"AMD chose two notebook chipsets for Mobile Athlon 4 and Mobile Duron. It's ALi's MaGiK1 and VIA's KT133A chipset. The MAGiK1 is able to run with PC100/133 SDRAM as well as PC1600/2100 DDR SDRAM, but so far we weren't too convinced of its performance in desktop systems. VIA's KT133A is a good performer, but it does not come with DDR-SDRAM support."
Because of supposed performance problems no vendors have announced any laptops w/ ALi's chipset, so at this point in time the mobile Athlon, which is certainly *my* choice of a dream portable processor, is not being offered with DDR.
I really wish today we were seeing a mobile AMD 760 or SiS 735 DDR PC-2100 solution, but these chipsets do not have mobile versions.
Ideally we would be ogling the Athlon 4 on the nVidia "Crush" chipset. As I recall, Crush uses a 128 bit memory bus to DDR memory that allows for a hideous amount of low-latency bandwidth, something like 3.6 GB per second.
But I digress, it is enough to have a mobile Athlon solution that absolutely wipes the floor with anything offered by their x86 competitor.:) Good for AMD, today is another proud day for them.:)
And I am sorry if anyone misread my initial comment, DDR compatibility is a function of the chipset, not the processor. Hopefully with the other two explanations I have posted here this has been clarified for one and all. I am off to bed, this was a bitch of a day.;)
When I first posted my comment there were no announced notebooks shipping with DDR. Although I am just getting off work and have not yet had time to update from all the tech sites, as of this afternoon (my time) Compaq has announced, and they are currently only shipping with SDRAM on a double-pumped 100 MHz FSB (yes, I know, they call it 200 MHz, and Intel calls their quad-pumped bus 400 MHz.)
For that matter where's PC-133?
As far as I know no one has announced a product using ALi's mobile DDR-capable chipset.
The processor can be paired with any type of RAM the chipset supports, I was hoping Compaq or Gateway would debut a laptop (today) with DDR to really show off the power of mobile socket A. Maybe more products have been revealed since 7 AM EDT. Maybe such a beast is shipping today.:)
Cache improvements, thermal diode on the CPU, 3 - 3.5 hours claimed battery life, significant performance gains over P III when both systems run on battery power, overall a performance gain over the current desktop Thunderbird.
In a nutshell.
No DDR, which if it were implemented would actually help laptops save more power.
Does intelligence require a mammalian brain? Octopii might beg to differ. Who knows where reptilian intelligence might have gone had the KT impact not occured?
We are endothermic, we are quick in body and mind, but this does not mean that we are the only answer to the question "what kind of biology is required for sentiency?"
The only answer we have is "human", but we see hints in the world around us that many different forms can acquire insightful intelligence, so it may be premature (and very Gene Roddenberry) to assume that only humanoids can be sentient.:)
Heh, regardless of whether or not the asteroid struck near us, if we look at it streaking through the sky it would be the last thing we saw.
Hint, as we learned from nuclear explosions, very energetic events can radiate significantly brighter than the sun. To keep your eye's lenses from frying your retinas, look away and cover your face with your hands.
If you manage to save your eyesight, when the brightness fades you may be in for quite a show. The problem is that if you are too close, by the time you see the oncoming shockwave it's way too late to do anything. And this doesn't take into consideration the ejecta thrown into the atmosphere or even into low orbit by the blast.
Search "tectites, rain of mud, rain of fire" on Yahoo. I suspect the environment gets really biblical after an asteroid impact unleashes a few times the combined total of the world's nuclear arsenals in a fraction of a second (it has happened several times in prehistory.)
The Fox Doctor Who was somewhat bastardized. I was surprised to see them handle the tradeoff in keeping with the tradition of the series, to open with the older doctor and switch them, but from there everything kinda went to hell.
Unfortunately the new Doctor, although British, ended up having an American woman at his side, which was not without precedence, but there were overtly romantic moments that would have caused the non-Fox incarnations of the Doctor to find a handy Dalek and volunteer for extermination.:)
You didn't miss much, nor are you missing much right now.:) Reality TV... The Weakest Link...
Ya know though, you could always do the geeky thing and add a TV card to your machine. Most OS' support one brand of TV card or another, if you absolutely HAD to have one. Then you could hide it when you weren't using it and still maintain some dignity.:)
I recall having read this somewhere, maybe in the author's notes to KSR's "Antarctica". My only fear is I could really see it being played up as a soap opera a la Guiding Light/Coronation Street Goes to Mars...
"Will Frank sleep with the beautiful Russian commander? Will Michel ever admit his love for her? Who is Coyote?"
"Tune in next week for another episode of "As the Planet Spins..."
Look at the averages of impacts through the fossil record, far back beyond the KT boundary. There have been quiet periods before. Suddenly an asteroid or a comet gets nudged or bumped in the outer solar system, and Earth has an exctinction event.
Do you forget that recently we watched a previously uncharted comet smack into Jupiter, Shoemaker-Levy 9? Less than 2.5 million years ago the crater Tycho was carved out of the lunar surface. There's always Tunguska to think about.
Statistically speaking it is a very safe bet that something already *is* on a collision course with the Earth, we just haven't noticed it yet. Just because no cataclysmic impact has happened within the incredibly brief space of time encompassed by recent human history, you make a very dangerous assumption that this somehow makes such an event less probable.
That's like someone who lived on the slopes of Mount Saint Helens' om May 17th, 1980 saying "it hasn't erupted in my lifetime, so this means it won't erupt in the future." The next day a gentleman named Harry Truman was proved fatally wrong and buried under several thousand feet of mountainside.
I for one feel it is safer (and more sensible) to err on the side of caution than to be unprepared.
The first segment of the cable would fall very slowly dragging along the ground, until friction with the Earth caused it to start wrapping around the planet, then the wrapping effect would create an effect like a figure skater pulling in her arms to spin as rapidly as possible.
The beginning segment will be moving too slowly for friction to destroy much of it, the middle segment might be finely balanced between friction-heated burning and impacting, but the end segment will be moving at several miles a second, which makes the effect of passing through the troposphere negligible...
The cable falling would not split the planet in half as someone else in one of these comments suggested, but someone or something would get smacked, very hard.
And KSR's "Mars" trilogy IMHO is one of the best sci-fi trilogies ever written. Any truth to Fox TV producing it as a miniseries?:)
The perfect carbon source and counterweight would be a carbonaceous asteroid. We snag one, put it in geosynchronous orbit, and weave the cable downward from it. We pull in additional asteroids from time to time and use solar energy to convert those asteroids' mass into plasma for thrust to keep the anchor asteroid stable. We lower the cable through the atmosphere, and meet it with a several mile high anchor structure/building.
Sounds simple enough, but I suspect to weave the cable we need to wait for nanotech assemblers, and of course we also have to get out to the asteroid belt and actually do something with them other than bump our probes into them.:)
The other nice feature here would be the solar farm required for the plasma generation station could later be used to send power down the cable to the large city which would undoubtedly develop around the cable's base.
I'd recommend outsourcing usenet. Usenet will eat up a *lot* of bandwidth and hard drive space. Let someone else handle it for you.
Your mileage may vary, but I would recommend a company like SuperNews, which hosts Usenet on their own high availability servers and simply charges you on a per connection basis. Start out with two simultaneous connections.
People on/. who are knowledgable tend to forget that for 98% of users the Internet consists of email and the World Wide Wait. Usenet usage for the local 2,500 user ISP is never more than ten concurrent connections.
I find the money an outsourcing company charges per month more than handles the hassle of maintenance, and if they are reputable (and you do not want to become a guru on the subject of usenet) the outsourcing company will supply much more thorough, more frequently-updated access than you could possibly provide.
If you get a chanellized E-1, which is required for 56k (T-1 channel in the US usually costs less than if you purchase per phone lines) you will start with either 29 or 30 channels/lines depending on how the telco sets up signaling.
In the US there are penalties for renting only a partial circuit, you pay more per channel.
For those who do not know, E-1 is European/Aussie circuit equivalent to T-1, but due to differences in signaling they get 2048 Kbps, as opposed to the US 1544 Kbps. Sweet, eh?:)
From personal experience these are the best tips I can give you:
Speak to your local telephone company at length. Ask them questions like "how old is your wiring", "do you support channelized E-1 lines for 56k dialup", "do you use load coils to extend your reach", and "what kind of distance charge do you have for bringing in a data connection"?
You must be a very, very patient person. Be prepared to work long hours with the telephone company and your data connection provider. Be prepared to have them give you conflicting information. Be prepared for your local telephone company to pass the buck for connection difficulties to you. Be prepared to call your local telephone company on the carpet.
Ask your data provider and your telco to provide you with their tech support hours. Ask them for direct phone numbers and contact names. If they limit their hours, ask them if they have extended support options.
Get to know all of your service representatives on a first-name basis. Send them Christmas cards. Be nice to them. You may need to call in favors some time at 3:30 in the morning when your data circuit dies and you have to call their tech support.
Expect to spend more money initially than you bring in. Do not expect your business to pay for itself in under twelve months, meaning have at least a twelve months' supply of operating capital available (the more, the better.)
Suscribe to your competitor's service. You have to know how they perform, they set the standard which you must at least meet, or exceed.
Give referral credits. Give a $5.00 discount on a month's service to anyone who refers a friend to your service.
Pinch your pennies (or your five cent pieces;).) You do not want to be a dot bomb. Have a three year business plan in place when you start up, stick to it.
You are a utility, not a service. In the rural area where I live I advised the small startup ISP to sell themselves as a utility, meaning they are more like a cable company or a satellite TV provider than a service. In my opinion this helps to foster a "must have" idea in customer's minds.
No one ever brings in a television to their cable company office saying "my TV is not working, what is wrong with your service", but they'll do it to you with their computers. Be prepared to answer all sorts of ridiculous questions, face all sorts of ridiculous situations, and have at least five percent of your neighbors actively hating you.:)
Get an unlisted telephone number. People you do not know will be calling you at home at 4 AM, screaming in your ear, MY SERVICE IS NOT WORKING.
If you are starting with yourself as the only employee, be prepared to forgo a social life. Search "monasteries, coping skills, celibacy" on Yahoo. Implement their suggestions.
Know your equipment. Be prepared to study, study, study. Neither your telephone company nor your data provider are likely to be experts on the equipment you purchase, so be prepared to be on your own in configuring equipment. Before you buy, see if your telco has any prefered RAS equipment. As a suggestion, see if the equipment provider will work with your telco in configuring equipment.
Find a support group. Get in touch with a few other ISP's not in your area. Use newgroups. Keep on good terms with knowledgable friends.
Know your local laws regarding Internet and telecommunications. Get a user agreement, have it gone over by an attorney, and enforce it rigidly.
Finally, never turn down a prescription for Prozac. Prozac is your friend. Prozac makes it better. Prozac may keep you from strangling the next guy who walks in and asks "I just bought a Commodore 64 at a rummage sale, and I cannot wait for you to connect it to the Internet.":)
HEY, which reminds me of one more suggestion -- know your limits. Are you going to try to connect any DOS machines? What about Macintosh? How slow of a modem is acceptable?:)
Think it over, carefully. It's not a living, it's a lifestyle. Go with God.:)
In all seriousness, how could the MD's who performed this be so arrogant as to think that they had the right to act unilaterally, irregardless of the "safety" of the "procedure."
It will most likely be proven that this procedure is safe, after the fact. In the meantime I assume the donor mitochondria were screened for rare, but inheritable mitochondrial diseases?
After all, we do have a complete mitochondrial genome too, right? And of course we have been looking at it long enough that we know what a healthy mitochondrial genome looks like -- we can read it forwards and backwards, eh?
At the very least these "doctors" should lose their licenses. At the most they should be charged with crimes against humanity and brought before an international tribunal. The human genome carries the most fundamental definition of "human". To experiment with that, even at the simple level of mitochondrial manipulation without previous debate -- or trials in non-human subjects -- is completely inexcusable.
These babies may be OK. What if they weren't? Don't these doctors accrue some penalty for performing experiments on humans?
This may be "science", but it's certainly not good science. It may be beneficial in the long run, but it is purported that so were some of the experiments performed by the Nazis. The end does not justify the means.
I am by no means a Luddite, I do believe there is promise in genetic manipulation, and I welcome careful research. Unfortunately, this was not careful research. This was show-boating with God's toys.
I think this was kept quiet til after the fact to avoid the uproar it will cause from stopping the experimental procedure from happening. *I* think they took the wrong approach.
But as in Star-Link, as we say here, hindsight *is* 20/20. These will not be monster-babies, but what other things are private institutes waiting to spring on us?
Axel -- I honestly have no idea how it happened that this story has not yet hit American media. Either the Beeb pulled a story out of their rear end, or for whatever reason this story is being supressed here.
If this story were true, this sort of thing would normally be front page news in the U.S. We have protests here over genetically-modified corn Star-Link, being used in fields and finding its way into the food supply.
Again, if this story is true I do not know why it is all over our papers, television news channels, and web news sites.:(
A classroom full of Jeremy's. A teacher who looks suspiciously like Michael Eisner. The lyrics to "It's a Small World After All" written on the blackboard. Rows and rows of black ears...
1. Probably not, this was rumored but as far as I know never confirmed. I suspect that since the technology required to isolate an isotopically pure form of any element is rather exotic and expensive this would not be an affordable option (search "nation states, uranium refining, nuclear club" on Yahoo.)
2. Probably not, see above. I suspect a die shrink and optimizations are the more likely causes of any heat reduction.
Re:3000' wide base, 3700' tall ...
on
First Arcology?
·
· Score: 1
I think he's referring to the Tacoma Narrows bridge.:) It wasn't caused by earthquakes, it was a breezy day that caused the bridge to resonate. It wobbled. It waved. If you would have had a skateboard you could have surfed from one end to the other -- until pieces of the deck started plummeting into the sound and the whole thing snapped like a broken guitar string.:)
3000' wide base, 3700' tall ...
on
First Arcology?
·
· Score: 1
Other than having bragging rights for the world's tallest building this is a serious waste of material. In the 3000' diameter hole you are creating for the base of the structure you can fit a dozen 75 storey high rises. What are the benefits of multiple shorter structures as opposed to one large one?
The incidence of apartment fires here in the U.S. is certainly above one per hundred thousand. A hundred thousand people living in one building? You will be lucky if you do not have one fire per year. The Ostankino Tower in Moscow was the world's second-tallest freestanding structure, and was supposedly impervious to flames. Thankfully it was mostly uninhabited, which kept fatalities to a minimum.
Distributing the population among multiple towers is much wiser.
A large amount of energy is required to lift utilities 3700' -- in addition to the energy requirements of a hundred thousand inhabitants, stores, offices, and cinemas. Where does Shanghai get the extra power to light up this beast?
Lifting water and people a hundred floors is done all over the world, all the time. Go with something proven.
Isn't Shanghai frequently in the path of typhoons? I understand the shape of the tower is aerodynamic, but if you allow air to flow through the structure then the interior structures will face typhoon winds that are stronger than those found at the surface. Even if the tower doesn't blow over, the interior, thanks to all that air freely moving about, will be a wreck.
When was the last time a conventional skyscraper built with current technologies blew over? When was the last time a conventional skyscraper's occupants were blown out of the structure by high winds? Additionally, I would not want to live within two miles of this beast. The debris raining out of it during a typhoon would be spectacularly dangerous.
Shanghai has earthquakes. Structures like this are unproven in earthquakes. 75 storey buildings survive earthquakes all the time. If you are going to build something this tall, I suspect it is more wise to try to at least find a tectonically-stable location for it.
As for simulators being able to predict the behavior of structures in adverse conditions, what about London's gloriously wobbly Millenium Foot Bridge, which was closed the day it opened because it was too unstable?
I suspect, at least I hope, that when/if sensibility prevails this structure will not be built as it is proposed. If this tower is built, then I am pretty certain that some day we'll watch the tragedy of this structure's demise unfold on live television.
Slashdot Mirror
From http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/01q2/010514/palomi no-09.html:
:) Good for AMD, today is another proud day for them. :)
;)
"AMD chose two notebook chipsets for Mobile Athlon 4 and Mobile Duron. It's ALi's MaGiK1 and VIA's KT133A chipset. The MAGiK1 is able to run with PC100/133 SDRAM as well as PC1600/2100 DDR SDRAM, but so far we weren't too convinced of its performance in desktop systems. VIA's KT133A is a good performer, but it does not come with DDR-SDRAM support."
Because of supposed performance problems no vendors have announced any laptops w/ ALi's chipset, so at this point in time the mobile Athlon, which is certainly *my* choice of a dream portable processor, is not being offered with DDR.
I really wish today we were seeing a mobile AMD 760 or SiS 735 DDR PC-2100 solution, but these chipsets do not have mobile versions.
Ideally we would be ogling the Athlon 4 on the nVidia "Crush" chipset. As I recall, Crush uses a 128 bit memory bus to DDR memory that allows for a hideous amount of low-latency bandwidth, something like 3.6 GB per second.
But I digress, it is enough to have a mobile Athlon solution that absolutely wipes the floor with anything offered by their x86 competitor.
And I am sorry if anyone misread my initial comment, DDR compatibility is a function of the chipset, not the processor. Hopefully with the other two explanations I have posted here this has been clarified for one and all. I am off to bed, this was a bitch of a day.
When I first posted my comment there were no announced notebooks shipping with DDR. Although I am just getting off work and have not yet had time to update from all the tech sites, as of this afternoon (my time) Compaq has announced, and they are currently only shipping with SDRAM on a double-pumped 100 MHz FSB (yes, I know, they call it 200 MHz, and Intel calls their quad-pumped bus 400 MHz.)
:)
For that matter where's PC-133?
As far as I know no one has announced a product using ALi's mobile DDR-capable chipset.
The processor can be paired with any type of RAM the chipset supports, I was hoping Compaq or Gateway would debut a laptop (today) with DDR to really show off the power of mobile socket A. Maybe more products have been revealed since 7 AM EDT. Maybe such a beast is shipping today.
Cache improvements, thermal diode on the CPU, 3 - 3.5 hours claimed battery life, significant performance gains over P III when both systems run on battery power, overall a performance gain over the current desktop Thunderbird.
In a nutshell.
No DDR, which if it were implemented would actually help laptops save more power.
Does intelligence require a mammalian brain? Octopii might beg to differ. Who knows where reptilian intelligence might have gone had the KT impact not occured?
We are endothermic, we are quick in body and mind, but this does not mean that we are the only answer to the question "what kind of biology is required for sentiency?"
The only answer we have is "human", but we see hints in the world around us that many different forms can acquire insightful intelligence, so it may be premature (and very Gene Roddenberry) to assume that only humanoids can be sentient. :)
Heh, regardless of whether or not the asteroid struck near us, if we look at it streaking through the sky it would be the last thing we saw.
Hint, as we learned from nuclear explosions, very energetic events can radiate significantly brighter than the sun. To keep your eye's lenses from frying your retinas, look away and cover your face with your hands.
If you manage to save your eyesight, when the brightness fades you may be in for quite a show. The problem is that if you are too close, by the time you see the oncoming shockwave it's way too late to do anything. And this doesn't take into consideration the ejecta thrown into the atmosphere or even into low orbit by the blast.
Search "tectites, rain of mud, rain of fire" on Yahoo. I suspect the environment gets really biblical after an asteroid impact unleashes a few times the combined total of the world's nuclear arsenals in a fraction of a second (it has happened several times in prehistory.)
The Fox Doctor Who was somewhat bastardized. I was surprised to see them handle the tradeoff in keeping with the tradition of the series, to open with the older doctor and switch them, but from there everything kinda went to hell.
:)
:) Reality TV ... The Weakest Link ...
:)
:X
Unfortunately the new Doctor, although British, ended up having an American woman at his side, which was not without precedence, but there were overtly romantic moments that would have caused the non-Fox incarnations of the Doctor to find a handy Dalek and volunteer for extermination.
You didn't miss much, nor are you missing much right now.
Ya know though, you could always do the geeky thing and add a TV card to your machine. Most OS' support one brand of TV card or another, if you absolutely HAD to have one. Then you could hide it when you weren't using it and still maintain some dignity.
Shut up Joe.
I recall having read this somewhere, maybe in the author's notes to KSR's "Antarctica". My only fear is I could really see it being played up as a soap opera a la Guiding Light/Coronation Street Goes to Mars ...
..."
:/
"Will Frank sleep with the beautiful Russian commander? Will Michel ever admit his love for her? Who is Coyote?"
"Tune in next week for another episode of "As the Planet Spins
Remember what Fox did to Doctor Who?
Um.
Look at the averages of impacts through the fossil record, far back beyond the KT boundary. There have been quiet periods before. Suddenly an asteroid or a comet gets nudged or bumped in the outer solar system, and Earth has an exctinction event.
Do you forget that recently we watched a previously uncharted comet smack into Jupiter, Shoemaker-Levy 9? Less than 2.5 million years ago the crater Tycho was carved out of the lunar surface. There's always Tunguska to think about.
Statistically speaking it is a very safe bet that something already *is* on a collision course with the Earth, we just haven't noticed it yet. Just because no cataclysmic impact has happened within the incredibly brief space of time encompassed by recent human history, you make a very dangerous assumption that this somehow makes such an event less probable.
That's like someone who lived on the slopes of Mount Saint Helens' om May 17th, 1980 saying "it hasn't erupted in my lifetime, so this means it won't erupt in the future." The next day a gentleman named Harry Truman was proved fatally wrong and buried under several thousand feet of mountainside.
I for one feel it is safer (and more sensible) to err on the side of caution than to be unprepared.
I think this is correct:
The first segment of the cable would fall very slowly dragging along the ground, until friction with the Earth caused it to start wrapping around the planet, then the wrapping effect would create an effect like a figure skater pulling in her arms to spin as rapidly as possible.
The beginning segment will be moving too slowly for friction to destroy much of it, the middle segment might be finely balanced between friction-heated burning and impacting, but the end segment will be moving at several miles a second, which makes the effect of passing through the troposphere negligible ...
The cable falling would not split the planet in half as someone else in one of these comments suggested, but someone or something would get smacked, very hard.
And KSR's "Mars" trilogy IMHO is one of the best sci-fi trilogies ever written. Any truth to Fox TV producing it as a miniseries? :)
The perfect carbon source and counterweight would be a carbonaceous asteroid. We snag one, put it in geosynchronous orbit, and weave the cable downward from it. We pull in additional asteroids from time to time and use solar energy to convert those asteroids' mass into plasma for thrust to keep the anchor asteroid stable. We lower the cable through the atmosphere, and meet it with a several mile high anchor structure/building.
Sounds simple enough, but I suspect to weave the cable we need to wait for nanotech assemblers, and of course we also have to get out to the asteroid belt and actually do something with them other than bump our probes into them. :)
The other nice feature here would be the solar farm required for the plasma generation station could later be used to send power down the cable to the large city which would undoubtedly develop around the cable's base.
I'd recommend outsourcing usenet. Usenet will eat up a *lot* of bandwidth and hard drive space. Let someone else handle it for you.
Your mileage may vary, but I would recommend a company like SuperNews, which hosts Usenet on their own high availability servers and simply charges you on a per connection basis. Start out with two simultaneous connections.
People on /. who are knowledgable tend to forget that for 98% of users the Internet consists of email and the World Wide Wait. Usenet usage for the local 2,500 user ISP is never more than ten concurrent connections.
I find the money an outsourcing company charges per month more than handles the hassle of maintenance, and if they are reputable (and you do not want to become a guru on the subject of usenet) the outsourcing company will supply much more thorough, more frequently-updated access than you could possibly provide.
If you get a chanellized E-1, which is required for 56k (T-1 channel in the US usually costs less than if you purchase per phone lines) you will start with either 29 or 30 channels/lines depending on how the telco sets up signaling.
In the US there are penalties for renting only a partial circuit, you pay more per channel.
For those who do not know, E-1 is European/Aussie circuit equivalent to T-1, but due to differences in signaling they get 2048 Kbps, as opposed to the US 1544 Kbps. Sweet, eh? :)
- Speak to your local telephone company at length. Ask them questions like "how old is your wiring", "do you support channelized E-1 lines for 56k dialup", "do you use load coils to extend your reach", and "what kind of distance charge do you have for bringing in a data connection"?
- You must be a very, very patient person. Be prepared to work long hours with the telephone company and your data connection provider. Be prepared to have them give you conflicting information. Be prepared for your local telephone company to pass the buck for connection difficulties to you. Be prepared to call your local telephone company on the carpet.
-
Ask your data provider and your telco to provide you with their tech support hours. Ask them for direct phone numbers and contact names. If they limit their hours, ask them if they have extended support options.
-
Get to know all of your service representatives on a first-name basis. Send them Christmas cards. Be nice to them. You may need to call in favors some time at 3:30 in the morning when your data circuit dies and you have to call their tech support.
-
Expect to spend more money initially than you bring in. Do not expect your business to pay for itself in under twelve months, meaning have at least a twelve months' supply of operating capital available (the more, the better.)
- Suscribe to your competitor's service. You have to know how they perform, they set the standard which you must at least meet, or exceed.
- Give referral credits. Give a $5.00 discount on a month's service to anyone who refers a friend to your service.
- Pinch your pennies (or your five cent pieces
;).) You do not want to be a dot bomb. Have a three year business plan in place when you start up, stick to it.
- You are a utility, not a service. In the rural area where I live I advised the small startup ISP to sell themselves as a utility, meaning they are more like a cable company or a satellite TV provider than a service. In my opinion this helps to foster a "must have" idea in customer's minds.
- No one ever brings in a television to their cable company office saying "my TV is not working, what is wrong with your service", but they'll do it to you with their computers. Be prepared to answer all sorts of ridiculous questions, face all sorts of ridiculous situations, and have at least five percent of your neighbors actively hating you.
:)
- Get an unlisted telephone number. People you do not know will be calling you at home at 4 AM, screaming in your ear, MY SERVICE IS NOT WORKING.
- If you are starting with yourself as the only employee, be prepared to forgo a social life. Search "monasteries, coping skills, celibacy" on Yahoo. Implement their suggestions.
- Know your equipment. Be prepared to study, study, study. Neither your telephone company nor your data provider are likely to be experts on the equipment you purchase, so be prepared to be on your own in configuring equipment. Before you buy, see if your telco has any prefered RAS equipment. As a suggestion, see if the equipment provider will work with your telco in configuring equipment.
- Find a support group. Get in touch with a few other ISP's not in your area. Use newgroups. Keep on good terms with knowledgable friends.
- Know your local laws regarding Internet and telecommunications. Get a user agreement, have it gone over by an attorney, and enforce it rigidly.
- Finally, never turn down a prescription for Prozac. Prozac is your friend. Prozac makes it better. Prozac may keep you from strangling the next guy who walks in and asks "I just bought a Commodore 64 at a rummage sale, and I cannot wait for you to connect it to the Internet."
:)
- HEY, which reminds me of one more suggestion -- know your limits. Are you going to try to connect any DOS machines? What about Macintosh? How slow of a modem is acceptable?
:)
Think it over, carefully. It's not a living, it's a lifestyle. Go with God.The Mitochondrian Research Society
http://www.kathleensworld.com/mitochon.html.
In all seriousness, how could the MD's who performed this be so arrogant as to think that they had the right to act unilaterally, irregardless of the "safety" of the "procedure."
It will most likely be proven that this procedure is safe, after the fact. In the meantime I assume the donor mitochondria were screened for rare, but inheritable mitochondrial diseases?
After all, we do have a complete mitochondrial genome too, right? And of course we have been looking at it long enough that we know what a healthy mitochondrial genome looks like -- we can read it forwards and backwards, eh?
At the very least these "doctors" should lose their licenses. At the most they should be charged with crimes against humanity and brought before an international tribunal. The human genome carries the most fundamental definition of "human". To experiment with that, even at the simple level of mitochondrial manipulation without previous debate -- or trials in non-human subjects -- is completely inexcusable.
These babies may be OK. What if they weren't? Don't these doctors accrue some penalty for performing experiments on humans?
This may be "science", but it's certainly not good science. It may be beneficial in the long run, but it is purported that so were some of the experiments performed by the Nazis. The end does not justify the means.
I am by no means a Luddite, I do believe there is promise in genetic manipulation, and I welcome careful research. Unfortunately, this was not careful research. This was show-boating with God's toys.
This story from MSNBC would seem to confirm the BBC story.
I think this was kept quiet til after the fact to avoid the uproar it will cause from stopping the experimental procedure from happening. *I* think they took the wrong approach.
But as in Star-Link, as we say here, hindsight *is* 20/20. These will not be monster-babies, but what other things are private institutes waiting to spring on us?
Axel -- I honestly have no idea how it happened that this story has not yet hit American media. Either the Beeb pulled a story out of their rear end, or for whatever reason this story is being supressed here.
:(
If this story were true, this sort of thing would normally be front page news in the U.S. We have protests here over genetically-modified corn Star-Link, being used in fields and finding its way into the food supply.
Again, if this story is true I do not know why it is all over our papers, television news channels, and web news sites.
I see a new movie ...
...
"The Boys from Disney"
A classroom full of Jeremy's. A teacher who looks suspiciously like Michael Eisner. The lyrics to "It's a Small World After All" written on the blackboard. Rows and rows of black ears
rejoice.
Please keep the work separate. I can see it now, a hacker breaking into Celera's systems causes the master genome files to be mingled. In 2021:
Mother: Doctor, I am so grateful this new genetic treatment saved little Jeremy's life, but I have one concern.
Doctor: What would that be?
Mother: Why does he look like Mickey Mouse?
Riiiiiiight moderator. Riiiiiiight.
Át the risk of losing karma d/t being "offtopic", thank you for your thank you -- that's a rarity too. :)
-Joe G.
1. Probably not, this was rumored but as far as I know never confirmed. I suspect that since the technology required to isolate an isotopically pure form of any element is rather exotic and expensive this would not be an affordable option (search "nation states, uranium refining, nuclear club" on Yahoo.)
p pr1.html.
2. Probably not, see above. I suspect a die shrink and optimizations are the more likely causes of any heat reduction.
3. Yes.
4. IBM is the patent holder on the SOI process AMD is reported to be using, see http://www.chips.ibm.com/bluelogic/showcase/soi/a
I think he's referring to the Tacoma Narrows bridge. :) It wasn't caused by earthquakes, it was a breezy day that caused the bridge to resonate. It wobbled. It waved. If you would have had a skateboard you could have surfed from one end to the other -- until pieces of the deck started plummeting into the sound and the whole thing snapped like a broken guitar string. :)
Other than having bragging rights for the world's tallest building this is a serious waste of material. In the 3000' diameter hole you are creating for the base of the structure you can fit a dozen 75 storey high rises. What are the benefits of multiple shorter structures as opposed to one large one?
Distributing the population among multiple towers is much wiser.
Lifting water and people a hundred floors is done all over the world, all the time. Go with something proven.
When was the last time a conventional skyscraper built with current technologies blew over? When was the last time a conventional skyscraper's occupants were blown out of the structure by high winds? Additionally, I would not want to live within two miles of this beast. The debris raining out of it during a typhoon would be spectacularly dangerous.
As for simulators being able to predict the behavior of structures in adverse conditions, what about London's gloriously wobbly Millenium Foot Bridge, which was closed the day it opened because it was too unstable?
I suspect, at least I hope, that when/if sensibility prevails this structure will not be built as it is proposed. If this tower is built, then I am pretty certain that some day we'll watch the tragedy of this structure's demise unfold on live television.