According to an article on the spider silk goats, way back when, the proteins were fine, but the real trick was in the extrusion. The way the spiders spin the proteins into the final product is a *major* factor in the strength and versatility of the silk. It's not just spinning them into silk that's the trick, there's a certain finesse to it that they don't seem to have quite right yet.
I'll say this... Sitting at a desk for 80 hours a week is bad for your back, your hips, your shoulders. If you're doing that kind of schedule, you need to also be doing core strengthening exercises at least once a day and stretching breaks every couple of hours (and that means real stretching, not just walking out for a coffee or a smoke).
When I've done more than 60 hour weeks, I'm not just tired, I'm in physical pain. To keep working, I then have to take something for that pain, and the longer I work, the more powerful a something I have to take. At the end of an 80 hour week, I'm a percocet-powered zombie, just trying to make deadline. I'm making mistakes and not only have to correct them later, but answer the e-mails of the customers affected by them.
I'm not just tired. I'm having to dope myself up so much for the pain that I legally shouldn't operate any heavy machinery.
If you're 25, you can do this Bataan death march. But if you're over 30 and doing 80 hour weeks with no end in sight, you need to reconsider your career choice, because it's not just going to make you tired, it will mess with your back and joints until you're an old man before your time.
There really isn't that much of a market for people who like to dick around with 10000 different ways to close a window, each with it's own myriad of quirks and bugs. They like to plug it in, turn it on, and have it work pretty much the same way as the one in the next cubicle, or the next building.
Must agree strongly. I install Linux about once a year to see if it's going to meet my needs, then uninstall it a few weeks later.
I want my apps to work, be easy to install, easy to upgrade, and have a familiar feel. I want driver support for my hardware (without having to compile the drivers from source while reading an only moderately helpful HOWTO and wondering if I'll screw it up this time!). I want plug and play. I want to be able to download one video player, one or two codec packs, and play all the diverse video clips I have on my HDD.
Linux is *getting* there, but isn't there yet.
I do do OSS. I've eschewed IE and Office for Firefox and Open Office, but they're available for Windows... so are PHP, Perl, Apache, and all my other webdev tools. Plus I have the ease of use I describe above.
Linux or Solaris? Whichever gets easier to install, personalize, and use for than Windows first. Right now, AFAICT, neither can make that claim yet. They're still both Server/Workstation/Hobbyist OSes with desktop aspirations.
- Greg
The issue date is completely irrelevant, you need to look at the filing/priority date which in this case is December 30, 1996. Was it obvious in 1996?
Amazon had been in business for two years by then (1996). Not saying Amazon invented e-commerce, but they'll do for an example of well-executed automated international shopping/shipping. And my recollection is fuzzy, but I believe that e-shopping was available to an extent on self-contained online network services like Prodigy, AOL and CompuServe as early as the 80s.
In the linked CNN story, they quote/paraphrase Michael Kirk, the executive director of the American Intellectual Property Law Association.
"After the State Street case, all patents applications would be judged by new criteria of novelty, utility and non-obviousness, says Kirk."
Does this patent have:
Novelty? - Maybe 20 or 30 years ago, but this hasn't been novel for a LOOOOONG time.
Utility? - Definitely. But so does a pair of scissors.
Non-obviousness? - Yeah, right. The patent was granted in 2002. This was non-obvious in 2002?
Ugghhh.
Requoting yourself... height of lameness
on
Hip-e All-In-One PC
·
· Score: 1
Go to their front page and they quote USA Today quoting them... "The creators of the hip-e claim it's the first PC specifically for teenagers."
Does this somehow make their claim more valid, because USA Today said they said it? It's like a lawyer going into court and showing the jury a newspaper: "The Daily Times says my client said he's innocent. What more proof do you need?"
The real bit is when someone takes that Nobel-winning work and patents the act of smelling things. Every unlicensed nasal inhalation, also known as a "sniff" will be a violation of their patent.
We already know that the Air Force has brought naqueta back through the Stargate and it's an amazingly powerful substance.
Do we really need anti-matter when more and more G'oauld technology is falling into our hands every year. And don't forget the expedition they recently sent to the Pegasus galaxy.
Saw a story at a home recording enthusiast site (sorry that I don't recall which) about using a Mini ITX mobo and a flash memory card instead of a HDD (I think they put knoppix on a 1gb CF) for a low-power, low-heat, nearly no noise solution for a recording studio.
I guess the same solution would work for a low power home firewall & mail server, and have the added advantage of being really nice and quiet too.
You could possibly sub a low power laptop HDD if you needed more storage space.
If you want to see Angelina Jolie naked, there's some skin in Gia. Judging from it, Angelina has benefitted from "foundation garments" and body doubling in later roles.
I also have to think that anyone who has dated a batshit crazy woman (ah, the good old days... when I could look beyond a woman's crumbling psyche and see the great rack inside), sees the downside in Angelina. Basically, I might want to do someone who looks like Angelina, but even just a night with that psycho might be more work than it's worth.
I haven't examined the camera on the 650, but I have a 600 and the camera on that is a piece of junk. Impossible to get good pics indoors, and only so-so in sunlight. If you're buying this phone for the camera, rethink your choice. If you're buying it for all the palm apps, color screen, PDA, phone integration, mobile e-mail, etc, then if the camera works consider it a nice bonus.
My favorite app is PDANet (separate application you can buy at junefabrics.com), which turns it into a cellular modem for your laptop via the hotsync cable. LOVE *that*!
> They don't even want people directing traffic to their site. Check out their policy here Ooops...So much for that rule:)
If you get the link from a third party and have not seen the policy, then you cannot agree to it, therefore you're indemnified from any breach of contract action they may try to file against you (IANAL, I just speak like one).
These sponsor contracts are very lucrative for the IOC, and though they may be a non-profit, they pay for many expensive perks and luxurious travel for the IOC's directors (do you think they fly to check out potential sites in Coach class?).
What's funny is that sometimes becoming the official anything of an olympic event may be worth way less than you paid. Converse paid millions to be the official shoe of the 1984 summer Olympics and blew their budget doing so, having little money to leverage and exploit this supposedly plum sponsorship.
Nike, not having thrown 8 figures at the organizing committee, blitzed advertising around L.A. and during the broadcast. By the end of the games, if you asked people what the official shoe was, they were answering "Nike".
- Greg
It's not just the shady companies
on
The Spyware Inferno
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Besides spyware, what annoys me is "user agents". Quicktime, RealPlayer, and Winamp all have little TSR's that load at start-up and eat megabytes of memory for "quality assurance" and "ease of use" purposes. I don't know how many times I've tried to disable qttask.exe or realsched.exe in my start up only to have it come back unexpectedly. Winamp's is easy to disable at setup, but Quicktime and Real require you to dig.
I don't say they're delivering ads or sending back personally identifiable info to their manufacturers, but they are using my resources without giving me what I consider to be any perceptible advantage.
If we're going to legislate spyware, these user agents need to be considered and the law needs to require Apple and Real to provide better notice of them and make them easier to shut down permanently.
I scored 90%, incorrectly IDing one legit e-mail as a fraud, meaning I missed one because of being overly cautious.
Some of these fraud mails looked really legit and were mainly given away by the fact that their URLs went to something like fraudprevent-visa.com instead of fraudprevent.visa.com. fraudprevent-visa.com is a domain name that may or may not be affiliated with Visa, while fraudprevent.visa.com is a subdomain of Visa.com, meaning it's not 100% safe, but much more likely to be legit.
But asking people to know this difference is asking a bit much of them. What might be interesting would be a "Phisher Identifier" built into mail clients that could identify bogus or unauthorized URLs based on a very carefully maintained database of legitimate URLs.
Seems that a plug-in could be written for Outlook, Eudora, etc.
I remember there was an Intel commercial with Homer Simpson getting his brain mod chipped, and at the end he's giving some academic lecture and has the "Intel Inside" logo tattooed on his head.
What I'd be really interested to know is, well, if we have 32-bit CPUs and 64-bit CPUs, where would our brains score on that scale?
Our visual recognition systems are very complex. But it's long been known that you only need a 2-bit system for a shave and a haircut.
So how will they make this fit with the Classic Trek episode Balance of Terror, in which we learned that no human ever saw the face of a Romulan during the Romulan Wars?
1: Facial cloaking devices that bend light around the head
2: Bandannas ("this here's a stick-up, human")
3: Big helmets!
4: The hero slingshots around the sun, goes back in time, and unveils Romulan faces, negating the old episode. Yes, it's a time paradox, but if "First Contact" could get away with telling Zeffrem Cochran about his future...
5: Ignore old Trek on the assumption that only the geekiest fans would remember that episode and the rest wouldn't care.
"spam spurting from their digital arteries"? Are you saying spam is the fluid of life, without which comcast will not survive?
A few months ago, I had a bad staph infection in the groin. One morning, as I walked into the bathroom, a portion of it burst. Suddenly the bathroom floor was splattered, a puddle of blood and pus at my feet, more of it dribbling down my leg.
For the next week, I had to pack the area with fresh gauze 2-3 times a day, the used packing coming away from the wound tinted a sickly melange of yellowish-green and red.
Those numbers are all really nice, but isn't this just putting one of those little dot band-aids on a stab wound? It seems to work for a while, but how long before the spambot authors come up with a way around the port 25 block? How long until new worms are traversing the net, creating worldwide bottlenecks, pinging out from newly zombied PCs to find the latest Windows vulnerability and install themselves?
Better yet, what if these zombied spambot-infected PC's have been creating a shadow P2P network so their makers can quickly and easily install patches, or send out network-wide commands to their armies of zombies? How long will the port 25 block remain effective then?
I give Comcast all sorts of kudos for doing something to try to staunch the spam spurting from their digital arteries, but I don't see this working in the long term.
If they bring their huge network of UPS Stores into this as drop/off and pick-up points, it's cool.
But if you actually have a day job, are trying to get your personal laptop repaired, and have to rely on UPS residential service (or company depots) for this... Take a gun and shoot your laptop. It will be cheaper and less aggravating in the long run to buy a new one than to try to deal with UPS's poor residential service and their very limited depot hours.
UPS will need to make the UPS Stores network a prime feature of this, or Toshiba will have a LOT of very unhappy ex-customers.
The base breaks down and the rover then breaks down and then the back up rover breaks down. How are the guys going to get back to the return craft then?
Moon missions in a futuristic RV. Feels like some cheap 70s TV Saturday morning sci-fi series.
That's just the ticket, ain't it. Winnebago finally becomes a NASA vendor. Mobile base, spare wheel on the back with a "Good Sam" wheel cover, towing a couple of electric Honda Quad-Runners as mini rovers. I can see it now. Space tourism will be huge.
Slashdot Mirror
- Greg
When I've done more than 60 hour weeks, I'm not just tired, I'm in physical pain. To keep working, I then have to take something for that pain, and the longer I work, the more powerful a something I have to take. At the end of an 80 hour week, I'm a percocet-powered zombie, just trying to make deadline. I'm making mistakes and not only have to correct them later, but answer the e-mails of the customers affected by them.
I'm not just tired. I'm having to dope myself up so much for the pain that I legally shouldn't operate any heavy machinery.
If you're 25, you can do this Bataan death march. But if you're over 30 and doing 80 hour weeks with no end in sight, you need to reconsider your career choice, because it's not just going to make you tired, it will mess with your back and joints until you're an old man before your time.
- Greg
Must agree strongly. I install Linux about once a year to see if it's going to meet my needs, then uninstall it a few weeks later.
I want my apps to work, be easy to install, easy to upgrade, and have a familiar feel. I want driver support for my hardware (without having to compile the drivers from source while reading an only moderately helpful HOWTO and wondering if I'll screw it up this time!). I want plug and play. I want to be able to download one video player, one or two codec packs, and play all the diverse video clips I have on my HDD.
Linux is *getting* there, but isn't there yet.
I do do OSS. I've eschewed IE and Office for Firefox and Open Office, but they're available for Windows... so are PHP, Perl, Apache, and all my other webdev tools. Plus I have the ease of use I describe above.
Linux or Solaris? Whichever gets easier to install, personalize, and use for than Windows first. Right now, AFAICT, neither can make that claim yet. They're still both Server/Workstation/Hobbyist OSes with desktop aspirations. - Greg
I'm cheap and so are my parents, but they're comfy with Windows...
.jpegs of their soon-to-be-born grandson
AVG Antivirus (grisoft.com)
IrfanView (irfanview.com) for viewing
Firefox 1.0 (mozilla.org) since it's more secure than IE and they won't know the difference
Other faves I use but couldn't palm off on them...
Pegasus Mail (pmail.com)
Shortkeys (shortkeys.com) - text macro utility (*great* when I'm doing helpdesk queues at work)
- G
Amazon had been in business for two years by then (1996). Not saying Amazon invented e-commerce, but they'll do for an example of well-executed automated international shopping/shipping. And my recollection is fuzzy, but I believe that e-shopping was available to an extent on self-contained online network services like Prodigy, AOL and CompuServe as early as the 80s.
- Greg
Does this patent have:
- Novelty? - Maybe 20 or 30 years ago, but this hasn't been novel for a LOOOOONG time.
- Utility? - Definitely. But so does a pair of scissors.
- Non-obviousness? - Yeah, right. The patent was granted in 2002. This was non-obvious in 2002?
Ugghhh.Does this somehow make their claim more valid, because USA Today said they said it? It's like a lawyer going into court and showing the jury a newspaper: "The Daily Times says my client said he's innocent. What more proof do you need?"
Ugh.
Greg
The real bit is when someone takes that Nobel-winning work and patents the act of smelling things. Every unlicensed nasal inhalation, also known as a "sniff" will be a violation of their patent.
Mouth breathers will be exempt.
- Greg
We already know that the Air Force has brought naqueta back through the Stargate and it's an amazingly powerful substance.
Do we really need anti-matter when more and more G'oauld technology is falling into our hands every year. And don't forget the expedition they recently sent to the Pegasus galaxy.
Anti-matter. Bah.
Saw a story at a home recording enthusiast site (sorry that I don't recall which) about using a Mini ITX mobo and a flash memory card instead of a HDD (I think they put knoppix on a 1gb CF) for a low-power, low-heat, nearly no noise solution for a recording studio.
I guess the same solution would work for a low power home firewall & mail server, and have the added advantage of being really nice and quiet too.
You could possibly sub a low power laptop HDD if you needed more storage space.
Just a thought.
I also have to think that anyone who has dated a batshit crazy woman (ah, the good old days... when I could look beyond a woman's crumbling psyche and see the great rack inside), sees the downside in Angelina. Basically, I might want to do someone who looks like Angelina, but even just a night with that psycho might be more work than it's worth.
- Greg
His answer to the problem was "42".
- Greg
My favorite app is PDANet (separate application you can buy at junefabrics.com), which turns it into a cellular modem for your laptop via the hotsync cable. LOVE *that*!
If you get the link from a third party and have not seen the policy, then you cannot agree to it, therefore you're indemnified from any breach of contract action they may try to file against you (IANAL, I just speak like one).
These sponsor contracts are very lucrative for the IOC, and though they may be a non-profit, they pay for many expensive perks and luxurious travel for the IOC's directors (do you think they fly to check out potential sites in Coach class?).
What's funny is that sometimes becoming the official anything of an olympic event may be worth way less than you paid. Converse paid millions to be the official shoe of the 1984 summer Olympics and blew their budget doing so, having little money to leverage and exploit this supposedly plum sponsorship.
Nike, not having thrown 8 figures at the organizing committee, blitzed advertising around L.A. and during the broadcast. By the end of the games, if you asked people what the official shoe was, they were answering "Nike".
- Greg
Besides spyware, what annoys me is "user agents". Quicktime, RealPlayer, and Winamp all have little TSR's that load at start-up and eat megabytes of memory for "quality assurance" and "ease of use" purposes. I don't know how many times I've tried to disable qttask.exe or realsched.exe in my start up only to have it come back unexpectedly. Winamp's is easy to disable at setup, but Quicktime and Real require you to dig.
I don't say they're delivering ads or sending back personally identifiable info to their manufacturers, but they are using my resources without giving me what I consider to be any perceptible advantage.
If we're going to legislate spyware, these user agents need to be considered and the law needs to require Apple and Real to provide better notice of them and make them easier to shut down permanently.
- Greg
Some of these fraud mails looked really legit and were mainly given away by the fact that their URLs went to something like fraudprevent-visa.com instead of fraudprevent.visa.com. fraudprevent-visa.com is a domain name that may or may not be affiliated with Visa, while fraudprevent.visa.com is a subdomain of Visa.com, meaning it's not 100% safe, but much more likely to be legit.
But asking people to know this difference is asking a bit much of them. What might be interesting would be a "Phisher Identifier" built into mail clients that could identify bogus or unauthorized URLs based on a very carefully maintained database of legitimate URLs.
Seems that a plug-in could be written for Outlook, Eudora, etc.
- Greg
What I'd be really interested to know is, well, if we have 32-bit CPUs and 64-bit CPUs, where would our brains score on that scale?
Our visual recognition systems are very complex. But it's long been known that you only need a 2-bit system for a shave and a haircut.
- Greg
1: Facial cloaking devices that bend light around the head
2: Bandannas ("this here's a stick-up, human")
3: Big helmets!
4: The hero slingshots around the sun, goes back in time, and unveils Romulan faces, negating the old episode. Yes, it's a time paradox, but if "First Contact" could get away with telling Zeffrem Cochran about his future...
5: Ignore old Trek on the assumption that only the geekiest fans would remember that episode and the rest wouldn't care.
- Greg
For the next week, I had to pack the area with fresh gauze 2-3 times a day, the used packing coming away from the wound tinted a sickly melange of yellowish-green and red.
That's more what I was thinking.
- Greg
P.S.: True story.
Better yet, what if these zombied spambot-infected PC's have been creating a shadow P2P network so their makers can quickly and easily install patches, or send out network-wide commands to their armies of zombies? How long will the port 25 block remain effective then?
I give Comcast all sorts of kudos for doing something to try to staunch the spam spurting from their digital arteries, but I don't see this working in the long term.
- Greg
But if you actually have a day job, are trying to get your personal laptop repaired, and have to rely on UPS residential service (or company depots) for this... Take a gun and shoot your laptop. It will be cheaper and less aggravating in the long run to buy a new one than to try to deal with UPS's poor residential service and their very limited depot hours.
UPS will need to make the UPS Stores network a prime feature of this, or Toshiba will have a LOT of very unhappy ex-customers.
- Greg
Populated by Jed, Jethro, Granny and Elly May... The Tranquility Craterbillies. :-)
- Greg
- Greg
That's just the ticket, ain't it. Winnebago finally becomes a NASA vendor. Mobile base, spare wheel on the back with a "Good Sam" wheel cover, towing a couple of electric Honda Quad-Runners as mini rovers. I can see it now. Space tourism will be huge.