Are you really trying to imply that it cost $64,000, $79,000, and $109,000 to produce each of these watches? The technology is kind of cool, I'll admit. But the whole company smacks of marketing one-ups-manship, and status symbol for the ultra-rich. People buy these sorts of things so they can display their wealth, so the more it costs and the better the name or feature that makes it cool, the more the maker can charge.
Point being that I'm sure it cost a lot to develop the technology, make a limited run, etc. But if you're implying the price mostly reflects the cost of manufacture, I think you're dreadfully wrong.
The main impetus for this was the FOX "infotainment" show that made claims the moon landing was faked. While everyone should know that network that brought you Celebrity Boxing, Who Wants To Marry A (abusive jerk), and The O'Reilly is the LAST place you should be looking for science, sadly that isn't always the case.
FOX is still a major network, and while they should be ashamed of themselves for spreading such blatant misinformation, it seems to me that NASA should have some response to this. Yes, I've heard the claim that responding to it only gives the crackpots more credibility, but when a major network (even the lowley FOX) suggests the moon landings were faked, the crackpots already have far too much credibility than they deserve.
Now, you can argue about WHAT NASA should say or do, I'm not sure funding a book was the proper thing. It would seem too late to make a big stink about FOX being so irresponsible to air trash like this, being that it's been almost 2 years since it was first shown. Personally I think this argument should be about what NASA should do about this sort of thing, not if.
At the time I did just this and had the same problem. Since that time Nvidia has released a new version that supports RH8 which is the source I'd assume you're talking about. (BTW I'm talking about the NForce driver, not the GForce drivers).
Well, from my own experience with windows I know they had buggy sound drivers for many months that caused XP to crash quite often whenever I played a game using DirectSound. It's since been fixed. So I don't doubt that Nvidia may produce buggier-than-normal drivers.
The other issue may be that kernel developers don't want to chase down problems that they can't fix, and are hard to troubleshoot without source code access.
You seem to attribute the afformentioned behavior to some ideological problem with binary drivers (which I guess is possible). Before you pass judgement I think you need to consider the possibility that kernel developers are just trying the most expedient route at solving the most problems they can. It's difficult to know what motivates peoples decisions when you don't know the tradeoffs involved.
Technically I guess you're be right, but the word prejudice is almost exclusively used in a negative way. Assuming that Nvidia writes poor drivers that cause system crashes, what's wrong with making a first pass guess that the source of your problem is the thing that goes wrong most often, i.e. Nvidia drivers? This is "prejudice", you're right. But people use prejudice every day to try to limit the scope of problems.
Maybe some developers have a "jihad" (a loaded word if I ever heard one) against binary modules, but using basic troubleshooting techniques is no evidence of it.
Yes. Nvidia did this for the Nforce drivers, and I believe for the GeForce drivers. This doesn't always solve the problem though. The RedHat 8 kernel (and I'm assuming other new distributions) was compiled with gcc 3.2, while the binary library Nvidia provides was compiled with gcc 2.95. Having kernel modules and the rest of your kernel compiled with major revision changes can cause problems, and inmod will refuse to load this module unless you use the force option. The end result is incompatibility until the Nvidia gets around to simply re-compiling the module with gcc3.2 (or you're technical enough to know to how to use the --force option with insmod, and are willing to take the risk it breaks something)
It's true that providing a binary library and a wrapper is a better solution than a completely closed binary, but there are still some large problems with this approach.
Wow. 30 grams of gold is almost one troy ounce (about 31 grams per troy ounce). A troy ounce of gold is about $330 US. That's quite an expensive, if not odd gift to give employees. I'm curious, did most people sell the gold, or keep it?
Re:Given up on Mandrake
on
Mandrake News
·
· Score: 1
Great that they're headed toward financial stability, but I've pretty much given up on Mandrake as well. Mandrake Update is a total POS (and I don't mean point of sale). It hardly ever works properly. The support sight is terrible... I tried reporting bugs on 8.1 in bugzilla, and I'm sure no one ever saw it. My most recent attempt with Mandrake was with 8.2 PPC, which was a nightmare. I never did get X set up properly, and MandrakeUpdate doesn't work at all. If I had to do it all over, I'd go back to RedHat.
It's great that any linux company is surviving, but Mandrake has some serious issues to work out. Perhaps there really is something to that whole stereotype about french engineering;).
Indeed. I was a sprint high speed DSL subscriber until recently, when they decided to pull out of the high speed DSL market in my area.
The word on the street I keep hearing is that's it's very difficult for companies to make profits off broadband. I really don't know why this is the case, broadband really isn't THAT unpopular. Are investors too impatient on a return on their investments? Do a lot of these companies just have a poor business model? Are these companies just badly managed? Or is this just a natural weeding of bad companies in an industry that's still fairly young?
I'd be willing to bet on the latter. Seems like this same thing happened in the early commercial dialup ISP era, but no one heard about it because the companies affected were much smaller.
This article was only listed under the science section, and not on the main page. The Pi article was presumably determined to have more mass appeal, so was put on the main page as well.
Sadly Mr./Ms Anonymous coward you are correct. I realize the problem lies deeper. Part of it is simply the fact that the Slashdot format is an extreme form of short attention span discussion. No dialogue on a topic goes on for more than say an hour or two, and the dialogue between two actual people doesn't last more than say a few minutes, if it occurs at all. Everyone wants to find out about "the new cool thing" of almost literally 5 minutes from now. Is this a sickness of our society, or more a sickness of the geek world?
At this point, only 5 hours after your reply I'm basically talking to myself. I'm not exactly sure why I bother... perhaps only to sharpen my own understanding.
This submission has no less than 15 links in it! I'm still not sure where the real content is. Worse, what appears to be the main link points to another few line discussion that references yet another article.
Posters, and especially editors, Please don't post/allow submissions that are filled with nothing but links, and links to links. You may think you're providing more information, but most of those links are just noise. This seems to be an emerging trend on slashdot, and I think it's a very bad one.
Taking a slight tangent for just a moment, sadly, the biggest problem with slashdot is there's never any real discussion (mostly that would involve the editors) about slashdot itself. There's constantly re-posts of material, and poor quality submissions. This needs to be fixed somehow, but can't happen unless the slashdot editors start talking about this problems and not just remain silent.
He brings up this point in the article. It's important to archive everything because we never know what's going to be usefull information in the future.
In other words, perspective and context is a huge part in determining value and meaning. At some point these annoying popup ads may play be important for someone studying the evolution of advertising on the net. In fact, popups, or the frequency or timing of them might be something that's missing from the archive.
Most of the culture is invisible to most of us most of the time. The things we take for granted
are the most ingrained into us, and possibly the most interesting to someone after the culture has changed.
Well, in this example I agree with you. Creating single celled organisms that can't survive outside a laboratory isn't much of a moral dilemma as far as I'm concerned.
But you seem to take this further. Their certainly are things I'd be concerned over involving biological research. Cloning humans and raising them to maturity is certainly a concern. Not for religious reasons, but simply for the fact that (currently) clones have damaged DNA. It seems an important ethical question whether it's morally right to create a human who might have major medical problems somewhere down the road.
How about using otherwise healthy humans for potentially harmfull medical experiments? Pay someone $10,000 to take an experimental HIV vaccine, then deliberately infect them with HIV. I'm not saying anyone would do this, but it's certainly a very valid ethical concern.
Biological research can directly involve humans and animals. Humans (and sometimes animals) are the main actors in ethical debates. It should be therefor be no surprise that biological research involves ethical concerns more than physics, chemistry, etc.
When you're in a plane you have line of sight view of a LOT more cell towers than when you're on the ground. Also high speed trains move only about 2.5-3 times faster than a car, while planes move 8-10 times faster than a car. Both of these combined can easily explain why you can use your phone on high speed trains, and not on a plane.
It is worth noting that game 6, in which Kramnik may have resigned too early, was found to be a probable draw with best play
It is also worth noting that Kramnik didn't have much time left on his clock, and it would have been
difficult for him to come up with the right moves given the amount of time he had left on his clock.
Wow.. did anyone else get the feeling they were at a presidential press conference where the answers often had little connection with the questions?
my favorites:
THG - Due to the reduced warranty period, does your company expect to make significant changes to the construction and design of the hard drive products?
Seagate - Seagate will continue to research and implement technologies that maintain and advance drive and data reliability -- these are critical attributes that our customers require.
Western Digital - Western Digital continues to offer a three-year warranty on its products through its Special Edition product family and available optional warranty upgrades. WD designs and manufactures its hard drives at the highest quality in the industry, and has built a reputation throughout the industry for superior quality. Our products consistently meet or exceed strict OEM customer quality requirements.
Another zinger:
THG - Each company participating in this Q & A session has cited cost as a major factor in its decision to lessen the warranty period for its hard drives. Do you anticipate that any of this cost savings will be passed on to consumers?
Maxtor - There have been a number of elements that have gone into our decision to adjust our warranty policy. In any case, customers will benefit from Maxtor's continued investment in new and innovative hard drive technologies such as new interfaces, increasing the areal density curve, and ongoing reliability improvements to name a few. For example, Maxtor is the only company currently shipping 80GB per platter hard drives.
Seagate - Consumers who buy hard drives have benefited from continually improving value-for-capacity. For many years, capacities have doubled over each 12 to 18 month period while unit prices have declined. Again, Seagate's highly advanced technologies, expertise and commitment to R&D have helped the company develop cost-effective designs, and to provide this value to our customers. Efficiencies in business processes also contribute to our ability to provide this level of value.
Western Digital - This new policy will allow the HDD industry to continue to be very competitive, which ultimately equates to increased end-user benefits. We anticipate consumers will continue to benefit from huge technological advances and manufacturing expertise that has resulted in surpassing Moore's Law in capacity offering one of the best values (cost-per-GB) in PC technology today.
I feel like I'm reading that useless marketing crap on the insert in the packaging that no one reads. I find it kind of sad that Toms makes no mention of this doubletalk.
It's a decent movie, but be forwarned that it's still a hollywood movie and they try to make scientists into the bad guy. From what I understand most of the bad guy scientist stuff was manufactured by Hollywood to make a better script. This pisses me off because many people get their impressions of the world from movies more than anyone cares to admit. Beyond that, you have to get past Nick Nolte's Italian accent, which is pretty funny.
The story is pretty amazing though, since the father has no training in science, and still manages to have a major insite after self-educating himself about molecular biology and this disease. In terms of people becoming more involved in medicine, and not just passive participants it's a great story.
That's exactly why they do this in the black rock desert. The playa is the main part, and is 27 miles long, and 12 miles wide of flat dry lake bed that's completely baren. It's nearly surrounded by mountains. There's no buildings to hit for quite a distance. The area surrounding it is very sparsely populated.
I guess there's a small chance a rocket would hit a building on re-entry. I wouldn't know how to calculate it, but given the large baren area it has to be almost nill.
like this article was written (well, could have been) by bratty little kids in middle school during lunch?
I know it's supposed to be a joke, but the answers all seem so juvenile. Substitute a few middle-school cliques for the categories forbes selected, and you have a article for the school paper. This article seems pretty poor journalism even for forbes.
You may have some sort of sleep disorder. If I were you I'd make an appointment at a sleep clinic. Your GP is probbably fairly ignorant about sleep disorders, at least according to one of the leading
sleep disorder specialist, William Dement. So try to
find a sleep clinic.
Yes we want to move away from old legacy architectures, but at the same time we don't want to pay thousands of dollars for a chip that has poor performance running current code, and even native code isn't all that hot (Itanium). IA64 is hardly a proven technology, and it remains to be seen whether the approach they've taken will pay off.
We also like to see competition between companies. Hardly anyone really has any loyalty toward either AMD or Intel, but we all like to see low prices and fast chips, and AMD coming out with a 64 bit chip that's affordable is still cool, even though it's still a lot of the same old architecture.
Actually you're wrong. Bearshare has the ability to list the files you're sharing via a built in web-server. I don't know if other gnutella clients allow this ability.
Huh? This sounds like basic inductive logic to me. While you're right that just because a meteor shares the same composition as a planet doesn't necessarily mean it came from that planet, it's certainly suggestive that it is.
Each planet has an isotope signature from one another. That is to say that in the example given mercury has a different ratio of one Oxygen isotope to another. These ratios AFAIK are consistant among the entire planetary body, and are not random. On the earth Oxygen-16 accounts for 99.76% of all oxygen atoms, where Oxygen-17 accounts for.4% of all oxygen atoms. On mercury this ratio is presumably different. If you measure a meteorite sample and it's similar in isotope ratios to that of mercury, you can reasonably conclude that the sample probbably came from mercury. If you do further analysis and find many other isotope ratios that are the same as they are on mercury, it becomes increasingly likely that your rock is really from mercury.
This is not pseudo-science at all, though from reading the article the hypothesis that the rock is from mercury is still pretty tentative. You may be right that this rock may not be from mercury, but your larger scale attack on the basis of isotope composition tying rock samples to certain planets is pretty flimsy.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you really trying to imply that it cost $64,000, $79,000, and $109,000 to produce each of these watches? The technology is kind of cool, I'll admit. But the whole company smacks of marketing one-ups-manship, and status symbol for the ultra-rich. People buy these sorts of things so they can display their wealth, so the more it costs and the better the name or feature that makes it cool, the more the maker can charge.
Point being that I'm sure it cost a lot to develop the technology, make a limited run, etc. But if you're implying the price mostly reflects the cost of manufacture, I think you're dreadfully wrong.
The main impetus for this was the FOX "infotainment" show that made claims the moon landing was faked. While everyone should know that network that brought you Celebrity Boxing, Who Wants To Marry A (abusive jerk), and The O'Reilly is the LAST place you should be looking for science, sadly that isn't always the case.
FOX is still a major network, and while they should be ashamed of themselves for spreading such blatant misinformation, it seems to me that NASA should have some response to this. Yes, I've heard the claim that responding to it only gives the crackpots more credibility, but when a major network (even the lowley FOX) suggests the moon landings were faked, the crackpots already have far too much credibility than they deserve.
Now, you can argue about WHAT NASA should say or do, I'm not sure funding a book was the proper thing. It would seem too late to make a big stink about FOX being so irresponsible to air trash like this, being that it's been almost 2 years since it was first shown. Personally I think this argument should be about what NASA should do about this sort of thing, not if.
At the time I did just this and had the same problem. Since that time Nvidia has released a new version that supports RH8 which is the source I'd assume you're talking about. (BTW I'm talking about the NForce driver, not the GForce drivers).
Actually no, that doesn't work. The problem is the binary library can't be re-compiled.
Well, from my own experience with windows I know they had buggy sound drivers for many months that caused XP to crash quite often whenever I played a game using DirectSound. It's since been fixed. So I don't doubt that Nvidia may produce buggier-than-normal drivers.
The other issue may be that kernel developers don't want to chase down problems that they can't fix, and are hard to troubleshoot without source code access.
You seem to attribute the afformentioned behavior to some ideological problem with binary drivers (which I guess is possible). Before you pass judgement I think you need to consider the possibility that kernel developers are just trying the most expedient route at solving the most problems they can. It's difficult to know what motivates peoples decisions when you don't know the tradeoffs involved.
Technically I guess you're be right, but the word prejudice is almost exclusively used in a negative way. Assuming that Nvidia writes poor drivers that cause system crashes, what's wrong with making a first pass guess that the source of your problem is the thing that goes wrong most often, i.e. Nvidia drivers? This is "prejudice", you're right. But people use prejudice every day to try to limit the scope of problems.
Maybe some developers have a "jihad" (a loaded word if I ever heard one) against binary modules, but using basic troubleshooting techniques is no evidence of it.
Yes. Nvidia did this for the Nforce drivers, and I believe for the GeForce drivers. This doesn't always solve the problem though. The RedHat 8 kernel (and I'm assuming other new distributions) was compiled with gcc 3.2, while the binary library Nvidia provides was compiled with gcc 2.95. Having kernel modules and the rest of your kernel compiled with major revision changes can cause problems, and inmod will refuse to load this module unless you use the force option. The end result is incompatibility until the Nvidia gets around to simply re-compiling the module with gcc3.2 (or you're technical enough to know to how to use the --force option with insmod, and are willing to take the risk it breaks something)
It's true that providing a binary library and a wrapper is a better solution than a completely closed binary, but there are still some large problems with this approach.
Wow. 30 grams of gold is almost one troy ounce (about 31 grams per troy ounce). A troy ounce of gold is about $330 US. That's quite an expensive, if not odd gift to give employees. I'm curious, did most people sell the gold, or keep it?
Great that they're headed toward financial stability, but I've pretty much given up on Mandrake as well. Mandrake Update is a total POS (and I don't mean point of sale). It hardly ever works properly. The support sight is terrible... I tried reporting bugs on 8.1 in bugzilla, and I'm sure no one ever saw it. My most recent attempt with Mandrake was with 8.2 PPC, which was a nightmare. I never did get X set up properly, and MandrakeUpdate doesn't work at all. If I had to do it all over, I'd go back to RedHat.
;).
It's great that any linux company is surviving, but Mandrake has some serious issues to work out. Perhaps there really is something to that whole stereotype about french engineering
Indeed. I was a sprint high speed DSL subscriber until recently, when they decided to pull out of the high speed DSL market in my area.
The word on the street I keep hearing is that's it's very difficult for companies to make profits off broadband. I really don't know why this is the case, broadband really isn't THAT unpopular. Are investors too impatient on a return on their investments? Do a lot of these companies just have a poor business model? Are these companies just badly managed? Or is this just a natural weeding of bad companies in an industry that's still fairly young?
I'd be willing to bet on the latter. Seems like this same thing happened in the early commercial dialup ISP era, but no one heard about it because the companies affected were much smaller.
This article was only listed under the science section, and not on the main page. The Pi article was presumably determined to have more mass appeal, so was put on the main page as well.
Sadly Mr./Ms Anonymous coward you are correct. I realize the problem lies deeper. Part of it is simply the fact that the Slashdot format is an extreme form of short attention span discussion. No dialogue on a topic goes on for more than say an hour or two, and the dialogue between two actual people doesn't last more than say a few minutes, if it occurs at all. Everyone wants to find out about "the new cool thing" of almost literally 5 minutes from now. Is this a sickness of our society, or more a sickness of the geek world?
At this point, only 5 hours after your reply I'm basically talking to myself. I'm not exactly sure why I bother... perhaps only to sharpen my own understanding.
This submission has no less than 15 links in it! I'm still not sure where the real content is. Worse, what appears to be the main link points to another few line discussion that references yet another article.
Posters, and especially editors, Please don't post/allow submissions that are filled with nothing but links, and links to links. You may think you're providing more information, but most of those links are just noise. This seems to be an emerging trend on slashdot, and I think it's a very bad one.
Taking a slight tangent for just a moment, sadly, the biggest problem with slashdot is there's never any real discussion (mostly that would involve the editors) about slashdot itself. There's constantly re-posts of material, and poor quality submissions. This needs to be fixed somehow, but can't happen unless the slashdot editors start talking about this problems and not just remain silent.
He brings up this point in the article. It's important to archive everything because we never know what's going to be usefull information in the future.
In other words, perspective and context is a huge part in determining value and meaning. At some point these annoying popup ads may play be important for someone studying the evolution of advertising on the net. In fact, popups, or the frequency or timing of them might be something that's missing from the archive.
Most of the culture is invisible to most of us most of the time. The things we take for granted are the most ingrained into us, and possibly the most interesting to someone after the culture has changed.
Well, in this example I agree with you. Creating single celled organisms that can't survive outside a laboratory isn't much of a moral dilemma as far as I'm concerned.
But you seem to take this further. Their certainly are things I'd be concerned over involving biological research. Cloning humans and raising them to maturity is certainly a concern. Not for religious reasons, but simply for the fact that (currently) clones have damaged DNA. It seems an important ethical question whether it's morally right to create a human who might have major medical problems somewhere down the road.
How about using otherwise healthy humans for potentially harmfull medical experiments? Pay someone $10,000 to take an experimental HIV vaccine, then deliberately infect them with HIV. I'm not saying anyone would do this, but it's certainly a very valid ethical concern.
Biological research can directly involve humans and animals. Humans (and sometimes animals) are the main actors in ethical debates. It should be therefor be no surprise that biological research involves ethical concerns more than physics, chemistry, etc.
When you're in a plane you have line of sight view of a LOT more cell towers than when you're on the ground. Also high speed trains move only about 2.5-3 times faster than a car, while planes move 8-10 times faster than a car. Both of these combined can easily explain why you can use your phone on high speed trains, and not on a plane.
It is worth noting that game 6, in which Kramnik may have resigned too early, was found to be a probable draw with best play It is also worth noting that Kramnik didn't have much time left on his clock, and it would have been difficult for him to come up with the right moves given the amount of time he had left on his clock.
Another zinger: I feel like I'm reading that useless marketing crap on the insert in the packaging that no one reads. I find it kind of sad that Toms makes no mention of this doubletalk.
It's a decent movie, but be forwarned that it's still a hollywood movie and they try to make scientists into the bad guy. From what I understand most of the bad guy scientist stuff was manufactured by Hollywood to make a better script. This pisses me off because many people get their impressions of the world from movies more than anyone cares to admit. Beyond that, you have to get past Nick Nolte's Italian accent, which is pretty funny. The story is pretty amazing though, since the father has no training in science, and still manages to have a major insite after self-educating himself about molecular biology and this disease. In terms of people becoming more involved in medicine, and not just passive participants it's a great story.
That's exactly why they do this in the black rock desert. The playa is the main part, and is 27 miles long, and 12 miles wide of flat dry lake bed that's completely baren. It's nearly surrounded by mountains. There's no buildings to hit for quite a distance. The area surrounding it is very sparsely populated. I guess there's a small chance a rocket would hit a building on re-entry. I wouldn't know how to calculate it, but given the large baren area it has to be almost nill.
like this article was written (well, could have been) by bratty little kids in middle school during lunch? I know it's supposed to be a joke, but the answers all seem so juvenile. Substitute a few middle-school cliques for the categories forbes selected, and you have a article for the school paper. This article seems pretty poor journalism even for forbes.
You may have some sort of sleep disorder. If I were you I'd make an appointment at a sleep clinic. Your GP is probbably fairly ignorant about sleep disorders, at least according to one of the leading sleep disorder specialist, William Dement. So try to find a sleep clinic.
Yes we want to move away from old legacy architectures, but at the same time we don't want to pay thousands of dollars for a chip that has poor performance running current code, and even native code isn't all that hot (Itanium). IA64 is hardly a proven technology, and it remains to be seen whether the approach they've taken will pay off. We also like to see competition between companies. Hardly anyone really has any loyalty toward either AMD or Intel, but we all like to see low prices and fast chips, and AMD coming out with a 64 bit chip that's affordable is still cool, even though it's still a lot of the same old architecture.
Actually you're wrong. Bearshare has the ability to list the files you're sharing via a built in web-server. I don't know if other gnutella clients allow this ability.
Huh? This sounds like basic inductive logic to me. While you're right that just because a meteor shares the same composition as a planet doesn't necessarily mean it came from that planet, it's certainly suggestive that it is. Each planet has an isotope signature from one another. That is to say that in the example given mercury has a different ratio of one Oxygen isotope to another. These ratios AFAIK are consistant among the entire planetary body, and are not random. On the earth Oxygen-16 accounts for 99.76% of all oxygen atoms, where Oxygen-17 accounts for .4% of all oxygen atoms. On mercury this ratio is presumably different. If you measure a meteorite sample and it's similar in isotope ratios to that of mercury, you can reasonably conclude that the sample probbably came from mercury. If you do further analysis and find many other isotope ratios that are the same as they are on mercury, it becomes increasingly likely that your rock is really from mercury.
This is not pseudo-science at all, though from reading the article the hypothesis that the rock is from mercury is still pretty tentative. You may be right that this rock may not be from mercury, but your larger scale attack on the basis of isotope composition tying rock samples to certain planets is pretty flimsy.