Scientists are introducing a brain-consuming maggot into Texas that turns fire ants into zombies.
After their brains are consumed, the fire ants wander aimlessly for two weeks, then die.
Flies emerge from the dead ants, hungry for more ants.
There are just so many bad science fiction plotlines here...and in all of them, we end up mining underground sugar caves for Nazgulesque maggots astride their fearsome zombie fire ants. In a few, we end up being tortured by the fire ants' Neo, who hunts the Evil Humans who brought the maggots among them...
The damage turned out to be a significant player in Columbia's loss, as it happened that the part of the shield that was damaged was extremely critical to the proper functioning of that area.
Launch damage to the heat tiles was a "significant player" in the loss of Columbia in the sense that John Wilkes Booth was a "significant player" in Abraham Lincoln's death.
The police in various districts have done CL stings repeatedly. Seems like here in Portland it's in the news every 3 months or so...cops rent a hotel room and answer ads, girls are busted. Or vice versa. It apparently hasn't shut this down. Police have been busting streetwalkers for years and yet you still see them on the corners of major cities...
CL switched to requiring phone verification for this category of ads. Then they started charging $5 to list. And now they're dropping it altogether.
I would think this was all business-driven - an evaluation that the hassle costs more than the revenue - but CL has no revenue. In fact, I don't think CL has any actual business model....it's just free ads for whoever wants them. You're probably right that it's the lawsuit threats that are driving them out of this.
Reading that headline, "Spirit Stuck In Soft Soil On Mars," I thought I'd been transported back to a 1930s Northwest Smith story about a haunted being trapped in the Red Planet. Alas...no.
In particular, adblock was intended to be a mechanism to 'restore balance' in online advertising. Not to necessarily block ALL ads, but to give users the power to block excessively annoying ads, so that webmasters would tone back ads to an acceptable level (for fear of users blocking them entirely).
I just looked over the adblock home page and could find no such intentions. It appears adblock was intended to, well, block ads.
The problem with free (gratis) is that it doesn't pay the bills for the developer. I'm not talking about being greedy, but accessories like kids, spouse and house come in handy in winter:-)
Please elaborate on how kids come in handy in winter. Are you a cannibal?
Because the PHBs like a single vendor. Nothing confuses them more than saying, "We're getting the OS from Microsoft, the database from Oracle, the language from Sun and the hardware from Dell." The less companies in this list, the better, regardless of the merits of technology.
This is not true of every Fortune 500 shop I've ever worked in. Most PHBs never met a platform they didn't like. Hell, at my current gig, we have mainframe, AS/400, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Linux (2 distros!), Windows, Oracle, DB/2, Sybase, MySQL, JBoss, Websphere, Cisco, Foundry, etc.
Lots of big shops are heterogenous to the point of pathology.
This is not the government saying this, it's a "Colorado medical advocate". It's one guy's opinion on what might happen. And, gosh, guess what industry he's in...
I'm assuming that not even a governmental department can be stupid enough not to have copies of the backups in a fire safe, off-site location.
Wouldn't surprise me in the least, but not because it's the government. The problem is that every organization of any size has under-the-radar skunkworks IT projects. There's always some guy in a field office who doesn't like central IT (often with good reason), doesn't like bureacracy, has a slow link to the home office, etc. Sometimes he's an amateur computer buff as well.
Next think you know, he's got a couple Gentoo boxes running under his desk with a MySQL + PHP app he's cooked up himself that his whole team is relying on. It works great (for them). Years go by and suddenly someone in central IT learns of it. They try to take it away and standardize it, but he goes to the business side and says "our customers will complain, they rely on it" and business tells IT to knock it off.
Usually about then, one of three things happen:
The disk on the recycled Packard Bell desktop that's running the database eats itself and he loses all the data.
Someone in auditing gets a clue and raises holy hell about HIPPA, SOX, etc.
There's a break-in because he has lousy security.
I've seen the above scenario in at least three large private firms. In this case, we're talking 10,000,000 records. That could live on someone's laptop or desktop. Central IT might not even know it exists. I could easily see someone office saying "we just got a grant for $5 million to study trends in prescriptions to look for abuse patterns, can you send over a disc with a data extract"? Hell, that might have happened ten years ago and it's been sitting on some share ever since, long forgotten.
I work at Sun on x64 products (both Intel and AMD) and this just isn't true. The x64 products are doing well, but our sales are still predominantly SPARC.
More importantly, the profits came overwhelmingly from SPARC. Selling high-end proprietary kit to big businesses is always going to be more profitable than selling volume x86 white boxes to the masses a per-dollar basis.
The long-term strategy has always been for Sun to place more emphasis on x64 products, but not to the exclusion of SPARC systems. And so far, x64 hasn't even achieved parity with SPARC, or anything like it. Why? Not something I'm going to comment on in a public forum.
And even though Sparc has been an important processor architecture it's likely that it's going the same way as Digital's Alpha - a slow death. The next processor that's going down the drain is probably the Power architecture, even though it's backed by IBM.
That's a pretty sweeping statement.
Right now, if you want a commodity chip that does most things very well, you buy something x86 based. If you have a lot of flexibility and want very low power consumption, you might consider Sun's CoolThreads chips. If you want very high performance and have a lot of money, you buy the fastest chip...which happens to be IBM's Power.
The CoolThreads stuff is neat, but never really took off at the volume Sun was hoping. To use them, you had to be very multithreaded and while that's great for webservers, there are already plenty of cheap webserving platforms. Yes, Sun fanboys, I know - keep your shorts on. It's a nice product. But in a market that is dominated by Linux + Apache, just "it takes less electricity" apparently wasn't enough when you consider that running your Ruby on Rails or whatever on Solaris is more work than running it on Linux.
That's SPARC. As for POWER...there will always be people who need the biggest, fastest, baddest processor. A lot less people need them than they used to - x86 commodity keeps getting faster. But there will always be the top X% of the market that needs speed. That's why IBM sells POWER. And hey, while we're catering to them, we can also use it in our run-of-the-mill servers (AIX, AS/400, Mainframe, etc.)
I think POWER has a lot more staying power than SPARC.
In most states, the largest state government constituency is the public unions. They are paid with your tax money...and they lobby government intensively...to be be paid more, and since it's not a profit/loss scenario and the taxpayers' purse is endless...
Unions are a great thing. Unions for public employees should be banned, because it's nothing more than a license to increase taxes endlessly to get more perqs.
This may have something to do with recent attacks on Adobe's Reader. People are switching to alternatives that can read PDFs and don't leave them vulnerable to such attacks. So Adobe may be moving from an application domination strategy to a file format domination strategy. Such a strategy would allow and even encourage all applications to support PDF as fully as possible. Another reason may be seeing as how Open Office has has this feature for a while, the legal argument you vaguely refer to may no longer be valid(if it ever was).
These are all silly speculations.
This change was obviously in the works long before the recent spate of Adobe Reader problems. Service Packs of this size take months to put together and test.
PDF was recognized as an ISO standard in July 2008. I think that had a lot more to do with it.
Hence, Microsoft has no problems implementing it, with or without Adobe's consent. Adobe was not a factor in this decision.
Yes, you need to think different here. Forget menus and toolbars. The ribbon is a great thing when you understand that they are somehow like toolbars, but they are dynamic as well. When you realize how the thing work, then you cannot live without it.
You really aren't saying anything here. "It's great when you understand it, and then you can't live without it". Why?
I will tell you one thing that is not great about Office 2007 - lack of keyboard shortcuts. There's all sorts of things I used to do in Office 1997-2003 without having to constantly taking my hands off the keyboard to use the mouse. Incidentally, that's why people hated dynamic menus in the first place - it broke all the finger macros. Previously, there was a way to disable them...alas, with the ribbon, you're stuck with it.
Office 2007 is slower the use. End of story as far as I'm concerned. But gosh, maybe I just don't "realize what a great invention" the ribbon is.
Gmail...Android...these really aren't great names anyway. You'd think a company the size of Google could come up with better names.
Deciding to name a product "Gmail" or "Android" is like deciding to name your company "Alliance Siding," "Northwest Construction," or "Best Plumbing" and then trying to get it trademarked in all states.
Hi! I also base all my scientific, medical, and public policy opinions on movies and other fiction.
FYI, lithium has been widely proscribed for depression for 25+ years. It's hardly surprising that a population that consumes more of it than normal would have a lower rate of suicide.
But you were saying about movies and other fiction? One can't make a humorous Strangelove reference in the same paragraph as reporting news?
Slashdot Mirror
There are just so many bad science fiction plotlines here...and in all of them, we end up mining underground sugar caves for Nazgulesque maggots astride their fearsome zombie fire ants. In a few, we end up being tortured by the fire ants' Neo, who hunts the Evil Humans who brought the maggots among them...
The damage turned out to be a significant player in Columbia's loss, as it happened that the part of the shield that was damaged was extremely critical to the proper functioning of that area.
Launch damage to the heat tiles was a "significant player" in the loss of Columbia in the sense that John Wilkes Booth was a "significant player" in Abraham Lincoln's death.
In other words, caused it.
The police in various districts have done CL stings repeatedly. Seems like here in Portland it's in the news every 3 months or so...cops rent a hotel room and answer ads, girls are busted. Or vice versa. It apparently hasn't shut this down. Police have been busting streetwalkers for years and yet you still see them on the corners of major cities...
CL switched to requiring phone verification for this category of ads. Then they started charging $5 to list. And now they're dropping it altogether.
I would think this was all business-driven - an evaluation that the hassle costs more than the revenue - but CL has no revenue. In fact, I don't think CL has any actual business model....it's just free ads for whoever wants them. You're probably right that it's the lawsuit threats that are driving them out of this.
Reading that headline, "Spirit Stuck In Soft Soil On Mars," I thought I'd been transported back to a 1930s Northwest Smith story about a haunted being trapped in the Red Planet. Alas...no.
This is a good start, but it would be good to see details of their methodology.
No, it would be good to see details of their method. Methodology is the study of methods. It is not a synonym for method.
In particular, adblock was intended to be a mechanism to 'restore balance' in online advertising. Not to necessarily block ALL ads, but to give users the power to block excessively annoying ads, so that webmasters would tone back ads to an acceptable level (for fear of users blocking them entirely).
I just looked over the adblock home page and could find no such intentions. It appears adblock was intended to, well, block ads.
The problem with free (gratis) is that it doesn't pay the bills for the developer. I'm not talking about being greedy, but accessories like kids, spouse and house come in handy in winter :-)
Please elaborate on how kids come in handy in winter. Are you a cannibal?
Because the PHBs like a single vendor. Nothing confuses them more than saying, "We're getting the OS from Microsoft, the database from Oracle, the language from Sun and the hardware from Dell." The less companies in this list, the better, regardless of the merits of technology.
This is not true of every Fortune 500 shop I've ever worked in. Most PHBs never met a platform they didn't like. Hell, at my current gig, we have mainframe, AS/400, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Linux (2 distros!), Windows, Oracle, DB/2, Sybase, MySQL, JBoss, Websphere, Cisco, Foundry, etc.
Lots of big shops are heterogenous to the point of pathology.
This is not the government saying this, it's a "Colorado medical advocate". It's one guy's opinion on what might happen. And, gosh, guess what industry he's in...
I'm assuming that not even a governmental department can be stupid enough not to have copies of the backups in a fire safe, off-site location.
Wouldn't surprise me in the least, but not because it's the government. The problem is that every organization of any size has under-the-radar skunkworks IT projects. There's always some guy in a field office who doesn't like central IT (often with good reason), doesn't like bureacracy, has a slow link to the home office, etc. Sometimes he's an amateur computer buff as well.
Next think you know, he's got a couple Gentoo boxes running under his desk with a MySQL + PHP app he's cooked up himself that his whole team is relying on. It works great (for them). Years go by and suddenly someone in central IT learns of it. They try to take it away and standardize it, but he goes to the business side and says "our customers will complain, they rely on it" and business tells IT to knock it off.
Usually about then, one of three things happen:
I've seen the above scenario in at least three large private firms. In this case, we're talking 10,000,000 records. That could live on someone's laptop or desktop. Central IT might not even know it exists. I could easily see someone office saying "we just got a grant for $5 million to study trends in prescriptions to look for abuse patterns, can you send over a disc with a data extract"? Hell, that might have happened ten years ago and it's been sitting on some share ever since, long forgotten.
Did you read the note?
No, every link from the WikiLeaks article seems Slashdotted ;-)
Maybe they figure it's safe to protest again, and won't be waterboarded now that Bush is out of office?
Yeaaaaaaaah....'cause gosh, there weren't whole cityfulls of yahoos protesting the Iraq War.
Seriously...the newspapers were full of headlines about "biggest protests since Viet Nam" and such.
They are also the market leader for maximizing synergy in cross-platform, dynamic object-oriented open source mindshare solutions.
You lost. Get over it.
And not my a small amount either. The word is landslide.
I wasn't aware that 52.9% constituted a landslide.
I work at Sun on x64 products (both Intel and AMD) and this just isn't true. The x64 products are doing well, but our sales are still predominantly SPARC.
More importantly, the profits came overwhelmingly from SPARC. Selling high-end proprietary kit to big businesses is always going to be more profitable than selling volume x86 white boxes to the masses a per-dollar basis.
The long-term strategy has always been for Sun to place more emphasis on x64 products, but not to the exclusion of SPARC systems. And so far, x64 hasn't even achieved parity with SPARC, or anything like it. Why? Not something I'm going to comment on in a public forum.
Post anonymously.
And even though Sparc has been an important processor architecture it's likely that it's going the same way as Digital's Alpha - a slow death. The next processor that's going down the drain is probably the Power architecture, even though it's backed by IBM.
That's a pretty sweeping statement.
Right now, if you want a commodity chip that does most things very well, you buy something x86 based. If you have a lot of flexibility and want very low power consumption, you might consider Sun's CoolThreads chips. If you want very high performance and have a lot of money, you buy the fastest chip...which happens to be IBM's Power.
The CoolThreads stuff is neat, but never really took off at the volume Sun was hoping. To use them, you had to be very multithreaded and while that's great for webservers, there are already plenty of cheap webserving platforms. Yes, Sun fanboys, I know - keep your shorts on. It's a nice product. But in a market that is dominated by Linux + Apache, just "it takes less electricity" apparently wasn't enough when you consider that running your Ruby on Rails or whatever on Solaris is more work than running it on Linux.
That's SPARC. As for POWER...there will always be people who need the biggest, fastest, baddest processor. A lot less people need them than they used to - x86 commodity keeps getting faster. But there will always be the top X% of the market that needs speed. That's why IBM sells POWER. And hey, while we're catering to them, we can also use it in our run-of-the-mill servers (AIX, AS/400, Mainframe, etc.)
I think POWER has a lot more staying power than SPARC.
Come to Oregon - the lobbying by public employee unions here is well-documented and furious.
In most states, the largest state government constituency is the public unions. They are paid with your tax money...and they lobby government intensively...to be be paid more, and since it's not a profit/loss scenario and the taxpayers' purse is endless...
Unions are a great thing. Unions for public employees should be banned, because it's nothing more than a license to increase taxes endlessly to get more perqs.
Let me guess, you're Russian?
Oh really? Who told you that?
Well, how about Greenpeace?
This may have something to do with recent attacks on Adobe's Reader. People are switching to alternatives that can read PDFs and don't leave them vulnerable to such attacks. So Adobe may be moving from an application domination strategy to a file format domination strategy. Such a strategy would allow and even encourage all applications to support PDF as fully as possible. Another reason may be seeing as how Open Office has has this feature for a while, the legal argument you vaguely refer to may no longer be valid(if it ever was).
These are all silly speculations.
Yes, you need to think different here. Forget menus and toolbars. The ribbon is a great thing when you understand that they are somehow like toolbars, but they are dynamic as well. When you realize how the thing work, then you cannot live without it.
You really aren't saying anything here. "It's great when you understand it, and then you can't live without it". Why?
I will tell you one thing that is not great about Office 2007 - lack of keyboard shortcuts. There's all sorts of things I used to do in Office 1997-2003 without having to constantly taking my hands off the keyboard to use the mouse. Incidentally, that's why people hated dynamic menus in the first place - it broke all the finger macros. Previously, there was a way to disable them...alas, with the ribbon, you're stuck with it.
Office 2007 is slower the use. End of story as far as I'm concerned. But gosh, maybe I just don't "realize what a great invention" the ribbon is.
Gmail...Android...these really aren't great names anyway. You'd think a company the size of Google could come up with better names.
Deciding to name a product "Gmail" or "Android" is like deciding to name your company "Alliance Siding," "Northwest Construction," or "Best Plumbing" and then trying to get it trademarked in all states.
Hi! I also base all my scientific, medical, and public policy opinions on movies and other fiction.
FYI, lithium has been widely proscribed for depression for 25+ years. It's hardly surprising that a population that consumes more of it than normal would have a lower rate of suicide.
But you were saying about movies and other fiction? One can't make a humorous Strangelove reference in the same paragraph as reporting news?
Sun had to sell and surprisingly it had to do with Notes.
Yuck, yuck yuck.
He means notes as in debt, folks. It's not a bad article, but he could have just said "debt" instead of making us think he meant Lotus Notes.