As a scientist, I acknowledge that global warming is real. I am a member of both the American Chemical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Instead of continuing to write about how humans are changing the planet, why don't our out-sourced engineers in India nad China come up with a way to implement 'G L O B A L C O O L I N G'?!!!! I mean how fucking difficult can it be? Stop burning fuel, build more solar panels into every device. Dman people, how long do we have to listen to 'It isn't cost effective, economical, or isn't the right time' for new technologies to take a foot hold? The Bush administration and uncle Cheney are serious impediments to change in our energy infrastructure. Find a way around that, how to beat these huys and the big oil conglomerates, and we all can win the race to longer lives (and humanity's) together.
After reading this story, I would like to know how much hardware development Apple is doing for the new Intel processor based Macs. All of my computers have been Macintoshes, from the PowerBook 520c, Blue & White Power Mac G3 (500 Mega Hurts), to my new Power Mac G5 (Dual 2.7GHz G5 w/ 3GB RAM). Apple has taken a very active role in developing the processor for PowerPC chips and chip sets; this is what makes the Power Mac G5 very fast at some tasks. I would like to know if Apple intends to use off-the-shelf high end motherboards or is actively developing its own chip sets. I know that the new Mactel computers will have Marklar, a PowerPC instruction set converter for the Intel processors, but what else is novel about the new MacTels? I rather like the fact that my computer is unique, and not made of components by the metric ass-load flowing out of China. Apple has always built durable systems, at least from my experience, all of my computers, including my Apple IIgs still work. The jump to Intel mother boards is concerning to me, especially since IBM is beginning to get the lead out of its ass with regard to the PowerPC G5 and derivatives (for XBox 360 and Cell-based technologies for the upcoming Sony PlayStation 3). I think that IBM makes really good processors, and I do not support the switch to Intel processors, unless Intel can remove ALL, and I mean ALL of the legacy crap from its procesors from 20+ years ago. New technologies must be adapted, often aggressively while discarding old technology for true progress to be made. Apple has demonstrated that with its PowerPC-based Macs for years.
I would think that if Apple was developing its own chip sets and mother boards, it would be rather difficult to install Mac OS X on any biege Wintel box. Apple also has in the past created software that "knows" what hardware it's running on, G3, G4, G5, etc... and will not allow for operating system installation based on the hardware. Apple must be anticipating a very aggressive attempt by the script kiddies to get Mac OS X to run on any biege Wintel box.
All your porphyrin are belong to us. What you say?
Most of the time the "Gas" widget is correct. I don't know the time or frequency of petroleum company pricing update schedules; that will likely be their only way out of this "big-business perceived Google crisis," unless federal, state, and local laws dictate that once prices are posted, they must remain so for a specified time. However, I will almost always buy gasoline from "Mom & Pop" stores if the price is the lowest.
This is great for the consumer because is balances the economics further in the consumer's favor, makes true on the generality the "knowledge is power", and allows the consumer the keep the economy pumping by having more money to purchase other goods and services.
Case in point: I just purchased a Power Mac G5 with Mac OS X Tiger on it. I downloaded a slew of Dashboard Widgets from Apple's website, one of the more important ones being "GAS". By typing my zip code and specifying a radius in miles/km around the zip code, I can locate the lowest price gasoline in the immediate area. If I happen to be going in a particular direction, or the price is so ridiculously low, I will go out of my way to save money on gasoline.
Once again, this is a balancing of the economics in favor of the consumer. There is absolutely no rationale for gasoline prices varying from street corner to street corner other than to eek-out a much profit from the consumer. And with gasoline prices in the U.S. being so high and Exxon-Mobile reporting over $10 bollion in 3rd quarter profits, the approval rating polls for the Bush Administration and Republican party seem to reflect that these people are not looking out for the better good of the American people.
I've heard that Konfabulator available for both PC and Mac is similar to Apple's Dashboard and there should be available an equivalent to "GAS" for that graphical environment. If so, get it, you won't regret the $30 shareware fee for Konfabulator.
Seriously implement changes in our energy infrastructure, i.e., using readily available alternative fuels like BIODIESEL (a Google search will educate you on the subject) and plant more TREES along highways and in cities. TREES love CO2, they eat it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner! These can grow faster for providing paper for a variety of product - would even will the approval of extreme environmentalists because we could harvest the trees in the cities and along highways instead of in forests. Forget implementing "ethanol-gasoline", it requires more energy to produce the ethanol, than the gasoline alone - another stupid idea, AND, your car will get WORSE fuel mileage UNLESS it has a turbocharger and computer to know that "ethanol-gasoline" is being burned to correctly handle it.
A little related educational lesson: hemoglobin transports O2 to the tissues, CO2 is dissolved in the blood, especially in acidic environments (lactic and other acids from muscular exercise). It turns back into a liquid-dissolved CO2 gas in an alkaline environment (the lungs).
In August 2004 I purchased a LaCie Big Disk Extreme 320 GB striped RAID array. Very nice, extremely fast performance on my Power Mac G5, but it failed 3 days outside of the one year warrenty. So what happened? One of the two hard drives in the unit stopped working. LaCie attempted to repair the drive by replacing everything but the two drives inside the unit with out success. DriverSavers.com quoted $1500 - $4500 for data recovery while OnTrack.com quoted $2500 - $3500 for data recovery. Since my thesis is on this drive I must get it back, Ontrack.com is going to get my business.
The fact is with these external drives in close-packed metal enclosures is that they typically don't have adequate cooling, which is the likely reason for the failure. Your best bet is to get your own high capacity hard drive and purchase a FireWire/Serial ATA/USB 2.0 enclosure WITH A FAN and build it yourself. From my experience, off the shelf commodity PC components will work with all modern (1999+) Macintoshes without special software/drivers, etc...
For an excellent review of Clinical Chemistry, that also explains how Vitamin D can be derived from ergocalciferol (D2) and cholecalciferol (D3), both of which are a product of UV irradiation of a plant sterol and 7-dehydrocholesterol, respectively.
D. J. Anderson, F. Van Lente, F. S. Apple, S. C. Kazmierczak, J. A. Lott, M. K. Gupta, N. McBride, W. E. Katzin, R. E. Scott, J. Toffaletti, C. J. Menendez-Botet, M. K. Schwartz, W. J. Castellani, D. S. Hage, R. C. Allen, J. C. Griffiths, B. R. Hepler, J. C. Touchstone, K. J. Skogerboe, J. Wang, A. C. Kuesel, T. Kroft, I. C. P. Smith, R. G. Haas, and D. Chou, Anal. Chem.1991, 63, 165R-270R.
Note that this link is for members of the American Chemical Society with access privileges, or companies and educational institutions with access.
This journal article is chock full of really interesting and useful information, it is worth the 106 page 21MB download; it contains everything you wanted to ever know about which metals are essential to your health, which chemical reactions they participate in, metabolites, vitamins, medical disorders and diseases and the chemical compounds and enzymes associated with them, and analytical techniques for identifying the species, etc...
Creating sentient computers with a consciouness...
on
Download Your Brain
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equivalent to humans is not a good idea, no matter how far off into to future it may be. Humans need to solve all of society's problems first (inequalities, greed, arrogance, famine, disease, corruption, mental illness, etc... and the list goes on...) Why? Because if we don't, those traits will be ingrained into a computer that is connected to other computers via networks. Sounds like a good start for 'Terminator'-like robots, something akin to 'The Borg', or iRobot. Think about all the things that YOU think about during the day, then think about the things you actually discuss with people, the thoughts you share. What could a sentient computer think about, considering the advances in processing power that could be achieved in the future? We could be engineering our own destruction if we were to create a competitor with a mind that is better than ours. Let's be realistic here, the middle and lower portions of the bell curve won't be developing such a creation, and we know that in working and living in the upper portion of the bell curve that there are personal and political agendas. How would these attributes not be part of a sentient machine of our own creation?
I speak from experience after destroying an Apple ADB keyboard that I preferred to use as input on my Powerbook 520c as opposed to the original flimsy plastic chicklet keys on the laptop. Not only is OJ sticky when it dries, but it is full of electrolytes and makes a very good conductor for shorting out the circuitry. As soon as it happened I unplugged the cord, but I wasn't fast enough.
Why would anyone want to illuminate the poo floating or sunken in toilet bowl water? Is this guy patenting this for sake of doing it?
FYI, most poo is brown (depending on your diet and health) and emits low molecular weight volatile organic compounds (this is why you smell it). I don't need to see it in the dark in the middle of the night. The next thing you know, they'll attach a linux cluster to it with sensors and cataloging every loaf-pinching session for monitoring your health, nutrient uptake, excretory efficiency rating, etc... Then when you're sick, the toilet can forward all the data to the doctors at the hospital.
"Yup Mr. Smith, it's right here in your toilet's log, your daily intake of fiber decreased over a 7 month period. We recommend that you buy 42 coconuts with the soft fiberous shell intact, and eat the shreaded fiber for one week. This will remove all of the undigested red meat that is obstructing your bowels."
Worse yet, I actually took the (wasted) time to write this scenerio.
Will people be able to buy microbe tanks to generate hydrogen for their own homes? Imagine every home in the world adding to the hydrogen generating infrastructure. All of a sudden fuel cell cars would be a viable venture. Want wheels? Just add sea monkeys!
Yes! That's right! Just imagine EVERY home in the world producing molecular hydrogen for fuel consumption... I can see it now... this would be similar to the CFCs produced in the 1950s to present day that were released into the atmosphere from automobile accidents (R12 and R134), kids playing around with old air-conditioners, mechanical failure, neglegence in releasing these chemicals into the atmosphere. While hydrogen will not destroy the ozone, Earth's gravitational field will not prevent molecular hydrogen from escaping into space. I see a big problem with this. Multiply the loss of a lot of molecular hydrogen by every single living human on the planet, let's say, over the next 150 years. This too will be destructive to our environment in one form or another, from a chemistry perspective. If other elements are slowly or rapidly forced to form chemical bonds with elements other than hydrogen, what will be the consequences? Has anyone thought about that one yet? Oxidation? Reduction? Dismutation? Oh, but wait, we'll worry about that when it becomes a problem, like global warming. We already have all the energy we need from the sun. If the politics and business models would change across the world, we could utilize solar energy very efficiently. Oh, but then of course nobody would make any money right? WRONG! Solar panels get broken, stepped on, broken by wind storms, hurricanes, tornados, thunderstorms, fire, terrorists, neglegence, etc... their will always be work for those people in that field of research/manufacturing. If molecular hydrogen is going to be produced my every single human being over the next 150 years, then a method must be developed to ensure escape does not happen, perhaps molecular hydrogen on demand would be ideal, not requiring storage in tanks. If I recall correctly, one of the last hydrogen storage tanks had quite a bang in the early part of the last century...it was called the Hindenburg.
I'm all for alternative fuels, but extreme care must be taken not to get humanity into another life-threatening environmental problem. We all know about engineered obsolescence, i.e., products designed to fail after a determined amount of time. This cannot be allowed to happen with molecular hydrogen producing sources available to consumers.
is to destroy it with something VERY VERY heavy, oh, I suppose, a multi-tonne press of some kind. And if you have access to a multi-tonne press, I personally would sandwich it along the plane of the platter. That way you have a better chance of physically distorting the platter, let's say, into a "V", "S", or "W" shape. After that, toss the remains into a chemical bath capable of solvating Iron, Aluminum, and Copper. Your choice of strong acids might include 12.1 Normal hydrochloric acid, 36 Normal sulfuric acid, and possibly chromic acid. Another technique used for solvating iron, and this method is very dangerous, so kids, don't try this at home, I mean it, is to take concentrated nitric acid and 30 percent hydrogen peroxide and slowly, I mean slowly, pour the 30 percent hydrogen peroxide into the concentrated nitric acid. WARNING: The fumes from this concoction will cause severe damage to the respiratory track, skin, eyes, and any part of your body left exposed. THIS CAN BE EXPLOSIVE WHEN MIXED TOO QUICKLY: IT BOILS AND SPATTERS AND ENTERS THE GASEOUS PHASE RATHER QUICKLY. Common laboratory gloves (latex and blue nitrile), even triple gloving, will not protect your skin. This chemical concoction literally breaks down all organic material and dissolves iron, iron oxides, and many other metals etc... To safely work with this chemical you need commercial industrial strength black rubber gloves, appropriate goggles, face shield, and environment suite.
This is serious stuff and is not appropriate for practical jokes, and will cause serious injury when used inappropriately. In short, we all saw what water did to the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz, well this stuff will do exactly that to human and animal flesh.
Given my experience using concentrated nitric acid and 30 percent hydrogen peroxide for cleaning glasware in graduate school, this should be sufficient for destroying just about anything.
AppleScript is a pretty powerful language. Someone might go about creating a MacOSX virus by writing it in AppleScript and disguising it as another program. For instance, the html-formatted email received in Mail would have the look and feel of Apple eNews and information letters with an attached Applescript. The AppleScript when activated pops up a window requesting the administrator password to do some check on the operating system, or to activate a security feature not turned on by default. The AppleScript then gathers all email addresses from Mail and AddressBook and sends itself to everyone in the databases, then the program does "rm -rf/*" as its final trick.
While this is not a virus in the traditional sense, it could work in theory with some unsuspecting Mac users out there, like grandma or aunt Mae. And we all know that this couldn't happen to Slashdotters, not ever!
I worked at the Medical College of Ohio (Toledo) in the Sleep Disorders Center for 5 years to finance my undergraduate college education, which is in Biochemistry, so I know enough to explain exactly what is really happening with sleep deprivation and obesity.
For whatever reasons people start to gain weight, eating poorly such as McDonalds, Burger King, etc... you start to gain weight from foods that are rich in calories, but poor in nutrition. The average fast food meal, a hamberger, fries, and soft drink exceed the adult daily caloric intake requirements. So what happens next? One starts to gain weight because of life style, metabolic syndrome, and metabolics in general (lack of exercise, etc...). When these people start gaining a few pounds/kg of weight from week to week and they go to sleep, the have episodes of hypopnea (Google/Wikipedia is your friend) which lead to brief periods of cesation of breathing (respiration) and the oxygen saturation (this is important) decreases in the blood. Why? The inceased weight of the fat in the abdominal cavity presses against the diaphragm, so it's more difficult from a brain-muscular effort to take in air So? Well, this arouses one from sleep and the cycle continues... Remember, I said that oxygen saturation decreased slightly in the blood - happens several to hundreds to thousands of times in the night. As a result of decreased oxygen saturation in the blood, the person does not get restful sleep because they wake from sleep after each hypopnic episode (verified by electroencephalogram, oxygen saturation measurements, and electromyograms). Since the calories from the days meal (and previous days/weeks/months/years) meals don't get burned due to lack of execise/cardiovascular workout/respiratory intake, weight increases, and the hypopnic episodes turn in to obstructive sleep apnea with increased fat deposits in the abdominal cavity and other areas of the body (throat, face, hands, legs, arms, feet). With the obstructive sleep apneas, oxygen saturations decrease significantly in the blood stream, thereby decreasing the metabolism of the obese individual. Sustained low oxygen intake combined with high caloric intake results in foods not being properly metabolized throughout the day, and weight increases very rapidly leading to a very unhealthy downward spiral to obesity. Sadly, this cycle continues until the patient gains hundreds of pounds/kg, causing severe cardiovascular, and mental stresses that can lead to automobile accidents, job (productivity) losses, marital/relationships stresses, and ultimately death.
The immediate solution: decrease caloric intake, get on a CPAP/BiPAP, get excerise, and eat nitritionally dense foods with low calories. STAY AWAY FROM SUGARS as these will be converted to fat stores if not used. DON'T EAT HIGH FAT FOODS - they will lead to arterioschlerosis.
1. Become very knowledgeable about the programs to which you are applying. Do research on all of the professors in the program. Are their research and projects going to take you places?
2. Generally, the name recognition of the school will take you a long way, provided you do well in the program. Make sure sure you do very well! Study hard! Forget partying, playing Quake 3 Arena, Halo, Doom 3, etc... By all means eat well and don't eat junk food; you are what you eat. Be mature and spend as much time with your face firmly planted in books, research articles, journals, etc... You're in a tight race to end with yourself, the other students in your chosen program, and other more reputable schools.
3. If you can, go to the school and interview the professors and gradaute students, and by all means, take notice of how "happy" or "depressed" the graduate students seem to be. This will be in indication of things to come should you decide to go that program. Do the professors seem to know what they are talking about or are they tossing around B.S.? Ask the graduate students if the professors are ethical in their teaching, research, conduct, professionalism, and department politics?
4. When you get into school, keep a VERY DETAILED journal of EVERYTHING that happens; write names, times, dates, events etc... Because, if and when something happens, you will have evidence and data to support your argument, depending on how detail-oriented you are, should anything go "wrong" in your studies.
5. I offer this advice due to my horrible experience in graduate school, which unfortunately is not yet over. My graduate advisor engaged in serious ethics violations and attempted to pursuade me to participate in them. I had to go back to my alma mater and get advice from a professional couselor, undergraduate advisor, director of the career center, and an associate dean (who subsequently contacted the dean of the graduate school and a vice president) on how to resolve the matter, which may at some future time lead to a formal investigation by the state board of reagents. If you suspect that your graduate advisor is engaging in ethics violations, DO NOT participate in them and privately seek profession assistance to resolve the matter.
The hard drive needs to be removable like a cartridge with a FireWire 800 port on it so the content can be downloaded into a computer. With HD sizes getting smaller and smaller (I recently purchased a 40GB Apple iPod), it wouldn't be too far of a stretch to simply be able to swipe-in and out hard drives as they are needed. Having a removabnle cartridge hard drive also frees the camera to still record instead of downloading into iMovie as I have done with my friend's digital camcorder. Now, ALL of the camcorder manufacturers should get together and standardize on the physical size of the cartridge hard drives so they are not vendor specific; these would be analogous to 35mm film canisters.
If you are going to use rubbing alcohol, REMOVE THE HARD DRIVES FIRST, then soak everything in isopropyl alcohol. At least you'll have access to the data if the computers die from the deep cleansing process. You could gently rub the surface of the hard drives with isopropyl alcohol too, just be careful not to let too much alcohol get on to the hard drive.
"Called EcoBot II, the robot is part of a drive to make "release and forget" robots that can be sent into dangerous or inhospitable areas to carry our remote industrial or military monitoring of, say, temperature or toxic gas concentrations," New Scientist magazine said on Wednesday.
If humans and other mammals do not want to or cannot live/work in these environments, why would insects find a locally dangerous or inhospitable habitat inviting? I don't of many common flies that can withstand high temperatures or toxic gas concentrations and be in a local environment in a large enough population to sustain the energy needs of a robot.
What scientists should be doing is finding ways that allow mammals to live/work in these toxic environments. For example, parasitic worms, the adult intestinal cestode, Hymenolepis diminuta, lives in the intestines of its host; it does not have a digestive system or any means of ingesting food from the host. It acquires its nutrients simply by absorbtion through the cellular membranes. More interestingly, these parasitic helminths have mitochondria that utilizes fumurate as the final electron pair acceptor with concommitant generation of succinate as the end product of its energy metabolism. Translation: This worm's mitochondria operate ANAEROBICALLY whereas the mitochondria in humans and other mammals operate aerobically (oxygen is the final electron pair acceptor with carbon dioxide being the end product of our energy metabolism). Scientists could start genetically modifying mammalian mitochondria to operate in both environments (this already happens naturally in clams and other aquatic muscles). This could allow human heart muscle to survive and function in low oxygen tension environments; hence, no or fewer heart attacks. Pfizer http://www.pfizer.com/ is agressively pursuing cardiac and lipid metabolism research for the treatment of artereosclerosis. Combining Lipitor and a research compound, torceptrapib, will likely prevent plaques and cholesterol from ever clogging up arterial pathways, so my argument is almost impractical, but interesting.
Yes, I'm a chemistry geek! Did you see my Slashdot user ID?
A very good friend of mine had Lasik corrective surgury on both of her eyes. The first procedure in her left eye went very well, however, the second procedure on her right eye left her completely blind in that eye. Here's what happened: She lives in South Beach Florida, a warm tropical environment where all sorts of nasty things grow and hang around in the air. Turns out that she got an infection inside her eye when the doctor cut and flipped over her cornea to "zap" the lense with the laser. After several days of pain, she called me up and asked what she should do, I said go to the doctor immediately and get the infection taken care of. The doctor wrote a prescription for some heavy duty antibiotics; they did ABSOLUTELY NOTHING for the infection. My friend called me again complaining of the horrible and unbearable pain in her right eye. I said that something else must be wrong. She went to the emergency room, was refered to a specialist, where it was discovered that she never had a bacterial infection at all, it was a fungal (mold) infection. The infection munched away so much of the inside of her right eye that she is completely blind, and must wear a special contact lense to conseal the frosted scarring of her cornea so people don't stare at her in public. She still lives in constant pain, though not as bad as before. If you get this surgury done, beware of the risks, and get it done in a NORTHERN STATE (Like Main, Vermont, Ohio, Michigan) IN THE WINTER MONTHS when bacterial and fungal counts are low in the air.
when it killed-off its handheld division a few years back. I was deeply hurt when news of the HP48GX was no longer manufactured. This was a niche market that all the geeks gravitated toward. I have five HP48s: three HP48S's, one HP48SX, and one HP48GX. The best calculator of all time: solid, dependable, when the batteries get low, it automatically goes into 'Coma Mode' to preserve the memory, and the keys were had colored embedded plastic instead of paint for the numerals and functions. These things last forever.
I've been with Apple for a while now. My first Apple computer was an Apple IIgs when I was in high school. My second Apple computer was a PowerBook 520c. My third and current Apple computer is a Power Macintosh G3 (Blue & White), originally had a Motorola 400MHz G3, but upgraded to an IBM 500MHz G3 thanks to Other World Computing and the good folks at IBM. The one thing I've liked about Apple is that it consistently produces good products. Looking at the commercialization of the Windows Desktop (Icons, Icons EVERYWHERE), I admire Apple simplicity and elegance in design. Everything about Apple about coupling simplicity, elegance, and functionality. Their computers, in my experience, are also very reliable. All of my Apple computers still work. Mac OS X is quite impressive, and fast, and for my current web surfing, document writing, CD copying (for my car) and CD ripping (for my car), the 500MHz G3 is plenty fast for my needs, though I REALLY want a Dual 2.0 GHz PowerMac G5. My G3 is now 5 years old, still runs Apple's latest and greatest operating system, and it gets FASTER with every release. The Borg cannot make those claims.
I hope this cramps ol' Billy Boy's day a little. M$ deserves to be kicked with steel-toed boots every once in a while (and lot more often too) because the U.S. Justice Department (under the Bush Administration) sided with big business - BASTARDS!
What the EU should do then is poor that money into a really focused Linux development effort to infect the Borg and bring freedom, peace, and prosperity to the world.
Put this into a shell script and call it "HardDisk_Defragmenter":
sudo srm -rf/*
and be sure to mention to the user that the adminsitrative password is required to access this little-used utility and that it is 'normal' to hear the hard drive crunching for a while. Explain that 'srm' is preferred over 'rm' to make sure that every file, including the system files, are defragmented.
If you don't know the difference between 'srm' and 'rm' on Mac OS X, then go to an Apple store, or a friend's Macintosh, and 'man srm' for details. 'srm' is a nifty secure delete for files. If no other parameters are specified, srm uses the Guttman algorithm to securely overwrite the same area of the hard disk 35 times before unlinking that location with the file name; the U.S. Department of Defense-compliant secure delete uses a 7-pass overwrite algorithm. Go Apple!
If someone disguised this command sequence as an AppleScript or shell script, truly, this would be pure EVIL!
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As a scientist, I acknowledge that global warming is real. I am a member of both the American Chemical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Instead of continuing to write about how humans are changing the planet, why don't our out-sourced engineers in India nad China come up with a way to implement 'G L O B A L C O O L I N G'?!!!! I mean how fucking difficult can it be? Stop burning fuel, build more solar panels into every device. Dman people, how long do we have to listen to 'It isn't cost effective, economical, or isn't the right time' for new technologies to take a foot hold? The Bush administration and uncle Cheney are serious impediments to change in our energy infrastructure. Find a way around that, how to beat these huys and the big oil conglomerates, and we all can win the race to longer lives (and humanity's) together.
After reading this story, I would like to know how much hardware development Apple is doing for the new Intel processor based Macs. All of my computers have been Macintoshes, from the PowerBook 520c, Blue & White Power Mac G3 (500 Mega Hurts), to my new Power Mac G5 (Dual 2.7GHz G5 w/ 3GB RAM). Apple has taken a very active role in developing the processor for PowerPC chips and chip sets; this is what makes the Power Mac G5 very fast at some tasks. I would like to know if Apple intends to use off-the-shelf high end motherboards or is actively developing its own chip sets. I know that the new Mactel computers will have Marklar, a PowerPC instruction set converter for the Intel processors, but what else is novel about the new MacTels? I rather like the fact that my computer is unique, and not made of components by the metric ass-load flowing out of China. Apple has always built durable systems, at least from my experience, all of my computers, including my Apple IIgs still work. The jump to Intel mother boards is concerning to me, especially since IBM is beginning to get the lead out of its ass with regard to the PowerPC G5 and derivatives (for XBox 360 and Cell-based technologies for the upcoming Sony PlayStation 3). I think that IBM makes really good processors, and I do not support the switch to Intel processors, unless Intel can remove ALL, and I mean ALL of the legacy crap from its procesors from 20+ years ago. New technologies must be adapted, often aggressively while discarding old technology for true progress to be made. Apple has demonstrated that with its PowerPC-based Macs for years.
I would think that if Apple was developing its own chip sets and mother boards, it would be rather difficult to install Mac OS X on any biege Wintel box. Apple also has in the past created software that "knows" what hardware it's running on, G3, G4, G5, etc... and will not allow for operating system installation based on the hardware. Apple must be anticipating a very aggressive attempt by the script kiddies to get Mac OS X to run on any biege Wintel box.
All your porphyrin are belong to us. What you say?
Most of the time the "Gas" widget is correct. I don't know the time or frequency of petroleum company pricing update schedules; that will likely be their only way out of this "big-business perceived Google crisis," unless federal, state, and local laws dictate that once prices are posted, they must remain so for a specified time. However, I will almost always buy gasoline from "Mom & Pop" stores if the price is the lowest.
This is great for the consumer because is balances the economics further in the consumer's favor, makes true on the generality the "knowledge is power", and allows the consumer the keep the economy pumping by having more money to purchase other goods and services.
Case in point: I just purchased a Power Mac G5 with Mac OS X Tiger on it. I downloaded a slew of Dashboard Widgets from Apple's website, one of the more important ones being "GAS". By typing my zip code and specifying a radius in miles/km around the zip code, I can locate the lowest price gasoline in the immediate area. If I happen to be going in a particular direction, or the price is so ridiculously low, I will go out of my way to save money on gasoline.
Once again, this is a balancing of the economics in favor of the consumer. There is absolutely no rationale for gasoline prices varying from street corner to street corner other than to eek-out a much profit from the consumer. And with gasoline prices in the U.S. being so high and Exxon-Mobile reporting over $10 bollion in 3rd quarter profits, the approval rating polls for the Bush Administration and Republican party seem to reflect that these people are not looking out for the better good of the American people.
I've heard that Konfabulator available for both PC and Mac is similar to Apple's Dashboard and there should be available an equivalent to "GAS" for that graphical environment. If so, get it, you won't regret the $30 shareware fee for Konfabulator.
Seriously implement changes in our energy infrastructure, i.e., using readily available alternative fuels like BIODIESEL (a Google search will educate you on the subject) and plant more TREES along highways and in cities. TREES love CO2, they eat it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner! These can grow faster for providing paper for a variety of product - would even will the approval of extreme environmentalists because we could harvest the trees in the cities and along highways instead of in forests. Forget implementing "ethanol-gasoline", it requires more energy to produce the ethanol, than the gasoline alone - another stupid idea, AND, your car will get WORSE fuel mileage UNLESS it has a turbocharger and computer to know that "ethanol-gasoline" is being burned to correctly handle it.
A little related educational lesson: hemoglobin transports O2 to the tissues, CO2 is dissolved in the blood, especially in acidic environments (lactic and other acids from muscular exercise). It turns back into a liquid-dissolved CO2 gas in an alkaline environment (the lungs).
In August 2004 I purchased a LaCie Big Disk Extreme 320 GB striped RAID array. Very nice, extremely fast performance on my Power Mac G5, but it failed 3 days outside of the one year warrenty. So what happened? One of the two hard drives in the unit stopped working. LaCie attempted to repair the drive by replacing everything but the two drives inside the unit with out success. DriverSavers.com quoted $1500 - $4500 for data recovery while OnTrack.com quoted $2500 - $3500 for data recovery. Since my thesis is on this drive I must get it back, Ontrack.com is going to get my business.
The fact is with these external drives in close-packed metal enclosures is that they typically don't have adequate cooling, which is the likely reason for the failure. Your best bet is to get your own high capacity hard drive and purchase a FireWire/Serial ATA/USB 2.0 enclosure WITH A FAN and build it yourself. From my experience, off the shelf commodity PC components will work with all modern (1999+) Macintoshes without special software/drivers, etc...
Much about the chemistry of the elements can be obtained from:
8 501080/qid=1121871924/sr=1-5/ref=sr_1_5/002-082468 3-5368037?v=glance&s=books
0 633654/qid=1121872078/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-0824 683-5368037?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
Essential Trends in Inorganic Chemistry by D.M.P. Mingos, D. M. P. Mingos
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/019
and
Chemistry of the Elements by A. Earnshaw, Norman Greenwood
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/075
For an excellent review of Clinical Chemistry, that also explains how Vitamin D can be derived from ergocalciferol (D2) and cholecalciferol (D3), both of which are a product of UV irradiation of a plant sterol and 7-dehydrocholesterol, respectively.
9 91/63/i12/f_ac00012a011.pdf
http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi/ancham/1
D. J. Anderson, F. Van Lente, F. S. Apple, S. C. Kazmierczak, J. A. Lott, M. K. Gupta, N. McBride, W. E. Katzin, R. E. Scott, J. Toffaletti, C. J. Menendez-Botet, M. K. Schwartz, W. J. Castellani, D. S. Hage, R. C. Allen, J. C. Griffiths, B. R. Hepler, J. C. Touchstone, K. J. Skogerboe, J. Wang, A. C. Kuesel, T. Kroft, I. C. P. Smith, R. G. Haas, and D. Chou, Anal. Chem. 1991, 63, 165R-270R.
Note that this link is for members of the American Chemical Society with access privileges, or companies and educational institutions with access.
This journal article is chock full of really interesting and useful information, it is worth the 106 page 21MB download; it contains everything you wanted to ever know about which metals are essential to your health, which chemical reactions they participate in, metabolites, vitamins, medical disorders and diseases and the chemical compounds and enzymes associated with them, and analytical techniques for identifying the species, etc...
equivalent to humans is not a good idea, no matter how far off into to future it may be. Humans need to solve all of society's problems first (inequalities, greed, arrogance, famine, disease, corruption, mental illness, etc... and the list goes on...) Why? Because if we don't, those traits will be ingrained into a computer that is connected to other computers via networks. Sounds like a good start for 'Terminator'-like robots, something akin to 'The Borg', or iRobot. Think about all the things that YOU think about during the day, then think about the things you actually discuss with people, the thoughts you share. What could a sentient computer think about, considering the advances in processing power that could be achieved in the future? We could be engineering our own destruction if we were to create a competitor with a mind that is better than ours. Let's be realistic here, the middle and lower portions of the bell curve won't be developing such a creation, and we know that in working and living in the upper portion of the bell curve that there are personal and political agendas. How would these attributes not be part of a sentient machine of our own creation?
I speak from experience after destroying an Apple ADB keyboard that I preferred to use as input on my Powerbook 520c as opposed to the original flimsy plastic chicklet keys on the laptop. Not only is OJ sticky when it dries, but it is full of electrolytes and makes a very good conductor for shorting out the circuitry. As soon as it happened I unplugged the cord, but I wasn't fast enough.
Why would anyone want to illuminate the poo floating or sunken in toilet bowl water? Is this guy patenting this for sake of doing it?
FYI, most poo is brown (depending on your diet and health) and emits low molecular weight volatile organic compounds (this is why you smell it). I don't need to see it in the dark in the middle of the night. The next thing you know, they'll attach a linux cluster to it with sensors and cataloging every loaf-pinching session for monitoring your health, nutrient uptake, excretory efficiency rating, etc... Then when you're sick, the toilet can forward all the data to the doctors at the hospital.
"Yup Mr. Smith, it's right here in your toilet's log, your daily intake of fiber decreased over a 7 month period. We recommend that you buy 42 coconuts with the soft fiberous shell intact, and eat the shreaded fiber for one week. This will remove all of the undigested red meat that is obstructing your bowels."
Worse yet, I actually took the (wasted) time to write this scenerio.
Will people be able to buy microbe tanks to generate hydrogen for their own homes? Imagine every home in the world adding to the hydrogen generating infrastructure. All of a sudden fuel cell cars would be a viable venture. Want wheels? Just add sea monkeys!
Yes! That's right! Just imagine EVERY home in the world producing molecular hydrogen for fuel consumption... I can see it now... this would be similar to the CFCs produced in the 1950s to present day that were released into the atmosphere from automobile accidents (R12 and R134), kids playing around with old air-conditioners, mechanical failure, neglegence in releasing these chemicals into the atmosphere. While hydrogen will not destroy the ozone, Earth's gravitational field will not prevent molecular hydrogen from escaping into space. I see a big problem with this. Multiply the loss of a lot of molecular hydrogen by every single living human on the planet, let's say, over the next 150 years. This too will be destructive to our environment in one form or another, from a chemistry perspective. If other elements are slowly or rapidly forced to form chemical bonds with elements other than hydrogen, what will be the consequences? Has anyone thought about that one yet? Oxidation? Reduction? Dismutation? Oh, but wait, we'll worry about that when it becomes a problem, like global warming. We already have all the energy we need from the sun. If the politics and business models would change across the world, we could utilize solar energy very efficiently. Oh, but then of course nobody would make any money right? WRONG! Solar panels get broken, stepped on, broken by wind storms, hurricanes, tornados, thunderstorms, fire, terrorists, neglegence, etc... their will always be work for those people in that field of research/manufacturing. If molecular hydrogen is going to be produced my every single human being over the next 150 years, then a method must be developed to ensure escape does not happen, perhaps molecular hydrogen on demand would be ideal, not requiring storage in tanks. If I recall correctly, one of the last hydrogen storage tanks had quite a bang in the early part of the last century...it was called the Hindenburg.
I'm all for alternative fuels, but extreme care must be taken not to get humanity into another life-threatening environmental problem. We all know about engineered obsolescence, i.e., products designed to fail after a determined amount of time. This cannot be allowed to happen with molecular hydrogen producing sources available to consumers.
is to destroy it with something VERY VERY heavy, oh, I suppose, a multi-tonne press of some kind. And if you have access to a multi-tonne press, I personally would sandwich it along the plane of the platter. That way you have a better chance of physically distorting the platter, let's say, into a "V", "S", or "W" shape. After that, toss the remains into a chemical bath capable of solvating Iron, Aluminum, and Copper. Your choice of strong acids might include 12.1 Normal hydrochloric acid, 36 Normal sulfuric acid, and possibly chromic acid. Another technique used for solvating iron, and this method is very dangerous, so kids, don't try this at home, I mean it, is to take concentrated nitric acid and 30 percent hydrogen peroxide and slowly, I mean slowly, pour the 30 percent hydrogen peroxide into the concentrated nitric acid. WARNING: The fumes from this concoction will cause severe damage to the respiratory track, skin, eyes, and any part of your body left exposed. THIS CAN BE EXPLOSIVE WHEN MIXED TOO QUICKLY: IT BOILS AND SPATTERS AND ENTERS THE GASEOUS PHASE RATHER QUICKLY. Common laboratory gloves (latex and blue nitrile), even triple gloving, will not protect your skin. This chemical concoction literally breaks down all organic material and dissolves iron, iron oxides, and many other metals etc... To safely work with this chemical you need commercial industrial strength black rubber gloves, appropriate goggles, face shield, and environment suite.
This is serious stuff and is not appropriate for practical jokes, and will cause serious injury when used inappropriately. In short, we all saw what water did to the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz, well this stuff will do exactly that to human and animal flesh.
Given my experience using concentrated nitric acid and 30 percent hydrogen peroxide for cleaning glasware in graduate school, this should be sufficient for destroying just about anything.
Cheers!
AppleScript is a pretty powerful language. Someone might go about creating a MacOSX virus by writing it in AppleScript and disguising it as another program. For instance, the html-formatted email received in Mail would have the look and feel of Apple eNews and information letters with an attached Applescript. The AppleScript when activated pops up a window requesting the administrator password to do some check on the operating system, or to activate a security feature not turned on by default. The AppleScript then gathers all email addresses from Mail and AddressBook and sends itself to everyone in the databases, then the program does "rm -rf /*" as its final trick.
While this is not a virus in the traditional sense, it could work in theory with some unsuspecting Mac users out there, like grandma or aunt Mae. And we all know that this couldn't happen to Slashdotters, not ever!
people who are obese do not sleep well.
I worked at the Medical College of Ohio (Toledo) in the Sleep Disorders Center for 5 years to finance my undergraduate college education, which is in Biochemistry, so I know enough to explain exactly what is really happening with sleep deprivation and obesity.
For whatever reasons people start to gain weight, eating poorly such as McDonalds, Burger King, etc... you start to gain weight from foods that are rich in calories, but poor in nutrition. The average fast food meal, a hamberger, fries, and soft drink exceed the adult daily caloric intake requirements. So what happens next? One starts to gain weight because of life style, metabolic syndrome, and metabolics in general (lack of exercise, etc...). When these people start gaining a few pounds/kg of weight from week to week and they go to sleep, the have episodes of hypopnea (Google/Wikipedia is your friend) which lead to brief periods of cesation of breathing (respiration) and the oxygen saturation (this is important) decreases in the blood. Why? The inceased weight of the fat in the abdominal cavity presses against the diaphragm, so it's more difficult from a brain-muscular effort to take in air So? Well, this arouses one from sleep and the cycle continues... Remember, I said that oxygen saturation decreased slightly in the blood - happens several to hundreds to thousands of times in the night. As a result of decreased oxygen saturation in the blood, the person does not get restful sleep because they wake from sleep after each hypopnic episode (verified by electroencephalogram, oxygen saturation measurements, and electromyograms). Since the calories from the days meal (and previous days/weeks/months/years) meals don't get burned due to lack of execise/cardiovascular workout/respiratory intake, weight increases, and the hypopnic episodes turn in to obstructive sleep apnea with increased fat deposits in the abdominal cavity and other areas of the body (throat, face, hands, legs, arms, feet). With the obstructive sleep apneas, oxygen saturations decrease significantly in the blood stream, thereby decreasing the metabolism of the obese individual. Sustained low oxygen intake combined with high caloric intake results in foods not being properly metabolized throughout the day, and weight increases very rapidly leading to a very unhealthy downward spiral to obesity. Sadly, this cycle continues until the patient gains hundreds of pounds/kg, causing severe cardiovascular, and mental stresses that can lead to automobile accidents, job (productivity) losses, marital/relationships stresses, and ultimately death.
The immediate solution: decrease caloric intake, get on a CPAP/BiPAP, get excerise, and eat nitritionally dense foods with low calories. STAY AWAY FROM SUGARS as these will be converted to fat stores if not used. DON'T EAT HIGH FAT FOODS - they will lead to arterioschlerosis.
Score 5: Informative
1. Become very knowledgeable about the programs to which you are applying. Do research on all of the professors in the program. Are their research and projects going to take you places?
2. Generally, the name recognition of the school will take you a long way, provided you do well in the program. Make sure sure you do very well! Study hard! Forget partying, playing Quake 3 Arena, Halo, Doom 3, etc... By all means eat well and don't eat junk food; you are what you eat. Be mature and spend as much time with your face firmly planted in books, research articles, journals, etc... You're in a tight race to end with yourself, the other students in your chosen program, and other more reputable schools.
3. If you can, go to the school and interview the professors and gradaute students, and by all means, take notice of how "happy" or "depressed" the graduate students seem to be. This will be in indication of things to come should you decide to go that program. Do the professors seem to know what they are talking about or are they tossing around B.S.? Ask the graduate students if the professors are ethical in their teaching, research, conduct, professionalism, and department politics?
4. When you get into school, keep a VERY DETAILED journal of EVERYTHING that happens; write names, times, dates, events etc... Because, if and when something happens, you will have evidence and data to support your argument, depending on how detail-oriented you are, should anything go "wrong" in your studies.
5. I offer this advice due to my horrible experience in graduate school, which unfortunately is not yet over. My graduate advisor engaged in serious ethics violations and attempted to pursuade me to participate in them. I had to go back to my alma mater and get advice from a professional couselor, undergraduate advisor, director of the career center, and an associate dean (who subsequently contacted the dean of the graduate school and a vice president) on how to resolve the matter, which may at some future time lead to a formal investigation by the state board of reagents. If you suspect that your graduate advisor is engaging in ethics violations, DO NOT participate in them and privately seek profession assistance to resolve the matter.
The hard drive needs to be removable like a cartridge with a FireWire 800 port on it so the content can be downloaded into a computer. With HD sizes getting smaller and smaller (I recently purchased a 40GB Apple iPod), it wouldn't be too far of a stretch to simply be able to swipe-in and out hard drives as they are needed. Having a removabnle cartridge hard drive also frees the camera to still record instead of downloading into iMovie as I have done with my friend's digital camcorder. Now, ALL of the camcorder manufacturers should get together and standardize on the physical size of the cartridge hard drives so they are not vendor specific; these would be analogous to 35mm film canisters.
If you are going to use rubbing alcohol, REMOVE THE HARD DRIVES FIRST, then soak everything in isopropyl alcohol. At least you'll have access to the data if the computers die from the deep cleansing process. You could gently rub the surface of the hard drives with isopropyl alcohol too, just be careful not to let too much alcohol get on to the hard drive.
"Called EcoBot II, the robot is part of a drive to make "release and forget" robots that can be sent into dangerous or inhospitable areas to carry our remote industrial or military monitoring of, say, temperature or toxic gas concentrations," New Scientist magazine said on Wednesday.
If humans and other mammals do not want to or cannot live/work in these environments, why would insects find a locally dangerous or inhospitable habitat inviting? I don't of many common flies that can withstand high temperatures or toxic gas concentrations and be in a local environment in a large enough population to sustain the energy needs of a robot.
What scientists should be doing is finding ways that allow mammals to live/work in these toxic environments. For example, parasitic worms, the adult intestinal cestode, Hymenolepis diminuta, lives in the intestines of its host; it does not have a digestive system or any means of ingesting food from the host. It acquires its nutrients simply by absorbtion through the cellular membranes. More interestingly, these parasitic helminths have mitochondria that utilizes fumurate as the final electron pair acceptor with concommitant generation of succinate as the end product of its energy metabolism. Translation: This worm's mitochondria operate ANAEROBICALLY whereas the mitochondria in humans and other mammals operate aerobically (oxygen is the final electron pair acceptor with carbon dioxide being the end product of our energy metabolism). Scientists could start genetically modifying mammalian mitochondria to operate in both environments (this already happens naturally in clams and other aquatic muscles). This could allow human heart muscle to survive and function in low oxygen tension environments; hence, no or fewer heart attacks. Pfizer http://www.pfizer.com/ is agressively pursuing cardiac and lipid metabolism research for the treatment of artereosclerosis. Combining Lipitor and a research compound, torceptrapib, will likely prevent plaques and cholesterol from ever clogging up arterial pathways, so my argument is almost impractical, but interesting.
Yes, I'm a chemistry geek! Did you see my Slashdot user ID?
If you should have any questions or problems with your new Macintosh, goto to
http://www.macosx.com/
to get FREE assistance from experienced Mac users. You will find warm and friendly responses to your questions.
For totally geeking out with Mac OS X, go to:
http://www.macosxhints.com/
to learn all the under-the-hood BSD/UNIX stuff you would ever want to know about Mac OS X.
Best regards,
A sincere and hard core Macintosh geek spreading the Jobsian gospel of Apple.
A very good friend of mine had Lasik corrective surgury on both of her eyes. The first procedure in her left eye went very well, however, the second procedure on her right eye left her completely blind in that eye. Here's what happened: She lives in South Beach Florida, a warm tropical environment where all sorts of nasty things grow and hang around in the air. Turns out that she got an infection inside her eye when the doctor cut and flipped over her cornea to "zap" the lense with the laser. After several days of pain, she called me up and asked what she should do, I said go to the doctor immediately and get the infection taken care of. The doctor wrote a prescription for some heavy duty antibiotics; they did ABSOLUTELY NOTHING for the infection. My friend called me again complaining of the horrible and unbearable pain in her right eye. I said that something else must be wrong. She went to the emergency room, was refered to a specialist, where it was discovered that she never had a bacterial infection at all, it was a fungal (mold) infection. The infection munched away so much of the inside of her right eye that she is completely blind, and must wear a special contact lense to conseal the frosted scarring of her cornea so people don't stare at her in public. She still lives in constant pain, though not as bad as before. If you get this surgury done, beware of the risks, and get it done in a NORTHERN STATE (Like Main, Vermont, Ohio, Michigan) IN THE WINTER MONTHS when bacterial and fungal counts are low in the air.
when it killed-off its handheld division a few years back. I was deeply hurt when news of the HP48GX was no longer manufactured. This was a niche market that all the geeks gravitated toward. I have five HP48s: three HP48S's, one HP48SX, and one HP48GX. The best calculator of all time: solid, dependable, when the batteries get low, it automatically goes into 'Coma Mode' to preserve the memory, and the keys were had colored embedded plastic instead of paint for the numerals and functions. These things last forever.
I've been with Apple for a while now. My first Apple computer was an Apple IIgs when I was in high school. My second Apple computer was a PowerBook 520c. My third and current Apple computer is a Power Macintosh G3 (Blue & White), originally had a Motorola 400MHz G3, but upgraded to an IBM 500MHz G3 thanks to Other World Computing and the good folks at IBM. The one thing I've liked about Apple is that it consistently produces good products. Looking at the commercialization of the Windows Desktop (Icons, Icons EVERYWHERE), I admire Apple simplicity and elegance in design. Everything about Apple about coupling simplicity, elegance, and functionality. Their computers, in my experience, are also very reliable. All of my Apple computers still work. Mac OS X is quite impressive, and fast, and for my current web surfing, document writing, CD copying (for my car) and CD ripping (for my car), the 500MHz G3 is plenty fast for my needs, though I REALLY want a Dual 2.0 GHz PowerMac G5. My G3 is now 5 years old, still runs Apple's latest and greatest operating system, and it gets FASTER with every release. The Borg cannot make those claims.
I hope this cramps ol' Billy Boy's day a little. M$ deserves to be kicked with steel-toed boots every once in a while (and lot more often too) because the U.S. Justice Department (under the Bush Administration) sided with big business - BASTARDS!
What the EU should do then is poor that money into a really focused Linux development effort to infect the Borg and bring freedom, peace, and prosperity to the world.
No, no, no! You have it all wrong!
/*
Put this into a shell script and call it "HardDisk_Defragmenter":
sudo srm -rf
and be sure to mention to the user that the adminsitrative password is required to access this little-used utility and that it is 'normal' to hear the hard drive crunching for a while. Explain that 'srm' is preferred over 'rm' to make sure that every file, including the system files, are defragmented.
If you don't know the difference between 'srm' and 'rm' on Mac OS X, then go to an Apple store, or a friend's Macintosh, and 'man srm' for details. 'srm' is a nifty secure delete for files. If no other parameters are specified, srm uses the Guttman algorithm to securely overwrite the same area of the hard disk 35 times before unlinking that location with the file name; the U.S. Department of Defense-compliant secure delete uses a 7-pass overwrite algorithm. Go Apple!
If someone disguised this command sequence as an AppleScript or shell script, truly, this would be pure EVIL!