Well, you can't autoclave it. They usually only do this with certain metals, since they can withstand the heat involved.
You could theoretically dip it in a biocide of some sort (they use stuff tougher than alcohol in operating rooms and on used surgical tools) but there's a "nook & cranny" problem. When designing non-metal surgical tools, you have to make sure you don't make any tiny cracks, holes, or grooves where stuff can cling and avoid the biocide. The last cell phone I saw had a lot of nooks and crannies. You'd possibly need to redesign one to be completely sealed, which is getting more feasible because of wireless battery charging technologies and wireless connectivity technologies.
Another alternative is that you could stick it in a sterile container and use it wirelessly, but then your wireless headset would still need to be sterilizable.
I'm not sure this will happen until they use their closed system and it leaks out that previously unknown candidate #1$!I0^%^@^@ was elected due to buffer overrun.
is lack of certain software. I'm a proud user of WineX, but it doesn't let me run everything, so I still need to keep a Windows machine around for Quicken, certain games, etc. and there are often no viable native-Linux alternatives.
That doesn't stop me from having my desktop be 100% Linux, though. I use my fiancee's desktop for Quicken, and I just wait for native or WineX-compatible games to come out.
Just replace the hard drives. SCO is saying they require a per-CPU license. If the distribution is just sitting on a disk, there's no CPU, therefore you pay the 0-CPU fee of $0.
Then hook them back up again when SCO goes the way of the dodo.
If I sent letters to people who were under no obligation to me and told them that they had to pay me $5 or suffer the wrath of my lawyers, I'd be put away for mail fraud, clear and simple. SCO is doing similar things on a larger scale. Why aren't they all in jail?
I remember the first time I heard someone talking about pacemakers and how the batteries in them wear out. I asked the obvious question, "How do they replace them?"
It involves surgery. YIKES!
The AbioCor heart uses/used rechargeable batteries. I wonder why they don't do that for pacemakers.
The technology doesn't do that, since it doesn't do advanced semantic analysis on the texts. And it's only meant to work on texts that were translated from one language to another. Feeding it one set of text in legalese and another set that explains the legalese doesn't fit the theory. Even if it did, you'd need millions of such texts before you'd begin to get anything usable.
Machine Translation as a whole does theoretically allow what you suggest, but example-based technologies don't understand the texts they translate so they can't re-express the same concepts in different ways. Knowledge-based systems, however, could do this. They don't actually understand the texts either, but many of them do use abstract meaning representations (or Interlinguas) to encode what a sentence or phrase means. You can make any kind of text generator you want to go from that meaning back to text. This includes foreign languages, the same language as the original, or 1980s Valley Girl speech.
My wife is a professional translator and has absolutely no respect for machine translatations.
Most of them suck, but I worked on a system that was actually quite good. It was designed for technical documentation in the heavy equipment domain, and because of this limited use, we were able to constrain the input grammar and vocabulary, which made it easier to make very good translations.
We worked with some of the best human translators around to make it as accurate and natural-sounding as possible, but we made the mistake of allowing the human translators at our customer's company to evaluate the system. They felt threatened by it and decided they didn't like it, even when they had to criticize sentences the system generated which were word-for-word what they asked us to make the system do.
They've had the same technology at CMU's LTI for years now, called EBMT. This officially stands for Example-Based Machine Translation, but those of us who worked with it called it Extremely Bad Machine Translation because it took millions of example sentences before it started to not suck, and even then it required manual tweaking and the addition of primitive grammar rules.
So yeah, this method learns fast, but it generally learns to a useless level for anything other than a rough assessment of some of the phrases that were in the original text.
If someone made such a device in a neat $50 box, it could crush the entire RFID movement.
I mean, if you were using RFID tags to get marketing data, would you rather have everyone's info, or only the info of people who can't afford a single $50 purchase?
"McBride, who is fluent in Japanese, will visit with several founding members to show them code samples in which the Linux open-source operating system allegedly violates SCO's Unix patents, said an SCO spokesman."
Something tells me that he won't need to use his Japanese much to understand their response. Laughter transcends language, after all.
Sounds to me like what you have in mind will do some of their cutbacks for them, starting with you... Just search for a better job and leave. If there are no better jobs, re-evaluate your strategy.
Now, why in the world would they suddenly throw away all the code, tools, and experience they have on their current platform to grab some tiny extra percentage by learning, developing for, and testing on a new platform?
They wouldn't need to. That's the point. Read up on Transgaming. Their goal is ultimately to get wine working so well that it becomes a perfect Windows environment for all applications, not just games.
But let's back up a bit. If you're not Microsoft, and you develop software for Windows, and you hear of a product that emulates 80% of the things Windows does, mightn't you want to try to code your application to hit that 80% functionality to gain an additional N million potential customers? After all, if you can make it work in what's basically a subset of Windows, shouldn't it work in Windows?
Yes, I would prefer Linux-native software over non-native software, but I can't fathom how it could be bad to have a 100%-compatible Windows environment.
It's the same connection/bandwidth. 150kbs down on one box is the same as 150 split to 75kbs down on 2 computers.
There's a subtle distinction, though. Your network usage on a single computer tends to go in bursts, unless you're constantly downloading stuff in the background. Their pricing model assumes you won't be using 100% of your bandwidth 100% of the time.
By adding another computer, they're probably concerned that another user will be overlaying their own burst pattern of usage on top of yours, bringing the total usage of the line closer to that dreaded 100% bandwidth 100% of the time.
So I think this move is for ISPs to protect themselves against the problems they'd have if people actually used the bandwidth they're being sold.
Other industries have these limitations, too. How often do you use your (cell / landline) phone? You ever wonder what would happen if everyone tried to use their phone at the same time? Telephone network outages happen a lot during holidays and major news events. Too many people on the phone network, and it can't handle it. That's the sort of thing that would eventually happen if people used all of the bandwidth that they pay for.
Of course, they should invest more in infrastructure and ensure that doesn't happen, but that costs more.
Eventually, this might lead to a better, standalone implementation of that "invisibile raincoat" thing that's been hyped over the last couple of months.
The TOS for the Express Network basically says that you are not allowed to use Express Network. For anything.
Specifically, they prohibit "machine-to-machine" connections, which, as far as I can tell, limits you from connecting your Express Network enabled computer to any other computer.
Oddly, they say you can use it to read email and surf the web, which I have a hard time reconciling with the whole part about how I'm not allowed to actually connect to the mail servers and web servers.
I'm already afraid of the changes I'm seeing in our government's treatment of us. If it gets too bad, citizens do have the right to revolt, and thanks to our gun laws, we may have the means to do it.
Of course if the Republicans announce that they're suddenly all in favor of gun control, I'm moving to Canada immediately.
All we need is commodity blimp technology. If you park a radio-opaque blimp between a satellite dish and its satellites (feasibility based on size of dish and closeness of blimp to dish), you could block a hell of a lot of communications, couldn't you?
I mean, all I need is to get static on all my DirecTV channels and walk outside to find a Comcast blimp hovering evilly by my dish. Then I'd have to get one and park it above the local Comcast downlink dish.
And you know who'd ultimately win? The blimp makers, that's right.
Remember the bell curve and where you are on it. That's why most people will not know what the hell you're talking about, and that's why you should cherish the people who do.
Great idea if they let you:) Also keep in mind the machine may work with Linux but not with the Knoppix boot CD, so don't give up if that doesn't help. Over the weekend I used Knoppix in two machines that I know to be Linux-compatible, yet each machine had problems (one wouldn't even boot Knoppix).
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Well, you can't autoclave it. They usually only do this with certain metals, since they can withstand the heat involved.
You could theoretically dip it in a biocide of some sort (they use stuff tougher than alcohol in operating rooms and on used surgical tools) but there's a "nook & cranny" problem. When designing non-metal surgical tools, you have to make sure you don't make any tiny cracks, holes, or grooves where stuff can cling and avoid the biocide. The last cell phone I saw had a lot of nooks and crannies. You'd possibly need to redesign one to be completely sealed, which is getting more feasible because of wireless battery charging technologies and wireless connectivity technologies.
Another alternative is that you could stick it in a sterile container and use it wirelessly, but then your wireless headset would still need to be sterilizable.
when Linus gets elected President?
I'm not sure this will happen until they use their closed system and it leaks out that previously unknown candidate #1$!I0^%^@^@ was elected due to buffer overrun.
is lack of certain software. I'm a proud user of WineX, but it doesn't let me run everything, so I still need to keep a Windows machine around for Quicken, certain games, etc. and there are often no viable native-Linux alternatives.
That doesn't stop me from having my desktop be 100% Linux, though. I use my fiancee's desktop for Quicken, and I just wait for native or WineX-compatible games to come out.
Just replace the hard drives. SCO is saying they require a per-CPU license. If the distribution is just sitting on a disk, there's no CPU, therefore you pay the 0-CPU fee of $0.
Then hook them back up again when SCO goes the way of the dodo.
If I sent letters to people who were under no obligation to me and told them that they had to pay me $5 or suffer the wrath of my lawyers, I'd be put away for mail fraud, clear and simple. SCO is doing similar things on a larger scale. Why aren't they all in jail?
I remember the first time I heard someone talking about pacemakers and how the batteries in them wear out. I asked the obvious question, "How do they replace them?"
It involves surgery. YIKES!
The AbioCor heart uses/used rechargeable batteries. I wonder why they don't do that for pacemakers.
The technology doesn't do that, since it doesn't do advanced semantic analysis on the texts. And it's only meant to work on texts that were translated from one language to another. Feeding it one set of text in legalese and another set that explains the legalese doesn't fit the theory. Even if it did, you'd need millions of such texts before you'd begin to get anything usable.
Machine Translation as a whole does theoretically allow what you suggest, but example-based technologies don't understand the texts they translate so they can't re-express the same concepts in different ways. Knowledge-based systems, however, could do this. They don't actually understand the texts either, but many of them do use abstract meaning representations (or Interlinguas) to encode what a sentence or phrase means. You can make any kind of text generator you want to go from that meaning back to text. This includes foreign languages, the same language as the original, or 1980s Valley Girl speech.
My wife is a professional translator and has absolutely no respect for machine translatations.
Most of them suck, but I worked on a system that was actually quite good. It was designed for technical documentation in the heavy equipment domain, and because of this limited use, we were able to constrain the input grammar and vocabulary, which made it easier to make very good translations.
We worked with some of the best human translators around to make it as accurate and natural-sounding as possible, but we made the mistake of allowing the human translators at our customer's company to evaluate the system. They felt threatened by it and decided they didn't like it, even when they had to criticize sentences the system generated which were word-for-word what they asked us to make the system do.
They've had the same technology at CMU's LTI for years now, called EBMT. This officially stands for Example-Based Machine Translation, but those of us who worked with it called it Extremely Bad Machine Translation because it took millions of example sentences before it started to not suck, and even then it required manual tweaking and the addition of primitive grammar rules.
So yeah, this method learns fast, but it generally learns to a useless level for anything other than a rough assessment of some of the phrases that were in the original text.
If someone made such a device in a neat $50 box, it could crush the entire RFID movement.
I mean, if you were using RFID tags to get marketing data, would you rather have everyone's info, or only the info of people who can't afford a single $50 purchase?
"McBride, who is fluent in Japanese, will visit with several founding members to show them code samples in which the Linux open-source operating system allegedly violates SCO's Unix patents, said an SCO spokesman."
Something tells me that he won't need to use his Japanese much to understand their response. Laughter transcends language, after all.
Since we have a bunch of AIX boxes, I guess now would be a good time to switch to Linux and avoid all this lawsuit stuff. Oh, wait...
Sounds to me like what you have in mind will do some of their cutbacks for them, starting with you... Just search for a better job and leave. If there are no better jobs, re-evaluate your strategy.
Now, why in the world would they suddenly throw away all the code, tools, and experience they have on their current platform to grab some tiny extra percentage by learning, developing for, and testing on a new platform?
They wouldn't need to. That's the point. Read up on Transgaming. Their goal is ultimately to get wine working so well that it becomes a perfect Windows environment for all applications, not just games.
But let's back up a bit. If you're not Microsoft, and you develop software for Windows, and you hear of a product that emulates 80% of the things Windows does, mightn't you want to try to code your application to hit that 80% functionality to gain an additional N million potential customers? After all, if you can make it work in what's basically a subset of Windows, shouldn't it work in Windows?
Yes, I would prefer Linux-native software over non-native software, but I can't fathom how it could be bad to have a 100%-compatible Windows environment.
It's the same connection/bandwidth. 150kbs down on one box is the same as 150 split to 75kbs down on 2 computers.
There's a subtle distinction, though. Your network usage on a single computer tends to go in bursts, unless you're constantly downloading stuff in the background. Their pricing model assumes you won't be using 100% of your bandwidth 100% of the time.
By adding another computer, they're probably concerned that another user will be overlaying their own burst pattern of usage on top of yours, bringing the total usage of the line closer to that dreaded 100% bandwidth 100% of the time.
So I think this move is for ISPs to protect themselves against the problems they'd have if people actually used the bandwidth they're being sold.
Other industries have these limitations, too. How often do you use your (cell / landline) phone? You ever wonder what would happen if everyone tried to use their phone at the same time? Telephone network outages happen a lot during holidays and major news events. Too many people on the phone network, and it can't handle it. That's the sort of thing that would eventually happen if people used all of the bandwidth that they pay for.
Of course, they should invest more in infrastructure and ensure that doesn't happen, but that costs more.
Eventually, this might lead to a better, standalone implementation of that "invisibile raincoat" thing that's been hyped over the last couple of months.
The TOS for the Express Network basically says that you are not allowed to use Express Network. For anything.
Specifically, they prohibit "machine-to-machine" connections, which, as far as I can tell, limits you from connecting your Express Network enabled computer to any other computer.
Oddly, they say you can use it to read email and surf the web, which I have a hard time reconciling with the whole part about how I'm not allowed to actually connect to the mail servers and web servers.
He's suing to keep his contact info private, but his contact info is clearly not private anymore.
Might as well try to unburn a match.
Of course if the Republicans announce that they're suddenly all in favor of gun control, I'm moving to Canada immediately.
It's only a matter of time before we see Alton Brown tell his viewers how to modify his grandmother's turkey soup recipe to make fuel oil.
All we need is commodity blimp technology. If you park a radio-opaque blimp between a satellite dish and its satellites (feasibility based on size of dish and closeness of blimp to dish), you could block a hell of a lot of communications, couldn't you?
I mean, all I need is to get static on all my DirecTV channels and walk outside to find a Comcast blimp hovering evilly by my dish. Then I'd have to get one and park it above the local Comcast downlink dish.
And you know who'd ultimately win? The blimp makers, that's right.
You know, if you plug a UPS into itself, you get everlasting power.
Remember the bell curve and where you are on it. That's why most people will not know what the hell you're talking about, and that's why you should cherish the people who do.
Great idea if they let you :) Also keep in mind the machine may work with Linux but not with the Knoppix boot CD, so don't give up if that doesn't help. Over the weekend I used Knoppix in two machines that I know to be Linux-compatible, yet each machine had problems (one wouldn't even boot Knoppix).