I make this comment way, way down below so it will probably be missed.
You missed one of the biggest speed improvements.
The RAM is much, much faster in the new PowerBook vs. the iBook. The 12" PowerBook is using 266MHz DDR, the iBook 100MHz SDRAM. I'd pay about $100 for that difference on its own (at least). >2.5-fold increase in RAM speed will make a huge difference in performance, probably about as much as the G3->G4 change.
We're talking Mac's here, I would have thought someone would've mentioned that its not just MHz that matters by now:)
There seem to be a lot of complaints on the minimal speed boost for the iBook -> 12" PowerBook jump in cost.
Anyone actually look at the difference in the RAM the two products use? This is probably where the cost difference comes from, not the materials its made of.
iBooks seem to use 100 MHz SDRAM, 12" PowerBook uses 266MHz DDR and the 17" uses 333MHz DDR. This should have a pretty big performance boost, at least as much as the processor boost, probably a whole lot more. Apple never seem cutting edge on memory tech but at least they're now giving you something respectable with the high end powerbook. That was actually one of the things that kept me away from Mac before (not a gamer, all my critical software was availible on both). That and the still high price.
You mention amusing adds and all I can think of is that old add (ran during the superbowl I think) where they fired gerbils or some rodent things out of a cannon into a wall with the company name on it. I can never remember the name, but the image of rodents smacking a wall, falling to the ground, shaking a bit then walking a way left an impression. Really no clue what they were selling though.
This is especially true in the games programming industry in Dallas ironically enough. I know a guy (not well) who after looking for over a year for a job has settled with volunteering his time on a project to at least keep the resume up and running. He even sounds competent. Icky, icky icky....
Re:Don't waste time on TFA, author misses the poin
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Moore's Law Disputed
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· Score: 2
Well put... Enough squabbling over this 'it's a bad paper'/'it's a good paper' nonsense. The paper correctly points out that Moore's law is poorly named. To most people this doesn't really matter. Your point - O{exp{t}} - is a good one. It should be noted though, and the paper seems to miss this, that the real take home message of Moore's law isn't that there will be a single exponential curve stretching back to the dawn of time, its that computer power (measured in an ever changing way) seems to double every couple years. This is useful if you take current circumstances into account to plan for the next few years.
Yes, Moore himself seemed to use an ever changing time constant and an ever changing metric of what was doubling, but it was being used as a way of predicting marketing trends. (it's the cost-optimum chip's power, now it's the total number of elements used in the cost-optimal chip, now its the feasible memory size, its the processor speed, its the transistor count, now we take into account the mythical "engineering cleverness" etc.) The problem is that the people the rule of thumb was created for (marketing folks) took the silly thing too seriously. It should be, and usually is, treated as a flexible rule of thumb. There will be periodic sweeping advances. There will be periodic lulls. It's not like it would be at all practical to use Moore's law to predict how long it would take to increase computer power by 10%, it is entirely dominated by local variations, or to predict the time for a 10x boost in power to the exact month. As long as a few months and as soon as three years are reasonable answers, trying to nail it down exactly is certain folly. Which seems to be the trap that the paper authors fall into.
If the paper helps a few people to set a project deadline realistically great, otherwise, it's just sort of a re-statement of the obvious. Think back 4*18mo (6yrs). Taking into account drive speeds, memory speeds, memory size, processor speeds, processor architecture, bus-speeds, addition of GPU's etc. do you really think that today's computers are only 16x faster than they were in 1997? Given the nebulousness of the definition (its cast as a limit in the paper, not the average) does it count as a doubling if someone decides to tie 2x as many processors together to make a more complex cluster? Alternatively, would you believe me if I said that computers would double in power sometime in the next 3 years? I get to make up the definition of double in power three years from now though. For those saying that people are basing multi-billion dollar decisions based on Moore's law... crap... I hope you're wrong.
If not, then in reference to a comment above, maybe we ought to give the hampsters a chance.
Re:Emasculated chemistry sets
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Uncle Tungsten
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· Score: 2
Not sure this actually went anywhere, but I remember some story about a movement to track chemical purchases (hopefully by delivery address) in an effort to reduce the possibility of someone making something nasty by just ordering it. In particular, I remember a study where someone bought and assembled a microbiology production facility using off the shelf stuff ordered through a bunch of distributors. Spooky stuff. Am a bit conflicted on whether or not government oversight is a good thing here.
University store rooms (at least the lab based ones) often have fairly interesting and obscure things in them. Have been around for a few clearings out of lab chem stocks and there's alway sat least one event of: "2kg of XXX! Didn't they outlaw that like 15 years ago..." "Maybe and this is about 20 years old". This is why Gen. Chem. profs will mention to examine old bottles labeled 'ether' without touching them (or speaking loudly around them) even when precious few students will ever run into one of these items, they are found periodically.
Just to be clear, no non-coding segments have been found in bacteria yet (last I heard).
My first impluse was that this is way off. I'm used to working with plasmids where frequently like 60% of the sequence is junk. They use E. Coli and D. radiodurans in the study mentioned in the article. A brief survey of E. Coli K12 (the parent of most common lab strains) sez that about 5-10% of it is non-coding. The old initial reference claims about 11% is non-coding, but a good chunk of that may be regulatory. The radiodurans genome is about 9% non-coding. The up shot is that there is actually a fair amount of 'junk-DNA' in (at least the Coli) bacterial genomes. Not a lot by human standards but enough to be able to squeeze in a chunk here or there if you're careful.
Another impulse was 'gad... that made it into Nature!?' (the journal, the article cited is a self congratulatory summary of their Nature paper). A lot of it follows a well duh kind of reasoning. 'Well duh' science is often the really good kind, but I wasn't particularily amazed by this. The DNA manipulation methods are beyond standard now, the only really clever thing was proposing the use of radiodurans as the host. Even that was sort of obvious (a blazingly well studied organism that is transformable). The DNA -> text using a 6 bit space? Well if you've ever designed linker regions in proteins I'm sure you were at least thought about spelling out you name or something in amino acids (unless your name is BOB). In part this is because every one learns the amino acids by doing stupid things like spelling out their name. Few people actually do this, mind you, as it usually would have some deleterious effect, but the point is I'm sure they weren't the first ones to try something like this, probably just the first to get funded to do this explicitly. Their big addition was to come up with a 3-letter code that includes all the letters and, ooo, punctuation. Then they spelled out bits of 'It's a small world.' My point is that it's not that far fetched and a bit surprising (to me) that it made it to Nature.
As to the utility of these things for information carriers... Mutation would be a problem in the long term. Sure radiodurans would survive nuclear war (these guys put cockroaches to shame) but they do it using lots of mismatch repair and recombinatorial repair methods. These are not perfect repair systems, they can and frequently do introduce many errors, especially in non-essential DNA space. Tying it to a functional protein isn't a bad idea, but unless the added sequence adds some survival advantage it won't enhance the lifetime of the measage (ie. if uncorrputed data gives an advantage then it is statistically less likely to propagate). Also, as you mentioned, the bacterium might notice long chunks (they're using 100 characters here) of useless DNA and excise it. For that kind of text, it might be better to just etch it into stone or something, at least you have some hope of seeing it intact in 2000 years.
Howz the door on the -610? From the image of it that I saw, it looks to have a similar door to the -600 case. Got a -600 case and the door is a pain in the ass! If you (as I do) try to open an optical drive while the door thing is closed it crashes. On the plus side the door is transparent which might have made for a solution to your IR receiver issue.
I am not a case modder but here are a few comments on that...
The article actually mentions (if you got to it before the slashdotting) that CoolerMaster sells bezels that match. That would be useful for the mid-tower case.
The desktop case (which looks like an AV component) doesn't need it because there is a very attractive door in front of the drive bays, making the whole thing look like a laserdisk player or a 7 disk CD changer or something. You only see the drives when the door is opened.
This bears mentioning though because I helped someone get a computer that ended up coming with an ATC-600 (IIRC). This is a desktop with a transparent door in front of the drive bays. Very attractive case, actually had Mac people ooo-ing and aww-ing (unpromted even). The case is really solid, put a 19" CRT on top of it with no complaints (which ordinarily might be a stupid thing to do). The door is attractive and well built. Unfortunaely the door is also a completely stupid idea if you actually plan on using the computer. There are two optical drives on the front, not surprisingly you often want to get in and out of them fairly often. The door is on some sort of smooth opening device, which means it opens slowly. Frequently you'll eject a CD or DVD and the drive slides right into the stupid little door. You can try to frantically open the door as the drive comes out but it goes way too slowly.
The result is that I tend to just leave the door open all the time when I'm using it, have almost brought myself to remove it (which looks pretty easy). I'm guessing that the new case has a similar problem with the door. If you're planning on using this in an AV system, be aware that this will be an issue (minor as it is, but these are rather expensive cases). The door is a liability and to some extent negates the 'don't need matching face plates' comment that started all this off in the first place.
I had great experiences with DirecTV DSL tech support. If I could remember their names I'd be naming them right now. Nice to have support by a person with a clue, not just someone reading a script. Also, the initial set-up was alarmingly easy. Whole thing took about 3-5 minutes.
And for the usual slashdot crowd, their description of how to setup with Linux, something along the line of, 'just plug it in, it already works'
I'm on DTV DSL right now as well. That you're looking at the PacBell DSL service and mentioned the SBC carrier brought up a question in my mind...
As far as I know DTV DSL was last miled by SBC, and near as I can tell SBC is the ONLY game in my town that is even remotely affordable. When I last looked there were a bunch of services but all of them used SBC's last mile service. Does this mean that I'll see basically the same service over the same lines or do the actual ISP's have all that much effect on the service quality? I never took advantage of the hosting service, haven't ever used the email account they gave me, so I was pretty much just working with DTV to get at SBC DSL. Seems like the worst service problems (slow downs etc) would be due to the last-mile carrier, not the ISP.
That said, DirectTV's service rocked. There was the occasional short outage but the transfer rate was awesome. Maybe that was because no one was using the service. Their service department was great too. They spent a bunch of time with me to track down that I basically had a crappy phone cord plugged into it (200' unshielded) and when you moved the cable around it would work for a bit then stop. Nightmare to diagnose that one. Follow that up with a flakey NIC connector on a laptop (figured that out when the cat was batting at the cord and connection went in and out) and you have a few irritating things to debug. They were quite happy to work through it and all at no charge.
Anyone know the legals when ISP's go down? Can they just sell our contracts to someone else and change the level of service with no way out for us? Do we get identical service for the remainder of our contract? Maybe changes with an opt out period? There was a seemingly unsubstantiated rant on DSLreports against DTV DSL regarding what happened when they left a market when I was shopping and am suddenly a bit nervous.
There was a slashdot story recently that actually mentioned some of the numbers. A spammer sends out like 300,000 email in hopes of getting fewer than 50 responses. A huge success would be 50, a dismal failure would be five. They break even at and expect about 12. So if they don't quite word that spam properly or don't negotiate their cut right, they actually lose money. Yes email is ridiculously cheap but the amazing thing is that even at their low low costs, they will lose money on a fair number of bulk emailings. It all seems strangely like some sort of gambling scheme.
I tend to agree with you on the confirmed email list/pyramid scheme thing, I would guess that someone is making their living off of email lists. But spam still gets sent, which means that someone still thinks they can make money at it. Even if the turnover is high, someone somewhere is still making a bit of money, and I'm not just talking about people selling lists. This means that believe it or not, SOMEONE IS ACTUALLY BUYING THE PENIS ENLARGER.
The interesting thing here is that by educating a few of the bottom feeders, the 0.01% or less that actually respond to these things, you could make spam unprofitable. Who are these people? I certainly don't know any of them. I know people who respond to the remove me link and I know people who might (sorry grandma) fall for bogus deals, but by and large they aren't the same people, in my case, the people I know who fall for this stuff don't have email accounts.
So who are they, how to figure this out? Hmm... Almost makes me want to hire a spammer to hit all the lists with an email collection scheme and all the people who respond get an email explaining how they're just enabling spammers and tell them how to avoid it in the future. Really, these people are the only ones who fall for this stuff, the brute force approach might actually work here. Just crazy enough to work. Just need to find someone with the cash to make it happen.
Grew up in Sebastopol. O'Reilly is a new arrival. Buildings weren't done last time I was in town. Very strange reading the description of my home town on Slashdot. Surreal. And I thought we were safe. More proof that safety through obscurity really isn't. Will have to check out the O'Reilly site over the holidays. They have a book store or do they just cut a break to the local independent (awesome) bookstore?
TicketBastard
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Add-Ons Add Up
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· Score: 5, Insightful
You know, it always somehow made sense to me that ticket master could charge a convenience fee for tickets. The idea was that they had to charge a small enough amount that you didn't decide that it was too much and just go over to the actual box office and buy it without the service charge. However, the amount they charge these days is f'ing ridiculous.
I wanted to go to a show recently where the venue is 200 yards from my house. I figured, ha! here's a chance to actually go to the box office and avoid the surcharge! It turns out that they have closed their box office, because no one was using it, you can only buy tickets through ticketmaster/bass or whatever. And the fee is like 35% of the cost of the ticket! When there was actually an alternative I would blissfully accept Tm's business model (and bend over), but now that there isn't an alternative at all. Anyone else have this happen (ie. tried to buy from a box office, when there no longer was one)? Alternatively, anyone ever get charged by ticketmaster when buying the ticket AT THE BOX OFFICE?
Re:self cleaning windows
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Lotus Nanotech
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· Score: 3, Insightful
This seem a little odd to anyone else? If the particles are ~1nm they really shouldn't significantly interact with visible light passing through it all that much should they? My guess is that yes, the surface is rough at the ~1nm scale but the coating itself is 100's of nm thick, when the hydrophobic polymers are considered. Or perhaps their spray technology still need a bit of work, if they're spraying globs of particles that could explain it as well.
Actually had to read that a few times before I even noticed the joke. If you can say that like it is only one word then you probably don't speak english as a first language.
Yes I've got cygwin, mostly I was whining. I haven't really been using it seriously though. It feels strangely broken to me for some reason, too used to shells in Irix or something. Part of it is the division of the cygwin system and the rest of the file system I guess. Or me being lazy.
Well, I'm working on my thesis now and am unfortunately committed to my current way of doing things (Word etc.). I have looked into others, but I'm just too far along at this point. However, there have been a bunch of times when clearly some tag isn't quite set properly and it would have been nice to get in and just set some parameter manually. A favorite was placing a figure using their frames tool. The figure (and frame) was big enough to exactly fill the page. If you put it a little too close to the corner the whole thing would trigger some sort of infinite loop. You could then sit back and watch as the page count went up until you bailed on Word! The other tag issue I had was that WordXP uses tags a little differently and EndNote didn't quite get it right. Another infinite loop was triggered with their new realtime formatting stuff. Didn't notice that one until it used up 1/2GB of memory! needless to say I turned that off.
In general though I've been getting more and more interested in LaTeX, seems like most of the authoring features I've decided I can't live without were implemented in LaTeX in the mid-80's. Sounds like you (or anyone else who's reading this and has experience with it) have a bit of experience with LaTeX. You mention the TOC formalism, is it part of a generic tagging protocol that could potentially be implemented with anything (like say figure references or equation numbering schemes), or are there just a couple of fixed functions... TOC and references? Also, how well does LaTeX handle inserted figures, in particular rastered formats like TIFF and vector formats like EPS? Is it as simple as telling it where the file is and it sends it on to the printer, or does it have trouble with images? Seems most of the examples I've run into use LaTeX because they are using lot's of equations, not images. If it handles images well (sounds like it's used by a lot of professionals so it wouldn't surprise me if it did work well) then maybe it's time I gave up on the whole WYSIWYG dependence.
That said, I just spent like an hour browsing around trying to figure out exactly what was up with BibTex. Sounds functionally good enough but EXTREMELY painful to use. You really can't beat the triviality of bibliographies with the new XP implentation of EndNote. Of course there's a bit of a crashing issue, but there's a work around.
Let's say I go to the trouble of learning TeX/LaTeX/BibTeX etc. Then pretty much Illustrator is the only thing keeping me on Windows. Anyone run it under Wine and give it a good workout yet?
And the usual "what about Mac?" Well, I'm a cheap bastard and when I looked, getting what I wanted meant a PowerMac, which I just couldn't afford. So far though XP hasn't been bad, VERY few crashes (like 5 in about four months, three of which were EndNote's fault). I would like a Unix command line though...
$500M for 1st yr / 4 quarters $125M for advertising in Q3 $177M total lost for Q3...
without PR, still $52M in the red...
Dunno that math seems pretty simple:)
I agree though, if most their loss is from PR, then they're not doing all that bad. Not even in the noise, considering what 3.5B from software sales. From the article though, it sounds like this is including profits from their Xbox game sales as well, not just losses from selling the console at below cost.
First off, damn straight! Pubmed is just an abstracting service, you still need to pay for access unless the article is free (yeah PNAS), so why would they bother. Also, PubMed is instrumental to pretty much all research which is medically related. There's a general complaint about the PubMed barrier, if it is old enough to have been published without ending up in pubmed, many people treat it like it doesn't exist.
What confuses me was that I thought PubScience was supposed to do the same (abstracting service) for general science, which is much needed service, seems most of the decent physical sciences search sites don't just charge but charge a huge amount for the service. A broad based PubMed style abstract/search service is critical. Why kill it?
Here's a quote from the launch of PubScience (why I got so excited about it):
PubSCIENCE allows users to search across thousands of bibliographic citations from multiple journal sources to identify information of interest. It focuses on the physical sciences and other energy-related disciplines and is modeled after the National Institutes of Health's PubMed. A link, once identified, will deliver the user directly to the publisher's doorstep website to view the full text if made available by the publisher. Alternately, a subscription, site license, or pay-per-view options may be necessary dependent upon publisher provisions.
If that's really what they were trying to do, why kill it? It is a basic, necessary service. If anything it should increase publishers revenues as it gives exposure to smaller journals and decreases the barrier to literature searches, making it much easier to find articles that you want, no matter where they are published. They must have been trying to push it further or something or why would they bother fighting it. Does anyone know what the now defunct service offered, beside abstracting services?
Then this sends me off on a whole different rant...
LeDuc said it is fairer to charge researchers for the articles they use than to charge taxpayers for the cost of running a Web site that makes them available for free.
Fairer, maybe. In science though making information availible to all is a very important thing. They quote a figure of $15 - $40 for articles. This is accurate but ridiculous. No one in academics is going to pay that much (industrial research yes, but even they complain, come on, you're going to read a lot less if you have to make a purchase request every time you want to read an article). The only reason that literature system currently works at all is that institutional subscriptions are negotiated such that they are affordable, and reasonable use is interpreted pretty generously. You can always write the authors and ask for a copy but this is a system which is dying (it is much easier to manage a pdf than a paper copy). If you're at a small school though, it really marginalizes your work, you just can't get all the literture.
The really offensive thing here is the taxpayers comment. I disagree with it strongly. The taxpayers, by and large, pay for the research in the first place. The only research that isn't at least partially paid for by tax payers (this includes indirect things like charitable foundations) is usually proprietary. Worried about different countries contributing differently, the amount that the literature database is used will pretty much be in direct proportion to the degree to which you are in a position to contribute to it.
Why not make it available to everyone at a price everyone can afford? Sure accuse me of being a clueless idealist. It sounds like the publishers had a ligitimate gripe with people mirroring some of the articles that were availible from pay sites. My point is that the research is paid for by tax payers, the articles are written by researchs being paid by taxpayers and the articles are reviewed by peers, who are paid by taxpayers. In the past it made sense because the cost of actual publishing was high. These days there are only a few journals that people actually seem to want in print, almost everything is done by the internet, its just faster and easier. As most everything is paid for by tax payers, why not take it one step further and make it availible to them as well. All that would be needed a system for running the actual editing/online publishing system, which believe me could be done for much less than a grand per article (assuming only 100 people would have paid for an article and that the prices were lower, $10). Maybe its time the PNAS model (online everything is free) was expanded and the government pays for a few free but high/medium profile journals.
Your friend could also probably switch her email account, but that's beside the point.
I will pretty much only ever click one of those things if I honestly remember signing up it, in which case it's rarely spam and usually from a company with a reputation to protect.
On the other hand I have a few messages that I get routinely that I haven't quite figured out how to filter out. The entertaining thing about one... a bunch of crappy boiler plate quasi content and one link... a link that sez 'remove me,' talk about an email harvester if I ever saw one. They're selling something but give you no way to respond (different email every time), they aren't even trying to appear legit.
This behavior makes it impossible for people like that spam-queen they had on WSJ the other day (yesterday?) to claim legitimacy. The 'Remove me' links don't work as a rule so claiming people can always opt out of their list is like saying you can avoid getting mugged by putting a big sign on your back, "please don't rob me, I'm carrying a lot of cash and now would be a bad time to lose it". If you're genuinely dealing with a well intentioned mugger it might help, but usually it only makes things worse.
Or they choose something that emits lower energy beta-particles. Yes betas are electrons but not all electrons have the same energy. The beta-emitters I've worked around can usually be stopped by something minor (ie. reasonably thin sheet of plexiglas). I'd guess that there are emitters of even lower energy beta particles that might be stopped by the skin without doing undue damage to it. Now the eyes, or taken internally on the other hand...
Tritium for example isn't that nasty unless you get some in you, where it's readily absorbed. Then if I recall you tend to incorporate some of it and it hangs around mutating genes etc for months to years. Of course, taking cadmium (ie. NiCd battery) internally is bad too, maybe worse when you consider the quantites involved in your average battery.
Alpha emitters BTW are not harmless. Radon is an alpha emitter but exists as a gas, which can be inhaled. It does do damage when it gets in your body.
The other side of this is how much material is in one of these units... For liability's sake it's probably putting out energy at a rate comparable to the ammount of energy you get from the sun if you're sun bathing or something. Hazardous only if you're routinely exposed to it. And whatever container its in should deal with that pertty well.
Yeah that was the one... So it wasn't such a bad mix-up.
Read through some of the old ANALOGs that were online. There's a review of the (then) new 1200XL. They talk about it having more memory but that most games will still only use 16k to support older models. Why did that sort of logic have to go away... "there's newer technology but we'll aim our games at the most common denominator" Another random game memory (not one that got punched in, but a reason to get a disk drive):
Slashdot Mirror
I make this comment way, way down below so it will probably be missed.
You missed one of the biggest speed improvements.
The RAM is much, much faster in the new PowerBook vs. the iBook. The 12" PowerBook is using 266MHz DDR, the iBook 100MHz SDRAM. I'd pay about $100 for that difference on its own (at least). >2.5-fold increase in RAM speed will make a huge difference in performance, probably about as much as the G3->G4 change.
We're talking Mac's here, I would have thought someone would've mentioned that its not just MHz that matters by now:)
There seem to be a lot of complaints on the minimal speed boost for the iBook -> 12" PowerBook jump in cost.
Anyone actually look at the difference in the RAM the two products use? This is probably where the cost difference comes from, not the materials its made of.
iBooks seem to use 100 MHz SDRAM, 12" PowerBook uses 266MHz DDR and the 17" uses 333MHz DDR. This should have a pretty big performance boost, at least as much as the processor boost, probably a whole lot more. Apple never seem cutting edge on memory tech but at least they're now giving you something respectable with the high end powerbook. That was actually one of the things that kept me away from Mac before (not a gamer, all my critical software was availible on both). That and the still high price.
The 15" PowerBook is still using SDRAM though.
You mention amusing adds and all I can think of is that old add (ran during the superbowl I think) where they fired gerbils or some rodent things out of a cannon into a wall with the company name on it. I can never remember the name, but the image of rodents smacking a wall, falling to the ground, shaking a bit then walking a way left an impression. Really no clue what they were selling though.
NO ONE IS HIRING!!!!!
This is especially true in the games programming industry in Dallas ironically enough. I know a guy (not well) who after looking for over a year for a job has settled with volunteering his time on a project to at least keep the resume up and running. He even sounds competent. Icky, icky icky....
Well put... Enough squabbling over this 'it's a bad paper'/'it's a good paper' nonsense. The paper correctly points out that Moore's law is poorly named. To most people this doesn't really matter. Your point - O{exp{t}} - is a good one. It should be noted though, and the paper seems to miss this, that the real take home message of Moore's law isn't that there will be a single exponential curve stretching back to the dawn of time, its that computer power (measured in an ever changing way) seems to double every couple years. This is useful if you take current circumstances into account to plan for the next few years.
Yes, Moore himself seemed to use an ever changing time constant and an ever changing metric of what was doubling, but it was being used as a way of predicting marketing trends. (it's the cost-optimum chip's power, now it's the total number of elements used in the cost-optimal chip, now its the feasible memory size, its the processor speed, its the transistor count, now we take into account the mythical "engineering cleverness" etc.) The problem is that the people the rule of thumb was created for (marketing folks) took the silly thing too seriously. It should be, and usually is, treated as a flexible rule of thumb. There will be periodic sweeping advances. There will be periodic lulls. It's not like it would be at all practical to use Moore's law to predict how long it would take to increase computer power by 10%, it is entirely dominated by local variations, or to predict the time for a 10x boost in power to the exact month. As long as a few months and as soon as three years are reasonable answers, trying to nail it down exactly is certain folly. Which seems to be the trap that the paper authors fall into.
If the paper helps a few people to set a project deadline realistically great, otherwise, it's just sort of a re-statement of the obvious. Think back 4*18mo (6yrs). Taking into account drive speeds, memory speeds, memory size, processor speeds, processor architecture, bus-speeds, addition of GPU's etc. do you really think that today's computers are only 16x faster than they were in 1997? Given the nebulousness of the definition (its cast as a limit in the paper, not the average) does it count as a doubling if someone decides to tie 2x as many processors together to make a more complex cluster? Alternatively, would you believe me if I said that computers would double in power sometime in the next 3 years? I get to make up the definition of double in power three years from now though. For those saying that people are basing multi-billion dollar decisions based on Moore's law... crap... I hope you're wrong.
If not, then in reference to a comment above, maybe we ought to give the hampsters a chance.
Not sure this actually went anywhere, but I remember some story about a movement to track chemical purchases (hopefully by delivery address) in an effort to reduce the possibility of someone making something nasty by just ordering it. In particular, I remember a study where someone bought and assembled a microbiology production facility using off the shelf stuff ordered through a bunch of distributors. Spooky stuff. Am a bit conflicted on whether or not government oversight is a good thing here.
University store rooms (at least the lab based ones) often have fairly interesting and obscure things in them. Have been around for a few clearings out of lab chem stocks and there's alway sat least one event of: "2kg of XXX! Didn't they outlaw that like 15 years ago..." "Maybe and this is about 20 years old". This is why Gen. Chem. profs will mention to examine old bottles labeled 'ether' without touching them (or speaking loudly around them) even when precious few students will ever run into one of these items, they are found periodically.
Just to be clear, no non-coding segments have been found in bacteria yet (last I heard).
My first impluse was that this is way off. I'm used to working with plasmids where frequently like 60% of the sequence is junk. They use E. Coli and D. radiodurans in the study mentioned in the article. A brief survey of E. Coli K12 (the parent of most common lab strains) sez that about 5-10% of it is non-coding. The old initial reference claims about 11% is non-coding, but a good chunk of that may be regulatory. The radiodurans genome is about 9% non-coding. The up shot is that there is actually a fair amount of 'junk-DNA' in (at least the Coli) bacterial genomes. Not a lot by human standards but enough to be able to squeeze in a chunk here or there if you're careful.
Another impulse was 'gad... that made it into Nature!?' (the journal, the article cited is a self congratulatory summary of their Nature paper). A lot of it follows a well duh kind of reasoning. 'Well duh' science is often the really good kind, but I wasn't particularily amazed by this. The DNA manipulation methods are beyond standard now, the only really clever thing was proposing the use of radiodurans as the host. Even that was sort of obvious (a blazingly well studied organism that is transformable). The DNA -> text using a 6 bit space? Well if you've ever designed linker regions in proteins I'm sure you were at least thought about spelling out you name or something in amino acids (unless your name is BOB). In part this is because every one learns the amino acids by doing stupid things like spelling out their name. Few people actually do this, mind you, as it usually would have some deleterious effect, but the point is I'm sure they weren't the first ones to try something like this, probably just the first to get funded to do this explicitly. Their big addition was to come up with a 3-letter code that includes all the letters and, ooo, punctuation. Then they spelled out bits of 'It's a small world.' My point is that it's not that far fetched and a bit surprising (to me) that it made it to Nature.
As to the utility of these things for information carriers... Mutation would be a problem in the long term. Sure radiodurans would survive nuclear war (these guys put cockroaches to shame) but they do it using lots of mismatch repair and recombinatorial repair methods. These are not perfect repair systems, they can and frequently do introduce many errors, especially in non-essential DNA space. Tying it to a functional protein isn't a bad idea, but unless the added sequence adds some survival advantage it won't enhance the lifetime of the measage (ie. if uncorrputed data gives an advantage then it is statistically less likely to propagate). Also, as you mentioned, the bacterium might notice long chunks (they're using 100 characters here) of useless DNA and excise it. For that kind of text, it might be better to just etch it into stone or something, at least you have some hope of seeing it intact in 2000 years.
Howz the door on the -610? From the image of it that I saw, it looks to have a similar door to the -600 case. Got a -600 case and the door is a pain in the ass! If you (as I do) try to open an optical drive while the door thing is closed it crashes. On the plus side the door is transparent which might have made for a solution to your IR receiver issue.
I am not a case modder but here are a few comments on that...
The article actually mentions (if you got to it before the slashdotting) that CoolerMaster sells bezels that match. That would be useful for the mid-tower case.
The desktop case (which looks like an AV component) doesn't need it because there is a very attractive door in front of the drive bays, making the whole thing look like a laserdisk player or a 7 disk CD changer or something. You only see the drives when the door is opened.
This bears mentioning though because I helped someone get a computer that ended up coming with an ATC-600 (IIRC). This is a desktop with a transparent door in front of the drive bays. Very attractive case, actually had Mac people ooo-ing and aww-ing (unpromted even). The case is really solid, put a 19" CRT on top of it with no complaints (which ordinarily might be a stupid thing to do). The door is attractive and well built. Unfortunaely the door is also a completely stupid idea if you actually plan on using the computer. There are two optical drives on the front, not surprisingly you often want to get in and out of them fairly often. The door is on some sort of smooth opening device, which means it opens slowly. Frequently you'll eject a CD or DVD and the drive slides right into the stupid little door. You can try to frantically open the door as the drive comes out but it goes way too slowly.
The result is that I tend to just leave the door open all the time when I'm using it, have almost brought myself to remove it (which looks pretty easy). I'm guessing that the new case has a similar problem with the door. If you're planning on using this in an AV system, be aware that this will be an issue (minor as it is, but these are rather expensive cases). The door is a liability and to some extent negates the 'don't need matching face plates' comment that started all this off in the first place.
Hear, hear...
I had great experiences with DirecTV DSL tech support. If I could remember their names I'd be naming them right now. Nice to have support by a person with a clue, not just someone reading a script. Also, the initial set-up was alarmingly easy. Whole thing took about 3-5 minutes.
And for the usual slashdot crowd, their description of how to setup with Linux, something along the line of, 'just plug it in, it already works'
I'm on DTV DSL right now as well. That you're looking at the PacBell DSL service and mentioned the SBC carrier brought up a question in my mind...
As far as I know DTV DSL was last miled by SBC, and near as I can tell SBC is the ONLY game in my town that is even remotely affordable. When I last looked there were a bunch of services but all of them used SBC's last mile service. Does this mean that I'll see basically the same service over the same lines or do the actual ISP's have all that much effect on the service quality? I never took advantage of the hosting service, haven't ever used the email account they gave me, so I was pretty much just working with DTV to get at SBC DSL. Seems like the worst service problems (slow downs etc) would be due to the last-mile carrier, not the ISP.
That said, DirectTV's service rocked. There was the occasional short outage but the transfer rate was awesome. Maybe that was because no one was using the service. Their service department was great too. They spent a bunch of time with me to track down that I basically had a crappy phone cord plugged into it (200' unshielded) and when you moved the cable around it would work for a bit then stop. Nightmare to diagnose that one. Follow that up with a flakey NIC connector on a laptop (figured that out when the cat was batting at the cord and connection went in and out) and you have a few irritating things to debug. They were quite happy to work through it and all at no charge.
Anyone know the legals when ISP's go down? Can they just sell our contracts to someone else and change the level of service with no way out for us? Do we get identical service for the remainder of our contract? Maybe changes with an opt out period? There was a seemingly unsubstantiated rant on DSLreports against DTV DSL regarding what happened when they left a market when I was shopping and am suddenly a bit nervous.
There was a slashdot story recently that actually mentioned some of the numbers. A spammer sends out like 300,000 email in hopes of getting fewer than 50 responses. A huge success would be 50, a dismal failure would be five. They break even at and expect about 12. So if they don't quite word that spam properly or don't negotiate their cut right, they actually lose money. Yes email is ridiculously cheap but the amazing thing is that even at their low low costs, they will lose money on a fair number of bulk emailings. It all seems strangely like some sort of gambling scheme.
I tend to agree with you on the confirmed email list/pyramid scheme thing, I would guess that someone is making their living off of email lists. But spam still gets sent, which means that someone still thinks they can make money at it. Even if the turnover is high, someone somewhere is still making a bit of money, and I'm not just talking about people selling lists. This means that believe it or not, SOMEONE IS ACTUALLY BUYING THE PENIS ENLARGER.
The interesting thing here is that by educating a few of the bottom feeders, the 0.01% or less that actually respond to these things, you could make spam unprofitable. Who are these people? I certainly don't know any of them. I know people who respond to the remove me link and I know people who might (sorry grandma) fall for bogus deals, but by and large they aren't the same people, in my case, the people I know who fall for this stuff don't have email accounts.
So who are they, how to figure this out? Hmm... Almost makes me want to hire a spammer to hit all the lists with an email collection scheme and all the people who respond get an email explaining how they're just enabling spammers and tell them how to avoid it in the future. Really, these people are the only ones who fall for this stuff, the brute force approach might actually work here. Just crazy enough to work. Just need to find someone with the cash to make it happen.
Grew up in Sebastopol. O'Reilly is a new arrival. Buildings weren't done last time I was in town. Very strange reading the description of my home town on Slashdot. Surreal. And I thought we were safe. More proof that safety through obscurity really isn't. Will have to check out the O'Reilly site over the holidays. They have a book store or do they just cut a break to the local independent (awesome) bookstore?
You know, it always somehow made sense to me that ticket master could charge a convenience fee for tickets. The idea was that they had to charge a small enough amount that you didn't decide that it was too much and just go over to the actual box office and buy it without the service charge. However, the amount they charge these days is f'ing ridiculous.
I wanted to go to a show recently where the venue is 200 yards from my house. I figured, ha! here's a chance to actually go to the box office and avoid the surcharge! It turns out that they have closed their box office, because no one was using it, you can only buy tickets through ticketmaster/bass or whatever. And the fee is like 35% of the cost of the ticket! When there was actually an alternative I would blissfully accept Tm's business model (and bend over), but now that there isn't an alternative at all. Anyone else have this happen (ie. tried to buy from a box office, when there no longer was one)? Alternatively, anyone ever get charged by ticketmaster when buying the ticket AT THE BOX OFFICE?
This seem a little odd to anyone else? If the particles are ~1nm they really shouldn't significantly interact with visible light passing through it all that much should they? My guess is that yes, the surface is rough at the ~1nm scale but the coating itself is 100's of nm thick, when the hydrophobic polymers are considered. Or perhaps their spray technology still need a bit of work, if they're spraying globs of particles that could explain it as well.
Actually had to read that a few times before I even noticed the joke. If you can say that like it is only one word then you probably don't speak english as a first language.
Yes I've got cygwin, mostly I was whining. I haven't really been using it seriously though. It feels strangely broken to me for some reason, too used to shells in Irix or something. Part of it is the division of the cygwin system and the rest of the file system I guess. Or me being lazy.
Well, I'm working on my thesis now and am unfortunately committed to my current way of doing things (Word etc.). I have looked into others, but I'm just too far along at this point. However, there have been a bunch of times when clearly some tag isn't quite set properly and it would have been nice to get in and just set some parameter manually. A favorite was placing a figure using their frames tool. The figure (and frame) was big enough to exactly fill the page. If you put it a little too close to the corner the whole thing would trigger some sort of infinite loop. You could then sit back and watch as the page count went up until you bailed on Word! The other tag issue I had was that WordXP uses tags a little differently and EndNote didn't quite get it right. Another infinite loop was triggered with their new realtime formatting stuff. Didn't notice that one until it used up 1/2GB of memory! needless to say I turned that off.
In general though I've been getting more and more interested in LaTeX, seems like most of the authoring features I've decided I can't live without were implemented in LaTeX in the mid-80's. Sounds like you (or anyone else who's reading this and has experience with it) have a bit of experience with LaTeX. You mention the TOC formalism, is it part of a generic tagging protocol that could potentially be implemented with anything (like say figure references or equation numbering schemes), or are there just a couple of fixed functions... TOC and references? Also, how well does LaTeX handle inserted figures, in particular rastered formats like TIFF and vector formats like EPS? Is it as simple as telling it where the file is and it sends it on to the printer, or does it have trouble with images? Seems most of the examples I've run into use LaTeX because they are using lot's of equations, not images. If it handles images well (sounds like it's used by a lot of professionals so it wouldn't surprise me if it did work well) then maybe it's time I gave up on the whole WYSIWYG dependence.
My two apps...
Adobe Illustrator
and
the EndNote plugin as used in Word.
That said, I just spent like an hour browsing around trying to figure out exactly what was up with BibTex. Sounds functionally good enough but EXTREMELY painful to use. You really can't beat the triviality of bibliographies with the new XP implentation of EndNote. Of course there's a bit of a crashing issue, but there's a work around.
Let's say I go to the trouble of learning TeX/LaTeX/BibTeX etc. Then pretty much Illustrator is the only thing keeping me on Windows. Anyone run it under Wine and give it a good workout yet?
And the usual "what about Mac?" Well, I'm a cheap bastard and when I looked, getting what I wanted meant a PowerMac, which I just couldn't afford. So far though XP hasn't been bad, VERY few crashes (like 5 in about four months, three of which were EndNote's fault). I would like a Unix command line though...
12 months in a year dude
:)
$500M for 1st yr / 4 quarters
$125M for advertising in Q3
$177M total lost for Q3...
without PR, still $52M in the red...
Dunno that math seems pretty simple
I agree though, if most their loss is from PR, then they're not doing all that bad. Not even in the noise, considering what 3.5B from software sales. From the article though, it sounds like this is including profits from their Xbox game sales as well, not just losses from selling the console at below cost.
This in particular struck me...
"We have no intention of going after PubMed."
First off, damn straight! Pubmed is just an abstracting service, you still need to pay for access unless the article is free (yeah PNAS), so why would they bother. Also, PubMed is instrumental to pretty much all research which is medically related. There's a general complaint about the PubMed barrier, if it is old enough to have been published without ending up in pubmed, many people treat it like it doesn't exist.
What confuses me was that I thought PubScience was supposed to do the same (abstracting service) for general science, which is much needed service, seems most of the decent physical sciences search sites don't just charge but charge a huge amount for the service. A broad based PubMed style abstract/search service is critical. Why kill it?
Here's a quote from the launch of PubScience (why I got so excited about it):
PubSCIENCE allows users to search across thousands of bibliographic citations from multiple journal sources to identify information of interest. It focuses on the physical sciences and other energy-related disciplines and is modeled after the National Institutes of Health's PubMed. A link, once identified, will deliver the user directly to the publisher's doorstep website to view the full text if made available by the publisher. Alternately, a subscription, site license, or pay-per-view options may be necessary dependent upon publisher provisions.
If that's really what they were trying to do, why kill it? It is a basic, necessary service. If anything it should increase publishers revenues as it gives exposure to smaller journals and decreases the barrier to literature searches, making it much easier to find articles that you want, no matter where they are published. They must have been trying to push it further or something or why would they bother fighting it. Does anyone know what the now defunct service offered, beside abstracting services?
Then this sends me off on a whole different rant...
LeDuc said it is fairer to charge researchers for the articles they use than to charge taxpayers for the cost of running a Web site that makes them available for free.
Fairer, maybe. In science though making information availible to all is a very important thing. They quote a figure of $15 - $40 for articles. This is accurate but ridiculous. No one in academics is going to pay that much (industrial research yes, but even they complain, come on, you're going to read a lot less if you have to make a purchase request every time you want to read an article). The only reason that literature system currently works at all is that institutional subscriptions are negotiated such that they are affordable, and reasonable use is interpreted pretty generously. You can always write the authors and ask for a copy but this is a system which is dying (it is much easier to manage a pdf than a paper copy). If you're at a small school though, it really marginalizes your work, you just can't get all the literture.
The really offensive thing here is the taxpayers comment. I disagree with it strongly. The taxpayers, by and large, pay for the research in the first place. The only research that isn't at least partially paid for by tax payers (this includes indirect things like charitable foundations) is usually proprietary. Worried about different countries contributing differently, the amount that the literature database is used will pretty much be in direct proportion to the degree to which you are in a position to contribute to it.
Why not make it available to everyone at a price everyone can afford? Sure accuse me of being a clueless idealist. It sounds like the publishers had a ligitimate gripe with people mirroring some of the articles that were availible from pay sites. My point is that the research is paid for by tax payers, the articles are written by researchs being paid by taxpayers and the articles are reviewed by peers, who are paid by taxpayers. In the past it made sense because the cost of actual publishing was high. These days there are only a few journals that people actually seem to want in print, almost everything is done by the internet, its just faster and easier. As most everything is paid for by tax payers, why not take it one step further and make it availible to them as well. All that would be needed a system for running the actual editing/online publishing system, which believe me could be done for much less than a grand per article (assuming only 100 people would have paid for an article and that the prices were lower, $10). Maybe its time the PNAS model (online everything is free) was expanded and the government pays for a few free but high/medium profile journals.
Make that two Yeeeaaahhh's!!!
Your friend could also probably switch her email account, but that's beside the point.
I will pretty much only ever click one of those things if I honestly remember signing up it, in which case it's rarely spam and usually from a company with a reputation to protect.
On the other hand I have a few messages that I get routinely that I haven't quite figured out how to filter out. The entertaining thing about one... a bunch of crappy boiler plate quasi content and one link... a link that sez 'remove me,' talk about an email harvester if I ever saw one. They're selling something but give you no way to respond (different email every time), they aren't even trying to appear legit.
This behavior makes it impossible for people like that spam-queen they had on WSJ the other day (yesterday?) to claim legitimacy. The 'Remove me' links don't work as a rule so claiming people can always opt out of their list is like saying you can avoid getting mugged by putting a big sign on your back, "please don't rob me, I'm carrying a lot of cash and now would be a bad time to lose it". If you're genuinely dealing with a well intentioned mugger it might help, but usually it only makes things worse.
Or they choose something that emits lower energy beta-particles. Yes betas are electrons but not all electrons have the same energy. The beta-emitters I've worked around can usually be stopped by something minor (ie. reasonably thin sheet of plexiglas). I'd guess that there are emitters of even lower energy beta particles that might be stopped by the skin without doing undue damage to it. Now the eyes, or taken internally on the other hand...
Tritium for example isn't that nasty unless you get some in you, where it's readily absorbed. Then if I recall you tend to incorporate some of it and it hangs around mutating genes etc for months to years. Of course, taking cadmium (ie. NiCd battery) internally is bad too, maybe worse when you consider the quantites involved in your average battery.
Alpha emitters BTW are not harmless. Radon is an alpha emitter but exists as a gas, which can be inhaled. It does do damage when it gets in your body.
The other side of this is how much material is in one of these units... For liability's sake it's probably putting out energy at a rate comparable to the ammount of energy you get from the sun if you're sun bathing or something. Hazardous only if you're routinely exposed to it. And whatever container its in should deal with that pertty well.
Yeah that was the one... So it wasn't such a bad mix-up.
Read through some of the old ANALOGs that were online. There's a review of the (then) new 1200XL. They talk about it having more memory but that most games will still only use 16k to support older models. Why did that sort of logic have to go away... "there's newer technology but we'll aim our games at the most common denominator"
Another random game memory (not one that got punched in, but a reason to get a disk drive):
JUMPMAN
One of the greatest puzzle games.
Sorry memory failing...
;)
I think it had 64k but I think it was an AtariXE. Atari64 is me screwing up