So while this is technically feasible, I doubt that Apple is planning a wholesale switch to Intel chips as there is too much invested in both marketing and developer relations. From a technical perspective, Darwin runs on both platforms and there have been long standing rumors of Apple maintaining dual codebases for current OS X releases, so making things run would not be a problem. Developers however, would require significant resources to recompile their code for compatibility. I suspect that the News.com story is only partially correct. Apple has for some time been using Intel chips in their Xserve, and their may very well be additional products yet to be announced. However, think about this possibility: Apple has significant resources devoted to Altivec just about everywhere in the OS, functions that are not available in any currently shipping Intel chip. But imagine this: What if rather than OS X being run on x86, Intel were to produce a PPC chip with Altivec? I do not know what the current licensing agreements are with Apple, IBM and Motorola, but if the licensing were prohibitive, perhaps Apple certainly could help with the reverse engineering of such a chip.
Even that seems like a bit of a stretch to me as I suspect the reality is more like Apple will be using Intel chips in a potential variety of new areas. Chips for networking and WIMAX for example. Or.....given the performance of Intel mobile chips relative to Motorola chips, perhaps as a warning shot across the bow of IBM, Apple will announce that Apple portable systems like Powerbooks will move to Intel chips. Even though I am quite the Apple aficionado, I have to admit that Intel is doing some pretty impressive portable CPUs. Near future plans for Intel portables include built in WiFi and dual cores. However, I realize that this would introduce more than a little difficulty for developers who have a "portable OS" and a "desktop OS" which would suck.
So....perhaps what is really going to happen is that Intel will produce a "portable" PPC chip for something new? Something like a new Newton? If I recall correctly, my Newton 130 ran an ARM chip, and I believe that Intel has the license rights to develop ARM based CPU cores..... Oh please oh please oh please.....
Because these days, everyone is expected to waste three or four years memorising things that can easily be looked up, rather than actually learning anything useful or cutting edge in a degree.
Bogus. If you do not have an understanding of the basics, then you have not prepared yourself to discover anything new. For those individuals who will be productive, they are working at the same time as they are learning. It means more work, but I've also found they are the best students who have the most potential.
Ballmer said: 'The hottest company right now -- the one nobody thinks can do any wrong -- may just be a one-hit wonder.'
Rather than post that as news, it and the iPod bit from Gates should be moddable. I am thinking Flamebait or Troll, and by Balmer's same logic, Microsoft may not be here in five years either.:-) Seriously though, this is classic Microsoft. "We are not in the market now with a competitive product, but once we are... boy you better look out because we are going to dominate! Granted, Microsoft's business model is to throw something out there that is usually half baked and then refine it until it works just good enough. They then leverage their monopoly and dominate the market. So, Google's dominance may not in fact, be everlasting but Google has shown the world how to make a search engine that works and is simple and elegant. If Microsoft wins the search engine market, our search engines will be cluttered with ad upon ad and suck up amazing amounts of bandwidth. In reality, given a level playing field, I believe the market will continue to speak and decide on the best browser, which right now judging from my logs appears to be Google.
The current Whitehouse administration has made damn sure that Anonymous Cowards don't travel anywhere in Airports. Only people with identities can board aircraft, so you don't count.:-)
Seriously though, the last three or four times I've flown out of Salt Lake International, Ft. Lauderdale International, Auckland International and Los Angeles International, I've seen errors or BSODs on information critical displays. One person is an admittedly small sample size, but with that one person, the observations are becoming a trend.
It is of course, an arbitrary decision manufactured by the marketing department as to my knowledge, there is no real functionality that is enabled on the "Pro" version of Windows with the Pentium 4 or Athalon chips. So, it seems like a fairly simple hack to get around this issue, as there is likely no real difference in the codebase of the Starter Edition other than some features that marketing has decided to disable and of course the above mentioned check, yes? (likely to violate the license terms)
So, quick question: Windows has appeared to evolved into a seriously fragmented OS. How many different versions of Windows are there? There is a Mobile, Embedded, Server, Pro, Home, Starter, Handheld......What else?
Oh, and Microsoft......If you cant make Windows more stable, you might want to do something about those error messages that crop up on computers running things like displays at airports. Almost every time I fly these days, at the airport, I see a computer running an information display that has crashed. Either a bluescreen of death (soon to be redscreen AND bluescreen of death in Longhorn), or a fundamental error message. This never looks good to customers and is bad advertising in large traffic areas. One of these days, one of these systems is going to get hacked and something truly embarrassing is going to be displayed on all of those big displays.
What is it with you Bill Gates? Why do you always have to "beat" beat everybody? The history of Mr. Gates is filled with prognostications about how Microsoft with win this and win that and how competitors don't have any idea of what is happening. Rah, rah, rah! Certainly much of this is marketing, but I much prefer companies that just keep their heads down creating the next big thing and then announcing it to everyones surprise. Pre-announcing products by years only serves to generate expectations that more often than not are unmet. Longhorn is how far out of the initial expected delivery date?
Now, as far as his bets on the future of the iPod, like just about everything else Apple has created and Microsoft has copied, the iPod is not stagnant. It's development is ongoing and dynamic, so Microsoft is going to have not not only copy, but out innovate a moving target.
OK, so like the other posters have said, there is considerable processing that occurs in the brain. However, most people are not aware of how much visual processing actually occurs in the retina. Hint: it is considerable.
As for the results that Humayan et al are showing to great effect, there are major problems aside from the engineering ones. First off, part of my PhD dissertation was on just this problem of retinal degeneration. It turns out that the implants they are designing are not taking into account some of the most basic issues of biology. Notably that any time you deafferent a CNS system, it remodels. They will have to deal with remodeling and continuously degenerating retina. In order for implants like this to work, we need to arrest retinal remodeling or take advantage of it to enable wiring into bionic or artificial biological circuits.
From an engineering standpoint, traditional electrode grids like this will end up with other problems. Notably, the issue of heating. You don't want to cook your retinas, so the need for very small currents with microelectrodes are what will be necessary. I show one such bionic implant on my blog here.
In fact, as I remember it, one of the first safety elevators was demonstrated at a World's fair (don't remember which one). The demo was the inventor cutting the rope that held the elevator up to the shock and amazement of the crowd.
But O'Connor adds that a series of mechanical breaks will activate should there be a sudden loss of pressure, to prevent the capsule falling.
I'm glad to see this because this was my first thought on watching the video. I can imagine all sorts of overly dramatic Hollywood type scenarios...... Cut the power to the building.....drama ensues. Or, a couple of well placed bullets into the side of the plexiglas causing a sudden implosion and dramatic falling of the lift. Also, one would want to ensure there are no leaks from the capsule to the inside of the lift tube. That sort of thing could play havoc on your eardrums, sinuses and eustachian tubes. Ask anyone who has been in a plane when they open a cargo door before completely equalizing the pressure in the cabin...... Wow, talk about uncomfortable.
It's not just mathematics features that need this. Every time I watched an X-Files, or movie where bioscience was rendered in film, I cringed at some of the silliness or unrealistic determinations that are made based upon the technology rendered.
I've got dibbs on her computational forensics skills first. Besides, she would likely not be happy to suddenly get a bunch of Slashers pinging her systems. Come to think of it, posting her IP domains might result in folks with sunglasses darkening my door. No way dude.:-)
I have certainly seen the number of attacks rising on our academic computing resources as well as my blog. Tracking IPs leads to lots of cable modems from Comcast and such which could be zombies, but given the lack of sophistication from those IPs, I have to wonder. Most of the attacks from these cable modem IPs are scripts directed at Windows vulnerabilities and buffer overflow attacks, but a few coming from Taiwan and Korea as well as some in the Balkans are fairly sophisticated that sometimes appear to come via compromised computers from other universities for example. Depending upon how sophisticated they are, I have reported some of them to Federal authorities who have the resources to subpoena logs and go after folks intruding into Federal resources. Interestingly others have also recently reported intrusions followed by blackmail which are likely not the domain of script kiddies. Certainly, comedy aside, one wonders if many of these kids have any idea of what they could actually be dealing with. Back in 1982 (we were 12), all that happened to us after hacking into government computers was my friend Lance getting his Apple ][+ confiscated followed by a job offer 9 years later from the same folks who confiscated his computer back in 1982. Now however, hacking into even an educational system could net you serious Federal penalties depending upon the system one hacks into. One admin friend of mine at a certain government lab is absolutely militant about this stuff. It has become her all consuming hobby to track these folks down and allocate whatever government resources she can muster to prosecute intruders into her systems. Woe be unto those that intrude into one of Melissa's systems.
Wow. Cannot Microsoft even come up with their own mantras rather than copy others? Come on now guys, this is pathetic, but I guess nothing is new under the sun. Seriously though, even now, I still own a bit of stock in Microsoft and I've been to the campus a number of times, so from the annual reports I get, along with friends who work there, I know Microsoft can/should be able to do better than this. (Or can they?)
There are absolutely some capable folks there, so what is the problem? Why must you (almost) always use Apple as a source for inspiration? There is a reason that I moved my investments in Microsoft stock to Apple stock three years ago, and you are doing nothing to make me want to reinvest in Microsoft. Is marketing that out of control up there? Jim, come on now, I've met you and you are one smart guy. Finding the above link to Apple took me all of two seconds in Google and this statement from the article: "Jim Allchin, Microsoft's group vice president for platforms, looked at my Apple PowerBook and smugly pointed out that the number of copies of Windows sold this year will be more than all the Macintosh computers used worldwide." really worries me. It shows an arrogance that is not going to serve you or Microsoft well.
Here are my items that I would like to see in the next Java:
1) The ability to allocate more memory space to Java apps. 2) 64 bit support. 3) Ability to/Easier implementation of hardware specific calls to speed calculations. (e.g. Altivec acceleration).
A little more pop action? Gave you hope? *Sob!* "But I love her sooo much". Seriously. Starwars has been moving more and more to a TV soap opera type thing for a while now using tired old tools many of which have been borrowed from other films of the past. Yoda hanging on to a ledge? This seems to be a common theme in Star Wars films and perhaps action films of all kinds. Remember the quote from another geek fav? Run you fools!. Slapstick comments from C3PO and the scream of R2D2 are just stereotyped now. And the use of this particular narrator for the TV spots is just silly. Seems a little soft, like they got the narrator for a feel good Disney movie to appeal to the kiddies. I expect if I saw the film, one might find many other completely cheesy references and pop culture call outs like explaining away the Force by invoking pop culture understanding of molecular biology. That was weak as can be and completely ruined the magic of having Sir Alec Guiness explain the Force as "It's an energy that surrounds all living things.. The best films create an atmosphere that allows you to populate many of the questions with your own imagination rather than spelling everything out.
Don't get me wrong. I loved the first two Star Wars films.... well A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back, but it started falling off for me with Revenge....whoops, Return of the Jedi. The next two had me shaking my head in disbelief. How could they go so wrong? What happened? Ewoks and Jar Jar and lightly veiled racism combined with poor dialogue. Yeah, the modelers at ILM are still some of the coolest, the animation is fabulous, John Williams is John Williams, but as a franchise, Star Wars has lost that magic for me........
For any aspiring film directors out there, please use the following guidelines as listed in order of importance.
Story>Writing>Acting>Direction>Cinematography>Ef fe cts/costume.
Thank you. I am just getting back into photography and have been told that many of my scientific images also have aesthetic value. So, I am exploring using the scientific imagery as art. Perhaps a SIGGRAPH presentation is in order....
I guess you do lot of image processing, what better choice than a rocking G5..
I do lots of image processing and those are my thoughts exactly. My work flow is something like a week at the bench doing "wetlab" work and approximately a month behind the computer screen analyzing the data. Computer systems that are fast minimize the amount of time in analysis and help get results published faster.
Wow, I'm curious to know what kind of needs you have that would justify this...
Scientific computing would be the answer. When decisions are made that depend on calculations, the sooner those calculations can be completed, the better. I am not yet at the point where I need my own cluster, but when calculations start to eat up hours per day or even whole days, you start to think about these things.
We are starting a project however, that will likely need a small cluster. I am thinking 5-10 Xserves would cut it for image analysis and dataset construction.
Sheer gear lust ?
Well, hellyeaa. It's Apple Computer we are talking about.
I am still waiting for a subnotebook from Apple. My 12in Powerbook is nice, but what I would really like is a subnotebook, perhaps even an Newton replacement. I've made an argument for Apple's reentry into the "PDA" market here. If such a device could be made, I am sure it would have huge sales. The market is moving towards smaller devices that are even more portable and there are folks that are clamoring for it. Mark Cuban also makes a compelling argument for smaller portable devices here.
Don't get me wrong....Apple needs to keep its Pro level line on top of things. In fact, I will likely be ordering a new G5 to replace my dual 2.0 G5 if they are in fact announced, but as the numbers are showing after Apple's financial conference yesterday, portables are where the market is at.
What makes a standard viable without the formal blessing of a standards organization?
The tests would be: "Does that standard meet the needs of disparate groups of people who may be using a tool for different purposes within an organized framework? Is the standard accessible? Also critically important: "does that standard lock one into a narrowly defined structure that is difficult to extend or modify as needs change? Is the standard backwards/forwards compatible? To answer your final question, standards become formalized when they begin to meet these tests and are adopted by appropriate shareholders. This of course is aside from issues of criteria definition, or guidelines which often begin to take on lives of their own and bastardize "standards".
OS X does not support Linux's ext2/3 and Reiser right now to my knolwedge, but there is an open source implementation of ext2 available for OS X. That said, OS X can at least boot ext2 filesystems. proc is also not supported, but the following are supported natively in OS X: volfs, union, synthfs, specfs, ramfs, nullfs, loop*, fdesc, devfs, deadfs, cddafs, WebDAV, SMB/CIFS, NFS, FTP, AFP, UFS, UDF, NTFS, MSDOS, ISO9660, HFS+ and HFS. Pretty impressive for an out of the box OS that is also easy to use and implement.
Also, I am not sure what you mean by having a hard drive "kill" a computer. Unless you are talking weird power flux issues, running a HD off of a PCI card should protect you from just about anything.
It really depends upon what level of security you are talking about. Degaussing certainly does not do the job adequately enough for some purposes, but the issue of maintaining a box that has all the hardware to be backwards compatible can be cumbersome and expensive. I suspect you are not in a sensitive/classifed government position as they have protocols for this sort of thing, but if you truly have seriously data sensitive needs for hard drives you are going to retire, I would suggest first formatting the drive with multiple writes and reads of serial 1's and 0's which should prevent 99.9% of data recovery attempts. An older G4 tower running OS X, should allow you to recognize and mount drives formatted with a variety of operating systems. Stick a couple of SCSI cards in it and an ATA and SATA card (Sonnet makes a combined card) which should give you multiple SCSI formats, ATA, Firewire and USB depending upon your needs. If you are really paranoid, actually disassembling the drives, degaussing and physically destroying the platters will finish the job. Believe it or not, data can even be reconstructed at the microscopic level through the use of electron microscopy, so the more damage done to the physical media, the harder it is to extract information.
Newsflash!! Anytime you touch anything, you're touching molecules with your bare hands! In fact, your hands are made of molecules, too!
Informative?!!!? I think not. Mod down and here is why: What the article has to do with is how to interact with molecules to see how they interact at the very hard to appreciate scales that one works with. Van der walls, intramolecular and intermolecular forces are critically important for many molecular reactions such as covalent bonding and enzymatic activity. Understanding how this happens is all part of the education in chemistry and for many students can be difficult. A post like this is just silly, or worse yet, ignorant if the poster is serious.
Seriously though, aside from efficiency of thought and action, a Slashdot membership does help as one gets to see the stories posted a few minutes before they are actually posted to the unwashed masses.
Part of this is that you have to consider that for many of us, the Internet has become a daily part of our workflow and without it we could not perform in our jobs. I absolutely need the Internet to collaborate with colleagues, and because I am paid to know things and to think, the ability to be able to search for information and access online scientific journals is critical. I cannot believe how much time I spent as a beginning undergraduate in the library looking through actual card catalogues! Now one can survey tremendous amounts of data in very little time, but the tradeoff is that we have become dependent upon the Internet for our data gathering. I will admit however, to also becoming dependent upon the Internet for daily news as well and do feel a sense of loss when disconnected. For instance, when taking hikes or going biking in the mountains for longer than a day, I feel the need for an information fix. Even when traveling nationally or internationally, I ensure that I am connected via broadband, can communicate through iChatAV with colleagues, can post to my blog, can get the latest news as it happens and of course, keep up with Slashdot.:-)
Of course the referenced links do contain valid points, particularly Rand's blog. What Rand alludes to however and needs to be learned is the ability to focus and extract the absolutely relevant information related to the task at hand. I've noticed in the undergraduates in particular that have come through the lab that they tend to try and multitask everything, talking on the phone, performing Internet related searches, writing their reports and listening to music while also running an experiment in the background. Almost always, mistakes ensue, the quality of the work suffers, wrong conclusions are drawn and it takes them a couple of months to learn to focus while eliminating some of the competing tasks to ensure quality work for the essential task at hand. Once they learn to focus, not only does the quality of their work improve, but also their ability to extract information from all sorts of tasks including Internet related work. Confusion goes away and is replaced by efficiency of thought and action.
Slashdot Mirror
So while this is technically feasible, I doubt that Apple is planning a wholesale switch to Intel chips as there is too much invested in both marketing and developer relations. From a technical perspective, Darwin runs on both platforms and there have been long standing rumors of Apple maintaining dual codebases for current OS X releases, so making things run would not be a problem. Developers however, would require significant resources to recompile their code for compatibility. I suspect that the News.com story is only partially correct. Apple has for some time been using Intel chips in their Xserve, and their may very well be additional products yet to be announced. However, think about this possibility: Apple has significant resources devoted to Altivec just about everywhere in the OS, functions that are not available in any currently shipping Intel chip. But imagine this: What if rather than OS X being run on x86, Intel were to produce a PPC chip with Altivec? I do not know what the current licensing agreements are with Apple, IBM and Motorola, but if the licensing were prohibitive, perhaps Apple certainly could help with the reverse engineering of such a chip.
Even that seems like a bit of a stretch to me as I suspect the reality is more like Apple will be using Intel chips in a potential variety of new areas. Chips for networking and WIMAX for example. Or.....given the performance of Intel mobile chips relative to Motorola chips, perhaps as a warning shot across the bow of IBM, Apple will announce that Apple portable systems like Powerbooks will move to Intel chips. Even though I am quite the Apple aficionado, I have to admit that Intel is doing some pretty impressive portable CPUs. Near future plans for Intel portables include built in WiFi and dual cores. However, I realize that this would introduce more than a little difficulty for developers who have a "portable OS" and a "desktop OS" which would suck.
So....perhaps what is really going to happen is that Intel will produce a "portable" PPC chip for something new? Something like a new Newton? If I recall correctly, my Newton 130 ran an ARM chip, and I believe that Intel has the license rights to develop ARM based CPU cores..... Oh please oh please oh please.....
Because these days, everyone is expected to waste three or four years memorising things that can easily be looked up, rather than actually learning anything useful or cutting edge in a degree.
Bogus. If you do not have an understanding of the basics, then you have not prepared yourself to discover anything new. For those individuals who will be productive, they are working at the same time as they are learning. It means more work, but I've also found they are the best students who have the most potential.
Ballmer said: 'The hottest company right now -- the one nobody thinks can do any wrong -- may just be a one-hit wonder.'
:-) Seriously though, this is classic Microsoft. "We are not in the market now with a competitive product, but once we are... boy you better look out because we are going to dominate! Granted, Microsoft's business model is to throw something out there that is usually half baked and then refine it until it works just good enough. They then leverage their monopoly and dominate the market. So, Google's dominance may not in fact, be everlasting but Google has shown the world how to make a search engine that works and is simple and elegant. If Microsoft wins the search engine market, our search engines will be cluttered with ad upon ad and suck up amazing amounts of bandwidth. In reality, given a level playing field, I believe the market will continue to speak and decide on the best browser, which right now judging from my logs appears to be Google.
Rather than post that as news, it and the iPod bit from Gates should be moddable. I am thinking Flamebait or Troll, and by Balmer's same logic, Microsoft may not be here in five years either.
The current Whitehouse administration has made damn sure that Anonymous Cowards don't travel anywhere in Airports. Only people with identities can board aircraft, so you don't count. :-)
Seriously though, the last three or four times I've flown out of Salt Lake International, Ft. Lauderdale International, Auckland International and Los Angeles International, I've seen errors or BSODs on information critical displays. One person is an admittedly small sample size, but with that one person, the observations are becoming a trend.
It doesn't really *solve* the problem, it just makes it more "friendly" to these sorts of microsoft displays.
:-)
Yes, of course the real solution would be to go to a more reliable operating system, but if I said that, the Microsofties would flame me.
It is of course, an arbitrary decision manufactured by the marketing department as to my knowledge, there is no real functionality that is enabled on the "Pro" version of Windows with the Pentium 4 or Athalon chips. So, it seems like a fairly simple hack to get around this issue, as there is likely no real difference in the codebase of the Starter Edition other than some features that marketing has decided to disable and of course the above mentioned check, yes? (likely to violate the license terms)
So, quick question: Windows has appeared to evolved into a seriously fragmented OS. How many different versions of Windows are there? There is a Mobile, Embedded, Server, Pro, Home, Starter, Handheld......What else?
Oh, and Microsoft......If you cant make Windows more stable, you might want to do something about those error messages that crop up on computers running things like displays at airports. Almost every time I fly these days, at the airport, I see a computer running an information display that has crashed. Either a bluescreen of death (soon to be redscreen AND bluescreen of death in Longhorn), or a fundamental error message. This never looks good to customers and is bad advertising in large traffic areas. One of these days, one of these systems is going to get hacked and something truly embarrassing is going to be displayed on all of those big displays.
What is it with you Bill Gates? Why do you always have to "beat" beat everybody? The history of Mr. Gates is filled with prognostications about how Microsoft with win this and win that and how competitors don't have any idea of what is happening. Rah, rah, rah! Certainly much of this is marketing, but I much prefer companies that just keep their heads down creating the next big thing and then announcing it to everyones surprise. Pre-announcing products by years only serves to generate expectations that more often than not are unmet. Longhorn is how far out of the initial expected delivery date?
Now, as far as his bets on the future of the iPod, like just about everything else Apple has created and Microsoft has copied, the iPod is not stagnant. It's development is ongoing and dynamic, so Microsoft is going to have not not only copy, but out innovate a moving target.
OK, so like the other posters have said, there is considerable processing that occurs in the brain. However, most people are not aware of how much visual processing actually occurs in the retina. Hint: it is considerable.
As for the results that Humayan et al are showing to great effect, there are major problems aside from the engineering ones. First off, part of my PhD dissertation was on just this problem of retinal degeneration. It turns out that the implants they are designing are not taking into account some of the most basic issues of biology. Notably that any time you deafferent a CNS system, it remodels. They will have to deal with remodeling and continuously degenerating retina. In order for implants like this to work, we need to arrest retinal remodeling or take advantage of it to enable wiring into bionic or artificial biological circuits.
From an engineering standpoint, traditional electrode grids like this will end up with other problems. Notably, the issue of heating. You don't want to cook your retinas, so the need for very small currents with microelectrodes are what will be necessary. I show one such bionic implant on my blog here.
In fact, as I remember it, one of the first safety elevators was demonstrated at a World's fair (don't remember which one). The demo was the inventor cutting the rope that held the elevator up to the shock and amazement of the crowd.
But O'Connor adds that a series of mechanical breaks will activate should there be a sudden loss of pressure, to prevent the capsule falling.
I'm glad to see this because this was my first thought on watching the video. I can imagine all sorts of overly dramatic Hollywood type scenarios...... Cut the power to the building.....drama ensues. Or, a couple of well placed bullets into the side of the plexiglas causing a sudden implosion and dramatic falling of the lift. Also, one would want to ensure there are no leaks from the capsule to the inside of the lift tube. That sort of thing could play havoc on your eardrums, sinuses and eustachian tubes. Ask anyone who has been in a plane when they open a cargo door before completely equalizing the pressure in the cabin...... Wow, talk about uncomfortable.
It's not just mathematics features that need this. Every time I watched an X-Files, or movie where bioscience was rendered in film, I cringed at some of the silliness or unrealistic determinations that are made based upon the technology rendered.
I've got dibbs on her computational forensics skills first. Besides, she would likely not be happy to suddenly get a bunch of Slashers pinging her systems. Come to think of it, posting her IP domains might result in folks with sunglasses darkening my door. No way dude. :-)
I have certainly seen the number of attacks rising on our academic computing resources as well as my blog. Tracking IPs leads to lots of cable modems from Comcast and such which could be zombies, but given the lack of sophistication from those IPs, I have to wonder. Most of the attacks from these cable modem IPs are scripts directed at Windows vulnerabilities and buffer overflow attacks, but a few coming from Taiwan and Korea as well as some in the Balkans are fairly sophisticated that sometimes appear to come via compromised computers from other universities for example. Depending upon how sophisticated they are, I have reported some of them to Federal authorities who have the resources to subpoena logs and go after folks intruding into Federal resources. Interestingly others have also recently reported intrusions followed by blackmail which are likely not the domain of script kiddies. Certainly, comedy aside, one wonders if many of these kids have any idea of what they could actually be dealing with. Back in 1982 (we were 12), all that happened to us after hacking into government computers was my friend Lance getting his Apple ][+ confiscated followed by a job offer 9 years later from the same folks who confiscated his computer back in 1982. Now however, hacking into even an educational system could net you serious Federal penalties depending upon the system one hacks into. One admin friend of mine at a certain government lab is absolutely militant about this stuff. It has become her all consuming hobby to track these folks down and allocate whatever government resources she can muster to prosecute intruders into her systems. Woe be unto those that intrude into one of Melissa's systems.
Wow. Cannot Microsoft even come up with their own mantras rather than copy others? Come on now guys, this is pathetic, but I guess nothing is new under the sun. Seriously though, even now, I still own a bit of stock in Microsoft and I've been to the campus a number of times, so from the annual reports I get, along with friends who work there, I know Microsoft can/should be able to do better than this. (Or can they?)
There are absolutely some capable folks there, so what is the problem? Why must you (almost) always use Apple as a source for inspiration? There is a reason that I moved my investments in Microsoft stock to Apple stock three years ago, and you are doing nothing to make me want to reinvest in Microsoft. Is marketing that out of control up there? Jim, come on now, I've met you and you are one smart guy. Finding the above link to Apple took me all of two seconds in Google and this statement from the article: "Jim Allchin, Microsoft's group vice president for platforms, looked at my Apple PowerBook and smugly pointed out that the number of copies of Windows sold this year will be more than all the Macintosh computers used worldwide." really worries me. It shows an arrogance that is not going to serve you or Microsoft well.
Here are my items that I would like to see in the next Java:
1) The ability to allocate more memory space to Java apps.
2) 64 bit support.
3) Ability to/Easier implementation of hardware specific calls to speed calculations. (e.g. Altivec acceleration).
A little more pop action? Gave you hope? *Sob!* "But I love her sooo much". Seriously. Starwars has been moving more and more to a TV soap opera type thing for a while now using tired old tools many of which have been borrowed from other films of the past. Yoda hanging on to a ledge? This seems to be a common theme in Star Wars films and perhaps action films of all kinds. Remember the quote from another geek fav? Run you fools!. Slapstick comments from C3PO and the scream of R2D2 are just stereotyped now. And the use of this particular narrator for the TV spots is just silly. Seems a little soft, like they got the narrator for a feel good Disney movie to appeal to the kiddies. I expect if I saw the film, one might find many other completely cheesy references and pop culture call outs like explaining away the Force by invoking pop culture understanding of molecular biology. That was weak as can be and completely ruined the magic of having Sir Alec Guiness explain the Force as "It's an energy that surrounds all living things.. The best films create an atmosphere that allows you to populate many of the questions with your own imagination rather than spelling everything out.
f fe cts/costume.
Don't get me wrong. I loved the first two Star Wars films.... well A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back, but it started falling off for me with Revenge....whoops, Return of the Jedi. The next two had me shaking my head in disbelief. How could they go so wrong? What happened? Ewoks and Jar Jar and lightly veiled racism combined with poor dialogue. Yeah, the modelers at ILM are still some of the coolest, the animation is fabulous, John Williams is John Williams, but as a franchise, Star Wars has lost that magic for me........
For any aspiring film directors out there, please use the following guidelines as listed in order of importance.
Story>Writing>Acting>Direction>Cinematography>E
You have a nice collection of digital images.
..
Thank you. I am just getting back into photography and have been told that many of my scientific images also have aesthetic value. So, I am exploring using the scientific imagery as art. Perhaps a SIGGRAPH presentation is in order....
I guess you do lot of image processing, what better choice than a rocking G5
I do lots of image processing and those are my thoughts exactly. My work flow is something like a week at the bench doing "wetlab" work and approximately a month behind the computer screen analyzing the data. Computer systems that are fast minimize the amount of time in analysis and help get results published faster.
Wow, I'm curious to know what kind of needs you have that would justify this...
Scientific computing would be the answer. When decisions are made that depend on calculations, the sooner those calculations can be completed, the better. I am not yet at the point where I need my own cluster, but when calculations start to eat up hours per day or even whole days, you start to think about these things.
We are starting a project however, that will likely need a small cluster. I am thinking 5-10 Xserves would cut it for image analysis and dataset construction.
Sheer gear lust ?
Well, hellyeaa. It's Apple Computer we are talking about.
I am still waiting for a subnotebook from Apple. My 12in Powerbook is nice, but what I would really like is a subnotebook, perhaps even an Newton replacement. I've made an argument for Apple's reentry into the "PDA" market here. If such a device could be made, I am sure it would have huge sales. The market is moving towards smaller devices that are even more portable and there are folks that are clamoring for it. Mark Cuban also makes a compelling argument for smaller portable devices here.
Don't get me wrong....Apple needs to keep its Pro level line on top of things. In fact, I will likely be ordering a new G5 to replace my dual 2.0 G5 if they are in fact announced, but as the numbers are showing after Apple's financial conference yesterday, portables are where the market is at.
What makes a standard viable without the formal blessing of a standards organization?
The tests would be: "Does that standard meet the needs of disparate groups of people who may be using a tool for different purposes within an organized framework? Is the standard accessible? Also critically important: "does that standard lock one into a narrowly defined structure that is difficult to extend or modify as needs change? Is the standard backwards/forwards compatible? To answer your final question, standards become formalized when they begin to meet these tests and are adopted by appropriate shareholders. This of course is aside from issues of criteria definition, or guidelines which often begin to take on lives of their own and bastardize "standards".
OS X does not support Linux's ext2/3 and Reiser right now to my knolwedge, but there is an open source implementation of ext2 available for OS X. That said, OS X can at least boot ext2 filesystems. proc is also not supported, but the following are supported natively in OS X: volfs, union, synthfs, specfs, ramfs, nullfs, loop*, fdesc, devfs, deadfs, cddafs, WebDAV, SMB/CIFS, NFS, FTP, AFP, UFS, UDF, NTFS, MSDOS, ISO9660, HFS+ and HFS. Pretty impressive for an out of the box OS that is also easy to use and implement.
Also, I am not sure what you mean by having a hard drive "kill" a computer. Unless you are talking weird power flux issues, running a HD off of a PCI card should protect you from just about anything.
It really depends upon what level of security you are talking about. Degaussing certainly does not do the job adequately enough for some purposes, but the issue of maintaining a box that has all the hardware to be backwards compatible can be cumbersome and expensive. I suspect you are not in a sensitive/classifed government position as they have protocols for this sort of thing, but if you truly have seriously data sensitive needs for hard drives you are going to retire, I would suggest first formatting the drive with multiple writes and reads of serial 1's and 0's which should prevent 99.9% of data recovery attempts. An older G4 tower running OS X, should allow you to recognize and mount drives formatted with a variety of operating systems. Stick a couple of SCSI cards in it and an ATA and SATA card (Sonnet makes a combined card) which should give you multiple SCSI formats, ATA, Firewire and USB depending upon your needs. If you are really paranoid, actually disassembling the drives, degaussing and physically destroying the platters will finish the job. Believe it or not, data can even be reconstructed at the microscopic level through the use of electron microscopy, so the more damage done to the physical media, the harder it is to extract information.
Newsflash!! Anytime you touch anything, you're touching molecules with your bare hands! In fact, your hands are made of molecules, too!
Informative?!!!? I think not. Mod down and here is why: What the article has to do with is how to interact with molecules to see how they interact at the very hard to appreciate scales that one works with. Van der walls, intramolecular and intermolecular forces are critically important for many molecular reactions such as covalent bonding and enzymatic activity. Understanding how this happens is all part of the education in chemistry and for many students can be difficult. A post like this is just silly, or worse yet, ignorant if the poster is serious.
How did you type all that in 20 seconds?
:-)
I'm cool like that.
Seriously though, aside from efficiency of thought and action, a Slashdot membership does help as one gets to see the stories posted a few minutes before they are actually posted to the unwashed masses.
Part of this is that you have to consider that for many of us, the Internet has become a daily part of our workflow and without it we could not perform in our jobs. I absolutely need the Internet to collaborate with colleagues, and because I am paid to know things and to think, the ability to be able to search for information and access online scientific journals is critical. I cannot believe how much time I spent as a beginning undergraduate in the library looking through actual card catalogues! Now one can survey tremendous amounts of data in very little time, but the tradeoff is that we have become dependent upon the Internet for our data gathering. I will admit however, to also becoming dependent upon the Internet for daily news as well and do feel a sense of loss when disconnected. For instance, when taking hikes or going biking in the mountains for longer than a day, I feel the need for an information fix. Even when traveling nationally or internationally, I ensure that I am connected via broadband, can communicate through iChatAV with colleagues, can post to my blog, can get the latest news as it happens and of course, keep up with Slashdot. :-)
Of course the referenced links do contain valid points, particularly Rand's blog. What Rand alludes to however and needs to be learned is the ability to focus and extract the absolutely relevant information related to the task at hand. I've noticed in the undergraduates in particular that have come through the lab that they tend to try and multitask everything, talking on the phone, performing Internet related searches, writing their reports and listening to music while also running an experiment in the background. Almost always, mistakes ensue, the quality of the work suffers, wrong conclusions are drawn and it takes them a couple of months to learn to focus while eliminating some of the competing tasks to ensure quality work for the essential task at hand. Once they learn to focus, not only does the quality of their work improve, but also their ability to extract information from all sorts of tasks including Internet related work. Confusion goes away and is replaced by efficiency of thought and action.