Hybridization. Under certain circumstances, viruses can "cross breed", causing the appearance of a previously-unknown strain. It's possible, but extremely unlikely to have this occur with a synthetic vaccine like this Ebola vaccine.
It's much more likely with a "live virus" vaccine like the old Smallpox vaccine, or a "partially killed" vaccine like they used to use for Polio.
"Had they not attacked us, we wouldn't have gotten involved, The Manhattan Project might not have happened and nobody in Nagasaki and Hiroshima would have had to have been horrifically killed."
Uh, no. The Manhattan project was started in reaction to the rumors of Germany working on atomic weapons. Even when Germany was defeated, and the rumors were proven false, the project went on.
Japan was the first available target for the bomb, and that's why it was used there. If the bomb had been perfected before the end of the war in Europe, it would have been used there. If it hadn't been ready by the end of WW2, it would have been used right away in the next war.
Wow, there's a scary thought. What if the U.S. hadn't used the bomb until the outbreak of the Korean war, after the stockpile had grown to thousands of bombs?
The advantage of burning them to CD is that then you're making a backup at the same time. And it's moderately more convenient to be able to do it all within iTunes.
Actually, excise taxes are extra sneaky, in that they're built into the selling price of the product, rather than added on at the end.
Everybody knows what their local sales tax rate is, but what percentage of consumers know what the federal or state taxes are on gas, liquor, or cigarettes?
A while back, when I was hacking a new option into the Objective-C compiler (for 2.9.5), I ran into an interesting duality in GCC. Some things are really easy to change, others considerably less so.
The back-end of GCC is pretty cleanly designed, so it's not too hard to change the object code output for a particular processor, or even to add support for a new processor (as long as it's a 32-bit, RISC processor with lots of general purpose registers).
On the other hand, the front end is a mess. Heaven help you if you want to change the parser behavior. Even something as basic as the processing of command-line options is needlessly complicated. The GCC driver program and the C frontend use entirely different code for processing the command line.
Changing the output of the compiler was actually easier than getting the options passed from GCC into the Obj-C frontend so I could actually turn the new behavior on and off.
I even found out that there were several options in our version of GCC that didn't do ANYTHING, since they never actually got passed down to the compiler from the GCC driver.
Someday, I may get motivated to sit down and make a real effort to fix this mess. I wonder if anyone would care?
I bought one of these to replace my wife's ailing M100. I was pretty surprised to find out that it doesn't have a backlight. What the hell were they thinking?
True, it doesn't include "backlight" anywhere on the list of features on the side of the box, but since (almost) every other Palm OS organizer ever made has a backlight, it's not like I would have expected it to be optional. Who would buy a digital watch or a cellphone without a backlight?
The Apple System Restore tool can erase a disk and copy a configuration onto it from a compressed disk image. This is what Apple uses for setting up machines on the production line.
"Sorry, but I've seen too many people learn how to kill off their virus scanners because they think it's slowing their system down to a crawl."
Hey - it definitely happens. Yesterday, my system was running at 100% CPU utilization for no apparent reason, so I fired up Process Viewer, and I see that Norton AutoProtect is using 89% of the CPU. I have no idea what it was doing, since there weren't any windows showing any Norton-related activity.
The best part is that I had AutoProtect *turned off* in Norton's preferences. What a great piece of software...
It's just not possible to make a (small) set of MD5 hashes that represent all the "useful ways to structure a C statement". Even with extensive pre-processing, there's just way too many different ways to express the same algorithm.
Because of the nature of MD5 as a cryptographic hash, the value of the hash gives you almost no useful information at all about the structure of the code.
For example, given 3 variables (a,b, and c) and just the basic arithmetic operations of +, -, * and/, you could generate (literally) an infinite number of arithmetic expressions. Not all of those would be "useful", but there's no way to even enumerate the possible "reasonable" arithmetical expressions, much less calculate an MD5 sum for any combination of three of them.
Look, it's really simple. The G4 is loud simply because they didn't put in the engineering effort to make it quiet. The G5 on the other hand, is really really quiet. I was just using one today, so I know whereof I speak.
No, they're not. They have good and bad points just like any other lighting technology.
> They are extremely minimalist in raw resources (a > transistor and a plastic shell that will outlast 5 or 6 > FLUORESCENTS),
And they require an enormous fabrication facility, using many toxic chemicals, to produce. The amount of toxic waste that is produced by a single semiconductor fab is pretty amazing.
> they beat even fluorescents in energy consumption by a > factor of 4 or more,
Doubtful. I'd like to see some figures for that (for white LEDs specifically). Don't forget to include the efficiency of the power supply.
> solid state so droppage or shock damage are not a factor.
Fair enough. You certainly can damage an LED with physical shock, but they are more durable than glass bulbs. On the other hand, they are much more susceptible to electrical damage than either filament or fluorescent bulbs.
> Color is easy to fix Not really. While LEDs are getting better, they don't have nearly the color rendering capability of either fluorescent or incandescent lamps.
> LED's are Diodes just like the ones the computer industry > has been perfecting for decades. The price will fall. A lot.
Actually, LEDs are made on an entirely different process, using entirely different materials than what's used for computer chips. Most LEDs are actually terrible diodes, having a very slow switching speed, for instance.
Essentially all of the cost-reduction in computer chips comes from increased circuit density. There's no economic advantage to making smaller LEDs - the real challenge is making larger LEDs, to allow a greater light output per device.
> Sidenote: All transistors and diodes produces photons as > a byproduct
No, they don't. You might want to look up how an LED works. Or maybe look up the definition of "band gap".
> Your computer is (depending on its transistor > density, since the wavelength of the photons are > dependent on the size of the transistor) currently > pumping out microwave and radio energy.
RF emission from computers is a consequence of the high frequency switching that occurs in the logic circuits. The size of the transistors has nothing to do with it.
If a fluorescent bulb is 80% efficient, then that means 20% of the energy is wasted as heat. A bulb that was 95% efficient would waste only 5% of the energy, and would be 4 times as efficient.
It's just math, you know. Or maybe it's just semantics...
LEDs last a long long time, but they do get dimmer over time. Normally the "lifetime" figure is based on a 50% loss in brightness.
Also, white LEDs depend on the use of phosphors to change blue light into yellow/red for warmer color. Unfortunately, the phosphors wear out faster than the LEDs, which causes the light to shift in color over time.
The Powerbooks with the defective batteries were the 5300 series. The laptops were recalled before they went into volume production. No customers were harmed by these laptops. The details of this event are easily available online. Google for "Powerbook 5300 fire"
Did you feel nauseous, become unable to think clearly, or see spots? If they were that bad, you ought to get the opinion of a doctor, cause migraines are nothing to mess around with.
If they weren't, you ought to be more careful with your adjectives. I hate it when people call every headache they get a "migraine". They're a fundamentally different kind of pain than what most people think of as "headaches".
On a (hopefully more useful) note, I get both migraine headaches and sinus-pressure headaches. The latter are much more closely related to the weather. If you have allergy or sinus problems, a decongestant tablet will probably do wonders for those headaches, if you take it before they get too bad.
"So how easy are they to integrate into a large network these days?"
Mostly, you just plug in the Ethernet and turn them on. I use both Macs and Windows machines every day at work, and they really do interoperate fine. SMB works fine for sharing files between the PC's and Macs, and they all support DHCP.
The only thing we haven't bothered to figure out yet is how to get our OS X Server to act as a primary domain controller for our NT network. It would be nice to share the usernames & profiles back and forth.
That's certainly your choice to make. It's interesting that none of the other applications you use have problems. That's the nature of cool hacks like that, though...
You're running Metallifizer, which attempts to change the appearance of running applications by loading code into them. I'd hardly consider that an OmniWeb problem. On a normally-functioning OS X system, OmniWeb renders fine.
Having actually seen what happens when you try this my advice is - don't. Most alkaline disposable batteries can be "recharged" to some extent, but they'll leak pretty soon thereafter. Some kinds of batteries, especially those that use Lithium, can be very dangerous to recharge.
If you want to recharge alkaline batteries, buy the ones that are built for it.
Slashdot Mirror
"So? Where's the problem in that?"
Hybridization. Under certain circumstances, viruses can "cross breed", causing the appearance of a previously-unknown strain. It's possible, but extremely unlikely to have this occur with a synthetic vaccine like this Ebola vaccine.
It's much more likely with a "live virus" vaccine like the old Smallpox vaccine, or a "partially killed" vaccine like they used to use for Polio.
-Mark
"Had they not attacked us, we wouldn't have gotten involved, The Manhattan Project might not have happened and nobody in Nagasaki and Hiroshima would have had to have been horrifically killed."
Uh, no. The Manhattan project was started in reaction to the rumors of Germany working on atomic weapons. Even when Germany was defeated, and the rumors were proven false, the project went on.
Japan was the first available target for the bomb, and that's why it was used there. If the bomb had been perfected before the end of the war in Europe, it would have been used there. If it hadn't been ready by the end of WW2, it would have been used right away in the next war.
Wow, there's a scary thought. What if the U.S. hadn't used the bomb until the outbreak of the Korean war, after the stockpile had grown to thousands of bombs?
-Mark
Maybe that's true for you. On the other hand, I've been known to change my plans for the night because there was a full or new moon coming up.
And when you get a rare occurrence like a new moon *on* friday the 13th, well...
-Mark
The advantage of burning them to CD is that then you're making a backup at the same time. And it's moderately more convenient to be able to do it all within iTunes.
-Mark
"Besides, re-coding without the DRM violates the ITMS Terms of Service, a legal agreement between the user and Apple"
How so? I just scanned the linked document, and I don't see anything that would indicate any problems with burning and re-encoding a track.
-Mark
Well, you could either:
1. Move your computer along with your other things (the authorization goes with the computer).
or...
2. Burn all your songs onto CDs, which removes the copy-protection entirely. Then, you can rip them back into iTunes.
-Mark
Actually, excise taxes are extra sneaky, in that they're built into the selling price of the product, rather than added on at the end.
Everybody knows what their local sales tax rate is, but what percentage of consumers know what the federal or state taxes are on gas, liquor, or cigarettes?
A while back, when I was hacking a new option into the Objective-C compiler (for 2.9.5), I ran into an interesting duality in GCC. Some things are really easy to change, others considerably less so.
The back-end of GCC is pretty cleanly designed, so it's not too hard to change the object code output for a particular processor, or even to add support for a new processor (as long as it's a 32-bit, RISC processor with lots of general purpose registers).
On the other hand, the front end is a mess. Heaven help you if you want to change the parser behavior. Even something as basic as the processing of command-line options is needlessly complicated. The GCC driver program and the C frontend use entirely different code for processing the command line.
Changing the output of the compiler was actually easier than getting the options passed from GCC into the Obj-C frontend so I could actually turn the new behavior on and off.
I even found out that there were several options in our version of GCC that didn't do ANYTHING, since they never actually got passed down to the compiler from the GCC driver.
Someday, I may get motivated to sit down and make a real effort to fix this mess. I wonder if anyone would care?
-Mark
I bought one of these to replace my wife's ailing M100. I was pretty surprised to find out that it doesn't have a backlight. What the hell were they thinking?
True, it doesn't include "backlight" anywhere on the list of features on the side of the box, but since (almost) every other Palm OS organizer ever made has a backlight, it's not like I would have expected it to be optional. Who would buy a digital watch or a cellphone without a backlight?
-Mark
The Apple System Restore tool can erase a disk and copy a configuration onto it from a compressed disk image. This is what Apple uses for setting up machines on the production line.
"man ASR' ion Terminal.app to get started.
-Mark
"Sorry, but I've seen too many people learn how to kill off their virus scanners because they think it's slowing their system down to a crawl."
Hey - it definitely happens. Yesterday, my system was running at 100% CPU utilization for no apparent reason, so I fired up Process Viewer, and I see that Norton AutoProtect is using 89% of the CPU. I have no idea what it was doing, since there weren't any windows showing any Norton-related activity.
The best part is that I had AutoProtect *turned off* in Norton's preferences. What a great piece of software...
-Mark
It's just not possible to make a (small) set of MD5 hashes that represent all the "useful ways to structure a C statement". Even with extensive pre-processing, there's just way too many different ways to express the same algorithm.
/, you could generate (literally) an infinite number of arithmetic expressions. Not all of those would be "useful", but there's no way to even enumerate the possible "reasonable" arithmetical expressions, much less calculate an MD5 sum for any combination of three of them.
Because of the nature of MD5 as a cryptographic hash, the value of the hash gives you almost no useful information at all about the structure of the code.
For example, given 3 variables (a,b, and c) and just the basic arithmetic operations of +, -, * and
-Mark
Look, it's really simple. The G4 is loud simply because they didn't put in the engineering effort to make it quiet. The G5 on the other hand, is really really quiet. I was just using one today, so I know whereof I speak.
-Mark
Windows 2000 Pro supports striping (RAID 0), but not mirroring. If you want mirroring, you need either 2K Server or Advanced Server, I forget which.
> LED's are the Grail.
No, they're not. They have good and bad points just like any other lighting technology.
> They are extremely minimalist in raw resources (a
> transistor and a plastic shell that will outlast 5 or 6
> FLUORESCENTS),
And they require an enormous fabrication facility, using many toxic chemicals, to produce. The amount of toxic waste that is produced by a single semiconductor fab is pretty amazing.
> they beat even fluorescents in energy consumption by a
> factor of 4 or more,
Doubtful. I'd like to see some figures for that (for white LEDs specifically). Don't forget to include the efficiency of the power supply.
> solid state so droppage or shock damage are not a factor.
Fair enough. You certainly can damage an LED with physical shock, but they are more durable than glass bulbs. On the other hand, they are much more susceptible to electrical damage than either filament or fluorescent bulbs.
> Color is easy to fix
Not really. While LEDs are getting better, they don't have nearly the color rendering capability of either fluorescent or incandescent lamps.
> LED's are Diodes just like the ones the computer industry
> has been perfecting for decades. The price will fall. A lot.
Actually, LEDs are made on an entirely different process, using entirely different materials than what's used for computer chips. Most LEDs are actually terrible diodes, having a very slow switching speed, for instance.
Essentially all of the cost-reduction in computer chips comes from increased circuit density. There's no economic advantage to making smaller LEDs - the real challenge is making larger LEDs, to allow a greater light output per device.
> Sidenote: All transistors and diodes produces photons as
> a byproduct
No, they don't. You might want to look up how an LED works. Or maybe look up the definition of "band gap".
> Your computer is (depending on its transistor
> density, since the wavelength of the photons are
> dependent on the size of the transistor) currently
> pumping out microwave and radio energy.
RF emission from computers is a consequence of the high frequency switching that occurs in the logic circuits. The size of the transistors has nothing to do with it.
If a fluorescent bulb is 80% efficient, then that means 20% of the energy is wasted as heat. A bulb that was 95% efficient would waste only 5% of the energy, and would be 4 times as efficient.
It's just math, you know. Or maybe it's just semantics...
LEDs last a long long time, but they do get dimmer over time. Normally the "lifetime" figure is based on a 50% loss in brightness.
Also, white LEDs depend on the use of phosphors to change blue light into yellow/red for warmer color. Unfortunately, the phosphors wear out faster than the LEDs, which causes the light to shift in color over time.
-Mark
The Powerbooks with the defective batteries were the 5300 series. The laptops were recalled before they went into volume production. No customers were harmed by these laptops. The details of this event are easily available online. Google for "Powerbook 5300 fire"
-Mark
Did you feel nauseous, become unable to think clearly, or see spots? If they were that bad, you ought to get the opinion of a doctor, cause migraines are nothing to mess around with.
If they weren't, you ought to be more careful with your adjectives. I hate it when people call every headache they get a "migraine". They're a fundamentally different kind of pain than what most people think of as "headaches".
On a (hopefully more useful) note, I get both migraine headaches and sinus-pressure headaches. The latter are much more closely related to the weather. If you have allergy or sinus problems, a decongestant tablet will probably do wonders for those headaches, if you take it before they get too bad.
-Mark
"So how easy are they to integrate into a large network these days?"
Mostly, you just plug in the Ethernet and turn them on. I use both Macs and Windows machines every day at work, and they really do interoperate fine. SMB works fine for sharing files between the PC's and Macs, and they all support DHCP.
The only thing we haven't bothered to figure out yet is how to get our OS X Server to act as a primary domain controller for our NT network. It would be nice to share the usernames & profiles back and forth.
-Mark
That's certainly your choice to make. It's interesting that none of the other applications you use have problems. That's the nature of cool hacks like that, though...
-Mark
You're running Metallifizer, which attempts to change the appearance of running applications by loading code into them. I'd hardly consider that an OmniWeb problem. On a normally-functioning OS X system, OmniWeb renders fine.
"ROMs do unfortunately suffer from bitrot"
Actually, real ROMs (mask-programmed ROMs) don't suffer any degradation over time. 100 years from now, they'll work just as well as today.
EPROMs are a different matter. Unfortunately, many arcade machines use EPROMS. Only the very high-volume games were made with mask ROMs.
On the other hand, most all cartridge-based home system games were made with mask ROMs. They'll probably never degrade.
-Mark
What do the mice do when it's one elephant and one weasel dancing?
-Mark
Having actually seen what happens when you try this my advice is - don't. Most alkaline disposable batteries can be "recharged" to some extent, but they'll leak pretty soon thereafter. Some kinds of batteries, especially those that use Lithium, can be very dangerous to recharge.
If you want to recharge alkaline batteries, buy the ones that are built for it.