If you want to know what this is about, watch Hans Rosling's ("the professor") excellent talk. This is about bringing lots of data that were collected with public money online so they can actually be used. Rosling uses simple but effective visualization tools (and is a great speaker) to get people interested in the data.
That video was posted weeks ago! Somebody's been SLACing off, apparently. Though I will cut them some SLAC, since the videos are really quite interesting. That's a SLAC piece of equipment they have there at SLACford...
This was a pure publicity stunt for Adams. He just picked a well-known person and made a big fuss to get his name into the headlines again. Gates is the perfect person for watercooler talk, since everybody knows him and has something (good or bad) to say about Microsoft. There was no chance this would ever lead anywhere, and now that they see that they won't get more publicity out of it, they're doing one last stunt (We give up! Too bad! We tried so hard!) and let it die with a bang.
The problem will be in jump-starting the supply of 3D data about molecules and everything else.
Well the RCSB Protein Data Bank would be a start, and there are tons of molecule data bases with 3D data that are only waiting to be thoroughly mined. The pharmaceutical companies have them, and there are free ones too.
In fact, the motivation for this research undoubtedly was the abundance of data that is out there but can't/could not be searched efficiently.
Radio listeners weary of hearing the same songs over and over may have something to cheer about
Huh? Ever heard of that dial thing on your radio? You don't need the government to step in and change the programming, just put down the Slurpee for a second and change the station. It's really no wonder ClearChannel et al are taking over the entire market when people can't be bothered to vote with their dials. There are still lots of alternatives, find them while they still exist and support them!
Gnaaaa, you're confusing me! I meant of course 8-bit, not 4-bit, since colors have three 8-bit components, not six 4-bit ones. Rest of the comment still holds, though, and proves that black equals white, for really dark shades of black.
What is actually interesting though is that even the combined wisdom of all the Firehose users has not been able to spot the dupe (and a bunch of others). You can still blame the editors for posting the dupe, but this collaborative filtering should really go much further.
It's great that IBM is writing this, but these tools have been around for years. They basically came out the same time as the final release of Java 1.5 (or "5.0"), when many people realized that it would be tricky to deploy programs that were using the new features. By now, everybody should have updated to 1.5 anyway.
I would assume that Sony is paying Amazon for that. Either that, or they have a contract that requires them to do that. There's really no other reason for Amazon to "play nice", since this simply isn't their fault.
That's a joke, right? This can never be legally binding. Why don't they take away your right to any kind of independent jurisdiction, while they're at it?
I think that most of what's going on in the advertising business is handwaving and black magic. How are they gauging the effectiveness of an ad? By showing it to a test audience? By watching the sales? Those aren't exactly very reliable, or causally linked, respectively.
It's just that podcasts seem to offer a technological solution to this problem, and that's why they're going after them. Restricting access just so that people can listen to ads is so against the idea of podcasts, however, that I very much doubt that they will get any kind of reasonable data using that, either.
Yeah, it's tricky for the other side too: If you download music illegally, you're financing terrorism - but if you buy the CD, you invite the terrorists to use your machine for attacks...
If 250A flow through your body, you're toast. The amperage is only what current flows when welding, but not when you're touching something with your high-resistance body. Knowing the voltage would be much more useful for comparison.
And then, I'd suspect that pain and actual danger don't necessarily have to be related. A high-voltage shock might kill you without causing any pain at all, while a pulsed, relatively low voltage shock will be very painful for a long time, but might not kill you at all.
I think that IBM is also using this for publicity. They have gained considerable geek-credit, and that means that more people are willing to work on their open source projects. And once this is all over, they will be the knights in shining armor who protected Linux. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against IBM - but I think they know very well why the do this and how.
What I still can't figure out is SCO. They're not going to win this, and they're not going to survive long after the verdict. So the only reason for doing it is if they were paid by Microsoft to damage Linux. I can't really think of any other reason.
No, this is the standard for peer reviewing in many sciences. There is a difference between accepting the paper or not (i.e., telling whether it's garbage), and forcing the author to follow all suggestions made in the reviews as an additional condition for publication. There are journals that will do that, but most don't, simply because it's much easier to suggest a new experiment etc. than to actually do it.
This has no bearing on the quality of the journal (which I, not being a physicist, cannot judge).
I don't see it either, when the labels can just make them buy another copy.
MS could foot the bill. That would make for some great marketing, and probably not be very expensive - at least when compared to the costs of your typical marketing campaign.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want to know what this is about, watch Hans Rosling's ("the professor") excellent talk. This is about bringing lots of data that were collected with public money online so they can actually be used. Rosling uses simple but effective visualization tools (and is a great speaker) to get people interested in the data.
That video was posted weeks ago! Somebody's been SLACing off, apparently. Though I will cut them some SLAC, since the videos are really quite interesting. That's a SLAC piece of equipment they have there at SLACford ...
This was a pure publicity stunt for Adams. He just picked a well-known person and made a big fuss to get his name into the headlines again. Gates is the perfect person for watercooler talk, since everybody knows him and has something (good or bad) to say about Microsoft. There was no chance this would ever lead anywhere, and now that they see that they won't get more publicity out of it, they're doing one last stunt (We give up! Too bad! We tried so hard!) and let it die with a bang.
Well the RCSB Protein Data Bank would be a start, and there are tons of molecule data bases with 3D data that are only waiting to be thoroughly mined. The pharmaceutical companies have them, and there are free ones too.
In fact, the motivation for this research undoubtedly was the abundance of data that is out there but can't/could not be searched efficiently.
Huh? Ever heard of that dial thing on your radio? You don't need the government to step in and change the programming, just put down the Slurpee for a second and change the station. It's really no wonder ClearChannel et al are taking over the entire market when people can't be bothered to vote with their dials. There are still lots of alternatives, find them while they still exist and support them!
Gnaaaa, you're confusing me! I meant of course 8-bit, not 4-bit, since colors have three 8-bit components, not six 4-bit ones. Rest of the comment still holds, though, and proves that black equals white, for really dark shades of black.
Which, in unsigned 4-bit int, would of course be #FFFFFF ...
What is actually interesting though is that even the combined wisdom of all the Firehose users has not been able to spot the dupe (and a bunch of others). You can still blame the editors for posting the dupe, but this collaborative filtering should really go much further.
It's great that IBM is writing this, but these tools have been around for years. They basically came out the same time as the final release of Java 1.5 (or "5.0"), when many people realized that it would be tricky to deploy programs that were using the new features. By now, everybody should have updated to 1.5 anyway.
Wow, that's one fast police office!
Paul Haeberli did this in 1994 - it's a neat idea for some experiments, but not a very practical solution.
I would assume that Sony is paying Amazon for that. Either that, or they have a contract that requires them to do that. There's really no other reason for Amazon to "play nice", since this simply isn't their fault.
That's a joke, right? This can never be legally binding. Why don't they take away your right to any kind of independent jurisdiction, while they're at it?
I think that most of what's going on in the advertising business is handwaving and black magic. How are they gauging the effectiveness of an ad? By showing it to a test audience? By watching the sales? Those aren't exactly very reliable, or causally linked, respectively.
It's just that podcasts seem to offer a technological solution to this problem, and that's why they're going after them. Restricting access just so that people can listen to ads is so against the idea of podcasts, however, that I very much doubt that they will get any kind of reasonable data using that, either.
Hey, at least they're honest! They didn't give themselves some inconspicuous feel-good name like Sony or sumpin ...
ROTFL, somebody mod this funny, please!
Yeah, it's tricky for the other side too: If you download music illegally, you're financing terrorism - but if you buy the CD, you invite the terrorists to use your machine for attacks ...
If 250A flow through your body, you're toast. The amperage is only what current flows when welding, but not when you're touching something with your high-resistance body. Knowing the voltage would be much more useful for comparison.
And then, I'd suspect that pain and actual danger don't necessarily have to be related. A high-voltage shock might kill you without causing any pain at all, while a pulsed, relatively low voltage shock will be very painful for a long time, but might not kill you at all.
I think that IBM is also using this for publicity. They have gained considerable geek-credit, and that means that more people are willing to work on their open source projects. And once this is all over, they will be the knights in shining armor who protected Linux. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against IBM - but I think they know very well why the do this and how.
What I still can't figure out is SCO. They're not going to win this, and they're not going to survive long after the verdict. So the only reason for doing it is if they were paid by Microsoft to damage Linux. I can't really think of any other reason.
Nah, it's just a test of the new RSS import feature they built into the submission process ...
No, this is the standard for peer reviewing in many sciences. There is a difference between accepting the paper or not (i.e., telling whether it's garbage), and forcing the author to follow all suggestions made in the reviews as an additional condition for publication. There are journals that will do that, but most don't, simply because it's much easier to suggest a new experiment etc. than to actually do it.
This has no bearing on the quality of the journal (which I, not being a physicist, cannot judge).
Excel
What about tellisnotspelledlike.tel? ;)
His links point to a mirror.