annexing zeros to the right of the decimal point isn't going to increase the payoff. They need to right shift the decimal point as well to have any chance of it improving the troll's prospects of success.
If there is someone in your company, who is in a position that management can not show is making the company money, then the problem is that said person should not be in the company, or optionally you have incompetent managment.
You may think that most IT staff in a non-technological company is not making money, but someone along the line did something you are unable to. They looked at the ability of each individual that you think is 'making money' for the company, and evaluated whether that person would be able to make more than the cost of the additional support person if a support person was hired, and what the expected return on investment in that person would be before they even opened that position for a manager.
_Every_ person working at a company is expected to contribute to the company's botom line. If they are in a position that doesn't contribute in some way or another, they don't belong.
And if you continue to treat your IT staff as if they don't belong to the company, because you are incompetent enough that you don't understand how vital your IT department is to your company, you are contributing to the sense that your IT staff doesn't belong, and you should expect that your IT staff will recognize that, and treat you like the enemy of your company that you are treating them as. And if you are in upper management and are treating your IT staff this way, you should expect no loyalty from anyone in your IT staff.
And in your example, the user does know more than 'Word is just not working right.' they know that when they attempt to print a PDF, Word does something unexpected. (put up a dialog with strange content, closes, makes the screen start doing odd things...) In most cases the fact that the user can only say 'Word is not working right' means that an IT tech has to come to the desk the user is at, or possibly gain remote access through an internally approved remote desktop support platform, and find out exactly what the user is doing that causes the problem to happen.
As for Facebook or other social sites, it's very rare that your IT department has specified those decisions. Almost everyone in your IT department knows full well that social websites, news sites, and e-mail sites on the web are almost invariable safer for your computer than the internal e-mail system and very likely the intranet environment that you have in house. In almost every case, the reason that your corporate policies marke these resources off limits has to do with the perception of the people making policy with respect to what they expect that employees will be doing on these sites, and how that will affect performance. In some companies there may be liability issues as well related to the possibility that internal information may end up becoming generally available on the internet, which can open the company to liability for privacy issues through insider trading issues and worse.
...and not one question about how long it would take the NSA to get a court order allowing them to copy your memories from whatever system you have them coppied to?
...is a post incident review with support people involved, and their management teams, along with directors and executive involvement to identify what the problem was that caused the business to be inoperative for the duration of the incident, what policies and procedures need to be followed going forwards, and so on. Once policies are established, solutions that support those policies can be implemented.
As an example for your situation, since a vendor was involved in an upgrade, that should have been part of a scheduled change. The change should be documented ahead of time as to what is being done, what systems are going to be touched, and who the responsible parties both within the company and external to the company are for that change. Included in the documentation should be the fallback plan for dealing with issues that crop up during and after the change, within an appropriate test window that is included in the change window, as well as clearly defined backout procedures. "fix and fall forward" or equivalent statements are not, and should not be, considered acceptable plans. Wherever possible you want to have documentation attached that the procedures involved have been tested in a suitable test environment. (This may not be possible in situations where a test environment would cost as much to prepare as the production environment.)
As far as limiting remote access, as others have pointed out, such limits are trivial based on what type of remote access is in place, and what policies are established. At the very least account authorizations required for performing changes on production devices should require someone in house approve that authentication, be specific to the time when those changes are scheduled to happen, and should not allow similar access to devices or types of devices not involved in the change.
As pointed out by Lionel Dricot at http://ploum.net/post/the-cost-of-being-convinced, there is a cost of changing your position. A large number of climate deniers have invested themselves in the position they have taken, and unless they can find a benefit to changing their position that outweighs the investment they have made, they are likely to stand firm in their state of denial.
Potentially a far more useful technique, than bashing them over the head with the facts, is to start by having them review the facts surrounding the level of CO2 in the atmosphere, and then ask them to provide proposals as to why those levels have changed in the timeframe they have. That engages them in the process of actually doing science, as once they have proposed a hypothesis as to what may be causing an increase in CO2, those hypotheses can be tested. (I.e. it's the destruction of the rainforest - what does satellite data show about the circulation of O2 generated in the rainforest? It tends to stay in the area of the rainforests. Volcanoes emit CO2! Have we seen a tremendous increase in volcanic activity in the past century? No. Etc.) Start getting them to invest in looking at possibilities that can be tested, rather than having them try to change their minds based on decisions they have invested in.
Nah, it probably won't work, but it seems to me to be better than trying to sit and debate the topic with people who've come to the table already decided that no matter what the logic of proof that's provided, they are not going to change their position.
The question you posed was 'What makes you think they are wrong?' in response to the perception that the scientists are squandering research funding, in the example as a $56000 hammer being sold to the military is perceived. That question makes two presumptions, that perhaps the $56000 hammer is fundamentally not squandering, or that scientists are squandering. While the image I had of a $56000 hammer was the idea of a 16 oz claw hammer with a wood handle, I concede that for $56000 one could be considering the entire assemblage of a jackhammer, hoses, compressor, trailer and vehicle to maintain fuel for the compressor, collection of replacement parts for appropriate daily maintenance and present it as a good deal. I can not see the former being anything other than squandering of spending on the military.
As to the idea that the scientists may be squandering research funding, I will concede that the possibility exists that scientists are squandering research funding. My point was that the idea behind providing examples of how the results may be used in practical terms is a way to bring home to the random reader of the news story that this research does have value. You may contest the validity of the specific examples given, either in my wild speculation example, or in the story's example of treating autism or epilepsy, but if you treat the positing of what the research may mean down the road as marketing rather than predictable results, you're going to get to why such suggestions are given.
Original post actually. I agree that knowledge that does not result in practical applications is worth research. As an example a moth's wings are covered in dust, which we don't find on butterflies. Why? What's the advantage that this provides a moth? Pilots know that dust on an aircraft wing has a significant impact on the aerodynamic characteristics of the wing, so there is the possibility that if we understand why a moth's wings are covered in dust, from an aerodynamic perspective, we may be able to develop aircraft wings which perform better in environments where dust is a problem. If the reason for the dust is that when a moth lands some of the dust is scattered onto the surface that it lands on, making it harder to recognize the moth, that might have practical applications in military camouflage. But if we discover that the reason that moths have dust on their wings has nothing to do with aerodynamics, or camouflage, is the research that proves those factors wasted? I don't think so.
The problem is that practical results make for better marketing of research. The Laser had no practical use when it was developed. It was not developed to solve a problem that the developer was working on, it was not developed to fit a niche of technology. For most of a decade we had little practical use for lasers. They didn't have the power needed to be useful in weaponry, and we didn't have the supporting technology to make use of them in sensor systems. Would you say today that the money spent developing the laser was squandered? Basic research is never wasted money. However it's often expensive, and if all you ever want to do is make the next quarter's balance sheet look good, you can't defend it. It's only when you look at the long term (often 30 years or so into the future) that it makes sense to fund basic research.
Yes it is, however scientists and reporters covering science research have no shortage of evidence demonstrating that if they don't provide concrete possible practical applications, the public perception is that scientists are getting research funding that they are squandering in the science equivalent of the $56,000 hammer sold to the military. Now if you want all research that is worth pursuing even if it doesn't lead to any practical applications receive that treatment, I'm pretty sure that there will be a large number of people willing to encourage the lambasting.
...Mike isn't going to be able to go after the 14 year old tweeter for a TOS violation under CFAA, as the TOS at Twitter do not seem to have a minimum age requirement that he would be violating.
As someone on the far side of 40 from the described 14 year old, I have to say that I appreciate that 14 year olds who are opposed to CISPA are aware that this will have an affect on their privacy, and are being vocal about it. It suggests that civic responsibility is recognized as part of one's personal sense of duty to our youth, which suggests that at least someone is paying attention to their school classes, which may be counter to what Mike expects of any of the public, much less the 14 year olds out there. It also suggests that a 14 year old is more aware of the issues involved than this sitting representative. While I think that's a positive reflection on our youth, I think it's a very poor reflection on at least one of our representatives in Congress.
Dude! Be careful with those parenting skills. Parents have been being arrested and their local police departments are trying to get their children taken away from them for doing such dangerous things to children as teaching them to be responsible, and letting them demonstrate those skills. It's a dangerous world out there for parents these days.
There are a few suggestions already, but here are some more.
If your system is doing nvram synchronization of system ram, that means that a suspend to nvram is almost instant, and since the copy from the nvram does not need to go through the disk subsystem on your motherboard (northbridge or sata controller) but can be handled directly by the system memory itself, it can significantly improve boot up time. I don't think it would be instantaneous, but it very well may be within a ping round trip for a web server to come up, process the ping and actually respond, perhaps go back to suspend until there is real traffic to attend to. (Though responding to a ping might be relegated to an improved ethernet controller, why start up the main system for a simple icmp request.) As a result of not having this system on when there is no actual traffic to handle means that you can save power even more than doing dynamic processor clock adjustments.
Alternatively if you are doing write buffering you can reserve a portion of your buffer for boot up system files that can load into memory on a cold start, so you don't have to wait for the hard drive to spin up from cold, and again is faster than plugging a usb3.0 memory stick into a usb port on the computer. Optimize the collection of files to be loaded there and you may be able to get a complete boot off the memory without touching the hard drive.
Extended logging into nvram so that the system can capture what is going on when it can't write/read the hard drive or flash drive because of a problem on the system board.
As prices go down, diskless laptops become completely diskless with apparent instant-on, instant suspend capabilities. Possibly even shutting down the system when there is no I/O happening. (GPUs on video cards could easily take over things like updating the clock on the display, shutting down the display after a cetain period of idle time, or even when sensing the laptop has been closed.)
Write buffering means that storage is journaled without having to do journaling on the hard drive. A side effect is that in a raid5 array if a physical drive fails during a write, you can redistribute what was written, and so long as you maintain two or more physical drives, can rebuild the array contents to maintain redundancy on the off chance that another drive fails before you get the first rebuilt. (something like that is going to take additional coding in the server OS, and means that the raid5 is going to be software rather than hardware based.)
Those are just a few ideas off the top of my head.
The problem is that the sensor system on a camera is not collecting an image destined for the human brain at a given moment. It's dumping data to best represent the original color spectrum that the human eye is able to sense, across the entire field of view of the sensor. As a result of that you are presented with an image via a screen or print, that allows you to look at any portion of the image and gather the approximate image that the sensor received.
A better question would be why don't we build displays that trigger the color and intensity functionality of the retina and as the eye and head move, the portion of the image that the color sensing rods on your retina are focused on receive the appropriate color stimulation, the portions that are only sensitive to intensity get grayscale levels. As you move your eyes and head, the system recognises where on the display you are looking and sets the correct stimulation levels to allow the mind to perceive that the screen is showing a full color image.
There are two requirements for that to function. The first would be that the display has to be able to detect where your eye is looking. Three cameras at the display should be enough to do that if the displays are planar, for non-planar displays, or huds, a head mounted sensor system of three camera's (and related hardware to sense where the pupil is looking) could provide the needed information. The second requirement would be to map out the user's retina for where color and intensity sensors are, and then apply that information to the portions of the screen that the eyes are looking at.
We are at the point where we could do that without too much difficulty. Well, other than adding another two front facing cameras to screens that have a webcam already. The display driver would have to be updated, and I suspect that most of the medium to high end video cards are capable of the necessary processing.
All that said, this is functionally similar to ray tracing, which has been offered as the 'next great improvement in display technology' for some 20 years. I kind of don't expect we'll see it before we see holographic memory become widely available.
...we've switched from calculating rggb values based on attenuated rggb values sensed, to calculating rgb values from sensing cyan (usually a color of reflected light with red subtracted, white+blue ?, white+red ?, and yellow (again reflected white light minus the blue spectral light.)
I can see the resulting files having better print characteristics, if the detectors sense to the levels close to the characteristics of ink used for prints, but I don't think that's going to help at the display the photographer will be using to manipulate the images.
And of course neither variety of photo image capture is comparable to the qualities of light that our rods and cones respond to in our eyes.
Human's have to get out there. Not as entertainment, but because if humans remain exclusively on this rock and in near earth orbits, humans are a sitting duck. The lessons learned in getting humans into low earth orbit, then high earth orbit, then to establish permanent bases on the Moon and Mars, are going to be used to develop longer term programs for human interstellar travel, exploration and in time colonization.
Or we can just develop robots to go out and do that for us and roll over here on earth and give up.
Actually, if you select the 'outdated' hardware correctly, you can do all of that with a used cell phone. Several have HDMI out through an adapter for the USB interface, and some of the latest have wireless video capabilities as well. xbmc has been ported to the Android platform.
Now that's not to say that it's the best solution in anyone's book, but my experience with Raspberry Pi is that it makes a mediocre xbmc interface as a front end to something like MythTv. It is capable, just as a 3/4 ton pickup is capable of hauling more than 5 tons if it's done right, but in my experience it's not really the right tool for the job. The real power of the Raspberry Pi comes in figuring out what you can do with it that no-one else has done. At some point people have made their own dropbox alternative with the platform, which tells me that the system would work well enough as a plug server as well. household environmental management seems like a reasonably trivial thing to work out, though you'll have to create your own vent management system to be able to control air flow for thermal regulation in some cases. I can see someone developing their own home surveying system using poles, hoses and water level sensors, then capturing the property topography and feeding it into their own CAD software to figure out how they want to do building projects, how much earth will have to be moved, where it might go, etc. Then hand off the same Raspberry Pi to their daughter who builds a scanner using nothing more than an led and photo-resistor, and a couple of stepper motors to move the sensor they built. Or use a few rotary encoders and a button to build their own 3d scanner.
Note, I'm not saying that using a Raspberry Pi as an xbmc set top box is a bad idea, just that there are a lot of things that you can do if you get out of the mindset that it's an entertainment device and recognize that it is so much more.
In addition to bluetooth, wifi, and USB, HTC phones with the proprietary interface that initially looks like a mini-USB interface, well is a bit more. USB is included, but it also has audio i/o, as well as serial I/O that is accessible on pins on the connector. If you're concerned that you don't have i2c or even mimo/miso options, you're probably right, but a tremendous number of android phones do have host capable USB ports, and can control Arduino Uno's as serial devices that way, or Arduino Leonardo's and Esplora's as USB devices directly, and through that path has access to all of the IOs available on those boards, (including I2C.)
Some people think all taxes are bad. In this case I would say that if Google is the only company working to provide 1Gig service, then any tax money going to Verizon, AT&T, Time Warner, Comcast, CenturyLink and so on needs to be pulled back and redistributed to those companies that are actually providing 1Gig service as part of their funds for continuing to build out the service. If one or more of the large telecoms wants in on the funds, they can demonstrate that they are actually rolling out relevant improvements.
It's not just finding amino acids. Yes, as yous say amino acids are have been detected before. the problem is that there are a lot of different amino acids, and only some of them are essential to the fundamental building blocks of life. What this research is showing is that they have detected some of the essential amino acids, rather than the general variety known about before. It's somewhat like the difference between knowing that there is carbon in interstellar space, and finding diamonds, graphine or bucky-tubes. Knowing that there is carbon there does not imply that you will find one of the specific forms, but if you find one of those forms, you can deduce that it is much easier to start from there as a building block for other things (presuming you know things that use them as building blocks.)
Likewise just because the building blocks of life are in interstellar space doesn't mean that life is everywhere, just that when conditions are favorable, it's reasonable to presume that the amino acids necessary can show up.
The question about creating it is not about simply generating calcite, or calcium carbonate, but in generating usable sized high quality crystals. Much of the stuff I've encountered in nature that is large enough to hold has crystals that are growing in multiple directions, with none discreetly large enough to be useful for either use. I'm quite certain that there are larger crystals that would be workable, but I'm wondering if the cost to grow high quality crystals might be low enough to make this into a workable product for either, or both markets.
As far as re-enactment community trying to navigate with one, I would suspect that if it ever happens it will be someone showing what tools a viking may have used to successfully navigate the North Atlantic. Similar to proof of concept expeditions done by Thor Heyerdahl in the 40's, 50s, 60's and so. No they don't demonstrate exactly what ancient travelers may have done, however they do show whether current ideas are workable. I would expect that one of the kits included in the expedition would include gps and satcom gear.
Since there appears to be at least two markets for calcite crystals, Astronomers, and I would expect the re-enactment community, I wonder if there is a means of creating either the variety needed by astronomers, or people interested in re-enacting voyages of vikings or others.
I would suspect that creating them would be potentially less difficult than creating man-made diamonds, but I haven't checked.
Slashdot Mirror
annexing zeros to the right of the decimal point isn't going to increase the payoff. They need to right shift the decimal point as well to have any chance of it improving the troll's prospects of success.
If there is someone in your company, who is in a position that management can not show is making the company money, then the problem is that said person should not be in the company, or optionally you have incompetent managment.
You may think that most IT staff in a non-technological company is not making money, but someone along the line did something you are unable to. They looked at the ability of each individual that you think is 'making money' for the company, and evaluated whether that person would be able to make more than the cost of the additional support person if a support person was hired, and what the expected return on investment in that person would be before they even opened that position for a manager.
_Every_ person working at a company is expected to contribute to the company's botom line. If they are in a position that doesn't contribute in some way or another, they don't belong.
And if you continue to treat your IT staff as if they don't belong to the company, because you are incompetent enough that you don't understand how vital your IT department is to your company, you are contributing to the sense that your IT staff doesn't belong, and you should expect that your IT staff will recognize that, and treat you like the enemy of your company that you are treating them as. And if you are in upper management and are treating your IT staff this way, you should expect no loyalty from anyone in your IT staff.
And in your example, the user does know more than 'Word is just not working right.' they know that when they attempt to print a PDF, Word does something unexpected. (put up a dialog with strange content, closes, makes the screen start doing odd things...) In most cases the fact that the user can only say 'Word is not working right' means that an IT tech has to come to the desk the user is at, or possibly gain remote access through an internally approved remote desktop support platform, and find out exactly what the user is doing that causes the problem to happen.
As for Facebook or other social sites, it's very rare that your IT department has specified those decisions. Almost everyone in your IT department knows full well that social websites, news sites, and e-mail sites on the web are almost invariable safer for your computer than the internal e-mail system and very likely the intranet environment that you have in house. In almost every case, the reason that your corporate policies marke these resources off limits has to do with the perception of the people making policy with respect to what they expect that employees will be doing on these sites, and how that will affect performance. In some companies there may be liability issues as well related to the possibility that internal information may end up becoming generally available on the internet, which can open the company to liability for privacy issues through insider trading issues and worse.
...and not one question about how long it would take the NSA to get a court order allowing them to copy your memories from whatever system you have them coppied to?
...is a post incident review with support people involved, and their management teams, along with directors and executive involvement to identify what the problem was that caused the business to be inoperative for the duration of the incident, what policies and procedures need to be followed going forwards, and so on. Once policies are established, solutions that support those policies can be implemented.
As an example for your situation, since a vendor was involved in an upgrade, that should have been part of a scheduled change. The change should be documented ahead of time as to what is being done, what systems are going to be touched, and who the responsible parties both within the company and external to the company are for that change. Included in the documentation should be the fallback plan for dealing with issues that crop up during and after the change, within an appropriate test window that is included in the change window, as well as clearly defined backout procedures. "fix and fall forward" or equivalent statements are not, and should not be, considered acceptable plans. Wherever possible you want to have documentation attached that the procedures involved have been tested in a suitable test environment. (This may not be possible in situations where a test environment would cost as much to prepare as the production environment.)
As far as limiting remote access, as others have pointed out, such limits are trivial based on what type of remote access is in place, and what policies are established. At the very least account authorizations required for performing changes on production devices should require someone in house approve that authentication, be specific to the time when those changes are scheduled to happen, and should not allow similar access to devices or types of devices not involved in the change.
As pointed out by Lionel Dricot at http://ploum.net/post/the-cost-of-being-convinced, there is a cost of changing your position. A large number of climate deniers have invested themselves in the position they have taken, and unless they can find a benefit to changing their position that outweighs the investment they have made, they are likely to stand firm in their state of denial.
Potentially a far more useful technique, than bashing them over the head with the facts, is to start by having them review the facts surrounding the level of CO2 in the atmosphere, and then ask them to provide proposals as to why those levels have changed in the timeframe they have. That engages them in the process of actually doing science, as once they have proposed a hypothesis as to what may be causing an increase in CO2, those hypotheses can be tested. (I.e. it's the destruction of the rainforest - what does satellite data show about the circulation of O2 generated in the rainforest? It tends to stay in the area of the rainforests. Volcanoes emit CO2! Have we seen a tremendous increase in volcanic activity in the past century? No. Etc.) Start getting them to invest in looking at possibilities that can be tested, rather than having them try to change their minds based on decisions they have invested in.
Nah, it probably won't work, but it seems to me to be better than trying to sit and debate the topic with people who've come to the table already decided that no matter what the logic of proof that's provided, they are not going to change their position.
Well, you could sell us the oil in your sand, and use the profits as you see fit... :-)
The question you posed was 'What makes you think they are wrong?' in response to the perception that the scientists are squandering research funding, in the example as a $56000 hammer being sold to the military is perceived. That question makes two presumptions, that perhaps the $56000 hammer is fundamentally not squandering, or that scientists are squandering. While the image I had of a $56000 hammer was the idea of a 16 oz claw hammer with a wood handle, I concede that for $56000 one could be considering the entire assemblage of a jackhammer, hoses, compressor, trailer and vehicle to maintain fuel for the compressor, collection of replacement parts for appropriate daily maintenance and present it as a good deal. I can not see the former being anything other than squandering of spending on the military.
As to the idea that the scientists may be squandering research funding, I will concede that the possibility exists that scientists are squandering research funding. My point was that the idea behind providing examples of how the results may be used in practical terms is a way to bring home to the random reader of the news story that this research does have value. You may contest the validity of the specific examples given, either in my wild speculation example, or in the story's example of treating autism or epilepsy, but if you treat the positing of what the research may mean down the road as marketing rather than predictable results, you're going to get to why such suggestions are given.
Original post actually. I agree that knowledge that does not result in practical applications is worth research. As an example a moth's wings are covered in dust, which we don't find on butterflies. Why? What's the advantage that this provides a moth? Pilots know that dust on an aircraft wing has a significant impact on the aerodynamic characteristics of the wing, so there is the possibility that if we understand why a moth's wings are covered in dust, from an aerodynamic perspective, we may be able to develop aircraft wings which perform better in environments where dust is a problem. If the reason for the dust is that when a moth lands some of the dust is scattered onto the surface that it lands on, making it harder to recognize the moth, that might have practical applications in military camouflage. But if we discover that the reason that moths have dust on their wings has nothing to do with aerodynamics, or camouflage, is the research that proves those factors wasted? I don't think so.
The problem is that practical results make for better marketing of research. The Laser had no practical use when it was developed. It was not developed to solve a problem that the developer was working on, it was not developed to fit a niche of technology. For most of a decade we had little practical use for lasers. They didn't have the power needed to be useful in weaponry, and we didn't have the supporting technology to make use of them in sensor systems. Would you say today that the money spent developing the laser was squandered? Basic research is never wasted money. However it's often expensive, and if all you ever want to do is make the next quarter's balance sheet look good, you can't defend it. It's only when you look at the long term (often 30 years or so into the future) that it makes sense to fund basic research.
Yes it is, however scientists and reporters covering science research have no shortage of evidence demonstrating that if they don't provide concrete possible practical applications, the public perception is that scientists are getting research funding that they are squandering in the science equivalent of the $56,000 hammer sold to the military. Now if you want all research that is worth pursuing even if it doesn't lead to any practical applications receive that treatment, I'm pretty sure that there will be a large number of people willing to encourage the lambasting.
...Mike isn't going to be able to go after the 14 year old tweeter for a TOS violation under CFAA, as the TOS at Twitter do not seem to have a minimum age requirement that he would be violating.
As someone on the far side of 40 from the described 14 year old, I have to say that I appreciate that 14 year olds who are opposed to CISPA are aware that this will have an affect on their privacy, and are being vocal about it. It suggests that civic responsibility is recognized as part of one's personal sense of duty to our youth, which suggests that at least someone is paying attention to their school classes, which may be counter to what Mike expects of any of the public, much less the 14 year olds out there. It also suggests that a 14 year old is more aware of the issues involved than this sitting representative. While I think that's a positive reflection on our youth, I think it's a very poor reflection on at least one of our representatives in Congress.
Dude! Be careful with those parenting skills. Parents have been being arrested and their local police departments are trying to get their children taken away from them for doing such dangerous things to children as teaching them to be responsible, and letting them demonstrate those skills. It's a dangerous world out there for parents these days.
There are a few suggestions already, but here are some more.
If your system is doing nvram synchronization of system ram, that means that a suspend to nvram is almost instant, and since the copy from the nvram does not need to go through the disk subsystem on your motherboard (northbridge or sata controller) but can be handled directly by the system memory itself, it can significantly improve boot up time. I don't think it would be instantaneous, but it very well may be within a ping round trip for a web server to come up, process the ping and actually respond, perhaps go back to suspend until there is real traffic to attend to. (Though responding to a ping might be relegated to an improved ethernet controller, why start up the main system for a simple icmp request.) As a result of not having this system on when there is no actual traffic to handle means that you can save power even more than doing dynamic processor clock adjustments.
Alternatively if you are doing write buffering you can reserve a portion of your buffer for boot up system files that can load into memory on a cold start, so you don't have to wait for the hard drive to spin up from cold, and again is faster than plugging a usb3.0 memory stick into a usb port on the computer. Optimize the collection of files to be loaded there and you may be able to get a complete boot off the memory without touching the hard drive.
Extended logging into nvram so that the system can capture what is going on when it can't write/read the hard drive or flash drive because of a problem on the system board.
As prices go down, diskless laptops become completely diskless with apparent instant-on, instant suspend capabilities. Possibly even shutting down the system when there is no I/O happening. (GPUs on video cards could easily take over things like updating the clock on the display, shutting down the display after a cetain period of idle time, or even when sensing the laptop has been closed.)
Write buffering means that storage is journaled without having to do journaling on the hard drive. A side effect is that in a raid5 array if a physical drive fails during a write, you can redistribute what was written, and so long as you maintain two or more physical drives, can rebuild the array contents to maintain redundancy on the off chance that another drive fails before you get the first rebuilt. (something like that is going to take additional coding in the server OS, and means that the raid5 is going to be software rather than hardware based.)
Those are just a few ideas off the top of my head.
The problem is that the sensor system on a camera is not collecting an image destined for the human brain at a given moment. It's dumping data to best represent the original color spectrum that the human eye is able to sense, across the entire field of view of the sensor. As a result of that you are presented with an image via a screen or print, that allows you to look at any portion of the image and gather the approximate image that the sensor received.
A better question would be why don't we build displays that trigger the color and intensity functionality of the retina and as the eye and head move, the portion of the image that the color sensing rods on your retina are focused on receive the appropriate color stimulation, the portions that are only sensitive to intensity get grayscale levels. As you move your eyes and head, the system recognises where on the display you are looking and sets the correct stimulation levels to allow the mind to perceive that the screen is showing a full color image.
There are two requirements for that to function. The first would be that the display has to be able to detect where your eye is looking. Three cameras at the display should be enough to do that if the displays are planar, for non-planar displays, or huds, a head mounted sensor system of three camera's (and related hardware to sense where the pupil is looking) could provide the needed information. The second requirement would be to map out the user's retina for where color and intensity sensors are, and then apply that information to the portions of the screen that the eyes are looking at.
We are at the point where we could do that without too much difficulty. Well, other than adding another two front facing cameras to screens that have a webcam already. The display driver would have to be updated, and I suspect that most of the medium to high end video cards are capable of the necessary processing.
All that said, this is functionally similar to ray tracing, which has been offered as the 'next great improvement in display technology' for some 20 years. I kind of don't expect we'll see it before we see holographic memory become widely available.
But then again...
...we've switched from calculating rggb values based on attenuated rggb values sensed, to calculating rgb values from sensing cyan (usually a color of reflected light with red subtracted, white+blue ?, white+red ?, and yellow (again reflected white light minus the blue spectral light.)
I can see the resulting files having better print characteristics, if the detectors sense to the levels close to the characteristics of ink used for prints, but I don't think that's going to help at the display the photographer will be using to manipulate the images.
And of course neither variety of photo image capture is comparable to the qualities of light that our rods and cones respond to in our eyes.
Human's have to get out there. Not as entertainment, but because if humans remain exclusively on this rock and in near earth orbits, humans are a sitting duck. The lessons learned in getting humans into low earth orbit, then high earth orbit, then to establish permanent bases on the Moon and Mars, are going to be used to develop longer term programs for human interstellar travel, exploration and in time colonization.
Or we can just develop robots to go out and do that for us and roll over here on earth and give up.
Actually, if you select the 'outdated' hardware correctly, you can do all of that with a used cell phone. Several have HDMI out through an adapter for the USB interface, and some of the latest have wireless video capabilities as well. xbmc has been ported to the Android platform.
Now that's not to say that it's the best solution in anyone's book, but my experience with Raspberry Pi is that it makes a mediocre xbmc interface as a front end to something like MythTv. It is capable, just as a 3/4 ton pickup is capable of hauling more than 5 tons if it's done right, but in my experience it's not really the right tool for the job. The real power of the Raspberry Pi comes in figuring out what you can do with it that no-one else has done. At some point people have made their own dropbox alternative with the platform, which tells me that the system would work well enough as a plug server as well. household environmental management seems like a reasonably trivial thing to work out, though you'll have to create your own vent management system to be able to control air flow for thermal regulation in some cases. I can see someone developing their own home surveying system using poles, hoses and water level sensors, then capturing the property topography and feeding it into their own CAD software to figure out how they want to do building projects, how much earth will have to be moved, where it might go, etc. Then hand off the same Raspberry Pi to their daughter who builds a scanner using nothing more than an led and photo-resistor, and a couple of stepper motors to move the sensor they built. Or use a few rotary encoders and a button to build their own 3d scanner.
Note, I'm not saying that using a Raspberry Pi as an xbmc set top box is a bad idea, just that there are a lot of things that you can do if you get out of the mindset that it's an entertainment device and recognize that it is so much more.
In addition to bluetooth, wifi, and USB, HTC phones with the proprietary interface that initially looks like a mini-USB interface, well is a bit more. USB is included, but it also has audio i/o, as well as serial I/O that is accessible on pins on the connector. If you're concerned that you don't have i2c or even mimo/miso options, you're probably right, but a tremendous number of android phones do have host capable USB ports, and can control Arduino Uno's as serial devices that way, or Arduino Leonardo's and Esplora's as USB devices directly, and through that path has access to all of the IOs available on those boards, (including I2C.)
Astrologers on the other hand...
Hey Doc, can you point me to the local u-drive-em spaceship rentals?
Some people think all taxes are bad. In this case I would say that if Google is the only company working to provide 1Gig service, then any tax money going to Verizon, AT&T, Time Warner, Comcast, CenturyLink and so on needs to be pulled back and redistributed to those companies that are actually providing 1Gig service as part of their funds for continuing to build out the service. If one or more of the large telecoms wants in on the funds, they can demonstrate that they are actually rolling out relevant improvements.
I think the providers in South Korea and Japan have figured out that they have a market for the out of date networking equipment they are replacing.
...hasn't learned the lessons that manufacturers and call center managers have learned?
That seems odd.
It's not just finding amino acids. Yes, as yous say amino acids are have been detected before. the problem is that there are a lot of different amino acids, and only some of them are essential to the fundamental building blocks of life. What this research is showing is that they have detected some of the essential amino acids, rather than the general variety known about before. It's somewhat like the difference between knowing that there is carbon in interstellar space, and finding diamonds, graphine or bucky-tubes. Knowing that there is carbon there does not imply that you will find one of the specific forms, but if you find one of those forms, you can deduce that it is much easier to start from there as a building block for other things (presuming you know things that use them as building blocks.)
Likewise just because the building blocks of life are in interstellar space doesn't mean that life is everywhere, just that when conditions are favorable, it's reasonable to presume that the amino acids necessary can show up.
The question about creating it is not about simply generating calcite, or calcium carbonate, but in generating usable sized high quality crystals. Much of the stuff I've encountered in nature that is large enough to hold has crystals that are growing in multiple directions, with none discreetly large enough to be useful for either use. I'm quite certain that there are larger crystals that would be workable, but I'm wondering if the cost to grow high quality crystals might be low enough to make this into a workable product for either, or both markets.
As far as re-enactment community trying to navigate with one, I would suspect that if it ever happens it will be someone showing what tools a viking may have used to successfully navigate the North Atlantic. Similar to proof of concept expeditions done by Thor Heyerdahl in the 40's, 50s, 60's and so. No they don't demonstrate exactly what ancient travelers may have done, however they do show whether current ideas are workable. I would expect that one of the kits included in the expedition would include gps and satcom gear.
Since there appears to be at least two markets for calcite crystals, Astronomers, and I would expect the re-enactment community, I wonder if there is a means of creating either the variety needed by astronomers, or people interested in re-enacting voyages of vikings or others.
I would suspect that creating them would be potentially less difficult than creating man-made diamonds, but I haven't checked.