Your own little black hole instead of a trash can.
The only problem is that you'd hear news stories about people who produced too much trash and caused their "trash hole" to grow in size so much that it swallowed their whole house.
Of course, it would be a much better story for students who didn't do their homework. "Our black hole ate it."
Ah, the infamous Interdictor class of starship. Capable of creating a gravity well so strong that it'll suck a ship right out of lightspeed travel. Sort of like a super duper tractor beam. Yeah, I'm hoping they make movies out of the post-Return-of-the-Jedi trilogy.
Seriously, though, these do apparently occur naturally, and evapourate quite quickly (generally speaking, a black hole evapourates more quickly as its radius shrinks).
I won't pretend to know anything real about quantum field theory, but I do know that the article indicated that the naturally occuring black holes in our atmosphere were theorized by the same calculations they were using to figure out how to create them, but they never said that any evidence of them had been observed. Did you have other information about observation of the naturally occuring phenomena that would be pretty cool reading?
I'm sorry. This kind of stuff may be funny in time, but it's not funny right now. There are thousands of lost lives, many more thousands of injured people. Right now, Americans are upset and tasting blood. There are people in many other countries who are downright afraid of what actions President Bush will take. There is just no room for humor here right now.
I'm not sure who has less class: the poster, or the one who modded up as funny.
See http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=21493&cid=2272 567 [slashdot.org]. The problem is in GTK+'s sorting algorithm (alphanumeric)
Yeah, I saw this after I posted. But the general argument is still valid.
Any language would fall prey to this problem if its programmer overlooked the fact that the widget's interface sorts alphanumerically, even your wonderful "strongly-typed-makes-me-a-better-programmer" languages.
This is true. However, I want to clarify that a strongly typed language doesn't necessarily make a better programmer. Using a strongly typed language as a beginner might help because it will teach you some basic rules. But in general, all the strongly typed languages do is reduce the number of runtime errors by catching some of them at compile time. No matter what, there's still room to shoot yourself in the foot.
It's taken the Wine and NTFS teams a long time to get where they have, and even then they're pretty far from complete compatibility. What makes these guys think they're going to get any closer?
Actually, I'm glad to see another effort out there. If they do make more progress than the Wine project has, perhaps they can provide some information that would improve Wine. It's really hard to write "compatible" APIs when there's all kinds of undocumented "features" that need to be emulated in order to make things work. If PetraOS has a better chance of figuring some of this stuff out, and if they use a "Clean Room" approach, they can certainly lend support to the Wine project.
No big deal for me. My cable modem provider wants $20 / month for a static IP address, so running a web server is pretty much out of the question -- unless somebody has any cute suggestions as to how to sneak the latest and greatest dynamic IP into a public DNS....
Besides, I'd only be running the server so that I could access my own stuff remotely. With that being the case, I'd just use port 1080 or something like that instead.
They have lots of money to fight, even if it is obvious that they are the ones who are wrong and are going to loose someday.
Yeah, and it's becoming really clear where they've suddenly directed a large chunk of that money. Go ahead, mod me down as flame-bait, but boy is my Spidey-Suspicious Sense tingling.
Well, consider this. The programs for things like navigation have to work without fail.
Oh yeah, we've really been programming things lately that don't fail. OK, maybe I'm a little harsh -- I'm certain I couldn't do any better. But I am curious as to how much of the $12MM would have to be allocated to other projects if we chose not to include this last flyby. What I mean is, those people that are getting paid would probably still have jobs, but the costs would be allocated to other projects. So how much of this cost is truly related to this final song?
The problem with the billennium bug is that there's a risk that programmers did not allocate enough digits
Actually, I think most of the posts I've read so far indicate not a problem in storage allocation, but instead a problem in sorting -- IE, they used a string sort rather than numeric.
your Python will succeed or fail in an equal number of situations as Perl
Sorry, I disagree. I'm neither a Python nor Perl biggot (don't have much time to devote to either), but the point made in the parent post was that in a strongly typed language like Python, programmers are prevented from using the wrong form of comparison. Yes, Perl has different comparison methods for numeric and string and yes, the programmer has nobody to blame but themselves if they make such a mistake, but having the language do a bit of idiot-proofing will ultimately yield fewer bugs. So no, I don't think there will be an equal number of failures in Python.
Note that I don't think this makes Python "better" or Perl "worse." It's just a feature that needs to be considered when choosing a language for a project.
...sales automation tools for handheld pcs. we couldn't do that on a PDA. there is no keyboard. how can a sales person lookup a customer / part, or enter an invoice / order with a stylus touch pad. answer, you can't...
Umm. I don't see the logic here. We developed an in-house version of our mobile sales automation tools specifically FOR the iPAQ. The touch pad keypad works fine for most of the data entry that needs to be done. Remember that when entering an invoice or something, you should never need to type the customer's name and address in -- that should have all been downloaded from your primary computer system, where somebody presumable used a traditional compute to enter the "busy" information months ago when your customer was just a prospect. Besides, if you need a keyboard for the iPAQ, just buy one.
Your numbers are off, sonny. iPaqs maybe favored by geeks, but HP Jordanas outsold both Compaq and Casio combined. HP accounted for just over 6% of all PDA sales, versus Q's ~3%.
I just want to question your number a little bit. Do your figures take into account the following:
The Journada name includes more than one class of devices, only part of which includes the PDA device that competes directly with the PDA version of the iPAQ. Are we comparing apples to apples?
I believe the Journada PDA was on the market first. Are we comparing during a time period where both devices were on the market?
Last year, the iPAQ had a much better display than the Journada. However, problems with manufacturing the display screens caused a serious holdup in the production of color iPAQs. Because of this, you quite literally could not get the device for several months. I know this because the company I work for had a high-profile relationship with Compaq with regards to the iPAQ. During this time, even we could not get all the devices we wanted. Maybe we shouldn't take this into account, but since Compaq had a higher demand than supply doesn't that suggest something?
Since the virus runs as the user who executed it, the chances of it causing havoc on a web server (like code red did) are minimal. Even on a normal linux box, the admin will be smart enough not to run an email attachment (it's not as simple as double clicking to run it) and if some "dumb" user runs it then it's no big deal.
I was going to post something to the same effect. Thanks for beating me to it.:) Anyway, certainly having a multiuser environment and reading your mail from a most unprivileged account would provide *some* protection, but what about those executables that have the "sticky" bit set and run with higher authority? Could the trojan use those to compromise the system?
You are claiming that just because someone runs a particular OS, they are either of higher or lower intellectual potential.
The parent article was probably poorly worded, but I don't think that was what the author meant. I think the message to be conveyed was that the vast majority of less capable computer users have chosen to use the Windows platform, at least partly because they don't know any other choices exist.
The majority of the Linux admins do it either because Linux == Free Beer or because "they think it's cool to run a server"
Actually, I don't consider those who run a Linux server just because they think it's cool to be an admin. I used to run a Linux server just for tinkering and I surely didn't consider myself an admin.
So, if you lay aside that group, you'll probably be suprised to see that a large portion of the real Linux admins out there run that OS for three reasons: 1. They don't want to have to frequently reboot an NT server, 2. They can run a whole bunch of Linux servers from a single distribution copy, and 3. They can get more reasonable performance using Linux on older or cheaper hardware.
First, let me say that I'm a Computer Scientist, not a doctor or bio-anything, so my knowledge and understanding is limited.
If these blood cells, produced from embryonic stem cells, are identical to ones produced from human marrow, why couldn't we just culture these using human marrow?
A classic problem. A big part of the issue is a certain "safety feature" built into the cells of your body -- they can only reproduce so many times. This helps to protect you against cancer. In most cases, a mutated cell will only reproduce so many times before dying out. Obviously, malignant cancers have conquered this problem on their own.
Now, there are stem cells available in adults (including in the marrow) that could probably used for exactly this purpose. However, it has been stated before that adult stem cells are not as "flexible" as the embryonic ones. I'm not sure if that would matter when producing blood cells.
If anybody has any references to just what the problem is with adult stem cells, I'd appreciate a few links so I can do some reading.
Yeah, imagine Mom's surprise when Junior grows a tail several weeks after a blood transfusion.
Seriously though, do you think they can reliably search for contamination -- given that they can't even agree on the "normal" genome mapping? If the contamination is really difficult to find, would it really matter much?
But, think of all the work!! You have to lift your left hand. You have to think where the backspace key is.
But there's part of your problem. It'll be less work for you if you start with your right hand. On most keyboards it's closer to the backspace key. (Of course then you have to find the mouse again....)
I'm actually surprised at the fact that the article focused on prosthetic implants (ie into the brain) as one of the primary benefits of this technology. Many of us on/. followed with similar thoughts. However, I see other applications to be much closer on the horizon. While we have a long way to go before we can start wet-wiring silicon to our brains, I think we could use this technology for artificial limbs much sooner. Theoretically, it should be possible to build entirely eltromechanical limbs that have the ability to transmit feeling -- hot and cold, pressure, pain, etc. Being able to connect electronic sensors in these limbs to actual nerve tissue is the missing link. In cases where a limb truly could not be attached, this would be the next best option. Any speculation on how long it will be?
The suits are willing to spend this kind of cash because they're looking for piece of mind.
I'm glad to hear that they find peace of mind in paying these kinds of prices, but I honestly don't think that even for the $250K price tag that they will get the performance and service they are expecting.
If you think you can do it for 40K then you've obviously got yourself a golden opportunity, call up the venture capitalists today! Okay, tomorrow.
Nah, I'd need at least a week.:) But seriously, I think that after the $40K level, there's really no additional value that can be added. Sure, they can add tons of service and support agreements, but if there's a drive array failure, the whole thing is down anyway. If lightening strikes the building and fries all of the power supplies, there's no redundancy. I don't know, maybe they are planning on setting up a full repair shop right next to all of their customers. Somehow though, I think that at the first "incident," this company is going belly-up. Am I being too harsh?
Could somebody please explain to me where the $250,000 value is? Is this just another case of bad allocation of venture capital? The $250,000 is the BASE price of a system that can hold up to 24 cpu boards that CAN be connected to a network or CAN be connected to a drive array. The stated purpose in the article is to provide redundancy for failover. The only cool thing I can see is that if a cpu fails, another cpu will assume its name, characteristics and storage space. What wasn't clear was whether or not all 24 CPU boards were redundant, or whether you could have several redundant machines within the same "cabinet." But there wasn't anything really magical going on here. These boards would contain either 2 or 4 high-end processors (just over 1 GHz). I can see a price tag of maybe $40,000 or something, but certainly nowhere near the order they are asking. Anybody have any insight on this?
The glut of fiber tends to be more in the metro space. I really don't see the middle of Iowa with a ton of fiber.
This is true, but my guess is that one the places where this dark fiber is going to be used eventually is in subscription-based streaming audio and video. And if you think where the most likely place for something like "Online Blockbuster" to set itself up, you'll see that a big city (with lots of customers close by) is the most logical starting point.
Connectivity, bandwidth and service almost always find their way to the rural areas last. It's a trade off when choosing a place to live: In the middle of the city with honking cars and lots of people and a choice between DSL, Cable and Sat; or a nice house with some land in the quiet country and nothing but 56K dialup that might give you 41K if you're lucky. It was a hard choice, but I opted for the quiet country and 56K dialup. But I hear that someday we might actually have cable modem!!:)
I seem to recall Germany outlawing embryonic stem cell research. They're real conservative...
And what do you know, they implanted ADULT stem cells into a heart attack patient, and it worked the same way as embryonic stem cells.
I've seen a couple shows on this technique too. The only drawbacks I've heard about indicate that the ADULT stem cells are not as flexible as the embryonic cells. However, I've never had the time to look into the validity or reason for this statement. It would seem to me that anytime you can have material from your *own* body used, it would be better, as there'd be less chance of immuno-response.
The problem with some conservatism is ignorance....I spent a lot of time researching this when my wife and I pursued Invitro Fertilization. Fetuses don't come along until I bleieve 4th or 5th month...
Congratulations. In one sentence, you've just managed to alienate a significant chunk of the population, many of whom I'm sure are more intelligent and more informed than you. And it is obvious that perhaps you didn't spend as much time researching as you would like us to think. Either that, or your doctor was an idiot. Here are some things that you should probably know.
Many religions that are against stem cell research consider even a freshly fertilized egg to be life, and that taking this life is murder. This is why many people have a moral question when they consider in-vitro fertilization. The procedure used for in-vitro usually generates more than one embryo -- only one of which is implanted. The moral question for them is "what happens to the others?" You can try to abstract the whole concept all you want by using terms like Zygote, Embryo and Blasti, but for some people all of these fall into one category: A human life.
Depending on who you talk to, a developing child is considered an embryo for only a short time. An embryo becomes a fetus during the *second* month. Even those that disagree with this generally agree that an embryo has become a fetus by the end of the first trimester (the 3rd month). The embryo actually develops a heart-beat during the first month, and the fetus forms part of the brain, arms, legs, major organs and facial features during the second month. A baby born prematurely during the sixth month can survive with intensive care, and there have been situations where a child born during the fifth month has survived.
Stem cells can come from embryos, aborted fetuses, and even blood and tissue extracted from the umbilical cord and placenta right at birth. No fertilized egg is fake and each could develop into a human if given the proper environment in which to grow. I don't know if you are just totally ignorant of this issue or if you're trying to spread wrong information to support your viewpoint.
The single biggest problem with all of this is that people can never be sure where the stem cells are coming from. Therefore, restrictions have to be made.
You need to try and understand that if *your* tax dollars are being used for something that you disagree with, then you have a voice. Certainly if the group agreeing with you is large enough, restrictions will be made into law. The people who disagree with stem cell research do so because they believe that human lives are being taken to support the research. To them, this overrides any of the possible benefits. A life for a life is not acceptable to them.
I'm not telling you that you should agree with them. But before you make a general statement indicating that many conservative people are ignorant, you had better take the time to understand both the facts and the emotions. In fact, if you understand their viewpoint thoroughly, it might make you a better and more informed critic of it.
Slashdot Mirror
The only problem is that you'd hear news stories about people who produced too much trash and caused their "trash hole" to grow in size so much that it swallowed their whole house.
Of course, it would be a much better story for students who didn't do their homework. "Our black hole ate it."
Ah, the infamous Interdictor class of starship. Capable of creating a gravity well so strong that it'll suck a ship right out of lightspeed travel. Sort of like a super duper tractor beam. Yeah, I'm hoping they make movies out of the post-Return-of-the-Jedi trilogy.
I won't pretend to know anything real about quantum field theory, but I do know that the article indicated that the naturally occuring black holes in our atmosphere were theorized by the same calculations they were using to figure out how to create them, but they never said that any evidence of them had been observed. Did you have other information about observation of the naturally occuring phenomena that would be pretty cool reading?
I'm not sure who has less class: the poster, or the one who modded up as funny.
Perhaps from a surrounding building when the towers collapsed?
Yeah, I saw this after I posted. But the general argument is still valid.
Any language would fall prey to this problem if its programmer overlooked the fact that the widget's interface sorts alphanumerically, even your wonderful "strongly-typed-makes-me-a-better-programmer" languages.
This is true. However, I want to clarify that a strongly typed language doesn't necessarily make a better programmer. Using a strongly typed language as a beginner might help because it will teach you some basic rules. But in general, all the strongly typed languages do is reduce the number of runtime errors by catching some of them at compile time. No matter what, there's still room to shoot yourself in the foot.
Actually, I'm glad to see another effort out there. If they do make more progress than the Wine project has, perhaps they can provide some information that would improve Wine. It's really hard to write "compatible" APIs when there's all kinds of undocumented "features" that need to be emulated in order to make things work. If PetraOS has a better chance of figuring some of this stuff out, and if they use a "Clean Room" approach, they can certainly lend support to the Wine project.
Besides, I'd only be running the server so that I could access my own stuff remotely. With that being the case, I'd just use port 1080 or something like that instead.
Yeah, and it's becoming really clear where they've suddenly directed a large chunk of that money. Go ahead, mod me down as flame-bait, but boy is my Spidey-Suspicious Sense tingling.
Oh yeah, we've really been programming things lately that don't fail. OK, maybe I'm a little harsh -- I'm certain I couldn't do any better. But I am curious as to how much of the $12MM would have to be allocated to other projects if we chose not to include this last flyby. What I mean is, those people that are getting paid would probably still have jobs, but the costs would be allocated to other projects. So how much of this cost is truly related to this final song?
Actually, I think most of the posts I've read so far indicate not a problem in storage allocation, but instead a problem in sorting -- IE, they used a string sort rather than numeric.
your Python will succeed or fail in an equal number of situations as Perl
Sorry, I disagree. I'm neither a Python nor Perl biggot (don't have much time to devote to either), but the point made in the parent post was that in a strongly typed language like Python, programmers are prevented from using the wrong form of comparison. Yes, Perl has different comparison methods for numeric and string and yes, the programmer has nobody to blame but themselves if they make such a mistake, but having the language do a bit of idiot-proofing will ultimately yield fewer bugs. So no, I don't think there will be an equal number of failures in Python.
Note that I don't think this makes Python "better" or Perl "worse." It's just a feature that needs to be considered when choosing a language for a project.
Umm. I don't see the logic here. We developed an in-house version of our mobile sales automation tools specifically FOR the iPAQ. The touch pad keypad works fine for most of the data entry that needs to be done. Remember that when entering an invoice or something, you should never need to type the customer's name and address in -- that should have all been downloaded from your primary computer system, where somebody presumable used a traditional compute to enter the "busy" information months ago when your customer was just a prospect. Besides, if you need a keyboard for the iPAQ, just buy one.
I just want to question your number a little bit. Do your figures take into account the following:
I was going to post something to the same effect. Thanks for beating me to it.
The parent article was probably poorly worded, but I don't think that was what the author meant. I think the message to be conveyed was that the vast majority of less capable computer users have chosen to use the Windows platform, at least partly because they don't know any other choices exist.
The majority of the Linux admins do it either because Linux == Free Beer or because "they think it's cool to run a server"
Actually, I don't consider those who run a Linux server just because they think it's cool to be an admin. I used to run a Linux server just for tinkering and I surely didn't consider myself an admin.
So, if you lay aside that group, you'll probably be suprised to see that a large portion of the real Linux admins out there run that OS for three reasons: 1. They don't want to have to frequently reboot an NT server, 2. They can run a whole bunch of Linux servers from a single distribution copy, and 3. They can get more reasonable performance using Linux on older or cheaper hardware.
If these blood cells, produced from embryonic stem cells, are identical to ones produced from human marrow, why couldn't we just culture these using human marrow?
A classic problem. A big part of the issue is a certain "safety feature" built into the cells of your body -- they can only reproduce so many times. This helps to protect you against cancer. In most cases, a mutated cell will only reproduce so many times before dying out. Obviously, malignant cancers have conquered this problem on their own.
Now, there are stem cells available in adults (including in the marrow) that could probably used for exactly this purpose. However, it has been stated before that adult stem cells are not as "flexible" as the embryonic ones. I'm not sure if that would matter when producing blood cells.
If anybody has any references to just what the problem is with adult stem cells, I'd appreciate a few links so I can do some reading.
Seriously though, do you think they can reliably search for contamination -- given that they can't even agree on the "normal" genome mapping? If the contamination is really difficult to find, would it really matter much?
But there's part of your problem. It'll be less work for you if you start with your right hand. On most keyboards it's closer to the backspace key. (Of course then you have to find the mouse again....)
*grin*
Not by a longshot. I'm sure somebody else will bring this up, but... try Opera. It is truly the fastest browser around -- even with images.
I'm actually surprised at the fact that the article focused on prosthetic implants (ie into the brain) as one of the primary benefits of this technology. Many of us on /. followed with similar thoughts. However, I see other applications to be much closer on the horizon. While we have a long way to go before we can start wet-wiring silicon to our brains, I think we could use this technology for artificial limbs much sooner. Theoretically, it should be possible to build entirely eltromechanical limbs that have the ability to transmit feeling -- hot and cold, pressure, pain, etc. Being able to connect electronic sensors in these limbs to actual nerve tissue is the missing link. In cases where a limb truly could not be attached, this would be the next best option. Any speculation on how long it will be?
Obviously.
The suits are willing to spend this kind of cash because they're looking for piece of mind.
I'm glad to hear that they find peace of mind in paying these kinds of prices, but I honestly don't think that even for the $250K price tag that they will get the performance and service they are expecting.
If you think you can do it for 40K then you've obviously got yourself a golden opportunity, call up the venture capitalists today! Okay, tomorrow.
Nah, I'd need at least a week.
Could somebody please explain to me where the $250,000 value is? Is this just another case of bad allocation of venture capital? The $250,000 is the BASE price of a system that can hold up to 24 cpu boards that CAN be connected to a network or CAN be connected to a drive array. The stated purpose in the article is to provide redundancy for failover. The only cool thing I can see is that if a cpu fails, another cpu will assume its name, characteristics and storage space. What wasn't clear was whether or not all 24 CPU boards were redundant, or whether you could have several redundant machines within the same "cabinet." But there wasn't anything really magical going on here. These boards would contain either 2 or 4 high-end processors (just over 1 GHz). I can see a price tag of maybe $40,000 or something, but certainly nowhere near the order they are asking. Anybody have any insight on this?
This is true, but my guess is that one the places where this dark fiber is going to be used eventually is in subscription-based streaming audio and video. And if you think where the most likely place for something like "Online Blockbuster" to set itself up, you'll see that a big city (with lots of customers close by) is the most logical starting point.
Connectivity, bandwidth and service almost always find their way to the rural areas last. It's a trade off when choosing a place to live: In the middle of the city with honking cars and lots of people and a choice between DSL, Cable and Sat; or a nice house with some land in the quiet country and nothing but 56K dialup that might give you 41K if you're lucky. It was a hard choice, but I opted for the quiet country and 56K dialup. But I hear that someday we might actually have cable modem!!
And what do you know, they implanted ADULT stem cells into a heart attack patient, and it worked the same way as embryonic stem cells.
I've seen a couple shows on this technique too. The only drawbacks I've heard about indicate that the ADULT stem cells are not as flexible as the embryonic cells. However, I've never had the time to look into the validity or reason for this statement. It would seem to me that anytime you can have material from your *own* body used, it would be better, as there'd be less chance of immuno-response.
Congratulations. In one sentence, you've just managed to alienate a significant chunk of the population, many of whom I'm sure are more intelligent and more informed than you. And it is obvious that perhaps you didn't spend as much time researching as you would like us to think. Either that, or your doctor was an idiot. Here are some things that you should probably know.
You need to try and understand that if *your* tax dollars are being used for something that you disagree with, then you have a voice. Certainly if the group agreeing with you is large enough, restrictions will be made into law. The people who disagree with stem cell research do so because they believe that human lives are being taken to support the research. To them, this overrides any of the possible benefits. A life for a life is not acceptable to them.
I'm not telling you that you should agree with them. But before you make a general statement indicating that many conservative people are ignorant, you had better take the time to understand both the facts and the emotions. In fact, if you understand their viewpoint thoroughly, it might make you a better and more informed critic of it.