Apple is running a very cool countdown clock on their main page here.
Flash aside, this is one important update for Mac users and shows how much code optimization can get you in terms of performance. This release runs impressively fast on current hardware, but more importantly for the installed user base, it gives new life to older machines with good performance on machines going back several years.
That is technically true, but the key work is published. You would be stunned to know how much science is funded and done by corporations and governments whose results are never, ever, published. However, that said, secrecy in published science also is present and many times it has its place, for instance in a coy response to a targeted question that the author is either 1) unsure of scientifically, or 2) wants to protect until they can actually publish or patent the results.
After reading the article, I think the author of the article was also referring to the ability of "common" folks to gain access to the tools with which to perform genetic engineering and such that previously were only available to those with the funding, education and resources to ensure that certain technologies have self limiting products that are controlled by a larger scientific process and oversight.
Two questions: 1.Where would OSS be with government support in embryonic phases?
Huge. Bigger than many of us realize and even from a Republican standpoint, OSS models can make companies, individuals and governments large amounts of cash. Think where we would be with an OSS model for healthcare software instead of the nightmare that is currently present in electronic health care records.
2. Slashdot is so powerful??
Slashdot is getting quite a bit of press and it helps that many of the folks who lurk and do some posting are actually participants in hard core science that is pushing the limits and helping move us forward. The problem with Slashdot is just that the absolute noise that has to be navigated through to get to the good stuff. Yeah, mod system works to some degree, but often people are modding down not because they find a comment incorrect, they are modding down because they don't agree.
Riiight, let's code a Windows game on a Mac. REAL smart, moron.
And why not? I realize I should expect this sort of post from an AC, but if you did any coding at all, you might realize that core coding itself has no platform preference. Yeah sure, there are specific system calls, but much coding can be accomplished for different platforms on many other platforms. After all, algorithms and math do not care if they are running on Windows or not.
In fact, I was sitting on a plane last year next to a guy coding for a Wintel system that was performing all of his coding in VirtualPC on a Mac. Why? I asked. His response was that virtual environments were easy to simply throw away if your root coding did something stupid. You dont have to go fishing around to try and fix problems. All you have to do is grab a fresh copy of your Wintel PC and start working again.
The ranking is the top Agenda setters, not the most powerful folks in tech as the poster states. For this reason I can easily see S. Jobs and Gates towards the top. This is slightly different than influence and worlds different that "Most Powerful".
I have to wonder how long until people start to realize that for truly critical (read millions of dollars) work, you're best off having the production machines OFFLINE.
I have to wonder how long until people start to realize that for truly critical work, they are still using Windows?
Seriously, the Internet is what makes many folks productive especially if they need to collaborate with others. our servers have proven invaluable for collaboration with folks from around the world so that they can write manuscripts with us or see data that we have processed for them.
EPR is very sensitive to oxygen and in cancerous cells there is less flow of oxygen.
While I am a physiologist by training, I am not an oncologist. However, that said, I should probably clarify your statement. Many forms of cancer are rapidly growing cell populations and therefore have high metabolic rates and therefore high oxygen utilization. Technically in these cells there is greater "flux" of oxygen through these cells but as they are imaged, they might appear to have lower levels of oxygen at any one instant due to their high metabolic usage.
Does this guy really think that everyone in the world is very ill and requires the depth of testing of an MRI? (Maybe he's just really old and all his peers have been through MRI's...)
Shoot, at one of the companies I am involved with, our MRI get lots of use from young, healthy folks who have injured themselves playing sports, hiking, biking etc.... MRI provides great visual access to bones and joints that previously was impossible without surgery.
Are you referring to the vague rumours of some "psychic" guys sitting in a dark military base over a map of the Russian Siberia and telling the gullible colonels how they "can see secret military bases and the personnel" at that and that point?
Put your foil hat back on. No, I am referring to the entire industry that has grown up around the analysis of imagery and other information gathered by any means involving satellite, airplane or ground based methodologies. For instance, the origins of this business can be traced back to NASA and the CIA for the study of images taken from satellites pointed at earth and other objects in space. These techniques have expanded to include IR, UV and multispectral analysis as well as radar, SAR and other methodologies.
Many folks have used these technologies for remote prospecting from space, forestry management, urban planning etc.... We are currently using many of the techniques in the study of retinal vision and the circuitries that mediate vision. My doctoral dissertation used these techniques to study retinal degenerations such as retinitis pigmentosa. The math is the same, only the "filters" are different.
However, the real problem lies in the focus of the light
No, tuneability of lasers to specific tissues and degrees of intensity are well worked out.
and how do we distinguish between well-behaving cells and carcinoma?
That is the point of the multispectral (potentially) analysis. The idea is that you in real time identify characteristics in normal versus transformed cells.
On a cell-to-cell scale?
That was the point of this article.
It would then costs millions to have a surgery getting one simple surgery done with the lasers and it would last ages.
No, it could cost significantly less to have the laser surgery, could provide a better outcome, reduce the time in surgery and under anesthesia and reduce infection rates.
If you think any kind of staining/identifying can work with computers that automate the thing then you better think who is to blame if such things happened.
Hrmmmm. You had better look at the remote sensing community. These folks going back to the 1970's in the CIA and NRO have been using computers to automate identification of multispectral targets for almost 4 decades.
Hmmmmm. These techniques, combined with multispectral analysis of tissues in real time could be just the ticket for surgical resection of certain cancers(meningiomas etc....). The multispectral analysis could be combined with a robotic laser that could automatically lase the "transformed" tissues, thus selectively killing cancerous cells. Cool.
Interestingly, among the academics given the MacArthur grants, the Ivy league schools Harvard, MIT and Yale appear to be producing a number of these folks whether at the undergraduate level, the graduate level or the faculty level. Many of the recipients appear to have done at least some time at those institutions.
I was really only joking......well, perhaps partially.:-) But I will be happy to field your questions.
So how would Microsoft channel all that money into SCO to keep them going?
Microsoft is worth how many Billions? It would take perhaps 5-6 million to prop up SCO to this point, much of that would be returnable. That much money in terms of investments for a company the size of Microsoft is nothing.
And it's not like some mystery people are bidding up the price of SCO stock just so the SCO executives can sell their shares for much more than they are really worth...
No, we know exactly who is bidding up SCO stock, and who is profiting from it.
Could be people don't want to be hassled by the thought on instability due to SCO's antics regarding their lawsuits. Maybe people are starting to wonder whether it's going to cost them more in the long run or something...
Oh, hell.....Here's a scary thought. What if Microsoft is underwriting, supporting or even directing SCO in their attacks on Linux and other *NIX? SCO stance plays right into the Microsoft playbook of the past few years.
In recent years commercial software interests, notably Microsoft, have lobbied hard to keep governments from openly preferring open source over proprietary software.
But Microsoft knows what's best for us right?:-)
Seriously though, a little lobbying is just fine in my book as long as that lobbying is truly an education of lawmakers on the issues and solutions to problems. The problem becomes when individual companies have such power and control as to dominate the lobbying process with money and resources so as to eclipse all other concerns.
So, when the article states "Business has consistently stated that it is essential for governments to ensure technologically neutral policy towards different software models," said the delegate from the business lobby, during the conference debate." I find it disturbing that removal of open source materials is allowed from the "business lobby". This argument is then followed by this statement "Governments cannot know, case-by-case, what software solution is best for every user," she said, urging the deletion of the open-source provisions. "Each user should be allowed to make a choice that meets their individual needs." which makes absolutely no sense and again argues that Microsoft knows what's best for me and my government.
Microsoft does not have governments best interest in mind when they say this. Rather they have their own best interest in mind by making these illogical arguments, and I suppose that these arguments could be interpreted and taken at face value, but then backfire upon Microsoft when governments say "enough of the security problems, virii and worms and associated costs associated with Microsoft, we're going with Apple computer".
The Army has also been a big backer of this sort of technology for their Land Warrior program. They want the ability to dynamically update their cammo for a variety of conditions from light to dark, from desert to urban to forest.
and provides clever genetically annealed menu systems for application and desktop control.
Genetically annealed menu systems? What the....?!? Well, I have been following bionics and cybernetics for a little while now, and this is certainly new to me.:-)
So, Palm is touting these as media devices for playing movies. We are considering developing some movies for ophthalmological surgical instruction on Palm devices, but I am wondering with memory limits of 64MB and add on cards only 256MB in size, is anybody really using these things to play anything more than 5-10 second clips? If so, please let me know what you are doing.
So, this is identity theft. Why cannot spammers be prosecuted for assuming somebody elses "identity" and doing business/making money at the expense of others? This practice is illegal and there must be a legal precedent, yes?
There are several open source solutions for the health care industry.
Yes, I've looks at a number of these, but the current state is poor. There is no common database that physicians and hospitals and developers could draw from. Such an open source database could make possible a number of products that reduce the workload that medical providers have to wade through. Currently the big requirement that everyone is having to deal with is HIPPA compliance. Imagine if the government were to approve a specific open source database that physicians and hospitals could then use and develop for. This would resolve many issues currently faced by providers with respect to privacy, insurance billing, Medicare and Medicaid billing, records management, multimedia integration into medical records, security etc...etc...etc...
Support from the upper echelon on government for such a project could go a long way towards maintaining and fixing our health care system without resorting to socialized medicine.
Said Joe Trippi, the Dean for America campaign manager: "It is extraordinary that our grassroots base is now building tools to support itself. This is grassroots squared." He added: "As far as we know, this is the first open source development project for a presidential campaign, and it's definitely the most ambitious."
O.K., so Dean is smart. This is one of the most impressive grass roots campaigns I have ever seen and he has my vote. Assuming Dean is elected President, given his background, perhaps we could have some open source solutions to the health care crisis to enable physicians and hospitals to reduce costs associated with all of the electronic medical records problems that are cropping up.
The ideal pair? Dean and Clark. A thinker and an individual who gets things done. What a concept!
Hrmmm. I really like the idea of basic cable coming with internet access. This sort of thing was what deregulation was supposed to be about. More products for cheaper given the open competition. Rather what has happened ever since cable deregulation has been a steady increase in the price of cable (from $9.00 to almost $50.00). And while the number of channels has increased, I am still getting the same channels I always watched, but my cable company has bundled in lots of shopping channels I don't want and I don't want to pay for. How difficult is it to simply give me the products I want to pay for? Give me 1) Broadband internet access 2) the History channel 3) the Learning channel 4) Discovery 5) CNN's 6)CSPAN 7)FoodTV 8) Speedvision 9) ESPN and perhaps a few others. The rest is just noise that I don't want to pay for and never watch.
So, at most 15 channels plus broadband should run what $25-30? They can have the other 70 channels.
This is an easy one. I simply will not purchase any CD that has platform proprietary requirements built into the CD or that cannot be ripped for fair use.
A much better solution format to encrypting CD's is here.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple is running a very cool countdown clock on their main page here.
Flash aside, this is one important update for Mac users and shows how much code optimization can get you in terms of performance. This release runs impressively fast on current hardware, but more importantly for the installed user base, it gives new life to older machines with good performance on machines going back several years.
All published science is "Open Source".
That is technically true, but the key work is published. You would be stunned to know how much science is funded and done by corporations and governments whose results are never, ever, published. However, that said, secrecy in published science also is present and many times it has its place, for instance in a coy response to a targeted question that the author is either 1) unsure of scientifically, or 2) wants to protect until they can actually publish or patent the results.
After reading the article, I think the author of the article was also referring to the ability of "common" folks to gain access to the tools with which to perform genetic engineering and such that previously were only available to those with the funding, education and resources to ensure that certain technologies have self limiting products that are controlled by a larger scientific process and oversight.
Two questions:
1.Where would OSS be with government support in embryonic phases?
Huge. Bigger than many of us realize and even from a Republican standpoint, OSS models can make companies, individuals and governments large amounts of cash. Think where we would be with an OSS model for healthcare software instead of the nightmare that is currently present in electronic health care records.
2. Slashdot is so powerful??
Slashdot is getting quite a bit of press and it helps that many of the folks who lurk and do some posting are actually participants in hard core science that is pushing the limits and helping move us forward. The problem with Slashdot is just that the absolute noise that has to be navigated through to get to the good stuff. Yeah, mod system works to some degree, but often people are modding down not because they find a comment incorrect, they are modding down because they don't agree.
Riiight, let's code a Windows game on a Mac. REAL smart, moron.
And why not? I realize I should expect this sort of post from an AC, but if you did any coding at all, you might realize that core coding itself has no platform preference. Yeah sure, there are specific system calls, but much coding can be accomplished for different platforms on many other platforms. After all, algorithms and math do not care if they are running on Windows or not.
In fact, I was sitting on a plane last year next to a guy coding for a Wintel system that was performing all of his coding in VirtualPC on a Mac. Why? I asked. His response was that virtual environments were easy to simply throw away if your root coding did something stupid. You dont have to go fishing around to try and fix problems. All you have to do is grab a fresh copy of your Wintel PC and start working again.
The ranking is the top Agenda setters, not the most powerful folks in tech as the poster states. For this reason I can easily see S. Jobs and Gates towards the top. This is slightly different than influence and worlds different that "Most Powerful".
I have to wonder how long until people start to realize that for truly critical (read millions of dollars) work, you're best off having the production machines OFFLINE.
I have to wonder how long until people start to realize that for truly critical work, they are still using Windows?
Seriously, the Internet is what makes many folks productive especially if they need to collaborate with others. our servers have proven invaluable for collaboration with folks from around the world so that they can write manuscripts with us or see data that we have processed for them.
Get a Mac. One that runs OS X.
EPR is very sensitive to oxygen and in cancerous cells there is less flow of oxygen.
While I am a physiologist by training, I am not an oncologist. However, that said, I should probably clarify your statement. Many forms of cancer are rapidly growing cell populations and therefore have high metabolic rates and therefore high oxygen utilization. Technically in these cells there is greater "flux" of oxygen through these cells but as they are imaged, they might appear to have lower levels of oxygen at any one instant due to their high metabolic usage.
Does this guy really think that everyone in the world is very ill and requires the depth of testing of an MRI? (Maybe he's just really old and all his peers have been through MRI's...)
Shoot, at one of the companies I am involved with, our MRI get lots of use from young, healthy folks who have injured themselves playing sports, hiking, biking etc.... MRI provides great visual access to bones and joints that previously was impossible without surgery.
WTF? Remote sensing?
Are you referring to the vague rumours of some "psychic" guys sitting in a dark military base over a map of the Russian Siberia and telling the gullible colonels how they "can see secret military bases and the personnel" at that and that point?
Put your foil hat back on. No, I am referring to the entire industry that has grown up around the analysis of imagery and other information gathered by any means involving satellite, airplane or ground based methodologies. For instance, the origins of this business can be traced back to NASA and the CIA for the study of images taken from satellites pointed at earth and other objects in space. These techniques have expanded to include IR, UV and multispectral analysis as well as radar, SAR and other methodologies.
Many folks have used these technologies for remote prospecting from space, forestry management, urban planning etc.... We are currently using many of the techniques in the study of retinal vision and the circuitries that mediate vision. My doctoral dissertation used these techniques to study retinal degenerations such as retinitis pigmentosa. The math is the same, only the "filters" are different.
However, the real problem lies in the focus of the light
No, tuneability of lasers to specific tissues and degrees of intensity are well worked out.
and how do we distinguish between well-behaving cells and carcinoma?
That is the point of the multispectral (potentially) analysis. The idea is that you in real time identify characteristics in normal versus transformed cells.
On a cell-to-cell scale?
That was the point of this article.
It would then costs millions to have a surgery getting one simple surgery done with the lasers and it would last ages.
No, it could cost significantly less to have the laser surgery, could provide a better outcome, reduce the time in surgery and under anesthesia and reduce infection rates.
If you think any kind of staining/identifying can work with computers that automate the thing then you better think who is to blame if such things happened.
Hrmmmm. You had better look at the remote sensing community. These folks going back to the 1970's in the CIA and NRO have been using computers to automate identification of multispectral targets for almost 4 decades.
Hmmmmm. These techniques, combined with multispectral analysis of tissues in real time could be just the ticket for surgical resection of certain cancers(meningiomas etc....). The multispectral analysis could be combined with a robotic laser that could automatically lase the "transformed" tissues, thus selectively killing cancerous cells. Cool.
Interestingly, among the academics given the MacArthur grants, the Ivy league schools Harvard, MIT and Yale appear to be producing a number of these folks whether at the undergraduate level, the graduate level or the faculty level. Many of the recipients appear to have done at least some time at those institutions.
Okay, I'll play the "straight man" :-)
:-) But I will be happy to field your questions.
I was really only joking......well, perhaps partially.
So how would Microsoft channel all that money into SCO to keep them going?
Microsoft is worth how many Billions? It would take perhaps 5-6 million to prop up SCO to this point, much of that would be returnable. That much money in terms of investments for a company the size of Microsoft is nothing.
And it's not like some mystery people are bidding up the price of SCO stock just so the SCO executives can sell their shares for much more than they are really worth...
No, we know exactly who is bidding up SCO stock, and who is profiting from it.
Could be people don't want to be hassled by the thought on instability due to SCO's antics regarding their lawsuits. Maybe people are starting to wonder whether it's going to cost them more in the long run or something...
Oh, hell.....Here's a scary thought. What if Microsoft is underwriting, supporting or even directing SCO in their attacks on Linux and other *NIX? SCO stance plays right into the Microsoft playbook of the past few years.
Probably not the case, but......what if.......?
In recent years commercial software interests, notably Microsoft, have lobbied hard to keep governments from openly preferring open source over proprietary software.
:-)
But Microsoft knows what's best for us right?
Seriously though, a little lobbying is just fine in my book as long as that lobbying is truly an education of lawmakers on the issues and solutions to problems. The problem becomes when individual companies have such power and control as to dominate the lobbying process with money and resources so as to eclipse all other concerns.
So, when the article states "Business has consistently stated that it is essential for governments to ensure technologically neutral policy towards different software models," said the delegate from the business lobby, during the conference debate." I find it disturbing that removal of open source materials is allowed from the "business lobby". This argument is then followed by this statement "Governments cannot know, case-by-case, what software solution is best for every user," she said, urging the deletion of the open-source provisions. "Each user should be allowed to make a choice that meets their individual needs." which makes absolutely no sense and again argues that Microsoft knows what's best for me and my government.
Microsoft does not have governments best interest in mind when they say this. Rather they have their own best interest in mind by making these illogical arguments, and I suppose that these arguments could be interpreted and taken at face value, but then backfire upon Microsoft when governments say "enough of the security problems, virii and worms and associated costs associated with Microsoft, we're going with Apple computer".
yes, but what if it crashes? does the whole outfit suddenly turn blue, making the wearer stick out like a sore thumb?
:-)
Gives new meaning to "Blue screen of death" does it not?
The Army has also been a big backer of this sort of technology for their Land Warrior program. They want the ability to dynamically update their cammo for a variety of conditions from light to dark, from desert to urban to forest.
and provides clever genetically annealed menu systems for application and desktop control.
:-)
Genetically annealed menu systems? What the....?!? Well, I have been following bionics and cybernetics for a little while now, and this is certainly new to me.
Seriously though, what are they talking about?
So, Palm is touting these as media devices for playing movies. We are considering developing some movies for ophthalmological surgical instruction on Palm devices, but I am wondering with memory limits of 64MB and add on cards only 256MB in size, is anybody really using these things to play anything more than 5-10 second clips? If so, please let me know what you are doing.
So, this is identity theft. Why cannot spammers be prosecuted for assuming somebody elses "identity" and doing business/making money at the expense of others? This practice is illegal and there must be a legal precedent, yes?
There are several open source solutions for the health care industry.
Yes, I've looks at a number of these, but the current state is poor. There is no common database that physicians and hospitals and developers could draw from. Such an open source database could make possible a number of products that reduce the workload that medical providers have to wade through. Currently the big requirement that everyone is having to deal with is HIPPA compliance. Imagine if the government were to approve a specific open source database that physicians and hospitals could then use and develop for. This would resolve many issues currently faced by providers with respect to privacy, insurance billing, Medicare and Medicaid billing, records management, multimedia integration into medical records, security etc...etc...etc...
Support from the upper echelon on government for such a project could go a long way towards maintaining and fixing our health care system without resorting to socialized medicine.
Said Joe Trippi, the Dean for America campaign manager: "It is extraordinary that our grassroots base is now building tools to support itself. This is grassroots squared." He added: "As far as we know, this is the first open source development project for a presidential campaign, and it's definitely the most ambitious."
O.K., so Dean is smart. This is one of the most impressive grass roots campaigns I have ever seen and he has my vote. Assuming Dean is elected President, given his background, perhaps we could have some open source solutions to the health care crisis to enable physicians and hospitals to reduce costs associated with all of the electronic medical records problems that are cropping up.
The ideal pair? Dean and Clark. A thinker and an individual who gets things done. What a concept!
Hrmmm. I really like the idea of basic cable coming with internet access. This sort of thing was what deregulation was supposed to be about. More products for cheaper given the open competition. Rather what has happened ever since cable deregulation has been a steady increase in the price of cable (from $9.00 to almost $50.00). And while the number of channels has increased, I am still getting the same channels I always watched, but my cable company has bundled in lots of shopping channels I don't want and I don't want to pay for. How difficult is it to simply give me the products I want to pay for? Give me 1) Broadband internet access 2) the History channel 3) the Learning channel 4) Discovery 5) CNN's 6)CSPAN 7)FoodTV 8) Speedvision 9) ESPN and perhaps a few others. The rest is just noise that I don't want to pay for and never watch.
So, at most 15 channels plus broadband should run what $25-30? They can have the other 70 channels.
The lawsuit also claims "...efforts to combat piracy on Kazaa violated terms for using the network."
This is kinda like claiming improper search and seizure for drug cases. I wonder if there is precedent in electronic law.
This is an easy one. I simply will not purchase any CD that has platform proprietary requirements built into the CD or that cannot be ripped for fair use.
A much better solution format to encrypting CD's is here.