We need to have a broader view here, when dealing with GM'd "products". Just one of the few obvious: nanotechnology. Genetical engineering is broadly used in "manufacturing" proteins which can do lots of things. E.g. modified molecules were produced of the proteins which instead of gathering the iron (natural forms of these are in our blood) could gather specified quantities (specified up to the number of atoms they could hold) gold, silver, whatever else. Then these could be organized into specified geometrical shapes, the protein purged off of them and what is you get ? An oganized matrix of metal bubbles which you could use for what ? You can build very small memory chips of them for example.
But this is only a minor achievement. Why I say that ? Because if you produce a protein which can only join to proteins in the membranes of cancerous cells, then you have just saved the life of a human being.
This is just the tip of the iceberg and I'm no nanotech engineer, just wanted to give a starting point.
Right. When you can't find professional arguments against a perfectly usable and very nicely done project like Hibernate you start the old story on bad sw names.
It's an old and boring disk alright, so not much use to start on that again.
And no, I won't even start picking from the many dozen software names that don't have anything to do with their goals. Because I just don't really care. If you give me a usable tool you can call it pumpkin-pie-2k if you wish. It's your choice.
Hell, does your name have anything to do with what you do ?:P
I don't see why won't you just be the ubergeek and build an android with your image and send it to work every day so you won't have to even get out of your bed ? You wouldn't even have to sit on a bike, let alone pedal the darn thing.
Man, if laziness would be a lethal disease, we'd have many more IT jobs open.
Mmmkay, so now I have a black box that records that I go over speed limits when the road is emtpy or when I feel like doing so, and we also have an intelligent box alerting every time I do so. That means I buy a car with all these and I will have to spend an afternoon disabling some multi-thousand $ worth of extra equipment that I'll never would've bought in the first place. Nice:)
perform well especially in poor lighting conditions
Umm, great achievement. Now we have a road sign alerting system that is tuned for poor lighting conditions. That wouldn't be bad, e.g. when driving on unknown territory at night. But does that "especially" imply that it performs poorer at normal lighting conditions ?:) Well if it performed very well in daylight and much better at dawn&dusk, I'd say alright, but I doubt it does so.
Anyway, if every just other such box would be reported here, we'd see nothing else.
Re:I kicked coffee accidentally with creatine
on
Coffee is Addictive
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· Score: 1
So what you say is C8H10N4O2 is bad and C4H9N3O2 is good ? Man, so that will surely make me stop on my daily caffeine:P
Am I the only one who is fed up reading like "company A developed a new search engine which uses company B's search engine by adding revolutionary and world shaking features like thinking instead of you"...
If some are so revolutionary, then why are they using someone else's engine by adding some stuff most people most probably never find out what to use for. Doesn't A9 ring a bell for anyone, or does it.
I have an idea. Let's make a totally new and ground breaking search engine which will use Google's results, but hey, the main idea: let's have a different logo and paint the site pink !
Geez, I sometimes just can't stop wondering about all the freaky things that money can be earned from these days.
Actually between Ivan and Jeanne I heard a researcher guy speaking who said that in fact there haven't been more hurricanes this year than in the previous 50 or so, just that they came more close to each other. He said that statistics don't show a definitive increasing tendency of increase in the numbers of hurricanes. He also said the strength of these also varied pretty much over the decades.
So who knows, one says the end of the world is coming, another says it's just casual/by chance.
I say, I'm glad I never run from a hurricane. I hope I'll never have to.
If one big player does it, the others have to follow or lose out.
This and more. I mean despite some (?) MS's businness misbehaviour they became a major success story (more or less also because of the ignorance of average people). So MS as a company and as businness behaviour is a good or a bad example ? Do some follow their ways from free choice or from necessity ? Probably both.
Why not? I mean Microsoft patents so much sh*t in a year one could hardly count on thousand fingers. So what should keep anyone else, let that be Mr. Schwartz (whom I personally don't really like despite my long term respect for Sun), from doing if not the same then something similar ?
It's just the most commmon businness (mal)practice these days. What can one do ? Not much besides watchin'a game and havin'a bud:P
But - somewhat - seriously, patenting a software licensing methodology is so much really worse than a gazillion ridiculous patent filings of Microsoft ? I very much doubt that.
This is what would really help Linux I think. Not just being able to read MS formats in open applications, but being able to read the open formats in MS applications.
That is the point ! Right on top ! Hey, I wanna marry you:D kidding of course:D
What I mean is, that from another point of view, Linux's so called "incompatibility" is a double edged sword: if one wants to achieve full compatibility, the other side [MS] has to help too. And that means if Word would be allowed (by MS) to read and write OpenOffice.org's format (which is just great, in concept and in practice), that would solve a lot of the document compatibility problems that you guys have just mentioned up above.
If that day would arrive, that would show one thing: that for example OpenOffice.org is superior, why ? because it show that can handle many more formats than Word itself (I mean Word has always been compatible with itself, and sometimes not even with itself)...
Of course you're right. About the format thing and others as well. And of course things have to be viewd from a different viewpoint for businnesses and for everyday home users. And yes, sadly MS has created such an environment in which an average home user cannot imagine the life without MS products. Hey, it's been their policy from the first day, and they succeeded in it, to make people believe they [MS] have what they [people] need.
Not because it is the best format, but because if I send someone a Word document, I expect them to be able to read it without hassle, and they pretty much always can.
That's why I always send documents in pdf or sometimes in rtf.
Thing is, when money/revenue depends on it, one tends to me more flexible towards clients. But until I can afford to do how I like, I'll do so and that is: if they expect me to be flexible and to be able to read all their crap, then I also expect them to be able to read pdf or rtf.
Linux might not disappear like that, but the proliferation of Linux (especially in the desktop arena) does depend a great deal on interoperability (Samba for instance) and compatibility of popular Linux-based applications with those in use by the 'rest of the world' (MS Office OpenOffice).
Ok, of course you have a point here and I agree with it to a point. Unfortunately (?) I've always been that type of techie (then nerd, then IT, then IT-nerd, hey some form of evolution does exist:)) who does think that to judge a fully separate and stand-alone OS by the ability to be compatible with Microsoft's siblings is a bit peculiar.
Of course I've taken my pills and now I know this is the real world:D so Linux needs to be highly compatible to convince the crowd they can live their Microsoft-lives without Microsoft's operating systems.
And so we need to be highly friendly on both the lowest and highest levels e.g. with AD in Samba or with formats in OpenOffice.org. But what has always sticked me from the inside:) was why does Linux need to keep telling and repeating its being compatible with crap when it does have its own fortes. Maybe the weight should be placed to letting people know what Linux has besides Windows siblings compatibility. I totally believe that Linux would very well do without any of Microsoft's achievements in the field of networking.
It may happen that Linux is one of the best OS's only in my world, but then I'd like to stay in it.
Then again, give credit where it's due, Windows has managed to make fully computer-illiterate masses of people to think they are all-knowing computer geeks. For them Linux needs to be learned, and they more easily say it's crap and under-developed than to learn anything new regarding Linux. I just think I'm getting pretty offtopic so I'll just cut it here:)
As it is, I can agree with most what you said. Just one thing. On: [...] only thing money allows you is purchasing power- the power to buy the little guy's technology or money to brute force competitors out of the marketplace[...] I tend to see more about this. What I mean is take for example BG's many "visionary" speaches on what people need, how technology will evolve, what our future digital home will look like, what formats will emerge, and I could go on. I usually get a headache when I hear how he tries to be a digital messiah every time he speaks
But given his money, he can actually make that happen. He can "persuade" certain other companies to take on his ideas and plans, he can "convince" organizations and companies on certains ways and formats they should adopt, he can follow very powerful (in the circles of the usual people most certainly) marketing and promotional strategies, and I could go on forever.
One could argue that some of their stuff would've emerged without their backing with lotsa cash, but that's only a typical "what-if" story. We'll never know. What's certain is that with all their money they can more easily go their ways than mostly anyone else.
So all this is about top 50 people influencing tech.
Then this all should go to Bill Gates. Why ? Because usually (and sadly) it's mostly not the guy who has the largest influence, but the money. This meaning if you can't persuade them, buy them or pay them.
Sorry but I can't be made to feel sorry for you UK guys in such cases. Just an example. I'm in an EU country, but e.g. amazon@UK doesn't count us in the EU, not in Europe, but in the rest-of-the-world category, having prices equivalent to those in US but in pounds (i.e. a $50 book costs 50pounds) and shipping costs are so high that in some cases ordering the same from the UK is almost the double (!) than ordering from the US.
And to the topic: I for one don't think this news was one that shouldn't belong here. For us Europeans this is good news. Or would you better see us complain at every ThinkGeek slashvert from now on ?:P
It's not the patent stack that should be the asset of a businness. It should be the applications of those patents in products and services combined with support in a way that would make a company in front of others despite not holding the patent single handedly.
Companies shouldn't just live on a successfull product based on some patents on which they cash in from other companies as well, economical growth and revenue increase should be formented by innovation in products, technologies and services and in the quality they provide them.
Well, given that microsoft's open source != our open source (i.e. ms shared source license vs gnu gpl or bsd), there's no surprise some people are not really overwhelmed by this step.
A bit greater step would be required from MS to make some of us jumping around in ecstasy.
Like I'd be willing to ever pay for films like "
Pleasure craft loaded with babes crashes into a remote island controlled by a mad ex-Nazi scientist who transforms pretty girls into rubber faced Frankensteins." or "An experimental rocket containing radiation contaminated wasps crashes in Africa making giant killer wasps that run amok."
:D Okay, okay, those were good times, but DVDs aren't that expensive these days and they stay on your shelf. I'd just move along.
It's nothing, but I feel wasting 400+ posts on such a "problem" is simply ridiculous. I just wanted to avoid and not even read in, but it just annoyed me after a while.
Maybe mums will also start to come around asking what to do with used pampers.
Linux has had USB drive support for a long time now. E.g. my usb pendrive, diva mp3 player, and even my kodak camrea with compact flash inside can be easily mounted/dev/sdx. For ages.
Blame it on the weatherman.
on
The Jobs Crunch
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Bad immigration policy-and bad trade deals are combining to decimate the middle class in America.
In the country where I live now I'm an immigrant, having settled and got citizenship about 8 years ago. I have been through many arguings and blind quarrels over the years over "immigrants take our jobs" and the like.
What I've found is the people who complain the most are those who are just down in the dumps, not necessarily because they couldn't get a job, but because they didn't want to accept any job, or just politicians who are what they are, anyplace, or just bloody ignorant.
It's the most easy to blame increasing uneployment rates on others who have jobs, especially if they come from abroad.
Really no offence and forgive my ignorance, but I have to tell, U.S. people also have their history on intolerance, racism and xenophoby.
You also have to take into account that some effects of the late dotcom boom and blow are still showing today. I mean there was a continuing very large over-employment of IT "professionals" , very many of which are dismissed even today.
What I want to point out is that there are very many aspects that lead to the given rising unemployment rates in the U.S. (and just that you know, that is _not_ that high if you consider other countries as well, which americans tend not to do), and only one of them may be connected to immigration of qualified professionals (I intentionally don't mention seasonal uneducated workers, that's another area of the problem).
Slashdot Mirror
We need to have a broader view here, when dealing with GM'd "products". Just one of the few obvious: nanotechnology. Genetical engineering is broadly used in "manufacturing" proteins which can do lots of things. E.g. modified molecules were produced of the proteins which instead of gathering the iron (natural forms of these are in our blood) could gather specified quantities (specified up to the number of atoms they could hold) gold, silver, whatever else. Then these could be organized into specified geometrical shapes, the protein purged off of them and what is you get ? An oganized matrix of metal bubbles which you could use for what ? You can build very small memory chips of them for example.
But this is only a minor achievement. Why I say that ? Because if you produce a protein which can only join to proteins in the membranes of cancerous cells, then you have just saved the life of a human being.
This is just the tip of the iceberg and I'm no nanotech engineer, just wanted to give a starting point.
Right. When you can't find professional arguments against a perfectly usable and very nicely done project like Hibernate you start the old story on bad sw names.
:P
It's an old and boring disk alright, so not much use to start on that again.
And no, I won't even start picking from the many dozen software names that don't have anything to do with their goals. Because I just don't really care. If you give me a usable tool you can call it pumpkin-pie-2k if you wish. It's your choice.
Hell, does your name have anything to do with what you do ?
I knew mother nature would come up with a solution first :)
I don't see why won't you just be the ubergeek and build an android with your image and send it to work every day so you won't have to even get out of your bed ? You wouldn't even have to sit on a bike, let alone pedal the darn thing.
Man, if laziness would be a lethal disease, we'd have many more IT jobs open.
Mmmkay, so now I have a black box that records that I go over speed limits when the road is emtpy or when I feel like doing so, and we also have an intelligent box alerting every time I do so. That means I buy a car with all these and I will have to spend an afternoon disabling some multi-thousand $ worth of extra equipment that I'll never would've bought in the first place. Nice :)
:) Well if it performed very well in daylight and much better at dawn&dusk, I'd say alright, but I doubt it does so.
perform well especially in poor lighting conditions
Umm, great achievement. Now we have a road sign alerting system that is tuned for poor lighting conditions. That wouldn't be bad, e.g. when driving on unknown territory at night. But does that "especially" imply that it performs poorer at normal lighting conditions ?
Anyway, if every just other such box would be reported here, we'd see nothing else.
So what you say is C8H10N4O2 is bad and C4H9N3O2 is good ? Man, so that will surely make me stop on my daily caffeine :P
Am I the only one who is fed up reading like "company A developed a new search engine which uses company B's search engine by adding revolutionary and world shaking features like thinking instead of you"...
If some are so revolutionary, then why are they using someone else's engine by adding some stuff most people most probably never find out what to use for. Doesn't A9 ring a bell for anyone, or does it.
I have an idea. Let's make a totally new and ground breaking search engine which will use Google's results, but hey, the main idea: let's have a different logo and paint the site pink !
Geez, I sometimes just can't stop wondering about all the freaky things that money can be earned from these days.
Actually between Ivan and Jeanne I heard a researcher guy speaking who said that in fact there haven't been more hurricanes this year than in the previous 50 or so, just that they came more close to each other. He said that statistics don't show a definitive increasing tendency of increase in the numbers of hurricanes. He also said the strength of these also varied pretty much over the decades.
So who knows, one says the end of the world is coming, another says it's just casual/by chance.
I say, I'm glad I never run from a hurricane. I hope I'll never have to.
If one big player does it, the others have to follow or lose out.
This and more. I mean despite some (?) MS's businness misbehaviour they became a major success story (more or less also because of the ignorance of average people). So MS as a company and as businness behaviour is a good or a bad example ? Do some follow their ways from free choice or from necessity ? Probably both.
Why not? I mean Microsoft patents so much sh*t in a year one could hardly count on thousand fingers. So what should keep anyone else, let that be Mr. Schwartz (whom I personally don't really like despite my long term respect for Sun), from doing if not the same then something similar ?
:P
It's just the most commmon businness (mal)practice these days. What can one do ? Not much besides watchin'a game and havin'a bud
But - somewhat - seriously, patenting a software licensing methodology is so much really worse than a gazillion ridiculous patent filings of Microsoft ? I very much doubt that.
This is what would really help Linux I think. Not just being able to read MS formats in open applications, but being able to read the open formats in MS applications.
:D kidding of course :D
That is the point ! Right on top ! Hey, I wanna marry you
What I mean is, that from another point of view, Linux's so called "incompatibility" is a double edged sword: if one wants to achieve full compatibility, the other side [MS] has to help too. And that means if Word would be allowed (by MS) to read and write OpenOffice.org's format (which is just great, in concept and in practice), that would solve a lot of the document compatibility problems that you guys have just mentioned up above.
If that day would arrive, that would show one thing: that for example OpenOffice.org is superior, why ? because it show that can handle many more formats than Word itself (I mean Word has always been compatible with itself, and sometimes not even with itself)...
Of course you're right. About the format thing and others as well. And of course things have to be viewd from a different viewpoint for businnesses and for everyday home users. And yes, sadly MS has created such an environment in which an average home user cannot imagine the life without MS products. Hey, it's been their policy from the first day, and they succeeded in it, to make people believe they [MS] have what they [people] need.
Not because it is the best format, but because if I send someone a Word document, I expect them to be able to read it without hassle, and they pretty much always can.
That's why I always send documents in pdf or sometimes in rtf.
Thing is, when money/revenue depends on it, one tends to me more flexible towards clients. But until I can afford to do how I like, I'll do so and that is: if they expect me to be flexible and to be able to read all their crap, then I also expect them to be able to read pdf or rtf.
Linux might not disappear like that, but the proliferation of Linux (especially in the desktop arena) does depend a great deal on interoperability (Samba for instance) and compatibility of popular Linux-based applications with those in use by the 'rest of the world' (MS Office OpenOffice).
:)) who does think that to judge a fully separate and stand-alone OS by the ability to be compatible with Microsoft's siblings is a bit peculiar.
:D so Linux needs to be highly compatible to convince the crowd they can live their Microsoft-lives without Microsoft's operating systems.
:) was why does Linux need to keep telling and repeating its being compatible with crap when it does have its own fortes. Maybe the weight should be placed to letting people know what Linux has besides Windows siblings compatibility. I totally believe that Linux would very well do without any of Microsoft's achievements in the field of networking.
:)
Ok, of course you have a point here and I agree with it to a point. Unfortunately (?) I've always been that type of techie (then nerd, then IT, then IT-nerd, hey some form of evolution does exist
Of course I've taken my pills and now I know this is the real world
And so we need to be highly friendly on both the lowest and highest levels e.g. with AD in Samba or with formats in OpenOffice.org. But what has always sticked me from the inside
It may happen that Linux is one of the best OS's only in my world, but then I'd like to stay in it.
Then again, give credit where it's due, Windows has managed to make fully computer-illiterate masses of people to think they are all-knowing computer geeks. For them Linux needs to be learned, and they more easily say it's crap and under-developed than to learn anything new regarding Linux. I just think I'm getting pretty offtopic so I'll just cut it here
[...]Linux would disappear if Microsoft did not grant access to its documentation[...]
:D :P
Muhahahahaha ! Ha-ha-ha ! Ha-...ha-...ha-ha-ha !
Sorry guys, I can't help myself, I just had a giggling spasm
As it is, I can agree with most what you said. Just one thing. On: [...] only thing money allows you is purchasing power- the power to buy the little guy's technology or money to brute force competitors out of the marketplace[...] I tend to see more about this. What I mean is take for example BG's many "visionary" speaches on what people need, how technology will evolve, what our future digital home will look like, what formats will emerge, and I could go on. I usually get a headache when I hear how he tries to be a digital messiah every time he speaks
But given his money, he can actually make that happen. He can "persuade" certain other companies to take on his ideas and plans, he can "convince" organizations and companies on certains ways and formats they should adopt, he can follow very powerful (in the circles of the usual people most certainly) marketing and promotional strategies, and I could go on forever.
One could argue that some of their stuff would've emerged without their backing with lotsa cash, but that's only a typical "what-if" story. We'll never know. What's certain is that with all their money they can more easily go their ways than mostly anyone else.
So all this is about top 50 people influencing tech.
Then this all should go to Bill Gates. Why ? Because usually (and sadly) it's mostly not the guy who has the largest influence, but the money. This meaning if you can't persuade them, buy them or pay them.
Sorry but I can't be made to feel sorry for you UK guys in such cases. Just an example. I'm in an EU country, but e.g. amazon@UK doesn't count us in the EU, not in Europe, but in the rest-of-the-world category, having prices equivalent to those in US but in pounds (i.e. a $50 book costs 50pounds) and shipping costs are so high that in some cases ordering the same from the UK is almost the double (!) than ordering from the US.
:P
And to the topic: I for one don't think this news was one that shouldn't belong here. For us Europeans this is good news. Or would you better see us complain at every ThinkGeek slashvert from now on ?
It's not the patent stack that should be the asset of a businness. It should be the applications of those patents in products and services combined with support in a way that would make a company in front of others despite not holding the patent single handedly.
Companies shouldn't just live on a successfull product based on some patents on which they cash in from other companies as well, economical growth and revenue increase should be formented by innovation in products, technologies and services and in the quality they provide them.
And this is just the very tip of the iceberg.
How immature can you get?
Well, given that microsoft's open source != our open source (i.e. ms shared source license vs gnu gpl or bsd), there's no surprise some people are not really overwhelmed by this step.
A bit greater step would be required from MS to make some of us jumping around in ecstasy.
s
Right, and if you include the two words: "in 2004" in that sentence, you get the joke of the millenia :P
Like I'd be willing to ever pay for films like " Pleasure craft loaded with babes crashes into a remote island controlled by a mad ex-Nazi scientist who transforms pretty girls into rubber faced Frankensteins." or "An experimental rocket containing radiation contaminated wasps crashes in Africa making giant killer wasps that run amok."
:D Okay, okay, those were good times, but DVDs aren't that expensive these days and they stay on your shelf. I'd just move along.
It's nothing, but I feel wasting 400+ posts on such a "problem" is simply ridiculous. I just wanted to avoid and not even read in, but it just annoyed me after a while.
Maybe mums will also start to come around asking what to do with used pampers.
The same what this guy should do with his mouse.
Linux has had USB drive support for a long time now. E.g. my usb pendrive, diva mp3 player, and even my kodak camrea with compact flash inside can be easily mounted /dev/sdx. For ages.
Bad immigration policy-and bad trade deals are combining to decimate the middle class in America.
In the country where I live now I'm an immigrant, having settled and got citizenship about 8 years ago. I have been through many arguings and blind quarrels over the years over "immigrants take our jobs" and the like.
What I've found is the people who complain the most are those who are just down in the dumps, not necessarily because they couldn't get a job, but because they didn't want to accept any job, or just politicians who are what they are, anyplace, or just bloody ignorant.
It's the most easy to blame increasing uneployment rates on others who have jobs, especially if they come from abroad.
Really no offence and forgive my ignorance, but I have to tell, U.S. people also have their history on intolerance, racism and xenophoby.
You also have to take into account that some effects of the late dotcom boom and blow are still showing today. I mean there was a continuing very large over-employment of IT "professionals" , very many of which are dismissed even today.
What I want to point out is that there are very many aspects that lead to the given rising unemployment rates in the U.S. (and just that you know, that is _not_ that high if you consider other countries as well, which americans tend not to do), and only one of them may be connected to immigration of qualified professionals (I intentionally don't mention seasonal uneducated workers, that's another area of the problem).
So what now, they can fsck each other, and uhh, oh, sensitive hands and stuff, even themselves.
:D I probably shouldn't suggest anything :D
So what's the next step ?