While the article has some good points to make, it suffers from a common flaw in arguments on this subject: the assumption that something that's too complex to model today is too complex to model, period.
It's certainly true that susceptibility to some diseases, along with other inherited traits, is determined by the interaction of tens or even hundreds of genes, and today we don't have the knowledge or the ability to factor all of them together and come up with a more precise picture of what's likely to happen to an individual. However, I think it's naive to assume that we'll never have the knowledge and ability to do so.
One obvious limitation we see today is the amount of computing power required to do the required multidimensional analysis and figure out which genes interact with which others to produce a particular effect. But all indications are that Moore's Law will be in effect for a while longer, and even if it peters out, the problem seems parallelizable enough that someone may eventually build a system or a network to churn through all the raw data. The United Devices cancer-cure project is a step in that direction.
Combine a few orders of magnitude of additional computing power with a vastly larger set of raw data and highly-refined techniques for reading and manipulating DNA -- none of which seems out of reach -- along with a public perception that biology is destiny, and something like Gattaca becomes quite plausible. Or if not that extreme, then certainly health plans rejecting applicants due to DNA and genetic screening for certain high-risk jobs ("We only want people who can get by on four hours of sleep").
What's more likely beyond our ability to ever comprehend is nurture, not nature, and ultimately that'll limit how precisely we'll be able to mold ourselves. A hundred years from now you'll probably be able to screen or engineer your kid's genes to give her a 25-point IQ boost or whatever amount of intelligence ends up being genetically determined. But what combination of factors causes a child in one strict, oppressive household to become a high-school dropout, while a child in another becomes a focused overachieving genius? If you want to raise the latter, what help does science offer? There may be no way to even measure the subtleties that nudge a child one way or the other, let alone use those measurements to provide any meaningful guidance to prospective parents.
We can, and IMO should, try to figure out everything that can be figured out about how our bodies tick. We can, and in some cases should, use that knowledge to improve the species. In the end I think we'll find it impossible to reduce ourselves to simple, predictable automatons, and that's just fine with me. Without the ability to surprise ourselves every once in a while, life in our custom-tailored bodies would get pretty dull.
It may not happen in the next 50 years, but plausibly in the next 100 we'll be able to mine asteroids for rare metals. What happens to the gold standard when there are billions of tons of it literally floating around for the taking?
No raw material is a good basis for a lasting money system. There's too much of everything in the universe and eventually we'll figure out how to get at it and/or manufacture it. Money is an abstraction for (though frequently not a fair measure of) the value of human activity anyway, so I have no problem with acknowledging that it's abstract and keeping it that way.
"My job is the perfect excuse for watching action films, soaps, quiz programmes -- where the language is busy right now," said chief editor John Simpson.
Disgraceful, adding your private family catchphrase to the OED.
Or is this just your average case of an earlier work's influence on a new release?
Hardly the first time Disney has poached earlier works for their animated films. What irks me is that at the same time they're making millions retelling other people's stories (and here I'm thinking more of Aladdin and Snow White and other renditions of classic stories) they're doing their damndest to prevent anyone else from doing the same with their classic stories.
So? You use a VCR and a TiVo. Dump the shows you want to archive to tapes (I use S-VHS) and delete the ones you only want to watch once. The fact that the hard disk has limited capacity is irrelevant unless you decide to leave town for a few weeks, in which case cheap videotapes wouldn't have solved your problem anyway.
A mere 10X speedup won't make Clippy any less annoying.
I don't know, anything that helps me dismiss the damn thing a couple milliseconds faster is forward progress as far as I'm concerned...
Re:To TiVo or Not to TiVo -- That is the question
on
Capture MPEG From TiVo
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· Score: 1
If you don't want a monthly fee, you can pay up front for a lifetime subscription. That's essentially what ReplayTV does; the lifetime fee is included in the price of the unit (they don't give you the option of paying later). Just think of it as the TiVo being $200ish more expensive than the ads say, and work out whether or not it's worth that amount of money to you.
At least one of the complaints this guy has is in fact due to an improvement in the new software; the one-touch record now includes as much of the beginning of the show as exists in its rewind buffer. No program guide equals no way for the unit to know when the current show started.
Now you could maybe argue that TiVo's engineers should have accounted for that case and fallen back to the old behavior so as to not break their legacy non-subscriber users. But you know, as someone who wants his TiVo service to keep running as long as possible, I can't work up all that much enthusiasm for the idea of TiVo spending engineering and QA resources supporting customers who're costing them money (they were losing money on every unit sold for a while, maybe still are, and making it back in subscription fees).
Then again, the idea of using a TiVo without the program guide is strange to me to begin with, so clearly I just don't get it. The guide is one of the nicest things about the unit; I have stopped knowing or caring exactly when most of the shows I watch are downloaded to its disk, and network schedule shuffling doesn't mess me up unless it's so last-minute that the listing service doesn't get notified. If you want to manually set your record timers, a VCR is cheaper.
Frankly, I consider the fact that the unit works at all without the service to be an unexpected bonus; the box was clearly designed and intended to be used with the service, and doing otherwise, it seems to me, is just asking for this kind of thing to happen over time.
Most of the things I've done to quiet my PC have been covered in other messages here (big fans at reduced voltage, quiet hard disk, etc.) One other thing I've done is to cover the inside surfaces of my case with a noise-damping material called Dynamat. It's available at car parts stores and is usually used to dampen engine and road noise. It looks more or less like a sheet of 1/8"-thick rubber with adhesive on one side. It cuts down substantially on reverberations inside the case and effectively makes the case thicker and thus less likely to transmit sound. I found it reduced my PC's noise level by a decibel or two -- not a dramatic change, but definitely noticeable.
The home theater PC crowd has done a lot of tweaking in the quest for a quiet PC. If your PC is sitting in a dedicated theater room acting as your DVD player you don't want fan noise distracting people from the movie. We also do a lot of stuff with remote control of PCs, useful when the box is in a different room or an enclosure.
Koolance makes a prebuilt water-cooled case that's supposed to be virtually silent. Even the power supply is water-cooled. Not suitable for super-hot AMD chips or overclocking, though they're apparently working on a more performance-oriented version for release later this year.
HardOCP.com's review has more details (the link on Koolance's home page doesn't point to the beginning of the review).
"Public domain" makes it available only to the first generation of people that touch it. It allows corporations to turn it into "Proprietary Software", which in effect means that the from that point on, the software is no longer "freely available to all".
Not true. If I take a piece of public-domain software and modify it, I can claim the modified version as my own and refuse to make it available to everyone. My modifications have no effect whatsoever on the status of the original public-domain release of the software. Someone else is free to come along and make other modifications and release their version under GPL or whatever other license they please.
Think about the concept of public domain as applied to music or literature if you don't believe me. If what you're saying were true, I could turn "Hamlet" into a copyrighted work and sue everyone who publishes or performs the original. Obviously that's not the way things work for "Hamlet," and it's not the way things work for software either.
Wasn't an attack. I want to know if you're careful to watch every last ad that a broadcaster inserts into its programming. And if not, how does getting up to go to the bathroom during an ad hurt the broadcasters less than fast forwarding through the same ad? A perfectly legitimate question, I believe, even if I perhaps should have explained myself at greater length.
Age of Empires? Close Combat? Links LS? Granted, they've had a tendency to acquire game developers rather than develop inhouse, but now they have a bunch of perfectly credible developers on staff and there's no reason to think those people will stop coming up with good games just because their paychecks come from Microsoft.
There are stacks of PS2s in stock at stores around here; looks like the shortage is well past at this point. (Fry's Electronics in Sunnyvale, CA, to name one specific store.) Have you tried any online vendors?
Taking breaks and icing will help more than a $300 keyboard.
While taking breaks is definitely a good idea no matter which keyboard you're using, if you find yourself having to ice your wrists, you're not using the right keyboard.
The Microsoft Natural Keyboard is a pretty lousy ergonomic keyboard, IMO. I find I have to stretch my fingers too much when I use it, and the space bar isn't comfortable to press. I used one for a while and if anything it made my constant wrist pain worse; I still had to ice my wrists.
Then I switched to the Kinesis Natural keyboard and after a week or so of adjustment, the wrist pain when I wasn't typing went away completely and I could type for a couple hours straight before feeling uncomfortable. I think it hasn't undone the damage of years of typing on a traditional keyboard, but it's come pretty close. I own three of them so I can bring my own keyboard to my contracting gigs. I wish my first computer had had this kind of keyboard; I probably never would have developed wrist pains to start with.
On that note, I'd urge people who aren't feeling wrist pain to switch to a better keyboard. Preventing tendonitis or CTS before it hits you is far preferable to figuring out how to get rid of it once your hands start going numb. Unfortuately I suspect this will largely fall on deaf ears; it's way too easy to keep saying, "What kind of idiot would spend $300 on something you could get for $10?" until it's too late. Consider it a form of insurance payment.
For people in busy offices, BTW, hooking a weird keyboard up to your PC has the added benefit that your coworkers will flee in terror rather than "borrowing" your PC for a few minutes while you're in a meeting.
Re:Yeah, when will the networks notice?
on
Calling Out TiVo
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· Score: 1
I hope that soon somebody comes out with a Tivo-like device which skips all the program downloading crap and just gives us what we want: commercial skipping.
Speak for yourself. The "program downloading crap" is what makes TiVo and ReplayTV revolutionary. You could buy commercial-skipping VCRs for years before TiVo came out, but you could never buy a VCR that shielded you from the whims of network schedules like TiVo does.
The "program downloading crap" is in some ways an attack on another cornerstone of network TV programming: the notion of a programming lineup. TiVo users, by and large, don't care what was on after their favorite shows, or what wacky inappropriate timeslots the shows are in. The idea of boosting one show's ratings by scheduling it before or after another show doesn't intersect with the TiVo reality. I no longer know or care what time or day half the stuff I watch is on.
If TiVo didn't let me blow through ads, I'd probably still be using it to collect shows to dump to tape so I could skip the ads with my VCR.
Agreed, though TiVo isn't even the issue. I can already record video, compress it in real time, and stream it across the net, all on my PC using commercially available software such as ShowShifter. Doing it with a TiVo is a lot harder than the alternatives, and further, what's on the TiVo's hard disk is probably the last thing you'd want to send over the net or put on a CD (by modern standards it's not compressed all that well).
But as you say, the question isn't, "Can people stream TV shows over the net?" but, "Why would people want to stream TV shows over the net?" Addressing the second question will make the first moot. I know I'd much rather pay a buck or two to get a professionally-made digital copy of my favorite TV show straight from the source than try to track it down online, download half of it only to have the person who's serving it drop off the net, and then realize that whoever digitized it had no clue how to work their compression software.
While it's always good news to see more speed for less money, I think the Pentium IV will still have some trouble even at half price.
The article touches on the reason when it mentions the high cost of Rambus memory. But it's not just Rambus. The P4 requires a new motherboard to accomodate that memory. Which requires a special power supply. And to fit that power supply, you may need a different case. You won't be able to use commodity-priced generic parts for any of this because the volume is still too low.
Now, granted, this is of little concern to a Dell or a Gateway, who eat a one-time cost to tweak their production lines but can churn out P4-compatible hardware relatively easily. I think it does spell trouble for smaller manufacturers and for hobbyists who want to cobble together their own PCs. Time will tell whether that makes any difference.
Finally, I think even the big manufacturers will have limited patience for Intel changing things around yet again when the processor family after the P4 comes out; every report I've read on the subject indicates that it'll require yet another new motherboard chipset, and you can bet if the P4 continues to sell slowly, Intel will rush the P5 out the door post haste.
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It's certainly true that susceptibility to some diseases, along with other inherited traits, is determined by the interaction of tens or even hundreds of genes, and today we don't have the knowledge or the ability to factor all of them together and come up with a more precise picture of what's likely to happen to an individual. However, I think it's naive to assume that we'll never have the knowledge and ability to do so.
One obvious limitation we see today is the amount of computing power required to do the required multidimensional analysis and figure out which genes interact with which others to produce a particular effect. But all indications are that Moore's Law will be in effect for a while longer, and even if it peters out, the problem seems parallelizable enough that someone may eventually build a system or a network to churn through all the raw data. The United Devices cancer-cure project is a step in that direction.
Combine a few orders of magnitude of additional computing power with a vastly larger set of raw data and highly-refined techniques for reading and manipulating DNA -- none of which seems out of reach -- along with a public perception that biology is destiny, and something like Gattaca becomes quite plausible. Or if not that extreme, then certainly health plans rejecting applicants due to DNA and genetic screening for certain high-risk jobs ("We only want people who can get by on four hours of sleep").
What's more likely beyond our ability to ever comprehend is nurture, not nature, and ultimately that'll limit how precisely we'll be able to mold ourselves. A hundred years from now you'll probably be able to screen or engineer your kid's genes to give her a 25-point IQ boost or whatever amount of intelligence ends up being genetically determined. But what combination of factors causes a child in one strict, oppressive household to become a high-school dropout, while a child in another becomes a focused overachieving genius? If you want to raise the latter, what help does science offer? There may be no way to even measure the subtleties that nudge a child one way or the other, let alone use those measurements to provide any meaningful guidance to prospective parents.
We can, and IMO should, try to figure out everything that can be figured out about how our bodies tick. We can, and in some cases should, use that knowledge to improve the species. In the end I think we'll find it impossible to reduce ourselves to simple, predictable automatons, and that's just fine with me. Without the ability to surprise ourselves every once in a while, life in our custom-tailored bodies would get pretty dull.
I'm personally going to dodge their heat rays long enough to throttle whoever put their name down as "All Your Base Are Belong To Us."
No raw material is a good basis for a lasting money system. There's too much of everything in the universe and eventually we'll figure out how to get at it and/or manufacture it. Money is an abstraction for (though frequently not a fair measure of) the value of human activity anyway, so I have no problem with acknowledging that it's abstract and keeping it that way.
Disgraceful, adding your private family catchphrase to the OED.
Ever heard of Canada and Mexico?
Expire, maybe not. But this paper argues that the Mickey Mouse copyright isn't valid to begin with.
Hardly the first time Disney has poached earlier works for their animated films. What irks me is that at the same time they're making millions retelling other people's stories (and here I'm thinking more of Aladdin and Snow White and other renditions of classic stories) they're doing their damndest to prevent anyone else from doing the same with their classic stories.
I'm not so bullheaded as to refuse to ever see a Disney film, but when I'm deciding what to go see I definitely take into account the fact that Disney's lobbying is a big reason there won't be any significant American contribution to the public domain for years to come.
That's right. I'm sure you can stop any time you want.
Right on! Let thousands of people die of cancer, as long as it means nobody is making a profit from a cure!
So? You use a VCR and a TiVo. Dump the shows you want to archive to tapes (I use S-VHS) and delete the ones you only want to watch once. The fact that the hard disk has limited capacity is irrelevant unless you decide to leave town for a few weeks, in which case cheap videotapes wouldn't have solved your problem anyway.
I don't know, anything that helps me dismiss the damn thing a couple milliseconds faster is forward progress as far as I'm concerned...
If you don't want a monthly fee, you can pay up front for a lifetime subscription. That's essentially what ReplayTV does; the lifetime fee is included in the price of the unit (they don't give you the option of paying later). Just think of it as the TiVo being $200ish more expensive than the ads say, and work out whether or not it's worth that amount of money to you.
Now you could maybe argue that TiVo's engineers should have accounted for that case and fallen back to the old behavior so as to not break their legacy non-subscriber users. But you know, as someone who wants his TiVo service to keep running as long as possible, I can't work up all that much enthusiasm for the idea of TiVo spending engineering and QA resources supporting customers who're costing them money (they were losing money on every unit sold for a while, maybe still are, and making it back in subscription fees).
Then again, the idea of using a TiVo without the program guide is strange to me to begin with, so clearly I just don't get it. The guide is one of the nicest things about the unit; I have stopped knowing or caring exactly when most of the shows I watch are downloaded to its disk, and network schedule shuffling doesn't mess me up unless it's so last-minute that the listing service doesn't get notified. If you want to manually set your record timers, a VCR is cheaper.
Frankly, I consider the fact that the unit works at all without the service to be an unexpected bonus; the box was clearly designed and intended to be used with the service, and doing otherwise, it seems to me, is just asking for this kind of thing to happen over time.
The home theater PC crowd has done a lot of tweaking in the quest for a quiet PC. If your PC is sitting in a dedicated theater room acting as your DVD player you don't want fan noise distracting people from the movie. We also do a lot of stuff with remote control of PCs, useful when the box is in a different room or an enclosure.
HardOCP.com's review has more details (the link on Koolance's home page doesn't point to the beginning of the review).
Not true. If I take a piece of public-domain software and modify it, I can claim the modified version as my own and refuse to make it available to everyone. My modifications have no effect whatsoever on the status of the original public-domain release of the software. Someone else is free to come along and make other modifications and release their version under GPL or whatever other license they please.
Think about the concept of public domain as applied to music or literature if you don't believe me. If what you're saying were true, I could turn "Hamlet" into a copyrighted work and sue everyone who publishes or performs the original. Obviously that's not the way things work for "Hamlet," and it's not the way things work for software either.
Wasn't an attack. I want to know if you're careful to watch every last ad that a broadcaster inserts into its programming. And if not, how does getting up to go to the bathroom during an ad hurt the broadcasters less than fast forwarding through the same ad? A perfectly legitimate question, I believe, even if I perhaps should have explained myself at greater length.
Is that such a bad thing? HBO seems to be having little difficulty cranking out quality programs without commercial interruptions.
Do you get up to go to the bathroom during TV commercials?
Age of Empires? Close Combat? Links LS? Granted, they've had a tendency to acquire game developers rather than develop inhouse, but now they have a bunch of perfectly credible developers on staff and there's no reason to think those people will stop coming up with good games just because their paychecks come from Microsoft.
There are stacks of PS2s in stock at stores around here; looks like the shortage is well past at this point. (Fry's Electronics in Sunnyvale, CA, to name one specific store.) Have you tried any online vendors?
While taking breaks is definitely a good idea no matter which keyboard you're using, if you find yourself having to ice your wrists, you're not using the right keyboard.
The Microsoft Natural Keyboard is a pretty lousy ergonomic keyboard, IMO. I find I have to stretch my fingers too much when I use it, and the space bar isn't comfortable to press. I used one for a while and if anything it made my constant wrist pain worse; I still had to ice my wrists.
Then I switched to the Kinesis Natural keyboard and after a week or so of adjustment, the wrist pain when I wasn't typing went away completely and I could type for a couple hours straight before feeling uncomfortable. I think it hasn't undone the damage of years of typing on a traditional keyboard, but it's come pretty close. I own three of them so I can bring my own keyboard to my contracting gigs. I wish my first computer had had this kind of keyboard; I probably never would have developed wrist pains to start with.
On that note, I'd urge people who aren't feeling wrist pain to switch to a better keyboard. Preventing tendonitis or CTS before it hits you is far preferable to figuring out how to get rid of it once your hands start going numb. Unfortuately I suspect this will largely fall on deaf ears; it's way too easy to keep saying, "What kind of idiot would spend $300 on something you could get for $10?" until it's too late. Consider it a form of insurance payment.
For people in busy offices, BTW, hooking a weird keyboard up to your PC has the added benefit that your coworkers will flee in terror rather than "borrowing" your PC for a few minutes while you're in a meeting.
Speak for yourself. The "program downloading crap" is what makes TiVo and ReplayTV revolutionary. You could buy commercial-skipping VCRs for years before TiVo came out, but you could never buy a VCR that shielded you from the whims of network schedules like TiVo does.
The "program downloading crap" is in some ways an attack on another cornerstone of network TV programming: the notion of a programming lineup. TiVo users, by and large, don't care what was on after their favorite shows, or what wacky inappropriate timeslots the shows are in. The idea of boosting one show's ratings by scheduling it before or after another show doesn't intersect with the TiVo reality. I no longer know or care what time or day half the stuff I watch is on.
If TiVo didn't let me blow through ads, I'd probably still be using it to collect shows to dump to tape so I could skip the ads with my VCR.
But as you say, the question isn't, "Can people stream TV shows over the net?" but, "Why would people want to stream TV shows over the net?" Addressing the second question will make the first moot. I know I'd much rather pay a buck or two to get a professionally-made digital copy of my favorite TV show straight from the source than try to track it down online, download half of it only to have the person who's serving it drop off the net, and then realize that whoever digitized it had no clue how to work their compression software.
While it's always good news to see more speed for less money, I think the Pentium IV will still have some trouble even at half price.
The article touches on the reason when it mentions the high cost of Rambus memory. But it's not just Rambus. The P4 requires a new motherboard to accomodate that memory. Which requires a special power supply. And to fit that power supply, you may need a different case. You won't be able to use commodity-priced generic parts for any of this because the volume is still too low.
Now, granted, this is of little concern to a Dell or a Gateway, who eat a one-time cost to tweak their production lines but can churn out P4-compatible hardware relatively easily. I think it does spell trouble for smaller manufacturers and for hobbyists who want to cobble together their own PCs. Time will tell whether that makes any difference.
Finally, I think even the big manufacturers will have limited patience for Intel changing things around yet again when the processor family after the P4 comes out; every report I've read on the subject indicates that it'll require yet another new motherboard chipset, and you can bet if the P4 continues to sell slowly, Intel will rush the P5 out the door post haste.