If you RTFA, and then read this, you will see that what the two cars do is quite different. The Prius requires quite a bit of user interaction, whereas the system engineered with Volvo appears to require very little driver interaction, as well as the flexibility to be applied in vehicles with different steering systems.
I agree generally. If there were no immediate drawback to this mutation it would seem that it would have become commonplace long ago assuming that a stronger human would have had an evolutionary advantage.
An earlier post theorized that this mutation may cause the heart to collapse at 35, thus preventing the proliferation of this mutation. The problem with that theory is that heart failure at that age would have been after average childbearing age even up to modern times. Even accepting that having living parents increases a childs chance of surviving to fertile age, it would appear that death at 35 would not have had a large effect on human evolution over much of its course.
The only conclusion I see is that the particular mutations neccesary for this condition to manifest are rare. I am not a specialist in gentics, but it seems that the nature of mutation is such that its rare manifestion as this condition, abnormal muscle development, would not exert a strong evolutionary pressure.
I can see this working. First, I buy a device, say a laptop, that is NFC enabled. Than perhaps I decide I want to set up a home wireless network. So, I buy a WAP that is also NFC enabled. I plug it in, bring my laptop within "touching" range and all of the protocol negotiations neccesary for comminucation are automagically taken care of. The only company I can see accomplishing this type of integration and maintaining the simplicity is Apple.
Picture it, they touch, and VOILA! Secure encrypted wireless, or at least as secure as wireless gets these days. We can always have hope.
From the article:
Digital technology can produce something clear enough to convey meaning, but only in a clipped monotone that sounds more like a robot than a real live person.
Did it occur to the author that perhaps the reason these synthesized voices "sound like a robot" is that robots really don't have much of a choice?
Suprisingly, Hawking's complaints are not that he "sounds like a robot", but that he sounds like an American.
Soon our robots will be able to sing with style, but will still talk funny.
You have to remember that it makes a difference what licence is being used, because if it is GPL the problem is easily solved. If someone sticks ads into the software and you don't like it, take it out and redistribute without the ads. Problem solved. I imagine that a package without the ads would appear as fast as humanly possible. For this reason I doubt any GPLed project would use that model, as there is very little that they can guarantee. I see web references as being a more convincing model for that sort of thing.
I would have framed the whole setup in a different way, perhaps allowing people to set up "feature bounties" kind of like Google Answers or the prior art bounties that I saw offered a while back.
1) It occured to me a while back that some of our scientific progress was mistimed and oportunity was missed. My idea was this: I wish someone in the 60s or 70s had seen two developing trends and combined them for mutual benefit of all. What could have been done is that a strong international body could have declared that research on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) would be severely limited on Earth. Earth would be declared a GM free zone. All research on GM must be conducted on Mars. However, first Mars must be mapped, surveyed, and analyzed to a level that we feel we understand its general environment before we arrive there. Second, a reasonable assessment must be made to determine that no unique life forms exist there. Third, Earth based companies are granted territory on Mars to conduct research. They can figure out how to get there and such with their own money. If this had been done I would bet that we would know more about Mars, GMOs, and numerous other spin-off technologies than we do now. As a side benefit, Earth would be arguably more safe than it is now. I am aware that there are problems with this idea. It is mostly an exercise in historical sci-fi that I have been playing around with in my head. I still think the idea of restricting certain kinds of research to areas off the Earth as a protection for all the species is an interesting idea.
2) I find this kind of research much more frigtening than any nanotech grey goo scenario. The equipment necessary for messing around with DNA like this is much cheaper than a nanotech fab.
And so with the finalists Linux and Windows you have a neck and neck race. Linux wins in the licensing part, but Windows wins out in the cost of use. The total TCO is pretty much equal, so it's really a toss up at this point.
What I would love to see is some accurate, trustworthy numbers in this department, if only for client machines (office suite and web, etc). Anecdotally I know that since August the Windows machines I maintain have required constant patching and attention in order to assure that they remain functioning at a baseline level. That is expensive in terms of required manpower. The Linux machines that I maintain have only required attention when I wanted to add or change capabilities. I have read recent analysis on patching on both systems, but what I have not seen is a comparison that takes into account end user configurations, and not all of the services that are available in the OS. Windows has for the most part required the pathces on ALL platforms. The major linux security issues that I have seen recently were related to services that are not deployed on the majority of end user workstations, and thus were not neccesary in those deployments. Sure, both systems have security, maintainence, and usage cost. My gut feeling is that Windows TCO goes up quickly when you have masses of end user deployments, quite probably at a rate higher than that of the alternatives. I know that there are ways to lock Windows down and to manage mass deployments, but are those methods less costly than the alternatives?
I don't have time to do the analysis (too busy maintaining those boxes). I have not yet seen any analysis that I trust. I know where my experience tends to point.
One item that I did not see mentioned specifically but was marginally addresses was simple icon consistancy within an app. This applies to the Windows version as well in the latest distributions that I have seen. The icons used on the panel (in gnome, I forget what Windows and KDE call it) are not the same as the icons that are distributed for the app itself. Right now on debian I am still getting a dragon in the red star for icon used in the Gnome menu, but the panel is using the split with an M on the upper left and a Netscape style ship wheel to the lower left. I could live with any consistancy, and perhaps it will need some help from the package builders. If I had a choice I would probably like something like the M used for the browser on OSX, but anything clean, recognizable, and consistant would be good.
I hate to confess it, but I did this very thing, only not with my laptop. This happened on vacation. I was distracted by a mongoose and forgot that I had set my digital camcorder on the roof of our small rental car. I got in the car and we proceeded to drive down a steep, twisty mountain road. After a few hundred yards we drove by a parking lot and all of these people were shouting at us, but it was in French and I don't speak French. We just kept driving until someone finally yelled "camera!". Fortunately my wife slowed to a stop (she was driving), and we rescued the camera, still sitting on top of the car. How it managed to stay up there I have no idea, but I sure was thankful, as it was my wife's camera and was almost brand new. These days she smiles when she notices me making sure I have the camera packed before I get into the car.
Just to clarify, they say that it CACHES 10 lookups in the table, and that the size of this table is configurable at compile time. So, you can lookup any domain, but it will slow you down, and on this system the difference between a cache hit and a lookup will probably be significant. However, as the link you provided states, their DNS implementation is not heavily tested, so some domail lookups may fail unexpectedly.
In an update to a previous story it is now reported that Matrix: Reloaded P2P downloads account for 10% of all net traffic. The MPAA is mobilizing in conjuntion with major ISPs like MSN and AOL to ensure that this does not happen in the future. Meanwhile in the real world energy production rates have increased 31% as millions of humans experience increased amphetimine levels. "The success of the simulation known as 'Trinity' on males specimens ages 14-26 has been remarkable", notes Analyst #31425. The Central Division for Human Stimulation is anticipating similar results later this year when they release the next installment of this package.
From the article: "You can run MacOS or MacOSX via Mac-On-Linux without needing to buy Apple hardware or acquire a BIOS. Yes, MacOSX runs, but don't expect great performance."
It should be noted that the hardware used by the reviewer was not the fastest, and OSX would be slow on it even if it was booted native, and not run in Mac-On-Linux as is being discussed. What is interesting here is not the perfomance, but the fact that it can be done at all. The system may not be usuable now for day to day work, but if the company manages to stay afloat perhaps it would be a workable solution for some people. Of course what I would love to see is cheap, customizable hardware where I can multi-boot OSX and by other OSs of choice.
I have seen microsoft headed in this direction ever since they first started trying to roll out WindowsCE. With CE they have a situation where the OS is in the hardware. I am sure they would love to see a world where 90% of motherboards came with a Windows ROM and running anything else took serious work. What could possibly be better for them than to have their OS tightly tied to the hardware? The standard PC platform out there is a target that other software can hit, but if they get into the business of designing the hardware they can play the same games they have with software and make interoperability a real nightmare.
I totally agree with one sentiment of this post, and that is that some of us who aren't part of a formal education system would appreciate Q+A sections at the end of chapters in ORA books. I consider myself an independant student and I use ORA books 99% of the time as my "textbooks". In my opinion ORA books are the only books where I feel like I really get a full return on my investment. I have regretted many book purchases, but never one from ORA. In the past I have found myself creating my own little assignments to practice material covered in a given chapter, but it would be nice to have someone who knows what I really need to be practicing to give me some challenges, and I trust ORA authors with that job. On another note, I see where people are coming from looking for online versions of the books (searchability would be great). However I feel justified in haveing to pay for and ORA book if that is neccesary to keep the quality of the books where it is. How about an electronic version released with each book? Or how about selling an electronic version for less since the cost of production is lower?
Slashdot Mirror
If you RTFA, and then read this, you will see that what the two cars do is quite different. The Prius requires quite a bit of user interaction, whereas the system engineered with Volvo appears to require very little driver interaction, as well as the flexibility to be applied in vehicles with different steering systems.
I agree generally. If there were no immediate drawback to this mutation it would seem that it would have become commonplace long ago assuming that a stronger human would have had an evolutionary advantage.
An earlier post theorized that this mutation may cause the heart to collapse at 35, thus preventing the proliferation of this mutation. The problem with that theory is that heart failure at that age would have been after average childbearing age even up to modern times. Even accepting that having living parents increases a childs chance of surviving to fertile age, it would appear that death at 35 would not have had a large effect on human evolution over much of its course.
The only conclusion I see is that the particular mutations neccesary for this condition to manifest are rare. I am not a specialist in gentics, but it seems that the nature of mutation is such that its rare manifestion as this condition, abnormal muscle development, would not exert a strong evolutionary pressure.
I am curious. Care to provide any more info, like links to where you can get the data sets and what software was used?
I am interested in astronomy, free (and especially Free/libre) software, and do not fear steep learning curves.
I can see this working. First, I buy a device, say a laptop, that is NFC enabled. Than perhaps I decide I want to set up a home wireless network. So, I buy a WAP that is also NFC enabled. I plug it in, bring my laptop within "touching" range and all of the protocol negotiations neccesary for comminucation are automagically taken care of. The only company I can see accomplishing this type of integration and maintaining the simplicity is Apple.
Picture it, they touch, and VOILA! Secure encrypted wireless, or at least as secure as wireless gets these days. We can always have hope.
Come on, geeks at the beach? Wouldn't the sun hurt our pale complexions?
Everybody knows all the real geeks are still in the desert trying to get their robots to go a few more miles.
From the article: Digital technology can produce something clear enough to convey meaning, but only in a clipped monotone that sounds more like a robot than a real live person.
Did it occur to the author that perhaps the reason these synthesized voices "sound like a robot" is that robots really don't have much of a choice?
Suprisingly, Hawking's complaints are not that he "sounds like a robot", but that he sounds like an American.
Soon our robots will be able to sing with style, but will still talk funny.
You have to remember that it makes a difference what licence is being used, because if it is GPL the problem is easily solved. If someone sticks ads into the software and you don't like it, take it out and redistribute without the ads. Problem solved. I imagine that a package without the ads would appear as fast as humanly possible. For this reason I doubt any GPLed project would use that model, as there is very little that they can guarantee. I see web references as being a more convincing model for that sort of thing.
I would have framed the whole setup in a different way, perhaps allowing people to set up "feature bounties" kind of like Google Answers or the prior art bounties that I saw offered a while back.
1) It occured to me a while back that some of our scientific progress was mistimed and oportunity was missed. My idea was this: I wish someone in the 60s or 70s had seen two developing trends and combined them for mutual benefit of all. What could have been done is that a strong international body could have declared that research on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) would be severely limited on Earth. Earth would be declared a GM free zone. All research on GM must be conducted on Mars. However, first Mars must be mapped, surveyed, and analyzed to a level that we feel we understand its general environment before we arrive there. Second, a reasonable assessment must be made to determine that no unique life forms exist there. Third, Earth based companies are granted territory on Mars to conduct research. They can figure out how to get there and such with their own money. If this had been done I would bet that we would know more about Mars, GMOs, and numerous other spin-off technologies than we do now. As a side benefit, Earth would be arguably more safe than it is now. I am aware that there are problems with this idea. It is mostly an exercise in historical sci-fi that I have been playing around with in my head. I still think the idea of restricting certain kinds of research to areas off the Earth as a protection for all the species is an interesting idea.
2) I find this kind of research much more frigtening than any nanotech grey goo scenario. The equipment necessary for messing around with DNA like this is much cheaper than a nanotech fab.
And so with the finalists Linux and Windows you have a neck and neck race. Linux wins in the licensing part, but Windows wins out in the cost of use. The total TCO is pretty much equal, so it's really a toss up at this point.
What I would love to see is some accurate, trustworthy numbers in this department, if only for client machines (office suite and web, etc). Anecdotally I know that since August the Windows machines I maintain have required constant patching and attention in order to assure that they remain functioning at a baseline level. That is expensive in terms of required manpower. The Linux machines that I maintain have only required attention when I wanted to add or change capabilities. I have read recent analysis on patching on both systems, but what I have not seen is a comparison that takes into account end user configurations, and not all of the services that are available in the OS. Windows has for the most part required the pathces on ALL platforms. The major linux security issues that I have seen recently were related to services that are not deployed on the majority of end user workstations, and thus were not neccesary in those deployments. Sure, both systems have security, maintainence, and usage cost. My gut feeling is that Windows TCO goes up quickly when you have masses of end user deployments, quite probably at a rate higher than that of the alternatives. I know that there are ways to lock Windows down and to manage mass deployments, but are those methods less costly than the alternatives?
I don't have time to do the analysis (too busy maintaining those boxes). I have not yet seen any analysis that I trust. I know where my experience tends to point.
One item that I did not see mentioned specifically but was marginally addresses was simple icon consistancy within an app. This applies to the Windows version as well in the latest distributions that I have seen. The icons used on the panel (in gnome, I forget what Windows and KDE call it) are not the same as the icons that are distributed for the app itself. Right now on debian I am still getting a dragon in the red star for icon used in the Gnome menu, but the panel is using the split with an M on the upper left and a Netscape style ship wheel to the lower left. I could live with any consistancy, and perhaps it will need some help from the package builders. If I had a choice I would probably like something like the M used for the browser on OSX, but anything clean, recognizable, and consistant would be good.
I hate to confess it, but I did this very thing, only not with my laptop. This happened on vacation. I was distracted by a mongoose and forgot that I had set my digital camcorder on the roof of our small rental car. I got in the car and we proceeded to drive down a steep, twisty mountain road. After a few hundred yards we drove by a parking lot and all of these people were shouting at us, but it was in French and I don't speak French. We just kept driving until someone finally yelled "camera!". Fortunately my wife slowed to a stop (she was driving), and we rescued the camera, still sitting on top of the car. How it managed to stay up there I have no idea, but I sure was thankful, as it was my wife's camera and was almost brand new. These days she smiles when she notices me making sure I have the camera packed before I get into the car.
Just to clarify, they say that it CACHES 10 lookups in the table, and that the size of this table is configurable at compile time. So, you can lookup any domain, but it will slow you down, and on this system the difference between a cache hit and a lookup will probably be significant. However, as the link you provided states, their DNS implementation is not heavily tested, so some domail lookups may fail unexpectedly.
In an update to a previous story it is now reported that Matrix: Reloaded P2P downloads account for 10% of all net traffic. The MPAA is mobilizing in conjuntion with major ISPs like MSN and AOL to ensure that this does not happen in the future. Meanwhile in the real world energy production rates have increased 31% as millions of humans experience increased amphetimine levels. "The success of the simulation known as 'Trinity' on males specimens ages 14-26 has been remarkable", notes Analyst #31425. The Central Division for Human Stimulation is anticipating similar results later this year when they release the next installment of this package.
From the article:
"You can run MacOS or MacOSX via Mac-On-Linux without needing to buy Apple hardware or acquire a BIOS. Yes, MacOSX runs, but don't expect great performance."
It should be noted that the hardware used by the reviewer was not the fastest, and OSX would be slow on it even if it was booted native, and not run in Mac-On-Linux as is being discussed. What is interesting here is not the perfomance, but the fact that it can be done at all. The system may not be usuable now for day to day work, but if the company manages to stay afloat perhaps it would be a workable solution for some people. Of course what I would love to see is cheap, customizable hardware where I can multi-boot OSX and by other OSs of choice.
I have seen microsoft headed in this direction ever since they first started trying to roll out WindowsCE. With CE they have a situation where the OS is in the hardware. I am sure they would love to see a world where 90% of motherboards came with a Windows ROM and running anything else took serious work. What could possibly be better for them than to have their OS tightly tied to the hardware? The standard PC platform out there is a target that other software can hit, but if they get into the business of designing the hardware they can play the same games they have with software and make interoperability a real nightmare.
What I really want to know is this. Is m$ on that list of companies, and how many /.ers signed up?
gearry
I totally agree with one sentiment of this post, and that is that some of us who aren't part of a formal education system would appreciate Q+A sections at the end of chapters in ORA books. I consider myself an independant student and I use ORA books 99% of the time as my "textbooks". In my opinion ORA books are the only books where I feel like I really get a full return on my investment. I have regretted many book purchases, but never one from ORA. In the past I have found myself creating my own little assignments to practice material covered in a given chapter, but it would be nice to have someone who knows what I really need to be practicing to give me some challenges, and I trust ORA authors with that job.
On another note, I see where people are coming from looking for online versions of the books (searchability would be great). However I feel justified in haveing to pay for and ORA book if that is neccesary to keep the quality of the books where it is. How about an electronic version released with each book? Or how about selling an electronic version for less since the cost of production is lower?