All a high level language does is make it EASIER to do , it does not ENABLE it in the first place.
Maybe splitting hairs here, but it is entirely possible that making something EASIER to do ENABLEs someone to do something they might not have otherwise been able to do.
I may not have the time to write a simple app in machine code (the testing alone!) , but I do have the time if I use a higher level language.
A computer however can one moment be a virtual World War II battlefield
While wheels are used to move people and equipment on the real battlefield.
and another moment a businessman's spreadsheet
and concentric wheels can be used to make calculations.
the next moment a television
which is adjusted using wheels
I understand the versatility of computers, I just wonder if many of the people posting here understand the versatility of the simple tools they use everyday. We use wheels and levers so often in every single thing we do that we seem to be completely oblivious to their presence.
Just for the fun of it, just stop and think about how many levers are in the human body and how versatile they are (that opposible thumb is a wonder!).
they're just doing the same hting only to a different device
I guess it depends on how you define things then. i could just as easily say a computer doesn't do anything beyond simple manipulations of 1's and 0's. Just doing the same things to different sets of 1's and 0's.
That's the question I have and I've seen others ask in this forum. Until someone can answer that question, I'll simply make the statement that computers are doing what we want them to do.
I can personally vouch for 30 years ago, and things have changed dramatically.
A friend of mine (who just retired) and I were talking a couple weeks ago about how getting or making a long distance phone call used to be a major event. And you can't just pick up the phone anymore to listen in on your neighbor's phone calls (anybody else remember "party lines").
Personal communications with someone in another part of the country (much less world) was a rarity compared to today. And it was just as often done with snail mail (8 cent stamp) as a phone call (relatively expensive).
And here we are. How many of us, from around the world are having a discussion about a single news article. If you look at it from a 30 years-ago perspecitve, what we're doing is just short of miraculous. Sounds amazingly like Kay's description of how we should be using computers and the internet to communicate with one another. Short of a "shared consciousness" I'm not sure how Kay sees us communicating much better.
I read the line "there are development versions of SFU that enable a single process to run code both from Windows and Unix libraries." and saw the following scene begin to unfold..
Clippy: Hey everyone, its my old friend Unix, come over here and say hello!
Clippy: Unix, I'd like to introduce you to some friends that just seem to follow me wherever I go. Here's Melissa, then there's Anna, and...., and Bagle, and...
First of all, Apple gets 3 times as much money as musicians from each sale. Apple takes a 35% cut from every song and every album sold, a huge amount considering how little they have to do.
Which explains why Apple isn't making any money off the iTMS, and is instead using it as a means to sell more iPods where they can make money.
Those, plus many other ideas were considered, and rejected. The best solution they found, as others have pointed out every time this comes up, was to simply use larger-than-needed solar panels. -that gave them the best chance of things working as long as possible. If you rely on any of these other "devices", then they become a potential weak link that could cause the entire mission to fail early.
I wouldn't worry too much yet. IMO the article reads like a FUD/Science Fiction cross.
So what if the circuit designers don't need to know all the physics behind what they're doing. They do need expertise in circuit design. In fact it amazes me sometimes how many people doing molecular biology don't even understand the chemistry behind what they're doing -they just follow the recipe. They do, however, know how to "design" what they're doing.
Yes, many proteins have a somewhat "modular" structure, but just sticking these "modules" together is most likely going to give you a misfolded protein that does nothing but get immediately degraded or end up in the cellular equivalent of the junk heap (if it doesn't kill the cell expressing it first).
There's all kinds of information in the article that IMO sounds much scarier and easier to do than it really is. From my vantage point it seems like it would be much harder to build a single working protein from pieces than to build an atomic bomb. It can take months to engineer a simple mutations and get a protein that's properly expressed.
Considering how much hard work it takes for experts, using very expensive equipment an reagents to do this kind of thing, I'm not too worried about BioHackers quite yet.
Nah, just make everyone walk past an MRI machine on the way out (or its magnetic equivalent). Just make sure they pass things like credit cards with magnetic strips through an alternate route (and hang on to your keys!).
Don't forget to subtract out the "work done" by leaving the payload behind, the loss due to friction, heat....
IIRC from what I read a year ago, the elevator was essentially one-way only (at least initially). It simply wasn't worth the "recovery cost" to send the "empty" back down. Especially when that time could be better spent sending the next payload up the elevator.
Heck, in America he could sue Best Buy, the assailant, the television manufacturer, anyone in the store who uses Linux or a P2P network, and McDonalds.
I've always felt that anything I buy and put on or in a desk/stand/cabinet for its lifetime doesn't need an extended warrenty. Any expensive electronics I'm carrying around on a regular basis do.
Sounds like the cheap headphones we got each of our kids to plug into the computer. My wife thought they were a great deal -$10 each and a lifetime warrenty.
Reading the warrenty, it said something like "for warrenty replacement please send the defective headphones plus $10 shipping and handling to...".
And if you're really cheap, go to BB and price the model you want. Then go to the local small-fry and tell them "This is what I want and this is what BB is selling it for."
Chances are they won't have the same model (BB and large volume retailers often get the cheaper models) but every time I've done it I've gotten something at least as good as the BB model for very little more -sometimes the same price.
Yep. Macs had been booting from CDs for years before Apple dropped the floppy. Part of the "magic" of SCSI being integrated into the Mac was it didn't matter if the attached SCSI drive was a hard drive, CD, Zip, Bernoulli, Jaz or whatever else. If it had a valid System Folder on it, it would boot. The Mac simply didn't have the requirement for a floppy that Intel based hardware did.
At my University, for each computer lab (we're talking College of Engineering, not CS) roughly half were workstations, the other half were Macs (would I date myself if I said they were brand new Mac Plus's?).
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All a high level language does is make it EASIER to do , it does not ENABLE it in the first place.
Maybe splitting hairs here, but it is entirely possible that making something EASIER to do ENABLEs someone to do something they might not have otherwise been able to do.
I may not have the time to write a simple app in machine code (the testing alone!) , but I do have the time if I use a higher level language.
To simulate is to recreate (approximate) one system in another system.
I might agree with that being his definition, except he seems to denigrate the idea that we have "simulated" the pen and paper world with computers.
A wheel is always a wheel.
And a computer is always a computer.
A computer however can one moment be a virtual World War II battlefield
While wheels are used to move people and equipment on the real battlefield.
and another moment a businessman's spreadsheet
and concentric wheels can be used to make calculations.
the next moment a television
which is adjusted using wheels
I understand the versatility of computers, I just wonder if many of the people posting here understand the versatility of the simple tools they use everyday. We use wheels and levers so often in every single thing we do that we seem to be completely oblivious to their presence.
Just for the fun of it, just stop and think about how many levers are in the human body and how versatile they are (that opposible thumb is a wonder!).
they're just doing the same hting only to a different device
I guess it depends on how you define things then. i could just as easily say a computer doesn't do anything beyond simple manipulations of 1's and 0's. Just doing the same things to different sets of 1's and 0's.
They could be so much more.
Like what?
That's the question I have and I've seen others ask in this forum. Until someone can answer that question, I'll simply make the statement that computers are doing what we want them to do.
I can personally vouch for 30 years ago, and things have changed dramatically.
A friend of mine (who just retired) and I were talking a couple weeks ago about how getting or making a long distance phone call used to be a major event. And you can't just pick up the phone anymore to listen in on your neighbor's phone calls (anybody else remember "party lines").
Personal communications with someone in another part of the country (much less world) was a rarity compared to today. And it was just as often done with snail mail (8 cent stamp) as a phone call (relatively expensive).
And here we are. How many of us, from around the world are having a discussion about a single news article. If you look at it from a 30 years-ago perspecitve, what we're doing is just short of miraculous. Sounds amazingly like Kay's description of how we should be using computers and the internet to communicate with one another. Short of a "shared consciousness" I'm not sure how Kay sees us communicating much better.
I read the line "there are development versions of SFU that enable a single process to run code both from Windows and Unix libraries." and saw the following scene begin to unfold..
Clippy: Hey everyone, its my old friend Unix, come over here and say hello!
Clippy: Unix, I'd like to introduce you to some friends that just seem to follow me wherever I go. Here's Melissa, then there's Anna, and...., and Bagle, and...
This didn't by chance happen in Soviet Russia, did it?
First of all, Apple gets 3 times as much money as musicians from each sale. Apple takes a 35% cut from every song and every album sold, a huge amount considering how little they have to do.
Which explains why Apple isn't making any money off the iTMS, and is instead using it as a means to sell more iPods where they can make money.
"Since a season of a show is 20 some dollars on DVD, it should be more than reasonable to be able to buy a single episode of a show for a dollar."
Don't know what shows you're watching, but all the ones I want on DVD seem to run $50-150 a season.
So maybe do something like iTunes : $2.00 an episode or $40 for an entire season -whichever is less.
Does that include home DVD's?
I have one titled "Lens Cap Not Removed" that compresses amazingly well with no loss of quality.
Those, plus many other ideas were considered, and rejected. The best solution they found, as others have pointed out every time this comes up, was to simply use larger-than-needed solar panels. -that gave them the best chance of things working as long as possible. If you rely on any of these other "devices", then they become a potential weak link that could cause the entire mission to fail early.
I wouldn't worry too much yet. IMO the article reads like a FUD/Science Fiction cross.
So what if the circuit designers don't need to know all the physics behind what they're doing. They do need expertise in circuit design. In fact it amazes me sometimes how many people doing molecular biology don't even understand the chemistry behind what they're doing -they just follow the recipe. They do, however, know how to "design" what they're doing.
Yes, many proteins have a somewhat "modular" structure, but just sticking these "modules" together is most likely going to give you a misfolded protein that does nothing but get immediately degraded or end up in the cellular equivalent of the junk heap (if it doesn't kill the cell expressing it first).
There's all kinds of information in the article that IMO sounds much scarier and easier to do than it really is. From my vantage point it seems like it would be much harder to build a single working protein from pieces than to build an atomic bomb. It can take months to engineer a simple mutations and get a protein that's properly expressed.
Considering how much hard work it takes for experts, using very expensive equipment an reagents to do this kind of thing, I'm not too worried about BioHackers quite yet.
I dunno -- what does it cost to send the workers back home via elevator vs. the cost of building a reentry vehicle and hauling it up to orbit?
I really don't know. But I do know the reentry vehicle could make the trip much faster!
Nah, just make everyone walk past an MRI machine on the way out (or its magnetic equivalent). Just make sure they pass things like credit cards with magnetic strips through an alternate route (and hang on to your keys!).
And who knows, it might even sound better...
Don't forget to subtract out the "work done" by leaving the payload behind, the loss due to friction, heat....
IIRC from what I read a year ago, the elevator was essentially one-way only (at least initially). It simply wasn't worth the "recovery cost" to send the "empty" back down. Especially when that time could be better spent sending the next payload up the elevator.
Check out the "Challenges" page of the NIAC paper here.
It covers things like lightning, meteors, wind and other factors.
Heck, in America he could sue Best Buy, the assailant, the television manufacturer, anyone in the store who uses Linux or a P2P network, and McDonalds.
I've always felt that anything I buy and put on or in a desk/stand/cabinet for its lifetime doesn't need an extended warrenty. Any expensive electronics I'm carrying around on a regular basis do.
Sounds like the cheap headphones we got each of our kids to plug into the computer. My wife thought they were a great deal -$10 each and a lifetime warrenty.
Reading the warrenty, it said something like "for warrenty replacement please send the defective headphones plus $10 shipping and handling to...".
And if you're really cheap, go to BB and price the model you want. Then go to the local small-fry and tell them "This is what I want and this is what BB is selling it for."
Chances are they won't have the same model (BB and large volume retailers often get the cheaper models) but every time I've done it I've gotten something at least as good as the BB model for very little more -sometimes the same price.
Yep. Macs had been booting from CDs for years before Apple dropped the floppy. Part of the "magic" of SCSI being integrated into the Mac was it didn't matter if the attached SCSI drive was a hard drive, CD, Zip, Bernoulli, Jaz or whatever else. If it had a valid System Folder on it, it would boot. The Mac simply didn't have the requirement for a floppy that Intel based hardware did.
At my University, for each computer lab (we're talking College of Engineering, not CS) roughly half were workstations, the other half were Macs (would I date myself if I said they were brand new Mac Plus's?).
And, AFAIK schools have already placed their orders so they can install computers over summer break.
The "school sales" I'd worry about are the student purchases. I don't know how big of a factor they are.