Of course, DB2... I really don't care too much about what OS is running - Linux would be nice to extend The Cause(tm), but one thing I've always been curious about is the partitioning of the data in particular.
What really constitutes the data for this job - the entire DNA for some subject? Or is the data collected from several people with and without the disease(s) to determine which genes are likely candidates for leading to the disorder?
Just curious. If anyone has a link to such answers, it would be muchly appreciated.
That very powerfull distributed systems are starting to become more mainstream. It's about flipping time that companies made use of computing resources beyond their previously wildest dreams.
Estimates of 437 years compressed to 1 month timeframes are awesome! The next big issue will be how fast will they be churning out cures/treatments? If this helps speed this up, there will certainly be a great number of lives saved.
Hopefully though more companies will jumpt to the forefront, and try to outdo each other ( you know they will) and come up with more radical applications and solutions.
I was curious - it had been asked - what OS are these beasts running?
Agreed - it's frightening to realize that something like that could be enforced via law.
But, here is something interesting (IMHO) - if international broadcasting laws permit the interchanging of commercials on TV (quick explanation: in Canada, NBC and Global show the same programme - when I switch to NBC channel, I actually get a copy of the Global cast which has Canadian commericials) would this be applied to the net commericials?
Certainly the net knows no boundaries, but neither did radio/tv broadcasts, and yet tv is apparently being regulated in this manner.
I know that the re-broadcasting of tv over the net was a big legal issue in the States, how much of a similar regionalized display of internet ads be affected?
But I would be willing to bet that an aquatic civilization could teach us a few things about fluid dynamics, and motion through fluids (both of which I know almost nothing about).
Since writing may be a tad difficult, a lot of information might get passed down by songs or legends. And I suspect that they may have to develop some form of calculus to describe very advanced turbulence equations. So being a college student there would suck because every exam would be oral, and we all know how well people perform in front of crowds.
I think the reason that they didn't shut it down was because unlike some parts of the planet, you need energy to heat homes. Additionally, manufacturing resources must be maintained lest civilization degrades or collapses. They did what they had to do to maintain their existance. People do tend to try to do things to survive.
As for turning parts of Russia into a comic book fantasy, several countries around the world openly practiced open-air atomic blasts with visitors from the public! They share the blame for doing stupid things with the best and worst of countries.
As for the knife - you should leave it in - it looked cool...
that the Ukraine had to bear the brunt of this disaster. I'm glad to see that support has gone in to help these people. This winter might be a little tight though with jobs lost, and lowered electrical resources.
Hopefully this doesn't dissuade the people from adopting future nuclear ventures as I still think this is a viable energy source.
As for the final resolution of Chernobyl: remove as much of the fuel as possible, and begin to bury it as a permament reminder of the risks of experimenting outside of laboratory/controlled conditions.
And as for the people, they worked hard and bravely, and managed to turn a Significant Disaster(tm) to a major disaster. They should be proud of the work required to even recover from it.
According to BT's Orr, the company is wholly unconcerned about generating any negative publicity by suing for the use of such a commonly used Internet technology. "We're looking for no more or no less than is appropriate for the rights to our intellectual property. It is a reasonable action," Orr said.
Reasonable action. I just think it's so funny that their legal engine is going to plow through and rack up fees et al. Reasonable action would be for them to recognize that this has been prior art described in the 1965 work. In some ways, this has always been prior art with texts referring to another part of the book with the ever famous, "See chapter 3".
Reasonable action - they can bite my shiny, metal...
After this behemoth swallows Disney, when can we expect the anti-trust and monopoly hounds go after it and slice it up into little bits?
I just can't see this beast (even sans Disney) not go for long before being challenged again. I guess that will happen shortly after people are given AOL CDs at the door to movie theatres after purchasing their tickets...
Recently there seems to be the promise of standardization within the net/*ML communities, and yet, things fal apart.
I'm not sure if it is just the intrinsic differences in ideologies between S*N/M$/*NIX/misc communities, but it doesn't seem like everybody can agree on a complete adherance to a spec.
I'm not being a doomsayer, but I think that we're going to see the continuation of pain and suffering and idiocy. Define the standard, and if you want a solaris version of it, then build it. If you want the M$ implementation, then build it. I think it's been mentioned here in a previous article, but some of these standards body have to go beyond documenting and designing the standard, and perhaps implement core engines.
Then and only then can we all reap the benefits of the technology no matter what implementation you use.
Don't use Ada (the language) at all - but I do have a picture of her and Charles Babbage on my cube wall... And yeah, in the picture - she was a babe...
Well, as a universally accepted n-mice configuration, you are correct that this would require a considerable amount of work and verification. But to be honest, it wouldn't be impossible to implement in a specific application such as a CAD package. But it would have to be specific to the application.
Personally, I imagine teleoperated n-mice systems such that a CAD supervisor could direct or go over designs with home working CAD layout people. A phone/teleconferencing call could allow for more CAD people to work at/out of their homes.
In my job, I take a webcam with me to email pictures of components off of assembly lines to show the designers at the home office - often saves a FedEx shipment or worse, a designer shipment. Because we all know "A picture is worth a thousand words or so depending on what compression ratio you use."
Seriously though - yeah, universally, it would be hard to do, but on the application level, it would be quite cool.
I unfortunately have to work within a Windoze NT environment and am charged with the task to automate systems, test gear, etc... More often than not, a piece of software for a given piece of test equipment refers itself as automated when it is only automated within its own context!
What this means is that if you open their GUI, and use their scripting system, and press GO, their script will drive a single piece of test gear to assist in analyzing/reporting/recording/testing whatever it is that is being tested. This is their idea of automation. When I talk with the vendors, the whole idea of being able to correlate the Device Under Test (DUT) conditions with their test system is utterly foreign. In some cases, I have been asked (in the case of a bulk call generator) is why nobody else seems to need this functionality? Everything that a person could ever need was within their GUI.
Generally, the GUI idea has abstracted far too many ideas into point and click. This may be fine for people who don't want to know too much, but for me, I'd love to be able to (ignore the DOS prompt)
C:\acquire_data | tee excel -file mytemplate mail -user glebite | error_filter_tool
Or, instead of using a vendor's GUI, to do even the following:
Actually - I live in Ottawa Canada, and listen
to 93X in Minnesota. As I often travel to
Minnesota, I have gone to some of the restaurants
and places that they have advertisements for.
I prefer the music on that station and love
the fact that it can stream. It's also nice to
be able to hear what the weather and driving conditions are like just prior to arriving - sometimes weather stations aren't good enough.
I'll admit that I've always wondered what the
billing/charging/royalties arrangement was with
streamed audio. I guess we know now... Interesting...
They might not be copyrightable, but they might be patented. Wouldn't that be neat - living in a world where you were legally unable to actually have bugs because M$ owned them all!
Sorry - you cannot have General Protection Faults in your system because we at M$ have patented that bug!
Sorry - invalid pointers and sloppy code as a process for product delivery is ours as well!
the quality of service issues and routing mechanisms, the biggest problems that I have seen lately is latency and availability of servers which contain the data I require. Although it is nice to see that I can retrieve data quickly, and there are people looking into improving that reliability, it's the end servers ultimately which must be operating with redundancy systems to make sure that the data is present. It's more than just the transport, it's also a matter of the reliability of the service at either end of the pipe.
I'd like to see better distributed servers and redundancies in place.
I'm glad that we don't have matter transporters with the mindsets of people who only focus on the transport: "Yes, we were able to reliably transport Mr. Glebite's particle descriptor table, but unfornately we had a server crash, and he is now irretrievable..."
But seriously, if it is possible to force bone marrow stem cells to grow into the other body parts, we may be able to get around the (soon-to-be) ethical issues with using fetal tissue.
But if my brain glowed in the dark, would anybody see it? Would anybody care?
Even if they were to take on this mammoth enterprise, and actually get it to work, how does logging transactions act as a serious blow to
democracy? I mean really, having the right to elect your officials has nothing to do with how they conduct the business and security of they country unless you are unable to vote again.
This is one of those silly statements that really irks me - the debate between freedom and security in a democracy. The real issue here is do you really want the government to know that you send emails or correspond with whoever it is that you correspond with.
Would these transaction logs be available to your company? Your estranged loved-one while you are going through a divorce? Could these be used in a civil court of law? Or are these STRICTLY used by the government in an effort and means to reduce seedy activities by seedy people?
quite what we need. Just ask the good people at Corel when they decided to write their entire suite in Java. That cost not only the company, but a lot of investors a lot of money. I've never enjoyed using apps written in Java - took too long to download, and the display varied soooooo much between platforms, I always questioned the legitimacy of portability.
Does anybody here remember CHIPS-8? Great little gaming system doing the same thing that Java is trying to do. Keep it simple.
Personally, I'm a Linux user - small time coder, and out of a whim, I downloaded the JDK, and balked at the size of it. I downloaded kafe, and gave it a try - it cored nastily, and I just said, "Fine - didn't need it, don't need it." and dusted off my trusty C compiler again.
Javascript although is handy from time to time for gloss, is not implemented the same way on different platforms. And yet, generally, c routines written on one machine to do basic processing and reasonable I/O works on my NT box at work just as well as my Linux box at home.
For prototyping, I do everything in TCL. Beyond that, I code in C, using TCL libraries for GUI et al... Java, C#, et al will never be a mainstay in my house, nor my job.
I have rarely seen departments who managed the deployment of software and licenses in a controlled and consistant manner. More often than not, I have seen absolute chaos reign when yearly audits of software inventory turned up many missing licenses. It may be a costly exercise to keep on top of such things, but when it comes down to a clearly legal issue, it's worthwhile.
I do think however that it is funny - a teacher at a local college has done analysis of companies, and in performed in-depth interviews with their staff and management and the results from M$ was interesting - honestly, they only expect to retrieve money from 15% of all installations of Windoze to make a decent profit. For the most part they expect government and government related contract companies to comply, making up a majority of the 15%. Small businesses are largely ignored. Medium-sized businesses are the target: 50-200 employees. My wife who was in this teacher's class said that Medium-sized companies are easily bullied.
Although, I would have thought that each installation of Windoze would have its own key or signature on the PC, proving that it was a unique install, or even an install from a site-license. That would reduce the requirement of producing the original CD or license on the spot.
On the other hand, we've all seen a bogus install that needs a quick re-install, so you turn to your neighbour, ask for their CD, and go right ahead with a new install.
Oh well, try your best, track software better, and avoid lawyers.
Re:Programmers Make Computers Slower Year by Year
on
Netscape 6 Vs. 4.7x
·
· Score: 1
If you want a quality word-processing package that had a minimal footprint, but still provided great WYSIWYG display and printing: CHI-Writer! I would kill for a copy that would run on Linux. I would even run DOSEMU for it - awesome formatting capabilities, and it ran on my XT off of floppies!!!!
But again, all development is comprised of the 3 Things: The Right, The Good, and The Cool. There is a degenerate case of The Stupid, but that only seems to be used by M$... First do The Right Thing, then if money permits, do The Good Thing, and if you have time, push for The Cool, but always stick with The Right Thing and you can never go wrong!
Far too many times I have seen people mix up the order when developing a system, and they wind up really screwing up.
Going for The Cool Thing always means you have to go back to the Good Thing, and actually implement The Right Thing.
Going for The Good Thing has slightly better success than initial reaching for The Cool Thing.
Going for The Right Thing always seems to work.
"RAM is cheap" statements frighten me almost as much as "next year the processors will be faster so we won't bother with changing the algorithms..." It's this mentality that causes animations of papers flying from a folder to another folder while copying files. Clearly The Stupid Thing way of thinking.
Perhaps Theodore K. was right - perhaps it's not the technology that's a bad thing, but how it has been crafted, and the motivations behind its creation.
Slashdot Mirror
Slaps forehead!
Of course, DB2... I really don't care too much about what OS is running - Linux would be nice to extend The Cause(tm), but one thing I've always been curious about is the partitioning of the data in particular.
What really constitutes the data for this job - the entire DNA for some subject? Or is the data collected from several people with and without the disease(s) to determine which genes are likely candidates for leading to the disorder?
Just curious. If anyone has a link to such answers, it would be muchly appreciated.
Thanks
That very powerfull distributed systems are starting to become more mainstream. It's about flipping time that companies made use of computing resources beyond their previously wildest dreams.
Estimates of 437 years compressed to 1 month timeframes are awesome! The next big issue will be how fast will they be churning out cures/treatments? If this helps speed this up, there will certainly be a great number of lives saved.
Hopefully though more companies will jumpt to the forefront, and try to outdo each other ( you know they will) and come up with more radical applications and solutions.
I was curious - it had been asked - what OS are these beasts running?
Agreed - it's frightening to realize that something like that could be enforced via law.
But, here is something interesting (IMHO) - if international broadcasting laws permit the interchanging of commercials on TV (quick explanation: in Canada, NBC and Global show the same programme - when I switch to NBC channel, I actually get a copy of the Global cast which has Canadian commericials) would this be applied to the net commericials?
Certainly the net knows no boundaries, but neither did radio/tv broadcasts, and yet tv is apparently being regulated in this manner.
I know that the re-broadcasting of tv over the net was a big legal issue in the States, how much of a similar regionalized display of internet ads be affected?
Just asking...
But I would be willing to bet that an aquatic civilization could teach us a few things about fluid dynamics, and motion through fluids (both of which I know almost nothing about).
Since writing may be a tad difficult, a lot of information might get passed down by songs or legends. And I suspect that they may have to develop some form of calculus to describe very advanced turbulence equations. So being a college student there would suck because every exam would be oral, and we all know how well people perform in front of crowds.
I think the reason that they didn't shut it down was because unlike some parts of the planet, you need energy to heat homes. Additionally, manufacturing resources must be maintained lest civilization degrades or collapses. They did what they had to do to maintain their existance. People do tend to try to do things to survive.
As for turning parts of Russia into a comic book fantasy, several countries around the world openly practiced open-air atomic blasts with visitors from the public! They share the blame for doing stupid things with the best and worst of countries.
As for the knife - you should leave it in - it looked cool...
Hopefully this doesn't dissuade the people from adopting future nuclear ventures as I still think this is a viable energy source.
As for the final resolution of Chernobyl: remove as much of the fuel as possible, and begin to bury it as a permament reminder of the risks of experimenting outside of laboratory/controlled conditions.
And as for the people, they worked hard and bravely, and managed to turn a Significant Disaster(tm) to a major disaster. They should be proud of the work required to even recover from it.
Reasonable action. I just think it's so funny that their legal engine is going to plow through and rack up fees et al. Reasonable action would be for them to recognize that this has been prior art described in the 1965 work. In some ways, this has always been prior art with texts referring to another part of the book with the ever famous, "See chapter 3".
Reasonable action - they can bite my shiny, metal...
at those temperatures, make sure that you don't hit it with a hammer lest you'll have shattered little bits of CPU everywhere....
After this behemoth swallows Disney, when can we expect the anti-trust and monopoly hounds go after it and slice it up into little bits?
I just can't see this beast (even sans Disney) not go for long before being challenged again. I guess that will happen shortly after people are given AOL CDs at the door to movie theatres after purchasing their tickets...
"Adults may quake at the transformation..."
So slow that I even responded to this out of sheer lack of other things to respond to.
Good point.
Recently there seems to be the promise of standardization within the net/*ML communities, and yet, things fal apart.
I'm not sure if it is just the intrinsic differences in ideologies between S*N/M$/*NIX/misc communities, but it doesn't seem like everybody can agree on a complete adherance to a spec.
I'm not being a doomsayer, but I think that we're going to see the continuation of pain and suffering and idiocy. Define the standard, and if you want a solaris version of it, then build it. If you want the M$ implementation, then build it. I think it's been mentioned here in a previous article, but some of these standards body have to go beyond documenting and designing the standard, and perhaps implement core engines.
Then and only then can we all reap the benefits of the technology no matter what implementation you use.
Ada - Lady Ada Byron King... Not the language.
Don't use Ada (the language) at all - but I do have a picture of her and Charles Babbage on my cube wall... And yeah, in the picture - she was a babe...
Well, as a universally accepted n-mice configuration, you are correct that this would require a considerable amount of work and verification. But to be honest, it wouldn't be impossible to implement in a specific application such as a CAD package. But it would have to be specific to the application.
Personally, I imagine teleoperated n-mice systems such that a CAD supervisor could direct or go over designs with home working CAD layout people. A phone/teleconferencing call could allow for more CAD people to work at/out of their homes.
In my job, I take a webcam with me to email pictures of components off of assembly lines to show the designers at the home office - often saves a FedEx shipment or worse, a designer shipment. Because we all know "A picture is worth a thousand words or so depending on what compression ratio you use."
Seriously though - yeah, universally, it would be hard to do, but on the application level, it would be quite cool.
I unfortunately have to work within a Windoze NT environment and am charged with the task to automate systems, test gear, etc... More often than not, a piece of software for a given piece of test equipment refers itself as automated when it is only automated within its own context!
What this means is that if you open their GUI, and use their scripting system, and press GO, their script will drive a single piece of test gear to assist in analyzing/reporting/recording/testing whatever it is that is being tested. This is their idea of automation. When I talk with the vendors, the whole idea of being able to correlate the Device Under Test (DUT) conditions with their test system is utterly foreign. In some cases, I have been asked (in the case of a bulk call generator) is why nobody else seems to need this functionality? Everything that a person could ever need was within their GUI.
Generally, the GUI idea has abstracted far too many ideas into point and click. This may be fine for people who don't want to know too much, but for me, I'd love to be able to (ignore the DOS prompt)
C:\acquire_data | tee excel -file mytemplate mail -user glebite | error_filter_tool
Or, instead of using a vendor's GUI, to do even the following:
C:\vendor-tool -file myscript > excel -file mytemplate
Yeah - keep the GUI, but please leave us a command line interface to the tool... This abstraction is my firm belief as to why most software sucks...
Thanks...
Actually - I live in Ottawa Canada, and listen to 93X in Minnesota. As I often travel to Minnesota, I have gone to some of the restaurants and places that they have advertisements for.
I prefer the music on that station and love the fact that it can stream. It's also nice to be able to hear what the weather and driving conditions are like just prior to arriving - sometimes weather stations aren't good enough.
I'll admit that I've always wondered what the billing/charging/royalties arrangement was with streamed audio. I guess we know now... Interesting...
They might not be copyrightable, but they might be patented. Wouldn't that be neat - living in a world where you were legally unable to actually have bugs because M$ owned them all!
Sorry - you cannot have General Protection Faults in your system because we at M$ have patented that bug!
Sorry - invalid pointers and sloppy code as a process for product delivery is ours as well!
the quality of service issues and routing mechanisms, the biggest problems that I have seen lately is latency and availability of servers which contain the data I require. Although it is nice to see that I can retrieve data quickly, and there are people looking into improving that reliability, it's the end servers ultimately which must be operating with redundancy systems to make sure that the data is present. It's more than just the transport, it's also a matter of the reliability of the service at either end of the pipe.
I'd like to see better distributed servers and redundancies in place.
I'm glad that we don't have matter transporters with the mindsets of people who only focus on the transport: "Yes, we were able to reliably transport Mr. Glebite's particle descriptor table, but unfornately we had a server crash, and he is now irretrievable..."
I want my brain to glow in the dark too!
But seriously, if it is possible to force bone marrow stem cells to grow into the other body parts, we may be able to get around the (soon-to-be) ethical issues with using fetal tissue.
But if my brain glowed in the dark, would anybody see it? Would anybody care?
Even if they were to take on this mammoth enterprise, and actually get it to work, how does logging transactions act as a serious blow to democracy? I mean really, having the right to elect your officials has nothing to do with how they conduct the business and security of they country unless you are unable to vote again.
This is one of those silly statements that really irks me - the debate between freedom and security in a democracy. The real issue here is do you really want the government to know that you send emails or correspond with whoever it is that you correspond with.
Would these transaction logs be available to your company? Your estranged loved-one while you are going through a divorce? Could these be used in a civil court of law? Or are these STRICTLY used by the government in an effort and means to reduce seedy activities by seedy people?
Does anybody here remember CHIPS-8? Great little gaming system doing the same thing that Java is trying to do. Keep it simple.
Personally, I'm a Linux user - small time coder, and out of a whim, I downloaded the JDK, and balked at the size of it. I downloaded kafe, and gave it a try - it cored nastily, and I just said, "Fine - didn't need it, don't need it." and dusted off my trusty C compiler again.
Javascript although is handy from time to time for gloss, is not implemented the same way on different platforms. And yet, generally, c routines written on one machine to do basic processing and reasonable I/O works on my NT box at work just as well as my Linux box at home.
For prototyping, I do everything in TCL. Beyond that, I code in C, using TCL libraries for GUI et al... Java, C#, et al will never be a mainstay in my house, nor my job.
I have rarely seen departments who managed the deployment of software and licenses in a controlled and consistant manner. More often than not, I have seen absolute chaos reign when yearly audits of software inventory turned up many missing licenses. It may be a costly exercise to keep on top of such things, but when it comes down to a clearly legal issue, it's worthwhile.
I do think however that it is funny - a teacher at a local college has done analysis of companies, and in performed in-depth interviews with their staff and management and the results from M$ was interesting - honestly, they only expect to retrieve money from 15% of all installations of Windoze to make a decent profit. For the most part they expect government and government related contract companies to comply, making up a majority of the 15%. Small businesses are largely ignored. Medium-sized businesses are the target: 50-200 employees. My wife who was in this teacher's class said that Medium-sized companies are easily bullied.
Although, I would have thought that each installation of Windoze would have its own key or signature on the PC, proving that it was a unique install, or even an install from a site-license. That would reduce the requirement of producing the original CD or license on the spot.
On the other hand, we've all seen a bogus install that needs a quick re-install, so you turn to your neighbour, ask for their CD, and go right ahead with a new install.
Oh well, try your best, track software better, and avoid lawyers.
If you want a quality word-processing package that had a minimal footprint, but still provided great WYSIWYG display and printing: CHI-Writer! I would kill for a copy that would run on Linux. I would even run DOSEMU for it - awesome formatting capabilities, and it ran on my XT off of floppies!!!!
But again, all development is comprised of the 3 Things: The Right, The Good, and The Cool. There is a degenerate case of The Stupid, but that only seems to be used by M$... First do The Right Thing, then if money permits, do The Good Thing, and if you have time, push for The Cool, but always stick with The Right Thing and you can never go wrong!
Far too many times I have seen people mix up the order when developing a system, and they wind up really screwing up.
Going for The Cool Thing always means you have to go back to the Good Thing, and actually implement The Right Thing.
Going for The Good Thing has slightly better success than initial reaching for The Cool Thing.
Going for The Right Thing always seems to work.
"RAM is cheap" statements frighten me almost as much as "next year the processors will be faster so we won't bother with changing the algorithms..." It's this mentality that causes animations of papers flying from a folder to another folder while copying files. Clearly The Stupid Thing way of thinking.
Perhaps Theodore K. was right - perhaps it's not the technology that's a bad thing, but how it has been crafted, and the motivations behind its creation.