I will admit that Mac OS X is actually a much better experience for the average computer user. I like to say though that Mac OS X is like a blender. You bring a blender home, you use it to blend - it blends. That's it. If you ever try to use those blades like a chain saw, it fails miserably. I can understand that the product does what it is designed to do.
I am a a biologist, and will say that as per my observation and feedback from colleagues, Windows is actually LESS painful to use than Mac OS X because of good driver support and most applications being written for Windows. We don't care for why Mac OS is more cumbersome to use and how it isn't Apple's fault that developers don't write for MacOS. It's just not productive. For specialist applications, we use Linux anyway so the Unix-likeness of MacOS is of no advantage to us.
Finally it comes to cost/benefit. If Windows can do everything we need to otherwise and Linux is free anyway, why should we spend so much more on Apple hardware just to run Mac OS ?
First : C-Nucleosides instead of N-Nucleosides as all natural nucleosides are...
Second : Non-coding synthetic nucleotides allowing various binding interactions etc. Essentially we can create novel regulatory elements.
Unfortunately, typical Slashdot lack of imagination and narrowmindedness when it comes to anything other than computers or politics seems to have overridden this topic.
Based on the information provided in the article But articles of this nature are not the best source for "How to run a nuclear power plant" tips, are they?
In my experience, the situation is almost always more complicated than what a journalist reports. Having no information about how the sensors were setup, what the hardware involved is like, I would say the software reacted as it should have. We don't know, it might have even reported that it is getting no data. But despite what the reason for it is, if Water Level=0, shut the plant down, is a safe baseline to go by. The shut down sequence was probably a separate module in the system, independent of what other modules in the software are doing. Its only job is a watchdog, assume the worst and shut the plant down. The engineers can figure out why that happened later...because this way the plant wont turn into a hot radioactive carnage-dump.
recording medium that gives off light when excited by a laser beam Did you just mean "fluorescent medium" and tune that down for us simple-minded folks here?
one download can and probabally usually is more than one installation. And vice versa, as well. I do think that downloading several distros and trying them out to settle on one is the norm, thus artificially expanding the Linux "switchers" metric.
OK, this is going to get some people pissed, but it is my honest opinion and I am not doing this to troll. There are a lot of scientific areas that are promoted to get peoples careers going. In fact, they are largely vaporware. Here are some examples:
1. Robotics. Most of academic robotics is pretty lame. The good people go into industry. Consider for example Michael Raibert and Big Dog. (Look on youtube.) This guy is a true genius, so he left MIT. Most robotics that you see in the media are really bad. Like Alan Alda talking to a robot that "has emotions".
2. Wavelets. First of all, was invented a long time ago. Its just another choice of basis. Not clear if they are the best for compression or denoising. Look closely and you will see that classical harmonic analysis provides a good competing answer. Jpeg2000 may be better than jpg but not clear if it is due to the use of wavelets, or because of the fact that they had like 40 people working on the lossless coding scheme, which is an ad hoc heuristic. And besides, how many of us are using jpg2000 ? Finally, people I know that work in it say "I just use the haar basis". Haar found this basis in something like 1912.
3. Chaos. By definition hard to appy to experimental science. As mention the mathematical theory is super hard. McMullen won a Fields medal for it. Work by Sullivan and Duordy is awesome, but they aren't claiming to connect it to experiments.
4. Catastrophe theory. This was the 60s and 70s version of wavelets. Hardly mentioned in the media anyone, and mostly the people who work on it are pure mathematicians.
5. Artificial intelligence. Goedel Escher Bach had our hopes up. But nothing ever happened. It' too hard. People claim breakthoughs all the time, but wheres the beef ?
6. Computer vision. A total mess. They don't even read each others papers and are busy reproducing each other's work, with tends to be some hacks that work only in limited conditions. Remember the MIT face recognition program after 9/11 that was at the Statue of Liberty ? They failed it! And I trust you speak of this from your expertise in every one of those fields ?
I'll talk about only what I know. In biology, from eco-systems to cellular processes, one sees a lot of non-linear dynamics, many of those appearing to conform to chaos theory. Chaos theory is beleived to be the closest thing we have to explaining those phenomenon. And yes, it is challenging.
MSN/YIM already inter-operate, Gtalk/AIM already inter-operate, Gtalk is XMPP-ish, and AIM is testing its XMPP in beta mode.
Given that , I would want MSN/YIM to move to XMPP really fast. Still, most people who use a particular instant messenger rarely do it because its better software or service- they do it, because their friends are on that particular service. IM war victories are therefore catalyzed by who gets the maximum new users onto their service. I think, MSN being bundled with Windows already has that one nailed.
And MSN and Yahoo display ads through their messengers (I dont know about AIM, Gtalk doesn't). Yet, their large user bases clearly show that quality is not what drives IM adoption. It also means that they hate 3rd party clients - no ad revenue.
Or , if one were to be cynical, what if Mr.Geist is operating precisely such a farm to later sell the numbers to companies not listed on their website? This is a formula to make tons of money at one shot, the company be damned later.
Be careful now! If you start tracking things back to the old times, you might find out that Apple stole some basic ideas crucial to its success on desktop from one company and the sued another company for doing exactly the same thing. To provide an example, Apple's claims to have used the mouse for the first time as an input device, it was in fact Xerox that did it first.
And I am from India too, and yes I know what karma means. However, its usage in English is slightly different, more akin to my interpretation of it. It was too much to explain the metaphysical cause-effect relationships in Hindu philosophy in a one-liner.:)
Oh stop whining, I didnt comment on the meaning of "karam" the Arabic word. "Karma" is (certainly) a Sanskirt word. In any case, there is a connection.
Does the first sale doctrine apply if I download the e-books to a cheap 5 Euro USB stick and sell away my USB stick (library of 30 or so e-books) ?
I am selling the medium, ain't I ? Or are they going to whine and say : "Oh no, your USB copy is a copy from the RAM of your machine, and you must sell off the RAM chip while it holds your copy in buffer!"
The normal "core" body temperature is 37 deg C. Skin however, being exposed , is substantially cooler at 30 deg C when bare and exposed to ambient temperature. A 7 deg difference has been harvested for energy before using Low temperature differential sterling engines.
Take away Iraq, Iran and Pakistan, and news from all of the other countries in the world combined filled up less than 6 percent of the American news hole, the project said."
...the American news hole...this may not apply in the rest of the world.
To extend that point actually, cancer is is characterized by a lot of secondary mutations in so called oncogenes, the most prevalent of these are now quite well characterized. This particular article talks about the metabolic side of cancer, but the genetic component still exists, and unlike the metabolic state, is more likely to be inherited in subsequent generations of cancer cells. Cancer is often a self-propagating cycle at the cellular level and so permit me the cynicism if I am a tad cautious of PKM2 being the crucial target that stops it all.
Your point is well-made. And as a Scientist myself, I do not believe that a party(even a scientific one) should be able to unilaterally how much money and for what purpose it gets its money from society for.
However, the basic premise in the current system is that society attributes some value to the contribution of the scientific community. It trusts it scientists to work on problems that affect the average user, and to increase the standard of living. The average person and the scientist are not supposed to view each other with hostility. If this is not true anymore, it is a sad day.
Isn't this a question of misuse of statistics then ? We know about lies and damned lies and...
I have difficulty deciphering if the article is about how the 1 in 5 number is a statistical misrepresentation when taken into account errors and so forth, or a more general commentary on FUD-spreading by certain organizations and institutions.
The statistical debate is clear, 1:5 is an inaccurate because it is too close to the indivisible unit of the problem, i.e, one person. It actually introduces an error rate almost comparable to itself, since there cannot be less than one person interviewed, the minimum error rate is 1. And thus 1:5 lies between bounds of 0:5 and 2:5. It also implies also an even spread of these cases, oversimplifying the problem.
Anytime you see social statistics on a sample size of many thousands or hundreds being represented in simple ratio of persons as 1:5 , assume that to be wildly inaccurate. Make this known , and we wont have to worry about the FUD.
Slashdot Mirror
I second that.
I will admit that Mac OS X is actually a much better experience for the average computer user. I like to say though that Mac OS X is like a blender. You bring a blender home, you use it to blend - it blends. That's it. If you ever try to use those blades like a chain saw, it fails miserably. I can understand that the product does what it is designed to do.
I am a a biologist, and will say that as per my observation and feedback from colleagues, Windows is actually LESS painful to use than Mac OS X because of good driver support and most applications being written for Windows. We don't care for why Mac OS is more cumbersome to use and how it isn't Apple's fault that developers don't write for MacOS. It's just not productive. For specialist applications, we use Linux anyway so the Unix-likeness of MacOS is of no advantage to us.
Finally it comes to cost/benefit. If Windows can do everything we need to otherwise and Linux is free anyway, why should we spend so much more on Apple hardware just to run Mac OS ?
Some pretty interesting things :
First : C-Nucleosides instead of N-Nucleosides as all natural nucleosides are...
Second : Non-coding synthetic nucleotides allowing various binding interactions etc. Essentially we can create novel regulatory elements.
Unfortunately, typical Slashdot lack of imagination and narrowmindedness when it comes to anything other than computers or politics seems to have overridden this topic.
In my experience, the situation is almost always more complicated than what a journalist reports. Having no information about how the sensors were setup, what the hardware involved is like, I would say the software reacted as it should have. We don't know, it might have even reported that it is getting no data.
But despite what the reason for it is, if Water Level=0, shut the plant down, is a safe baseline to go by. The shut down sequence was probably a separate module in the system, independent of what other modules in the software are doing. Its only job is a watchdog, assume the worst and shut the plant down. The engineers can figure out why that happened later...because this way the plant wont turn into a hot radioactive carnage-dump.
scroll up on the link, boy.
...when you can have the full she--bang in just as small a package with the Oqo E2.
Agreed, it's on the expensive side, but think of what you're getting...its very reasonable for the price.
... a machine between the Mini and the Mac Pro ...
It's called an iMac?That would be called a "Highscreen" Rather than a widescreen.
Most LCD screens I've seen can be rotated into a vertical "Potrait" mode, thus giving you plenty of vertical space for code vieweing.
1. Robotics. Most of academic robotics is pretty lame. The good people go into industry. Consider for example Michael Raibert and Big Dog. (Look on youtube.) This guy is a true genius, so he left MIT. Most robotics that you see in the media are really bad. Like Alan Alda talking to a robot that "has emotions".
2. Wavelets. First of all, was invented a long time ago. Its just another choice of basis. Not clear if they are the best for compression or denoising. Look closely and you will see that classical harmonic analysis provides a good competing answer. Jpeg2000 may be better than jpg but not clear if it is due to the use of wavelets, or because of the fact that they had like 40 people working on the lossless coding scheme, which is an ad hoc heuristic. And besides, how many of us are using jpg2000 ? Finally, people I know that work in it say "I just use the haar basis". Haar found this basis in something like 1912.
3. Chaos. By definition hard to appy to experimental science. As mention the mathematical theory is super hard. McMullen won a Fields medal for it. Work by Sullivan and Duordy is awesome, but they aren't claiming to connect it to experiments.
4. Catastrophe theory. This was the 60s and 70s version of wavelets. Hardly mentioned in the media anyone, and mostly the people who work on it are pure mathematicians.
5. Artificial intelligence. Goedel Escher Bach had our hopes up. But nothing ever happened. It' too hard. People claim breakthoughs all the time, but wheres the beef ?
6. Computer vision. A total mess. They don't even read each others papers and are busy reproducing each other's work, with tends to be some hacks that work only in limited conditions. Remember the MIT face recognition program after 9/11 that was at the Statue of Liberty ? They failed it! And I trust you speak of this from your expertise in every one of those fields ?
I'll talk about only what I know. In biology, from eco-systems to cellular processes, one sees a lot of non-linear dynamics, many of those appearing to conform to chaos theory. Chaos theory is beleived to be the closest thing we have to explaining those phenomenon. And yes, it is challenging.
MSN/YIM already inter-operate, Gtalk/AIM already inter-operate, Gtalk is XMPP-ish, and AIM is testing its XMPP in beta mode.
Given that , I would want MSN/YIM to move to XMPP really fast. Still, most people who use a particular instant messenger rarely do it because its better software or service- they do it, because their friends are on that particular service. IM war victories are therefore catalyzed by who gets the maximum new users onto their service. I think, MSN being bundled with Windows already has that one nailed.
And MSN and Yahoo display ads through their messengers (I dont know about AIM, Gtalk doesn't). Yet, their large user bases clearly show that quality is not what drives IM adoption. It also means that they hate 3rd party clients - no ad revenue.
Or , if one were to be cynical, what if Mr.Geist is operating precisely such a farm to later sell the numbers to companies not listed on their website?
This is a formula to make tons of money at one shot, the company be damned later.
And I am from India too, and yes I know what karma means. However, its usage in English is slightly different, more akin to my interpretation of it. It was too much to explain the metaphysical cause-effect relationships in Hindu philosophy in a one-liner. :)
Oh stop whining, I didnt comment on the meaning of "karam" the Arabic word. "Karma" is (certainly) a Sanskirt word.
In any case, there is a connection.
Karam is an arabic word, but derived from the Sanskrit "karma" actually. It means the fruits of our actions.
The Apple Mafia ?
Does the first sale doctrine apply if I download the e-books to a cheap 5 Euro USB stick and sell away my USB stick (library of 30 or so e-books) ?
I am selling the medium, ain't I ? Or are they going to whine and say : "Oh no, your USB copy is a copy from the RAM of your machine, and you must sell off the RAM chip while it holds your copy in buffer!"
I see MP3 Deja vu coming...
The normal "core" body temperature is 37 deg C. Skin however, being exposed , is substantially cooler at 30 deg C when bare and exposed to ambient temperature. A 7 deg difference has been harvested for energy before using Low temperature differential sterling engines.
To extend that point actually, cancer is is characterized by a lot of secondary mutations in so called oncogenes, the most prevalent of these are now quite well characterized. This particular article talks about the metabolic side of cancer, but the genetic component still exists, and unlike the metabolic state, is more likely to be inherited in subsequent generations of cancer cells. Cancer is often a self-propagating cycle at the cellular level and so permit me the cynicism if I am a tad cautious of PKM2 being the crucial target that stops it all.
I detailed my personal experience regarding sensationalism in science journalism here : http://nachiket.wordpress.com/2008/01/26/sensationalism/
This is a serious issue in terms of the effects it has on the public opinion of science.
Your point is well-made. And as a Scientist myself, I do not believe that a party(even a scientific one) should be able to unilaterally how much money and for what purpose it gets its money from society for.
However, the basic premise in the current system is that society attributes some value to the contribution of the scientific community. It trusts it scientists to work on problems that affect the average user, and to increase the standard of living. The average person and the scientist are not supposed to view each other with hostility. If this is not true anymore, it is a sad day.
Isn't this a question of misuse of statistics then ? We know about lies and damned lies and...
I have difficulty deciphering if the article is about how the 1 in 5 number is a statistical misrepresentation when taken into account errors and so forth, or a more general commentary on FUD-spreading by certain organizations and institutions.
The statistical debate is clear, 1:5 is an inaccurate because it is too close to the indivisible unit of the problem, i.e, one person. It actually introduces an error rate almost comparable to itself, since there cannot be less than one person interviewed, the minimum error rate is 1. And thus 1:5 lies between bounds of 0:5 and 2:5. It also implies also an even spread of these cases, oversimplifying the problem.
Anytime you see social statistics on a sample size of many thousands or hundreds being represented in simple ratio of persons as 1:5 , assume that to be wildly inaccurate. Make this known , and we wont have to worry about the FUD.