Genetic engineering/splicing seems to rile some folks, but I think it offers some interesting insight into the potential for ecosystems by design.
As I understand it, evolution/natural selection is the natural effect when
beings are subjected to adversity: only the strong survive. Thinking about
this, it becomes clear that in a model where evolution is the sole factor
traits that affect survival are gradually weeded out over time because those
without such traits are more likely to survive. So too beings that experienced
beneficial mutation are likely to preserve such traits.
But this
article raises an interesting consideration. When I was in junior high,
we took a brief field trip to collect pond water to view under microscopes,
and one of the most interesting things was how those little critters with the
thing called a flagellum would zoom around. This article brings up the point
that this device, which is not exclusive to pond scum, is "irreducibly
complex": it is made up of several parts, none of which separately would
be of beneficial use to the creature employing it (in fact, such a creature
would probably die off under natural selection.) The odds of a mutation
creating all parts simultaneously are astronomical, and consequently, the only
accepted theory that can sanely describe such a thing is intelligent design,
which has been hinted at in many different real-life examples as well as
probabistically explained by Pascal's Wager.
This theory is currently derided and discriminated against in favor of older
theories, mind you, much as Galileo was in favor of the theory that the Earth
was flat, because it threatens to dredge up the uncomfortable unknown. But like
any theory, the more evidence that is found to support it particularly to the
exclusion of existing theories, the more likely it is correct. So as skeptical
as I am of intelligent design, I can't help but notice how much of our biological
model it predicts. Has anybody heard anything more about this?
I imagine this ties in with Windows Media Player as well, and that we can look forward to shopping through it for the latest in music and audiobooks?
Everybody who said that the interface didn't matter will now have their chance to be proven right. I still think Microsoft's solution is going to win on Windows, and it'll in no small part be due to their attention to Windows interface standards in implementing their application.
The fact of the matter is that they've proven to adapt themselves well to competing platforms (and the competition in general), whereas Apple software only seems to look good and perform well on Apple hardware. If you look at things like Office for the Mac, you can see that when Microsoft puts their effort towards cross-platform products they actually work at making the product fit in with the environment it's supposed to work with.
So, in the long run, if Apple doesn't dramatically revamp their iTunes offering on Windows, I fully expect it to be swamped by Microsoft's opumescent solution.
There is a perceptible slowing of the Internet as the flare hits our magnetosphere -- at first I thought this might be satellite-related, however the slowdown appears to occur within the country as well as to overseas links. Perhaps this is related to the effect on the power grid?
Gaming is interactive; television is not. For most gamers, watching people play games is like watching people eat food. They're more interested in the participation.
Gamers don't really need a heads-up about what's new. They largely play sequels or the latest tired iteration of the first-person shooter/RTS genres, or whatever their favorite magazine tells them to get for their consoles. Reviews all lie anyway.
Gamers aren't going to bother sitting in front of a TV for hours when they can sit in front of a computer for hours. The biggest decision for many is whether to camp in a plane in BF1942 or bitch in the public forums.
Game channels/shows don't succeed because even if they were firing on all cylinders the hardcore gamer is on the computer and nobody else really cares to watch them. It's the poker tournament dilemma with electronics.
Because being able to follow networks of business relations and friendships is something that would be very valuable to many organizations. Perhaps more valuable than a happy user of their software, if you catch my drift.
I have more problems with the implementation than the idea.
Black boxes in vehicles should be common knowledge, easily retrievable in a court case (preferably fitting a common standard), and tamperproof.
The fault I find with them right now is that because most people don't know they're there it's more likely black box information would be used in cases against the owner rather than by the owner as concurring evidence to an accident report.
If Microsoft is effectively reined in, would this be a net benefit to the computer industry?
Who would fill the void? Their leading competitors have higher priorities than consumer satisfaction and industry cooperation, I'll bet.
Does mixing up standards again seem like a good idea? Plug and play ain't the prettiest but it's a damn sight better than trying to get things to work in the 80s used to be.
Justice doesn't always equal punishment. In business, sometimes it really is about letting the ends justify the means. I'd prefer Microsoft take a more relaxed stance towards Open Source and the like, sure, but I think the people in this process are showing great wisdom in not immediately jumping down Microsoft's throat. Stifling innovation is the quickest way to kill this industry.
Right now, SCO's drive has been towards getting businesses to compensate them. Issuing and tracking licenses for 1000 corporations is easier than handling the whole Linux community.
Microsoft has multiple tiers for their licensing plans. It's likely that SCO has yet to implement more efficient licensing plans for the community at large; I'd imagine that eventually they'll set up a form where one can pay for their service with a credit card online and get a unique customer number or something similar. But it shouldn't be a surprise that more attention is paid to businesses that are using more services and are therefore more lucrative to focus on.
Besides, do you really want them to start charging everybody right now? I'd welcome this reprieve.
Besides the speed advantage, SCSI drives also typically last two to three times longer than their IDE counterparts, and generally go through more rigorous testing.
Tape drives are like this, too. They look the same, they act about the same during the write process, but the cheapie drives that come with some servers will fail to reread the tapes if they're reused as constantly as they are in most businesses (who, on average, reuse the same weekly tapes for a full year or more!). Better to put the money into a DLTtape solution than to rely on what's bundled with the server.
Thin clients still make a great deal of sense to deploy. Point-of-sale, inventory, universities, libraries, kiosks, and pretty much any other single-purpose/limited-purpose configuration particularly where a large number of machines are deployed with identical configurations demand client/server setup.
I'd argue we'll see even more of this when Microsoft's.NET initiative takes hold. Their plans will make it very easy for businesses to run supercomputers and lease time out to other businesses or even homes.
The interface kind of sucks. Why they chose to redefine 'Maximize' is beyond me, and you can't get it to fill the window.
I don't think saving $2 on an album is that great of a bargain when the compression is lossy and you factor in the cost of disc and jewel case.
Quicktime and iTunesHelper are both loaded at computer startup and happily sit in the background, guzzling memory (iTunesHelper is 3 MB, for example). Does this crap really need to run when I'm not using it?
Arbitrary restrictions on burning a playlist (10 burns, then you have to mess with it to burn more) seems a bit silly.
That said, I do like the store browsing, and getting 30sec of good quality samples on the music is pretty nice, although I'd prefer full song at low quality (might be a problem with Audiobooks, but they've proven they can differentiate the two.)
At this point, I'm going to stick with buying used and ripping the stuff into Windows Media Player. The interface is better, it doesn't automatically suck memory when I'm not using it, and the visualization runs at more than 3fps.
Today's Internet culture is an example of what happens when you have to mix entertainment in with something good.
If I want a good time I'll spend a night on the town. They don't need to keep dumping packets of sugar into everything else I consume just to make it palatable to mouthbreathers.
I get your point, but I don't think they're shooting for ratings. They just want to be included in the cable packages along with all those other crappy stations we've got to buy along with the two or three we watch.
djbdns looked like an interesting and secure alternative to BIND, but I'll be darned if I can get it to cache/forward DNS requests and serve its own at the same time.
The answer in the manual was to use a server for each, which entirely missed the point of why I was seeking Free Software to do this in the first place. Ultimately I went with Windows 2000, which in this narrow scenario did what I wanted without the issues that plague BIND.
qmail, on the other hand, installed simply (for a Unix program) and worked flawlessly. A true gem of a program.
Verisign seems like they're more interested in performing as a business rather than acting as a steward for the domain registry.
A lot of people seem upset about the whole Sitefinder thing, though, which struck me as kind of wierd. IE popped up a helpful page when a domain wasn't found; what's so bad about the actual domain registrar doing it? Anyway, it seemed like a miniature thing next to some of the other problems people had with them. (Interesting thing I found out; miniature with British pronounciation actually means 'microscopic or smaller' where with English it's just 'small'.)
The point I'm getting to: there are other registrars that seem to do the same thing at the end of the day without all the baggage or cost.
I assume most if not all of this will be available for download (via GPL) correct? Granted, with a few more advertisements and all... but even if you pay for it you get those right?
Actually, it's been scientifically proven that in any group of n people, where n is a logistically huge number but easily represented by your average P2P population, on average n/20 of the population will accurately represent the opinion of the population.
This means, effectively, that the scheme will work if only one person in twenty rates the content.
I don't think it's a very savory concept, but what's the alternative: they all just dissipate and find other jobs that are nonexistant in our economy?
This was not a good time to implement a nationwide do-not-call list. Although maybe I don't care about this so much because I don't have a cell phone and don't intend to get one (they may or may not give you brain cancer, but everybody I know that has one has no attention span anymore.)
So long as they keep away from faxes, and keep the pitches to a minimum, this probably isn't that big of a deal. Maybe they can even cut a deal to make instant messenging between phones free if you're willing to get the occasional ad?
The change from SMTP to something else is probably the only thing that will work, in my opinion. Every other proposed option is a kludgy workaround.
Bayesian filters work pretty well, but there is still a cost being borne by every system that must transfer the mail that's just being thrown away. Pay-to-play e-mail punishes everybody. SPEWS and similar are error prone as SomethingAwful have demonstrated and are reactive, not proactive.
We've got a greater need for SMTPng than IPng. I'm pretty sure that if a solution was available that was interoperable with current mail setups until a cutoff date a year or three in the future and deployed gradually we'd see something implemented that did the trick and cut way down on wasted bandwidth.
Ever since I began using the Internet, I invisioned its future as a massive online repository of information and media. It's nice to see that with projects like this, MIT OpenCourseware, and Project Gutenberg, some of the walls to information are beginning to crumble.
Knowledge is worthless if the right people don't have access to it. Who knows what sorts of inventions and discoveries we've missed out on because the person who could bring them to us lacked a critical element of the formula?
Anyway, it's good to see that science is starting to open up, hopefully with medicine to follow. There's another interesting resource I found, Origins, that has a great deal of scientific articles that may be of interest to people who are persuing that type of field, and no doubt a great deal more that will spring up now that the door has been opened to free scientific knowledge on the Internet.
I've been using Samba for awhile, and despite some config difficulties it performed as advertised.
However, even if it's quicker than Windows Server 2003, NFS still seems to do a great deal better on my home network for the same things. For example, I typically get 10%-20% of the transfer with SMB as I do with NFS.
So I don't recommend using Samba at all unless you're looking for Windows compatibility.
Well, at a minimum, they could have afforded to maintain OS/whatever in parallel with their Mac offering, much as Be did (BeOS ran on BeBocks/Intel).
It might not offer the same level of reliability, but Apple could have taken advantage of the peerless size of the Intel userbase and offered an alternative OS that would have been practical for the average user. They could have even built binaries that ran across both platforms without recompiling (just include both versions in the file and have the OS determine which to execute based on the hardware.)
Different strokes for different folks, of course, but I much preferred the humor in Discworld, which would also make an excellent bonus item were it offered.
Sam & Max is a little too hard to be a worthwhile title -- what use is there in having a really great plot (which I'm not accusing it of) when you're stuck on the same puzzle for hours (aka the Myst conundrum).
It'd be worth the fee if Kazaa would put together a team to verify the hashes, whether by paying them outright or comping them on the service. You know, earn their keep a little.
The ISP would also need a cut from Kazaa, since they're taking a portion of the bandwidth hit.
If there's anything that raises my hackles a bit, it's the concept of building a business model on illegal behavior as a means of doing legitimate business down the road. That's the opposite of the way things are done in this country.
This is bound to be subject to state and local laws (furthermore, I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advise but just helpful tips), so no advice you see here is going to be more helpful than that you'll get from a friendly neighborhood attorney.
However, this does bring to mind some things people should do to protect themselves from information fraud:
Shred or finely tear any documents with personal information. If it's a mailing, shred the envelope and any advertising with it as well.
Never purchase from a telemarketer, a TV commercial, or online stores. Telemarketing firms like to share information, and hire some pretty colorful people.
Put as little information on your check as possible (name only is best, or name and address).
Only use your credit card for paying bills.
Get a P.O. box.
Don't rent cars or purchase cell phones.
This is just a shortlist of information I've been told; basically, one has to be vigilant but also realize that much of this is beyond your control.
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As I understand it, evolution/natural selection is the natural effect when beings are subjected to adversity: only the strong survive. Thinking about this, it becomes clear that in a model where evolution is the sole factor traits that affect survival are gradually weeded out over time because those without such traits are more likely to survive. So too beings that experienced beneficial mutation are likely to preserve such traits.
But this article raises an interesting consideration. When I was in junior high, we took a brief field trip to collect pond water to view under microscopes, and one of the most interesting things was how those little critters with the thing called a flagellum would zoom around. This article brings up the point that this device, which is not exclusive to pond scum, is "irreducibly complex": it is made up of several parts, none of which separately would be of beneficial use to the creature employing it (in fact, such a creature would probably die off under natural selection.) The odds of a mutation creating all parts simultaneously are astronomical, and consequently, the only accepted theory that can sanely describe such a thing is intelligent design, which has been hinted at in many different real-life examples as well as probabistically explained by Pascal's Wager.
This theory is currently derided and discriminated against in favor of older theories, mind you, much as Galileo was in favor of the theory that the Earth was flat, because it threatens to dredge up the uncomfortable unknown. But like any theory, the more evidence that is found to support it particularly to the exclusion of existing theories, the more likely it is correct. So as skeptical as I am of intelligent design, I can't help but notice how much of our biological model it predicts. Has anybody heard anything more about this?
Everybody who said that the interface didn't matter will now have their chance to be proven right. I still think Microsoft's solution is going to win on Windows, and it'll in no small part be due to their attention to Windows interface standards in implementing their application.
The fact of the matter is that they've proven to adapt themselves well to competing platforms (and the competition in general), whereas Apple software only seems to look good and perform well on Apple hardware. If you look at things like Office for the Mac, you can see that when Microsoft puts their effort towards cross-platform products they actually work at making the product fit in with the environment it's supposed to work with.
So, in the long run, if Apple doesn't dramatically revamp their iTunes offering on Windows, I fully expect it to be swamped by Microsoft's opumescent solution.
There is a perceptible slowing of the Internet as the flare hits our magnetosphere -- at first I thought this might be satellite-related, however the slowdown appears to occur within the country as well as to overseas links. Perhaps this is related to the effect on the power grid?
- Gaming is interactive; television is not. For most gamers, watching people play games is like watching people eat food. They're more interested in the participation.
- Gamers don't really need a heads-up about what's new. They largely play sequels or the latest tired iteration of the first-person shooter/RTS genres, or whatever their favorite magazine tells them to get for their consoles. Reviews all lie anyway.
- Gamers aren't going to bother sitting in front of a TV for hours when they can sit in front of a computer for hours. The biggest decision for many is whether to camp in a plane in BF1942 or bitch in the public forums.
Game channels/shows don't succeed because even if they were firing on all cylinders the hardcore gamer is on the computer and nobody else really cares to watch them. It's the poker tournament dilemma with electronics.Because being able to follow networks of business relations and friendships is something that would be very valuable to many organizations. Perhaps more valuable than a happy user of their software, if you catch my drift.
Black boxes in vehicles should be common knowledge, easily retrievable in a court case (preferably fitting a common standard), and tamperproof.
The fault I find with them right now is that because most people don't know they're there it's more likely black box information would be used in cases against the owner rather than by the owner as concurring evidence to an accident report.
Who would fill the void? Their leading competitors have higher priorities than consumer satisfaction and industry cooperation, I'll bet.
Does mixing up standards again seem like a good idea? Plug and play ain't the prettiest but it's a damn sight better than trying to get things to work in the 80s used to be.
Justice doesn't always equal punishment. In business, sometimes it really is about letting the ends justify the means. I'd prefer Microsoft take a more relaxed stance towards Open Source and the like, sure, but I think the people in this process are showing great wisdom in not immediately jumping down Microsoft's throat. Stifling innovation is the quickest way to kill this industry.
Microsoft has multiple tiers for their licensing plans. It's likely that SCO has yet to implement more efficient licensing plans for the community at large; I'd imagine that eventually they'll set up a form where one can pay for their service with a credit card online and get a unique customer number or something similar. But it shouldn't be a surprise that more attention is paid to businesses that are using more services and are therefore more lucrative to focus on.
Besides, do you really want them to start charging everybody right now? I'd welcome this reprieve.
Tape drives are like this, too. They look the same, they act about the same during the write process, but the cheapie drives that come with some servers will fail to reread the tapes if they're reused as constantly as they are in most businesses (who, on average, reuse the same weekly tapes for a full year or more!). Better to put the money into a DLTtape solution than to rely on what's bundled with the server.
I'd argue we'll see even more of this when Microsoft's .NET initiative takes hold. Their plans will make it very easy for businesses to run supercomputers and lease time out to other businesses or even homes.
I don't think saving $2 on an album is that great of a bargain when the compression is lossy and you factor in the cost of disc and jewel case.
Quicktime and iTunesHelper are both loaded at computer startup and happily sit in the background, guzzling memory (iTunesHelper is 3 MB, for example). Does this crap really need to run when I'm not using it?
Arbitrary restrictions on burning a playlist (10 burns, then you have to mess with it to burn more) seems a bit silly.
That said, I do like the store browsing, and getting 30sec of good quality samples on the music is pretty nice, although I'd prefer full song at low quality (might be a problem with Audiobooks, but they've proven they can differentiate the two.)
At this point, I'm going to stick with buying used and ripping the stuff into Windows Media Player. The interface is better, it doesn't automatically suck memory when I'm not using it, and the visualization runs at more than 3fps.
Ditto with Starflight. Both series had the gaming down cold, and I'd like to see what could be done with them using today's technology.
If I want a good time I'll spend a night on the town. They don't need to keep dumping packets of sugar into everything else I consume just to make it palatable to mouthbreathers.
I get your point, but I don't think they're shooting for ratings. They just want to be included in the cable packages along with all those other crappy stations we've got to buy along with the two or three we watch.
The answer in the manual was to use a server for each, which entirely missed the point of why I was seeking Free Software to do this in the first place. Ultimately I went with Windows 2000, which in this narrow scenario did what I wanted without the issues that plague BIND.
qmail, on the other hand, installed simply (for a Unix program) and worked flawlessly. A true gem of a program.
A lot of people seem upset about the whole Sitefinder thing, though, which struck me as kind of wierd. IE popped up a helpful page when a domain wasn't found; what's so bad about the actual domain registrar doing it? Anyway, it seemed like a miniature thing next to some of the other problems people had with them. (Interesting thing I found out; miniature with British pronounciation actually means 'microscopic or smaller' where with English it's just 'small'.)
The point I'm getting to: there are other registrars that seem to do the same thing at the end of the day without all the baggage or cost.
I assume most if not all of this will be available for download (via GPL) correct? Granted, with a few more advertisements and all... but even if you pay for it you get those right?
This means, effectively, that the scheme will work if only one person in twenty rates the content.
This was not a good time to implement a nationwide do-not-call list. Although maybe I don't care about this so much because I don't have a cell phone and don't intend to get one (they may or may not give you brain cancer, but everybody I know that has one has no attention span anymore.)
So long as they keep away from faxes, and keep the pitches to a minimum, this probably isn't that big of a deal. Maybe they can even cut a deal to make instant messenging between phones free if you're willing to get the occasional ad?
Bayesian filters work pretty well, but there is still a cost being borne by every system that must transfer the mail that's just being thrown away. Pay-to-play e-mail punishes everybody. SPEWS and similar are error prone as SomethingAwful have demonstrated and are reactive, not proactive.
We've got a greater need for SMTPng than IPng. I'm pretty sure that if a solution was available that was interoperable with current mail setups until a cutoff date a year or three in the future and deployed gradually we'd see something implemented that did the trick and cut way down on wasted bandwidth.
Knowledge is worthless if the right people don't have access to it. Who knows what sorts of inventions and discoveries we've missed out on because the person who could bring them to us lacked a critical element of the formula?
Anyway, it's good to see that science is starting to open up, hopefully with medicine to follow. There's another interesting resource I found, Origins, that has a great deal of scientific articles that may be of interest to people who are persuing that type of field, and no doubt a great deal more that will spring up now that the door has been opened to free scientific knowledge on the Internet.
However, even if it's quicker than Windows Server 2003, NFS still seems to do a great deal better on my home network for the same things. For example, I typically get 10%-20% of the transfer with SMB as I do with NFS.
So I don't recommend using Samba at all unless you're looking for Windows compatibility.
It might not offer the same level of reliability, but Apple could have taken advantage of the peerless size of the Intel userbase and offered an alternative OS that would have been practical for the average user. They could have even built binaries that ran across both platforms without recompiling (just include both versions in the file and have the OS determine which to execute based on the hardware.)
Sam & Max is a little too hard to be a worthwhile title -- what use is there in having a really great plot (which I'm not accusing it of) when you're stuck on the same puzzle for hours (aka the Myst conundrum).
At least it's free, I guess.
The ISP would also need a cut from Kazaa, since they're taking a portion of the bandwidth hit.
If there's anything that raises my hackles a bit, it's the concept of building a business model on illegal behavior as a means of doing legitimate business down the road. That's the opposite of the way things are done in this country.
However, this does bring to mind some things people should do to protect themselves from information fraud:
- Shred or finely tear any documents with personal information. If it's a mailing, shred the envelope and any advertising with it as well.
- Never purchase from a telemarketer, a TV commercial, or online stores. Telemarketing firms like to share information, and hire some pretty colorful people.
- Put as little information on your check as possible (name only is best, or name and address).
- Only use your credit card for paying bills.
- Get a P.O. box.
- Don't rent cars or purchase cell phones.
This is just a shortlist of information I've been told; basically, one has to be vigilant but also realize that much of this is beyond your control.