The title is very misleading and is born of sloppy reporting. The whole eye was NOT transplanted, rather the cornea was what was transplanted. The cornea had adhered to the boys iris clouding his vision. Technically and surgically, this is nothing of note as corneal replacements have been happening now for years and years. Politically however stuff like this is good for Indian Pakistani relations.
The title suggests that the whole eye was transplanted which would indeed be very exciting as I myself work in vision rescue focusing on diseases that cause blindness through degeneration of the retina. However, the concept of rescuing vision once we have lost it due to trauma to the retina or degenerative diseases is much more difficult than simply replacing the tissue with a healthy donor tissue. We are working with a number of folks on bionic and biological therapies and replacements for retinal vision loss, but it is a challenging prospect despite what some commercial organizations would have the media believe.
In addition to the above mentioned corrections, there are other problems with this story. In particular, apparently the child was born blind from birth which would suggest that depending upon how old the child is, there will be problems due to vision being occluded during certain critical periods of vision pathway development. This means that there may be no vision in the eye that was clouded anyway, or that vision may not be fully "normal" and likely will never be.
I would have to agree with this. It is also true of kids that are extraordinarily bright and very high achievers early on in life. The harsh reality that we all had to live up to was that you grow up and get a university degree, perhaps a doctorate (or two), and then you are just like everybody else you associate with, only you peaked earlier. I am still in my early thirties, but everybody around me is pretty much equally smart and accomplished. Some are happier than others so the secret is finding you niche, what it is that you like doing for a living and striving to continue making a difference. The really sad cases to me are the ones where folks make a name for themselves early on and then ride on their early efforts for as long as they can eventually becoming bitter.
On the other hand, you do tend to get opportunities that you would not normally receive, and I would encourage you to explore as many of those as possible. If you don't know what you want to do, go to a liberal arts college and see where that takes you.
Actually, cryptic paint schemes go back as far as the early 1900's in war ships designed to conceal edges and make it difficult to determine which direction a ship may be traveling in. They have been used on and off for years, but most commonly on smaller littoral combat platforms rather than larger ships.
it is controlled by 'state-of-the-art computers using a Windows NT operating system'. '
First off, I am not sure I would call an NT system "state of the art". Next, I have to wonder just why folks are using a commodity platform to perform literally "mission critical" operations in a combat environment. Particularly one whose history of security is dubious at best.
Shoot, we used iChatAV rather successfully from Auckland, New Zealand to Salt Lake City for remote collaboration in a lab environment rather successfully with hardly any delay whatsoever. In fact, I routinely used (and still use) iChatAV with a wireless connection, so I do not understand what this is all about.
There are other issues in addition to regulating radio spectrum that the FCC has undertaken. Namely, business management and media consolidation and "morals" are only one part of that aspect they feel they have to "regulate".
Should the FCC be abolished?
In a word,.......No. However, under the current director, Michael Powell (sorry Colin) I would argue there needs to be more oversight to ensure they are actually doing their job and protecting the peoples right to media and information. It could simply be a result of the overall current Whitehouse administration, but big media certainly does have an ally in the FCC right now. The current FCC supports large media consolidations to the point where we now have just FIVE large giants of commercial control in this country. Because media has become big business and not about reporting all the news that is fit to print or doing a journalists obligation to report facts, diversity of coverage becomes a monetary decision. Will it fit within the bottom line of the company? What will it do to our profit margins? I myself am rather disgusted with the way CNN has gone in the last few years after having started as THE source for my news. However, in the last few years they have decided from a business perspective, it makes more sense to report on the news mostly, but also a bit on stuff like who Jennifer Lopez is marrying now. Please.
OK, the social engineering that is going on here is getting out of control. It's bad enough that you have someone talking on their phones in the elevator/restaurant/movie theatre or on the subway behind you about all sorts of things (many of which are quite personal), but now we are going to get people gesticulating madly, waving their arms back and forth to send messages.
Lets have some real innovation, yes? Rather than fun and games with LEDs, what I would like to see some real innovation in in terms of interaction with cell phones much like iChatAV (prevents having to remember phone numbers etc...), whereby you could call someone wherever they may be over TCP/IP or have servers automatically negotiate phone calls through traditional land lines if the receiver of the call is not available on the iChatAV equivalent. It could be relatively easy to establish a hierarchy of places to contact a person starting with VOIP, then progressing on down to sending a voice to text message at the very last.
Right now at least, we do have phones (V600) that will automatically negotiate networks (so I can have one phone to travel with internationally rather than having to keep two or three depending upon the networks), but most of these phones have maddening interfaces and that in of itself could use some thought and effort. Look, placing GUI interfaces on lots of stuff is OK if it streamlines your operation of the device, but the phone companies and even automobile manufacturers are using lousy GUI interfaces to perform simple tasks. (I absolutely refuse to consider the new BMW's because of that stupid GUI that has to be navigated through three screens to change the radio station or move the seat or change the temperature.
In 6 1/2 months, they've now converted their investment to $13 million in cash and $13.7 million of common stock, for a loss of almost half their investment.
Nelson: Ha ha!
Seriously though. This should be a lesson to VC funds and financing operations that finance companies whose business models are built upon legal action and sucking off the hard work and sweat of people who make ideas work through the creation of products that improve our lives. These companies based on litigious action are typically fairly sleazy operations and will not generate any "good will" for the financing operations or companies.
I personally would much rather support and fund (and yes, even make money from) companies who are out there to make a difference. Work to make something new or make a difference rather than prostituting yourself for mere money and parasitizing off of others hard work and insight.
Re:So will we see Darwin open sourced?
on
Evaluating Open Source
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Modded as interesting? You do know that Darwin is already open sourced.....Don't you?
In order to let folks know just how cool Microsoft is, they always seem to pre-announce products by several months to years and invariably when they come out, they always seem to be somehow less than they promised. The iPod is good.....damned good. So I am certainly going to take a wait and see approach, but one usually gets what they pay for.
I likely will be sticking with the iPod I suspect.
I have heard that some sites are planning a huge SneakerNet (or, rather, JumboNet? CessnaNet?) and hoping to fly out stacks of DAT tapes of the unreduced data back "home."
So, we here in academia are a bit spoiled in terms of bandwidth. However, companies and some in academics have to pay for lots of bits and bytes and are thus interested in costs to move these sorts of data. I was talking with Jim Gray a couple of weeks ago and he was telling me that a recent study revealed some of the true costs of moving lots of data. For instance: Lets say you are trying to move a terabyte of data from London to Los Angeles. It turns out it is cheaper (and faster) to put it on magnetic storage and fly it from London to Los Angeles than it is to try and move it over the Internet.
Ummmm......I think it is too late and past my bed time. A quick rechecking of the numbers reveals a total of 960000000 bytes for each image in a 4800000000 pixel array giving us a much more manageable total of approx.9GB/image in raw form (again, assuming a 16 bit image).
Although the article does say 500 megapixel, a simple calculation could answer your question. The CCD is composed of elements giving it a pixel array of 180k X 240k pixels giving us 28800000000 pixels! (Assuming each pixel holds one grey value in a 16 bit image ) Working from 16 bits/pixel and 8 bits/byte, we are looking at 2 bytes per pixel. So 2 bytes * 28800000000 pixels gives us 57600000000 bytes or almost 54 GB/image!
If you were to take multispectral or even RGB images, one would multiply the file size by the appropriate dimension.....
Well, if they can truly get cargo to space at a single US dollar/ton, this is orders of magnitude cheaper than current costs which run approx $10k/kg. Which could very well result in a total destabilization of the space launch business. (a little chaos now and then is a good thing.....yes?). Of course we also have maglev and space elevators which could also provide this a run for the money, but I suspect maglev would be more expensive and due to helium costs, space elevators might be cheaper still.
However, I have to ask: Why on Earth would you ask this question on slashdot? Go post do a search on groups.google.com and POST IN A NEWSGROUP OVER THERE.
OK, I guess we should expect this kind of statement from Slashdot (particularly from an Anonymous Coward), but there are folks with M.D.'s and Ph.D.'s here on Slashdot (like me) and some of these folks work in areas like this. Slashdot is news for nerds and stuff that matters.....right? Well, you might be interested to know what the incidence of schitzophrenia is? I'll give you a hint: It's more common than you thought and it affects a great number of folks that are nerds and folks that use computers. Try thinking of something or someone other than yourself for a change and perhaps you might learn something.
And to those moderators who modded this as insightful?.......Shame on you.
The magic doesn't come from vectors. Vectors are just how you throw the numbers around
And your point is?
The reason the classification apparently works well is their choice of representation of the document: a word histogram -- the occurance count for each word. To measure the distance between two histograms, you usually use the chi-squared test.
For a univariate space (or perhaps bivariate space) this will work, but now try implementing standard chi-square analysis in multivariate (or hyperspectral) space. Starts to fall short rather quickly thus the measures of distances between clusters analysis.
Image clustering is hard, and the problem comes from picking a good representation of the image.
Yes, I do image clustering almost every day. Well, at least a couple times a week. With proper discriminands one can overcome "good image representation" problems.
Of course, a "word histogram" for an image makes no sense.
Actually, it does in a sense when you realize that images are simply matrices of numbers just like sentences or paragraphs can be identified as matrices after assigning lookup values to certain properties.
Just considering pixel intensity or pixel color doesn't work either.
Actually, yes it does. This is how many standard measures of image cluster analysis work.
You usually have to start looking at things like lines, curvatures, intersections, texture patterns, etc.
Actually, no. For many image classification algorithms that examine pixel value (oil bearing strata, concrete vs granite, types of aluminum in missiles etc...), structure or anatomy play absolutely no role in the identification of classes.
Once you decide tools you're going to use to describe an image and algorithms to calculate them, you can starting talking about how far away one image is from another, which then naturally leads to clustering techniques.
That is a very difficult approach to take for image classification that begins to rely on machine processing and image "interpretation" which is a much higher order problem.
But, the hard part about the clustering is getting them into a space in which they actually, nicely cluster.
Simply add more discriminands or filters and don't worry about "describing" the image. Other properties (like structure and anatomy) fall out after image clustering.
Infact I'd be willing to bet that its just another bayesian e-mail filter with maybe a few extra bells and whistles.
Actually data clustering algorithms are completely different beasts than a standard bayesian analysis. Do a search on k-means clustering or ISODATA clustering methods to see what I mean. However, if you are referring to a bayesian cluster analysis (like those implemented for genetic analysis of microarrays) then you might be correct. Only for reasons you might not intend.
Each document is in turn represented by a long string of numbers, one for each word in the corpus. In mathematical terms, we would say that every document is a vector of n numbers or a point in a space with n dimensions. I know it sounds quite geeky but if you can visualize that, you're halfway there.
Ah, it uses vector math. With Altivec, no wonder Mail is so damned fast.
The other really interesting thing about mail is that it implements clustering algorithms to rank and group which makes me wonder why more GIS software is not running on OS X. Image classification would be a no brainer for folks that spend their time examining images and multispectral datasets.
The reader told Macworld: 'I downloaded the file in the hope that perhaps Microsoft had released some sort of public beta.
Using Limewire? A likely story.
The file unzipped, and to my delight the Microsoft icon looked genuine and trustworthy.' However, he added: 'I clicked on the installer file, and to my horror in 10 seconds the attachment had wiped my entire Home folder!'"
This is the risk you take when downloading stuff that you don't pay for. If you purchased Office 2004 from Microsoft (thus supporting the promotion and development of software for OS X), then you would have something to gripe about. As it stands, one might suggest you got what you paid for.....
This is 2004, you should know by now not to open a file from an untrusted source.
Well said. However, this does raise the possibility of other code that could be made to look like just about anything. So, once again, think about what you install on your computer just like you would think about what you eat or who you have sex with. If you don't know, trust or suspect that software/food/person, then either screen them or think twice.
Free textbooks online? The ability to continually update and correct errors and misinformation? Sign me up.
We have taken this approach with possibly the earliest (to my knowledge) online textbook available. This site is an online textbook of retinal biology and anatomy compiled by a number of folks. Please forgive the old-school design (early 90's web look, feel and code but that was when it went online) as I am redesigning it in my not so spare time and hope to start wrapping in genetics, molecular biology etc... in the near future.
Other cool facts: Despite the admittedly narrow focus of retinal cell biology, this site does garner upwards of 45,000 hits/day and is running on an old G3 iMac. (one of the best $600 I ever spent).
Well, let's see: If Apple has been uncommunicative about the presence (or absence) of any security holes, it is simply because they would rather not publicize the presence of particular holes. It's good policy for their OS while also maintaining an open source presence with Darwin that allows for public scrutiny. It should also be noted that Apple is also working towards approval of certain security ratings from assorted groups and governmental agencies, but they are not publicizing that either. They would rather maintain a low profile and have good reasons for doing so. After all, the core of OS X, the NeXT OS has a long history of a presence in intelligence and security circles (NSA, CIA, FBI etc...).
I read the linked article and was absolutely stunned at how superficial the evidence was given the claims being made. If one is going to make such statements, one would think there would be a little more substance, but hey the article certainly has garnered some attention, so perhaps that was the sole goal of the author? Or if one were likely to believe in conspiracies, one might guess that the author was put up to writing the article by a potential competitor? In science, we have to publish "disclosures" that establish corporate or political linkages. Perhaps it is time for the news media to do the same?
Look, the graphics are important, but I must say. Story, story, story.. That is what is going to make a great game beyond any cool effects and such. This is especially true if games are going to become more immersive and be more "cinematic" in nature. Games like Half-life, Marathon, and Deux Ex were games that succeeded not because their graphics were the absolute cutting edge, but because they had reasonably good story lines. I would still like to see more in the way of character development and story progression, as the immersive environment depends much more on story than anything else. After all, how many of you remember the Infocom games?
Currently it looks like only a Windows client is available, though."
Might it make more sense to have the client available on platforms which are not necessarily vulnerable to most of these infections? After all, many of the systems which are connected to the Internet full time (servers/workstations etc...) are not Windows machines.
Slashdot Mirror
The title is very misleading and is born of sloppy reporting. The whole eye was NOT transplanted, rather the cornea was what was transplanted. The cornea had adhered to the boys iris clouding his vision. Technically and surgically, this is nothing of note as corneal replacements have been happening now for years and years. Politically however stuff like this is good for Indian Pakistani relations.
The title suggests that the whole eye was transplanted which would indeed be very exciting as I myself work in vision rescue focusing on diseases that cause blindness through degeneration of the retina. However, the concept of rescuing vision once we have lost it due to trauma to the retina or degenerative diseases is much more difficult than simply replacing the tissue with a healthy donor tissue. We are working with a number of folks on bionic and biological therapies and replacements for retinal vision loss, but it is a challenging prospect despite what some commercial organizations would have the media believe.
In addition to the above mentioned corrections, there are other problems with this story. In particular, apparently the child was born blind from birth which would suggest that depending upon how old the child is, there will be problems due to vision being occluded during certain critical periods of vision pathway development. This means that there may be no vision in the eye that was clouded anyway, or that vision may not be fully "normal" and likely will never be.
(yes, I am a vision scientist)
I would have to agree with this. It is also true of kids that are extraordinarily bright and very high achievers early on in life. The harsh reality that we all had to live up to was that you grow up and get a university degree, perhaps a doctorate (or two), and then you are just like everybody else you associate with, only you peaked earlier. I am still in my early thirties, but everybody around me is pretty much equally smart and accomplished. Some are happier than others so the secret is finding you niche, what it is that you like doing for a living and striving to continue making a difference. The really sad cases to me are the ones where folks make a name for themselves early on and then ride on their early efforts for as long as they can eventually becoming bitter.
On the other hand, you do tend to get opportunities that you would not normally receive, and I would encourage you to explore as many of those as possible. If you don't know what you want to do, go to a liberal arts college and see where that takes you.
They wanna ditch their POTS while I wanna ditch our POTUS! :-)
Actually, cryptic paint schemes go back as far as the early 1900's in war ships designed to conceal edges and make it difficult to determine which direction a ship may be traveling in. They have been used on and off for years, but most commonly on smaller littoral combat platforms rather than larger ships.
it is controlled by 'state-of-the-art computers using a Windows NT operating system'. '
First off, I am not sure I would call an NT system "state of the art". Next, I have to wonder just why folks are using a commodity platform to perform literally "mission critical" operations in a combat environment. Particularly one whose history of security is dubious at best.
Shoot, we used iChatAV rather successfully from Auckland, New Zealand to Salt Lake City for remote collaboration in a lab environment rather successfully with hardly any delay whatsoever. In fact, I routinely used (and still use) iChatAV with a wireless connection, so I do not understand what this is all about.
There are other issues in addition to regulating radio spectrum that the FCC has undertaken. Namely, business management and media consolidation and "morals" are only one part of that aspect they feel they have to "regulate".
Should the FCC be abolished?
In a word,.......No. However, under the current director, Michael Powell (sorry Colin) I would argue there needs to be more oversight to ensure they are actually doing their job and protecting the peoples right to media and information. It could simply be a result of the overall current Whitehouse administration, but big media certainly does have an ally in the FCC right now. The current FCC supports large media consolidations to the point where we now have just FIVE large giants of commercial control in this country. Because media has become big business and not about reporting all the news that is fit to print or doing a journalists obligation to report facts, diversity of coverage becomes a monetary decision. Will it fit within the bottom line of the company? What will it do to our profit margins? I myself am rather disgusted with the way CNN has gone in the last few years after having started as THE source for my news. However, in the last few years they have decided from a business perspective, it makes more sense to report on the news mostly, but also a bit on stuff like who Jennifer Lopez is marrying now. Please.
OK, the social engineering that is going on here is getting out of control. It's bad enough that you have someone talking on their phones in the elevator/restaurant/movie theatre or on the subway behind you about all sorts of things (many of which are quite personal), but now we are going to get people gesticulating madly, waving their arms back and forth to send messages.
Lets have some real innovation, yes? Rather than fun and games with LEDs, what I would like to see some real innovation in in terms of interaction with cell phones much like iChatAV (prevents having to remember phone numbers etc...), whereby you could call someone wherever they may be over TCP/IP or have servers automatically negotiate phone calls through traditional land lines if the receiver of the call is not available on the iChatAV equivalent. It could be relatively easy to establish a hierarchy of places to contact a person starting with VOIP, then progressing on down to sending a voice to text message at the very last.
Right now at least, we do have phones (V600) that will automatically negotiate networks (so I can have one phone to travel with internationally rather than having to keep two or three depending upon the networks), but most of these phones have maddening interfaces and that in of itself could use some thought and effort. Look, placing GUI interfaces on lots of stuff is OK if it streamlines your operation of the device, but the phone companies and even automobile manufacturers are using lousy GUI interfaces to perform simple tasks. (I absolutely refuse to consider the new BMW's because of that stupid GUI that has to be navigated through three screens to change the radio station or move the seat or change the temperature.
Sorry for the rant.
In 6 1/2 months, they've now converted their investment to $13 million in cash and $13.7 million of common stock, for a loss of almost half their investment.
Nelson: Ha ha!
Seriously though. This should be a lesson to VC funds and financing operations that finance companies whose business models are built upon legal action and sucking off the hard work and sweat of people who make ideas work through the creation of products that improve our lives. These companies based on litigious action are typically fairly sleazy operations and will not generate any "good will" for the financing operations or companies.
I personally would much rather support and fund (and yes, even make money from) companies who are out there to make a difference. Work to make something new or make a difference rather than prostituting yourself for mere money and parasitizing off of others hard work and insight.
Modded as interesting? You do know that Darwin is already open sourced.....Don't you?
In order to let folks know just how cool Microsoft is, they always seem to pre-announce products by several months to years and invariably when they come out, they always seem to be somehow less than they promised. The iPod is good.....damned good. So I am certainly going to take a wait and see approach, but one usually gets what they pay for.
I likely will be sticking with the iPod I suspect.
I have heard that some sites are planning a huge SneakerNet (or, rather, JumboNet? CessnaNet?) and hoping to fly out stacks of DAT tapes of the unreduced data back "home."
So, we here in academia are a bit spoiled in terms of bandwidth. However, companies and some in academics have to pay for lots of bits and bytes and are thus interested in costs to move these sorts of data. I was talking with Jim Gray a couple of weeks ago and he was telling me that a recent study revealed some of the true costs of moving lots of data. For instance: Lets say you are trying to move a terabyte of data from London to Los Angeles. It turns out it is cheaper (and faster) to put it on magnetic storage and fly it from London to Los Angeles than it is to try and move it over the Internet.
Ummmm......I think it is too late and past my bed time. A quick rechecking of the numbers reveals a total of 960000000 bytes for each image in a 4800000000 pixel array giving us a much more manageable total of approx .9GB/image in raw form (again, assuming a 16 bit image).
Although the article does say 500 megapixel, a simple calculation could answer your question. The CCD is composed of elements giving it a pixel array of 180k X 240k pixels giving us 28800000000 pixels! (Assuming each pixel holds one grey value in a 16 bit image ) Working from 16 bits/pixel and 8 bits/byte, we are looking at 2 bytes per pixel. So 2 bytes * 28800000000 pixels gives us 57600000000 bytes or almost 54 GB/image!
If you were to take multispectral or even RGB images, one would multiply the file size by the appropriate dimension.....
Well, if they can truly get cargo to space at a single US dollar/ton, this is orders of magnitude cheaper than current costs which run approx $10k/kg. Which could very well result in a total destabilization of the space launch business. (a little chaos now and then is a good thing.....yes?). Of course we also have maglev and space elevators which could also provide this a run for the money, but I suspect maglev would be more expensive and due to helium costs, space elevators might be cheaper still.
However, I have to ask: Why on Earth would you ask this question on slashdot? Go post do a search on groups.google.com and POST IN A NEWSGROUP OVER THERE.
OK, I guess we should expect this kind of statement from Slashdot (particularly from an Anonymous Coward), but there are folks with M.D.'s and Ph.D.'s here on Slashdot (like me) and some of these folks work in areas like this. Slashdot is news for nerds and stuff that matters.....right? Well, you might be interested to know what the incidence of schitzophrenia is? I'll give you a hint: It's more common than you thought and it affects a great number of folks that are nerds and folks that use computers. Try thinking of something or someone other than yourself for a change and perhaps you might learn something.
And to those moderators who modded this as insightful?.......Shame on you.
The magic doesn't come from vectors. Vectors are just how you throw the numbers around
And your point is?
The reason the classification apparently works well is their choice of representation of the document: a word histogram -- the occurance count for each word. To measure the distance between two histograms, you usually use the chi-squared test.
For a univariate space (or perhaps bivariate space) this will work, but now try implementing standard chi-square analysis in multivariate (or hyperspectral) space. Starts to fall short rather quickly thus the measures of distances between clusters analysis.
Image clustering is hard, and the problem comes from picking a good representation of the image.
Yes, I do image clustering almost every day. Well, at least a couple times a week. With proper discriminands one can overcome "good image representation" problems.
Of course, a "word histogram" for an image makes no sense.
Actually, it does in a sense when you realize that images are simply matrices of numbers just like sentences or paragraphs can be identified as matrices after assigning lookup values to certain properties.
Just considering pixel intensity or pixel color doesn't work either.
Actually, yes it does. This is how many standard measures of image cluster analysis work.
You usually have to start looking at things like lines, curvatures, intersections, texture patterns, etc.
Actually, no. For many image classification algorithms that examine pixel value (oil bearing strata, concrete vs granite, types of aluminum in missiles etc...), structure or anatomy play absolutely no role in the identification of classes.
Once you decide tools you're going to use to describe an image and algorithms to calculate them, you can starting talking about how far away one image is from another, which then naturally leads to clustering techniques.
That is a very difficult approach to take for image classification that begins to rely on machine processing and image "interpretation" which is a much higher order problem.
But, the hard part about the clustering is getting them into a space in which they actually, nicely cluster.
Simply add more discriminands or filters and don't worry about "describing" the image. Other properties (like structure and anatomy) fall out after image clustering.
Infact I'd be willing to bet that its just another bayesian e-mail filter with maybe a few extra bells and whistles.
Actually data clustering algorithms are completely different beasts than a standard bayesian analysis. Do a search on k-means clustering or ISODATA clustering methods to see what I mean. However, if you are referring to a bayesian cluster analysis (like those implemented for genetic analysis of microarrays) then you might be correct. Only for reasons you might not intend.
Each document is in turn represented by a long string of numbers, one for each word in the corpus. In mathematical terms, we would say that every document is a vector of n numbers or a point in a space with n dimensions. I know it sounds quite geeky but if you can visualize that, you're halfway there.
Ah, it uses vector math. With Altivec, no wonder Mail is so damned fast.
The other really interesting thing about mail is that it implements clustering algorithms to rank and group which makes me wonder why more GIS software is not running on OS X. Image classification would be a no brainer for folks that spend their time examining images and multispectral datasets.
The reader told Macworld: 'I downloaded the file in the hope that perhaps Microsoft had released some sort of public beta.
Using Limewire? A likely story.
The file unzipped, and to my delight the Microsoft icon looked genuine and trustworthy.' However, he added: 'I clicked on the installer file, and to my horror in 10 seconds the attachment had wiped my entire Home folder!'"
This is the risk you take when downloading stuff that you don't pay for. If you purchased Office 2004 from Microsoft (thus supporting the promotion and development of software for OS X), then you would have something to gripe about. As it stands, one might suggest you got what you paid for.....
This is 2004, you should know by now not to open a file from an untrusted source.
Well said. However, this does raise the possibility of other code that could be made to look like just about anything. So, once again, think about what you install on your computer just like you would think about what you eat or who you have sex with. If you don't know, trust or suspect that software/food/person, then either screen them or think twice.
Free textbooks online? The ability to continually update and correct errors and misinformation? Sign me up.
We have taken this approach with possibly the earliest (to my knowledge) online textbook available. This site is an online textbook of retinal biology and anatomy compiled by a number of folks. Please forgive the old-school design (early 90's web look, feel and code but that was when it went online) as I am redesigning it in my not so spare time and hope to start wrapping in genetics, molecular biology etc... in the near future.
Other cool facts: Despite the admittedly narrow focus of retinal cell biology, this site does garner upwards of 45,000 hits/day and is running on an old G3 iMac. (one of the best $600 I ever spent).
Well, let's see: If Apple has been uncommunicative about the presence (or absence) of any security holes, it is simply because they would rather not publicize the presence of particular holes. It's good policy for their OS while also maintaining an open source presence with Darwin that allows for public scrutiny. It should also be noted that Apple is also working towards approval of certain security ratings from assorted groups and governmental agencies, but they are not publicizing that either. They would rather maintain a low profile and have good reasons for doing so. After all, the core of OS X, the NeXT OS has a long history of a presence in intelligence and security circles (NSA, CIA, FBI etc...).
I read the linked article and was absolutely stunned at how superficial the evidence was given the claims being made. If one is going to make such statements, one would think there would be a little more substance, but hey the article certainly has garnered some attention, so perhaps that was the sole goal of the author? Or if one were likely to believe in conspiracies, one might guess that the author was put up to writing the article by a potential competitor? In science, we have to publish "disclosures" that establish corporate or political linkages. Perhaps it is time for the news media to do the same?
Look, the graphics are important, but I must say. Story, story, story.. That is what is going to make a great game beyond any cool effects and such. This is especially true if games are going to become more immersive and be more "cinematic" in nature. Games like Half-life, Marathon, and Deux Ex were games that succeeded not because their graphics were the absolute cutting edge, but because they had reasonably good story lines. I would still like to see more in the way of character development and story progression, as the immersive environment depends much more on story than anything else. After all, how many of you remember the Infocom games?
These explorers will reveal once and for all that the B arc crashed on this planet and we are all ancestors of the Golgafinchan.
:-)
- Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.
Ah, the sig on this one says it all. Which moderator rated this as Informative? Shame on you!!!!
Currently it looks like only a Windows client is available, though."
Might it make more sense to have the client available on platforms which are not necessarily vulnerable to most of these infections? After all, many of the systems which are connected to the Internet full time (servers/workstations etc...) are not Windows machines.