IBM has offered quite a few thin-and-light optical-drive-removed models over the years, albeit generally at a somewhat uncomfortable premium.
I have very fond memories of my Thinkpad 570 (stolen, alas) and the X series has more recently occupied the niche.
The really tragic thing is that Lenovo has been churning out assorted thin-and-lights without trackpoints! If you have to use a touchpad, you might as well just not bother.
Are you familiar with the (almost certainly apocryphal; but pretty excellent) treatment given to one Marcus Licinius Crassus after his management career came to an abrupt and sticky end? That might also serve as an interesting model...
Radiation in Denver is unavoidable. Radiation in Fukushima was manmade, and the inadequate safety features and inept management seem to be common problems with nuclear (and other) power plants. The furor is because the Fukushima radiation release could have been avoided, but wasn't.
But remember: Responsible, Serious, Journalists have dismissed any displeasure you might feel about having health risks you don't understand imposed on you become somebody higher up the food chain doesn't give a fuck as 'hysteria', so go about your business...
Honestly, that's what really annoys me about the tone of this article... Do I have the slightest belief that Fukushima residents(or, for that matter, just about anybody else who isn't an epidemiologist or involved in some aspect of medical physics) has an accurate understanding of the risks it poses to them? Hardly. Does this mean that it is 'hysteria' to be worried when your local operators have been exhibiting negligence and incompetence indistinguishable from malice while issuing bland statements about how you have nothing to worry about? Also hardly.
Really, a lot of anxiety about 'nuclear' this and 'GMO' that is pretty tepidly supported; but stems from the (overwhelmingly more robust) sense that the people deploying the technology being fretted about don't actually much care whether it is safe or not, cannot be relied upon to do what is necessary to ensure that it is safe, and are more than happy to lie about it for as long as they can get away with it. It would be nice if the anxiety were a bit more carefully focused; but there is a quite legitimate locus for it...
Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"!
on
The Panic Over Fukushima
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Where things get hairy is when dealing with various isotopes and how they do(or don't) get picked up by biological systems or absorbed by humans.
It is certainly possible to be injured or killed(horribly) by direct, penetrating exposure to a source of ionizing radiation; but that's pretty rare. The Therac-25 cases, that physicist who accidentally stuck his head in a particle accelerator, shoe salesmen from the good old days, the occasional poor bastard who gets caught in a criticality accident, that sort of thing.
Much more dangerous, at a population level, is absorbing a zesty isotope that, although too scarce in the environment, or not sufficient to penetrate skin(as with alpha emitters), can build up in specific tissues and irradiate them over time.
The trouble is that the risk presented by these sorts of sources depends a lot on biochemistry, lifestyle factors, and other annoying-to-measure stuff.
Tablet: Much more versatile, backlit, more expensive.
For travelling/commuting users, the hardware characteristics of the e-ink devices are pretty compelling. Sunlight readable, cheap enough that losing/breaking/having one stolen isn't the end of the world, and can last (literally) weeks on a charge.
For less mobile purposes, though, it matters rather less. Tablets aren't exactly laborious to carry, and they last long enough.
Given that your question is "I want to read more", I'd be concerned about the psychological and attention aspects of the device. A tablet, aside from the suckitude of a software keyboard, is a portal to the Internet, man's greatest corrupter and destroyer, It That Hungers For Free Time, devourer of souls. This definitely has its perks; but your odds of doing more serious reading are not among them.
E-ink devices, by contrast, frequently have wifi and may have some sort of rudimentary browser; but are largely too limited to muster any real distraction. You may put it down; but you won't just close the book and start tossing angry birds. That would make them my recommendation.
Unfortunately, there is a slight wrinkle: PDF support. PDFs tend to reflow/resize poorly(though this can vary by source, 'PDF' is a monstrously complex beast, and can mean almost anything from slightly overwrought plaintext to some seriously indigestable monstrosities that are virtually impossible to view in anything other than the intended size and layout), which makes them a bit tricky on e-ink screens(since the slower refresh rates discourage lots of zooming/scrolling). Tablets are often a better option there. Either category should support all reasonably common etext formats; but epubs and their ilk are much better behaved on more limited devices.
I would like to imagine that any financial problems EA is seeing are also a result of their shockingly poor handling of developers, unethical treatment of customers, misguided use of DRM, and famously incompetent management.
Famously incompetent you say? We should probably award them a lucrative retention bonus immediately, lest they abandon ship to mismanage somebody else.
EA certainly has a lousy reputation; but it strikes me that video game publishers in general would be a very odd thing to purchase whole if they are selling because of hard times...
Presumably there is the back catalog; but most games don't hold their value that well over time(not necessarily a serious issue if the game still runs on current versions of Windows and you can just shove it out as a download at impulse-purchase prices; but if the game is bitrotten or encumbered in some contractual issue, you probably aren't going to be able to charge enough to make it worth fixing...).
There are also likely some developers/artists/etc. but the demographics of game industry workers seem to skew toward young and mobile. Especially if the ship is sinking you can probably hire them piecemeal, and you can't necessarily retain them if you buy the whole thing.
Would you be paying for the various franchises? How much is it worth to legally sell "Command and Conquer: Kane Cashes It In" vs. selling an otherwise equivalent grim-near-future-warfare-and-alien-minerals RTS?
Surely "Origin" can't be worth much more than the precious metals in the servers it runs on, minus the cost of extracting them.
Again, EA seems like a particularly unpalatable purchase; but I'm a bit confused about the idea of buying any down-at-heel publisher. It seems like being down-at-heel suggests that the whole is not greater than the sum of the parts, and that most of the parts are either optional, not very valuable, or available for purchase either by offering them a bigger paycheck, or by bidding on a chunk of the publisher's corpse...
I'm told that children just can't resist the sweet taste of beryllium salts. They seem like logical candidates, if we can train them sufficiently in the necessary machining techniques.
Honestly, I think twitter is pretty screwed. Their centralized architecture means that every user costs them money, less whatever they can scrape back on low-value consumer advertising embedded in feeds; but unless they can point to a giant mass of authentic users, the potentially more lucrative analytics types are going to be a very hard group to attract. As a generic messaging middleware platform they are highly limited and not terribly reliable, so they attract only the lowest value bot traffic in that area.
I'd be inclined to suggest that this is one of those 'just because you have a problem doesn't mean there is a solution' situations...
Would you be willing to put your hands around the neck of a marketing flack? I've heard that their squamous epidermal membranes can exude carcinogenic mucus when they are stressed or threatened...
Unfortunately, problems of this nature can likely only be solved by social pressure.
If more people responded to the phrase "Yeah, I'm in branding-centric social media analytics." in the same way that they would respond to the phrase "I can't get off unless the puppy is bleeding.", there would almost certainly be less of this in circulation.
My understanding is that the difference you mention is what allows CIPA to remain where the CDA and COPA were struck down: CDA and COPA required filtering, period. CIPA doesn't require it, it just makes it a condition of accepting money that most of the targets they are after almost always do, in practice, have to make use of.
Roughly analogous to the technique by which the legal drinking age isn't strictly 21, unless you want highway funding or anything crazy like that...
"Hey guys, I've been thinking that maybe we need some new ideas on how to make our product less popular. Yeah, I know that we have to contend with network effects and a fairly strong first-mover advantage; but so did Myspace, we can do this, people! The service we offer is technologically totally fucking replaceable, and its continued viability depends on a pleasant UX for all the non-bots in our subscriber base."
"Say, your mention of UX gives me an idea... What if we were to start fucking around with the 3rd parties who produce the most popular interfaces to our product? If I remember, AOL's endless game of cat-and-mouse over OSCAR clients totally helped them retain relevance in the IM space..."
"Man, that is Genius! If we do this right, the name 'twitter' will come to mean 'Just like xmpp, only far less versatile and run by assholes' within the month. Get to it!"
I don't doubt that plagiarism was the order of the day(even in academia, the idea that plagiarism is a bad thing hardly goes back to the beginning); but I would be curious to know why...
The incentive behind copying things is pretty obvious; but mere copying isn't plagiarism. It takes lack of attribution to get to that level, and the incentive to not attribute isn't nearly as obvious. If I'm a newspaper editor in Baltimore, reprinting a story from a Boston paper, why wouldn't I include "As lately printed in ye Boston Herald" to assure my readers that they were getting authentic coverage from the scene, rather than me making shit up?
In the US, at least, I don't know the dirty details on other jurisdictions, the name of the game is CIPA'. The "Children's Internet Protection Act"(what could go wrong, eh?)
After the "Communications Decency Act" and the "Child Online Protection Act" were banhammered for being grossly unconstitutional, we got CIPA. Many thanks to Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), Sen. Ernest Hollings (D-SC), Rep. Bob Franks (R-N.J.), Rep. Chip Pickering (R-MS), and the justices writing for the majority on UNITED STATES V. AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSN., INC. (02-361) 539 U.S. 194 (2003).
There's also the direct attack on the browser and/or client network stack: Between Browser Helper Objects and Winsock LSP trickery, IE is an open book to anybody with admin access to the client, and other browsers are probably not too much better(and have their own plugin interfaces).
It isn't as elegant as a network-side setup; but various sorts of browser monkeying and monitoring are relatively common features of 'enterprise' AV or "endpoint management" software, and they usually stick their dirty little fingers into the guts of the browser well beyond the ability of a casual or unprivileged user to remove.
I would think that copying errors and degradation would be a serious issue if attempting to use DNA for arbitrary data storage. In organisms, we can even observe some segments of DNA(like those that code for elements of vital metabolic processes) are highly similar across a broad range of organisms, while non-coding or minimally important regions can vary wildly from individual to individual or even cell to cell; because the penalty for getting them wrong is so low...
Unless the data you are interested in also have, by some impressive coincidence, vital biological importance cruft buildup(or even substantial deletion) could be quite rapid. DNA isn't without self repair mechanisms; but one of the big ones is 'mutants dying' rather than something more elegant.
They don't want us to be able to see scantily clad women. That makes me pissed off right there.
On the other hand, this was an attack against their oil export capacity. The faster the rest of the world can suck the hydrocarbons out of the middle east, the faster we can go back to letting them fight amongst themselves over god's own sandbox on earth...
Yes, that policy was eventually changed, at least for now; but the history of carrier veto over the sole authorized source of applications purely according to their profitability is.. Not Exactly... a good counter-argument.
Any proposals on what to do with images produced by instruments that sample outside of the human visual range? The guys down at legal said that I'm not allowed to use true-color displays for anything higher energy than longwave UV anymore... Not my fault what happened to those kids.
If you don't mind being unable to take color shots of relatively fast moving things, you can use a conventional greyscale sensor, swap color filters between frames, and then crunch the result into a color image(or, if you have the space and don't mind a moderately complex optics package, you can have three greyscale sensors, each with a fixed color filter). If you need a color image within one frame, you use a fixed bayer(or similar) filter and demosaicing. Eats nontrivial resolution compared to the pure greyscale or swapped filters strategy; but you get everything in one shot and fewer moving parts. Then you have the somewhat oddball Foveon approach, where your greyscale sensors are stacked vertically, and use the different rates of absorption in silicon of different frequencies to do the filtering...
In very broad terms, they all have the 'greyscale sensors and filters' strategy; but there are a fair few ways to go about it. If you count chemical and biological sensors, you are more likely to find sensor elements that are actually tuned to a specific wavelength, rather than filtered to it; but the final image is still a matter of crunching together results from individual elements that are really only giving you intensity data for a relatively narrow slice of frequencies.
Slashdot Mirror
IBM has offered quite a few thin-and-light optical-drive-removed models over the years, albeit generally at a somewhat uncomfortable premium.
I have very fond memories of my Thinkpad 570 (stolen, alas) and the X series has more recently occupied the niche.
The really tragic thing is that Lenovo has been churning out assorted thin-and-lights without trackpoints! If you have to use a touchpad, you might as well just not bother.
Are you familiar with the (almost certainly apocryphal; but pretty excellent) treatment given to one Marcus Licinius Crassus after his management career came to an abrupt and sticky end? That might also serve as an interesting model...
Radiation in Denver is unavoidable. Radiation in Fukushima was manmade, and the inadequate safety features and inept management seem to be common problems with nuclear (and other) power plants. The furor is because the Fukushima radiation release could have been avoided, but wasn't.
But remember: Responsible, Serious, Journalists have dismissed any displeasure you might feel about having health risks you don't understand imposed on you become somebody higher up the food chain doesn't give a fuck as 'hysteria', so go about your business...
Honestly, that's what really annoys me about the tone of this article... Do I have the slightest belief that Fukushima residents(or, for that matter, just about anybody else who isn't an epidemiologist or involved in some aspect of medical physics) has an accurate understanding of the risks it poses to them? Hardly. Does this mean that it is 'hysteria' to be worried when your local operators have been exhibiting negligence and incompetence indistinguishable from malice while issuing bland statements about how you have nothing to worry about? Also hardly.
Really, a lot of anxiety about 'nuclear' this and 'GMO' that is pretty tepidly supported; but stems from the (overwhelmingly more robust) sense that the people deploying the technology being fretted about don't actually much care whether it is safe or not, cannot be relied upon to do what is necessary to ensure that it is safe, and are more than happy to lie about it for as long as they can get away with it. It would be nice if the anxiety were a bit more carefully focused; but there is a quite legitimate locus for it...
Where things get hairy is when dealing with various isotopes and how they do(or don't) get picked up by biological systems or absorbed by humans.
It is certainly possible to be injured or killed(horribly) by direct, penetrating exposure to a source of ionizing radiation; but that's pretty rare. The Therac-25 cases, that physicist who accidentally stuck his head in a particle accelerator, shoe salesmen from the good old days, the occasional poor bastard who gets caught in a criticality accident, that sort of thing.
Much more dangerous, at a population level, is absorbing a zesty isotope that, although too scarce in the environment, or not sufficient to penetrate skin(as with alpha emitters), can build up in specific tissues and irradiate them over time.
The trouble is that the risk presented by these sorts of sources depends a lot on biochemistry, lifestyle factors, and other annoying-to-measure stuff.
First, the hardware:
E-ink reader: Cheaper, lighter, better battery life, sunlight readable.
Tablet: Much more versatile, backlit, more expensive.
For travelling/commuting users, the hardware characteristics of the e-ink devices are pretty compelling. Sunlight readable, cheap enough that losing/breaking/having one stolen isn't the end of the world, and can last (literally) weeks on a charge.
For less mobile purposes, though, it matters rather less. Tablets aren't exactly laborious to carry, and they last long enough.
Given that your question is "I want to read more", I'd be concerned about the psychological and attention aspects of the device. A tablet, aside from the suckitude of a software keyboard, is a portal to the Internet, man's greatest corrupter and destroyer, It That Hungers For Free Time, devourer of souls. This definitely has its perks; but your odds of doing more serious reading are not among them.
E-ink devices, by contrast, frequently have wifi and may have some sort of rudimentary browser; but are largely too limited to muster any real distraction. You may put it down; but you won't just close the book and start tossing angry birds. That would make them my recommendation.
Unfortunately, there is a slight wrinkle: PDF support. PDFs tend to reflow/resize poorly(though this can vary by source, 'PDF' is a monstrously complex beast, and can mean almost anything from slightly overwrought plaintext to some seriously indigestable monstrosities that are virtually impossible to view in anything other than the intended size and layout), which makes them a bit tricky on e-ink screens(since the slower refresh rates discourage lots of zooming/scrolling). Tablets are often a better option there. Either category should support all reasonably common etext formats; but epubs and their ilk are much better behaved on more limited devices.
I would like to imagine that any financial problems EA is seeing are also a result of their shockingly poor handling of developers, unethical treatment of customers, misguided use of DRM, and famously incompetent management.
Famously incompetent you say? We should probably award them a lucrative retention bonus immediately, lest they abandon ship to mismanage somebody else.
EA certainly has a lousy reputation; but it strikes me that video game publishers in general would be a very odd thing to purchase whole if they are selling because of hard times...
Presumably there is the back catalog; but most games don't hold their value that well over time(not necessarily a serious issue if the game still runs on current versions of Windows and you can just shove it out as a download at impulse-purchase prices; but if the game is bitrotten or encumbered in some contractual issue, you probably aren't going to be able to charge enough to make it worth fixing...).
There are also likely some developers/artists/etc. but the demographics of game industry workers seem to skew toward young and mobile. Especially if the ship is sinking you can probably hire them piecemeal, and you can't necessarily retain them if you buy the whole thing.
Would you be paying for the various franchises? How much is it worth to legally sell "Command and Conquer: Kane Cashes It In" vs. selling an otherwise equivalent grim-near-future-warfare-and-alien-minerals RTS?
Surely "Origin" can't be worth much more than the precious metals in the servers it runs on, minus the cost of extracting them.
Again, EA seems like a particularly unpalatable purchase; but I'm a bit confused about the idea of buying any down-at-heel publisher. It seems like being down-at-heel suggests that the whole is not greater than the sum of the parts, and that most of the parts are either optional, not very valuable, or available for purchase either by offering them a bigger paycheck, or by bidding on a chunk of the publisher's corpse...
I'm told that children just can't resist the sweet taste of beryllium salts. They seem like logical candidates, if we can train them sufficiently in the necessary machining techniques.
Honestly, I think twitter is pretty screwed. Their centralized architecture means that every user costs them money, less whatever they can scrape back on low-value consumer advertising embedded in feeds; but unless they can point to a giant mass of authentic users, the potentially more lucrative analytics types are going to be a very hard group to attract. As a generic messaging middleware platform they are highly limited and not terribly reliable, so they attract only the lowest value bot traffic in that area.
I'd be inclined to suggest that this is one of those 'just because you have a problem doesn't mean there is a solution' situations...
But now ve hav vays only of collectink unemployment...
Would you be willing to put your hands around the neck of a marketing flack? I've heard that their squamous epidermal membranes can exude carcinogenic mucus when they are stressed or threatened...
Unfortunately, problems of this nature can likely only be solved by social pressure.
If more people responded to the phrase "Yeah, I'm in branding-centric social media analytics." in the same way that they would respond to the phrase "I can't get off unless the puppy is bleeding.", there would almost certainly be less of this in circulation.
My understanding is that the difference you mention is what allows CIPA to remain where the CDA and COPA were struck down: CDA and COPA required filtering, period. CIPA doesn't require it, it just makes it a condition of accepting money that most of the targets they are after almost always do, in practice, have to make use of.
Roughly analogous to the technique by which the legal drinking age isn't strictly 21, unless you want highway funding or anything crazy like that...
"Hey guys, I've been thinking that maybe we need some new ideas on how to make our product less popular. Yeah, I know that we have to contend with network effects and a fairly strong first-mover advantage; but so did Myspace, we can do this, people! The service we offer is technologically totally fucking replaceable, and its continued viability depends on a pleasant UX for all the non-bots in our subscriber base."
"Say, your mention of UX gives me an idea... What if we were to start fucking around with the 3rd parties who produce the most popular interfaces to our product? If I remember, AOL's endless game of cat-and-mouse over OSCAR clients totally helped them retain relevance in the IM space..."
"Man, that is Genius! If we do this right, the name 'twitter' will come to mean 'Just like xmpp, only far less versatile and run by assholes' within the month. Get to it!"
I don't doubt that plagiarism was the order of the day(even in academia, the idea that plagiarism is a bad thing hardly goes back to the beginning); but I would be curious to know why...
The incentive behind copying things is pretty obvious; but mere copying isn't plagiarism. It takes lack of attribution to get to that level, and the incentive to not attribute isn't nearly as obvious. If I'm a newspaper editor in Baltimore, reprinting a story from a Boston paper, why wouldn't I include "As lately printed in ye Boston Herald" to assure my readers that they were getting authentic coverage from the scene, rather than me making shit up?
In the US, at least, I don't know the dirty details on other jurisdictions, the name of the game is CIPA'. The "Children's Internet Protection Act"(what could go wrong, eh?)
After the "Communications Decency Act" and the "Child Online Protection Act" were banhammered for being grossly unconstitutional, we got CIPA. Many thanks to Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), Sen. Ernest Hollings (D-SC), Rep. Bob Franks (R-N.J.), Rep. Chip Pickering (R-MS), and the justices writing for the majority on UNITED STATES V. AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSN., INC. (02-361) 539 U.S. 194 (2003).
There's also the direct attack on the browser and/or client network stack: Between Browser Helper Objects and Winsock LSP trickery, IE is an open book to anybody with admin access to the client, and other browsers are probably not too much better(and have their own plugin interfaces).
It isn't as elegant as a network-side setup; but various sorts of browser monkeying and monitoring are relatively common features of 'enterprise' AV or "endpoint management" software, and they usually stick their dirty little fingers into the guts of the browser well beyond the ability of a casual or unprivileged user to remove.
Objection! Your honor, we at Apple strongly prefer insufflation of powder cocaine to smoking crack!
I would think that copying errors and degradation would be a serious issue if attempting to use DNA for arbitrary data storage. In organisms, we can even observe some segments of DNA(like those that code for elements of vital metabolic processes) are highly similar across a broad range of organisms, while non-coding or minimally important regions can vary wildly from individual to individual or even cell to cell; because the penalty for getting them wrong is so low...
Unless the data you are interested in also have, by some impressive coincidence, vital biological importance cruft buildup(or even substantial deletion) could be quite rapid. DNA isn't without self repair mechanisms; but one of the big ones is 'mutants dying' rather than something more elegant.
Nasty, racist tabloid. Has no place on this site.
How can you be so mean to the Daily Heil?
To download critical security updates and antirvirus definitions! Don't you care about Best Practices?
Is it wrong that I feel like cheering?
They don't want us to be able to see scantily clad women. That makes me pissed off right there.
On the other hand, this was an attack against their oil export capacity. The faster the rest of the world can suck the hydrocarbons out of the middle east, the faster we can go back to letting them fight amongst themselves over god's own sandbox on earth...
How quickly we forget......
Yes, that policy was eventually changed, at least for now; but the history of carrier veto over the sole authorized source of applications purely according to their profitability is.. Not Exactly... a good counter-argument.
Any proposals on what to do with images produced by instruments that sample outside of the human visual range? The guys down at legal said that I'm not allowed to use true-color displays for anything higher energy than longwave UV anymore... Not my fault what happened to those kids.
Not really...
If you don't mind being unable to take color shots of relatively fast moving things, you can use a conventional greyscale sensor, swap color filters between frames, and then crunch the result into a color image(or, if you have the space and don't mind a moderately complex optics package, you can have three greyscale sensors, each with a fixed color filter). If you need a color image within one frame, you use a fixed bayer(or similar) filter and demosaicing. Eats nontrivial resolution compared to the pure greyscale or swapped filters strategy; but you get everything in one shot and fewer moving parts. Then you have the somewhat oddball Foveon approach, where your greyscale sensors are stacked vertically, and use the different rates of absorption in silicon of different frequencies to do the filtering...
In very broad terms, they all have the 'greyscale sensors and filters' strategy; but there are a fair few ways to go about it. If you count chemical and biological sensors, you are more likely to find sensor elements that are actually tuned to a specific wavelength, rather than filtered to it; but the final image is still a matter of crunching together results from individual elements that are really only giving you intensity data for a relatively narrow slice of frequencies.