As someone invested in stemcells, I find this headline even more misleading than that... it may be the first for stem cells in treating ALS, but another company has had 2 phase 1 trials for stem cell treatment of neurodegenerative diseases:
http://news.ucsf.edu/releases/first-stem-cell-clinical-trial-for-treating-brains-communication-highway/
StemCells, Inc.
"The study is the second neural stem cell clinical trial for neurodegenerative diseases to be conducted in the United States. A Phase I trial using the same type of neural stem cells was completed in January..." (emphasis mine).
I'll try my best to explain them (spoilers): 1) "But the whole airplane hook business?" The hook thing doesn't make sense if it was 'random airplane', but Alfred mentioned someone would 'do it for cash' before the trip, so this plane was in on it, they were flying around and saw the parachute and swooped in to pick them up. I'm sure there are pilots (Wash, hehe), that could do this.
2) "Lucius Fox giving away Batman's identity." I think the key here is that a client would have to 'fund' the research, so as an accountant (not lawyer IMHO), you would expect to see A) payments for the research or at least B) a contract laying out payment for completion of said research. The only person who could divert funds of that scale (not really slush money) would be the CEO.
3) Rachel Dawes actress change... Suspension of disbelief, different films, this happens from time to time, heck the actor that portrayed batman in the last series (keaton, clooney, kilmer), changed, why such a stink about someone not as central to the story. Plus, I think it was MUCH improved over the Holmes rendition.
4)Fight scenes Can't really agree with this outing, but the fight scenes in the first one definately was distracting. Personally I like the chaotic feel and greater use of the gadgets/environment in this one... batman is a great deal about the gadgets. I can see "punch, punch, duck" anyday; using a grapple to trip up hostages so that they don't get shot mistakenly is, IMHO, more of what differentiates Batman from Joe Kung-Fu.
5)"The ending makes no sense" Lots of sub items here..... but the Dent as a Hero has to do with the fact that people can't identify with a man wearing full body armor fashioned after a bat, using technology that even the government hasn't been able to create (I know I can't, perhaps you're a billionaire vigilante yourself). Dent, on the other hand, is a person who could be any one of us, and people would like to think they could be, standing by their principles in the face of adversity for the good of all man, risking their life even, so that the bad guys (i.e. identifyable humans doing bad as opposed to villains we can't identify with doing evil... again you could be a clown gone bad;-), but I can't identify with the joker per se), don't hurt anyone. In short, he's a Hero anyone of us could potentially become.
Maybe the guy in the truck got lucky, or saw him get in the car and, using shortcuts, got in position to be there. The crashing of the car to save the guy gets to the core of what Bruce Wayne Batman was trying to say, protect, even if its convenient to not do so.... the accountant was an asshat, but he wasn't a bad guy, some might even say he was fulfilling his job to the stockholders by bringing to light the misappropriation of corporate assets. Saving him definately got the message across, I'm sure.
6) Cell phones as sonar... I don't know cell tech very well, so I got nothing here... except suspension of disbelief... billions of dollars to use for research at high tech company, i'm sure can come up with something.
... Oh, by the way, the QS22 doesn't support a hard drive which means you need fast NFS. The cost of ownership is more than just the cost of single blade. This is misleading. It is always more than the cost of a single blade when dealing with bladecenters; Chassis, network modules, SAN modules, redundant power, etc... You only need one server, buy a rack mount or desktop workstation. Bladecenters are for when you need many that stay up as long as possible. 7-14 is where it shines.
A FiberChannel card connected to external storage unit will work fine. Bladecenters were designed for complete redundancy and internal HDs (regardless of RAID config) are crude forms of redundancy in the enterprise these days. Far better to have multiple paths to a sharable storage unit that can have the LUNs automatically shifted to another blade in event of failure AND can be mirrored to another unit somewhere else in case of catastrophe.
You're telling me, I was probably one of those addresses from ibm.com he talked about in his summary, being one of the few IBMers that even knew how to use the Internet back then. To think I could have been slashdot royalty.
I didn't sign up for the same reasons. To top it off I rarely posted out of fear that the company would not have liked it (my early years and around the time some others got fired for a little too much nature watching. It wasn't until the first time we had a virus popping up and no one knew what it was until I knowingly jumped on here to see a discussion about it, that I felt comfortable visiting/posting; it saved us time and money, and that's an easy sell to business types. The number of ibm.com hits went way up since that day I'm sure.
There is no such thing as an "objective, external reality". All things viewed and/or reported by a human being are subjective. This is similar to the logically self-contradicting phrase "There are no absolutes", itself an absolute.
Or contemplate "This statement is false" as a mind bender.
I use it for all the coding work I do. It has a GUI building tool that only generates Java code. Its much better than the old visual age line of products that required separate files to manage the GUI construction. You can even edit most of the generated code manually without fear of no longer being able to use the GUI builder. It uses (Eclipse) as its base platform so other eclipse plugins can be added to the tool. It includes extensive tools for other web related development as well (DB definitions, EJB work, XML, etc...)
Granted, it's listed as ~$2k for 1 license, so its not for everyone, but you'd be hard pressed to find a java/web development function that it doesn't help you with.
Finally, a topic on slashdot that I can claim more experience in than most. I've been doing blades for awhile now and still find it difficult to describe them exactly. Here goes try number 67217. Disclaimer: This is particular to IBM's Blade offering, so it may not be entirely accurate to other offerings (dell and hp for instance).
The basic concept of a blade is to extract all the 'non-computational' aspects of a server and provide them as shared resources to a group of systems that contain the remaining 'computational' parts.
A blade chassis, the 'non-computational' part, contains all the shared components, power (1800+ watts usually), network and san io modules, cdrom, floppy, usb ports (some contain serial ports), big honking fans, and a management module that coordinates all the chassis components and blades.
A blade usually contains 1 or 2 CPUs, memory, a few plugs to insert either laptop sized HDs, or SAN cards, and a connection to a bladecenter. No expansion ports, no power supply, no fans, no traditional video port, no traditional network ports. If you use the SAN card and boot from SAN, there are literally no moving parts in the blade. The connection to the bladecenter provides IO, video/serial access, power. All in the size of about 2 Think Pad T41s put side by side. They're designed so the chassis FANs can remove the heat from the blades properly (make sure you got TONS of cooling as it gets HOT behind them). In all, 14 of the blades can be placed in a 7U space, 12.25 inches, high and 19 inches wide. 28 CPUs (56 cores), 224 GB RAM all in about the space of two tower PCs.
An additional feature of blade centers, is the chassis is redundant in spades when configured fully, redundant networking, san, power, cooling. The Network IO modules often provide load balancing features for blade level redundancy if your applications can handle being load balanced.
You're making a few assumptions. One, that making each PS3 happens immediately, and two that all their capacity is making is the PS3 all the time. The 200k per month of the PS3s have likely been in the build phase for a bit by (random number)5%(/random number) of their capacity. While that's been happening, the other 95% of their capacity is probably pumping out another product which is likely near the end of that products contract fulfillment commitment. Once each person completes the work they need to do for that product, they start working on PS3s. Presto, you got enough people working on enough PS3s to do 2 million/month. Say it takes 1 month to build a PS3, expect the rate of build starts to hit (2,000,000/30) for each day in the month of September (simplistic view, but the general idea is there).
I've heard that famous phrase several times in my life and think that it bears repeating in this topic.
The truth as I see it is that there is no one root cause to why one kid turns violent, why another kills themself, and why yet another turns out normal. I'm surprised with all the people in this forum that have programming experience, that more people don't realize that there's a billion and one things that can go wrong with a programs execution which may or may not be forseeable; compared to the human brain, the most complex of computer programs seems like a simple for loop that outputs its index on each iteration (oversimplification maybe, but helps make my point). Like a person who points to one cause for all the problems with all programs, it should seem almost laughable to think that one cause, could be the reason for all kids who act out against social stigmas; whether acted out against themselves or others.
Do bullies make people feel small, insignificant, or worthless - certainly. Do some parents fail in their parenting duties - absolutely. Do movies/games expose kids to elements that they might not be exposed elsewhere - unequivocally yes.
The 'village' is relied on to help kids deal with and learn from what they are exposed to (both good and bad exposure). The 'village' is relied on to reinforce socially acceptable behaviour, while discouraging socially unacceptable behaviour. Bullying is unacceptable, shyness is, while not unacceptable, not viewed as a good trait to have. So both these behaviours need to be influenced to change by the 'village'.
Now some people will say, 'How dare the 'village' determine what is and is not acceptable behaviour. I want to be an individual, unique from all others'. To this I'm not sure how to respond, save that uniqueness is at the same time impossible to attain and a forgone conclusion regardless of what you do (resolving that oxymoron is left to the reader,... it's taken me 11 years to fully understand that myself... I thought my teacher was insane when he first postulated it). And also, if you decide to be unique outside the view of the 'village' you need to accept the outcome of that decision (i.e. be accountable for that action as well).
The problem is exacerbated by the fact that the 'village' is no longer just a physically constrained set, it is essentially WORLD - {people such that said people have no Internet access}. This makes it harder for the 'village' to agree on what is socially acceptable and not. History is not in favor of there ever being agreement either (ref. crusades, inquisition, et al).
Maybe its time we all accepted our responsibility in this global 'village' and start working towards helping those that exibit socially unacceptable behaviour rather than 'flame them'. Next time your working at a theatre where a 14 year old tries to see the latest 'massacre' flick, tell them no go. When you see someone bullying someone, stand up for the oppressed. When someone posts flame bait, give it its due and ignore it.
Thanks for reading this, curious what everyone thinks.
Dan
A moments thought would have shown him, but then again, a moment is a long time and a thought a painful process. - Author unknown to me (if anyone knows post it in reply - I think it was Lord Byron)
Mathematicians will never refer to anything as a law or an "unqualified truth". When you learn "Number Theory" you may get the impression that what you have is "unqualified truth", but in reality, as it is with all mathematical theorums, the result is true if the assumptions you made are also true, and in Mathematics there are a lot of assumptions; assumptions that when you get down to it are nothing more than some Mathematician's best guess as to what is true (It is a lot more complicated than this as some people assume x and prove y, then others assume z and prove x, and yes there are cases where people assume y and prove z (Axiom of Choice et. al. is classic example)).
A classic example I have always used to illustrate this concept to my friends is that of Euclidean Geometry vs. assorted Non-Euclidean Geometries (Hyperbolic Geometry being a fun example). There are many 'assumptions' of Euclidean Geometry. Change only the assumption about about parallel lines not meeting at 'Infinity' to be that they do meet at infinity and you can come up with results that have just as much mathematical 'truth' as Euclidean Geometry, but which contradict 'truths' of Euclidean Geometry.
Relevence? The theory of evolution is only true in so far as the assumptions are true. Usually when I see a scientific theory break down, the scientists discover some assumption that was not quite right, they modify the assumption and rebuild. Lather, rinse, repeat...
Slashdot Mirror
As someone invested in stemcells, I find this headline even more misleading than that... it may be the first for stem cells in treating ALS, but another company has had 2 phase 1 trials for stem cell treatment of neurodegenerative diseases: http://news.ucsf.edu/releases/first-stem-cell-clinical-trial-for-treating-brains-communication-highway/ StemCells, Inc. "The study is the second neural stem cell clinical trial for neurodegenerative diseases to be conducted in the United States. A Phase I trial using the same type of neural stem cells was completed in January..." (emphasis mine).
I'll try my best to explain them (spoilers):
1) "But the whole airplane hook business?"
The hook thing doesn't make sense if it was 'random airplane', but Alfred mentioned someone would 'do it for cash' before the trip, so this plane was in on it, they were flying around and saw the parachute and swooped in to pick them up. I'm sure there are pilots (Wash, hehe), that could do this.
2) "Lucius Fox giving away Batman's identity."
I think the key here is that a client would have to 'fund' the research, so as an accountant (not lawyer IMHO), you would expect to see A) payments for the research or at least B) a contract laying out payment for completion of said research. The only person who could divert funds of that scale (not really slush money) would be the CEO.
3) Rachel Dawes actress change...
Suspension of disbelief, different films, this happens from time to time, heck the actor that portrayed batman in the last series (keaton, clooney, kilmer), changed, why such a stink about someone not as central to the story. Plus, I think it was MUCH improved over the Holmes rendition.
4)Fight scenes
Can't really agree with this outing, but the fight scenes in the first one definately was distracting. Personally I like the chaotic feel and greater use of the gadgets/environment in this one... batman is a great deal about the gadgets. I can see "punch, punch, duck" anyday; using a grapple to trip up hostages so that they don't get shot mistakenly is, IMHO, more of what differentiates Batman from Joe Kung-Fu.
5)"The ending makes no sense" ;-), but I can't identify with the joker per se), don't hurt anyone. In short, he's a Hero anyone of us could potentially become.
Lots of sub items here..... but the Dent as a Hero has to do with the fact that people can't identify with a man wearing full body armor fashioned after a bat, using technology that even the government hasn't been able to create (I know I can't, perhaps you're a billionaire vigilante yourself). Dent, on the other hand, is a person who could be any one of us, and people would like to think they could be, standing by their principles in the face of adversity for the good of all man, risking their life even, so that the bad guys (i.e. identifyable humans doing bad as opposed to villains we can't identify with doing evil... again you could be a clown gone bad
Maybe the guy in the truck got lucky, or saw him get in the car and, using shortcuts, got in position to be there. The crashing of the car to save the guy gets to the core of what Bruce Wayne Batman was trying to say, protect, even if its convenient to not do so.... the accountant was an asshat, but he wasn't a bad guy, some might even say he was fulfilling his job to the stockholders by bringing to light the misappropriation of corporate assets. Saving him definately got the message across, I'm sure.
6) Cell phones as sonar... ... except suspension of disbelief... billions of dollars to use for research at high tech company, i'm sure can come up with something.
I don't know cell tech very well, so I got nothing here
...Oh, by the way, the QS22 doesn't support a hard drive which means you need fast NFS. The cost of ownership is more than just the cost of single blade. This is misleading. It is always more than the cost of a single blade when dealing with bladecenters; Chassis, network modules, SAN modules, redundant power, etc... You only need one server, buy a rack mount or desktop workstation. Bladecenters are for when you need many that stay up as long as possible. 7-14 is where it shines.
A FiberChannel card connected to external storage unit will work fine. Bladecenters were designed for complete redundancy and internal HDs (regardless of RAID config) are crude forms of redundancy in the enterprise these days. Far better to have multiple paths to a sharable storage unit that can have the LUNs automatically shifted to another blade in event of failure AND can be mirrored to another unit somewhere else in case of catastrophe.
You're telling me, I was probably one of those addresses from ibm.com he talked about in his summary, being one of the few IBMers that even knew how to use the Internet back then. To think I could have been slashdot royalty.
I didn't sign up for the same reasons. To top it off I rarely posted out of fear that the company would not have liked it (my early years and around the time some others got fired for a little too much nature watching. It wasn't until the first time we had a virus popping up and no one knew what it was until I knowingly jumped on here to see a discussion about it, that I felt comfortable visiting/posting; it saved us time and money, and that's an easy sell to business types. The number of ibm.com hits went way up since that day I'm sure.
Or contemplate "This statement is false" as a mind bender.
Cheers.
First a disclaimer that I work for IBM. Similarly, my comments don't necessarily reflect that of my employer, etc, etc, etc...
r /application/
http://www-306.ibm.com/software/awdtools/develope
I use it for all the coding work I do. It has a GUI building tool that only generates Java code. Its much better than the old visual age line of products that required separate files to manage the GUI construction. You can even edit most of the generated code manually without fear of no longer being able to use the GUI builder. It uses (Eclipse) as its base platform so other eclipse plugins can be added to the tool. It includes extensive tools for other web related development as well (DB definitions, EJB work, XML, etc...)
Granted, it's listed as ~$2k for 1 license, so its not for everyone, but you'd be hard pressed to find a java/web development function that it doesn't help you with.
Dan
Finally, a topic on slashdot that I can claim more experience in than most. I've been doing blades for awhile now and still find it difficult to describe them exactly. Here goes try number 67217. Disclaimer: This is particular to IBM's Blade offering, so it may not be entirely accurate to other offerings (dell and hp for instance).
The basic concept of a blade is to extract all the 'non-computational' aspects of a server and provide them as shared resources to a group of systems that contain the remaining 'computational' parts.
A blade chassis, the 'non-computational' part, contains all the shared components, power (1800+ watts usually), network and san io modules, cdrom, floppy, usb ports (some contain serial ports), big honking fans, and a management module that coordinates all the chassis components and blades.
A blade usually contains 1 or 2 CPUs, memory, a few plugs to insert either laptop sized HDs, or SAN cards, and a connection to a bladecenter. No expansion ports, no power supply, no fans, no traditional video port, no traditional network ports. If you use the SAN card and boot from SAN, there are literally no moving parts in the blade. The connection to the bladecenter provides IO, video/serial access, power. All in the size of about 2 Think Pad T41s put side by side. They're designed so the chassis FANs can remove the heat from the blades properly (make sure you got TONS of cooling as it gets HOT behind them). In all, 14 of the blades can be placed in a 7U space, 12.25 inches, high and 19 inches wide. 28 CPUs (56 cores), 224 GB RAM all in about the space of two tower PCs.
An additional feature of blade centers, is the chassis is redundant in spades when configured fully, redundant networking, san, power, cooling. The Network IO modules often provide load balancing features for blade level redundancy if your applications can handle being load balanced.
For reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_server
http://www.blade.org/
Dan
You're making a few assumptions. One, that making each PS3 happens immediately, and two that all their capacity is making is the PS3 all the time. The 200k per month of the PS3s have likely been in the build phase for a bit by (random number)5%(/random number) of their capacity. While that's been happening, the other 95% of their capacity is probably pumping out another product which is likely near the end of that products contract fulfillment commitment. Once each person completes the work they need to do for that product, they start working on PS3s. Presto, you got enough people working on enough PS3s to do 2 million/month. Say it takes 1 month to build a PS3, expect the rate of build starts to hit (2,000,000/30) for each day in the month of September (simplistic view, but the general idea is there).
Cheers.
-Dan
Except that:
"'Is there any upside here? NO,' Walton grunts. It's simply a necessary (and frustrating) expense."
Is in reference to having to retain lawyers to fight the lawsuits that are filed against the company. It is NOT in reference to customer service.
The truth as I see it is that there is no one root cause to why one kid turns violent, why another kills themself, and why yet another turns out normal. I'm surprised with all the people in this forum that have programming experience, that more people don't realize that there's a billion and one things that can go wrong with a programs execution which may or may not be forseeable; compared to the human brain, the most complex of computer programs seems like a simple for loop that outputs its index on each iteration (oversimplification maybe, but helps make my point). Like a person who points to one cause for all the problems with all programs, it should seem almost laughable to think that one cause, could be the reason for all kids who act out against social stigmas; whether acted out against themselves or others.
Do bullies make people feel small, insignificant, or worthless - certainly. Do some parents fail in their parenting duties - absolutely. Do movies/games expose kids to elements that they might not be exposed elsewhere - unequivocally yes.
The 'village' is relied on to help kids deal with and learn from what they are exposed to (both good and bad exposure). The 'village' is relied on to reinforce socially acceptable behaviour, while discouraging socially unacceptable behaviour. Bullying is unacceptable, shyness is, while not unacceptable, not viewed as a good trait to have. So both these behaviours need to be influenced to change by the 'village'.
Now some people will say, 'How dare the 'village' determine what is and is not acceptable behaviour. I want to be an individual, unique from all others'. To this I'm not sure how to respond, save that uniqueness is at the same time impossible to attain and a forgone conclusion regardless of what you do (resolving that oxymoron is left to the reader, ... it's taken me 11 years to fully understand that myself... I thought my teacher was insane when he first postulated it). And also, if you decide to be unique outside the view of the 'village' you need to accept the outcome of that decision (i.e. be accountable for that action as well).
The problem is exacerbated by the fact that the 'village' is no longer just a physically constrained set, it is essentially WORLD - {people such that said people have no Internet access}. This makes it harder for the 'village' to agree on what is socially acceptable and not. History is not in favor of there ever being agreement either (ref. crusades, inquisition, et al).
Maybe its time we all accepted our responsibility in this global 'village' and start working towards helping those that exibit socially unacceptable behaviour rather than 'flame them'. Next time your working at a theatre where a 14 year old tries to see the latest 'massacre' flick, tell them no go. When you see someone bullying someone, stand up for the oppressed. When someone posts flame bait, give it its due and ignore it.
Thanks for reading this, curious what everyone thinks.
Dan
A moments thought would have shown him, but then again, a moment is a long time and a thought a painful process. - Author unknown to me (if anyone knows post it in reply - I think it was Lord Byron)
A classic example I have always used to illustrate this concept to my friends is that of Euclidean Geometry vs. assorted Non-Euclidean Geometries (Hyperbolic Geometry being a fun example). There are many 'assumptions' of Euclidean Geometry. Change only the assumption about about parallel lines not meeting at 'Infinity' to be that they do meet at infinity and you can come up with results that have just as much mathematical 'truth' as Euclidean Geometry, but which contradict 'truths' of Euclidean Geometry.
Relevence? The theory of evolution is only true in so far as the assumptions are true. Usually when I see a scientific theory break down, the scientists discover some assumption that was not quite right, they modify the assumption and rebuild. Lather, rinse, repeat ...