If being a 'superhuman' were to confer a survival advantage, then natural selection would have ensured that the mutated gene would have become the standard. Given the obvious advantages of huge muscles, what are the downsides that apparently more than negate it? I read the article and couldn't find a definitive answer. There's one interesting bit:
A recent paper indicated that myostatin might normally function to keep satellite cells quiescent. Without myostatin, he said, the satellite cells might be so active building muscle that they become depleted early in life.... will his satellite cells be used up so that his muscles start to deflate when he is 30 or so?
I'm wondering if that could be it. But then getting weak after age 30 doesn't sound like a big deal to me because humans' reproductive peak occurs well below that age. Any bio people have a clue about any other possibilities?
Oops, ignore my rant above, I checked the site again and there *is* an education category which seems to have been added after I submitted my app. Pretty cool.
Absolutely. The interface is very nice. I have only one little crib with it: the categorization system. It doesn't cover all categories. When I submitted my app, gretools, I couldn't find a proper category to put it into. Ideally it would be under "Education" but there's no such category. So I put it under Games/miscellaneous, where no one who's looking for a vocabulary app will find it:-(
Sourceforge has a nice categorization scheme, I wish they'd copied that instead of inventing their own. I suggested this to Eugenia but I guess its too late to do anything after the site is already active.
On another note, notice that helix player is the most popular app in the list. Also note that it has a high rating. For those who haven't checked it out, this is a "reformed" app from Real and not the spyware/bloatware shit that they have for windows. They also have a no fuss download page where you get straight links to the rpm/tarball etc.
I don't think it would have been a shock or anything. Anyone who thinks they are immune to competition will quickly perish. Obviously opera is a great product for cell phones, but the mozilla guys have been doing consistent work reducing their memory footprint and increasing speed, and with some more focused work they could be as nearly as good as opera. A cash infusion could help them do just that. And Gecko's rendering is at least as good as Opera's.
In case you don't know, Doctorow is the author of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (available for free), a great book which explores a sort of utopian future where the economy is no longer scarcity based and reputation is everything. Interestingly, if there's anything that's sure to kill any chance of our transitioning to an abundance-based society, it's DRM.
Apparently there are licensing compatibility issues. I mean, nobody who contributes under either of the licenses wants it to be incompatible with the other, its just that the two licenses were created for slightly different purposes. Wikipedia doesn't use CC-SA mainly because CC didn't exist back then, and wikibooks uses GFDL because wikipedia uses GFDL. There's been a lot of discussion about moving wikibooks to CC-SA or allowing new books to use CC-SA, but I don't know what came of them. The attribution clause of the GFDL makes things slightly tedious for wikipedia, and its something they'd rather do without.
But I do find it bizarre that anyone would start a new project when wikibooks already exists. Really can't see how competition is good in this case. Maybe these guys don't like the wiki model. Good luck finding authors if they want everyone to use subversion. Not everyone is a programmer! Also notice they're using CC-BY-NC-SA where NC is non-commercial; definitely incompatible with GFDL. Even co-operation at a later stage with wikibooks would prove difficult.
I was reading a book called "Information and randomness" the other day (highly technical book) and about 50 of the papers in the bibliography are by Chaitin! Seeing how often Chaitin's theorems/discoveries etc. are cited made me realize how vast this guy's contributions are. People so deeply involved in research rarely write popular math books, and so its a pleasant surprise to see that he does, and is quite good at it.
is because there are so many different widget libraries still in use. Suppose the user is running kmail in gnome, and browsing with mozilla, with OO.o in the background. Hardly an uncommon situation. But that's 4 different widget sets, and a lot of memory could be saved if all apps used the same widgets as they do on Windows. Sadly, choice is often not good.
Recently the Chinese wikipedia suffered a spam attack with a distributed network of bots editing articles to add link to some chinese intenet marketing site. In response, the latest version of MediaWiki (the software that runs the wikipedias and sister projects) has a feature to block edits matching a regex (so you can prevent links to a specific domain). Wikis generally have more protection against spamming than weblogs. So I wouldn't worry.
Simple. Don't have the user click on an image, but track their iris to see which image they're looking at. Kills eavesdropping dead, and lets you reuse images too. Drives cost way up, but maybe it can come down with mass production? Just a thought.
Re:The future is BRIGHT
on
The GNOME Roadmap
·
· Score: 2, Informative
One area in which GNOME has lagged behind other desktop operating
systems like Windows and Mac OS X is tight integration with hardware.
GNOME is working with the freedesktop.org community to make
plug-and-play hardware management just work.
Here's a great paper (written just a couple of days back) that describes the current state and future plans of this effort. Highly recommended reading. If you read it your "warm feelings of loveliness" will be doubled:)
Re:What applications are there
on
Mono Beta 2 Released
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The latest contribution that I think will have widespread and exciting ramification's was brought to Inkscape quite out of the blue by Mike Hearn. Mike's project, called AutoPackage, seeks to solve the perennial problem of easily installing software on Linux. It wrappers the underlying RPM, Debian, etc. systems with a friendly GUI front end, similar to what's used on Windows. Mike's hoping Inkscape can help be a good proof of concept for his work, and we're looking forward to gaining an extremely easy installation mechanism for non-technical users.
Mmm... I'd love it for two of my favorite open source projects to come together.
Romero said that not only is the gag order affecting how he and other staff at the ACLU can talk about the case, but it is having an impact on the broader activities of the organization, which has been actively engaged in educating and organizing against the Patriot Act since the law's inception in late 2001.
In other words, the Patriot act is being used to stifle dissent against the act itself.
Slashdot Mirror
A recent paper indicated that myostatin might normally function to keep satellite cells quiescent. Without myostatin, he said, the satellite cells might be so active building muscle that they become depleted early in life. ... will his satellite cells be used up so that his muscles start to deflate when he is 30 or so?
I'm wondering if that could be it. But then getting weak after age 30 doesn't sound like a big deal to me because humans' reproductive peak occurs well below that age. Any bio people have a clue about any other possibilities?
Yes. It is crucial to Microsoft's strategy that they not do that. See here for example.
Oops, ignore my rant above, I checked the site again and there *is* an education category which seems to have been added after I submitted my app. Pretty cool.
The GNOME devs are actively working on this issue.
See for example
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/ 2004-May/msg00028.html
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2004 -April/msg00065.html
You should start seeing the improvements in 2.8.
Sourceforge has a nice categorization scheme, I wish they'd copied that instead of inventing their own. I suggested this to Eugenia but I guess its too late to do anything after the site is already active.
On another note, notice that helix player is the most popular app in the list. Also note that it has a high rating. For those who haven't checked it out, this is a "reformed" app from Real and not the spyware/bloatware shit that they have for windows. They also have a no fuss download page where you get straight links to the rpm/tarball etc.
I don't think it would have been a shock or anything. Anyone who thinks they are immune to competition will quickly perish. Obviously opera is a great product for cell phones, but the mozilla guys have been doing consistent work reducing their memory footprint and increasing speed, and with some more focused work they could be as nearly as good as opera. A cash infusion could help them do just that. And Gecko's rendering is at least as good as Opera's.
No, they didn't say that very cool thing. The second quote was from Mandrakesoft.
Looks like a dupe
In case you don't know, Doctorow is the author of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (available for free), a great book which explores a sort of utopian future where the economy is no longer scarcity based and reputation is everything. Interestingly, if there's anything that's sure to kill any chance of our transitioning to an abundance-based society, it's DRM.
Beating the averages
Both are amazingly good.
But I do find it bizarre that anyone would start a new project when wikibooks already exists. Really can't see how competition is good in this case. Maybe these guys don't like the wiki model. Good luck finding authors if they want everyone to use subversion. Not everyone is a programmer! Also notice they're using CC-BY-NC-SA where NC is non-commercial; definitely incompatible with GFDL. Even co-operation at a later stage with wikibooks would prove difficult.
I made a PDF version of the book if anyone's interested.
I was reading a book called "Information and randomness" the other day (highly technical book) and about 50 of the papers in the bibliography are by Chaitin! Seeing how often Chaitin's theorems/discoveries etc. are cited made me realize how vast this guy's contributions are. People so deeply involved in research rarely write popular math books, and so its a pleasant surprise to see that he does, and is quite good at it.
Linux deployments on the server stopped being news years ago. If we see some movement on enterprise desktops, that'd be worthy of the /. frontpage.
is because there are so many different widget libraries still in use. Suppose the user is running kmail in gnome, and browsing with mozilla, with OO.o in the background. Hardly an uncommon situation. But that's 4 different widget sets, and a lot of memory could be saved if all apps used the same widgets as they do on Windows. Sadly, choice is often not good.
Operating systems such as Windows and Linux have no facility for stopping data being written to the hard drive.
That's a flat out lie.
$ man mlock
MLOCK(2) Linux Programmer's Manual MLOCK(2)
NAME
mlock - disable paging for some parts of memory
SYNOPSIS
#include
int mlock(const void *addr, size_t len);
DESCRIPTION
mlock disables paging for the memory in the range starting at addr with length len bytes.
OpenSSH uses paging protection. It also zeroes out the password in memory. Immediately upon hashing it. I've seen the code.
Authors are at Stanford? Paper at USENIX? Can't believe this shit.
Recently the Chinese wikipedia suffered a spam attack with a distributed network of bots editing articles to add link to some chinese intenet marketing site. In response, the latest version of MediaWiki (the software that runs the wikipedias and sister projects) has a feature to block edits matching a regex (so you can prevent links to a specific domain). Wikis generally have more protection against spamming than weblogs. So I wouldn't worry.
I thought this was fark instead of slashdot!
Mmmm... samba!
It has a bad case of schizophrenia.
Simple. Don't have the user click on an image, but track their iris to see which image they're looking at. Kills eavesdropping dead, and lets you reuse images too. Drives cost way up, but maybe it can come down with mass production? Just a thought.
Here's a great paper (written just a couple of days back) that describes the current state and future plans of this effort. Highly recommended reading. If you read it your "warm feelings of loveliness" will be doubled :)
Muine, a media player
Woodpusher, an ICS chess client (seems to have stagnated recently though).
Dashboard, an exciting new user interfact paradigm.
I'm sure there are others, these are the ones I remember off the top of my head.
Mmm... I'd love it for two of my favorite open source projects to come together.
In other words, the Patriot act is being used to stifle dissent against the act itself.