In the antediluvian days, before the great internet flood, CompuServe was center of the universe of the digital social space. I am sure that some readers are now asking "CompuWhat?" Then, in the Internet Archaic era, AOL arose to command the hearts and minds and social intercourse of the wired populace. "AOWhat?" Then came the Classical age of internet civilization, where Yahoo was the great Caesar. "Ya-What?". After the Dark Ages of the dotcom meltdown, a social media Renaissance arose with great city states like Myspace and Flickr. "Maybe your space grandpa, but not my space!"
[To quote from the Wikipedia article about Myspace: "From 2005 to 2008, Myspace was the largest social networking site in the world, and in June 2006 surpassed Google as the most visited website in the United States. In April 2008, Myspace was overtaken by Facebook in the number of unique worldwide visitors. . . As of January 2018, Myspace was ranked 4,153 by total Web traffic, and 1,657 in the United States."]
Now, Facebook has arisen, to a rousing IPO, intriguing founders and principles, and a flow of money to make the robber barons of the Gilded Age blush with envy. Yet, social preeminence in the digital age would seem to be a fleeting, precarious, and uncertain thing. Of late, Facebook has garnered attention mostly for its dark and nefarious side, akin perhaps to fascism, communism, and other dubious and totalitarian social philosophies of the 20th century.
The Greeks reminded us of the moral perils of hubris, in parables such as Daedalus and Icarus. In modern terms, "the bigger they are, the harder they fall". Given the history of internet social media in the past 20-30 years, anybody heavily invested in Facebook might want to consider their long term position. Who knows - the very existence of monolithic social media behemoths such as Facebook might be more akin to the media model of Snapchat and Instagram, here today gone tomorrow.
In the transition from where we are to where we will be with respect to energy, the idea of an "energy portfolio" is crucial. Societies will mix and match sources to accommodate geography, locale, weather, seasons, time of day, and available resources as well as user load. Transition from one portfolio mix to another will take decades, and will depend on exisiting and projected infrastructure and engineering projects, the economy, public policy, and political will. "Wind is a blowin' in, and oil is a burnin' out" - you are correct, one project does not the case make. But look at this in context of other current news. Wind installations are no longer just incidental odd job projects, and this one is being sponsored by a whole State. Solar is advancing rapidly. Nuclear is being discussed again. Energy recycling and repurposing is getting serious discussion (e.g. using ventilation from data centers to heat houses). Energy storage has always been a central issue, but Tesla has hit the news in recent weeks for its major battery projects such as in Australia. Electric cars have developed traction almost overnight. Need more proof that the idea of a new energy economy is trenchant? Saudi Arabia has been in the news of late, looking to diversify its economy in recognition that the oil genie might not grant wishes forever. One wind project by itself does not "show that oil is on the way out", but it is another high profile indicator that that is true. "On the way out" is not instant gratification - it might be 50 or 100 years before we achieve a globally respectable degree of sustainable and eco-friendly energy production. This project though is another welcome indicator that the concept has taken hold, and that society just might be on a committed pathway to reduce petroleum use.
I got a new laptop in 2007, with then new Vista. I also put Vista on some of my household machines. I hated it at first, as you said. Then, it improved with SP's, and it got better, as SP's tend to do. And, as time went on, I got used to it. I learned to live with it. Yet I rarely had a session where I did not have some reason to swear at it. On my main desktop machine which was my computing center, I continued to run XP (I loved XP, still do). Work with anything long enough, learn its quirks, and you can learn to live with it even if not love it. In the end, it turns out that Vista preserved the majority of computing paradigms that MS introduced with 3.11-95-98-200-XP, so once you got over the shock of what changed, it wasn't really so bad.
There were some big objections such as UAC, "min spec" debacle, security, etc., but there were also a zillion little sniggling things that were wrong. Technical architecture aside, an OS has two components, what's under the hood, and the user interface. Regardless how well or poorly it did with under the hood architecture, there was no reason to alter user paradigms that everyone knows and uses, especially since MS had invented or at least promoted and entrenched so many of them. Imagine suddenly all autos have the steering wheel and driver switched to the opposite side. Imagine that suddenly screws, nuts, and bolts have an entirely new system of thread sizes, that suddenly the qwerty keyboard is replaced with some new scramble of letters dictated by Steve Ballmer. I do a lot of work with font design. Vista suddenly broke font handling. File management via Explorer was suddenly deficient. Utilities such as Classic Shell came about not just because a few old fogies could not keep up with changing times, but because there is no reason to break basic functional paradigms just to be different.
Regardless who "invented" this, that, and the other OS feature (Xerox, Apple, IBM, MS, whatever), MS had its pivotal role. When MS made those earlier versions of Windows, they were not constrained by prior notions of what it should be. Right or wrong, they worked through the issues, and tweaked the interface, to get something that worked and people liked or at least got accustomed to. When Ballmer and Vista were in play, they tried, for better or worse, to fix core architecture problems, but they were not obliged to fudge the user interface paradigms, but they did. In so doing, not only did they disrespect and disregard the entire world user base, but they disrespected their own company forebears, second guessing what 20 years of MS engineers had developed before them. A lot of it was just change for change's sake, dumb and misguided.
Anybody could have learned to live with and adapt to the UAC prompts if that is all it was, or just corrupted font handling, or any other single thing. But, everything all piled up made it unpleasant, even after getting used to it and accepting that it was not too different than prior versions. It was different enough, and mostly for no sound reason, and that is why it was hated. It was better than Win 95. It wasn't better than Win 2000 or XP. Good riddance.
About 15 years ago, a technology came on the market called Provant, developed and managed by Regenesis Biomedical in Scottsdale, AZ. It was a radiofrequency generator that delivered energy to tissues via an external antenna applied to the skin. It was meant to augment or accelerate wound healing. Like the many other stimulatory or pro-proliferative wound healing technologies, it worked well for some patients, not at all for others, sometimes contrary effects, and everything in between. Overall, it was not sufficiently effective to generate much buzz, and the company eventually began to market it for post-operative pain and swelling. You can read about it at links such as: https://www.regenesisbio.com/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
While I had no direct involvement with the company, I did have opportunity to use it, and to visit the company and look through the labs. The device uses RF at about 12MHz. I cannot recall power or power densities delivered to the tissues. The effects under the microscope were dramatic. Fibroblasts in cell culture had a profound increase in motility and mitosis, exactly what is needed, in principle, in healing wounds, and of course, what goes awry when cells transform to cancer.
Circa 1900, biological sciences become so deeply entrenched in biochemistry and the metabolic processes in the body that chemistry and pharmacology became the defining sciences and therapeutics of most medical research and care. Physical modalities and energy interactions in the body became bastard children. Other than the effects of ionizing higher energies (ultraviolet, x-ray, gamma), the roles of heat, light, radio, stress-strain, acoustics, and similar energies have never received the same legitimacy as the chemical studies. Thus, "physical modalities" and the study of anything along those lines often gets dismissed as trivial, irrelevant, illegitimate, or second class or non-professional.
Furthermore, when such subjects come up via large public grants or national studies or in the popular media, they are often in conjunction with pervasive popular technologies that people are not so ready to give up, like cell phones. Thus, these studies engender debate and resistance.
The point is that RF has effects in the body. Good, bad, or indifferent all depends on many things. The Provant system was used for therapeutic effects. The studies that are the basis for this Slashdot post hint at possible negative effects. It is worth looking at the actual study publications, They are voluminous, at: https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/abou... https://tools.niehs.nih.gov/ce...
They show that tumor occurrence tended to increase with greater exposures, but for almost all tumors, incidence was very low. Even if hypothetically all tumor occurring subjects were to have died (which is nowhere near the case), the great majority of RF exposed subjects not only survived but had a distinct and significant increase in longevity. So, is it good or bad? Like many therapies, good things have their side effects, which if kept to low incidence are considered acceptable.
So, is this report good or bad? It depends on your point of view. If you see it as interesting science, good. If you see it as an insight to further studies about disease or longevity, good. If it you see it as a threat to your Second City Amendment rights to carry a cell phone, then you might get incensed about totalitarian conspiracies to take them away.
Studies such as this might or might not have applicability to human medicine and public safety, but they provide useful information to be considered in the overall analysis. Read the actual original source materials. They are rather mat
The responses here to this article not surprisingly run the gamut from hokum and bunk to contemplative science and philosophy. This is to be expected because this is a speculative subject for which there is no patent answer, so one can assess or react to it in any number of legitimate and respectable ways, from doctrinaire belief to dismissive skepticism. There are however a few points worth considering before adopting too strong of an opinion either way.
1) The world has always been full of charlatans and phony philosophers promulgating ridiculous beliefs meant to beguile and defraud the intellectually weak and unwary, purveyors of fud (fear-uncertainty-doubt), self-serving false prophets who seek power or recognition through the intimidation of retarded ideas. Any sensible person who is not cognizant of that reality of history and human nature risks succumbing to the worst nightmares that mankind has ever produced. Thus, kudos to the skeptics who keep us honest and prevent intellectual derailments.
2) However, the universe is also full of rich wonders awaiting our discovery. We only know what we know today because of the efforts and insights of scientists and philosophers before us, and we in turn are the intellectual stepping stones to the generations that follow. Unanswered questions seek their solutions, and we, the stewards of finding and preserving new knowledge, must not become complacent with what we already know, but must seek the new knowledge that awaits around the corner of the next experiment or observation. Thus, kudos to those dreamers and believers with the enthusiasm to seek the answers to the next question.
Consider the evolution of discovery in human society up until this point. Flip a wall switch and we can see at night without first gathering wood and rubbing two sticks together. Would that not have seemed like magic to a neolithic citizen? We can talk to each other around the world in real time, audio, video, and data. Even Marconi and Morse, who could have understood the technologies perfectly well, would probably have marveled where we have come since their innovations, yet for much of history prior to them, such technologies would have been magic, the work of god or the devil. People in the times of Cleopatra, Constantine, and Charlemagne might have explained flying machines and human flight as the work of divine endowment, yet we hop planes as easily as a chariot, and even the Montgolfier and Wright brothers would have marveled at the pictures that come to use from Jupiter, Saturn, and Pluto. Our science was the magic and mysticism of prior generations. There is a vast universe of unknown knowledge that awaits discovery, so we must keep open eyes and minds not to overlook what to future generations might seem so obvious.
Even when an idea, a postulate, a hypothesis, a theory proves to be wrong, just a fantasy, it may often light the way to real discovery. We debase the alchemists of prior times because they are perceived as being on a fool’s quest to transform base metals. Yet in their times, they did not know that gold could not be made by simple mixing and stirring of common items. We only know that because they discovered and proved that for us smug people from the future. While they never found the philosopher’s stone and the secret of transformation, they discovered the properties of materials and chemistry. Our modern chemical sciences and technologies were not born in an intellectual big bang at the end of the 18th century. They are the formalization of vast chemical and metallurgical knowledge gained by empiricism and limited scientific experimentation garnered over millenia before.
Copernicus was not successful because of a metaphysical epiphany, but because, trying to first work the numbers from the church doctrine point of view, he could not account for the motion of the planets. he was brave enough to buck society and take a fresh look. How many meritorious grants from promising post docs have been buried because t
The discussions and technological development about electric cars and airplanes always seems to imply an all-or-none approach to the power source and the drive train. The motive force, torque or thrust, comes from a fuel-energy system that is either all carbon-combustive or else all electrical. Why not a hybrid system?
Assume that the best way to go for the future is an electric drive train. Electric engines provide the mechanical motive force to move the vehicle, and an electrical system (battery or fuel cell) delivers the energy to the engines. But, what if there was an added component to resupply the fuel system - a classic carbon-combustion engine driving an electrical generator. The generator engine would be wholly separate from the drive train (unlike current hybrid electrical cars). It would serve only to generate electricity to restore charge on the batteries (or as needed, feed directly through the power inverter or electrical output stage). In principle, the generator would be a much smaller, lighter, more efficient device than the primary motive engines. It need not run at all except at times of high demand, or for emergency situations such as primary "fuel" running low or unexpected failure in the primary electrical supply system.
Many of the comments in this thread talk about the inadequacies of current electrical technologies to meet FAA requirements for 45 minutes extra flight time, or what next when the batteries are drained? As a back up safety or a range extension subsystem, it seems that a carbon fuel based electrical generator has merit at many levels. Yet, there never seems to be much discussion of such. So, for those more knowledgeable about the subject, what are your thoughts about using a fossil fuel electrical generation system to feed the batteries?
Cortana powered thermostat - maybe not as dumb as it first sounds.
Disclaimer #1 - I do not work for MS, and I hate Cortana. Disclaimer #2 - I do not work for Johnson Controls, and I do not own any of their thermostats (at least, I don't think so), but to be honest, I do like the way thermostats let me control the temperature at home and in the office - what a clever invention!
And did I mention . . . I hate Cortana. I have it completely suppressed on my PC's - never ever have to see it pop up, not ever. On my Windows phone, Cortana pops up, primarily just to annoy me, anytime I breath on the phone, or the TV or radio is on nearby, or my cat whines, but since I use the phone only for the most basic activities like phone calls, I can live with that annoyance.
I don't get it, why Cortana makes sense. However, I also do not use Siri, Alexa, or the others - I personally just don't find that to be my style. I like talking to people, typing and pointing on my computer. For those who enjoy using voice assistants, I would be curious to now how they rate Cortana versus the others.
I have read that Amazon Echo and Alexa devices were big winners during the holiday shopping season. So, why do people find that intriguing or compelling, but not Cortana? Partly I think because an Echo Dot sits out of your way. Speak to it when you want, but if you don’t call it, it doesn’t bother you.
Cortana on the other hand is just in your face, always an unwelcome annoyance when you are trying to do something that requires your attention.
To me, that epitomizes the Microsoft way - foisting on users what MS thinks is best for everyone, working in you face rather than by your side, working against you instead of with you. (Just my opinion, probably shared by many here.)
Seen from that point of view, MS would by playing the fool to think that selling Cortana to a thermostat maker is a great inroad into the IoT. It sounds stupid, until . ..
Look at it from the thermo-makers point of view. Check out the Johnson Controls website, at the link referenced in the Slashdot post: "Johnson Controls' Cortana-powered thermostat" http://www.johnsoncontrols.com...
Those guys were apparently excited to develop this device. It has a touchscreen panel for the usual thermostat interactions and control, but "GLAS can [also] be controlled by mobile app or by voice, thanks to Microsoft’s voice-enabled digital assistant, Cortana." Keep in mind, this is not MS trying to push something stupid on the hamstrung user or the unwary developer. This is not Clippy, not Vista, not UAC, not forced Win10 updates, not any of the million and one irritating things that MS is legendary for – this is not MS forcing Cortana into a device where no one wants it.
This is the company that wants to use Cortana as a tool or subsystem in its product, Johnson's choice. Whether Cortana or Hey Google or the others is the best choice, that is another discussion, but consider the potential benefit of this arrangement (and no, I am not being facetious).
Perhaps I want to keep the heating or AC off in the house during the day when I am at work, save energy and money. On my way home from work, I can call ahead by 20 minutes and get the house warmed up. Or vice versa, I ran out the door in the morning, late to work, and forgot to turn off the system, so I can call in and do so. Perhaps I have the AC on, but the weather changers, a cold front comes in and it starts raining and temperature drops, so I no longer need to have the AC on to keep the pets at home safe.
Perhaps on the way out the door, I realize I want to know the weather report, decide to take a jacket or raincoat, but I already turned off my computer. As I am walking out, I pass the thermostat, which is doubling as a weather report kiosk, and I can ask, and it tells me what I need t
I am not sure why this item was introduced as "moderately disturbing". If you will permit me, I will explain what it is, since I use it regularly. (I have no stock nor other biased affiliation with the company or product.) The product first came on the market in 1998, over 10 years ago. It has a well-established place in the treatment of chronic wounds. It is not the only product in the category of "living cell therapies" for chronic wounds. The other product is Dermagraft, similar, and likewise around for nearly 10 years. When Apligraf first came out, it was promoted as skin-graft-in-a-box. It is not. It is allogeneic material (recipients will reject it), and thus it does not "take" to the body like an autogenous skin graft. In its earliest years, when the company was promoting it as a skin graft, it got some high profile press because it was put to good use as readily available biological coverage for burn victims of the 9-11-2001 twin towers catastrophe. The company that makes it, Organogenesis, partnered with pharma giant Novartis for marketing and product management, and under them, they listened to customers who told them it was not skin grafts in a box, and they redefined its marketing for chronic wounds. The product management has been back in the hands of Organogenesis for about 3 or 4 years now.
The material is essentially a poly-pharmaceutical packaged in a living material. The raw materials come from donated foreskins. Extensive safety testing is done. Pure extracted fibroblasts are put into cell culture, where they do their business and re-form a collagen matrix equivalent to normal dermis. After that, pure keratinocytes are cultured on top of the dermis, and an epidermis forms. The product is shipped in its petri dish, as a circle of 44 sq cm area. The Gizmodo article shows a picture of it. As a living material, its procurement and handling are a bit different than most medical devices, but it is easy to get and apply.
The juvenile cells in the material make a broad spectrum of growth factors and other biochemicals which have a positive pro-proliferative effect on wounds. The role for this material is for chronic and pathological wounds. The company got its market approval and indications from the FDA for studies done on diabetic and venous ulcers, but the material is useful for chronic and pathological ("cap") wounds of any cause. Like anything else, it does not work for all wounds or patients, but it is fairly predictable, and its results can be rather dramatic. When a cap wound of whatever cause has been treated to the point that disease is quiet, inflammation is gone, and the wound should be healing but it is not, then that is when wound stimulatory therapies are applied. There are several available, and Apligraf has been one of the flagship products in this category for 10 years now. Many wounds which simply will not budge no matter what will take off and heal once this is applied.
Organogenesis has its first new product coming out soon, for oral mucosa and gingiva, so perhaps that is why they are trying to stir up some attention with articles like the one quoted. However, it is not Brave New World nor Coma nor any other meat factory. It is just on the leading edge of biological therapeutics in the 21st century. And if Slashdotters want to make lots of jokes as they often do, like "put Viagra in the petri dish to grow more", well, we've already heard them all.
(All very timely, since I just gave a presentation on this last week (and have been for 8 years). If you want to learn more, I posted a copy of the presentation on the website I use for posting talks and presentations and whatnot. This particular talk has a mix of my slides and company slides. It is NOT yet annotated with full text on each slide, so some will just be pictures and you will have to infer what you can, but text should be coming one of these days: http://www.arimedica.com/content/arimedica_apligraf_(partially%20annotated)_2005-1006.pdf Again, I have no investment nor bias here, I just use this stuff in practice because it works and it's an important product.)
"I think people will look back on Vista after the Windows 7 release and realize that there were actually a bunch of good things there . .." - Q: If an MS exec thinks that there is some goodness in Vista that people will miss, then why would they throw away that goodness? A: They're Microsoft. - I have Vista on my Laptop. I have XP on may main desktops. I just put XP and Linux on my new netbook. All things considered, I think that the overall Vista experience is a smoldering pile of pig droppings. But amongst all the turds are a few nuggets of digestible goodies. I can certainly see where some users will have gotten used to using Vista, and might miss what they have become accustomed to - that's just normal human nature. I hate it, but I have gotten used to it myself, so I can see the point. - If they know there are features that customers like, then why eliminate them from 7? The exec said so himself - people will miss something. I take that to mean that they know there are some things people like, and they are deliberately removing them (cynical view), or they don't give a crap that they are removing them (existential view). - His remarks sound like "We know Vista sucks, but wait 'til you see what we did to it in 7 - then you'll finally get it how good Vista was - hahahaha!" Or am I missing something? - If you want to give your customers a good experience and make them happy, keep the good things in. I have no idea what features he might be referring to, but if he knows that users like them, and that they are going to miss them, why would a corporate exec want to make the experience bad, nostalgic for the old system? Just wondering. It makes no sense, unless you are in the MS parallel universe, I guess. - Like when MS took the best feature of its Office suite, the ability to customize and extend the apps, toolbars, and menus, then stripped it all away in favor of the 2007 Ribbon of Shit. "People might miss the old toolbars . . . screw 'em."
Lot's of good suggestions here. Here's what I would do. Get yourself one of those 100-in-one project kits, or 400-in-1, work through it, and from there, pick a handful that would work with your students. You can then buy the parts you need in bulk - a 1000 resistors here, a 100 caps, 50 transistors, 100 diodes, etc - all cheap. Put together a parts box with all that stuff, including wire, solder, bulbs, led's, battery clips, alligator leads, etc. Then get a few basic durable goods - soldering irons, a multimeter, etc. You will also need some breadboards and solder boards. Each year, you can add a few projects and components, and soon enough you will have a real electronics workshop. - Whatever specific projects you choose, they should represent the basics: basic circuits, basic components, r-c, basic logic, gates, timing, oscillators and mv's, mux-demux, comparators, etc. Five or ten basic building block IC's should be able to cover hundreds of projects in these basic categories. There is nothing like a good ol' 555 for timing projects, 7400's for starter digital logic, and a 741 for introduction to analog concepts. Almost any project you will find in a 100-in-1 kit will be easy enough to build for under $5 once you have the basic lab or shop equipment.
Correct, that is our conventional understanding of things. But what if there are other primitive energy capture and translation systems that remain repressed or down regulated by the presence of these structures? What if a cell could be kept on "life support" for a few hours or days after removing its mitochondria or chloroplasts, enough for up regulation of latent genes that will revert the cell back into a some sort bacteria-like mode of metabolism? Granted, it is much less likely for advanced eukaryotes like mammalian or insect cells or rose bushes, but what about for algae or diatoms or sponges? We can presume that at some point endosymbionts and cells became so entangled that neither could survive nor revert without the other. However it would also seem likely that there is a transition group of species which could still be unentangled in the lab.
Yes, you are exactly correct, that sticking chloroplasts into animal cells would be the necessary flip side of that experiment. - I was not referring to turning pine trees into Night of the Living Dead. What would be interesting is to see what would happen to algae under these circumstances, or to cultures of moss cells or flowering plant cells. Pick a popular research plant - tobacco for instance - and then pull the chloroplasts out of a few cells, then stick them into a cell culture medium - e.g. agar petri dishes or mammalian cell culture flasks - and see if they become planktonic, aggressive, nutrient-tropic, or if they start to express cell surface structures or other organelles related to sensing and locomotion. Since the algae are phylogenetically much closer to all of this, it seems plausible that they might revert to animal-like forms and function. - If nobody has ever done these experiments, now would be a good time.
Biology is full of promoter-inhibitor relationships, and this seems like an interesting one. When the algae is inside the protist, the host's "animal" behaviors and anatomy are suppressed, but they clearly remain in a latent state, ready to reactivate after fission. It makes one wonder to what extent chloroplasts remain as endosymbionts versus organelles in genuine plant species. So . . . . . . Does anyone know of any research where chloroplasts were removed from plant cells in culture, to see if the remaining cells revert to some atavistic animal-like exogenous-food-seeking state?
This article and related comments make me think that netbooks will be a problem for Windows in ways that were not fully anticipated. There are two premises to this:
1) Where is the MinWin concept in all of this? It sounds like the concept of a small snappy kernel is only relative to where Windows was with Vista. If it just barely runs on an Atom based system, with no capacitance or wiggle room for big apps and data, then how could this ever be ported to ARM and various mobile devices like phones / PDAs etc?
2) Netbooks are about to become the new laptops. The current laptop form factor has been around about 15 years, successful only after technology worked its way through various large incarnations of "portable PCs" and performance became commensurate with desktops. Now, we are entering another era of miniaturization, and Netbooks at about half the size of laptops seem to be a nice balance between smaller size but usable screen and keyboard. And don't forget that iPhones and the like are a winning form factor as well.
The problem is that people are not going to settle for netbooks being just a glorified PDA or internet kiosk. They will see a familiar user interface, it will run most of their apps (even if slow and kludgy), and it will look and feel mostly like their desktops and laptops. So, expectations and demands will rise. The industry will respond by making chips, boards, screen technologies, etc. more capable, and within 5 to 10 years, smaller form factor netbooks will rival the performance of today's laptops and even today's desktops, just as 15 years ago "laptops" supplanted "portable PCs". The current form factor of laptops will not disappear - laptops are successful for a reason, and large screens and keyboards will remain of crucial importance for many users - but people will come to expect the smaller form netbook, handy and easy to carry, to nonetheless perform as a desktop and run all their apps while on the go.
Hardware makers will make these goals possible. In the meantime, people are starting to become familiar with other OSes as the cellphone-PDA-mediaplayer class of devices becomes more pervasive. As such, what people really want is easy, smooth, intuitive, bug-free transparent performance, and not necessarily a single given proprietary look and feel. This article and thread makes me wonder if MS and Windows are going to end up being perpetually a step behind, planning products based on today's marketplace and technologies, but delivering the product several years later when technology and people's expectations have moved forward.
You are completely right, but they never would have changed their name to "Time Warner.com or something idiotic like that". I don't think that "dot com" really meant anything to them; they really didn't understand how the world was changing. They were stuck on the AOL way of doing things, which was most definitely NOT "dot com".
Part of that whole mess was just raw psychology: hubris, blindness, old fogeyism, and getting run over by the bullet train of market reality. In the period circa 1998 - 2001, Win 98, Internet Explorer, DSL, cable broadband, and the dotcom boom all turned the world en masse to the real Internet. While AOL saw opportunities in the Internet, it was so tied to its own version of online services, a glorified dialup bulletin board service, that it never saw where the rest of the world had suddenly detoured to. The AOL - Time Warner merger came after the ascendency of AOL, as they were starting to become irrelevant.
Hubris - thinking that flash-in-the-pan AOL could take the leadership role from well-established and dependable multimedia Time-Warner. Blindness - letting their hubris and rose-colored vision mask what was happening with the real Internet and ISPs. Old fogeyism - believing that their traditional ways would prevail, as the whole world was giving up roller skates for sports cars.
Not surprisingly in retrospect, but perhaps not predictable at the time, is that consumer tastes in the media itself changed. Time Magazine and Turner Classic Movies remain important, but who then necessarily realized that the likes of YouTube, FaceBook, the blogosphere, and all of their forebears of the time would divert attention from classic print and TV media.
At that time, they just didn't get it, what "dot com" was really all about. They were all going to lose value anyway, but kudos to Steve Case for sucking something out of the stodgy and clueless old guard - like it or hate it, you gotta admire it.
Your point is well taken. A project like this is trying to mimic normal neuroanatomy and physiology. What happens when the brain becomes acutely or chronically pathological is much more complex. When the nervous system is in its usual healthy state, then the kind of digital architecture implemented in this project can work to a degree as a simulator. For instance, when a synapse triggers, it is in a sense an all-or-none saturated response or switch, so digital logic is useful to model it. However, neurons and their interconnections are more analog than digital, especially during conditions of disease. For instance, changes in the levels of a neurotransmitter or its receptor, or electrolyte changes which will attenuate the response to the transmitter, create variable responses, more like putting a potentiometer in the circuit, rather than an on-off switch. In fact, the responses of a neuron to its many synaptic inputs will exhibit varying degrees of time base integration, multiple input summation, and selective signal rejection, while on the output side, there can be amplification or attenuation, and oscillations or chaotic dynamics in lieu of one-shot trigger responses. This is the perfect place for large scale analog circuit modeling.
It seems like digital chips and digital programming, simulation, and control have become so entrenched (or cheap) in the mindset of designers and users, that analog gets short-changed when thinking about modern large-scale models. Designing a VLSIC with thousands of opamps, and making them addressable through thousands of addressable DAC's, and then ganging thousands of them together into your "brain computer simulator" would be a daunting and expensive chip design challenge, but ultimately far more realistic. There are some things, like the pathological states that you mentioned, that just cannot be effectively simulated on a digital chip - a software simulation yes, but not in digital-only silicon, or so it seems to me.
The original post may be based on incidental observations, meaning it is true for some people, but I don't think that a generalization can be drawn. In my own work, I see some young grads who are lazy, some who are full-bore energetic self-starters with realistic understanding and expectations, and everything in between.
"TV reality college graduates" has some truth behind it, because TV can glamorize your appreciation of things, or else over-romanticize them into unreality. For instance, who would have thought that being a chef would be glamorous, but the Food Network has propelled chefdom into stardom and cooking schools into sought after trades - that's glamour. But how many people have romanticized about being a TV or sports celebs thinking that they too can be a star, only to have reality bite back when you try to get your big break.
IT and tech jobs have been glamorized to some extent on TV, and so have business-MBA-entrepreneur models, so no surprise then that someone who is fundamentally immature and unrealistic might seek to be a "22-year-old who leads billion-dollar corporate mergers in Paris and jets around the world". I think three things are about to change those attitudes:
1 - With the world economy in a meltdown, and major banks and financiers dissolved, being a money-grubbing MBAstard is about to get less glamorous. Anybody looking to be that 22 yearold billionaire will get some serious ego deflation in the coming job market.
2 - If you want to work from the tech rather than the business side, well guess what, lots of companies cannot afford tech right now, so, no soup for you! Just like the wannabee starlets who wait tables, you might only find employment these days doing the same, or accepting get-dirty infrastructure work that the government is now starting to fund. Nothing like digging a ditch to burst your bubble.
3 - All new industries have a certain dynamism that is inherently glamorous. The PC revolution made lots of MS millionaires. The dot-com era made lots of dot-com millionaires. The net-Google era is making its own millionaires. But these major emerging technologies and societal transformations are already here, and their entrepreneurial heyday might be over, or at least in a lull, until some other new major tech and industry comes along, such as perhaps green energy. With the current worldwide economic slump, glitzy make-millions jobs for young grads riding the wave of a new industry just aren't there right now, at least not in computers and tech, as far as I can see.
This thread has generated a lot of great responses, and you can pick and choose from a variety of good solutions. Here is another, the one that I have settled on as my preferred safety-backup-reinstall method: hard drive clones.
I use XP-SP2. My main machine has been running smooth as silk for 4 years. I have had rare problems, but when they have occurred, they have been of mixed causes - hard drive failure, a UPS failure which caused unbootable file system corruption, and even a trojan picked up right here on a Slashdot link a few months ago. No sweat for me though . . .
My backup solution depends on external hard drives which mirror my internal drives. I keep all data and apps (other than those that insist on installing under \ProgramFiles) on separate internal drives. That way, if C: gets corrupted, my other data is safe. My C: system drive has only the OS and ProgramFiles apps. This means that I can keep the system drive relatively small (120GB), meaning I can buy several mirror drives quite inexpensively.
I have several C: drive mirrors. I duplicate my main drive to these external backups 2 or 3 times a week. I duplicate just before any major system or application upgrade. I use an older version of Norton Ghost (v9) for this, which makes flawless duplicates while running in the background. (I also use Acronis to make point-in-time compressed images of the drive, which can be reloaded onto a hard drive if need be.)
The few times that I have had a disaster, I just pull out my latest mirror, swap it into the disk-0 position, and turn my machine back on - like nothing ever happened.
Consequently, this is also a great way to test installations or new software, or to create drives that you or your wife could use for your own purposes.
(See the comments above by diggitzz about cleaning up your dirty system before getting ready to make your first mirror image.)
Ever since settling on the system-drive-mirror solution for my OS safety backups, I have not had a moment's anxiety about losing a drive, testing new OSes, nor keeping my installation clean.
Back in high school c1970, we got the coolest toy - a rack mount high speed paper tape reader to feed our PDP-8S. We could load our 4K Fortran, and still have half the memory leftover for programming. Evidently our school had a bigger budget than where you were, because we also got the fanfold tape splice & repair gizmo.
From the original article: "Magneto-Optical Drive . . . If you've ever owned one of these drives, award yourself 100 geek-cred points, and 1000 points if you still own one."
Gimme a couple o'thousand of them geek cred points!
I had three Fujitsu MO drives, on line from about 1997 to 2002. I used them for hard drive backup and off-line storage. The reason was simple - best cost-per-megabyte of all media during that period, plus luxurious high capacity by standards of that era.
The rules are simple: every advance in processor speed, memory, hard drive capacity, screen resolution, app complexity, file formats, I/O interfaces, and I/O devices results in users generating bigger and bigger files, more and more data. Hard drives are always at the head of the curve on sheer capacity, but until the past few years, hard drives were also expensive. How then do you find the best balance between economy of hardware costs, economy of media costs and storage space, and economy of time to write files and backup. In that era, late 90's, hard drives were roughly in the 500MB - 4GB range, and pricey. So how do you backup? I used CDs, DVDs, Colorado/QIC tapes, and then MO's.
CDs seemed great c1992-1994, but write speeds then were sloooow, their capacities quickly became inadequate, and they were pricey until DVDs came along.
DVDs were just like CDs, just a generation farther in terms of speed and capacity, but with the same caveats and shortcomings. Whether CD or DVD, these media were simply behind the curve compared to HD capacity and speed.
(Blu-ray simply extends these same issues to another generation. Optical is useful as a medium of large file exchange and distribution, but until someone comes up with a 500GB or 2TB 5.25 optical disk for $5 that can do a full write in 30 minutes, it is mainly useless for most backup tasks.)
QIC tapes were great for total system backup and restore, but only for relatively small HDs, and they were slow for random data access, the tapes were pricey, and the technology was being phased out by 2002.
MO fit the bill for robust high capacity affordable storage. It was the genuine diamond-in-the-rough. I could not find my little file of calculations from back then, but the drives were affordable (comparable to any CD recorder), the media were a fraction of the cost-per-megabyte of writable CDs (and then DVDs), read/write access times were way better than CD, the media were sturdy and well protected. Capacities were 640MB, like CDs. but reusable, faster, cheaper. It was all good things.
I never understood back then why it wasn't more popular, because it was superior in almost all respects of usability and expense. Technologically, I suppose there will be experts here who can comment on that, but it seemed like a fairly dependable technology, which lives on today as DVD-RAM (also dying). I suppose that the companies who made it just never organized the way that Blu-ray or HD-DVD consortia organized and pushed for their formats.
I have long since copied all of my MO disks to more contemporary storage, but my Fujitsu SCSI-interfaced DynaMO drives are still here on my shelf, ready to power up anytime I want to plug in - and yes, they work just great.
All of these discussions become moot when GMR was discovered (giant magneto-resistance), suddenly pushing HD capacities from 4GB to 18GB, and then onto today's TB capacities. Today, there is no pragmatic way, for the home / office / small business user to backup PCs with a few TBs of data except by using other HDs. And since HD prices have had a steep decline, the cost-per-GB is dirt cheap these days. My own backup strategies for the past few years have been exclusively HD-to-HD, having MULTIPLE backup sets at all times that are cheap, fast, and run-in-the background. HD-to-HD backup far superior to any CD-DVD-QIC-MO-BluRay solution - heartily recommended to all users - and that advice earns me a another couple o'thousand of them geek cred points!
There is a big difference between AOL/CompuServe/Prodigy/MSN and Hearst style newspapers and magazines. The AOL's were glorified bulletin boards. In the 1980's, they created communities and on-line access when there was nothing else. As they evolved in the early 1990's, they provided access to limited amounts of content. Then, in the latter 1990's, the WWW opened up the Internet to the general public, giving consumers unedited access to content and social networking, making the AOL's stodgy, kludgy, and expensive with marginal value, in a word, irrelevant. It wasn't that the subscription based model failed, it's just that once you have tasted something sweeter, AOL kind of soured. The monthly fees you pay to your ISP ARE your subscription fees, its just that you are paying for much greater choice. Which just goes to show, that people ARE willing to pay for the content and quality they choose.
The biggest difference between the AOL's and Newspapers is that the AOL's just dish up someone else's reporting. Newspapers create content. Even busy blogs like Slashdot depend on bulletin board style posting of news content generated by real news organizations and reporters. If all newspapers dried up and went away, the rest of the Internet would be starved for real content. The world and society need the newspapers, or the function they serve - news professionals. The problem these days is finding a way to keep them in business when their primary revenue stream is drying up. Historically, newspapers, TV news, magazines, (Traditional News Organizations - TNA's) used to handle BOTH content reporting/creation and content delivery. Content creation is costly, eating cash without inherently generating revenue, making content delivery the money side of the business. Now, the public is spending money on alternative means of delivery, curtailing the revenues to TNAs that create content for the rest of us.
It is a time of flux for everyone, and TNAs are especially challenged to stay in business because of declining revenues. But we need them. Every problem like this is someone else's opportunity, and over the next 10-20-30 years, the dynamics of it all will change, but there will still be news content providers. Exactly who, how we pay for it, who splits the revenue stream, how we receive and read it all - that's the big experiment we are just entering. Kudos to venerable organizations like Hearst to not just sit idly by and sink into oblivion (like so many companies do), but at least try to adapt, to win or go down fighting.
What I foresee is a combination of models that seem to be emerging. There will be Kindle-like readers that are bigger, richer, more like a magazine in size and resolution. You will subscribe through your ISP to receive your newspapers. Perhaps there will be a "basic cable" type of service that gives you your local paper and USA Today. Then, there will be a premium service that gives you the NY Times, The Washington Post, and 3 premium newspapers of your choice. Then there will be similar plans for your magazines. You pay one fee to your ISP company, and they forward the revenues to the publishers, just like TV/cable, and HBO-Showtime- Cinemax, etc.
This reminds me of English versus metric, how most of the world uses metric measures, whereas in the US (and elsewhere?), feet, inches, quarts, and pounds persist. Sounds like now might be a good time for MS to lock up rights to the english measurement systems, convert all Windows coding to those standards, and start charging activation fees to use a foot-long ruler . . . keeping unilateralism alive and well.
1 >> "Making any plastic will be still as easy as it is today : you buy some type of oil-derivative at the store, and polymerize it. Easy enough."
True, it should be easy, once you figure out an economical, industrializable chemistry to do your polymerization. But wrong, you don't just buy some type of oil-derivative. Current polymers based on petroleum refinement are based on hydrocarbons. Plastics such as poly-styrene, -propylene, -ethylene, -ester, and nylon generally have long carbon backbones. The plus side of it: cheap source of monomer, cheap and easy chemistry, great resulting products. The down side of it: biology generally doesn't have long carbon backbones, so life-on-earth has not generally evolved the metabolic machinery to handle hydrocarbons and derivatives. Petroleum forms from biochemistry subjected to pyrolytic conditions where life itself cannot survive. Thus, while petroleum and biochemistry share carbon, they share little else. That is why there is interest in finding biochemistry-based polymers that can be plasticized, because they will be subject to natural biological degradation.
If you look at the structure of lignin, it is already polymerized, based on a backbone of carbohydrates and quinones - and that is something that many self respecting microbes can sink their teeth into. A lignin based plastic would just further polymerize the compound into something with the desired characteristics (mw, density, viscosity, melting point, modulus, plasticity, etc).
2 >> "It will however, be a very costly thing to do indeed : it requires loads of energy. Right now that energy has simply been put in oil long ago . ..We will still make plastics. Producing them, however, will stop producing energy and start massively costing energy."
Lignin has already stored a lot of that energy - it is already a large and highly structured compound. Further polymerization shouldn't be any more expensive than any other plastization chemistry.
I don't think that anybody in industry or the consumer side, or even the ecology side, objects to the energy of producing plastics. Plastics are wonderful materials - cheap, easy, abundant, safe for humans - pretty much all good, except that they persist in the ecosystem, ultimately bad. Most of the petroleum we use is spent on energy. If alternative energy would be used for cars, homes, and industry, there will be more than enough petroleum to fulfill our plastics needs forever. All of the issues that apply here have to do with the environmental impact of non-biodegradable plastics, NOT with energy misuse, industrial efficiency, greenhouse gases and effects, petroleum reserves, nor global oil politics. The plastics industry is pretty sound - and would be nearly perfect if we could make a bio-plastic. Until now, that has been a challenging task, or someone would have done it already. I don't think that there is a nefarious polystyrene lobby that has squashed development; everybody recognizes it is important. And once you do discover an applicable chemistry and then tool-up the manufacturing infrastructure, it then becomes cheap, moneywise and energywise - just another plastic.
3 >> "So that leaves multiple scenarios open. If we do get fusion operational somehow, for example, plastics will likely be as abundant as they are today, at least for a while. Even if we don't nuclear power is probably cheap enough to provide all those "specialty plastics", maybe even at comparable prices. The mass-market plastic will be the only thing disappearing."
Huh? We make plenty of plastic now without fusion. You make it sound like production of a lignin-based plastic will be some sort of energy-sucking black hole. It's just another plastic - but with a whole lot of impediments to having just a simple chemistry. If you read the original article, this is making news because it does sound promising - these guys might have cracked that nut of finding a process that can
Intel is a major employer where I live, here in Phoenix. The big news in the media today is that Intel is consolidating 2 big fabs in Chandler (#22 and #32). Reports indicate it will save some money and a few jobs in this down economy, but the goal of this $7B investment and physical merging of the plants is to gear up for 32nm. As you point out, the current economy is probabaly a good time for them to do this.
Slashdot Mirror
In the antediluvian days, before the great internet flood, CompuServe was center of the universe of the digital social space. I am sure that some readers are now asking "CompuWhat?" Then, in the Internet Archaic era, AOL arose to command the hearts and minds and social intercourse of the wired populace. "AOWhat?" Then came the Classical age of internet civilization, where Yahoo was the great Caesar. "Ya-What?". After the Dark Ages of the dotcom meltdown, a social media Renaissance arose with great city states like Myspace and Flickr. "Maybe your space grandpa, but not my space!"
[To quote from the Wikipedia article about Myspace: "From 2005 to 2008, Myspace was the largest social networking site in the world, and in June 2006 surpassed Google as the most visited website in the United States. In April 2008, Myspace was overtaken by Facebook in the number of unique worldwide visitors. . . As of January 2018, Myspace was ranked 4,153 by total Web traffic, and 1,657 in the United States."]
Now, Facebook has arisen, to a rousing IPO, intriguing founders and principles, and a flow of money to make the robber barons of the Gilded Age blush with envy. Yet, social preeminence in the digital age would seem to be a fleeting, precarious, and uncertain thing. Of late, Facebook has garnered attention mostly for its dark and nefarious side, akin perhaps to fascism, communism, and other dubious and totalitarian social philosophies of the 20th century.
The Greeks reminded us of the moral perils of hubris, in parables such as Daedalus and Icarus. In modern terms, "the bigger they are, the harder they fall". Given the history of internet social media in the past 20-30 years, anybody heavily invested in Facebook might want to consider their long term position. Who knows - the very existence of monolithic social media behemoths such as Facebook might be more akin to the media model of Snapchat and Instagram, here today gone tomorrow.
In the transition from where we are to where we will be with respect to energy, the idea of an "energy portfolio" is crucial. Societies will mix and match sources to accommodate geography, locale, weather, seasons, time of day, and available resources as well as user load. Transition from one portfolio mix to another will take decades, and will depend on exisiting and projected infrastructure and engineering projects, the economy, public policy, and political will. "Wind is a blowin' in, and oil is a burnin' out" - you are correct, one project does not the case make. But look at this in context of other current news. Wind installations are no longer just incidental odd job projects, and this one is being sponsored by a whole State. Solar is advancing rapidly. Nuclear is being discussed again. Energy recycling and repurposing is getting serious discussion (e.g. using ventilation from data centers to heat houses). Energy storage has always been a central issue, but Tesla has hit the news in recent weeks for its major battery projects such as in Australia. Electric cars have developed traction almost overnight. Need more proof that the idea of a new energy economy is trenchant? Saudi Arabia has been in the news of late, looking to diversify its economy in recognition that the oil genie might not grant wishes forever. One wind project by itself does not "show that oil is on the way out", but it is another high profile indicator that that is true. "On the way out" is not instant gratification - it might be 50 or 100 years before we achieve a globally respectable degree of sustainable and eco-friendly energy production. This project though is another welcome indicator that the concept has taken hold, and that society just might be on a committed pathway to reduce petroleum use.
I got a new laptop in 2007, with then new Vista. I also put Vista on some of my household machines. I hated it at first, as you said. Then, it improved with SP's, and it got better, as SP's tend to do. And, as time went on, I got used to it. I learned to live with it. Yet I rarely had a session where I did not have some reason to swear at it. On my main desktop machine which was my computing center, I continued to run XP (I loved XP, still do). Work with anything long enough, learn its quirks, and you can learn to live with it even if not love it. In the end, it turns out that Vista preserved the majority of computing paradigms that MS introduced with 3.11-95-98-200-XP, so once you got over the shock of what changed, it wasn't really so bad.
There were some big objections such as UAC, "min spec" debacle, security, etc., but there were also a zillion little sniggling things that were wrong. Technical architecture aside, an OS has two components, what's under the hood, and the user interface. Regardless how well or poorly it did with under the hood architecture, there was no reason to alter user paradigms that everyone knows and uses, especially since MS had invented or at least promoted and entrenched so many of them. Imagine suddenly all autos have the steering wheel and driver switched to the opposite side. Imagine that suddenly screws, nuts, and bolts have an entirely new system of thread sizes, that suddenly the qwerty keyboard is replaced with some new scramble of letters dictated by Steve Ballmer. I do a lot of work with font design. Vista suddenly broke font handling. File management via Explorer was suddenly deficient. Utilities such as Classic Shell came about not just because a few old fogies could not keep up with changing times, but because there is no reason to break basic functional paradigms just to be different.
Regardless who "invented" this, that, and the other OS feature (Xerox, Apple, IBM, MS, whatever), MS had its pivotal role. When MS made those earlier versions of Windows, they were not constrained by prior notions of what it should be. Right or wrong, they worked through the issues, and tweaked the interface, to get something that worked and people liked or at least got accustomed to. When Ballmer and Vista were in play, they tried, for better or worse, to fix core architecture problems, but they were not obliged to fudge the user interface paradigms, but they did. In so doing, not only did they disrespect and disregard the entire world user base, but they disrespected their own company forebears, second guessing what 20 years of MS engineers had developed before them. A lot of it was just change for change's sake, dumb and misguided.
Anybody could have learned to live with and adapt to the UAC prompts if that is all it was, or just corrupted font handling, or any other single thing. But, everything all piled up made it unpleasant, even after getting used to it and accepting that it was not too different than prior versions. It was different enough, and mostly for no sound reason, and that is why it was hated. It was better than Win 95. It wasn't better than Win 2000 or XP. Good riddance.
About 15 years ago, a technology came on the market called Provant, developed and managed by Regenesis Biomedical in Scottsdale, AZ. It was a radiofrequency generator that delivered energy to tissues via an external antenna applied to the skin. It was meant to augment or accelerate wound healing. Like the many other stimulatory or pro-proliferative wound healing technologies, it worked well for some patients, not at all for others, sometimes contrary effects, and everything in between. Overall, it was not sufficiently effective to generate much buzz, and the company eventually began to market it for post-operative pain and swelling. You can read about it at links such as:
https://www.regenesisbio.com/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
While I had no direct involvement with the company, I did have opportunity to use it, and to visit the company and look through the labs. The device uses RF at about 12MHz. I cannot recall power or power densities delivered to the tissues. The effects under the microscope were dramatic. Fibroblasts in cell culture had a profound increase in motility and mitosis, exactly what is needed, in principle, in healing wounds, and of course, what goes awry when cells transform to cancer.
Circa 1900, biological sciences become so deeply entrenched in biochemistry and the metabolic processes in the body that chemistry and pharmacology became the defining sciences and therapeutics of most medical research and care. Physical modalities and energy interactions in the body became bastard children. Other than the effects of ionizing higher energies (ultraviolet, x-ray, gamma), the roles of heat, light, radio, stress-strain, acoustics, and similar energies have never received the same legitimacy as the chemical studies. Thus, "physical modalities" and the study of anything along those lines often gets dismissed as trivial, irrelevant, illegitimate, or second class or non-professional.
Furthermore, when such subjects come up via large public grants or national studies or in the popular media, they are often in conjunction with pervasive popular technologies that people are not so ready to give up, like cell phones. Thus, these studies engender debate and resistance.
The point is that RF has effects in the body. Good, bad, or indifferent all depends on many things. The Provant system was used for therapeutic effects. The studies that are the basis for this Slashdot post hint at possible negative effects. It is worth looking at the actual study publications, They are voluminous, at:
https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/abou...
https://tools.niehs.nih.gov/ce...
They show that tumor occurrence tended to increase with greater exposures, but for almost all tumors, incidence was very low. Even if hypothetically all tumor occurring subjects were to have died (which is nowhere near the case), the great majority of RF exposed subjects not only survived but had a distinct and significant increase in longevity. So, is it good or bad? Like many therapies, good things have their side effects, which if kept to low incidence are considered acceptable.
So, is this report good or bad? It depends on your point of view. If you see it as interesting science, good. If you see it as an insight to further studies about disease or longevity, good. If it you see it as a threat to your Second City Amendment rights to carry a cell phone, then you might get incensed about totalitarian conspiracies to take them away.
Studies such as this might or might not have applicability to human medicine and public safety, but they provide useful information to be considered in the overall analysis. Read the actual original source materials. They are rather mat
The responses here to this article not surprisingly run the gamut from hokum and bunk to contemplative science and philosophy. This is to be expected because this is a speculative subject for which there is no patent answer, so one can assess or react to it in any number of legitimate and respectable ways, from doctrinaire belief to dismissive skepticism. There are however a few points worth considering before adopting too strong of an opinion either way.
1) The world has always been full of charlatans and phony philosophers promulgating ridiculous beliefs meant to beguile and defraud the intellectually weak and unwary, purveyors of fud (fear-uncertainty-doubt), self-serving false prophets who seek power or recognition through the intimidation of retarded ideas. Any sensible person who is not cognizant of that reality of history and human nature risks succumbing to the worst nightmares that mankind has ever produced. Thus, kudos to the skeptics who keep us honest and prevent intellectual derailments.
2) However, the universe is also full of rich wonders awaiting our discovery. We only know what we know today because of the efforts and insights of scientists and philosophers before us, and we in turn are the intellectual stepping stones to the generations that follow. Unanswered questions seek their solutions, and we, the stewards of finding and preserving new knowledge, must not become complacent with what we already know, but must seek the new knowledge that awaits around the corner of the next experiment or observation. Thus, kudos to those dreamers and believers with the enthusiasm to seek the answers to the next question.
Consider the evolution of discovery in human society up until this point. Flip a wall switch and we can see at night without first gathering wood and rubbing two sticks together. Would that not have seemed like magic to a neolithic citizen? We can talk to each other around the world in real time, audio, video, and data. Even Marconi and Morse, who could have understood the technologies perfectly well, would probably have marveled where we have come since their innovations, yet for much of history prior to them, such technologies would have been magic, the work of god or the devil. People in the times of Cleopatra, Constantine, and Charlemagne might have explained flying machines and human flight as the work of divine endowment, yet we hop planes as easily as a chariot, and even the Montgolfier and Wright brothers would have marveled at the pictures that come to use from Jupiter, Saturn, and Pluto. Our science was the magic and mysticism of prior generations. There is a vast universe of unknown knowledge that awaits discovery, so we must keep open eyes and minds not to overlook what to future generations might seem so obvious.
Even when an idea, a postulate, a hypothesis, a theory proves to be wrong, just a fantasy, it may often light the way to real discovery. We debase the alchemists of prior times because they are perceived as being on a fool’s quest to transform base metals. Yet in their times, they did not know that gold could not be made by simple mixing and stirring of common items. We only know that because they discovered and proved that for us smug people from the future. While they never found the philosopher’s stone and the secret of transformation, they discovered the properties of materials and chemistry. Our modern chemical sciences and technologies were not born in an intellectual big bang at the end of the 18th century. They are the formalization of vast chemical and metallurgical knowledge gained by empiricism and limited scientific experimentation garnered over millenia before.
Copernicus was not successful because of a metaphysical epiphany, but because, trying to first work the numbers from the church doctrine point of view, he could not account for the motion of the planets. he was brave enough to buck society and take a fresh look. How many meritorious grants from promising post docs have been buried because t
The discussions and technological development about electric cars and airplanes always seems to imply an all-or-none approach to the power source and the drive train. The motive force, torque or thrust, comes from a fuel-energy system that is either all carbon-combustive or else all electrical. Why not a hybrid system?
Assume that the best way to go for the future is an electric drive train. Electric engines provide the mechanical motive force to move the vehicle, and an electrical system (battery or fuel cell) delivers the energy to the engines. But, what if there was an added component to resupply the fuel system - a classic carbon-combustion engine driving an electrical generator. The generator engine would be wholly separate from the drive train (unlike current hybrid electrical cars). It would serve only to generate electricity to restore charge on the batteries (or as needed, feed directly through the power inverter or electrical output stage). In principle, the generator would be a much smaller, lighter, more efficient device than the primary motive engines. It need not run at all except at times of high demand, or for emergency situations such as primary "fuel" running low or unexpected failure in the primary electrical supply system.
Many of the comments in this thread talk about the inadequacies of current electrical technologies to meet FAA requirements for 45 minutes extra flight time, or what next when the batteries are drained? As a back up safety or a range extension subsystem, it seems that a carbon fuel based electrical generator has merit at many levels. Yet, there never seems to be much discussion of such. So, for those more knowledgeable about the subject, what are your thoughts about using a fossil fuel electrical generation system to feed the batteries?
Cortana powered thermostat - maybe not as dumb as it first sounds.
Disclaimer #1 - I do not work for MS, and I hate Cortana.
Disclaimer #2 - I do not work for Johnson Controls, and I do not own any of their thermostats (at least, I don't think so), but to be honest, I do like the way thermostats let me control the temperature at home and in the office - what a clever invention!
And did I mention . . . I hate Cortana. I have it completely suppressed on my PC's - never ever have to see it pop up, not ever. On my Windows phone, Cortana pops up, primarily just to annoy me, anytime I breath on the phone, or the TV or radio is on nearby, or my cat whines, but since I use the phone only for the most basic activities like phone calls, I can live with that annoyance.
I don't get it, why Cortana makes sense. However, I also do not use Siri, Alexa, or the others - I personally just don't find that to be my style. I like talking to people, typing and pointing on my computer. For those who enjoy using voice assistants, I would be curious to now how they rate Cortana versus the others.
I have read that Amazon Echo and Alexa devices were big winners during the holiday shopping season. So, why do people find that intriguing or compelling, but not Cortana? Partly I think because an Echo Dot sits out of your way. Speak to it when you want, but if you don’t call it, it doesn’t bother you.
Cortana on the other hand is just in your face, always an unwelcome annoyance when you are trying to do something that requires your attention.
To me, that epitomizes the Microsoft way - foisting on users what MS thinks is best for everyone, working in you face rather than by your side, working against you instead of with you. (Just my opinion, probably shared by many here.)
Seen from that point of view, MS would by playing the fool to think that selling Cortana to a thermostat maker is a great inroad into the IoT. It sounds stupid, until . . .
Look at it from the thermo-makers point of view.
Check out the Johnson Controls website, at the link referenced in the Slashdot post:
"Johnson Controls' Cortana-powered thermostat"
http://www.johnsoncontrols.com...
Those guys were apparently excited to develop this device.
It has a touchscreen panel for the usual thermostat interactions and control, but "GLAS can [also] be controlled by mobile app or by voice, thanks to Microsoft’s voice-enabled digital assistant, Cortana."
Keep in mind, this is not MS trying to push something stupid on the hamstrung user or the unwary developer.
This is not Clippy, not Vista, not UAC, not forced Win10 updates, not any of the million and one irritating things that MS is legendary for – this is not MS forcing Cortana into a device where no one wants it.
This is the company that wants to use Cortana as a tool or subsystem in its product, Johnson's choice. Whether Cortana or Hey Google or the others is the best choice, that is another discussion, but consider the potential benefit of this arrangement (and no, I am not being facetious).
Perhaps I want to keep the heating or AC off in the house during the day when I am at work, save energy and money. On my way home from work, I can call ahead by 20 minutes and get the house warmed up. Or vice versa, I ran out the door in the morning, late to work, and forgot to turn off the system, so I can call in and do so. Perhaps I have the AC on, but the weather changers, a cold front comes in and it starts raining and temperature drops, so I no longer need to have the AC on to keep the pets at home safe.
Perhaps on the way out the door, I realize I want to know the weather report, decide to take a jacket or raincoat, but I already turned off my computer. As I am walking out, I pass the thermostat, which is doubling as a weather report kiosk, and I can ask, and it tells me what I need t
I am not sure why this item was introduced as "moderately disturbing". If you will permit me, I will explain what it is, since I use it regularly. (I have no stock nor other biased affiliation with the company or product.) The product first came on the market in 1998, over 10 years ago. It has a well-established place in the treatment of chronic wounds. It is not the only product in the category of "living cell therapies" for chronic wounds. The other product is Dermagraft, similar, and likewise around for nearly 10 years. When Apligraf first came out, it was promoted as skin-graft-in-a-box. It is not. It is allogeneic material (recipients will reject it), and thus it does not "take" to the body like an autogenous skin graft. In its earliest years, when the company was promoting it as a skin graft, it got some high profile press because it was put to good use as readily available biological coverage for burn victims of the 9-11-2001 twin towers catastrophe. The company that makes it, Organogenesis, partnered with pharma giant Novartis for marketing and product management, and under them, they listened to customers who told them it was not skin grafts in a box, and they redefined its marketing for chronic wounds. The product management has been back in the hands of Organogenesis for about 3 or 4 years now.
The material is essentially a poly-pharmaceutical packaged in a living material. The raw materials come from donated foreskins. Extensive safety testing is done. Pure extracted fibroblasts are put into cell culture, where they do their business and re-form a collagen matrix equivalent to normal dermis. After that, pure keratinocytes are cultured on top of the dermis, and an epidermis forms. The product is shipped in its petri dish, as a circle of 44 sq cm area. The Gizmodo article shows a picture of it. As a living material, its procurement and handling are a bit different than most medical devices, but it is easy to get and apply.
The juvenile cells in the material make a broad spectrum of growth factors and other biochemicals which have a positive pro-proliferative effect on wounds. The role for this material is for chronic and pathological wounds. The company got its market approval and indications from the FDA for studies done on diabetic and venous ulcers, but the material is useful for chronic and pathological ("cap") wounds of any cause. Like anything else, it does not work for all wounds or patients, but it is fairly predictable, and its results can be rather dramatic. When a cap wound of whatever cause has been treated to the point that disease is quiet, inflammation is gone, and the wound should be healing but it is not, then that is when wound stimulatory therapies are applied. There are several available, and Apligraf has been one of the flagship products in this category for 10 years now. Many wounds which simply will not budge no matter what will take off and heal once this is applied.
Organogenesis has its first new product coming out soon, for oral mucosa and gingiva, so perhaps that is why they are trying to stir up some attention with articles like the one quoted. However, it is not Brave New World nor Coma nor any other meat factory. It is just on the leading edge of biological therapeutics in the 21st century. And if Slashdotters want to make lots of jokes as they often do, like "put Viagra in the petri dish to grow more", well, we've already heard them all.
(All very timely, since I just gave a presentation on this last week (and have been for 8 years). If you want to learn more, I posted a copy of the presentation on the website I use for posting talks and presentations and whatnot. This particular talk has a mix of my slides and company slides. It is NOT yet annotated with full text on each slide, so some will just be pictures and you will have to infer what you can, but text should be coming one of these days:
http://www.arimedica.com/content/arimedica_apligraf_(partially%20annotated)_2005-1006.pdf
Again, I have no investment nor bias here, I just use this stuff in practice because it works and it's an important product.)
"I think people will look back on Vista after the Windows 7 release and realize that there were actually a bunch of good things there . . ."
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Q: If an MS exec thinks that there is some goodness in Vista that people will miss, then why would they throw away that goodness?
A: They're Microsoft.
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I have Vista on my Laptop. I have XP on may main desktops. I just put XP and Linux on my new netbook. All things considered, I think that the overall Vista experience is a smoldering pile of pig droppings. But amongst all the turds are a few nuggets of digestible goodies. I can certainly see where some users will have gotten used to using Vista, and might miss what they have become accustomed to - that's just normal human nature. I hate it, but I have gotten used to it myself, so I can see the point.
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If they know there are features that customers like, then why eliminate them from 7? The exec said so himself - people will miss something. I take that to mean that they know there are some things people like, and they are deliberately removing them (cynical view), or they don't give a crap that they are removing them (existential view).
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His remarks sound like "We know Vista sucks, but wait 'til you see what we did to it in 7 - then you'll finally get it how good Vista was - hahahaha!" Or am I missing something?
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If you want to give your customers a good experience and make them happy, keep the good things in. I have no idea what features he might be referring to, but if he knows that users like them, and that they are going to miss them, why would a corporate exec want to make the experience bad, nostalgic for the old system? Just wondering. It makes no sense, unless you are in the MS parallel universe, I guess.
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Like when MS took the best feature of its Office suite, the ability to customize and extend the apps, toolbars, and menus, then stripped it all away in favor of the 2007 Ribbon of Shit. "People might miss the old toolbars . . . screw 'em."
Lot's of good suggestions here. Here's what I would do. Get yourself one of those 100-in-one project kits, or 400-in-1, work through it, and from there, pick a handful that would work with your students. You can then buy the parts you need in bulk - a 1000 resistors here, a 100 caps, 50 transistors, 100 diodes, etc - all cheap. Put together a parts box with all that stuff, including wire, solder, bulbs, led's, battery clips, alligator leads, etc. Then get a few basic durable goods - soldering irons, a multimeter, etc. You will also need some breadboards and solder boards. Each year, you can add a few projects and components, and soon enough you will have a real electronics workshop.
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Whatever specific projects you choose, they should represent the basics: basic circuits, basic components, r-c, basic logic, gates, timing, oscillators and mv's, mux-demux, comparators, etc. Five or ten basic building block IC's should be able to cover hundreds of projects in these basic categories. There is nothing like a good ol' 555 for timing projects, 7400's for starter digital logic, and a 741 for introduction to analog concepts. Almost any project you will find in a 100-in-1 kit will be easy enough to build for under $5 once you have the basic lab or shop equipment.
Fascinating. Thanks !
Correct, that is our conventional understanding of things. But what if there are other primitive energy capture and translation systems that remain repressed or down regulated by the presence of these structures? What if a cell could be kept on "life support" for a few hours or days after removing its mitochondria or chloroplasts, enough for up regulation of latent genes that will revert the cell back into a some sort bacteria-like mode of metabolism? Granted, it is much less likely for advanced eukaryotes like mammalian or insect cells or rose bushes, but what about for algae or diatoms or sponges? We can presume that at some point endosymbionts and cells became so entangled that neither could survive nor revert without the other. However it would also seem likely that there is a transition group of species which could still be unentangled in the lab.
Yes, you are exactly correct, that sticking chloroplasts into animal cells would be the necessary flip side of that experiment.
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I was not referring to turning pine trees into Night of the Living Dead. What would be interesting is to see what would happen to algae under these circumstances, or to cultures of moss cells or flowering plant cells. Pick a popular research plant - tobacco for instance - and then pull the chloroplasts out of a few cells, then stick them into a cell culture medium - e.g. agar petri dishes or mammalian cell culture flasks - and see if they become planktonic, aggressive, nutrient-tropic, or if they start to express cell surface structures or other organelles related to sensing and locomotion. Since the algae are phylogenetically much closer to all of this, it seems plausible that they might revert to animal-like forms and function.
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If nobody has ever done these experiments, now would be a good time.
Biology is full of promoter-inhibitor relationships, and this seems like an interesting one. When the algae is inside the protist, the host's "animal" behaviors and anatomy are suppressed, but they clearly remain in a latent state, ready to reactivate after fission. It makes one wonder to what extent chloroplasts remain as endosymbionts versus organelles in genuine plant species. So . . .
. . .
Does anyone know of any research where chloroplasts were removed from plant cells in culture, to see if the remaining cells revert to some atavistic animal-like exogenous-food-seeking state?
This article and related comments make me think that netbooks will be a problem for Windows in ways that were not fully anticipated. There are two premises to this:
1) Where is the MinWin concept in all of this? It sounds like the concept of a small snappy kernel is only relative to where Windows was with Vista. If it just barely runs on an Atom based system, with no capacitance or wiggle room for big apps and data, then how could this ever be ported to ARM and various mobile devices like phones / PDAs etc?
2) Netbooks are about to become the new laptops. The current laptop form factor has been around about 15 years, successful only after technology worked its way through various large incarnations of "portable PCs" and performance became commensurate with desktops. Now, we are entering another era of miniaturization, and Netbooks at about half the size of laptops seem to be a nice balance between smaller size but usable screen and keyboard. And don't forget that iPhones and the like are a winning form factor as well.
The problem is that people are not going to settle for netbooks being just a glorified PDA or internet kiosk. They will see a familiar user interface, it will run most of their apps (even if slow and kludgy), and it will look and feel mostly like their desktops and laptops. So, expectations and demands will rise. The industry will respond by making chips, boards, screen technologies, etc. more capable, and within 5 to 10 years, smaller form factor netbooks will rival the performance of today's laptops and even today's desktops, just as 15 years ago "laptops" supplanted "portable PCs". The current form factor of laptops will not disappear - laptops are successful for a reason, and large screens and keyboards will remain of crucial importance for many users - but people will come to expect the smaller form netbook, handy and easy to carry, to nonetheless perform as a desktop and run all their apps while on the go.
Hardware makers will make these goals possible. In the meantime, people are starting to become familiar with other OSes as the cellphone-PDA-mediaplayer class of devices becomes more pervasive. As such, what people really want is easy, smooth, intuitive, bug-free transparent performance, and not necessarily a single given proprietary look and feel. This article and thread makes me wonder if MS and Windows are going to end up being perpetually a step behind, planning products based on today's marketplace and technologies, but delivering the product several years later when technology and people's expectations have moved forward.
You are completely right, but they never would have changed their name to "Time Warner.com or something idiotic like that". I don't think that "dot com" really meant anything to them; they really didn't understand how the world was changing. They were stuck on the AOL way of doing things, which was most definitely NOT "dot com".
Part of that whole mess was just raw psychology: hubris, blindness, old fogeyism, and getting run over by the bullet train of market reality. In the period circa 1998 - 2001, Win 98, Internet Explorer, DSL, cable broadband, and the dotcom boom all turned the world en masse to the real Internet. While AOL saw opportunities in the Internet, it was so tied to its own version of online services, a glorified dialup bulletin board service, that it never saw where the rest of the world had suddenly detoured to. The AOL - Time Warner merger came after the ascendency of AOL, as they were starting to become irrelevant.
Hubris - thinking that flash-in-the-pan AOL could take the leadership role from well-established and dependable multimedia Time-Warner. Blindness - letting their hubris and rose-colored vision mask what was happening with the real Internet and ISPs. Old fogeyism - believing that their traditional ways would prevail, as the whole world was giving up roller skates for sports cars.
Not surprisingly in retrospect, but perhaps not predictable at the time, is that consumer tastes in the media itself changed. Time Magazine and Turner Classic Movies remain important, but who then necessarily realized that the likes of YouTube, FaceBook, the blogosphere, and all of their forebears of the time would divert attention from classic print and TV media.
At that time, they just didn't get it, what "dot com" was really all about. They were all going to lose value anyway, but kudos to Steve Case for sucking something out of the stodgy and clueless old guard - like it or hate it, you gotta admire it.
Your point is well taken. A project like this is trying to mimic normal neuroanatomy and physiology. What happens when the brain becomes acutely or chronically pathological is much more complex. When the nervous system is in its usual healthy state, then the kind of digital architecture implemented in this project can work to a degree as a simulator. For instance, when a synapse triggers, it is in a sense an all-or-none saturated response or switch, so digital logic is useful to model it. However, neurons and their interconnections are more analog than digital, especially during conditions of disease. For instance, changes in the levels of a neurotransmitter or its receptor, or electrolyte changes which will attenuate the response to the transmitter, create variable responses, more like putting a potentiometer in the circuit, rather than an on-off switch. In fact, the responses of a neuron to its many synaptic inputs will exhibit varying degrees of time base integration, multiple input summation, and selective signal rejection, while on the output side, there can be amplification or attenuation, and oscillations or chaotic dynamics in lieu of one-shot trigger responses. This is the perfect place for large scale analog circuit modeling.
It seems like digital chips and digital programming, simulation, and control have become so entrenched (or cheap) in the mindset of designers and users, that analog gets short-changed when thinking about modern large-scale models. Designing a VLSIC with thousands of opamps, and making them addressable through thousands of addressable DAC's, and then ganging thousands of them together into your "brain computer simulator" would be a daunting and expensive chip design challenge, but ultimately far more realistic. There are some things, like the pathological states that you mentioned, that just cannot be effectively simulated on a digital chip - a software simulation yes, but not in digital-only silicon, or so it seems to me.
The original post may be based on incidental observations, meaning it is true for some people, but I don't think that a generalization can be drawn. In my own work, I see some young grads who are lazy, some who are full-bore energetic self-starters with realistic understanding and expectations, and everything in between.
"TV reality college graduates" has some truth behind it, because TV can glamorize your appreciation of things, or else over-romanticize them into unreality. For instance, who would have thought that being a chef would be glamorous, but the Food Network has propelled chefdom into stardom and cooking schools into sought after trades - that's glamour. But how many people have romanticized about being a TV or sports celebs thinking that they too can be a star, only to have reality bite back when you try to get your big break.
IT and tech jobs have been glamorized to some extent on TV, and so have business-MBA-entrepreneur models, so no surprise then that someone who is fundamentally immature and unrealistic might seek to be a "22-year-old who leads billion-dollar corporate mergers in Paris and jets around the world". I think three things are about to change those attitudes:
1 - With the world economy in a meltdown, and major banks and financiers dissolved, being a money-grubbing MBAstard is about to get less glamorous. Anybody looking to be that 22 yearold billionaire will get some serious ego deflation in the coming job market.
2 - If you want to work from the tech rather than the business side, well guess what, lots of companies cannot afford tech right now, so, no soup for you! Just like the wannabee starlets who wait tables, you might only find employment these days doing the same, or accepting get-dirty infrastructure work that the government is now starting to fund. Nothing like digging a ditch to burst your bubble.
3 - All new industries have a certain dynamism that is inherently glamorous. The PC revolution made lots of MS millionaires. The dot-com era made lots of dot-com millionaires. The net-Google era is making its own millionaires. But these major emerging technologies and societal transformations are already here, and their entrepreneurial heyday might be over, or at least in a lull, until some other new major tech and industry comes along, such as perhaps green energy. With the current worldwide economic slump, glitzy make-millions jobs for young grads riding the wave of a new industry just aren't there right now, at least not in computers and tech, as far as I can see.
This thread has generated a lot of great responses, and you can pick and choose from a variety of good solutions. Here is another, the one that I have settled on as my preferred safety-backup-reinstall method: hard drive clones.
I use XP-SP2. My main machine has been running smooth as silk for 4 years. I have had rare problems, but when they have occurred, they have been of mixed causes - hard drive failure, a UPS failure which caused unbootable file system corruption, and even a trojan picked up right here on a Slashdot link a few months ago. No sweat for me though . . .
My backup solution depends on external hard drives which mirror my internal drives. I keep all data and apps (other than those that insist on installing under \ProgramFiles) on separate internal drives. That way, if C: gets corrupted, my other data is safe. My C: system drive has only the OS and ProgramFiles apps. This means that I can keep the system drive relatively small (120GB), meaning I can buy several mirror drives quite inexpensively.
I have several C: drive mirrors. I duplicate my main drive to these external backups 2 or 3 times a week. I duplicate just before any major system or application upgrade. I use an older version of Norton Ghost (v9) for this, which makes flawless duplicates while running in the background. (I also use Acronis to make point-in-time compressed images of the drive, which can be reloaded onto a hard drive if need be.)
The few times that I have had a disaster, I just pull out my latest mirror, swap it into the disk-0 position, and turn my machine back on - like nothing ever happened.
Consequently, this is also a great way to test installations or new software, or to create drives that you or your wife could use for your own purposes.
(See the comments above by diggitzz about cleaning up your dirty system before getting ready to make your first mirror image.)
Ever since settling on the system-drive-mirror solution for my OS safety backups, I have not had a moment's anxiety about losing a drive, testing new OSes, nor keeping my installation clean.
Back in high school c1970, we got the coolest toy - a rack mount high speed paper tape reader to feed our PDP-8S. We could load our 4K Fortran, and still have half the memory leftover for programming. Evidently our school had a bigger budget than where you were, because we also got the fanfold tape splice & repair gizmo.
From the original article: "Magneto-Optical Drive . . . If you've ever owned one of these drives, award yourself 100 geek-cred points, and 1000 points if you still own one."
Gimme a couple o'thousand of them geek cred points!
I had three Fujitsu MO drives, on line from about 1997 to 2002. I used them for hard drive backup and off-line storage. The reason was simple - best cost-per-megabyte of all media during that period, plus luxurious high capacity by standards of that era.
The rules are simple: every advance in processor speed, memory, hard drive capacity, screen resolution, app complexity, file formats, I/O interfaces, and I/O devices results in users generating bigger and bigger files, more and more data. Hard drives are always at the head of the curve on sheer capacity, but until the past few years, hard drives were also expensive. How then do you find the best balance between economy of hardware costs, economy of media costs and storage space, and economy of time to write files and backup. In that era, late 90's, hard drives were roughly in the 500MB - 4GB range, and pricey. So how do you backup? I used CDs, DVDs, Colorado/QIC tapes, and then MO's.
CDs seemed great c1992-1994, but write speeds then were sloooow, their capacities quickly became inadequate, and they were pricey until DVDs came along.
DVDs were just like CDs, just a generation farther in terms of speed and capacity, but with the same caveats and shortcomings. Whether CD or DVD, these media were simply behind the curve compared to HD capacity and speed.
(Blu-ray simply extends these same issues to another generation. Optical is useful as a medium of large file exchange and distribution, but until someone comes up with a 500GB or 2TB 5.25 optical disk for $5 that can do a full write in 30 minutes, it is mainly useless for most backup tasks.)
QIC tapes were great for total system backup and restore, but only for relatively small HDs, and they were slow for random data access, the tapes were pricey, and the technology was being phased out by 2002.
MO fit the bill for robust high capacity affordable storage. It was the genuine diamond-in-the-rough. I could not find my little file of calculations from back then, but the drives were affordable (comparable to any CD recorder), the media were a fraction of the cost-per-megabyte of writable CDs (and then DVDs), read/write access times were way better than CD, the media were sturdy and well protected. Capacities were 640MB, like CDs. but reusable, faster, cheaper. It was all good things.
I never understood back then why it wasn't more popular, because it was superior in almost all respects of usability and expense. Technologically, I suppose there will be experts here who can comment on that, but it seemed like a fairly dependable technology, which lives on today as DVD-RAM (also dying). I suppose that the companies who made it just never organized the way that Blu-ray or HD-DVD consortia organized and pushed for their formats.
I have long since copied all of my MO disks to more contemporary storage, but my Fujitsu SCSI-interfaced DynaMO drives are still here on my shelf, ready to power up anytime I want to plug in - and yes, they work just great.
All of these discussions become moot when GMR was discovered (giant magneto-resistance), suddenly pushing HD capacities from 4GB to 18GB, and then onto today's TB capacities. Today, there is no pragmatic way, for the home / office / small business user to backup PCs with a few TBs of data except by using other HDs. And since HD prices have had a steep decline, the cost-per-GB is dirt cheap these days. My own backup strategies for the past few years have been exclusively HD-to-HD, having MULTIPLE backup sets at all times that are cheap, fast, and run-in-the background. HD-to-HD backup far superior to any CD-DVD-QIC-MO-BluRay solution - heartily recommended to all users - and that advice earns me a another couple o'thousand of them geek cred points!
There is a big difference between AOL/CompuServe/Prodigy/MSN and Hearst style newspapers and magazines. The AOL's were glorified bulletin boards. In the 1980's, they created communities and on-line access when there was nothing else. As they evolved in the early 1990's, they provided access to limited amounts of content. Then, in the latter 1990's, the WWW opened up the Internet to the general public, giving consumers unedited access to content and social networking, making the AOL's stodgy, kludgy, and expensive with marginal value, in a word, irrelevant. It wasn't that the subscription based model failed, it's just that once you have tasted something sweeter, AOL kind of soured. The monthly fees you pay to your ISP ARE your subscription fees, its just that you are paying for much greater choice. Which just goes to show, that people ARE willing to pay for the content and quality they choose.
The biggest difference between the AOL's and Newspapers is that the AOL's just dish up someone else's reporting. Newspapers create content. Even busy blogs like Slashdot depend on bulletin board style posting of news content generated by real news organizations and reporters. If all newspapers dried up and went away, the rest of the Internet would be starved for real content. The world and society need the newspapers, or the function they serve - news professionals. The problem these days is finding a way to keep them in business when their primary revenue stream is drying up. Historically, newspapers, TV news, magazines, (Traditional News Organizations - TNA's) used to handle BOTH content reporting/creation and content delivery. Content creation is costly, eating cash without inherently generating revenue, making content delivery the money side of the business. Now, the public is spending money on alternative means of delivery, curtailing the revenues to TNAs that create content for the rest of us.
It is a time of flux for everyone, and TNAs are especially challenged to stay in business because of declining revenues. But we need them. Every problem like this is someone else's opportunity, and over the next 10-20-30 years, the dynamics of it all will change, but there will still be news content providers. Exactly who, how we pay for it, who splits the revenue stream, how we receive and read it all - that's the big experiment we are just entering. Kudos to venerable organizations like Hearst to not just sit idly by and sink into oblivion (like so many companies do), but at least try to adapt, to win or go down fighting.
What I foresee is a combination of models that seem to be emerging. There will be Kindle-like readers that are bigger, richer, more like a magazine in size and resolution. You will subscribe through your ISP to receive your newspapers. Perhaps there will be a "basic cable" type of service that gives you your local paper and USA Today. Then, there will be a premium service that gives you the NY Times, The Washington Post, and 3 premium newspapers of your choice. Then there will be similar plans for your magazines. You pay one fee to your ISP company, and they forward the revenues to the publishers, just like TV/cable, and HBO-Showtime- Cinemax, etc.
This reminds me of English versus metric, how most of the world uses metric measures, whereas in the US (and elsewhere?), feet, inches, quarts, and pounds persist. Sounds like now might be a good time for MS to lock up rights to the english measurement systems, convert all Windows coding to those standards, and start charging activation fees to use a foot-long ruler . . . keeping unilateralism alive and well.
Your points are somewhat flawed.
1 >> "Making any plastic will be still as easy as it is today : you buy some type of oil-derivative at the store, and polymerize it. Easy enough."
True, it should be easy, once you figure out an economical, industrializable chemistry to do your polymerization. But wrong, you don't just buy some type of oil-derivative. Current polymers based on petroleum refinement are based on hydrocarbons. Plastics such as poly-styrene, -propylene, -ethylene, -ester, and nylon generally have long carbon backbones. The plus side of it: cheap source of monomer, cheap and easy chemistry, great resulting products. The down side of it: biology generally doesn't have long carbon backbones, so life-on-earth has not generally evolved the metabolic machinery to handle hydrocarbons and derivatives. Petroleum forms from biochemistry subjected to pyrolytic conditions where life itself cannot survive. Thus, while petroleum and biochemistry share carbon, they share little else. That is why there is interest in finding biochemistry-based polymers that can be plasticized, because they will be subject to natural biological degradation.
If you look at the structure of lignin, it is already polymerized, based on a backbone of carbohydrates and quinones - and that is something that many self respecting microbes can sink their teeth into. A lignin based plastic would just further polymerize the compound into something with the desired characteristics (mw, density, viscosity, melting point, modulus, plasticity, etc).
2 >> "It will however, be a very costly thing to do indeed : it requires loads of energy. Right now that energy has simply been put in oil long ago . . .We will still make plastics. Producing them, however, will stop producing energy and start massively costing energy."
Lignin has already stored a lot of that energy - it is already a large and highly structured compound. Further polymerization shouldn't be any more expensive than any other plastization chemistry.
I don't think that anybody in industry or the consumer side, or even the ecology side, objects to the energy of producing plastics. Plastics are wonderful materials - cheap, easy, abundant, safe for humans - pretty much all good, except that they persist in the ecosystem, ultimately bad. Most of the petroleum we use is spent on energy. If alternative energy would be used for cars, homes, and industry, there will be more than enough petroleum to fulfill our plastics needs forever. All of the issues that apply here have to do with the environmental impact of non-biodegradable plastics, NOT with energy misuse, industrial efficiency, greenhouse gases and effects, petroleum reserves, nor global oil politics. The plastics industry is pretty sound - and would be nearly perfect if we could make a bio-plastic. Until now, that has been a challenging task, or someone would have done it already. I don't think that there is a nefarious polystyrene lobby that has squashed development; everybody recognizes it is important. And once you do discover an applicable chemistry and then tool-up the manufacturing infrastructure, it then becomes cheap, moneywise and energywise - just another plastic.
3 >> "So that leaves multiple scenarios open. If we do get fusion operational somehow, for example, plastics will likely be as abundant as they are today, at least for a while. Even if we don't nuclear power is probably cheap enough to provide all those "specialty plastics", maybe even at comparable prices. The mass-market plastic will be the only thing disappearing."
Huh? We make plenty of plastic now without fusion. You make it sound like production of a lignin-based plastic will be some sort of energy-sucking black hole. It's just another plastic - but with a whole lot of impediments to having just a simple chemistry. If you read the original article, this is making news because it does sound promising - these guys might have cracked that nut of finding a process that can
Intel is a major employer where I live, here in Phoenix. The big news in the media today is that Intel is consolidating 2 big fabs in Chandler (#22 and #32). Reports indicate it will save some money and a few jobs in this down economy, but the goal of this $7B investment and physical merging of the plants is to gear up for 32nm. As you point out, the current economy is probabaly a good time for them to do this.