Okay, understood.
Why not install a proper OS then?
Because, there's not always a choice. My main work machine runs Linux and I use OSX at home. I spend at least 85% of my time on those systems. However, I'm also forced to use a Windows machine for some tasks because the hardware/software combo I need to do my work is Windows only. I defintely feel the productivity hit when I'm on the Windows machine. I feel the OS gets in the way and I'm itching to ditch it. I'm investigating ways of improving things: e.g. I run Dexpot but it's flaky at times and feels like a hack. So that brings me to my second answer to your question: why shouldn't Windows have the features that would make us deem it to be a "proper OS"?
Personally, I think this stuff with the Start Button is a side show. Even if they reverted it back completely to the Win7 behavior, it wouldn't remedy the underlying problems with the OS and the MS software ecosystem in general. In particular: the persistent development of their own "standards" for the purposes of locking out competition, general dumbing down of the OS, poor CLI integration (please just build-in Bash), no multiple desktops, and why sometimes when I drag many large files into a new directory does Win 7 spend ages doing a copy then delete?
By the time you've taken into account the costs of launching this thing into space (and maintaining it) won't regular solar power work out as being more efficient? Alternatively, what about spending the money on developing more efficient solar panels?
Yes, perhaps MS have "fallen flat" in search, social networks, etc. What's really unforgivable, however, are the Vista and Win8 debacles; those are cases where MS screwed up on home turf. The perception that they're having trouble getting their OS right must be tainting their efforts in other spheres. I reckon the XBox is relatively isolated from the Windows aura, as it's almost a brand in its own right (you never hear the term "Microsoft XBox"). Other things, such as search and phones, are harder to dissociate from Windows. Microsoft's real problem right now is that they're not "cool." It's that intangible quality that they need to foster in order to hit the upswing with consumers.
For those who are interested, it's possible to get the feeds from the orbital solar observatories and make your own movies of the Sun in action. A nice piece of software to automate this is jhelioviewer: http://jhelioviewer.org/
You can even purchase a small solar telescope that will allow you to view the sun safely at hydrogen alpha wavelengths (at which a lot of features are visible). A popular beginner scope is the Meade PST: http://www.meade.com/product_pages/coronado/scopes/pst.php (Lunt is another good manufacturer). With that you can see solar flares, prominences, sun spots, etc. Prominences are particularly fun because they change visibly over the time-course of minutes; so you can literally see the Sun watch the sun change before your eyes. Here's a link on what's possible to see visually: http://www.prairieastronomyclub.org/resources/solar-observing/observing-the-sun-in-h-alpha/
I'm not sure I see this 3-D tsunami happening. What most people want to buy are things like food, TVs, cameras, phones, cars, AC units, computers, bathtubs, toiletries, etc. These are what make "a modern life" and none of these things can be printed. 3D printing is great for one-off items (e.g printing a small replacement part at home), trinkets, prototyping and making complicated plastic parts that are hard to machine. However, it will suck for making stuff in bulk because it's slow. Forming parts with molds, for instance, will always be faster and cheaper if you're doing stuff in bulk. If you want to provide for a whole country then you're going to need to be doing it in bulk.
I thought you were a physicist:)
You're right it would depend on environmental factors.
At the moment, cloning works by injecting "healthy" DNA from a donor cell to a recipient cell. So basically, you give the biology a good DNA sample and let it do its stuff. If that DNA is damaged then the reciepient cell will just die. DNA that's been hanging around at room temperture will very quickly begin to degrade beyond the point at which this could work (even though YOU could sequence it and read back lots of information). The only way (that I can see -- biologist but not an expert in cloning) of cloning a person under these circumstances is to sequence the degraded sequence in the tooth, attempt to reassemble and fix mistakes in silico, then synthesise the chromosomes which you then inject into a donor ovum. As far as a I know, the latter two steps aren't ready for prime time for this sort of application.
Yes, but that means that *half the bonds* are broken in 521 years. For many purposes that may not be too bad, but doesn't cloning have substantially tougher demands? Perhaps you can correct me, but I'm not aware of any animals that have been cloned from DNA that's been left hanging around at room temperture for years on end.
To obtain a complete sequence suitable for cloning you would need a DNA sample that was obtained from living tissue and either processed immediately or suitably frozen in the interim. DNA starts to degrade pretty quickly. That's why nobody is going to clone Lennon or any mammoths any time soon. Regarding the mammoths: yes, they've been fozen but they're discovered as the ice thaws (by which time the damage has been done).
How are the going to enforce real names? Real names are irrelevent, anyway. The way people behave in an on-line community has more to do with the way the community is structured and maintained than whether people use their real names. I'm involved in a few communities. Some are friendly and welcoming. Others, not so much. None enforce real names.
I work in a fly lab. We kill thousands of flies each week... by freezing them. I know you were joking, but it's surprising how badly insects handle being frozen.
Saying drive-in theaters are dying is like saying faith in the flat earth is dying.
Off-topic, but interestingly faith in a flat Earth saw a resurgence in the 19th century. It was reaslised in about the 6th and 5th centuries BC that the Earth was spherical. It is a myth that the flat Earth model dominated the middle ages. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_earth Instead, flat Earthers started to appear in the 19th and, freakishly, persist today: http://theflatearthsociety.org/cms/
According to TFA: "It is too early to say if the structural brain differences found in the study are a marker of dyslexia." Why? Because the children in this study are still of pre-school age so they haven't been followed up. What they have shown, it seems, is that a smaller arcuate fasciculus makes you worse at tasks such as producing word sounds.
Planets are not all that bright, actually, by the time you've magnified them. I bought an 18" f/4 a couple of years ago, and I must say I'm really blown away by the planetary views. The extra aperture really brings the image to life because the colours are so much more vivid than they are in a little refractor. If the seeing's not so good I just stop it down to a 6".
TFA is shit. GFP is just a marker that is used to do the real science. What's the real science? Who knows. TFA doesn't say anything comprehensible on the matter. Crappy science reporting if ever I saw it. Why's this even on Slashdot? Scientists have been creating GFP animals for years now.
Some amateurs do grind their own mirrors, but lens grinding is a whole different kettle of fish. Hardly anyone does that. A little Googling will soon get you started with mirror grinding.
Getting through med school will require you memorise a lot of stuff. You need a system of note taking that promotes that. I didn't go to med school, but I did do a related degree. We did a lot of anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, etc. What worked for me was to write notes during the lecture with pen and paper. This is way more flexible and faster than messing around with tablet or laptop. Then, after the lecture, transcribe and make the notes neater and put into a binder for storage. Cross-reference with a textbook when producing the final copy of your notes to fill them out. This process cements the knowledge in your head because you *think* about what you learned. It really helps to make it stick. I found memorising my own notes was easier than memorising a text book.
Zambuto makes very expensive, high end, mirrors. Most beginners would be far better off spending $500 on a complete telescope from http://www.telescope.com/
I'm an amateur astronomer. If you haven't seen the night sky from a really dark location then you owe it to yourself to do so. This map of the US shows you where's dark and where's not: http://www.jshine.net/astronomy/dark_sky/ Basically, anywhere "blue" and darker will be breathtaking. You can go and just look up or bring binoculars and a simple star chart. You don't need fancy equipment to enjoy astronomy, but a dark sky is important.
If you want to get into it and buy a telescope then perfectly serviceable ones are now pretty cheap. There's a great forum called cloudynights.com, where you can ask questions and learn more. Basic rule is to buy a telescope from a dedicated astronomical telescope supplier not a department store.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, understood. Why not install a proper OS then?
Because, there's not always a choice. My main work machine runs Linux and I use OSX at home. I spend at least 85% of my time on those systems. However, I'm also forced to use a Windows machine for some tasks because the hardware/software combo I need to do my work is Windows only. I defintely feel the productivity hit when I'm on the Windows machine. I feel the OS gets in the way and I'm itching to ditch it. I'm investigating ways of improving things: e.g. I run Dexpot but it's flaky at times and feels like a hack. So that brings me to my second answer to your question: why shouldn't Windows have the features that would make us deem it to be a "proper OS"?
Personally, I think this stuff with the Start Button is a side show. Even if they reverted it back completely to the Win7 behavior, it wouldn't remedy the underlying problems with the OS and the MS software ecosystem in general. In particular: the persistent development of their own "standards" for the purposes of locking out competition, general dumbing down of the OS, poor CLI integration (please just build-in Bash), no multiple desktops, and why sometimes when I drag many large files into a new directory does Win 7 spend ages doing a copy then delete?
By the time you've taken into account the costs of launching this thing into space (and maintaining it) won't regular solar power work out as being more efficient? Alternatively, what about spending the money on developing more efficient solar panels?
Yes, perhaps MS have "fallen flat" in search, social networks, etc. What's really unforgivable, however, are the Vista and Win8 debacles; those are cases where MS screwed up on home turf. The perception that they're having trouble getting their OS right must be tainting their efforts in other spheres. I reckon the XBox is relatively isolated from the Windows aura, as it's almost a brand in its own right (you never hear the term "Microsoft XBox"). Other things, such as search and phones, are harder to dissociate from Windows. Microsoft's real problem right now is that they're not "cool." It's that intangible quality that they need to foster in order to hit the upswing with consumers.
For those who are interested, it's possible to get the feeds from the orbital solar observatories and make your own movies of the Sun in action. A nice piece of software to automate this is jhelioviewer: http://jhelioviewer.org/ You can even purchase a small solar telescope that will allow you to view the sun safely at hydrogen alpha wavelengths (at which a lot of features are visible). A popular beginner scope is the Meade PST: http://www.meade.com/product_pages/coronado/scopes/pst.php (Lunt is another good manufacturer). With that you can see solar flares, prominences, sun spots, etc. Prominences are particularly fun because they change visibly over the time-course of minutes; so you can literally see the Sun watch the sun change before your eyes. Here's a link on what's possible to see visually: http://www.prairieastronomyclub.org/resources/solar-observing/observing-the-sun-in-h-alpha/
I'm not sure I see this 3-D tsunami happening. What most people want to buy are things like food, TVs, cameras, phones, cars, AC units, computers, bathtubs, toiletries, etc. These are what make "a modern life" and none of these things can be printed. 3D printing is great for one-off items (e.g printing a small replacement part at home), trinkets, prototyping and making complicated plastic parts that are hard to machine. However, it will suck for making stuff in bulk because it's slow. Forming parts with molds, for instance, will always be faster and cheaper if you're doing stuff in bulk. If you want to provide for a whole country then you're going to need to be doing it in bulk.
I thought you were a physicist :)
You're right it would depend on environmental factors.
At the moment, cloning works by injecting "healthy" DNA from a donor cell to a recipient cell. So basically, you give the biology a good DNA sample and let it do its stuff. If that DNA is damaged then the reciepient cell will just die. DNA that's been hanging around at room temperture will very quickly begin to degrade beyond the point at which this could work (even though YOU could sequence it and read back lots of information). The only way (that I can see -- biologist but not an expert in cloning) of cloning a person under these circumstances is to sequence the degraded sequence in the tooth, attempt to reassemble and fix mistakes in silico, then synthesise the chromosomes which you then inject into a donor ovum. As far as a I know, the latter two steps aren't ready for prime time for this sort of application.
Yes, but that means that *half the bonds* are broken in 521 years. For many purposes that may not be too bad, but doesn't cloning have substantially tougher demands? Perhaps you can correct me, but I'm not aware of any animals that have been cloned from DNA that's been left hanging around at room temperture for years on end.
Apparently it was a "key part of the defence" http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/22/bradley-manning-woman-chelsea-gender-reassignment
To obtain a complete sequence suitable for cloning you would need a DNA sample that was obtained from living tissue and either processed immediately or suitably frozen in the interim. DNA starts to degrade pretty quickly. That's why nobody is going to clone Lennon or any mammoths any time soon. Regarding the mammoths: yes, they've been fozen but they're discovered as the ice thaws (by which time the damage has been done).
How are the going to enforce real names? Real names are irrelevent, anyway. The way people behave in an on-line community has more to do with the way the community is structured and maintained than whether people use their real names. I'm involved in a few communities. Some are friendly and welcoming. Others, not so much. None enforce real names.
neither Google nor Apple is so unimaginative and desperate to pursue simpletons
:)
Obviously this is just a ploy to increase the number of Apps on their store, to make it look more populated and active than it really is.
it looks like MS wants quantity instead of quality
How's that any different to 95% of the crap on the Apple and Google stores?
I work in a fly lab. We kill thousands of flies each week... by freezing them. I know you were joking, but it's surprising how badly insects handle being frozen.
Saying drive-in theaters are dying is like saying faith in the flat earth is dying.
Off-topic, but interestingly faith in a flat Earth saw a resurgence in the 19th century. It was reaslised in about the 6th and 5th centuries BC that the Earth was spherical. It is a myth that the flat Earth model dominated the middle ages. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_earth Instead, flat Earthers started to appear in the 19th and, freakishly, persist today: http://theflatearthsociety.org/cms/
You really don't have a clue, do you?
I read the release name and thought for a moment they'd realised the error of their ways since 1.4. Sadly no. I will continue to use Clementine.
According to TFA: "It is too early to say if the structural brain differences found in the study are a marker of dyslexia." Why? Because the children in this study are still of pre-school age so they haven't been followed up. What they have shown, it seems, is that a smaller arcuate fasciculus makes you worse at tasks such as producing word sounds.
Planets are not all that bright, actually, by the time you've magnified them. I bought an 18" f/4 a couple of years ago, and I must say I'm really blown away by the planetary views. The extra aperture really brings the image to life because the colours are so much more vivid than they are in a little refractor. If the seeing's not so good I just stop it down to a 6".
TFA is shit. GFP is just a marker that is used to do the real science. What's the real science? Who knows. TFA doesn't say anything comprehensible on the matter. Crappy science reporting if ever I saw it. Why's this even on Slashdot? Scientists have been creating GFP animals for years now.
Some amateurs do grind their own mirrors, but lens grinding is a whole different kettle of fish. Hardly anyone does that. A little Googling will soon get you started with mirror grinding.
Getting through med school will require you memorise a lot of stuff. You need a system of note taking that promotes that. I didn't go to med school, but I did do a related degree. We did a lot of anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, etc. What worked for me was to write notes during the lecture with pen and paper. This is way more flexible and faster than messing around with tablet or laptop. Then, after the lecture, transcribe and make the notes neater and put into a binder for storage. Cross-reference with a textbook when producing the final copy of your notes to fill them out. This process cements the knowledge in your head because you *think* about what you learned. It really helps to make it stick. I found memorising my own notes was easier than memorising a text book.
Zambuto makes very expensive, high end, mirrors. Most beginners would be far better off spending $500 on a complete telescope from http://www.telescope.com/
I'm an amateur astronomer. If you haven't seen the night sky from a really dark location then you owe it to yourself to do so. This map of the US shows you where's dark and where's not: http://www.jshine.net/astronomy/dark_sky/ Basically, anywhere "blue" and darker will be breathtaking. You can go and just look up or bring binoculars and a simple star chart. You don't need fancy equipment to enjoy astronomy, but a dark sky is important. If you want to get into it and buy a telescope then perfectly serviceable ones are now pretty cheap. There's a great forum called cloudynights.com, where you can ask questions and learn more. Basic rule is to buy a telescope from a dedicated astronomical telescope supplier not a department store.