Well, lets see: with my research occupying upwards of 80-90 hours a week working, including some time posting on Slashdot:-), who has time for TV?
Seriously though, I mark my time online historically with the first major news announcement I heard online before I heard it via television. That news item was the Oklahoma city bombing of the Federal Building. Since then I have received most of my news items online rather than through traditional outlets. Even as a subscriber to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, I get most of my content online.
Additionally, with the increasing productivity of the average American worker just trying to keep their jobs, one might suppose that the Internet provides for a more flexible media resource outlet allowing folks to customize their news searches without having to wait through the tripe and entertainment garbage that Fox News and more recently CNN et. al. have been delivering.
Dell (and other box manufacturers) cannot be happy about such a statement. After all, their entire business model is dependent upon making a profit assembling wrappers for different flavors of Windows. So, even though they tried with Linux to diversify somewhat and protect themselves some time ago (only to be spanked back by Microsoft), their fortunes are irrevocably tied to the success (or failure) of Microsoft.
I suppose that this could be construed as the ultimate embrace and extend (then smother) approach though, right? Get a huge number of companies to support your position and build your company and then overnight, take all of their business revenues over in one way or another.
As for Gates predilection for predictions..... I would like to see fewer grandiose predictions (although speech recognition and tablets and visual programming are decidedly not grandiose and are in fact products shipping and under development by a number of companies) and more fundamental focus on making Microsoft products suck less.
Well, there is always going to be the camp that would prefer to play games on their "PC" simply because they do not want a separate game box or they just don't play many games at all except for the occasional exceptional title. For instance, my work takes up most of my time (80-90 hours/week) so I really don't have much time or interest in playing games, but when Halo came out for OS X.....:-) Well, lets say productivity dropped a bit on the weekends, but I really don't have much interest in purchasing a game console.
I suppose however that the console market may eventually become the place for the pre-eminent titles especially given the kind of hardware that will be going into the next generation systems (G5s in the next Xbox?) and that PC titles will become ports. Of course we did see this approach with Halo, but only because MS screwed it up for us by purchasing Bungie, thus delaying the launch of Halo for Mac/Win and killing it all together for Linux.
As loathe as I am to say it now, Microsoft has actually show us the benefit of "standards". Only the benefits are not quite in their definition as they want to control all of the standards and get a cut of all money from the use of those "standards". Also, it should be noted that Microsoft is not all bad. They actually produce some nice code (Office for OS X is quite nice), however, they always seem to be behind the curve as if they are not able to innovate anything. They missed the GUI, the Internet and now notably the search engine all by quite a while only to turn the company around and focus all of their efforts on exploiting what they missed. The market dominance however, has shown us the benefit of having "standard" file types such as.doc that just about everybody in certain industries uses exclusively.
So, besides the cool tech issues, and clearing waterways of obstructions, the big deal here is that almost all of the old growth forests are gone. It is nigh impossible to find lumber that has grown slow and does not have knots in it anymore. In fact, Aladdin homes used to advertise back in the 20's and 30's that they would pay you a dollar for every knot you were able to find in the lumber they used to construct your home, but now....
At any rate, this old growth wood that is at the bottom of lakes and rivers has become quite prized for high end furniture, musical instruments and other applications where modern lumber does not cut it (*Snicker*), so developing robotics like this should have quite the payoff.
"I want to make sure (a user) can't get through... an online experience without hitting a Microsoft ad," he said.
So, does not the recent 600 some odd millions dollar fine by the EU suggest anything to these guys? The USDOJ let them off the hook, but the rest of the world is proving not to be as forgiving. Perhaps they should be a little more humble?...........Nah.
Hmmm, it seems that another approach might also provide these desirable side benefits but also work to secure the Internet as a whole, and not have to use "Trusted" architectures. Although, there are new controversies from the following approach, in short, from my journal: "an emerging Internet security company, Symbiot is taking an entirely new, albeit controversial approach to Internet defense and cyberwarfare that should appeal to cyberpunks everywhere. Rather than the traditional passive response that has been used by sysadmins and CTO's worldwide, Symbiot is taking a more "active" defense approach by implementing a common subscription based access to a "threat database" that will allow participating networks to determine the degree of threat and respond democratically (by using the shared resources of other participating networks) and proportionally to the attack by allowing for a graduated response to cyber attacks. The potential of an asymmetrical response to a threat is also not out of the question.... Links for additional information are here and here."
RIAA uses a simple technology called webcrawler to scan IP addresses for copyrighted material, but if a student is not sharing or uploading files, then RIAA cannot view the material on a person's computer.
I would actually be curious as to 1) how this technology works and 2) what the legalities of it are.
From the wording, one would guess that the algorithm goes through IP addresses of files shared on common p2p networks, and based upon that, do they assume you are automatically sharing copyrighted material and thus are subject to search? Or is the algorithm simply correlating those copyright material uploaded to shared databases with an IP address and then assuming the offending computer contains "ill gotten booty"? Or is that ill booten gotty?:-)
Regarding the legalities, unless there is some agreement that most folks unknowingly consent to, having the RIAA looking through "material" on someone's computer should be illegal whether or not they are engaging in illegal theft of intellectual property......right? I suppose that if the RIAA were looking for narrowly defined "signatures" of IP or copyright protected data, they would have to scan the entire contents of hard drives and without a subpoena, I have to wonder if this is legal at all? I suppose the software bots could simply be looking for material that is left wide open to the Internet which would obviate many of the legal concerns, but why would someone host any significant (especially illegally obtained) collection of software wide open?
I seem to recall that Sim City was ported to the Macintosh by a group in Russia and that a significant amount of the original programming was outsourced to Russia as well? Given that the sim was incredibly slow on a Pentium 3 I had and not that much faster on an old G4, I wondered about the "cleanliness" of the code that went into the sim. There certainly is a huge pool of programming talent in Russia (at least in Kiev that I know of where estimates range from 10-16% of the populace having CS skills), so perhaps the sim code was simply so big that it resulted in the slow performance?
My research is in retinal degenerations, but where I work, we have patients who lose their vision for a number of reasons from trauma to corneal problems to diabetes and other pathologies. One of our most valuable services we have is helping people make the transition from the world of the sighted to living without vision cues. I am currently looking at this code for OS X (have known about it for some time) and I will push hard to make it the de-facto standard for our patients as it simplifies their life (try dealing with all the various security problems and stability problems of Windows without using your eyes) and will be easier on their budgets as it will come free with OS X.
Indeed. I actually had this happen to me by the Discovery Channel of all sources. There was a documentary on vision rescue strategies where the producers of this particular show used some of my data in a completely backwards fashion in a segment that ironically was intended to support a particular bionic approach when the data suggested exactly the opposite. The data explicitly demonstrated radical changes in the retina that would not support a bionic chip, yet the show concludes the opposite while showing my data!.
Apparently a looming deadline inspired the producers to go to production before I approved the script.
This sort of thing simply exemplifies the sad state of science education in the general public. People when presented with the most superficial of data will adopt as truth the most extreme or absurd of claims with no critical assessment. This sort of blind trust allows folks to be taken in by claims of better health through unproven herbal supplements or claims of penile enlargments. On more serious notes, the lack of critical thinking among some has led to political and international policy that threatens to influence the state of world affairs.
Not only local user groups, but we are collaborating with some folks in computer science and the last meeting we had, I counted 6 out of 10 laptops which were Macs. This is from a department that two or three years ago was almost impossible to find a Macintosh anywhere. At the last international scientific vision meetings I attended, the percentage of Macs was up significantly at around 30% of the total and I am looking forward to seeing what the percentages are at this years meetings.
Interesting because others have estimated that the iPod will add another 15 cents a share to Apple's earning this year which rises to 25 cents a share by 2006.
This is only focusing on the iPod and ignoring all other products in Apple's inventory announced and unannounced which are having large influences in their respective markets.
Yet at the same time, Google has reported an increase in the percentage of Mac users using Google. HP has licensed the iPod for distribution and iTunes for inclusion on HP computers. And furthermore, Apple appears to be making huge headway into the science and technology markets as well as gaining steam again in the higher education environments. Finally, a significant portion of the scientists I work with are switching platforms from Windows to OS X.
So, from where I am viewing the market from the perspective of an end user, Apple's market position is looking pretty good to me. This article appears to be another one in the long chain of prognosticators predicting the demise of Apple Computer, but what they always miss is the disproportionate influence the company has had on the personal computer industry. Hey, where would Microsoft get all their R&D from if not for Apple?
Nah, its the little green men shooting at one another in an epic battle of water rights. You thought that water rights in the American West were a hot button topic, well on Mars.....
Seriously though, at the very least, the cool thing is that we have seen a "shooting star" from the surface of another planet for the first time. The timing of NASA and JPL on both Spirit and Opportunity so far has been impeccable. Let's hope their luck continues.
Seriously. I am absolutely with you on this one. The thing that worries me is that Spielberg and Cruise will make another film like Minority Report, that has all the potential of being good cinematic material that could tell a good story and make commentary on social issues, but falls completely flat on lousy acting. A great book, but from the looks of it, will become another vehicle for T. Cruise.
Ahhhh, long walk on the beach of Plum Island watching the birds. (all kidding aside, seriously, it is good bird watching there). But, it should be noted that Plum Island is only one of several BSL-4 labs around the country that are publicly acknowledged. Others are located at UC Davis (proposed back in 2000 at least), UTMB in Galviston Texas, One propsed for Boston University, there are two just outside Washington D.C., there is one in Atlanta at the CDC and one in San Antonio. I believe we also have a BSL-4 lab out at dugway proving grounds in Utah as well.
So, one should know that these facilities are the absolute best place to do research with the kinds of pathogens and chemicals and folks should not be scared at the mere presence of these facilities because of the work they do to help understand disease and potentially, biological weapons that may be used against us. However, we should know about their presence, and we should have contingency plans in place for the surrounding population (aside from "sanitation") should we have problems at these facilities.
Some of the other issues are that there is only so much space within a given area of cortex. So, if neurons get bigger, glial cells (the neuronal support cells of the brain) have to give up the space. What does this mean? I don't know for sure, but there could be less buffering capacity for pathologic events. Neuronal size often traditionally has more to do with the basic electrical properties of cables. It turns out that a couple of guys named Hodgkin and Huxley made a series of equations that describe the passive electrical properties of axons (the long distance signaling part of the neuron) and they found out that the larger the diameter, the faster and farther a given "pulse" could go. However, more to the point of your question, if electrical activity were to "leak" across neurons, I suppose that the spatial mapping of neural systems might also become less precise?
Absolutely brilliant. First, you write an insightful first post, thereby gaining karma for being insightful. Then you respond to it with something funny, allowing a whole new set of mod points to be spent on a seperate post.
My Karma's been maxed out for a great, long while now (at least I think). I have karma to burn and am not worried about it in the least.
The second comment was made after I realized that yes, I did in-fact, have....First Post. I assumed I would get modded down, but hey, that's Slashdot for you. (I did think it was funny though)
Oh, dude. You are opening yourself up to all sorts of abuse from the Slashdot crowd, but I will try and make some constructive comments to head off any noise.
I have worked in the past with family on a couple of businesses ranging from molecular modeling and pharmacologic development to health care and real estate and I can tell you sometimes it works and sometimes it does not. You will simply have to find out by jumping in, but make sure that everybody understands that running your own business is hard work. Just in case you did not get that: Running your own business is hard work. Sorry to repeat myself, but I have seen the attitude more than once of people saying "Hey, I will start my own business and it will be cool. I can set my own hours, etc...etc...etc...", but many folks have no idea how complicated or difficult it can be. Beyond your knowledge of the work involved, everybody else in a small start up or small company will have to have strong work ethics, some luck and some insight into the market you are looking at working in. Get yourself a good CPA to do quarterly taxes, have regularly scheduled (but short and concise) status update meetings, and decide before you go in, which people are going to accept which responsibilities. Also, be aware that starting your own business can occupy all aspects of your life including your moment to moment thoughts and difficulties can arise if everybody involved in the early stages does not have the same vision.
Also, I don't know what your relationship is with your girlfriend, but both of you need to establish right from the start whether or not she is an employee or a partner, and you need to decide for your relationship what the future (if any) holds in terms of marriage. Even long term live-in relationships can have "common-law" implications, so if the business takes off, but your relationship does not, how are you going to deal with that? It might also be prudent to establish early on what the investment shares are as well. Who "owns" the business? Is your brother going to be a partner or employee?
Given HP's recent relationship with Apple on a rebranded iPod, does that mean that 1) the tunes sold in starbucks will be AAC and/or 2) that iTunes will be involved?
Xerox PARC did the R&D for modern GUIs. The Lisa was Apple's first attempt to copy the Xerox PARC GUI work, and it failed. Then, Apple tried again with Macintosh, and by cutting a lot of corners made the system cheap enough to make it a success.
I have seen the early GUI development by PARC. MUCH more R&D was required to get that concept up and running for a machine that could serve as a "personal computer." Yes, the Lisa failed, but it was the first personal computer that had a GUI.
The laser printer was developed at Xerox PARC. Postscript was developed at Adobe, based on a more complicated PDL developed at Xerox PARC. Apple just happened to create a successful product based on those technologies.
PARC "invented" the laser printer, but it was Apple who heavily underwrote a new company by the name of Adobe and co-developed the laser printer for use with the personal computer.
The Psion predates the Apple Newton by nearly a decade, and I think it wasn't the first PDA either.
I'll give you that technically, but I used an early Psion in 1986 or so and it was not really a functional information manager. The Newton 120 that I owned a couple of years later was a true PDA that allowed for word processing, information management, communication for email and early Internet via modem and IR, and more. The Psion was more of a glorified address book or flat data file keeper.
Not even close; you can find the history of the laptop here. In fact, the idea goes back to Alan Kay's work on Dynapad--late 1960's or early 1970's.
Laptop form factor!(not laptop) with palm rests in front of a full sized keyboard with trackball or (later) trackpad was the innovation there. All of the previous laptops I have owned have been awkward with keyboards up front with no place to rest your hands and no pointing device integral to the laptop.
The Apple II was irrelevant to speech recognition research and development
My point still stands, that the first speech synthesis was developed years before anybody else on the Apple ][.
Not even close. (Digital Camera)
Consumer digital camera! is what I said. I remember the MavicaPro series and they were hideously expensive. The Quicktake was actually affordable by the consumer.
You other examples either refer to system integration issues (e.g., supposed first use of a 3 1/2" floppy--developed by Sony), or are vague and meaningless from a technological point of view.
Hey, I remember installing Microsoft Word or Office using a skyscraper of little floppy disks and I for one, am grateful that Apple began shipping computers with CD-ROM drives in them for just this reason.
Plug and play compatibility is something that is also a huge time saver. Do you remember setting all of those damned DIP switches when installing a video (or other) expansion card and constantly rebooting every time you changed something? Come on now, even now with a modern SGI Octane, when I install a new video card (or other expansion card) I am down for at least a half hour configuring things. Plug and play revolutionized the personal computer industry.
First to include built in networking is meaningless? There is this thing you are using called the Internet.........
Firewire is meaningless? I guess you don't use any significant amounts of data.
Look, don't get pissy and there is no call to be offended. I am simply giving credit where credit is due. I grew up using TRS-80s, IBM PCs, Heathkits, Apple ][s, Sun Solaris boxes, SGI IRIX boxes etc.... and I find Apple really does make the easiest to use yet most flexible kit. OS X pushes that flexibility even further.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, lets see: with my research occupying upwards of 80-90 hours a week working, including some time posting on Slashdot :-), who has time for TV?
Seriously though, I mark my time online historically with the first major news announcement I heard online before I heard it via television. That news item was the Oklahoma city bombing of the Federal Building. Since then I have received most of my news items online rather than through traditional outlets. Even as a subscriber to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, I get most of my content online.
Additionally, with the increasing productivity of the average American worker just trying to keep their jobs, one might suppose that the Internet provides for a more flexible media resource outlet allowing folks to customize their news searches without having to wait through the tripe and entertainment garbage that Fox News and more recently CNN et. al. have been delivering.
Dell (and other box manufacturers) cannot be happy about such a statement. After all, their entire business model is dependent upon making a profit assembling wrappers for different flavors of Windows. So, even though they tried with Linux to diversify somewhat and protect themselves some time ago (only to be spanked back by Microsoft), their fortunes are irrevocably tied to the success (or failure) of Microsoft.
I suppose that this could be construed as the ultimate embrace and extend (then smother) approach though, right? Get a huge number of companies to support your position and build your company and then overnight, take all of their business revenues over in one way or another.
As for Gates predilection for predictions..... I would like to see fewer grandiose predictions (although speech recognition and tablets and visual programming are decidedly not grandiose and are in fact products shipping and under development by a number of companies) and more fundamental focus on making Microsoft products suck less.
You did not read my post very carefully. Reread it and you will see that we are not very far apart in our opinions.
-BWJones
Well, there is always going to be the camp that would prefer to play games on their "PC" simply because they do not want a separate game box or they just don't play many games at all except for the occasional exceptional title. For instance, my work takes up most of my time (80-90 hours/week) so I really don't have much time or interest in playing games, but when Halo came out for OS X..... :-) Well, lets say productivity dropped a bit on the weekends, but I really don't have much interest in purchasing a game console.
I suppose however that the console market may eventually become the place for the pre-eminent titles especially given the kind of hardware that will be going into the next generation systems (G5s in the next Xbox?) and that PC titles will become ports. Of course we did see this approach with Halo, but only because MS screwed it up for us by purchasing Bungie, thus delaying the launch of Halo for Mac/Win and killing it all together for Linux.
As loathe as I am to say it now, Microsoft has actually show us the benefit of "standards". Only the benefits are not quite in their definition as they want to control all of the standards and get a cut of all money from the use of those "standards". Also, it should be noted that Microsoft is not all bad. They actually produce some nice code (Office for OS X is quite nice), however, they always seem to be behind the curve as if they are not able to innovate anything. They missed the GUI, the Internet and now notably the search engine all by quite a while only to turn the company around and focus all of their efforts on exploiting what they missed. The market dominance however, has shown us the benefit of having "standard" file types such as .doc that just about everybody in certain industries uses exclusively.
So, besides the cool tech issues, and clearing waterways of obstructions, the big deal here is that almost all of the old growth forests are gone. It is nigh impossible to find lumber that has grown slow and does not have knots in it anymore. In fact, Aladdin homes used to advertise back in the 20's and 30's that they would pay you a dollar for every knot you were able to find in the lumber they used to construct your home, but now....
At any rate, this old growth wood that is at the bottom of lakes and rivers has become quite prized for high end furniture, musical instruments and other applications where modern lumber does not cut it (*Snicker*), so developing robotics like this should have quite the payoff.
"I want to make sure (a user) can't get through ... an online experience without hitting a Microsoft ad," he said.
So, does not the recent 600 some odd millions dollar fine by the EU suggest anything to these guys? The USDOJ let them off the hook, but the rest of the world is proving not to be as forgiving. Perhaps they should be a little more humble?...........Nah.
Hmmm, it seems that another approach might also provide these desirable side benefits but also work to secure the Internet as a whole, and not have to use "Trusted" architectures. Although, there are new controversies from the following approach, in short, from my journal: "an emerging Internet security company, Symbiot is taking an entirely new, albeit controversial approach to Internet defense and cyberwarfare that should appeal to cyberpunks everywhere. Rather than the traditional passive response that has been used by sysadmins and CTO's worldwide, Symbiot is taking a more "active" defense approach by implementing a common subscription based access to a "threat database" that will allow participating networks to determine the degree of threat and respond democratically (by using the shared resources of other participating networks) and proportionally to the attack by allowing for a graduated response to cyber attacks. The potential of an asymmetrical response to a threat is also not out of the question.... Links for additional information are here and here."
RIAA uses a simple technology called webcrawler to scan IP addresses for copyrighted material, but if a student is not sharing or uploading files, then RIAA cannot view the material on a person's computer.
:-)
I would actually be curious as to 1) how this technology works and 2) what the legalities of it are.
From the wording, one would guess that the algorithm goes through IP addresses of files shared on common p2p networks, and based upon that, do they assume you are automatically sharing copyrighted material and thus are subject to search? Or is the algorithm simply correlating those copyright material uploaded to shared databases with an IP address and then assuming the offending computer contains "ill gotten booty"? Or is that ill booten gotty?
Regarding the legalities, unless there is some agreement that most folks unknowingly consent to, having the RIAA looking through "material" on someone's computer should be illegal whether or not they are engaging in illegal theft of intellectual property......right? I suppose that if the RIAA were looking for narrowly defined "signatures" of IP or copyright protected data, they would have to scan the entire contents of hard drives and without a subpoena, I have to wonder if this is legal at all? I suppose the software bots could simply be looking for material that is left wide open to the Internet which would obviate many of the legal concerns, but why would someone host any significant (especially illegally obtained) collection of software wide open?
SCO seeks licenses down under
Should not this read......"SCO seeks victims down under?"
I seem to recall that Sim City was ported to the Macintosh by a group in Russia and that a significant amount of the original programming was outsourced to Russia as well? Given that the sim was incredibly slow on a Pentium 3 I had and not that much faster on an old G4, I wondered about the "cleanliness" of the code that went into the sim. There certainly is a huge pool of programming talent in Russia (at least in Kiev that I know of where estimates range from 10-16% of the populace having CS skills), so perhaps the sim code was simply so big that it resulted in the slow performance?
My research is in retinal degenerations, but where I work, we have patients who lose their vision for a number of reasons from trauma to corneal problems to diabetes and other pathologies. One of our most valuable services we have is helping people make the transition from the world of the sighted to living without vision cues. I am currently looking at this code for OS X (have known about it for some time) and I will push hard to make it the de-facto standard for our patients as it simplifies their life (try dealing with all the various security problems and stability problems of Windows without using your eyes) and will be easier on their budgets as it will come free with OS X.
Indeed. I actually had this happen to me by the Discovery Channel of all sources. There was a documentary on vision rescue strategies where the producers of this particular show used some of my data in a completely backwards fashion in a segment that ironically was intended to support a particular bionic approach when the data suggested exactly the opposite. The data explicitly demonstrated radical changes in the retina that would not support a bionic chip, yet the show concludes the opposite while showing my data!.
Apparently a looming deadline inspired the producers to go to production before I approved the script.
This sort of thing simply exemplifies the sad state of science education in the general public. People when presented with the most superficial of data will adopt as truth the most extreme or absurd of claims with no critical assessment. This sort of blind trust allows folks to be taken in by claims of better health through unproven herbal supplements or claims of penile enlargments. On more serious notes, the lack of critical thinking among some has led to political and international policy that threatens to influence the state of world affairs.
Not only local user groups, but we are collaborating with some folks in computer science and the last meeting we had, I counted 6 out of 10 laptops which were Macs. This is from a department that two or three years ago was almost impossible to find a Macintosh anywhere. At the last international scientific vision meetings I attended, the percentage of Macs was up significantly at around 30% of the total and I am looking forward to seeing what the percentages are at this years meetings.
Interesting because others have estimated that the iPod will add another 15 cents a share to Apple's earning this year which rises to 25 cents a share by 2006.
This is only focusing on the iPod and ignoring all other products in Apple's inventory announced and unannounced which are having large influences in their respective markets.
Yet at the same time, Google has reported an increase in the percentage of Mac users using Google. HP has licensed the iPod for distribution and iTunes for inclusion on HP computers. And furthermore, Apple appears to be making huge headway into the science and technology markets as well as gaining steam again in the higher education environments. Finally, a significant portion of the scientists I work with are switching platforms from Windows to OS X.
So, from where I am viewing the market from the perspective of an end user, Apple's market position is looking pretty good to me. This article appears to be another one in the long chain of prognosticators predicting the demise of Apple Computer, but what they always miss is the disproportionate influence the company has had on the personal computer industry. Hey, where would Microsoft get all their R&D from if not for Apple?
Nah, its the little green men shooting at one another in an epic battle of water rights. You thought that water rights in the American West were a hot button topic, well on Mars.....
Seriously though, at the very least, the cool thing is that we have seen a "shooting star" from the surface of another planet for the first time. The timing of NASA and JPL on both Spirit and Opportunity so far has been impeccable. Let's hope their luck continues.
Seriously. I am absolutely with you on this one. The thing that worries me is that Spielberg and Cruise will make another film like Minority Report, that has all the potential of being good cinematic material that could tell a good story and make commentary on social issues, but falls completely flat on lousy acting. A great book, but from the looks of it, will become another vehicle for T. Cruise.
Ahhhh, long walk on the beach of Plum Island watching the birds. (all kidding aside, seriously, it is good bird watching there). But, it should be noted that Plum Island is only one of several BSL-4 labs around the country that are publicly acknowledged. Others are located at UC Davis (proposed back in 2000 at least), UTMB in Galviston Texas, One propsed for Boston University, there are two just outside Washington D.C., there is one in Atlanta at the CDC and one in San Antonio. I believe we also have a BSL-4 lab out at dugway proving grounds in Utah as well.
So, one should know that these facilities are the absolute best place to do research with the kinds of pathogens and chemicals and folks should not be scared at the mere presence of these facilities because of the work they do to help understand disease and potentially, biological weapons that may be used against us. However, we should know about their presence, and we should have contingency plans in place for the surrounding population (aside from "sanitation") should we have problems at these facilities.
Some of the other issues are that there is only so much space within a given area of cortex. So, if neurons get bigger, glial cells (the neuronal support cells of the brain) have to give up the space. What does this mean? I don't know for sure, but there could be less buffering capacity for pathologic events. Neuronal size often traditionally has more to do with the basic electrical properties of cables. It turns out that a couple of guys named Hodgkin and Huxley made a series of equations that describe the passive electrical properties of axons (the long distance signaling part of the neuron) and they found out that the larger the diameter, the faster and farther a given "pulse" could go. However, more to the point of your question, if electrical activity were to "leak" across neurons, I suppose that the spatial mapping of neural systems might also become less precise?
Absolutely brilliant. First, you write an insightful first post, thereby gaining karma for being insightful. Then you respond to it with something funny, allowing a whole new set of mod points to be spent on a seperate post.
My Karma's been maxed out for a great, long while now (at least I think). I have karma to burn and am not worried about it in the least.
The second comment was made after I realized that yes, I did in-fact, have....First Post. I assumed I would get modded down, but hey, that's Slashdot for you. (I did think it was funny though)
Oh, dude. You are opening yourself up to all sorts of abuse from the Slashdot crowd, but I will try and make some constructive comments to head off any noise.
I have worked in the past with family on a couple of businesses ranging from molecular modeling and pharmacologic development to health care and real estate and I can tell you sometimes it works and sometimes it does not. You will simply have to find out by jumping in, but make sure that everybody understands that running your own business is hard work. Just in case you did not get that: Running your own business is hard work. Sorry to repeat myself, but I have seen the attitude more than once of people saying "Hey, I will start my own business and it will be cool. I can set my own hours, etc...etc...etc...", but many folks have no idea how complicated or difficult it can be. Beyond your knowledge of the work involved, everybody else in a small start up or small company will have to have strong work ethics, some luck and some insight into the market you are looking at working in. Get yourself a good CPA to do quarterly taxes, have regularly scheduled (but short and concise) status update meetings, and decide before you go in, which people are going to accept which responsibilities. Also, be aware that starting your own business can occupy all aspects of your life including your moment to moment thoughts and difficulties can arise if everybody involved in the early stages does not have the same vision.
Also, I don't know what your relationship is with your girlfriend, but both of you need to establish right from the start whether or not she is an employee or a partner, and you need to decide for your relationship what the future (if any) holds in terms of marriage. Even long term live-in relationships can have "common-law" implications, so if the business takes off, but your relationship does not, how are you going to deal with that? It might also be prudent to establish early on what the investment shares are as well. Who "owns" the business? Is your brother going to be a partner or employee?
Given HP's recent relationship with Apple on a rebranded iPod, does that mean that 1) the tunes sold in starbucks will be AAC and/or 2) that iTunes will be involved?
Xerox PARC did the R&D for modern GUIs. The Lisa was Apple's first attempt to copy the Xerox PARC GUI work, and it failed. Then, Apple tried again with Macintosh, and by cutting a lot of corners made the system cheap enough to make it a success.
I have seen the early GUI development by PARC. MUCH more R&D was required to get that concept up and running for a machine that could serve as a "personal computer." Yes, the Lisa failed, but it was the first personal computer that had a GUI.
The laser printer was developed at Xerox PARC. Postscript was developed at Adobe, based on a more complicated PDL developed at Xerox PARC. Apple just happened to create a successful product based on those technologies.
PARC "invented" the laser printer, but it was Apple who heavily underwrote a new company by the name of Adobe and co-developed the laser printer for use with the personal computer.
The Psion predates the Apple Newton by nearly a decade, and I think it wasn't the first PDA either.
I'll give you that technically, but I used an early Psion in 1986 or so and it was not really a functional information manager. The Newton 120 that I owned a couple of years later was a true PDA that allowed for word processing, information management, communication for email and early Internet via modem and IR, and more. The Psion was more of a glorified address book or flat data file keeper.
Not even close; you can find the history of the laptop here. In fact, the idea goes back to Alan Kay's work on Dynapad--late 1960's or early 1970's.
Laptop form factor!(not laptop) with palm rests in front of a full sized keyboard with trackball or (later) trackpad was the innovation there. All of the previous laptops I have owned have been awkward with keyboards up front with no place to rest your hands and no pointing device integral to the laptop.
The Apple II was irrelevant to speech recognition research and development
My point still stands, that the first speech synthesis was developed years before anybody else on the Apple ][.
Not even close. (Digital Camera)
Consumer digital camera! is what I said. I remember the MavicaPro series and they were hideously expensive. The Quicktake was actually affordable by the consumer.
You other examples either refer to system integration issues (e.g., supposed first use of a 3 1/2" floppy--developed by Sony), or are vague and meaningless from a technological point of view.
Hey, I remember installing Microsoft Word or Office using a skyscraper of little floppy disks and I for one, am grateful that Apple began shipping computers with CD-ROM drives in them for just this reason.
Plug and play compatibility is something that is also a huge time saver. Do you remember setting all of those damned DIP switches when installing a video (or other) expansion card and constantly rebooting every time you changed something? Come on now, even now with a modern SGI Octane, when I install a new video card (or other expansion card) I am down for at least a half hour configuring things. Plug and play revolutionized the personal computer industry.
First to include built in networking is meaningless? There is this thing you are using called the Internet.........
Firewire is meaningless? I guess you don't use any significant amounts of data.
Look, don't get pissy and there is no call to be offended. I am simply giving credit where credit is due. I grew up using TRS-80s, IBM PCs, Heathkits, Apple ][s, Sun Solaris boxes, SGI IRIX boxes etc.... and I find Apple really does make the easiest to use yet most flexible kit. OS X pushes that flexibility even further.