We've been quite happy with our Google Search Applance.
The two exceptions are the way it handles secured documents (on our mostly-Windows network, that meant authenticating twice or doing complicated Kerberos stuff), and hardware (we've had two boxes fail with drive issues in the last year).
Still, when it comes to search results and speed, it's been very good. I'm also a fan of Google Desktop, but that's a completely different story and more difficult to centrally manage.
It's ironic you should say that. We had two drives fail our our last GSA. After the first red light, they told us to wait. A couple days later we got our second and lost our search ability for a few days (falling back to good ol' Microsoft Index Server).
A few days ago, we started getting weird search results and you couldn't get to the admin console. After talking to the folks in operations, it turns out we had an endless list of file errors scrolling away on the screen. Now Google tech support is poking around while we wait for something to happen. My guess is that we have a controller failure or something similar.
In any case, I wondered if the "We don't to hardware" comment was an honest self-assessment of their ability to put together a stable piece of equipment.
The other big issue is scarring. Nerves have a really hard time growing through scar tissue. What I was hoping to see in this article is how long the injuries were left untreated. If stem cells were cultivated before the injury and injected before scarring can occur, it's not going to be that helpful in real-life situations.
My favorite Alien-like feeder is the Dragonfly larvae:
Dragonfly larvae have a remarkable tool at their disposal when hunting prey: their lower lip is modified into a long, hinged jaw terminating in two sharp, hook-like mandibles. This is known as the "mask". When a prey is in sight, the mask is thrust forward and the prey instantly impaled on the hooks, then drawn back to the mouth and eaten. There's also a good video of the jaw in action.
Version 3 is the traditional version to buy with Microsoft products. The first release is a mess, the second one is a guess at improvements (as they typically haven't received good feedback from customers by then), but the third one is typically solid and well-received.
That rule of thumb has worked well with Windows 3.0, Word 3.0, SQL 7 (which was actually the third version after Microsoft bought Sybase), and so on. Service packs are a little trickier. SP2 could be considered the third "release" of an OS. With XP, it wasn't really until SP2 that it seemed secure and stable enough.
I think your excuse was just fine, but off by a digit.
I had dreams about Bioshock the night after playing, not scary precisely, but full of a sense of dread and loss. Dreams aren't entirely unusual (I dreamed about yellow dragons after playing lots of Adventure as a kid). Still, it's rare enough that it means I was brought into the world of Bioshock more fully than others in recent memory.
The unique aspect of Bioshock is that the fear of death has been removed. Respawning is fairly painless and I'm armed with a variety of tricks against even the toughest enemies. What's left is a sense of horror at what humanity is capable of, of hubris and atrocities committed for a supposedly just cause. That's a deeper dread, perhaps, than demons leaping out of closets, but just as effective.
In my opinion, 2K Games has addressed the issues that have come up in a very rapid and appropriate way. When people started running into problems with the 2 active PC install issue, they bumped it up to 5, even though this technically lets 5 people pool their dollars to buy a single game.
The other thing to note is that the DRM is dictated by the publisher, not so much the developer (though in this case they became the same during Bioshock's development). Personally I haven't had any problems with it at all.
None of this retracts from the fact that Bioshock is one of the best games ever made. It has gorgeous art direction, intriguing morality, wonderfully diverse gameplay, and a sense of tension I haven't seen for ages. I spent most of Sunday playing the game and dreamt about it all night. That's something I haven't done with a game in a very long time.
There's an agreement between the president and the Senate Leader Reid to no longer due this. If the President breaks that agreement, it'll upset folks, plus the Senate can be kept perpetually in session by having a senator come in every few days throughout the normal recess. It's not legally binding, of course, but if the President wants to accomplish anything in the next year, I suspect he'll keep his word.
Tom Lawry, the CEO of Verus, is someone I've known for over ten years. He used to work for our healthcare organization and was one of the first people to "get it" over the Internet. He pushed for the formation of our web services team and sold the organization on making an Intranet when the whole thing was seen as a big fad.
Afterwards he went on to form his own company, but still hung around as a consultant. He wasn't particularly technical, but was very good at navigating through the political issues that often come up with organizational change. For example, switching from paper to online job applications was fairly exciting, if only getting our various regions to agree on a single form.
In later years, we had our disagreements with Tom. I wasn't too happy on how he assisted with our Internet site (his organization was starting to get into the web design business). As a person, he was always kind and thoughtful, despite his various business endeavors. He'd talk about his kid, how expensive going out to a movie in Seattle was getting, or tell stories about the Sisters from his time working at our organization (we're a Catholic healthcare organization).
We were actually just starting to sign up to use his latest product (a clinic billing system). He was partnering with our medical record system vendor and it seemed reasonably good. Fortunately we didn't have any security breaches related to this incident, but it seems to have been blind luck to some degree.
I think it's impossible for any CEO, even if they have a technical background, to be aware of every technical issue within their organization. In any complex endeavor, there's just too much going on. At this point, it seems like Tom has suffered quite a bit already. He's lost the business he's spent a decade growing. Prosecutors are looking into criminal charges. I don't know how he'll recover professionally. I'm sure he'll spend the rest of his life second-guessing what he should have done better. Hired different people? Brought in an outside auditor?
For me, it was a reminder that everything can just disappear in a flash. Cherish what you've got.
HPV and other naturally occurring viruses cause cancer quite nicely. Of course, if you want a viral weapon, why not use Ebola which you don't have to wait years to see an effect? I realize mad scientists come in all sorts of colors and flavors, but killing people with cancer seems awfully slow (unless your country has a cure for cancer and others don't).
I'm not sure what business you're in, but whenever you start storing customer database on laptops, you've got a potential security risk. I work in Healthcare and whenever a laptop or tape with hundreds of thousands of patient names gets stolen, bad things happen. The hospital involved typically has to send out mailings to everyone potentially impacted, which can get extremely expensive and damage their reputation.
We had a case of a vendor that ended up making other customer data (fortunately not ours) available on the Internet to the point where Google was indexing patient billing records. It was sad in a way, the owner had spent a decade building up his business and overnight the company vanished.
Though this isn't the answer to your question, please be cautious with the data on your laptop. Even if you have no medical customers, odds are you work with data that has privacy implications. Treat it with care.
Remember this is only a study of mitochondrial DNA, not the DNA for the nucleus. I think it's more likely that geographic barriers have lowered, causing a reduction in diversity over time. It may also be that certain mitochondrial variations were better adapted for a thousand years ago, while they don't hold up so well in the modern world. It could be that the Black Death, for example, ended up destroying populations with certain variations or simply that the rare variations vanished.
From this article:
Now, Leonhardt and Philbin have calculated that the Casimir force between two conducting plates can turn from being attractive to repulsive if a "perfect" lens is sandwiched between them. A perfect lens can focus an image with a resolution that is not restricted by the wavelength of light. Such a lens could be made from a metamaterial made of artificial structures that are engineered to have negative index of refraction -- which means that the metamaterial bends light in the opposite direction to an ordinary material.
According to the researchers, the negative-index metamaterial is able to modify the zero-point oscillations in the gap between the surfaces, reversing the direction of the Casimir force. Indeed, the researchers believe that this repulsive force is strong enough to levitate an aluminium mirror that is 500nm thick, causing it to hover above a perfect lens placed over a conducting plate. Since the Casimir force acts on the length scale of nanomachines, manipulating it could be important for future applications of nanotechnology. To summarize, nothing has been built yet. It's possible that it could be built, though you'd have to make a "perfect" lens in the tiny space between the two plates. Unfortunately, every "perfect" lens I've heard of tends to be wavelength-specific and relatively large (compared to the gap the Casimir effect requires). It may be that these are just engineering hurdles, but it may also be physically impossible to pull off.
We recently had a catastrophic failure of our data center. We had a planned generator test that went horribly wrong. Unfortunately we'd added so many computers that our battery backups only had 10 or 15 minutes of power. Unfortunately the computer operator missed something and everything went down hard. Except for one computer system.
The Tandem that houses our main clinical application had this big array of D batteries. We'd always made fun of the administrators because of it, but miraculously it stayed up when everyone else went down. I now bow down before their primitive greatness.
This is unfortunately a common issue with people. When two events happen at about the same time, people assume they're somehow connected. The autism and vaccine link, for example, is one of those things where they get their shots and soon afterwards, they notice their child is acting strangely. Then there's the old "this coincidence must be a sign of the divine" theory.
We run into this all the time when doing server administration. For example, one of our developers found that web pages were slower on our new virtual servers. The obvious thought is that virtualization=slow. It turns out that compression hadn't been turned on for those servers. Since he was going over a slow VPN connection, it made a fairly significant difference. Once switched on, they worked about the same as real servers.
The only thing I can think of needing a desktop for is to play games. Video cards for laptops are usually under powered, mostly because of heat, space, and power issues of "real" cards.
For most everything else, my two year-old $400 Dell laptop works fine. It plays movies, browses the web, and runs productivity applications without a problem.
I remember the issues the Vampire: Bloodlines folks had with the HL2 engine. The problem is that the HL2 folks kept making engine changes while Troika worked on theirs. Integrating updates was a big deal. When Obsidian made Neverwinter Nights 2, they had Bioware's code base, but there were some broken functions even though the first NWN had been out for a long time.
Like you say, the U3 engine likely went through a lot of changes and neither they nor the licensee understood how much work is involved in using a piece of software that's still being developed.
Actually, this demonstrates a key difference in the educational philosophies of China and many South American countries. In South America, the focus was on the best and the brightest. In China, the focus was on getting everyone the equivalent of a high school education.
Now, obviously there's lots of other factors, but note that China has a huge industrial base now. Basically anyone can work in a factory or business doing ordinary tasks. In South America, the poor continue to be poor and the well educated move to other countries.
I'd like to think there's significant value in teaching nearly everyone to read and write well, basic math skills, and the ability to follow directions. Remember that these immigrant children are going to end up marrying your daughters, working in your office, and taking care of you in your old age. You get a pretty good return on investment spending a few thousand dollars in basic education per kid. Don't let prejudice derail common sense.
You could possibly use airbags if you moved the big thing down in pieces. The hardest aspect is that you'd want everything to land within a few miles of each other, especially important things like air and people.
I think they got sick of me saying "You realize you can never, ever do this, right?"
They're used to disclaimers at this point. It began with the plasma in the microwave video, I believe. Both my wife and I have master's degrees in science, so my kids are pretty much doomed to that sort of odd curiosity about things. My four year-old is quite good at scientifically scooping out the guts of slugs and snails, for example.
My kids and I spent nearly an hour looking at all of these last night. Sam kept exclaiming "That's totally awesome!" Even four year-old Emma enjoyed the blending of the Barbies.
I assume the whole thing is a viral marketing deal for the brand of blender, but it's so beautifully done. My wife and I decided that it was pretty obviously marketing towards men. Women might enjoy chopping up a rake or two, but men's eyes grow wide and they get a funny grin whenever you start tossing in glow sticks, marbles, iPhones, and other fun things.
The other thing of note is that he probably should have been wearing a respirator for some of these tricks. The marbles in particular were very nasty. Breathing in small amounts of glass smoke is incredibly bad for your lungs. That's why they banned asbestos, after all.
Slashdot Mirror
We've been quite happy with our Google Search Applance.
The two exceptions are the way it handles secured documents (on our mostly-Windows network, that meant authenticating twice or doing complicated Kerberos stuff), and hardware (we've had two boxes fail with drive issues in the last year).
Still, when it comes to search results and speed, it's been very good. I'm also a fan of Google Desktop, but that's a completely different story and more difficult to centrally manage.
It's ironic you should say that. We had two drives fail our our last GSA. After the first red light, they told us to wait. A couple days later we got our second and lost our search ability for a few days (falling back to good ol' Microsoft Index Server).
A few days ago, we started getting weird search results and you couldn't get to the admin console. After talking to the folks in operations, it turns out we had an endless list of file errors scrolling away on the screen. Now Google tech support is poking around while we wait for something to happen. My guess is that we have a controller failure or something similar.
In any case, I wondered if the "We don't to hardware" comment was an honest self-assessment of their ability to put together a stable piece of equipment.
The other big issue is scarring. Nerves have a really hard time growing through scar tissue. What I was hoping to see in this article is how long the injuries were left untreated. If stem cells were cultivated before the injury and injected before scarring can occur, it's not going to be that helpful in real-life situations.
Version 3 is the traditional version to buy with Microsoft products. The first release is a mess, the second one is a guess at improvements (as they typically haven't received good feedback from customers by then), but the third one is typically solid and well-received.
That rule of thumb has worked well with Windows 3.0, Word 3.0, SQL 7 (which was actually the third version after Microsoft bought Sybase), and so on. Service packs are a little trickier. SP2 could be considered the third "release" of an OS. With XP, it wasn't really until SP2 that it seemed secure and stable enough.
I think your excuse was just fine, but off by a digit.
I had dreams about Bioshock the night after playing, not scary precisely, but full of a sense of dread and loss. Dreams aren't entirely unusual (I dreamed about yellow dragons after playing lots of Adventure as a kid). Still, it's rare enough that it means I was brought into the world of Bioshock more fully than others in recent memory.
The unique aspect of Bioshock is that the fear of death has been removed. Respawning is fairly painless and I'm armed with a variety of tricks against even the toughest enemies. What's left is a sense of horror at what humanity is capable of, of hubris and atrocities committed for a supposedly just cause. That's a deeper dread, perhaps, than demons leaping out of closets, but just as effective.
In my opinion, 2K Games has addressed the issues that have come up in a very rapid and appropriate way. When people started running into problems with the 2 active PC install issue, they bumped it up to 5, even though this technically lets 5 people pool their dollars to buy a single game.
The other thing to note is that the DRM is dictated by the publisher, not so much the developer (though in this case they became the same during Bioshock's development). Personally I haven't had any problems with it at all.
None of this retracts from the fact that Bioshock is one of the best games ever made. It has gorgeous art direction, intriguing morality, wonderfully diverse gameplay, and a sense of tension I haven't seen for ages. I spent most of Sunday playing the game and dreamt about it all night. That's something I haven't done with a game in a very long time.
There's an agreement between the president and the Senate Leader Reid to no longer due this. If the President breaks that agreement, it'll upset folks, plus the Senate can be kept perpetually in session by having a senator come in every few days throughout the normal recess. It's not legally binding, of course, but if the President wants to accomplish anything in the next year, I suspect he'll keep his word.
As long as you remember that there is a tide.
Tom Lawry, the CEO of Verus, is someone I've known for over ten years. He used to work for our healthcare organization and was one of the first people to "get it" over the Internet. He pushed for the formation of our web services team and sold the organization on making an Intranet when the whole thing was seen as a big fad.
Afterwards he went on to form his own company, but still hung around as a consultant. He wasn't particularly technical, but was very good at navigating through the political issues that often come up with organizational change. For example, switching from paper to online job applications was fairly exciting, if only getting our various regions to agree on a single form.
In later years, we had our disagreements with Tom. I wasn't too happy on how he assisted with our Internet site (his organization was starting to get into the web design business). As a person, he was always kind and thoughtful, despite his various business endeavors. He'd talk about his kid, how expensive going out to a movie in Seattle was getting, or tell stories about the Sisters from his time working at our organization (we're a Catholic healthcare organization).
We were actually just starting to sign up to use his latest product (a clinic billing system). He was partnering with our medical record system vendor and it seemed reasonably good. Fortunately we didn't have any security breaches related to this incident, but it seems to have been blind luck to some degree.
I think it's impossible for any CEO, even if they have a technical background, to be aware of every technical issue within their organization. In any complex endeavor, there's just too much going on. At this point, it seems like Tom has suffered quite a bit already. He's lost the business he's spent a decade growing. Prosecutors are looking into criminal charges. I don't know how he'll recover professionally. I'm sure he'll spend the rest of his life second-guessing what he should have done better. Hired different people? Brought in an outside auditor?
For me, it was a reminder that everything can just disappear in a flash. Cherish what you've got.
HPV and other naturally occurring viruses cause cancer quite nicely. Of course, if you want a viral weapon, why not use Ebola which you don't have to wait years to see an effect? I realize mad scientists come in all sorts of colors and flavors, but killing people with cancer seems awfully slow (unless your country has a cure for cancer and others don't).
I'm not sure what business you're in, but whenever you start storing customer database on laptops, you've got a potential security risk. I work in Healthcare and whenever a laptop or tape with hundreds of thousands of patient names gets stolen, bad things happen. The hospital involved typically has to send out mailings to everyone potentially impacted, which can get extremely expensive and damage their reputation.
We had a case of a vendor that ended up making other customer data (fortunately not ours) available on the Internet to the point where Google was indexing patient billing records. It was sad in a way, the owner had spent a decade building up his business and overnight the company vanished.
Though this isn't the answer to your question, please be cautious with the data on your laptop. Even if you have no medical customers, odds are you work with data that has privacy implications. Treat it with care.
No more "in Soviet Russia" jokes. They're not funny.
Well, except maybe "I, for one, welcome our new asteroid stealing overlords from Soviet Russia."
Remember this is only a study of mitochondrial DNA, not the DNA for the nucleus. I think it's more likely that geographic barriers have lowered, causing a reduction in diversity over time. It may also be that certain mitochondrial variations were better adapted for a thousand years ago, while they don't hold up so well in the modern world. It could be that the Black Death, for example, ended up destroying populations with certain variations or simply that the rare variations vanished.
Now, Leonhardt and Philbin have calculated that the Casimir force between two conducting plates can turn from being attractive to repulsive if a "perfect" lens is sandwiched between them. A perfect lens can focus an image with a resolution that is not restricted by the wavelength of light. Such a lens could be made from a metamaterial made of artificial structures that are engineered to have negative index of refraction -- which means that the metamaterial bends light in the opposite direction to an ordinary material.
According to the researchers, the negative-index metamaterial is able to modify the zero-point oscillations in the gap between the surfaces, reversing the direction of the Casimir force. Indeed, the researchers believe that this repulsive force is strong enough to levitate an aluminium mirror that is 500nm thick, causing it to hover above a perfect lens placed over a conducting plate. Since the Casimir force acts on the length scale of nanomachines, manipulating it could be important for future applications of nanotechnology. To summarize, nothing has been built yet. It's possible that it could be built, though you'd have to make a "perfect" lens in the tiny space between the two plates. Unfortunately, every "perfect" lens I've heard of tends to be wavelength-specific and relatively large (compared to the gap the Casimir effect requires). It may be that these are just engineering hurdles, but it may also be physically impossible to pull off.
Actually, it's based on Them!, but they couldn't get the license. It's sort of a spiritual successor, with giant beetles instead of giant ants.
We recently had a catastrophic failure of our data center. We had a planned generator test that went horribly wrong. Unfortunately we'd added so many computers that our battery backups only had 10 or 15 minutes of power. Unfortunately the computer operator missed something and everything went down hard. Except for one computer system.
The Tandem that houses our main clinical application had this big array of D batteries. We'd always made fun of the administrators because of it, but miraculously it stayed up when everyone else went down. I now bow down before their primitive greatness.
This is unfortunately a common issue with people. When two events happen at about the same time, people assume they're somehow connected. The autism and vaccine link, for example, is one of those things where they get their shots and soon afterwards, they notice their child is acting strangely. Then there's the old "this coincidence must be a sign of the divine" theory.
We run into this all the time when doing server administration. For example, one of our developers found that web pages were slower on our new virtual servers. The obvious thought is that virtualization=slow. It turns out that compression hadn't been turned on for those servers. Since he was going over a slow VPN connection, it made a fairly significant difference. Once switched on, they worked about the same as real servers.
The only thing I can think of needing a desktop for is to play games. Video cards for laptops are usually under powered, mostly because of heat, space, and power issues of "real" cards.
For most everything else, my two year-old $400 Dell laptop works fine. It plays movies, browses the web, and runs productivity applications without a problem.
I remember the issues the Vampire: Bloodlines folks had with the HL2 engine. The problem is that the HL2 folks kept making engine changes while Troika worked on theirs. Integrating updates was a big deal. When Obsidian made Neverwinter Nights 2, they had Bioware's code base, but there were some broken functions even though the first NWN had been out for a long time.
Like you say, the U3 engine likely went through a lot of changes and neither they nor the licensee understood how much work is involved in using a piece of software that's still being developed.
Actually, this demonstrates a key difference in the educational philosophies of China and many South American countries. In South America, the focus was on the best and the brightest. In China, the focus was on getting everyone the equivalent of a high school education.
Now, obviously there's lots of other factors, but note that China has a huge industrial base now. Basically anyone can work in a factory or business doing ordinary tasks. In South America, the poor continue to be poor and the well educated move to other countries.
I'd like to think there's significant value in teaching nearly everyone to read and write well, basic math skills, and the ability to follow directions. Remember that these immigrant children are going to end up marrying your daughters, working in your office, and taking care of you in your old age. You get a pretty good return on investment spending a few thousand dollars in basic education per kid. Don't let prejudice derail common sense.
You could possibly use airbags if you moved the big thing down in pieces. The hardest aspect is that you'd want everything to land within a few miles of each other, especially important things like air and people.
- Malaria and other diseases
- heatwave deaths
- water quality
It sure would have been helpful to have talked about them over the last seven years.I think they got sick of me saying "You realize you can never, ever do this, right?"
They're used to disclaimers at this point. It began with the plasma in the microwave video, I believe. Both my wife and I have master's degrees in science, so my kids are pretty much doomed to that sort of odd curiosity about things. My four year-old is quite good at scientifically scooping out the guts of slugs and snails, for example.
My kids and I spent nearly an hour looking at all of these last night. Sam kept exclaiming "That's totally awesome!" Even four year-old Emma enjoyed the blending of the Barbies.
I assume the whole thing is a viral marketing deal for the brand of blender, but it's so beautifully done. My wife and I decided that it was pretty obviously marketing towards men. Women might enjoy chopping up a rake or two, but men's eyes grow wide and they get a funny grin whenever you start tossing in glow sticks, marbles, iPhones, and other fun things.
The other thing of note is that he probably should have been wearing a respirator for some of these tricks. The marbles in particular were very nasty. Breathing in small amounts of glass smoke is incredibly bad for your lungs. That's why they banned asbestos, after all.