"You can bring your baby or toddler to work, so long as it can talk, feed itself and stick effortlessly to the ceiling like a spider.
Well, hey. At least its a start. Previously, many DOD organizations and departments had an absolute policy on software/platform. In many places, especially sensitive installations, the policy was Solaris. In the last few years there has been an inexorable move toward Windows, despite the obvious problems. Other defense contractors have been moving in the same direction presumably to control costs by moving everything to one platform. However, most people are finding that this is not the best solution and they are allowing the installation/use/purchase of other systems including open source, Linux and OS X.
Don't know about you but I don't want to see any of my favourite movies on a 3.8" screen.
Can you imagine trying to watch a letterbox movie on this thing? No thanks. I think I will stick with my 12in Powerbook for those times on the road when I want to watch a movie.
Well, this sounds great and all for the production of folks with "practical" knowledge, but I would worry that the theory is taking a back seat. I mean this kinda sounds like the high school electronics courses I took where we would build electronic circuit boards without really knowing the theory. There is a reason that the US higher ed system is commonly accepted as one of the best in the world and that is that many schools concentrate on theory allowing the students to innovate after they graduate. If we don't teach theory, we are simply producing maufacturing monkeys, not engineers.
Gee, and why should they? After all, companies know what's best for the consumer, right? Hey, I want all of my news and entertainment to come from just a couple companies who can disseminate their news, products and viewpoints, that way we are not so confused by different sides of reality.
I'll tell ya folks, the truth is about to become muddier to the average citizen, and yet much more difficult to discern for those that actually are interested in the truth.
So, aside from the obvious statement about Linux based Beowolf servers, I find it interesting that these computer scientists turned "Microsofties" are advocating a position held by Oracle's Ellison. Jeez, this is the way things were back in the 70's too. What's old is what's new eh?
O.K., aside from the rather schizoid posting, I clicked on the link and actually read some of this stuff. Why? Because it's 1:40 a.m. and I can't read any more real science without it leaking out of my ears. So, at the end of the article, filled with leaky logic and propositions that would get an undergraduate philosophy student in trouble, I get to this:
Another event that would let us conclude with a very high degree of confidence that we are in a simulation is if we ever reach the point where we are about to switch on our own simulations. If we start running simulations, that would be very strong evidence against (1) and (2). That would leave us with only (3).
and I have to wonder.....this guy is a postdoctoral fellow at Oxford? Jeez, what are they paying these guys for? Pop culture derivative drivel about a movie whose sequel sucked?. This is like high school philosophy where you would sit around drinking beer in someones mom's basement saying "so, dude, how do we know if we are really here?" Please. I'm all for arts and liberal education, but let's work at thinking about things that can make a difference.
Since they've now apparently isolated this gene, isn't it kind of like having "root" access to stem cells?
Not quite. Because you know which gene is responsible does not mean you know how to 1) activate it, 2) turn it off, 3) modulate it's activity. All three of these possibilities will be different in various tissues that may have differing rates of turnover. Take for instance lung tissue versus neural tissue. Lung tissue turns over quite a bit from stem cell populations, whereas neural tissue does not (well mostly does not).
The whole genomics world is just the beginning in that there will be a whole post-genomics world where scientists need to figure out how all of the code works. We just now are getting to the point where we know what the code is and its general order, but we do not know how all of it works. It's like reverse engineering a system where we are not certain of all of the rules by which the system is constructed. With computer code at least, one can know the general order of code, its structure and execution. Bioscience is more......slippery.:-)
Browser detection has always been about identifying what capabilities the browser supports, or what bugs need to be worked around. Otherwise you wind up with sites that don't work in some browsers, and everybody bitches at you for not supporting them.
You are missing the point.:-) If Microsoft has their way, there will only be one browser. Detection and customizing your web page for more than one browser will be moot. {sarcasm} All this open source stuff and other browsers will just get in the way. {/sarcasm}
It's not the cable companies preventing you from ordering these channels a la carte, it's the channel owners. The packages are sold to cable companies as packages, and they're required to be sold to consumers as a package.
To what end? To me this is the same logic the RIAA and the record companies were using to prevent folks from getting the songs they wanted ala-carte. These guys don't have to worry about piracy in the same way and if I want the history channel, a couple of discovery channels, local and national news with some sports channels for equestrian stuff and motorsport, I should be able to order and pay for just those channels. No shopping channels, no pop culture channels, etc...etc...etc...
Well, looking at the cable industry I can only say that deregulation has simply resulted in higher cable bills. Prior to deregulation I paid $9.95 U.S./month for cable, now I am looking at $51.00/month and the only new channels available to me now are things like shopping channels, multiple MTV channels and other crap I have no interest in. In fact, what they have done is packaged channels I did watch into more expensive premium packages meaning I can no longer get Speedvision or others I am interested in without paying even more.
The technology exists for us to be able to purchase channels ala-carte yet we still have to pick "packages" and only have access via the cable companies or the dish companies. Perhaps Apple could help things out the way they have the music industry?
It's a shame, but often to accomplish work in the sciences (which means publishing and getting grants) one often has to use the best tool for the job. Sometimes this means spending lots of money and effort to develop tools which are not available. Other times it means purchasing hardware that is available and can do the job (those $40k SGI Octanes come to mind). Some times you can get lucky and use a tool that is both free and commonly available (a wonderful example is ImageJ developed by Wayne Rasband(sp?) who also wrote the seminal NIHImage.
Unfortunately, one can waste huge amounts of time, effort and money attempting to find solutions that will meet your needs for lower costs/free, but that time and money might be better spent obtaining the tools that will do the job and simply working at the job until it is accomplished. I understand what you are saying though in that I am trying to transition our lab from Wintel to Macintosh for a whole variety of reasons from security to ethics to simply that all around, Macs seem to be better tools, especially with OS X. That said, we still have to run Wintel hardware and Microsoft operating systems until the tools that we require are on our platforms of preference and we still will probably have to have both operating systems co-exist for some time to come. That is OK with me though as I will always go for the better tool. If it is available on Windows, that's what I will get. However, the MacOS is so much better that if the tools are also available for OS X, I will default there.
Well, I suppose if there is life on Mars, the likelyhood of more advanced life elsewhere in the universe is greater. That would certainly make me feel more comfortable as this universe is an awfully big place and to think we were all alone would be......scary.
I should have said released into the atmosphere with the ash and other byproducts after the burning of the coal. The coal is inherently radioactive due to the high uranium content.
Re:Importance of research and computer modeling
on
Nucular Hydrogen Economy
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I should clarify an earlier point. The amount of radioactivity produced by this plant equal to the Three Mile Island release is happening every day.
Importance of research and computer modeling
on
Nucular Hydrogen Economy
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
It should be noted that many of these technologies are theoretical and are the result of basic research combined with applied research. While I am not a fan of the current administration, I do tend to agree with their view of nuclear power as long as newer safe designs are implemented. To those who are critical of this, it should be noted that we have a large coal burning electricity plant in central Utah that produces as much radioactivity and throws it into the atmosphere as Three Mile Island did. This is because of the high uranium content of the coal. At any rate, the basic research is important here and should be funded along with the applied research into such things as computational modeling of high temperature physics.
I am surprised that federal departments/agencies have not developed this yet given the large numbers of laptops that go missing every year. Some of them even have classified data on them with the classic example being a certain former head of the CIA who was a little loose with his Powerbook.
Nonetheless, the user base of MacOS as a server OS is trace.
That may be, but until recently Apple has not had an OS capable of large scale serving. I have used IRIX, Solaris and Windows in the past, but I find OS X to be the best of breed in terms of a do it all OS.
There simply are no deployments of the type talked about in the article, with hundreds of domain servers needing to be migrated. These guys don't mess around - they expect to have industrial strength support during the upgrade, and they expect there to be no regressions.
Ummmm, well, seeing as how the xserve is a very recent entry into the field, I would not expect many large deployments yet. However, the ability to provide over 5000 hits/second and saturating 3 T3 lines is pretty damned impressive. Or how about streaming 3000 live connections all at once? Or netbooting hundreds of machines all at once? As for sites that are using OS X, off the top of my head, I believe that there is certainly Apple.com, all of the Quicktime streaming they are doing for the movies on Apple.com. I am sure there are others that I am not aware of.
Apple is in an entirely different league - they can ship a trivial OS update that accidentally deletes entire hard disks worth of data and can get off by paying for a few hundred disk recoveries and having an "everybody makes mistakes" attitude. That kind of thing isn't really acceptable for the desktop, but the extreme loyalty of Apples customers means they can essentially get away with it. That simply doesn't fly when you run most of the worlds servers.
Well, Microsoft has proven you wrong here on innumerable occasions. I can't tell you how many times I have had to advise folks to reinstall Windows because of file/registry corruption, or had to deal with the implications of an infection by a virus or worm in someones database or email program that got in becuase of commonly known and well documented security holes. You are sounding like a Microsoft apologist here.
2003 is a server OS. MacOS X is not, despite Apples best attempts.
I don't know what you are talking about. I have been using OS X as a server OS for some time now and it has got to be the easiest server OS to manage. It is more stable than W2003 server, easier to manage less expensive etc...etc...etc... I am running it here and in several other places in addition to my primary workstation that also hosts a couple of small bandwidth websites.
O.K., can anyone here tell me why Microsoft is spending an order of magnatude more $$'s to develop Windows than Apple is spending on developing OS X? It can't be testing because the Apple products appear so much more refined.
We ask that because we have classes that have a lot of proofs, and then we have no idea to what detail we are supposed to reproduce them.
In bioscience, the detail is critically important and if we cover it in class, I would expect the student to be able to reproduce it in detail and be able to think about implications.
By the way, your calculator on your webpage looks awesome with OS X and Safari.
However, most of the "early birds" I have known in the hard core basic sciences are typically very productive in their research AND publications AND teaching. Some of the professors I have always had the most respect for spend more time in the lab than some of the graduate students and post-docs and are in the lab early in the morning.
In the clinical setting, mornings are traditionally the time you spend in rounds educating your students before patients are discharged, while in the basic science setting, mornings are good times to deal with student issues so that you don't have to take time out of your schedule in the day when you are either 1) in the writing groove or 2) in the middle of an experiment. It also shows to the professor or instructor that the students will make the effort to get their asses out of bed to meet with them when they themselves are "at work".
The only time the students would show up was around midterms and during the last two weeks of classes. For the most part, it was a nice block of uninterrupted time.
Yeah, and the common question is......"how much of what we covered is going to be on the exam?" To which my response has always been......all of it. If we took the time to cover it in class, it has all likelyhood of being on the exam.
Off topic? What did this get modded as off topic for? The site was slashdotted, so what else is there to talk about except the effects of slashdotting?
As a followup, I would be interested in discovering what the statistics are for a Slashdotting? How many hits are typically recieved after a post on slashdot? What are the most Slashdot resistant configurations? Where are the limitations usually found in a Slashdotting? Is it the router, the OS, the ethernet bandwidth? Hard drive speed? For instance, with a really fat internet connection will a site like this one running on a lowly iMac withstand a Slashdotting?
Slashdot Mirror
"You can bring your baby or toddler to work, so long as it can talk, feed itself and stick effortlessly to the ceiling like a spider.
Well, hey. At least its a start. Previously, many DOD organizations and departments had an absolute policy on software/platform. In many places, especially sensitive installations, the policy was Solaris. In the last few years there has been an inexorable move toward Windows, despite the obvious problems. Other defense contractors have been moving in the same direction presumably to control costs by moving everything to one platform. However, most people are finding that this is not the best solution and they are allowing the installation/use/purchase of other systems including open source, Linux and OS X.
Don't know about you but I don't want to see any of my favourite movies on a 3.8" screen.
Can you imagine trying to watch a letterbox movie on this thing? No thanks. I think I will stick with my 12in Powerbook for those times on the road when I want to watch a movie.
Well, this sounds great and all for the production of folks with "practical" knowledge, but I would worry that the theory is taking a back seat. I mean this kinda sounds like the high school electronics courses I took where we would build electronic circuit boards without really knowing the theory. There is a reason that the US higher ed system is commonly accepted as one of the best in the world and that is that many schools concentrate on theory allowing the students to innovate after they graduate. If we don't teach theory, we are simply producing maufacturing monkeys, not engineers.
...and no rules to bind them...
Gee, and why should they? After all, companies know what's best for the consumer, right? Hey, I want all of my news and entertainment to come from just a couple companies who can disseminate their news, products and viewpoints, that way we are not so confused by different sides of reality.
I'll tell ya folks, the truth is about to become muddier to the average citizen, and yet much more difficult to discern for those that actually are interested in the truth.
So, aside from the obvious statement about Linux based Beowolf servers, I find it interesting that these computer scientists turned "Microsofties" are advocating a position held by Oracle's Ellison. Jeez, this is the way things were back in the 70's too. What's old is what's new eh?
O.K., aside from the rather schizoid posting, I clicked on the link and actually read some of this stuff. Why? Because it's 1:40 a.m. and I can't read any more real science without it leaking out of my ears. So, at the end of the article, filled with leaky logic and propositions that would get an undergraduate philosophy student in trouble, I get to this:
Another event that would let us conclude with a very high degree of confidence that we are in a simulation is if we ever reach the point where we are about to switch on our own simulations. If we start running simulations, that would be very strong evidence against (1) and (2). That would leave us with only (3).
and I have to wonder.....this guy is a postdoctoral fellow at Oxford? Jeez, what are they paying these guys for? Pop culture derivative drivel about a movie whose sequel sucked?. This is like high school philosophy where you would sit around drinking beer in someones mom's basement saying "so, dude, how do we know if we are really here?" Please. I'm all for arts and liberal education, but let's work at thinking about things that can make a difference.
Since they've now apparently isolated this gene, isn't it kind of like having "root" access to stem cells?
:-)
Not quite. Because you know which gene is responsible does not mean you know how to 1) activate it, 2) turn it off, 3) modulate it's activity. All three of these possibilities will be different in various tissues that may have differing rates of turnover. Take for instance lung tissue versus neural tissue. Lung tissue turns over quite a bit from stem cell populations, whereas neural tissue does not (well mostly does not).
The whole genomics world is just the beginning in that there will be a whole post-genomics world where scientists need to figure out how all of the code works. We just now are getting to the point where we know what the code is and its general order, but we do not know how all of it works. It's like reverse engineering a system where we are not certain of all of the rules by which the system is constructed. With computer code at least, one can know the general order of code, its structure and execution. Bioscience is more......slippery.
Browser detection has always been about identifying what capabilities the browser supports, or what bugs need to be worked around. Otherwise you wind up with sites that don't work in some browsers, and everybody bitches at you for not supporting them.
:-) If Microsoft has their way, there will only be one browser. Detection and customizing your web page for more than one browser will be moot. {sarcasm} All this open source stuff and other browsers will just get in the way. {/sarcasm}
You are missing the point.
It's not the cable companies preventing you from ordering these channels a la carte, it's the channel owners. The packages are sold to cable companies as packages, and they're required to be sold to consumers as a package.
To what end? To me this is the same logic the RIAA and the record companies were using to prevent folks from getting the songs they wanted ala-carte. These guys don't have to worry about piracy in the same way and if I want the history channel, a couple of discovery channels, local and national news with some sports channels for equestrian stuff and motorsport, I should be able to order and pay for just those channels. No shopping channels, no pop culture channels, etc...etc...etc...
Well, looking at the cable industry I can only say that deregulation has simply resulted in higher cable bills. Prior to deregulation I paid $9.95 U.S./month for cable, now I am looking at $51.00/month and the only new channels available to me now are things like shopping channels, multiple MTV channels and other crap I have no interest in. In fact, what they have done is packaged channels I did watch into more expensive premium packages meaning I can no longer get Speedvision or others I am interested in without paying even more.
The technology exists for us to be able to purchase channels ala-carte yet we still have to pick "packages" and only have access via the cable companies or the dish companies. Perhaps Apple could help things out the way they have the music industry?
It's a shame, but often to accomplish work in the sciences (which means publishing and getting grants) one often has to use the best tool for the job. Sometimes this means spending lots of money and effort to develop tools which are not available. Other times it means purchasing hardware that is available and can do the job (those $40k SGI Octanes come to mind). Some times you can get lucky and use a tool that is both free and commonly available (a wonderful example is ImageJ developed by Wayne Rasband(sp?) who also wrote the seminal NIHImage.
Unfortunately, one can waste huge amounts of time, effort and money attempting to find solutions that will meet your needs for lower costs/free, but that time and money might be better spent obtaining the tools that will do the job and simply working at the job until it is accomplished. I understand what you are saying though in that I am trying to transition our lab from Wintel to Macintosh for a whole variety of reasons from security to ethics to simply that all around, Macs seem to be better tools, especially with OS X. That said, we still have to run Wintel hardware and Microsoft operating systems until the tools that we require are on our platforms of preference and we still will probably have to have both operating systems co-exist for some time to come. That is OK with me though as I will always go for the better tool. If it is available on Windows, that's what I will get. However, the MacOS is so much better that if the tools are also available for OS X, I will default there.
Well, I suppose if there is life on Mars, the likelyhood of more advanced life elsewhere in the universe is greater. That would certainly make me feel more comfortable as this universe is an awfully big place and to think we were all alone would be......scary.
I should have said released into the atmosphere with the ash and other byproducts after the burning of the coal. The coal is inherently radioactive due to the high uranium content.
I should clarify an earlier point. The amount of radioactivity produced by this plant equal to the Three Mile Island release is happening every day.
It should be noted that many of these technologies are theoretical and are the result of basic research combined with applied research. While I am not a fan of the current administration, I do tend to agree with their view of nuclear power as long as newer safe designs are implemented. To those who are critical of this, it should be noted that we have a large coal burning electricity plant in central Utah that produces as much radioactivity and throws it into the atmosphere as Three Mile Island did. This is because of the high uranium content of the coal. At any rate, the basic research is important here and should be funded along with the applied research into such things as computational modeling of high temperature physics.
I am surprised that federal departments/agencies have not developed this yet given the large numbers of laptops that go missing every year. Some of them even have classified data on them with the classic example being a certain former head of the CIA who was a little loose with his Powerbook.
Nonetheless, the user base of MacOS as a server OS is trace.
That may be, but until recently Apple has not had an OS capable of large scale serving. I have used IRIX, Solaris and Windows in the past, but I find OS X to be the best of breed in terms of a do it all OS.
There simply are no deployments of the type talked about in the article, with hundreds of domain servers needing to be migrated. These guys don't mess around - they expect to have industrial strength support during the upgrade, and they expect there to be no regressions.
Ummmm, well, seeing as how the xserve is a very recent entry into the field, I would not expect many large deployments yet. However, the ability to provide over 5000 hits/second and saturating 3 T3 lines is pretty damned impressive. Or how about streaming 3000 live connections all at once? Or netbooting hundreds of machines all at once? As for sites that are using OS X, off the top of my head, I believe that there is certainly Apple.com, all of the Quicktime streaming they are doing for the movies on Apple.com. I am sure there are others that I am not aware of.
Apple is in an entirely different league - they can ship a trivial OS update that accidentally deletes entire hard disks worth of data and can get off by paying for a few hundred disk recoveries and having an "everybody makes mistakes" attitude. That kind of thing isn't really acceptable for the desktop, but the extreme loyalty of Apples customers means they can essentially get away with it. That simply doesn't fly when you run most of the worlds servers.
Well, Microsoft has proven you wrong here on innumerable occasions. I can't tell you how many times I have had to advise folks to reinstall Windows because of file/registry corruption, or had to deal with the implications of an infection by a virus or worm in someones database or email program that got in becuase of commonly known and well documented security holes. You are sounding like a Microsoft apologist here.
2003 is a server OS. MacOS X is not, despite Apples best attempts.
I don't know what you are talking about. I have been using OS X as a server OS for some time now and it has got to be the easiest server OS to manage. It is more stable than W2003 server, easier to manage less expensive etc...etc...etc... I am running it here and in several other places in addition to my primary workstation that also hosts a couple of small bandwidth websites.
O.K., can anyone here tell me why Microsoft is spending an order of magnatude more $$'s to develop Windows than Apple is spending on developing OS X? It can't be testing because the Apple products appear so much more refined.
We ask that because we have classes that have a lot of proofs, and then we have no idea to what detail we are supposed to reproduce them.
In bioscience, the detail is critically important and if we cover it in class, I would expect the student to be able to reproduce it in detail and be able to think about implications.
By the way, your calculator on your webpage looks awesome with OS X and Safari.
However, most of the "early birds" I have known in the hard core basic sciences are typically very productive in their research AND publications AND teaching. Some of the professors I have always had the most respect for spend more time in the lab than some of the graduate students and post-docs and are in the lab early in the morning.
In the clinical setting, mornings are traditionally the time you spend in rounds educating your students before patients are discharged, while in the basic science setting, mornings are good times to deal with student issues so that you don't have to take time out of your schedule in the day when you are either 1) in the writing groove or 2) in the middle of an experiment. It also shows to the professor or instructor that the students will make the effort to get their asses out of bed to meet with them when they themselves are "at work".
The only time the students would show up was around midterms and during the last two weeks of classes. For the most part, it was a nice block of uninterrupted time.
Yeah, and the common question is......"how much of what we covered is going to be on the exam?" To which my response has always been......all of it. If we took the time to cover it in class, it has all likelyhood of being on the exam.
Off topic? What did this get modded as off topic for? The site was slashdotted, so what else is there to talk about except the effects of slashdotting?
As a followup, I would be interested in discovering what the statistics are for a Slashdotting? How many hits are typically recieved after a post on slashdot? What are the most Slashdot resistant configurations? Where are the limitations usually found in a Slashdotting? Is it the router, the OS, the ethernet bandwidth? Hard drive speed? For instance, with a really fat internet connection will a site like this one running on a lowly iMac withstand a Slashdotting?
Done, fin, kaput. Man, there has got to be some system in place to temporarily mirror sites before posting on Slashdot, yes?