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Comment Re:Satire or irresponsible? (Score 1) 572

by MmmmAqua (#30471650) Attached to: Angry AT&T Customers May Disrupt Service
City streets are a government-provided service, funded by the public and built for the public good. While your streets may very well be shitty, you have legal rights and recourse to make the government un-shitty your streets. No such luck in dealing with a corporation, even when their approach of squeezing every penny out of customers and neglecting to actually support services they are selling causes unreliable access to a bona-fide public service, 911.

AT&T's bottom-line mentality is what is irresponsible here.

Comment Re:Doctors (Score 1) 294

by MmmmAqua (#28490719) Attached to: IT and Health Care

They think of it as something that is subsidiary to their role as caretakers, when it's actually central to it, as it is in pretty much any industry and they are completely in denial of that fact

This attitude from IT is exactly why the doctors are so obstinate. The constant barrage of geeks claiming that IT is the core of everything is the cause of most of the bad reception IT gets from doctors and other professionals.

You think IT is central to health care, and just as important as physicians? Well, there were hospitals and doctors long before there were computers. It's HEALTH CARE, and the central idea is to make sick people better. If the integrated systems or individual applications can't make a doctors job easier or more efficient, they will not be used. The problem isn't that doctors are stubborn jerks, it's that you aren't offering good enough products.

This kind of bullshit is one of the reasons I recently left IT after thirteen years as a software and systems engineer. For medicine, ironically enough, considering the topic.

Comment Re:Crap (Score 1) 291

by MmmmAqua (#27477521) Attached to: IBM Withdraws $7B Offer For Sun Microsystems, Says NYT
Niagara-generation SPARC CPUs are open source. Anyone with an idle fab laying around can go ahead and start churning out UltraSPARC T1 and T2 processors. Fujitsu has an interest in the architecture not dying, since the SPARC Enterprise server line is actually Sun/Fujitsu and the SPARC64-V PRIMEPOWER is all Fujitsu.

That doesn't get you very far without compatible hardware to plug the CPU into, but Sun being bought and shut down by the likes of MS doesn't necessarily mean SPARC will go bye-bye.

http://www.opensparc.net/

Comment Re:Apple: Breakin' a bunch of crap recently (Score 2, Insightful) 264

by MmmmAqua (#26908087) Attached to: Apple's Mac OS X Update Breaks Perl
That doesn't really matter as much as how Sims 2 is using Quicktime. If they are sticking to the published API and an update broke the game, then, yeah, Apple screwed up. But if they are using an undocumented macro, function, or method, then Apple isn't at fault.

FWIW, I have a few apps written against QTKit that have worked unmodified for some time now. So at least some of the API is stable. Who knows what arcane corners Aspyr is delving into, though?
United States

Submission + - DashCam Catches Officer Threatening Motorist

Submitted by januth
januth writes: I just finished reading about this incident, in which a St. George, Missouri police officer was caught on a motorist's personal dashcam threatening to invent charges to arrest him even though the motorist had done nothing wrong.

"The incident began at around 2am. Darrow [the motorist] was to meet a friend who was working late and was going to pick him up. Darrow headed toward a 24-hour commuter parking lot in an unincorporated part of Saint Louis County in his 1997 Nissan Maxima. He put on his turn signal and entered the lot which, aside from Kuehnlein's cruiser, was essentially vacant. After stopping the car, the police officer approached and began questioning Darrow about what he was doing. When Darrow declined to discuss his personal business, the police sergeant exploded. Although the video clearly shows Darrow driving properly and using his turn signal, the police officer insisted that Darrow had broken the law."

Had Darrow not had his own video camera running it would have been his word against the police officer's. He has had another interesting run-in with the police that he captured on video as well. In both cases he's merely asking the questions any citizen should be able to ask of a police officer. In both cases, the police do not respond well.
Security

Submission + - Credit Card security: Who pays for breaches?

Submitted by
PetManimal
PetManimal writes: "A scheme to steal customers' credit and debit card information at a New England supermarket chain highlights a little-understood fact about credit card security: Customers still think that the credit-card companies have to eat fraudulent charges, but since PCI DSS standards were adopted, it's actually the merchant banks and merchants who have to pay up. And, according to the author of the last article, it's a good thing:

The main reason PCI exists is that there are tens of thousands of merchants who don't understand the basics of information security and weren't even taking the very minimum steps to secure their networks and the credit card information they stored. ... PCI pushes that burden downstream and forces merchants to take on a preventative role rather than a reactive role. They have to put in a properly configured firewall, encrypt sensitive information and maintain a minimum security stance or be fined by their merchant banks. By forcing this to be an issue about prevention rather than reaction, the credit card companies have taken the bulk of the financial burden off of themselves and placed it on the merchants, which is where much of it belongs anyways.
"
User Journal

Journal Journal: Ford Vehicles to Read Email 1

Journal by quadra23
In an update to a prior Slashdot story from December, news sources such as WBIR are carrying news states the new Ford and Microsoft service called Sync will be hitting the roads in the fall of 2007, as mentioned at the recent Chicago Auto Show. The service would be able to read the emails and using an audio system will be capable of reading the email contents aloud.
Google

Submission + - Massive Google hard drive survey

Submitted by
CristianoMonteiro
CristianoMonteiro writes: "Google studied a hundred thousand SATA and PATA drives with between 80 and 400GB storage and 5400 to 7200rpm, and while unfortunately they didn't call out specific brands or models that had high failure rates, they did find a few interesting patterns in failing hard drives. One of those we thought was most intriguing was that drives often needed replacement for issues that SMART drive status polling didn't or couldn't determine, and 56% of failed drives did not raise any significant SMART flags. See story."

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