Score one for the aussies. In best American fashion, Dr Marshall was snatched up quite some time ago and has been a professor at Univ of Virginia for the last fifteen years, where he's been proving and developing techniques out of his discovery.
Many of us who went through med school there figured he'd win it eventually. It was interesting that I'd never know Marshall was at UVa from the BBC article.
http://www.odeo.com/ probably gets a fair amount of traffic with podcasting taking off.
In addition to the 37signals and 43 Things sites, the new "Agile Web Development with Rails" book describes a mortgage processing engine (www.rapidreporting.com):
Rapid Reporting is running their identity and income verification engine on top of a Rails system. It's used by roughly 80% of the top 1000 mortgage underwriters in the US and is built to handle 2 million mortgage application transactions per month.
The arguments for these high valuations (and Yahoo!, at around 60 times expected profits is right up there too) all boil down to one: the growth in internet firms' business reflects a secular shift that is broadly impervious to economic cycles and has a long way to run.
I disagree with any premise that a huge market prices stocks using one valuation criterion. Are internet leaders priced high because they aren't affected by economic cycles? That's not why I invested in some of them in the past (and one of them now). How many employees does Time-Warner have? How many does Google to return those kinds of profits? As computers get faster and cheaper and seep into every nook and cranny of our society, who is in better position to explore new markets in profitable ways?
Is it all that surprising that the number of people willing to spend four years of their lives and a hundred thousand dollars to enter this field are dropping?
Yes. It shows how people view a Comp Sci education as vocational training more than an essential part of our increasingly digital world. If you had only 4 years before getting a job, would you rather get an English degree or a Comp Sci degree? For me, the choice would be obvious.
Computer Science trains your brain. It lets you understand an essential technology in our economy. If people view it in vocational terms, it's because it hasn't been marketed effectively, both by the teachers of computer science and people who use it every day. Computer Science is one of the building blocks for a career. Sure you can make it the sum total of your work, like a student can focus on English skills after an English B.A., but such thinking is only one of many paths that are neglected and underemphasized in Comp Sci's case.
In the course of my career, I've been extremely thankful for my comp sci background. It's let me do work in medicine, 3D imaging, game playing, earth science, finance, Japanese word processing, and other fields.
There's a lot of niches for people with computer skills. Find one that lets you work sane hours and enjoy the rest of your life. Sometimes it's a tradeoff between income and lifestyle. Sometimes you'll find that improving your lifestyle leads to improving productivity, enjoyment, and eventually success.
There are places where 70-80 hour weeks are common, even 100+ hour weeks. Surgical residents, for example, have been fighting battles to stop institutional insanity. Many Wall St jobs require long hours. Thankfully tech use permeates all of society and an incredible number of job niches. Spend some time and explore the possibilities.
Antihero != "average person protagonist"
on
The Escapist
·
· Score: 1
I'd have to disagree with you. Antihero is not defined as an "average person." There are many antiheros in literature who would be anything but average. The central notion of the antihero is the lack of some heroic qualities, which is not the same as saying they are average.
I referenced a literature book over here because you wanted something more academical than Wikipedia. People could rightly apply "antihero" to some renditions of Batman, and that character is anything but average.
Def of Antihero from "Handbook of Literary Terms"
on
The Escapist
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Antihero: A protagonist who lacks one or more of the conventional qualities attributed to a hero. Instead of being dignified, brave, idealistic, or purposeful, the antihero may be cowardly, self-interested, alienated, or weak. Although instances of the antihero are sprinkled throughout literature since ancient times -- for instance, Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605) and Byron's Don Juan (1819-24) -- the antihero in the current sense is essentially a twentieth-century character. Their antiheroism tends to reflect the spiritual or social afflictions of modern man and woman -- atheism, loneliness, mistrust of authority, disillusionment with Western ideals. Posing a satiric or frank contrast to traditional portrayals of idealized heroes and heroines, antiheroes are figures of moral and psychological waywardness, and also of social and ethical criticism. Their oppositional nature stems not simply from within, but from the interaction of self and society; hence their failings point to themselves and to the worlds they inhabit. Modern examples range from Arthur Miller's Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman (1949) to the sex-crazed Jewish adolescent in Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint (1969).
From "Handbook of Literary Terms: Literature, Language, Theory." X.J. Kennedy et al. 2005.
In your first two sentences, it's fashion not "fashon", jiminy not "jimminy", and you should pay attention to changing subject number ("someone... their...them"). If "fashon has certain rules, like grammar," then you should note that fashion rules are even more flexible than grammar. My analogy is, in fact, more generous than it should be. If you comment on someone's fashion in a clothes store, at least the both of you are in a place dealing with clothes and fashion. If you comment on someone's spelling mistake ('definately' instead of 'definitely') in a forum about object-oriented programming, you are (1) calling attention to what may be a typo in a very public fashion in (2) a venue that is not about spelling and grammar.
I suppose you give a lecture to every teen with jeans so low their butt shows, because it violates your fashion rules.
"If your output sucks do not expect everyone to gloss over it with tolerance and blissful acceptance... It is the utmost in arrogance to shovel shit in someone elses face and say "act like it smells like roses!"
How easy it is to set up straw men to support your weak case. We're talking about 'definately' and 'should of'. If these are your examples of "shit" and "sucks", I would caution you in throwing stones from your obviously glass house. I can live without people who are seriously offended by such mistakes in a web venue. These type of people might also take offense at sentence fragments in literature. The best writers of English can and will break grammatical rules, but the main issue I have with the top post, and your post in particular, is the global requirement of perfect spelling and grammar. At the very least, the top post (and you) should differentiate between professional publications and the majority of web venues. If you or Strom did intend to limit the domain of your perfect-English zone, then you should have presented your argument better instead of concentrating on spelling and grammar.
I'm a techie who is presumably competent in English; I've got published fiction and card-carrying status with a professional writers association. But my prose is hardly flawless on a first draft typed at 60 words/minute, and that's the style of communication on free-for-all boards like/. and most web venues.
Unsolicited correction of someone's English on the web is like stepping up to fellow customers in a clothes store and suggesting ways to improve their current wardrobe. Sure, you might be more fashion-savvy, but you'd still be arrogant.
It's still hard to grok what this "prevention" means to the time traveller. If you go back, are you physically prevented from firing the gun or will the gun misfire? Or if you make a change, does the timeline establish a new universe with the old one running along merrily as a parallel universe.
When we use our senses, we only see things in the typical 4D realm, so is it possible that all those other postulated dimensions (to 11) give the degrees of freedom to allow bifurcations in the timeline? Geez this is confusing.
Re:Ruby on Rails as a threat to PHP?
on
Ajax On Rails
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
What a troll. PHP is so low performance and scales so poorly that major web sites moved to it from the Java world, and there are enterprise-focused solutions like Active Grid that are now available. It's so un-"useful" that myriad discussion boards and community portals are invariably PHP-based. New development tools and plug-in support for popular design/programming tools are popping up. Each of these web technologies has a sweet spot, but your narrow-minded viewpoint is best revealed by your aversion to "this ancient approach of text-edited, interpreted syntax." Yeah, right. Google and every other major web presence must agree with your assessment since they only use Java and.NET now.
Extract from Web 2.0 chapter available there
on
Ajax On Rails
·
· Score: 1
As mentioned in Curt's great article, the Agile Web Development with Rails (beta) book has a nice chapter on Ajax support. You can even get an extract of the chapter at the pragmatic programmer's site:
PDF Extract of Chap 18: Web 2.0
Figure 18.1 should make Ajax clear. The book is highly recommended, and the 2nd Beta was just released last week.
One benefit of this shift will probably be faster emulation of Windows apps on Mac OS. The Virtual PC won't have to translate the Pentium instruction set anymore. It still has to handle other aspects of Windows, but I would guess the speed of Windows app emulation goes way up. So Mac users will get the benefit of Unix-core + reasonable Windows app speed. Any reason this wouldn't be true?
The Stanford research is interesting, but I'm still trying to make up my mind about the Semantic Web, learning about RDF, and whether I need to bake in ways of handling these kinds of assertions in my web app. The Stanford group writes, "Our hope is that our search application spurs development of the Semantic Web, and leads to sites publishing their data in this format so that we don't have to." It obviously takes more work to encode such information and getting user contributions auto-marked for the semantic web. For a counter viewpoint, take a look at some of Clay Shirky's work -- in particular:
Will the semantic web be supported by future versions of Drupal, phpBB, and other grass-roots content management web apps? Not sure. Since a lot of the content is visitor generated, you would have to build in ways of providing easy markup. Would be interested to hear/. thoughts on the matter.
For most consumers, hardware is less of a factor
on
Apple's First Flops
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Although PCs have the edge for power/price, hardware bang for buck is becoming less of a factor except for gamers. Chip speeds and memory sizes are starting to go past consumer requirements, even if you throw in HD video, so design and software are the key factors. This may be why we see Apple recapturing some market share.
There's enough of a market within homes, particularly digital homes, to drive Apple growth without business penetration. Apple is trying to be the new Sony and the hardware is a commodity; it's the software and design that are the real added values.
Well I popped over to Amazon to check out your recommended book, and it has one of the worst ratings I've ever seen for a CS book. Really really bad reviews. Either Nutt is at the short end of a conspiracy of mad students, or his book really is too simplistic.
This appendix on Mach is from the newest edition of the classic "Operating System Concepts," Seventh Edition by Silberschatz, Galvin, and Gagne (Wiley). ISBN: 0-471-69466-5. Published December 2004.
There are also free online chapters for FreeBSD and Nachos.
"And according to a detailed cost model analysis conducted by our firm, we estimate the manufactured cost for a 40-inch NED panel could be under $400"
Manufactured cost is not what you'll pay at retail. A little Googling uncovered this heuristic for a 6:1 manufactured vs retail cost. The ratio seems optimistic for today's razor thin margins and the commodity TV business, but it still indicates much higher retail prices.
It may not be possible to manufacture your product at the cost necessary for it to retail at a price customers will pay. A new consumer product typically must be manufacturable at no more than 1/6 of its retail price to adequately compensate the product's distribution channel (e.g., the manufacturer must sell at 2 times their manufactured cost to cover their operating costs and profit, the wholesaler must sell at 1.5 times their cost and the retailer at 2 times their cost -- 2 x 1.5 x 2 = 6). There are many good product ideas that simply can't be manufactured for the needed cost -- in fact finding a way to manufacture a product at the needed cost is frequently the much more difficult problem than simply designing the functionality.
Although the parent is a troll or lacks a sense of humor, I'll come clean on two things:
The grandparent post was meant to be *funny* although to be funny there has to be a little truth in the form of their embrace/extend/extinguish tactics.
Aside from certain predatory business practices (which are understandable in the dog-eat-dog world of business), I admire Bill Gates. Anyone who puts billions of $$ and his own time into world-altering worthy causes like The Gates Foundationshould be admired. Let's face it, when the future looks back on Gates, he'll be remembered as more magnanimous than the tycoons that started the Nobel prize and funded the libraries. Even though I'll probably switch to Apple in time, I take consolation that probably 95% of the Gates fortune will eventually go to charity. I've got no delusions that this man who routinely gets ridiculed on/. will do more good for this world than me and my hundred closest friends.
So we can joke about this sit-down using lines from Braveheart, but let's not forget what Gates is doing in his fleecing of the rich and giving to the poor. (Preparing for the onslaught, or maybe mercifully, all of/. has moved on...)
Eric Raymond: Longshanks.. er.. Gates desires peace?
Brad Smith: He declares it to me, I swear it. He proposes that you withdraw your attack. In return he grants you file formats, patents, and this chest of gold which I am to pay to you personally.
Eric Raymond: File formats and patents. Gold. That I should become Judas?
Brad Smith: Peace is made in such ways.
Eric Raymond: Slaves are made in such ways. The last time Gates spoke of peace I was a boy. And many open-source nobles, who would not be slaves, were lured by him under a flag of truce to a barn, where he embraced and extended and extinguished them. I was very young, but I remember this Gates notion of peace.
How you pay for editing, formatting, printing, and distribution is a separate issue from how you establish credibility. Credibility, IMHO, is created through reputable peer review and editorial standards. Credibility can be helped by forcing a mind-shift among the scientific community, so that the respected researchers both submit to and peer review open access journals. Mandating that scientists submit to open access journals, as a prerequisite of government grants, is a great way to bootstrap this shift.
Vanity press does not equal pay-to-publish. One means that the author can get his work published regardless of its merit (hence the "vanity"). The other means that the author has to pay, but does not preclude a peer review vetting process.
I never understood the economics of peer-reviewed scientific journals. The authors don't get any money and are usually tech-savvy enough to produce well-formatted papers. The peer-reviewers (at least when I peer reviewed) didn't get any money. And being an editor is an academic feather in your cap. So the cost of content and the cost of reviewing the content is close to zero. But some journals cost individuals and especially the institutions a large amount of money. In this day of electronic typesetting and distribution, does it make any sense?
Take the New England Journal of Medicine. It's about $150 for an individual subscription and ranges from $1000 to $17,000 for institutions depending on the size. This is for a publication that doesn't pay authors, and in fact can make authors bend over backwards. No wonder all sorts of publication models are being explored.
Just like everybody else here, I'm wondering what possessed Meetup.com to charge this much money, and to make the volunteer organizer responsible for the bill. Then I took a look at the size of the company.
Anyone else think 26 full-time employees, a full board of directors, and apparent VC funds are overkill for a company like this? Sure, they bring a lot of value added features to organizing local groups, but this isn't an amazingly difficult web app, and with VC funding on board, you just know the target valuation will force aggressive community-killing fees.
Charging a flat high fee for groups of any size makes no sense. This will be another good idea, bad execution dot-com failure. If they have to charge those kinds of rates, it's clear that they didn't bootstrap the company in a judicious manner. It's too bad, because they provide a nice service. Evite.com will probably get some of their refugees.
So the chip "figures out" absolutely nothing. The brain learns to "figure out" the chip.
I don't think it's as clear cut as that. Sure, there's a lot of plasticity on the human side. These devices don't just get implanted, turned on, and voila -- artificial limbs are moving. There's a long training period for humans to adapt and get the most benefit. But if you attach a neural sensor to a computer, there's the ability to apply sophisticated signal processing and pattern recognition techniques to the output signals. This has been a common technique when using EEG to drive computer operations, and I imagine it would be used with these intracortical chips as input devices.
Slashdot Mirror
Score one for the aussies. In best American fashion, Dr Marshall was snatched up quite some time ago and has been a professor at Univ of Virginia for the last fifteen years, where he's been proving and developing techniques out of his discovery.
l l_barry.html
http://www.virginia.edu/topnews/10_04_2005/marsha
Many of us who went through med school there figured he'd win it eventually. It was interesting that I'd never know Marshall was at UVa from the BBC article.
I disagree with any premise that a huge market prices stocks using one valuation criterion. Are internet leaders priced high because they aren't affected by economic cycles? That's not why I invested in some of them in the past (and one of them now). How many employees does Time-Warner have? How many does Google to return those kinds of profits? As computers get faster and cheaper and seep into every nook and cranny of our society, who is in better position to explore new markets in profitable ways?
Is it all that surprising that the number of people willing to spend four years of their lives and a hundred thousand dollars to enter this field are dropping?
Yes. It shows how people view a Comp Sci education as vocational training more than an essential part of our increasingly digital world. If you had only 4 years before getting a job, would you rather get an English degree or a Comp Sci degree? For me, the choice would be obvious.
Computer Science trains your brain. It lets you understand an essential technology in our economy. If people view it in vocational terms, it's because it hasn't been marketed effectively, both by the teachers of computer science and people who use it every day. Computer Science is one of the building blocks for a career. Sure you can make it the sum total of your work, like a student can focus on English skills after an English B.A., but such thinking is only one of many paths that are neglected and underemphasized in Comp Sci's case.
In the course of my career, I've been extremely thankful for my comp sci background. It's let me do work in medicine, 3D imaging, game playing, earth science, finance, Japanese word processing, and other fields.
There's a lot of niches for people with computer skills. Find one that lets you work sane hours and enjoy the rest of your life. Sometimes it's a tradeoff between income and lifestyle. Sometimes you'll find that improving your lifestyle leads to improving productivity, enjoyment, and eventually success.
There are places where 70-80 hour weeks are common, even 100+ hour weeks. Surgical residents, for example, have been fighting battles to stop institutional insanity. Many Wall St jobs require long hours. Thankfully tech use permeates all of society and an incredible number of job niches. Spend some time and explore the possibilities.
I'd have to disagree with you. Antihero is not defined as an "average person." There are many antiheros in literature who would be anything but average. The central notion of the antihero is the lack of some heroic qualities, which is not the same as saying they are average.
I referenced a literature book over here because you wanted something more academical than Wikipedia. People could rightly apply "antihero" to some renditions of Batman, and that character is anything but average.
Antihero: A protagonist who lacks one or more of the conventional qualities attributed to a hero. Instead of being dignified, brave, idealistic, or purposeful, the antihero may be cowardly, self-interested, alienated, or weak. Although instances of the antihero are sprinkled throughout literature since ancient times -- for instance, Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605) and Byron's Don Juan (1819-24) -- the antihero in the current sense is essentially a twentieth-century character. Their antiheroism tends to reflect the spiritual or social afflictions of modern man and woman -- atheism, loneliness, mistrust of authority, disillusionment with Western ideals. Posing a satiric or frank contrast to traditional portrayals of idealized heroes and heroines, antiheroes are figures of moral and psychological waywardness, and also of social and ethical criticism. Their oppositional nature stems not simply from within, but from the interaction of self and society; hence their failings point to themselves and to the worlds they inhabit. Modern examples range from Arthur Miller's Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman (1949) to the sex-crazed Jewish adolescent in Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint (1969).
From "Handbook of Literary Terms: Literature, Language, Theory." X.J. Kennedy et al. 2005.
In your first two sentences, it's fashion not "fashon", jiminy not "jimminy", and you should pay attention to changing subject number ("someone... their...them"). If "fashon has certain rules, like grammar," then you should note that fashion rules are even more flexible than grammar. My analogy is, in fact, more generous than it should be. If you comment on someone's fashion in a clothes store, at least the both of you are in a place dealing with clothes and fashion. If you comment on someone's spelling mistake ('definately' instead of 'definitely') in a forum about object-oriented programming, you are (1) calling attention to what may be a typo in a very public fashion in (2) a venue that is not about spelling and grammar.
I suppose you give a lecture to every teen with jeans so low their butt shows, because it violates your fashion rules.
"If your output sucks do not expect everyone to gloss over it with tolerance and blissful acceptance... It is the utmost in arrogance to shovel shit in someone elses face and say "act like it smells like roses!"
How easy it is to set up straw men to support your weak case. We're talking about 'definately' and 'should of'. If these are your examples of "shit" and "sucks", I would caution you in throwing stones from your obviously glass house. I can live without people who are seriously offended by such mistakes in a web venue. These type of people might also take offense at sentence fragments in literature. The best writers of English can and will break grammatical rules, but the main issue I have with the top post, and your post in particular, is the global requirement of perfect spelling and grammar. At the very least, the top post (and you) should differentiate between professional publications and the majority of web venues. If you or Strom did intend to limit the domain of your perfect-English zone, then you should have presented your argument better instead of concentrating on spelling and grammar.
I'm a techie who is presumably competent in English; I've got published fiction and card-carrying status with a professional writers association. But my prose is hardly flawless on a first draft typed at 60 words/minute, and that's the style of communication on free-for-all boards like /. and most web venues.
Unsolicited correction of someone's English on the web is like stepping up to fellow customers in a clothes store and suggesting ways to improve their current wardrobe. Sure, you might be more fashion-savvy, but you'd still be arrogant.
It's still hard to grok what this "prevention" means to the time traveller. If you go back, are you physically prevented from firing the gun or will the gun misfire? Or if you make a change, does the timeline establish a new universe with the old one running along merrily as a parallel universe.
When we use our senses, we only see things in the typical 4D realm, so is it possible that all those other postulated dimensions (to 11) give the degrees of freedom to allow bifurcations in the timeline? Geez this is confusing.
What a troll. PHP is so low performance and scales so poorly that major web sites moved to it from the Java world, and there are enterprise-focused solutions like Active Grid that are now available. It's so un-"useful" that myriad discussion boards and community portals are invariably PHP-based. New development tools and plug-in support for popular design/programming tools are popping up. Each of these web technologies has a sweet spot, but your narrow-minded viewpoint is best revealed by your aversion to "this ancient approach of text-edited, interpreted syntax." Yeah, right. Google and every other major web presence must agree with your assessment since they only use Java and .NET now.
As mentioned in Curt's great article, the Agile Web Development with Rails (beta) book has a nice chapter on Ajax support. You can even get an extract of the chapter at the pragmatic programmer's site: PDF Extract of Chap 18: Web 2.0
Figure 18.1 should make Ajax clear. The book is highly recommended, and the 2nd Beta was just released last week.
One benefit of this shift will probably be faster emulation of Windows apps on Mac OS. The Virtual PC won't have to translate the Pentium instruction set anymore. It still has to handle other aspects of Windows, but I would guess the speed of Windows app emulation goes way up. So Mac users will get the benefit of Unix-core + reasonable Windows app speed. Any reason this wouldn't be true?
The Stanford research is interesting, but I'm still trying to make up my mind about the Semantic Web, learning about RDF, and whether I need to bake in ways of handling these kinds of assertions in my web app. The Stanford group writes, "Our hope is that our search application spurs development of the Semantic Web, and leads to sites publishing their data in this format so that we don't have to." It obviously takes more work to encode such information and getting user contributions auto-marked for the semantic web. For a counter viewpoint, take a look at some of Clay Shirky's work -- in particular:
Will the semantic web be supported by future versions of Drupal, phpBB, and other grass-roots content management web apps? Not sure. Since a lot of the content is visitor generated, you would have to build in ways of providing easy markup. Would be interested to hear /. thoughts on the matter.
Although PCs have the edge for power/price, hardware bang for buck is becoming less of a factor except for gamers. Chip speeds and memory sizes are starting to go past consumer requirements, even if you throw in HD video, so design and software are the key factors. This may be why we see Apple recapturing some market share.
There's enough of a market within homes, particularly digital homes, to drive Apple growth without business penetration. Apple is trying to be the new Sony and the hardware is a commodity; it's the software and design that are the real added values.
Well I popped over to Amazon to check out your recommended book, and it has one of the worst ratings I've ever seen for a CS book. Really really bad reviews. Either Nutt is at the short end of a conspiracy of mad students, or his book really is too simplistic.
This appendix on Mach is from the newest edition of the classic "Operating System Concepts," Seventh Edition by Silberschatz, Galvin, and Gagne (Wiley). ISBN: 0-471-69466-5. Published December 2004.
/. them): http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd -0471694665.html
There are also free online chapters for FreeBSD and Nachos.
Link to Wiley's purchase page (given that we are
"And according to a detailed cost model analysis conducted by our firm, we estimate the manufactured cost for a 40-inch NED panel could be under $400"
Manufactured cost is not what you'll pay at retail. A little Googling uncovered this heuristic for a 6:1 manufactured vs retail cost. The ratio seems optimistic for today's razor thin margins and the commodity TV business, but it still indicates much higher retail prices.
From The Entrepreneur Network:
- The grandparent post was meant to be *funny* although to be funny there has to be a little truth in the form of their embrace/extend/extinguish tactics.
- Aside from certain predatory business practices (which are understandable in the dog-eat-dog world of business), I admire Bill Gates. Anyone who puts billions of $$ and his own time into world-altering worthy causes like The Gates Foundation should be admired. Let's face it, when the future looks back on Gates, he'll be remembered as more magnanimous than the tycoons that started the Nobel prize and funded the libraries. Even though I'll probably switch to Apple in time, I take consolation that probably 95% of the Gates fortune will eventually go to charity. I've got no delusions that this man who routinely gets ridiculed on
/. will do more good for this world than me and my hundred closest friends.
So we can joke about this sit-down using lines from Braveheart, but let's not forget what Gates is doing in his fleecing of the rich and giving to the poor. (Preparing for the onslaught, or maybe mercifully, all ofIt goes a little like this...
Brad Smith: The king desires peace.
Eric Raymond: Longshanks.. er.. Gates desires peace?
Brad Smith: He declares it to me, I swear it. He proposes that you withdraw your attack. In return he grants you file formats, patents, and this chest of gold which I am to pay to you personally.
Eric Raymond: File formats and patents. Gold. That I should become Judas?
Brad Smith: Peace is made in such ways.
Eric Raymond: Slaves are made in such ways. The last time Gates spoke of peace I was a boy. And many open-source nobles, who would not be slaves, were lured by him under a flag of truce to a barn, where he embraced and extended and extinguished them. I was very young, but I remember this Gates notion of peace.
How you pay for editing, formatting, printing, and distribution is a separate issue from how you establish credibility. Credibility, IMHO, is created through reputable peer review and editorial standards. Credibility can be helped by forcing a mind-shift among the scientific community, so that the respected researchers both submit to and peer review open access journals. Mandating that scientists submit to open access journals, as a prerequisite of government grants, is a great way to bootstrap this shift.
Vanity press does not equal pay-to-publish. One means that the author can get his work published regardless of its merit (hence the "vanity"). The other means that the author has to pay, but does not preclude a peer review vetting process.
I never understood the economics of peer-reviewed scientific journals. The authors don't get any money and are usually tech-savvy enough to produce well-formatted papers. The peer-reviewers (at least when I peer reviewed) didn't get any money. And being an editor is an academic feather in your cap. So the cost of content and the cost of reviewing the content is close to zero. But some journals cost individuals and especially the institutions a large amount of money. In this day of electronic typesetting and distribution, does it make any sense?
Take the New England Journal of Medicine. It's about $150 for an individual subscription and ranges from $1000 to $17,000 for institutions depending on the size. This is for a publication that doesn't pay authors, and in fact can make authors bend over backwards. No wonder all sorts of publication models are being explored.
Just like everybody else here, I'm wondering what possessed Meetup.com to charge this much money, and to make the volunteer organizer responsible for the bill. Then I took a look at the size of the company.
Anyone else think 26 full-time employees, a full board of directors, and apparent VC funds are overkill for a company like this? Sure, they bring a lot of value added features to organizing local groups, but this isn't an amazingly difficult web app, and with VC funding on board, you just know the target valuation will force aggressive community-killing fees.
Charging a flat high fee for groups of any size makes no sense. This will be another good idea, bad execution dot-com failure. If they have to charge those kinds of rates, it's clear that they didn't bootstrap the company in a judicious manner. It's too bad, because they provide a nice service. Evite.com will probably get some of their refugees.
6) Ability to work on what you are passionate about, and on a platform that brings joy to coding - priceless.
I don't think it's as clear cut as that. Sure, there's a lot of plasticity on the human side. These devices don't just get implanted, turned on, and voila -- artificial limbs are moving. There's a long training period for humans to adapt and get the most benefit. But if you attach a neural sensor to a computer, there's the ability to apply sophisticated signal processing and pattern recognition techniques to the output signals. This has been a common technique when using EEG to drive computer operations, and I imagine it would be used with these intracortical chips as input devices.