I like the combination of iTunes and Airport Express - http://www.apple.com/airportexpress/ - devices. Each Airport Express can join a wireless or wired network and has an optical digital and analogue audio output which you can connect to a hifi / radio with aux input etc. Each Airport Express appears as a remote speaker in iTunes and you can tell iTunes to play to any / all remote speakers. And you can control everything with Apple's free Remote app - http://www.apple.com/itunes/remote/ - on an iPod Touch / iPhone. It all works rather well.
Here is the real story, as best as I can infer from the information I am given, but I have a high degree of confidence in my interpretation. First, it is not plausible that the spider bite itself did anything to regenerate nerves or muscles or improve David Blancarte's neurological function. So what did happen. The story reports:
Ever since, David's been relying on his wheelchair to get around. Then the spider bite. A Brown Recluse sent him to the hospital, then to rehab for eight months.
It is always important to seperate out variables when considering cause and effect. There are at least three variables we are being presented - Blancarte was biten by a brown recluse (which is poisonous), then he was treated for his bite in the hospital, and then he spent eight months in rehab. Of those three variables, which one is most likely to have resulted in his ability to walk? My bet is on the eight months of rehab.
To understand this we must further separate out variables. Motor ability (like walking) results from two general categories of factors - neurological and functional. Neurological factors include things like how intact the spinal cord and nerves are, and is there any damage to specific parts of the brain. Functional factors include conditioning, training, and motivation. So the question we must always ask when someone makes an improvement in motor ability is: was their improvement neurological, functional, or both.
I'd go with Citrix (I don't think MS Terminal Services is there just yet) and deploy MS Office to those servers and then distribute all other software via Microsoft Softgrid (soon to be called Microsoft Application Virtualization): http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/softgrid/default.mspx
The combination of Citrix + Softgrid is a pretty powerful combination - there's no need to silo your Citrix farm any more, and apps deployed via softgrid don't leave any junk behind on the filesystem or registry (since both are virtualised). Use a Citrix access gateway (basically an SLL VPN device that integrates with Citrix) to publish a windows desktop and then your remote offices just need a decent connection to the internet (budget approx 50 kbit/sec per user with 30% concurrent usage). Users can then work from home or from a notebook with a 3G data card too. Or forget the access gateway and connect the offices to the data centre with dedicated leased lines / MPLS links etc.
In each office install network printers onto each local device and then use the Citrix Universal Printer driver to send compressed print jobs from the data centre to the printer via the citrix client. Or if you have the bandwidth, install the printer on a print server located in the data centre and send jobs directly from the print server, over the WAN, to the printer in the remote office (this is easier to manage).
Lock down the citrix servers and client desktops with AppSense http://www.appsense.com/ and you'll then have a secure, remotely accessible system which is managed centrally.
There has been a media flurry surrounding this new study by lead author Dr. Evangelos Michelakis, in which he found that dichloroacetate (DCA) can selectively kill a wide range of cancer cells.
Basically, in most cancers the mitochondria are turned off. Mitochondria are the little energy factories inside every cell. They also are responsible for triggering apoptosis - programmed cell death. Cancer cells make their energy outside the mitochrondria, their mitochondria turn off, they lose the ability to trigger apoptosis, and they become immortal. Being immortal is part of what makes them cancer. DCA turns mitochondria back on, which in Dr. Michelakis's study caused the cancer cells to immediately die, while having no affect on healthy cells.
This is an exciting discovery that is sound in principle and likely to have implications for future cancer research and treatments. And Dr. Michelakis's study is very hopeful. But (here comes the skepticism) his study was carried out in vitro - on cells in test tubes. Before we get too excited we need to carry out clinical trials in humans with cancer. Experience has shown that it is difficult to predict how a drug will act inside the body based solely on in vitro studies. Even animal data - although very useful - has its limits. We need to prove that the drug will get to cancer tissue in sufficiently high concentrations to kill the cancer cells, and that it won't just suppress the tumor for a while. We also need to make sure there are no unforeseen negative consequences.
Historically there have been frequent laboratory discoveries that seem to show a promising new treatment for cancer, but when studied in humans the promise is not realized, or the effect is much more modest than was hoped. Cancer research has slowly ground forward, and we have made steady progress, but the "magic bullet" has never been found, despite frequent false alarms heralded in the press. So at this point in time the rational outlook to have is one of cautious optimism. Certainly this is a promising discovery, and it deserves to be studied clinically. We can also hold out reasonable hope that this will turn out to be more than an incremental improvement and will actually be deserving of the moniker "breakthrough." Let's do the research and cross our fingers.
There is another very interesting aspect to this story, mentioned in Jeff's question. DCA has been around for awhile, so no pharmaceutical company can patent it (it is already in the public domain). This means that it is unlikely a pharmaceutical company will pay the millions of dollars needed to fund the research for a drug it cannot own the patent on. I don't think it's impossible, just unlikely. As an advantage, the drug is already well studied and so many of the preliminary hurdles have already been overcome. Therefore the cost of research would be much less than if a company had to start from scratch with a new drug.
But let's assume that the bean counters at all the pharmaceutical companies calculate that the return on investment would not be sufficient to justify the research. And let's further assume that the PR value of "curing cancer" is not deemed sufficient either. That does not mean that DCA will not be researched.
There are other ways to fund research. Universities fund research programs, programs that also support their infrastructure with money they get from doing pharmaceutical company funded research. So university researchers can use their own resources to do the studies necessary - as Dr. Michelakis a
I remember Macgyver defeating a hand print scanner using chalk dust to stick to the oils deposited by the previous person who used the scanner. I guess a swipe scanner makes much more sense if you want to try and keep Macgyver out (who are we kidding here, Macgyver can defeat any security system with nothing more than a bar of chocolate and a toothpick).
I nearly drowned on my coffee when I head Dr Karl read out my post this morning. Dr Karl on Mel in the Morning is now the number 1 podcast in Australia. A positive example of the slashdot effect:)
Dr Karl has a happy hour on Triple-J every Thursday morning with Mel (who most slashdotters would die for) - and it's also released as a podcast too. http://www.abc.net.au/science/k2/stn/default.htm
Once a week for a magic hour, Karl is Live on Air on triple j. It's an hour devoted to the collective exploration of some of the great mysteries of life, such as "why does the water in the shower slow down just when it gets hot?"
I use ac3filter http://ac3filter.sourceforge.net/download/ to do the same thing - great for watching HD p2p downloads when the file is wmv-hd (wmv-hd doesn't use AC3 or DTS, it uses WMA Professional 5.1 for the audio).
Every science geek should listen to Dr Karl's podcast on triple j. Dr Karl has degrees in physics and medicine and is great at answering all those science / medical / engineering questions we all have - and his answers are entertaining to boot (if I had kids, I'd force them to listen to it - and they'd love it too). Brilliant stuff - it's on my iPod every thursday morning. (he's also on five live in the UK an hour after his triple j show, but noon Aussie time translates to 3am UK time unfortunately). To quote from the website: Once a week for a magic hour, Karl is Live on Air on triple j. It's an hour devoted to the collective exploration of some of the great mysteries of life, such as "why does the water in the shower slow down just when it gets hot?". Sorry this has turned into a Dr Karl ad, but it's a great listen.
Remain silent? There was a BBC Horizon documentary on this very subject broadcast earlier this year. You can read more about the problem and the solution here:
Problem: Italian Company (Alenia Spazio) responsible for comms corrected for doppler shift on the carrier signal, but not on the data rate. Alenia Spazio's insistence on confidentiality may have played a role in this oversight. NASA reviewers were never given the specs of the receiver. As JPL's [Robert] Mitchell explained, "Alenia Spazio considered JPL to be a competitor and treated the radio design as proprietary data."
Solution: Altered the trajectory of Cassini / Huygens so that Huygens is moving parallel to Cassini during descent, sidestepping the doppler shift issue.
Then you can't simply browse the list of artists thinking "hmmm, who am i in the mood for...?". Unlike the soundblaster wireless music remote - come on guys!!!
But perhaps they could make it an optional feature for the ipod?
Having completed the fabrication of a steel mount the H30 was duly
screwed to the ceiling and a good quality composite and a SCART/VGA
cable were connected. Incidentally while on the subject of ceiling
mounting, the 3mm mounting holes in the base of the H30 look pretty
inadequate for supporting 1100 of projector from the ceiling. I took
the precaution of drilling a hole in the ceiling mount base plate to
accommodate an additional 6mm bolt; this was then screwed into the
tripod-mounting hole for additional security.
Anyway having lined it all up some friends came around to help set
it up and see how it performed. One is the proud owner of an AE300 and
the other a high end Sony CRT projector that he has installed in a
dedicated room with matt black walls to reduce light reflection.
Having quickly tweaked the basic settings on the H30 we darkened
the room and put on The Scorpion King, we sat there in utter amazement;
the picture quality was truly awesome.
We then put on Armageddon, as we tend to use it, as a reference
disc as it contains a good variety of differing scenes, again the
picture quality was amazing.
The H30 uses the Pixelworks deinterlacing and scaling chip as
opposed to the popular and unquestionably competent Faroudja DCDI, this
was my only reservation about the projector prior to purchasing.
Not anymore, the picture was very sharp and had an extremely
pleasing film like quality with few artefacts even in fast moving scenes
and panned shots.
The black level was incredible far better than anything I have
ever seen before south of CRT. I had the masking lens attached which I
think I read somewhere increases the contrast ratio to around 2500:1 by
reducing unwanted light. Projectors cant project black, correct me if Im
wrong but my belief is that to get true black the pixels in the chip are
in effect switched off and black is in fact displayed as absence of
light. This is one of the reasons why you tend to get a more pleasing
picture the darker the room. Most projectors are unable to switch the
pixels off completely but it is considered that DLP technology is
slightly better at it than LCD particularly on budget home theatre
projectors such as the H30. We also found that detail in dark scenes was
outstanding, certainly better than we had expected.
Screen door was good and fan noise acceptable, light spill was
also not too bad with just a small amount on the ceiling about a foot or
so in front of the projector. None of us noticed significant rainbow
even though we did try very hard to see them particularly on high
contrast fast moving scenes.
We only used eco-mode, as the brightness was more than adequate
for a light controlled room and less light tends to give better blacks
and contrast anyway, eco mode also has the added benefit of bumping the
expected lamp life up from 2000 to 3000 hours. I was actually quite
surprised by the projectors brightness, we eventually put this down to
the H30s six segment (RGBRGB) colour wheel and the fact
just finished re-soldering my firewire connector..
on
iPod Mini Design Flaw?
·
· Score: 1
the 1st gen ipod also had a big design flaw - the firewire port is fixed in place with some dabs of solder and once those joints had come loose (after two years use) all that was holding the firewire port to the motherboard were 6 thin pins soldered in place... so of course, they all snapped. thankfully, i manged to re-solder everything back in place (talk about a steep learning curve) and everything works. i'd have hated to buy a new ipod - i like my navigation wheel which actually rotates - it's easier to use when your ipod is in your pocket. of course, i'd have considered an iriver, but the ipod has the best navigation system bar none. that would have been a tough choice.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, there seems to be a pulseaudio module for Airport Express: http://www.shivaneck.com/?p=119
it can be done, just a bit more complicated: http://www.jroller.com/nwinkler/entry/amarok_and_the_airport_express
I like the combination of iTunes and Airport Express - http://www.apple.com/airportexpress/ - devices. Each Airport Express can join a wireless or wired network and has an optical digital and analogue audio output which you can connect to a hifi / radio with aux input etc. Each Airport Express appears as a remote speaker in iTunes and you can tell iTunes to play to any / all remote speakers. And you can control everything with Apple's free Remote app - http://www.apple.com/itunes/remote/ - on an iPod Touch / iPhone. It all works rather well.
From: http://www.theskepticsguide.org/sgublog/?p=519 by Steven Novella
Here is the real story, as best as I can infer from the information I am given, but I have a high degree of confidence in my interpretation. First, it is not plausible that the spider bite itself did anything to regenerate nerves or muscles or improve David Blancarte's neurological function. So what did happen. The story reports:
Ever since, David's been relying on his wheelchair to get around. Then the spider bite. A Brown Recluse sent him to the hospital, then to rehab for eight months.
It is always important to seperate out variables when considering cause and effect. There are at least three variables we are being presented - Blancarte was biten by a brown recluse (which is poisonous), then he was treated for his bite in the hospital, and then he spent eight months in rehab. Of those three variables, which one is most likely to have resulted in his ability to walk? My bet is on the eight months of rehab.
To understand this we must further separate out variables. Motor ability (like walking) results from two general categories of factors - neurological and functional. Neurological factors include things like how intact the spinal cord and nerves are, and is there any damage to specific parts of the brain. Functional factors include conditioning, training, and motivation. So the question we must always ask when someone makes an improvement in motor ability is: was their improvement neurological, functional, or both.
So, put some pebbles in your shoes and you'll escape recognition. The world seems to be heading towards the one described in Corey Doctorow's Little Brother novel. - which is available under a creative commons license. Nicely formatted at feedbooks.com.
I'd go with Citrix (I don't think MS Terminal Services is there just yet) and deploy MS Office to those servers and then distribute all other software via Microsoft Softgrid (soon to be called Microsoft Application Virtualization): http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/softgrid/default.mspx
The combination of Citrix + Softgrid is a pretty powerful combination - there's no need to silo your Citrix farm any more, and apps deployed via softgrid don't leave any junk behind on the filesystem or registry (since both are virtualised). Use a Citrix access gateway (basically an SLL VPN device that integrates with Citrix) to publish a windows desktop and then your remote offices just need a decent connection to the internet (budget approx 50 kbit/sec per user with 30% concurrent usage). Users can then work from home or from a notebook with a 3G data card too. Or forget the access gateway and connect the offices to the data centre with dedicated leased lines / MPLS links etc.
In each office install network printers onto each local device and then use the Citrix Universal Printer driver to send compressed print jobs from the data centre to the printer via the citrix client. Or if you have the bandwidth, install the printer on a print server located in the data centre and send jobs directly from the print server, over the WAN, to the printer in the remote office (this is easier to manage).
Lock down the citrix servers and client desktops with AppSense http://www.appsense.com/ and you'll then have a secure, remotely accessible system which is managed centrally.
That's odd... in Europe I installed the WM6 upgrade for the Blackjack (SGH-i600 in these parts) ages ago.
http://www.samsungmobile.com/promotion/i600/index.jsp
Dr. Steven Novella discusses this drug on his blog.
From: http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/default.asp ?Display=28
I remember Macgyver defeating a hand print scanner using chalk dust to stick to the oils deposited by the previous person who used the scanner. I guess a swipe scanner makes much more sense if you want to try and keep Macgyver out (who are we kidding here, Macgyver can defeat any security system with nothing more than a bar of chocolate and a toothpick).
I nearly drowned on my coffee when I head Dr Karl read out my post this morning. Dr Karl on Mel in the Morning is now the number 1 podcast in Australia. A positive example of the slashdot effect :)
Dr Karl has a happy hour on Triple-J every Thursday morning with Mel (who most slashdotters would die for) - and it's also released as a podcast too. http://www.abc.net.au/science/k2/stn/default.htm
Once a week for a magic hour, Karl is Live on Air on triple j. It's an hour devoted to the collective exploration of some of the great mysteries of life, such as "why does the water in the shower slow down just when it gets hot?"
Ahh, this would explain why my undergraduate WIMP detector failed to detect anything ;)
I use ac3filter http://ac3filter.sourceforge.net/download/ to do the same thing - great for watching HD p2p downloads when the file is wmv-hd (wmv-hd doesn't use AC3 or DTS, it uses WMA Professional 5.1 for the audio).
Instructions here: http://www.avforums.com/forums/showthread.php?p=19 25770#post1925770
Every science geek should listen to Dr Karl's podcast on triple j. Dr Karl has degrees in physics and medicine and is great at answering all those science / medical / engineering questions we all have - and his answers are entertaining to boot (if I had kids, I'd force them to listen to it - and they'd love it too). Brilliant stuff - it's on my iPod every thursday morning. (he's also on five live in the UK an hour after his triple j show, but noon Aussie time translates to 3am UK time unfortunately). To quote from the website: Once a week for a magic hour, Karl is Live on Air on triple j. It's an hour devoted to the collective exploration of some of the great mysteries of life, such as "why does the water in the shower slow down just when it gets hot?". Sorry this has turned into a Dr Karl ad, but it's a great listen.
Remain silent? There was a BBC Horizon documentary on this very subject broadcast earlier this year. You can read more about the problem and the solution here:
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature /oct04/1004titan.html
And here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon /saturn_prog_summary.shtml
Problem: Italian Company (Alenia Spazio) responsible for comms corrected for doppler shift on the carrier signal, but not on the data rate. Alenia Spazio's insistence on confidentiality may have played a role in this oversight. NASA reviewers were never given the specs of the receiver. As JPL's [Robert] Mitchell explained, "Alenia Spazio considered JPL to be a competitor and treated the radio design as proprietary data."
Solution: Altered the trajectory of Cassini / Huygens so that Huygens is moving parallel to Cassini during descent, sidestepping the doppler shift issue.
No!!!!!!!
Then you can't simply browse the list of artists thinking "hmmm, who am i in the mood for...?". Unlike the soundblaster wireless music remote - come on guys!!!
But perhaps they could make it an optional feature for the ipod?
this is what i suggested last year!7 631
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=65970&cid=607
The X1 has been usurped by the new Optoma ThemeScene H30. Less rainbows, quieter, greater contrast ratio and produces a very film-like image. Cost is around 1000 (GB Pounds) - projector central lists a price of $1400 (US).
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?thre adid=351894
http://www.avforums.com/forums/showthread.php?thre adid=127171&perpage=15&pagenumber=1
http://www.projectorcentral.com/part_opinions.cfm? part_id=2235
http://www.themescene.tv/Newsite/H30-Main.htm
From MikeD on avforums.com:
Having completed the fabrication of a steel mount the H30 was duly screwed to the ceiling and a good quality composite and a SCART/VGA cable were connected. Incidentally while on the subject of ceiling mounting, the 3mm mounting holes in the base of the H30 look pretty inadequate for supporting 1100 of projector from the ceiling. I took the precaution of drilling a hole in the ceiling mount base plate to accommodate an additional 6mm bolt; this was then screwed into the tripod-mounting hole for additional security.
Anyway having lined it all up some friends came around to help set it up and see how it performed. One is the proud owner of an AE300 and the other a high end Sony CRT projector that he has installed in a dedicated room with matt black walls to reduce light reflection.
Having quickly tweaked the basic settings on the H30 we darkened the room and put on The Scorpion King, we sat there in utter amazement; the picture quality was truly awesome.
We then put on Armageddon, as we tend to use it, as a reference disc as it contains a good variety of differing scenes, again the picture quality was amazing.
The H30 uses the Pixelworks deinterlacing and scaling chip as opposed to the popular and unquestionably competent Faroudja DCDI, this was my only reservation about the projector prior to purchasing.
Not anymore, the picture was very sharp and had an extremely pleasing film like quality with few artefacts even in fast moving scenes and panned shots.
The black level was incredible far better than anything I have ever seen before south of CRT. I had the masking lens attached which I think I read somewhere increases the contrast ratio to around 2500:1 by reducing unwanted light. Projectors cant project black, correct me if Im wrong but my belief is that to get true black the pixels in the chip are in effect switched off and black is in fact displayed as absence of light. This is one of the reasons why you tend to get a more pleasing picture the darker the room. Most projectors are unable to switch the pixels off completely but it is considered that DLP technology is slightly better at it than LCD particularly on budget home theatre projectors such as the H30. We also found that detail in dark scenes was outstanding, certainly better than we had expected.
Screen door was good and fan noise acceptable, light spill was also not too bad with just a small amount on the ceiling about a foot or so in front of the projector. None of us noticed significant rainbow even though we did try very hard to see them particularly on high contrast fast moving scenes.
We only used eco-mode, as the brightness was more than adequate for a light controlled room and less light tends to give better blacks and contrast anyway, eco mode also has the added benefit of bumping the expected lamp life up from 2000 to 3000 hours. I was actually quite surprised by the projectors brightness, we eventually put this down to the H30s six segment (RGBRGB) colour wheel and the fact
Leave the dead horse alone - much more exciting new on the Babylon 5 front, straight from the horses mouth:
http://www.jmsnews.com/scripts/MsgStore.dll?MfcISA PICommand=GetMsg&List=1&Topic=5&Flags=0&Query=Brow seCmd&QFlags=0&ls=0&qs=0&qt=0
B5:TMoS
Now what on earth does that mean...?
the 1st gen ipod also had a big design flaw - the firewire port is fixed in place with some dabs of solder and once those joints had come loose (after two years use) all that was holding the firewire port to the motherboard were 6 thin pins soldered in place... so of course, they all snapped. thankfully, i manged to re-solder everything back in place (talk about a steep learning curve) and everything works. i'd have hated to buy a new ipod - i like my navigation wheel which actually rotates - it's easier to use when your ipod is in your pocket. of course, i'd have considered an iriver, but the ipod has the best navigation system bar none. that would have been a tough choice.
http://scienceblog.com/community/article2389.html
the profile is still called phoenix in the application data directory (windows) and ~/.phoenix (linux/unix).
oh dear, some facts...
firstly, beagle2 charges its batteries automatically.
secondly, the airbag did fail its first tests, but it did pass its final test (there was not enough time to test further).
sources? the bbc - they made a great 2 part documentary which followed beagle2 from genesis to launch.
not if you flip to BBC/PBS etc... or just hit the teletext button.
because most people grab the remote and flip to other channels when the adverts are on anyway...