That's incredibly disturbing. To save you future trauma, it might help to remember that the product is called the "Stadium Pal". Then you can just search for the name.;)
Good point, but at the end of your operation, you have a motheboard that's missing a chip. You kinda forgot step 2. Given that you just said that the procedure tends to destroy the chip, I don't think one can just reverse it to put the new chip on.
So how do they lose money when their stock price goes down?
They make the money on the initial sale of the stock right? I don't understand how what happens to the price after that affects their profits at all. It's true it affects their ability to issue more stock or bonds, but with the cash reserves they'll get from the IPO, I don't think they'll have to worry about that for a while.
I think about it this way: The stock price represents the market's best estimate of the company's expected value.
The expected value of a future event is (roughly) the payoff you would get from that event times the probability that it will happen.
SCO's potential payoff from the IBM lawsuit is pretty big I guess, if they can convince big blue to settle, and the probability of that happening seems to have just gone up. Thus, the expected asset value of their company goes up, and so does their stock price.
Sure, they didn't release the evidence, but that Forbes article contained pretty detailed allegations. Much more detailed, it seems to me, than anything I've heard from SCO before. Of course, I personally wouldn't put any money on their chances of winning, but if I were a professional trader looking for a speculative investment, I might give it a shot.
Well, I see two questions here. One, are the two markets the same size? and two, do you get the same experience?
Obviously, a ton more people have PCs than X-Boxes. So, maybe they think a larger market will bear a higher price.
Second, I don't own an X-Box, and have never played on one (so long gamer cred), but I'm going to guess that the PC experience of Doom 3 is superior to the X-Box experience, and a superior product is worth more money. The resolution and color quality alone would do it for me.
Also, maybe MS restricts the selling price of X-Box games. Their licensing agreement gives them control over things like that, no doubt.
Well, your typical computer bus runs at several hundred MHz. Your typical audio amplifier handles a range between 20Hz and 20KHz, or somewhere in that neighborhood. So, one is operating in the RF range, and the other isn't.
That's semiconductors separated by oxide (oxidized silicone or glass) to allow fields derived from differing voltages on either side of the glass to affect conductivity and thereby provide actuatable signals. All this new system does is replace the Oxide with something else; namely the walls of the outside of the chip and the unavoidable air-gap.
First of all, it's "silicon" for god's sake. Second of all, a capacitor and a transistor aren't the same at all! How are you going to dope the air between two conductors with an N or a P channel?
BUT it's more efficient than transferring physical electrons from silicon to copper and amplifying it such that you can induce a measurable current down the coppy wire several centimeters away.
This just doesn't make any sense. The signals are carried on metal when they're inside the chip! Ok, you need to amplify them to take them off-chip, but metal is your primary signal carrier no matter what.
More-over, it's more practical to etch micro-wire paths on the edge of a chip than to manually pin-punch chips like we do today.
What do you mean manually pin-punch chips? The wires between the chip and package are spun by a machine, and (if it's soldered at all) the package is soldered onto the board by another machine! Do you really think someone is sitting their manually punching hundreds of pins on millions of CPUs?
Circuit boards are cheap and easy to make, but I don't buy that they are easy to replace. Since almost everything is surface mounted to the board, the chips are non-trivial to remove. Thus, it's generally cheaper to replace the whole thing.
If your northbridge or southbridge goes bad today, you buy a new mainboard. In this respect, eliminating the circuit board would be an improvement if you could just replace the chip that failed.
Well, your case already is a Faraday cage (unless you've built one of those wood cases). It's not perfect, of course, since it has holes in it, but if you make the holes smaller you increase your heat problems.
Anyway, the problem would be other sources of RF interference inside the case itself. Your video card, for instance.
I agree with you 100% that this has been overhyped by the media, as is their way. Even the science press shows a poor understanding of concepts like uncertainty, and tends to over-generalize results. I suppose that is their way of trying to make science interesting to the general public.
There is a great article in Science about the questions this leaves unanswered, and the work left to be done. I think it's called "An end to the prion debate? don't count on it" or something similar.
As for their claim none of the control mice show any CNS dysfunction, I am bit dubious too. Obviously, we all (or at least most) have PrP in our CNS matter right now, but unless it misfolds, we are not going to get CJD. So it is possible that the Tg9949 mice had a much lower (or zero) incidence of misfolding in their MoPrP than the Tg196 mice (due to differences in their genomes or whatever).
Personally, I think this whole debate won't be entirely resolved until we have better techniques for observing the conformations of real proteins.
I don't find there lack of CNS dysfunction in the control group to be statistically significant at 670 days.
It's 'their'. And unfortunately, what you consider 'significant' doesn't really matter. The very term 'statistically significant' implies that the determination is made with statistics, not your personal judgement.
From the paper text: Brain extracts prepared from these Tg mice transmit prion disease to Tg mice expressing low levels of MoPrP(P101L), designated Tg196 mice (5). About 30% of Tg196 mice develop spontaneous illness at ~550 days of age.
What you're missing is that the Tg196 mice were NOT the control group. Both the experimental and controls were mice called "Tg9949", or just "Tg", which express a HIGH level of MoPrP(P101L). The Tg196 mice (which express a LOW level of it) were used to test the infectivity of the brain extracts from the experimental group. This was done to satisfy Koch's 3rd postulate.
As for statistics about the control group, check the bottom of the leftmost column of p. 674. You'll find:
In the study reported here, Tg9949 mice
were healthy at ~670 days of age and failed
to show any signs of disease at 620 days after
inoculation with PBS
PBS being the control solution. I would interpret that to mean ALL control mice. Apparently there's also a table (S1) with more info, but it's only available on-line. Check the top of the article for the URL.
Control mice that received a brain injection without the lab-made prions did not develop prion disease after 670 days. But animals that received the synthetic prions started showing the wobbly gait, ungroomed fur and rigid tails that are the clinical signs of rodent prion disease after 380 days.
Extracts from the brains of those diseased animals were injected into normal mice which started getting sick after, on average, only 154 days. That suggested the starting number of synthetic prions was low, but improved after one cycle of replication in a mouse brain, says Legname.
As another poster has already pointed out, long incubation periods are a feature of prion diseases. That's part of what makes them so difficult to study.
Re:Can arrow key history be like Matlab's?
on
Bash 3.0 Released
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· Score: 1
This really doesn't have the functionality that he wants. It only brings you to the most recent command that started with that text. Suppose you want the 2nd or 3rd most recent, but don't know which?
Pushing updates wouldn't work so well for people behind firewalls.
Plus, with your system, the server would have to send a billion updates every time any new content appeared. For frequently updated sites, this would probably increase the total traffic.
You don't seriously think they paid the retail price for these do you? Come on.
Re:First run unsuccessful due to pilot error....
on
X43-A on to Mach 10
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· Score: 1
Umm, when a control surface falls off, I'd call that a failure. If you want to say it failed becuase it was being operated outside of design limits, go ahead, but it's still a failure.
Also, is there some reason why the Orbital people who participate in the project didn't appraise NASA of their mistake before the flight?
Also also, just to nitpick, there isn't a pilot, so you can't really call it 'pilot error', 'design error' would make more sense.
Re:No point "breathing air" at that temperature.
on
X43-A on to Mach 10
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· Score: 1
Well, the flight doesn't have to be that short. The point is to evaluate the engine concept. You don't need to fly very long if all you want to see is how the air travels through the engine, and whether you can generate thrust.
This is definitely NOT being done just to cross some Mach 10 "line", rockets have travelled much faster than that already.
As an aside, the now-cancelled X-43C follow-on to this project was going to fly much longer using a larger craft and different fuel.
ii) The whole point of the project is to test the engine concept, which had never been used to power a plane before this project.
NASA does do a lot of research on space travel and biology, but as another poster has already pointed out, the concepts you mention are pretty well understood.
While you have a very valid point about traffic flow and convenience, I have to ask why, if this is such a good business model, don't we hear about all the big chains doing it? Is there a McDonalds across from a McDonalds somewhere? Is it just that the Starbucks in this configuration get more attention because of their percieved ubiquity?
I don't know where you got your sense of humor, but I'm fairly sure the part in quote marks is supposed to represent what the ladies say when they find out about this guy.
Or were you trying to make some kind of "I don't get the joke" joke?
Whoa there. Are you saying that there exists a number that's rational in base 10 but irrational in base 2? 'cause if you are, you need to stop and think about that one some more.
Slashdot Mirror
That's incredibly disturbing. To save you future trauma, it might help to remember that the product is called the "Stadium Pal". Then you can just search for the name. ;)
BTW, David Sedaris gave it a pretty poor review.
Good point, but at the end of your operation, you have a motheboard that's missing a chip. You kinda forgot step 2. Given that you just said that the procedure tends to destroy the chip, I don't think one can just reverse it to put the new chip on.
So how do they lose money when their stock price goes down?
They make the money on the initial sale of the stock right? I don't understand how what happens to the price after that affects their profits at all. It's true it affects their ability to issue more stock or bonds, but with the cash reserves they'll get from the IPO, I don't think they'll have to worry about that for a while.
I think about it this way: The stock price represents the market's best estimate of the company's expected value.
The expected value of a future event is (roughly) the payoff you would get from that event times the probability that it will happen.
SCO's potential payoff from the IBM lawsuit is pretty big I guess, if they can convince big blue to settle, and the probability of that happening seems to have just gone up. Thus, the expected asset value of their company goes up, and so does their stock price.
Sure, they didn't release the evidence, but that Forbes article contained pretty detailed allegations. Much more detailed, it seems to me, than anything I've heard from SCO before. Of course, I personally wouldn't put any money on their chances of winning, but if I were a professional trader looking for a speculative investment, I might give it a shot.
When I load BugMeNot lately, all I get is a blank page. Am I the only one?
It sucks, because it was really helpful to me for a few weeks.
Well, I see two questions here. One, are the two markets the same size? and two, do you get the same experience?
Obviously, a ton more people have PCs than X-Boxes. So, maybe they think a larger market will bear a higher price.
Second, I don't own an X-Box, and have never played on one (so long gamer cred), but I'm going to guess that the PC experience of Doom 3 is superior to the X-Box experience, and a superior product is worth more money. The resolution and color quality alone would do it for me.
Also, maybe MS restricts the selling price of X-Box games. Their licensing agreement gives them control over things like that, no doubt.
Well, your typical computer bus runs at several hundred MHz. Your typical audio amplifier handles a range between 20Hz and 20KHz, or somewhere in that neighborhood. So, one is operating in the RF range, and the other isn't.
I call BS.
That's semiconductors separated by oxide (oxidized silicone or glass) to allow fields derived from differing voltages on either side of the glass to affect conductivity and thereby provide actuatable signals. All this new system does is replace the Oxide with something else; namely the walls of the outside of the chip and the unavoidable air-gap.
First of all, it's "silicon" for god's sake. Second of all, a capacitor and a transistor aren't the same at all! How are you going to dope the air between two conductors with an N or a P channel?
BUT it's more efficient than transferring physical electrons from silicon to copper and amplifying it such that you can induce a measurable current down the coppy wire several centimeters away.
This just doesn't make any sense. The signals are carried on metal when they're inside the chip! Ok, you need to amplify them to take them off-chip, but metal is your primary signal carrier no matter what.
More-over, it's more practical to etch micro-wire paths on the edge of a chip than to manually pin-punch chips like we do today.
What do you mean manually pin-punch chips? The wires between the chip and package are spun by a machine, and (if it's soldered at all) the package is soldered onto the board by another machine! Do you really think someone is sitting their manually punching hundreds of pins on millions of CPUs?
Circuit boards are cheap and easy to make, but I don't buy that they are easy to replace. Since almost everything is surface mounted to the board, the chips are non-trivial to remove. Thus, it's generally cheaper to replace the whole thing.
If your northbridge or southbridge goes bad today, you buy a new mainboard. In this respect, eliminating the circuit board would be an improvement if you could just replace the chip that failed.
Well, your case already is a Faraday cage (unless you've built one of those wood cases). It's not perfect, of course, since it has holes in it, but if you make the holes smaller you increase your heat problems.
Anyway, the problem would be other sources of RF interference inside the case itself. Your video card, for instance.
I agree with you 100% that this has been overhyped by the media, as is their way. Even the science press shows a poor understanding of concepts like uncertainty, and tends to over-generalize results. I suppose that is their way of trying to make science interesting to the general public.
There is a great article in Science about the questions this leaves unanswered, and the work left to be done. I think it's called "An end to the prion debate? don't count on it" or something similar.
As for their claim none of the control mice show any CNS dysfunction, I am bit dubious too. Obviously, we all (or at least most) have PrP in our CNS matter right now, but unless it misfolds, we are not going to get CJD. So it is possible that the Tg9949 mice had a much lower (or zero) incidence of misfolding in their MoPrP than the Tg196 mice (due to differences in their genomes or whatever).
Personally, I think this whole debate won't be entirely resolved until we have better techniques for observing the conformations of real proteins.
I don't find there lack of CNS dysfunction in the control group to be statistically significant at 670 days.
It's 'their'. And unfortunately, what you consider 'significant' doesn't really matter. The very term 'statistically significant' implies that the determination is made with statistics, not your personal judgement.
From the paper text:
Brain extracts prepared from these Tg mice transmit prion disease to Tg mice expressing low levels of MoPrP(P101L), designated Tg196 mice (5). About 30% of Tg196 mice develop spontaneous illness at ~550 days of age.
What you're missing is that the Tg196 mice were NOT the control group. Both the experimental and controls were mice called "Tg9949", or just "Tg", which express a HIGH level of MoPrP(P101L). The Tg196 mice (which express a LOW level of it) were used to test the infectivity of the brain extracts from the experimental group. This was done to satisfy Koch's 3rd postulate.
As for statistics about the control group, check the bottom of the leftmost column of p. 674. You'll find:
In the study reported here, Tg9949 mice were healthy at ~670 days of age and failed to show any signs of disease at 620 days after inoculation with PBS
PBS being the control solution. I would interpret that to mean ALL control mice. Apparently there's also a table (S1) with more info, but it's only available on-line. Check the top of the article for the URL.
From a New Scientist article about the research:
Control mice that received a brain injection without the lab-made prions did not develop prion disease after 670 days. But animals that received the synthetic prions started showing the wobbly gait, ungroomed fur and rigid tails that are the clinical signs of rodent prion disease after 380 days.
Extracts from the brains of those diseased animals were injected into normal mice which started getting sick after, on average, only 154 days. That suggested the starting number of synthetic prions was low, but improved after one cycle of replication in a mouse brain, says Legname.
As another poster has already pointed out, long incubation periods are a feature of prion diseases. That's part of what makes them so difficult to study.
This really doesn't have the functionality that he wants. It only brings you to the most recent command that started with that text. Suppose you want the 2nd or 3rd most recent, but don't know which?
Pushing updates wouldn't work so well for people behind firewalls.
Plus, with your system, the server would have to send a billion updates every time any new content appeared. For frequently updated sites, this would probably increase the total traffic.
Sometimes stupid is the smartest way to go.
Opera now has RSS built in. Just click on an rss link and it automatically adds it to your list of newsfeeds.
You don't seriously think they paid the retail price for these do you? Come on.
Umm, when a control surface falls off, I'd call that a failure. If you want to say it failed becuase it was being operated outside of design limits, go ahead, but it's still a failure.
Also, is there some reason why the Orbital people who participate in the project didn't appraise NASA of their mistake before the flight?
Also also, just to nitpick, there isn't a pilot, so you can't really call it 'pilot error', 'design error' would make more sense.
Well, the flight doesn't have to be that short. The point is to evaluate the engine concept. You don't need to fly very long if all you want to see is how the air travels through the engine, and whether you can generate thrust. This is definitely NOT being done just to cross some Mach 10 "line", rockets have travelled much faster than that already. As an aside, the now-cancelled X-43C follow-on to this project was going to fly much longer using a larger craft and different fuel.
I won't pretend to be an expert, but there's this other great aerodynamic force called "lift" that you are leaving out of your calculations.
Also, any justification for your 4x size number?
i) The X-43 is unmanned.
ii) The whole point of the project is to test the engine concept, which had never been used to power a plane before this project.
NASA does do a lot of research on space travel and biology, but as another poster has already pointed out, the concepts you mention are pretty well understood.
While you have a very valid point about traffic flow and convenience, I have to ask why, if this is such a good business model, don't we hear about all the big chains doing it? Is there a McDonalds across from a McDonalds somewhere? Is it just that the Starbucks in this configuration get more attention because of their percieved ubiquity?
I don't know where you got your sense of humor, but I'm fairly sure the part in quote marks is supposed to represent what the ladies say when they find out about this guy. Or were you trying to make some kind of "I don't get the joke" joke?
What, are Starbucks drinks high in H. pylori or something?
Whoa there. Are you saying that there exists a number that's rational in base 10 but irrational in base 2? 'cause if you are, you need to stop and think about that one some more.