I'm currently doing a research project on biomaterial-surface interactions (which is a huge field, so I might miss out on some points).
There are several properties that make gold suitable for these medicinal applications. I'll give a few that I took from chem rev 2005, 105, 1103(*).:
It can readily form a thiol-bond with sulfur-containing molecules, this allows for sticking lots of stuff to it, synthetic carbon chains, but also DNA and proteins, all by relatively simple techniques
It is very easy to create gold layers of a known structure, there are several deposition techniques available.
It is biocompatible: less noble metals like Nickel have Nickel atoms migrating into the system, which can kill cells. Furthermore there will be a lot of oxidation going on at those less noble metal surfaces.
Gold can be combined with a lot of electrochemical analysis techniques, and others like SPR, MS, etc.
There are alternatives available, e.g. Palladium, Platinum, but gold is so versatile that it will be the mostly used metal for quite some time I would say.
(*) the article is mostly about self-assembled monolayers, so not very general and most of it will not be useful to you, but it contains a very good explanation of the reason why people choose gold in any of these applications.
My home pc uses a "1 Ghz" Cyrix C3. At work we have igel fanless thin clients with exactly the same processor. After I found that out I figured I could get rid of my cpu fan, and replaced it with a zalman northbridge heatsink. Two results: 1) I cannot play dvd's anymore (but I have a workaround that works when I plug in an external DVD-player into the TV-card running Dscaler at low resolution) 2) I found that my harddrive is actually the loudest part of my pc..
Anyway, these thin client processors can run WinXP smoothlessly, but have a bit of trouble when it comes to high loads, especially for video processes. Then again, I'm using an exotic onboard trident cyberblade, I guess most of my problems would be solved when plugging in a PCI video card.
So you don't want to compile gentoo on these boxes, but I really think the current thinclient cpus would do really well as standalone pcs as well for most practical (office) purposes.
on the same website, though a bit old, an interview with the CEO, pretty interesting how they started building their humble line of CPUs amid the big-guy CPU wars:
Ok, you have a lot of valid points here. First of all, SEO should not be possible. As soon as optimizing for a certain search engine is possible, it will be misused.
But Google removing individual SEOs as in the case of BMW will not solve the problem, as other ones will appear continuously. Especially your last point made me realize that you cannot prevent SEO by regulation, but that you need an algorithm that will (a) give you automatically the most intelligent result (b) will be immune for obviously invaled SEO requests.
This might be hard to implement, but then again, if I can determine in a blink of a second that a lot of my search result websites are obviously fake (e.g. containing in a few lines incoherent terms linking to cars and washing machines, politics and job offers), then why shouldn't a search algorithm be able to do that.
As you say, the one who gets this under control, will immediately be the mostly used search engine. Maybe google should stop making fancy applications for a while and concentrate again on what they are known for in the first place: giving us useful search results. It will cost them a lot of money if they won't.
Hah, I got a leaflet from Ford this week, where they showed a picture of their upcoming MPV, with the offer that if you would "preorder now, before you can even see it in the showroom!", you would get a 600 euro refund on a comfort-package. I was pondering there why someone would order a car they haven't even seen in reality!
Anyway, I'm not a gamer, but in the preview session of a gaming magazine I found in the train a couple of months ago, I read not only positive remarks, but mostly remarks like 'they should really improve this and that on the game to make it worthwile'. Fair enough.
Almost directly below the search box on BMW.de there is the "händler suche" link. Really, really hard to miss that one!:) Too much of a search button freak, ey?
Furthermore I just tried and searched on google.de to the phrase "autohaus finden" in combination with all german car brands and in none of these cases I found a link to the main car manufacturer involved, be it at the results or at the advertizements. I did find individual dealerwebsites, though, but only of the dealers that have the word 'Autohaus' in the name.
So if before the ban BMW actually showed up there that would just mean that their aggressive technique apparently worked to lead lots of normally not very good searches to their main website. That's nice for them and all, but it's apparently not a standard way of getting high on google ranks, as all other car brands refer from making harvest sites like that.
It was not a very good search to begin with, because 'autohaus' is not the best word to find a dealer, not every dealers will use this word, you would use 'haendler' instead. And because there's no location mentioned in the search. I don't want to search for dealers that are 8 hours driving from where I live! What would you expect to find searching for 'find mercedes dealer' in google.com? I find some site called edmunds.com, a local dealer in maryland, and the official UK mercedes site (maybe you would want to find one in the us or australia instead?). In other words, a good search result will depend on doing a good search, a company should not 'help' you by generating massive amounts of redirecting websites to lead you to their main site even when you do a inefficient search.
Tip of the day: if you want to find a local car dealer, skip google, go directly to the official factory website, at the main site there will be dealer-search option, voila, ready. Alternatively, you could look in the yellow pages website ( www.gelbeseiten.de in germany). Do you want to look for second hand cars then you could use one of these search directories, in germany mobile.de is a good one, it will find you official dealers and private offers combined. So, I hope this Matt person will find his german car dealer now!;)
the crap has nothing to do with the penalty, try e.g. "mercedes autohaus finden" in google.de, you'll find the same amount of crap, and no official mercedes site anywhere near the first 30 hits. (nor at the ads, even)
Still, this is a problem of Google, they cannot filter out the content-less harvesting sites efficiently yet, especially in Germany.
BTW, googling for "BMW" will lead you to the various offical BMW sites of which you'd guessed the correct url beforehand anyway;)
companies can buy google hardware for intranet searches. Maybe they will do the same for all other applications they are working with. Since these are however still closed source "black boxes", AND connected to your network, I don't know how trustworthy you can be that these will not upload everything to the big google database.
Indeed, GP got it a bit wrong. You should care because networks like that can be used to spam you, lay down useful networks, use the combined CPU power to crack security keys you'd rather not have cracked etc. etc.
I took some time to read the article and take a look at the fancy photo gallery of the cubicles of the last decades. What a sad view, they looked uncomfortable, unorganized and packed even when still empty in the try-to-make-it-nice-looking brochure photos! I never worked in such an environment and hope I never will.
Funny that you say that, I bought one ("marble mouse") a month ago. I am now using an old-fashioned roller mouse and noticed that I didn't like new optical mice because they jitter every now and then.
I needed about a week to get used to it, in the beginning I was rolling all over the place. Now I would want one at work too. They're superior to optical mice as the surface if controlled: no jitter. They're superior to mice in general because you don't have to move your wrist all over the place.
_another_ MS hardware failure? MS hardware itself has a pretty good reputation actually, I know a lot of linux-only people that use a microsoft mouse for this reason. The OS can be another thing, as the register article mentions the daily reboot necessary for the previous tablet pc os.
ah it can run XP? nice! But wasn't MS planning to have us all buy new dual-core intel pcs just because we would need that to run their new OS, while stopping service for XP completely?
Well, but look at the price! > $2000 is way too much for such an inbreed between laptop and pda. Also, the thing looks a bit too thick, and I guess that screen quality is only getting better in time, so the same format might work better this time.
Indeed, also the navigation buttons on the sides. But with MS's claimed $500 prize, they are a bit cheaper. For the rest, this pepper pad looks pretty cool to me!
Apparently, it has a rotatable back, revealing a small size keyboard. This would make it interesting for me. And I'm also interested in the hardware issues, might be a nice thing to run linux on, I'd buy it instead of a laptop. What also would be nice is a USB port to connect a real keyboard to it.
Furthermore, the most recent london attacks just costed a few hunderd pound. With such low amounts of money needed, tracking is completely impossible. This BBC article is an interesting read in the current discussion btw, worth your time.
but it's spot on! Just this month I saw 2 schoolgirls looking at some Beyonce video on their mobile phone. That's where a lot of money is, and since a lot of these kids aren't paying their phonebills themselves anyway, they'll use all those overly expensive functions, and make the telcos happy.
Just think of it, all those ads you see on MTV for jamba packages with 3 ringtones for 5 euro, no sane person would use that, but still they're apparently making lots of money on it (howelse would they be able to pay the advertizement costs?).
Indeed, someone at slashdot seems desperate to get this "overhype" thingy going. It was tried 3 days before, just to found out later that the actual article was not about the overhyping at all, but actually a praise of the simple remote ( http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/03/ 1911227 )
Well, the editors can be glad that someone was prepared to write an article that would fit this slashdot topic at last;)
I don't see people being so much pro-RIM as anti-patent.
Even more reason to don't be too much on the RIM side, it itself was sueing handspring just because they used a 'small format' keyboard on their machines. Really, how obvious is it that a small device that needs text input will have small keyboard? Personally, I think that everyone lost in the end in this case, a load of money was transferred from one company to another, no technological advancement took place. I do think that patents in itself are not a bad thing , but they should be immensly more strictly regulated and formulated. I guess even a software patent could be feasible, as long as care is taken that is completely new and it only applies to the exact method used. An alternative method leading to the same outcome should still be possible. This is daydreaming of course, there's just not enough manpower or will to do patents this carefully, and in the end crap will come out of it.
Slashdot Mirror
There are several properties that make gold suitable for these medicinal applications. I'll give a few that I took from chem rev 2005, 105, 1103(*).:
There are alternatives available, e.g. Palladium, Platinum, but gold is so versatile that it will be the mostly used metal for quite some time I would say.
(*) the article is mostly about self-assembled monolayers, so not very general and most of it will not be useful to you, but it contains a very good explanation of the reason why people choose gold in any of these applications.
But thank you for pointing me on this, it's realy a word with potential, might come in handy when writing reports!
Anyway, these thin client processors can run WinXP smoothlessly, but have a bit of trouble when it comes to high loads, especially for video processes. Then again, I'm using an exotic onboard trident cyberblade, I guess most of my problems would be solved when plugging in a PCI video card.
So you don't want to compile gentoo on these boxes, but I really think the current thinclient cpus would do really well as standalone pcs as well for most practical (office) purposes.
http://linuxdevices.com/articles/AT2656883479.html
But Google removing individual SEOs as in the case of BMW will not solve the problem, as other ones will appear continuously. Especially your last point made me realize that you cannot prevent SEO by regulation, but that you need an algorithm that will (a) give you automatically the most intelligent result (b) will be immune for obviously invaled SEO requests.
This might be hard to implement, but then again, if I can determine in a blink of a second that a lot of my search result websites are obviously fake (e.g. containing in a few lines incoherent terms linking to cars and washing machines, politics and job offers), then why shouldn't a search algorithm be able to do that.
As you say, the one who gets this under control, will immediately be the mostly used search engine. Maybe google should stop making fancy applications for a while and concentrate again on what they are known for in the first place: giving us useful search results. It will cost them a lot of money if they won't.
Anyway, I'm not a gamer, but in the preview session of a gaming magazine I found in the train a couple of months ago, I read not only positive remarks, but mostly remarks like 'they should really improve this and that on the game to make it worthwile'. Fair enough.
Furthermore I just tried and searched on google.de to the phrase "autohaus finden" in combination with all german car brands and in none of these cases I found a link to the main car manufacturer involved, be it at the results or at the advertizements. I did find individual dealerwebsites, though, but only of the dealers that have the word 'Autohaus' in the name.
So if before the ban BMW actually showed up there that would just mean that their aggressive technique apparently worked to lead lots of normally not very good searches to their main website. That's nice for them and all, but it's apparently not a standard way of getting high on google ranks, as all other car brands refer from making harvest sites like that.
It was not a very good search to begin with, because 'autohaus' is not the best word to find a dealer, not every dealers will use this word, you would use 'haendler' instead. And because there's no location mentioned in the search. I don't want to search for dealers that are 8 hours driving from where I live! What would you expect to find searching for 'find mercedes dealer' in google.com? I find some site called edmunds.com, a local dealer in maryland, and the official UK mercedes site (maybe you would want to find one in the us or australia instead?). In other words, a good search result will depend on doing a good search, a company should not 'help' you by generating massive amounts of redirecting websites to lead you to their main site even when you do a inefficient search.
Tip of the day: if you want to find a local car dealer, skip google, go directly to the official factory website, at the main site there will be dealer-search option, voila, ready. Alternatively, you could look in the yellow pages website ( www.gelbeseiten.de in germany). Do you want to look for second hand cars then you could use one of these search directories, in germany mobile.de is a good one, it will find you official dealers and private offers combined. So, I hope this Matt person will find his german car dealer now! ;)
Still, this is a problem of Google, they cannot filter out the content-less harvesting sites efficiently yet, especially in Germany.
BTW, googling for "BMW" will lead you to the various offical BMW sites of which you'd guessed the correct url beforehand anyway ;)
companies can buy google hardware for intranet searches. Maybe they will do the same for all other applications they are working with. Since these are however still closed source "black boxes", AND connected to your network, I don't know how trustworthy you can be that these will not upload everything to the big google database.
Indeed, GP got it a bit wrong. You should care because networks like that can be used to spam you, lay down useful networks, use the combined CPU power to crack security keys you'd rather not have cracked etc. etc.
ah, dammit, someone out there reads slashdot, they fixed the picture!
I took some time to read the article and take a look at the fancy photo gallery of the cubicles of the last decades. What a sad view, they looked uncomfortable, unorganized and packed even when still empty in the try-to-make-it-nice-looking brochure photos! I never worked in such an environment and hope I never will.
Funny that you say that, I bought one ("marble mouse") a month ago. I am now using an old-fashioned roller mouse and noticed that I didn't like new optical mice because they jitter every now and then. I needed about a week to get used to it, in the beginning I was rolling all over the place. Now I would want one at work too. They're superior to optical mice as the surface if controlled: no jitter. They're superior to mice in general because you don't have to move your wrist all over the place.
_another_ MS hardware failure? MS hardware itself has a pretty good reputation actually, I know a lot of linux-only people that use a microsoft mouse for this reason. The OS can be another thing, as the register article mentions the daily reboot necessary for the previous tablet pc os.
ah it can run XP? nice! But wasn't MS planning to have us all buy new dual-core intel pcs just because we would need that to run their new OS, while stopping service for XP completely?
Well, but look at the price! > $2000 is way too much for such an inbreed between laptop and pda. Also, the thing looks a bit too thick, and I guess that screen quality is only getting better in time, so the same format might work better this time.
Indeed, also the navigation buttons on the sides. But with MS's claimed $500 prize, they are a bit cheaper. For the rest, this pepper pad looks pretty cool to me!
http://www.nu.nl/news.jsp?n=689884&c=134
Apparently, it has a rotatable back, revealing a small size keyboard. This would make it interesting for me. And I'm also interested in the hardware issues, might be a nice thing to run linux on, I'd buy it instead of a laptop. What also would be nice is a USB port to connect a real keyboard to it.
Indeed, I can imagine the 100s of useless hits on google for my search already!
Furthermore, the most recent london attacks just costed a few hunderd pound. With such low amounts of money needed, tracking is completely impossible. This BBC article is an interesting read in the current discussion btw, worth your time.
ah, as opposed to 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, etc ;)
I was planning to mod you up but then I noticed that "PMS clan" is NOT a very promoting name for a clan with a lot of girls playing in there :)
Just think of it, all those ads you see on MTV for jamba packages with 3 ringtones for 5 euro, no sane person would use that, but still they're apparently making lots of money on it (howelse would they be able to pay the advertizement costs?).
Well, the editors can be glad that someone was prepared to write an article that would fit this slashdot topic at last ;)
(Not that I've read TFA this time)
Even more reason to don't be too much on the RIM side, it itself was sueing handspring just because they used a 'small format' keyboard on their machines. Really, how obvious is it that a small device that needs text input will have small keyboard? Personally, I think that everyone lost in the end in this case, a load of money was transferred from one company to another, no technological advancement took place. I do think that patents in itself are not a bad thing , but they should be immensly more strictly regulated and formulated. I guess even a software patent could be feasible, as long as care is taken that is completely new and it only applies to the exact method used. An alternative method leading to the same outcome should still be possible. This is daydreaming of course, there's just not enough manpower or will to do patents this carefully, and in the end crap will come out of it.
Isn't RIM a Canadian company?
oops :) Main point still holds, though.