Dammit! Wake up! 66% on right, 34% on left. Still a significant portion and unlikely to change in the case of the UK due to the expense of rebuilding junctions.
Doesn't matter, early morning syndrome struck and the figure is 44% drive on the left, 66% on the right. My bad. 72% of the world's roads are for left hand drive cars.
"After watching the video, the real cause of accidents is clear: they drive on the wrong side of the road!"
Amusing although more than half (66%) of the world's population actually does drive on the left but that is besides the point.
NZ has a real problem with bad drivers. People don't have any clue about stopping distances so tailgating is rampant so the number of related accidents is very high. The road surfaces aren't very good, cars aren't kept in good condition as the Warrant Of Fitness is cursory at best compared with say the MOT in the UK. I was appalled when I first moved here to find that the tyres on my recently bought car were OK as far as the WOF was concerned because they had tread on 80% of the surface (bald around the edges due to misaligned tracking) and passed just fine. The car would slide and aquaplane in the rain so I replaced the whole lot.
Basically, bad road awareness and poorly maintained cars is the main problem. Oh, and no insurance is required, not even third party so if someone crashes into you and they are uninsured you are stuffed. I bought fully comp insurance because of this.
The only real blessing is that the speed limit is so low (100 kph or 62 MPH max even on the few stretches of motorway) but even so, NZ drivers are scary!
JustShootMe said "I like how you think. There's something to be said for finding a niche."
The important thing is to find something which has a good population of the opposite sex. Macho sports - not a good idea. Something a bit more arty like acting, singing, skating, dancing etc will give you a much better chance. You might even do better with someone significantly younger too so don't worry about trying to meet someone your age. Available women my age when I was out there (early 30's) were all damaged goods (divorced manhaters it seemed) but with a bit of maturity and a stable income you can be very attractive to someone a decade or so your junior.
Once you enjoy your new hobby and forget about trying to get a woman you just never know when you'll stumble into one. They're not all going to be the perfect one but eventually you'll stop transmitting desperation and relax. You'll find yourself lying in bed with someone one morning, with your child just waking up in the next room, and wonder how that happened:-D
Why limit yourself to geeks? I spent years at various Universities trying and failing to meet women and it wasn't until I started doing stuff outside of my normal group that I did. I took up figure skating of all things and met my future wife. Now you may ask why a red blooded male would take up figure skating. Same reason I did cookery at school. No red blooded male would do them so there were loads of females and no competition.
Get out, take up a social activity. A friend of mine in a similar situation took up dancing and ended up meeting lots of girls too.
I've disabled Java in Safari and doubt I'll see any difference since so few sites use Java applets these days. This is of course unrelated to Javascript which is much more disruptive when disabled.
Yeah, some of these are pretty old. I do remember working on a machine where the compiler wasn't smart enough to make the code really fast so I would get the.s file out and hand edit the assembly code. This resulted in some pretty spectacular speedups (8x for instance). Mind you, more recently I was forced to do something similar when working with some SSE code written for the Intel chips which was strangely slower on AMD. Turned out it was because the Intel chips (PIII and P4) were running on a 32 bit bus and memory access in bytes was pretty cheap. The Athlons were on the 64 bit EV6 bus and so struggled more so were slower. Once I added some code to lift the data from memory in 64 bit chunks and then do the reordering it needed using SSE the AMD chips were faster than the Intel ones.
Sometimes I think we have lost more than we have gained though with our reliance on compilers being smarter. It was great fun getting in there with lists of instruction latencies and manually overlapping memory loads and calculations. Also when it comes to squeezing the most out of machines with few resources, I remember being amazed when someone managed to code a reasonably competent Chess game into 1K on the Sinclair ZX81. Remember too that the ZX81 had to store the program, variables, and display all in that 1K. For this reason, the chess board was up at the left top of the screen. It was the funniest thing to be writing code on a 1K ZX81 and as the memory got full you could see less and less of your program until the memory was completely full and you could only see one character on screen....
Neomonk said "I first installed an early version of slackware, back in 95 or so. I don't quite remember how many floppies it was"
I installed about the same time. It was 40 floppies for a full install. I downloaded them from sunsite onto my SPARCStation at work which fortunately had a floppy drive. dd them onto the floppies and then off home with them.
The install was based on the 1.0 kernel and I was putting it on because I had been working on some code on my SPARC and the SGI Indigo we had in the lab and wanted to compile it on a 486DX33 PC I had at home. Unfortunately, the machine was running Windows 3.1 and the Microsoft C compiler I had simply didn't want to compile the code. That and the lack of any decent network capabilities made me look at Linux. It took a couple of goes but I got the machine up and was able to get X going in 1024x768 interlaced mode. Compiled my code and it was good.
I used the machine to develop new software I intended to run on bigger machines, plus I wrote my PhD thesis using LaTeX since I was able to get the entire text 10x over on a single floppy so I could carry the disc to the office and keep a backup on two different sites. Shortly I upgraded the HD to 200MB, found some more RAM to get it up to 20MB from the original 8, added a 14.4 modem, Sound Blaster card and CD-ROM and it was really going somewhere.
Amazing how much power that little machine gave me.
OK, so WinCE/Mobile/whatever the hell isn't really Windows. It won't run all your apps. Linux won't either but is much more functional than Windows Mobile. Where will this leave MS with their strategy of forcing companies to bundle Windows instead of Linux on their Netbooks? What about the next OLPC which isn't supposed to have an Intel compatible processor either? Is this all a strategy to spoil MS's fun? I sure hope so!
"If we already had it all figured out, it would get pretty boring very quickly."
Indeed. One of the great attractions of science in general is the fact that there is always something new to learn. The day you make your first discovery, solve a problem that has stumped other researchers for years, those are the days you live for.
Other times, its the whole "that's funny" thing where you simply notice something odd and it leads you in a completely unanticipated direction. The primary difference between people who go into science and those who avoid it is that scientists aren't worried by being proven wrong about something (at least they shouldn't be) since it is probable that what you discovered is way more interesting. There are also those people who like to think they know everything that is ever going to be known and who will shun and deny knowledge that contradicts their beliefs. They just love when scientists find something they didn't expect because they think it means science is wrong. Fact is, science is always wrong about something and admitting being wrong is the first step to learning more. If you can't admit you're wrong, well, you're learning nothing and just consuming resources until something else consumes you. But I'm sure Jebus loves you so don't feel too bad......
While I agree that 2GB being non-upgradable in the MacBook Air is an oversight, to be honest 2GB is still a fairly hefty amount of RAM. My old MacBook Pro has 2GB and rarely uses more than half of it under Leopard. In fact, Leopard on my old iBook G4 with 640MB works pretty well so 2GB is plenty for OS X. On the other hand, if you're talking about Vista then 2GB is a bit tight. It is funny when people compare specs between PCs and Macs and don't consider that the difference in performance between OS X and Vista can make a much bigger difference than whether one has 4GB or the other has 2GB.
I fully expect my MacBook Pro (just coming up to 3 years old) to serve me well for another few years at least before it needs to be replaced. Not one of my PC laptops has ever lasted me more than a year since I am very hard on my machines. As you say, I wouldn't trust Dell to be able to make a machine that can withstand the daily use my laptops get put through.
I have a pair of Netgear adapters because my ADSL modem is in my living room and the room I wanted to put my office in was at the other end of the house. Previously, I have drilled holes and run ethernet or bridged my wireless base stations and that worked OK but this time I just couldn't get a connection to hold up and I didn't want to mess with long wires. With network over mains I can now have two separate base stations running giving me much better coverage in the house. File transfers over the mains connection is quicker than my 54G wireless and I stream HD movies from my Mac mini to my Apple TV via the mains, then over wireless to the ATV.
arelas said: "Impressive, 8MB ram in 94...I think I only had 4 and that cost me dearly."
I was able to upgrade it a few years later to 20MB as I found four 4MB memory sticks. 1MB sticks were pretty easy to come by but the 4MB ones were pretty rare. Linux would run fairly well in 4MB but 8 was definitely better and with 20MB it flew. I had a 386 laptop which only had 2MB and I was able to get a very bare install of Slackware onto it just for shits and giggles of course. Using PLIP I was able to network it to my 486 and use it as a terminal. X was too much for it to manage mind you but it was cool just for command line stuff. I even had a VT100 emulator on my Psion 3a. Since the 486 had the 14.4 modem, I was able to share my internet connection from it to my growing selection of rescued machines. By 1996 I was running a SUN SPARCStation 1 with OpenBSD as my main work machine. I managed to get 64MB of RAM for it, a 19" monitor and it was a very nice environment to write my PhD thesis up using LaTeX. I really miss the Type 4 SUN Keyboard and optical mouse.
I started out with Slackware in late 1994 on a 486DX33 with 8MB of RAM. It was amazing. 40 floppies to install it since I had no CDROM drive. I bought a 14.4 modem and had access to my university e-mail (pine FTW). X11, gcc, Netscape, FTP, the lot. All on a machine with 200MB of disc. I reckon I could function quite happily on that machine even today apart from Netscape which would have to be replaced with Lynx I guess.
By 2000, a Linux distro was incredibly easy to install by comparison. Today it is even easier. You barely even need to worry about compatibility.
SolemnLord said "Is it as quick as running XP? Well, no, but don't forget that XP is a seven-year-old operating system that required a Pentium II at release."
You know, you should try running the latest XP SP3 fully patched on a PII. XP today is not the same as XP seven years ago. For a laugh, I installed the original XP release under VirtualPC on my PPC Mac (which runs Win2K SP4 happily) and XP was OK, until I updated. With all updates applied it was impossibly slow.
Of course, a modern netbook, while slow compared with bigger machines, still has plenty of power to run XP and it works OK in 512MB still. Win7 is still going to require more than that and you also have to factor in updates that will inevitably arrive and will slow your machine down until it becomes unusable. XP or Linux is still the safest choice.
All sequencing methods have error rates and this is very low given the read lengths they are looking at. Every method currently used goes for multiple coverage where the same piece of sequence is run multiple times. Read errors will be somewhat randomly (I say somewhat because some techniques produce more errors later in the read) so by reading the same sequence multiple times you can exclude the errors and build a 100% correct sequence. The biggest problem with current next gen sequencing techniques is that they have short reads (Illumina/Solexa are about 36bp) and this makes sequence assembly a challenge. You need high levels of coverage to detect errors versus SNPs (real mutations) and will also have problems traversing repetitive regions of sequence. 4000bp reads, even with errors, will help enormously and reduce the complexity of de-novo assembly (assembling without a template to map against) so we will be able to sequence many more species accurately and quickly.
Last year, I woke up and found that my eye was full of floaters and I was seeing flashes. I quickly checked for those symptoms using Google which led me to a page on Wikipedia describing the symptoms of a detached retina. I called my wife down from upstairs and told her we were going to the hospital. When a doctor checked my eye, I had indeed suffered a posterior vitreous detachment which had ripped several chunks of retina away. I was immediately treated with a laser and the doctor told me that if I hadn't been so prompt it is likely I would have gone blind in that eye. I have had to have several other surgeries (more laser treatment, vitrectomy and finally a membrane peel) and am on the road to recovery. I will likely get a cataract which will be treated by lens replacement but at least I can still see.
Of course, my symptoms were quite specific so I can understand people with quite general symptoms thinking they have cancer or something.
"I think if a company wants to force someone not to work in their area of expertise for a year then they should be forced to compensate that person for a year. They should match Apple's compensation and benefits and the guy doesn't have to work. That seems fair."
In the UK this is referred to as 'Garden leave'. Basically, if the company wants to enforce the non-compete, they have to continue to pay you even while you sit in the garden and watch the grass grow. If they won't pay you not to work then they have no reasonable way to limit you because they simply cannot expect you to not work in your field of expertise. I was in this situation at one point where the company I was working for couldn't pay me the money they owed so I went off and consulted in direct violation of my non-compete but since they couldn't pay me not to they were SOL. Of course, lawyers may well disagree with this interpretation. Bastards.
I agree that Commodore BASIC was horrible. I first learned BASIC on a Commodore PET 3008 and it was very limited unless you started POKEing into memory. Sinclair BASIC for the ZX81 (my first computer) wasn't much better. The best BASIC of the era came on the BBC Micro which supported REPEAT UNTIL loops, PROCs and so on so you didn't have to write code full of GOTOs. Oh, and it was easily the fastest machine on the block for years after release despite being based on the 6502 just as the CBM machines were although it did run at 2Mhz instead of 1Mhz of the CBMs. In my neck of the woods, the BBC was what people got if they really wanted a computer and the C64 was what they got if they wanted a games machine.
Back when I did my Palaeontology degree (admittedly this was back in the 80s) radiocarbon dating was only supposed to be accurate to about 80,000 years anyway. If you wanted to measure longer times you needed to use other methods or simply go with stratigraphical dating where you worked on the basis of relative ages based on fast evolving fossil species such as ammonites.
I used to have uncapped broadband in the UK. Sure, it was only 1Mbps which made it challenging to get any decently large files down but there was no upper limit imposed. Now I live in NZ and it is very different. At first I thought it was great because I was getting 3Mbps but there was a 1.5GB cap at which point you got dropped down to dialup speed. I chewed through the 1.5GB in less than a week. Upgraded to 5GB limit and found my speed dropped to 1Mbps and I still managed to use it all. Upped again to 10GB and each month I chew through that and sometimes have to put up with a few days at dialup speed until I tick over to the next month and the counter resets.
All this talk of 250GB limits makes me sick. I can't even consider regular movie downloads in SD let alone the few HD ones on offer. To make matters worse, bloody Blu-ray went and won the format war so I can't even buy US discs without worrying about them being flipping region A when HD DVD was always region free so my HD projector is somewhat starved of material.
Parallel programming isn't hard. It is quite a natural way to express your code. The problem is with the languages that people choose to use. Anything based on a sequential language isn't going to work well. Back in the early 90's there was a lot of research done into trying to automatically parallelise sequential code to take advantage of SIMD and MIMD computing platforms. Personally, I wrote code on Thinking Machines CM-200, MasPar MP-1 and MP-2 all of which were SIMD and used a language based off C where the normal data types had plural versions to distribute data across the array. This was reasonably effective for some algorithms and the natural offshoot is the MMX/SSE type vector types on modern CPUs which are programmed in a similar way. MIMD programming was somewhat different and the closest you get these days is threading or MPI but these sit on top of traditional languages and are pretty nasty. Back in the late 80's there were transputers which were programmed in OCCAM. This language was naturally parallel and easy to use. Of course, it was a new language so people avoided it but if you wrote code in OCCAM it was very fine grained parallelism and this made it very simple to serialise back onto a smaller number of CPUs. CSP based languages (Ada was another one) would be a good way to work with many cores but I'm damn sure we'll end up with more half baked sequential code with bits of parallelism welded in.
Parallel programming has really suffered in the last few decades such that I feel the current state of play (lots of cheap nodes in a cluster hooked together with ethernet and programmed using MPI or similar) is pretty desperate. Cheap, but nasty.
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Dammit! Wake up! 66% on right, 34% on left. Still a significant portion and unlikely to change in the case of the UK due to the expense of rebuilding junctions.
Doesn't matter, early morning syndrome struck and the figure is 44% drive on the left, 66% on the right. My bad. 72% of the world's roads are for left hand drive cars.
"After watching the video, the real cause of accidents is clear: they drive on the wrong side of the road!"
Amusing although more than half (66%) of the world's population actually does drive on the left but that is besides the point.
NZ has a real problem with bad drivers. People don't have any clue about stopping distances so tailgating is rampant so the number of related accidents is very high. The road surfaces aren't very good, cars aren't kept in good condition as the Warrant Of Fitness is cursory at best compared with say the MOT in the UK. I was appalled when I first moved here to find that the tyres on my recently bought car were OK as far as the WOF was concerned because they had tread on 80% of the surface (bald around the edges due to misaligned tracking) and passed just fine. The car would slide and aquaplane in the rain so I replaced the whole lot.
Basically, bad road awareness and poorly maintained cars is the main problem. Oh, and no insurance is required, not even third party so if someone crashes into you and they are uninsured you are stuffed. I bought fully comp insurance because of this.
The only real blessing is that the speed limit is so low (100 kph or 62 MPH max even on the few stretches of motorway) but even so, NZ drivers are scary!
JustShootMe said "I like how you think. There's something to be said for finding a niche."
The important thing is to find something which has a good population of the opposite sex. Macho sports - not a good idea. Something a bit more arty like acting, singing, skating, dancing etc will give you a much better chance. You might even do better with someone significantly younger too so don't worry about trying to meet someone your age. Available women my age when I was out there (early 30's) were all damaged goods (divorced manhaters it seemed) but with a bit of maturity and a stable income you can be very attractive to someone a decade or so your junior.
Once you enjoy your new hobby and forget about trying to get a woman you just never know when you'll stumble into one. They're not all going to be the perfect one but eventually you'll stop transmitting desperation and relax. You'll find yourself lying in bed with someone one morning, with your child just waking up in the next room, and wonder how that happened :-D
Why limit yourself to geeks? I spent years at various Universities trying and failing to meet women and it wasn't until I started doing stuff outside of my normal group that I did. I took up figure skating of all things and met my future wife. Now you may ask why a red blooded male would take up figure skating. Same reason I did cookery at school. No red blooded male would do them so there were loads of females and no competition.
Get out, take up a social activity. A friend of mine in a similar situation took up dancing and ended up meeting lots of girls too.
Other than Windows itself, are they specifying what other malware needs to be installed too?
I've disabled Java in Safari and doubt I'll see any difference since so few sites use Java applets these days. This is of course unrelated to Javascript which is much more disruptive when disabled.
Yeah, some of these are pretty old. I do remember working on a machine where the compiler wasn't smart enough to make the code really fast so I would get the .s file out and hand edit the assembly code. This resulted in some pretty spectacular speedups (8x for instance). Mind you, more recently I was forced to do something similar when working with some SSE code written for the Intel chips which was strangely slower on AMD. Turned out it was because the Intel chips (PIII and P4) were running on a 32 bit bus and memory access in bytes was pretty cheap. The Athlons were on the 64 bit EV6 bus and so struggled more so were slower. Once I added some code to lift the data from memory in 64 bit chunks and then do the reordering it needed using SSE the AMD chips were faster than the Intel ones.
Sometimes I think we have lost more than we have gained though with our reliance on compilers being smarter. It was great fun getting in there with lists of instruction latencies and manually overlapping memory loads and calculations. Also when it comes to squeezing the most out of machines with few resources, I remember being amazed when someone managed to code a reasonably competent Chess game into 1K on the Sinclair ZX81. Remember too that the ZX81 had to store the program, variables, and display all in that 1K. For this reason, the chess board was up at the left top of the screen. It was the funniest thing to be writing code on a 1K ZX81 and as the memory got full you could see less and less of your program until the memory was completely full and you could only see one character on screen....
Neomonk said "I first installed an early version of slackware, back in 95 or so. I don't quite remember how many floppies it was"
I installed about the same time. It was 40 floppies for a full install. I downloaded them from sunsite onto my SPARCStation at work which fortunately had a floppy drive. dd them onto the floppies and then off home with them.
The install was based on the 1.0 kernel and I was putting it on because I had been working on some code on my SPARC and the SGI Indigo we had in the lab and wanted to compile it on a 486DX33 PC I had at home. Unfortunately, the machine was running Windows 3.1 and the Microsoft C compiler I had simply didn't want to compile the code. That and the lack of any decent network capabilities made me look at Linux. It took a couple of goes but I got the machine up and was able to get X going in 1024x768 interlaced mode. Compiled my code and it was good.
I used the machine to develop new software I intended to run on bigger machines, plus I wrote my PhD thesis using LaTeX since I was able to get the entire text 10x over on a single floppy so I could carry the disc to the office and keep a backup on two different sites. Shortly I upgraded the HD to 200MB, found some more RAM to get it up to 20MB from the original 8, added a 14.4 modem, Sound Blaster card and CD-ROM and it was really going somewhere.
Amazing how much power that little machine gave me.
OK, so WinCE/Mobile/whatever the hell isn't really Windows. It won't run all your apps. Linux won't either but is much more functional than Windows Mobile. Where will this leave MS with their strategy of forcing companies to bundle Windows instead of Linux on their Netbooks? What about the next OLPC which isn't supposed to have an Intel compatible processor either? Is this all a strategy to spoil MS's fun? I sure hope so!
Lucky they didn't pull the poor bloke out of the car and burn him as a witch. Ignorant peasants.
"If we already had it all figured out, it would get pretty boring very quickly."
Indeed. One of the great attractions of science in general is the fact that there is always something new to learn. The day you make your first discovery, solve a problem that has stumped other researchers for years, those are the days you live for.
Other times, its the whole "that's funny" thing where you simply notice something odd and it leads you in a completely unanticipated direction. The primary difference between people who go into science and those who avoid it is that scientists aren't worried by being proven wrong about something (at least they shouldn't be) since it is probable that what you discovered is way more interesting. There are also those people who like to think they know everything that is ever going to be known and who will shun and deny knowledge that contradicts their beliefs. They just love when scientists find something they didn't expect because they think it means science is wrong. Fact is, science is always wrong about something and admitting being wrong is the first step to learning more. If you can't admit you're wrong, well, you're learning nothing and just consuming resources until something else consumes you. But I'm sure Jebus loves you so don't feel too bad......
While I agree that 2GB being non-upgradable in the MacBook Air is an oversight, to be honest 2GB is still a fairly hefty amount of RAM. My old MacBook Pro has 2GB and rarely uses more than half of it under Leopard. In fact, Leopard on my old iBook G4 with 640MB works pretty well so 2GB is plenty for OS X. On the other hand, if you're talking about Vista then 2GB is a bit tight. It is funny when people compare specs between PCs and Macs and don't consider that the difference in performance between OS X and Vista can make a much bigger difference than whether one has 4GB or the other has 2GB.
I fully expect my MacBook Pro (just coming up to 3 years old) to serve me well for another few years at least before it needs to be replaced. Not one of my PC laptops has ever lasted me more than a year since I am very hard on my machines. As you say, I wouldn't trust Dell to be able to make a machine that can withstand the daily use my laptops get put through.
I have a pair of Netgear adapters because my ADSL modem is in my living room and the room I wanted to put my office in was at the other end of the house. Previously, I have drilled holes and run ethernet or bridged my wireless base stations and that worked OK but this time I just couldn't get a connection to hold up and I didn't want to mess with long wires. With network over mains I can now have two separate base stations running giving me much better coverage in the house. File transfers over the mains connection is quicker than my 54G wireless and I stream HD movies from my Mac mini to my Apple TV via the mains, then over wireless to the ATV.
arelas said: "Impressive, 8MB ram in 94...I think I only had 4 and that cost me dearly."
I was able to upgrade it a few years later to 20MB as I found four 4MB memory sticks. 1MB sticks were pretty easy to come by but the 4MB ones were pretty rare. Linux would run fairly well in 4MB but 8 was definitely better and with 20MB it flew. I had a 386 laptop which only had 2MB and I was able to get a very bare install of Slackware onto it just for shits and giggles of course. Using PLIP I was able to network it to my 486 and use it as a terminal. X was too much for it to manage mind you but it was cool just for command line stuff. I even had a VT100 emulator on my Psion 3a. Since the 486 had the 14.4 modem, I was able to share my internet connection from it to my growing selection of rescued machines. By 1996 I was running a SUN SPARCStation 1 with OpenBSD as my main work machine. I managed to get 64MB of RAM for it, a 19" monitor and it was a very nice environment to write my PhD thesis up using LaTeX. I really miss the Type 4 SUN Keyboard and optical mouse.
I started out with Slackware in late 1994 on a 486DX33 with 8MB of RAM. It was amazing. 40 floppies to install it since I had no CDROM drive. I bought a 14.4 modem and had access to my university e-mail (pine FTW). X11, gcc, Netscape, FTP, the lot. All on a machine with 200MB of disc. I reckon I could function quite happily on that machine even today apart from Netscape which would have to be replaced with Lynx I guess.
By 2000, a Linux distro was incredibly easy to install by comparison. Today it is even easier. You barely even need to worry about compatibility.
SolemnLord said "Is it as quick as running XP? Well, no, but don't forget that XP is a seven-year-old operating system that required a Pentium II at release."
You know, you should try running the latest XP SP3 fully patched on a PII. XP today is not the same as XP seven years ago. For a laugh, I installed the original XP release under VirtualPC on my PPC Mac (which runs Win2K SP4 happily) and XP was OK, until I updated. With all updates applied it was impossibly slow.
Of course, a modern netbook, while slow compared with bigger machines, still has plenty of power to run XP and it works OK in 512MB still. Win7 is still going to require more than that and you also have to factor in updates that will inevitably arrive and will slow your machine down until it becomes unusable. XP or Linux is still the safest choice.
All sequencing methods have error rates and this is very low given the read lengths they are looking at. Every method currently used goes for multiple coverage where the same piece of sequence is run multiple times. Read errors will be somewhat randomly (I say somewhat because some techniques produce more errors later in the read) so by reading the same sequence multiple times you can exclude the errors and build a 100% correct sequence. The biggest problem with current next gen sequencing techniques is that they have short reads (Illumina/Solexa are about 36bp) and this makes sequence assembly a challenge. You need high levels of coverage to detect errors versus SNPs (real mutations) and will also have problems traversing repetitive regions of sequence. 4000bp reads, even with errors, will help enormously and reduce the complexity of de-novo assembly (assembling without a template to map against) so we will be able to sequence many more species accurately and quickly.
Last year, I woke up and found that my eye was full of floaters and I was seeing flashes. I quickly checked for those symptoms using Google which led me to a page on Wikipedia describing the symptoms of a detached retina. I called my wife down from upstairs and told her we were going to the hospital. When a doctor checked my eye, I had indeed suffered a posterior vitreous detachment which had ripped several chunks of retina away. I was immediately treated with a laser and the doctor told me that if I hadn't been so prompt it is likely I would have gone blind in that eye. I have had to have several other surgeries (more laser treatment, vitrectomy and finally a membrane peel) and am on the road to recovery. I will likely get a cataract which will be treated by lens replacement but at least I can still see.
Of course, my symptoms were quite specific so I can understand people with quite general symptoms thinking they have cancer or something.
"I think if a company wants to force someone not to work in their area of expertise for a year then they should be forced to compensate that person for a year. They should match Apple's compensation and benefits and the guy doesn't have to work. That seems fair."
In the UK this is referred to as 'Garden leave'. Basically, if the company wants to enforce the non-compete, they have to continue to pay you even while you sit in the garden and watch the grass grow. If they won't pay you not to work then they have no reasonable way to limit you because they simply cannot expect you to not work in your field of expertise. I was in this situation at one point where the company I was working for couldn't pay me the money they owed so I went off and consulted in direct violation of my non-compete but since they couldn't pay me not to they were SOL. Of course, lawyers may well disagree with this interpretation. Bastards.
I agree that Commodore BASIC was horrible. I first learned BASIC on a Commodore PET 3008 and it was very limited unless you started POKEing into memory. Sinclair BASIC for the ZX81 (my first computer) wasn't much better. The best BASIC of the era came on the BBC Micro which supported REPEAT UNTIL loops, PROCs and so on so you didn't have to write code full of GOTOs. Oh, and it was easily the fastest machine on the block for years after release despite being based on the 6502 just as the CBM machines were although it did run at 2Mhz instead of 1Mhz of the CBMs. In my neck of the woods, the BBC was what people got if they really wanted a computer and the C64 was what they got if they wanted a games machine.
"If the pilots lost consciousness they would lose control of the aircraft and may slump on to the controls and put the plane into an unsafe course."
I'm not sure how this would be possible since the Airbus 330 has a side mounted joystick rather than the traditional yoke.
However, I have to agree that fly by wire is presenting some disturbing scenarios.
Back when I did my Palaeontology degree (admittedly this was back in the 80s) radiocarbon dating was only supposed to be accurate to about 80,000 years anyway. If you wanted to measure longer times you needed to use other methods or simply go with stratigraphical dating where you worked on the basis of relative ages based on fast evolving fossil species such as ammonites.
I used to have uncapped broadband in the UK. Sure, it was only 1Mbps which made it challenging to get any decently large files down but there was no upper limit imposed. Now I live in NZ and it is very different. At first I thought it was great because I was getting 3Mbps but there was a 1.5GB cap at which point you got dropped down to dialup speed. I chewed through the 1.5GB in less than a week. Upgraded to 5GB limit and found my speed dropped to 1Mbps and I still managed to use it all. Upped again to 10GB and each month I chew through that and sometimes have to put up with a few days at dialup speed until I tick over to the next month and the counter resets.
All this talk of 250GB limits makes me sick. I can't even consider regular movie downloads in SD let alone the few HD ones on offer. To make matters worse, bloody Blu-ray went and won the format war so I can't even buy US discs without worrying about them being flipping region A when HD DVD was always region free so my HD projector is somewhat starved of material.
Parallel programming isn't hard. It is quite a natural way to express your code. The problem is with the languages that people choose to use. Anything based on a sequential language isn't going to work well. Back in the early 90's there was a lot of research done into trying to automatically parallelise sequential code to take advantage of SIMD and MIMD computing platforms. Personally, I wrote code on Thinking Machines CM-200, MasPar MP-1 and MP-2 all of which were SIMD and used a language based off C where the normal data types had plural versions to distribute data across the array. This was reasonably effective for some algorithms and the natural offshoot is the MMX/SSE type vector types on modern CPUs which are programmed in a similar way. MIMD programming was somewhat different and the closest you get these days is threading or MPI but these sit on top of traditional languages and are pretty nasty. Back in the late 80's there were transputers which were programmed in OCCAM. This language was naturally parallel and easy to use. Of course, it was a new language so people avoided it but if you wrote code in OCCAM it was very fine grained parallelism and this made it very simple to serialise back onto a smaller number of CPUs. CSP based languages (Ada was another one) would be a good way to work with many cores but I'm damn sure we'll end up with more half baked sequential code with bits of parallelism welded in.
Parallel programming has really suffered in the last few decades such that I feel the current state of play (lots of cheap nodes in a cluster hooked together with ethernet and programmed using MPI or similar) is pretty desperate. Cheap, but nasty.