best I know.
Y'all probably know more than I on the subject, and there's probably a hidden joke there that I missed, so If you were trolling good job I guess;)
Well it was hard as I recall primarily because the installer required X, and the standard cd at the time didnt properly detect my card. Like I need a really pretty installer just to make partitions and copy files? Who thought that up?
Speaking of partitions, it defaults to brain-dead. It looks like someone who didnt know what they were doing mindlessly copied windows.
I tried Kubuntu once. It was a lot harder to get installed than slackware, and even after getting it all working I didnt like it as much. Slack has a great clean KDE.
Not at all. Cartel behaviour, like you describe, is always vulnerable to defection. The more the cartel tries to force the market, the more the profit motive for the first defector. Absent the ability to use force to prevent this cartels are a minor problem.
Koch was the Libertarian Party's vice-presidential candidate in the 1980
So I was entirely correct. He never ran for President, and he never ran for anything within my knowledge (I became involved in '88.)
What if Koch [...] the federal government [...] "shrunk it down so it's small enough to drown in a bathtub" ?
That would be wonderful for all of us except for the handful at the top of the present system, who might have to learn to work for a living.
Not at all. Papers that were previously rejected benefit from additional, careful revisions by their authors, therefore they end being of higher quality than they would have.
The conclusion the journals would like you to reach, and it may explain some of the effect. Seems to me likely the larger effect is simply that papers which break new ground tend to be controversial to old guard, thus accumulate rejections, but when and if finally published they also tend to accumulate more citations as well, as even the old guard will then have to cite in their rebuttals.
The problem, I think, is that browsers are now far too complex to be effectively maintained as a community project. Sure, you see little browser projects, like how KDE is trying to push Rekonq as their new default browser, but come on: look at how many people it takes just to make Firefox and Chrome secure, and they're fixing security bugs constantly. How could a few guys make a secure browser in their spare time, a browser that does all the modern JS/CSS/HTML5/plugin stuff? I don't think it can be done.
I believe it can be done, but it can only be done by someone that wont flinch from breaking things in terms of support for existing page that work in existing broken browsers, and perhaps even refusing to implement some of the stuff that's more recently been crammed through standards as well. This really narrows the possibilities for it to actually happen.
The idea of securing the browser by having a team of people constantly closing bugs is just a symptom of a long detour down a dead end path. To make the browser secure you have to design it in from the start and you have to firmly subjugate other design goals to that one.
A browser that firmly subjugates the plug-in isnt going to have the plug-in manufacturers as happy with it, of course. Back when the design errors were being made people were getting rich on the dotcom bubble and it seemed ever so much more important to 'enable' people to run anything and everything in the browser (as if downloading an application and then running it was just an impossible chore) than to worry about possible consequences. I said at the time to anyone that would listen where this would lead and I was called an idiot for my trouble more than once, but look, hey, I was right all along.
future--or Opera if you don't care about FOSS.
Eh, Chrome or Opera seem about the same from a care about FOSS perspective. Neither is Free, but both are free and available on common varieties of linux at least. And Opera seems much more willing to accomodate my desire for a browser rather than a clingy adware delivery system.
Perhaps a slight exaggeration, but with the amount of time we are talking about, and so much work done on NEW UI stuff over that time, it's insane that major UI breakage has been ignored and left to fester the entire time. Fixing what is broken should be obviously and undeniably higher priority than adding new features. How many new features has firefox added in just the last ten years? Yet the paid developers cant be bothered to fix the fundamentals of the system, and actually suggest that the users should send them patches to shoot down instead of doing something about it?
Thank you for a civil and respectful debate. Even though we disagree on the line, I appreciate your cogent replies.
Likewise.
I don't want to live in a Nihilistic society, I want a society that values life.
On that we agree as well. And contrary to the AC I do believe we get some say over the kind of society we live in. Not the kind of direct and immediate and total control we might like, but we do have some control, and those who say otherwise are only trying to soothe their conscience for the fact they cant be bothered to actually exert the influence they do have.
First, you can deprive people of food clothing and shelter by more means than simply snatching them away. You can refuse to give him a job, or pay him so little he cannot afford them.
This only works if you have a monopolistic position as an employer, and you dont get to hold that kind of position without violating rights to do it. I understand that this isnt so unusual today - but that is the making of your policies, not mine.
Your extended rant about all the 'libertarians' you hate gave me a good laugh, thanks. I am not sure that even one of the people you mentioned is a libertarian! Grover Norquist? Paul Ryan? Necons. Rand leans our way but he's still more of a conservative than a libertarian. Charles Koch, to the best of my knowledge, never ran for anything and he was certainly never our candidate for President. You are just blindly slinging mud on a subject you know nothing about.
And so on with the rest of you. The fact that you don't "get it".. don't "get" discrimination and exploitation need to be curtailed by the state, is just the baseline starting point of everything else you spew.
And the fact that you refuse to see that setting the fox to guard the henhouse isnt a wise policy makes the baseline for your own spew I suppose.
Under kosher law (bearing in mind there are some minor differences between branches of Judaism here) fish have the same favourable status as in Islam, but other seafood (anything in the water without fins and scales) does not. Like pig prohibition (common to Judaism and Islam today, common across the entire ME in ancient times) it's tempting to see a health benefit, whether that had anything to do with the origin of the taboo or not it probably has something to do with its continued strength. The seafood prohibited under kosher, scale-less bottom feeding fish, crustaceans, etc. are in fact the ones that are most likely to wind up making you sick, assuming they are wild.
The article is about farm-raised Tilapia, however. Tilapia has fins and scales so the GP was incorrect, it's a kosher species. The problem here appears to be an artifact of fish-farming, rather than something inherent in that species of fish.
I guess I overstated, I dont expect a program that doesnt suck. Just one that sucks less. That's all I ask for, a little slack.
They suck when they get in your way with awkward interfaces or change for the sake of change. They suck when they encourage a generation of truly awful web designers and even infect HTML itself with suckage. They suck when they hand control of your machine out to any random web page they happen to get directed to. They suck when they insult your intelligence with idiotic schemes premised on the notion that you are an idiot - someone for instance that thinks an inflated version number means a better browser, or that you are someone that is 'confused' by having options.
The list of when they suck could go on for some length, obviously, without ever being exhaustive. Bit like I said, I expect every piece of software to suck a bit. I just try to keep the direction of travel in the right direction - always moving towards suck less, not suck more.
I use every major browser and experiment with minor ones. I have to use windows for work so that is the majority of what I see unfortunately. Firefox is devolving into suck before my eyes. IE is required for maybe half the things I do at work. It works fine, sort of. It basically lets anything in. I never use it to open a random link, or even do research, just open intranet stuff with it. And I still wind up having to reset it periodically because it craps all over itself. But it works well enough for what I have to use it for.
I used to do everything else in Firefox, now I am playing with Chrome and Opera. Opera was really great back about 3.6. Then it got bloated. It's still bloated, but it may be a workable substitute for Firefox. The licensing situation is very poor however.
Of course the same is true of Chrome, and Chrome is just nasty too. Chrome is SkankaGoogle getting way too clingy. It doesnt get used much, but I have been noticing lately gmail doesnt want to work until I use chrome. Might need to replace gmail too...
Nvidia are probably *the only* fucking company that really went the whole way and really release the right 'kind of ' full drivers for Linux. Yes, they are closed source binary. Yes, they are proprietry.
Bam, out of the gate, you contradict yourself completely and utterly. Binaries are NOT the right kind of drivers for linux. Period.
You can wave your hands and run around screaming religion all you want but this has nothing to do with religion. Linux supports dozens of cpus, how many does that binary support again? And when it has a bug how do I fix it again? Step-debugging is possible but it's way too much work, thank you. Plus since it's a binary instead of software, any little thing in the kernel could change and boom you lost your so-called driver! That's not support. That's fraud.
You are right, the intel on-board stuff sucks. It's a pretty solid general rule that integrated anything sucks, in fact. But there is suck and then there is blow. A crappy intel onboard graphics is still good enough most of the time, you can partially compensate for it with a beefier cpu and still save money because it's a lot cheaper, and, oh yeah, it actually has drivers available - pretty important. So it wins, every time. It's Nvidia that is losing money here, not me. Every time I buy a videocard, I look at their nicer boards first, check to see if there are drivers yet, but there never are, so I buy something else instead.
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I have to agree with you. I dont even have a GPS, but I would have one if I hadnt spent way too much on this damn "smart" phone with builtin GPS. Which has the crappiest GPS antenna known to man and probably some other hardware problems as well - it usually works, eventually, but it's more of an irritant than an asset. I'd have been a lot happier with a simple phone that works, and a separate GPS device that also worked, instead of having both crammed into one device that often doesnt work.
The OS is just the basic software you need to use a computer. On a general purpose computer 'use' normally means to load an application. On a calculator, it just needs to handle input and output, so an argument could easily be made that it consists entirely of hardware and OS.
Yes, I have had similar experiences. The History Channel is actually really awful. It's pure entertainment and they espouse all kinds of nonsense and give it an air of respectability.
Granted. Now here is the problem. Even if it's doable, that doesnt mean it's good business. If you set up a situation where it's possible to do a good job, but it's better business not to do so, guess which will happen? Sure a percentage will do a good job. The others will do it cheap, show higher profit margins, draw all the investment capital, and eventually crowd out the less profitable competition.
There is an unavoidable tradeoff between making it easy to do legitimate things and making it hard to do illegitimate things. They have made bank making both very easy to do, and that's somewhat appropriate on the typical pc. It's just wildly inappropriate on medical equipment.
While *nix style open systems have definite advantages, I am not sure that is what I would pick for a medical device that could kill someone if it malfunctioned either.
I think you are looking at half the picture.
Or if you have to cut your systems off from the network to feel secure, you've already failed.
The fact is in theory you should be able to secure one end and not care about the other, but in practice any security worthy of the name involves at least taking reasonable precautions at both ends.
Consumer PCs are designed to be cheap and fast, not reliable or secure. They just arent a fit for the job for any sort of device on which a patients life is going to depend, and that wont change if you eliminate all networking and run a great embedded OS on it, although that would improve the situation somewhat. You really need custom hardware. Now over my lifetime I have seen custom hardware eliminated from application after application, replaced by commodity hardware, for economic reasons, but it's a fact that you give up reliability. In SOME cases you can get the reliability back RAID style, but in others you just cant. Medical equipment seems like a good place to expect to see examples of this.
Building the machine purposely, from the ground up, and implementing the software needed the same way, and doing it to a high standard, isnt cheap. It wont be done in a regulated market where the regulators are ok with unpatchable windows ce install. If one manufacturer did this and put out a great device... they would never make their money back on it.
I appreciate what you are saying, but consider it from another POV. If the market is regulated like this, it actually minimises liability for this sort of technical incompetence. It's very hard to sue someone that can demonstrate they were under regulatory oversight and complied in all ways with it. Understanding that, from a business point of view, if I can make the product cheaper by using commodity white boxes and windows, without hiring anyone that actually knows what they are doing, and the regulators will bless the result - then from a business perspective I would be incompetent to do anything else.
When the practical effect of the regulatory regime is to make sure that business competence will entail technical incompetence I would lay the resulting product 100%, not 50%, on the regulatory regime.
So what you are telling us is that this is a regulatory problem. It's the regulators who are, at least in effect, demanding that medical devices be built using old insecure operating systems and then not be tampered with, and since they have the power of the state behind them everyone else is helpless in the face of their incompetence.
Why windows? Because any monkey can throw it on and stitch together something that works.
Not something that works properly, of course, but that would cost extra. As long as the buyers are totally clueless about the tech and believe whatever marketing tells them, then the company that puts the money into marketing and gets a monkey to slap xp on a white box and call it a custom control console beats the one that hires real techs and does a good job everytime.
The difference has nothing to do with compiled versus interpreted, that is a common misconception because early scripting languages were more often than not interpreted, but it's never been a hard and fast rule. Scripting is stringing together pre-existing tools with i/o and control logic. You can probably script in any language if you want to but some languages are written specifically for it. It's not a bad thing, it's very often the quickest most efficient way to deal with things.
Hex and octal are easily converted by hand into binary and back, so I dont see too much difference there. It was the macro in the macro assemblers that first justified the 'high level' moniker.
I'm a little confused by your plus 5 mod, I usually get flambaited into oblivion when I say so, but I was taught that C, along with Pascal, pretty much embodied 'high level programming language' and anything more abstract isnt programming, it is scripting. Assembler is still quite abstract. Low level programming means hexadecimal.
Your video (at least the start, havent watched it all yet) is talking about the chicago incident, his was about the later Dr Who hijacking, so you could both be right.
Subs have active and passive sonar too. Active pings are a two-edged sword, you can get an exact fix on the target, but you definitely give the target an absolute fix on you... it's important not to be the first one to do that without being sure you have the target(s) pretty well mapped through other means already, so it tends to be a battle of the passive systems, the best I know.
Y'all probably know more than I on the subject, and there's probably a hidden joke there that I missed, so If you were trolling good job I guess ;)
Well it was hard as I recall primarily because the installer required X, and the standard cd at the time didnt properly detect my card. Like I need a really pretty installer just to make partitions and copy files? Who thought that up?
Speaking of partitions, it defaults to brain-dead. It looks like someone who didnt know what they were doing mindlessly copied windows.
I tried Kubuntu once. It was a lot harder to get installed than slackware, and even after getting it all working I didnt like it as much. Slack has a great clean KDE.
Not at all. Cartel behaviour, like you describe, is always vulnerable to defection. The more the cartel tries to force the market, the more the profit motive for the first defector. Absent the ability to use force to prevent this cartels are a minor problem.
So I was entirely correct. He never ran for President, and he never ran for anything within my knowledge (I became involved in '88.)
That would be wonderful for all of us except for the handful at the top of the present system, who might have to learn to work for a living.
The conclusion the journals would like you to reach, and it may explain some of the effect. Seems to me likely the larger effect is simply that papers which break new ground tend to be controversial to old guard, thus accumulate rejections, but when and if finally published they also tend to accumulate more citations as well, as even the old guard will then have to cite in their rebuttals.
I believe it can be done, but it can only be done by someone that wont flinch from breaking things in terms of support for existing page that work in existing broken browsers, and perhaps even refusing to implement some of the stuff that's more recently been crammed through standards as well. This really narrows the possibilities for it to actually happen.
The idea of securing the browser by having a team of people constantly closing bugs is just a symptom of a long detour down a dead end path. To make the browser secure you have to design it in from the start and you have to firmly subjugate other design goals to that one.
A browser that firmly subjugates the plug-in isnt going to have the plug-in manufacturers as happy with it, of course. Back when the design errors were being made people were getting rich on the dotcom bubble and it seemed ever so much more important to 'enable' people to run anything and everything in the browser (as if downloading an application and then running it was just an impossible chore) than to worry about possible consequences. I said at the time to anyone that would listen where this would lead and I was called an idiot for my trouble more than once, but look, hey, I was right all along.
Eh, Chrome or Opera seem about the same from a care about FOSS perspective. Neither is Free, but both are free and available on common varieties of linux at least. And Opera seems much more willing to accomodate my desire for a browser rather than a clingy adware delivery system.
Perhaps a slight exaggeration, but with the amount of time we are talking about, and so much work done on NEW UI stuff over that time, it's insane that major UI breakage has been ignored and left to fester the entire time. Fixing what is broken should be obviously and undeniably higher priority than adding new features. How many new features has firefox added in just the last ten years? Yet the paid developers cant be bothered to fix the fundamentals of the system, and actually suggest that the users should send them patches to shoot down instead of doing something about it?
Likewise.
On that we agree as well. And contrary to the AC I do believe we get some say over the kind of society we live in. Not the kind of direct and immediate and total control we might like, but we do have some control, and those who say otherwise are only trying to soothe their conscience for the fact they cant be bothered to actually exert the influence they do have.
This only works if you have a monopolistic position as an employer, and you dont get to hold that kind of position without violating rights to do it. I understand that this isnt so unusual today - but that is the making of your policies, not mine.
Your extended rant about all the 'libertarians' you hate gave me a good laugh, thanks. I am not sure that even one of the people you mentioned is a libertarian! Grover Norquist? Paul Ryan? Necons. Rand leans our way but he's still more of a conservative than a libertarian. Charles Koch, to the best of my knowledge, never ran for anything and he was certainly never our candidate for President. You are just blindly slinging mud on a subject you know nothing about.
And the fact that you refuse to see that setting the fox to guard the henhouse isnt a wise policy makes the baseline for your own spew I suppose.
Under kosher law (bearing in mind there are some minor differences between branches of Judaism here) fish have the same favourable status as in Islam, but other seafood (anything in the water without fins and scales) does not. Like pig prohibition (common to Judaism and Islam today, common across the entire ME in ancient times) it's tempting to see a health benefit, whether that had anything to do with the origin of the taboo or not it probably has something to do with its continued strength. The seafood prohibited under kosher, scale-less bottom feeding fish, crustaceans, etc. are in fact the ones that are most likely to wind up making you sick, assuming they are wild.
The article is about farm-raised Tilapia, however. Tilapia has fins and scales so the GP was incorrect, it's a kosher species. The problem here appears to be an artifact of fish-farming, rather than something inherent in that species of fish.
I guess I overstated, I dont expect a program that doesnt suck. Just one that sucks less. That's all I ask for, a little slack.
They suck when they get in your way with awkward interfaces or change for the sake of change. They suck when they encourage a generation of truly awful web designers and even infect HTML itself with suckage. They suck when they hand control of your machine out to any random web page they happen to get directed to. They suck when they insult your intelligence with idiotic schemes premised on the notion that you are an idiot - someone for instance that thinks an inflated version number means a better browser, or that you are someone that is 'confused' by having options.
The list of when they suck could go on for some length, obviously, without ever being exhaustive. Bit like I said, I expect every piece of software to suck a bit. I just try to keep the direction of travel in the right direction - always moving towards suck less, not suck more.
I use every major browser and experiment with minor ones. I have to use windows for work so that is the majority of what I see unfortunately. Firefox is devolving into suck before my eyes. IE is required for maybe half the things I do at work. It works fine, sort of. It basically lets anything in. I never use it to open a random link, or even do research, just open intranet stuff with it. And I still wind up having to reset it periodically because it craps all over itself. But it works well enough for what I have to use it for.
I used to do everything else in Firefox, now I am playing with Chrome and Opera. Opera was really great back about 3.6. Then it got bloated. It's still bloated, but it may be a workable substitute for Firefox. The licensing situation is very poor however.
Of course the same is true of Chrome, and Chrome is just nasty too. Chrome is SkankaGoogle getting way too clingy. It doesnt get used much, but I have been noticing lately gmail doesnt want to work until I use chrome. Might need to replace gmail too...
Bam, out of the gate, you contradict yourself completely and utterly. Binaries are NOT the right kind of drivers for linux. Period.
You can wave your hands and run around screaming religion all you want but this has nothing to do with religion. Linux supports dozens of cpus, how many does that binary support again? And when it has a bug how do I fix it again? Step-debugging is possible but it's way too much work, thank you. Plus since it's a binary instead of software, any little thing in the kernel could change and boom you lost your so-called driver! That's not support. That's fraud.
You are right, the intel on-board stuff sucks. It's a pretty solid general rule that integrated anything sucks, in fact. But there is suck and then there is blow. A crappy intel onboard graphics is still good enough most of the time, you can partially compensate for it with a beefier cpu and still save money because it's a lot cheaper, and, oh yeah, it actually has drivers available - pretty important. So it wins, every time. It's Nvidia that is losing money here, not me. Every time I buy a videocard, I look at their nicer boards first, check to see if there are drivers yet, but there never are, so I buy something else instead.