The new estimate, of between 20,000 to 25,000 genomes is marginally less than the 27,000 for the Arabidopsis, a flowering plant in the mustard family. Earlier estimates had placed the number of genomes at around 44,000 - or even as high as 100,000.
AFAIK, there's a lot more research going into the human genome than into the Arabidopsis one. So one would naturally presume that the number of human genes would be known better.
But if the estimate for the number of human genes is subject to so much variation, how can you be so sure of that for the Arabidopsis?
Is this a meaningful comparison?
(Not to mention that the entire premise seems to be flawed..)
Yes, the next GCC release will be 4.0.0 (previously known as 3.5.0).
It's currently in "stage 3" which is basically the GCC equivalent of 'feature freeze', where only documentation and bugfixes can be added, but not features.
The actual release is expected to be in early next year.
Really, before trying to make their commercials more effective, perhaps they should find out if their commercials are effective.
I'm not saying marketing doesn't work.. Obviously people need to know about you and your product if you're going to sell anything.
But, from what I understand.. there's a lot of theories at the bottom of today's marketing that don't make sense to me.
For instance, marketing generally tries to target young people. Not because they are consumers, but on the theory that consumption patterns like brand loyalty are set at a young age, and kept through life.
Now.. how can they possibly know that? If they're studying middle-aged people now, then they're learning that the advertising of the 70's was effective. Then. And quite a lot has changed in both advertising and how people relate to it since then.
So really.. it seems to me to be a good question whether neuroscience will help much, because the critical attitude of science seems to go straight out the window once something becomes a 'marketing theory'.
Now that this seems to have been quite thoroughly debunked...
Will MacWorld and the other sites which reported on CherryOS do the Right Thing and pull the story?
Or perhaps even better, do a new story on PearPC instead and give the guys who do deserve credit some.
Re:Fixing fundamental design mistakes?
on
Linus Interviewed
·
· Score: 1
the problem is not the user running rm -rf on their home dir. The problem is an untrusted application (one the user didn't write) doing the same.
Perhaps this is a problem. But it's not one which is solvable. Software can be malicious, true, but it can also be buggy, or the user can have misunderstood how to use it, or any other number of scenarios exist here which can end up unintentionally screwing up user data.
It just can't be done. The operating system can't read minds and figure out the users intentions with every command he or she runs.
It isn't fair to say we can trust any arbitary binary we download from the net.
I didn't say that either. But I do say that it's not the business of the OS to determine whether a program should be trusted or not. That must be the choice of the user. However, I think it's a good idea for the software to *inform* the user when they run a program which may not be trustworthy.
I don't believe the issue is moot because root is required to install the software. I think that is a safeguard in itself. It's a warning flag: When you do something as root, you have to be completely sure of what you're doing.
In my experience, most Windows users default to running as Administrator. By comparison, most Unix users never login as root. In fact, a number of Linux distros don't even allow you to login as root by default. It makes the installation of new software a non-casual event.
It's a pretty important factor. If windows users needed to type an administrator password every time they installed software, there would be a lot less adware and spyware installed everywhere.
Finnish swedes is an ethnic group in its own right. "Finlandssvenskar" in their own words, don't really consider themselves Swedes. (And why should they? The first swedish settlements in Finland date back over 800 years or so ago..)
The finnish-swedish language isn't pure swedish either, the pronunciation is different, and there are a few colloquialisms and they still use some words considered archaic in swedish.
So, they consider themselves to be Finnish-swedish. It's its own identity, but still undeniably part of the Finnish identity.
Of course, the Finnish identity is itself very young (from a european standpoint). Finland was just a part of Sweden for most of the last millenium. Finland fell into Russian hands in the early 19th century, and the romantic movement of the same in combination with Russian oppression gave rise to finnish nationalism and the invention of the 'finnish identity'. (It's noteworthy that key figures in that movement, like Runeberg and Sibelius, were swedish-finns.)
So really.. it's hard to say "Finnish, not Swedish", given that the Swedish history and influence is a part of being Finnish.
Re:Fixing fundamental design mistakes?
on
Linus Interviewed
·
· Score: 1
by now that the really important stuff is under $HOME
No. Perhaps for the user, but not from the system perspective. A user can clobber his $HOME simply by running an uncareful rm -rf. If you give people the power to modify data, you have to expect people to also occasionaly screw up their own data.. you have to draw the line somewhere. And that 'somewhere' is at compromising other users data, and the system itself.
IBM traditionally refuses to hire anyone without American citizenship. This rule was relaxed to allow the hiring of permanent residents. Nonetheless, as a matter of corporate policy, IBM managers generally do not hire people with an H-1B visa.
Where did you ever get that idea from?
IBM has 320,000 employees worldwide, out of which about 150,000 are in the USA.
I think the main philosophy here is that IBM is not in the software business. It's not in the hardware business either. IBM is in the solutions business. That is, the hardware, OS, software, support and the whole enchilada that goes with it.
(Sure, IBM had its years with the PC, trying to dominate the retail market. But they failed at that, despite still making a pretty darn good laptop, they're not the force they once were.)
Out of this context of selling solutions.. it doesn't matter to them if the software is open source or not. Open source can even serve to increase their profit margins, saving them development costs.
IBM bought Transarc and open-sourced their AFS implementation (now OpenAFS). Was that because it had no commercial value? I don't think so.. Transarc had made some money off it.
Rather, it was because it was a useful part of the solutions IBM offered. And they could make more money off it as such than selling it retail. (which I believe they still do, but it's hardly why they bought it)
Rexx, on the other hand.. Well, that's certainly a case of something they couldn't make money off to begin with.
The biggest thing Windows has going for it is the massive number of existing applications. But a different processor architecture would require porting. But unless the platform catches on, noone is going to port.
So why would anyone switch? This is pretty much the fate of the old Windows-Alpha port. Very few apps got ported (PuTTY is one of the few I know). Besides, most people were using Alphas as server machines, for which the software they needed was already available on the competing Unixes.
So.. no.. I don't think Windows could ever haul itself off the x86 platform. Too many legacy apps which are x86-specific.
Am I the only one who thinks this might just be one of SCO's biggest PR gunblasts to their own foot in quite a while?
I'm not sure if they could've given Groklaw more legitimacy if they tried.
Who are they aiming at? Certainly they must understand that they have no chance whatsoever at building up the kind of community and following Groklaw has?
So who, then? Journalists? Which journalist is going to quote 'pro-SCO.net' as a source? And if they do, in the future, it's hardly likely they'd do it without quoting Groklaw.. now that they're officially 'the other side'.
(The question of who, in such an exchange, is going to come out sounding more trustworthy is left as an exercise for the reader.)
Now, I have to wonder, how much would it cost to pay Microsoft to GPL their Office product file formats?
What do you mean? Release GPL code for reading/writing these file formats, or do you mean release the specifications for these file formats (in which case the GPL would be an unsuitable license since it's not source code).
As for the latter.. that might become available for free.. If the EU antitrust guys do their job properly.
There is a definition of Open Source on which most within Open Source agree.
Item six:
No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
So it's not open source under a widely accepted definition. And no, university research is not neccesarily exempt, either.
It's a very narrow exemption which is only applicable to people doing research (or teaching) which is precisely within the bounds of the patent. But if you are merely using the patented invention to do research, you need a license.
They'll stick to that until their business dries up because someone else is using GMO trees to make better paper for less.
I don't argue with the fact that GMO trees has the potential of making better paper for less.
But just because you can do something better for less does not automatically mean it'll take over the market. And that's where the environmental concerns come in.
You can make better paper for less right now using chlorine-bleaching. Yet they've largely abandoned that. Because of environmental concerns putting market pressure on them.
Do not expect Canada or the Nordic countries to be shortly covered with GM pines; commercial use of GM trees in Europe is at least ten years off. But it is on its way.
How is it on its way? Because some guys are researching it?
Now the I can't speak for the entire world, but I live in Sweden, I know a lot of people in the paper industry, and I've personally spoken with people belonging to senior management of several scandinavian paper companies.
And they all said the same thing: They currently have no interest whatsoever in GMO trees. They're not researching for it, they don't want it. The are interested in biotech, but only to the extent that it can give them insight into how to do traditional forestry better.
Why trust them? Well, the reasoning behind this is that this industry has been harshly critizied by environmentalists for a long time. Today, they've pretty much 'cleaned up their act' (in scandinavia), aiming for FSC acreditation and so on.
They are not about to throw all that work away.
That said.. I'm personally positive to biotech, and I think that we might very well see GMO trees out there. But not in ten years time. Not in the nordic countries anyway.
Good point, actually. It points out a kind of inherent problem..
Since Polaroid had a patent, they didn't need to constantly try to innovate with completely new things and stay at the front of the market. There are a lot of examples of single-invention companies going that way.
But: Polaroid did have its day.. Had they not had any patents at all, you can bet their instant-camera business would've been ripped off from the start, and we'd just have seen the established camera companies get richer.
It wasn't an outsourcing. It was a sale. A privatization.
And how is this relevant to Dirac? It's a different department. That was the Technology Division, whereas Dirac is being developed by the BBC Research and Development department.
I don't think it's quite fair to assume that there is a connection here. The Beeb has around 30,000 employees.. it's one of the worlds largest broadcasters. (if not the largest)
Actually.. To respond to my own post with a little elaboration:
You could be possible to build a micro-lab which tests for something by mixing a sample fluid with different reagents and combining that with some 'fluid-logic' in order to determine the result.
Besides research, I could imagine good practical use for this kind of technology in forensics.
Obviously, a small, cheap and easy-to-use (maybe even disposable) test which could be done directly at a crime scene could be very important in catching criminals.
Re:Sounds great but...
on
Fluid Logic Chips
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The width of these channels is 100 micrometers.
The flows here are created by the capillary forces which dominate at that size.
Slashdot Mirror
The new estimate, of between 20,000 to 25,000 genomes is marginally less than the 27,000 for the Arabidopsis, a flowering plant in the mustard family. Earlier estimates had placed the number of genomes at around 44,000 - or even as high as 100,000.
AFAIK, there's a lot more research going into the human genome than into the Arabidopsis one. So one would naturally presume that the number of human genes would be known better.
But if the estimate for the number of human genes is subject to so much variation, how can you be so sure of that for the Arabidopsis?
Is this a meaningful comparison?
(Not to mention that the entire premise seems to be flawed..)
Yes, the next GCC release will be 4.0.0 (previously known as 3.5.0).
It's currently in "stage 3" which is basically the GCC equivalent of 'feature freeze', where only documentation and bugfixes can be added, but not features.
The actual release is expected to be in early next year.
Really, before trying to make their commercials more effective, perhaps they should find out if their commercials are effective.
I'm not saying marketing doesn't work.. Obviously people need to know about you and your product if you're going to sell anything.
But, from what I understand.. there's a lot of theories at the bottom of today's marketing that don't make sense to me.
For instance, marketing generally tries to target young people. Not because they are consumers, but on the theory that consumption patterns like brand loyalty are set at a young age, and kept through life.
Now.. how can they possibly know that? If they're studying middle-aged people now, then they're learning that the advertising of the 70's was effective. Then. And quite a lot has changed in both advertising and how people relate to it since then.
So really.. it seems to me to be a good question whether neuroscience will help much, because the critical attitude of science seems to go straight out the window once something becomes a 'marketing theory'.
Now that this seems to have been quite thoroughly debunked...
Will MacWorld and the other sites which reported on CherryOS do the Right Thing and pull the story?
Or perhaps even better, do a new story on PearPC instead and give the guys who do deserve credit some.
the problem is not the user running rm -rf on their home dir. The problem is an untrusted application (one the user didn't write) doing the same.
Perhaps this is a problem. But it's not one which is solvable. Software can be malicious, true, but it can also be buggy, or the user can have misunderstood how to use it, or any other number of scenarios exist here which can end up unintentionally screwing up user data.
It just can't be done. The operating system can't read minds and figure out the users intentions with every command he or she runs.
It isn't fair to say we can trust any arbitary binary we download from the net.
I didn't say that either. But I do say that it's not the business of the OS to determine whether a program should be trusted or not. That must be the choice of the user. However, I think it's a good idea for the software to *inform* the user when they run a program which may not be trustworthy.
I don't believe the issue is moot because root is required to install the software. I think that is a safeguard in itself. It's a warning flag: When you do something as root, you have to be completely sure of what you're doing.
In my experience, most Windows users default to running as Administrator. By comparison, most Unix users never login as root. In fact, a number of Linux distros don't even allow you to login as root by default. It makes the installation of new software a non-casual event.
It's a pretty important factor. If windows users needed to type an administrator password every time they installed software, there would be a lot less adware and spyware installed everywhere.
Linus isn't Swedish in that sense, though.
Finnish swedes is an ethnic group in its own right. "Finlandssvenskar" in their own words, don't really consider themselves Swedes.
(And why should they? The first swedish settlements in Finland date back over 800 years or so ago..)
The finnish-swedish language isn't pure swedish either, the pronunciation is different, and there are a few colloquialisms and they still use some words considered archaic in swedish.
So, they consider themselves to be Finnish-swedish. It's its own identity, but still undeniably part of the Finnish identity.
Of course, the Finnish identity is itself very young (from a european standpoint). Finland was just a part of Sweden for most of the last millenium. Finland fell into Russian hands in the early 19th century, and the romantic movement of the same in combination with Russian oppression gave rise to finnish nationalism and the invention of the 'finnish identity'.
(It's noteworthy that key figures in that movement, like Runeberg and Sibelius, were swedish-finns.)
So really.. it's hard to say "Finnish, not Swedish", given that the Swedish history and influence is a part of being Finnish.
by now that the really important stuff is under $HOME
No. Perhaps for the user, but not from the system perspective. A user can clobber his $HOME simply by running an uncareful rm -rf.
If you give people the power to modify data, you have to expect people to also occasionaly screw up their own data.. you have to draw the line somewhere. And that 'somewhere' is at compromising other users data, and the system itself.
IBM traditionally refuses to hire anyone without American citizenship. This rule was relaxed to allow the hiring of permanent residents. Nonetheless, as a matter of corporate policy, IBM managers generally do not hire people with an H-1B visa.
Where did you ever get that idea from?
IBM has 320,000 employees worldwide, out of which about 150,000 are in the USA.
Most IBM employees aren't even in the USA.
I disagree.
I think the main philosophy here is that IBM is not in the software business. It's not in the hardware business either. IBM is in the solutions business. That is, the hardware, OS, software, support and the whole enchilada that goes with it.
(Sure, IBM had its years with the PC, trying to dominate the retail market. But they failed at that, despite still making a pretty darn good laptop, they're not the force they once were.)
Out of this context of selling solutions.. it doesn't matter to them if the software is open source or not. Open source can even serve to increase their profit margins, saving them development costs.
IBM bought Transarc and open-sourced their AFS implementation (now OpenAFS).
Was that because it had no commercial value? I don't think so.. Transarc had made some money off it.
Rather, it was because it was a useful part of the solutions IBM offered. And they could make more money off it as such than selling it retail. (which I believe they still do, but it's hardly why they bought it)
Rexx, on the other hand.. Well, that's certainly a case of something they couldn't make money off to begin with.
You probably don't.
The biggest thing Windows has going for it is the massive number of existing applications. But a different processor architecture would require porting. But unless the platform catches on, noone is going to port.
So why would anyone switch? This is pretty much the fate of the old Windows-Alpha port. Very few apps got ported (PuTTY is one of the few I know). Besides, most people were using Alphas as server machines, for which the software they needed was already available on the competing Unixes.
So.. no.. I don't think Windows could ever haul itself off the x86 platform. Too many legacy apps which are x86-specific.
True, it doesn't happen naturally very often, but it does happen.
Why would a CO2 leak be more likely? I'd think it to be far less likely, because we can choose the geological conditions where we store the CO2.
Oil won't escape from containment and (supposedly) cause catastrophic global warming...
I take it you haven't seen a burning oil field then?
How is this diffrent then toxic waste from nuclear plants being stored under ground....
Tweaking your analogy:
How is this different from all the oil stored underground that we're pumping up and burning?
Am I the only one who thinks this might just be one of SCO's biggest PR gunblasts to their own foot in quite a while?
I'm not sure if they could've given Groklaw more legitimacy if they tried.
Who are they aiming at? Certainly they must understand that they have no chance whatsoever at building up the kind of community and following Groklaw has?
So who, then? Journalists? Which journalist is going to quote 'pro-SCO.net' as a source? And if they do, in the future, it's hardly likely they'd do it without quoting Groklaw.. now that they're officially 'the other side'.
(The question of who, in such an exchange, is going to come out sounding more trustworthy is left as an exercise for the reader.)
Now, I have to wonder, how much would it cost to pay Microsoft to GPL their Office product file formats?
What do you mean? Release GPL code for reading/writing these file formats, or do you mean release the specifications for these file formats (in which case the GPL would be an unsuitable license since it's not source code).
As for the latter.. that might become available for free.. If the EU antitrust guys do their job properly.
Item six:
So it's not open source under a widely accepted definition. And no, university research is not neccesarily exempt, either.
It's a very narrow exemption which is only applicable to people doing research (or teaching) which is precisely within the bounds of the patent. But if you are merely using the patented invention to do research, you need a license.
How can you have an 'open source' implementation of something which is patented?
If it's patented, you'd need a license to develop the program further. You'd need a license just to run it.
How is that 'open source'?
They'll stick to that until their business dries up because someone else is using GMO trees to make better paper for less.
I don't argue with the fact that GMO trees has the potential of making better paper for less.
But just because you can do something better for less does not automatically mean it'll take over the market. And that's where the environmental concerns come in.
You can make better paper for less right now using chlorine-bleaching. Yet they've largely abandoned that. Because of environmental concerns putting market pressure on them.
Do not expect Canada or the Nordic countries to be shortly covered with GM pines; commercial use of GM trees in Europe is at least ten years off. But it is on its way.
How is it on its way? Because some guys are researching it?
Now the I can't speak for the entire world, but I live in Sweden, I know a lot of people in the paper industry, and I've personally spoken with people belonging to senior management of several scandinavian paper companies.
And they all said the same thing: They currently have no interest whatsoever in GMO trees. They're not researching for it, they don't want it. The are interested in biotech, but only to the extent that it can give them insight into how to do traditional forestry better.
Why trust them? Well, the reasoning behind this is that this industry has been harshly critizied by environmentalists for a long time. Today, they've pretty much 'cleaned up their act' (in scandinavia), aiming for FSC acreditation and so on.
They are not about to throw all that work away.
That said.. I'm personally positive to biotech, and I think that we might very well see GMO trees out there. But not in ten years time. Not in the nordic countries anyway.
Good point, actually. It points out a kind of inherent problem..
Since Polaroid had a patent, they didn't need to constantly try to innovate with completely new things and stay at the front of the market. There are a lot of examples of single-invention companies going that way.
But: Polaroid did have its day.. Had they not had any patents at all, you can bet their instant-camera business would've been ripped off from the start, and we'd just have seen the established camera companies get richer.
So there are lessons both ways.
Do you read what you reference? It says that that project was canned.
And what, exactly, does this now-deprecated document have to do with the Dirac codec?
1) Nobody has been laid off, moron. They are just employed by Siemens now instead of the BBC.
2) None of those people were working on Dirac. It's a completely different department.
It wasn't an outsourcing. It was a sale. A privatization.
And how is this relevant to Dirac? It's a different department.
That was the Technology Division, whereas Dirac is being developed by the BBC Research and Development department.
I don't think it's quite fair to assume that there is a connection here. The Beeb has around 30,000 employees.. it's one of the worlds largest broadcasters. (if not the largest)
Actually.. To respond to my own post with a little elaboration:
You could be possible to build a micro-lab which tests for something by mixing a sample fluid with different reagents and combining that with some 'fluid-logic' in order to determine the result.
Besides research, I could imagine good practical use for this kind of technology in forensics.
Obviously, a small, cheap and easy-to-use (maybe even disposable) test which could be done directly at a crime scene could be very important in catching criminals.
The width of these channels is 100 micrometers.
The flows here are created by the capillary forces which dominate at that size.
No gravity required.