People who insist on tagging articles with "correlationisnotcausation" need to understand that "causation" is a human concept, it doesn't actually exist in the universe (except at extremely low particle levels - and even that might turn out to be less than 100% certain).
Every chain of events has tens, hundreds, thousands, millions of intermediate steps, and all of them have a chance to "fail". It's all a matter of probability. It's extremely unlikely that I'll ever be able to move my hand through a table (without breaking the table, anyway), but if a freak set of statistical improbabilities takes place, it could happen.
Beyond a certain level of statistical correlation and consistent temporal relationship (i.e., "X (very nearly) always happens after Y"), we say that something (X) is "caused" by something else (Y).
Of course, maybe the investigators overlooked some variables, and I'm sure they're not claiming that every child that ate candy became violent, but it seems that rewarding impulsive behaviour with candy during childhood increases the likelihood of impulsive (and violent) behaviour later. Is that even particularly surprising?
If you think "causation" is any more than a human rational construct, I recommend reading Stanislaw Lem's "The Investigation". In the real universe (outside our heads), things just happen. Science tries to describe how they happen, not why they happen.
"the iPhone makes it far to easy to ignore this advice"...?
Did the iPhone suddenly invent mobile internet access? Web access has been a standard feature of every cell phone and PDA sold in the world (certainly in Europe and Asia) since years before the iPhone even existed. And is Google now somehow the only way to contact other people or read news websites?
Can these articles at least be tagged with "productplacement" or possibly "fanboysummary"?
And anyway, sequestered jurors aren't allowed to keep cellphones, while non-sequestered jurors can even watch TV, so the whole point is nonsensical.
It's not so much a matter of making the game harder, it's a matter of making it more consistent.
Oblivion was designed to be a console game and to be played by console gamers. It was essentially a fighting game trying to pretend it was a RPG, with a completely inconsistent, illogical world. What OOO and other mods did (BTW, Oscuro is the name of the guy, not the mod) was make the game more consistent, get rid of (or at least greatly reduce) the nonsensical auto-levelling enemies and rewards, and try to intertwine some of the quests with each other (it was pretty obvious that Oblivion's quests had been designed by different people and just stuck together with spit right before release).
Extrapolating the "evolution" from Morrowind to Oblivion, there's a very good chance that TES:V will play like a cross between Serious Sam and Super Mario Kart.
Which RAID controllers do that, exactly? That's a bit like saying that SATA controllers will treat a drive with a single bad sector as being dead. I've never seen a controller do such a thing, and I doubt anyone making those controllers would stay in business for long.
Some controllers will consider a drive as "missing" if it doesn't respond for more than 30 seconds or so, and some SATA drives had a bug (more of a design flaw when used in RAID) that made them spend up to 2 minutes trying to recover a bad sector before responding. The result was the controller assumed the drive had died and said the rebuild had failed. In other words, the problem was the delay, not the bad sector. Anyway, you could still restart the rebuild, but this could be painfully slow if you had a lot of bad sectors.
This is not true for modern controllers, SCSI drives or "RAID edition" SATA drives, that never spend more than a couple of seconds trying to recover bad sectors (they simply give up and let the RAID controller handle it).
I'm not sure if the SATA spec has been expanded to include a "I'm busy trying to remap a sector" drive state, which would obviously be the ideal solution, but "TLER" and longer wait times by modern controllers have made the problem essentially disappear, and I think the problem never existed with SCSI / SAS drives, which is what most people would use for "enterprise" RAID-5 arrays.
If a sector fails during an array rebuild in RAID-5 (after a complete drive failure), you lose one stripe's worth of data (ex., 64 kB x N-1, where N is the number of drives), you don't lose the entire array. Following the article author's logic, if you have a read error in a single drive, then all the data on the drive is lost.
It's amazing that ZDNet would pay someone this clueless to write an article about this subject, it's amazing they published it without any verification, it's amazing that the article is still online (and essentially uncorrected) after almost one year, and it's even more amazing that someone decided to post this on Slashdot.
Grammar checking, resizable text boxes, automatic language translation, fast and efficient javascript engine, just for starters. [...] The references I made to OS X were mostly with regard to problems with failing to properly code for that platform and take advantage of the ways it is superior to Windows.
Opera doesn't have any built-in spelling or grammar checking, so that hardly counts as a "feature copied from other browsers" (unless you mean they copied the absence of a built-in checker?). Under Windows / Linux, Opera uses GNU Aspell and, under OS X, it will use the operating system's checker. I guess that contradicts your theory that "Opera is not coded to take advantage of the features offered by OS X".
Resizable text boxes are not defined by the current HTML / CSS standards. If and when resizability becomes a valid property of text boxes, recognised by the W3C, I'm sure Opera will implement it. Allowing the user to resize text boxes on pages that weren't coded to deal with that can seriously break their layout. If the web site creator wants the boxes to be resizable, right now, he or she can implement it with JavaScript (and this works fine in Opera). Opera also does not support some proprietary Mozilla CSS extensions, for example, but will support the "official" (W3C) equivalents.
I'm not sure what you mean by "automatic language translation". If you're talking about Safari's Language Translator widget, that's a 3rd party plug-in and, in any case, Opera can do the same thing; you just need to select some text, right-click on it and select the language (no need to install 3rd party widgets or cut & paste the text). Opera has done this since before Safari even existed, so again I don't see how it can be considered a feature copied from another browser.
Finally, I also don't see how "fast and efficient javascript engine" counts as a "feature copied from other browsers"; when the current Opera JS engine was released, it was 4 times faster than pretty much any other browser of the time (still is the fastest in most interactive operations, although string handling is a bit slow - possibly due to the extra privacy / security features in Opera). Personally I've never felt that Opera was "slow" at handling JS (can't say the same about Firefox 2. Firefox 3 is much better, but still not as responsive as Opera in several sites I visit).
Gecko based browsers still run it twice as fast as Opera.
Latest "non-partisan" benchmark I could find online at an English-language site (September 2008):
Opera 9.5.2 runtime = 420 Firefox 3.0.1 runtime = 538
Firefox (Gecko) is 30% slower (or was, one month ago - that may have changed, but most people don't update their browser every day, so my original point stands).
Sunspider is a "core" JavaScript benchmark that doesn't test any web page manipulation or interaction. That's fine if you're planning to code JavaScript applications, but won't tell you much about how well a browser handles JavaScript used in an interactive web page (which is what really matters to 99% of end users).
BTW, if you look at the results of Google's V8 benchmark, Google Chrome is more than twice as fast as any other browser. And I bet Microsoft could come up with a benchmark where MSIE would be #1. That doesn't mean it'll translate into the real world.
Opera has introduced many new features, and other browsers have been slow to copy them, but Opera has always been quick to clone any useful features from other browsers.
Such as...? The only major feature that I remember Opera introducing after other browsers was automated password management, and they took ages to add that.
I'm going to pick the most featureful and preferred platform for my own use. [...] a quick test on the platform I prefer shows that Opera is not particularly fast
When the platform you choose is the platform of choice for 5% of people (in the US - probably more like 3% worldwide), I really don't think your results can be taken to represent browser performance in general (as experienced by the majority of people).
And are you really surprised that WebKit's internal benchmark (Sunspider) runs faster on WebKit-based browsers...?
Actually, according to the writers of the test, no engine passed completely until September 25th, when Webkit managed to render the animation portion smoothly
Opera's rendering engine (Presto/WinGogi) and WebKit (used in Chrome / Safari) both reached 100/100 on the 26th and 27th of March, respectively.
Introducing "smoothness" requirements means a browser may pass or fail the test depending on what hardware it's running on (and the opinion of the person watching the test - smooth for you might not be smooth for me). IMO the point of the Acid test is to check standards-compliance, not performance. If a browser gets 100/100, it passed.
And while both layout engines got the perfect score months ago, the current release version of Safari scores only 75/100, and Opera 9.60 scores only 85/100 (highest of any current non-beta browser, but still not 100).
BTW, the Acid3 test has changed several times after bugs in the test itself were discovered, the latest one on September 29th, so maybe no engine will actually get 100/100 when it's fixed.
it used to be that Opera had pretty much cloned all the neato features of other browsers
In fact, they were so good at "cloning the neato features of other browsers" that they often cloned those features months (sometimes years) before the other browsers had them (in some cases, before those browsers even existed).:-)
Personally, I like Opera on Windows quite a bit and it may be my favorite browser on that platform... but I don't browse in Windows [...] you realize they coded it for Windows
If you're going to pick one platform to optimise (or if you're going to pick one platform to benchmark), it makes sense to pick the platform with 90% market share (Windows) over one that barely reaches 5% (OS X), no? Or test all platforms and then weigh the final scores based on each platform's share.
[quote]Long-time opera user here, and I feel it's falling behind rapidly. No ACID3, relatively slow javascript, other browsers catching up.[/quote]
You're kidding, right? Opera was the first browser to get 100/100 in ACID3 (unsurprisingly, BTW, since the ACID test is co-developed by some guys from Opera Software), one day before WebKit, and consistently wins JS benchmarks (only being narrowly beaten in some of them by FF3 - FF2 got hammered).
And what sense does it make to say that it's "falling behind" while "other browsers are catching up"...? Falling behind what, exactly?
What I want to know about the new version is: can we FINALLY delete a message attachment while keeping the actual message? To me, that (along with the mail search index becoming corrupted and requiring a rebuild every couple of months) is the main problem with M2. Also, it should allow index searches by partial words. Okay, I have three complaints. And I didn't expect the spanish inquisition.
Is it just me or does anyone else get the feeling that the original story confuses two completely different concepts (digital photos and drive images)?
If you're going to measure quality simply by number of units sold, McDonald's must serve the finest food in the world.
How much a game sells is mainly a product of how much hype was created around it and / or how good its prequels were. Lots of brilliant games (ex., System Shock 2) were short-term commercial failures because people simply don't hear about them.
Oblivion is fine as a "medieval combat" game with a big world to explore, lots of monsters, etc., especially after you install a mod or two to get rid of the incredibly stupid auto-levelling system. But it was not even close to the "living world" RPG that was being promised (the "groundbreaking AI" somehow morphed into repetitive, buggy scripting, etc.), and in fact had less atmosphere than any of the previous Elder Scrolls games (which, while not perfect, looked like they could be the start of something good).
So yes, to pretty much anyone expecting a "true" RPG, with an immersive, consistent game world, and gameplay that actually required people to use their brains, Oblivion was a major disappointment.
Now, I'm sure there are people who like medieval-themed FPS games designed for 8 year old console players with ADD (in fact, that seems to be a huge market these days - medieval theme optional), so future Elder Scrolls games might continue to sell. But they won't be selling to the same people who bought Oblivion because they were told it would be a good RPG.
I'm the type of gamer that likes to play the game that was given to me. As such, I rarely use mods unless they're produced by the same company that made the game.
So, if the game is crap, you still "like to play it" simply because "it was the game that was given to you", even if someone created a mod that makes the game a lot better (like OOO for Oblivion)? Oh well, I guess conformism is its own punishment.
This is a very bad sign, that goes far beyond the absence of actual mod tools.
Some people don't know why Half-Life was such a great game and why Oblivion was so disappointing. The answer is just one word: play-testing. Okay, maybe that's two words.
Half-Life spent half its development life (ha-ha) in testing (and refining). And Half-Life 2 levels started being playtested before the textures were even ready (remember those "orange map" screenshots in the teasers?).
Oblivion's quests feels buggy and disjointed mainly because it was not playtested by anyone outside Bethesda, and some last-minute adjustments to the game probably weren't tested at all.
Now, what does all this have to do with the announcement that mod tools won't be available? Simple: mod tools and documentation are tipically readied for end users while the game is in the final testing stage which, even on a relatively linear game like Half-Life, should take several months or years, if the game is to be any good. During this stage only minor things are being tweaked, like map design, damage of each weapon, location and frequency of rewards, etc.. Basically stuff that doesn't keep the programmers too busy, so they can focus on polishing the mod tools (in fact, better mod tools will also make that final tweaking much easier).
So, when the official word is that "[mod tools are] not on our schedule right now. We need to get the game done and out", what that means is the game isn't even ready yet, but the release date is already set, so there will be little if any playtesting (probably, as with Oblivion, only internal playtesting, which is close to useless in terms of gameplay tuning, it'll just catch the most obvious bugs). And, of course, without mod tools we can't even expect a fan-made "Fallout Overhaul" any time soon.
I can't say this is unexpected, but it is disappointing. Considering the FPS-like gameplay shown in the demo videos and now this, I'm pretty sure I won't be buying Fallout 3 in the first few months after release, if ever.
Can someone please put the 1992 Origin team back together? I miss a good RPG.
The "correlation isn't causation" argument has its limits. You might as well say that people should be allowed to shoot other people, because the act of pulling the trigger doesn't actually cause the other person to die, and not everyone that is hit by a bullet dies as a direct or indirect consequence of that. But there is quite a strong correlation between aiming a gun at someone and pulling the trigger and that someone not being alive shortly afterwards.
Hell, even in physics we don't know "why" stuff happens, we just know that some stuff seems to happen consistently after some other stuff, even in cases where looking deeper reveals no mechanism linking the two things. Causation is just a (very) strong correlation.
The above isn't related to this particular case; just to the tendency people have to use the "correlation isn't causation" argument around here.
Regarding these videos, something made with the aim of "intimidating people" probably falls under "incitement to violence", and is therefore already forbidden in most civilised countries. From TFA, it seems Google has no problem with videos showing knife tricks, etc., so no real loss. Basically they're just saying they'll now keep an eye out for something they should already have been keeping an eye out for.
I definitely prefer well defined rules ("you can't post this") than a situation where people who break some unknown rule are then the subject of police investigation, surveillance and possibly (unjustified) arrest (think students requesting some book tagged as a "terrorist manual" from a public library to use as part of some project, etc.).
Well, mine boots in one minute, and that's including the 25 seconds the RAID controller spends looking for drives (before I installed it, it "booted to desktop" in exactly 26 seconds - I timed it). Add about 3 seconds to start something like Notepad / Textpad (or 6 seconds to start a real word processor) and you should be up and running in 30-90 seconds. Not lightning fast, and slightly slower than a "lightweight" Linux system, but a long way from "4 minutes".
But you can be up and running in much less than that simply by using sleep / hibernate, instead of actually loading the full OS.
Or get a modern PDA / cell phone. You can take photos of anything that's already written down or you can use the sound recorder to take voice notes (this is assuming you don't like typing on a PDA / cell phone keyboard). Then just transfer everything to your PC via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth or whatever.
For the true "pen & paper" feel, get a digital pen (Flash-heavy site). You'll still need to find something (or someone) to write on, though.
High Fructose Corn Syrup might be not very common in Europe, but most of the soft drinks contain "glucose-fructose syrup"... Generally the same evil shit, only probably not made from corn.
Glucose-fructose syrup used in Europe will nearly always have less than 10% of fructose, so it's very different from HFCS (which has 40-55% fructose). The one similar to HFCS is called isoglucose (typically with 42% fructose). In any case, the majority of drinks (Coke, Fanta, etc.) uses sucrose (mostly due to production quotas & taxes, not because of any health concerns).
And anyway, sucrose (regular cane / beet sugar) breaks down into fructose and glucose when it's digested, so if there's anything special about HFCS it won't be the fructose (or the glucose), it'll probably be in some other substance present in it in very small amounts, and not present in other types of sugar.
Not that any of this has much to do with the study in question.
And we got some yogurt in Italy last summer that was chock full of HFCS, IIRC, so it's not unheard of even there.
You probably don't remember correctly. It's very much "heard of". It's just not used very frequently (for various reasons, starting with the fact that Europe doesn't produce more corn than it knows what do do with - in fact, it probably imports some corn), and when it is used, it's generally called "isoglucose", not HFCS, so you probably wouldn't have recognised it anyway.
I would say you may have been eating an imported yogurt (made in the USA or Japan), but I seriously doubt anyone in Italy would import dairy products from either of those two countries. Unless it was frozen yogurt, of course.
It's not impossible that some italian brand of yogurt decided to use a relatively rare, highly regulated sweetener, and then described it on the label (in English, no less) using the american designation. It's just highly unlikely.
people who eat prepackaged foods are more likely to be in a hurry
Go on, criticise people who (in fact don't) jump to conclusions based on incomplete data and then pull some sweeping, nonsensical generalisation out of thin air.
Oh, and then build on that by adding:
[...] and thus more prone to stress, and thus more prone to obesity. They are also less likely to have time to get exercise, and thus more prone to obesity. [...] what common cause triggered both the obesity [...] increased BPA exposure and obesity [...] Obesity would presumably [...] that resulted in weight gain [...]
Seriously, RTFA. It says nothing about obesity. It's about heart disease and diabetes.
People who eat more prepackaged foods are more likely to be taking in all sorts of stuff---high fructose corn syrup, higher levels of sugar, higher levels of various preservatives [...]
It seems that no one bothers to actually read the articles before posting (save the "you must be new here", I'm being sarcastic).
You see, the study didn't test exposure to BPA. It only compared the likelihood of some diseases with the amount of BPA present in the body. That's an important detail.
In other words, this correlation may very well indicate causation... the other way around. Heart disease or diabetes may cause your body to retain more BPA. As simple as that.
Shooting off in random directions and making conjectures about the habits of people who come into contact with BPA is pointless (unless you're planning to back it up with data). For example, BPA is used in the packaging of several vegetables, so you can eat nothing but "health food" and still come into contact with BPA frequently. In fact the article points out that 90% of the people tested had some BPA in their body. Also, high-fuctose corn syrup is relatively rare outside the USA (extremely rare in Europe), and the study was (apparently) conducted in the UK.
In any case the study's authors are not claiming any causation, one way or the other, and they specifically say they did not identify any mechanism through which BPA would cause any illness.
Well, in the hospitals etc, the normal strain is indeed killed of by disinfectants and antibiotics, and only the resistant ones survive.
You realise that's kind of a tautology, right?:-)
What I'm talking about would be to intentionally design different disinfectants and antibiotics and use them as a sort of rigged rock-paper-scissors game. [...] Or to say it an other way, design disinfectants and antibiotics to target the bacterial resistance mechanisms against other disinfectants and antibiotics.
Just because a bacterial strain is resistant to antibiotic X, that immunity does not necessarily make it more susceptibe to any other kind of "attack". Its "cost" to the bacteria might boil down to something like slower reproduction, greater need of food, etc.. In some rare cases it might have no cost at all.
Now, if you stop using that antibiotic for several years, then bacteria that aren't immune to it might slowly become dominant again (because they reproduce faster, or require less food, or whatever). So the antibiotic that killed 99% of bacteria in 1999 and then could only kill 1% of bacteria in 2000 might be able to kill 50% in 2010 and 99% in 2050, if it's not used for 50 years (if it's used, then the resistant strain will remain dominant, because the antibiotic will kill its competitors).
So you use antibiotic X for a couple of years, then you switch to Y for a couple of years, then to Z, and so on. You only go back to X when you run out of alterntives. This technique (antibiotic rotation) can reduce the need for new antibiotics, and is already used, though not as well as it should (it needs to be coordinated between different countries, etc.).
The sterilisation system described in this article (which isn't really new) is nice because it kills bacteria using an approach very different from ingestible / injectable antibiotic, so even if resistant strains somehow develop, that resistance shouldn't impact the effectiveness of antibiotics. It's not as if they're covering the walls with penicillin.
Honestly, though, most people who work with bacteria conflate the the two verbally and expect the listener to parse it out.
Absolutely. The problem is the listener can only parse it out if (s)he is already familiar with the process (and, as the polls about creationism, intelligent design, etc., show, most people don't really know what "natural selection" consists of, let alone understand how the use of antibiotics leads to the existence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria).
I'm willing to give the researcher the benefit of the doubt, though it does allow someone with confusion on the subject to stay confused.
If only they "stayed confused" (uncertain), that would be a good thing, because it might stimulate them to lern more. The problem is when they are mistaken (i.e., fully convinced of something that is incorrect) and that mistake gets reinforced.
Sadly this problem even affacts some people supposedly responsible for the "public understanding of science" (cough*Dawkins*cough). They're great at preaching to the choir, but completely unable to get through to people who don't already have a reasonable understanding of the subject, due to that use of (often misleading, and mistake-reinforcing) "shorthand".
I don't think making people more accurate would prevent nutjobs from believing in creationism;-)
What I found is that, if you explain things step by step (and explain that natural selection has nothing to do with the origin of life, etc.), most creationist nutjobs will actually see that it makes sense. They'll still "believe" in creation, but they'll understand and accept natural selection, which is an important first step. The supernatural isn't disprovable by science, but it can be made unnecessary.
"Bacteria growing a resistance" already refers to more than one organism, as it's not "bacterium".
But it doesn't necessarily refer to more than one generation, which is the whole point. I don't think anyone expects to be infected by a single bacterium (it's was freakin' huge, man!), so you'd always use "bacteria" even when talking about a single strain / generation.
When you say "the children are growing", people will take that to mean "multiple children are getting bigger", not that "each generation is taller than the previous one". The mechanisms are completely different (individual development versus selection within the species).
Okay, human generations are getting taller because they have more food and so on, not (just) because of selection, but you get the point.
Our immune system does not "learn".
Our individual cells and antibodies do not learn. The immune system as a whole can detect pathogens, increase its own level of activity, test several ways of dealing with them, and remember what "worked". Isn't that pretty much the definition of "learning" (unless you get metaphysical)?
Expose a person to a weak pathogen (ex., a vaccine) and her immune system may acquire immunity to it. This is the immune system of that same person, not "future generations of her species". And, unless someone explains it to them, people assume bacteria work the same way (expose them to a bit of antibiotic and they'll become "vaccinated" against it).
I don't have any problem with someone saying that a given bacterial strain "acquired immunity to" a given antibiotic. My point is that its immunity was the result of a random mutation (which took place independently of its exposure to the antibiotic), and not a "deliberate" mutation caused by exposure to the antibiotic. The antibiotic simply eliminated the individuals that weren't immune, thus causing future generations to descend from the immune ones. Antibiotics don't make bacteria stronger, they kill them. They just don't necessarily kill 100% of them.
Anyway, I'm obviously preaching to the choir, here. If only there was a way to make mainstream media more competent or, failing that, kill all the ignorant strains...:-p
Slashdot Mirror
That second sentence makes absolutely no sense.
People who insist on tagging articles with "correlationisnotcausation" need to understand that "causation" is a human concept, it doesn't actually exist in the universe (except at extremely low particle levels - and even that might turn out to be less than 100% certain).
Every chain of events has tens, hundreds, thousands, millions of intermediate steps, and all of them have a chance to "fail". It's all a matter of probability. It's extremely unlikely that I'll ever be able to move my hand through a table (without breaking the table, anyway), but if a freak set of statistical improbabilities takes place, it could happen.
Beyond a certain level of statistical correlation and consistent temporal relationship (i.e., "X (very nearly) always happens after Y"), we say that something (X) is "caused" by something else (Y).
Of course, maybe the investigators overlooked some variables, and I'm sure they're not claiming that every child that ate candy became violent, but it seems that rewarding impulsive behaviour with candy during childhood increases the likelihood of impulsive (and violent) behaviour later. Is that even particularly surprising?
If you think "causation" is any more than a human rational construct, I recommend reading Stanislaw Lem's "The Investigation". In the real universe (outside our heads), things just happen. Science tries to describe how they happen, not why they happen.
"Googling"...?
"the iPhone makes it far to easy to ignore this advice"...?
Did the iPhone suddenly invent mobile internet access? Web access has been a standard feature of every cell phone and PDA sold in the world (certainly in Europe and Asia) since years before the iPhone even existed. And is Google now somehow the only way to contact other people or read news websites?
Can these articles at least be tagged with "productplacement" or possibly "fanboysummary"?
And anyway, sequestered jurors aren't allowed to keep cellphones, while non-sequestered jurors can even watch TV, so the whole point is nonsensical.
And then kill them with a chainsaw and use their blood to write "666" on the walls.
That would definitely freak out superstitious people.
It's not so much a matter of making the game harder, it's a matter of making it more consistent.
Oblivion was designed to be a console game and to be played by console gamers. It was essentially a fighting game trying to pretend it was a RPG, with a completely inconsistent, illogical world. What OOO and other mods did (BTW, Oscuro is the name of the guy, not the mod) was make the game more consistent, get rid of (or at least greatly reduce) the nonsensical auto-levelling enemies and rewards, and try to intertwine some of the quests with each other (it was pretty obvious that Oblivion's quests had been designed by different people and just stuck together with spit right before release).
Extrapolating the "evolution" from Morrowind to Oblivion, there's a very good chance that TES:V will play like a cross between Serious Sam and Super Mario Kart.
Which RAID controllers do that, exactly? That's a bit like saying that SATA controllers will treat a drive with a single bad sector as being dead. I've never seen a controller do such a thing, and I doubt anyone making those controllers would stay in business for long.
Some controllers will consider a drive as "missing" if it doesn't respond for more than 30 seconds or so, and some SATA drives had a bug (more of a design flaw when used in RAID) that made them spend up to 2 minutes trying to recover a bad sector before responding. The result was the controller assumed the drive had died and said the rebuild had failed. In other words, the problem was the delay, not the bad sector. Anyway, you could still restart the rebuild, but this could be painfully slow if you had a lot of bad sectors.
This is not true for modern controllers, SCSI drives or "RAID edition" SATA drives, that never spend more than a couple of seconds trying to recover bad sectors (they simply give up and let the RAID controller handle it).
I'm not sure if the SATA spec has been expanded to include a "I'm busy trying to remap a sector" drive state, which would obviously be the ideal solution, but "TLER" and longer wait times by modern controllers have made the problem essentially disappear, and I think the problem never existed with SCSI / SAS drives, which is what most people would use for "enterprise" RAID-5 arrays.
If a sector fails during an array rebuild in RAID-5 (after a complete drive failure), you lose one stripe's worth of data (ex., 64 kB x N-1, where N is the number of drives), you don't lose the entire array. Following the article author's logic, if you have a read error in a single drive, then all the data on the drive is lost.
It's amazing that ZDNet would pay someone this clueless to write an article about this subject, it's amazing they published it without any verification, it's amazing that the article is still online (and essentially uncorrected) after almost one year, and it's even more amazing that someone decided to post this on Slashdot.
"Microsoft, Google Battle Over Energy Efficiency"
And! Microsoft and Google! Say your goddamn conjunctions!
Grammar checking, resizable text boxes, automatic language translation, fast and efficient javascript engine, just for starters. [...] The references I made to OS X were mostly with regard to problems with failing to properly code for that platform and take advantage of the ways it is superior to Windows.
Opera doesn't have any built-in spelling or grammar checking, so that hardly counts as a "feature copied from other browsers" (unless you mean they copied the absence of a built-in checker?). Under Windows / Linux, Opera uses GNU Aspell and, under OS X, it will use the operating system's checker. I guess that contradicts your theory that "Opera is not coded to take advantage of the features offered by OS X".
Resizable text boxes are not defined by the current HTML / CSS standards. If and when resizability becomes a valid property of text boxes, recognised by the W3C, I'm sure Opera will implement it. Allowing the user to resize text boxes on pages that weren't coded to deal with that can seriously break their layout. If the web site creator wants the boxes to be resizable, right now, he or she can implement it with JavaScript (and this works fine in Opera). Opera also does not support some proprietary Mozilla CSS extensions, for example, but will support the "official" (W3C) equivalents.
I'm not sure what you mean by "automatic language translation". If you're talking about Safari's Language Translator widget, that's a 3rd party plug-in and, in any case, Opera can do the same thing; you just need to select some text, right-click on it and select the language (no need to install 3rd party widgets or cut & paste the text). Opera has done this since before Safari even existed, so again I don't see how it can be considered a feature copied from another browser.
Finally, I also don't see how "fast and efficient javascript engine" counts as a "feature copied from other browsers"; when the current Opera JS engine was released, it was 4 times faster than pretty much any other browser of the time (still is the fastest in most interactive operations, although string handling is a bit slow - possibly due to the extra privacy / security features in Opera). Personally I've never felt that Opera was "slow" at handling JS (can't say the same about Firefox 2. Firefox 3 is much better, but still not as responsive as Opera in several sites I visit).
Gecko based browsers still run it twice as fast as Opera.
Latest "non-partisan" benchmark I could find online at an English-language site (September 2008):
http://celtickane.com/webdesign/jsspeedarchive.php
Opera 9.5.2 runtime = 420
Firefox 3.0.1 runtime = 538
Firefox (Gecko) is 30% slower (or was, one month ago - that may have changed, but most people don't update their browser every day, so my original point stands).
Sunspider is a "core" JavaScript benchmark that doesn't test any web page manipulation or interaction. That's fine if you're planning to code JavaScript applications, but won't tell you much about how well a browser handles JavaScript used in an interactive web page (which is what really matters to 99% of end users).
BTW, if you look at the results of Google's V8 benchmark, Google Chrome is more than twice as fast as any other browser. And I bet Microsoft could come up with a benchmark where MSIE would be #1. That doesn't mean it'll translate into the real world.
Opera has introduced many new features, and other browsers have been slow to copy them, but Opera has always been quick to clone any useful features from other browsers.
Such as...? The only major feature that I remember Opera introducing after other browsers was automated password management, and they took ages to add that.
I'm going to pick the most featureful and preferred platform for my own use. [...] a quick test on the platform I prefer shows that Opera is not particularly fast
When the platform you choose is the platform of choice for 5% of people (in the US - probably more like 3% worldwide), I really don't think your results can be taken to represent browser performance in general (as experienced by the majority of people).
And are you really surprised that WebKit's internal benchmark (Sunspider) runs faster on WebKit-based browsers...?
Actually, according to the writers of the test, no engine passed completely until September 25th, when Webkit managed to render the animation portion smoothly
Opera's rendering engine (Presto/WinGogi) and WebKit (used in Chrome / Safari) both reached 100/100 on the 26th and 27th of March, respectively.
Introducing "smoothness" requirements means a browser may pass or fail the test depending on what hardware it's running on (and the opinion of the person watching the test - smooth for you might not be smooth for me). IMO the point of the Acid test is to check standards-compliance, not performance. If a browser gets 100/100, it passed.
And while both layout engines got the perfect score months ago, the current release version of Safari scores only 75/100, and Opera 9.60 scores only 85/100 (highest of any current non-beta browser, but still not 100).
BTW, the Acid3 test has changed several times after bugs in the test itself were discovered, the latest one on September 29th, so maybe no engine will actually get 100/100 when it's fixed.
it used to be that Opera had pretty much cloned all the neato features of other browsers
In fact, they were so good at "cloning the neato features of other browsers" that they often cloned those features months (sometimes years) before the other browsers had them (in some cases, before those browsers even existed). :-)
Personally, I like Opera on Windows quite a bit and it may be my favorite browser on that platform... but I don't browse in Windows [...] you realize they coded it for Windows
If you're going to pick one platform to optimise (or if you're going to pick one platform to benchmark), it makes sense to pick the platform with 90% market share (Windows) over one that barely reaches 5% (OS X), no? Or test all platforms and then weigh the final scores based on each platform's share.
[quote]Long-time opera user here, and I feel it's falling behind rapidly. No ACID3, relatively slow javascript, other browsers catching up.[/quote]
You're kidding, right? Opera was the first browser to get 100/100 in ACID3 (unsurprisingly, BTW, since the ACID test is co-developed by some guys from Opera Software), one day before WebKit, and consistently wins JS benchmarks (only being narrowly beaten in some of them by FF3 - FF2 got hammered).
And what sense does it make to say that it's "falling behind" while "other browsers are catching up"...? Falling behind what, exactly?
What I want to know about the new version is: can we FINALLY delete a message attachment while keeping the actual message? To me, that (along with the mail search index becoming corrupted and requiring a rebuild every couple of months) is the main problem with M2. Also, it should allow index searches by partial words. Okay, I have three complaints. And I didn't expect the spanish inquisition.
No, you don't get it. The article is about the extremely high-acceleration sporing of fungus fire.
Is it just me or does anyone else get the feeling that the original story confuses two completely different concepts (digital photos and drive images)?
Torture camps? Check.
Oligarchy with fake elections? Check.
Getting ass kicked in Afghanistan? Check.
And now the state is nationalising corporations.
It's official, folks, the USA are the new Soviet Russia. Time to recycle all those jokes.
Finally we know what goes between:
1. Shine a laser on a surface full of nanoscale holes. ...and...
3. Profit!
Did it not sell well?
If you're going to measure quality simply by number of units sold, McDonald's must serve the finest food in the world.
How much a game sells is mainly a product of how much hype was created around it and / or how good its prequels were. Lots of brilliant games (ex., System Shock 2) were short-term commercial failures because people simply don't hear about them.
Oblivion is fine as a "medieval combat" game with a big world to explore, lots of monsters, etc., especially after you install a mod or two to get rid of the incredibly stupid auto-levelling system. But it was not even close to the "living world" RPG that was being promised (the "groundbreaking AI" somehow morphed into repetitive, buggy scripting, etc.), and in fact had less atmosphere than any of the previous Elder Scrolls games (which, while not perfect, looked like they could be the start of something good).
So yes, to pretty much anyone expecting a "true" RPG, with an immersive, consistent game world, and gameplay that actually required people to use their brains, Oblivion was a major disappointment.
Now, I'm sure there are people who like medieval-themed FPS games designed for 8 year old console players with ADD (in fact, that seems to be a huge market these days - medieval theme optional), so future Elder Scrolls games might continue to sell. But they won't be selling to the same people who bought Oblivion because they were told it would be a good RPG.
I'm the type of gamer that likes to play the game that was given to me. As such, I rarely use mods unless they're produced by the same company that made the game.
So, if the game is crap, you still "like to play it" simply because "it was the game that was given to you", even if someone created a mod that makes the game a lot better (like OOO for Oblivion)? Oh well, I guess conformism is its own punishment.
This is a very bad sign, that goes far beyond the absence of actual mod tools.
Some people don't know why Half-Life was such a great game and why Oblivion was so disappointing. The answer is just one word: play-testing. Okay, maybe that's two words.
Half-Life spent half its development life (ha-ha) in testing (and refining). And Half-Life 2 levels started being playtested before the textures were even ready (remember those "orange map" screenshots in the teasers?).
Oblivion's quests feels buggy and disjointed mainly because it was not playtested by anyone outside Bethesda, and some last-minute adjustments to the game probably weren't tested at all.
Now, what does all this have to do with the announcement that mod tools won't be available? Simple: mod tools and documentation are tipically readied for end users while the game is in the final testing stage which, even on a relatively linear game like Half-Life, should take several months or years, if the game is to be any good. During this stage only minor things are being tweaked, like map design, damage of each weapon, location and frequency of rewards, etc.. Basically stuff that doesn't keep the programmers too busy, so they can focus on polishing the mod tools (in fact, better mod tools will also make that final tweaking much easier).
So, when the official word is that "[mod tools are] not on our schedule right now. We need to get the game done and out", what that means is the game isn't even ready yet, but the release date is already set, so there will be little if any playtesting (probably, as with Oblivion, only internal playtesting, which is close to useless in terms of gameplay tuning, it'll just catch the most obvious bugs). And, of course, without mod tools we can't even expect a fan-made "Fallout Overhaul" any time soon.
I can't say this is unexpected, but it is disappointing. Considering the FPS-like gameplay shown in the demo videos and now this, I'm pretty sure I won't be buying Fallout 3 in the first few months after release, if ever.
Can someone please put the 1992 Origin team back together? I miss a good RPG.
The "correlation isn't causation" argument has its limits. You might as well say that people should be allowed to shoot other people, because the act of pulling the trigger doesn't actually cause the other person to die, and not everyone that is hit by a bullet dies as a direct or indirect consequence of that. But there is quite a strong correlation between aiming a gun at someone and pulling the trigger and that someone not being alive shortly afterwards.
Hell, even in physics we don't know "why" stuff happens, we just know that some stuff seems to happen consistently after some other stuff, even in cases where looking deeper reveals no mechanism linking the two things. Causation is just a (very) strong correlation.
The above isn't related to this particular case; just to the tendency people have to use the "correlation isn't causation" argument around here.
Regarding these videos, something made with the aim of "intimidating people" probably falls under "incitement to violence", and is therefore already forbidden in most civilised countries. From TFA, it seems Google has no problem with videos showing knife tricks, etc., so no real loss. Basically they're just saying they'll now keep an eye out for something they should already have been keeping an eye out for.
I definitely prefer well defined rules ("you can't post this") than a situation where people who break some unknown rule are then the subject of police investigation, surveillance and possibly (unjustified) arrest (think students requesting some book tagged as a "terrorist manual" from a public library to use as part of some project, etc.).
XP loads in roughly 4 minutes to usable
Well, mine boots in one minute, and that's including the 25 seconds the RAID controller spends looking for drives (before I installed it, it "booted to desktop" in exactly 26 seconds - I timed it). Add about 3 seconds to start something like Notepad / Textpad (or 6 seconds to start a real word processor) and you should be up and running in 30-90 seconds. Not lightning fast, and slightly slower than a "lightweight" Linux system, but a long way from "4 minutes".
But you can be up and running in much less than that simply by using sleep / hibernate, instead of actually loading the full OS.
Or get a modern PDA / cell phone. You can take photos of anything that's already written down or you can use the sound recorder to take voice notes (this is assuming you don't like typing on a PDA / cell phone keyboard). Then just transfer everything to your PC via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth or whatever.
For the true "pen & paper" feel, get a digital pen (Flash-heavy site). You'll still need to find something (or someone) to write on, though.
High Fructose Corn Syrup might be not very common in Europe, but most of the soft drinks contain "glucose-fructose syrup"... Generally the same evil shit, only probably not made from corn.
Glucose-fructose syrup used in Europe will nearly always have less than 10% of fructose, so it's very different from HFCS (which has 40-55% fructose). The one similar to HFCS is called isoglucose (typically with 42% fructose). In any case, the majority of drinks (Coke, Fanta, etc.) uses sucrose (mostly due to production quotas & taxes, not because of any health concerns).
And anyway, sucrose (regular cane / beet sugar) breaks down into fructose and glucose when it's digested, so if there's anything special about HFCS it won't be the fructose (or the glucose), it'll probably be in some other substance present in it in very small amounts, and not present in other types of sugar.
Not that any of this has much to do with the study in question.
And we got some yogurt in Italy last summer that was chock full of HFCS, IIRC, so it's not unheard of even there.
You probably don't remember correctly. It's very much "heard of". It's just not used very frequently (for various reasons, starting with the fact that Europe doesn't produce more corn than it knows what do do with - in fact, it probably imports some corn), and when it is used, it's generally called "isoglucose", not HFCS, so you probably wouldn't have recognised it anyway.
I would say you may have been eating an imported yogurt (made in the USA or Japan), but I seriously doubt anyone in Italy would import dairy products from either of those two countries. Unless it was frozen yogurt, of course.
It's not impossible that some italian brand of yogurt decided to use a relatively rare, highly regulated sweetener, and then described it on the label (in English, no less) using the american designation. It's just highly unlikely.
people who eat prepackaged foods are more likely to be in a hurry
Go on, criticise people who (in fact don't) jump to conclusions based on incomplete data and then pull some sweeping, nonsensical generalisation out of thin air.
Oh, and then build on that by adding:
[...] and thus more prone to stress, and thus more prone to obesity. They are also less likely to have time to get exercise, and thus more prone to obesity. [...] what common cause triggered both the obesity [...] increased BPA exposure and obesity [...] Obesity would presumably [...] that resulted in weight gain [...]
Seriously, RTFA. It says nothing about obesity. It's about heart disease and diabetes.
People who eat more prepackaged foods are more likely to be taking in all sorts of stuff---high fructose corn syrup, higher levels of sugar, higher levels of various preservatives [...]
It seems that no one bothers to actually read the articles before posting (save the "you must be new here", I'm being sarcastic).
You see, the study didn't test exposure to BPA. It only compared the likelihood of some diseases with the amount of BPA present in the body. That's an important detail.
In other words, this correlation may very well indicate causation... the other way around. Heart disease or diabetes may cause your body to retain more BPA. As simple as that.
Shooting off in random directions and making conjectures about the habits of people who come into contact with BPA is pointless (unless you're planning to back it up with data). For example, BPA is used in the packaging of several vegetables, so you can eat nothing but "health food" and still come into contact with BPA frequently. In fact the article points out that 90% of the people tested had some BPA in their body. Also, high-fuctose corn syrup is relatively rare outside the USA (extremely rare in Europe), and the study was (apparently) conducted in the UK.
In any case the study's authors are not claiming any causation, one way or the other, and they specifically say they did not identify any mechanism through which BPA would cause any illness.
Well, in the hospitals etc, the normal strain is indeed killed of by disinfectants and antibiotics, and only the resistant ones survive.
You realise that's kind of a tautology, right? :-)
What I'm talking about would be to intentionally design different disinfectants and antibiotics and use them as a sort of rigged rock-paper-scissors game. [...] Or to say it an other way, design disinfectants and antibiotics to target the bacterial resistance mechanisms against other disinfectants and antibiotics.
Just because a bacterial strain is resistant to antibiotic X, that immunity does not necessarily make it more susceptibe to any other kind of "attack". Its "cost" to the bacteria might boil down to something like slower reproduction, greater need of food, etc.. In some rare cases it might have no cost at all.
Now, if you stop using that antibiotic for several years, then bacteria that aren't immune to it might slowly become dominant again (because they reproduce faster, or require less food, or whatever). So the antibiotic that killed 99% of bacteria in 1999 and then could only kill 1% of bacteria in 2000 might be able to kill 50% in 2010 and 99% in 2050, if it's not used for 50 years (if it's used, then the resistant strain will remain dominant, because the antibiotic will kill its competitors).
So you use antibiotic X for a couple of years, then you switch to Y for a couple of years, then to Z, and so on. You only go back to X when you run out of alterntives. This technique (antibiotic rotation) can reduce the need for new antibiotics, and is already used, though not as well as it should (it needs to be coordinated between different countries, etc.).
The sterilisation system described in this article (which isn't really new) is nice because it kills bacteria using an approach very different from ingestible / injectable antibiotic, so even if resistant strains somehow develop, that resistance shouldn't impact the effectiveness of antibiotics. It's not as if they're covering the walls with penicillin.
Honestly, though, most people who work with bacteria conflate the the two verbally and expect the listener to parse it out.
Absolutely. The problem is the listener can only parse it out if (s)he is already familiar with the process (and, as the polls about creationism, intelligent design, etc., show, most people don't really know what "natural selection" consists of, let alone understand how the use of antibiotics leads to the existence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria).
I'm willing to give the researcher the benefit of the doubt, though it does allow someone with confusion on the subject to stay confused.
If only they "stayed confused" (uncertain), that would be a good thing, because it might stimulate them to lern more. The problem is when they are mistaken (i.e., fully convinced of something that is incorrect) and that mistake gets reinforced.
Sadly this problem even affacts some people supposedly responsible for the "public understanding of science" (cough*Dawkins*cough). They're great at preaching to the choir, but completely unable to get through to people who don't already have a reasonable understanding of the subject, due to that use of (often misleading, and mistake-reinforcing) "shorthand".
I don't think making people more accurate would prevent nutjobs from believing in creationism ;-)
What I found is that, if you explain things step by step (and explain that natural selection has nothing to do with the origin of life, etc.), most creationist nutjobs will actually see that it makes sense. They'll still "believe" in creation, but they'll understand and accept natural selection, which is an important first step. The supernatural isn't disprovable by science, but it can be made unnecessary.
"Bacteria growing a resistance" already refers to more than one organism, as it's not "bacterium".
But it doesn't necessarily refer to more than one generation, which is the whole point. I don't think anyone expects to be infected by a single bacterium (it's was freakin' huge, man!), so you'd always use "bacteria" even when talking about a single strain / generation.
When you say "the children are growing", people will take that to mean "multiple children are getting bigger", not that "each generation is taller than the previous one". The mechanisms are completely different (individual development versus selection within the species).
Okay, human generations are getting taller because they have more food and so on, not (just) because of selection, but you get the point.
Our immune system does not "learn".
Our individual cells and antibodies do not learn. The immune system as a whole can detect pathogens, increase its own level of activity, test several ways of dealing with them, and remember what "worked". Isn't that pretty much the definition of "learning" (unless you get metaphysical)?
Expose a person to a weak pathogen (ex., a vaccine) and her immune system may acquire immunity to it. This is the immune system of that same person, not "future generations of her species". And, unless someone explains it to them, people assume bacteria work the same way (expose them to a bit of antibiotic and they'll become "vaccinated" against it).
I don't have any problem with someone saying that a given bacterial strain "acquired immunity to" a given antibiotic. My point is that its immunity was the result of a random mutation (which took place independently of its exposure to the antibiotic), and not a "deliberate" mutation caused by exposure to the antibiotic. The antibiotic simply eliminated the individuals that weren't immune, thus causing future generations to descend from the immune ones. Antibiotics don't make bacteria stronger, they kill them. They just don't necessarily kill 100% of them.
Anyway, I'm obviously preaching to the choir, here. If only there was a way to make mainstream media more competent or, failing that, kill all the ignorant strains... :-p