A new vaccine has been developed that targets the part of a flu virus that is conserved between mutations. Admittedly it might not be as effective as a targeted vacciene for a particular strain, but it would likely provide general protection against most flu viruses. So far it's been tested in ferrets (a good human model) and protects against H5N1 avian influenza.
I've been closely following Obsidian Entertainment's development of NWN2 and so far I'm quite happy with their approach. They've completely redone the graphics and toolset, kept the part of the game that worked (rules engine and scripting system), and are focusing on a single player game that so far sounds quite good.
In the last few days, they've released new screenshots (and here), as well as new movies. So far, it looks to be a very pretty game at least.
About ten years ago, I got my assorted MS certifications, taking 10 different tests at a cost of $1,000 total. I was new to my current job and found that while it didn't immediately raise my salary, it did get my foot in the door.
Within six months, I was our company's first SQL Server admin. A year after that, I was the sole developer on the newly formed Web Services team. Long-term, the certifications were a very wise investment.
Still, the bottom-line is that people were most impressed by my performance. Being able to study and pass ten different tests probably reflects on my sometimes insane degree of focus, rather than full comprehension. I barely passed my NT certification and only now fully understand the wacky security model.
Personally, I become overly chatty instead. This often leads to me speaking my mind more freely at meetings than I otherwise would. The little part of me that asks "should I really say that?" doesn't speed up as much as the bouncy part that says "What? That's a stupid idea! Let me share with the group."
Needless to say, coffee turns me into a "WTF-man" more than a "yes-man".
Actually, they're modding games, like Neverwinter Nights. The scripting language is very C/Java like, albeit simpler. There's a tremendous number of creative skills you can learn from the whole thing.
It's getting to the point where you want to keep your OS and core applications in Flash memory and things that are less important on hard drives. I just bought a 512 MB usb key for $25. Scaling up, you could get a multi-GB flash drive for a couple hundred bucks.
Some companies have multi-tiered storage solutions (e.g. fast SCSI RAID, cheap EIDE RAID, optical, etc.). Some of those ideas may make their way into desktop devices. You'd boot off of flash memory nearly instantly (it would cache your OS and core applications), then you'd play your MP3s, surf the web, or whatever on your relatively slow hard drive.
We're pretty unhappy about the Microsoft search built into IIS, which we've used for years. We got a Google test box last year and were reasonably happy with it, though the database-integration wasn't that great.
This seems to fix this. For example, if someone types in a name, we can create a custom web page that talks to the search, sending back the matches from our employee directory. It does seem to take a bit of work to build each link into your databases, but it's probably worthwhile for the big ones.
I think most innovation in the gaming world is a gradual evolution. For starters, you have to rate the amount of change the gaming audience is willing to take. Creating something wildly different may be difficult for mass audiences to pick up and understand. One of the reasons World of Warcraft is so successful is that it didn't dramatically innovate, but rather took all the gameplay elements that worked well in the MMORPG realm and polished them all to a beautiful shine.
If you wish to innovate, try to do so one element at a time. Introducing a morality system in Ultima IV was it's big new thing. Some innovations are stylistic, such as the post-apocalyptic worlds of Wasteland and Fallout.
Probably the hardest thing to judge is whether or not a new gameplay element is fun, innovation or otherwise. I'm working on a complicated system for Neverwinter Nights 2 that involves ship-to-ship combat, trading, and more. I'm so close to development that it's hard to say if it's fun or not. I'll probably have to wait for my QA folks to hopefully give me the honest truth.
So, best of luck to you. Hopefully you can keep your soul intact and your bills paid.
Telecommuting is overrated in a number of cases. I enjoy the ease of contact with my coworkers. Part of the draw of my current profession is that I work with funny, intelligent people.
Working at home would likely be filled with endless distractions, mostly in the form of a two and seven-year-old who want to play Princess or Legos, respectively. Rarely does my coworker dress up in pink and demand they be called Princess Dave.
Torrents are hard to beat in terms of convenience. They're typically HDTV, commercial free, and can be downloaded the next day. The catch, of course, is that they're inconvenient for non-technical people. They have to find a site that has them, click a link, wait for a download, and so on.
I think it's very smart for ABC to offer up a very easy way to watch shows via their website. The catch is that they'll likely be somewhat poor quality and you have commercials. People live with commercials now. I suspect it would be even easier at your computer, where you can ALT-Tab to something else for a few minutes. Still, it's enough of a hassle that torrents won't go away any time soon.
I wonder how local stations feel about this? Local stations get their ad revenue by selling local advertising. If people move to this and stop watching television, local stations may start disappearing. A similar issue was raised with NPR and podcasting just last week.
I host a phpbb2 bulletinboard to help coordinate a team of amateur game developers. It's not linked anywhere, nor is it installed in the default directory. Still, one of these spam bots managed to find it and within a week had 50+ registrations of people with bogus web addresses.
My solution was to implement the visual check that everyone's talking about. I still get some registrations, but much fewer. What's crazy is that by default, these users can't do hardly anything. Unfortunately creating spam is basically free on a per-bulletin board basis.
I'm tempted to post some of them, just so they can feel the mighty power of Slashdot, but my account would probably be banned for life as I bet many of these sites have malware all over 'em.
If you Google about for him, you get some interesting stuff:
DR. WATSON: A question for Pieter Tans. What if we don't want carbon dioxide to increase to more than one thousand parts per million? For example, what if we want to keep CO2 from exceeding 450, what is the implication for burning all the fossil fuels?
DR. TANS: It would be Draconian. I showed the real long term effect of it. If we want to keep CO2 below 450 ppm permanently, I guess we would have to stop just about today, almost.
What do we see? At least during '92 and '93, there is tremendous uptake of CO2 at mid-latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere by plants. The uptake is about half as large as the total combustion of fossil fuels. So this is fortunate, this is good news. People in the oil and coal industry might love it. But like I said, we don't know if this is going to last. Biologists are generally very skeptical that this will keep happening for decades. In fact, we know that in 1994, terrestrial uptake at the mid-latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere was much smaller than during '92 and '93. So we know that it varies a lot from year to year. It just so happened that when we got our isotopic analysis on line, there were two big years of terrestrial uptake.
Just reading through what he's said, he seems like a straight-shooter. Sometimes he says things that the oil industry might hate, some things they might love. Ah, science!
Camera tech is pretty well-known. Adding IR, UV, magnification, auto-adjusting for sunlight/night vision is all fairly trivial once you have the optic connection.
Imagine switching to sepia tone whenever you want that "wild west" feel.
The hard part, of course, is the resolution. Stimulating specific optic nerves is tricky, but fortunately your brain is good at dealing with odd input even if you don't get the connection quite right. It reminds me of the experiment where someone wore mirror glasses that flipped the world upside-down. After a week or so, everything seemed normal.
Why is this scored as redundant? I think this person's on to something. The key is to have advertising personalized to the person downloading the podcast. If you know their geographic location, you can identify an NPR affiliate and give specific ads.
True, everyone hates advertising, but you can always skip over it in a podcast.
At my organization, we recently passed some policies around the release of medical information. Essentially we're complying with existing laws in Washington, where we have hospitals, so mostly we're being consistent across our organization.
What it means is that if medical information somehow gets outside of our organization without our permission, we need to notify patients. This can get extremely expensive in cases where large amounts of records get lost or stolen. There's an exception in the law that lets us publish ads in major papers instead of sending out letters. I think the barrier is around a million dollars or so before we switch to ads.
Is this a good thing? My son's medical information was on some backup tapes stolen from the back of a car from a different healthcare organization. I personally don't care about it and it's unlikely the information gets used for malicious purposes. The cost for sending all the letters was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars most likely. Costs like that would bankrupt small organizations, though in today's healthcare market, it's becoming the price of doing business.
What'll probably happen is that big organizations will bear the cost of this in stride, while smaller organizations will have yet another risk that might shut them down at any moment.
It may be that while prayer doesn't do anything for the outcome of a patient, it and other rituals do wonders for everyone else. We go to weddings, funerals, baby showers, and celebrate things like Halloween and Easter. I'm not religious, but I very much appreciate those rituals in my life. It's something to look forward to and enjoy, moments of stability in an otherwise chaotic life.
Instead of praying, our family tends to get together to eat and talk. We may be plumper for it, but it's a much tastier experience.
Remember that there were different results when the patient was told they were being prayed for. Once that's done, it introduces an interesting twist:
They're praying for me? Oh, crap, I must be a goner.
Sure enough, those who were told they were being prayed for had more complications than those who weren't told.
On a more serious note, I think it's important to do this as a counter to the other "experiments" that showed that prayer helped people. Science is about reproducing results. If a scientist claims something is true, it's the obligation of others to prove them wrong or back up the findings.
The ability to see your quest history and make a quest your active one.
For your active quest, it generally shows you where to go next. While this may seem like "spoonfeeding" the player, in a huge world like this it saves tons of wandering around.
That's not to say there's no issues. I succumbed to weighing down the C key and leveling up my various magic skills by casting spells repeatedly. The game balance is also occasionally off, with encounters not always scaling to my current skill level. Early on, combat and enemies seemed easy. Now that I'm at level 22, each encounter takes a long time and is extremely challenging.
Still, hats off to Bethesda to making an incredible game.
Excellent point. If I have 100 children, but only one survives, I'm not particularly "fit" evolutionarily.
Evolution is a long term thing. It may be that big brains and reproductive restraint are counterproductive in the long-run. It could also be that slow and steady wins the race. Me, I've got my two kids and plan on investing huge amounts of time in making them prepared for the world.
To me, it gets at the root that concepts of self and other are fairly arbitrary. It often makes more sense thinging about who I am in the context of family, work, and society.
I managed to sign up very early, so I got to play with it a fair bit. Since I'm a web developer, I was most interested in the technology rather than having yet another web site I maintain. Here's the things they did well, in my opinion:
The use of AJAX is well done. Pages save by themselves, you can drag and align images, and there's a nifty file upload utility.
There's simple versioning, allowing work on pages before publishing.
The HTML editor is super-easy. They do let you play with the raw HTML, which might cause problems down the road.
In general, I think it'll be a nice tool for people wanting a small little web site with a handful of pages. It doesn't do other things very well, such as maintaining navigation between pages or doing any sort of interactive pages. Still, Google tries hard to capture the 80% useage and I think they've done so with this little application.
Now here's the thing I really like about tartigrades. They are apparently the World's Toughest Animal. You can shoot them into space, take them to the deepest ocean depths and let them go, deprive them of air, water, and food for years and they don't care. Send them into the core of nuclear reactor. They'll be fine.
Slashdot Mirror
A new vaccine has been developed that targets the part of a flu virus that is conserved between mutations. Admittedly it might not be as effective as a targeted vacciene for a particular strain, but it would likely provide general protection against most flu viruses. So far it's been tested in ferrets (a good human model) and protects against H5N1 avian influenza.
I've been closely following Obsidian Entertainment's development of NWN2 and so far I'm quite happy with their approach. They've completely redone the graphics and toolset, kept the part of the game that worked (rules engine and scripting system), and are focusing on a single player game that so far sounds quite good.
In the last few days, they've released new screenshots (and here), as well as new movies. So far, it looks to be a very pretty game at least.
About ten years ago, I got my assorted MS certifications, taking 10 different tests at a cost of $1,000 total. I was new to my current job and found that while it didn't immediately raise my salary, it did get my foot in the door.
Within six months, I was our company's first SQL Server admin. A year after that, I was the sole developer on the newly formed Web Services team. Long-term, the certifications were a very wise investment.
Still, the bottom-line is that people were most impressed by my performance. Being able to study and pass ten different tests probably reflects on my sometimes insane degree of focus, rather than full comprehension. I barely passed my NT certification and only now fully understand the wacky security model.
Personally, I become overly chatty instead. This often leads to me speaking my mind more freely at meetings than I otherwise would. The little part of me that asks "should I really say that?" doesn't speed up as much as the bouncy part that says "What? That's a stupid idea! Let me share with the group."
Needless to say, coffee turns me into a "WTF-man" more than a "yes-man".
Actually, they're modding games, like Neverwinter Nights. The scripting language is very C/Java like, albeit simpler. There's a tremendous number of creative skills you can learn from the whole thing.
It's getting to the point where you want to keep your OS and core applications in Flash memory and things that are less important on hard drives. I just bought a 512 MB usb key for $25. Scaling up, you could get a multi-GB flash drive for a couple hundred bucks.
Some companies have multi-tiered storage solutions (e.g. fast SCSI RAID, cheap EIDE RAID, optical, etc.). Some of those ideas may make their way into desktop devices. You'd boot off of flash memory nearly instantly (it would cache your OS and core applications), then you'd play your MP3s, surf the web, or whatever on your relatively slow hard drive.
We're pretty unhappy about the Microsoft search built into IIS, which we've used for years. We got a Google test box last year and were reasonably happy with it, though the database-integration wasn't that great.
This seems to fix this. For example, if someone types in a name, we can create a custom web page that talks to the search, sending back the matches from our employee directory. It does seem to take a bit of work to build each link into your databases, but it's probably worthwhile for the big ones.
Behold the power of Rot 13! It's ten times more powerful than that weak Rot 3.
I think most innovation in the gaming world is a gradual evolution. For starters, you have to rate the amount of change the gaming audience is willing to take. Creating something wildly different may be difficult for mass audiences to pick up and understand. One of the reasons World of Warcraft is so successful is that it didn't dramatically innovate, but rather took all the gameplay elements that worked well in the MMORPG realm and polished them all to a beautiful shine.
If you wish to innovate, try to do so one element at a time. Introducing a morality system in Ultima IV was it's big new thing. Some innovations are stylistic, such as the post-apocalyptic worlds of Wasteland and Fallout.
Probably the hardest thing to judge is whether or not a new gameplay element is fun, innovation or otherwise. I'm working on a complicated system for Neverwinter Nights 2 that involves ship-to-ship combat, trading, and more. I'm so close to development that it's hard to say if it's fun or not. I'll probably have to wait for my QA folks to hopefully give me the honest truth.
So, best of luck to you. Hopefully you can keep your soul intact and your bills paid.
Telecommuting is overrated in a number of cases. I enjoy the ease of contact with my coworkers. Part of the draw of my current profession is that I work with funny, intelligent people.
Working at home would likely be filled with endless distractions, mostly in the form of a two and seven-year-old who want to play Princess or Legos, respectively. Rarely does my coworker dress up in pink and demand they be called Princess Dave.
Torrents are hard to beat in terms of convenience. They're typically HDTV, commercial free, and can be downloaded the next day. The catch, of course, is that they're inconvenient for non-technical people. They have to find a site that has them, click a link, wait for a download, and so on.
I think it's very smart for ABC to offer up a very easy way to watch shows via their website. The catch is that they'll likely be somewhat poor quality and you have commercials. People live with commercials now. I suspect it would be even easier at your computer, where you can ALT-Tab to something else for a few minutes. Still, it's enough of a hassle that torrents won't go away any time soon.
I wonder how local stations feel about this? Local stations get their ad revenue by selling local advertising. If people move to this and stop watching television, local stations may start disappearing. A similar issue was raised with NPR and podcasting just last week.
I host a phpbb2 bulletinboard to help coordinate a team of amateur game developers. It's not linked anywhere, nor is it installed in the default directory. Still, one of these spam bots managed to find it and within a week had 50+ registrations of people with bogus web addresses.
My solution was to implement the visual check that everyone's talking about. I still get some registrations, but much fewer. What's crazy is that by default, these users can't do hardly anything. Unfortunately creating spam is basically free on a per-bulletin board basis.
I'm tempted to post some of them, just so they can feel the mighty power of Slashdot, but my account would probably be banned for life as I bet many of these sites have malware all over 'em.
Camera tech is pretty well-known. Adding IR, UV, magnification, auto-adjusting for sunlight/night vision is all fairly trivial once you have the optic connection.
Imagine switching to sepia tone whenever you want that "wild west" feel.
The hard part, of course, is the resolution. Stimulating specific optic nerves is tricky, but fortunately your brain is good at dealing with odd input even if you don't get the connection quite right. It reminds me of the experiment where someone wore mirror glasses that flipped the world upside-down. After a week or so, everything seemed normal.
Why is this scored as redundant? I think this person's on to something. The key is to have advertising personalized to the person downloading the podcast. If you know their geographic location, you can identify an NPR affiliate and give specific ads.
True, everyone hates advertising, but you can always skip over it in a podcast.
At my organization, we recently passed some policies around the release of medical information. Essentially we're complying with existing laws in Washington, where we have hospitals, so mostly we're being consistent across our organization.
What it means is that if medical information somehow gets outside of our organization without our permission, we need to notify patients. This can get extremely expensive in cases where large amounts of records get lost or stolen. There's an exception in the law that lets us publish ads in major papers instead of sending out letters. I think the barrier is around a million dollars or so before we switch to ads.
Is this a good thing? My son's medical information was on some backup tapes stolen from the back of a car from a different healthcare organization. I personally don't care about it and it's unlikely the information gets used for malicious purposes. The cost for sending all the letters was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars most likely. Costs like that would bankrupt small organizations, though in today's healthcare market, it's becoming the price of doing business.
What'll probably happen is that big organizations will bear the cost of this in stride, while smaller organizations will have yet another risk that might shut them down at any moment.
It may be that while prayer doesn't do anything for the outcome of a patient, it and other rituals do wonders for everyone else. We go to weddings, funerals, baby showers, and celebrate things like Halloween and Easter. I'm not religious, but I very much appreciate those rituals in my life. It's something to look forward to and enjoy, moments of stability in an otherwise chaotic life.
Instead of praying, our family tends to get together to eat and talk. We may be plumper for it, but it's a much tastier experience.
Remember that there were different results when the patient was told they were being prayed for. Once that's done, it introduces an interesting twist:
They're praying for me? Oh, crap, I must be a goner.
Sure enough, those who were told they were being prayed for had more complications than those who weren't told.
On a more serious note, I think it's important to do this as a counter to the other "experiments" that showed that prayer helped people. Science is about reproducing results. If a scientist claims something is true, it's the obligation of others to prove them wrong or back up the findings.
- The quick travel option on the map.
- The ability to see your quest history and make a quest your active one.
- For your active quest, it generally shows you where to go next. While this may seem like "spoonfeeding" the player, in a huge world like this it saves tons of wandering around.
That's not to say there's no issues. I succumbed to weighing down the C key and leveling up my various magic skills by casting spells repeatedly. The game balance is also occasionally off, with encounters not always scaling to my current skill level. Early on, combat and enemies seemed easy. Now that I'm at level 22, each encounter takes a long time and is extremely challenging.Still, hats off to Bethesda to making an incredible game.
Excellent point. If I have 100 children, but only one survives, I'm not particularly "fit" evolutionarily.
Evolution is a long term thing. It may be that big brains and reproductive restraint are counterproductive in the long-run. It could also be that slow and steady wins the race. Me, I've got my two kids and plan on investing huge amounts of time in making them prepared for the world.
- The use of AJAX is well done. Pages save by themselves, you can drag and align images, and there's a nifty file upload utility.
- There's simple versioning, allowing work on pages before publishing.
- The HTML editor is super-easy. They do let you play with the raw HTML, which might cause problems down the road.
In general, I think it'll be a nice tool for people wanting a small little web site with a handful of pages. It doesn't do other things very well, such as maintaining navigation between pages or doing any sort of interactive pages. Still, Google tries hard to capture the 80% useage and I think they've done so with this little application.Going to the moon and back probably "slows down" time for an astronaut by a tiny fraction of a second.
Getting hit by a lot of hard radiation causes all sorts of cellular problems, not just cataracts.
How are the two connected again?
The CPU is cheap, but you'll be paying an arm and a leg for "extras" like disk storage and memory.
Want a printout of your results? That's $100 per page . . .