Interesting Links for 6-7-2011

[andrewducker]

• Why Did L.A. Noire Take Seven Years to Make? (Enough to put you off ever working in the games industry)
  (tags: games work)
• Cutting down on salt doesn't reduce your chance of dying
  (tags: health salt)
• Conservative MEPs defeat new climate change targets (against instructions too - want to bet if they get punished?)
  (tags: politics conservatives climatechange europe)
• C.S. Lewis reviews Childhood's End (He liked it. I agree.)
  (tags: CSLewis ArthurCClarke review)
• Amazon just bought The Book Depository
  (tags: books amazon uk)
• Google's lack of decent testing on Android makes it unfit to be used in the enterprise
  (tags: google android testing email EpicFail)
• A collection of awful sci-fi book covers
  (tags: scifi art books)
• Chinese coal blamed for global warming er... cooling
  (tags: china globalwarming environment coal)

Comments

[teresafloyd]

I'm glad at least some of the books inside those awful covers aren't too bad. I own quite a few of them!

[kerrypolka.livejournal.com]

Mmmmmm tasty, tasty salt.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

I eat a lot of salt once more. Seems to help stop be being stiff. Blood pressure is perfect at all tests (anywhere from 116/66 to 120/80), resting heart rate about 62. I don't watch my fat intake and I don't do 'cardio' either! Don't regularly eat many carbs [barring intermittent binges])

I don't think I'm just geneiocally 'lucky' - when I drank, and ate more 'normally', my blood pressure was horrible (142/92) and my heart rate 70-90.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

On the dreadful book covers - I see from "Status Quotient: The Carrier" on page 4 that proto-UGG boots were/will be trendy in the past/future...

Actually, that guy is quite hunky... I won't hold the Uggs against him - now I'm thinking what's so wrong with this cover ? :-)

[star-tourmaline.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid I don't think anything reduces your chances of dying.

[mair_in_grenderich]

that was my thought :)

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure a lot of those covers are fair to include in a worst sci-fi/fantasy covers list. Many of them are not sci-fi but simply works of genres that couldn't be marketed as what they were at the time (erotica, fetish fiction, white power fiction) and had to have a cover that pretended the book was sci-fi while also letting readers know what it was.

I mean, of course, a vintage Gor book is going to have an insane cover - but that doesn't make it a sci-fi or fantasy book, it's still porn for DomBoys and PetGirls.

Other covers - the Phillip K. Dick one for example - simply represent the artistic design trend of their time.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I'd say that if it takes place on a planet on the other side of the sun from earth and has an ongoing invented culture, it's sf. It's not good sf, it might even be evil sf because of the generalization to all men and all women, but I don't think we only get to claim the relatively good stuff.

[doubtingmichael.livejournal.com]

My experience was usually the opposite - you got some SF book with a racy looking cover, and then the contents were much tamer. Of course, I was looking for SF/fantasy, not porn.

I think the publishers liked to have salacious covers to draw people's attention on the shelves, and maybe to draw in people who were after some porn. But it often wasn't truth in advertising.

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

I could eat less salt if it didn't mean eating less Marmite.

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

I tried to connect my personal Android device (a Google/Samsung Nexus S) to work's email, which is on a MS exchange server. In order to set up the connection, I had to grant them permission to remotely wipe the device, i.e. ability to erase all my data and apps by checking a box on the server.

Never mind that they don't want and won't use this ability; I refused on principle since it's just too disproportionate - nuke permissions just so I can send and receive bits of text? Forget it.

So, no enterpriseyness for me on android since that case was just not thought through. After all, people connecting their own phones to work's email is very uncommon, right? /endsarcasm

[andrewducker]

There's not a chance that my company will allow me to have work email on my phone without that setting, so I assume it's attached as standard to the work-email connectors.

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

Why not? Erase their own confidential data maybe, but everything else as well is taking it too far.

[andrewducker]

Because the feature is not tied to the app. If someone has your phone, and doesn't run the app, they can still get to the data. Therefore Security want to be able to trigger a remote wipe of the email and any attachments, etc. that you might have downloaded. They can't depend on whatever email program you're running to do so, so they have to remotely trigger a wipe of the whole phone.

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

Hm, I see.

The sensible compromise may be to allow a remote wipe of an app and all its data. not the whole phone. I can see how you want the OS to do this, not the app itself, which might not be running before app the data is siphoned out.

However saving attachments out of the email app into general storage is not a new security hole, nor is it specific to phones. Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V gets around a lot of security.

[andrewducker]

And this is why my work don't allow access to email on home PCs, because it would be insecure. You have to use a virtual session over Citrix to connect to it.

(By law we have to do everything we can to avoid data-leakage - it's a legal responsibility. Not all companies will be as strict, obviously.)

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

I have a similar arrangement at my office, and the privacy concerns are enormous... because we handle health data now, so PHIPPA (Personal Health Information Privacy Protection Act, read as "pee-hippa" by most, read as "bane of my existance" by me) absolutely forbids a lot of forms of data-sharing most companies use routinely. To the point of insane restrictions on how "ctrl-c" and "ctrl-v" work... we lean on Citrix pretty heavily to comply.

-- Steve isn't quite so quick as others to blame corruption and incompetance for the mess that resulted from Ontario's attempt to move patient charts online... PHIPPA was *not* written with the Internet in mind, and forbidding the use of IP (and related infrastructure) because the packets might venture out-of-province absolutely cripples the enterprise from the get-go.

[andrewducker]

They forbade IP??? WTF?

People are frequently surprised that we have all of our USB ports and the like locked down. Enterprise thinking doesn't come naturally to most people.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

If I understand the mess correctly (IANAL) the phrasing of the law is archaic and badly needs changing; it doesn't distinguish between data and packets when it forbids allowing health information to leave the province.

IP packet switching doesn't distinguish by geography. So in order to use IP, eHealth would have had to lay down its own network without access out-of-province. And laying down a dedicated, separate network (particularly to rural and remote regions) is prohibitively expensive.

Soooo, billion-dollar boondoggle that gets nowhere because government can't seem to ammend PHIPPA while trying to both conform to it and to allow doctors to use the existing Internet.

-- Steve calls it the bane of his existance for a reason.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

The reasons why Exchange ActiveSync works that way are covered below - but why don't you connect via IMAP instead? Exchange servers speak IMAP even if you won't get the GAL connection and will need to sync that separately.

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

I have just tried that suggestion - in theory yes, IMAP is on, in practice ... the port is fire-walled when connecting from my phone.

I can live without mobile work email.

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

Wow, that LA Noire game made me angry - particularly since a lot of the bollocks the head man talked about "well, it's new technology, this just happens" also applies to the work I do. What total crap.

[andrewducker]

Yes. That attitude annoys the hell out of me as well. Sure, things can go wrong and fall behind, but to be in crunch mode for that long means that management were failing in their jobs.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Because it took them that long to put the superfluous 'e' in?

[supergee.livejournal.com]

The cover guy just doesn't like monsters. And what can you do a book called The Color of Her Panties to make it worse?

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

I just tried to verify on Google that the title was a spoof of Piers Anthony's style and preoccupations.

I found out that it was not a spoof. :(

[simont]

Publish it :-)

[henriksdal.livejournal.com]

haha - I thought the Scifi covers were shopped until I recognised the Puffin Citadel of Chaos book :>

[steer.livejournal.com]

Cutting down on salt doesn't reduce your chance of dying

Unless you're a slug.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Nah, it's like in TFA - it was only a moderate reduction in salt. I would imagine that going from, say, 10g/day salt to 8g/day isn't going to materially affect slug mortality either.