This mouse is basically exactly what the physical therapists described as ideal; hand in the hand-shake position, not needing to bend the wrist, with the arm relaxed. and at $80 it's not bad compared to some ergo devices. It's not a 'quack' device, it's designed to help a real, legitimate medical/work issue. If it's lightweight and Optical (I hate mechanical mice so very very much), I'll buy several. Another few years of work would repay the cost a few thousand times over..
One issue I see with this mouse is the scroll wheel. As a scientist that works at the bench, I use pipetman alot. From the pictures, using the scroll wheel seems to produce a very similar range of motion to using a pipetman (assuming you use your thumb). If you love to use the scroll wheel, this mouse will cause undue stress on some of those tendons you are trying to protect. Half of my co-workers have been put on PT for the beginning symptoms of RSI. I do admit that this solution is way better than the traditionaly scroll wheel, which is amazingly bad.
Ergonomic pipetman now use electronics and motors that allows the use of a single trigger button to control uptake and dispense. The designs are looking alot like flight sim joysticks, which are quite comfortable.
For analog signals and xvid/DiVX/MPEG2 playback, a P3 is more than sufficient, as you already know. Have you tried decoding those bright new shiny H/X264 video files using mplayer, vlc, etc? My P3-based 1.3GHz Celery just sits there at 100%. All I get is sound and a nice black screen or a frozen frame. Maybe your 2GHz Celery has enough juice to plow through an H/X264 video. Maybe it's a problem with the linux codecs. I still watch most of my video on this machine running MythTV and a Hauppage PVR250, but xvid is not exactly perfectly smooth on it (mplayer -vo xv).
For HD, hardware encoding does not exist for the consumer market. If they do, then ponying up for such "better tuner card" is going to cost much much much more moolah. Hardware decoding requires some very recent GPU like 6800-series from Nvidia and, I think, the R10000-series from ATI. I don't think either company's linux drivers will do hardware decoding, yet. So, for now, HD playback probably needs a nice beefy CPU.
Now if only Hybrid64 or Merged64 or ConjoinedTwin64 support was better. Pure64 support in Debian is pretty painful (yes, I've got chroot ia32 working, still painful). I haven't tried installing a pure ia32 system onto my Athlon64 system, yet.
Wait, this record company exec released information about iTunes Music Store and Apple wasn't available for comment? I don't think Jobs like being put on the spot like that. If a deal has been struck and EMI jumped the gun, will they be punished like ATI for "leaking"?
So, this subwoofer can create sound waves down to 1Hz, but how big of a room do you need to create such a standing wave? I'm guessing most people don't have a room to produce even a 20Hz standing wave.
I don't know about the current crop of PDA's. I have a Palm IIIe which has been sitting in a draw for many many years. The reason why I put it in the draw was it really didn't do anything very well. Play games? Gameboy was better. Calendar? I didn't really need one, but when I did, I had a laptop. Notes/ToDo Lists? Data entry was a pain even though I could write in Grafitti better then I could with pen & paper. Contact List? One of the only reasons why I did use my Palm, but then data entry was a pain. Also, cellphone works better since I can lookup AND call on the same device. 2MB of RAM couldn't do much more...
Basically, I found it too cumbersome to use so I stopped using it.
That which costs $100m today will cost $10m in 5 years, and could be done by highschool kids in the garage in 10.
Not that this is an absolute law or anything, but as knowledge and tools are refined, the whole process becomes less expensive.
If science were slowed down a little bit, it wouldn't really bother me much at all, in fact I might encourage it.
But you need to spend capital (money, time, effort) in order to advance things and reduce their costs. If you don't, then it will remain $100m forever (plus the cost of inflation/deflation). Things do not magically decrease in price so that high school kids can do "science."
The funny thing is that until 1998-99 these small molecules (20-40 nucleotide long) were simply dismissed as junk...
Here is a journal article abstract from Cell showing that small RNA's were known to be more than just junk. Whether the rest of the biological scientist believed this as proof of the non-junkiness of small RNA transcripts is not known to me. Antisense technology definately predates 1998 and probably even predates the paper. Whether it was believed that the mechanism underlying antisense technology was used in vivo at that time is not known to me.
Let's not forget online, either. Sony (Research), back before the PS2's launch, said gamers would be able to download titles from existing PlayStation and PS2 libraries via broadband.
Gates, meanwhile, told gamers they would be able to download trial versions of games to their Xbox's hard drive to help them decide whether to buy a retail copy. The same promise is being made with Xbox 360.
Only thing is, broadband acceptance in the US is not exactly ubiquitous. Back when xbox1 and ps2 launched, how many people actually had broadband? Also, how big are those latest and greatest PC game demos? Almost as big as the full game itself!
Back then there wasn't much of a market. Now, the demos are frickin' HUGE! Maybe downloading games and demos is doable, but it's still going to take mucho bandwidth to distro a demo for Halo3 or God of War 2. They should have builtin Bittorrent support into their console. Now that would be ironic justice!
Well, for one, it would make the whole confusing use of clock speeds vs platform processor go away.
Huh? What about AMD chips running around 2.4GHz with a label reading 4000+? Not to mention VIA's CPUs... what does their 1GHz mean in relation to AMD's (pick your favorite core design) and Intel's (pick you favorite core design). There is even difference in the different cores for the same processor name!
The mega(giga)hertz-myth was a brilliant marketing strategy for Intel in the 90's. Sadly, it will be a long, long time before people forget. I'm sure salespersonages will be using this myth for a long time to sucker someone in.
The Xbox 360 will also have to compete with people's willingness to wait for the PS3 and Nintendo Revolution. This may or may not be a factor depending on what Sony and Nintendo can deliver next week at E3. Remember, an early lauch didn't help Sega much with the Dreamcast (or the Saturn, which they forcefully lauched a few months early in the US to get a headstart on the PS).
It seems to me that most gamers and even many households own multiple "nextgen" gaming consoles. How many people own both an Xbox and a PS2 and/or a GC? I would expect (any ever do a study?) that most gamers in "after college" market probably own all three, a PS1, a DC, and a saturn. I, unfortunately, only own a GC, but many of my aquaintences do own more then 1 console (standard sampling errors do apply). I'll probably end up with a PS2 just to play all those great PS2 RPG's I keep hearing about.
Re:It could be worse ...
on
Star Wars Sickout
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
In law school, there is the famous case of 4 guys who were adrift at sea and nearing death from starvation. 3 had wives and families, one was young and just starting his career. The 3 older men decided they'd kill the younger as the younger had the least to lose and they'd eat him. That's what they did. They were rescued the next day.
It should have been the 3 with families that should sacrifice for the single guy. They already passed on their genes and burned up a bunch of their potential, while the young guy's potential will never be realized and hadn't his genes pass onto a child (that he knew of).
Not only do I like the ability to skip the raunchy stuff, but I like the fact that this promotes the idea that people can have control over the content that they pay to license. Hollywood considers the filters to be an "edit" of the original movie, but since the original DVD isn't altered, I don't see any difference between this and manually skipping content. It empowers the user and I like that. The implications are broader than just "Family Friendly Movies."
Does this really give you control or is it just a sugar pill? The DVD still has to follow the rules set out by whoever made the DVD. The only skippable content are those that you are already allowed to skip. If the maker puts in a TrojanMan(tm or R or C) commericial and flagged it "no-skip", you have to watch that commercial. Clearplay cannot automatically skip that commercial. They can't allow you to skip that commercial, or they give up their "license" to edit the movie. To the DVD maker, it seems the ads are worth more than the film.
Ya, I guess, eventually, Spotlight will be useful as an all in one interface, but it's so much easier to browse my iPhoto library then it is to write up descriptions to the pictures and have Spotlight find the picture from the descriptions.
I hope so, now I have a 12" 1.5GHz Aluminum with only 512MB of RAM. I hope I see some increase in speed, but I fear I will need more memory to see real speed improvements.
And if I hadn't bought a Mac Mini I would have skipped Panther altogether because Panther *is* a relatively minor release. Tiger, with Spotlight, is a different kind of cat altogether.
Well, to each their own, I guess. I'm not too thrilled about Spotlight. Unless it is able to find me a picture of my grandmother from some event with the filename like 102_678.jpg, since I have more trouble keeping track of all my pictures then my composed-of-mostly-words type files. And yes, iPhoto is pretty good at doing that job, which is another reason why Spotlight is ho-hum for me.
I can tell you that Panther was an awesome update, well worth it's price. When an OS upgrade can make you feel like you just received a new machine, that's an upgrade that is worth it to me. On a 1GHz Titanium PB, I felt the machine was at least 10-20% faster then 10.2.x. The way Apple releases new machines, that's like getting the next generation PB for the cost of an OS upgrade.
Wonder why the author didn't mention that part at all? If you were thinking about buying a GBA, then it's almost a no-brainer to go with the DS instead. Also, there's that built in library of >500 games right there, and those games cost a lot less then $50.
Value going to the PSP? Isn't "value" too subjective? If the PSP isn't able to play the games I want, then it's got no value. Vice versa for the DS.
Giving the DS a win in gameplay, when most of the DS article was lambasting the lack of games and gameplay... WTF?
Apparently, Sydney Brenner, 2002 Nobel Laureate in Medicine and long-time geneticist, coined the phrase "junk DNA". He championed the pufferfish, due to it having a low amount of "junk DNA", to replace Drosophila as the best model organism on which to perform large scale metagenesis experiments. To paraphrase a quote from Dr. Brenner:
Technically, any human with 2 X chromosomes (not sure about cases of non-disjunction), is a chimera since either the maternal or paternal X chromosome is randomly turned off at random times during development. That's the way we balance expression from the sex chromosomes. Other species up regulate the single sex chromosome.
So most women are chimeras between mom's X and dad's X. Chalk up another difference between men and women! ^_^
It is one that appears to be at odds with what most of the researchers I work with use. An internal coding exon is not an ORF. The whole coding sequence would be a single ORF that excludes the intervening introns.
If that is the convention, then I will have to accept. I don't like though since it seems so restrictive if you don't know what the full length mRNA (or some other RNA) looks like.
If I read your above definition correctly, you would call every stretch of DNA that does not include a stop codon an ORF, even without requiring an initiation codon. This would mean the entire genome would be in an ORF! Even nucleotide triplets that match a termination codon would be in an ORF since they cannot be terminated in every frame. This definition is clearly not very useful.
How do you know a stretch of DNA is NOT transcribed (discounting the obvious like poly-nucleotide repeats, SINES, etc)? And I thought an ORF was defined as 1 single reading frame not all three? Anyways, there are instances, especially in virus genomes, of overlapping genes, in both reading frames and sense/anti-sense strands. So what is not an ORF in one reading frame may be an ORF in another.
Huh? All of the ncRNAs[1] transcribed from the human genome are transcripts. Only some of them are ORFs. ORF is a bad term to use when referring to ncRNAs.
"Transcript" = RNA. I was talking about DNA in my original post. Specifically, the stretch of DNA that encodes a ncRNA, which I incorrectly lumped together with ORFs. Still, an ORF is talking about a stretch of DNA. Hence, I was not talking about "transcripts" because I was talking about DNA.
non-coding vs non-translated. Coding is synonymous with translating. I admit "ntRNA" looks too much like it should refer to "nucleotideRNA". Yet, it does refer back to the simple principle of transcription and translation. I bet "untranslated" predates both ncRNA and my made up ntRNA (only because I didn't want to type out "non-translated" more than once). Then, it could have been "utRNA" for Unreal Tournament RNA Edition...err...untranslatedRNA.
My guess, whoever coined the phrase "non-coding RNA" just wanted to add some more jargon to the life/medical scientist's lexicon. Bastard.
You are correct that non-translated RNAs (ntRNA) do not equal ORFs, but you are wrong to say that ORFs have in-frame start and termination codons. Would things like internal exons be considered non-ORF's since they do not contain a start codon? To me, ORF is just a stretch of DNA that does not include a stop codon and may be bracketed by splice acceptor/donor sites. Since ntRNA's may be transcribed by any of the RNA polymerases (probably just RNA Pol-II and RNA Pol-III since RNA Pol-I seems to be rRNA specific for now) and the presence of a stop codon is not a factor since it's not translated, ntRNA's certainly encompass more than just ORFs.
I definitely don't mean transcripts since I was referring to DNA regions that possibly code for ntRNAs.
Since this is/., correcting the original post is impossible for someone with a 6-digit ID like me.
to how many genomes are in a single human genome. However, speaking about genes in a genome, as the article states, this "correction" only counts those genes that make some discernable protein product. The number misses the number of open reading frames (ORF) that may not encode a protein at all, but a regulatory or enzymatic RNA. Probably, the next big project in life/medical research, after the big proteomics initiatives, will be the study of non-protein encoding ORFs. This problem is very tough to crack since 1) these RNA's do not have a common sequence element like "normal" messenger RNAs, 2) may be as short as 15 base pair (LIN12(?) in C. elegans), and 3) there are MANY, MANY possible ORFs in the genome.
Are these technically genes? They are regulated. They have a function. They are transcribed. The only thing different from the standard definition of a gene is that the RNA is not translated into protein.
In addition to multiple protein products from one "gene" as the article states, regulation of the gene may also be much more complex compared to "lower" organism. For example, the gene expression profile of the malarial parasite Plasmodium falciparum suggests very limited regulation. Basically, it looks like a linear progression with very limit amount of response. So, temporal and spatial regulation makes even multiple product genes seem to like a larger cohort of genes. Take the daughterless gene in Drosophila. It is used very early in embryonic development to control sexual differentiation. However, later, the gene product is used in neuronal differentiation. So, for the fly, sex is literally on the brain.
about quality of life stuff, don't get me wrong, but this is hardly the cure for cancer, AIDS, or diabetes. Are you telling me there were no more qualified applicants than this? People working on life stuff, not "just" quality of life?
Because we don't have a cure for cancer, AIDS, or diabetes. I don't think they've even given out a Nobel for the discovery of transcription factors, yet.
While reasearching this to play online game with buddies, I found that ventrilo and teamspeak were the most popular. Ventrilo has clients for many platforms (Win32, OSX, Linux, BSD, Solaris) but only a client for Win32. OSX and Linux clients are in development. Teamspeak seems to have only Win32 and Linux client and servers.
My friends and I couldn't get Teamspeak to work, while ventrilo worked straight from install (on Win32 client & server or linux client).
To bad neither are Free Software/Open Source since both are distributed as binaries.
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One issue I see with this mouse is the scroll wheel. As a scientist that works at the bench, I use pipetman alot. From the pictures, using the scroll wheel seems to produce a very similar range of motion to using a pipetman (assuming you use your thumb). If you love to use the scroll wheel, this mouse will cause undue stress on some of those tendons you are trying to protect. Half of my co-workers have been put on PT for the beginning symptoms of RSI. I do admit that this solution is way better than the traditionaly scroll wheel, which is amazingly bad.
Ergonomic pipetman now use electronics and motors that allows the use of a single trigger button to control uptake and dispense. The designs are looking alot like flight sim joysticks, which are quite comfortable.
For analog signals and xvid/DiVX/MPEG2 playback, a P3 is more than sufficient, as you already know. Have you tried decoding those bright new shiny H/X264 video files using mplayer, vlc, etc? My P3-based 1.3GHz Celery just sits there at 100%. All I get is sound and a nice black screen or a frozen frame. Maybe your 2GHz Celery has enough juice to plow through an H/X264 video. Maybe it's a problem with the linux codecs. I still watch most of my video on this machine running MythTV and a Hauppage PVR250, but xvid is not exactly perfectly smooth on it (mplayer -vo xv).
For HD, hardware encoding does not exist for the consumer market. If they do, then ponying up for such "better tuner card" is going to cost much much much more moolah. Hardware decoding requires some very recent GPU like 6800-series from Nvidia and, I think, the R10000-series from ATI. I don't think either company's linux drivers will do hardware decoding, yet. So, for now, HD playback probably needs a nice beefy CPU.
Now if only Hybrid64 or Merged64 or ConjoinedTwin64 support was better. Pure64 support in Debian is pretty painful (yes, I've got chroot ia32 working, still painful). I haven't tried installing a pure ia32 system onto my Athlon64 system, yet.
Wait, this record company exec released information about iTunes Music Store and Apple wasn't available for comment? I don't think Jobs like being put on the spot like that. If a deal has been struck and EMI jumped the gun, will they be punished like ATI for "leaking"?
So, this subwoofer can create sound waves down to 1Hz, but how big of a room do you need to create such a standing wave? I'm guessing most people don't have a room to produce even a 20Hz standing wave.
I don't know about the current crop of PDA's. I have a Palm IIIe which has been sitting in a draw for many many years. The reason why I put it in the draw was it really didn't do anything very well. Play games? Gameboy was better. Calendar? I didn't really need one, but when I did, I had a laptop. Notes/ToDo Lists? Data entry was a pain even though I could write in Grafitti better then I could with pen & paper. Contact List? One of the only reasons why I did use my Palm, but then data entry was a pain. Also, cellphone works better since I can lookup AND call on the same device. 2MB of RAM couldn't do much more...
Basically, I found it too cumbersome to use so I stopped using it.
Go Go Old-fashioned Research! ^_^
Only thing is, broadband acceptance in the US is not exactly ubiquitous. Back when xbox1 and ps2 launched, how many people actually had broadband? Also, how big are those latest and greatest PC game demos? Almost as big as the full game itself!
Back then there wasn't much of a market. Now, the demos are frickin' HUGE! Maybe downloading games and demos is doable, but it's still going to take mucho bandwidth to distro a demo for Halo3 or God of War 2. They should have builtin Bittorrent support into their console. Now that would be ironic justice!
The mega(giga)hertz-myth was a brilliant marketing strategy for Intel in the 90's. Sadly, it will be a long, long time before people forget. I'm sure salespersonages will be using this myth for a long time to sucker someone in.
It seems to me that most gamers and even many households own multiple "nextgen" gaming consoles. How many people own both an Xbox and a PS2 and/or a GC? I would expect (any ever do a study?) that most gamers in "after college" market probably own all three, a PS1, a DC, and a saturn. I, unfortunately, only own a GC, but many of my aquaintences do own more then 1 console (standard sampling errors do apply). I'll probably end up with a PS2 just to play all those great PS2 RPG's I keep hearing about.
It should have been the 3 with families that should sacrifice for the single guy. They already passed on their genes and burned up a bunch of their potential, while the young guy's potential will never be realized and hadn't his genes pass onto a child (that he knew of).
Heartless bastards.
Does this really give you control or is it just a sugar pill? The DVD still has to follow the rules set out by whoever made the DVD. The only skippable content are those that you are already allowed to skip. If the maker puts in a TrojanMan(tm or R or C) commericial and flagged it "no-skip", you have to watch that commercial. Clearplay cannot automatically skip that commercial. They can't allow you to skip that commercial, or they give up their "license" to edit the movie. To the DVD maker, it seems the ads are worth more than the film.
Ya, I guess, eventually, Spotlight will be useful as an all in one interface, but it's so much easier to browse my iPhoto library then it is to write up descriptions to the pictures and have Spotlight find the picture from the descriptions.
I hope so, now I have a 12" 1.5GHz Aluminum with only 512MB of RAM. I hope I see some increase in speed, but I fear I will need more memory to see real speed improvements.
Well, to each their own, I guess. I'm not too thrilled about Spotlight. Unless it is able to find me a picture of my grandmother from some event with the filename like 102_678.jpg, since I have more trouble keeping track of all my pictures then my composed-of-mostly-words type files. And yes, iPhoto is pretty good at doing that job, which is another reason why Spotlight is ho-hum for me.
I can tell you that Panther was an awesome update, well worth it's price. When an OS upgrade can make you feel like you just received a new machine, that's an upgrade that is worth it to me. On a 1GHz Titanium PB, I felt the machine was at least 10-20% faster then 10.2.x. The way Apple releases new machines, that's like getting the next generation PB for the cost of an OS upgrade.
That *is* a MAJOR upgrade.
Wonder why the author didn't mention that part at all? If you were thinking about buying a GBA, then it's almost a no-brainer to go with the DS instead. Also, there's that built in library of >500 games right there, and those games cost a lot less then $50.
Value going to the PSP? Isn't "value" too subjective? If the PSP isn't able to play the games I want, then it's got no value. Vice versa for the DS.
Giving the DS a win in gameplay, when most of the DS article was lambasting the lack of games and gameplay... WTF?
Apparently, Sydney Brenner, 2002 Nobel Laureate in Medicine and long-time geneticist, coined the phrase "junk DNA". He championed the pufferfish, due to it having a low amount of "junk DNA", to replace Drosophila as the best model organism on which to perform large scale metagenesis experiments. To paraphrase a quote from Dr. Brenner:
junk DNA != trash
http://big.mcw.edu/display.php/239.html
Technically, any human with 2 X chromosomes (not sure about cases of non-disjunction), is a chimera since either the maternal or paternal X chromosome is randomly turned off at random times during development. That's the way we balance expression from the sex chromosomes. Other species up regulate the single sex chromosome.
So most women are chimeras between mom's X and dad's X. Chalk up another difference between men and women! ^_^
Man, what a great acronym
IPFreely?
IPU?
IPUP WeAllP!
For a golden night, showered with passion, it's IPTV!
How do you know a stretch of DNA is NOT transcribed (discounting the obvious like poly-nucleotide repeats, SINES, etc)? And I thought an ORF was defined as 1 single reading frame not all three? Anyways, there are instances, especially in virus genomes, of overlapping genes, in both reading frames and sense/anti-sense strands. So what is not an ORF in one reading frame may be an ORF in another.
"Transcript" = RNA. I was talking about DNA in my original post. Specifically, the stretch of DNA that encodes a ncRNA, which I incorrectly lumped together with ORFs. Still, an ORF is talking about a stretch of DNA. Hence, I was not talking about "transcripts" because I was talking about DNA.
non-coding vs non-translated. Coding is synonymous with translating. I admit "ntRNA" looks too much like it should refer to "nucleotideRNA". Yet, it does refer back to the simple principle of transcription and translation. I bet "untranslated" predates both ncRNA and my made up ntRNA (only because I didn't want to type out "non-translated" more than once). Then, it could have been "utRNA" for Unreal Tournament RNA Edition...err...untranslatedRNA.
My guess, whoever coined the phrase "non-coding RNA" just wanted to add some more jargon to the life/medical scientist's lexicon. Bastard.
You are correct that non-translated RNAs (ntRNA) do not equal ORFs, but you are wrong to say that ORFs have in-frame start and termination codons. Would things like internal exons be considered non-ORF's since they do not contain a start codon? To me, ORF is just a stretch of DNA that does not include a stop codon and may be bracketed by splice acceptor/donor sites. Since ntRNA's may be transcribed by any of the RNA polymerases (probably just RNA Pol-II and RNA Pol-III since RNA Pol-I seems to be rRNA specific for now) and the presence of a stop codon is not a factor since it's not translated, ntRNA's certainly encompass more than just ORFs.
/., correcting the original post is impossible for someone with a 6-digit ID like me.
I definitely don't mean transcripts since I was referring to DNA regions that possibly code for ntRNAs.
Since this is
to how many genomes are in a single human genome. However, speaking about genes in a genome, as the article states, this "correction" only counts those genes that make some discernable protein product. The number misses the number of open reading frames (ORF) that may not encode a protein at all, but a regulatory or enzymatic RNA. Probably, the next big project in life/medical research, after the big proteomics initiatives, will be the study of non-protein encoding ORFs. This problem is very tough to crack since 1) these RNA's do not have a common sequence element like "normal" messenger RNAs, 2) may be as short as 15 base pair (LIN12(?) in C. elegans), and 3) there are MANY, MANY possible ORFs in the genome.
Are these technically genes? They are regulated. They have a function. They are transcribed. The only thing different from the standard definition of a gene is that the RNA is not translated into protein.
In addition to multiple protein products from one "gene" as the article states, regulation of the gene may also be much more complex compared to "lower" organism. For example, the gene expression profile of the malarial parasite Plasmodium falciparum suggests very limited regulation. Basically, it looks like a linear progression with very limit amount of response. So, temporal and spatial regulation makes even multiple product genes seem to like a larger cohort of genes. Take the daughterless gene in Drosophila. It is used very early in embryonic development to control sexual differentiation. However, later, the gene product is used in neuronal differentiation. So, for the fly, sex is literally on the brain.
Because we don't have a cure for cancer, AIDS, or diabetes. I don't think they've even given out a Nobel for the discovery of transcription factors, yet.
While reasearching this to play online game with buddies, I found that ventrilo and teamspeak were the most popular. Ventrilo has clients for many platforms (Win32, OSX, Linux, BSD, Solaris) but only a client for Win32. OSX and Linux clients are in development. Teamspeak seems to have only Win32 and Linux client and servers.
My friends and I couldn't get Teamspeak to work, while ventrilo worked straight from install (on Win32 client & server or linux client).
To bad neither are Free Software/Open Source since both are distributed as binaries.