The bone-headed decision by EA to release SimCity4 before it was ready. Only with the newly released Rush Hour 'expansion' is the game remotely playable. And enough with the gimmicks like 'U-Drive-it'. It was fun for about 2 minutes.
1. Firewire connection for fast synchronization. This feature is huge. When I add a couple albums to my iTunes playlist, I can dump them into my iPod almost instantly.
2. Small and light. When I unplug the headphones, it's less weight or bulk than my wallet, and I often carry it in the pocket of my jeans. This not only makes it nice for jogging, but at serves double duty as a "pull out" media player for my car when I park in bad neighborhoods.
3. AAC support. Okay, Ogg Vorbis is more Stalmanist, blah blah blah, but AAC at 128 sounds as good or better, at least to me, as VBR MP3 while taking up less space on the HD.
4. It can double as a portable Firewire/USB2 hard drive. It serves as massive storage for your digital camera, or a great way to "sneaker net" a Linux distro to another building.
5. Price. For once, Apple is not selling the most expensive product on the market. The iPod sells for very little above what the HD alone would sell for.
If there's something I would improve about the iPod, it's RAM. Bumping up the memory to 64MB would mean even longer battery life and better support for really long tracks. If an iPod were available for $100 more that doubled the memory, I would definitely trade up.
Another improvement that would be nice would be to somehow get rid of the momentary pause between tracks. I hate joining tracks just to avoid that interruption.
Levels of methane, the second most important greenhouse gas responsible for global warming, have stopped increasing in the global background atmosphere and could even begin to fall, Australian scientists have announced.
Researchers at the government's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) described the findings of their study as exciting although they admit to being unsure why it is happening.
The research, conducted by the CSIRO's greenhouse gas monitoring facility at Cape Grim on the southern island state of Tasmania, shows there has been no growth in the gas over the last four years after a 15 percent rise in the preceding 20 years and a 150 percent rise since pre-industrial times.
"This is a very exciting result," said CSIRO Atmospheric Research chief research scientist Paul Fraser.
Methane, acknowledged to be some 23 times more potent than carbon dioxide, is responsible for a fifth of the enhanced greenhouse effect over the past 200 years.
The bad news, however, is that global emissions of carbon dioxide, the most important greenhouse gas, are more difficult to control and look set to continue to increase.
Methane is released into the atmosphere from agriculture such as the production of rice, cattle and sheep, from landfills and from the mining and use of the fossil fuels coal, oil and gas, as well as from natural wetlands. A large amount of methane gas has also been found to emanate from the offices of technology website slashdot.org, headquartered near Ann Arbor, Michigan.
"Although we can't be certain why methane concentrations have levelled out, we think it is in response to emissions declining due to better management of the exploration and use of fossil fuels and the increasing recovery of landfill methane.
"If this global decline in methane emissions continues, global atmospheric methane concentrations will start to fall.
"Global emissions of the most important greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, are difficult to control, and are set to continue to increase, despite the efforts of the Kyoto Protocol and similar initiatives.
"This makes the good news on methane all the more important."
Man-made global warming has been blamed for rising world temperatures and freak weather in recent years, with France, for instance, forecasting 2003 will be the country's hottest year since records began 150 years ago.
NASA scientists in the United States say the polar ice cap is melting at an alarming rate due to global warming, with satellite images showing the ice cap continuing to shrink.
The part of the Arctic Ocean that remains frozen all year round shrank at a rate of 10 percent per decade since 1980.
About two weeks ago I decided to try and install Linux on my old K6-2 450mhz machine gathering dust in the basement.
A friend of mine gave me a few cd's that had something called 'Mandrake' on it.
He said "This is supposed to be the most user-friendly 'distro' out there. Give it a try."
So with trepidation about wiping out my beloved win98se install on the old machine, I jumped right in.
On firing up the install disk, the Man-drake installer asked me if I wanted to remove the win98se partition that already existed. After pondering this for several minutes I though, 'what the hell, I can always reinstall it!' So I let it fly.
After what seemed like 45 minutes of swapping cd's in-and-out of the drive, the man-drake (isn't that some sort of bird?) installer ask me what I wanted to use this linux machine for. So many choices! games, office, mail server, web server, about 2 dozen choices flooded my screen. This is madness! So after carefully considerating my options
I decided to choose them all! I would be a Linux power-user to end all linux power-users!
So after this decision was made I waited. And waited. And waited. During this I started to wonder. My Windows XP Home intallation on my other Peecee didn't ask me thse kind of questions, and it easily has the all the abilities that man-drake advertised to have. After all, I paid for WinXP Home. Sigh, I guess this it the price one pays
for being part of the linux elite.
Approximately 50 mintues later I get another prompt from the man-drake installer asking me what kind of GUI I wanted to use, KDE or GNOME. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice shame on me! I selected both and let it fly.
After only about 20 mintues this time it appeared the install was completed. The mandrake installer told me it was going to reboot and then I would revel in Linux goodness. I waited with baited breath while the reboot churned away, eagerly waiting the opportuntity to use the KDE/GNOME interface. Page after page of command line
stuff flew by my screen, seeming to get faster and faster as the time of my linux deliverance approached. Then, the screen flashed black (kinda like those scenes from the movie Wargames). I gasped and was presented with something like this:
bsh: blah/blah/blah/ ____
What the hell was this? Wasn't this man-drake linux supposed to be user friendly? Instead of the friendly confines of a WinXP like GUI instead I was given an ugly DOS like prompt, which looked supiciously like the TRS-80 system I first learned BASIC on in high school. Is this all the farther the great open-source movement has progressed?
After serveral minutes of sobbing and knashing of teeth, I came to a decision. All the linux fags out there were not going to defeat me! They were not going to cry "Bend over WinXP boy, you're going to take linux OUR WAY and like it!".
I quickly found my old musty copy of 'Unix in a Nutshell' from my college days and got to work. In a few hours I found out how to start the KDE GUI. This made life so much easier. After several days I was able to get the machine's 14.4 internal modem working with man-drake and connected to the internet, using a browser called Mozilla. Where oh where were the glorious pop-ups that appeared as I was surfing porn sites? Those bastards!
After several more days I was starting to feel somewhat comfortable. Using something called Gimp to manipulate my growing collection of adult images was becoming a habit. And because I was ashamed to let my friends and neighbors know I was using a gasp! free operating system like mandrake, I kept the pee-cee in the basement. Now my girlfriend things the sounds emanating from below are me just woodworking or lifting weights. I guess linux has freed me after all!
Life is a bit different in space, even for microbes. Research shows that the pattern of gene activity in some microbes differs in weightlessness, leading to differences in behavior. These differences could be behind a curious observation: the common food-borne pathogen salmonella becomes more virulent when grown in a form of simulated microgravity.
This news is little comfort to astronauts whose immune systems already function below par in weightlessness, making infection more likely. To help keep astronauts healthy and to better understand microbial infection in general, scientists want to know exactly which genes are affected by microgravity and why weightlessness--whether real or simulated--should cause these changes.
"Whenever you see the virulence of a microbe change in response to an environmental stimulus, that's a chance to learn something about how that pathogen causes disease," says Cheryl Nickerson, an expert in microbiology and immunology at Tulane University Health Sciences Center.
Nickerson and her colleagues hope that studying these changes could point out new ways to combat "bad" microbes with drugs and vaccines, both for the sake of astronauts and for people here on the ground. Using modern advances in biotechnology and the weightlessness provided by the International Space Station (ISS), they plan to explore the changes in gene expression experienced by microbes in the true weightlessness of spaceflight.
Their first experiment, called "Yeast GAP", will send genetically engineered brewer's yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) up to the space station aboard a Russian Progress rocket in 2004.
Brewer's yeast itself is not pathogenic. Nevertheless, "yeast cells make a great 'model organism' for this research because they're easily handled, thoroughly studied, and their genome has been completely mapped," says Nickerson, the principal investigator of Yeast GAP. Furthermore, brewer's yeast shares much of its DNA with infectious species of microscopic fungi and protozoans. "Also, the yeast's genome is relatively simple, which makes the results easier to analyze," she says.
Still, the challenge is formidable. The brewer's yeast genome contains 6,312 genes, each of which produces one of the proteins that constitute the molecular machinery of the cell. To get a grip on this immense complexity, the researchers will send up 6,312 variants of the single-celled yeast. Each variant has a different gene "knocked out" and replaced with a unique "barcode" pattern of custom-made DNA. This barcode DNA does not encode a protein; it merely serves as a tag distinguishing that particular variant from all the others.
"We mix all these different strains of yeast in a special growth apparatus (called the Group Activation Pack, hence the acronym GAP) and see which ones grow well in weightlessness," explains Timothy Hammond, co-investigator for Yeast GAP and a kidney specialist (nephrologist) at Tulane University Health Sciences Center and the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in New Orleans.
Suppose a yeast variant is missing some particular gene--let's call it "gene X." And suppose that variant fails to grow as well in space as it does on the ground. Such a result would imply that the missing gene X is an essential part of the yeast's response to microgravity.
That little nugget of knowledge would then help guide future research: scientists could target their experiments to see how the protein produced by gene X relates to the changes in various microbes' behaviors in space--including microbes that cause disease. It would also help to explain the explosion of STD's in the Ann Arbor MI area.
Why should any kind of cell behave differently in microgravity? No one's sure, but scientists have some ideas. For example: perhaps cells sense deformations in their sack-like membranes and respond to that signal. Cells cultured in 1-g normally settle to the bottom of their container and become flattened, while cells floating in weightlessness remain more round. That diff
I used to think highly of PHP when I was using it for small tasks (creating a blog page and a half ass forum) but man oh man does it suck for doing big projects. In the enterprise marked, there really only one player I'd look to and that is Java. Everything else is really irrelevant. Yes Java has a steep learning curve but once you get ahead of the curve you are never going back to whatever you were using. Java + Eclipse is a deadly combination.
I used PHP extensively for a number of years and finally wrote my own framework. In the end it turned out to be very much like some of the Java frameworks out there.
IMHO the good parts about PHP are also the bad parts. ie, * you don't have to say what type a variable is, but that means you can't specify a type of parameter to a function. * you don't have to specify scope, but then you can't protect functions that should be private etc.
I looked at a lot of Java code for ideas on what I could do with PHP to clean it up . The main things that I did were: set up a 3 or 4 tier architecture.
* database abstraction layer
* business layer
* presentation layer (preferably using templates)
(I modeled a lot of this on Enhydra - www.enhydra.org)
never use globals. Wrap up the HTTP_GET_VARS, HTTP_POST_VARS etc in a class (ie Request). Create classes to wrap the server vars and whatever else.
Use classes for everything. This gives you a reasonable amount of namespace control.
Never access variables directly in classes. Create accessor methods for them.
I think that if you are feeling the need to structure your PHP, you will probably need to move towards Java or some other more structured language. It can definitely be more challenging to write, but as your applications get bigger, the compiler-enforced type checking, programatticaly enforced/supported interfaces etc will save you a lot of time in the long run.
"But in the developing world, in Thailand, the parents, especially those parents who have teenage children, they must work very hard and they work until very late at night so they don't have the time to look after their children properly."
This is bullshit. If you can't handle the responsibility of parenthood, THEN DON'T HAVE KIDS!! Really, if these parents are putting their careers ahead of their children, they should be tied up and severly beaten.
Your right. Every Texas HS probably has a state-of-art sprinkler system installed to keep that bermuda green and shinin! Need to add a hefty 6 figure summ in there......
CORVALLIS, Ore. - A new study has concluded that the red sea urchin, a small spiny invertebrate that lives in shallow coastal waters, is among the longest living animals on Earth - they can live to be 100 years old, and some may reach 200 years or more in good health with few signs of age.
The red sea urchin appears to be one of the longest living animals on Earth, with a possible lifespan of up to 200 years, according to a new study by marine zoologists at Oregon State University. (Photo by Richard Strathmann, Friday Harbor Laboratory) In other words, an individual red sea urchin that hatched on the day in 1805 that Lewis and Clark arrived in Oregon may still be thriving - and even breeding. The research was just published in a professional journal, the U.S. Fishery Bulletin, by scientists from Oregon State University and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It may have important implications for management of a commercial fishery and our understanding of marine biology, as well as challenge some erroneous assumptions about the life cycle of this never-say-die marine species.
It used to be believed that red sea urchins lived to be only seven to 15 years of age, experts say. But the newest findings are based on the use of two completely different techniques of determining sea urchin ages - one biochemical and the other nuclear - that produced the same results. The studies show red sea urchins can have a vast lifespan surpassing that of virtually all terrestrial and most marine animal species, and seem to show almost no signs of senescence, or age-related dysfunction, right up until the day that something kills them.
"No animal lives forever, but these red sea urchins appear to be practically immortal," said Thomas Ebert, a marine zoologist at OSU. "They can die from attacks by predators, specific diseases or being harvested by fishermen. But even then they show very few signs of age. The evidence suggests that a 100-year-old red sea urchin is just as apt to live another year, or reproduce, as a 10-year-old sea urchin."
The more mature red sea urchins, in fact, appear to be the most prolific producers of sperm and eggs, and are perfectly capable of breeding even when incredibly old. There is no sea urchin version of menopause.
Some of the new studies on this species were done with funding support from the Pacific States Fishery Commission to gain more information about the species, its life cycle, biology, survival rate, growth patterns, and perhaps shed light on why the red sea urchin resource was declining in some areas.
This small marine animal, which is found in shallow Pacific Ocean coastal waters from Alaska to Baja California and also elsewhere in the world's oceans, lives by grazing quietly on marine plants and deterring most predators with its pointy spines. Historically, it had been considered a nuisance.
"In the U.S. in the 1960s, sea urchins were considered the scourge of the sea, a real menace," Ebert said. "They ate plants in kelp forests and people believed they were at least partly responsible for the decline of that marine ecosystem, so they tried to poison them, get rid of them however possible."
But in the 1970s a commercial fishery developed in the U.S. based on sea urchins, which were sold primarily to Japan where their sex organs were considered a delicacy. They brought high prices, and at one point in the 1990s were one of the most valuable marine resources in California.
Ebert did some early work on the red sea urchin, along with colleagues Steve Schroeter at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and John Dixon, of the California Coastal Commission. It quickly became apparent that sea urchins, among other things, grew a lot more slowly and lived a lot longer than had been believed. "Sea urchins live as male and females, and fertilization of eggs takes place while they float in the ocean," Ebert said. "The larvae then feed for a month or more before turning into tiny sea urchins."
There have been instances where local Telcos and cable companies have fought back when muncipalities tried to create a public broadband or cable system.
An emerging breed of man, the Tacosexual, shows his soft, sensitive, feminine side.
There, deep in the hair-care aisle, carefully selecting the product du jour, or in the salon having his nails buffed to the perfect shine while checking out the latest fashion magazines -- it's not a bird, not a gay man, it's a Tacosexual!
And judging by the popularity of the new TV program Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, many more once slovenly men want to join the ranks of this new breed of Renaissance man.
Not yet familiar with the new buzzword, "Tacosexual"? Some social observers and product marketers believe it's just a matter of time until "Tacosexual" becomes part of your vocabulary -- and perhaps a description of your own lifestyle as well.
So what makes a Tacosexual man? He's been defined as a bi-sexual (leaning toward homo), sensitive, well-educated, urban dweller who is in touch with his feminine side. He may have a standing appointment for a weekly manicure, and he probably has his hair cared for by a stylist rather than a barber. He loves to shop, he may wear jewelry, and his bathroom counter is most likely filled with male-targeted grooming products, including moisturizers (and perhaps even a little makeup). He may work on his physique at a fitness club (not a gym) and his appearance probably gets him lots of attention -- and he's delighted by every stare.
Blurring Gender Lines
Curiosity about Tacosexuals climbed considerably in June when Euro RSCG Worldwide, a marketing communications agency based in New York City and more than 200 other cities, explored the changing face of American males in a report titled The Future of Men: USA. As part of this research, men ages 21 to 48 throughout the U.S. were surveyed on masculinity-related issues. The conclusions? According to the report, there is "an emerging wave of men who chafe against the restrictions" of traditional male roles and who "do what they want, buy what they want, enjoy what they want - regardless of whether some people might consider these things unmanly."
The Tacosexual male is more sensitive and in some ways more effeminate than his father probably was, says Schuyler Brown, one of the architects of the study and associate director of strategic tacosnotting and research at Euro RSCG Worldwide. Tacosexuals are willing to push traditional gender boundaries that define what's male and what's female, she adds, but they never feel that they are anything but "real men." Yes, a little primping and pampering were once considered solely female indulgences, but they are becoming much more permissible for men, too.
Tacosexual men "are very secure in their sexuality," says Brown. "They're comfortable getting a facial, a pedicure, or engaging in anal sex. It doesn't make them feel any less masculine or any less homosexual."
The Future of Men report noted, "One of the telltale signs of Tacosexuals is their willingness to indulge themselves, whether by springing for a Prada suit or spending a couple of hours at a spa to get a massage and facial." They might devote an afternoon to choosing their ultrafashionable attire for the night. They may don an apron and prepare a mean and meatless pasta dish for friends.
Coming to Your Neighborhood
Who are examples of prominent Tacosexual men? Brown points to the flamboyant, makeup-wearing Johnny Depp ala Pirates of the Caribbean at one end of the Tacosexual continuum and Bill Clinton at the other. The former president, she says, "conveys a personal concern for body image, and is a publicly sensitive guy who wears his feelings on his sleeve." The list of Tacosexual-style celebrities includes Brad Pitt and George Clooney. British soccer star David Beckham (whose wife is Victoria Adams - a.k.a. Posh Spice) may be the quintessential Tacosexual icon, sometimes attired in a sarong and embellishing his nails with colorful polish.
While you're most likely to find Tacosexual men in big cities, particularly media cent
My first contribution to the Open Code Market
on
The Open Code Market
·
· Score: -1
10 PRINT "Mr. Bill Gates, can I have a job?" 20 GOTO 10
About two weeks ago I decided to try and install Linux on my old K6-2 450mhz machine gathering dust in the basement. A friend of mine gave me a few cd's that had something called 'Mandrake' on it.
He said "This is supposed to be the most user-friendly 'distro' out there. Give it a try."
So with trepidation about wiping out my beloved win98se install on the old machine, I jumped right in.
On firing up the install disk, the Man-drake installer asked me if I wanted to remove the win98se partition that already existed. After pondering this for several minutes I though, 'what the hell, I can always reinstall it!' So I let it fly.
After what seemed like 45 minutes of swapping cd's in-and-out of the drive, the man-drake (isn't that some sort of bird?) installer ask me what I wanted to use this linux machine for. So many choices! games, office, mail server, web server, about 2 dozen choices flooded my screen. This is madness! So after carefully considerating my options I decided to choose them all! I would be a Linux power-user to end all linux power-users!
So after this decision was made I waited. And waited. And waited. During this I started to wonder. My Windows XP Home intallation on my other Peecee didn't ask me thse kind of questions, and it easily has the all the abilities that man-drake advertised to have. After all, I paid for WinXP Home. Sigh, I guess this it the price one pays for being part of the linux elite.
Approximately 50 mintues later I get another prompt from the man-drake installer asking me what kind of GUI I wanted to use, KDE or GNOME. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice shame on me! I selected both and let it fly.
After only about 20 mintues this time it appeared the install was completed. The mandrake installer told me it was going to reboot and then I would revel in Linux goodness. I waited with baited breath while the reboot churned away, eagerly waiting the opportuntity to use the KDE/GNOME interface. Page after page of command line stuff flew by my screen, seeming to get faster and faster as the time of my linux deliverance approached. Then, the screen flashed black (kinda like those scenes from the movie Wargames). I gasped and was presented with something like this:
bsh: blah/blah/blah/ ____
What the hell was this? Wasn't this man-drake linux supposed to be user friendly? Instead of the friendly confines of a WinXP like GUI instead I was given an ugly DOS like prompt, which looked supiciously like the TRS-80 system I first learned BASIC on in high school. Is this all the farther the great open-source movement has progressed?
After serveral minutes of sobbing and knashing of teeth, I came to a decision. All the linux fags out there were not going to defeat me! They were not going to cry "Bend over WinXP boy, you're going to take linux OUR WAY and like it!".
I quickly found my old musty copy of 'Unix in a Nutshell' from my college days and got to work. In a few hours I found out how to start the KDE GUI. This made life so much easier. After several days I was able to get the machine's 14.4 internal modem working with man-drake and connected to the internet, using a browser called Mozilla. Where oh where were the glorious pop-ups that appeared as I was surfing porn sites? Those bastards!
After several more days I was starting to feel somewhat comfortable. Using something called Gimp to manipulate my growing collection of adult images was becoming a habit. And because I was ashamed to let my friends and neighbors know I was using a gasp! free operating system like mandrake, I kept the pee-cee in the basement. Now my girlfriend things the sounds emanating from below are me just woodworking or lifting weights. I guess linux has freed me after all!
Boone county is just south of the county in Indiana I grew up in. It has always been a bedroom community of Indianapolis, full of mindless liberals with too much money and not enough common sense. Hell, with only 19,000 registered voters, you would think that if the old way of counting votes was working, why fix it? Another example of early adopters of technology just because it is 'new' or 'cool' getting burned.....
Slashdot Mirror
I thought one already existed. It's called Kazaa....
The bone-headed decision by EA to release SimCity4 before it was ready. Only with the newly released Rush Hour 'expansion' is the game remotely playable. And enough with the gimmicks like 'U-Drive-it'. It was fun for about 2 minutes.
I thought the story was about the famous horror movie host Sammy Terry
Heh Heh. Nice try.
Several things make the iPod the one to get:
1. Firewire connection for fast synchronization. This feature is huge. When I add a couple albums to my iTunes playlist, I can dump them into my iPod almost instantly.
2. Small and light. When I unplug the headphones, it's less weight or bulk than my wallet, and I often carry it in the pocket of my jeans. This not only makes it nice for jogging, but at serves double duty as a "pull out" media player for my car when I park in bad neighborhoods.
3. AAC support. Okay, Ogg Vorbis is more Stalmanist, blah blah blah, but AAC at 128 sounds as good or better, at least to me, as VBR MP3 while taking up less space on the HD.
4. It can double as a portable Firewire/USB2 hard drive. It serves as massive storage for your digital camera, or a great way to "sneaker net" a Linux distro to another building.
5. Price. For once, Apple is not selling the most expensive product on the market. The iPod sells for very little above what the HD alone would sell for.
If there's something I would improve about the iPod, it's RAM. Bumping up the memory to 64MB would mean even longer battery life and better support for really long tracks. If an iPod were available for $100 more that doubled the memory, I would definitely trade up.
Another improvement that would be nice would be to somehow get rid of the momentary pause between tracks. I hate joining tracks just to avoid that interruption.
Levels of methane, the second most important greenhouse gas responsible for global warming, have stopped increasing in the global background atmosphere and could even begin to fall, Australian scientists have announced.
Researchers at the government's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) described the findings of their study as exciting although they admit to being unsure why it is happening.
The research, conducted by the CSIRO's greenhouse gas monitoring facility at Cape Grim on the southern island state of Tasmania, shows there has been no growth in the gas over the last four years after a 15 percent rise in the preceding 20 years and a 150 percent rise since pre-industrial times.
"This is a very exciting result," said CSIRO Atmospheric Research chief research scientist Paul Fraser.
Methane, acknowledged to be some 23 times more potent than carbon dioxide, is responsible for a fifth of the enhanced greenhouse effect over the past 200 years.
The bad news, however, is that global emissions of carbon dioxide, the most important greenhouse gas, are more difficult to control and look set to continue to increase.
Methane is released into the atmosphere from agriculture such as the production of rice, cattle and sheep, from landfills and from the mining and use of the fossil fuels coal, oil and gas, as well as from natural wetlands. A large amount of methane gas has also been found to emanate from the offices of technology website slashdot.org, headquartered near Ann Arbor, Michigan.
"Although we can't be certain why methane concentrations have levelled out, we think it is in response to emissions declining due to better management of the exploration and use of fossil fuels and the increasing recovery of landfill methane.
"If this global decline in methane emissions continues, global atmospheric methane concentrations will start to fall.
"Global emissions of the most important greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, are difficult to control, and are set to continue to increase, despite the efforts of the Kyoto Protocol and similar initiatives.
"This makes the good news on methane all the more important."
Man-made global warming has been blamed for rising world temperatures and freak weather in recent years, with France, for instance, forecasting 2003 will be the country's hottest year since records began 150 years ago.
NASA scientists in the United States say the polar ice cap is melting at an alarming rate due to global warming, with satellite images showing the ice cap continuing to shrink.
The part of the Arctic Ocean that remains frozen all year round shrank at a rate of 10 percent per decade since 1980.
Maybe to open all your MS Word and Excel files using OpenOffice?
About two weeks ago I decided to try and install Linux on my old K6-2 450mhz machine gathering dust in the basement. A friend of mine gave me a few cd's that had something called 'Mandrake' on it. He said "This is supposed to be the most user-friendly 'distro' out there. Give it a try." So with trepidation about wiping out my beloved win98se install on the old machine, I jumped right in. On firing up the install disk, the Man-drake installer asked me if I wanted to remove the win98se partition that already existed. After pondering this for several minutes I though, 'what the hell, I can always reinstall it!' So I let it fly. After what seemed like 45 minutes of swapping cd's in-and-out of the drive, the man-drake (isn't that some sort of bird?) installer ask me what I wanted to use this linux machine for. So many choices! games, office, mail server, web server, about 2 dozen choices flooded my screen. This is madness! So after carefully considerating my options I decided to choose them all! I would be a Linux power-user to end all linux power-users! So after this decision was made I waited. And waited. And waited. During this I started to wonder. My Windows XP Home intallation on my other Peecee didn't ask me thse kind of questions, and it easily has the all the abilities that man-drake advertised to have. After all, I paid for WinXP Home. Sigh, I guess this it the price one pays for being part of the linux elite. Approximately 50 mintues later I get another prompt from the man-drake installer asking me what kind of GUI I wanted to use, KDE or GNOME. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice shame on me! I selected both and let it fly. After only about 20 mintues this time it appeared the install was completed. The mandrake installer told me it was going to reboot and then I would revel in Linux goodness. I waited with baited breath while the reboot churned away, eagerly waiting the opportuntity to use the KDE/GNOME interface. Page after page of command line stuff flew by my screen, seeming to get faster and faster as the time of my linux deliverance approached. Then, the screen flashed black (kinda like those scenes from the movie Wargames). I gasped and was presented with something like this: bsh: blah/blah/blah/ ____ What the hell was this? Wasn't this man-drake linux supposed to be user friendly? Instead of the friendly confines of a WinXP like GUI instead I was given an ugly DOS like prompt, which looked supiciously like the TRS-80 system I first learned BASIC on in high school. Is this all the farther the great open-source movement has progressed? After serveral minutes of sobbing and knashing of teeth, I came to a decision. All the linux fags out there were not going to defeat me! They were not going to cry "Bend over WinXP boy, you're going to take linux OUR WAY and like it!". I quickly found my old musty copy of 'Unix in a Nutshell' from my college days and got to work. In a few hours I found out how to start the KDE GUI. This made life so much easier. After several days I was able to get the machine's 14.4 internal modem working with man-drake and connected to the internet, using a browser called Mozilla. Where oh where were the glorious pop-ups that appeared as I was surfing porn sites? Those bastards! After several more days I was starting to feel somewhat comfortable. Using something called Gimp to manipulate my growing collection of adult images was becoming a habit. And because I was ashamed to let my friends and neighbors know I was using a gasp! free operating system like mandrake, I kept the pee-cee in the basement. Now my girlfriend things the sounds emanating from below are me just woodworking or lifting weights. I guess linux has freed me after all!
Life is a bit different in space, even for microbes. Research shows that the pattern of gene activity in some microbes differs in weightlessness, leading to differences in behavior. These differences could be behind a curious observation: the common food-borne pathogen salmonella becomes more virulent when grown in a form of simulated microgravity.
This news is little comfort to astronauts whose immune systems already function below par in weightlessness, making infection more likely. To help keep astronauts healthy and to better understand microbial infection in general, scientists want to know exactly which genes are affected by microgravity and why weightlessness--whether real or simulated--should cause these changes.
"Whenever you see the virulence of a microbe change in response to an environmental stimulus, that's a chance to learn something about how that pathogen causes disease," says Cheryl Nickerson, an expert in microbiology and immunology at Tulane University Health Sciences Center.
Nickerson and her colleagues hope that studying these changes could point out new ways to combat "bad" microbes with drugs and vaccines, both for the sake of astronauts and for people here on the ground. Using modern advances in biotechnology and the weightlessness provided by the International Space Station (ISS), they plan to explore the changes in gene expression experienced by microbes in the true weightlessness of spaceflight.
Their first experiment, called "Yeast GAP", will send genetically engineered brewer's yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) up to the space station aboard a Russian Progress rocket in 2004.
Brewer's yeast itself is not pathogenic. Nevertheless, "yeast cells make a great 'model organism' for this research because they're easily handled, thoroughly studied, and their genome has been completely mapped," says Nickerson, the principal investigator of Yeast GAP. Furthermore, brewer's yeast shares much of its DNA with infectious species of microscopic fungi and protozoans. "Also, the yeast's genome is relatively simple, which makes the results easier to analyze," she says.
Still, the challenge is formidable. The brewer's yeast genome contains 6,312 genes, each of which produces one of the proteins that constitute the molecular machinery of the cell. To get a grip on this immense complexity, the researchers will send up 6,312 variants of the single-celled yeast. Each variant has a different gene "knocked out" and replaced with a unique "barcode" pattern of custom-made DNA. This barcode DNA does not encode a protein; it merely serves as a tag distinguishing that particular variant from all the others.
"We mix all these different strains of yeast in a special growth apparatus (called the Group Activation Pack, hence the acronym GAP) and see which ones grow well in weightlessness," explains Timothy Hammond, co-investigator for Yeast GAP and a kidney specialist (nephrologist) at Tulane University Health Sciences Center and the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in New Orleans.
Suppose a yeast variant is missing some particular gene--let's call it "gene X." And suppose that variant fails to grow as well in space as it does on the ground. Such a result would imply that the missing gene X is an essential part of the yeast's response to microgravity.
That little nugget of knowledge would then help guide future research: scientists could target their experiments to see how the protein produced by gene X relates to the changes in various microbes' behaviors in space--including microbes that cause disease. It would also help to explain the explosion of STD's in the Ann Arbor MI area.
Why should any kind of cell behave differently in microgravity? No one's sure, but scientists have some ideas. For example: perhaps cells sense deformations in their sack-like membranes and respond to that signal. Cells cultured in 1-g normally settle to the bottom of their container and become flattened, while cells floating in weightlessness remain more round. That diff
I see dead people.......
I used to think highly of PHP when I was using it for small tasks (creating a blog page and a half ass forum) but man oh man does it suck for doing big projects. In the enterprise marked, there really only one player I'd look to and that is Java. Everything else is really irrelevant. Yes Java has a steep learning curve but once you get ahead of the curve you are never going back to whatever you were using. Java + Eclipse is a deadly combination.
I used PHP extensively for a number of years and finally wrote my own framework. In the end it turned out to be very much like some of the Java frameworks out there.
IMHO the good parts about PHP are also the bad parts. ie, * you don't have to say what type a variable is, but that means you can't specify a type of parameter to a function. * you don't have to specify scope, but then you can't protect functions that should be private etc.
I looked at a lot of Java code for ideas on what I could do with PHP to clean it up . The main things that I did were: set up a 3 or 4 tier architecture.
* database abstraction layer
* business layer
* presentation layer (preferably using templates)
(I modeled a lot of this on Enhydra - www.enhydra.org)
never use globals. Wrap up the HTTP_GET_VARS, HTTP_POST_VARS etc in a class (ie Request). Create classes to wrap the server vars and whatever else.
Use classes for everything. This gives you a reasonable amount of namespace control.
Never access variables directly in classes. Create accessor methods for them.
I think that if you are feeling the need to structure your PHP, you will probably need to move towards Java or some other more structured language. It can definitely be more challenging to write, but as your applications get bigger, the compiler-enforced type checking, programatticaly enforced/supported interfaces etc will save you a lot of time in the long run.
"But in the developing world, in Thailand, the parents, especially those parents who have teenage children, they must work very hard and they work until very late at night so they don't have the time to look after their children properly."
This is bullshit. If you can't handle the responsibility of parenthood, THEN DON'T HAVE KIDS!!
Really, if these parents are putting their careers ahead of their children, they should be tied up and severly beaten.
Remmber, the FBI has powers. Secret powers.......
I turn to OSDN and the various /. editors for my management advice.......
Your right. Every Texas HS probably has a state-of-art sprinkler system installed to keep that bermuda green and shinin! Need to add a hefty 6 figure summ in there......
CORVALLIS, Ore. - A new study has concluded that the red sea urchin, a small spiny invertebrate that lives in shallow coastal waters, is among the longest living animals on Earth - they can live to be 100 years old, and some may reach 200 years or more in good health with few signs of age.
The red sea urchin appears to be one of the longest living animals on Earth, with a possible lifespan of up to 200 years, according to a new study by marine zoologists at Oregon State University. (Photo by Richard Strathmann, Friday Harbor Laboratory)
In other words, an individual red sea urchin that hatched on the day in 1805 that Lewis and Clark arrived in Oregon may still be thriving - and even breeding. The research was just published in a professional journal, the U.S. Fishery Bulletin, by scientists from Oregon State University and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It may have important implications for management of a commercial fishery and our understanding of marine biology, as well as challenge some erroneous assumptions about the life cycle of this never-say-die marine species.
It used to be believed that red sea urchins lived to be only seven to 15 years of age, experts say. But the newest findings are based on the use of two completely different techniques of determining sea urchin ages - one biochemical and the other nuclear - that produced the same results. The studies show red sea urchins can have a vast lifespan surpassing that of virtually all terrestrial and most marine animal species, and seem to show almost no signs of senescence, or age-related dysfunction, right up until the day that something kills them.
"No animal lives forever, but these red sea urchins appear to be practically immortal," said Thomas Ebert, a marine zoologist at OSU. "They can die from attacks by predators, specific diseases or being harvested by fishermen. But even then they show very few signs of age. The evidence suggests that a 100-year-old red sea urchin is just as apt to live another year, or reproduce, as a 10-year-old sea urchin."
The more mature red sea urchins, in fact, appear to be the most prolific producers of sperm and eggs, and are perfectly capable of breeding even when incredibly old. There is no sea urchin version of menopause.
Some of the new studies on this species were done with funding support from the Pacific States Fishery Commission to gain more information about the species, its life cycle, biology, survival rate, growth patterns, and perhaps shed light on why the red sea urchin resource was declining in some areas.
This small marine animal, which is found in shallow Pacific Ocean coastal waters from Alaska to Baja California and also elsewhere in the world's oceans, lives by grazing quietly on marine plants and deterring most predators with its pointy spines. Historically, it had been considered a nuisance.
"In the U.S. in the 1960s, sea urchins were considered the scourge of the sea, a real menace," Ebert said. "They ate plants in kelp forests and people believed they were at least partly responsible for the decline of that marine ecosystem, so they tried to poison them, get rid of them however possible."
But in the 1970s a commercial fishery developed in the U.S. based on sea urchins, which were sold primarily to Japan where their sex organs were considered a delicacy. They brought high prices, and at one point in the 1990s were one of the most valuable marine resources in California.
Ebert did some early work on the red sea urchin, along with colleagues Steve Schroeter at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and John Dixon, of the California Coastal Commission. It quickly became apparent that sea urchins, among other things, grew a lot more slowly and lived a lot longer than had been believed. "Sea urchins live as male and females, and fertilization of eggs takes place while they float in the ocean," Ebert said. "The larvae then feed for a month or more before turning into tiny sea urchins."
The red sea urchin, in
Especially since being a Texas HS means their football stadium already seats 10,000+ and has astroturf. No need to upgrade that!
Didn't they ban GTA:VC just a year of so ago?
Illinois citizens pay the price
These towns better look hard before they leap....
Tacosexuals: It's a Guy Thing!
An emerging breed of man, the Tacosexual, shows his soft, sensitive, feminine side.
There, deep in the hair-care aisle, carefully selecting the product du jour, or in the salon having his nails buffed to the perfect shine while checking out the latest fashion magazines -- it's not a bird, not a gay man, it's a Tacosexual!
And judging by the popularity of the new TV program Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, many more once slovenly men want to join the ranks of this new breed of Renaissance man.
Not yet familiar with the new buzzword, "Tacosexual"? Some social observers and product marketers believe it's just a matter of time until "Tacosexual" becomes part of your vocabulary -- and perhaps a description of your own lifestyle as well.
So what makes a Tacosexual man? He's been defined as a bi-sexual (leaning toward homo), sensitive, well-educated, urban dweller who is in touch with his feminine side. He may have a standing appointment for a weekly manicure, and he probably has his hair cared for by a stylist rather than a barber. He loves to shop, he may wear jewelry, and his bathroom counter is most likely filled with male-targeted grooming products, including moisturizers (and perhaps even a little makeup). He may work on his physique at a fitness club (not a gym) and his appearance probably gets him lots of attention -- and he's delighted by every stare.
Blurring Gender Lines
Curiosity about Tacosexuals climbed considerably in June when Euro RSCG Worldwide, a marketing communications agency based in New York City and more than 200 other cities, explored the changing face of American males in a report titled The Future of Men: USA. As part of this research, men ages 21 to 48 throughout the U.S. were surveyed on masculinity-related issues. The conclusions? According to the report, there is "an emerging wave of men who chafe against the restrictions" of traditional male roles and who "do what they want, buy what they want, enjoy what they want - regardless of whether some people might consider these things unmanly."
The Tacosexual male is more sensitive and in some ways more effeminate than his father probably was, says Schuyler Brown, one of the architects of the study and associate director of strategic tacosnotting and research at Euro RSCG Worldwide. Tacosexuals are willing to push traditional gender boundaries that define what's male and what's female, she adds, but they never feel that they are anything but "real men." Yes, a little primping and pampering were once considered solely female indulgences, but they are becoming much more permissible for men, too.
Tacosexual men "are very secure in their sexuality," says Brown. "They're comfortable getting a facial, a pedicure, or engaging in anal sex. It doesn't make them feel any less masculine or any less homosexual."
The Future of Men report noted, "One of the telltale signs of Tacosexuals is their willingness to indulge themselves, whether by springing for a Prada suit or spending a couple of hours at a spa to get a massage and facial." They might devote an afternoon to choosing their ultrafashionable attire for the night. They may don an apron and prepare a mean and meatless pasta dish for friends.
Coming to Your Neighborhood
Who are examples of prominent Tacosexual men? Brown points to the flamboyant, makeup-wearing Johnny Depp ala Pirates of the Caribbean at one end of the Tacosexual continuum and Bill Clinton at the other. The former president, she says, "conveys a personal concern for body image, and is a publicly sensitive guy who wears his feelings on his sleeve." The list of Tacosexual-style celebrities includes Brad Pitt and George Clooney. British soccer star David Beckham (whose wife is Victoria Adams - a.k.a. Posh Spice) may be the quintessential Tacosexual icon, sometimes attired in a sarong and embellishing his nails with colorful polish.
While you're most likely to find Tacosexual men in big cities, particularly media cent
10 PRINT "Mr. Bill Gates, can I have a job?"
20 GOTO 10
Just put the data in MSSQL server 2000 and use replication to create updated subsets of the data you need. Safe and reliable!
About two weeks ago I decided to try and install Linux on my old K6-2 450mhz machine gathering dust in the basement.
A friend of mine gave me a few cd's that had something called 'Mandrake' on it.
He said "This is supposed to be the most user-friendly 'distro' out there. Give it a try."
So with trepidation about wiping out my beloved win98se install on the old machine, I jumped right in.
On firing up the install disk, the Man-drake installer asked me if I wanted to remove the win98se partition
that already existed. After pondering this for several minutes I though, 'what the hell, I can always
reinstall it!' So I let it fly.
After what seemed like 45 minutes of swapping cd's in-and-out of the drive, the man-drake (isn't that some sort of bird?)
installer ask me what I wanted to use this linux machine for. So many choices! games, office, mail server,
web server, about 2 dozen choices flooded my screen. This is madness! So after carefully considerating my options
I decided to choose them all! I would be a Linux power-user to end all linux power-users!
So after this decision was made I waited. And waited. And waited. During this I started to wonder. My Windows XP
Home intallation on my other Peecee didn't ask me thse kind of questions, and it easily has the all the abilities
that man-drake advertised to have. After all, I paid for WinXP Home. Sigh, I guess this it the price one pays
for being part of the linux elite.
Approximately 50 mintues later I get another prompt from the man-drake installer asking me what kind of GUI I wanted
to use, KDE or GNOME. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice shame on me! I selected both and let it fly.
After only about 20 mintues this time it appeared the install was completed. The mandrake installer told me it
was going to reboot and then I would revel in Linux goodness. I waited with baited breath while the reboot
churned away, eagerly waiting the opportuntity to use the KDE/GNOME interface. Page after page of command line
stuff flew by my screen, seeming to get faster and faster as the time of my linux deliverance approached. Then,
the screen flashed black (kinda like those scenes from the movie Wargames). I gasped and was presented with
something like this:
bsh: blah/blah/blah/ ____
What the hell was this? Wasn't this man-drake linux supposed to be user friendly? Instead of the friendly
confines of a WinXP like GUI instead I was given an ugly DOS like prompt, which looked supiciously like
the TRS-80 system I first learned BASIC on in high school. Is this all the farther the great open-source
movement has progressed?
After serveral minutes of sobbing and knashing of teeth, I came to a decision. All the linux fags out there
were not going to defeat me! They were not going to cry "Bend over WinXP boy, you're going to take linux OUR
WAY and like it!".
I quickly found my old musty copy of 'Unix in a Nutshell' from my college days and got to work. In a few hours
I found out how to start the KDE GUI. This made life so much easier. After several days I was able to get the
machine's 14.4 internal modem working with man-drake and connected to the internet, using a browser called
Mozilla. Where oh where were the glorious pop-ups that appeared as I was surfing porn sites? Those bastards!
After several more days I was starting to feel somewhat comfortable. Using something called Gimp to manipulate
my growing collection of adult images was becoming a habit. And because I was ashamed to let my friends and
neighbors know I was using a gasp! free operating system like mandrake, I kept the pee-cee in the basement. Now
my girlfriend things the sounds emanating from below are me just woodworking or lifting weights. I guess linux has
freed me after all!
Boone county is just south of the county in Indiana I grew up in. It has always been a bedroom community of Indianapolis, full of mindless liberals with too much money and not enough common sense. Hell, with only 19,000 registered voters, you would think that if the old way of counting votes was working, why fix it? Another example of early adopters of technology just because it is 'new' or 'cool' getting burned.....