So could we kill off all the 'typical' flu viruses allowing the evolution of something more aggressive?
Probably not inconceivable; but there are a couple of points to consider: TFA mentions targeting structures that are 'highly conserved' between different virus subtypes. Typically(and I am not a molecular biologist, so feel free to cringe and/or correct me) the fact that a structure is 'highly conserved' between genetically distinct populations means that it is extremely important for some reason. Mutations happen(and very, very fast in influenza), so regions that aren't life-critical can diverge significantly over time. Life-critical regions, on the other hand, do experience mutations; but most of the mutants die. The degree of conservation across genetic lineages that diverged at a known period in the past can tell you a lot about how important that area is, even if you don't yet know exactly what it does.
Second, while this also doesn't preclude a really nasty bug, it is important to remember that diseases aren't little agents playing Pandemic 2 and trying for a high score. Killing your host can be a viable strategy, if you gain enough from doing so; but (in the very weak sense that mindless evolving virues can even have 'goals') the 'goal' isn't body count, it's survival and reproduction. Very high mortality is frequently counterproductive, because hosts die faster than the disease can spread to new ones. In broad strokes, high mortality tends to occur when a novel pathogen shows up for the first time; but ends up being selected against over time(see the classic attempt to use Myxoma virus against feral rabbits in Australia).
"Several of these have now been taken into clinical development, and this review discusses the progress that has been made, as well as considering the requirements for licensing these new vaccines and how they might be used in the future."
It just wouldn't be a slashdot story if 'intellectual property' didn't pop up somewhere, now would it?
In fairness, it is true that raw NAND flash has some obnoxious behavior around read/write and erasure, which may have been what the grandparent poster was referring to. On the PC side, though(and, often, on the embedded side. I don't know exactly how the economics shake down; but a lot of devices use eMMC rather than dealing with a flash filesystem, whether for software convenience or to keep pin and trace counts low) that's all behind a controller chip that handles the messy details and tells a bunch of comforting lies about being a more or less normal hard drive, with a few minor differences like TRIM.
Those of us who've seen what happens when we invest time and money in Microsoft's other pet project platforms aren't about to jump on Windows Phone 8.
It will be interesting to see if the way that software is tightly coupled with hardware(hardware that is generally replaced at an alarming rate) in 'mobile' makes this more of an issue than usual.
It certainly isn't news that Microsoft goes through development fads about as fast as it can dream up acronyms for them; but, with desktop and server cases, it has usually been possible to keep the offspring of a now-deprecated fad limping along for years after it is officially killed. And, while it is hardly the most glamorous part of the technology industry, a lot of people pay the mortgage by handling various aspects of keeping ghastly legacy crap that happens to be vital to something or other up and running. And, while Microsoft never seems very happy about it, they generally have caved to demand for legacy support on the desktop and server side.
With phones, though, you can't exactly order a stack of WP8 devices from Verizon and then downgrade them to WM6 to support your line-of-business whatever. You are essentially stuck with whatever version is shipping at the moment, with the possibility that some of your older devices might get updates, maybe. That isn't an environment where you can be nearly as comfortable that you will be able to just-make-it-work even after your chosen platform has officially been killed.
Laptops are one obvious win, since only the largest ones can even contain a RAID of any flavor, and certainly not a properly cooled 15k SAS type arrangement.
When you aren't dealing with form-factor constraints, though, the big deal is random access. SSDs are only moderately superior(and some are actually worse) than HDDs for big, well-behaved, linear reads and writes. If you are faced with lots and lots of requests for little chunks from all over the disk, though, mechanical HDDs fall off a cliff and SSDs don't.
According to TFA, each of these new 8GB 20nm dice are 118 mm. There are 32 of them in the 335 series. 37.8 square centimeters of processed silicon is serious business. Honestly, I'm amazed that it's so cheap.
I'm a bit surprised that Intel seems to have abandoned doing their controllers in-house(which they did for some of their early entries in the SSD market, back when there was some...um... extremely variable quality available. *cough* JMicron *cough*). Does SandForce have some juicy patents that make it impossible for Intel to economically match/exceed them even with superior process muscle? Has building competent flash controller chips now been commodified enough that Intel doesn't want to waste their time? Did some Intel project go sour and force them to go 3rd party?
I'm sure that in populations where neonates spend substantial amount of times cuddling up and sucking daddy's nipples, similar effects of paternal love might well be noticed... That just doesn't seem to happen very much in primates.
Is anybody else reminded of Harlow's rather disconcerting work on maternal attachment in monkeys and his later, even more disconcerting, work on the effects of isolation on monkeys(if your laboratory apparatus includes a device referred to as the 'pit of despair' you might have an ethics problem...)?
Unfortunately, while it comes up for very understandable reasons every time a story about looking at brain structure appears, the spectre of phrenology is really only useful as a cautionary tale about optimism....
Phrenology falls especially flat because it used skull morphology as an (inaccurate) proxy for measurements of the brain that weren't nondestructively available at the time(not that knowledge of brain function was good enough to have made such measurements useful even if available); but it was an early stab at the theory that psychological phenomena, and 'mind' in general, are ultimately dependent on the physical operations of the brain.
That's the nuisance. Phrenology was embarrassingly lousy as an actual scientific theory of anything resembling predictive power(and pop-phrenology was even worse, barely better than horoscopes and speculations about why undesireables look like monkeys); but made an early grab for the only really viable premise in neurology, the idea that mental phenomena are ultimately based on physical activity in the brain.
Unless you are some kind of Cartesian dualist, an Occasionalist, or take monads really seriously, you don't have a whole lot of options other than being a (hopefully much improved) post-phrenologist...
"our dual mission is to facilitate travel in the United States while we secure our borders, our people, and our visitors from those that would do us harm like terrorists and terrorist weapons, criminals, and contraband,"
Nice sound byte accusing him of being a terrorist without actually saying it.
Every time I see this kind of thing it just confirms that the biggest threat to peace and the ones creating racial intolerance and hatred are the US Government.
Unfortunately, it also seems like a strikingly incompetent thing to do, even if you adopt the 'the US can do whatever it feels like' school of international relations... The guy is a fairly high profile politician, if ICE wants to know what his views are, all they have to do is crack a newspaper, ask the state department, or both. Not Hard. If there is some suspicion that there is more there than meets the eye, a couple of hours in some dingy airport getting harassed by customs goons certainly isn't going to find it, and is certainly far less subtle and more offensive than more effective ways of gathering intelligence.
So, provoke an incident with Pakistan, a country with which we can barely pretend to be even frenemies with these days, in exchange for absolutely no gain? Um, good work there, guys...
Only a fool would do an important networking job without monster cables. Do you know how much packet fidelity you can lose if stray RF gets into your fiber?
Say what you will about the... er... 'afterlife optimized' strategy of some of the Iranian hardliners, it seems clear enough that they've got policy people available who aren't stupid.
The 'cyber war' stuff? It's pretty clear from some of the cool anti-PLC goodies in the wild that that has already been declared, and it is also clear(from years of banal criminal activity driven mostly by the fact that it's easy and profitable) that US financial interests are dubiously secure. Plus, since they are neither military nor civilian-in-a-bleeding-heart-way(like medical equipment or electrical/water/sewer infrastructure) they can do all the attacking they want and there will be no PR gain for the US beyond the usual probably-inflated-and-so-large-as-to-be-basically-meaningless 'damage' numbers that get trotted out after every hacker attack.
Drones? If you are playing catch-up, emphasize bang-for-buck(hobbyists aren't building the really good stuff; but drones are cheap even by the standards of obsolete MIGs if you aren't paying General Dynamics to build them) with the occasional Assymetry Surprise(like that alleged-GPS-spoof drone capture a while back) to keep the enemy jumpy.
" they can't actually force you to run any software or put your computer into any particular state."
It certainly is a good thing that nobody involved in computers, software, internet services, etc. has any significant market power... Also good that nobody would ever attempt to mechanically enforce a contract that gives them greater rights than contract law allows(this is why, for instance, DRM systems never trample on fair use rights...)
Well guys, I don't know about you, but I have only one question: Is it a separate chip on the motherboard? Because if it is, I'm hosting SMC desoldering classes the day this thing hits the market. Who'd have thought the day would come when we'd have to modchip our own damn computers...
Depends on the implementation. Some TPMs are not exactly hard to remove(that riser card on the LPC headers is sold as an option for that particular motherboard, so they made it easy to add or remove.
Some, like the chip on which that Asus module is based, or a bunch of the Infineon and Atmel ones, are reasonably civilized TSSOPs. Not hard to remove, allegedly packaged to be hard to tamper with at a chip level; but it's your problem if the firmware/BIOS/whatever flips out and refuses to do anything until the TPM is restored(and each one has a unique, and kept secret from you, RSA key burned in, so you have fun cloning/impersonating it to a hostile chipset...)
If, on the other hand, you have a system with something like the Intel GM45 chipset, you'd better have your microscope and ion beam ready because the TPM is on the same silicon as the motherboard chipset.
The TPMs from the likes of Broadcom are somewhere in the middle: They are integrated directly with some of the company's ethernet(and possibly other; I'm only familiar with the ones in some GigE products) chips; and aren't exactly going to be trivial to remove; but your computer will still work if you take a screwdriver to that part, unlike the Intel ones.
They still make the mice, not sure about joysticks(which seem to have fallen off a cliff in terms of popularity of late, except for console thumbsticks), and said mice are still a decent deal. In OEM packaging they are substantially cheaper than the 'fancy' opticals; but the fit and finish are markedly better than the $3 "Inland" and other mystery mice.
What I'm more concerned about is the possibility that Microsoft's hardware plans are basically going to boil down to some unwholesome mixture of Xbox and Apple: reasonably well polished; but indifferent or downright hostile to anything except the firmware it shipped with and the increasingly tightly integrated set of first-party online services and 3rd party products officially blessed by the vendor...
For all its messiness, the seething pit of Wintel gear has(if at times only through apathy, and the need to make sure that WinXP doesn't freak out despite being a decade old) been a great boon to our ability to run free software on hardware with a useful price/performance ratio and good absolute performance without playing a risky cat-and-mouse game with an overtly hostile vendor.
It would be a great pity indeed to see MS start xboxing the Wintel world into a bunch of opaque appliances.
I wonder if this is some relatively isolated 'Yeah, go RPi! freedom and stuff! Now, back to business...' thing, or if this represents an actual shift in thinking on BCM's part, to the effect that keeping relatively banal code proprietary does actually inconvenience potential buyers of their chips without necessarily providing a commensurate competitive advantage?
I'm told that authorities are awaiting the results of an MRI for confirmation; but there are strong suspicions that Richard Stallman succeeded in burrowing in to Scott A. McGregor, concealing himself inside the host body, and gradually subverting the host's central nervous system.
If you run TF2 from Linux, you can only play as an engineer. The eventual ReactOS version will lock you into playing a heavy; but unlock the secret 'Putin Pecs' item...
To be paid to the snarky foxcon wage slave(or his/her next of kin, if company security catch up to him) who upstages this announcement by live-streaming a product announcement straight from the factory floor!
Slashdot Mirror
So could we kill off all the 'typical' flu viruses allowing the evolution of something more aggressive?
Probably not inconceivable; but there are a couple of points to consider: TFA mentions targeting structures that are 'highly conserved' between different virus subtypes. Typically(and I am not a molecular biologist, so feel free to cringe and/or correct me) the fact that a structure is 'highly conserved' between genetically distinct populations means that it is extremely important for some reason. Mutations happen(and very, very fast in influenza), so regions that aren't life-critical can diverge significantly over time. Life-critical regions, on the other hand, do experience mutations; but most of the mutants die. The degree of conservation across genetic lineages that diverged at a known period in the past can tell you a lot about how important that area is, even if you don't yet know exactly what it does.
Second, while this also doesn't preclude a really nasty bug, it is important to remember that diseases aren't little agents playing Pandemic 2 and trying for a high score. Killing your host can be a viable strategy, if you gain enough from doing so; but (in the very weak sense that mindless evolving virues can even have 'goals') the 'goal' isn't body count, it's survival and reproduction. Very high mortality is frequently counterproductive, because hosts die faster than the disease can spread to new ones. In broad strokes, high mortality tends to occur when a novel pathogen shows up for the first time; but ends up being selected against over time(see the classic attempt to use Myxoma virus against feral rabbits in Australia).
(From TFA, emphasis mine)
"Several of these have now been taken into clinical development, and this review discusses the progress that has been made, as well as considering the requirements for licensing these new vaccines and how they might be used in the future."
It just wouldn't be a slashdot story if 'intellectual property' didn't pop up somewhere, now would it?
In fairness, it is true that raw NAND flash has some obnoxious behavior around read/write and erasure, which may have been what the grandparent poster was referring to. On the PC side, though(and, often, on the embedded side. I don't know exactly how the economics shake down; but a lot of devices use eMMC rather than dealing with a flash filesystem, whether for software convenience or to keep pin and trace counts low) that's all behind a controller chip that handles the messy details and tells a bunch of comforting lies about being a more or less normal hard drive, with a few minor differences like TRIM.
Those of us who've seen what happens when we invest time and money in Microsoft's other pet project platforms aren't about to jump on Windows Phone 8.
It will be interesting to see if the way that software is tightly coupled with hardware(hardware that is generally replaced at an alarming rate) in 'mobile' makes this more of an issue than usual.
It certainly isn't news that Microsoft goes through development fads about as fast as it can dream up acronyms for them; but, with desktop and server cases, it has usually been possible to keep the offspring of a now-deprecated fad limping along for years after it is officially killed. And, while it is hardly the most glamorous part of the technology industry, a lot of people pay the mortgage by handling various aspects of keeping ghastly legacy crap that happens to be vital to something or other up and running. And, while Microsoft never seems very happy about it, they generally have caved to demand for legacy support on the desktop and server side.
With phones, though, you can't exactly order a stack of WP8 devices from Verizon and then downgrade them to WM6 to support your line-of-business whatever. You are essentially stuck with whatever version is shipping at the moment, with the possibility that some of your older devices might get updates, maybe. That isn't an environment where you can be nearly as comfortable that you will be able to just-make-it-work even after your chosen platform has officially been killed.
Laptops are one obvious win, since only the largest ones can even contain a RAID of any flavor, and certainly not a properly cooled 15k SAS type arrangement.
When you aren't dealing with form-factor constraints, though, the big deal is random access. SSDs are only moderately superior(and some are actually worse) than HDDs for big, well-behaved, linear reads and writes. If you are faced with lots and lots of requests for little chunks from all over the disk, though, mechanical HDDs fall off a cliff and SSDs don't.
According to TFA, each of these new 8GB 20nm dice are 118 mm. There are 32 of them in the 335 series. 37.8 square centimeters of processed silicon is serious business. Honestly, I'm amazed that it's so cheap.
I'm a bit surprised that Intel seems to have abandoned doing their controllers in-house(which they did for some of their early entries in the SSD market, back when there was some...um... extremely variable quality available. *cough* JMicron *cough*). Does SandForce have some juicy patents that make it impossible for Intel to economically match/exceed them even with superior process muscle? Has building competent flash controller chips now been commodified enough that Intel doesn't want to waste their time? Did some Intel project go sour and force them to go 3rd party?
I'm sure that in populations where neonates spend substantial amount of times cuddling up and sucking daddy's nipples, similar effects of paternal love might well be noticed... That just doesn't seem to happen very much in primates.
Is anybody else reminded of Harlow's rather disconcerting work on maternal attachment in monkeys and his later, even more disconcerting, work on the effects of isolation on monkeys(if your laboratory apparatus includes a device referred to as the 'pit of despair' you might have an ethics problem...)?
Unfortunately, while it comes up for very understandable reasons every time a story about looking at brain structure appears, the spectre of phrenology is really only useful as a cautionary tale about optimism....
Phrenology falls especially flat because it used skull morphology as an (inaccurate) proxy for measurements of the brain that weren't nondestructively available at the time(not that knowledge of brain function was good enough to have made such measurements useful even if available); but it was an early stab at the theory that psychological phenomena, and 'mind' in general, are ultimately dependent on the physical operations of the brain.
That's the nuisance. Phrenology was embarrassingly lousy as an actual scientific theory of anything resembling predictive power(and pop-phrenology was even worse, barely better than horoscopes and speculations about why undesireables look like monkeys); but made an early grab for the only really viable premise in neurology, the idea that mental phenomena are ultimately based on physical activity in the brain.
Unless you are some kind of Cartesian dualist, an Occasionalist, or take monads really seriously, you don't have a whole lot of options other than being a (hopefully much improved) post-phrenologist...
"our dual mission is to facilitate travel in the United States while we secure our borders, our people, and our visitors from those that would do us harm like terrorists and terrorist weapons, criminals, and contraband,"
Nice sound byte accusing him of being a terrorist without actually saying it.
Every time I see this kind of thing it just confirms that the biggest threat to peace and the ones creating racial intolerance and hatred are the US Government.
Unfortunately, it also seems like a strikingly incompetent thing to do, even if you adopt the 'the US can do whatever it feels like' school of international relations... The guy is a fairly high profile politician, if ICE wants to know what his views are, all they have to do is crack a newspaper, ask the state department, or both. Not Hard. If there is some suspicion that there is more there than meets the eye, a couple of hours in some dingy airport getting harassed by customs goons certainly isn't going to find it, and is certainly far less subtle and more offensive than more effective ways of gathering intelligence.
So, provoke an incident with Pakistan, a country with which we can barely pretend to be even frenemies with these days, in exchange for absolutely no gain? Um, good work there, guys...
As soon as an asteroid wipes out the human population, those odds are gonna shift a bit.
True, the odds of anybody getting killed in a car accident will be substantially lower than they are now after an apocalyptic asteroid strike...
Only a fool would do an important networking job without monster cables. Do you know how much packet fidelity you can lose if stray RF gets into your fiber?
Just for giggles, I wonder if the costs of lobbying against the requirement to provide cost estimates can be factored into the cost estimate?
As if hundreds of Hollywood accountants suddenly received job offers from Canadian Telcom companies...
Say what you will about the... er... 'afterlife optimized' strategy of some of the Iranian hardliners, it seems clear enough that they've got policy people available who aren't stupid.
The 'cyber war' stuff? It's pretty clear from some of the cool anti-PLC goodies in the wild that that has already been declared, and it is also clear(from years of banal criminal activity driven mostly by the fact that it's easy and profitable) that US financial interests are dubiously secure. Plus, since they are neither military nor civilian-in-a-bleeding-heart-way(like medical equipment or electrical/water/sewer infrastructure) they can do all the attacking they want and there will be no PR gain for the US beyond the usual probably-inflated-and-so-large-as-to-be-basically-meaningless 'damage' numbers that get trotted out after every hacker attack.
Drones? If you are playing catch-up, emphasize bang-for-buck(hobbyists aren't building the really good stuff; but drones are cheap even by the standards of obsolete MIGs if you aren't paying General Dynamics to build them) with the occasional Assymetry Surprise(like that alleged-GPS-spoof drone capture a while back) to keep the enemy jumpy.
I'm pretty sure that any of several dozen rubbery-and-poorly-dubbed monster movies can tell us what happens next...
" they can't actually force you to run any software or put your computer into any particular state."
It certainly is a good thing that nobody involved in computers, software, internet services, etc. has any significant market power... Also good that nobody would ever attempt to mechanically enforce a contract that gives them greater rights than contract law allows(this is why, for instance, DRM systems never trample on fair use rights...)
Definitely nothing to worry about.
Well guys, I don't know about you, but I have only one question: Is it a separate chip on the motherboard? Because if it is, I'm hosting SMC desoldering classes the day this thing hits the market. Who'd have thought the day would come when we'd have to modchip our own damn computers...
Depends on the implementation. Some TPMs are not exactly hard to remove(that riser card on the LPC headers is sold as an option for that particular motherboard, so they made it easy to add or remove.
Some, like the chip on which that Asus module is based, or a bunch of the Infineon and Atmel ones, are reasonably civilized TSSOPs. Not hard to remove, allegedly packaged to be hard to tamper with at a chip level; but it's your problem if the firmware/BIOS/whatever flips out and refuses to do anything until the TPM is restored(and each one has a unique, and kept secret from you, RSA key burned in, so you have fun cloning/impersonating it to a hostile chipset...)
If, on the other hand, you have a system with something like the Intel GM45 chipset, you'd better have your microscope and ion beam ready because the TPM is on the same silicon as the motherboard chipset.
The TPMs from the likes of Broadcom are somewhere in the middle: They are integrated directly with some of the company's ethernet(and possibly other; I'm only familiar with the ones in some GigE products) chips; and aren't exactly going to be trivial to remove; but your computer will still work if you take a screwdriver to that part, unlike the Intel ones.
They still make the mice, not sure about joysticks(which seem to have fallen off a cliff in terms of popularity of late, except for console thumbsticks), and said mice are still a decent deal. In OEM packaging they are substantially cheaper than the 'fancy' opticals; but the fit and finish are markedly better than the $3 "Inland" and other mystery mice.
What I'm more concerned about is the possibility that Microsoft's hardware plans are basically going to boil down to some unwholesome mixture of Xbox and Apple: reasonably well polished; but indifferent or downright hostile to anything except the firmware it shipped with and the increasingly tightly integrated set of first-party online services and 3rd party products officially blessed by the vendor...
For all its messiness, the seething pit of Wintel gear has(if at times only through apathy, and the need to make sure that WinXP doesn't freak out despite being a decade old) been a great boon to our ability to run free software on hardware with a useful price/performance ratio and good absolute performance without playing a risky cat-and-mouse game with an overtly hostile vendor.
It would be a great pity indeed to see MS start xboxing the Wintel world into a bunch of opaque appliances.
I wonder if this is some relatively isolated 'Yeah, go RPi! freedom and stuff! Now, back to business...' thing, or if this represents an actual shift in thinking on BCM's part, to the effect that keeping relatively banal code proprietary does actually inconvenience potential buyers of their chips without necessarily providing a commensurate competitive advantage?
I'm told that authorities are awaiting the results of an MRI for confirmation; but there are strong suspicions that Richard Stallman succeeded in burrowing in to Scott A. McGregor, concealing himself inside the host body, and gradually subverting the host's central nervous system.
If you run TF2 from Linux, you can only play as an engineer. The eventual ReactOS version will lock you into playing a heavy; but unlock the secret 'Putin Pecs' item...
I wonder what the terms and conditions governing the 'anonymous' gathering of information for Microsoft's advertising arm will be?
To be paid to the snarky foxcon wage slave(or his/her next of kin, if company security catch up to him) who upstages this announcement by live-streaming a product announcement straight from the factory floor!