The huge gap between what we get here in Australia, to what Chattanooga has rolled out, is amazing.
Chattanooga is offering 1Gbps for $70/mo (I don't see a data cap!) or you can go nuts and get 10Gbp for $300/mo.
Here in Australia, if your area is lucky enough to have workable "high-speed" broadband, it'll cost you $70AUD/mo for 50Mbps (asymm) and that's likely to have a data cap, possibly metered in both directions. A 100Mbps connection will be around $100AUD/mo and depending on the technology behind it, your real throughput may be much less.
And so in this light, the pay-gap is reinforced for both genders, as for what are the men pursuing increased income and eschewing other choices? Young men, perhaps only for status, but as age increases, many will be thinking families.
We should really be discussing the restructure of society at large. Why do we live the way we do in the west, in single generation dwellings? Why do we follow an essentially centuries old workplace structure?
There are many more choices in life besides "commercial IT career" and "scrubbing toilets". It is also a false implication that these lead to superrich and working-poor respectively. The set of all vocations doesn't have a natural ranking order unless you place judgements on each vocation. Soo... take a step back maybe be less biased?
For the record, I moonlight as the toilet scrubber of household.
Amiga models all had their quirks and to say the A2000 was pointless is looking back a little simplistically. I'll agree that the A2000 wasn't sexy, even at the time.
The A1000 was the first offering, followed about 2 years later by the A2000 and A500. Being the first iteration, the A1000 had many quirks and suffered from a stylish but impractically slim case size (for the era). The A2000 addressed the lack of expandability, while the A500 answered the low end of the market. Though the CPU did not change, there were a lot of changes in the overall chipset -- one large one being that the A2000 came with 1MB of chipset (dedicated) memory to the A1000s initial 256kB.
The A3000 came another ~2 years later -- was a little late to the party -- and delivered in a number of areas, but perhaps tellingly, many professionals would stick with the A2000 + 68030 accelerator boards. Accelerators from the leading company GVP were stable and much faster than initial A3000s, beyond which many video/CGI orientated cards would not initially fit in the A3000. That people moved the A3000 hardware to third-party cases is perhaps saying a lot about expandibility vs sexy cases.
The models that were pretty pointless were the half-way (or less) upgrades -- the A2500 and A1500.
If it wasn't for the third-party hardware developers, the Amiga would have died much sooner and the A2000 was the workhorse for these companies.
In the world of network science this strategy is about as effective as putting a pseudonym on your mailbox and expecting to function as a effective hideout.
Not only are we exporting unskilled labor, we're exporting our pollution!
It's worse than that, since the manufacturing done at higher emission standards would mean less pollution for the same product. As this would inevitably be at a higher cost, consumption would go down and products would reflect that tendency via feedback. Factor in this effect for the entire supply chain from raw materials and energy to finished product.
The 454 pyro-sequencer currently produces 400bp reads, not 20bp.
Granted, that's still a fair bit shorter than this experimental tech claims, but it's also a commercialized product you can actually buy right now. I think it would only be fair to quote current performance figures.
I'm not sure whether the above post should be marked "astroturfing" but it sure reads a little too positive.
454's sequencing technology is a welcomed addition to existing technologies, but don't believe the hype, particularly when the person talking has stock options.
The analysis of genomic sequencing data (metagenomics or otherwise) is highly benefited by large contiguous pieces or ideally whole contiguous genomes. Related to this and more fundemental is the fact that the shorter the pieces of DNA spat out by a machine the harder the problem of assembling them into larger contiguous chunks. This is due in part to the combinatorics of an alphabet made up of only 4 symbols but mainly the fact that genomic DNA contains many repeat structures even in lower organisms.
Without going into detail, it suffices to say that the longer the pieces (or "reads") produced by a sequencing machine, the easier the problem. Add to this the realities of sequencing errors and throw in metagenomics where you may have many organisms with almost the same genome, the problem gets quite hard.
Currently the large sequencing facilties that use 454 machines use them to complement their existing machines which produce 3-10 times longer reads (depending on who's talking). There are in fact papers investigating the ideal ratio of reads produced by new and old technologies.
Another factor to keep in mind is that, although the new high-throughput technologies (454 is the first to market, but not the only player) hold alot of promise, a large part of their appeal was going to be an enormous cost reduction. The problem is, so far that part of the equation hasn't met expectation. They are quite costly to run due to the cost of consumables and those prices are set by the manufacturer.
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.
Abundance of material doesn't pose a problem. Soil samples are so abundant in diverse microorganisms that its actually a problem later on. For water sampling it is quite straight-forward to use tangential flow filters to collect sufficient biomass by simply processing the appropriate volume of water.
Of the shotgun sequencing type, most studies to date have been of marine organisms.
It wasn't autobooting.
on
AmigaOS 4
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· Score: 2, Informative
Amiga disk drives had a mechanical switch which acted to inform the OS whenever a disk was inserted into the drive. The OS would read the bootblock when a disk was inserted, but it didn't actually "boot" it.
Virus writers then used that short-sighted habit of the OS to get their code into memory. These "Bootblock Viruses" were widespread and generally tended to be pretty innocuous, one of the most common being the "ByteBandit" virus, which did nothing but spread itself.
The switch wasn't actually necessary for the disk to be read and one "hack" -- in the traditional sense -- was to cut the plastic pin off the switch so that the OS wouldn't notice disk insertions. Of course, in that state inserted disks wouldn't appear on the desktop automatically.
Does anyone recall the media hubbub surrounding the release of Star Wars: Attack of the Clones? That the movie had been released onto P2P networks before it had even hit the theatres in many countries? Incontravertible evidence that something _had_ to be done about this scourge of filesharing!
A cynic might think it an interesting situation that a dutiful journalist would have to admit to committing a potential crime just to verify the report. A less determined one might just settle for the query results, with the less technologically adept ones being completely convinced: ignorant of the fact that no hard coupling exists between a file's name and its content.
When the claims were tested for veracity by secret anonymous squirrels, none of the files found on the Gnutella network contained any footage of the film.
No idea why that record held so long for diesel at what seems a low number (236 vs 410)
By default, really.
236mph, while indeed fast, isn't extrodinarily fast by today's standards in car performance. It will have simply been a lack of interest. If they break the broader "internal combustion" record of 409.3mph it would be more impressive, but then again that was set in 1965...
Those of us with an embarrassingly large playtime in MMOGs would probably say that filling in the blanks due to lost packates (as seen in games like Everquest and everything today) is certainly better than waiting for retransmits (like in the original Ultima Online), but often enough, you ended up chasing ghosts.
This was merely annoying as a newbie, chasing orc pawns in overloaded starter zones, but in much later stages the same feature could result in writing off hours of playtime for 40 people in unforgiving raid zones.
LANAP but if you ask me, Jobs is a perfect case study for clinical narcissism.
It's not a totally uncommon condition in people that achieve great things after striving for many more years than a more rational person might, but not everyone thus afflicted has the necessary talent to accompany them in that struggle.
Clearly, people seem to attribute most of Jobs success to Jobs well publisized/marketed degree of talent for design and foresight. These are the two skills that seem to have the most cacher when persuing "god of the industry" status.
However the skill that benefitted him the most by far, the skill he has always had right from the beginning, is the ability to deeply excite other people about his ideas. Enough that he could convince some of the absolutely best people in their various fields to leave the pleasant, comfortable jobs and work for him.
These people were time and again totally crucial the success of his business ventures. The ventures were not always successful in their own right, but always ended up with at least some great IP that could be mated to another idea.
Yes, and that was the motivation for the base 2 prefixes such as kibi. Too many manufacturers were using the metric equivalents interchangably as both base 10 and base 2. This made a mess of an otherwise entirely consistent and well conceived system of measurement.
Even though the new units were introduced years ago, they have been taken up quite slowly. However, I believe if you look closely you'll find that some manufacturers do use the new units, and that it regresses back in incorrect usage downstream on the supply chain.
I believe the inventor, that owned all the patents that are being used to sue RIM, died about 3-4 years ago.
What bothers me in this entire process is that NTP was composed entirely of the inventor and a lawyer. So for much of this case, it's been just a lawyer.
The most foolish thing though is that I believe RIM could have settled this case for far smaller sum early on, but now its 600M and probably something similar again in lawyers fees and business damage.
Prizes are nice to encourage research and development, but it's far behind funding the work in the first place. Nothing can be done if no money is available and funding isn't generated through speculating on a future rich prize market.
Besides which, prizes are generally about chanelling development not the research which gets you to the point of development.
The source code to the web app or the code to the underlying operations? In reality, the site is probably most interesting because it is an attempt at an ajax webapp for scientists. The actual underlying operations being performed are very well understood and algorithmically quite basic.
There have been innumerable bioinformatics sites put up over the years by various institutions, but they've never been examples of refined usability. You could say that is because the focus has been on the underlying tools and not the interface.
Despite being highly educated and working alongside a great deal of computational effort, biologists in general are not anymore computer literate that your average office worker. Much of the computational side has been taken up by computer literate Mathematicians, Physicists and Comp. Scientists. Those that can bring together a multitude of tools (often rudimentary academia quality software) to solve a problem through programming, find many of their collegues cannot or will not do the same. The older generation directing the labs then ask those that can to design sites to provide tools for the illiterate but as is the case in research, these static tools generally do not provide the necessary power or flexibility. Many efforts end up being ignored in favour of simply casing down the programmer in question.
Ultimately, the best solution is to teach programming to biologists as a core subject. Our old categorization of the sciences is out-moded.
Actually, in countries where prostitution is legalized and regulated to a degree, there are both men and women who choose to do it and they're not unwashed desparate people with no other choices. It _is_ simply sex for money.
Prostitution is so stigmatized in the US, its a joke. Especially when you consider how prevalent it is despite that fact.
While learning about bleeding edge tools will always be one form of knowledge (and a bottomless one), it doesn't speak greatly of a programmers judgement if they're regularly attempting to employ the latest tool in whatever project they happen to be working on, being denied by the project management and then getting frustrated. To me that says junior developer.
Sure, there will be instances where something new fulfills a need that simply isn't addressed by older tools, but real examples of that are rather rare. What is a more commonplace source of frustration, and one where the knowledgable person should really find it unbearable, would be thing such as honestly having substantially better design skills that the project's designers.
If you have a great deal of design experience and recognize the weaknesses in a particular design, but you're hired simply as an implementer and told repeatedly to "just implement what we've got", you're going to get frustrated and in this case that frustration is justified.
I think that is probably a better analogy with this person. Hired as an educator sounds like extremely nebulous and hands off role. Someone who founds a Linux distribution is going to be a hands on sort of guy. If all you can only watch the other kids on the swing set, you're going to get sick of it.
You can have both people and tech being polite.
on
Polite Cell Phones
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· Score: 1
Although I do not know why this takes a university group to think about, you can bring both people and technology together to make for a more polite environment.
Monitoring the environment isn't the way to go. We should be signalling phones to do things, where how much occurs within the phone is dictated by the owner.
Signal fields which switch phones to a silent setting could still be configurable by the owner, assuming that the range of choices still results in a "silent" phone.
As for another matter, why the heck do I need to set the time on my phone? Why isn't there a mobile equivalent of NTP on every phone today? How your phone reacts to change in time due to travel, could also be configurable.
Slashdot Mirror
The huge gap between what we get here in Australia, to what Chattanooga has rolled out, is amazing.
Chattanooga is offering 1Gbps for $70/mo (I don't see a data cap!) or you can go nuts and get 10Gbp for $300/mo.
Here in Australia, if your area is lucky enough to have workable "high-speed" broadband, it'll cost you $70AUD/mo for 50Mbps (asymm) and that's likely to have a data cap, possibly metered in both directions. A 100Mbps connection will be around $100AUD/mo and depending on the technology behind it, your real throughput may be much less.
And so in this light, the pay-gap is reinforced for both genders, as for what are the men pursuing increased income and eschewing other choices? Young men, perhaps only for status, but as age increases, many will be thinking families.
We should really be discussing the restructure of society at large. Why do we live the way we do in the west, in single generation dwellings? Why do we follow an essentially centuries old workplace structure?
There are many more choices in life besides "commercial IT career" and "scrubbing toilets". It is also a false implication that these lead to superrich and working-poor respectively. The set of all vocations doesn't have a natural ranking order unless you place judgements on each vocation. Soo... take a step back maybe be less biased?
For the record, I moonlight as the toilet scrubber of household.
The A1000 was the first offering, followed about 2 years later by the A2000 and A500. Being the first iteration, the A1000 had many quirks and suffered from a stylish but impractically slim case size (for the era). The A2000 addressed the lack of expandability, while the A500 answered the low end of the market. Though the CPU did not change, there were a lot of changes in the overall chipset -- one large one being that the A2000 came with 1MB of chipset (dedicated) memory to the A1000s initial 256kB.
The A3000 came another ~2 years later -- was a little late to the party -- and delivered in a number of areas, but perhaps tellingly, many professionals would stick with the A2000 + 68030 accelerator boards. Accelerators from the leading company GVP were stable and much faster than initial A3000s, beyond which many video/CGI orientated cards would not initially fit in the A3000. That people moved the A3000 hardware to third-party cases is perhaps saying a lot about expandibility vs sexy cases.
The models that were pretty pointless were the half-way (or less) upgrades -- the A2500 and A1500.
If it wasn't for the third-party hardware developers, the Amiga would have died much sooner and the A2000 was the workhorse for these companies.
In the world of network science this strategy is about as effective as putting a pseudonym on your mailbox and expecting to function as a effective hideout.
Not only are we exporting unskilled labor, we're exporting our pollution!
It's worse than that, since the manufacturing done at higher emission standards would mean less pollution for the same product. As this would inevitably be at a higher cost, consumption would go down and products would reflect that tendency via feedback. Factor in this effect for the entire supply chain from raw materials and energy to finished product.
The 454 pyro-sequencer currently produces 400bp reads, not 20bp. Granted, that's still a fair bit shorter than this experimental tech claims, but it's also a commercialized product you can actually buy right now. I think it would only be fair to quote current performance figures.
I'm not sure whether the above post should be marked "astroturfing" but it sure reads a little too positive.
454's sequencing technology is a welcomed addition to existing technologies, but don't believe the hype, particularly when the person talking has stock options.
The analysis of genomic sequencing data (metagenomics or otherwise) is highly benefited by large contiguous pieces or ideally whole contiguous genomes. Related to this and more fundemental is the fact that the shorter the pieces of DNA spat out by a machine the harder the problem of assembling them into larger contiguous chunks. This is due in part to the combinatorics of an alphabet made up of only 4 symbols but mainly the fact that genomic DNA contains many repeat structures even in lower organisms.
Without going into detail, it suffices to say that the longer the pieces (or "reads") produced by a sequencing machine, the easier the problem. Add to this the realities of sequencing errors and throw in metagenomics where you may have many organisms with almost the same genome, the problem gets quite hard.
Currently the large sequencing facilties that use 454 machines use them to complement their existing machines which produce 3-10 times longer reads (depending on who's talking). There are in fact papers investigating the ideal ratio of reads produced by new and old technologies.
Another factor to keep in mind is that, although the new high-throughput technologies (454 is the first to market, but not the only player) hold alot of promise, a large part of their appeal was going to be an enormous cost reduction. The problem is, so far that part of the equation hasn't met expectation. They are quite costly to run due to the cost of consumables and those prices are set by the manufacturer.
Abundance of material doesn't pose a problem. Soil samples are so abundant in diverse microorganisms that its actually a problem later on. For water sampling it is quite straight-forward to use tangential flow filters to collect sufficient biomass by simply processing the appropriate volume of water.
Of the shotgun sequencing type, most studies to date have been of marine organisms.
Amiga disk drives had a mechanical switch which acted to inform the OS whenever a disk was inserted into the drive. The OS would read the bootblock when a disk was inserted, but it didn't actually "boot" it.
Virus writers then used that short-sighted habit of the OS to get their code into memory. These "Bootblock Viruses" were widespread and generally tended to be pretty innocuous, one of the most common being the "ByteBandit" virus, which did nothing but spread itself.
The switch wasn't actually necessary for the disk to be read and one "hack" -- in the traditional sense -- was to cut the plastic pin off the switch so that the OS wouldn't notice disk insertions. Of course, in that state inserted disks wouldn't appear on the desktop automatically.
Does anyone recall the media hubbub surrounding the release of Star Wars: Attack of the Clones? That the movie had been released onto P2P networks before it had even hit the theatres in many countries? Incontravertible evidence that something _had_ to be done about this scourge of filesharing!
A cynic might think it an interesting situation that a dutiful journalist would have to admit to committing a potential crime just to verify the report. A less determined one might just settle for the query results, with the less technologically adept ones being completely convinced: ignorant of the fact that no hard coupling exists between a file's name and its content.
When the claims were tested for veracity by secret anonymous squirrels, none of the files found on the Gnutella network contained any footage of the film.
We'll make our own black obeliks now thankyou... now if we could just make them invulnerable to damage.
I would have beat you to that reply, but my computer only had this quaint mouse interface.
In my best Simpson's Comic Store owner voice
"Best episode ever!"
That was one item I considered bidding on when Christies first announced the auction
By default, really.
236mph, while indeed fast, isn't extrodinarily fast by today's standards in car performance. It will have simply been a lack of interest. If they break the broader "internal combustion" record of 409.3mph it would be more impressive, but then again that was set in 1965...
There is some fine irony in that statement.
Those of us with an embarrassingly large playtime in MMOGs would probably say that filling in the blanks due to lost packates (as seen in games like Everquest and everything today) is certainly better than waiting for retransmits (like in the original Ultima Online), but often enough, you ended up chasing ghosts.
This was merely annoying as a newbie, chasing orc pawns in overloaded starter zones, but in much later stages the same feature could result in writing off hours of playtime for 40 people in unforgiving raid zones.
It's not a totally uncommon condition in people that achieve great things after striving for many more years than a more rational person might, but not everyone thus afflicted has the necessary talent to accompany them in that struggle.
Clearly, people seem to attribute most of Jobs success to Jobs well publisized/marketed degree of talent for design and foresight. These are the two skills that seem to have the most cacher when persuing "god of the industry" status.
However the skill that benefitted him the most by far, the skill he has always had right from the beginning, is the ability to deeply excite other people about his ideas. Enough that he could convince some of the absolutely best people in their various fields to leave the pleasant, comfortable jobs and work for him.
These people were time and again totally crucial the success of his business ventures. The ventures were not always successful in their own right, but always ended up with at least some great IP that could be mated to another idea.
Even though the new units were introduced years ago, they have been taken up quite slowly. However, I believe if you look closely you'll find that some manufacturers do use the new units, and that it regresses back in incorrect usage downstream on the supply chain.
What bothers me in this entire process is that NTP was composed entirely of the inventor and a lawyer. So for much of this case, it's been just a lawyer.
The most foolish thing though is that I believe RIM could have settled this case for far smaller sum early on, but now its 600M and probably something similar again in lawyers fees and business damage.
Besides which, prizes are generally about chanelling development not the research which gets you to the point of development.
There have been innumerable bioinformatics sites put up over the years by various institutions, but they've never been examples of refined usability. You could say that is because the focus has been on the underlying tools and not the interface.
Despite being highly educated and working alongside a great deal of computational effort, biologists in general are not anymore computer literate that your average office worker. Much of the computational side has been taken up by computer literate Mathematicians, Physicists and Comp. Scientists. Those that can bring together a multitude of tools (often rudimentary academia quality software) to solve a problem through programming, find many of their collegues cannot or will not do the same. The older generation directing the labs then ask those that can to design sites to provide tools for the illiterate but as is the case in research, these static tools generally do not provide the necessary power or flexibility. Many efforts end up being ignored in favour of simply casing down the programmer in question.
Ultimately, the best solution is to teach programming to biologists as a core subject. Our old categorization of the sciences is out-moded.
Prostitution is so stigmatized in the US, its a joke. Especially when you consider how prevalent it is despite that fact.
Sure, there will be instances where something new fulfills a need that simply isn't addressed by older tools, but real examples of that are rather rare. What is a more commonplace source of frustration, and one where the knowledgable person should really find it unbearable, would be thing such as honestly having substantially better design skills that the project's designers.
If you have a great deal of design experience and recognize the weaknesses in a particular design, but you're hired simply as an implementer and told repeatedly to "just implement what we've got", you're going to get frustrated and in this case that frustration is justified.
I think that is probably a better analogy with this person. Hired as an educator sounds like extremely nebulous and hands off role. Someone who founds a Linux distribution is going to be a hands on sort of guy. If all you can only watch the other kids on the swing set, you're going to get sick of it.
Monitoring the environment isn't the way to go. We should be signalling phones to do things, where how much occurs within the phone is dictated by the owner.
Signal fields which switch phones to a silent setting could still be configurable by the owner, assuming that the range of choices still results in a "silent" phone.
As for another matter, why the heck do I need to set the time on my phone? Why isn't there a mobile equivalent of NTP on every phone today? How your phone reacts to change in time due to travel, could also be configurable.