Holding an interesting presentationis not an easy task.
For start observe how Steve Jobs does it. Try reading some articles about how powerpoint can be stupid and boring. There are even videos on that topic on YouTube that are nice and funny.
Then, remember that you can only resort to very limited number of letters (not words) at each slide. As computers do all that You mentioned, but also cartoons and some other things kids digg, start with snippet of some cartoon, and then use black screen for bringing Your punchline.
IT guys made it possible.
Remember, images, images, images. Flickr and toher image repositories will help You.
Keep it simple, it is much more easy to bring the message across if You reduce clutter in your presentation. Think Zen, avoid using "wizards", graphs, titles, and so on.
My friends digged some web page with images of wireless router, made from standard PC, dipped in 5-6 liters of common vegetable oil. They wanted cooling and protection from moisture. I think it was in Spain.
Oil provided cooling and system worked, so he said to me, but I never tried it myself. I guess that oil will need to be changed every year or two?
On the other hand, I know a man that worked on potting elcetronical circuits before installing then in enviroment where anything could happen - vibration up to 9G's, rain, snow, ice, You name it. It was very expensive resin, and we coul not get it easily, but than again that was 15 years ago when he worked on missle guidance systems.
It is rather interesting that this article, in fact, deals with responsibility of a vendor, and to some extent, efforts of some structures to shift that responsibility away. Wasn't that the point of this article, posted on/. yesterday' http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/31/1323230
As a meter of fact I am aware that such cases are spread all over many parts of our society. I know that one major (EU and US) ISP/telco provider had to use winNT with certain, 5+ years old service pack until 2005 (and somewhere maybe even now) because control software made by also major provider could not be run on any other OS.
I am aware that many hospitals, and other institutions have PC's with sensitive data and unprotected connection on the net. Trick is, it is easier to blame the hacker than to take responsibility. If one can blame the invisible enemy that could be used in the future, even better.
It seems that discovering hot water goes a long way.
While my friends enjoy 21km link using two 20Eur Atheros-based WiFi cards pluged in PC's (routers) running linux, I just don't see what's the big fuss. Not to mention that You can buy a pair of routers for 50Eur and do the same trick using DD-WRT firmware and two parabolic 19-24dBi antenas.
It is a problem, but don't You think that the same scenario can (and most likely will) happen but his time, You will get the codes also counterfeited form that same distributor? Or maybe removed by that same producer?
I work with a medical device worth about $900.000,00 and the surface of the table for patients can be dissolved with normal, medical grade alcohol or similar liquid. We found out about that after wiping the blood stain from it. Now we have erosions and discolorations on the surface. On the other side, part of equipment if reported to service center 75 days ago. What do You think, will they extend the warranty period or change that table because it cannot be cleansed?
I bet they'll just ignore us. They have our money. And I remember the bill for replacement of desktop mouse for workstation on the old machine (made by Sun, not by them)... $1000,00 plus tax.
It is the standards and expectations that go down, not up.
As You mentioned "data mining" I had a reflex to replay with link to WEKA, state-of-the-art datamining and statistics tool, written in java. http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/ml/weka/
That may not be what You want for small shop, but it may be what You need.
Right, my company uses some 150 computers and they all cut monitor off after 15 minutes, and shut down or hibernate (depending on convinience of user) after 30-60 minutes.
About 20 stay always on go in sleep mode after 30 minutes. Six servers stay on always. The problems are 3 Xenon based servers and one device that is loced by vendor and can only be shut off or left on. Unfortunately, they control one device that uses up to 500kW in stand-by.
This is a good advice, my experience tells me that very good link from point A to point B can be achieved using 802.11b/g wireless.
For example - use 2 or more sets of the following: Waterproof casing - $10-30 Parabolic antenna 24dBi (N female connector) - Hyperlink, PacificWireless, Andrew - cost about US $75 LMR195/240/400 (rpSMA to N male) pigtail, 0.6m, 3m or more in length - cost from US$10 to US$20(3m) Wireless router - Buffalo, Linksys - and put DDwrt in them they are about 50-70$ each (http://www.ddwrt.org) Ecellent alternative are Mikrotik routers, a bit more expensive ($100) but much more flexible (http://www.mikrotik.com) they also sell complete devices integrated in antennas)
Then find any location in the range of 50km with faster internet, setup all in your home, put it up and use. These devices use small amounts of energy (5W) and work reliably. You can even connect from your home to such device using normal wireless card in your PC. Line of sight is a must for such distances. Having two hops is not a problem, only more expensive.
I have seen effective speeds of 17mbps and more on links with more than 20km, working for months without any human intervention.
My guess is that Sony will smack them down anyway but it is a good gamble. The worst enemy is one that has got no way out. Actually Sony has got only one comparison to do. What cost more: trial or settlement.
This is just one more demonstration of flaws in US IP laws.
I understand that US population is about 300 million, but why do You US residents can't comprehend that EU has got millions of people that drive less then 15 miles to work? Asia and India also.
I do. Sometimes I walk, sometimes I go with bike, sometimes I take a car. When it rains or snows. I would like to have such car for those days.
I have not seen any advertising for Fiat 500 on US web pages. Guess Why?
I have written a book with over 750 pages and some 150 illustrations. Initially I tried to type it in Word, but I gave up after page 45. Damn MS Word could not hold page number still no meter what. After page 50, Word2000 decided to count it "american way" - each page=100 page numbers and growing like mad. And illustrations were so alive... I could not "catch" them, they constantly played hide&seek with me.
Then I switched to OpenOffice 1.3. At the end I just pressed "convert to PDF", and send the file to press. They did not had any objections.
Anyway, my instituion uses some 100+ computers, all of them with OpenOffice 2.x They do have three MSOffices, but only for conversion of files when explicitly needed by customers.
Same thing with my friend and his company Samba/gateway/DNS/etc P-100.
He put linux on it, set everthing up and went for another job in US (we live in Europe).
After two years and-something he was back and they contacted him "because something was worng with network". They found that server locked toalet (some re-decorating was done, obviously). Poor PC was so full of dust that CD tray would not open. Processor fan and PSU fan were also blocked by dust "and other things". Unfortunately, power controler on mainboard was dead so they swhitched to win2000 for server. It took them six(6) months to get similar functionality and reliability.
This reminds me of having placed my Orinoco RG-1000 in plastic box at the roof top. When everthing was in place, I realised that I left my UTP with RJ45 on it outside of the box.
Now, it would be really simple if I had have at least on RJ45 at hand, but nearest was 100m down (33feet) at local store about 2km (1.5mile) away.
So I just opened the case, pulled UTP through crack and left it that way. It still worked flawlesly, three years later. Then I replaced it with WRAP unit.
We had same problem with one MRI scanner I have used. Device room is so tiny that one cannot go around the unit and AC unit is cheapest I've ever seen. They punched some holes to the hallway but temperature in summer goes over 38 C (about 95F) and the machine (Sun inside) generally freezes after two hours of operation.
Same thing happened in other institution with more powerful MR scanner (also Sun inside) where AC unit was failing on a regulary basis, at least once a month. In one year they had that scanner fail so many times that they basically could buy a new one easily for the same money.
Thing is, computers in those scanners never failed, only the amplifilers.
Some time ago, local branch of HUGE telecommunications company was asked to connect two buildings. Distance: about 5 km (4 miles?). Really no-brainer kind-a-task.
The tehnicians decided to use aDSL (128/1024kb) and make a tunnel through public internet. Only three computers were on one side, using RDP application, (minimal graphical setings) so they figured, that was engouh. But wrong they were. On one side Siemens aDSL router, and on other side Cisco firewall and router simply did not like each other. The stuff worked terribly when only one computer was online, and tunel crashed when one needed to print or to use more computers (two for example). The price was low, as requiered, but it did not work. Then they tried to use their routers (much more expensive) to creat encrypted tunnel. It failed again.
Then local radio amateurs jumped in. They used their own 802.11g links and using old, for-junk-ready-computers with monowall and linux configured encrypted point to point tunnel through their network, using svereal routers and nodes. They shaped tunnel to only 50kbps and stuff it works. Total out-of-service time in one month? About one hour. Average router/AP uptime is about 50 days.
Why? It appears that some (expensive) routers are sensitive to high bandwidth fluctation at such low bandwidth conditions. Wireless software on the other hand is often made having that in mind. Somtimes less is more.
Good. The same happened some 800 years ago, the so called medival-warm-period. It was time of prosperity for europe, and it lasted about 200 years, ending with the chill that is easily seen on paintings of Bruegel (paintings like Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap, but more famous are Peasant wedding and The Tower of Babel) and in literature and so on. In that time, there were no industry or cars to produce changes in the climate, only our sun could do that.
Don't let the fud get in the way of thinking. There will bee nice weather in Siberia, and a water pathways will open between USA and Russia. After all, chinese medival navigators have found no ice around north pole what is documented, but ignored. Visiting of the north pole will be done on sea, and Greenland will finally be green!
I am just wondering, will I have time to see that.
There is something that bothers me about all this protein folding stuff.
What is the main use of finding-the-way-the-proteins-fold? To find out how the protein would look like? Hmmmm. If anyone wants, You can look in the past and see number of papers showing that several hundreds of millions of dollars was spent on similar projects in the past 30 years, and the effect was? Almost nothing. Such enormous computing projects gave us predictions about protein folding (helix/strand) of accuracy from 60 to 70%. Don't remember, testing such algorithms on large series of random samples will give You MORE than 50% accuracy. On large number of samples, practically any algorithm will give You about 66% accuracy.
The thing is, if You have one amount of proteins and calibrate many of today's algorithms and then test it on some different proteins, You should get accuracy of al least 80% to call the test usable/good. In medicine, acceptable accuracy of new method is at 90%!
Can this project reach such accuracy?
Now, for the end, there are some, obviously less known papers that describe methods for protein folding prediction with accuracy well above 85%. There are some papers that give directions that it does not really metter how the protein will look like, because one can predict when and how it will fold, and, what is more important, interact with other proteins. Wasn't that the idea behind all this?
But that is, obviously, not mainstream....and just for the end, I do want to use all the muscule of my 200$ video card.
As always we do tend to write about what we know, not about what someone asked us.
Therefore, I am going to do the same. Segmentation in "need pictures for my kid" and "medical use" are way different. While procedures described above (Gimp, Photoshop,...) work fine, detection and use parts of 2D/3D/4D datasets in medical and similar purpouses is way more complex. Today, You can see nice images from big vendors of medical equipment (Siemens, GE, Phillips, Toshiba, Hitachi,...) but all of the images that You can get are fruits of trained eyes and hands. And it took them quite some time and processor power to do it.
So, for coloring book, stick to Gimp, and You fingers.
Finally! Europe is going for BioDiesel, but NY is going back to the electricity.
It is not widely known, but before we have all sold our souls to gasoline, back in the 1930's, a large number of delivery trucks in NY was running on electricity.
Just by the was, today is a birthday of Nikola Tesla, a genius that invented AC, and many other today-common things. Is it coincidenc?
I think that this almost hits the point.
Semantic Web is just an attepmt, but a it really is just that. Most likely "a step in wrong direction".
How many times one can change a meaning of conversation by using its face, hands, body posture? How to write that down is just too hard for simple silogistic logic used in today's technology, even in semantic web.
There is nice link that describes that even better:
http://www.shirky.com/writings/semantic_syllogism. html
As far as I know, there is much better device, more TV-look-a-like, and it was presented on RSNA 2003 in Chicago, last december. Although dr. Harkany gave me this info, I did not have seen actual device, but this 3D display was invented in Hungary, and since it really looks like TV, it gives 180 degrees, but nice-looking 3D view. Do some googling...
Slashdot Mirror
Holding an interesting presentationis not an easy task.
For start observe how Steve Jobs does it. Try reading some articles about how powerpoint can be stupid and boring. There are even videos on that topic on YouTube that are nice and funny.
Then, remember that you can only resort to very limited number of letters (not words) at each slide. As computers do all that You mentioned, but also cartoons and some other things kids digg, start with snippet of some cartoon, and then use black screen for bringing Your punchline.
IT guys made it possible.
Remember, images, images, images. Flickr and toher image repositories will help You.
Keep it simple, it is much more easy to bring the message across if You reduce clutter in your presentation. Think Zen, avoid using "wizards", graphs, titles, and so on.
And remember... practice makes it perfect.
I don't think that is what he ment.
My friends digged some web page with images of wireless router, made from standard PC, dipped in 5-6 liters of common vegetable oil. They wanted cooling and protection from moisture. I think it was in Spain.
Oil provided cooling and system worked, so he said to me, but I never tried it myself. I guess that oil will need to be changed every year or two?
On the other hand, I know a man that worked on potting elcetronical circuits before installing then in enviroment where anything could happen - vibration up to 9G's, rain, snow, ice, You name it. It was very expensive resin, and we coul not get it easily, but than again that was 15 years ago when he worked on missle guidance systems.
I am not much of help, am I?
It is rather interesting that this article, in fact, deals with responsibility of a vendor, and to some extent, efforts of some structures to shift that responsibility away. /. yesterday'
Wasn't that the point of this article, posted on
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/31/1323230
As a meter of fact I am aware that such cases are spread all over many parts of our society. I know that one major (EU and US) ISP/telco provider had to use winNT with certain, 5+ years old service pack until 2005 (and somewhere maybe even now) because control software made by also major provider could not be run on any other OS.
I am aware that many hospitals, and other institutions have PC's with sensitive data and unprotected connection on the net. Trick is, it is easier to blame the hacker than to take responsibility.
If one can blame the invisible enemy that could be used in the future, even better.
It seems that discovering hot water goes a long way.
While my friends enjoy 21km link using two 20Eur Atheros-based WiFi cards pluged in PC's (routers) running linux, I just don't see what's the big fuss. Not to mention that You can buy a pair of routers for 50Eur and do the same trick using DD-WRT firmware and two parabolic 19-24dBi antenas.
You won't get my $500 for that box.
It is a problem, but don't You think that the same scenario can (and most likely will) happen but his time, You will get the codes also counterfeited form that same distributor? Or maybe removed by that same producer?
I work with a medical device worth about $900.000,00 and the surface of the table for patients can be dissolved with normal, medical grade alcohol or similar liquid. We found out about that after wiping the blood stain from it. Now we have erosions and discolorations on the surface.
On the other side, part of equipment if reported to service center 75 days ago. What do You think, will they extend the warranty period or change that table because it cannot be cleansed?
I bet they'll just ignore us. They have our money. And I remember the bill for replacement of desktop mouse for workstation on the old machine (made by Sun, not by them)... $1000,00 plus tax.
It is the standards and expectations that go down, not up.
I saw that too.
As You mentioned "data mining" I had a reflex to replay with link to WEKA, state-of-the-art datamining and statistics tool, written in java.
http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/ml/weka/
That may not be what You want for small shop, but it may be what You need.
Right, my company uses some 150 computers and they all cut monitor off after 15 minutes, and shut down or hibernate (depending on convinience of user) after 30-60 minutes.
About 20 stay always on go in sleep mode after 30 minutes. Six servers stay on always. The problems are 3 Xenon based servers and one device that is loced by vendor and can only be shut off or left on. Unfortunately, they control one device that uses up to 500kW in stand-by.
And there is no way pushing that vendor....
This is a good advice, my experience tells me that very good link from point A to point B can be achieved using 802.11b/g wireless.
For example - use 2 or more sets of the following:
Waterproof casing - $10-30
Parabolic antenna 24dBi (N female connector) - Hyperlink, PacificWireless, Andrew - cost about US $75
LMR195/240/400 (rpSMA to N male) pigtail, 0.6m, 3m or more in length - cost from US$10 to US$20(3m)
Wireless router - Buffalo, Linksys - and put DDwrt in them they are about 50-70$ each (http://www.ddwrt.org)
Ecellent alternative are Mikrotik routers, a bit more expensive ($100) but much more flexible (http://www.mikrotik.com) they also sell complete devices integrated in antennas)
Then find any location in the range of 50km with faster internet, setup all in your home, put it up and use. These devices use small amounts of energy (5W) and work reliably. You can even connect from your home to such device using normal wireless card in your PC. Line of sight is a must for such distances. Having two hops is not a problem, only more expensive.
I have seen effective speeds of 17mbps and more on links with more than 20km, working for months without any human intervention.
This is just one more demonstration of flaws in US IP laws.
I understand that US population is about 300 million, but why do You US residents can't comprehend that EU has got millions of people that drive less then 15 miles to work? Asia and India also.
I do. Sometimes I walk, sometimes I go with bike, sometimes I take a car. When it rains or snows. I would like to have such car for those days.
I have not seen any advertising for Fiat 500 on US web pages. Guess Why?
Tesla also deserves to be mentioned here.
I have written a book with over 750 pages and some 150 illustrations. Initially I tried to type it in Word, but I gave up after page 45. Damn MS Word could not hold page number still no meter what. After page 50, Word2000 decided to count it "american way" - each page=100 page numbers and growing like mad. And illustrations were so alive... I could not "catch" them, they constantly played hide&seek with me.
Then I switched to OpenOffice 1.3. At the end I just pressed "convert to PDF", and send the file to press. They did not had any objections.
Anyway, my instituion uses some 100+ computers, all of them with OpenOffice 2.x They do have three MSOffices, but only for conversion of files when explicitly needed by customers.
Same thing with my friend and his company Samba/gateway/DNS/etc P-100.
He put linux on it, set everthing up and went for another job in US (we live in Europe).
After two years and-something he was back and they contacted him "because something was worng with network". They found that server locked toalet (some re-decorating was done, obviously).
Poor PC was so full of dust that CD tray would not open. Processor fan and PSU fan were also blocked by dust "and other things".
Unfortunately, power controler on mainboard was dead so they swhitched to win2000 for server. It took them six(6) months to get similar functionality and reliability.
This reminds me of having placed my Orinoco RG-1000 in plastic box at the roof top. When everthing was in place, I realised that I left my UTP with RJ45 on it outside of the box.
Now, it would be really simple if I had have at least on RJ45 at hand, but nearest was 100m down (33feet) at local store about 2km (1.5mile) away.
So I just opened the case, pulled UTP through crack and left it that way. It still worked flawlesly, three years later. Then I replaced it with WRAP unit.
We had same problem with one MRI scanner I have used. Device room is so tiny that one cannot go around the unit and AC unit is cheapest I've ever seen. They punched some holes to the hallway but temperature in summer goes over 38 C (about 95F) and the machine (Sun inside) generally freezes after two hours of operation.
Same thing happened in other institution with more powerful MR scanner (also Sun inside) where AC unit was failing on a regulary basis, at least once a month. In one year they had that scanner fail so many times that they basically could buy a new one easily for the same money.
Thing is, computers in those scanners never failed, only the amplifilers.
Some time ago, local branch of HUGE telecommunications company was asked to connect two buildings. Distance: about 5 km (4 miles?). Really no-brainer kind-a-task.
The tehnicians decided to use aDSL (128/1024kb) and make a tunnel through public internet. Only three computers were on one side, using RDP application, (minimal graphical setings) so they figured, that was engouh. But wrong they were. On one side Siemens aDSL router, and on other side Cisco firewall and router simply did not like each other. The stuff worked terribly when only one computer was online, and tunel crashed when one needed to print or to use more computers (two for example).
The price was low, as requiered, but it did not work. Then they tried to use their routers (much more expensive) to creat encrypted tunnel. It failed again.
Then local radio amateurs jumped in. They used their own 802.11g links and using old, for-junk-ready-computers with monowall and linux configured encrypted point to point tunnel through their network, using svereal routers and nodes. They shaped tunnel to only 50kbps and stuff it works. Total out-of-service time in one month? About one hour. Average router/AP uptime is about 50 days.
Why? It appears that some (expensive) routers are sensitive to high bandwidth fluctation at such low bandwidth conditions. Wireless software on the other hand is often made having that in mind. Somtimes less is more.
Despite all efforts of Apple, Vista is my prime reason for switching to Mac.
O.K. so Arctic is loosing ice.
Good. The same happened some 800 years ago, the so called medival-warm-period. It was time of prosperity for europe, and it lasted about 200 years, ending with the chill that is easily seen on paintings of Bruegel (paintings like Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap, but more famous are Peasant wedding and The Tower of Babel) and in literature and so on. In that time, there were no industry or cars to produce changes in the climate, only our sun could do that.
Don't let the fud get in the way of thinking. There will bee nice weather in Siberia, and a water pathways will open between USA and Russia. After all, chinese medival navigators have found no ice around north pole what is documented, but ignored. Visiting of the north pole will be done on sea, and Greenland will finally be green!
I am just wondering, will I have time to see that.
There is something that bothers me about all this protein folding stuff.
...and just for the end, I do want to use all the muscule of my 200$ video card.
What is the main use of finding-the-way-the-proteins-fold? To find out how the protein would look like? Hmmmm.
If anyone wants, You can look in the past and see number of papers showing that several hundreds of millions of dollars was spent on similar projects in the past 30 years, and the effect was? Almost nothing. Such enormous computing projects gave us predictions about protein folding (helix/strand) of accuracy from 60 to 70%. Don't remember, testing such algorithms on large series of random samples will give You MORE than 50% accuracy. On large number of samples, practically any algorithm will give You about 66% accuracy.
The thing is, if You have one amount of proteins and calibrate many of today's algorithms and then test it on some different proteins, You should get accuracy of al least 80% to call the test usable/good. In medicine, acceptable accuracy of new method is at 90%!
Can this project reach such accuracy?
Now, for the end, there are some, obviously less known papers that describe methods for protein folding prediction with accuracy well above 85%. There are some papers that give directions that it does not really metter how the protein will look like, because one can predict when and how it will fold, and, what is more important, interact with other proteins. Wasn't that the idea behind all this?
But that is, obviously, not mainstream.
As always we do tend to write about what we know, not about what someone asked us.
Therefore, I am going to do the same.
Segmentation in "need pictures for my kid" and "medical use" are way different. While procedures described above (Gimp, Photoshop,...) work fine, detection and use parts of 2D/3D/4D datasets in medical and similar purpouses is way more complex. Today, You can see nice images from big vendors of medical equipment (Siemens, GE, Phillips, Toshiba, Hitachi,...) but all of the images that You can get are fruits of trained eyes and hands. And it took them quite some time and processor power to do it.
So, for coloring book, stick to Gimp, and You fingers.
And, no I have not used spellchecker.
Stay simple.
Zagreb, Croatia has got SMS parking from september 2001. and in 2002. system was installed in most of the cities in Croatia
Therefore, that is not-so-new news for us.
Want to know more? http://www.rao.hr/
N
Finally! Europe is going for BioDiesel, but NY is going back to the electricity.
It is not widely known, but before we have all sold our souls to gasoline, back in the 1930's, a large number of delivery trucks in NY was running on electricity.
Just by the was, today is a birthday of Nikola Tesla, a genius that invented AC, and many other today-common things. Is it coincidenc?
I think that this almost hits the point.
. html
Semantic Web is just an attepmt, but a it really is just that. Most likely "a step in wrong direction".
How many times one can change a meaning of conversation by using its face, hands, body posture? How to write that down is just too hard for simple silogistic logic used in today's technology, even in semantic web.
There is nice link that describes that even better:
http://www.shirky.com/writings/semantic_syllogism
As far as I know, there is much better device, more TV-look-a-like, and it was presented on RSNA 2003 in Chicago, last december. Although dr. Harkany gave me this info, I did not have seen actual device, but this 3D display was invented in Hungary, and since it really looks like TV, it gives 180 degrees, but nice-looking 3D view. Do some googling...
And what about the fact that three years ago scientists reached 45+ years awaited consensus that DNA:
1) is never only double-stranded, but it can be single, double and triple strand
2) is never simetrical double helix, but always a bit skew
3) does not have 2 and 3 links between bases, but only (always) 2 links between purins and pirimidins.
If anyone still cares, science is about understanding things as they are, not as we would like them to be.