Dunno, but it's the funniest thing he said. Don't remember the S-100 cards looking like skateboards, but you could make a pretty cool hamster house out of them.
I, for one, am much more worried about the idiots running the various nuclear armed states on this planet and their assorted apocolyptic politicians than anything the universe is planning on tossing our way.
. We've used most of the easily accessible oil and a fair bit of the easily accessible coal, and those resources were necessary to get to our current tech level. If some event sends our tech level back a few thousand years (or possibly even only a few hundred) it may well be that we won't have the resources necessary to return to a technologically advanced situation.
That might turn out to be a feature, rather than a bug. "A few thousand years" is just another blink in time. The over riding problems for humans (and the rest of the planet) is that there are too damned many of us. If you drop the population by a couple of billion, keep it down (the hard part) and reboot the system you might end up with something that lasts longer than the system that we're screwing around with now.
If not, then maybe the NEXT few thousand years will do it. Worked for the Moties, right?
For example, comets that are no longer outgassing could potentially have very elliptical orbits that would not be detected by WISE. Also, there may be smaller asteroids that WISE has not detected that could make a life pretty unpleasant in a more narrow area even if they don't lead to an extinction event.
And, unhappily enough, TFA was concerned with said celestial body.
So it's OK to go back to shivering in fear. Besides, US presidential elections are just around the corner (again).
Unless it turns out to be hugely popular (I find it hard to believe they are since MS is been so quiet) it'll be a mistake. Having an empty MS store across from a busy Apple store just makes Apple look better.
There is / was a Sony store about 1/2 block and 90 degrees to the Apple Store. Wandered in there once waiting for the crowd to thin out at the Apple Store (it was soon after the iPad launch).
Quiet. Eerily quiet. A bunch of TVs hooked to MTV, some headphones, a bunch of computers at random screens. A couple of employees crouched in the corner. Dark.
They don't get it. Microsoft doesn't get it. I'm not really sure I get what the attraction is about the store but it sure has resonated with a bunch of people.
is, why Venus seems like a tabu for exploration and research?
872 degree F surface temperature, 93 bar surface pressure, a bunch of hydrochloric acid that, along with the temperature and pressure melts everything in a few minutes.
Want an example how this can be abused? Alright. Suppose someone with a minor disease visits websites or forums talking about that. Fast forward a few years. Said person seeks health insurance, but can't get any, because the insurance companies will have access to that person's surfing habit, and will flag this person as undesirable customer. So no coverage, right?
Well, I'm a doctor, I look up major and minor diseases all the time. I'm going to be in BIG trouble, right?
I don't think it will be that obvious, nor that intrusive. I'm not in favor of everyone on the planet logging every keystroke I send into the Internet but I believe the ramifications are going to be more annoying than dangerous. The government can barely keep up with the information I send them (I'm looking at YOU, IRS). The credit databases like Experian are so full of incorrect data that it's laughable.
If people were really trawling search histories with an eye towards looking for bad guys, we'd all be in jail.
Tim Cook certainly could change the timbre of the argument by coming out and saying "hey, we're still very much interested in graphics professionals, here is what we're going to do". Even without a detailed map, a lot of people would stop and listen (for a while). Better yet, the big application vendors could get together with Apple and smile and slap each others back and make cooing noises.
Kinda don't think it's going to go that way, but who knows?
You're talking laptops (where MacPros seem to rule the roost currently). TFA is talking media professionals (video / film especially) using desktops and render farms.
TFA is describing media professionals, not so much iOS developers (which Apple does need). For the latter, a Mac mini is fine. Apple just isn't competing in the higher end stuff.
And I think Apple has pretty much lost much of the Final Cut business. Not so much today - professionals aren't looking to replace their entire tool chain every time Apple releases a new version, but when it does come time to upgrade, many FCP users will be looking long and hard at alternatives. Just the backwards compatibility debacle is deal killer for many folks.
It's because they infiltrate and dominate all of the colleges that produce creative professionals. Any art/design school basically requires you to have a Mac, and as a result, almost every art/design job requires a Mac.
BS. I recently financed my stepson's education at Vancouver Institute of Media Arts, a fairly well known "art/design" school. We went up to the campus, looked around. Lots and lots of Windows. A couple of Macs in the corner, sitting unused.
Talking to the faculty (who to a person started out on Macs) one finds two major issues: Graphics cards for the MacPros suck hard compared to Windows offering and Apple's random walk as far as long term strategies make it hard for a company to invest a couple of million dollars in Apple gear. Nobody suggests using Macs for anything other than cool laptops.
There were a bunch of MacBooks running around - all running Bootcamp.
So, you're view of the Mac centric artistic universe was probably true a decade ago, but it certainly isn't true now. Windows 7 really is a pretty good, quite stable applications platform. Same for the Windows toolchain. And, as TFA points out, SolidWorks and 3DS Max, two very important 3D programs are Windows only.
Apple has lost this battle and really isn't even fighting a credible rearguard action.
What you are not seeing is that Apple is trying to change at times what it MEANS to be a professional, how they work...
'Professional'.
That word doesn't mean what Apple thinks it means. For the purposes of this thread, professional is much closer to fuzzyfuzzyfungus' definition of someone who has "Final cut, two dozen specialized plugins, one or more boutique hardware components for capture or output, some sort of storage backend, possibly some in-house custom tools..." then Apple's view of a couple of metrosexuals hammering out some cheezy TV ad at Starbucks. People with a serious workflow that does what THEY want it to do, not what Steve Jobs thinks they should be doing.
Room for both groups, obviously, but the writing is pretty much on the wall - Apple is going to be a smaller and smaller part of serious professional's workflow as the Windows ecosystem improves and evolves. No biggy really, if you decide to ditch OS X, most of your Apple hardware will work fine for the next couple of years. Nothing is etched in stone anyway, things change. Software changes, hardware changes.
I often use the term "Kill the whores!" when excited and "Demons are coming to rape my skull!" when leaving. Does this classify me as a psychopath or just an average academic?
It's not just the reels on top. The mechanical film path through the camera is also gone, which involves a lot of big metal parts.
Seriously, look at these things: http://www.red.com/products/epic... The body is 5 pounds. Another 5 pounds for a lens, and you have a cinematography camera in about 10 pounds.
Picked up a Panavision lately? The body alone weighs more than that. By the time you've strapped on a lens and a loaded reel, it's quite a load to lug.
Picked up a fully loaded RED1 recently? It doesn't weigh 5 pounds anymore. Between the monitor, the stand, the recorder box, and half a dozen other little gizmos they can bulk up pretty fast. Actually getting a 4K system that is light and small and useful is a problem that a number of people actively are addressing.
People get around this by using smaller cameras like the Sony EX3 and changing their shooting style to match the camera (like the 'documentary' scenes in District 9) (which was mostly shot on RED 1's).
Compared to paying Will Smith $20,000,000 to star in your movie renting a Red camera or a Cinealta F65 is peanuts.
This is key for pro work. The camera cost is a very small percentage of the total budget. Most productions rent them. Since your intermediate step is more than 90% digital these days (nobody rotoscopes by painting on the film any more), you might as well forgo the chemical process altogether and use digital capture.
Archiving is a separate issue and if one bothers to read TFA (which is pretty good BTW, congrats) you see a number of companies are actively working towards solving all the problem us brilliant armchair archivists have thrown at the subject.
Imagine many data centers spread across the planet, duplicate copies of stored items, offline and online access... we seem to be on this path now with The Cloud..
That's a great idea . We could get it all organized and call it something catchy - like 'Pirates' or something.
The bacterium that causes plague, Yersinia pestis, is still highly virulent today but has different symptoms, leading some historians to doubt that it was the agent of the Black Death.
Those doubts were laid to rest last year by detection of the bacterium’s DNA in plague victims from mass graves across Europe. With the full genome now in hand, the researchers hope to recreate the microbe itself so as to understand what made the Black Death outbreak so deadly.
So far, the evidence points more toward the conditions of the time than to properties of the bacterium itself. The genome recovered from the East Smithfield victims is remarkably similar to that of the present-day bacterium, says the research team, led by Kirsten I. Bos of McMaster University in Ontario and Johannes Krause of the University of Tübingen in Germany.
So the bug is pretty much the same genetically and presumably biologically. What is likely different is the host. At the time of the Black Death there was widespread famine. It is certainly plausible that Y. pestis is much more pathologic in a weak, starving host living in awful non hygienic circumstances. This is a testable hypothesis but hopefully no one is ever going to do that experiment.
Slashdot Mirror
Dunno, but it's the funniest thing he said. Don't remember the S-100 cards looking like skateboards, but you could make a pretty cool hamster house out of them.
The whole story has very little substantial fact behind it, and factual errors such as pointed out above do not promote confidence.
I bet you're a lot of fun at astronomy parties.
I, for one, am much more worried about the idiots running the various nuclear armed states on this planet and their assorted apocolyptic politicians than anything the universe is planning on tossing our way.
Occam's razor and all that.
. We've used most of the easily accessible oil and a fair bit of the easily accessible coal, and those resources were necessary to get to our current tech level. If some event sends our tech level back a few thousand years (or possibly even only a few hundred) it may well be that we won't have the resources necessary to return to a technologically advanced situation.
That might turn out to be a feature, rather than a bug. "A few thousand years" is just another blink in time. The over riding problems for humans (and the rest of the planet) is that there are too damned many of us. If you drop the population by a couple of billion, keep it down (the hard part) and reboot the system you might end up with something that lasts longer than the system that we're screwing around with now.
If not, then maybe the NEXT few thousand years will do it. Worked for the Moties, right?
For example, comets that are no longer outgassing could potentially have very elliptical orbits that would not be detected by WISE. Also, there may be smaller asteroids that WISE has not detected that could make a life pretty unpleasant in a more narrow area even if they don't lead to an extinction event.
And, unhappily enough, TFA was concerned with said celestial body.
So it's OK to go back to shivering in fear. Besides, US presidential elections are just around the corner (again).
Strikes me that there are a lot of possible interpretations.
The most obvious of which is the joke just whooshed by you.
I just checked out /b/ ...
Now YOU need counseling as well.
I think you may have missed the humorous nature of his post. No, on second thoughts, you definitely missed it.
That's because, in space, no one can hear you go "whoosh".
Unless it turns out to be hugely popular (I find it hard to believe they are since MS is been so quiet) it'll be a mistake. Having an empty MS store across from a busy Apple store just makes Apple look better.
There is / was a Sony store about 1/2 block and 90 degrees to the Apple Store. Wandered in there once waiting for the crowd to thin out at the Apple Store (it was soon after the iPad launch).
Quiet. Eerily quiet. A bunch of TVs hooked to MTV, some headphones, a bunch of computers at random screens. A couple of employees crouched in the corner. Dark.
They don't get it. Microsoft doesn't get it. I'm not really sure I get what the attraction is about the store but it sure has resonated with a bunch of people.
Thank you. Thank you. Nice article.
Now, to try and read it without head asploding.
Seriously, it's worth clicking, and understanding the abstract doesn't require advanced physics knowledge.
Best. Abstract. Ever.
is, why Venus seems like a tabu for exploration and research?
872 degree F surface temperature, 93 bar surface pressure, a bunch of hydrochloric acid that, along with the temperature and pressure melts everything in a few minutes.
What's not to like?
What about that for "juvenile"!
Less 'juvenile' than the DA's behavior. And that's pretty sad.
Want an example how this can be abused? Alright. Suppose someone with a minor disease visits websites or forums talking about that. Fast forward a few years. Said person seeks health insurance, but can't get any, because the insurance companies will have access to that person's surfing habit, and will flag this person as undesirable customer. So no coverage, right?
Well, I'm a doctor, I look up major and minor diseases all the time. I'm going to be in BIG trouble, right?
I don't think it will be that obvious, nor that intrusive. I'm not in favor of everyone on the planet logging every keystroke I send into the Internet but I believe the ramifications are going to be more annoying than dangerous. The government can barely keep up with the information I send them (I'm looking at YOU, IRS). The credit databases like Experian are so full of incorrect data that it's laughable.
If people were really trawling search histories with an eye towards looking for bad guys, we'd all be in jail.
Tim Cook certainly could change the timbre of the argument by coming out and saying "hey, we're still very much interested in graphics professionals, here is what we're going to do". Even without a detailed map, a lot of people would stop and listen (for a while). Better yet, the big application vendors could get together with Apple and smile and slap each others back and make cooing noises.
Kinda don't think it's going to go that way, but who knows?
You're talking laptops (where MacPros seem to rule the roost currently). TFA is talking media professionals (video / film especially) using desktops and render farms.
TFA is describing media professionals, not so much iOS developers (which Apple does need). For the latter, a Mac mini is fine. Apple just isn't competing in the higher end stuff.
And I think Apple has pretty much lost much of the Final Cut business. Not so much today - professionals aren't looking to replace their entire tool chain every time Apple releases a new version, but when it does come time to upgrade, many FCP users will be looking long and hard at alternatives. Just the backwards compatibility debacle is deal killer for many folks.
It's because they infiltrate and dominate all of the colleges that produce creative professionals. Any art/design school basically requires you to have a Mac, and as a result, almost every art/design job requires a Mac.
BS. I recently financed my stepson's education at Vancouver Institute of Media Arts, a fairly well known "art/design" school. We went up to the campus, looked around. Lots and lots of Windows. A couple of Macs in the corner, sitting unused.
Talking to the faculty (who to a person started out on Macs) one finds two major issues: Graphics cards for the MacPros suck hard compared to Windows offering and Apple's random walk as far as long term strategies make it hard for a company to invest a couple of million dollars in Apple gear. Nobody suggests using Macs for anything other than cool laptops.
There were a bunch of MacBooks running around - all running Bootcamp.
So, you're view of the Mac centric artistic universe was probably true a decade ago, but it certainly isn't true now. Windows 7 really is a pretty good, quite stable applications platform. Same for the Windows toolchain. And, as TFA points out, SolidWorks and 3DS Max, two very important 3D programs are Windows only.
Apple has lost this battle and really isn't even fighting a credible rearguard action.
What you are not seeing is that Apple is trying to change at times what it MEANS to be a professional, how they work...
'Professional'.
That word doesn't mean what Apple thinks it means. For the purposes of this thread, professional is much closer to fuzzyfuzzyfungus' definition of someone who has "Final cut, two dozen specialized plugins, one or more boutique hardware components for capture or output, some sort of storage backend, possibly some in-house custom tools..." then Apple's view of a couple of metrosexuals hammering out some cheezy TV ad at Starbucks. People with a serious workflow that does what THEY want it to do, not what Steve Jobs thinks they should be doing.
Room for both groups, obviously, but the writing is pretty much on the wall - Apple is going to be a smaller and smaller part of serious professional's workflow as the Windows ecosystem improves and evolves. No biggy really, if you decide to ditch OS X, most of your Apple hardware will work fine for the next couple of years. Nothing is etched in stone anyway, things change. Software changes, hardware changes.
I often use the term "Kill the whores!" when excited and "Demons are coming to rape my skull!" when leaving. Does this classify me as a psychopath or just an average academic?
Yes.
It's not just the reels on top. The mechanical film path through the camera is also gone, which involves a lot of big metal parts.
Seriously, look at these things: http://www.red.com/products/epic ... The body is 5 pounds. Another 5 pounds for a lens, and you have a cinematography camera in about 10 pounds.
Picked up a Panavision lately? The body alone weighs more than that. By the time you've strapped on a lens and a loaded reel, it's quite a load to lug.
Picked up a fully loaded RED1 recently? It doesn't weigh 5 pounds anymore. Between the monitor, the stand, the recorder box, and half a dozen other little gizmos they can bulk up pretty fast. Actually getting a 4K system that is light and small and useful is a problem that a number of people actively are addressing.
People get around this by using smaller cameras like the Sony EX3 and changing their shooting style to match the camera (like the 'documentary' scenes in District 9) (which was mostly shot on RED 1's).
(more parenthesis for (extra) effect.)
Compared to paying Will Smith $20,000,000 to star in your movie renting a Red camera or a Cinealta F65 is peanuts.
This is key for pro work. The camera cost is a very small percentage of the total budget. Most productions rent them. Since your intermediate step is more than 90% digital these days (nobody rotoscopes by painting on the film any more), you might as well forgo the chemical process altogether and use digital capture.
Archiving is a separate issue and if one bothers to read TFA (which is pretty good BTW, congrats) you see a number of companies are actively working towards solving all the problem us brilliant armchair archivists have thrown at the subject.
Imagine many data centers spread across the planet, duplicate copies of stored items, offline and online access... we seem to be on this path now with The Cloud..
That's a great idea . We could get it all organized and call it something catchy - like 'Pirates' or something.
No, what is interesting, according to TFA is that
The bacterium that causes plague, Yersinia pestis, is still highly virulent today but has different symptoms, leading some historians to doubt that it was the agent of the Black Death.
Those doubts were laid to rest last year by detection of the bacterium’s DNA in plague victims from mass graves across Europe. With the full genome now in hand, the researchers hope to recreate the microbe itself so as to understand what made the Black Death outbreak so deadly.
So far, the evidence points more toward the conditions of the time than to properties of the bacterium itself. The genome recovered from the East Smithfield victims is remarkably similar to that of the present-day bacterium, says the research team, led by Kirsten I. Bos of McMaster University in Ontario and Johannes Krause of the University of Tübingen in Germany.
So the bug is pretty much the same genetically and presumably biologically. What is likely different is the host. At the time of the Black Death there was widespread famine. It is certainly plausible that Y. pestis is much more pathologic in a weak, starving host living in awful non hygienic circumstances. This is a testable hypothesis but hopefully no one is ever going to do that experiment.
Way to go Slashdot! Stick with computers
The scientists isolated the DNA (not RNA) of the Bacterium (not virus) that caused the "Black Death" (the Plague).
That's like saying Ford recently upgraded their turboprop so it can run on liquid nitrogen.
Arrrgh!