I have three substantive objections, in decreasing order: 1) Leveraging of monopoly power, to the deterement of the tech community as a whole. Embrace-extend-extinguish is one example of this.
2) Hideous security. Way back in ~1995 all the security people were warning them about the nightmare they were building with many of their "features". A gazillion exploits later, they woke up to the problem, and have spent the last ~5 years trying (and largely failing) to undo the damage.
3) FUD.
The other reasons are pretty superficial, and wouldn't go very far without the above:
4) Hooked on Linux (I needed a real multitasking OS in the early 90s - Windows couldn't do that then.) 5) I like the free software model. (Sharing information is large part of how science has been so succesfull, and I'm a scientist.) 6) David vs Goliath syndrome. (I make a point of buying AMD rather than Intel, but I don't dislike Intel. This isn't enough by itself.)
There's two submillimetre telescopes on Mauna Kea - the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory (where I did my PhD observing) and the James Clarke Maxwell Telescope.
Thomas Paine's "Age of Reason" has three main sections (I forget which order they were in) * Arguing for Deism and against "revealed religion", which relies on prophets and holy books. A perfect god would not use such an imperfect method to communicate with people. To understand god, look at nature, which can't be faked. * Arguing against Christianity, through biblical criticism. * Arguing against atheism.
So Paine, for one, was clearly not an atheist.
If they were alive today? It is a little like speculating what Hitler would have been like if he'd been brought up by Ghandi. I think an American alive today with their general level of scepticism would be an atheist.
Maybe it is different for Americans, but it really isn't possible (from my point of view) for VHS to go the way of 8-track tapes. To my memory, in my life (and I can remember the '70s) I've seen one 8-track player and zero 8-track tapes. In terms of liveliness, even Beta is a hyperactive ferret on a sugar high* compared to 8-track.
* This metaphor was brought to you by Sluggy Freelance. Remember - a metaphor is a simile that's grown up.
Yeah, but the heatsink for the processor/graphics card combo system will be righteous.
"Righteous" = "big"?
Intel was making 130W CPUs until AMD got better performance with 60W (although Intel have now overtaken AMD on this.) I've got a 40W GPU which is as powerful as a 100W GPU of a couple of years ago.
A state-of-the-art CPU plus a mid-to-high range GPU today could come in at around 130W. The 130W CPU heat-sink problem is solved (for noisy values of "solved".)
Also, it is much easier to deal with a big heatsink on the motherboard than on a video card - the size and weight are much less restricted.
Hm, perhaps if AMD starts making 100+W fusion chips, they'll start supporting Intels BTX form factors (which were largely designed to improve cooling.) As a silent computing nut, I think this would be a Good Thing.
This doesn't rule out some interbreeding - it just means that none of our hypothetical Neanderthal ancestors are on a purely maternal line. This could easily happen by chance - e.g. if our ancestry is 0.1% Neanderthal, we would expect (if there is no selection) that 99.9% of the alleles they contributed to the gene pool will eventually become extinct. The mitocondria could simply be one of those alleles. (It won't be the case that 99.9% of the alleles are extinct now, because some will still be on the way to extinction, but a sizable fraction will already be extinct through chance.)
In short - the mtDNA evidence is suggestive, but not conclusive.
You're working with Russell Gray? I've heard him talk several times at the annual NZ phylogenetics meeting.
Indeed, what they observe is the expected signature of admixture with an archeaic lineage - I've given some thought to this in the past, although I hadn't considered the possibility that the introduced allele would be strongly selected for. I've (quickly) read the paper, and it looks good to me. (Disclaimer - it is a bit peripheral to my own research, so I could easily miss subtilties.) I'm a bit surprised they didn't try for Nature or Science. (Although PNAS is not far behind in prestige.)
The paper is listed as 'open access', so it should be accessible to all via the link in the parent post. (I can't tell directly, as I'm at a university which would give me access anyhow.)
I got a D70 when it had just come out (when DSLRs had just come down to a consumer-friendly price range.) This is my second digital camera. The killer advantages for me were (1) Near zero shutter lag (2) Much better low-light capability. (You can't always use a flash - sometimes the main point of a photo is the ambient light.)
I also have come to value the ease of some adjustments. The one I use most is dimming the flash (my default camera setting is to have the flash on -0.7 f-stops. This avoids the 'flat' look that full flash gives.) Second is adjusting the exposure - often +0.7 to +1.3 f-stops when I have a dark subject against a bright background. It also has much better battery life than my previous camera.
The biggest disadvantage is size - it is too big to carry all the time, so I may have a good shot but no camera on me. The lack of a swivel LCD screen for composing shots would be the next biggest disadvantage.
Some of the advantages in the article don't look to be truely DSLR specific - ruggedness, adjustment options, lens quality. A non-DSLR could have these if the manufacturers cared to put them there.
On education, some good looking stuff and: "I also believe things like learning Latin are essential."
Why Latin? I could understand "I believe learning a second language is essential" and maybe even "learning a highly inflected language", but what is educationally magical about Latin?
(Not that I personally have anything against Latin.)
I'd like to make the point that this scenario is what we expected from observing other stars and clusters.
Stars start forming when giant molecular clouds are compressed, typically by the mass density wave of a spiral arm. This creates a star-forming region, where many thousands of stars will be formed in close proximity. Because the gas is able to efficiently shed kinetic energy (transforming it into heat), the stars have low velocities relative to each other, so are gravitationally bound in an "open cluster". (The Pleiades cluster is a spectacular nearby example.)
Stars of many sizes (masses) are formed, and the high mass ones very quickly run through their lives and explode as supernovae, while the stars are still in a cluster. (The lifetime of a star has roughly an inverse-cube relationship to its mass.)
Over a period of tens of millions to billions of years, the cluster is broken up. (How long it takes depends on its location in the galaxy and how tightly bound it was initially.) I think that tidal effects from passing molecular clouds and spiral arm waves are mostly responsible for this, but it is long enough since I've studied this that I could be mistaken. By now, the sun's sisters are probably distributed uniformly in a ring around the centre of the galaxy. The supernova remnants are long, long gone.
The summary was nearly content-free, so I read the article - and it added nothing not already in the summary.
Are they talking about a boot manager, or VMware-like software running under Windows? By "give away", do they mean bundled with Windows, or free($) download?
I think you have some valid points, but overestimate their importance.
I don't have any knowledge about the vaccine preservative, so I can't address that point.
I'd expect nutrition to be only one factor among many contributing to response to a disease. Measles and smallpox can still kill or maim a well-fed person. Being well-fed and exposed to a disease is like running through a gunfight wearing a bullet-proof vest. Being vaccinated is like being in a tank. (Well, it depends on the disease - not all vaccines are equally effective.) Positive thinking is like having a bible in your brest pocket - it doesn't hurt, but it will only occasionally save you.
If I had a child, I wouldn't blindly give her every vaccine that was offered, but in most cases the risk/benefit clearly favours vaccination. For some diseases which are mild in children but severe in adults, it may make more sense to vaccinate at adolescence. For some, like chickenpox, the benefit of vaccination is not so large, as the disease is not dangerous.
By vaccinating my child, I'm also helping others, by reducing the chance my child will infect them. If the disease is eradicatable, I'm also helping future generations, who could be free from both vaccine and disease. I was vaccinated against smallpox, but my hypothetical child need not be.
Four things in this world are sacred: books, children, freedom and generosity.
Painfully worked out by me, using my very rudimentary Latin. My/. journal collects other Latin/.sigs, with translations (or feeble attempts at translation.)
There is zero evidence for a causal link between MMR vaccination and autism. The research that claimed a link was never published, and recent replication (much delayed, because it was hard to find out what needed to be replicated) showed the result to be false.
There is evidence contradicting a correlational link between MMR vaccination and autism. Japan stopped using MMR a decade ago, with no effect on autism.
Moving on to vaccination in general: there can be adverse side effects of vaccination, which need to be intelligently balanced against the benefits - but consider real side effects, not phantom ones like autism.
The greatest achievement (IMHO) of mankind - the elimination of smallpox - was achieved by vaccination. We are on the verge of eliminating polio (which nearly killed my mother as a child.) This has been delayed by years by a groundless anti-vaccine scare.
The problem isn't that people can find out your SSN.
The problem is that banks etc. use knowledge of SSN for authentication. If someone accumulates debt in your name, based only on their knowledge of your SSN and other readily available data (DOB, mother's maiden name) then you should be able to simply disown those debts, sticking the problem back on the people who accepted inadequate ID.
In 1989, a random of the journalistic persuasion asked hacker Paul Boutin "What do you think will be the biggest problem in computing in the 90s?" Paul's straight-faced response: "There are only 17,000 three-letter acronyms."
Scenario 1: USSR: *whoosh* *boom!* USA: Hey, you nuked Nashville! USSR: Yeah, so? USA: I ought to nuke you right back! USSR: Quit while you're ahead. Try it and I'll nuke every city you have. Which is better, no Nashville or no anything? USA: Ulp, OK, but we're going to say really nasty things about you in the press.
Scenario 3: USSR: Hm, maybe nuking Nashville isn't such a hot idea. Let's not.
The USA wants scenario 3. If USSR believes that nuking Nashville will lead to scenario 1, the USA won't get scenario 3. It is in the USA's interest to ensure the USSR believes in scenario 2. This means the USA must be prepared (and obviously so) to follow through on scenario 2, even though it is irrational to do so (once Nashville is gone.)
There are arguments that this is why anger evolved. If you have a reputation for violently losing your temper, people will try hard not to offend you - because you will act irrationally (and to their detrement) if they do.
Your points are interesting, but that's not what Google is talking about. They're just proposing that the cable from the power supply to the motherboard inside a PC or server should only carry 12V. The power supply is still internal, and each device still has a separate supply.
The ordinary home/office PC would be as you say: mains AC into the back, internal PSU converts to 12V DC, which connects to the m/b (and drives.) However once you have computer hardware which requires just a 12V supply, there will be demand for cases which take 12V DC directly and have no internal PSU. This demand will come from data centres (improved efficiency, cooling, UPS integration), low-power small form-factor home/office computers (improved cooling, smaller case size) and niche markets where 12V is more readily available than mains AC (inside cars, solar powered.)
For the ordinary user, it makes little difference (except for the switch to new hardware standards.) The point is that it *enables* the other scenarios.
There's already a small-scale example of this: the PicoPSU. You use an external 12V power brick, and then internally replace your entire computer PSU with something about the size of a matchbox. However, it is only 120W, and a bit short on connectors.
(1) Notice that this monster system consumes 260W under load. So why do so many people think they need a 600W power supply? (2) 260W is for the entire system, not just the CPU. (But much of it is the CPU - ~100W *increase* from core duo to this chip.) (3) It is an engineering sample. We can hope the final will do better than this.
sneakernet:
Term used (generally with ironic intent) for transfer of electronic information by physically carrying tape, disks, or some other media from one machine to another. "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with magtape, or a 747 filled with CD-ROMs." Also called 'Tennis-Net', 'Armpit-Net', 'Floppy-Net' or 'Shoenet'; in the 1990s, 'Nike network' after a well-known sneaker brand.
I have a few floppies/zip disks/CD-RWs around labeled "sneakernet packet".
Slashdot Mirror
I have three substantive objections, in decreasing order:
1) Leveraging of monopoly power, to the deterement of the tech community as a whole. Embrace-extend-extinguish is one example of this.
2) Hideous security. Way back in ~1995 all the security people were warning them about the nightmare they were building with many of their "features". A gazillion exploits later, they woke up to the problem, and have spent the last ~5 years trying (and largely failing) to undo the damage.
3) FUD.
The other reasons are pretty superficial, and wouldn't go very far without the above:
4) Hooked on Linux (I needed a real multitasking OS in the early 90s - Windows couldn't do that then.)
5) I like the free software model. (Sharing information is large part of how science has been so succesfull, and I'm a scientist.)
6) David vs Goliath syndrome. (I make a point of buying AMD rather than Intel, but I don't dislike Intel. This isn't enough by itself.)
There's two submillimetre telescopes on Mauna Kea - the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory (where I did my PhD observing) and the James Clarke Maxwell Telescope.
I remember the marketing for OS/2 Warp. If I hadn't already known that it was an OS, I'd have concluded they were selling a web browser.
Thomas Paine's "Age of Reason" has three main sections (I forget which order they were in)
* Arguing for Deism and against "revealed religion", which relies on prophets and holy books. A perfect god would not use such an imperfect method to communicate with people. To understand god, look at nature, which can't be faked.
* Arguing against Christianity, through biblical criticism.
* Arguing against atheism.
So Paine, for one, was clearly not an atheist.
If they were alive today? It is a little like speculating what Hitler would have been like if he'd been brought up by Ghandi. I think an American alive today with their general level of scepticism would be an atheist.
No, it is well established that there are four types of roleplayers.
The Real Man
The Real Roleplayer
The Loonie
The Munchkin
Maybe it is different for Americans, but it really isn't possible (from my point of view) for VHS to go the way of 8-track tapes. To my memory, in my life (and I can remember the '70s) I've seen one 8-track player and zero 8-track tapes. In terms of liveliness, even Beta is a hyperactive ferret on a sugar high* compared to 8-track.
* This metaphor was brought to you by Sluggy Freelance. Remember - a metaphor is a simile that's grown up.
Yeah, but the heatsink for the processor/graphics card combo system will be righteous.
"Righteous" = "big"?
Intel was making 130W CPUs until AMD got better performance with 60W (although Intel have now overtaken AMD on this.) I've got a 40W GPU which is as powerful as a 100W GPU of a couple of years ago.
A state-of-the-art CPU plus a mid-to-high range GPU today could come in at around 130W. The 130W CPU heat-sink problem is solved (for noisy values of "solved".)
Also, it is much easier to deal with a big heatsink on the motherboard than on a video card - the size and weight are much less restricted.
Hm, perhaps if AMD starts making 100+W fusion chips, they'll start supporting Intels BTX form factors (which were largely designed to improve cooling.) As a silent computing nut, I think this would be a Good Thing.
This doesn't rule out some interbreeding - it just means that none of our hypothetical Neanderthal ancestors are on a purely maternal line. This could easily happen by chance - e.g. if our ancestry is 0.1% Neanderthal, we would expect (if there is no selection) that 99.9% of the alleles they contributed to the gene pool will eventually become extinct. The mitocondria could simply be one of those alleles. (It won't be the case that 99.9% of the alleles are extinct now, because some will still be on the way to extinction, but a sizable fraction will already be extinct through chance.)
In short - the mtDNA evidence is suggestive, but not conclusive.
You're working with Russell Gray? I've heard him talk several times at the annual NZ phylogenetics meeting.
Indeed, what they observe is the expected signature of admixture with an archeaic lineage - I've given some thought to this in the past, although I hadn't considered the possibility that the introduced allele would be strongly selected for. I've (quickly) read the paper, and it looks good to me. (Disclaimer - it is a bit peripheral to my own research, so I could easily miss subtilties.) I'm a bit surprised they didn't try for Nature or Science. (Although PNAS is not far behind in prestige.)
The paper is listed as 'open access', so it should be accessible to all via the link in the parent post. (I can't tell directly, as I'm at a university which would give me access anyhow.)
I got a D70 when it had just come out (when DSLRs had just come down to a consumer-friendly price range.) This is my second digital camera. The killer advantages for me were
(1) Near zero shutter lag
(2) Much better low-light capability. (You can't always use a flash - sometimes the main point of a photo is the ambient light.)
I also have come to value the ease of some adjustments. The one I use most is dimming the flash (my default camera setting is to have the flash on -0.7 f-stops. This avoids the 'flat' look that full flash gives.) Second is adjusting the exposure - often +0.7 to +1.3 f-stops when I have a dark subject against a bright background. It also has much better battery life than my previous camera.
The biggest disadvantage is size - it is too big to carry all the time, so I may have a good shot but no camera on me. The lack of a swivel LCD screen for composing shots would be the next biggest disadvantage.
Some of the advantages in the article don't look to be truely DSLR specific - ruggedness, adjustment options, lens quality. A non-DSLR could have these if the manufacturers cared to put them there.
Taken as in taught? Yes. Latin wasn't useful.
On education, some good looking stuff and: "I also believe things like learning Latin are essential."
Why Latin? I could understand "I believe learning a second language is essential" and maybe even "learning a highly inflected language", but what is educationally magical about Latin?
(Not that I personally have anything against Latin.)
I'd like to make the point that this scenario is what we expected from observing other stars and clusters.
Stars start forming when giant molecular clouds are compressed, typically by the mass density wave of a spiral arm. This creates a star-forming region, where many thousands of stars will be formed in close proximity. Because the gas is able to efficiently shed kinetic energy (transforming it into heat), the stars have low velocities relative to each other, so are gravitationally bound in an "open cluster". (The Pleiades cluster is a spectacular nearby example.)
Stars of many sizes (masses) are formed, and the high mass ones very quickly run through their lives and explode as supernovae, while the stars are still in a cluster. (The lifetime of a star has roughly an inverse-cube relationship to its mass.)
Over a period of tens of millions to billions of years, the cluster is broken up. (How long it takes depends on its location in the galaxy and how tightly bound it was initially.) I think that tidal effects from passing molecular clouds and spiral arm waves are mostly responsible for this, but it is long enough since I've studied this that I could be mistaken. By now, the sun's sisters are probably distributed uniformly in a ring around the centre of the galaxy. The supernova remnants are long, long gone.
The summary was nearly content-free, so I read the article - and it added nothing not already in the summary.
Are they talking about a boot manager, or VMware-like software running under Windows? By "give away", do they mean bundled with Windows, or free($) download?
I think you have some valid points, but overestimate their importance.
I don't have any knowledge about the vaccine preservative, so I can't address that point.
I'd expect nutrition to be only one factor among many contributing to response to a disease. Measles and smallpox can still kill or maim a well-fed person. Being well-fed and exposed to a disease is like running through a gunfight wearing a bullet-proof vest. Being vaccinated is like being in a tank. (Well, it depends on the disease - not all vaccines are equally effective.) Positive thinking is like having a bible in your brest pocket - it doesn't hurt, but it will only occasionally save you.
If I had a child, I wouldn't blindly give her every vaccine that was offered, but in most cases the risk/benefit clearly favours vaccination. For some diseases which are mild in children but severe in adults, it may make more sense to vaccinate at adolescence. For some, like chickenpox, the benefit of vaccination is not so large, as the disease is not dangerous.
By vaccinating my child, I'm also helping others, by reducing the chance my child will infect them. If the disease is eradicatable, I'm also helping future generations, who could be free from both vaccine and disease. I was vaccinated against smallpox, but my hypothetical child need not be.
Four things in this world are sacred: books, children, freedom and generosity.
/. journal collects other Latin /.sigs, with translations (or feeble attempts at translation.)
Painfully worked out by me, using my very rudimentary Latin. My
You utterly fail to address the point:
There is zero evidence for a causal link between MMR vaccination and autism. The research that claimed a link was never published, and recent replication (much delayed, because it was hard to find out what needed to be replicated) showed the result to be false.
There is evidence contradicting a correlational link between MMR vaccination and autism. Japan stopped using MMR a decade ago, with no effect on autism.
Moving on to vaccination in general: there can be adverse side effects of vaccination, which need to be intelligently balanced against the benefits - but consider real side effects, not phantom ones like autism.
The greatest achievement (IMHO) of mankind - the elimination of smallpox - was achieved by vaccination. We are on the verge of eliminating polio (which nearly killed my mother as a child.) This has been delayed by years by a groundless anti-vaccine scare.
The problem isn't that people can find out your SSN.
The problem is that banks etc. use knowledge of SSN for authentication. If someone accumulates debt in your name, based only on their knowledge of your SSN and other readily available data (DOB, mother's maiden name) then you should be able to simply disown those debts, sticking the problem back on the people who accepted inadequate ID.
From the Jargon File:
In 1989, a random of the journalistic persuasion asked hacker Paul Boutin "What do you think will be the biggest problem in computing in the 90s?" Paul's straight-faced response: "There are only 17,000 three-letter acronyms."
It comes down to game theory.
Scenario 1:
USSR: *whoosh* *boom!*
USA: Hey, you nuked Nashville!
USSR: Yeah, so?
USA: I ought to nuke you right back!
USSR: Quit while you're ahead. Try it and I'll nuke every city you have. Which is better, no Nashville or no anything?
USA: Ulp, OK, but we're going to say really nasty things about you in the press.
Scenario 2:
USSR: *whoosh* *boom!*
USA: *whoosh* (2000 times) *boom!* (2000 times)
USSR: *whoosh* (2000 times) *boom!* (2000 times)
Scenario 3:
USSR: Hm, maybe nuking Nashville isn't such a hot idea. Let's not.
The USA wants scenario 3. If USSR believes that nuking Nashville will lead to scenario 1, the USA won't get scenario 3. It is in the USA's interest to ensure the USSR believes in scenario 2. This means the USA must be prepared (and obviously so) to follow through on scenario 2, even though it is irrational to do so (once Nashville is gone.)
There are arguments that this is why anger evolved. If you have a reputation for violently losing your temper, people will try hard not to offend you - because you will act irrationally (and to their detrement) if they do.
Your points are interesting, but that's not what Google is talking about. They're just proposing that the cable from the power supply to the motherboard inside a PC or server should only carry 12V. The power supply is still internal, and each device still has a separate supply.
The ordinary home/office PC would be as you say: mains AC into the back, internal PSU converts to 12V DC, which connects to the m/b (and drives.) However once you have computer hardware which requires just a 12V supply, there will be demand for cases which take 12V DC directly and have no internal PSU. This demand will come from data centres (improved efficiency, cooling, UPS integration), low-power small form-factor home/office computers (improved cooling, smaller case size) and niche markets where 12V is more readily available than mains AC (inside cars, solar powered.)
For the ordinary user, it makes little difference (except for the switch to new hardware standards.)
The point is that it *enables* the other scenarios.
There's already a small-scale example of this: the PicoPSU. You use an external 12V power brick, and then internally replace your entire computer PSU with something about the size of a matchbox. However, it is only 120W, and a bit short on connectors.
whether the municipal water people can tell if a bluegill is tripping on LSD?
Or, for that matter, viagra.
(If anyone feels like responding "your can't trip on viagra" - that depends on how big the pill is, and whether you're looking where you're walking.)
(1) Notice that this monster system consumes 260W under load. So why do so many people think they need a 600W power supply?
(2) 260W is for the entire system, not just the CPU. (But much of it is the CPU - ~100W *increase* from core duo to this chip.)
(3) It is an engineering sample. We can hope the final will do better than this.
From the Jargon File:
sneakernet:
Term used (generally with ironic intent) for transfer of electronic information by physically carrying tape, disks, or some other media from one machine to another. "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with magtape, or a 747 filled with CD-ROMs." Also called 'Tennis-Net', 'Armpit-Net', 'Floppy-Net' or 'Shoenet'; in the 1990s, 'Nike network' after a well-known sneaker brand.
I have a few floppies/zip disks/CD-RWs around labeled "sneakernet packet".