On the other hand we are moving to a 24/7 society where people work different hours (the typical "office hours" are hopefully a thing of the past, including the two traffic jams in the morning and evening). Some countries are clearly ahead of others. As a Swede I still can not get over that they are closing all shops around 18 or 19 o'clock here in Belgium (and they are closed on Sundays!). For me, it will be very liberating when I can choose when to work and when to do shopping etc instead of moving along with the herd. In that society we also do not need a local time.
I think you may have the wrong picture, unless Steve Jobs has turned into Norse Mythology. Honestly, I don't want to acknolwedge the existence of iDin, which is 30% thinner and lighter than Odin
The fun thing is that I read this wrong as Idun, who happened to be the norse godess who watched over the golden apples that made the gods immortal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%C3%B0unn)
Sample selection will always cause a bias no matter how extensive it is. The important thing is that the sources are well described so that the bias(es) can be properly accounted for (I think GoogleBooks does fit that requirement). The interesting thing with this paper is that it makes use of the "-omics" approach to something that previously had been a purely scholarly subject (where the insight of the individual scholar naturally gets limited by its ability to manually absorb material, at a much lower throughput and a much smaller sample size, but arguably at a higher quality). I think this looks a lot like in my own field (molecular biology), where we wet-lab people struggle to connect two dots and variations thereof, whereas the genomics/transcriptomics/proteomics get the massive datasamples out there.
The whole point however is that it is not either-or situation. In my own field, the small and focused wet-lab projects are still vital to find the new (unexpected) mechanisms, but the ideas are often pulled from results of massive data collection from the "-omics" guys.
That does not sound very realistic since it would mean that you would have to initiate new limb buds at the appropriate places, and I doubt that those extra limbs would be functional (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymelia). Replacing Tbx5 with Tbx4 under the native Tbx5 promoter would however mean that you would have expression at the appropriate place (front limb buds), time and level. A proof-of-concept experiment by overexpression was already done back in 1999 (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v398/n6730/abs/398810a0.html) but that one utilized overexpression and suffered from remaining endogenous Tbx5 expression.
Ok this was a proof-of-concept experiment to make a transgenic dog using Dox-inducible expression. It might be useful for some stuff since dogs are a genetic model for some human diseases but still not THAT cool...
What I am REALLY looking forward to is someone doing a homologous replacement of Tbx5 with Tbx4 in chickens (pehaps by using zinc finger nucleases). This would most likely change the development of the wings to front-legs. A four-legged chichken - THAT would be cool.
When that proof-of concept experiment would be done we could do the same for a number of other birds - ostriches for example (would be neat riding beasts)... and with some proper breeding we might even be able to generate something similar to dinosaurs:P
The whole point (which Linus often stresses) is that open source is all about "scratching your own itch". This means that all contributions are self-serving. I am actually quite surprised that Apple has not tried to push patches to Linux for kernel GCD support yet. That would also have been a self-serving improvement since they want to push the standards of C in that direction.
Well, in fact Linus Torvalds was used as counter example to FSF in the "Cathedral and the Bazaar". Most open source projects prior to Linux was either horribly fragmented or horribly centralized by requiring copyright assignment to FSF or some other organization.
In that way the manner in which Linus let others contribute to and influence Linux, he actually demonstrated another model of development (which inspired to the "Cathedral and Bazaar" text, read it if you haven't). People seem to think that Linus is a celebrity by choice - from what I have experienced, he is rather uninterested in those things. I think there is a big difference between idol worship and admiration/respect to/for someone who does something really well. Since Linus is not trying to sell us something like ideology (RMS) or shiny trinkets (Jobs), I tink he is worthy of some admiration.
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/
apple, Microsoft and Sun all have radically changed their widowing systems on many occasions while maintaining continuity for their developers. It did not mean no work, it just meant that recompiles could produce a functional product in most cases, albeit one that might look like poo and not have any of the new capabilities of the windowing system.
I find it somewhat hard to believe that the original design of X was so perfectly extendible that after decades of use it is not straining its seems.
So a change may be good.
However, i do see a downside. The nice thing about X unlike Windows and Macs main display interface is that it is more easily separated from the desktop. If you want to use a mac or windows system remotely you have to use something like VNC or a remote desktop app. In both cases you are getting the whole desktop not a display window. You can't run multiple instances of it. That's the main thing I like about X.
I would like a 9P2000 file system interface similar to plan9/dev/draw, which could be used for totally network transparent sharing standard of Wayland and X11 or whatever windows over the network.
http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/IWP9/2008/v9fb.pdf
Sounds like the Tile64 idea http://www.tilera.com/products/processors/TILE64, which basically is a massively parallel design where each individual core is relatively low power. For a gaming system I think this might be quite suitable - it should be more GPU than CPU dependent anyway.
In fact, the whole patent issue around H.264 is only an issue in a FEW countries (US included). A dutch developer is currently making a Firefox-spin (WildFox, http://wildfox.sourceforge.net/) for the rest of the world. Why should the rest of the world suffer because a few (dominant) countries have a retarded stance on software/specification patents?
I also believe that WebM is a Good Thing... but lets face it - there will be lots of disputes whether a certain way of solving things in video encoding/decoding are "too similar" to what is given in specifications for patent-encumbered technologies. This is the whole issue with the patents - they are (intentionally) extremely vague and describe "processes". Copyright is a whole other issue - where it is easy to prove that something is original work.
Since the whole "smartbook revolution" seems to be a puff of hot air, the thing to hope for would be that some sort of "assembly kit" possibilities for computer-building hobbyists interested in RISC/ARM architecture could be available. This seems to be a market entirely owned by x86, with tons of pieces that can be stuck together like lego.
I for one would love to have a full-size passively cooled laptop with low-energy processor and screen.
It would ofcourse be good if google "ate their own dogfood" so to speak. I have always found it strange that tech demos from Google always show a Windows or OS X computer. Hopefully this will change with Chrome OS, which should be ideal for the "office droids", whereas a more complete Linux distro could work for developers.
The weird thing is that there are several entries in the statistics page [URL] http://www.top500.org/stats/list/35/os [/URL] that actually ALSO are linux, not just the top 405, but also the RedHat, CentOS CNL, SLES, (CellOS?) etc entries.... Looking at it that way UNIX is already outcompeted with a few entries of AIX and opensolaris. I wonder what happened to Plan9 on the Blue Gene....
Well - go figure. This is a sociologist investigating the culture of real scientists. Ofcourse they will come up with something post-modern like this and expect that just because most scientists just get on with their work (I know I do) instead of discussing completely irrelevant fantasies. My personal experience is that most fellow scientists are ignostic (as opposed to agnostic or active atheists) - they simply see the issue of the existence of a Deity as a pointless and futile effort since "Deity" is not clearly defined (that is, God is as existing as Tuesdays - both created by man and have both physical and cultural effects on the evolution of our societies and they can mean vasty different things for different people). I see no point in discussing the existence of fairies (although lab-gnomes are known to mess up experiments at times) and see equally little point in discussing the implications of whatever-your-favourite-religion-is. Another strange observation is that Religion often == judeo-christian faith in most of those studies, whereas many of those scientists still claiming "religious faith" probably have a more deistic/god-is-in-your-mind type of faith.
But current versions of Firefox are fine - at least on Linux, Mac and BSD. I have no information on how it works on that other operating system, but I don't believe anyone really uses that, since it's not ready for the desktop yet.;-) And I have never (ever) had any problems with the browser's stability.
[innocent sounding irony] Plan9? I heard about a Firefox port, but I thought that was just a rumor. In fact, 2010 is the year of Plan9 on the desktop. [/innocent sounding irony]
The only thing we can hope for is that the proprietary software vendors start with an incredibly draconian DRM and copy protection which makes software piracy virtually impossible.... the fun part will be that this will only benefit their Free Software competitors.
In fact, plant cells have a cell membrane and a cell wall. Thanks to the cell wall, the cell membrane can only expand to a certain size (pushing towards the wall: Turgor pressure), which means that a plant cell in low-salt (destilled) water will not burst as an animal cell does.
I think a cooler application would be freeze-resistant crops. The difficulty might be that the glycolipid (xylomannan) needs several enzymes to be correctly produced in other organisms than this beetle - in contrast to previous "antifreeze" proteins where freeze-resistance only involves introducing one new gene into the organism.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand we are moving to a 24/7 society where people work different hours (the typical "office hours" are hopefully a thing of the past, including the two traffic jams in the morning and evening). Some countries are clearly ahead of others. As a Swede I still can not get over that they are closing all shops around 18 or 19 o'clock here in Belgium (and they are closed on Sundays!). For me, it will be very liberating when I can choose when to work and when to do shopping etc instead of moving along with the herd. In that society we also do not need a local time.
I think you may have the wrong picture, unless Steve Jobs has turned into Norse Mythology. Honestly, I don't want to acknolwedge the existence of iDin, which is 30% thinner and lighter than Odin
The fun thing is that I read this wrong as Idun, who happened to be the norse godess who watched over the golden apples that made the gods immortal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%C3%B0unn)
Sample selection will always cause a bias no matter how extensive it is. The important thing is that the sources are well described so that the bias(es) can be properly accounted for (I think GoogleBooks does fit that requirement). The interesting thing with this paper is that it makes use of the "-omics" approach to something that previously had been a purely scholarly subject (where the insight of the individual scholar naturally gets limited by its ability to manually absorb material, at a much lower throughput and a much smaller sample size, but arguably at a higher quality). I think this looks a lot like in my own field (molecular biology), where we wet-lab people struggle to connect two dots and variations thereof, whereas the genomics/transcriptomics/proteomics get the massive datasamples out there. The whole point however is that it is not either-or situation. In my own field, the small and focused wet-lab projects are still vital to find the new (unexpected) mechanisms, but the ideas are often pulled from results of massive data collection from the "-omics" guys.
That does not sound very realistic since it would mean that you would have to initiate new limb buds at the appropriate places, and I doubt that those extra limbs would be functional (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymelia). Replacing Tbx5 with Tbx4 under the native Tbx5 promoter would however mean that you would have expression at the appropriate place (front limb buds), time and level. A proof-of-concept experiment by overexpression was already done back in 1999 (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v398/n6730/abs/398810a0.html) but that one utilized overexpression and suffered from remaining endogenous Tbx5 expression.
Ok this was a proof-of-concept experiment to make a transgenic dog using Dox-inducible expression. It might be useful for some stuff since dogs are a genetic model for some human diseases but still not THAT cool... What I am REALLY looking forward to is someone doing a homologous replacement of Tbx5 with Tbx4 in chickens (pehaps by using zinc finger nucleases). This would most likely change the development of the wings to front-legs. A four-legged chichken - THAT would be cool. When that proof-of concept experiment would be done we could do the same for a number of other birds - ostriches for example (would be neat riding beasts)... and with some proper breeding we might even be able to generate something similar to dinosaurs :P
The whole point (which Linus often stresses) is that open source is all about "scratching your own itch". This means that all contributions are self-serving. I am actually quite surprised that Apple has not tried to push patches to Linux for kernel GCD support yet. That would also have been a self-serving improvement since they want to push the standards of C in that direction.
Well, in fact Linus Torvalds was used as counter example to FSF in the "Cathedral and the Bazaar". Most open source projects prior to Linux was either horribly fragmented or horribly centralized by requiring copyright assignment to FSF or some other organization. In that way the manner in which Linus let others contribute to and influence Linux, he actually demonstrated another model of development (which inspired to the "Cathedral and Bazaar" text, read it if you haven't). People seem to think that Linus is a celebrity by choice - from what I have experienced, he is rather uninterested in those things. I think there is a big difference between idol worship and admiration/respect to/for someone who does something really well. Since Linus is not trying to sell us something like ideology (RMS) or shiny trinkets (Jobs), I tink he is worthy of some admiration. http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/
apple, Microsoft and Sun all have radically changed their widowing systems on many occasions while maintaining continuity for their developers. It did not mean no work, it just meant that recompiles could produce a functional product in most cases, albeit one that might look like poo and not have any of the new capabilities of the windowing system.
I find it somewhat hard to believe that the original design of X was so perfectly extendible that after decades of use it is not straining its seems.
So a change may be good.
However, i do see a downside. The nice thing about X unlike Windows and Macs main display interface is that it is more easily separated from the desktop. If you want to use a mac or windows system remotely you have to use something like VNC or a remote desktop app. In both cases you are getting the whole desktop not a display window. You can't run multiple instances of it. That's the main thing I like about X.
I would like a 9P2000 file system interface similar to plan9 /dev/draw, which could be used for totally network transparent sharing standard of Wayland and X11 or whatever windows over the network.
http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/IWP9/2008/v9fb.pdf
Sounds like the Tile64 idea http://www.tilera.com/products/processors/TILE64, which basically is a massively parallel design where each individual core is relatively low power. For a gaming system I think this might be quite suitable - it should be more GPU than CPU dependent anyway.
In fact, the whole patent issue around H.264 is only an issue in a FEW countries (US included). A dutch developer is currently making a Firefox-spin (WildFox, http://wildfox.sourceforge.net/) for the rest of the world. Why should the rest of the world suffer because a few (dominant) countries have a retarded stance on software/specification patents? I also believe that WebM is a Good Thing... but lets face it - there will be lots of disputes whether a certain way of solving things in video encoding/decoding are "too similar" to what is given in specifications for patent-encumbered technologies. This is the whole issue with the patents - they are (intentionally) extremely vague and describe "processes". Copyright is a whole other issue - where it is easy to prove that something is original work.
Since the whole "smartbook revolution" seems to be a puff of hot air, the thing to hope for would be that some sort of "assembly kit" possibilities for computer-building hobbyists interested in RISC/ARM architecture could be available. This seems to be a market entirely owned by x86, with tons of pieces that can be stuck together like lego. I for one would love to have a full-size passively cooled laptop with low-energy processor and screen.
It would ofcourse be good if google "ate their own dogfood" so to speak. I have always found it strange that tech demos from Google always show a Windows or OS X computer. Hopefully this will change with Chrome OS, which should be ideal for the "office droids", whereas a more complete Linux distro could work for developers.
The weird thing is that there are several entries in the statistics page [URL] http://www.top500.org/stats/list/35/os [/URL] that actually ALSO are linux, not just the top 405, but also the RedHat, CentOS CNL, SLES, (CellOS?) etc entries.... Looking at it that way UNIX is already outcompeted with a few entries of AIX and opensolaris. I wonder what happened to Plan9 on the Blue Gene....
Well - go figure. This is a sociologist investigating the culture of real scientists. Ofcourse they will come up with something post-modern like this and expect that just because most scientists just get on with their work (I know I do) instead of discussing completely irrelevant fantasies. My personal experience is that most fellow scientists are ignostic (as opposed to agnostic or active atheists) - they simply see the issue of the existence of a Deity as a pointless and futile effort since "Deity" is not clearly defined (that is, God is as existing as Tuesdays - both created by man and have both physical and cultural effects on the evolution of our societies and they can mean vasty different things for different people). I see no point in discussing the existence of fairies (although lab-gnomes are known to mess up experiments at times) and see equally little point in discussing the implications of whatever-your-favourite-religion-is. Another strange observation is that Religion often == judeo-christian faith in most of those studies, whereas many of those scientists still claiming "religious faith" probably have a more deistic/god-is-in-your-mind type of faith.
But current versions of Firefox are fine - at least on Linux, Mac and BSD. I have no information on how it works on that other operating system, but I don't believe anyone really uses that, since it's not ready for the desktop yet. ;-) And I have never (ever) had any problems with the browser's stability.
[innocent sounding irony] Plan9? I heard about a Firefox port, but I thought that was just a rumor. In fact, 2010 is the year of Plan9 on the desktop. [/innocent sounding irony]
The only thing we can hope for is that the proprietary software vendors start with an incredibly draconian DRM and copy protection which makes software piracy virtually impossible. ... the fun part will be that this will only benefit their Free Software competitors.
In fact, plant cells have a cell membrane and a cell wall. Thanks to the cell wall, the cell membrane can only expand to a certain size (pushing towards the wall: Turgor pressure), which means that a plant cell in low-salt (destilled) water will not burst as an animal cell does.
I think a cooler application would be freeze-resistant crops. The difficulty might be that the glycolipid (xylomannan) needs several enzymes to be correctly produced in other organisms than this beetle - in contrast to previous "antifreeze" proteins where freeze-resistance only involves introducing one new gene into the organism.