Windows XP on itself might be a stable platform, but the fact that 3rd party apps crashing can cause a reboot... Is scary for people used to Linux and (OS X) Macs. Not trolling, just... We're simply not used to that. I'm the first to say that a kernel panic locking up the system is as bad as a reboot for non-diehard programmers, but... The computer rebooting itself...
I mean, not so long ago I was with a friend, playing a game that was quite unstable both on PC and the Mac, but all of a sudden his machine rebooted, and, mannnn... That freaked me out, I thought something very seriously bad had happened, like a hardware glitch or so, You should've seen my face! He just cursed, but I began to stammer about unplugging the machine, grin.
Any archeologist or rather: geologist has anything to say about this: does this look artificial or natural (at least one of the pics looks *really* natural in origin in my untrained eyes)
I'm no expert (at all! But I read most of Dawkins (the 'gene-centered evolutionist') more than once, heh.) but I'd say yes, otherwise this behaviour wouldn't have evolved -or persisted. I mean: if this were a less optimal behaviour compared to other predatory/feeding tactics, individuals of a species exhibiting this behaviour would be at a disadvantage, compared to others of their species, and so they would be less 'fit', end up at the bottom rung of the reproductive ladder, not able to pass this trait... ('xcuse my less than brilliant English) So this behaviour would die out pretty quickly. The mere fact that there are individuals exhibiting this, shows it must be a fairly successful strategy (assuming there are quite a bit of them showing this behaviour) OTOH.. It could be a losing strategy, one would have to study these catfishes for awhile, see how many do this, and how they compare to others.
You could see it as a very early, primitive stage of going-to-the-land.
Probably, when there were no earth dwelling creatures bigger than insects, those insects would be an easy catch to anything that started to jump out of the water to get at them, because they had no defenses for something like that happening (why would they, it never happened, evolving strategies against such attacks would be wasteful, and not help them in their fitness...) So fish that adapted this strategy would've had had ample, 'unsuspecting' prey, as opposed to water-bourne prey, which would've obviously had survival (evasive) strategies to big fish. So these fish were probably quite successful in surviving, even when food in the water was getting scarce for whatever reason. So, that catfish demonstrates a *very* hunt-efficient evolution, and over time it would stay longer out of the water, go deeper inland, while evolving the stuff to survive outside the water (lungs) What it shows is quite convincingly the incentive/bonus behind becoming a land-animal: more readily/easily available food.
So... Initially he liked the idea. Must be so, otherwise he wouldn't have offered a free version of Windows? And now the $100 computer suddenly has become a mockery?
Hmmm... I wonder why that change of heart?/Sarcasm/
They do. From the BBC article: "From its general shape and appearance, the new creature resembles freshwater "squat lobsters" found in South America. But Dr Segonzac said that genetic analysis showed it was closer to marine members of this group."
IMHO, it doesn't *look* cool at al, the idea might be cool, but it's plain ugly.
Seriously, this looks amateurish, look at those two ugly fan covers, for starters, this thing just has no style at all, the way it is built, ugh. Will stick out as a sore thumb in *any* livingroom (or conference sideroom or what have you) If this were covered as a case-mod, people would mock this thing, the woodwork is pathetic. I bet it comes with a beige powercord;)
TFA: "WS: GeorgeStepanek asks: "You've said that 'Wikimedia's mission is to give the world's knowledge to every single person on the planet in their own language.' But very few of the wikipedias in the languages of third-world countries are seeing as much activity as the first-world language wikipedias. Do you have any ideas on how this could be turned around?"
JW: I am a believer in outreach. I would like for the Foundation to raise money specifically to pay one or more minority language co-ordinators. The goal would be to reach out in a more organized way to professors and graduate students and expat communities who have good Internet access, to seed projects for languages where the majority of speakers have poor internet access."
If I were an English teacher in said countries, and had computer-access, I'd give them excercises by letting them translate some (printouts) of the entry-level stuff to their own language. Then, when they grow more proficient, give them more complex stuff (interesting articles, stuff to discuss etc.) I bet they'd be proud to see their stuff up at 'their' Wikipedia.
Wasn't the subtitle of that book with the dialogues "the best SF film Never made"? (or something like that) Weird they missed that one, it was a great read...
Rubble.
Lots of these graves, once closed up, were buried under intentional landslides, to make sure gravediggers didn't find them or at least give them a hard time to get acces to them. Which seemed not have worked for most, given the fact most of them were obviously visited several times during the centuries by gravediggers... Victorian archeologists/antiquairs just went looking around for landslides that looked out of place, the gravedigggers of old probably too, heh.
That big pile of rubble makes it all but impossible to get meaningful readings.
And indeed, the Valley is big, and funding for such large-scale operations stuff probably lacking...
Chris Phoenix is a genuinely Nice Guy (TM)
When he started out with CRN, one of the first things he did was publish some fairly detailed papers. I thought that was great, 99% of the stuff you could find re: nanomanufacturing was severely dumbed-down or market-speak nonsense. And the interesting ones are subscribers-only.
So I sent him a thank-you email for the effort to publish the stuff so everyone could read it, not only paying scientists with gazillions of subscriptions.
I never expected to get a reply, but one or two days later there was a pleasant, personal reply, complete with (rusty) Dutch sentence in it to boot (I mentioned I was Belgian)
IMO, this attitude is reflected in the whole of CRN, open discussion, open to critique, etc. Well worth a visit.
Yes, I seriously expected some scientist type of guy trying to live off the road. (expect Belgians to come up with the worst puns...)
Thought it would involve taking samples and discussions about bacteria, heavy-metals and such.
I live in Belgium, a country that takes pride in its high quality of education.
But just yesterday a survey showed that about 70% of the youth doesn't have a clue how you can contract HIV, and a very high percentage takes no protective measures at all. Staggering numbers for a developed country.
One of the people that was involved in organising the survey said this was partly to blame to the false sense of security. Rumors about new cures, tales about how good the HIV treatments work. Youth these days seems to think it isn't that deadly after all, at least not deadly enough to be very wary... Sensibilisation campaigns seemed to be inadequate to change this view.
Heh, probably so. They're a last-ditch attempt at saving lives, just like the ejection seat. (not all pilots survive using those) I can imagine astronauts not being too enthousiastic having to use the emergency-system, but if you have to choose between 100% chance of dying and a smaller percentage of it happening,...
Launch and early ascent phases are arguably the most dangerous episodes in a spaceflight, next to reentry. You're *always* fucked when something mayor goes wrong. Does not mean you don't have to try to implement some safety-measures, esp. when these are relatively painless to implement re: costs and weight-penalties.
Safety-belts and airbags have saved countless of lives, but you're still fucked when something mayor goes wrong. I don't see car-manufacturers not installing these items because of that. (I know flawed analogy, aren't they all...)
Read the summary again: "It has no powered-flight escape system." Soyuz has this. As had Apollo.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_escape_system
it's usually a little solid-fuel rocket atop the crew cabin, that brings you out of harm's reach when a launcher fails catastrophically. Such a system could've saved the Challenger crew. Normally these things work automatically, whenever certain parameters go out of a certain range (signifying something's seriously wrong.)The first generation of Soyuz had this too, but it was triggered manually by flight control, almost cost the live of one cosmonaut when his rocket started misbehaving, IIRC. He sat there, unable to do anything, hoping launch-control would react in time.
The thing I noticed, (as a non-native English poster) is that the longer I'm in an English 'thinking-mode' the more errors I make, like switching too and to, spelling increasingly phonetically... (like typing 'Am' instead of "I'm" etc...)
I guess after a while you just start speed-typing, w/o thinking consciously about the foreign grammar and vocabulary anymore. Probably native English speakers/writers suffer from this even more, just because English is at times quite unlogical or has a lot of homonyms(sp?)...
Those are easily blocked, because they always use the same wordings. I guess most servers/filters block them before they, and so they don't show up at most people's inboxes...
Then again, I get those in my Gmail account, (and those are in fact almost the only spammails I get, 3 or 4 a week...) which I think is strange, because if *I* can redirect those to my spambox by using a simple, dumb filter myself, I don't understand why GMail doesn't filter them theirselves...
>What use is a robot that can navigate a desert if it can't actually see anything?
It can drive in total darkness, for starters... I'd think that's a big advantage in a warzone. Not sure how rangefinders would cope with sandstorms, mist etc, but then you could maybe switch to another set of non-visual sensors (acoustic? Only when it's 'cam' out there, probably... Why only limit a vehicule's sensors to the visual light spectrum?
Our eyes and brains are so good at the task, because it's all we have to orient ourselves, while computers have other alternatives that may prove better suited to a situation. Add the fact that computer-vision is not too good, to put it mildly, in low-light situations, mist, dust etc...
This is modded funny, but he's not kidding, I remember seeing footage (I think BBC) of a sweaty soldier stepping up to locals (in a friendly town) so they could reach under his flak-jacket and feel for themselves that, no, it is *not* artificially cooled, the guy is *really* wearing all this stuff and feels very hot...
The translation (in subtitles) of the locals talking to eachother was things like "oh, that is really hot, how do they manage?......that must be hard... " and stuff like that...
The soldier commented he constantly heard, via translators, the locals thought they were wearing some cooling gizmo, and he was clearly fed up with it.
Isn't it just because you didn't actually use those accounts for a long time, you got kicked off? IIRC Google 'recycles' dormant accounts... A lot of other free webmail providers do, so...
And what about the ill-fated MSX? (Extended Microsoft Basic-based)
Then, all 'hobby'computers were so ddifferent there was little or no chance you could interchange programs between say a C64 and an Apple.
MSX was set up as a standard, and various companies released computers under the MSX moniker. Yamaha, Spectravideo, Philips, Pioneer, Soni, Toshiba...
Too little too late, though, too epensive compared to the existing computers and (IMO at that time) underperforming. Later there was the MSXII standard, but it didn't save the day...
It didn't help most of the 'Standardized' computers weren't 100% compatible with eachother, the very goal of MSX got killed by each manufactur embracing the standard... And extending upon it. Sounds familiar?
http://www.faq.msxnet.org/
Did this with a first generation iBook (Clamshell) If you google around you generally find alternative replacement lights for little money, compared to the 'official' stuff. Always worth to check for that. Be sure to invest some time to try and find a servicemanual, that could save you a lot of headscratching. Laptops are a tad more complicated to dismantle AND put back together than bix boxes, everything is crammed in tiny spaces, lots and lots of screws, sometimes you have to go in in a particular step-by-step way not to break stuff etc... Inane stuff like, say, having to remove the optical drive to reach the connectors for the screen etc... It takes time, but it's worth it, IMO. If you like that kind of stuff, heehee. But if you don't you wouldn't be here, now do you?;)
Oh, but bowel movements are considered art. At least where I live, Belgium. Check out Delvoye's "Cloaca," a machine that produces exactly this...:D
Oh, seems Americans consider it art too:
http://www.absolutearts.com/artsnews/2002/01/25/29 594.html
Slashdot Mirror
Windows XP on itself might be a stable platform, but the fact that 3rd party apps crashing can cause a reboot... Is scary for people used to Linux and (OS X) Macs.
Not trolling, just... We're simply not used to that.
I'm the first to say that a kernel panic locking up the system is as bad as a reboot for non-diehard programmers, but... The computer rebooting itself...
I mean, not so long ago I was with a friend, playing a game that was quite unstable both on PC and the Mac, but all of a sudden his machine rebooted, and, mannnn... That freaked me out, I thought something very seriously bad had happened, like a hardware glitch or so, You should've seen my face! He just cursed, but I began to stammer about unplugging the machine, grin.
he put up pictures himself: http://www.bosnianpyramid.com/Archive_files/240420 06.html
Any archeologist or rather: geologist has anything to say about this: does this look artificial or natural (at least one of the pics looks *really* natural in origin in my untrained eyes)
I'm no expert (at all! But I read most of Dawkins (the 'gene-centered evolutionist') more than once, heh.) but I'd say yes, otherwise this behaviour wouldn't have evolved -or persisted.
I mean: if this were a less optimal behaviour compared to other predatory/feeding tactics, individuals of a species exhibiting this behaviour would be at a disadvantage, compared to others of their species, and so they would be less 'fit', end up at the bottom rung of the reproductive ladder, not able to pass this trait... ('xcuse my less than brilliant English) So this behaviour would die out pretty quickly. The mere fact that there are individuals exhibiting this, shows it must be a fairly successful strategy (assuming there are quite a bit of them showing this behaviour)
OTOH.. It could be a losing strategy, one would have to study these catfishes for awhile, see how many do this, and how they compare to others.
You could see it as a very early, primitive stage of going-to-the-land.
Probably, when there were no earth dwelling creatures bigger than insects, those insects would be an easy catch to anything that started to jump out of the water to get at them, because they had no defenses for something like that happening (why would they, it never happened, evolving strategies against such attacks would be wasteful, and not help them in their fitness...)
So fish that adapted this strategy would've had had ample, 'unsuspecting' prey, as opposed to water-bourne prey, which would've obviously had survival (evasive) strategies to big fish. So these fish were probably quite successful in surviving, even when food in the water was getting scarce for whatever reason.
So, that catfish demonstrates a *very* hunt-efficient evolution, and over time it would stay longer out of the water, go deeper inland, while evolving the stuff to survive outside the water (lungs)
What it shows is quite convincingly the incentive/bonus behind becoming a land-animal: more readily/easily available food.
>Social search is a method whose time has come, Osmer says.
Coming from Microsoft, this sounds like a threath to me, heehee...
So... Initially he liked the idea. Must be so, otherwise he wouldn't have offered a free version of Windows? And now the $100 computer suddenly has become a mockery?
/Sarcasm/
Hmmm... I wonder why that change of heart?
They do.
From the BBC article: "From its general shape and appearance, the new creature resembles freshwater "squat lobsters" found in South America. But Dr Segonzac said that genetic analysis showed it was closer to marine members of this group."
IMHO, it doesn't *look* cool at al, the idea might be cool, but it's plain ugly.
;)
Seriously, this looks amateurish, look at those two ugly fan covers, for starters, this thing just has no style at all, the way it is built, ugh. Will stick out as a sore thumb in *any* livingroom (or conference sideroom or what have you) If this were covered as a case-mod, people would mock this thing, the woodwork is pathetic. I bet it comes with a beige powercord
TFA: "WS: GeorgeStepanek asks: "You've said that 'Wikimedia's mission is to give the world's knowledge to every single person on the planet in their own language.' But very few of the wikipedias in the languages of third-world countries are seeing as much activity as the first-world language wikipedias. Do you have any ideas on how this could be turned around?" JW: I am a believer in outreach. I would like for the Foundation to raise money specifically to pay one or more minority language co-ordinators. The goal would be to reach out in a more organized way to professors and graduate students and expat communities who have good Internet access, to seed projects for languages where the majority of speakers have poor internet access." If I were an English teacher in said countries, and had computer-access, I'd give them excercises by letting them translate some (printouts) of the entry-level stuff to their own language. Then, when they grow more proficient, give them more complex stuff (interesting articles, stuff to discuss etc.) I bet they'd be proud to see their stuff up at 'their' Wikipedia.
Wasn't the subtitle of that book with the dialogues "the best SF film Never made"? (or something like that) Weird they missed that one, it was a great read...
Rubble. Lots of these graves, once closed up, were buried under intentional landslides, to make sure gravediggers didn't find them or at least give them a hard time to get acces to them. Which seemed not have worked for most, given the fact most of them were obviously visited several times during the centuries by gravediggers... Victorian archeologists/antiquairs just went looking around for landslides that looked out of place, the gravedigggers of old probably too, heh. That big pile of rubble makes it all but impossible to get meaningful readings. And indeed, the Valley is big, and funding for such large-scale operations stuff probably lacking...
Chris Phoenix is a genuinely Nice Guy (TM) When he started out with CRN, one of the first things he did was publish some fairly detailed papers. I thought that was great, 99% of the stuff you could find re: nanomanufacturing was severely dumbed-down or market-speak nonsense. And the interesting ones are subscribers-only. So I sent him a thank-you email for the effort to publish the stuff so everyone could read it, not only paying scientists with gazillions of subscriptions. I never expected to get a reply, but one or two days later there was a pleasant, personal reply, complete with (rusty) Dutch sentence in it to boot (I mentioned I was Belgian) IMO, this attitude is reflected in the whole of CRN, open discussion, open to critique, etc. Well worth a visit.
Yes, I seriously expected some scientist type of guy trying to live off the road. (expect Belgians to come up with the worst puns...) Thought it would involve taking samples and discussions about bacteria, heavy-metals and such.
I live in Belgium, a country that takes pride in its high quality of education. But just yesterday a survey showed that about 70% of the youth doesn't have a clue how you can contract HIV, and a very high percentage takes no protective measures at all. Staggering numbers for a developed country. One of the people that was involved in organising the survey said this was partly to blame to the false sense of security. Rumors about new cures, tales about how good the HIV treatments work. Youth these days seems to think it isn't that deadly after all, at least not deadly enough to be very wary... Sensibilisation campaigns seemed to be inadequate to change this view.
Heh, probably so. They're a last-ditch attempt at saving lives, just like the ejection seat. (not all pilots survive using those) I can imagine astronauts not being too enthousiastic having to use the emergency-system, but if you have to choose between 100% chance of dying and a smaller percentage of it happening, ...
Launch and early ascent phases are arguably the most dangerous episodes in a spaceflight, next to reentry. You're *always* fucked when something mayor goes wrong. Does not mean you don't have to try to implement some safety-measures, esp. when these are relatively painless to implement re: costs and weight-penalties. Safety-belts and airbags have saved countless of lives, but you're still fucked when something mayor goes wrong. I don't see car-manufacturers not installing these items because of that. (I know flawed analogy, aren't they all...)
Read the summary again: "It has no powered-flight escape system." Soyuz has this. As had Apollo. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_escape_system it's usually a little solid-fuel rocket atop the crew cabin, that brings you out of harm's reach when a launcher fails catastrophically. Such a system could've saved the Challenger crew. Normally these things work automatically, whenever certain parameters go out of a certain range (signifying something's seriously wrong.)The first generation of Soyuz had this too, but it was triggered manually by flight control, almost cost the live of one cosmonaut when his rocket started misbehaving, IIRC. He sat there, unable to do anything, hoping launch-control would react in time.
The thing I noticed, (as a non-native English poster) is that the longer I'm in an English 'thinking-mode' the more errors I make, like switching too and to, spelling increasingly phonetically... (like typing 'Am' instead of "I'm" etc...) I guess after a while you just start speed-typing, w/o thinking consciously about the foreign grammar and vocabulary anymore. Probably native English speakers/writers suffer from this even more, just because English is at times quite unlogical or has a lot of homonyms(sp?)...
Those are easily blocked, because they always use the same wordings. I guess most servers/filters block them before they, and so they don't show up at most people's inboxes... Then again, I get those in my Gmail account, (and those are in fact almost the only spammails I get, 3 or 4 a week...) which I think is strange, because if *I* can redirect those to my spambox by using a simple, dumb filter myself, I don't understand why GMail doesn't filter them theirselves...
>What use is a robot that can navigate a desert if it can't actually see anything? It can drive in total darkness, for starters... I'd think that's a big advantage in a warzone. Not sure how rangefinders would cope with sandstorms, mist etc, but then you could maybe switch to another set of non-visual sensors (acoustic? Only when it's 'cam' out there, probably... Why only limit a vehicule's sensors to the visual light spectrum? Our eyes and brains are so good at the task, because it's all we have to orient ourselves, while computers have other alternatives that may prove better suited to a situation. Add the fact that computer-vision is not too good, to put it mildly, in low-light situations, mist, dust etc...
This is modded funny, but he's not kidding, I remember seeing footage (I think BBC) of a sweaty soldier stepping up to locals (in a friendly town) so they could reach under his flak-jacket and feel for themselves that, no, it is *not* artificially cooled, the guy is *really* wearing all this stuff and feels very hot... The translation (in subtitles) of the locals talking to eachother was things like "oh, that is really hot, how do they manage?... ...that must be hard... " and stuff like that...
The soldier commented he constantly heard, via translators, the locals thought they were wearing some cooling gizmo, and he was clearly fed up with it.
Isn't it just because you didn't actually use those accounts for a long time, you got kicked off? IIRC Google 'recycles' dormant accounts... A lot of other free webmail providers do, so...
And what about the ill-fated MSX? (Extended Microsoft Basic-based) Then, all 'hobby'computers were so ddifferent there was little or no chance you could interchange programs between say a C64 and an Apple. MSX was set up as a standard, and various companies released computers under the MSX moniker. Yamaha, Spectravideo, Philips, Pioneer, Soni, Toshiba... Too little too late, though, too epensive compared to the existing computers and (IMO at that time) underperforming. Later there was the MSXII standard, but it didn't save the day... It didn't help most of the 'Standardized' computers weren't 100% compatible with eachother, the very goal of MSX got killed by each manufactur embracing the standard... And extending upon it. Sounds familiar? http://www.faq.msxnet.org/
Did this with a first generation iBook (Clamshell) ;)
If you google around you generally find alternative replacement lights for little money, compared to the 'official' stuff. Always worth to check for that.
Be sure to invest some time to try and find a servicemanual, that could save you a lot of headscratching. Laptops are a tad more complicated to dismantle AND put back together than bix boxes, everything is crammed in tiny spaces, lots and lots of screws, sometimes you have to go in in a particular step-by-step way not to break stuff etc... Inane stuff like, say, having to remove the optical drive to reach the connectors for the screen etc...
It takes time, but it's worth it, IMO. If you like that kind of stuff, heehee.
But if you don't you wouldn't be here, now do you?
Oh, but bowel movements are considered art. At least where I live, Belgium. Check out Delvoye's "Cloaca," a machine that produces exactly this... :D
Oh, seems Americans consider it art too:
http://www.absolutearts.com/artsnews/2002/01/25/29 594.html