Reducing admin to a skeleton staff is the 'old way' now. The financial companies have woken up to just how vulnerable they are to having their systems fail (the costs worked out that it could kill a bank in a week, if things weren't working again, and though they don't publicly admit, it is known that a few are not in as strong a position as they'd like to be). Once they get over the 'Just In Time' mentality of fast buck now, and screw the future, they realise that a little fat is needed to last the leaner times (i.e. system failure). Simply put, the costs of not having that 'fat' are now being seen as an unacceptable risk. If you're not taking care of your continuity plans, people will treat you warily (plus, good luck with the insurance). The US is currently known to be behind Europe in the Continuity arena, but from people at the top in this arena, the word is that they're slowly waking up to it. Which, in general, is good news. Renting servers in Asia doesn't help if their link fails, and you need people inside your building working on files that would have been held on a building server. A day's outage like that can wipe out the cost savings (and more) of years of outsourcing. Outsourcing works to a point, for low priority work, for commodity storage, and for non-critical data/applications. For the rest.. Well, you do the maths. And, as the great quote from "Dirty Harry" goes.. "Do you feel lucky, Punk?".
Being the buzzword that it is (and the role I work in) pretty much nixes having the network administered in India. Having someone on the inside can get a fair grasp of what's fallen over. Your main gate goes down, and if you're on the outside, it could be a gateway falling over, or the whole place has gone up in smoke. Which plan do you put in action the second things happen? Who knows where all the latest places the switches, routers, servers, power lines, gas lines and so on are? Who knows the users and techs on the ground well enough to pull a team together when things are bad, seemingly out of thin air? And the channels in the company/organisation well enough to know who needs to know what? That, I think, would be the local admin. There are some things that can't be outsourced. Part of having a plan to survive the unknown (which is what business continuity is all about) involves having people there, on the floor, when things are bad, that have the skills to make the right decisions when they're needed. If those skills are on another continent, without the visuals, and communications channels, kiss goodbye to your company when it hits the fan bigtime. A quickly hired local consultant won't understand the business, so can't rebuild/continue it. Basically, outsourcing that level is gambling with the company. If everything goes fine with never a problem, you save a shed load by outsourcing. If it all goes tits up, bend over and kiss your ass (and your company) goodbye.
What a weird use of logic. If you've bought the game, you've already compensated the owner of the copyright. Now, a crack is a patch. And a patch is basically the errata section that may be applied to any book that doesn't contain what it should (you can find errata pages for scientific textbooks now and then). Now, by your logic, it'd be illegal to insert errata pages into legally bought books if those pages were produced by a third party. In actuality, it's completely legal. Applying a crack to a legally purchased game is not illegal. You've certainly not stolen anything (having already paid). You've also not violated copyright (as you've paid for the privilege of owning a copy). You are not supporting pirates by using a crack. They gain nothing from it. So where's the support? And again, using a crack is not illegal. If software doesn't do what I want, I'll fix it. Either that, or I'll send it back to the manufacturer, and specify why I was unhappy with their product. If they refuse to accept it back on the grounds that a box has been opened (in violation of all normal consumer rights), I'll damn well do what needs be done to ensure it fits my needs. You have a really odd view of what constitutes theft and copyright violation. I'd really love to know where you get your ideas. They certainly don't have much to do with what the legal system sees them as. I'd hazard a guess you've been reading a lot of the 'educational pamphlets' written by the anti-piracy offices. But, to give you the benefit of the doubt, I'd like to see your rationale of why you consider using a crack to be copyright violation, or theft. And please make the argument such that it would stand up to scrutiny, rather than just say "Because it is", which is what you've been doing.
Actually, the cost of things spiraling to the point they're only just supported by two incomes is a product of both partners working. Back about 30 years ago (at the edge of my memory), things were affordable on one income, at a stretch. The 'Normal' way things worked was that partners got married, had kids, and one partner stayed at home to raise them (usually the female, but not always). Over the last 30 years, more and more emphasis has been places on both partners working, so that you can afford more and better. The result has been that more 'disposable' income has been available. This has meant that the competition for resources (housing etc) has increased to the point that only those with two incomes can afford to buy/rent in decent areas. Now, it's practially mandated that both partners work. The 'Right to work' of both partners has become twisted to 'The necessity to work'. From my point of view, I'd love to be able to support a 'home body' lass.. And worked my butt off to be in a position to do so, for quite some time. More than one of my male friends would be quite happy being the home body in counterpoint to a female breadwinner (and some of them have done so, but money is incredibly tight for them, to the point they can rarely actually go out places with kids). Basically, I think the "any partner can work" was a great move, but the "Both partners can work" was misguided and very short sighted.
Actually, it goes more like: US company comes into EU, gets treated nicely. Said company breaks laws in EU, gets taken to court (anti trust). Company gets upset that people have told it that it's being naughty, asks US to back it up, because it's not fair, people are picking on it. US tells company to grow up and deal with it like everyone else.
A touch of common sense?
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Region-free PS3
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· Score: 3, Informative
Perhaps Sony, touched with the debacles it's been involved in recently (the Rootkit being the most well known), has decided its time to rely on a modicum of common sense. After all, the market has done without regional coding since the dawn of time (well, until a few years ago) and prospered. The simplest solution being the best (as is often the case) says remove the complexity that doesn't really gain anything, and see what you have. The copy protection on a console.. I can live with that.. I've never been that interested in backups, as I take great care with the disks.. I have, however, been most peeved when buying region coded items that refuse to play just because I'm in the 'wrong country'. Hopefully it's the start of a new trend of business actually listening, rather than dictating. I doubt it, but hey. It's a hope.
The more you try continuity of service, the more diverse the applications you consider bringing to bear. I've got a browser on my mobile phone, simply because I may need to pick up mail when I'm way away from any PC. Using a PDA with ssh on it simply lets me use a text terminal when I need interactive shells on the servers, in case the rest of the kit is unavailable (or I'm miles away from anywhere, and unexpectedly need to work via shell).
Yes, they may be redundant, but when your main access channels are down, or unavailable, you learn to love your redundant but always present channels.
Superman is a pretty specific example of "Super Hero". Just like a "Smart for two" is a specific example of a "Car". Claiming a trademark on Superman, means you can't use Superman as a character, or company without falling foul of Trademark laws (and rightly so). Just like you can't sell a car under the name of a "Smart for two" without it actually being that car. The problem here is that "Super Hero" doesn't actually make you think of anything other than a highly generic set of characters, many of which don't have anything to do with DC or Marvel. It would be like a company claiming to own the trademark on the word "Car". These days, it really is a generic, and ought to be treated as such.
There are already bluetooth keyboards out there (hey, I have one tucked by). If someone made those cheaply (vast markup because they're currently not a commodity item), that'd solve that problem!
Ok. Well, I suggest you go without Medical insurance, car insurance, dental insurance, house insurance and so on. Hey, you may never need them. But when you do, they make a hell of a difference having them there and freely available, because the time you absolutely need things most is the time you can least afford time or money (or both).
Hmm.. I'm the database admin for a hospital over here in the UK, and there is absolutely no restriction on me seeing any medical data. It all passes around the hospital on the networks, is intercepted by the interfaces to the internal databases, and ends up on my servers. Now, I've signed many a form which amounts to "If I release any of the medical data, I'll never really be able to work in IT again", which I consider a fair clause. Everyone in the tech department is basically bound by the same agreement. If anyone is found to abuse the privilege, the consequences are dire. Thankfully, everyone has a healthy lack of curiosity in that area (frequent trips past the operating theatres do that for you).
SQL Server 2005's not a bad engine. It just doesn't scale like Oracle does. If they chose Oracle for the job, I say fair play to 'em for choosing the right tool for the job. They probably had to fight tooth and nail politically to do it, but it shows they're serious.
I can remember the quality of the searches from both of those. Alta Vista used to end up choked by the advertisers and marketers adding in spurious words to the pages. It was also not that user friendly to get a decent search on the go (although not too bad once you got used to it). Google on the other hand had (and still has) an excellent algorithm for gathering what you want from a very basic search string that's very user friendly. It also does this very quickly. I changed from Alta Vista (and Webcrawler before it) to Google because of the vastly different quality of the search results. For MS to get noticably better than google, it'll have to be truly exceptional. Most people won't notice that extra few hundred results returned at the tail end of 8.2 million returned results in a search. Coupled, as has been noted elsewhere that Google has a vast public acceptance (and to a degree trust, which is entirely lacking in Microsoft), MS are in for a rough ride of it. Still, it's good to see, as competition creates better products.
The tech part is entirely neutral in the equation.
The real issue here is management. Because information is available, management often believe they do need it.
Often, that's pretty far from the truth. People spend so much time now gathering useless figures, processing those, and presenting them that they often don't bother to take care of the issues that don't readily fit into numeric analysis, or worry about whether they're introducing noise into the signal (which only needs to be filtered out again later).
What people need to do is take a step back and determine what they really need to do their job, and get a process in place that'll automate delivery of the figures they actually need to them when they're needed. That way, they'll likely find that the job does increase in efficiency.
And what kind of intensive care unit is "shut down" when they can't use computers?
I work in a hostpital as one of the business continuity team; we keep the place running in the event of something just like this, and have to evaluate the problems that'll occur in an outage if it happens.
ITU is dependant on having patient records, history, full charts and responses available in a very rapid fashion. When the computers go down, they don't stop working, just all the communications that happen near instantly suddenly have to be ordered from medical records, and use sneakernet, which is a massive time overhead. In time critical requirements, this may mean the difference between life and death.
Fair enough, the hospital should have been more secure, but there again, it all comes down to how many admins they have on the job. I know my time is allocated (still) in a very small part on security. I'm pressing to have more allocated. And my budget for security tools is small. Hell, with the NHS budget cuts next year, we'll be lucky to have much budget at all. Still, it's improving slowly. I'm still not happy with it, which gives me more incentive to work harder on it. But anyone who would attack a hospital system has to be aware that lives are at stake here, not just a few pounds/dollars. In commercial places, I'd frequently warn people if I could work out who they were, or the admin of the sytems they came in from if I couldn't. Eventually, I'd call the police if I believed they were being too persistent, as a last resort.
In the hospital, I spot an attack, police will be warned promptly. No messing around. The place I work at saved my brother's life years back in ITU (when, by rights, his injuries should have killed him). I'm a little protective of the work they do, and the systems that let them do their job more efficiently. After all, they may just make that difference between life and death in the borderline cases, and every little win by the skin of the teeth means a lifetime to somebody.
That was just a clarification, not a dispute. I'm behind you all the way in the sentiment you express. They're in trouble, and justly so.
Weird that. I was using Occam on paralell processors back in the late 80s.. And it had absolutely no problem with leveraging 12 paralell processors then. Something must have improved in the last near 20 years.
The problem I see with it though is we will end up with a lot of medium quality material because no one will want to invest the effort and money to create good material
Well, that'll be one step better than the low quality material they pump out these days, as they don't want to invest the time and quality to put out good quality material, when they can advertise and sell low quality crap.
X-Plane works nicely with multiple monitors.. Not as graphically pretty as the MS offering, but as far as being a 'realistic' simulation of flying a plane, it knocks the pants off the MS sim (I do both, sim and real flying).
Methinks a lot of people will treat it as a kind of joke when it comes out, a name they've heard of, but don't expect much from (I certainly don't expect much out of it).. What I'm hoping for is that the game, like the previous DN games, doesn't take itself seriously, and manages to capture the offbeat, humourour lacivousness that the earlier ones did so well. If it does, it'll be a success, in that offbeat, humourous way that the previous ones were. They didn't break new ground, and they didn't have the latest gizmoes. They just had a lot of people who played it and commented "That was a bit of a laugh.", rather than "Whoah, look at those graphics!".
Oddly, we sometimes have the same kinds of problems. For desktop boxes, there are stores with hard disks, RAM sticks, and so on. Spare boxes to replace those that blow up too. For a server, there really are hoops to jump through. We don't carry spare RAM for those (as finance won't shell out for stocks of RAM; they're covered in 'support agreements' if they go wrong). Trying to get upgrades for a server is a nightmare. We work out what needs to be done. Send it to Finance. Finance sit on it for 3-4 weeks, then sometimes reject it as being an unnecessary purchase. So, we re-submit it again, saying that if it doesn't go through, then we'll shortly be suffering big problems. So finance sit on it for another 3-4 weeks until giving an answer. Sometimes, this involves putting things more strenuously again, and sometimes it'll get cleared, but it's rare to get things through the Finance department first time. Oddly, they're the ones that expect things to be done yesterday when they even think they may have a problem, and the most highly overstaffed department here. The trick to running an IT department is to keep the paperwork down (which means the managers actually have to work at giving real reports), and don't have them at the mercy of some monstrosity such as a Finance department where people don't have a clue what the purchase actually means (or at least have someone in Finance that actually understands what tech is generally about).
The real reason was that there was no way NT would run on a standard home PC in those days, or a standard business PC. NT was a complete hog compared to resources required by 3.11. Knowing that they'd completely fail if they pushed NT as the next step because most people couldn't afford to buy the hardware needed to run it, they packaged '95 as a solution. I was working in IT for the ad agency that had the Microsoft account, and I saw the campaign being built, and the reasons for the claims. One was that 95 would run in x (where x was 4 I think) meg of ram. The reason that was set as the mark was that people on the above average machines would have enough memory to run it, and memory was sufficiently cheap to enable people to upgrade to enough to run it. However, running anything on top of it was another matter, and needed more RAM. However, that was happily left out of the ads (what a surprise). Compatibility wasn't that big a bugbear. There were some DOS only apps out there, but NT thunked to 16bits happily enough for most offices. It was all about making sure MS had the revenue stream to ensure they had their cash injection from the market in a timely manner. They couldn't sell NT to the home market because of hardware spec, and knew it, so '95 was the solution.
Nobody is saying that copyright infringement isn't copyright infringement.
And nobody is saying that P2P is a wonderful thing for the artists.
What they are saying is that litigation is not the solution to the problem; its simply adding another problem to the existing one (creating a wave of extremely bad publicity for the musci industry when they know that their sales slump is simply due to people already purchasing alternate products with their cash).
When they find a suitable solution to the problem, then they'll no doubt apply it.
The RIAA is doing something akin to applying the death penalty for jumping a red traffic light.
Sensibly, the Canadian label is letting it be known that this is simply too heavy handed, and stating that they would like things toned down a little please.
The true damage done to the RIAA in this isn't that someone is standing up to them, it's that a record label is standing up to them and saying "You are not representing the best interests of the Artists.".
This is a major broadside to the spin and misdirection campaign they have going (i.e. We sue sharers because they hurt the artists! We act for the artists! We're being the good guy fighting evil!). Now, one of "the fold" has stood out, and actually declared "You are stating you represent us, but in fact, you're acting way out of line and going contrary to our real wishes.".
The crux being, this record label is an agent for an artist mentioned in a case by the RIAA, and yet both the label and the artist are explicit in not wanting the RIAA to go ahead with the action. The RIAA are doing so. Thus they lose the moral high ground they've been claiming so long to the general public, and showing themselves blatantly to NOT be following the wishes of the artists AND their own members. Which really cuts out a fair portion of their reason for being.
Glad to see you deadpost, so most people won't reply; I'll bite though
Here's just a few documented speciation events which have occurred in recent times. Finding this was easy, as it was document number #2 in a google search for "Documented speciation event".
Ask the right places, and you will recieve and answer. Better yet, go research.
Interesting. What's you level of understanding of Evolution. BSc Biochemistry/Zoology/Biology/Genetics? Master, or PhD? Or basic schooling with a few easy books on the side and an armchair expert?
The basic theory of evolution holds water, and models of it's behaviour (i.e. emergent systems) show a natural tendancy to improvement. Speciation events have been catalogued. Mutation and selection for fitness traits has been observed. Evolution, as a theory is a very strong one. The further back in history one goes, the less survives from the time period, thus the harder it is to obtain the evidence and a clear audit trail (have you ever tried finding clothing from 2000 years ago, which is in a clearly recorded era of history?).
I'd actually be interested in hearing your dispute with the theory of Evolution. You've said it needs to be understood in a drastically different way, but can you explain why? If you've got clear evidence of a flaw, then I'd be happy to listen. If you just say 'because it does', then that's not a debate. Personally, I treat evolution as a good guideline (the best I know of), and leverage it while writing adaptive/learning systems. If you've got a better method, I'll be happy to listen, as it'd make my life a lot easier.
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Reducing admin to a skeleton staff is the 'old way' now. The financial companies have woken up to just how vulnerable they are to having their systems fail (the costs worked out that it could kill a bank in a week, if things weren't working again, and though they don't publicly admit, it is known that a few are not in as strong a position as they'd like to be).
Once they get over the 'Just In Time' mentality of fast buck now, and screw the future, they realise that a little fat is needed to last the leaner times (i.e. system failure). Simply put, the costs of not having that 'fat' are now being seen as an unacceptable risk. If you're not taking care of your continuity plans, people will treat you warily (plus, good luck with the insurance).
The US is currently known to be behind Europe in the Continuity arena, but from people at the top in this arena, the word is that they're slowly waking up to it.
Which, in general, is good news.
Renting servers in Asia doesn't help if their link fails, and you need people inside your building working on files that would have been held on a building server.
A day's outage like that can wipe out the cost savings (and more) of years of outsourcing.
Outsourcing works to a point, for low priority work, for commodity storage, and for non-critical data/applications.
For the rest.. Well, you do the maths. And, as the great quote from "Dirty Harry" goes.. "Do you feel lucky, Punk?".
Being the buzzword that it is (and the role I work in) pretty much nixes having the network administered in India.
Having someone on the inside can get a fair grasp of what's fallen over. Your main gate goes down, and if you're on the outside, it could be a gateway falling over, or the whole place has gone up in smoke.
Which plan do you put in action the second things happen? Who knows where all the latest places the switches, routers, servers, power lines, gas lines and so on are?
Who knows the users and techs on the ground well enough to pull a team together when things are bad, seemingly out of thin air? And the channels in the company/organisation well enough to know who needs to know what?
That, I think, would be the local admin. There are some things that can't be outsourced. Part of having a plan to survive the unknown (which is what business continuity is all about) involves having people there, on the floor, when things are bad, that have the skills to make the right decisions when they're needed.
If those skills are on another continent, without the visuals, and communications channels, kiss goodbye to your company when it hits the fan bigtime. A quickly hired local consultant won't understand the business, so can't rebuild/continue it.
Basically, outsourcing that level is gambling with the company. If everything goes fine with never a problem, you save a shed load by outsourcing.
If it all goes tits up, bend over and kiss your ass (and your company) goodbye.
What a weird use of logic. If you've bought the game, you've already compensated the owner of the copyright.
Now, a crack is a patch. And a patch is basically the errata section that may be applied to any book that doesn't contain what it should (you can find errata pages for scientific textbooks now and then).
Now, by your logic, it'd be illegal to insert errata pages into legally bought books if those pages were produced by a third party. In actuality, it's completely legal.
Applying a crack to a legally purchased game is not illegal. You've certainly not stolen anything (having already paid). You've also not violated copyright (as you've paid for the privilege of owning a copy).
You are not supporting pirates by using a crack. They gain nothing from it. So where's the support? And again, using a crack is not illegal.
If software doesn't do what I want, I'll fix it. Either that, or I'll send it back to the manufacturer, and specify why I was unhappy with their product. If they refuse to accept it back on the grounds that a box has been opened (in violation of all normal consumer rights), I'll damn well do what needs be done to ensure it fits my needs.
You have a really odd view of what constitutes theft and copyright violation. I'd really love to know where you get your ideas. They certainly don't have much to do with what the legal system sees them as. I'd hazard a guess you've been reading a lot of the 'educational pamphlets' written by the anti-piracy offices.
But, to give you the benefit of the doubt, I'd like to see your rationale of why you consider using a crack to be copyright violation, or theft. And please make the argument such that it would stand up to scrutiny, rather than just say "Because it is", which is what you've been doing.
Actually, the cost of things spiraling to the point they're only just supported by two incomes is a product of both partners working.
Back about 30 years ago (at the edge of my memory), things were affordable on one income, at a stretch. The 'Normal' way things worked was that partners got married, had kids, and one partner stayed at home to raise them (usually the female, but not always).
Over the last 30 years, more and more emphasis has been places on both partners working, so that you can afford more and better.
The result has been that more 'disposable' income has been available. This has meant that the competition for resources (housing etc) has increased to the point that only those with two incomes can afford to buy/rent in decent areas.
Now, it's practially mandated that both partners work. The 'Right to work' of both partners has become twisted to 'The necessity to work'.
From my point of view, I'd love to be able to support a 'home body' lass.. And worked my butt off to be in a position to do so, for quite some time.
More than one of my male friends would be quite happy being the home body in counterpoint to a female breadwinner (and some of them have done so, but money is incredibly tight for them, to the point they can rarely actually go out places with kids).
Basically, I think the "any partner can work" was a great move, but the "Both partners can work" was misguided and very short sighted.
Actually, it goes more like:
US company comes into EU, gets treated nicely.
Said company breaks laws in EU, gets taken to court (anti trust).
Company gets upset that people have told it that it's being naughty, asks US to back it up, because it's not fair, people are picking on it.
US tells company to grow up and deal with it like everyone else.
Perhaps Sony, touched with the debacles it's been involved in recently (the Rootkit being the most well known), has decided its time to rely on a modicum of common sense. After all, the market has done without regional coding since the dawn of time (well, until a few years ago) and prospered.
The simplest solution being the best (as is often the case) says remove the complexity that doesn't really gain anything, and see what you have. The copy protection on a console.. I can live with that.. I've never been that interested in backups, as I take great care with the disks.. I have, however, been most peeved when buying region coded items that refuse to play just because I'm in the 'wrong country'.
Hopefully it's the start of a new trend of business actually listening, rather than dictating. I doubt it, but hey. It's a hope.
The more you try continuity of service, the more diverse the applications you consider bringing to bear.
I've got a browser on my mobile phone, simply because I may need to pick up mail when I'm way away from any PC. Using a PDA with ssh on it simply lets me use a text terminal when I need interactive shells on the servers, in case the rest of the kit is unavailable (or I'm miles away from anywhere, and unexpectedly need to work via shell).
Yes, they may be redundant, but when your main access channels are down, or unavailable, you learn to love your redundant but always present channels.
Superman is a pretty specific example of "Super Hero".
Just like a "Smart for two" is a specific example of a "Car".
Claiming a trademark on Superman, means you can't use Superman as a character, or company without falling foul of Trademark laws (and rightly so).
Just like you can't sell a car under the name of a "Smart for two" without it actually being that car.
The problem here is that "Super Hero" doesn't actually make you think of anything other than a highly generic set of characters, many of which don't have anything to do with DC or Marvel.
It would be like a company claiming to own the trademark on the word "Car".
These days, it really is a generic, and ought to be treated as such.
There are already bluetooth keyboards out there (hey, I have one tucked by).
If someone made those cheaply (vast markup because they're currently not a commodity item), that'd solve that problem!
Ok. Well, I suggest you go without Medical insurance, car insurance, dental insurance, house insurance and so on.
Hey, you may never need them.
But when you do, they make a hell of a difference having them there and freely available, because the time you absolutely need things most is the time you can least afford time or money (or both).
Hmm.. I'm the database admin for a hospital over here in the UK, and there is absolutely no restriction on me seeing any medical data.
It all passes around the hospital on the networks, is intercepted by the interfaces to the internal databases, and ends up on my servers.
Now, I've signed many a form which amounts to "If I release any of the medical data, I'll never really be able to work in IT again", which I consider a fair clause.
Everyone in the tech department is basically bound by the same agreement.
If anyone is found to abuse the privilege, the consequences are dire. Thankfully, everyone has a healthy lack of curiosity in that area (frequent trips past the operating theatres do that for you).
SQL Server 2005's not a bad engine. It just doesn't scale like Oracle does.
If they chose Oracle for the job, I say fair play to 'em for choosing the right tool for the job.
They probably had to fight tooth and nail politically to do it, but it shows they're serious.
I can remember the quality of the searches from both of those.
Alta Vista used to end up choked by the advertisers and marketers adding in spurious words to the pages.
It was also not that user friendly to get a decent search on the go (although not too bad once you got used to it).
Google on the other hand had (and still has) an excellent algorithm for gathering what you want from a very basic search string that's very user friendly.
It also does this very quickly. I changed from Alta Vista (and Webcrawler before it) to Google because of the vastly different quality of the search results.
For MS to get noticably better than google, it'll have to be truly exceptional. Most people won't notice that extra few hundred results returned at the tail end of 8.2 million returned results in a search.
Coupled, as has been noted elsewhere that Google has a vast public acceptance (and to a degree trust, which is entirely lacking in Microsoft), MS are in for a rough ride of it.
Still, it's good to see, as competition creates better products.
The tech part is entirely neutral in the equation.
The real issue here is management. Because information is available, management often believe they do need it.
Often, that's pretty far from the truth. People spend so much time now gathering useless figures, processing those, and presenting them that they often don't bother to take care of the issues that don't readily fit into numeric analysis, or worry about whether they're introducing noise into the signal (which only needs to be filtered out again later).
What people need to do is take a step back and determine what they really need to do their job, and get a process in place that'll automate delivery of the figures they actually need to them when they're needed.
That way, they'll likely find that the job does increase in efficiency.
I work in a hostpital as one of the business continuity team; we keep the place running in the event of something just like this, and have to evaluate the problems that'll occur in an outage if it happens.
ITU is dependant on having patient records, history, full charts and responses available in a very rapid fashion. When the computers go down, they don't stop working, just all the communications that happen near instantly suddenly have to be ordered from medical records, and use sneakernet, which is a massive time overhead. In time critical requirements, this may mean the difference between life and death.
Fair enough, the hospital should have been more secure, but there again, it all comes down to how many admins they have on the job. I know my time is allocated (still) in a very small part on security. I'm pressing to have more allocated. And my budget for security tools is small. Hell, with the NHS budget cuts next year, we'll be lucky to have much budget at all. Still, it's improving slowly. I'm still not happy with it, which gives me more incentive to work harder on it.
But anyone who would attack a hospital system has to be aware that lives are at stake here, not just a few pounds/dollars. In commercial places, I'd frequently warn people if I could work out who they were, or the admin of the sytems they came in from if I couldn't. Eventually, I'd call the police if I believed they were being too persistent, as a last resort.
In the hospital, I spot an attack, police will be warned promptly. No messing around. The place I work at saved my brother's life years back in ITU (when, by rights, his injuries should have killed him). I'm a little protective of the work they do, and the systems that let them do their job more efficiently. After all, they may just make that difference between life and death in the borderline cases, and every little win by the skin of the teeth means a lifetime to somebody.
That was just a clarification, not a dispute. I'm behind you all the way in the sentiment you express. They're in trouble, and justly so.
Weird that.
I was using Occam on paralell processors back in the late 80s.. And it had absolutely no problem with leveraging 12 paralell processors then. Something must have improved in the last near 20 years.
The problem I see with it though is we will end up with a lot of medium quality material because no one will want to invest the effort and money to create good material
Well, that'll be one step better than the low quality material they pump out these days, as they don't want to invest the time and quality to put out good quality material, when they can advertise and sell low quality crap.
X-Plane works nicely with multiple monitors.. Not as graphically pretty as the MS offering, but as far as being a 'realistic' simulation of flying a plane, it knocks the pants off the MS sim (I do both, sim and real flying).
Methinks a lot of people will treat it as a kind of joke when it comes out, a name they've heard of, but don't expect much from (I certainly don't expect much out of it)..
What I'm hoping for is that the game, like the previous DN games, doesn't take itself seriously, and manages to capture the offbeat, humourour lacivousness that the earlier ones did so well.
If it does, it'll be a success, in that offbeat, humourous way that the previous ones were. They didn't break new ground, and they didn't have the latest gizmoes.
They just had a lot of people who played it and commented "That was a bit of a laugh.", rather than "Whoah, look at those graphics!".
Oddly, we sometimes have the same kinds of problems.
For desktop boxes, there are stores with hard disks, RAM sticks, and so on. Spare boxes to replace those that blow up too.
For a server, there really are hoops to jump through. We don't carry spare RAM for those (as finance won't shell out for stocks of RAM; they're covered in 'support agreements' if they go wrong). Trying to get upgrades for a server is a nightmare.
We work out what needs to be done. Send it to Finance.
Finance sit on it for 3-4 weeks, then sometimes reject it as being an unnecessary purchase.
So, we re-submit it again, saying that if it doesn't go through, then we'll shortly be suffering big problems.
So finance sit on it for another 3-4 weeks until giving an answer. Sometimes, this involves putting things more strenuously again, and sometimes it'll get cleared, but it's rare to get things through the Finance department first time.
Oddly, they're the ones that expect things to be done yesterday when they even think they may have a problem, and the most highly overstaffed department here.
The trick to running an IT department is to keep the paperwork down (which means the managers actually have to work at giving real reports), and don't have them at the mercy of some monstrosity such as a Finance department where people don't have a clue what the purchase actually means (or at least have someone in Finance that actually understands what tech is generally about).
The real reason was that there was no way NT would run on a standard home PC in those days, or a standard business PC.
NT was a complete hog compared to resources required by 3.11.
Knowing that they'd completely fail if they pushed NT as the next step because most people couldn't afford to buy the hardware needed to run it, they packaged '95 as a solution.
I was working in IT for the ad agency that had the Microsoft account, and I saw the campaign being built, and the reasons for the claims.
One was that 95 would run in x (where x was 4 I think) meg of ram. The reason that was set as the mark was that people on the above average machines would have enough memory to run it, and memory was sufficiently cheap to enable people to upgrade to enough to run it.
However, running anything on top of it was another matter, and needed more RAM. However, that was happily left out of the ads (what a surprise).
Compatibility wasn't that big a bugbear. There were some DOS only apps out there, but NT thunked to 16bits happily enough for most offices.
It was all about making sure MS had the revenue stream to ensure they had their cash injection from the market in a timely manner. They couldn't sell NT to the home market because of hardware spec, and knew it, so '95 was the solution.
Nobody is saying that copyright infringement isn't copyright infringement. And nobody is saying that P2P is a wonderful thing for the artists. What they are saying is that litigation is not the solution to the problem; its simply adding another problem to the existing one (creating a wave of extremely bad publicity for the musci industry when they know that their sales slump is simply due to people already purchasing alternate products with their cash). When they find a suitable solution to the problem, then they'll no doubt apply it. The RIAA is doing something akin to applying the death penalty for jumping a red traffic light. Sensibly, the Canadian label is letting it be known that this is simply too heavy handed, and stating that they would like things toned down a little please.
The true damage done to the RIAA in this isn't that someone is standing up to them, it's that a record label is standing up to them and saying "You are not representing the best interests of the Artists.".
This is a major broadside to the spin and misdirection campaign they have going (i.e. We sue sharers because they hurt the artists! We act for the artists! We're being the good guy fighting evil!). Now, one of "the fold" has stood out, and actually declared "You are stating you represent us, but in fact, you're acting way out of line and going contrary to our real wishes.".
The crux being, this record label is an agent for an artist mentioned in a case by the RIAA, and yet both the label and the artist are explicit in not wanting the RIAA to go ahead with the action. The RIAA are doing so. Thus they lose the moral high ground they've been claiming so long to the general public, and showing themselves blatantly to NOT be following the wishes of the artists AND their own members. Which really cuts out a fair portion of their reason for being.
Glad to see you deadpost, so most people won't reply; I'll bite though
Here's just a few documented speciation events which have occurred in recent times. Finding this was easy, as it was document number #2 in a google search for "Documented speciation event".
Ask the right places, and you will recieve and answer. Better yet, go research.
Interesting. What's you level of understanding of Evolution. BSc Biochemistry/Zoology/Biology/Genetics? Master, or PhD? Or basic schooling with a few easy books on the side and an armchair expert?
The basic theory of evolution holds water, and models of it's behaviour (i.e. emergent systems) show a natural tendancy to improvement. Speciation events have been catalogued. Mutation and selection for fitness traits has been observed.
Evolution, as a theory is a very strong one. The further back in history one goes, the less survives from the time period, thus the harder it is to obtain the evidence and a clear audit trail (have you ever tried finding clothing from 2000 years ago, which is in a clearly recorded era of history?).
I'd actually be interested in hearing your dispute with the theory of Evolution. You've said it needs to be understood in a drastically different way, but can you explain why?
If you've got clear evidence of a flaw, then I'd be happy to listen. If you just say 'because it does', then that's not a debate.
Personally, I treat evolution as a good guideline (the best I know of), and leverage it while writing adaptive/learning systems.
If you've got a better method, I'll be happy to listen, as it'd make my life a lot easier.