Except that Nokia needs to do the research in order to have a business, and cell service providers would not want to create a network that only supported one vendor's phones. Of course, the service providers do not particularly care about letting small companies join the party, since there are enough large companies to satisfy the need for diversity.
Really, wireless communication methods do not need to be researched by a corporation; much of development of wireless communications methods was done in academia or by the military, and there is no reason why that shouldn't continue into the future. Why are these standards not be based on patent-free research performed at universities or the results of DARPA funded projects?
Why not? How about the fact that it locks out small companies who want to make products that adhere to the standard?
Just a hint: when standards are developed in house by a single company, it puts that company at an unfair advantage. Maybe the standards should not completely based on a single company's work?
Yes, I know, it is ridiculous to think that anyone without a multibillion dollar R&D budget could ever sell consumer electronics; after all, if they are not a big corporation, what the hell are they doing making cell phones?
You dare me to go back for two weeks? I travel very frequently, and often have nothing more than a cell phone GSM modem -- that's 9.6k dialup -- and I manage to get by. No, I cannot watch Youtube or download the latest torrents -- but that hardly makes it "worthless." There is more to the Internet than Adobe's plugin.
I am pretty sure that the banks that rely on Linux on zSeries to manage billions of dollars of transactions per day would disagree with you. Is that not a valuable enough target for the "bad guys?"
This has been going on for a while; social networking websites, news websites (with comments), aggregators like/., and blogs are routinely astroturfed.
ALSA was not behind Windows. Actually, my sound system was working fine until Pulseaudio came along. Now the only problem is the massive amount of CPU time Pulseaudio uses.
Why is that OK? I know that Fidonet is long forgotten for most, but a friend of mine who is still active there pointed out that the Whitehouse press release echo recently died because the Obama administration decided to "upgrade" to a new, blog system for press releases. I can see a net neutrality bill being passed that only covers the web, and suddenly I will lose access to IRC and Usenet because my ISP decided to maximize web bandwidth at the cost of other "services."
Most patients do not come out of a CT scan with radiation burns or poisoning. I did not say that the dose would be solely determined by hardware, I said that the maximum dose would be hardware controlled. The dose itself should be determined by software for the exact reason you specified; different scans require different levels of radiation. Most scans do not require a level that can injure the patient, yet the machine in question allowed the software to raise the level that high.
Why does everyone on slashdot think that software is right for every situation?
Dude, that was my point about being able to override the maximum dose. Most patients do not require the kind of doses that obese patients do, and it is not common to use a CT Xray to unblock an artery. As you noted, those very high doses cause burns -- the doctor should not be able to deliver that high a dose without realizing it (e.g. he should have to do something very unusual to the machine in order to have that much Xray power).
"How do you actually measure this stuff if you can't use the software?"
In the analog domain. My point was about having a maximum power output limited by hardware that could not be overridden in software.
"Then this hardware device must magically know, without software help, when the patient has left the table and now there's a new patient (with new maximums)."
Why? A doctor must initiate the scan; this should trigger the hardware to automatically reset itself to a safe maximum level. Perhaps by using something like a "button," which when depressed would "complete a circuit." Yes, a shocking concept, an input device that is not a touch screen.
"In this particular case the excess dosage was bad for many patients, but it may not have been inappropriate for the original patient that prompted them to "customize" the machine for in the first place."
Yes, they required an unusually high and dangerous level of power from the machine. This should require them to override the hardware safety mechanism, and that mechanism should be immediately reset prior to the next scan. The problem, of course, is that this machine had no hardware safety mechanism.
"Radiation therapy essentially uses dangerous doses of radiation all the time."
Yet early radiation therapy machines did have hardware interlocks to prevent radiation overdoses. This is not even a radiation therapy machine, it is just an X-ray CT scan machine.
Therein lies the problem. There should be a hardware mechanism that limits the maximum power the machine can operate at, despite what the software requests. If there is a reason to increase that limit, it should have to be done in hardware, using a mechanism that automatically resets after a single run. The process of overriding the hardware limit should be conspicuous: nobody should be able to do it without intending to do so. Preferably, it should be obvious when the limit has been overridden (e.g. something should be very different from normal when you use the machine), to prevent a doctor from activating a machine that has a raised power limit without realizing it (e.g. if a technician raises the limit then walks away).
These are not Earth-shattering concepts. These ideas fall more under the category of "basic safety." Software is too fragile, and software switches are too non-obvious, to be relied upon to manage these things.
The machine's software should not be capable of triggering the release of that much radiation; any change in the radiation levels should require some kind of hardware interaction. Even an idiot who did not RTFM should not be able to cause harm with the machine.
Email already has a threading mechanism, you just need to use a client that supports it. In fact, there are two such mechanisms: In-Reply-To and References headers, either one of which can be used to construct a threaded view. Try using KMail, Evolution, Thunderbird, etc.
Oh don't you worry about beating "don't copy that floppy" -- the SIIA has released "don't copy that 2," complete with scaremongering tactics that claim you will be thrown in jail for copyright infringement, or if you are a minor, then a SWAT team will chase down your mother and throw her in jail. Naturally, the SIIA attempts to portray the entire warez community as being greedy and seeking to profit from illegally copying software, reality notwithstanding.
The best way to fight them is to create or encourage others to create independent entertainment and distribute it in a free (libre) manner. Create media on low-cost equipment, distribute it through P2P networks, and you are essentially fighting the system. Unfortunately, it is difficult to compete with corporate advertising (e.g. MTV), and so this method is not likely to sway the majority of people (who do not particularly care about the issues surrounding the RIAA).
What was common in 1906 was for people to grab whatever they could and use it for the musical entertainment at parties. If some group couldn't afford a piano, they might have a banjo, guitar, some kind of drums, etc. They might just sing without any instruments whatsoever. Where do you think drinking songs were performed?
His comment was not about the number of musicians. It was about the culture surrounding music. When I was an undergrad, there were only a handful of parties with live entertainment; even when friends of mine who were musicians went to parties, they almost never played an instrument or sang anything. There was still music at the parties -- but it was recorded, and identical versions of the same songs could be heard over and over again at party after party.
In particular, small gatherings among friends tended to lack live music. A party with 20~ people typical involved some digital music player hooked up to a set of speakers, and not a single person actually singing or playing an instrument. Whether you think this is a good thing or not is not relevant to whether or not the comment in 1906 was accurate.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that Nokia needs to do the research in order to have a business, and cell service providers would not want to create a network that only supported one vendor's phones. Of course, the service providers do not particularly care about letting small companies join the party, since there are enough large companies to satisfy the need for diversity.
Really, wireless communication methods do not need to be researched by a corporation; much of development of wireless communications methods was done in academia or by the military, and there is no reason why that shouldn't continue into the future. Why are these standards not be based on patent-free research performed at universities or the results of DARPA funded projects?
Mobile web ;).
Why not? How about the fact that it locks out small companies who want to make products that adhere to the standard?
Just a hint: when standards are developed in house by a single company, it puts that company at an unfair advantage. Maybe the standards should not completely based on a single company's work?
Yes, I know, it is ridiculous to think that anyone without a multibillion dollar R&D budget could ever sell consumer electronics; after all, if they are not a big corporation, what the hell are they doing making cell phones?
So? Why should a STANDARD force its adherents to pay royalties?
Canned answer: "How else will we encourage innovation?!"
You dare me to go back for two weeks? I travel very frequently, and often have nothing more than a cell phone GSM modem -- that's 9.6k dialup -- and I manage to get by. No, I cannot watch Youtube or download the latest torrents -- but that hardly makes it "worthless." There is more to the Internet than Adobe's plugin.
Dial up is "worthless Internet?" I guess half of the world's Internet users have been swindled.
I am pretty sure that the banks that rely on Linux on zSeries to manage billions of dollars of transactions per day would disagree with you. Is that not a valuable enough target for the "bad guys?"
This has been going on for a while; social networking websites, news websites (with comments), aggregators like /., and blogs are routinely astroturfed.
ALSA was not behind Windows. Actually, my sound system was working fine until Pulseaudio came along. Now the only problem is the massive amount of CPU time Pulseaudio uses.
Why not just demand that your contacts all digitally sign their messages? This is basically a cryptographically managed whitelist.
Why is that OK? I know that Fidonet is long forgotten for most, but a friend of mine who is still active there pointed out that the Whitehouse press release echo recently died because the Obama administration decided to "upgrade" to a new, blog system for press releases. I can see a net neutrality bill being passed that only covers the web, and suddenly I will lose access to IRC and Usenet because my ISP decided to maximize web bandwidth at the cost of other "services."
Most patients do not come out of a CT scan with radiation burns or poisoning. I did not say that the dose would be solely determined by hardware, I said that the maximum dose would be hardware controlled. The dose itself should be determined by software for the exact reason you specified; different scans require different levels of radiation. Most scans do not require a level that can injure the patient, yet the machine in question allowed the software to raise the level that high.
Why does everyone on slashdot think that software is right for every situation?
Dude, that was my point about being able to override the maximum dose. Most patients do not require the kind of doses that obese patients do, and it is not common to use a CT Xray to unblock an artery. As you noted, those very high doses cause burns -- the doctor should not be able to deliver that high a dose without realizing it (e.g. he should have to do something very unusual to the machine in order to have that much Xray power).
I have been using aioe for the time being, although I am always in the market for something better.
"How do you actually measure this stuff if you can't use the software?"
In the analog domain. My point was about having a maximum power output limited by hardware that could not be overridden in software.
"Then this hardware device must magically know, without software help, when the patient has left the table and now there's a new patient (with new maximums)."
Why? A doctor must initiate the scan; this should trigger the hardware to automatically reset itself to a safe maximum level. Perhaps by using something like a "button," which when depressed would "complete a circuit." Yes, a shocking concept, an input device that is not a touch screen.
"In this particular case the excess dosage was bad for many patients, but it may not have been inappropriate for the original patient that prompted them to "customize" the machine for in the first place."
Yes, they required an unusually high and dangerous level of power from the machine. This should require them to override the hardware safety mechanism, and that mechanism should be immediately reset prior to the next scan. The problem, of course, is that this machine had no hardware safety mechanism.
"Radiation therapy essentially uses dangerous doses of radiation all the time."
Yet early radiation therapy machines did have hardware interlocks to prevent radiation overdoses. This is not even a radiation therapy machine, it is just an X-ray CT scan machine.
"Most hardware is software these days."
Therein lies the problem. There should be a hardware mechanism that limits the maximum power the machine can operate at, despite what the software requests. If there is a reason to increase that limit, it should have to be done in hardware, using a mechanism that automatically resets after a single run. The process of overriding the hardware limit should be conspicuous: nobody should be able to do it without intending to do so. Preferably, it should be obvious when the limit has been overridden (e.g. something should be very different from normal when you use the machine), to prevent a doctor from activating a machine that has a raised power limit without realizing it (e.g. if a technician raises the limit then walks away).
These are not Earth-shattering concepts. These ideas fall more under the category of "basic safety." Software is too fragile, and software switches are too non-obvious, to be relied upon to manage these things.
The machine's software should not be capable of triggering the release of that much radiation; any change in the radiation levels should require some kind of hardware interaction. Even an idiot who did not RTFM should not be able to cause harm with the machine.
Modem? Get off my lawn!
This message was received by Slashdot as a UPS package with a spool of punched tape inside.
Bring it back from where? Usenet still exists and is still used in certain communities (crypto, math).
Email already has a threading mechanism, you just need to use a client that supports it. In fact, there are two such mechanisms: In-Reply-To and References headers, either one of which can be used to construct a threaded view. Try using KMail, Evolution, Thunderbird, etc.
Oh don't you worry about beating "don't copy that floppy" -- the SIIA has released "don't copy that 2," complete with scaremongering tactics that claim you will be thrown in jail for copyright infringement, or if you are a minor, then a SWAT team will chase down your mother and throw her in jail. Naturally, the SIIA attempts to portray the entire warez community as being greedy and seeking to profit from illegally copying software, reality notwithstanding.
The best way to fight them is to create or encourage others to create independent entertainment and distribute it in a free (libre) manner. Create media on low-cost equipment, distribute it through P2P networks, and you are essentially fighting the system. Unfortunately, it is difficult to compete with corporate advertising (e.g. MTV), and so this method is not likely to sway the majority of people (who do not particularly care about the issues surrounding the RIAA).
What was common in 1906 was for people to grab whatever they could and use it for the musical entertainment at parties. If some group couldn't afford a piano, they might have a banjo, guitar, some kind of drums, etc. They might just sing without any instruments whatsoever. Where do you think drinking songs were performed?
His comment was not about the number of musicians. It was about the culture surrounding music. When I was an undergrad, there were only a handful of parties with live entertainment; even when friends of mine who were musicians went to parties, they almost never played an instrument or sang anything. There was still music at the parties -- but it was recorded, and identical versions of the same songs could be heard over and over again at party after party.
In particular, small gatherings among friends tended to lack live music. A party with 20~ people typical involved some digital music player hooked up to a set of speakers, and not a single person actually singing or playing an instrument. Whether you think this is a good thing or not is not relevant to whether or not the comment in 1906 was accurate.