While combining functions on drives is nice since it saves space and, once the prices settle, even final costs of having just one drive in the computer. So far fragility created by mergeing devices that can fail in different has not proven to be a big problem that I have seen. e.g. the CD writer on the cd/dvd combo burns out prematurely and I have to replace the whole shebang. The motors or tray gears seem to go first.
But what does happen is that it takes longer and longer for the gorram computer to mount the cd/dvd. This is especially noticable when one inserts a damaged CD into a drive. the computer grunts and groans freaking for ever trying to decide it it is looking at a CD, and CD-R, D DVD-r, and DVD+R, a DVD. And each of these seems to have some different time consuming error protocol that involves trying to spin the thing at different speeds. Now they are going to be adding not one but two more protocols. And I imagine it won't be long before we have HDDVD-R and HDDVD+R and so on thrown on top of this.
it's going to take minutes when you shove in that Bad CD before your computer lets you eject it.
On Macs you can't just eject the CD by pushing a button like you can on Linux. Windows is heading that way, though I'm not really sure what VISTA does.
How long before the device manufacturer's figure this pattern out 1) Create two competing technonologies that are equally sufficient but incompatible. 2) Stifle standardization 3) market more expensive devices that handle both, as both a marketing advantage, a manufacturing skill advantage, 4) and to inflate costs, assuming profit margin is proportional to gross, and the number of units sold is the same. 5) profit!
there is no ?????
A very interesting side effect is that MS can no longer dictate platform specs. This is remarkably new phenomena and worth watching.
Finally Could the slash dot filter PLEASE stop people from writing M$ instead of MS. (;_;)
Every thing you say is completely wrong.
This contest is testing filters on a live short window of time. What you want has already been done many times in the past (look up the work done by NIST for example). I'm sorry but you have utterly misunderstood what I was saying or you don't understand the reference you linked to. The reference you link to is an on-line tracking filter for spam. The spam itself can vary or not, but it is not co-evolving in response to the filter itself which is what real spam does.
In the past, filters have been tested on spam data collected over literally a year or more, which captures the natural variation of the spam stream. Now I'm certain you don't understand the difference between spam varying and spam co-evolving. In simple terms the first is game theory when you opponent does not change his strategy in response to yours. The second is game theory when the opponent adapts to changes in your strategy.
your other idea of giving direct feedback to a spam source on what works and what doesn't is meaningless, as real world spammers don't get feedback from individual filters either No that's not even wrong. Just about All spammers do is see what works. They stop using strategies that no longer work. It's not hard at all for them to test what is working. three techniques 1) look at the response rate to the ad as it varies with modality of the spam delivery 2) include a tracking gif. A certain fraction of people have html mail so you get a response. 3) open a gmail account and spam yourself to see what gets through.
No you are mistaken I believe. The term "live" is meant inthe sense of real time and sequentially deliveres spam. An on-line test. Not a test where one has the entire corpus of spam to train and filter. But the spam signature waveform is, unless I'm wrong, not going to be reactive to the filters. I'd even bet that all filters will be delivered the same message sets for ease of comparison. I doubt the spam will evolve it's signature in an intelligent reactive manner to evade the filter. But that's the hallmark of real spam--it not only varies but it adapts.
The trouble I can see with a test like this is that's it's a static test. It assumes a key feature of spam which is not true. namely that the spam signature is constant over time or at least makes an ergodic assumption. The thing about spam is that it is evolutionary. Not only does it's signature vary but the spammers learn what is getting through and shift to sending more of that flavor.
To see why this matters consider two spam hypothetical spam programs. One blocks 99% of the test set spam but lets a particular form of spam comprising only 1% of the test set through. And contrast this with another program that is adaptive but to avoid false-postives has to err on the side of letting through 20% of the spam it flags (making it only 20% effective).
While the former method would smoke the latter in a static trial. in the real world spammers would just shift to exclusively sending the kind of spam that gets through the first filter.
To make this a real contest they should make it adversarial. Give the spam script a feedback signal on which spam is getting through and let it adjust it's mix of spam and chaffe to try to maximize the the rate it can push spam through (or bust the filter by chaffing to minimize the number of legit e-mails that survive).
I'd implement them the same way LiveCDs do. for example an "eggdrop" tarball on the local disk filesystem root that contains custimizations. Would not be hard to include signed patches too.
put the game on a live CD they user must boot off of to play. Encrypt it. Claim DMCA violations if any attempts to reverse engineer. Not in a fascist sue-your-ass way, but just in a banning your MAC address for life kind of way.
You might not be happy with this but it seems like a fairly effective solution that moves it away from the grey area of memory co-resident. software.
Well I'll be darned. I guess I'm the fool here. My bad for not noticing that. Still my comment about the patchy resolution munging still holds--that happens on my fast macs too. I've played AVIs of the same Battlestar galactica show and it's quite striking how much lower res the itms ones are.
Of course I suppose that might also be some limit imposed on them by the studios. Just like music they cap the resolution to make transcoding an ugly prospect. After all in theory H264 ought to be about the best quality codec you can get.
I've tried using quicktime insted of itunes but same result.
iTunes uses Quicktime. What did you expect?
-jcr
one less layer of middleware. Others have reported marginally better results using quicktime. My own tests show that it matters more how long the program has been running. Empirically, quiting and restarting quicktime reduces the glitch rate. Thus I think people seeing better results with quicktime are doing so simply because they start quicktime only after itunes has gotten too glitchy.
This is not an apple TV problem per se, it's an ITMS problem. I don't have an ATV but I do buy videos. Indeed there are two problems I have with all the TV shows I have bought there.
1) Though it varies, the patchy compression artifacts on my computer is wretched. For the same size AVI file compressed off of a cable card the quality of the latter is much higher.
2) my 800Mhz imac can no longer play the itms videos without glitching. I've tried using quicktime insted of itunes but same result. I think this started when the doubled the number of pixels (but as noted above they did not actually improve the resolution).
The glitching is obviously due to either the codec or the DRM because I don't get this with the same size AVI file.
SUre my computer is 5 years old. But could they not at least admit they don't play on 800Mhz computers?
Many products in the US must be marked "made in china" or where ever and some even have to give percentage breakdown of the parts by country of origin. If this is valuable for components and assembly perhaps it should also be valuable to other costs of producing a product. E.g. total up the pro-rated cost of back-office, R&D, and tech support, that is outsourced and report that too.
Next consider policy based taxes. If country X is competing on wages well perhaps that's okay as long as he playing field is level. For example, if Country X, has no social security or OSHA laws that drive up the cost of doing business then a tariff should be applied to level the playing field. If they have child labor or lack family leave or have no environmental compliance costs then a tariff should be applied.
Otherwise any time we try to upgrade our social standards in the US, it costs jobs.
Wage competition on a level playing field is fine. If an CS graduate in India can do your job for less, then you are paid too much apparently. But if he's doing if for less because there's no OSHA laws then that undermines the OSHA laws. Need to fix that.
THe converse of this happens all the time. Some counties put tarriffs on wheat from countries that subsidize their farmers or their steel producers.
It's not "protectionist". Protectionist would be raising the tarrif's above the unpaid social costs to protect wages and jobs.
Also the cables would probably become lighting conduits if they are insulators and lighting discharge if they are conductors.
If we are constantly discharging the potential between the earth and the upper atmosphere I would expect this would have profound effects on the weather.
I'm unfamiliar with SL scripting, but from my MUSH days I suspect it goes more like this:
1. Person A inserts fixed amount of money into a machine.
2. Machine rolls a random number and determines the payout.
3. Machine returns an amount of money to the player....where there is no "escrow" step at which Big Brother can examine the entire transaction and see if it looks like gambling. There are just individual payments: money goes in, stuff happens, and later money comes out. Well Okay different terminology but same effect. The machine is a "trusted" escrow device because it's functional, albeit random, is pre-agreed between the parties. i.e. The owner of the machine can't affect it's outcome after the first party has paid.
Now my set of conditionals still holds. 1) if the output of a machine is money
2) if the input of the machine was money
3) if there is a call to a random number generator inside the machine it is gambling.
If linden imposed such a test how woul dthis break second life?
Thinking about this a second here is one such thing that would break A juke box that plays random songs for 1 dollar 1) player inserts a 5 dollar bill 2) machine makes change and out puts 4 dollarrs 3) machine randomly selects song.
But this could be patched by inventing a change machine so the player could get exact change.
Okay now step two. perhaps this could test could be voided if the casionos used "chips" instead of cash. then the output/input is chips. and a separate machine redeems them.
I can't fathom how this even begins to work. How does someone "set up" a casino in second life. When the player and the house engage, I assume there must be some sort of "escrow" function where the players enter a contract for some transaction. In this case the transaction must be conditioned on the outcome of some random number generator. Where does that generator live?
Assuming that what a casino consists of is the coupling of an escrowed transaction and a random number generator then I would imagine that a casino looks like this
1) Person A contracts to buy one item from a market basket of goods for X dollars 2) the market basket is filled with a sample of goods that differ slightly. These might for example be good apples and rotten apples. Sometimes the buyer gets a bad apple. Sometimes they get a good one. 3) a random number generator provided by second life determines which apple they get.
Now substitute 2X dollars for good apples and 0 dollars for bad apples and we have a casino.
If this is all there is to it then all linden needs is the following logic 1) if an escrowed transactions occurs
2) if the outcome of the transaction is random
3) if both parts of the escrow are Linden Dollars Then this is gambling.
speed of sound at sea level = 761.207051 miles per hour the top of the wheels go twice the speed of the train, and even faster if there is any slippage. Since the train wheels actually dip below the level to f the track the top of the train wheel is actually going even faster than twice the train velocity.
so at 350MPH the tops are going faster than 700 mph.
They are damn close to the speed of sound, and presumably the peak speed was higher than the average speed.
Moreover as they go up in altitude the speed of sound gets slower. so when they cross the alps they will be above the speed of sound for sure.
Maglev, won't have that problem since there's no wheels going at twice the the speed of sound.
You think that's bad, wait till they start messing with the output devices. But don't worry the finger in the nose. it's suppose to go there (thats why it fits) and thus your nose was rewired too be the download port for your finger camera. it's only 100MBs/sec though so if you have a lot of images you need to use the firewire port located in the rear.
This is a bit like the communist theory that people would share their different abilities freely. Ignoring the aspect that by not sharing freely but only strategically one can achieve both success and simultaneously a more productive community (in terms of resource exploitation) would make understanding capitalism difficult when put under the communist martian's microscope. Thus if this analogy holds determining which "bags" hold which traits may turn out to be more important in determining behavior than which traits are present.
For example, if my traits are simply eating food that other produce and shitting in the water, I would be the dominant species in any communist cess pool. But that cess pool would be driven out of existence by a more efficient community that had a way to get rid of me by demanding that I have some redeeming trait to exchange.
Meta genomics is usually applied to unculturable communities. As such it can only be done when the source is so abundant that one can get enough DNA to be able to sequence it.
The best this can do is tell you what genes are present in abundance. Often you may also need primers for that gene so you have to guess a portion of it before you go looking for it. Thus one has some blind spots but these are no worse perhaps than the simple reality that one must always miss some of the low concentration genomes. The presumption is that higher concentration genomes are the most important. That's debatable. If a martian sampled our planet he'd conclude we are irrelevant, and probably that nothing but the top layer of sea water was relevant, given the profile of DNA concentration. Maybe he's right, but I think he'd be missing out on using this to explain a lot of phenomena on earth. How would this explain for example high rise building, deforestation, or changes in the atmosphere, let alone nuclear explosions. For those you might need to sequence us.
Another problem with this kind of analysis is that while it tells you what is there it does not tell you how the genes interact. For that you need to measure things under varying condittions where relative abundances shift. E.g. finding conditions where nominally the same populations exist--highly coupled envirnonments in equilibrium--where there are different stresses and opportunities. Perhaps the best example of this is depth profiles in sea water. However, obtaining enough degrees of freedom in the experimental conditions, so that one can correlate DNA presence patterns is rough. These self-simmmilar variations can be factored out only under assumptions that need to be justified. Typically Linear factors are assumed and that's almost certainly not true. It certainly would be false in any situation involving either negative feedback or saturation effects. getting enough sample points of entire meta genomes is thus the limit. It's pretty heroic to do even one. And of course one replicate is not enough since one can't distinguish noise from variations one is seeking. So it's all very hard.
Thus it's sort of a race which will prove more powerful. Reductive decomposition of a population one species at a time or a discovery based meta genomic analysis.
the simple answer is we need to do both. When it works reduction is far more conclusive about interactions. But there's likely some aspects of community life that dont reside in any one geneome but are traits that float around between different "owners". Likewise, most environments like ground soils have proven to be unculturable so one is sort of stuck with metagenomics or nothing.
Asking what Lua has over Perl/python is like asking what YAML has over XML. You can do more in XML but it's not a lightweight format. YAML is clean and human readable, and fast to parse. It's so lightweight that I actually use it in my Python program to define complex structures of constants, since it's actually a cleaner syntax than the python code itself!
Indeed there are extremely few XML applications I have seen that would not be much better served by YAML. for example,.plist files on macs ought to be YAML. this would make a much better bridge between unix flat file configs and the desired database style configs that.plist achieve. (On the other hand things like markup languages for complex text layout are apropos for XML. my point is very few places benefit from XML.)
So the analogy here is that sometimes simpler is more useful than full featured. the trick is getting the most out of the least, not simply removing features from the complex form. Besides which To the extent that YAML is turing complete it's as good as anything else. Just as YAML can in principle represent anything that XML can.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow! A humble apology on slashdot--land of thick skins.
While combining functions on drives is nice since it saves space and, once the prices settle, even final costs of having just one drive in the computer. So far fragility created by mergeing devices that can fail in different has not proven to be a big problem that I have seen. e.g. the CD writer on the cd/dvd combo burns out prematurely and I have to replace the whole shebang. The motors or tray gears seem to go first.
But what does happen is that it takes longer and longer for the gorram computer to mount the cd/dvd. This is especially noticable when one inserts a damaged CD into a drive. the computer grunts and groans freaking for ever trying to decide it it is looking at a CD, and CD-R, D DVD-r, and DVD+R, a DVD. And each of these seems to have some different time consuming error protocol that involves trying to spin the thing at different speeds. Now they are going to be adding not one but two more protocols. And I imagine it won't be long before we have HDDVD-R and HDDVD+R and so on thrown on top of this.
it's going to take minutes when you shove in that Bad CD before your computer lets you eject it.
On Macs you can't just eject the CD by pushing a button like you can on Linux. Windows is heading that way, though I'm not really sure what VISTA does.
posting here since my other post is the parent.
How long before the device manufacturer's figure this pattern out
1) Create two competing technonologies that are equally sufficient but incompatible.
2) Stifle standardization
3) market more expensive devices that handle both, as both a marketing advantage, a manufacturing skill advantage,
4) and to inflate costs, assuming profit margin is proportional to gross, and the number of units sold is the same.
5) profit!
there is no ?????
A very interesting side effect is that MS can no longer dictate platform specs. This is remarkably new phenomena and worth watching.
Finally Could the slash dot filter PLEASE stop people from writing M$ instead of MS. (;_;)
NIST for example). I'm sorry but you have utterly misunderstood what I was saying or you don't understand the reference you linked to. The reference you link to is an on-line tracking filter for spam. The spam itself can vary or not, but it is not co-evolving in response to the filter itself which is what real spam does.
In the past, filters have been tested on spam data collected over literally a year or more, which captures the natural variation of the spam stream. Now I'm certain you don't understand the difference between spam varying and spam co-evolving. In simple terms the first is game theory when you opponent does not change his strategy in response to yours. The second is game theory when the opponent adapts to changes in your strategy. your other idea of giving direct feedback to a spam source on what works and what doesn't is meaningless, as real world spammers don't get feedback from individual filters either No that's not even wrong. Just about All spammers do is see what works. They stop using strategies that no longer work. It's not hard at all for them to test what is working. three techniques
1) look at the response rate to the ad as it varies with modality of the spam delivery
2) include a tracking gif. A certain fraction of people have html mail so you get a response.
3) open a gmail account and spam yourself to see what gets through.
No you are mistaken I believe. The term "live" is meant inthe sense of real time and sequentially deliveres spam. An on-line test. Not a test where one has the entire corpus of spam to train and filter. But the spam signature waveform is, unless I'm wrong, not going to be reactive to the filters. I'd even bet that all filters will be delivered the same message sets for ease of comparison. I doubt the spam will evolve it's signature in an intelligent reactive manner to evade the filter. But that's the hallmark of real spam--it not only varies but it adapts.
The trouble I can see with a test like this is that's it's a static test. It assumes a key feature of spam which is not true. namely that the spam signature is constant over time or at least makes an ergodic assumption. The thing about spam is that it is evolutionary. Not only does it's signature vary but the spammers learn what is getting through and shift to sending more of that flavor.
To see why this matters consider two spam hypothetical spam programs. One blocks 99% of the test set spam but lets a particular form of spam comprising only 1% of the test set through. And contrast this with another program that is adaptive but to avoid false-postives has to err on the side of letting through 20% of the spam it flags (making it only 20% effective).
While the former method would smoke the latter in a static trial. in the real world spammers would just shift to exclusively sending the kind of spam that gets through the first filter.
To make this a real contest they should make it adversarial. Give the spam script a feedback signal on which spam is getting through and let it adjust it's mix of spam and chaffe to try to maximize the the rate it can push spam through (or bust the filter by chaffing to minimize the number of legit e-mails that survive).
I'd implement them the same way LiveCDs do. for example an "eggdrop" tarball on the local disk filesystem root that contains custimizations. Would not be hard to include signed patches too.
put the game on a live CD they user must boot off of to play. Encrypt it. Claim DMCA violations if any attempts to reverse engineer. Not in a fascist sue-your-ass way, but just in a banning your MAC address for life kind of way. You might not be happy with this but it seems like a fairly effective solution that moves it away from the grey area of memory co-resident. software.
Who will accredit third world banks such as the FIRST BANK OF JOSEPH ENTBE OF NIGERIA?
Don't feed the troll soldier.
Well I'll be darned. I guess I'm the fool here. My bad for not noticing that. Still my comment about the patchy resolution munging still holds--that happens on my fast macs too. I've played AVIs of the same Battlestar galactica show and it's quite striking how much lower res the itms ones are.
Of course I suppose that might also be some limit imposed on them by the studios. Just like music they cap the resolution to make transcoding an ugly prospect. After all in theory H264 ought to be about the best quality codec you can get.
iTunes uses Quicktime. What did you expect?
-jcr
one less layer of middleware. Others have reported marginally better results using quicktime. My own tests show that it matters more how long the program has been running. Empirically, quiting and restarting quicktime reduces the glitch rate. Thus I think people seeing better results with quicktime are doing so simply because they start quicktime only after itunes has gotten too glitchy.
Well at least the EMP will take out the brain implants, solving one problem.
This is not an apple TV problem per se, it's an ITMS problem. I don't have an ATV but I do buy videos. Indeed there are two problems I have with all the TV shows I have bought there.
1) Though it varies, the patchy compression artifacts on my computer is wretched. For the same size AVI file compressed off of a cable card the quality of the latter is much higher.
2) my 800Mhz imac can no longer play the itms videos without glitching. I've tried using quicktime insted of itunes but same result. I think this started when the doubled the number of pixels (but as noted above they did not actually improve the resolution).
The glitching is obviously due to either the codec or the DRM because I don't get this with the same size AVI file.
SUre my computer is 5 years old. But could they not at least admit they don't play on 800Mhz computers?
Hmmm...according to his published papers this news brief is all wrong. these things get 0.14% conversion efficiency in nearly full sun. Bah.
Many products in the US must be marked "made in china" or where ever and some even have to give percentage breakdown of the parts by country of origin. If this is valuable for components and assembly perhaps it should also be valuable to other costs of producing a product. E.g. total up the pro-rated cost of back-office, R&D, and tech support, that is outsourced and report that too.
Next consider policy based taxes. If country X is competing on wages well perhaps that's okay as long as he playing field is level. For example, if Country X, has no social security or OSHA laws that drive up the cost of doing business then a tariff should be applied to level the playing field. If they have child labor or lack family leave or have no environmental compliance costs then a tariff should be applied.
Otherwise any time we try to upgrade our social standards in the US, it costs jobs.
Wage competition on a level playing field is fine. If an CS graduate in India can do your job for less, then you are paid too much apparently. But if he's doing if for less because there's no OSHA laws then that undermines the OSHA laws. Need to fix that.
THe converse of this happens all the time. Some counties put tarriffs on wheat from countries that subsidize their farmers or their steel producers.
It's not "protectionist". Protectionist would be raising the tarrif's above the unpaid social costs to protect wages and jobs.
Also the cables would probably become lighting conduits if they are insulators and lighting discharge if they are conductors. If we are constantly discharging the potential between the earth and the upper atmosphere I would expect this would have profound effects on the weather.
1. Person A inserts fixed amount of money into a machine.
2. Machine rolls a random number and determines the payout.
3. Machine returns an amount of money to the player.
Now my set of conditionals still holds.
1) if the output of a machine is money
2) if the input of the machine was money
3) if there is a call to a random number generator inside the machine
it is gambling.
If linden imposed such a test how woul dthis break second life?
Thinking about this a second here is one such thing that would break
A juke box that plays random songs for 1 dollar
1) player inserts a 5 dollar bill
2) machine makes change and out puts 4 dollarrs
3) machine randomly selects song.
But this could be patched by inventing a change machine so the player could get exact change.
Okay now step two. perhaps this could test could be voided if the casionos used "chips" instead of cash. then the output/input is chips. and a separate machine redeems them.
That must be the problem. Right?
I can't fathom how this even begins to work. How does someone "set up" a casino in second life. When the player and the house engage, I assume there must be some sort of "escrow" function where the players enter a contract for some transaction. In this case the transaction must be conditioned on the outcome of some random number generator. Where does that generator live?
Assuming that what a casino consists of is the coupling of an escrowed transaction and a random number generator then I would imagine that a casino looks like this
1) Person A contracts to buy one item from a market basket of goods for X dollars
2) the market basket is filled with a sample of goods that differ slightly. These might for example be good apples and rotten apples. Sometimes the buyer gets a bad apple. Sometimes they get a good one.
3) a random number generator provided by second life determines which apple they get.
Now substitute 2X dollars for good apples and 0 dollars for bad apples and we have a casino.
If this is all there is to it then all linden needs is the following logic
1) if an escrowed transactions occurs
2) if the outcome of the transaction is random
3) if both parts of the escrow are Linden Dollars
Then this is gambling.
How hard could that be?
ah good point. It's more subtle than it might seem: A sonic boom would occur be true if the wheels were square (and the track a catenary)
speed of sound at sea level = 761.207051 miles per hour
the top of the wheels go twice the speed of the train, and even faster if there is any slippage. Since the train wheels actually dip below the level to f the track the top of the train wheel is actually going even faster than twice the train velocity.
so at 350MPH the tops are going faster than 700 mph.
They are damn close to the speed of sound, and presumably the peak speed was higher than the average speed.
Moreover as they go up in altitude the speed of sound gets slower. so when they cross the alps they will be above the speed of sound for sure.
Maglev, won't have that problem since there's no wheels going at twice the the speed of sound.
You think that's bad, wait till they start messing with the output devices. But don't worry the finger in the nose. it's suppose to go there (thats why it fits) and thus your nose was rewired too be the download port for your finger camera. it's only 100MBs/sec though so if you have a lot of images you need to use the firewire port located in the rear.
This is a bit like the communist theory that people would share their different abilities freely. Ignoring the aspect that by not sharing freely but only strategically one can achieve both success and simultaneously a more productive community (in terms of resource exploitation) would make understanding capitalism difficult when put under the communist martian's microscope. Thus if this analogy holds determining which "bags" hold which traits may turn out to be more important in determining behavior than which traits are present.
For example, if my traits are simply eating food that other produce and shitting in the water, I would be the dominant species in any communist cess pool. But that cess pool would be driven out of existence by a more efficient community that had a way to get rid of me by demanding that I have some redeeming trait to exchange.
The best this can do is tell you what genes are present in abundance. Often you may also need primers for that gene so you have to guess a portion of it before you go looking for it. Thus one has some blind spots but these are no worse perhaps than the simple reality that one must always miss some of the low concentration genomes. The presumption is that higher concentration genomes are the most important. That's debatable. If a martian sampled our planet he'd conclude we are irrelevant, and probably that nothing but the top layer of sea water was relevant, given the profile of DNA concentration. Maybe he's right, but I think he'd be missing out on using this to explain a lot of phenomena on earth. How would this explain for example high rise building, deforestation, or changes in the atmosphere, let alone nuclear explosions. For those you might need to sequence us.
Another problem with this kind of analysis is that while it tells you what is there it does not tell you how the genes interact. For that you need to measure things under varying condittions where relative abundances shift. E.g. finding conditions where nominally the same populations exist--highly coupled envirnonments in equilibrium--where there are different stresses and opportunities. Perhaps the best example of this is depth profiles in sea water. However, obtaining enough degrees of freedom in the experimental conditions, so that one can correlate DNA presence patterns is rough. These self-simmmilar variations can be factored out only under assumptions that need to be justified. Typically Linear factors are assumed and that's almost certainly not true. It certainly would be false in any situation involving either negative feedback or saturation effects. getting enough sample points of entire meta genomes is thus the limit. It's pretty heroic to do even one. And of course one replicate is not enough since one can't distinguish noise from variations one is seeking. So it's all very hard.
Thus it's sort of a race which will prove more powerful. Reductive decomposition of a population one species at a time or a discovery based meta genomic analysis.
the simple answer is we need to do both. When it works reduction is far more conclusive about interactions. But there's likely some aspects of community life that dont reside in any one geneome but are traits that float around between different "owners". Likewise, most environments like ground soils have proven to be unculturable so one is sort of stuck with metagenomics or nothing.
Asking what Lua has over Perl/python is like asking what YAML has over XML. You can do more in XML but it's not a lightweight format. YAML is clean and human readable, and fast to parse. It's so lightweight that I actually use it in my Python program to define complex structures of constants, since it's actually a cleaner syntax than the python code itself!
.plist files on macs ought to be YAML. this would make a much better bridge between unix flat file configs and the desired database style configs that .plist achieve. (On the other hand things like markup languages for complex text layout are apropos for XML. my point is very few places benefit from XML.)
Indeed there are extremely few XML applications I have seen that would not be much better served by YAML. for example,
So the analogy here is that sometimes simpler is more useful than full featured. the trick is getting the most out of the least, not simply removing features from the complex form. Besides which To the extent that YAML is turing complete it's as good as anything else. Just as YAML can in principle represent anything that XML can.