But for every one of you using every feature of Microsoft office, there are 10's of thousands of users who don't even use 10% of the features and are only using MS Office because it's what's installed on their computer and/or what they know from work.
Most people don't even know what the features of MS office are, let alone prefer it because of them. They use it out of sheer inertia.
That's pretty sad coming from a "VP of Innovation and Technology"... if I were IBM I'd can his worthless ass and hire someone a bit more visionary.
I'm sure that within 50 years (maybe 10) there'll be new technology that will blow our minds... you'd have thought that IBM would want to be inventing it, not sitting on the sidelines saying "nah.. it's all already been invented".
I'm more inclined to believe those who see the speed of innovation increasing exponentially, maybe towards something so extreme (e.g. man-computer hybrids) that it can be called a singularity, than believe those who think it's all been done.
Turns out it needs the H.264 CODEC which only comes with QuickTime 7, but I had QuickTime 6..
QuickTime 6 won't download (presumably doesn't support) the CODEC, nor does the QuickTime updater offer to download QuickTime 7. You need to explicity download QuickTime 7 (which comes bundled with iTunes) from Apple, and then the video plays fine.
Using the Quick Time player on Windows XP it says required compressor not available (1st time I tried it also said not available on server)... what do I need?
As someone who remember using Novell Btrieve (B-tree index file library) way back when, the last thing I associate with Novell is quality. This simple library had dozens of new errata every few months.
Nothing can eliminate "survival of the fittest" - that's just a statement of the mechanics.
The definition of "fittest" of course changes as the evolutionary landscape does, and presumably cruder forms of competition for food and mates doesn't currently play as large a part in human "fitness" as it used to, but nonetheless there are segments of the human gene pool that are outbreeding others, and that is the direction we are therefore evolving towards.
There are of course also portions of the global gene pool that mostly breed within themselves, and are therefore liable to evolve in different directions from each other.
No gene is trying to overcome overpopulation (or anything else), and in fact number of descendents is the way we measure successful genes, so a large population is a sign of success not failure (from an evolutionary winners/losers perspective).
Anyway, there are factors that tend to counter overpopulation, such as transmittable diseases (our population is their environment), and a population that is growing faster than it's food supply, so over-population (in any evolutionarily meaningful sense) can only ever be a temporary phenomenon - it's self correcting.
I don't recall reading of such a huge cost difference between the original and scaled-back designs. Are you sure that ~$100B is right? The scaled-down design is "only" expected to cost ~$3B to construct and another ~$3B to operate over it's 10+ year lifetime. Why such a huge difference between the 10m and 6.2m designs?
I think the problem with any type of sky car is the drivers rather than the vehicle. Can you imagine what rush hour would be like? There'd be no minor fender benders, only fatalities (and watch out below). Maybe sometime in the future when the sky cars are able to fly themselves and avoid collisions, but I still doubt it!
Well, the theoretical understanding of plasmas and how to control them has advanced massively since the early days of JET, the materials science has advanced, the designs for issues like Helium "ash" removal are there... I'm not sure what aspect of Fusion reactor design you seem to think are still such a problem?
That's true for this version (ITER), but energy output scales rapidly as a result of size. At this point there don't seem to be any obtacles other than the money each iteration requires and the necessary ironing out of practical problems that these pre-production designs are intended for. The physics, material and design issues seem to have been resolved.
Note that ITER isn't meant as a production model - it was always a test design, but one that takes us very much closer to production. It could however, prior to the budget cut, have delivered net enery output.
Except that ITER (in France) *may* be able to generate a net positive energy output. Due to budget restrictions that's no longer a primary goal, but the design parameters still make it a possibility even if that's now on the edge of it's capabilities due to the cutbacks (it'll still cost ~$3B to build).
Indeed. Back in my heavy drinking (i.e. student) days I used to swear by taking the occasional massive bender. Think of it as a brain reset. Works just like rebooting your PC or degaussing your monitor.
Given that the WikiPedia article describes the purpose of the original Desktop Accessories being to get around the lack of multitasking, it seems that another predecessor are MS-DOS TSRs (terminate-and-stay-resident applets).
I'm not sure what the difference is meant to be between, say, a calculator Widget and a calculator application - I assume Widgets are easier to develop?
It's sad that despite all our scientific knowledge of the world it's still necessary to have a term to identify the minority (atheists) who really get it, and realize that the universe, ourselves included, is just driven by the law(s) of nature.
Do we also need to define ourselfs as afsmists, aghostists, etc?!
There's an interesting article in the current issue of "Atlantic" magazine that gives a plausible explanation, based on modular evolution of the brain, for the widespread belief in dualism and belief in god.
The article doesn't say they had a tailgating strategy, it just mentions the raw fact that during the race they'd been tailgating another entry until choosing to pass them. There's no suggestion (let alone assertion) that they could have passed earlier but chose not to, or deliberately delayed attempting to pass until late in the course.
Tailgating would appear to be a pretty poor strategy anyway - it assumes that the one you're tailgating is sensing the road and safe speed better than you are.
The "strategy" employed, per the article, was to learn from a human driver what weights to give to various sensor inputs, as well as to teach itself how to interpret it's video input by comparing it to the same section of road when it got close enough to scan by lidar.
If one has a varied population differently suited to the prevailing environment, then necessarily the more suited ones will prevail - they will live longer, compete and breed better, leave more offspring. This isn't a theory or even an empirical observation - it's cold logic (a conclusion of "better suited" being defined to mean precisely that!).
If the characteristics of the individuals in a population are hereditory, then it follows from the above (again - just logic - not theory) that each generation will be better suited to the prevailing environment than the previous one.
If these hereditory characteristics are subject to continual variation then this process will continue ad-infinitum, with each generation becoming more suited to the local environment prevailing at the time. If populations exist in differing environments then the the generations of the respective populations will chart different courses as their individual hereditory charactristics are put to the test by the differing local environments. Again, pure logic - no theory involved.
Darwin's genius was both pointing out the above facts (obvious when you think about it, but radical at the time, and anyways seemingly irrelevant given that no such hereditory mechanism was known), and having such faith in this being the mechanism for evolution that he did so at a time when these hereditory charactrics that would drive the whole scheme, and variations to those hereditory characteristics, was just a theory. Thus the theory of evolution, at the time it was conceived was rightly called the Theory of Evolution.
Since Darwin's time we have of course discovered that these theorized hereditory characteristics do indeed exist - encoded in DNA, that they are inherited via the process of sexual reproduction, and that they are continually subject to variation by factors such sexual reproduction. The cold logic of evolution which during Darwin's time required theorized mechanisms to become fact rather than theory, has therefore indeed become fact due to these scientific discoveries. It is not correct to call it a theory anymore since the only theoretical part of it has been proved.
Indeed, not only is evolution now proved to be inevitable in nature, but of course this ability to evolve via dumb variation and "survival of the fittest" is even being used today (genetic algorithms) to design things like airoplane wings whose complexity is beyond the ability of any human to design "intelligently"!
Some people get hung up on speciation - accepting that animals may vary due to evolution, but thinking that creation of new species is somehow a different matter altogether. In fact, speciation is just a trivial specific case of evolution, albeit one with dramatic (over time) results. The scientific definition of species is that two animals are different species if they can't interbreed. DNA changes that change anything other than ability to interbreed (e.g. size, color of eyes, type of metabolism) do not make a new species, but if a particular DNA combination makes the offspring unable to interbreed with the species of the parents then it is by definition a new species, and becuase of this inability to interbreed is necessarily going to diverge from it's predecessor species. Of course in practice speciation involves other factors such as social & geographic ones ones - interbreeding being avoided due to reasons other than lack of viability, and we find whole populations "speciating" (drifing apart to the point of inability to interbreed) rather than this occuring on an indivual basis.
Biology is in it's infancy, and in some sense only really started a few decades ago with the discovery of DNA (which effectively turned Darwin'w theory into an established fact).
If you look at what we are cabable today, since that discovery, we are able to feed raw chemicals into a machine and spit out a semi-living entity (it's being done for the Polio virus) at the other end. Our knowledge of genetics is sufficient to genetically modify things to suit our purpose (many of which are alredy on your grocery shelf), as well as to proove tenets of evolution such as breeding a stork with teeth (it's been done). We'll soon be able to fabricate from scratch DNA of not only existing or modified but truly designer species (it's being worked on).
So you're statement of "we don't know how to do it" it ill-informed at best.
Anticipating your reply of "well, OK, but we're intelligent!", don't forget that research is also progressing into the precurors of DNA, origins of celllar structures, etc. It's not as if we've discovered DNA and hit a brick wall of "how the heck did THAT come about?!!". Note also that even dumb-as-a-rock nature can manipulate DNA and create new species via mutation, and survival-of-the-fittest "selection".. specices at all points of divergence are all around us (forest/plains elephants pre-diverge, lions/tigers diverged but not yet past the incapable-of-interbreeding point of no-return (aka speciation), humans and apes recently diverged species, etc, etc, etc).
I saw Asimo when he was "on tour" in his previous version, and he's very impressive - a bit freaky really! We're so used to seeing special effects in movies, that it's easy to write off a robot walking around as no big deal, but to see Asimo walking up a flight of stairs was very impressive, knowing that this is the real deal - he does that totally autonomously.
The latest videos show lots of enhancements - running in circles and turing on the spot, plus now capable of doing other things such as carrying a tray of coffee and placing it down on a table, or pushing a trolly around an obstacle course... he's beginning to become actually *useful*. He could easily deliver drugs in a hospital they way "box on wheels" robots are currently doing.
What I'd like to see would be a DARPA grand challenge (drive across the desert) entry where they used a stock car, and Asimo walked up to it, got in, and drove off. Maybe with a babe in the passenger seat. It seems that the technology to do this is now available - just load rhe requisite software into Asimo, and give him wireless access to any additional data sources (GPS, Sonar) that the vehicle is equipped with.
Yahoo and Google choose their web hosting services as they please - T3, dial-up or whatever. They pay for whatever bandwidth they want.
Now, I, as a potential accessor of both sites also pay for a certain capped bandwidth to the internet as a whole.
The only meaning that makes sense to what BellSouth is suggesting is that if they are MY ISP then they will deliberately selectively throttle my access to sites I am trying to access unless the target site has paid them what amounts to "protection money"?!!
I wonder why BellSouth think anyone would choose to use them as an ISP is that is the type of access they are planning to provide?!!
Re:Yes twice as deadly... but... perspective
on
A Flu Pandemic?
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· Score: 2, Informative
They are saying a possible death rate of 5% (assuming it drops from the current 50%), so that'd be 320M dead, not 80M.
But in fact if you read the article they're suggesting that only 25% of the population would become ill, so it's only 5% of that. In the US that's be 5% x 25% x 250M = 3.1M dead.
To get a handle on that number, consider the 100 largest cities in the US all EACH having not one but ten 9-11 type disasters.. 100 * 10 * 3000 = 3M.
Slashdot Mirror
But for every one of you using every feature of Microsoft office, there are 10's of thousands of users who don't even use 10% of the features and are only using MS Office because it's what's installed on their computer and/or what they know from work.
Most people don't even know what the features of MS office are, let alone prefer it because of them. They use it out of sheer inertia.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't your colleagues' colleagues by definition also your colleagues?
By that definition, isn't everyone Kevin Bacon?
That's pretty sad coming from a "VP of Innovation and Technology"... if I were IBM I'd can his worthless ass and hire someone a bit more visionary.
I'm sure that within 50 years (maybe 10) there'll be new technology that will blow our minds... you'd have thought that IBM would want to be inventing it, not sitting on the sidelines saying "nah.. it's all already been invented".
I'm more inclined to believe those who see the speed of innovation increasing exponentially, maybe towards something so extreme (e.g. man-computer hybrids) that it can be called a singularity, than believe those who think it's all been done.
Nah...
Turns out it needs the H.264 CODEC which only comes with QuickTime 7, but I had QuickTime 6..
QuickTime 6 won't download (presumably doesn't support) the CODEC, nor does the QuickTime updater offer to download QuickTime 7. You need to explicity download QuickTime 7 (which comes bundled with iTunes) from Apple, and then the video plays fine.
Using the Quick Time player on Windows XP it says required compressor not available (1st time I tried it also said not available on server)... what do I need?
As someone who remember using Novell Btrieve (B-tree index file library) way back when, the last thing I associate with Novell is quality. This simple library had dozens of new errata every few months.
Nothing can eliminate "survival of the fittest" - that's just a statement of the mechanics.
The definition of "fittest" of course changes as the evolutionary landscape does, and presumably cruder forms of competition for food and mates doesn't currently play as large a part in human "fitness" as it used to, but nonetheless there are segments of the human gene pool that are outbreeding others, and that is the direction we are therefore evolving towards.
There are of course also portions of the global gene pool that mostly breed within themselves, and are therefore liable to evolve in different directions from each other.
No gene is trying to overcome overpopulation (or anything else), and in fact number of descendents is the way we measure successful genes, so a large population is a sign of success not failure (from an evolutionary winners/losers perspective).
Anyway, there are factors that tend to counter overpopulation, such as transmittable diseases (our population is their environment), and a population that is growing faster than it's food supply, so over-population (in any evolutionarily meaningful sense) can only ever be a temporary phenomenon - it's self correcting.
Thanks for the important correction!
I don't recall reading of such a huge cost difference between the original and scaled-back designs. Are you sure that ~$100B is right? The scaled-down design is "only" expected to cost ~$3B to construct and another ~$3B to operate over it's 10+ year lifetime. Why such a huge difference between the 10m and 6.2m designs?
I think the problem with any type of sky car is the drivers rather than the vehicle. Can you imagine what rush hour would be like? There'd be no minor fender benders, only fatalities (and watch out below). Maybe sometime in the future when the sky cars are able to fly themselves and avoid collisions, but I still doubt it!
Well, the theoretical understanding of plasmas and how to control them has advanced massively since the early days of JET, the materials science has advanced, the designs for issues like Helium "ash" removal are there... I'm not sure what aspect of Fusion reactor design you seem to think are still such a problem?
The Moller sky-car, FWIW, works.
That's true for this version (ITER), but energy output scales rapidly as a result of size. At this point there don't seem to be any obtacles other than the money each iteration requires and the necessary ironing out of practical problems that these pre-production designs are intended for. The physics, material and design issues seem to have been resolved.
Note that ITER isn't meant as a production model - it was always a test design, but one that takes us very much closer to production. It could however, prior to the budget cut, have delivered net enery output.
Except that ITER (in France) *may* be able to generate a net positive energy output. Due to budget restrictions that's no longer a primary goal, but the design parameters still make it a possibility even if that's now on the edge of it's capabilities due to the cutbacks (it'll still cost ~$3B to build).
http://www.iter.org/index.htm
I've evaluated this claim in light of the mind being the product of a neural machine, and have determined it to be a load of bollocks.
Maybe not, but you should be able to sing like Milli Vanilli!
Indeed. Back in my heavy drinking (i.e. student) days I used to swear by taking the occasional massive bender. Think of it as a brain reset. Works just like rebooting your PC or degaussing your monitor.
How about a raptor weighing 200lb+, standing 6.5ft tall with a wingspan of 7-8 meters (~25ft)?
n s
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentavis_magnifice
Not too much you could do to stop one of those swooping down and sucking on your brain!
Given that the WikiPedia article describes the purpose of the original Desktop Accessories being to get around the lack of multitasking, it seems that another predecessor are MS-DOS TSRs (terminate-and-stay-resident applets).
I'm not sure what the difference is meant to be between, say, a calculator Widget and a calculator application - I assume Widgets are easier to develop?
It's sad that despite all our scientific knowledge of the world it's still necessary to have a term to identify the minority (atheists) who really get it, and realize that the universe, ourselves included, is just driven by the law(s) of nature.
Do we also need to define ourselfs as afsmists, aghostists, etc?!
There's an interesting article in the current issue of "Atlantic" magazine that gives a plausible explanation, based on modular evolution of the brain, for the widespread belief in dualism and belief in god.
Not ever, for that matter.
The article doesn't say they had a tailgating strategy, it just mentions the raw fact that during the race they'd been tailgating another entry until choosing to pass them. There's no suggestion (let alone assertion) that they could have passed earlier but chose not to, or deliberately delayed attempting to pass until late in the course.
Tailgating would appear to be a pretty poor strategy anyway - it assumes that the one you're tailgating is sensing the road and safe speed better than you are.
The "strategy" employed, per the article, was to learn from a human driver what weights to give to various sensor inputs, as well as to teach itself how to interpret it's video input by comparing it to the same section of road when it got close enough to scan by lidar.
I have to disagree.
If one has a varied population differently suited to the prevailing environment, then necessarily the more suited ones will prevail - they will live longer, compete and breed better, leave more offspring. This isn't a theory or even an empirical observation - it's cold logic (a conclusion of "better suited" being defined to mean precisely that!).
If the characteristics of the individuals in a population are hereditory, then it follows from the above (again - just logic - not theory) that each generation will be better suited to the prevailing environment than the previous one.
If these hereditory characteristics are subject to continual variation then this process will continue ad-infinitum, with each generation becoming more suited to the local environment prevailing at the time. If populations exist in differing environments then the the generations of the respective populations will chart different courses as their individual hereditory charactristics are put to the test by the differing local environments. Again, pure logic - no theory involved.
Darwin's genius was both pointing out the above facts (obvious when you think about it, but radical at the time, and anyways seemingly irrelevant given that no such hereditory mechanism was known), and having such faith in this being the mechanism for evolution that he did so at a time when these hereditory charactrics that would drive the whole scheme, and variations to those hereditory characteristics, was just a theory. Thus the theory of evolution, at the time it was conceived was rightly called the Theory of Evolution.
Since Darwin's time we have of course discovered that these theorized hereditory characteristics do indeed exist - encoded in DNA, that they are inherited via the process of sexual reproduction, and that they are continually subject to variation by factors such sexual reproduction. The cold logic of evolution which during Darwin's time required theorized mechanisms to become fact rather than theory, has therefore indeed become fact due to these scientific discoveries. It is not correct to call it a theory anymore since the only theoretical part of it has been proved.
Indeed, not only is evolution now proved to be inevitable in nature, but of course this ability to evolve via dumb variation and "survival of the fittest" is even being used today (genetic algorithms) to design things like airoplane wings whose complexity is beyond the ability of any human to design "intelligently"!
Some people get hung up on speciation - accepting that animals may vary due to evolution, but thinking that creation of new species is somehow a different matter altogether. In fact, speciation is just a trivial specific case of evolution, albeit one with dramatic (over time) results. The scientific definition of species is that two animals are different species if they can't interbreed. DNA changes that change anything other than ability to interbreed (e.g. size, color of eyes, type of metabolism) do not make a new species, but if a particular DNA combination makes the offspring unable to interbreed with the species of the parents then it is by definition a new species, and becuase of this inability to interbreed is necessarily going to diverge from it's predecessor species. Of course in practice speciation involves other factors such as social & geographic ones ones - interbreeding being avoided due to reasons other than lack of viability, and we find whole populations "speciating" (drifing apart to the point of inability to interbreed) rather than this occuring on an indivual basis.
Huh?
Biology is in it's infancy, and in some sense only really started a few decades ago with the discovery of DNA (which effectively turned Darwin'w theory into an established fact).
If you look at what we are cabable today, since that discovery, we are able to feed raw chemicals into a machine and spit out a semi-living entity (it's being done for the Polio virus) at the other end. Our knowledge of genetics is sufficient to genetically modify things to suit our purpose (many of which are alredy on your grocery shelf), as well as to proove tenets of evolution such as breeding a stork with teeth (it's been done). We'll soon be able to fabricate from scratch DNA of not only existing or modified but truly designer species (it's being worked on).
So you're statement of "we don't know how to do it" it ill-informed at best.
Anticipating your reply of "well, OK, but we're intelligent!", don't forget that research is also progressing into the precurors of DNA, origins of celllar structures, etc. It's not as if we've discovered DNA and hit a brick wall of "how the heck did THAT come about?!!". Note also that even dumb-as-a-rock nature can manipulate DNA and create new species via mutation, and survival-of-the-fittest "selection".. specices at all points of divergence are all around us (forest/plains elephants pre-diverge, lions/tigers diverged but not yet past the incapable-of-interbreeding point of no-return (aka speciation), humans and apes recently diverged species, etc, etc, etc).
I saw Asimo when he was "on tour" in his previous version, and he's very impressive - a bit freaky really! We're so used to seeing special effects in movies, that it's easy to write off a robot walking around as no big deal, but to see Asimo walking up a flight of stairs was very impressive, knowing that this is the real deal - he does that totally autonomously.
The latest videos show lots of enhancements - running in circles and turing on the spot, plus now capable of doing other things such as carrying a tray of coffee and placing it down on a table, or pushing a trolly around an obstacle course... he's beginning to become actually *useful*. He could easily deliver drugs in a hospital they way "box on wheels" robots are currently doing.
What I'd like to see would be a DARPA grand challenge (drive across the desert) entry where they used a stock car, and Asimo walked up to it, got in, and drove off. Maybe with a babe in the passenger seat. It seems that the technology to do this is now available - just load rhe requisite software into Asimo, and give him wireless access to any additional data sources (GPS, Sonar) that the vehicle is equipped with.
Let me get this right...
Yahoo and Google choose their web hosting services as they please - T3, dial-up or whatever. They pay for whatever bandwidth they want.
Now, I, as a potential accessor of both sites also pay for a certain capped bandwidth to the internet as a whole.
The only meaning that makes sense to what BellSouth is suggesting is that if they are MY ISP then they will deliberately selectively throttle my access to sites I am trying to access unless the target site has paid them what amounts to "protection money"?!!
I wonder why BellSouth think anyone would choose to use them as an ISP is that is the type of access they are planning to provide?!!
They are saying a possible death rate of 5% (assuming it drops from the current 50%), so that'd be 320M dead, not 80M.
But in fact if you read the article they're suggesting that only 25% of the population would become ill, so it's only 5% of that. In the US that's be 5% x 25% x 250M = 3.1M dead.
To get a handle on that number, consider the 100 largest cities in the US all EACH having not one but ten 9-11 type disasters.. 100 * 10 * 3000 = 3M.