If price is no object, you should check out Tesla Motors's roadster. Although I believe a recent Wired article on the company stated they're planning a more average-joe sedan in the not-too-distant future.
I've always seen evolution as a consequence of the physics of our universe. Imagine what it would take to design a system with all the right physical rules such that a diverse ecosystem including intelligent life forms would arise from an a large gasseous cloud floating in space (or whatever, I'm no astropaleogeologist).
If believers want to evangelize, fine, but perhaps they should look into the possibility that God 'designed' physics, and leave it to the scientists among us to illuminate the details thereof.
--
To stay on topic, saying that this discovery "proves" human evolution is poor word choice. It seems from TFA that it provides unambiguous evidence to support a theory which was probably already supported enough to be judged an fairly acceptable fact of life, but scientists should know better. I guess that makes for a poor headline.
I was re-installing panther on a new hard disk for my cube, and did the software update thing after i got it running. When I saw 10.3.4 update, i was blankly confused, but clicked ahead anyway for some reason. Now, two hours later, I'm reading Slashdot and realizing that there actually was a new update today, and feeling like a software-installing Forrest Gump, happening to be at the 'right' place at the 'right' time.
Everything is cool so far, but I feel like a total idiot for not noticing. And yet I feel compelled to tell this to other people...
I got a friend's horribly-wrecked-dell/windows computer up and running with a MandrakeMove live CD, and backed up a bunch of his data off to an external drive, and promised to help him restore his system at some point in the near future when we had time. In the meantime, he can surf the web, and I showed him how to reboot with the live CD if things get scary. In return he gave me a copy of the Original, Pre-Special-Edition Star Wars trilogy.
Granted, it's a tiny niche, but there's a lot of software my coworkers and I use that keeps us tied to Windows. For example:
- Texas Instruments Code Composer Studio IDE for their DSP products - Altera's Quartus II IDE - Cadence electronic design software (Orcad Capture, PSpice...) - Analog Devices' VisualDSP++ IDE
I imagine many other tools in the embedded devices market are windows-only, too. It probably keeps costs down for companies like these to make their development software only available for the most ubiquitous platform. Annoying for those of us who wouldn't use windows otherwise, though, especially when the average cpu and memory requirements for many of these applications is rather low. Most of the time for me, these programs are just sitting idle while I read a schematic or pore over some code. I doubt they'd run much worse on an emulator.
I know it's a little childish to complain about the companies that choose an established platform with obviously stock IDE GUI elements to make their IDE that will sell in small numbers. They probably don't make a lot of money off of the IDE, as it's the chips that they sell in quantity. I don't blame them for their economic good sense, and they have enough problems with their single platform to begin with.
And I agree that a cheap $100 used PC would run most of the apps I would need it to, but that's not what I want. Windows has annoyed me enough over the years that I want to use something else now. Perhaps these guys feel similarly.
I agree that good system architects don't start with fonts, but otherwise I halfheartedly disagree. Code designed from one reference point is difficult to use from another, in my experience.
It's possible to have both good UI design AND good back-end design, and have them work together. It usually requires several people working together synergistically. And calling them "UI weenies" isn't going to make systems software any better.
Back to the topic, I do concur that for people to *ever* pay for Friendster, whatever the back end is needs to work WAY better.
Mod this one up--two informative links that highlight two sides of a crucial issue that is underdiscussed in my opinion.
I love the idea of efficient hybrid cars and all the cool portable electronic devices we have that make our lives easier (or at least more geeky), but battery innovation has not kept up with everything else.
The first is for vendors of: Partridges, Pear Trees, Turtle Doves, French Hens, Geese-a-Laying, Swans, Maids-a-Milking, Ladies Dancing, or Lords-a-Leaping
1) buy the above items from your "Traditional" store 2) sell them on the "Internet" 3) PROFIT!!!
The second is for vendors of: Calling Birds, Gold Rings, Pipers Piping, or Drummers Drumming.
1) buy Gold rings on the "Internet". Download anti-RIAA sound clips of birds, pipes, and drummers, and burn to a CD. 2) sell them in a "Traditional" store 3) PROFIT!!
Another business model comes to mind:
1) Get job at bank 2) Convince boss to use silly Christmas-themed ploy to get company in the newsmedia... 3) PROFIT!!
I've used cable modems from Time Warner's Roadrunner service in the Austin area for several years, and sometimes have been impressed with the bandwidth we (2-4 housemates) got, regularly sustaining several hundred kB/sec over long periods downloading ISOs while some of the housemates (not me, of course) were P2Ping.
With a recent move, I switched to Earthlink, because they could be billed with the cable, presumably (i thought) used some of the same infrastructure as Roadrunner, and were *cheaper*. While we're now in a different neighborhood, our connection is significantly worse. Besides things seeming to slow to a crawl now and then, our connection regularly fails once every day or three, requiring a reset of our connection.
Slashdot Mirror
If price is no object, you should check out Tesla Motors's roadster. Although I believe a recent Wired article on the company stated they're planning a more average-joe sedan in the not-too-distant future.
I think you can take that idea a bit further.
I've always seen evolution as a consequence of the physics of our universe. Imagine what it would take to design a system with all the right physical rules such that a diverse ecosystem including intelligent life forms would arise from an a large gasseous cloud floating in space (or whatever, I'm no astropaleogeologist).
If believers want to evangelize, fine, but perhaps they should look into the possibility that God 'designed' physics, and leave it to the scientists among us to illuminate the details thereof.
--
To stay on topic, saying that this discovery "proves" human evolution is poor word choice. It seems from TFA that it provides unambiguous evidence to support a theory which was probably already supported enough to be judged an fairly acceptable fact of life, but scientists should know better. I guess that makes for a poor headline.
Yes! Mod this up insightful.
Wow. Blast from the past. Thanks, I had totally forgotten about this awesome* cartoon.
* not really, but i watched it anyway.
You have got to be fucking kidding me.
I was re-installing panther on a new hard disk for my cube, and did the software update thing after i got it running. When I saw 10.3.4 update, i was blankly confused, but clicked ahead anyway for some reason. Now, two hours later, I'm reading Slashdot and realizing that there actually was a new update today, and feeling like a software-installing Forrest Gump, happening to be at the 'right' place at the 'right' time.
Everything is cool so far, but I feel like a total idiot for not noticing. And yet I feel compelled to tell this to other people...
I got a friend's horribly-wrecked-dell/windows computer up and running with a MandrakeMove live CD, and backed up a bunch of his data off to an external drive, and promised to help him restore his system at some point in the near future when we had time. In the meantime, he can surf the web, and I showed him how to reboot with the live CD if things get scary. In return he gave me a copy of the Original, Pre-Special-Edition Star Wars trilogy.
Granted, it's a tiny niche, but there's a lot of software my coworkers and I use that keeps us tied to Windows. For example:
- Texas Instruments Code Composer Studio IDE for their DSP products
- Altera's Quartus II IDE
- Cadence electronic design software (Orcad Capture, PSpice...)
- Analog Devices' VisualDSP++ IDE
I imagine many other tools in the embedded devices market are windows-only, too. It probably keeps costs down for companies like these to make their development software only available for the most ubiquitous platform. Annoying for those of us who wouldn't use windows otherwise, though, especially when the average cpu and memory requirements for many of these applications is rather low. Most of the time for me, these programs are just sitting idle while I read a schematic or pore over some code. I doubt they'd run much worse on an emulator.
I know it's a little childish to complain about the companies that choose an established platform with obviously stock IDE GUI elements to make their IDE that will sell in small numbers. They probably don't make a lot of money off of the IDE, as it's the chips that they sell in quantity. I don't blame them for their economic good sense, and they have enough problems with their single platform to begin with.
And I agree that a cheap $100 used PC would run most of the apps I would need it to, but that's not what I want. Windows has annoyed me enough over the years that I want to use something else now. Perhaps these guys feel similarly.
I agree that good system architects don't start with fonts, but otherwise I halfheartedly disagree. Code designed from one reference point is difficult to use from another, in my experience.
It's possible to have both good UI design AND good back-end design, and have them work together. It usually requires several people working together synergistically. And calling them "UI weenies" isn't going to make systems software any better.
Back to the topic, I do concur that for people to *ever* pay for Friendster, whatever the back end is needs to work WAY better.
Mod this one up--two informative links that highlight two sides of a crucial issue that is underdiscussed in my opinion.
I love the idea of efficient hybrid cars and all the cool portable electronic devices we have that make our lives easier (or at least more geeky), but battery innovation has not kept up with everything else.
The first is for vendors of: Partridges, Pear Trees, Turtle Doves, French Hens, Geese-a-Laying, Swans, Maids-a-Milking, Ladies Dancing, or Lords-a-Leaping
1) buy the above items from your "Traditional" store
2) sell them on the "Internet"
3) PROFIT!!!
The second is for vendors of: Calling Birds, Gold Rings, Pipers Piping, or Drummers Drumming.
1) buy Gold rings on the "Internet". Download anti-RIAA sound clips of birds, pipes, and drummers, and burn to a CD.
2) sell them in a "Traditional" store
3) PROFIT!!
Another business model comes to mind:
1) Get job at bank
2) Convince boss to use silly Christmas-themed ploy to get company in the newsmedia...
3) PROFIT!!
I've used cable modems from Time Warner's Roadrunner service in the Austin area for several years, and sometimes have been impressed with the bandwidth we (2-4 housemates) got, regularly sustaining several hundred kB/sec over long periods downloading ISOs while some of the housemates (not me, of course) were P2Ping.
With a recent move, I switched to Earthlink, because they could be billed with the cable, presumably (i thought) used some of the same infrastructure as Roadrunner, and were *cheaper*. While we're now in a different neighborhood, our connection is significantly worse. Besides things seeming to slow to a crawl now and then, our connection regularly fails once every day or three, requiring a reset of our connection.
I guess you get what you pay for...