Dr. Romesberg dismissed concern that novel organisms would run amok and cause harm, saying the technique was safe because the synthetic nucleotides were fed to the bacteria. Should the bacteria escape into the environment or enter someone’s body, they would not be able to obtain the needed synthetic material and would either die or revert to using only natural DNA.
Yeah, and we all know how well that worked out with the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.
I disagree. She seemed much more clued-up - or at least willing to admit the ludicrousness of their visit - than her father, and she quite clearly stated that almost everything they had seen had been staged for their benefit. I found her post to be fascinating.
Yes, Schmidt visiting North Korea to talk to them about the benefits of being able to watch videos of cats on the Interwebs when the majority of the population live in grinding poverty and tens of thousands are held in forced labour camps is amazingly asinine, but that's not her fault. She was just along for the ride.
It's a good question, but one I'm not qualified to answer as I've not tried making anything with it yet. This is very much a geeky toy, though, as the resistance of the paint is too high to use it for repairs to real circuits (I've done some brief testing).
I'm not sure better or cheaper is the point with this stuff - it's the charm of it that is the lovely thing. The fact that you can paint it straight onto card means you can make something that has the traditional feel of a wedding invitation, but with a geeky twist.
Something as simple as a RED led showing through a little cut out heart would take just a few minutes per card to make and would produce something cute, with a hand-made feel.
They make conductive gloopy black paint that you can use both to paint circuit boards and to cold solder components into them. I met a couple of the people behind the company at a trade show a couple of weeks back and bought a pot (no other connection to company). It's very clever stuff and they have a load of tutorials and examples on the site.
I think this is probably the most interesting thing about Apple, and probably almost entirely down to the powerful control exerted by Steve Jobs and his laser-like focus: they drop technologies and features just as fast as they invent them.
If you look at Microsoft, you see a company that is dragging around everything they have ever created, but Apple just throw it overboard as soon as it seems to be weighing them down. It's hard to imagine any other company that would have had the balls to suddenly drop the floppy disc and all of their proprietary interconnect standards. They abandoned their original OS in favour of something completely new, they drop legacy APIs at a moment's notice, features, product lines, everything.
Every time they do this they get a huge number of people bitching about their cluelessness here on/., but they still seem to sell more products and make more money each year. Say what you will about them, they are clearly getting something right, and that thing *must* be understanding their market. So if they drop the camera and other features from the nano, you can be sure they spent a lot of time thinking about it and decided they didn't need it.
Presumably they discovered that the kind of people with a nano probably have some other device, like a camera-phone, and weren't using the camera or the contacts app.
...UK Music are not the UK music industry. Sharkey is a lobbyist with a bunch of artists on his side, but he doesn't speak for any of the publishers/labels.
I mean it's a refreshing opinion, but it doesn't represent any grand outbreak of common sense.
Everyone runs the current build (he implies they run the daily build, but I expect that is too much hassle to upgrade every day, so in fact everyone runs the last sprint build (which is less than 2 weeks old, and has had a brief stabalizaiton period).
It's maybe worth noting that the BSDs have been source distributions for a very long time and that rebuilding the world is ingrained in the being of BSD developers. There's no real reason why they wouldn't be upgrading daily.
I've used both for serious commercial development and I personally prefer C# to Java. If it means anything, I consider myself pretty impartial, as Java and C# are just two of the dozen or so languages I've worked in and I consider neither to be the most interesting.
C# and Java are only really similar in the way that you would expect two garbage-collected, object-oriented, C-derived languages to be similar. People who say C# is 95% the same as Java are missing the point: it's the small differences that make one language nicer to use as a developer.
Your mileage may vary. You should give both a go and make up your own mind.
If it makes you uncomfortable you could try explaining that to them and ask if they'd be willing to budge on the terms of the contract. Try asking to speak to a senior technical person rather that someone from HR or legal. Be honest about why you have misgivings and explain to them why it might be in their interest to allow you to contribute back your work (if it really isn't in their interest then you'll obviously face a tougher time talking them round).
If that fails then it's really your call as to how important the job is to you versus the project.
Honestly, though, I wouldn't feel too bad about not contributing back. The BSD license is exactly designed to allow companies to do what they want to do. Anyone contributing to a BSD-licensed project should be well aware of that. The others working on it might be disappointed, but if they shun you then they're working on the wrong project and/or idiots.
Final bit of advice: an open-ended promise never to work on the project again is probably unenforceable and almost certainly negotiable. You should argue it down to 5 years if you do nothing else.
The coolest thing about Elite was the trick of using a timer triggered off the vertical sync to re-program the video controller 3/4 of the way through the screen refresh so that the top part of the screen (the external view) was in a black and white mode and the bottom part (the ship's displays) were in a lower resolution 4-colour mode. (Original Elite, the later co-processor version used 4- and 8-colour modes respectively.)
Frickin' brilliant. I spent ages carefully re-implementing the idea in my own code.
Another thing to add about how cool the Beeb was though is asymmetric multi-processing thanks to the Tube co-processor interface. How cool was that in an 8-bit machine!
I had a BBC B and then later a BBC Master 128 (which I upgraded to a BBC Master Turbo). I learned BASIC, Forth, Lisp, Pascal, C and 8502 assembler on the BBC Micro before I even got to University. I learned most of the 1st year CS algorithms and data structures course from Beebug (the BBC Users Group) magazine.
The BBC had what, at the time, was a "proper" operating system on a home computer and you could patch all of the system calls so that you could inspect and modify the behaviour. With the excellent Exmon machine monitor and the BBC Advanced User Guide, the machine was a treasure trove for an aspiring programmer.
I don't think there's anything comparable that a 12 year old kid can really get a chance to understand anymore.
16% seems pretty good to me given the utter dominance of Microsoft in the corporate world. I would categorise 1 in 6 business users as struggling. If anything, it seems far higher than I would have expected.
Why? I don't consider it the job of University to fill in commercial skills. I fear it is that mistake that has led to the decline in good CS grads.
When considering candidates for a programming job I don't lend any weight to the languages they learned at University. Learning Java at University does not demonstrate ability to program commercially in it. I expect graduates to have to start from scratch working with experienced programmers and learning their craft. Their ability to do that is what I look for.
Generally, I find that if a candidate has been taught three different languages together with the CS theory behind them, they'll have a good grasp of how computers work. This should provide them with the necessary groundwork to pick up the language they need for their day job. And by different languages, I mean from different programming paradigms - Java and C# are not sufficiently different to be worth teaching both at University.
For context: I learned Pascal (basic imperative concepts), Ada (multi-threading), C (pointers and low-level programming), C++ (OO), Prolog (logic programming) and Haskell (functional programming) at University - none of which I program in my day job.
All programming languages have a practical application outside the classroom. It is failing to realise that that reduces your value to me as a programmer.
If only there were some kind of existing infrastructure to do this! A kind of grid that runs nationally and can be connected to by different power generation systems. Even better, what if you used the same grid to distribute power to those using it!
In that case, this also fits the theory of evolution. Evolution attempts to explain the past, but what predictions does it make of the future than could be checked out by experiment?
You are joking, right? The Theory of Evolution does not "attempt to explain the past" - it attempts to explain how one can get from point A to a later point B. We just happen to have mostly developed and verified the theory by looking at As and Bs that are in the past.
When one has access to an overwhelming amount of past evidence that can be compared against, one doesn't need to wait the 10s of millions of years necessary to see if it happens again.
That anyone doubts the truth of Evolution anymore I see as an astonishing failure of the school system.
What is this "more than 666"? Do you mean 667? Why make such a random and meaningless statement?
If it was 666 at the time you wrote, why not say "so far 666 have been submitted". If you wanted to just indicate a large general number, why not say "more than 650" or "almost 700".
Ada's multi-threading support is about two orders of magnitude better than Java's as well. It was a source of extreme disappointment to me that years of concurrency research got boiled-down to the 'synchronized' keyword.
Multi-threading is only hard because most languages have piss-poor support for multi-threading. I recommend to anyone that they go away and learn about Ada tasks and the select statement to see how it ought to be done.
Erm, just compile the C code to a shared library, load it into the.NET runtime and interact with it via the P/Invoke machinery. You've never had to compile C to IL in order to run it from.NET.
If you look closely at Microsoft.NET you'll find that it's mostly just a set of wrappers around the standard Win32 DLLs.
Many people seem to be confusing the number of machines you can share ANY music with simultaneously with the number of machines you can have authorized to play Purchased Music.
No, it was me both times;-)
Yeah, you got me. I did confuse the two. That's what I get for posting "quick" comments...
I was unfortunate enough to have a system crash earlier this week. However, after I reformatted the drive and installed the OS, the computer was still authorized.
Ah. That's rather groovy. It must be just tied to the serial number of the hardware then. I've never had the problem (being outside of the US anyway and unable to use iTMS), I'd just heard that from others.
I feel stupid, but could someone explains to me how this works? I've been interested in trying out the iTMS, but I want to understand it better first.
I'm a little wooly on the mechanics of it myself to be honest. But as I understand it, all the music you buy is encrypted with something unique to your account. When you authorize a computer you download a key that will decrypt your music (and only your music) on that machine. The keys must be locked to the computer somehow (a la activation) and Apple will only issue you 5. If you want to move your music from one machine to a new one and don't have a spare key, then you need to de-authorize one computer freeing the key so that you can authorize the new one.
The downside of this is that catastrophic system failure (or theft) will lose one of your keys. Or if you authorize a computer and then re-format the drive to do a clean re-install without having de-authorized first, then again you lose the key.
Also, is it true that no other players will play AAC? I am worried about this lock-in Ars Technica is talking about. Maybe I should wait til standards get set...
I've successfully played Apple AAC music on other players before. Apple's.m4a files are just MPEG4 containers with a single audio stream. The problem is the.m4p files which are encrypted first. The encryption format is proprietary and obviously the keys are secret even if you knew the file format...
I guess whether Apple ever license their DRM tech to competing players depends on whether Apple can ever make iTMS turn a profit.
Erm, QuickTime?... AppleWorks, FileMaker Pro. Going back into the mists of time we have the OpenDoc framework which was meant to be cross-platform, and other horrible genetic experiments like Taligent/Pink.
Slashdot Mirror
Dr. Romesberg dismissed concern that novel organisms would run amok and cause harm, saying the technique was safe because the synthetic nucleotides were fed to the bacteria. Should the bacteria escape into the environment or enter someone’s body, they would not be able to obtain the needed synthetic material and would either die or revert to using only natural DNA.
Yeah, and we all know how well that worked out with the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.
Thanks, Obama!
I disagree. She seemed much more clued-up - or at least willing to admit the ludicrousness of their visit - than her father, and she quite clearly stated that almost everything they had seen had been staged for their benefit. I found her post to be fascinating.
Yes, Schmidt visiting North Korea to talk to them about the benefits of being able to watch videos of cats on the Interwebs when the majority of the population live in grinding poverty and tens of thousands are held in forced labour camps is amazingly asinine, but that's not her fault. She was just along for the ride.
It's a good question, but one I'm not qualified to answer as I've not tried making anything with it yet. This is very much a geeky toy, though, as the resistance of the paint is too high to use it for repairs to real circuits (I've done some brief testing).
I'm not sure better or cheaper is the point with this stuff - it's the charm of it that is the lovely thing. The fact that you can paint it straight onto card means you can make something that has the traditional feel of a wedding invitation, but with a geeky twist.
Something as simple as a RED led showing through a little cut out heart would take just a few minutes per card to make and would produce something cute, with a hand-made feel.
[Oops! Meant to login before posting that comment. Here it is again with a 1 higher score ;-)]
Take a look at these guys:
http://www.bareconductive.com/
They make conductive gloopy black paint that you can use both to paint circuit boards and to cold solder components into them. I met a couple of the people behind the company at a trade show a couple of weeks back and bought a pot (no other connection to company). It's very clever stuff and they have a load of tutorials and examples on the site.
I think this is probably the most interesting thing about Apple, and probably almost entirely down to the powerful control exerted by Steve Jobs and his laser-like focus: they drop technologies and features just as fast as they invent them.
If you look at Microsoft, you see a company that is dragging around everything they have ever created, but Apple just throw it overboard as soon as it seems to be weighing them down. It's hard to imagine any other company that would have had the balls to suddenly drop the floppy disc and all of their proprietary interconnect standards. They abandoned their original OS in favour of something completely new, they drop legacy APIs at a moment's notice, features, product lines, everything.
Every time they do this they get a huge number of people bitching about their cluelessness here on /., but they still seem to sell more products and make more money each year. Say what you will about them, they are clearly getting something right, and that thing *must* be understanding their market. So if they drop the camera and other features from the nano, you can be sure they spent a lot of time thinking about it and decided they didn't need it.
Presumably they discovered that the kind of people with a nano probably have some other device, like a camera-phone, and weren't using the camera or the contacts app.
...UK Music are not the UK music industry. Sharkey is a lobbyist with a bunch of artists on his side, but he doesn't speak for any of the publishers/labels.
I mean it's a refreshing opinion, but it doesn't represent any grand outbreak of common sense.
Everyone runs the current build (he implies they run the daily build, but I expect that is too much hassle to upgrade every day, so in fact everyone runs the last sprint build (which is less than 2 weeks old, and has had a brief stabalizaiton period).
It's maybe worth noting that the BSDs have been source distributions for a very long time and that rebuilding the world is ingrained in the being of BSD developers. There's no real reason why they wouldn't be upgrading daily.
I've used both for serious commercial development and I personally prefer C# to Java. If it means anything, I consider myself pretty impartial, as Java and C# are just two of the dozen or so languages I've worked in and I consider neither to be the most interesting.
C# and Java are only really similar in the way that you would expect two garbage-collected, object-oriented, C-derived languages to be similar. People who say C# is 95% the same as Java are missing the point: it's the small differences that make one language nicer to use as a developer.
Your mileage may vary. You should give both a go and make up your own mind.
If it makes you uncomfortable you could try explaining that to them and ask if they'd be willing to budge on the terms of the contract. Try asking to speak to a senior technical person rather that someone from HR or legal. Be honest about why you have misgivings and explain to them why it might be in their interest to allow you to contribute back your work (if it really isn't in their interest then you'll obviously face a tougher time talking them round).
If that fails then it's really your call as to how important the job is to you versus the project.
Honestly, though, I wouldn't feel too bad about not contributing back. The BSD license is exactly designed to allow companies to do what they want to do. Anyone contributing to a BSD-licensed project should be well aware of that. The others working on it might be disappointed, but if they shun you then they're working on the wrong project and/or idiots.
Final bit of advice: an open-ended promise never to work on the project again is probably unenforceable and almost certainly negotiable. You should argue it down to 5 years if you do nothing else.
The coolest thing about Elite was the trick of using a timer triggered off the vertical sync to re-program the video controller 3/4 of the way through the screen refresh so that the top part of the screen (the external view) was in a black and white mode and the bottom part (the ship's displays) were in a lower resolution 4-colour mode. (Original Elite, the later co-processor version used 4- and 8-colour modes respectively.)
Frickin' brilliant. I spent ages carefully re-implementing the idea in my own code.
Or 6502 assembler even... *looks sheepish*
Another thing to add about how cool the Beeb was though is asymmetric multi-processing thanks to the Tube co-processor interface. How cool was that in an 8-bit machine!
I had a BBC B and then later a BBC Master 128 (which I upgraded to a BBC Master Turbo). I learned BASIC, Forth, Lisp, Pascal, C and 8502 assembler on the BBC Micro before I even got to University. I learned most of the 1st year CS algorithms and data structures course from Beebug (the BBC Users Group) magazine.
The BBC had what, at the time, was a "proper" operating system on a home computer and you could patch all of the system calls so that you could inspect and modify the behaviour. With the excellent Exmon machine monitor and the BBC Advanced User Guide, the machine was a treasure trove for an aspiring programmer.
I don't think there's anything comparable that a 12 year old kid can really get a chance to understand anymore.
s/would/wouldn't/
idiot
16% seems pretty good to me given the utter dominance of Microsoft in the corporate world. I would categorise 1 in 6 business users as struggling. If anything, it seems far higher than I would have expected.
Why? I don't consider it the job of University to fill in commercial skills. I fear it is that mistake that has led to the decline in good CS grads.
When considering candidates for a programming job I don't lend any weight to the languages they learned at University. Learning Java at University does not demonstrate ability to program commercially in it. I expect graduates to have to start from scratch working with experienced programmers and learning their craft. Their ability to do that is what I look for.
Generally, I find that if a candidate has been taught three different languages together with the CS theory behind them, they'll have a good grasp of how computers work. This should provide them with the necessary groundwork to pick up the language they need for their day job. And by different languages, I mean from different programming paradigms - Java and C# are not sufficiently different to be worth teaching both at University.
For context: I learned Pascal (basic imperative concepts), Ada (multi-threading), C (pointers and low-level programming), C++ (OO), Prolog (logic programming) and Haskell (functional programming) at University - none of which I program in my day job.
All programming languages have a practical application outside the classroom. It is failing to realise that that reduces your value to me as a programmer.
If only there were some kind of existing infrastructure to do this! A kind of grid that runs nationally and can be connected to by different power generation systems. Even better, what if you used the same grid to distribute power to those using it!
Think of the possibilities!
In that case, this also fits the theory of evolution. Evolution attempts to explain the past, but what predictions does it make of the future than could be checked out by experiment?
You are joking, right? The Theory of Evolution does not "attempt to explain the past" - it attempts to explain how one can get from point A to a later point B. We just happen to have mostly developed and verified the theory by looking at As and Bs that are in the past.
When one has access to an overwhelming amount of past evidence that can be compared against, one doesn't need to wait the 10s of millions of years necessary to see if it happens again.
That anyone doubts the truth of Evolution anymore I see as an astonishing failure of the school system.
What is this "more than 666"? Do you mean 667? Why make such a random and meaningless statement?
If it was 666 at the time you wrote, why not say "so far 666 have been submitted". If you wanted to just indicate a large general number, why not say "more than 650" or "almost 700".
Ada's multi-threading support is about two orders of magnitude better than Java's as well. It was a source of extreme disappointment to me that years of concurrency research got boiled-down to the 'synchronized' keyword.
Multi-threading is only hard because most languages have piss-poor support for multi-threading. I recommend to anyone that they go away and learn about Ada tasks and the select statement to see how it ought to be done.
Erm, just compile the C code to a shared library, load it into the .NET runtime and interact with it via the P/Invoke machinery. You've never had to compile C to IL in order to run it from .NET.
.NET you'll find that it's mostly just a set of wrappers around the standard Win32 DLLs.
If you look closely at Microsoft
Many people seem to be confusing the number of machines you can share ANY music with simultaneously with the number of machines you can have authorized to play Purchased Music.
;-)
No, it was me both times
Yeah, you got me. I did confuse the two. That's what I get for posting "quick" comments...
I was unfortunate enough to have a system crash earlier this week. However, after I reformatted the drive and installed the OS, the computer was still authorized.
Ah. That's rather groovy. It must be just tied to the serial number of the hardware then. I've never had the problem (being outside of the US anyway and unable to use iTMS), I'd just heard that from others.
I feel stupid, but could someone explains to me how this works? I've been interested in trying out the iTMS, but I want to understand it better first.
.m4a files are just MPEG4 containers with a single audio stream. The problem is the .m4p files which are encrypted first. The encryption format is proprietary and obviously the keys are secret even if you knew the file format...
I'm a little wooly on the mechanics of it myself to be honest. But as I understand it, all the music you buy is encrypted with something unique to your account. When you authorize a computer you download a key that will decrypt your music (and only your music) on that machine. The keys must be locked to the computer somehow (a la activation) and Apple will only issue you 5. If you want to move your music from one machine to a new one and don't have a spare key, then you need to de-authorize one computer freeing the key so that you can authorize the new one.
The downside of this is that catastrophic system failure (or theft) will lose one of your keys. Or if you authorize a computer and then re-format the drive to do a clean re-install without having de-authorized first, then again you lose the key.
Also, is it true that no other players will play AAC? I am worried about this lock-in Ars Technica is talking about. Maybe I should wait til standards get set...
I've successfully played Apple AAC music on other players before. Apple's
I guess whether Apple ever license their DRM tech to competing players depends on whether Apple can ever make iTMS turn a profit.
Erm, QuickTime? ... AppleWorks, FileMaker Pro. Going back into the mists of time we have the OpenDoc framework which was meant to be cross-platform, and other horrible genetic experiments like Taligent/Pink.