More specifically, if you run the article page through the validator it fails with 60 errors. The truth is that the vast majority of pages out there will fail. It's a catch-22: as long as browsers are not compliant, web-pages won't be compliant... and as long as web-pages are not compliant, what's the point in standards-compliant browsers?
I believe your take on it is pretty typical. We all feel like we "should" compile the page to some gold-standard, but ultimately the most important thing (in the short term, at least) is getting the page to look right on the most-used browsers.
I will add to this, however, that I use the W3C validator as a way to help fix bugs. Often if something is not showing up correctly in one particular browser, it can be fixed by addressing one of the errors that the validator picks up. I highly recomend checking all your pages. Even if they don't always pass, the errors will give you insight into how your page is being parsed.
So in response to the original question "do you validate all your pages": I sure do! I check them all, and I fix any of the errors that are easy to fix. I also use it as an invaluable tool to get the page working in many browsers. Ultimately, however, if I have to depart from the W3C spec in order to get something looking right in an important browser, then I leave the errors in.
Yes, neutron beamlines are great for study of transmutation and nuclear properties.
All this stuff about the "commercial benefits" is a cartoonish beard for A-bomb research.
I think that's an exageration. At the facilities I've worked at, the research has been heavily geared towards science. Some facilities do indeed use the beams to study materials and designs for next-generation nuclear power plants, but not for weapons. Unlike Los Alamos, the SNS is optimized for academic research. In fact one of its "selling points" is accessibility to scientists (due in part to the fact that it's not a weapons lab).
Also, I'm not sure that "A-bomb research" has benefitted from fundamental studies in transmutation and decay rates recently. Modern advances in nuclear weaponry seem to come from engineering the bomb design, and have nothing to do with new insights from fundamental studies.
the most obviously valuable use of a high-density, high-energy neutron beam is studying heretofore under-investigated fission reactions and adding significant digits to heretofore over-investigated fission reactions.
That kind of research is probably much more useful to the medical isotopes community than it is to the weapon design community.
The US certainly does research on nuclear weapons, but I don't think the SNS is intended to be part of that infrastructure.
Thanks to the posters who pointed out the mistake in my previous post. Indeed power is typically on the order of 5 cents/kWhr. I also confused the discussion by mentioning the 1.4 MW that the SNS is rated for. The 1.4 MW is the power delivered to the target. It requires about 42 MW to generate that 1.4 MW proton beam. So we're talking about:
I would imagine that most experiments will take significantly longer to prepare and put into papers afterward than they will do perform -- so skilled labour still takes the cake as the bulk of the expense.
You're quite right. In my experience it takes months of sample preparration before going to do such work, and it takes months afterwards to finish analyzing all the data (and then more time to write up the papers). The actual beamtime is typically only one or two weeks. So the bulk of the time for any particular scientific study is not spent at the neutron source.
However, when it comes to money, the skilled labour in question is mostly graduate students and post-docs, who are not very expensive. If two grad students work on a project for a year, this costs $40,000, whereas the two weeks of beamtime at the hypothetical $5,000/day amounts to $70,000.
For a company, however, the equation is a no-brainer: the beamtime will typically give them information that would have taken many skilled people years to obtain with any other technique.
The purpose of a "neutron beam" is *neutron scattering.* You can either use a continuous beam from a nuclear reactor, or a neutron pulse from a spallation source (which the SNS is). The idea is that you sent the beam at your (scientifically interesting) sample, and measure the directions and energies of the neutrons that are scattered/reflected/diffraction from the sample. This is a huge field, but here are some ideas of what it can be used for:
1. Neutron diffraction can be used for crystallography: to determine the crystal structure (hence molecular structure) of some novel material, drug, protein, etc. This can be done with x-rays also, but for some samples neutrons give better results.
2. Neutron reflectivity can be used to study thin films: to analyze coatings applied to electronics, or anti-abrasive coatings, or membranes used in medical applications, and so on.
3. Neutrons can be used to study industrial materials: for instance, a neutron beam can be used to probe a weld joint and map out the 3-dimensional arrangment of microsocpic stress patterns in the material. This has been used to design better welding processes, better aircraft components, engine parts, and so on.
4. A neutron beam can be used for "imaging" similar to an x-ray... except that neutrons can pass through dense materials (like lead) quite easily and can image organic materials with better sensitivity than x-rays.
5. Neutron beams can be used for the study of nuclear physics and chemistry, the properties of neutrons, and other particle-physics questions.
There are of course many other things you can do with a neutron beam, but hopefully that gives you an idea of the diversity of research that goes on at a neutron scattering facility.
I doubt that would attract 2,000 international scientists annualy
Well there is quite a bit of demand for neutron beam-time. Since the SNS will take the flux up a notch (8 times higher than anything we have now), researchers will be able to complete their experiments faster (or conversely complete more experiments in a given timeslot), and will also be able to detect things that perhaps went unnoticed before. So yes, there will quite a bit of demand for this installation.
Yes, something like that. The instrument at full output is supposed to be 1.4 MW. Assuming 5$/kWhr (note that big installations end up paying less per kWhr, on average, than a residential user) that's over $100,000/day in electricity costs. Of course when running this delivers neutron beams along all of the beam tubes. When fully operational, there should be 24 beamlines, meaning that each researcher is "only" costing ~$5000/day in electricity.
I imagine that lots of scientists would want to play around with this- I would certainly have fun with it given the chance. At that price, though, only extremely well-funded researchers could afford to use this machine.
As far as I know, that's not how it works. The researcher does not "pay" outright for the beamtime (although companies renting beamtime do). What happens is that a researcher makes an application for beamtime. Like any other grant, this is reviewed by experts. If the proposal is accepted, the researcher gets the beamtime (for "free"). So instead of giving government funds to researchers, who then buy beamtime, the SNS is funded and divides out the beamtime to researchers worldwide, based on the scientific merit of the proposals.
I'm not 100% sure that's how the SNS will be run, but that is how such "user facilities" have been run in my experience. The SNS is a government-funded facility whose goal it is to "get important science done" and as such its top priority is to divide up the beamtime to researchers (from around the world) without "wasting any beam-time" and hopefully giving opportunities for the best science to be completed (regardless of how much money the research group has).
You're one among many posters to suggest that they open-source their drivers. I franly agree that this is a good idea. It would be good for the Linux community (obviously), and I think it would be good for them, also.
Obviously this would differentiate their product, and carve out a niche where that "big boys" seem to be ignoring. More importantly, if this product is new, then presumably they are currently in a position where they *can* conceivably open-source their driver. During any debate on open-sourcing video drivers, it is usually pointed out that doing so would be difficult, because sufficient documentation might not exist, or because of licensing issues, etc. However this new product line is at a stage where open-sourcing will yield the maximum return-on-investment. If they do it now, they will start getting 'free' software upgrades, bug fixes, documentation, and so on. This means their product will mature faster and they can close the gap with their competitors more quickly.
Frankly I think that would be an excellent move on their part. Without such an admittedly drastic move, their product has nothing new to offer and this product line will die off.
They should be thinking to themselves "imagine if our video card was the *default choice* for anyone selling or building a Linux or BSD system?" That's market differentiation right there.
Seeing as how there is no physical packaging, nor physical inventory that might suffer breakage, one wonders how Sony will defend against these charges.
It's pretty simple. Sony will simply claim that there are marketing costs, server costs, bandwidth costs, and so on that amount to the same thing. To say otherwise would be to admit that they could be selling the downloads at lower cost to the consumer than the equivalent CD.
Sony may even capitulate so far as to actually update the contracts, so that it spells out, for online sales, how much money goes to marketing, bandwidth, etc. At the end of the day, however, I highly doubt that the artist will see a larger percentage of the sales than they did before. Nor will the consumer see any kind of savings.
It's unfortunate, too, because a reasonable pricing model for online downloads of music could have been arranged where:
1. The consumer pays less per track than for the equivalent physical media (which is fair, considering compression losses and lack of a physical object).
2. The artist gets slightly more per sale than before.
3. The label gets slightly more per sale (because of savings due to lack of packaging, etc.).
However (and not too surprisingly), the labels have decided that any savings that arise should all be kept by themselves. As we are starting to see, this strategy will lead to losses instead, as both artists and consumers seek out better strategies... maybe even business models without so many middle-men.
Just downloaded the program and am playing with it. My first impressions:
Pro: Very intuitive interface. Unlike most 3D modelling programs, you can start creating and coloring objects immediately. You can create simple layouts very quickly, and then use the neat "tape measure" tool to measure distances. This is absolutely great for making a model of a room to consider different layouts for desks or whatever.
Con: As in many cases, simplicity leads to limited designs. To make anything complex would be a nightmare. Also, I can't see any way to make things look "slick and cool" or to render them in anything but a simplistic cartoon-like style. It has none of the elegant programatic control of something like POVray, for instance.
Overall I think it's a neat toy that some people may enjoy, but I think anyone serious about 3D will give it a pass (including, I'm guessing, the Pro version). On the other hand, I would like to see some open-source projects get some inspiration about the interface from this program. An add-on to POVray for creating simple shapes (with the more complex work then being done in code) would be nice.
Why do you think your comment is flamebait? Do you think that this statement is controversial:
Has everyone's perception of value been altered by p2p downloads, cracked software and other Internet-rendered amenities? Without a doubt.
I think that statement is true, and I don't think we should attribute to it any negative connotation. I believe that the perceived value of information and creative expression was over-inflated before the digital age. Now we are seeing such things drop to their actual value, which is quite low.
I'm not saying that information is worthless. Far from it: knowledge is power certainly. What I'm saying is that previously there were boundaries on information exchange (some very real, like the difficulty of printing books, and some artificial, like copyright). Now that the boundaries have been lifted, our "perception of value" has indeed been altered. We now understand what a low cost there is on information exchange, and how much we can all benefit from the free exchange of information (examples: Linux, wikipedia, etc.).
I think p2p downloads and software cracks point to the fact that information CAN be exchanged with very little effort. I know many people hate the "information wants to be free" tagline, but ultimately it appears that since information CAN be exchanged freely, why should we artificially limit it?
I think it is a good thing that we are starting to realize that freeing information is easy and useful.
An open-source style of coding doesn't automatically mean that all contributions are good quality. However it does generally mean that you get many more contributions, so you can afford to be picky. Also, a "cheap hack" could conceivably be rewritten by a more by-the-book coder to fit in with the current architecture. In my own programming experience, I find that at least half the battle is just in figuring out what's going wrong. The "cheap hack" probably already exposes what sections of the code are interacting in an improper way. Thus, the code contribution (even if not accepted into the tree) represents "research" into the nature of a bug. This can be useful to the more serious coders.
I think with any large software project (OSS or closed), it can be difficult to maintain the architecture. It's very tempting to accept hacks to deal with problems. As always, the quality of the code depends a great deal on those key people who are in charge of validating code and integrating it into the tree. They have to exercise discipline. In an open-source project, all code mergers are visible to everyone, so I'd imagine that this would be yet another reason why architecture could be kept more stable in OSS versus closed-source (where you could silently add a hack into the code without many people noticing).
You're absolutely correct. MS is doing this because they want to capture market share.
The interesting thing (to me) is whether this is a "MS takes over yet another niche" phenomenon or whether this is a "MS desperately trying to slow loss of market share." If they don't support Linux at all, they will lose a certain number of people who decide to go fully Linux to suit their needs. By offering compatible virtualization, MS can also recapture this market. On the other hand, building in this compatibility will make some people experiment with Linux who might not have otherwise. Thus there is some number of customers that MS stands to lose (in the long term) because people become familiar with Linux.
Apparently MS is betting that the number of people they gain will outweigh the number they lose. I think they are right, in the short term... but that in the long term virtualization in general (with MS's contribution being included in that) stands to help Linux more than it helps Windows. When any OS can run any other OS as a virtual system quickly and efficiently, then consumer choice is maximized. As more people become familiar with Linux, the idea of spending alot of money on MS Windows will cease to be attractive. An entire company might be able to get away with only paying for a few Windows licenses, since when they are needed they would be transparently transferred to the computer that needed it at that moment.
Slashdot and Digg are not capable of censorship. The first ammendment states "Congress shall make no law....". Slashdot is not Congress, Digg is not Congress.
I know what you're getting at, but the term "censorship" does apply here. By the US legal definition, this is not censorship (legally, that term applies to attempts by the government to block ideas/information from being exchanged), but what is going on certainly corresponds to the dictionary definition of censorship (which is simply along the lines of "limitations on speech or expression by those with power").
Censorship by non-government bodies is not illegal (in most cases), but it's still valid to call it censorship. Even though it's not illegal, it may still be unethical or hypocritical at the least. Digg and Slashdot are capable of censorship in the moral (although not legal) sense, and we can certainly debate whether they what they are doing is "right" or "wrong" in our view.
If you don't like what happens on a website, don't go there, start your own. That's the real democracy of the internet.
I agree with you there. The reason that governmental censorship is wrong/scary is that the people have no options available to them. When a company or individual tries to censor information, it is less troublesome because they have limited power. The people can go elsewhere for their information. But this is also why censorhip (or more generically, 'information control') by monopolies is dangerous. When the media, for instance, is controlled by a small number of people, then they effectively have censorship power, which is decidely a bad thing. This is also why I think there should be exceptions in copyright to prevent it from being used as a censorship device. The people need access to a broad spectrum of information and opinions. Serious attempts to limit this spectrum (whether by governments or private citizens/companies) need to be challenged.
Indeed. This is one of the main reasons that I've moved towards using open-source wherever possible. I built a MythTV and it allows me to escape the desires of the networks. Myth will let me auto-skip commercials, or play a DVD without watching the silly intro animations, or even watch downloaded content. I would not trust that to be the case if I paid money for a commercial device. I want to be in control of my devices, pure and simple.
I know many slashdotters download music/movies (rather than buy) more because of the convienience and control, rather than just "saving money." In fact many of us already pay for the content that we end up downloading (for instance I have downloaded shows rather than watch them on TV). I would rather spend 3 minutes searching for a torrent I need, rather than wait through 30 seconds of "no skip" commercials. Why? Because I hate artificial barriers and money-grabs.
I'm certainly no expert in such things, but here are some suggestions. The idea, of course, is to make life difficult for the spam-bot (or the spam-bot writer I suppose) without making life hell for your users. You seem to already be using a CAPTCHA, but you could switch to a different one. Everytime you switch, the bot-writer has to update his code. This is annoying for him but is no big deal for your users, since they are humans and can pass whatever simple visual test you give them. You might also consider making small changes to the HTML of those "make new account" pages. It's likely that that bot is making many assumptions about how your page is organized. Changing the names of forms (or having random names), or changing subtle things about the layout (things that a human wouldn't even notice, but which would break an HTML parsing program that was expecting your page to be organized in a certain way) are also good ways to slow down the bots. Make the HTML obfuscated. Include bogus hidden forms, for instance.
Perhaps the best way to fix your site is to attack it yourself. Try to write a simple bot that automates the login process, and see what happens. You may suddenly notice a subtle hole in your security (maybe the filename for the captcha gives away what it is... or maybe after a successful verification, the same cookie can be used to create another account... or something). In the process of attacking your own site you may uncover something you've missed before.
This is certainly a valid worry. As I understand it, however, modern flash memories have more or less dealt with this problem, because: (1) The number of rewrites is now quite large (hundreds of thousands?) (2) The writing-to-disk software/hardware implements "load balancing." If you rewrite the same file 1000 times, it won't use the same exact block on the flash disk for each of those writes. Instead it will move from block to block with various writes/deletes/modify actions. This, coupled with some "slack" (the actual disk size is a little bit bigger than the "useable" disk size) allows for the wear to be distributed over the whole device. (3) The system uses conventional error-correction and flagging of bad blocks.
As another poster pointed out, magnetic hard disks also have a limited number of rewrite cycles. But in practical terms we usually don't reach this limit. For critical applications I imagine you'd use a RAID of flash disks just like a RAID of magnetic drives.
Well the idea with disposable electronics/devices is that the manufacturing is cheaper and the end devices cost so little that they are disposable. The 'dream' of those working on these devices is that they become so cheap that they replace things like billboards and flyers and so forth. Basically you can hand out "disposable paper-thin TVs" on the street as advertising. Many consumers like the idea of being able to easily replace their devices. (TV doesn't quite fit the new decor of your living room? Just throw it out and buy a new one...) I think it's pretty obvious that there will be a consumer demand for cheaper, disposable devices.
What worries me much more is the obvious environmental impact. Society has made some progress over the last decade to be more "environmentally friendly" yet new directions like this one just push us ever further towards a fully "disposable society."
it seems like the EU is more interested in making an extra 30 or 40 million than making sure the consumer is protected.
Not really. The EU courts handed out a ruling. Microsoft did not comply. It's embarassing that the EU has to resort to daily fines to get Microsoft to comply with the law, but that's the only way to force a company to take the law seriously.
Is 2.36 million a day enough of a fine to make breaking the law an unprofitable method of doing business? I doubt it, given how much money Microsoft has saved up.
Well the article says:
the software giant would face a retroactive fine of $2.36 million a day for the period between Dec. 15 and the date the final decision is issued
It's been 85 days since Dec 15, 2005. So that means that the fine would already be $202 million. Microsoft's market cap is $281 bilion. So I guess it's not a big % of their budget. On the other hand, this fine represents an "operating cost" of $861 million a year. Paying out a billion dollars a year is not a trivial amount of money, even for MS. It's not so much that they "can't afford it" since they have large reserves of cash (enough to pay off this fine for many years, no doubt)... it's more that investors are not going to be pleased knowing that $1 billion/year is disappearing without any return on it. That will negatively affect stock prices, hence affect Microsoft's ability to operate, compete, etc.
Plus, I would fully expect the EU to increase the daily fine if this went on for a long time. I'm sure other laws would come into play also, based on Microsoft's obvious ignoring of rulings. They could be ordered to stop doing business in the EU altogether. After all, if they are unwilling to comply with this legal directive, then who knows what others laws they might ignore. You can't afford to have rogue companies operating in your countries!
So I think MS will have to take this fine seriously, one way or another.
I love my MythTV, although it is not without its share of bugs. I store the shows and music on a 160Gb drive and have never had any problems with filesizes or number of files. Apparently the filesystem that the MythTV data is on plays a large role in determining how well it scales with lots of data. I use ext3 and it has worked well.
Your home media networking sounds complex, and that's something that MythTV does pretty well. The MythTV backend (which records programs and manages the database) can run on a different computer than the frontend (which allows browsing and playing of content). So you can get at your content from anywhere. And of course you can store your data on a different computer than the backend runs on if you really want to (just mount the drive appropriately). You can even have multiple frontends access the database at the same time. I often transcode recorded shows and sync them onto my laptop, so that I can watch shows elsewhere (I use TV-out on my Macbook to play shows on other people's TVs). I've never used MCE so I don't know if it can do similar things.
While I don't use my Myth to store terabytes of data, I suspect it's up to the task. I'd say give Myth another try (I wrote a tutorial after getting my system running: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/MythTV).
Agreed. Another problem is that you cannot do a text-search on that page. Even if a word appears (later on in the list), if you do a search for it, you won't be able to find it. In firefox, you usually jump to the search term... but now you can't because it is hidden in some way. So you can't actually navigate the page.
Also you can't do the whole "I remember it was on the third page of the Google search results" thing. You have to laboriously find things in a long list that you can't scroll through quickly. Why do they feel the need to put a fancy scroll-thing when browsers have that functionality built in? It just makes it run slow.
There are times when AJAX is helpful (like for smoothly scrolling dynamic maps). Displaying text results is NOT a good time to use AJAX... just use normal clean HTML and everyone will be happy.
I fully agree that Excel (and OpenOffice.org's Calc) has a horrible interface for making graphs. It is frustrating to actually get anything to look the way you want. Moreover, there is no simple way to get a graph "looking perfect" and then apply that formatting style to other graphs. You either have to start from scratch, or copy the graph and then change the data that it is pointing to. Both are tedious. I wish OO.o had a simple way to apply formatting from one graph to another (maybe it does... anything know of a trick?).
However, despite how bad Excel's graph capabilities are, you may be interested to know that there is a better way to select and modify graph items. Instead of right-clicking madly, open up the "Chart" toolbar (right-click on the toolbar near the top and make the "Chart" one visible). When you select a graph, the toolbar will list all the items ("Data series 1", "Data series 2", "x-axis", etc.). You can now pick the one you want and open its properties quickly. This allows you to "get" the item you want.
That having been said, it's a frustrating experience. There is no good way, for instance, to have proper-looking scientific/exponential notation on a graph in either Excel or OO.o calc. These are the types of things that I think OO.o could really be *ahead* of MS Office... It wouldn't take much programming (compared to what has already been done), and it would make OO.o immediately more useful than MS Office for certain tasks.
I don't want to turn this into a "TiVo versus MythTV" argument, but I think it's worth noting that the MythWeb plugin that comes with MythTV allows you to schedule shows from any browser, anywhere. Because MythTV runs on a Linux box, you get a webserver and fileserver and all that out-of-the-box. So you can log into your Myth from anywhere that has internet, and schedule a show to record, on an impulse. You can even remotely (via SSH) transcode a show, and download it to your local computer for easy viewing.
There's no reason why you couldn't access your MythTV from any laptop or PDA that has some basic web access. I often, as the summary suggest, record a show on an impulse, when someone mentions it to me. This is an awesome feature that I'm sure TiVo users would love to have. However even at 5$/month it seems overpriced to me. This should be included for free as a "value added" that would encourage people to buy TiVo and and sign up for Verizon.
Slashdot Mirror
More specifically, if you run the article page through the validator it fails with 60 errors. The truth is that the vast majority of pages out there will fail. It's a catch-22: as long as browsers are not compliant, web-pages won't be compliant... and as long as web-pages are not compliant, what's the point in standards-compliant browsers?
I believe your take on it is pretty typical. We all feel like we "should" compile the page to some gold-standard, but ultimately the most important thing (in the short term, at least) is getting the page to look right on the most-used browsers.
I will add to this, however, that I use the W3C validator as a way to help fix bugs. Often if something is not showing up correctly in one particular browser, it can be fixed by addressing one of the errors that the validator picks up. I highly recomend checking all your pages. Even if they don't always pass, the errors will give you insight into how your page is being parsed.
So in response to the original question "do you validate all your pages": I sure do! I check them all, and I fix any of the errors that are easy to fix. I also use it as an invaluable tool to get the page working in many browsers. Ultimately, however, if I have to depart from the W3C spec in order to get something looking right in an important browser, then I leave the errors in.
Yes, neutron beamlines are great for study of transmutation and nuclear properties.
All this stuff about the "commercial benefits" is a cartoonish beard for A-bomb research.
I think that's an exageration. At the facilities I've worked at, the research has been heavily geared towards science. Some facilities do indeed use the beams to study materials and designs for next-generation nuclear power plants, but not for weapons. Unlike Los Alamos, the SNS is optimized for academic research. In fact one of its "selling points" is accessibility to scientists (due in part to the fact that it's not a weapons lab).
Also, I'm not sure that "A-bomb research" has benefitted from fundamental studies in transmutation and decay rates recently. Modern advances in nuclear weaponry seem to come from engineering the bomb design, and have nothing to do with new insights from fundamental studies.
the most obviously valuable use of a high-density, high-energy neutron beam is studying heretofore under-investigated fission reactions and adding significant digits to heretofore over-investigated fission reactions.
That kind of research is probably much more useful to the medical isotopes community than it is to the weapon design community.
The US certainly does research on nuclear weapons, but I don't think the SNS is intended to be part of that infrastructure.
Thanks to the posters who pointed out the mistake in my previous post. Indeed power is typically on the order of 5 cents/kWhr. I also confused the discussion by mentioning the 1.4 MW that the SNS is rated for. The 1.4 MW is the power delivered to the target. It requires about 42 MW to generate that 1.4 MW proton beam. So we're talking about:
42,000 kW * 0.05 $/(kW hour) * 24 hours/day = 50,400 $/day
(Hopefully I haven't made a mistake this time.) This is a lot of money, but really not such a big deal for a facility this size.
I would imagine that most experiments will take significantly longer to prepare and put into papers afterward than they will do perform -- so skilled labour still takes the cake as the bulk of the expense.
You're quite right. In my experience it takes months of sample preparration before going to do such work, and it takes months afterwards to finish analyzing all the data (and then more time to write up the papers). The actual beamtime is typically only one or two weeks. So the bulk of the time for any particular scientific study is not spent at the neutron source.
However, when it comes to money, the skilled labour in question is mostly graduate students and post-docs, who are not very expensive. If two grad students work on a project for a year, this costs $40,000, whereas the two weeks of beamtime at the hypothetical $5,000/day amounts to $70,000.
For a company, however, the equation is a no-brainer: the beamtime will typically give them information that would have taken many skilled people years to obtain with any other technique.
So, what's the point of this thing?
The purpose of a "neutron beam" is *neutron scattering.* You can either use a continuous beam from a nuclear reactor, or a neutron pulse from a spallation source (which the SNS is). The idea is that you sent the beam at your (scientifically interesting) sample, and measure the directions and energies of the neutrons that are scattered/reflected/diffraction from the sample. This is a huge field, but here are some ideas of what it can be used for:
1. Neutron diffraction can be used for crystallography: to determine the crystal structure (hence molecular structure) of some novel material, drug, protein, etc. This can be done with x-rays also, but for some samples neutrons give better results.
2. Neutron reflectivity can be used to study thin films: to analyze coatings applied to electronics, or anti-abrasive coatings, or membranes used in medical applications, and so on.
3. Neutrons can be used to study industrial materials: for instance, a neutron beam can be used to probe a weld joint and map out the 3-dimensional arrangment of microsocpic stress patterns in the material. This has been used to design better welding processes, better aircraft components, engine parts, and so on.
4. A neutron beam can be used for "imaging" similar to an x-ray... except that neutrons can pass through dense materials (like lead) quite easily and can image organic materials with better sensitivity than x-rays.
5. Neutron beams can be used for the study of nuclear physics and chemistry, the properties of neutrons, and other particle-physics questions.
There are of course many other things you can do with a neutron beam, but hopefully that gives you an idea of the diversity of research that goes on at a neutron scattering facility.
I doubt that would attract 2,000 international scientists annualy
Well there is quite a bit of demand for neutron beam-time. Since the SNS will take the flux up a notch (8 times higher than anything we have now), researchers will be able to complete their experiments faster (or conversely complete more experiments in a given timeslot), and will also be able to detect things that perhaps went unnoticed before. So yes, there will quite a bit of demand for this installation.
about $82,200/day just in electricity costs.
Yes, something like that. The instrument at full output is supposed to be 1.4 MW. Assuming 5$/kWhr (note that big installations end up paying less per kWhr, on average, than a residential user) that's over $100,000/day in electricity costs. Of course when running this delivers neutron beams along all of the beam tubes. When fully operational, there should be 24 beamlines, meaning that each researcher is "only" costing ~$5000/day in electricity.
I imagine that lots of scientists would want to play around with this- I would certainly have fun with it given the chance. At that price, though, only extremely well-funded researchers could afford to use this machine.
As far as I know, that's not how it works. The researcher does not "pay" outright for the beamtime (although companies renting beamtime do). What happens is that a researcher makes an application for beamtime. Like any other grant, this is reviewed by experts. If the proposal is accepted, the researcher gets the beamtime (for "free"). So instead of giving government funds to researchers, who then buy beamtime, the SNS is funded and divides out the beamtime to researchers worldwide, based on the scientific merit of the proposals.
I'm not 100% sure that's how the SNS will be run, but that is how such "user facilities" have been run in my experience. The SNS is a government-funded facility whose goal it is to "get important science done" and as such its top priority is to divide up the beamtime to researchers (from around the world) without "wasting any beam-time" and hopefully giving opportunities for the best science to be completed (regardless of how much money the research group has).
You're one among many posters to suggest that they open-source their drivers. I franly agree that this is a good idea. It would be good for the Linux community (obviously), and I think it would be good for them, also.
Obviously this would differentiate their product, and carve out a niche where that "big boys" seem to be ignoring. More importantly, if this product is new, then presumably they are currently in a position where they *can* conceivably open-source their driver. During any debate on open-sourcing video drivers, it is usually pointed out that doing so would be difficult, because sufficient documentation might not exist, or because of licensing issues, etc. However this new product line is at a stage where open-sourcing will yield the maximum return-on-investment. If they do it now, they will start getting 'free' software upgrades, bug fixes, documentation, and so on. This means their product will mature faster and they can close the gap with their competitors more quickly.
Frankly I think that would be an excellent move on their part. Without such an admittedly drastic move, their product has nothing new to offer and this product line will die off.
They should be thinking to themselves "imagine if our video card was the *default choice* for anyone selling or building a Linux or BSD system?" That's market differentiation right there.
all the websites on myspace look like crap..
I was about to accuse you of exagerating and being pointlessly mean. Then I actualy went to MySpace, clicked on "browse" and opened 5 random pages.
They all look like crap.
I guess that's why I'd never gone to MySpace before today.
Seeing as how there is no physical packaging, nor physical inventory that might suffer breakage, one wonders how Sony will defend against these charges.
It's pretty simple. Sony will simply claim that there are marketing costs, server costs, bandwidth costs, and so on that amount to the same thing. To say otherwise would be to admit that they could be selling the downloads at lower cost to the consumer than the equivalent CD.
Sony may even capitulate so far as to actually update the contracts, so that it spells out, for online sales, how much money goes to marketing, bandwidth, etc. At the end of the day, however, I highly doubt that the artist will see a larger percentage of the sales than they did before. Nor will the consumer see any kind of savings.
It's unfortunate, too, because a reasonable pricing model for online downloads of music could have been arranged where:
1. The consumer pays less per track than for the equivalent physical media (which is fair, considering compression losses and lack of a physical object).
2. The artist gets slightly more per sale than before.
3. The label gets slightly more per sale (because of savings due to lack of packaging, etc.).
However (and not too surprisingly), the labels have decided that any savings that arise should all be kept by themselves. As we are starting to see, this strategy will lead to losses instead, as both artists and consumers seek out better strategies... maybe even business models without so many middle-men.
Just downloaded the program and am playing with it. My first impressions:
Pro:
Very intuitive interface. Unlike most 3D modelling programs, you can start creating and coloring objects immediately. You can create simple layouts very quickly, and then use the neat "tape measure" tool to measure distances. This is absolutely great for making a model of a room to consider different layouts for desks or whatever.
Con:
As in many cases, simplicity leads to limited designs. To make anything complex would be a nightmare. Also, I can't see any way to make things look "slick and cool" or to render them in anything but a simplistic cartoon-like style. It has none of the elegant programatic control of something like POVray, for instance.
Overall I think it's a neat toy that some people may enjoy, but I think anyone serious about 3D will give it a pass (including, I'm guessing, the Pro version). On the other hand, I would like to see some open-source projects get some inspiration about the interface from this program. An add-on to POVray for creating simple shapes (with the more complex work then being done in code) would be nice.
-1 Flamebait.
Why do you think your comment is flamebait? Do you think that this statement is controversial:
Has everyone's perception of value been altered by p2p downloads, cracked software and other Internet-rendered amenities? Without a doubt.
I think that statement is true, and I don't think we should attribute to it any negative connotation. I believe that the perceived value of information and creative expression was over-inflated before the digital age. Now we are seeing such things drop to their actual value, which is quite low.
I'm not saying that information is worthless. Far from it: knowledge is power certainly. What I'm saying is that previously there were boundaries on information exchange (some very real, like the difficulty of printing books, and some artificial, like copyright). Now that the boundaries have been lifted, our "perception of value" has indeed been altered. We now understand what a low cost there is on information exchange, and how much we can all benefit from the free exchange of information (examples: Linux, wikipedia, etc.).
I think p2p downloads and software cracks point to the fact that information CAN be exchanged with very little effort. I know many people hate the "information wants to be free" tagline, but ultimately it appears that since information CAN be exchanged freely, why should we artificially limit it?
I think it is a good thing that we are starting to realize that freeing information is easy and useful.
An open-source style of coding doesn't automatically mean that all contributions are good quality. However it does generally mean that you get many more contributions, so you can afford to be picky. Also, a "cheap hack" could conceivably be rewritten by a more by-the-book coder to fit in with the current architecture. In my own programming experience, I find that at least half the battle is just in figuring out what's going wrong. The "cheap hack" probably already exposes what sections of the code are interacting in an improper way. Thus, the code contribution (even if not accepted into the tree) represents "research" into the nature of a bug. This can be useful to the more serious coders.
I think with any large software project (OSS or closed), it can be difficult to maintain the architecture. It's very tempting to accept hacks to deal with problems. As always, the quality of the code depends a great deal on those key people who are in charge of validating code and integrating it into the tree. They have to exercise discipline. In an open-source project, all code mergers are visible to everyone, so I'd imagine that this would be yet another reason why architecture could be kept more stable in OSS versus closed-source (where you could silently add a hack into the code without many people noticing).
You're absolutely correct. MS is doing this because they want to capture market share.
The interesting thing (to me) is whether this is a "MS takes over yet another niche" phenomenon or whether this is a "MS desperately trying to slow loss of market share." If they don't support Linux at all, they will lose a certain number of people who decide to go fully Linux to suit their needs. By offering compatible virtualization, MS can also recapture this market. On the other hand, building in this compatibility will make some people experiment with Linux who might not have otherwise. Thus there is some number of customers that MS stands to lose (in the long term) because people become familiar with Linux.
Apparently MS is betting that the number of people they gain will outweigh the number they lose. I think they are right, in the short term... but that in the long term virtualization in general (with MS's contribution being included in that) stands to help Linux more than it helps Windows. When any OS can run any other OS as a virtual system quickly and efficiently, then consumer choice is maximized. As more people become familiar with Linux, the idea of spending alot of money on MS Windows will cease to be attractive. An entire company might be able to get away with only paying for a few Windows licenses, since when they are needed they would be transparently transferred to the computer that needed it at that moment.
Slashdot and Digg are not capable of censorship. The first ammendment states "Congress shall make no law....". Slashdot is not Congress, Digg is not Congress.
I know what you're getting at, but the term "censorship" does apply here. By the US legal definition, this is not censorship (legally, that term applies to attempts by the government to block ideas/information from being exchanged), but what is going on certainly corresponds to the dictionary definition of censorship (which is simply along the lines of "limitations on speech or expression by those with power").
Censorship by non-government bodies is not illegal (in most cases), but it's still valid to call it censorship. Even though it's not illegal, it may still be unethical or hypocritical at the least. Digg and Slashdot are capable of censorship in the moral (although not legal) sense, and we can certainly debate whether they what they are doing is "right" or "wrong" in our view.
If you don't like what happens on a website, don't go there, start your own. That's the real democracy of the internet.
I agree with you there. The reason that governmental censorship is wrong/scary is that the people have no options available to them. When a company or individual tries to censor information, it is less troublesome because they have limited power. The people can go elsewhere for their information. But this is also why censorhip (or more generically, 'information control') by monopolies is dangerous. When the media, for instance, is controlled by a small number of people, then they effectively have censorship power, which is decidely a bad thing. This is also why I think there should be exceptions in copyright to prevent it from being used as a censorship device. The people need access to a broad spectrum of information and opinions. Serious attempts to limit this spectrum (whether by governments or private citizens/companies) need to be challenged.
Indeed. This is one of the main reasons that I've moved towards using open-source wherever possible. I built a MythTV and it allows me to escape the desires of the networks. Myth will let me auto-skip commercials, or play a DVD without watching the silly intro animations, or even watch downloaded content. I would not trust that to be the case if I paid money for a commercial device. I want to be in control of my devices, pure and simple.
I know many slashdotters download music/movies (rather than buy) more because of the convienience and control, rather than just "saving money." In fact many of us already pay for the content that we end up downloading (for instance I have downloaded shows rather than watch them on TV). I would rather spend 3 minutes searching for a torrent I need, rather than wait through 30 seconds of "no skip" commercials. Why? Because I hate artificial barriers and money-grabs.
I'm certainly no expert in such things, but here are some suggestions. The idea, of course, is to make life difficult for the spam-bot (or the spam-bot writer I suppose) without making life hell for your users. You seem to already be using a CAPTCHA, but you could switch to a different one. Everytime you switch, the bot-writer has to update his code. This is annoying for him but is no big deal for your users, since they are humans and can pass whatever simple visual test you give them. You might also consider making small changes to the HTML of those "make new account" pages. It's likely that that bot is making many assumptions about how your page is organized. Changing the names of forms (or having random names), or changing subtle things about the layout (things that a human wouldn't even notice, but which would break an HTML parsing program that was expecting your page to be organized in a certain way) are also good ways to slow down the bots. Make the HTML obfuscated. Include bogus hidden forms, for instance.
Perhaps the best way to fix your site is to attack it yourself. Try to write a simple bot that automates the login process, and see what happens. You may suddenly notice a subtle hole in your security (maybe the filename for the captcha gives away what it is... or maybe after a successful verification, the same cookie can be used to create another account... or something). In the process of attacking your own site you may uncover something you've missed before.
This is certainly a valid worry. As I understand it, however, modern flash memories have more or less dealt with this problem, because:
(1) The number of rewrites is now quite large (hundreds of thousands?)
(2) The writing-to-disk software/hardware implements "load balancing." If you rewrite the same file 1000 times, it won't use the same exact block on the flash disk for each of those writes. Instead it will move from block to block with various writes/deletes/modify actions. This, coupled with some "slack" (the actual disk size is a little bit bigger than the "useable" disk size) allows for the wear to be distributed over the whole device.
(3) The system uses conventional error-correction and flagging of bad blocks.
As another poster pointed out, magnetic hard disks also have a limited number of rewrite cycles. But in practical terms we usually don't reach this limit. For critical applications I imagine you'd use a RAID of flash disks just like a RAID of magnetic drives.
Well the idea with disposable electronics/devices is that the manufacturing is cheaper and the end devices cost so little that they are disposable. The 'dream' of those working on these devices is that they become so cheap that they replace things like billboards and flyers and so forth. Basically you can hand out "disposable paper-thin TVs" on the street as advertising. Many consumers like the idea of being able to easily replace their devices. (TV doesn't quite fit the new decor of your living room? Just throw it out and buy a new one...) I think it's pretty obvious that there will be a consumer demand for cheaper, disposable devices.
What worries me much more is the obvious environmental impact. Society has made some progress over the last decade to be more "environmentally friendly" yet new directions like this one just push us ever further towards a fully "disposable society."
it seems like the EU is more interested in making an extra 30 or 40 million than making sure the consumer is protected.
Not really. The EU courts handed out a ruling. Microsoft did not comply. It's embarassing that the EU has to resort to daily fines to get Microsoft to comply with the law, but that's the only way to force a company to take the law seriously.
Is 2.36 million a day enough of a fine to make breaking the law an unprofitable method of doing business? I doubt it, given how much money Microsoft has saved up.
Well the article says:
the software giant would face a retroactive fine of $2.36 million a day for the period between Dec. 15 and the date the final decision is issued
It's been 85 days since Dec 15, 2005. So that means that the fine would already be $202 million. Microsoft's market cap is $281 bilion. So I guess it's not a big % of their budget. On the other hand, this fine represents an "operating cost" of $861 million a year. Paying out a billion dollars a year is not a trivial amount of money, even for MS. It's not so much that they "can't afford it" since they have large reserves of cash (enough to pay off this fine for many years, no doubt)... it's more that investors are not going to be pleased knowing that $1 billion/year is disappearing without any return on it. That will negatively affect stock prices, hence affect Microsoft's ability to operate, compete, etc.
Plus, I would fully expect the EU to increase the daily fine if this went on for a long time. I'm sure other laws would come into play also, based on Microsoft's obvious ignoring of rulings. They could be ordered to stop doing business in the EU altogether. After all, if they are unwilling to comply with this legal directive, then who knows what others laws they might ignore. You can't afford to have rogue companies operating in your countries!
So I think MS will have to take this fine seriously, one way or another.
I love my MythTV, although it is not without its share of bugs. I store the shows and music on a 160Gb drive and have never had any problems with filesizes or number of files. Apparently the filesystem that the MythTV data is on plays a large role in determining how well it scales with lots of data. I use ext3 and it has worked well.
Your home media networking sounds complex, and that's something that MythTV does pretty well. The MythTV backend (which records programs and manages the database) can run on a different computer than the frontend (which allows browsing and playing of content). So you can get at your content from anywhere. And of course you can store your data on a different computer than the backend runs on if you really want to (just mount the drive appropriately). You can even have multiple frontends access the database at the same time. I often transcode recorded shows and sync them onto my laptop, so that I can watch shows elsewhere (I use TV-out on my Macbook to play shows on other people's TVs). I've never used MCE so I don't know if it can do similar things.
While I don't use my Myth to store terabytes of data, I suspect it's up to the task. I'd say give Myth another try (I wrote a tutorial after getting my system running: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/MythTV).
Agreed. Another problem is that you cannot do a text-search on that page. Even if a word appears (later on in the list), if you do a search for it, you won't be able to find it. In firefox, you usually jump to the search term... but now you can't because it is hidden in some way. So you can't actually navigate the page.
Also you can't do the whole "I remember it was on the third page of the Google search results" thing. You have to laboriously find things in a long list that you can't scroll through quickly. Why do they feel the need to put a fancy scroll-thing when browsers have that functionality built in? It just makes it run slow.
There are times when AJAX is helpful (like for smoothly scrolling dynamic maps). Displaying text results is NOT a good time to use AJAX... just use normal clean HTML and everyone will be happy.
I fully agree that Excel (and OpenOffice.org's Calc) has a horrible interface for making graphs. It is frustrating to actually get anything to look the way you want. Moreover, there is no simple way to get a graph "looking perfect" and then apply that formatting style to other graphs. You either have to start from scratch, or copy the graph and then change the data that it is pointing to. Both are tedious. I wish OO.o had a simple way to apply formatting from one graph to another (maybe it does... anything know of a trick?).
However, despite how bad Excel's graph capabilities are, you may be interested to know that there is a better way to select and modify graph items. Instead of right-clicking madly, open up the "Chart" toolbar (right-click on the toolbar near the top and make the "Chart" one visible). When you select a graph, the toolbar will list all the items ("Data series 1", "Data series 2", "x-axis", etc.). You can now pick the one you want and open its properties quickly. This allows you to "get" the item you want.
That having been said, it's a frustrating experience. There is no good way, for instance, to have proper-looking scientific/exponential notation on a graph in either Excel or OO.o calc. These are the types of things that I think OO.o could really be *ahead* of MS Office... It wouldn't take much programming (compared to what has already been done), and it would make OO.o immediately more useful than MS Office for certain tasks.
I don't want to turn this into a "TiVo versus MythTV" argument, but I think it's worth noting that the MythWeb plugin that comes with MythTV allows you to schedule shows from any browser, anywhere. Because MythTV runs on a Linux box, you get a webserver and fileserver and all that out-of-the-box. So you can log into your Myth from anywhere that has internet, and schedule a show to record, on an impulse. You can even remotely (via SSH) transcode a show, and download it to your local computer for easy viewing.
There's no reason why you couldn't access your MythTV from any laptop or PDA that has some basic web access. I often, as the summary suggest, record a show on an impulse, when someone mentions it to me. This is an awesome feature that I'm sure TiVo users would love to have. However even at 5$/month it seems overpriced to me. This should be included for free as a "value added" that would encourage people to buy TiVo and and sign up for Verizon.