Month: October 2012

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Truth

This should be required viewing for everyone at my workplace. I can't tell you how many times I've gone to a desktop and opened up IE to see one quarter of the screen taken up by toolbars. "I don't know how those got there!" And they wonder why shit doesn't work…

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Putting Things into Perspective

Stolen from a post on Facebook:

SCALE MODEL OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM

How big is the solar system? Scientists have placed the edge of the solar system at the Kuiper Belt or the Oort Cloud. The Kuiper Belt is an asteroid belt beyond Pluto (today, Pluto is categorized as a member of the Kuiper Belt) and about 60 times as massive as the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The Oort Cloud is the theoretical mass of comets, asteroids and other debris beyond the Kuiper Belt. This puts the solar system's diameter at roughly 1.5 light years across, or about fifteen trillion kilometers.

In order to put this scale to a size that can be better related to, the Sun will be represented by a bowling ball about eight inches across. About 7.6 meters from the bowling ball is Mercury, represented by a pinhead. Another 6.9 meters is Venus, represented by a peppercorn, and Earth is 5.3 meters further, represented by another peppercorn (the moon is about 6.1 centimeters from the Earth, represented by a pinhead). At this point, Earth is almost 20 meters from the Sun. Continuing past the Earth 10.7 meters is find Mars, a second pinhead.

Between Mars and Jupiter is the asteroid belt. The asteroid belt is about 41.5 meters from the Sun. However, the asteroid belt is mostly empty space. Thirty one meters past the asteroid belt, or 72.4 meters past Mars, is Jupiter, represented by a chestnut. To put this scale into perspective, Jupiter is 102.9 meters from the Sun and more than a city block from Mars.

After Jupiter are the rest of the outer planets: Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, represented by a hazelnut, a coffee bean, and a peanut, respectively. Saturn is 85.3 meters past Jupiter, with Uranus 189.7 meters past that and Neptune 214.1 meters past Uranus. Finally arrive at Pluto, represented by a pinhead 184.4 meters past Uranus. This point is one kilometer from the Sun. At this distance, the bowling ball is no longer visible, not even with binoculars. Less than a millimeter past Pluto are the Voyager probes.

Of course, while the planets do not stay in a straight line (the Voyager probes used a unique aligning of the outer planets to their advantage), they generally stay about the same distance from the Sun and from each other. So, while Jupiter and Saturn can be as close as 85 meters together in this model, they can be as far as 391 meters apart when they are on opposite sides of the Sun from each other.

The nearest star to the Sun is Proxima Centauri, at 4.2 light years. On this model, it is a whopping 6,759 kilometers from the bowling ball that represents the Sun. The star Arcturus, which is 58,996 kilometers from the bowling ball – about four and a half times the width of the Earth – would be five meters across, longer than a standard pickup truck. Rigel, which is over a million kilometers from the bowling ball – three times further away than the moon – would be ten meters across, about the length of a standard school bus. Betelgeuse, the red giant in the constellation Orion, would be about 158 meters across – twice the size of an American football field. Yet, in this model, the Earth is just the size of an ordinary peppercorn.

– R. Atkinson

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Bwaaaaaahaha!

From Business Insider:

At first blush, Microsoft's entry-level Surface tablet seems like a good value compared to the iPad and other tablets. That's because you get double the storage (32 GB versus 16 GB) for the same price as the iPad, US$499 (C$519).

But the reason Microsoft started the Surface at 32 GB instead of 16 GB is because the operating system,Windows RT, takes up approximately 12 GB of space.

Those numbers come from a Reddit AMA session with members of Microsoft's Surface team. When asked how much space Windows RT takes up, Microsoft's Surface test manager, Ricardo Lopez said there will be about 20 GB of free space after Windows RT, Office RT, and "a bunch of apps."

It's not a straight answer, but it's pretty clear Windows RT is a massive operating system. For reference, Apple's iPad operating system takes up less than 1 GB. If Microsoft had made the entry-level Surface a 16 GB device, you'd only have about 4 GB free to play around with.

Remind me again why I should care about anything Microsoft does?

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Hospital Computer Hardware Also Suffers From Infections

No surprise there. Until about a year before I left my previous place of employment, all the fetal monitors in the patient rooms had no anti-virus software whatsoever.

From Ars Technica:

Drug-resistant bacteria aren't the only pernicious bugs that hospitals need to worry about.  MIT's Technology Review reports that hospitals' computerized equipment—such as patient monitoring systems, MRI scanners,  and nuclear medicine systems—is dangerously vulnerable to malware, and many systems are in fact heavily infected with viruses.

That's because many of these systems run on older versions of Windows—such as Windows 2000. Medical equipment manufacturers often won't support security patches or operating system upgrades for their systems, largely out of concern about whether such changes would require them to resubmit their systems to the Food and Drug Administration for certification.

The scope of the problem was the topic of a panel discussion (PDF) at a National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Information Security and Privacy Advisory Board on October 11. Mark Olson, the Chief Information Security Officer at Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, told attendees that malware had infected fetal monitors in his hospital's high-risk pregnancy ward, to the point where they were so slow they couldn't properly record data.

"Fortunately, we have a fallback model," Olson said. "They are in an (intensive care) unit—there's someone physically there to watch. But if they are stepping away to another patient, there is a window of time for things to go in the wrong direction." The systems have since been replaced with new ones—based on Microsoft's Windows XP.

"The systems have since been replaced with new ones—based on Microsoft's Windows XP." Oh, that's reassuring…