... because it was never as big and bloated as the Internet bubble. Furthermore, unlike all those Internet services and software packages that have just disappeared without a trace, open source software stays around: the investment in it isn't lost.
Of course, I do have my doubts that a company like Red Hat makes sense. Open source is best for specialized, highly-skilled consultants and professionals. It also makes sense for a few hardware vendors and large, established consulting shops like IBM. But companies like Red Hat and VA Linux aren't in that league.
This is great work. But if people want high-efficiency, pleasant-looking light-bulbs, they can already get them and save money in the process. The fact that people don't buy them despite all their advantages suggests that the problem isn't technology, it's people.
You can find the patent here. It's completely bogus. Any patent examiner with a minimum background in electrical engineering should have thrown this out, and anybody investing millions of dollars in it should have had it checked out by someone who actually knows something about electrical engineering. This is really no different from the patent and investment follies of the Internet bubble.
I know the work of a couple of those people pretty well. They were excellent specialists, but their work was not directly related to biological weapons.
Imagine that there had been a missile attack scare in the US. This is roughly like looking through the ranks of recent deaths of computer scientists and implying that anybody who died who was working on Ada compilers, control systems software, robotics, or large-scale software engineering was somehow related to SDI work.
Of course, an X-Files style conspiracy would be so much more interesting, I suppose.
Our bodies have not evolved to use cell phones.. So what? Nothing is consequenceless.... Cellphones, like planes and cars, offer convenience and productivity advantages; the question is are they worth the price. Sure, there are negatives, but do the negatives. (What, *MAYBE* a few brain cancers after 20 years.) outweigh the advantages?
What are you babbling about? I have made no argument whether or not the tradeoff is worth it.
The only point I have made is that people who proclaim that microwaves cannot have any important biological effects based on arguments from physics are wrong and simply have no clue about biological systems. That claim, I absolutely stand by.
Hey, I was just pointing out that the reasoning by "rneches" was spurious and uninformed.
Whether or not microwaves actually cause cancer or not, I have no opinion on. That they have biological effects, however, has been documented in the literature. You can look that up for yourself.
Wavelengths of that size don't have enough energy to disrupt even a weak chemical bond.
Indeed. But they are strong enough to move small polar molecules or side-chains around in ways that differ from ordinary thermal motion. When you do this inside something as complex as a channel protein or a membrane, it could easily disrupt its function. There are plenty of other possible mechanisms of action. There isn't even a question of whether these effects exist--they clearly do--it's only a question of whether there is some critical biochemical process that is affected by them.
for a cell phone to give you cancer, the human body would have have to be more chemically unstable than nitroglycerine.
Yes, and that is indeed the case. The only reason you don't notice is because all those subtle reactions happen inside carefully controlled and protected environments--cellular compartments and reaction sites of enzymes.
So, what is our hypothetical candidate cancer-causing quanta going to have to inonize to do the deed? Well, DNA of course. It's going to have to cause a genetic mutation.
No, sorry, that's not the only way in which physical or chemical agents cause cancers. DNA damage and mutations arise in our cells constantly and spontaneously. We wouldn't be able to survive if we didn't have a variety of biological mechanisms for repairing the damage and for killing pre-cancerous cells. Non-ionizing radiation may disrupt or alter inter-cellular signalling and thereby interfere with those mechanisms.
I've heard this kind of stuff over and over again - and alarmingly often from people who ought to know better (physics teachers, engineers, et cetera). The next time someone starts to tell you about cell phones giving you cancer, here's what you should tell them.
Physicists and engineers should practice a bit more humility when it comes to biology because most of them just don't have a clue (as your posting demonstrates).
Have you ever looked at a vibrational absorption spectrum? 900MHz isn't "almost" 2.45GHz; you can't excite a 900MHz vibration with 2.45GHz photons.
You are making the mistaken assumption that microwave heating of liquid water is primarily based on the excitation of a particular vibrational mode. It is not. A simple explanation can be found here.
What does this have to do with cancer?
I have no idea what your mistaken ideas about how microwaves heat water have to do with cancer. I didn't even mention the word "cancer".
Let's see if we can follow your logic, and extrapolate a solution:
1) cell phones can heat your brain a tiny amount
2) heating it might give you cancer, even though there's no evidence for it
3) therefore anything that heats your tissue more than a cellphone should be banned
4) therefore, all clothing, heaters, laptops, and warm food should be banned.
I made no such argument. I didn't even say that cell phones should be banned. Perhaps your education is not just deficient in physics, it is also deficient in basic reading comprehension?
Our bodies have evolved to deal with the level of IR radiation that occurs in the environment. Our bodies have not evolved to deal with the level of RF radiation that cell phones emit, and RF radition emitted by cell phones has very different physical properties from IR. So, in different words, your argument is just plain stupid.
What this doesn't even take into account is that, while Oracle can be OK as a high-end database if you give it a dedicated DBA, it is absolutely awful as a quick-and-dirty databse. I doubt that there are 270000 Oracle licenses in the world that represent properly installed and maintained Oracle systems. Many users of databases would be served much better with something that's easier to intall and maintain than Oracle, even if that databse is less capable or less full-featured in some sense. In different words, if you take into account the high cost of installing and running an Oracle database properly, this contract is even more costly than it seems on paper.
Yeah, but radioactivity and X-rays are ionising radiation. Non-ionising isn't really as dangerous.
I have no idea what that is supposed to mean. Both kinds of radiation can kill, as can a rock that's dropped on your head. The question is whether the RF you are exposed to daily is a significant risk compared to other risks (including risk from ionizing radiation) you are exposed to daily, and whether we can control those risks through public policy.
I don't know whether it is dangerous or not, but I do know that your arguments for why people shouldn't worry don't hold. We know that individual cell phones operating in normal ways have measurable biological effects, so it stands to reason to suspect that they might be harmful if either radiation increases or exposure is long-term.
There's a much larger EM field set up by the traction motors.
Not necessarily inside the passenger cabin, which is usually shielded from those motors. They are also much lower frequency and don't result in tissue heating. And nobody has demonstrated physiological effects from that.
Why isn't anyone worried by that?
Lots of people are, in fact, quite worried about it.
Well, of course, a cell phone is no microwave. But your head isn't a potato either (actually, judging by your comments, maybe your head is, but mine isn't). It doesn't take a lot of heat to cause serious damage in some tissues, and RF can potentially cause lots of other problems at much lower intensities. Nobody knows what the long term effects of constant exposure to RF are. But we do know that there are clear, short-term, biologically measurable responses at normal cell phone strengths already.
Also, the 2.45GHz frequency is deliberately not the optimal frequency for absorption and heating of water, it's a tradeoff between heating and penetration (you don't just want to cook the surface of the food). I believe the optimal frequency is somewhere around 900MHz. Whatever it is, anything in the range from maybe 500MHz to maybe 3GHz is bad news: at some frequencies, it heats strongly but doesn't penetrate very deeply (risk of cararacts), at others, it heats less well but penetrates deeper (risk to your brain and organs).
The point of that article, too, is that many places where people use cell phones are cavities.
People used to think that radioactivity and X-rays were really nifty and harmless, but things turned out differently. Maybe we should learn from that and be more careful this time around.
Macromedia is countersueing over some hare-brained UI gimmick of their own; if we are lucky, the two companies will sue each other out of existence and web sites will stop using both PDF and Flash.
Note that the patent applies to a UI gimmick in the Flash authoring software, not the Flash player. And if Macromedia's software engineering is at all reasonable, they should be able to remove this feature from their software within days and without losing any significant functionality. They can probably actually just post a small patch that disables the dragging for now and later come up with an alternative in terms of non-patented UI technology.
The fact that this is patented at all and that Adobe has been brazen enough to sue over it is something we shouldn't forget, however.
What an idiotic patent: that's a simple presentation choice, similar to choosing a snazzy layout for some printed document. Are we going to patent bold faced section headings next? It's also very similar to docking toolbars.
If Macromedia's software engineering is reasonably good, they should be able to rip this out of their product line within a few days.
A couple of years ago, I would have agreed. But I just got rid of all my SCSI equipment.
These days, the dual IDE controllers on most motherboards let you hook up up to two high performance hard disks and one or two CD-ROM drives without sacrificing any performance. For any expansion beyond that (external drives, scanners tape drives, etc.), USB2 and FireWire are the way to go: they are very efficient, cheap, electrically more reliable, and support more devices. The host interfaces are standardized, so most controllers will work under most operating systems out of the box. And, in terms of drivers, they generally encapsulate SCSI, so that software requires no or few changes.
Note that IDE is completely standard now: Apple uses it, Sun uses it, and just about every operating system understands it.
I don't see why that is a function of the bus. Head movement optimization can be done no matter what interface you have. The main constraints of IDE used to be that it kept the CPU fairly busy and that (I believe) you could only talk to one drive at a time. But with modern controllers, the IDE controller itself handles all the timing and talking to each drive, and you can just put different drives onto different controllers. A smart controller might even be able to do the reordering automatically, depending on how the host talks to it.
Hired guns as expert witnesses are a serious problem, in particular if they don't really have much of a clue.
Go to Madnick's home page at MIT. It looks to me like the guy is stuck in the 1970's somewhere and he just seems deeply in love with big corporations--but judge for yourself. There's little experience listed there with desktop machines, the consumer market, or modern software systems.
His written testimony is quite funny. He writes things like (I'm paraphrasing) "if we do this, it would help Microsoft's competitors and hurt Microsoft" (yup, that's the point of an antitrust remedy), "this would mean that consumers might have to choose from many different components" (yup, again, that's the point), and "opening up would expose Microsoft's intellectual property" (again, that's the point: the value of much of Microsoft's so-called "intellectual property" lies in their monopoly position, not in some kind of innovation or technical contribution).
It's good that this guy exposed himself for what he really is: a hired gun with little expertise in the area he is testifying on.
Microsoft's last big-name hired Gun was Gregory Mankiw from Harvard, who stated big and bold that "delaying the release of Windows would be like throwing sand in the gears of human progress", but then later had to admit that he knew absolutely nothing about computers and just kind of thought that he thought Microsoft was good because monopolies in general were good (as a modern Harvard economist, he didn't quite put it that way, but that's what it amounted to).
Evolution looks pretty nice and has the basic functionality you would expect in such a package. But it still lacks a lot of the polish I would expect from something that wants to compete with Outlook as an easy-to-use full-features GUI mail client. For example, there is very little drag-and-drop support: you can't drag URLs onto the calendar, you can't link mail messages to TODO entries, etc. And--it just crashed on me with a "Segmentation Fault".
Evolution is a good start in its category. But let's not overpromise.
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Of course, I do have my doubts that a company like Red Hat makes sense. Open source is best for specialized, highly-skilled consultants and professionals. It also makes sense for a few hardware vendors and large, established consulting shops like IBM. But companies like Red Hat and VA Linux aren't in that league.
This is great work. But if people want high-efficiency, pleasant-looking light-bulbs, they can already get them and save money in the process. The fact that people don't buy them despite all their advantages suggests that the problem isn't technology, it's people.
You can find the patent here. It's completely bogus. Any patent examiner with a minimum background in electrical engineering should have thrown this out, and anybody investing millions of dollars in it should have had it checked out by someone who actually knows something about electrical engineering. This is really no different from the patent and investment follies of the Internet bubble.
Imagine that there had been a missile attack scare in the US. This is roughly like looking through the ranks of recent deaths of computer scientists and implying that anybody who died who was working on Ada compilers, control systems software, robotics, or large-scale software engineering was somehow related to SDI work.
Of course, an X-Files style conspiracy would be so much more interesting, I suppose.
Penguins can't survive in the arctic because of predatory birds that eat their eggs and chicks. In terms of climate and food, they would to fine.
What are you babbling about? I have made no argument whether or not the tradeoff is worth it.
The only point I have made is that people who proclaim that microwaves cannot have any important biological effects based on arguments from physics are wrong and simply have no clue about biological systems. That claim, I absolutely stand by.
Whether or not microwaves actually cause cancer or not, I have no opinion on. That they have biological effects, however, has been documented in the literature. You can look that up for yourself.
Indeed. But they are strong enough to move small polar molecules or side-chains around in ways that differ from ordinary thermal motion. When you do this inside something as complex as a channel protein or a membrane, it could easily disrupt its function. There are plenty of other possible mechanisms of action. There isn't even a question of whether these effects exist--they clearly do--it's only a question of whether there is some critical biochemical process that is affected by them.
for a cell phone to give you cancer, the human body would have have to be more chemically unstable than nitroglycerine.
Yes, and that is indeed the case. The only reason you don't notice is because all those subtle reactions happen inside carefully controlled and protected environments--cellular compartments and reaction sites of enzymes.
Well, since according to the profound physical insights of "Gordon", IR and microwaves are really the same, then let's just use IR for cell phones.
No, sorry, that's not the only way in which physical or chemical agents cause cancers. DNA damage and mutations arise in our cells constantly and spontaneously. We wouldn't be able to survive if we didn't have a variety of biological mechanisms for repairing the damage and for killing pre-cancerous cells. Non-ionizing radiation may disrupt or alter inter-cellular signalling and thereby interfere with those mechanisms.
I've heard this kind of stuff over and over again - and alarmingly often from people who ought to know better (physics teachers, engineers, et cetera). The next time someone starts to tell you about cell phones giving you cancer, here's what you should tell them.
Physicists and engineers should practice a bit more humility when it comes to biology because most of them just don't have a clue (as your posting demonstrates).
You are making the mistaken assumption that microwave heating of liquid water is primarily based on the excitation of a particular vibrational mode. It is not. A simple explanation can be found here.
What does this have to do with cancer?
I have no idea what your mistaken ideas about how microwaves heat water have to do with cancer. I didn't even mention the word "cancer".
Let's see if we can follow your logic, and extrapolate a solution: 1) cell phones can heat your brain a tiny amount 2) heating it might give you cancer, even though there's no evidence for it 3) therefore anything that heats your tissue more than a cellphone should be banned 4) therefore, all clothing, heaters, laptops, and warm food should be banned.
I made no such argument. I didn't even say that cell phones should be banned. Perhaps your education is not just deficient in physics, it is also deficient in basic reading comprehension?
Sure. Look at Alan Preece's research here, summarized here.
Our bodies have evolved to deal with the level of IR radiation that occurs in the environment. Our bodies have not evolved to deal with the level of RF radiation that cell phones emit, and RF radition emitted by cell phones has very different physical properties from IR. So, in different words, your argument is just plain stupid.
What this doesn't even take into account is that, while Oracle can be OK as a high-end database if you give it a dedicated DBA, it is absolutely awful as a quick-and-dirty databse. I doubt that there are 270000 Oracle licenses in the world that represent properly installed and maintained Oracle systems. Many users of databases would be served much better with something that's easier to intall and maintain than Oracle, even if that databse is less capable or less full-featured in some sense. In different words, if you take into account the high cost of installing and running an Oracle database properly, this contract is even more costly than it seems on paper.
I have no idea what that is supposed to mean. Both kinds of radiation can kill, as can a rock that's dropped on your head. The question is whether the RF you are exposed to daily is a significant risk compared to other risks (including risk from ionizing radiation) you are exposed to daily, and whether we can control those risks through public policy.
I don't know whether it is dangerous or not, but I do know that your arguments for why people shouldn't worry don't hold. We know that individual cell phones operating in normal ways have measurable biological effects, so it stands to reason to suspect that they might be harmful if either radiation increases or exposure is long-term.
There's a much larger EM field set up by the traction motors.
Not necessarily inside the passenger cabin, which is usually shielded from those motors. They are also much lower frequency and don't result in tissue heating. And nobody has demonstrated physiological effects from that.
Why isn't anyone worried by that?
Lots of people are, in fact, quite worried about it.
Also, the 2.45GHz frequency is deliberately not the optimal frequency for absorption and heating of water, it's a tradeoff between heating and penetration (you don't just want to cook the surface of the food). I believe the optimal frequency is somewhere around 900MHz. Whatever it is, anything in the range from maybe 500MHz to maybe 3GHz is bad news: at some frequencies, it heats strongly but doesn't penetrate very deeply (risk of cararacts), at others, it heats less well but penetrates deeper (risk to your brain and organs).
The point of that article, too, is that many places where people use cell phones are cavities.
People used to think that radioactivity and X-rays were really nifty and harmless, but things turned out differently. Maybe we should learn from that and be more careful this time around.
Note that the patent applies to a UI gimmick in the Flash authoring software, not the Flash player. And if Macromedia's software engineering is at all reasonable, they should be able to remove this feature from their software within days and without losing any significant functionality. They can probably actually just post a small patch that disables the dragging for now and later come up with an alternative in terms of non-patented UI technology.
The fact that this is patented at all and that Adobe has been brazen enough to sue over it is something we shouldn't forget, however.
If Macromedia's software engineering is reasonably good, they should be able to rip this out of their product line within a few days.
People need to relax, have fun, and enjoy life. That both makes them more productive when they do work, and it gives them a reason to earn money.
These days, the dual IDE controllers on most motherboards let you hook up up to two high performance hard disks and one or two CD-ROM drives without sacrificing any performance. For any expansion beyond that (external drives, scanners tape drives, etc.), USB2 and FireWire are the way to go: they are very efficient, cheap, electrically more reliable, and support more devices. The host interfaces are standardized, so most controllers will work under most operating systems out of the box. And, in terms of drivers, they generally encapsulate SCSI, so that software requires no or few changes.
Note that IDE is completely standard now: Apple uses it, Sun uses it, and just about every operating system understands it.
I don't see why that is a function of the bus. Head movement optimization can be done no matter what interface you have. The main constraints of IDE used to be that it kept the CPU fairly busy and that (I believe) you could only talk to one drive at a time. But with modern controllers, the IDE controller itself handles all the timing and talking to each drive, and you can just put different drives onto different controllers. A smart controller might even be able to do the reordering automatically, depending on how the host talks to it.
That used to be true. But modern IDE controllers are smart as well and take the load off the CPU.
Go to Madnick's home page at MIT. It looks to me like the guy is stuck in the 1970's somewhere and he just seems deeply in love with big corporations--but judge for yourself. There's little experience listed there with desktop machines, the consumer market, or modern software systems.
His written testimony is quite funny. He writes things like (I'm paraphrasing) "if we do this, it would help Microsoft's competitors and hurt Microsoft" (yup, that's the point of an antitrust remedy), "this would mean that consumers might have to choose from many different components" (yup, again, that's the point), and "opening up would expose Microsoft's intellectual property" (again, that's the point: the value of much of Microsoft's so-called "intellectual property" lies in their monopoly position, not in some kind of innovation or technical contribution).
It's good that this guy exposed himself for what he really is: a hired gun with little expertise in the area he is testifying on.
Microsoft's last big-name hired Gun was Gregory Mankiw from Harvard, who stated big and bold that "delaying the release of Windows would be like throwing sand in the gears of human progress", but then later had to admit that he knew absolutely nothing about computers and just kind of thought that he thought Microsoft was good because monopolies in general were good (as a modern Harvard economist, he didn't quite put it that way, but that's what it amounted to).
OpenOffice 1.0 is out. It works. And, in any case, an exec departing isn't the same thing as all the projects getting scrapped.
Evolution is a good start in its category. But let's not overpromise.