I always enjoyed using Klingon for my Google language. Last time I looked, though, they didn't have that translation for Gmail. They must not have enough volunteers...
This is true. I've been present for 30-odd DBS implants for Parkinson's in the past year. These use the same tech being used for these depression implants - and, in fact, DBS for Parkinson's sometimes causes exaggerated emotional responses, including uncontrollable crying or laughter. Sometimes, family members will tell the doctor that someone is a "new person" after surgery, doing or saying things they never would have expressed before - both in positive and negative ways.
We already stick DBS electrodes into this region of the brain to treat Parkinson's disease that is refractive to conventional drug therapy. That, in itself, is an improvement over the prior technique of burning lesions into these parts of the brain. (Now, I don't want to think about how they originally came up with that idea.)
When these electrodes don't end up exactly where they're supposed to go, funny things can happen. Sometimes you'll get new symptoms that exhibit themselves physically, and other times you can see an emotional response. Being in the OR while these are implanted, I've worked with surgeons and staff that have seen some bad outcomes. One patient a few years ago, when they turned on the test stimulator, began crying uncontrollably. Another patient couldn't stop laughing. These responses to stimulating the "wrong" parts of this area of the brain have been known for decades, back when they were creating permanent lesions. (At least with the modern approach, the effect is generally reversible.)
So, it's not like the guy just started poking wires into someone's brain on a whim. The science here, I assume, was in finding the "right" spot to target and what kind of settings to use on the generator. However, just like DBS stimulation for Parkinson's, we really don't know why sending pulses of electricity to these particular spots in the brain does what it does.
Maybe, perhaps, some of us would rather live in a less self-centered world than our ancestors?
Maybe there are a few other souls out there that don't think the American military is the right answer to all of the world's problems? That perhaps cooperation with our fellow beings on this small little planet, not unilateralism, would be a good idea?
Then again, I thought we were only one of several allied nations who won World War II, and don't believe that France should forever worship us for liberating them from Germany. I might just be crazy.
The 512MB RAM will kill it, no matter the CPU speed.
Quick speed test... 1.6GHz Celeron 420 w/ 512MB RAM. I opened Start -> Control Panel. From time of last click to time of icons appearing: 16 seconds.
With 1GB, it gets better. You'll still find certain desktop operations that are painfully slow for no apparent reason, though - copying files across a network being the worst for me. I haven't run Vista on 2GB yet, but I am lead to believe it would finally work "well" with that level of memory. You could probably be happy with 2GB and a 3GHz-D system.
*RANT* Yet in my desire to be modern and legitimate (well, that and MS's Validation system - before this year, I haven't had a legal license to Windows since Win95 & NT4) I trudge along with this POS. I can't even run any slightly modern 3D game on the sucker because the graphics driver is crap. (Well, only when running massively graphics intensive things like, oh, GameTap's menu screen. Worked fine under XP on the exact same hardware - and I get the same results across three laptops with i945GM chipsets.) *END RANT*
This year I've been on three business trips, no amenities at all. Twice through O'Hare with American, the first leg was 3:30 and the second was 50 minutes. They offer a $5 sandwich on the longer flight, and nothing at all on the second. United, which went through Denver with two flights of about 2 hours each, only had drinks. None of the Super-80s, ERJs, or CRJs had anything in the way of conveniences - which is how they adapted to compete with the likes of Southwest.
The only time I've ever had in-flight movies were on my flights to Europe as a kid. There was one time when I was taking a couple-hour flight that they played a canned news show on monitors on the bulkhead - even that was probably 5 years ago... That was more like being bombarded with commercials than entertainment.
Even hospital rooms can be serious sources of infection, despite routine deep cleaning with antimicrobial and viricidal solutions. Dunno the last time an airplane smelled like it had actually been cleaned. Most the windows on my recent flights have had oily residue from previous passengers' hair or face on them - definitely a nice touch. I don't want to think about the tray table, seat back, or arm rests.
I'd rather stay overnight in the airport than stay overnight in 2-3 hotels while driving cross-country -- and the entertainment is better anyway; driving you only get the radio, whereas on a plane, you can watch movies or actually get work done.
I have to say, the beds in those hotels are a lot more comfortable than the half-broken cots DFW handed out.
Also, entertainment depends entirely upon what flight you have. I haven't been on a plane with in-air radio or video in years. The last dozen flights haven't even had power plugs to run my laptop past its less-than-stellar battery life. At least in my car, my kids can watch the portable DVD player, and charge their DSes along the way.
I just took an 18-hour (each way) trip between Tucson to Tulsa a couple weeks back. With the spike in gas prices, and spending some cash on food, it cost me about $400 round-trip. It took three days in all.
I've taken it by air in the past, and the cheapest I can generally find for tickets is about $400 round trip - per person. It still takes two days to travel this way - with connecting flights, security checks, and waiting for late flights in airports, you have to set aside a day even for only a few hours of time in the air.
The only way air travel is anywhere near economical is if I can book many months in advance to get good discount pricing, and if I'm traveling alone. As soon as I include my wife on the trip, let alone some or all of our kids, there's no question about whether we'll drive or fly.
For me, the best way to handle the stupid drivers and overworked truckers is to take the non-interstate highways. US-70/60 between Las Cruces, NM, and Amarillo, TX, is shorter, faster, is just as wide, has less traffic, is more scenic, and gives better gas mileage than I-25/40.
But no matter what, I agree that air is safer than the road. I have no fear when boarding an airplane - I've flown dozens of times, and I still feel amazement when I gaze out the window during the flight. I wish air travel could be done more cheaply - but would that compromise that very safety?
If I put $10, play $10 worth of plays, happen to only "win" back $1, hit cash out and take my $1 ticket... Then yes, everything is fine and dandy. Probability dictates that eventually, my wins and losses (and those of everyone else playing) will even out to slightly favor the casino. That's the price for the service of entertainment.
However, that has nothing to do with what was happening here. To bring your comparison closer to reality:
1. If I put $10 in, the machine registers $1 worth of credits, I hit cash out and get a ticket for $1... I'll be finding someone to complain to pretty quickly. It is wrong, and they ought to correct it.
2. If I put $10 in, the machine registers $100 worth of credits, I hit cash out and get a ticket for $100... and then I do this repeatedly, never playing the "game" at all, before walking out of the casino with my so-called winnings... well, I'd be feeling pretty guilty when I got home, whether a law was broken or not. It is wrong, and I ought to correct it.
On GSN, they compress Who Wants To Be A Millionaire for extra commercial space too. Though you can't catch the dropped frames, it's pretty obvious when everyone's voices suddenly go up in pitch by a few steps.
Yeah, I tried BLAZEMONGER once, but I never could get above -15460243 points. I think the people who got positive scores must have been using a trainer.
Of course, my whole system melted, letting the blue smoke escape, after only a couple hours. Poor old thing.
> Has a test ever been done where you take 2 computer illiterate > people and give them a task to determine which can figure it > out faster?
My understanding is that's how it used to be done, in the '80s at least. You'd get focus groups to come in and test out new ideas, see how well they could learn it, compared to other approaches.
However, I would bet we don't have large masses of people who truly have no experience using computers anymore, nor are they the target for most new computer systems. Therefore, you are left with testing "intuitivity" not with people who have no experience at all, but rather with those who have experience with existing OSes, and that's primarily going to be prior versions of Windows.
Reminds me of when I got ahold of a late beta of Win2k Server, and tried it out on my home Win95 system. It was a P200 with 64MB RAM, which seemed fine and dandy... but my fatal error was giving it the spare 1GB partition (which I used to experiment with Linux distros) of my 5GB drive, so I wouldn't have to touch the FAT32 partition at all. Hey, it met all the system requirements, so why not?
It installed, but left less than 100MB left on the partition. After the final reboot, it sucked up the last bit of disk space for the swapfile, and it started configuring itself... About an hour later, it seemed to be finished, and I tried to log in. Up came a big window for setting up Active Directory. For the next several hours, the computer did nothing but swap to and from the woefully undersized pagefile, completely unresponsive to my vain attempts at input. I let it sit overnight, and finally gave up the next morning and wiped the partition.
Didn't occur to me at the time, but all I needed was a little more disk space for the pagefile, and then it would have at least booted properly, even if not been very fun to use. As it was, I didn't touch Win2k again until I had upgraded to a 500MHz K6-2 and 256MB RAM.
For what it's worth, I don't seem to have actually learned my lesson yet. I'm currently running Vista w/ Aero on a cheapo Compaq Celeron laptop with 512MB RAM and i945 graphics, loaded up with IIS7, SQL2k5, SUA, an X server, and so on. But hey, it _looks_ pretty!;)
Kinda like the space shuttle is "designed" to send astronauts into orbit and safely back to earth.
Why does "designed to survive" mean it absolutely will? You have to look at possible failures throughout the design, not just in the launch vehicle. So why not consider what happens if it explodes and showers particles over a city?
When it comes down to it, though, this isn't an H-bomb exploding over Orlando, it's a single release of radioactive material that some here are equating with the radon that 6% of american households already experience on a daily basis. (Sorry I can't figure the relative exposure myself.)
Problem in our case was, we didn't have control over the network the userids were created on, nor did we have control over the terminal software we used to connect to it. We're talking stuff that's got at least 20-30 years of legacy in it.
On our few clients with only broadband connections, where we were using VPNs instead of using the unnamed national internet dialup network as the intermediary, we did have a modern setup like that. Each tech had his own password, logged into a (web-based) server, and hit a button to reset a password. (Now, we have to tell it to them over the phone, after various identification checks, since this is the password they use to get into the network and therefore, their email. But similar idea regardless.)
Suppose there's a company that does contract tech support for corporate remote dialin access through a national internet company. Each company's userids are separated under a top-level account, so they have to have a different admin userid on each account.
Since these admin userids are shared with the customer company as well, they can't use the same password for all of them. But each of the techs needed to know what each of the several dozen passwords were, so they could reset the ids when someone called in for a locked password.
The solution for this particular real-life example was an excel spreadsheet that was printed out and posted on everyone's cubicle wall. It was maintained by one of the techs, saved on their desktop machine. When each password expired and forced a reset, it was recycled through seven different passwords to bypass the "same as previous password" security feature, and then changed back to the original again - to prevent us having to reprint out 100 new password sheets every couple of days.
I bet, if I still had one of my old sheets from years ago, almost all the passwords are the same today. I think a password vault is a much more secure idea.
I'm not going to debate the basis of this particular patent. However, our patent system is supposed to grant a monopoly of production for creating a unique and novel invention. It's not just making sure you get paid a license fee because you came up with some combination of previous things that noone else has sold before - it's an incentive for advancing science and creating new technology.
In other words, once a machine is patented to pick cotton, coming up with another machine with a different gear layout isn't good enough: you shouldn't get a patent, and others can copy your concepts freely. You've got to add something truly unique to it to qualify for another patent and collect your own license payments.
Slashdot Mirror
I always enjoyed using Klingon for my Google language. Last time I looked, though, they didn't have that translation for Gmail. They must not have enough volunteers...
This is true. I've been present for 30-odd DBS implants for Parkinson's in the past year. These use the same tech being used for these depression implants - and, in fact, DBS for Parkinson's sometimes causes exaggerated emotional responses, including uncontrollable crying or laughter. Sometimes, family members will tell the doctor that someone is a "new person" after surgery, doing or saying things they never would have expressed before - both in positive and negative ways.
We already stick DBS electrodes into this region of the brain to treat Parkinson's disease that is refractive to conventional drug therapy. That, in itself, is an improvement over the prior technique of burning lesions into these parts of the brain. (Now, I don't want to think about how they originally came up with that idea.)
When these electrodes don't end up exactly where they're supposed to go, funny things can happen. Sometimes you'll get new symptoms that exhibit themselves physically, and other times you can see an emotional response. Being in the OR while these are implanted, I've worked with surgeons and staff that have seen some bad outcomes. One patient a few years ago, when they turned on the test stimulator, began crying uncontrollably. Another patient couldn't stop laughing. These responses to stimulating the "wrong" parts of this area of the brain have been known for decades, back when they were creating permanent lesions. (At least with the modern approach, the effect is generally reversible.)
So, it's not like the guy just started poking wires into someone's brain on a whim. The science here, I assume, was in finding the "right" spot to target and what kind of settings to use on the generator. However, just like DBS stimulation for Parkinson's, we really don't know why sending pulses of electricity to these particular spots in the brain does what it does.
Maybe, perhaps, some of us would rather live in a less self-centered world than our ancestors?
Maybe there are a few other souls out there that don't think the American military is the right answer to all of the world's problems? That perhaps cooperation with our fellow beings on this small little planet, not unilateralism, would be a good idea?
Then again, I thought we were only one of several allied nations who won World War II, and don't believe that France should forever worship us for liberating them from Germany. I might just be crazy.
If it throws lawyers at the problem, it will lose the suit.
Not that this has ever stopped Apple (or most any other company, for that matter) in the past.
The 512MB RAM will kill it, no matter the CPU speed.
Quick speed test... 1.6GHz Celeron 420 w/ 512MB RAM. I opened Start -> Control Panel. From time of last click to time of icons appearing: 16 seconds.
With 1GB, it gets better. You'll still find certain desktop operations that are painfully slow for no apparent reason, though - copying files across a network being the worst for me. I haven't run Vista on 2GB yet, but I am lead to believe it would finally work "well" with that level of memory. You could probably be happy with 2GB and a 3GHz-D system.
*RANT*
Yet in my desire to be modern and legitimate (well, that and MS's Validation system - before this year, I haven't had a legal license to Windows since Win95 & NT4) I trudge along with this POS. I can't even run any slightly modern 3D game on the sucker because the graphics driver is crap. (Well, only when running massively graphics intensive things like, oh, GameTap's menu screen. Worked fine under XP on the exact same hardware - and I get the same results across three laptops with i945GM chipsets.)
*END RANT*
This year I've been on three business trips, no amenities at all. Twice through O'Hare with American, the first leg was 3:30 and the second was 50 minutes. They offer a $5 sandwich on the longer flight, and nothing at all on the second. United, which went through Denver with two flights of about 2 hours each, only had drinks. None of the Super-80s, ERJs, or CRJs had anything in the way of conveniences - which is how they adapted to compete with the likes of Southwest.
The only time I've ever had in-flight movies were on my flights to Europe as a kid. There was one time when I was taking a couple-hour flight that they played a canned news show on monitors on the bulkhead - even that was probably 5 years ago... That was more like being bombarded with commercials than entertainment.
the planes are practically hospital rooms.
Even hospital rooms can be serious sources of infection, despite routine deep cleaning with antimicrobial and viricidal solutions. Dunno the last time an airplane smelled like it had actually been cleaned. Most the windows on my recent flights have had oily residue from previous passengers' hair or face on them - definitely a nice touch. I don't want to think about the tray table, seat back, or arm rests.
I'd rather stay overnight in the airport than stay overnight in 2-3 hotels while driving cross-country -- and the entertainment is better anyway; driving you only get the radio, whereas on a plane, you can watch movies or actually get work done.
I have to say, the beds in those hotels are a lot more comfortable than the half-broken cots DFW handed out.
Also, entertainment depends entirely upon what flight you have. I haven't been on a plane with in-air radio or video in years. The last dozen flights haven't even had power plugs to run my laptop past its less-than-stellar battery life. At least in my car, my kids can watch the portable DVD player, and charge their DSes along the way.
I just took an 18-hour (each way) trip between Tucson to Tulsa a couple weeks back. With the spike in gas prices, and spending some cash on food, it cost me about $400 round-trip. It took three days in all.
I've taken it by air in the past, and the cheapest I can generally find for tickets is about $400 round trip - per person. It still takes two days to travel this way - with connecting flights, security checks, and waiting for late flights in airports, you have to set aside a day even for only a few hours of time in the air.
The only way air travel is anywhere near economical is if I can book many months in advance to get good discount pricing, and if I'm traveling alone. As soon as I include my wife on the trip, let alone some or all of our kids, there's no question about whether we'll drive or fly.
For me, the best way to handle the stupid drivers and overworked truckers is to take the non-interstate highways. US-70/60 between Las Cruces, NM, and Amarillo, TX, is shorter, faster, is just as wide, has less traffic, is more scenic, and gives better gas mileage than I-25/40.
But no matter what, I agree that air is safer than the road. I have no fear when boarding an airplane - I've flown dozens of times, and I still feel amazement when I gaze out the window during the flight. I wish air travel could be done more cheaply - but would that compromise that very safety?
If I put $10, play $10 worth of plays, happen to only "win" back $1, hit cash out and take my $1 ticket... Then yes, everything is fine and dandy. Probability dictates that eventually, my wins and losses (and those of everyone else playing) will even out to slightly favor the casino. That's the price for the service of entertainment.
However, that has nothing to do with what was happening here. To bring your comparison closer to reality:
1. If I put $10 in, the machine registers $1 worth of credits, I hit cash out and get a ticket for $1... I'll be finding someone to complain to pretty quickly. It is wrong, and they ought to correct it.
2. If I put $10 in, the machine registers $100 worth of credits, I hit cash out and get a ticket for $100... and then I do this repeatedly, never playing the "game" at all, before walking out of the casino with my so-called winnings... well, I'd be feeling pretty guilty when I got home, whether a law was broken or not. It is wrong, and I ought to correct it.
It's why you can get your DSL from companies like Earthlink instead of your phone company.
Unless you let the telco install fiber to the curb... now they don't have any copper to lease, and you're locked in once again.
I was thinking the same. Had mod points yesterday, and didn't find anything worth modding... *sigh*
Gotta stop letting people watch old episodes of Max Headroom on Joost.
(Just watched the blipverts episode last night. Freaky.)
On GSN, they compress Who Wants To Be A Millionaire for extra commercial space too. Though you can't catch the dropped frames, it's pretty obvious when everyone's voices suddenly go up in pitch by a few steps.
Yeah, I tried BLAZEMONGER once, but I never could get above -15460243 points. I think the people who got positive scores must have been using a trainer.
Of course, my whole system melted, letting the blue smoke escape, after only a couple hours. Poor old thing.
I thought it was Prince, formerly known as The Artist, formerly known as The Artist Formerly Known As Prince, formerly known as Prince.
> Has a test ever been done where you take 2 computer illiterate
> people and give them a task to determine which can figure it
> out faster?
My understanding is that's how it used to be done, in the '80s at least. You'd get focus groups to come in and test out new ideas, see how well they could learn it, compared to other approaches.
However, I would bet we don't have large masses of people who truly have no experience using computers anymore, nor are they the target for most new computer systems. Therefore, you are left with testing "intuitivity" not with people who have no experience at all, but rather with those who have experience with existing OSes, and that's primarily going to be prior versions of Windows.
Yeah, might have been a little more humorous if my fingers hadn't confused those two keys.
Dangit, why can't you posters explain the obscure acronyms you use in your comments?
I can't for the life of me figure out what "./" stands for. Sheesh.
Reminds me of when I got ahold of a late beta of Win2k Server, and tried it out on my home Win95 system. It was a P200 with 64MB RAM, which seemed fine and dandy... but my fatal error was giving it the spare 1GB partition (which I used to experiment with Linux distros) of my 5GB drive, so I wouldn't have to touch the FAT32 partition at all. Hey, it met all the system requirements, so why not?
;)
It installed, but left less than 100MB left on the partition. After the final reboot, it sucked up the last bit of disk space for the swapfile, and it started configuring itself... About an hour later, it seemed to be finished, and I tried to log in. Up came a big window for setting up Active Directory. For the next several hours, the computer did nothing but swap to and from the woefully undersized pagefile, completely unresponsive to my vain attempts at input. I let it sit overnight, and finally gave up the next morning and wiped the partition.
Didn't occur to me at the time, but all I needed was a little more disk space for the pagefile, and then it would have at least booted properly, even if not been very fun to use. As it was, I didn't touch Win2k again until I had upgraded to a 500MHz K6-2 and 256MB RAM.
For what it's worth, I don't seem to have actually learned my lesson yet. I'm currently running Vista w/ Aero on a cheapo Compaq Celeron laptop with 512MB RAM and i945 graphics, loaded up with IIS7, SQL2k5, SUA, an X server, and so on. But hey, it _looks_ pretty!
Kinda like the space shuttle is "designed" to send astronauts into orbit and safely back to earth.
Why does "designed to survive" mean it absolutely will? You have to look at possible failures throughout the design, not just in the launch vehicle. So why not consider what happens if it explodes and showers particles over a city?
When it comes down to it, though, this isn't an H-bomb exploding over Orlando, it's a single release of radioactive material that some here are equating with the radon that 6% of american households already experience on a daily basis. (Sorry I can't figure the relative exposure myself.)
Problem in our case was, we didn't have control over the network the userids were created on, nor did we have control over the terminal software we used to connect to it. We're talking stuff that's got at least 20-30 years of legacy in it.
On our few clients with only broadband connections, where we were using VPNs instead of using the unnamed national internet dialup network as the intermediary, we did have a modern setup like that. Each tech had his own password, logged into a (web-based) server, and hit a button to reset a password. (Now, we have to tell it to them over the phone, after various identification checks, since this is the password they use to get into the network and therefore, their email. But similar idea regardless.)
I think you're missing the point.
Suppose there's a company that does contract tech support for corporate remote dialin access through a national internet company. Each company's userids are separated under a top-level account, so they have to have a different admin userid on each account.
Since these admin userids are shared with the customer company as well, they can't use the same password for all of them. But each of the techs needed to know what each of the several dozen passwords were, so they could reset the ids when someone called in for a locked password.
The solution for this particular real-life example was an excel spreadsheet that was printed out and posted on everyone's cubicle wall. It was maintained by one of the techs, saved on their desktop machine. When each password expired and forced a reset, it was recycled through seven different passwords to bypass the "same as previous password" security feature, and then changed back to the original again - to prevent us having to reprint out 100 new password sheets every couple of days.
I bet, if I still had one of my old sheets from years ago, almost all the passwords are the same today. I think a password vault is a much more secure idea.
True, I suppose I was thinking after the original patent has expired.
You're modded insightful, so I'm gonna bite.
I'm not going to debate the basis of this particular patent. However, our patent system is supposed to grant a monopoly of production for creating a unique and novel invention. It's not just making sure you get paid a license fee because you came up with some combination of previous things that noone else has sold before - it's an incentive for advancing science and creating new technology.
In other words, once a machine is patented to pick cotton, coming up with another machine with a different gear layout isn't good enough: you shouldn't get a patent, and others can copy your concepts freely. You've got to add something truly unique to it to qualify for another patent and collect your own license payments.