An artificial heart is a monumental challenge - not the mechanics of making a pump - a good squirt gun can do the same - but the problems of bio-integration.
To be technical, Peter Houghton did not have an artificial heart. He had an LVAD, a left ventriculer assist device, an implantable supplement to the patients's own heart. That technology has been successful to a degree, and it represents a step on the ladder leading to a true prosthetic heart, but it just ain't the same.
The spectrum and art of implantable cardiovascular prosthetics and vasculo-integrated devices includes long term implants and short term bridge devices: valves (prosthetic and cadaveric), vascular grafts (patches and conduits), electro-gizmos (pacers, AICD's), ventricular assist devices (iabps, lvads), and pump-oxygenators. We know how to overcome many limitations, but not all of them in a dependable zero-fault long term bio-integrated package with serious power requirements. The main issues:
Zero-fault dependability. Sustained long term power requirements. Solving power by external hookups means that hardware traverses the skin, meaning infection. Alloplastic (prosthetic) materials sitting in the blood stream are subject to infection from circulating bacterial transients. Established cardiovascular infections mean sepsis and metastatic infection (means high risk of death). The treatment for hardware infections is to remove the device, but unlike other hardware (eg a joint replacement), you cannot just remove a prosthetic heart if that's your only pump. Materials and fluid engineering to prevent thrombosis on the device surfaces (blood is programmed to clot on prosthetic materials). Materials and mechanical engineering to prevent red cell damage and lysis (they get hammered going through pumps and valves). Systems for control and variable power outputs to match physiological demand (devices to date have been pretty much just dumb pumps, and if you look at the problem from a control point of view, transducing relevant feedback and deciding on target references is a complex problem for cardiovascular dynamics).
"Out of curiosity, what is the great challenge in producing an artificial heart?" Materials, bio-integration, infection, power, dependability. There, those are the challenges. If it was easy, it would have been done already. Lots of people are working on it. Notable attempts, like Jarvik, have had only limited success. A real artificial heart just isn't on the horizon these days, but it is one of those things that we do "understand" to be achievable - it just needs more time, engineering, materials, and power technologies.
See also the comments above by rlseaman - this will address those as well.
The liver has multiple functions for both biochemical synthesis and detoxification. Unlike most organs and tissues, it has two circulatory inflows. The arterial circulation is the nutritive blood supply, just as the arterial circulation for any tissue. A portal circulation is one in which the venous effluent from a tissue does not return directly to the systemic circulation, but instead detours through another organ first. There are two portal circulations in most chordates - the hypothalamic-pituitary circulation, and the splanchnic portal system. The purpose of the splanchnic portal is to take raw digestate absorbed from the gut, and pass it through a chemical filter (the liver) which will detoxify or eliminate nasty exogenous compounds before they get back into the general circulation (via the hepatic veins). The hepatic artery supplies the liver; the portal vein is the business of the liver. Detoxified products that must be eliminated from the body are excreted into the bile, which is eliminated through the gut. Without a liver at all, death will occur within just a few days, about 3-7.
Renal failure is also lethal, but in the early 1950's, technologies were developed to keep renal failure patients alive - the dialysis machine. Dialysis is used as a bridge to organ transplantation, but for many people it is their permanent replacement kidney. It is an extraordinarily effective device. It could be "perfected" "back then" because the dialysis machine and the kidney are both relatively simple machines when it comes the elimination / detoxification aspects of its function. It depends simply on diffusion across semi-permeable membranes so that chemical concentrations can be equilibrated. No cells nor other active function is needed.
Compare this to heart function. We can transplant hearts quite successfully, but unlike the kidney, we cannot keep people alive without their native heart. Attempts in the past 10-20 years to develop mechanical bridge devices have all been technical, medical, and ethical failures, awaiting some future technologies to make the concept truly feasible.
The liver is in between. With regard to basic medical and ethical issues, an artificial liver should be comparable to the kidney. But technically and scientifically, making an artificial liver has been impossible until recently. Unlike the kidney, emulating liver function cannot be done by simple passive dialysis - the liver has MANY active chemical processes that must be actively metabolized. Attempts to run a patient's blood through a pig liver was the best available technology, and it doesn't work well at all, certainly not long term. What these researchers have done in this article is to mate living human cells to a dialysis device.
From the company's description of the product, it sounds like a fairly standard dialysis cartridge to start with. The key element, something that was NOT technically possible until the biotech revolution that we are now going through, is to put living cells in the device. I presume that the dialysis membranes are much more "porous" than renal dialysis membranes, allowing bigger molecules to get across, but hepatocytes remain sequestered on their side - there is no chance of "mixing and migration". All modern biotech "living cell" products go through ELABORATE testing and purification to get clean single cell lines. "Immortalized" means they have had their genome switched on so that they can mitose and replicate ad infinitum, without reaching the natural limits of mitosis that many differentiated cell lines have. Bile ducts, portal veins, and all that are not needed, because wastes come in through your normal arterio-venous dialysis shunt, and go out in the dialysis effluent. Because the device is not directly siphoning splanchnic blood, the clearance of potential dietary "toxins" is slower, but any patient with advanced liver disease has to make certain dietary adjustments anyway.
I agree completely. The merits or demerits of Windows 7 aside, it may fail for no reason other than the economy. Potential customers just are not going to be buying. It seems like MS's traditional marketing and customer relations strategies are problems enough in good times, and can only accelerate a laissez-faire, not-now, I-don't care attitude about their software in this down economy.
Your comment that especially made me think was "I think that the way these companies operate in such times is that IT departments will be under great pressure to economize as much as they possibly can. If that using Linux and Open Office means they can save 5% a year, after retraining and reequipping, I'm pretty sure they will do it." I got me to thinking about what "retraining and reequipping" might mean to IT departments and employees, and how Open Office and other FOSS programs may have the advantage. It is not just the cost of purchase, but also the cost of "retraining and reequipping" . . . . . .
People want to just use their tools and be productive. They want their OS and apps to be unobtrusive, with no need to re-learn changes-for-change's-sake. MS has introduced all kinds of user interface changes-for-change's-sake lately, like that retarded ribbon thing. Win7 seems to be making user customization even more limited. Users already know how to use "classic" menu and toolbar interfaces, and a typical workplace will have employees that would rather stick to what they know, rather than switch or re-learn. Open Office apps maintain that conventional paradigm that everyone knows. No one was asking for a better mousetrap, and OO now looks more like classic MS Office than the new MS Office. Given the choice between transitioning to Open Office versus MS-Vista/7 Office, I would think that OO apps need little retraining compared to the newer MS apps, making total cost of deployment even cheaper yet for using OO.
Ancient philosopher says, "you can't scrute the inscrutable."
The reason that Titan is of such great interest (aside form the fact that Cassini-Huygens is giving us reams of data that we could never see from Earth), is that its chemistry is considered comparable to Earth in the pre-biotic eras. Our current hydro-nitrox environment evolved slowly due to abiotic and biotic chemistry starting with something that may be similar to what Titan now has. Somewhere in the distant past, biotic chemistry had to start in something that had high methane or other hydrocarbons. Even now, earth has extremophile niche organisms, some of which might well survive conditions comparable to Titan, to a degree.
But, there are crucial differences. Biotic chemistry and the formation and evolution of life depend on complex molecules interacting in a solution. The ionic or soluble molecules, with nitrogen, oxygen, and sulfur, as well as C-H, which define life as we understand it, need water as the solvent. On Titan, it may exist at some thermal boundary far below the surface, but not at the top (the same reason that Jupiter's Europa, which does have water and ionic solutions in oceans near the surface is of such great interest as to the possibility of life).
Titan is probably too cold to permit evolution. Atmospheric ionizations, lightening, deep geothermal chemistry, and so on may indeed have generated some biotic precursors - complex organics, amino acids, carbohydrates, or nucleic acids - but the chances of them being able to interact the gazillions of times needed to randomly find stable and regenerative molecules is unlikely at its ambient temperatures.
However, the possibility that, at the right temperatures and thermodynamics, that these molecules could assemble and evolve in a methane solvent, is not beyond theoretical possibility, as long as enough nitrogen, oxygen, other atoms, (water), and energy are there to evolve the complexity of the molecules. This is what is presumed to have happened on earth.
It is possible that current Titanic atmospheric chemistry is converting CH4 into larger hydrocarbons and other molecules, which would sequester the methane, making it "disappear". Since these molecules would be denser than methane, they might be below the observable surface, and we would not know about them. It is possible though that far enough below, where warmer, that the chemistry has become very complex, possibly pre-biotic, or perhaps even biotic. Of course, that is the point of this original article, that the hydrocarbons are there in mass quantities, so some sort of long term chemistry is going on.
It would be interesting to take Titan's chemistry, as we have learned about it from Cassini-Huygens, put it in a laboratory bioreactor, adds some "lightening", heat, and so forth, and see what happens. In an old original Outer Limits episode from the 60's, they did just that, and some spooky creature evolved - how prescient!
I agree. The discussion throughout this thread would be the normal discussion and speculation for life as it was up until 6 months ago. Not a day goes by now that we are not hearing about layoffs by the thousands or tens of thousands. Merits (or not) of the new release aside, the target customers for this are either not there or not buying. Estimates of how long the recession will last vary, but some predict as much as 5 years of downsizing and stagnation. Even if Win 7 is the greatest thing ever, sales may be incongruously low, due strictly to the economy. Win7 may lose, not on merit, but because no one is buying right now.
Linux & open source clearly are the right price in this economy. If MS wants to fight for market share and to retain its customer base, it seems like their strategy at this point ought not to be focused on revenue and profit, but on customer loyalty. Imagine they said "We feel your pain, we know you cannot afford major os-hardware-training investment right now, and we are with you. We will give the new OS away for pennies, and we will support training and deployment." That could win hearts and minds like nothing else.
There may be few profits to take in this economy, but if MS can keep their customers, then they can recover profits as the economy eventually warms up. If they release Win7 with the same "rape and ripoff" blatant disregard for customers as they have always shown, then the economy more than the merits of Win7 may decide this issue. I think it is a fair guess that if Win7 is inherently underwhelming, and if MS treats customers as dogfood-as-usual, and if this economy continues for another 3 years or so, that the landscape for OS market share will be radically different when they start to develop Win 8.
While everybody here is having fun with fart jokes and other ha-ha's, you actually bring up an interesting issue in population biology which will have direct implications for colonization of Mars, terra-forming, and the introduction of hazardous or beneficial biota. So, if anyone has some spare time and wants to do a serious calculation, figure this one:
Assume the following, all based on available Mars science and on basic biology: - Assume that Mars is sterile - either never had life, or had life which is now all dead and not ressurectible. - Assume though that prior conditions have left a fertile ground, with porous rocks or soils with sufficient organics or other metabolically useful materials that primitive or extremophile biota can live on them. - Assume that at some level below the surface, lets say 10 to 100 meters down, that temperatures are reasonably constant and temperate, and that soils are moist, perhaps with periodic liquid water flows. - Assume that a single species that could thrive on that medium is newly introduced - just one small speck of a colony, or even just one microbe. - Assume no competition from any other species. - Assume that the species is mall enough to percolate easily through the medium. - Assume that its growth kinetics and population density and dynamics are the same as would be seen in Earth soils or a petri dish.
The questions to answer then are: - How quickly would the population spread itself across the planet? - What would a geographic mapping of its distribution look like year by year? - At what point would the mass of metabolic by-products be detectable by remote sensing? - Is it possible that prior Mars landings could have infected the planet to the point that it is now detectable?
Of course, environmental, seasonal, geographic, and substrate-nutritional issues would profoundly influence the situation, but as I said, ASSUME, that Mars would be no different than a funky but favorable test tube for that organism.
And, by the way, does anyone know what NASA or other agencies do to try to NOT inoculate the planet when they send probes there?
The enormous size of the concept makes all of the engineering specs daunting, but it does not violate any basic physical or engineering principles. It seems that you have to consider two scenarios about how this works - one in which the apex of the cable, or its center of gravity would be displaced downward with each "micro"-jerk, and one in which the position of the cable remains strictly stationary, one of which would be energy inefficient, and one of which could be engineered to be efficient and possibly workable.
Scenario 1 - In this, the whole elevator wire is displaced with each downward jerk. This is the bad idea. Even if it moves by just by millimeters or even microns at a time, displacing the whole cable means moving it against it's own kinetic energy and angular momentum, losing energy. To re-elevate the cable, a thruster at the top could restore its angular velocity, lifting it back to its "stationary" position, dragging the payload climber up in the process. The jerking at the bottom dissipates energy in the cable to "reload" it; the top thruster supplies the lifting energy, restoring the lost energy to the cable, and also supplying energy to lift the climber. Note that energy is expended to lift both cable and climber. Note too the repetitive loads and unloads on the cable, with degrees of slack, deformation, and sudden re-tensioning, all of which may wear the cable, causing ultimate failure or the need for regular maintenance and replacement.
Scenario 2 - What though if the top of the cable remains stationary, maintaining its precise altitude, via the very principles of the space elevator? The overall inertia of the cable could keep in stationary, but forces acting axially would stretch the cable according to its elastic properties and parameters. What then if the cable was engineered in such a way that its material, width, length, and density all create a resonant frequency that the vibrator could match. The cable might tense and de-tense symmetrically along its length, acting as any type of oscillating spring, without any net change in length nor significant 2- and 3-dimensional deformation. At a non-resonant harmonic, the cable would lose energy, and the vibrator at the bottom and a thruster at the top would have to pump it back in, just like in scenario #1. But if the vibration goes at the right frequency, the cable could be kept oscillating at minimum energy, just enough to overcome internal friction and inertance. Seems to me that a lot of energy would have to be put in in the first place to get the system running, but once there, only a little bit of power needs to be supplied to keep it tuned. In that sense, it is no different than any other mechanical or electronic oscillator, eg the tank circuit in a radio receiver, that can be kept running with only minimum new energy at the resonant frequency. The climber would be lifted with each local upward recoil of the cable. This would dampen the oscillation a bit, and this is where the vibrator at the bottom would react on each cycle to put that energy back into the system, to keep it oscillating on frequency. If this is running at the cable's prime frequency, then the only energy expended is in lifting the climber. (Resupplying internal heat losses in the cable is part of the baseline overhead of running the system, not a cost against lifting the payload). And, there is much less wear on the cable, so maintenance costs are down. The caveat to this is that the cable must be vibrating non-stop. The energy of resonance would be like a giant flywheel or stretched spring, and it would be way too expensive to power it up and down each time you want to use it. So, power it up just once, putting gobs of energy into oscillating the cable at its resonant frequency, then maintain that frequency with tiny squirts of energy on each cycle. When a climber wants to climb, the "kicker" on the vibrator simple puts in a bit more force or energy on each cycle to supply the energy needed to lift the climber. More energy is needed in th
"Is not the restraint systems. No restraint system could have saved them. The fact that their vehicle was disintegrating from burning up might have something to do with it."
You are missing the point of what forensic pathology is all about. Correct, nothing was survivable as that craft disintegrated. BUT, examining the forensic evidence establishes precisely how the bodies were injured and when death occurred, and by what mechanism. For instance, atlanto-axial dislocation of the cervical spine, a skull fracture, rib fractures, a lacerated aorta at the ligamentum arteriosum - these all say boatloads about the moment-by-moment events, and what precisely caused the lethal and non-lethal traumas to the body. Knowing how the body was injured then lets you infer the sequence of dynamic loads on the body, and from that where and when the hardware and systems failed, and then from that, where there is room for improvement. This is no different than when the NTSB investigates a plane crash, with the "engineering analysis" being done by pathologists on the cadavers, rather than structural engineers on wing and fuselage parts.
Let's say for instance that the crew compartment was hardened to survive a breakup, no structural failure of that "escape pod", no decompression, plus a parachute system to ensure a soft landing. Even then, the crew would have died. Why? Because the seating and restraint system allowed their bodies to move in lethal ways during sudden accel-/deceleration, or because sloppy crew practices forgot to don helmet or gloves, rendering the pressure conservation system irrelevant. It is from forensic studies like this that you can figure exactly what went wrong, and then engineer or enforce better systems to prevent future calamity. No system like Shuttle re-entry can be made entirely safe and non-lethal, but understanding each aspect of failure leads to better designs and practices which can prevent lethality during lesser degrees of catastrophe.
>> somewhat as flamebait >> No, it's a fair observation, but only partly true. The sad part is that it IS true in part.
>> doctors are mechanics for the human body. No more, no less. >> When I first learned about electronics, I asked a professor about how much he kept in mind the physics of it all when he designed a circuit. His reply was that all that stuff about electrons and holes and field effects and so on about how transistors work, didn't mean a thing . . . you learn how to string the parts to gether, do the calculations, and you get a circuit. Science means a lot to study how things work and how to engineer new devices, but not for the nuts and bolts daily application of tried and true methodology, no matter what field you are in. Lots of everyday medical practice is bore-me-to-tears nuts and bolts, but that's what the job is.
>> The vast, overwhelming majority of doctors have little to no true scientific training, any more so than a business person or Joe the Plumber. >> Erroneous. Plumbers and business people may have little very little science knowledge. Doctors have a lot - it is a necessary prerequisite to have math, physics, chemistry, biology, and so on. You cannot understand the nuts-and-bolts daily grunt work without it. However, it is true that most doctors have no credentials to be an investigative scientist. And sadly, many do not apply their science knowledge daily to solve challenging or unusual cases. Then again, there are a lot of biology grads doing lab work that sucks and barely qualifies as science either. If a meterology grad gets a job as a TV weatherman, they are not sceintists, but they do know somthing about science. There is no black-and-white, just shades of grey in between.
>> Even those doctors doing active medical research have limited scientific faculties >> That is just a silly stereotype - you just don't know the right people. It is true that most physicians are not scientists, but there are some excellent ones. Just remember, don't confuse science with practice. Most doctors do just practice, a limited few do just science, and some do both (and well). All have been well schooled in the foundations, but whether they learned or snoozed through it is another story. And, some doctors are just idiots too. In the end, if you are sick, you want a doctor who can fix your problem and make you healthy, not tell you how to do a PCR or a LaPlace transform.
This is really a story about the Yellow's - Fever and Journalism that is - and a collective fever of the social psyche that allows reports like this to flourish
Media have ALWAYS played up the sensational, ignoring the good, and marginalizing their own mistakes. In the US, the concept of free speech keeps the governmant from suppressing communication, but there is no such thing as "free speech". Those with the means of traditional puiblication are bound to readership, advertisers, shareholders, and profitibility - the "truth" is only that which sells the most. "Remember the Maine", the Spanish American War, and the media wars of Pulitzer-vs-Hearst. Media reports like this survive and thrive on FUD. It is the basis of YELLOW JOURNALISM. The nice thing about Slashdot and similar blogs, Usenet, and the like, is that this is a genuinely free and democratic forum for the exchange of news and ideas.
FUD-mongering is much easier to spread and manipulate when it comes to technical subjects that average people do not understand - like medical and technology things. The original newspaper stories in this report were no different than the late-night TV ads by lawyer sleaze-buckets who advertise for medical malpractice and medical device liability. All that BS is easy to sell to Joe Sixpack.
The follow-up reports and references, like the one showing decreased asthma episodes and expense among MMR vaccinated children, show the value of public health programs and medical technologies. People need to see the BIG picture, but sadly, many cannot see beyond the ends of their noses. The problem is that many people today are the recipients of public health benefits that they have no idea about. For instance, who today worries about being crippled by polio, dying from smallpox or pertussis, becoming neurologically impaired by measles? Scourges of bygone centuries are all but forgotten by the average person - thanks to vaccines and public health programs, the doctors and scientists who developed them, the companies and governments that made it all possible, and the public who funded them. Nothing is perfect though, and there may in fact be the occasional complication or death from a vaccine, but we do what we do because 3 deaths a year from a medical treatment that saves 100,000 deaths a year from the disease is a good thing. Any newspaper reporter, editor, publisher, or owner who wants to "stick their money where their mouth is", ought to NOT vaccinate their own kids for any of these diseases, then see what happens.
If people had as much fear of Yellow Journalism as they do of Yellow Fever, we wouldn't see nonsense like this. Sadly, most people have no more appreciation of Yellow Journalism than they do of Yellow Fever, and they can be easily infected by both. Yellow Fever is not prevalent in most parts of the worls, but Yellow Journalism is. Slashdot and similar community forums are a good vaccine for FUD and false reporting, but sadly, they do not have the wide reaching cirulation and readership that fudpapers do. On the other hand, MANY traditional newspapers are downsizing because of competition from modern internet media - let's hope that more truth and less FUD prevail as time goes by.
The responses to this item support the worthiness of text messaging - Amen. But there is a bleaker side to this - reflecting the deterioration of quality in surgical education, at least here in the USA, but probably elsewhere. Any vascular surgeon should know how to do a forequarter amputation, or any amputation. It's not that hard, and it is a basic concept in General Surgery, the grandaddy and pre-requisite of Vascular Surgery. It's not like this was a brain tumor or pancreatectomy, where some specialized knowledge and experience is needed. So, while the story sounds heroic, and it had a happy outcome for the patient, and it demos the value of text messaging and instant world-wide communication, even into the most remote bush or outback, please consider what this story sounds like to a seasoned surgeon:
Hi, I'm a baker. I run our local bake shop. We make pies and cakes, bread and cookies all day long . . . Wow, I am so glad to be a finalist in the Food Network Pro Baker's Bake-Off, what an honor . . . What's that you say? Our secret bake-off challenge is to bake a muffin? Holy crap Batman, I don't know how to bake a muffin. Quick, how can I text message the Iron Chef?
I have been listening to this story being hyped in the news all day, but it doesn't deserve quite that much attention. While this is a "great case" that most surgeons would appreciate, and a great outcome for the patient, the CNN report (and NPR and others) does what lay media generally do with medical reports - over-dramatize yesterday's news. This is an evolutionary case based on established surgical technologies which have been validated over the past 12 years, not a revolutionary implementation of new science. And regardless if you have any thoughts or opinions about embryonic stem cell research, this is not an embryonic case, it is just the use of autogenous cells to repopulate a regenerative biomatrix.
This is the "new surgery" of the 21st century, a move toward live engineering of living tissues rather than using alloplastic implants. Much of this new surgery is done strictly in situ, inserting an implant, and letting pluripotential cells circulating through the host find the implant and then reorganize themselves into a mature tissue. This works well with connective tissue matrices that will support the ingrowth of "connective tissue cells" derived from the embryonic mesoderm. The items available to surgeons are manufactured matrices such as Integra (Integra Life Sciences, New Jersey), and cadaveric matrices, usually dermis (of human, bovine, porcine, and equine origin, eg from LifeCell, Ethicon, TEI Biosciences, et al). Simply put, we implant these materials to reconstruct dermis, fascias, ligaments, and various skeletal and mesenchymal structures, and human host cells find them and make new living dermis-fascia-ligaments-etc. This works extremely well for reconstruction of skin and musculoskeletal structures. Not much progress has been made yet on the generation of glands and organs (which require function specific epithelial or ecto-entodermal cells).
These technologies and procedures have been a part of regular surgical practice since about 1996. Make no mistake about it - the tracheo-bronchial reconstruction you read about is a great case, but it is just a progressive implementation of existing concepts and methods to a wider range of diseases and indications. There will be more and more and more of this is the coming decades. In fact, existing regenerative materials could have easily made a new trachea-like conduit, avoiding the need for a human anatomical gift or organ donation, except for one thing . ..
The trachea and bronchi need a special architecture to avoid collapse. Because of the Bernoulli principle, these conduits could collapse during inspiration, so nature prevents that by having these pipes surrounded by semi-rigid cartilage rings. Regenerated cadaveric dermis by itself will not work. So instead, these guys used a donated trachea for its gross architecture and mechanical integrity, processed it in the same way that dermal matrices are processed to get rid of cells and immunogens, and then they seeded some host cells, then let it grow in situ. In actuality, the seeding step was largely irrelevant. When collagen-aminoglycan matrices (decellularized cadaveric materials) are implanted, circulating stem cells find them automatically. Pre-seeding could speed up the process by a week or so, but no big deal.
The cells which were seeded were NOT embryonic stem cells. They were just autogenous random marrow cells, some of which will be pluripotential, and able to regenerate tissues according to an embryonic model of tissue histogenesis. Note too that even if these were embryonic omnipotent stem cells, there is no such thing as a tracheal cell. What they implanted was a connective tissue matrix, generated by, and then repopulated by two and only two types of cells: fibroblasts and vascular cells. This is the supporting structure of all organs and tissues. Think of it like reinforced concrete. You can use cement and rebar to make a bridge, a road, a building, and so on, all with different shapes, loads, and functions, but it's all just cement and rebar.
This got me to thinking - but I am no expert on this - so here's a question for those who know:
Given legal and licensing issues, it makes sense to work around this issue with a RISC / VLIW core (and NVidia has already mastered this) with a JIT or x86 bytecode interpreter at the front end. The pipeline grows by a cycle or two or six or eight, but throughput after the first nanosecond is the same . . . or is it?
Could this be the marriage that ends the x86 vs RISC war? Like a Windows VM riding on top of Linux, is this a way to maintain legacy compatibility and programming efficiency with increased horsepower? Assuming the same fabrication scale and technology, the same semiconductor chemistry and fabrication, all other things being equal, I can imagine that a RISC/VLIW processor could be made to outperform an x86 core by lightyears. Complex highly parallel code could be executed with fewer transistors per core, more cores per chip (or smaller chips), decreased energy and heat, increased clock speeds, etc. I can even foresee where the pre-process interpreter could be swapped in or out (on the die) to make the multi-core, multi-pipeline RISC processor compatible with any other existing processor or code base. If NVidia's core is itself proprietary and protected, and if the hybrid chip really looks like an x86 to the code base out there, but runs really really fast and cool and efficient, this could put NVidia on the throne of processor sales in decades to come.
Whether any of these rumors are true or not, whether any of this happens or not, am I right in thinking that an interpreted front end on a good RISC processor would ultimately be faster and more efficient?
Your reasoning may be a bit specious. If your databases get "several thousand writes per second", it sounds like this may be massive underuse of your bandwidth - i.e. your servers or databases may be able to handle hundreds of thousands or millions of writes per second. If a few seconds were lost or went down, then the incoming traffic might get cached or queued, waiting for services to come back on line. Once the connection is re-established, the write backlog might take only a few seconds or a few fractions of a second to catch up and be back to real time. Users might be unaware of the whole thing, or they would re-log and try again, and there would be no perceptible throttle or bottleneck to data logging. Any system that presses its bandwidth limits, any system that walks dangerously close to its top capacity, with no capacitances or reserves, is likely to be down quite a bit. A system such as yours, which hardly taxes its bandwidth at all (I am guessing) could certainly tolerate lost seconds. Admittedly, your system may have had problems like this in the past, and the system was upgraded to handle higher capacity. . . . Which is why Wikipedia no longer runs on just one machine. It does sound as though Wikipedia may have found a sweet spot, balancing load against reserve capacity or bandwidth, for robust up-time versus economic efficiency. I am sure that this is a topic that computer and network engineers have studied exhaustively - perhaps someone else knows?
2008 will be the year that many people start to look for alternatives. Remember, this is Slashdot, tech savvy people who are very familiar with these issues, but who are but a small fraction of overall computer users. 2008 is the year that many regular folks start to question their OS. Remember, most "regular folks" get their Vista with a new computer. MS claims to have "sold" 100M or so copies of Vista. If true, they are sowing seeeds of destruction, because enough regular folk will start to see the limtations of this release and start to complain and look for alternatives. It happened to me - I'm a tech savvy/.'er, but I am VERY happy with XP, and very happy to be looking at alternatives (Nix'es) to Vista because of how bad an experience that Vista has been. I think that 2008 - 2009 is the year that many folk, tech and regular alike, start to look elsewhere - BUT . . .
That alone won't drive Linux onto the desktop in great numbers. Too many regular folk with limited computing needs are / will be happy enough with Vista, or they won't know any different. Left to the desktop market itself, Windows will reign for a long time, no matter how bad it might be - BUT . . .
Linux will succeed on the desktop for the very same reason that Windows originally did: migration from the workplace.
Remember when PCs were nerdy things for the tech elite? Not that long ago. Two things changed that. One was the development of the Web, which brought "point-and-shoot" graphical commerce and communications onto the desktop. That is what suddenly drove everyone and their granny to get wired. By that time, many people were already very familiar and comfortable with PCs and Windows because they used them at work - they already knew how to use a PC, even if they had never bought one themselves. Dominance in business, as opposed to arts & graphics, is what let MS reign over Apple - Windows won the hearts and minds of regular folk because that is what they learned at work.
Linux will succeed on the desktop because the WORKPLACE hates Vista and is looking for Linux solutions. The more that "regular folk" employees use a new Linux system at work, they more that Linux will grow on them. Think of how easy it is for them to learn a new OS under these circumstances. They will use it because their employer decided on Linux. Like or not at first, they can learn it safely, non-threatening, non-anxiety provoking, since they need not worry about losing their own data, and the company IT will support their learning curve.
Once the workplace starts switching to Linux, people will start to learn it, and use it, and like it. When it then comes time to buy a new PC at home, and if they have had a bad MS-Windows experience, they may then have no hesitation to get what they already know and like from work. The more this happens, the more users will start seeking productivity apps, and this will drive third party app development, which in turns strengthens Linux's position, and the whole thing ramps up.
The average person will not get Linux on the desktop because they hate Vista - most have never heard of Linux yet. They will get Linux on the desktop because they had a good experience with it at work, and they now know how to use it.
I think that "2008 is the year of the Linux desktop" only in the sense that this is the year that the soil is tilled, and some of the seeds are planted. The growing season will come over the next 2-3 years. If MS flops with their latest promise of Win7, then Linux can expect a huge bumper crop by 2012-2014.
Some of the comments in this thread refer to Ballmer and madness. In the end, that may be indeed what brings down MS - simple human arrogance, pride, prejudice, and hubris - to an obsessive degree. Poets and artists throughout the ages have dramatized or memorialized similar events. It does make you wonder what is going on - or not - in the chambers of the Board of Directors. Do they know what's going on? Do they get it? Do they care? None of this activity makes sense - Just Not Right, as you said. That's why my silly fanciful story makes as much sense as anything - it at least fits some of the facts as well as anything.
[Apologies - I posted this already, buried somewhere deep in this thread. Sorry if you see the duplicate - this is my first Slashdot post, and I got it all bolloxed and in the wrong place - but I think I got it all straight now.]
Now, now. Before all you naysayers and Slashdot cynics read too much into this, consider that there may be some real madness to their methods. Consider this report, on the front page of my newspaper, retrieved by my time-traveling teletype machine.
Reprinted from the Bizarro World Times April 1, 2010
Headline: BALLMER PLAYS FIDDLE AS MICROSOFT BURNS Reported by Peter Perplexed and Wally Whathehelljusthappened
Federal investigators with the SEC and FBI, along with Interpol authorities, today released preliminary information about the sudden and dramatic collapse of Microsoft. Investors, employees and customers, still largely in the dark about the sudden seeming evaporation of the company, were none to happy to hear this news, but at least there was a sense of relief that some answers are starting to come through.
Employees at all Microsoft campuses worldwide showed up to work today to find their buildings padlocked, the workforce locked out. Customer support at all levels, the phones at all of the corporate offices, and the MS website and MSN are all completely offline. Shareholders seem to have lost their entire investment in Microsoft as the NASDAQ has eliminated the company form the exchange. What happened? How could it happen so suddenly and so thoroughly? Where are the company principals (not to mention their principles)?
And even more peculiar, we are starting to receive worldwide reports of their latest operating system, Windows Smokescreen (aka Windows 7) suddenly quitting - wiping hard drives on systems that it is installed on, or otherwise refusing to boot a computer. Here at the Times, we first noted problems when many users started getting the following message: "You do not seem to have the properly signed and verified digital rights to the email and txt files you just created - you are hereby prohibited from using Windows again."
Based on the public reporting by the above agencies, plus investigations from multiple news agencies and tech and financial reporters, we believe that the following is an accurate, albeit sketchy recreation of events at the world's largest software vendor, beginning about 2 years ago, leading up to today's dramatic events:
January 2008 - Numerous events indicate that MS is aware of the fiasco that is Vista, its latest release of Windows. Regardless that the new OS has a variety of merits, it simply has too many demerits, and it has garnered no loyalty nor market share among home and business users - especially among businesses - meaning a serious interruption of revenue and credibility for the company and its flagship product. MS announces an accelerated schedule for creating and releasing its next proposed Windows OS - version 7. Many are skeptical.
February, 2008 - MS announces a hostile takeover bid for Yahoo! No one can understand a legitimate or business-responsible rationale for this move. General opinions take the dim cynical view that this is an expensive but lame attempt to compete with Google, by eliminating the third major player in the online search and advertising market. The offer is made at nearly TWICE the outstanding market capitalization of Yahoo!
March, 2008 - Until now, Yahoo! has made no official reply. The unofficial discussion from Yahoo! execs is that the bid is a disgrace, that they will never capitulate to the rapacious so-and-so's at the Evil Empire, that market consolidation is a losing proposition for the public, that the deal will NEVER go through. Nevertheless, market speculation on Yahoo! and MS stock drives up share prices.
April, 2008 - Over the past month, the MS bid for Yahoo! has risen another 30%, to a net of nearly $58 B (billion), keeping ahead of the speculative price rises and nominal Yahoo! value. All of the fuz
Now, now. Before all you naysayers and Slashdot cynics read too much into this, consider that there may be some real madness to their methods. Consider this report, on the front page of my newspaper, retrieved by my time-traveling teletype machine.
Reprinted from the Bizarro World Times April 1, 2010
Headline: BALLMER PLAYS FIDDLE AS MICROSOFT BURNS Reported by Peter Perplexed and Wally Whathehelljusthappened
Federal investigators with the SEC and FBI, along with Interpol authorities, today released preliminary information about the sudden and dramatic collapse of Microsoft. Investors, employees and customers, still largely in the dark about the sudden seeming evaporation of the company, were none to happy to hear this news, but at least there was a sense of relief that some answers are starting to come through.
Employees at all Microsoft campuses worldwide showed up to work today to find their buildings padlocked, the workforce locked out. Customer support at all levels, the phones at all of the corporate offices, and the MS website and MSN are all completely offline. Shareholders seem to have lost their entire investment in Microsoft as the NASDAQ has eliminated the company form the exchange. What happened? How could it happen so suddenly and so thoroughly? Where are the company principals (not to mention their principles)?
And even more peculiar, we are starting to receive worldwide reports of their latest operating system, Windows Smokescreen (aka Windows 7) suddenly quitting - wiping hard drives on systems that it is installed on, or otherwise refusing to boot a computer. Here at the Times, we first noted problems when many users started getting the following message: "You do not seem to have the properly signed and verified digital rights to the email and txt files you just created - you are hereby prohibited from using Windows again."
Based on the public reporting by the above agencies, plus investigations from multiple news agencies and tech and financial reporters, we believe that the following is an accurate, albeit sketchy recreation of events at the world's largest software vendor, beginning about 2 years ago, leading up to today's dramatic events:
January 2008 - Numerous events indicate that MS is aware of the fiasco that is Vista, its latest release of Windows. Regardless that the new OS has a variety of merits, it simply has too many demerits, and it has garnered no loyalty nor market share among home and business users - especially among businesses - meaning a serious interruption of revenue and credibility for the company and its flagship product. MS announces an accelerated schedule for creating and releasing its next proposed Windows OS - version 7. Many are skeptical.
February, 2008 - MS announces a hostile takeover bid for Yahoo! No one can understand a legitimate or business-responsible rationale for this move. General opinions take the dim cynical view that this is an expensive but lame attempt to compete with Google, by eliminating the third major player in the online search and advertising market. The offer is made at nearly TWICE the outstanding market capitalization of Yahoo!
March, 2008 - Until now, Yahoo! has made no official reply. The unofficial discussion from Yahoo! execs is that the bid is a disgrace, that they will never capitulate to the rapacious so-and-so's at the Evil Empire, that market consolidation is a losing proposition for the public, that the deal will NEVER go through. Nevertheless, market speculation on Yahoo! and MS stock drives up share prices.
April, 2008 - Over the past month, the MS bid for Yahoo! has risen another 30%, to a net of nearly $58 B (billion), keeping ahead of the speculative price rises and nominal Yahoo! value. All of the fuzzy warm sentiments about corporate independence, freedom, mom, baseball, and apple pie go by the wayside, as money talks. At a hurried and hastily organized Yahoo! shareholders meeting, the merger-buyout is accepted.
Now, now. Before all you naysayers and Slashdot cynics read too much into this, consider that there may be some real madness to their methods. Consider this report, on the front page of my newspaper, retrieved by my time-traveling teletype machine.
Reprinted from the Bizarro World Times
April 1, 2010
Headline:
BALLMER PLAYS FIDDLE AS MICROSOFT BURNS
Reported by Peter Perplexed and Wally Whathehelljusthappened
Federal investigators with the SEC and FBI, along with Interpol authorities, today released preliminary information about the sudden and dramatic collapse of Microsoft. Investors, employees and customers, still largely in the dark about the sudden seeming evaporation of the company, were none to happy to hear this news, but at least there was a sense of relief that some answers are starting to come through.
Employees at all Microsoft campuses worldwide showed up to work today to find their buildings padlocked, the workforce locked out. Customer support at all levels, the phones at all of the corporate offices, and the MS website and MSN are all completely offline. Shareholders seem to have lost their entire investment in Microsoft as the NASDAQ has eliminated the company form the exchange. What happened? How could it happen so suddenly and so thoroughly? Where are the company principals (not to mention their principles)?
And even more peculiar, we are starting to receive worldwide reports of their latest operating system, Windows Smokescreen (aka Windows 7) suddenly quitting - wiping hard drives on systems that it is installed on, or otherwise refusing to boot a computer. Here at the Times, we first noted problems when many users started getting the following message: "You do not seem to have the properly signed and verified digital rights to the email and txt files you just created - you are hereby prohibited from using Windows again."
Based on the public reporting by the above agencies, plus investigations from multiple news agencies and tech and financial reporters, we believe that the following is an accurate, albeit sketchy recreation of events at the world's largest software vendor, beginning about 2 years ago, leading up to today's dramatic events:
January 2008 - Numerous events indicate that MS is aware of the fiasco that is Vista, its latest release of Windows. Regardless that the new OS has a variety of merits, it simply has too many demerits, and it has garnered no loyalty nor market share among home and business users - especially among businesses - meaning a serious interruption of revenue and credibility for the company and its flagship product. MS announces an accelerated schedule for creating and releasing its next proposed Windows OS - version 7. Many are skeptical.
February, 2008 - MS announces a hostile takeover bid for Yahoo! No one can understand a legitimate or business-responsible rationale for this move. General opinions take the dim cynical view that this is an expensive but lame attempt to compete with Google, by eliminating the third major player in the online search and advertising market. The offer is made at nearly TWICE the outstanding market capitalization of Yahoo!
March, 2008 - Until now, Yahoo! has made no official reply. The unofficial discussion from Yahoo! execs is that the bid is a disgrace, that they will never capitulate to the rapacious so-and-so's at the Evil Empire, that market consolidation is a losing proposition for the public, that the deal will NEVER go through. Nevertheless, market speculation on Yahoo! and MS stock drives up share prices.
April, 2008 - Over the past month, the MS bid for Yahoo! has risen another 30%, to a net of nearly $58 B (billion), keeping ahead of the speculative price rises and nominal Yahoo! value. All of the fuzzy warm sentiments about corporate independence, freedom, mom, baseball, and apple pie go by the wayside, as money talks. At a hurried and hastily organized Yahoo! shareholders meeting, the merger-buyout is accepted.
May, 2008 - Financial reporters start to speculate why there has not been much discuss
Slashdot Mirror
In answer to Shihar and Benzido . . .
An artificial heart is a monumental challenge - not the mechanics of making a pump - a good squirt gun can do the same - but the problems of bio-integration.
To be technical, Peter Houghton did not have an artificial heart. He had an LVAD, a left ventriculer assist device, an implantable supplement to the patients's own heart. That technology has been successful to a degree, and it represents a step on the ladder leading to a true prosthetic heart, but it just ain't the same.
The spectrum and art of implantable cardiovascular prosthetics and vasculo-integrated devices includes long term implants and short term bridge devices: valves (prosthetic and cadaveric), vascular grafts (patches and conduits), electro-gizmos (pacers, AICD's), ventricular assist devices (iabps, lvads), and pump-oxygenators. We know how to overcome many limitations, but not all of them in a dependable zero-fault long term bio-integrated package with serious power requirements. The main issues:
Zero-fault dependability.
Sustained long term power requirements.
Solving power by external hookups means that hardware traverses the skin, meaning infection.
Alloplastic (prosthetic) materials sitting in the blood stream are subject to infection from circulating bacterial transients. Established cardiovascular infections mean sepsis and metastatic infection (means high risk of death).
The treatment for hardware infections is to remove the device, but unlike other hardware (eg a joint replacement), you cannot just remove a prosthetic heart if that's your only pump.
Materials and fluid engineering to prevent thrombosis on the device surfaces (blood is programmed to clot on prosthetic materials).
Materials and mechanical engineering to prevent red cell damage and lysis (they get hammered going through pumps and valves).
Systems for control and variable power outputs to match physiological demand (devices to date have been pretty much just dumb pumps, and if you look at the problem from a control point of view, transducing relevant feedback and deciding on target references is a complex problem for cardiovascular dynamics).
"Out of curiosity, what is the great challenge in producing an artificial heart?"
Materials, bio-integration, infection, power, dependability.
There, those are the challenges.
If it was easy, it would have been done already.
Lots of people are working on it.
Notable attempts, like Jarvik, have had only limited success.
A real artificial heart just isn't on the horizon these days, but it is one of those things that we do "understand" to be achievable - it just needs more time, engineering, materials, and power technologies.
See also the comments above by rlseaman - this will address those as well.
The liver has multiple functions for both biochemical synthesis and detoxification. Unlike most organs and tissues, it has two circulatory inflows. The arterial circulation is the nutritive blood supply, just as the arterial circulation for any tissue. A portal circulation is one in which the venous effluent from a tissue does not return directly to the systemic circulation, but instead detours through another organ first. There are two portal circulations in most chordates - the hypothalamic-pituitary circulation, and the splanchnic portal system. The purpose of the splanchnic portal is to take raw digestate absorbed from the gut, and pass it through a chemical filter (the liver) which will detoxify or eliminate nasty exogenous compounds before they get back into the general circulation (via the hepatic veins). The hepatic artery supplies the liver; the portal vein is the business of the liver. Detoxified products that must be eliminated from the body are excreted into the bile, which is eliminated through the gut. Without a liver at all, death will occur within just a few days, about 3-7.
Renal failure is also lethal, but in the early 1950's, technologies were developed to keep renal failure patients alive - the dialysis machine. Dialysis is used as a bridge to organ transplantation, but for many people it is their permanent replacement kidney. It is an extraordinarily effective device. It could be "perfected" "back then" because the dialysis machine and the kidney are both relatively simple machines when it comes the elimination / detoxification aspects of its function. It depends simply on diffusion across semi-permeable membranes so that chemical concentrations can be equilibrated. No cells nor other active function is needed.
Compare this to heart function. We can transplant hearts quite successfully, but unlike the kidney, we cannot keep people alive without their native heart. Attempts in the past 10-20 years to develop mechanical bridge devices have all been technical, medical, and ethical failures, awaiting some future technologies to make the concept truly feasible.
The liver is in between. With regard to basic medical and ethical issues, an artificial liver should be comparable to the kidney. But technically and scientifically, making an artificial liver has been impossible until recently. Unlike the kidney, emulating liver function cannot be done by simple passive dialysis - the liver has MANY active chemical processes that must be actively metabolized. Attempts to run a patient's blood through a pig liver was the best available technology, and it doesn't work well at all, certainly not long term. What these researchers have done in this article is to mate living human cells to a dialysis device.
From the company's description of the product, it sounds like a fairly standard dialysis cartridge to start with. The key element, something that was NOT technically possible until the biotech revolution that we are now going through, is to put living cells in the device. I presume that the dialysis membranes are much more "porous" than renal dialysis membranes, allowing bigger molecules to get across, but hepatocytes remain sequestered on their side - there is no chance of "mixing and migration". All modern biotech "living cell" products go through ELABORATE testing and purification to get clean single cell lines. "Immortalized" means they have had their genome switched on so that they can mitose and replicate ad infinitum, without reaching the natural limits of mitosis that many differentiated cell lines have. Bile ducts, portal veins, and all that are not needed, because wastes come in through your normal arterio-venous dialysis shunt, and go out in the dialysis effluent. Because the device is not directly siphoning splanchnic blood, the clearance of potential dietary "toxins" is slower, but any patient with advanced liver disease has to make certain dietary adjustments anyway.
I agree completely. The merits or demerits of Windows 7 aside, it may fail for no reason other than the economy. Potential customers just are not going to be buying. It seems like MS's traditional marketing and customer relations strategies are problems enough in good times, and can only accelerate a laissez-faire, not-now, I-don't care attitude about their software in this down economy.
Your comment that especially made me think was "I think that the way these companies operate in such times is that IT departments will be under great pressure to economize as much as they possibly can. If that using Linux and Open Office means they can save 5% a year, after retraining and reequipping, I'm pretty sure they will do it." I got me to thinking about what "retraining and reequipping" might mean to IT departments and employees, and how Open Office and other FOSS programs may have the advantage. It is not just the cost of purchase, but also the cost of "retraining and reequipping" . . . . . .
People want to just use their tools and be productive. They want their OS and apps to be unobtrusive, with no need to re-learn changes-for-change's-sake. MS has introduced all kinds of user interface changes-for-change's-sake lately, like that retarded ribbon thing. Win7 seems to be making user customization even more limited. Users already know how to use "classic" menu and toolbar interfaces, and a typical workplace will have employees that would rather stick to what they know, rather than switch or re-learn. Open Office apps maintain that conventional paradigm that everyone knows. No one was asking for a better mousetrap, and OO now looks more like classic MS Office than the new MS Office. Given the choice between transitioning to Open Office versus MS-Vista/7 Office, I would think that OO apps need little retraining compared to the newer MS apps, making total cost of deployment even cheaper yet for using OO.
Ancient philosopher says, "you can't scrute the inscrutable."
The reason that Titan is of such great interest (aside form the fact that Cassini-Huygens is giving us reams of data that we could never see from Earth), is that its chemistry is considered comparable to Earth in the pre-biotic eras. Our current hydro-nitrox environment evolved slowly due to abiotic and biotic chemistry starting with something that may be similar to what Titan now has. Somewhere in the distant past, biotic chemistry had to start in something that had high methane or other hydrocarbons. Even now, earth has extremophile niche organisms, some of which might well survive conditions comparable to Titan, to a degree.
But, there are crucial differences. Biotic chemistry and the formation and evolution of life depend on complex molecules interacting in a solution. The ionic or soluble molecules, with nitrogen, oxygen, and sulfur, as well as C-H, which define life as we understand it, need water as the solvent. On Titan, it may exist at some thermal boundary far below the surface, but not at the top (the same reason that Jupiter's Europa, which does have water and ionic solutions in oceans near the surface is of such great interest as to the possibility of life).
Titan is probably too cold to permit evolution. Atmospheric ionizations, lightening, deep geothermal chemistry, and so on may indeed have generated some biotic precursors - complex organics, amino acids, carbohydrates, or nucleic acids - but the chances of them being able to interact the gazillions of times needed to randomly find stable and regenerative molecules is unlikely at its ambient temperatures.
However, the possibility that, at the right temperatures and thermodynamics, that these molecules could assemble and evolve in a methane solvent, is not beyond theoretical possibility, as long as enough nitrogen, oxygen, other atoms, (water), and energy are there to evolve the complexity of the molecules. This is what is presumed to have happened on earth.
It is possible that current Titanic atmospheric chemistry is converting CH4 into larger hydrocarbons and other molecules, which would sequester the methane, making it "disappear". Since these molecules would be denser than methane, they might be below the observable surface, and we would not know about them. It is possible though that far enough below, where warmer, that the chemistry has become very complex, possibly pre-biotic, or perhaps even biotic. Of course, that is the point of this original article, that the hydrocarbons are there in mass quantities, so some sort of long term chemistry is going on.
It would be interesting to take Titan's chemistry, as we have learned about it from Cassini-Huygens, put it in a laboratory bioreactor, adds some "lightening", heat, and so forth, and see what happens. In an old original Outer Limits episode from the 60's, they did just that, and some spooky creature evolved - how prescient!
I agree. The discussion throughout this thread would be the normal discussion and speculation for life as it was up until 6 months ago. Not a day goes by now that we are not hearing about layoffs by the thousands or tens of thousands. Merits (or not) of the new release aside, the target customers for this are either not there or not buying. Estimates of how long the recession will last vary, but some predict as much as 5 years of downsizing and stagnation. Even if Win 7 is the greatest thing ever, sales may be incongruously low, due strictly to the economy. Win7 may lose, not on merit, but because no one is buying right now.
Linux & open source clearly are the right price in this economy. If MS wants to fight for market share and to retain its customer base, it seems like their strategy at this point ought not to be focused on revenue and profit, but on customer loyalty. Imagine they said "We feel your pain, we know you cannot afford major os-hardware-training investment right now, and we are with you. We will give the new OS away for pennies, and we will support training and deployment." That could win hearts and minds like nothing else.
There may be few profits to take in this economy, but if MS can keep their customers, then they can recover profits as the economy eventually warms up. If they release Win7 with the same "rape and ripoff" blatant disregard for customers as they have always shown, then the economy more than the merits of Win7 may decide this issue. I think it is a fair guess that if Win7 is inherently underwhelming, and if MS treats customers as dogfood-as-usual, and if this economy continues for another 3 years or so, that the landscape for OS market share will be radically different when they start to develop Win 8.
While everybody here is having fun with fart jokes and other ha-ha's, you actually bring up an interesting issue in population biology which will have direct implications for colonization of Mars, terra-forming, and the introduction of hazardous or beneficial biota. So, if anyone has some spare time and wants to do a serious calculation, figure this one:
Assume the following, all based on available Mars science and on basic biology:
- Assume that Mars is sterile - either never had life, or had life which is now all dead and not ressurectible.
- Assume though that prior conditions have left a fertile ground, with porous rocks or soils with sufficient organics or other metabolically useful materials that primitive or extremophile biota can live on them.
- Assume that at some level below the surface, lets say 10 to 100 meters down, that temperatures are reasonably constant and temperate, and that soils are moist, perhaps with periodic liquid water flows.
- Assume that a single species that could thrive on that medium is newly introduced - just one small speck of a colony, or even just one microbe.
- Assume no competition from any other species.
- Assume that the species is mall enough to percolate easily through the medium.
- Assume that its growth kinetics and population density and dynamics are the same as would be seen in Earth soils or a petri dish.
The questions to answer then are:
- How quickly would the population spread itself across the planet?
- What would a geographic mapping of its distribution look like year by year?
- At what point would the mass of metabolic by-products be detectable by remote sensing?
- Is it possible that prior Mars landings could have infected the planet to the point that it is now detectable?
Of course, environmental, seasonal, geographic, and substrate-nutritional issues would profoundly influence the situation, but as I said, ASSUME, that Mars would be no different than a funky but favorable test tube for that organism.
And, by the way, does anyone know what NASA or other agencies do to try to NOT inoculate the planet when they send probes there?
The enormous size of the concept makes all of the engineering specs daunting, but it does not violate any basic physical or engineering principles. It seems that you have to consider two scenarios about how this works - one in which the apex of the cable, or its center of gravity would be displaced downward with each "micro"-jerk, and one in which the position of the cable remains strictly stationary, one of which would be energy inefficient, and one of which could be engineered to be efficient and possibly workable.
Scenario 1 - In this, the whole elevator wire is displaced with each downward jerk. This is the bad idea. Even if it moves by just by millimeters or even microns at a time, displacing the whole cable means moving it against it's own kinetic energy and angular momentum, losing energy. To re-elevate the cable, a thruster at the top could restore its angular velocity, lifting it back to its "stationary" position, dragging the payload climber up in the process. The jerking at the bottom dissipates energy in the cable to "reload" it; the top thruster supplies the lifting energy, restoring the lost energy to the cable, and also supplying energy to lift the climber. Note that energy is expended to lift both cable and climber. Note too the repetitive loads and unloads on the cable, with degrees of slack, deformation, and sudden re-tensioning, all of which may wear the cable, causing ultimate failure or the need for regular maintenance and replacement.
Scenario 2 - What though if the top of the cable remains stationary, maintaining its precise altitude, via the very principles of the space elevator? The overall inertia of the cable could keep in stationary, but forces acting axially would stretch the cable according to its elastic properties and parameters. What then if the cable was engineered in such a way that its material, width, length, and density all create a resonant frequency that the vibrator could match. The cable might tense and de-tense symmetrically along its length, acting as any type of oscillating spring, without any net change in length nor significant 2- and 3-dimensional deformation. At a non-resonant harmonic, the cable would lose energy, and the vibrator at the bottom and a thruster at the top would have to pump it back in, just like in scenario #1. But if the vibration goes at the right frequency, the cable could be kept oscillating at minimum energy, just enough to overcome internal friction and inertance. Seems to me that a lot of energy would have to be put in in the first place to get the system running, but once there, only a little bit of power needs to be supplied to keep it tuned. In that sense, it is no different than any other mechanical or electronic oscillator, eg the tank circuit in a radio receiver, that can be kept running with only minimum new energy at the resonant frequency. The climber would be lifted with each local upward recoil of the cable. This would dampen the oscillation a bit, and this is where the vibrator at the bottom would react on each cycle to put that energy back into the system, to keep it oscillating on frequency. If this is running at the cable's prime frequency, then the only energy expended is in lifting the climber. (Resupplying internal heat losses in the cable is part of the baseline overhead of running the system, not a cost against lifting the payload). And, there is much less wear on the cable, so maintenance costs are down. The caveat to this is that the cable must be vibrating non-stop. The energy of resonance would be like a giant flywheel or stretched spring, and it would be way too expensive to power it up and down each time you want to use it. So, power it up just once, putting gobs of energy into oscillating the cable at its resonant frequency, then maintain that frequency with tiny squirts of energy on each cycle. When a climber wants to climb, the "kicker" on the vibrator simple puts in a bit more force or energy on each cycle to supply the energy needed to lift the climber. More energy is needed in th
"Is not the restraint systems. No restraint system could have saved them. The fact that their vehicle was disintegrating from burning up might have something to do with it."
You are missing the point of what forensic pathology is all about. Correct, nothing was survivable as that craft disintegrated. BUT, examining the forensic evidence establishes precisely how the bodies were injured and when death occurred, and by what mechanism. For instance, atlanto-axial dislocation of the cervical spine, a skull fracture, rib fractures, a lacerated aorta at the ligamentum arteriosum - these all say boatloads about the moment-by-moment events, and what precisely caused the lethal and non-lethal traumas to the body. Knowing how the body was injured then lets you infer the sequence of dynamic loads on the body, and from that where and when the hardware and systems failed, and then from that, where there is room for improvement. This is no different than when the NTSB investigates a plane crash, with the "engineering analysis" being done by pathologists on the cadavers, rather than structural engineers on wing and fuselage parts.
Let's say for instance that the crew compartment was hardened to survive a breakup, no structural failure of that "escape pod", no decompression, plus a parachute system to ensure a soft landing. Even then, the crew would have died. Why? Because the seating and restraint system allowed their bodies to move in lethal ways during sudden accel-/deceleration, or because sloppy crew practices forgot to don helmet or gloves, rendering the pressure conservation system irrelevant. It is from forensic studies like this that you can figure exactly what went wrong, and then engineer or enforce better systems to prevent future calamity. No system like Shuttle re-entry can be made entirely safe and non-lethal, but understanding each aspect of failure leads to better designs and practices which can prevent lethality during lesser degrees of catastrophe.
>> somewhat as flamebait >>
No, it's a fair observation, but only partly true. The sad part is that it IS true in part.
>> doctors are mechanics for the human body. No more, no less. >>
When I first learned about electronics, I asked a professor about how much he kept in mind the physics of it all when he designed a circuit. His reply was that all that stuff about electrons and holes and field effects and so on about how transistors work, didn't mean a thing . . . you learn how to string the parts to gether, do the calculations, and you get a circuit. Science means a lot to study how things work and how to engineer new devices, but not for the nuts and bolts daily application of tried and true methodology, no matter what field you are in. Lots of everyday medical practice is bore-me-to-tears nuts and bolts, but that's what the job is.
>> The vast, overwhelming majority of doctors have little to no true scientific training, any more so than a business person or Joe the Plumber. >>
Erroneous. Plumbers and business people may have little very little science knowledge. Doctors have a lot - it is a necessary prerequisite to have math, physics, chemistry, biology, and so on. You cannot understand the nuts-and-bolts daily grunt work without it. However, it is true that most doctors have no credentials to be an investigative scientist. And sadly, many do not apply their science knowledge daily to solve challenging or unusual cases. Then again, there are a lot of biology grads doing lab work that sucks and barely qualifies as science either. If a meterology grad gets a job as a TV weatherman, they are not sceintists, but they do know somthing about science. There is no black-and-white, just shades of grey in between.
>> Even those doctors doing active medical research have limited scientific faculties >>
That is just a silly stereotype - you just don't know the right people. It is true that most physicians are not scientists, but there are some excellent ones. Just remember, don't confuse science with practice. Most doctors do just practice, a limited few do just science, and some do both (and well). All have been well schooled in the foundations, but whether they learned or snoozed through it is another story. And, some doctors are just idiots too. In the end, if you are sick, you want a doctor who can fix your problem and make you healthy, not tell you how to do a PCR or a LaPlace transform.
This is really a story about the Yellow's - Fever and Journalism that is - and a collective fever of the social psyche that allows reports like this to flourish
Media have ALWAYS played up the sensational, ignoring the good, and marginalizing their own mistakes. In the US, the concept of free speech keeps the governmant from suppressing communication, but there is no such thing as "free speech". Those with the means of traditional puiblication are bound to readership, advertisers, shareholders, and profitibility - the "truth" is only that which sells the most. "Remember the Maine", the Spanish American War, and the media wars of Pulitzer-vs-Hearst. Media reports like this survive and thrive on FUD. It is the basis of YELLOW JOURNALISM. The nice thing about Slashdot and similar blogs, Usenet, and the like, is that this is a genuinely free and democratic forum for the exchange of news and ideas.
FUD-mongering is much easier to spread and manipulate when it comes to technical subjects that average people do not understand - like medical and technology things. The original newspaper stories in this report were no different than the late-night TV ads by lawyer sleaze-buckets who advertise for medical malpractice and medical device liability. All that BS is easy to sell to Joe Sixpack.
The follow-up reports and references, like the one showing decreased asthma episodes and expense among MMR vaccinated children, show the value of public health programs and medical technologies. People need to see the BIG picture, but sadly, many cannot see beyond the ends of their noses. The problem is that many people today are the recipients of public health benefits that they have no idea about. For instance, who today worries about being crippled by polio, dying from smallpox or pertussis, becoming neurologically impaired by measles? Scourges of bygone centuries are all but forgotten by the average person - thanks to vaccines and public health programs, the doctors and scientists who developed them, the companies and governments that made it all possible, and the public who funded them. Nothing is perfect though, and there may in fact be the occasional complication or death from a vaccine, but we do what we do because 3 deaths a year from a medical treatment that saves 100,000 deaths a year from the disease is a good thing. Any newspaper reporter, editor, publisher, or owner who wants to "stick their money where their mouth is", ought to NOT vaccinate their own kids for any of these diseases, then see what happens.
If people had as much fear of Yellow Journalism as they do of Yellow Fever, we wouldn't see nonsense like this. Sadly, most people have no more appreciation of Yellow Journalism than they do of Yellow Fever, and they can be easily infected by both. Yellow Fever is not prevalent in most parts of the worls, but Yellow Journalism is. Slashdot and similar community forums are a good vaccine for FUD and false reporting, but sadly, they do not have the wide reaching cirulation and readership that fudpapers do. On the other hand, MANY traditional newspapers are downsizing because of competition from modern internet media - let's hope that more truth and less FUD prevail as time goes by.
The responses to this item support the worthiness of text messaging - Amen. But there is a bleaker side to this - reflecting the deterioration of quality in surgical education, at least here in the USA, but probably elsewhere. Any vascular surgeon should know how to do a forequarter amputation, or any amputation. It's not that hard, and it is a basic concept in General Surgery, the grandaddy and pre-requisite of Vascular Surgery. It's not like this was a brain tumor or pancreatectomy, where some specialized knowledge and experience is needed. So, while the story sounds heroic, and it had a happy outcome for the patient, and it demos the value of text messaging and instant world-wide communication, even into the most remote bush or outback, please consider what this story sounds like to a seasoned surgeon:
Hi, I'm a baker. I run our local bake shop. We make pies and cakes, bread and cookies all day long . . .
Wow, I am so glad to be a finalist in the Food Network Pro Baker's Bake-Off, what an honor . . .
What's that you say? Our secret bake-off challenge is to bake a muffin? Holy crap Batman, I don't know how to bake a muffin. Quick, how can I text message the Iron Chef?
Puleeeze . . . .
I have been listening to this story being hyped in the news all day, but it doesn't deserve quite that much attention. While this is a "great case" that most surgeons would appreciate, and a great outcome for the patient, the CNN report (and NPR and others) does what lay media generally do with medical reports - over-dramatize yesterday's news. This is an evolutionary case based on established surgical technologies which have been validated over the past 12 years, not a revolutionary implementation of new science. And regardless if you have any thoughts or opinions about embryonic stem cell research, this is not an embryonic case, it is just the use of autogenous cells to repopulate a regenerative biomatrix.
This is the "new surgery" of the 21st century, a move toward live engineering of living tissues rather than using alloplastic implants. Much of this new surgery is done strictly in situ, inserting an implant, and letting pluripotential cells circulating through the host find the implant and then reorganize themselves into a mature tissue. This works well with connective tissue matrices that will support the ingrowth of "connective tissue cells" derived from the embryonic mesoderm. The items available to surgeons are manufactured matrices such as Integra (Integra Life Sciences, New Jersey), and cadaveric matrices, usually dermis (of human, bovine, porcine, and equine origin, eg from LifeCell, Ethicon, TEI Biosciences, et al). Simply put, we implant these materials to reconstruct dermis, fascias, ligaments, and various skeletal and mesenchymal structures, and human host cells find them and make new living dermis-fascia-ligaments-etc. This works extremely well for reconstruction of skin and musculoskeletal structures. Not much progress has been made yet on the generation of glands and organs (which require function specific epithelial or ecto-entodermal cells).
These technologies and procedures have been a part of regular surgical practice since about 1996. Make no mistake about it - the tracheo-bronchial reconstruction you read about is a great case, but it is just a progressive implementation of existing concepts and methods to a wider range of diseases and indications. There will be more and more and more of this is the coming decades. In fact, existing regenerative materials could have easily made a new trachea-like conduit, avoiding the need for a human anatomical gift or organ donation, except for one thing . . .
The trachea and bronchi need a special architecture to avoid collapse. Because of the Bernoulli principle, these conduits could collapse during inspiration, so nature prevents that by having these pipes surrounded by semi-rigid cartilage rings. Regenerated cadaveric dermis by itself will not work. So instead, these guys used a donated trachea for its gross architecture and mechanical integrity, processed it in the same way that dermal matrices are processed to get rid of cells and immunogens, and then they seeded some host cells, then let it grow in situ. In actuality, the seeding step was largely irrelevant. When collagen-aminoglycan matrices (decellularized cadaveric materials) are implanted, circulating stem cells find them automatically. Pre-seeding could speed up the process by a week or so, but no big deal.
The cells which were seeded were NOT embryonic stem cells. They were just autogenous random marrow cells, some of which will be pluripotential, and able to regenerate tissues according to an embryonic model of tissue histogenesis. Note too that even if these were embryonic omnipotent stem cells, there is no such thing as a tracheal cell. What they implanted was a connective tissue matrix, generated by, and then repopulated by two and only two types of cells: fibroblasts and vascular cells. This is the supporting structure of all organs and tissues. Think of it like reinforced concrete. You can use cement and rebar to make a bridge, a road, a building, and so on, all with different shapes, loads, and functions, but it's all just cement and rebar.
I saw your comments - that is precisely what got me to thinking about this. I appreciate your insights - thanks.
!drawkcab siht daer ot gniyrt ekil si neerg no etihw gnidaeR
.
(Hold your monitor up to a mirror to see what it really says.)
This got me to thinking - but I am no expert on this - so here's a question for those who know:
Given legal and licensing issues, it makes sense to work around this issue with a RISC / VLIW core (and NVidia has already mastered this) with a JIT or x86 bytecode interpreter at the front end. The pipeline grows by a cycle or two or six or eight, but throughput after the first nanosecond is the same . . . or is it?
Could this be the marriage that ends the x86 vs RISC war? Like a Windows VM riding on top of Linux, is this a way to maintain legacy compatibility and programming efficiency with increased horsepower? Assuming the same fabrication scale and technology, the same semiconductor chemistry and fabrication, all other things being equal, I can imagine that a RISC/VLIW processor could be made to outperform an x86 core by lightyears. Complex highly parallel code could be executed with fewer transistors per core, more cores per chip (or smaller chips), decreased energy and heat, increased clock speeds, etc. I can even foresee where the pre-process interpreter could be swapped in or out (on the die) to make the multi-core, multi-pipeline RISC processor compatible with any other existing processor or code base. If NVidia's core is itself proprietary and protected, and if the hybrid chip really looks like an x86 to the code base out there, but runs really really fast and cool and efficient, this could put NVidia on the throne of processor sales in decades to come.
Whether any of these rumors are true or not, whether any of this happens or not, am I right in thinking that an interpreted front end on a good RISC processor would ultimately be faster and more efficient?
Your reasoning may be a bit specious. If your databases get "several thousand writes per second", it sounds like this may be massive underuse of your bandwidth - i.e. your servers or databases may be able to handle hundreds of thousands or millions of writes per second. If a few seconds were lost or went down, then the incoming traffic might get cached or queued, waiting for services to come back on line. Once the connection is re-established, the write backlog might take only a few seconds or a few fractions of a second to catch up and be back to real time. Users might be unaware of the whole thing, or they would re-log and try again, and there would be no perceptible throttle or bottleneck to data logging. Any system that presses its bandwidth limits, any system that walks dangerously close to its top capacity, with no capacitances or reserves, is likely to be down quite a bit. A system such as yours, which hardly taxes its bandwidth at all (I am guessing) could certainly tolerate lost seconds. Admittedly, your system may have had problems like this in the past, and the system was upgraded to handle higher capacity. . . . Which is why Wikipedia no longer runs on just one machine. It does sound as though Wikipedia may have found a sweet spot, balancing load against reserve capacity or bandwidth, for robust up-time versus economic efficiency. I am sure that this is a topic that computer and network engineers have studied exhaustively - perhaps someone else knows?
Right idea, but wrong year I think.
/.'er, but I am VERY happy with XP, and very happy to be looking at alternatives (Nix'es) to Vista because of how bad an experience that Vista has been. I think that 2008 - 2009 is the year that many folk, tech and regular alike, start to look elsewhere - BUT . . .
2008 will be the year that many people start to look for alternatives. Remember, this is Slashdot, tech savvy people who are very familiar with these issues, but who are but a small fraction of overall computer users. 2008 is the year that many regular folks start to question their OS. Remember, most "regular folks" get their Vista with a new computer. MS claims to have "sold" 100M or so copies of Vista. If true, they are sowing seeeds of destruction, because enough regular folk will start to see the limtations of this release and start to complain and look for alternatives. It happened to me - I'm a tech savvy
That alone won't drive Linux onto the desktop in great numbers. Too many regular folk with limited computing needs are / will be happy enough with Vista, or they won't know any different. Left to the desktop market itself, Windows will reign for a long time, no matter how bad it might be - BUT . . .
Linux will succeed on the desktop for the very same reason that Windows originally did: migration from the workplace.
Remember when PCs were nerdy things for the tech elite? Not that long ago. Two things changed that. One was the development of the Web, which brought "point-and-shoot" graphical commerce and communications onto the desktop. That is what suddenly drove everyone and their granny to get wired. By that time, many people were already very familiar and comfortable with PCs and Windows because they used them at work - they already knew how to use a PC, even if they had never bought one themselves. Dominance in business, as opposed to arts & graphics, is what let MS reign over Apple - Windows won the hearts and minds of regular folk because that is what they learned at work.
Linux will succeed on the desktop because the WORKPLACE hates Vista and is looking for Linux solutions. The more that "regular folk" employees use a new Linux system at work, they more that Linux will grow on them. Think of how easy it is for them to learn a new OS under these circumstances. They will use it because their employer decided on Linux. Like or not at first, they can learn it safely, non-threatening, non-anxiety provoking, since they need not worry about losing their own data, and the company IT will support their learning curve.
Once the workplace starts switching to Linux, people will start to learn it, and use it, and like it. When it then comes time to buy a new PC at home, and if they have had a bad MS-Windows experience, they may then have no hesitation to get what they already know and like from work. The more this happens, the more users will start seeking productivity apps, and this will drive third party app development, which in turns strengthens Linux's position, and the whole thing ramps up.
The average person will not get Linux on the desktop because they hate Vista - most have never heard of Linux yet. They will get Linux on the desktop because they had a good experience with it at work, and they now know how to use it.
I think that "2008 is the year of the Linux desktop" only in the sense that this is the year that the soil is tilled, and some of the seeds are planted. The growing season will come over the next 2-3 years. If MS flops with their latest promise of Win7, then Linux can expect a huge bumper crop by 2012-2014.
Living in Phoenix.
Some of the comments in this thread refer to Ballmer and madness. In the end, that may be indeed what brings down MS - simple human arrogance, pride, prejudice, and hubris - to an obsessive degree. Poets and artists throughout the ages have dramatized or memorialized similar events. It does make you wonder what is going on - or not - in the chambers of the Board of Directors. Do they know what's going on? Do they get it? Do they care? None of this activity makes sense - Just Not Right, as you said. That's why my silly fanciful story makes as much sense as anything - it at least fits some of the facts as well as anything.
[Apologies - I posted this already, buried somewhere deep in this thread. Sorry if you see the duplicate - this is my first Slashdot post, and I got it all bolloxed and in the wrong place - but I think I got it all straight now.]
Now, now. Before all you naysayers and Slashdot cynics read too much into this, consider that there may be some real madness to their methods. Consider this report, on the front page of my newspaper, retrieved by my time-traveling teletype machine.
Reprinted from the Bizarro World Times
April 1, 2010
Headline:
BALLMER PLAYS FIDDLE AS MICROSOFT BURNS
Reported by Peter Perplexed and Wally Whathehelljusthappened
Federal investigators with the SEC and FBI, along with Interpol authorities, today released preliminary information about the sudden and dramatic collapse of Microsoft. Investors, employees and customers, still largely in the dark about the sudden seeming evaporation of the company, were none to happy to hear this news, but at least there was a sense of relief that some answers are starting to come through.
Employees at all Microsoft campuses worldwide showed up to work today to find their buildings padlocked, the workforce locked out. Customer support at all levels, the phones at all of the corporate offices, and the MS website and MSN are all completely offline. Shareholders seem to have lost their entire investment in Microsoft as the NASDAQ has eliminated the company form the exchange. What happened? How could it happen so suddenly and so thoroughly? Where are the company principals (not to mention their principles)?
And even more peculiar, we are starting to receive worldwide reports of their latest operating system, Windows Smokescreen (aka Windows 7) suddenly quitting - wiping hard drives on systems that it is installed on, or otherwise refusing to boot a computer. Here at the Times, we first noted problems when many users started getting the following message: "You do not seem to have the properly signed and verified digital rights to the email and txt files you just created - you are hereby prohibited from using Windows again."
Based on the public reporting by the above agencies, plus investigations from multiple news agencies and tech and financial reporters, we believe that the following is an accurate, albeit sketchy recreation of events at the world's largest software vendor, beginning about 2 years ago, leading up to today's dramatic events:
January 2008 - Numerous events indicate that MS is aware of the fiasco that is Vista, its latest release of Windows. Regardless that the new OS has a variety of merits, it simply has too many demerits, and it has garnered no loyalty nor market share among home and business users - especially among businesses - meaning a serious interruption of revenue and credibility for the company and its flagship product. MS announces an accelerated schedule for creating and releasing its next proposed Windows OS - version 7. Many are skeptical.
February, 2008 - MS announces a hostile takeover bid for Yahoo! No one can understand a legitimate or business-responsible rationale for this move. General opinions take the dim cynical view that this is an expensive but lame attempt to compete with Google, by eliminating the third major player in the online search and advertising market. The offer is made at nearly TWICE the outstanding market capitalization of Yahoo!
March, 2008 - Until now, Yahoo! has made no official reply. The unofficial discussion from Yahoo! execs is that the bid is a disgrace, that they will never capitulate to the rapacious so-and-so's at the Evil Empire, that market consolidation is a losing proposition for the public, that the deal will NEVER go through. Nevertheless, market speculation on Yahoo! and MS stock drives up share prices.
April, 2008 - Over the past month, the MS bid for Yahoo! has risen another 30%, to a net of nearly $58 B (billion), keeping ahead of the speculative price rises and nominal Yahoo! value. All of the fuz
Now, now. Before all you naysayers and Slashdot cynics read too much into this, consider that there may be some real madness to their methods. Consider this report, on the front page of my newspaper, retrieved by my time-traveling teletype machine.
Reprinted from the Bizarro World Times
April 1, 2010
Headline:
BALLMER PLAYS FIDDLE AS MICROSOFT BURNS
Reported by Peter Perplexed and Wally Whathehelljusthappened
Federal investigators with the SEC and FBI, along with Interpol authorities, today released preliminary information about the sudden and dramatic collapse of Microsoft. Investors, employees and customers, still largely in the dark about the sudden seeming evaporation of the company, were none to happy to hear this news, but at least there was a sense of relief that some answers are starting to come through.
Employees at all Microsoft campuses worldwide showed up to work today to find their buildings padlocked, the workforce locked out. Customer support at all levels, the phones at all of the corporate offices, and the MS website and MSN are all completely offline. Shareholders seem to have lost their entire investment in Microsoft as the NASDAQ has eliminated the company form the exchange. What happened? How could it happen so suddenly and so thoroughly? Where are the company principals (not to mention their principles)?
And even more peculiar, we are starting to receive worldwide reports of their latest operating system, Windows Smokescreen (aka Windows 7) suddenly quitting - wiping hard drives on systems that it is installed on, or otherwise refusing to boot a computer. Here at the Times, we first noted problems when many users started getting the following message: "You do not seem to have the properly signed and verified digital rights to the email and txt files you just created - you are hereby prohibited from using Windows again."
Based on the public reporting by the above agencies, plus investigations from multiple news agencies and tech and financial reporters, we believe that the following is an accurate, albeit sketchy recreation of events at the world's largest software vendor, beginning about 2 years ago, leading up to today's dramatic events:
January 2008 - Numerous events indicate that MS is aware of the fiasco that is Vista, its latest release of Windows. Regardless that the new OS has a variety of merits, it simply has too many demerits, and it has garnered no loyalty nor market share among home and business users - especially among businesses - meaning a serious interruption of revenue and credibility for the company and its flagship product. MS announces an accelerated schedule for creating and releasing its next proposed Windows OS - version 7. Many are skeptical.
February, 2008 - MS announces a hostile takeover bid for Yahoo! No one can understand a legitimate or business-responsible rationale for this move. General opinions take the dim cynical view that this is an expensive but lame attempt to compete with Google, by eliminating the third major player in the online search and advertising market. The offer is made at nearly TWICE the outstanding market capitalization of Yahoo!
March, 2008 - Until now, Yahoo! has made no official reply. The unofficial discussion from Yahoo! execs is that the bid is a disgrace, that they will never capitulate to the rapacious so-and-so's at the Evil Empire, that market consolidation is a losing proposition for the public, that the deal will NEVER go through. Nevertheless, market speculation on Yahoo! and MS stock drives up share prices.
April, 2008 - Over the past month, the MS bid for Yahoo! has risen another 30%, to a net of nearly $58 B (billion), keeping ahead of the speculative price rises and nominal Yahoo! value. All of the fuzzy warm sentiments about corporate independence, freedom, mom, baseball, and apple pie go by the wayside, as money talks. At a hurried and hastily organized Yahoo! shareholders meeting, the merger-buyout is accepted.
May, 2008 - F
Now, now. Before all you naysayers and Slashdot cynics read too much into this, consider that there may be some real madness to their methods. Consider this report, on the front page of my newspaper, retrieved by my time-traveling teletype machine. Reprinted from the Bizarro World Times April 1, 2010 Headline: BALLMER PLAYS FIDDLE AS MICROSOFT BURNS Reported by Peter Perplexed and Wally Whathehelljusthappened Federal investigators with the SEC and FBI, along with Interpol authorities, today released preliminary information about the sudden and dramatic collapse of Microsoft. Investors, employees and customers, still largely in the dark about the sudden seeming evaporation of the company, were none to happy to hear this news, but at least there was a sense of relief that some answers are starting to come through. Employees at all Microsoft campuses worldwide showed up to work today to find their buildings padlocked, the workforce locked out. Customer support at all levels, the phones at all of the corporate offices, and the MS website and MSN are all completely offline. Shareholders seem to have lost their entire investment in Microsoft as the NASDAQ has eliminated the company form the exchange. What happened? How could it happen so suddenly and so thoroughly? Where are the company principals (not to mention their principles)? And even more peculiar, we are starting to receive worldwide reports of their latest operating system, Windows Smokescreen (aka Windows 7) suddenly quitting - wiping hard drives on systems that it is installed on, or otherwise refusing to boot a computer. Here at the Times, we first noted problems when many users started getting the following message: "You do not seem to have the properly signed and verified digital rights to the email and txt files you just created - you are hereby prohibited from using Windows again." Based on the public reporting by the above agencies, plus investigations from multiple news agencies and tech and financial reporters, we believe that the following is an accurate, albeit sketchy recreation of events at the world's largest software vendor, beginning about 2 years ago, leading up to today's dramatic events: January 2008 - Numerous events indicate that MS is aware of the fiasco that is Vista, its latest release of Windows. Regardless that the new OS has a variety of merits, it simply has too many demerits, and it has garnered no loyalty nor market share among home and business users - especially among businesses - meaning a serious interruption of revenue and credibility for the company and its flagship product. MS announces an accelerated schedule for creating and releasing its next proposed Windows OS - version 7. Many are skeptical. February, 2008 - MS announces a hostile takeover bid for Yahoo! No one can understand a legitimate or business-responsible rationale for this move. General opinions take the dim cynical view that this is an expensive but lame attempt to compete with Google, by eliminating the third major player in the online search and advertising market. The offer is made at nearly TWICE the outstanding market capitalization of Yahoo! March, 2008 - Until now, Yahoo! has made no official reply. The unofficial discussion from Yahoo! execs is that the bid is a disgrace, that they will never capitulate to the rapacious so-and-so's at the Evil Empire, that market consolidation is a losing proposition for the public, that the deal will NEVER go through. Nevertheless, market speculation on Yahoo! and MS stock drives up share prices. April, 2008 - Over the past month, the MS bid for Yahoo! has risen another 30%, to a net of nearly $58 B (billion), keeping ahead of the speculative price rises and nominal Yahoo! value. All of the fuzzy warm sentiments about corporate independence, freedom, mom, baseball, and apple pie go by the wayside, as money talks. At a hurried and hastily organized Yahoo! shareholders meeting, the merger-buyout is accepted. May, 2008 - Financial reporters start to speculate why there has not been much discuss