Bananna de Terra, at least, are more commonly seen in the states as Plantains, but I think the important point is that there isn't a great deal of genetic difference between those varieties you've listed. If the sweet banana is vulnerable, then all the others are as well.
My very limited understanding is that Bananas are originally from an area in India where the native jungle is disappearing so the chance of pulling out an actually genetically different banana from anywhere else is quite small, though there are native crops elsewhere according to wikipedia (australia, in fact). But that's probably not enough to qualify as true diversity.
Apparently it's been demonstrated that our basic ability to count to around 4 is controlled by specific neurons firing upon recognition of the specific quantity. That's why the OP spoke of fish having the same basic ability to count as apes, people with learning problems, etc. See http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/03/03/080303fa_fact_holt on page 3 for this:
"Dehaene has been able to bring together the experimental and the theoretical sides of his quest, and, on at least one occasion, he has even theorized the existence of a neurological feature whose presence was later confirmed by other researchers. In the early nineteen-nineties, working with Jean-Pierre Changeux, he set out to create a computer model to simulate the way humans and some animals estimate at a glance the number of objects in their environment. In the case of very small numbers, this estimate can be made with almost perfect accuracy, an ability known as "subitizing" (from the Latin word subitus, meaning "sudden"). Some psychologists think that subitizing is merely rapid, unconscious counting, but others, Dehaene included, believe that our minds perceive up to three or four objects all at once, without having to mentally "spotlight" them one by one. Getting the computer model to subitize the way humans and animals did was possible, he found, only if he built in "number neurons" tuned to fire with maximum intensity in response to a specific number of objects. His model had, for example, a special four neuron that got particularly excited when the computer was presented with four objects. The model's number neurons were pure theory, but almost a decade later two teams of researchers discovered what seemed to be the real item, in the brains of macaque monkeys that had been trained to do number tasks. The number neurons fired precisely the way Dehaene's model predicted--a vindication of theoretical psychology. "Basically, we can derive the behavioral properties of these neurons from first principles," he told me. "Psychology has become a little more like physics.""
It looks like this article is discussing the discovery of the same neurons performing the same function in fish. That's what this part of our own "intelligence" is at a basic level, apparently.
Power over ethernet provides DC over pins that are not used for data on an rj-45 connection. What you're talking about is powerline ethernet (or ethernet over power).
I can't disagree more with the recommendation to use basic tax software. If you have any non-1040 income (i.e. almost any independant work) then you may discover, as I did, that turbotax is monumentally stupid. It's had me overpay by >$1000 two years in the past. The IRS automatic checkers refunded me that money. You can't imagine how it sucks to drain your bank account, only to have the IRS send you back some of that money 2 months later.
Also, if you've done any work outside of a regular job (edit some html, write some php, have a meeting to advise someone, minor things that are billable etc.) if you have even a few square feet, a percentage of your apt/house dedicated to work, and if you've bought a computer or any computer-related equipment and had any business-related meals with your co-workers, consultants, professionally-related friends etc. then you need an accountant to get that money out of your taxes. Turbotax just doesn't do it.
After 2 years in a row with turbotax screwing me, I've hired an accountant for the last 2 years and it's been far more than worth it.
Doesn't a freedos and a virtual x86 (i.e. bochs or something similar) that's self-contained make for a market for this? Just package up a 30-40mb VM (that's enough space built in to save games), and sell it for $10.
No hassle with trying to turn your teraherz machine into a 8-bit cpu, and your whizbang video card into a BIOS-driven EGA display, just emulate it. The best part is it probably won't become obsolete again. The emulator should work for a long, long time.
The New Yorker's fact checking is famous for being strong and covering their *sses. If the New Yorkers fact checkers fell down, then maybe Yau's got a chance in court. However if the fact checkers have gone over the material and contacted the sources as they should, then this case will get thrown out of court and Yau will be made to look dumber than he was made to look in the article.
The problem is that a good, solid DNS server these days won't answer recursive lookups to the world since that can be a way to game a dns server, or just overwhelm it into submission.
I'm an earthlink customer, and until today I was on the fence about switching service, but today on top of this stupidity they've got at least one bogus DNS server and sites like capoeira.com and my own remote shell server were getting in the case of capoeira.com an NXDOMAIN response and for my site being redirected to a completely different host.
If earthlink is doing this in a way that's otherwise breaking their DNS, then I'm out of there. I pay a pretty penny for the service and I'm not going to stand for having that service be "supplemented" by having sites that I want to go to blackholed by incompetance and subsequently turned into $.0004/per impression in extra dough for earthlink, because it's about $10 in frustration for me.
I'm strongly considering PRK right now, because I'm starting to have reactions to the new generation of silicon hydrogel lenses, and I don't want to have to worry about new materials getting put in my eye every few years for extended periods, and my possible litany of adverse reactions that could come with each new gee-gaw.
So, because I practice capoeira angola, and even though it's usually pretty chill there's the chance of getting kicked in the face, I'm leaning towards PRK instead of LASIK because I don't want to deal with a loose corneal flap along with anything else that may be involved in recovering from such a situation.
The most important thing, it seems to me, that's changed in the last few years is wavefront and laser eye tracking. Both of these seem to provide a far better chance of achieving a life with un-assisted vision than anything prior. The success rates seem to be phenomenal now - 98% better than 20/20 with wavefront scans and lasik and/or prk.
Right. So find the RHEL documentation for cpuspeed, or for the changes to kernel parameters that re-enabled kernel.panic_on_oops, etc. I've been waiting almost 9 months for anaconda changes to get documented (anyone else know about ignoredisk?)
Oh, and what about changing the base package manifest? With the same ks.cfg file, you'll end up with completely different sets of packages on different updates because redhat changes the base list every update.
I was the SA and mail admin for void.com from about '94-96 (before it was in the hands it presently appears to be in).
There was an amazing amount of bogus email that went to null@void.com - largely from people filling in web forms. It was a huge waste of bandwidth at the time. I can only imagine how much traffic it would generate now.
I believe that yorkies were originally bred to be mousers.
Aha, here we go: In an effort to produce canines with exceptional skill at catching mice and rats, the common men of the day would breed only smallest, quickest and best ratters of the bunch. These men were not out to produce a purebred, sophisticated breed of dog; instead they desired the best dogs to keep the mice away. This is the reason why no records were kept as to what breeds were mixed to create the Yorkshire Terrier. (from http://news.affari.to/news_details.php?id=101 here.
So it would make lots of sense that the yorkies would go crazy. That's a pretty cool corroboration.
BTW, I'd be right there with you in not knowing anything about the series, and thus the movie except for a friend who took it upon himself to introduce the first couple of episodes a couple of weeks back (to myself and a host of other friends). and I promptly spent the next weekend watching the entire series back-to-back. It's some of the best writing I've ever seen in TV, and certianly consistantly the best sci-fi program I've ever seen. Not that the bar was too high.
IIRC AFS only provides for a single system to be the writer to the whole distributed filesystem (though it does allow replicants so even if the main server dies the files are still available for read).
GFS allows every node to read and write simultaneously so each system can get full bandwidth out of the storage unit.
They're rather different beasts, solving different problems.
That's not such a surprise. Remember that it was that NeXT OS (or however you capitalize it), and that it ran on Intel and 68k for a long while before the OSX goodies started to get built on top of it.
The whole point of the initial MacOSX exercise was to get it running on the powerpc at all!
You've got good insurance, or got lucky. With a for-pay HMO here in NYC, a friend of mine would have been dead except for luck, because getting into the office of an oncologist who could handle him would have taken him 2-4 months normally.
If he hadn't been friends from 20 years back with someone who was a researcher in the field, and who pushed him to the front of the line he was in as a favor, he'd be dead, dead, dead.
I only hope that didn't kill anyone else, but our current system doesn't work well enough unless you're paying $$$ (or get lucky and get around the system).
Our education system has a lot to answer for but... have you noticed that we have something above a 99% literacy rate in this country?
If we had that kind of health coverage, even just for emergencies and annual checkups (excluding a lot of things that may be more expensive and special case like chiropractic, physical therapy, etc. that should be included but maybe can't be - dunno, I'm not a health-care wonk), that'd be *amazing*. Actually, it'd be *about sub-par* compared with most of the rest of the first world.
I care because for the last 10+ years, people have said "XYZ broke, can you fix it for me". I got tired of putting my head in my hands and saying "re-install" after tweaking around for hours on and, and then dealing with that horrified look of the realization of what that means to the poor sucker.
Now, if I start from the beginning and recommend things that I know I can support (for instance, linux isn't entirely about a platform - its an environment where you can actually, if you look carefully, back up an entire application without having to wonder what its done to the registry).
Every quarter or two Dell makes noises about maybe using AMD chips, or some other chips, in some part of its business.
Then it squeezes more concessions out of Intel to be the flag bearer. They get something - more marketing $$$, better volume margines, etc. that're given to them, and soon the dance starts over again.
The reason Dell hasn't used AMD to date is, from the customers point of view, because Intel keeps showering them with money. At the same time, HP is making sales here because they've got quad opteron systems./me *shrugs*
So be it. If Intel doesn't keep padding Dell's bottom line, then maybe they'll have a 6850 fitted out with opterons next year.
There's nothing in any of the linux licenses that says you can't take the license you're using, shut it down, decomission the system, format the drive, throw it out, and re-use that license on another system. You still have the same number of licenses for whatever linux you were running.
Now, I seem to recall that if a company bought a windows PC, and then wiped the drive and re-installed their windows build, which could have exactly the same or less software on it, MS demanded that they pay an additional license fee on top of the one that was paid for with the system, even though the net number of licenses in the organization had changed by excatly zero.
The DoD, which is a government agency, paid BBN, and a few universities, to get ARPANET going, which eventually became the internet. Companies like Sun, Cisco, Google, Yahoo, etc. came out of university settings where very small amounts of government grants (angel investments, if you will) fostered huge returns for the country at large.
You jackass.
As for which University I work for - none. I happen to work for one of the largest companies in the world. Believe you me we don't do any research or contribute much to the global knowledge base. We do benefit a lot from things developed at universities like SQL, bsd unix inventions like a solid tcp/ip stack (don't even try to pretend that commercial ip stacks were the foundation of the internet - the bsd stack was ported everywhere because it worked, unlike private venture stacks) the fast filesystem and the ground it broke, etc.
What I've read in my life of real groundbreaking research comes more often from universities far more often than from private business - this could partly be because published papers can seed other research, whereas a lot of private research dies its own quiet death within a company.
IMO (and this is only my opinion) the US government funding of medical, computer, and other research has returns that enrich all of our lives.
Right... the government is paying for grants universities because they don't get weapons, medicine, science and more out of it. They're just throwing money at rich lefty elites who like to look down at folks. Unlike the stand-up folks in private business like haliburton, global crossing, enron, and other down-to-earth right wing pillars of our society.
You jackass.
You know, there's this thing called the internet that some people "work"ing at universities came up with. I hear its kinda helping the economy.
Having automated transport could radically improve the amount of reading time people in the suburbs get in this country. Having to drive a car to work and wasting that commute time really sucks.
Yeah, my uncle used to work with him. In those pretty IBM ads that featured some of the fractal work they were doing, IBM put Benoit in front of a screen with a bunch of pretty work my uncle was doing at the time. My uncle got no credit, of course.
Went qmail->courier. A bunch of things the suite as a whole does makes it even easier to setup than postfix. I.e. I can set up virtual users and a virtual domain and have the mail server and lda and imap and pop3 server etc. etc. etc. all work from the same auth database with the same schema, whether the database is ldap, mysql or postgres with very little tweaking.
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Bananna de Terra, at least, are more commonly seen in the states as Plantains, but I think the important point is that there isn't a great deal of genetic difference between those varieties you've listed. If the sweet banana is vulnerable, then all the others are as well.
My very limited understanding is that Bananas are originally from an area in India where the native jungle is disappearing so the chance of pulling out an actually genetically different banana from anywhere else is quite small, though there are native crops elsewhere according to wikipedia (australia, in fact). But that's probably not enough to qualify as true diversity.
-Peter
Apparently it's been demonstrated that our basic ability to count to around 4 is controlled by specific neurons firing upon recognition of the specific quantity. That's why the OP spoke of fish having the same basic ability to count as apes, people with learning problems, etc. See http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/03/03/080303fa_fact_holt on page 3 for this:
"Dehaene has been able to bring together the experimental and the theoretical sides of his quest, and, on at least one occasion, he has even theorized the existence of a neurological feature whose presence was later confirmed by other researchers. In the early nineteen-nineties, working with Jean-Pierre Changeux, he set out to create a computer model to simulate the way humans and some animals estimate at a glance the number of objects in their environment. In the case of very small numbers, this estimate can be made with almost perfect accuracy, an ability known as "subitizing" (from the Latin word subitus, meaning "sudden"). Some psychologists think that subitizing is merely rapid, unconscious counting, but others, Dehaene included, believe that our minds perceive up to three or four objects all at once, without having to mentally "spotlight" them one by one. Getting the computer model to subitize the way humans and animals did was possible, he found, only if he built in "number neurons" tuned to fire with maximum intensity in response to a specific number of objects. His model had, for example, a special four neuron that got particularly excited when the computer was presented with four objects. The model's number neurons were pure theory, but almost a decade later two teams of researchers discovered what seemed to be the real item, in the brains of macaque monkeys that had been trained to do number tasks. The number neurons fired precisely the way Dehaene's model predicted--a vindication of theoretical psychology. "Basically, we can derive the behavioral properties of these neurons from first principles," he told me. "Psychology has become a little more like physics.""
It looks like this article is discussing the discovery of the same neurons performing the same function in fish. That's what this part of our own "intelligence" is at a basic level, apparently.
-Peter
You've got your product buzzwords backwards.
Power over ethernet provides DC over pins that are not used for data on an rj-45 connection. What you're talking about is powerline ethernet (or ethernet over power).
-Peter
I can't disagree more with the recommendation to use basic tax software. If you have any non-1040 income (i.e. almost any independant work) then you may discover, as I did, that turbotax is monumentally stupid. It's had me overpay by >$1000 two years in the past. The IRS automatic checkers refunded me that money. You can't imagine how it sucks to drain your bank account, only to have the IRS send you back some of that money 2 months later.
Also, if you've done any work outside of a regular job (edit some html, write some php, have a meeting to advise someone, minor things that are billable etc.) if you have even a few square feet, a percentage of your apt/house dedicated to work, and if you've bought a computer or any computer-related equipment and had any business-related meals with your co-workers, consultants, professionally-related friends etc. then you need an accountant to get that money out of your taxes. Turbotax just doesn't do it.
After 2 years in a row with turbotax screwing me, I've hired an accountant for the last 2 years and it's been far more than worth it.
-Peter
Doesn't a freedos and a virtual x86 (i.e. bochs or something similar) that's self-contained make for a market for this? Just package up a 30-40mb VM (that's enough space built in to save games), and sell it for $10.
No hassle with trying to turn your teraherz machine into a 8-bit cpu, and your whizbang video card into a BIOS-driven EGA display, just emulate it. The best part is it probably won't become obsolete again. The emulator should work for a long, long time.
-Peter
The New Yorker's fact checking is famous for being strong and covering their *sses. If the New Yorkers fact checkers fell down, then maybe Yau's got a chance in court. However if the fact checkers have gone over the material and contacted the sources as they should, then this case will get thrown out of court and Yau will be made to look dumber than he was made to look in the article.
-Peter
The problem is that a good, solid DNS server these days won't answer recursive lookups to the world since that can be a way to game a dns server, or just overwhelm it into submission.
I'm an earthlink customer, and until today I was on the fence about switching service, but today on top of this stupidity they've got at least one bogus DNS server and sites like capoeira.com and my own remote shell server were getting in the case of capoeira.com an NXDOMAIN response and for my site being redirected to a completely different host.
If earthlink is doing this in a way that's otherwise breaking their DNS, then I'm out of there. I pay a pretty penny for the service and I'm not going to stand for having that service be "supplemented" by having sites that I want to go to blackholed by incompetance and subsequently turned into $.0004/per impression in extra dough for earthlink, because it's about $10 in frustration for me.
-Peter
I'm strongly considering PRK right now, because I'm starting to have reactions to the new generation of silicon hydrogel lenses, and I don't want to have to worry about new materials getting put in my eye every few years for extended periods, and my possible litany of adverse reactions that could come with each new gee-gaw.
So, because I practice capoeira angola, and even though it's usually pretty chill there's the chance of getting kicked in the face, I'm leaning towards PRK instead of LASIK because I don't want to deal with a loose corneal flap along with anything else that may be involved in recovering from such a situation.
The most important thing, it seems to me, that's changed in the last few years is wavefront and laser eye tracking. Both of these seem to provide a far better chance of achieving a life with un-assisted vision than anything prior. The success rates seem to be phenomenal now - 98% better than 20/20 with wavefront scans and lasik and/or prk.
-Peter
Ummm...
Right. So find the RHEL documentation for cpuspeed, or for the changes to kernel parameters that re-enabled kernel.panic_on_oops, etc. I've been waiting almost 9 months for anaconda changes to get documented (anyone else know about ignoredisk?)
Oh, and what about changing the base package manifest? With the same ks.cfg file, you'll end up with completely different sets of packages on different updates because redhat changes the base list every update.
Fun, eh? Certianly not stable, though.
-Peter
I was the SA and mail admin for void.com from about '94-96 (before it was in the hands it presently appears to be in).
There was an amazing amount of bogus email that went to null@void.com - largely from people filling in web forms. It was a huge waste of bandwidth at the time. I can only imagine how much traffic it would generate now.
-Peter
Aha, here we go:
In an effort to produce canines with exceptional skill at catching mice and rats, the common men of the day would breed only smallest, quickest and best ratters of the bunch. These men were not out to produce a purebred, sophisticated breed of dog; instead they desired the best dogs to keep the mice away. This is the reason why no records were kept as to what breeds were mixed to create the Yorkshire Terrier. (from http://news.affari.to/news_details.php?id=101 here.
So it would make lots of sense that the yorkies would go crazy. That's a pretty cool corroboration.
-Peter
Sure, go and spoil the mystique :)
BTW, I'd be right there with you in not knowing anything about the series, and thus the movie except for a friend who took it upon himself to introduce the first couple of episodes a couple of weeks back (to myself and a host of other friends). and I promptly spent the next weekend watching the entire series back-to-back. It's some of the best writing I've ever seen in TV, and certianly consistantly the best sci-fi program I've ever seen. Not that the bar was too high.
-Peter
IIRC AFS only provides for a single system to be the writer to the whole distributed filesystem (though it does allow replicants so even if the main server dies the files are still available for read).
GFS allows every node to read and write simultaneously so each system can get full bandwidth out of the storage unit.
They're rather different beasts, solving different problems.
-Peter
Doh! Bart!
That's not such a surprise. Remember that it was that NeXT OS (or however you capitalize it), and that it ran on Intel and 68k for a long while before the OSX goodies started to get built on top of it.
The whole point of the initial MacOSX exercise was to get it running on the powerpc at all!
-Peter
You've got good insurance, or got lucky. With a for-pay HMO here in NYC, a friend of mine would have been dead except for luck, because getting into the office of an oncologist who could handle him would have taken him 2-4 months normally.
If he hadn't been friends from 20 years back with someone who was a researcher in the field, and who pushed him to the front of the line he was in as a favor, he'd be dead, dead, dead.
I only hope that didn't kill anyone else, but our current system doesn't work well enough unless you're paying $$$ (or get lucky and get around the system).
-Peter
Our education system has a lot to answer for but... have you noticed that we have something above a 99% literacy rate in this country?
If we had that kind of health coverage, even just for emergencies and annual checkups (excluding a lot of things that may be more expensive and special case like chiropractic, physical therapy, etc. that should be included but maybe can't be - dunno, I'm not a health-care wonk), that'd be *amazing*. Actually, it'd be *about sub-par* compared with most of the rest of the first world.
-Peter
I care because for the last 10+ years, people have said "XYZ broke, can you fix it for me". I got tired of putting my head in my hands and saying "re-install" after tweaking around for hours on and, and then dealing with that horrified look of the realization of what that means to the poor sucker.
Now, if I start from the beginning and recommend things that I know I can support (for instance, linux isn't entirely about a platform - its an environment where you can actually, if you look carefully, back up an entire application without having to wonder what its done to the registry).
-Peter
Every quarter or two Dell makes noises about maybe using AMD chips, or some other chips, in some part of its business.
/me *shrugs*
Then it squeezes more concessions out of Intel to be the flag bearer. They get something - more marketing $$$, better volume margines, etc. that're given to them, and soon the dance starts over again.
The reason Dell hasn't used AMD to date is, from the customers point of view, because Intel keeps showering them with money. At the same time, HP is making sales here because they've got quad opteron systems.
So be it. If Intel doesn't keep padding Dell's bottom line, then maybe they'll have a 6850 fitted out with opterons next year.
-Peter
There's nothing in any of the linux licenses that says you can't take the license you're using, shut it down, decomission the system, format the drive, throw it out, and re-use that license on another system. You still have the same number of licenses for whatever linux you were running.
Now, I seem to recall that if a company bought a windows PC, and then wiped the drive and re-installed their windows build, which could have exactly the same or less software on it, MS demanded that they pay an additional license fee on top of the one that was paid for with the system, even though the net number of licenses in the organization had changed by excatly zero.
Is this guy aware of that?
-Peter
The DoD, which is a government agency, paid BBN, and a few universities, to get ARPANET going, which eventually became the internet. Companies like Sun, Cisco, Google, Yahoo, etc. came out of university settings where very small amounts of government grants (angel investments, if you will) fostered huge returns for the country at large.
You jackass.
As for which University I work for - none. I happen to work for one of the largest companies in the world. Believe you me we don't do any research or contribute much to the global knowledge base. We do benefit a lot from things developed at universities like SQL, bsd unix inventions like a solid tcp/ip stack (don't even try to pretend that commercial ip stacks were the foundation of the internet - the bsd stack was ported everywhere because it worked, unlike private venture stacks) the fast filesystem and the ground it broke, etc.
What I've read in my life of real groundbreaking research comes more often from universities far more often than from private business - this could partly be because published papers can seed other research, whereas a lot of private research dies its own quiet death within a company.
IMO (and this is only my opinion) the US government funding of medical, computer, and other research has returns that enrich all of our lives.
You jackass.
-Peter
Right... the government is paying for grants universities because they don't get weapons, medicine, science and more out of it. They're just throwing money at rich lefty elites who like to look down at folks. Unlike the stand-up folks in private business like haliburton, global crossing, enron, and other down-to-earth right wing pillars of our society.
You jackass.
You know, there's this thing called the internet that some people "work"ing at universities came up with. I hear its kinda helping the economy.
-Peter
Having automated transport could radically improve the amount of reading time people in the suburbs get in this country. Having to drive a car to work and wasting that commute time really sucks.
-Peter
Yeah, my uncle used to work with him. In those pretty IBM ads that featured some of the fractal work they were doing, IBM put Benoit in front of a screen with a bunch of pretty work my uncle was doing at the time. My uncle got no credit, of course.
-Peter
I second that raised hand.
Went qmail->courier. A bunch of things the suite as a whole does makes it even easier to setup than postfix. I.e. I can set up virtual users and a virtual domain and have the mail server and lda and imap and pop3 server etc. etc. etc. all work from the same auth database with the same schema, whether the database is ldap, mysql or postgres with very little tweaking.
-Peter