It’s called Bing. Have a look at what it can do here.
It seems it’s the year of the search engine enhancement. Like Wolfram Alpha it’s moved away from the search and see who has the most hits but moved towards helping you make your decisions by displaying pertinent data and letting you decide. It is a midway point between Wolfram Alpha and Google which means they will all have their niche in the marketplace and Google will most likely have to share dominance. Can’t be a bad thing today.
No mention of when it will be available though which is interesting as the demo shows it clearly in action so you would assume it’s almost ready. Hope that it isn’t set up just for the demo and it’s nothing like that.
All these enhancements should mean that the web gets a lot easier to use as we can find, theoretically, what we are looking for easier.
One of the things I hate about the Internet is how easy it is to do your own thing. The one that I keep on hitting is to do with video files.
First of all there is a multitude of formats available for use, we have MOV, QT, AVI etc. etc. all of which are totally incompatible. After that, with some of them, you then have a multitude of codecs that are used. What the benefit of these are is beyond me. I understand that they can squeeze a few more bytes compression out of a video file. Whoopy do dah. I already have a computer full of bloatware and to have to download a new codec just to run a video file because some geek thinks that the 20KB space saving is worth while is getting annoying. Especially when I get the message ‘Error downloading Codec’. Very informative. So I went looking on Google. Seems there are a lot of sites out there with codecs. Some are even at version 6.8.5. Great, so not only is there a million of these codecs but they keep getting upgraded frequently as well.
Yet my video files get bigger and bigger and my media player is 10Mb but has 2Gb of codecs in it.
What is it with graphics? I thought pictures were bad enough with all their formats but video is undoubtably king for the geek.
An interesting post at NHS Blog Doctor which basically shows the difference between treatment in a high tech, high liability area and in a low tech, low liability area.
Now, as in all these things we never know what would have happened if the kid had died. Would there have been a case for negligence or something? We shall never know.
I’ve seen the articles that talk about these and other similar cases and they seem to lean three ways.
- That doctors are now so reliant on high tech that they can’t actually perform without the scanners.
- That training on simulators makes doctors not appreciate that they are working on real live people.
- That they are so afraid of the legal ramifications that they just don’t want to take the risk.
Well, as you suspected, I have an opinion on this.
I think the technology is great. It enables people to train in an environment that is risk free and learn from their mistakes. They can repeat procedure after procedure until they get it right at no risk to life or limb.
I think that those that leave that environment and then work on real people are very much aware that they are not in a training environment and don’t have the luxury of making mistakes and take a bit more care. Of course not everyone cares about others to the same level, sliding scales again, but we should rely on malpractice and peer pressure to make sure that these people are kept in line. Make a mistake, fine, make the same again and your skills are questioned and, if relevant, your license removed. As is set up now if you screw up in a hospital.
However, I do see the malpractice scene as causing issues well out of proportion to the benefits. Sure if a doctor operates on someone in the street when they could just staunch the wound and he could go to hospital safely then they should face an enquiry but if someone is clearly not going to make it to hospital without some emergency first aid then they should not be penalised, lose their livelihood, their savings and perhaps freedom for attempting it and failing. Of course the statement ‘is clearly not going to make it’ might be different with 20/20 hindsight but it should be based on intent and what is known at the time and viewed as such at the hearing.
I believe that to a highly trained and skilled doctor the scanners etc. are aids. Something that they use to provide a diagnosis and aid in treatment. They rely on skills from training, peers, books and scanners. Lack of the scanners means they have to rely on their training, peers and books to diagnose and treat. If on their own just their training. Just like in the olden days. Few people remember everything and in an emergency situation time is critical and little of it is available to consider the options. So mortality will undoubtedly suffer but to allow it to hit zero because they won’t try because they are scared to face malpractice suits is short sighted and stupid. Pretty much the mindset of our legislative bodies unfortunately. All it does is put money in the pockets of lawyers and over compensate those that would likely have got nothing from the purses of good Samaritans. It’s unintended consequences are that nobody is willing to help because they are risking so much and for no benefit to themselves. Nobody gets sued for doing nothing.
Another example of the politicians making law intended to make people safer doing the opposite.
It seems that the human race survived rising sea levels 5000 years ago. The people around then clearly destroyed all the SUVs at that time and saved the planet. Cheers all around.
So why re-invent the wheel. Let’s learn from them. So how did they do it?, read here. Isn’t it strange they had some common sense then that seems to be missing nowadays even though we are supposed to be more intelligent.
My conclusion? I suspect that politicians were non existent in those days.
Reading this article on Paintballing ‘Is there a problem with paintball?’ where it discussed the German response to a shooting in Germany by considering banning paintball. Although it seems they will ‘only’ regulate it. With the nanny state in the UK you can be certain it won’t be long before we look at the same issue and come up with an even more draconian solution.
Nobody will look at the people that perform the crimes. See how many of them played paintball, airsoft etc. and how many of them are on the dole or in single parent families. That would be facts they don’t want to face so they ignore them and just do something. No matter how ineffective and anyway paintball isn’t like football, whose supporters are really violent, so there won’t be a backlash. An easy win. They seem to be doing something and little chance of a reaction.
I’ve played paintball. I enjoyed it. I’ve not felt the need to go out and kill anyone becauseof it, so far anyway. However, I have watched what has gone on in politics, the destruction of my country, the injustice the clampdown on liberties and have felt that it is getting to the time when something must be done.
Why is it that we as a society can watch the same techniques being applied time after time and can believe even for an instant that this time it will stop before it gets too far? The salami tactics have been used for decades. It even got a mention in Yes Minister where it was explained that if the Russians invaded a bit at a time we would not push the nuke button.
Yet for some reason we just don’t accept that it will be used on us ‘this time’.
Weapons, drink, smoking all are being treated to the salami tactics. Plans are being put in place to salami slice energy, via smart meters, food and travel. If politicians have their way we would be up to 1970 soviet standards by 2012.
So when will we learn? Well according to what I can see this is one that the bulk of us won’t ever pass. The children of the smart ones, the ones who fought in our big wars, are short sighted and stupid. It seems we may have to wait until the chains are on us all before we do anything.
It seems that we have a new technique available to us to send secret messages to our pals without our government listening in.
Read here about hiding messages in TCP/IP packets.
This works because of the fault tolerant nature of TCP/IP, basically what it was designed for. It takes your transmission and splits it into little chunks, about 512bytes, and sends each chunk on it’s way with a wrapper containing addresses and positional data among other things. This transmission can be anything, a web page, EMail, internet phone call, P2P information etc. The data is received and reassembled at the other end as well as intercepted and reassembled in our KGB style boxes at the ISPs. Now our receiving stations sends back an error on a packet and this triggers a retransmission. This new packet contains the hidden data. The KGB box already has a valid packet so it ignores it and so the snoops don’t see what has been sent. Voila. Secret message.
Now like everything else this can be worked around by a software upgrade. Software can trap all packets and display them but there are many errors in normal operation so how can you tell which ones are deliberate? This means you need to keep every error package as well and try and decrypt them. As 0.1% of the packets error that is a lot of data. Its impractical.
Like the war on drugs the government is wasting our money on futile exercises. What do they care though? It’s our money not theirs.
I liked the comment ‘One application of the RSTEG technique might be to help people in totalitarian regimes avoid censorship.’ I wouldn’t have described the UK as a totalitarian regime, yet, but they are working on it and it will come in handy here as well.
I can’t wait until we have a practical space elevator. It is what we really need instead of rockets to get objects, people and material, into orbit at an affordable cost. Once it is ready we will have several space stations up there we can just hop on a lift to get to.
Now there is a new theory that space elevators could rotate to move objects into space by using the rotational power of the Earth instead of a separate power source.
Quite how we get back to Earth though is skipped over. Parachutes and heat shields for all. I’m assuming that we can use the conventional space elevator theory to travel back down.
Now this looks like the future. Cars built purely for use by the Police. Well at least that’s the plan. Although I can see some complaining that Carbon motors is not a local firm and they need to buy locally to protect their workforce. Although currently I suppose it won’t be long before our government owned firms produce what they are told to.
The only thing I wonder about is why it has taken so long. Especially when some forces in the UK have been using high performance cars for decades. Although I suppose these ones can hardly be used for undercover work.
Earlier this week I was at a risk seminar where we were looking at the risks caused by the recession on IT projects.
Basically, it boiled down to companies going bankrupt and our IT services being disrupted by the loss of service and/or support. Nothing unusual there and a few solutions were suggested. The main issue is that government doesn’t tend to have the same resilience built in as private businesses due to the way their IT work is subcontracted out but the rest of the risks are similar.
One risk raised that was interesting was that private businesses were concerned about their data being compromised. There was major debate about how to allocate contingency. What’s new you may think, hackers have been out there for years so why the big debate? Well yes they have. So what exactly is the concern?
The concern was over our democratically elected governments accessing the data.
Wait till your local council or plod gets hold of these. Little remote cameras that can watch what trash you put in your bins and recycling as well as following you wherever you go, including your home, if you are on the latest KGB watchlist.
MS’s belated answer to Google
It’s called Bing. Have a look at what it can do here.
It seems it’s the year of the search engine enhancement. Like Wolfram Alpha it’s moved away from the search and see who has the most hits but moved towards helping you make your decisions by displaying pertinent data and letting you decide. It is a midway point between Wolfram Alpha and Google which means they will all have their niche in the marketplace and Google will most likely have to share dominance. Can’t be a bad thing today.
No mention of when it will be available though which is interesting as the demo shows it clearly in action so you would assume it’s almost ready. Hope that it isn’t set up just for the demo and it’s nothing like that.
All these enhancements should mean that the web gets a lot easier to use as we can find, theoretically, what we are looking for easier.