I live in a dense residential neighborhood in a metro-suburb right next to Boston and have an active gas leak outside my house. You can smell it two houses in both directions.
The gas company has been here twice. The fire department once. The town fire chief actually called an emergency number at the gas company to ask them to fix it.
Guess what? No fix... 4 months and counting.
The party line the gas company has been giving me is (paraphrased)... "There are too many leaks in the area, so we are triaging. Unless the gas is actively leaking INTO the house (as opposed to outside of the house), we won't fix it for now. Given the Hurricane Sandy response in the mid-atlantic region, things are pushed back even further. We'll keep monitoring the leak. Trust us."
Uh, huh... yeah, my house is going to blow up. Or at the least, one of my trash cans on the curb is turning into a bottle rocket.
The missus once gave two guys a geek-gasm by dropping a reference to CmdrTaco in a sentence. As she related the story, the guys were dumbfounded that a non-geek (and a woman no less) knew of the great and powerful CmdrTaco.
I don't know what surprised me more-- irrefutable evidence that she actually listens to the geeky things I say or that N=2 nerds congregated in public during the daylight hours.
The parent is spot on... work and home machines are different beasts entirely. What it means to boot in the home setting is a fractional subset of what needs to be accomplished on boot for a work machine.
If I may add to the list of work place boot killers... (1) Drive decryption. In my industry, this is a government requirement and a common sense moral necessity, but dear Lord does it kill my boot time. Just getting through the login process (which precedes the boot loader) takes a minute.
(2) Drive mounts. These shouldn't stall boot, but they do. Someone with more IT-fu than I want to comment on why my Win7 computer stalls while trying to map NFS shares?
We've never had a problem with someone using our software without citing us appropriately. Most cases people *want* to cite us because it justifies how they used it in their own work and helps them get the paper accepted by the reviewers. If your boss is worried about people not citing your software, then your software is completely derivative anyways (your software does more than just compute the mean, right?).
We were worried about big-pharma companies using our software for drug discovery, so we had UC give us license text that does the following... - Gives full rights for non-commercial entities to use and modify the software as long as the notice is retained. - Absolves UC of any damages that might result from using the software - If you are a commercial entity, you cannot use the software until you contact the University and setup a licensing agreement.
Here is that license text....
----------------- Citation: First Author, et al. Journal of Whatever (2008) ----------------- Copyright 2008 The Regents of the University of California All Rights Reserved
Permission to use, copy, modify and distribute any part of this software for educational, research and non-profit purposes, without fee, and without a written agreement is hereby granted, provided that the above citation and copyright notice, this paragraph and the following three paragraphs appear in all copies.
Those desiring to incorporate this software into commercial products or use for commercial purposes should contact the Technology Transfer & Intellectual Property Services, University of California,
IN NO EVENT SHALL THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BE LIABLE TO ANY PARTY FOR DIRECT, INDIRECT, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES, INCLUDING LOST PROFITS, ARISING OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.
THE SOFTWARE PROVIDED HEREIN IS ON AN "AS IS" BASIS, AND THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA HAS NO OBLIGATION TO PROVIDE MAINTENANCE, SUPPORT, UPDATES, ENHANCEMENTS, OR MODIFICATIONS. THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA MAKES NO REPRESENTATIONS AND EXTENDS NO WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EITHER IMPLIED OR EXPRESS, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, OR THAT THE USE OF THE SOFTWARE WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY PATENT, TRADEMARK OR OTHER RIGHTS.
I called the customer service number (*611) and talked to a rep for 20 minutes asking every conceivable question about this policy change. I put her on speakerphone and continued reading slashdot while we chatted. If a lot of people called them like this, their call center costs will rise. I don't see really any other way of letting them know my discontent.
The 10.2% number came from a marketing research firm named NPD. This firm doesn't have access to the sales records from all sources. This includes Apple online and retail stores, Amazon.com, and Wal-Mart (Sam's Club).
So that number is HUGELY vague because those are really big retailers for the iPod and other MP3 players.
This must be the "chatter" the CIA and NSA picked up on when Homeland Security raised the threat level from Mango Orange to WillyWonka Fireball Red.
Now if you don't mind, I need to go back to homedepot for duct tape and plastic tarps.
True, DMSO (etc) doesn't have to be used, but the yields can be a lot better if you do. As long as you get the cells out of the DMSO soon after thawing, there usually aren't any negative effects. I usually plate 1mL thawed mammalian fibroblast cells w/ DMSO + 10mL BCS (or FCS) in a 10cm plate and then do a medium change the next day. Easy as pie. Protocols are different per cell lines of course.
But yeah, extremophiles are really nifty cell types. Do you know if these bacteria have been classified as extremophiles?
I think I answered your criticism with my closing statement. Obviously immortalized mammalian cells would not have survived such treatment. These bacteria cells did.
I have whole freezers full of mammalian, bacteria, and yeast cells that I can though out and revive with a usual 80% efficiency. Freezing cells for later use is VERY common in the research world. For longterm storage -160 is preferred and for short term -80 is acceptable. The fact that these survived bacteria so long at -27 is suprising. It makes me wonder what percentage actually survived.
What is a bit more suprising about this is that the cells were not stored in any special solution. DMSO or glycerol based solutions are typically added to the cell media right before freezing because they prevent ice crystals from burtsting the cells. You ever fill a sealed glass container with water and then freeze it? The water will expand and crack the glass. Same principle here.
I've yet to see Debian or YDL support a new apple computer straight out of the gate. When they do support a new model, its most often in a crippled state. Like some posters here have mentioned, the nvidia Go line of graphics cards are barely supported and lack 2d and 3d acceleration. Other items still NOT supported are Bluetooth, Airport Extreme, and external video (on powerbooks). These features were all in the 12" powerbook that came out over 12 months ago!!! The powermac g5 support page just simply lists "No."
Linux on ppc is just not worth it on a new machine. But on a positive note, by the time support is available, the computer will be too old to upgrade to the newest MacOS and will need the linux build.
... then I'd have an excuse not to spend an hour reading this 46 page beast.
Am I the only one who is a little perplexed at the complexity of the AMD cpu roadmap? The constant barrage of codenames and pin settings is really becoming trying. A more solidified upgrade path with a set numbers of goals would be much appreciated.
Yeah, and a home-brewed tactical nuke has legitimate uses as an excavation tool. Just because you can find an obscure use for a tool that has a prominent list of evil uses doesn't mean the tool should be released to the public.
He proclaims he doesn't want "nefarious types" to get ahold of the development information, but he doesn't say how he screens the subscriber list to weed out these people.
If you are being paid to plow a street, shouldn't the state be allowed to audit whether you've done the work or not? It seems that the only people who would/should be concerned here are those that are overcharging the state.
Oftentimes I find that the claims of "big brother" or misquotes of Orwell are made by those striving to protect their illicit activities.
So what happens when another city bans the term? Some city councilman (councilperson?????) hears the story and decides he wants a quick jolt of good PR. Then another council-human does it. Then another council-huperson. Then another council-spiritualy-accepting-individual does it.
Will international computing standards now be set by the tip of the PC spear? Someone needs to nip this behavior in the bud. Anyone up to sparking some more LA riots?
I have that version. You are, in fact, incorrect. As long as you have a version of OSX on your drive, you can select the erase and install method at the bottom of the list of install options. It'll erase the drive and then do a clean install.
If you accidently formatted before trying to install panther, you'll have to reinstall 10.0/.1/.2 and then try again. I did this initially, but was able to do a very basic install of jaguar in 10 minutes.
"Patent examiners have from 8 to 25 hours to read and understand each application, search for prior art, evaluate patentability, communicate with the applicant, work out necessary revisions, and reach and write up conclusions."
These are government workers people. You forget that they get coffee every 2 hours, a smoke break every hour, a pastry diversion every 3 hours, and spend 1 out of every 5 minutes keeping the perpetual-motion machine running.
The ringing in my ears comes from three distinct camps.
1. Those who are peeved that their super-specific, GUI or API-hacking freeware no longer works.
2. Those who crammed their heads up their asses and used the "archive and install" or upgrade methods to put Panther on.
3. Those elite few who have found a legitimate bug in panther.
My answers are...
1. "Umm, duh?" If the API I is no longer there, of course your freeware hack won't work. Its not apple's fault, so why blame them? We've gone through this on every major upgrade since system 6. If apple had to keep every API in each upgrade, macOSX would be as unstable as windows. Wait a week until your freeware developer updates the application to utilize the new API and then upgrade to panther. What's the problem?
2. Apple's use of point release numbers (10.1, 10.2, 10.3) is quite misleading. All three really change a lot under the hood and as such upgrading is a really messy process. If you expect and demand a stable OS, then manually backup your data and do a clean install. This should be common practice. Sure, its convenient to upgrade, but if you are browsing slashdot, you should have enough computer savvy to do a proper clean install.
3. Thank you for finding an error. I assume you've posted a bug report to apple? For the benefit of the rest of us, if you could post your system configuration, hardware, etc that'd be really useful for troubleshooting the problem. As always, the next point-point release (10.3.1) will solve a lot of the problems that people report.
Shouting "apple blows b/c feature XYZ doesn't work!!" is not very helpful. You have to also include your hardware info, whether you upgraded or clean installed panther, and what third-party apps you have installed. Let's be productive people, not a bunch of whiners.
Windows on external displays connected to some PowerBook computers are drawn better. The Bluetooth menu bar item works better when a Bluetooth USB adapter is disconnected and reconnected. Addresses a situation in which an external FireWire storage device would not become available (mount) and this message would appear: "A disk attempting to mount as 'unknown' has failed. Please use Disk Utility to check the disk." Addresses an issue in which some Bluetooth devices may not be available after the computer wakes from sleep. Addresses an issue in which some Bluetooth keyboards may show a delayed response when you press a key after the computer wakes from sleep. Addresses an issue in which some iBook computers could make a clicking sound when using Mac OS X 10.2.5 or 10.2.6.Reduces a potential delay when removing some devices from the Bluetooth pairing list. Addresses a potential issue in which an audio application can unexpectedly quit when a USB- or FireWire-based audio device is disconnected. Bluetooth preferences correctly displays the Bluetooth menu bar item's status if the item was enabled elsewhere. Includes several enhancements for Safari. Includes support for USB 2.0 devices, including PCI and PC cards for computers that do not include USB 2.0 hardware.
I'm hesitant to accept this guy's work. He's made similar claims in the past that never panned out. Now he's claiming that the booster shot is enough to promote resistance, even when other researchers have already tried and discounted this possibility. So whats so special about his monkeys that made the vaccine "work"? I wouldn't put too much faith in this finding until an independent group has confirmed it via repeating the study. He's either just boosted his career to new highs, or he's just killed it. Time will tell.
iTMS music can be authorized on 3 computers. If you move to an area of the globe not serviced by the iTunes validation servers, just find a friend you trust and ftp/scp/carrier-pigeon your purchased songs over to him. Then get him to authorize his computer on your account (as I said, friend you trust as you are giving them your password). He/She can reencode your songs as mp3s and transfer them back. So now you can play your music. Was that so hard?
That being said...
What's all this mindless chatter about how DRM is evil and how we should boycott companies that use it? DRM is necessary because people have shown the willingness (and in some cases zeal) for stealing material. Apple couldn't have left DRM out if they wanted to get even some indie labels to sign on. Don't blame apple, blame "the man" and the hordes of people who frequent sharing establishments. The fact that apple pushed real hard to allow a more lax DRM than given by other music services speaks volumes. Apple wants you to be able to burn mixes, play on iPods, and share the music between your home and work computers. Sure, its DRM'd and there are a few glitches (ie: out of country), but its the best "the man" will let us do. I'm happy with that for the moment.
Slashdot Mirror
I live in a dense residential neighborhood in a metro-suburb right next to Boston and have an active gas leak outside my house. You can smell it two houses in both directions.
The gas company has been here twice. The fire department once. The town fire chief actually called an emergency number at the gas company to ask them to fix it.
Guess what? No fix... 4 months and counting.
The party line the gas company has been giving me is (paraphrased)... "There are too many leaks in the area, so we are triaging. Unless the gas is actively leaking INTO the house (as opposed to outside of the house), we won't fix it for now. Given the Hurricane Sandy response in the mid-atlantic region, things are pushed back even further. We'll keep monitoring the leak. Trust us."
Uh, huh... yeah, my house is going to blow up. Or at the least, one of my trash cans on the curb is turning into a bottle rocket.
A true visionary.
The missus once gave two guys a geek-gasm by dropping a reference to CmdrTaco in a sentence. As she related the story, the guys were dumbfounded that a non-geek (and a woman no less) knew of the great and powerful CmdrTaco.
I don't know what surprised me more-- irrefutable evidence that she actually listens to the geeky things I say or that N=2 nerds congregated in public during the daylight hours.
The parent is spot on... work and home machines are different beasts entirely. What it means to boot in the home setting is a fractional subset of what needs to be accomplished on boot for a work machine.
If I may add to the list of work place boot killers...
(1) Drive decryption. In my industry, this is a government requirement and a common sense moral necessity, but dear Lord does it kill my boot time. Just getting through the login process (which precedes the boot loader) takes a minute.
(2) Drive mounts. These shouldn't stall boot, but they do. Someone with more IT-fu than I want to comment on why my Win7 computer stalls while trying to map NFS shares?
We've never had a problem with someone using our software without citing us appropriately. Most cases people *want* to cite us because it justifies how they used it in their own work and helps them get the paper accepted by the reviewers. If your boss is worried about people not citing your software, then your software is completely derivative anyways (your software does more than just compute the mean, right?).
We were worried about big-pharma companies using our software for drug discovery, so we had UC give us license text that does the following...
- Gives full rights for non-commercial entities to use and modify the software as long as the notice is retained.
- Absolves UC of any damages that might result from using the software
- If you are a commercial entity, you cannot use the software until you contact the University and setup a licensing agreement.
Here is that license text....
-----------------
Citation: First Author, et al. Journal of Whatever (2008)
-----------------
Copyright 2008 The Regents of the University of California
All Rights Reserved
Permission to use, copy, modify and distribute any part of this software for educational, research and non-profit purposes, without fee, and without a written agreement is hereby granted, provided that the above citation and copyright notice, this paragraph and the following three paragraphs appear in all copies.
Those desiring to incorporate this software into commercial products or use for commercial purposes should contact the Technology Transfer & Intellectual Property Services, University of California,
IN NO EVENT SHALL THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BE LIABLE TO ANY PARTY FOR DIRECT, INDIRECT, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES, INCLUDING LOST PROFITS, ARISING OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.
THE SOFTWARE PROVIDED HEREIN IS ON AN "AS IS" BASIS, AND THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA HAS NO OBLIGATION TO PROVIDE MAINTENANCE, SUPPORT, UPDATES, ENHANCEMENTS, OR MODIFICATIONS. THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA MAKES NO REPRESENTATIONS AND EXTENDS NO WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EITHER IMPLIED OR EXPRESS, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, OR THAT THE USE OF THE SOFTWARE WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY PATENT, TRADEMARK OR OTHER RIGHTS.
I called the customer service number (*611) and talked to a rep for 20 minutes asking every conceivable question about this policy change. I put her on speakerphone and continued reading slashdot while we chatted. If a lot of people called them like this, their call center costs will rise. I don't see really any other way of letting them know my discontent.
:)
+1 mod for screwing the big guy.
The 10.2% number came from a marketing research firm named NPD. This firm doesn't have access to the sales records from all sources. This includes Apple online and retail stores, Amazon.com, and Wal-Mart (Sam's Club).
So that number is HUGELY vague because those are really big retailers for the iPod and other MP3 players.
This must be the "chatter" the CIA and NSA picked up on when Homeland Security raised the threat level from Mango Orange to WillyWonka Fireball Red. Now if you don't mind, I need to go back to homedepot for duct tape and plastic tarps.
True, DMSO (etc) doesn't have to be used, but the yields can be a lot better if you do. As long as you get the cells out of the DMSO soon after thawing, there usually aren't any negative effects. I usually plate 1mL thawed mammalian fibroblast cells w/ DMSO + 10mL BCS (or FCS) in a 10cm plate and then do a medium change the next day. Easy as pie. Protocols are different per cell lines of course.
But yeah, extremophiles are really nifty cell types. Do you know if these bacteria have been classified as extremophiles?
"These bacteria cells are hardy little suckers."
I think I answered your criticism with my closing statement. Obviously immortalized mammalian cells would not have survived such treatment. These bacteria cells did.
I have whole freezers full of mammalian, bacteria, and yeast cells that I can though out and revive with a usual 80% efficiency. Freezing cells for later use is VERY common in the research world. For longterm storage -160 is preferred and for short term -80 is acceptable. The fact that these survived bacteria so long at -27 is suprising. It makes me wonder what percentage actually survived.
What is a bit more suprising about this is that the cells were not stored in any special solution. DMSO or glycerol based solutions are typically added to the cell media right before freezing because they prevent ice crystals from burtsting the cells. You ever fill a sealed glass container with water and then freeze it? The water will expand and crack the glass. Same principle here.
These bacteria cells are hardy little suckers.
I've yet to see Debian or YDL support a new apple computer straight out of the gate. When they do support a new model, its most often in a crippled state. Like some posters here have mentioned, the nvidia Go line of graphics cards are barely supported and lack 2d and 3d acceleration. Other items still NOT supported are Bluetooth, Airport Extreme, and external video (on powerbooks). These features were all in the 12" powerbook that came out over 12 months ago!!! The powermac g5 support page just simply lists "No."
YDL hardware support page
Linux on ppc is just not worth it on a new machine. But on a positive note, by the time support is available, the computer will be too old to upgrade to the newest MacOS and will need the linux build.
... then I'd have an excuse not to spend an hour reading this 46 page beast.
Am I the only one who is a little perplexed at the complexity of the AMD cpu roadmap? The constant barrage of codenames and pin settings is really becoming trying. A more solidified upgrade path with a set numbers of goals would be much appreciated.
I wonder how Mrs. Valenti will react when she finds out that Jack's bad behavior is responsible for the horse's head under the sheets.
its rather big and bloated and of sub-par consistency. I'd rather take my Ass Around the Corner and hang with the other non-conformers.
Yeah, and a home-brewed tactical nuke has legitimate uses as an excavation tool. Just because you can find an obscure use for a tool that has a prominent list of evil uses doesn't mean the tool should be released to the public.
He proclaims he doesn't want "nefarious types" to get ahold of the development information, but he doesn't say how he screens the subscriber list to weed out these people.
Open source software == good
Open source flying cylinder of death == bad
If you are being paid to plow a street, shouldn't the state be allowed to audit whether you've done the work or not? It seems that the only people who would/should be concerned here are those that are overcharging the state.
Oftentimes I find that the claims of "big brother" or misquotes of Orwell are made by those striving to protect their illicit activities.
So what happens when another city bans the term? Some city councilman (councilperson?????) hears the story and decides he wants a quick jolt of good PR. Then another council-human does it. Then another council-huperson. Then another council-spiritualy-accepting-individual does it.
Will international computing standards now be set by the tip of the PC spear? Someone needs to nip this behavior in the bud. Anyone up to sparking some more LA riots?
I have that version. You are, in fact, incorrect. As long as you have a version of OSX on your drive, you can select the erase and install method at the bottom of the list of install options. It'll erase the drive and then do a clean install.
If you accidently formatted before trying to install panther, you'll have to reinstall 10.0/.1/.2 and then try again. I did this initially, but was able to do a very basic install of jaguar in 10 minutes.
"Patent examiners have from 8 to 25 hours to read and understand each application, search for prior art, evaluate patentability, communicate with the applicant, work out necessary revisions, and reach and write up conclusions."
These are government workers people. You forget that they get coffee every 2 hours, a smoke break every hour, a pastry diversion every 3 hours, and spend 1 out of every 5 minutes keeping the perpetual-motion machine running.
The ringing in my ears comes from three distinct camps.
1. Those who are peeved that their super-specific, GUI or API-hacking freeware no longer works.
2. Those who crammed their heads up their asses and used the "archive and install" or upgrade methods to put Panther on.
3. Those elite few who have found a legitimate bug in panther.
My answers are...
1. "Umm, duh?" If the API I is no longer there, of course your freeware hack won't work. Its not apple's fault, so why blame them? We've gone through this on every major upgrade since system 6. If apple had to keep every API in each upgrade, macOSX would be as unstable as windows. Wait a week until your freeware developer updates the application to utilize the new API and then upgrade to panther. What's the problem?
2. Apple's use of point release numbers (10.1, 10.2, 10.3) is quite misleading. All three really change a lot under the hood and as such upgrading is a really messy process. If you expect and demand a stable OS, then manually backup your data and do a clean install. This should be common practice. Sure, its convenient to upgrade, but if you are browsing slashdot, you should have enough computer savvy to do a proper clean install.
3. Thank you for finding an error. I assume you've posted a bug report to apple? For the benefit of the rest of us, if you could post your system configuration, hardware, etc that'd be really useful for troubleshooting the problem. As always, the next point-point release (10.3.1) will solve a lot of the problems that people report.
Shouting "apple blows b/c feature XYZ doesn't work!!" is not very helpful. You have to also include your hardware info, whether you upgraded or clean installed panther, and what third-party apps you have installed. Let's be productive people, not a bunch of whiners.
Windows on external displays connected to some PowerBook computers are drawn better.
The Bluetooth menu bar item works better when a Bluetooth USB adapter is disconnected and reconnected.
Addresses a situation in which an external FireWire storage device would not become available (mount) and this message would appear: "A disk attempting to mount as 'unknown' has failed. Please use Disk Utility to check the disk."
Addresses an issue in which some Bluetooth devices may not be available after the computer wakes from sleep.
Addresses an issue in which some Bluetooth keyboards may show a delayed response when you press a key after the computer wakes from sleep.
Addresses an issue in which some iBook computers could make a clicking sound when using Mac OS X 10.2.5 or 10.2.6.Reduces a potential delay when removing some devices from the Bluetooth pairing list.
Addresses a potential issue in which an audio application can unexpectedly quit when a USB- or FireWire-based audio device is disconnected.
Bluetooth preferences correctly displays the Bluetooth menu bar item's status if the item was enabled elsewhere.
Includes several enhancements for Safari.
Includes support for USB 2.0 devices, including PCI and PC cards for computers that do not include USB 2.0 hardware.
I'm hesitant to accept this guy's work. He's made similar claims in the past that never panned out. Now he's claiming that the booster shot is enough to promote resistance, even when other researchers have already tried and discounted this possibility. So whats so special about his monkeys that made the vaccine "work"? I wouldn't put too much faith in this finding until an independent group has confirmed it via repeating the study. He's either just boosted his career to new highs, or he's just killed it. Time will tell.
iTMS music can be authorized on 3 computers. If you move to an area of the globe not serviced by the iTunes validation servers, just find a friend you trust and ftp/scp/carrier-pigeon your purchased songs over to him. Then get him to authorize his computer on your account (as I said, friend you trust as you are giving them your password). He/She can reencode your songs as mp3s and transfer them back. So now you can play your music. Was that so hard?
That being said...
What's all this mindless chatter about how DRM is evil and how we should boycott companies that use it? DRM is necessary because people have shown the willingness (and in some cases zeal) for stealing material. Apple couldn't have left DRM out if they wanted to get even some indie labels to sign on. Don't blame apple, blame "the man" and the hordes of people who frequent sharing establishments. The fact that apple pushed real hard to allow a more lax DRM than given by other music services speaks volumes. Apple wants you to be able to burn mixes, play on iPods, and share the music between your home and work computers. Sure, its DRM'd and there are a few glitches (ie: out of country), but its the best "the man" will let us do. I'm happy with that for the moment.